Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  On paper the rich mineral seams, which criss-cross the continent, should provide the bonanza to fund Africa out of its misery. But in reality they have often proved the continent's bane. The deadliest fault line running through Africa at the end of the century is neither ideological nor tribal but geological. Far from financing development, Africa's minerals have frequently fomented chaos, misery and war, leading many Africans to argue wearily that it would have been better if the continent had never seen a single diamond. The only exceptions are in Southern Africa where the minerals are out of the government's direct control.

  The pattern started in the last century when the Witwatersrand seam of gold was found in the Transvaal, one of the two then independent Boer republics. The discovery sparked one of the world's greatest-ever gold rushes around what is now Johannesburg. It also led to war between the hardy isolationist Boers, who viewed the birth of the licentious new city around the ever deepening mine shafts as a terrible curse, and the British empire, which was urged by Cecil Rhodes and other financiers to take control of the mines.

  Shortly before the war began, Paul Kruger, the hirsute Boer leader, is said to have sat on his Pretoria stoep (veranda) gloomily contemplating the ruin that the gold had wreaked. Ironically, he was echoing the sentiments of a man he would have regarded as a primitive savage, Lobengula, the last king of the Ndebele, who frequently cursed his country's fabled and elusive mineral wealth which lured Rhodes to send a team of volunteers to invade his kingdom. The cri de coeur of these two very different men has been resounding through Africa ever since, although not, it has to be said, from the mouths of many leaders. Far from bewailing Africa's rich deposits, African governments have for the most part welcomed them as a quick way to fund exotic lifestyles and insure their futures.

  Nigeria, the sprawling giant of West Africa, is the starkest example. It is the world's ninth largest oil producer and also has fabulous deposits of natural gas. But the oil that is drilled off shore in the Niger delta literally stays off-shore, with the vast profits heading straight into foreign bank accounts. Nigeria reaped a 12.4 billion-dollar bonus from the 1990 Gulf crisis when oil prices soared. A few years later a state audit could account for barely 5 per cent.

  Shortly after the report was compiled, I asked the British High Commissioner in Lagos where Nigeria had gone wrong. He gave a one-word answer: oil. 'If you are wealthy in bananas or groundnuts it makes it hard for the state to be too corrupt,' he said. 'But Nigeria suddenly got oil [in the Seventies] and no one sees it. It just disappears.'

  Dr Mafia Akoba was Minister of Oil in the mid-Seventies, the early years of the oil boom, when the depressing saga began. Two decades later he was an environmental activist in Port Harcourt, the principal city in the delta. He worked in a dilapidated old town house on the outskirts, brimming with books and paperwork, and reminiscent of the study of an absent minded tutor. As I drove to meet him, dark columns of smoke rose from Ogoniland, the most exploited region, where fires were burning off excess gas. As the sun went down, the landscape was lit up as if by a full moon.

  'The people who live among this oil don't have anything to show for it,' he said. 'It's not like Saudi oil where the oil is in the desert far away from the people. There are six million people in the delta living among the pipelines and rigs. All they get is pollution of the air and the land. They are prepared to do without oil for two or three generations until a humane government is in place that uses the revenues in a responsible way.'

  Dr Akoba was a close colleague of the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was, at the time of my visit in October 1995, imprisoned with eight other Ogoni activists awaiting trial for the murder of three tribal chiefs. It was patently a political case. A month later General Abacha, the hardline military leader, turned down pleas from Mandela and other Common wealth leaders and executed Saro-Wiwa and his fellow activists. After a brief outcry, international outrage waned. All the while the oil-wells kept pumping.

  Shell, which drilled half of Nigeria's 1.9 million barrels a day, gave me a sanitized tour of Ogoniland by helicopter, ending with a visit to a brand-new clinic they had funded in one of the poorest areas. At dawn the following morning a Catholic priest smuggled me into the restricted area in the back of his car for a very different view. Life in Ogoniland was an endless battle against repression, poverty and fear. Oil pollution was clogging up its creeks, making it ever harder for the fishermen in their dug-out canoes to keep their families alive. Hundreds of locals had been arrested, tortured and killed for daring to demand a share of the revenue. Blackened and deserted homes in village after village testified to the brutal ways of the state. Shell did later suspend its operations in Ogoniland pending increased government investment in the region, but only after increasingly violent protests.

  The same harsh pragmatism pertains wherever there is oil in Africa. When drugged-up youths festooned in bandoliers and rocket launchers ransacked Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, in July 1997, the scenes of burning boulevards pandered to all the old preconceptions of African anarchy. Nominally it was a war of revenge between the president, Pascal Lissouba, and his predecessor, General Denis Sassou-Nguesso, whom he had ousted in the Congo's first multi-party elections in 1992. But this was no random chaos; the real motivation for the war was control of the off-shore oil fields.

  Lissouba had made the fatal mistake of alienating France, the regional power broker and former colonial power, by renegotiating long-standing contracts with French oil companies and dangling them before American firms. For several years he had been a valued regional client of the Quai d'Orsay. But he had failed to appreciate that he was valued for only one thing - oil. French forces have a long history of involvement in their former colonies, but when several thousand paratroopers and foreign legionaries were sent to rescue expatriates from Brazzaville, the most striking aspect of their operation was their neutrality. Lissouba's hotline to Paris had been cut off and he was left to roam Africa in a fruitless search for support before he was forced into exile by his old rival. Lissouba had taken power by the ballot box and had been overthrown by the bullet and yet there was a marked lack of international condemnation for his successor. Western politicians pursue the same remorseless logic towards Africa as the Big Men: oil matters more than ethics.

  Angola fits the tragic pattern but with an added twist: it is twice cursed as it has a treasure trove of diamonds as well as rich fields of oil. Adventurers in the nineteenth century thought that 'King Solomon's Mines' lay in what is now Zimbabwe. They were wrong. Angola is the El Dorado of southern Africa, or at least it would be, if it were at peace. By the mid-Nineties what had been the archetypal Cold War conflict had become a clash of minerals - the oil of the MPLA against the diamonds of Savimbi. In one of Africa's classic ironies, the richest oil-wells of Cabinda, an enclave separated from the rest of Angola by a promontory of the former Zaire, were operated in the Cold War by a subsidiary of the American company Chevron but guarded by Cubans. When I returned to Angola years later, in 2007, it was clear that the oil revenues had spawned a tiny corrupt elite who had vast wealth while the population continued to struggle to survive.

  Savimbi by contrast relied on diamonds, a far more cost-efficient source of income for a rebel army. Unlike in South Africa, where the remaining deposits of diamonds are deep underground and can only be extracted at vast expense, in Angola they are alluvial and so can literally be plucked from the ground. The scenes on river banks in eastern Angola brought to mind tales of the gold-panners in the Klondike. The banks were riddled with holes and populated by thousands of villagers digging away like termites. They worked for a minimal wage as they had no hope of finding a market for the stones. Angola was then the world's fourth largest diamond producer and Savimbi's control of the north-east guaranteed him four-fifths of the national trade.

  To the envy of Angolans, Mozambique moved effortlessly towards peace after its election in 1994. It had as bloody a recent history but it had no minerals.
(Nearly 20 years later vast natural gas reserves were found off its coast. It was from clear that when the gas was on-stream the revenues would be fairly distributed.)

  Nearly a hundred years ago, when work started on the Benguela Railway, it is said that for every labourer the contractors had to hire a second to carry water. It was an extraordinary story. The end of the Cold War so nearly provided a new chapter. The new breeze paved the way for a resolution of what was regarded as a far more intractable problem, South Africa’s white minority rule. A few weeks after my train ride I was to witness a potent symbol of the changing times when I came across a group of Afrikaner farmers trekking north through Zambia in search of a new life. But Savimbi was no F.W. De Klerk, the Afrikaner Nationalist who negotiated himself from power. The superpowers' premier proxy battlefield became silent only when Savimbi was killed in 2002 - and it was only then that the Benguela Railway had a chance of running again.

  5 - The Last White Patriarch

  F.W. De Klerk- Whither the White Africans?

  The Toyota bakkie (pick-up) was caked in thick red dust and its metalwork was pitted with dents and scars. It had already travelled more than 1,000 miles through southern Africa, but the worst part of the journey was still to come and the driver clearly had no illusions about the scale of the challenge ahead. He was a thick-set grizzled man in his early forties with a sparse beard. Switching off the engine he sat chatting to his two passengers, men of similar ilk, before sauntering over to a roadside farm-shop for a bag of biltong, the dried meat staple of the Afrikaner. It had kept the Boer commandos in the field for two long years at the turn of the century, much to the frustration of the 'khakis' of Lord Kitchener's British Imperial army. Now it was once again sustaining a spirit of adventure.

  It was August 1995, and Dirk Kruger had been three days on the road since leaving his family farm northwest of Johannes burg. In the finest pioneering tradition he had stayed clear of towns and laid out his bedding roll at night by the side of the road. Now he was twenty miles north of Lusaka, the Zambian capital, within a day's drive of his goal, the rich untamed bush of the north. His dream of a plot of land was within his grasp. Only the newly painted signboard advertising fresh farm pro duce and biltong had persuaded him to take a break from the road.

  With asphalt for at least some of the way and four-wheel drive for the gravel roads and thorn scrub, Kruger was undoubtedly having an easier time of it than his ancestors, whose ox-wagon trek through southern Africa last century was one of history's great feats of endurance. Fittingly he was reluctant to compare his endeavour with that of the voortrekkers.

  'Lots of people would like to see this as a second Great Trek,' he said. 'I'm not so sure. It's economic circumstances that forced me to leave South Africa. That is all. South Africa is not an agriculturally friendly country. The drought there is so bad I probably wouldn't be able to farm my old place in a few years. Here the rainfall is good, as is the soil ...'

  After a growl of Afrikaans from one of his companions he broke off and they departed in a cloud of dust. But as they chugged in search of a new plot of land it was tempting to conclude that Kruger's forebears would have been proud of him. His farm, near Mafikeng, the small market town immortalized in British schoolbooks by the Boer War siege, was for sale. In return he hoped to buy 1,000 hectares of untamed bush. He would rent a plot of irrigated land while the authorities processed the 'investment license' he needed to buy state land. His family were waiting for his word before joining him.

  Kruger was in the vanguard of an extraordinary exodus. Under apartheid Afrikaners were reared to fear and deride the rest of their continent under black rule. From their earliest days the lesson was drummed home from the blackboard and pulpit: Africa was hostile, brutal and corrupt. Yet in an apparent contradiction that goes to the heart of the Afrikaner psyche, they saw themselves as Africans, the continent's 'white tribe', and despised the rooineks (rednecks), the English-speakers, who had a foot in Europe.

  In reality most Afrikaners' contact with Africa was no more profound than bush hunting expeditions and romanticized fire side evocations of their rugged past. Afrikaners had little under standing of the rhythms and privations of African life, so it was all the more remarkable that after years of preferment under white rule Kruger and hundreds of others should head north of the Limpopo and confront arguably their darkest fears.

  For many of the new trekkers Africa came as a terrible shock.

  South Africa's white farmers were cushioned by fat subsidies under successive apartheid governments. Prospective trekkers were devastated to find their promised land was every bit as run-down as the old jokes about Africa had implied. Many lost their life savings in 1997 in the Republic of Congo, a favoured destination, after it erupted in a bloody civil war. Zambia, too, while stable, was to prove the nemesis of many a would-be pioneer. Some did an abrupt about-turn a few miles across the frontier after seeing the appalling state of the roads. As Dirk Kruger headed off on the final stage of the journey, Charles Harvey, the owner of the farm-shop, snorted in derision. His family has farmed in Zambia for most of the century, some how surviving the economic blunderings of the country's independence ruler, Kenneth Kaunda.

  *

  Hundreds of them have been pitching up here for advice, but the attitude of most of them is all wrong. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere you have to be a hell of a special guy. When your kid is sick it takes five hours to reach a doctor ... You can't phone your granny on her birthday and you don't get any more money for your produce if it comes from the back of beyond. It's not easy: you have to start from scratch. Okay, you decide to set up in the bush, but how do you get your goods out?

  There were fertile grounds for cynicism about the grandiose claims of the new trekboers. While their spokesmen maintained they were forging a new partnership between the Afrikaner and Africa, the prime motivation of many of them seemed to be just the reverse. Kruger, like many others, was not a natural 'new' South African. He came from a right-wing heartland. Just as his forefathers had trekked away from British suzerainty in ' the Cape, so he conceded he was keen to escape his new overlords, South Africa's first black government. Initially several African governments, most notably Zambia, Mozambique and Congo, welcomed the initiative. They hoped that in exchange for cut-price land Afrikaners would revitalize their devastated agriculture. But as the movement gathered pace in the late

  Nineties, the hosts became concerned they had sanctioned the entrenchment of right-wing enclaves, which were exploiting their cheap labour.

  Yet despite its imperfections the new 'trek' did symbolize one of the more striking turnarounds in Africa in the late twentieth century. Since Jan van Riebeeck founded a way station for the Dutch East India Company at the Cape in 1652, the Afrikaners had kept the rest of Africa at arm's length. Van Riebeeck formalized the division by planting a bitter almond hedge to keep the interior at bay. Over the next two and a half centuries Afrikaners forged through the hedge and fanned out across southern Africa, but it remained a heresy to consider that Africans had rights.

  The alienation of the Afrikaner from the rest of Africa reached its height in the second half of the twentieth century when, far from modernizing their world view, South Africa's whites codified it in law. In protest at apartheid, white South Africans were barred from most of the continent. Planes flying to Johannesburg were banned from flying over black Africa and had to take a lengthy detour round the 'bulge' of West Africa. The Afrikaner Nationalists responded in kind, launching punitive raids into South Africa's neighbours against the governments that supported the then banned black liberation movements, the ANC and the more radical Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).

  The end of white rule in South Africa brought that sequence to an end. The inauguration of Nelson Mandela brought liberation not just for blacks, but also ironically for many of South Africa's 5.3 million whites, even if many of them, particularly among the three million Afrikaners, could not see it at the time. In one stroke
Afrikaners had been freed from the burden of their history and from responsibility for their tortured country. Theirs will not be an easy journey into the new millennium. The Afrikaner carries an immense burden of guilt from the past, which may in part account for Mr Kruger's Zambian trek. Many are also resentful of the present and fearful of the future: as each year passes they will face increased competition from blacks and will watch an erosion of their old world. But, contrary to outsiders' perceptions, there is no monolithic Afrikaner group. The end of apartheid meant that the way was at last clear for Afrikaners to play a more constructive role in Africa with their agricultural, commercial and industrial know how and their financial and military might. Unlike the white settlers elsewhere in the continent, Afrikaners have nowhere to flee.

  Even as Kruger rumbled across Zambia hundreds of white South African businessmen were moving north across the Limpopo, signing contracts and looking for deals. Maputo, the capital of neighbouring Mozambique, has been reinvigorated by South African investment. Locals sometimes muttered their opposition. The newcomers were not of course philanthropists. But Africa does not need charity; it has been suffocated by it over the years. Rather Africa needs business, and white South Africans, both as individuals and as leaders of Johannesburg corporations, may be among the few with the capital who are prepared to give the rest of the continent a chance.

  A few miles down the road from Charles Harvey's biltong shop an unmarked track heads off into the bush. After bumping for eight or nine miles a low homestead ringed by a simple wire fence comes into view. With its tumbledown outhouses and dusty yard, Gerrit and Bernice Bronkhorst's 2,000-hectare farm is nothing like their former smallholding east of Pretoria. It has neither electricity nor a telephone. The week before I visited them a hyena took one of their precious cattle. Even as we spoke a column of soldier ants was taking possession of the yard.