Reflections on West African Coups: Changing Faces of Power

Bongo the First took the wise precaution of having Moroccans in his presidential guard because he knew that his own countrymen were not entirely to be trusted, as Bongo the Second has learned to his cost. The Moroccan guard was notorious for falling upon the remains of state banquets and devouring them like locusts.

I suppose I should have been outraged at the time, but somehow I wasn’t. I suppose I saw it all as par for the course: Africa, after all, was never going to be Scandinavia. Several of the nearby states still have the presidents they had when I passed through them 37 years ago: Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo-Brazzaville, Paul Biya of Cameroon, and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea.

The last is particularly interesting. He has been president since he overthrew his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, and had him executed in 1979. Teodoro Obiang Nguema was an accomplice of one of the worst, and certainly among the most bizarre, regimes in world history.

Macías Nguema was democratically elected the first president after the independence of the only Spanish colony in Sub-Saharan Africa. By the end of his 11 years of dictatorship, the economic product of the country had declined by 95 percent, the word “intellectual” had been banned, wearing spectacles was a capital offense, the national treasury was kept in the president’s villa, and up to a half of the population had been killed or driven into exile. The president had awarded himself the title of The Unique Miracle. His children were sent to North Korea for safety, Kim Il Sung having been a friend of Macías. One of his daughters, I believe, still lives there.

Teodoro was a privileged member of this most murderous regime, which both starved and tortured its prisoners to death; indeed, he was one of its pillars, and he’s still president, addressing the United Nations as if he were respectable. In the meantime, Equatorial Guinea has become rich on oil—or perhaps I should say the regime has become rich on oil. The people remain mired in poverty, though it must be admitted that the nephew is not nearly as bad as his uncle. But this is to damn with the faintest of praise, considering what his uncle was like (amazingly, there seems to be no biography of this appalling but most interesting figure).

The Bongo dynasty was not nearly as bad as the Macías dynasty. I traveled through Gabon as if it were a normal country. True, I was briefly arrested there as a South African spy by a policeman as I alighted from a truck that had given me a lift. The policeman sat me down in his little hut-like office, and when he learned that I was a doctor, he circled the chair in which I was sitting and said admiringly, “Vous avez beaucoup de papier dans la tête” (You have a lot of paper in your head), which was very high praise indeed. He let me go, and we parted on the best of terms, once I had advised him on what to do about his syphilis. My espionage had been forgotten.

One of my best moments in Gabon was coming across an excellent French restaurant in the jungle, with immaculate table linen. The chef was from the Périgord region, whose cuisine is rich but not light.

I also visited Lambarene, where Albert Schweitzer founded his hospital. Dr. Schweitzer was very famous in his day and his face was as recognizable as Einstein’s, but I don’t suppose that more than 1 in 10,000 20-year-olds would recognize it now. A German film company was making a film about Dr. Schweitzer but found the real hospital not good enough, so it erected a new, cleaner, temporary and disposable one nearby.

When the chancelleries of the world say that they’re “concerned” by a coup in Gabon, I can’t help but think they’re using the word “concerned” in some technical sense.

First published in the Epoch Times.