In the first two decades of independence, there were some forty successful coups and countless attempted coups. In 1967 a 27-year-old Ghanaian army lieutenant, Sam Arthur, finding himself in temporary command of an armoured car unit, decided on an attempt to seize power because, he later confessed, he wanted to ‘make history’ by becoming the first lieutenant successfully to organise a coup. The coup attempt was given the name ‘Operation Guitar Boy’. Arthur’s armoured car unit drove into Accra but failed to gain control.
Many coups were accomplished without violence. Some countries even established a tradition of peaceful coups. In Dahomey – later renamed Benin – all six coups after independence were bloodless. In Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), where political activity was confined to such a small elite that incoming ministers tended to be related to those who had just been thrown out, politicians took pride in the fact that no one had ever been killed for political reasons. There was considerable disquiet, therefore, when, during the country’s fourth coup in 1982, rival army factions clashed; shooting had never occurred before.
Whatever their real reasons for seizing power, coup leaders invariably stressed the strictly temporary nature of military rule. All they required, they said, was sufficient time to clear up the morass of corruption, mismanagement, tribalism, nepotism and other assorted malpractices they claimed had prompted them to intervene and restore honest and efficient government and national integrity.
Some attempts were indeed made to return to civilian rule. The generals who overthrew Kwame Nkrumah stayed in power for only three years, taking no serious initiatives other than to increase the pay of soldiers, before handing back control to politicians. The next civilian government, however, encumbered by massive debts from the Nkrumah era, undermined by falling cocoa prices on the world market and pummelled by inflation and strikes, lasted for only three years before the army stepped in again. The next military ruler, General Ignatius Acheampong, ran a regime that was so corrupt that the army eventually removed him, installing another general. Just weeks before new elections were due to be held in 1979, a new phenomenon arose. A group of junior officers led by a 32-year-old air force officer, Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings, seized power and embarked on what was described as a ‘house-cleaning exercise’. Eight senior officers, including three former heads of state, were executed by firing squad; traders accused of profiteering were publicly flogged; the main market in Accra was razed to the ground; and impromptu People’s Courts were set up to deal with scores of army officers and businessmen accused of corruption and malpractice. Rawlings then handed power over to the politicians. But only three years later he was back, staging a second coming in 1982. By then, after twenty-five years of mismanagement, plunder and corruption, Ghana had become a wasteland, a society that was crumbling in ruins at every level.
In Nigeria, after thirteen years of military government, General Olusegun Obasanjo presided over elections in 1979 reinstating civilian rule in what seemed to be propitious circumstances. Under a new constitution, Nigeria was divided into a federation of nineteen states, reducing the risk of polarisation between the country’s three main ethnic groups and allowing some minority groups their own representation. The new federal structure consisted of four predominantly Hausa-Fulani states, four Yoruba, two Igbo and nine ethnic minority states. Furthermore, the constitution required political parties to demonstrate a broad national presence before they could qualify for registration. Launching the new system, Obasanjo made clear he wanted no return to past practices. ‘Political recruitment and subsequent political support which are based on tribal, religious and linguistic sentiments contributed largely to our past misfortune,’ he said. ‘They must not be allowed to spring up again. Those negative political attitudes like hatred, falsehood, intolerance and acrimony also contributed to our national tragedy in the past: they must not be continued.’
The election in 1979 was held in relatively calm conditions. It was won by the National Party of Nigeria, a northern-based party which drew support from Yoruba, Igbo and minority groups alike. Its leader, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, was a mild-mannered, unassuming and ascetic politician from a northern Fulani family, inclined to seek consensus. Though the election aroused the old ethnic tensions and rivalries that had wrecked the First Republic, they were more diffused than before. What seemed especially promising were Nigeria’s economic prospects. By 1979 Nigeria had become the world’s sixth largest oil producer, with revenues soaring to $24 billion a year.
Such riches, however, set off a vicious scramble for political office and the wealth that went with it. Access to the government spending process became the gateway to fortune. Patronage politics and corruption reached new heights. The press spoke of ‘the politics of bickerings, mudslingings . . . lies, deceit, vindictiveness, strife and intolerance that are again creeping back into the country’s political scene’. Addressing the annual conference of the Nigerian Political Science Association in 1981, Claude Ake observed:
We are intoxicated with politics; the premium on political power is so high that we are prone to take the most extreme measures to win and to maintain political power . . .
As things stand now, the Nigerian state appears to intervene everywhere and to own virtually everything including access to status and wealth. Inevitably a desperate struggle to win control of state power ensues since this control means for all practical purposes being all powerful and owning everything. Politics becomes warfare, a matter of life and death.
Foremost in the scramble were Shagari’s associates. Renowned for venality, Shagari’s administration was termed ‘a government of contractors, for contractors and by contractors’. According to Larry Diamond, an American expert on Nigeria, ‘the meetings of his cabinet and party councils became grand bazaars where the resources of the state were put up for auction’. The expected kickbacks on contracts rose to 50 per cent. An official enquiry in 1980 established that the cost of government contracts, inflated by kickbacks, was 200 per cent higher than in Kenya. Another enquiry found that the costs of construction in Nigeria were three times higher than in East Africa or North Africa and four times higher than in Asia.
When the oil boom came to an end, the economy plunged into recession, government projects were abandoned, unemployment soared. State governments became unable to pay teachers and civil servants or to purchase drugs for hospitals. But among the elite, the scramble went on. Visiting Nigeria on the eve of elections, Larry Diamond recorded: ‘Everywhere one turned in 1983, the economy seemed on the edge of collapse. Still the politicians and contractors continued to bribe, steal, smuggle and speculate, accumulating vast illicit fortunes and displaying them lavishly in stunning disregard for public sensitivities.’
The elections in 1983 were conducted with such massive rigging and fraud that even hardened observers of Nigeria were astonished. Shagari, being the incumbent, won a second term, but as Nigeria descended into anarchy, the generals took control once more. ‘Democracy had been in jeopardy for the past four years,’ remarked a former army chief of staff. ‘It died with the elections. The army only buried it.’
‘The trouble with Nigeria,’ wrote the Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, in 1983, ‘is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.’
There were a few military regimes that were noted for ruling effectively and for their efforts to root out corruption. In Togo, General Eyadéma, the former French army sergeant who had taken part in the assassination of President Olympio in 1963 and who seized power four years later, achieved a degree of stability rare in West Africa. In Niger, Colonel Seyni Kountché, after overthrowing Hamani Diori’s corrupt regime in 1974, demanded efficiency and discipline and dealt swiftly with anyone who did not comply, caring little whether his regime was popular or not. But Africa’s military rulers generally turned out to be no more competent, no more immune to the temptation of corruption, and no more willing to give up power than the regimes they had overthrown. And amid the hurly-burly of coups and revolutions that afflicted Africa came the tyrants.
In Zanzibar, Abeid Karume’s regime, set up after the 1964 revolution against the ruling Arab elite, was bizarre and vindictive from the outset. A former merchant seaman, once proud to have served as an oarsman for the Sultan’s ceremonial barge, Karume had little formal education but had gained popularity in the run-up to independence in 1963 as leader of the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP), drawing support from African labourers, fishermen, farmhands and craftsmen occupying the lower rungs of Zanzibar society. In the last election before independence the ASP gained a majority of total votes cast, taking some 54 per cent, but won only a minority of seats. The result intensified deep-rooted racial animosity between Arab and African inhabitants, culminating in revolution and the emergence of Karume as head of a Revolutionary Council.
Once in power, Karume acted swiftly to crush the Arab community. The Revolutionary Council ordered arrests, imprisonment without trial, torture and execution as it saw fit and seized property and plantations at will. Thousands of Arabs were forcibly deported, packed into dhows, some old and unseaworthy, and sent to the Arabian Gulf. A British port official witnessed how the first three dhows were crammed with 450 Arab deportees given only 600 gallons of water for a journey expected to last anything from three to six weeks. A deserted, forlorn air settled over the narrow streets and alleys of Stone Town, once filled with thriving shops and businesses. A correspondent wrote of the Arab community in 1965: ‘They have lost the arrogance typical of their ruling days. Their shyness, their unobtrusive gait as they shuffle along the narrow lanes . . . gives the centre of the town the atmosphere of a ghetto.’
The prosperous Asian community, numbering 20,000, whom the sultan had encouraged to settle in Zanzibar, survived the revolution largely intact, but they too became the target of victimisation. Asian civil servants were abruptly sacked; their special schools were closed. Asians accused of minor offences were publicly flogged. When four young Persian girls refused to marry the elderly Karume, he ordered the arrest of ten of their male relatives for ‘hindering the implementation of mixed marriages’, and threatened to deport both the men and the hundred-odd members of the Persian Ithnasheri sect to which they belonged. President Nyerere prevailed on him to drop the charges, but a few months later, four other Persian girls were forced to marry elderly members of the Revolutionary Council; and eleven of their male relatives were ordered by a ‘people’s court’ judge to be imprisoned and flogged. ‘In colonial times the Arabs took African concubines without bothering to marry them,’ said Karume. ‘Now that we are in power, the shoe is on the other foot.’
The population at large was subjected to dictatorial control. Ruling by decree, Karume declared a one-party state and ordered all adult Zanzibaris to sign up as members of the ASP. A picture of Karume had to be displayed in every home. His security service, trained by East Germans, was given powers to arrest, torture and imprison without trial. Anyone who complained, even about food or consumer shortages, was liable to be denounced as an ‘enemy of the revolution’. Karume also set up his own courts to deal with ‘political’ offences, appointing judges with powers to hand out death sentences from which the only right of appeal was to himself.
Distrustful of intellectuals and disliking experts, he soon fell out with Marxist members of the Revolutionary Council. Two former members accused of plotting against him were executed. Though given to making long rambling speeches, he never developed a coherent policy. More and more came to depend on his erratic and capricious personality. He banned contraceptives; forced ‘volunteers’ to undertake farmwork; closed private clubs and abolished private business and trading enterprises. He expelled staff from the World Health Organisation and suspended malaria-control programmes on the grounds that Africans were ‘malaria-proof’, precipitating a huge surge in malaria.
His attitude towards government expenditure was equally bizarre. As a result of sharp increases in the price of cloves from 1965, Zanzibar gained substantial foreign reserves. But rather than spend the reserves on development projects or on much-needed imported goods like medicines, Karume preferred to hoard them. He insisted that Zanzibar should become self-sufficient. So while the exchequer bulged with funds, hospitals and clinics were chronically short of drugs, and basic supplies of rice, flour and sugar were rationed.
Karume’s end came in 1972 when an army officer bearing a personal grudge shot him dead as he was relaxing with friends on the ground floor of party headquarters, drinking coffee and playing bao, a Swahili game akin to draughts. Large crowds turned out for his funeral, but they were noticeably subdued.
Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s career as dictator of the Central African Republic combined not only extreme greed and personal violence but delusions of grandeur unsurpassed by any other African leader. His excesses included seventeen wives, a score of mistresses and an official brood of fifty-five children. He was prone to towering rages as well as outbursts of sentimentality; and he also gained a reputation for cannibalism.
From an early age, Bokassa’s life was affected by violence. When he was six years old, his father, a petty chief in the village of Boubangui, was beaten to death at the local French prefect’s office for protesting against forced labour. His distraught mother killed herself a week later, leaving a family of twelve children as orphans. Raised by a grandfather and educated at mission schools, he was constantly taunted by other children about the fate of his unfortunate parents. After completing secondary education, he enlisted in the French army, receiving twelve citations for bravery in combat during the Second World War and in Indo-China, including the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de Guerre. French officers, while recognising his courage under fire, also knew him to be a vain and capricious personality. But in the rush to independence, Bokassa gained rapid promotion. After serving as a sergeant for seventeen years, he left the French army in 1961 with the rank of captain and was given the task of helping to set up a national army. Three years later, at the age of forty-two, he was appointed chief of staff of the CAR’s 500-man army.
Bokassa seized power on 31 December 1965, after learning that President David Dacko, a cousin, intended to replace him. Initially Bokassa’s regime was not especially brutal. A former minister was beaten to death because he was deemed not to have shown enough respect to the army in the past. A former head of internal security was executed with extreme cruelty. Dacko was held in solitary confinement for three years. Political prisoners and inmates in Ngaragba prison in Bangui were routinely tortured or beaten on Bokassa’s orders, their cries clearly audible to nearby residents. But otherwise Bokassa’s preoccupation was to enjoy the pomp and power of office and to amass a fortune for himself.
He liked to describe himself as an ‘absolute monarch’ and forbade mention of the words democracy and elections. He promoted himself first to the rank of general and then to marshal, for ‘supreme services to the State’. For public appearances he insisted on wearing so many medals and awards that special uniforms had to be designed for him to accommodate them. He delighted in naming after himself a host of schools, hospitals, clinics, roads and development projects as well as Bangui’s new university. The front page of every school exercise book in the entire country was adorned with his picture. He adored the ceremony of state visits and toured the world a number of times, taking with him large retinues of assistants and distributing gifts of diamonds to his hosts.
His every whim became government policy. He himself held twelve ministerial portfolios and interfered in all the others. He controlled all decision-making, every promotion or demotion, every reward or punishment. Ministers were shuffled with monotonous regularity, as often as six times a year, to ensure that they did not become a threat. As the telephone system in Bangui hardly functioned, all government offices were required to keep their radios switched on in order to hear intermittent instructions sent directly from the presidential office. Development projects were sometimes started with sudden enthusiasm, then abandoned when Bokassa’s interest dwindled and the money was needed for another new idea. In a fit of pique about Bangui’s poor airline connections, he decided that a national airline should be established: Air Centrafrique was duly set up, then promptly collapsed after a few flights.
Using government funds at will and fortunes he made from diamond and ivory deals, Bokassa acquired a whole string of valuable properties in Europe, including four chateaux in France, a fifty-room mansion in Paris, houses in Nice and Toulouse and a villa in Berne. He built a huge ‘ancestral home’ at Berengo, fifty miles from Bangui, and ordered a motorway to be built to it. The presidential estate there included private houses and apartments for foreign visitors furnished with reproduction antique furniture and gilt mirrors.
He permitted government ministers to make their own fortunes, occasionally chiding them for excessive greed, but willing to overlook corruption when it suited him. He also pampered the army with large salaries and sophisticated equipment and allowed officers to engage in commercial activities, recognising that his hold on power depended on the army’s loyalty. Defence expenditure doubled between 1967 and 1969, and remained the second largest item in the budget. He packed the Presidential Guard with members of his own Mbaka tribe, mainly from his own village, providing them with the best uniforms and equipment. The government’s finances were accordingly chaotic. No proper records were kept; budgets were ignored in favour of ad-hoc spending. Civil service salaries were often three or four months in arrears.
His sexual proclivities were voracious. He installed wives and mistresses in separate residences, leaving his palace several times each day to pay them visits, holding up traffic on the way. His principal wife, Catherine, a strikingly attractive woman whom he first spotted at the age of thirteen, lived in the Villa Nasser and owned a fashionable boutique in the city centre. Another favourite, La Roumaine, a blonde cabaret dancer whom he met on a visit to a nightclub in Bucharest, lived in the Villa Kolongo, a palatial residence on the banks of the Oubangui river, surrounded by tropical gardens with courtyards, pools and fountains. Most of his wives tended to be known by their nationality; they included the German, the Swede, the Cameroonian, the Chinese, the Gabonese, the Tunisienne, and the Ivorienne. He was proud of his conquests. ‘I did it like everyone,’ he said in an interview in 1984. ‘In Formosa, for example, I hustled the most beautiful woman in the country whom I later married. In Bucharest, the most beautiful woman in Romania; in Libreville, the most beautiful woman in Gabon . . . and so on. My criterion was beauty.’
He spent considerable effort tracking down a daughter named Martine born to a Vietnamese wife he married in Saigon in 1953. The first Martine to arrive in Bangui turned out to be an impostor. Nevertheless, to show his magnanimity, Bokassa adopted her. Then the real Martine was found working in a cement factory in Vietnam. Bokassa offered both of them in marriage via a kind of public auction. The eventual winners were a doctor and an army officer. Bokassa joyfully presided over a double wedding held in the cathedral, attended by several African heads of state. For the fake Martine, the marriage was to end in disaster. Her husband was involved in an assassination attempt on Bokassa and executed. A few hours after his death, she gave birth to a baby boy. The infant was taken away and murdered.
The French, keen to ensure that the Central African Republic remained within the French orbit, continued to underwrite Bokassa’s regime with financial and military support. In wayward moods, Bokassa frequently picked quarrels with them, occasionally threatening to leave the French fold. In 1969 he announced a ‘Move to the East’ and proclaimed scientific socialism as the government’s goal, expecting rewards to flow from the Eastern bloc, but when they failed to materialise, he reversed course. He abruptly converted to Islam, taking the name Salah Addin Ahmed Bokassa, hoping for Arab funds, but disappointed by the result soon reverted to the Catholic Church.
Despite the quarrels, Bokassa’s attachment to France remained profound. He worshipped de Gaulle, addressing him as ‘Papa’ even after he had become president. The greatest moment of his life, he once said, was when he was decorated by de Gaulle in person. During de Gaulle’s funeral, he was inconsolable. ‘Mon père, mon papa,’ he sobbed in front of de Gaulle’s widow. ‘I lost my natural father when I was a child. Now I have lost my adoptive father as well. I am an orphan again.’ Bokassa also struck up a warm friendship with President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – ‘a dear cousin’ – putting a wildlife reserve at his disposal for him to hunt every year and plying him with generous gifts of diamonds. Bokassa estimated that Giscard personally killed some fifty elephants and countless other animals during the 1970s.
It was during Giscard’s presidency that the French indulged Bokassa’s greatest folie de grandeur. In an attempt to emulate Napoleon, whom he described as his ‘guide and inspiration’, Bokassa declared the Central African Republic an empire and himself emperor of its 2 million subjects and made elaborate arrangements for his own coronation, using as a model the ceremony in which Napoleon had crowned himself emperor of France in 1804. From France he ordered all the trappings of a monarchy: a crown of diamonds; an imperial throne, shaped like a golden eagle; an antique coach; thoroughbred horses; coronation robes; brass helmets and breastplates for the Imperial Guard; tons of food, wine, fireworks and flowers for the festivities and sixty Mercedes-Benz cars for the guests.
The coronation took place on 4 December 1977 at the Palais des Sports Jean-Bedel Bokassa, on Bokassa Avenue, next to the Université Jean-Bedel Bokassa. To the strains of Mozart and Beethoven, wearing a twenty-foot-long red-velvet cloak trimmed with ermine, Bokassa crowned himself and then received as a symbol of office a six-foot diamond-encrusted sceptre.
The spectacle of Bokassa’s lavish coronation, costing $22 million, in a country with few government services, huge infant mortality, widespread illiteracy, only 260 miles of paved roads and in serious economic difficulty, aroused universal criticism. But the French, who picked up most of the bill, curtly dismissed all such criticism. ‘Personally,’ said the French Cooperation Minister, Robert Galley, who represented Giscard at the coronation, ‘I find it quite extraordinary to criticise what is to take place in Bangui while finding the Queen of England’s Jubilee ceremony all right. It smacks of racism.’ At the end of a state banquet, Bokassa turned to Galley and whispered, ‘You never noticed, but you ate human flesh’, a remark that prompted his reputation for cannibalism.
Reminiscing in later years about the coronation, Bokassa told the Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio, ‘It was the least the French could do to repay me for my services as a soldier fighting for their country, and for all the personal favours their politicians received when I became president.’
The ultimate irony was that less than two years after the coronation, as a result of Bokassa’s violent conduct, the French themselves felt obliged to step in and remove him from power. Bokassa’s propensity for violence became increasingly evident during the 1970s. In 1972, in a campaign against theft, he published a decree prescribing mutilation for thieves. As part of the campaign, he personally led a bevy of ministers to Ngaragba prison where he ordered guards to beat convicted thieves with wooden staves. As the convicts screamed in agony, Bokassa turned to a foreign newspaper reporter to observe: ‘It’s tough, but that’s life.’ Three men died and several others seemed barely alive. The next day, forty-two thieves who had survived the beating, together with the corpses of the three others, were put on display under a blazing sun on a stand in Bangui’s main square. When the United Nations Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, protested at the atrocity, Bokassa called him ‘a pimp’, ‘a colonialist’ and ‘dumb as a corpse’. His other exploits included assaulting a British journalist with an ivory-tipped walking stick and attempting to strike a personal representative of Giscard d’Estaing.
The list of Bokassa’s victims at Ngaragba grew ever longer. ‘From 1976 to 1979,’ the prison director subsequently testified, ‘I executed dozens of officers, soldiers, diverse personages, thieves, students – under instructions from Bokassa.’ Some were beaten to death with hammers and chains. Bokassa was also said to hold kangaroo courts in the gardens of the Villa Kolongo, sentencing men to be killed by lions or crocodiles he kept there.
The events that led to Bokassa’s downfall started with student demonstrations in Bangui on 19 January 1979, in protest at an imperial edict that all pupils buy and wear new school uniforms. The uniforms were manufactured by a textile company owned by members of the Bokassa family and sold exclusively in their retail stores. The demonstrations were joined by crowds of unemployed youths and quickly turned into riots; one of Bokassa’s stores was ransacked. The riots were brutally suppressed by the Imperial Guard but strikes by teachers, students and civil servants continued.
In April, after further protests, scores of students were rounded up and taken to Ngaragba. One group of thirty students was stuffed into a small cell designed to hold one person; another group of twenty suffered the same fate. By the time the cell doors were opened the next morning, many were dead. Several witnesses claimed that Bokassa himself turned up at the prison and joined in beating and killing other students in detention. An independent judicial inquiry subsequently concluded: ‘In the month of April 1979, the massacre of about 100 children was carried out under the orders of Emperor Bokassa and almost certainly with his personal participation.’ In France, the media dubbed Bokassa the ‘Butcher of Bangui’.
No longer able to stand the embarrassment of propping up Bokassa’s regime, the French, after considerable prevarication, decided to remove him. On 20 September while Bokassa was on a visit to Libya, French troops stationed in Gabon and Chad, flew into Bangui, took control and installed David Dacko as president. Among the items they discovered at his residences were several chests full of diamonds, more than 200 cameras and accessories and a collection of pornography. At the Villa Kolongo they also found two mutilated bodies in a refrigerator. One body, with its head, arms and one leg missing, was identified as that of a mathematics teacher. When French troops drained the pond at Villa Kolongo, they came across bone fragments said to have come from some thirty victims eaten by crocodiles. The soldiers were told that other victims had been fed to lions kept in a nearby cage. When pressed by reporters about Bokassa’s eating habits, President Dacko readily conceded that human flesh had been a regular item on his menu and had been served on occasion to foreign dignitaries. Bokassa, for his part, always denied charges of cannibalism.
Bokassa sought asylum in France, but was turned away. He found refuge instead in Côte d’Ivoire. At a trial that took place in Bangui in his absence in 1980, he was accused of murder, embezzlement and cannibalism and sentenced to death. After four years in Côte d’Ivoire, he was allowed to settle in his chateau at Hardricourt, west of Paris. In 1986, feeling homesick, he decided to return to the Central African Republic. He was put on trial, found guilty of murder, though not cannibalism, and sentenced to death. The sentence was subsequently commuted, first to life imprisonment, then to twenty years’ forced labour. In prison he turned to religion, constantly read the Bible and considered himself an apostle of Christ. After seven years’ imprisonment he was released and spent his last years in Bangui in the Villa Nasser, surviving on a French army pension. He died in 1996, at the age of seventy-five, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Berengo.
At the time of Uganda’s independence in 1962, Idi Amin was a newly commissioned officer, promoted from the ranks, with a military record that had already given British officials cause for concern. Virtually illiterate, with no schooling and limited intelligence, he had been recruited in 1946 to serve as a trainee cook in the King’s African Rifles. A man of huge physique, he had gained attention by excelling at sport and marksmanship and by displaying qualities of stamina and loyalty which British officers admired. For nine years he held the national title of heavyweight boxing champion. Posted to Kenya during the Mau Mau campaign with the rank of corporal, he was nearly cashiered for carrying out interrogations of suspects with undue brutality. British officers nevertheless considered him worthy of promotion as a non-commissioned officer; he duly rose to the rank of sergeant-major, the highest position then open to African soldiers under British rule. But he was never regarded as ‘officer material’. In the press of events leading to independence, however, as Britain searched for potential African army officers, Amin was considered an obvious possibility for promotion. Though failing to make much progress on special education courses to which he was sent, he nevertheless was given a commission in 1961 at the age of about thirty-six, one of only two Ugandan officers at the time.
Six months before independence, Amin’s proclivity for violent conduct became a matter of controversy. While participating in a military operation in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, Amin was accused of murdering three Turkana tribesmen. British officials in Nairobi dealing with the case wanted criminal charges brought against Lieutenant Amin, but the Governor of Uganda, Sir Walter Coutts, argued that to put on trial for murder one of only two African officers in Uganda shortly before independence would be politically disastrous. He asked instead that Amin should be returned to Uganda to face a court martial or other proceedings.
The decision on Amin’s future was left to Uganda’s new prime minister, Milton Obote. Obote recommended that Amin should merely be reprimanded. Thus reprieved, Amin continued his climb to the top. In 1964 he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, given command of his own battalion and appointed deputy commander of the army. He soon became a familiar figure in the capital, Kampala, introduced into Obote’s inner circle, invited frequently to State House, provided with a Mercedes car and other perquisites and clearly trusted by Obote as a bluff, loyal and simple soldier who would do his bidding without too much scruple.
The early years of Uganda’s independence were a time of considerable optimism. Between 1960 and 1965, Uganda, with booming exports of coffee, cotton and tea, achieved the highest per capita growth in East Africa. A carefully constructed federal constitution had enabled the ancient kingdom of Buganda to retain a measure of internal autonomy, with its own parliament, the Lukiiko, and monarchic traditions, while allowing the central government in Kampala to maintain effective control nationally. As prime minister of a coalition government, Obote set out to accommodate the disparate ethnic groups on which Uganda was built. The broad division occurred between the Bantu groups to the south, such as the Baganda, and the Nilotic and Sudanic groups of the north, such as the Acholi and Langi, to which Obote belonged; but as much rivalry was to be found among southerners or among northerners as between the north and the south. In the spirit of cooperation that prevailed after independence, Obote supported the appointment of the Baganda king, the Kabaka, Sir Edward Mutesa, as head of state in 1963.
Obote’s ambitions, however, were soon to tear Uganda apart. In common with many other African leaders, he set his sights on establishing a one-party state, arguing that tribal and factional groupings tended to threaten the stability of the country and that a one-party state was needed to forge a sense of national unity. His style of government became increasingly secretive and autocratic. Facing dissent within the cabinet, Obote arranged for armed police to burst into the cabinet room and haul five leading ministers off to prison. In what was tantamount to a coup, he then announced he was assuming all powers, abrogated the constitution, suspended the National Assembly, dismissed the Kabaka as president and appointed Amin as the new army commander. Two months later, in April 1966, he published a new constitution installing himself as executive president of a united state endowed with immense powers.
When the Baganda parliament, the Lukiiko, tried to oppose him and rallied supporters, Obote ordered Amin to attack the Kabaka’s palace on Mengo Hill, three miles from Kampala’s centre. The palace was shelled and ransacked and several hundred Baganda died. The Kabaka managed to escape after climbing a high perimeter wall and hailing a passing taxi. He spent the rest of his life in exile in London, dependent on the dole and the generosity of friends, and died there of alcoholic poisoning in 1969. His palace, meanwhile, was turned over for use by Amin’s troops; the Lukiiko was taken over by the defence ministry; martial law was declared in Buganda; hundreds of Baganda were detained without trial; and Baganda political parties were outlawed. In 1967 Obote completed the rout by abolishing the kingdom of Buganda altogether, carving it up into four administrative districts.
Obote’s position seemed impregnable. Yet his regime had come to depend for survival largely on coercion enforced by the army and the police. Intending to reinforce his control of the security apparatus, he developed a secret police organisation known as the General Service Department, recruiting members largely from his own Langi tribe and giving it a free hand to arrest and imprison suspected opponents. He also cultivated a personal following among senior army officers and built up support among the large contingents of Langi and Acholi troops in the army.
Amin, invariably shrewd and cunning when it came to his own safety, matched Obote’s manoeuvres by enlisting loyal groups of Kakwa, Madi and Lugbara tribesmen from his home district in the West Nile region; he also recruited heavily from Nubian communities scattered in towns around Uganda, descendants of southern Sudanese mercenaries used by the British authorities to pacify areas of Uganda, who were related directly to Amin’s tribal group.
Their suspicions of each other intensified. Amin was implicated in the murder of the army’s deputy commander, an Acholi officer who supported Obote. Amin also faced accusations of embezzlement of army funds. Taking advantage of Obote’s departure from Uganda for a Commonwealth conference, Amin struck first.
Amin’s coup in January 1971 was carried out with remarkably little resistance from within the army and greeted in many parts of Uganda with relief and enthusiasm. Throughout Buganda, the news of Obote’s downfall brought rejoicing and popular demonstrations. Enjoying the role of national hero, Amin began by adopting conciliatory measures. He released political prisoners, lifted emergency regulations and made arrangements for the body of the Kabaka to be brought back from England for a traditional burial. He appointed a cabinet consisting mainly of highly qualified civilians drawn from the ranks of the civil service, the legal profession and Makerere University. After the first cabinet meeting, Amin’s new ministers came away impressed, so they remarked, by his good nature and common sense. ‘He was a model of decorum and generosity,’ wrote Henry Kyemba, the cabinet secretary. Amin’s early pronouncements encouraged a sense of optimism. He stressed the temporary nature of military rule, disbanded the secret police and promised free elections. He spent much time travelling by helicopter and by car from one district to another, listening to elders and addressing meetings.
Yet Amin never felt secure. Fearing a counter-attack by Obote supporters, he organised death squads to hunt down and kill scores of army and police officers he suspected of opposing him. Within a few months, mass killing of Langi and Acholi began. ‘It was impossible to dispose of the bodies in graves,’ wrote Kyemba.
Instead, truckloads of corpses were taken and dumped in the Nile. Three sites were used – one just above Owen Falls Dam at Jinja, another at Bujagali Falls near the army shooting range, and a third at Karuma Falls near Murchison Falls. The intention was for the bodies to be eaten by crocodiles. This was an inefficient method of disposal. Bodies were frequently swept to the bank, where they were seen by passersby and fishermen. At Owen Falls many bodies must have been carried through the dam over which the Kampala–Jinja road ran, but many floated into the still waters to one side, near the power station.
In place of the old officer corps, Amin promoted men from his own West Nile district and Nubians, some of them from the ranks of the army, some who were raw civilians, giving them control of special units he set up to snuff out dissent. They owed no loyalty other than to Amin; they were given unlimited powers; and they came to be regarded with utter dread.
Amin’s popularity soon dwindled. He had no interest in the business of government, nor indeed any understanding of it. ‘His English was poor,’ recalled Kyemba. ‘He read very badly and clearly had a hard time just signing prepared documents. As his first Principal Private Secretary, I never ever received a handwritten note from him. Amin had no idea how governments were run.’ Unfamiliar and impatient with the intricacies of administration, he ruled by whim, broadcasting his orders over the radio and plundering at will what he needed from the treasury. A huge proportion of funds was diverted to military expenditure. When budgets ran out, Amin routinely ordered the central bank to print more currency to ‘solve’ the problem. Ministers quickly learnt that to argue against him was both unprofitable and dangerous. Explaining his defection in 1975, Andrew Wakhweya, a finance minister, remarked: ‘The government is a one-man show. Impossible decisions are taken by General Amin which ministers are expected to implement. The decisions bear no relationship to the country’s available resources.’ As prices soared and consumer goods became unobtainable, disillusionment with Amin’s regime steadily spread.
Hoping to revive his popularity, Amin turned vindictively on Uganda’s Asian community. A wealthy, aloof, immigrant minority, controlling much of the country’s trade and industry, the Asians were profoundly disliked. In August 1972, in a move that was applauded not only by the African population of Uganda but in other African countries with unpopular Asian communities, Amin ordered Asians with British nationality to leave the country within three months. Their expulsion, however, benefited not the expectant African populace, but Amin’s army. The shops, the businesses, the property that the Asians were forced to leave behind, even their personal possessions, were seized as spoils by Amin’s cronies. Within a few months, the huge amounts of Asian wealth had vanished. Shops were stripped then left bare; factories broke down; trade was severely disrupted; entire sectors of enterprise collapsed. In the general exodus of the Asian community that occurred – some 50,000 left in all – Uganda lost a large proportion of doctors, dentists, veterinarians, professors and technicians. At a stroke, government’s revenues were cut by nearly 40 per cent. The overall impact on government services was disastrous.
Far worse was to come. After an abortive invasion that Obote supporters launched from Tanzania in 1972, Amin took revenge on civilians suspected of opposing him. Thousands died at the hands of his special squads. No one was immune. The chief justice was dragged away from the High Court, never to be seen again. The university’s vice-chancellor disappeared. The bullet-riddled body of the Anglican archbishop, still in ecclesiastical robes, was dumped at the mortuary of a Kampala hospital shortly after he had issued a memorandum speaking out about the ‘suspicion, fear and hidden hatred’ that the civilian population felt towards Amin’s forces.
One of Amin’s former wives was found with her limbs dismembered in the boot of a car. When Henry Kyemba reported the matter, Amin expressed no surprise and ordered him to have the dismembered parts sewn back on to the torso and then arrange for Amin to view the body together with their children. According to Kyemba, Amin was widely believed to perform blood rituals over the dead bodies of his victims. ‘On several occasions when I was Minister of Health, Amin insisted on being left alone with his victims’ bodies,’ he wrote from exile. ‘There is of course no evidence for what he does in private, but it is universally believed in Uganda that he engages in blood rituals.’ On other occasions, Kyemba witnessed Amin boasting that he had eaten human flesh.
As, one by one, civilian ministers were dismissed or fled into exile, bearing tales of atrocity and torture, Amin replaced them with military colleagues, mostly untrained and in some cases barely literate. All notion of orderly government ceased to exist.
Constantly needing to demonstrate his power and importance, Amin promoted himself to the rank of field marshal, declared himself president for life, and awarded himself military medals and titles like Conqueror of the British Empire; he also claimed he was ‘the true heir to the throne of Scotland’. He took sadistic pleasure in humiliating officials, usually men with wide education and experience, for whom he held an instinctive distrust. His treatment of expatriates living in Uganda, especially the British, was sometimes similarly demeaning. A group of British residents, inducted as army reservists, were required to kneel in Amin’s presence when they took the oath of loyalty, as a sign of his power over his former colonial masters. To impress African diplomats at a grand Kampala reception, Amin staged his entrance on a wooden litter borne by British carriers.
He enjoyed too playing a role on the world stage, firing off bizarre cables to foreign leaders. He wished President Nixon ‘a speedy recovery from Watergate’; offered Britain’s music-loving prime minister, Edward Heath, a post as bandmaster after his election defeat; advised Israel’s Golda Meir ‘to tuck up her knickers’ and run to Washington; suggested to Mao Tse-tung that he should mediate in the Sino-Soviet dispute; and proposed himself as head of the Commonwealth. In a telegram to the United Nations secretary-general, he praised the action of Palestinian guerrillas who had murdered Israeli participants at the Olympic Games, and he went on to extol Hitler’s extermination of the Jews. ‘Hitler and all German people knew that the Israelis are not people who are working in the interests of people of the world and that is why they burnt over six million Jews alive with gas on the soil of Germany.’ By threatening to execute a British lecturer who had written a manuscript describing Amin as a ‘village tyrant’, he became the centre of world attention. Pleas for clemency arrived from the Queen, the British prime minister, the Pope and some fifty heads of state.
However cruel, capricious and brutal many of Amin’s actions may have seemed in the West, in much of Africa he was regarded as something of a hero. By expelling the Asian community and attacking Western imperialism, he was seen to be fearlessly asserting African interests. At meetings of the Organisation of African Unity, of which he was chairman for one year in 1975, Amin’s appearances, weighed down with his own medals and gold braid, inspired enthusiastic applause. He was also able to trade on his Muslim credentials, gaining valuable support and generous loans from the Arab world, notably from Saudi Arabia and Libya, in return for agreeing to promote the Islamic cause in Uganda.
The end of Amin’s tyranny came in 1979. Faced with internal dissension, squabbling and rivalry within his army, Amin desperately sought a diversion and ordered the invasion of the Kagera Salient in northern Tanzania, allowing his troops to loot and plunder at will in an orgy of destruction. In retaliation, Tanzania launched a force of 45,000 men across the border and then decided to oust Amin altogether. After initial resistance, Amin’s army broke and ran. Amin himself abandoned Kampala without a fight, fleeing northwards to his home in the West Nile district, eventually finding refuge in Saudi Arabia.
Amin’s rule had left Uganda ravaged, lawless and bankrupt, with a death toll put at 250,000 people. When exiles were reunited with old friends on the streets of Kampala, they greeted each other in their delight with the phrase, ‘You still exist!’ But there was to be no respite. In 1980 Obote regained power in disputed elections, plunging Uganda into an anarchic civil war. Obote’s repression was as bad as Amin’s had been; his ‘northern’ army was accused by human rights groups of being responsible for 300,000 civilian deaths. By the time Obote was overthrown in 1985, Uganda was ranked among the poorest countries in the world.
Equatorial Guinea enjoyed only 145 days of independence before it was pitched into a nightmare of brutality and coercion that lasted for eleven years. A former Spanish colony, comprising the mainland province of Rio Muni and the main island of Fernando Po (Bioko), it achieved independence in October 1968 under a shaky coalition government led by Francisco Macías Nguema. A politician of limited education and low mental ability, Nguema had made his way up the ladder as a result of the support of Spanish administrators who believed he could be turned into a trustworthy collaborator relied upon to do their bidding. On three occasions he had failed to pass examinations qualifying him for a civil service career and emancipado status, succeeding the fourth time only because of overt Spanish favouritism. In 1960, under Spanish auspices, he had been appointed alcade – mayor – of Mongomo district in the east of Rio Muni and given a seat in the small national assembly on Fernando Po. But while being groomed for office by the Spanish, Nguema harboured intense resentments against them and an abiding hatred of foreign culture and ‘intellectuals’ in general. Once in power, he lashed out.
The incident that triggered his rage occurred in February 1969 when on a visit to Bata he discovered Spanish flags still flying there. His inflammatory speeches against the Spanish sent youth activists into the streets searching for Spanish victims. Fearing for their safety, thousands of Spaniards fled the country. When the foreign minister, Ndongo Miyone, sought to defuse the crisis, Nguema refused to listen. A few days later Ndongo was summoned to a meeting at the presidential palace, beaten with rifle butts, hauled off to prison with broken legs, and brutally murdered. Scores of other politicians and officials whom Nguema wanted out of the way were killed. A former ambassador died after being repeatedly immersed in a barrel filled with water for more than a week. By the end of March most of the Spanish population of 7,000, including civil administrators, teachers, technicians, professionals and shopkeepers had fled, abandoning their businesses, property and prosperous cocoa and coffee plantations.
Equatorial Guinea steadily sank into a morass of murder and mayhem. Ten of the twelve ministers in the first government were executed. In their place Nguema installed members of his own family and fellow tribesmen from the small Esangui clan from the Mongomo region. His nephew, Colonel Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbosogo, became commander of the National Guard, military commander of Fernando Po, secretary-general of the ministry of defence and head of prisons. Other nephews were appointed to senior security posts; one simultaneously held the portfolios of finance, trade, information, security and state enterprises; a cousin ran foreign affairs. Officers in the security forces were all linked to Nguema by ties of kinship.
Given unlimited powers to arrest, torture, rape and murder, Nguema’s security forces wreaked vengeance on the country’s educated classes and took savage reprisals against any hint of opposition. Thousands were incarcerated in prison and murdered there; two-thirds of national assembly deputies and most senior civil servants were killed, imprisoned, or driven into exile. Many were executed on a whim. When the director of statistics published a demographic estimate that Nguema considered too low, he was dismembered to ‘help him learn to count’. In two documented cases he ordered the execution of all former lovers of his current mistresses. He also ordered the murder of husbands of women he coveted. Before each state visit that Nguema made abroad, political prisoners were routinely killed to dissuade other opponents from conspiring against him. Death sentences were invariably carried out with extreme brutality. Guineans were liable to be punished merely for failing to attend manifestations of praise and joy or for being ‘discontento’. In 1976 the last remaining senior civil servants, handpicked by Nguema to replace those he had previously murdered, sent him a mass petition asking for a relaxation of the country’s total isolationism, hoping there would be safety in numbers. Every one of the 114 petitioners was arrested and tortured, many never to be seen again.
No proper administration survived. The only people to be paid regularly were the president, the army, the police and the militia. Most ministries – including those dealing with education, agriculture, construction and natural resources – had no budgets at all and their offices in Malabo were shut. The central bank too was closed after the director was publicly executed in 1976. All foreign exchange was delivered instead to Nguema who hoarded it along with large amounts of local currency in his various palaces on Fernando Po and Rio Muni. When Nguema was short of money, he resorted to ransoming foreigners: $57,600 for a German woman; $40,000 for a Spanish professor; $6,000 for a deceased Soviet citizen.
In long, rambling and incoherent speeches, Nguema fulminated against his pet bugbears – education, intellectuals and foreign culture. He closed all libraries in the country, prohibited newspapers and printing presses and even banned the use of the word ‘intellectual’. All formal education came to an end in 1974 when Catholic mission schools were told to close. Children from then on were taught only political slogans.
In his drive to control organised religion, he ordered church sermons to include references to him as ‘The Only Miracle’ and decreed that his portrait be displayed in all churches. Under threat of immediate arrest, priests were forced to reiterate slogans such as, ‘There is no God other than Macías’, and ‘God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Papa Macías. Without Macías, Equatorial Guinea would not exist.’ Even this, though, did not satisfy him. In a series of edicts in 1974 and 1975, he banned all religious meetings, funerals and sermons and forbade the use of Christian names. Christian worship became a crime. Virtually all churches were subsequently locked up or converted into warehouses. The cathedral in Malabo was incorporated into the presidential compound and used to store weapons. Foreign priests were expelled. The last Claretine missionary was held as a hostage at the age of eighty-five and released only after a ransom had been paid.
The urban economy collapsed. On a visit to Malabo in 1977, a foreign researcher, Robert af Klinteberg, described it as a ghost town, like ‘a place hit by war or plague’. Nearly all shops, market stalls and the post office, along with government ministries, were closed down; consumer goods were unobtainable; electricity supplies were erratic. Trade and commerce were replaced by barter. Goods arriving on the few ships still calling at Malabo mostly went to Nguema’s clique; the rest rapidly sold out at exorbitant prices. In rural areas, cocoa and coffee production plummeted. Nigerian plantation workers on contract were treated like slave labour and left in droves. To replace them, Nguema ordered the forced recruitment of 2,500 males from each of the country’s ten districts, causing an exodus of tens of thousands to neighbouring Gabon and Cameroon.
In his report on Equatorial Guinea, Klinteberg summed it up as a land of fear and devastation no better than a concentration camp – the ‘cottage industry Dachau of Africa’. Out of a population of 300,000, at least 50,000 had been killed and 125,000 had fled into exile. Hardly a single intellectual remained in the country; fewer than a dozen technical school graduates survived.
Presiding over this slaughterhouse, Nguema exhibited many signs of overt madness. His conversation and ideas were increasingly disjointed; his moods swung suddenly from periods of calm to uncontrollable violence. He sometimes carried out lengthy monologues with former colleagues whom he had executed. His movements were often jerky and uncoordinated; he became progressively deaf, shouting loudly in order to hear himself, refusing the use of hearing aids; he consumed large quantities of drugs, local stimulants like bhang and iboga, that visibly affected the pupils of his eyes. He received treatment in Spain for illnesses that were never disclosed.
Ill at ease in Fernando Po, he retreated to the mainland, first to Bata, where a new presidential palace was built for him, then to live in his remote native village in Mongomo where three of his four wives lived. He took with him most of the national treasury, storing huge wads of bills in bags and suitcases in a bamboo hut next to his house. Some of the money rotted in the ground. He also kept the country’s pharmaceutical store there. Surrounded by relatives and village elders, he spent hours around a campfire discussing ‘state policy’ and reminiscing about the good old days before white rule.
Many Guineans believed he was endowed with supernatural powers. His father, a Fang of the Esangui clan, was said to be a much feared sorcerer, and Nguema constantly used his knowledge of traditional witchcraft both to prop up his legitimacy and to keep the local population in terrified submission. At his home in Mongomo he built up a huge collection of human skulls to demonstrate his power. He invented plots, then uncovered them, in order to prove his invincibility. He used clan leaders and elders and itinerant praise singers to spread the dreaded message of his magical powers. ‘You may be against Macías as long as the sun shines, but in the night you have to be for him,’ one of Klinteberg’s informants told him.
Nguema’s demise came in 1979 as the result of a clash with his ambitious nephew Colonel Obiang Nguema and other members of his family, who feared that unless he was removed they might be dragged down with him. They were spurred on by an incident in June 1979 when six officers of the National Guard who travelled to Mongomo to ask Macías to release funds for the payment of salaries several months in arrears were summarily shot. On 3 August Obiang led a coup against his uncle. After setting fire to most of the country’s fiscal reserves, Macías escaped with two suitcases of foreign currency but was captured two weeks later.
After debating whether to put him on trial or commit him to a psychiatric ward, the family decided on a trial. The trial was held in September 1979 in the Marfil cinema in Malabo. The charges included genocide, paralysis of the economy and embezzlement of public funds. Out of a total of 80,000 murders listed in the original indictment, Nguema was found guilty on 500 counts. He rejected all murder charges, suggesting that his nephew, Obiang, was responsible. ‘I was head of state, not the director of prisons.’ Along with five of his most brutal aides, he was sentenced to death.
Fearful of his supernatural powers, no local soldier was willing to participate in a firing squad. So the task was given to a group of Moroccan soldiers. Long after his death, Nguema’s ghost was believed to be a potent force in Equatorial Guinea. But his successor, Colonel Obiang, settled in comfortably enough.
Major Mengistu Haile Mariam first gained prominence when he harangued the Derg into ordering the execution of some sixty high officials from Haile Selassie’s regime. Ambitious, ruthless and cunning, he was impatient from the start for revolutionary action. Coming from a poor background, a private soldier who had worked his way up the ranks to officer training school, his career and character seemed to symbolise the driving force behind the revolution. His mother was the illegitimate daughter of an Ethiopian nobleman, his father a guard at the nobleman’s house. With little formal education, he was placed with the army as a ‘boy’ at the age of fifteen. A dour, secretive figure, whose dark complexion and facial features linked him to one of the empire’s conquered peoples of the south, he despised the rich and well-born elite that surrounded Haile Selassie’s court. Stationed with the Third Division in Harar province, he acquired a record for insubordination and was constantly in trouble. One reason why he was sent as a representative to the Derg when it was first formed in Addis Ababa in June 1974 was said to be that his divisional commander simply wanted to get rid of him.
As a member of the Derg, Mengistu made common cause with the ordinary soldiers and non-commissioned officers who made up a large part of its membership and who became his power base. He also struck up close links with radical students and Marxist activists, many of whom had returned to Ethiopia from exile in 1974 demanding revolutionary change.
The changes initiated by the Derg came in swift succession. In December 1974 it proclaimed the advent of Ethiopian socialism. In January 1975 it nationalised banks and insurance companies, followed in February by all large industrial and commercial companies. In March it nationalised all rural land, abolishing private ownership and the whole system of land tenancy, thus destroying at a stroke the economic power of the old regime. To spread its message to rural areas, where 90 per cent of the population lived, it despatched the entire body of 50,000 secondary school students, university undergraduates and teachers into the countryside. ‘Christ exhorted his apostles to go and teach,’ a Derg official told students. ‘Today Ethiopia is sending you to the countryside to enlighten the people.’ In July the Derg nationalised all urban land and rentable houses and apartments. The monarchy, too, was formally abolished. The climax came in April 1976 when Mengistu appeared on radio and television to proclaim Marxism-Leninism as Ethiopia’s official ideology.
As the revolution gathered momentum, Ethiopia was engulfed in strife and turmoil. Landlords and land-owners organised armed resistance; royalists and the nobility raised the banner of revolt; in one province after another, rebellions against the central government over long-held grievances flared up. In the north-western province of Begemdir a conservative opposition party, the Ethiopian Democratic Union, led by aristocrats, raised an army, succeeded in capturing towns close to the Sudan border and advanced towards the provincial capital, Gondar. In the north-east Afar tribesmen formed the Afar Liberation Front and mounted guerrilla attacks on traffic using the main road to the port of Assab on the Red Sea coast, where the country’s only oil refinery was located. In Tigray province a large guerrilla force was established by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front with the help of the Eritreans. In the south the Oromo Liberation Front was launched with support from Somalia. The Somalis also revived the Western Somali Liberation Front, which had lain dormant for five years, and began to infiltrate arms and equipment into the Ogaden, preparing for a new initiative to recapture their ‘lost’ lands.
The fiercest struggle occurred in Eritrea. When the Derg decided in November 1974 to prosecute the war in Eritrea rather than seek a negotiated settlement, Eritrean guerrillas launched a massive onslaught. By mid-1976 the guerrillas had gained control of most of the countryside and were laying siege to small army garrisons. In a desperate attempt to shore up the army’s hold on Eritrea, the Derg recruited a huge peasant army from other provinces, hoping that sheer numbers would overwhelm the guerrillas. Poorly trained and armed only with ancient rifles, scythes and clubs, the peasant army was routed on the Eritrean border even before it had been deployed.
In Addis Ababa the Derg met growing opposition from radical political groups which wanted civilian control of the revolution. In September 1976 the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), drawing support from labour unions, teachers and students, all vehemently opposed to military rule, embarked on a campaign of urban terrorism against the Derg and its civilian ally, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement, usually known by its Amharic acronym, Meison. An assassination attempt was made on Mengistu in the centre of Addis Ababa in September, the first of nine such attempts. Scores of officials and supporters of the Derg were murdered. The Derg in turn sent out its own murder squads.
The Derg itself was split between rival factions. Mengistu demanded uncompromising action against the Derg’s opponents; other officers favoured a more conciliatory approach. At a meeting of the Derg at the Grand Palace on 3 February 1977, Mengistu and his supporters suddenly left the room, leaving behind seven members he considered his enemies. Mengistu’s bodyguards stormed into the room with machine guns and forced them down to the basement. Mengistu joined them there and joined in the executions. He was now in undisputed control.
Mengistu next turned ruthlessly against his civilian opponents, embarking on what he referred to as a campaign of ‘red terror’, licensing civilian groups – the lumpen-proletariat of the slums – to act on his behalf. ‘It is an historical obligation to clean up vigilantly using the revolutionary sword,’ he told his supporters. ‘Your struggle should be demonstrated by spreading red terror in the camp of the reactionaries.’ At a rally in Addis Ababa in April, he smashed three bottles filled with a red substance he said represented the blood of the revolution’s enemies, inciting followers to avenge themselves on the EPRP. He ordered arms to be distributed to ‘defence squads’ formed by urban neighbourhood associations, or kebeles, as they were called. Months of urban warfare, assassination and indiscriminate killing followed as supporters of the EPRP, Meison and the Derg struggled for control. From the kebeles of the shantytowns, armed gangs hunted down students, teachers and intellectuals deemed to be ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Bodies of murdered victims were left lying where they fell with signs attached to their clothing naming them as ‘oppositionists’ or were dumped in heaps on the outskirts of the capital. Thousands died in the red terror, thousands more were imprisoned, many of them tortured and beaten. By mid-1977 the EPRP was effectively destroyed. In the final phase of the red terror, to establish his own supremacy, Mengistu turned on his Meison allies, destroying them too. The young generation of intellectual activists who had so avidly supported the revolution were all but wiped out.
Mengistu’s hold over other parts of Ethiopia was nevertheless precarious. By mid-1977 the Ethiopian army in Eritrea had lost most major towns and controlled little more than Asmara and the ports of Massawa and Assab. In July 1977 Somalia, deciding the time was ripe to take advantage of the Derg’s preoccupation with Eritrea and other revolts, launched a full-scale invasion of the Ogaden. By August the Somalis controlled most of the Ogaden. In September they captured Jijiga, an Ethiopian tank base, and pressed on towards the town of Harar and the rail and industrial centre of Dire Dawa, the third largest city in Ethiopia.
What rescued Mengistu from military defeat was massive intervention by Soviet and Cuban forces, determined to prop up his Marxist regime. In November 1977 the Soviets mounted a huge airlift and sealift, ferrying tanks, fighter aircraft, artillery, armoured personnel carriers and hundreds of military advisers to Ethiopia. A Cuban combat force numbering 17,000 joined them. Led by Cuban armour, the Ethiopians launched their counter-offensive in the Ogaden in February 1978, inflicting a crushing defeat on the Somalis. The full force of the Ethiopian army, supported by the Soviet Union, was then turned on Eritrea.
At the fourth anniversary celebrations marking the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1978, Mengistu sat alone in a gilded armchair covered with red velvet on a platform in Revolution Square in Addis Ababa watching a procession of army units and civilian groups pass before him. Then he returned to his headquarters at the Grand Palace. Having succeeded in holding the old empire together, he liked to portray himself as following a tradition of strong Ethiopian rulers. Indeed, Mengistu came to be compared with the Emperor Tewodros, a nineteenth-century ruler who started his career as a minor local chieftain, fought his way up to take the Crown and then strove to reunite the empire after a period of disintegration. At official functions at the Grand Palace, while members of the Derg stood respectfully to one side, Mengistu chose to preside from the same ornate chair that Haile Selassie had once favoured.
One of his ministers, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, once a fervent supporter of the revolution, recalled his growing sense of disillusionment.
At the beginning of the Revolution all of us had utterly rejected anything having to do with the past. We would no longer drive cars, or wear suits; neckties were considered criminal. Anything that made you look well-off or bourgeois, anything that smacked of affluence or sophistication, was scorned as part of the old order. Then, around 1978, all that began to change. Gradually materialism became accepted, then required. Designer clothes from the best European tailors were the uniform of all senior government officials and members of the Military Council. We had the best of everything: the best homes, the best cars, the best whisky, champagne, food. It was a compete reversal of the ideals of the Revolution.
He recalled, too, how Mengistu changed once he had gained complete control.
He grew more abrasive and arrogant. The real Mengistu emerged: vengeful, cruel and authoritarian. His conduct was not limited by any moral considerations. He began to openly mock God and religion. There was a frightening aura about him. Many of us who used to talk to him with our hands in our pockets, as if he were one of us, found ourselves standing stiffly at attention, cautiously respectful in his presence. In addressing him we had always used the familiar form of ‘you’, ante; now we found ourselves switching to the more formal ‘you’, ersiwo. He moved into a bigger, more lavish office in the Palace of Menelik. He got new, highly trained bodyguards – men who watched you nervously, ready to shoot at any time. We now were frisked whenever we entered his office. He began to use the Emperor’s cars and had new ones imported from abroad – bigger, fancier cars with special security provisions. Wherever he went he was escorted by these cars packed with guards, with more riding alongside on motorcycles.
He concluded: ‘We were supposed to have a revolution of equality; now he had become the new Emperor.’