A Continent for the Taking by Howard W. French
Author:Howard W. French
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307424303
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER EIGHT
Castles in the Sand
My second visit to Mali came more than a decade after my first. In lieu of a goatskin sack and a battered tape player, I was carrying spiral notebooks and a mini cassette recorder. It was 1995, and I was returning to the African country that had first seduced me. Although I was no longer the footloose student-adventurer, I was every bit as thrilled by the prospect.
As a precocious democracy, Mali had come to occupy a special place in African politics. Like a latter-day echo of its early empires, the country was again in the continent’s historical vanguard. Three years earlier, Mali had held one of West Africa’s first competitive multiparty presidential elections, and ever since, it had been like a vast research laboratory on full public display. The highly experimental protocol being tested on African soil was an exotic notion widely known as Western-style democracy.
Alpha Oumar Konaré, the man who had emerged as president, enjoyed a reputation as a new kind of leader. He was an archaeologist who had given up a ministerial job during the country’s long one-party era in order to join a growing civic movement calling for democracy, and he had spoken of democracy ever since as something that Malians deserved now, rather than in some hypothetical and distant future. Konaré’s contemporaries among Africa’s leaders imposed countless constraints on their adversaries, and used so many obfuscations when speaking of democracy as to drain the word of all meaning. The democracy that Konaré spoke of, though, was something that no Westerner would have trouble recognizing.
This was a region full of heads of state who had been guerrilla leaders, military men, stern founding fathers or faceless technocrats, who ruled at the pleasure of the so-called international financial institutions, or Iffys. To a man, they had sought to impose their persons, no matter how unattractive, on their countries. The evening news was a record of their day. Dancing troupes followed them everywhere to sing their praises. And their official portraits watched over workers in every government office. Konaré signaled his difference by exhibiting modest self-confidence with none of the oppressive props of the charismatic leader. He often drove himself around the capital, negotiating Bamako’s dusty streets with a minimal security detachment discreetly in tow. He showed up at the funerals of ordinary people he had known way back when. And he had a generous enough sense of humor to laugh at himself.
For a journalist like me to see the president, all roads led through his director of intelligence, Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga, a man universally known by his middle name alone. Michel Kouamé, the editor in chief of Ivory Coast’s state-owned newspaper, Fraternité Matin, had offered a bitterly cynical explanation for the fact that Mali’s top spy controlled the president’s agenda.
Michel came from a remarkable family of writers and journalists, but he had always remained committed to a model of African politics that had been under siege almost everywhere in the continent since the beginning of the decade: the one-party state.
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