The Last of Africa's Big Men
by Michael Schaffer
JUNE 30, 2009 TAGS:
One telling detail about this month’s death of Omar Bongo Ondimba, who ruled the small Central African nation of Gabon for nearly 42 years, was the small matter of where it took place.
It was fairly inevitable, given the state of the former French colony’s medical system, that the president would seek treatment abroad. With a tiny population and generous supplies of oil, Gabon by now could be a country with a first-world quality of life — presumably including advanced oncology facilities. But that didn’t happen under Bongo, who became one of the world’s richest men even as his government neglected the basics. So when cancer threatened, the treatment plan was simple: off to Europe.
More interesting, though, was just where in Europe he wound up. During his four decades in power, Bongo spent as much time as possible in France. In addition to $2 million worth of luxury cars and 70 different bank accounts, he owned 39 properties there, four of them on Paris’ prestigious Avenue Foch. “Africa without France is like a car without a driver,” he once said of the relationship with the old imperial power. “But France without Africa is like a car without petrol.”
And yet Bongo breathed his last in Barcelona, not in Marseilles or Nice or any of the other metropolitan haunts he once frequented.
The decision had nothing to do with the quality of Spain’s doctors. In his final year, at long last, Bongo was mad at the French. Anticorruption activists for years had sought recourse against a man who treated Gabon as his personal property. And for years, Bongo’s patrons in the French government had squelched the efforts, turning a blind eye to corruption in the name of “Francafrique,” the country’s continued dominance of what are officially independent ex-colonies.
This year, though, the case was permitted to move forward, dragging into court the sordid details of Bongo’s wealth, as well as the allegedly misbegotten riches of two equally venerable colleagues elsewhere. Anger over the decision not only affected Bongo’s final medical decisions, but also the mood at his funeral in Libreville. Pro-government crowds cheered Jacques Chirac, who coddled Bongo during his two terms as French president — and has been accused of having the dictator bankroll one of his own political campaigns. Nicholas Sarkozy, the incumbent who has hinted at easing France’s embrace of corrupt ex-dependencies, was resoundingly booed.
As such, the funeral of one little man — Bongo was 4 feet, 11 inches tall — may also have marked a farewell to a well-established archetype: the Big Man, the post-colonial political boss who rules courtesy of wealthy European influence, and runs his country’s affairs without any concern for transparency or democracy.
Once upon a time, Big Men ruled much of Africa. Zaire had its Joseph Mobutu, Cote d’Ivoire its Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Malawi its Hastings Banda. By the 1970s, as goons like Idi Amin became the face of postcolonial rule, coups d’etat and Big Man dictatorships seemed so ingrained in the continent that it was hard to remember how the end of white imperial domination, just a decade earlier, was supposed to herald an age of freedom and democracy.
Predictably, some cases of unrestrained power tipped into actual mass murder: Francisco Macias Nguema killed at least 50,000 of his countrymen as he turned Equatorial Guinea into what one writer called “the Dachau of Africa.” The Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa had himself crowned emperor in a lavish, French-funded ceremony; after his overthrow, he was convicted of cannibalism and mass murder.
Bongo, by those standards, wasn’t an especially evil Big Man. By all accounts, he preferred buying off opponents over slaughtering them. The oil gave him a lot of patronage projects to help win friends: Glitzy government buildings went up in Libreville; a $2 billion railway, one of the few postcolonial railways on the continent, spanned the sparsely populated country. Enough insiders were enriched that the capital boasts luxury-car dealerships and Western-style stores selling $400 champagne bottles. Meanwhile, streets were rutted and a third of the population made do on less than $2 a day.
The end of the Cold War was the first big strike against the age of the Big Man. In the 1990s, entrenched leaders like Mobutu were rousted from power as their old patrons no longer had a strategic interest in protecting embarrassing allies. But the new regimes were often undercut by instability, allowing the old regimes to reassert themselves — either with a new face or without. France, always less interested than the United States or England in moralizing about its allies, was especially convivial to its crooked friends.
Which is why a second, more recent development could be especially jarring for would-be Big Men of the future. Where advocates for ex-colonies once debated ideology, corruption itself has now become a cause. In Zambia this month, a judge will rule on the rarest of cases: a criminal corruption prosecution, in Africa rather than overseas, of an African head of state. Among the escapades of the country’s ex-president, Frederick Chiluba, was a $500,000 shopping spree at a single Geneva boutique. His official salary was $10,000 a year.
Though Bongo’s death frees him from his own European prosecution, Congo-Brazzaville’s Denis Sassou-Nguesso, already notorious for a 2006 New York visit that ran up bills that exceed Britain’s total annual humanitarian aid to his country, remains a target of the same inquiry. So does Teodor Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, the subject of a previous corruption scandal that caused the downfall of Washington’s Riggs Bank and made it harder for would-be friends in the West to embrace his oil-rich republic.
How much this sort of unfavorable publicity hurts a dictator’s ability to retain power is anyone’s guess. But when it comes to retaining those crucial foreign patrons, Big Men of the future are likely to live a bit smaller. Bongo the archetype is following Bongo the man into that great gilded Parisian apartment in the sky.
It was fairly inevitable, given the state of the former French colony’s medical system, that the president would seek treatment abroad. With a tiny population and generous supplies of oil, Gabon by now could be a country with a first-world quality of life — presumably including advanced oncology facilities. But that didn’t happen under Bongo, who became one of the world’s richest men even as his government neglected the basics. So when cancer threatened, the treatment plan was simple: off to Europe.More interesting, though, was just where in Europe he wound up. During his four decades in power, Bongo spent as much time as possible in France. In addition to $2 million worth of luxury cars and 70 different bank accounts, he owned 39 properties there, four of them on Paris’ prestigious Avenue Foch. “Africa without France is like a car without a driver,” he once said of the relationship with the old imperial power. “But France without Africa is like a car without petrol.”
And yet Bongo breathed his last in Barcelona, not in Marseilles or Nice or any of the other metropolitan haunts he once frequented.
The decision had nothing to do with the quality of Spain’s doctors. In his final year, at long last, Bongo was mad at the French. Anticorruption activists for years had sought recourse against a man who treated Gabon as his personal property. And for years, Bongo’s patrons in the French government had squelched the efforts, turning a blind eye to corruption in the name of “Francafrique,” the country’s continued dominance of what are officially independent ex-colonies.
This year, though, the case was permitted to move forward, dragging into court the sordid details of Bongo’s wealth, as well as the allegedly misbegotten riches of two equally venerable colleagues elsewhere. Anger over the decision not only affected Bongo’s final medical decisions, but also the mood at his funeral in Libreville. Pro-government crowds cheered Jacques Chirac, who coddled Bongo during his two terms as French president — and has been accused of having the dictator bankroll one of his own political campaigns. Nicholas Sarkozy, the incumbent who has hinted at easing France’s embrace of corrupt ex-dependencies, was resoundingly booed.
As such, the funeral of one little man — Bongo was 4 feet, 11 inches tall — may also have marked a farewell to a well-established archetype: the Big Man, the post-colonial political boss who rules courtesy of wealthy European influence, and runs his country’s affairs without any concern for transparency or democracy.
Once upon a time, Big Men ruled much of Africa. Zaire had its Joseph Mobutu, Cote d’Ivoire its Felix Houphouet-Boigny, Malawi its Hastings Banda. By the 1970s, as goons like Idi Amin became the face of postcolonial rule, coups d’etat and Big Man dictatorships seemed so ingrained in the continent that it was hard to remember how the end of white imperial domination, just a decade earlier, was supposed to herald an age of freedom and democracy. Predictably, some cases of unrestrained power tipped into actual mass murder: Francisco Macias Nguema killed at least 50,000 of his countrymen as he turned Equatorial Guinea into what one writer called “the Dachau of Africa.” The Central African Republic’s Jean-Bedel Bokassa had himself crowned emperor in a lavish, French-funded ceremony; after his overthrow, he was convicted of cannibalism and mass murder.
Bongo, by those standards, wasn’t an especially evil Big Man. By all accounts, he preferred buying off opponents over slaughtering them. The oil gave him a lot of patronage projects to help win friends: Glitzy government buildings went up in Libreville; a $2 billion railway, one of the few postcolonial railways on the continent, spanned the sparsely populated country. Enough insiders were enriched that the capital boasts luxury-car dealerships and Western-style stores selling $400 champagne bottles. Meanwhile, streets were rutted and a third of the population made do on less than $2 a day.
The end of the Cold War was the first big strike against the age of the Big Man. In the 1990s, entrenched leaders like Mobutu were rousted from power as their old patrons no longer had a strategic interest in protecting embarrassing allies. But the new regimes were often undercut by instability, allowing the old regimes to reassert themselves — either with a new face or without. France, always less interested than the United States or England in moralizing about its allies, was especially convivial to its crooked friends.
Which is why a second, more recent development could be especially jarring for would-be Big Men of the future. Where advocates for ex-colonies once debated ideology, corruption itself has now become a cause. In Zambia this month, a judge will rule on the rarest of cases: a criminal corruption prosecution, in Africa rather than overseas, of an African head of state. Among the escapades of the country’s ex-president, Frederick Chiluba, was a $500,000 shopping spree at a single Geneva boutique. His official salary was $10,000 a year.
Though Bongo’s death frees him from his own European prosecution, Congo-Brazzaville’s Denis Sassou-Nguesso, already notorious for a 2006 New York visit that ran up bills that exceed Britain’s total annual humanitarian aid to his country, remains a target of the same inquiry. So does Teodor Obiang of Equatorial Guinea, the subject of a previous corruption scandal that caused the downfall of Washington’s Riggs Bank and made it harder for would-be friends in the West to embrace his oil-rich republic.How much this sort of unfavorable publicity hurts a dictator’s ability to retain power is anyone’s guess. But when it comes to retaining those crucial foreign patrons, Big Men of the future are likely to live a bit smaller. Bongo the archetype is following Bongo the man into that great gilded Parisian apartment in the sky.
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