Read Online Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French - Free Book Online

Africa’s Anglo-phone behemoth broken into less formidable bits. The Biafran War ended in 1970, but the combustible fuel of ethnicity had never altogether ceased fuming.
    Between cigarettes, an exasperated Mohammed made calls on his cellular phone, usually speaking in Hausa, which I do not understand. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I sensed that he was telling associates to call things off, and I felt my chances of landing a meeting with the scar-faced president slipping away. Over the next few hours, what I had hoped would be an evening with the dictator devolved instead into a series of encounters with the regime’s dignitaries. To a man, they were people who had played significant roles in their country’s history, and they were trotted out, it seemed, to impress upon me that Nigeria’s situation wasn’t just a matter of Abacha against the world. But like dodgy exhibits in a shoddy court brief, they had produced exactly the opposite effect.
    The first character was Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the Igbo general who had led the Biafran secession. I had once mentioned him briefly to Mohammed as someone I had met in Ivory Coast at a New Year’s party at my parents’ house years earlier, during his long exile there, and for an uninspired hour or so, the would-be founder of Biafra, as full of ambition and as accomplished at betrayal as ever, tried to convince me that Abacha’s efforts to rewrite the constitution and reorganize Nigerian politics along “truly democratic lines” were legitimate.
    This was hard enough to believe on the face of it. But hearing it from the man who had confused the fate of Igbo Nigeria with his own ego, unnecessarily prolonging the Biafran War long after it had become hopeless, while reputedly earning himself a fortune in gun-running, was upsetting. This was the man who had instigated the war and then fled Biafra aboard an airplane intended to carry orphaned children to safety. I held my tongue, so as to avoid any incident.
    Hours later, though, the evening ended disastrously at the Abuja home of another top Abacha aide, Baba Gana Kingibe, a northern aristocrat who was the regime’s foreign minister and later its interior minister, or top cop. Kingibe had run on Abiola’s ticket as his vice-presidential candidate, and his treachery arguably put even Ojukwu’s to shame.
    Kingibe was a classic civilian version of the modern northern elite: impeccably educated in Britain and full of snobby witticisms; insufferably condescending, but also simmering with resentments and insecure as hell. His generation of ambitious northerners, men in their fifties, was driven by an obsession never to be dominated again by their generally better educated, richer peers in the south. The south may have been where Nigeria’s oil was, but the north still controlled the army. As long as it continued to do so, people like Kingibe were determined to control the country’s resources—particularly the El Dorado of oil revenues aptly referred to by greedy politicians as the national cake.
    Over drinks in his sunken living room, stylishly appointed with sleek European furniture, Kingibe probed for ways to establish some rapport with me, and the conversation kept returning to the subject of American blacks. Not quite able to hide his disdain, he hinted strongly that African-American politicians had been receiving payoffs from Nigeria in an effort to build a Nigeria lobby in Washington. With the notable exception of Senator Carol Moseley-Braun of Illinois, who had made a trip to Abuja to meet with General Abacha, and told CNN afterward that the Clinton administration should “treat Africa like any other nation” (
sic
), however, there had been precious little to show for it.
    In the insidious language of Nigerian military rule this sort of thing is called “settling people,” a term with an oddly colonial ring about it that means “to buy someone’s silence or cooperation.” With all the money the Abacha