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  • Colonel Tandja’s Country
  • Peter Chilson (bio)

Not long ago, a man I used to know lost his job and went to prison in the space of a few hours. Months later and just as abruptly he returned home, charges dropped, with little explanation. His name is Mamadou Tandja. He was once a colonel in the army of Niger, a West African country more than twice the size of France and covered mostly by the Sahara. He became, years after I met him, the twice democratically elected civilian leader of an African nation state—an anomaly on a continent of dictators.

Tandja’s ten-year reign over Niger ended February 18, 2010, during a cabinet meeting at the gleaming white presidential palace overlooking the Niger River in Niamey, the capital city, when shortly after noon mutinous soldiers blew open the palace gate. This began, The New York Times reported, “a day of gunfire, explosions and nonstop military music on the radio” during which a few soldiers and civilians died. Mutineers burst in on the cabinet and hustled Tandja to a car, unharmed. They kept him a few days at an army base before moving him to house arrest in the servants’ quarters of a palace villa, and accused him of taking more than $100 million in foreign aid and other funds. A year later, in March 2011, Niger’s military rulers demoted Tandja again, this time to Kollo civilian prison outside the capital. There, among thieves, at the age of 73 he awaited trial, complaining of poor health and harsh quarters—until May, when he left Kollo a free man, all sins forgiven for lack of evidence.

Yet the criminal stain, the notion that he took the money, haunts me. I feel betrayed by a man I had hoped stood for something. For two years I was a teacher in Niger’s Tahoua region, which Tandja ruled through drought in the 1980s. Governor Tandja owned a spot in the mind of every civil servant, [End Page 89] tangling us in fear, desire, and guilt—fear of being noticed and punished as if we all deserved a stint behind bars; desire to be blessed by his power; and guilt for not working to his standards. Tandja jailed a clerk for losing track of rice stores, an act that made him a man of the people, protector of the food. He locked up others for keeping unclean offices. He jailed a farmer jaywalking on a rural road as his motorcade approached. One man I knew was imprisoned for having a broken water faucet when Tandja visited his home.

To my knowledge, no one he sent to prison died, but to this day I cannot decide whether to despise or admire Tandja. He has wandered a Shakespearian path, sometimes Richard III, ruthless and vindictive, or Prince Hal, triumphing over personal vice to lead a country. Tandja-the-devil drank hard and pilfered food aid as his people went without. Tandja-the-last-honest-man tried to be everywhere at once for his people.

Under Tandja, half of Niger’s 14 million people starved in a famine he claimed the international press invented. Yet I cannot condemn him. It’s easy to damn a leader for negligence in a land for centuries mired in drought and ethnic conflict. Niger ranks 186, second from last (above the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on the 2011 United Nations Human Development Index—a measure of life expectancy, education, literacy, and standard of living. After a half-century of independence and billions of dollars in aid, Nigeriens barely scratch a living in Saharan heat. They die young in a nation, the borders of which were drawn in 1904 by Frenchmen so frustrated by persistent poverty that they later dubbed Niger a “phantom colony.”

Colonel Tandja’s country.

I first met Tandja one bright morning in March 1986, when a desert-brown light tank rolled to a stop and cut its engine outside a concrete school building in Bouza, the village where I was a Peace Corps English teacher working with fifth-graders. My students and I watched through the French windows we’d opened to cool the room...

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