The aristocrats of Africa

Richard West

When Business Traveller offered to send me to Africa (courtesy of an airline) I chose Senegal for a quite simple reason: it is one of the few countries left in Africa where a journalist is allowed. Of course, one can get a new passport, describ- ing oneself as a 'businessman', a teacher or even a waiter (a useful wheeze, as it can be Confused with 'writer') but woe betide anyone who starts to work as a journalist under false pretences. Africans are, with some reason, fearful of white spies and Mercenaries.

It takes about two days for a Senegal visa. The Ivory Coast does not require a visa from British subjects but the expense and climate there are horrid. One can get without difficulty to Upper Volta but I have been there; and when you've heard Ougadougou calling, you can easily heed aught else.Most countries in Africa are vir- tually barred to journalists: Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Chad, Ghana (Usually), the Benin Republic, Liberia, Guinea and even nice old Sierra Leone, 'where I once spent a month or so doing research for a book. 'You will have to get a telex from your representative in Freetown,' they told me in London. I had no representative, so I could not get an en- try permit. Most of the rest of Africa is as bad. Zaire may not give an advance visa; You have to pay through the nose for one at the airport. Angola, Mozambique and Ethiopa, the Marxist states, are banned ex- cept to pro-communist toadies. Uganda is Perilous. Tanzania has kindly withdrawn the persona non grata order applied to me on my last visit, but I do not feel like testing the hospitality. Malawi refused me entry the only occasion I tried to go there. Zimbabwe is tolerant, so far. Even South Africa now demands that visiting journalists get a 'work permit' which generally takes several weeks to obtain.

Countries ban journalists when they have something to hide; and this is quite often ef- fective. We all saw TV films of the horror of South Vietnam and are seeing them now of El Salvador — largely because the old Saigon regime and now the regime in El Salvador have always admitted journalists. Needless to say, we have never seen film of Russian or Cuban anti-guerrilla war in Afghanistan, Ethiopia or Angola. No foreign journalist, not even a communist, has ever, in 60 years, had a glimpse of Russia's Gulag Archipelago, just as none saw Hitler's death camps until they were freed by allied troops. As a result, it is often the less bad coun- tries that get the worse publicity, just because journalists go there. South Africa

is a case in point. One can see the brutality; one can sometimes watch the secret police- men sweating it out in the witness box of an open court, as happened during the inquest on Steve Biko; above all, one can read a daily attack on the government in the English-language press. In most of the rest of Africa, horror goes unobserved and cer- tainly unreported. The most secretive coun- tries are also the most corrupt. A place like Nigeria, which has rightly been termed a `kleptocracy', can also corrupt the foreign press by refusing visas to journalists except those who write the kind of 'special report' (or advertising puff) that sometimes ap- pears in the Guardian and The Times.

Bad publicity goes to the countries that least deserve it. Newspapers are always writing about the corruption in Kenya, especially the trade in animals poached from the game reserves; yet Kenya is, by African standards, a model of honest government. One seldom needs to bribe an official. The Ivory Coast is always describ- ed by the left as `captialistic', 'a rat race', 'neo-colonial' and the rest; because it is one of the few African countries where most people eat.

Like the Ivory Coast, Senegal is anti- Marxist. Unlike the Ivory Coast, it is poor, and is therefore accused of being a client state or even a puppet of France. Certainly, France runs most of the trade in peanuts, Senegal's main produce. France provides almost everything Senegal needs from abroad, as well as a great many things she does not need, like luxury foods, clothes, cosmetics and cars. The French provide much of the business class, the senior army

and navy advisers, the senior civil service and most of the teachers at Senegal's two universities, as well as the lycees — where black children follow the courses set in France, parrOting slogans like 'we are all Gauls'. Many thousands of Senegalese, like those forced from their land by the en- croachment of the desert, have gone to work in France as dustmen, street cleaners, pedlars and in other sub-proletarian jobs. When I first came to Dakar, nearly 20 years ago, I was startled to see the street signs Defense d'uriner, which I assumed were left-overs of old colonial rule. The signs have been repainted in even larger letters a wonderful irony when one considers that those Senegalese who can read and under- stand French are just the ones who never, anyway, pee in the street.

Yes, the French guard their influence; but Senegal is nevertheless very pleasant by West African standards. Food is available at a price that almost everyone can afford. people are well dressed. There is not much crime; indeed two of the people who loudly complained of the muggings when I was here to make a film seven years ago told me that now the streets were safer. The father of Senegalese politics, and his country's first president, Leopold Senghor, has resigned in peace and passed on the govern- ment to a constitutional, very able suc- cessor. Almost alone of black African states, Senegal tolerates both a political op- position and criticism in newspapers and conversation. Cynical Europeans (both of the left and the right) often say that black Africans need a one-party dictatorship; but do black Africans want such a regime? Cerainly, it does not suit the Senegalese, who are a quite exceptionally clever people, with genuine claims to nationhood. They are not just the inhabitants of a state drawn on the map by Europeans.

The Woloff and Mandingo people (they are quite closely related) have many at- tributes that might be called aristocratic: tall, handsome, quick-thinking, arrogant, lazy and artistic. These peoples along the Senegal and the Gambia rivers lived peacefully with each other compared to most West Africans. This meant that when the European slavers came, the Senegalese did not indulge in tribal or local wars in order to sell their prisoners 'down the river'. The island of Goree , opposite Dakar, was used as a depot for slaves brought from down the coast, but few slaves actually came from Senegal. (An ex- ception was the Gambian ancestor of Alex Haley, author of Roots. He was kidnapped rather than sold into slavery.)

Largely because they were not a slave people, the Senegalese demanded and won respect from the Europeans — the Por- tuguese, Dutch, English and finally the French. Even before the French Revolu- tion, Senegalese of mixed blood were represented in Paris. A pure black Senegalese, Blaise Diagne, became a deputy in 1914 and later a minister, charged with the task of recruiting the Senegalese to fight in the First World War. After that war, the Senegalese were used by the French as an occupation army in Germany, much to the fury of liberal and left-wing people in England, who thought this an insult to a defeated foe.

Their gallantry in the cause of France brought little reward to the black Senegalese. In the Second World War, when Senegal sided with Vichy against de Gaulle, the black population did not take sides. They suffered in 1940 when de Gaulle arrived with the British Navy to try to take Dakar, first by persuasion and later by naval gunfire. The attack failed.

We went to Dakar With General de Gaulle.

We sailed round in circles And did bugger all sang the Royal Marines. There were 74 blacks among the military and civilian dead.

This Anglo-French battle only sharpened hostility between Senegal and the little British colony of the Gambia which is enclosed by it on all sides. Until its in- dependence in 1965, the Gambia was both very British and very delightful. Then the Swedish tourists started to come; the Gam- bia became one of the nastiest countries in Africa; and after its revolution last year it was in effect annexed by Senegal. I think this was wise, although, to judge by last week's report from Andrew Brown (Spec- tator 13 March), the hapless Gambians re- sent it.

The former President Senghor is a renowned and indeed very good poet, who coined the less good expression of negritude to describe the role of African culture. His enemies harp on his Frenchness; his lifelong fondness for Georges, later President Pom- pidou; his French wife and his French château. ('He owns one half of Normandy and Jean Gabin owns the other,' I was told once by a sour Frenchwoman living in Dakar.) But his poems are also very African. In fact he discovered his African origins while he was living in exile in France. He dreamed back to Joal, his birth- place, to the segnares, the mixed-race courtesans, and

...the funeral festivals steaming with the blood of slaughtered herds, The noise of quarrels, rhapsodies of the griots.

1 remember pagan voices rhyming the Tantum Ergo

And the procession and the palms and the arches Of triumph.

If Senghor was drawn to France this was not because he renounced his roots in Senegal. The reasons were rather religious and tribal. He speaks the language of the Serers, a minority people, and holds to the Catholic Church in a largely Muslim coun- try.

Another famous Senegalese writer, Ousmane Sembene, represents much of the opposition to Senghor. He is either a Com- munist or something near it; his novel translated in English as God's Bits of Wood, is one of the few socialist realist

works of merit from any country; his films won acclaim in America and in Europe. Yet Sembene also writes in French; he lives in France (perhaps he may have to for reasons of politics), and seemed to me, when I met him, rather more French than African in his manner — which is gruff.

It has been said that the Senegalese are

'neither French nor African; one might equally say they are both French and African. Theirs is one of the few states In Africa that can also claim to be a nation. lboland, or Biafra as it was all too briefly known, is another. In a continent that one has to regard with ever-deepening dismay, Senegal offers reason for hope.