The Africans (26 page)

Like many presidents, Tolbert said all the right words, but he didn’t hear the rage building and he couldn’t see the pillars of stability tumbling. The lessons of African history escaped him.

Sadly, there is little to suggest that history won’t keep repeating itself. If any trend is likely, it is that Africa will have more coups, not fewer, in the decade ahead, because few presidents have addressed themselves to the causes of instability. Tolbert made reforms, but they were too few, too late, and their main effect was to give the opposition more room in which to agitate. For just that reason, most presidents are afraid to liberalize their own rule. But by refusing to do so, they create the very conditions that eventually lead to what they fear most—the loss of power.

The shortcomings that resulted in Tolbert’s murder and Doe’s ascendance exist in virtually every African country, usually far more acutely than they did in Liberia. And if national economies continue to wither and presidents continue to keep closed the safety valves of public expression, there can be only one conclusion: Africa’s era of instability is just beginning.

T
HE
E
UROPEAN
EMPIRE
that once stretched the length and breadth of Africa had, by the summer of 1977, shrunk to a Vermont-sized chunk of coastal desert known as the French Territory of Afars and Issas, a wretched wasteland France had colonialized 115 years earlier as a refueling stop for its Saigon- and Madagascar-bound ships. Located on Ethiopia’s northeast border, the territory—commonly referred to by the name of its capital, Djibouti, which means “my casserole” in the Afar language—was a resourceless and penniless land that cost France $100 million a year to operate. It had only two factories, one for bottling Coca-Cola, the other for bottling Pepsi, and almost everything except a few home-grown tomatoes was imported: table salt from Holland, vegetables and eggs from Ethiopia, meat from Kenya, drinking water from France. The population of 320,000 Afar and Issa tribesmen included three university graduates, no doctors and one
fille de joie
, Madame Fatima, a toothless Somali who ran the Red Arrow brothel frequented by French Legionnaires.

Djibouti, the capital and only city, was a wonderfully seedy place where Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet would have felt right at home. There was a dingy square, Place Menelik, surrounded by cafés and bars nestled under urine-drenched arches. French soldiers and civilians sat at the tables there, shirts unbuttoned to the waist, sweating in the 100-degree evening heat, swilling lukewarm beer and chasing away the swarming beggars with a wave of the hand. At
night the foreigners retreated behind louvered shutters in shabby villas on streets like the Rue de Beauchamps and Avenue Pasteur. The Africans lived on the other side of town, in shacks made of packing crates. Beyond the African quarter was a barricade of barbed wire forming a ten-mile necklace around Djibouti. After President Charles de Gaulle was greeted by riots on a visit in the 1960s, the French erected the barricade to control the swelling city population.

The atmosphere of Djibouti was reminiscent of Saigon circa 1950. The elegance was gone, but a faded charm lingered. Everything needed painting and sweeping. The sun beat down like a hammer, and everyone moved slowly, concerned with little except the arrival of siesta time, which stretched from eleven-thirty to four. Even the mosquitoes were lethargic, so sluggish that you could catch them in flight with your bare hand. The one hotel in town without cockroaches, the 39-room La Siesta, had only a single spigot in each bathroom which produced, naturally enough, hot water. In the hotels and bars, ceiling fans groaned overhead but the air was too heavy to move, and at night Frenchmen lay on their bedroom floors under the fans and poured bottles of water over their bodies and hoped they would fall alseep.

There were 15,000 Frenchmen in Djibouti—soldiers, businessmen, civil servants, expatriate wanderers—and by early 1977 most had already started packing their bags, having lost another home away from home. Indochina was gone. West Africa was gone. Soon Djibouti would be gone too, and the Frenchmen would drift on to Tahiti or New Caledonia, even back to France. The end of the European colonial era in Africa came on a June night, dripping with heat and humidity, in a capital city surrounded by barbed wire, and it would come without tears or toasts, farewells or nostalgia. Africa’s newest nation would be launched into independence in a sad little ceremony that rated hardly a line in the international media and attracted not a single head of state.

The president-to-be, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, had been hand-picked by France. He was sixty-one years old, a former nomad and a camel herder with a sixth-grade education. I arrived unannounced at his door one afternoon before independence, and rising from the couch where he had been napping, he welcomed me with a bottle of Coke and a French cigarette. His was a tidy cement-block house with three bedrooms, no air conditioning and a few pieces of old
furniture in the living room. He seemed not at all worried by the future when I asked him how a country that was 90 percent desert and produced nothing could survive economically.

“Ah,” he replied, puffing on his cigarette, “but when you were born, you had no money, correct? Then you worked and got some money and you lived better. We will do the same because we will find solutions when we are free to meet our responsibilities.

“We have many possibilities—salt, tourism, atomic energy, maybe a duty-free port like Hong Kong, and”—after a pause—“French aid.”

There was no great sense of excitement on that June evening in 1977 as five centuries of European colonialism in Africa dwindled down to their final few seconds.
^*
Several hundred chairs were lined up near the piers for the ceremony and a handful of buildings were whitewashed at the last minute. The new airport passenger terminal opened and the La Siesta hotel put up a “No vacancy” sign. The French aircraft carrier
Foch
anchored a few miles out to sea in the unlikely event an evacuation of the expatriates would be necessary, and Madame Fatima bolted the Red Arrow at 6
P.M
., mumbling aloud, “Mercy, what will I ever do without the Legionnaires?” There was a shooting outside the barbed-wire perimeter that claimed one life when something called the Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast—an outfit pledged to overthrowing the government that had not yet even taken office—demanded permission to enter Djibouti. Gouled smoothed out the problem with some skillful negotiating, and most of the front’s 3,000 members were left milling outside the barricade with their camels and guns. By eleven o’clock the invited guests were in their seats. The women, stout and big-chested, wore colorful print-cloth dresses, and the men sat glassy-eyed, chewing khat, a narcotic weed imported from Ethiopia to which virtually every adult male in Djibouti is addicted.

At precisely one minute past midnight, France’s high commissioner, Camille d’Ornano, offered a crisp salute as the French tricolor was lowered and folded for the last time in Africa. Hassan Gouled Aptidon, who would move out of his little home and into
the French governor’s seaside mansion the next day, was now the president of Africa’s fiftieth independent nation, the Republic of Djibouti. A bugle sounded from somewhere in the darkness, a cannon roared twenty-one times from the French armada in the harbor, and fireworks danced through the skies, illuminating the ramshackle port city overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait that leads from the Red Sea to the oil routes of the Indian Ocean. Polite applause rippled through the audience and then everyone moved off into the night. Soon Djibouti was empty and silent. The torch had been passed.

John Gunther was no supporter of colonialism as an institution. But in
Inside Africa
, published in 1953, he shared the prevailing Western view that the European presence had been largely positive: