The Africans (43 page)

The African is mystified when a Westerner gets upset with these inconveniences, considering such signs of impatience a peculiarity of the Europeans and Americans. The African doesn’t live his life by a clock and he doesn’t get ruffled if things move slowly or not at all under the warm tropical sun. He will wait quietly in line for three or four hours to pay his water bill and obediently help fill stadiums to hear his leaders drone on for an afternoon about political philosophies he doesn’t understand. He will queue all day at a hospital to see a doctor and move on without a word of protest—to return the next day—when told the doctor isn’t seeing any more patients. What’s the rush? he will ask. Time is the one thing in life there is an abundance of.
^*

The most enduring memory of Africa I have is of idleness (not laziness): of thousands of Kenyans stretched out dozing on every inch of grass in Nairobi; of crowds sitting in city squares, of block-long lines outside government offices, of a hundred or more people waiting silently in a hospital emergency room, some with broken bones or festering wounds, hoping to see a doctor. Sometimes I would return to my Nairobi office after lunch and find a dozen people sitting there with my Ugandan secretary. They would be staring at the wall, no one talking, their hands folded in their laps. They had nowhere to go and nothing else to do. There were few jobs. Even for those who did work, the economic incentives in Africa are so small—a Tanzanian farmer receives ten cents from his government for producing the pound of freshly roasted coffee beans you pay $5 for in an American supermarket—that idleness is a tolerable alternative to work. And in those circumstances life is not lived by a clock.

But, curiously, if you put an African behind the wheel of a car, he is transformed. Speed becomes crucial. White-knuckled and seemingly as intent as a race-car driver, he careens at breakneck clip down hills and around corners, his vehicle inevitably as jam-packed as a Tokyo subway car. Posted speed limits are ignored by drivers and not enforced by policemen, vehicle safety inspections are not required, seat belts are virtually unknown. The result is a highway carnage bloodier than most old tribal wars.

In Zaire the road from the airport to Kinshasa is littered with scores of smashed cars left to rust. In Nigeria the new sixty-mile freeway linking Lagos and Ibadan resembles a deadly carnival game of bumper cars with kamikazelike drivers whizzing by left and right, roaring up behind other vehicles, swerving or jamming on their brakes at the last second. In Uganda, army trucks tear down the middle of the potholed roads, and oncoming traffic is expected to head for the shoulders.

Kenya has less than 2,000 miles of paved roads, yet about 1,500 persons die on them each year. After forty-four people died in one pile-up outside Nakuru in 1979, the police commissioner, Ben Gethi, announced a campaign aimed at the “control of drinking habits when using roads.” If Californians drove the way Kenyans did, and you took into account the number of registered vehicles and the miles of usable roads in both places, the annual death toll would exceed 120,000.

South Africa’s National Road Safety Council says that whites own 72 percent of the country’s four million vehicles and account for 21 percent of the road fatalities. Blacks own 12 percent of the vehicles and account for 62 percent of the deaths. In an attempt to reduce the slaughter, the council buys space in newspapers aimed at black readers and publishes a comic strip called “The Crazy Adventures of Bobo.” The hero is a black, naïve about the perils facing him when he takes the wheel.

It is difficult to find a satisfactory explanation for the Africans’ propensity to pass on blind curves and drive at out-of-control speeds. The best one, I suppose, is that an African does not conceptualize a potential problem the way a Westerner does. The Westerner says, If I do this, that might happen. The uneducated African does A without reasoning that it could lead to B. If an oncoming car has to swerve off the road to avoid his vehicle, and there is no collision and no injuries, the African does not say, Next time I’d better not do that. He will do exactly the same thing because he has, after all, accomplished
his objective of getting from one point to another without major mishap. He does not deal with the unexpected on a sophisticated level because to do so is, again, a quality of education and training, and the automobile is a new device to most Africans.

One evening the body of a pedestrian was lying on the four-lane highway near our house in Nairobi. The rush-hour traffic veered around it at high speed, but no one stopped. Occasionally a car would neglect to swerve and would strike the body. The driver would continue on, his accelerator pushed to the floor. A friend from the United Nations passed the scene and stopped at a pay phone to call the police. He had this conversation:

“Hello. I want to report that there’s a body lying on the highway. Just beyond Riverside Drive.”

“How many are there?” the police dispatcher asked.

“How many what?”

“How many bodies are there?”

“One. There is one dead man on the road who was run over.”

“Is he carrying identification?”

“Look, I don’t know anything except that I’ve stopped up the road at the petrol station to call you.”

“I see. And this man, how long has he been dead?”

The conversation dragged on for another half-minute before the dispatcher asked one final question: “How many did you say there were?”

Such an exchange may unglue a Westerner, but often what is unfathomable to him makes perfect sense to an African. And who’s to say one is right and the other wrong?

On December 8, 1978, for instance, two Zaire air force Mirage jets approached Kinshasa from Bangui. The tower radioed the pilots, Major Uzapango Kanzeka Mba and Captain Luamba Nguy Wanguy, not to land because of limited visibility. Baffled, the pilots abandoned their jets and parachuted to safety. The planes ran out of fuel and crashed into the Atlantic ocean. They had solved the problem.

Then there was the Interpol conference in Nairobi, which attracted top law enforcement officers from throughout the world. At the session I attended, the topic was a broad overview of international counterfeiting and the first speaker was an FBI agent from the Washington headquarters. Midway through his presentation the Ivory Coast’s delegate started frantically waving his hand from the
rear of the room. He was recognized and proceeded to read out a list of the serial numbers of all stolen bills in his country.

Or ask my friend Greg Jaynes about WAWA. A correspondent for the
New York Times
, he had been stationed in Nairobi for only a few days when there was a coup in the Central African Empire. His foreign editor told him to get there as quickly as possible. The Inter-Continental Hotel in Nairobi booked him into the “new” Inter-Con in Bangui, and Jaynes, setting off on his first out-of-town African assignment, was relieved to know that at least a clean room awaited him. He flew from Nairobi to Paris to Bangui—the quickest way to get from East to West Africa is usually via Europe—and arrived in a taxi at the address of the Bangui Inter-Continental Hotel, clutching his confirmation slip. All he found there was a hole in the ground. Construction had not yet started. The driver shrugged and suggested he come back in a year. Jaynes shrugged and found an un-air-conditioned room at the nearby Rock Hotel.

Jaynes had discovered what more experienced travelers already knew: there are few burdens in Africa greater than trying to get from here to there in a hurry. Trains opened up Africa for the adventurous traveler, but now, because the rails are unreliable or inoperable, the roads frequently impassable, and interstate highways all but nonexistent, you must fly. The real function of Africa’s airlines, though, has little to do with providing service or turning a profit. They were established originally to bring a sense of identity and prestige to fledgling nations, so the first priority for most governments at independence, even before expenditures on education and health, was a spanking new airport and an international carrier bearing the new flag.

Air Burundi, for example, had two international flights a week when I lived in Africa, both to Nairobi. It lost $12,000 on each round trip, but Burundi, one of the world’s ten poorest nations, refused to suspend the service because it wanted the prestige of being an international carrier. Air Tanzania needs hard cash so badly that it doesn’t accept credit cards; and in most countries a foreigner buying a plane ticket cannot use local currency—pounds sterling or dollars only, please. Ghana Airways, once an efficient little carrier with twenty aircraft, was down to four operable planes at last count, including an ancient VC-10 with clogged toilets and faded upholstery. It was known as “Old Faithful” and was used on the prestigious run to London.

Black Africa has twenty-eight national carriers, all of whom lose money, except for Gambia Airways, which has no airplanes. Gambia, a pleasing little West African country that lives by its wits and within its means, owns two flight ramps and runs an office that sells Gambian Airways tickets for transportation on other airlines, thus earning the nonexistent carrier a tidy $250,000 annual profit. As for the other government-owned airlines, well, most have more pressing needs than carrying passengers. Those needs include shuttling presidents and cabinet ministers around the world, ferrying troops and war supplies to various battlefronts, as Ethiopian Airlines does, or transporting coffee to the international marketplace, as Ugandan Airlines’ lone Boeing 707 does. If passengers get bumped as a result, they should expect neither an apology nor a hotel voucher. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” I once heard an airline clerk tell a stranded passenger on a Wednesday. “There’s another flight Saturday.”

One morning the phone rang in the Nairobi home of an American journalist. It was Air Zaire and the clerk informed him that his flight to Kinshasa had been delayed two days for technical reasons. How, my friend asked, could the airline be so precise about the length of the delay? “Oh, the president has the plane,” the clerk said, “and he’s promised to return it by Tuesday.”

Sure enough, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire had flown off to Europe with the airline’s only Boeing 747. His wife had taken the DC-10. No matter that Air Zaire flights QC 011 and QC 073 failed to show up those days for scheduled stops in Nairobi, Brussels, Paris and Bujumbura. (Not long afterward, the country went broke, and the planes were repossessed.)

Even if a plane does show up, that’s no guarantee it will stop. Three diplomats I knew were waiting in Bujumbura, Burundi, one day for a long-overdue Air Zaire flight; finally they saw it approaching in the distance and let out a cheer. But the jet was at 37,000 feet and there it stayed, zooming by right overhead. What my friends didn’t know was that airlines ignore scheduled stops in Bujumbura if there are fewer than four passengers to be picked up.

Things don’t happen in Africa the way they do in the United States or Western Europe, and if you expect otherwise, nervous indigestion may be your only reward. What may seem impolite or crude to a Westerner is not intended to be that way at all by an African. What may seem inefficient actually may prove to be very
direct and practical. Again, the African takes care of A but doesn’t worry about the ramifications of B.

I remember seeing seventy-five American tourists check into the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar es Salaam to start a one-week safari through Tanzania. The next day the government needed rooms to host a conference on apartheid in South Africa. While the Americans were out exploring the slovenly capital, their bags, clothes and personal belongings were collected from each room and tossed into a huge pile in the corner of the lobby. They returned to the hotel to discover that they had been checked out.

“You
can’t
do that!” stormed one American, his face red with anger.

“You don’t understand,” the receptionist replied, very calmly and rationally. “We need the rooms. All the other hotels are full in Dar, so if we don’t take your rooms, where is the delegation going to stay?”

EAWA (East Africa Wins Again). The tourists cut their Tanzanian trip short and caught a flight to the Seychelles.

There is, though, one unsettling aspect to the casualness of the African system: it is often controlled by men who have guns but not the training to use them sensibly. Confronted with the unexpected, they react unpredictably. Their authority far exceeds their ability to exercise their power wisely or even humanely.

During the final days of Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda, Dave Wood of
Time
magazine and Bob Caputo, a free-lance photographer, drove with me in a rented car from Nairobi to the Kenya-Uganda border. We hoped to pick up some color for our stories, interview a few refugees coming out of Uganda, perhaps find a Kenyan authority knowledgeable on events in Uganda. No Western journalist had been allowed into Uganda for months at that time, and we remembered the four European journalists who had recently been murdered after crossing Lake Victoria in a boat.

We reached the Kenyan border town of Malaba shortly before lunch. Refugees were streaming out of Uganda, old men and women in tattered rags carrying their few possessions, and on the Kenyan side, scores of trailer trucks were parked bumper to bumper, their drivers unwilling to enter the area a few miles ahead where pro- and anti-Amin forces were battling.

A small cement bridge spanning a dry riverbed marks the actual
border. A hundred yards farther on is a guard shack and police station that serves as the Ugandan regional immigration post. We parked our car and crossed the bridge on foot, thinking the Ugandan dozing in the shack would merely tell us to go back to Kenya, which, after all, was only a thirty-second walk away. He awoke with a start, adjusting his reflector sun glasses and grabbing his rifle in one motion.

“
Jambo
,” I said, the Swahili greeting for “hello.” “We just wondered how things were going on the border. Any chance of getting a visa?”

The man stared back wordlessly.

“Well, glad to see everything’s quiet,” Wood said, getting a bit uneasy. “We might just as well get back to Kenya. Sorry for the bother.”