In June, Toyota launched the fifth generation of its Land Cruiser Prado in the South African market. In its first two months, nearly 1,000 units were sold! This is extremely good for a car with a starting price of US$73,000.
Launches of the new Prado followed in a couple of other African countries including Mozambique and Kenya, where last year, the motor grapevine had it that the demand for a range of Land Cruisers, driven by new members of Parliament and state agencies, was so high that the waiting time to fulfil an order at Toyota Kenya was pushed to nearly one year. Despite new models retailing at between $65,000 and $120,000 in a continent where workers in some countries earn just $50 a month, big Toyota sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are the rage. Overall, Toyota is the leader across the continent, with its Hilux the bestseller in more than 30 markets across the continent.
When a car has that level of success, it ceases to be just a car. In Africa Toyota is big politics, a maker and destroyer of states, a decider of wars, the great African post-Cold War zeitgeist, the ideological barometer of its 21st century, the vessel of masculinity, a pedestal for big egos, a symbol of power, and even a signal for when an African big man is about to change mistresses, all rolled into one. Newly independent South Sudan after 2011 became a caricature of out-of-control Toyota Land Cruiser addiction, with (probably exaggerated) stories of corrupt generals with $125,000 V8s packed outside their mud huts in the world’s newest nation.
The remarkable thing is that this Toyota hegemony on the continent is less than 40 years old. For decades the seemingly unbreakable and barebones Land Rover was king of Africa’s bad roads. It – and the French car brand Peugeot – was the vehicle of the British empire in Africa, and the pillage and subjugation of the continent’s heartland.
The heritage passed on to post-independence Africa; the District Commissioner drove in one, as did the Police chief, the coup-making Army chief and junior officers, the government minister touring the countryside, the president inspecting a military parade on Independence Day, the humanitarian organisation feeding people struck by famine, the Health Ministry and NGO do-gooders vaccinating children in villages and distributing oral rehydration salts to women, the Police cracking down on protestors, the army fighting rebels, the rebels fighting the army, tourists on safari to see lions in wildlife parks; game rangers chasing down poachers, and poachers carrying off tusks they had just plucked off slaughtered elephants. The farmers, especially of the settler variety, worshipped the Land Rover, as did the expatriate Catholic and Protestant priests taking God’s word to superstitious Africans in remote hamlets.
The continent was married to Land Rover, but it had a very public affair with the Peugeot. In East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, the chase car of choice for the Police and lead vehicle in the convoys of newly installed independent presidents and prime ministers was the Peugeot 404. It became known in the region as “kadenge”. In the 1970s and early 80s, the Peugeot pickup ruled the roost briefly and was especially adaptable as a public mini-bus (matatu). The game changer was the sassy Peugeot 504, manufactured and distributed by the French company from 1968 to 1983.
Ugandan military dictator Field Marshal Idi Amin was madly in love with the Peugeot 504. In the morning, he would drive his open-roof Land Rover and then jump behind the wheel of the 504 in the afternoon to drive around at high speed. The 504 also enjoyed a glorious period in the East African Safari Rally of the time.
A series of events, directly and indirectly, led to Toyota’s Africa triumph. The first was an “eastward” ideological shift. The liberation wars in southern Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Namibia) and West Africa (Guinea-Bissau) were entering a decisive stage, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was entering greater pan-African consciousness. In the throes of the Cold War, this led to a significant leftward and Socialist bloc/Asia-facing pivot in Africa, which would go on to impact attitudes towards products, including vehicles, from the West.
However, most of Africa was also ruled by mostly incompetent and cruel one-party civilian and military regimes that had run their economies down. In this upheaval, came the global oil crisis of the 1970s caused by two events; the 1973 Yom-Kippur War, also known as the Ramadan War or the October War, between Israel and a coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria; and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Both events resulted in disruptions of oil supplies from the region which sent fuel prices sky-high and caused carnage in Africa.
A report produced by the Bank of Tanzania to an Africa meeting of central banks projected that the oil import bill of non-producing African countries would rise from $516 million ($3.85 billion in 2024) in 1972 to $2,063 million in 1974 (about $12.8 billion in 2024).
With infrastructure decayed under one-party and military regimes, and fuel prices through the roof, Africa needed a hardy but versatile vehicle, with lower consumption and maintenance cost than the Land Rover and Peugeot – preferably from a source that didn’t have history on the continent as a coloniser or Cold War patron of local oppressors. Toyota ticked all the boxes, helped by the fact that electronics from Japan, especially from Sony and Panasonic, were already sweeping Africa and supplanting European makers like Philips and Grundig.
The biggest advertisement for Toyota was quite bloody, coming via the Great Toyota War which took place in 1987 in Northern Chad and on the Chad–Libya border, the last phase of the Chadian–Libyan War. It takes its name from the Toyota pickup trucks, primarily the Toyota Hilux and the Toyota Land Cruiser, used to provide mobility for the Chadian troops as they fought against the Libyans, and as “technicals” – 4×4 military vehicles mounted with machine guns.
Since 1983, Chad had been effectively partitioned, with the northern half controlled by the rebel Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) headed by Goukouni Oueddei and supported by Libyan forces, while the south was held by the Chadian government led by Hissène Habré. The 1987 war resulted in a heavy defeat for Libya, at the hands of Habré’s forces, with some accounts reporting that it lost one-tenth of its army, with 7,500 men killed. Chadian forces suffered 1,000 deaths. The “technical” was born, and from Somalia’s militants, and Islamist jihadists in the Middle East Africa and Sahel Africa, to the bushes of Asia, the Toyota has remained the vehicle of choice – as it has for armies and police on the opposite side of the battle lines.
The post-Cold War reforms produced economic booms in several African countries, and despite continued conflicts in places, Africa entered its longest unbroken period of relative peace and stability. There has been a population explosion, rapid urbanisation, hectic gentrification, and a dizzying mushrooming of skyscrapers. In the madding crowds, tall buildings, and streets that in cities like Uganda’s capital Kampala look like lunar surfaces, the old symbol of prestige, the low-riding Mercedes Benz, just wouldn’t do. The big men and women had to go higher and encase themselves in more robust car cockpits. The Toyota Land Cruiser’s premium rose.
It also became a symbol of power and prestige, an essential item for the political class and the elite. Anti-corruption watchdogs around Africa have over the last two decades reported extensively on corrupt politicians misappropriating millions of dollars over the years, a portion of which is spent on luxury items like high-end cars, including Toyotas, Range Rovers, and Mercedes Benzes.
After the election of many a new African parliament, there always follows a binge, in which, top of the list and most expensive, are new wheels for the freshly minted representatives of the people.
In highly polarised polities like Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria, the government side and opposition always agree on at least one thing: on the big Toyota as the vehicle worthy of their status.
Newly powerful African men, change up their lifestyle considerably to match their new station, and a new wife or mistress, is par for the course. Presumably, the wife for the Toyota Corolla, can’t simply be upgraded to the wife for the new Toyota Land Cruiser 300 Series.
At a more lethal level, in April 2023, the Sudan war broke out after a fall-out between military ruler General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former ally, Mohammed “Hemedti” Hamdan Daglo, the wealthy leader of the powerful Rapid Support Forces (RSF), with whom he had plotted to seize power.
Described by the UN as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis”, it has killed at least 20,000 people, displaced over 10 million people inside the country, and forced over 2 million to flee to neighbouring countries.
The RSF were rich enough that Hemedti pledged over $1 billion to the Sudanese Central Bank to stabilise the country’s currency in the aftermath of the economic crisis and protests which led up to the ousting of President Omar al-Bashir in April 2019.
And they have splashed a lot of their wealth on Toyotas. The RSF bought over 1,000 vehicles during the first six months of 2019 from dealers in the United Arab Emirates. The shipments included over 900 Toyota Hilux and Land Cruisers, which the RSF frequently converts into “technicals”.
If the 1987 Chadian–Libyan War was the first Toyota War, the Sudan conflict is Toyota War 2.0, and more deadly. And those pushing for peace, and working to feed and save the millions imperilled by the war, also ride in their Toyotas – without the mounted machines. When in August 1937 Kiichiro Toyoda founded Toyota in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, which is still its headquarters, out there 344 kilometres from the capital Tokyo, he would never have imagined any of this in his wildest dreams. That his cars would have such far-reaching political consequences 10,820 kilometres away, on a continent very few Japanese had visited at that point.
