The Africans

by David Lamb

  “What’s the last part?” the typist asked.

  “I said, ‘That’s a question.’ You don’t have to write that down.”

  “None of it?”

  “No, just the last part, the part about the question.”

  “My answer to that,” Stewart said, “is that it depends on the demand and the need and the government policies in force.”

  “How about your water bills, electricity, things like that. They up to date?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “I ask that ’cause I don’t ever know no government people who pays their utility bills.”

  “Mr. Stewart,” said an officer, reading from a prepared question he had struggled over for some time, “according to the history of Liberia, this is the first coup d’état in history. If this is correct and true, please refresh your memory and tell this tribunal from your keen observations what the progressive differences are between the administration of the late president Tubman and President Tolbert. I want you to evaluate the different administrations as far as serving the masses and the importation of goods.”

  “The importation of goods?” Stewart replied. “Well, I’m not really in a position to evaluate that—”

  “To what?” the typist asked.

  “Evaluate. E-v-a-l-u-a-t-e. I really can’t evaluate that. Certainly, during the Tubman years goods were cheaper and the cost of living was less.”

  “So,” the officer said, “you indirectly made us understand that the Tubman administration better managed the affairs of the nation, particularly”—and he kept repeating “particularly” while the typist put in a new piece of paper—“particularly in regard to the masses, commonly referred to as the poor people.”

  “Yes.”

  “May we then conclude that the coup of April 12, 1980, was necessary to relieve the people of Liberia of their suffering?”

  “Not only was it necessary—”

  “Wait,” said the typist. “Not what?”

  “Not only was it necessary, it was long overdue.”

  The questioner smiled and nodded in agreement. “This trial is recessed so we can get some lunch. Mr. Stewart, you are finished.”

  “Finished? How do you mean? Will I be coming back again?”

  “Maybe,” the officer said with a shrug.

  The next morning Sergeant Doe, the new head of state, held his first press conference for the forty or so foreign correspondents who were now in Monrovia. He strode into the ballroom of Tolbert’s mansion wearing a wide-brimmed army ranger hat, crisply pressed fatigues and combat boots. He carried a ceremonial sword, a .357 magnum revolver and a walkie-talkie. In halting English he read a prepared statement, handled two brief questions and sat down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” his new information minister, Gabriel Nimely, announced in a casual voice, “you are invited to some executions at two-thirty.”

  Back at the Barclay Training Center, where the trials had been held, the mood was festive. Thousands of civilians had packed the beach, and hundreds of soldiers, many of them drunk, danced and pranced around a small white mini-bus in which thirteen condemned officials of the Tolbert regime were locked. They pounded on the windows and kicked at the doors, laughing and jeering at the men inside.

  “Hey, there, Cecil boy,” one soldier shouted at the former foreign affairs minister, “I’m going to get the first shot. If I don’t kill you, don’t worry much. We’ll let you die slow.”

  Sergeant Doe’s motorcade arrived with a roar and nine of the condemned men were dragged from the bus—the remaining four would witness the spectacle and be pulled out later—and bound to the telephone poles. They wore only underpants. The soldiers taunted them and tickled them during the twenty minutes it took the firing squad to get organized. The officer in charge cursed as he tried to unjam his rifle.

  Cecil Denis, the distinguished foreign affairs minister whom I had known well over the past few years, glared with disgust at his tormentors. Frank Tolbert, the late president’s brother, fainted. Frank Stewart glanced about wide-eyed, as though it were all a nightmare from which he would suddenly awake. James Phillips, the finance minister and the husband of my travel-agent friend from Washington, D.C., wet his underpants.

  “Squad, fire!” the commander ordered, his rifle finally functioning properly. For three minutes the executioners unleashed volley after volley. Bullets smacked into Phillips’ arms and shoulders before one struck his forehead. Stewart was hit in the stomach, then thirty seconds or so later, in the heart. Denis continued to stand upright, eyes closed, as one bullet after another zinged harmlessly by. Finally a soldier stepped out of the ranks and killed him with a burst of machine-gun fire. A great shout of joy rose from the mob: “Freedom. We got our freedom at last!” The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses.

  One of Doe’s first moves as head of state was to double the wages of soldiers and civil servants, whose support he needed to retain power. The treasury was already in the red, though, and the $34 million annual expenditure for the salaries only heightened Liberia’s economic crisis. Before long it became evident that the people’s ecstasy at the executions had been premature. Power had changed hands but little else changed. Sergeant Doe promoted himself to General Doe, and each morning a hairdresser came to the executive mansion to fluff up his Afro. He raced around town with an escort of motorcycle cops, and he took care of his opponents at secret trials and public executions. In no time at all, he became quite comfortable with his new job as head of state, and the United States, not wanting to lose its toehold of influence in West Africa, courted him like a hero.

  But in killing Tolbert, Doe and his soldier-politicians had merely identified the symptoms of Liberia’s discontent. The causes remained. Running a government, they found, was more demanding than staging a coup; formulating remedies for national illnesses was more complex than shooting government officials bound to telephone poles. Freedom, the people learned, did not come from the barrel of a gun. Only one thing seemed certain as a result of the army takeover: Liberia’s first coup d’état would not be its last.

  The Liberian coup unnerved every president in Africa. If the chairman of the OAU could be murdered by a gang of enlisted men, who was safe? The answer was: No one. Political stability is largely an illusion in sub-Sahara Africa and almost any government can be overthrown as suddenly and as easily as Tolbert’s. And below the paper-thin veneer of civilization in Africa lurks a savagery that waits like a caged lion for an opportunity to spring.

  Tolbert’s downfall was founded on the same mistakes that have led to the overthrow of so many other African presidents. First, he raised his people’s expectations and aspirations, economically and socially, but delivered little of what he promised. Second, he allowed governmental corruption and the gap between rich and poor to grow beyond that undefined limit which Africans accept and tolerate. And finally, he misread the pretense of obedience that Africans pay almost any man with authority as a sign of love and respect for him. In the end, he was destroyed by the system he had helped create and try to liberalize.

  Like many presidents, Tolbert said all the right words, but he didn’t hear the rage building and he couldn’t see the pillars of stability tumbling. The lessons of African history escaped him.

  Sadly, there is little to suggest that history won’t keep repeating itself. If any trend is likely, it is that Africa will have more coups, not fewer, in the decade ahead, because few presidents have addressed themselves to the causes of instability. Tolbert made reforms, but they were too few, too late, and their main effect was to give the opposition more room in which to agitate. For just that reason, most presidents are afraid to liberalize their own rule. But by refusing to do so, they create the very conditions that eventually lead to what they fear most—the loss of power.

  The shortcomings that resulted in Tolbert’s murder and Doe’s ascendance exist in virtually every African country, usually far more acutely than they did in Liberia. And if national economie
s continue to wither and presidents continue to keep closed the safety valves of public expression, there can be only one conclusion: Africa’s era of instability is just beginning.

  * The fifth coup, in 1972, was engineered by a young French-trained paratrooper, Mathieu Kérékou. He and a group of soldiers surrounded the presidential palace, where the ruling ministerial council was gathered at siesta time. In a matter of seconds the ministers’ status of governors changed to one of prisoners.

  Kérékou decided that the country’s 3.3 million people needed a Marxist “revolution.” Christmas and Easter were abolished as legal holidays, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were banned and their officers were ordered to undergo “demystification” training. Kérékou also forced sorcerers into special asylums—an unpopular move because witchcraft is still commonly practiced in Benin. Voodoo, in fact, was born in Benin and spread from there to Haiti and other parts of the world.

  Kérékou was still in power in 1984. He had given his country a decade of political stability, but only at the cost of widespread repression and steady economic deterioration.

  * The 38,000 residents of one of the Comoros’ four islands, Mayotte, voted to remain an overseas territory of France when independence was declared. Mayotte has the only deep-water port in the Comoros, and because of its association with France, is more prosperous than the other three islands: Grande Comore (where the capital is located), Anjouan and Moheli. The Organization of African Unity contends that France’s presence in Mayotte is colonial and illegal.

  * After reading the story about the Comoros I wrote for the Los Angeles Times, Clint Eastwood located Denard in France, flew him to Hollywood and bought the rights to his life story for an undisclosed price. Eastwood was going to play Denard, but the actor was unhappy with the script he had commissioned and the movie was put on ice before filming started.

  * In November 1981 a group of wealthy Seychellois living in exile recruited, for $1,000 each, fifty-two white mercenaries from South Africa, including Michael (Mad Mike) Hoare, a notorious Irishman who had fought in the Congo in the mid-sixties, to bring Mancham back to power. The bargain-basement mercenaries flew into Victoria on a commercial jetliner, pretending to represent a sports and drinking club called the “Ancient Order of Foam Blowers.” A customs official discovered their weapons while checking baggage, and after a fire fight at the airport the mercenaries hijacked an Air India jet and flew back to South Africa, the coup attempt nipped in the bud. (Five of the hired gunmen were captured and imprisoned in the Seychelles. The surviving mercenaries flew into Johannesburg, where they were later tried on hijacking charges. Some, including Hoare, were sentenced to prison.) Mancham denied having anything to do with the affair. He also said he was not involved with a coup attempt in 1982, which René put down with the help of Tanzanian soldiers.

  † Ships brought African slaves to the United States until 1860, and the society’s accomplishments were small. It gradually lost support and came under attack from abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison. They looked on Liberia as a palliative to ease the conscience of whites who refused to deal with the real issue: slavery.

  * Liberia has only two ships of its own, but more than 2,500 vessels ply the seas flying Liberia’s flag of convenience. Registration fees for the Liberian merchant fleet earn the Monrovia government $16 million annually. For the shipowners, about one third of whom are American, the savings run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The Liberian flag enables them to hire low-paid, nonunion crews and to forgo some of the strict safety regulations that are imposed by nations such as the United States and Britain.

  THE COLONIAL HERITAGE

  I’ll tell you this: those old days were incredibly good for the European. There was no law, so we made it. We were the law.

  —LATHAM LESLIE-MOORE,

  a ninety-year-old British settler in Kenya

  THE EUROPEAN EMPIRE that once stretched the length and breadth of Africa had, by the summer of 1977, shrunk to a Vermont-sized chunk of coastal desert known as the French Territory of Afars and Issas, a wretched wasteland France had colonialized 115 years earlier as a refueling stop for its Saigon- and Madagascar-bound ships. Located on Ethiopia’s northeast border, the territory—commonly referred to by the name of its capital, Djibouti, which means “my casserole” in the Afar language—was a resourceless and penniless land that cost France $100 million a year to operate. It had only two factories, one for bottling Coca-Cola, the other for bottling Pepsi, and almost everything except a few home-grown tomatoes was imported: table salt from Holland, vegetables and eggs from Ethiopia, meat from Kenya, drinking water from France. The population of 320,000 Afar and Issa tribesmen included three university graduates, no doctors and one fille de joie, Madame Fatima, a toothless Somali who ran the Red Arrow brothel frequented by French Legionnaires.

  Djibouti, the capital and only city, was a wonderfully seedy place where Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet would have felt right at home. There was a dingy square, Place Menelik, surrounded by cafés and bars nestled under urine-drenched arches. French soldiers and civilians sat at the tables there, shirts unbuttoned to the waist, sweating in the 100-degree evening heat, swilling lukewarm beer and chasing away the swarming beggars with a wave of the hand. At night the foreigners retreated behind louvered shutters in shabby villas on streets like the Rue de Beauchamps and Avenue Pasteur. The Africans lived on the other side of town, in shacks made of packing crates. Beyond the African quarter was a barricade of barbed wire forming a ten-mile necklace around Djibouti. After President Charles de Gaulle was greeted by riots on a visit in the 1960s, the French erected the barricade to control the swelling city population.

  The atmosphere of Djibouti was reminiscent of Saigon circa 1950. The elegance was gone, but a faded charm lingered. Everything needed painting and sweeping. The sun beat down like a hammer, and everyone moved slowly, concerned with little except the arrival of siesta time, which stretched from eleven-thirty to four. Even the mosquitoes were lethargic, so sluggish that you could catch them in flight with your bare hand. The one hotel in town without cockroaches, the 39-room La Siesta, had only a single spigot in each bathroom which produced, naturally enough, hot water. In the hotels and bars, ceiling fans groaned overhead but the air was too heavy to move, and at night Frenchmen lay on their bedroom floors under the fans and poured bottles of water over their bodies and hoped they would fall alseep.

  There were 15,000 Frenchmen in Djibouti—soldiers, businessmen, civil servants, expatriate wanderers—and by early 1977 most had already started packing their bags, having lost another home away from home. Indochina was gone. West Africa was gone. Soon Djibouti would be gone too, and the Frenchmen would drift on to Tahiti or New Caledonia, even back to France. The end of the European colonial era in Africa came on a June night, dripping with heat and humidity, in a capital city surrounded by barbed wire, and it would come without tears or toasts, farewells or nostalgia. Africa’s newest nation would be launched into independence in a sad little ceremony that rated hardly a line in the international media and attracted not a single head of state.

  The president-to-be, Hassan Gouled Aptidon, had been hand-picked by France. He was sixty-one years old, a former nomad and a camel herder with a sixth-grade education. I arrived unannounced at his door one afternoon before independence, and rising from the couch where he had been napping, he welcomed me with a bottle of Coke and a French cigarette. His was a tidy cement-block house with three bedrooms, no air conditioning and a few pieces of old furniture in the living room. He seemed not at all worried by the future when I asked him how a country that was 90 percent desert and produced nothing could survive economically.

  “Ah,” he replied, puffing on his cigarette, “but when you were born, you had no money, correct? Then you worked and got some money and you lived better. We will do the same because we will find solutions when we are free to meet our responsibilities.

  “We have many possibilities—salt, tourism, atomic en
ergy, maybe a duty-free port like Hong Kong, and”—after a pause—“French aid.”

  There was no great sense of excitement on that June evening in 1977 as five centuries of European colonialism in Africa dwindled down to their final few seconds.* Several hundred chairs were lined up near the piers for the ceremony and a handful of buildings were whitewashed at the last minute. The new airport passenger terminal opened and the La Siesta hotel put up a “No vacancy” sign. The French aircraft carrier Foch anchored a few miles out to sea in the unlikely event an evacuation of the expatriates would be necessary, and Madame Fatima bolted the Red Arrow at 6 P.M., mumbling aloud, “Mercy, what will I ever do without the Legionnaires?” There was a shooting outside the barbed-wire perimeter that claimed one life when something called the Front for the Liberation of the Somali Coast—an outfit pledged to overthrowing the government that had not yet even taken office—demanded permission to enter Djibouti. Gouled smoothed out the problem with some skillful negotiating, and most of the front’s 3,000 members were left milling outside the barricade with their camels and guns. By eleven o’clock the invited guests were in their seats. The women, stout and big-chested, wore colorful print-cloth dresses, and the men sat glassy-eyed, chewing khat, a narcotic weed imported from Ethiopia to which virtually every adult male in Djibouti is addicted.

  At precisely one minute past midnight, France’s high commissioner, Camille d’Ornano, offered a crisp salute as the French tricolor was lowered and folded for the last time in Africa. Hassan Gouled Aptidon, who would move out of his little home and into the French governor’s seaside mansion the next day, was now the president of Africa’s fiftieth independent nation, the Republic of Djibouti. A bugle sounded from somewhere in the darkness, a cannon roared twenty-one times from the French armada in the harbor, and fireworks danced through the skies, illuminating the ramshackle port city overlooking the Bab el-Mandeb strait that leads from the Red Sea to the oil routes of the Indian Ocean. Polite applause rippled through the audience and then everyone moved off into the night. Soon Djibouti was empty and silent. The torch had been passed.