Big Men Little People Read online

  Big Men, Little People

  The Leaders Who Defined Africa

  Alec Russell

  © Alec Russell 2013

  Alec Russell has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2000 by New York University Press.

  This edition published in 2013 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For my parents, with much love

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  1 - The King of Kleptocracy

  2 - The Last Days of a North London Doctor

  3 - Kenya - Where the Kalenjin are Kings

  4 - The Cold War Crooner

  5 - The Last White Patriarch

  6 - White Man's Magic

  7 - A Very Zulu Chief

  8 - From SherbornetSwaziland - The King of the Clouds

  9 – Madiba Magic

  10 - Small Men

  11 - Comrade Bob

  12 - Africa Roaring at Last

  Conclusion

  Chapter Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Extract from Building BRICS by Barbara Njau

  Introduction

  We were almost at the airport when they sprang the trap. There were thirty of them in pressed charcoal-grey uniforms with bright pink chevrons. A giant road-side poster proclaiming 'Jesus is our Commando' framed their oil-drum barricade. One of the ringleaders, a police inspector, swaggered towards us. With an exaggerated civility he shook our hands.

  'You are welcome,' he said, before adding sternly: 'This is a mobile court.' Reuben, our driver, motioned us to keep silent. Swearing under our breath we pulled over, fearing we could be detained for hours. But it took only a moment to understand the workings of the mobile court: the police were prosecutor, jury and judge in one; there was no defence. We all knew the only issue was the size of the bribe, but the policeman doggedly maintained the pretence that his 'court' was a recognized arm of the law.

  'No fire extinguisher?' he frowned when he opened our boot.

  'That's very serious. You will have to come with me to the courtroom.' Reuben's protestations were not to be heard. He was escorted round the nearest corner to the 'judge', the senior police officer, to negotiate the appropriate fee.

  Behind us, other 'judges' fanned out across the road. A lanky driver in a garish robe was shaking with rage. He yanked his hands up and down, remonstrating with an inscrutable sergeant.

  'What do you mean, an explanation?' the driver shouted.

  'You stopped me! I'm the one who needs an explanation.' But of course there was nothing he could do; to drive in Nigeria, under the late dictator General Sani Abacha, was to run an endless obstacle course. One day there was a purge on wind screen wipers, the next on bumpers, the next on tyres. The only way to survive was to lower your gaze and pay the fee. The policeman shook our hands once Reuben had paid the fine.

  'You are free to go,' he said solemnly. 'The court is over.'

  Quivering with the pent-up humiliation of years of such affronts, Reuben accelerated away through the back streets of Port Harcourt, Nigeria's southern oil town. A devout Catholic, he had been a policeman at independence in 1960 and through the bloody Biafran war of 1967-70, when up to a million Nigerians died in an abortive attempt at secession by the lbo tribe.

  'We would never have behaved in this way,' Reuben said.

  'We had pride in our work. But these guys, they do anything.' We drove on in silence to the airport.

  I heard Reuben’s lament for the independence era many times when travelling in sub-Saharan Africa in the late Nineties. The Sixties were a heady time for Africans: all over the continent colonial flags were being struck; Africans were at last to be free; a glittering future beckoned. But for most of the continent the last forty years of the 20th Century were a shattering experience. Since independence Africans were terribly betrayed.

  They were betrayed by the European powers, which abandoned their colonies in unseemly haste, leaving them with a handful of graduates to try to forge and then govern new nation states. They were betrayed by the superpowers, which used Africa as a battlefield in the fight for global domination, and sanctioned corruption and tyranny as long as their interests were served. Most of all they were betrayed by their own leaders, many of whom did little but bask in personality cults, fill foreign bank accounts and beggar their people.

  Independence was never going to be easy. A largely pre literate society was being thrust headlong into the modern world. But the Big Men, as the independence leaders became known, made the task far harder. Under their misrule, Africa has plunged relentlessly downhill. The 'Toad Kings', as Wole Soyinka, Nigeria's dissident writer, dubbed them, pandered to the most grotesque caricatures of Third World dictators: courts were suborned; opponents were jailed; treasuries were pillaged; rival tribes were excluded from power. All the while the state media lauded their idiosyncrasies as the mark of genius.

  From time to time a new optimistic gospel did the rounds. In the Eighties the talk was of 'structural adjustment', a rigorous programme of free-market reform. Earnest World Bank and International Monetary Fund consultants toured the continent's capitals claiming they had the medicine for Africa's economic woes. But the austerity programmes that were essential if the reform was to work were all but impossible to sustain in Africa's impoverished and demoralized states. Then came the Nineties, billed as the decade of democracy following the end of the Cold War. But this too had limited success. The euphoria over a wave of multi-party elections in the early Nineties soon waned as many of the new democrats proved themselves cut from the Big Men's autocratic cloth.

  Even Nelson Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's president in 1994, which was hailed as a new African dawn, had limited impact on the rest of the continent. As Afrikaner fighter pilots flew over their new black president to mark the end of white rule, 2,000 miles to the north Rwandans were hacking down fellow Rwandans with machetes, and hoes in a genocide that was to claim up to a million lives.

  At the end of the twentieth century, Africa stumbled into another new era: the age of the Big Men drew to a close. The 'Great Helmsman' of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko; General Sani Abacha, the most brutal and corrupt in a sequence of venal Nigerian leaders; Malawi's Dr Hastings Banda, best known for his ban on long hair, mini-skirts and jeans - all died within eight months of each other. A few ageing autocrats held on to power through the first decade of the 21st Century in the same self-serving ways, notably Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. But the independence generation was all but extinct. And as the 21st Century unfolded so it became clear that a new and more hopeful era was unfolding.

  In the late Nineties and early 2000s there was often at best faltering progress. It was far from clear that the post Big Men had learned from their predecessors’ mistakes. Some economists feared that even as China, India and Brazil were emerging as new world powerhouses, sub-Saharan Africa would fall further and further behind the rest of the world. And yet others, rightly as it ultimately emerged, believed that the post-Big Men leaders were taking the first step to powering a renaissance. The stories of twelve very different African leaders, I encountered in the Nineties – and then more recently between 2007 and 2013 - attempt to show how Africa has made this journey. It is far from a comprehensive picture: more than half the leaders come from southern Africa. It is also not a particularly cheery picture. But it does try to highlight currents coursing through the continent even it the worst of times which never made the news and yet which suggested that Africa's journey into the new millennium was not irredeemably bleak.

  I begin in the steamy heart of the Congo, the proverbial Heart of Darkness, where the twe
ntieth century opened amid international hand wringing over atrocities by Belgian rubber planters and closed in a depressingly similar way with outrage over massacres and mass graves. Straddling these two eras was the long rule of Mobutu, the 'King of Kleptocracy', under whom everything and everyone had a price.

  Mobutu was a preposterous figure. Sustained by Cold War politics, his avarice was legendary even among other Big Men. His subjects were playthings to be exploited at will, and yet as he gazed defiantly over his palace grounds on his last public appearance, resplendent in a turquoise and gold tunic, it was easy to understand how he dazzled his people back in the Sixties when he took power. The last days of his regime shone a ray of light into the rapacity of Big Man rule and the corruption that is Africa's curse. The speed with which his successor, Laurent Kabila, imposed his own cult and forfeited international sympathy was a sobering introduction to the difficulties Africa faced in finishing with Big Men once and for all.

  My second Big Man, Dr Banda of Malawi, was, like Mobutu, defiant to the last. As he sat in his quarters in the old British governor's residence, a few months short of his ninety-eighth birthday, he insisted as he always had that Malawians were like children and could not govern themselves. His extraordinary career from being a successful GP in North London to Life President highlighted the ease with which dictators can take power and the difficulties would-be democrats face. Shrivelled like a dried-up prune, he cackled to himself, muttering that Julius Caesar was his role model because he knew how to be 'tough'.

  Moi, who ruled Kenya for 24 years until 2002, completes the opening trio of old-style Big Men. Moi was canny enough to reform just enough to stay in power through the millennium. When I finally wheedled my way into his presence in 1997 he gave me a sombre lecture on the dangers of tribalism. The bloodstained record of Kenya's neighbours underlines his case – as arguably did the brutal violence in Kenya after its disputed election of 2007 - but Moi was, of course, like all Big Men, a past master at playing the tribal card and indeed just about anything else that would ensure his survival.

  My encounters with Mobutu, Banda and Moi left little doubt that the 'Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' were not suddenly going to retire from their favourite stamping ground; corruption, dictatorship and tribal bloodshed continued to dominate Africa's political agenda after they had left office. But the three leaders' bewilderment and frustration with the changing face of world politics did also shed light on one of the positive developments of the 1990s. For more than a century Africa has been a proxy battlefield, first for Europe's feuding colonialists and then for the superpowers. The end of the Cold War left Big Men scrambling for support. One of the dangers of the new millennium was that the superpowers' disengagement would fuel weariness with Africa and a drying up of the investment it so badly needed. But the emergence of China as a powerful force of investment and diplomacy in sub-Saharan Africa in the 21st Century soon laid that concern to rest as a new “scramble” ensued.

  The Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who was killed in 2002 after over three decades as a bush-fighter, was the “Frankenstein's monster” of the Cold War: sustained for years by the CIA. In his last decade he had no need of his handlers. In 1995 after months underground, I witnessed him emerging from his bush hideaway in a dark Mercedes, wearing a cream jacket, waving an ebony cane. He looked like a black-marketeer, which in a sense he was - Angola's long running war testifies to the cynicism of superpower meddling and also to Africa's bane, its vast mineral wealth. With a few exceptions, it is a sad but fundamental rule of Africa that where there are minerals there is war.

  So what of the white Big Men whose dictates for so long dominated the headlines from Arica? When I arrived in Johannesburg in 1993, fresh from reporting the war in Bosnia, there was talk of South Africa going the same way as the former Yugoslavia. A few years later, however, the sight of a doughty Boer farmer bumping along the road north to find a new plot in the Zambian bush was tangible proof that change was sweeping through southern Africa. The end of the Cold War paved the way for the end of apartheid, opening up South Africa, the continent's superpower, to engage with the rest of Africa. For Afrikaners it was a faltering process personified by F. W. De Klerk, South Africa's last white president, who dismantled apartheid, and Eugene Terre'Blanche, the white extremist. Afrikaners see themselves as African, yet were raised to look down on Africa and post 1994 had to accept they were no longer in charge. My last sight of Terre'Blanche was in a court in a small South African town, slumped in the dock after he was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to kill a black employee – over a decade later he was murdered by an embittered employee. For some Afrikaners, like the trekking farmer and indeed De Klerk himself, the end of white rule was liberating. They were at last free of the burden of apartheid and able to engage with their continent. Some Afrikaner businessmen rapidly led the way north exploiting the more favourable business climate.

  The early post-Big Men years led to a period when corporations and even mercenary bands ended playing the same interventionist role as colonialists did in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. A classic example was Sierra Leone. One of the most extraordinary encounters of my five years in Africa was with an Afrikaner mercenary colonel, or rather business consultant who had led a band of soldiers to restore order. His business partners were busily exploiting the local diamond mines. Yet he was adored by the locals who were overjoyed that someone was making up for the failure of their government to protect them from rebels. The West pressed the government to cancel the contract and it did. Soon afterwards the country lapsed back into chaos.

  Even then, however, there were positive signs of an Africa beyond the television images of famine and war, one that was sowing the seeds for the new more hopeful continent of the second decade of the 21st Century. Most strikingly, there were signs of a new realism among African intellectuals and even some politicians. Although Mugabe, the last of my classic Big Men, successfully played the 'colonial card' to entrench his power, pinning the blame on the white man is no longer the rallying cry it once was. All over the continent there are people willing to say publicly that Africa has failed and that Africans themselves have to take a share of the blame. As Africa searches for a way to reconcile the medieval with the modern, Christianity and Islam with animism and tradition, many are also starting to appreciate that the continent has to find an accommodation between traditional African and Western values.

  Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, South Africa’s one-time Zulu nationalist leader, was the very image of the new-age tribal chief. He used ethnicity and fealty to maintain his position and yet when he sat in government in Cape Town under Nelson Mandela he was the quintessential modern politician. He manipulated chiefs and their followers to bolster his power, but his story showed how rural Africa had to find a place for the traditional leaders who held sway before the arrival of the colonists and who still played the role of father-confessor-cum-robber baron in tracts of the continent.

  The boyish King Mswati III of Swaziland more than any other African leader embodies the complexity of tradition. It was easy to mock Africa's last absolute monarch. When I met him in 1996, the chief of police preceded me into the king's presence on his hands and knees. A decade and a half later he was still in power. The fissures threatening his monarchy were still unresolved reflecting the divisions between town and country, reaction and reform.

  If there was one man who brought purpose and hope to the continent it was the living embodiment of reconciliation.

  Nelson Mandela was of course the great exception among independence leaders. Far from closing down streets ahead of his motorcade as was de rigueur for Big Men, he arrived for a lunch I was hosting without a single outrider. He was one of a handful of African heads of state to have had the interests of his people at heart. He acted as a bridge between the old and the new schools of leadership. His reconciliatory vision was imbued with African ubuntu (humanity) and inspired the world to hope that the continent really
could throw off its troubled past. But even the 'Mandela magic' had limits, it seemed.

  And so it was hardly surprising that Mandela's successor, Thabo Mbeki, faced scepticism in the West when he talked of an 'African Renaissance'. As the millennium dawned, the future looked depressingly familiar: of sub-Saharan Africa's four giants, only South Africa was stable; Nigeria's latest attempt at civilian rule was under threat from religious, ethnic and regional tensions; the Congo was locked in a murderous war which is destabilizing central Africa; the Sudan was racked by famine and fighting.

  If Mandela's dream of stemming Africa's slide was to have a chance, much depended on Mbeki and Africa's 'new' leaders, pragmatic autocrats like Ghana's President Jerry Rawlings and Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. They are an odd trio; they can roughly be labelled as the democrat, the reluctant democrat and the anti-democrat. All three vigorously condemned the cults and corruption of the old-style 'Big Men'. Their reformist records were hailed in the West. But their challenge was stark.

  The first months of the millennium produced a series of disaster stories, which revived the old stereotypes of a continent without hope. Yet a decade later investors were talking of Africa as the new frontier, and amid steady economic growth in large parts of the continent, and a spread of democracy, it became clear that the era of the Big Men was over and a new more positive age had begun.

  1 - The King of Kleptocracy

  Mobutu Sese Seko - The Curse of Corruption

  For a tantalizing moment the melee cleared. After a stifling two hour wait in the market which masqueraded as the arrivals hall at Kinshasa's N'djili Airport I had had my passport stamped. I had also dispensed a hundred US dollars to sundry officials, including a colonel in a band-master's uniform who bore a marked similarity to General Noriega, the pineapple-faced ex-leader of Panama. Unfortunately the 'system' had not yet finished with me. Just when it looked as though I could head for the exit and start the next battle for a taxi into town, a willowy teenager in a baggy gown ran up to me waving his arms. My 'protocol', the local euphemism for airport pimp, who had fastened on to me the moment I had left the reassuring safety of the South African Airways jet, had returned.