Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

And yet with the UN unwilling and the OAU unable to intervene in the continent's many wars, 'private armies' do fill a gap. It is a depressing indication of the depths into which much of Africa has sunk that governments have to rely on mercenaries for law and order. The flowering of new-age mercenaries at the end of the millennium sparked considerable hand-wringing in the West. But a country as devastated as Sierra Leone requires dispassionate assessment.. The Nigerian-led regional peace keeping force which the West was keen to promote, looted Monrovia (the capital of neighbouring Liberia) more thoroughly than the feuding warlords, before it was eventually brought under control. For the people of Kono EO had at least brought stability for the first time in several years. Diplomats, politicians and even some aid-workers in Freetown made flattering comparisons between EO and the cost and track record of the UN in Africa.

  EO's importance to Sierra Leone's stability was cruelly illustrated in 1997, just over a year after it held its first democratic elections. Bankrupted by the excesses of his military predecessors, President Kabbah, the newly elected civilian leader, cancelled EO's contract shortly after he took office. He made his decision after the IMF made clear that its loans, the economy's prop, could not be used to foot the South Africans' bill. He was renegotiating a contract when junior army officers, who had formed an alliance with, of all people, the rebels, took power in a coup.

  For a year Freetown and Kono were subject to a reign of terror until the junta was overthrown by a regional peace keeping force advised by none other than EO and a British firm of 'consultants', Sandline. Regional diplomats were convinced the coup could never have happened if EO had been retained in its proposed role as national security advisor.

  The role of mercenaries in Sierra Leone developed into a major scandal in Britain when it emerged that the British High Commissioner, Peter Penfold, had liaised with Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, the head of Sandline, a former Guards officer, in trying to bring down the junta. The left took their chance to attack the Foreign Office and accused it of reverting to old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy. The right saw it as a chance to attack the Labour government over its pledges to introduce a new moral foreign policy.

  Afflicted by the myopia of its critics, the government pledged to root out the culprits. Only after several days on the defensive did it appreciate the most important point of the 'Arms to Africa' affair, as the Sandline/Sierra Leone controversy became known, namely that the 'good guys' had won.

  Sierra Leoneans, however, had no such difficulty. They demonstrated in the streets of Freetown in their thousands in support of the embattled high commissioner and indeed for Sandline. History repeated itself six months later when the rebels, this time backed by Liberia, once again took Freetown before once again being bloodily repulsed by the Nigerians. When Penfold toured the city, he was cheered by residents who saw the criticism of him as the height of Western hypocrisy and arrogance. They were convinced that if he had been allowed to work with Sandline the city would never have fallen for a second time. Of course, they would love to be bound by the same stringent laws and principles of a Western liberal democracy, but they know that that is a fantasy for the forseeable future, and so they calculate accordingly: if sanctioning mercenaries is a compromise, then so be it.

  The echoes of this 'new' white involvement were unpalatable to many in the West. EO was officially disbanded on l January 1999 shortly after South Africa passed the law banning mercenary activity by its nationals. But it was widely believed that EO had merely shifted its assets and personnel, in search of a lower profile. And while the 'security consultants' and mining companies inevitably attracted colourful headlines, elsewhere private enterprise from the old colonial powers had a more overtly beneficial impact. In Mozambique, the customs service in the late Nineties was run by a team from Crown Agents, the former agent general for British Crown Colonies, who were in 1995 commissioned to reform one of the world's more porous frontiers. It was not a conventional aid project as the initiative came from the authorities. It was a partnership which the government would never have considered when Mozambique became independent twenty-five years before, and yet it showed how the old colonial powers could work with Africa.

  General Viljoen, one of the few South Africans who had the charisma and standing to have led a last white stand, had an instinctive understanding of the parameters of this new world. He was one of the instigators of the movement to send Afrikaner farmers around the continent and he travelled around Africa meeting government ministers to smooth the way for the Boers. His bluff soldierly ways adapted well to parliamentary politics. When I last saw him in his office in Pretoria he was still talking of the need for a homeland for Afrikaners, but the decline of his party's vote by two thirds to less than l per cent in 1999 made clear that the dream was over, whether he was prepared to admit it or not. Two decades after the end of white rule in South Africa it was clear that Afrikaners continued to fret about their country’s future and in particular standards of education but far-Right talk of secessionism evaporated.

  As for Terre'Blanche, his reputation imploded once and for all in a magistrates' court in Potchefstroom, a university town west of Johannesburg once seen as a cradle of Afrikaner thinking.

  E.T. was in court to be sentenced for attempted murder after he assaulted a black employee with an iron bar, leaving him with permanent brain damage. As he sat in the dock in a beige suit, the scene behind him must have been reassuring. Whites occupied the front three rows of the gallery, while blacks were crammed into the back. But his supporters watched in silence as the magistrate branded Terre'Blanche 'a violent man motivated by a hatred for blacks' and jailed him for six years. He had to sit in the cells as court officials counted the three sacks of coins delivered by his supporters as bail money. As a black crowd danced triumphantly outside the court, several AWB members had to ask for police protection to reach their cars.

  Three years later, on 30 March 2000, E.T. started a one-year sentence for assaulting a garage attendant while his appeal against the separate conviction for attempted murder was still pending. Playing up to his image one last time, he rode up to Potchefstroom prison on a black horse, dressed in black fatigues, rooted as ever in the 'old Africa', seemingly oblivious to the fact that these days even tribal chiefs are starting to adjust to the modern era.

  In April 2010 he was beaten to death on his farm by a black farm labourer supposedly over a wage dispute. His murder refocused attention on the high rate of attacks on isolated farms

  7 - A Very Zulu Chief

  Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi - The Rebirth of Traditional Leaders

  The first to boo was a portly chief with a leopard-skin head dress. Sweating profusely, he cleared his throat and emitted a low growl of dissent. His neighbours in the packed public gallery of the Zulu legislative assembly chamber, an eclectic riot of patterned cotton gowns, traditional Zulu wear and grey suits, glanced down at their leader as if for reassurance that the time was right. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the traditional prime minister of the Zulu nation, was staring ahead of him, but with the tiniest hint of a smile. The rumble turned into a roar. A matronly Zulu in a painted cotton dress jumped to her feet with an ululatory shriek. The circular hall echoed to the stamping of feet.

  Utterly outmanoeuvred, the guest speaker, a bespectacled white judge, spluttered, shuffled his papers and temporarily abandoned his speech. Judge Johann Kriegler, one of South Africa's most respected liberal judges and head of the electoral commission for its first all-race vote, had come to tell the chiefs of Zululand to step into line, to bow to the will of central government. As if in a Johannesburg courtroom he wagged his finger for emphasis. He should have known better. No outsider lectures a Zulu chief on his home ground, least of all in Ulundi, the old Zulu capital, where since time immemorial nothing has happened without the say-so of the traditional leaders.

  King Goodwill Zwelithini, direct descendant of Cetshwayo, whose impis humbled the British at Isandhlwana in January 1879 before finally being crush
ed on a plain a few miles from the chamber, sat to the right of the judge. He wore a dark Nehru suit and clutched a sceptred staff. Not a flicker of emotion passed his face, not even when a priest recalled his ancestors' deeds and prayed that he too would have 'strength, courage and wisdom ... at this time of great trial.' But he was in those days little more than a puppet. Beside him sat Buthelezi, his uncle and mentor, the Richelieu of Zulu politics. He was - of course - the model host.

  'The judge is only the messenger,' Buthelezi chided the hecklers. 'If you don't like the message, don't hit the messenger.' But the crowd knew their man. They hummed their support for his every word. When the judge tried again, they drowned him out. His appeals for fair play were shouted down. His hectoring tone and loss of temper met scornful laughs.

  After the meeting I bumped into Prince Vincent Zulu, one of the more thoughtful members of the Zulu royal house. He could barely control his contempt. 'He came down applying his glib Western democratic values as if we were in Cape Town or Johannesburg,' he said. 'He had no idea. This is what happens if you dare to criticize a chief.'

  A newcomer to Zulu politics might have been tempted to conclude it was a classically South African black/white contretemps. The sight of the white official coming to give orders to proud tribal leaders was steeped in colonial imagery. If you blurred your vision and blotted out the suits, the judge could have been an emissary of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Secretary for Native Affairs, in the late 1870s, warning Cetshwayo either to submit or face war, or an agent of Cecil Rhodes, a decade later, trying to wheedle his way into the affections of Lobengula, the last of the Ndebele kings.

  But the Zulus' fury was founded on something far more profound than historical or racial gripes. The acrimonious scene was part of the giddy final countdown to South Africa's April 1994 election. Buthelezi had won another victory in his bid to wield absolute power in Zululand. He had also won the latest round in one of Africa's longest-running battles - the clash of Western liberal democracy with traditional leaders, a dispute that went to the heart of the continent's predicament in the late twentieth century.

  I was given a vivid and improbable reminder of the judge's humiliation two years almost to the day later when the proud and puissant Zulu chiefs gave short shrift to another grey-haired luminary from Pretoria. But this time the visitor should have known the form as he had spent his formative years in a chief's homestead - he was none other than Nelson Mandela.

  The world's most famous former political prisoner had been in office for nearly two years, and he had made an unprecedented journey to the royal palace at Nongoma to urge the chiefs to accept that the days of untrammelled feudal authority were at an end. His magic was then at its most potent. The most diehard right-wingers were still falling for his reconciliatory charm. But the Zulu chiefs would have none of it.

  In a deliberate snub he was kept waiting for over an hour as they and their indunas (headmen) gathered under a vast marquee. The whistles and catcalls began even as he opened with a judicious condemnation of the two main regional political parties, his own African National Congress and Buthelezi's Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party, whose followers since the mid-Eighties had been engaged in a murderous low-level civil war. He gamely plodded through his prepared speech but his fury was tangible. His mouth was set in a scowl usually reserved for public appearances with his estranged wife, Winnie. Finally he could take no more and he left his text.

  'It's people who think through their blood, not through their brains, who are creating the problems,' he said. 'I don't hide from speaking the truth anywhere in South Africa. You can shout until you are blue in the face.. .' And that is exactly what they did through a long and fractious afternoon until he rose in frustration and left.

  It was a Friday night and a feast had been prepared. Chuckling with delight, the amakhosi (chiefs) settled back to enjoy themselves before returning to their villages to crow over their leader's famous victory.

  *

  If you believe the idealists, there was a time when Africa had a baronial democracy that was second to none. 'Then our people lived peacefully under the democratic rule of their kings ...' wrote one African politician in 1984, with a yearning reminiscent of Virgil recalling a more glorious and simple past. 'Then the country was ours in our name and right ... All men were free and equal and this was the foundation of government. The council of elders was so completely democratic that all members of the tribe could deliberate in its deliberations. Chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, all took part and endeavoured to influence its decisions.' 1

  The longing in this instance is forgivable, as the author was Nelson Mandela and he was writing in 1984, his twentieth year in prison, with no end in sight. Mandela was echoing the language of black liberation politicians from the first half of the century when talking up their pre-colonial history was vital for inspiring the future. But in these confused and troubled times for Africa it is as destructive to talk up the past as it is to deride it. Over the last century or so both Africans and outsiders have been guilty on both counts. All the while traditional leaders have fallen further into limbo.

  After years of partisan scholarship there is now a rough and ready consensus that in the middle of the last century when the trickle of colonial traders and missionaries penetrating Africa turned into a flood, most of the continent had a working social structure under traditional leaders. It was superstitious, hereditary and often inhumane. There were plenty of barbaric tribes who neatly reinforced European stereotypes about the 'Dark Continent'. But contrary to the widely held perception in Europe at the time, many chiefs did run their tribes along well established lines. If you were a chief, you had to consult the elders and allow the people their say in assemblies before making major decisions. If you defied the rules, you might get away with it. A handful, like Shaka, the warrior founder of the Zulu nation, broke the customary compact and forged a military dictatorship. But there was always the danger of being 'de-stooled' if you were too oppressive. Chiefs were seen as the repository of ancestral spirits. It was a brave man or woman who chanced their wrath by breaking the rules.

  This system, which had lasted for hundreds of years, stood in the way of the colonists as they started to make inroads into Africa. Initially the newcomers masked their disdain and respected the authority of traditional leaders. But the portly African leader with a few necklaces of beads, a gourd of liquor and an out-of-date musket soon became a stock figure of fun. When the Great Powers decided to carve up Africa at the end of the last century, chiefs were widely dismissed out of hand. The British proved cannier than their French, Portuguese and Belgian counterparts. For the British, the chiefs were useful local partners, albeit of an unequal status. But any colonial officer would, of course, have been shipped home in a trice if he had dared to suggest a parallel between the House of Commons in Westminster and the popular African custom of holding tribal assemblies under the central village tree, or a link between councils of elders and meetings of the cabinet.

  The arrival of the colonists began a period of relentless decline for chiefs. In one of many ironies of independence, many of the leaders who had endlessly talked of returning Africa to the Africans proved the most abusive of chiefs. In the 1860s Dr James Africanus Horton, a prominent African academic, had drafted a constitution for an independent African state. Taking into account tribal diversities he suggested a confederacy with a parliament composed of two houses, one with traditional leaders, the other of elected delegates. But his counsel went by the wayside in the heady days of independence in the Fifties and Sixties. 'Presidents for life' - possibly the most odious coinage of independence - trumpeted the hereditary rule of Africa's chiefs to justify their own permanence in office. But on the ground chiefs were treated as colonial stooges and relics of a conservative past. At odds with the Marxist and modernist dreams that were the fashions of the time, in swaths of the continent they were stripped of their authority, doomed in some cases to become little more than Scot
tish clan chiefs, relying on baubles to re-create their forefathers' glory.

  It will come as no surprise, however, to anyone acquainted with the tragic failure of the modern African state that many chiefs survived even if their powers had been curbed. A glance at the map shows that a rigid centralized government would be doomed to fail in most of the continent. The distances are too huge and the physical and climatic obstacles too severe to expect central directives to achieve their goal. Respect for chiefs has dwindled in cities as urbanization has dismantled traditional social units. But in rural areas, home to an estimated two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africa's population, traditional leaders are a way of life. Buttressed by Africa's creaky infrastructure and poor communications, chiefs have continued doing what they have always done, applying customary law, resolving land, marital and livestock disputes while leaving politicians in distant capitals to pontificate on the need for reform.

  Every day all over Africa clans and communities gather before their chiefs, usually under a village tree, to discuss their troubles. Some are generals; others perform the service of social workers, magistrates and much more. It is all very fine to talk of individual rights in air-conditioned offices in capitals. But even South Africa, by far the richest and best administered sub Saharan state, lacks the means to implement its modernizing message. Indeed, after the trauma of colonialism and independence, many Africans in rural areas are turning back to their chiefs as bedrock in a chaotic and confusing world.

  When Sierra Leone's central government collapsed in the early Nineties, whom did the villagers turn to for guidance but their chiefs? They resurrected a rag-tag militia of tribal hunters, known as Kamajors, a buccaneering lot who dressed up in colourful uniforms and went on patrol draped with bandoliers, bows and arrows and automatic rifles. The Kamajors consulted witch doctors for spells to ward off bullets. They swore primitive oaths. Their re-emergence was condemned in many quarters as a retrogressive step. A prominent American academic wrote a millenarian article entitled 'The Coming Anarchy', published in February 1994 in Atlantic Monthly, in which he presented Sierra Leoneans' reliance on traditional authorities and 'ju-ju' warriors as a sign of West Africa's social and moral decay. Sierra Leonean friends and indeed Kamajors themselves shook their heads indignantly when I put this theory to them. 'He (the academic) should have been here before the mobilization of the Kamajors,' they muttered. 'That was when we had real anarchy.' It was the modern state that had failed them. The Kamajors may have been little more than an African Dad's Army but they and the chiefs were protecting the people from their own soldiers.