The Africans

by David Lamb

  Suddenly the planes veered and plunged, hurtling straight for the hotel. And in the split second it takes for disbelief to turn to horror, they were upon us, two silvery American-made F-5 fighters leading the attack, a poky old British Canberra Bomber bringing up the rear. Bombs thudded and cannon barked like firecrackers and people screamed, diving and tumbling and elbowing their way to the ground in a panic of confusion. I dove toward the old Chevrolet, my camera and cigarettes and sunglasses all headed in different directions. I clutched my notebook with both hands and squirmed to make myself as flat as possible. There were moans and cries all around me and I remember thinking that I had seen—which I’m sure I hadn’t—the face of one of the pilots, smiling as he flashed by fifty feet above. I had an absurd reaction, wanting to stand up and scream, “For God’s sake, don’t hit me! I’m an American!”

  Four times the planes passed over us, engines shrieking, guns rattling, the ground trembling. At the end of the first three passes they pulled straight up at the outskirts of town, circled high above Jijiga for what seemed like a tantalizing hour—but was actually only a few seconds—and dove again upon us like hawks seeking their prey. Then, after a fourth pass, they were gone, streaking back to the north.

  The first strafing run decapitated a Somali nurse named Sarah outside the ramshackle eighty-bed hospital. It also blew away a ten-year-old boy in a mud home across the street. The hospital’s only doctor was critically wounded by shrapnel as he rested in his bed, and outside one ward a civilian patient writhed on a stretcher, his stomach and head torn open. He moaned his final prayers to Allah, then his body quivered and relaxed. The man who had been comforting him removed the plasma tube from his arm and walked toward the toolshed that in times of crisis also served as a temporary morgue.

  In all, seven Somalis were killed; twenty or thirty were gravely wounded. The attack was apparently designed not to destroy Jijiga, but only to demoralize the people there. Indeed, seven deaths were not many for a people so inured to never-ending war. In the Ethiopian air attack a few days earlier, three had died; in the one before that, nine. And over ten centuries of warfare between the Somalis and Ethiopians, fought first with spears, then with multimillion-dollar war machines supplied by foreign allies, those small numbers had grown large, and the hating had become very deep.

  “We have lived with war for many years,” said a blacksmith, Mohammed Heeban. “For as long as I can remember, as long as my grandparents can remember, there has been war in the Ogaden. We are used to death. It is not a big price to pay if our people can get our land back from the Abyssinians.”

  Chances are good that Heeban’s children may not know much peace either. For one Saturday night that November, shortly after we left the Ogaden, American spy satellites detected an unexpected massive movement of Soviet aircraft heading for the Horn of Africa. The Russians had made their choice. Fifteen thousand Cuban troops and $1 billion worth of Soviet weapons were on the way to Ethiopia. Soon Soviet-advised Ethiopian troops, spearheaded by Soviet tanks and Cuban infantrymen, would sweep back into the Ogaden, recapturing Jijiga and the other desert towns lost during the Somali offensive. The Somali guerrillas would drift back into their mountain hideouts to restock arms and prepare for hit-and-run nighttime attacks, just as their forefathers had been launching for generations.

  The arms lift resulted in a stunning shift in the Horn of Africa’s military balance, international loyalties and political ideologies. President Siad Barré threw out the Russians—most of whom simply moved to Ethiopia—and never again uttered a favorable word about Marxism. He ordered the removal of all anti-American posters in Mogadishu, ended the surveillance of American diplomats and asked for assistance from Washington, which had reneged on its promise to give Somali “defensive” arms. The Americans returned with a diplomatic mission of sixty-nine persons and $86 million for military, developmental and refugee assistance. They moved into the residences and offices abandoned by the Russians and began negotiations to take over the former Soviet military base at Berbera. The Ethiopians meanwhile expelled the Americans, smeared Addis Ababa with grotesque caricatures of Uncle Sam, signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union and announced their intention to become black Africa’s first authentic Communist state. Washington’s closest African ally was now a Soviet satellite, and Moscow’s African stepchild was under the tutelage of the United States. Ethiopia and Somalia had put themselves on the open market and sold their allegiances to the highest bidder with the best deal. One day, no doubt, the arrangement will come unhinged and the loyalties will change again.

  The flip-flop in the Horn underscored once more that Africa’s fortunes rest in the hands of the Eastern and Western factions and that both blocs consider Africa important enough to make substantial military and economic investments in the continent. The Russians have been willing to fight to the last drop of Cuban blood, the Americans to counter Soviet expansionism with guns if not surrogate troops. Certainly Africa’s strategic location and potential wealth—as well as its inability to defend itself—make it vulnerable to outside manipulation that could lead to foreign confrontation.

  Although I have had few kind words about the Soviet role in Africa, each African country should, I think, be free to choose its own form of government. Marxism has been no more a disaster in Mozambique than capitalism has been in Ghana, but by its very nature, Marxism denies the Africans the economic advancement and individual dignity they seek to become a free people. To counter this, the West must continue to provide the financial assistance Africa needs to develop, even if much of that money is filtered off by corrupt presidents and ill-conceived projects. And, sadly, it probably will have to continue to provide the guns Africa needs to secure its borders even if some of those guns are used by despotic presidents to perpetuate their own rule. The alternative is to let Moscow take Africa piece by piece, exploiting the fragility of individual countries and choosing Communism for these people, who would not have chosen it for themselves.

  * About 11,000 Africans have scholarships to study in the Soviet Union—one of the few forms of aid Moscow offers without any strings attached. Most have encountered there stronger racism than what they saw at home during the colonial period, and over the years thousands have left Moscow before the completion of their studies, deeply disillusioned. If you want to make an African into a capitalist, the saying goes, send him to school in Moscow; if you want him to be a Communist, send him to Paris.

  * Between 1953 and 1981, sub-Sahara Africa received 6 percent of the economic assistance and 1 percent of the military assistance that the United States provided to foreign countries.

  * The most generous nations statistically are Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, each giving above 0.9 percent of its gross national product. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries provided $5.2 billion of aid in 1979, but many Third World recipients complained that the growth of OPEC’s aid has not been as steep as the climb in its oil revenues. The Soviet Union gave $1.4 billion in aid in 1979, the great bulk going to Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea. Collectively the Communist countries give only 0.04 percent of their combined gross national products to developmental aid.

  * Ethiopia was fighting two wars, one against secessionist guerrillas in Eritrea, its northern province, the other against Somali inhabitants of its western region known as the Ogaden. Morocco was fighting an Algeria-supported group called the Polisario for the phosphate-rich Western Sahara (formerly the Spanish Sahara). Spain had pulled out of the area in 1976 after ceding the northern two-thirds to Morocco and the southern third to Mauritania; South Africa was fighting SWAPO (South-West Africa People’s Organization) guerillas for Namibia (formerly South-West Africa), a one-time German protectorate that South Africa administered illegally under an outdated (1920) League of Nations mandate. Angola was fighting Jonas Savimbi’s guerrillas. Chad was battling Libyan-backed rebels. Zimbabwe, Uganda and Mozambique were combatting antigovernment insurgency movement
s.

  * Many etymologists believe the word “coffee” comes from the name Kaffa, a province in southwest Ethiopia that is reputedly the birthplace of coffee.

  * Eritrea was an Italian colony from the nineteenth century until 1941. A United Nations resolution in 1952 ended British administration, and Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia under an agreement that gave it considerable autonomy, including the right to elect its own parliament. In 1962 Haile Selassie abolished the federation unilaterally and absorbed Eritrea as Ethiopia’s fourteenth province. About 40,000 Arab-backed, Marxist-oriented Eritreans have been fighting for twenty years to regain their independence. The guerrillas are divided into three factions, which have battled one another when there are no Ethiopians in the area to fight.

  SEPARATE ROADS FOR TWO NEIGHBORS

  To those who speak of a Pan-African union, I ask, What are we supposed to share? Each other’s poverty?

  —PRESIDENT FÉLIX HOUPHOUËT-BOIGNY of the Ivory Coast

  For the first twenty years, we in Guinea have concentrated on developing the mentality of our people. Now we are ready to move on to other business.

  —PRESIDENT AHMED SÉKOU TOURÉ of Guinea

  THE IVORY COAST AND GUINEA in West Africa share many things, among them a common border. Both countries are former French colonies, both have had but one president, both have recognized the importance of agricultural development, both have enjoyed political stability, both are struggling to reach shared goals of economic growth, individual dignity and national self-reliance, and both were born as nations in the same era, the Ivory Coast in 1960, Guinea in 1958.

  Back in the dying days of colonialism, Guinea was the rich child of the French family and was, most agreed, destined to become the wealthiest nation in black Africa. It was Africa’s leading banana exporter, and its verdant farmlands fed much of French-speaking West Africa. Its earth held one-third the world’s known bauxite reserves, more than two billion tons of high-grade ore, and enough diamonds and gold to fill a dozen Fort Knoxes. Its three major rivers offered great potential for hydroelectric development, and its capital, Conakry, a tidy white-washed little town perched on Tumbo Island and surrounded by blue ocean, attracted thousands of French tourists. The beaches were lined with palms, the restaurants were staffed by chefs from Paris, and a deluxe room in the seaside Hotel de France cost no more than a bottle of inexpensive Chablis.

  The Ivory Coast had no such good fortune. Its heavy surf, treacherous harbors and lack of minerals discouraged the early European settlers who pushed on east and established their forts on the Gold Coast (now Ghana). The dense forests of the southwest were virtually impenetrable, and the dry red earth of the north yielded little except dust. At the end of World War II, the Ivory Coast had a one-crop economy, coffee, which accounted for two thirds of its exports, and a capital, Abidjan, with a small expatriate population and 20,000 African residents who lulled away the tropical days in their mud huts, seldom bothering to even catch a fish for dinner in the nearby lagoon. The Ivory Coast, everyone thought, was destined to join the line of international beggars.

  But the predictions were wrong. From the first day of independence, the Ivory Coast and Guinea set off on divergent roads, the former pursuing a capitalistic course heavily influenced by France, the latter a radical philosophy—“Marxism in African clothes,” President Sékou Touré called it—under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union. In each case just one man—the president—was responsible for deciding the path his country should take toward national self-reliance. Those decisions made more than twenty years ago have produced dramatically different results. They offer a fascinating insight into the role of ideology in the Third World and into the power of a single man to determine the fate of his nation for generations to come.

  President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast is an uncommon figure amid the tumult and violence of Africa, speaking with a soft, reasoned voice, forgiving those dedicated to his downfall (even those who have tried to kill him), telling his people, “We must go slowly, my children, for we are in a hurry.”

  A devout Catholic who never drinks or smokes, Houphouët-Boigny wears black homburg hats and three-piece suits and meets secretly with South African leaders, believing that dialogue solves more problems than diatribe. He has a great fondness for France—dividing his summers between an apartment in Paris and an estate in Switzerland—and he disdains the radical rhetoric that has become so characteristic of African politics. He welcomes Western journalists, issuing visas to all who apply, because, he says, the Ivory Coast has nothing to hide. Which, in fact, it doesn’t: not one execution has ever been carried out in the Ivory Coast since independence and the country doesn’t even hold a single political prisoner.

  Félix Houphouët-Boigny (the name Boigny means “the ram”) was born in 1905, the son of a wealthy Baoule chief. He made his way through the French colonial education system, studying medicine in Dakar, Senegal, and became a respected public health official and prosperous planter before entering politics in 1944. That year he created the Ivory Coast’s first agricultural union, which later became the forum for planters demanding minimum prices for coffee and cocoa crops, denied them by the colonial regime’s discriminatory laws.

  At the end of World War II he went to France for the first time, as the Ivory Coast’s representative in the Parlement. Within a few years he had become a minister in the government of Prime Minister Guy Mollet, the first African colonial to hold a cabinet post in a European government. As late as 1959, the year before independence, he was still declaring that the Ivory Coast was not ready for nationhood. “Perhaps my grandchildren …” he said.

  But he returned home and immediately ensured his popularity by abolishing the single most hated feature of colonial rule, a labor law that allowed the French planters to conscript workers from any village in the country. He may have been in France all those years (1946 to 1958), but his heart remained in Africa; although his debts to France were great, he probably never made a presidential decision—including the expulsion of the Russian embassy from Abidjan in 1969—that was designed to please the French rather than to benefit the Ivorians.

  Houphouët-Boigny competed successfully with the French on their own terms. He mastered their colonial system and he learned how to use the European. Despite what his critics say, he didn’t sell out to France; he simply used France’s resources—money and people—for his country’s betterment and he did it at a relatively small cost to the Ivorians.

  It is a mark of Houphouët-Boigny’s confidence that he does not surround himself with the symbolic trappings favored by other African presidents. He doesn’t wear a leopard-skin cap or carry a fly whisk or wave a white handkerchief. He doesn’t display his Africanism on his sleeve because, in competing with the French and succeeding, he has no hangups about the Europeans or the Africans. He knows precisely who he is.

  Houphouët-Boigny is a short, stocky man in his mid-seventies, respectfully called Le Vieux (The Old Man) by his countrymen. If he appears out of step with mainstream Africa, as he often does, it raises some questions about what beat Africa is marching to. For Houphouët-Boigny has presided over a country that has enjoyed the fastest, steadiest growth of any non-oil producer in sub-Sahara Africa (except South Africa). The African backwater has become the African miracle, and passengers landing at Abidjan’s gleaming, air-conditioned international airport often shake their heads, thinking they must be debarking on the wrong continent. As the saying goes, Abidjan is very nice and very convenient to Africa.

  From its modest beginnings it has grown into black Africa’s most luxurious metropolis, as clean and orderly as it is modern. Pastel-shaded office buildings soar twenty stories high, superhighways carry trucks laden with export produce to the port, the elegant shops and bustling markets are awash with goods, the restaurants are perhaps the best in all Africa. Abidjan even has its own Club Mediterranée and its own artificial-ice skating rink (the only other one is in South Africa) and a boomin
g tourist industry that pumps many million francs into the economy each year.

  Of course, skating rinks and $80-a-day hotel rooms may be fine for the visiting Westerner, but they don’t mean much to the underpaid resident Ivorian. Indeed, the skeptics are quick to scoff at the Ivory Coast, saying its rapid growth is superficial, that its prosperity is dependent on the continued presence of French nationals, that development dollars have been concentrated in the cities, not the countryside. Their suspicions were heightened in 1982 when, for the first time since independence, the country experienced zero industrial growth. Just as alarming, the foreign debt was growing and students were openly questioning whether democracy was possible in a one-party political system. But the Ivory Coast had still moved lightyears ahead of its neighbors. Even in the villages, a traveler sees telecommunications lines and paved roads and running water and tin roofs for the one-room huts. They are the milestones by which progress in rural Africa is judged.

  Largely because the Ivory Coast has avoided political adventurism and shunned hefty expenditures on defense and wasteful projects, the country has been able to devote 20 percent of its budget to education, and school attendance has risen from 22 percent to 55 percent since independence; literacy is a remarkably high 60 percent, more than twice the continental average.

  The country’s gross national product—the sum of all goods and services produced—has tripled since 1965. Palm-oil production has increased sevenfold, making the Ivory Coast the world’s largest producer. Per capita income has jumped from $70 to $1,000, the highest of any non-oil producer in Africa (except for South Africa and the Seychelles), making the country so well off that it is not even eligible for United States’ developmental assistance.