The Africans (21 page)

The acrimonious disputes, though all were solved peacefully, caused much apprehension in Europe, and it was finally decided that the world’s powers had better sit down to determine some game rules for Africa. Delegates from fourteen countries assembled for the Conference of Great Powers in Berlin in October 1884.
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Four months later, on February 26, 1885, they signed the General Act of the Berlin Conference, which provided that any power that effectively occupied African territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish possession of it. The Berlin treaty, along with other accords signed during the next fifteen years, defined “spheres of influence,” which partitioned the continent among European governments and reduced their rivalry for domination. After a flurry of public debate, anticolonialist protests subsided in France and Italy. Conservative governments ruled in England and Germany. Policies of mercantilism were prevalent from Rome to London. Europe was assertive and nationalistic. Its mood favored colonialism.

The effect of the Berlin Conference was to divide, not unify. The colonial boundaries were artificial and illogical. They ignored the cultural cohesion of tribal Africa and separated the peoples of ethnic mini-nations held together for centuries by their common heritage and language. No sensible grouping of people remained.

The Masai, a proud, nomadic, warlike tribe, was split between German-ruled Tanganyika and British-ruled Kenya. And on the other coast, right through the middle of French-speaking Senegal, a narrow strip was inserted that followed the Gambia River from the Atlantic Ocean into the interior; that wormlike intrusion is The Gambia, an English-speaking country smaller than Connecticut. The Portuguese sold trade rights to the river to English merchants, and England later formalized its presence in a treaty with France. The accord divided the Mandingo and Wolof peoples into two colonies with different languages and different European masters.

In 1900, Africans living in Europe convened the First Pan-African Conference in London. The move was mainly aimed at providing a sense of community for Africans abroad, but more important, it represented the first step in Africa’s search for African unity. The two world wars—in which 700,000 Africans fought on the side of
their colonial masters—brought Africa more into the world’s mainstream, and by the late 1940s the continent’s leaders were turning their attention from the concept of Pan-Africanism to independence. A few leaders still hoped that the continent could merge into a United States of Africa, or at least into regional groups of English- and French-speaking nations. But Africa’s new nations opted at independence to recognize the colonial boundaries rather than try to redefine new national entities. The result was a hodgepodge of countries, and today no one talks anymore about combining sovereignties.

Most African leaders will admit privately today that the OAU does not work in its present format and needs to be overhauled if it is to be anything more than a symbolic reminder of Africa’s dim dreams of finding an identity and a unity. First, the charter needs to be amended to allow the OAU the authority to influence and even control African events. Second, the power of the heads of state (who are the OAU’s “supreme organs” and the only decision-making body in the organization) should be diminished and partly transferred to the secretary-general, giving him the strength to act independently on urgent matters. And third, member states must stop hiding behind the mask of unity that dictates that any criticism of an African or an African country is detrimental to the well-being of Africa.

Unfortunately, though, Africa, like the Third World as a whole, expresses itself mainly in clichés and slogans. Most African leaders believe that if they talk long enough and loud enough, someone will listen and take them seriously. But words have lost their meaning. What is said publicly has nothing to do with what is thought privately. People talk at each other, not to each other.

President France Albert René of the Seychelles drew a warm response at the OAU summit in 1979 when he condemned the new constitution and called for penalties against African countries doing business with South Africa. The logic of such statements defies understanding. At the time, 60 percent of the Seychelles’ trade was with South Africa, and René had suspended his own constitution after coming to power in a coup that overthrew a man who had twice defeated him in free elections.

In OAU summit after OAU summit, the delegates quite rightly condemn the injustices of apartheid in South Africa. Yet how much credence can those words have on a continent where more than a
million people have died at the hands of their own governments in the first two decades of independence? How credible can the voice of the OAU be if it expresses outrage at the death of activist Steve Biko in South Africa and utters not a word of protest while President Idi Amin slaughters Ugandans like cattle during an eight-year rule of terror?

“The OAU’s silence has encouraged and indirectly contributed to the bloodshed in Africa,” a Ugandan Anglican bishop, Festo Kivengere, told me. “I mean, the OAU even went so far as to go to Kampala for its summit [in 1975] and make Amin its chairman. And at the very moment the heads of state were meeting in the conference hall, talking about the lack of human rights in southern Africa, three blocks away, in Amin’s torture chambers, my countrymen’s heads were being smashed with sledge hammers and their legs were being chopped off with axes.”

One of Amin’s successors, President Godfrey Binaisa, made the same point in the 1979 summit in Liberia. “There’s no use criticizing others’ human rights records when we are doing the same things,” he said. Binaisa went on to condemn the Central African Empire, where Emperor Bokassa I had recently beaten to death eighty disrespectful schoolchildren, and Equatorial Guinea, where Life-President Macias Nguema Biyogo had murdered one eighth of his country’s population.
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The conference fell silent as Binaisa delivered his address in soft, reasoned tones. Nodding heads bobbed awake. Empty seats filled. Delegates fidgeted uncomfortably. Never before had an African head of state actually condemned by name another African country for violating its people’s human rights. The delegates were shocked and none too pleased. There was no applause when Binaisa returned to his seat ten minutes later. “He is either a drunk or a traitor; I do not know which,” a delegate from Benin later muttered in the corridors. Binaisa was neither, but the speech was to be his last at an
OAU summit. Ten months later he was overthrown.

Perhaps one day the OAU will feel secure enough to admit that more divides its members than unites them, that candor and criticism can be as healthy as they can be disruptive, that countries with differences can still act as one when the common good is threatened. Perhaps Africa and the outside world simply expected too much too soon from the OAU.

As Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia said in his opening remarks at the OAU’s founding in 1963, twelve years before he, too, was overthrown, “The Union which we seek can only come gradually …” No one today would contest the wisdom of that comment.

T
HE
MOST
REMARKABLE
ASPECT
of Africa’s coups d’état is not how many there are, but how small their impact is on the average citizen’s life. They are usually staged in the name of economic reform and social justice, yet they seldom accomplish either. And when the African awakes, turns on his radio and hears the voice of an unknown general saying that the government has just been taken over, he treats the matter casually. Chances are he has heard it all before. He accepts the change in leadership without debate, hopes for the best and does as he is told.

True, countries may undergo a radical shift in political orientation, as happened in Ethiopia when Haile Selassie’s feudal, pro-Western government was toppled by a clique of soldiers who were both Marxist and murderous. But except for the land-reform policies the sergeants instituted, the Ethiopian peasantry would hardly have known there was a new government in Addis Ababa. Even in Uganda, the leadership exchange between Milton Obote and Idi Amin did not greatly affect life in the rural areas, where about 80 percent of the population lives. This separation between city rulers and rural subjects helps explain why Africa does not have revolutions in the sense of popular uprisings. It has coups in which power is merely transferred within an inner circle of cousins, friends and soldiers. The procedure is so routine that the coup d’état has become to Africa what a presidential or parliamentary election is to the West—except that the loser often ends up dead or in prison instead of in comfortable retirement.

In Sierra Leone, army generals brought down the civilian government in 1967; within a matter of months they were overthrown by other senior officers, who in turn were driven from office by a sergeants’ revolt. Benin (formerly Dahomey) endured five military coups d’état, ten attempted coups, twelve governments and six constitutions between 1963 and 1972.
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Junior military officers staged a “coup of conscience” in Ghana in 1979 and executed three former heads of state for corruption in the space of a few days, and never managed to bring about a single lasting reform. No sooner had the firing squads laid down their rifles than the black market reopened, government officials began taking bribes again and smuggling of cocoa to neighboring countries resumed. Fifteen countries in Africa have had one coup since independence, thirteen others have had two or more. By 1983, no fewer than fifty governments had been overthrown in independent Africa, and twenty-eight of Africa’s countries had experienced coups d’état. Most coups were politely welcomed by the African citizenry whose lives were already so difficult that any change was viewed as an agreeable alternative.

It is worth noting that sub-Sahara Africa did enjoy political stability for the first six years of the independence era (1957–1962). But in 1963 the founding president of Togo, Sylvanus Olympio—whom President John F. Kennedy called “one of Africa’s most distinguished leaders”—was assassinated at the gate of the United States embassy in Lome while seeking refuge. Olympio was a political moderate and fiscal conservative. He had managed to invigorate his fledgling country’s agricultural sector, balance its budget and end its French subsidy. But he paid with his life for refusing to increase the size or salaries of his 250-man army. The soldiers were amazed—and so was the rest of Africa—how easily they had gotten their way. A few shots and they were in business. The precedent was set. With
Olympio’s death began a period of continental instability unmatched in the modern world.