Climate of Fear (3 page)

Within my own continent, however, it would have been virtually impossible to find one extreme example of the preemptive strategies that were adopted by the artist colonies of Europe, not even when the French rode roughshod over the protestations of African nations and detonated the first nuclear device on African soil in the middle of the last century. Africans were already inured to other forms of fear, and a nuclear conflagration was such an exotic threat that the French explosion remained a pure political aggravation, not one that ever translated into a visceral fear. Today, few of us on the continent will deny that the circumstances, and the dimension, of the current face of fear have transformed awareness even in our normally immune corners of the globe and brought into immediacy the charms of Europe's artistic exodus. The only trouble is, such overactive imaginations will find it difficult to think of a secure destination. Events of a hitherto unimaginable dimension have rendered virtually every corner of the globe vulnerable.

Reality is indeed catching up with science fiction, or, shall we now simply say, history is repeating itself in a phenomenon that appears to have been cloned from fiction. I refer to that perennial motif of the literature of megalomania, a fascination with the notion of one individual's obsession to dominate the world—to be distinguished from ruling, or governing, simply to
dominate
—that stuff of science fiction that found reality in the historic aberration of an Adolf Hitler. Now James Bond 007 moves beyond fantasy derring-do where the global sword of Damocles is an orbiting satellite, awaiting the push of a button unless a hundred billion euros are paid into a special account and the whole world acknowledges a new Master of the Universe, ensconced in the bowels of some inaccessible island. However, even the orbiting pod of destruction has its limitations in in-stilling universal fear. Far more effective is the domesticated agency whose very ordinariness is more terrifying than the sophisticated bomb, and is inversely proportionate to the bomb's lethal reach. A sachet of sarin is located no one knows where, but is ready to be punctured when the signal is given. The banal shopping bag left innocuously at the entrance to a metro station is eyed as a potential enemy, capable of devastation less dramatic than, but every bit as awesome as, a plane hurtling down from the sky in a ball of flames.

In 1989, less than a year after Lockerbie, a UTA passenger flight—UTA, like Pan Am, has since collapsed—was brought down by an act of sabotage over the Republic of Niger. That event was swallowed with total equanimity by African heads of state. Was this from policy, the tranquilizing pill of African and/or Third World solidarity, that catechism of historic victims of European imperialism that urged them to close ranks in the face of any accusations by the historic oppressors of the world? Or did this muteness emanate from fear of probable reprisal by the aggressor, who was predictably intolerant of any voice—within or without—that dared to criticize its methods of anti-imperialist challenge?

That silence, I confess, gave me pause, and here is why. In the original lecture to which I referred at the beginning—“Climates of Art”—when French arrogance sought to spread the fear of the nuclear holocaust to African soil, even during that immediate postindependence stage of insecure nationhood, I lauded the fact that African states had not hesitated to act in concert. The outrage of a continent was vocal and sustained. France was declared a pariah nation, and numerous African countries broke diplomatic relations with the arrogant Gauls for infesting African soil with nuclear fumes. The economic consequences, in the main, were bravely ignored. On a personal level, since that outrage coincided with my début on the stage of the Royal Court Theatre in London—one of those experimental one-night stands on a Sunday—I declaimed an angry poem in condemnation of such an act of continental disdain. Indeed, the recent hysterical mood of resentment in the United States over the refusal of France to jump into an unnecessary U.S.-promoted war with Iraq was nothing compared with the mood of the African continent when France, despite stern warnings, went ahead and detonated its atom bomb. With that concerted response on my mind, I think I could be forgiven for expecting no less than the same heated reaction when a plane was deliberately blasted out of African skies.

Nothing of the sort took place. A planeload of humanity had been deliberately blown apart and, suddenly, the political touchiness of the continent appeared to have gone to sleep. None of that earlier fervor of moral outrage was forthcoming, not even a credible warning to whomever the perpetrators were to kindly take their warfare elsewhere or be confronted with the righteous anger of African nations. The commencing view on the continent was that this was a PLO gambit, aided and abetted by some Middle East allies, and there were sufficient reasons to lean toward such a view. Libya—and Gadhafi—entered the list of suspects some time later.

That studied muteness, I felt, could only be born out of fear. The political club that was then the Organization of African Unity made only the most tepid statements of condemnation. If it set up its own technical commission of investigation, it must have been deliberately low-key, an apologetic step that was shrouded in mystery—for fear of reprisals? Political cowardice or a lack of moral will, what dominated the thinking of many African leaders was, frankly, “Let us keep mute and maybe he will exempt us from his current revolutionary rampage, or at least exercise his restraining influence and cloak us in selective immunity.” They had only to recall that Libya, headed by a young maverick called Gadhafi, was then at the height of its powers. It advertised a progressive, even radical, agenda, one that threatened corrupt as well as repressive governments, provided a training ground for dissidents of the left, right, or indeterminate—and not merely on the African continent. In short, the fear of Libya was the beginning of wisdom.

That silence obtained its rebuke when contrasted with the combative cry of the world over Lockerbie. It was indeed a shock of contrasts. In the case of Lockerbie, a painstaking exercise of detective work spanned continents. The culprits were not only identified but boldly advertised, and a pursuit of the malefactors undertaken until they were eventually brought before a court of justice. That culture of “neighborly reticence”—let us take note—is yet again paralyzing the will of African leaders today as they turn a blind eye to the genocidal operations currently being waged in the Sudan. A new Rwanda is in the making—to cite the belated acknowledgment by the secretary-general of the United Nations—but the victims wait in vain for the moral outcry of a continent, or a structure of relief from the global community.

Again, an updated postscript to the pairing of those two aerial assaults: in the terms of settlements finally agreed in the last year by the Libyan government, the Niger atrocity appeared to be constantly attached as a footnote, a minor codicil to the Lockerbie agreement, almost an afterthought. Those terms of settlement, being derisory in comparison, further bore out my earlier plaint: even in the supposedly egalitarian domain of death, some continue to die more equally than others. But the succession of Lockerbie by Niger had at least impressed one fact on the world: the enthronement of a qualitatively different climate of fear, an expression of global dominance through a disregard for innocents, without respect to territory, and without even a pragmatic questioning of the possible rupturing of existing political alliances. Libya was after all—still is—a member of the Organization of African Unity, now the African Union. That fact did not prevent her assault on the constituency of that organization. The implicit proclamation appeared to be that, in the new arena of conflicts, there would be no cordon sanitaire, no sanctuary for innocents, no space that was out of bounds in the territorial claims of a widening climate of fear.

Even as the foregoing was being drafted, just a few months ago, the world was astounded by a once unthinkable volte-face by the Libyan government. I listened in a state of near hypnosis as the Libyan leader stepped up to the microphones to renounce not only the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction but—terrorism! Within the radical caucuses of the sixties, seventies, and eighties on the African continent, any suggestion that Mr. Gadhafi was remotely linked with the promotion of acts that involved the arbitrary disposition of lives, and should be condemned for this, was greeted with those
knowing
smirks that declared one a victim of Western brainwashing and an enemy of the anti-imperialist struggle. The notion that there should be rules and restraints even within an accepted mandate of justifiable violence in the cause of a people's liberation was simply too abstruse a concept, one that identified only the lackeys of the imperialist order. Distasteful though the conclusion may be to such mind-sets, September 11, 2001, has proved to be only a culmination of the posted signs that had been boldly scrawled on the sands of the Sahara, over decades, in letters of blood.

We are repeatedly bombarded with the notion that the world we once knew ended on September 11, 2001. I find myself unable to empathize with such a notion, and we shall look at the reasons why as we proceed with our series. For now, let me simply admit that it is within that subjective context that I found it most appropriately symbolic that I, the only African passenger aboard a British Airways flight between London and Los Angeles on that day, should be the last person on the plane to learn what had happened, and perhaps one of the last million or two of the world population to know that the world had, allegedly, undergone a permanent transformation. It is an appropriate anecdote on which to end this introductory lecture.

What happened was quite simple: my routine on an aircraft—which I regret to admit has virtually become my third or fourth home—is quite simple. I take advantage of the total isolation to do some work, eat at meal-times, doze off in fits and starts, drink any amount of wine I feel like—in defiance of medical wisdom—but mostly engage in a sometimes intensive dialogue with my laptop. On September 11, the routine was no different. I must have been in one of my sleep modes when the event occurred. When I woke up, I simply reported back for duty with my laptop.

My surprise was quite subdued when, eight to nine hours after takeoff, I heard the pilot announce that we were now approaching Manchester—subdued because the United States makes free with the names of cities from all over the world, and I imagined that the weather had forced the pilot to follow a different flight pattern from the norm, one that brought him over some American town called Manchester, rather than the city of Boise, Idaho, a name I had grown accustomed to hearing from the flight deck as we drew close to Los Angeles. However, when, a few minutes later, the same voice announced that we were now crossing the Welsh border, I had to wonder if this was not one coincidence too many.

Before I had time to work out what it all meant, however, the next announcement informed me that we were making our approach for a landing in . . . Cardiff! I pressed the bell and the flight steward came by. Why, I asked, were we landing in Cardiff, and could he inform me in what part of the United States that was situated?

The poor man blinked hard, stared down at me. Didn't I know that we had turned around in mid-Atlantic? There had been, he said, a “security incident” in the United States and all planes were being either diverted or not permitted to take off at all if their destination was the U.S. We were headed for Cardiff because there were no more berths at Heathrow, other U.S.bound planes having been grounded. Beyond that, he could offer no explanation. I shrugged it off. It was not, after all, the first time that my plane had been diverted or done a full turnaround, mid-Atlantic, on account of some technical problem.

Here is an appropriate moment to confess to my own five-year cohabitation with a personalized form of fear. Nothing less than fear had long since schooled me into traveling with only hand luggage. I have always been a light traveler, but the habit became de rigueur under the terror reign of Sanni Abacha of Nigeria. So unscrupulous were the methods of that dictatorship that its agents did not hesitate to introduce contraband, specifically hard drugs, into the luggage of the opposition, then alert the customs officials at the destination of the approaching drug baron. If I lived under any real fear during the struggle to rid the nation of that dictatorship, it was definitely that, over and above anything else. It surpassed even the possibility of being seduced by a designing female, like the hapless whistle-blower on the Israeli nuclear activities whose pleasure trip with his paramour ended up in the net spun by the Mossad, and an eighteen-year prison sentence. Against such a predicament one could at least protect oneself by resisting temptation; checked-in luggage was far more vulnerable matter. This project of incrimination through baggage tampering actually succeeded with a traditional monarch who had refused to surrender his domain to Abacha's campaign for a life presidency. I was involved in what were fortunately successful efforts to extricate that innocent from a virtual illegal imprisonment in London, public embarrassment, and even extortion.

The fear of Abacha had thus turned me into one baggageless passenger you could swear by on any flight, and thus the very first out of the customs area—that is, when I was not being interrogated for having three passports stuck together, plastered with visas and immigration stamps from cover to cover. This time, passage was smooth. I ensconced myself in the bus that had been provided to take us to our hotel, settled down with a book. An hour, one and a half, then nearly two hours later, I was still seated in the bus, increasingly impatient, joined by only a handful of fellow passengers. Cardiff was apparently not accustomed to receiving so many jumbo jets all at once, and the baggage handlers were in a total flounder.

I got down to look for someone at whom to rail for the delay, stretch my legs, find out into what hotel we were booked, and look for a taxi—then recognized some of the passengers huddled around a mobile telephone, while others queued up for the public equipment. Only then did I begin to suspect that something truly out of the ordinary was responsible for our turnaround. I approached the mobile-telephone owner, who was transmitting to his circle live developments from the United States. That was how, nine to ten hours after the event, I came to know that the world I knew was supposed to have disappeared, or become altered unrecognizably.