In the capital city of Mr. Mobutu's Zaire, whom was I going to call? The police? Even if the rugged-looking crew didn't turn out to be the police, the telephones have been out these many years. And no Zairean, such as the pickup driver from whom I'd hitched the ride, would think of intervening in such a macabre but routine sideshow.
Anglo-Saxon tribal lore tells the parable of the sparrow that flies into the dining hall at night, flutters about for a moment, and then wings out again. Its brief time in the light, and the darkness from which it comes and to which it goes, provides the allegory of a human life. I know less about that Zairean's life than my forebears knew about the sparrow's. And Africa today is relayed to the rest of the world in similar fashion, by brief and sad or shocking images that stay for a moment on the retina before fading away again. The swollen infant, the milkless mother, the hoarse, red-eyed street fighter or jungle combatant, the operatic dictator, the chaotic and miserable crowd—these are the Africans we feel we "know."
And while images from the rest of the world are grim enough in all conscience, there can be something weird and neolithic about African traumas. General Idi Amin did keep human heads in his freezer. Samuel Doe of Liberia was videotaped having his ears cut off by the transition team of the incoming administration. Murders in Rwanda and Somalia were, perhaps, not morally different from or worse than murders in Bosnia or Ulster but seemed somehow more primitive, carried out as they were with clubs and axes, or with bare hands and by dancing, gibbering crowds.
Moreover, run the rule across Africa and see if you can find, anywhere in the entire foresaken continent, anything like a success story. The economies are used to scare the children of World Bank officials. (When I was last in Zambia, there was a national day of prayer for the local currency. Prayer was not answered.) The famines, plagues, and epidemics are, from old-style locusts to ultra-modern aids, the most sweeping and devastating. The clan wars and wars of religion are the most bitter and pitiless. Human life is at its nastiest, most brutish, and shortest.
Statistics do their usual job of confirming initial impressions. Of the 20 most impoverished nations in the world, 18 are in Africa. Per capita G.N.P. declined at the rate of almost 2 percent per year in the 1980s. Though it contains one-eighth of the world's population, the continent's share of world trade has dipped to just above 2 percent. But these paltry 2 percents balloon into terrifying figures when the downside is being measured. The sub-Saharan African debt was 110 percent of the total G.N.P. of all its nations in 1991. Of the people diagnosed as having the aids virus, two-thirds are in Africa.
Almost all current writing about Africa depends on a blend of Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh: the brooding, throbbing stagnation of the Congo and the sinister farce of egomaniacal "Afrocentric" politics. (V. S. Naipaul is sometimes successful in achieving a literary synthesis of the two.) In no country is this journalistic temptation harder to resist than in the original Congo itself (now pointlessly renamed Zaire), where I had my haunting brief encounter on the roadside. Here, where Conrad's river could be like the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Rhine, or the Mekong—a great waterway of trade—you find instead a huge sweltering ditch, studded with eroded hulks and sunken barges in which, as in every crevice of African decay, some wretched people have tried to scratch out a home. Attempting to make sense of my chance sighting of the man I couldn't help, I struggled to widen the small pool of light in which I'd glimpsed him.
Great place, Zaire. It's as large as the United States east of the Mississippi, and it's the second-largest French-speaking country in the world. It has colossal resources, built as it is on vast reefs of copper, cobalt, and diamonds, to say nothing of its immense river network and its wealth of game and arable land. It has been the recipient of tremendous generosity from every kind of lending institution. It could have broken out of the "Third World" a generation ago. But instead it became a demonstration case of the deliberate uses of underdevelopment—something neither Waugh nor Conrad bothered even to imagine.
Inititation begins at the airport. International airlines will not let their aircraft spend a night in Kinshasa, because they are not sure the planes will still be there in the morning, and because no insurance company will cover them for the stopover. As I stepped off the plane, I was grabbed and surrounded on the tarmac between the stairs and the "terminal." My passport was seized by one official—at least he said he was an official—while a brisk auction of my belongings was begun by other, rival bureaucrats and assorted freelances.
The filthy, airless arrivals building was awash with garbage and pools of fetid water, as well as with predators of all kinds who, I later learned, were off-duty cops in search of an income supplement. If not for the aid of a big and kindly Zairean doctor I had met on the plane, I might be there still. And not even he could get me out of the parking lot, which was a wasteland of rusting cars and jagged potholes. The uniformed goons of the Zairean army, guns and bayonets to the fore, simply placed their jackboots against the doors of the creaking and springless taxi, preventing the driver from getting behind the wheel until he had handed over a wad of dirty bills. This tax is passed on to the consumer, as I later found.
One of the soliders, very much the worse for drink, insisted on getting into the taxi so as, he explained, to guarantee my safety on the ride to the hotel. Upon arrival he demanded $1,500 in cash for the privilege, and followed me angrily into the lobby when I refused to pay. His breath was undoing my tie. Nobody in the hotel offered to take my side.
General Mobutu Sese Seko, the cunning bandit who presides over the country (his titles variously translate as "the cock who leaves no hen untouched" and "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his inflexible will to win, goes from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake"), is not a subtle man. One of the main streets in his capital is named for Emperor Bokassa, the deposed tyrant of the neighboring Central African Republic, who practiced cannabilism and murdered hundreds of schoolchildren who refused to wear his choice of uniform. In the eastern part of Zaire, a large stretch of water is named in honor of Idi Amin.
I quote from a brochure of the state tourist industry: "Thanks to the great number of hippos, the fish in Lake Amin benefit from a rich and abundant diet provided by their excrement." The same point is emphasized a little lower down: "Lake Idi Amin Dada, extraordinarily rich in fish thanks to the defecation of a myriad of lake hippos." One wants to picture the planning meeting. "Tourism is slow. The numbers are down badly. We can't do much about the airport. But what if we offer them a fish dinner, stressing the hippo shit and reminding them twice of the enticing name of the lake?"
I thought that the author of Scoop and Black Mischief could have made something of that. And Conrad would have had no difficulty recognizing the rotting, crashing decay of the equatorial interior. When the Belgian colonists departed in 1960, the country could boast 88,000 miles of decent road. By 1985, this had contracted to 12,000 miles, of which only 1,400 were paved. Today, the smallest trip outside Kinshasa requires an all-terrain vehicle. The backcountry and forest have lost all connection with the capital and the coast.
To this, however, can be added some strictly modern horrors. I spent part of an afternoon at the suburban villa of Etienne Tshisekedi, the veteran opposition leader, who, on the previous day, had been subjected to an attack by one of Mobutu's private militias. The windows in his study had been shot out, and a litter of grenade shells and cartridge cases had been collected by supporters as evidence. Here was a scene recognizable from Bosnia or El Salvador or Lebanon; the civilian and nontribal politician trying desperately to survive in a welter of mayhem and superstition.
In the garden, a large black cock was playing a vicious game of cat and mouse with a crippled frog, something I didn't know poultry had the wit or the cruelty to do. As the pecking torture went on, I listened to the aides of Tshisekedi, who was legally made prime minister in 1991 and who enjoys vast popular support, but who—if only because he can hardly leave his home—is failing to make any headway against the vast corruption and lawlessness of the Mobutu state. "Our leadership comes from every main national group and tribe, while Mobutu's entourage is all from the Ngabandi clan," I was told by Frederic Kibassa, one of the toughest and most outspoken of the dissidents. "Mobutu's political family is corrupted through and through." Estimates by Western diplomats of the private fortune Mobutu has hijacked from the central bank fluctuate between $4 billion and $11 billion: "At any rate," an American envoy to the country told me, "he could clear the national debt by writing a personal check."
But Mobutu's larger achievement is to have corrupted an entire society and made it complicit with beggary, embezzlement, and theft. An elevator attendant in one run-down government ministry wanted a bribe to take me from the 18th to the 19th floor. Passport Control extends an imperative palm just as your plane is boarding. Policemen farm their beats. I was detained with my photographer companion, Ed Kashi, as we tried to get some pictures of the Congo riverbank; two separate teams of police and customs officials disputed the extortion rights over us and threatened to take the camera equipment before settling for a compromise price. "I am afraid, Mr. Christopher," said my guide sadly at one point, "that my country is a jungle. A jungle." This was no sarcastic white settler talking with condescension about Mau Mau land. This was a man genuinely embarrassed by the abject shame of his country.
He actually said this to me after he'd shown me the Kinshasa zoo. I had not especially wanted to go, since I'm fed up with reading articles that describe Africa as being either a safari park or an elephants' graveyard, but I soon understood why he wished me to see it. After being contemptuously fleeced by a couple of bored gatekeepers, we were admitted to a tiny hell. Baffled bears with sore-covered muzzles were moldering in dirty, waterless pens. A scrofulous eagle sat in a dropping-spattered cage. A lioness sported a suppurating stump where her tail had been.
It was the very essence of a country that has forgotten self-respect and that cannot be bothered to safeguard even its natural patrimony of charismatic wildlife. As we drove sadly away, my Zairean friend still apologizing for the wreck and squalor, we passed a few roadside food stands where sat clutches of roadkill vendors. You could get a squashed fox for a few grubby bills, and some live pangolins were being roughly handled for curious potential buyers. Everything was coarse, brutal, and cheap, and nothing worked. It wasn't just worse than when the much-hated Belgian racists had departed. It was worse than before colonialism began at all.
Portuguese explorers in the first decade of the 19th century reported on the kingdom of Kazembe, which occupied the part of Zaire now called Shaba or Katanga Province. The kingdom, they said excitedly, was "rich in food and strongly governed." Today, malnutrition is the leading cause of death among Zairean children, and a warlord system runs Shaba Province. The once fabulous mining operations have been virtually shut down, as the skilled Baluba workers, who knew how to run them, are being ethnically cleansed from the area.
"Don't be deceived by the chaos," said one experienced Western businessman. "Mobutu likes it this way. With hyperinflation it's easy for foreigners to make money, and it's the cut from foreigners that fills his pockets. With no roads, no army can topple him. With no communications, the opposition can never organize. With total corruption, it's every man for himself and people can be picked off one by one." The uses of underdevelopment.
As I went around the markets and streets of Kinshasa, I was often asked if I was French. This was not a compliment to my poor usage of the tongue, and it wasn't asked in a friendly way. What people turned out to mean was that if I was French they wouldn't talk to me. Popular hatred of France for its open support of Mobutu exceeds even the dislike of the C.I.A. for installing him, in a coup in 1965, in the first place. The French intervention in Rwanda was widely seen as a scheme to help both Mobutu and the blood-stained Rwandan officers who carried out the genocide of last April. After the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans left their country by way of the river system, the embalmed corpse of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana was unloaded at Kinshasa airport by the very officers who had used his death as a pretext for massacre. Even as they broadcast appeals for panic-stricken Rwandans to flee the nightmare of the Goma refugee camp, they themselves were setting up shop in Zaire's finest hotels and most fragrant banks. Mobutu's soliders, meanwhile, were robbing the refugees at the frontier and charging international relief aircraft 300 bucks a flight—cash—for the privilege of using the Goma strip. I could have warned them.
Several times I was told that "what happens in Algeria will happen here"—that soon foreigners would be killed on sight. The Zairean people are probably too gentle and too welcoming, as individuals, ever to make good on such threats. But there is an almost bottomless well of humiliation and frustration to draw upon, and though episodes of violence have been infrequent, they have been very ferocious. The certainty in any case is that if things do turn nasty we will see Zaireans in the raw, untreated state in which their fellow Africans are presented to us now—stripped of cover and dignity and occupying certain well-worn categories. The Refugee. The Beggar. The Slum Dweller. Just like the nameless man who was dragged across my headlamps.
But now take another look at that guy. There's no God-given reason why he isn't dressed in a good suit of clothes, supporting his family by working for a thriving mining company at a standard of living higher than that of southern Italy or northern Portugal. Or why, on weekends, he isn't taking the children on a cruise upriver, perhaps to see a well-run game park or maybe to explore the wonders of the rain forest, where careful and judicious logging provides a healthy income to farmers who would otherwise move hungrily to the townships, while preserving the canopy and older growths for—among other things—innovative research into tropical medicine.
This is no Utopian dream. The material conditions for this other Zaire already exist. And there are men and women there qualified to administer it, except that they tend to be either in prison or abroad. (In the 1980s, at least 100,000 educated and professional Africans fled the continent.) The current situation is almost completely determined by outsiders, who have shored up Mobutu as a "friendly power," who have bought the raw materials cheap, who have supplied the guns and trainers to the swollen and unnecessary army, and who have set the percentage rate at which Zaireans will work—or not work—to repay their debt. If the "new globalism" means anything, it means that, outward appearances to the contrary, the man I saw is part of the same political economy as I am.
The fact is that, unfair as it may seem, Africa desperately needs that success story I mentioned earlier. Not everyone is as crude as the late Richard Nixon, who confided to H. R. Haldeman that American blacks were no good because Africa itself was no good and had never produced a workable or civilized society. ("The worst," he added viciously, "is Liberia, which we built.") In common with far too many educated people, Nixon knew less about Africa than he did about the north face of the Eiger. But his cynicism finds a partial echo in the weariness with which rationalizations for African failure are received.
Yes, we know that colonialism was devastating and disruptive. Yes, we know that the political borders of Africa make no sense and were drawn without regard to human reality. Yes, no doubt the international-trade deck is stacked against African products. But does this explain why there is still slavery in Mauritania and southern Sudan (often but not always Islamic enslavement of Christians, and what do Mr. Farrakhan's Black Muslims have to say about that?)? Does it explain why millions of young girls are genitally mutilated? Does it explain why the Wa-Benzi—a brilliant street term for the local class that rides in the imported Mercedes limousine—are greedier and less productive than any privileged elite in Asia or Latin America?
Like my Zairean guide, who referred angrily to his country as a jungle, Africans are often their own sternest critics. In the Ivory Coast, where I attended a conference of political parties, the chairman of the meeting, Achi Koman, gave me a copy of his pamphlet. It turned out to contain a long denunciation of sorcery and witchcraft among the educated classes. He told me later that in his opinion it was one of the country's most urgent problems, and that even the most outwardly sophisticated university graduates were often in thrall to some village féticheur.
The Ivory Coast is actually a very good place to contemplate the persistence of cultism and its frequent counterpart, the glorification of the chieftain or leader. The capital, Abidjan, is a well-run Frenchified coastal city with numerous chic shops and restaurants and a functional if overlarge bureaucracy. But it is not, technically, the political capital of the nation. That honor belongs to the provincial town of Yamoussoukro, birthplace and ancestral village of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Until his death in 1993, F.H.-B. ran the country like a private estate. And if you make the three-hour journey north by road to Yamoussoukro, you can see his memorial.
Soaring directly out of the red dirt and the scrub is an immense Roman Catholic cathedral (perhaps 15 percent of Ivorians are Catholic in name) which was designed specifically to be taller than St. Peter's Basillica in Rome. For some reason you need a military permit to enter the place, but on the day of my visit that was a pointless preliminary because I was the only person there. The vast domed structure with its inhuman scale had the look of something that had recently landed from a Steven Spielberg set. Lizards fooled about. A guard dozed stertorously in the men's room. A mongrel was attempting to give itself a blow job on the steps, but abandoned the effort either because of the heat or from a feeling that the surroundings were inappropriate.
Yamoussoukro is eerie, because its huge Stalinist boulevards and avenues lead nowhere, and because its vast "Institute," dedicated to the study of Houphouët-Boigny "thought," is completely bare of books and papers. Here, as elsewhere in Africa, you get a queasy sense of the jungle creeping unstoppably back. Meanwhile, what has been built is a sort of unsatisfying and discordant compromise between opportunistic capitalism and tenacious tribalism. The contract to build the wasteful and hideous basilica (at a cost which is not disclosed but which consumed a sizable fraction of the country's budget) went, as most local contracts do, to the French construction conglomerate Bouygues, which is to France what Bechtel is to the United States. That was one of the many pourboires which sweeten the relationship between Paris and its African client states. Yet smack in the middle of this neglected hellhole of concrete and glass and marble modernism, there is a large artificial lake dedicated to the care and feeding of sacred crocodiles. This in turn is right next to the immense presidential palace which F.H.-B. awarded himself. Interestingly, the saints and martyrs in the cathedral stained glass are all conspicuously white. But stationed close to the Redeemer in one panel is a black man whose face is well known from official portraits.
As I watched the crocs plying to and fro in that way they have, I was thinking of a conversation I had had in the capital the night before. "F.H.-B. got the Pope himself to come and consecrate that basilica," I was told. "But when he died he wasn't buried in it. Everyone thought it was supposed to be his mausoleum, but he had arranged for his body to be handed over to the 'traditional medicine' priests. The funeral was in secret. On these occasions, cher ami, the witch doctors are supposed to take back the power they conferred on the big chief when he was alive. That usually means human heads—up to 40 of them for a really major chieftain."
Oh come on, I thought (and indeed said). Wouldn't people notice that there were—to take one objection at random—some missing persons? "Ah, but who counts the peddlers who wander over the border from Liberia or Guinea? Who will miss the occasional refugee, or ask any questions?" These were Africans talking. Europeans in Abidjan, some of whom thought it was politically non-kosher to suggest human sacrifice at the presidential level, nonetheless confirmed that their servants had been nervous, and had gone around checking on stray or missing members of their families. Impressive, at any rate, was the number of people who believed the story.
Superstition can take more than one form. Houphouët-Boigny was a French client. Joaquim Chissano is the leader of a revolutionary and secular party in Mozambique—a former Portuguese colony that tore itself away by armed struggle, and until recently proclaimed the slogans of socialist internationalism. Today, President Chissano greets visiting diplomats and dignitaries by bending their ears about Transcendental Meditiation, and has awarded millions of hectares of prime land to "the Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corporation."
In the past two decades, Mozambique has been through an anti-colonial revolution, swiftly superseded by a vicious war of attrition with South Africa in which perhaps one million Mozambicans lost their lives. Its economy has been beggared and put into World Bank receivership. After such an acute crisis of expectations, and such a numbing series of disappointments, perhaps people are willing to give anything a try. "If you want to see voodoo economics," said one rather bitter Mozambican radical, "don't read the World Bank reports. Go to the market in Maputo and ask for the black-magic section. They have one now. They didn't used to, but that's all coming back these days."
On a visit to the market, which sold everything from hubcaps to Johnnie Walker, I found the voodoo section without difficulty and was offered a surefire male-potency enhancer. It looked like a suspension of tofu in vinegar, and I felt confident enough to pass it up after a brief hesitation, especially since—to my relief—the vendor didn't really seem to believe in it either.
However, when people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo. There is almost no country in Africa where it is not essential to know to which tribe, or which subgroup of which tribe, the president belongs. From this single piece of information you can trace the lines of patronage and allegiance that define the state.
The promise of political independence has soured. Economic progress has not merely been arrested, it has been turned back. In most countries, the state forms a thin and unpopular veneer on a pain-racked society. In Nairobi, the relatively clean and modern capital of Kenya, I went to a conference of right-thinking people who were concerned with this very subject. The seminar was on "Democracy in a Multi-Ethnic Society," a pressing topic at any time in Kenya, which is riven with tribal envy between the Luo and the Kikuyu peoples, but an especially absorbing one in view of the news from Rwanda. (On the edge of all political conversation in Africa today, if you listen, you can hear the word "Rwanda.")
Though Kenya is outwardly calm, and its English-language press maintains a jaunty tone, worrying news creeps in from the outlying districts. There is the Somali horror show on the border. There are election riots in the slums. Up in the Rift Valley, a crude war of clan against clan has broken out.
The meeting took place in the Nairobi Safari Club, in a highly urbane and relaxed atmosphere. It had something of the feel of an old British colonial gathering, called to discuss signs of restlessness among the natives. But with the exception of a German Social Democratic team who were helping sponsor the event, all present were Africans. There was some nervous joking about the morning's headlines, which featured a denunciation by President Daniel arap Moi of all such "Democracy conferences," which he accused of being anti-Kenyan activities sponsored by sinister forces overseas.
This was likely to be more than mere rhetoric; President Moi has an imperious way with dissent and uses his police force with a heavy hand. Moreover, he is from a minority tribe himself and is given to consolidating his position by playing off the principal tribes against one another. The word at the meeting was that the fighting in the Rift Valley was probably state-instigated as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. And in Kenya, l'etat c'est Moi.
The day's keynote speaker was Professor Ali Mazrui, a smooth-as-silk Kenyan-born academic who now holds a chair at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He appeared to get straight to the point by stressing the abattoir conditions in Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Angola, Burundi, and elsewhere. "Is it the old slate of the colonial order being washed clean with buckets of blood?" he asked. "Or is the blood in fact spilling in the maternity ward of history as a new Africa is trying to breathe amidst the mess of convulsive birth pangs?"
I could think of a question much scarier than these. What if it's neither of the above? What if all the bloodshed is for nothing? What if Africa is neither cleansed in blood nor giving birth in blood, but just plain drowning in blood? What if it's rocketing back into the primeval, using 20th-century techniques to accomplish its own destruction? Well, I only asked.
This was a gathering sponsored by, among others, the National Concerns Council and a group called Gender Sensitive Initiatives, which God knows is needed in a continent where on every road you see men leading strings of women like pack animals. But I wondered if such nicely named outfits would care to look reality in the face.
Actually, Mazrui improved as the morning wore on. He proposed six tests for a minimally successful state. Does it control its own territory? Is it sovereign over its own resources? Can it collect revenue? Does it maintain an infrastructure of roads, railways, and telephones? Can it provide services such as health, education, and sanitation? Is it able to guarantee law and order? There is a seventh question which he touched upon. Does it control some areas by day but surrender that vestigial power at night?
By any or all of these tests, including the informal and crepuscular seventh one, the majority of African states are not states at all, just entities with occasional impact on the lives of the people who dwell in them. South Africa qualifies as a proper state, as does Botswana, and as do Namibia and Zimbabwe. But that claim would still come as news to millions of their citizens, who live outside the charmed circle of development and "the market."
And to their noncitizens. Much of South Africa's mining labor force comes from impoverished Mozambique, which in effect lives by the export of the people. Perhaps one in seven inhabitants of the Ivory Coast is a hungry immigrant from a neighboring country. Even before the terrifying events of April 1994, 200,000 or so Rwandans lived as refugees in Uganda. Eritrea is trying to repatriate a large chunk of its population from Sudan, which in its turn is creating a mass of internal refugees as the Muslim-Christian conflict becomes more acute.
Solzhenitsyn once wrote of the prison population of the U.S.S.R. as a nation apart, with its own rules and even its own economy. In Africa, the displaced person is a special category of citizenship, or at any rate of existence. Nobody really knows how many millions of them there are. On a dusty and glaring day, I went to visit the Boane camp in Mozambique, which is supposed to be a clearing center, operated by the U.N., for returning Mozambicans who fled to Swaziland during the war. Of the first two men I spoke to, one was an Ethiopian merchant sailor who had made his way down the coast of eastern Africa by sea and had a rather confused account of how he came to be in a relocation center 35 miles from the Swazi border, and the other was a former Angolan policeman who had left the city of Huambo, on the other side of the continent, to get away from the unita guerrillas of Jonas Savimbi. He, too, was at something of a loss to explain his presence in this transient wilderness. But, for the moment, it was home. And there wasn't much to go back to.
Both men were educated, with qualifications and skills, and both could speak fair English. Yet in any foreseeable future they were fated to be part of a vast population of Africa whose tragedy is that nobody wants them, nobody needs them, and nobody knows who or where they are. As far as the world economy is concerned, they might as well not have been born, and might as well hurry up about dying.
Until recently, it was an article of faith among white settlers that this—the Acropolis of southern Africa—could not conceivably have been built by the ancestors of the shiftless blacks. The country's leading archaeologist, Peter Garlake, was compelled to live abroad when this dogma was made official by the Ian Smith regime. It has now been established beyond doubt that Great Zimbabwe was the work of an African civilization of the later Iron Age, probably in the 13th century but perhaps before that.
On the day of my visit, the vast stone enclosure with its beautifully curved and rounded observation tower was being looked over by a group of Afrikaner tourists. Newly encouraged to travel in black Africa by the amazing developments in their own homeland, they had come to see for themselves that Africa really does have a history and an architecture that pre-dates the white conquest. They were full of enthusiasm, and were writing flattering things in the visitors' book. Well, I thought, I've lived to see it.
Of course, the question arises, if Great Zimbabwe was so great, why did it collapse? There's no clear answer to this question, but it may have had something to do with a loss of contact with the eastern coast. All the way from Masvingo down to the shores of Mozambique, there are lesser Zimbabwes (the word in the Shona language means both "houses of stone" and "venerated houses") that used to be part of the same extended civilization. But if you want to follow this natural archaeological trail, you come up against a frontier that was drawn during the course of a late-19th century local quarrel between Anglo-Saxon empire builder Cecil Rhodes and the Portuguese.
At the frontier, which cuts across the road with hardly any notice, signs in English and Portuguese warn of land mines. But there is no reason that a minefield should separate the populations on either side of the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border, who are both from the Shona nation and are in fact the same people with a common local language. Nor does it make sense, at a particular bend in the road, for the Shona people to stop going to schools that teach English and start attending schools where the medium of instruction is Portuguese.
Zimbabwe is the country where the young Doris Lessing wrote her first stories—The Grass Is Singing and This Was the Old Chief's Country. For decades after, she was persona non grata in what was then Rhodesia and, returning after independence to write her book African Laughter, she was amazed to find the settlers engaged in the same conversation they had been having when she left.
I had a sample of that very conversation at that very bend in the road at the Zimbabwe-Mozambique crossing. Standing at the border post was a trio of tough, blond young men. They were South Africans, but not in the least like the friendly, mellow Afrikaner families I'd encountered at the Zimbabwe ruins. They looked more like San Diego surf nazis, and they were in a foul mood. Since they had arrived without troubling to acquire visas, the border guards wouldn't let them cross. More insulting still, the guards would not take money to bend the rules. They were polite but firm in this refusal. "Christ, man, I thought everyone in Africa took bribes," remarked the tallest of the three charmers. Yes, that's right, I thought venomously, push your way into one of the few honest countries left in Africa, start throwing bribes and foreign currency about, and then go home and complain that everybody is on the take.
An unsatisfactory conversation ensued. "Vanity Fair—isn't that a pornography magazine?" Well, I mean to say, really! I changed the subject with what I thought was appropriate dignity, asking them how they liked Zimbabwe. Not a bit, it was sort of a nothing country, not at all the sort of thing they were used to. Oh, and what sort of thing was that? "Well, back home in South Africa we have Catseyes down the middle of the road. They haven't got anything like that here." Weeks later, in Johannesburg, I found that these youths had pissed me off sufficiently to make me notice that—aha!—there was a distinct shortage of Catseyes on the main roads.
Actually, Zimbabwe has at least one foot in the First World. If you fly in from any neighboring country, you see the suburbs of the capital, Harare, winking with the blue eyes of many, many swimming pools. The quarter-million or so white settlers have abandoned their silly claim to run and own the country in exchange for the undisturbed right to make money in their own way, and they have been joined by a large and ambitious black middle class. An America visitor can use his credit cards, dial AT&T direct, and deal with gleaming car-rental companies. The choice of golf clubs, safari parks, and mountain resorts is extraordinary.
But as elsewhere in Africa, and perhaps more noticeably in Zimbabwe because of the contrast, you have only to walk a few steps from the pool of light around your hotel, or turn your car or jeep a few yards off the main road, to find yourself in the Third World again.
The aids crisis is actually one of the few exceptions to this rule, because it strikes all classes and conditions. In a ritzy discotheque in Harare, I met Alex Kaunda, son of the man who until recently was the president of neighboring Zambia. There had been an aids death in that family. But most Third World afflictions are unsubtle in being income-related. (Just as the Third World itself is unsubtle in making poor people very thin and rich people very fat.) I began to compose a sort of blank-verse "Sub-Saharan Blues," in which the first line of each verse ran: "You know you're in the Third World when … " Thus:
You know you're in the Third World when you see a half-dozen scabby, tiny, scrawny Zimbabwean children playing cheerfully with the improvised toy of a simple balloon made from an inflated prophylactic—the gift of a superbly sincere Swedish charity. In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.
You know you're in the Third World when you talk to an agronomist and he tells you that in southern Africa the drought of 1991–92 was disastrous for food production and the good rains of 1992–93 a huge relief, but that unfortunately the good rains have created ideal conditions for a plague of locusts.
You know you're in the Third World when, flying up the western coast on the national airline of Cameroon, you decide that a visit to the men's room is in order. Reaching the back of the plane and giving the door handle the usual twist and tug, you are fortunate to be covered in nothing worse than confusion when the whole unit comes away in your hand. (I actually muttered the word "wawa" at that point. Taught me by the most liberal white resident I've ever met, it is an unavoidable acronym which means: "West Africa Wins Again.")
You know you're in the Third World when, hearing that a mother in Zaire has lost two children, you tentatively inquire the cause of death and are told "diarrhea." (In an added touch, epidemiologists have now traced the cause of many deaths in that same rich country to a renewed outbreak of … bubonic plague.)
Outside the Eritrean city of Massawa, its beautiful coral streets and squares still charred and gouged from the last days of the 30-year war for independence in Ethiopia, I stood at the edge of a grave. Behind an improvised wall of corrugated iron in the middle of some dull coastal flatlands, a mini killing field had been created. Piles of ammunition boxes lay stacked every which way, spilling their contents in all directions. But the contents, in what I realized has the makings of a nasty metaphor, were not ammunition. They were the end products of ammunition.
Yellowing skeletons were sprawling in contorted attitudes, and piles of skulls went with them. Most of the skulls had bullet holes either directly between the eyes or squarely in the back of the neck: a 20th-century "signature" that by now even a child (or in these regions, especially a child) can recognize. These unaccountable and horribly inseparable bodies had been heaped up after an execution.
The Eritrean liberation forces had lost enough people of their own, God knows, and are still loooking for thousands of prisoners and hostages who went "missing." But this trove of murder was no help to their inquiry. It belonged, rather, to the war-crimes trials which the new government of Ethiopia will be staging. These skeletons, some still clad in rags of uniform, almost certainly belonged to dissident Ethiopian officers and soldiers who had urged an end to the dirty war against Eritrea, and had been shot down in heaps pour encourager les autres.
The Dergue, the Ethiopian dictatorship responsible for the skeletons, was supported politically and militarily by the former Soviet Union and by Cuba, which had obvious geopolitical ambitions in a country so near the Persian Gulf. But it was also supported politically by the United States and militarily by Israel. Washington favored the continuance of an imperial "unitary state," and Israel opposed the emergence of a new Eritrean state that seemed friendly to Arab nationalists on the other side of the Red Sea.
So the killing field of Massawa, to which I was taken by a group of bright and courageous young Eritreans who had returned from exile in Los Angeles, was a sort of laboratory of foreign interference. Yet again, when Africans had been willing to kill one another, they had found outsiders willing to arm and encourage them.
In 1960, in Tourist in Africa, Evelyn Waugh wrote, "Even now you will find people of some good will and some intelligence who speak of Europeans as having 'pacified' Africa. Tribal wards and slavery were endemic before they came; no doubt they will break out again when they leave. Meantime under European rule in the first forty years of this century there have been three long wars in Africa on a far larger scale than anything perpetrated by marauding spearmen, waged by white men against white, and a generation which has seen the Nazi regime in the heart of Europe had best stand silent when civilised and uncivilised notions are contrasted."
A shrewd point, and from an unexpected source. Nonetheless, there is a sense in which really terrifying and elemental violence is more a part of contemporary African experience than it is of, say, most of Asia and Latin America. The radiant Somali human-rights crusader Rakiya Omaar, co-director of the organization African Rights and author of the definitive new work on Rwanda, put it to me like this: "Many people can imagine losing a friend or loved one. But these people have lost all their kin, all their loved ones, all their friends—everyone who even knew who they were."
Rakiya was convinced from her work in the field that the final death count in Rwanda would be even higher than the estimates of half a million. And this, as she pointed out grimly, arises from two rather modern, premeditated forms of barbarism—the broadcast of coordinated orders over a special radio station, and "the use of fragmentation grenades at close range on people who had been herded together."
Rwanda was no frantic explosion of bloodlust, but a long-prepared plan to destroy an entire people. Since before 1990, the Rwandan military had been buying and stockpiling an arsenal of light and heavy weapons, purchased directly from South Africa, Egypt, and the ever helpful French. Even the United States did its bit, training 35 Rwandan officers and NCOs in American military schools, and furnishing loans for the purchase of American military equipment. In 1992 the Bush administration cheerfully certified to Congress that Rwandan government "relations with the U.S. are excellent," and announced that "there is no evidence of any systematic human rights abuses by the military or by any other element of the government of Rwanda."
And how did the impoverished Rwanda pay for the weapons that would make it into one gigantic charnel house, instead of the verdant and fertile upland community it had once been? In order to finance a $6 million arms deal with Egypt, Rwanda obtained an export guarantee from France's nationalized bank Credit Lyonnais. This loan was to be redeemed in … tea. Poor Rwanda mortgaged the future earnings of its Mulindi tea plantation to Credit Lyonnais as collateral, and gave Egypt a million dollars' worth of fresh tea as a commodity down payment.
Thus were the innocuous herbal products of a thriving rural people turned into a Western technology transfer, which in turn made a serious genocide, as distinct from a random massacre, actually thinkable and doable. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Nobel laureate, once quite properly wrote that it is Africans themselves who are to blame for "the trail of skeletons along desiccated highways … the lassitude and hopelessness of emaciated survivors crowded into refugee camps … the mounds of corpses." But when these things happen, the West is not entitled to watch as if they were happening on another planet. The globalization of the world economy means an exchange of responsibilities as well as techniques and resources, and as Joseph Conrad actually did write in Heart of Darkness, "The conquest of the earth … is not a pretty thing when you look into it."
"Mozambique is in a coma," I was told by Jose Luis Cabaço, one of the many white Mozambicans who supported that country's independence movement. A long civil and tribal conflict, which was also an aspect of its long war with white Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa, has left Mozambique barely breathing.
We were sitting in the beautiful Hotel Polana in Maputo, where Graham Greene set the scene of illicit interracial romance in The Human Factor. "There is no state," continued Cabaço, who served as minister of information in the revolutionary regime and is still a member of its Parliament. "There is no economy. There is no independence. The war against us was designed by anthropologists"—he practically spat out the word—"who knew all our society's weak points. And a coma requires an oxygen tent. That oxygen tent is now being supplied by the powers that be."
He was right, both on the first point and on the second. The tribalist contras who were financed by South Africa in the bad old days were people who understood the weak spots. They went for the clinics and the schools, using local witch doctors to spread fear of new things, and they kidnapped children and turned them into killers. Roy Stacey, an assistant secretary in the Reagan-era State Department, called this "one of the most brutal holocausts against ordinary human beings since World War II." Today, Mozambique's vital signs are flickering again. But only on one important condition.
It hit me when I went to the stricken hamlet of Mohiua, in the northern Mozambican province of Zambézia, to see the contras being demobilized and to watch preparations for this fall's multi-party elections. To get to Mohiua, I had to fly first to Nampula on a Russian plane with South African pilots and (a first for me, and only their second U.N. peacekeeping effort) an immaculate Japanese ground crew. Then I hitched a ride on a United Nations Puma helicopter which boasted a British flight crew and a Bangladeshi ground crew. On arrival in the bush, I found officers and soldiers from India, Egypt, Spain, Argentina, and (nice to see some Africans) Guinea-Bissau. All along my journey from the capital, I had not met a single Mozambican official. The writ of the government did not run anywhere.
The word is "recolonization." It's a decision that has been made for quite a few African countries. For obvious reasons, it's not called recolonization, out loud, in Africa itself. For equally obvious reasons, it is not called recolonization in the West either, or not outside a few nostalgic newspapers in London and Paris. But in country after country, with Mozambique as a salient case, you find that the local Treasury is a branch of the World Bank, the armed forces are under the stewardship of the United Nations, the electoral register is in the care of international "observers," the distressed citizens apply for relief to outside charities and aid groups, and the choicest bits of real estate are in the hands of multinational corporations.
In the scrub and dirt of Mohiua, nothing grew except footprints. The ex-heroes of South Africa's surrogate army stood around glowering indiscriminately. Their chief, a man distinguished by his highly abbreviated pair of pink Lurex hot pants, was obviously afraid of his men, or his boys, who had been waiting too long for their handout of shoes and rations from the foreigners.
The atmosphere veered nastily between a sorry, unhygienic torpor and an ugly, vindictive frustration. One group of malcontents stood shiftily apart, showing the lopped and stunted effect of a harvesting of limbs—a foot here, a shin there—by land mines. They needed the crisply attired foreign-aid workers, and they also hated and resented them. Any trite moment, such as the arrival of a batch of cans bearing the blue-and-gold logo of the European Union, or the passage by of an undulating village woman, could cause a cacophony of whooping or a pointless shoving match. In the command tent, where it was planned to give every man, able-bodied or otherwise, a machete and a plastic bucket before sending him back to his home village (if he could find it), and where there was some jocular unease because of the Rwandan echo of the pile of machetes, I heard the ultimate insult being whispered. "They're like children, really: out of temper one minute and eager for attention the next. How can you deal with them?"
This was not said by only the non-Africans present. Fernando, the very personable, plump, and patient volunteer from Guinea-Bissau, had the roughest time with the rabble of ex-fighters. At one point, calling him a traitor to Africa and other things less tender and polite, they loudly offered to kill him. "You don't believe me?" said one young tough with a vicious cast in his eye. "I've killed plenty of people." He looked and sounded quite believable, but after an interval of menace he found his attention engaged elsewhere and sloped away to do whatever the next thing was. A few years ago, he had been corrupted by having too much power. Now he was corrupted by having no power at all.
In the Inhambane Province of Mozambique, in 1983, perhaps 100,000 people starved because the world's lending institutions did not relish the "independence" rhetoric of the government. Or, as a World Bank report rather frigidly phrased it, that government's "policy stance was, moreover, instrumental in provoking a sharp decline in external assistance, which further exacerbated the emerging crisis." That lesson, anyway, has now been learned. Every country in Africa has come to heel. The Structural Adjustment Program, or sap, is the only available model. Export-led growth, deflation, and debt repayment are the new mantras.
But export what? The rest of the world doesn't even pretend to want the continent's main export, which is people. In the Ivory Coast I read a brochure which touchingly invited me to visit: "The Banco Forest, the last trace of the first forest which used to cover all the regions before is now a place looked for and admired by the visitors, its haven of 3000 hectares of preserved forest and of numerous and varied essences." Behind this fractured English crouched the disagreeable truth that, like much of western Africa, the Ivory Coast has little to sell but its old-growth forests, and that these must be felled and logged at an unreal pace, or else the country—a country, after all, that is named for a raw material—would have no "growth" statistics to report to its creditors. "wala," to rephrase the old saying. West Africa Loses Again.
Even when externally determined policies are probably a "good thing," they arrive like sudden thunderstorms or droughts. In January, the entire populations of 13 African countries woke up one morning to discover that their currencies had been devalued by 50 percent. From Senegal to Burkina Faso and from Cameroon to Chad, the legal tender is the C.F.A. franc (C.F.A. standing technically for Communauté Financière Africaine but known in local vernacular as Colonies Françaises d'Afrique), pegged to the franc and set by the French Treasury. The decision to halve the rate had been made by a French prime minister, without any real consultation.
This is what recolonization has come to mean: African states, and African peoples, being rescued for their own good. If the policy of the outsiders is sound and consistent, they wait and live. If not, they wait and die.
To see how people can drown in powerlessness, you have to understand the depth of the debt hole into which Africa has fallen, or been plunged. Every year, the continent pays out between $10 and $11 billion on a debt which stands at about $180 billion and is climbing. While according to unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, only $9 billion is required to underwrite the immediate health, schooling, food, and family-planning requirements of the continent. Servicing the debt, then, takes more out of Africa than the projected outlays on social spending for the 1990s.
But out of which "Africa"? Most of those promiscuous loans were made during the years of grandiose dictatorship and one-party statism, when men like Mobutu were being supported by the West, and other profligate and sanguinary regimes, such as Ethiopia's Dergue, were being indulged by the former Soviet Union. Now the emerging civil societies (and their children) are being compelled to pay for crimes they did not commit and for blundering, ecologically foolish prestige projects that they had no hand in commissioning.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for one, has proposed a modest six-month moratorium on debt repayment, in order to provide a breathing space (or at any rate a panting space) for good government. "The money saved during this time should be used not to benefit the elite, but the so-called ordinary people," Tutu said, adding that Africa needs and deserves "a second chance now that most governments have seen the light and seen that democracy and freedom are cheaper than oppression."
Some African writers, like Kwame Anthony Appiah in his marvelous book In My Father's House, are properly skeptical of there being such a place as "Africa" at all. The differences among Africans, as Appiah says, are as great as the differences between Africans and non-Africans. Nonetheless, there is an undeniable African aspiration. Absurd and grotesque as it may frequently be—it chose Idi Amin as its chairman in 1975—the Organization of African Unity embodies the idea of a continent-wide consciousness.
Miriam Makeba sang beautifully at the independence ceremonies of many African states, and tightened a million throats when she spoke of one day singing at an all-African freedom celebration. In these more limited times, let's admit that many Africans would settle for the single, unarguable success story that I proposed earlier.
Currently, everybody's favorite nominee for success story is Uganda. This is partly because 15 or so years ago the very word "Uganda" was a synonym for everything loathsome and terrifying, for a country reduced to the uttermost degradations of cruelty, ignorance, and tribal barbarism. Today, I find myself talking to Toshihiro Fujiwara, a World Bank economist, who is full of pleasant surprises. Uganda, he says, is on its way "back." "Relations between the different peoples and tribes are good. All political and economic discussions are very open and very free. There is a stable exchange rate for the currency, and the economy is growing. The bureaucracy is easy to deal with, and it has no 'hidden agenda' of diverting resources to itself." When I inquire of Fujiwara what makes the difference, he is inclined to stress the big factor in Africa—the rogue factor and the charisma factor—which is leadership. "President Yoweri Museveni is a very good, clean, popular president," he says, "and that makes a huge difference."
It is true that Museveni's reputation is justly very high, and also true that he played a useful role in supporting and protecting the many Rwandan refugees who were driven into Uganda. But the key fact is that it was not forced upon him from outside. Recently, alluding to the time when the first Portuguese slavers arrived in Africa, Museveni said, "We will have to rely on ourselves. We have to go back to the year 1500, where we left off building an economy integrated in itself, able to produce its own food, its own tools, its own weapons."
The Swahili word for this concept, now coming back into vogue after a long series of experiments with foreign models, is Majimbo. It stands for the idea of local initiative and trust in traditional wisdoms. suny Binghamton's Professor Ali Mazrui is one of its leading advocates, and Basil Davidson, perhaps the greatest living historian of Africa, has been very sympathetic to much the same scheme.
"Of course I'm a great admirer of Basil's. We all are. But I heard he'd gone a bit native." My conversation partner, who is speaking so affectionately of a man who is as English as the day is long, is Professor Bereket Habte Sellassie. He is one of Africa's most distinguished lawyers and academics, and he has come home, after a long exile, to chair the commisson that is writing Eritrea's constitution. To him, the problem with Majimbo and majimboism is that it is a bit too much like the way it sounds—a bit fuzzy, a bit archaic, a bit improvised, and a bit too respectful of rather dubious "traditional" leaderships. One reason that I like Asmara, the capital of Africa's newest country, is that it is a place where you can have conversations in this tone of voice.
Having survived Mussolini's depredations, the attempt by British colonialism to partition them along tribal lines, and three decades of bloody Ethiopian occupation and repression, the Eritreans have done a remarkable thing. They have gotten rid of outside tutelage, while retaining the best of Italy (the food and the espresso, though even an ardent fan cannot praise the wine, which tastes like sheep-dip), the best of England (pedestrian traffic in Asmara is directed by modest but efficient Girl Scouts wearing white ankle socks), and most of the useful contacts with Ethiopia.
Though the war of liberation went on for generations, and though every adult Eritrean has seen violence and suffered from it, there is no cult of the gun. No testosterone-infested jerks and yahoos with machine guns mounted on their jeeps, like the cowardly road-warrior "technicals" in neighboring Somalia. It is rare to see a policeman, and very rare indeed to see an armed solider, even though burned-out tanks and the rubble of warfare litter the country.
Driving down to the coastal city of Massawa, I watched with mingled admiration and annoyance as a smart motorcycle cop drew abreast of our car, signaled us to pull over, parked his machine, and, removing one white glove for the purpose, gave a disciplined salute to his well-polished helmet. He then issued us a ticket for passing another car too fast on a bombed-out causeway. Our driver was ticked off, all right, but the thought of offering money did not even occur to him. As he grumbled, I thought of telling him how lucky he was.
The aid agencies like Eritrea because it is honest and open and because the money doesn't get sucked up into stray pockets along the way. They also like Eritrea because, in a very rough neighborhood, it is going against the tide of religious and tribal sectarianism. Next door, in Sudan, a jihad of revolting proportions is being waged by the Muslim fanatics in Khartoum against the Christians and animists of the South, and against secular ideas. You know the story in Somalia—no longer a state and barely a nation. In Yemen, across the straits, a political and social bloodbath.
The two big tests for Eritrean society will be, and already are, the overcoming of tribal and religious fissures, and the emancipation of women. Both tasks are made easier by the nature of the war Eritrea fought, a people's war which involved both sexes, fighting together. Although the country is divided into nine ethnic groups and three main religions, the solidarity that has emerged from this is more than rhetorical.
For example, both the Muslim mufti and the Coptic Christian patriarch agreed recently to go on the airwaves and say clearly that the practice of female circumcision and infibulation was not sanctioned by Koranic or biblical teaching. What a tonic it was to sit with Sheikh Alamin Usman Alamin, the grave and courteous mufti, and to hear him speak about the need for schools to be free and nondenominational, about the importance of elevating the status of women, and about the necessity of cooperating with Christians. "We were brothers in the movement for independence," he says, "and brothers we will remain." In any case, as he adds, the rule of one religion is no guarantee of harmony: "Look at Yemen"—as he speaks, most of the Yemeni national airline is parked on the tarmac at the Asmara airport, hiding from the civil war in Aden—"they are all Muslims there."
This broad-minded, open style found its counterpart in Abune Philipos, the Coptic Orthodox prelate, who pointed out something I had already noticed—namely the way in which any village of size could boast a Christian church and a mosque side by side. Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodoxy has the advantage, also, of dating back to the fourth century A.D. and thus of being entirely African.
In Eritrea, one does not encounter the fateful combination, consisting of resentment of Europeans and envy of Europeans, which disfigures so many other countries. The president, Issaias Afwerki, drives around in a jeep and, in his first address to the Organization of African Unity, accused that body of being a waste of time. The constitution is being written slowly and carefully, to avoid either offending the traditionalists or giving in to them too much. The press is fairly free. The refugees and exiles are in one case clamoring and in the latter case often hurrying to come home. There are no photographs of leaders or politicians in public places.
It can be done, even in a country with almost no natural resources, and this multiplies the reproach that is involved in contemplating the rot and crash and failure elsewhere. We need to seek out the Eritreas, and the Professor Sellassies in all countries, and clasp them to us. It's no good dealing with Africa through the medium of intermittent horror stories, half-cocked panicky interventions, high-handed economic relations, debt schedules, cultural blinkers, and the shipment of expensive weapons. The resilience of Africans (and what resilience) and the resources of Africa (and such resources) can yet be combined in astounding ways. The alternative is warned against by a unicef statement, which concluded, "The abandonment of hopes for the continent would mean the writing off of the talents, aspirations and potential of one eighth of mankind, both now and far into the next century." We have no right to amputate the human family in that way.