COMMENTS: Togo: The Dictator's New Clothes
Packer, George
LOME — Vendors crowd the unpaved streets of Lome, selling Seiko watches and unpackaged socks. One of them, a small, barefoot boy, hawks a comic book called 11 y avait une fois .. . Eyadema—"Once...
...In shooting Olympio he had proved his human strength...
...and those with nothing are too busy toiling their supper out of the soil to think of the government at all...
...Democratic, Communist, revolutionary, authentic: the slogans, like the political costumes, mean very little...
...Seeing a band of cheering Americans, for a moment his stern face broke into a smile...
...Mobutu's idea of "authenticity," that in an African country things should be African, has been duplicated in Togo—now everyone must use an African first name in public, which explains the piece of tape fixed to all the pictures of Eyadema in all the shops and restaurants and schools: it blocks out "Etienne" in the name beneath the photograph...
...Public life is an elaborate ritual of contradictions in which everyone agrees to play along...
...A peasant muttering against the government complained of bad crops, and not denial of freedom or corruption...
...The average Togolese, whether peasants who hoe their yam field or teachers who complain about their bush post, don't yet have a political consciousness...
...by Peter Townsend, Fabian Society Pamphlet #500 416...
...The regime's garb is patchwork...
...Eyadema's Togo is a country that would be totalitarian if it had the means...
...He has no ideology to impose...
...A congratulatory letter from Eyadema to another head of state on that country's national holiday makes headlines, affirming Togo's warm friendship—even if that country is hostile, like Benin next door...
...how today, as general, he continues to rule in peace and justice...
...Already in Lome you begin to smell, along with women's cooking oil, the fetid air of discontent...
...Classes were canceled for three days for rehearsals...
...If Eyadema is the "Father" of Togo, the people are politically his children...
...Some seasons the rain is good, other seasons sparse, but each year whatever it is has to be lived with...
...Climactic moments punctuate the tale—Eyadema pardons a would-be assassin, Eyadema emerges from the flaming wreck of his plane, as an onlooker exclaims in French, "Zut...
...When a friend of mine couldn't find work and grew desperate, he wrote to another West African government and was told he would have a teaching job if he went...
...Uniformed doormen stand idle outside...
...Instead of 15 million poor the total could now be 18 million...
...The lore of the event permeates national life, from yearly celebrations and song lyrics to the names of Lome's luxury hotels: the second-best in town is called the Sarakawa, and the first, of course, is the 2 Fevrier...
...how the scowling, square-jawed French killed his father...
...Togo is a tropical backwater with only one major road and electricity in a handful of towns, but for 18 years General Eyadema has kept himself constantly in the public eye and ear, blending a mythic aura, ideas stolen from here and there, and force...
...His equivalent in America would be George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Caspar Weinberger —all in one large-sized pair of shoes...
...It didn't, and now the Togolese government and the French backers lose millions of African francs every day...
...When news came of political turmoil in the Upper Volta to the north, a teacher told me, "That's why all of Togo prays for General Eyadema...
...He idles his time away, makes money as he can, tries not to despair...
...He waved...
...Since 1981 long-term unemployment has increased substantially, and so have the numbers of people obliged to resort to supplementary benefit (from less than 5 million to substantially over 7 million...
...From Why are the Many Poor...
...In the middle of Lome another mirage appears...
...Nor were the educated immune to naïvet...
...The local governor once came to give a speech at the school where I taught, around the time the government announced the suppression of a coup plot...
...And when it does crash to the asphalt desert, it will probably be replaced by another statue, another embodiment of the people in one hero...
...animation," with its sweet pop melodies, is rehearsed, and watched by an approved audience at the airport where the president will arrive, the convention hall where he will speak...
...He may well rule for another 18 years, provided the French and Americans don't decide that he is no longer in their interest and stage a successful Sarakawa...
...but without electricity, access to the bush, and a large army and well-trained police, it falls short of absolute control (perhaps this qualifies it, in the current jargon, as "authoritarian"—a totalitarian country with kerosene lamps...
...After the triennial coup "attempt" has been put down, a few suspects are put on trial in the State Security Court, convicted on meager evidence, and forgotten for years in a jail without light, air, or decent food...
...In its deserted landscape, the rain-stained bronze is Togo's Statue of Liberty, but it commemorates the man who has real power: running the country, Eyadema has become the country...
...In every restaurant, hotel, school, even the Lebanese shops, from the capital to the most remote town in the savannah, his picture is displayed—either the earlier one, shown on the comic book's cover, or the newer black-and-white close-up, smiling in his business suit, more confident and plumper...
...Iv THE MYTH CENTERS on one event, the plane crash, which every Togolese over the age of five or six knows about...
...One of them, a small, barefoot boy, hawks a comic book called 11 y avait une fois .. . Eyadema—"Once Upon a Time . . . Eyadema...
...how on January 13, 1963, as a sergeant, he bravely shot Toga's first president, the evil Olympia, trying to climb a wall into the American embassy...
...And the animateurs' dress is only half-authentic: from the waist down they wear traditional loincloths, but their T–shirts--like the comic book, the watches, the shop portraits—show the face of Eyadema...
...A series of cartoons tells of the president's simple life as a village boy...
...Teachers limited their dissent to the government's latest order that they leave their female students alone...
...His name is no less ubiquitous—on Eyadema schools, stadiums, T–shirts...
...He's alive...
...The government supports traditional festivals, like the Kabye tribe's ritual wrestling tournament during seven days in the northern village of Evala, on which the president descends by helicopter...
...The boy closes the book and tries to bargain the price...
...And although Togo is bordered by two pro-Soviet states, the paper makes no reference to "Communist infiltrators"—in fact, Eyadema has close ties with Kim Il Sung of North Korea...
...Cheerfulness about public issues and a willingness to wear the Eyadema blazon defined the awareness of nearly everyone I knew...
...Development" is the watchword all over Africa—the one word, whatever it may mean, that everyone agrees is good...
...But these are easy words, symbols of obedience...
...III MENTION OF EYADEMA at the top of a story requires five lines alone, for day after day he is "President of the Republic, General of the Army, Minister of Defense, His Excellency Gnassingbe Eyadema...
...There are many Kwames rotting away in the capital—victims of the contradiction in what Eyadema has done for Togo...
...her children attend the Ecole Francaise...
...Functionaries preached the state gospel far more readily than farmers, in part because they knew it better but mainly because anyone with a job has something to protect and owes a kincl of debt to the state and its ruler, and pays back in fear and loyalty...
...He has been educated to the ears, and 16 years in school have cleft him from the familiar life of his village...
...Eyadema built the 2 Fevrier a few years ago with French investment when he hoped the Organization of African Unity would take up quarters in Lome...
...The peasants and teachers among whom I lived in a mud-hut village in the southern hills accepted the tale as readily as the boy selling it on the coastal capital's streets...
...for independence from France, Eyadema was fighting in the French Foreign Legion against Algerian rebels...
...Eyadema demands African first names, but the shops stay in Lebanese hands...
...More and more Togolese spend years making the hard journey through school and university, while washing dishes and studying under lampposts, only to find on receiving their degree that no job awaits them—not even a remote post miles from a paved road...
...To the villagers I lived with, the regime was always there, an accepted fate like malaria or drought...
...He is an African hero-chief in a business suit, but not vicious...
...One paper, La Nouvelle Marche (the New Course), comes out daily in Lome, 10 or 12 badly printed tabloid pages, and reaches the northern savannah a few days later...
...A week later the police summoned him to the local gendarmerie...
...Dressed in an officer's uniform and beaked cap, feet apart, face unsmiling but benign, he extends an open hand toward the lot...
...Students sing how "lucky" the country is, old men tune ancestral chants to new hymns of thanks to their "liberator...
...The recent photo hangs off the mezzanine balcony in the cavernous lobby of the 2 Fevrier, a 10-by-10-foot blowup staring down on guests...
...Alone in a huge empty parking lot, the luxury hotel imposes a skyscraper's steel and glass on a shantytown where chickens share the road with taxis...
...Counted in these various categories were over 31/2 million children, half of them in working families...
...The comic book is a token of the political life of this tiny West African country, sandwiched in between Ghana and Nigeria, where I lived for almost two years...
...And at the end, lowering his voice and staring at the uniformed students in the fierce midday sun, he added: "As for the possibility of dissent among any of you—well, great pain would lie in store for you, and you would be sure never to make this village your happy home again...
...War and genocide are two ideas he has not borrowed...
...When a whale was spotted he flew out over the Gulf of Guinea in a helicopter and machinegunned her as a hunting trophy—a petty corruption...
...a different face, perhaps, but the same extended hand...
...Eyadema's protean reign, as much as his repressiveness, makes him a difficult target for revolt...
...Eyadema has not published a little red or green book of sayings, "Eyademism" isn't taught at the university...
...her husband does a good business to the benefit of nobody but himself and his French company, and doesn't even bother to close the office on Economic Liberation Day...
...Now the promise of that sacrifice has been broken, and he's trapped in Lome with a headful of knowledge and nowhere to go...
...The referenda of '72 and '79, in which he won 99 percent and 100 percent approval, saw soldiers at polling places and an open ballot of two cards—one color for Yes and one for No...
...African governments have never changed because of genuine revolution...
...Nothing nearby is more than a few stories high...
...The economy, along with that of almost every other African nation, is in ruins, the national debt huge, the job market shrunk to nothing...
...on Mitterrand's parade route, signs proclaimed "RPT—Socialist party: Same Objective, Same Ideal...
...Standing under a palm-frond shelter, the governor warned them to denounce dissent wherever they heard it: at school, among friends, in the family...
...Meanwhile the vast majority of villagers in whose name the "revolution" was staged continue to break their backs in the fields, looking up one day to find their children must now have new names and the "animation" songs have changed...
...The government accused the French of sabotage, nationalized the plant, and named January 24 "Economic Liberation Day...
...The image presides like a giant idol over the new complex, and the hand gestures to invisible throngs that the hotel, the ministries with their gold-tinted windows, the glittering convention hall of the single party that Eyadema founded—all are his...
...Pas d'histoires," one taxi driver painted on the side of his van: "No stories—no trouble...
...Beneath the Eyadema shirts they were farmers, market women, and small children, enjoying life together...
...For them the government remains a fact of life, like rainfall (though much less important...
...National tourist posters call it "L'Afrique en miniature" because Togo has both tropical and savannah re411 gions...
...Every now and then it intruded on their lives, in the form of a drop in the price paid for farmers' cocoa or a speech by a functionary...
...they have only added another coup d'etat to Africa's endless list...
...His Kabye tribe hasn't massacred the rival Ewe, unlike Robert Mugabe's Shona in the Ndebele part of Zimbabwe...
...A few have been executed...
...A foreign dignitary might be treated to a voodoo ceremony by an official fetish priest at the presidential palace, hosted by the all-powerful Chief...
...They gave them back to him and sent him away, with a warning: no one leaves Togo without permission...
...when he trundled onto the grounds in his chauffeured Peugeot, students danced "animation," and then assembled in obedient rows on the grass...
...There are no other public figures...
...A handful of middle-level officers assassinate the president, seize the radio tower, execute ministers after show trials, and declare a revolution...
...We heard a siren and rushed to the gate to look down at the road...
...But revolution is not at hand...
...Better to mind the family and the fields, and leave politics to the crazy men who want to touch it and get burned...
...State propaganda turns old religious practices into the new religion of Eyadema's reign...
...Amnesty International reports frequent detention without trial of suspected "opponents," and state torture is less than authentically African—electric shocks...
...They become bureaucratic bolts and fixtures, duly carrying out the borrowed ideas of the one man who can speak...
...In the parking lot's center, atop a pedestal on a green knoll, stands a 20-foot bronze statue of General Eyadema...
...The motorcade rushed by...
...how on the same day four years later, as a lieutenantcolonel, he toppled the corrupt new government and took power...
...Even when the villagers gathered in a clearing between huts for "animation" on January 13, and listened to 12-year-olds mangle the French slogans, they took pleasure in the drums, dance, communal energy...
...They had intercepted his letter and confiscated his documents...
...Yet he demands nothing of the Togolese except attendance at the annual political fetes and applause when his name is uttered in public...
...The numbers in the categories I have described have doubled, from 744 million to 15 million in 20 years under successive governments but have accelerated in the last five years...
...Togo had its own democracy, it didn't need the democracy of foreigners...
...It would be foolish to throw down your cutlass and stop farming altogether, for then you'd only go hungry...
...The highlight of authenticity is "animation," another import from Zaire...
...Today tourists can visit the burnedout shell of the plane beside a museum, to which a paved road has been built through the local millet fields...
...But near the commercial center, the Hotel 2 Fevrier rises 37 stories up into the humid air...
...In the middle of the bush, on a muddy road lined with banana trees and crumbling huts where little goats scurried out of the way, an African president appeared like John F Kennedy, a mirage of Western power...
...The city's quarter-million people inhabit a sprawl of shacks along dirt roads, with a patch of modern buildings and pavement downtown...
...As long as he lives we have peace...
...the tower's upper floors are as empty and silent as the asphalt desert below...
...Kwame sent, as requested, his papers and degree...
...Western leftists who long for the outbreak of Third World revolutions may have to wait years for the spectacle of throngs in the empty lot below the 2 Fevrier pulling down the bronze image to cries of "Liberte...
...Politically, too, with its confusion of borrowed identities, Togo is a small image of the continent, lately decolonized, now adrift...
...Still, any resident will proudly point it out, visible from miles away, as a sign of Togo's development...
...And when even that opening is closed to them, as to Kwame, they become offal...
...At the convention hall of the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT), Togo's only political party, you can buy a watch whose face shows that of Eyadema fading in and out as the second hand sweeps past each quarter-minute...
...In schools and at political rallies, especially on January 13 and 24, students and the youth wing of the RPT, militants animateurs, perform synchronized dances and sing French lyrics: "Heureux le peuple Togolais," "Merci, merci, Gnassingb...
...The French, from whom the Togolese economy is no more "liberated" today than in 1974, now make up the clientele of the hotels...
...There is no free speech whatsoever, not even the whiff of an opposition...
...On January 24 his private plane crashed near the village of Sarakawa...
...Between 1979 and 1981 the total increased from just over 11 million to 15 million—or by nearly 4 million—and there is no discernable halt to that trend...
...The government estimated that there were, in 1981, 15 million people with very low incomes, including those with very low incomes, including those with lower incomes than the state poverty line, those with incomes only marginally above...
...If the story of the crash seems mythic in a Roman way, much of Eyadema's imagery has been borrowed from a source slightly closer to home— Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire...
...Most African countries have adopted one foreign ideology or another, but Togo's Eyadema changes his shape as often as Proteus...
...Mobutu has made himself one of the world's richest men in a dirt-poor land, but Eyadema, though hardly ascetic, has a smaller appetite...
...New ideas, he said, were always welcome, but only within the walls of the RPT—the primitive disorder before the salvation by Eyadema must never overtake the country again...
...Kwamê 415 and the hundreds like him, educated youth to whom much had been promised, now unwanted by their society and unable to leave, seem the only hope for change from within Togo...
...One shouldn't forget that the "Father of Togo" shot his way into paternity...
...La Nouvelle Marche provides the obligatory slogan, "La Revolution Togolaise"—yet the wife of a French businessman shops in Lome's elegant store and carps at the slow cashier...
...with the survival of the Sarakawa crash he became divine...
...Underneath his clothes—whether the Western president's, the mythic hero's, or the African chief s—Eyadema is, naked, a dictator...
...But the black Mercedes and double-breasted suit that appeared on the muddy bush road were Western...
...His face, and only his, appears everywhere...
...Those who have something are too afraid of losing it in the maelstrom of African life to oppose the government...
...Kwame is near wit's end...
...The use of the adjective "mass" before poverty is therefore justified—even on the basis of the state's own threshold definition of low incomes...
...When Eyadema built the Universite du Benin in Lome he declared it a proud step for Togo's development...
...One student who refused to join the RPT was held for eight years and died shortly after his release...
...Once villagers have taken care of the superficial signs, they are left alone...
...Politics is a story told in a comic book that a little boy vends...
...Only three or four floors are ever occupied, since tourism and business bring in just a trickle of visitors...
...V YET FOR A FEW YOUNG PEOPLE I KNEW, it is becom ing difficult to keep their hands out of the fire...
...The titles return throughout the story, along with such heroic epithets as "the Man of Peace," "the Man of January 13," or "the Father of the Country" (rewriting history, for in fact while Olympio lobbied the U.N...
...The university continues to confer degrees upon the few who survive the educational system, but many of them end up jobless on the malarial streets of Lome—lucky to have part-time work giving French lessons, hustling to find a position as their scholarship money runs out...
...Nearly 6 million of these were people of pensionable age (nearly 2 million of whom were also disabled), nearly 4 million were in families dependent on those in full-time work, over 21/2 million were in families of unemployed people, nearly 2 million were members of the families of single parents, and rather less than a million were disabled people under pensionable age and their dependents...
...He must wonder if it wouldn't have been better never to have left the fields...
...The Europeans' houses and businesses are not confiscated as they were in Uganda and Zaire, nor do the Lebanese shopkeepers on the ocean front have to worry that this week's radio will announce a "radical, authentic action," meaning forced exodus...
...The Poor in Thatcher's England Who are the poor...
...But villagers wanted to be left in peace, and so they accepted the price cut, they listened to the speech, they didn't ask questions...
...and when Francois Mitterrand visited Lome on January 13, 1983, he was received, if not like Caesar, at least as a Pompey...
...On the book's glossy color cover, against a background of village scenes, battles, and parades, the face of its hero stands out under a military cap: the coal-black, unsmiling face, eyes slightly dull and ill-at-ease, of Togo's president, Etienne Gnassingbe Eyadema...
...Rule by personality cult has the advantage over sheer dictatorial force: it appeals to affection as well as fear, and part of Eyadema's success in surviving (the first priority of any dictator) is that he has not been as ruthless as other African autocrats...
...He wears various political costumes, utters contradictory slogans...
...The president's survival testified to his status as someone greater than a man, endowed with a power more magical than human...
...Togo is all things to all people, as mutable as the chameleons that scuttle in the bush...
...Its leader displays himself in a collage of heroic images...
...Kim is "Comrade...
...The eager salesboy opens the comic book and flips through its pages...
...More than once I saw a boy in a taxi station peddling works of Marx and Engels alongside the oranges and peanuts...
...What little official information there is, with illiteracy at 80-90 percent, he monopolizes...
...His rule, in its various forms, has become inevitable, his will and goodness as unquestionable as a father's to young children...
...The steel skeleton of his new villa, looming on a hill over his tiny home village aside the Route Nationale, stood half-built throughout my two years, a road sign not just of harsh economic conditions but of Eyadema's relative evenhandedness...
...He had appeared at a military base nearby, and afterward his motorcade cruised into town and wound its way through the hills above...
...Eyadema tells the people they are happy, and they won't say he's wrong—Togolese politics doesn't go beyond this balance...
...He cannot leave—he says the government fears opposition abroad—but he has nothing to stay for...
...Only after months of friendship would Togolese dare speak to me about politics, in strict privacy with voices lowered...
...the army hasn't run amok in the bush, unlike that of Uganda...
...413 EYADEMA, of course, is not above the more common methods of dictators...
...When he made his triumphal return to Lome on February 2, he was hailed, like Caesar returned from Gaul, as a demigod...
...Eyadema's corruption is in scale with the size of the country, it is not gluttonous...
...its short history is a manipulable fairy tale...
...The fete's political content was incidental, a song whose words they didn't know...
...But in a country where any idea not originating within "the walls of the RPT" is snuffed out, the intellectuals produced by the university have no use for their minds...
...Now he is, authentically, just "Gnassingbe" Eyadema...
...A few police cars flashed by, and seconds later two Mercedes, followed by a black convertible, top down— and standing in the back seat, in a double-breasted suit, Eyadema...
...The repe412 tition of name and face mesmerizes like the chant of a new national myth...
...The pilot and others died, but Eyadema emerged—as the comic book glowingly depicts— unscathed...
...Togo receives development money from the U.S., while the French train the army...
...But "animation" does not quite have the authenticity of a village funeral, a social occasion in which everyone participates, taking turns to dance to rhythmic drums inside the circle of dancers...
...When Eyadema writes to Mobutu in the paper, he uses the Zairean's preferred title, "Citoyen...
...This sort of "news" story relegates the real news of African wars and the dire state of the economy to distortion in the inside pages, or to oblivion...
...Authenticity" came from Mobutu...
...Until they do, there can be no democracy in Togo...
...In early 1974, the country had a dispute with France over the nationalization of Togo's phosphate plant: France wanted to retain partial interest, but Eyadema hedged...
...Besides the human suffering, this situation is becoming the only internal threat to the regime—a class of educated, alienated young people...
...Caught between a dying past and a dangerous future, between Afri414 can soil and Western building, and between the two hungry superpowers, Eyadema's Togo reflects them all and has no real face of its own...
...H I SAW EYADEMA ONCE, in my first few weeks when I was still at a Peace Corps training center...
...Mort a Eyadema...
Vol. 32 • September 1985 • No. 4
