Fruit salad
Aidan Hartley
Laikipia
Somebody should ask Tony and Bob how the Year of Africa is going. I know nobody wants to be reminded of the G8 thing any more. But they should be. Down here on the continent the African Renaissance just turned into a Jacobean tragedy.
Here’s a quick round-up. First we have Tony’s best mate and Commissioner for Africa Meles Zenawi. Ethiopia’s Lenin lookalike and his gang held elections earlier this year and were horrified when it all went against them. Naturally, they rigged the results, which brought the good people of Addis Ababa out on to the streets. In response, Meles deployed his troops to use grenades and machineguns against the civilian crowds, wiping out at least 76 of them. Thousands of others have been thrown into jail.
Meanwhile, across the frontier in Eritrea there is Glenys Kinnock’s former idol Issayas Afewerki chewing carpets. As a guerrilla chieftain Issayas shot and poisoned his way to the top but was always a darling of the Left. Now Meles and Issayas are itching to resume their third war in a decade. Their dispute is over a tiny triangle of disputed desert along their borders. The conflict has already resulted in the deaths of countless thousands.
Next we have leading Commissioner for Africa Benjamin Mkapa. Tanzania’s outgoing Revolutionary party president has achieved the amazing feat of being friends with both Tony Blair and Robert Mugabe. He manages to spout democracy — while sending security forces to Zanzibar to shoot dead civilian voters silly enough to demonstrate against the third rigged democratic election in a decade!
Even over here in Kenya I have banned all family travel to big cities in case of trouble. At home I am glued to the radio and newspapers. The roads are probably fine but it is a safer bet just to lie low like an envelope, as they say here. Next week the population votes in a referendum on a new constitution promising better human rights than the old one.
The voting symbol for YES to the new constitution is a banana. NO is signified by an orange. Voters take their fruit of choice along to rallies in the hot sun. The papers are full of photos of people eating their symbols. In the markets, people have been attacking vendors of rival fruits. ‘This is not healthy for economic growth and general security of the country,’ observed vicepresident Moody Awori, a decent elder politician with a taste for baby-blue tengallon hats. ‘There is nothing special with these two signs. I ate bananas today in the morning and drank orange juice and there is nothing bad with that.’ It would be funny had it not been so tragic. Police have already shot dead seven people in the campaign violence, including a schoolboy of 13. Thanks to the angry mobs, or maybe the potholed roads, the politicians have spurned their Mercedes-Benz cars to zip between rallies in favour of helicopters. These cost thousands per hour at taxpayers’ expense. At the same time the government wants Western countries to feed a million starving poor people in Kenya. Recently, a couple of MPs flew out of a rally in their chopper, only to return later because they had left a mobile phone behind.
An old man here used to say, ‘Just because you are sick in your hat, it doesn’t mean you have to then put it on your head.’ At times like this I recall the riots of 15 years ago, when crowds across Africa began loudly demanding an end to dictatorship and the right to democracy. I witnessed it all as a journalist on the streets. I was supposed to be objective. But in my heart I was with the demonstrators, whose cause everybody knew was right. The cops didn’t care what I thought. They were always beating the crap out of me. I still have a zip-like scar on my skull.
The day a new government won power in Kenya’s peaceful elections three years ago, I wept for joy. At last, I thought. I scratch my scar today and wonder what it was all about. I have been foolish. Like many others I mistakenly believed that Africa’s ills would be quickly solved in the new era of multi-party democracy. Perhaps they will one day, but I no longer know what’s going to happen. I’m not going to put a hat full of sick on my head.
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