All posts tagged African Union

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

  1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
  2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
  3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
  6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
  7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

  1. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
  2. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
  3. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
  4. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

  1. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
  2. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
  3. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
  4. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

  • A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
  • Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

  • Hawiye, 25%
  • Isaaq, 22%
  • Darod, 20%
  • Rahanweyn, 17%
  • Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

  • 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
  • 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
  • 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

More Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 27, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, Islamic terrorism
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 27, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/27/the-worlds-most-dangerous-place-inside-the-outlaw-state-of-somalia-james-fergusson/

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong (2005)

Michela Wrong has had a long career as a journalist, working for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times, specialising in Africa. She came to the attention of the book-buying public with the publication in 2001 of ‘In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo’, which I read and reviewed.

This is the follow-up, a long and thorough (432 pages, including chronology, glossary, notes and index) account of the modern history of Eritrea, the country to the north of Ethiopia, which was bundled in with Ethiopia at independence and which fought a 30 year war to be free.

The milky haze of amnesia

I’m afraid Wrong alienated me right at the start, in her introduction, by claiming that the ex-colonial and imperial powers (Britain, Italy, America) have made a conscious effort to erase their involvement in such places in order to conceal all the wrongs we did around the world

History is written – or, more accurately, written out – by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers – from Italy to Britain, the US to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all – behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than to dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism; well, which nation really wants to remember that? (Foreword, page xi)

This is an example of conspiracy theory – that everything that happens in the world is the result of dark and threatening conspiracies by shady forces in high places. It may sound trivial to highlight it so early in my review, but it is the conceptual basis of the entire book, and an accusation she returns to again and again and again: that there are so few histories of Eritrea because the imperial powers want to suppress the record of their behaviour there, to display ‘the conquerors’ lazy capacity for forgetfulness’ (p.xxii). I’m afraid I take issue with this for quite a few reasons.

1. First, I tend towards the cock-up theory of history. Obviously there are and have been countless actual conspiracies but, in geopolitics at any rate, events are more often the result of sheer incompetence. Read any of the accounts of the US invasion of Iraq or Britain’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea that the establishments of three or four countries have placed an embargo on discussion of imperial interventions in Eritrea is obviously doubtful.

2. Second, there has been no embargo on accounts of Britain’s involvement in plenty of other and far worse colonial debacles: the concentration camps we set up during the Boer War or during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya are common knowledge or, at least, there are loads of books and articles about them. Or take India. Nowadays there’s a growing pile of books about how we looted and ruined the subcontinent; Britain’s responsibility for the catastrophic partition featured in an episode of Dr Who, about as mainstream as you can get.

Books about the evils of the British Empire are pouring off the press, so these are hardly ‘forgotten’ or ‘erased’ subjects. Quite, the reverse, they’re extremely fashionable subjects – among angry students, at middle class dinner tables, in all the literary magazines here and in the States, among BBC and Channel 4 commissioning editors falling over themselves to show how woke, aware and anti-colonial they are.

Or check out the steady flow of anti-Empire, anti-slavery exhibitions (like the current installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall about empire and slavery, or Kara Walker’s installation in the same location about empire and slavery, or the upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy about empire and slavery) and, in the bookshops the same twenty or so books about the crimes of the British Empire or the evils of the slave trade trotted out time after time. Anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery sentiments are the received opinion of our time, one of its central ideological underpinnings.

Eight reasons why nobody’s much interested in Eritrean history

Wrong makes a big deal of the fact that so many Italians, Brits and Americans she spoke to during her research had no awareness of their nations’ involvements in Eritrean history, but this has at least seven possible explanations, all more plausible than it being due to some kind of conspiracy. Let’s consider just Britain:

1. British imperial history is huge

First, the history of the British Empire is a vast and complicated subject. Hardly anyone, even specialists, even professional historians, knows everything about every period of every colony which the British ruled at one point or another. Understandably, most people tend to only know about the big ones, probably starting with India, the slave trade, not least because this is being hammered home via every channel.

2. Second World War history is huge

Second, the British took over the running of Eritrea from the Italians when we fought and defeated them in the spring of 1941, in a campaign which was wedged in between the bigger, more important and better known Desert War in Libya. So the same principle applies as in the point about the empire as a whole, which is: even professional historians would probably struggle to remember every detail of every campaign in every theatre of the Second World War.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of the main theatres and campaigns of the Second World War. Did you know them all?

It was only reading up the background to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy that I realised there was a whole theatre of war in West Africa, which I’d never heard about before. Was this due to what Wrong calls the ‘milky haze of amnesia’ deriving from some government-wide conspiracy to forget? I doubt it. The reality is people only have so much time and attention to spare.

3. Limited attention of ordinary people

What percentage of the British population do you think gives a monkeys that Britain was, for ten years or so, in the late 1930s and through the Second World War, responsible for administering Eritrea? Weren’t we also running about 50 other countries at the time? I suspect my parents’ experience of being bombed during the Blitz and watching Battle of Britain dogfights over their London suburb were quite a bit more relevant to their lives than the details of British administration of the faraway Horn of Africa.

4. General historical awareness is dire, anyway

Most people don’t care about ‘history’, anyway. If you did a quick basic history quiz to the entire British population of 67 million, I wonder how many would pass. Auberon Waugh once joked that the fact that Henry VIII had six wives is probably the only fact from history which all Britons know, but I suspect this is way out of date. I live in the most multi-ethnic constituency in Britain. Most of the people I interact with (doctor, dentist, shopkeepers, postman, electrician, council leafblowers) were not born in this country and many of them barely speak English. I struggle to explain that I want to buy a stamp at the shop round the corner because they don’t speak English so don’t know what ‘stamp’ is until I point to a pack. I can’t believe many of the non-English-speaking people who now live here give much of a damn about the minutiae of Britain’s imperial history unless, of course, it’s the bit that affected their country.

5. Busy

And this is because people are busy. The difference between Wrong and me is that she thinks it’s of burning importance that the British ‘confront’ every aspect of their ‘colonial past’, whereas I take what I regard as the more realistic view, that a) most people don’t know b) most people don’t care c) most people are stressed just coping with the challenges of life.

By this I mean trying to find the money to pay their rent or mortgage, to buy food, to pay for the extras their kids need at school, or to find money to pay for their parents’ ruinously expensive social care. Most people are too busy and too stressed to care about what happened in a remote country in Africa 80 years ago. Most people are too busy and worried about the day-to-day to care about any of the big global issues that newspapers and magazines are always trying to scare us about, whether it’s the alleged impact of AI or the war in Ukraine or the threat from China. Most don’t know or care about ‘history’ and, I’d argue, they’re right to do so, and to live in the present.

I’m a bookish intellectual who’s interested in literature and history but I’ve had to learn the hard way (i.e. via my children and their friends) that there are lots of people who really aren’t. They’re not ‘erasing’ anything, they just live lives which don’t include much interest in history, be it imperialist, early modern, medieval or whatever. They’re too busy going to music festivals or shopping at Camden market, and sharing everything they do on TikTok and Instagram, getting on with their (exciting and interesting) lives, to know or care about the minutiae of the historical record of every single one of the hundred or so nations Britain had some kind of imperial involvement in.

Wrong thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy on the part of the British authorities not to give Eritrea a more prominent part in our history. I think it’s a realistic sense of perspective.

6. Commercial priorities

Books tend to be published, and documentaries commissioned, if the editors think there is a commercially viable audience for them. Last time I visited the Imperial War Museum I spent some time in the bookshop chatting to the manager because I was struck by the very, very narrow range of subjects they stocked books about. There were entire bookcases about the First and Second World War, a big section about the Holocaust, one about Women in War, and that was about it. I couldn’t even find a single book about Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, for God’s sake! When I quizzed him, the bookshop manager explained that they’re a commercial operation and need to maximise their revenue, and so only stock books on the subjects people want to buy.

Living in a commercial/consumer capitalist society as we do, maybe the lack of awareness, books and articles about the modern history of Eritrea is not due to a government conspiracy to suppress it but simply because it is a niche subject which interests hardly anyone, and so – there’s no money in it.

7. News agendas

When this book was published (in 2005) the population of Eritrea was 2.8 million i.e. it was one of the smallest countries in the world. Britain’s involvement in Eritrea was a tiny subset of the enormous, world-encompassing commitments of the Second World War, and one among many, many imperial entanglements which lingered on after the end of the war, of which India and Palestine were the headliners.

Even now, the current conflicts between Eritrea, Tigray and Ethiopia barely reach the news because they are, in fact, minor conflicts, they are far away, they have been going on for decades with no particularly dramatic changes to report on and, crucially, no signs of a conclusion – so they just never make the news agenda. Why would they, when Russia is threatening to start world war three?

8. Predictable

And I suppose there’s an eighth reason which is that, for anybody who is interested in modern history, it is utterly predictable that today’s historians or historical commentators will take a feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperial line. Nothing could be more predictable than a modern historian ‘revealing’ the racist repressive truth about British imperial behaviour. This is the stock, standard modern attitude. To reveal that European imperial behaviour in Africa was ‘racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief’ is the opposite of news – it is the utterly predictable compliance with modern ideology, as expressed through all available channels of print, TV, social media, films and documentaries.

So, those are my eight reasons for not buying into the central premise of Michela Wrong’s book which is that there has been some kind of conspiracy of silence among the ex-imperial powers, that they have deliberately let the history of their involvement in Eritrea sink into ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ in order to conceal from a public eager for every scrap of information about Italy, Britain and America’s involvement in one of the world’s smallest countries.

Presumable origin of the book

Wrong first visited Eritrea in 1996 in order to do a country profile for the Financial Times. She was surprised to discover that there was very little published about the place. She saw an opportunity. She approached her publisher, who agreed there was an opportunity to fill a gap and sell to the kind of niche audience which is interested in the history of tiny African countries. Obviously she would be building on the success of her first book to extend her brand.

But, to make the book more marketable it would have to incorporate several features: 1) elements of touristic travelogue, passages dwelling on, for example, Asmara’s surprising Art Deco heritage or the vintage railway that snakes up into the high plateau of the interior, the kind of thing that appears in ‘Train Journeys of The World’-type TV documentaries. Tick.

Second way to sex it up would be to adopt the modern woke, progressive, anti-imperial ideology so much in vogue, and make sure to criticise all the western powers for their racism, sexism, massacres and exploitation. Tick.

And so we’ve ended up with the book we have. It is a history of Eritrea in relatively modern times i.e. since the Italians began annexing it in the 1890s, up to the time of writing in about 2004, written in a superior, judgemental, often sarcastic and sneering tone, regularly facetious and dismissive about every action of the colonial powers, hugely reluctant to point out that the relevant African powers (i.e. Ethiopia) were ten times worse than anything the imperialists did.

I’m not saying Wrong is wrong to point out that the Italians were racist exploiters who carried out appalling, semi-genocidal massacres and installed apartheid-style laws; or that the British, to their shame, maintained many of Italy’s racist discriminatory laws and practices while dismantling and carting off much of the country’s infrastructure; or that the UN screwed up big time when it assigned Eritrea to be part of Ethiopia against the wishes of its people; or that the Americans should have done more to foster statehood and encourage Eritrean independence when they used the place as a listening post during the Cold War.

I’m sure all her facts are completely correct and they certainly build up into a damning portrait of how successive western powers abused a small African nation. No, what put me off the book was a) Wrong’s assumption that the lack of knowledge about Eritrea was the result of some kind of cover-up among the imperial powers, and b) her tone of sneering, sarcastic superiority over everyone that came before her. Her snarky asides about this or that imperial administrator or British general quickly become very tiresome.

It is possible to write history in a plain factual way and let the facts speak for themselves. Nobody writes a history of the Holocaust full of sneering asides that the Nazis were ‘racist’ and ‘discriminatory’ – ‘Hitler, in another typically racist speech…’. You don’t need to say something so obvious. The facts speak for themselves. Constantly poking the reader in the ribs with sarcastic asides about the awful colonialists gets really boring.

Travel writing

Wrong strikes a note of travel writer-style indulgence right from the start of her book. The opening pages give a lyrical description of what you see as you fly over the desert and come into land at Eritrea’s main airport. From her text you can tell she regards flying from one African capital to another, jetting round the world, as an everyday activity. It isn’t though, is it, not for most people, only for a privileged kind of international reporter.

She then goes on to explain that Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, has one of the finest collections of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the world. In other words, the opening of her book reads just like a Sunday supplement feature or upscale travel magazine article. Although she will go on to get everso cross about Eritrea’s agonies, the opening of the book strikes a note of pampered, first world tourism which lingers on, which sets a tone of leisured touristic privilege. I know it’s unintended but that’s how it reads.

Anti-western bias

Like lots of posh people who have enjoyed the most privileged upbringing Britain has to offer and then become rebels and radicals against their own heritage, Wrong is quick to criticise her own country and very slow to criticise all the other bad players in the story.

In particular, she downplays the elephant in the room which is that most of Eritrea’s woes stem from its 30-year-long war to be independent of Ethiopia, the imperialist nation to its south. She downplays the extent to which this was two African nations, led by black African leaders, who insisted on fighting a ruinous 30-year war in which millions of civilians died… and then started up another war in 1998, conflicts which devastated their economies so that, as usual, they needed extensive food aid to be supplied by…guess who?.. the evil West.

Gaps and absences

Imperial benefits, after all

There’s a particular moment in the text which brought me up short. In the chapter describing the machinations of various UN commissions trying to decide whether to grant Eritrea its independence or bundle it in with Ethiopia (Chapter 7, ‘What do the baboons want?’), Wrong describes the experiences of several commissioners who toured the two countries and immediately saw that Eritrea was light years ahead of Ethiopia: Ethiopia was a backward, almost primitive country ruled by a medieval court whereas Eritrea had industry and education and a viable economy which were established by the Italians. And the British had given Eritrea an independent press, trade unions and freedom of religion (p.171).

Hang on hang on hang on. Back up a moment. Wrong has dedicated entire chapters to excoriating Italian and British administrators for their racism, their exploitation of the natives, Italian massacres and British hypocrisy. Entire chapters. And now, here, in a brief throwaway remark, she concedes that the Italians also gave the country a modern infrastructure, harbours and railway while the British introduced modern political reforms, freedom of the press and religion, and that these, combined, meant Eritrea was head and shoulders more advanced than the decrepit empire to its south.

When I read this I realised that this really is a very biased account. It reminded me of Jeffrey Massons’s extended diatribe against therapy. Nothing Wrong says is wrong, and she has obviously done piles of research, especially about the Italian period, and added to scholarly knowledge. But she is only telling part of the story, the part which suits her pursuit of unremitting criticism of the West.

And she is glossing over the fact that the Italians, and the British, did quite a lot of good for the people of Eritrea. This doesn’t fit Wrong’s thesis, or her tone of modern enlightened superiority to the old male, misogynist, racist imperial administrators, and so she barely mentions it in her book. At a stroke I realised that this is an unreliable and deeply biased account.

Magazine feature rather than history

Same sort of thing happens with chapter 10, ‘Blow jobs, bugging and beer’. You can see from the title the kind of larky, sarky attitude Wrong takes to her subject matter. Dry, scholarly and authoritative her book is not.

The blowjobs chapter describes, in surprising detail, the lifestyle of the young Americans who staffed the set of radio listening posts America established in the Eritrean plateau in the 1950s and 60s. The plateau is 1.5 miles high in some places and this means big radio receivers could receive with pinprick accuracy radio broadcasts from all across the Soviet Union, Middle East and rest of Africa. The signals received and decoded at what came to be called Kagnew Station played a key role in America’s Cold War intelligence efforts.

As her larky chapter title suggests, Wrong focuses her chapter almost entirely around interviews she carried out with ageing Yanks who were young 20-somethings during the station’s heyday in the late 60s. One old boy described it as like the movie ‘Animal House’ and Wrong proceeds to go into great detail about the Americans’ drinking and sexual exploits, especially with prostitutes at local bars. She sinks to a kind of magazine feature-style level of sweeping, superficial cultural generalisation:

This was the 1960s, after all, the decade of free love, the Rolling Stones and LSD, the time of Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix and Hunter Thompson. (p.223)

This is typical of a lot of the easy, throwaway references Wrong makes, the kind of sweeping and often superficial generalisations which undermine her diatribes against the British and Italian empires.

Anyway, we learn more than we need to about service men being ‘initiated in the delights of fellatio’ by Mama Kathy, the hotel in Massawa nicknamed ‘four floors of whores’, about a woman called Rosie Big Tits (or RBT) who would service any man or group of men who paid, about the disgusting behaviour of the gang who called themselves The Gross Guys (pages 225 to 226).

This is all good knockabout stuff, and you can see how it came about when Wrong explains that she got in touch with the surviving members of The Gross Guys via their website, and then was given more names and contacts, and so it snowballed into what is effectively a diverting magazine article. She includes photos, including a corker of no fewer than seven GIs bending over and exposing their bums at a place they referred to as Moon River Bridge.

I have several comments on this. 1) Interwoven into the chapter are facts and stats about the amount of money the US government gave Haile Selassie in order to lease this land, money the Emperor mostly spent on building up the largest army in Africa instead of investing in infrastructure, agriculture and industry, with the result that he ended up having loads of shiny airplanes which could fly over provinces of starving peasants. So there is ‘serious’ content among the blowjobs.

Nonetheless 2) the blowjob chapter crystallises your feeling that this book is not really a history of Eritrea, but more a series of magazine-style chapters about colourful topics or individuals (such as the chapter about the Italian administrator Martini and the English activist Sylvia Pankhurst), which don’t quite gel into a coherent narrative.

3) Most serious is the feeling that this approach of writing about glossy, magazine, feature-style subjects – interviews with badly behaved Yanks or Sylvia Pankhurst’s son – distracts her, and the narrative, from giving a basic, reliable account of the facts.

It’s only after the chapter about blow jobs and drinking games that we discover, almost in passing, that the same period, the late 1960s, saw the rise and rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) which waged a steadily mounting campaign of attacks against centre of Ethiopian power e.g. police stations. And that the Ethiopian police and army, in response, embarked on a savage campaign to quell the insurgents / guerrillas / freedom fighters in the time-old fashion of massacring entire villages thought to be supporting them, gathering all the men into the local church and setting it on fire, raping all the women, killing all their livestock, burning all their crops, the usual stuff.

For me, this is the important stuff I’d like to know more about, not the ‘four floors of whores’ popular with American GIs.

Religious division

And it was round about here that I became aware of another massive gap in Wrong’s account, which is a full explanation of Eritrea’s ethnic and in particular religious diversity. Apparently, the low-lying coastal area, and the main port, Massawa, was and is mostly Muslim in make-up, with mosques etc, whereas the plateau, and the capital, Asmara, are mostly Christian, churches etc.

Wrong’s account for some reason underplays and barely mentions either religion or ethnicity whereas, in the countries I’ve been reading about recently (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo), ethnic and religious divides are absolutely crucial to understanding their histories and, especially, their civil wars.

She only mentions very briefly, in passing, that it was ethnic difference which led to there being two Eritrean independence militias, the ELF and the ELPF. It was only from Wikipedia that I gathered the former was more Arab and Muslim, the latter more Christian or secular, and socialist. She nowhere explains the ideological or tactical differences between them. She nowhere names their leaders, gives histories of the movements or any manifestos or programs they published. All this Wrong herself has consigned to the ‘milky haze of amnesia’. Is she involved in an imperialist conspiracy to suppress the truth, I wonder? Aha. Thought so. It’s all an elaborate front.

Similarly, when the ELPF eventually eclipse the ELF to emerge as the main Eritrean independence militia, Wrong doesn’t explain how or why. Her description of this presumably important moment in rebel politics is described thus:

The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat. (p.283)

That’s your lot. A bit more explanation and analysis would have been useful, don’t you think?

Key learnings

Each chapter focuses on a particular period of Eritrea’s modern (post-1890) history and Wrong often does this by looking in detail at key individuals who she investigates (if dead) or interviews (if living) in considerable detail.

Ferdinando Martini

Thus the early period of Italian colonisation is examined through the figure of Ferdinando Martini, governor of Eritrea from 1897 to 1907, who made heroic activities to modernise the country even as he endorsed Italy’s fundamentally racist laws. Wrong draws heavily on his 1920 literary masterpiece about his years as governor, ‘Il Diario Eritre’ which, of course, I’d never heard of before. Maybe Wrong thinks that almost all foreign literature has been sunk in ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ whereas I take the practical view that most publishers find most foreign publications commercially unviable and so not worth translating or publishing.

It was, apparently, Martini who gave the country its name, deriving it from the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa, based on the adjective ‘erythros’ meaning ‘red’.

It was Martini who commissioned the Massawa to Asmara train line, a heroic feat of engineering from the coast up into the steep central plateau, which Wrong describes in fascinating details and wasn’t completed during his time as governor.

Italian emigration

The Italian government hoped to export its ‘surplus population’ i.e. the rural poor from the South, to its African colonies but Wrong shows how this never panned out. Only about 1% of the Italian population travelled to its colonies compared to a whopping 40% who emigrated to America, creating one of America’s largest ethnic communities.

The Battle of Keren

Wrong’s account of the British defeat of the Italians in Eritrea focuses on a gritty description of the awful Battle of Keren, in March 1941, where British troops had to assault a steep escarpment of bare jagged rocks against well dug-in Italian (and native) troops, in relentless heat, with much loss of life. Once in control the British embarked on a scandalous policy of asset stripping and selling off huge amounts of the infrastructure which the Italians had so expensively and laboriously installed, including factories, schools, hospitals, post facilities and even railways tracks and sleepers.

Sylvia Pankhurst

Surprisingly, one of the most vocal critics of this shameful policy was Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the redoubtable Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading suffragette. Sylvia fell in love with Ethiopia and ran a high-profile campaign against Mussolini’s brutal invasion of 1936, demanding the British government intervene. After the war, her relentless pestering of her political contacts and the Foreign Office earned her the gratitude of the emperor Haile Selassie himself. Wrong estimates that the British stole, sold off, or shipped to her full colonies (Kenya, Uganda) getting on for £2 billion of assets (p.136). When she died, in 1960, aged 78, she was given a state funeral and buried in Addis Ababa cathedral. A lot of the material comes via her son, Richard Pankhurst, who was raised in Ethiopia, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and who Wrong meets and interviews on several occasions.

John Spencer

Meetings with Spencer, an American who was international legal adviser to Haile Selassie. In the early 1950s the UN was worried (among many other pressing issues) with the future of Eritrea. There were three options: full independence; full integration into Ethiopia; federal status within Ethiopia. There were strong views on all sides. Independent commentators wondered whether Eritrea could ever be an economically viable state (good question since, 73 years later, it is still one of the poorest countries on earth). Ethiopians wanted complete assimilation in order to give them access to the Red Sea. As a canny, aggressive American lawyer, Spencer lobbied hard for the Ethiopian option with the result that he is remembered with hatred to this day in Eritrea.

Kagnew Listening Station

The Americans discovered the high Eritrean plateau was uniquely located to receive clear radio signals from all over the hemisphere. From the 1950s onwards they paid Selassie a hefty premium, plus military and development aid, for the right to build what ended up being some 19 separate listening stations. Ethiopia became the largest recipient of American aid in Africa. Wrong tells its story via interviews with half a dozen of the thousands of GIs who staffed it in the 1960s. She (repeatedly) blames them for ignoring and erasing the reality of the violent insurgency and brutal repression spreading throughout Eritrea. What does she expect a bunch of 20-something GIs to have done? Launched an independent peace mission?

Wrong works through interviews with Melles Seyoum and Asmerom to tell the story of the widely supported EPLF insurgency against the Ethiopian occupying forces.

Keith Wauchope

Similarly, she tells the story of the brutal Ethiopian crackdown of the 1970s through the eyes of Keith Wauchope, deputy principal officer at Asmara’s US consulate from 1975 to 1977. In particular the ‘Red Terror’ when the Ethiopian revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries and Chinese revolutionaries before them, moved to eliminate all political opponents and even fellow revolutionaries who deviated even slightly from the party line. By this stage I’ve realised that the book doesn’t proceed through events and analysis but by moving from interviewee to interviewee.

Nafka

Bombed out of their towns and villages by the Soviet-backed Ethiopian regime’s brutal campaign, the EPLF withdrew to the high Eritrean plateau where they holed up for a decade. they developed a cult of total war, total commitment, even down to the details of combat wear (basic, functional), disapproval of romantic relationships between fighters. They built an entire underground town including hospitals and schools, the famous Zero school, around the highland town of Nafka, to evade Ethiopia’s Russian-supplied MIG jets.

Wrong has met and interviewed a number of ex-fighters. It comes over very clearly that she venerates them as, she says, did most of the other western journalists who made their way to the EPLF’s remote bases and were impressed by their discipline and commitment, not least to education, holding seminars and workshops about Marxism, Maoism, the Irish struggle, the Palestinian struggle and so on. Western journalists called them ‘the barefoot guerrilla army’. She calls these western devotees True Believers.

But she is candid enough to admit that the hidden redoubts of Nafka also nursed a fanatical sense of commitment and rectitude. This was the Marxist practice of self criticism and self control, which would translate into the overbearing authoritarianism the Eritrean government displayed once it won independence in 1993.

‘Eritrea is a militarized authoritarian state that has not held a national election since independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), headed by President Isaias Afwerki, is the sole political party. Arbitrary detention is commonplace, and citizens are required to perform national service, often for their entire working lives. The government shut down all independent media in 2001.’ (Freedom House website, 2023)

Ah, not so cool and fashionable once they actually come to power.

John Berakis

In line with the rest of the book, the chapter about the EPLF’s long years in its secret underground bases and highland redoubts, is told / brought to life via the biography of John Berakis, real name Tilahun (p.299) who was, improbably enough, both a committed fighter but also a qualified chef. Wrong interviews him and hears all about improbable banquets and feasts and recipes which he cooked up for the Fighters.

Asmara tank graveyard

The huge graveyard of tanks and other military equipment on the outskirts of Asmara is the peg for describing the astonishing amount of hardware the Soviet Union gave to Ethiopia: at one point in 1978 Soviet aircraft bearing equipment were arriving every 20 minutes in Ethiopia. By the end of the Soviets’ support for the Derg, the Russians had sent nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia , about $5,400 for every man, woman and child in the population (p.314).

She makes the point that the USSR’s influence was on the rise. In 1975 Angola and Mozambique both became independent under Marxist governments. Across Africa one-party rule was ripe for Soviet influence. Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia all had Marxist governments. It felt like the tide of history was flowing Russia’s way. By contrast America, had been weakened and humiliated by its defeat in Vietnam which had promptly turned communist, as did Laos and Cambodia.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Wrong profiles Mengistu, his personal grievances for being looked down on by Ethiopia’s racial elite, his slavish devotion to the USSR (he declared Brezhnev was like a father to him), busts of Marx on the table, erected the first statue of Lenin anywhere in Africa etc.

But, of course, over the years Mengistu slowly morphed into another African strongman, driving in his open-topped Cadillac through the hovels of Addis Ababa, eliminating all possible opponents, living in a miasma of paranoia, surrounded by courtiers and flunkeys, turning into Haile Selassie. During the catastrophic famine of 1983/84 Ethiopia continued to spend a fortune on its military, which had ballooned to almost 500,000 troops, and spent $50 million on the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Selassie and their coming to power. Over a million Ethiopians died in the famine.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 worried all the communist regimes and his coterie slowly changed the tone of political commentary, starting to question the huge amount of aid the USSR was giving to supposedly Marxist African regimes. Even so between 1987 and 1991 Moscow still sent Addis $2.9 billion in weaponry (p.327).

Yevgeny Sokurov

Wrong appears to have interviewed quite a few Russian diplomats and military men. Former major Yevgeny Sokurov has some savagely candid words about the USSR’s entire African policy:

‘Helping Mengistu, that arrogant monkey, was pointless…In Moscow there was a pathological desire to support these thieving, savage, African dictatorships. It was a waste of time.’ (quoted p.340)

Anatoly Adamashin

A really profound comment is made by Anatoly Adamashin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, who points out that the Cold War led both America and the USSR and the African countries themselves to believe they were engaged in a historic struggle between reactionary capitalism and revolutionary communism, but it was never really that: it was always wars between ethnically-based factions, or ambitious individuals, simply for power.

As with Mobutu (Zaire) or Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Jonas Savimbi (Mozambique) or Eduardo dos Passos (Angola) or here, with Mengistu in Ethiopia, when the Cold War evaporated it revealed that most of those conflicts had been the crudest struggles to achieve and maintain power.

It’s such a powerful view because it comes from a former Soviet official i.e. not from what Wrong regards as the racist imperialist West.

Mengistu flees

As the EPLF closed in on the capital, Mengistu took a plane to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum by another bogus Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe, given a farm (probably confiscated from the ghastly white colonists) and lived an allegedly pampered life for decades. During his rule over a million Ethiopians died in the famine, and over 500,000 in the wars and/or the Red Terror, or the forced relocation of millions of peasants which, of course, led to famine and starvation.

The Organisation of African Unity

Wrong delivers an entertainingly withering verdict on the Organisation of African Unity:

One of the most cynicism-inducing of events: the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table. (p.357)

Even better, she describes it as ‘a complacent club of sclerotic dictators and psychopathic warlords’ (p.358).

Eritrean independence

In 1993 the population voted for independence and Eritrea became an independent country with its own political system, flag, army and so on. Five years of reconstruction and hundreds of thousands of exiles returned home. When war broke out again, Wrong characteristically doesn’t blame it on the new Ethiopian or Eritrean governments, the parties that actually went to war, but on the wicked imperialists:

The national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea’s face. (p.361)

It’s because of our legacy, apparently, that the Eritreans and Ethiopians went back to war, bombing and napalming and strafing each other’s citizens, killing 80,000 in the 2 years of war, 1998 to 2000. Two of the poorest countries in the world spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bomb each other into submission. Surely the leaders of those two countries have to shoulder at least some of the responsibility themselves?

The result of this second war was impoverishment for Eritrea which was rightly or wrongly seen as the main aggressor. Foreign investment dried up. Ethiopia imposed a trade blockade.

Afwerki Isaias

The man who rose to become secretary general of the ELPF, and then president of independent Eritrea in 1993. The trouble is that, 30 years later, he is still president, in the time-honoured African tradition. To quote Wikipedia:

Isaias has been the chairman of Eritrea’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. As Eritrea has never had a functioning constitution, no elections, no legislature and no published budget, Isaias has been the sole power in the country, controlling its judiciary and military for over 30 years. Hence, scholars and historians have long considered him to be a dictator, described his regime as totalitarian, by way of forced conscription. The United Nations and Amnesty International cited him for human rights violations. In 2022, Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea, under the government of Isaias, second-to-last out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index, only scoring higher than North Korea.

Tens of thousands have fled one of the most repressive regimes in the world and the jaundiced reader is inclined to say: you fought for independence; you made huge sacrifices for independence; you won independence; at which point you handed all your rights over to a psychopathic dictator. You had the choice. You had the power. Don’t blame Italy. Don’t blame Britain. Don’t blame America. Blame yourselves.

Paul Collier’s view

Compare and contrast Wrong’s fleering, sarcastic, anti-western tone with Paul Collier’s discussion of Eritrea. Collier is an eminent development economist who is concerned to improve the lives of people in Africa here and now. He gives short shrift to third world rebel movements. In very stark contrast to Wrong’s 400 pages of grievance and complaint against the West, Collier’s account of Eritrea’s plight is brisk and no-nonsense:

The best organised diaspora movement of all was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The diaspora financed the war for thirty years and in 1992 they won. Eritrea is now an independent country. But did the war really achieve a liberation of the Eritrean people? In September 2001, after an unnecessary international war with Ethiopia, half the Eritrean cabinet wrote to the president, Isaias Afwerki, asking him to think again about his autocratic style of government. He thought about it and imprisoned them all. He then instituted mass conscription of Eritrean youth. Ethiopia demobilised, but not Eritrea. Eritrean youth may be in the army as much to protect the president from protest as to protect the country from Ethiopia. Many young Eritreans have left the country…Was such a liberation really worth thirty years of civil war?
(The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, 2008 Oxford University Press paperback edition, page 23)

Or compare Wrong with the chapter describing the horrific punishments, prisons and reign of terror run by Afwerki, in Paul Kenyon’s 2018 book, ‘Dictatorland’. The horror of Afwerki’s rule is glossed over in Wrong’s account because of her relentless concern to blame the West for everything. These two other accounts provide a necessary balance, or just simple reminder that sometime African nations’ dire plights are less to do with colonial oppression 80 years ago, and more the result of gross mismanagement and terrible leadership in the much more recent past.

Eritrea timeline

16th century – Ottoman Empire extends its control over the Red Sea/Ethiopian/Eritrean coast.

1800s – The Ottoman Turks establish an imperial garrison at Massawa on the Red Sea coast.

1869 – An Italian priest buys the Red Sea port of Assab for Italy from the local sultan.

1870 – Italy becomes a unified nation.

1885 – The British rulers of Egypt help Italian forces capture the Red Sea port of Massawa. This was to prevent the French getting their hands on it.

1887 to 1911 – Italians construct the Massawa to Asmara railway.

1890 – Italy proclaims the colony of Eritrea.

1894 – revolt of the previously loyal chief, Bahta Hagos, crushed.

1896 – 1 March, Italian army trounced by the Emperor Menelik at the Battle of Adwa; the borders of Eritrea are agreed.

1912 – After defeating Ottoman forces Italy seizes the two provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which it joins under the name Libya (a division which reopened after the ousting of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, and last to this day).

1915 – Italy is persuaded by France and Britain to join their side in the First World War, with the promise of Trieste, southern Tyrol, northern Dalmatia and expansion of her territories in Africa

1922 – Mussolini seizes power, campaigning on many grievances one of which is the Allies never gave Italy the empire they promised

1930 – coronation of Ras Tafari as emperor of Ethiopia; he takes the regnal name Haile Selassie. The coronation is attended by Evelyn Waugh who writes a hilarious satirical account, which is also full of accurate details about the country, Remote People (1931). (As a side note Waugh’s book is extensively quoted in Giles Foden’s humorous account of First World War naval campaigns in Africa, ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’.)

1935 – Mussolini launches a campaign to conquer Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie addresses the League of Nations to complain about the invasion, the use of poison gas and atrocities, but is ignored.

1936 – Italian troops enter Addis Ababa and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are all incorporated into ‘Italian East Africa’. Italy institutes apartheid-style race laws stipulating segregation. Evelyn Waugh was sent to cover the war and turned his despatches into a book, which includes a surprising amount of straight history of Ethiopia, Waugh In Abyssinia (1936).

1941 – During the Second World War, British advance from Sudan into Eritrea, fighting the brutal Battle of Keren (February to March 1941), which Wrong describes in detail, featuring a map.

1941 to 1942 – Britain crudely strips Eritrea of all the facilities the Italians had spent their 5-year-imperial rule installing, removing factories, ports, even railways sleepers and tracks, stripping the place clean. Britain also keeps in place many of Italy’s race laws.

1945 to 1952 Britain administers Eritrea, latterly as a United Nations trust territory.

1948 – The UN Four Powers Commission fails to agree the future of Eritrea.

1950s – former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst devoted her final decade (she died in 1960) to denouncing the asset stripping of both Eritrea and Ethiopia carried out by the British.

1950 – A fractious UN commission settles on the idea of making Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia, which is ratified by the General Assembly in 1952 in Resolution 390 A (V). The US signals that it favours the integrated model because it needs a quiescent Ethiopia as location for its huge radio listening station.

1950s – Ethiopia slowly but steadily undermines Eritrea’s identity: closing its one independent newspaper; having its sky-blue flag replaced by the Ethiopian one; having its languages of Tigrinya and Arabic replaced by Amharic; downgrading the Eritrean parliament, the Baito, to a rubber stamp for the Emperor’s decisions.

1953 – The US and Ethiopia sign a 25-year lease on the Kagnew radio listening station.

1958 – The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) is formed with a largely Muslim membership, looking to brothers in the Arab world.

The Eritrean war of Independence

1961 – First shots fired by ELF guerrillas, against a police station.

1962 – On 14 November 1962 members of the Baito were browbeaten and bribed into accepting full union and abolishing themselves i.e. Ethiopia annexed Eritrea without a shot being fired. A day of shame, a day of mourning, many of the Baito fled abroad. For the next few years the UN refused to acknowledge or reply to petitions, letters, legal requests from independence activists. The UN washed its hands and walked away.

1963 – Organisation of African Unity set up in Addis Ababa, largely at the Emperor’s initiative, and freezes African nations’ borders in place.

1967 – Full-scale guerrilla war. The Ethiopian army carries out numerous atrocities.

1970 – ELF splits and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) is formed, a secular socialist predominantly Christian highlanders. By the early 70s the liberation movements had secured some 95% of Eritrean territory.

1974 – Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown in a slow-motion military coup (see ‘The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński). A military junta calling itself the Dergue or Derg comes to power. After squabbling (and killing) among themselves, a forceful lieutenant, Mengistu Haile Mariam, emerges as its leader and driving force. The Derg declares Ethiopia a socialist state committed to Marxism-Leninism. It rejects Selassie’s alliance with the US and turns instead to the Soviet Union.

1975 – In response to increasing insurgent attacks, the Ethiopian army goes on the rampage in Asmara, slaughtering up to 3,000 civilians, then destroys over 100 villages, killing, burning, raping wherever they go.

1977 to 1978 – Massive Soviet support enable Ethiopian forces to reverse the EPLF’s hard-won gains, thus ensuring the war would double in length, continuing for another 14 years.

1978 – Somalia launches a campaign to seize the Ogaden region of Ethiopia which is now fighting two wars, in the north and east. Soviet ships and artillery mow down EPLF fighters, airplanes carpet bomb Eritrean villages.

1982 – Ethiopia launches a massive military assault named the Red Star Campaign in an effort to crush the rebels, but itself suffers heavy casualties.

1985 – Mikhael Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union.

1988 – March: Battle of Afabet is the turning point of the war, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front smashes an armoured convoy and then takes the town with barely a shot fired. Wrong describes the surreal way the Ethiopian commanders destroyed their own armoured column, once it had been trapped in a steep valley, burning hundreds of their own troops to death. Basil Davidson on the BBC described it as the equivalent of the Viet Minh’s historic victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (p.337). It is described in an article by Peter Worthington.

1989 – May: senior Ethiopian generals try to stage a coup the day after Mengistu flew to East Germany to plea for more arms. The coup was foiled, several key generals, 27 other senior staff and some 3,500 soldiers were executed in the month that followed, further weakening the demoralised Ethiopian army. The Soviets, fed up with supplying Ethiopia (and their other African ‘allies’) huge amounts of munitions, withdraw their ‘special advisers’. The last one leaves in autumn 1989.

1990 – February: The EPLF takes Massawa in a daring land and speedboat operation.

1991 – Spring: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front captures the entire coast and moves on the Eritrean capital, Asmara. In the last few years disaffected Amharas and Omoros in central and southern Ethiopia had formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPDRF). Running parallel to Eritrea’s history, the equally rebellious province of Tigray had spawned the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975. Now the three groups worked together to topple Mengistu.

Eritrean independence

1993 – In a UN-supervised referendum, 99.8% of Eritreans vote for independence.

1994 – Having won independence, the EPLF reconstituted itself as the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and went onto establish one of the most autocratic, dictatorial regimes in the world.

1998 to 2000 – Eritrean-Ethiopian border clashes turn into a full-scale war which leaves some 70,000 people dead.

2001 – September: Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, closes the national press and arrests a group of opposition leaders who had called on him to implement a democratic constitution and hold elections.

END OF WRONG’S NARRATIVE

That’s as far as Wrong’s narrative covers. What follows is from the internet. There are loads of websites providing timelines.

2007 – Eritrea pulls out of regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) as IGAD member states back Ethiopian intervention in Somalia.

2008 June – Fighting breaks out between Djiboutian and Eritrean troops in the disputed Ras Doumeira border area. At least nine Djiboutian soldiers killed. The US condemns Eritrea, but Eritrea denies launching an attack.

2009 December – The UN imposes sanctions on Eritrea for its alleged support for Islamist insurgents in Somalia.

2010 June – Eritrea and Djibouti agree to resolve their border dispute peacefully.

2014 June – The UN Human Rights Council says about 6% of the population has fled the country due to repression and poverty.

2016 July – The UN Human Rights Council calls on the African Union to investigate Eritrean leaders for alleged crimes against humanity.

2017 July – UNESCO adds Asmara to its list of World Heritage sites, describing it as a well-preserved example of a colonial planned city.

Peace with Ethiopia

2018 July – Ethiopia and Eritrea end their state of war after Ethiopian diplomatic overtures.

2018 November – The UN Security Council ends nine years of sanctions on Eritrea, which had been imposed over allegations of support for al-Shabab jihadists in Somalia.

Credit

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong was published in 2005 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2005 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

Related reviews

More Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 24, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/24/i-didnt-do-it-for-you-how-the-world-used-and-abused-a-small-african-nation-michela-wrong/

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2

This is a huge, 700-page, compendious history of all the African nations from independence (roughly the mid-1950s) to the time it was written (around 2010), so 55 years or so of modern African history.

Meredith chooses as epigraph to this big book the Latin tag from Pliny the Elder, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ meaning ‘Out of Africa always something new’ – but a reading of the actual book confirms how utterly inappropriate this is. For if Meredith’s book demonstrates anything it is that, since independence, out of Africa have come the same five or six stereotypical narratives or events – civil war, one-party rule, dictatorship, economic collapse, famine, vast amounts of foreign aid – and the consistent failure to deliver the utopian dreams everyone hoped for in the heady first years of independence.

Two major contexts

Meredith only mentions them in passing but two broad historical contexts are worth bearing in mind.

  1. The independence movement in Algeria spiralled out of control into an appallingly brutal war which neither side was able to stop, and which threatened to tear the colonial power, France, apart. The war was at its worst in 1957 to 1961. The point is that Algeria stood as a terrible warning to the other colonial powers (Britain, Belgium, Portugal) of what might happen if they mismanaged things or delayed.
  2. The victory of Fidel Castro’s communists in Cuba in 1959 ushered in an era when the threat of the new African states falling to communism seemed very real and of global importance in the war between the two superpowers. Hence the head of the CIA warning President Eisenhower that Congo’s Patrice Lumumba might be ‘the African Castro’ and America’s feverish paranoia that if Congo fell to the communists it might influence the entire continent (p.104). Looking back, this level of anxiety seems exaggerated, even absurd. But the context is crucial in understanding the actions of all the colonial powers, but especially of America, which set about undermining left-wing governments and supporting right-wing, capitalism-loving dictators across the continent.

Both of these examples or precedents (Algeria, Cuba) lay behind the decisions of Britain and Belgian, in particular, not to linger or suppress independence movements. In other words, they added to the sense of urgency and haste which characterised the rush to make Africa independent, with such questionable results.

Part 1

1. The Gold Coast experiment (Ghana)

The tragic life of Kwame Nkrumah who went from political prisoner in the early 1950s, to lead his own political party, the Convention People’s Party, won the general election held under British auspices in 1954, before leading Ghana to independence in March 1957. Meredith vividly describes the week-long celebrations, attended by worthies from around the world including Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.

With a sickening inevitability Nkrumah found the new country difficult to rule, repressed political opposition and rigged elections. In 1964 he amended the constitution to make Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup led by the National Liberation Council.

2. Revolt on the Nile (Egypt)

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led the 1952 revolution which overthrew the 32-year-old playboy King Farouk I. Much rhetoric about freedom and Arab socialism as Nasser tightened his grip on power, imprisoning rivals and getting elected president in 1956. The catastrophe of the Suez Crisis which put the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. From that moment Britain’s rush to decolonise picked up speed.

3. Land of the Setting Sun (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria)

Apparently, the Arab word for north-west Africa, maghreb, means ‘land of the setting sun’ (as opposed to our word ‘Levant’ which means ‘rising’, to describe the old Ottoman Empire).

This chapter describes the descent of Algeria into a terrible insurgency which kicked off in the spring of 1954 with a wave of bomb attacks by the National Liberation Front (French: Front de libération nationale or FLN) with both sides slowly breaching their early declarations to target only combatants, so that by August 1954 the FLN was bombing civilian cafés and restaurants while the French security forces cracked down hard on the civilian Arab population, with large-scale arrests and torture.

An often overlooked aspect of the terrible war in Algeria (1956 to 1962) was that it made the French more amenable to granting its neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, independence. Meredith describes the independence campaigning of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. The French arrested, imprisoned and exiled both these leaders, but eventually gave into widespread protests and both Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in March 1956.

In 1957, amid an upsurge in terrorist bombings, the French governor of Algeria handed power over to the military, led by General Jacques Massu. The army locked down the capital city Algiers, ringing it with barbed wire, dividing it into sections which could be searched, cleared and then surveilled. Thousands of Algerians were arrested and tortured using electric shocks or waterboarding. It became known as The Battle of Algiers. In the country, peasants were rounded up into camps while native collaborator/spies (harkis) were deployed by the French.

By 1958 the FLN had been defeated, its leaders seeking refuge in Tunisia, whose new leader Bourguiba gave them sanctuary. However, the political system in France itself was in crisis. Violent disagreements about policy in Algeria led to the collapse of a series of short-lived governments. Worried that pacifist-defeatist politicians would gain power, in May 1958 the military took control of Algeria, allying with leading colons (white French colonists) to form a Committee of Public Safety. The French government declared a blockade, at which the Committee called for the return of the wartime hero, General de Gaulle.

4. L’Afrique Noire (Senegal, Ivory Coast)

L’Afrique Noire was the French term for the sub-Saharan part of its colonial empire, including Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Meredith describes the careers of Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire.

5. Winds of Change (British colonies)

This chapter covers the independence movements in British colonies such as Nigeria.

Nigeria

Nigeria had only been created by the forcible union of north and south Nigeria in 1914, the north and south having themselves been slowly cobbled together from former, smaller protectorates since 1900. Nigeria could be divided into three great blocs: the north was Muslim and Hausa-speaking, with a conservative, feudal social system. It had few schools or colleges. The West, including the capital Lagos, was mostly Yoruba. Being on the coast, dotted with cities, it was more economically advanced and urban. In the East lived the Igpo who tended to be very well educated but had no social system of their own and so were scattered around Nigeria’s other territories. In addition there some 250 other ethnic groups, some of which protested and rebelled, including the Edo-speaking people of Benin province who longed to restore the kingdom of Benin. The British struggled with successive constitutions to try and create a balance between all these different constituencies. Nigeria was granted independence in 1960.

As a rule of thumb British colonies in West Africa were much more advanced than British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika) and Central Africa (north and south Rhodesia, Nyasaland). Politics in these latter countries was dominated by the fierce lobbying of the small white minorities, who dominated the local governors. Thus the settlers persuaded the Colonial Office to create a federation of Central Africa, consisting of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Kenya

Plans for a similar federation in East Africa were wrecked by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was an organised protest against the grotesque monopoly of the best agricultural land in Kenya by whites, and the land deprivation and lack of rights enforced on the million-strong Kikuyu population. Meredith gives a thorough account: the phrase mau mau actually meant nothing in Kikuyu, it was just a rallying call, and then the name given to the secret meetings where oaths of allegiance were sworn to the movement. Despite white paranoia, very few whites were actually killed during the so-called ’emergency’ (1952 to 1960), Meredith gives the number as 32, fewer than lost their lives in traffic accidents in Nairobi over the same period. He details British accusations that the Kikuyu leader Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU) was involved, which led to a kangaroo court convicting and imprisoning him; and the brutal measures the British took against the insurgency, including setting up concentration camps.

The first Blacks were elected to Kenya’s legislative council in 1957. In October the Highlands area was formally opened to all races. The British thought they would continue to rule Kenya for at least another decade. In the event, independence was granted on December 12, 1963.

Nyasaland

Meredith gives the story of Nyasaland, to which the elderly Dr Hastings Banda returned as leader of the independence movement in 1959, determined to scupper Britain’s plans to make it part of a federation with Rhodesia. The colonial governor imported troops who tried to quell protests which turned into riots, troops shot, protesters killed, it becomes a nationwide movement etc.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring north Rhodesia, in the run-up to contested 1959 elections the authorities banned a leading nationalist party and imprisoned its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. Britain was losing its reputation for progressive colonialism in a welter of protests and arrests across all its African colonies.

Abruptly, Harold Macmillan’s conservative government gave in. Late in 1959 the Foreign Secretary Iain Macleod said further repression would lead to bloodshed. In February 1960 Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech. Behind it was fear that further suppressing calls for independence would drive African nations into the hands of the communists. The British knew most of their colonies weren’t ready for independence – Meredith lists the pitiful number of native lawyers or administrators in the central and east African countries – but hurrying was a less bad option than delay, with the increasing repression, bloodshed and reputational damage that would inevitably entail.

6. Heart of Darkness (Congo)

The gruesome history of the Belgian Congo. It beggars belief that there are still statues of King Leopold II, one of the most blood-thirsty rulers in history, in Belgium. Congo was notable for four or five reasons:

  1. It was and is the largest country in Africa.
  2. The grotesque rule of Leopold II was probably the most evil, mass murdering of all the colonial regimes. As many as 10 million Congolese died during his rule, 1885 to 1908.
  3. Once the colony had been handed over to the Belgian government to run, it developed through the 20th century as one of the richest sources of minerals (particularly copper and diamonds) in the world.
  4. The rush to independence was hastiest and most foolhardy here than almost anywhere else. At independence Congo had 3 Black civil servants, 30 university graduates, no doctors, secondary school teachers or army officers. The firebrand new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, had just four years of secondary school education plus one year in a technical college for postal clerks (p.95).
  5. With the result that within days of winning independence on 1 June 1960, Congo collapsed into chaos.

The army mutinied, the entire province of Katanga tried to secede, riots in the main cities included attacks on whites so that the entire Belgian community i.e. everyone who knew how to run the infrastructure of the country, fled in panic. Profile of the hectic unpredictable character of Lumumba, and the long dismal series of events which led, first to his arrest and, eventually, to his murder by Belgian and Congolese soldiers on the orders of his one-time lieutenant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, with the collusion of the UN and US, on 17 January 1961.

The stream of crises continued until Mobutu took power in a definitive military coup in 1965, and was to rule a one-party state for 32 years, until 1997.

7. The White South

South Africa

Meredith points out that the southern nations of Africa – north and south Rhodesia, south-west Africa and South Africa – looked at the other African countries gaining independence and were horrified by what they saw, especially the complete chaos punctuated by bloodbaths and military coups in Congo.

The fiercest response was in South Africa which in 1948 had established the system of apartheid and spent the next decades hardening the division between whites and blacks. Meredith chronicles the early history of the African National Congress (ANC), revolving round the figure of Nelson Mandela and the failure of peaceful efforts to counter apartheid. Peaceful protests such as general strikes became harder to justify after the SA authorities carried out the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, killing 69 protesters and injuring 180.

The more violent atmosphere heralded by the massacre led the ANC to establish the armed wing of the struggle, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. These guys carried out a not very effective sabotage campaign against a variety of infrastructure targets. In 1962 Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, despite a lack of evidence against him. But then in 1964 the authorities discovered the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe hideout at Rivonia, which was stuffed with incriminating documents. On the basis of these, Mandela was retried and, along with the key leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto, sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.

Rhodesia

Meredith gives the history of Rhodesia, taking in the creation of the two independence parties, ZANU and ZAPU, up until November 1965 when Ian Smith‘s Rhodesian Front government, rebelling against pressure to grant Black independence, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the mother government in the UK.

Angola

Angola was a backwater of the mouldering Portuguese empire, which was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1956 the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) was founded but police swoops in 1959 and 1960 arrested most of its leaders. In 1961 the colony was horrified by an outbreak of extreme violence in the north, where machete-wielding gangs massacred white bosses and the Blacks who worked for them. This was partly the work of a different group, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), run by Holden Roberto.

Mozambique

On the other side of the continent, in the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, 1962 saw the creation of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) which commenced a campaign of small-scale guerrilla attacks against border posts etc.

Dates of independence

1956 – Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia

1957 – Ghana

1958 – Guinea

1960 – Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian), Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo (France), Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania,

1961 – Sierra Leone, Tanganyika

1962 – Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria, Uganda

1963 – Kenya, Zanzibar

1964 – Nyasaland (Malawi), North Rhodesia (Zambia)

1965 – Gambia

1966 – Botswana, Lesotho

1975 – Angola, Mozambique

1980 – Zimbabwe

1990 – Namibia

1993 – Eritrea

2011 – South Sudan

Part 2

8. The Birth of Nations

A chapter summarising the dire state of the geography and economies of most African nations at independence, and the consequent economic challenges they faced. It’s here that Meredith gives the shocking figures about the lack of African graduates or professionals right across the continent.

9. The First Dance of Freedom

Abandoning democracy

Meredith laments that almost all the new national leaders consciously disavowed democracy and instituted one-party rule. It’s interesting to read their justifications. It was claimed that democracy derived from advanced societies with well-defined classes and class interests which could be represented by political parties. By contrast, leaders like Nkomo and Kenyatta argued that while parties may have been necessary to organise and motivate different groupings in the fight against colonialism, now the colonialists had left and the nations were free, democracy represented a threat to African countries because the likelihood was that parties would come to be based on tribal or regional allegiances and so work to split and divide the nation. There’s actually a lot to this argument, as that’s what many African parties came to be, fronts for specific tribes or regional interests.

One-party rule

Regardless of the justifications, almost all the first leaders of the newly independent African nations went on to abolish democracy, establish one-party rule, declare themselves presidents for life, lock up any opposition figures (p.176), create cults of their greatness (p.180), set up a secret police which was told it could go to any lengths to save the state from communist or capitalist or imperialist subversion etc etc. These cults often took the name of the Great Leader – Nasserism, Nkrumahism and so on (p.163).

Corruption

And misuse money, in two specific ways: 1) instituting state-sponsored corruption at every level of society, while 2) spending fortunes on grandiose building projects, palaces, mansions, waterfront hotels. Presidents, ministers and powerful figures swiftly awarded themselves ‘the platinum lifestyle’ (p.171).While Nkrumah was crapping on about ‘African socialism’ his ministers made fortunes. Ghanaian minister Krobo Edusei caused a scandal when his wife ordered a £3,000 gold-plated bed from a London store. In later life he admitted to owning 14 homes, a luxury beach house, a London flat, expensive cars and six different bank accounts. African socialism.

Army coups

In 1958 in Sudan the army took control in Sudan from squabbling politicians. In 1963 Togo’s president was shot dead in a coup. In 1964 African mobs overthrew rule by the Arab elite and the sultan was forced to flee, the French army had to put down military coups in Gabon and Cameroon, while the British army suppressed army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya. From 1965 coups became more frequent: in 1965 Algeria’s first leader was deposed; Mobutu overthrew president Joseph Kasa-Vubu in Congo; there was a military coup in Benin; Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic, and so on.

10. Feet of Clay (Ghana)

An extended description of Kwame Nkrumah’s slow descent into authoritarian rule, isolation, paranoia, arbitrary arrest of opponents, accompanied by rising corruption. Meredith makes the pretty well-known point that patronage and corruption weren’t parasites on the system which could be eliminated; they were the system.

A detailed account of how Nkrumah destroyed the Ghana economy through mismanagement, ignorance, terrible accounting, disastrous decisions and so on. Incompetence on a national scale, plus classic withdrawal into dictator paranoia. And, also classically, when the army intervened it wasn’t for the good of the country – they’d happily watched it go to wrack and ruin – it was because Nkrumah started tampering with it, wishing to bring it directly under his control as he had done every other aspect of Ghanaian life. So it was that while Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, the army deposed him. Joyous crowds celebrated in the streets, his statues was pulled down and portraits defaced. The kind of thing we were to see scores and scores of times in developing countries around the world over the past 60 years.

11. A House Divided (Nigeria)

Nigeria. Meredith explains the entirely tribal basis and vicious infighting of Nigerian politics which led up to the January 1966 military coup, in which the Supreme Council of the Revolution not just sacked but executed civilian politicians. And the complicated rivalries between North, West and East Nigeria which led leaders in the East to declare independence as Biafra, and the 3-year-long war which followed, in which up to 2 million Nigerians died.

12. Death of an Emperor (Ethiopia)

An entertaining account of the elaborate ritual which surrounded the Emperor Haile Selassie and the surprisingly aggressive imperial campaigns which had doubled his country’s size, starting back in the time of his ancestor Menelek (ruled 1889 to 1913), including the annexation of Eritrea and contested parts of Somaliland.

In the early 1970s mismanagement, especially of a famine in Wollo, protests by various sectors, and Selassie’s hastening senility, emboldened a group of army officers, who called themselves the Derg, to stage a coup in stages throughout 1974, which ended with the complete overthrow of Selassie on 12 September. In November the junta executed 60 former officials of the imperial government plus dissident elements within the Derg itself, by firing squad, and Ethiopia was declared a republic to be governed on Marxist-Leninist lines.

  • The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)

13. The Coming of Tyrants

After the first few heroic years of optimism, the military coups began. But worse was the advent of the monsters: Abaid Karume in Zanzibar (1964 to 1972); Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic (1966 to 1979); Idi Amin in Uganda (1971 to 1979); Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (1968 to 1979); Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia (1977 to 1991).

14. In Search of Ujamaa (Tanzania)

Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. He was a committed socialist though without a socialist party or advisers. In the mid-1960s he nationalised everything in Tanzania and proclaimed this native form of socialism ujaama, which is KiSwahili for ‘familyhood’ (p.253). In 1974 this was turned into the forced movement of some 11 million peasant farmers into collective farms, which had the same kind of catastrophic effect as in the Stalin-era Ukraine or Mao’s China i.e. the collapse of agricultural productivity and widespread hunger. Nyerere had to go begging to the World Bank and IMF and food agencies for emergency food supplies. As its economy went steadily downhill, Nyerere’s one-party state did improve literacy, schools, drinking water etc, but almost entirely funded by aid from the West.

15. The Passing of the Old Guard

Ghana

Nkrumah’s sad exile in a slowly deteriorating villa in Guinea planning a triumphant return to Ghana which never took place.

Egypt

Nasser’s great dreams of leading an Arab renaissance came to nothing, attempts to unify with Syria were a fiasco, his intervention in Yemen backfired, leading up to the humiliation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which the Israelis seized the Sinai with its oil wells from Egypt. Yet he remained popular and Egypt was plunged into mourning when he died in 1970 of a heart attack, aged just 52.

Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta was the opposite of Nyerere, a keen advocate of capitalism, and provided the stable political and legal framework within which private enterprise could flourish. Much of the land belonging to the white settlers, the issue behind the Mau Mau movement, was sold to Black Kenyans. During the 1970s he faced political challenges and hardened his one-party rule. His fiercest critic was found murdered etc. Late in life Kenyatta slowly lost interest in ruling, preferring to concoct complex riddles. He died peacefully in 1978.

Senegal

President Léopold Senghor remained strongly Francophile, committed to maintaining links with France, accepting French capital in business and retaining French troops to safeguard his regime. In France he was a noted poet. In 1976 he bucked the one-party trend of his neighbours by allowing the establishment of two new political parties. In 1980 he handed over power to his protégé, becoming the first African ruler to relinquish power voluntarily.

Guinea

The first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, created a paranoid atmosphere of permanent plots which he claimed to uncover and used to arrest, torture and publicly execute opponents, real or imagined. A fifth of the population fled abroad. Touré nationalised industries, persecuted independent businesses, created parastatal agencies, so that the economy tanked and was, eventually, only surviving on western aid. After 20 years of enforced socialism, he began to relent and allow some elements of private enterprise.

16. The Slippery Slope

An overview of the calamitous economic issues which hit Africa in the 1970s and 80s, being:

  • famine and drought
  • the two oil shocks of the 1970s
  • the collapse of commodity prices on which most African states depended for foreign revenue
  • the disastrous loss of agricultural land, soil degradation and desertification

On top of all this, an explosive growth in population.

17. The Great Plunderer (Zaire)

This refers to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who ruled Congo from the date of his second military coup in 1965 to his overthrow by the forces invading from Rwanda in 1997. During those 32 long years he changed the country’s name to Zaire, Africanised all placenames (Leopoldville > Kinshasa, Elizabethville > Lubumbashi) and even his own name, changing it to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

Mobutu nationalised agriculture, seized all businesses from foreign owners, causing a collapse in the country’s economy, and looted it on a grand scale, siphoning vast amounts into private bank accounts. Probably the greatest African kleptocrat, he was said to have stolen up to $15 billion. The Americans supported him on the simple Cold War basis that he was fiercely anti-communist and so maintained the centre of Africa against any Soviet influence. Mobutu was an honoured guest of US presidents from John F Kennedy to George Bush. Meredith doesn’t need to comment.

18. White Dominoes (Mozambique, Angola)

Portugal was the last European country to decolonise. Independence movements in its two main African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, commenced military activities in 1961, leading to what became known as the Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974).

In 1968 Portugal’s long-serving dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was replaced by another authoritarian ruler, Marcello Caetano. He inherited military operations in Portugal’s main two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. However, junior army officers had become unhappy with the way the army seemed like it was committed forever to these ruinous, unwinnable wars and so, on 25 April 1974, carried out the Carnation Revolution, overthrowing Caetano. Portugal’s new military rulers set out to divest themselves of her colonies immediately. Small Guinea-Bissau was easily granted independence in 1973.

Mozambique

In Mozambique the main liberation force had been the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led by the zealous Marxist, Samora Machel. Terrified by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Marxist Machal, in the year between the declaration of independence in 1974 and its legal implementation on 25 June 1975, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique fled the country, including all the civil servants, administrators, managers of the infrastructure and all businesses.

Frelimo passed a law ordering the remaining Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless, leaving a country empty of experienced administrators, engineers and so on.

Frelimo commenced an aggressive implementation of Marxism-Leninism which proved a disaster: central planning was as badly managed here as in most other African countries, leading to economic collapse, inflation, shortages of everything but especially food. Industrial output and agriculture collapsed leading to widespread famine. Frelimo eventually generated so much opposition that the anti-communist forces united to form the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias.

Renamo found backing from South Africa and the US. Civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was to consume 15 ruinous years from 1977 to 1992. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, with somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dying of famine. 1.7 million Mozambicans took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced.

Angola

Something similar happened in Angola. As the deadline for independence approached, three rebel or independence groups/parties/armies vied for power, being the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA. As violence broke out most of the white Portuguese fled and the country collapsed into a civil war between what emerged as the two main forces, the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The civil war lasted from 1975, with interludes, until 2002. See:

Part 3

19. Red Tears (Ethiopia)

How in 1974 the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) of army officers, also known as the Derg, overthrew the regime of emperor Haile Selassie. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized full control and initiated a wave of repression which became known as the Red Terror. During this two-year campaign as many as 50,000 Ethiopians were arrested, tortured and executed. The Derg dumped the corpses in the street and gained notoriety by demanding that families of the executed pay for the bullets. Marxist-Leninist housekeeping.

Meredith explains how Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist policies, along with his brutal campaigns against Eritrean and Tigrayan separatists in the north, helped bring about the great Ethiopia famine of 1984 which led to Live Aid. At the time more than half of Ethiopia’s annual budget was devoted to maintaining an army of 300,000 (armed and supplied by Soviet Russia) in order to carry out operations against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (p.334).

Mengistu was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed in collectivising agriculture and enforcing super low prices in order to provide subsidised food for his key constituencies in the cities. The detailed chronicle of his deliberate ignoring of the famine, attempts to deny it, to prevent journalists or aid agencies entering the famine-stricken areas, and then the politically motivated strategy of moving hundreds of thousands of starving people against their will from the north (close to where Eritrean separatists operated) to the more secure south where they had no homes or livelihoods, makes for terrible reading. What a complete bastard.

The title of this chapter comes from a memoir of his time in Mengistu’s government written by a defector from the Derg, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, ‘Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia’. In the words of reviewer Mohammed Hassen, this exposes ‘the callous brutality of the Ethiopian government towards its own people’, and the leaders of the Derg as ‘uninformed, anti-people, anti-democratic criminal thugs’ (Online review).

20. Fault Lines (Chad, Sudan)

Chad

Across the north of Africa is a line between the Arab Muslim north and the start of the Black African and often Christian south. Meredith gives a long, detailed and deeply depressing account of the north-south conflict in Chad, in which both sides massacred each other and Colonel Gaddafi, in power in Libya from 1969 onwards, took advantage by trying to seize northern Chad and, at his most ambitious, declared the unification of Chad with Libya – under his supreme control, of course.

Sudan

To the East, the equally long-running and demoralising war between Muslim north and Christian south Sudan. A key aspect of the backstory to both conflicts is that the northern Muslims had, for centuries, captured southern blacks as slaves as part of the widespread Arab slave trade. In fact Meredith records Arab militias capturing and enslaving Black southerners in the 1980s, all accompanied by vitriolic racism about the Blacks being sub-humans etc. About the Atlantic slave trade I hear on a daily basis and in virtually every art exhibition I go to; about the Arab slave trade, never.

21. The Scourge of AIDS

The interesting point is the number of African governments which refused to acknowledge AIDS or dismissed it as a racist Western conspiracy, with the result that many African countries didn’t commence AIDS-awareness campaigns till the 1990s by which time the disease had taken hold in their populations. Two notable exceptions were Senegal under Abdou Diouf, and Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni. Respect.

22. The Lost Decade

A detailed look at the economic collapse of almost all African countries by the 1980s so that they became increasingly dependent on foreign aid, on loans which needed to be continually rescheduled, and the accompanying demands from the IMF and World Bank for ‘structural reforms’. Through mismanagement, drought, civil war, collapse of commodity prices, most African countries became dependent on aid from the West.

What comes over, and is expressed in terms by African commentators themselves, is what condemned Africa to becoming the most backward and poverty-stricken of the world’s continents was the appalling quality of African leaders – tyrants, dictators but, above all, thieves, on an epic, mind-boggling scale.

23. The Struggle for Democracy

The long hold on power of Africa’s strong men, the generation who took power at independence and often clung on to it for 25 years or more, for example:

  • Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (president for 38 years)
  • Omar Bongo in Gabon (41 years)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (president for 33 years)
  • Mobutu in Zaire (32 years)
  • Hastings Banda in Malawi (30 years)
  • Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (27 years)
  • Moussa Traore in Mali (22 years)

Of the 50 African states in 1990, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships.

The fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era. One party regimes and Marxist regimes appeared old-fashioned overnight. But the strong men clung on in the new landscape, for example Mobutu who struggled on for another 7 years.

24. A Time of Triumph (South Africa)

A long and harrowing description of ‘grand’ apartheid in all its totalitarian, racist horror. Meredith gives an interesting explanation of the changes in international affairs and geopolitics during the late 1980s which led the apartheid leadership to consider sweeping reform. He ends with a moving account of negotiations with Nelson Mandela, climaxing with his release and then the first free, multi-racial elections in South Africa’s history.

Apart from the long, complex history of violence, guerrilla warfare, civil war between the ANC and Inkatha, South Africa’s interference in all the nations bordering it and so on – on a human level I learned that a) Mandela and the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk, really didn’t get on, and that b) when his marriage to wife Winnie Mandela ended, she very publicly took a much younger lover and embarrassed him in public (‘Mandela’s late years of freedom were constantly blighted by her wayward example’), leaving him an often lonely figure (p.438).

Part 4

25. In The Name of the Prophet (Egypt, Algeria, Sudan)

Sayyid Qutb

The imperialists had oppressed them. Secular nationalism was a failure. The first generation of post-independence rulers turned out to be corrupt tyrants. Socialism and Marxism turned out to be dead ends. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 there began a revival of political Islam which seemed to many ordinary people a last resort, given that all western political systems and theories had failed. Political Islam encouraged the idea that western concepts like democracy or capitalism were infidel and inappropriate to Muslim lands, and that only return to the purity of the Prophet’s laws and rules would restore society.

The principal architect of jihad ideology [was] Sayyid Qutb…whose writings influenced generations of radical Islamists. (p.444)

Qutb, an Egyptian who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, was imprisoned by Colonel Nasser, then executed in 1965 – but not before he’d developed, written and distributed a starkly simplistic view of Islam. According to Qutb the entire Muslim world can be divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan with no middle ground. Repressive regimes cannot be changed from within and so must be overthrown by jihad i.e. armed struggle.

Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar el-Harb – the Abode of War. ‘It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there.’ (p.444)

This is really, really important. Qutb’s writings are crucial to understanding the modern age. His simplistic binary worldview, and his insistence that democracy, nationalism, human rights and all those other ideas, are infidel western abominations – all this explains the wars which have steadily engulfed the Arab/Muslim world in the last 30 years.

Qutb’s writings explain why generations of jihadis have been convinced that the only honourable and devout course of action is to fight your enemies to extermination. His writings have hugely contributed to instability right across the Arab world and are the ideological background to jihadis fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Meredith mentions a couple of other Muslim thinkers:

  • cleric Omar Abdel Rahman who taught that jihad was the only way to vanquish the enemies of Islam (p.445)
  • Muhammed al-Farag, who taught that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and that armed struggle is imperative for all true Muslims in order to cure a decadent society: ‘the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them with a complete Islamic Order’ (p.446)

Only jihad can bring about the perfect Islamic society. Jihad must be waged until the perfect Islamic society is achieved. But there are many forces resisting this, the obvious outside forces of America and the West, but also the populations of many of these countries. So the kind of perfect Islamic state the jihadis dream of will probably never be achieved. Therefore the Muslim world, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, is condemned to permanent war or insurgency for the foreseeable future.

Algeria

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) had been the main force behind the long bloody war for the independence of Algeria from France. After independence was finally granted in 1962, the FLN became the party of government, instituting socialist policies and a one-party regime. Meredith lists the reasons why the FLN slowly became unpopular. Two stick out. One was that they downplayed agriculture in a bid to industrialise, keeping food prices artificially low in order to placate their constituencies in the towns and cities. The result was that life as a farmer got harder and harder, with many rural youths deciding to quit the poverty of the countryside and try their luck in the city. This is interesting because it’s an abiding theme of so many of these countries. If I could travel back in time to the early 60s and was an adviser to newly independent African nations, I’d say: ‘Cherish your farmers’. In Algeria, as everywhere else, neglecting and even undermining agriculture led to the country becoming ever more reliant on food imports.

The second is the explosion in population. I am a Darwinian materialist, a believer in the blunt facts of the environment and biology a long way before culture and politics. Thus the simple relevant fact is that the population of Algeria exploded from 10 million in 1962 to 26 million in 1992. No rate of economic growth, anywhere, could keep up with this explosion in mouths to feed and, more to the point, young men to employ.

Groups of young men hanging round on street corners become a prey to warlords and the siren call of violent revolution. This is true all round the developing world. The West supplied the medicines to developing countries which hugely improved infant mortality and recovery from illness, but without doing anything to transform a) cultural attitudes to women and childbirth or b) expand the economies. Result: lots of aimless young men looking for a cause.

Enter radical Islam which promises a better world, which gives young men a purpose, a goal, a sense of identity, and money and respect. What’s not to like, what’s not to sign up and commit your life to?

As radical Islamic parties began to appear in Algeria the military command which called the shots in the FLN tried to cancel them. After complicated manoeuvres the FLN agreed to hold free elections and Islamic parties stood in them. But when the Islamists looked like winning, the FLN abruptly cancelled the results and took back military control. The rest of the story could have been written by an AI bot. The Islamists hit back with a terror campaign, the army cracked down, arbitrarily arresting thousands, imprisonment without trial, torture etc, the Islamists ramped up their campaign, and so on.

Again, with utter inevitability, the insurgency spawned an extremist wing, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). With utter predictability they started off saying they’d stick to military targets but soon found these too well protected and their attacks having less and less affect so they widened their targets. Journalists were singled out, but more and more members of the general public were also murdered. Abdelkader Hattab wrote a pamphlet titled: ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’ (p.457).

As in Iraq, in order to build the perfect Islamic state, it turned out to be necessary to kill lots of Muslims, first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands.

What became known as the Algerian Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002 and led to around 150,000 deaths. Of course the economy was wrecked. Of course a lot of the best and brightest middle classes simply fled abroad.

Egypt

I visited Egypt in 1981 and then in 1995, just before Islamist terror groups began attacking tourists. Groups like Jamaat al-Jihad and Gamma Islamiyya increasingly targeted government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians, burned Christian shops and churches, and bookshops and theatres and video stores. Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best known writers, was shot dead. The Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was knifed. ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’, in practice.

Then they started attacking tourists: in 1996 17 Greek pilgrims were murdered outside their hotel. In 1997 58 foreign tourists were murdered in the Valley of the Kings. Meredith tells us that a Japanese man was eviscerated and inside his stomach cavity was stuffed a note reading: ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ (p.461). Fine by me. I’m never going back to a Muslim country.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat by army Islamists in 1981. Now Mubarak set about crushing the Islamic groups ruthlessly, telling his own people and the international community that he wouldn’t let Egypt become the next Algeria. This chapter takes the story up to 2000, when Mubarak was arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organisations to prevent them standing in that year’s elections.

26. Black Hawk Down (Somalia)

The first fact about Somalia is that, at independence, about 40% of the people who thought of themselves as Somalis lived outside the borders of the country, in Ethiopia or Kenya. So from the day of independence the government neglected agriculture and the economy and focused on military action to try and extend its borders to include the full population.

Second fact is the Somalis have a strong and complex clan system, clans within clans, which extends in a hierarchy from the five main super-clans down through ever-diminishing sub-clans. So:

  1. Never-ending warfare helped impoverish the country, especially after the Soviet Union dropped its support for Somalia in favour of Mengistu’s Marxist revolution in neighbouring Ethiopia.
  2. As central government collapsed under the pressure of military defeats, poverty, famine and so on, the country disintegrated into a warzone of permanently fighting, feuding clans, at multiple levels, with warlords ruling their territories through terror.

27. The Graves Are Not Yet Full (Rwanda)

The Rwandan genocide. I’ve summarised the dreadful events elsewhere. I’ll just pick up on two related themes, mentioned re. Algeria. 1) the population of Rwanda ballooned from 2 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1990, which led to 2) lots of unemployed youths hanging around, waiting for a cause and meaning (and cash):

Youths with no prospect of work were easily recruited [into the interahamwe) with promises of land, jobs and other rewards… (p.496)

The French government of François Mitterrand comes over as the genocide-supporting scumbags indicated by all the other accounts. For example, it was the French government which refused the Belgian request to increase the number of the latter’s peacekeepers, so that Belgians ended up being forced to watch Tutsis being hacked to death in front of them but were unable to intervene. Because of France (p.510).

Mitterrand was determined to prevent a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in Rwanda even if it meant continuing to collaborate with genocidal killers. (p.519)

France made five arms shipments to the Hutu government while it was carrying out the genocide. Bastard Mitterrand sent a French force into Rwanda to protect the Hutu Power génocidaires (the equivalent of protecting the SS). Meredith tells of French soldiers slowly realising that the Hutus they had been sent to protect were in fact genocidal killers and realising that their government (Mitterrand) had lied to them. The piles and piles of Tutsi corpses were a clue. But the French government refused to allow their troops on the ground to track down and bring to justice the génocidaires hiding among the mass Hutu refugees who fled into Congo, once the Tutsi-led RPF reactivated the civil war and invaded in order to end the killing.

To the end, the French protected the organisers of the genocide. (p.522)

We’re never meant to forget the Holocaust. Well, in the same spirit, surely we should never forgive the arms and aid and support and protection the French government extended to the perpetrators of the second most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

Mind you, Meredith goes on to paint the UN as far worse, biased towards Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, ignoring reports from the Canadian commander of the UN force on the ground, UNAMIR, General Roméo Dallaire. And then the Belgian government, which withdrew their contingent altogether, abandoning thousands of Tutsis who had taken shelter in their compounds and who were hacked to pieces within hours of their abandonment (p.512). And the Americans behaved disgracefully, Bill Clinton doing everything he could to avoid using the G word (genocide) and refusing to commit troops. Everyone in a position of power in the West let the genocide happen.

More Tutsis were killed in churches than any other type of building, although a lot were killed in maternity wards where a lot had their bellies ripped open and their babies hacked to pieces before they themselves were hacked to death.

Some people still believe in the essential goodness of the human race. Such innocence is touching, charming, but dangerous.

28. Where Vultures Fly (the two Congo wars)

Who supported Mobutu after he had reduced Zaire to starving ruins? France. Why? Because he spoke French. Because he represented la francophonie. Because he represented a bulwark against the rise of the beastly English-speaking leaders such as Museveni of Uganda. France supported mass murderers and world-beating kleptocrats because their crimes were less important than the preservation of ‘French culture’ (p.525). Look at their wise and good achievements in the realm of international affairs: Vietnam. Algeria. Models of wisdom and statecraft. And Vichy, when millions of French people wholeheartedly co-operated with German Nazis whose values they enthusiastically endorsed.

This is not an exaggeration. When considering international affairs, it’s important to bear in mind what despicable depths the French establishment’s paranoid fear of the English-speaking world drives them. James Barr describes the despicable behaviour of the French in Lebanon and Syria during the Second World War:

This chapter describes how the million and a half Hutu refugees from Rwanda were crammed into refugee camps, mostly in Congo, where the Hutu Power génocidaires rebuilt their power, controlled the distribution of aid, murdered dissenting voices, kept the refugees in line with terror, while they sold some of the aid the West gave them in order to buy arms to re-invade Rwanda and resume attacking Tutsi communities.

Meredith explains how the leader of the RPF, Paul Kagame, conspired with President of Uganda Mouseveni to invade eastern Zaire, to crush the Hutu Power leaders, to force the Hutu refugees to return to their country. How they found a useful idiot from within Zaire to front the army they were creating, namely fat, stupid guerrilla turned nightclub-owner Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

The combined RPF and Ugandan army force which Kabila fronted not only liberated the Hutu refugee camps, but marched on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, triggering the panic-stricken flight of the sick old dictator, Mobutu in 1997. In short order and to his own surprise, Kabila found himself in power and set about surrounding himself with cronies in the traditional style. Unwisely, he tried to bolster his support among the Congolese by turning on his Ugandan and Rwandan-Tutsi backers, whose forces were much resented in Kinshasa and beyond.

This policy badly backfired because when Kagame and Museveni found their puppet acting up against them, in 1998 they instituted a second invasion from the east, this time not marching but flying their forces direct to Kinshasa to overthrow Kabile. At this point, however, various outside countries began to get involved, several big ones supporting Kabile who had signed lucrative deals with them allowing them to plunder Congo’s natural resources.

This was the complex situation which led to what became known as the Great War of Africa. Slowly the country splintered into regions held by rival warlords or outside armies. A peace treaty was signed in 2002 which required armies from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. In four years of chaotic conflict (1998 to 2002) some 3 million Africans had died, mostly unarmed Congolese civilians. But even after the peace treaty, fighting continued in east Congo, and continues at a low level to this day.

29. Blood Diamonds (Liberia, Sierra Leone)

Liberia

Meredith recaps the extraordinary early history of Liberia, a colony on the west coast of Africa funded in 1822 by guilt-stricken liberal Americans who wanted to return some of their slaves to the motherland. Instead, the few thousand returned Blacks ended up creating their own version of slavery, subjugating the poor locals, exploiting their labour, building homes and dressing in the elaborate nineteenth century style of their former American oppressors. Now the immigrant Blacks oppressed the locals. The Americo-Liberians amounted to no more than 1% of the population but lorded it over the indigenes.

In a neat historical irony, in 1931 an international commission found members of the entirely Black Liberian government guilty of involvement in organised slavery (p.546).

But it the story stops being in any way funny when in April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a coup which overturned a century of Americo-Liberian rule. Semi-literate, Doe came from a minority tribe, the Krahn, from the deep jungle. He and colleagues broke into the mansion of President William Tolbert to complain about unpaid wages. Finding him asleep in bed they shot him multiple times before disembowelling him and dumping his body in the garden. This was the coup where Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were taken down to the beach, tied to posts and shot by a squad of drunken soldiers. I remember seeing the video on the news. This set the tone of ten years of savage, primitive, ignorant, incompetent rule.

Like all stupid people, Doe thought the world revolved around him and thus saw conspiracies everywhere. His comms people publicised the idea that he had survived 38 or more assassination attempts because of his magical powers, because bullets stopped in mid-air, knives refused to cut him, and so on – fairy tales designed to appeal to the largely illiterate population.

In August 1984 Doe arrested a popular university lecturer and 15 colleagues claiming they were planning a coup. When students protested, Doe sent a troop of soldiers who opened fire indiscriminately, stripped students naked, demanded money and/or raped them (p.551). This all made me think of all Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches from the 1950s and 60s about ‘Africa for Africans’, ‘African values’, how a liberated Africa would become a beacon of progress and civilisation…

Throughout all the mayhem the US government stood by Doe, declaring his obviously rigged elections valid, overlooking his brutal massacres, upping annual aid to $80 million, and inviting him to the White House for red carpet treatment. Why? Because he was staunchly anti-Soviet. That’s all that mattered (p.555).

In November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa, who had led the 1980 coup along with Doe, tried to seize power and there was premature rejoicing – until Doe managed to regain control, hunt down Quiwonkpa and have him kicked and hacked to death, followed by even harsher crackdowns on the population, which including victimisation of the entire Gio tribe which Quiwonkpa came from.

In 1989 another former colleague, Charles Taylor, led a militia into Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast, thus commencing a guerrilla war against Doe. Doe sent out death squads to devastate villages in the regions Taylor had seized. Taylor armed children (‘Small Boy Units’) and told them to kill everyone. The country descended into barbarity.

Bolstered by cane spirit, marijuana and cheap amphetamines, youths and boy soldiers evolved into psychopathic killers, adorning themselves with women’s wigs, dresses, fright masks and enemy bones and smearing their faces with white clay and make-up in the belief that this gave them supernatural perception…’It’s a children’s war,’ said a senior United Nations observer. ‘Kids get promoted in rank for committing an atrocity. They can cut off someone’s head without thinking. The troops move into a village. They take everything and kill and rape. They stay a couple of weeks and then move on.’ (p.558)

It’s interesting to read that many of the stoned fighters thought that wearing wigs or dresses i.e. adopting two identities, would confuse enemy bullets. Traditional African values. Reminds me of the website I found last time I was reading about this subject, a collection of photos of the surreal garb of drug-addled psychopathic militia men.

In 1989 a colleague of Taylor’s named Prince Johnson split off from Taylor’s army to set up the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, with the result that Liberia became caught in a three-way civil war. Or just – war. Marauding soldiers from each side burned, looted, raped and massacred at will. Half the population fled the country. Nigeria sent a peacekeeping force which didn’t establish any kind of peace but secured a few buildings in the capital Monrovia. When Doe drove down to the port to greet them, he was captured by Prince Johnson’s men.

Johnson ordered a video to be made of his men torturing a badly battered Doe, including the moments when they sliced his ears off. The video became a bestseller across West Africa. You can watch it on YouTube and reflect on the speeches of Kwame Nkrumah explaining how African values would civilise the world.

Inevitably, the African peacekeeping force turned out to be every bit as corrupt and lawless as the militias they were sent to police, giving warlords weapons in exchange for looted goods, leading to the joke that ECOMOG stood for ‘Every Car Or Moving Object Gone’.

Taylor established control everywhere outside the capital, and came to commercial arrangements with western companies to allow trade to continue. In two years he’s estimated to have raked off £200 million from these gangster deals.

Sierra Leone

The chaos from Liberia then spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone. This country was already a basket case due to the 17-year, one-party rule of President Siaka Steven whose regime made a fortune trading diamonds via Lebanese dealers, while the economy languished, government employees went unpaid, and gangs of youths filled the streets looking for a cause. The usual.

The force Taylor sent into Sierra Leone in March 1991 called itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was led by the psychopath, Foday Sankoh. This was the group Anthony Loyd writes about terrifyingly in Another Bloody Love Letter. Child soldiers became a key feature of Sierra Leone’s civil war. They were given drugs, indoctrinated and taught to kill. Some had to kill their own parents as an initiation test. Some hated it, wanted to leave but were afraid of themselves being killed. But others loved it. As researchers Krijn Peters and Paul Richards concluded:

‘The pay may be derisory but weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did; soon the AK47 brings food, money, a warm bath and instant adult respect. The combat groups substitutes for lost family and friends.’ (quoted page 563)

Like the white overseers in King Leopold’s Congo, the RUF took to hacking off the hands and limbs of civilians, at random, purely for the terror it created. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes. A coup in the capital brought Valentine Strasser to power. He paid a firm of mercenaries, Executive Outcomes, to clear the capital Freetown in exchange for rights to the country’s diamond mines. Executive Outcomes fighters cleared Freetown in one week, testament to the shoddy, amateurish character of the African fighters on all sides.

More splinter groups, more coups, more fighting, 14 attempts at a ceasefire, tens of thousands more hand choppings and mutilations. A final ceasefire brought UN intervention. But when the UN went to seize the diamond mines, in 2000, the RUF captured 500 of its peacekeepers. It was now that Britain sent in a full battle force to release the UN troops, seize government buildings and train the SL army. Sankoh was arrested and the RUF splintered into ineffectual groups. In the wake of the British intervention, the UN deployed 18,000 troops to bring about a comprehensive peace.

Eleven years of war had left 50,000 dead, 20,000 mutilated, three quarters of the population displaced, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the league of human development. Back in Liberia, Charles Taylor amassed a huge fortune from illegal diamond trading. His overthrow in 2003 was as violent and brutal as his coming to power, with two more factions, groups or militias murdering and raping their way to the capital. Eventually Taylor was forced out but flew peacefully to Nigeria to take up life in a comfortable retirement villa. There is no justice on earth, nothing like justice.

30. No Condition Is Permanent (Nigeria)

Meredith describes the brutal rule of General Sani Abacha, military ruler from 1993 to 1998. His crackdown on all opposition. The rise of organisations representing the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta who had seen none of the tens of billions of oil money generated around them, only the pollution and destruction of their environment. The work of the popular writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was eventually arrested, accused of organising an anti-government conspiracy etc and, despite international protests, executed in November 1995.

Abachi’s death in 1998 is the opportunity for a review of how far the country had fallen. Despite annual oil revenue of $280 billion, income per head was less than a third of what it had been in 1980, at $310; half the population lived on less than 30 cents a day and had no access to clean drinking water. Half of under fives were stunted due to malnutrition. Nigeria was regularly judged to be the most corrupt country in the world.

What this litany of disasters begins to impress on even the most sympathetic reader is that Africans do not seem able of running their own countries. Catastrophic wars, epic corruption, barbaric violence resulting in crushing poverty, if the generation of independence campaigners had seen the future would they have been in such a tearing hurry to gain independence from their colonial masters?

Abachi’s death didn’t bring peace and light: the end of the military regime led to an explosion of political parties across the country, which themselves exacerbated ethnic rivalries, and also the rise of Islamic militancy, which led to clashes between Muslims and Christians. Despite free elections in 1999 and again in 2003, observers wondered whether Nigeria, a country of 120 million made up of 250 ethnic groups, was ungovernable. [That was in 2000. Nigeria’s population in 2023 has almost doubled, to 215 million.]

31. The Honour of Living (Sudan)

General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and declared his commitment to creating an Islamic state. This was followed by the arrest of all opposition figures, torture including burning, beating and rape, the usual behaviour of leaders promising to build a better society – first you have to lock up a lot of people. 1991 saw the introduction of a new Islamic penal code: women were hounded out of public life, segregation of men and women was enforced in all public places, there was a ban on music, cinema and the compulsory Arabisation of all culture.

The ideologue of all this was Hassan al-Turabi, founder of the National Islamic Front and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the first Gulf War, in 1991. Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference to bring together thinkers and leaders to fight back against America’s ‘colonisation’ of the Arab World. Sudan became a refuge for anti-western terrorist groups. This is very important. It marks the start of a new type of aggressive new anti-western ideology, of the war on America.

Meredith gives a good short description of the career of Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the blind cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman organised the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Extremists trained in Sudan undertook assassinations and attacks across the Arab world. In 1998 activists trained by al Qaeda attacked hotels in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people. Now we enter ‘the modern world’, the era we still live in in 2023, the era of unceasing conflict and Islamic insurgency across the entire Arab world.

Their Islamic ideology justified the Bashir regime in intensifying the war against southern, Black, Christian rebels. Villages were bombed, populations massacred and sold into slavery, with the blessing of Islamic scholars. The southern forces split into two parties who had a civil war between themselves in which tens of thousands of civilians died, which triggered a famine in which hundreds of thousands perished (p.594). Humans, eh? Impressive species.

Alongside massacres in the south went the discovery and exploitation of oil. The Khartoum government reaped a huge bonanza and spent it on…arms. By 2002 the civil war had left an estimated 2 million dead. But after 9/11 the Americans became active. Sudan was identified as a training base for Islamic terrorists and Bashir had to back down and promise to comply.

32. Black Gold (Angola)

The crushingly depressing history of Angola in the 1980s and 1980s, a country destroyed by an endless civil war between the supposedly ‘Marxist’ MPLA government based in Luanda, and the madly self-centred, narcissistic, overweening arrogance of Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

Land mines, aerial bombing, indiscriminate massacre, burning, looting, rape of women and children. Maybe 5 million died, many more had legs blown off by the millions of landmines, the country was laid waste – all while Eduardo dos Santos and the elite of the MPLA lived like kings by salting away the revenue derived from the huge oil deposits found just offshore. Getting on for half the annual oil revenue, billions of dollars, was stolen by dos Santos and his clique, while the children starved to death in the streets. As with Congo, or Nigeria, why give aid to oil- and resource-rich countries which have enough natural income to invest in infrastructure, roads, markets, clean water, schools, but which they either steal or spend on arms and weapons?

33. A Degree In Violence (Zimbabwe)

The slow descent into paranoid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. I hadn’t realised that he was initially conciliatory towards the white minority, and even his arch enemy Ian Smith, for the first two or three years of his rule because his first priority was eliminating all his black rivals, starting with Joshua Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). It was called the Gukurahundi campaign (Shona for ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’). During this campaign Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans, rampaged through ZAPU’s heartland, Matabeleland, and massacred thousands of civilians accused of being ‘dissidents’. Some estimates say as many as 80,000 were killed during the 5-year campaign.

Slowly Zimbabwe became like all the other African one-party states, a machine for redirecting wealth into the pockets of a small elite around the figurehead leader. As the economy collapsed and inflation and unemployment rose, so did Mugabe’s deployment of racist, anti-white rhetoric, focused on the policy of farm reclamation, seizing back land from the white farmers who owned a disproportionate amount of it. As Meredith explains, it’s all Mugabe had left, rabble-rousing racism to distract attention from the complete failure of his leadership.

Mugabe’s successive rounds of farm seizures spelled the end of commercial farming as a major industry in Zimbabwe. Many of the confiscated farms didn’t go to the deserving poor but to friends and family and tribal supporters of Mugabe, who then stripped and sold off their assets or left them to rot. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks who worked on the confiscated farms were thrown out of work. Land lay fallow. Food production collapsed. Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, became dependent on food aid.

By 2003 the economy had collapsed and an estimated quarter of the population had fled the country. Three-quarters of the remainder lived on less than a dollar a day. Meredith covers the coming together of opposition movements in the Movement for Democratic Change and the rise of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the elections he contested in 2002 and 2008, elections Mugabe comprehensively managed with intimidation, violence and hectoring messages through state media.

Opposition activists were hunted down, beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. (p.646)

Meredith’s narrative takes the reader up to 2008 when Mugabe, despite spending 28 years utterly devastating his country, was still in power. It was very depressing to switch to Wikipedia and see that Mugabe continued to rule the country he had ruined for another nine years, till he was overthrown in 2017.

34. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (South Africa)

The books and movies all focus on Nelson Mandela‘s long march to freedom. Not so many examine the calamitous challenges he faced on taking power in 1994: trying to reverse the best part of a century of totalitarian racism which had entrenched grotesque inequality between the affluent whites and the crushingly poor Black population; trying to integrate millions of badly educated young Africans into the economy, trying to introduce Blacks into every level of a 100% white political and civil administration and into SA’s commercial life. The army, the police, the education system, everything needed reforming.

Plus the expectations of activists at all levels who had spent a lifetime working for the ‘revolution’ which would create a land of plenty. There was an epidemic of strikes and protests or just straightforward crime. To all this Mandela had to react much like Mrs Thatcher, explaining that the state just didn’t have the resources to make everyone rich. There would have to be belt-tightening. It would take time.

Meredith has an extended passage describing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it struggled to find its way, was a compromise in nature and intent, but ended up unearthing far more than anyone expected. Its impartiality was emphasised by the way it was reviled by both sides, both stalwarts of the apartheid regime and the ANC itself, found guilty of murdering white civilians, Black opponents, of prosecuting a civil war with Inkatha, and the 400-plus victims of ‘necklacing’.

Meredith’s account of Mandela’s sustained efforts to achieve reconciliation between the races at every level bring a tear to the eye. What a hero.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, elected unopposed to lead the ANC in 1997, was not a hero. Despite having been raised a communist, Mbeki promptly announced a set of neoliberal capitalist policies designed to boost the economy, namely strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation and liberalisation of state industries.

But Mbeki will go down in history as the man who adopted a minority view that HIV did not cause AIDS, promoted this view at every opportunity, refused to support AIDS awareness campaigns, refused to license anti-HIV drugs, for year after year, in the face of mounting criticism both within SA and internationally.

Mbeki insisted on playing the race card i.e. insisting that the global scientific consensus about HIV/AIDS was a racist attack on Black Africans on a par with apartheid. His obstinate refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients and pregnant women was calculated, by 2008, to have led to the premature deaths of 365,000 South Africans.

The greatest political challenge facing every nation is not to end up being led by idiots.

Mbeki undertook a more aggressive strategy of getting white businesses to include Black partners but, far from lifting the entire Black population out of poverty, this tended to enrich just the small number of educated, well-connected Blacks. The strategy developed into crony capitalism. Perceiving that they were being discriminated against, some 750,000 skilled whites just left the country, replaced by less qualified or experienced Blacks (p.679). Services decayed. Poverty grew alongside rising violent crime.

South Africa now has exceptionally high rates of murder, gender-based violence, robbery and violent conflict. It has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mbeki turned into a typical African leader. He created a climate of fear in the ANC. He emasculated parliament. He appointed officials for their loyalty to him, not their abilities. He shamefully supported Robert Mugabe even as Mugabe turned into a dictator and reduced his country to beggary.

And, falling into line with traditional African leaders, Mbeki and his cronies became involved in corruption, in particular creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars from state defence procurements. The ANC became split between the Mbeki faction and one led by Jacob Zuma, who himself was charged with money laundering, fraud and rape.

In 2007 Zuma stood against Mbeki and won the post of ANC leader, then stood for the presidency in 2009. The party split, but corruption became more embedded. The gap between rich and poor grew. Crime became the only way to survive for millions. After this book was completed Jacob Zuma went on to be elected president and serve from 2009 to 2018.

Incidentally, Meredith has written a series of books about South Africa, including a biography of Mandela, which explains the authoritativeness of his SA chapters:

  • In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa In The Post War Period (1988)
  • South Africa’s New Era: The 1994 Election (1994)
  • Nelson Mandela: A Biography (1999)
  • Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth (2001)

35. Out of Africa

Decline

In 2001 the Organisation of African Unity was replaced by a new African Union. Same old dictators, though. Same corruption, same tribalism, same civil wars. Same population explosion which means half the population live below the poverty line, same huge unemployment, with millions permanently on the brink of starvation. 250 million Africans are undernourished; school enrolment is falling; life expectancy is falling. [This appears to be wrong, now; life expectancy in Africa is, apparently, 63.]

MDGs

By some estimates the West has spend £1.2 trillion in aid to Africa. There has often been little to show. In the 2000s there was a flurry of activity with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005 Bob Geldof created a huge media event around the Live 8 campaign and gigs. But the West has donor fatigue. Pledges made under MDGs and Live 8 weren’t carried through. African countries have promised to reform and then utterly failed to do so too many times.

China

Into the breach has stepped China, which has been signing trade deals across Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). By 2010 China-Africa trade had leapt to $115 billion. A million Chinese had moved to Africa.

The Arab Spring

And then, just as Meredith was completing this book, along came the Arab Spring leading to the overthrow of ageing dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on into the Middle East i.e. Yemen, Bahrein, Syria. And yet within a few years, Egypt was back in the hands of the military, Libya had collapsed as a state, Syria fell into a ruinous civil war; only Tunisia survived and flourished as a democracy.

Kenya

Meredith ends with the calamitous recent history of Kenya, which threw out Daniel arap Moi and his cronies (known as the Karbanet syndicate) after 23 years of looting the country. However, his successor, Mwai Kibaki, merely instituted a new kleptocracy for his tribe and supporters (who came to be known as the Mount Kenya mafia). Corruption reached scandalous new heights with some $4 billion a year, or one third of the national budget, being raked off by the corrupt elite.

When Kibaki refused to accept the results of the 2007 election i.e that he had lost to opposition leader Raila Odinga, he plunged Kenya into tribal bloodshed which left thousands dead, the economy damaged and Kenya’s reputation for stability in tatters. It had become just one more African country, ruined by its corrupt rulers’ inability to cede power.

Africa’s wounds are self-inflicted. Africans have proved ruinously incapable of running their own countries. Meredith ends his book by describing the majority of Africa’s rulers as ‘vampires’ who have converted all the instruments of the state into money-making scams, who use rabble-rousing ethnic rhetoric or state terror to remain in power, while their populations slip ever backwards into poverty, sickness and starvation.

Thoughts

Some pretty obvious themes emerge from this 700-page odyssey but in the last 5 or 6 chapters something bigger than the themes struck me, which is that this is a very negative view of Africa. Often it is very harrowing and dark indeed, as when the subject matter is bleak, as in Algeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola.

But it took me a while to grasp how much this is a journalist’s not a historian’s or academic’s point of view of the subject. And, like all journalists, Meredith accentuates the negative. Man buys a puppy for his kids, who love it, is not news. New puppy attacks children, that is news.

I know it’s an obvious and well-known journalistic principle, but in the last 100 pages it really struck home that Meredith focuses relentlessly on the bad news, on countries with long-running wars and political crises, the ones we read about in the newspapers: Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, settings for horrible wars, massacres, genocides even. On the basis of this book it would be tempting to write all of Africa off as an irredeemable disaster zone. But there are 50 or so countries in Africa, and not all of them are having civil wars all the time. Some of them might even be doing rather well. Many people might be living ordinary lives, doing jobs, getting married, having parties. Despite the impression Meredith gives, life expectancy across Africa is actually rising.

Anyway, that was my one Big Thought: that if you only read this book you would be left with the impression that Africa is a vast abattoir of eternal massacre and mutilation, vampire leaders and epic corruption. I don’t think Meredith intends to be biased and I’m sure everything he writes is absolutely true. But by the end of his book I began to think that it’s not necessarily the complete truth, about the entire continent, and all its countries, and all the people who live in them.

Credit

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith was published in England by the Free Press in 2005. A revised edition was published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.

Related links

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 10, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/the-state-of-africa-martin-meredith-2/