The Sun Never Sets on Empire

The sky looked like the aftermath of a Three Stooges pie-throwing party. The sun was making headway against all the stickiness, washing it smooth with the pale glow of pink lemonade. You hardly notice skies around Cambridge: all spring means is that you pick your eyes up from the slush and mud puddles and occasional faces where they've rested all winter, and look at the trees now and then. But when you're on a ship in the South Atlantic the sky makes your whole world because it blends with the sea out there at infinity. You become a dot floating in a concave covered dish. It was time I pondered the lack of horizons. Three months going down the coast of West Africa on a merchant ship overwhelms you with reality.

Abidjan, The Ivory Coast--The Ivory Coast has had the same government since independence, one of the few African countries to exhibit such stability. This has encouraged investment, especially by the French and the Swiss, who would like to see a tropical Riviera spring up along the coast. So far, they have built the most beautiful hotel I've ever seen. It's called the Hotel Ivoire, and comes equipped with a shopping arcade full of small local businesses, a casino, a convention center, four tennis courts, a pair of swimming pools, a nine-hole golf course, and an ice-skating rink. The hotel employs over a thousand people, and has stimulated the local crafts industry as well. But the rink seems more than slightly anomalous.

From the observation deck atop the twenty-six story main tower of the hotel I could see people in pirogues coming home to their bamboo shacks across the bay after another day of fishing to survive; and my ship, too, unloading a thousand tons of foreign aid grain, reminding me that three hundred miles away there was a drought and people were starving. But life in the big city goes on as always. Abidjan's sidewalk cafes were full of people drinking and fending off the hordes of peddlars, who sell anything from boa constrictor skins to nose-rings, and have cousins in every port.

Takoradi, Ghana--It rained in scattered showers all three days the ship was in Ghana. Everyone took refuge in the Hotel Atlantic, which had a reputation for lively dances every Friday and Saturday nights. Each of the bands that played had four or five drummers and percussionists, along with twenty or thirty fellow-travelers who banged on anything in reach. The message was plain: music is rhythm and the dancing rhythms were the best I had ever seen.

The best restaurant in town was run by an Englishwoman for her husband, a rich Ghanaian who owned it and whose family at one time had the Ghana timber concession. The timber business wasn't thriving, she told me: trailers stacked with hundred-foot logs lined the railroad tracks and the docks, waiting for someone to decide what to do with them.

The Englishwoman's hero is Kwame Nkrumah, a former president of Ghana who was deposed by the army while he was away visiting Peking. She says that the military governments that have succeeded each other at one or two year intervals since Nkrumah's fall have done nothing. "He built what roads, hospitals, and schools there are, and the government is letting them fall apart. Ghana is being fed by the long-range planting projects Nkrumah started--almost anything will grow in this soil--but nobody is innovating any more."

Lome, Togo--Back of the wide yellow beach and its palm trees that are your first impression, there are the woven-bamboo shacks that surround every city I saw in Africa. The huts are fenced-off into compounds with communal cooking and eating areas.

The villages are magnets to the seamen, because the prostitutes live there. A house wall-papered with a 1971 Sears, Roebuck catalogue soon became the sailors' hangout, because it was big as houses go in the villages, with two rooms and a six-foot ceiling (when often two or three whores work a single room in shifts), and because the prostitute who lived there had an ice chest that was a cornucopia of beer. Her proudest possessions were the kerosene lamp on the table in the front room and the stack of fourteen bars of soap beside it. Raised as I was on Right Guard, Dial, and Johnson's Baby Shampoo, it was hard to get excited about soap. But as a material good, it has its advantages: it's solid to the touch, fits right in your hand, and smells nice. Soap was her step into twentieth century consumerism. It wasn't a very big step, but then nobody in Africa has taken a very big step into a consumer society. Everybody seems to assume they will, eventually, though--instead of calling them "underdeveloped countries," the current fashion has them pegged as "developing nations." I suppose that means the villages are doomed--luxury hotels will want that waterfront space--but I would rather have the villages, they're friendlier.

Port Gentil, Gabon--The flags were out in Port Gentil, too. The President of Gabon, Albert Bongo, and the President of neighboring Cameroun, el-Amidji, were in town to demonstrate Central African unity and boost their egos. It turned out later that the welcome signs--"Vive la cooperacion Africaine"--and the clean streets weren't enough. The presidents were pissed because the clapping hadn't been enthusiastic enough, and Bongo made vague threats about funds to the local authorities.

The Gabonese who changed my money at the bank (Union Monetaire du Afrique Centrale--a relic of the French colonial administration) laughed as told me the story. It seems that nobody in Port Gentil really cares about the central government of Gabon: Port Gentil is in effect an island at the mouth of southern Gabon's largest river. No highway or railroad connects it with the rest of Gabon and it's pretty much self-sufficient. Logs comes down the river to Port Gentil's sawmills, oil is beginning to be pumped from under Port Gentil, and ships come to take it all away. That's all anyone is concerned with.

Port Gentil is also the home of what they told me was the "largest plywood factory in the world," the Compagnie Forestiere du Gabon. It's about the size of five football fields, just in floorspace. It has three lakes in which you can hardly see the water, there are so many logs and it has a dozen hangars where the finished product is stored. It takes about fifteen minutes for a twenty-foot log to be stripped of its bark, clamped into the peeling machine, and transformed into a few hundred feet of "veneer," one-quarter to one-eighth of an inch thick. The veneer is baked, tested, sewn together if it breaks, doused with glue, and stamped in one of five thirty-foot high presses, the biggest of which was "Made in Oregon." Official colonialism may be ten years dead, but suspicions of economic imperialism still linger: the tour guide was French, as were the heads of the shipping agency, and supervisory positions all along the West African coast seem to be the domain of the white man.

Pointe Noire, The People's Republic of the Congo--I was riding across a bridge in Pointe Noire on a Sears, Roeback one-speed that belonged to one of the ship's engineers. The jeans I was wearing were three years old and the camera in my hand was a lowly Kodak, but there was still more luxury in my boots, and certainly in my bones, than the people around me would see in a year.

The bridge was nicely symbolic, too. It spanned a ravine that divided Pointe Noire into a city and a village. The city was where the seamen were, sitting in the wicker chairs and on the foam pads beside the Atlantic Palace Hotel's swimming pool, as obsequious white-coated waiters served them gin and tonics. All they needed were pith helmets and cigars to put the scene back 20 years, when paternal Europeans were prodding their adopted African children into the mummifying swathes of apron strings. But the apron strings have rotted in the heat and humidity. The people in the government come from Lycee Nacionale and St. Cyr no longer, but from villages like the one across the bridge.

A well-tempered bustle moved me right along, past the village's new school--the sort of whitewashed adobe place where you could see the kids standing in the doorways being casual. The municipal stadium was next door--a five-foot-high grass-covered embankment keeping the soccer field from running out into the market, the center of things, where I was going.

It grabbed my nose first, and dragged it across expanses of rotting fruits and vegetables to the meat counter, where the flies were holding a grand council, preparing to carry away the whole shebang. No one but me seemed to be aware of the impending catastrophe: the butcher and his assistant kept hacking away at the three chunks of meat, prospective customers stood talking quietly in the general lassitude of a 90-degree day. Finally even the flies settled down in the warm calm.

I was being as unobtrusive as the flies until I drew my camera. People either got disgruntled and ignored me with their peripheral vision, or pretended not to see me, or grinned as I grimaced at the inevitable clumsiness of taking people's pictures. Two waist-high kids came over to look at the bicycle. One spoke French for both of them, and told me about his father's bike that had a "pa-pa-put" motor on it so he never had to pedal except to get started. He asked me about the name engraved on the frame of the bike, and laughed when I said the American r's in "Sears, Roebuck."

Matadi, Zaire Republic--It was a six-hour trip up the Congo River. The first half was delta swamp with dense jungle and occasional mudflats where huge flocks of birds congregated. The second half was hills, cliifs, ravines, small huts wherever there was greenery, and lone fishermen paddling along the backwaters.

Matadi is Zaire's outlet to the ocean, paved and built up by the Belgians before they left in the violent early 1960's. There haven't been any new buildings for a long time, and marks of civilization, like the concrete slabs covering the sewer ditches, are falling apart. Like center cities everywhere, Matadi is giving way to the suburbs: the villages which crowd the circle of hills around the city now use shale-and-cement and concrete blocks for building materials instead of woven cane and occasional tin-and-plywood.

The concrete walls are usually covered with Zaire's new flag, Black-Hand-Holding-Golden-Torch-in-a-Green-Circle, and pictures of Zaire's president Mobutu Sete Seko. Mobutu has changed the county's name from the Congo to Zaire, instituted the new flag, and changed his own image in an effort to foster nationalism among his people. Mobutu's face appears on every Zaire stamp, and on all currency except for the very smallest coin. On coins minted in 1967, right after he came to power, he's depcited in an army uniform with rows of medals on his chest and a mean look on his face under his black glasses. Coins from 1969 show him in a business suit. In 1972 an African fur hat is added to the suit. The latest 1974 coins have him wearing a daishiki and fur hat--the only still recognizable feature is the black glasses, as thick as ever.

Luanda Angois--One week before the ship anchored in Luanda harbor, the city had convulsed in its second summer riot which left over a hundred people dead. From the ship you could see the black smudge in Luanda's tin-and-plywood suburban shack jungle that used to be four blocks of homes. Everywhere you went in Luanda there were jeeps, carrying soldiers, carrying guns. Portugal had been fighting a guerilla war since 1961 in Angola, a Portuguese colony since the 1500's. That war had one good result: the young Portuguese soldiers sent to Angola came back disgusted at the mud and sand and at Portugal's semi-feudal dictatorship which was wasting them there in a futile holding action. They overthrew that government in 1974. But although the new government was willing and even anxious to give Angola up, the three factions of the Angolan guerilla movement still hadn't formed a coalition which could take the government of Angola from Portugal.

The Portuguese Angolans were just as fragmented: many were staying because they had no place to go and owned only their homes; others were panic-stricken at the prospect of independence and left. Two passenger ships which called at Luanda almost empty August 24 and September 2 each left carrying 800 passengers over capacity. During those ten days, trucks and vans crammed with luggage and household goods formed a line which snaked over a mile back into the city from the docks.

The black market reflected this mass exodus. Since the Angolan escudo is worth nothing outside Angola (one of Portugal's many exploitations), foreign currency was in great demand by those trying to leave and by the black marketeers who got to the foreigner first. On the day after we arrived, August 24 the highest dollar exchange was 32 escudos--the official rate is 25 to the dollar. But on September 16, the day before we left, the white counter-coup had failed to prevent the independence of Portugal's colony on the east coast of Africa, Mozambique, and one dollar was worth 50 or more black market escudos.

The reason the ship stayed in Luanda so long was a dockworkers' strike and slowdown, a final revolt against the coerced labor Angola has exploited for hundreds of years. When slavery was finally abolsished in the 1870's, it was replaced with a labor code which allowed the government to force anyone who did not have a steady job--always Africans--to sign a six-month contract with employers who had asked the government for workers. Village life was destroyed since men weren't there for six months out of the year and were often shipped to other parts of Angola. In response to the world's disapproval over the past two decades, the Portuguese revised their "native policy." But the attitude remains, as do the long hours and low pay. So the dockworkers slowed down and sat down.

Like every other country I saw in Africa, the problems of underdevelopment are rampant in Angola. There is hardly any industry and most manufactured goods are imported; Luanda for instance, a city of a half-million, has no bottling or canning facility. There is one doctor for every 10,000 people in Angola; there are 3000 college students in a population of five and a half million; the per-capita income is less than $500 a year.

And the multinational corporations are moving in, too. Oil-rich Cabinda, Angola's enclave north of the Congo River, is controlled by Cabinda Gulf Oil Company, which is rumored to be financing a separatist guerilla movement there. American Oil Company has just opened a field south of Luanda with cooperation from Shell. On the rooftop patio of a downtown Luanda hotel, I met an American tractor demonstrator and salesman from the Ford Motor Company whose job was to town-hop in the interior and set up Ford's market. He was very proud of Luanda's Ford dealership, Robert Hudson Ford, and their $20 million parts warehouse. His impression of the countryside was that "parts of it are very scenic, but most only reminds you that there are tons of bauxite and iron ore under it."

There is a distinct possibility that under the present unsettled conditions, the Angolan government may be unable to exercise control over multinational operations as they attempt to extract the oil, bauxite and iron ore. That is a worry common to many African governments because of their chronic instability, limited authority, and minimal revenues.

The reason I was on the rooftop was the sunset. Because of Luanda's location on a point of land, with an island sheltering the bay, you see sunrises over the bay and sunsets over the ocean. And they're always beautiful. At sunrise on the ship's last morning in Luanda, the water in the bay shimmered like smooth aluminum foil watercolored pink and orange. But the source of the shimmer was soon painfully evident: an oil film, produced by the anchored ships, spread over the entire bay.

And development dawns over Angola. Oil slicks are only the precursors of ice-skating.