A Democracy of Guns and Spirits

...For them to be able to adapt to our country, the country has to adapt a little to their mentality...

...Suddenly all the external powers who controlled desperate Africa's fate were changing...

...For them democracy has changed nothing essential yet, except their minds...

...To Gregoire it isn't a political system but a mysterious force that appeared one day in 1990 and changed everything: people who had suffered in silence for over two decades suddenly refused to endure any more...

...What made the conference think that it could declare itself sovereign and name a transitional government leading to elections...

...It wasn't what the locals ate, but the fate of the locals was no longer in their own hands, and they would have to learn to serve up foreign fare...

...The statue fell, but the dictator is unwilling to leave...

...A lot of people, including a series of American ambassadors, allowed themselves to be fooled about the true nature of the regime...

...How could the bush-taxi drivers, who used to cringe as they paid extortion money to policemen, suddenly organize themselves into a union powerful enough to force the dictatorship to agree to a national conference...

...The ringleader was a Kabye sergeant named Eyadema...

...Kodjo passed the time by perfecting an imitation of her snotty, precious French...

...Like most of Africa, Togo was trying to sell off state enterprises and lure foreign investors to set up low-wage, tax-free factories...

...The end of the cold war and the upheaval in Eastern Europe—in francophone Africa it's called le vent de l'Est—gave the Togolese not just a model but an opportunity...

...His friends and hunting partners included Ceaucescu, Mobutu, Giscard d'Estaing, Francois Mitterrand's son, Josef Strauss of Bavaria, and Kim Il Sung...

...In the same year the World Bank began linking its Africa loans to political as well as economic liberalization, and at the 1990 Franco-African summit French President Mitterrand declared for the first time that French aid would be conditioned on democracy and human rights...

...The wind from the East blew across Togo's border...

...Political affairs were none of their business...

...The market was now a mud flat...

...In the end, Kodjo found work as an apprentice cook in the little Lomé hotel where I had rented a room...

...So the planets had suddenly aligned them530 • DISSENT the few remaining whites with desperate tenacity...

...The Togolese I knew when I was a teacher seemed compliant, cheerful when it was called for, most often indifferent...

...Democracy has come to Togo—partly...

...No one talked about torture chambers, about suspected opponents thrown out of helicopters...

...No one was crying exploitation...

...One militiaman said that he'd undergone several days of ceremonial preparation that allowed him to work forty-eight hours without sleeping...

...The Ewe, in the south, are historically more educated...

...Democratic power is something like fetish power, a matter of spirits and state of mind...

...Democracy had "come" to Togo, and to much of the rest of Africa—or so I'd heard...

...My conversations with colleagues in the long hot afternoons felt dull, drained of mental vigor by the gaping hole in available subject matter and by their own willful lack of interest—but not particularly terror-stricken...

...The Eyadema regime began to insist that it had always intended to liberalize—that, in fact, it had been liberalizing for quite some time, at a pace suited to the country's immaturity...

...Since democracy until now has been realized mainly in perception and expression, the taxi-less taxi driver Gregoire's vision of a sudden, inexplicable change in spirit, an infusion of courage and freedom and power where there had been none, remains perhaps the truest account I heard...

...Originally colonized by the Germans, handed over to the French after Versailles, Togo is one of Africa's crimes of European cartography—a resource-poor sliver of threeanda-half million people wedged between Ghana and Benin...

...But when Vigniko Amedegnato, the RPT's fleshy, buoyant, chain-smoking general secretary, explained the regime's economic policy to me, he didn't even pretend to believe in democratic ideals...

...He thought about it, and then he said, "Partly...

...And what if the soldiers had done it in 1990 or 1992...

...It's just 350 miles, less than the length of Florida, from the humid coastal capital Lome up through the tropical southern highlands around Kpalime, the flat teak forests of the central region near Sotouboua, the rocky hills of the president's home above Lama Kara, and the Keran game park of the dry northern savannah where the Sahara feels close...

...In one vast air-conditioned room he kept his elephants, lions, and tigers from a Canadian zoo...

...In the short term the Togolese keep getting poorer, and the violent transition has made things much worse, sorely testing the faith of the new believers...

...To the outside world Togo was "the Switzerland of Africa": West Africa's banking center, an attractive spot for tourists, "stable" and pro-Western...

...The old military regime had declared it an eyesore and soldiers had razed it in 1989, on the eve of a presidential visit...

...But he remained a soldier...

...Where did my teacher friends, Togo's supposed intellectuals who used to ask no questions and entertain no ideas, get the idea that they could go on strike...

...At the time we were appealing above all to the Americans...

...We spent two hours waiting for a hotel owner to wake up from his nap, while his ten-year-old mulatto daughter ordered the staff around by poolside...

...Togo's borders slice up villages but yoke together distant tribes that have no historical ties...

...In other words, democratization served roughly the same purpose as putting pizza on the menu in hotels...

...When the Americans are in your home you have to show them at least a little democracy...

...I asked a young man named Gregoire, a newly licensed taxi driver without a taxi, whether anyone had protested in 1989 when the market was destroyed...

...The country offers the spectacle of democracy at its birth, bloody, squalling, and miraculous...

...Three months later Kodjo was back at his hated father's mud house in Woum...

...I asked him—an agricultural trainer— whether he believed it himself...

...The people wouldn't let them...

...I went back because I couldn't quite believe it...

...All this in an impoverished African backwater that hadn't had a free election since 1958, when the Togolese voted for independence from France...

...It depends on whom you ask and what the word means to the person, and the word sometimes seems to have as many meanings as there are Togolese...

...Upon awakening, the hotelier was too busy to see us...

...Dictatorship," said a Frenchman of long experience in the country, "makes everyone stupid and mean...

...In 1989 the Beninois were the first to revolt: the "Marxist" regime there, economically devastated and ideologically empty, followed its European counterparts and disintegrated like rotten timber, with very little loss of life...

...At the beginning of this year, after countless scheduled elections were postponed or nullified by fraud, Togolese finally lined up and voted freely for a Parliament in which the opposition majority will try to coexist with President Eyadema...

...That had an immediate impact on our politics— better modify our politics so that these people didn't feel they were in a bizarre country...

...the Kabye, farmers from the north, make up 80 percent of the armed forces...

...He built himself a massive chateau on a hill above his village, with ostentatious domes and turrets and arches looming like a medieval fortress over the round mud huts and hardscrabble millet fields of Kabye peasants...

...Togo is trapped between the old and the new in a violent, seemingly endless transition...

...But it doesn't take long to learn that in Africa democracy means much more than elections...

...Some of them wear the white facial paint and thigh-length tunics of the much-feared abrafo—men with supernatural powers known for their skills at decapitation...

...a few were shot dead in the act...

...He shed his military uniform for a double-breasted suit, pomaded his hair, grew stout, and cultivated the image of a peace-loving African statesman...

...For the twenty-five-year-old who stays in high school because there's no work, the college graduate who smuggles toilet seats from Ghana to make ends meet, the refugee waiting for justice to reach his new village, the driver without a vehicle—for them the idea that democracy will bring development is so far just a hope, or an illusion...

...Africa's options had been reduced to a cry of "Exploit us...

...This thought also appalled Gregoire, but now he was outraged...

...Economic discontent had become a serious internal threat...

...They couldn't...

...You trouble yourself too much for me...

...And so Eyadema is still alive, protected by guns and gri-gri, clinging to what remains of his power...

...As we waited on an empty stretch of highway for a bus to take Kodjo back to his village, he began to weep...

...While the economy collapsed and a tenuous Parliament was elected and the president's soldiers continued to shoot their countrymen, he was learning a trade that he hoped would one day give him a job...

...The militiamen are crudely armed with machetes, bows and arrows, and ancient twelve-caliber hunting rifles...

...but Kpatcha stayed on in the capital...

...After independence in 1960, three years of increasingly dictatorial rule under the first president, Sylvanus Olympio, an Ewe, ended in black Africa's first military coup d'etat...

...On the way into town, a fellow passenger told me that these militiamen believed themselves invulnerable to the army's bullets...

...In a few cases fragile new governments have been elected...

...When I asked Gregoire if he would shoot Eyadema given the chance, he echoed what other young men had told me: that anyone would botch the job unless he had intensive spiritual preparation, because the president has visited the strongest fetish priests—in India even...

...But when I went back recently to a town seven miles from the village where I'd lived as a Peace Corps volunteer, I could no longer find my way around...

...How did their students, who used to submit to beatings and year after year of failure, imagine they could follow suit...

...The emptiness of the great stone pedestal, now guarded by a twelve-year-old goalie at one end of a noisy soccer game, mocked the empty field across the street: arbitrary state power answered by the sudden power of the mob...

...The popular revolt that began in 1990 has stripped away much of Eyadema's authority, but he is still president and still controls the army...

...In 1990," he told me, 528 • DISSENT as if this had been the stupidest question of all, "democracy came...

...For a quarter century Eyadema ruled through brute force and a personality cult he borrowed from various dictators and leaders, African and foreign...

...it didn't seem to occur to them that it could be otherwise...

...Foreigners don't have the same mentality as us," he rasped...

...Some of them had been my students...

...One afternoon, I accompanied Kodjo on a job interview...

...Around the same time the Eyadema regime was establishing with much fanfare a free trade zone at the Lome port...

...Kpatcha finally quit high school and came to Lome as well, to live with his relatives in Adewui and enroll in a computer programming course...

...What is happening in Togo has been happening all over Africa—anglophone and francophone, Marxist and pro-Western, poor and destitute...

...Ten years ago President Eyadema was sacred, and the insult would have been blasphemy...

...FALL • 1994 • 537...

...The Togolese calendar acquired a handful of hallowed dates, the hotels in Lome changed their names, and everywhere Eyadema appeared his praises were literally sung by groups of Togolese who danced and chanted on pain of death...

...The big outdoor market in the center of Kpalimé, the sprawl of tables and stalls where I used to come on Saturdays to buy pineapples and eggs and wave flies off my lunch and listen to the chatter of the girls pounding yams, was gone...

...For years Togo had been ground down under debt, IMF-imposed austerity, entrenched corruption, and disastrous falls in world commodity prices...

...But just across the street, the twenty-foot statue of President Gnassingbé Eyadema was gone too, pulled down in 1991 by townspeople...

...Oh, no, they would be thrown in jail...

...Even before them, Kpalime, at the heart of the lush, mountainous coffee and cacao region in Togo's southwest, was already transformed: in the very town where the Togolese People's Assembly (RPT)— the single party of the Eyadema dictatorship—was born, civilian militias search vehicles for bombs that the president's men might bring into the stronghold of the new democratic opposition...

...Around the corner, a wall was covered with abusive graffiti...

...more often, the upheavals have led to anarchy and stalemate...

...No one imagined Togo free, but if Idi Amin was mutilating his countrymen, and Angola was tearing itself to pieces, and Ethiopians were dying by the thousands, it became easier to think that life in Togo was at least tolerable...

...Where did the ordinary Togolese who spoke at that conference for six weeks in the summer of 1991—the doctors, the bureaucrats, above all the handful of soldiers —find enough courage to tell the truth about the Eyadema years and admit how dictatorship had implicated every one of them, and then enough wisdom to pardon and reconcile...

...Well— what was the difference...

...Since 1989 the people of Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Kenya, Zambia, Zaire, Congo, and other countries have tried to get rid of regimes that replaced harsh colonial rule with often harsher African dictatorships...

...According to a legend that Eyadema does nothing to discourage, he himself fired the fatal shot...

...For a moment he smiled the pathetic fearful smile I remembered from my Peace Corps years under the dictatorship...

...Someone had written: "Eyadema Has AIDS...

...Beyond that, there's no explaining it...

...The American ambassador in Lome told me that in the long term democracy, Africa's new mantra, will go hand in hand with development, its old one...

...In 1974, Eyadema's private jet crashed near his home village: the two French pilots were killed, but Eyadema emerged, godlike, from the wreckage unFALL • 1994 • 529 scathed...