The Africans

by David Lamb

  Nigeria went to the polls in 1979—a rare event in itself in Africa—and elected as its president Alhaji Shehu Shagari, a wealthy businessman and former headmaster of a primary school. He is a northern Moslem, one of the Hausa-Fulani people, and in accordance with a constitutional requirement that the vice president be from a different tribe, he picked an Ibo as his running mate. With a capitalistic economy and a foreign policy favoring the West, Shargari built a solid foundation for democracy. He was reelected in 1983 by more than four million votes in an election carried off as smoothly as anyone had dared hope. It was a mark of how far Nigeria had progressed that in the 1983 election, there were more polling places in the country (166,000) than there were soldiers in the army (138,000).

  Many formidable challenges lie ahead for Nigeria. Will the soldiers stay in the barracks if the civilians falter? Can oil really be put to work to benefit the majority instead of a chosen few? Will tribalism again surface as the most powerful force? Can corruption and greed be contained and national energies channeled toward common goals? These may remain unanswered questions for years to come, but the most encouraging sign, I think, that the Nigerian experiment will succeed is the presence of a growing middle and upper class. It is the largest, most substantial one in black Africa, and it is certainly worth remembering that it was the birth of an English middle class in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that enabled Britain to become stable and powerful. If Nigeria can hold together the pieces of nationhood, its return to civilian government is perhaps the single most significant event to have happened in postcolonial Africa. If Nigeria can succeed, other struggling black African nations will surely try to follow.

  * Only four African countries—Tanzania, Gabon, the Ivory Coast and Zambia—recognized the Ibos’ independence. The others believed that to violate the borders inherited at independence and to legitimize any secessionist movement would set a dangerous precedent.

  * Ojukwu set up a trucking business in the Ivory Coast and became a millionaire. The Nigerian government refused to allow him to return home to contest the national elections of 1979, as he said he wanted to do. The government finally lifted the travel restrictions in 1982 and granted Ojukwu a pardon. He returned to his homeland and proclaimed, “The Ibos first responsibility is to think of themselves as being Nigerians above all else.”

  * Tribalism remains such a sensitive issue that Nigeria—like seven other black African countries—has never taken a nationally accepted census since independence. A 1963 head count collapsed in confusion when it showed that the Moslem north, the early seat of national political power, held only a slim population lead over the Christian south. A 1973 census was thrown out when it reported that the north had nearly twice as many people as the south. (The accuracy and integrity of both counts were highly suspect.) Nigeria accordingly bases its population information on projections from a pre-independence census in 1960, which makes it all but impossible to establish realistic development plans. Estimates of Nigeria’s population vary from 80 million to 120 million.

  Postscript: Every update I have had to make since the first edition of The Africans appeared in print has been the result of unfortunate news, and Nigeria is no exception. On New Year’s Eve, 1983, Nigeria’s civilian government was overthrown in a bloodless coup d’état. Sharagi and scores of his officials were jailed for corruption. Nigeria’s exciting experiment with democracy was over and the soldiers were back in power. The general who led the coup, forty-one-year-old Mohammed Buhari, promised to end graft and straighten out the economy. It was a promise the Nigerians had heard made many times before.

  ALONE AGAINST THE WORLD

  All other African black nations govern themselves. We have been in Africa three hundred years and have the same right to govern ourselves as they. This right we cannot and will not forfeit.

  JOHN VORSTER,

  former South African prime minister

  Right from my days as a young military officer, I always felt that I would achieve a life ambition if I could fight for liberation in southern Africa.

  —LIEUTENANT GENERAL OLUSEGUN OBASANJO,

  former Nigerian head of state

  NOW WE COME TO THE PAYOFF, South Africa, the continent’s only developed, First World nation. Were it not for its institutionalized racism, South Africa is what every African country would aspire to become. Built with cheap black labor, white ingenuity and a seemingly endless supply of gold and diamonds, South Africa is advanced enough to have the capability to make an atomic bomb, powerful enough to withstand the condemnation of the entire world, prosperous enough to make any government in Europe, not to mention Africa, full of envy. The great irony of all this is that South Africa’s resources are no greater, its farmland no more fertile, its people no more inherently intelligent than those of other countries whose economic and social infrastructures have collapsed.

  But to understand South Africa, we need a new frame of reference. Little of what I have written thus far applies to South Africa, for everything about the place is different. Its economy is as solid as a cement foundation, its leadership united, its army disciplined and skilled. Even its physical characteristics often stand in contrast to the rest of equatorial Africa. There are little towns that seem to belong in England’s Cotswolds, beach resorts along the 2,700-mile coastline that remind you of the Riviera, and perhaps the world’s most magnificent city, Cape Town, overlooking the “Tavern of the Seas”—the confluence of the Indian and Atlantic oceans. The moderate climate, with warm sunny days and cool nights, provides excellent growing conditions for everything from grapes to grain. On Table Mountain in Cape Town there are more varieties of wild flowers than can be found in all the British Isles.

  If you asked an Afrikaner why his country had fared so much better than the rest of Africa, he would give you a simple explanation: South Africa is run by whites, the rest of sub-Sahara Africa by blacks. “Let a black man be trained as an airplane mechanic; let him overhaul a Boeing 747 from nose to tail and let [Prime Minister] P. W. Botha and his cabinet go for a ride in it,” says Jaap Marais, a conservative former member of parliament.

  Marais did not, of course, mention that black Africans pilot and provide maintenance for most national carriers on the continent (and I’ve never known one to crash with a load of government officials). But white South Africans look at the world—and their own country—with tainted glasses, and everything they have accomplished has been achieved at a terrible cost. The fact that what they have done to their black population is no worse than what some black governments have done to their own people is not a viable argument on the continent. To most Africans, the world’s ultimate crime is the racism of whites toward blacks. In its shadow the threats posed by poverty, disease, warfare or Communism all pale. There is only one place left in Africa where that racism is both overt and legal, and until it ends, however violent that ending may be, Africa can never be at peace with itself.

  Before we take a close look at this country, which is really the linchpin of the continent’s future, let me recite two telling statistics: (1) With 125,400 people in jail, South Africa has the highest per capita prison population in the Western world.* The government provides no racial breakdown, but diplomatic sources estimate that less than 3 percent are white. (2) Ninety-five percent of the Western world’s executions are carried out in South Africa. In 1980, the hangings totaled 130. Only one of the victims was white.

  Today it seems impossible to think of South Africa without remembering a haunting phrase from Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country. “I have one great fear in my heart,” says a black minister, “that one day when they [the whites] turn to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

  Every evening at five-twenty a South African Railways passenger train pulls out of Maputo, the Mozambican capital, bound for Johannesburg, 376 miles away. It is a journey between two universes, between two mutually dependent enemies separated by seventeen hours in travel and light-years in mentality.

>   All seven cars—like the toilets inside—are marked NONWHITES and in them are packed five or six hundred Mozambicans, men heading for the South African gold mines, women clutching chickens and vegetables to be sold at the markets along the way, everyone squeezed together like matchsticks, two and sometimes three people sharing the same seat. I checked my ticket again. Sure enough, it said “First Class.” The coal-black Mozambicans around me, the only non-African on the train, chuckled good-naturedly as I sucked in my breath and wiggled my buttocks, hoping to salvage an extra inch or two on the wooden seat. For three hours our train poked along, its whistle clearing cows and errant children from the tracks, moving ever so slowly through the sleepy, primitive villages between Maputo and Ressano García on the border.

  The town of Ressano García is all but invisible in the blackness of night. The train grinds to a halt there with squeals and hisses, and an amiable Mozambican soldier dressed in sandals and baggy old fatigues ambles onboard. While checking everyone’s ticket he borrows a few cigarettes from the passengers and waves his rifle around casually as though it were only a plaything. Then we all file into the dark, dingy terminal. The kiosk is dust-covered and closed, apparently abandoned long ago. The overhead light fixtures are without bulbs and hang from frayed electrical cords. In the far corner an immigration official, holding a flashlight over the top of his little wooden table, riffles through the passports of the people queued in front of him, stamping an exit visa in each. One by one the travelers saunter back onto the train for the final leg of the journey, which will carry them into the strange land of South Africa.

  Komatipoort, the South African border town, is only a few miles down the track, but its bright lights can be seen for quite a distance. The terminal is clean and freshly painted; the white-owned homes nearby have small tidy yards and windows ablaze with lights. The train stops briefly in Komatipoort so that a white crew can take over and two cars designated WHITE ONLY can be added. Now, I’m told, I will have my first-class seat. The black passengers file off the train again, standing this time silently and rigidly before an Afrikaner immigration officer in a crisply pressed uniform. They shuffle their feet uneasily. The white man eyes them wordlessly, as though seeing through them rather than looking at them. He examines each travel document with deliberate thoroughness. His rubber stamp falls with a thud. Permission to enter South Africa granted.

  To cross that border is almost like landing on an alien planet, for no two countries in Africa represent greater extremes, ideologically and politically. Mozambique, a revolutionary Marxist state, which defeated the Portuguese colonials in a war of independence, is dedicated to the downfall of the white government in Pretoria; South Africa, a quasi-fascist state, which has borrowed philosophical elements from the Nazi doctrine, is committed to the supremacy of the white race. Understandably enough, black Africa is obsessed with the injustices of the racist giant at its southern doorstep, yet it needs South Africa economically, and its calls for boycotts and sanctions and wars amount to little more than idle threats it cannot back with action. When your grain silos are empty—and your enemy’s are full—you do not have much bargaining power.

  Indeed, black Africa depends on South Africa. Without it, national economies in the southern third of the continent would fall like dominoes. Because of its economic self-sufficiency and military strength, South Africa—governed by the continent’s only white tribe, the Afrikaner—has managed to do pretty much as it pleases to its black majority while remaining immune to mild pressures exerted by the international community. As long as black Africa remains economically weak it can do nothing to influence change within its southern neighbor, and South Africa will continue to stand out like a millionaire general in a room of penniless privates. It is one of only eleven countries in the world that feeds itself and has food left over to export. It is the only industrialized country on a continent otherwise populated exclusively by Third World nations. It is the world’s richest nation in terms of white-per-capita, non-petroleum wealth. And its military could take on any dozen black African armies in conventional warfare and still punch through to the northern Sahara in a month or so.

  The government can afford to spend nearly 20 percent of its budget, or $3 billion a year, on defense. Its armed forces are comprised of 86,000 regulars and 260,000 reservists—blacks and whites, though 90 percent of the officers are white and military facilities at the camps are segregated. The South African army is one of the most mobile and self-sufficient in the world, needing only one man in the rear to support one soldier on the front lines. (In Vietnam the United States has seven support troops in the rear for each combat soldier.)

  Only one black African nation, Malawi, has diplomatic relations with South Africa, and virtually none admits to doing business with South Africa. But what goes through back doors is another matter. Each year at least twenty African countries indirectly support apartheid by purchasing more than $1 billion worth of South African goods and services. Kenya buys South African maize, which it says comes from Mozambique. Zambia buys South African beef, which it says comes from Botswana. Gabon buys South African construction equipment, which it says comes from Europe. Zaire gets 50 percent of its food from South Africa; eighty percent of Zimbabwe’s trade goes through South Africa; Malawi built its new capital at Lilongwe with the help of a $12 million South African loan; Mozambique keeps its ports and railroads running with South African technicians and administrators; six neighboring countries supply 182,000 laborers for the South African mines; the Republic of Cape Verde gets 20 percent of its foreign earnings from landing fees and refueling charges at the South African–built airport on Ilha do Sal. (Denied landing rights at almost every other airport in Africa, South African Airways could not make its long-haul flights to New York and Europe unless its planes stopped at Ilha do Sal.)

  Make no mistake, though. South Africa is the enemy. Fewer than 4.5 million whites there hold 24 million blacks, colored and Indians* in a form of bondage unique to the modern world, and if there is one thing that unites black Africa, it is a shared hatred of the Afrikaner and his system. But in business, pragmatism takes over where morality and ideology leave off. Apartheid in another country is one thing; economic suicide at home is quite another. As President Nyerere once said, “If I didn’t have shoes and South Africa was the only place to get shoes, then I would do without them. But if I didn’t have corn and South Africa was the only place to get corn, then I would go to South Africa.”

  I had been traveling throughout black Africa for nine months before I got to South Africa for the first time. By then I had grown used to hearing how beautiful cities such as Luanda and Maputo had once been. I had become accustomed to visiting dirty, understaffed hospitals, government offices full of broken typewriters and telephones, and schools without chalk for the blackboards or seats for the toilets. Nothing, I thought, could faze me anymore, but when I reached South Africa, I was dumfounded. It works. You pick up the phone and get a dial tone. You summon a waiter and are handed a menu. You get on an airplane and it departs on schedule. Modern highways carry you through the country, which is twice the size of Texas, and the stores are stocked with goods (radios, cotton shirts, hardcover books, tennis rackets) that I hadn’t seen since my last trip to Europe. Arriving in Johannesburg is like being back in Cleveland or St. Louis.

  Johannesburg, built on a mile-high plateau, did not exist until gold was discovered there in 1886. The city is neither pretty nor exciting but it has a sense of vitality, a feeling of substance and permanence, unlike so many African cities that seem ready to blow away in a strong wind. It has high-rise office buildings, more than a hundred carefully tended parks, and Beverly Hills–like suburbs that contain more swimming pools and tennis courts than I’ve ever seen in one place. Johannesburg (population 1.5 million, about the same as Houston) is also the starting point for the world’s most elegant passenger train, the Blue Train, which makes the twenty-four-hour trip to Cape Town three times a week, usually arriving w
ithin the appointed minute.

  But the spooky thing about South Africa is that—if you are white—you don’t sense initially that anything is wrong. You can’t sense the tension or feel the oppression. There is, in fact, often no awareness that you are in a black country. In the heat of downtown Johannesburg, you don’t even see many blacks around. You go through the department stores, which are staffed with white clerks and filled with white customers. You sit in a restaurant and find only white patrons. But where are the blacks? If this is their country, where is their world? Poking through Johannesburg after dark is like visiting Iowa and finding no farmers.

  What you don’t see—and what you can’t see without government permission—is Soweto (short for South-West Township), thirty minutes from Johannesburg on the black-only commuter train. It is a teeming, clamorous township of 2 million blacks, an enclave where horse-drawn coal carts creak along the dirt roads between box-shaped houses with outhouses and no electricity, where men confront their defeats with half-jacks (half-quart bottles) of brandy in more than 1,400 illegal shebeens (speakeasies), where gangs of young toughs calling themselves “Wild Geese” or “Russians” roam the dark streets with pistols stolen from whites’ homes, where on any given day there are three murders.