Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  Where was the humanity of the “civilized” Europeans during the early years of the rush to dehumanize Africans, who were traded just as coolly as one would truck in timber or coal? Indeed, even the Catholic conventions of the day legitimized the inhuman treatment of “pagans.”

  Where the African practice of slavery hurt most was in helping plant the seed in the European mind for the immense traffic that followed. The first Europeans who traded in African slaves were in reality more interested in acquiring gold. But when the early Portuguese travelers learned of abundant production of gold near places like El Mina (The Mine), in present-day Ghana, they paid for the metal with slaves captured elsewhere along the coast, and discovered that the Fanti people who lived in that coastal area were eager buyers.

  Surprisingly, to this day, there has been little willingness to contemplate the true impact of over four centuries of slavery on Africa. Slavery’s cost to the continent did not merely involve the loss of untold millions of souls who died along the bone-strewn footpaths where captives in chains were driven to the coast, or perished in the horrific Middle Passage. Nor, finally, can it be measured in the ten million or so hardy survivors who ultimately reached the Americas. There was an immense social impact on Africa, too.

  As the Portuguese trade in slaves flourished, the English, French, Danes and Swedes were attracted to it as well. Steadily, what had begun as a good business, at least when seen from the narrow perspective of the elite in the African societies who provided slaves, turned into an unmitigated disaster, one that destroyed not only the weaker societies that were preyed upon, but also the stronger kingdoms that were the predators.

  By the 1700s, each year sixty thousand slaves on average were being shipped across the Atlantic from West and Central Africa. This figure does not begin to take into account the number of people killed in the violent slaving raids that ripped through the African countryside, disrupting life in all but the most desolate corners of the continent, as far inland as the dry escarpments of Dogon-land. All the while, in a foreshadowing of what, 450 years later, was to befall the feeble commodity-based economies put in place by the Europeans during the colonial era, the terms of trade in Africa’s slave business were steadily whittled down until the market price of a slave was essentially zero.

  At the outset, Europeans paid for their black captives with horses, then with guns and cheap manufactured goods like copper kettles, cloth and shaving bowls, then with crude metal bars. By the peak of the trade, when the death and destruction had softened up the continent for the colonialism that was soon to come, the Europeans were engaging in outright asset stripping.

  Africans were purchased using shovelfuls of shiny, indestructible cowry shells, which the Europeans introduced as a unit of exchange and loaded into their ships as ballast in Indian Ocean ports of call such as the Maldives. Bit by bit, the tonnage in useless shells was replaced by enchained men, women and children as the slavers took on their living cargo along a huge stretch of the African coast, from present-day Angola in the south to Mauritania in the northwest.

  The cost of the slave trade in terms of sheer population loss was nothing short of catastrophic. The continent had always been underpopulated because of its poor soils and difficult climate, and because of the endemic diseases that have plagued mankind in Africa ever since the species emerged there. Some demographers calculate that had there not been an Atlantic slave trade, by 1850 the total population of the continent would have been about seventy million, or 40 percent higher than the actual population at the time.

  But in the end, what may represent the most damaging legacy of all is that the Western slave industry, like its Arab-run twin, which was concentrated in East Africa, fueled mass migration and generalized warfare among Africans, as neighbor was pitted against neighbor, society against society. Europeans had created a thirst for their goods, and for the quick profit that came from trading in fellow humans, which Africans used to buy them. The ensuing scramble wiped out the intricate and inherently conservative social codes that prevailed in one society after another. In the space of a generation, or even less in many instances, the authority of king or chief, and the respect for communal laws and customs that had kept people finely tuned with their local environment over centuries, was destroyed.

  “For Africans, enslavement was a threat that compounded the uncertainties of existence—a fear at the back of the mind, dulled by familiarity perhaps, an ache that induced a lingering fatalism in society as it passed from generation to generation,” writes John Reader in his illuminating survey, Africa: A Biography of the Continent. “Kidnapping, capture, enslavement threatened villagers in various parts of West Africa for up to 400 years: 20 generations lost some kinsmen to the slavers, or saw their neighbors routed. . . . The pre-existing political economies in which chiefs and elites commanded the respect and occasional material tribute of their subjects were transformed into systems controlled by warlords and powerful merchants who obliged indebted chiefs and elites to collect slaves as payment against forced loans.”

  In the kingdom of Kongo, this threat was clearly perceived by the first African sovereign to face it. The king when Portugal’s slave trade went industrial, Affonso, was an enthusiastic and remarkably flexible modernizer. A fervent convert to Christianity, he quickly learned to read and write, and by reputation came to know the Scriptures better than the monks sent to spread the faith in his land.

  Affonso immediately sensed the potential threat to his culture inherent in its collision with expansionist Europe. And although he recognized the disadvantages his people faced against the technologically superior outsiders, as leader of his own well-organized empire of two million, he was no less self-confident.

  For Affonso, preserving his empire meant buying time: absorbing as much Western learning as he could, and adapting it in ways that would not destroy Kongolese culture. Sons from his court were sent to be schooled in Portugal, and Affonso constantly begged the missionaries and other envoys from Lisbon to send more teachers in order to fortify his elite. The footrace between slavery and education proved to be no contest in the end, though, and Affonso watched in growing despair as the threads that held his realm together came unstitched. Even his relatives became caught up in the slave trade, if not as slavers, then as slaves themselves.

  Among the most pathetic diplomatic exchanges ever between a sub-Saharan African and a European happen to be the oldest surviving documents written by an African in a European language. In a series of letters written in his own hand in 1526, Affonso appealed to the Christian virtue of his Portuguese counterpart, King João III: “Each day the traders are kidnapping our people—children of this country, sons of our nobles and vassals, even people of our own family. . . . Corruption and depravity are so widespread that our land is entirely depopulated. . . . We need in this kingdom only priests and schoolteachers, and no merchandise, unless it is wine and flour for Mass. . . . It is our wish that this kingdom not be a place for the trade or transport of slaves.”

  Later that year, Affonso wrote João III again to deplore the destabilizing influence of the accelerating Portuguese barter trade of European merchandise for human beings. “These goods exert such a great attraction over simple and ignorant people that they believe in them and forget their belief in God. . . . My Lord, a monstrous greed pushes our subjects, even Christians, to seize members of their own families, and of ours, to do business by selling them as captives.”

  The king of Portugal’s reply was brutal in its simplicity and resounded like a death knell for Affonso’s kingdom. Kongo, he said, had nothing else to sell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Leviathan

  Having already done a five-year stint in West Africa as a freelance reporter a decade earlier, in 1994 I accepted a posting to Abidjan as the New York Times West Africa bureau chief. West Africa had received hardly any press attention in the United States for years, but I accepted the job as a personal challenge. My marriage to Avouka, whose family is f
rom both Ivory Coast and neighboring Ghana, had given me some extra perspective on the region. So had the many friendships I had developed in Africa and the countless trips around the continent that I had taken during my first six years living in Abidjan, in the early 1980s, when I had worked as a translator, university professor and then as a journalist.

  We had barely arrived in Abidjan in August, with our two children in tow, when a big story beckoned from Nigeria. The country had been in an open state of crisis since June, when the true winner of annulled presidential elections, the millionaire-turned-politician Moshood K.O. Abiola, had been jailed. In the hardball world of Nigerian politics, the logic behind the treason charge against him was as simple to understand as it was outrageous: Abiola had had the gall to try to prevent the military from hanging on to power by asserting his legitimate right to the presidency.

  My predecessor, Kenneth Noble, had generously left me a list of important contacts. He had also warned me about the airport, stressing that unless a driver or greeter whom you can trust meets you there, you risk being kidnapped, robbed or even killed. Lagos had been plenty dangerous a decade earlier, when I had visited the city often, so I took the warning seriously. I sent a telex to the Eko Hotel where Ken’s driver, David, worked, gave him my flight number and arrival time, and asked him to be sure to meet me.

  I had far less luck, though, in placing calls to Nigeria to set up interviews with people during the week that I planned to stay. Africa’s giant, it was often said, had feet of clay, and one obvious sign of this was a telephone system that barely functioned. What good was it, I wondered, to have the most energetic and self-confident population on the continent, not to mention one of the most generous endowments of natural resources anywhere, if something so basic as the telephone system was allowed to fall into permanent disrepair?

  My flight from Abidjan landed at Lagos in the middle of a blazing afternoon, and I began to note the decay even as we deplaned. It had not been so long ago that Murtala Muhammed airport was a marvel of Africa. As recently as the 1980s, Nigeria had been a country that sensed it was going places. The country proudly led the continent in democratization, in the fight against apartheid and in boldly developing heavy industries—oil, steel, automobiles—that no black nation had mastered before.

  In the 1980s, the new Lagos airport boasted retractable boarding corridors that allowed passengers to avoid the rainy season’s deluges and walk straight from the plane to the terminal. This might seem like a negligible detail to a Westerner, but here the symbolism was important. Landing in Lagos was meant to feel just like arriving at Heathrow or JFK, sending a message to the world that Nigeria was no moldering African backwater, but an emerging power.

  As my plane landed at the airport a decade later, however, I had to clamber down the rolling stairway from the aircraft the old-fashioned way and then precariously climb back up a teetering, ladder-style stairway into those fancy boarding bridges, which had long been immobilized by rust and a lack of maintenance. Corruption had eaten away at everything here since that bygone era of pride and optimism. Most would say the rot had started under the elected government of Shehu Shagari, who was overthrown in a military coup in 1983, and things had gotten steadily worse under a succession of bemedaled generals.

  Nigeria had become one of Africa’s most tragic stories, as if a great family franchise had been run into the ground by decadent nephews prematurely handed the reins of management. The callow nephews in this tale were army generals, and like King Midas in reverse, the officers who had run the country for the last decade had debased everything they had touched, starting, of course, with politics, which they had turned into a contest of self-enrichment.

  The leader who ran the country in the mid-1990s, General Sani Abacha, stood out even in this crowd. As an officer who had been involved at a senior level in every coup since the one that overthrew Shagari, he represented the final evolutionary wrinkle of a predatory, runaway institution: a general who offered no explanations for his actions, no smiles and no mercy. With the coup to prevent Abiola from taking office as the elected president in November 1993, Abacha had finally become the man in charge, no longer a power in the shadow of the more respected, more charming or more ostentatiously clever generals he had once served.

  In the months before my arrival, Nigerians were discovering to their horror that Abacha was more interested in killing people than in dazzling them. He gladly ruled from the shadows, from behind dark glasses, where he seemed to relish his image as the person his country-men feared most. Abacha rarely appeared in public, working by night and sleeping well into the day. He reportedly kept long lists of enemies, real and imagined, whom he methodically tracked, executed or jailed. Gradually he came to take on the aura of a motion picture monster, and in a society notable for bold individualism, for a people who were not intimidated easily, Abacha lurked menacingly in the popular imagination, like Jaws, a hidden leviathan that gave people the chills.

  I had taken care not to check any bags, and was relieved to get through the immigration formalities without a hitch. My relief was redoubled when I stepped outside and was approached by David, who by way of bona fides showed me the telex that I had sent his boss. A broad, thickset man of medium height and a ready smile, David insisted on carrying my bags, and we began our long walk to the parking area, where he had left his car.

  As we descended a stairway, a thin, sinister-looking man wearing an agbada, the loose and flowing three-piece outfits favored by many Nigerians, approached me and asked to see my papers. David, who was walking a few paces ahead, turned to say to me in his guttural English, “Don’t mind that man.” I wasn’t inclined to show my passport again anyway and merely kept walking. But the thin man stepped up his pace determinedly and approached David, warning him excitedly, “Do you know me?” and waving a wrinkled ID card. “Don’t you know that I am a police officer? You just wait. I will show you.”

  As the man sped off angrily, David laughed. “It is good Mr. Noble told you to have me meet you. It is always like this here. We Nigerian people, we are no good. We are always making trouble. Why?”

  As David put my things into the trunk of his Peugeot sedan, I saw the thin man approaching again. This time, though, he had two armed soldiers with him. David told me that no matter what happened I should let him do the talking. His car was slow to start, and before the engine could turn over, the men were upon us. This time the thin man stayed in the background, and while one soldier stood in front of the car with his rifle raised, the other came to my side of the car and demanded my passport.

  “Don’t give it to him, Mr. French,” David insisted. “They have no right. Don’t listen to them.”

  With that, the soldier became furious, and ran around to the driver’s side to threaten David. “Why did you tell the man not to obey me?” he asked angrily, raising his gun.

  To my amazement, David grew only bolder. “This man already had his passport checked inside. You people are just making trouble for nothing.” The soldier then demanded David’s papers, and he flashed an ID card, perhaps his driver’s license, but refused to hand it over. “Here is my business card,” he said, giving it to them. “If you need to see me, you can find me at work. I will wait for you there, but you will leave this man alone.”

  This made the soldiers only angrier. “Who is this American man to you?” one of them screamed. “Are you willing to die for him?”

  David began to start the engine again. It was no longer flooded and turned over smartly. “Stop your car, or I will shoot you,” the soldier in the front shouted.

  Then, as he put the car in gear, David said, more as a dare than a question, “Can you shoot me? Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t so sure, but throughout the whole tense standoff I had been a powerless spectator. The car sped off, forcing the soldier who had been standing in front of us to dive out of the way. I held my breath and waited for gunfire, but it never came.

  Welcome back to Nigeria, I thought
, shaking my head in disbelief. David smiled as he drove toward the highway, and then delivered an important lesson in survival. “You must never fear those people,” he said. “If you do, you are finished.”

  David took me to the Sheraton Hotel in Ikeja, a hotel that was located more than ten miles from the center of Lagos but had the advantages of reliable power, decent telephones—by Lagos standards—and good security. When I checked in, a woman at the reception desk named Bunmi, who had known my predecessor, urged me to stay on the “executive floor.”

  I must have winced at the seeming extravagance, because she immediately pulled me aside to explain. “There are all kinds of people in this hotel, and the government is watching everybody,” she told me. “It is only a matter of time, but one day they will come looking for you. If you are on the executive floor, we can at least warn you without them knowing, and you may be lucky enough to escape arrest.”

  After the airport experience, I happily accepted the offer and tried to settle in. Like the grease that crackled and spit in the large aluminum bowls that market women used on street corners to deep-fry fish and yams, Nigeria was boiling. With union leaders openly challenging the government with calls for a nationwide strike to force Abacha to relinquish power and install Abiola in his rightful place, and with opposition figures having the run of Lagos and being quoted widely even in the more conservative press, there was a feeling that the country might once again be heading for a calamitous civil war.