Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  Moi closed my interview with what he no doubt thought was a Cassandra-esque prediction. 'I am not a dictator. Although people blame Moi now, one day they will understand what Moi was.'

  The perennial difficulty of assessing Africa as an outsider, is knowing whose standards to apply. For an increasing number of Kenyans, however, the question required no reflection. Moi's opponents threw up their hands at the thought that the world should apply second-rate standards to their country. They did not care a jot that Leakey is white. All they wanted was to see an end to the corruption that flourished under Moi.

  As I boarded my plane home, an Indian fridge salesman collapsed into the seat beside me. He had never encountered such a corrupt country in ten years travelling the world. As he recounted his tales of grasping government officials I heard the contemptuous laugh of Koigi, the dreadlocked dissident, ringing in my ears.

  'Moi believes whites are fools because we [blacks] don't blush. Whites do not understand when they are being lied to. And you must remember: you have to be a rabbit to know how cruel the jungle is.'

  It is all too easy for whites travelling in Africa to take away an idealized view of the continent. But, as I was to find, there is no such danger if you take a train in Angola, the ultimate victim of the superpowers' meddling in Africa.

  4 - The Cold War Crooner

  Jonas Savimbi - Western Disengagement or Disarray?

  The conductor brushed down his faded grey uniform and straightened his peaked cap. His fingers faltered over his fading gold brocade. Then he glanced at his watch. It was time. As his whistle resounded over the platform, stragglers rushed to take their seats. School-children in black and white uniforms shouted and waved from the windows. With a final root toot toot from the engine driver, the pastel station buildings of Lobito, once one of the premier ports on Africa's Atlantic coastline, receded in the early morning haze. Against the odds, or at least against my expectations, the dawn train to Benguela was leaving bang on time.

  A faded photograph of Portuguese colonial architecture was inlaid in the compartment wall opposite me, a reminder of the days when Europeans took a liner to Lobito and then headed inland by train, bolstered by silver service in the restaurant cars and hot showers in the berths. The photograph was unharmed in the twenty years since the Portuguese had abruptly abandoned Angola and returned whence they had come, by sea, five centuries earlier.

  The carriage's teak fittings and brass and silver work, while in need of a polish, were also in fine nick. But then again I should not have been surprised. For railway buffs and indeed Africa-watchers Benguela has been a name to conjure with for almost a century. In the best traditions of the railway's indomitable founding engineers, it was clearly going to take more than a war to make the last of its employees lower their standards.

  In 1902 Robert Williams, a canny Scots business associate of Cecil Rhodes won a concession from the Portuguese to build a railway through their territory to link the minerals of northern Rhodesia and King Leopold's Congo to the coast. Within thirty years his task was complete. It was a triumph of engineering, opening up southern and central Africa. Starting at Benguela it snaked more than 1,000 miles up and across the central 6,000-ft plateau through the forests of the hinterland which powered the locomotives' wood-fired boilers into the heart of the continent, where they linked with a railway from Beira, on the Indian Ocean. For the Portuguese it was also extremely lucrative. By the early Seventies, rail traffic was generating an estimated $43 million a year.

  The railway timetable still dutifully records the destinations of those glory years. Several of my fellow passengers were from Huambo, the first significant town to the east, and they gazed out the window imagining they were bound for home. Johnny Alcides, a twenty-year-old student, had not seen his four brothers and two sisters in Huambo since he fled into the bush eighteen months earlier when his father was killed in the latest eruption of Angola's thirty-year-old war. He had walked to Lobito in March 1993. He longed, he said, to be able to queue up at Lobito ticket office and order a single to Huambo. But to return home by train, such a potent symbol of normality, was, he knew, only a dream.

  The Benguela Railway has been blocked for all but a few stretches since the Portuguese pulled down the flag and left in 1975. The three liberation movements had forged a power sharing agreement for the post-colonial era in an attempt to overcome the differences which had riven their fight against white rule. But the settlement collapsed even before the Portuguese left, reigniting what would become Africa's longest running civil war.

  In the words of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish writer who reported the chaotic countdown to independence, the fighting was 'sloppy, dogged and cruel. Everyone was everyone's enemy, and no one was sure who would meet death.' 1 His words apply to each and every African bush war. In Angola, in the absence of front lines, the Benguela Railway was an obvious and easy target.

  My train-ride, in July 1995, coincided with a lull in the fighting as the United Nations tried to implement a peace agreement between the two protagonists, the ruling MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and the rebel movement, Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). The third liberation movement, the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola), had long since disintegrated. The railway, however, was still firmly closed after a series of fruitless attempts to reopen it, most notably by Tiny Rowland, the late chief executive of Lonrho. It was not until 2006, more than a decade after my visit that the advent of peace and the arrival of colossal Chinese investment led to the rebuilding of the railway.

  With Lonrho's vast mining and agriculture interests in the region Rowland had been interested in an offer by the MPLA to relaunch the railway in the mid-Eighties. He was the arch Africa-hand among Western businessmen. When he died in 1998 tributes flowed in from all corners of the continent. But not even his web of contacts, which extended to every regional seat of power, rebel and official, could make Unita's primary African backer, South Africa, agree to leave the railway alone. For Pretoria it was too important a target. If the Benguela Railway reopened, the 'front-line' states of Zambia and Zimbabwe would be able, if they so wanted, to impose their much-vaunted but hitherto anodyne economic blockade. The closure of the railway meant that the black governments of southern Africa had to swallow their pride and rely on apartheid ports, a useful source of income for Pretoria and vital political leverage on their enemies.

  Thirty-one miles from Lobito the train chugged into Benguela. My trip was at an end. The journey had provided a poignant taste of Angola's might-have-been. On paper Angola is doubly blessed, with the mineral riches of its northern neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Zaire as it still was at the time of my ride, and the agricultural potential of its eastern neighbour, Zambia. The railway could have been the communications hub of the sub-continent. Instead until the end of the first decade of the new millennium it was little more than a museum piece. Then Chinese state infrastructure companies set to work making the railway run again.

  In an irony I only learned later, the man most responsible for the destruction of Williams' and Rhodes' dream was raised on stories of the Benguela Railway. On 3 August 1934 one of Angola's first black railway officials, a Protestant pastor who had been forced by debt to seek work where he could, had a son. The baby's name was Jonas Malheiro Savimbi.

  Even allowing for the distortions of African leaders' biographies it seems fair to say the history of Angola runs in Savimbi's veins. His grandfather, Sakaita, was a chief of the Ovimbundu, the country's largest ethnic group, which makes up more than a third of the population. Outraged by a second wave of colonization by Afrikaner and Portuguese farmers, and devastated by falling rubber prices, Sakaita led an ill-fated rebellion against the Portuguese in 1902 in the central town of Bailundo, which ninety years later was to be Savimbi's base. The uprising was brutally suppressed after four months, and Sakaita lost his chieftainship as punishment, but he never lost hope that another Savimb
i would take up the revolutionary baton.

  By deciding to work with rather than against the system, Sakaita's son Loth, Savimbi's father, had a very different experience of colonial rule. He defied Sakaita's prohibition on having contact with whites and went to the local missionary school. Stricken by debt over an unpaid bill for a traditional healer, he looked to the Benguela Railway for employment and rose in due course to become Angola's first black station-master.

  His post was a dazzling achievement for Africans of the time, especially in one of the Portuguese colonies where the slave trade had died out only in the late nineteenth century and where blacks were still assumed to have a duty to do menial work. In Portuguese eyes Loth had attained the greatest of good fortunes for an African, having qualified as an assimilado. Like the evolues of the Belgian colonies, the assimilados had a special status which, on paper at least, accorded them the rights of the Portuguese. But in practice these privileges-were all but impossible to attain, as to qualify you had to be able to speak and write fluent Portuguese, and the authorities provided no primary schools for Africans. By 1960 it is reckoned that fewer than one in a hundred Angolans were assimilados. The 'pro motion' also came at a humiliating price, as their compromise laid them open to charges of being 'Uncle Toms'.

  These twin strands of family experience fuelled Savimbi in his early crusade to defy the Portuguese. Sakaita is said to have taught him the old tribal languages which would prove vital in his bid for rural support, and also the importance of stockpiling ammunition, another useful lesson for the years ahead. Embittered by his very different experiences, Loth reared the young Savimbi to believe he had to play a role in changing Angola, and in pursuit of this goal he ensured his son was educated by Protestant missionaries.

  It was these same missionaries who are said to have organized a legendary football match between their black pupils and white children from the local town, Andulo, which, if true, provides a telling insight into Savimbi's mindset. The story, which was first told by Savimbi to his biographer, Fred Bridgland, does have the ring of truth. The arrangement was that Savimbi provided the ball and the whites provided the referee. All went according to plan until the game started and the Portuguese referee disallowed every goal the black pupils scored. So enraged was the young Savimbi that he walked off the pitch with his ball in his hands. 'My own team shouted that I could not do it because the administrator's son was playing,' he told Bridgland.

  'I carried on walking and the game had to be abandoned. (2)

  The stubborn streak is one of the few consistent strands in Savimbi's subsequent career. Having transferred to a better school, run by another set of missionaries, he promptly incurred their wrath by defying their ban on ballroom dancing, which was all the rage among educated Africans of the time - and indeed still was in South African townships at the end of the twentieth century. Loth is said to have suggested that he should tango in secret with his sisters. But the fiery young Savimbi refused to back down, arguing that it was practically the only pastime available to him, as the Portuguese had banned would be assimilados from traditional African dancing. Savimbi was suspended for a year. Defying his father once again, he walked for several days to the bustling town of Silva Porto, where, through brilliance and determination, he won a coveted scholarship and a ticket to Lisbon.

  He soon, however, transferred his passion to a national stage as politics began to predominate over the desire for a profession. While in Europe in his early twenties he met many of the icons of black nationalism, including Kenyatta and Nkrumah, who kindled his revolutionary spirit. He briefly worked with the exiled leaders of Angola's liberation movements. But he later said they had despised his village upbringing. He also claimed they did not represent the aspirations of the Ovimbundu. With the backing of the Chinese, his first political friends, who trained him in guerrilla warfare, he slipped into Angola in 1966 with ten other Angolans and later the same year officially founded UNITA. He has been in the bush since then with barely a break.

  Savimbi's career over the next twenty years was a host of contradictions - at least it was in Western eyes. An admirer of Mao's 'long march', he promoted peasant socialism over the Soviet-style Marxist-Leninism of the MPLA. But in the Eighties he became the darling of Western conservatives because of his stand against Communism. Unita trumpeted that it was the party of 'negritude', a potent cause among the Ovimbundu, who felt they had been marginalized by the mesticos, people of mixed race, in the coastal cities. And yet for many years Savimbi's principal supporter was South Africa's apartheid government; he even appeared at the inauguration of South Africa's authoritarian president P.W. Botha in 1984.

  His foreign backers hailed him as a hero of capitalism and the free market. But these labels reflected more the wishful thinking of the West - and a brilliant public relations campaign by his aides in Washington- than reality. He was dubbed pro Western because he was against the Marxist MPLA, but his real skill was that he knew how to impress the West. On infrequent tours of Europe he held court in smart London hotels. Little did his admirers know it but, if called upon, he could have quoted at length from Marx, a legacy from the dabbling of his youth. Instead, however, he would pander to his audience and quote Machiavelli, Churchill and Clausewitz. His command of French, English, German and Portuguese inevitably entrenched his standing as an 'intellectual' who understood the sophisticated subtleties of the West. But back home in true Maoist style he condemned intellectuals and praised peasant thought.

  President Reagan was intrigued by him. The two had a fireside chat at the White House, an honour usually reserved for heads of state. But his vision and his personality were far more complex than American officials - in public at least - under stood. He is at heart a tribal leader and his style and instincts reflect some of the complexities of Africa which so baffle the West. He despises Christianity, banning Bibles in areas under his control, in spite of - or maybe because of - his missionary upbringing. He led Unita like a tribal chief in a pre-literate society bolstering his appeal with recourse to poetry, tradition and myth. His praise-singers spread fantastic tales of his voracious sexual appetite and his heroic powers of endurance in the bush attributes, which won him a fanatical following and entrenched his absolute authority.

  Because of his free-market rhetoric, Savimbi was assumed also to espouse Western liberal democratic values - or at least it was hoped that he did. But it was a mistake to assume that just because Savimbi spoke the West's language he had forgiven the role of the white man in Africa. He has a strong Africanist streak. His grandfather had, after all, been defeated by the Portuguese, and his father had had the humiliation of being dubbed 'almost white'. Like Mobutu, Banda, Moi and many other Big Men, Savimbi used the West for what he could get from them, but he was never a liberal manque as some of his Western supporters naively hoped.

  By the late Eighties Savimbi's rationale was clear. All his ideals, if indeed he had ever had any, had become subordinate to a hunger for power. He talked of the need for accountable government and berated the MPLA's totalitarian record. He was an inspirational guerrilla leader. In the Seventies he emulated his hero Mao and disappeared on a 'long march' through the hinterland, leading the world to believe he was dead. But he led UNITA with a ruthless intolerance of dissent. Critics were tortured and killed in his presence. Joseph Conrad would have recognized and understood the apparent contradiction between the smooth-talking sophisticated Savimbi of the White House encounter and the cruel chieftain of the bush.

  In the Seventies and early Eighties, claims that Unita operated in a climate of fear were widely played down as the propaganda of the MPLA, which itself had an appalling record. But in 1989 the stories became irrefutable when dissenters disclosed how over the years Savimbi had systematically purged high-ranking Unita supporters and their families. Women and children were thrown on bonfires on trumped-up charges, including witchcraft. Among them were wives of dissenters who had already been executed and women who had refused his advances. A
mnesty International reported that crowds were made to watch as whole families were burned alive in Jamba, his headquarters in the far south, a scattering of bases in a wilderness of forest, savannah and bush.

  The disclosures came ironically just as Savimbi's chances of inheriting power in Luanda, the capital, seemed stronger than ever. Perestroika had enabled the impoverished and crumbling Soviet Union to retract its tentacles from far-flung corners of the globe. After months of tortuous negotiations a peace accord was signed in Lisbon in May 1991, paving the way for Angola's first multi-party elections scheduled for September the following year. Savimbi was expected to do well even in the MPLA's urban heartlands as the party's record of inefficiency and corruption had disillusioned many of its traditional supporters. President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos, the party leader, was a colourless apparatchik with a fraction of Savimbi's charisma. In a clear sign that government officials were not confident of victory, the embezzlement of oil revenues from the rich off-shore fields reached new heights between the peace accord and the election. If Savimbi had presented himself as the man to unify the nation, he might have coasted home to a comfortable victory. Consensus and unity have a powerful resonance across Africa. But so, too, at least in the eyes of politicians, do authority and power. Far from promoting himself as the man to heal Angola's wounds, Savimbi talked of how he would crush the elite 'Ninja' security forces of the MPLA, not the most astute campaign in a country that was full of people like Johnny Alcides, my railway carriage companion, aching for peace. The chilling account of the fall from grace and murder of one of his most brilliant aides, Tito Chingunji, further damaged Savimbi's image in the count down to polling day and destroyed his credentials in the West once and for all.