The Africans (35 page)

Independence in Kenya did not bring a radical shift in political and economic philosophies; Mozambique and Angola became Marxist. Economies were nationalized, farming cooperatives established, one-party systems created, the free press dismantled. (Colonial Angola had seventeen radio stations, sixteen newspapers and fifteen magazines; independent Angola has two newspapers and one radio station, all under government control.) There was no room for Europeans who were not committed ideologues.

Marxism has failed in Mozambique and Angola—just as it has failed everywhere in Africa. Everywhere it has been tried, national economies have stagnated, the masses have been kept ignorant of their right to question, Soviet influence has grown beyond any reasonable limits, repression has become a key government tool, over-bureaucratization has destroyed what little efficiency existed in the public and private sectors. Africa, unlike, say, China, does not have the tradition of central government so essential to the propagation of Communism. It has no history of placing common welfare above that of the family or tribe. It has no experience in being industrious in any endeavor unrelated to individual survival. The tenets of Marxism are alien to African culture.

Marxism failed in Somalia and Algeria because nationalism and an adherence to Islam proved stronger than any dedication to a political system. Ghana, Guinea, the Sudan and the Congo all flirted with it but found that economic realities carried more weight than visionary ideals. Ethiopia is still trying it but has accomplished little other than the death of many of its people in a government terror
campaign against “counterrevolutionaries.” President Julius Nyerere’s dreams of a socialistic Tanzania sounded fine in the classroom but in practical application did nothing to advance his country economically. Political ideology, whether it is imported from East or West, does not fill empty stomachs or rebuild abandoned factories. It merely usurps energies that should be devoted to national development. It leaves a numbed people mumbling foolish slogans at the command of their presidents, and if that ideology is Marxist, it removes all individual economic incentives. The result is that an untrained, uneducated people have no motivation, and care little about increased production. The tropical sun gives them warmth, the fertile earth gives them food, the tribe gives them protection. Surrounded by decay, denied the opportunity to rise above the crowd through industriousness and ingenuity, they do what they must to survive, but not much more.

At Angola’s only functioning cotton mill, Africa Textile, outside Benguela, so many workers were showing up three and four hours late each day that the company sold everyone a bicycle at cost and began rewarding punctual workers with cloth at reduced prices. Absenteeism still averages 30 percent.

When production falls at the General Tire plant, a party meeting is called and the workers vote, usually unanimously, to declare a “Red Saturday”—an extra workday, which they donate without pay. General Tire had a Red Saturday during my visit, and only 3 of the 150 employees showed up—two foreigners and a party official.

“Our production was really hurt by all the political meetings the workers hold at the drop of a hat,” a foreign executive at Africa Textile said. “Now, finally, we’ve convinced the party to ban meetings, except after five
P.M
. on Friday. I told the party, ‘Look, you’ve got the only mill still operating in Angola. Why not leave it alone?’ ”

For most Angolans, ideology is just something they must live with. They cannot escape it, but they don’t pay much attention to it either. In one of the few factories operating in Luanda I asked a worker what he thought of an uncomplimentary drawing of President Carter scrawled on the nearby wall. “Who did you say that is?” the worker asked, puzzled. Then, after a lengthy pause, he added, “Is he Communist?” The bookstores are among the few shops still open in Luanda, but they sell only Communist literature. The newspapers are filled not with news but with propaganda. The ruling
party exhorts the hungry masses to labor for society’s benefit while weeds and jungle reclaim the plantations, mothers nurse their babies on tea and sugar, and the standard of living deteriorates by the day.

“Angola, Angola, Angola!” a navy lieutenant exclaimed, throwing up his hands in exasperation one day when most of his men didn’t show up for a training exercise. “What is this thing we have created?”

O
NCE
IT
WOULD
have been easy simply to forget Africa. But no longer. By the 1980s the world had come courting and the stakes were high: Africa’s untapped mineral reserves were among the most plentiful in the world; its location was a strategic one from which a military power could control the West’s major oil-shipping routes as well as the Red Sea, gateway to the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean; its strength as a political bloc was sufficient to affect decisions made in the United Nations; its growing markets were absorbing billions of dollars in foreign goods every year and demanding more; its unfilled farmlands were fertile and huge, a potential breadbasket for millions of people at home and abroad. Yet for all its riches, Africa was still virgin territory, vulnerable to internal pressures, susceptible to external influence. It was an inviting prospect for foreign suitors who came calling with gifts of guns and money.

And from Moscow to Washington, from Rio de Janeiro and Havana to Paris and Tokyo, governments jockeyed for influence, for a stake in the future of this continent, which twenty or thirty years from now might carry the weight to tip the world’s balance of power, one way or the other. The first “scramble for Africa” occurred a century ago when the European powers met in Berlin to carve up the Dark Continent for themselves. This new “invasion” was more subtle but its aims were similar: economic and strategic
domination. So far, Africa has fallen into line. It needs money from the West to survive and weapons from the Eastern bloc to fight the enemy of the moment. And in accepting those dollars and guns, it has become as beholden to and dependent on foreign governments as it was in the final days of colonialism. It speaks of being left alone to find African solutions to African problems, but when there is a problem, military or economic, the summons for help immediately goes out to Paris or Moscow or London or Washington. It speaks of being nonaligned, but with the exception of oil-rich Nigeria, has not the clout to act or speak independently. So a new division, this one ideological, has appeared in Africa, dividing the continent in half. One group, the so-called progressives, looks to Moscow as its patron saint; the other, the so-called moderates, has cast its lot with the West. The groupings are helter-skelter, not regional, and as cross-border rivalries heighten, the potential for superpower confrontation increases.

There is a saying that you cannot buy the allegiance of an African government—you can only rent it for a day. And that pretty well sums up the risks involved for those investing in Africa’s future. Governmental loyalties change overnight and are sometimes available to the highest bidder. Moderate presidents are overthrown by progressive ones, who are toppled by army generals, who are ousted by army sergeants. Economies are nationalized and denationalized, foreign communities are expelled and invited back.

No foreign power should know this better than the Soviet Union. But the Russians are slow learners—and the most racist of all the foreigners in black Africa.
^*
They live in compounds surrounded by high stone walls, seldom mix with Africans except at diplomatic functions and do not hire Africans for even the lowliest embassy job. They bring their own receptionists, cooks and chauffeurs from home. In Mogadishu, Somalia, and Lobito, Angola, special beaches were set aside for the Russians. In Conakry, Guinea, the Russians rode from their fortresslike embassy to their residential compound in buses, even though they could have walked the distance in five
minutes. One day, strolling through an outdoor market in Mogadishu with a group of Western journalists, we were surrounded by an angry crowd. The people shook their fists at us and glared and repeated over and over, “
Ruusk, Ruusk, Ruusk
.” Finally our translator said something in Somali. The mood softened and the crowd pulled back to let us pass. “Don’t worry,” our guide said. “They thought you were Russians.”

Such hostility should surprise no one. Almost every African country that formed an intimate relationship with Moscow—among them Egypt, Ghana, Guinea, Somalia and the Sudan—eventually discovered that they were on the wrong end of an unbalanced deal; the heavy-handed Russians were sent packing. The Soviet policy in Africa is based on capitalizing on regional instability and on providing the military hardware—but not the developmental assistance—needed to buy the dependence of various radical factions. Throughout the seventies, Moscow was content to probe for weak spots and to collect a few pieces of real estate here and there, adding Ethiopia, Mozambique and Angola to its current cluster of allies. For the eighties, Moscow’s goal appears to be the extension of a Soviet-influenced belt that would reach across southern Africa from Mozambique to Angola and would isolate pro-Western South Africa, the continent’s only industrialized nation. It is a policy of opportunism that benefits only the Soviet Union.

The worry to the West is not that one or two African countries will become Communist; it is that a Soviet presence in any country has a destabilizing effect on the entire region. Economic growth and political stability do not give rise to radical regimes; poverty and turmoil do. A peaceful Africa, prosperous and steady, is to the advantage of the West—and, of course, Africa itself—but not the Soviet Union. Take a map of Africa and put a red pin in every country where the government is especially repressive, where warfare engulfs the land, where the economy is a shambles. And wherever there is a pin, that’s where the Soviet Union’s influence is the strongest.