The Gods Are Truly Crazy

A Guerrilla Image

Many of us see Africa in National Geographic colours: emaciated Ethiopian refugees; Coke-bottle-tossing bushmen; machine gun brandishing twelve-year olds; lunatic dictators; drug-trafficking, ivory-smuggling, gorilla-murdering guerrillas; and, of course, elephants, zebras, giraffes, lions. Oh, and, don’t chuckle, but, for some of us, even misplaced Bengal tigers.

Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan journalist, wryly notes: ‘[If you are writing a book about Africa]…never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress…Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances.’

As Wainaina points out, Africa is home to 900 million people and 54 countries. And just how many tribes are there? Well, on current estimates somewhere close to two million. That’s a hell of a lot of different ways of looking at things.

Cameroon, for example—a smallish African nation of around 20 million inhabitants, is home to over 200 ethnic groups and just as many languages. Currently run by the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (emphasis on ‘Democratic’, but note the ‘People’s’ as in the People’s Republic of China), on the surface Cameroon appears like it’s on it’s way to becoming part of the developed world. Nothing could be further from the truth. In 2007, Transparency International placed Cameroon as the 138^th most corrupt country out of 168. Human rights organisations maintain that police abuse against minorities and activists is rife. According to official statistics Cameroon’s HIV/AIDS seroprevalence rate is estimated at 5.4% for those aged 15-49. Post Mandela South Africa is even worse. In 2005, 31% of pregnant women were found to be HIV infected. There are now over one million AIDS orphans in South Africa, and the number appears to be rising. So how can African nations shake their dysfunctional global image? And how in heaven’s name might one individual ever manage to bring this continent into the 21^st century? Well, while I was in South Africa recently I met someone who just might be up for to the job.

For years, while bathing in the lap of Western luxury, I’d been hearing of the atrocities of South African apartheid. Fellow college students built a giant cage where they slummed for days and nights, smack bang in the middle of an ivy-league campus. What exactly are you protesting? people asked them. We’re doing this for Nelson Mandela, they said. Twenty-seven years of imprisonment, they said. Lucky for them, within a few days Mandela was finally released. I hope they didn’t think, as they revitalized on diet coke, grits and pork barbeque, that their protest had anything to do with the end of apartheid. Today, most of them are working in finance institutions, insurance companies, multinational conglomerates; and many of them are on Facebook too.

Ask people where in the world South Africa is headed right now, and believe me, most locals will tell you they honestly don’t know. You’ll hear: ‘corruption’, ‘segregation’, ‘racism’, ‘AIDS’, ‘lack of education’, ‘housing crisis’, ‘unemployment’, ‘murder’, rumbling in dives all over the cities. People have a tendency to remember the horror stories, the bad apples, not the successes. The apartheid regime ended only 15 years ago, but under a faint mist of sweetish perfume, the air still reeks. Nelson Mandela’s intentions of true freedom for all are still a million miles away. Business is suffering, unemployment is rampant, and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policies are inadvertently nudging the more profitable, predominately white-owned businesses abroad. Although the intention of BEE is to create workforce equality, it forces employers to put social background into the foreground of employment decisions rather than qualifications. Bishop Tutu has frequently said that black empowerment seems to benefit not the vast majority but a ‘recycled’ elite. Dehumanising poverty, he says, as experienced by millions of South Africans, is the biggest threat to the South Africa’s security.

Opinions on the current government range from ‘innately corrupt’ to ‘downright dumb’; yet one thing is certain, Nelson Mandela still represents the only true figurehead for equality and democracy in South Africa, perhaps even the whole continent. Some say that when Mandela is gone for good everything will tumble into a complete and utter madhouse.

A Dream of America

Alain Menye, an immigrant from Cameroon, has lived in South Africa for ten years. All he knows is that his prospects seem better here than back home, and better than back in Gabon where he drove a taxi for three years: a clap-trap truck come shuttle-bus hauling farmers and labourers to and from industrial wastelands. Once, long ago, he dreamed of going to America; but that dream now seems far out of reach.

‘What about back home in Cameroon?’ I ask him over a beer. We are sitting in Mama Africa, a bar on Cape Town’s trendy Long Street. The bartender hands me mine with a gleaming smile, but places Alain’s far beyond arm’s reach. Alain shrugs, cracks the bottle open on the edge of the bar. Froth gushes all over the floor.

‘They don’t like us African immigrants,’ he says glaring at the bartender. ‘You know, my father has three wives. My mother is the third so she’s the least important, and I’m her middle child. Most of my youth my Dad didn’t acknowledge my presence. I had no idea what my father’s full name was until just a couple of years ago. Worst of all, the Cameroonian people are totally blind, deaf and dumb. It’s as if they live in a silent dream—in an alien world.’

‘They don’t ask any questions,’ he says. ‘The concepts and ideas we have would never even cross their minds in a thousand years. They’re just…there—sleeping, eating, somehow surviving: Mama dealing with her bad leg and grandkids (my older sister’s children), my father twiddling his thumbs or playing cards before breakfast and dinner. Every once in a while he gets to drive a truck and they pay him a couple of coins. He spends this on whatever booze he can get his hands on. But, you know, they’re my blood. I want them to be proud of me.’

‘They must be proud of you Alain,’ I say, trying to cheer him up. ‘You have a job, you speak decent English, you live in South Africa, the most developed country on the continent, right?’

Alain chuckles sarcastically: ‘Proud of me? South Africa? The best country? It’s all the same, corruption is everywhere.’

‘Over the years have you managed to visit your parents?’

‘Never,’ he says taking a great swig—half of it dribbles down his jacket. ‘As for a job, I don’t have one.’

‘You sell African antiques and artefacts to tourists in the Global Pan-African Exchange where I first met you. Isn’t that your job?’

Somewhere Over Rainbows

A week earlier, I walked into a well-manicured building that calls itself ‘The Largest African Market in South Africa’. Spread out on four floors, jumbled booths display everything from Congolese wedding masks to Kenyan Antelope hide: anything ethnic your loud-shirt tourist might hang in his white-washed suburban living room.

Browsing through the four floors of the market takes hours. And get this: there’s not a single South African working here, not one. These are all immigrants—legal and illegal, from all across Africa: Cameroon, Ghana, Guinea, Congo, Mali, Senegal. There must be a hundred languages bouncing around these walls. It’s an ideal place to absorb a broad spectrum of views, to get to know people from all kinds of tribes and creeds. Down a long corridor on the third floor in a small booth I meet Alain. I also arrange to talk to Susan from Senegal and Emmanuel the artist from Sierra Leone, but neither shows up at the designated time and place. When Susan doesn’t appear, I ring her mobile.

‘So what’s up?’ I ask.

‘Sorry, b-b-boss say no go,’ she stammers nervously.

‘Listen, I can meet you outside. In a coffee shop. No one will know.’

‘No, too dangerous.’ She hesitates, then says, ‘Boss wants you to pay for my time. He says you’re a big journalist. You want a big story, you can interview him.’

We never meet, but Alain agrees to slip away after work.

Alain finishes the last of his beer. ‘Slave is what I am,’ he says. ‘See this coat, these shoes, these trousers? Well, they don’t belong to me. I have them on loan. Loan. I sleep under a stairway with one old blanket a friend gave me. I use the shower once a week. I endure slave labour with a smile six days a week—at least until I have fulfilled my obligation to the old man.’

‘What old man?’

‘The Cameroonian man who owns the antiques. He didn’t want me to see you again. He asked me, “What the hell you want to talk to that white man for? What’s so bloody important about you?” I told him I wasn’t going to meet you. I took the bus a few stops then doubled back. The old man always takes a coffee across the street after work. He watches my every step.’

‘So you don’t get a commission or a salary?’

‘Oh, the old man sometimes gives me fifty rand to buy something to eat. But no, right now everything I have is beneath the black skin on my black body.’

I’m stunned. ‘So how long? Can’t you go back home? What about your sister in Gabon?’

‘You see, there’s something I haven’t told you,’ he says.

I have this feeling that Alain is going to hit me up for some cash—he’s a salesman after all, he tells a good story. I bite my lip for having these thoughts.

He clears his throat. ‘Forgive me. You see I recently came out of South African prison. Before I went to prison I didn’t even speak English. Now I can speak to you, but I’m a slave for the next two years. If I make one wrong step, one telephone call and I’m back in prison again; so I’ve got to keep my nose clean, keep my head down.’

Alain tells me that he arrived here in 1998 on the back of a fruit truck from Gabon just after his sister died—he doesn’t really want to get into the circumstances of her death, but I guess HIV (he describes her withering away to skin and bone in a matter of weeks). He crawled through bushes and scorpions to get to the freedom of Nelson Mandela’s South Africa; he’s been crawling ever since.

He was set up with a job as Assistant Manager of a bar in downtown Cape Town belonging to a fellow Cameroonian who lives in Pretoria. That went well for all of three months, he says, until, one fine eve—the bar was hopping—the police stormed in and shut the place down, just like that (something about paperwork problems, he says). Alain was out of a job. The next morning over breakfast his new South African girlfriend zapped him with the news that she was pregnant. Oh, what in Allah’s name had he come to this place for?

Sin City

Unlike Johannesburg, people tell me Cape Town is relatively safe—though when I first picked up the rent-a-car, I asked the guy over the counter: ‘Carjacking is not so common round here, right? Not like Jo’burg?’ He said: ‘Not very common. But I won’t tell you it doesn’t happen.’ That made me feel so much better.

My cousin spent three months in Cape Town eight years ago with nineteen other students. ‘We didn’t know what we were getting into. Of the twenty of us, three were mugged; two were stabbed and ended up in hospital. The police told us later that 25% was better than average. They said: “You’ve got to keep your eyes peeled in the front and back of your head.”’

In Jo’burg you daren’t head downtown, even for a pack of cigarettes. Distributors of electrical fencing and security systems make an absolute packet. One white Afrikaans woman told me: ‘Me? Me, I’m not worried, not worried about a thing. I’ve lived in Jo’burg all my life and I’m never leaving. That’s why I drive a big car. If someone stands in my way, I just drive ‘em down.’ ‘That’s right,’ said her husband calmly lighting up his pipe. ‘It’s been five years since we were last broken into.’ I’m looking to see if he’s joking, but he just says, ‘Not a worry, mate. Just stay at home at night. I love this country. Couldn’t live anywhere else in the world. When I visited London some years back, I said to the wife: “This place could do with a good lick of paint.” Not like our Jo’burg, not at all.’

For the record, South African police statistics indicate that around 5,000 murders and 10,000 rapes are committed in Johannesburg and its suburbs every year.

And Bluebirds Can Fly

‘You see,’ says Alain, ‘I was an illegal alien. I couldn’t get a real job. Besides, there’s hardly enough work for the blacks here, and they hate us. I thought I was going to be a Dad. I couldn’t let my kid down, my parents down—they would never have forgiven me.’ He doesn’t mention the South African girlfriend.

‘So what was it? Drugs?’ Here’s me thinking I’ve got it all sussed out.

‘No, not drugs. It was money. Counterfeit money. These two guys I knew, well they were printing. I helped someone to buy some of it. I was just a middleman. Then, some guy I met wanted to buy some too. It turned out he was a cop.’

‘So I mean, this was only a small deal, right? You’d only just started.’

‘It was only three days after I even knew about it.’

‘So, the police offered you…an arrangement?’

‘Course, they knew I wasn’t anyone important. They didn’t want me, they wanted the ringleaders; but I didn’t breathe a word. Couldn’t, or I would have ended up much worse than in jail.’

‘And now you’re out, somehow you’ve got to pay off a debt?’

Alain doesn’t answer the question, but his silence speaks loud and clear. ‘And your girlfriend,’ I ask. ‘Was she pregnant?’

‘No, of course not—she disappeared in a flash when I got arrested. She was just trying to get me tied down. A lot of South African girls do that, man.’

Now one might say that Alain’s view is jaded. This long arduous journey has darkened his world. Surely it can really only go uphill from here? So I encourage him, suggest he follow his own words of advice, sit out the two years, but study, study, study. It’s all about educating yourself, I say. Perhaps, he says, he might one day be a lawyer just like Nelson Mandela.

‘What would you really like to be, Alain?’

He doesn’t even flinch: ‘The President of a United Africa.’

Well, who knows? Stranger things have happened. For the moment though, I see rainbows flashing before my eyes.