Finding a place in Abidjan (5 and end)

_{Is it happening, at long last…?}

More contacts with more agencies yielded nothing. Most of them working online have a clientele that can easily afford €1,000 a month as a starter rent and that clientele does not include me. 

One of the agencies serving the filthy rich is the one that – incredibly! – I paid my rent to when I lived in Ouagadougou. I recognised the logo – AICI. I had no idea that I was paying an agency that had once been run by…Côte d’Ivoire’s First Lady and now by one of her close friends, who also runs the country’s annual Who’s In – Who’s Out event, the Children of African Gala Dinner. We just had the latest edition in the glitzy Sofitel Hotel Ivoire, early March. (I wonder if one of the members of the namedropping family I described earlier showed up there…) Anyway, little surprise, then, that AICI (with branches in Abidjan, Paris, Ouagadougou, Yamoussoukro and Cannes, that hotbed of the Moneyed, the Great and the Good) rents apartments starting at three million francs…that’s €4,600. Per month. In Abidjan. Obviously, AICI would not get away with charging these outrageous amounts in much (much!) cheaper Ouagadougou… But this is just to give you some idea of the insane yawning gap between the rich and the poor. 

On we go and I promise you we’re nearing the end. 

Another restaurant staff member told me her brother works for…another housing agency. Before I could think “here we go again” I made a decision to go and see him. I got his number and we agreed to meet in front of Café Versailles, Ivorian reggae star Alpha Blondy’s old place. I don’t think he’s got anything to do with it any longer, which may account for the atrocious American autotuned r&b dross the place vomited out as I was arriving. It was hot and they were late (I assumed, correctly, that brother in question would not come by himself). 

Eventually, they arrived, on two motorbikes. Hopefully this was not going to be yet another installment of ‘Hello We’re From the Kingdom of Vagueness and our Job is Showing Up…’ But no. My new contact was indeed the restaurant staff member’s brother and the other man was his colleague. Off we went to see the place, which they were in the process of readying for the next locataire. 

_{Yes, Rivièra Palmeraie would have been really nice but then you can’t always get what you want…}

Apparently, the process of getting the place ready involved leaving a godawful mess for said next locataire to clean up. That could be me: I walked around, liked what I saw (one smallish room, one slightly larger, one salon with space to play with, two toilets, balcony with a nice view, kitchen) and thought: this, I think, will do for now. It’s the top floor of a nice, solid looking older building and the view is towards Le Plateau and its behemoth government tower, a landmark mosque and my beloved Deux Plateaux. At €381 a month I’d be reasonably safe financially. 

So this is it, then. I could finally get back to the hotel, bring my accumulated wad of cash and take it to the office of the agency managing the building. But the two gentlemen insisted that they’d take me to the office themselves, for the paperwork. This turned out to be a mere five minute ride but my biker mate got stuck in a rut while trying to cross a busy road (yes, another one) and was so unstable that I declined any future lifts. Walking is a lot safer, thank you. Incidentally, both men ended up demanding Showing Up Money after all, so that’s where the Right To Visit Fee I thought I had kept in my pockets for once eventually went… I did tell the gentlemen that I expected them to remove their piles of wood chippings, wooden low chair, plastic bottles, plastic bags, empty paint jars, rags and assorted other crap that has nothing whatsoever to do with me. I’ll get rid of the paint and the dust and grime on the floor, no worries – I ran my own places and kept them clean for decades. 

Now that I knew where the agency was (a ten-minute walk, tops, from what was now going to be MY apartment, yay!!!) I could easily wander back to the hotel, a mere 40-minutes away on foot, along the boulevard Latrille, into the Rue des Jardins, as I cleared my head. All I had to do was come back with two month’s rent, two month’s caution and admin costs. This looked like a small but bona fide family business. The genial owner invited me into his office for a chat, just to get to know his new tenant. Journalist, hey…. His daughter is doing the admin and lives next door to the apartment complex, so if anything were the matter all I have to do is call her. 

In short, I have a place, a contract, this desk I am working at right now, one very recently acquired table and four chairs, a mattress, water, electricity, Orange Money with which to pay the water and the electricity, and that balcony. Not bad for an all-too-frequently penniless hack… Highest urgency – something to make decent coffee with.

One drawback I have already spotted: the concierge. This role is taken by two lovely young fellows but both of them go to sleep at the impossible hour of 10-11pm, while this whole area is filled to the brim with watering holes, eateries and maquis offering food from here, Lebanon, Congo, Cameroon, China, Italy, Vietnam, France… There’s also a very French sounding coffee place that never closes… As many of you know my time to come alive is at night. Having said that, I have made it a point to be in before midnight at the latest – but even at that early hour our concierge will already be sleeping. I find this…slightly awkward. This is a family complex; people go to bed early. Should I just go: sod it – if I feel like coming in at 2am I should just bloody well do it…? That would be rude, would it not? A slight dilemma, which a future fridge will partially solve, if and when the means to acquire such arrive. 

Speaking of awkward. As I was checking out of my hotel, the staff member whose brother finally got me this place wanted to know whether I was going to hire her for cooking and cleaning. I had to tell her that there was really no need. I will eat outdoors for the time being (prices being ridiculously cheap if you know where to look) and I do my own cleaning. She wasn’t too disappointed – I hope. Oh and the brother in question accosted me recently in a nearby street as I was minding my own business, breezily telling me that his cousin had just died in Yopougon… I cut him off before he could ask me for the taxi fare. I am out of your clutches, gentlemen and some ladies from the Kingdom of Vagueness. With or without an office. Or cousins. Or a daughter to marry off. Or Right To Visit Fees. Or any of the gazillion other schemes and cock-and-bull stories you have in your inexhaustible repertoire. Au revoir (peut-être)!

_{In my office, I have a handwoven sash carrying the Ivorian national colours, courtesy of master weaver Yao Mathieu from Bouaké, who I will be paying a visit. And then I want to go to San Pedro and Korhogo and Odienné and Man and Daloa and Jacqueville and Kong and Abengourou and…everywhere in Abidjan. The picture on my desktop is in honour of one of my previous cities for which I retain a hard-to-explain but nevertheless very real fondness. Bamako.} 

Finding a place in Abidjan (4)

I had taken to mailing tons of agencies, most of whom never bothered to reply. But one of them had something in an area called Abatta. Not my favourite part of town, even though I had an option, an eternity ago, to a place that gave the most brilliant view of the city. (Cue remark about not getting an apartment to stare out of the window…all true.) But I had already stayed next door to Abatta, a collection of blocks of flats plonked down at an angle in the most unimaginative way possible, making for a completely soulless part of town. Besides, it’s on the road to the hot new property market of Bingerville, a place I considered in the past but have rejected because of the absolutely murderous traffic situation. 

There are two basic things to understand about Abidjan: water and traffic. Apparently, no city on earth sits next to more water than Abidjan. The Ébrié Lagoon, which stretches some 200 kilometres from end to end, as long as The Netherlands is wide, envelops this city, which can be more aptly described as a series of islands with an ever growing inland area attached. This means that there are limits to the places traffic can go, even when some of the pressure is lifted by the lagoon ferry services. Some of these places are called bridges. Natch.

There used to be two, linking Le Plateau to the sprawling southern suburbs of Treichville and further down Marcory, Koumassi and eventually Port Bouët. They date back to the 1950s and 60s. Only ten years ago a third was added, linking Marcory/Koumassi to Cocody. Another, still under construction, will be the most eagerly awaited link from Yopougon, Abidjan’s most populous suburb, to Le Plateau. The only road you can take there now doubles as the main route to The North and is permanently choked by the most monstrous of traffic jams.  There is already a fifth bridge in place, a prestigious work modelled after modern structures like the iconic Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam. It was used as a symbol for Côte d’Ivoire’s progress at the opening ceremony of the African Cup of Nations. It also serves virtually no other purpose, linking the affluent parts of Cocody to Le Plateau, both already served by a network of six-lane roads. 

_{Yay!! The caption function has suddenly re-appeared… Anyway: this is the road leading up to that brand new bridge, the contours of which you can see slightly left-of-centre. The colossal thing on the right is the giant new government tower, to be completed in………no one knows. The other towers are the older government office blocks, all on Le Plateau.}

So it all boils down to this: when you are looking for an area to live and work, Think Traffic. Not the rock band but the colossal amounts of time you will waste when you live in Yopougon and work at the airport, say. Or when you have appointments on Le Plateau but have decided to stay in Abatta…

Oh yes! I was heading to Abatta and after leaving the hotel and getting into yet another taxi I immediately regretted even going there. It was afternoon and the minute we were on the motorway it was Stand Still Time. Of course, everybody working on Le Plateau, in Cocody-Angré, Vallon etc was already leaving, hoping to beat the more monstrous variety of this jam. I texted the démarcheur I was supposed to meet outside a supermarket that I was going to be late. He said: no problem – he was leaving anyway and would find a replacement. Charming. 

It took an eternity, even when the taxi driver, ever inventive when it comes to using Abidjan’s many backroads to beat the worst of the traffic, managed to gain a little time. Many a driver has told me that at this time of day they point blank refuse to take passengers on this stretch – not worth the wait, the waste of petrol and time. 

I arrived at the supermarket where my contact was no longer waiting. His replacement did not pick up the phone when I called. This was turning into Mission Impossible in a place I did not even like that much… After three more attempts he picked up and said that I should cross another extremely busy road and find the place where three palm trees were standing. “I am sitting there.” 

There was someone sitting under said palm trees but this was clearly not the person waiting for a house-hunter. In fact, he gave the very distinct impression of someone who was not waiting for anyone – at all. I turned left into the next street, a sand-covered stretch lined by shops and square blocks, half-finished or already inhabited, three to four storeys high. On the veranda of one of these shops (selling electronics as it happened) a small cluster of men was hanging out, not doing anything in particular. One of them was faffing about with a mobile phone and a cable. This turned out to be my contact. His name was Diallo. 

Hello Diallo. Name’s Bram. Nothing. This is going swimmingly. We wandered off to wherever this thing was located in this decidedly uninspiring part of town. 

“By the way,” the man at the agency had told me on the phone. “Do not pay any Right To Visit Fee. We don’t allow it. Please remember this.” 

The first intelligible sentence out of Diallo’s mouth was: “The Right To Visit Fee is 5,000 francs.” I said nothing. Turned away from him and into the direction from where I had come. Never looked back. Kept walking. Wandered along the road and then flagged down a cab back to the hotel. And every time I see pictures of those horrible traffic jams I think: thank heavens I let that go…

Finding a place in Abidjan (3)

One of my good journalist friends here had a right old chuckle when I told him about Mr No Office. “You were absolutely right. You’ve avoided a disaster there. He would have run off with the money and you’d have zero recourse. But yep – they dress to the nines and are very convincing actors…it’s all part of their game.” He went on to explain that because of the massive numbers of people wanting to come here, there is an incredible housing crisis, a colossal building spree and prices are out of control. People don’t just arrive from all corners of this country – where Abidjan has Mythical Status – but also from its crisis-ridden neighbours to the north: Mali and Burkina Faso, currently saddled with terrorist insurgencies and violently intolerant and inept military juntas. Indeed, the entire West African region from Senegal to Nigeria by way of Guinea and Liberia comes into Abidjan, likes it and stays – often in the less affluent sections of neighbourhoods like Abobo, Adjamé, Williamsville, Yopougon or the giant sprawl at Port Bouët, behind the airport. When the recklessly overzealous governor of the Abidjan District recently knocked down hundreds of homes in Yopougon, the spokeswoman for the people he had made homeless had this surname: Ouédraogo. You don’t get more Burkinabè than that…

So sadly, this really is the Wild West. Witness, for an example, the rather frighteningly frequent building collapses, always new buildings and often not even finished. Yes, you must present your work sheet to the relevant authorities but once you have obtained your building permit, legally or otherwise, you can do whatever you want. And that includes cutting corners. Or building over underground water reservoirs. Where Abidjan now stands used to be dense tropical rainforest. Some of it still exists, as do the groundwater bodies that used to feed the trees… Building on top of those involves extreme risks. Nobody cares. In short, then, there is an astonishing number of people involved in the housing business, from building to distribution. There’s hardly any regulation, which explains the dizzying number of agencies, be they bona fide operators, conmen or outright criminals. “This is encouraged at the highest level,” my friend ended his tour d’horizon. “Of course, politicians and bureaucrats and high-ranking military are in up to their necks in this business. They are the ones cashing in. They don’t want to regulate anything!” 

Yes it’s pretty but there’s more to this city than just the façade. Much more. 

By now, the hotel staff is getting interested in my case. One of them tells me that she knows someone who lives in a building where two apartments have been empty for quite some time. Off we go again, to an area not that far from that not-so-very-nice apartment I had rejected earlier. 

It took me a while to locate it while walking and talking on the phone: yes…at this petrol station (on a very busy four-lane road, a bit like the one I used to live next to in Dakar)…right, so now I need to find a sandy little street going steeply up (DO NOT go past the pharmacie, you’ll have missed it)…got it…good…can you see a building marked [insert name] on your left? Now take the next street to your right…by the time I had reached the building following my host’s instructions I had run out of phone credit. And breath. 

The building had a really nice vibe to it. Even the moody concierge warmed to me when I told him I had been to the northern Ivorian city where he came from. 

“I live on the fourth floor,” my host told me cheerfully, as her three-years-old daughter stamped her feet on every step of the staircase, turning her head to make sure that everybody was watching and appreciated how good she had become at negotiating this monster. My place was on the second floor of this large complex, built around an inner courtyard. “We do all sorts of things here,” my perhaps future neighbour went on to explain. “We gather in the evening and sit on the roof.” A community of people having rooftop gatherings and probably parties? Niiiiice….. If the environment was pleasant enough I was prepared to compromise on the quality of my own place (at €305 a month), provided a few repairs were made. That, the concierge assured me, would be done. 

So off I went the next day to an office that turned out to be attached to the Ministry of Justice. I was ushered into a tiny room kept at a temperature reserved for soft drinks. There was an old style wooden window that gave on to an office, out of which came a very nice bespectacled elderly lady with a form that I had to fill in in order to qualify for the roof top parties…I mean the apartment. 

It all looked very official. I filled in the form, including the mandatory and recently acquired local telephone number (phew!!!). But I sensed other snags ahead. I had to fill in something relating to the date of the incorporation of my business. Er…..1992? Where? Netherlands? Mozambique, where I did my first reporting? 

Would I, at long last, land? Not so fast…

If you are in what is nominally francophone west Africa and you hear the phrase “Il y a un petit problème” it means that the proverbial excrement is about to hit the fan. 

I needed a physical address for my one-man enterprise, the very nice lady said, once she had re-emerged from the office where she had gone with my completed form. I understood that the entire establishment where my soon-(not?)-to-be apartment was located was indeed run by the state and that the conviviality was almost certainly due to the fact that everybody living there worked for the same employer. Anyway, my physical address…that would be the one where I will be living once I have the keys to this apartment, right? 

Wrong. We need a physical address now. Well I am staying at an hotel if that’s any help, while looking for a place to install myself and business. Not going to work. “So, this is a classic Catch-22, right?” I think she understood the reference. As I walked out I felt angry and dejected for the first and only time. So near and yet so far! 

Finding a place in Abidjan (2)

After the depressing Palmeraie episode it was clear to me that staying in the €200 – €250 rentage range would only get me more of the same. I had to choose between staying well inside my financial comfort zone but live in what amounted to a suicide-inducing squat or up my game. Abidjan is most definitely not Bamako, where this modest amount got me a bloody 4-roomed villa with a huge patio and a roof terrace. But that’s the thing: there are far more people wishing to live in Abidjan and the housing market is a lot tighter as a result. 

Cue the next installment, a few months after Palmeraie. I am staying at this nice –sortalike affordable – place in Deux Plateaux and once again looking for that elusive apartment. (Forget about villas here, unless you’re a millionaire or an expat working for a company, an NGO, the United Nations or a government.) One evening, I am walking down a street not far from the hotel when I spot a simple outdoor place that has a sign planted on its grassy lawn. The sign says “Pizza”. I like pizza. They also have beers. Do they have my favourite, Beaufort? Yes, they do. A pretty charming young woman is running the place and she explains that they also do open air grillades, where fish or chicken or meat are barbecued to Ivorian perfection. Attiéké (fermented cassava pulp that has been grated or granulated, thanks Wikipedia) is mandatory. You are in Côte d’Ivoire, and you shall eat attiéké. It is combines effortlessly with grilled fish, chicken, meat and veg. 

The pizzas, she tells me, come from her mother’s restaurant on the main road, Rue des Jardins, close to the giant Carrefour supermarket. Pizza it is, tonight. The taste is good, the beers are cold and the bill does not break the bank. All good. I’ll be back. 

On my next visit, half the family – including Mom – sits outside and I am invited to the family table. The conversation includes politics and I notice a fair bit of name-dropping (a Monsieur le ministre they appear to know, a politician they are supposedly related to, an important director of something or other). Next, they describe their luxury palace behind the wall we’re sitting outside of: very famous artists stay here, you know, which would help the daughter of the house get free tickets to these otherwise ludicrously overpriced events in Five Star resorts and hotels. Daughter in question, whose job it seems to be to run the place, look pretty and keep her mouth shut when Mom is talking, just nods as the latter reels off the names of the famous people she knows. 

Nope, not looking for a place like this but you may find the people the family is discussing coming over for a swim, here at the Hotel Ivoire, the city’s most expensive hotel. If you fork out €22,50 you can swim there, too. 

Then the subject turns to finding a place to live. Well it just so happens – of course – that Mom has a friend who runs…a housing agency. Abidjan has thousands of those but never mind, I get the number and the friend in question directs me to the sympathetic elderly gentleman who proceeded to escort me to that €381-a-month spot I did not like very much. 

Mom’s housing agency friend shows up in person at my next visit. “Well, you know,” she intones peremptorily, “you cannot get anything good for any less.” I am pretty well aware of the price/quality issues around here, thank you very much. The fact that you have inflated the rent of your less-than-stellar apartment to a level it does not merit means that you are contributing to the city-wide house price crisis. And don’t give me that spiel about there being the African Nations Cup, making things more difficult. People who come to watch the tournament use AirBnB, stay in hotels or with friends, rent fully furnished apartments and go away after six weeks; they don’t explicitly ask for places where they can stay for a year or longer. 

Then Mom chimes in and asks if I would be interested in…coming into her pizza restaurant. To do what? Oh, just sit there. She even hinted I would be getting paid for this. Why? Well, having a white man in your restaurant would bring in more customers. There’s a gazillion restaurants of all kinds here and competition is cutthroat – but really? You can’t be that desperate – or just plain weird.

It was time to extricate myself from this increasingly elaborate web of intrigue, which in my nagging estimation had also begun to include what I suspect to be another one of Mom’s schemes – pairing me off with her daughter. So we can both sit in her restaurant? All told, the whole episode yielded one unsatisfying apartment visit and, of course, as an offshoot, Mr Smooth Real Estate Agent Without An Office. And if you think this is beginning to look like a cast of characters from a classic Russian novel, you’re not wrong. And we’re nowhere near the end…

Stay tuned for Part 3…

Finding a place in Abidjan (1)

“I’m not going to lie to you. There is no address for the agency’s office. It is…mobile.” 

Smartly dressed, sporting an immaculately maintained designer beard, eyes behind fashionable spectacles and carrying a small stack of important looking files and documents under his arm…this man looked every inch the smooth-talking real estate agent and convincingly acted the part. We were standing in the main room of a fairly pleasant three-roomed house, looking at a garden that was not attached to the house. 

(I had begun to notice the habit of these agents to make me come to the window and admire whatever view there was, as if I was going to spend my days looking out windows instead of being half-folded over a laptop, getting work done.)

“You will have the sun in your room every afternoon,” Mr Smooth told me. Sure, nice. And yes, it was conveniently located, had a nice feel to it and with a proposed rent of CFA200,000 a month (€305) comfortably inside my freelancer’s budget. It was in an area I already knew from earlier visits, too; nice restaurants and maquis were not far away – but then again: show me a part of this town where these are not in evidence…

I was nearly convinced. 

So, would I then be able to bring the equivalent of €1,300 from my hotel over in Deux Plateaux to this place and would I be able to do this very very quickly? Three months’ rent, two month’s rent worth of caution money and something for the administration. (In fact, paying six months’ rent upfront in cash is considered normal practice in many parts of Abidjan.)

Ah yes – the paperwork. This was the moment when it occurred to me to ask smooth-taking real estate man for the address of the agency managing the property, so we could sort this out, if not today then surely tomorrow morning. This last idea got him slightly agitated: “No, no, no – it must all be done today. You know how fast things move here…”. Yes, I knew. So no problem, I offered: we can go to the office today – this afternoon. 

At which point he offered his “I’m not going to lie to you…” spiel. 

I pondered this as I walked off the premises and walked onto the nearby road busy with taxis that would take me to the hotel. The fact is, dear reader, I did not take any taxi. At all. Instead I walked up a hill to a nearby shopping centre and pondered the situation some more. Something was off: why is he in such a hurry and why is there no agency with an address attached to his operation? What if I run into problems? I desperately wanted an apartment but not so desperately that I was prepared to walk into any old trap. I took out my phone and called Mr Real Estate With No Address. 

“I am terribly sorry,” I began. “I have just arrived at my hotel and I felt the need to check my email. And I received one from my most important client, who is keeping my little business afloat, essentially. He has just informed me that he’s filing for bankruptcy. I am devastated. Need to re-think my entire business model and even my reason for being here.” 

Interestingly, he did not respond in any way to the dramatic content of my message. All he said was: “So, this is over then. We shouldn’t bother…” His disappointment was profound, absolutely palpable, even through the crappy phone connection we were using. My instincts had been correct. 

_{House Hunt Central. All efforts started – and ended – here…}

Everything had started reasonably innocently; not entirely but that’s another story I will tell you later. I had been looking at yet another apartment, a second-floor thing in a building just off a very busy road in a part of town that was still being developed and I had not really liked it. I found it dark, a bit cramped, not particularly well-maintained and sitting in an old building, which can be an advantage provided it is well kept. It was not. So all in all, I was not feeling it and especially at €381 a month I found the price/quality balance tilting in the wrong direction. 

So I told the sympathetic elderly man who had been showing me the place that this was going to be a “no”. Would he know other places? He immediately said: “Oh but I have a friend I can ask and he may have something for you at a slightly better price.” Of course I was interested but then I ended up with smooth-talking No Office Man… 

Luckily though, neither apartment came with the dreaded droit de visite, the latest invention in Abidjan’s Wild West housing market. (Well, ok, I had to leave the equivalent of €3,00 to No Office Man as he got himself a soft drink waiting for me to return with the cash, which never happened…) The Right To Visit Fee is 5,000 CFA (or €7,50) per visit. This can shoot up pretty fast, especially when you are house-hunting in earnest. I had already found this out half a year earlier, when I was in Rivièra Palmeraie, a truly wonderful part of town. I would have gladly settled there had I not made the terrible mistake of staying within the €200 to €250 rent-per-month bracket, for which Palmeraie, home to wonderful maquis and lovely eateries, offered a limitless supply of the most dank, decrepit, depressing, dark, windowless, soulless, spaceless caves imaginable. I was transported from one walled-in hovel to another concrete-surrounded nightmare by taxis (paid for by…have a guess…), having to fork out one Right To Visit Fee after another and after the seventh or eighth of these places I had enough and called it quits. None of the places did what I wanted it to do: provide space to work, occasionally relax and sleep. 

_{The big Riviera 2 underpass and roundabout, looking east. Follow this road down about two kms and turn left –Palmeraie is there. What this picture does not show is the never-ending traffic jam nightmare on this road. People have rejected living in parts of town further down this throughfare because of the traffic. I’m one of them.} 

During my Palmeraie exploits I had become acquainted with the Abidjan equivalent of le démarcheur. These are men (always men), who work on a commission basis and whose job it is to get you to like what they show you. A démarcheur specialises in sending you, through WhatsApp, highly pimped up pictures of the apartment with pictures taken at such an angle so as to make rooms larger than they actually are. Fish-eye lenses help, obviously. His job is also to get you to accept the conditions. In Palmeraie, this typically means six months’ rent in advance (it’s a popular area) and admin plus caution. Bring cash, the adverts say. These things are then sorted out by the agent that’s managing the property and rest assured: anyone who comes with a stuff-and-nonsense story about ‘a mobile agency’ is a conman. Sadly, there are tons of them about, as this is West Africa’s most coveted city. Everyone wants to live in Abidjan. 

Usually, when a démarcheur takes you to visit a place, any number of other men (always men) suddenly turn up out of nowhere and start walking along. It was never made clear to me what on god’s green earth their actual jobs were, apart from Showing Up. Whenever I asked the obvious questions (What’s he doing here? Why is he here? What’s his job? Maintenance? Showing up is a job now?) I never got a straight answer. It looked a bit like those young men in Plateau and Deux Plateaux who have assigned to themselves the job of Parking Place Indicator. Which, given the insane number of cars here is not such a bad idea. But what this miniature army of hangers-on was doing as I was visiting yet another depressing cave was far less clear. Fortunately, almost none of them asked me for a Show Up Fee, which I guess they could have done (don’t give anybody any ideas!). 

to be continued, even ended, eventually…

Murderous missions and a warning to Europe

I have just finished reading Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All The Brutes”, with thanks to my dear friend Daniel Brown, who alerted me to the existence of this book. Its author traces two things: his obsession with that phrase that provides the title of his work – and his travels to and through a land where a litany of odious events took place, acts of barbarism committed by French colonialists that have been largely erased from collective memory. 

Written in 1990 (first published in Swedish and translated into English six years later) it addresses issues Europe has never properly grappled with. As a result the continent now finds itself in the throes of another violent shake to the extreme right, as exemplified by the Dutch parliamentary elections in November 2023 and others before it. The result may have been particularly shocking to those still steeped in the carefully self-manufactured mythology about the Netherlands being this place of tolerance and openness, while it so clearly is anything but. 

In many parts of Europe, from Russia where it sits at the heart of government, to Brexit Britain; in Italy where it rules in a diluted form; to France, Germany and the Netherlands where it is making major inroads, the extreme right or indeed outright fascism is on the rise. And with it comes, as Lindqvist writes “… The same hatred of aliens. The same preparedness for violence…” And the same mass propensity towards amnesia, very specifically amnesia about the European colonial projects, in which (attempted) exterminations played a central part. From the Dutch in what is today Indonesia to the settlers across the United States, death followed European colonists wherever they set foot. 

It was said earlier this year: with the Russian colonial invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s holiday from history is over. But there has been a much longer holiday from history, one that was fuelled by the amnesia I just mentioned. In fact, it is more accurate to call it cowardice.

Lindqvist starts his book like this: “You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Which is what he sets out to do in a way that is concise – the book consists of 169 taut paragraphs – frank, brutally honest and sometimes puzzling; the dream scenes he inserts here and there feel like they may have been intended to add depth to the story but they act more like interruptions. 

The phrase that gave the book its title comes from the novella that Joseph Conrad wrote at the tail end of the 19th century, a small book that has given rise to films like Apocalypse Now and invited harsh criticism from the great novelist Chinua Achebe and others. It will probably be busy finding its feet for a good while to come. Lindqvist uses the phrase to build his central argument: the civilising mission Europeans had arrogated to themselves to spread around the world was an exercise in cultural vandalism, mass murder and genocide. 

The list is long, very long. From the disappearance of the Guanches, who lived in the Canary Islands before the Spanish arrived there at the end of the 15th century, via the Tasmanians who were mercilessly hunted down and killed by British settlers in the first half of the 19th century to the unspeakable atrocities meted out to the people of Congo in the name of the Belgian King Leopold II and the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples by the German colonial invaders of Namibia early 20th century, the history of European expansion around the world is one of utter physical and cultural destruction. 

The self-serving gloss that that covered these murderous practices was the one that Europeans still enthusiastically cover themselves in: civilisation. The French were most explicit in it – la mission civilisatrice was sometimes so thorough that it left few people to civilise – but all colonising nations were thinking along the same lines: we are superior, they must either be brought up to our level or die. Kurtz, the main character in Heart of Darkness writes a lofty treatise about civilising the people that surround him but scribbles this at the end of his paper: “Exterminate all the brutes!”. 

Genocide and greed are the main drivers here, not some undefined and fundamentally racist idea about uplifting other people. It was not a superior civilisation that subjugated supposedly ‘lesser’ peoples on four continents outside Europe. It was the fact that the Europeans brought guns, with which they could steal the land and ruin peoples’ way of life, take away their livelihoods and take over their economies. A similar triptych of white supremacy, murderous disposition and the ability to see and treat living human beings as commodities marked the transatlantic slave trade. 

Lindqvist argues, and I agree with him, that the atrocities Europeans committed around the world became the template for similar events in Europe itself. Germans involved in the Namibian genocides effortlessly found their way into the party of the Nazis. Russia’s violent colonial expansion into Central Asia has fed straight into its genocidal behaviour in Ukraine*. Colonialism is the template here, not unlike French behaviour in Algeria or indeed British behaviour towards the Irish, who fled an engineered famine on their island in the 19th century. Just like Stalin engineered famines in Kazakhstan and Ukraine and various governments in the Horn of Africa deliberately caused mass starvation in the 1980s. Rarely, if ever are famines accidents; they are political creations. 

^{_{*As an aside, there is a remarkable similarity between the Nazis’ view of Ukraine and Ukrainians and that of Russia: as a land and a people to be used, without the right to decide who and what they want to be.}}

While Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness, Captain Paul Voulet and Lt-Col Julien Chanoine tore through the Sahel with their ‘Central African Expedition’. Lindqvist takes a more or less similar route and travels overland from Algeria to Niger, where the French expedition committed its worst atrocities. It lends poignancy to the book: Conrad knew nothing about Voulet’s existence but Kurtz commits the same acts of horrific cruelty in fiction as Voulet does in actual fact. His and Chanoine’s blood-soaked expedition to reach and conquer Lake Chad is the subject of a recent BBC documentary by the Nigerian-British activist Femi Nylander. 

The poignancy of this story only increases knowing that Niger this year became the last in a string of countries where military coups have resulted in French troops remaining there (more than six decades into independence) being asked to leave. And while this is unfolding in the Sahel, Europe is descending yet again into a morally degenerate far-right morass. Lindqvist will not see the rest of these events unfold; he died in May 2023. 

So deeply has European colonialism embedded dependency in African psyches that the thought has taken root (in Bamako as well as Bangui and Ouagadougou) that salvation and delivery from the aftermath of the presence of one European colonial power requires the presence of another: Russia, every bit as ruthless and callous and cruel as the one chased away. The massacres have already begun, in Sudan, in Mali and in the Central African Republic. Signed: Wagner, the mercenary outfit recently formally folded back into the Russian military establishment. 

So deeply embedded is the notion of racial superiority in European psyches that they genuinely seem to believe that the horrors they are currently re-evoking through the ballot box (because of their desire to have ‘all the brutes’ removed from sight if not from the face of the earth) will somehow fail to visit them this time. They are wrong. Again, Europe sets itself on a path to self-destruction and this time there will be no Big New Kid on the block to bail them out, as was the case in 1945. In fact, that 1945 Kid (the USA of course) is in danger of murdering its democracy and succumbing to its very own brand of fascism if it makes the mortal mistake of electing Donald Trump back into the White House. I am today far less sanguine about European democracies’ ability to contain resurgent fascism, compared to when I wrote my little treatise on it five years ago. Amnesia and ignorance are not accidents; they are deliberate choices. 

_{A meeting at the headquarters of the former ruling party and historical anti-colonial liberation movement Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde. The historical leader and principal ideologue, Amilcar Cabral, looks on in the background. Pic by yours truly, taken in Bissau.}

Conrad’s book – and Lindqvist’s in its wake – have been criticised for reducing Africans to innate objects. By and large, they do not speak; they are mere props, a backdrop to the all-consuming White Male Psychodrama. In Conrad’s case, the criticism is fully justified. Heart of Darkness not only lets Marlow, the narrator, speak about the Congolese in a way that is unacceptable by any standards, it also presents Kurtz’s descent into violent madness as the central great drama of the story – not the catastrophe that Europeans and their greed deliberately caused by invading, pillaging and raping Congo, causing millions to die. It clearly had not occurred to Conrad to imagine that there would be Congolese with their own stories to tell about what was being done to their country. 

Lindqvist’s, I feel, is another case, in that he is addressing Europeans and Europe. He convincingly builds the argument that the Holocaust, that supposedly unique pinnacle of evil, was not the one-off event it is always presented to be. It was, in fact, an integral part of Europe-driven events that started in the Canaries four-and-a-half centuries earlier and never really stopped. It happened in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s and it is happening right now in 2023, when we are witnessing yet another another brutal colonial invasion, this time by a fascist-run state, Russia. The fuel remains the same: ethnic/racial superiority, the morbid mental acrobatics required to dehumanise The Other and a willingness to kill. And elsewhere in Europe, eight decades after the Holocaust, voters are electing to take their continent violently to the extreme right – again. Social media like Facebook and Elon Musk’s plaything “X” play a particularly sinister – I would argue downright evil – role in this. Their algorithms protect fascists and sanction those that call them out. I have repeatedly been the object of their dangerous nonsense. The ill winds coming through these formerly social media constitute a clear and present threat to democracy and the rule of law, unless and until we claw back control. 

And Lindqvist’s book is there to remind – in very precise terms – those pushing Europe to the extreme right of the exact content and consequences of their choices. They only have to look to Ukraine and they will see what is in store – perhaps not yet for them but most assuredly for their children. 

A screaming trip to Bouaké

It is Thursday morning in my very nice little and affordable (!) hotel in Vallon, Cocody. Work is made impossible by an almighty racket: men are attaching an extra skin made of aluminium (a very loud metal) to the roofing connected to the wall enclosing the courtyard, where two ladies run a restaurant with a combination of sweet pleasantness and steely determination. But I need to go: Bouaké and the second edition of a – hopefully – annual festival – Bo Balo – let’s have fun, are calling. Bouaké is 346 kilometres from Abidjan says Google. Google is an idiot, as we all know. 

Taxi to the Adjame ‘bus station’ and it is as busy, rundown and badly organised as the last time I was here. This is a disappointment. At an intersection close to my leave-taxi-get-on-bus point my driver, an enthusiastic young man sporting an outrageous thick-rimmed white pair of spectacles runs into one of the ubiquitous Chinese tricycles that transport absolutely everything. His problem: the tricycle is made of hard steel – the outside of his Toyota is not. Some heated exchanges and arguments ensue but it all ends pretty quickly. 

Through the maze of market women, ambulant vendors, les coxeurs (nice ones for a change), pedestrians milling about in huge numbers, buses, minibuses of the gbaka variety, taxis, private cars and men carrying impossibly large loads on their heads and backs we make it to the UTB bus station, from were a bus leaves to any destination in the country pretty much every ten minutes. Union des transporteurs de Bouaké (hey! that’s where I’m going) runs hundreds of mostly Chinese-built buses all around the country and are a household name. Hard job trying to break their stranglehold on the market but STBA seems to be doing a good job of it (aha – it means Société Bonkoungou d’Agneby…does this mean the very well-connected Burkina Faso construction and infrastructure + hotels + supermarkets + private airline tycoon is behind this one…? That would explain its success…)

From the bus on the road, late afternoon

There is a four-lane trunk road from Abidjan via the capital Yamoussoukro to Bouaké but getting ON that road takes some time. You see, you’re actually already on that Great Northern Road but you are also on the road that links the giant Yopougon suburb to Abidjan and here this only means one thing: monstrous traffic jams. So while the trip all told may be a good 450 kilometres if you go by Yamoussoukro (not Google) it will take you an hour and a half at least to get going. We take ages to leave the ‘bus station’, blocked by passing traffic and then some more ages to get out of the street now entirely made of mud (of course it is raining) and then some more ages to finally leave the neighbourhood ready to join the Yopougon traffic jam…

Barely properly on our way – at last! – a man emerges from the driver’s compartment and posts himself right next to the row where I am sitting. As I try to concentrate very hard on the spectacle of the sun setting outside my window, ‘Pastor Chris’ launches into a diatribe about Jesus. He promises his shouted sermon will take 15 minutes but in point of fact takes – again – ages. I’m sure he is doing good work, asking for discarded clothes so he can help orphans but he laces his sermon with screamed exhortations to “Give Your Heart To Jesus”, which my right ear that sustained damage in a self-inflicted audio accident in a self-op cabin at Radio Netherlands cannot support. I am making hugely unsuccessful attempts to shut my right ear and remain sortakinda neutral. And take pictures of the sunset. 

Bus is flying at this point…

The pastor has interesting ways to put his audience’s life experiences into perspective. He shows a video of a young white America man who was born without limbs but testifies that god’s calling prevented him from killing himself. Invoking Jesus for the seventieth time (it’s still early) the pastor, rather unsubtly in my view, demands to know whether his audience members still think they’ve got problems…

Next up, as if to belabour his point some more: a particularly graphic film of the crucifixion of a blood-covered Jesus with grotesquely overblown dramatic effects of his suffering face, mouth open in terrible gaping grimaces as the Roman nails go into his hands and feet and the wailing disciples and girlfriends (you do remember, do you not, that he was “a very naughty boy”), followed by another screamed exhortation from Pastor Chris to “Give Your Heart To Jesus, I Am Begging You”. As his cross goes up and the bus hurtles along I find myself strangely unable to get the film song featuring that whistle out of my head…

It was an apocalyptic moment, lived both vicariously and at a satirically safe distance… Reader, two passengers were converted on the spot. I was not among them.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, perhaps thanks to Pastor Chris blessing our voyage yet again as he left the bus. As the driver sped along some more, my neighbour took to playing passages from the Koran on his mobile phone, loudly. He clearly needed a differently denominated but equally fictitious blessing. Whatever floats your boat, I say. The bus was using the new four-lane motorway into Yamoussoukro and again the brand new one between that city and Bouaké but also bits of the much smaller old road, for passenger delivery. At the same speed. We got there, a little after 10pm. Thank you, Jesus, or Pastor Chris or my Koran-playing neighbour (or maybe all three). 

Bouaké is not as insanely busy as Abidjan but lively enough, which is pleasing to know. It has come from very far, being the capital of the Ivorian rebel army between 2002 and 2011 and having seen dreadful standoffs between rival factions of that army. People fled en masse, the town emptied out and entire streets got boarded up. It’s all looking much better now. I took an (invariably slightly overpriced) taxi ride to the Hôtel Paradis Du Centre, which turned out to have no WiFi but more importantly had Monsieur Kouakou, who stayed in late for me and other clients arriving still later, took less than 20 minutes to find a spicy chicken – attiéké – salad combi that is a maquis classic here and also served up a nice fresh Beaufort beer for instant recovery from the trip. The room: clean, basic and pleasantly Old Skool with the exception of the flatscreen television – with only about a dozen channels. Lovely. 

The Festival Bo Balo, which is why I am here, starts tomorrow. Sunday I shall be on the same trip back. Hopefully Pastor Chris will stay off the bus…even though you should never underestimate the power of the Other World in these zones…

Democracy or military rule…a debate worth having?

We’re now six coups in since the start of the third decade of this century and still none the wiser, as I argued after the first one, back in August 2020. But after Bamako 2020 and 2021, Conakry 2021, Ouagadougou 2022 (twice), Niamey 2023 and Libreville 2023 we could perhaps put one issue to bed: the seemingly endless debate about what’s best for a country: democracy or military rule. The answer to that question in this mostly West African context is clear: it’s neither one nor the other. 

The framework in which many citizens on the African continent live, from Cape Town to Port Sudan, across to Dakar and back down to Windhoek via Kinshasa, is an alien framework. In the late 19^th and early 20th Century the rich tapestry of traditional forms of pre-colonial administration was forced into a small collection of administrative straightjackets made in Europe. (We’ll leave to one side the much older but similarly problematic issue of two imported monotheistic religions, another can of worms.)

The colonial state, a deeply anti-democratic beast, did not die when independence started arriving between 1956 and 1994. It remained in place and was put to use by the new power holders. In the main these were Africans schooled at universities in countries that had produced those straightjackets: Portugal, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, France. 

The straightjackets consisted of administrative structures (bureaucracies) and laws that were alien to the people that were supposed to be governed like this. They were only ever going to be respected under duress. The academic Mahmood Mamdani and many others have argued forcefully that the quintessential characteristic of the colonial state was the widespread use of violence. Violence was the means to compel people to – superficially – pay respect to those laws and structures; violence was also – and crucially – the means to extract labour from the colonised, as plantation workers, railway builders or indeed ‘tirailleurs’*. Colonial violence assumed a highly recognisable form: people (mostly men) in uniform – police, gendarmerie, army. 

^{*Tirailleur’ (rifleman) is the term used by the French to describe men from the colonies who fought for the coloniser on frontlines in Europe. The film of the same name tells the story of a young man from northern Senegal who is pressganged into the French army during the First World War. His father (played by the formidable Omar Sy) volunteers to go to the European front in order to save his son. Tragedy ensues while the brutality of life in the trenches is vividly brought home.} 

_{A life of violence. Chadian president Idriss Déby Itno, received military training in France, fought of Ghadaffi’s invasions in the 1980s while serving in the army of the murderous US-installed tyrant Hissène Habré, staged a coup and removed Habré in 1990, had his regime saved by France on several occasions and died while fighting yet another armed rebellion in 2021.} 

On attaining Independence, the violent colonial state became the violent post-but-not-post colonial state. Or, as one friend from Zambia told me long ago: “Our governments threw out the good laws from colonial times and kept the bad ones…” During a relatively short period known as the ‘Cold’ War*, these (nominally) newly independent territories became subject to a global contest for turf between a United States suffering from an imperialistic messiah syndrome and an equally imperialistic but deeply cynical Soviet Union, which the latter lost. But whether the USA line was chosen or the USSR line, the violent not-post-colonial states remained firmly in place. Its clearest symbols continue to be the men in uniform, with an often sinister intelligence service in the background, spying on dissent in order to suppress it. Ordinary citizens tend to stay well clear: one of the many things non-post-colonial states have inherited from their colonial predecessors is their predatory nature. 

^{*that ‘Cold’ War was of course only cold in Europe, where the USA-USSR standoff remained frozen for 44 years while the hot battles for turf were fought directly or by proxies in places like Angola, Congo, SE Asia, Nicaragua, Indonesia where literally millions of innocent ordinary people ended up paying the ultimate price.}

^{The president of France, 1981 – 1995.}

In 1989-91, the ‘Cold’ War ended with the departure of the Soviet Union. High on its self-declared ‘victory’, the ‘winning’ (Western) party discovered a new mission: those violently repressive not-post-colonial states that Europe had created in its own image had to become real democracies. More precisely: they had to become Multi Party Democracies, also in Europe’s image. And in this fashion, dear reader, was created a ‘debate’ over whether Europe-style armies or Europe-style politics should run the countries that became former colonies 30 – 65 years ago. I hope you recognise its futility. Even when you may be inclined to think that it is probably better to be ruled by politicians than by soldiers, the net result for the vast majority of the people actually living in those countries under either of these types of governments (or their hybrids) has been various shades of nothing. While the top un-mysteriously gets richer and richer, it does not really matter whether it wears a uniform, a traditional garb, or a three-piece suit…

_{“…thanks to your massive and colourful participation…” A fictitious but entirely credible characterisation of an Angolan politician. He is seen addressing a crowd that consists of empty trousers, dresses and shirts. After this literally hollow ritual the politician and his entourage absolutely stuff themselves with food. The film (Nossa senhora da loja do chinês) perfectly illustrates the cynicism in and of Angola’s de facto one party state. (Pic taken by me during the 2023 screening at the Fespaco in Ouagadougou.} 

The new post ‘Cold’ War message of this new fully truly wholly and deeply democratic dispensation was delivered by, who else, a French president, in June 1990. Most of the African leaders listening in disinterested fashion to François Mitterand delivering his “I am announcing democracy” speech in the luxury seaside resort of La Baule were of the opinion that this latest instance of French presidential pomposity and bombast would have the carefully calculated impact of precisely…nil. In addition, nobody was thinking that ‘democracy’ meant giving up nice and very expensive junkets. They were correct on both counts. 

This man, for instance, heard Mitterand speak just four years after he had grabbed power in a bloody traitorous coup in Burkina Faso, during which his (supposed) friend and comrade Thomas Sankara was murdered. Blaise Compaoré went on to re-invent himself as a politician and ruled without interruption until a popular insurrection – and another coup – removed him a full 24 years later – or 21 years after Mitterand’s death. Others, like Cameroon’s Paul Biya and Congo’s Denis Sasso-Nguessou remain in place even today. One of the things these men and many like them have in common is that they effortlessly straddle the so-called divide between democratic rule and military rule, our subject. They embody both: either as putschists-turned-politicians or as politicians so well-versed in their countries’ security systems that they might as well be considered wholly part of them – in fact: they lead those security systems. It’s the law. Made in Europe. 

Indeed, military men – especially the higher-ranked ones – and politicians belong to the same national elites and they work solidly inside those Europe-imposed straightjackets, frequently moving in and out of military camps and presidential palaces through endlessly revolving doors. While there have been instances in the past where leaders have tried and sometimes succeeded to bend the mould (Sankara and Lumumba spring to mind), none of the current crop of putschists represent such a break, in spite of their highly convenient anti-imperialist, panafrican, ‘France Get Lost’ rhetoric. It’s gloss, a fig leaf, a populist rhetorical trick designed to appeal to an exasperated population. It serves neatly to obfuscate the escalating grimness in the countries these officers are leading off a cliff. It also hides their galloping greed. 

_{The ‘Tombouctou’ burns after having had rockets fired at it by Islamic terrorists on September 7th this year. More than 60 passengers died; hundreds jumped into the river and were saved by villagers of Gourma-Rharous, near Timbuktu. Weeks later, distress signs were still heard from those who survived this horrific attack: nobody was taking care of them. In a echo of what happened in Zimbabwe after the worst bus disaster in the country’s history 32 years ago, money that was spontaneously raised in a peoples’ effort to help their fellow countrymen and women, disappeared.}

Because let us be clear: the first coup in Mali was triggered by the sacking of the head of the presidential guard. Hang on, that sounds familiar…*goes through files* oh yes, that’s the coups in Gabon and Niger 2023 explained as well, only this time the chaps about to be fired went one better and took over their bosses’ jobs; in Mali a friend from the barracks got the top seat. That friend, Colonel Assimi Goïta, went on to do a full-blown power grab in May 2022. He’s not going away any time soon. Burkina Faso’s strongman Captain Ibrahim Traoré ejected a man who had put himself in the presidential seat through a coup. He knows damn well that the same can easily be done to him and so Traoré is busy turning the country into a war psychosis-addled vigilante state and its capital into a fortress. Talk of transitions and time-tables are insults to the intelligence of the people living there – most of whom are not concerned with what’s going on in and around those presidential palaces and military barracks anyway; to them it’s the same old distant capital city politics that will only impact their lives negatively. The same can be said of the launching of the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger), which will do what the earlier and equally doomed G5 Force Sahel did: set up yet another costly and ineffective parallel structure. It’s there to preserve the juntas in power, nothing else. And finally Guinea, where the trigger of the coup was a personal dispute between the current strongman-in-charge Col Mamadi Doumbouya and his then minister of Defence. Again, no lofty anti-imperialist ideals in sight. What you hear is politicians in uniform playing to the gallery.

_{In other words: move over so I can take your place}

There will be more of these. Togo, like Gabon (or indeed Syria for that matter) is a violent autocracy run by a corrupt family dynasty that shows no sign of departing. Perhaps the fates of Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville, both run by ageing tyrants that go through the motions of holding sham elections will be decided in the barracks. Whatever happens, one thing is clear: this fresh crop of putschists lacks the vision and the foresight to re-instate an African authenticity with which they can rule their countries and address the myriad problems that need sorting out. That requires bold steps, like diminishing the dead weight of the capital city and its politico-military circus. Nope, can’t have that…

_{A politician’s folly: Guinea’s Alpha Condé succeeded in obtaining a third term in office by getting a supposedly new Constitution passed by popular referendum, the oldest trick in the anti-democratic book and a bloody one in the case of Guinea. Condé was subsequently deposed for his troubles. Supposedly a lifelong disciple of democracy, Condé had quite a lot of international credit (also from this writer), which he went on to squander in spectacular fashion.} 

Senegal may have been spared the spectre of a coup after president Macky Sall abandoned his criminally insane project to trample on his country’s constitution and attempt a third term presidency. The Senegalese like their institutions and do not have any kind words to say about those that have tried tampering with them. Ironically, it is from this country (where there is that rarest of commodities: heartfelt respect for these European straightjackets) that one of the continent’s iconic artists, Youssou Ndour, vaguely hinted at an Africa re-discovering home-grown ways of administration when I interviewed him over a decade ago as he made a short-lived presidential bid. Interesting. We need much more and much more elaborate thinking along those lines but it will not come from the lot currently in charge, be that in Bamako, Banjul, Conakry, Niamey, Abuja or for that matter Abidjan or Luanda. Because for now it’s…meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

In conclusion, then: if none of the imported forms of governance work, would it not be a wise idea to (re)try something that’s home-grown? And what would that look like? Now THAT’s a debate worth having…

The Psychopath State

After a short hiatus, a re-start. And an extremely short break from matters West African.

While the Sahel continues to burn and insurgencies/banditism/terrorism threaten the neighbours on the coast, two other conflicts keep grabbing the headlines. And there are two agents in those conflicts that bear an eerie resemblance to each other (they also have to a greater or lesser extent left their footprints on African soil, very rarely with any positive result). So what follows may appear shocking to some but to anyone paying serious attention the parallels are clearly visible and legion, once you start observing their present-day 21st Century behaviour. Yes, there are background, context and history. However, we are standing on the vantage point that enables to regard and analyse current behaviour. We also must take into account the fact that the character of these countries’ leaderships has changed beyond any recognition.

The conflicts I am referring to are located on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and on Europe’s eastern flank. And the agents briefly under discussion here are Israel and Russia. They are ‘run’ (being charitable here) by ‘governments’ (being charitable again) that are guided by similar feelings-based convictions and engage in similar practices. A shortlist:

1. Both have integrated supremacist thinking into their core policy-making processes, which places their own kind at the top of the pyramid and everyone else below. Violent apartheid in Israel and the mass recruitment of lesser beings from Russia’s colonial Asian hinterland for its brutal imperialist war in Ukraine are examples. 

2. Both believe they are at the helm of countries that belong to a Chosen People, entitled to preferential status and treatment, at home and abroad.

3. Needless to say, both enjoy fanatical religious backing for their contemporary proto-fascist worldviews. 

4. Both think that being run by extreme right-wing war-loving nutjobs is a perfectly normal state of affairs. 

5. Both are absolutely convinced that they have a Special Mission to fulfil in this world. Other peoples’ opinions on this issue obviously do not matter. Neither the Chosen People status nor the Special Mission calling need explanation. They are god and thus possess the god-given right to determine who lives or dies, for instance in Gaza or Ukraine. 

6. Both consider it their inalienable right to bully their neighbours into submission if they they stand too close, too tall, get in their way, too uppity or think they can forge their own paths. The non-chosen need the Chosen, who will correctly determine their Destiny.

7. The flipside of this is of course that both are guided by the unshakeable conviction that laws and rules made in and for ordinary countries inhabited by people of a lesser stature…do not apply to them. This is particularly the case when said laws and rules are adopted by that loathsome international body known as the United Nations. Russia vetoes the rules it does not like; Israel ignores them. That is only natural: Chosen Countries on Special Missions should be able to wipe their behinds with any rule, law, agreement or deal that stands in their Very Special Way. 

8. Consequently, both consider total impunity to be their birthright… Chosen Countries on Special Missions (or Military Operations) must be able to get away with Murder, Rape, Torture, Abduction, Disappearances, Mass Internment and more.

9. Both, therefore, routinely commit the most horrendously barbaric war crimes, use incendiary weapons like phosphorus against unarmed civilians, a practice the world abhors but they love. After all, non-chosen, non-special people burn nicely and deservedly so.

10. Both also consider schools, hospitals, civil energy infrastructure, children’s playgrounds, media and culture buildings, restaurants and people’s homes highly enjoyable targets for their bombs, missiles, rockets and fire-breathing monstrosities. As an excuse, they will always be able to resort to their favourite malarkey, the “human shield” thesis, as a justification for bombing the hell out of people they want erased from the face of the earth. 

11. Both consider nuclear blackmail a perfectly legitimate tactic if it helps them to get them what they want. 

12. However, both also lie constantly, repeatedly and incessantly about what it is they want and do. 

13. Crucially, both have a very special knack of using past tragedy and disaster for two ends: first, as a pretext and justification for the atrocities they now commit themselves and second: as the go-to formula to insist that their self-declared eternal victimhood entitles them to every humanity-destroying thing they do, now and forever. 

We already have the Gendarme State, the Surveillance State, the Bully State, the Aggressor State and the Rogue State. Given Russia’s and Israel’s current behaviour, have we now entered the era of the Psychopath State? 

MINUSMA, a post mortem

Part Three: departure

So the vote is in: MINUSMA will depart and the drawdown will begin immediately. Departure procedure will end on December 31 this year. 

Let’s be blunt. MINUSMA has been a disaster, not seen since the doomed UNAVEM II mission that sent Angola back to civil war. UNAVEM II was the mission during which the late Dame Margaret Anstee, its leader, famously quipped that she had been asked to fly a 747 (the UNSC resolution number that established UNAVEM II) with only enough fuel for a DC3, given the gigantic task UNAVEM had to perform with the resources available. In the end, MINUSMA was more like a Volkswagen Beetle that had been given the engines and enough fuel to power an Airbus. It just had nowhere to land the damn thing. 

To the Bamako junta MINUSMA was, to paraphrase its populist parlance, “the last enemy of Mali”. For the reasons explained in the previous part the colonels want it out because they detest the prying human rights eyes of these UN busybodies. We want to kill people in peace, thank you very much. Couple that with the just-adopted new constitution, which will concentrate even more power in the hands of the president (Macron must be green with envy) and we have the contours of a fully-fledged military dictatorship, ostensibly put in place with the full consent of the Malian people – at least those of the 39% that bothered to show up for the constitutional referendum vote.

The junta has thus removed the last bulwark standing between the Malian populations, especially in the Centre and the North – and the armed gangs stalking the land: jihadists, self-defence militias, the army, Wagner, other bandits, proxies, rebels. None of these groups portend anything good for the ordinary men, women and children who are trying to survive and stay out of harm’s way. Which will be even more difficult for them now than it was before. As the Dakar-based Timbuktu institute Bakary Sambe says, and I paraphrase: “To those safe, relatively well-off and internet-connected people in Bamako, MINUSMA has always meant something totally different compared to people those in Gao, Ménaka and Timbuktu, where it meant at least some protection.” Insecurity is something a Bamakois rarely has to worry about, even when the armed gang menace has been crawling ever closer to the capital. 

_{UNSG Guterres; he won’t be back in Bamako any time soon}

The Mission’s departure will inevitably mean serious job losses. This is of no concern to the junta, as we could already glean from an earlier one of their actions, when they prohibited any and all activity of NGOs financed from France. Late one February night this year, in one of Badalabougou’s watering holes (a dépôt), I got talking to a very dejected elderly man who had been working for one of those NGOs. He told me that he had been fired as a result of this petty vindictiveness on the part of the junta and was just floating from one informal job to another, barely making enough to survive. He knew of others, who had been returning to their lands and hoped to survive that way. Multiply this by a couple of thousands and you’ll have an idea of what this will mean to the economy. 

Of course, just like the development circuit, these are all artificial economies with vastly inflated salaries that bear little connection to the actual economy out on the streets. But the shock will nevertheless be significant as those salaries end, spending ends, kids may well drop out of schools because their parents can no longer afford the tuition fees. Supermarkets will see their revenues fall, no so much Bamako’s wonderful and ubiquitous we-sell-everything corner shops, which will continue as before. 

But the larger picture goes beyond that of a violent vindictive military junta hell-bent on maintaining itself in power. It is the entirety of the UN mission model that is in urgent need of a fundamental re-think. The ones I witnessed that were successful were Mozambique (1992-94), Sierra Leone up to an extent (1999 – 2005) and ditto for Liberia (2003 – 2018). And even then serious question should have been asked about the purpose and the effectiveness of these colossal and costly missions. And Angola should have been a wake-up call: when the conditions for a peace mission are absent, don’t send one. But as we saw earlier: conditions obtaining on the ground rarely if at all inform the ones making decisions about such missions. 

At its most fundamental level, then, this is about the yawning disconnect between what missions like MINUSMA are supposed to be doing on the ground and what the air-conditioned policy makers say they should be doing. It’s like organising a workshop about the correct use of fire extinguishers – and tweeting about it – while studiously ignoring the fact that the meeting place has already been doused with gasoline and there’s someone on the way carrying matches. Carayol quotes the French researcher Thierry Vircoulon, who puts it well: “UN missions no longer solve conflicts and bring peace. They stabilise conflicts.” And thus help make them go on forever. MINUSMA’s departure is bad news for the communities where it provided a modicum of protection. But for the dynamics conflicts themselves, the difference will be negligible. To the extent that it is allowed through, there will be more bad news from Mali.