The Africans (2 page)

I interviewed presidents and witch doctors, university professors and guerrilla leaders, merchants and peasants. I spent a few fearsome hours in one of Idi Amin’s Ugandan jails, accused of being a mercenary or a CIA agent, and many wonderful days on the starlit African plains, where the stillness and solitude seem eternal. Over glasses of whiskey and cups of coffee, in stately mansions and homes made of cattle dung and mud, from the desert wastelands of Djibouti to the oil fields of Nigeria, I talked with hundreds of Africans about their countries, their lives, their dreams. This book, part political travelogue, part contemporary history and wholly personal, is a result of those travels and tries to answer two questions that perplex even the Africans themselves: What is Africa and who are the Africans?

I have limited the book to the area I know best—sub-Sahara Africa, which comprises the forty-six countries south of a line drawn from Morocco to Egypt. The five Moslem countries to the north share little politically or economically with the rest of contemporary Africa. But sub-Sahara Africa—or black Africa, as it is commonly called—contains cohesive elements enabling it to be considered as an entity. Even white-ruled South Africa, as peculiar a country as there is in the world today, can be explained within the context of its hostile black neighbors.

No continent has been more mistreated, misunderstood and misreported over the years than Africa. Ask an American to mention four things he associates with Africa and the answer is likely to be “pygmies, jungle, heat and lions.” Yet pygmies have been all but extinct for decades, jungle is now as uncommon as snow in Southern California, the heat is no more intolerable than that in Washington, D.C., on a summer’s day, and lions are so few in number that most Africans have never seen one.

If you had read Ernest Hemingway, you knew that Africa was an enchanting, spectacularly beautiful land; if you had read Robert Ruark, you knew that Africans were usually unsophisticated and occasionally savage. Not much else seemed worth knowing. Africa was a mere footnote to history, an appendage that one American journalist in World War II dismissed as “just a bunch of real estate.”

But the Africa of the 1980s can no longer be brushed aside so
glibly. Africa today is influencing events and policies in foreign capitals from Moscow to Washington. Extraordinary changes are propelling it toward a destiny its presidents cannot comprehend or control. Where these changes take Africa will influence, and perhaps determine, the world’s direction in the twenty-first century—
if
Africa can harness its natural and human resources. And if it can, Africa is the grand prize of the Third World.

When John Gunther published his book
Inside Africa
, in 1953, not a single black nation had gained its independence from the imperial powers of Europe. Today there are fifty-one independent countries in Africa, and every one except South Africa is ruled by the majority. The Africa that Gunther wrote about was the last frontier of white colonialism, an orderly, uneventful place where the pulse of nationalism beat only faintly. The Africa I encountered two decades later was the first outpost of black nationhood, volatile, unpredictable, truculent. Gunther’s perspective was fashioned largely through interviews with white administrators and a handful of conservative Africans such as Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. But that Africa no longer exists. Today a journalist deals with Africans on their own terms, in their own territory—and finds that a new breed of radicals has replaced the old conservatives. The circumstances that shaped this change—and are still shaping it—were nothing short of cataclysmic.

If Africa is much discussed and little understood these days, it is hardly surprising, for the continent is as diverse and complex as it is huge. Africa is four times larger than the United States and has twice as many people. It spans seven time zones, and to fly from Nairobi in the east to Dakar, Senegal, in the west takes longer than to fly from New York to London. It is inhabited by 2,000 tribes or ethnic groups, most of which have a specific language or dialect. In many capitals you can have lunch with an Oxford-educated businessman who wears three-piece Western suits and asks you about last year’s Superbowl game, then drive a few hours and dine on a recently slaughtered goat with illiterate herdsmen who hunt with bows and arrows, live on a barter economy and think all white men are missionaries or doctors.

To many Westerners, Africa simply makes no sense at all, primarily because they apply Western values to a land that is not comparable with any on earth. Punctuality, for instance, is an alien concept—noon can fall anywhere between 11
A.M
. and 2
P.M
. on the African clock—and although African airlines publish schedules, no
one pays them much heed, least of all the airline companies themselves. Speaking concisely is not a regional trait, either, for most Africans will tell you what they think you want to hear. Ask an African to accomplish the impossible—“I’d like the sun to rise in the south tomorrow morning”—and he will smile, nod and say, “No problem.” He knows perfectly well that there is a problem, but it’s just his way of being accommodating.

How do you explain a continent where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong tribe? How do you explain a continent whose heads of state applauded Idi Amin when he walked into a summit wearing his Stetson and six-shooters, having just presided over the massacre of several thousand Ugandans, including the Anglican archbishop? What do you say about the president of Tanzania, who translated Shakespeare into Swahili in his spare time and held more political prisoners than South Africa? Or the pint-sized president of Gabon, who wears platform shoes, bans the word “pygmy” from his country’s vocabulary, and while his countrymen are destitute, spends $2 million on a house in Beverly Hills, California, for his daughter and zips around Libreville in a gold-plated Cadillac followed by a silver-plated Cadillac ambulance?

For every Amin, however, there is a Léopold Sédar Senghor, the former Senegalese president, an erudite man who was a strong contender for the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. For every corrupt and callous African president stashing millions of dollars in his Swiss bank account, there is an African teacher earning $60 a month, proud that his students are Africa’s hope for tomorrow. And for every reason there is to ignore sub-Sahara Africa as an inconsequential member of the international community, there are a dozen to treat it seriously. Among them:

First, Africa has one-third the votes in the United Nations, far more than any other region. Second, it has the largest reserves of untapped natural resources in the world, minerals essential to both the East and the West in times of war and peace. Third, its empty farmlands could feed itself and all of Western Europe. Even if another acre was never cleared, its fertile soil is capable of producing 130 times what it yields today.
^*
Fourth, it is a potential battleground for the superpowers, who may well be as obsessed with Africa twenty years from now as they are with the Middle East
today. Fifth, it has human resources that are as undeveloped as its sunken treasures—455 million people, half of them no older than fifteen, who yearn for, and eventually will demand, lives free from disease, poverty and repression.

This is a book about those people and the events that shape their lives. It is not a survey of African art, culture, history or religion. It is only a book about Africa today, the story of people who won their freedom on battlefields and at negotiating tables, only to discover that their white colonial masters had been replaced by black neocolonial leaders more concerned with personal power and wealth than national consensus or development.

Many readers will find this an unsettling book because the Africa of the 1980s is neither a happy nor a hopeful place. The colonialists designed the scenario for disaster, and the Africans seem to be trying their best to fulfill it. Calamity waits within arms’ reach, oblivious of Africa’s potential strength. Across the whole continent, economies are collapsing, cities are deteriorating, food production is declining, populations are growing like weed-seeds turned loose in a garden. Governments fall at the whim of illiterate sergeants and disgruntled despots, prisons are as overcrowded as the farmlands are empty, and at last count the number of refugees in Africa had reached the incredible figure of five million—people driven from their homelands by wars, tyrants and poverty.

“Africa is dying,” Edem Kodjo, secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity, told a group of African leaders in 1978. “If things continue as they are, only eight or nine of the present countries will survive the next few years. All other things being equal, absolute poverty, instead of declining, is likely to gain ground. It is clear that the economy of our continent is lying in ruins.”

Events, no doubt, will overtake some sections of this book. Presidents I have interviewed and written about will be killed, imprisoned or exiled, political allegiances will waver, countries may even change their names. In Africa nothing political stays unchanged very long. But the people and happenings described here will, I believe, continue to be representative of Africa’s third decade of independence.

As troubled as these early years of nationhood have been, Africa needs not dwell forever in the uncertain twilight zone. Its dreams have been only mislaid, not lost. The morass has escape routes. Africa is a continent of surprises: nothing is ever quite as it seems and nothing ever happens quite as it is supposed to.

A
NYONE WHO HAS
lived in Africa knows how tough it is to shake that wondrous continent from one’s spirit and, after a year in the United States, Sandy and I returned in 1982. Based in Cairo, we stayed for another four years and went back often to visit the people and the places I had written about earlier.

The Africa I encountered on my second assignment remained an uneasy blend of hope and tragedy. Its economic health was growing more desperate by the month, yet a handful of countries had managed to achieve some genuine progress and many African leaders were engaged in an agonizing reappraisal of their priorities. What has become clear is that Africa alone cannot undo the damage of the past thirty years. It needs a massive global rescue effort, and it needs it now, before a disaster of wartime dimension befalls the continent.

Assigning blame for Africa’s failures has become irrelevant, particularly because there is ample blame for all to share. But if Africa remains a sickly place into the 1990s, all the world suffers, and its economies and stability will be threatened. Just as surely as South Africa’s system of apartheid is in its death throes, so must a new system of social justice, economic incentives and agricultural reform be born in black Africa. Perhaps then, from the ashes of what is past, Africa can get the fresh start it so desperately needs.

D
AVID
L
AMB
Los Angeles
September 1986