Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (101 page)

The collapse of black Africa’s first and model state into military rule was a distressing blow, more particularly since its huge near-neighbour, Nigeria, had itself lapsed from constitutionalism into militarism the month before. Nigeria’s population made it by far the most important of the black African states and, during the 1960s, the development of oil made it economically the most secure. It, too, had emerged from a long process of preparation for self-rule, beginning with the first elected Africans in 1922–3. It was the masterpiece of Lord Lugard’s ‘dual mandate’ system, the most conscientious and high-minded exercise in colonial administration ever devised. Internal tension between the dominant tribes, the Hausa and Fulani of the north, the Ibo of the east and the Yoruba of the west, long antedated British sovereignty. Despite the most elaborate efforts to devise a fool-proof federal system, they survived it. Nigeria’s history, indeed, illustrates the essentially superficial and ephemeral impact of colonialism. A far bigger impact, indeed, was made by the arrival of nationalism, in its Afro-Asian form, with its emphasis on the ‘rights’ of each ethnic community. If all these had been conceded, Nigeria would have had to be a federation of some 200 states.
¹⁹
The assertion of ‘rights’ to the point of fracture made Nigeria unworkable by the normal processes of democratic debate and
compromise. Breakdown nearly came in 1964, only four years after independence, and finally in 1966; and military rule in turn led to the secession of the east, which termed itself ‘Biafra’, on 30 May 1967, followed by two years’ civil war and immense loss of life.

This tragic conflict divided Africa. Only Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon and the Ivory Coast backed Biafra. The other African states supported the Nigerian military regime, most of them because they feared similar secessions which they calculated would work to the advantages of the ‘imperialists’. But if Balkanization was an imperial aim, why had the colonial powers striven so hard to create unitary states or, that failing, viable federations; and why did all the great powers (as it happened) support Nigeria against the secessionists, the chief reason why Biafra was crushed? There were no answers to these questions. The political philosophy of African nationalism was based upon a theory of colonialism which was not merely false but fundamentally and systematically misleading. It was bound to lead to disillusion, frustration and war.

Unfortunately, in the watershed years 1959–60, when the colonial powers began to pull out of Africa at a rapidly accelerating rate, this false theory became the prevailing wisdom of the
UN
, under the impact of the Bandung generation and, above all, Dag Hammarskjöld. The critical moment came when Belgium was persuaded against its better judgement to pull out of the Congo on 30 June 1960. Belgium had run this vast and valuable though primitive region with excessive political paternalism but, from 1920 onwards, with increasing economic success. The returns of heavy industrial investment began to come in during the 1950s. The index of industrial production rose, 1948–58, from 118 to 350, with productivity increasing two and a half times during these years. Directly contradicting all the Leninist-type theories of imperialism, industrial production was growing at an annual rate of 14.3 per cent in the 1950s, tailing off only at the prospect of independence.
²⁰
As a result, at the time of independence, the Congo had, for instance, a higher ratio of hospital beds, 560 per 100,000 inhabitants, than any other African country (higher than Belgium’s own in fact) and the highest literacy rate, 42 per cent (rates in British colonies ranged from 30 per cent in Uganda to 15 per cent in Tanganyika and Nigeria; French rates averaged 10 per cent).
²¹
But Belgium’s educational effort was concentrated overwhelmingly in the primary sector: there was no Congolese doctor, engineer or senior administrator, and above all there was not a single African officer in the 25,000-strong
Force Publique.

What the system had rapidly produced, in its last frantic years of impending abdication, was a crop of professional politicians, all concealing deep tribal affiliations beneath a veneer of European-style
ideology. The three most important, Joseph Kasavubu the President, Patrice Lumumba the Prime Minister, and Moise Tshombe, premier of Katanga, the richest of the provinces, were bitter tribal and populist rivals.
²²
All three were volatile personalities but Lumumba was by far the most unstable. He was a former postal-clerk and brewery worker turned full-time political agitator, and now Minister of Defence as well as head of the government. The Belgian legacy was fragile enough but it might conceivably have lasted a few years. Lumumba, however, chose the independence ceremonies to make a rabble-rousing attack on white rule; five days later on 5 July the garrison in Leopoldville, the capital, mutinied and threw out its white officers, prior to surging forth to loot, rape and kill Europeans and Africans alike. The Belgians waited for five days, while the terror spread and increased, and while Hammarskjöld, at
UN
headquarters in New York, did nothing, though his own
UN
staff in the Congo were thrown out of their hotel rooms at gunpoint by the exultant mutineers. Only on 10 July did the Belgians send in their own troops to restore order. Immediately Hammarskjöld saw his chance, turned angrily and decisively on the Belgians, and on 13 July, in front of the Security Council, denounced their troops as a threat to peace and order.
²³
The Secretary-General had been looking for an opportunity to expand the
UN
‘s role, and to ride to world government on a swelling tide of Third World emotion. As the great Belgian statesman, Paul-Henri Spaak, said of him: ‘Il
a vécu l’anticolonialisme exacérbé et triomphant. Il y participait par devoir, mais aussi, j’en suis sure, par conviction.’
²⁴
He believed that the
UN
was to be the catalyst of the new Africa. France’s relations with Africa, he told André Malraux, were like a good martini: ‘France might be the gin, but the
UN
was definitely the angostura’ (suggesting that he was as confused about martinis as he was about Africa). In the affairs of Afro-Asia, he said, ‘Only the
UN
, of which they are themselves members, breaks the colonial spell and puts the matter outside the orbit of the Cold War.’
²⁵
If Hammarskjöld had done nothing and allowed Belgium to restore order, the crisis might have been quickly resolved, with the minimum of bloodshed. Tshombe, to extract the Katanga mining industry from the chaos, had declared the province independent on 11 July. This problem, too, might have been resolved by negotiation. Instead the Secretary-General immediately set about creating and deploying a
UN
army, taken not from the Security Council powers (as the
UN
Charter clearly intended) but from the ‘non-aligned’ states from whom Hammarskjöld drew his following. Moreover, he sought to use this expeditionary force not merely to restore order, which the Belgians were far more capable of doing, but to reunite Katanga to the Congo by violence. He saw himself as
king-maker, and Lumumba as the king. Nor is it difficult to see why he backed Lumumba, who seems to have had little following, and that purely tribal, among the Congolese themselves, but whose rhetoric appealed strongly to Pan-African intellectuals and to the Afro-Asian leaders to whom the Secretary-General looked for backing.

In this forlorn endeavour, Hammarskjóld paid scant regard to the lives, black or white, he was risking. Cold, detached, consumed by an overwhelming ambition masquerading as an ideal, he thought in terms of a political abstraction, not human beings. He formulated what became a characteristic
UN
double-standard: that whereas the killingof Africans by whites (as at Sharpeville in South Africa on 21 March 1960) was of international concern and a threat to peace, the killing of Africans by Africans (or of whites by Africans, or of Asians by Africans or all three races by Africans) was a purely internal matter outside the purview of the
UN
. Thus the
UN
became identified with a form of inverted racism, which was to cost an incalculable number of African lives over the next two decades. Even in Hammarskjöld’s time the toll was heavy. His
UN
army became a source of further instability rather than the reverse. His protégé, Lumumba, tried to set up his own secessionist state, fell into the hands of the Congolese army, now controlled by a former
NCO
, ‘General’ Mobutu, was tossed to the Katangese and murdered, 17–18 January 1961. The eclipse of this worthless scoundrel, responsible for the deaths of thousands, was described by Hammarskjóld as ‘a revolting crime against the principles for which this Organization stands’.
²⁶
In fact it was no more than a meaningless incident in a long power-struggle. The Secretary-General lost his emotional detachment and became obsessed with the need to revenge the death of the king he had failed to make by using his
UN
troops to expel the whites from Katanga and change its regime, the first instance of what might be termed imperialism by international bureaucracy. But in the process he made the error of leaving the abstract make-believe world of his
UN
offices and descending into the real world of the Congo basin. It cost him his life when his aircraft hit a tree near Ndola in September 1961.

Hammarskjóld, like many other outsiders, assumed one could discern, and respond to, Western-type political principles and situations in what was, in fact, nothing more than a seething cauldron of tribal and personal politics. All the Congolese politicians shifted their positions as expediency and self-preservation dictated. It was absurd that
UN
policy should be tied to any one of them. The Algerians, and other Afro-Asian busy-bodies, made the same mistake. Ben Bella (soon to vanish into an oubliette himself) dismissed Tshombe as ‘a travelling museum of imperialism’.
²⁸
In fact he proved a popular prime minister when Kasavubu, reversing all his previous views, appointed him. But
not for long. The Congolese street-mob was as volatile as Shakespeare’s Roman mob (or a Cairo mob rehearsed by Nasser). One moment the cry was, ‘Long live Tshombe, Arabs go home!’ The next it was: ‘Down with Tshombe, Arabs send him home!’ (He had since been condemned to death for treason.)
²⁹
The watershed was in December 1965 when, as was probably inevitable, Mobutu ended the political era with a military
coup.
He then went on, at the next Independence Day celebrations, to salute the man for whose murder he was responsible: ‘Glory and honour to an illustrious citizen of the Congo, to a great African, and to the first martyr of our independence – Patrice Emery Lumumba, who was the victim of the colonialist plot!’ Thereafter, Mobutu, now president, ruled with the support of Western interests, to the enrichment of many hundreds of friends, supporters and relatives and not least of himself: by the early 1980s he was reckoned to be a billionaire, perhaps the world’s wealthiest man, richer than King Leopold of Belgium, who once owned the country.
³⁰

The watershed years 1959–60, culminating in the long Congolese crisis, to which the
UN
made so disastrous a contribution, probably destroyed any chance, however remote, that constitutionalism would become the norm in the new African states. Too many hopes had been invested in the new class of professional politicians. They could not deliver. They broke, or were broken, under the strain. The military men took over. The same thing had happened in the first ‘liberated’ continent, Latin America, in the early decades of the nineteenth century: the generation of Bolivar, the
Liberador
, was succeeded by the first generation of
Caudillos.
The phenomenon was repeated in the Arab world, where the military, led by Colonel Nasser and his colleagues, began to take over from 1952. In black Africa, the first successful military
coup
took place in Togo in January 1963, when Sylvanus Olympio was murdered. Six months later Fulbert Youlou was ousted in Brazzaville. Two months after that Hubert Maga was overthrown in Cotonou. There were mutinies in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in January 1964, followed the next month by the ousting of Leon Mba in Gabon (reversed by de Gaulle’s paratroopers). Mobutu’s Zaïre
coup
followed in November 1965, accompanied by two in Dahomey in quick succession,
coups
in the Central African Republic and in Upper Volta the following January and in Ghana in February. The first Togo
coup
attracted immense and world-wide publicity; by the time it was repeated, exactly five years later, no one outside the country took any notice. By this date (January 1968) black Africa had undergone sixty-four military
coups
, attempted
coups
and mutinies.
³¹
By the end of the 1960s, the decade of independence, Dahomey had already experienced
six
coups
, Nigeria and Sierra Leone three each, and with two each for Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Togo, Upper Volta and Zaïre; many others had had one. During the 1970s, indeed, the military
putsch
became the chief means of changing political direction or the personnel of élites throughout black Africa; and already by 1975 twenty of the forty-one states were ruled by military or military-civil juntas.
³²

Even when military power did not become the normal arbiter of politics, parliamentary democracy in the Western sense, including the essential right to remove a government by electoral process, disappeared within a few years of independence, being replaced by Leninist one-party systems. In a very few cases, Kenya being the outstanding example, virtual one-party rule was accompanied by the survival of free market economics and the rule of law, at any rate up to a point. There, the ruling party became simply a non-idealistic organization for promoting the careers of élites from the dominant tribe.
³³
Even in these quasi-constitutional states, corruption has been institutionalized, with the
signes extérieures de la richesse
interpreted as evidence of capacity to lead. President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, one of the few terrorist leaders to make successfully the transition to responsible rule, actually upbraided one of his opponents, the Leftist Bildad Kaggia, at a public meeting, for failing to enrich himself: