Who Is Safe?
(See Cover)
Unless I can meet at least some of these aspirations, my head will roll just as surely as the tickbird follows the rhino.
--Julius Nyerere (1961)
The aspirations that accompanied African independence were great indeed and, to an extent, some of them have been realized. From Dakar to Dar es Salaam, gleaming office buildings rise where rust-roofed shantytowns once stood. Hydroelectric dams now hum where only the crocodile hunter passed ten years ago. Africans who a short time ago ran drugstores or taught elementary school debate eloquently with their former colonial rulers in the United Nations, or struggle manfully with the problems of nonalignment in a world increasingly complicated by shifts of temperature in the cold war.
But the tickbird still follows the rhino, and to the extent that Africa's new leadership has not met Africa's aspirations, or avoided the pitfalls left by its colonial past, heads have been rolling. The headlines of the past two months testify that Africa is still a continent of chaos and contradiction. Since the year began, crises have erupted at a rate of one a week, and it seems that in the alphabet of independent Africa, A is for anarchy, B is for bedlam, and C is for coup.
The Fragile Societies. Zanzibar's month-old government fell to a savage anti-Arab coup. A flash fire of mutinies singed the wings of three fledgling East African nations. Border warfare exploded between Ethiopa and Somalia.
Hatreds rooted in a tribal past bloomed into butchery as the Bahutu of Rwanda set out to eliminate their former Watutsi masters. Poisoned arrows zipped through the Congo's Kwilu province in the latest chapter of that sad nation's four-year history. In the Sudan, black secessionists battled the Arab government of Dictator Ibrahim Abboud. And last week, in Gabon, mobs hurled stones and bottles at the French troops who had restored bold, autocratic President Leon Mba to power last month after an abortive, 42-hour coup.
The fragility of Africa's new societies was nowhere more dramatically illustrated than in President Julius Nyerere's Tanganyika. Long considered Africa's most sensible and sensitive statesman, Nyerere had assiduously cultivated unity in his own country, preached it to the continent at large. His immense popularity at home had been based not on wild promises of a golden future but on a clear-eyed appraisal of the hard work that lay ahead. His own sober determination to get on with the job of building a nation seemed to have communicated itself to his people, largely through his motto, "Uhuru na kazi"--"Independence and work." Then, in a sudden, senseless instant, Nyerere's carefully woven fabric of stability ripped down the middle. His army rose against him; riots exploded in the streets of Dar es Salaam. Only by calling in British troops did Nyerere survive. When the smoke cleared, a frightening question remained: If Julius Nyerere could be shaken to the verge of destruction, who in all Africa was safe?
To the Ill-Prepared. One of the great ironies of the 20th century is that independence came most quickly and with the least resistance to the world's poorest, most ill-prepared region. The vast swath of independent sub-Saharan Africa sweeps from Dakar on the Atlantic through the rain forests of the Congo, up and down the great lakes and Great Rift of East Africa, up to the bone-dry horn of Somalia. This 7,800,000-sq.-mi. area could almost contain Red China and the U.S., yet has only 186 million inhabitants. With few exceptions, the 29 nations of the region are abysmally poor, showing a per capita income of less than $100 annually (compared with Latin America's $295). Only 10% of the population can read and write.
Part of the blame for black Africa's current chaotic state lies with its for mer colonial rulers. "Divide and rule" was the watchword, and by encouraging tribalism, the colonial masters repressed the development of modern, nation-welding institutions in order to ensure easy administration. Over this mosaic of tribal loyalties and languages were laid arbitrary "national" boundaries, producing a cartography of chaos, a sort of automatic Balkanization that only heightened the African's confused sense of identity. The huge Bakongo tribe, for example, was split among three vastly different colonial regimes--the French Congo, the Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola.
Guarding the colonial boundaries were armies of black conscript soldiers, whose white officers often encouraged their pride and savagery. Rarely did the colonialists train more than a thin rank of African civil servants, technologists or military commanders. In all the Congo, there were no doctors, one lawyer, 31 university graduates and 84 junior-high teachers when freedom came.
The New Class. The wave of independence that washed over Africa, beginning with Sudan in 1956, was followed almost immediately by a riptide of readjustment. From Ouagadougou to Bagamoyo, the bush dwellers flocked to the cities, ready to swap their tribal heritage for a briefcase and a $30 suit. The cities suddenly bulged at their seams: from a population of 15,000 in 1939, the Ivory Coast's capital of Abidjan has swollen to more than 250,000.
"Africanization" was the cry: turn out the white civil servants and let the Africans run the show. Thus arose Africa's own version of the New Class, comprising everyone with a salary. And the salary, in most cases, had to be just what the Europeans were paid. In Nigeria today, young Hausa tribesmen in pin-stripe suits earn as much as $8,400 a year as government civil servants, live in lovely houses on fashionable Ikoyi Island in Lagos. In Dahomey, fully 60% of the country's budget goes toward paying government personnel.
The strain is, of course, too great. Last year Senegalese Poet-President Leopold Sedar Senghor--once the prince of Paris' black boulevardiers--was obliged to tell the nation that Senegal could unfortunately no longer afford to pay civil servants housing and winter-clothing allowances or finance vacation trips to France. But Senghor has never implemented his decree, and the ridiculous subsidies remain. And he did not even dare suggest a cut in basic pay, for fear of another upheaval like the one he put down 15 months ago, when a coup was led by his old friend, Premier Mahmadou Dia, and supported by some ministers, the territorial guard and the gendarmerie.
"No Help Needed." Africa's New Class demands jobs, and as a result bureaucracy proliferates. In the twelve governments of former French Africa alone, there are perhaps 200 ministers, where once 25 were enough. This pressure can lead to absurdities. In order to mollify his own youthful job seekers, Niger's President Hamani Diori last December ousted 16,000 Dahomeyans--the intellectual cream of West Africa --thus depriving himself of half his teachers and three-quarters of his Finance Ministry technical staff.
Too often, despite a government's best efforts, jobs are simply not to be found. In the Cameroun port town of Douala, shop and office windows are festooned with signs reading "No help needed." Secondary-school graduates are willing to work three months without pay for a chance at a job. Young men as diligent as that will eventually get ahead--even if they have to storm the presidential palace, burn a minister's Mercedes or join the Union des Populations Camerounaises--a rebel group that has conducted the longest, bloodiest rebellion in Africa, a seven-year war that has cost 50,000 lives.
The Game Is Je Souffre. Almost everywhere, the rural African has fared less well than his city brother, and bitter jealousy is the inevitable result. In the Congo's Kwilu province, Pierre Mulele has capitalized on this resentment and, with the aid of a Communist guerrilla-warfare manual, made his disillusioned Congolese rebels, the Jeunesse, a potent weapon against the government.
Nowhere has independence been so agonizing as in the Congo. After the Belgians left, tribal warfare and secession sent the once promising young nation slithering almost instantly back toward the Stone Age. Today, in Katanga's Elisabethville, once a delightful, well-fed little city, meat hunters sell rats to hungry housewives. Congolese, from children to Cabinet ministers, play the game of je souffre, their long faces proclaiming their suffering even while their hands reach out for matabich--the bribe. The bribe rarely works for long. Says one would-be fixer with frank wistfulness: "You can't buy these guys. All you can do is hire them for the afternoon."
The Congo's pathetic struggle to build some kind of parliamentary government has been a miserable failure. Last September, confusion was so great in the Parliament that it was prorogued. This spring the Congolese hope to vote for a new Parliament--with no great expectation of improvement. After the election, the United Nations troops that have held Premier Cyrille Adoula's government together will pull out. Already the vultures (including Mulele) are circling, and many feel that Adoula may be the Kerensky of Africa.
Victim to Dry Rot. Another source of African unrest has been the extravagance and economic naivete of some of its new leaders. The Brazzaville Congo's Abbe Fulbert Youlou, a Roman Catholic priest turned President, ordered mauve cassocks from Dior, quaffed champagne and built himself a luxury hotel. Meanwhile, his country's timber-based economy fell victim to dry rot. Crowds of New Class labor union members, with the aid of the army, politically defrocked him last August. A similar fate befell Dahomey's President Hubert Maga, who built himself a $3,000,000 palace and shrugged off charges of "squandermania" until his countrymen last December gave him the boot.
But austerity can be just as dangerous. No West African leader was more reluctant to part with a franc than Togo's strapping Sylvanus Olympio. Then one night he woke to find his house aswarm with mutinous soldiers. Next morning he was found dead near the U.S. embassy, with lizards scuttling near his body. The soldier who shot him said he had not meant to kill. It was just that the troops wanted a bigger army.
The happiest combination of political freedom and national progress on the continent so far has occurred in Nigeria. There, three clearly defined and potentially antagonistic tribal regions have been melded into a smoothly working two-party federal government under stolid Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. Since 1950, Nigeria's gross national product has grown steadily. It now has five universities where it had none in 1947, and its primary-school enrollment has more than tripled (from 820,000 to 2,600,000) in the same time. But Sir Abubakar has his problems. Nigeria's last official census was in 1952, and since not only political but economic power hangs on the numerical balance between the feudal north and the more progressive south,
Nigerians want desperately to know how many of which are where. Two weeks ago, "preliminary" results of last fall's census were released, showing an astounding 64% jump, to 55.6 million people. Since the main "increase" came in the politically dominant north, suspicious southerners cried foul. Riots broke out, and more than a thousand students in Ibadan chartered buses and headed for Lagos to demonstrate. They were turned back by steel-helmeted cops with tear gas.
That sort of regional trouble is perhaps only to be expected in a huge, tribally fragmented nation like Nigeria. But what happened earlier this year in Tanganyika, blessed by a minimum of tribal conflict, came as a jolt to all the world.
Suited for Freedom. Tanganyika came to independence in 1961 no better off economically than any other African nation. Though huge (362,688 sq. mi.) and harshly beautiful, the country was not wealthy. Average income was $55 a year, and fully half of its exports were in three crops: sisal, cotton and coffee. Tanganyika's mineral wealth was scanty, consisting of some gold and the Williamson diamond mine near Lake Victoria in the north. With its game-thick Serengeti Plains aswarm with trophy heads, and soaring Mount Kilimanjaro to attract all the Hemingway buffs, it had tourist potential.
But Tanganyika had three things working for it that made the country seem ideally suited for uhuru. Of its 10,000,000 population, 98% is African. And although the people are divided into 120 separate tribes, the majority are of Bantu stock, and all share the Swahili lingua franca. Thus, unlike neighboring Kenya and Uganda, Tanganyika has no basic conflicts between rival tribes or kingdoms, nor had it a large white-settler population to fight against independence and give rise to black Mau Mau-type terrorism. What whites there were mostly stuck to the cool, green coffee-and-banana highlands.
Secondly, Tanganyika has had no bitter experience with colonialism in recent years. Its brief encounter with the Germans is almost forgotten today. In 1884, the fast-moving explorer Karl Peters swung through Tanganyika and in six weeks made treaties with twelve chiefs to make Tanganyika a German territory. Harsh administrators, the Germans put down rising after rising, the most serious being the Maji-Maji rebellion in 1905, repressed the people so cruelly that any colonial power to follow could only have seemed gentle by comparison. After World War I, when the British threw the Germans out, Tanganyika became a British mandate, first under the League of Nations, then the United Nations.
Up from Tribalism. These two preconditions needed a third, however, to make Tanganyika a successful independent state. That ingredient--leadership--is provided by Julius Nyerere. A slender, soft-eyed man with a Chaplinesque mustache, Nyerere is the antithesis of most African leaders. Where others affect high-flown nicknames like "Redeemer" (Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah) or "Lion of Malawi" (Nyasa-land's Kamuzu Banda), Nyerere is content to be known as Mwalimu--Swahili for teacher. Where other leaders use their high-powered, government-owned radios for propaganda messages, Nyerere uses his to broadcast casual eco nomic lessons. Recently he translated Shakespeare's Julius Caesar into Swahili, and although after Caesar's assassination Cassius shouts "Uhuru, uhuru!", Tanganyika's Julius was careful to avoid equating himself with Rome's.
Julius Kambarage Nyerere was born 42 years ago near Musoma, on the shores of Lake Victoria, into a pagan, tribal world. His father was a chief of the Zanaki, a small (40,000 members) Bantu tribe that filed the teeth of their young and fought the fierce, blood-and-milk-drinking Masai. Herding goats as a boy, Julius, at twelve, wrapped himself in a piece of trade cloth and hiked off to begin his education.
At Tanganyika's Tabora Secondary School, he got good grades and was converted to Roman Catholicism, but never made "head boy"--his teachers found him not enough of a disciplinarian. At Uganda's Makerere University, he won first prize in the regional literary competition. His essay: an application of John Stuart Mill's arguments for feminism to the tribal societies of Tanganyika. After three years of teaching biology, he won a scholarship to Edinburgh, and in 1949 became the first Tanganyikan ever to study at a
British university. There he whipped his white friends at word games, studiously subdued the crossword puzzles in the Scotsman, and whetted the "politics of complaint," which would lead him to the presidency of Tanganyika. Then he went home.
Forging a Party. On July 7, 1954, Nyerere converted a social club into the Tanganyika African National Union. TANU was his from then on. Off into the back country he went to recruit members and cut tribal bonds. Wearing green bush shirts, slacks and leather sandals, waving an ivory-topped cane and chain-smoking Clipper cigarettes (he has since stopped), Nyerere began touring Tanganyika in a battered Land Rover. "I still remember the license--DSK 750," he reminisces. "We had to push so often over the mudholes that I will never forget it." A low-key speaker who never talked down to his audiences, Nyerere interlarded his membership pitches with dry humor and nonviolent philosophy. Yet the British considered him a dangerous rabble-rouser, as they did anyone pushing for ii/ntru. Nyerere also courted danger with his own people. "I will never be a member of any government that discriminates against non-Africans," he said--and meant it.
By 1960, TANU was 500,000 strong and unquestionably the best-organized party in East Africa. In elections that summer, party candidates won 70 of 71 seats in the Legislative Council, and a month later Nyerere was asked to form a government. By December 1961, the country was fully independent. A torch was lighted on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, and Julius Nyerere became the first East African leader to have achieved uhuru.
Rumbles of Disorder. The crises that Nyerere had always expected developed quickly. First came the threatened resignation of 600 British civil servants, desperately needed to run the government until Africans could be trained to replace them. They were angry because their "golden handshake"--the severance pay of up to $28,000 a man--could not be paid in lump sums. Nyerere's government simply could not afford it. Turning on the earnest charm that had welded his party, he talked 300 of the British into staying on. But then another disaster struck. Droughts and floods in 1962 ruined the maize crop, forcing 500,000 Tanganyikans onto the famine rolls, gobbling up $6,000,000 earmarked for national development. Nyerere already had help from Britain and the World Bank, including a $67 million three-year plan designed by his British Finance Minister, shrewd, brilliant Sir Ernest Vasey. Nyerere also instituted a "selfhelp" program under which Tanganyikans donate one day a week to urgently needed projects.
So far so good. But then--only 44 days after independence--Nyerere's well-tuned ear caught rumblings of dissent within TANU. With uhuru an accomplished fact, party discipline was crumbling. Says former Governor General Sir Richard Turnbull: "TANU was like a 100-horsepower engine which had been building up its power before independence, then had the load lifted." Nyerere feared that TANU might turn against him. So he resigned.
Back to the Bush. Turning over the prime ministry to his reliable, mild-mannered deputy, Rashidi Kawawa,
Julius jumped into his Land Rover and began beating through the bush. In flyblown Indian Ocean towns and sun-seared mud-hut villages in Chaggaland, he recruited new grass-roots leaders and urged participation in the self-help program.
By mid-1963, the government's $250,000 investment in self-help had yielded an estimated $2,500,000 in product: 10,400 miles of roads, 166 clinics, 368 schools, 267 village halls, 308 clams and 515 wells. At one tiny village, a man dug up 500 ant-eaten pound notes and brought them to Nyerere, who promised to build a bank on the very spot.
Nyerere's self-exile actually served as a long election campaign. In November 1962, with Tanganyika becoming a republic, he ran for President and took 98% of the 1,100,000 votes cast.
Loading the Rifles. Nyerere had always insisted on equality for all races in the new Tanganyika--for whites and Arabs as well as for the black majority. However, during his first two years, he had compromised to the extent of implementing an Africanization program aimed at filling government jobs with Africans. Then last January he made an announcement that ultimately reverberated up and down the length of East Africa's Great Rift. "It would be wrong of us to continue to distinguish between Tanganyikan citizens on any ground other than character and ability," he told the nation. "We cannot allow the growth of first-and second-class citizenship." Africanization, he said, was dead. For this bow to racial equality, he was immediately and savagely denounced by trade union leaders in Dar. Silent but more ominous was the reaction of the Tanganyika Rifles, the nation's 1,600-man army. Still commanded by British officers two years after uhuru, the African soldiers interpreted de-Africanization to mean that they would not gain the promotions they had been promised. Locked and loaded with resentment, the Rifles needed only a touch to unload through the muzzle. Four days later, on the tiny island of Zanzibar, 221 miles off the East African coast, a finger began moving toward the trigger.
Shaken Awake. Led by John Okello, a muscular, messianic Ugandan house painter turned cop, a handful of rebels armed with a few automatic rifles, pangas, and bows and arrows stormed the police armory, grabbed the cable office, radio station, police and government headquarters, and toppled the Arab-dominated Zanzibar Nationalist Party government. Behind studded doors and on clove plantations, the heavily armed Arabs fought on for days. Before the bloodbath ended, at least 500 Arabs were dead, while some reports counted the casualties as high as 5,000. Into the presidency came Afro-Shirazi Party Leader Abeid Karume, who claimed that he had really sparked the revolt. Okello denied it. However, last week Okello was twirling a cane in Dar es Salaam, and reports had it that he was no longer welcome in Zanzibar.
Whatever the motives and machina tions of Zanzibar's coup leaders, it is clear that the violence and ease of accomplishment with which their revolution was carried out flashed a mutinous impulse across the Zanzibar Channel. At 3 a.m. on Jan. 20, Julius Nyerere was asleep in the second-floor bedroom of his Moorish-style State House in Dar es Salaam. Suddenly security men shook him awake, told him that mutiny had erupted among the battalion of Tanganyika Rifles stationed at Colito Barracks outside Dar. Fearing that, like his friend, Sylvanus Olympic, he might be killed to no purpose, Nyerere went into hiding. Had he remained in public view, if only to negotiate with the mutineers, the general rioting and the 17 deaths that followed might not have occurred. Today Nyerere admits as much. But he did accomplish the most important thing--he kept himself and his government alive.
After his hard-driving Minister of External Affairs and Defense, Oscar Kambona, had negotiated a settlement with the rebels, Nyerere emerged, toured the city to the relief of all, but made no mention of disciplining the mutineers. Next day, to test his control over them, he ordered the First Battalion to put on its dress uniforms. They refused. Negotiations over the pay increase were breaking down and the soldiers were growing restive. Their ringleaders had been meeting with the leaders of the Tanganyika Federation of Labor, and there were reports that a general strike was being planned for the weekend.
Nyerere still refused to act. Finally, Kambona convinced him that he must call for help. Both Kenya's and Uganda's Prime Ministers, Jomo Kenyatta and Milton Obote, had swallowed their anticolonial pride and called in British troops when the spirit of mutiny flared among their Riflemen. Reluctantly, Nyerere followed suit. It took only 60 Royal Marine Commandos to rout the mutineers.
On Beyond Anarchy. Once the British presence was an accomplished fact, Nyerere got tough. He dismissed the entire First Battalion, fired 500 of his 5,000-man police force suspected of aiding the mutineers, and disbanded the labor federation, arresting 200 of its ranking members. Then, safe but sorry, he cast about for ways to fend off potential African criticism for his calling in of the British.
His solution was to call a special meeting of the Organization for African Unity. This fledgling Pan-African grouping of 33 states was created last May at Addis Ababa, where Emperor Haile Selassie sponsored the latest moves toward continental unity. The O.A.U. is an amalgam of two earlier unity attempts that had failed (the Casablanca Pact and the Monrovia Group), and with its insistence on African solutions to African problems, it listened with sympathy to Nyerere's story, effectively absolved him of his sin. Shaken but still alive, Julius Nyerere set out to rebuild his army and his popularity.
Haven for Rebels. What does Nyerere's experience portend for the future of emerging Africa? One of the few heartening lessons in his brush with disaster was the O.A.U.'s willingness to forgive him. Nyerere, after all, is a leader in African unity, permits his capital to be used as headquarters for the O.A.U.'s Liberation Committee, whose aim is to crack the white grip on southern Africa. This is one of the few issues around which all black Africans can rally. Dar es Salaam (Arabic for "Haven of Peace") further belies its name by serving as the home base for at least seven African insurgent parties dedicated to eradicating colonialism and apartheid from the south. Largest is the Mozambican Liberation Front--Frelimo--which maintains a military training camp 40 miles northwest of Dar, where some 500 young Mozambican refugees receive weapons training with rifles supplied by Algeria.
But it seems clear from the events of recent months that neither these rifles nor any others will be used against white Africa in a major assault for some time to come. The new independent nations have too many problems at home. The war against white Africa will be fought, for the time being, with boycotts and propaganda, and through such limited guerrilla-type actions as Holden Roberto's in Angola. There is, of course, the continuing struggle against Africa's whites in the corridors and debating rooms of the United Nations, where sub-Sahara's independent countries--fully 28% of the General Assembly--bring unrelenting pressure to bear.
Voice of the Mammies. What institutions are emerging from the new Africa? Whether Western political scientists like it or not, the one-party state seems likely to be the pattern in most of Africa for the foreseeable future.
African leaders argue that, to a degree, it provides just the continuity from colonialism that the new nations need.
Colonial administrators found it easier to make major decisions without consulting the populace. In the same way, one-party leaders like Nyerere and Nkrumah insist that they cannot afford the luxury of dissent and opposition. Many argue, by way of rationalization, that the one-party state is a modern adaptation of traditional tribal society, in which the individual was free to ex press his viewpoint under the baobab tree, but had to accept the tribe's (or chief's) decision once rendered. And indeed a certain amount of discussion filters up from the ranks to the top in parties like TANU, even in Nkrumah's monolithic Convention People's Party. Osagyefo recently told a visitor that he not only listened intently to the dissenting opinions of Ghana's "market mammies" but accepted them with alacrity: after all, the mammies control much of the nation's retail trade, hence hold much of its cash. The situation is familiar to any Madison Avenue man working on a consumer-goods account.
What Nyerere's near disaster demonstrated more pointedly than anything else is that even the leader of a strong one-party state cannot enforce his decisions so long as his army disagrees. For the most part, Africa's armies are small and politically uninformed. But political awareness seems to be developing. Nyerere's solution to the problem has been to rebuild his army with TANU Youth Wingers, and already he has thousands of volunteers. This, he claims, will both keep the nation's youth busy and provide Nyerere with a body of troops that see things through TANU's --and therefore his--eyes. If political awareness must come to his army, he would rather it be his brand of aware ness. The Ivory Coast's President Felix Houphouet-Boigny has perhaps the easiest solution to the problem: since the Ivoriens have no enemies to fight, he has simply taken their guns away. Even the cops in Abidjan carry nothing more deadly than cigarettes and money in their holsters.
An old saying has it that in Africa "there is no past, no future, only the present." For the time being, the present means ambition and anarchy, poverty and political intrigue. Upheaval will follow uhuru for some time to come. Slowly, gradually, economies will harden, a middle class will emerge, political activity will coalesce into forces that can be accommodated by democratic techniques. Then, and only then, will any African be safe.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.