It was one of those steamy, Graham Greene-ish days in a nameless West African country. The conference was winding down, and six of the delegates, including myself, had been invited to pay a courtesy call on the president.
We drove in convoy from the undistinguished conference centre, a structure that must have
been thought up sometime in the 1980s to emulate the kind of architecture that had been regarded as modern, if not avant-garde, in Europe in the 1960s.
But this was not Europe. This was the fetid tropics. The only signs of Europe were the ordered rows of rotting bungalows laid out, at some distant time in the past, in some semblance of civilised order, crumbling away into typically African deconstruction and argumentative disarray on the outskirts. That, and the schizophrenic personality that colonialism and its sudden withdrawal (officially, at least) had stamped on the ancient continent.
The presidency is an ugly concrete complex of buildings, hideously grandiose in the Mao-ze-dung style of the same time.
Someone in the car points out that the president has taken the precaution of containing the Ministry of Defence within his own compound, in order to keep an eye on it. It is hard to forget that the president whom we wait nervously to meet is himself a general who took power by force in a military coup three decades ago, who then bowed out of power after 18 years of control, let civilian politicians try to prove their mettle for the next years, and was then re-elected to serve his present terms.
The president enters, erupting quietly and confidently into the ante-chamber where we have been sweating, in spite of the airconditioning, in inappropriate suits and ties.
We have spent the past two days confirming to each other, in the most intellectual of terms (Francophones, even when they are not academics, have an incorrigibly florid, Robespierrian way of turning a simple comment into a four-act drama, elaborately filled out with sub-plots and clarinets) that Africa’s fundamental problem lies with bad leadership.
But the irruption of the president has all of us on our feet, with lumps of inarticulacy trapped in our smart-ass, educated throats.
He is wearing a dark-blue safari suit. Beneath it is a grey silk shirt, buttoned to the throat, with a short, chic Nehru collar — no tie.
The first impression is of a dark, handsome face beneath a head of white hair, a stern, firm frame propelling him into this cold space of kitsch armchairs with their loud yellow covers, with its high ceiling whose concrete beams might collapse on us at any moment. Hysteria? The lights have already flickered to black twice while we were waiting for his Excellency’s intervention, and no one has emerged to explain to us why there should have been a power cut in the heart of the powerhouse of the nation. No explanation accompanies his Excellency’s entrance, either. One minute he isn’t there, the next he is.
As the leader of our delegation introduces us, I am appalled to discover that I know nothing of the man to whom we have come to pay our respects. His eyes are partly hidden behind large, green, concave lenses, a short white baton in his hand adding to the impression that we might be dealing with a blind man. A very powerful blind man, a focused mind whose evil confidence is rendered all the more powerful by that very sightlessness, like Blind Pew from Treasure Island.
But the president is not blind. On the contrary: he sees all. He taps the baton against the fake Chinese coffee table that separates us from his eminence as he takes his seat. I feel as if I could be in the presence of Papa Doc Duvalier, or Joseph Mobutu, or one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s cunningly interesting inventions of a tropical dictator, drawn from real life, and now introduced into our midst.
We have been drawing up resolutions relating to the problems of unaccountability among Africa’s post-colonial leadership. Now, confronted by the real thing, we are evasive — awed by the sheer power of the man’s presence.
The president is president because he knows how to take the upper hand. He knows what we are thinking and immediately throws the challenge into our laps:
“Tell me, all you intellectuals,” he rasps, looking round our hushed, transfixed circle through those enigmatic green glasses which give nothing away: “why is it that Africa is so far behind the rest of the world? Why is it that we have not even begun to take off, when the rest of the world is already in orbit?”
He knows his stuff. He knows that we think we have the answers, and he is ready to back-foot us before we can formulate them. And the last answer we are going to offer, here in his lair, is the one that suggests that he and his kind have sabotaged us with bad governance and lack of accountability. We are the ones being called to account.
The president, like a Colombian general in his tropical labyrinth, is a lonely man. He has blood on his hands, accidents from an innocent past when Africa was a pawn in the Cold War, and sides had to be taken. But life must go on. Someone has to take on the tedious task of leading Africans to the Promised Land.
After an hour’s chat, the seance is over. Nothing has been resolved. We rise to bid our thankful farewells to his Excellency.
Outside, the heat takes your breath away. The interior of our car is a welcome relief as we drive back through the crumbling town, back to our immaculate conference centre for more debates, more resolutions, and more questions than ever about Africa’s future.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza