Finding West Africa's past to make sense of the present

Adéwálé Májà-Pearce's West African odyssey Shine Your Eye is something of a slow burner. The title is a pidgin phrase, an advice to be careful, perhaps the equivalent of "watch your step". Our author confronts a number of challenges as he sets off from Nigeria to traverse Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso and finally Niger.

The first part of his journey takes the road from Nigeria west along the seaboard to Senegal, a stretch once known as the Slave Coast. Before leaving Nigeria, Májà-Pearce visits the Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum, housed in a building where slaves, mostly war captives and criminals, were crammed in, with about 40 men, women and children locked up in three-metre square room, pending the arrival of the next slave ship to transport the enslaved across the Atlantic to the New World.

Abass was enslaved himself; and shipped to Brazil before returning to Africa as a free man at the behest of his "master", who made him his business partner. Abass proceeded to build "barracoon" cells for intended slaves pending transportation. He made a fortune.

Májà-Pearce comments: "Africans generally have yet to acknowledge their complicity in the 426-year-long Atlantic Slave Trade (1441 - 1867)." He goes on to quote Olabiyi Babalola Joseph Yai, a history professor and for years Benin's permanent representative to UNESCO: Benin "is still a country divided between the families of the enslaved and the slave traders. But the elite don't want to talk about what happened here."

It is a sobering start to a book which casts its eye over the past and present of this extraordinary region.

Crossing borders

The journey our author undertook repeated his extensive travels in the 15 countries of the West African sub-region over three decades working for the London-based magazine Index on Censorship.

In the past he travelled on a UK passport, requiring pre-arrival visas, but he subsequently acquired a Nigerian passport thanks to his father's nationality, which allowed him free passage across the area of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

The hitch is that immigration officers invariably require a "dash" or bribe to supplement their meagre salaries - what economists call an "implicit tax".

Májà-Pearce observes that there is a clear difference between the way anglophone and francophone immigration officials deal with those trying to enter their countries. The former are "almost apologetic" as they extract bribes, while the later are "nakedly aggressive" and "even insolent" in their approach. He recalls his overnight stay in a Togolese jail when he met an immigration officer who took exception to his passport photo and to the absence of a financial inducement to overlook those concerns.

Views of atrocities past

When our author reaches Liberia and Sierra Leone, his narrative turns to the late 1980s and early 90s and the ghastly, bloody events of the various struggles for power. As he writes, the carnage that unfolded involved, unforgivably, "children as young as eight years old recruited to join battle with trained soldiers".

Májà-Pearce turns his attention to a lesser-known, terrifying person: one Joshua Milton Blahyi, also known as General Butt Naked. Blahyi and his troops went into battle wearing just shoes and magic charms, believing their state of undress would make them immune to bullets.

Májà-Pearce describes it as "incredible", that "not a single Liberian warlord was ever tried - much less punished..."

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor was charged, and found guilty, only for crimes in Sierra Leone, during that country's civil war. For those crimes he is currently serving a 50-year sentence in a UK prison.

A radical in Cameroo

Incidents that Májà-Pearce highlights from 20th century francophone West Africa are equally steeped in violence and bloodshed.

He begins the second part of his book with look back at the way France "granted independence" to its African colonies. He writes: "Where Britain took a laissez-faire attitude by creating 'a class with a vested interest in co-operation'... France took no risks in its anxiety to maintain its global grip... The key was the so-called co-operation agreement that gave France continued control over the resources of the territories..."

One of the first countries to gain independence thus was Cameroon, and central to Cameroon's story is Ruben Um Nyobè, the charismatic leader of the Union des Populations du Cameroun who, as Májà-Pearce comments, "shared Sékou Touré's view that a post-colonial future dominated by Paris would be no better than colonialism itself: 'La colonisation,' um Nyobè argued, 'c'est esclavage'." Colonisation is slavery.

Nyobè was captured and killed in 1958, and a follower, Félix-Roland Moumié, was poisoned in Geneva by the French secret services while President de Gaulle unleashed 300 French officers and five battalions of mostly African troops in an all-out war, Májà-Pearce says.

Military rule returns

The final leg of his journey takes him to the Sahel and into the present day. Extremist groups and their roadside bombs, mortars, landmines, weapons, drug and human trafficking, as well as the ransoming of captives, are endemic.

The Sahel is also a region where military figures, capitalising on mass disenchantment with civilian governments, have led coups to seize the reins of power. Arguably the most famous of this new generation of soldier-leaders is Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso, who consciously models himself on the radical, "anti-colonial" military rulers of the past.

"From the beginning," Májà-Pearce writes, "Traoré made it clear that he was following the path laid out by his slain predecessor, the equally youthful - and equally charismatic - Thomas Sankara..."

Clearly, Májà-Pearce sees something arresting in Traoré's vision and the policies he has introduced, such as free education up to and including university level; autonomous water points for clean drinking water; and focusing on agriculture.

But that is not to suggest that the author has nothing to say about Traoré's authoritarianism, and that of military rule in general. In the last passage before the book's epilogue he writes: "It is a symptom of sub-Saharan Africa's desperate condition that Traoré is feted as the saviour we desperately crave, having so quickly forgotten why we temporarily succeeded in ridding ourselves of the soldiers who turned us into second class citizens in our own countries.

"But then, alas, it seems that we need it; we need to be kicked up the backside by a small piki (to use the local patois) in military uniform before we finally wake up to the pitiful condition we find ourselves in, which is akin to slavery, but which we have colluded in realising, if only we will take responsibility."