Paul Johnson writes in his 1983 book Modern Times:
The great temptation of colonialism, the worm in its free-market
apple, was the itch to indulge in social engineering. It was so fatally
easy for the colonial administrator to persuade himself that he could
improve on the laws of supply and demand by treating his territory
as an ant-hill and its inhabitants as worker-ants who would benefit
from benevolent organizing. The Belgian Congo, where white settlers
were given no political powers at all for fear they would oppress the
natives, was a monument to well-meaning bossiness. The law
instructed firms to behave like *a good head of family’. As in Soviet
Russia, there were restrictions on native movement, especially in the
big cities, and in Elizabethville natives had to observe a curfew. The
notion was that the African could be shoved around for his own
good. Practice, of course, was much less benevolent than theory.
Until 1945, the French used social engineering on a huge scale in the
form of forced labour and native penal codes. It was infinitely less
savage and extensive than the Gulag Archipelago but it rested on
some of the same assumptions.
The most dedicated of the social engineers were the Portuguese,
who ran the first and the last of the empires. In Angola and
Mozambique they adopted slavery from the Africans, institutiona-
lized it and integrated it with their administrative system. The
slave-trade, especially to Brazil, was the economic mainstay of these
two territories for three hundred years. The treaties the Portuguese
signed with the African chiefs were for labour, not products (though
in Mozambique the Arabs acted as middlemen). The Portuguese
were the only primary producers of slaves among the European
powers. They defended the trade desperately and resisted its suppres-
sion, abolishing it only when compelled by the British, and replacing
it by a commercialized system of forced labour. This they maintained
to the end in the 1970s, still with the co-operation of the African
chiefs, who in the slave-days ran the labour-gangs or shabalos.
Cecil Rhodes wanted to absorb Angola and Mozambique in the
free British system, regarding Portuguese colonialism as an ana-
chronism: in his innocence he did not realize it was a portent of
twentieth-century totalitarianism. In the post- 1945 period the Portu-
guese provided every year 300,000 contracted labourers from Mo-
zambique and 100,000 from Angola, mainly for South Africa. Every
African who had not been assimilated and granted citizenship (the
Portuguese had no colour-bar as such) had to possess a caderneta or
pass-book with his work record. Bad workers were sent to the local
jefe de posto for corporal punishment on the hand with a palmatoria
or perforated ping-pong bat. The ultimate deterrent was hard labour
on ‘the islands’ (Sao Tome or Principe). Like the Belgians, the
Portuguese had a curfew, and Africans could not normally leave the
house after nine. 35
The Portuguese authorities hotly defended their methods on moral
grounds. They argued that in return for exporting labour, the two
colonies were getting ports and railways and other investment
unobtainable by any other means. They claimed they took their
civilizing mission seriously: Africans were not children but adults
who must be made to accept social responsibilities. This meant
taking the men out of idleness into work, and the women out of the
bondage of the fields into their proper role in the home. 36 But like
most forms of moralizing interference it had unforeseen side-effects.
In 1954 the Bishop of Beira complained that exporting labour was
totally destructive of family life since 80 per cent of the men in his
diocese were habitually away from home, either in Rhodesia and
South Africa or on work-projects within the territory. 37
Even the British-influenced territories used large-scale social en-
gineering in the form of land-apportionment to underpin racial
divisions. In Kenya the expulsion of the Kikuyu from the ‘White
Highlands’ between the wars (which we have noted in Chapter Four)
raised some of the same moral objections as Stalin’s collectivization
of the farms. It was the direct cause of the ferocious Mau Mau
outbreak in the 1950s. Land apportionment legislation in Southern
Rhodesia, a similar policy, was one of the underlying causes of the
guerrilla war there which dominated Rhodesian history in the 1970s
and was ended only with the change to black rule in 1979. But the
outstanding example was South Africa, where social engineering was
raised into the central principle (indeed philosophy) of government
in the form of apartheid.
In South Africa pass-laws (and books) as forms of social control
went back to the eighteenth century, being supposedly abolished in
1828 but creeping back in again, until in the 1970s arrests under
movement-restriction laws averaged more than 600,000 a year. 38
Their origins lay in Elizabethan regulations to control ‘sturdy
beggars’, themselves provoked by rapid population increase. But it is
ironic that South Africa’s first positive measures of social engineering were the work of Jan Christian Smuts, who was one of the principal architects both of the League of Nations and of the UN, and who personally at San Francisco in 1945 drafted the UN Declaration on
Human Rights.
Smuts was one of the Boer moderates who, in the liberal peace
settlement after the Boer War, were associated with the British in the
re-creation of the country. These men laid the legislative foundations
of a semi-totalitarian state based upon the principle of racial-
ordering. In 1911 strikes by contract workers (i.e. blacks) were made
illegal, while the Mines and Works Act reserved certain job-
categories for whites. In 1913 the Natives Land Act introduced the
principle of territorial segregation by skin-colour. This Act was the
key to all that followed, not least because it determined the nature of
the African response which was to create their own proliferating
varieties of Zionist religious sects. 40 In 1920 the Native Affairs Act
introduced segregated political institutions for Africans, setting up
the Native Conference of African leaders, nominated by government,
and guided by the all-white Native Affairs Commission of ‘experts’.
In 1922 an Act restricted skilled apprenticeships to those with
minimum educational qualifications (i.e. non-Africans). In 1923 the
Native (Urban Areas) Act created segregated African residential
areas in and near towns. In 1925 the Industrial Conciliation Act
denied collective bargaining rights to Africans. The 1925 Wages Act
and the 1926 Colour Bar Act were specifically designed to draw a
gulf between poor whites and the African masses. 41
It was Smuts, again, who moved South Africa in a directly
opposite direction to that followed by the government of India after
Amritsar. In 1921 he massacred an African ‘Israelite’ sect which
engaged in a mass-squat on forbidden land at Bulhoek, and the
following year he put down a black labour rebellion in the Rand with
700 casualties. This ruthless policy was reinforced with further
legislation. The 1927 Native Administration Act made the Gov-
ernor-General (i.e. the government) Supreme Chief over all Africans,
with authoritarian powers to appoint headmen, define tribal boun-
daries, move tribes and individuals, and control African courts and
land-ownership. Its Section 29 punished ‘any person who utters any
words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to
promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans’.
Government police powers were further increased by the Mines and
Works Act and Riotous Assemblies Act of 1930. 42 This granitic
massing of totalitarian power took place at exactly the same time
Stalin was erecting his tyranny on the Leninist plinth, gave govern-
ment comparable powers and was designed to produce the same
results.
During the Second World War, Smuts, who had earlier destroyed
the hopes of the coloured and mixed races of securing political equality with white voters, extended social engineering to them. In 1943 he set up a Coloured Affairs Department to ‘administer’ the Cape
coloureds, and the same year he introduced the Pegging Act to stop
Indians moving into white areas. Far from making common cause
between the whites, Asians and coloureds, against the overwhelm-
ing majority of blacks, it was Smuts’s United Party which drove
both into the arms of the black nationalists (who hated them more
than whites), and the Indian element was vital in swinging Asian
and UN opinion against South Africa. 43 Hence all the structural
essentials of white supremacy and physical segregation existed
before the United Party lost power to the Boer Nationalists in May
1948.
What the Nationalists did was to transform segregation into a
quasi-religious philosophical doctrine, apartheid. In many ways
they were a similar development to African nationalism itself. Their
earliest slogan, Afrika voor de Afrikaaners, was identical with the
black ‘Africa for the Africans’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Their
religious sectarianism flourished at the same time as African Zion-
ism and for the same purpose: to bring together in collective
defence the oppressed, the unwanted and the discriminated against.
It was remarkably similar to Jewish Zionism too, in both its origins
and consequences. The Boers created their own Zion, which then
served as the focus of hatred and unifying force for the Africans, as
Israel did for the Arabs. The first Boer nationalist institutions,
1915—18, were created to provide help for poor whites through job
agencies, credit banks and trade unions. They were fiercely anti-
Semitic as well as anti-black and anti-British. The movement began
with the defence of the underdog, then broadened to promote the
political, economic and cultural interests of the Afrikaaners as a
whole, then in 1948 suddenly made itself overdog, with a ven-
geance. 44
Apartheid first appeared as a political programme in 1948,
treating the Reserves as the proper homeland for Africans where
their rights and citizenship were rooted, but its origins went back to
the foundation in 1935 of the Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rasse-
studie. It was therefore directly influenced by Hitler’s racial ideas
and his plans for segregated settlement in Eastern Europe, though it
added a Biblical underpinning lacking in Hitler’s atheist panorama.
Beneath the surface, apartheid was a muddle, since it combined
incompatible elements. As pseudo-scientific racism, it derived, like
Hitlerism and Leninism, from social Darwinism; as a religious
racism, it derived from fundamentalist beliefs which denied Dar-
winism in any form. On the surface, however, it had a certain
clarity and simplicity; and the political system Smuts had created,
reinforced by the Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951),
which knocked the coloureds off the Common Roll, gave the
Nationalists a secure tenure of power which is now well into its
fourth decade. They have thus had the means to embark on a course
of social engineering which, for consistency and duration, is rivalled
only by Soviet Russia’s own.
The object of apartheid was to reverse the tide of integration and
create wholly separate communities. The Prohibition of Mixed
Marriages Act (1949) extended the ban from white-African to all
unions across the colour lines. The Immorality Act made extra-
marital sex illegal in any circumstances but more severely punished if
it involved miscegenation. The Population Registration Act (1950)
allocated everyone to a racial group, like the Nuremberg Laws. The
Group Areas Act, the same year, empowered the government to
designate residential and business areas for particular racial groups.
It began the process of shoving human beings around like loads of
earth and concrete, and flattening their homes and shops with
bulldozers. The first phase of apartheid was consolidated by the
security provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950),
which defined Communism not only as Marxism-Leninism but ‘any
related form of that doctrine’ and any activity whatever which
sought to bring about ‘any political, industrial, social or economic
change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or
disorder’. This turned the authoritarian elements of the state, for the
first time, against a significant portion of the white population.
The second phase followed the appointment of the ideologist
H.F.Verwoerd as Minister of Native Affairs in 1950. He was an
intellectual, Professor of Social Psychology at Stellenbosch, who
significantly was not an inward-looking old-style Boer but had been
born in Holland and educated in Germany. He gave the system a new
unity, especially after he became premier in 1958. 45 His Bantu
Education Act of 1954 imposed government control over all African
schools, brought the missions to heel, introduced differential sylla-
buses and an educational system specifically designed to prepare
Bantu-speakers for their place in society. At the same time, the
systematic creation of separate living areas, the ‘Bantustans’, was
begun. Segregation began to penetrate every aspect of life, including
sport, culture and, not least, church services; and by 1959 the
government had effectively segregated higher education.
During the years 1959-60, which in effect created the black
African continent, many observers believed apartheid was doomed
to collapse in the near future. That was Harold Macmillan’s view
when he gave his ‘Winds of Change’ speech in Pretoria on 3 February
1960, followed almost immediately by the Sharpeville shooting, in
which sixty-nine Africans were killed. 46 It was thought that an
Amritsar syndrome would now at last set in, that the tide of African
advance was irresistible, that the Boers would lose their will and their
nerve. There was a flight of capital. South Africa left the Common-
wealth. There was likewise a belief that apartheid, even on its own
terms, was unworkable. It conflicted with many of the demands of the
market economy, on which South Africa depended for survival. It
conflicted, too, with the ineluctable logic of demography. The central
blueprint for progressive apartheid was the so-called Tomlinson
Report of 1956, probably the most elaborate description of and
justification for large-scale social engineering ever put together. It
stated that ‘the dominant fact of the South African situation’ was that
there was ‘not the slightest ground for believing that the European
population, either now or in the future, would be willing to sacrifice its
character as a national entity and a European racial group’. And it
proceeded from there to knock the country into an appropriate shape. 47
The Report was criticized at the time for its absurd over-optimism, both
about the ease with which industry could be sited near Bantu areas and
about the growth of the black population. The accumulating evidence
of the 1960s appeared to confirm these caveats. In 1911, when race
policy started, Europeans were nearly a third of the black population
(1,276,242 whites against 4 million blacks, 500,000 coloureds and
150,000 Asians). In 1951, when apartheid had got going, there were
2,641,689 whites, 8,560,083 blacks, 1,103,016 coloureds and
366,664 Asians. By 1970 the whites had risen only to 3,752,528, the
blacks had jumped to 15,057,952, the coloureds to 2,018,453 and the
Asians to 620,436. It was calculated that, by the year 2000, Africans
and coloureds would outnumber whites by ten to one. 48 This made the
relative areas assigned to whites and blacks seem unrealistic, particu-
larly since the creation of industrial jobs near Bantu areas was
proceeding at only 8,000 a year against the Tomlinson projection of
50,000. The moral inequities of the system were gruesomely apparent.
By 1973 only 1,513 white families had been forced to move out of the
‘wrong’ race areas, while 44,885 coloured and 27,694 Indian families
had been engineered out of their homes, some of them occupied since
the days of the Dutch East India Company. 49 There was a constant
process of African squatting in forbidden areas, accompanied by
equally constant bulldozing, under heavily armed police and army
guard, horribly reminiscent of Russia, 1929-32. Presiding over this
exercise in perverted Utopianism were Boer intellectuals, trained in the
social sciences. Granted its internal contradictions and implausibilities,
and the fact that African, and increasingly, world opinion were
mobilized against it, the experiment seemed destined to collapse.
Yet the lesson of Soviet collectivization has been that such schemes,
however morally and economically indefensible, can endure, if pursued
with sufficient ruthlessness and brute physical power. Moreover, there
were certain factors working in favour of the regime. Like Russia,
South Africa is immensely rich in minerals: gold, coal, diamonds,
manganese and copper (in order of importance), plus antimony,
asbestos, chromium, fluor-spar, iron ore, manganese, mica, plati-
num, phosphates, tin, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc and many
others. 50 Far from declining, as had been predicted in 1960, the
South African economy flourished mightily from 1962 onwards,
throughout the boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. When the boom
ended in 1973—4, world inflation produced a price-revolution in gold
from which South Africa, the world’s largest producer (gold forms
more than half the total of her mineral wealth), was the principal
beneficiary. While incomes over virtually all the rest of Africa,
including those of her most dedicated and active enemies, fell, South
Africa’s rose. Between 1972 and 1980, for instance, a standard
sixty-pound gold ingot rose in retail value from $250,000 to $2.5
million, a tenfold increase. 51 The price-revolution benefited govern-
ment revenues by over $1 billion a year and also provided funds for a
huge rise in capital investments.
This steady growth in South Africa’s income in the two decades
after the ‘Winds of Change’ struck the continent enabled the regime
to construct shelters against it in the form of a self-contained arms
industry, which made South Africa virtually independent of reluctant
foreign suppliers, and a military nuclear-weapons programme. By
the early 1980s South Africa was spending $2.5 billion annually on
defence, but this was no more than 6 per cent of gnp, a tolerable
burden (by this point many black and Arab African countries were
spending 25-50 per cent of gnp on their armed forces). 52 South
African forces were periodically involved in maintaining security in
South- West Africa, a former German colony Smuts had failed to
secure outright at Versailles in 1919, South Africa being given it in
trusteeship, a formula which (by another irony) he had invented
himself. But in general South Africa survived with remarkably little
damage, either to the military power or to the morale of the white
ruling class, the decolonization by force of Angola, Mozambique and
Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the 1970s.
The Boer nationalists, as opposed to Smuts, had always criticized
his unrealized scheme to create a ‘great white dominion’ including
Rhodesia and Mozambique, and running from the Cape up to
Kenya. They argued in the 1920s that this would merely ‘engulf the
whites in a future black Africa. In the 1970s their caution was proved
justified, when the ratio of white to black even within South Africa
fell to 1:5. The South African regime refused to commit its own
fortunes to the preservation of the crumbling bastions of colonialism
to the north. When, in due course, they fell, the white laager
contracted. This brought triumphant, militant and armed black
nationalism to South Africa’s own frontiers, backed by overwhelm-
ing majorities in the UN, the Organization of African Unity and a
growing measure of Soviet-bloc physical support, chiefly in the form
of Cuban troops and advisers.
Yet the ‘confrontation’ between South African apartheid and
black nationalism was verbal and political rather than military, still
less economic. The nearer the African states were to South Africa, the
more they felt the pull of her immense and prosperous economy and
the less inclination did they display in carrying their resolve to
destroy apartheid further than words. Ordinary Africans voted with
their feet, not indeed in favour of apartheid but for the jobs the South
African economy provided. At the time of the boycott organized by
the auo in 1972, the South African Chamber of Miners employed
381,000 blacks, one-third of whom came from north of latitude 22
degrees S, and one-third from Mozambique. The number of blacks
coming to South Africa increased steadily in the 1970s, not least
because real wages for blacks in the Rand rose rapidly at a time when
they were falling in most of black Africa. The neighbouring regimes
called themselves ‘front line states’ and kept up the anti-apartheid
rhetoric, but in practice the governments of Zambia, Malawi,
Zimbabwe and, above all, Mozambique made themselves systematic
collaborators with the apartheid system by deliberately increasing
their exports of labour to the Rand. Malawi, Botswana and Zambia
pulled out of the auo boycott; other states simply broke it, as they
had earlier broken the boycott of Southern Rhodesia. South Africa
built Malawi’s new capital at Lilongwe and the Cabora Bassa dam in
Mozambique; and when one front-line president, Seretse Khama of
Botswana, fell ill, he was immediately flown to a ‘whites only’
hospital in Johannesburg. 53
It is significant that by the early 1980s the most active of South
Africa’s enemies was remote Nigeria, the only major black oil
producer. Its royalties, which exceeded $23 billion in 1980, pres-
erved it (as gold did South Africa) from the 1970s recession and gave
it the luxury of preserving an independent foreign-economic policy.
But states south of the Congo and the Great Lakes could not resist
the pull of the Rand magnet and, in practice, adjusted their ideologi-
cal policies accordingly.
In any case, differences between Pretoria’s policy and those of
most black African states were more theoretical than real. All
African states practised racist policies. In the 1950s and 1960s,
Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a
quarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who
remained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its
Arabs or deprived them of equal rights. In the 1970s Asians were
expelled from most states in the Horn and East-Central Africa and
they were discriminated against everywhere; even in Kenya they were
threatened with expulsion in 1982. In most cases race-discrimination
was a deliberate act of government policy rather than a response to
popular demand. When the Uganda government expelled the Asians
in 1972 the motive was to provide its members and supporters with
free houses and shops, not to please ordinary black Ugandans, whose
relations with the Asians had been friendly. 54 Anti-Asian racism was
usually propagated by official or semi-official newspapers controlled
by governments. In the 1970s they regularly published racist mat-
erial: that Asian women had feelings of superiority, hence their
refusal to sleep with black men; that Asians smuggled currency out
of the country in suitcases; that Asian businessmen were monopolists
and exploiters; a typical headline read ‘Asian Doctors Kill their
Patients’. 55
From independence onwards, most black African states practised
anti-white discrimination as a matter of government policy. In the
second half of the 1970s Kenya and the Ivory Coast were virtually
the only exceptions. Houphouet-Boigny, President of the latter, drew
attention to anti-white racism at the oau, telling the other heads of
state:
“It is true, dear colleagues, that there are 40,000 Frenchmen in my country and that this is more than there were before Independence. But in ten years I hope the position will be different. I hope that then there will be 100,000 Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us to meet again and compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend.” 56
But the commonest, indeed the universal, form of racism in black
Africa was inter-tribal, and it was this form of racism, for which one
euphemism is social control, which led a growing number of African
states, in the 1960s and still more in the 1970s, to exercise forms of
social engineering not unlike apartheid. One of the merits of colonial
rule in Africa (except where white supremacy policies dictated
otherwise) was that it geared itself to tribal nomadic movements,
both cyclical and permanent. It permitted a high degree of freedom
of movement. As populations rose, and pressures on food resources
increased, this laissez-faire policy became more difficult to maintain.
But it was a tragedy that, when independence came in the early
1960s, the successor-states chose to imitate not colonial-style liberal-
ism but white-supremacist control. The Bandung— Leninist doctrine
of the big, omnicompetent state joined in unholy matrimony with
segregationism. But of course the Soviet state had always controlled
all internal movement and settlement, not least its own Asian tribes.
Leninist and South African practice fitted in comfortably together.
Throughout black Africa, the documentation of social control –
work permits, internal and external passports, visa requirements,
residence permits, expulsion orders — proliferated rapidly with
independence. And, as South African experience testified, once
documents appear, the bulldozer is never far behind. In the early
1970s it emerged in many places in West Africa, to shift squatters
from coastal towns back into the interior. 57
The great drought which struck a dozen Central African countries
near the desert-bush border in the 1970s increased nomadic
movement and so the practice of violent social control. There had
long been racial enmity along the desert line, since nomadic tribes
(especially Touregs) had seized southerners for slavery. One of the
first acts of independent Mali, which straddled the line, was to
massacre its northern Touregs. When drought-relief funds became
available, Mali (and other states) used them to finance control
systems. As the Secretary of the International Drought Relief Com-
mittee in Mali put it: ‘We have to discipline these people and to
control their grazing and their movements. Their liberty is too
expensive for us. This disaster is our opportunity.’ 58 Control of
movement, in Mali and elsewhere, was accompanied by other forms
of social engineering. In such states development plans were delib-
erately drawn up in the late 1960s and 1970s to force everyone,
nomads included, into the money economy by taxation. They did not
differ in essentials from the old forced-labour system devised by the
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgian colonizers. 59
The most suggestive case of a new African state moving towards
totalitarianism was provided by Tanzania. Its leader, Julius Nyerere,
was a professional politician of the Nkrumah generation. In the
1960s, when the politicians were bowled over by the soldiers, he
contrived to survive by militarizing his rhetoric and his regime. In
1960, in reaction to the Congo crisis, he said: There is not the
slightest chance that the forces of law and order in Tanganyika will
mutiny.’ 60 In January 1964 they did so, and Nyerere barely survived
with the help of white British troops who disarmed his black army.
He then disbanded it and recreated it from scratch as a party army: ‘I
call on all members of the Tanu Youth League, wherever they are, to
go to the local Tanu office and enrol themselves: from this group we
shall try to build the nucleus of a new army.’ 61 Four days later he
announced the appointment of a Political Commissar for the Tanza-
nia People’s Defence Forces.
This conscious imitation of Leninism was accompanied by the
erection of a one-party state. In 1961 Nyerere had said he would
welcome an opposition party to Tanu: ‘I would be the first to defend
its rights.’ 62 But in January 1964, with the party youth being
reorganized as an army, he appointed a commission to design what
he termed ‘a democratic one-party state’, observing that its job was
not ‘to consider whether Tanzania should be a one-party state. That
decision has already been taken. Their task is to say what kind of a
one-party state we should have.’ 63 At the subsequent election, there
was a choice of candidates, but under the same party label (meaning
they needed Nyerere’s approval to stand) and they were not free to
raise issues. 64
The way in which Nyerere, the former pacifist, used militaristic
terminology to further his authoritarian state was ingenious and
helped to explain his remarkable appeal to the Western intelligentsia,
which led one black sociologist to coin the term ‘Tanzaphilia’. 65
Defending his suppression of human rights, such as the freedom of
speech, of the press and of assembly, Nyerere observed: ‘Until our
war against poverty, ignorance and disease has been won, we should
not let our unity be destroyed by somebody else’s book of rules.’ But
of course such a ‘war’, by definition, could never be ‘won’.
Moreover, such a ‘war’ was easily extended from internal to external
opponents: Nyerere followed Sukarno’s advice to find an enemy.
From the post-mutiny period onwards he was in the forefront of the
African leaders who demanded a concerted politico-military cam-
paign against Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories and South Africa.
The philosophy of his new authoritarian state was summed up in the
‘Arusha Declaration’ of February 1967, which stated bluntly: ‘We
are at war’ and was full of militaristic imagery and sloganizing. 66
Of course Tanzania was not at war with anybody. But the fiction
was used to justify wartime restrictions and suspension of rights. The
Arusha Declaration was an updated and Africanized version of
Bandung, and similarly redolent of the higher humbug. Anything
‘inconsistent with the existence of a classless society’ was banned.
‘No one must be allowed to live off the work done by others’: that
permitted widespread arrests of ‘capitalists’, especially Asians. The
government ‘must be chosen and led by peasants and workers’: that
allowed Nyerere to exclude anyone he wished from political activity.
‘Laziness, drunkenness and idleness’ were condemned: a pretext for
forced labour. ‘It is necessary for us to be on guard against internal
stooges who could be used by external enemies who aim to destroy
us’: a pretext for a permanent political witch-hunt. ‘Loitering’ was
specifically condemned: a pretext for the sweep-and-search opera-
tions beloved of all black African governments, slavishly copied from
the South African police-manuals. The machinery for control was
contained in the party structure: ‘the ten-house cell’ being the basic
unit, moving up through the ward, the district, the region to the
nation. The philosophy behind Arusha was termed by Nyerere
ujamaa, ‘familyhood’, based upon a mythic past: ‘In our traditional
African society, we were individuals within a community. We took
care of the community and the community took care of us. We
neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men.’ 67 Ujamaa was
designed to recapture that spirit. Yet in practice it was as anti-family as any other totalitarian doctrine. Offenders were brought before
‘ten-house cell’ courts. ‘Political education officers’ handed out tracts
which, for example, stated:
The cell leader has to keep a close watch so as to detect any new faces in his
ten houses. When he sees a stranger, he must make enquiries and find out
who he is, where he came from, where he is going, how long he will remain
in the area and so on. Usually the host reports to the cell leader about his
guests and gives all the necessary information. If the leader doubts the
stories of these strangers, he must report the matter to the branch officials
or to the police. 68
Cell-leaders were given the right to detain anyone classified as
‘runaway’ (usually from forced labour) and to order ’round-ups’ of
‘miscreants’. A favourite phrase was e serikali yeze kuyesula, ‘the
government know how to unearth’. Indeed, after the 1964 mutinies
Nyerere seems not only to have flung off his British democratic
trappings but to have descended into the colony’s Prussian past. His
party militia learned the goose-step. He introduced sumptuary
legislation and sartorial uniformity. In 1968 he decided that the
Masai could not be allowed into Arusha wearing ‘limited skin
clothing or a loose blanket’ or indeed any kind of clothing termed
‘awkward’ or ‘soiled pigtailed hair’. 69 But having banned the tradi-
tional African garb, he switched the attack eight months later to
‘remnants of foreign culture’, authorizing the Tanu Youth League to
manhandle and strip African girls wearing mini-skirts, wigs and tight
trousers. 70 So girls were forbidden to wear trousers while men had to
put them on: more or less the old white missionary standard. When
the Masai complained, they were told God had forced Adam and Eve
to dress before he drove them out of Eden. 71 But the missionaries had
not set political spies in everyone’s house.
Nyerere’s ujamaa was merely the most elaborate and sanctimoni-
ous of the new authoritarian philosophies developed by the charis-
matic petty tyrants of black Africa. At the village level it was merely a
euphemism for forced collectivization. In Zambia, the same process
was termed ‘village regrouping’. Its one-party dictator, Kenneth
Kaunda, termed the national philosophy ‘humanism’. This was
derived, he said, from the truth that all people are ‘human under the
skin’. But some turned out to be more human than others. ‘Zambian
humanism’, he declared, ‘aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in
Man . . . the attainment of human perfection’, by ridding society of
‘negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy,
individualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, national-
ism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, diseases, igno-
rance and exploitation of man by man’. 72 The list gave the state
endless scope for authoritarian action. Elsewhere, other ‘isms’ ap-
peared. Ghana produced ‘Consciencism’, Senegal ‘Negritude’. In the
Congo, President Mobutu was at a loss until he hit upon the ideal
ideology: ‘Mobutuism’.
Once the tyrannies began to appear in the early 1960s, they swiftly
graduated from the comparatively sophisticated (and bloodless)
despotisms of Nyerere’s Tanzania to resurrected horrors from
Africa’s darkest past. The gruesome comedy Evelyn Waugh had
fabricated in Black Mischief became fact. On ‘Kenyatta Day’,
October 1965, the President of Kenya, once termed by the British
governor ‘the leader of darkness and death’, now called by relieved
white settlers ‘the old man’, held a ‘Last Supper’, to commemorate
the meal before his arrest as a Mau Mau terrorist. 73 In Malawi, Dr
Hastings Banda, known as ‘Conqueror’ and ‘Saviour’, used witch-
craft to sacralize his rule. In Zaire, Joseph Mobutu banned Christian
names and re-named himself Monutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa
Za Banga, freely translated as ‘the cock that leaves no hens alone’. 74
President Bongo of Gabon banned the word pygmy (he was under
five feet tall) but kept a bodyguard of giant German ex-Foreign
Legionaries, whose delight was to sing the Horst Wessel Lied at the
main hotel. 75 As the 1960s progressed, violence struck the new
African elites with increasing frequency. Two Prime Ministers of
Burundi were murdered in quick succession. The 1966 Nigerian
coup cost the lives of the Federal Prime Minister and two of the three
regional premiers. Would-be Caudillos died too: in the Congo
People’s Republic an executed brass-hat was displayed dead on TV,
his mouth crammed with dollars. Rulers showed an inclination to
carry out retribution personally. The President of Benin (formerly
Dahomey) murdered his Foreign Minister when he found him in bed
with the Presidential wife. Another Foreign Minister, this time
in Equatorial Guinea, was clubbed to death by his own head of
state.
This last incident was one of the innumerable crimes committed by
President Francisco Macias Nguema. In the poorer African states, of
which there are nearly thirty, rulers set up one-party states and in
theory disposed of absolute authority. But in practice they tended to
have little power to influence intractable events or even to arbitrate
tribal quarrels. All they could do was to tyrannize, usually by
personal violence. Macias was a case in point. He was born in the
Spanish colony in 1924, served in the administration, became
President on independence in 1968 and made himself President for
life in 1972. During the next seven years he turned the country into a
virtual prison-camp; many of its inhabitants simply fled for their
lives. A Spanish-mounted coup overthrew him on 3 August 1979,
and he was tried for ‘genocide, treason, embezzlement and systema-
tic violation of human rights’. His execution was carried out by a
Moroccan firing-squad flown in when local troops complained his
spirit was too strong for mere bullets and would return ‘as a tiger’. 76
The case of President (later Emperor) Bokassa of the Central
African Republic was similar. When the French gave the colony
independence they put in a hand-picked professional politician,
David Dako, as president. Ineffectually he tried to balance the head
of the police, Izamo, against Bokassa, who led the army, and Bokassa
proved the most agile of the trio. 77 From 1965 Bokassa was life
President and from 1977 Emperor, holding an elaborate coronation
ceremony in December attended by 3,500 foreign guests and featur-
ing an eagle-shaped throne, a crown with 2,000 diamonds and
regalia modelled on Napoleon’s coronation. It cost $30 million, a
fifth of the country’s meagre revenues. His friendship with the
expansive President Giscard d’Estaing of France, to whom he gave
diamonds, was not the least of the factors which buttressed his
regime. He celebrated his first anniversary by sacking and exiling his
eldest son, Prince Georges, for anti-paternal remarks. Two months
later, in January 1979, he slaughtered forty schoolchildren who
rioted when forced to buy uniforms made in Bokassa’s factory. In
April, between thirty and forty more children were murdered in the
Ngaragba prison, apparently in Bokassa’s presence and partly by
him, a fact established by a commission of Francophone lawyers
under Youssoupha Ndiaya of Senegal. When Giscard, alarmed by
the publicity, sent out his adviser on African affairs, Rene Journiac,
to ask the Emperor to abdicate, he was whacked on the head by the
imperial sceptre. In retaliation Giscard landed troops at Bangui on
21 September 1979, with Dako in their luggage as replacement-
president. Bokassa was given asylum in the Ivory Coast at Giscard’s
request, and was later condemned to death in absentia for murder,
cannibalism, ‘intelligence with Libya’ and fraud in gold and dia-
monds.
The Sekou Toure regime in the Republic of Guinea was little
better; Colonel Gadafy’s in Libya considerably worse; both commit-
ted the additional crime of exporting their horrors to their neigh-
bours. The most instructive case, however, was that of ‘General’
Amin in Uganda, because it illustrated so many weaknesses of the
world system in the 1970s. It was also the most tragic, for it virtually
destroyed Uganda, once the most delightful country in Africa.
Churchill, who visited it as Colonial Under-Secretary in 1908, called
it ‘that paradise on earth’, ‘that tropical garden’. ‘Uganda is a
fairy-tale,’ he wrote. ‘You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk
and at the top there is a wonderful new world.’ 78 Uganda’s indepen-
dence was rushed through in October 1963 in accordance with
Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ policy. The Baganda ruling tribe
were well-educated and always impressed Europeans by their charm.
But the country was in many ways primitive, riven by complex tribal
rivalries, racial enmity between Muslim north and Christian south
and long-standing sectarianism within the Christian communities.
Violent magic was ubiquitous. The Kakwa and Nubi of the Muslim
north drank their victims’ blood and ate their livers and believed in
the Mahdist ‘Yakan of Allah water’, which when drunk makes
soldiers invulnerable. But the sophisticated Baganda kings also
mutilated bodies for purposes of politico-religious terror. 79 To make
matters worse, Milton Obote, the professional politician installed as
Prime Minister on independence, was a narrow-minded anti-Baganda
sectarian of exceptional administrative incompetence. In 1966 he
destroyed the constitution by using Amin to storm the Kabaka’s
palace and eject him by force. When Obote, in turn, was toppled by
Amin in January 1971, many people greeted military rule with
approval as the lesser of two evils.
It is important to grasp that even at this stage Idi Amin was known
to be an exceptionally cunning and wicked man. The giant son of a
Lugbara witchwoman, he had become a Muslim at sixteen and drew
his power from the northern Kakwas and Nubis. He enlisted in the
King’s African Rifles as a boy and his promotion to officer, though
he was virtually uneducated, reflected the desperate need to avoid a
Congo-type mutiny as independence neared. He quickly acquired an
evil reputation in Kenya, fighting against cattle-rustlers. It was
discovered he had murdered Pokot tribesmen and left them to be
eaten by hyenas, got information from Karamajog tribesmen by
threatening to cut off their penises with a panga, and had actually
sliced off the genitals of eight of them to obtain confessions. He was
also known to have murdered twelve Turkana villagers. The British
authorities were themselves reluctant to prosecute one of the few
black officers on the eve of independence, and referred the case to
Obote, already Prime Minister-designate. Obote settled for a ‘severe
reprimand’, a curious punishment for mass-murder. 80 Indeed, he
promoted Amin colonel, used him to put down the Baganda and
permitted him to build up a military tribal base in the north, to
engage in large-scale smuggling of gold and ivory, to recruit Muslims
without reference to the government, to murder the only other senior
black officer, Brigadier Okoya (and his wife) in January 1970, and
thereafter to treat the army as his own. When Obote was told by the
auditor-general that £2.5 million was missing from army funds, the
Prime Minister left for a conference in Singapore, telling Amin he
wanted a ‘full explanation’ by his return. That was to invite a coup,
which Amin had already been pressed to undertake by Colonel
Gadafy and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who wished to oust
Obote’s Israeli advisers.
Amin’s was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim-Arab interest
from the start, since he began massacres of the Langi and Acholi
tribes within weeks of taking over. In July 1971 he asked the Israelis
to help him invade Tanzania by seizing the port of Tanga; they
responded by pulling out. The British repented their support at the
same time, and thereafter Amin was Gadafy’s client. Muslims form
only 5 per cent of the population and only Libyan support made the
long tyranny possible, though Palestinian terrorists provided Amin
with his personal bodyguard and the most adapt of his executioner-
torturers. Gadafy persuaded Amin to throw out the Asians, and it
was at that point, in August 1972, that the real looting of the country
began. But it ought to be on record that Britain was shipping
armoured cars to Amin as late as December 1972. 81 Indeed, freight-
ing of scarce luxuries to Uganda from Stansted airport, an important
traffic which enabled Amin to keep up the morale of his soldiers,
continued with British government approval almost to the end of the
terror.
Surviving cabinet minutes give a unique glimpse of the emergence
of a primitive tribal tyranny in the outward forms of British
bureaucratic constitutionalism. Thus cabinet minute 131, dated 14
March 1972, read: ‘Should any minister feel that his life was in
danger from unruly crowd or dissatisfied persons, he was at liberty
to shoot to kill.’ 82 In fact it was not dissatisfied persons but the
President whom ministers feared. His Minister of Education, Edward
Rugumayo, who escaped in 1973, sent a memorandum to all African
heads of state which claimed Amin had ‘no principles, moral
standards or scruples’ and would ‘kill or cause to be killed anyone
without hesitation’. 83 His Attorney-General, Godfrey Lule, wrote:
‘He kills rationally and coolly.’ Henry Kyemba, Minister of Health,
said that it was the murder of Michael Kagwar, President of the
Industrial Court, in September 1971, which ‘revealed to the country
as a whole that the massacres were not to be limited to the army or
the Acholi and Langi’. 84 The dead soon included any public figure
who in any way criticized or obstructed Amin: the governor of the
Bank of Uganda, the vice-chancellor of Makerere University, the
Foreign Minister, the Chief Justice, dragged out of his court in broad
daylight, Archbishop Janan Luwum — the last beaten to death, along
with two cabinet ministers, by Amin himself. Amin often partici-
pated in atrocities, sometimes of a private nature. Kyemba’s wife
Teresa, matron-in-charge of Mulago hospital, was present when the
fragmented body of Amin’s wife Kay was brought in: Amin appears
not only to have murdered but dismembered her, for he kept
collections of plates from anatomical manuals. He is also said to
have killed his son and eaten his heart, as advised by a witchdoctor
he flew in from Stanleyville. 85 There can be little doubt he was a
ritual cannibal, keeping selected organs in his refrigerator.
The image of refrigerated cannibalism encapsulated the regime,
which was a grotesque caricature of a Soviet-type terror. The
traditional police simply faded away, as their senior officers were
murdered for investigating Amin’s crimes. Like Stalin, Amin had
competing security services. They included his personal creation, the
Public Safety Unit, the military police and his equivalent of the kgb,
an organization called the State Research Centre which had evolved
out of the old Cabinet Research Section and still retained its bound
volumes of the Economist. The src was run on the advice of
Palestinians and Libyans who had themselves, in some cases, had
Russian training. It usually killed with ‘sledgehammers but it was by
no means primitive in all respects. It was linked by tunnel to Amin’s
villa so that intended victims who came to see him (he liked to ask
them to cocktails) could be taken away without being seen again.
src beatings were regular affairs, carried out at specific times every
day. In contrast to Amin’s impulsive nature, there was an element of
totalitarian routine and bureaucratic order about the terror. As in the
Soviet bloc, at least two src agents were attached to Ugandan
overseas missions. Like the kgb, the src financed itself by commer-
cial activities (including drug rackets) and often killed for hard
currency. 86 Amin was not just a case of a reversion to African
primitivism. In some respects his regime was a characteristic reflec-
tion of the 1970s. His terror was a Muslim-Arab phenomenon; his
regime was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians
and Libyans.
It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the
ugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the
organization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for
prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one
authority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the
nature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of
200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The src
records revealed how important the ‘Stansted whisky run’ was to the
regime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when
Amin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling
him ‘a village tyrant’. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even
by the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair
with a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew
to Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue
until 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin’s overthrow. The only
government to emerge with credit was Israel’s, which acted vigo-
rously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an
airliner at Entebbe in June 1976.
Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with
the old Latin- American principle of ‘Caudillos stick together’. Des-
pite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the
oau elected him its president and all except three of its members
attended the oau summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not
so much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and
rightly feared an Amin invasion. ‘By meeting in Kampala,’ he
protested, ‘the heads of state of the oau are giving respectability to
one of the most murderous administrations in Africa.’ Furious, the
oau even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of
state showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when,
having consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a
go-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded
when Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a
Swede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air
Force made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a
target labelled ‘Cape Town’ (the bombs all missed and the Air Force
commander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left), oau
heads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there
was no criticism of Amin whatever by the oau until 1978; even then
it was muted. 87
Most members of the UN, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet
blocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of
the oau, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a
rabid speech which denounced the ‘Zionist-US conspiracy’ and
called not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its ‘extinction’ (i.e.
genocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he
arrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when
he left. The following day the UN Secretary-General and the President
of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin’s honour. 88
Attempts to raise Uganda’s violation of human rights at the UN in
1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin
the same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even
when he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to
his downfall five months later, the oau refused to condemn him and
told Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist
dictator dropped his verbal guard:
Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in
Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in
Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans …. Being
black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans. 89
That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic
principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans
was not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking
the UN had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide.
The Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the
Bandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of
Africa. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It
was claimed the applause which greeted him at the UN was ‘ironic’.
The terror was being linked to ‘imperialism’. 90 Nor did Uganda’s
sorrows end when Tanzania’s ‘army of liberation’ arrived, with
Obote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they
got to Kampala was to loot it. Though Amin himself was given
sanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal
forces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With
Nyerere’s armed backing Obote ‘won’ the 1980s elections. Obote’s
upc party and the Nyerere-controlled ‘military commission’ gerry-
mandered constituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats un-
contested upc victories; killed one opposition (Democratic Party)
candidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning
officers who were not upc stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and
other officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became
clear on election night that the dp was nevertheless winning,
announced on the official radio that all results would be ‘vetted’ by
the military — whereupon the secretary to the election commission
fled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of dp
victories and Obote was declared the winner. 91 The result was
regional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisci-
plined and mostly unpaid ‘armies’ prolonged indefinitely the agony
of Churchill’s ‘fairy-tale land’.
