Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
Lesotho is a place with which I have an unfulfilled date. While taking part in a BBC African service discussion with the late King Moshoeshoe of Lesotho, I discovered that apart from being nicely spoken and charming, he had almost as much a passion for democracy as I had.
As he was a natural-born ruler, this stood strangely on the king. After the programme, we eagerly exchanged addresses, and I still have his autograph in my address book. He wanted me to join a group of democrats he had put together in London to bring pressure on the continent’s many tin-pot dictators.
Moshoeshoe also intimated that the attempts of the Lesotho coup-makers to keep him abroad were about to be frustrated and that he would be returning home soon. “You must come and see us,” he said. I immediately promised to do that, but couldn’t get round to it until he was (as they used to say in Hastings Banda’s Malawi) “accidentalised”. I wonder what happened to the investigation into his “accident”?
While we were being introduced, I nearly laughed out loud. This was because Moshoeshoe had paid a visit to Ghana in 1966, if my memory serves me right, and had unwittingly provided Ghanaians with one of the best laughs we had for years. The head of state with whom the Ghana army had replaced the brilliant Kwame Nkrumah was a dull ex-sergeant, now a full lieutenant-general, called Joseph Ankrah.
Ankrah was bow-legged, and, through an unfortunate accident, one of his legs became shorter than the other. So he rolled around rather than walked. Give those Ghanaians who hated the idea of Nkrumah being overthrown by a bunch of soldiers such a figure as head of state and what do you think they would call him? Hopalong Cassidy, of course!
Poor Ankrah – he could hardly utter a sentence without visiting the parlour of Madam Missus Malaprop. In his first nationwide broadcast after becoming head of state, he said “Ghana will no longer pay lipstick to African unity!”
And then, Moshoeshoe visited Ghana and Ankrah had to introduce him at a state banquet. “King Lesotho of Moshoeshoe,” he began.
That was not all that Ankrah contributed to Ghanaian political folklore. The smart alecs among us said that the “lipstick” slip was definitely Freudian, because he was so much in thrall to “Bottom Power” that he had sent his wife to be educated, at government expense, at an expensive “finishing school” in England, so as to acquire the graces of being “first lady”.
But – so the rumour went – this “first lady” was so incurably ingrained with the street mentality of what in South Africa would be the equivalent of “township Accra”, that when she came back, she could not resist the urge to go to the popular Makola market – where she used to shop before her induction as first lady – in the stately Mercedes Benz 600 which was normally only used on state occasions. And immediately a new proverb made its way into Accra’s lexicography: “You can take the woman out of Bukom [very rough area] but you can never take Bukom out of the woman!”
With Ankrah and Moshoeshoe in my subconscious, the pictures I saw recently on television, depicting the destruction that has taken place in Maseru, affected me rather badly. I was reminded of the famous American comment, apropos a napalmed Vietnamese village: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Whatever happened to South Africa’s previously formidable diplomatic and intelligence techniques? How could a venture in which no less a person than Deputy President Thabo Mbeki was involved have ended in such a disaster? One is even more bemused when one reads that the tension created by allegations of electoral fraud against the government of Prime Minister Pakalitha Mosisili might have been defused had the report of the Langa inquiry been published in full as soon as it was presented and its recommendations followed.
It is true that the rolling demonstration by members of the Lesotho opposition threatened to provide the coup-prone Lesotho army with another excuse to intervene yet again in the country’s political affairs. But even if one accepts Mbeki’s statement that South Africa’s concerns were “humane”, that hardly absolves South Africa from blame. One thing about the use of military force outside one’s own borders is that it must be swift and as clinical as possible. Otherwise, as the United States has learned to its cost, one gets sucked into a long campaign that attracts opprobrium to oneself.
Certainly, sending a mere 600 soldiers – some of whom, if the TV news reports are to be believed, had to “ask their way” around Maseru – seemed to be amateurish, to say the least. One has to ask, if this is the consequence of attempting to bring order to a country in which there was the risk of a breakdown of law and order, what would it have been like if a breakdown of law and order had in fact occurred?
Which begs the question: was the operation deliberately botched to embarrass President Nelson Mandela? What sort of intelligence appreciation or assessment was made before the troops were ordered in? Did the arson and looting come as a complete surprise, and if so, should it have been? Unless South Africa asks itself these uncomfortable questions, and rids itself of those whose apparent incompetence led to this terrible mess, it risks becoming a paper tiger.
One good thing must come out of the whole sorry spectacle: it must convince everyone in the region that the use of armed force to solve political problems must be regarded as a last resort, with “last” writ large.
I am beginning to get the impression that machismo politics is gaining ground in Southern Africa. Instead of pushing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Laurent Kabila to seek a political settlement with his opposition, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe dispatched troops.
Was that done only to help Kabila repulse the Rwandans and the Ugandans, or was there a secondary objective? Did Zimbabwe seek to prove the point to South Africa that South Africa is nobody’s “Big Brother” and should not be “throwing its weight about” within Southern African Development Community and beyond?
If in fact that is how Zimbabwe’s so- called “wrong-footing” of South Africa over the Congo was read in Pretoria, did that play any role in persuading Pretoria to embark on the precipitate military intervention in Lesotho? Are the two Southern African nations playing a game of acquisition of “spheres of influence”?
I hope that’s not true, for while such gamesmanship might appear like child’s play to Washington or Paris, Africa can in no way afford to be engaged in such idle frolics. Not only do such adventures waste precious money, but they also create a bad example which all sorts of regimes, that do not care a damn about the high-minded concerns of Zimbabwe or South Africa, are only too glad to follow.
Have you heard of a more absurd situation than Chad feeling obliged to send troops, numbering about 2 000, to help Kabila in the Congo? This is a country that hasn’t known more than a few months of intermittent peace since its independence from France in 1960. Yet because military solutions are so fashionable in Africa, it thinks it is qualified to contribute to the solution of the Congolese problem. No wonder I sometimes feel like resigning from African politics.