Accra, Ghana. It takes a couple of days to settle into the new rhythm, the different kind of mindset you have to take on to decide what you think about another place, a different chunk of the embattled African continent.
Now, on my third day, I have decided that the overall experience gives scope for optimism, after all, about where Africa is going.
Not that the signs leap out at you on the quaint streets of Accra. My first impression is that the
place is far more run down than it was the last time I was here, almost seven years ago. The signs of desperation are up – drop-outs with their motley hair lying on the sidewalks, madmen shunned by their peers, ignored by civil society and its agencies of law and order that would otherwise provide a safety net. And, like everywhere else in Africa, young women driven into glum prostitution hanging on the hinges of the car parks and bars of the better hotels.
There is that feeling of stagnation dotted with pools of opulence: the run-down English colonial town with its ex-natives now in occupation of the decaying bungalows, the long miles of lively shanty towns, and then, suddenly, and for no good reason, the five-star hotel behind its discreet walls, draped with aid workers from Scandinavia, Italian engineers, and intense little guys from Taiwan waiting impatiently to do business, combination-locked briefcases on their laps, eyes on the door.
If Africa is so hopeless, why do all these people still insist on coming here? Why not just leave it to sink back into its inevitable, fevered indolence?
But there is (in spite of present difficulties, and regardless of our permanent wave of temporary inconveniences) cause for hope, if not excitement, on the Dark Continent.
“OK, justify that,” says my friend the professor.
The professor’s career over the past 15 years or so is enough to kill your hopes for a golden age of Africa in our lifetime. But in a way, the fact that he and I are around at all, talking the same language (and I don’t just mean English) and able to recall the same landmarks and look towards the same kind of goals – this in itself is part of that special quality of optimism.
The professor comes from Kenya. He completed his studies there and then, with a post-graduate degree from an English university under his belt, returned to his motherland to settle into an academic career at the University of Nairobi.
For 18 years, with occasional ups and downs, this all went well. But then the ugly contradictions of post-colonialism began to intrude into his world. His commitment came into question – not his unchallengeable commitment to academic excellence, but his commitment to the regime that controlled the country.
So he found himself picked up one fine day by a bunch of policemen and detained, first in a cellar in the middle of town, then at a detention centre out in the middle of nowhere. It was six months before his wife and family had any confirmation that he was still alive, and had not simply become another name in the list of the vanished.
The year and a half that followed was to be a cat-and-mouse game of survival, with bizarre, Afro-Kafkaesque edges.
“The senior officers who have been sent to arrest you suddenly find, when they have got you alone in some dingy room, that they have no idea why they have picked you up in the first place,” he says. “There is nothing that you have actually done that can be defined as unlawful. They have been given a vague indication that you are a Marxist, but they have no idea where to begin to interrogate you about your alleged Marxist ideas.”
So the cat and the mouse passed the months looking uselessly at each other, unable to engage in any real end game, and unable to escape each other’s presence.
There were occasional bouts of torture -“Water torture was the worst,” he says. “Being locked up for a week in a room knee high in water, without food or drink.”
It takes a second for me to take in the implications of this. How do you sleep, for example? But his description gets more graphic: “You’re just there, bumping into your own shit as it floats around.” And on and on it goes, this meaningless charade of muffled violence.
He survived to tell the tale. But he got back to campus to find that he had been fired for failing to turn up for work.
The only option left open to him was to go into exile. So he is now part of a brain drain that Africa cannot afford, lecturing at a university in Texas, of all places, and observing Africa’s unfolding drama from afar.
So where is the room for optimism? Well, we are still young. It will take more than these 40-odd years of independence for Africa to get over its trauma of struggling to redefine its torn identity. Torture and exile are part of the process.
And here, under the black star of optimism that was hoisted into the night sky of Accra by Kwame Nkrumah all those years ago, some of Africa’s new exiles are able to gather together to ruminate over the landmarks that have brought us this far.
We may be living in grey and sometimes tortuous times. But in spite of everything, there is still a positive, timeless kind of energy that shines out of the African personality that gives one hope – in spite of present difficulties.
Archive: Previous columns by John Matshikiza