Africa: Who Is Safe?

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The strain is, of course, too great. Last year Senegalese Poet-President Leopold Sedar Senghor—once the prince of Paris' black boulevardiers—was obliged to tell the nation that Senegal could unfortunately no longer afford to pay civil servants housing and winter-clothing allowances or finance vacation trips to France. But Senghor has never implemented his decree, and the ridiculous subsidies remain. And he did not even dare suggest a cut in basic pay, for fear of another upheaval like the one he put down 15 months ago, when a coup was led by his old friend, Premier Mahmadou Dia, and supported by some ministers, the territorial guard and the gendarmerie.

"No Help Needed." Africa's New Class demands jobs, and as a result bureaucracy proliferates. In the twelve governments of former French Africa alone, there are perhaps 200 ministers, where once 25 were enough. This pressure can lead to absurdities. In order to mollify his own youthful job seekers, Niger's President Hamani Diori last December ousted 16,000 Dahomeyans—the intellectual cream of West Africa —thus depriving himself of half his teachers and three-quarters of his Finance Ministry technical staff.

Too often, despite a government's best efforts, jobs are simply not to be found. In the Cameroun port town of Douala, shop and office windows are festooned with signs reading "No help needed." Secondary-school graduates are willing to work three months without pay for a chance at a job. Young men as diligent as that will eventually get ahead—even if they have to storm the presidential palace, burn a minister's Mercedes or join the Union des Populations Camerounaises—a rebel group that has conducted the longest, bloodiest rebellion in Africa, a seven-year war that has cost 50,000 lives.

The Game Is Je Souffre. Almost everywhere, the rural African has fared less well than his city brother, and bitter jealousy is the inevitable result. In the Congo's Kwilu province, Pierre Mulele has capitalized on this resentment and, with the aid of a Communist guerrilla-warfare manual, made his disillusioned Congolese rebels, the Jeunesse, a potent weapon against the government.

Nowhere has independence been so agonizing as in the Congo. After the Belgians left, tribal warfare and secession sent the once promising young nation slithering almost instantly back toward the Stone Age. Today, in Katanga's Elisabethville, once a delightful, well-fed little city, meat hunters sell rats to hungry housewives. Congolese, from children to Cabinet ministers, play the game of je souffre, their long faces proclaiming their suffering even while their hands reach out for matabich—the bribe. The bribe rarely works for long. Says one would-be fixer with frank wistfulness: "You can't buy these guys. All you can do is hire them for the afternoon."