The Africans (10 page)

Somalia, a Moslem country where some girls’ vaginas are stitched together to ensure purity until marriage, was less subtle in its attempts to improve the women’s lot. President Mohamed Siad Barré declared in 1975 that henceforth men and women were equal. Many Moslem scholars in Somalia protested, contending that the Koran held women inferior. Barré settled the argument by executing ten of the scholars and sentencing twenty-three others to prison for up to thirty years. The executions didn’t provide any new opportunities for women, but no one debates the merits of sexual equality in Somalia anymore.

Only two hours by air from the green pastures of Kenya, Somalia is a foreboding land of desert and furnace heat. The people are nomads, lean and tough, and during the
tangambili
(the long, hot months between monsoons) the entire country slips into slumber, and nothing, nothing at all, carries the vaguest hint of urgency.

Great herds of camels plod along the sandy, sun-blanched streets of Mogadishu, the capital, headed for the waterfront and export to Saudi Arabia. Donkeys amble by, ignoring their masters’ whips, and they move wearily past the mosques and beaches where old ladies sit sweltering in black
chadors
that cover everything but their eyes. The donkeys haul carts, loaded with bricks and cement blocks and sometimes grain, and from the rear of each beast hangs a canvas bag to catch its droppings. In the bone-dry fields outside Mogadishu, women stand eight-hour shifts as human scarecrows, perched on rock piles that elevate them above the maize, motionless except for their flapping arms that scare away the birds.

One day I met an old man named Abdullah in a Somali village. He had a wispy beard and watery eyes and, he said, a great loneliness. Two of his three wives had died, and nine of his eleven children had gone off to the city. All but three of his camels had succumbed to drought or the Somali-Ethiopian war that has dragged
on for a thousand years. “There is little to do now but wait for death,” he said.

Abdullah had not followed his children into the city because in Africa the cities are for the young and the able-bodied. They do not absorb the elderly, and if you walk the streets of an African capital, you see virtually no old people. To be poor and old in an African city is not a happy fate, so the aged remain in the rural communities, where the changes are less threatening and the extended family concept makes sure that a helping hand is always near.

Each Sunday, Abdullah’s eldest son, Ahmed, who is a primary-school teacher, drives from Mogadishu to visit his father. Ahmed always brings a few shillings, several cigarettes and a cup or two of maize. Abdullah appreciates the visits but he is puzzled by his son’s life—the Renault car he prefers to a camel, the slacks and sweater instead of flowing robes, the clean-shaven face. And Ahmed’s two young sons are just as puzzled by their grandfather’s customs. After visiting for an hour or so, they always start fidgeting. “When are we going home?” they ask their father, not meaning to be impolite.

Abdullah’s wife prepared some potatoes one Sunday when Ahmed and his children visited. Everyone sat on the ground, outside Abdullah’s mud-and-stick hut, eating the potatoes with their hands from a tin pot. Several chickens and two goats wandered among them. Abdullah seemed not to notice the flies but the children swatted at them constantly.

“Grandfather,” the ten-year-old boy said, “how can you live like this? Why don’t you get a table? You don’t even have the sweet kind of potatoes like we get in the city.”

The old man looked up, hurt, but said nothing. In a moment he dropped his gaze and went back to eating.

T
HE TELEVISION SCREEN
fills with an image of heavenly clouds. A choir of voices swells in the background. The music grows louder, and as the clouds drift apart there emerges the face of a man, dark and handsome, a leopard-skin cap perched jauntily on his head. His gaze is steady and the faintest trace of a smile crosses his lips. The camera zooms in and holds for what seems like a very long time on the face. It speaks of strength, compassion, wisdom, though no words are uttered. What the viewer knows immediately is that this is no mere mortal. No indeed. It is Mobutu Sese Seko, a political survivor whose name translates roughly as “the all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from contest to contest, leaving fire in his wake.” And this is the start of the eight o’clock TV news in Kinshasa.

Mobutu became president of Zaire in 1965, and though lurching from crisis to crisis, has managed to hold together his huge country with its 200 tribes and bloody history of instability. Like most African presidents, he rules as half-god, half-chieftain, combining the techniques of twentieth-century communication with ancient tribal symbolism. By his own decree he has become the embodiment of a homespun philosophy and a national symbol above criticism. He has caused his people great suffering, but at his command they turn out by the tens of thousands to line the parade routes and fill the stadiums and sing his praises. In short, Mobutu is more than a president. He is a cult.

His teachings—called Mobutism—have, by his order, become
the national philosophy. His portrait is the only picture allowed in public places; it even hangs in hotel elevators. His people wear Mobutu badges, pinned over their hearts, and T-shirts bearing his likeness, and Mao-style attire known as a Mobutu shirt. They sing his name in popular songs and recite his sayings (“It is better to die of hunger than to be rich and a slave to colonialism”) in schools and factories. None of this, though, means that Mobutu’s 26 million people have any great fondness for him. They are only doing what they are told to do and paying homage to their chief as they are expected to do. One day, when Mobutu is overthrown, they will tear down his statues, burn his pictures, curse his name and pay allegiance to a new chief.

Although Mobutu’s excesses are extravagant even by African standards, the man himself is not an aberration among his presidential peers. He is but one in a fraternity whose members command respect by words, not deeds. These men represent a curious mixture of European influence and African tradition, and their power is absolute. Their overseas bank accounts are stuffed with pilfered funds, and their loyalties and concerns are distinctly self-centered, often having little to do with national advancement.

Mobutu is, in fact, more a creation of Western capitalism than he is of African custom. Like Africa’s other second-generation presidents, he is the symbol of his country’s sickness, not the sole cause of it. After independence the inherited European systems soon ceased to work and the substitute African systems broke down. Men like Mobutu were left to rule by experiment. They became, in effect, neocolonial governors, operating and living much in the style of their former white masters. The welfare of the African people is generally not much more important to them than it was to the colonial governors.

When Mobutu came to power, Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) was a country on the move. Rich copper mines stood ready for exploring, fertile fields for tilling. By the early 1970s, with copper bringing record prices on the world market, Mobutu, a former journalist and one-time army sergeant, found himself presiding over an unprecedented economic boom. His response was to go on a spending orgy that made economists’ heads whirl. But his priorities were sadly confused; what he sought was not national development, but personal prestige and national grandeur.

He built palaces, eleven in all, and linked some of them to the capital with four-lane highways. He dedicated monuments to himself
and constructed stadiums in which to address his people. He visited New York, admired the World Trade Center and had a small-scale duplication of the buildings constructed in Kinshasa. He bought off his enemies and turned his friends—most of them from his own Gbande tribe—into overnight millionaires. He redesigned the main street of Kinshasa and cut down the lovely old trees in the center divider so the boulevard could accommodate more military vehicles for a parade. He spent $15 million sponsoring the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman world championship fight in 1974. Said Ali: “Zaire’s gotta be great. I never seen so many Mercedes.” And as for himself—well, Mobutu was hardly the penniless army sergeant of a decade ago. He was now one of the world’s wealthiest men, with assets conservatively estimated by Western intelligence sources at more than $3 billion. Mobutu, incidentally, did not have enough faith in his country’s economic future to invest at home; like other African presidents, his fortune was in European banks and European real estate.

Of every dollar coming into Zaire, whether it was in the form of a foreign aid grant or a business contract, Zairian officials took twenty cents off the top for their personal cut. In 1977 Zaire’s coffee crop was valued at $400 million. Because of smuggling and underinvoicing, only $120 million was returned to Zaire’s treasury. The rest ended up in foreign bank accounts held by Mobutu and his Gbande colleagues. Everyone was on the take, and in Zaire you needed to know only two things to survive or prosper: Whom do I see and how much will it cost?

Not surprisingly, from the very beginning Mobutu and his pals were about the only ones excited over the course of developments in Zaire. So, trying to drum up some national spirit, Mobutu launched what he called an African “authenticity” program. “We are resorting to this authenticity,” he said, “in order to rediscover our soul, which colonization had almost erased from our memories and which we are seeking in the tradition of our ancestors.”

He ordered all Zairians to replace their Christian names with African ones, and set the example himself by dropping his first and middle names (Joseph Desiré) in favor of Sese Seko. He changed the Congo’s name to Zaire (meaning “river”), forbade the wearing of Western attire, designed a national uniform that looks like a Mao suit, canceled Christmas and put up his portrait in the churches.

Carrying his zeal a step further, he expropriated $500 million in foreign enterprises and expelled the Asian merchants who had kept
the economy running. Most of the Belgian plantation owners, technicians and businessmen were forced out, too. Mobutu awarded the confiscated businesses to his friends. In many cases the new operators merely sold the merchandise still in stock and closed up shop.

The Zairian people whispered about Mobutu’s misdeeds, but only quietly because his secret police had permeated every level of society. In the U.S. Congress there were debates about Washington’s cozy alliance with the Kinshasa government, but the official line was that Zaire was economically and strategically important, that it was a counterbalance to growing Soviet influence in central Africa and that Mobutu, a staunch anti-Communist, should be supported regardless of his shortcomings. As a result, Zaire in the late 1970s was receiving nearly half of all the aid money the Carter Administration allocated for black Africa. But Washington wasn’t helping a country develop; it was merely buying the loyalty of a chieftain, much in the same way Europe did during the colonial era. It was encouraging the very conditions that could lead to revolution and expanded Soviet influence.

Zaire paid a heavy price for Mobutu’s short-sightedness. Copper prices plunged and the boom of the seventies quickly became the bust of the eighties. Zaire became an economic cripple and a social misfit, and by 1980 Mobutu was experiencing the ultimate humiliation for a black African leader: he turned the running of his country over to foreigners. He invited back the Belgian businessmen whose firms he had expropriated in the 1970s. He brought in Moroccan guards to provide his security. The International Monetary Fund was running the central bank, and Belgian specialists were operating the customs department. Other Europeans were moving into the finance ministry, the taxation office and the transportation system. Mobutu called this new experiment for economic recovery the Mobutu Plan. It was well named because it was an attempt to save Mobutu, not Zaire.