Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (104 page)

The most suggestive case of a new African state moving towards totalitarianism was provided by Tanzania. Its leader, Julius Nyerere, was a professional politician of the Nkrumah generation. In the 1960s, when the politicians were bowled over by the soldiers, he contrived to survive by militarizing his rhetoric and his regime. In 1960, in reaction to the Congo crisis, he said: ‘There is not the slightest chance that the forces of law and order in Tanganyika will mutiny.’
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In January 1964 they did so, and Nyerere barely survived with the help of white British troops who disarmed his black army. He then disbanded it and recreated it from scratch as a party army: ‘I call on all members of the Tanu Youth League, wherever they are, to go to the local Tanu office and enrol themselves: from this group we shall try to build the nucleus of a new army.’
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Four days later he announced the appointment of a Political Commissar for the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces.

This conscious imitation of Leninism was accompanied by the erection of a one-party state. In 1961 Nyerere had said he would
welcome an opposition party to Tanu: ‘I would be the first to defend its rights.’
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But in January 1964, with the party youth being reorganized as an army, he appointed a commission to design what he termed ‘a democratic one-party state’, observing that its job was not ‘to consider whether Tanzania should be a one-party state. That decision has already been taken. Their task is to say what kind of a one-party state we should have.’
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At the subsequent election, there was a choice of candidates, but under the same party label (meaning they needed Nyerere’s approval to stand) and they were not free to raise issues.
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The way in which Nyerere, the former pacifist, used militaristic terminology to further his authoritarian state was ingenious and helped to explain his remarkable appeal to the Western intelligentsia, which led one black sociologist to coin the term ‘Tanzaphilia’.
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Defending his suppression of human rights, such as the freedom of speech, of the press and of assembly, Nyerere observed: ‘Until our war against poverty, ignorance and disease has been won, we should not let our unity be destroyed by somebody else’s book of rules.’ But of course such a ‘war’, by definition, could never be ‘won’. Moreover, such a ‘war’ was easily extended from internal to external opponents: Nyerere followed Sukarno’s advice to find an enemy. From the post-mutiny period onwards he was in the forefront of the African leaders who demanded a concerted politico-military campaign against Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories and South Africa. The philosophy of his new authoritarian state was summed up in the ‘Arusha Declaration’ of February 1967, which stated bluntly: ‘We are at war’ and was full of militaristic imagery and sloganizing.
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Of course Tanzania was not at war with anybody. But the fiction was used to justify wartime restrictions and suspension of rights. The Arusha Declaration was an updated and Africanized version of Bandung, and similarly redolent of the higher humbug. Anything ‘inconsistent with the existence of a classless society’ was banned. ‘No one must be allowed to live off the work done by others’: that permitted widespread arrests of ‘capitalists’, especially Asians. The government ‘must be chosen and led by peasants and workers’: that allowed Nyerere to exclude anyone he wished from political activity. ‘Laziness, drunkenness and idleness’ were condemned: a pretext for forced labour, it is necessary for us to be on guard against internal stooges who could be used by external enemies who aim to destroy us’: a pretext for a permanent political witch-hunt. ‘Loitering’ was specifically condemned: a pretext for the sweep-and-search operations beloved of all black African governments, slavishly copied from the South African police-manuals. The machinery for control was contained in the party structure: ‘the ten-house cell’ being the basic
unit, moving up through the ward, the district, the region to the nation. The philosophy behind Arusha was termed by Nyerere
ujamaa
, ‘familyhood’, based upon a mythic past: in our traditional African society, we were individuals within a community. We took care of the community and the community took care of us. We neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men.’
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Ujamaa
was designed to recapture that spirit. Yet in practice it was as anti-family as any other totalitarian doctrine. Offenders were brought before ‘ten-house cell’ courts. ‘Political education officers’ handed out tracts which, for example, stated:

The cell leader has to keep a close watch so as to detect any new faces in his ten houses. When he sees a stranger, he must make enquiries and find out who he is, where he came from, where he is going, how long he will remain in the area and so on. Usually the host reports to the cell leader about his guests and gives all the necessary information. If the leader doubts the stories of these strangers, he must report the matter to the branch officials or to the police.
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Cell-leaders were given the right to detain anyone classified as ‘runaway’ (usually from forced labour) and to order ‘round-ups’ of ‘miscreants’. A favourite phrase was
e serikali yeze kuyesula
, ‘the government know how to unearth’. Indeed, after the 1964 mutinies Nyerere seems not only to have flung off his British democratic trappings but to have descended into the colony’s Prussian past. His party militia learned the goose-step. He introduced sumptuary legislation and sartorial uniformity. In 1968 he decided that the Masai could not be allowed into Arusha wearing ‘limited skin clothing or a loose blanket’ or indeed any kind of clothing termed ‘awkward’ or ‘soiled pigtailed hair’.
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But having banned the traditional African garb, he switched the attack eight months later to ‘remnants of foreign culture’, authorizing the Tanu Youth League to manhandle and strip African girls wearing mini-skirts, wigs and tight trousers.
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So girls were forbidden to wear trousers while men had to put them on: more or less the old white missionary standard. When the Masai complained, they were told God had forced Adam and Eve to dress before he drove them out of Eden.
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But the missionaries had not set political spies in everyone’s house.

Nyerere’s
ujamaa
was merely the most elaborate and sanctimonious of the new authoritarian philosophies developed by the charismatic petty tyrants of black Africa. At the village level it was merely a euphemism for forced collectivization. In Zambia, the same process was termed ‘village regrouping’. Its one-party dictator, Kenneth Kaunda, termed the national philosophy ‘humanism’. This was derived, he said, from the truth that all people are ‘human under the
skin’. But some turned out to be more human than others. ‘Zambian humanism’, he declared, ‘aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in Man … the attainment of human perfection’, by ridding society of ‘negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, individualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, nationalism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, diseases, ignorance and exploitation of man by man’.
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The list gave the state endless scope for authoritarian action. Elsewhere, other ‘isms’ appeared. Ghana produced ‘Consciencism’, Senegal ‘Negritude’. In the Congo, President Mobutu was at a loss until he hit upon the ideal ideology: ‘Mobutuism’.

Once the tyrannies began to appear in the early 1960s, they swiftly graduated from the comparatively sophisticated (and bloodless) despotisms of Nyerere’s Tanzania to resurrected horrors from Africa’s darkest past. The gruesome comedy Evelyn Waugh had fabricated in
Black Mischief
became fact. On ‘Kenyatta Day’, October 1965, the President of Kenya, once termed by the British governor ‘the leader of darkness and death’, now called by relieved white settlers ‘the old man’, held a ‘Last Supper’, to commemorate the meal before his arrest as a Mau Mau terrorist.
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In Malawi, Dr Hastings Banda, known as ‘Conqueror’ and ‘Saviour’, used witchcraft to sacralize his rule. In Zaïre, Joseph Mobutu banned Christian names and re-named himself Monutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, freely translated as ‘the cock that leaves no hens alone’.
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President Bongo of Gabon banned the word pygmy (he was under five feet tall) but kept a bodyguard of giant German ex-Foreign Legionaries, whose delight was to sing the
Horst Wessel Lied
at the main hotel.
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As the 1960s progressed, violence struck the new African élites with increasing frequency. Two Prime Ministers of Burundi were murdered in quick succession. The 1966 Nigerian
coup
cost the lives of the Federal Prime Minister and two of the three regional premiers. Would-be
Caudillos
died too: in the Congo People’s Republic an executed brass-hat was displayed dead on
TV
, his mouth crammed with dollars. Rulers showed an inclination to carry out retribution personally. The President of Benin (formerly Dahomey) murdered his Foreign Minister when he found him in bed with the Presidential wife. Another Foreign Minister, this time in Equatorial Guinea, was clubbed to death by his own head of state.

This last incident was one of the innumerable crimes committed by President Francisco Macias Nguema. In the poorer African states, of which there are nearly thirty, rulers set up one-party states and in theory disposed of absolute authority. But in practice they tended to have little power to influence intractable events or even to arbitrate
tribal quarrels. All they could do was to tyrannize, usually by personal violence. Macias was a case in point. He was born in the Spanish colony in 1924, served in the administration, became President on independence in 1968 and made himself President for life in 1972. During the next seven years he turned the country into a virtual prison-camp; many of its inhabitants simply fled for their lives. A Spanish-mounted
coup
overthrew him on 3 August 1979, and he was tried for ‘genocide, treason, embezzlement and systematic violation of human rights’. His execution was carried out by a Moroccan firing-squad flown in when local troops complained his spirit was too strong for mere bullets and would return ‘as a tiger’.
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The case of President (later Emperor) Bokassa of the Central African Republic was similar. When the French gave the colony independence they put in a hand-picked professional politician, David Dako, as president. Ineffectually he tried to balance the head of the police, Izamo, against Bokassa, who led the army, and Bokassa proved the most agile of the trio.
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From 1965 Bokassa was life President and from 1977 Emperor, holding an elaborate coronation ceremony in December attended by 3,500 foreign guests and featuring an eagle-shaped throne, a crown with 2,000 diamonds and regalia modelled on Napoleon’s coronation. It cost $30 million, a fifth of the country’s meagre revenues. His friendship with the expansive President Giscard d’Estaing of France, to whom he gave diamonds, was not the least of the factors which buttressed his regime. He celebrated his first anniversary by sacking and exiling his eldest son, Prince Georges, for anti-paternal remarks. Two months later, in January 1979, he slaughtered forty schoolchildren who rioted when forced to buy uniforms made in Bokassa’s factory. In April, between thirty and forty more children were murdered in the Ngaragba prison, apparently in Bokassa’s presence and partly by him, a fact established by a commission of Francophone lawyers under Youssoupha Ndiaya of Senegal. When Giscard, alarmed by the publicity, sent out his adviser on African affairs, René Journiac, to ask the Emperor to abdicate, he was whacked on the head by the imperial sceptre. In retaliation Giscard landed troops at Bangui on 21 September 1979, with Dako in their luggage as replacement-president. Bokassa was given asylum in the Ivory Coast at Giscard’s request, and was later condemned to death
in absentia
for murder, cannibalism, ‘intelligence with Libya’ and fraud in gold and diamonds.

The Sékou Touré regime in the Republic of Guinea was little better; Colonel Gadafy’s in Libya considerably worse; both committed the additional crime of exporting their horrors to their neighbours. The most instructive case, however, was that of ‘General’
Amin in Uganda, because it illustrated so many weaknesses of the world system in the 1970s. It was also the most tragic, for it virtually destroyed Uganda, once the most delightful country in Africa. Churchill, who visited it as Colonial Under-Secretary in 1908, called it ‘that paradise on earth’, ‘that tropical garden’. ‘Uganda is a fairy-tale,’ he wrote. ‘You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk and at the top there is a wonderful new world.’
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Uganda’s independence was rushed through in October 1963 in accordance with Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ policy. The Baganda ruling tribe were well-educated and always impressed Europeans by their charm. But the country was in many ways primitive, riven by complex tribal rivalries, racial enmity between Muslim north and Christian south and long-standing sectarianism within the Christian communities. Violent magic was ubiquitous. The Kakwa and Nubi of the Muslim north drank their victims’ blood and ate their livers and believed in the Mahdist ‘Yakan of Allah water’, which when drunk makes soldiers invulnerable. But the sophisticated Baganda kings also mutilated bodies for purposes of politico-religious terror.
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To make matters worse, Milton Obote, the professional politician installed as Prime Minister on independence, was a narrow-minded anti-Baganda sectarian of exceptional administrative incompetence. In 1966 he destroyed the constitution by using Amin to storm the Kabaka’s palace and eject him by force. When Obote, in turn, was toppled by Amin in January 1971, many people greeted military rule with approval as the lesser of two evils.