Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French

heading for a calamitous civil war.
    For a brief time, Abacha’s ministers had attempted conciliation, offering concessions that sounded more generous in the headlines than in the newspaper stories beneath them. One of these was an offer to release Abiola if only he would agree to renounce his mandate, not meet publicly with supporters and forswear overseas travel. Abiola’s fiery senior wife, Kudirat, was the first to publicly scoff at the proposal, not even allowing it to get a full run in the afternoon newspapers before announcing that her husband would accept nothing of the sort.
    As dangerous as the moment seemed, this kind of defiant spunk filled me with hope for Nigeria, indeed for all of Africa. According to widely held theory, civil society is supposed to flourish only in relatively prosperous countries. Democracy, in turn, is said to survive only in places where there is a vibrant civil society and a large middle class. The early 1990s had already seen countries like Mali, Benin and Congo-Brazzaville defy this logic, however briefly in Brazzaville’s case. They had each “gone democratic” as a result of citizens’ uprisings, unsupported and almost unnoticed by the outside world.
    Western diplomats had long spoken patronizingly about Africa and about Africans, sometimes doubting aloud, as French president Jacques Chirac often did, if they were “ready” for democracy. But except for South Africa, which caught the world’s imagination because of the presence of white people and large Western investments, whenever Africans had attempted to answer in the affirmative, through their actions, the West had remained silent and unmoved. Now it was the turn of Nigeria, Africa’s demographic giant, to try to break the mold, but the reactions of the outside world were much the same. Apart from muffled protests about the annulment of Abiola’s election, there had been little more than hand-wringing over whether or not to impose sanctions on the Abacha regime.
    About half of Nigeria’s oil was exported to the United States, where the country’s so-called Bonny Crude was prized for its “sweetness,” or lack of polluting sulfur, which made it ideal for gasoline production. Washington had long railed against Muammar al-Qaddafi and had waged a war against Saddam Hussein, but as long as oil continued to flow, seriously chastising Abacha for aborting Africa’s biggest experiment with democracy was never seriously considered.
    After the “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia in 1993, the United States had resolved that helping Africa was not worth another American life. Now, Washington’s timid response to the Nigerian military’s hijacking of the democratic process was sending the message that Africa wasn’t worth a few pennies’ rise in the price of American gasoline, either. In fact, for all their gilded rhetoric about democracy and human rights, the actions of the United States, France and Britain had long shown a pronounced preference for the devils they knew well in Africa—Abacha, Mobutu, the apartheid system in South Africa— over the untidiness of their democratic opponents.
    In Nigeria, the West was slow to realize the full extent of the evil it had, in effect, endorsed. Western diplomats would often say that Abacha was preferable to some junior officers coming in and taking over, but they had never stopped to ask themselves the right question in the first place: What can we do to help democracy prevail?
    I began to realize just how awful things could be under Abacha that first week in Nigeria, and it was hardly a case of prescience. To my amazement, the executive floor of the Sheraton was swarming with pro-democracy activists, some of whom were hiding out there, while others, including the opposition press, merely came to pick up the latest tidbits on opposition strategy. Abiola’s top aide, Fred Eno, and I had eaten breakfast together a couple of times that week, but he was constantly interrupted by