A ll old Africa hands have a story of their narrow
escape from charging elephants to tell. I have one myself, but I know from experience that such stories are usually more interesting to the teller than to the told.
They are not quite as bad as big game hunting stories, however: they are the real conversation killers. I knew an African re-tread (as expatriates who cannot forget their time in Africa are sometimes called) who used to bore dinner parties with his claim to have shot 50 zebra in an afternoon.
‘What did you use?’ asked an incredulous guest (I had heard the story several times before). ‘A machine gun?’ The only creature I shot on my one big game hunting expedition in Africa was a little green snake. At least, I think I shot it; it was there before I pulled the trigger and gone afterwards. I found the whole thing so distasteful that I nearly turned Jain and swept the ground before me lest I trod on insects.
France has even more old Africa hands than Britain. My sister-in-law’s builder, for example, spent ten years working on Gbadolite, the palace, airport and casino complex built in the back of beyond by Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko in honour of his mother, who came from there. I suppose the jungle must have reclaimed it by now. There is a book to be written about the fate of the follies of fallen African dictators. The casinos and the airports depart.
My next-door neighbour in France worked in the Central African Republic at the time when Jean-Bedel Bokassa was merely President for Life rather than the Emperor he was soon to turn himself into. He — my neighbour, that is — was a mathematics teacher with an administrative responsibility for the whole country. One day Bokassa summoned him and told him that next year he wanted 100 pupils to pass the baccalaureate.
My neighbour explained the difficulties to the President for Life: there were at the most 30 pupils in Central African schools who just might pass next year if they were lucky.
Bokassa insisted, however. My neighbour went to the minister of education and told him of His Excellency’s impossible demand. The minister then went to Bokassa himself, and reiterated the impossibility. He was relieved of his post and sent back to his village forthwith.
This demonstrates just how primitive and backward African thinking is by comparison with our own. Neither the Minister nor Bokassa saw the obvious solution to the problem that would have occurred at once to any British government minister or educational bureaucrat: lower the standard dramatically, but still call the exam the baccalaureate.
No wonder that Africa, unlike Britain, stagnates and makes no progress. They haven’t even heard of performance targets there, or service level agreements, let alone strategic development and comprehensive reviews. I shouldn’t be surprised if Bokassa didn’t even know what a management consultant was, and had never been on a single team-building away-day. No wonder that the per capita gross domestic product of the Central African Republic hasn’t risen as fast as ours.
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