by David Lamb
Their continued presence is a reminder of how little the colonialists did to prepare Africa for independence. For the most part, Africa has been an accommodating host, although every now and then the size and influence of the expatriate community does become an issue. The complaints voiced against the whites in Africa today fall into four broad areas: the expatriates take jobs that Africans should fill; they try to sabotage the economy to maintain their jobs and perpetuate the myth that Africans are incapable of governing themselves; they live as a privileged class; they are, in some cases, second-rate professionals in their own countries who manage to pass themselves off as “experts” in Africa.
“In the last twenty years,” Kenya’s vice president Mwai Kibaki said, making a valid point, “Africa and Asia have been invaded with all kinds of social misfits from overseas whose theories and phony products have been rejected in their own countries.
“There are some who propagate theories for the salvation of developing nations. Those we do not need. We need the ones who can accommodate our ideas into a practical approach compatible with our needs, without inviting more foreigners.”
Certainly no one would deny that in terms of creature comforts the expatriate lives as well today in countries such as Kenya as he did during colonial times. He has a large home with an acre of gardened grounds and he belongs to the local sports club, where tennis courts cost $1.25 an hour and thirty-year-old ball “boys” get ten cents a set; he does most of his socializing with other expatriates, not Africans; he reads the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris, and listens to the BBC on his shortwave radio to keep up with world events; and he finds, at least in places like Nairobi and Abidjan, that life doesn’t seem to have changed greatly over the years.
There is a British professional theater, Donavan Maule, in Nairobi where an African is seldom seen. There are restaurants such as Bobbie’s Bistro, where the only black faces at dinner are usually those of the waiters. There is Sunday horse racing at Ngong, as pretty as an English country track, where European women in white gloves and wide-brimmed hats place bets with Asian bookmakers. And there is the Muthaiga Club, its library stocked with British newspapers, its men-only bar populated by members who spend many hours musing about how conditions have deteriorated since independence. The high-ceilinged restaurant serves, in the best English tradition, overcooked roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Coffee is taken in the lounge, where middle-aged and elderly Europeans cling to a vanishing life style, remembering the old days and, for the time being at least, still living them.
One evening an aging Englishman sat dozing in one of the lounge’s overstuffed armchairs. The Times of London was on his lap and his right hand was wrapped around an empty brandy snifter. A fly buzzed around his nose and he suddenly awoke with a start. “Steward!” he bellowed. A white-jacketed Kenyan hurried over obediently, just as he would have forty years ago, to pour him another brandy.
If Kenya is still one of the last Third World enclaves of the good life, most of Africa offers the expatriate considerably more frustrations. Life is expensive, conveniences few; the shelves of supermarkets are bare, gasoline is rationed; the simplest task becomes an exercise in perseverance.
In Lagos, Nigeria, a three-bedroom house similar to a tract home in the United States leases for $50,000 a year, three years’ rent in advance. In Tanzania, items like cheese and butter are as rare as caviar. In Zambia the phones don’t work when it rains, and a resident calling the telephone company to inquire if something can be done is told simply: “Wait till the rain stops.”
The last time I visited Bob Heisey, an American who was in his fifth year with a U.S. engineering firm in Zaire, he was pushing fifty and tiring fast of the expatriate life. He was trying to save enough of his salary to buy a boat—$1,000 a foot, he figured it would cost—and sail away with his wife, Kathy, into the South Pacific sunsets. There were times, though, when he was ready to forget his dream.
The rent on his little three-bedroom house had just been jacked up to $1,100 a month. There was no telephone and sometimes no water. Three of his good friends had been arrested the previous weekend by Zairian soldiers for taking pictures of the beach. His own camera had been stolen the week before that. The cook hadn’t shown up for eight days and the gardener wanted another loan. The temperature peaked at a steady 100 degrees each day and stayed there throughout much of the night. The air conditioner was broken and there were no spare parts in Zaire to repair it. The same with his car.
He decided to forget his misfortunes one evening and take Kathy out to dinner. The bill was $150. The wine was extra. Driving home that night, the Heiseys were stopped at a roadblock and the police shook them down for a few more dollars.
“This isn’t living,” Bob said to Kathy. “I don’t know what you’d call it. Surviving, I guess. But it isn’t living.”
When we twice returned to the United States on brief vacations, friends would ask, “But what is Africa really like?” The best answer was: “Different.” The poverty is enormous and yet only by Western standards would you call the rural African poor. He has all the things needed to sustain him—food, clothing, a modest shelter, family love. Health conditions are appalling, but most Africans have access to better medical facilities than they did thirty years ago. The phones that don’t work and the clocks that are ignored may ruffle an American visitor but they don’t affect the African’s life much at all. The Westerner may have trouble adapting to Third World culture shock; the African obviously has none at all. He designed the system and he knows how it works, how to live within its limitations.
Once I spent two fruitless nights at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Zaire trying to call my Los Angeles office to dictate a story. Over and over I called the switchboard and each time the operator explained that the lines were very, very busy on the international exchange. But he had a friend in the hotel who had a friend at the exchange and maybe, he explained, he could be of assistance. “Do you know the system?” he asked. No, I said, and kept waiting for a call that never came through.
A colleague set me straight the next day. “Dummy,” he said, “just tell the operator you want to make the call ‘on the system.’ You’ll be through in five minutes.”
Sure enough, that evening I had an immediate connection to Los Angeles. The operator knocked at my door a few minutes after I hung up and I paid him $100. No transaction of the call appeared on my hotel bill or in the Zaire-owned telephone company records. The government had been cheated, the hotel had been cheated, but my call had gone through. The system—as it always does in the long run—had won out.
* In the Swahili language of East Africa, time is measured by the sun. Each day begins at one o’clock (late dawn), which on a Westerner’s watch is seven o’clock. This six-hour difference continues throughout the day and night, and explains why a taxi I once told to pick me up at noon showed up at six in the evening. Most educated urban Africans, however, use Western time, not Swahili time.
SOME OF THE NEWS THAT IS FIT TO PRINT
Truth is whatever promotes your government. If something is not favorable to your country, then it isn’t true and you should not publish falsehoods.
—A Somali official, giving his view of the media’s role in Africa
EVERY TUESDAY MORNING for a good many months I used to drive over to the Ethiopian embassy in Nairobi to ask, beg and cajole for a visa. The consular officer, a courteous, noncommittal man, would receive me warmly. We drank tea together in his office, talked about African politics in vague terms and eventually got around to my request. Ah, the visa, he would say. No problem. The government in Addis Ababa was working on it. If I would just be patient a little longer.
Ethiopia was an important story in those days. The junta that overthrew Haile Selassie was doing its flip-flop with Moscow and Washington, and dozens of Western journalists were clamoring for visas in order to get a first-hand look at the revolution. Finally, at six o’clock one evening, I received a call from my con
tact at the embassy. I could pick up my visa the next morning, he said. I was delighted, thinking my persistence had helped me outsmart my colleagues and would lead to an exclusive trip to Ethiopia. No such luck. Eighty-seven other Western journalists had also received visas, and two days later, a mini-brigade of reporters from Nairobi, London, Paris and New York descended on Addis Ababa with typewriters and cameras. By any standard, it was an unusual visit, a public relations debacle for Ethiopia, which made us prisoner of something called “The Program” and tried to deal with us much as it would with its own dissidents.
The Program is a news-management device used by many African countries. It is a rigid itinerary of people and places to see, designed for a particular visit of journalists and intended to show them only what the government wants them to see. If a journalist tries to deviate from it, such as by talking to a cab driver without authorization, he is told, “You can’t do that; it is not on The Program.”
From the airport of Addis Ababa we were whisked into the faded old Ghion Hotel and given our instructions by an army major with a revolver in his shoulder holster: we could not leave the hotel without permission, or hire taxis, or go anywhere without an escort, or miss any events on The Program, or eat our meals in other than the hotel restaurant at the appointed hour.
Unfortunately for Ethiopia, Western journalists in a pack are a fairly obstinate, aggressive bunch, so within a day we were sneaking past the corridor guards, slipping away from the dinner table under the guise of going to the bathroom, and making independent contacts in Addis Ababa. Each night gunfire crackled outside the hotel, and in the morning the bodies of five or six “counter revolutionaries” would be stretched out on the sidewalk, left there to rot in the sun until collected by next of kin. No photographs, our escorts said—but the photographers snapped away, anyway.
“I don’t understand why you people are so difficult,” growled one of the soldiers from the information ministry. “Our journalists do what we tell them. Why don’t you?”
One day after we returned from the Ogaden battlefront, where Ethiopian and Cuban troops were repelling the Somali invasion, several local reporters sought us out for interviews, trying to solicit pro-Ethiopian quotes about the war and the revolution. The unmistakable conclusion was that the readers of the Ethiopian Herald would put more faith in what we said—even though African officialdom considers Western coverage of Africa stilted—than they would in what their own government-paid Ethiopian journalists wrote. The readers’ mistrust of their hometown media was hardly surprising, for in Ethiopia, and in almost every other country in Africa, the prime role of the media is to serve the government, not to inform the people. The press is a propaganda vehicle, used to manipulate and organize and control; any questioning voice is a potential threat and only the government is wise enough to know what the people need to know. Here’s how an official communiqué from the Republic of Somalia defines the role of the press: “It is the function of the nation’s mass communications media to weld the entire community into a single entity, a people of the same mind and possessed of the same determination to safeguard the national interests.”
With only a few exceptions, black Africa’s newspapers are government-owned. They are edited and written by civil servants, not independent reporters, and their contents are as unbiased as something a U.S. political party might publish during an election campaign. They contain all of the good news and none of the bad, concentrating on windy speeches made by officials and sometimes printing four or five pictures of the president in a single edition. Readers of the Ethiopian Herald, for example, learned nothing about the Ogaden war when the Somali advance was unchecked; the Herald simply carried no stories about the war. It was not until Ethiopia took the offensive that the daily paper started covering the conflict, but even then, it made no mention of the Cuban and Russian role, a role that was capturing page-one headlines in the United States and Europe.
Government-controlled media are, of course, more the rule than the exception in the Third World. What is noteworthy, though, is that black Africa inherited a competitive, untethered press at independence and managed to destroy it so effectively that no one asks anymore what the future of the press is in Africa. They ask instead if it has any future at all. Except in Nigeria—where the black press dates back to a paper called Iwe Irohnin, first printed in 1859—the early newspapers on the continent were published by colonialists for colonialists. They bequeathed to Africa’s young nations an independent press pledged to serving the people and a constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression. But in country after country, the free press was the first of the Western-styled institutions to fall. It was the tool the governments most needed to manipulate the minds of the uneducated masses. News was censored and managed to the point that what got into print was little more than government press releases. Before long there was not a single independent radio station left in all of black Africa. Nigeria’s first government needed only one year to forget its proud journalistic history and its independence promises in favor of a more secure course that stifled critical comment. In 1961 the High Court of Lagos found journalist Chike Obi, the “Thomas Paine of Nigeria,” guilty of sedition as a result of a pamphlet he had published entitled “The People: Facts That You Must Know.” The seditious section read:
Down with the enemies of the people, the exploiters of the weak and oppressors of the poor!… The days of those who have enriched themselves at the expense of the poor are numbered. The common man in Nigeria can today no longer be fooled by sweet talk at election time only to be exploited and treated like dirt after the booty of office has been shared.
The story across the whole continent is not much different. President Hastings Banda of Malawi jailed virtually the whole nongovernmental press corps in the mid-seventies. President Kenneth Kaunda appoints and fires newspaper editors in Zambia; in Uganda and Zaire, journalists shuttle in and out of jail so regularly that their wives don’t even ask where they have been when they reappear after an absence of several days. Equatorial Guinea’s president Macias Nguema Biyogo went one step further: by the time he was overthrown and killed in 1979, all journalists of note had been executed or were in exile.
South Africa is more subtle, and first-time visitors there are often astonished to pick up English-language newspapers and find editorials critical of the government. Indeed, the country’s forty-three daily and weekly newspapers do produce some first-class examples of adversary and investigative journalism. But reporters know precisely how far they can go. South Africa has fifty laws that directly affect the dissemination of information, and another fifty statutes or administrative regulations that indirectly restrict the public’s right to know. If a reporter, for instance, wanted to confirm the arrest of a black nationalist, his inquiry would have to include the address and birth date of the person believed jailed. This information is often impossible to provide because the births of many blacks are not registered and not remembered by the family. Thus the authorities have no obligation to say whom they are holding.
Predictably, the role of newspapers in Africa today has declined so much that they have very little significance in society. And not much circulation either. In the mid-sixties, according to the London-based International Press Institute (IPI), there were 299 daily newspapers in Africa. That figure included about forty papers in the Arab states, mostly Egypt, and about thirty in the white-ruled areas of southern Africa. By the early 1980s, only about 150 dailies were left on the continent, and the shrinkage had occurred almost exclusively in black Africa. Nine countries had no newspaper at all.
The combined daily circulation of the papers in Africa fell during that period from well over three million to two million. Thus, the circulation on a continent of 455 million people is only about two thirds of what a single London newspaper, the Daily Mirror, sells in a day.
“When you look at the struggle of the press in Africa,” said IPI’s Frank Barton, “the sad truth is that the press is losing. I ca
n’t be optimistic about the press’s future in Africa. Everything else on the continent has expanded in the last ten years—roads, education, medical facilities—and newspapers continue to shrink. I’d suspect in another ten years that we may not see more than about fifty dailies in Africa.”
Government constraints are not the sole reason for the decline of the African newspaper. Among the others: an illiteracy rate that runs as high as 90 percent in some countries; the emergence of radio as the most powerful communications medium in Africa; the high cost of importing newsprint from Europe; and the absence of daily or weekly newspapers in the rural areas, where the majority of people live. All of this has made newspapers an amenity of the city elite.
If the printed word belongs to the educated few in Africa, the radio belongs to all. It is the voice of authority, though not necessarily truth, and when it speaks, Africa listens. Its importance as a government medium is probably greater than that on any other continent, forming as it does the most direct link between the rulers and the ruled. In 1955 there were half a million radios in Africa; now there are more than twenty-five million. For every 20 people there is one radio, compared to one edition of a daily newspaper for every 210 people and one television set for every 525.
In the Central African Republic, the government uses radio announcements to summon foreign diplomats to the presidential palace. In Nigeria, the government broadcasts to its people in seventeen ethnic languages. In rural Kenya, schoolchildren take “creative writing” courses over static-filled radios set up in small dark classrooms. In Mozambique, the government used to beam its propaganda into white-ruled Rhodesia for an hour a day on 998 kilohertz, and Rhodesia, then in the throes of civil war, used to throw its own right back into Mozambique on 1007 kilohertz. And in most countries, the government radio station is as heavily guarded as the national treasury; get the station and you can take control of the country and the people as well.
