Africa, Cry Africa

AFTER a year of familiarisation and training I was informed in December 1960 that I would be posted in April, 1961 as Third Secretary in the Australian High Commission in Accra, Ghana, in West Africa.

After a flurry of farewells in Canberra, a few days in Singapore to kit ourselves out in tropical clothing and a day in Rome we headed off across north Africa to Ghana.

Singapore in 1961 was very much a colonial city, an old city at the crossroads, that reeked of both Asia and the British Empire. To a Tasmanian couple barely out of their teens and on their first trip out of Australia it was a marvellous experience.

We stayed in the old Cathay Hotel, now long gone since Lee Kwan Yew’s clean up, and I still recall going into the bar mid-morning to get a cool drink to be confronted by a scene straight from Somerset Maugham. There were five men scattered around the bar, big men with red faces drinking neat spirits and chatting in what was subsequently confirmed as Dutch. Three of them had their pith helmets sitting on the bar! They were probably rubber plantation managers from somewhere in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia.

The patronage at the old and famous Raffles Hotel, which we visited a couple of times, was much the same. A few travellers passing through but a preponderance of colonial civil servants, planters and business people. And not far from the hotel there was the uniquely Asian melange of downtown Singapore, Old Singapore, with its alleys and traders and rickshaw boys and its marvellous mix of smells and accents and bars and tobacco and exotic foods and just about any and every product one could possibly wish to buy.

And so to Ghana. We arrived at Accra airport early one morning and the climate was much as it would be for the next two years — a temperature of around 30C, sometimes higher but rarely much lower, and a constant humidity factor of about 85%. The only exception to this pattern was for a few weeks early in the year during the harmatan when hot dry winds would sweep in from north central Africa and one would lie awake during the night listening to the cracking sounds as the dry wind sucked the moisture out of the timbers.

Debilitating as the climate could be for elderly people, it was more readily accommodated by those who were younger, like ourselves, and the many other young diplomats in Accra. I played regular tennis through my time in Ghana and as a family we spent a good deal of our free time swimming and picnicking with friends at the beaches in Accra and beyond. Air conditioning, although primitive by contemporary standards, was used full time in the office but very selectively at home. We cooled the bedroom for an hour or so before going to bed and then switched it off and slept under a sheet, sometimes using a ceiling fan on very low rotation. This pattern was modified slightly after our first daughter was born in early 1962. However, the guiding principle was to adjust to the climate as quickly as possible by minimising the use of air conditioning.

Cricketer of note

When we arrived in Accra the professional diplomatic staff comprised the high commissioner himself, Bertie Ballard, and a third secretary, previously Frank Milne, whom I replaced. In addition, there was a trade commissioner, Bob Cristofani — a cricketer of note who toured England with the Services XI under Lindsay Hassett at the end of World War II — plus two secretarial/administrative staff and locally engaged Ghanaian staff comprising a receptionist and three drivers.

My High Commissioner had stepped out of an Evelyn Waugh novel. He was a short, stout, bald, spry and amiable bachelor who had joined the fledgling foreign service — more by accident than design — when the few were all we had as a foreign service. A graduate of Melbourne University, where he gained a law degree, he was diverted from practising as a lawyer when in the mid-1930s he agreed to serve as the Australian representative in Vila in the New Hebrides. After about three years in Vila he returned to the law in Melbourne but it was not long before he was back in Vila, this time as the official Australian representative in the New Hebrides. World War II had broken out and the Australian government wanted a representative in Vila for all the normal purposes — especially looking after the interests of Australians in the area — but also because the New Hebrides leadership was currently aligned with the Vichy regime in France which was sympathetic to the German cause.

Within a short time Bertie became the link between the Free French forces under de Gaulle in London and the fledgling Free French interests in the New Hebrides. With de Gaulle providing the tactical advice from London and Bertie passing the messages to and fro it was not long before the Free French interests in the New Hebrides were in control. I understand that de Gaulle’s memoirs include a brief reference to Bertie’s supportive role during that period.

Bertie was a man of high intelligence and wide-ranging interests in the arts, especially literature and music. Language was another great interest. Indeed, when we arrived in Ghana, he was reading Winnie the Pooh — in Latin! He went back to Latin from time to time “….to freshen up”, especially as it is one of the principal roots of English and many of the European languages, a number of which he could speak, well or passably.

He was a man of impeccable taste and almost the ideal mentor for a young diplomat on his first posting. He was in the latter years of his professional career and not one who guarded his territory in an obsessive way. He was generous with his advice — born of decades of experience in various parts of the world — and he gave me my head in terms of developing a wide range of contacts in Ghana, undertaking analytical work on Ghanaian politics and policies, travelling widely within the country and generally assuming a proactive role of a kind that few third secretaries would enjoy. In this context I am reminded of the many colleagues who aspired to a first posting in one of the important and allegedly glamorous major embassies or high commissions around the world — Washington, London, Paris, Rome, New York, Tokyo and the like.

Some of them did some interesting work as third secretaries in those posts but for the most part they were part of massive bureaucracies compared to tiny postings like Lagos or Accra or Buenos Aires or Lima. In those smaller posts, with only a couple of diplomats, one had to do everything with all the attendant responsibility, excitement and reward. Indeed, when Bertie was reposted, to Colombo, after I had been only one year in Accra and two years in the service, I was left as Acting High Commissioner for a further twelve months before my term was up and I was recalled to Canberra and replaced in Accra by a High Commissioner and a Second Secretary.

Sydney Nolan

One of the joys of Ghana was that it was a sort of crossroads. The people who drifted through Ghana were invariably interesting people and, the foreign community being fairly small, it was not unusual for a delinquent diplomatist like myself to get to know many of these people, especially after Bertie was posted to Colombo and I was left in charge of the post.

Joe Isaac, the eminent Australian economist and industrial relations expert, spent a few months in Ghana while we were there; we saw a bit of Conor Cruise O’Brien during the period he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana; Sir Robert Jackson, an Australian, was playing a central role in the development of the Volta hydro-electric scheme and associated industrial development; Graeme Irwin, another Australian, had the chair in history at the university; and we looked after Sidney and Cynthia Nolan for a few days after Nolan had completed his sketching and photography in East Africa and was on the way back to London to prepare for his African exhibition at the Tate. Sir Geoffrey de Freitas had left the Labor front bench to become British High Commission to Ghana, a country where Peggy Cripps, the daughter of one of Britain’s Labor luminaries of the middle decades of the last century, Sir Stafford Cripps, was suffering Nkrumah’s incarceration of her husband, Joe Appiah, a political opponent of the President.

I never met Joe Appiah but I did have an association with one of his fellow political prisoners, a journalist whom I had befriended and who was gaoled at about the same time as Appiah. Some months after these particular gaolings, I received a visit at my office from the wife of the imprisoned journalist. She conveyed her husband’s warm regards and passed me a small ball of paper which was in fact toilet paper on which my friend had written a brief note and a list of questions. The questions sought confirmation of various political developments in Ghana. I explained that, as a diplomat, I had been placed in an extremely difficult situation and that our exchange must remain completely confidential or else Nkrumah would have me out of the country in a flash. She understood and we agreed to meet again the next day.

Bertie was intrigued by these events and terrified that the exchanges would become public which, thankfully, was never the case. By way of a verbal report through his wife, I was able to inform my imprisoned friend — after checking with diplomatic and local sources — that the intelligence available in Usher Fort Prison was immeasurably more comprehensive and more accurate than anything available on the outside! Ironically, Appiah and my friend were imprisoned under odious ‘preventive detention laws’ in the gestation of which a key role had been played by yet another British Labor identity — one Geoffrey Bing who was one of the more sinister British advisors to President Nkrumah.

During our term in Ghana, the Congo crisis was raging a few countries to the south and this meant that there was a constant stream of British journalists stopping off in Accra — to or from the Congo — to find, or in some cases, create a story. Richard Beaston from the Telegraph, Colin Legum from the Observer, Walter Partington from the Daily Express and countless others. Partington was one of the great characters of this camel train. He was front page of the Express for a couple of weeks — with lurid stories all written without leaving the bar of the Ambassador Hotel — until the Ghanaian authorities finally ran out of patience and tossed him out. Partington saw his journalistic lot as being not to worry about facts but, as he frequently said, to give the Putney housewife the sort of stuff that she would enjoy with her kippers at breakfast. Our man in Africa!

Bars and bedrooms

Then there were the occasional visits from the Benka-Coker twins from Sierra Leone. Brad Benka-Coker had undertaken foreign service training in Canberra and thus regarded all Australian diplomats as prospective party partners. His brother, Ponnie, was something important in the Sierra Leonean version of the CIA! Back in the 1930’s, Samuel — later Sir Samuel and Chief Justice of Sierra Leone — and Mrs. Benka-Coker begat themselves these twin sons. Mr. Benka-Coker was a keen cricket follower and, given that the boys were born on the same day that Bradman and Ponsford made a record partnership — or did something similarly important — he named them Bradman and Ponsford Benka-Coker, known henceforth as Brad and Ponnie. Entirely logical when you think about it. In those early days there was little evidence that the twins had made a huge mark in the foreign policy and intelligence fields but considerable evidence that they had cut a massive swathe through the bars and bedrooms of a large slab of Africa.

One of the most powerful groups in Ghana were the ‘mammies’ who were the dominant forces in all the markets around the country. The mammies were astute businesswomen and ladies of more than modest proportions. The markets they ran were — indeed, still are from all accounts — a critical element in local commerce. Not unlike good auctioneers in Australia, they were also mostly women of great humour, in which respect one particular story merits a further telling. It concerns the visit to Ghana of a World Health Organisation birth control expert who visited the country to preach the merits and techniques of birth control.

She decided to seek the support of the mammies — a powerful group in commercial and political terms — whom she gathered together and lectured on birth control, complete with audiovisual aids and accompanying literature. At the conclusion, she provided these queens of local commerce with quantities of birth control pills which they promised to distribute to the local female population. Upon returning some months later to check on progress she found that the mammies had turned a tidy profit by selling the pills to the men as aids to sexual potency!

A great delight in Ghana was to ‘go bush’ from time to time, visit the towns and villages outside the capital — along the coast or into the rainforest and cocoa-growing area of central Ghana or beyond to the sub-Saharan region of northern Ghana. There was always a specific purpose to such travel such as to present books on Australia to local schools, meet senior regional officials, draw attention to scholarships available under Australian aid programmes or visit major new development initiatives.

Wherever one went the people were delightful company and the hospitality was more than generous. Usually there was a gathering of some kind and invariably it featured the local chiefs and a brief ceremony that involved the pouring of a ‘libation’. This latter activity revealed that far and away the most successful alcohol salesman in Africa was the fellow selling schnapps. The key players, including the visitor, would stand in a circle — with the villagers looking on a few yards away — and, after the obligatory, but thankfully brief, speeches glass tumblers would be handed around the VIP group and filled with schnapps. Always schnapps. To drink about six fluid ounces of schnapps at ten o’clock in the morning — or even under a scorching sun in 85% humidity in the middle of the afternoon — is an experience not soon forgotten.

Back in Accra the business of diplomacy was transacted across desks, tennis nets, bars and party tables lavish with some of the best curries one could hope to eat. As indicated at the beginning of these reflections, Ghana was a very young country when we lived there, and it was a country with some very young people in positions of prominence, such as departmental heads. Most of them had been educated to university entrance level in Ghana — at schools like Achimota College which had a reputation for excellence far beyond Ghana’s borders — and then at the University of Ghana, after it was established, or at one of the better British universities. Increasing numbers went to American universities and, as Cold War competition heated up, Eastern European and Chinese universities also got their piece of the action. It was a marvellous place to work and one of those rare postings where the younger members of the diplomatic community were better placed, than the older and more experienced diplomats, to enjoy high level contact. As a consequence, in my day at least, the Canadians, Australians and Nigerians in particular were well placed to enjoy the professional benefits of youth.

Sad story of Africa

We were especially lucky to enjoy Ghana when we did because, after Nkrumah’s excesses, the country’s sufferings compounded over subsequent decades. Ghana’s story is part of the story of modern Africa and it is a sad story because it points up the appalling disruption that has accompanied the transition from so-called unsophisticated societies to so-called modern societies. The result in a great many African countries has been human horror on an awesome scale. Indeed, Africa is one of the great tragedies of the modern era and future historians will not be complimentary about the twentieth century’s failure to adequately address it.

The trouble was that colonial exploitation was replaced by other forms of exploitation — political, economic, cultural — by the West, the Soviet bloc and a few others, including the Arabs, Israelis, Chinese and Cubans. Above all, the people of Black Africa have been exploited by their own venal leaders who invariably saw independence as an opportunity for power, self-aggrandisement and the accumulation of massive personal wealth.

Irrespective of the forms of colonialism in Africa — British, French, Belgian, Portuguese or whatever — they were all, to varying degree, exploitative. It was the temper of the times. Of course, such judgmental observations are easily made with the benefit of hindsight, much as it is easy to assert that, overwhelmingly, the African countries were simply not ready for “independence.” However, judging them from our own viewpoint and experience, they would probably never have been ready. The fact is that the independence movement that swept through Africa from the late 1950s onwards was understandable, inevitable and irreversible. The trouble was that colonial exploitation was replaced by other forms of exploitation — by the West, the Soviet bloc and a few others, including the Arabs, Israelis, Chinese, Cubans and others.

One can only weep for that relatively small band of decent, honest and talented Africans — many of them educated abroad as well as at home — who took up senior administrative positions in the newly independent countries. Many of those people have left their homelands and are scattered around the world, working in academia, industry, Western bureaucracies or the United Nations.

Sea of turbulence

One can weep, too, over the apparent futility of seeking to address the problem with any hope of forging effective outcomes in the short term. Millions of Africans are cast adrift in a sea of turbulence, cynicism and self-interest. The aid agencies can only apply bandaids on the margins while the United Nations, along with its specialised agencies, is an inept bureaucracy writ large. The UN, created in the shadow of the Second World War, has lurched into a new century with a cumbersome, maladministered, archaic structure that is more captive of its own inertia than it is of the so-called great powers.

This is not to suggest that any countries, Western or otherwise, have cause for self-congratulation about their roles in Africa. In this regard, the flight into exile of people like President Mobutu of Zaire, with a few billion dollars of loot, remind us not only of the human misery and economic vandalism caused by Third World dictators but also of the double standards displayed by Western governments over the same period.

Mobutu’s murderous and corrupt predecessors, contemporaries and successors included Idi Amin, the venal warlords of Ethiopia and Somalia, Liberian thugs and sundry other blights on humanity who have been the public face of modern Africa. Where such leeches have been overthrown and escaped, they invariably retire to Switzerland, France or somewhere in the Arab world to see out their days in luxury — courtesy of the poor, misbegotten nations that they ruled and raped. One can only abhor the appalling crimes committed during the relatively recent conflict in what was previously known as Yugoslavia. One can also endorse the institution of a war crimes process related to that conflict. Equally, however, it is more than quaint that the Third World thugs escape any such formal examination of their excesses. They are either summarily executed before they flee or, more often than not, they sip champagne in a Swiss villa while the world moves on.

There are reasons for this anomaly. First, some would argue that — generally irrespective of what it does within its own borders — the government of a nation state should be able to do much as it pleases within those borders. This is a moot point but, then, Yugoslavia was a nation state while Tito held it together. Perhaps UN intervention — largely ineffectual as it was — and the subsequent war crimes process, reflected a concern that the gross aspects of that conflict just shouldn’t happen in the so-called civilised world. It’s not cricket, or baseball. It’s the sort of thing you expect in the jungle republics of black Africa but not, surely not, in a country that shared borders with the twin pillars of Western civilisation — Greece and Italy!!

Suited the West

Secondly, and perhaps of most relevance, is the fact that it has suited the West to suffer the Mobutus and others — indeed, to prop them up, send them aid and arms – because they were part of the bulwark against communism or militant Islam or whoever the principal nasty was or is. This support was rendered in the full knowledge of the gross excesses of the regimes concerned. Prior to its collapse under its own weight, the Soviet Union was doing exactly the same thing and with similar results in Cuba, North Korea and — where and when it could — in various parts of Africa.

None of this will change, at least not to any significant extent in the foreseeable future. Sad but true. And if you hear that the United Nations is stepping in somewhere, head for the bunker because they will either be too late or too useless. Indeed, in Rwanda some 750,000 human beings were slaughtered in a few months and hundreds of women were raped every day for roughly the same period. This would not have happened had Kofi Annan acceded to the desperate pleas of General Dallaire, his soldier on the spot, to send troops. Annan eventually apologised for that blunder — about a decade after it happened.

Besides, all the many Mobutus left in the world have their seats, representatives and votes at the UN. That is entirely proper and, oh, so very reassuring!

* Please note that this essay draws heavily on two pieces I wrote some years ago which were published by 40 South and the Copley Group in the USA respectively.