The Africans

by David Lamb

  Foreign aid represents a reasonably accurate barometer of Washington’s interest in an area, and Callaghan might have been surprised to learn that sub-Sahara Africa did not rank high, despite all the time Carter and Young spent discussing it.* In 1979 Washington budgeted only $265 million in developmental assistance for black Africa. That represented seventy-one cents per recipient, or 17 percent of Washington’s total world-wide aid commitment. Israel, on the other hand, recieved $785 million that year, and Egypt $750 million. One footnote worth mentioning here: four fifths of Washington’s aid to black Africa is nonmilitary, while most of the Soviet’s is military.

  The United States, with an aid budget of $4.7 billion in 1979, remained the biggest contributor in the world, but it was far from the most generous. If you measure aid against wealth, the United States contributes only 0.2 percent of its gross national product to the Third World. That ranked it fifteenth among the seventeen members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a grouping of industrialized democracies. (Only Austria and Italy gave proportionately less of their gross national product.) The United States’ contribution has grown steadily smaller over the years, falling from 0.5 of GNP in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, to 0.32 in 1970 to its current low.* The decline has continued under the Reagan Administration, causing former Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie to remark that the United States “can no longer afford to act as if foreign aid were charity, and as if diplomacy were a diversion. They are as vital as defense.”

  Black Africa is also important to U.S. business, although it is still a largely untapped market. U.S. investment in black Africa totals only $2.5 billion, with another $1.5 billion in South Africa. (In Latin America, which has fewer people and fewer resources, U.S. investment is six times more; in Brazil alone it is $8 billion.) American exports to black Africa are only $3.4 billion (and $1.3 billion to South Africa), but imports, ranging from oil to coffee to cashew nuts, are $13.6 billion from black Africa (and $1 billion from South Africa). Nearly half the global U.S. trade deficit is with African countries, an imbalance that will continue until the United States makes a greater effort to link its own economy with Africa’s developmental priorities.

  A peaceful, prosperous Africa serves everyone’s interests except the Soviet Union’s. But, sadly, Africa has not known a single day of peace since the independence era began. From the deserts of West Africa to the Horn of Africa in the east, this troubled continent enters the 1980s in a scramble to arm itself with the best weapons it can beg, borrow or buy. Armies across the continent are growing, defense expenditures increasing, armaments becoming more sophisticated. According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, military spending in sub-Sahara Africa, excluding South Africa, rose between 1975 and 1978 from $1 billion to $3.5 billion. It was the largest defense expenditure for any Third World bloc outside the Middle East. The number of black Africans under arms rose during that period from 475,000 to 750,000, and in 1983 no fewer than ten wars were being fought in Africa.* They ranged from wars of secession to wars of liberation, and they pitted Marxists against Marxists, Western-backed factions against Soviet-backed factions, whites against blacks and blacks against blacks.

  “The big powers made our continent a battleground and our people the cannon fodder for their wars,” said the Sudan’s president, Jaafar Numeiri. “I fear that our continent will go the same path that Asia has taken for twenty years of war and destruction.”

  Sub-Sahara Africa, with the exception of South Africa, does not manufacture its own weapons, so its wars are waged with weapons imported from abroad. It is, though, an oversimplification to blame the superpowers, as Numeiri did, for Africa’s inability to live at peace with itself.

  True, the artificial colonial boundaries Africa inherited at independence did exacerbate cross-border hostilities. But even if those borders had never been established, even if the superpowers had not armed the newly independent states, chances are Africa would still be fighting wars, with bows and arrows if necessary. Centuries-old traditions do not change in a decade or two. Nor do men become presidents and generals in Africa by making concessions. They assume and maintain power for the most part because they mastered the arts of guile and force. They do not negotiate with enemies when they can banish or jail or kill. Their solution may be crude and only temporary, but it is an essential tool of governments that have not wielded a consensus among their people and of presidents who have not included in their inner circle those of differing political, tribal or religious persuasions. These outcasts make their voices heard with gunfire, not words.

  “The storm has not struck yet,” South Africa’s Prime Minister John Vorster said in 1977 of the continent’s increasing military problems. “We are only experiencing the whirlwinds that go before it.”

  Even though the majority of Africa’s 455 million people do live in peace, Vorster’s words were prophetic, and bloodshed under the banners of liberation, secession, religion, nationalism and territorial integrity, increased while the Organization for African Unity watched helplessly, having neither the mechanism to impose its decisions on member states nor the will to condemn member heads of state.

  When the OAU mediation committee met in Nairobi in 1979 to discuss the eight wars Africa was then fighting, the secretary-general began the session with these words: “Our task today is to bring a smile back to the lips of our African brothers.”

  A few delegates groaned. But such bromides were as close as the OAU ever came to taking a stand on anything, except apartheid. Several weeks later the committee sent a group of representatives to Dar es Salaam to consider the Tanzania-Uganda war that eventually resulted in the downfall of Idi Amin. A few hours after arriving, they were headed back to Nairobi for dinner, having said they could not linger because they had forgotten to pack their nightclothes.

  “As far as I can tell, they were more interested in wearing pajamas than in settling a war,” said Tanzania’s foreign minister, Ben Mkapa.

  Covering African wars presents Western journalists with some unusual obstacles because the wars themselves are usually shrouded in mystery, secrecy and falsehood. The lack of reliable information from the governments involved and the inaccessibility of the battle-fronts make it difficult if not impossible to determine who is winning, who is dying, who is supporting whom, who gets what spoils. Not only is it frequently difficult to tell the players without a scorecard, but sometimes it is impossible to get a scorecard. These jottings from a notebook I kept during the 1979 Tanzania-Uganda war—a war journalists had to cover from neighboring Kenya—illustrate the often undefinable line between fact and faction:

  March 10—Libya denies that it is shuttling military supplies into Uganda to bail out President Amin.

  March 11—Two Libyan transport planes land at Entebbe air base in Uganda loaded with military supplies and soldiers.

  March 19—Amin announces that Palestine Liberation Organization commandos are fighting beside his soldiers on the front lines.

  March 25—A PLO official calls a press conference in Tanzania and says: “I want to assure you that no Palestinians are involved in the fighting in Uganda.”

  March 26—Radio Uganda reports that Amin is trapped in his residence, that the highway from Entebbe to Kampala has been cut, that enemy tanks are closing in on the president’s home.

  March 27—Radio Uganda makes no mention of the previous day’s broadcast, saying only that everything is calm in Uganda and Amin is with his troops.

  One British journalist sent from London to East Africa to cover the war succumbed professionally to the lack of information. He couldn’t get a visa to enter Uganda and he didn’t learn anything very topical from the Ugandan refugees pouring into Kenya, so he sat in his room at Nairobi’s Inter-Continental Hotel, haphazardly moving toy tanks on a map of Uganda spread out at his feet. Then he wrote a story based on his map maneuvers. A more enterprising American journalist managed to get through on the telephone to Amin’s r
esidence. He identified himself and was told by the official on the other end: “I know you’re CIA, so plug me into President Carter first, and we’ll give him something to rock ’n’ roll about.”

  The result of this double-talk and no-talk is that reporters frequently must cull their information from second-hand sources—refugees, Western embassies, government radio broadcasts and, all too often, one another. But using your ingenuity can be dangerous in Africa, and the risk is often not worth the value of the story. I remember four European journalists who came through Nairobi a few weeks before Idi Amin was chased out of Uganda by the invading Tanzanian army. One of them had been told by his editor to photograph and interview Amin. The assignment was both absurd and impossible, for Uganda was a scary, paranoid place, closed to the civilized world. Still, the four journalists were determined to get into Uganda by any means possible. Those of us based in Nairobi told them, “You’re crazy. Don’t try.” They went anyway, renting a fisherman’s rowboat in Kenya and slipping across Lake Victoria to a small village near Entebbe. Several Ugandan soldiers greeted them politely there, took them to the local police station, and shot them dead.

  On a map of Africa there is a region in the east that resembles a rhinoceros horn, jutting into the Gulf of Aden between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. This is the so-called Horn of Africa. It consists of three countries, Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti, occupies an area slightly larger than Alaska and Oregon combined and has a population of 35 million people. To the west of the mountain spine that cuts Ethiopia in half some of the world’s best coffee is grown.* To the east the riverbeds quickly run dry and the scrub-covered plateaus give way to an endless expanse of desert that stretches to the coast. This is the home of the Somalis, a nomadic people, defiant and tough, imbued with both a sense of fatalism and a knowledge of survival, qualities they learned in living with the rhythm of the desert and the beat of war.

  Unlike most other Africans, the 4 million people of Somalia are fiercely nationalistic. They share a common language and a common culture and a common belief that their Moslem leaders are descendants of Aquil Abu Talib, cousin of the prophet Mohammed. Isak Dinesen, in her book Shadows on the Grass, compared the Somalis to the ancient Icelanders of the Nordic sagas. The Somalis have faced expansionist threats from the Portuguese, Ethiopians, Egyptians, French, English and Italians and never willingly yielded an inch or lost an ounce of spirit. In 1921 the British subdued one Somali leader, Muhammad Abdullah Hassan, only after they bombed his forts. “It is wonderful,” said a British officer, “how little we have yet managed to impress the Somalis with our superior power.”

  For years the Horn of Africa has been synonymous with crisis. Wars have dragged on here for centuries longer than the white man has been in Africa. The Soviet Union and the United States, wanting access to the horn’s strategic coastal location, have confronted each other here. Christianity and Islam, Marxism and pro-Western socialism have collided here. The evils of poverty and repression fester here. In almost any direction you travel from Mogadishu, the Somali capital, the paved road soon turns into dirt and sand and before long you will happen onto a makeshift camp, where rows of straw huts stretch as far as the eye can see. And there you will find another product of Africa’s wars and harsh governments—the refugee, one of five million Africans on the run.

  For all her thirty-three years, Dol Abdu Husein has lived in the shadow of war and drought. Planes rain death from the skies and artillery shatters the desert stillness. Water holes go dry, the earth cracks, cattle die. Children whimper with hunger and the camels grow restless, sensing that it is time to move on.

  Husein, a tall, graceful Somali woman who has mastered the art of survival, shrugs. She dismisses these forces that control and buffet her life—and that have made her a refugee—with a single, brief observation: “The fates are powerful.”

  Until a month before I met her in a Somali refugee camp known as Gialalassi, home for Mrs. Husein and her four children had been the Ogaden, the barren Ethiopian province where Somali nomads and Ethiopian farmers have been fighting each other for a thousand years. It is a vast, empty place, full of deprivation and despair. In all her life, Mrs. Husein has never tasted a glass of ice water, never seen a city or flipped an electric switch.

  “I would not have left but finally I got too scared,” she said, holding her youngest child close to her breast. “The Ethiopian planes came often, bombing our villages and water holes, and many died in their attacks. There are Cuban soldiers everywhere, trying to drive us from our land. It was time to run.”

  And so under the cover of darkness one night, leaving her soldier husband behind to continue the guerrilla war against Ethiopia, she gathered her children, wrapped all her belongings in a blanket, draped the blanket on her camel’s back and headed for Somalia. Thirteen days later she crossed the border. The nomad had officially become a refugee.

  “It is very difficult for these people to adjust,” the commander of the Gialalassi camp, Colonel Abdullah Haji Ahmed, said. “Their whole way of life has changed and they may never be able to reclaim what is gone.

  “All their days they have lived free, unrestricted, moving with their herds to the good grass and water. Now they have no herds and no room to roam and we tell them they must dig latrines for sanitation. They don’t understand that.”

  All across Africa there are similar scenes at camps where people like Mrs. Husein live on charity and sufferance. They have fled from tyranny, revolution, tribal animosity, apartheid, poverty, war and drought, and their displacement has caused what the United Nations calls the greatest refugee problem the world has known since World War II.

  The African refugees—one of every 100 persons on the continent is a refugee—represent more than half the world’s nine million homeless people. They are larger in number than the combined populations of Benin, Burundi, Chad, Botswana, the Central African Republic, Djibouti, Gabon, Gambia, Liberia and Swaziland.

  In 1965, when 535,000 Africans were classified as refugees, the All-African Conference of Churches blamed the exodus largely on racial discrimination in white-ruled southern Africa. The conference issued a new report in 1979, noting that the majority of today’s refugees are black Africans victimized by black dictatorships.

  “Many Africans in positions of power—the power elite—are not genuinely interested in making their people aware of the basic human rights in society,” the report said. “Given the present situation with human rights on this continent, anyone in Africa can become a refugee.”

  In many cases the flight of refugees follows no logical pattern, reflecting the artificiality of Africa’s national boundaries. About 400,000 Angolans, for example, have fled to Zaire, and 200,000 Zairians have taken refuge in Angola. Thousands of Burundians have escaped to neighboring Rwanda, and thousands of Rwandans have moved into Burundi. In all, twenty-five of Africa’s fifty-one countries have sizable refugee populations. Among them are deposed presidents, former cabinet ministers and guerrilla leaders, wealthy businessmen and university professors and, by the millions, peasants and nomads, whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Tragically, Africa’s refugee problem is of more concern to the international community than it is to Africa itself. The same is true of food shortages, population growth and the misfortunes wrought by droughts and other natural disasters. It is, in fact, to most African presidents’ advantage to keep their countries in a constant state of emergency, because then they can parlay the crisis into a windfall of monetary assistance and can justify the repressive measures they use in the name of national survival. In one particularly bad harvest year, for instance, Kenya sold 80,000 tons of wheat to Zambia, then declared that it had been struck by an emergency shortage. Western donor agencies filled the quota, and everyone was happy. Kenya banked the proceeds of its sale to Zambia, received free wheat to make up the difference and didn’t have to go through the hassles of planning for the storage and distribution of its crops. A
nd the donor agencies once again had been able to explain their existence by ticking off statistics on how many people they had saved from starvation.

  President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania nicely summed up this crisis mentality, telling the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Poul Hartling: “I love the refugees. They cultivate the country for me. But I have no money. You bring in the money.”

  Of all the countries I visited in Africa, none remains etched more clearly in my memory than Ethiopia. A land rich in history and full of international intrigue, Ethiopia today is the fulcrum for the balance of power in the Horn of Africa, and it is here, as much as anywhere on the continent, that one learns just how fickle political alliances can be.

  The name Ethiopia is derived from the Greek words “to burn” and “face”—the land of people with burnt faces. Except for Egypt, Ethiopia is the oldest independent state in Africa. The fertile mile-high plateaus of the interior are surrounded by craggy mountains that shoot almost straight up from the desert floor below. These mountains formed a natural barrier that enabled the Ethiopians to repel outside penetration and, living in isolation, to develop their own culture over more than two thousand years. The mountains made Ethiopia so inaccessible that it was one of only two countries (the other being Liberia) in black Africa never colonized by Europe. And it is the only country where Christianity (Coptic) is indigenous and not imported by European missionaries.

  According to legend—and it is only legend—the first Ethiopian ruler, Menelik, was a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Many Ethiopians have European facial features, and the dominant ethnic group, the Amharas (from a Hebrew word meaning “mountain people”), look down on other black Africans as inferior. Long before the rest of East Africa had discovered the wheel, Ethiopians were recording their history in a written language, Amharic.