His voice had gradually, unnoticeably become quieter, sympathetic, caressing almost. The sun had turned colour and he was now silhouetted in the circle of brilliant yellow light.
‘Comrades, we come here not as conquerors, even though our methods may seem brutal. Remember that innocents must sometimes suffer so that innocence is protected. We are here to help you, help you rid yourselves of your slavery to the French, free you from the system that has been crippling you for so many generations. If we have been brutal then forgive us. The justice of our guns is the justice of our cause, and the justice of our cause is the justice of our guns. Our fight is just because our cause is just. Equally because our cause is just so is our fight just.’
He paused and placed the megaphone on the ledge in front of him. Few below, looking up at him, their blankets slipping from their shoulders as the sun began to warm them, understood him, and even though he spoke clearly to them in the island’s colloquial patois, his words were foreign. Some, as they had closed their eyes, wondered if they weren’t listening to a recording, the voice so constant, so unhesitating. And the phrases . . . ‘justice and guns . . . fight is just because cause is just’ repeated in a monotone like some dreadful paternoster or their own mouthings of the Holy Mary at Sunday morning mass.
The black guy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and creased his bottom lip with a thumb and forefinger. Then he picked up the megaphone and turned up the volume control. The voice boomed now, distorted, harsh and imperative.
‘Comrades. It has been decided that you should rid yourselves of your colonial attitudes immediately and for that reason you have been evacuated from your houses. How long you remain away from them depends entirely on you. We reason that the root evil of Capitalism is money and where you lived, how you lived, the way you worked and what you earned were the trappings of that evil. We reason that you would find it impossible to comprehend and sympathize with the society we intend for you, surrounded by these things.
‘So during the next few months you will live here in the hangars and work on our projects, obeying our routine just as long as it takes you, one by one, to absorb our reeducation programme.
‘During this time you will consider us friendly tools to help you re-align yourselves. We will help you to be free, we will guide you to that freedom. But let me warn you and warn you once only, that we expect your fullest co-operation. We know the majority of you will respond, some sooner than others. But eventually you will all comply, you will all absorb, you will all change and you will all be grateful.’ He rested the megaphone on his shoulder, and walked slowly ten yards to his right, turned and came slowly back again. Five thousand faces looked up at him in total silence.
‘It has been decided that your island will be renamed. As of this moment your new Socialist Republic will be called Uzania.’
There were murmurs below and the black guy shouted to the soldiers who walked quickly around the perimeter of the crowd shouting the name and indicating with a rifle barrel for this man or that woman to stand and shout out loud the name, over and over again.
‘Now,’ shouted the black guy through the megaphone, ‘we will sing your new name, loudly and proudly. And remember you are announcing the rebirth of a nation.’
Hesitantly, but encouraged by the soldiers’ boots and rifle butts, the thousands stood up and began to chant ‘Uzania . . . Uzania . . . Uzania’ and then following the orders from the megaphone they began a secondary chant: ‘La Lutte Incessante . . . La Lutte Incessante.’ For five minutes they continued until the black guy held up his hand and they were silent again.
‘La Lutte Incessante, remember that. The struggle will continue, the struggle to purge yourselves of the disease that has festered here like leprosy.’
He beckoned to the crowd to sit down.
‘Within the next few days, after your Independence celebrations and the inauguration of your new President, you will be divided into classes to begin your re-education. Your day will begin at six and end at six with an hour’s break for food and water at midday. In the re-education classes you will be taught the philosophy of Marxist-Lenin-ism and the Ideal of the Community. The mechanics of cooperatives and communal farms will be explained to you; the role of the individual in the State will be explained to you and so will the essential Socialist dogma of Collectivism.
‘You will be divided into these classes arbitrarily, sixty to a class and families will be divided, because disorientation is essential to speedy reform. Each class, and listen carefully to this, each class will proceed as fast as the slowest member of it, so your progress will depend upon your class collectively. This will help teach you the duties of collective activity, its benefits and its faults. It will be for you as class members to persuade those who hold you back to move faster forward. But should we discover a class whose majority refuses to co-operate then we shall resort to our own methods of persuasion, methods which we know from long experience never fail.
‘Later, as you progress in your classes and in the work you are allocated to here, you will be interrupted by progressive members of the classes who we consider eligible for promotion as group leaders. They will stop you in your work or study and conduct their own political seminars and these group studies will quickly become part of the fabric of your daily routine. They will be known as dynamization groups.
‘The dynamization leaders, as these progressive Comrades will be called, will also form our Watch Committee, our vigilantes, and they will report back to me on the attitudes of those around them.
‘Your work will be almost entirely on your communal farms once we have decided how the estates should be divided up. No money will be paid because man’s labour is a duty to the State and as things are collectively produced so will they be collectively shared.’
In a slow, very emphasized movement the black guy sat down at the edge of the roof and casually crossed his legs. He looked down at the people below and those closest to him thought they could see him smile. For a minute he sat there. Then in a different voice again, comforting now, he said, ‘You will find all this very strange at first. Disruptive and maybe even a little frightening. But remember that Revolution is the child of sacrifice.
‘The children will adapt first and quickly as children always do. Some of you will cry out and want to die. Some of you may even attempt to escape the island but you all know how impossible that is, so we’ll not even bother to chase you. We will leave you to the sea, to be broken on the coral or eaten whole by the sharks.
‘But, Comrades, believe me, the change I promise you will not be as painful as my words would indicate. I have seen good honest people like you adapt easily in my own country, Cuba, in Angola, in Mozambique, in Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
‘Soon, very soon I promise you, many more countries throughout Africa will follow your example and enter our Socialist paradise, from the Arab north to the racist south. Remember that your efforts to change, your realization of our ideals, will take you into the new order, into the glorious family of World Soviet Socialist Republics.’
Quickly he stood up, legs wide apart and raised the megaphone to his mouth and up to the sky like a bugle. Then he began punching the air with his other fist, emphasizing each word as he screamed them out:
‘Uzania . . . Uzania . . . La Lutte Incessante.’
‘Uzania . . . Uzania … La Lutte Incessante.’
And suddenly as the noise increased and the chanting worked into its own momentum, and the words their own rhythm, here and there in the crowd, young men and women jumped to their feet stiff with excitement, glistening with sweat, flinging their arms into the air and shouting enthusiastically at the black guy above them . . . ‘Uzania. . . Uzania. . . La Lutte Incessante.’
14
It was an imposing room, large, with white emulsioned walls and a ceiling with a moulded plaster cornice of roses intertwined with vine. In the centre of
the ceiling was an old-fashioned electric fan which was preferred to the modem, noisy, cumbersome air-conditioning units that blocked out the light. There were bookshelves on one wall, a large gilt-framed mirror on another and a five-by-five-foot portrait of Lenin on the third.
The floor was made of teak parquet squares darkened red by half a century of beeswax polishing and, raised off the floor by small felt pads to stop the feet from scratching, was a desk.
The desk fitted perfectly the style of the room, large and with an exceptional shine reflecting the narrow beams of sunlight that edged in through the cracks of the shuttered and barred windows. Except for a red telephone at one end and a glass water-jug at the other, the desk top was bare. At each corner were drawers and, under them, cupboards with ornate heavy brass locks, and, carved into the desk’s broad edges, were delicate tiny relief cameos of scenes from African tribal life - a kraal, a woman carrying a pitcher of water, a man with oxen, a boy hoeing, an eagle, a buffalo. It was very obviously an African desk, made of Usimbithi taken from the Chirundu Forests that bordered the Zambesi.
All these things made it something of a special desk. But it was more. It was unique, because on it during the past five years had been laid out maps and plans of a new colonial ambition. On it had been spread out the political blueprints of Russia’s proposed African Empire.
The chair on the shuttered window side of the desk was also deceptively ordinary but like its companion also unique. It was high-backed and the padded seat and arm-rests were made of leather, coarse-grained but supple and cool, cut from the belly of a young cow elephant. The underside of the arm-rests concealed multiple devices that might easily have belonged in the imagination of spy-fiction writers. There was a button that operated the film projection screen which fell silently into position in front of the window; another button set off an alarm and simultaneously locked all the security gates inside the building; another operated the telephone scrambler, making the connection to the red telephone on the desk independent of the main switchboard and ensuring that all conversations on it were private and secure; a fourth amplified whatever was being said by visitors in the waiting-room next door.
The chair had had in five years only one occupant, a man who regulated himself, his office and his many staff with an uncompromising discipline. A man who would frequently spread out on the table Russian maps and plans, who would frequently arrange computer data in neat columns, examine foreign reports and progress memoranda from a hundred different sources and the complicated minutiae of the many Soviet conspiracies in Africa and their casualties.
There he would read and remember the typescripts of recorded conversations on his own scrambled telephone or conversations recorded by radio microphones off people’s telephones in other offices in this and other surrounding countries. In this room had been prepared and launched Russia’s newest ambition, an ambition first born of the Czars and now rapidly taking shape across the entire African Continent.
And Dr Vassily Solodovnikov, Soviet Ambassador to Zambia, High Dignitary of the KGB, from his headquarters in the capital, Lusaka, sitting opposite the portrait of the father of the Bolshevik Revolution, was the man appointed by Moscow to be its Director.
Sometimes he would press another button on the underside of the arm-rest and the face of Lenin would suddenly be transformed by infra-red light into a map of Africa, spanning the northernmost tip of Tunisia to South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Pencil beams of light would, at the touch of his finger, magnify national boundaries, major rivers and cities and, at the turn of a switch, Cuban or French or Moroccan or United Nations troop deployment could be spotted immediately in the continuing wars of Zaire, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia, Somalia and other localized conflicts sponsored by Moscow. He would turn the switch again and change the back projection to show another more involved layout - a series of straight lines drawn across the map spreading out like the spines of a lady’s fan originating from a single source off the East African coast, a tiny island, hardly a fly speck, and dwarfed further by its heavily printed name, UNION.
There exposed on Lenin’s face in various interpretations was the Ambassador’s plan for Communist expansion in Africa.
The fan of lines, a broad half circle, spreading from Union, covered much of Central and Eastern Africa, the tip of each spine being no more than 1,500 miles from its base, or more specifically four hours’ flying time in any one of the Ilyushin transport or bomber squadrons of the Soviet Air Force. Under this tactical umbrella, Cubans and their fellow African Marxists, sharpened for Revolution by Soviet training, could comfortably spread their havoc throughout, as they described it, the ‘tottering political, bankrupt wastelands of Africa, already primed for revolution by a generation of corruption, nepotism, sloth and quasi-Socialist adventures’.
The Soviet plan was simple, ambitious and the product of thirty years of careful conspiracy. It was based on the much-loved Soviet premise that the war against Capitalism was best fought and won not with guns but by default, that is, the West’s own chronic failures adequately to look after its own interests, particularly its African interests. And those revolutionaries who remembered their history were encouraged by a sentence of Lenin’s written in 1920 as part of his thesis on the available routes of Soviet world expansion: ‘The conquest of Europe,’ he prophesied, ‘will pass through Africa.’
The plan was drafted in the late fifties when the colonial powers, Britain, France and Belgium, began quickly uncluttering themselves of their African Empires, and the Politburo, watching from Moscow and encouraged by this sudden haste, predicted that the wind of change would leave a vacuum. They saw a continent of black infants in nationhood, independent but clumsy and untried, stumbling from one coup to the next, failing their democratic experiments, resurrecting tribal hatreds and breaking down colonial boundaries in the name of secession, newly-born but economic and political paraplegics within the first generation. The members of the Politburo, the Junta of the Soviet Communist Party, chaired energetically by party leader Nikita Khrushchev, were excited by the plan and its prospects, and within six months of their historical 5 May Resolution, the blueprint was delivered for their examination and assent. So impressed were they by its vision that they nominated its principal architect, its Director, a young Foreign Service graduate with a reputation for brilliance and thoroughness. And Dr Vassily Solodovnikov became head of Moscow’s Africa Institute.
The plan was code-named ‘Red Saddle’, a flamboyant title for the Russians, but it exactly described their plan. A ‘Red Saddle’ spanning Africa, east-west from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, effectively dividing the continent into three separate entities; Arab-Africa north of the Tenth Parallel, then a central bloc of Soviet Socialist Republics stretching south to the Tropic of Capricorn and then the land mass of the Republic of South Africa, isolated and ready for revolution.
The ‘Red Saddle’ straddled some of the most stagnant black nations in Africa. It also sat on the many of the continent’s wealthiest. Collectively they represented potential mineral wealth without which the economies of the West could not expand, could not, according to some Soviet experts, even survive. Conquest of thirteen countries within this bloc represented a bonanza so huge it could eventually turn Central Africa into an area industrially greater than the United States. The mining data was available.
In Shaba Province, Southern Zaire, in one tiny area twenty miles square, was concentrated 75 per cent of the world’s supply of cobalt; there was also in surrounding mines radium, uranium, copper, gold, cadmium, platinum, germanium, zinc. There were the forests and the oil of Angola, the diamonds and uranium of Namibia, the copper of Zambia, the coal and chrome of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, and the vast Cobora Bassa hydroelectric dam in Mozambique, the largest in Africa, that would provide power for the bloc’s industrial development. And, already built by the British two generations before, was the network of railways east-west, north-south, th
at would provide the essential transport communication.
This then was the prize the Russians suddenly saw for themselves thirty years ago and confrontation with the West was the least of their concerns. They had correctly predicted how long it would take the West to recover from the trauma of de-colonization, a recovery delayed further by the war in Vietnam and the Portuguese Revolution.
No Soviet-backed enterprise is ever slap-happy and the plan slowly and, with only occasional blunders, cleverly progressed and a new germ of conflict was introduced, a new virus distributed, and Marxist ideology was skilfully superimposed on the tired conflict of racialism. Black men who had known only hatred of the white man’s rule were taught how to fight and reject the white man’s Capitalism they’d inherited. Which they did with a little help from their new friends. The Red man had arrived at last in Africa.
All this Dr Vassily Solodovnikov had lived with from the first days of the plan’s conception. Never had he questioned its theme and, being a confident man, never had he doubted its final success. But then in his long career he had never known any other conclusion to anything he had ever attempted.
It was late June and the temperature in the streets of Lusaka reached a freak high and people looked for relief in the shade of their verandahs or acacia trees. But the closed, locked shutters kept the Ambassador’s office cool. By mid- afternoon the shine on the desk top was ever so slightly masked in a thin layer of dust. The chair had not been moved and the elephant-hide arm-rests were pushed hard against the desk’s carved edge. The fan was still and the only movement in the half-light was a fly struggling its last moments in the water-jug. Lenin looked down into an empty room but it would be some days before his face revealed Africa again.
Red Joker Page 16
