The Soccer War

A DISPUTE OVER A JUDGE ENDS IN THE FALL OF A GOVERNMENT

In November 1965 I was flying from Algiers to Accra. Along the way, the airplane landed in Conakry. The airport was filled with soldiers and police. I asked a man from Guinea what was going on. ‘They’ve uncovered a conspiracy against the republic,’ he said. ‘There was an attempt on Sekou Touré’s life. There have been arrests and resignations.’

In Accra, three days later, President Nkrumah called a press conference about Rhodesia. To reach his office, you had to pass through three gates and three courtyards. Each courtyard was filled with soldiers and police. We were told to arrive an hour before the press conference began and were then left standing in a line. One by one, we were admitted to a room where there were two policemen who carried out body searches. During the search, a policeman found a mechanical pencil in the pocket of my jacket. I was ordered to take it apart. I did so. I was ordered to put it together. I put it together. Take it apart again. The policemen conferred: there was something funny about that pencil. I had taken on a new role, the role of suspect, not knowing what the verdict would be. Finally, one of the policemen asked: ‘Will you swear that this pencil cannot fire?’ I answered yes, I would swear. They allowed me to take it.

Nkrumah looked tired. They say he is worn out and does not sleep well. In September, there were rumours in Accra that the army staff was forming a conspiracy, that the military might make a bid for power. At the end of September, Nkrumah removed the chief and assistant chief of the general staff, reorganized the ministry of defence and named himself commander-in-chief of the army. He received his marshal’s baton at a special ceremony.

From Accra, I drove to Lagos in Nigeria. To get there, you cross through two small countries, Togo and Dahomey. Between Accra and the Ghanaian border, the road was closed six times and at each place there were army and police sentries standing in front of barriers, searching vehicles and inspecting documents.

At the border between Ghana and Togo there was a large padlocked gate, and when I drove up, a policeman wandered around it for a considerable time, looking for the key. Against this fence two years ago, Silvanus Olympio, the president of Togo, was executed by a firing squad of several officers. The capital of Togo, Lomé, begins just beyond the gate. It is small, sandy, hot and beautiful, a beach city, and the sea can be felt everywhere. I listened to the radio news in the Hotel du Golf. The announcer read the first reports from Leopoldville about General Mobutu’s coup in the Congo. Mobutu had arrested President Kasavubu and named himself president for five years. The most characteristic thing about Mobutu’s speech was the precision of the decree that he would be president ‘for five years’.

Nobody else would have anything to say about it.

But Mobutu was right: here it takes one officer and a thousand soldiers to establish a force that has no competition. Who can oppose them? How many governing parties are there here that in the moment of truth can field a thousand people who are dedicated, idealistic and, most important, not quarrelling with each other?

From Lomé to the border of Dahomey is fifty kilometres, a road runs beside the sea the whole way. Along the shore there is a fishing village, the longest village in the world, measuring more than a hundred kilometres in length, that begins in Ghana and ends in Dahomey. It was in Dahomey that I came across a coup by sheer accident.

As I was driving into Cotonou, which constitutes half the capital of Dahomey (the other half, called Port Novo, is thirty kilometres down the road), I passed a car being driven by the AFP correspondent, Jacques Lamoureux, who started shouting at me: ‘Stop! Pull over! There’s a revolution here!’ Lamoureux was visibly elated, because Cotonou is a pretty little town but a boring one and its sole real attraction is the revolution, which occurs only once every few months.

This time the president of the republic, Sourou Migan Apithy, was locked in a struggle with Justin Ahomadegbe, the vice-president and head of the government. Their dispute had started with an argument over which one of them had the right to appoint a judge to the Supreme Court. Each wanted to fill the position, as each had a large family among whom various positions continually had to be distributed.

Little by little the argument between the president and the vice-president grew so heated that they had stopped talking to each other. They were in touch now only by correspondence, but even that was soon abandoned as well, since they returned again in the letters to the subject of the judge, and the name calling started all over. (Apithy showed me the letters later.)

For several months the state had ceased to function; the cabinet had not met; the country was paralysed.

Here we can see the mechanisms of African politics perfectly: Dahomey is a poor, underdeveloped country. To lift Dahomey out of poverty will require enormous effort, concentrated energy and education. But nobody is even working.

For months the government and the party, the parliament, the army, everything has been engaged in this dispute over a judge. There is relentless debate over the judge; resolutions are passed, various compromises are discussed.

I arrived in Cotonou on the day when both sides concluded that every legal argument had been exhausted and it was time to take concrete measures. Ahomadegbe struck first. He called a meeting of the politburo of the governing party, the PDD (Parti Démocratique Dahoméen), and the politburo voted to expel Apithy from the party and remove him from the presidency as ‘the only means of saving the unity of the Dahomeyan nation.’ That evening, Ahomadegbe went on the radio to say that history had given him responsibility for the fate of the Dahomeyan nation and, thus, he would take upon himself the duties of president. It looked therefore as if Ahomadegbe had won. But when we drove to Apithy’s headquarters in Porto Novo the next day, we found him wholly unconcerned. Apithy ate dinner, had a nap and then received us and stated that he had been elected president by the people and only the people could deprive him of that office.

So Dahomey had two presidents, two heads of state.

Such a situation cannot go on for long. Fortunately, someone had the sense to call a meeting of political activists — something like a party convention — who were summoned to Cotonou on Sunday. This was the national leadership: party bosses, members of parliament, labour and youth movement officials, wholesalers from the bazaar (an important political force), priests, witch-doctors and army officers. The meeting took place in the palace of the former president of Dahomey, Hubert Maga, who was overthrown by the army in 1963.

The palace is famous.

The building of it used up all of the funds that had been set aside for the three-year national development plan. Its huge gates are carved of pure gold. Snakes, also gold, twine around the marble columns in the main hall. The whole palace drips gold. Niches in the walls are inlaid with precious stones, and authentic Persian carpets cover the floors. During the confusion of 1963, when Colonel Christopher Soglo overthrew President Hubert Maga, the precious silver dishes that Maga had imported from Paris antique shops disappeared. Vice-President Ahomadegbe took it upon himself to investigate, and concluded publicly that Colonel Soglo’s wife had taken the silver. The government crisis that subsequently erupted was smoothed over somehow, but it was clear that if Soglo got involved now — decided to act — Ahomadegbe would have to lose.

In any case, we went to the meeting.

On the steps of the palace we met Soglo, now a general, who greeted us and stopped to talk. Soglo is a stocky, jovial, energetic man. He is fifty-six. He served in the French army from 1931 as a career NCO. He was dressed simply, in an army shirt without insignia. He wore a green beret. Soglo did not carry a weapon, and neither did other officers, nor the paratroopers surrounding the palace. During the course of the military takeover that I was about to witness, I did not see a single armed soldier. This distinguished the present coup from that of October 1963, when the army used weapons: namely, the one mortar in the possession of the Dahomeyan army. When Soglo arrested Hubert Maga, the members of the cabinet, unsure about what was happening, barricaded themselves in a small building near the main square. Soglo himself then set up the mortar in front of the building (he was the only one in the army who knew how to operate it) and announced through a megaphone that if the cabinet did not resign by four in the afternoon, he would begin firing on the building. The cabinet decided unanimously to resign, which it communicated to Soglo through the window, and thus ended the political crisis of October 1963.

Now Soglo stood with us on the stairs of the palace, in a good humour, conversing. He told us that he was completely unable to reconcile them—‘them’ meaning the self-proclaimed president and the one elected by the people. Later he added that he would ‘have to do something.’

Just before the party convention opened, word went around that the witch-doctors had come out in support of Ahomadegbe. ‘Well, Apithy’s finished,’ opined the AFP correspondent, Jacques Lamoureux, who then sent a dispatch to Paris saying so. But we waited. The convention ended without an agreement later that afternoon, with the activists splitting into two camps, supporting different presidents. In the evening flyers were handed out, consisting of three sentences: ‘Down with Fascism! Down with Ahomadegbe! Long live the Army!’ That same evening, Ahomadegbe made a dramatic, single-handed attempt to arrest Apithy. He drove to Porto Novo, where Apithy resided. He then went to the gendarmerie barracks and demanded that the commander of the gendarmes, Major Jackson, arrest. Apithy. But the major told Ahomadegbe that he took orders from General Soglo; the two argued, then Ahomadegbe went back to Cotonou. The major must then have reported everything to General Soglo, because, by the time Ahomadegbe had returned, Soglo had decided to act at once.

That same night, at four in the morning, Soglo woke Apithy and ordered him to sign his letter of resignation. Apithy said that he would sign only if he saw with his own eyes that Ahomadegbe had also signed a letter of resignation. Soglo agreed, got into his car and drove to Cotonou. He woke Ahomadegbe and ordered him to sign his resignation. Ahomadegbe signed. Soglo took the paper and drove back to Porto Novo, to Apithy. The whole time, Soglo was alone. He showed Ahomadegbe’s resignation to Apithy. Then Apithy signed his own resignation. By six in the morning, the crisis was over. Soglo named a new premier: Tairu Congacu, a colourless, second-rank figure. Soglo obviously kept the real power in his own hands.

From this revolt in Dahomey I drove straight into the fires of the civil war that had been going on in western Nigeria since October. On the road from the Dahomey-Nigeria border to Lagos: barriers, police, troops, searches, checkpoints. Burned cars in the ditches. Burned huts in the villages. Army patrols in trucks. This war was hopeless and absurd, with no end in sight. Hundreds of people had already died, hundreds of houses had been burned and great sums of money wasted.

In the course of one month I had driven through five countries. In four of them, there were states of emergency. In one, the president had just been overthrown; in a second, the president had saved himself only by chance; in a third, the head of government was afraid to leave his house, which was surrounded by troops. Two parliaments had been dissolved. Two governments had fallen. Scores of political activists had been arrested. Scores of people had been killed in political conflicts.

Over a distance of 520 kilometres, I had been checked twenty-one times and subjected to four body searches. Everywhere there was an atmosphere of tension, everywhere the smell of gunpowder.