Doctor at large
Joseph Hone
ZANZIBAR TO TIMBUKTU by Anthony Daniels
John Murray, £13.95, pp.231
Africa . . . A President Bongo, so touchy over his small stature that he chooses his cabinet on the grounds of height more than for any other distinction; Pygmy tribes guarded by police in their forest enclave to ensure their ready availa- bility for tourists; a bus which, though moving only within its own state borders, but owing to endless palavers and mon- strous extortions at 'customs' and 'pass- port' controls, takes seven hours to travel 100 yards; the execution of a thief in which the firing squad, taking several minutes to complete the job, works its way up from the victim's feet.
These must be fictional African conceits, discarded material from Scoop or Black Mischief Not at all. As Auberon Waugh wrote of his father's diaries, 'They show that the world of Evelyn Waugh's novels did in fact exist.' And so it is here in this sensible, witty but finally horrifying account of a contemporary journey which Dr Anthony Daniels made through the ever deepening penumbra of the dark continent.
And, yes, he speaks of a genuine Presi- dent Bongo — of Equatorial Guinea Just as he reflects on all the above local entertainments, as fact not fiction. And were it not for his scientific training and generally scrupulous approach in the book, one might not have believed him — though I can vouch for much of what he says in any case, having experienced many of the same sort of bizarreries on a similar transcon- tinental trip I made some years ago.
Here we get a picture of the real Africa today — curtains drawn aside, stones lifted up to reveal all the corrupt wrigglings, the fantastic mutations and survival mechan- isms which conditions create in Africans now. And Dr Daniels, who for two years practised in Tanzania, reflects on all these grotesque life forms with a fascinated, if largely unsurprised, concern — a Darwin come to the Galapagos Islands, finding most of his theories proved.
Travelling always in the local manner, by bus, train, river boat and hair-raising taxi, staying in flea-pit hotels, hovels and even sleeping on the side of the road, Dr Daniels takes this via dolorosa with great stoicism, full of wry thoughts in a succes- sion of very dry seasons, through Tanza- nia, Rwanda, Zaire and the other Fran- cophone states of West Africa to Nigeria before ending up in fabled Timbuktu, where — in a parody of a final Livingstone- like encounter — he meets the wife of an American missionary. 'I'm happy here,' she tells him, 'because I know this is where the Lord wants us to be. But otherwise Timbuktu's the pits, the absolute pits.' Quite so — like most of the other places visited here, and Dr Daniels is never economical with the truth.
But these are truths not so readily admitted elsewhere, particularly by well- meaning people in the West, who shy away from the proposition that Africa's horren- dous problems are largely self-inflicted, in great measure by its various criminal regimes — its Idi Amins, Mobutus and Emperor Bokasas. And it is due to these Molochs with their murderous tribal ambi- tions, savage armies and ubiquitous lack- eys, more than to any earlier colonialism, that so much of Africa has become a preposterous three-ring circus of cruelty, folly and delusion — aided and abetted, of course (because we want the uranium there or to keep the Ruskies out), by America and the other Western powers.
Nor are the myriad national and interna- tional aid organisations entirely blameless either. Ever since the ill-fated groundnuts scheme, there has been a tendency to throw charity or quite unsuitable agricultu- ral methods and equipment at African problems — which may in the end do much more harm than good. Dr Daniels takes a severe, but in my own experience appropriate, overview of this usually in- sensitive and abortive Western endeavour: The recycling of aid money is undoubtedly the principal economic activity of Equatorial Guinea. Organisations . . . ofevery conceiv- able hue have descended like vultures on the carcass of the country . . . Guinea's misfor- tune has turned it into a land of opportunity for the perpetually disgruntled cosmopoli- tans of the international aid fraternity, whose need to help those less fortunate than them- selves is happily compatible with their need for large tax-free salaries. However, his book is no polemic. We are far from the noise of any axes being ground, other than those of sympathy for the locals and impatience at the vicious or naive machinations of all concerned with Africa today — African administrators, Western governments, charitable and other do-gooders. He has written a splen- did road book, packed with every kind of real travel experience. And just as fine is his laconic eye and style where the wit or folly of a scene hits you powerfully some seconds afterwards, like a well-told joke. But who-is the joke on? There's the rub.
In front of the Scoop-like backdrops described here — of fatuous aid schemes, of tin-pot dictators in their tapestry of casual mayhem and genocide — lie the ordinary people. What's to be done about them? Dr Daniels has no ready answer. None of us can have. But the past may have messages, for any real future in Africa must surely first of all demand less arrogant, corrupt and murderous African administrations. And a recurrent theme emerges in Dr Daniels's conversations with several elderly Africans: how much better things were in colonial days. Irony indeed — that the morally wrong, but just and efficient rule of all those old District Commissioners should be so lovingly com- memorated, not by us, but by Africans themselves.
`Give me liberty or give me death' was the cry of the original African freedom- fighters. As a result of the crazed leaders who have come to power in their wake, Africans now have the misfortune to suffer both. They're free all right — and dying in swarms. Dr Daniels's book, in essence, is a heart-rending tour of the charnel house.
Joseph Hone is the author of Children of the Country: Coast to Coast Across Africa (Hamish Hamilton, 1986).
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