reads like a caricature of third-world despotism. During the terrifying reign of the country’s post-independence leader, Macíías Nguema, a third of the population was murdered or forced into exile. The self-proclaimed ‘Unique Miracle’, regarded by observers as ‘Africa’s Pol Pot’, banned the word ‘intellectual’ and had his political opponents garrotted, buried alive and crucified (powerful symbolism in Africa’s only Spanish-speaking Catholic country). Chillingly, on Christmas Eve 1975, Macíías oversaw the execution of 150 alleged coup plotters in the national football stadium while a band played Those Were the Days, his favourite song. Not unfairly, The Sunday Times called Equatorial Guinea “the wickedest place on earth”. The police state that Macíías constructed remained in place after he was overthrown in 1979 by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema, and in 2002, Obiang won another sevenyear term with 97.1% of the vote (down from 99.2% in 1996, although he garnered 103% in some precincts –“setting”, as Der Spiegel wryly put it, “what could well be a democratic record”). Yet Equatorial Guinea is not one of the ‘outposts of tyranny’ identified by Condoleezza Rice in 2004: rather, the president of this oil-rich nation is, according to Rice, a “good friend, and we welcome you”. How deeply depressing that an administration that purports to proselytise freedom should so shamelessly parade its hypocrisy. It ought to send a shiver down the spine to know that this winter, gas from Equatorial Guinea will be heating British homes. “Africa without France is a car without a driver”, Omar Bongo once told Libéération; “France without Africa is a car without petrol”. Nicholas Sarkozy began his first trip to Africa with a visit to the arch-Francophile Mr. Bongo, whom The Cameroon Tribune described as a “symbol of Franççafrique”. This term, coined by Franççois-Xavier Verschave, refers to an unspoken arrangement between the ruling elites of France and her former colonies, which became the subject of intense speculation during ‘Angolagate’ –a scandal that demonstrated, after Verschave, France àà fric [‘fric’ being a slang word for ‘cash’]. Shortly after his election, Sarkozy pledged instead to promote ‘Eurafrique’, but a recent controversial speech delivered at the University of Dakar, Senegal, suggests that French priorities have not altered substantially (“What Africa wants is the same as what France wants”, Sarkozy remarked coercively: “cooperation”). The President’s address ranged from the mawkish (“I have come to tell you that your pain and your suffering are ours and therefore are mine”) to the overtly, at times intentionally, patronising (his appeal to jeunes d’Afriqueand la jeunesse africaineis repeated 29 times) to what was widely, if a little unfairly, viewed as an apologia for French colonial exploitation. Certainly, and perhaps more importantly, there was no contrition over French support for Hutu genocidaires in 1994, and France still refuses to cooperate with the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal. Instead, the speech revelled in the sort of fanciful exoticism that it supposedly set out to refute:

The African peasant, who for thousands of years lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time, rhythmed by the endless repetition of the same gestures and the same words. In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour nor the idea of progress.

While lamentable, this neo-Enlightenment teleology is nonetheless predictable – indeed, his speechwriter owes much to Hegel’s caricature of the African in Reason in History– but it is strange that Sarkozy evoked the phrase ‘African renaissance’, an allusion to the concept popularized by Thabo Mbeki, when his whole thesis is grounded in the idea that Africa has never entered history, has yet to be born a first time, existing previously only in a womb-like nirvana. Sarkozy was duly praised as “a citizen of African” by Mbeki, a leader who continues to bolster Robert Mugabe’s murderous regime in Zimbabwe, and whose government has repeatedly resisted calls for antiretroviral treatment for all HIV-infected South Africans (p.19), demonising the drugs as tools of a neo-colonial conspiracy. There is a graceful serenity – “a tranquil dignity” – to the River Thames in the opening scene of Heart of Darkness that belies the savagery at the book’s core. 150 years after the birth of Joseph Conrad, we are in the midst of a new ‘Scramble for Africa’, and the City of London, “also...one of the dark places of the earth”, is once again a key player, this time as what the Royal African Society describes as “the Laundry of Choice” for capital flight. And the Congo, wracked by intestinal and proxy conflict, is again a scene of unspeakable ‘horror’. The waters which ferried Marlow to Africa were, 150 years before Conrad, the very same that ferried men and women to slavery, to that other continent which suffered for its abundance (remember the cry of the Conquistador: “Este oro comemos!”[We eat this gold!]). On the anniversary of the abolition –that ‘first liberal intervention’ –we must reaffirm the case for a free and fair trade, one which empowers Africans to manage the flow of resources and reverse the tides of history:

Quite simply, genetic memory made metaphor, musical time stretched like currents, songs escaping to ribbon the sky; like a whipped hem of waves laying claim to the shore.

--

(Nii Ayikwei Parkes, ‘ballast V’)

This issue of The Liberal is dedicated to the memory of two late contributors to the magazine: Lord (Tim) Garden, a voice of great clarity and authority on defence and military matters; and Michael Hamburger, one of Europe’s foremost poets, translators and critics, whose final published review appears on p.42.

6 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007
L E TTE RS

RENOVATION, NOT REVOLUTION

THE WRATH OF CLEGG

Dear Sir,

Dear Sir,

In his excellent article on the February Revolution (‘From Autocracy to Anarchy’, April/May 2007), Sergey Roy contends that “There cannot be a genuine revolution without something called a ‘revolutionary situation’, encapsulated in the simple formula: ‘The ruling classes can no longer rule, while the lower classes can no longer go on living as they do’”. To avoid this type of revolutionary situation, the macroeconomic argument goes, Russia quite simply needs to renovate itself continually: to improve and expand all of its aging facilities and services to meet the needs of its population, and hence to increase its productivity, security and health. The considerable finance and investment that is necessary to this process can only be achieved in a situation where supplies of capital and labour are predictable – that is, in a nonrevolutionary situation. That the macroeconomic outlook is the most anti-revolutionary in living memory is the pride of Russia’s ‘ruling classes’ today. The truly revolutionary threat to the ‘ruling classes’ is on the micro level. Unpredictable health, security, pricing and employment afflict much of Russia’s ‘lower classes’ – and here the ‘lower classes’ include Politkovskaya and Litvinenko. Many of these problems can be ascribed not to some chink in Russia’s macroeconomic armour, but to the anarchic behavioral patterns of individuals and local organisations, to a life lived with little long-term concern for the balance sheet. The major struggles to be waged in Russia’s immediate future will come not from revolutions, but from forceful attempts to regulate the accumulation of minor instabilities that form a seemingly inevitable part of life in countries so huge and diverse.

NICHOLAS RICE Moscow LETTEROFTHEQUARTER

Ming Campbell, Chris Rennard and I are all excoriated in Simon Kovar’s somewhat breathless view that the Liberal Democrats are going to the dogs (‘The Politics of Coalition’, April/May 2007). But his argument is only coherent if you believe the spurious allegations he makes. To suggest, for instance, that I am altering the stance of the Liberal Democrats on the vital issue of asylum policy is bizarre. I have long campaigned for the rights of asylum seekers, previously in the East Midlands as an MEP, and now in Sheffield as a local MP. I have repeatedly harangued the Government on the senseless cruelty it inflicts on thousands of destitute asylum seekers –the very first question I ever asked of the Home Secretary as Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman was on the paltry support provided to applicants. I work closely with campaign groups on the issue, and have forcefully promoted our party’s policy of giving asylum seekers awaiting decisions on their applications the right to work in Britain. Perhaps Mr Kovar is referring to my mockery of the Government’s failure to meet its own self-imposed target of reaching a ‘tipping point’, at which more asylum seekers are deported than make applications. If so, he is perhaps unaware that one of the greatest cruelties of the asylum system is precisely its incompetence which has left thousands in legal limbo for years on end. I make no apology for attacking Home Office incompetence because I strongly believe a fair asylum system is only possible if it is an efficient asylum system. But then again, why let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

NICK CLEGG MP

Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman London

Letters should be addressed to the editor and sent either electronically to letters@ theliberal.co.uk or in hard copy to Liberal letters, 208210a High Road, East Finchley, London, N2 9AY. Correspondence may be edited for length and clarity. Each issue a different book is on offer for the best letter. Available for Winter 2007:

– Anna Politkovskaya’s A Russian Diary, translated by Arch Tait with a foreword by Jon Snow (Harvill Secker, RRP £17.99). – A new edition of Franz Kafka’s Züürau Aphorisms, with an introduction and afterword by Roberto Calasso (Harvill Secker, RRP £10).

Please specify your preferred title.

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 7