In Africa, where you lay your hat is not necessarily your home, writes Arthur Maimane Robert Gue<, the latest general to stage a military coup in Africa, has succeeded where others as power hungry have failed: he has blocked all opposition. Gue< came to power in Cte d'Ivoire in December, and, unlike others soldiers who claimed they staged coups to restore law and order, as well as democracy, he has been surprisingly quick in calling elections. But in order to hold on to power, Gue< is offering himself as a civilian candidate in Sunday's presidential election, a poll that looks set to be as good as a one-horse race. The general's greatest victory since the coup was presented to him on October 6, when the Supreme Court ruled to disqualify 14 of his 19 rivals for the presidency. The judicial decision was not unexpected: a few days earlier Washington sent an envoy to warn the general that the United States wanted free and fair elections, or else ... The two leading candidates who have been excluded from the race are Henri Konan B'di', the former president toppled by Gue<, and former prime minister Alassane Ouatarra. The case against Ouatarra is the more interesting because it has been attempted elsewhere on the continent in our democratic era.
Ouatarra was first accused by B’di’ and now by Gue< of being a foreigner - an immigrant from Burkina Faso and therefore not qualified for public office south of the common border. Ouatarra has denied that he is one of the thousands of Burkinabe who quit the poverty-stricken northern state to seek their fortune in Cte d'Ivoire. A similar accusation was levelled at Kenneth Kaunda when he attempted a political comeback after his long reign in Zambia was closed down by Frederick Chiluba and his Movement for Multiparty Democracy. The new president claimed the old man was a foreigner from Malawi and thus could not stand for re-election. Chiluba's own presidency was later placed in doubt when it was claimed that he, too, was a foreigner - born in neighbouring Zaire. That claim has since faded away (as have his opponents), and the diminutive head of state is said to be considering amending Zambia's Constitution so that he can stand for a third term in next year's elections. The accusations of undesirable foreignness could have been political shenanigans - you may hang your hat here, but you're still not one of us - but they could have some basis as another dividend from what was termed "the scramble for Africa" in the late 19th century.
That was when European superpowers met in Berlin to draw arbitrary lines on a map, delineating the borders of the colonies they claimed as their own. Some lines were as straight as a ruler, the nearest example being the borders between South Africa and Mozambique and Botswana and Namibia. These borders split communities, and even villages, which were then expected to salute different foreign flags and learn European languages as their only official means of communication.
At a conference in Kampala for Anglophone and Francophone writers some years ago, Nigerian Wole Soyinka had a brainwave that broke through the colonial barriers. When his limited French failed him during a conversation with a writer from Dahomey who did not speak English, Soyinka broke into Yoruba. The man was surprised, but then replied in their native language. Soyinka, who has since won the Nobel Prize for Literature, had remembered that Dahomey was across the border from Nigeria and had been part of Yorubaland before the scramble that partitioned the continent. (Dahomey has since been renamed Benin by radical Africanists, which only confuses maters as Benin is also the name of a province in Nigeria that is world-famous for its traditional and highly prized bronze statuettes.)
People have also ignored colonial borders to maintain social and communal contact – and to seek their fortunes. French administrators did not prevent people from the semi-desert they named Haute Volta (Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso) from travelling south into the resource-rich Cte d’Ivoire to hack out farms in tropical forests and plant produce, which was exported by the colonialists to the rest of the world. The immigrants remained in Cte d’Ivoire after independence in 1960, but they are now threatened by Gue<'s xenophobia. Cte d'Ivoire's first president, the late F'lix Houpho?t-Boigny, was happy to let the immigrants remain as there was plenty of fertile land available. His only condition (unwritten) was that they add value to his country. The patriotic Gue< has now declared that only ethnic Ivoirians can own land. More than 20 000 Burkinabe have fled north since December, following bloody attacks by neighbours who have for generations accepted them, even if envious of their industrious successes as farmers, business people and sometimes politicians.
Further south, people from what was Nyasaland flowed westwards across the border to earn a living on the Copper Belt in what was Northern Rhodesia, or south to the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. Most of them were recruited by mining corporations, and were not the so-called economic refugees who are these days resented in Cte d’Ivoire, Libya and South Africa. The excuse given for the modern southern xenophobia (in the age of the African “renaissance”) is that “these makwerekwere are stealing our jobs and causing all this crime”.
In Libya, where Colonel Moammar Gadaffi is preaching a continental federation, the black sub-Saharan Africans are “yam-yam” cannibals. And up west in Cte d’Ivoire a reason now endorsed by the Supreme Court is that foreigners from Burkina Faso want to steal political power. Last Sunday the US declared indignantly that it was suspending all assistance in preparing for this weekend’s elections in Cte d’Ivoire because the Supreme Court’s “unjust decision robs the Ivorian people of any meaningful choice”. But the odds are that Gue< would have rigged the elections anyway, if the courts did not come to his aid.
Once upon a time there were no official borders. But a sovereignty learned from European colonial masters has not unscrambled the scramble for Africa. So, what chance a continental renaissance?
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