Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

by Howard W. French

  This was the innermost river station, the scene of innumerable horrors since the days of Leopold II, the port beyond which no boats traveled. Kisangani had once boasted movie theaters and a bowling alley. There had been a Rotary Club and foreign consulates. People had attempted the grafting of Western culture here many times, but it never seemed to take. Outsiders were forever promising “progress,” whether through industry, administration or Western religion, but seeing how it always involved violence and rape, the Africans who eked out a living here preferred to be left alone.

  The diamond trade was the only surviving business in town, as was made plain by the cheaply stenciled advertisements on the walls of the storefronts. Rambo Diamond bore the image of a large gem and a machine gun. The next shop on the dusty roadway, Mr. Cash, strove for a slightly less intimidating image, with its picture of sparkling gems set off against a crudely reproduced $10,000 bill.

  Although he named neither of them, Naipaul had gotten nothing so right in his acerbic book as his portraits of Mobutu and Kisangani. His words about the city hung in my thoughts as we bounded along toward the low, concrete villa of the World Food Programme representative, where I would sleep on the ground, on the front terrace, covered with mosquito netting and sweating and tossing through the night from the fierce, sawing attacks of the swarming insects that bred on the river nearby. “Valuable real estate for a while, and now bush again,” Naipaul said of the city. “You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Castles in the Sand

  My second visit to Mali came more than a decade after my first. In lieu of a goatskin sack and a battered tape player, I was carrying spiral notebooks and a mini cassette recorder. It was 1995, and I was returning to the African country that had first seduced me. Although I was no longer the footloose student-adventurer, I was every bit as thrilled by the prospect.

  As a precocious democracy, Mali had come to occupy a special place in African politics. Like a latter-day echo of its early empires, the country was again in the continent’s historical vanguard. Three years earlier, Mali had held one of West Africa’s first competitive multiparty presidential elections, and ever since, it had been like a vast research laboratory on full public display. The highly experimental protocol being tested on African soil was an exotic notion widely known as Western-style democracy.

  Alpha Oumar Konaré, the man who had emerged as president, enjoyed a reputation as a new kind of leader. He was an archaeologist who had given up a ministerial job during the country’s long one-party era in order to join a growing civic movement calling for democracy, and he had spoken of democracy ever since as something that Malians deserved now, rather than in some hypothetical and distant future. Konaré’s contemporaries among Africa’s leaders imposed countless constraints on their adversaries, and used so many obfuscations when speaking of democracy as to drain the word of all meaning. The democracy that Konaré spoke of, though, was something that no Westerner would have trouble recognizing.

  This was a region full of heads of state who had been guerrilla leaders, military men, stern founding fathers or faceless technocrats, who ruled at the pleasure of the so-called international financial institutions, or Iffys. To a man, they had sought to impose their persons, no matter how unattractive, on their countries. The evening news was a record of their day. Dancing troupes followed them everywhere to sing their praises. And their official portraits watched over workers in every government office. Konaré signaled his difference by exhibiting modest self-confidence with none of the oppressive props of the charismatic leader. He often drove himself around the capital, negotiating Bamako’s dusty streets with a minimal security detachment discreetly in tow. He showed up at the funerals of ordinary people he had known way back when. And he had a generous enough sense of humor to laugh at himself.

  For a journalist like me to see the president, all roads led through his director of intelligence, Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga, a man universally known by his middle name alone. Michel Kouamé, the editor in chief of Ivory Coast’s state-owned newspaper, Fraternité Matin, had offered a bitterly cynical explanation for the fact that Mali’s top spy controlled the president’s agenda.

  Michel came from a remarkable family of writers and journalists, but he had always remained committed to a model of African politics that had been under siege almost everywhere in the continent since the beginning of the decade: the one-party state. As an apparatchik of sorts, he had done well under Ivory Coast’s authoritarian governments, and now that Mali was being touted as an example for the region, Michel wanted me to believe that Konaré, for all of his good press, was at heart no more of a democrat than any other African leader.

  The proof, he said, would come when Konaré’s second term expired, when the law would bar him from seeking reelection. “One way or another, Konaré will change the constitution,” Michel told me with a patronizing chuckle. “You Americans are always looking for a horse to back, someone who reflects your own self-image; what you don’t understand is that power works differently in Africa than it does in the West. Once you’ve got it, you can’t just give it up.” So I took note of Michel’s skepticism, thanked him for the contact and headed off for Bamako.

  Coventional wisdom holds that multiparty democracy can bloom only in a country with a large and prosperous middle class. And yet, in 1991, a citizens’ movement made up of human rights activists, labor organizers, students and mothers whose children had been killed or imprisoned by the armed forces came together to overthrow a dictatorship that had been in place for twenty-three years.

  An African coup, in itself, was hardly rare. What made Mali’s revolution so special was the democratic spirit that had guided it, as unwaveringly as our own revolution more than two hundred years before it. “Give me time to make contact with the people, my people, for whom we have taken this action,” Amadou Toumani Touré, the general who seized power, told the nation in his very first radio address, after several days of bloodshed during which soldiers killed scores of unarmed demonstrators. “We can say that this future action will involve the establishment of an unlimited multiparty system, social justice and total democracy in our country.”

  Touré held true to his word, ignoring the pressure to hang on to power that would come from clan and military colleagues alike. And little more than a year after the citizens’ revolt, Mali had chosen Konaré, forty-six, as its first democratically elected president, giving him about 70 percent of the vote.

  Like General Touré before him, Konaré had quickly shown that he was made of something special. Running what Americans would call a retail-style campaign in a country of parched badlands and tumbleweed as large as Texas and California combined, he avoided the temptation to pose as a rainmaker or to promise miracles. Instead, Konaré told crowds that his party did not have money to distribute right and left. Even more remarkable, once it appeared that he was the strong favorite, Konaré warned against the perils of a landslide, saying that a healthy democracy required a strong opposition. “We’re here to identify the problems,” he told an American reporter as they strode together down a dirt alleyway during the thick of the campaign. “What we guarantee is good management.”

  I was reporting in the Caribbean when all of this took place, and I can recall my sense of wonderment and pleasure when I first heard this news. If such things could happen in Mali, one of the world’s ten poorest countries, where less than 20 percent of the population can read, they should be possible anywhere in Africa, I thought. I was reminded of a Creole saying favored by Haiti’s president Jean-Bertrand Aristide: “Analphabète pas bête,” or illiterate does not mean stupid.

  As Robert and I flew from Abidjan to Bamako, I watched the landscape morph from dense rain forest to grassy savannah, and finally to an endless expanse of
sere-colored sand and dust, relieved only by the lazy arc of the Niger River and the narrow, fertile band of green that hugs its banks. In the back of my mind, I was trying hard to picture Boubèye. In my African travels, I had dealt with more presidential goons than I cared to recall. However soft and gentle Mali’s newly democratic face, there would always be some trepidation going into a meeting with a chief of state security.

  I found a message from Boubèye waiting for me at my hotel, and the next day, at the appointed time, I went to the government office building where he had told me to meet him, and was surprised to find a slight man dressed unpretentiously in a loose-fitting two-piece cotton outfit. It was almost identical to the cheap casual clothing my brother and I had bought for our trip to Mopti years before. With his shrugging posture, he bore a distinct look of world-weariness, but I could detect none of the telltale signs of evil one’s imagination associates with state security officers, whether the cold, squinting stare and skeptical interrogation or the clammy, forced friendliness meant to lower one’s guard.

  Boubèye received me in a windowless office and we talked for an hour or so. He asked me why I wanted to see the president, and then lectured me about a festering rebellion among the Tuareg, in the north. Finally, he surprised me with a question about American commitment to African democracy.

  “Americans always say they have no strategic interest in Mali,” he said, chain-smoking, as he pierced me with his indicting gaze. “Maybe that is true in military or economic terms, but whatever happened to political values? The extension and consolidation of democracy in Africa should be seen as a strategic conquest, a victory for humanity.”

  I was due to travel to Timbuktu after spending a few days in Bamako, and Boubèye offered to help expedite the laissez-passer that I would need to go there as a journalist. He gave me the names of some contacts among the local officials as well. Then, at the very end of our interview, he told me that my appointment with Konaré was set for four o’clock the next afternoon. “Try to be there a few minutes beforehand, please.”

  From my meeting with Boubèye, I drove to the American Embassy through Bamako’s dusty grid of streets, which seemed to lie like a thin crust on what was still at heart a very large African village. I wanted to get Washington’s view of the Malian experience. It would be wrong to say that there was no excitement about Mali among the embassy staff. In a continent where civil wars and authoritarian regimes were commonplace, many diplomats clearly considered democratic Mali to be a great posting. Still, there was a distinct undercurrent of defensiveness about American assistance.

  The diplomat who received me, Michael Pelletier, hastily ticked off Washington’s good works. There were 160 Peace Corps volunteers in Mali involved in health care, developing water resources, education and reforestation projects. There had been a proliferation of “democratization projects,” too. These, he said, included support for a legal clinic for women, training for young lawyers and funding for civic education spots on local radio, urging people to vote and pay their taxes. Overall, Pelletier told me, the United States was spending $33 million a year helping Mali. “This has been one of the most important countries in our African aid program,” he said. “Since democratization, funding has either stayed level or shrunken more slowly than in other places.”

  It was a game effort on his part, but there was no concealing the fact that the aid numbers were miserly for a country of this size. Across the continent, in fact, in Uganda, the government of a very different kind of new leader, Yoweri Museveni, was receiving nearly twice as much aid. And all the while, Museveni was virtually proclaiming multiparty democracy unfit for Africans, or at least for Ugandans, while fanning insurgencies that would spark genocide in both Rwanda and Zaire.

  Washington’s spending patterns were no mere abstraction. Africans saw them as a clear expression of the United States’ deepest feelings toward the continent. Like the French president, Jacques Chirac, who had once proclaimed that Africans “weren’t ready for democracy,” Washington was still placing its biggest bets on “strongmen” who gave the appearance of maintaining order, while in reality sowing the seeds of future destabilization at home and in their surrounding regions.

  Museveni was merely the latest in a long string of charismatic strongmen with whom the West had disastrously waltzed. The political bloodline ran through Mobutu, the infamous Idi Amin Dada, Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, Liberia’s semi-literate Master Sergeant Samuel Kanyon Doe and the Angolan terrorist cum anti-communist guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, whom Ronald Reagan once toasted as Africa’s Abraham Lincoln. Each of them was disowned only after the situation in his country had gotten frighteningly messy, or when America’s interests had otherwise shifted.

  As obvious as it may seem now, it bears repeating still, given their disastrous legacy, that we supported leaders like these for our own strategic reasons, and for those reasons alone, during the long years of the Cold War. Noble though our rhetoric may often be, democracy, indeed the welfare of Africans, had nothing to do with our choices. Tragically, for almost all of Africa, these years coincided with the formative period of the independence era.

  Throughout the Cold War, the West had promoted what the French once called vitrines du capitalisme, supposed showcases of capitalism in Africa. These were countries like Kenya, Ivory Coast and even Zaire in Mobutu’s heyday, where “pro-Western” dictators allowed the former colonials and settlers to play the leading economic roles, and to dictate broadly the thrust of their foreign policy. The sky-lines of showcase capitals often filled out handsomely with foreign-built office buildings and skyscrapers for banks, insurance companies and hotels. For many Africans, though, few of whom got to work in the shiny new towers, or even to visit them, this veneer of development seemed like a form of payoff to the regimes that banned their freedom of expression and deprived them of the right to a meaningful vote.

  During Mobutu’s reign, America’s Export-Import Bank and its European counterparts found imaginative ways to fund economic monstrosities like the Inga Dam in Zaire, whose final cost of about $2 billion qualified it as one of the biggest white elephants of all time. America’s overriding logic in an era of global competition with the Soviet Union was to control as many pawns on the African checkerboard as it could, and big projects, with their steep commissions and routine overbilling, were a good way to buy loyalty. As the Cold War ended, though, the need for African showcases ended as well. Many of the West’s most obliging friends began to totter. Others, like Mobutu, who had served Western political interests unstintingly for thirty years while amassing personal fortunes (Mobutu’s was $5 billion), were unceremoniously shoved from power by Washington’s barely concealed hands.

  A smaller circle of American friends soon emerged, and at its center was Washington’s favorite new star, Museveni, who had managed to stabilize Uganda through force of arms in the mid-1980s, after years of chaos and ruin under two previous Western darlings, Amin and Milton Obote. As always, narrowly drawn questions of Western security, rather than considerations of Africa’s longer-term development, were driving our choice. Our latest love affair with a Ugandan dictator stemmed mostly from Museveni’s willingness to sponsor an insurgency in southern Sudan against that country’s Islamic fundamentalist government.

  Museveni would eventually win heavy praise for making Uganda a supposed beacon of economic promise for the continent. The country had posted 8 to 10 percent growth rates throughout the 1990s, but as with the bygone era of capitalist showcases, the growth reflected a selffulfilling prophesy, because it was brought about largely through massive flows of aid from the United States, Britain, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These almighty international financial institutions had become a virtual government in absentia for the entire African continent in the post–Cold War era. Through their tutelage, poor African countries were supposed to be mastering the mechanics of free-market economics, and absorbing vital lessons about transparency and accountability. Th
e people who ran the Iffys understood implicitly that their own credibility required a few “success stories,” and Washington, whose influence within the IMF and World Bank is paramount, annointed Uganda as the era’s star pupil.

  The whole process reeked of cynicism, though, with Western powers once again promoting a select few African stars for reasons entirely of their own. Moreover, though few bothered to examine the record, the advice of the World Bank and the IMF often proved disastrous, which is hardly surprising, given that poor countries were being pushed to compete with one another over commodities, driving their prices steadily downward, while rich countries protected their own farming and basic industries, like textiles, from competition. “The critics of globalization accuse Western countries of hypocrisy, and the critics are right,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner and former chief economist of the World Bank. “The Western countries have pushed poor countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers . . . depriving them of desperately needed export income.”

  By the mid-1990s, Ghana, which for a decade had been held up by the Iffys as an economic example to other African countries, could hardly be said to be taking off. Rather than dwell on where their advice might have gone wrong, the Iffys began bad-mouthing Ghana while promoting Uganda as the fresh, new paragon. For all of the West’s supposed moral superiority and intellectual firepower, its own commitment to accountability was proving as poor as that of any run-of-the-mill African dictatorship.