The Africans

How do you explain a continent where hundreds of thousands of people have been killed for no other reason than that they belonged to the wrong tribe? How do you explain a continent whose heads of state applauded Idi Amin when he walked into a summit wearing his Stetson and six-shooters, having just presided over the massacre of several thousand Ugandans, including the Anglican archibishop? What do you say about the president of Tanzania, who translated Shakespeare into Swahili in his spare time and held more political prisoners than South Africa? For every Amin, however, there is a Leopold Sedar Senghor, the former Senegalese president, an erudite man who was a strong contender for the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature. For every corrupt and callous African president stashing millions of dollars in his Swiss bank account there is an African teacher earning $60 a month, proud that his students are Africa’s hope for tomorrow.

This is a book about Africa today: the story of people who won their freedom on battlefields and at negotiating tables, only to discover that their white colonial masters had been replaced by black neocolonial leaders more concerned with personal power and wealth than national consensus or development.

Many readers will find this an unsettling book because the Africa of the 1980s is neither a happy nor hopeful place. Across the whole continent economies are collapsing, cities are deteriorating, food production is declining, populations are growing like weed-seeds turned loose in a garden. Governments fall at the whim of illiterate sergeants and disgruntled despots, prisons are as overcrowded as the farmlands are empty, and at last count the number of refugees in Africa had reached the incredible figure of five million.

But, troubled as these early years of nationhood have been, Africa need not dwell forever in the uncertain twilight zone. Its dreams have been only mislaid, not lost.

A
LSO BY
D
AVID
L
AMB

The Arabs

W
E ARRIVED IN
A
FRICA
during the drought of 1976. The plains had turned brown and had cracked. The cattle were dying and children’s bellies swelling. Thick black clouds engulfed Mount Kenya, where powerful spirits are believed to dwell, influencing all that is evil and good in the cycles of life. For nearly a year the gods had been angry and not a drop of rain had fallen. An impoverished people waited for better times, their lives controlled by forces they could neither understand nor alter.

My wife, Sandy, and I stayed in Africa until 1980, she working as a free-lance filmmaker, I as a correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times
. Two new countries were born and eleven governments overthrown during these four years. The droughts came and went many times. The refugee population grew into the millions, the wars spread like brushfires. And through it all the Africans maintained a resilience and stoicism unknown in the West. They simply carried on, accepting both good fortune and misfortune with a single thought: The Fates are powerful.

From our base in Nairobi, Kenya, I traveled through forty-eight African countries, logging more than 300,000 miles by air, road and rail. Sometimes, for months on end, I bounced from wars to coups d’état thousands of miles apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where very nice people were doing very terrible things to one another. But the madcap moments of ferment were not the real exhilaration of Africa. That came in the brief respites
when Africa was at peace with itself, and there was time to explore the cities and villages, to talk and question, to feel the exuberance and despair of a newly independent people caught between past and present.