Objects of Fascination: The African Icons
‘In those days Rysiek had various radical objects of fascination,’ Nowak tells me. ‘Number One was Frantz Fanon. Do you know who he was?’
Fanon wrote the ‘bible’ of the anti-colonial movements of that era. Born on the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean, he was an Afro-Frenchman who fought in the Second World War and was decorated for bravery. By profession he was a psychiatrist. In protest against the brutality of the French in Algeria, where he was head of a hospital psychiatric ward, he resigned from his job. He joined the Algerian anti-colonial guerrilla movement, the FLN. He died prematurely of leukaemia, but in the last year of his life, 1961, he wrote a book that guaranteed him posthumous fame – The Wretched of the Earth.
With Nowak’s help, Kapuściński laboriously wades through the original text – they both have rather a poor grasp of French, but the book has not been translated into English yet.
Fanon administers crushing criticism not just to the crimes of the Europeans in the lands they conquered, but also to the governments of allegedly – as he claims – liberated countries. He persuades us that the liberation process being witnessed in Africa is ‘false decolonization’, which leaves power in the hands of the imperialists and their local puppets. And so he urges the overthrow of these people by way of armed combat; he argues that revolutionary violence is a purgative and liberating force.
But it so happens that for the colonized this violence is invested with positive, formative features because it constitutes their only work. This violent praxis is totalizing since each individual represents a violent link in the great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence of the colonizer. Factions recognize each other and the future nation is already indivisible. The armed struggle mobilizes the people, i.e. it pitches them in a single direction, from which there is no turning back . . .
At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their self-confidence . . . When they have used violence to achieve national liberation, the masses allow nobody to come forward as ‘liberators’ . . . Enlightened by violence, the people’s consciousness rebels against any pacification.1
Fanon believes in the approaching onset of revolution in Africa. Its chief motors are to be the lumpenproletariat and the peasantry, because the urban workers are corrupted by the system and represent an aristocracy within the poorest social groups. By contrast, the ‘formation of the lumpenproletariat is a phenomenon which is governed by its own logic . . . However hard it is kicked or stoned it continues to gnaw at the roots of the tree like a pack of rats.’2
Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of liberated Kenya, and one of Kapuściński’s objects of fascination, will soon change into a disappointment.
One morning Kapuściński is woken by the Czechoslovak correspondent Zdeněk Kubeš.
‘Have you seen it?’
‘Seen what?’
‘Your article, of course!’
Some time earlier, Kapuściński wrote a report about corruption within Kenyan government circles. He asks the PAP to reserve this material for the Special Bulletin, not publish it in the press. After moving from Dar es Salaam, Kapuściński is living in Nairobi, and he has to be careful about exposing the abuses committed by the rulers of his host country. The PAP editorial office either does not notice or disregards his proviso; in any case, Polityka reprints the piece, and then the Kenyan English-language daily Standard copies it from the Polish weekly.
In the article, titled ‘The Ruling Élite’, Kapuściński writes:
Over a nine-month period in 1963, Kenya’s Prime Minister Kenyatta acquired three of the most expensive limousines in the world (a Lincoln Continental, a Mercedes 300 SE and a Rolls Royce – the price of these cars totals $55,000). Uganda’s Prime Minister Obote held a wedding party in October 1963 for 28,000 people at a cost of $60,000, taken from the state budget. When asked didn’t he think the party was too costly for Uganda, Obote replied: ‘The weddings of the British royal family are no cheaper. The Ugandan people must bear the costs of maintaining the high standing of its leaders, who were heroes in the fight’ . . .
Today’s degeneration of the African élite is a consequence of the fact that the battle for independence was fought in isolation from social issues, and that the specific slogan was liberty, but not equality. This was chiefly the result of the political immaturity of the masses, but it also arose from the actual style of fighting for independence, a style imposed by the colonialist, but adopted by many of the groups leading the independence movement, a style that relies on bargaining, compromise, negotiation, constitutional amendments, and guarantees plotted behind the scenes without reference to the masses.3
The Kenyan newspaper supplements Kapuściński’s text with a commentary in more or less the following tone: ‘Look what the communists write about us, while pretending to be Africa’s friends.’
Kapuściński is convinced he will soon be deported. He goes to the airlines office to book a return ticket to Poland. Meanwhile, Kenyatta’s government is debating the scandal.
‘A British man told me afterwards,’ recalls Bolimowska, ‘that Odinga [vice president at the time, and leader of the left wing of the ruling camp] asked the assembled cabinet members: “Has this Polish journalist written anything that isn’t true?” A murmur goes round the room . . . After a pause someone stands up and says: “Unfortunately, it is the truth.” Odinga: “So why should we arrest him?” ’
Odinga’s intervention definitely saves Kapuściński. He is not expelled from Kenya, although three months later he leaves of his own accord. After a short convalescence in Poland, he transfers the PAP post to Nigeria. Soon all journalists from the socialist camp will be thrown out of Kenya; Kapuściński is banned from entering the country for many years.
His fascination with Patrice Lumumba, leader of the fight against Belgian colonialism, comes earlier. Before going to Africa as a permanent correspondent, Kapuściński travels to Congo, arriving just as news of Lumumba’s murder is doing the rounds. He succumbs to the cult of Lumumba after the killing, but the portrait he paints of a charismatic leader is essentially realistic:
Patrice is the son of his people. He will be naive and mystical at times; he will also have a tendency to jump quickly from one extreme to the other, from bursts of happiness to silent despair. Lumumba is a fascinating figure, because he is inexpressibly complicated. Nothing about this man yields to definition. Every formula is too narrow. He is a restless, chaotic zealot, a sentimental poet, an ambitious politician, an impetuous soul, amazingly proud and meek all at once, confident of his truth to the very last, deaf to the words of others, engrossed in his own, wonderful voice.4
Nkrumah is not merely an object of fascination; he is virtually a guru, a saviour. A few years earlier, during his first trip to Africa, Kapuściński sees him at a rally in Accra.
With undisguised sympathy, or downright excitement, he writes:
The fact that we have Kwame is a blessing for Ghana, as it was a blessing for America to have Lincoln, for Russia to have Lenin, and for England to have Nelson . . . He is the Messiah and the organizer, the friend of suffering humanity, who has achieved his eminence by following the path of pain, service and devotion.5
Nkrumah’s big idea is a large union of African states. He sees himself in the role of leader.
He rejects two of life’s temptations and the one force that can overpower him, blind him: women, money and religion. These things might cause him to lose sight of the goal: Ghana’s liberation. ‘Kwame set himself this goal when he was still a boy,’ Kapuściński writes, both enthusiastically and naively. ‘Nkrumah is turgid, intent, with the manner retained from his days preaching in the American black churches.’6
Kapuściński will have a great deal of trouble when, in 1966, troops supported by the CIA overthrow Nkrumah and it comes to light that Africa’s Messiah had given asylum to war criminal Horst Schumann, a doctor from Auschwitz. Schumann, as Kapuściński writes in a report for the Special Bulletin, ‘used prisoners as guinea pigs for his experiments’. (During the putsch Nkrumah was on a visit to China. He will never return to his country; he will spend the rest of his life in exile in Guinea, and will die during medical treatment in Romania.)
‘If I had to compare him with anyone, then maybe only with Mahatma Gandhi. He was the most genuine idealist. Ever smiling and friendly’ – years later, this is how Kapuściński remembers the saint of African socialism, Julius Nyerere, president of Tanganyika (later Tanzania).
Nyerere establishes a one-party system (there is virtually no opposition anyway). He creates political life, which has never existed here before now. His people call him Mwalimu – the Teacher. The Teacher believes that on African land, opposition arises from tribal battles or thoughtless imitation of European models. From the viewpoint of Western democratic thinking these are heresies, but thanks to Nyerere’s policies Tanzania is unique in the region in its freedom from tribal divisions and conflict.
The economy, which centres on rural communes (ujamaa), is a disaster. On borrowed money Nyerere builds school and hospitals, but the system as a whole is inefficient; people escape from village poverty to the cities. Among the ruling élite, corruption and nepotism are rife, but Nyerere himself is not corrupt – he ‘does not help’ his family. In the mid 1980s, when Tanzania goes bankrupt, to the amazement of his compatriots and world opinion Nyerere voluntarily resigns. He announces that he has let the country down, and he leaves: an unprecedented occurrence in the history of modern politics. He is a true saint.