What a moment to arrive in Senegal. This week I watched as my new hometown of Dakar made history.
Hissène Habré, who heaped death, torture, rape and imprisonment on his fellow Chadians, was jailed for life by a court set up by Senegal and the African Union to try the former dictator for crimes against humanity.
As a reporter in South Africa over the past few years, I spent a good bit of time in courtrooms. In particular those that contained Oscar Pistorius and Shrien Dewani, the British man cleared of killing his wife Anni on the couple’s honeymoon.
The Habré trial hasn’t received a fraction of the attention that Pistorius’s did, despite being many times more important. In court, I was surrounded by Habré’s victims as the judge slowly relieved them of their fear that their tormentor would evade justice using the looted millions that protected him for decades. It was quite an experience.
Habré was marched out of court as his countrymen and women cheered. Eminent lawyers were in tears, survivors danced, everyone hugged each other.
The trial was heard in Dakar’s new Palais de Justice. Down the road, the old one – which has lain empty for years, its floors strewn with yellowing piles of documents – has been cleaned up for part of the Dakar Biennale, Dak’Art.
The City in the Blue Daylight is this year’s title, taken from a poem by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. The line goes: “Your voice tells us of the republic, that we erect the city in the blue day / In the equality of a brotherhood of people.”
The biennale, praised by all who have seen it, is about re-enchanting Africa and the world; finding new energy and creativity to refresh countries that have lost some of the shine they acquired from independence. Its curator, Simon Njami, said in a 2012 essay: “It’s crucial to unlearn Africa. To rebuild it with new tools. And these tools depend upon contemporaneity.”
As I witnessed the pandemonium that followed Habré’s sentencing, I thought of two installations at the crumbling old Palais de Justice.
The Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka has filled one of its old courtrooms with earth and created what seems like a giant grave. Alone in there, I felt a little spooked. On walls daubed with mud graffiti, one word dominates the rest: “Revolution.” Under it: “This is not my body. You cannot eat it.”
In the courtroom next door an ostentatious gold throne in the shape of a bird with wings outstretched sits where the judges’ bench should be. It is lined with red velvet, a red carpet leading up to it. One wall is adorned with mocked-up photographs of dictators sitting on the throne. On the other, in large red letters, the artist, the Belgian-Beninois photographer Fabrice Monteiro, has scrawled: “Ceci n’est pas un Phoenix.”
It is gloriously kitsch, but far less so than the occasion that inspired it – the $20m coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, who ruled what he rechristened the Central African Empire for three years in the 1970s. Bokassa’s golden throne was in the shape of an eagle. Monteiro mocks him by making his a pigeon, and naming the installation Father of the Nation.
As I watched Chad’s abusive “father” being whisked to jail, I pictured Habré on that pigeon throne, the graveyard he filled with bodies nearby. This phoenix, I thought, can’t rise from the ashes.
There is certainly a lot to be pessimistic about in Africa, but the art being created across the continent offers an opportunity for re-enchantment – and so does the Habré verdict.
Before the cheering and clapping and ululating that greeted the court’s decision, there had been an audible, collective exhalation of relief from the hundreds of people watching. Habré had presumed that he would get away with it again – but his seemingly powerless victims had held him to account in an African court, on African soil.
Just before I left South Africa to move to Senegal, I took a tour of Johannesburg’s constitutional court. A good friend who works there as a clerk enthusiastically agreed to show me around.
Built on the site of the city’s old and notoriously harsh prison, and using its bricks, the constitutional court is a beautiful building packed with symbolism. The 27 rights contained in the country’s constitution are carved into the court’s huge wooden doors.
My friend proudly explained how each element of the court had been carefully chosen, recasting justice for post-apartheid South Africa.
The courtroom is sunk into the ground so that the judges look out through windows at street level, and are reminded of the people they serve by the many different legs that walk past. Usually, you can’t tell the race, gender or class of the owner of each pair, only that they belong to a human being. It serves as a symbolic reminder in a country where people are often still judged on the colour of their skin.
I thought of those legs as I listened to the judge sentencing Habré. In the end, all Habré’s money and connections couldn’t buy his freedom. The legs won out.
