The Writer and the World (38 page)

So the borrowed ideas—about colonialism and alienation, the consumer society and the decline of the West—are made to serve the African cult of authenticity; and the dream of an ancestral past restored is allied to a dream of a future of magical power. The confusion is not new, and is not peculiar to Zaire. Fantasies like this animated some slave revolts in the West Indies; and today, in Jamaica, at the university, there are people who feel that Negro redemption and Negro power can only come about through a return to African ways. The dead Duvalier of Haiti is admired for his Africanness; a writer speaks with unconscious irony of the Negro’s need for a “purifying” period of poverty (unwittingly echoing Duvalier’s “It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer”); and there are people who, sufficiently far away from the slaughter ground of Uganda, find in Amin’s African nihilism a proof of African power.

It is lunacy, despair. In the February 7th issue of
Jeune Afrique
—miraculously on sale in Kinshasa—a French African writer, Seydou Lamine, examines the contradictions of African fantasy and speaks of “the alibi of the past.” Mightn’t this talk of Africanness, he asks, be a “myth” which the “princes” of Africa now use to strengthen their own position? “For many, authenticity and Negroness
[la négrité]
are only words that stand for the despair and powerlessness of the man of Africa faced with the discouraging immensity of his underdevelopment.”

And even
Elima
, considering the general corruption, the jobs not done, the breakdown of municipal administration in Kinshasa, the uncleared garbage, the canals not disinfected (though the taxis are, regularly, for the one-zaire fee), the vandalized public television sets and telephone booths, even
Elima
finds it hard on some days to blame the colonial past for these signs of egoism. “We are wrong to consider the word ‘underdevelopment’ only in its economic aspects. We have to understand that there is a type of underdevelopment that issues out of the habits of a people and their attitudes to life and society.”

Mobutism,
Elima
suggests, will combat this “mental plague.” But it is no secret that, in spite of its talk of “man,” in spite of its lilting national anthem called the
Zairoise (“Paix, justice et travail”)
, Mobutism honours
only one man: the chief, the king. He alone has to be feared and loved. How—away from this worship—does a new attitude to life and society begin? Recently in Kinshasa a number of people were arrested for some reason and taken to Makala jail: lavatoryless concrete blocks behind a whitewashed wall, marked near the gateway
DISCIPLINE AVANT TOUT.
The people arrested couldn’t fit easily into the cell, and a Land-Rover was used to close the door. In the morning many were found crushed or suffocated.

Not cruelty, just thoughtlessness: the visitor has to learn to accommodate himself to Zaire. The presidential domain at Nsele (where Muhammad Ali trained) is such a waste, at once extravagant and shoddy, with its over-furnished air-conditioned bungalows, its vast meeting halls, its VIP lounges (carpets, a fussiness of fringed Dralon, African art debased to furniture decoration). But Nsele can be looked at in another way. It speaks of the African need for African style and luxury; it speaks of the great African wound. The wound explains the harassment of foreign settlers, the nationalizations. But the nationalizations are petty and bogus; they have often turned out to be a form of pillage and are part of no creative plan; they are as short-sighted, self-wounding and nihilistic as they appear, a dismantling of what remains of the Belgian-created state. So the visitor swings from mood to mood, and one reaction cancels out another.

Where, in Kinshasa, where so many people “shadow” jobs, and so many jobs are artificial and political, part of an artificial administration, where does the sense of responsibility, society, the state, begin? A city of two million, with almost no transport, with no industries (save for those assembly plants, sited, as in so many “developing” countries, on the road from the airport to the capital), a city detached from the rest of the country, existing only because the Belgians built it and today almost without a point. It doesn’t have to work; it can be allowed to look after itself. Already at night, a more enduring kind of bush life seems to return to central Kinshasa, when the watchmen (who also shadow their jobs: they will protect nothing) bar off their territory, using whatever industrial junk there is to hand, light fires on the broken pavements, cook their little messes and go to sleep. When it is hot the gutters smell; in the rain the streets are flooded. And the unregulated city spreads: meandering black rivulets of filth in unpaved alleys, middens beside the highways, children,
discarded motorcar tyres, a multitude of little stalls, and everywhere, in free spaces, plantings of sugar-cane and maize: subsistence agriculture in the town, a remnant of bush life.

But at the end of one highway there is the university. It is said to have gone down. But the students are bright and friendly. They have come from the bush, but already they can talk of Stendhal and Fanon; they have the enthusiasm of people to whom everything is new; and they feel, too, that with the economic collapse of the West (of which the newspapers talk every day) the tide is running Africa’s way. The enthusiasm deserves a better-equipped country. It seems possible that many of these students, awakening to ideas, history, a knowledge of injustice and a sense of their own dignity, will find themselves unsupported by their society, and can only awaken to pain. But no. For most there will be jobs in the government; and already they are Mobutists to a man. Already the African way ahead is known; already inquiry is restricted; and Mobutu himself has warned that the most alienated people in Zaire are the intellectuals.

So Mobutism simplifies the world, the concept of responsibility and the state, and simplifies people. Zaire’s accession to power and glory has been made to appear so easy; the plundering of the inherited Belgian state has been so easy, the confiscations and nationalizations, the distribution of big shadow jobs. Creativity itself now begins to appear as something that might be looted, brought into being by decree.

Zaire has her music and dance. To complete her glory, Zaire needs a literature; other African countries have literatures. The trouble,
Elima
says in a full-page Sunday article, is that far too many people who haven’t written a line and sometimes can’t even speak correctly have been going here and there and passing themselves off as Zairois writers, shaming the country. That will now stop; the bogus literary “circles” will be replaced by official literary “salons”; and they must set to work right away. In two months the president will be going to Paris. The whole world will be watching, and it is important that in these two months a work of Zairois literature be written and published. Other works should be produced for the Lagos Festival of Negro Arts at the end of the year. And it seems likely, from the tone of the
Elima
article, that it is Mobutu who has spoken.

M
OBUTU
speaks all the time. He no longer speaks in French but in Lin-gala, the local lingua franca, and transistors take his words to the deep bush. He speaks as the chief, and the people listen. They laugh constantly, and they applaud. It has been Mobutu’s brilliant idea to give the people of Zaire what they have not had and what they have long needed: an African king. The king expresses all the dignity of his people; to possess a king is to share the king’s dignity. The individual’s responsibility—a possible source of despair, in the abjectness of Africa—is lessened. All that is required is obedience, and obedience is easy.

Mobutu proclaims his simple origins. He is a
citoyen
like everyone else. And Mama Mobutu, Mobutu’s wife, loves the poor. She runs a centre for deprived girls, and they devote themselves to agriculture and to making medallions of the king, which the loyal will wear: there can never be too many images of Mobutu in Zaire. The king’s little magnanimities are cherished by a people little used to magnanimity. Many Zairois will tell you that a hospital steamer now serves the river villages. But it is where Mobutu appears to be most extravagant that he satisfies his people most. The king’s mother is to be honoured; and she was a simple woman of Africa. Pilgrimages are announced to places connected with the king’s life; and the disregarded bush of Africa becomes sacred again.

The newspapers, diluting the language of Fanon and Mao, speak every day of the revolution and the radicalization of the revolution. But this is what the revolution is about: the kingship. In Zaire Mobutu is the news: his speeches, his receptions, the
marches de soutien
, the new appointments: court news. Actual events are small. The nationalization of a gaudy furniture shop in Kinshasa is big news, as is the revelation that there is no African on the board of a brewery. Anti-revolutionary activity, discovered by the “vigilance” of the people, has to do with crooked vendors in the market, an official using a government vehicle as a night taxi, someone else building a house where he shouldn’t, some drunken members of the youth wing of the party wrecking the party Volkswagen at Kisangani. There is no news in Zaire because there is little new activity. Copper continues to be mined; the big dam at Inga continues to be built. Airports are being extended or constructed everywhere, but this doesn’t mean that Air Zaire is booming: it is for the better policing of the country.

What looked obvious on the first day, but was then blurred by the reasonable-sounding words, turns out to be true. The kingship of Mobutu
has become its own end. The inherited modern state is being dismantled, but it isn’t important that the state should work. The bush works; the bush has always been self-sufficient. The administration, now the court, is something imposed, something unconnected with the true life of the country. The ideas of responsibility, the state and creativity are ideas brought by the visitor; they do not correspond, for all the mimicry of language, to African aspirations.

Mobutu’s peace and his kingship are great achievements. But the kingship is sterile. The cult of the king already swamps the intellectual advance of a people who have barely emerged. The intellectual confusions of authenticity, that now give such an illusion of power, close up the world again and point to a future greater despair. Mobutu’s power will inevitably be extinguished; but there can now be no going back on the principles of Mobutism. Mobutu has established the pattern for his successors; and they will find that African dependence is not less than it is now, nor the need for nihilistic assertion.

To arrive at this sense of a country trapped and static, eternally vulnerable, is to begin to have something of the African sense of the void. It is to begin to fall, in the African way, into a dream of a past—the vacancy of river and forest, the hut in the brown yard, the dugout—when the dead ancestors watched and protected, and the enemies were only men.

1975

Y
AMOUSSOUKRO
, a place deep in the wet forests of the Ivory Coast, is one of the wonders of black Africa. It used to be a village, and perhaps then it was like some other West African bush villages, where grass huts perish after two years. But Yamoussoukro was also the seat of a regional tribal chief; and during the half a century or so of direct French rule in the interior, the authority of the chieftaincy—moral, or spiritual, or magical authority—was not forgotten.

The very old man who is still chief received a French education. He became what the French called a “colonial” doctor—not the finished French product, but a doctor nonetheless. Later he became a politician, a protest leader. With independence in 1960—the bush returned with alterations to its people—he began to rule the Ivory Coast. And he has ruled ever since.

He has ruled well. He has used the French as technicians, advisers, administrators; and, with no ready-made mineral wealth, with the resources only of tropical forests and fields, he has made his country rich. So rich, that the Ivory Coast imports labour from its more depressed or chaotic African neighbours. Labour immigration, as much as natural increase, has raised the population from three million in 1960 to nine million today. Abidjan, the capital, begun unpromisingly on the black mud of a fetid lagoon, has become one of the biggest ports in West Africa. And 150 miles inland, at the end of an auto-route that would not disgrace France itself, the president’s ancestral village of Yamoussoukro, has been transformed.

The ancestral village has in fact vanished from public sight. The entire village—huts (if they still survive), common ground, the semi-sacred palaver tree—has been incorporated into the grounds of a new presidential palace. And all is hidden by a high palace wall that must be many miles long.

Down one side of the palace there is an artificial lake, and in this lake turtles and man-eating crocodiles have been introduced. These are totemic, emblematic creatures, and they belong to the president. There were no crocodiles in Yamoussoukro before. No one knows precisely what they mean. But to all Africans they speak at once of danger and of the president’s, the chief’s, magically granted knowledge of his power as something more than human, something emanating from the earth itself.

The power and wisdom of the chief have caused the forest around Yamoussoukro to disappear. Where once were African fields, unused common land, and wild trees there are now ordered, mechanized plantations. For square mile upon square mile mangoes, avocadoes or pineapples grow in straight lines, the straight lines that are beautiful to people to whom Nature is usually formless, unfriendly bush. Land in this part of Africa, it is said, belongs to the user; there can be no title in bush. And until they were given to the state some years ago, these plantations around Yamoussoukro were the president’s personal estates.

The president’s ideas have always been big, and his plans for Yamoussoukro are very big. He would like it to be one of the great cities of Africa and the world. The land has been levelled, and avenues as wide as runways outline the metropolis that is to be. Extravagant and sometimes brilliant modern buildings have been set down in the stripped wilderness and await full use.