Castigation of the Raj

 

A review of Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, Mariner Books, NYC, 2024

 

Theroux jumps back in time to take the actual sojourn of Eric Blair, later known by his pen name of George Orwell, in Burma in the 1920s and turn it into a novel.  Blair was a policeman for Britian, the imperial power of the country.  Theroux grafts onto the facts of Blair’s five years there to create a novel. Perhaps some of the internal machinations - places, people, and introspection - of the sojourn are drawn from records of the era.  But to his credit, Theroux exercises literary license in compiling a gripping and insightful novel.

Let there be no mistake this book is an indictment of the British Raj, of British rule in Asia.  Blair is a willing pawn in the oppressive imperial rule. Yet throughout, in his mind he questions most everything about his and his government’s presence in the Asian backwater.  The book tracks Blair’s thinking, his reactions, his rejections, his muses, his lusts, and his memories as the story progresses. Needless to say, Blair is a bundle of contradictions.  As with all of Theroux’s characters in his many books, no one is pure. All characters are complicated, and many are venal. That is certainly true in this story.  Theroux never seems to find many redeeming features in the people he creates.  This harsh criticism of people lends veracity to the story, but makes a reader wonder if the world is really that bleak?

There is no real plot to this book. It just tracks the five years that Blair spent in Burma. The reader wonders if the man will ever adjust or quit, but that is about it for suspense. 

Above criticism notwithstanding, I enjoyed the book. It is a well written page turner. It elucidates in fictional form a period in George Orwell’s life that helped shape his antiauthoritarian views that surfaced years later in Animal Farm and 1984.  More than that it cast a realistic perspective on British classism, racism and imperialism. We all need to learn from the past.

Terrific history of Kenya's Coast

 

A review of Kenya’s Swahili Coast – From the Roman Empire to 1888 by Judy Aldrick, Old Africa books, 2024.

This book provides a general overview of centuries of the politics and culture of Africa’s east coast. It is quite readable. Various sections cover key events, rulers, wars, squabbles, invaders, explorers, missionaries, and personalities. The sum is a good appreciation of what happened on the coast and how it evolved, prospered, and declined, until the end of the 19^th century. 

The east African coast was known to the outside world – Romans and Chinese – thousands of years ago. However, it became a more active trading destination during the spread of Islam. Various independent city states peopled by a polyglot of persons from Arabia, India, and Africa, who became known as the Swahili people, traded slaves, ivory, grain, mangrove poles and other products to and from Arabia and the Indian sub-continent via the annual change in the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean.  The Swahili towns were trading entrepôts, they did not control the hinterland.  Little written has descended from this era, but ruins and oral stories indicate well-developed self-contained societies.

All that changed with the arrival of the Portuguese beginning with Vasco Da Gama in 1488. Better ships and weaponry enabled the European invaders to assert control of the coast. Stark evidence of Portuguese power is Fort Jesus in Mombasa. Completed in 1593 this bastion still dominates Mombasa’s old harbor.  Portuguese fortunes all along the coast waxed and waned as its garrisons struggled to govern the various towns and control trade with the east.

As Portuguese sea power gave way to Dutch and English prominence, its political control of the coast passed to Arab potentates from Oman and Zanzibar. In turn, the succession of Sultans often resorted to indirect rule, relying on local families to govern coastal entities.  The Mazrui family of Mombasa, for example, produced 10 successive liwalis (governors) who effectively controlled the key city for a hundred years.

Yet, as this book reports, never was everything peaceful and happy.  Squabbles, intrigue, fighting, ruling family dynamics, competition between the Swahili towns, loyalty to contesting overlords or protecting powers, economic fortunes – especially the devastating impact of the elimination of slavery – all combined to render the scene changing and complex.  Author Aldrick delves into this morass of confusion and provides a coherent compendium of key events and personages.

Comment: I lived in Mombasa for three years and got to know the author, and the modern city, and some of the past, but this book has many revelations. I enjoyed the vignettes about individuals.  I had not realized there were so many quasi-independent Swahili towns with their own liwalis.  Similarly, I learned that many neglected settlements like those on Pate Island were once important players.

This book is a must read for those interested in Kenya’s history. It provides a long-needed layman’s look at the storied past of the coast. 

   

 

Loss, Pain and Mystery in Uganda

 

A review of The Atlas of Forgotten Places by Jenny D. Williams, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2017

 

This intriguing novel revolves around the Lord’s Resistance Army, the movement led by rebel warlord/messianic leader Joseph Kony that terrorized northern Uganda for decades beginning in the 1980s.  The author set her story and her characters accurately in the context of wariness and suspicion that typified the Acholi homeland in 2006, just after the fighting migrated to Sudan and the Congo. The Acholi people were traumatized by conflict. All were victims of one sort or another. Especially vulnerable were returnees, those who had escaped from the LRA.  Back home, they lived with the stigma of mistrust.  Rose, the best drawn character in this story, is one of those folks. She harbors memories, fears and secrets, which leak out slowly as the plot progresses.

The basic plot, however, involves the disappearance of Lily, a young American woman. Her aunt Sabine comes to Uganda to find her.  Has Lily simply disappeared or been taken against her will?  Sabine has lots of baggage from her earlier work in Africa, even in Uganda. Sabine investigates, perseveres, enlists others to help, and along the way confronts her own demons.  After-the-fact, the plot seems contrived, but it does push the tale along. There are several nice, unexpected twists as the story comes to fruition.

Author Williams’ strengths are in her descriptions of Acholi life and the introspections of her characters as they confront the obstacles before them.  

Readers will undoubtedly come away with improved knowledge of the trauma that Ugandans experienced. The personalization of that trauma via the characters of this story adds immeasurably to the impact of such understanding.

Disclaimer: As readers of this blog know I too am an author. Two of my books, The Last Rhino and Finding Kony, also deal with the predations of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the region. I commend Ms. Williams for getting it right in penning a significant contribution for outside comprehension of the terrible – and continuing - pains that afflict the Acholi people.

  

Opinion, Criticism and Satire

 

A review of How to Write About Africa – Collected Works by Binyavanga Wainaina, One World, New York, 2022.

 

Kenyan writer Wainaina is a puzzle. Outspoken, even outrageous, his métier is criticism and sarcasm. This is shown both in his fiction and his essays, which share this tome.  Wainaina spares no quarter in portraying excess human foibles, including greed or misplaced humanitarianism.  His satire bites deep and certainly reflects an obsession with pointing out erroneous western perceptions about Africa and Africans.  The title of the book comes from an early essay to that effect. Yet, Wainaina is an equal opportunity critic in that he also diatribes against the motivations of fellow Africans in playing to western stereotypes or in their relations with each other.  He delights in showing warts and all.  His characters are very human.

The fiction pieces allow the author to develop realistic but purposely overdrawn characters. I liked Ships in High Transit about tourists at the coast being bamboozled by folks pretending to be Maasai. Real truths about both sides emerge.  Equally entertaining is An Affair to Disremember. It is sort of a sad story about lives and expectations gone awry. 

Most telling of the essays is Beyond River Yei which is a report of a sojourn in South Sudan as part of an effort to eradicate sleeping sickness. In that piece Wainaina demonstrates legitimate chops as a feature writer.

Readers won’t want to miss key satires of How to Be a Dictator and the title piece How to Write about Africa.

Throughout the collection there is plenty for a reader to think about, muddle over, agree with, reject, or object to. That, in fact, is the author’s goal.  And, it is well accomplished.  

Coda: Nakuru born son of a Kikuyu father and a Ugandan Tutsi mother, after secondary school Binyavanga fled to South Africa where he began his writing career, and came out. Subsequently, he returned to Kenya to rattle cages there via Kiwani?, a magazine he published. Sadly, Wainaina died young in 2019.

Folly in Accra

 

Turquoise – Three Years in Ghana: A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence Grobel, HMH Press, 2022.

This is a candid memoir. I was offput by revelations of sex and drugs in initial chapters but reading on found that the totality of the chapters – not really chapters but sequential anecdotes or observations – began to build a comprehensive picture of the Ghana that Grobel experienced.  It was indeed a place that operated by its own set of confusing cultural constraints. Some were legacies of traditional village life, but others were mechanisms that modern Ghanaians developed to cope with each other within a corrupt system where getting ahead was the principal objective.  Sex, graft, nepotism, fatalism, humor, relationships, obligations, misunderstandings, all got mixed up in the quests of Grobel’s subjects: first to survive and then to thrive.

Author Grobel was a full participant in the scene around him and acute observer of it. His sketches of life and people in his life in Accra are trenchant. Some chapters are connected in a desultory manner, others stand alone.  Grobel was acutely aware of his foreignness and how that figured into how people saw and dealt with him and how he dealt with them.  He was generally sympathetic to Ghanaians but scathing regarding diplomats and outside do-gooders.  During his years in Ghana Grobel developed lasting friendships; one with a young man named Atar and another with girlfriend Akua. The saga of their interactions tracks throughout the book.

The overall impact of the memoir is to paint Ghana and Ghanaians in unvarnished terms. Despite Grobel’s cynicism, a genuine affection for Ghana and its people shines through.

Folly and Madness in the Congo

 

 

A review of The Last Expedition – Stanley’s Mad Journey through the Congo by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson, W. W. Norton, NY, 2005.

 The popular facts - In 1886 word began to spread that Emin Pasha, a German national who was the governor of Equatoria Province of Egyptian Sudan, was under siege by Mahdi jihadists who in 1885 had executed British Governor General Charles Gordon and stuck his head on a pole in Khartoum. The British public was outraged by this atrocity so rallied to support the relief of Gordon’s last remaining lieutenant.  Because the Mahdists controlled the Nile, an overland expedition was conceived designed to resupply Emin Pasha and to offer him an escape from the marauding jihadists. The best-known explorer of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley, was designated to lead the expedition.

It began to go wrong from the beginning.  The major decision that backfired was Stanley’s bullheaded determination to approach Equatoria from the west, that is starting at the Atlantic Ocean. The shorter alternative was from the east along the slave caravan trails from Zanzibar.  Stanley’s iron will prevailed and the column of nearly a thousand men – nine Europeans, some Sudanese soldiers, some Somali fighters and hundreds of Zanzibari porters, augmented by hundreds of African carriers – both hired and enslaved – began the 2000-mile journey from the mouth of the Congo River, up the river and its Aruwimi tributary. They hacked through hundreds of miles of oppressive, dank, dark, wet jungle to Lake Albert. Beginning in March 1887, they sought to transport hundreds of tons of ammunition, weaponry, and supplies as well as an eighty-foot-long metal boat. Materiel was divided into sixty-pound loads carried by men. Those who survived the rigors of the journey finally arrived at the Lake in December 1887.

The going was hell. Rivers became impassable. The Ituri jungle was impenetrable, and native tribes, including pygmies, cannibals, and indigenous slavers, were hostile. Harassment and conflict plagued the column. Food ran out and little was available. Men starved, were wounded, weakened, and became susceptible to disease. Hundreds died. Stanley badgered and berated his officers. He brutalized slackers and laggards, and had thieves and deserters hung. Given the almost insurmountable obstacles, it is amazing that the column crept onwards, seemingly empowered by Stanley’s unbending will.

Upon finally reaching Lake Albert, the southernmost part of Equatoria, Stanley and Emin Pasha finally met.  Each privately recognized the irony of Pasha rescuing Stanley rather than the other way around.  However, Pasha exercised diminishing control over his Egyptian troops who, at first, refused to believe that their sovereign the Khedive of Egypt had abandoned them.  Secondly, they opted to rebel against Pasha and his so-called savior Stanley. Pasha was a weak, indecisive administrator and while he dithered, Stanley returned into the forest to reclaim what was left of his rear column and supplies. That took a year!

Finally, back at Lake Albert Stanley set a deadline and Pasha realized he had no option. He had to leave. Another huge column set out for Zanzibar. This column moved excruciatingly slowly as well but did not suffer from the horrors of the jungle. Twelve hundred miles later on December 4, 1889, they arrived at Bagamoyo, on the Indian Ocean coast across from Zanzibar Island.  There during a joyful welcoming dinner celebration, Emin Pasha unwittingly stepped out of a second story window and smashed his head on the stones below. (Pasha survived but never left Africa). Stanley, who had more than enough of the dithering gentle soul, left him and returned to a tumultuous reception in England. 

Reality – The authors of this book recount the facts of the expedition but reveal the maneuvering, the backbiting, the antagonisms, the politics, the scheming, the betrayals, the bravery, the motives, the competence, the incompetence, and the character of all involved. The first narrative of the expedition was Stanley’s best seller In Darkest Africa. In that book Stanley painted himself as hero and protagonist without peers. In fact, Stanley was aloof, selfish, and haunted by his humble origins. He was motivated by the prospects for fame and fortune. He focused on results. He had no friends or colleagues on the expedition, only subordinates.

Later publications of letters, diaries and memoirs by his British companions cast considerable doubt on Stanley’s version of events, especially his leadership and management styles. The authors of the book used the various accounts of the expedition throughout the saga to paint an authentic portrait of the expedition, of its people, of the hardships, and of the decisions made and not made.  Especially revealing are the roles that Stanley’s British subordinates played. Indeed, without them – and Stanley gave them little credit in his opus – the expedition would not have survived.  Major Barttelot, William Bonny, James Jameson, Arthur Jephson, Dr. Parke, Lt. Stairs, Herbert Ward, and even notorious Arab slaver Tippu Tib, all played important roles in the expedition’s various fortunes.  Consequently, The Last Expedition provides contemporary readers with an accurate recitation of the reality of the expedition to rescue Emin Pasha. It is terrific readable history!

Afterword – Readers will note various citations, not just from Stanley, but from others mentioned above, employed to underline points in the text. Indeed, as the authors later explain, in the years after the expedition was completed, the contrasting points of view provided fodder for Britian’s popular press. The sanctimonious anti-Stanley hoopla certainly tarnished his reputation but could not refute the fact that he was the 19^th century’s most intrepid explorer.  

Murder in Central Africa

 

A review of The Soul Murderer by Timothy Lenderking. 

This novel set in a fictious country that closely resembles Equatorial Guinea tells an embellished tale of men with fictious names who were involved in a murder inside the U.S. embassy. The real event happened in 1971 after which principal officer Alfred Erdos was convicted of stabbing to death his administrative assistant, Donald Leahy. Author Lenderking’s telling of the story tracks the facts even though he goes way beyond them to enhance the plot, fill in backgrounds of the victim and murderer and their families, plus spin new elements into the turbid and never completely understood saga. The author adds twists and turns to the event – as if it weren’t sensational enough on its merits – that transform a good foreign service story into an interesting novel. It is worth a read. 

Wonderous Feet, Remarkable Journey!

 

A review of Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gapah, Simon Shuster, NY.

 

This imaginative and intriguing novel relates tales from the group of Africans who accompanied and/or were employed by Dr. David Livingstone on his final voyage into central Africa.  Livingstone died while on the journey. His team debated before deciding to carry his body, his maps, and papers fifteen hundred miles across forbidding terrain to the coast so that everything, especially the corpse, could be returned to England.

The novel is written in the voices of Livingstone’s companions. First his cook Halima, who cynically observes all around her, their foibles and motives. Secondly, the pious Jacob Wainright who struggles between leadership, Christian morality, and his own failings. Truly, these voices see Africa from their own perspective, and with great insight.  The mystery that is never satisfactorily unraveled is why? Why cart a desiccated corpse for months? Plausible explanations are offered as to why this disparate group would undertake such an arduous journey – loyalty, devotion to the doctor, fear, superstition, Christian faith, confidence in each other – but there is no definitive summation, just the complexities of what they did.

The plot aside, the novel offers a realistic glimpse of Africa in the latter part of the Nineteenth century. The slave trade was ever present. Its terror loomed over the land. Territories and villages were controlled by warlords or chiefs.  Negotiations were necessary for all travel, and no one could be hurried. The group dynamics of the bearers are intrinsic to the story.  The author invents marvelous scenarios of how they coped with the task before them and with each other.   

Author Gapah, a Zimbabwean, has done a remarkable job of weaving together the strands of known history with the fictional reality of how they did it. Out of Darkness, Shining Light is an impressive read.    

Kudos for Finding Kony

 

Robert Gribbin, Finding Kony: A Novel.  A review by Alan G. Johnston.  Note:  both Robert Gribbin and Alan Johnston were in the Peace Corps group that arrived in Kenya in October 1968.  They both spent many years in Africa.

 

On March 5, 2012, a U.S.-based NGO, Invisible Children, Inc., released a short documentary film called Kony 2012.  The intent of the film, meant for world-wide distribution, was to make the infamous Ugandan warlord, Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), so famous that he couldn’t hide.  The goal was to have him arrested and brought to justice by the end of 2012. The film quickly went viral, garnering more than 100 million views and becoming the most “liked” video on YouTube.

The film highlights the announcement by Barack Obama in October 2011 that the U.S. would be sending 100 Special Forces military advisors to assist the Ugandan Defense Force in the search for Kony.  The African Union quickly authorized a force of 5,000 military from Uganda, D.R. Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan to carry out the hunt for Kony, with communications, intelligence, and logistics support from the U.S. advisors. By this time, Kony and his LRA had fled from Uganda to somewhere in Central Africa.

In the end, the hunt proved futile, although the LRA as a fighting force was greatly diminished.  By April 2017 the United States concluded that the LRA no longer posed a threat to Uganda and the Special Forces were withdrawn.  This is where Robert Gribbin and his new novel, Finding Kony, steps in.  He calls on his protagonist, freelance journalist Paul Simmons, to take over the search.  Gribbin calls on his lengthy experience throughout Central Africa to provide an authentic context for this dangerous adventure.  We have met Simmons before as he risked his lifetime after time pursuing stories in South Sudan during a civil war (in Serpent of the Nile).  He is a Black American former Peace Corps Volunteer and now freelance journalist based in Mombasa, Kenya.  Once again, he gets himself into some very tricky positions interviewing victims of LRA atrocities in Uganda in search of hints as to how to find Kony. He eventually heads off first to Chad and then by land through Sudan into Central Africa, illegally crossing more than one border, in his search to find and interview Kony to find out what Kony has to say about his goals and motivations.

Gribbin is particularly adept at providing a realistic and convincing picture of the complex environment of embassies, customs and immigration agencies, UN organizations, peace-keeping forces, NGOs, traditional leaders, and para-military groups.  It is clear that Gribbin has visited refugee camps and knows his way around the isolated and dusty towns and villages through which his fictional journalist must track his quarry.

This is a tale of adventure intertwined with real world humanitarian issues and the quest for justice.  The International Criminal Court has indicted Kony for crimes against humanity.  Is that case any closer to being resolved?

4/17/2023

 

Finding Kony is here!

 I am pleased to announce the publication of my newest novel. It is entitled Finding Kony. Obviously, for folks knowledgeable about Africa, it is a story about Joseph Kony, the now long-missing messianic leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Under Kony's leadership the LRA arose in the mid-1980s to challenge Museveni's takeover of the Acholi homeland in northern Uganda. Channeling spirits, Kony appealed both to Acholi mysticism as well as their fear of Museveni's army to rally thousands to his cause. Despite initial success, LRA fortunes soon waned. Consequently, it turned to terrorism - violence against civilians, mutilations, pillaging homesteads, and kidnapping of children compelling them to become fighters or sexual slaves. Such actions soiled the LRA in the eyes of the world and it became a pariah. Yet it remained a fearful opponent.

After resolution of the civil war in neighboring Sudan in 2005, the LRA fled west from Uganda into desolate regions of southern Sudan, the Congo and the Central African Republic.  A military force from affected states joined by the United States carried the fight to those regions. Over the years under pressure the LRA wasted away and became defunct, but Kony, who had been indicted by the International Criminal Court, was never apprehended. He is still out there.   

This is the framework for my novel. My hero, Paul Simmons, a freelance journalist based in Kenya, pursues a quest to find Kony, and to interview him. Along the way he learns much about Kony, about the LRA, its victims, and its adherents. Complementing Paul's efforts is a parallel plot of murders in contemporary Uganda. It all eventually comes together even as Paul heads into the wilds of western Sudan on the trail of the elusive general.

The book is available from Amazon.com in both ebook and paperback.  Enjoy

Opportunity: If any readers of this blog volunteer to write and post a review of the book on Amazon or elsewhere, let me know in the comment section below and I'll send you a copy.

 

Explorers' Trials and Tribulations in the Search for the Nile

 

River of the Gods – Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile, by Candice Millard, Doubleday, NY, 2022.

 

River of the Gods is an in-depth investigation into the lives and psyches of explorers Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.  The author did an astonishing amount of research and artfully employs quotations and citations from hundreds of letters, journals, and official records from the era.  The sheer amount of material available gives evidence to a pre-electronic culture where people wrote things down.

The two protagonists in this epic were men of strong views and towering egos. They connected first in an effort to explore the Horn of Africa. Failures and misunderstandings there festered for years and resurfaced later when the two joined to find the source of the Nile. Departing from Zanzibar with a huge caravan of porters, they headed into the interior of what is now Tanzania. Their safari was rife with obstacles, bad weather, insects, desertions, hostility from indigenous tribes, sickness, and inadequate supplies. Once on the shores of Lake Tanganyika they were determined to prove that it had a northern outlet which was the Nile.  They were unable to make that determination. Exhausted in spirit and body, and out of supplies they began the trek back to the coast.  While Burton lay ill, Speke mounted a trek to a northern lake.  He subsequently spotted Lake Victoria, which he named in honor of his queen, and proclaimed it the source of the Nile.

Returning to England the two bickered openly about the facts. Ultimately Speke was funded for a second expedition to determine the truth. Accompanied by James Grant he did circle Lake Victoria and verified that the Nile exited from it.  Even so, Burton and Speke’s personalities and standing in society continued to clash leading to a planned public debate in England on the issues. However, on the day prior to the encounter, Speke died in a hunting accident.

The value of this book is not so much its recitation of the facts of the explorers’ journeys, which have been well described elsewhere over the years, but in the in depth look at the personalities of the two men – their foibles, passions, strengths, and prejudices.  It is a fascinating study.

I have, however, several quibbles with the book. First the cover contains a photograph of Murchinson Falls on the Nile, a sight that neither Burton nor Speke ever saw.  Why imply that they did? Secondly, the author refers throughout to the lake as Lake Victoria Nyanza without noting that ‘Nyanza’ is a local term for lake. So, Lake Victoria Nyanza is ‘Lake Victoria Lake.’  Finally, she neglected to tell the after-the-fact story that the British colonial government erected a statue of Speke overlooking Owen Falls, where the Nile begins, with a plaque stating that Speke was the first man to ever see that sight. Shortly after independence the new Ugandan government dismantled the monument noting that Ugandans had been seeing the sight for centuries.

My quibbles aside, this is a book worth reading.

 

Abduction in the Serengeti

 

A review of The Lioness by Chris Bohjalian, Doubleday, NY, 2022

 

This novel is a thriller with an ostensibly simple plot. A group of movie stars is kidnapped while on safari in the Serengeti in 1964.  Alternating between flashbacks (mostly boring) to key moments in their lives, the protagonists struggle with their captors against the backdrop of vicious wild animals. Death lurks on all sides – from ruthless Russian captors or leopards, snakes, or hyenas. Plenty of people die.

The Africa setting, that is descriptions of the game reserve park are accurate, but geography is way off – equating an easy drive, for example, from the Serengeti to Albertville, Congo. Oops! that is hundreds of miles distant and there is a huge lake in the way.  The motive for kidnapping slowly leaks out as the novel moves forward. It is implausible, but it does keep the tale going. Afterall this is fiction.

The author inaccurately described a wrecked land rover when one character insists that another roll up the windows, so the dead inside won’t be eaten by scavengers.  Land rovers in the 1960s all had sliding windows, not roll-ups.  Similarly, the author describes a leopard attack that probably could never occur. But again, cut him some slack. It is fiction.

As improbably as the story is, I enjoyed the novel.

Election Saga, Bangui

 

I wrote this piece in December 2020 prompted by what had been going on during the past few weeks in America.  I submitted it to the Foreign Service Journal. It was finally published in the June 2022 edition as a Reflections piece.  

Election Saga, Bangui

     Election day in the Central African Republic in 1993 was busy. I sent all embassy personnel hither and yon as election observers. I too made the rounds of voting precincts in Bangui.

    Voters lined up and waited patiently for their turn. They then marked their ballot and stuffed into the box, always accompanied by a resounding “a voté”  - by a nearby poll watcher. Everything went smoothly.

    After closing the precinct officials and party poll watchers hovered around the counting table to ensure that ballots were correctly tabulated. Then the box was sealed and transported to the Supreme Court for the final official tally. Nonetheless, it quickly became apparent that incumbent President Andre Kolingba was destined to lose.

     Two days later, at mid-morning, I got a phone call at the office from Chief Justice Edouard Frank. “Ambassador,” he said, “They are going to kill me, if I start the count.”

    Whoa! I thought. “Sit tight, I’ll be right over,” I replied.

    There was too much at stake for the nation and for the process to let it collapse at the end.  I told my driver Robert to put on all the flags, and we drove to the Supreme Court. I found Justice Frank in his office. He was clearly shaken by the threat, emanating, he avowed from the presidency; but after calming down he realized his duty.

   With my support he agreed to go forward. So he and I, followed by the other justices, all in their judicial robes, walked across the courtyard to the court chamber. I took a front row seat, and the process of counting began. It proceeded without interference.

   Meanwhile I contacted my German and French colleagues. At least one of us was present for the entire count.  Kolingba came in fourth. (I was later told by a contact in the presidency that our presence in the court room had, indeed, caused a plan to disrupt the proceedings to abort.)

     However, President Kolingba, who had obviously been misled by his entourage as to his popularity, was not yet done.  That afternoon he emptied the prisons, apparently in hope to cause civil unrest so that he could declare martial law and nullify the election.

     A key part of this plan was to release former President Jean Bedel Bokassa who was president from 1966 to 1976, declared himself Emperor Bokassa I and ruled as such until 1979. Kolingba thought that the people might either rise up to support the aging mentally diminished monarch or revolt against him.  Either way, it could result in martial law.

     There were no uprisings, however. The city remained tranquil while thousands of prisoners in their prison-pink shorts headed home. Bokassa’s family moved him quickly into a protected residence, where he rusticated and eventually died.

     To his credit, Kolingba finally conceded. He acknowledged the validity of the results and the election of Ange Patassé as president. One of his final acts was to bestow the Order of Merit of the Central African Republic upon me, my French, German and European Union colleagues.

      Ironically, one of the first acts of President Patassé the next week was to award the four of us the same medal as a token of appreciation for our role in mandating the election. So, we each have two.