Africa

by Guy Arnold

  The third French Equatorial African territory was Central African Republic, which was almost exactly in the centre of the continent. With an area of 238,000 square miles it was slightly larger than France although supporting a mere 1.2 million people at independence. Before independence Central African Republic had been dominated politically by Barthelemy Boganda who, unfortunately, was killed in an air crash in 1959. David Dacko then became leader of the ruling Mouvement pour l’Evolution Sociale de l’Afrique Noire (MESAN) and subsequently President in 1960. In 1962 Dacko told the National Assembly that the country should dispense with the French subsidy to the budget because every year receipts had exceeded expenditure and the favourable balance of £575,000 was greater than the usual French subvention. Apart from diamonds the country’s wealth came from cotton, coffee and cattle. Dacko soon followed the growing number of precedents elsewhere on the continent to make Central African Republic a one-party state. At independence Dacko had asked Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who had fought for the Free French and risen to the rank of captain in the French Army in Indo-China, to create a Central African Army. This Bokassa did successfully to become Commander-in-Chief in 1963 and Chief of General Staff in 1964. When in 1966 Dacko faced opposition while he attempted to prune his corrupt, overpaid civil service whom he accused of ‘negligence, corruption, even sabotage’ Bokassa stepped in to seize power on New Year’s Eve 1966. He imprisoned Dacko, abrogated the constitution and made himself President. His coup led to immediate poor relations with France. Bokassa’s only real consideration, it soon became clear, was to perpetuate his own rule.

  The last of the small French West African territories that became independent in 1960 was Upper Volta: impoverished and landlocked, it had a larger population than its richer neighbour Ivory Coast and its economy was almost entirely based upon agriculture. The first President of Upper Volta was Maurice Yameogo, a political lightweight who had to play a balancing act between the pressures exerted by his more powerful neighbours, the radical Nkrumah of Ghana and the conservative Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast.

  Four giant French territories were Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad whose combined area covered 4,821,300 square kilometres (only a little short of 2 million square miles) stretching from the Atlantic (Mauritania) to Sudan (Chad). In 1960 their combined populations came only to 13,331,000 people, averaging three to the square kilometre. Extending from the Sahara southwards through the Sahel region to the richer savannah country of the south and divided between Arab or nomadic Tuareg peoples in the north and sedentary black Africans in the south they could hardly be described as nations at all. It is simply that the laws of imperial expansion had persuaded the French to move into this huge ‘empty quarter’ during the nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa and work out subsequently how to divide and administer the territories. Mauritania with just over one million people at independence was by population the smallest state of French West Africa and consisted largely of desert which, in any case, was claimed by Morocco; most of the 1960s were to pass before Morocco admitted Mauritania’s right to exist as an independent state. Moktar Ould Daddah, the country’s first President, turned Mauritania into a one-party state in 1967. At least Mauritania had large mineral resources in the form of 100 million tons of iron ore and rapid development of this after independence gave the people one of the higher per capita incomes of the region. Mali (see above), with Ghana and Guinea, was for a time one of the three radical states of the region. Niger, slightly larger than Mali, was the second largest of all the West African states though with only three people to the square kilometre as opposed to Nigeria’s 60. Over a million of its people were Hausa and enjoyed close cross-border relations with the people of Northern Nigeria. Niger was – and remains – one of the poorest countries in the world; two-thirds of it is desert and large areas in the northeast uninhabitable. The economy is based upon traditional agriculture and the rearing of livestock although important uranium deposits gave it strategic importance, especially at independence during the height of the Cold War.

  The most remote of these four countries, and one of the most remote in all Africa, is Chad. Covering 495,000 square miles its population was under three million at independence. The country suffered from poor communications both internally and with its neighbours while its centres of economic development lay between 1,400 and 2,800 kilometres from the sea. The vast northern region was mainly desert inhabited by a sparse population of Arab nomads; the south was more advanced under black Africans. There were longstanding historical tensions between north and south, the northerners having traditionally raided the south for slaves. The economy depended upon livestock in the north and east and the cultivation of cotton in the south and economic survival depended upon continuing French aid after 1960. It had the least developed industrial sector of Equatorial Africa. The Parti Progressiste Tchadien (PPT) became the local branch of the RDA and formed the first African government after elections in 1957. Francois Tombalbaye became the leader of the party in 1959 and the country’s first President in 1960.

  It is one of the ironies of the African story that this huge harsh bleak under-populated land, a vacuum seized by the colonial French, should have witnessed a quarter of a century of civil war from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. The war witnessed three occasions when France sent in troops to support the south; old territorial claims between France and Italy, dating from the 1930s, were resuscitated by Libya’s Gaddafi to the 50,000 square mile Aozou Strip in the north (it contained rich deposits of uranium); and US financial support was provided to ensure that Gaddafi did not succeed in his designs. Like other Sahel countries, Chad suffered from the problem of land divided between a black, ‘Christian’ south (in this case the most prosperous section of the population) and a poorer north, which was mainly inhabited by nomadic, Arab or Arabicized peoples who were Muslims. In 1962 President Tombalbaye took steps to turn the country into a one-party state under the PPT, and though representatives of both groups – southerners and northerners – were members, Tombalbaye was its dominant force. A French garrison had remained in the north of Chad at independence, but in 1964 these French troops were withdrawn to be replaced by elements of the Chad national army, which soon became embroiled in local disputes. Although the one-party state was accepted in the south, this was not the case in the north. A first revolt, partly in reaction to heavy taxes, took place in 1966 at Ouaddai and was supported from across the Sudanese border. This and other early rebellions were haphazard: in part against taxation and the southern civil service, and in part the result of long-standing northern suspicion of and antipathy to the people of the south. Gradually the northern rebels organized themselves and formed the Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad (FROLINAT) (Chad Liberation Front) in 1966. Frolinat became the spearhead of a revolt, which up to that time had been sporadic and without obvious purpose. The situation was complicated in 1966 when an anti-government revolt occurred in the south at Salamat, while in the far north the Toubou nomads, acting as government guards at Aozou, mutinied in sympathy with northern aspirations. The first leader of FROLINAT, Dr Abba Siddick, was soon replaced by Goukouni Oeddei, who introduced another factor into the war when he turned to Libya for support. In 1968 the French air force transported government troops to Aozou, then in 1969 1,600 French troops were sent to Chad in support of Tombalbaye. The number was reduced in 1971 and the troops were removed altogether in 1972 without having made much difference to the growing power of FROLINAT, which at that stage was undefeated. By the beginning of the 1970s the war was set to continue for two decades.

  THE NON-FRENCH TERRITORIES OF WEST AFRICA

  A number of tiny enclaves along the West African coast had been seized as strategic footholds by the British and Portuguese: these included Sierra Leone and The Gambia, and Portuguese Guinea (later the independent state of Guinea-Bissau). The exception was Liberia. Liberia had been founded by American philanthropists for freed slaves and had become independent in 1847. In 1960, after more
than a century of independence for most of which time it had been ruled by the True Whig Party, Liberia had a population of 1.5 million people and an economy dominated by the export of iron ore and rubber. In 1943 William Tubman, who came from an old Americo-Liberian family, became President. A natural conservative, he refused to join the Ghana–Guinea Union of 1958, favouring instead a loose confederation of West African states. Tubman was to rule Liberia until his death in 1971 and despite his insistence on state occasions of dressing in a black morning coat and top hat pushed Liberia into the modern era. He gave all Liberians the vote for the first time and began the difficult task of eliminating the distinctions between the Afro-Americans of Monrovia and the Africans of the hinterland. There had been little development in Liberia before Tubman came to power, so he introduced a series of five-year plans and opened the country to foreign investment with his ‘open door policy’ which led to rapid economic growth and a big increase in government revenues (these had amounted to only US$2 million in 1944 but had reached US$200 million by 1971). Concessions to foreign companies led to an improvement in the country’s technical and social infrastructure but otherwise did little for general economic development. Even so, under Tubman the first deep-water port was opened at Freeport and the iron ore port at Buchanan while arterial roads and a power grid were extended nationally and better education and health services were introduced. Tubman played a leading role in rallying the moderates – the Monrovia Group – as opposed to the radical Casablanca Group at the beginning of the 1960s and with Haile Selassie of Ethiopia helped formulate the principles of the OAU.

  Sierra Leone, founded by British philanthropists for former slaves, represented the early stirring of British unease at the slave trade from which the country had long profited. After achieving independence in 1961 it passed through a troubled decade that saw the emergence of different layers of military coup-makers. Its economy depended upon alluvial diamonds, a large proportion of which were illegally smuggled out of the country, and iron ore. The Gambia, stretching like an attenuated finger into Senegal, between 13 and 30 miles wide and 300 miles long on both banks of the Gambia River, is a geographic absurdity, part of the fragmentation of the continent carried out by the European colonialists. Dawda Jawara became the Prime Minister of this tiny state in 1963 when it achieved self-government and remained so after full independence in 1965, only turning The Gambia into a republic in 1970. Jawara followed constitutional practices and won successive elections at the polls. Portuguese Guinea descended into a long liberation war during the 1970s and this was only resolved in 1974. One other tiny territory in this region was Spanish Equatorial Guinea, which became independent in 1968.

  PARTY POLITICS

  Although the military coup emerged as the most popular basis for a new government in West Africa over these years, political activity in the region had a long history. A myth, carefully fostered by the colonial powers, grew up in the post-war era that only after 1945, affected by the momentous changes taking place world-wide, did the colonial peoples of Africa begin to demand independence. Political agitation against the colonial system went back much further although mass voting, which is the necessary basis for a fully effective political party, came only after 1945. Moreover, as the new generation of nationalist politicians such as Kwame Nkrumah soon realized, whoever got in first reaped the harvest, for the one certain basis for mass support was opposition to continued colonial control: this hostility to the existing colonial system was as widespread as its companion enthusiasm for self-rule. As demands for independence grew so too did Western alarm that the successor governments to colonialism would turn to the new model of Communism, for Western thinking at this time was dominated by Cold War calculations. As Houphouët-Boigny, the most pro-Western of emerging leaders, is reputed to have said: ‘If you send your son to the University of Paris he comes back a communist, but if you send him to the University of Moscow he comes back a conservative.’21

  Parties could break down political apathy but to do so they had to establish cells in every town and village and create a flow of information both ways: that is, from the leadership to the people and in return from the rank and file to the leaders. Although political parties did do this – or try to do it – by the beginning of the 1960s only those in Mali and Guinea were still making serious efforts to keep close touch with the rank and file. More ominously for genuine party politics, ‘Ghana’s party pays lip service to this objective, but does not really try. The parties have agents all over the country, but their job is to keep the populace in line, rather than to stimulate discussion and transmit opinion upwards.’22 Arthur Lewis, the eminent West Indian economist and political commentator, who made this judgement, was perfectly correct, but what he did not do was draw a parallel with such behaviour in the new states of Africa and similar behaviour in the old democracies of the West. Over the 40 years from that time to the end of the twentieth century a stream of criticisms of African political behaviour have been made from outside the continent as though Africa is a showcase of bad political behaviour unrelated to patterns that exist elsewhere. Political parties in multiparty systems may pay lip service to the need for opposition but they always try to hold onto power as long as possible. In the Africa of the 1960s where the departing colonial powers left behind multiparty systems even though for their own purposes they had put their support behind a particular party and its leadership, the party that held power at independence had an opportunity which would not recur to consolidate its position on the once-off basis of having led the country to independence. Unsurprisingly, in the circumstances, the new ruling parties chafed at the presence of an opposition party and worked to eliminate it. Where practicable, they absorbed the opposition; otherwise they suppressed it and created a one-party state. This happened with quite remarkable regularity so that by the mid-1960s only Nigeria, which was about to explode, Sierra Leone and The Gambia retained multiparty systems. The suppression of opposition parties necessarily meant other suppressions as well. Criticism of the ruling party that had become synonymous with the state became treason so that criticism by individuals, trade unions, rural organizations or any other groups was suppressed and those making it harassed. In turn this led to control of the press with leading newspapers becoming organs of the ruling party. As a result of this progression of controls in the name of loyalty to the ruling party and government, there was a steady erosion of civil liberties and curtailment of the rule of law.

  African politicians who achieved supreme power at this time were little different from politicians elsewhere: they wanted power for themselves and meant to hold on to it for as long as they were able to do so, for personal love of power has always been a principal motivation for all politicians. What made a huge difference and enabled so many to become absolute so quickly was the sudden switch from colonial control to national control and the ‘nationalist’ who had led his people to independence found himself to be in a unique position. In any case, the modern democracy of mass parties that genuinely tolerate one another when in opposition is not only a recent political phenomenon but a relatively rare one as well. A majority of West African politicians coming to power in the circumstances of the 1960s decided against the system that the West had only offered them selectively and late in the last days of colonialism. This immediate rejection of multiparty democracy by parties and leaders who had fought a political battle on the single issue of independence was hardly surprising. Another factor that had to be taken into account – and still needs to be understood – was the utterly beguiling attraction of ministerial power. Men who only a few years earlier had been fighting their battles from small offices, being harassed and sometimes imprisoned, found themselves enjoying all the trappings of power and, moreover, being treated as above the law by their followers and more generally by the populace at large. The decisions they took were often of less importance than the fact of taking them at all. These heady days did not last long: ministers who were overthrown or lost the
ir jobs discovered how quickly they could be forgotten; and those smart or tough enough to hold on to power soon discovered other means of bolstering their positions – suppression and if necessary oppression – always, of course, in the name of national unity. A number of African leaders found little difficulty in making the transition from popular nationalist fighting the colonial oppressors into one-party rule dictator who believed himself to be above the law and would indeed be all powerful until his turn came to be overthrown in a coup. The fact that such behaviour was all too apparent gave much satisfaction to reactionaries in the former metropolitan powers who had argued that their colonies were not ready for independence and the fact of their satisfaction led many Africans to support their tyrants since they could not bring themselves to agree with their former colonial masters. In general, though there were to be significant exceptions, Africa would sustain one-party systems of greater or lesser dictatorial tendencies for another two decades, and was to be supported in this by its supposed friends in the West on the grounds that African development required unity from below if it was to work. Such arguments were self-serving: against the background of the Cold War with the need to accumulate allies on the one hand and the Western determination to maintain its economic stranglehold on its former colonies on the other, a one-party system under a dictatorial leader was often easier to deal with, especially if the leader needed external financial support to survive, than would have been a more fractious democracy. Although there were many genuine grounds for rejecting Nkrumah’s persistent calls for a union of all African states, one reason for rejection undoubtedly was the determination of the new leaders to enjoy their freshly won powers without hindrance.