End of a bad joke
Richard West
The coup d'etat against Emperor Bokassa is Yet another piece of good news in a year that has seen the disappearance from office of Pol Pot (Cambodia), Field Marshal (and King of Scotland) Amin, the President (and 'unique miracle') Macias Nguemo of Equatorial Guinea, to say nothing,of David Owen in Britain. As I mentioned after the fall of Amin, it would be most unwise to make any accusations against Bokassa 7 of murder, for instance, or misappropriation of funds — for it is not just the Anglophone politicians in Africa who know of the wealth to be made out of Britain's revered laws of libel. Having recently cost the Spectator dear in the courts, I shall play safe this time and say that I cannot believe those terrible stories about Bokassa shooting or poking the eyes out pf schoolchildren. Such !vounding suggestings are quite impossible to maintain in front of a wise British Airy. 1 shall therefore confine my remarks on Bokassa to what little I saw of him and his country before he was overthrown.
The great American journalist Negley Parson called Bangui, the capital of the !ountry, the nearest thing he had seen to darkest Africa' when he visited it in , 1,939; and the only place where he had seen tne entire white population drunk by nine in the morning. He himself had been on the Wagon for several months but was driven by Bangui to take a half bottle of brandy in one swig. Shortly after independence in 1960, the Central African Empire (then still only republican in its status) was the setting of a bitter and prize-winning French novel. One of the cabinet is shown consuming another's brains for breakfast while the one likeable character in The Savage State (before he is Murdered) asks: 'We only live half as long as the rest of the world — is that right?'. Right. Infant mortality over the last few Ye.ars has been running so high that many children miss the chance to go on to school to be murdered. 0.11 my only visit to Bangui, in 1971, the Saviour of the Republic, the Engineer Without Equal, and Central African St Christopher (Bokassa liked titles almost as much as Stalin did) had won notoriety by the .attempt to find the daughter he sired during army service in Indo-China; she had been born about 1953 when all little girls Were named Martine after the popular film star Martine Carole. The story of Bokassa's search reached the offices of a Saigon newspaper, which made an appeal for a Martine, now aged about fifteen of mixed Vietnamese and African characteristics. Such a girl was found and flown to Bangui where Bokassa insisted that all the diplomatic corps turn out to meet her at three in the morning. Then things went sour. It was not the correct Martine, and another one was produced by Saigon, the first disappearing.
This story had caused some facetiousness in the foreign press, so that when we were coming in to land at Bangui the stewardess announced a list of the newspapers banned in the Central African Republic. The French people I met there were not quite so loudly contemptuous of the great man as those I had met in the neighbouring countries. Among the blacks, the fear was palpable. None would look at me, let alone talk to me so I was rather surprised to read report in a Sunday newspaper not long afterwards that 'Papa Bok' was loved and revered by the African population. Much the same lie was told in the English papers about Amin, apparently on the premise that blacks are too stupid to fear and detest a dictator.
The sole occasion I actually saw Bokassa was actually in Kampala where he had gone to discuss techniques with his fellow mass murderer, to swop a few medals and open Bokassa Avenue, previously named after an Indian judge. The atmosphere of the Kampala crowd was deathly cool towards both the dictators until the smaller man, his left side laden with decorations, reached up to kiss Amin on his fat cheeks; but the laughter was unmixed with good humour. Both Amin and Bokassa were excellent jokes except to the people they lorded it over.
The French, the former colonial rulers, have least jtistification for sneering at what has become of this once remote African country. The pillage began about 1900, when rubber companies inspired by the easy wealth of the Belgians across the Congo, sent Senegalese troops into what is now the Bangui region to press men into forced labour as porters or pickers. A missionary, Father Daigre, reported that thousands fled across the river into Belgian territory while 'others hid in the bush or in caves from which they were dislodged by hand-grenades'. Men who refused to carry a thirty kilo load for fifteen miles over dif ficult country — often supplied with unfamil iar food — were subjected to fines, imprisonment or a flogging with the chicotte of hippopotamus hide. As villages round Bangui collapsed into lethargy, Father Daigre saw graves plundered for human flesh; children rooting for slugs in the rubbish and men, like skeletons, walking. This was ogouru, the local word for death by despair as seen and described by Joseph Conrad the other side of the Congo River.
In 1903, in this same equatorial colony, two French officials employed on recruiting were brought to trial for their methods of work. No charge was preferred for use of the chkotte and the taking of women and children as ransom to force the young men to work. Both Toque and Gaud, for these were their names, admitted having men shot without trial but claimed these were justifiable executions. However Toque had killed one man by throwing him over a waterfall; Gaud had cooked a woman alive in an oven and both had forced a servant to drink soup boiled from a man's head, as well as blowing a prisoner up with a stick of dynamite. It was typical of colonial sentiment to protest when Toque and Gaud were found guilty and sent to prison for two years.
When the novelist Andre Gide went to Oubangui-Chari in 1925 he found that little had changed. In his subsequent book Voyage au Congo he described how French officials and planters beat the Africans to death. Indeed Bokassa's father was killed by the French, allegedly because he was pro-German. We Europeans should not lightly sneer at Africans for cruelty and rapacity.
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