Absolute power
Aidan Hartley
Iused a wad of Sierra Leone currency as big as a roll of lavatory paper to buy a seat on the Russian chopper that takes passengers from Lungi airport across the lagoon to Freetown. Seconds before takeoff, a horde of fare-dodging Guinean prostitutes invaded the aircraft and plonked down on laps, fluttering their gold eyelashes. That helped me to forget my fear of flying and start enjoying West Africa.
Freetown is a steamy dump. Think Peckham meets Kew Gardens and a dose of athlete’s foot. ‘How de body?’ locals say to each other by way of greeting. ‘Oh,’ they answer, ‘de body fine!’ I’m not so sure about that. I saw plenty of civil war victims waving amputated stumps on street corners. I adored the Sierra Leoneans I met, but it baffled me how they sank so low. And I also wondered what the future holds. A road sign I saw urged PRAY AND WAIT FOR SOMETHING TO HAPPEN.
By contrast Accra, Ghana, was a bit dull, like Woking with bad traffic. Every single white man in my hotel was with an ugly hooker. It was as if they picked them up with their room keys and then, instead of nipping off for a screw, they crowded the restaurant queuing up for buffet food. I was relieved when ex-President Jerry Rawlings invited me for lunch at his place, where he piled my plate high with shrimp and bananas while he vented about African affairs.
After two days with Rawlings, once known as ‘Junior Jesus’, I finally got a sense of how much fun it must be to be an absolute ruler. While Rawlings was still president, his daughter decided she wanted to go on a skydiving course, so he told the German ambassador to send down a couple of air-force instructors sharpish, which they did. Being a protective dad, he signed up for the course as well. On his first jump he leapt out of the aircraft and forgot to open his parachute. ‘Thank god for that barometric thingy,’ he remembered. ‘It opened up my chute just in time or I would have been the ex-president sooner than I planned. The Germans filmed the whole thing with a helmetmounted camera, and you can see me tumbling with my fat belly exposed.’ Next on my cross-continental safari I went to Zanzibar, playground of my misspent youth. In the 1980s, ‘Stinkibar’ was only just opening up after years of socialism. Every weekend I used to catch an overnight dhow from Dar es Salaam out to Stone Town, rent a Vesper and try to persuade a girl to ride pillion, hang green coconuts on the handlebars to go with my bottle of rum and zoom off to sleep on the beaches. As an FT stringer I once spent a fortnight covering Zanzibar’s annual budget.
On arrival this time I had an immediate mid-life crisis. My young Zanzibari friend Ally Saleh had turned grey, and Stone Town was transformed into a tourism destination full of ‘antique’ shops selling tikki toys, and Internet cafés crowded with Scandinavian punks. Revolutionary communism was better by far than this. Mainlanders claim militant Islam is now on the rise in Zanzibar. This is their way of persuading the West to support their brutal suppression of the islanders. If only it were true, since this might get rid of the grockles.
In Dar es Salaam I interviewed the old socialists who helped Julius Nyerere implement their socialist policies. ‘How did it go?’ I asked one 82-year-old minister. ‘Oh, the policies failed.’ I thought, you absolute bastard. ‘We always admitted our mistakes,’ he said, by way of explaining why he has never seen fit to resign since 1961. Nyerere nationalised 50,000 acres of my father’s land in West Kilimanjaro. He gave our neighbours 30 minutes to pack their bags and leave after a lifetime’s work on their farms. He translated Shakespeare into Swahili and got the papers to photograph him on his bicycle or wielding a peasant’s mattock, while ruining the lives of millions of Tanzanians.
Today, Tanzania’s president flies around in a $29 million jet purchased with his poor people’s money. It is so big he cannot even land the thing on more than five airstrips in the country. The minister said that the jet was needed not to visit the ‘villages’ but for the president’s meetings abroad. I pointed out that not even Tony Blair has his own jet. ‘But we are not as rich as the British and we are not as advanced,’ the minister said. ‘You make all the planes, we have to buy them.’ Aidan Hartley’s series on 50 years of Africa’s independent history will be broadcast on Radio Four in January.
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