The Africans

by David Lamb

  One such procession was forming at the airport at the precise moment a West German diplomat arrived in Moroni from Madagascar on a chartered flight. He had come to discuss a large agricultural grant the Bonn government was considering for the Comoros. He watched bewildered as the prisoners were herded and whipped into a single line. Not having been met by any Comorian official, he caught a ride to Moroni with the driver of an old French army truck. He entered the ministry of foreign affairs, where he had been expected, and found himself in consultation with two ranking officials. They were about seventeen years old, and of course, neither could read or write. “It was a very astonishing exercise,” the diplomat recalled. He was airborne within the hour. There was no further mention of the German grant.

  “We can’t go on running the country like this, with teen-agers in charge, with so many people in jail,” the prime minister, Abbas Jusuf, told Solih one day. “People are starting to say we are crazy. The country is paralyzed.”

  “Silence,” Jusuf remembers Solih screaming. “Do you not realize that I have visions, great visions? That is is I who guide our destiny?”

  The next day Jusuf’s seventy-five-year-old mother was marched through the streets in a burlap sack and imprisoned on unannounced charges.

  Solih, though, did have a great vision one night and he spoke of it often afterward. It was of a man and his dog and they had come to kill him. Solih awoke sweating and trembling the next morning, his cook told me, and after a breakfast of sausages and brandy, issued a presidential decree: all dogs on the Comoros were to be killed immediately. The youth brigade carried out the order that day, butchering hundreds with their machetes, dragging others to death behind Land-Rovers.

  The Comorian people displayed a remarkable reaction to the national delirium: silence and quiescence. It was as though Los Angeles had made Charles Manson mayor, and then sat back to casually watch the chaos. But the Comorian response was not unique, for Africans as a whole show a remarkable capacity for tolerance toward their leaders. Presidents can get away with murder, literally and figuratively, and no voices are raised in protest. They can pilfer the treasury bare, have the blood of a thousand men on their hands, govern like medieval monarchs—and still command the obedient servility of their people. Fear is a powerful master. At some undefinable point, though, when corruption and craziness become too overt, a president places himself in jeopardy. Both his job and his life are on the line. And in the spring of 1978, that moment was fast arriving for Ali Solih.

  There was a man in Solih’s past named Bob Denard. He was fifty years old and referred to himself as a military technician. His profession had carried him from Indochina to Africa during more than two decades of warfare, and in many African countries there was no more hated or feared name than his. Bob Denard was one of les affreux (the terrible ones)—a French-born white mercenary who, for a fee, would do the dirty work for Africans they couldn’t do for themselves. There were not many jobs left for “the dogs of war” by the time Solih’s enemies contacted Denard; in fact, there were not many mercenaries left either. Most had gone into retirement, slipping quietly from the limelight. They were middle-aged men left to reminisce about the Biafras and Katangas and Stanleyvilles. But Denard had never fought for a real winner, and he wanted one last curtain call for a dying profession.

  “African armies are much better than they used to be,” Denard lamented with a trace of nostalgia. “There was a time when our services were really needed, but that time is passing now. I think I am the only person left who could have mounted an operation like this.”

  Denard was no stranger to the Comoros. He and a handful of hired guns had helped stage the coup which brought Solih to power. An avowed anti-Communist, Denard later pulled out of the islands and moved to Paris when his employer began espousing radical causes. Now he had the tacit approval of the French government, and two new employers: Ahmed Abdallah, the exiled first Comorian president, and Mohammed Ahmed, a wealthy Comorian businessman who mortgaged his penthouse apartment in Paris to help raise the $2 million Denard needed for the operation. It took Denard three months to put together an invasion force of twenty-nine men, mostly French and Belgian, each with a military specialty ranging from communications to munitions.

  In April 1978 they set off from Europe in a rusting thirty-year-old trawler, the Masiwa, under the guise of making mineral surveys in Argentina. When they reached the Cape of Good Hope they simply turned left instead of right. Shortly after midnight on May 13, the Masiwa slipped through the mist to Grande Comore, where it stopped offshore. At the front of the trawler stood Bob Denard and his German shepherd.

  The island’s largest hotel, the 25-room Itsandra, was, as usual, empty and the twenty-one-year-old bartender and night custodian, Youssouf Zoubeir, had wiled away the evening playing Ping-Pong in the lobby with the cook and watching lizards scurry along the walls in search of insects. “Every night seemed as long as a lifetime in those days,” Zoubeir later recalled.

  Down the road, at the seaside military camp, Abdul Mdahuma, the exiled president’s former senior adviser, was finishing his second year of imprisonment in Room 10 of a windowless cell block with mud floors, cement walls and thick wooden doors. He had eaten his daily ration of rice and beans and settled down with the three former ministers with whom he shared the six-by-six-foot cubicle, wondering if the whispered rumors of an impending coup were true.

  Ali Solih had heard those rumors too. But his fears were dispelled by Jean Guilsou, a French mercenary who had come to the Comoros with Denard in 1975 and had stayed to train the president’s bodyguards. Guilsou, who had become an accomplice in the new plot, convinced Solih that the threat was coming from the next island, Anjouan. Now betrayed by even his most trusted friends, Solih dispatched his 2,000-man army to Anjouan, leaving Moroni open to attack.

  Solih was in his hilltop villa the night Denard arrived. The president’s two teen-age mistresses were upstairs. Until well past midnight Solih sat at the mahogany dining-room table drinking brandy with Olacharry Christian, a French shipping agent who had invited himself for an evening of idle conversation. Christian had ended up on the short end of the stick in several business deals with Solih and now his allegiances had changed; they belonged to Bob Denard, who at that moment waited a mile offshore with his band of mercenaries.

  Shortly before four o’clock, Denard received the radio message from Moroni that Solih had fallen asleep, full of brandy. The mercenaries, their faces blackened with charcoal, their hands holding sawed-off shotguns and grenades, slipped into three rubber rafts and paddled ashore, landing on the beach near the Itsandra Hotel, where Youssouf Zoubeir had become bored watching lizards and dozed off. Worshipers in the mosque across the street stared in disbelief, said nothing and returned to their prayers.

  The mercenaries split into three groups. One moved on foot along the coastal road to the radio station—always the first target in any African coup; another filed up the hill to Solih’s villa; a third headed north to the military camps where, after a brief fire fight, the guards were lulled and the wooden doors holding Abdul Mdahuma and three hundred other prisoners were swung open.

  In three hours the mini-war was over. Thirty men had captured a country.

  The skirmish claimed the lives of ten Comorian soldiers. The others, along with their eighty Tanzanian advisers, fled or threw down their weapons. The operation cost the mercenaries a single sprained ankle. By breakfast time, Denard was on the phone to Abdullah in Paris.

  Solih was under house arrest. The army had surrendered. The people were dancing in the streets. “You can come home,” Denard told Abdullah, “as soon as we clean things up a bit.”

  Two weeks later, after Abdullah had returned to a rousing welcome, Solih was shot to death by the mercenaries, who said he had tried to escape from his villa, where he was awaiting trial for misappropriating millions of dollars of aid money from China and Kuwait. Denard loaded his body into the back of an open Land-Rover. There were two ch
est-high bullet holes in Solih’s white shirt. The vehicle moved through Moroni, Solih stretched out in the back. Small crowds gathered to hiss a farewell. Just outside of town, past the abandoned parliament building, Denard turned off the paved road and headed up a rocky track toward the 7,600-foot-high volcano, Kharthala.

  Solih’s mother and sister, Fatime, waited there. “Here is Ali Solih,” Denard said, dragging the body from the vehicle and letting it fall to the ground. “If you need some of my men to dig a hole, I will get them. But I do not want a lot of people at the burial.” Only a couple of curious youngsters showed up, and Solih was interred in his mother’s backyard with his name scratched into the wet cement of a simple grave marker.

  Africa reacted with shocked indignation. The OAU summit refused to recognize the new Comorian government and turned back Abdullah’s delegation, refusing to issue its members the credentials they needed to enter the conference hall. Once again white men had used their authority to determine the destiny of a black people. African sovereignty had been held up to ridicule. The mercenaries’ presence in the Comoros was like rubbing salt in an open wound, reminding African governments how little control they really had over their own future. “We’ve got to send these people packing,” said the Seychelles president, Albert René, who, in fact, had come to power a year earlier with the help of black mercenaries from Tanzania. (That had been acceptable as far as the OAU was concerned.)

  “I don’t know what the African countries are so upset about,” Denard said. “At least they know where I am. If they send me away, I will disappear, and who knows where I may show up next?

  “All my life people have accused me of fighting for wrong causes, of backing the wrong side. Now I have done something that gets rid of a crazy president who ruined his country. We get a sensible anti-Communist government back into power. I am on the right side. And people still accuse me of doing wrong. I don’t understand why Africa isn’t grateful.”

  But if Africa brooded in anger, the Comorians themselves were overcome with joy. Denard had ended a nightmare and to them he was a hero and a liberator. They cheered him on the streets, and Denard responded with exaggerated military salutes. They sold T-shirts emblazoned with his name. Children reached out to touch him, the elderly moved respectfully aside to let him pass, the new government gave him the run of the islands.

  “A man reaches a point in his life when he sees it’s time to settle down and he selects a place,” Denard said. “Here in the Comoros, I can eat well, I can drink, sleep and make love. There you have it. If the people want me, it will take a hundred thousand Cubans to get us off the islands.”

  Bob Denard had indeed found a home. He bestowed Comorian citizenship and the rank of colonel on himself. He took the Moslem name Moustapha Mouhadjou and announced that he was hanging up his gun and settling down on his islands in the sun. The young bartender at the Itsandra Hotel introduced him to a receptionist there named Mazna, and Denard promptly married her.

  By that time the mercenaries had taken over control of the key ministries, including defense and communications. They got the mail flowing in the once empty post office and started fixing the telephones. They supervised the removal of garbage from the streets, staffed a health clinic and made the Comorians whitewash their scruffy homes. They formed a new army, and they moved into the villas where French colonialists and later Solih’s henchmen had lived. For the first time in Africa’s history, an independent country was being run by European mercenaries.

  I arrived in the Comoros not long after Solih had been killed. In the course of a few weeks, as often happens in black Africa, an entire people had changed its personality. It was spooky. The immigration officials who greeted me so warmly and politely at the airport were the same men who would have jailed or beaten a foreign journalist a month earlier. The Comorian officials who spoke of the need for reform were, in some cases, the same men who had enforced Solih’s Draconian rule. The amiable youngsters who chatted so openly about the horrors of life under Solih were the same fellows who only recently had marched prisoners through the streets. How could there be such a complete transition so quickly? People would shrug indifferently. “We did what we were told to do,” explained a young man who had been a member of the youth brigade.

  The Comoros under President Ahmed Abdullah rapidly returned to what it had been before Solih. The economy was denationalized, close relations with France were re-established, elections were held, the children were sent back to school, adults again became civil servants. I arrived at Abdullah’s house for an interview one sultry afternoon in a bullet-riddled Renault that had been shot up during Denard’s coup. The government driver had picked me up an hour late, and when we pulled into the president’s driveway I saw an elderly man sitting alone by the garage. He was drinking a glass of ice water and smoking a Marlboro cigarette, and he had his bare right foot tucked in his lap, yoga style. His sandals were on the ground nearby.

  “Please tell the president that I apologize for my tardiness,” I said. “There was some confusion over the time of the interview.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the man replied, “I am the president.”

  Abdullah was a gracious and articulate host. His coup, he said, had been the first in Africa waged in the name of democracy and capitalism. He lit another cigarette with his gold Dunhill lighter. An ocean breeze stirred the coconut palms, and the only sounds were those of the waves nearby and the expressions of Abdullah’s optimism. “After every storm,” he said, “there is a calm, and if we do not get bogged down in ideology, our islands can again be peaceful and prosperous. For us, this is like starting our independence all over again.”

  As for Bob Denard, the Comoros had agreed to let him stay, but it had become obvious from Africa’s reaction that his presence would create too many problems and would politically isolate the Comoros. Denard accepted the decision and agreed that, yes, he was obliged to go. Abdullah hosted a lavish state banquet with French wine and Kenyan beef for Denard.

  “Whatever some people in the world say,” Abdullah told him, “you leave here a national hero. You can hold your head high. You can come back to the Comoros any time—but if you do, please come as a tourist.”

  The next morning Denard bought up all the T-shirts in Moroni bearing his name, drank his last bottle of orange soda pop, kissed his Comorian wife goodbye, collected the Zairian wife he had met during another war who had flown from Paris to join him in Moroni, and, dressed in civilian clothes and lugging a duffel bag, drove to the airport in the Land-Rover that had carried Ali Solih to his grave. A cargo flight hauling Rhodesian beef to Paris had been diverted to Moroni to pick up Denard because no other African country would have given him a transit visa.

  And four months after he had arrived on a fishing trawler, Denard climbed aboard the jet, offered a crisp salute to the gathered ministers and government officials and was gone, a winner at last but still a man without a home.*

  Here’s what one man who should know says about the leadership in Africa today: “There are some pretty shameful things going on, in no small part because Africa has such mediocre leadership. Everywhere you look, there are guns and unhappy people. The promises of independence have been a fake in most countries, and I can tell you this: a lot of people in Africa preferred the colonial days. They had more freedom.

  “All this shouting about neocolonialism and imperialism is just silly jargon. It’s an excuse to divert attention from national shortcomings. Black Africa devotes so much attention to South Africa and the apartheid there that it forgets the real problems are right there on its own doorstep.”

  The speaker was James (“Just call me Jimmy”) Mancham, who for eleven months and seven days was president of the Seychelles, a peaceful cluster of islands (population 60,000) in the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles from Kenya. He had been overthrown by his prime minister, Albert René, and sixty Tanzanian soldiers and now he was sitting at his usual corner table in his favorite London restaurant, Mr.
Chow, sipping white wine with Perrier water and reminiscing about the error of his ways.

  “You know, right before the coup two people from the outside—I can’t tell you where they were from—came to me and said that if I didn’t do René in, he was going to do me in.

  “I said, ‘What do you mean—do René in?’ And they said I had to kill him if I wanted to stay in power. That I couldn’t do. I never even held a political prisoner. Maybe that was my weakness, because if you’re going to be president in Africa, you’ve got to be ruthless to survive. If you don’t have the stomach for violence, then you’re going to lose your job, sometimes your life.”

  Mancham was living with an attractive Australian journalist in a penthouse near Hyde Park. He was a nonpracticing lawyer, educated in Paris and London, with sufficient business interests back in the Seychelles to live comfortably. (He spoke cautiously about René, not wanting to lose those interests.) In his spare time he wrote poetry—a sort of upbeat version of Rod McKuen—and he spoke in a touching way about his need to share friendship and make people around him happy.

  The last time I had seen him was three years earlier, a few days before the coup. The bearded Mancham, then only thirty-seven years old, had entered his office in State House wearing an embroidered Mexican shirt open to the third button, flared slacks and loafers with no socks. A gold chain hung loosely around his neck. He rubbed the night-before’s party from his heavy eyes and winked at us. “I don’t believe in self-denial,” he said, by way of introduction. “All the world leaders would like to live like I do, and if they could get away with it, they would.” He winked again, leaned back in his chair and burst into song: “Tonight, tonight …”

  I had to pinch myself to remember that this was a presidential interview. I had never had one quite like it. But then, I had never met a president quite like Mancham either. He tooled around his little island nation in a blue Rolls-Royce convertible, often in sneakers and shorts and usually in the company of beautiful women from Europe and the United States. Recently divorced from Heather, an Englishwoman, he made no secret of his desire to have a different first lady in State House each weekend—a desire he frequently fulfilled—and he made no attempt to separate his private life from his public one. “Is it a crime to be happy and have fun?” he would ask.