The Africans (42 page)

“Not now,” an official behind me whispered mysteriously. “The time is not right. You have to leave.” Knowing how a leper must feel, I walked across the large hall and down the stone steps. “We’ll
reschedule the interview, don’t worry,” the official called out cheerily.

But he never contacted me or answered my messages, and five days later I made the 3,300-mile trip back to Nairobi, having no hint of what had gone wrong. Waiting for me was a seventeen-page, single-spaced telegram from Touré with answers to my seven questions.

Touré’s voice is an abrasive one, and one that has been difficult to ignore. In 1958, when France gave its African colonies the choice of independence or continued association with France, only the Touré-led Guineans voted (by 97 percent) for immediate independence. President Charles de Gaulle flew to Conakry in an attempt to sway the thirty-six-year-old Touré, who, in effect, told De Gaulle to get lost. Within a month, on De Gaulle’s orders, all but twenty of the 4,000 French colonial administrators—including doctors, teachers, judges and technicians—had pulled out of Guinea. They took everything, from the country’s maps to medical supplies in the hospital, even the china plates from the governor’s palace, where Touré now lives.

The Guineans rejoiced at the French departure. But Touré banned demonstrations and snapped, “This is no time for dancing.” Guinea was alone and adrift, an outcast even among its more conservative neighbors. Touré, closely associated with the French Communist Party and later winner of a Lenin Peace Prize, searched for assistance in the West and found only hostility. Only the Soviet Union seemed eager to help. It was an error the West would make often in the years ahead, as it brushed aside Angola’s Agostinho Neto and Mozambique’s Samora Machel and other influential African leaders merely because their political orientation was radical. They were left with nowhere to turn to but Russia.

From Moscow came Guinea’s first aid contributions: snowplows, porcelain toilet seats and six giant combine harvesters, which no one knew how to drive. Moscow built a sports stadium, a few small office buildings, a military academy (now empty), and the longest runway in West Africa (which Guinea never found much use for, but which served the Russians well as a staging area during the Angolan civil war in the mid-seventies). Moscow sent high school teachers (who spoke only Russian), built a big compound where Russian diplomats could live and work behind a stone wall and not have to mix with the Guineans, and negotiated some tough bargains that must have left Touré feeling a little short-changed.

Among them was one for fishing rights in which the Soviet Union
keeps, without charge, 60 percent of the fish caught in Guinean waters and sells the remainder to Guinea. More important, the Soviet Union developed Guinea’s bauxite, the raw material of aluminum, and buys the ore with unconvertible rubles at far below the world price. Under the agreement, 90 percent of the ore from one of the major mines must go to the Soviet Union, while all Guinea’s income from the mine goes toward paying off its Soviet debts. (Another mine, operated by a Western consortium, earns more than $100 million a year in hard currency for Guinea, representing 70 percent of the country’s foreign exchange.)

Twenty years after independence, Touré was becoming increasingly bitter about the inadequacies of Eastern-bloc aid. He grumbled privately that the Soviets were “more capitalistic than the capitalists”; to prove his contention, he pointed to the $25 million a year Guinea was repaying Moscow for its early loans and “assistance.” On top of that he made his first trip to the Ivory Goast—he had once dismissed Houphouët-Boigny as a French colonialist—and was dumfounded by the progress he saw. Then Touré did what so many African leaders have done in times of need: he turned to the West for capital and expertise. He invited Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to Conakry for a visit and greeted the French president like a lost brother. He toured the United States and marveled at the sophistication of farming in the Midwest. He started easing out of his alliance with Moscow and toned down his Marxist rhetoric so that his philosophy became an African blend of socialism, nationalism and Islam. He even reduced the repression that had characterized his regime.

But in his search for international respectability, Touré had a hard time living down the past. He had always been single-minded and ruthless in his pursuit of revolutionary goals. His authority was unquestioned. His cabinet ministers might suggest, but only Touré decided. The state, the presidency and the party were all one, and politics were discussed only in hushed tones. None but the foolhardy challenged the Clairvoyant Guide.

Thousands of Guineans who tried to go against the tide had been imprisoned or killed. Torture was as common as the waving of Touré’s symbolic white handkerchief. By the best count available, seventeen of Touré’s cabinet ministers were shot or hanged between 1958 and the late 1970s, eighteen others were condemned to life in prison at hard labor. Several years ago the bloated bodies of five hanged officials were left to sway from the downtown Castro Bridge for two days as a lesson to the masses. Touré’s murdered victims included
Diallo Telli, the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity. As many as two million Guineans—a staggering total of 40 percent of all the Guinean people—have escaped their homeland to live in exile in other African and European countries.

When Amnesty International accused the Touré regime of practicing torture, the president replied in a word: “Rubbish.” He offered to open his prisons to any African president who was prepared to open his own to the same inspection. None accepted.

In his telegram to me, Touré said:

Touré has a point, for there have been some intangible benefits from his decision to go it alone. Even though only 12 percent of the farmland is cultivated now and Guinea is forced to import most of its food, even though the per capita income of $210 has, in real terms, dropped since independence, even though signs of Guinea’s great potential wealth are nowhere to be seen and the country has only 300 miles of paved roads, Guinea is a country virtually without crime, corruption, prostitution or beggars. There is not a single foreigner holding down any key government position. There has been no disruptive rural exodus in Guinea because there is nothing in the cities to attract people. There have been no unfulfilled aspirations in Guinea because to know nothing else is to want nothing more. Guineans do not travel freely to the Ivory Coast to see how that country has changed. They do not listen to radio stations or read newspapers that give them access to uncensored opinions. They know only the world Touré has created for them, and in that world, there is no gap between rich and poor because everyone is poor. Even Conakry’s few businessmen live in dirt-floor hovels
shared with chickens and goats.

If Guineans expect more, they do not show it. They express, in fact, a pride in their nationhood that is rare in Africa, an awareness that Touré, regardless whether he courts the Russians or the French, has not compromised his revolutionary principles during more than two decades of independence. Touré has done it his way and he is indebted to no one. If all 350 foreigners left Guinea tomorrow, the country would be no worse off than it is today. Touré’s emphasis has been nationalistic, not tribalistic, his concerns have centered on what he calls human development, not on economic growth.
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Rather than being resentful, the Guineans have accepted Touré’s priorities and have become more secure in their own identity than most African people, more comfortable with the paucity of amenities than others.

That has been the major accomplishment of black Africa’s senior statesman, who once proclaimed, “All Africa is my problem.” It is, though, a modest accomplishment compared with the huge cost the Guineans have had to pay for a president who gave his people poverty and repression along with the promised freedom.

After my visit to Guinea, I wrote a long story about Touré that appeared on page one of the
Los Angeles Times
. I felt sure he would be offended by my description of the repression and economic sluggishness in Guinea. On the contrary, Touré told a U.S. diplomat in Conakry that he was delighted with the article, the he felt it was a fair and balanced assessment of Guinea’s place in Africa. Those were adjectives a Western journalist does not often hear from an African president, and they just went to show that Touré had no apologies for anything he had done. Indeed, some Africanists believe Touré has chosen a wiser long-range course for his country than has Houphouët-Boigny. They say he has disciplined and organized his people, has given them a sense of nationhood and has contained the temptations, greed and self-interest that can erode the foundations of nationhood.

But what would happen if the Guineans had a choice? What would happen if they had a chance to get a piece of something rather than being assured a slice of nothing? If they could speak their mind without fear of reprisal, if they were given the freedom to question and ponder, what would they say?
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G
ENERALLY
,
THE
LESS
INTELLIGENT
the white man is, the more backward he thinks the African is. “But they didn’t even have the
wheel
,” old settlers will say, implying that if it weren’t for the European, Africa would still be the Dark Continent. This simply isn’t true. The African devised systems—political, social, economic—that worked fine for him. It was only when he was thrust into a Western-oriented world that those systems started to break down. The African culture shock that an outsider encounters has to be considered in that context because everything is tainted by the newness of the African’s confrontation with the modern world.

Most Western tourists who visit the continent are pretty well isolated from the mind-bending frustrations of Africa. They are whisked from the airport to a Hilton or an Inter-Continental Hotel to a game-viewing lodge to a tour of Nairobi’s city market and back to the airport for a flight to London or Rome. But if you linger, you quickly realize that all those things you learned in the West about punctuality, efficiency and rational thought processes don’t have much to do with Africa. Africa can only be explained in terms of Africa. It is a different world where the shortest distance between two points is seldom a straight line, where patience is more than a virtue; it is a necessity for survival. Africa has taken all the worst aspects of European bureaucracy, combined them with ignorance and indifference, and come up with a system that is as undirected, as lethargic as a rudderless dhow in a rough sea. Niceties aside, Africa just doesn’t work very well.

In West Africa the expatriates have a word to describe their losing battles with life’s daily encounters. The word is WAWA, an acronym
for West Africa Wins Again. It is a reminder that to avoid stress, you move with the system, not around it or through it. If the phone doesn’t work, the hotel is out of food, the air conditioner sputters and dies, the government official shows up three hours late for his appointment with you, the plane doesn’t arrive on the scheduled day, much less the appointed hour, you merely shrug and dismiss your travails with the words, “I was WAWAed.” The malady is rarely fatal.