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Sunday, 05/29/2005 2:10:47 PM

Sunday, May 29, 2005 2:10:47 PM

ERHE - Essential DD, 10/02 article in The New Yorker, re-inserted in box, copy below.

OUR NEW BEST FRIEND
by JON LEE ANDERSON
Issue of 2002-10-07
Posted 2003-07-18

On July 16th, the government of the tiny West African nation of São Tomé was overthrown in a military coup. As Jon Lee Anderson reported in The New Yorker last fall, São Tomé has become increasingly important to the United States as a potential source of oil—its reserves are estimated to be in the billions of barrels. Anderson's article, which ran in the October 7, 2002, issue, appears here.

Until recently, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, was significant only to stamp collectors and a few wealthy sportfishermen. São Tomé, which is the collective name most outsiders use to refer to the two islands that make up the republic, produces more Marilyn Monroe stamps than any other country—nine versions—and it has one of the two best tarpon-fishing waters on the planet. Some people might also recognize São Tomé from their phone bills, since the Portuguese telecommunications company that controls the state telephone business allows phone-sex services to route calls through São Tomé. A small amount of high-quality cocoa is also produced there. But none of these enterprises bring in much money. São Tomé is one of the world’s most indebted and most impoverished nations.

The islands lie in the Gulf of Guinea, pretty much on the equator. They have a combined land mass of three hundred and seventy-two square miles, more or less the size of metropolitan Indianapolis. They were discovered by the Portuguese in the late fifteenth century, when they were essentially rain forests, uninhabited by humans but full of crocodiles, venomous cobras, many unique species of plants, and more kinds of ferns than anywhere else on the planet. The Portuguese used the islands as a transshipment base for slaves on their way from Africa to Brazil, and slave owners cut down trees and developed plantations that produced sugar and then, early in the nineteenth century, coffee and cocoa. In 1907, British chocolate-makers protested the use of slave labor in São Tomé, and the Portuguese colonists were pressured into adopting supposedly fairer policies, although forced labor continued in one form or another right up until the islands gained their independence, in 1975.

Unlike most of Europe’s colonial dependencies in Africa, São Tomé became a republic without bloodshed, following the ascension in Lisbon of a left-wing military junta and the end of the dictatorship established by António Salazar. Most of the Portuguese colonists who were still living in São Tomé, two or three thousand people, simply packed up and went home, leaving behind more than a hundred thousand blacks and mestizos. Nothing very much has happened there since then. Even during the late nineteen-seventies and the eighties, when the country was aligned with the Soviet bloc and was full of Angolan troops and Russian, Chinese, and Cuban advisers, it barely registered on the geopolitical radar. In 1991, there was a peaceful transition from one-party rule to democracy. Much like its independence from Portugal, São Tomé’s official shedding of Marxism was managed without commotion.

The President of São Tomé, Fradique de Menezes, a cocoa trader known to nearly everyone by his first name, came to the United States a few weeks ago. He addressed the U.N. during the international commemoration of the attack on the World Trade Center, and the next morning he and ten other African heads of state had breakfast with President Bush at the Waldorf-Astoria. Afterward, there was a meeting at which the African leaders gave five-minute speeches, most of them in French. Bush tapped his pencil and looked bored. Then Fradique, who was seated next to Bush, rose and spoke eloquently, in beautiful, lightly accented English, of the common interests of São Tomé and the United States. Bush perked up. The pencil-tapping ceased. “Long before the tragic attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, energy security was a world concern,” Fradique said. He mentioned the importance of “alternative sources of oil outside the politically volatile Middle East,” and reminded his listeners that São Tomé “is strategically situated on the most important petroleum area in the world today: the deep water off the western coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea.” It is a place, Fradique said, that was referred to in Vice-President Cheney’s National Energy Policy report as “the fastest-growing source of oil and gas for the American market.”

In fact, São Tomé is sitting on reserves of perhaps four billion barrels of crude oil. Even if one uses a conservative number for the price of a barrel, say twenty dollars, it is clear that São Tomé and the United States do indeed have common interests.

“This is the thinking,” a State Department official said to me. “We import fifty per cent of our oil. Supplier number one is Canada, two is Saudi Arabia, three is Venezuela, four is Mexico, and five is Nigeria. Folks have finally figured out that we don’t need to rely on the Middle East for oil. African oil is less sticky than the stuff you get in the Middle East, and much of it is in deep water far offshore, so the natives don’t notice it being taken, whereas in the Middle East it’s pumped out of the ground under the noses of Wahhabi fundamentalists. Then you have São Tomé, which is basically the only stable democracy in West Africa. It’s perfect.”

Nigeria, which is São Tomé’s neighbor to the north, now produces about two million barrels of oil a day, more than half of which goes to the United States. Seismic studies made of São Tomé’s waters that are closest to the Niger River delta, where the river sediments in the sea create rich oil beds, indicate that several “significant deposits” of oil lie under the ocean floor in depths ranging from twenty-four hundred to nine thousand feet. “In oil-industry jargon, ‘significant’ means at least a billion barrels in place,” William Brumbaugh, an oil consultant who has worked for several American oil companies, explained to me. The technology for extracting oil from deep offshore reserves has improved considerably in the last few years. There is talk, probably exaggerated, of São Tomé’s having two hundred years’ worth of oil reserves at production levels of five hundred thousand barrels a day. Most of its waters have not yet been mapped, but Brumbaugh reckoned that São Tomé would soon be a very rich little country. “São Tomé has the potential to be another Brunei,” a U.S. government official said. “Dividing up billions of dollars of oil money among a hundred and forty thousand people”—the current population of the islands—“will make them all very comfortable one day. If they manage to pull it off, and keep the bad guys at bay, it’ll be a first in Africa. Otherwise, they’ll end up like Angola, Part II.”

American and European oil companies, principally Chevron, have been extracting Angola’s oil for decades, mostly from rigs off the coast at Cabinda, an Angolan enclave five hundred miles southeast of São Tomé. In Angola and elsewhere in Africa, the oil companies operate with little or no oversight, and they pay huge “signature bonuses,” sometimes amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, to their host governments in return for oil concessions. These payments usually end up in the private bank accounts of whatever privileged class is running the country. “Oil provides the government of Angola with three billion to five billion dollars a year,” Gavin Hayman, of Global Witness, an environmental watchdog group, says. “So why can’t it feed, shelter, and educate its people?”

São Tomé is in a very rough neighborhood. The most immediate problem is Nigeria, one of Africa’s most endemically violent and corrupt countries. A treaty signed by Fradique’s predecessor, Miguel Trovoada, settled a dispute over the maritime borders of São Tomé and Nigeria and gave Nigeria a preëminent role in a joint authority that was set up to administer their shared oil bounty. Fradique also inherited a series of questionable contracts that ceded sweeping exploration and drilling rights for a number of offshore oil blocks in São Toméan waters to a subsidiary of a Nigerian corporation.

Fradique became President a year ago, in an election that was pretty much controlled by Trovoada, whose term was up. São Tomé has had only three Presidents since independence. The first one, Manuel Pinto da Costa, was getting a medical checkup in Lisbon this summer, and I stopped to see him on my way to Africa. Pinto da Costa is a handsome, genial mulatto man of sixty-five. He was staying in a small three-star hotel near the old city center, and he met me in his room. Pinto da Costa was the President of São Tomé for fifteen years, until 1991, and he still wields a great deal of moral authority. Last spring, his party, the Movimento de Libertação de São Tomé e Príncipe, won a majority of seats in parliamentary elections, forcing the government into a national unity coalition.

Pinto da Costa ran the country during its Marxist period. He was educated in Lisbon, France, and East Germany, and received a Ph.D. in economics from Humboldt University in Berlin. “Back in 1975, we didn’t have many choices,” he said. “We couldn’t go with God—the West—so we went with the Devil.” He laughed at his joke. “On that first independence day of ours, I was only thirty-seven years old. I had no experience in anything. I thought I was dreaming. I remember the Portuguese flag going down, the São Toméan flag going up, then walking into the palace and thinking, What am I going to do now? At the time, seventy-three per cent of our people were illiterate; only six or seven people had university educations. All anyone knew was the culture of cocoa, and that had been in decline for decades. It was an enormous challenge. By 1985, we had reduced illiteracy by fifty per cent; I even taught people how to read and write myself. And we reduced poverty. Health and education were free. For the West, this was Communist stuff. We nationalized the plantations. What else could we do? The Portuguese had abandoned them. We asked the Portuguese to come back, but they laughed at us.”

Pinto da Costa called on Mao, Castro, and Kim Il Sung. The Chinese built the National Assembly, a great white modernist conference center with a thousand seats that still hulks, mostly unused, at the edge of the sea in São Tomé, the capital city. The Cubans sent doctors, teachers, and military instructors, and provided scholarships to hundreds of São Toméans; the East Germans built a brewery. Angola’s Marxist government supplied free shipments of oil. The Russians set up a radar tracking station for civil aviation.

Nonetheless, Pinto da Costa began to deal with the West. In 1987, after the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank helped coördinate a “structural adjustment” program, the United States provided agricultural-development credits, and trained some São Toméan soldiers. In 1989, Pinto da Costa convened a constituent assembly to create a new constitution, which paved the way for multiparty elections, although he chose not to run. Around this time, Jan Hartman, a U.S. State Department officer then stationed in Gabon who had got interested in São Tomé, told him that the Voice of America’s transmitter in Liberia had been destroyed during the civil war there. One of the last things Pinto da Costa did before leaving office was to invite the Voice of America to erect a relay station in São Tomé. In 1993, the fifty-four-million-dollar facility began sending programs to the African mainland.

“I thought that a U.S. presence in São Tomé was important for our equilibrium,” Pinto da Costa said. “We are surrounded by Francophone and Anglophone countries. And it is especially important now, in this globalized world, and with the coming of oil, because I know that this is a mafioso world, full of dirty tricks, and without being connected to a powerful country like the U.S., São Tomé would be absorbed, swallowed up. Oil can be a blessing or a curse.”

When I left him, Pinto da Costa was preparing to go out for the evening. He and a friend, the former President of Cape Verde, were seeing a recent Richard Gere movie, “Unfaithful,” which was playing down the street.

There is a flight from Lisbon to São Tomé once a week. It arrives at daybreak, descending over fog-shrouded jungle mountains to a tiny, remarkably orderly—for Africa—airport where a few soldiers in clean and pressed uniforms stand discreetly off to the side. The road into town runs along a palm-fringed bay, past villas on stilts with tin walls, terra-cotta-tile roofs, and deep wooden porches. Derelict boats, half sunk, form a rusting line near the sleepy port, where a few intact boats bob at anchor. The town is built along two adjoining ocean bays, with a seaside avenue, a promenade lined with flowering shade trees, and, in the center, a clutch of graceful, balconied buildings dating from the colonial period. The tallest building on the island is a seven-story, Soviet-era concrete office block near the seafront. There are never very many people on the streets, except in the crowded bazaar, and there are almost no automobiles.

In the evening of the first day I was in São Tomé, Henrique Pinto da Costa, the former President’s younger brother, picked me up at my hotel in his Jeep. Henrique is an agricultural economist and works, he said, as an unpaid consultant to President Fradique. We drove out of town on one of the little roads leading up into the cool mountains at the center of the island, passing a string of shanties and a verdant riot of cacao trees. After about twenty minutes, we reached Fradique’s hacienda, Quinta da Favorita.

A guard with a gun and a walkie-talkie let us through a yellow iron swing gate. We parked in front of another gateway, beyond which I could see a large house with sweeping stairways, verandas, and a swimming pool. Two rustic open longhouses made of hardwood, one of them built around the roots of a huge rubber tree, straddled the driveway. Guards escorted us to the living room of the house, where several Presidential aides were sitting on couches, watching the news on a huge television set. The room was decorated in a hodge-podge way. There were a few African wood sculptures, and several local paintings on the walls, of the kind one sees in souvenir shops. The ceiling had exposed hardwood beams, but the floor was covered in shiny white vinyl. There were floral-print sofas, a liquor trolley, and a simple wooden dining table. The contents of a CD stand next to the TV indicated that the President’s tastes ran to Barry White.

Fradique was in an adjacent room meeting with his ambassador to Taiwan. They were discussing the reception of the Taiwanese President, Chen Shui-bian, who was arriving the next day. It was a big moment for São Tomé. Taiwan provides ten million dollars in aid every year: about one-third of São Tomé’s annual budget. After a few minutes, Fradique, a small, stout man in a short-sleeved African collarless suit, came out to greet me. He is sixty, light-skinned, with kinky black hair, a gray mustache, and wily, slightly almond-shaped eyes. His father was Portuguese and his mother was São Toméan. Fradique waved me, Henrique Pinto da Costa, and his aides over to the table. “Come and eat,” he said. Supper was baked grouper and rice, followed by tropical fruit and flan for dessert. The TV blared away as we ate, and Fradique’s eyes darted to the screen frequently. He observed that a man being interviewed by a reporter had been the head of São Tomé’s military garrison and had tried, unsuccessfully, to pull off a military coup in 1995, when Fradique was a member of parliament. “Can you imagine this guy as the President?” he asked, and guffawed. The man was dark-skinned, and had a rough manner of speaking. Fradique was educated in Lisbon and Brussels and worked for several American companies, including I.T.T. and Archer Daniels Midland. After independence, he was São Tomé’s ambassador to the European Union and then a government minister, before becoming a businessman.

Seeing the coup-plotter, or perhaps something else, had put Fradique into a bad mood, and he began complaining about the dearth of trustworthy people in his government, and the lack of initiative among the citizenry. “If you drive around São Tomé, you see all these able-bodied young men sitting outside at ten in the morning in front of their houses, drinking and playing cards. What do I do about them?” São Tomé, he said, had been an economic mess since the breakup of the cocoa plantations. “São Tomé will have to gain some benefits from its oil,” he said. “There simply isn’t enough money coming in from cocoa anymore to run the country.”

Fradique mentioned that he’d been visited a few days earlier by executives from Chevron-Texaco. “They made a big point to talk about their humanitarian programs,” he said, and handed me some brochures the Americans had given him, which illustrated their social consciousness in other places in Africa where they drilled for oil, such as Cabinda. Fradique looked skeptical. He was getting a lot of overseas visitors, he said. And Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria, had held his hand at a recent meeting. “They all treat me like I am their sweetheart,” he cackled. “I wonder why?”

There was a parade for the Taiwanese President the next morning, and then a series of meetings. A few days later, I stopped by the Taiwanese Embassy and talked to the ambassador, Tai-Son Ko. He said that his government had made many contributions to São Tomé over the years, in addition to outright financial aid. It had built the new Biblioteca Nacional just down the boulevard, and had restored the Art Deco cinema across the street. During President Chen Shui-bian’s visit, he had promised to help Fradique with São Tomé’s malaria problem, which is acute. “Malaria is an impediment to development and outside investment,” Tai-Son Ko said. He also filled me in on rumors that the United States was going to build a military base on São Tomé. He thought it was a good idea. “This is a very strategic area,” he said, “and the São Toméans are friendly. They are Catholics, not Muslims, and there is no anti-American feeling here.”

Not long afterward, Kenneth Moorefield, the American ambassador in Gabon, who is accredited to São Tomé and Príncipe, arrived from Libreville and hosted a cocktail party in a reception room at the Miramar, the hotel where I was staying. Moorefield is a fit, middle-aged Texan, a career foreign-service officer, but a newcomer to Africa. He took up his post in April. If the U.S. intends to step up its presence in the region militarily, Moorefield is probably the right man for the job. A West Point graduate, he earned a Silver Star and a Purple Heart in Vietnam, where he served two tours as an Army infantry officer. Moorefield did not want to be drawn out about U.S. intentions in São Tomé. “The idea of a home port needs to be studied,” he said to me cautiously, “although there are no plans for this at the moment, and there are different ways of assuming a strategic presence. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a base or a port with all the commitment and investment that implies. You have to build the damned thing, and then, God knows, you have to protect it. But if you believe that this is an area of enhanced strategic importance, and I do, then the U.S. must adopt a new level of relationship with the region. If you see that fifteen per cent of our oil comes from this area, and this could soon be thirty per cent, then x plus y makes z. It doesn’t take a genius to work that out.”

I accompanied Moorefield and his wife and daughter to the airport. We stood outside the little terminal, looking out over the bay. Moorefield commented on its beauty and how peaceful it seemed. “I hope it doesn’t become violent with the influx of consumer goods, which will inevitably accompany the oil boom,” he said. “Oil has never meant good things for underdeveloped countries except where autocratic regimes have been in place to keep the lid on.” It was still possible to imagine how it must have been in colonial times, with the charming villas and people promenading on the seafront. “It reminds me of Hanoi,” he said.

Fradique had hired two lawyers to sort out his problems with the oil contracts. The day that they arrived in São Tomé, Fradique invited us all up to dinner at Quinta da Favorita. He had set up a table outside, next to the swimming pool, and his cabinet ministers and senior advisers were there, including several who, as officials of the government of Miguel Trovoada, had negotiated the oil contracts Fradique now wanted to break. One of them, Rafael Branco, had been Trovoada’s foreign minister. Branco had signed some of the controversial concessions and the maritime treaty with the Nigerians. Nonetheless, Fradique had appointed Branco as his oil minister. It seemed a counterintuitive thing to do, but, as someone close to the government explained it to me, Fradique was following “the L.B.J. theory that it’s better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

The two lawyers were Americans: Greg Craig and Michael O’Connor, of the Washington firm of Williams & Connolly. Fradique greeted Craig effusively. “I am honored,” he said. “I have seen you, I think, many times, on CNN.” (Craig has had several high-profile clients: John Hinckley, President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky episode, Elián González’s father.) Fradique was in an exuberant mood, and drank French champagne before dinner, red wine with dinner, and whiskey afterward. Everything was self-service, and Fradique popped the champagne himself. He chatted about the oil contracts with Greg Craig, who mentioned that he didn’t have all the documents he needed. Fradique said that he would have what Craig wanted photocopied straightaway, but the various aides seated around the table began squabbling about who should go to the photocopying machine. “You are the chief of staff, you should go do it,” one said. The chief of staff retorted sourly, “Why don’t you?” and didn’t budge from his chair. In the end, Fradique did the photocopying himself, accompanied by Henrique Pinto da Costa.

Greg Craig told me that he had become interested in São Tomé a few weeks earlier, when he received a call from Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former congressman from Boston, who heads the Citizens Energy Corporation. Kennedy had met Fradique and thought Craig might be able to give him the legal help he needed. (Craig worked for many years for Senator Edward Kennedy.) “Here was a little country that had not yet been destroyed by big oil,” Craig said. “The idea is to put together something that will somehow change the model for an oil-producing state.”

Craig and O’Connor stayed in São Tomé for two weeks, going through the oil contracts and meeting daily with Fradique and his advisers. One afternoon, I went to see Rafael Branco. He was dressed in a mauve embroidered African tunic and pantaloons and wore a gold Rolex watch. Branco acknowledged that he was worried about what Craig was up to. He drew a crude map that showed São Tomé and Príncipe and the coast of Nigeria, and then a line indicating where the supposed maritime boundary was. “Now, this is where the real line is,” he said, “and this is where the Nigerians insisted it was.” He drew a line much closer to São Tomé. “During the arbitration, I felt it was important to retain this”—he pointed to the gap between the two lines—“even though it was forty per cent for us and sixty for them, because if we had gone to the International Court of Justice the boundary might have ended up in their favor, and we might have lost the part that seems likely to have the greatest oil reserves. It’s not for nothing that Exxon Mobil is obsessed only about the five blocks there”—he pointed to the boundary line. “They must know something. And, in the end, better something than nothing. I would rather have less money and more internal stability.” He said that he hadn’t profited from the deal, which is what everyone assumes. “I swear that I made no money out of it; you can take my word or not.” Branco said that he was concerned about the consequences if the Nigerians felt that the arrangement was falling apart. “This reworking or contesting of the contracts is seriously affecting vested interests in Nigeria, and also here, that is clear.” Branco arched his eyebrows. “It’s a particularly delicate moment.”

One evening, I had a drink with Fradique at Quinta da Favorita. He was in his downstairs office sending e-mails when I arrived. After a few minutes, he came out to the swimming pool, where an aide had seated me. He complained about his computer, saying that he thought it had a virus. Then he went back to the office for a few minutes, and when he returned he was muttering. “Oh, forget it,” he said, more or less to himself, and he sat down and seemed to relax. Twiggy, an abandoned dog he’d found wandering the streets and brought home, sat under the table at my feet, scratching his fleas.

I asked Fradique to explain what was wrong with the oil deals. It wasn’t the sixty-forty split of territory with Nigeria that was the problem. “That’s O.K. with me,” he said. But Nigeria had been ceded extremely preferential powers in choosing which blocks of reserves it could exploit. The most serious problem stemmed from a deal that had been signed several years ago with the Environmental Remediation Holding Corporation, E.R.H.C., a company based in Houston, which had promised to undertake exploration on behalf of São Tomé and to publicize and promote its oil reserves. The deal had fallen apart and gone into arbitration. “Then suddenly Chrome, a Nigerian company, said they were going to buy E.R.H.C.,” Fradique said, “like some kind of a miracle, and that they wanted to help São Tomé and Príncipe settle things. They described themselves as ‘African brothers,’ and they proposed a new agreement, in return for benefits to themselves.” Chrome Energy Corporation is owned by Sir Emeka Offor, a wealthy businessman who was closely associated with the late Nigerian dictator Sami Abacha—who stole an estimated four billion dollars from the state while he was in power, from 1993 to 1998—and is now close to President Obasanjo. In May of last year, around the time Miguel Trovoada approached Fradique and asked him if he would like to become São Tomé’s next President, a deal with E.R.H.C., which by then was a subsidiary of Chrome, was signed.

“Did money change hands, do you think?” I asked Fradique.

“I have no proof of that,” he said. “Maybe journalists can help find out.” He guffawed. A big cockroach scuttled under the table, and Fradique tried to stamp on it but missed.

“When I actually read the contracts, I couldn’t accept them,” Fradique said, bitterly. “This is business. Each person is trying to win the good piece of cake for himself. I have no problem with that. But here we are playing with the lives of one hundred and forty thousand people in São Tomé and Príncipe, who live in misery—O.K., not as great misery as others in Africa, but still badly. I’m not promoting a contest of the poor, but here you can see places where there is no running water, no lights, destroyed roads, no jobs, malaria. We’re a poor country. So why should we jeopardize our chances?”

Gavin Hayman, of Global Witness, told me later that he had seen the offending contracts and that Fradique was right to challenge them. “The E.R.H.C.-São Tomé deal has been described as one of the worst in the oil industry’s checkered history,” Hayman said. “E.R.H.C. got an incredibly lucrative arrangement under almost totally opaque conditions.”

“You see some of those contracts and you scratch your head,” Joe Kennedy said to me later. “You can’t just give away the patrimony of a country, and that’s what was going on there.” Kennedy is enthusiastic about Fradique’s chances of keeping São Tomé out of the pattern of corruption that the other African oil states have fallen into. “He’s the real deal,” Kennedy said. “São Tomé could become the Monaco of Africa.”

Fradique went public with his criticism of the “lack of transparency” in the deals a few months after he was elected, and threatened to cancel the agreements unless they were renegotiated. But things got a little sticky, because it turned out that some of the money for Fradique’s campaign, which was managed by Trovoada’s son, Patrice, came from none other than E.R.H.C./Chrome. The implication, of course, was that the Trovoadas received money from the Nigerians in return for the concessions, and that they had tried to buy off Fradique—but that he wouldn’t go for it.

Until the issue of the oil deals came up, Patrice Trovoada had been Fradique’s foreign minister, and Fradique fired him. Relations with the Nigerians also soured. “I think that Obasanjo is sincere,” Fradique said, “but there are other people around him.” The Nigerians do not have a good track record of adhering to agreements, and they are a daunting enemy. “The Nigerians are trying to push a mutual defense treaty on São Tomé that would involve several hundred Nigerian troops coming into the country,” Gavin Hayman said. “Fradique is terrified of this and trying to get out of it.” A close adviser to Fradique confirmed that Obasanjo had asked Fradique to accept such an arrangement. He was wide-eyed. “Can you imagine? They wanted to send two hundred soldiers here,” he said. “They could have taken this place over in five minutes. Bye-bye São Tomé government.” São Tomé’s entire “army” doesn’t have more than two hundred soldiers. They could be easily crushed by a similar number of Nigerian troops, who are battle-hardened from their experience in Sierra Leone and Liberia, not to mention from regularly killing their own citizens. Someone suggested that Iraq and Kuwait was not an inappropriate analogy.

Fradique has taken on some formidable foes. One day when he was showing me around the headquarters of his cocoa business, he remarked, somewhat wistfully, “Last year, I was having a good time, making money, having girls and parties, and then the Trovoadas came to me and said would I like to be President, and here I am!” He seemed not to have anticipated what he was getting into.

Miguel Trovoada, who left such a tangled web for Fradique, is an urbane, dark-skinned man with white hair. He is sixty-six, a year older than Pinto da Costa, São Tomé’s first President. Both men belong to the tiny São Toméan middle class. They studied in Lisbon in the late fifties, when the city was a hotbed of young African revolutionaries plotting the liberation of their homelands. Trovoada studied law and led the first São Toméan independence movement. He was Pinto da Costa’s prime minister until 1979, when he was sent to jail following allegations of a coup attempt. There were also allegations of theft of government money, and in 1981 Trovoada went into exile in Paris. He returned to São Tomé in 1990, formed his own party, and was elected President the next year. By this time, he had apparently shed his leftist inclinations, and he established diplomatic relations with Taiwan and initiated the first of a series of agreements aimed at developing São Tomé’s oil wealth.

I saw Trovoada at a reception at Quinta da Favorita one night shortly after I arrived, and spoke to him later, just as he was preparing to return to his home in Paris. Why had he chosen Fradique as his successor? He laughed. “Well, there was this idea in the air that, after me, Pinto da Costa would return to power again, that it was just the two of us who took turns being President, but I thought that the next President should be someone who came from the economic sector. And there was Fradique. He was a businessman, and he also had political and diplomatic experience. This man, I thought, was capable. That was why I chose him.” Trovoada chuckled again, and I asked him if he still felt that he had made the right decision. “I should say that each leader has his own temperament,” he replied vaguely. “Obviously, we have different ways of exercising power.” As for the oil contracts and agreements with Nigeria, “everything that was done was done within the law,” Trovoada said. “Others might have done things in a different way. But I acted in good faith.”

Miguel Trovoada’s son, Patrice, a chubby, youthful-looking man of forty, came by to see me one morning at my hotel. He wore slacks and a tropical shirt and a gold ring studded with diamonds. Patrice, who is referred to behind his back as Baby Doc, divides his time between São Tomé, Paris, and Houston, where he owns a construction company. He converted to Islam a number of years ago. He boasts of his friendship with some of Africa’s least savory dictators, including Qaddafi, and he knows that he is a notorious figure in São Tomé. “I am not well liked by the élites here,” he said, “because I have quite a bit of money and because I made it on my own, outside of São Tomé.”

We sat on a sofa in the lobby, and, as we began to talk, Patrice was interrupted by a call on his cell phone. He apologized and explained that it was his mother. “She would be furious if she knew I was out of bed. Yesterday I had a malaria attack.” A couple of tall Nigerians wearing traditional clothing came by. One was the adviser to the foreign minister, and the other was a member of the joint Nigerian-São Toméan oil authority. The oil man told Patrice to come around for breakfast at the Nigerian Embassy. He called him Camarada Militante, and they both chuckled. He was flying back to Nigeria in a few hours, he said, and he wanted to talk to Rafael Branco about what had happened in a meeting with Fradique and the lawyers. He said this in an irritated fashion, and then left. Patrice turned back to me, and spoke about Fradique.

“The man is very strange. He has no wife”—his wife died ten years ago—“no children, no parents, no friends, and he is like a wild bull. He charges straight ahead. One thing is for sure: he doesn’t like the Nigerians, and this can be very dangerous for São Tomé and Príncipe. The United States is not taking into account what kind of man they have as a partner here. The next few months are particularly crucial, and Fradique is going to disappoint a lot of people. He’s a sweet talker, but he has no methodology. And I am responsible for this”—Patrice laughed. “I went and chose this man! We chose him so he could insure some vision we had, and so that I could return to the back office. I figured he’d take a year to make changes—new President, new rules, and all of that—but not the way he’s done it!”

One evening, Fradique held a dinner to celebrate the anniversary of São Tomé’s independence. Tables for about two hundred people were set in the front garden of the Presidential palace, an elegant pink-and-white mansion that once housed the colonial governors. It was lit up dramatically and looked like a big cake. Around noon the next day, in Independence Plaza, opposite the corniche, where a grandstand had been erected, a group of women were dancing, animated by free beer and Carnival-style music coming from speakers. Several men and boys had climbed into a breadfruit tree to get a better view. Amiable-looking soldiers wearing red berets and holding Kalashnikovs stood at attention when a security convoy drove up, followed by a cavalcade of cars led by two Mercedeses. One, which had a red license plate with the letters “PR,” for “President of the Republic,” was carrying Fradique and Teodoro Obiang, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, a tall thin man in a dark suit. Omar Bongo, the dictator of Gabon, was in the other Mercedes. Bongo is a tiny, natty man, very black, and he wore what looked like custom-made shoes with platform heels. His wife is a rather queenly woman, much younger than him and a head taller. She was wearing a great deal of gold jewelry, a gold-and-purple print dress, and gold-rimmed Gucci sunglasses. She ascended the grandstand and took her place next to her petite husband. Bongo has been in power since 1967, and has long enjoyed a close relationship with French oil companies. Obiang has held office since 1979, when he overthrew his uncle and had him executed. In the last few years, Exxon Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, and a host of smaller U.S. companies have secured lucrative deals with Obiang for a share of Equatorial Guinea’s estimated billion and a half barrels of offshore oil. Both Bongo and Obiang are exceedingly corrupt and exceedingly wealthy.

Attentive security men from the three countries stood on the grandstand, and there were more of them near the official cars parked at either end of the plaza, suspiciously eying passing theatre groups and undulating women in batik sarongs. A soldier on the roof of a building at one corner of the plaza surveyed the scene with binoculars. Two Arabs in suits—Obiang’s Moroccan security guards—stood at the back of the grandstand. Inebriated dancers and mimes swayed to the sounds of drums and flutes. A group of men were dressed up as women, some in headdresses and clothing decorated with mirrors and bits of gold. Several children jumped between sticks that men held on the ground and slammed together. Two men briefly and exuberantly simulated copulation in front of the grandstand—Mme. Bongo averted her gaze—and pranced off again.

Bongo and Obiang frowned stolidly at the spectacle, staring straight ahead through their dark sunglasses. Fradique, who was wearing a gray suit with a quaint bow tie, smiled and nodded, apparently delighted with the chaos. President Obasanjo of Nigeria was supposed to have been at the ceremony, but he didn’t arrive in time. His jet flew into São Tomé that evening, and he went off to meet privately with Fradique.

Alfredo Gaspar, who manages Fradique’s business interests in Portugal, where the President owns several restaurants and night clubs, took me for a drive to the north end of the island. We travelled on one of the old cut-stone roads that were built by forced labor under the Portuguese and are now mostly blanketed with a layer of tar. The road ran through dense forests of ceibas, papayas, coco palms, and mango trees. We drove into a run-down plantation that had once been, I could see, a miniature world all its own, with a great, fanciful overseer’s house, a narrow-gauge railway, a dispensary, stores, and blocks of dismal workers’ cottages. The people who lived there now looked as if they had very little to do, and they stared at us blankly as we drove around. Gaspar said that the plantation had been renamed the Augustinho Neto, after Angola’s late revolutionary leader. It was where Fradique’s father had lived and worked after emigrating to São Tomé from Portugal.

We drove on along the coast—past black volcanic beaches and shipwrecked trawlers, more plantations, and, occasionally, people walking barefoot or on bicycles—and soon reached the spot where historians say the first Portuguese landed, in either 1469 or 1470. It was marked by a small concrete cross on a plinth in a gravel turnaround. Two young black men carrying harpoons were standing there, and they sold Gaspar some freshly caught squid and eel, and a pair of prehistoric-looking mollusks with big protruding eyes. He paid almost nothing, but the fishermen were grateful, and they waved, smiling broadly, as we drove off.

The road that circles most of the island of São Tomé runs, literally, past people’s front doors. They walk, talk, and play on its rumpled surface, scattering when a vehicle comes barrelling along, although that is not often, since almost nobody has a vehicle. Women and children carry water in jerricans and bunches of firewood on their heads; cacao cutters trudge slowly, carrying long hooked spears. Little boys run on the shoulders of the road, spinning rubber tires with sticks, or trailing toy trucks made of wood. When they see a foreigner, they jump with excitement and yell “Branco!” (white) and “Doce!” (candy). Pigs dart across the road and into the forest, foraging for food, and men, drunk on palm wine, teeter and sway. When a car goes by, everyone pauses to stare, and many wave; the old men often tip their hats with polite subservience. After dark, since there is almost no electricity outside the capital, people gather around the few houses or little stores lit with kerosene lamps, staring at the light.

I was in Washington a few weeks after I left São Tomé, and I went to see Paul Michael Wihbey, one of the founders of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, a spinoff of a symposium held in January by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a Jerusalem-based think tank. The symposium had been organized to discuss alternatives to Arab oil supplies, and a few months afterward Wihbey’s group published a white paper that included a recommendation that the Bush Administration declare the Gulf of Guinea an area of “vital interest” to the United States. It also encouraged the establishment on São Tomé of a “regional subcommand, similar to U.S. Forces Korea.”

The white paper attracted a lot of attention from politicians and American oil companies. Wihbey had just been to Nigeria and had met with President Obasanjo and other officials. “Obasanjo was very receptive to the idea of a U.S. strategic role in the Gulf of Guinea,” Wihbey said. “A mantra in our meetings was the idea that post-9/11, the Gulf of Guinea should replace the Persian Gulf. Obasanjo is interested in debt relief, and he hints at raising oil production in return. These states—Nigeria, São Tomé, Angola, and others—realize they have an opportunity for a new relationship with the United States. We made the point to Obasanjo that this opportunity will not last forever. He seems to understand this, and so does Fradique.” Barry Schutz, a veteran Africa analyst and co-chairman of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group, added, “These countries don’t pose the problems that the countries of the Middle East do. Of course, there are problems with their governments, but you have to be able to take the baby with the bathwater.” Wihbey hopes that Bush will declare the Gulf of Guinea a region of strategic importance fairly soon. “Right now, the ball is in Washington’s court, specifically the White House.”

Fradique stayed in the United States for a week after his breakfast with President Bush. He went to Texas and to Washington, for meetings with oil executives, congressmen, the World Bank, the I.M.F., and White House and Pentagon officials. The high-level meetings were a sign of what Paul Michael Wihbey calls “a sea-change that is taking place in U.S. geopolitical strategy,” which includes Bush’s recently unveiled strike-first policy toward states like Iraq. “Even if the U.S. is successful in regime change in Iraq, all the signs are that the Persian Gulf will continue to be extremely volatile for many years to come,” Wihbey said. “And there’s a six-thousand-mile coastline along West Africa that is rich in oil and natural gas, with not a blue-water navy in the area. So the security of these oil-producing states needs to be guaranteed. A São Tomé and Príncipe home port for commercial vessels and warships is an absolute prerequisite for the development of the region.”

On September 20th, E.R.H.C received a letter from Fradique saying that São Tomé would not accept the existing contract between them. “This is huge,” Greg Craig said. “The Nigerians can now decide whether they want to negotiate or litigate. It would be a huge plus for human decency if they decide to negotiate. But President Fradique has said that he’ll do either.” Wihbey was less sanguine on this issue. “The conflict cannot be allowed to reach the point where it causes a breakdown in diplomacy,” he said. “That would have a very deleterious effect on oil companies and other investors. The U.S. has a strong interest in making sure this is resolved amicably, as soon as possible.” E.R.H.C. announced that it was sticking by the contract.

Fradique flew from Washington to Lisbon and was resting there before going on to São Tomé. He was feeling a little sick, he told me on the phone, and thought he might be coming down with malaria: “When you’re from São Tomé, you know, it’s in your blood.” He was thrilled with his trip to America. He had discussed the idea of a U.S. naval home port on São Tomé with Jendayi Frazer, Condoleezza Rice’s deputy for Africa, with Senator Kennedy and Walter Kansteiner, the Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, and with a senior Pentagon adviser. Kansteiner was going to visit São Tomé in mid-October. “In all my meetings, I explained about São Tomé and how we are a very small country and need protection, because we will soon be producing oil and have so much money, and will be very . . . how shall I say—attractive—to outsiders. I said that we welcome any installation the United States wants to put in São Tomé.” He had also felt out some of his fellow African leaders about the prospect of São Tomé hosting an American military base. They were coming around. “You know, just a little while ago nobody even knew about São Tomé,” Fradique said, “and so this creates some jealousy. In the end, this is something that all of these people would like for themselves.”

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/archive/030728fr_archive02

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