The Africans (24 page)

And four months after he had arrived on a fishing trawler, Denard climbed aboard the jet, offered a crisp salute to the gathered ministers and government officials and was gone, a winner at last but still a man without a home.
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Here’s what one man who should know says about the leadership in Africa today: “There are some pretty shameful things going on, in no small part because Africa has such mediocre leadership. Everywhere you look, there are guns and unhappy people. The promises of independence have been a fake in most countries, and I can tell you this: a lot of people in Africa preferred the colonial days. They had more freedom.

“All this shouting about neocolonialism and imperialism is just
silly jargon. It’s an excuse to divert attention from national shortcomings. Black Africa devotes so much attention to South Africa and the apartheid there that it forgets the real problems are right there on its own doorstep.”

The speaker was James (“Just call me Jimmy”) Mancham, who for eleven months and seven days was president of the Seychelles, a peaceful cluster of islands (population 60,000) in the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles from Kenya. He had been overthrown by his prime minister, Albert René, and sixty Tanzanian soldiers and now he was sitting at his usual corner table in his favorite London restaurant, Mr. Chow, sipping white wine with Perrier water and reminiscing about the error of his ways.

“You know, right before the coup two people from the outside—I can’t tell you where they were from—came to me and said that if I didn’t do René in, he was going to do me in.

“I said, ‘What do you mean—
do
René
in
?’ And they said I had to kill him if I wanted to stay in power. That I couldn’t do. I never even held a political prisoner. Maybe that was my weakness, because if you’re going to be president in Africa, you’ve got to be ruthless to survive. If you don’t have the stomach for violence, then you’re going to lose your job, sometimes your life.”

Mancham was living with an attractive Australian journalist in a penthouse near Hyde Park. He was a nonpracticing lawyer, educated in Paris and London, with sufficient business interests back in the Seychelles to live comfortably. (He spoke cautiously about René, not wanting to lose those interests.) In his spare time he wrote poetry—a sort of upbeat version of Rod McKuen—and he spoke in a touching way about his need to share friendship and make people around him happy.

The last time I had seen him was three years earlier, a few days before the coup. The bearded Mancham, then only thirty-seven years old, had entered his office in State House wearing an embroidered Mexican shirt open to the third button, flared slacks and loafers with no socks. A gold chain hung loosely around his neck. He rubbed the night-before’s party from his heavy eyes and winked at us. “I don’t believe in self-denial,” he said, by way of introduction. “All the world leaders would like to live like I do, and if they could get away with it, they would.” He winked again, leaned back in his chair and burst into song: “Tonight, tonight …”

I had to pinch myself to remember that this was a presidential interview.
I had never had one quite like it. But then, I had never met a president quite like Mancham either. He tooled around his little island nation in a blue Rolls-Royce convertible, often in sneakers and shorts and usually in the company of beautiful women from Europe and the United States. Recently divorced from Heather, an Englishwoman, he made no secret of his desire to have a different first lady in State House each weekend—a desire he frequently fulfilled—and he made no attempt to separate his private life from his public one. “Is it a crime to be happy and have fun?” he would ask.

At State House he had put a quick end to the stuffy formalities inherited from the British colonial administrators. He entertained in open-neck sports shirts and filled his mansion that overlooked the Indian Ocean with orchestras and his favorite French wines. Almost every night the house echoed until the early hours with the sounds of laughter and singing.

On overseas trips, which he made with great regularity, he banged out press releases and telexed them back home to the local newspaper. At home, when the disc jockey at the local radio station overslept, he would slip on shorts and sneakers, drive to the station and spend a couple of hours reciting his poetry, reading the news and playing records.

And when a British gossip columnist got wind of an extramarital affair just before his twelve-year marriage broke up, he had an unusual response. He called a meeting of the islands’ political leaders, held up a picture of the model involved and said, “This is the woman. Now, have I done anything wrong?” Apparently his people thought not. In the election three weeks later, his party won thirteen seats; René’s got two.

But if Mancham pursued the good life with gusto, he also worked tirelessly on behalf of the Seychelles. He was a one-man public relations agency, traveling the world and telling anyone who would listen about the beauty of a nation very few people had ever heard of. He opened an international airport. Several luxury hotels sprang up. The tourist industry boomed. Visitors arrived from the distant corners of the world to enjoy this tropical paradise, whose president had a political credo he called “the Singing Philosophy”—just be happy as a person and a nation. His goal, Mancham declared, was to put a boy with a guitar under every palm tree.

“We are a small, quiet country,” Mancham said. “We should not
pretend to be anything else. We do not need great doses of political ideology. Let us just be what we are.”

That, however, is not easy for an African country. Mancham headed off for London in the summer of 1977 to attend the Commonwealth Conference. René bid him farewell at the airport and that night sent his Tanzanian military “advisers” to the radio station. They played Peter, Paul and Mary records, and in the morning René made a simple announcement through a spokesman: Mancham had been overthrown and would not be allowed to return home. The Seychelles was just twenty-three days short of its first anniversary of independence.

René criticized Mancham’s flamboyant life style, saying he spent too much time jet-setting and not enough minding the affairs of state. And perhaps Mancham should have been a good-will ambassador-at-large, not a president, but if any country had an opportunity to achieve the dreams of independence without a coup d’état, it was the Seychelles, Africa’s smallest country in terms of population. Its per capita income of $650 was among the highest in Africa. So was its literacy rate (75 percent for persons between fifteen and thirty years of age), and its life expectancy at birth (seventy years for a woman, sixty-three for a man). The islands were completely free of malaria and the other diseases that have brought such misfortune to the rest of Africa. The people, mostly descendants of French settlers and their African slaves, were racially harmonious. (Mancham himself had Chinese and Creole ancestry.) Their life was so quiet, so seemingly secure, that the Seychelles didn’t even have an army.

“It’s no big heroic deed to take over the country,” Mancham said. “Twenty-five people with sticks could do it.”

Without Mancham the Seychelles might have remained an isolated backwater. But his great failing was naïveté, his belief that his country was entitled to something that did not belong to Africa—an age of innocence. René moved the Seychelles to the left politically and started tampering. He partly nationalized the economy, locked up a few opponents and formed an army, advised by the same Tanzanian soldiers who had turned Uganda into a shambles. The influx of tourists slowed, the economy weakened, the free press died. By 1980 the Seychelles was observing the third anniversary of the coup with a military parade through downtown Victoria, the capital. There were uniformed soldiers, armored personnel carriers and lots of weapons everywhere. The palm trees along the route swayed in
the balmy breezes, and under them were young men who had forgotten their guitars and now carried guns.
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“Look at it this way,” Mancham said when we met in London a few days before he set off to lecture on a Lindblad tour of the South Pacific. “I’m alive. That’s more than a lot of ex-presidents in Africa can say. Besides that, everyone had fun when I was president, and how many ex-presidents can say that?”

The United States Congress in 1816 chartered a white philanthropic group known as the American Colonization Society. Supported by a $100,000 congressional grant, the society began organizing ship caravans of freed slaves who wanted to return to the Africa of their forefathers. Six years later, after being refused admission to Britain’s Sierra Leone colony, the first shipload of freedmen landed near the mouth of the Mesurado River on the West African coast. With them was an agent of the society and a U.S. Navy lieutenant who persuaded the local chiefs, at gunpoint, to sell them the site for $300 worth of assorted hardware, knickknacks and biscuits.

Over the next years 45,000 former slaves—or black pioneers, as they called themselves—returned to West Africa.
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They named their new home Liberia (for “liberty”), and their capital Monrovia (in honor of U.S. President James Monroe). In 1847 Liberia became Africa’s first republic. It had an American-style government, a striped red, white and blue flag with a single star, and a national motto of “The love of liberty brought us here.”

The new settlers adopted the only desirable life style they knew—that of the ante-bellum whites who had ruled them—and
they turned the sixty indigenous tribes into an underprivileged majority, referring to them until the 1950s as “aborigines.” The pioneers and their “Americo-Liberian” descendants became a black colonial aristocracy. They controlled the commerce, ran the government and sent their sons abroad to be educated. The men wore morning coats and top hats, drank bourbon, joined the Masons and formed a secret society called Poro that acknowledged no African heritage. They passed on to their children their American names such as Christian Maxwell, George Browne and Barton Bliss—the army’s chief of staff in the late 1960s was General George Washington—and a member of their True Whig Party was as conservative as any Southern Republican back in the United States.

Even today, urban Liberia seems more like William Faulkner’s South than Africa. The official currency is the same U.S. dollar bills used in New York or Chicago—though they are faded and wrinkled and long ago were taken out of circulation by American banks. Policemen wear summer uniforms discarded by the New York City Police Department, and townships have names such as Louisiana, New Georgia and Maryland. On Sundays, when the strip joints on Broad and Gurley streets in Monrovia are closed, American gospel music fills the radio stations, and the accents in the packed Baptist church on Center Street are distinctly Deep South.

For a long time Africans poked fun at Liberia, disparaging it for adopting attitudes and importing values not in keeping with African traditions. But there was one aspect of Liberia no one mocked: stability. While governments fell like dominoes throughout Africa, Liberia seemed as solid as a rock politically. It was the essence of permanence and internal strength. By 1980 it had known 133 years of stability not marred by a single coup d’état. On top of that, it had become the first black African country to experience a peaceful, constitutional transfer of power when in 1971 President William V. S. Tubman died in office and was succeeded by his vice president of twenty years, William Tolbert. “We can take pride in the fact that this nation stands today as a true example of stability,” the new president said.

Then fifty-eight years old, Tolbert was the grandson of a freed American slave and the son of a wealthy rubber baron. He had begun his government service as a typist in the treasury in 1935. He was an ordained minister and the first black man ever elected president of the Baptist World Alliance, and would later become chairman
of the Organization of African Unity. He called his political philosophy Humanistic Capitalism and he lectured his people in preachy homilies.

“In a world of rising expectations and accelerated change,” he said, “the lofty goals of national destiny still require and demand that Liberians harness and channel all their resources … in order to achieve a sustained upward thrust for ever-escalating rounds of distinction—yea, higher heights.”

Tolbert was a decent man who, though certainly not untouched by corruption and nepotism, ruled more capably than many African presidents and more benignly than most. There were three main problems his administration had to come to grips with. First, Liberia had to be moved more into Africa’s political mainstream. Second, accommodation had to be made with the indigenous Africans who had become increasingly resentful of their second-class citizenship. Third, the economy—based on iron ore, timber, rubber and the registration of the world’s largest ghost fleet of ships
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—had to be buoyed and restructured. Never having been a colony, Liberia had missed out on the benefits of colonialism (schools, roads, hospitals and a trained bureaucracy) as well as those of postcolonialism (huge European grants and foreign investment). The very independence that made Liberia unique had also cost its 1.8 million people dearly.

Tolbert made modest progress on all three fronts. He rode to his inauguration in a Volkswagen Beetle and wore a white safari suit to show that Tubman’s stuffy, top-hat era had ended. He sold Tubman’s $2 million yacht (it was never clear what happened to the proceeds). He brought more people who weren’t the privileged descendants of slaves into the government, started a liberation fund to combat white rule in southern Africa and spoke out against the brutalities of Uganda’s Idi Amin, one of the few African presidents to do so. He introduced universal suffrage, advocated free university education and amended the constitution so he could not run for another term, something no president had ever done on the continent.

“We’ve been so lucky in Liberia,” a businesswoman in Monrovia, Ruth Phillips, told me one day. “This is one of the few places in Africa that has known political stability and has respect for the rights of the individual. If you blame other presidents for what they did to their countries, then you have to credit Tolbert for what happened to Liberia.”