It was not much of a road block: a heap of branches and a broken fridge with a cow’s skull on top, painted the orange, white, and green of the flag of Côte d’Ivoire. But the rebels manning it had guns and rocket-propelled grenades, so we stopped.
There were about fifty of them, and they were determined to look tough. Some strutted around shirtless, with sashes of bullets wrapped around their chests. Others wore T-shirts with death’s heads on them. Most sported reflective sunglasses, and all except the most senior officer waved their weapons around carelessly. Several were drunk. It was 10:30 on a hot Ivorian morning, but the top was off the plastic jerry can of koutoukou, a throat-scalding local palm spirit, and young rebels were gulping it from battered tin cups.
They told us to get out of the car. I was traveling with Kate Davenport, another British journalist, and Hamadou Yoda, our Ivorian driver and guide. None of us wanted trouble, so we got out, stood in the road, and tried politely to explain our business while they searched our bags.
In my bag, one of them found the corrected first draft of this book, which I was hoping to read on spare evenings during this trip to report on Côte d’Ivoire’s civil war. It was a thick block of paper, held together with a rubber band. The rebel picked it up, waved it in my face, and demanded to know what it was. “It’s a book,” I said. “What’s it about?” he asked.
“It’s about the abuse of power in Africa. It describes how men with guns, like you, have impoverished an entire continent,” I wanted to reply, but of course I said nothing of the sort, though it would have been true.
In five years of reporting on Africa, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing power abused. Some of the less media-savvy politicians are quite open about it.
I once had a conversation with the governor of a remote part of Namibia, where a minor uprising had just been put down with energetic brutality. Several hundred people had been tortured and then released without charge, presumably because they were innocent. Asked whether he was sorry that innocent people had been tortured, the governor told me his only regret was that he had not been able to take part in the beatings himself. I couldn’t think of any more questions after that.
Africa* is in a bad way and this book is my attempt to explain why. I think it’s an important question and one that needs to be answered if the continent is ever to recover. But I don’t think the gravity of the topic is an excuse for dull writing, so I’ve tried to keep the narrative vivid and punchy. Whenever it makes the argument more digestible, I’ve thrown in real-life examples. Some may be startling, but none, I hope, is gratuitous. The anecdote in Chapter 4 about the prostitute in the lift illustrates a serious point.
On re-reading the text, it occurs to me that I’ve left out a lot of the good things about Africa. The kindness of its people, their passion for life, the extraordinary hospitality of the poorest of the poor, the joy of Congolese rumba music, the sunset over the Okavango delta; the list goes on. But this is a book about why Africa is poor, so it has to grapple with war, pestilence, and presidents who think their office is a license, literally, to print money.
Africa has endured its share of evil leaders. The more colorful tyrants, such as Idi Amin and Mobutu Sese Seko, are well known. What is less well known is that, with so few effective checks on arbitrary power in Africa, its well-meaning leaders have often done great harm, too. Julius Nyerere, the revered former Tanzanian president, sincerely hoped to make his people better off by forcing millions of them into giant collectives, but instead he almost destroyed his nation’s capacity to feed itself.
The rebels at that Ivorian road block probably also thought they were fighting for a noble cause. To be fair, the government they hoped to overthrow was indeed an unpleasant one. But their revolution did not topple it. Rather, it split the country in two and exposed wide swathes of it to rape and pillage.
Not that we were badly treated. They only held us for an hour. We were given seats in the shade, near an old tape deck belting out dance tunes, and our guard kept offering us swigs of koutoukou. At one point, we watched him respectfully help a couple of old ladies up an earthy bank they had to climb in order to be questioned. All in all, this was a relatively disciplined group of rebels, which was a relief. But it would have been better if there had been no war, no road blocks, and no need to ask men with guns for permission to go about one’s daily business.
* By “Africa,” I mean sub-Saharan Africa. This book does not deal with the Arab countries of North Africa.