by David Lamb
“We want you to stay and to farm well in this country,” he told the settlers. “This is the policy of this government … What the government needs is experience, and I don’t care where it comes from. I will take it with both hands.
“Continue to farm your land well, and you will get all the encouragement and protection of the government. The only thing we will not tolerate is wasted land.
“Kenya is large enough, and its potential is great. We can all work together harmoniously to make this country great, and to show other countries in the world that different racial groups can live and work together.”
The whites stirred uneasily, looking at one another to make sure they heard the old man correctly. Then they stood and cheered.
Most of the whites have left the highlands since then, reluctantly but more or less voluntarily. The pressure for land is great in over-populated Kenya and the huge white-owned ranches are being bought by the cooperatives, the land is being fenced and the whites have moved closer to Nairobi or Mombasa or gone back home to England. The hundred or so white settler families who remain—representing one of the largest white farming communities in black Africa—speak little today of their future, hoping only that they, if not their children, will be able to stay on the land that was turned green and productive through the sweat of their forefathers. If they can’t, it will not be because the African subjected them to the same discrimination that they inflicted on the African. It will be because land is the most sacred possession in Africa—land rights was the original issue in the Mau Mau war—and if the government is to maintain the support of its people, every rural African must eventually have his plot.
I have always found it strange—not unsettling, just unusual—to land on a grassy runway in the highlands and be greeted by a cluster of barefooted, blond-haired white farm children who were as African in their understanding of life as the blackest child of Africa. It seemed a flashback to another era. But the highlands are full of scenes frozen in time, and in the autumn of 1979, 300 white Kenyans gathered at Charlie Stone-Wigg’s 45,000-acre Gianni Ranch for the marriage of his daughter to Frederick Brendan, son of another old-time settler family. The little town of Nyeri, a few miles from the Aberdare Country Club, had seen many such weddings in the past but would not see many more.
Two small-boy ushers, one wearing a kilt and both with clean, slicked-down blond hair, stood by the stack of wedding programs. The European soloist sang “The Holy City” and the European vicar called upon the congregation to ask for Jesus’ help in time of need. The new Mrs. Brendan wore a homemade white dress and a lace shawl and she blushed as she walked down the aisle with her husband. The bride and groom both were born in Kenya and, given their choice, they both one day would be buried in Kenya.
In the drizzle after the ceremony, the guests crowded onto the verandah of the Stone-Wiggs’ home. This was the last of the settler community, second- and third-generation white African farmers, and everyone knew everyone else—the Nyeri crowd greeting the people from Naivasha and Nanyuki, the Kitale families joking with their friends from Nakuru and Gil Gil and Naro Moru. Their faces were tanned from the African sun and their hands were callused and their laughter could be heard a long way off.
An old Kikuyu woman wandered up the road. She was barefoot and stoop-shouldered beneath the load of firewood on her back and her tattered dress was hardly more than a rag. She stood on the lawn for a few minutes, unnoticed, a black face in a sea of white. Then, losing interest, she moved on toward her village several miles away.
Three months after the wedding the Stone-Wiggs left Gianni Ranch, which soon would be divided into as many as ten thousand subsistence plots. The red oat grass that Stone-Wigg had nurtured so skillfully for his merino sheep and boran cattle would disappear, and the region’s delicate ecological balance would be threatened.
The division of Kenya’s large export-producing ranches for pint-sized subsistence farms, each supporting fifteen or twenty people, is a worrisome omen for a land with no mineral wealth and the world’s highest birth rate. With the division comes a decline in agricultural production and a diminishing tax base for the government. (In 1975 Kenya was self-sufficient in wheat; in 1980 it had to import half of the 280,000 tons of grain needed to feed its people.) The government in Nairobi says that the subdividing must stop, that the white farmer must continue to produce if Kenya is to prosper.
But the pressure for land makes the destruction of the big farms inevitable. In the same way, the pressure for housing eventually will result in the destruction of the white-owned urban estates. And the pressure for jobs will lead to fewer and fewer white-held positions. Almost all white Kenyans now send their children to school in Europe, preparing them for a life very different from the one they have grown up with.
As one of the settler farmers told me, “I don’t want my kids to learn to love Africa too much.”
* In a strange turn of events, one country, Rhodesia, would later return briefly to a colonial status. The white population there had declared unilateral independence from Britain in 1965. In late 1979, when it became apparent the whites could not win an intensifying guerrilla war, Rhodesia reverted to a colony ruled by a British governor. In April 1980, Rhodesia became the independent nation of Zimbabwe.
* The Sudan, administered by Britain and Egypt, became independent in 1956. Its population is largely Arab, and although I have included it in sub-Sahara Africa, many people lump it with the Saharan countries. But black Africa’s independence era is generally referred to as having started with Ghana in 1957.
* The largest denomination is Catholicism, which has upwards of 75 million followers and twelve cardinals in Africa. (Ten of the cardinals are African, two are European.) The Protestant Church has an estimated 50 million members. The majority of Ethiopia’s 31 million people are members of the Coptic church. In many areas the Africans’ denomination depends solely on which missionaries got there first. In northwest Kenya, for example, almost everyone is a Quaker.
* For census purposes, a slave counted as two thirds of a white American in 1860.
* The Lebanese, numbering more than 200,000 in Africa, control the economies of several West African countries as tightly as Asians control those in East Africa.
* On New Year’s Eve 1980, after twenty years as chief of state, the seventy-four-year-old Senghor did something no African president had ever done: he stepped down voluntarily, handing over power to his prime minister, Abdou Diouf. Senghor’s presidential term had been scheduled to expire in 1983. (Cameroon’s founding president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, similarly retired in 1982 after twenty-two years in office.)
FROM LISBON WITH LOVE
We’re producing 600 tires a day in Angola, but God knows how we’re doing it. The workers come in the morning and push the buttons, and if everything works, fine. If it doesn’t, they just go home.
—A U.S. executive of General Tire & Rubber Co.
after touring the company’s plant in Luanda, Angola, where absenteeism runs 50 percent a day
IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE NOW, but only a few years ago Luanda was known as the Rio de Janeiro of Africa. And Angola was a place of prosperity and abundance. Ask a Portuguese what life was like in that colony on the South Atlantic coast and he will smile, close his eyes and blow a kiss.
Angola, he’ll say, was a much better place to live than Lisbon. Savor it for just a day and you would know that Thomas Wolfe was only half right: it wasn’t that you couldn’t go home again; it was that you didn’t want to go home again. There were weekends on the beach, eating fresh lobster and prawns; chic shops stuffed with gourmet foods and the latest European fashions; luxury high-rise apartments overlooking the bay, summer homes at Lobito—an African version of Florida’s West Palm Beach; and, almost right up to the end, not the slightest hassle with the “natives.” And then there was Luanda.
Luanda, the capital, was built on hills that rose gently from the bay. The sidewalks were paved with mosaic tile, and the street
s were wide and lined with trees. There were parks everywhere, neatly clipped and ablaze with flowers, and throughout the city there were 170 restaurants and night clubs, open from dusk to dawn. The skyline, stretching from the twenty-five-story President Hotel to the seventeenth-century Dutch fort a few miles away, was like nothing else in Africa. There was, in fact, no more striking urban view—and no more pleasing life style—on the entire continent.
One of the best things, as far as the Portuguese were concerned, was that you didn’t have to be rich or even literate to enjoy the fruits of this good life. You only had to be white. For with a resident population of 500,000 Portuguese, Angola was the “whitest” colony in all Africa. Like Portugal’s other African colonies—Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sāo Tomé and Príncipe—it was the exclusive domain of white men who thought they would stay forever. Even menial jobs such as driving a taxi, cutting hair, tending bar, were held by the Portuguese. About the only jobs available to the 7 million black Angolans were as servants, janitors or plantation workers. At independence in 1975, after five centuries of Portuguese domination, 98 percent of the Angolans were illiterate and scarcely more than a handful had any technical skills, much less a university education.
Independence coincided with the collapse of the Portuguese overseas empire, which left in its wake a cluster of revolutionary, and often Marxist, independent states stretching across Africa. The whites became fearful, expecting the Africans to turn on them with vengeance. And in a panic of settler hysteria, they fled to Europe or South Africa in the largest white migration Africa had ever known. They brought with them everything they could carry or ship. More than twenty thousand cars were put on vessels; hundreds of others were totaled in drunken games of “chicken” on the streets of Luanda so that none would be left for the Angolans. The fishing fleet sailed off to Lisbon or down to Walvis Bay in Namibia. Telephones were ripped from the walls, typewriters were packed, plantations abandoned, mansions shuttered. Doctors walked out of the hospitals and professors emptied their desks at the university. In the course of a single week, 95 percent of the employees of the Bank of Angola departed, leaving junior clerks and janitors to run it. By the time the exodus ended, Angola had been stripped bare: all that remained were 25,000 whites and the carcass of a nation. “I’m not proud of what we did, but we didn’t leave voluntarily, you know,” a Portuguese exporter told me.
To refer to Portugal’s colonial history as disgraceful would be to give Lisbon the benefit of the doubt. Portugal stood for all the evils of colonialism and none of the good. It took but did not give. It milked its two largest African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, as dry as a dead cow and bequeathed them nothing but the guarantee of economic disaster.
Today you can still stand on the patio of the Panorama Hotel and gaze out across the bay at Africa’s most beautiful skyline. But not much else is the same. The hotel’s entrance is guarded by a young woman wearing fatigues and double-buckle Soviet combat boots and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. The harbor is full of Soviet ships, but cargo stands rotting on the piers while dock workers doze in the shadows nearby.
The mosaic sidewalks have cracked, exposing large gaps of stones and dirt, and garbage fills the streets. The high-rise apartments are occupied by squatters; the corridors reek of urine, and laundry hangs from the balcony railings. Rats scurry through the deserted restaurants, torn and filthy awnings hang limply in the stifling afternoon heat. The parks are overgrown, rusting frames of wrecked cars litter the alleys, and promptly at 5 A.M., when the curfew ends, women start queuing for a loaf of bread or a can of powdered milk imported from Brazil.* By noon, the lines stretch for blocks.
Walking through Luanda alone one afternoon, I was struck by the eerie notion that I had entered a living ghost town, that here was the African city of the twenty-first century. It had people but no sense of life or purpose. Block after block of stores were closed, their windows broken and boarded up. Neon signs flashed mysteriously above IBM, Sony and Singer showrooms that had been empty for years. Hotel employees snoozed at the reception counters, and government workers slouched behind desks that were barren of telephones, typewriters, pencils or paper. Elevators were stuck where they had jammed two or three years earlier, and air conditioners coughed and sputtered and threw out blasts of hot air.
In my $40-a-day hotel room a sign advised: “The great difficulty we are finding in replacing lost or deteriorated objects forces us to make this special request. Should you need a towel, please request same at the porter’s desk.” But the hotel had no porter, no porter’s desk, no running water, no food in the dining room except soup and bread.
One morning from my hotel window I noticed what appeared to be a Peugeot convertible, moving ever so slowly along the beachfront road. When it finally drew even with the hotel, I saw that the owner had cut off the car’s top, gutted the inside and attached a yoke to the front axle. The $10,000 Peugeot had been turned into a cart and was being pulled by oxen.
“I’d grant you that we’re not in a very happy state of affairs,” a senior police official told me. “I wouldn’t suggest for a minute that anyone would want colonialism and the Portuguese back, but certainly, unless you’re an important party official, you were a lot better off in 1970 than you are in 1980.”
His conclusion seemed reasonable enough, for Angola was a wounded and fragile country in a state of utter deterioration. Yet, like so many African countries, its resources were immense and its possibilities for development great.
Angola (the name comes from an early king, N’gola) is fourteen times the size of Portugal, or as big as Spain, France and Italy combined. Once you leave the flat narrow strip along the coast, the land rises quickly into a shrub-covered plateau, often a mile high or more, which forms one of Africa’s great watersheds. The rains are generous throughout much of Angola and the climate is temperate. Though there are millions of acres of fertile, unused farmland, agricultural development has been retarded by a variety of tsetse fly whose bite is so painful that domestic animals become uncontrollable. As a result, there are no horses or beasts of burden in all of southern Angola, an area twice the size of Colorado.
In terms of natural resources, Angola is one of the two or three potentially wealthiest countries in black Africa. Its offshore oil platforms, operated by Gulf, earn Angola about $5 million a day. (Sixty percent of the oil ends up in the United States, even though Washington has never recognized the Marxist government in Luanda.) Its exported coffee crop and its diamond mines (which are covertly run by South African interests) were at independence among the world’s most productive. Its iron ore exports used to bring in $75 million annually, its sisal and cotton crops another $51 million. Additionally, Angola earned $100 million a year from traffic fees paid by Zaire and Zambia on the Benguela Railroad. But by 1980, Angola had little more than its petroleum income, and most of that was being used to pay for its war against antigovernment guerrillas in southern Angola.*
Angola had been crippled by its abrupt transition into independence and by the Portuguese exodus, by the continuing civil war against South African-backed guerrillas, by a bewildered Marxist government which thought the nation’s problems would go away if it recited enough slogans, by a bored, obedient population that was not trained to provide the skills a new nation required. Angola had become a victim of both past and present, exploited by the colonialists and misled by the nationalists. It was the tragic symbol of what Africa is and a case study of what, with luck and planning, it could be. One day, perhaps, the chasm between those two extremes will no longer be worlds apart.
The first European to reach Angola was the Portuguese explorer Diogo CāTo, who landed at the mouth of the Congo River in 1483. The people he found there were of Bantu stock, representing a hundred different tribes, and the land was under the rule of an African monarch, the King of the Kongo. Seven years later the Portuguese sent a small fleet of ships to the kingdom, carrying priests, skilled workers and tools. The mission was re
ceived warmly and in return for the Portuguese favors, the king accepted Christianity and agreed to send his son, the future King Afonso, to Lisbon for schooling. Thus began, on a note of mutual respect, Portugal’s African presence. It would end nearly five hundred years later with the Portuguese losing liberation wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau and fleeing the continent in panic.
Relations between Lisbon and King Afonso soon deteriorated. The Kongo kingdom was racked by internal revolt and gradually disintegrated. The slave traders came and military clashes were frequent. The Portuguese meanwhile extended their contacts southward along the coast and in 1575 founded Luanda. In 1641 a Dutch fleet seized Luanda and another slaving port, Benguela, forcing the Portuguese to retreat into the interior. Seven years later an expedition from Brazil returned the coast to Portuguese control.
Why had Lisbon fought so determinedly for a coastal strip on a primitive, mysterious continent? Its incentive was economic—slaves. For during three centuries an estimated three million Angolans were shipped to plantations in Brazil, providing the foundation of that Portuguese colony’s economic growth. The slaving industry in Angola was made possible by the willing participation of chiefs from two tribes: the Chokwe, a mobile, aggressive group living in eastern Angola, and the Ovimbundu, the largest ethnic group, which ranged through central and southern Angola and represented 40 percent of the total population.
Portuguese soldiers and settlers faced sporadic but continuous warfare in Angola for more than a century after the founding of Luanda, and it was not until the late 1800s that Lisbon was able to extend its control into the high plateaus of the interior. By then the European imperial powers had begun their “scramble for Africa.” Portugal, industrially and technologically backward, was the lightweight of the group which met in Berlin in 1884–1885 to establish the boundaries of Africa. Largely because of Britain’s support, Portugal was granted the “right of occupation” in Angola. At the same time it was forbidden to move into the central African lands of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Nyasaland (Malawi), all of which were placed in Britain’s sphere of influence.
