The Africans (22 page)

Africa has no tradition of government such as, say, China has had, so as often as not the coups lead to a complete breakdown in effective administration. Why, then, does Africa keep having coups when the results are so seldom positive? Part of the reason is historical, entwined in the same forces that stymied nationalistic causes: tribalism, linguistic diversity, colonial boundaries, unsteady economic foundations. And part is contemporary, reflecting the character of the men at the top:

In their insecurity, African presidents closed the safety valve of public expression. Dissidents and creative thinkers were killed, jailed or exiled. Newspapers and radio stations were brought under government control. People who did not pay homage to their president, no matter how misguided his ways, were considered traitors. Discontent built, tension rose. Each country became a sort of pressure cooker. There was no escape for the steam. And when the pressure became too great to contain, there was an inevitable explosion.

Colonialism ensured stability. It was the symbol of continuity, of law and order. When that era ended, there was a void with no strong central authority, except perhaps the military. Uneducated, ambitious men stepped into the vacuum, and the only power base they could immediately establish was built on the strength of the gun. In civilian countries the army became, in effect, the opposition party, waiting in the wings for an opportunity to test its theories on how to run a government.

The European powers, as I mentioned earlier, imposed on Africa a political system that did not work. Parliamentary democracy was a luxury for Africa’s young, uncertain governments. When the inherited systems broke down, neophyte presidents disposed of the Old Guard, but they had not thought out any sensible substitute. They tried to write new rules without understanding the old ones. The first coup usually settled nothing; it only led to another.

A man who gains power in Africa does not surrender it voluntarily. In the West a president can be impeached or voted out of office, a prime minister can be brought down by a vote of no confidence. Although some countries such as Kenya do have “no confidence” provisions in their constitutions, no such tradition of succession exists in Africa. Presidents become life-presidents (one even became emperor). However overdue their departure, they stay
until they are killed or driven from office, believing that, as with a village chief, their right to rule is inalienable.

There are three specific coups d’état, each representing a different dimension of how and why governments are overthrown, that deserve a closer look. Two of the coups symbolize the extremes: in the Comoros the horrors preceded the coup; in Liberia they followed it. The third coup, in the Seychelles, comes closer to the norm, for it was a harmless, foolish affair that need not have happened at all.

The Comoros islands are only a speck in the Indian Ocean, four volcanic islets that, from the window of an airplane, look no bigger than icebergs, lost and adrift in the choppy seas. The islands are very beautiful and very poor and are known primarily, if at all, for their
ilang-ilang
, an exotic flower whose extract is widely used in French perfumes. But except for the
ilang-ilang
, the fine sandy beaches and the soft ocean breezes, the Comorian people can count few blessings. Resourceless, destitute and disease-ridden, their island republic is the waif of the French colonial empire, the stepchild of an independence movement that promised so much and delivered so little.

Potable water is still a luxury on the islands, collected during the rainy season in masonry cisterns. Illiteracy among the 400,000 Comorians tops 90 percent. Bananas make up 20 percent of the people’s caloric intake, and half the children die before the age of five. There are only 14,000 paid jobs in the entire country, and it was not until 1976 that the Comoros manufactured its first farm implement, a wooden hoe. The islands had nine doctors and no working telephones when I arrived in Moroni, the capital, on a rattling DC-3 from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, four hundred miles away. The only dentist had left two years earlier, and an old travel guide I picked up in my hotel—where I was the only guest—advised: “If you fall seriously ill on the Comoros, fly to Paris.”

The Comoros—comprising only 693 square miles, one-sixth the size of Yellowstone National Park—declared unilateral independence from France in July 1975, thus becoming a republic and, later, the 143rd member of the United Nations.
^*
France retaliated
by promptly withdrawing its $18 million annual subsidy and five hundred technicians. Disaster was inevitable. Twenty-eight days after the French flag was furled, the Comoros had its first coup d’état. Attempted coups followed in each of the next three years, including one masterminded by the president’s press attaché. People died, the prisons were filled, paranoia gave way to a national insanity. The
période noire
, as it became known, had begun, and what happened next was as bizarre as anything modern Africa has ever seen. It was a drama whose cast of characters included a demented president, a white mercenary looking for a winning side after twenty-three years of fighting for losers, and two wealthy Comorian exiles, one of them an ex-president, plotting their return to the islands from the seclusion of a penthouse apartment in Paris.

Ali Solih had seemed normal enough when he first came to power in a coup six months after independence. He was thirty-nine years old then, balding with a slight paunch. He had three attractive wives and he gave each her due share of attention. He was an atheist and a moderate drinker, despite his early Moslem upbringing, and was known as something of an idealist, frequently extolling the virtues of the Chinese revolution. His record as a senior civil servant in the ministry of agriculture was undistinguished. On the surface at least, there was nothing to suggest that this mild-mannered, bland government official would soon be transformed into the Madman of Moroni.

“Do not believe all you hear about Ali Solih; my son was a good boy,” his seventy-nine-year-old mother, Mahamouda Mze, said one afternoon, receiving me in her tiny tin-roofed home a few miles from Moroni. Her living room was dark and cool behind the frayed blankets she had nailed across the open windows. An old Marconi radio sat in the corner, useless because her village had never had electricity. She had placed a rear-view auto mirror and a vase of plastic roses on a table near the radio for decoration. She lit her kerosene lamp, the blazing sun outside invisible in the blackened chamber she seldom left.

“You know,” she said, “Ali would come every month to bring me food and a few francs, and he was always talking about how he wanted to do something for his people. He said Communism was best for a poor country like this. He said experiments with it failed in Tanzania and all over Africa, but he was going to make it work and all the world would look to the Comoros.

“When he made the coup, I was scared. I did not want him to be president because I knew he would make many enemies.” She paused, taking a sip from the warm Coca-Cola bottle she held. Then she went on, “Now you tell me something. How could this thing happen? What went wrong?”

Clearly, some great change came over Ali Solih. Some say it was the drugs and alcohol that changed him. Others believe he had a mental breakdown. Whatever the reason, the pressures of the presidency far exceeded the limits of his abilities. His fuzzy notion of national goals grew dim in the glow of personal power and the pleasures it could bring. The men with the brains to think or the courage to speak went to jail or to their graves until only the sycophants were left. The Comoros became Solih’s personal toy, and like a child with a new Christmas present, he played and experimented and manipulated, ending one game and starting another whenever he became bored.

Boasting that he had “changed the people’s mentality,” he put together his own parody of the Chinese revolution. He fired the 3,500 members of the civil service and turned the government over to teen-age dropouts, the group he could most easily indoctrinate. He lowered the voting age to fourteen, burned 134 years of French administrative records and declared himself a prophet. He closed the hotels (“Foreign influence corrupts,” he declared) and nationalized everything from the taxi cabs to the bread shops. He brought in Chinese advisers to guide him and Tanzanian soldiers to protect him. He denounced religion as a curse and forbade Moslem women to wear black veils. Once he stormed into a mosque and raged at the worshipers, “Go ahead. Call on God! See if He answers.”

For days at a time he refused to leave his white stucco palace. He divorced his wives and kept steady company with a bevy of young girls in his second-floor bedroom, drinking whiskey and smoking hashish and watching movies on his 16mm projector until the sun came up and the light of morning calmed his nerves. During the day he popped Valiums. His eyes grew bloodshot, his mumbled words became incoherent.

Through the streets of Moroni, past the little whitewashed homes and the clusters of empty shops and the shuttered high school, roamed the youth brigade that Solih had sanctioned. Its members were illiterate toughs, and the so-called revolution—of which they had not the vaguest understanding—had bestowed upon them their first taste of authority. They had no ideology other than the power
of the gun, and they killed and terrorized and raped. Petty criminals and “counterrevolutionaries” were marched through the narrow, winding streets, dressed in burlap grain sacks, their heads shaved and their faces painted with white stripes. A member of the youth brigade followed each procession with a megaphone, announcing the prisoner’s alleged crimes to the Comorians who lined the way.

One such procession was forming at the airport at the precise moment a West German diplomat arrived in Moroni from Madagascar on a chartered flight. He had come to discuss a large agricultural grant the Bonn government was considering for the Comoros. He watched bewildered as the prisoners were herded and whipped into a single line. Not having been met by any Comorian official, he caught a ride to Moroni with the driver of an old French army truck. He entered the ministry of foreign affairs, where he had been expected, and found himself in consultation with two ranking officials. They were about seventeen years old, and of course, neither could read or write. “It was a very astonishing exercise,” the diplomat recalled. He was airborne within the hour. There was no further mention of the German grant.