12. Come Back, Colonialism

Welcome to the jungle! From the “Rainbow Nation” to the “Heart of Darkness,” the intrepid Carlyle Club explores decolonization: its benefits, however abstract and dubious; and shortcomings, however mind-numbingly horrific.

Table of Contents

1. In Defense of Racist Imperialist Oppression
2. Land of Springs
3. Equal Rights for All Civilized Men
4. The Thin Red Line
5. Rainbow Nation
6. East Meets West
7. Heart of Darkness
   1. Boom in the Jungle
   2. Independence
   3. The Congo Massacre
   4. The Wheel of History
   5. Notes on the Congo Free State
8. Recommended Reading
9. Letters to the Editor

Audrey Hepburn in the Belgian Congo (image)

In Defense of Racist Imperialist Oppression

Thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course.

Evelyn Waugh

Despite all their mistakes and insensitivities, our imperial forebears left the world a better place than they found it.

Keith Windschuttle

The Thomas Carlyle Club for Young Reactionaries aspires to nothing less than maximum controversiality, and I for one believe we’re succeeding admirably. Huzzah! Jolly good. We’ve done slavery (Issue 3), we’ve done lynching (Issue 11) — well, we haven’t done them, but you know what I mean. Anyway, it seems only natural that we should stay the course and bring our gun turrets to bear on colonialism, completing a sort of reactionary racialist trifecta.

I’m sure I don’t need to remind you loyal Party members that colonialism is to be considered double- or even tripleplusungood. Then again, maybe I do. (Better safe than sorry when potential thoughtcrimes are involved.)

From around the ’net: colonialism means…

• “racism,” obviously,
• “colonial racism,”
• “a disease based on racism,”
• “racism has been a major part,”
• “racist thinking,”
• “racist structures,”
• “racist underpinnings,”
• “racist white rule,”
• “racist colonial settlers,”
• “racist colonial feminism,”
• “a legacy of oppression,”
• “institutionalised racism and oppression,”
• “invasion, dispossession and subjugation,”
• “racism, sexism, imperialism, and capitalism,”
• “draining African wealth,”
• “the ‘white man’ was plundering the world,”
• “brutal wars of conquest and genocide,”
• “unnecessary economic hardships,”
• “painful forced migration,”
• “general heinousness,”
• “obvious moral wrongness,”
• “Holocausts,”
• “reduce a colonised person to the sub-human which he is for the colonialist,”
• “white hordes have sallied forth to assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the world,” and let us not forget
• “colonists have no appreciation for life.”

Yes, the official history of European imperialism and racist white racism is well known to all of us, which is unfortunate, because the official history of European imperialism and racist white racism gets absolutely every single little thing completely and irredeemably wrong, and the only people who promote it are idiots and liars.

I’ll get back to that shortly. First, I want to talk a bit about malaria. Try, if you please, to make sense of this remarkable piece in the New York Times (2008):

Last year, challenging global health orthodoxy, Bill and Melinda Gates called for the eradication of malaria.

That is, for exterminating the parasite everywhere and forever, except perhaps in laboratory storage, as has thus far happened to just one disease in history, smallpox.

Their call, delivered at a malaria conference that they had convened in Seattle, was, in Mrs. Gates’s language, “audacious.” Her husband went further, asking, “Why would anyone want to follow a long line of failures by becoming the umpteenth person to declare the goal of eradicating malaria?”

[…]

The best opportunity probably existed in 1955, the year Mr. Gates was born and the year the W.H.O. said it would eradicate malaria. With weapons then new, DDT and chloroquine, a fast-acting synthetic quinine, annual deaths were driven down below 500,000.

[…]

The world changed. Before the 1960s, colonial governments and companies fought malaria because their officials often lived in remote outposts like Nigeria’s hill stations and Vietnam’s Marble Mountains. Independence movements led to freedom, but also often civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care.

Um… I think I have a pretty good idea what “civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care” look like. But what is this other thing? Yes, this “freedom” of which you speak, which apparently makes up for all the other things? As in: given the choice between (a) peace, plenty, good health and rule of law, without “freedom,” and (b) civil war, poverty, corrupt government and the collapse of medical care, with “freedom,” obviously you should go ahead and start a war, burn the crops, bomb the hospitals, bribe the judges, etc., etc., and only a stoopid raciss could possibly disagree.

Was that the plan all along? I mean: when we in the free world, with our perfect, universally applicable, final form of human government (and how lucky we are to be living at the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution), were sending Africa, Asia and South America our vintage revolutionary terror, calling it liberation, did we tell them: look, you’re going to have civil war, poverty, corrupt government and boatloads of malaria, but at least you will be able to vote (for the kleptocratic tribal chieftain of your choosing); or did we, in fact, tell them their lives would get better in every imaginable way once they’d hacked up all the missionaries?

And I wonder what our former colonial subjects have to say about that…

Land of Springs

The findings of a 2011 poll by Jamaica’s biggest newspaper, The Gleaner, may surprise the reader who learned about colonial history from a college professor — or, God forbid, a journalist — instead of reading primary sources.

Most Jamaicans believe they would be better off if they were still ruled by Britain, a poll shows.

In a harsh indictment of nearly 50 years of independence, 60 per cent of those surveyed hanker for the days when the country was Britain’s biggest Caribbean colony.

Only 17 per cent said the crime-ridden, poverty-stricken nation would be worse off under British rule.

The depth of feeling is particularly astonishing as generations of Jamaican leaders have portrayed the British as oppressors who subjected the Caribbean to slavery.

[…]

‘As painful, and some will claim insulting, as these statistics may be to Jamaican nationalists, they are quite understandable — and even logical,’ the paper said in an editorial. ‘The attitudes are formed by people’s existing realities and their expectations for the future.’

These realities, it added, include living in a country ‘where, for more than a generation, economic growth has averaged below 2 per cent per annum and its homicide rate is among the highest in the world.’

The newspaper also highlighted Jamaica’s ‘creaky’ justice system, ‘patchy’ law and order, ‘indifferent’ education system and the widespread public perception of ‘overwhelming’ corruption.

[…]

In recent years, violence by drug gangs has made the island one of the most dangerous places in the world.

They won their “freedom,” and with it: poverty, crime, corruption.

Further details:

The results were remarkably consistent across all age groups, with a majority of those old enough to remember independence and young people born long after saying the country would be better off as a British colony. Two-thirds of respondents 65 years of age or older said the country would be better off under British rule, while nearly that same proportion of respondents in the 18–34 age range agreed.

But Audrey Campbell, president of the Toronto-based Jamaican Canadian Association, questioned the entire premise of the poll, saying many Jamaicans can in no way compare life now to what it was like under British rule because they were born after independence.

“That’s like saying, ‘I kind of like the concept of slavery. Who needs self government? Who wants the right to dictate their future? I’d rather have someone come in and tell me based on what they think.’ Seriously?” said Campbell, who was born in Jamaica after independence and came to Canada as a young girl.

Well done, Ms. Campbell! It is indeed like saying “I kind of like the concept of slavery.” Who indeed needs “self government” if other government works better? Oh, never mind, I see now: you just wanted to publicly attest to your total ignorance of the history of slavery in addition to colonialism.

“It’s such a broad statement . . . there are different contexts for each age group. What is so appealing about British colonialism that we’d want it?”

Good question. Here’s another: can anyone explain to me what “the right to dictate their future” actually means, in terms of actual, real, concrete things, in the context of a “creaky” justice system, “patchy” law and order, “overwhelming” corruption, and some of the worst violent crime on the planet?

Equal Rights for All Civilized Men

Michelle Gavin (The Washington Post, 2007) is looking toward Zimbabwe’s future:

When Zimbabwe became an independent country in 1980, it was a focal point for international optimism about Africa’s future. Today, Zimbabwe is a basket case of a country. Over the past decade, the refusal of President Robert Mugabe and his ruling party to tolerate challenges to their power has led them to systematically dismantle the most effective workings of Zimbabwe’s economic and political systems, replacing these with structures of corruption, blatant patronage and repression. The resulting 80 percent unemployment rate, hyperinflation, and severe food, fuel and power shortages have created a national climate of desperation. Estimates suggest that roughly one-quarter of the entire population has fled the country. Meanwhile, the government’s violent crackdown on voices of dissent has left the opposition divided and eroded public confidence in the prospects of peaceful political change.

The human rights and humanitarian consequences of these developments have attracted the attention of the United States and others in the international community, as has the potential of the crisis to add Zimbabwe to the roster of the world’s dangerously unstable failed states. But years of Western condemnation and targeted sanctions have done little to alter the course or speed of Zimbabwe’s decline. The cyclical crackdowns on opposition figures, the anti-climatic regional negotiations, and the ever-shrinking economic figures tend to merge into a drumbeat of hopelessness, and a real danger exists that policymakers fatigued and distracted by other crises will lose enthusiasm for playing an engaged and constructive role in southern Africa’s most alarming political crisis.

[…]

But, as I argue in a new Council Special Report, Planning for Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe, the U.S., working with others, can help to alter the calculus of the Zimbabwean players who can affect change — at least those players who are not 83 years old and determined to tank their country in a fit of pique. By focusing on the future and putting a serious commitment to Zimbabwe’s recovery on the table, we might be able to influence the present.

This means working closely with others in the international community to map out strategies that will help bring essential services back on line and get the economy back on track. It also requires building consensus around governance-related conditions that must be met to set those plans in motion, like respect for basic human rights, an end to the political manipulation of food aid, and amendment or repeal of repressive laws. Finally, this requires marshalling real resources in an international trust fund for Zimbabwe’s recovery — resources that can serve as powerful incentives for potential successors to Mugabe to embrace vital reforms.

A clear plan to link robust recovery assistance to better governance can help Zimbabweans interested in charting a new course to plan their strategy by making it clear just how the spigots of international support can be turned back on. This approach will open up space for a new diplomatic discourse about Zimbabwe’s potentially prosperous future, rather than simply the prickly present. Such a plan would also lay the groundwork for a sound reconstruction investment, because just as bad governance led to today’s economic catastrophe, sound governance will make or break recovery.

“Alter the calculus.” “Influence the present.” “The spigots of international support.” “Zimbabwe became an independent country in 1980.” Does the choice of word not seem a little strange coming from this former International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, now U.S. Ambassador to Botswana?

Today, the “independent” country of Zimbabwe can’t even afford to run its own rigged election. But that’s okay. The important thing is that they have freedom.

There have been no significant protests against the result as Mugabe retains an iron grip. Police trucks with mounted water cannon watch over “freedom square,” the name given to an open field in downtown Harare.

Freedom, glorious freedom:

The general mood across the nation is one of despondency. Everyone seems depressed. No one knows what to do next. It would seem the will of the people has not triumphed at all. Riot police patrol quiet streets. No one sings or dances.

[…]

Mercifully it was peaceful. Memories of the 2008 election — burnt and lacerated bodies, weeping girls and women who had been raped, swollen, bleeding feet and dead bodies — were fresh in the minds of many.

The Zanu-PF’s “victory” must be considered in the light of the following: This is a country where 95% of the population is unemployed; an estimated 25% live and work in the diaspora to keep their relatives back home fed and at school; 15% are orphans (largely as a result of the AIDS pandemic). It is therefore pretty easy to buy people — and votes.

I expect Mugabe can’t wait for those wonderful “spigots” to be turned back on.

There is, of course, some support for Mugabe in the rural areas, where he has given hundreds of thousands of families land, agricultural inputs and food — which was given as humanitarian aid by the international community and re-bagged and distributed in Mugabe’s name strictly to Zanu-PF members during the past 15 years. Many families were threatened with the loss of their land and homes if Zanu-PF did not win in their area.

How did it come to this? David Smith (The Guardian, 2010):

Few could have guessed that, when the country marks 30 years of independence, it will also be forced to salute 30 years of Mugabe’s iron rule. Nor could they have imagined they would be asking how this eloquent freedom fighter, once lauded by the west and knighted by the Queen, turned into one of Africa’s most reviled tyrants.

Truly a mystery. Because we were told, weren’t we, by the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, social-justice types, that Mugabe was an “eloquent freedom fighter” — and more! Told by Andrew Young, for instance, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations:

Ambassador Andrew Young described Robert Mugabe in an interview with the Times of London on May 22, 1978: “Does Mr Mugabe strike you as a violent man?” the Times reporter asked.

“Not at all, he’s a very gentle man,” Young replied.

“In fact, one of the ironies of the whole struggle is that I can’t imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have.

“I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication.

“The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible. . . . The problem is he was educated by the Jesuits, and when you get the combination of a Jesuit and a Marxist kind of philosophy merging in one person, you’ve got a hell of a guy to deal with,” Young was further quoted in the interview.

If they didn’t actually know the truth, they could easily have learned it. John Darnton confesses to the New York Times (2008):

These days, as I watch Robert Mugabe tighten his 28-year-old stranglehold on Zimbabwe while the forces of opposition try to pry away his fingers, I can’t help thinking back to a conversation he and I once tried to have about T. S. Eliot, poetry and the month of April.

Let me explain. At the time, nearly 30 years ago, Mugabe was an unknown leader of a guerrilla movement trying to overthrow white rule in what was then Rhodesia. I was a New York Times foreign correspondent covering Africa. And Rhodesia itself was a delusional outpost of colonial living in which many of the 270,000 whites appeared blissfully unaware of a war being pressed on behalf of the 7 million blacks. They sipped sundowners beside swimming pools, played bowls on a clipped lawn in Salisbury Park and listened to a daily radio broadcast to pick up snatches of the Shona language like “Take out the garbage.”

I first heard mention of Mugabe in May 1976 in the Quill Club of the Ambassador Hotel, a watering hole where Prime Minister Ian Smith’s police, guerrilla sympathizers, reporters and agents from various factions suspended normal antipathies for the sake of gossip. We foreign correspondents used to toss around names of the ultimate leader of the emergent new country like miners testing gold nuggets: Would it be Joshua Nkomo? Ndabaningi Sithole? Jason Moyo? A Guardian correspondent named James McManus, who looked particularly dashing in the safari suits we all wore, pulled me aside and said that he was putting his money on a new man called Robert Mugabe.

No one knew much about him, he said, but he was a Shona, which meant that he belonged to the largest tribal group. He was said to be operating out of Mozambique, then notorious as Rhodesia’s hard-line communist neighbor. And, most intriguing of all, he was an intellectual, a teacher who loved the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Understandably, this last bit of information got to me.

[…]

Mugabe sat behind a large, uncluttered wooden desk. He did not stand to greet me, but neither did he hesitate to shake my hand. He seemed surprised to see me, though I learned that he had heard of my desire to meet with him. He was not averse to granting an interview to the Western press, and I gained the impression that this was among the first he had given.

[…]

As the interview seemed to be drawing to a close — he was looking frequently at his watch — I couldn’t repress the unsatisfying feeling that I had won a headline but hadn’t really learned anything about the man himself. He was expressionless. His voice hadn’t risen. His small eyes hadn’t broken through the mask of placid assurance and even, it seemed, remote indifference.

Surely there must be a key to unlock this enigma. “So,” I said, “what is it exactly that attracts you to T.S. Eliot?”

He gave me a blank look and stood up. “You know,” I added, “‘The Waste Land.’”

For the first time incomprehension crossed his features, maybe even a flash of irritation. I persisted.

“‘April is the cruelest month,’” I said. “Eliot. The poet. You know.” As he ushered me to the door, his bewilderment seemed to turn to anger. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” he said, closing the door firmly behind me.

How strange. Mugabe turned out to be something entirely different from what we were promised by the people who helped him seize power, including journalists from The New York Times and The Guardian, and other members of the international community:

What has happened in Zimbabwe is to Britain’s eternal shame. When the Foreign Office handed power to him after the 1980 Lancaster House Agreement, its mandarins muttered that Mugabe was probably a decent chap. So decent that within years he had massacred thousands of Matabele supporters of his arch-rival, Joshua Nkomo.

David Smith again:

Today there are many Zimbabweans who believe that, far from being a good man corrupted by power, Mugabe’s ruthless streak was forged long ago in the bitter liberation struggle, during which he spent 10 years in jail. Reflecting on three decades of bloodshed, economic ruin and erosion of civil liberties, they see little to celebrate in the eclipse of what was once Africa’s greatest hope.

On 18 April 1980, the renegade colony of Rhodesia gave way to the new Zimbabwe, ending a seven-year war that left 27,000 dead. Mugabe, a guerrilla fighter hated by Ian Smith’s white-minority regime, announced a policy of reconciliation and invited whites to help rebuild the country.

[…]

White farmers were brutally evicted, replaced by Zanu-PF cronies or black Zimbabweans who lacked the skills and capital to farm.

The ensuing chaos undermined the economy, which shrank to half the size it had been in 1980. The Zimbabwean dollar went into freefall. The one-time food exporter became dependent on foreign aid. Hyperinflation set world records. Schools and hospitals crumbled, cholera broke out and life expectancy dropped from 61 to 45. An estimated 3 million people fled to neighbouring South Africa.

[…]

Zimbabwean independence 30 years ago signalled the demise of the last outpost of the British empire in Africa. With it Rhodesia, so-called after its imperial founder, Cecil John Rhodes, was dispatched to the history books.

Rhodes, who modelled himself on Caesar, was one of the dominant figures in Victorian colonialism. He ruthlessly exploited southern Africa’s mineral wealth and dreamed of building a Cape-Cairo railway.

Okay, let’s review. On the one hand, we have a “liberation struggle” by a “freedom fighter,” which was also “a war on behalf of the 7 million blacks,” culminating in Zimbabwe’s legitimate “independence” in 1980 — which somehow led to an “erosion” of actual “civil liberties,” not to mention “corruption, blatant patronage and repression,” and of course literal dependence on “the spigots of international support.”

On the other hand, we have Rhodesia, that “renegade colony” and “delusional outpost,” declaring its fraudulent, unauthorized, illegal “independence” in 1965.

The move was immediately condemned as illegal (“an act of treason”) by the British government, the Commonwealth, and the United Nations. Independent Rhodesia was not recognized by any country; even apartheid South Africa sent no ambassador to Salisbury, the capital. Britain and the U.N. imposed economic sanctions, and many Rhodesians worried that an oil embargo would cripple their landlocked country.

So this earlier, fake “independence,” of the same actual piece of land (and with a lot less violence), saddled Rhodesia with a “white-minority regime”: the sort of people who “ruthlessly exploited southern Africa’s mineral wealth” (i.e., made a profit), and even “dreamed of building a railway” — the fiends! All while somehow not inducing “roughly one-quarter of the entire population” to flee.

(By the way, Rhodesia never implemented apartheid or denied blacks the vote; it only required that voters own property. As Cecil Rhodes put it: “Equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambesi.”)

Obviously, this necessitated “economic sanctions” and other interference by the “international community” (remember the Quill Club), which ultimately succeeded in “dispatching” the “renegade colony” — and more than a few innocent lives — “to the history books.”

For some racist reason, even after the triumph of this “liberation struggle” by the great “freedom fighter” (followed, of course, by “three decades of bloodshed, economic ruin and erosion of civil liberties,” and “the eclipse of what was once Africa’s greatest hope”), Ian Smith’s stupid retarded racist government hated Mugabe, even though he wanted “reconciliation” and for “whites to help rebuild the country” he’d just destroyed.

I wonder why they felt that way…

Let’s investigate, with the help of some interesting booklets published by the government of Rhodesia:

• ‘Anatomy of Terror’ (1974),
• ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ (1978), and
• ‘The Murder of Missionaries in Rhodesia’ (1978).

We might also try

• ‘The Farmer at War’ (1979),
• ‘A View of African Nationalism’ (1976),
• and ‘A Case for Rhodesia’ (1978)

for a broader perspective.

Wait, the murder of missionaries? Why yes, that’s how the “eloquent freedom fighter” conducted his “liberation struggle” (Time, 1978):

At the beginning of the war, the killings of white missionaries had seemed, in most cases, to be merely part of the prevailing violence. The latest rash of murders suggests that the guerrillas are now killing missionaries in an effort to create panic among Rhodesia’s remaining whites, particularly in rural areas. Since whites are now leaving the country at the rate of 1,000 a month, that brutal plan may be having some success.

Under more politically correct circumstances, this might be called ethnic cleansing. However, since the perpetrators are black and the victims white, we’ll adopt the standard convention and call it “white flight.”

The third booklet can tell you all about the Elim Mission Massacre of 1978, also known as the Vumba Massacre. Quoting the Sunday Mail in Salisbury (1978):

Eight British missionaries and four young children — including a three-week-old baby — were bayoneted to death by terrorists on Rhodesia’s Eastern border on Friday night in the worst massacre of whites since the six-year-old war began.

Three of the missionaries were men and the others women.

A sixth woman was stabbed and beaten and left for dead. She staggered 300 m into the freezing Vumba bush to spend the night before being found semi-conscious by security forces yesterday. Despite intensive care in a Salisbury hospital she subsequently died.

The gruesome murders, by a group of eight to 10 terrorists, happened at Emmanuel Mission School — 15 km south-east of Umtali and 8 km from the Mozambique border — once used as the Eagle boarding school.

[…]

Most of the women had been sexually assaulted, and one mutilated.

The children had been dragged from their beds. Two children were in yellow pyjamas, one with a red dressing gown, and a third in a flowery nightdress.

One child had her tiny thumbs clenched in her palms.

Even hardened security men were stunned by the bloody scene and stood around silently. “The quiet is uncanny,” said one.

Mr. Brian Chapman, director of the Church in Rhodesia and South Africa, visited the scene yesterday. He said: “We saw no humanity here.”

Crush that baby’s skull — that darker men might rule! (image)

From the Citizen in South Africa (1978):

“Non-violence in many ways is being practised by the Patriotic Front. I asked one of their commanders, Tongogara, what they actually do in Rhodesia, and he said they’re not doing much fighting, except when they are fired upon, or when the Rhodesian defence forces find them and try to run them out.

“Basically what they are doing is moving around the villages and conducting political seminars and singing songs.”

So says Mr. Andrew Young, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in a recent [May 22, 1978] interview with the London Times.

This weekend, in the worst atrocity committed against white civilians in the history of Rhodesia’s six-year war, terrorists of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe National Liberation Army hacked and battered to death almost the entire white staff and their families at the Elim Pentacostal Mission in the Eastern border mountains.

Mr. Young is asked: “Does Mr. Mugabe strike you as a violent man?”

He replies: “Not at all, he’s a very gentle man. In fact, one of the ironies of the whole struggle is that I can’t imagine Joshua Nkomo, or Robert Mugabe, ever pulling the trigger on a gun to kill anyone. I doubt that they ever have…. The violent people are Smith’s people and hopefully they won’t be around for the new Zimbabwe.”

This weekend, when local and international journalists arrived at the scene of the massacre 15 km from Umtali and less than 7 km from the Mozambique border, the mutilated and blood-stained bodies of three men, four women and five children — including a three-week-old baby — were lying as they had been found that morning.

Mr. Young is asked how he gets on with Mr. Mugabe.

He replies: “I find that I am fascinated by his intelligence, by his dedication. The only thing that frustrates me about Robert Mugabe is that he is so damned incorruptible…. The problem is he was educated by the Jesuits, and when you get the combination of a Jesuit and a Marxist kind of philosophy merging in one person, you’ve got a hell of a guy to deal with.”

This weekend, one of the newspapermen who flew to the scene of the massacre reported: “The bodies lay in clusters round the school’s cricket pavilion. The victims had all been foully abused. All but one of the four adult women had been raped and left semi-naked on the grass.”

Mr. Young tells of the “deep-seated humanism” of a young man who told him: “I started killing at 14 and when you kill and when you realize you could be killed for something that you believe in, you learn that there’s nothing more precious and valuable than human life.”

This weekend, at the scene of the massacre, correspondents reported that the “victims were beyond help, with axe wounds scarring their bodies, bayonet thrusts deep in their backs, and skulls crushed by knobkerries or lengths of thick wood.

“Shocked and angry troops viewed the carnage and quietly cursed the terrorists. One man had tears in his eyes as he muttered: ‘The bastards. They are nothing better than animals. How could they do this?’”

Yet these are the terrorists whom men like Andy Young support.

The tragedy of Africa is not just that such savagery still persists.

It is that terrorism has been given respectability. That the men with the guns are regarded as freedom fighters, as liberators, when they are no more than thugs and animals.

When will the World Council of Churches appreciate that it must stop aiding men who kill and maim the innocents?

When will our local political priests accept that it is time to condemn, instead of support, such forces of evil?

When will Mr. Andy Young and people like him realize that every man, woman or child who dies at Elim or at Kolwezi, or anywhere else on this dark continent, is a victim of insensate hate and barbarism?

When will they back the forces of peace, of tolerance, of goodwill, instead of supporting the brutal and beastly terrorists?

When indeed. As for Joshua Nkomo, that other “very gentle man”…

Perhaps one of the cruelest attacks came on Sept. 3, 1978. The Hunyani, a Vickers Viscount passenger plane carrying 52 passengers and 4 crew men, was shot down. The plane crashed, but due to the pilot’s skill, there were 18 survivors. Promising them help, the guerrillas rounded up 10 of them and then shot them.

A group run by Joshua Nkomo organized the massacre. Nkomo chuckled about his “triumph” in an interview with the BBC.

Joshua Nkomo served as Mugabe’s vice president from 1987 to 1999.

In February 1979, a second plane was shot down. There were no survivors.

In April 1979, Rhodesia voted and died.

In a scene reminiscent of the recent Iraqi elections, nearly 3 million blacks came out to vote under a state of martial law and with armed guerrillas actively seeking to disrupt the balloting. Although 100,000 soldiers protected the polling places, 10 civilians were killed by Mugabe and Nkomo’s forces. Even so, the election was a resounding success and produced a clear verdict. An overwhelming majority of voters chose Muzorewa to become the first black prime minister of Zimbabwe Rhodesia, as the country was now called.

Sadly, this democratic outcome was a chimera. Muzorewa — spurned by the West, deemed illegitimate by the African dictatorships, and forced to contend with Communist-armed insurgents — would hold power for a mere matter of months. The betrayal of Muzorewa is one of the more craven episodes in American foreign policy.

Liberal international opinion condemned the election before it ever took place. Andrew Young called the interim government “neofascist,” and the New York Times editorialized that the election would be a “moral and diplomatic disaster.” In March 1979, 185 individuals signed a statement calling it a “fraud” and opined that “free elections require … freedom for all political parties to campaign,” presumably even parties committed to one-party rule and violence if they do not win. Then, once the election took place, the left discredited it as a charade. A cover story in the Nation by British journalist David Caute, entitled “The Sham Election in Rhodesia,” featured a cartoon with a smiling white man in safari outfit holding a gun as sheep with black faces (“electoral livestock,” in Caute’s words) lined up to vote. Caute likened the new black government to Vichy France.

The appearance of a popularly elected, black-led, anti-Marxist government in Africa confronted Western liberals with a challenge: Would they accept this interim agreement, widely endorsed by the country’s blacks, as a step on the path to full majority rule, or would they reject the democratic will of the Zimbabwean people in favor of guerrilla groups that supported Soviet-style dictatorship? Caute at least had the honesty to admit that “Mugabe, indeed, openly espouses a one-party state and makes no secret of the fact that any election won by ZANU would be Zimbabwe’s last.”

Bayard Rustin, the black civil rights leader who had been the chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and the national chairman of the Social Democrats USA, observed the April election as part of a Freedom House delegation. A founder of the Committee to Support South African Resistance, Rustin was outraged at the response of those on the left. “No election held in any country at any time within memory has been more widely or vociferously scorned by international opinion than the election conducted last April in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe Rhodesia,” he wrote in Commentary. The Freedom House delegation, whose members had previously monitored elections in 26 countries, interviewed over 600 black voters and visited more than 60 polling stations throughout the country. Rustin determined the elections to be “remarkably free and fair.” Even the Nation editorial board conceded that the elections had “undeniably mobilized a genuine outpouring of sentiment for peace among black Rhodesians.” The New York Times, like Mugabe and Nkomo, however, did not care about the democratic means employed, only the end result. “The real issue is not how the election was conducted, but what it was about,” the Times intoned, snidely referring to the black political organizations participating in the elections as the “collaborating parties.”

“The contrast between how the election was viewed by most Zimbabweans (the name preferred by blacks) and how it was described by critics outside the country is nothing less than extraordinary,” Rustin wrote. With the United States openly deferring to the wishes of ZANU, ZAPU, and their enablers among the African tyrannies, Rustin said, “We have found ourselves, until now, tacitly aligned with groups armed by Moscow, hostile to America, antagonistic to democracy, and unpopular within Zimbabwe Rhodesia itself.”

Hey, wait a minute! That doesn’t sound at all like a “liberation struggle” by a “freedom fighter” “on behalf of” black Zimbabweans. You don’t suppose some of those politicians, journalists, and academics might have been, well, fibbing? They seemed so trustworthy!

After the election, the Patriotic Front continued to wage war on the new multiracial government, which proceeded to defend itself with an army and police force that were, respectively, 85 percent and 75 percent black. But the government also extended an olive branch to the guerrillas in hopes of achieving a ceasefire and promised that any and all guerrillas willing to put down their guns would have a “safe return” to civilian life without fear of punishment. Would the guerrilla groups maintain their campaign against Zimbabwe Rhodesia now that a black prime minister had been elected? The government got its answer in May. Four of Prime Minister Muzorewa’s envoys to the guerrillas were seized by Mugabe’s forces, displayed before 200 tribesmen, and shot as an example of what would become of those who negotiated with the new black government. Six weeks later, 39 representatives of Rev. Sithole were also murdered.

[…]

In July, Muzorewa came to the United States determined to “remove the blindness” of the Carter administration. He said that there were “some people who are sick in the head in the international world” for maintaining sanctions against a country that had transitioned peacefully from white power to majority rule. Muzorewa was far too sanguine about his ability to persuade Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young; their blindness was incurable. In October, all four members of the Zimbabwe Rhodesia executive council traveled to the United States to plead for recognition, and Carter refused to meet with them. Disappointed by the West’s rebuff, Muzorewa noted that while Zimbabweans “are prepared to forget the past and work together with our white brethren, … some people in Britain, America, Africa, and other parts of the world appear unwilling to allow us to do so.”

Of the election that had catapulted Muzorewa to power, Martin Meredith wrote, “However much disappointment there was with a constitution which entrenched white privilege, the opportunity to vote for a black leader who promised peace was worth having.” But as Muzorewa immediately discovered, to the Carter administration, no government without Robert Mugabe in charge was worth having.

In 2003, the American diplomat Samantha Powers, now U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (Andy Young’s old job), interviewed Ian Smith, the last prime minister of Rhodesia. Powers learned nothing, of course, but we won’t make the same mistake.

Nearly forty years ago Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, became the first and only white colonial ruler to break away from the British Crown. He had tired of London’s nagging about the subjugation of Rhodesian blacks. In 1965 Smith declared independence. “The mantle of the pioneers has fallen on our shoulders,” he said, calling on white Rhodesians to maintain standards in a “primitive country.” Smith saw himself as an apostle of Cecil John Rhodes, the British magnate who gave Rhodesia its name, and who in the late nineteenth century duped black tribal leaders into signing over the fertile land to white pioneers. Although Rhodesia in 1965 was home to just over 200,000 whites and four million blacks, Smith shared Rhodes’s belief that black majority rule would occur “never in a thousand years.”

Smith was of course wrong. In 1980, after a civil war that cost 30,000 lives, the black majority took charge of the country, which was renamed Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe — the nationalist leader whom Smith had branded a “Marxist terrorist” and jailed for more than a decade; a man who had once urged his followers to stop wearing shoes and socks to show they were willing to reject the trappings of European civilization — became President.

[…]

Smith insists that when Mugabe banned him from politics, in 1987, he was glad for the opportunity to return to full-time farming. But in Zimbabwe, where whites owned the finest farmland and most blacks remained dispossessed two decades after independence, politics and land became inseparable. A few days before my visit Smith was reading the morning newspaper when he came across a government notice listing the latest batch of farms designated for seizure by the state. His farm was among them.

For a man who had just learned that he would lose his livelihood, his passion, and his family home, Smith was strangely unflustered. Largely ignored since independence, he seems to have found in the blind bungling of Robert Mugabe’s regime a grim redemption for white rule. “You can’t imagine how many people come up to me and say, ‘We didn’t agree with you back then. We thought you were too rigid and inflexible. But now we see you were right. You were so right: they were not fit to govern.’”

So he was. South African author Rian Malan (2007):

By the beginning of this year, Smith was utterly vindicated.

The past is a foreign country, my friends. Try not to get lost.

The Thin Red Line

Zimbabwe, as I’m sure you all know, is the former Southern Rhodesia; the former Northern Rhodesia is now Zambia. How is Zambia doing these days? Well, it has no shortage of well-wishers and do-gooders, including economic “genius” Jeffrey Sachs.

Sachs became obsessed with Africa during his first visit to the continent, a trip to Zambia in 1995, when the underfunded health care system had been totally overwhelmed by AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. The suffering and death Sachs saw shocked him, and he began reading everything he could about poverty, devouring works on agriculture, nutrition, disease, education, and commerce, synthesizing what he’d learned for papers and reports. Eventually he devised a massive experiment in foreign intervention at the village level. If it succeeded (or, in Sachs’ view, when it succeeded) in a handful of villages, it could then be expanded to cover entire countries and even — why not? — all of Africa.

[…]

But the road to success was not nearly as smooth — or knowable — as Sachs had predicted. The original plan was for the people of Dertu to preserve their nomadic lifestyle. But the abundance of donated food and services drew people from far and wide and induced them to settle. What had originally been little more than a watering hole for camels became a sprawling shantytown, its streets clogged with garbage. The new livestock market failed. The one water pump broke down. People began to fight among themselves for distributed goods. There was drought, followed by flooding. There were epidemics. There was theft, malingering, misreporting, and more.

Hey, at least Zambia is no longer under colonial rule. I mean, just look at the hideous colonial scheming of American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham, known as “The King of Scouts” (1899):

Gold, both from quartz and placer, has positively come out of this northern country, and its sources will be traced. And as the country comes under the active sway of the white man, and the raidings of one tribe by another are rigorously put down, it will be found to produce a still greater variety of products. Its cotton may be as famed as that of Egypt, its coffee of like quality to that of Blantyre, and its fibres and rubber equal to any grown. There is here a great field for the patient and energetic colonist for years to come — to control and direct the different tribes of natives, and to organize and develop its permanent industries. It may yet be that the thin bands of steel creeping ever northward will do for the Empire what that thin red line has done so often in every corner of the earth.

Having thrown off its British “oppressors,” Zambia is currently being recolonized by the Chinese.

When workers at Collum coal mine protested about poor wages and working conditions in 2010, their Chinese managers responded by opening fire with live rounds. In fairness, they were not shooting to kill: no one actually died, but 11 of the miners suffered bullet wounds.

[…]

This year, protests at Collum have continued, spurred by the fact that its Chinese owners pay their employees less than the national minimum wage for shopworkers. On Saturday, the miners crushed a 50-year-old Chinese manager to death with a trolley.

[…]

While Beijing likes to claim that it forges “win-win partnerships” with African nations, the reality is that one side tends to win a great deal more than the other. The outlines of these agreements are always similar: China promises to build lots of useful infrastructure, particularly roads and railways, in return for privileged access to the country’s natural resources.

“Win-win partnerships,” of course, are nothing like European colonial rule, because something something white supremacy, and Chinese people aren’t white.

But this has three consequences. First, the minerals that China extracts are always worth more than the infrastructure it builds. Put bluntly, Beijing always takes out more than it puts in (that is the whole point of the exercise).

Crisis in Africa! Someone, somewhere, might actually be making a profit on something.

Second, the workforce that actually builds the roads, railways etc is often Chinese, so the number of jobs created is relatively small. Third, the skills needed to maintain this infrastructure are not always passed on, meaning that much of it will probably fall to bits a decade or two hence.

To be fair, part of the blame may lie with the Zambians themselves…

Finally — and most seriously of all in the case of Zambia — the Chinese are not always exemplary managers of the mines and oilfields they are handed control over.

[…]

I would hazard a guess that, in general, many Africans would prefer to work for established Western mining companies. That is certainly the view of Michael Sata, the Zambian president who won power largely because of widespread unease over the consequences of Chinese investment.

While opposition leader in 2007, Sata said: “We want the Chinese to leave and the old colonial rulers to return. They exploited our natural resources too, but at least they took good care of us. They built schools, taught us their language and brought us the British civilisation. At least Western capitalism has a human face; the Chinese are only out to exploit us.”

In Zambia, at least, that seems to be the popular view.

It must be: they made Sata their president.

Rainbow Nation

Surely not South Africa? “Apartheid! Blacks with passes! Racist dictatorship! Shame of the human race!” Well, on the other hand, at least the Afrikaners kept the lights on (2008):

Outrage concerning the country’s ongoing power cuts spread among business, agricultural and political sectors on Thursday, as Eskom announced that the risk for continued cuts over the weekend remained high.

“Load shedding will continue today (Thursday) until after evening peak and the possibility of load shedding remains high for the rest of the week into the weekend”, said Eskom in a statement.

[…]

Business Unity of South Africa (Busa) said on Thursday that the power cuts had cost businesses — particularly small-to-medium enterprises — “millions of rand with no end in sight.”

This had led to despondency and pessimism, as well as eroding “local and international confidence in the reliability of South Africa’s electricity supply.”

Commentary from a South African blogger:

Ecologists call frogs an indicator species because, with their highly permeable skins and living both in water and on land, frogs are among the first species to show if something is wrong with the environment.

[…]

If nature gives us signposts and indicators of when something is wrong or out of kilter — and remember the balance is very, very delicate — what indicators are there in society when things go wrong?

Well, firstly the lights go out.

[…]

The bottom line: the ANC and its entourage of grotesque groupies are dangerously incompetent. And judging by Zuma Simpson’s childish pantomime performances so far, the downward spiral has only just begun. Or, put in astronomical terms, the supernova has collapsed and the black hole will gradually now begin taking shape.

“Oh, don’t be such an idiot alarmist, Kriel. You’re blowing this thing out of all proportion. We overcame apartheid; we can do anything. We must just look on the bright side and be positive, blah, blah, fishpaste …”

I say, take a look around, folks. This is nothing new, just the worst catastrophe these clowns have made so far.

My indicator species are friends and acquaintances who have been rainbow nationalists, glass-is-half-full, surely-they’re-not-that-bad, crime-is-everywhere-y’know, silver-lining loyalists, people of all colours and of the soil — and they’re the missing frogs now. They’re the ones who are saying, ‘Let’s get out of here while we still can. Or at least let’s get the children out.’”

[…]

So, while darkness falls across Africa’s great dream, soccer dads are just shot for fuck-all waiting to pick up their sons, kids are brutalised by the minute, and thugs and killers and rapists do just as they please, I’m going to the museum to see what frogs look like.

That’s if the museum has power.

‘The Path to Darkness,’ from now-inactive Commentary South Africa:

Sitting in the darkness induced by the latest Eskom blackout one can’t but help feel a growing sense of anger with the current government. One brought on by what is the latest round of its poor administration and following both a lack of ability and willingness to combat crime, shore up infrastructure and enforce discipline and accountability in so-called leaders.

Still, let’s review the chain of events that brought us here to this — excuse the pun — dark era that is finally breaking the camel’s back for many.

[…]

Eskom, for its part, also implemented the most radical BEE and AA programme in South Africa outside of government departments, despite knowing full well that it lived and died on the (scarce) skills of its workforce. This program entailed putting in place policies to forbid the employment of any and all white males. Those skilled whites already at the company were meanwhile either outright retrenched or quietly informed that they had zero hope of promotion or advancement at the company. Unsurprisingly, most of the latter left or emigrated while some were paradoxically later rehired as consultants at more than double their prior salary.

[…]

So now we sit in a crisis, in which companies are losing millions, ordinary people are being inconvenienced in a thousand different ways a day and livelihoods are in danger. This all promises future hardship as the government, in a move all too late in the game, plans to enforce electricity quotas and smart electricity boards that’ll allow Eskom to turn off parts of our houses and businesses as it pleases. Mass retrenchments loom at the mines and enquiries at emigration agencies have spiked enormously, with predictions of an emigration wave similar to that in 1994.

Despite this demonstration of utter incompetence not a single person responsible for this mess has received anything so severe as a reprimand, let alone a sacking or resignation. We’re the ones who suffer, while those who willingly and criminally led us into this continue to enjoy their perks. They still have their expensive salaries and positions that fortify their personal security. We have darkness and an economy without power supply to 10% of its productive capacity while the outside press watches and reports on this debacle.

‘No Longer Optimistic,’ from same:

I’m not going to engage in any in-depth analysis of the current power crisis aflicting the country. Contrary to past form I admit that I am fed up with the poor governance of the ANC coupled with the debacles that are Mbeki and Zuma. This has also forced me towards a distressing conclusion: if I am going to emigrate from South Africa I will have to do so within the next five years.

I admit that I’ve tried to maintain an air of optimism about this country in the past. However the sheer incompetence, ineptitude and corruption exhibited by the ANC and Eskom to bring us to this stage has changed my view. Especially as it seems to be part of a wider deterioration in other local infrastructure, public services and ultimately the socio-political situation.

Six years later:

• ‘Eskom warns of blackouts’
• ‘Eskom declares electricity emergency’
• ‘SA’s electricity headache here to stay — Expert’
• ‘Remember that less is more — Eskom’

Surely this cannot be correct! Everyone knows South Africa is a million billion times better off now that the evil whites are out of power — political power, I mean. After all, something something apartheid, something something Nelson Mandela, something something black people are just as smart as white people!

If anyone can correct our misunderstandings, it must be South Africa Rocks:

After reading the incredibly upsetting anti-SA blogs from expats around the world I decided to make a stand. This blog is that stand. I am standing up for all the good in SA. For all the great things that SA citizens do and for all the people who love this country. I love this country and I believe in it and the success that is soon to come.

SA Rocks is not a website dedicated to blindly praising South Africa. I understand that every country has flaws and I do not deny the flaws of South Africa. I do feel that there are enough people who berate our country and it’s time for people to start acting and thinking positively about South Africa.

Well, here he is in 2008: ‘Confession: I’m having a difficult week.’

There are many things that I have managed to deal with and come to terms with in my life here in SA. Crime is one of them, for some reason I have managed to look past it and believe that it will get better. Politics is another area that I can rationalise because of my understanding of how things work, what the implications of actions are and a basic understanding of the system.

I am commonly referred to these days as “The SA Rocks Guy” and most of the time I like that, I think. This week though that has been hanging over my head. It’s tough to be that guy, the guy who is rationally and realistically positive in the face of great adversity and the many challenges that this country presents. I love that challenge, I thrive on it but this week it is getting the better of me.

[…]

How long before the depression turns in to anger and turns in to fleeing? I am going to be completely honest here, it has seriously crossed my mind that I should leave SA in the last week. I have considered packing a suitcase and getting on a plane. I can do it. I know I am financially able to and I have places to go, lots of places to go.

A guest post, later that day: ‘I want to stay, please give me a reason.’

It might sound very cliché and overdone but I will begin like this: I really am a proud South African. I love living here. I’ve been lucky enough to do a bit of traveling in my 23 years and barring New York City, this is the place I want to be.

However lately I have been questioning all of the above in light of what is going on. Today I am particularly worried. I feel helpless and to an extent I feel it may be time to start looking into moving — out of SA.

Why? Well, besides president, the next president, the National Police Commissioner, and all the murders and rapes he isn’t stopping, there’s

LOAD-SHEDDING. This really is getting me down. We are all, as a basic human right, entitled to electricity and clean water. Water is fine — for now. Electricity on the other hand, well… This load shedding is killing me. I understand that there are less fortunate people than me, and if this is how I feel then I can only imagine how they feel. It took me over an hour to get to work this morning, fighting against lights that are out and stupid taxi drivers (who have no consideration for anyone else but themselves).

I don’t think it’s right for us to sit back and accept this. It’s bullshit, but then what do I do… I have no power (pardon the pun) to change this, and well unless there is a massive uprising, where people turn around and say enough is enough, then what?

I hate being the voice of doom, but at the same time I just can’t help but think about moving. I am still young, but eventually I want to have kids and I want them to be brought up here. Your knowledge through education of the world is so much greater than in other countries. I am an ambitious person, I have goals that I really want to achieve, but if I’m forced to live in a place that is being run by alleged corrupt officials and children can’t learn at school then in actual fact I’ll have no choice. I try very hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel (if you’ll pardon the pun again). I look at the wonderful highveld sunsets. I listen to my favourite radio djs every day and know that I wouldn’t get the same quality abroad and I think back to my summer holiday down in the Eastern Cape, the beach, the sea, the good holiday vibes from everyone down there and well I see why I love this place. Please give me some reassurance that things will get better.

other things amanzi is the journal of a surgeon in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa — and “the best doctor blog on the internet,” according to Forbes. The victims in ‘south african crime’ (2008) are presumably white.

i recently watched the movie capote. i enjoyed it. but, being south african, i was interested in the reaction the movie portrayed of the american community to the murders that the movie is indirectly about. their reaction was shock and dismay. their reaction was right.

but in south africa there is a similar incident every day. i don’t read the newspaper because it depresses me too much. you might wonder why i, a surgeon, am posting on this. one reason may be because i often deal with the survivors (two previous posts found here and here). at the moment i have three patients who are victims of violent crime. one is the victim of a farm attack. an old man who had his head caved in with a spade. why? just for fun, it seems. but maybe the reason i’m writing this post is because i’m south african. this is my country and i’m gatvol.

just three recent stories. some guys broke into a house. they gaged the man. it seemed that whatever they shoved into his mouth was shoved in too deep, because as they lay on the bed violating his wife, he fought for breath and finally died of asphyxiation.

then there is a woman alone at home. some thugs broke in and asked where the safe was. they were looking for guns. she told them she had no safe and no guns. they then took a poker, heated it to red hot and proceeded to torture her with it so that she would tell them what they wanted to hear. because she could not, the torture went on for a number of hours.

then there is the story of a group of thugs that broke in to a house. they shot the man and cut the fingers of the woman off with a pair of garden shears. while the man lay on the floor dying, the criminals took some time off to lounge on the bed eating some snacks they had found in the fridge and watch a bit of television.

these are only three stories, but, if you do read the papers, you can hear about similar stories on a daily basis. and our great and mighty president, the eminently blind thabo mbeki, believes there is no problem with crime here.

yes, you americans were right to be horrified by the story upon which capote is based. we south africans, through the leadership of possibly the worst leader of a country in the world today, well we just get used to it.

Please give me some reassurance that things will get better. And did they?

They did not.

Few South Africans have the moral stature of retired archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who campaigned against apartheid and now laments the crime and inequality that plague the nation two decades after it cast off racist white rule.

“We can’t pretend we have remained at the same heights and that’s why I say please, for goodness’ sake, recover the spirit that made us great,” Tutu said. “Very simply, we are aware we’ve become one of the most violent societies. It’s not what we were, even under apartheid.”

The last word to Walter Williams (2002):

Moral crusaders have the habit of heading off to their next crusade without bothering to see whether anything went wrong on their last one. During the 80’s, TransAfrica, NAACP, Black Congressional Caucus, Hollywood glitterati, college students, and other groups held massive protests on college campuses and at the South African Embassy, built shanty towns and called for disinvestment and sanctions against South Africa for its racist apartheid system.

There’s no longer apartheid and there’s black rule in South Africa but what’s the story there now? Andrew Kenny writes about it in his article, “Black People Aren’t Animals.” The article appears in the British magazine The Spectator (12/15/01), the world’s oldest continuously published English language magazine (est. 1838).

Each South African day sees an average of 59 murders, 145 rapes and 752 serious assaults out of its 42 million population. The new crime is the rape of babies; some AIDS-infected African men believe that having sex with a virgin is a cure. Twelve percent of South Africa’s population is HIV-positive but President Mbeki says that HIV cannot cause AIDS. In response to growing violence, South Africa’s minister of safety and security, Steve Tshwete says, “We can’t police this; there’s nothing more we can do. South Africa’s currency, the rand, has fallen about 70 percent since the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in 1994. Emigration from South Africa (mainly of skilled people) is now at its highest level ever.

Mr. Kenny asks: “Is South Africa doomed to follow the rest of Africa into oblivion?” He says no but I’m not as optimistic because of the pattern nearly everywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. The tragic fact of business is that ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism. Colonial masters never committed anything near the murder and genocide seen under black rule in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Somalia and other countries where millions of blacks have been slaughtered in unspeakable ways that included: hacking to death, boiling in oil, setting on fire and dismemberment. If as many elephants, zebras and lions had been as ruthlessly slaughtered, the world’s leftists would be in a tizzy.

When Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, was under white rule, the ANC demanded the ouster of Prime Minister Ian Smith and the installation of black rule. Today, Zimbabwe’s Minister Robert Mugabe commits gross violations of black and white human rights. With the help of lawless thugs, Mugabe has undertaken a land confiscation program from white farmers. Instead of condemning Zimbabwe human rights abuses, the South African government has given Mugabe its unqualified support.

Andrew Kenny says that whites treat blacks like animals. When a dog misbehaves, we don’t blame the dog; we blame the owner for improper training. In Africa, when blacks behave badly, Kenny says colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, globalization or multi-nationalism is blamed for not bringing up blacks properly. Liberals saw South Africa’s, apartheid and other human rights abuses as unjust because blacks were suffering at the hands of whites. They hold whites accountable to civilized standards of behavior. Blacks are not held to civilized standards of behavior. From the liberal’s point of view it might even be racist to expect blacks to adhere to civilized standards of behavior.

During South Africa’s apartheid era, I visited several times and lectured at just about every university. In a 1987 syndicated column I wrote: “Africa’s past experience should give western anti-apartheid activists some pause for thought. Wouldn’t it be the supreme tragedy if South African blacks might ponder at some future date, like the animals of Jones’ Manor, whether they were better off under apartheid? That’s why blacks must answer, what’s to come after apartheid? Black rule alone is no guarantee for black freedom.”

East Meets West

I think we need a break from Africa. Don’t you? I direct your attention to the City of Life. ‘Hong Kong Was Better Under the British,’ writes Hugo Restall, an editor of The Wall Street Journal in Asia (2012).

The slow-motion implosion of Henry Tang, Beijing’s pick to be Hong Kong’s next chief executive, brings to mind a speech given shortly before the 1997 handover by former Far Eastern Economic Review Editor Derek Davies. In “Two Cheers for Colonialism,” Mr. Davies attempted to explain why the city flourished under the British. Fifteen years later, the Chinese officials who are having trouble running Hong Kong might want to give it a read.

The Brits created a relatively uncorrupt and competent civil service to run the city day-to-day. “They take enormous satisfaction in minutes, protocol, proper channels, precedents,” as Mr. Davies described them, “even in the red tape that binds up their files inside the neat cubby holes within their registries.” Their slavish adherence to bureaucratic procedure helped create respect for the rule of law and prevented abuses of power.

Above the civil servants sat the career-grade officials appointed from London. These nabobs were often arrogant, affecting a contempt for journalists and other “unhelpful” critics. But they did respond to public opinion as transmitted through the newspapers and other channels.

Part of the reason they did was that Hong Kong officials were accountable to a democratically elected government in Britain — a government sensitive to accusations of mismanaging a colony. Still, local officials often disobeyed London when it was in the local interest — for this reason frustrated Colonial Office mandarins sometimes dubbed the city “The Republic of Hong Kong.” And for many decades the city boasted a higher standard of governance than the mother country.

[…]

The communists claim that the European powers stripped their colonies of natural resources and used them as captive markets for their manufacturers. But Hong Kong, devoid of resources other than refugees from communism, attracted investment and built up light industry to export back to Britain. And as for taking back the profits, Mr. Davies noted, “No British company here would have been mad enough to have repatriated its profits back to heavily-taxed, regularly devaluing Britain.”

[…]

Contrast all this with Hong Kong after the handover. The government is still not democratic, but now it is accountable only to a highly corrupt and abusive single-party state. The first chief executive, Tung Chee Hwa, and Beijing’s favorite to take the post next month, Henry Tang, are both members of the Shanghainese business elite that moved to the city after 1949. The civil service is localized.

[…]

In recent years, the Lands Department has made “mistakes” in negotiating leases that have allowed developers to make billions of Hong Kong dollars in extra profit. Several high-level officials have also left to work for the developers. This has bred public cynicism that Hong Kong is sinking into crony capitalism.

This helps explain why the public is so upset with Mr. Tang for illegally adding 2,400 square feet of extra floor space to his house. Likewise Michael Suen, now the secretary for education, failed to heed a 2006 order from the Lands Department to dismantle an illegal addition to his home. His offense was arguably worse, since he was secretary for housing, planning and lands at the time.

In both cases the issue is not just a matter of zoning and safety; illegal additions cheat the government out of revenue. But it’s unlikely Mr. Tang will face prosecution because nobody above or below him is independent enough to demand accountability. So now there is one set of rules for the public and another for the business and political elites. Under the British, Hong Kong had the best of both worlds, the protections of democracy and the efficiency of all-powerful but nervous administrators imported from London. Now it has the worst of both worlds, an increasingly corrupt and feckless local ruling class backstopped by an authoritarian regime. The only good news is that the media remain free to expose scandals, but one has to wonder for how much longer.

[…]

Mr. Davies ended his appraisal of colonialism’s faults and virtues thus: “I only hope and trust that a local Chinese will never draw a future British visitor aside and whisper to him that Hong Kong was better ruled by the foreign devils.” Fifteen years later, that sentiment is becoming common.

How common? Ask Radio Free Asia:

An informal online poll by a Hong Kong newspaper inspired by a recent referendum in the Falkland Islands shows that 92 percent of readers who voted think Hong Kongers would prefer a return to British rule.

[…]

Hong Kong legislator and political activist Leung Kwok-hung, known by his nickname “Long Hair,” said that while the poll wasn’t a scientific survey, it gave a snapshot of public sentiment towards Beijing in the years since the 1997 handover to Chinese rule.

“Hong Kong people feel that [their own] government is doing a worse job than it was during British rule,” Leung said.

“If you were to ask them whether they were better off before the handover, the answer would probably be that things were a bit better.”

Leung said people in Hong Kong tended to see 1997 as a dividing line.

“The interference from the Chinese Communist Party has frightened people in Hong Kong,” he said. “That interference is getting more and more obvious, and more and more serious.”

One Facebook user commented on the poll that the British had never told Hong Kong people they should be “patriotic” or that they should support the government.

“The government didn’t interfere with the media; it respected Hong Kong’s local culture, so people naturally gave their allegiance to the British,” the user wrote.

Heart of Darkness

The Democratic Republic of the Congo* (DRC) is quite possibly the worst place on Earth, and well worth exploring. From the comfort and safety of Radish, of course!

*Formerly known as:

• the Republic of Zaïre (1971–1997) under President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, whose name means “the all powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, shall go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake,”
• the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1964–1971) again,
• the Republic of the Congo (1960–1964), not to be confused with its neighbor, the Republic of the Congo,
• the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), when it was actually habitable,
• the Congo Free State (1885–1908), when it was badly mismanaged by its absentee owner, King Leopold II (but see below), and
• nothing — because the Congolese never invented writing.

Where are you, DRC? There you are!

(image)

Key areas: the capital, Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville; Kikwit; Equator province; Kananga, formerly Luluabourg; Kisangani, formerly Stanleyville; Lubumbashi, formerly Elisabethville; Goma, North Kivu province; Bukavu, formerly Costermansville, South Kivu province; and little Bunia in the circled region.

(image)

Crocodiles on a Plane

The Congo has seen more fatal plane crashes than any other African country since 1945. As a result, all Congo-based airlines are banned from European Union airspace. According to EU spokeswoman Michele Cercone, “there is a general lack of effective control by the civil aviation authorities there to monitor and maintain minimum technical standards” for airplanes.

That “general lack of effective control” includes, among other things, a 2010 crash that killed 20 people, caused by a loose crocodile on board.

In July 2011, 127 people were killed when the pilots of a Boeing 727 missed the runway at Kisangani during a thunderstorm — or was it 90 people? Or 82? Or maybe 75? The Congo Transport Ministry couldn’t make up its mind, “in part because airlines in the African country do not always keep a complete passenger list.” (Of course they don’t.)

In 2008, the same airline, Hewa Bora Airways, lost a DC-9 on takeoff from Goma, a city in the North Kivu province of eastern Congo, killing 40, most of them on the ground; and a smaller plane later that year, killing 17. So why do the Congolese still fly Hewa Bora Airways? Because they can’t drive anywhere:

Few passable roads traverse the country after decades of war and corrupt rule, forcing the country’s deeply impoverished people to rely on ill-maintained planes and boats to move around.

(You may be wondering where all those roads came from in the first place…)

Kinshasa

Kinshasa, formerly Leopoldville, the capital and largest city of the Congo, is one of the ten most dangerous cities in the world, along with Baghdad, Beirut, Detroit, and New Orleans. The local media in Kinshasa — much like in Detroit and New Orleans, as a matter of fact — broadcast “hate messages inciting Congolese to target and take revenge on ‘white people and foreigners.’”

Kinshasa is the sort of place where police have to act quickly to arrest “13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises, after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.”

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Things we learned today: never share a taxi in Kinshasa with a man wearing gold rings. He is probably a sorcerer who will enchant your genitals with black magic.

“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Notoriously filthy Kinshasa, also known as “The Dustbin” (image)

On a lighter note, we are relieved to learn that Kinshasa has finally released a herd of innocent goats languishing in Congolese prison on trumped-up charges:

A minister in the Democratic Republic of Congo has ordered a Kinshasa jail to release a dozen goats, which he said were being held there illegally.

Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo said he found the goats just in time during a routine jail visit.

The beasts were due to appear in court, charged with being sold illegally by the roadside.

The minister said many police had serious gaps in their knowledge and they would be sent for retraining.

[…]

BBC Africa analyst Mary Harper says that given the grim state of prisons in Congo, the goats will doubtless be relieved about being spared a trial.

There was no word on what their punishment would have been, had they been found guilty.

I Put a Spell on You

In North Kivu province in September 2008, fighting broke out between rival soccer teams during a match. A policeman tried to intervene, but was pelted with rocks by spectators. Police fired tear gas into the crowd, and 13 people died of suffocation during the ensuing rush for the exits. It all started when one team’s “goalkeeper reportedly ran up the pitch chanting ‘fetishist’ spells in an attempt to change the course of the match.”

Accusations of witchcraft are common in the Congo, where many “use charms and other objects to practise witchcraft as part of their traditional animist beliefs.” Accused witches are quite often small children.

According to a United Nations report issued this year, a growing number of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo are being accused of witchcraft and subjected to violent exorcisms by religious leaders, in which they are often beaten, burned, starved and even murdered.

This is confirmed by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF):

Unicef’s latest available statistics show that around one hundred cases of child sorcery allegations were referred to them in 2008 in the North Kivu province of Eastern Congo alone.

That number increased nearly fivefold to 450 in the same area last year.

Accused child witches often end up on the street.

The non-profit group Save the Children estimates that 70% of the roughly 15,000 street children in Kinshasa, the capital, were kicked out of their homes after being accused of witchcraft.

Javier Aguilar, a child protection officer for UNICEF in Kinshasa puts the number of street children at 20,000, and confirms that around 70 percent are accused witches.

According to Arnold Mushiete, a Catholic social worker, these tens of thousands of homeless children “are frequently raped and beaten, even by police. Drug use is rampant. Girls often resort to prostitution, leaving their own babies to sleep on the side of the road at night while they sell themselves.”

Consider the case of 12-year-old “Henri.”

12 year-old, Henri, which is not his real name, points at a large fresh looking scar on his midriff.

“People accused me of sorcery and my mother believed them,” he says.

“Look, here on my stomach. She tried to kill me with a knife. It really hurt and I cannot understand why my mother did it.”

[…]

“She threw me out of the house and told me to go away,” he says.

Henri was then forced to live on the streets until charity workers convinced his mother that the allegations were untrue.

[…]

“She didn’t say sorry to me. She didn’t say anything.”

Alessandra Dentice, UNICEF’s head of child protection in the Congo, says a new law is helping.

It was only after the Children’s Voice charity visited his grandparents and warned them that making witchcraft allegations against children is now illegal, that the matter was finally dropped.

But the existence of a recently introduced law under the Child Protection Code is one thing. Enforcing it can be quite another, according to local lawyer, Antonie Famber.
“The trouble is that most people here still believe in witchcraft so this makes the law very hard to enforce,” he says.

“To make matter worse even some government officials believe in sorcery themselves. Take the case of a colleague of mine who is also a lawyer. He knows that the law does not recognise sorcery but he has accused his own children of witchcraft.”

Indeed, “even the head of a special government commission to protect children accused of witchcraft said he thinks it is possible for children to be ‘sorcerers.’”

You sometimes see a very little child with big eyes, black eyes, a distended stomach,” said Theodore Luleka Mwanalwamba. “These are the physical aspects.”

[…]

He said cracking down on abusive pastors is difficult because “important people” are sometimes members of their churches.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that many activists agree that the law is not being enforced, including Liana Bianchi, administrative director for the humanitarian group Africare. She blames the accusations on poverty: “Accusations of witchcraft have become socially acceptable reasons for why a family turns a child out on the street.”

It’s possible, I guess…

Only desperation could force families to cast children into the streets, and, as a nation, Congo is one of the most desperate places in the world. With 80 percent of the population earning less than $1 a day, Congo has one of the poorest populations on the continent. It also has one of the youngest. The average life expectancy is 41. Even though 1 out of 5 children dies before reaching the age of five, nearly half of Congo’s population is under the age of 14.

That may explain what happened to 13-year-old refugee Kisungu Gloire:

His stepmother delivered a baby that was stillborn. She blamed Kisungu, calling him a witch. She had a dream that Kisungu was trying to kill her, and then tried to burn him with a flaming plastic bag. She took him to a priest to perform an exorcism, but when that appeared to have failed, she finally stopped feeding him and told him to get out.

It might also account for the fate of 16-year-old Ntumba Tshimanga:

Even though Ntumba worked on the street to bring food home, his presence was resented, and soon the family started to accuse him of being a witch. If he was late from an errand, they claimed that he was performing witchcraft on the streets. If there was an illness in the family, it was because Ntumba had cast a spell. Five years ago, Ntumba left to live on the streets.

But poverty cannot explain why Julie Moseka paid $50 to have her 8-year-old daughter Noella exorcised, which is to say tortured, in a country where the average annual salary is $100:

During the ceremony, Pastor Tshombe and three of his aides held Noella’s spindly limbs down and poured hot candle wax on her belly while she screamed and cried. Then the pastor bit down hard and pulled the skin on her stomach, pretending to pull demonic flesh out of her.

In an interview afterward, Tshombe acknowledged the ritual can be painful, but he says it’s necessary because otherwise the children would not be “cured.”

[…]

Noella’s mother, agreed. “It was imperative that it happen this way,” she said, “because the child is accused of witchcraft.”

I’m reminded of Scottish explorer John Duncan’s Travels in Western Africa (1847):

Not even the appearance of affection exists between husband and wife, or between parents and children. So little do they care for their offspring, that many offered to sell me any of their sons or daughters as slaves. They are, to speak the truth, in point of parental affection inferior to brutes.

Say it with me now: das raciss!

Well, Alessandra Dentice has a more politically acceptable explanation:

“This is a country where is no social cohesion any longer, there is no sense of community, no sense of family,” she says.

“So, whenever anything happens at family or community level it is very easy for them to blame someone who is powerless and seems to have no rights.”

Ms Dentice went on tell me how serious sorcery allegations can be for the children concerned.

“A lot of these children are beaten up or burnt. Unfortunately it is very common,” she says.

“I have just received this morning a report about a girl of 12-years-old who has been burnt because she was accused of witchcraft.”

While some Congolese try to stamp out sorcery, others seek to use it to their advantage: in 2009, Congolese government troops from the 85th Brigade in North Kivu province raped pygmies, including children, “to gain supernatural powers and protection,” according to a regional rights group.

“The village chief was stripped and (sodomised) in the presence of his wife, his children and daughter in-law.

“The children in turn were stripped and raped in front of their father.”

It said armed groups in the region also abused the pygmies.

Elderly citizens and children were also being raped by the armed groups and wayward FARDC soldiers in eastern DRC, it added.

The pygmies live essentially as subsistence hunter-gatherers in the forests in the DRC’s equatorial zones and have been targeted by militia groups in the past.

(We’ll see exactly how the pygmies have been “targeted” a little later…)

Rape Central

Speaking of rape, the Congo has been called “the worst place on earth to be a woman.”

A new study released Wednesday shows that it’s even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a rate equal to 48 per hour.

That rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in one year by the United Nations.

Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the rate could be even higher.

[…]

Congo, a nation of 70 million people that is equal in size to Western Europe, has been plagued by decades of war. Its vast forests are rife with militias that have systematically used rape to destroy communities.

The analysis, which will be published in the American Journal of Public Health in June, shows that more than 400,000 women had been raped in Congo during a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007.

Talk about rape culture! Clearly the Congo is in desperate need of a SlutWalk.

Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues, has a theory:

“Rape is employed as a weapon because it is effective,” Verveer said. “It destroys the fabric of society from within and does so more efficiently than do guns or bombs.”

Rape is an effective weapon of war because it breaks apart families and communities, Verveer said.

“In addition to these rapes and gang rapes, of which there have been hundreds of thousands over the duration of the conflict, the perpetrators frequently mutilate the woman in the course of the attack,” she said. “The apparent purpose is to leave a lasting and inerasable signal to others that the woman has been violated.”

That, she said, in Congo as in many other cultures gives the victim “a lifelong badge of shame.” If married, she often is cast aside. If unmarried, she cannot find a mate.

(Don’t worry, we’ll get to the mutilations shortly.)

Men, too, are routinely raped:

For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.

According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians.

Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.

The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.

The joint military operations that began in January between Rwanda and Congo, David and Goliath neighbors who were recently bitter enemies, were supposed to end the murderous rebel problem along the border and usher in a new epoch of cooperation and peace. Hopes soared after the quick capture of a renegade general who had routed government troops and threatened to march across the country.

But aid organizations say that the military maneuvers have provoked horrific revenge attacks, with more than 500,000 people driven from their homes, dozens of villages burned and hundreds of villagers massacred, including toddlers thrown into open fires.

And it is not just the rebels being blamed. According to human rights groups, soldiers from the Congolese Army are executing civilians, raping women and conscripting villagers to lug their food, ammunition and gear into the jungle. It is often a death march through one of Africa’s lushest, most stunning tropical landscapes, which has also been the scene of a devastatingly complicated war for more than a decade.

In 2010, nearly 200 women were gang-raped within miles of a UN base.

Will F. Cragin of the International Medical Corps said aid workers knew rebels had occupied Luvungi town and surrounding villages in eastern Congo the day after the attack began on July 30. U.N. agencies sent text messages to cell phones saying the area was occupied, he said.

The international community to the rescue! Or not:

Cragin told The Associated Press by telephone that his organization was only able to get into the town, which he said is about 10 miles from a U.N. military camp, after rebels ended their brutal spree of raping and looting and withdrew of their own accord on Aug. 4.

There was no fighting and no deaths, he said, just “lots of pillaging and the systematic raping of women” by between 200 and 400 rebels.

Four young boys also were raped, said Dr. Kasimbo Charles Kacha, the district medical chief.

“Many women said they were raped in their homes in front of their children and husbands,” Cragin said. Others were dragged into the nearby forest.

He said that by the time they got help it was too late to administer medication against AIDS and contraception to all but three of the survivors.

Yes, it seems the uncontrollable Congolese rape epidemic hasn’t exactly helped with the uncontrollable Congolese AIDS epidemic.

More than 40,000 women and girls were raped by soldiers and used as sex slaves in the six-year civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and desperately need medical care, according to a report released yesterday.

Presumably the 400,000 or so raped between 2006 and 2007 need it just as desperately.

There are only two hospitals that can treat rape victims in the eastern Congo, where most of the fighting has taken place. Most of the treatment for rape victims has been provided by humanitarian aid agencies rather than the government, and even the agencies warn that they are not able to reach all the people who need help. Médecins Sans Frontières estimates that in some regions, it is helping only 5 per cent of women who have been sexually abused. In many cases, women were raped as they walked to medical centres to seek treatment.

Health groups warn that the rapes have caused a massive increase in the rate of HIV/Aids infection. More than 20 per cent of the population in eastern Congo is estimated to be infected, and more than half of the population could catch the virus within the next 10 years, making the rate of infection one of the highest in the world. As militias and soldiers from neighbouring countries move back home, they will spread the infection.

The earliest confirmed case of HIV in a human is from the Congo in 1959.

Ultra-Rape

“Warning,” begins a 2006 Newsweek report on the war in eastern Congo: “do not read this story if you are easily disturbed by graphic information, or are under age, or are easily upset by accounts of gruesome sexual violence.” The report is subtitled: “The atrocity reports from eastern Congo were so hellish that Western medical experts refused to believe them — at first.” Wheeee

This is about fistulas — and rape, which in Congo has become the continuation of war by other means. Fistulas are a kind of damage that is seldom seen in the developed world. Many obstetricians have encountered the condition only in their medical texts, as a rare complication associated with difficult or abnormal childbirths: a rupture of the walls that separate the vagina and bladder or rectum.

[…]

In eastern Congo, however, the problem is practically an epidemic. When a truce was declared in the war there in 2003, so many cases began showing up that Western medical experts at first called it impossible — especially when local doctors declared that most of the fistulas they were seeing were the consequence of rapes. “No one wanted to believe it at first,” says Lyn Lusi, manager of the HEAL Africa hospital (formerly called the Docs Hospital) in the eastern Congo city of Goma. “When our doctors first published their results, in 2003, this was unheard of.”

Oh, look: Goma again. Say, aren’t you glad we’re exploring the Congo?

It had been no secret that nearly all sides in the Congo’s complex civil war resorted to systematic rape among civilian populations, and estimates were as high as a quarter million victims of sexual assault during the four-year-long conflict. But once fighting died down, victims began coming out of the jungles and forests and their condition was worse than anyone had imagined. Thousands of women had been raped so brutally that they had fistulas. They wandered into hospitals soaked in their own urine and feces, rendered incontinent by their injuries.

I know what you’re thinking: how violent would a rape have to be?

Ordinary rapes, even violent ones, do not usually cause fistulas, although it’s not medically impossible. Doctors in eastern Congo say they have seen cases that resulted from gang rapes where large numbers of militiamen repeatedly forced themselves on the victim. But more often the damage is caused by the deliberate introduction of objects into the victim’s vagina when the rape itself is over. The objects might be sticks or pipes. Or gun barrels. In many cases the attackers shoot the victim in the vagina at point-blank range after they have finished raping her. “Often they’ll do this carefully to make sure the woman does not die,” says Dr. Denis Mukwege, medical director of Panzi Hospital. “The perpetrators are trying to make the damage as bad as they can, to use it as a kind of weapon of war, a kind of terrorism.” Instead of just killing the woman, she goes back to her village permanently and obviously marked. “I think it’s a strategy put in place by these groups to disrupt society, to make husbands flee, to terrorize.”

Now you know!

“All the armed men rape,” says Doctor Mukwege. “When we see a lesion, we can tell who the perpetrator is; there are special methods of each group, types of injuries. The Interahamwe after the rape will introduce objects; a group in Kombo sets fire to the women’s buttocks afterwards, or makes them sit on the coals of a fire. There’s another group that specializes in raping 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-year-old girls, one that gets them pregnant and aborts them.” The youngest victim of fistula from rape his hospital has seen was 12 months old; the oldest, 71.

[…]

Last April, he says, a 5-year-old girl was brought to him. Her tormentors had raped her and then fired a pistol into her vagina. She was operated on twice at Panzi Hospital without success before being sent to a hospital in the United States where surgeons tried twice more to repair the damage. They failed, too. She’ll spend the rest of her life with a colostomy bag.

[…]

Late one evening a group of Interhamwe gunmen raided her [20-year-old Bahati’s] village in South Kivu, killed 10 of the men, and abducted 10 women and girls. She says she and the other captives were kept chained except when they were unbound to be gang-raped. She became pregnant after five months, and her captors gave her a crude abortion by shoving something into her — she says she doesn’t know what they used. Her doctors say the abortion probably caused the fistula.

“Probably.” Hard to narrow it down, you see.

Benga, 16, and Masoro, 17 […] were kept tied to trees except when they were doing domestic chores or being raped. Their mothers were raped in front of the girls. Benga bursts into tears recalling the experience. “Their purpose is simply to ruin people, to rape people,” she says. “I don’t know why.”

Yeah, why is that?

No one can say why. The answer is almost too awful to consider, and impossible to understand.

Ultra-Mega-Rape

Meanwhile, the UN has its hands full in South Kivu, where “sexual atrocities extend ‘far beyond rape’ and include sexual slavery, forced incest and cannibalism.”

Yakin Erturk called the situation in South Kivu the worst she has ever seen in four years as the global body’s special investigator for violence against women. Sexual violence throughout Congo is “rampant,” she said, blaming rebel groups, the armed forces and national police.

[…]

“The atrocities perpetrated by these armed groups are of an unimaginable brutality that goes far beyond rape,” she said in a statement. “Women are brutally gang raped, often in front of their families and communities. In numerous cases, male relatives are forced at gun point to rape their own daughters, mothers or sisters.”

(By the way, this is basically the reason the American South needed lynching.)

Fistulas return, as well:

The statement continued: “Frequently women are shot or stabbed in their genital organs, after they are raped. Women, who survived months of enslavement, told me that their tormentors had forced them to eat excrement or the human flesh of murdered relatives.”

[…]

The Panzi hospital, a specialized institution in Bukavu near the Rwandan border, sees about 3,500 women a year suffering fistula and other severe genital injuries resulting from atrocities, Erturk said.

She attributes nearly 20 percent of abuse cases to the army and police forces:

Army units have deliberately targeted communities suspected of supporting militia groups “and pillage, gang rape and, in some instances, murder civilians,” she said.

North-west Congo has its fair share of atrocities, too:

The tactics include “pillaging, torture and mass rape,” she said, citing a December incident when 70 police officers took revenge for the torching of a police station in Karawa by burning the Equator town, torturing civilians and raping at least 40 women, including an 11-year-old girl.

No police officer has been charged or arrested in relation to the atrocities, she said, adding that similar operations have since been carried out in Bonyanga and Bongulu, also in Congo’s northwest.

But let’s get back to the action in eastern Congo:

Militiamen grilled bodies on a spit and boiled two girls alive as their mother watched, U.N. peacekeepers charged Wednesday, adding cannibalism to a list of atrocities allegedly carried out by one of the tribal groups fighting in northeast Congo.

[…]

The allegations of cannibalism in the U.N. report were from a summary of testimony from witnesses gathered over a year from hundreds of people who had been kidnapped by militias in the region. The report said that some victims were killed by torture and decapitation. Those not killed were held in labor camps and forced to work as fishermen, porters, domestic workers and sex slaves.

“Several witnesses reported cases of mutilation followed by death or decapitation,” the report said.

The U.N. report included an account from Zainabo Alfani in which she said she was forced to watch rebels kill and eat two of her children in June 2003.

The report said, “In one corner, there was already cooked flesh from bodies and two bodies being grilled on a barbecue and, at the same time, they prepared her two little girls, putting them alive in two big pots filled with boiling water and oil.”

Her youngest child was saved, apparently because at six months old it didn’t have much flesh.

Alfani said she was gang-raped by the rebels and mutilated. She survived to tell her horror story, but died in the hospital on Sunday of AIDS contracted during her torture two years earlier, the U.N. report said.

All right, so it’s hard to judge the reliability of any given story, but it’s clear that a lot of horrible things are going on in the Congo.

The tribal group in question is the Patriotic Resistance Front of Ituri, which entered the country from Uganda, according to General Patrick Cammaert, then commander of UN forces in the Congo:

Members of the group were suspected of killing nine U.N. peacekeepers in a Feb. 25 [2005] ambush. On March 1, gunmen fired on Pakistani peacekeepers and the peacekeepers fought back, killing up to 60 fighters, U.N. officials said at the time.

At that point, the war had been officially over for three years.

Poor Pygmies

Did I mention that soldiers sometimes abduct and murder civilians, then devour their hearts? The U.N. has plenty of reports on the subject, if you’re interested.

An investigation team visited Mambasa in the eastern Congo and heard testimony indicating a pattern of looting, killing and violence against women by the armed factions during fighting last October and December.

The team noted acts of cannibalism, and tactics to force family members to eat parts of their loved ones, that could be considered part of a policy of psychological torture, mainly conducted against the Nande and Pygmy populations.

Poor pygmies.

In all the team interviewed 368 people — victims and witnesses alike. One witness reported that soldiers killed his brother and four other people, including a three-year-old child, then took the heart of one of the victims and sucked the blood from it.

Another said soldiers killed his father, cut his chest open, removed the heart, cooked it and ate it in front of him. In yet another reported case, soldiers under the command of a woman executed six people out of a group of 13, pulled out their hearts and forced the other prisoners to taste the human flesh.

Poor, poor pygmies.

Marauding rebels are massacring and eating pygmies in the dense forests of north-east Congo, according to UN officials who are investigating allegations of cannibalism in Ituri province, where fighting between several rebel groups has displaced about 150,000 people in the past month.

Many of the displaced tell of rebel fighters capturing and butchering pygmies, Manoddje Mounoubai, spokesman for the UN ceasefire monitoring mission in Congo, said yesterday.

The UN had sent six officials to investigate the accusation as well as other human rights abuses, he said.

Other UN officials in the capital, Kinshasa, and the eastern city of Goma said that widespread cannibalism had already been established.

“Ituri is completely out of control and cannibalism is just the latest atrocity taking place,” said one, who asked not to be named until the investigators deliver their report. “Perhaps this will finally alert the world to what’s going on.”

What is with pygmies and magic spells?

“We hear reports of [enemy] commanders feeding on sexual organs of pygmies, apparently believing this would give them strength,” [Sudi Alimasi, an official of a pro-government group] said.

“We also have reports of pygmies being forced to feed on the cooked remains of their colleagues.”

[…]

Much of the vast forested area is controlled by the Mayi-Mayi, a loose grouping of tribal militias united by their magical beliefs and taste for human flesh.

On a recent assignment in eastern Congo the Guardian correspondent saw many Mayi-Mayi fighters wearing parts of the bodies of their Rwandan enemies, in the belief that this would make them invincible.

This entire issue of Radish in one sentence:

Cannibalism has re-emerged throughout eastern Congo as the last vestiges of colonial influence have been eroded during the war.

The International Community to the Rescue

As we’ve seen, the international community has not been consistently helpful to the Congolese.

The U.N. has over 17,000 troops in the Congo right now, but they are widely dispersed, and have been unable to fully protect civilians or even defend their own bases. Nkunda’s rebels forced government soldiers to retreat from intense battles up to the edges of the provincial capital of Goma. The biggest losers in this conflict are the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the middle — forced to relocate repeatedly, many victims of looting, rape and murder by both advancing rebels and some government soldiers — looking to thinly-spread U.N. forces for help. The humanitarian crisis and threat of further regional destabilization, has made this conflict a top U.N. priority recently.

Throwing stones at U.N. peacekeepers in North Kivu province (image)

In November 2012, M23 rebels captured Goma, the capital of North Kivu province. Fortunately, U.N. troops were in the area. The international community to the rescue!

Or not.

Goma, the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), had fallen to rebels. M23 fighters captured the seat of the world’s biggest peacekeeping operation with ease on Tuesday, parading past UN troops who offered no resistance. Even by the standards of this turbulent region, it was a day of high drama that raised the stakes for further conflict.

M23, allegedly backed by neighbouring Rwanda, marched into the city of 1 million people after the Congolese army crumbled and fled. Scores of heavily armed rebels walked through the city unchallenged as small groups of residents greeted them.

[…]

After nearly eight months of mutinies, skirmishes, advances, retreats, declarations, claims and counter-claims, the actual fighting lasted just a matter of hours. By Monday evening M23, which has been accused of killings, rapes and recruiting child soldiers since it launched an uprising in April, had advanced to within four miles of Goma.

[…]

In the late morning Gabriel Alamazani, a Congolese non-government organisation worker, appeared on the boulevard, coming from the direction of heavy gunfire.

“There are no more Congolese troops in the town. M23 are here, they have entered the centre of the town, there is no doubt,” he said. “I saw over 100 M23 fighters there. Monusco [the UN stabilisation mission in the Congo] is doing nothing; they saw M23 and then left in their trucks.”

[…]

Monusco had previously sworn that it would not allow M23 to take Goma, where it has about 1,400 troops; many Congolese were outraged by the UN’s inaction. “What purpose do they serve?” demanded one man, who declined to give his name. “They drive out in their tanks, they watch the fighting, then they return. They do nothing!”

A South African Monusco soldier, who did not wish to be named, said: “We [Monusco] have had no trouble with M23, to be honest.”

However, a senior UN source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: “There is no army left in the town, not a soul … once they were in the town what could we do? It could have been very serious for the population.”

M23 turned out to be somewhat serious for the population as well.

Even in the remotest reaches of North Kivu, where roads do not go, you will find children with whom you have at least two words in common: “Monuc”, the original name of the UN peacekeeping force, and “biscuit,” thanks to their misguided attempt to ingratiate themselves by distributing baked goods among people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now called Monusco, the force is highly visible but largely ineffectual, locals say.

“They do not do anything,” says a doctor in his office in Goma, the provincial capital. The national army, FARDC, is fighting the M23 rebel group on the outskirts of the city. Behind rebel lines, a catalogue of abuse has taken place in recent months, including rape, forced recruitment and summary executions. “The primary mission of 17,000 soldiers in this country is to protect civilians and they’ve done nothing so far. The UN forces are on a sightseeing mission,” said the doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Things may be about to change. The UN is deploying an offensive combat force for the first time in an attempt to neutralise eastern Congo’s myriad armed groups.

Apparently the international community hasn’t been defending its bases again:

In eastern Congo, civilians have been raped, beheaded and massacred in close proximity to Monusco bases. The force has existed for 13 years and has cost $10bn (£7bn), but commentators agree that it has failed on numerous occasions to secure civilians.

[…]

People remember 20 November last year when M23 took control of Goma. “Why did Monusco not stop them? They lost our faith,” one man recalls. Like the doctor, he believes the new brigade is, in principle, a good thing. “The Congolese think of Goma and they think of war. The intervention brigade will help to change that,” he says.

M23 promptly crumbled.

Congolese rebels surrendered on Tuesday to end a bloody 20-month uprising offering tentative hopes of peace in one of the world’s deadliest conflicts.

The M23 rebel movement capitulated under an onslaught from a renewed Congolese army backed by 3,000 UN fighters. Captured or forced to flee, the rebels declared a ceasefire and said they were ready to disarm and demobilise to pursue a political settlement.

[…]

The rebels’ demise came with bewildering speed after Congolese and UN troops stepped up their offensive when peace talks stalled again last month. The Congolese military seized control of more than six towns in just a matter of days, cornering the insurgents in heavily wooded hills on the border with Uganda and Rwanda and, on Tuesday, driving them out of their last two strongholds.

[…]

The rebels’ capitulation marks a dramatic turnaround less than a year after they captured Goma, the east’s biggest city, and bragged of marching on the capital to topple Kabila. M23 officers could be seen swaggering around Goma’s best lakeside hotels while UN peacekeepers were passive spectators and the DRC army fell into a drunken, defeated shambles, wreaking revenge on civilians.

Ten Years of Total War

In 2008, the International Rescue Committee released a report on the effects of the last ten years of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These estimates are probably not even close to reliable, but they give you a sense of the conditions:

An estimated 5.4 million people were killed by conflict and its fallout in Congo from 1998 until April 2007, says a report released Tuesday by the International Rescue Committee.

Most of the deaths were due to the humanitarian crisis caused by the war, which badly eroded health-care services and caused famine, says the report by the internationally recognized non-governmental aid organization. The report found that outbreaks of easily treated diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, malnutrition, measles and whooping cough have been major killers in Congo, especially among children.

Nearly half of the fatalities were among children under the age of five, even though they make up only 19 per cent of the total population.

[…]

The International Rescue Committee study found that roughly 45,000 Congolese continue to die each month, even though a peace accord formally ended the war in 2002.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture: the Democratic Republic of the Congo is quite simply an astonishingly bad neighborhood.

Interestingly enough, it was not always so.

Boom in the Jungle

(Radish-recommended listening.)

We can get a glimpse of the Congo under Belgian rule in the archives of Time magazine: ‘Boom in the Jungle’ (1955).

In the Belgian Congo last week massed tom-tom drummers practiced a welcome tattoo. Prosperous Negro shopkeepers climbed up wooden ladders and draped the Congolese flag (a golden star on a blue field) from lampposts and triumphal arches set up along Boulevard Albert I, the spanking concrete highway that bisects the capital city of Leopoldville. In far-off mission churches, encircled by the rain forest that stretches through Belgian territory from the Atlantic to the Mountains of the Moon, choirs of Bantu children rehearsed the Te Deum. African regiments drilled, jazz bands blared in the bush, and on the great brown river that drains the middle of the continent Negro captains tooted the raucous steam whistles on their swiftly gliding paddle boats.

The toots and Te Deums were all in preparation for the arrival this week of the slim, spectacled young man who is King of the Belgians and, as such, the sovereign lord of 14 million Congolese. It will be his first state visit to his African Empire.

The Congo is King Baudouin’s richest, widest realm. It is eighty times the size of the mother country, and half again as populous. Booming Congo exports provide the dollars and pounds that make the Belgian franc one of the world’s hardest currencies. Belgians drink Congo coffee, wear shirts made of Congo cotton, wash them with soap made from Congo palm kernels. Without the mighty Congo, little Belgium might go broke; with it, a nation of 9,000,000 still counts as a world empire.

[…]

The Belgians like to feel that they have devised “a middle way,” making possible black-white partnership. Their program is: full speed ahead in economics and education, dead slow in politics.

So far, the evidence is that the Belgian way is working. The Congo, under hard-working capitalism, has become a tropical cornucopia in the heart of a poverty-stricken continent.

On a street corner in Elisabethville, now Lubumbashi, in 1953 (image)

The Congo supplies the U.S. with well over half the uranium produced in the non-Communist world; it also mines and exports 75% of the free world’s cobalt (essential for jet aircraft engines), 70% of the industrial diamonds. One third the size of the U.S., it is a hot, humid, fecund basin drained by a river system second only to the Amazon in volume. In the east lies Ruanda-Urundi, where the seven-foot Watussi live; in the south lies Katanga, the metalliferous wonderland that fronts on Rhodesia and is the site of Shinkolobwe, the world’s richest uranium mine. Between is the timeless jungle (48% of the Congo is forested), with beetles the size of pigeons, dwarf antelope no bigger than terriers, bearded Pygmies with humplike buttocks who hunt the rare okapi (half antelope, half giraffe).

To Novelist Joseph Conrad, the Congo River was “an immense snake uncoiled” curving through “joyless sunshine into the heart of darkness.” There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the 19th century “scramble for Africa,” when Baudoin’s great-granduncle, Leopold II staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold’s rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.

(But see below.)

Today, all has changed. Nowhere in Africa is the Bantu so well fed and housed, so productive and so content as he is in the Belgian Congo.

In little more than a generation of intense economic effort, the Belgians have injected 20 centuries of Western mechanical progress into a Stone Age wilderness. The results are staggering: in forests, where 50 years ago there were no roads because the wheel was unknown, no schools because there was no alphabet, no peace because there was neither the will nor the means to enforce it, the sons of cannibals now mine the raw materials of the Atomic Age.

Belgian brains and Bantu muscle have thrust back the forest and checked the dread diseases (yaws, sleeping sickness, malaria) which sapped the Bantu’s strength. In some areas, the Congo’s infant-mortality rate is down to 60 per 1,000 — better than Italy’s figure. More than 1,000,000 children attend primary and secondary schools — 40% of the school-age population (compared with less than 10% in the French empire).

The Belgians taught the Bantu to run bulldozers, looms and furnaces, to rivet ships, drive taxis and trucks. Girls with grotesque tribal markings etched into their ebony foreheads sell in shops, teach in schools, nurse in hospitals. Already thousands of natives in the Congo’s bustling cities earn $100–$150 a month — more than most workers in Europe, and small fortunes by African standards. They buy sewing machines, phonographs and bicycles in such profusion that Sears, Roebuck has recently put out a special Congo catalogue.

Public education, free to all, circa 1950 (image)

The education of the natives didn’t end with high school, either (1957):

Belgium’s plan for the inevitable march to self-government for Africans lies in education and economic opportunity for the blacks. The multiracial, Catholic-run Lovanium University will graduate its first Negro lawyers and engineers next year. At Luluabourg, deep in the heart of the Congo, black cadets are training at the colony’s first military academy. Nowhere in Africa is there such a solid, well-paid class of native technicians. Congolese pilot river and lake steamers, run locomotives, do 90% of the repair work at the big military base at Kamina. But Africans are still segregated in native quarters, must be in their own part of town by curfew — 9–10 o’clock.

The horror! Well, by 1988, the horrors of racist imperialist colonialism were over, and Lovanium University had been renamed the “University of Kinshasa.”

Malaika, a 23-year-old law student at the University of Kinshasa, often has the money to eat just one meal a day. Indeed, professors at the 8,000-student university complain that it is hard to teach when many students faint during class because of hunger.

Nor does Malaika have money to buy textbooks, which have become a rare sight on campus. The university library has had no acquisition budget since 1971, so Malaika borrows books from a professor or takes a one-hour bus trip downtown to use libraries at Government ministries.

[…]

The university used to serve three meals a day to students, but the meals have been phased out because of Zaire’s economic crisis. Garbage and weeds cover much of the campus, and many windows are broken.

[…]

Professors go to extraordinary lengths to supplement their income because their pay ranges from $15 a week for lecturers to $85 a week for senior professors. Chemistry professors make perfume in their laboratories to sell to local shops. On a recent day, several physics professors divided up a truckload of canned sardines to sell to storeowners, street vendors and friends.

The National University of Kinshasa is considered the wealthiest and most prestigious university in Zaire. At the University of Kisangani, students drag chairs from class to class because of a shortage of seats. There are so few working toilets in University of Lubumbashi dormitories that most students use the outdoors as their outhouse.

As for Luluabourg, it was renamed “Kananga,” meaning “a place for peace or love.” That’ll show those Belgians! Its current inhabitants are just blown away by Western mechanical progress like the rope water pump, which is exactly what it sounds like.

Audrey Hepburn in the Belgian Congo (image)

But let’s get back to that boom in the jungle — nope, that isn’t the sound of the M23’s 120mm mortars:

The Belgians compare the Congo with the state of Texas, though in fact the Congo is bigger and far richer in its natural resources. The Congo’s gross national product has tripled since 1939. Money is plentiful. Belgian investors take more than $50 million a year in dividends alone. Once the Congo depended exclusively on mining and farming; today it manufactures ships, shoes, cigarettes, chemicals, explosives and photographic film. With its immense reserves of hydroelectric power (a fifth of the world’s total), the Belgians expect the Congo to become “the processing plant for all Africa.”

The Congo boom makes its cities grow like well-nourished bamboo shoots. In six years the Negro population of Elisabethville —

Fighters entered the city, in the mineral-rich Katanga province, and opened fire on Congolese army and police killing four, officials said.

— has jumped from 40,000 to 120,000, Costermansville —

The violence has forced more than 100,000 people to flee, more than half of whom are children, according to the UN children’s agency.

— from 7,000 to 25,000, Stanleyville —

Further heavy shelling has broken out between Rwandan and Ugandan troops around the rebel-held city of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

— from 25,000 to 48,000. But the pride of the Congo is Leopoldville —

BBC Africa analyst Mary Harper says that given the grim state of prisons in Congo, the goats will doubtless be relieved about being spared a trial.

— (pop. 370,000), a bustling, modern metropolis that is spreading along the south bank of Stanley Pool.

Leo, as the Belgians call it, has tripled its population in the past six years. Its 20,000 whites live apart in a suburb that seems far too big for them. […]

Adjoining “white Leo” is the teeming “native town,” known to the Negroes as Le Beige. Without its 350,000 Africans, Leopoldville would crumble in the tropical sun. Each morning, thousands of Negroes bicycle into downtown Leo to work in the shipyards and offices. Evenings, they stream homeward to the jumble of shacks, tenements, modern homes and tastefully built hospitals that make up “black Léo.” In the darkness, millions of candles glow under the mango trees where Negro market women do a roaring trade in bread, beer and dried fish, green-and-brown-striped caterpillars (a delicacy when fried in deep fat) and blackened lumps of elephant meat.

Primitivism and progress, magic and machinery, go hand in hand in Le Beige. A government helicopter sprays the town with DDT to keep away mosquitoes, but many of the Negroes put far more faith in “charms.” There are swimming pools, tennis courts and night schools, but many of those who use them still believe in witchcraft.

Boenda tribesmen of western Congo in 1951 (image)

The Belgian attitude is that these things will only change slowly. It is an attitude that is shared by the three big institutions which run Congo life: the state, which is absolute (no one has a vote in the Congo); the big corporations, which control one-third of the land area and at least half the Negro workers; and the Roman Catholic Church, which maintains the Congo’s schools and most of its hospitals. The state is Governor General Léo Pétillon, 52, a diminutive Belgian barrister who stands but 5 ft. 3 in. in his epauleted white uniform. Known as the “Little Lion” to the 5,000 Belgian civil servants who govern the Congo on his orders, Pétillon has an actor’s mobile face, slow limpid speech, and graceful white hands which more often than not gesticulate with a lighted Camel to emphasize a point. An old Africa hand, he is guided by a motto like that of his predecessors: Dominer pour Servir — dominate to serve.

Pétillon stands for “paternalisme,” the policy which the Belgians openly proclaim as the secret of their success in the Congo. “The African understands paternalism,” says the Governor with conviction. “It was he who invented it.” In the Congo, paternalism means bread but no votes, good government but no opposition; the best Negro housing in Africa but no real freedom of movement. “The emphasis is on economics,” says Governor Pétillon. “The fascination of becoming a skilled worker handling precision machinery drives out of the Negro’s mind the need for politics.”

The Congo has excellent roads because the rural population is compelled to labor on them; it is developing scientific agriculture by forcing peasant farmers to grow minimum quotas of cotton, and jailing them for failure to deliver. Each Negro city dweller is fingerprinted and must carry a plastic identity card attached to his tax receipt. Yet the Congo is one of the few places in Africa where there is practically no racial tension.

“This is black man’s country,” says Governor Pétillon. Before a white man may buy Congo land, he must prove to the government that no native is using it, and that it will not be needed for native settlement.

[…]

1929 Belgian family photograph (image)

All told, five big companies control about 90% of the Congo’s capital investment. They treat their Bantu workers with the same assiduous paternalism shown by the Congo state. For its 63,000 black dependents, the Union Minière furnishes attractive brick bungalows and good schools, prenatal care and milk for mothers and children, medals for the men who excel at their work in the mines. “This is capitalism as it works in the Congo,” said one industrialist proudly.

But the Congo is also run by Christian missionaries, who in most cases got there first. Of the Congo’s 14 million Africans, 4,700,000 are baptized Roman Catholics (the rest are almost all pagan). The Roman Catholic Church maintains 678 medical centers, 16,500 primary, 103 secondary and 171 technical schools.

The churchmen are more aware than the government or the corporations that the half-educated African, stirred by the white man’s literature and moved by his religion, cannot always be satisfied by bread and machines alone. The Congolese, or those among them who have climbed fastest from darkness to light, are slowly starting to talk about such verboten things as self-rule and democracy. Their stirrings are not enough to disturb the massive calm of the Belgian administration, or impede the spectacular advance of the Congo economy, but they are perceptible. To some Belgians they are alarming. Says a top-ranking Congo official: “What would the Negroes do with votes? Votes mean Communism.”

To most of the hard-headed businessmen who run the Congo government, the signs of a Negro awakening present not a danger but a challenge. “Once advance has begun, you cannot stop it, on any front,” says Economist Henri Cornélis, Pétillon’s deputy and almost certain successor. The Brussels Cabinet agrees, and the result is that the Congo government is getting ready to give the Congolese a small voice in the colony’s affairs. Some time next year, if present plans are carried out, the literate Africans in the principal Congo cities (15% of the total native population) will vote alongside the whites for panels of urban councilmen, who will advise the local prefects.

The Belgians plan to move slowly — and progress steadily. “We adapt and adjust continually to the Congo’s circumstances,” says Governor Pétillon. “In the cities perhaps we shall move towards the ordinary concept of democracy, for black and white alike, but in the countryside, we may have to be content for a long time with a modified form of tribalism.”

Here are some before and after pictures from a Belgian encyclopedia showing technological and societal progress in the Congo under Belgian rule.

(A) Housing. (B) Construction of Leopoldville. (C) Home life.

Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say: “technological” and “societal” ““progress”” under racist imperialist Nazi-like Belgian oppression.

(D) Braiding methods. (E) Shipping. (F) Dentistry.
(G) Women’s dress. (H) Music. (I) Play.

Independence

(Radish-recommended listening.)

“Once advance has begun, you cannot stop it, on any front,” said Henri Cornélis. A self-fulfilling prophecy? Who can say? The natives won their glorious Freedom, with what results we have already seen — but how? Did those awful Belgian exploiters put up much of a fight, or did they recognize at once the plain righteousness and virtue of the black nationalist cause? Again we turn to the wonderful archives of Time magazine (whose articles I reproduce solely for educational purposes) to explore the history of the Congo’s “liberation.”

It begins, like so much of the 20th century’s Progress, with bullying by America’s Wilsonian world government, better known as the “international community” (1955):

Many of Leopoldville’s 20,000 Belgians were not prepared in advance to be much impressed by their young king. “That infant,” snapped one sun-helmeted businessman as he watched Baudouin’s arrival in a Sabena DC-6 airliner. The colonists had seen too many prim, unsmiling photographs of the bespectacled King, watchfully flanked by his father, ex-King Leopold, and his purposeful stepmother. But a change seemed to have come over shy King Baudouin the moment he left Brussels. He became relaxed, friendly and informal — a man on his own. On the plane, he insisted on getting himself sprayed with “baptismal” water with the rest when the plane crossed the equator. At banquets and state occasions, Baudouin scorned the special salons reserved for the royal party, shook hands with everybody, exchanged courtly pleasantries with the colony’s ladies, disrupted schedules by lingering long past protocol deadlines — at one party until 1 a.m. Scheduled to deliver a formal address at Leopoldville’s huge, open-air stadium, Baudouin looked out over a crowd of 80,000 people, noticed many fainting under the broiling sun. He unceremoniously took a pencil and cut his prepared speech in half.

The speech, too, was welcome to those Belgians in the Congo who have been smarting under the advice from U.N. committees. The U.N. had deplored Belgium’s refusal to allow the natives any political voice whatever. “We must be inspired by our own consciences, and our duties,” said Baudouin pointedly.

“These can be dictated to us only by ourselves, who thoroughly know Belgian Africa. We know what imperatives are imposed upon us by our sovereignty, and this sovereignty must be exercised by us — without sharing.” In other words, Belgium’s particular paternalism would continue to prevail.

Now really, King Baudouin, what possible harm could there be in holding a few local elections? Look (1957):

One cloudy, hot morning last week in Leopoldville, capital of the vast Belgian Congo (about four times the size of Texas and 77 times larger than Belgium itself), long lines of natives stood quietly in the dusty streets. Across town, amid the mangoes, palms and cassia trees of the European quarter, far fewer white citizens were similarly lined up. Belgian gradualism was making another cautious move forward, permitting the first elections — for either whites or blacks — to be held in Belgium’s fabulously rich (cobalt, uranium, copper, gold) and only colony.

The voting was for urban councilors to act as “advisers” to the Belgian authorities. All males, white or black, over 25 years of age were eligible to vote. The Belgian aim is to create a “partnership” between the two races, setting them out to travel on parallel courses, but with the whites significantly senior. Thus, under the new “cities statute,” Leopoldville is divided into three European communes for its population of 30,000 whites, and eight jampacked African communes for its 350,000 blacks. White and Negro mayors will be selected from the elected councilors by veteran (six years) Governor General Leon Petillon.

At once we see the essentially tribalistic nature of popular government among Africans:

None of the candidates represented a political party, and the native voting generally followed tribal lines, with the numerically strong Bakongo emerging on top. […] The Belgian authorities have agreed to “consult” with the newly elected councilors but not necessarily follow their recommendations. A colonial official explained: “We will allow them to make little mistakes — but not a big nonsense.”

[…]

This week the urban elections (or “consultations,” as the Belgian authorities prefer to call them) will be extended to Elisabethville and Jadotville, the largest towns in the mining province of Katanga. Next in line: Stanleyville, Bukavu, Luluabourg, Matadi. But not even unlimited economic opportunity can still the demand for political expression, which runs through Africa like a fever. Said one Congolese last week: “This didn’t come soon enough, and it isn’t enough.”

The votes are in, and as expected, black nationalism and tribalism are the big winners (October 1958):

The political paroxysm shaking all Africa has even sent tremors into the calm heartland of the Congo. Last year Belgium permitted limited elections for the first time, and 13 black and five white mayors took office. Settled in modernistic offices, well paid, and furnished with chauffeur-driven Opel sedans, the African mayors were supposed to act as agents of Belgian authority. Instead, some assumed the old prerogatives of tribal chiefs and seized firm political control of the native communes. Recently African intellectuals in Léopoldville united to form the Congo’s first native political party, with the aim of “independence” but “in a reasonable time and by means of peaceful negotiations.” […]

Yet at week’s end Léon Pétillon, Minister of the Belgian Congo, a veteran of 17 years in Africa, was able to say soothingly to a huge crowd in Léopoldville: “Be not upset about your future. Have care for it, but not fear: Belgium is conscious of the needs of your nascent political state. Cast a backward glance at all that has been accomplished during the last 50 years. Why should the future be less generous to you than the past?”

Why indeed?

Oh, right: decolonization.

The only unanswered question: Would the future be as generous to Belgium?

Promptly and forcefully, the natives reply (January 1959):

In the broad-boulevarded tropical city of Leopoldville one day last month, a security officer handed the Belgian Governor General a piece of paper with a song written on it. The composer was unknown, but the song itself was being sung at nationalist meetings throughout the territory. “Congoland, land of our forebears,” ran the opening lines, “we will fight for your freedom, if blood must run in streams.” Last week, after the worst eruption the Congo had seen in a decade, blood did in fact run in Léopoldville (pop. 300,000).

In Brussels the reaction was stunned surprise. For 50 years the Belgians have — with model efficiency and unruffled complacency — run the land, 80 times the size of their own, that was once the private property of King Leopold II. They kept the 12.8 million blacks strictly segregated and denied them the vote — but then, the 107,000 white residents had no vote either, and paternalism had many advantages for all. It was not until 1957 that the Congolese, black or white, were allowed to take part in their first municipal elections, and the government has never clearly said how much more self-government can be expected.

Allow me to introduce you to the first major player in Congolese politics:

Among the blacks there had sprung up a quasi-religious group called Abako, which Belgian newspapers brushed off as merely a tribal organization. Originally it had been formed by the Bakongo tribe of the south as a sort of protective union against the harder-working and more favored Bangalas. But under the leadership of a slight, timid-looking but steel-willed fanatic named Joseph Kasavubu, 41, it gradually turned its anger upon bigger targets.

[…]

Joseph Kasavubu, “steel-willed fanatic” from the Bakongo tribe (image)

After his election as one of Léopoldville’s commune burgomasters in 1957, he had himself declared “Supreme Leader” by his followers, and began receiving homage seated on a leopard skin, symbol of tribal supreme power. Meanwhile, the rival Bangalas also began organizing, and the bush telegraph began to echo the nationalist sentiments of the recent All African Peoples Conference in Accra. To make matters worse, the demand for Congolese copper ore hit a slump, and jobless natives swarmed into the city to find work. Finally, one day last week, 4,000 blacks jammed into the courtyard of a Y.M.C.A. to hear Kasavubu speak at an unauthorized protest meeting. When the police arrived, the riots began.

With cries of “Independence!”, “Down with Belgium!” and “Vive Ghana!”, the crowd surged down Prince Baudouin Avenue, was soon joined by thousands of spectators who were just then emerging from the football stadium. The swollen mob swept through the city, upset and burned cars, stoned and mauled Europeans, pillaged shops. Bands looted public buildings and invaded mission schools, concentrating their fury on Roman Catholic more than on Protestant schools (though Kasavubu, mission-educated, studied philosophy for three years as a Catholic seminarist). Under orders from their Belgian officers, African police opened fire, and Belgian paratroopers manned key points about the European part of the city. But for two whole days the rioting continued, until an estimated 175 people had been killed.

Clearly this shows just how ready the natives are for self-government.

In Brussels a hushed special session of Parliament quickly voted to send an investigatory mission. The new Minister of the Congo, Maurice van Hemelrijck, a longtime critic of Belgian complacency and the author of a long-awaited proposal for the Congo’s gradual emancipation that is to be presented to Parliament this week, gave his countrymen a brief but pointed lecture. “We have been on the border of catastrophe,” he said. “We are not without fault. We could not wait so long without punishment before letting the Congolese know of our intentions.”

We must have more concessions! Concessions, you see, mean Progress (October 1959):

For a prosperous half-century, tiny Belgium successfully ruled the vast, mineral-rich Congo with what seemed to be the most foolproof of colonial formulas: steady economic progress, combined with almost no political progress at all. But as the virus of nationalism spread across Africa and the newly autonomous republics of Charles de Gaulle’s French Community sprang up throughout the continent, the Belgian Congo suddenly caught freedom fever.

(Caught it from the international community, as you may recall.)

Early this year, after Leopoldville, capital of the Congo, exploded in the bloodiest race riots the colony had known in a decade, Belgium hastily promised gradual independence “without fatal delays and without rash haste.” Last week, despite all of Belgium’s careful timetables (local council elections next December, establishment of the first parliament next year), the freedom-hungry Congo appeared to be hurtling headlong toward chaos.

Now let’s meet the second major player in Congolese politics:

Since January, a bewildering array of 60 political parties has emerged in the Congo. New groups and splinter groups form with such rapidity that one Congolese leader found that the party he heads had split in two while he was flying from Leopoldville to Brussels last week. The most powerful Congolese politician is Joseph Kasavubu, 42, one of Leopoldville’s ten native commune burgomasters. But Kasavubu’s Abako Party represents mostly the Bakongo people of the southwest, who want immediate independence only for themselves. Abako’s chief rival is the National Congolese Movement Party, headed by a flamboyant convicted embezzler who wants independence without bothering with elections until later. From a Belgian point of view, there is little to choose between the two major parties — or the 58 other varieties; the main objective of all is to get rid of Belgian rule.

Now really, King Baudouin, what possible harm could there be in holding a few local elections?

Patrice Lumumba, “flamboyant convicted embezzler” from the Batetela tribe (image)

Besides bombarding Belgian officials and missionaries with letters threatening them with death unless they clear out, the Congolese have begun quarreling among themselves. Last week, at the Kitona paratroop base, 180 men were wounded, after a band of Bakongo tribesmen threw up picket lines to keep non-Bakongo workers away from their jobs. In Moanda, where the Abako Party has been accusing chiefs of selling out depinda (independence) for a million Congolese francs, at least one chief’s house has been burned to the ground, and tension runs so high that Belgian youngsters now go to school escorted by troops carrying Tommy guns.

But of all the sources of tension, the most dramatic has been the return of what the Congolese call the Mundele ya Mwinda, the White Man with the Lantern. The Mundele superstition goes back to the time when Belgian officials would come into a village at night to round up Congolese males for forced labor. Gradually, the blacks began to see these officials as one all-powerful demon, whose lantern cast an evil spell. Though no one knows exactly who brought the legend of the evil White Man back to life, thousands of Congolese are today convinced that he is once again stalking the land to hypnotize blacks with his lantern and then grind them up into corned beef.

(But see below.)

In recent weeks, nationalist agitators have begun distributing long lists of license-plate numbers belonging to cars the Mundele is supposed to own. Some of the cars belong to Europeans, others to native political opponents of the listmakers; all are in peril of being burned by mobs, and in the past week, five have been. In Leopoldville, black parents have been taking their children out of schools whose teachers are said to be under the Mundele’s spell. A shipment of European sports cars with evil-looking radiators and outsized exhaust pipes nearly got dumped in the river, when the story spread that these were the Mundele’s meat-grinding machines. And Africans and Belgians alike have been beaten up, merely on the suspicion that they might be agents of the Mundele.

“White flight” is by far the kindest term for ethnic cleansing:

Largely as a result of such terrorism, an estimated 7,000 Belgians have left the colony and European capital is fleeing as well. In Belgium, the feeling is growing that whatever the government decides to do about the Congo, its concessions will have to be big and quick. Says Leo Collard, president of the opposition Socialist Party: “It’s no use finding unrealistic time schedules for gradual independence now that the Congolese seem determined to decide their own future. This we have to bear in mind, if we want to prevent a second Algeria.”

Exercise for the reader: what’s the difference between concessions, which are good and just and necessary, and appeasement, which is bad and wrong and never works? Hint: it has something to do with the international community, also known as world opinion. In 1914, this meant whatever Britain wanted; by 1945, it meant whatever America wanted.

But I digress: we were talking about glorious Freedom (November 1959).

Hoping to keep up with the hot spirit of independence that is racing through the Congo like fire in dry bush, Belgium is holding elections there in December to offer a modicum of local self-rule, as a forerunner of a promised national government by Africans in 1964. But Congolese Africans, in a land 99% black, are impatiently several jumps ahead of the process.

Bidding for political power, the Lower Congo’s Abako Party announced it would boycott the December vote rather than submit to the “slowness” of Brussels’ timetable. Hoping to gain control of the rival Congolese National Movement, an ambitious politician named Patrice Lumumba increased the ante. Fiery Lumumba, a 33-year-old former postal clerk and convicted embezzler, cried, “Total independence NOW NOW NOW,” at a Stanleyville meeting of his followers, many of them armed with spears and painted as if for battle. Police rushed in to arrest Lumumba, and his supporters fought back, touching off two days of rioting in which more than 70 Africans were killed, hundreds more wounded.

Belgium, meanwhile, is really burning through those Ministers of the Congo:

In Brussels, Parliament was called back into special session to discuss the riots. Minister of the Congo Auguste De Schrijver announced that he would visit the Congo himself this month to confer with Congolese leaders. “I ask, nay I implore, all concerned to renew the dialogue between Belgians and Congolese,” said De Schrijver plaintively. The Socialist opposition wanted De Schrijver and the government to be ready to negotiate independence now with the Africans. “Why wait for elections when you know the major parties will boycott it?” demanded Socialist Leader Léon Collard.

There is a good chance that the Congolese African leaders will boycott De Schrijver’s conference as well as the December elections. “Nineteen Sixty will be a year of war and misery,” predicted Troublemaker Lumumba before he was led off to jail by the Stanleyville police. As if fearing this prediction was all too accurate, Belgians began flying troop reinforcements south to the Congo.

Within months, the Belgian government had come around (February 1960):

So swift has been the pace of nationalist pressure in the Belgian Congo, and so harsh its violence, that by last week shaken Belgian leaders (who a few years ago boasted that their economic paternalism would long postpone political freedom) were resigned to an offer of full independence for the Congolese this year. At a round-table conference with 81 African delegates in Brussels, the Belgians agreed to a timetable calling for elections beginning May 16 to choose a Congolese Parliament, to be followed by a declaration of independence on June 30.

Who will be the first democratically elected leader of the Congo (March 1960)?

Of all the African politicians now jostling for position in the soon-to-be-independent Belgian Congo, none makes the Belgians feel more uneasy about the future than cocky Patrice Lumumba, 33. A onetime postal clerk and convicted embezzler, Lumumba was hustled briefly off to jail only four months ago after bloody riots erupted in his home town of Stanleyville, leaving 20 of his fellow Africans dead. Last week the Congo was recovering from a visit that he paid to the Congo’s second largest city, Elisabethville.

Lumumba has powerful enemies in Elisabethville, who hope that after independence they will be able to keep the copper wealth of their Katanga province pretty much to themselves. He also has there a fiercely loyal tribal following, which he has carefully kept inflamed. The result was that no sooner had Lumumba appeared on the scene, a leopard skin draped dramatically over his well-tailored lounge suit, than the fighting began.

It lasted for three days, and spread through the suburbs and into the countryside until it reached the copper center of Jadotville, 65 miles away. Plumed warriors charged at each other with pangas and poisoned spears, and the environs of the bustling city of Elisabethville (pop. 177,000) were soon filled with death and mutilation. Since bereaved Africans like to keep the number of their dead secret from the authorities, there was no telling how many casualties there had been. The official figures — seven dead, 148 injured — were admittedly low.

With glorious Freedom only a month away, we are surprised to learn that the relatively sensible white Congolese have just been disenfranchised by their own government (30 May 1960; my emphasis):

Some 2,000,000 citizens of the Belgian Congo were in the throes of their first election. Voters did not seem to think that balloting was enough. Spear-carrying Baluba tribesmen chased Luluas through the streets of Léopoldville. One angry group descended on a police post and stoned the cops. In five weeks of electioneering, 57 people were dead.

Object was to choose men to lead the new nation, three times the size of Texas, when it becomes independent next month. By decree from Brussels, the Congo’s 115,000 whites are not allowed to vote, and most of the half-naked, illiterate black voters had no idea what the candidates were talking about. There were 65 parties in the field. […]

But the man to beat was Patrice Lumumba, 34, the tall, goateed radical from Stanleyville who last week was storming through the back country in a cream-colored convertible. […] His followers sell orange-colored Lumumba shirts and party cards to raise money; any black man caught in Stanleyville without his party card was apt to get a beating from Lumumba’s toughs. Opposing fragmentation of the huge colony, Lumumba preaches national unity under a strong central government, but his kind of unity strikes fear in the hearts of many whites. In French, which the Belgians understand, his sleek loudspeaker-equiped cars last week made conciliatory noises about future relations with the Belgians; but in the native dialect, they poured out anti-white diatribe.

One of the key motives of the black nationalists in the Congo (as in other places) turns out to be sexual access to white women — consent optional:

Lumamba’s followers promised cheering black audiences that they would get the white man’s cars, houses — even womenfolk — when independence comes, and more than one Stanleyville resident was said to have answered a knock on the door to find an African asking to be shown the house he would be given after June 30. More ominously, Lumumba men produced a blacklist of Belgians who would be “eliminated” after independence unless they left the country. Sabena’s daily jets to Europe were already jammed, and 80 special flights were scheduled to handle the rush of Belgians scuttling for safety before the independence date.

With authority collapsing and district administrators leaving their posts in fear or exasperation, the Brussels government put its foot down. “We cannot allow it to be said that we gave the Congo its independence in a state of chaos,” Premier Gaston Eyskens told Parliament. Secretly, he pulled a large part of Belgium’s Liberation Division out of West Germany, airlifted it to Congo bases for use if futher trouble occurred.

The election does not go smoothly (6 June 1960):

The Belgian government last week regretfully announced that it could not give the final results of the Congo’s nationwide elections. Among the reasons:

• In the Sankuru River, a motor launch carrying ballot boxes downstream struck a sandbar and sank. Boxes containing 10,000 ballots disappeared in a swirling mass of crocodiles.
• In Kindu and the province of Kasai, candidates who believed that they had been defeated nullified the results by setting fire to polling stations and ballot boxes.
• At the big Belgian airbase of Kamina, an election dispute ended with four voters hacked to death by machetes and 14 wounded.
• At Luebo, Baluba tribesmen armed with flintlock rifles and spears set fire to 200 homes and huts and slaughtered at least 18 Lulua tribesmen. Lulua warriors retaliated by raiding nearby Baluba villages, and six more died.

Eventually, though, the votes do come in — and once again, to approximately no one’s surprise, black nationalism and tribalism have come out on top (13 June 1960):

The elections were over and the votes were counted, but for harassed Belgian officials in sweltering Léopoldville last week, the nightmare of readying the Congo for independence on June 30 had just begun.

No one knew for certain where the capital would be, and controversy even raged over the new flag (yellow stars on a blue field). The man with the largest bloc of votes in the first Parliament, goateed Patrice Lumumba, 34, was a convicted embezzler; the only other leader who might command a following, chubby, erratic Joseph Kasavubu, 43, just three months ago was vowing to destroy the new nation by pulling his own Lower Congo region out and merging it with the French territory next door.

That key motive again:

Some followers of the two men reportedly flocked into the towns, staking claims to white settlers’ homes — and to their wives. Kasavubu’s party newspaper darkly suggested that “in former days, African women had to slave to bring up the white man’s mulatto children, but in the future, white women will have to rear the mulatto offspring of the black man.” As if all this were not enough, the Congo’s finances were chaotic; $230 million in capital escaped the country before exchange controls were imposed, leaving scarcely enough in currency reserves to back the Congo franc.

In this atmosphere, no one could blame the whites who chose to leave for their “holidays” in Europe, as preparations for the independence celebrations began. Many would never return. Sabena’s daily flights to Brussels were booked solid for weeks ahead, and hundreds of settlers were driving out through Uganda, their belongings piled high atop their autos. The Belgians who decided to stick it out were laying in stocks of food and fuel for a speedy getaway if necessary.

Three days ’til glorious Freedom, but we still have no president or prime minister (27 June 1960):

Streaming into Leopoldville last week, the delegates to the Congo’s first Parliament were a strange-looking lot. Some had the sharply pointed heads of a tribe that practices infant skull bandaging. Newly elected Senators in elaborate robes sat soberly at sidewalk cafes sipping beer, looking somewhat dazed. Others were tieless and in shirtsleeves, but sported bright, beaded caps with dangling horns and tassels as they gawked at the sights. Most were obscure villagers who had never before been to the city, but some of the faces were already nationally and even world famous.

Lumumba and Kasavubu are fighting it out — quite literally:

Wiry, goateed Patrice Lumumba, 34, the Batetela tribesman from Stanleyville, whizzed about grandly in a black limousine as he dickered desperately to get control of the first government. Chubby, 43-year-old Joseph Kasavubu, loyal to his Bakongo people, was also deep in negotiation with key faction leaders such as Paul Bolya of the Mongo tribe and Jean Boli-kango, the Ngombe spokesman. The corridors of Leopoldville’s new Palais de la Nation echoed to the jabber of a score of languages and dialects, for the Congo’s first legislators represent a nation of more than 150 separate tribes, each with its own interests and jealous point of view, its own savage and mystic creed, its own desire for power.

Out of this tribal nightmare must come a national cabinet, a prime minister and a chief of state in time for independence day on June 30; but bloody tribal fighting has raged for months through the Congo. Bitterest of all was in the land of the Lulua. Since the 19th century, when Arab slave raiders drove the frightened Baluba westward into Lulua territory, the Baluba had happily tilled Lulua soil in semi-serfdom in exchange for the right to remain in the area. Then last year, when whispers of Congolese independence filtered out from Leopoldville, the Baluba began declaring themselves free men, tried to take over some of the Lulua land for themselves.

The warlike Lulua reacted with spears, knives and sharpened sticks, killing hundreds of Baluba, burning their huts and carrying off their women. Only Belgian armed intervention, coupled with the mass removal of tens of thousands of Baluba to another region, stopped the blood bath.

[…]

Thus, tribalism may yet tear the vitals out of the new Congo before it even gets its start as a nation, just as it has been the political plague everywhere in Africa. For to conservative tribal rulers, democracy is a mysterious and not entirely welcome concept. Tribal elders do not like the idea of upstart youngsters challenging their authority in the tribe’s affairs. Warrior clans, like the Lulua, whose hegemony was built with spears and brawn, are outraged to find themselves outvoted by the humble Baluba, who have adopted such unmanly professions as clerk or typist. Many tribes had less interest in establishing a new nation than in protecting their own traditional home areas from outside interference.

[…]

With total independence ten days away, the Congo’s tribalists were still bickering in mutual hostility. Sly Patrice Lumumba was given his chance to form a coalition but failed. At week’s end, the Belgian authorities turned to the mercurial Kasavubu. Even if he succeeded, he was given little chance of survival for long with Lumumba in opposition. Said a neutral diplomat in Leopoldville gloomily: “I have an uneasy feeling this place is tottering on the brink of disaster.”

The Congo Massacre

(Radish-recommended listening.)

Lumumba is elected premier by the Congo’s first parliament. Kasavubu accepts the presidency, “a chiefly ceremonial office under the proposed constitution” (July 1960). Glorious Freedom at last! There remains but one step to complete the Black Triumph. The slow boil begins (August 1960):

“Recognize who are the victims!” cried Belgium’s Foreign Minister Pierre Wigny, and the U.N. Security Council listened.

“Madame P. had a baby only a few months old in her arms whom the soldiers struck and threatened to kill if she did not allow herself to be violated. She was violated 20 times. Madame Q., several days after having given birth, still had an open tear in her abdomen held with clips. She was raped by several soldiers. What do you wish, gentlemen, shall I continue?”

It was difficult to believe that there could be a sympathetic answer to such a calendar of horrors. Yet the Congo’s representative, Thomas Kanza, 27, who is one of only 16 university graduates in his nation of 14 million, went far to accomplish it. Speaking with dignity and restraint, he noted that there were other victims besides the unfortunate Belgian women: the Congolese themselves.

If the people of Congo were incompetent to govern, Kanza argued, “the first reproach must go to those who trained us.”

So the Belgians should have stayed in power longer to teach the natives how to run things? I thought the word was “Total independence, NOW NOW NOW.”

The Belgians ruled the Congo for 80 years without educating a single Congolese doctor or engineer. […]

The multiracial, Catholic-run Lovanium University will graduate its first Negro lawyers and engineers next year.

Now might be a good time to mention the five known studies of Congolese intelligence.

• Verhagen (1956) gave Raven’s Progressive Matrices (a non-verbal, multiple-choice test of abstract reasoning) to 67 adults, and obtained a mean IQ of 64.
• Laroche (1959) gave the RPM to 222 children, ages 10–15; mean IQ, 68.
• Boivin and Giordani (1993) gave the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children (designed to be culturally unbiased) to 47 children, age 8; mean IQ, 62.
• Boivin et al. (1995) gave the K-ABC to 95 children, ages 7–12; mean IQ, 68.
• Giordani et al. (1996) gave the K-ABC to 130 children, ages 7–9; mean IQ, 65.

But I digress. You know, I really meant it when I said that sexual access to white women was one of the key motives of the Congolese black nationalists:

It was at Camp Hardy early this month that mutinous Force Publique troops had locked up 35 Belgian officers and raped their wives. The soldiers then released the officers and asked them to resume command. “They refused because of what we did to their wives,” said a puzzled mutineer. “Why? I gave my wife many times to white men.” Another Congolese soldier explained that the European women who were raped were “bad women.” He said: “They walked around in shorts showing their legs, but when black men came to them, they refused to shake hands. Belgian officers slept with our women all the time, but we could never sleep with theirs.”

[…]

As it turns out, a “flamboyant convicted embezzler” makes a poor leader:

Most bewildering factor in the Congo crisis is 34-year-old Premier Lumumba. His temperament is like the New England weather: if you don’t like it, wait a minute. Last week Lumumba first denounced the United Nations as a “tool of imperialism” and then hailed its action as “extremely gratifying.” On Monday he was clamoring to have Russian troops land in Leopoldville; on Friday he renounced his flirtation with the Soviet Union and said Red intervention was “unnecessary.” After weeks of screaming insults and threats against Belgium, Lumumba blandly about-faced to say he could have “no rancor” against Belgians because “this great country of Congo was built by them.”

So it’s probably just as well they murdered him (February 1961):

At the height of her husband’s power, 28-year-old Pauline Lumumba wore diamonds and high heels and Paris frocks. Last week she bared her breasts in the Congo’s traditional sign of mourning, and led a wailing procession of other bare-breasted women through the streets of Léopoldville. Coldly and without regrets, her husband’s archfoes in far-off Katanga province had just proclaimed that Patrice Lumumba was dead and buried deep.

The Katangese, who defied world opinion for weeks in hanging onto Lumumba, finished the affair with a flourish. “I will speak frankly,” said Katanga Interior Minister Godefroid Munongo. “If people accuse us of killing Lumumba, I will reply: ‘Prove it.’”

The last time Patrice Lumumba was seen alive by anyone but his captors was Jan. 17. It was the low point in the career of a man who had dreamed of bossing a united Congo in the grand style of the man whom he admired, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. He had failed, but as a Western diplomat put it, “being the best demagogue around, he kept anybody else from running it either.” Taken from a military prison in Thysville, where in typical fashion he had almost fast-talked his guards into mutiny, Lumumba was flown to Elisabethville, hauled out and savagely beaten by Katangese soldiers, then driven off to jail, his hands bound behind his back with rope. Most Congo experts are now convinced that the Katangese, aware that Lumumba was gaining followers even while in prison, shot him the very next morning.

[…]

While the world outside burst into uproar, the Congo itself received the news with sluggish calm, as if Lumumba’s death was to be expected. There was some scattered violence — but not the widely predicted blood bath. In Léopoldville, Lumumba fans rioted for a night, and somebody cut a man in half. In Bukavu, drunken Congolese soldiers seized a Roman Catholic priest, cut off his ears and then beheaded him. […]

Among the mourners: President Joseph Kasavubu’s government, which observed a minute of silent tribute for “a sincere patriot who got involved with bad foreigners” — though it was the Kasavubu government that turned Lumumba over to Katanga after he got too hot to handle in the Thysville prison.

Chief aspirant to Lumumba’s mantle is Antoine Gizenga, 39, a onetime schoolteacher and an all-out proCommunist. Gizenga founded a small anticolonialist party in a Léopoldville saloon two years ago, later flitted off to Prague’s Institute for African Studies. His party won 13 Parliament seats in last year’s election. He tossed them to Lumumba, and Lumumba made him Vice Premier. Since shortly after his boss’s arrest last December, Gizenga has run the show from the Eastern province river capital of Stanleyville (and to one recent visitor, he remarked that he saw “no reason for a change” even if Lumumba were released). He keeps Lumumba’s younger brother Louis close by for prestige purposes, but his closest ties are to the Communists.

In disorderly Stanleyville, a city of about 130,000, the Congolese soldiers are so unpredictable in their loyalty that Gizenga has three times asked for U.N. protection from his own army. Jungle mold grows thick on factory walls, and unemployment is almost total. The troops and officials have drunk up the stocks of imported cognac at the best hotels and are now reduced to palm beer. Gasoline and munitions are in short supply.

Lumumba’s death led to even more unfortunate Belgian women (March 1961).

The Belgian priest’s white cassock was soaked with sweat, and his head was heavily bandaged. “Even in my worst visions of hell, I could not imagine tortures like this,” he said wearily. He was one of a tattered band of missionaries who arrived in Leopoldville last week after fleeing from Gizenga-held Kivu province. Their story proved that however statesmanlike the conduct of some Congolese politicians, there were other Congolese still capable of savage and primitive brutality.

Five weeks ago, the pro-Lumumba troops and goon squads in Kivu went on a drunken rampage, seeking revenge for Lumumba’s death. One 75-year-old nun was thrown from a truck, and while she lay in the dust, with both arms and her pelvis broken, was raped by eleven soldiers. An American missionary girl was held prisoner for days and raped four times. One of the biggest laughs was to rip the clothes off white women and force them to dance about on sharp gravel, chanting such phrases as “I murdered Lumumba, the Christ of the Congo.” After one dance nine nuns lay naked on a floor all night, locked in with Congolese soldiers. Said one: “They did not rape us, but did with our poor bodies things so disgusting we dare not say them and even less write them down.”

The international community to the rescue! Or not.

After the brutalities had gone on for weeks, U.N. Malayan troops finally got moving. They shepherded 35 missionaries into a hotel in the town of Kindu, got 20 out to Leopoldville. No one died, though a nun whose breasts were badly burned with lighted cigarettes wakes up at night screaming at the memory. The U.S. last week protested the “outrages” and demanded that the culprits be brought to justice. But 250 missionaries were still trapped in Kivu.

Things really aren’t going well for newly “liberated” Congo (July 1961):

A year after independence, the Congo’s economy was a national mess. Katanga, whose copper mines have missed hardly a day’s work through all the troubles, was booming. But in the rest of the Congo, 70% of the labor force was unemployed. Exports, which before independence averaged $20 million a month, had dropped to $6.5 million. Inflation had pushed food prices up 20%, and building construction was at a complete standstill. Yet, by African standards, the Congo is a rich country, and somehow things faltered on, thanks mainly to the U.N., which had poured in tens of millions of dollars for famine relief and civil servants’ salaries, helped run the government as best it could with its small staff of specialists. The U.N.’s 20,460 troops had slowly but surely brought an end to bloodshed in a land whose quarreling tribes had been slaughtering one another by the hundreds.

Well, at least the international community is happy: they’ve made themselves necessary. (“How can Africa move away from aid dependence?” Uh, colonial rule?)

Sudden outbursts of savagery (November 1961):

It began as just another week of heat and torpor in the Congo. Sweating natives, as usual, loaded palm kernels into boats at upcountry river stations, while understaffed United Nations teams passed out powdered milk to babies and urged the villagers to expand their scraggly little farm plots. In Leopoldville, things seemed normal enough: harassed Premier Cyrille Adoula, struggling to hold his limping central government together, still pondered ways to whip Katanga’s Secessionist Moise Tshombe into line, and noted nervously that Eastern Province’s Antoine Gizenga talked of breaking away again to win autonomy for his own ragtag region. At U.N. headquarters, staffers looked forward to National Army Day, which, the army promised, would be celebrated by no parades — just by “calm and dignity.”

But everyone had forgotten the savagery that lay just beneath the Congo veneer of nationhood. Like an ugly scene glimpsed by the lightning of hot equatorial skies, the Congo government again stood revealed as incapable of governing, its army a disorganized rabble.

[…]

Hottest rumor of the week followed the arrival one sultry forenoon of two planeloads of U.N. Italian crewmen who had ferried in a shipment of U.N. scout cars for Kindu’s Malayan garrison. “Belgian paratroops!” cried Gizenga’s men as they hopped into trucks for the dash to the airport. Bursting into the nearby Malayan officers’ mess, where the 13 Italian flyers were having lunch, the Congolese soldiers grabbed the “Belgian” crewmen and hustled them off to a jail near town. Two Italians shouted their protests in French as they waved U.N. identity cards. “Ah, Flemish!” cried the Congolese as they began to beat the prisoners. Then someone opened fire, and one by one, the 13 Italians were killed on the spot.

Producing knives, the frenzied troops then hacked the bodies into pieces, tossing them as souvenirs to the civilian crowd that watched. That afternoon, several Congolese soldiers strode into the local office of the World Health Organization, gleefully dropped a human hand on a desk and walked out giggling; others heaved the rest of the ghastly remains into the muddy Lualaba.

The international community to the rescue again!

“What can I do?” shrugged Colonel Pakassa to U.N. officials who flew in two days later in anxious search for the missing airmen. “You know how soldiers are.” The colonel’s own men, in fact, had held him off at gunpoint during part of the savage episode. For hours he pretended that the Italians were still in jail, admitted only that they had been “beaten.” Finally, he announced that they had “escaped.” Only then did the true, grisly story begin to emerge.

[…]

The bigger question was Gizenga’s own role in the massacre. He had been seen a few days after the killings in Kindu itself, hundreds of miles from his Stanleyville headquarters. Had he provoked the bloody slaughter as a slap at the U.N.’s authority in a region he hoped to conquer? If so, similar trouble could be expected to the south in Albertville, stronghold of northern Katanga on Lake Tanganyika’s shore, where another batch of Gizenga troops turned up in an obvious Gizenga bid to chop off a sizable chunk of Moise Tshombe’s province.

But it seemed quite possible that Antoine Gizenga had as little control over his wild-eyed soldiers as did Colonel Pakassa.

Update on the state of the Congo after two years of glorious Freedom (July 1962):

Trumpets blared and drums rattled as the proud procession moved down Leopoldville’s broad Boulevard Albert I to celebrate the Congo’s second anniversary of independence. President Joseph Kasavubu and Premier Cyrille Adoula took the salute from the black soldiers of the new Garde Républicaine, who were decked out in powder-blue uniforms with black lace trimming and red feathered hats. Along the route, 20,000 Congolese added their cheers to the festive occasion.

The panoply was welcome relief from the drabness of life in the Congo today. Six months after the end of the bloody fighting between the U.N. forces and Katanga, the new nation lies exhausted in the equatorial sun, a battered giant unable to make productive use of the freedom its black leaders fought so hard to win. Even with the help of nearly 3,000 Belgian and U.N. technicians and advisers and $86 million of U.S. financial aid, the railroads are not running in most of the Congo, two-thirds of the nation’s trucks are idle for lack of spare parts, and the roads are almost impassable.

Must be the legacy of colonialism that’s stopping the Congolese from fixing up the roads. Must be. (That’s a real thing, right? We didn’t just make that up to cover up the scientifically incontrovertible but politically inconvenient racial differences in cognitive ability that refute the Progressive doctrine of Equality, did we?)

The result is that some areas of the vast Congo interior are at a virtual standstill; last year coffee and cotton exports yielded only fractions of their normal revenue, and much of the big palm-oil output is lost to smugglers. Unemployed workers upcountry now flock to Leopoldville, where 100,000 of the normal 300,000 labor force are already out of work. Organized gangs, ignoring the barred windows and the bright floodlights around homes of the well to do, creep up at night to saw off the bars and steal what they can. The U.N. is bringing 64 judges from abroad to build a judiciary system for the country. One of the first judges to arrive lost his briefcase to a thief on his first day in town.

Except for locally made beer and cigarettes, Leo’s shops are virtually empty of consumer goods, and prices for the items still available have soared. No end to inflation is in sight, since Adoula’s central government simply prints more and more paper money to make up for its hideous deficits (April revenue: $14 million; April expenditure: $36 million).

[…]

Still, it’s not all bad: a few white people are trickling back in. They’ll fix things:

Even with these handicaps, Adoula can boast some progress toward stability. Some Belgian technicians and businessmen are returning; many intend to stay for only a short period, but others have even brought their wives and children back, and a few black nannies are again seen in the parks with their white charges.

But I grow tired of this Black Mess. Let us skip ahead to the inevitable conclusion. This is the culmination of the Black Triumph. This is the Congo Massacre (1964).

The Simbas came at 7 o’clock. Grim-faced in their manes of monkey fur and feathers, they banged on the doors of the Residence Victoria with spears and gun butts, roughly hustled their white hostages out into the street. For an hour, the skies over Stanleyville had pulsed with airplane engines and apprehension. Watchers on the rooftops saw parachutes bloom and fall over the airfield to the west; gunfire ticked closer in the near distance. The Belgians had come, and help for the hostages was on its way — fast, but for many not fast enough.

Belgian paratroopers prepare for Stanleyville hostage rescue operation (image)

The Simbas marched the 250 whites out into the broad, dawn-pale streets near the monument of the late Patrice Lumumba, the wild leftist demagogue who was the Congo’s first Premier and remains its leading martyr. The marble steps below the rain-blanched image were discolored with the blood of more than 100 Congolese executed in recent months: even before the rebels turned on the whites, they had brutally exterminated black opponents of their arcane revolutionary cause. At the monument, in the name of socialism and the Congolese People’s Republic, the former mayor of Stanleyville had been eviscerated, his liver and kidneys eaten raw by a laughing rebel officer while the mayor slowly died.

The hostage column was marched into nearby Avenue Sergeant Kitele, then ordered to sit down in the street. “We didn’t believe they would harm us deliberately,” recalls U.S. Consul Michael P. Hoyt, who walked with one of his aides at the head of the column. “But there was always the chance of an accident. The firing kept getting closer. Then I saw one of the Simbas fire into the crowd and I saw people running. Everybody began running. I was not running properly and I fell down twice. My legs wouldn’t function right. A guy ahead of me went over a wire fence. I decided it was best to keep down. I didn’t hear any screams during the firing. Funny. I always thought that people being shot at screamed.”

There were plenty of screams elsewhere. As the U.S. planes kept coming and stick after stick of Belgian paratroopers popped silk over the city, Radio Stanleyville shrilled its last message: “Ciyuga! Ciyuga! Kill them all! Men, women and children. Kill them all! Have no scruples!” The Simbas (Swahili for “lions”) of Rebel General Nicholas Olenga did their best to carry out the order. In the Avenue Sergeant Kitele, according to some survivors, the command to fire was given by “Major Bubu,” a deaf-mute ex-boxer addicted to hemp who served as personal bodyguard to Rebel Defense Minister Gaston Soumialot. Bubu’s order could not have been a scream, but in its strangled, inarticulate ferocity must have expressed precisely the blood lust of the Simbas.

Rifles and Sten guns rattling, they fired point-blank into the seated hostages. The gunners picked women and children as their first targets. Many whites flopped onto the pavement, pretending to be dead. Others did not have to pretend. One Belgian child was cut in half by a Sten-gun burst. Parents who flung themselves over their children were stitched by the wild bullets that sprayed the crowd. A woman sat openmouthed as gunfire chopped down the people on either side of her. She somehow came through unhurt.

Belgian paratrooper lies among dead hostages (image)

Not so lucky was a quiet, self-effacing American medical missionary from Torrance, Calif., who for two months had been a pawn of the rebel regime in its negotiations with the U.S., Belgium and the legal Congolese government of Premier Moise Tshombe. Periodically sentenced to death as an “American spy,” periodically reprieved when things seemed to go well for the rebels, Dr. Paul Earle Carlson, 36, caught a slew of bullets through head and back as he tried to escape the slashing gunfire.

“Carlson was not singled out,” says Mike Hoyt, who saw the surgeon die. “He arrived late at the rear of the column with two other Americans. They started running and went over a wall. Then he started over. He just didn’t make it. It made me sick. He had been through so much, and to be killed at the very end.”

Dr. Paul Carlson (image)

Moments after Carlson died, the Belgian paratroopers arrived, and at their approach the Simbas took to their heels. The troops secured the airport, quickly fought their way into town. Surprise, speed and Simba cowardice kept the slaughter near Lumumba Square from reaching major proportions. But across the Congo River, in Stanleyville’s Rive Gauche section, the Simbas found 28 other victims. The hostages were hacked to pieces on the street. Among them were four Spanish nuns and a number of Spanish and Dutch priests. According to a witness, the priests were beaten and then their throats were cut. After similar treatment, the nuns were placed on top of them. The usual mutilations were carried out on the sexual organs, and flesh was cut from the bodies to be eaten.

One Belgian who escaped said: “We bought our lives with beer and money. The fathers and nuns had nothing to ransom their lives with.” Of some 1,300 whites in Stanleyville, all but 60 were rescued. Of the dead, at least 29 were Belgian, one Canadian, two American — Carlson and another missionary, Phyllis Rine, 25, of Mount Vernon, Ohio.

Dr. Carlson assists as a Belgian woman is brought to a departing C-130 (image)

The survivors, grey with shock and gaudy with bloodstains, hiked the mile and a half to the airport. There bullet-riddled U.S. C-130 transports — winged by rebel ground fire during the airdrop — waited to fly them to Leopoldville and safety. “It was not a happy, singing group,” said Hoyt with grim understatement, “although I couldn’t help feeling glad to be alive.” By 10:27 a.m. the first transports were back in Leopoldville. They were chockablock with living, dead, dying and wounded. They kept coming all day: crisp white nuns and an old priest in a black Homburg; two little girls, bloodstained, holding tightly to their dolls; a mother and daughter in pajamas and no shoes; a baby with its feet sticking out of an airline bag.

The dead were set down in front of a U.S. Air Force hangar, and Belgian Catholic priests performed the last rites. There had been no time yet to provide coffins. U.S. Ambassador George McMurtrie Godley watched two marines drape the Stars and Stripes over the body of Dr. Paul Carlson. Someone had taken a New Testament from Carlson’s pocket, to be sent to his wife.

A single life, or even a hundred, may not appear to mean much in the grim reckoning of Africa. The tribes butchered each other for centuries before the white man arrived, and in colonial days white soldiers killed countless, nameless Africans. But Dr. Carlson’s murder, along with the massacre of perhaps another hundred whites and thousands of blacks, had a special, tragic meaning.

Carlson symbolized all the white men — and there are many — who want nothing from Africa but a chance to help.

He was no saint and no deliberate martyr. He was a highly skilled physician who, out of a strong Christian faith and a sense of common humanity, had gone to the Congo to treat the sick. His death did more than prove that Black African civilization — with its elaborate trappings of half a hundred sovereignties, governments and U.N. delegations — is largely a pretense. The rebels were after all, for the most part, only a rabble of dazed, ignorant savages, used and abused by semi-sophisticated leaders.

But virtually all other black African nations, including the more advanced and moderate ones, supported the rebels without even a hint of condemnation for their bestialities. Virtually all these nations echoed the cynical Communist line in denouncing the parachute rescue as “imperialist aggression.” When this happened, the sane part of the world could only wonder whether Black Africa can be taken seriously at all, or whether, for the foreseeable future, it is beyond the reach of reason.

The U.S.-Belgian intervention was decided upon only as a last resort, when all negotiations had failed with the rebel regime of Christophe Gbenye — the bearded “President” of the Peking-backed Congo People’s Republic, who packs a Colt revolver in his blue jeans and drives a Rolls-Royce.

When the more or less Communist-backed rebels first launched their attack on the government, the U.S. helped Premier Tshombe only with relatively modest sums of money and supplies.

He himself recruited white officers of various nationalities to stiffen the loyal Congolese army.

When the rebels captured Stanleyville last August, they treated the whites living there relatively well at first. But as the war began to turn against them, they grew increasingly venomous, until finally all whites were “Americans” and deserving of maltreatment or death.

The rebel regime kept announcing that 10,000 Americans were fighting alongside Tshombe. Except for an occasional refugee’s horror story, little was known on the outside about the fate of the whites during that period. But last week, the grim details were filled in.

Anyone with a radio set — either transmitter or receiver — was considered a spy, calling in “Yankee” help against the cause. Sister Anne-Maria Merkens, mother superior of a mission hospital at Bondamba, 300 miles northwest of Stan, owned a tiny transistor radio. Simbas in leopardskins appeared in mid-September, accused the nuns of sending messages to the Americans, even though the radio was only capable of receiving signals. They returned a few weeks later, killed the mission’s cows, stole its chickens and rice. On their next visit, they abducted schoolgirls aged 7 to 14, spent the night sniffing dope, dancing and raping. Finally, in November they “arrested” Sister Anne-Maria and another nun, forced them to strip, and locked them up in Basoko with 16 other nuns, 23 priests and three civilians.

“The next day, Nov. 11, the Simbas heard two light planes overhead,” Sister Anne-Maria recalled last week: “In rushed a Simba, who with a sweep of his spear brushed the table clean. Shouting accusations that we had summoned the Americans, the Simbas attacked the priests. They hammered them mercilessly with sticks and rifle butts until nearly everyone was covered with blood and bruises. Then we were marched outside, told to strip off all our clothes, and ordered to sit down.” Naked, the nuns were beaten fiercely, locked up without food and clothing for 24 hours in a small room. “Again and again they promised to kill us or eat us alive or throw us into the river in sacks.”

Finally the priests and nuns were taken to Stanleyville to join the rebels’ other hostages. By now the leaders were trying to barter the lives of their prisoners for a ceasefire.

[…]

It was becoming increasingly clear that Gbenye’s control over his savage Simbas was fraying, and that unless something was done immediately, the hostages in rebel territory would be massacred out of hand. U.S. Consul Hoyt and his four aides were under threat of death for most of their three-month captivity, at one point were told to eat slices of an American flag (“We just made like we were chewing it,” said Vice Consul David Grinwis. “It was a very durable flag”). Early last week, Gbenye himself fed the fires by telling a cheering crowd: “As fetishes we will wear the hearts of Belgians and Americans; we will dress in the skins of Americans and Belgians.”

On instructions from Washington, U.S. Ambassador William Attwood broke off the talks. To save the lives of the hostages, the 600 men of Belgium’s crack Regiment Para-Commando, led by a stocky, balding Africa hand, Colonel Charles Laurent, 51, would have to live up to their motto: Nee Iactantia Nee Metu (Neither Boasting nor Fearing). They did.

Congo mercenaries come under rebel fire en route to Stanleyville (image)

From Ascension Island, where they had been in readiness for a week, the paracommandos flew in 14 U.S.-piloted C-130s to Katanga’s giant Ka-mina Military Base and thence toward their target. Below the gaping jump-hatches, the Congo wound broad and tawny through black-green bush; the tin and tile roofs of Stanleyville shone pink in the early light. […]

The Belgian paras sustained only seven casualties in rescuing the hostages. Four hours after their arrival, the Congolese 5th Mechanized Brigade rolled into Stan, spearheaded by the tough white fighters of Major Mike Hoare, 44, a starchy South African who served behind Japanese lines in Burma under Britain’s mystical guerrilla warfare expert, Orde Wingate. No mystic himself, Hoare insisted that his 300 men stay neatly shaved, refrain from drinking beer before battle, but cared not a whit what they did otherwise. Mostly South Africans and Rhodesians, they gave no quarter to any black resembling a rebel.

[…]

Congo mercenary on bank of Congo River (image)

Gbenye and his rebel ministers had fled Stanleyville, and with them went more than 1,500 Ibs. of gold (valued at nearly $800,000) from the Kilo-Moto Mines and more than $6,000,000 from the vaults of the Banque du Congo. But many Simbas had stayed behind sniping at anyone who moved, and the mopping up was bloody.

As troops entered the rebel headquarters near Lumumba Square, a black hand was spotted reaching from a closet to close the door. A Belgian opened up with his automatic rifle. In the headquarters alone, 25 rebels — mostly unarmed, minor political types — were sprayed with rifle fire as they hid under beds, beneath the kitchen table, and in wardrobes, which toppled like tipped coffins as their occupants died. Outside, Tshombe’s tough Katangese gendarmes hunted down Simbas.

Black residents of Stanleyville took to wearing white headbands to show their allegiance to the Leopoldville government, but that did not always work, and many a headband was soon stained red.

Mercenaries roll into Stanleyville (image)

While a ghostly Stanleyville was gradually secured by the government troops, hundreds of white hostages still remained in rebel hands elsewhere. Two days after the Stanleyville drop, the Belgian paras jumped again, this time at Paulis, northeast of Stanleyville, where 270 whites were being kept prisoners.

When they arrived, the paras found 20 hostages murdered with a deliberate savagery reminiscent of the Nazi death camps. A group of Simbas had burst into a Dominican mission where 71 Belgians and an American missionary, Joseph Tucker, 49, had been held for three weeks.

The rebels, drunk and high on hemp, chose their victims for the night. Jean de Gotte, Belgian honorary consul in Paulis, watched in horror: “The first dozen were bound, hands and feet tied together behind their backs — trussed like chickens. They were taken outside and dumped on the sidewalk. Five white fathers were stripped of their cassocks and their beards were cut off. Mr. Tucker was first. They hit him across the face with a beer bottle and blinded him. Then they beat him slowly, down the spine, with rifle butts and sticks. Every time he squirmed they hit him. It took him 45 minutes to die. Some of them died more quickly.” The next night, seven more Belgians were killed. The priests’ bodies were left on the mission steps; others were dumped into a crocodile-infested river.

In Paulis, the rebels were equally savage with their fellow Africans. The pro-Tshombe provincial president had been executed as an example to the town’s 30,000 inhabitants. The Simbas first cut out his tongue, next lopped off his ears, feet and hands. Then they began a slow scrimshaw from the bottom up. It took him 15 minutes to die.

One survivor estimated that 4,000 Congolese were killed in Paulis — mostly the town’s “intellectuals” (clerks, teachers, civil servants). “They started by killing anyone who was well-dressed,” said a 27-year-old railway employee who got out alive. “In this country, the well-dressed are well-educated.” As the paras tried to get the survivors out of Paulis, the Simbas followed them back to the rutted dirt airstrip where the C-130 waited. A rearguard held them off while the first planes took off, then scrambled for the last plane, which waited with its engines whining impatiently. They took off in a hail of mercifully inaccurate rebel fire. Aboard one of the planes flew Mrs. Angeline Tucker and her three children. She had not seen her husband die.

Once again, it’s the international community to the rescue!

After that, to the disgust of U.S. and Belgian officials on the scene, the paratroopers were withdrawn, presumably in deference to “world opinion,” even though an estimated 1,100 whites were still in rebel-held territory.

[…]

Swedish soldiers in the Congo (image)

The hope still seems to be that white people will trickle back in and fix up the place:

Despite the fact that Rebel Boss Gbenye and his henchmen have been driven from their capital, the fight will go on for some time. In their rapid push to save white lives, the Congolese army left big rebel pockets behind. Many pessimists talk of a “Hundred Years War.” How can the rebellion be crushed? The remedy, as Tshombe sees it, is a patient formula — denounced as neo-colonial by his enemies — in which white men will hold as many key jobs as possible for as long as it takes to mold an effective army and an efficient administration. His refusal to “Africanize” at all cost is part of the reason why he is beyond the pale of his peers in other African nations. And yet a sizable number of whites have stayed on in such places as Nigeria and Ghana, where they are welcomed but not overly publicized.

[…]

The blacks of Stanleyville and Paulis are not likely soon to forget the heavy tread of the mercenaries. And it will take the whites even longer to forget or forgive the enormities committed by the Simbas. A great many of the Belgians and other whites who lived and worked in the Congo now shudder at the thought of returning. And yet, others — a surprisingly high number — have already said that after a while, they will go back, if asked.

“If asked.” Let’s try that again: A great many of the Jews who lived and worked in Germany now shudder at the thought of returning. And yet, others have already said that after a while, they will go back, if asked. Or how about: A great many of the white people who lived and worked in Detroit now shudder at the thought of returning. And yet, others have already said that after a while, they will go back, if asked.

Oh, white guilt: you crack me up sometimes.

In all likelihood, they will not go in the spirit of a Paul Carlson, who once said, “In this century, more people have died for their witness for Christ than died in the early centuries, which we think of as the days of martyrs.” They will be in the Congo for more mundane reasons. But if there is ever to be a normal, sane relationship between Black Africa and the white world, they will have to be there, and they will have to be accepted. For so life goes.

Whatever that means.

The world at night (image)

The Wheel of History

(Radish-recommended listening.)

I don’t know of any country in the world where a bunch of foreigners came and developed the country. I don’t know one.

Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse (“The Bill Gates of Ghana”)

The fate of post-colonial Congo in ‘Come Back, Colonialism, All Is Forgiven’ (Time magazine, 2008), from which, of course, this issue takes its name:

Le Blanc and I are into our 500th kilometer on the river when he turns my view of modern African history on its head. “We should just give it all back to the whites,” the riverboat captain says. “Even if you go 1,000 kilometers down this river, you won’t see a single sign of development. When the whites left, we didn’t just stay where we were. We went backwards.”

Le Blanc earns his keep sailing the tributaries of the Congo River. He’s 40 years old, and his real name is Malu-Ebonga Charles — he got his nickname, and his green eyes and dark honey skin, from a German grandfather who married a Congolese woman in what was then the Belgian Congo. If his unconventional genealogy gave him a unique view of the Congo’s colonial past, it is his job on the river, piloting three dugouts lashed together with twine and mounted with outboards, that has informed his opinion of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s present. “The river is the artery of Congo’s economy,” he says. “When the Belgians and the Portuguese were here, there were farms and plantations — cashews, peanuts, rubber, palm oil. There was industry and factories employing 3,000 people, 5,000 people. But since independence, no Congolese has succeeded. The plantations are abandoned.” Using a French expression literally translated as “on the ground,” he adds: “Everything is par terre.”

It’s true that our journey through 643 kilometers of rainforest to where the Maringa River joins the Congo at Mbandaka, has been an exploration of decline. An abandoned tugboat here; there, a beached paddle steamer stripped of its metal sides to a rusted skeleton; several abandoned palm oil factories, their roofs caved in, their walls disappearing into the engulfing forest, their giant storage tanks empty and rusted out. The palms now grow wild and untended on the riverbanks and in the villages we pass, the people dress in rags, hawk smoked blackfish and bushmeat, and besiege us with requests for salt or soap. There are no schools here, no clinics, no electricity, no roads. It can take a year for basic necessities ordered from the capital, Kinshasa, nearly 2,000 kilometers downstream, to make it here — if they make it at all. At one point we pass a cargo barge that has taken three months to travel the same distance we will cover in two days. We stop in the hope of buying some gasoline, but all we get from the vessel are rats.

Even amid the morbid decay, it comes as a shock to hear Le Blanc mourn colonialism. The venal, racist scramble by Europeans to possess Africa and exploit its resources found its fullest expression in the Congo. In the late 19th century, Belgium’s King Leopold made a personal fiefdom of the central African territory as large as all of Western Europe. From it, he extracted a fortune in ivory, rubber, coffee, cocoa, palm oil and minerals such as gold and diamonds. Unruly laborers working in conditions of de facto slavery had their hands chopped off; the cruelty of Belgian rule was premised on the idea that Congo and its peoples were a resource to be exploited as efficiently as possible. Leopold’s absentee brutality set the tone for those that followed him in ruling the Congo — successive Belgian governments and even the independent government of Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 to 1997 and who, in a crowded field, still sets the standard for repression and corruption among African despots.

Sure, let’s just skip the years 1908–1960. (And see below.)

Le Blanc isn’t much concerned with that history; he lives in the present, in a country where education is a luxury and death is everywhere. Around 45,000 people die each month in the DRC as a result of the social collapse brought on by civil war, according to a study released in January by the International Rescue Committee. It estimated the total loss of life between 1998 and April 2007 at 5.4 million. For many Congolese like Le Blanc, the difficulties of today blot out the cruelties of the past.

“On this river, all that you see — the buildings, the boats — only whites did that. After the whites left, the Congolese did not work. We did not know how to. For the past 50 years, we’ve just declined.” He pauses. “They took this country by force,” he says, with more than a touch of admiration. “If they came back, this time we’d give them the country for free.”

And so it was well before the First and Second Congo Wars (1991):

The wheel of history, it almost seems, has come full circle here.

Nearly a century ago, when the first Europeans ventured into Zaire’s vast interior, Kikwit was a small village whose people and institutions existed in a quiet, self-contained world wholly uninterrupted by the frenetic rhythms of modernity.

The village gradually disappeared as a social and cultural force as Belgium, Zaire’s colonial ruler, exploited the region’s mineral and agricultural wealth, transforming Kikwit into a provincial trading center. A paved highway was built to speed diesel trucks hauling cassava and corn to other regions.

While the Belgians were often consummately patronizing to their African subjects, they installed an efficient colonial administration. In time, they introduced health care, water projects, education, telephones and power lines, helping to turn this once isolated village into one of the most affluent and best-tended cities in the core of equatorial Africa.

Today, the legacy of Kikwit’s colonial past is swiftly disappearing.

“Civilization is coming to an end here,” said Rene Kinsweke, manager of Siefac, a chain of food stores, as he spoke of how Kikwit has become a dispiriting tableau of chaos and catastrophe. “We’re back where we started. We’re going back into the bush.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the dizzying pace of decay in this city of nearly 400,000 people. Six months ago, the Siefac food conglomerate consisted of 21 stores in Bandundu Province. Today, a single store is left, and it is to close as soon as its remaining stock is sold, Mr. Kinsweke said.

The main road to Kikwit is now rutted and crumbled, and for most of the year the city can be reached from Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital, only by a four-wheel-drive vehicle. In 1960, when Zaire gained independence, a visitor could drive the 300 miles in six hours. Today the same drive takes at least 10 hours.

Elsewhere in town, squatters have moved into homes that once belonged to the Belgian colonials. Entire families now camp on sidewalks, in parks and even in cemeteries. Streets and backyards are littered with indescribable filth, and toward the edges of the city the roads crumble into dirty sand and then disappear altogether. Rats and flies are breeding as never before, adding to critical sanitation and hygiene problems.

It is at night, though, that Kikwit’s seemingly inexorable roll toward ruin is felt the strongest. The sky of this sprawling city is lit with exactly two street lights, one for each of the city’s remaining nightclubs. Aside from private generators, there is no electricity; nor is there running water. The postal, telex and telephone offices have been on strike for months, and no one seems able to recall when the regional radio station made its last broadcast.

“Kikwit is virtually cut off from the rest of the world,” said Anthony Jones, a former Peace Corps volunteer working at a trucking company here, one of the few such ventures still operating.

“The saddest thing,” Mr. Jones added, “is that most of Zaire seems destined to follow the same fate unless things change soon.”

Well, things have certainly changed since 1991…

Life in Kikwit, in fact, has been slowly deteriorating for years, prompted in part by the neglect of the main road linking it to the capital and in part by the diversion of resources into official pockets. But the lingering Belgian influence was a bulwark against collapse.

In Kikwit, Belgian missionaries helped run the school system, and Belgian physicians and nurses operated the main medical center.

All this ended abruptly about 18 months ago when, in one of his periodic fits of pique against the Brussels Government, President Mobutu Sese Seko ordered all Belgian cooperative agencies, which included most physicians, teachers, bridge engineers and public health administrators, expelled from Zaire. The French soon followed, and the United States Agency for International Development, which based one of its largest programs here, began pulling out last June.

The departure of the international agencies has been devastating, but compounding Kikwit’s misery is a growing scarcity of food because most people here simply cannot afford rising food prices. The inflation rate is nearly 3,000 percent.

[…]

For many people living here, the bitterest thing is the sense that the best days of their lives are behind them.

A Belgian priest, one of the few remaining Europeans in the region, said: “The problem is, once people taste civilization, they can never go back to their old ways of doing things. All we have left here is a longing for what we once had, and a bitterness for what now exists.”

“If they came back,” said Le Blanc, “this time we’d give them the country for free.” Ah, but they won’t be back, will they? Rejoice, people of Congo.

Rejoice.

Those frenetic rhythms of modernity — so loud, so confusing — are all quiet now. The wheel of history, whatever that is, has come full circle.

Meaning?

Meaning the end, now and for all time, of European civilization in your land. The hated white man — your racist, imperialist colonial oppressor — will never, ever return.

Back to the bush you go, now. Back to the jungle. Back to the Stone Age. For so life goes. What more is there to say? Our final listening must, of course, be… the end.

This is the end,
My only friend, the end.
Of our elaborate plans: the end.
Of everything that stands: the end.
No safety or surprise: the end.

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free.
Desperately in need
Of some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land.

Until next time, reader.

Notes on the Congo Free State

Ah, the Congo Free State. No one knows anything, but everyone has an opinion. Thus necessitating this appendix.

Walter Russell Mead doesn’t even know the difference between the Congo Free State (1885–1908) and the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), but that’s not going to stop him slandering the Belgian people:

Yet another peace agreement has been announced in the long running war in the eastern Congo. The Congo War has been responsible for more than five million deaths, created untold numbers of refugees, been responsible for countless atrocities and at various times has sucked in other neighboring countries. This war has many causes. Perhaps its root cause is the chaos that the execrable Belgians (whose colonization of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi was perhaps the ugliest episode in the history of European colonization) left behind.

Richard Fernandez probably can’t name a single identifiable true statement about the Congo Free State — but he’s not the liar here, oh no:

Forget Bull Conner. Forget Selma, Alabama. Leopold was responsible for the enslavement, mutilation and murder of perhaps tens of millions of people in equatorial Africa toward the end of the 19th century. And he did it in the name of justice. He lied, and he lied shamelessly.

[…]

And yes the Belgian King committed atrocities almost as great, if not absolutely greater than those of Adolf Hitler.

The lies and stupidity are endless, reader, and I have neither the time nor the patience to go through them one by one and refute them; instead, I simply present a selection from The Latest Phase of the Congo Question (1906). After that, you’ll be in a suitably skeptical mindset to do your own research and make up your own mind.

The Congo question has entered upon a new phase. The conditions prevailing in the Free State have been investigated by a commission whose honesty and integrity have been acknowledged even by the bitterest enemies of the Congo Government.

The opinion of the Commissioners was:

1. That the charges against the Congo Administration had been greatly exaggerated.
2. That in certain instances the Congo Government had been guilty of negligence, but that, taking it all in all, the administration compared favorably with the government of the colonies of other powers in Africa.
3. That a number of administrative reforms should be put in operation as soon as possible — especially that the labor tax should be more strictly supervised and equitably levied and that the use of “capitas” (armed native overseers) should be prohibited to concessionary companies. These were the two defects in the Congo Administration which had given rise to most of the criticisms against the Government.

On the 3rd of June, 1906, King Leopold issued twenty-five Decrees carrying out the recommendations of the Commission of Inquiry.

These Decrees cover all the points on which the Administration has been criticized. They provide, among other things, for the extension of the judicial system for additional grants of land to natives; above all they regulate the labor-tax and abolish the use of capitas or armed native sentries.

[…]

The Accusations Against the Congo.

The accusations against the Congo are chiefly based upon four kinds of evidence:

1. Stories, partly true and partly false, of a few isolated incidents which occurred many years ago during the period when all the energies of King Leopold’s Government were engaged in putting down the Arab slave-raids, and in the days when the State was just beginning to set its hand to the task of administering this immense territory in Darkest Africa.
2. Endless exaggerations and multiplications of those stories reminding one of Falstaff’s eleven men in buckram suits grown out of two.
3. Fanciful stories told by natives and accepted by missionaries as gospel truth without the slightest attempt at verification.
4. Flat libels.

As an example of old stories galvanized and still doing duty as current events may be cited some statements made by the Secretary of the Boston Congo Reform Association in a magazine just published (December, 1906). He relates as though it were the newest piece of gossip an incident described by Mr. Sjoblom. That incident was first related by Mr. Sjoblom nine years ago, but it is now served up as something fresh and no date given to it. It may or may not be a true story, but its resurrection suggests that there is a scarcity of fresh “atrocities” in stock.

In the same article the Secretary of the Congo Reform Association of Boston affirms that “cannibalism exists in spite of the dictum of the Inquiry Commission,” and then proceeds to prove the prevalence of cannibalism in the present year of grace by narrating without date an incident that occurred more than ten years ago.

[…]

The Large Majority of Missionaries in the Congo in Favor of the Government.

The enemies of the Congo claim that their views are backed by the great body of missionaries in the Congo. This claim is absolutely false.

There are over 500 missionaries out there, Protestant and Catholic. Out of this number 52 have signed an “Appeal” against the Administration — in other words, about one missionary in ten is against the Government.

Of these 52 signers sixteen are wives of missionaries and are supposed to echo the opinions of their husbands. Thirty-five of the signers have mission stations in the district near the coast and, consequently, do not speak with any authority in passing judgment on events which were alleged to have happened in the interior — apparently they relied on stories told them by others. One of the signers has his missionary station situated in Portuguese Africa, and another signer, Rev. Mr. Hensey, arrived in the Congo for the first time on December 23, 1905 and nineteen days later signed the appeal condemning the administration of a country one-third the size of the United States.

The opinion of 52 missionaries, no matter how hastily formed, should be treated with proper consideration, but the opinion of the remaining 450 is evidently of much more weight, and in the documents collected in this pamphlet will be found extracts from letters which go to show that the large majority of Congo missionaries uphold King Leopold’s rule in Africa and praise him for the good work he has accomplished.

Among other documents will be found a letter from the principals of all the Catholic Orders in the Congo, expressing the sentiments of their 384 missionaries in repelling the attacks which have been directed against the Government.

I highly recommend you read those primary sources. For example, Dr. Christy of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine is interviewed by the Liverpool Echo (1904):

With regard to the mutilations in the Congo, described by Mr. Casement, I may tell you that only last year in Uganda I saw similar mutilations, which, it is well known were, done by the natives in Uganda, notably on King Mtesa’s day. In walking through Toro and Unyoro, I have seen men without noses, ears, and, frequently, without hands.

Similarly, Colonel James J. Harrison writes The Times (1904):

Again, Dr. Guinness has exhibited all over the country photographs of living native victims with their hands cut off, a custom he and other missionaries swear to “as not being a native custom but one introduced by civilization.” Why, I ask, do they not explain how this same custom comes to be practiced in Khartum, the Sudan, and Uganda?

He further writes The Morning Post (1905):

We know how often it has been stated that the native tribes dwelling on the Congo side of the Nile all fled across the river some years ago and built their villages in Uganda, the reasons given being the cruelty and oppression of the Belgian officials. Traveling south from Redjaf to Mahagi I was astonished to find no end of new villages being built and all by natives who formerly had run over to Uganda, but were now returning. Passing Kadge Kadge I met a powerful chief called Tokwe busily employed erecting kraals, saying all his tribe were disgusted with Uganda Government and were coming back.

When questioning all these people one always got the same reply. “We have tried both Governments and like the Belgian one best, so have returned.”

You may be wondering how modern-day critics of the Congo Free State have responded to primary sources such as these. The answer, of course, is that they have simply ignored them, and screamed a lot about racism. This is a classic Progressive debating strategy with an extraordinarily high success rate.

Anyway, the commission ultimately reaches this conclusion (my emphasis):

From the mass of statements, testimony and information gathered by the Commission it appears that the mutilation of dead bodies is an ancient custom which does not have in the eyes of the native the horrible character which it does in ours. The cutting off of certain parts of a dead body fulfils the natives desire to procure a trophy or simply a piece of evidence. The mutilation of fallen enemies frequently occurred in the wars between natives in certain regions. […]

One point is beyond doubt: a white man has never inflicted such mutilations, nor caused such mutilations to be inflicted, upon living natives as a punishment for failure to bring in taxes nor for any other cause. Deeds of such a kind have never been stated to us by a single witness, and in spite of all our investigations, we have never been able to discover such a case.

But do read the whole thing (and whatever other primary sources you like) and decide for yourself — for this has gone on long enough, I think! Adieu!

Recommended Reading

Want to learn more about the topics covered in this issue of Radish? We recommend the following resources. (We do not, however, necessarily endorse all opinions expressed in them: some are not nearly extreme enough.)

Goodbye, Africa

• Africa Addio (English subtitles)
• ‘From Cromer to Romer and back again: colonialism for the 21st century’
• ‘The Failure of Democracy in Africa’
• ‘The Coming Anarchy’

South Africa

• ‘South Africa: a message to Jenny’
• ‘Life in South Africa Today’
• ‘No More Mandelas’
• ‘South Africa: Life in Azania’
• ‘Cry, the beloved country’
• ‘Post-Apartheid South Africa Enters Anxious Era’
• ‘South Africa: Addicted to Corruption’
• ‘South Africa Facing White Genocide, Total Communist Takeover’
• ‘Genocide Looms for White Farmers’
• ‘Nelson Mandela “proven” to be a member of the Communist Party after decades of denial’
• ‘Nelson Mandela: Flawed Saint’
• ‘Neoconservative Applauds White Despoliation In South Africa’
• The Death of Johannesburg
• Law and Disorder in Johannesburg
• Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa

Rhodesia/Zimbabwe

• ‘The country that used to exist’
• ‘Review: “Mugabe and the White African”’
• ‘Beautiful Rhodesia’
• ‘Zimbabwe Develops Helicopter’

Assorted, Tangential & Miscellaneous

• Racism, Guilt and Self-Deceit (PDF here and here)
• ‘Social workers considered sending boy to the Congo for exorcism’
• ‘Nigeria: I Agree With Dr Watson’