Political Reality Brought to Life

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John Lister reviews "THE COUP", the novel by John Updike (Penguin, £1.25)

Poverty and disease-a fact of life in Central Africa Marxist political analysis is well equipped to dissect and explain the material contradictions that give rise to petty bourgeois military dictatorships in the underdeveloped nations of Africa.

But the strength of John Updike's latest novel The Coup is that-while making no pretence of offering a Marxist critique-it synthesises many of these contradictions and presents us with a living, breathing petty bourgeois dictator in the flesh.

He is Colonel Hakin Felix Ellellou. He does not, of course exist, any more than the state of Kush, newly liberated from French imperialism actually exists.

Distinctive

And yet many of the most distinctive features of both do form the bare bones upon which a number of African states operate today:

'In area Kush measures 126, 912, 180 hectares. The population density comes to 0.03 per hectare... There are twenty-two miles of railroad and one hundred and seven of paved highway... Among the natural resources of Kush perhaps should be listed our diseasesan ample treasury which includes, besides famine and its edema and Kwashiorkor, malaria, typhus, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, leprosy, bilharziasis, onchocerciasis, measles, and yaws... The average life expectancy in Kush is thirty-seven years, the per capita gross national product 579, the literacy rate 6%... The form of government is a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed."

Ellellou —who narrates the story in the third personreflects in his life, his beliefs and his relationships the curious blend of ancient past and exploited present, of would-be national independence and actual oppression that create the basis for the confused petty bourgeois regimes of black Africa.

From a tribal background he sought a career in the armed forces of occupying French imperialism-fought in Vietnam, and rose to a leading position is the colonial administration, before participating in the 1968 coup to oust the aging puppet monarch, and eventually becoming President is 1969.

Professing allegiance to both Islam and to what he believes to be Marxism, Ellellou treads a delicate path between internal and external opponents.

American Aid And the other events of his life are sketched in by extended flashback sequences, in which he relates how the administrators of his regime, courted by the offers of lavish American aid while the economy nears collapse in a 5-year drought, begin to turn against him.

Ellellou's four totally different wives also reflect the curious contradictions within the economy and society of Kush.

There is his tribal wife Kadongoloimi, much older than himself as living testimony to the old habits and customs; there is Candy-the middle class white American woman met during his days in exile as a student in the USA; there is Sheba, an African woman who Ellellou loves for "her vacancy", as she drifts through each day with music and drugs. And there is Sittina, the Westernised African woman, with whom he eventually goes into exile in Spanning this spectrum is Ellellou's mistress, Kutunda, a tribal woman whom he meets among a party of well-diggers, and who rapidly elevates herself to a career among the administrators of the regime, and an alliance with those that eventually oust Ellellou from office.

Sardonic

The novel is beautifully written, offering a blend of poetic prose and sardonic comment on the plight of a would-be nation seeking independence of both the imperialists and the Soviet. Union (whose secret rocket bases give the Stalinists an interest in preserving sympathetic regime).

The clumsy and arrogant efforts of external 'aid' programmes are exposed, as the angry Ellellou points out to a baffled US envoy that earlier cattle vaccination programmes had helped wipe out scarce forage and water supplies; that deep wells had disrupted nomadic grazing patterns and thus created new deserts; and that the 'foodstuff' handed out in a neighbouring state is in fact cattle-feed which gives humans diarrhoea.

Yet try as he might-through the execution of the old king or the burning of a mountain of US dehydrated foodstuffs, Ellellou cannot escape the economic stranglehold of imperialism. As Interior Minister Ezana points out:

"Interest on present loans, my good President, plus the salaries of our civil service, account for a hundred and eleven percent of the Kush National budget."

Looking on the bright side, Ezana goes on:

"These debits are in fact credits, for they persuade the capital holding countries to hold us upright"

This insight is echoed later after Ellellou's downfall by the US government representative Klipspringer:

"The thing about indebtedness ... is it's the best insurance policy you can buy. The deeper in debt the debtor gets, the more the creditor will invest to keep him from going under. You guys were taking an incredible risk, not owing us a thing all those years."

"Indeed even for the imperialists Kush was a disater:

"none showed a profit. On paper, colonialism was distinctly losing verture. The cost of the armies, the administrators, the flags, the forts, the bullets, the roads, the quinine, the imported knives, forks and spoons, quite outweighed the grudging haul of raw materials and taxes elicited from the unprincipled, evasive chiefs and stubbornly inefficient populace."

In the end it is the discovery of oil in Kush-a new source of wealth, which heralds the palace coup that ousts Ellellou and sees the installation of a pro-imperialist regime.

Insight

The Coup is a novel, not a political tract. But in vivia; often amusing - and mordant language, Updike offers the reader an insight into the problems, the realities of neocolonial Africa.

The • American author actually succeeds through the medium of the novel in becoming a convincing petty bourgeois African dictator.

The Coup-despite its cover illustration-is not so much a novel of action as a novel depicting the restrictions on the possible actions of petty bourgeois nationalist regimes. . Updike, himself, no doubt would draw from the evidence he presents a profound scepticism as to the prospects of ever liberating the masses of black Africa and the neo-colonial countries.

But he does not impose this view on his novel. In this respect, Updike as a real artist offers the reader not a predictable predigested and reactionary lesson in imperialist "reality" but a chailenging journey into the unusual, which provides for Marxists implicit evidence of the need for the world socialist Modern

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