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

Audrey Hepburn in the Belgian Congo (image)

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…

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?

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:

We might also try

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.

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.

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:

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.”

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.

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 in