Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (26 page)

“Many years of drought have made the people of this region extremely poor, and it is their pauperization that poses the greatest danger to these objects,” Diaby said, invoking a combination that was basic to almost every African crisis: the misery of the locals and the greed of powerful outsiders. “As soon as Djenné’s discovery was announced, the galleries and museums in Europe were paying agents to try to find them Djenné artifacts,” he said ruefully. “That’s what set off the digging, and it won’t stop until the market is glutted with delta objects, and the interest shifts elsewhere.”

Diaby was far more perceptive about the cultural complexities and consequences than his initial broadside against foreign dealers suggested. “The collectors will tell you that they are preserving the items, and helping spread knowledge and appreciation of our culture. But the very manner of procurement is fueling a market that feeds a whole underworld of looters who destroy the sites and pay pennies to the diggers.

“They tell us that we don’t have any place to keep these artifacts in Mali. But if they have a real desire for promotion and preservation, let them come here and help us create a museum and educate our people. Instead, they collect the objects fraudulently, and their museums and galleries become laundering sites for the cultural products of our region. Honestly speaking, a few collectors may be profiting, but it is doing nothing but harm for Africa, and for Mali.”

Poverty alone, Diaby knew, could not explain the ongoing rape at Djenné-Jeno. Indeed, with his mention of education, he had put his finger on another key to the problem, indeed to many of Africa’s problems. Old, cracked pottery and ancient items of worship like figurines had no meaning and little intrinsic value to the poor farmers and herdsmen of this area. Most of them had no concept of the interest or value such items could hold for white people in faraway Paris or New York, either. To them it was all a little strange, but since digging for dusty bric-a-brac provided a means to survive, they were happy to dig. The only formal schooling that most of the men in these parts had received was in the bare little Islamic classrooms where, as boys, imams had taught them Koranic prayer.

Islam began to spread through this part of Mali in the eleventh century, and with it came a harsh rejection of ancestor worship, the use of masks and a rich tradition of other figurative art. Like Christianity, which arrived in West Africa much later, the new religious import meant a huge infusion of learning and, by implication, something we usually agree to call progress. But acceptance of the new faith came at a steep cost: cultural self-renunciation.

President Konaré’s government had taken pains to plaster walls in towns and villages throughout the region with anti-pillaging posters. But to a thoroughly Islamicized population, moreover one that had recently lived through severe droughts and famine, and on top of that was illiterate, the effort was noble but ultimately meaningless. “To you it may seem paradoxical, but the people here don’t feel the same connection to this history that the elites of Bamako, or maybe even an intellectual in Abidjan, does,” said Diaby. “They have been taught to scorn their own art, and to revile their own culture. Saving Djenné-Jeno will require a lot of education. Museums must be built right here, so that tourists can come, and jobs can be created, and people can see for themselves how highly their own culture is valued.”

CHAPTER NINE

Tough Love

The rains in Liberia had stopped as if on cue late one morning near the end of January 1996, and the sun was so strong that it required only a smidgen of patience to watch the puddles burn off. Madeleine Albright, Washington’s representative to the United Nations, was due to touch down in a couple of hours, and even the weather had decided that it had better cooperate, clearing the skies for her Boeing 737. Liberians had long been accustomed to thinking of America as their all-powerful but, to them, inexplicably disinterested patron, and the disappearance of the clouds came like celestial reconfirmation.

Albright would be the highest-ranking American official to visit Liberia since George Shultz’s visit eleven years earlier, and for anyone who still remembered, the precedent alone might have been grounds for concern. Like Shultz before her, Albright had chosen a sensitive time to visit. Against all odds, the country’s main warlords had come together to form a transitional Council of State. Almost miraculously, fighting had ceased five months before, and there was serious talk of elections for the first time in recent memory. All of this would require money, however, and Liberia being America’s West African stepchild, the international community was waiting to see what form Washington’s commitment would take.

The Clinton administration had labored to keep Liberia’s problems off the radar screen, and given the depressing grab bag of mediocre politicians and outright thugs who kept the country’s pot boiling, it is certainly not hard to understand why Liberia was thought of as a headache when it was thought of at all. There were cheaper, faster and more secure ways for the world’s most powerful country to transmit its intelligence and diplomatic messages, and just as surely as endless acres of oozing trees had become outmoded by the discovery of cheaper synthetic ways to make rubber, Liberia’s antenna farms were now technological relics of the pre–global positioning satellite and pre-Internet past.

The ceasefire that greeted Albright in Monrovia interrupted what had easily been, on a per capita basis, one of Africa’s most horrible civil wars. No fewer than 150,000 of the 2.6 million Liberians had died during seven years of mayhem. A comparable toll for the United States would be the loss of nearly 21 million citizens. Most of Liberia’s survivors had been turned into internal refugees by the recurrent waves of fighting. In the capital there were no jobs, no electricity and no running water. After countless attempts to find a political solution to the conflict, Liberia’s fighting had degenerated into a massive and chaotic asset grab, with each militia stripping from the land whatever of value it could get. And yet this time, somehow, West African diplomats had pulled out of their hats an agreement involving the leading warlords, which they believed just might hold.

But the country’s neighbors, and Liberians themselves, knew that if the outside world did not inject emergency funds into the country, the fragile peace would not last. More than anything else, money was needed to help the corrupt yet indispensable 8,000-man West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, deploy throughout the heavily forested interior. Running a close second was funding for disarmament and job training for the thousands of boy soldiers who had the run of the countryside, and were now streaming into Monrovia. Without it there was certain to be another explosion, only the timing of which was in doubt.

Washington and its European partners were preoccupied with the crisis in Bosnia, though, and scarcely seemed concerned with what diplomats thought of as a messy, two-bit African tragedy. The United Nations was spending $25 million every week on peacekeeping in Bosnia in 1996, $4 million more than it spent in Liberia in the entire year. “It took the Americans one week to raise $1.8 billion for Bosnia,” Victor Gbeho told me on the eve of the Albright visit. He was a senior Ghanaian diplomat in Liberia on behalf of the West African Economic Community, which had first fielded ECOMOG in August 1990. “If I were paranoid, I would say the Westerners’ delays that we are always facing here are due to one simple fact: This is Africa.”

For her curious little whistle-stop tour of Africa, Albright had chosen as destinations Liberia, Rwanda and Angola—all countries that figured squarely atop any list of places where the West in general, and the United States in particular, had failed the continent most spectacularly in the 1990s. Washington’s client and ally Jonas Savimbi had kept the Angolan civil war going for sixteen years, using $250 million of American taxpayers’ money and American-supplied weapons ferried via Liberia and Mobutu’s Zaire, right next door, to thoroughly gut the country and leave a half million dead.

America’s ostensible aim had been to force a Marxist government to hold democratic elections, which Savimbi was expected to win. When Savimbi was defeated at the polls in 1992, however, he began fighting yet again. The Clinton administration, feeling no sense of obligation to Savimbi or to a country that had hitherto been primarily the Republicans’ obsession, simply turned its back on Angola, agreeing not to speak about the unspeakable in ways that only the truly powerful of the world can. Like the retouched May Day photos of old from the Soviet Union, where airbrushes magically lifted disgraced leaders from the reviewing-stand lineup, making them officially forgotten, the sacrifice of Angola on the altar of the Cold War would simply disappear from the news. Clinton decided to spend as little as possible on UN peacekeeping operations there, and the war America had helped create sputtered on for a full decade more, until Savimbi himself was killed in an ambush by the Angolan army in 2002.

By comparison to Liberia, the first stop on Albright’s tour, Rwanda and Angola were both fresh tragedies. Liberia was a place where Washington’s record of betrayal and disregard was already a depressing 174-year-old tale of recidivism, and yet no amount of bitter history could shake the Liberians’ sweet and entirely genuine image of themselves as America’s wards. The sentiment was a holdover from the very establishment of the country in 1822.

History had a way of serving up reminders to Liberians that their love of all things American was never meant to be requited. There had been the scandalously cheap price Firestone had paid for its plantations. There had been the singling out of the country by the League of Nations for sanctions over the slavelike work conditions, although European powers were using forced labor to grow cotton, rubber and cocoa all over the continent. Of much more recent note for most Liberians, though, was America’s abandonment of the country in the early stages of its civil war, in June 1990.

Boy soldiers loyal to Charles Taylor were advancing on the city from one direction. What was worse, Taylor’s insurrection, although it was not yet six months old, had already splintered, producing an even more fearsome force, a rival band of fighters from the National Patriotic Front led by an erratic, self-proclaimed field marshal named Prince Yormie Johnson, who were rushing toward the capital from another direction.

President Doe’s peculiar means of fiddling while Rome burned had been to smoke marijuana and play checkers all day while barricaded in the executive mansion with several hundred loyalists from his Krahn ethnic group. When Johnson’s irregulars reached the city, though, he roused himself from his stupor to order a merciless bout of ethnic cleansing against the Mano and Gio peoples, who he deemed were the rebels’ main supporters. Doe, of course, was to be assassinated by Johnson’s fighters in September 1990.

Liberia’s horrors actually prefigured the atrocities that were to come in Rwanda, and America’s instincts were identical in both cases. While churches full of huddling people were becoming scenes of unimaginable slaughter, 2,500 United States Marines who were part of a task force along with six navy vessels steaming off the capital’s shore swooped into Monrovia to selectively evacuate the city’s American residents, along with other Westerners and Lebanese traders. Liberians were left to their own devices, just as Rwandans would be four years later.

“We deployed a large marine amphibious force near Liberia to evacuate U.S. citizens, an operation accomplished with great efficiency,” Herman Cohen, an assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, told the journalist Bill Berkeley, speaking with deep regret, albeit years later. “A modest intervention . . . could have avoided the prolonged conflict.” Cohen confessed, however, that throughout 1990 he had never once managed to speak to the president about the Liberian crisis.

On the ground in Liberia, American officials rejected all requests to provide protection for the skeleton staff that had managed to keep the city’s main hospital functioning. In Washington, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesperson, announced matter-of-factly in a statement read to reporters that “the U.S. military has no role to play in this conflict.” “Somewhere along the way,” an official told the
Washington Post
reporter in Liberia, “we just decided we weren’t going to get involved. Period. My impression is that Washington and Congress are absolutely fed up with Liberia.”

It did not take long for Liberians to understand that Madeleine Albright had not come bearing much of anything new. The new American dispensation that Liberians dreamed of was not in the offing, not even any aid for a transitional government desperate to make its ceasefire hold. What the American diplomat did deliver was the kind of bullish tough-love speech that was her trademark, and boiled down to its essence, it said that Liberians should help themselves first, and only then could American help materialize.

The weather may have bowed to an Imperial America, but in West Africa, Albright had decided to hold her news conference within the confines of tiny Spriggs Payne airfield, where the usual scrum of pick-pockets, touts and sleazy immigration officials gave way to a pushy, sweaty crowd of journalists, nervous State Department security agents and Nigerian soldiers wielding big automatic rifles. America might have its high-flying rhetoric about being the indispensable nation, but on Liberian soil day-to-day survival depended upon Nigeria. Reinforcing this notion none too subtly, a Nigerian airlift into Monrovia of fresh soldiers and supplies continued throughout Albright’s brief press conference, forcing the usually overpowering Albright to shout to be heard over the heavy drone of the Nigerian C-130s.

In her speech and in her brief give-and-take with the press, Albright had unself-consciously laid bare the fault lines that undermined American policy toward West Africa. The region supplied an important and growing share of American oil imports. U.S. trade with the region surpassed trade with all of the countries of the former Soviet Union combined. And millions of Americans traced their ancestry to the region. Yet the fervently held bottom line, one that resounded throughout her comments, was that America had no vital or strategic interests in the region.

The United States’ top priority in Liberia was to avoid any direct involvement in the country’s crises, and with the threat of an explosion ever present, it could pull this off only through moral compromises so ugly that they were better kept out of view. Washington rightly abhorred the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, but desperately needed his country to keep the lid on war-wracked Liberia and Sierra Leone. In Nigeria most citizens lacked electricity or safe drinking water, yet the country was propping up ECOMOG in these two countries at the reported cost of $10 million per month. Moreover, Nigeria was paying for relative peace in a currency that the United States had been unwilling to countenance in Africa since the 1993 debacle in Somalia: the lives of its soldiers.

Extending ECOMOG’s writ beyond Monrovia’s modest perimeter, however, required heavy trucks and communications gear, help with things like airlifts and spare parts, and in such areas America was indeed indispensable. The only consistent feature of Washington’s policy toward Nigeria, whether we were censoring the country for its grave human rights abuses or cooperating in places like Liberia, however, was the emphasis on doing things cheaply. The United States had shown no stomach for serious human rights sanctions for fear of hurting American oil supplies or interests. At the same time, exhibiting a kind of hypocritical prudishness for which Liberians would pay the bill in lives lost, Washington was unwilling to work openly with Nigeria in regional peacekeeping efforts, even when they were well intended.

From all evidence, America’s behavior was driven by appearances, not principle, and what counted most to the Africa policymakers was to avoid being seen to be cooperating with the Abacha regime. So in Liberia, a country desperately in need of international support for peacekeeping, the State Department devised a stingy bureaucratic solution that would satisfy no one. The idea was to hire American private contractors to perform essential tasks for ECOMOG, rather than to allow army-to-army cooperation with Nigeria’s military regime. Soon, Americans were flooding the streets of Monrovia, driving huge trucks laden with food aid and other supplies, and building the odd concrete pillboxes that bored-looking ECOMOG soldiers would man at every major intersection.

Liberia was a country flat on its back, with unemployment high beyond measure and treasury reserves too meager to warrant counting. Washington’s policy, though, would see to it that almost no jobs were created and that negligible funds were injected into the economy. For the cash-strapped Liberian Council of State, there was no alternative source of funds to the wildcat mining and marauding of the countryside that had been the main feature of the civil war in the first place. Those who knew the country best, from the senior Nigerian officials to the American ambassador, William B. Milam, understood implicitly that this situation could not hold. With occasional skirmishes in the bush over rich diamond fields, and lots of prickly jockeying for position among the warlords in the capital, it was only a question of time before Liberia’s unstable concoction of an interim government would explode.