The Africans Read online

  —LIEUTENANT GENERAL OLUSECUN OBASANJO,

  former Nigerian head of state

  CARLOS MIRANDA, former guerrilla fighter and one-time prisoner of war, sat with his friends in the barren little café, idling away the Saturday afternoon over a bottle of Portuguese wine and a few memories. There really wasn’t much else to do, anyway. Cacheu, in Guinea-Bissau, is a small quiet town and the day was hot. So the men sat at their rickety wooden table, just talking quietly or doing nothing at all, expending little energy except that needed to brush away the flies. The walls of the bar were bare save for a faded photograph of the president, Luis de Almeida Cabral,* and the stock of refreshments had dwindled to a dust-covered jug of rum, a case of Coca-Cola and an odd assortment of white wines, served lukewarm because the refrigerator, like the electricity in Cacheu, had long since broken down. The near-sighted bartender was propped like a broom against the refrigerator, squinting and sweating, and when a bottle slipped from his hands and shattered at his feet, he kicked the glass under the counter without a word and wiped his damp hands across his T-shirt. His family—a wife and seven young children—was sprawled out on the concrete floor nearby, fast asleep.

  “Francisco broke another bottle,” Miranda said. “No wonder there’s nothing left to drink.” Francisco had indeed been dropping too many precious bottles of Coke lately, and his carelessness had become a source of much annoyance.

  Outside the bar, along the one sandy road that leads away, to Bissau, once the capital of Portuguese Guinea and since 1974 the capital of the independent West African state of Guinea-Bissau, the town was very still. Dogs lay panting in the shade of drooping palms; a solitary woman sat in the square with a dozen turnips spread out in the dirt before her. The ancient rusted cannon atop the fort at the edge of town pointed toward the Cacheu River estuary; downstream, a hundred yards from the fort, three abandoned patrol boats swayed to and fro in the lazy currents. Lingering there between the fort and the boats were three centuries of history, a history that spoke of the birth and death of the Portuguese empire in Africa and the dawn of Africa’s own troubled independence.

  The stone fort, built in 1647, had been the symbol of Portugal’s might when its colonial rule stretched from Africa to South America to Asia. And the Soviet-made patrol boats, left to rot and sink in the muddy waters of the river, were the discarded tools of the longest and militarily most successful liberation war ever waged in black Africa against colonial authority.

  Carlos Miranda had been a soldier, and later a prisoner of the Portuguese, in that war, which lasted from 1961 to 1974. His guerrilla movement, with significant help from the Soviet Union and Cuba, had fielded a 10,000-man army and eventually forced the 35,000 Portuguese and African government troops to abandon the countryside and withdraw into fortified urban areas. Their victory directly influenced the coup d’état that brought down the Lisbon dictatorship on April 25, 1974.

  “You ask what the difference between colonialism and independence means to me,” the thirty-six-year-old Miranda said, filling my glass with wine. “Well, I will tell you. The difference is great. Now I go to bed at night and I sleep comfortably. I do not worry about the secret police. And I do not tip my hat to the Tuga [Portuguese].

  “Now I speak to a white man without fear. Before, white and black did not talk. But now at this moment I have the pleasure of sitting with you, a white, and I speak to you like a man. That is all we fought for, the right to respect. We did not hate the Portuguese people, only the Portuguese government. Even if you were Portuguese, I would still be happy to sit with you, because now we are equals.”

  It was, I thought, an eloquent response. Miranda—a customs clerk with nine children and a salary of $50 a month—had not been a leader in the liberation war, only one of the foot soldiers. But it was for people like him that the war had been fought, and independence had given him a priceless reward: self-respect. For Guinea-Bissau as a whole, though, things had not gone particularly well since the first unfurling of the country’s yellow and green flag with a black star on a red field. Only one person in twenty could read, life expectancy at birth was only thirty-five years, and 45 percent of the children died before the age of five. Shortages of everything from rice to soap were epidemic, and when a merchant in the capital put four hundred pairs of just imported shoes on display one day during my visit, such a mob showed up that the police had to be called to restore order. The country had a small peanut crop and some animal hides to export and bauxite reserves worth exploiting, but not much else to build an economic foundation on. In all of Guinea-Bissau (population 800,000) there were only 24,000 jobs, 82 percent of them in the public sector.

  Unlike two other former Portuguese colonies, Mozambique and Angola, Guinea-Bissau had not been a white-settler colony. The Portuguese came only to administer and to save enough money to retire on back home. Within a few weeks of independence, all but 350 of the 2,500 Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau hurried home. Most departed with no sorrows. And what they left as a legacy of three hundred years of colonial rule was pitifully little: fourteen university graduates, an illiteracy rate of 97 percent and only 265 miles of paved roads in an area twice the size of New Jersey. There was only one modern plant in Guinea-Bissau in 1974—it produced beer for the Portuguese troops—and as a final gesture before leaving, the Portuguese destroyed the national archives.

  In many ways Guinea-Bissau is a microcosm of a continent where events have conspired against progress, where the future remains a hostage of the past, and the victims are the Carlos Mirandas of Africa. As setback followed setback and each modest step forward was no more effective than running in place, black Africa became uncertain of its own identity and purpose, divided by ideology and self-interests, perplexed by the demands of nationhood—and as dependent militarily and economically on foreign powers as it was during the colonial era. It moves through the 1980s as a continent in crisis, explosive and vulnerable, a continent where the romance of revolution cannot hide the frustration and despair that tears at the fiber of African society.

  To many outsiders, Africa seems an intimidating and foreboding place. But remember, the changes that have swept Africa in less than a generation—forty-three new countries were born south of the Sahara between 1956 and 1980—have been as traumatic as those endured by any people anywhere in peacetime. Before we move on to examine these changes in detail, let’s strip away a few mysteries and put the continent in a contemporary perspective.

  Africa—its name may have come from the Latin word aprica (“sunny”) or the Greek word aphrike (“without cold”)—was once part of Gondwanaland, the hypothetical supercontinent that also included South America, Asia, India, Australia and Antarctica. Africa occupies 20 percent of the earth’s land surface, or 11.7 million square miles. Only Asia is larger. Africa is 5,000 miles long, reaching from the God-forsaken deserts of the north to the lush wine country in the south, and 4,600 miles wide. Its coastline measures 18,950 miles—shorter than Europe’s because of the absence of inlets and bays—and the equator cuts Africa just about in half. Africa’s climate varies wildly, from temperate in the high plateaus, to tropical along the coastal plains to just plain intolerable in the sizzling deserts.

  The coastal strip around Africa is narrow, and the interior plateaus are characterized by wide belts of tropical rain forest, wooded savannah and grassland plains. In the far north is the Sahara, the world’s largest desert. It covers one quarter of the continent, an area as large as the United States mainland. In the far south is the Kalahari Desert, the world’s seventh largest. The highest point in Africa is Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, 19,340 feet tall and snowcapped the year round, but with the exception of Antarctica, Africa is, in proportion to its size, the flattest continent in the world, something like the Great Plains of North America without corn, an endless champaign that flows from country to country, through the cities and back into the dusty look-alike villages, yielding just enough food to provide millions of subsistence farmers with the me
agerest of existences.

  Wandering through those empty spaces, you realize that ten thousand American farmers turned loose on African soil could transform the face—and the future—of the continent as surely as they did their own land. It seems so easy. Yet farming in black Africa is still a hoe-and-sickle enterprise, more primitive than any in the world. For example, there are but 7 tractors for every 25,000 farmed acres (compared to 45 in Asia, 57 in South America and 240 in the United States) and Africa uses only 4 pounds of fertilizer for every acre. (Asia and South America each use about ten times more; the United States, twenty times more.) Just as distressing, each year Africans are working less and less land as the desert advances like a plundering army, taking as its booty the lean hopes of helpless people and leaving in its wake barren wasteland.

  The Sahara alone is growing at the rate of 250,000 acres a year, and in Northern Africa, once the grassy breadbasket of the Roman Empire, the process known as desertization is actually a visible phenomenon. Only a generation ago the capital of Mauritania (Nouakchott, meaning “the Place of the Winds”) was many days’ walk from the Sahara. Now it is in the Sahara. Vast, dead expanses of shifting, rolling sand dunes stretch as far as the eye can see and beyond. Blowing sand piles up against walls and fences like snowdrifts, and the city streets dead-end at the desert’s doorstep a few hundred yards away. No longer able to support their livestock, thousands of Berbers have poured into Nouakchott, buying homes that they use for storage while living under tents in their backyards. A way of life—and the spirit of a people—has changed forever.

  Scientists point out that desertization is not unique to Africa, for deserts are growing on all six inhabited continents. Some blame nature for climatic changes and drought. Others cite man’s abuse of the environment, particularly overgrazing and the destruction of forests that hasten the erosion of topsoil. Still others believe the phenomenon is cyclic because ages-old deserts have always grown and shrunk and shifted at the mercy of nature’s many forces. Whatever the reason, the ecological metamorphosis is a frightening one for Africa, where weather satellites have detected a constant cloud of fine, reddish particles blowing toward India. The particles have been identified as topsoil, and it takes up to a thousand years to replace a layer of topsoil.

  The irony of Africa’s misfortunes is that this is the place where mankind originated—and this was a center of culture and sophistication long before the Europeans arrived. Fossils nearly 3 million years old found by the anthropologists Mary Leakey and her late husband, Louis, have shown that the evolution of man from his apelike ancestors probably took place in East Africa. And American and French scientists working in Ethiopia have discovered simple stone tools 2.5 million years old. The razor-sharp cutters and the fist-sized rock choppers, the oldest tools ever found, were used, they believe, to slice through animal skins and butcher carcasses.

  As far back as 500 B.C., when the Nok culture flourished in Nigeria, furnaces were being used to smelt iron. The Nigerian state of Benin exchanged ambassadors with Portugal in 1486. At that time Timbuktu in Mali was a major trading center of international fame. The splendors of the Songhai Empire, which stretched from Mali to Kano, Nigeria, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were compared by early travelers with those of contemporary Europe. “As you enter it, the town appears very great,” a Dutch visitor wrote about 1600 of Edo city in Benin. “You go into a great broad street, not paved, which seems to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoes Street in Amsterdam … The houses in this town stand in good order, one close and even with the other, as the houses in Holland stand …” Now-priceless bronze busts were being cast in Nigeria’s Ife state before Columbus set sail for America. Iron-age Africans started building stone structures in the area we call Zimbabwe as early as A.D. 1100, and sixteenth-century Portuguese maritime traders found that some West African textiles were superior to anything then being made in Europe.

  Because the history of ancient Africa was passed from generation to generation by the spoken, not written, word, the origins, and sometimes the fate, of the old civilizations remain clouded in mystery. (One exception is Ethiopia, which did have a written language.) It was, though, intra-African warfare and not the arrival of the European that ensured the disintegration of Africa’s early civilizations: the Ghana Empire was destroyed in the thirteenth century by Almoravid warriors from Senegal; the Mali Empire began to crumble in 1430 under pressure from the nomadic Tuaregs; the Songhai Empire was broken up in 1591 when its troops were defeated by an invading Moroccan army. With no written language, no way to store and exchange information, Africa lacked the building blocks a civilization needs; it was defenseless against a new enemy from the north—the white man.

  The Portuguese, in the fifteenth century, were the first Europeans to undertake systemic voyages of discovery southward along the African coast. Thus began six centuries of contact between African and European in which the African—until recently, when he learned how to turn the white man’s feelings of guilt into a gold mine of international aid—always ended up second best. The Portuguese explorers opened the door for the slave traders, who in turn ushered in the missionaries, who were, in their own right, agents of colonialism. Each invader—slaver, missionary, colonialist—sought to exploit and convert. Each came to serve himself or his God, not the African. With Europe looking for new markets and materials during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, the European powers scrambled for domination in Africa, Balkanizing the continent into colonies with artificial boundaries that ignored traditional ethnic groupings. By 1920 every square inch of Africa except Ethiopia, Liberia and the Union of South Africa was under European rule or protection or was claimed by a European country.

  The manner in which colonial administrations governed virtually ensured the failure of Africa’s transition into independence. Their practice of “divide and rule”—favoring some tribes to the exclusion of others—served to accentuate the ethnic divisiveness that had been pulling Africa in different directions for centuries. Before independence, the colonialist was the common enemy. When he left, the major tribal groups in each country had to confront one another for leadership roles, and on a continent where tribal loyalty usually surpasses any allegiance to the nation, the African’s new antagonist became the African.

  Tribalism is one of the most difficult African concepts to grasp, and one of the most essential in understanding Africa. Publicly, modern African politicians deplore it. Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi (arap means “the son of”) calls it the “cancer that threatens to eat out the very fabric of our nation.” Yet almost every African politician practices it—most African presidents are more tribal chief than national statesman—and it remains perhaps the most potent force in day-to-day African life. It is a factor in wars and power struggles. It often determines who gets jobs, who gets promoted, who gets accepted to a university, because by its very definition tribalism implies sharing among members of the extended family, making sure that your own are looked after first:

  To give a job to a fellow tribesman is not nepotism, it is an obligation. For a politician or military leader to choose his closest advisers and his bodyguards from the ranks of his own tribe is not patronage, it is good common sense. It ensures security, continuity, authority.

  The family tree of William R. Tolbert, Jr., the assassinated Liberian president, provides an illuminating example of how African politicians take care of their own. Tolbert’s brother Frank was president pro tempore of the senate; his brother Stephen was minister of finance; his sister Lucia was mayor of Bentol City; his son A.B. was an ambassador at large; his daughter Wilhelmina was the presidential physician; his daughter Christine was deputy minister of education; his niece Tula was the presidential dietician; his three nephews were assistant minister of presidential affairs, agricultural attaché to Rome and vice governor of the National Bank; his four sons-in-law held positions as minister of defense, deputy minister of public works, commissioner for im
migration and board member of Air Liberia; one brother-in-law was ambassador to Guinea, another was in the Liberian senate, a third was mayor of Monrovia.

  In its simplest form, one could compare tribalism to the situation in a city like Boston, where one finds a series of ethnic neighborhoods, with the blacks in Roxbury, the Italians in the North End, the Irish in South Boston, the Jews in the neighboring town of Brookline, the WASPs in the Wellesley suburbs. Each group is protective of its own turf, each shares a cultural affinity and each, in its own way, feels superior to the other. Africa has 2,000 such “neighborhoods,” some of which cover thousands of square miles, and each of those tribes has its own language or dialect—usually unintelligible to another tribe that may be located just over the next hill—as well as its own culture, traditions and, in most cases, physical features that make one of its members immediately recognizable to an individual from another tribe.

  In Lusaka, Zambia, a university student I knew applied for a job and was told to report to the personnel manager. My friend leaned over the receptionist’s desk and asked, “What tribe is he?” Told that the manager was a Mashona, my friend, who belonged to another ethnic group, replied, “Then I’ll never get the job.” He didn’t.

  A live-in cook in Africa earns about $75 a month—a luxury most expatriates can easily afford—and shortly after arriving in Nairobi, I hired a cook from the Kikuyu tribe, a gardener and an askari (night watchman) from the Luo tribe. For the next three months our house was in turmoil as they fought and cussed and argued with one another for hours on end. We fired the watchman after he accused us of trying to poison him—he said we were prejudiced against the Luos—and we put Dishun, the gardener, on indefinite sick leave when he accused the cook of bewitching him with evil spirits. We took Dishun to our British doctor, but the prescribed pills didn’t help his stomach cramps. He returned to his village, where the witch doctor, using herbs and chants, quickly cured him. In the meantime we had hired a Kikuyu gardener and askari. They struck up an immediate friendship with the Kikuyu cook. Tranquillity returned to our home.