Nicholas Shaxson
22 June 2009
analysis
Nairobi — After becoming president, Bongo set about building a one-party state. "Gabon was being tugged between different tribes and regions," he said.
"Having multiple parties would have been dangerous; democracy soon turns into an explosion of demands which it is impossible to satisfy, leading to endless strikes which fragile countries like ours cannot withstand."
Gabon, he said, needed discipline, not democracy. So he held an election, winning with over 99 per cent of the vote.
Bongo remained fiercely pro-French, resisting advice from President Mobutu of Zaire to rename Gabon's second city, Franceville, with a more African name.
"I love France, which is still my own country, a little bit," Bongo said.
Yet he was becoming more confident and independent-minded, too, and he took Gabon into OPEC in 1973 and converted to Islam, changing his name from Albert-Bernard to El Hadj Omar Bongo.
Perhaps one of Bongo's greatest pieces of luck, oddly enoug+h, was to have come from a minority ethnic group.
This made him perfect for France -- since he had no solid local support base of his own, he would have to rely heavily on French soldiers to prevent coups.
But it also meant that he has had to work tirelessly to keep potentially antagonistic factions happy, building coalitions among minorities as counterweights to the dominant Fangs, and allocating resources judiciously to keep everyone loyal.
Bongo began to prove himself a master puppeteer, deftly tweaking the strings of a helter-skelter of marionettes beneath him -- from the powerful "Bongo barons" plugged into leaks in the budget, through foreign politicians and oil, timber, and manganese interests, to the various leaders in a complex and antsy ethnic patchwork.
"To fight tribalism, we made sure never to favour one of our nine provinces over the others," he went on.
"If there are nine places to fill, we take one from each province. Really, it is a policy of quotas; we push minorities forward -- a bit like what the Americans call positive discrimination. We try to choose the best person for the job, but it is not always possible. If the minorities feel aggrieved, they react, and it can be violent. Once a fabric is torn, it is hard to put it back together."
He rebukes ministers who stuff their cabinets only with their ethnic brethren.
Local politics are so sensitive to ethnicity that Bongo, even if provoked by interviewers, will not mention the ethnic groups by name. He also acts like a village superchief, personally resolving disputes.
When students or trade unions clamour to go on strike, only a face-to-face interview with Bongo, where he might hand out cash, will solve it.
When he is out of town, nobody in Gabon makes important decisions.
"In your country," Bongo told a French interviewer, "numerous barriers prevent ordinary citizens from reaching the president. Not here. I receive ordinary citizens.... some have come hundreds of kilometres to tell me their problems; I don't have the right not to receive them. Often I just give them what I can, a financial donation."
In essence, he learned how to allocate oil money carefully.
To outsiders, this looks like corruption -- which is also what it is. Economics is about who gets what, so economics in Africa's oil zones is, in fact, just politics.
He doesn't see it as sleaze, "Don't speak to me about corruption," he told one interviewer.
"That is not an African word."
Yet he and his family also became -- especially after the 1970s oil boom -- fabulously wealthy.
The French spy Maurice Robert, who became France's ambassador in Libreville in 1979, said that for all his admiration for Bongo, he had to try and protect Bongo against himself.
"Spontaneously generous, he gave too much leeway to his family and close allies in the world of business," Robert said. "This stained his image badly, with accusations of corruption."
Along with his extensive secret services at home and abroad, which mingled with the French foreign intelligence networks, other very curious currents underpinned Bongo's rule and the relationship with France.
Secret societies like Bwiti, which use the drug iboga to conjure up spirits, are central to Gabonese culture. They use cruel, unpleasant, and even dangerous initiation rituals, which instil fierce loyalty.
The writer Pierre Pean describes initiation rites for one secret society: Would-be ministers would travel to Franceville, near Bongo's birthplace, where they would make secret vows. Next, Bongo would wash his feet in a bowl, and the supplicant would drink the contents.
The French secret services knew that white people would not be initiated into these very African, very private power networks.
But they did find that Western fraternal societies -- Freemasons, Rose-Croix (Rosicrucians), or Opus Dei -- which still infest Western politics today -- grew splendidly in Africa's fertile cultural soils, where local traditions had already learned over centuries to accommodate Catholicism, Protestantism, and other foreign beliefs.
Bongo created (and is still today grand master of) the Grand Rite Equatorial, an Africanised hybrid of two French lodges that has members in several countries, and most top Elf officials were Masons. In the former British colonies, Freemasonry is also active, but most are shunned by the Franco-African Masons as Trojan horses for dreaded AngloSaxon influence. A Gabonese professor told me more:
"Freemasonry is about solidarity: you help others. It is also a way to control people, and those in power use it. These people are hard to recognise. Bongo uses Freemasonry; he uses Rose-Croix; he uses Bwiti. With rituals there is fear of the sacred, of mystical forces. They can make you do things to use against you later... If they have your secrets, you will obey. If you have the top 200 men in [this] position -- then you have the country! There are other fears, too. You can prevent a man from earning -- if you are in the opposition, you take Bongo's money. If you are cast out from the system, that is the end for you -- social death. That fear is as effective as violence. In some countries the fear of a brutal ruler is open, but not here. It is not like the death squads in Colombia. It is more subtle."
These fraternal societies supercharged Foccart's networks, which spread under and subverted the facades of official power like tree roots.
Fortified with oil money, they helped Bongo bend the leaders of fractious tribes to his will and give him a purchase on power at all levels of society.
When the formal laws that we are familiar with in the West break down in Africa, solidarity networks replace them _ the only order available amid the disorder of venal, broken nations. (Networks of different kinds also enable certain groups -- Lebanese, Indian, Chinese, or Muslim traders -- to flourish amid Africa's chaos.)
By plugging Gabon into France via oil and Freemasonry, Foccart had created something unusually potent.
These systems also provided African rulers with side channels into French politics, linking up with what the writer Stephen Smith calls "a parallel, shadow structure, more important than the visible, elected structure of the French state."
The invisible oil-fed subterranean networks help explain odd things. Opposition parties never get anywhere: They appear, but instead of falling under bullets or truncheon blows they rise, crest, then sink into irrelevance, as if sapped by a mysterious undertow.
One firebrand opposition leader, Paul Mba Abessole, who roused the masses against Bongo in the early 1990s, is now part of the "presidential majority," a group of wealthy pro-Bongo political parties that one satirical Gabonese newspaper called "a box of cheese, assaulted by mice."
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