by David Lamb
Sure enough, President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire had flown off to Europe with the airline’s only Boeing 747. His wife had taken the DC-10. No matter that Air Zaire flights QC 011 and QC 073 failed to show up those days for scheduled stops in Nairobi, Brussels, Paris and Bujumbura. (Not long afterward, the country went broke, and the planes were repossessed.)
Even if a plane does show up, that’s no guarantee it will stop. Three diplomats I knew were waiting in Bujumbura, Burundi, one day for a long-overdue Air Zaire flight; finally they saw it approaching in the distance and let out a cheer. But the jet was at 37,000 feet and there it stayed, zooming by right overhead. What my friends didn’t know was that airlines ignore scheduled stops in Bujumbura if there are fewer than four passengers to be picked up.
Things don’t happen in Africa the way they do in the United States or Western Europe, and if you expect otherwise, nervous indigestion may be your only reward. What may seem impolite or crude to a Westerner is not intended to be that way at all by an African. What may seem inefficient actually may prove to be very direct and practical. Again, the African takes care of A but doesn’t worry about the ramifications of B.
I remember seeing seventy-five American tourists check into the Kilimanjaro Hotel in Dar es Salaam to start a one-week safari through Tanzania. The next day the government needed rooms to host a conference on apartheid in South Africa. While the Americans were out exploring the slovenly capital, their bags, clothes and personal belongings were collected from each room and tossed into a huge pile in the corner of the lobby. They returned to the hotel to discover that they had been checked out.
“You can’t do that!” stormed one American, his face red with anger.
“You don’t understand,” the receptionist replied, very calmly and rationally. “We need the rooms. All the other hotels are full in Dar, so if we don’t take your rooms, where is the delegation going to stay?”
EAWA (East Africa Wins Again). The tourists cut their Tanzanian trip short and caught a flight to the Seychelles.
There is, though, one unsettling aspect to the casualness of the African system: it is often controlled by men who have guns but not the training to use them sensibly. Confronted with the unexpected, they react unpredictably. Their authority far exceeds their ability to exercise their power wisely or even humanely.
During the final days of Idi Amin’s rule in Uganda, Dave Wood of Time magazine and Bob Caputo, a free-lance photographer, drove with me in a rented car from Nairobi to the Kenya-Uganda border. We hoped to pick up some color for our stories, interview a few refugees coming out of Uganda, perhaps find a Kenyan authority knowledgeable on events in Uganda. No Western journalist had been allowed into Uganda for months at that time, and we remembered the four European journalists who had recently been murdered after crossing Lake Victoria in a boat.
We reached the Kenyan border town of Malaba shortly before lunch. Refugees were streaming out of Uganda, old men and women in tattered rags carrying their few possessions, and on the Kenyan side, scores of trailer trucks were parked bumper to bumper, their drivers unwilling to enter the area a few miles ahead where pro- and anti-Amin forces were battling.
A small cement bridge spanning a dry riverbed marks the actual border. A hundred yards farther on is a guard shack and police station that serves as the Ugandan regional immigration post. We parked our car and crossed the bridge on foot, thinking the Ugandan dozing in the shack would merely tell us to go back to Kenya, which, after all, was only a thirty-second walk away. He awoke with a start, adjusting his reflector sun glasses and grabbing his rifle in one motion.
“Jambo,” I said, the Swahili greeting for “hello.” “We just wondered how things were going on the border. Any chance of getting a visa?”
The man stared back wordlessly.
“Well, glad to see everything’s quiet,” Wood said, getting a bit uneasy. “We might just as well get back to Kenya. Sorry for the bother.”
The man kept staring at us, his face a mask that showed neither recognition of our presence nor awareness of our words.
“Shall we run or walk?” Caputo said under his breath.
The man motioned us with the barrel of his rifle in the direction of the police station. The groans of a man being beaten inside reached our ears. I swallowed hard and terrible visions filled my mind.
We were led into an interrogation room by a member of Amin’s State Research Bureau (a euphemism for the national murder squad); there was dried blood on the unpainted cement floor and a single lamp bulb was hanging by a cord from the ceiling. Beneath the light cord was an empty desk, and the man who sat there, dressed in shabby fatigues and muddy boots, stared at us impassively, his eyes invisible behind large sunglasses. He began his remarks by saying that mercenaries and CIA agents were not welcome in Uganda. We assured him that we understood this and said we were journalists. What was the difference? he asked.
There really were no answers for the questions he asked, and each jumbled response seemed to increase his suspicions. What did we mean, he asked, that we had rented a car? Couldn’t we afford to buy a car? If California was my home, how could I also live in Nairobi? If I was a journalist, why didn’t I have a typewriter with me? If we wanted to know something about Uganda, why didn’t we just call the ministry of information in Kampala? Had we ever been in the U.S. Army? Had we ever been in Israel? How about South Africa? The answer to all three of the last questions was yes. He led us into separate rooms and told us, “Write down everything you know about Uganda, where you learned it, who told you, and who you are.” He gave us each a pad of yellow scratch paper and a ball-point pen.
I filled a page. He read it with great difficulty, his lips mouthing each word, his pencil moving along each line. “That’s not long enough,” he finally said. “Write more.” So I filled another half page, mostly about what a lovely drive it had been from Nairobi. That satisfied him, and he took my pad with a grunt, disappearing down the corridor. I could hear him shouting over an apparently static-filled phone line to Jinja, the military command post a hundred miles west. He was asking for instructions on what to do with us and I could imagine the voice on the other end saying matter-of-factly, “Kill them.”
He returned a few minutes later. The icy glare had given way to a friendly smile. He had removed his sunglasses. He embraced us like old friends, shaking our hands and patting our backs. He had received his instructions, and his demeanor, before and now, was only a guise, a façade that gave not the slightest hint of his real emotions or feelings.
“You are free to go now,” he said, still pumping our hands. “I have been asked to tell you that your interest in Uganda is deeply appreciated and we hope you will return soon. You will always be welcome.”
We crossed back into Kenya, feeling like condemned prisoners who had won a reprieve. The young men on the bridge tried to sell us Ugandan shillings at a discount rate. The old women peddling tomatoes and turnips glanced at us with a faint trace of curiosity. We got into our car, knowing that the man back in the police station could have killed us just as casually as he had sent us on our way. He would simply have done whatever his boss had told him to do.
In many ways, the longer I stayed in Africa, the less I really understood the nuances of the African character, and any Westerner who says he feels differently is probably being less than honest. Before going to Africa, I had lived for four years in Asia and for two in Australia, and when I left those continents, I felt I had a grasp of who the people were, how they would react to certain situations, why they responded in particular ways, what they thought about the world around them. But the African often becomes a deepening mystery. It is rare that he will reveal his inner emotions or talk about his beliefs in more than superficial terms. As often as not, he will tell you what he thinks you want to hear rather than risk offending you with an opinionated view. He does not often defy authority and he will follow anyone who asserts himself as a leader, however inept, with an amazing alacrity. His
resilience extends beyond any logical human limits; his crops can fail, his children can die, his government can treat him grievously and the African still carries on, uttering no protest, sharing no complaints.
For a people who have had to tolerate so many injustices over the centuries, yet have remained basically gentle, polite and racially equitable, I was constantly shocked to see the cruelty, even sadism, that Africans inflict on one another so willingly. In Zaire, mobs will pull the driver from a car that has struck a pedestrian and beat him to death on the spot. The U.S. embassy there has this advice if any of its personnel are involved in an accident: Drive off fast and don’t stop until you get to a police station. In Kenya the victim of, say, a purse-snatch has only to holler “Thief!” Every bystander will take off after the culprit, and in a carnival-like atmosphere, punch and kick him to death. In a single week a few summers ago, nine Kenyans who had been stealing from merchants in the Nairobi markets were stoned and kicked to death in various incidents.
One day after our house had been burglarized, my wife, Sandy, went to the neighborhood police station to file a report. A middle-aged Kenyan, shoddily dressed and wearing only one shoe, was stretched out semiconscious behind the sergeant’s desk. Sandy started writing out a list of our stolen items, but the sergeant seemed preoccupied. “I wish this guy was dead so I didn’t have to fill out the form,” he said to no one in particular. “Yeah, he ought be dead,” said one of the sergeant’s subordinates. For the next twenty minutes, every time a policeman walked by the prostrate man, the officer kicked him in the head or groin. It was done casually, without comment, as offhandedly as getting a drink at the water cooler.
The sergeant apparently felt he owed Sandy an explanation. He pulled a rumpled pack of imported Benson & Hedges cigarettes (available for $2 a pack anywhere in Nairobi) from the man’s pocket. “See,” the sergeant said, “he’s a thief. Otherwise he couldn’t afford these.”
I’ll never find such behavior easy to explain, whether it happens in America or Africa. But in trying to understand the African character, you have to start with an awareness of how debilitating everything in Africa is. The heat, the diseases, the shortage of jobs and the absence of free expression all drain the energies, making the African—even those who are Christian—a fatalist, intent on his own survival but caring little for those who are less fortunate. Some people told me that the Africans’ violent reaction to thievery reflected the heritage of the village, an open society where property rights are respected, stealing is considered a violation of the group’s welfare, and instant justice is meted out. That was, though, a weak argument. The fatal beating of thieves was, I thought, indicative of only one thing in the life of urban Africa: boredom.
If the African is often inexplicable to the American or European, so must the outsider be to the African. Indeed, many of the whites who have made Africa their home are a peculiar lot, and some could not survive in a society where life was more rigid and regulated. They live in a small, self-centered world, often immune from change, isolated from much human contact, pursuing whatever it is—perhaps gorillas or ancient bones—that brought them to Africa in the first place. My first introduction to this community was as full of culture shock as anything I ever encountered in any African home.
At a little Tanzanian village called Makuyuni, the paved road turns to dirt and for the next hundred miles it twists and tumbles through the vast plains in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, finally ending as a narrow track, rough and rutted, at the home of Mary Leakey.
Mrs. Leakey, now nearing seventy, appeared at her door, cigar in hand. A gusting wind raced through her compound, kicking up thick layers of fine, red dirt and churning into groaning motion the two windmills out back which were used to generate electricity. She shielded her eyes from the blowing dust to watch our car approach her home—so far from anywhere but the fossils of the past.
The home, located in the splendid isolation she cherishes dearly and protects fiercely, rests on a small hilltop overlooking the Serengeti Plains. A few miles away is the fabled extinct volcano, Ngorongoro, and below, almost at her doorstep, is Olduvai Gorge, the anthropological treasure chest that has yielded to the Leakeys and other scientists so many secrets about early man.
Mrs. Leakey eyed Sandy and me wordlessly. She does not like intruders, and although she had approved our visit and we had brought her a box full of groceries, a bottle of whiskey and two flagons of wine, there was no greeting and no smile. “It’s not usually blowing this much,” she said simply. Then Mrs. Leakey, widow of Dr. Louis Leakey and herself a gifted anthropologist, disappeared behind the closed door of her den to get back to work. There she works for months on end, disregarding weekends and holidays, immersed in her solitary world.
Unlike her husband, who relished the public attention earned by his warm personality and professional achievements, Mrs. Leakey, a feisty, independent woman, is reticent beyond the point of coldness. She makes no attempt to hide her displeasure with any interference in her work at Olduvai and she bristles at what she considers the ignorance and impertinence of journalists, tourists and other strangers who occasionally pass her way. “If I could just go back to my maiden name, Mary Nicol,” she said in one of her more expansive moments, “I could get a lot more work done. Living with this so-called Leakey legend becomes quite a tiring burden. I don’t see why everyone always wants to talk about it.”
But the remarkable Leakeys have built a legend that will live on. Louis (who died in 1972 at the age of sixty-nine) and Mary Leakey showed that the evolution of man probably took place in East Africa, and the 1.75-million-year-old primate skull—known as Zinjanthropus—that she found in Olduvai Gorge in 1959 pushed back by nearly one million years the accepted date of man’s evolution. It took her eighteen months to piece together the skull’s five hundred pieces of bone fragment in what many scientists called some of the most detailed anthropological work ever done. Of their three sons, Jonathan operates a snake farm in Kenya and has made his own important anthropological discoveries in East Africa; Richard, a civil servant of the Kenyan government, is director of national museums; Philip is the only white man in the Kenyan parliament.
Mrs. Leakey avoided us all afternoon, and by dinnertime I was getting nonplused. I went out to our car to get a pack of cigarettes, accidentally locked my keys inside, and had to break the window with a rock to retrieve them. I had visions of making the rough twelve-hour drive back to Nairobi the next day, calling my editor in Los Angeles, and saying, “No story. She wouldn’t talk.”
Mrs. Leakey’s home was a low, rambling structure, made of wood and tin, and built piecemeal over the years. The open-air living room was an extension of the patio, and Sandy and I sat there, waiting. The wind still blew outside and no one else was about except the servants. Finally, from the evening shadows beyond the patio, Mrs. Leakey appeared, a glass of whiskey in one hand and a thin cigar in the other. She settled into an old stuffed chair and asked, “Now, what is it you want to know?” Each question was met with a penetrating eye and a terse phrase, followed by stony silence.
Well, I asked, was each of the Leakeys’ children encouraged to follow his own path as a youth, independent of his parents’ fame? “I don’t know what you mean,” she replied. “We were just a normal family.” (Just like any other family, I guess, growing up in Olduvai Gorge, a hundred miles from the nearest Europeans and fifty from the closest town.)
Was there anything she could add to the story about the hippopotami that used to bathe and urinate in the Leakeys’ only water source at Olduvai, thus polluting the precious supply of drinking water? “I don’t know where you got that,” she said. “There hasn’t been a hippopotamus around here for four hundred thousand years.” She was right: I had meant to say “rhinoceros.”
How did she feel about the changes she had seen during her forty-one years in East Africa as the region moved from colonialism to independence? “You can’t see changes until after they happen,” she said.
And what were the small rewards that carry an anthropologist through the long periods of often fruitless searching? “That’s a stupid question,” she said. “I just do a job that I enjoy.”
The steak was good at dinner that evening but the conversation was tough, and Mrs. Leakey soon excused herself, saying perhaps we could talk some more in the morning. But she was up and off before dawn, in pursuit of her two dogs, which had run away during the night, driving across the plains in a Land-Rover, a solitary figure disappearing over the horizon, swallowed up by the African experience.
I had come to Olduvai Gorge expecting to find a sort of heroine and that was the profile I had had in mind to write. Mrs. Leakey had shattered the stereotype—and actually given me a much more interesting angle. “Why don’t you just forget all the things you thought she was,” Sandy suggested, “and write an article about what all this time alone out here has done to her.” It was good advice; the Times later put my “noninterview” on page one.
• • •
Most people are surprised to learn that, if you exclude Angola and Mozambique, there are more whites living in black-ruled Africa today than there were during the colonial era. In all they number more than half a million, including 20,000 Americans. (Additionally, there are 4.5 million whites in South Africa.) The largest white populations are in Zimbabwe (135,000), Kenya (75,000) and the Ivory Coast (50,000). Some, like Mary Leakey, have lived in Africa for years, and many, I hasten to add, are warm, kind people with whom it is a pleasure to spend an evening. But the majority of white expatriates in Africa today are short-timers who work for Western companies, offering technical or managerial skills in which Africans are not yet trained. They are airline pilots, hotel managers, agricultural experts, oil executives, ministerial advisers, architects, doctors, financiers, and they stay three or four years and move on to other assignments.
