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Freight Dogs by Giles Foden (2021)

It takes much mental energy just to shackle himself to the present moment.
(Manu, central protagonist of Freight Dogs, page 322)

This is Giles Foden’s sixth and most recent novel. It’s a substantial work, weighing in at 400 pages. Like his first four novels it’s set in Africa and is based around fraught, politically and historically significant events. The first four were set during, respectively:

  • the evil rule of Idi Amin (The Last King of Scotland)
  • one of the main sieges of the Boer War (Ladysmith)
  • the 1998 embassy bombing in Dar es Salaam (Zanzibar)
  • the Anglo-German naval conflict on Lake Tanganyika during World War One (Mimi and Toutou Go Forth)

This one is set in Rwanda in 1996 i.e. two years after the Rwandan genocide (April 1994 to July 1994), just as the invasion of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda, the so-called First Congo War, is about to take place, and then follows the protagonist over the following six fraught, violent years in Congo’s history.

The plot centres on Manu (diminutive of Immanuel) Kwizera, son of a peasant family living on the Zaire side of the border with Rwanda (near the village of Pendele in North Kivu). Manu is a Munyamulenge i.e. a member with his family of the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis who came into the South Kivu province of Congo from Rwanda between one and two centuries ago and considered themselves settled Congolese until North and South Kivu became ethnically polarised as a result of the genocide and also of Congo’s president, Mobutu, stirring up trouble, portraying them as alien immigrants and a threat to the majority Hutu population.

Manu has been lucky enough to be sent to a Catholic boarding school in the provincial capital Bukavu, which is where the story opens. The story follows him as he is caught up in the snowballing violence in the aftermath of the genocide then invasion.

‘Freight dogs’ is the rather flattering slang phrase which freelance pilots of freight planes jokily apply to themselves (p.59):

‘That’s the kind of risk-taking people we crazy freight dogs are!’ (p.75).

The bulk of the story describes how Manu wangles his way from endangered peasant into the world of these cargo pilots, running guns and whatever else is required between militias, armies and guerrillas, for the fee of gold or diamonds or whatever other loot they can bargain for.

The book is divided into six parts. [I’ve added the text in square brackets.]

  1. The Aftermath: June to November 1996 [of the Rwanda genocide]
  2. Seven to Heaven: November 1996 to May 1997 [the First Congo War]
  3. The Interbellum: June 1997 to August 1998 [between the two Congo wars]
  4. Fighting Fire, Treading Water: August 1998 to February 2002 [the Second Congo War]
  5. The Lights of Europe: March 2004 to December 2006 [Amsterdam and Belgium]
  6. The Deconfliction Zone: January 2007 [back in Uganda]

I didn’t like this book, for the following reasons:

1. History and footnotes

The novel is hag-ridden by the history. I’ve just read two very detailed histories of Rwanda (by Gerard Prunier and Michela Wrong) and Foden’s novel, at least to begin with, feels like a clumsy rehash of all the key facts, it feels like a Wikipedia article listing all the events from 1994 to 1996, with a very light skin of fiction laid over it.

Foden has so much factual research to cram into the text, especially at the start as he rushes to give the complicated backdrop to the genocide then to the first Congo War, that I was surprised he didn’t add it as footnotes. In fact very often it feels like footnotes:

This figure looked like a large bag of milk (milk is often served in bags in this part of Africa). (p.41)

The Lendu are the other ethnic group around Bunia, historically in violent conflict with the Hema over land usage. (p.136)

Take the scores of times Foden gives encyclopedia-style backgrounders on the major towns and cities of Congo, on ethnic groups, on colonial history, on the ongoing relations between Uganda, Rwanda and Zaire, on the origin of various guerrilla groups and so on.

Or when Foden just includes newspaper cuttings to convey the world of politics and fast moving events (p.110) or cites an old colonial-era work on Bantu mythology (p.179) or characters overhear radio news bulletins which handily update us on the developing political background.

Or the factual backgrounders on non-war-related subjects, such as the extended passage about East Congo volcanoes, or the migration of crested cranes, national bird of Uganda (p.253).

Or the very staged scene where Manu walks around the Belgian Royal Museum of Africa, staggered by its artificiality and lies, itself a flimsy pretext for shoehorning in some of the facts about the atrocious rule of Leopold II (p.305).

Or the extended sequence describing what it’s like to work in an abattoir. Or the different breeds of African cow. Or how to run a potato farm. Not to mention the technical details about flying a plane which recur throughout the story. The book is just overflowing with often only partially-digested background research.

You know the expression, ‘show don’t tell’. Well, fairly regularly Foden tells, he tells you what’s happening and what to think about it:

As Cogan [the pilot] fiddles with a lever…Manu is already reinventing, becoming someone else, despite constantly thinking back to the someone he was before. (p.58)

At moments it’s like reading the SparkNotes of a novel alongside the novel itself and, after a while, realising you prefer the Notes. They’re better written and get to the point faster.

The narrator or the characters are often fully aware of the exact nature of events and their significance, as they occur, in a way nobody in real life is. The characters anachronistically show the benefits of much later knowledge, but at the time of the original events.

For example, for the last fifteen years or so there’s been a growing awareness among western commentators that the RPF regime of President Paul Kagame is a repressive security state, which carried out atrocities against unarmed Hutu and Congolese civilians right from the start (i.e. 1996). See Michela Wrong’s devastating indictment, Do Not Disturb. But even a liberal sceptic like Wrong admits that for years and years after the genocide she believed the RPF line that they were knights in shining armour who ended the genocide and sought only to kill those responsible for it, during their invasion of Congo. Only slowly did the modern view of events and the very negative view of Kagame’s RPF emerge.

But Foden gives Manu this clear-eyed and authoritative opinion early on in the book. You could argue that that’s because he’s seen RPF troops carrying out terrible massacres but it’s more than that. Manu is a teenage peasant with only a superficial education caught up in terrible and confusing events – but he is given thoughts appropriate to a mature academic commentator, many years his senior, and with the benefit of the subsequent 25 years of history, research and revision.

Manu says nothing, knowing well enough by now about the grinding machine that’s not just Rusyo, but the whole security apparatus of the Rwandan state. (p.93)

How can some peasant brought up on a rural farm possibly know about ‘the whole security apparatus of the Rwandan state’? That’s not the voice of a confused character caught up in bewildering events but of Foden the history buff, benefiting from decades of hindsight and calm detached analysis, projecting  his perspective back onto his character for the benefit of the reader.

It feels like Foden is keen to show the reader that he holds the latest (very negative) opinion of Kagame and the RPF, he is itching to convey this information, and so he has his cipher, Manu, think it – completely inappropriately for someone caught up in the middle of events, with no knowledge of how they’re going to pan out.

This is what I mean by saying that the novel is hag-ridden by the history. The history comes first, drives the events, provides the scaffold of the book – and the characters are made to twist and bend to illustrate the history, to come out, on every page, with dialogue and speeches whose sole purpose is to explain the latest developments, always with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, rather than express their psychologies or opinions.

The characters feel like puppets manipulated to dramatise a series of historical events which are far larger than them. This historical hindsight sometimes comes right out into the open. For example, the occasion when Manu hears a reporter on the radio saying the AFDL has taken Kinshasa and Kabila is now president:

He doesn’t say the First Congo War is over because he doesn’t know it’s the first yet but that’s what it is (p.153)

This is the tone of Foden the intrusive narrator emerging as puppet-master or, more precisely, omniscient knower of the historical record, beneficiary of 20 years of hindsight, ensuring that the historical record comes first, is the pre-eminent aspect of the narrative, and the so-called ‘characters’, with their necessarily limited knowledge, come a poor second,

All these history lessons and the frequent authorial nudges telling you what to think and how to interpret things feel claustrophobic, like being cornered by a drunk at a party who’s going to set you straight about the state of the world.

Examples of raw historical background shoehorned into the text or delivered as dialogue

Factual explanations of the complicated background and course of the two Congo wars are continually described in the narration or, more often, in stagey dialogue where characters talk to each other as if they’re quoting from one of Gérard Pruner’s books on the subject.

‘Mai-Mai,’ Cogan says casually, referring to the guerrilla units that have formed to protect local villages from the RPA and Ugandans and FAZ alike. (p.138)

I started keeping a record of pages which contain this kind of factual or explanatory content around page 135 and quickly realised that there’s some on almost every page:

  • 130: Foden explains how Nelson Mandela tried to broker a deal between Kabila and Mobutu
  • 135: Foden explains the behaviour of the Mai-Mai, for example massacring an entire village on the Massif d’Tombwe
  • 136: Foden explains the conflict between the Hema and the Lendu about land ownership around Bunia
  • 138: Foden explains the Mai-Mai, ultra-patriotic Congolese militias committed to defending local populations against all incomers
  • 139: Foden describes how city after city falls to the AFDL, until Kinshasa is taken and Kabila named president
  • 142: Foden describes Mobutu’s palace at Gbadolite, the Division Spéciale Présidentielle, Mobutu exiting in a Russian plane, the abandoned DSP angrily fire on the plane then loot and trash the palace (16 May 1997)
  • 149: Foden gives a history of Karonga as a slave trading centre, history of British Nyasaland, Cecil Rhodes, African Lakes Company
  • 150: Foden gives anecdotes about Hastings Banda
  • 153: Foden describes the flavour of the new Kabila regime e.g. corrupt mineral deals and banyamulenge horse-whipping the locals
  • 164: Foden describes Kabila’s unreliable performance of his presidential duties
  • 168: Foden explains how diamonds, gold and coltan are becoming the new minerals to smuggle
  • 173 to 176, and 181 to 183: Foden gives extended explanations of East Congo volcanoes, their behaviour, definitions of ‘active’, ‘dormant’ etc
  • 199: Foden describes the proliferation of rebels groups in the east, Kabila’s erratic behaviour, alienation of his Rwandan and Ugandan backers
  • 222 to 226: Foden describes the shooting down of the plane carrying Hutu president of Rwanda Juvénal Habyarimana which triggered the Rwandan genocide, the role of the SAM anti-aircraft missile, the growing rift between the Rwandan and Ugandan armies
  • 229: Foden explains how Kabila called for all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo ( 27 July 1998)
  • 231: Foden explains how the Rwandans and Ugandans reinvaded Congo to overthrow Kabila, thus triggering the Second Congo War
  • 235 to 248: Foden gives an extended description of Manu among the pilots hijacked into flying RPA forces to Kitona airport, west of Kinshasa, then his extended forced service during first part of Second Congo War
  • 255: Foden explains the proliferation of militias in eastern Congo
  • 258: Foden describes the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, 16 January 2001, and summarises the conspiracy theories about who shot him and why
  • 266: Foden explains the failure of various peace treaties to end the second Congo war
  • 280: Foden describes the street battles between Rwandan and Uganda forces in Kisangani

On almost every page the reader is bombarded with undigested chunks of historical background information.

2. Convenient coincidences

Related to this forced feeling, is the Zelig aspect of the narrative whereby the protagonist, Manu, just happens to be present at pretty much all the key events in Congo from the start of the narrative in 1996, onwards. The book shares this quality with The Last King of Scotland whose protagonist kept on being at the right place at the right time, meeting all the key players in a series of lucky coincidences which started off by being exciting, then began to be a bit too convenient, and then toppled over into feeling ludicrous and/or horrifically hallucinatory, according to taste.

Same here. When Manu is saved from murderous FAZ soldiers by a squad of AFDL fighters, it isn’t any old troop but the one led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the man handpicked by Rwanda and Uganda to lead the assault into Congo and who was, eventually, to replace Mobutu as president of Congo (p.29).

Later Manu will witness or hear about all the key turning points in the two Congo wars. In a striking scene he and two fellow fright dogs will be present when President Mobutu takes off from the private runway at his vast jungle palace, heading into exile, and confront his enraged troops as they loot the palace. In this respect – the hero being there at key moments, eye witness to historical turning points – it’s very like Last King but without the slowly mounting horror which makes Last King such an intense and, eventually, hallucinatory read.

The main thing about life in the real world is how random most of it is. Foden’s fictions are contrived so that they introduce us to all the key players in a certain set of historical events and stretch the concept of coincidence to snapping point.

I know that Foden’s novels are intended to be serious thrillers and they are certainly ‘serious’ in two senses, 1) that they lack any humour or warmth, and 2) they deal with horrifyingly violent events. And yet when it is revealed that one of the crates of contraband gold which Cogan and Manu pinched from a consignment and buried in secret contains, in fact, not gold but the rocket launcher which shot down Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane and so triggered the Rwanda genocide I burst out laughing, tickled by Foden’s chutzpah in making his hero or colleagues witnesses to every single one of the key events in the historical period.

The coincidences pile up when Foden has Manu among the commercial pilots whose planes are hijacked to fly RPA forces to Kitona airport in the bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to unseat Kabila, I was beyond laughing and just marvelled at the way the novel is entirely based on the history, a reskinning of the events in a light covering of ‘fiction’, and Manu, the central character, for all the effort Foden puts in to try and make his feelings believable, little more than a cipher.

In the final scenes, where Manu is absolutely down on his luck, impoverished and immiserated in racist Belgium, the sudden appearance of the old freight dog, Papa, to save and rescue him is presumably meant to be a sensible event but, in my mind prompted the image of the Monty Python cartoon of the clouds opening and angels blowing trumpets. Beyond ludicrous. A fairy tale.

3. The central figure is a cipher

The central character, Manu, isn’t very interesting. He doesn’t have interesting thoughts, he doesn’t have much to say for himself, he’s more of a cipher or front man pasted on top of what often feels like a factual summary of Rwanda’s recent history. ‘Sometimes he hates his own passivity’ (p.227). Exactly. A cork bobbing on the ocean has more character. It doesn’t help that he uses white western and old fashioned diction like ‘assuaged’ and ‘deems’ and ‘presages’. I don’t know exactly what a survivor of the Congo wars would sound like but almost certainly not like a middle-aged, English, public school author.

4. Awkward prose style

Foden’s prose style is really weird. It’s always been unstable: in King of Scotland there were some odd passages and chapters; Ladysmith and Mimi and Toutou use old-fashioned mannerisms and word order but I thought maybe these were tailored to the century-old settings, but they recur here, plus new oddities of phraseology, which I found disrupted my reading on every page.

Foden’s accounts and interpretations of post-genocide Rwandan history didn’t interest me very much because I’ve just read two much better, more thorough and professional accounts – and I wasn’t that interested in the main characters as characters – so the thing that ended up interesting me most in the book was Foden’s weird style.

1. The awkward preposition

There’s his dogged insistence on avoiding a ‘dangling preposition’ (ending a sentence with a preposition) which makes him put propositions in the middle of sentences, thus creating all sorts of unnatural contortions – maybe my obsession with this is irrational but it really bugs me:

  • He looks exactly the sort of business-inclined person of whom her evidently prosperous parents would approve. (p.71)
  • The demons which have been flitting in his head since the incident with the archbishop and Don Javier, for which he does not know whether he was to blame or not. (p.50)
  • Manu reads the grease-stained page of newspaper in which his Rolex came. (p.109)

See how the obsession with not ending a sentence with a proposition leads him into all kinds of unnatural contortions. He prefers to use ‘of which’ as a connector:

  • The bigger picture of which their actions that day had played a part… (p.37)
  • Birds flitted between mossy branches as they ascended what seemed like a vast flight of basalt-black stairs, finally reaching the flat top of a mountain range, the expanse of which seemed to fill the cavern of the sky. (p.29)
  • In the back of this first car, the metal of which was punctured with bullet holes…

I don’t know why this bugged me so much, but I’d have thought it would be more natural and fluent to just write ‘whose’ – ‘whose expanse seemed to fill…’, ‘whose bodywork was punctured with bullet holes’ etc.

  • Are they faux amis, like those of which Don Javier used to speak in another context of translation… (p.147)

I looked this whole issue of dangling or hanging prepositions up online and came across the joke sentence allegedly written by Winston Churchill to highlight how stupid this ‘rule’ is and what ridiculous distortions it leads you into once you set off down this road:

“That is the type of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”

The aversion to ending a sentence with a proposition is very old fashioned and formal and so sits oddly with other elements in the text, which are trying to be cool, woke and up to date.

  • They descend through the dense green, amid which the dirt road winds like a slalom course (p.187)
  • The sky is filled with just such a gas-laden plume of which she once warned him. (p.265)
  • With visibility reduced, he has to rely on his instruments, with which electrical discharges in the gas cloud are in any case interfering. (p.265)
  • He gathers up his few clothes and belongings, making a pile on the bed, before going back out to the kitchen and finding a bag in which to put them. (p.208)
  • It’s a different prison from that in which Aisha is being held (p.216)

Why not the simpler easier to read ‘a bag to put them in’ or ‘the one Aisha is being held in’ or ‘which she warned him about’? It sounds trivial, but these sentences, rearranged into unnatural contortions in order to avoid ending with a preposition, occur on every page and help set the tone of Foden’s stilted, awkward prose.

  • What Manu notices are the black plastic parts of the recording device that he stole from the journalist outside the court, about which he’d totally forgotten. (p.375)
  • Afterwards, Manu’s hand is still gripping the banister, static hissing in the ear to which his other hand continues to hold the phone. (p.376)

2. Odd phrasing

Anyway, this specific issue aside, there’s plenty of just plain odd phraseology:

Recognition [the name of a character] turned the radio off at this point, falling into slumbers. (p.38)

Recognition looked on as the second beating Manu then suffered was conducted. (p.42)

Manu got up, supposing to make his way to the docks as instructed. (p.43)

He was at a moment of limits, tripping over kerbs and broken parts of buildings destroyed by munitions (p.43)

All this apparent cogitation was in truth too unwilled to be a called a decision. (p.44)

While he’s enumerating the options, the pilot door of the plane opens. (p.51)

He’s embarrassed, almost ashamed that he’s been making too much of things that some of them, with no better a history than his own…are facing down with equanimity. (p.108)

He drinks so much, in fact, that he loses track of the liquid courage for his future (p.159)

Not long later, reckoning that they are safe now… (p.195)

All that stuff he [Cogan] liked to sing, by turns bright and breezy, mournful and melancholy, whatever the weather outside the cockpit, reports on which the Texan told him not to trust. (p.219)

Seeing even worse atrocities than those committed against the women of Boma, Manu realises that there’s always something worse than what he thought was the worst before. (p.242)

One Monday morning further on in this period of steadfast resolution (p.256)

What I have learned is not to judge so quickly, as the moment oneself is to be judged is always about to arrive. (p.275)

But this animal at the Expo is much older a beast than even Joséphine would be now. (p.353)

‘I’m so sorry,’ says Manu, pulling himself jerkily back into joint and wondering if this bizarre episode is a conclusive rupture with the past that has been plaguing him. (p.355)

Now the breath in the old man’s chest is slowing stint by stint, as his illness comes to a terminus. (p.372)

As for Anke, he has (against his own past conjecture) almost forgotten her… (p.382)

A faint smell of piss wafted over from the latrine and Manu saw the financier’s nostrils mushroom – ever so widely, as if the pleasant occasion of a meal had been robbed away in some still greater larceny than this basic reminder of other facts of the body besides ingestion. (p.395)

The sun was pouring out its almost last tot of light, making the air tremble, like Cogan’s hands sometimes did… (p.397)

The prose consistently feels as if it’s written by someone whose first language is not English, someone who is struggling against mighty odds to express themselves in an unfamiliar language. It’s not the occasional oddity – the contorted sentence structure, the weird phrasing, they’re in every paragraph on every page.

3. Intrusive narrator

Sometimes the narrator intrudes into his own sentences to comment on the action, like an eighteenth century narrator, like Henry Fielding, or a moralising Victorian author:

In this moment, he wonders if he has become abhorrent to her and that this chance of love, perhaps his only chance (as he then presumes; fatal error of all disappointed in love!) has been blown entirely (p.312)

The clash between this very old tactic, the strange Victorian phraseology (‘fatal error of all disappointed in love!’) and then the slangy modern American phrase (‘has been blown’) create a really weird disjunctive effect.

4. The continuous present

Now I’ve started, there’s another aspect of Foden’s prose which is really distinctive and equally unsettling, which is his fondness for sentences with multiple clauses, at least one of which refers to ongoing events by using the present participle. These examples demonstrate what I mean:

  • Manu also supposes, continuing to walk along, that he ought to inform Cogan’s ex-wife and son. (p.220)
  • A black Mercedes pulls up alongside him. For a second, his reflection sliding along its wing, it’s like he’s back in Lubumbashi. (p.220)
  • He decides, it being Christmas Day, that he will go to Mass again (p.253)

This is odd and unnatural word order. It would be more natural to write ‘As he walked, Manu realised that he probably ought to…’ or ‘For a second his reflection slid along the wing of the car, reminding him of…’ But Foden is really addicted to this unnatural, cluttered way of writing; an example occurs in more or less every paragraph, the text is saturated with them.

5. Having

There’s a kind of logical extension of the previous habit, which is to use the present participle ‘having’ to indicate an event which has taken place before the one being described in the sentence. So instead of describing the events in simple chronological order thus: ‘Manu opened the door and walked into the room’, Foden always prefers to complicate things by starting in the present, cutting back to an action which has just been completed in a subordinate clause, before returning to the present action for the second half of the sentence – ‘Manu walked, having opened the door, into the room’.

  • They get out of the vehicle, Faithful having grabbed the drawer from Manu’s lap as they stopped. (p.222)
  • Stinking, having not been able to wash properly for weeks, he just wants to go home. (p.242)
  • Maquela’s over the border in Angola – nominally enemy territory, since the Angolan government, having been on the Rwandan side in the first war, are now aligned with Kabila and Zimbabwe. (p.245)

I suppose some readers might like this embroilment of the prose, this mixing up. But to me it felt like listening to a story told by someone with a stutter. The awkward phrasing, the stilted structuring continually distracted my attention.

It’s not grammatically incorrect, not incomprehensible, just strangely off and, along with the preposition-phobic sentences and the consistently strange phrasing, these oddities all build up into a sustained sense of awkwardness everywhere in Foden’s prose.

I suppose these odd phrases, these unwieldy sentences, could be a conscious effort to convey the difference of Manu’s African culture and the fact that he doesn’t speak or think in English. Maybe. Maybe that’s the aim, but I wasn’t convinced and, whatever the motivation, it’s just not very enjoyable to read this spavined prose. It was so distracting I wanted to stop reading the book after 50 pages but forced myself to go on to the end, less and less interested in the plot, more and more entranced by the strangeness of Foden’s prose.

6. Poor proofreading

It’s not helped by quite a few typos and proofreading mistakes, which made me think the proofreaders were sometimes as puzzled by Foden’s prose peculiarities as I was. Can you spot the mistake in this sentence?

Later he’ll hear how Phiri landed the Boeing, every second expecting it (as now Manu also expects) the Cargomaster to be brought down by a MANPAD. (p.238)

Which I think should be:

Later he’ll hear how Phiri landed the Boeing, every second expecting it (as now Manu also expects the Cargomaster) to be brought down by a MANPAD. (p.238)

The plot

Manu has barely returned from boarding school to the family farm before a squad of Zaire Armed Forces (AZF) soldiers drive up and murder his family, raping his mother and sister first, garrotting his father in an attempt to find out where the family treasure is buried.

Manu has a rope tied round his neck and is being led away when the AZF force is itself ambushed by Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) troops led by none other than Laurent-Désiré Kabila (this is the first of many improbable coincidences for Kabila is to go on to become the newt president of Congo).

Kabila gives Manu a gun and invites him to shoot dead the man who just killed his father but Manu, being the hero of a western fiction instead of a real person, can’t and doesn’t. Kabila is impressed and lets the AZF soldier in question run off into the jungle

Manu is then pressed into the AFDL and taken with other soldiers down to the Hutu refugee camps right on the border with Rwanda. Here Foden follows the modern view that the AFDL and the Rwandan Patriotic Force (RPF) carried out a mini version of the Rwanda genocide only this time it was Tutsis massacring Hutu men, women and children. Manu watches horrible killings.

In the marketplace of the town of Nyamwera he takes part in the torture and shooting of a) archbishop Christophe Munzihirwa, who had occasionally visited his Catholic boarding school, and b) his favourite teacher, Don Javia Mendia. It happens because the sadistic AFDL officer, Major Rusyo, made him shoot at a car approaching their convoy, it was only after they’d done so that the wounded archbishop staggered out and they discovered Don Javia dead inside. The AFDL troops then stabbed the archbishops with bayonets and ordered at gunpoint Manu to join in, which he misinterpreted to mean fire his rifle, which may or may not have actually hit the archbishop, who the other soldiers proceeded to finish off anyway.

Because Manu is such a cipher there’s no sense of how these opening 40 or so pages packed with horrific incidents affects him. You’d have thought he’d be catatonic with shock but there’s no attempt to convey shock, PTSD or psychosis, instead he remains the blank cipher used to shuffle the narrative along.

Supervising his induction into the AFDL is a brutal boy his own age, named Recognition. After receiving a number of brutal beatings from him, Manu manages to slip away from the AFDL camp and embarks on a long trek back to his farm. Here he buries the body of his mother and then sets off stumbling through the jungle in the direction of Uganda, which he hopes will be safe.

After some days in the jungle Manu stumbles across an airfield at Rutshuru on the border between Congo and Uganda, and witnesses black soldiers doing some kind of deal with the fat scruffy white pilot of a small cargo plane.

When the soldiers drive off, Manu stumbles into the light of the arc lamps (it’s night) and, after initially scaring the pilot, they get chatting. The pilot’s name is Norm Cogan and he’s a scruffy, disreputable, jobbing ‘freight dog’. His last assistant did a runner, so he asks Manu if he’d like the job of being his fixer (p.55). Next thing Manu’s washing and scrubbing stuff then getting into the plane and they fly from the edge of Congo to the airport at Entebbe, Uganda.

Norm then drives Manu to the bar he owns, The Passenger, run by his bad-tempered wife, Aisha, where he introduces Manu to his fellow ‘freight dogs’:

  • Aisha, the bad-tempered African owner of the bar
  • Gerry Magero from Kenya
  • Max Chénal from Belgium, former priest, a ‘tight-faced old man in oversized specs’, known as ‘Papa’
  • Evgeny Blok from Russia, muscular, moustachioed (p.81)

These guys are national stereotypes on the same kind of level as the foreign characters in cheesy movie adaptations of ‘Death on the Nile’ or ‘Murder on the Orient Express’. Cogan is the worst. In the same way that the chunks of history are shoehorned into the narrative, Cogan’s America-ness is rammed home every time he opens his mouth.

He says things like: ‘Kabila’s cockamamy outfit’, ‘that went down the swanee’, ‘my momma used to say’, ‘nothing sticks forever kid’, ‘go the whole nine yards’, ‘we done fell in love’, ‘fuckedy freak show, here we go’, ‘hold on to your hat, kid’, ‘we’re all yappedy doo-dah now’, ‘what’s the matter kid?’ ‘hot diggety, she looked good!’, ‘the one’s a biggee’, ‘shit’s about to hit the fan’. He is, in other words, a dictionary of Yankee clichés. He sounds like a character out of Indiana Jones.

For no particular reason these tough old guys decide to adopt Manu and teach him how to fly, start giving him lessons, buy him a flyer’s licence, a pilot’s uniform, training manuals, flight bag etc. He’s still only 19.

So Manu goes on seven or eight trips with Cogan and Evgeny, studies the manuals, and eventually gets his pilot’s licence. On one of these trips we see Cogan landing at a remote base in the middle of carrying a cargo of gold, and getting Manu to help bury one of the crates, allegedly with the help of the trip’s sponsor, Major Faithful.

Part 3. The Interbellum: June 1997 to August 1998

A chapter where Manu does a purely civilian job, unconnected with the war, namely ferrying a Belgian expert in volcanoes, an attractive young blonde (is there any other kind of expert in volcanoes?), Anke Desseaux, around the volcanoes of the Great Lakes.

Until their jeep (driven by a hired driver) is ambushed by a small crew led by none other than Manu’s old comrade, Recognition. Recognition explains he’s gone AWOL from the ADFL and is trying to set up a Tutsi militia to protect their own kind, here in East Congo.

Manu wrestles his machine gun off him, shoots dead the two other guerrillas in the ambush, shoots Recognition in the leg and would have finished him off if only Anke had started to come round from being knocked out.

So Manu knocks Recognition out with the rifle butt, hauls Anke into the jeep, recovers her belongings, and drives down the mountain to a town, sees doctor, checks into hotel, she cleans up, sleeps, next day demands to be taken to the nearest airport to catch the next flight to Europe.

(Given that the last section of the book is titled ‘The lights of Europe’ I’d be surprised if Manu doesn’t end up fleeing to Europe and looking Anke up. She will either be pleased and they resume their affair, or engaged or married to someone else, leaving Manu bereft. Either option will feel equally as clichéd.)

Talking of women, Manu spends time on the beaches of Lake Victoria and several times spies a beautiful woman sashaying across the sand, dipping into the lake etc and eventually plucks up the guts to talk to her. Her name is Edith.

Much later, on one of his trips with Cogan, into the jungle to ferry around crates of gold or ammunition, Manu is astonished to discover, amid the sprawling army base full of drunk or stoned soldiers, this very same Edith! Turns out she is the daughter of the Major Faithful they’re doing this trip for. (Manu may be surprised but any reader of Foden is used to his routine deployment of far-fetched coincidences.)

Even more far-fetched than Manu meeting Edith in the middle of nowhere, is the way she comes on strong to him, takes him to a hut, and makes him have modern sex with her (by modern I mean not just penetration but, after he’s climaxed, insisting on him stroking and masturbating her till she comes, too.)

Next morning he’s woken by Cogan and hustled off to finalise the cargo and fly off, his emotions understandably still reeling from this intense and unexpected rumble in the jungle.

Time marches on. Of the cadre of freight dog pilots, Papa quits and goes back to Belgium (after making a half-hearted attempt to chat up Manu, who only then realises he’s gay); Evgeny moves to Dubai, safer business and good schools for his kids).

And Cogan is shot dead, Manu (in another of those far-fetched coincidences) happening to drive by Cogan’s car crashed in a ditch to find the fat American still alive though bleeding profusely. Manu takes him to the local hospital which is closed and barred to new admissions (because they gunshot wounds generally deriving from gangland shootings which sometimes follow their victims into the hospital). Thus Cogan bleeds to death in his car before a doctor belatedly comes out from the hospital to see him.

A little before this Manu had arrived back at The Passenger (the freight dogs’ bar) where he’s still kipping in the spare room Cogan gave him, finding it locked climbs in through the back window and thus overhears Aisha complaining about Cogan being a) bad in bed b) serially unfaithful c) frittering away all the earnings of his freight company. Gerry reassures her that he won’t have to put up with Cogan much longer, then the pair have sex right there in the bar while Manu watches through a crack in the door.

Anyway, this explains why, upon Cogan’s death, Gerry and Aisha are arrested by the police, who turn up recordings of them plotting to kill Cogan (because the cops had been making recordings of an illegal drug baron who Gerry, it turns out, had been doing flights for).

As he lay dying one of the last things Cogan told Manu is that he’s made a new will, leaving everything to Manu i.e. 1) the bar, 2) his freight business, Normanair.

So by about half way through the story, Manu’s mentor, Cogan, has disappeared, and so have the other flight dogs Papa, Evgeny and Gerry, leaving him qualified enough to carry on the freight business, but lonely.

As a resident of Entebbe/Kampala, we’ve accompanied Manu on trips to see the nightlife, to various bars and entertainments, and learned that he got friendly with some guys (David and Matthias) who’d set up a dance troupe but were worried about the financial insecurity of the dance world, so Manu has the bright idea of hiring them as manager and barmen at The Passenger.

Part 4. Fighting Fire, Treading Water: August 1998 to February 2002

Things are just settling down when the Second Congo War kicks off and Manu finds himself just one of half a dozen commercial pilots who are held at gunpoint at the airport by his nemesis, Major Rusyo, who forces them to fly RPA troops to Kitongo, the airport on the far west of Congo, which the RPA plan to use as a base to overthrow the now out-of-favour Kabila.

But this dashing plan is foiled when the Angolan army come in to support Kabila and prevent a quick surgical coup. It was the Angolan government’s decision which triggers the long, drawn-out struggle of the Second Congo War which mutates into the Great War of Africa, which becomes bogged down in fighting between multiplying militias, guerrilla groups, warlords and so on, in a kaleidoscope of conflict.

Manu tries to duck out of all this but is conscripted at gunpoint by Rusyo, and spends months in an increasingly feverish blur of stress, lack of sleep and amphetamines, running guns and ammo into Congo and taking out all manner of goods – gold, coltan, diamonds, coffee, even train rolling stock. The RPA’s excuse of overthrowing Kabila to install a democratic government wears thin: Manu realises it is just looting, pure and simple.

After these months the Angolan troops close in on the airport the RPA have been using, at N’djili. The Angolans fire anti-aircraft missile at him which he only just dodges using a shake and roll technique  which Cogan taught him.

Manu lands at a jungle airstrip, Maquela do Zombo, in UNITA-held north Angola, where he is trapped with the RPA for four months. Only on 23 December 1998 does he finally get to fly out, carrying as many RPA men and munitions as possible as Angolan government forces once again close in.

Time passes. The war unravels into chaos. Manu keeps completely out of it, spending two years doing clean commercial flights, ferrying tourists to see gorillas or sunbathe in Zanzibar. David and Matthias prove honest employees, turning The Passenger into a popular profitable bar.

Suddenly it’s early 2002 and Anke Desseux rings him up saying she wants to hire him to take her back to the volcano which her instruments tell her, may be about to blow. The flight is a disaster. Plumes of smoke and rivers of lava rolling down the side, burning towns, into Lake Kivu. Worse the acid fumes strip the paint off the outside of the plane and damage the windscreen. They barely make it back to Entebbe in one piece and Manu is furious at the damage to his one and only airplane.

He drives her to hotel, they both freshen up, sit sulking in the bar, eventually she gets him to spill the story of his life, all its many traumas, she takes him back to her hotel room and they have championship sex, twice. (As young healthy men and women protagonists of airport thrillers generally do, compare tall, handsome skindiver Nick Karolides and young attractive diplomat Miranda Powers in Zanzibar. When he tells us that Anke’s bare breasts are ‘lightly freckled’ you think, of course they are. That’s the kind of book this is: the history is true and horrifying but almost the entire fictional content is riddled with clichés.)

Next day Anke has to fly back to Belgium, of course and, of course, they have an emotional parting at the airport and, of course, Manu drives back to his apartment feeling abandoned, alone, again.

Part 5. The Lights of Europe: March 2004 to December 2006

Very abruptly it’s two years later, years of calm business flights as Manu slowly expands the company. Then Brigadier Faithful calls him to his office and asks him to go and fetch the buried crate containing the incriminating anti-aircraft firer. He will pay him $80,000 plus costs to dig it up, load it on board and fly it to Amsterdam where it will be handed over to a government enquiry. Why? Because the Ugandans, whose army Faithful is in, want to get back at the Rwandans who are systematically undermining them, backing anti-Uganda militias etc, by revealing that it was the RPA which shot down Habyarimana’s plane.

So Manu flies to the place in the jungle where he and Cogan buried it, digs it up and flies to Amsterdam and hands it over to the academic (who is probably a spy).

But then Manu is flabbergasted to be arrested! Turns out he’s wanted on an Interpol warrant for the murder of Don Javier and the Archbishop all those years ago in Nyamwera. Turns out an NGO has been pursuing murders of Spanish citizens and, having done the Franco regime and various South American governments, is now turning its attention to the murder of Spanish citizens in Africa.

The accusations are desperately unfair but then it turns out that the main witness against him is none other than Recognition, the comrade who forced him to perform these very deeds, and has now, bizarrely, become a Catholic friar in the monastery base of the NGO which is bringing all these accusations. Triggering in Manu a recurrence of the existential crises of doubt and personality which have dogged him throughout the narrative.

Standing there in the dock in his prison shows, he begins to think of himself as barely alive. (p.289)

Manu’s lawyer takes him outside the court for a cigarette (guarded by a security guard). A court journalist comes over and, in a mad moment, Manu grabs the journalist, puts the sim car of his phone to his jugular, forces the cop and lawyer to lie on the ground, gets the keys to the handcuffs he’s wearing, then runs off.

In the busy city streets he comes across a protest march, something about Palestine and Israel, blends in and marches along for bit, skips into a subway, gets away. A few hours later he’s on a train to Brussels courtesy the cash in the journalist’s wallet.

After a few days on the road he looks like any other hobo African immigrant. There’s a very staged and contrived scene where he wanders round the Royal Museum of Africa in Brussels, comparing the staged dioramas to the Congo he grew up in. Colonial fiction versus lived reality, imperialist lies etc.

Obviously he’s schlepped all this way to see Anke. (I knew from the moment they first met, had their violent visit to the volcano, then she scarpered back to Europe, that she would play a central role in the book’s final section.) When he finally gets to Anke’s office he is horrified to discover that she doesn’t retain the high idealised feelings for him that he has for her. It was only one night, years ago.

When she hesitantly tells Manu that she’s engaged to be married (p.313) I burst out laughing. That’s what I predicted 100 pages earlier. It felt as old and clichéd as a Thomas Hardy novel.

If she will not love him of her own accord, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, he can do that will convince her to do so. (p.315)

God, I wish this novel had just stopped on page 300 at the end of the second Congo War. Though it undermined the fiction, I quite enjoyed being harassed by the history. Now the reader is going to be hectored by Hardy for the last 100 pages.

Manu had put all his hopes on Anke helping him but she had screamed and threatened to call the police. So he goes to the African quarter of Brussels. Fellow Congolese recommend a hostel. It’s filthy and kept by a slimy predatory gay man who shows Manu to a disgustingly dirty room. He’s advised to get a job in an abattoir and there follows an extended, stomach-churning description of jobs in an abattoir which reads like the transcription of a research visit Foden made to one.

Woke ideology

Earlier, in the court scenes, Manu had raised the spectre of racism. On the run he encountered racist glances. In the Museum of Africa he was forced to think about colonialism. In the abattoir the supervisor showing him round makes the ‘racist’ comment that many of the African workers he has to supervise are lazy.

Part 5 is the woke part of the book, the part where Foden shows his white readers what white Europe looks like to a black outsider, a man unjustly accused and on the run, a victim of western imperialism and racism. Hmm. So maybe the reader isn’t going to be hectored by Hardy so much as worn down by woke.

Foden is the kind of liberal white man who went to an English public school, then Cambridge, and writes books attacking his own class and country. One of the characters in the immigrants’ hostel is a Somali whose village was bombarded by the Royal Navy, killing the rest of his family. This character says the Royal Navy is worse than the Russians.

‘Everyone should know that British people are thugs underneath, even as they pretend to be gentlemen on top. Only the Russians are worse. No! In some ways they are better, because at least they don’t pretend.’ (p.328)

Later Manu is made to equate the behaviour of the British Army with that of the RPA which, as we’ve seen, rapes, kills, tortures, massacres and loots wherever it goes:

…the horrors that happen when soldiers, English or Rwandan or whatever, invade a place, wrapping their their violence in necessity or duty or honour. (p.343)

This made me despise Foden and turn dislike of this badly written, cliché-ridden farrago into contempt. It’s his kind of superior, upper-class, woke anti-patriotism which has contributed to the decline of the Labour Party, the loss of its working class voters, the defection of the Red Wall to the Tories, the election of Boris Johnson and Brexit. It’s the kind of liberal literary superiority which has led to the rise of the right across Europe, to populist authoritarians who appeal to working class or lower-middle-class voters who feel they and their values, their patriotism, their support for their armed services and, very often their actual military service, are being attacked, dismissed, and ridiculed by a metropolitan elite of smug, superior, arrogant, public school tossers. Well, look no further. Voici le trahison des clercs.

Part 5 of the book turns into a festival of wokeness, a sequence of opportunities for Foden to highlight how racist Europeans are, how stupid and patronising (pages 377 and 378), especially farmers, they’re all racists, apparently (p.383).

As Carol Midgley has written, ‘The white working class seems to be the one group in society that it is still acceptable to sneer at, ridicule, even incite hatred against’ which is precisely what Foden does, by depicting the rough Belgian hostel keepers and the Belgian farmers visiting the Expo as unreconstructed ‘racists’, Papa’s farmer neighbours and the German tourists who pay to go on his tours of Great War battlegrounds, as racists, all racists, racists to a man.

Because what’s really harming Africa isn’t multinational corporations conspiring with corrupt leaders to loot their countries and keep their populations in crushing poverty, or the personal rivalries of military leaders vying for complete control (see the civil war in Sudan, the coup in Niger) – it’s definitely the owners of crappy refugee hostels and European farmers having ‘racist’ attitudes.

What makes me cross is not the race issue, it’s the classism. All the characters Foden creates in order to describe them as ‘racist’ are working class. Foden, as noted, went to one of the nobbiest private schools in Britain. So, for me, it’s not about racism; it’s an upper class white private schoolboy flaunting his woke credentials by denigrating working class oiks.

If you believe the British Army can be casually compared to the Rwandan Patriotic Front which spent years massacring up to 400,000 mostly unarmed civilians, systematically looting an entire country and triggering a war in which up to 5 million people died, mostly of starvation and disease, then this is the book for you.

Final stupid coincidence

Why am I going on about racist farmers? Manu is selected by the abattoir to represent the company at an industrial expo devoted to the meat industry. In the event no one’s interested in watching him preparing sausages so he packs up early and wanders around the other exhibits. He is overcome by pages of maudlin sentimental longing for his simple innocent life as a farmer’s son.

Anyway, being a cow farmer at heart explains why, when Manu sees a stand devoted to Ugandan cattle, he breaks down and cries. At which the raggedy horned cow which is the chief exhibit, in a piece of typically heavy-handed Foden symbolism, drops down dead. Almost as if the cow symbolises Manu’s boyhood hopes and dreams! (Remember what I said about the book being more like the SparksNotes outline of a novel than an actual novel, coming ready equipped with its own interpretative framework.)

In the final Ridiculously Unlikely Coincidence of the book, who should come round the corner as Manu is experiencing the latest and deepest of his psychological breakdowns, than Papa, the elderly gay pilot from the good old days back in Uganda!

Papa is appalled that Manu has fallen on such hard times and promptly takes Manu away from the Expo, helps him quit his job at the abattoir, check out of the slummy hostel, and takes him to stay in his lovely farm in the country. Saved by his fairy godmother, panto style.

Manu spends 6 months learning about potato farming i.e. Foden regurgitates all the research he’s done on the subject, just as the abattoir chapter felt like a big gobbet of factual research about abattoirs, skimpily rearranged into something resembling ‘fiction’.

Papa continues to be his fairy godmother, adopting Manu who takes a false Belgian name, Adamu Chénal. Another false identity. Then Manu learns that Papa is dying of AIDS. In his last few days Papa arranges where he wants to be buried, then informs Manu he’s leaving the farm to him. And the old Dakota plane he’s been patching up in a barn.

So this is the second set of gifts from white men which have transformed Manu’s fortunes, first Cogan’s freight company and bar, now Papa’s farm and plane. For a man who complains about white racism, he’s had nothing but life-changing gifts from white people. Maybe, in this respect, Manu is an allegory of Africa, which has received over $1.2 trillion in aid but still wants more, much more, for the indefinite future.

Tom Burgis’s book The Looting Machine explains in great detail how African elites steal foreign aid, loot their own countries, and live in luxury while their populations starve in the streets. But the implication of Foden’s narrative is that, because they’re Africans massacring each other, at least they aren’t committing the real crime here, which is making ‘racist’ remarks.

There’s a few more digs at the British authorities by this British author so keen to do down his own country (p.379), before Manu finally gets his licenses and permissions and whatnot and, with wild improbability, flies Papa’s old Dakota back to Uganda.

Part 6. The Deconfliction Zone: January 2007 [back in Uganda]

Happy endings all round. Papa’s old plane didn’t actually make it all the way to Entebbe but crash landed on a hillside outside Mbarara, south-west Uganda, and so Manu sets up shop here, planting European potatoes in adjacent farmland he buys and converting the wrecked plane into a restaurant for tourists (the ones he so liberally accused of being racist in the previous section). But Manu’s happy to take white people’s money, as he was happy to be gifted their bars and businesses and farms and planes throughout the narrative.

And Edith, the Brigadier’s daughter who he had championship sex with in the jungle that time, she hears he’s back in the country, seeks him out, they renew their affair, they’re going to get married. Disney happy ending. The Lion King. Hakuna Matata!

Big Theme: Identity

The book’s big theme is Identity. We know this because Foden lays it on with a trowel every couple of pages and there’s a big sign saying Author’s Message next to each one.

The topic of identity has been done to death, and then far beyond, in hundreds of art exhibitions, novels, plays, movies, TV shows, millions of articles, thousands of charities and so on. It is the Topic of Our Time, what with the political brouhaha surrounding immigrants and refugees, what with young people confused about their genders all wondering who they are, who they’re meant to be, what with the nations of the West undergoing a snowstorm of cultural crises. Here are some of the ways Identity is central to the novel’s conception:

– The Rwanda civil war, the genocide and the Congo wars were all about ethnic identity, on a massive scale. Manu is a Tutsi among predominantly Hutu populations, heir to ethnic strife and then victim of ethnic massacres.

– Manu struggles to maintain a sort of Catholic identity in the face of the horror of the world (he wants to attend a Christmas Day service). But he is caught between the rituals of European Catholicism and African tradition – we see him undergoing a traditional coming-of-age ceremony in the jungle.

– Working for the white man (Norman Cogan) offers an escape from these tangled ethnic conflicts but at the cost of making Manu very conscious of being a black man working in a predominantly white industry.

– On trial in Amsterdam Manu realises the enormous gulf between the real life person and the cardboard cutout concocted by the legal system.

– Traipsing through the Belgian countryside Manu swaps the specificity of his identity as head of Normair for the generic identity of black tramp, ‘just another African migrant’ (p.303).

– Manu has built up his night with Anka into a Great Amour so he is devastated to learn that she thinks of it as only a one-night stand with a bit of exotic and now, back in Europe, has slotted back into engagement and marriage with a respectable white fiancé. It knocks Manu’s sense of the value or validity of his own experience.

– Manu adopts a fake identity when he is adopted as Papa’s son, yet another identity to live up to, to perform.

So there’s at least half a dozen embodiments or enactments of the Issue of Identity to ponder and unpack.

A-level English exam question

Discuss the theme of identity in the novel Freight Dogs by Giles Foden.

Essay length: 5,000 words maximum.

Deadline: end of first term.

Refer to the useful quotes on pages 58, 60, 97, 98, 107, 111, 151, 205, 287, 303, 361, 390 and the following:

The person who flew through the sky is resisting being reduced back to an older form: that of one who must identify as Tutsi or sub-Tutsi (p.97)

Later that night, lying in his own loaned RPF tent and sleeping bag, desperate for the morning and the return to Entebbe, Manu fiddles with the threads of his own frayed identity… He must simply be a freight dog now, just like Cogan said. That’s my group, that’s my team, that’s the badge I must wear. (p.98)

He’s trying to hold on to his new pilot persona…his new role as a pilot (p.100)

Somehow, he knows, he must become more deeply his own person, find solidarity in himself… (p.131)

He wonders, as he tries to sleep, if there’s a way he can similarly be both, can stay among the freight dogs but be clean of their sins? (p.205)

Another morning in this period of his failing to become the person he wants to be, now that he’s truly on his own and there’s nobody to imitate. (p.230)

Conclusions

Pros

If you’re going to write a novel about the Congo wars, having a commercial freight pilot as a central character is a very clever idea because, as the narrative makes abundantly clear, all these wars involved the aerial transport of weapons and munitions into war zones, and contraband loot out of them. Plus it means you can rope in specific incidents, such as the hijacking of commercial planes by the RPA to fly them to Kitona airport, in the early part of the Second Congo War. If you’re going to have one protagonist navigate through this complicated sequence of events, then having him be a pilot is a smart move.

Cons

A novel is not made ‘serious’ by being a) completely humourlesss or b) by simply by treating ‘serious’ subjects or c) by having lots of harrowing violence in it. So do umpteen cheap films and crappy documentaries. A novel is made ‘serious’ by the integrity of its conception, the depth of its characterisation, and the integrity of its prose style. I’m afraid Freight Dogs, for me, failed on all three counts.

Credit

Freight Dogs by Giles Foden was published in 2021 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. References are to the 2022 paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

Africa reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 29, 2023

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Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher (2007)

I walked inside [the former Belgian restaurant in the Congo town of Kalemie] to find a wreck. A wooden bar ran along one wall and a Congolese lady stood behind it.
‘Do you have anything I could drink?’
‘No.’
‘Do you have anything I could eat?’
‘No.’
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, page 103)

In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.134)

The Congo river system is potentially one of the most valuable assets in all of Africa, but in recent years it has been choked to a standstill by war and mismanagement.
(Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart, p.295)

As the lurid title suggests, Butcher is a journalist, not a historian or scholar. He was appointed Africa correspondent of the Daily Telegraph in 2000 and this book is a colourful description of his self-appointed task of repeating Henry Morton Stanley’s famous expedition across central Africa, from Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika, across country for 500 kilometres until he hit the River Congo, and then 3,000 or so kilometres down Africa’s second longest river, right down to the sea, beyond Boma – a journey he undertook in August 2004 (just as the Athens Olympics were about to start, p.322).

Limited use as a reference

Early on, Butcher inadvertently indicates the limits of his journalistic style or knowledge or interest or research, when he knocks off a description of the Rwanda genocide and how it unravelled into the two Congo Wars, which themselves degenerated into the Great War of Africa, in a mere two pages (13 to 14).

As it happens I’ve read about six book-length or chapter-length accounts of the Rwandan genocide and the wars which followed, all of which go into vastly more detail about this complicated and terrible sequence of events, and so I flinched a bit at the superficiality and, in my opinion, errors in Butcher’s brief summary. He has an interviewee say that Mobutu ‘invited’ ‘the Hutu gunmen’, the interahamwe, to flee into Zaire. He writes that ‘the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government’ then sent troops to support Laurent Kabila’s insurgency (p.13).

This is not only very simplified but, in my opinion, actively misleading. It wasn’t just the interahamwe that fled into Zaire but the entire Hutu government and administration which had planned and carried out the appalling genocide of the Tutsi minority. Justifiably terrified of being captured and punished for their crimes, the Hutu administration terrified millions of Hutus into thinking the invading Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front would take revenge on them for the genocide, and so it turned into a mass exodus of a large part (about a quarter) of Rwanda’s population across the border into Congo.

It’s true that Mobutu had a long-standing close relationship with the Hutu leadership of Rwanda, but he didn’t ‘invite’ the fleeing génocidaires nor their million peasant compatriots into his country, they just crossed the border and presented Mobutu with a crisis (and an opportunity).

Butcher skips any explanation of the pre-existing civil war in Rwanda which was the context for the genocide and helps to explain it. Nowhere in the book does he mention the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), or its leader and still the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, or the key role the RPF played in ending the genocide when the entire international community (the UN, Britain, America, France) was standing by and letting it happen (to our eternal shame).

He nowhere explains that the Hutu génocidaires established an iron control of the vast refugee camps just inside the Zaire border and used them as bases to launch attacks against Tutsi villages inside Rwanda, continuing the genocide on a small scale while marshalling their resources to launch a re-invasion with the aim of completing the job of exterminating all the Tutsis.

He nowhere explains that the new Rwandan government of national unity repeatedly complained about the Hutu exiles to the Congo government of Mobutu, and begged the UN and international partners to step in and stop the raids and to rein in the Hutu génocidaires but that, once again, the international community did nothing.

He doesn’t explain that this was why, after a year of putting up with this destabilising presence on its western border, the RPF-backed Rwanda government decided to do something about it: to send its army into the Congo, dismantle the refugee camps, force the Hutu population to return to their country with promise of safe passage and that they would be unpunished if they just returned to their villages, while at the same time chasing the genocidal Hutu leaders and their mass-murdering militia, the interahamwe, deeper into Congo with the aim of killing them and putting an end to their genocidal plans once and for all.

He doesn’t explain how Kigali found a willing partner in the government of Uganda, which contributed its own forces, and suggested they use as a fig leaf and front man for their invasion, the drunken, womanising guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been ‘fighting’ a small-scale insurgency against the Mobutu regime for 30 years and who they now put at the head of a new rebel force concocted for the purpose (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo). Nor that the initial operation was so successful that Rwanda and Uganda decided to send their forces on right across Congo to the capital, Kinshasa, forcing the ageing ailing dictator Mobutu to flee the country (May 1996) and  installing their puppet, Kabila, as new president of Congo.

Butcher’s narrative gives the rough shape of these events but is, on my reading of the sources, wrong in most of its details, for example claiming that Rwanda and Uganda ‘backed’ a pre-existing military campaign by Kabila rather than Kabila being a convenient front man for an armed group invented for the purpose to cover an invasion entirely planned and led by Uganda-Rwanda.

It was when Kabila, safely established in power as the new president of Congo in 1997, began attacking his own Rwandan and Ugandan backers, ordering their troops to leave the capital, refusing to obey their orders any more, that Uganda and Rwanda, infuriated that their puppet had turned against them, mounted a second invasion, in 1998, to overthrow him.

This is why people refer to two Congo wars. The First Congo War, from 1996 to 1997 was the Rwanda-Uganda invasion to a) empty the Hutu refugee camps and b) overthrow Mobutu. The Second Congo War started in 1998 and was Rwanda-Uganda’s attempt to overthrow Kabila and impose a regime more friendly to them. It was this second invasion which got seriously bogged down because many of Congo’s neighbouring countries sent forces to support either the Kabila government or to ally with Uganda-Rwanda. Generally the alliances were influenced by deals to get their hands on Congo’s mineral resources. Thus Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe supported Kabila in exchange for access to minerals in Congo’s south-east, and so units of the Zimbabwean army found themselves fighting units from other nations in the tropical jungles of Congo, an expensive and bewildering waste of men and resources which distanced the Zimbabwe army from the regime (as described in Douglas Rogers’s account of the coup which eventually overthrew Mugabe).

This second conflict unravelled as not only forces from ten or so neighbouring countries got involved, but as regional warlords arose and seized control of different parts of the huge country. This is the complicated, multi-party conflict which is sometimes referred to as the Great War of Africa. Theoretically it ended with a peace treaty in 2003 but, on the ground, much violence continued in the form of roving bands of ‘soldiers’ or warlord-led militias, who emerged from the jungle, massacred villages, terrorised towns, looted all the food, raped all the women, murdered the men, then disappeared back into the jungle.

This, then, was the deeply insecure and scary environment in which Butcher planned to stage his recreation of Henry Morton Stanley’s epic journey down the Congo river. In the event, although he hears many rumours of roving warbands, although he hears from inhabitants of towns and villages of past attacks, and although he and his travelling companions race past small guard posts, he never in fact meets or has any encounters with any of the terrifying army, militia or tribal warriors.

I’ve summarised the events of the Congo wars in such detail because they are the vital backdrop to Butcher’s adventure, and because he refers to them again and again throughout the book, but mostly in what I regard as a misleadingly simplistic way. In particular I went from being puzzled to feeling a bit disturbed by his complete omission of the context of the genocide (i.e. the Rwandan civil war) and its cause (a deliberate policy of mass extermination in the name of Hutu Power), by his systematic downplaying of the genocide itself, by his complete omission of the name of the key organisation in both the civil war, the ending of the genocide, and the Congo wars i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and his preference for using the phrase ‘the Tutsi-dominated’ Rwandan government. The repeated use of this phrase cumulatively gives the impression that the source of all the disruption and violence in the region was the RPF-backed government in Kigali.

Now it is definitely true that the two Rwanda-Uganda invasions of Congo, first to overthrow Mobutu, and then to overthrow Kabila, massively destabilised the whole centre of Africa. But you have to understand that the RPF’s aim was to dismantle the Hutu regime which had just carried out the worst genocide of modern times, and then to overthrow the génocidaires’ main supporter, Mobutu, and install a government which would ensure that such a genocide never took place again. Unless you grasp that underlying motive for their actions you make it seem as if the Tutsi government was the unmotivated source of the disorder in the region. It certainly evolved into that situation, especially once all Congo’s neighbours piled in, but that wasn’t their initial motive.

The general thrust of Butcher’s account is correct and he repeats the outline of events several more times throughout the book, but almost all the fine details and the deeper background, which would help you make more sense of these tumultuous events, are either wrong or just missing.

In particular I found Butcher’s underplaying of the genocide (he mentions it but never dwells on what a truly horrific and regionally seismic event it was), his casting of the Hutus as helpless victims, and his continual nudging references to the violence across the region being caused by the ‘Tutsis-dominated’ government in Kigali, build up into a misleadingly incomplete and worryingly biased account of events. A casual reading of the book would lead you to believe that the Tutsis are the bad guys in the story and behind all the violence.

What I’ve just written is based on the following sources:

And, of course, Wikipedia:

But the same goes for Butcher’s versions of earlier events. On pages 58 to 59 he gives a brisk summary of the murder of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba, which is heavy on gruesome detail (the acid used to dissolve the corpse) but very light indeed on the complex international and domestic crises Lumumba found himself facing and made considerably worse by his own troubled character and his chaotic and rash decisions, alienating the Americans who found him impossible to work with, then inviting the Soviet Union to send armed forces to help him put down secessionist movements, which alarmed all the Western powers, the Americans and the UN.

Again, Butcher’s account isn’t wrong, as far as it goes, but by focusing narrowly on Lumumba’s murder and heavily blaming the colonial power, the Belgians (Belgian army officers helped kidnap Lumumba then fly him to a remote part of the country, were present when he was badly beaten, then shot dead and buried in a shallow grave) Butcher’s account omits the six months of hectic crises which preceded it, and Lumumba’s role in exacerbating it.

He gives no sense of how Lumumba’s difficult character worsened the crises and, eventually, led everyone concerned (including many of his own ministers and his army) to believe that Congo would be better off with him out of the way and replaced by someone more stable and predictable.

I’m not defending these events. I’m just pointing out that Butcher’s zippy two-page account, focusing (like a thriller) on the gruesome events of the murder itself, omits the complexity of the context and so militates against a proper understanding.

For all these reasons I would actively advise against reading this book as any kind of authoritative source for the geopolitics of the region and the period. For that, the best place to start would be the outstanding ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’ by David Van Reybrouck (2010).

Chaps in Africa

So, having established Butcher as a poor source of historical description or analysis, I was, in a sense, freed up to read the book for what it really is: a boy’s own adventure story, a ripping yarn, a white man’s tale of derring-do in the heart of Africa etc.

The ripping yarn tone of the story explains the praise on the cover from an impressive list of white, public school-educated, male Africa hands who recognise one of their own. These include: Alexander McCall Smith, Giles Foden, John le Carré and William Boyd. Boyd is quoted as saying: ‘The day of the intrepid traveller is not over’, which can be translated as: ‘White chaps can still have ripping adventures in the jungle’, a slice of cheery public school optimism which, once you’ve actually read the book with its bleak descriptions of super violence, social collapse and cannibalism, you might come to regard as pretty inappropriate.

Look at me, I’m woke

Butcher is at pains to stay on the right side of the reviewers and modern woke opinion by lambasting the wicked colonialists who exploited Africa during the wicked colonial period (the evils of wicked colonialism are described or referred to scores and scores of time) with a vehemence typical of a certain sort of middle-aged, middle-class, literary white man.

But I found the same is true of his dogged insistence on the evils of colonialism as of his references to the origins of the Congo wars, namely he’s not wrong, but, after a while, you start to realise he’s not describing the issue in its full complexity. He is, after all, a journalist, and so he’s writing in catchy headlines and peppy phrases.

For example, in several places he elides the truly evil, wicked, genocidal regime of the disgusting King Leopold in the 1880s and 1890s with the much more benign rule of the Belgian colonialists after the Second World War. OK, maybe they still had the same racist, white supremacist beliefs, but, as his actual narrative makes abundantly clear, they no longer massacred entire villages and cut people’s hands off; instead the post-war colonial regime built airports and railways and roads, and ports and docks, and ran mines and plantations and businesses and, above all, maintained the peace, creating the basis of a potentially prosperous country. Eliding the two eras and their policies into one thing struck me as morally dubious but also historically and politically misleading.

At one point, in a typically jeering throwaway remark, Butcher says it was one of Belgium’s most notable blunders that they didn’t train up a cohort of educated native politicians and administrators to take over the running of the country when they left. This sounds fine but it’s really a cheap shot because the Belgian colonial authorities, just like the French and British ones, thought they would be running Africa for decades to come and so had plenty of time to create an infrastructure and slowly train up the indigenes.

None of them anticipated the sudden rush for independence which was triggered by the independence of Ghana (in 1957). In particular none of them anticipated a key factor, which I’ve highlighted in my reviews of, for example, Martin Meredith’s bleakly hilarious book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence’, which was that, once negotiations started, the African nationalist parties tried to outdo each other in demanding independence, soon, sooner, NOW!

With the result that the fiery nationalists at the conference called to discuss the future of the Belgian Congo demanded they be given independence within three months of the conference ending. Many commentators at the time thought this was wildly rash but they were, of course, all denounced as racist imperialists.

Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist is set against the backdrop of the crisis of 1960 and gives a lot of  factual detail about the lead-up to Lumumba’s murder. Some of the secondary characters who the impeccably liberal protagonist meets at cocktail parties etc point out that the Africans are nowhere near being able to run a country, that handing over rule to them will lead to massacres, white flight and the collapse of the country into civil war and…they are treated as racist bigots, disliked by the woke hero, ignored by the politicians. Trouble is, those racist bigots turned out to be 100% correct and then some. Rushed independence turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for the people of the Congo.

White privilege

Butcher takes every possible opportunity to slag off the wicked Belgian colonialists, but he is considerably less attuned to the way that he, a middle-class, well-connected white westerner, with thousands of dollars stashed in his kit, along with zippy technology (laptop and satellite phone) and possessor of tiptop connections to government authorities, numerous non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the press (his employer, The Telegraph newspaper) is only able to undertake the journey because of his (relative) wealth, his white privilege and his western privilege.

Quite a few times he walks into the offices of bureaucrats or confronts African officials who are notably more respectful of him than of their fellow Africans who they’ve just been bullying, simply because he is a white man. The entire journey is only possible because he is, by Congo standards, rich, because he has thousands of dollars stashed in his clothes and so is able to pay Africans hard cash to drive him through the jungle, canoe him down the river, and generally bribe his way out of trouble.

That William Boyd quote could more accurately be rewritten as: ‘The day of the intrepid [western white male] traveller [with lots of cash and connections] is not over’.

In the footsteps of Stanley

Butcher’s entire expedition is an attempt to recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s great expedition across country to, and then down, the mighty Congo River, in which he was accompanied by three white companions and over 300 African porters, and which took three long gruelling years, from 1874 to 1877.

As you might expect, this inevitably entails several summaries of Stanley’s biography and character, of the great expedition (pages 44 to 49), and Stanley’s narrative (and illustrations) are referenced throughout the book, in particular whenever Butcher arrives at a place which Stanley first visited, or a town he in fact founded (for example, the settlement of Stanleyville which he founded at the end of the series of treacherous rapids which he modestly named, the Stanley Falls). Inevitably, Butcher also references Stanley’s central role in opening up central Africa for the murderous genocidal regime of the truly evil King Leopold of Belgium.

But again, I found Butcher’s account good as far as it went, but it never goes much beyond the stereotype of the wicked, brutal racist Victorian explorer. Butcher takes the standard journalistic view that Stanley was a wicked, violent, racist who treated his hundreds of native porters with appalling brutality and didn’t hesitate to open fire on tribespeople who got in his way. All the subtlety and complexity about the man and his achievements to be found in the (obviously much longer) biographies like that of Tim Jeal (2007) are simply absent. Jeal doesn’t gloss over Stanley’s brutality, but places him in the context of his time, compares him with other explorers, and explains the challenges he faced, from the treacherous Arab slave traders who dominated the region, to the often violent and sometimes cannibal tribes Stanley had to deal with.

I’m not in the slightest exonerating Stanley: the work he went on to do for King Leopold, systematically swindling scores of tribal leaders out of their ancestral lands by making them sign contract with Leopold which they obviously didn’t understand and had no legal validity, was obviously wicked and inexcusable. I’m just saying that, as with the Congo wars and Lumumba’s murder, Butcher’s journalistic summaries of Stanley gloss over the far more complex, more fascinating and therefore more useful facts.

Butcher’s mum

The blurb, the preface and much of the text all emphasise that Butcher is setting out to recreate Stanley’s epic voyage of explanation down the Congo – but on pages 8 to 11 we learn of a much more homely, domestic motive for his trip. His mother did it.

Butcher’s mum was a jolly hockey sticks daughter of the empire who, aged 21 in 1958, was packed off to southern Africa, with a friend, as a sort of finishing school. She travelled from Cape Town to Salisbury (modern Harare in Zimbabwe). It was the very end of the colonial era and so all the countries she travelled through – South Africa, Rhodesia – were still run by white colonial administrations, and so there was law and order and a good travel infrastructure: planes and trains and ferries ran on time and regularly.

This applied just as much to the 1958 Belgian Congo which the two young gells crossed as the final part of their journey. Leopoldville was the hub of one of Africa’s largest airline and the Congo’s chief port, Matadi, was served by a fleet of ocean liners. Everything – trains, planes, ferries – worked like clockwork , staffed by polite porters and obliging stewards – and so Butcher’s mother, when he used to question her, had little or no memory of it.

Now, 45 or so years later (2004), the countries she travelled through have collapsed into dictatorship (Zimbabwe) or chaos (Congo), most of the infrastructure of the latter having collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle (railway lines and railway sleepers long ago dismantled and sold for scrap or burned as firewood; stations derelict; docks abandoned, as in a dystopian sci fi movie).

Butcher’s mum kept brochures and posters and timetables from her trip which Butcher describes poring over lovingly as a boy and young man. And so Butcher’s adventure has this second level, not only retracing the steps of the man who ‘discovered’, mapped, named and revealed central Africa to western readers in the 1870s and 80s – but at the same time moving through the surreal ruins of what had once been the thriving and efficient colonial infrastructure remembered by his mum and recorded in the various brochures and timetables she kept, circa 1958 (plus other 1950s documents and guides he acquired in preparation for his trip).

So: two sets of ghosts, and that’s just the white ghosts. Obviously Butcher discovers, once he enters the country, that he is also moving among spirits of all the African tribes who lived and died, fought and were enslaved, and, more recently, burned and looted, their way through the same terrain. (See Ryszard Kapuściński’s excellent book, The Shadow of The Sun, for extended descriptions of how belief in the spirits of the dead continue to saturate African culture.)

So Butcher’s trip is alive with resonances and echoes.

Kalemie

Butcher starts his journey in the port of Kalemie on the west bank of Lake Tanganyika, which is where Stanley arrived with his huge expedition of over 300 porters, after having crossed country from Zanzibar and then crossed the lake from east to west. Instead Butcher kicks off his journey by flying there, direct from South Africa. I thought this was a slightly odd decision. To fully recreate the Stanley expedition he ought to have travelled overland from the Tanzanian coast to Lake Tanganyika, as Stanley did. It would have been interesting to have his description of modern-day Zanzibar and Tanzania, and would have maybe provided a useful contrast between one African country and another.

So anyway, Butcher flies direct to Kalemie on the western, Congo, side of Lake Tanganyika and it’s here that, after quite a few digressions about Stanley, his mum, the contacts he has drummed up in preparation for the trip, and the briefings he’s had, that he finally gets the journey started.

Kalemie straightaway provides a good example of the decline and decay all of Congo has fallen into, after 32 years of Mobutu’s systematic looting of his own country, zero investment and appalling corrupt local administration, followed by seven years (1997 to the time of his visit, 2004) of increasingly chaotic and widespread conflict. From a distance it looks like a modern town but once he’s landed and looks more closely:

What I had taken to be an estate of factories, damaged in the recent war in the Congo, turned out to be a ruin dating from a much earlier age. Faded advertisements could just be made out on the walls…Grass grew long and untroubled through the railway sleepers on the approaches to the disused station…An old railway carriage…stood rusting in the tropical heat. In one of the compartments someone had made a small cooking fire on the floor, now surrounded by various dirty pots…Instead of a functioning high street what I found was a dusty space filled by gaggles of meandering locals…Of the buildings themselves there was little beyond the fronts. Rust had not just coloured the roofs but eaten out huge holes through which tropical rain had flooded for countless rainy seasons…Pipes that once brought mains water to each building lay broken and there was not one working lightbulb…Without cobalt or diamonds or gold to draw outsiders’ interest here, Kelamie had been hollowed out by the years. Where there had once been a substantial settlement, nothing but the husk remained. (pages 85 to 85)

And this in ‘one of the biggest towns in the Congo’, a town with no state radio or TV, no newspaper, no landline phones and no internet, no petrol stations or cars, where the 1950s airport the Belgians built has become a bullet-riddled ruin (p.88).

This is what decades of neglect, lack of investment, lack of law and lack of local government produce, in a place ‘run by’ officials and administrators who do nothing but loot and steal and demand bribes for every transaction, a place where the state fails to provide either teachers or doctors or police (p.105). A key word or theme or image which threads through the text is ‘ruin’, along with its cousins, ‘derelict’, ‘wreck’, ‘decline’, ‘decay’ and ‘abandoned’.

Going backwards

Butcher hires some guys to take him by motorbike (two bikes and their owners for security’s sake, and because they know the route) inland from Kalemie. The key fact to grasp is that there are no roads any more, let alone railways. In the 1950s guides and the memory of his mother (and other accounts from the 1950s, which he cites) the major cities and many of the towns were connected by good asphalt roads which the Belgians built. Every single one of these has disappeared and been swallowed back into the jungle. Several times he comes across vehicles buried under decades of tropical foliage and realises that the narrow track through the jungle where he’s standing was, 50 years previously, an open, asphalt highway busy with cars and lorries. Now all gone, disappeared.

Similarly, Congo’s main cities were joined by railway lines and all of these have disappeared. In some cases the metal rails have been removed along with the sleepers and all that’s left is a track worn flat by the trudging of African feet. In town after town he comes across derelict, abandoned railway stations. In one particularly vivid moment he’s struggling through thick tropical forest, the sky blocked out by interlocking trees swaying high above him, dense foliage pressing right up against the narrow path he’s pushing his motorbike through when his boot clunks against something metallic. When he squats down and scrapes away at the thick soil and undergrowth at his feet he is stunned to reveal a metal rail. Beneath his feet and completely swallowed up by raw jungle is a railway which was part of thriving, developing country just 40 years previously. He is staggered by how quickly, and how totally all these infrastructures have been utterly lost, by how swiftly the country has unravelled and gone backwards.

Butcher’s journey

So Butcher rides pillion on the back of a motorbike from Kalemie heading directly west, roughly following the old abandoned overgrown railway line which once ran alongside the River Lukuga and linked Kalemie on Lake Tanganyika to join the River Lualaba between Kabalo and Kongolo. But after a 110k or so they take an abrupt right turn, heading north towards Mukumbo, then onto Kabambarre, and then to Kasongo, a now-ruined port on the River Congo.

This journey doesn’t look much on the (very good) map in the book, but it was in fact a mind-boggling 500 kilometres. (The book contains one master map of the entire route, done in a professional cartographic style, and then each chapter of the actual narrative starts with a charming hand-drawn map of that particular leg of the journey, complete with hand-drawn dotted lines, place names, and distances. Sweet. And handy.)

Anyway, Butcher covered this awesome 500k on the back of a motorbike! Along rutted, narrow, earth tracks bounded by tropical rainforest and continually littered with tree roots, bumps and ravines, streams, gulley and occasional rivers. No wonder he got a sore bum!

He takes a (very basic) ferry across the river and, on the other side, contracts more motorcyclists to drive him through 200km more narrow winding jungle paths, via the (ruined) town of Kibombo and on to another riverside port, Kindu. It’s on this leg that he comes across the wreckage of an armoured car which was shelled and destroyed during a firefight on a major road paralleling the river. Now the road has completely disappeared and all that’s left is a rusting metal hulk, almost completely overgrown by jungle.

In Kindu he contacts the local UN station (‘Hi, I’m a white jounralist’) which agrees to convey him in one of their river patrol boats 150k north, to the riverside settlement (not a town, just a few huts on the muddy bank) of Lowa. Here the friendly, civilised UN sailors set him ashore, with much shaking of heads over his folly, and Butcher, very scared, approaches some local Congolese lounging near huge wooden canoes. He is greatly relieved when one of them agrees to take him by canoe, or pirogue, the 200k by river further north to the town of Ubundu. This man, Malike Bade, quickly recruits three other oarsmen and off they set.

Ubundu, the ruined town which had once been the thriving Belgian port of Ponthierville, marks the start of the 150k or so of rapids and waterfalls collectively (still) named the Stanley Falls. Butcher has to transfer from the river to dry land and hitches a ride with some motorcyclists who work for a western charity (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’), who have just delivered supplies to Ubundu and are now returning to their base at Kisangani, the big settlement which marks the end of the Stanley Falls.

It’s on this leg that he has the haunting experience of stumbling across a rail from the railway the Belgians built running north-south parallel to the river, now not only abandoned but completely buried by the tropical jungle (pages 248 to 249).

It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards. (p.249)

Kisangani is the first town in nearly 1,000 kilometres which has proper roads, car, electric power, hotels worth the name, and running water, and bed with clean sheets, so he has an orgy of showers and sleeping and eating proper food, and then more showers and more eating and sleeping.

He discovers Kisangani may look like a big functioning town but most of the infrastructure here, as everywhere else in Congo, is in ruins – the ruined railway station and the ruined harbour, the riverside cranes which look so impressive from a distance but haven’t worked for decades, broken beyond repair:

a shell, prone to spasms of political anarchy and chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians…It owed what little stability it had to the artificial props of a large UN force and foreign aid workers. (p.255)

And the local politicians do everything they can to undermine even these fragile elements of stability. A few months before he arrived in Congo there had been conflict in the profoundly unstable Bukavu region far to the east on the Rwandan border, with reports of Rwandan forces massacring Congolese. Instead of calming opinion, Kisangani’s officials inflamed it and blamed the deaths on the UN for failing to protect the Bukavese, with the result that angry mobs went on the rampage, looting then setting fire to UN buildings, ransacking aid organisations’ offices and warehouses, while the so-called police stood by or even joined in.

When you read of events like this you wonder, why are we bothering to give money to help people who are so absolutely determined to ruin themselves?

I heard heartbreaking stories about corrupt Congolese officials pocketing aid money intended for local public-health workers, and local soldiers not just looting aid equipment, but brazenly asking for cash to hand it back to its rightful owners. Many in the aid community spent their time counting the days until their contracts were up and they could go back to the real world. (p.285)

A Catholic missionary, Father Leon, tells him about the notorious massacre of monks and gang rape of nuns which took place here in 1964 (24 November 1964, to be precise), was widely reported, and helped crystallise world opinion that Congo was slipping back into Stone Age barbarism (pages 270 to 274).

After five days Butcher moves out of his hotel and into the last large mission being run in the city, by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After two weeks of sounding out local ship crews and NGOs, trying to find a boat which will take him down the river, after numerous disappointments, Butcher eventually secures a ride on a UN patrol boat (‘Hi, I’m a white journalist’) which will take him the 1,000 kilometres down the river to the port of Mbandaka.

On the way he becomes ill and weak with fever so that by the time he arrives at Mbandaka, he just can’t face another week or two or three hustling for his next ride down the river. Mbandaka is much smaller and more ruinous than Kisanagani was, so there isn’t even a hotel. God knows where he’d stay. Whereas the UN riverboat captain had told him that a UN helicopter service left the following morning for Kinshasa.

Reluctantly, but with great relief, Butcher travels the 600k from Mbandaka to the country’s capital, Kinshasa by helicopter. Here he is put up in the amazingly luxurious gated compound owned by a major international mining company, which won lucrative contracts by helping with the smooth transition of power after wily old Laurent Kabila was unexpectedly assassinated (16 January 2001) and succeeded by his completely inexperienced son, Joseph Kabila, aged just 30 at the time.

Only after days of showers, lots of sleep, taking a variety of medicines, eating proper food and drinking clean water in this rich, privileged western enclave, does Butcher feel human again, and in a position to decide what to do next. He consults with the senior guy minding the mining company compound who explains that there are no buses or taxis in Kinshasa. The only possible option is to pay to have one of the mining company’s cars and driver drive him along the only remaining road in the entire country (recently refurbished with foreign aid money) the 350k to the Atlantic port at Boma. So that is what he does.

In total the journey took him ‘six harrowing weeks’, 44 days, and was a dazzling, deeply depressing insight into the state of contemporary Africa.

Butcher’s bleak view of Africa

As the Telegraph‘s Africa correspondent, Butcher is amusingly blunt: Africa is fucked, that’s his basic position. African nations were screwed by the colonial powers from the Congress of Berlin to independence (the 1880s to the 1960s); then suffered epic civil wars and/or the extended rule of vicious kleptocrats; and have now mostly fallen into states of disrepair, degradation, police states, autocracies, characterised by epic corruption, horrible everyday violence, and the regular occurrence of coups or civil wars.

The one constant through all these episodes was the heavy undertow of human suffering. It gnawed away at every African epoch I read about, no matter whether it was caused by nineteenth-century colonial brutes or twenty-first century despots. Generations of Africans have suffered the triumph of disappointment over potential, creating the only continent on the planet where the normal rules of human development and advancement simply don’t apply.

It was this sense of stagnation that troubled me most as I worked my way through my reading list. Sub-Saharan Africa has forty-one separate countries of stunning variety – from parched desert to sweaty rainforest, from wide savannah to snow-tipped volcano – and yet as I did my background research, the history of these varied countries merged into a single, pro forma analysis…as crude as the underlying assumption: that African nations are doomed to victim status.

By the time I started working in Africa as a journalist in 2000, its patina of despair had thickened to impenetrability… (p.4)

Certainly, when it comes to Congo, Butcher regards it as a country which has comprehensively gone to ruin, a place which has not only ceased developing but is actively undeveloping, moving at speed back into pre-20th century, pre-industrial times.

The failure of the Congo is so complete that its silent majority – tens of millions of people with no connections to the gangster government or the corrupt state machinery – are trapped in a fight to stay where they are and not become worse off. Thoughts of development, advancement or improvement are irrelevant when the fabric of your country is slipping backwards around you. (p.289)

Butcher has a map from 1961 which shows all the railways, roads, airports, mines and towns built by the Belgians. Now almost all of them are abandoned and have faded back into the jungle. The Great War has left the huge territory divided between regional powers, armies and militias or just local bandits, any of whom might stop and shoot you for no reason.

Butcher is continually, vehemently rude about the white man, about colonialists, about outsiders who came into Congo, and is much consumed by the white supremacist, racist, arrogance which thought it knew what was best for the Congolese. Again and again he makes the same point.

And yet very often, in the very next paragraph, he goes on to describe at great length, and very upsettingly, just how completely Congo was devastated by its kleptocratic rulers, by Mobutu and his clique in faraway Kinshasa, who developed the cult of the leader of the nation while all the while stealing every last dollar from their people, building grotesquely luxurious palaces and villas, buying scores of properties around the world, while the infrastructure of entire provinces such as Katanga collapsed and disappeared back into the jungle.

And then he goes on to describe the work of the United Nations which strives hard to bring the warring sides in Congo’s endless conflicts to the negotiating table, which expends a small fortune trying to police the ceasefire at locations all across this country as large as a continent. For example, the story of Kisangani which saw horrific levels of violence in various civil conflicts, whose infrastructure and economy collapsed, and is nowadays only just about propped up by the UN and western NGOs, when the local population aren’t ransacking them.

The point being that, no matter how woke, anti-colonial and politically correct Butcher tries to be in his editorialising, the blindingly clear conclusion from his long, gripping narrative is that the Congolese simply cannot rule themselves. (p.319).

As soon as they tried to (June 1960) the place collapsed into a series of civil wars along with tribal massacres on a hair-raising scale, and now, as he writes (2004), 43 years after independence, Butcher’s journey amounts to an odyssey through a country which has not only failed to develop but is, to use his powerful neologism, undeveloping, with communities all across the country deprived of the clean water, electricity, communications, industry, travel infrastructure, even minimal education, even the most basic medical facilities, all things they took for granted under the Belgians.

Now it’s all gone, decayed, corroded, overgrown, crumbled to dust, and the country has reverted to its African origins: impenetrably difficult to travel across, riddled with disease (cholera from the water, malaria from the ubiquitous mosquitos) and infested with blood-thirsty, savage warrior bands, who arrive out of nowhere, kill all the men, rape all the women, burn the village to the ground, then disappear back into the jungle.

It’s a tropical hell. It’s Hieronymus Bosch in the jungle.

Summary

As I’ve probably stated at too great a length, I was unhappy with Butcher’s journalistic and rather superficial descriptions of many key aspects of Congo’s modern history. And I am gently mocking of the contradiction that, despite his insistent criticism of colonialism and white racism and imperial exploitation etc, it is only because he is a white westerner and (relatively) rich that he can pay the locals to ferry him wherever he wants, waltz into UN offices anywhere in the country and not only get their attention but persuade them to help him out (by boat, by bike, by helicopter). He’s a white man. Of course they’ll help.

But what I haven’t emphasised enough is that Butcher is also a cracking writer, with a great eye for detail. His descriptions of the jungle, the ruined settlements, primitive villages or scary cities (like Kisangani) are vivid and compelling. It’s a gripping, exciting read.

And also, Butcher has a knack for interviewing people or getting them to tell him about themselves and stories about their trade, village, town, or local history. Obviously these stories are tidied up and made fit for western consumption, he’s a journalist, that’s what he does. But he talks to a wide range of people who begin to build up a sense of opinions and experiences from right across this vast country.

(There are obvious omissions: he never speaks to anyone from any of the armed militias which, according to his interviewees, roam so much of the jungle, emerging to carry out unspeakable atrocities, but then journalists rarely do. They’re not the kind of people who make for compliant and articulate interviewees and so their voices are consistently absent from most western accounts.)

So although there are better books to go to in order to to understand the recent political and military history of the Congo, Butcher’s sweaty, fearful, sleepless, buttock-bruising account gives you a really vivid feel for what the country and its actual population – thousands of miles from the slick government spokesmen and official narratives of downtown Kinshasa – are really like. And a vivid and almost overwhelming sense of the dreadful fate, almost complete social collapse back into the Stone Age, which so much of it has undergone.

On the long slow journey down the river aboard a UN patrol boat (more accurately, a primitive tug or ‘pusher’) Butcher finds himself audience to an impassioned diatribe by the Malaysian captain, Mohammed Yusoff Sazali, who explains that Malaysia, like Congo, was colonised for centuries; Malaysia like Congo was subject to a cruel racist colonial masters (the British); Malaysia gained independence about the same time as Congo (1957 and 1960); Malaysia like Congo was dragged into Cold War conflicts. And yet, 50 years later, Malaysia is part of the world, has achieved great things in education and health, has a booming economy, they even host a Grand Prix every year. While Congo is collapsing year by year into pre-industrial, Stone Age poverty. Why? Why has Malaysia stormed ahead and Congo fallen so far behind? The skipper:

had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa? (p.310)

Credit

Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher was first published by Chatto and Windus in 2007. References are to the 2008 Vintage paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 22, 2023

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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.

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Posted by Simon on November 10, 2023

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Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901) part 1

He borrowed right- and left-handedly from all the customs of the country he knew and loved.
(Kim, Chapter 4)

Proper name: Kimball O’Hara

Nickname on the streets of Lahore: Little Friend of All The World

Kipling was dazzlingly prolific in prose and poetry but he only wrote three novels: ‘The Light That Failed’ (1891), ‘Captains Courageous’ (1897) and ‘Kim’ (1901). The first two are dubious works, problematic for a variety of reasons. By contrast ‘Kim’ is generally thought to be his masterpiece, the one significant, long-form work of prose which merits comparison with other novelists of his day, Hardy, Conrad, Wells, Foster, Bennett.

The basic idea is simple. From the start of his career Kipling enjoyed depicting working class characters, underdogs and low caste people, particularly soldiers in the British Empire’s imperial armies. These could be specific characters such as the soldiers three who appear in a dozen or more tales – Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris – or the rough Portuguese seamen who crew the fishing schooner in Captains Courageous. Or when he captured the tone and voice of working class squaddies in the two sets of Barrack Room Ballads.

Kim pushes this tendency to a kind of extreme by focusing on a central character who is the orphan son of pretty much the poorest, lowest class in British India, his father (Kimball O’Hara) a former colour sergeant and later an employee of an Indian railway company, and Annie Shott (p.75), his mother, poor Irish, a former nanny in a colonel’s household.

When they both die young, Kim is orphaned, becoming ‘a poor white of the poorest’. But Kim wriggles free of caring relatives and interfering missionaries, of ‘societies and chaplains’, to become a street urchin, living on his wits, carrying out favours for countless merchants and shopkeepers, becoming so deeply tanned that strangers mistake him for a native Indian. His nickname among ordinary natives, shopkeepers, the local policemen and all who know him is ‘Little Friend of All The World’. He is ‘thoughtful, wise, and courteous; but something of a small imp’ (Chapter 4).

The whole novel is, then, a street-level depiction of Kipling’s beloved India of the 1890s. It starts in the Indian city of Lahore (now part of Pakistan), which is where Kipling himself was born and raised. Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the curator of the Lahore Museum. In numerous letters and journal entries, Kipling describes roaming the streets of the teeming, mysterious, often stinking muddy city from an early age, driven by incurable curiosity to seek out new experiences, sights, sounds and smells – as is his boy hero:

[Kim] meant to investigate further, precisely as he would have investigated a new building or a strange festival in Lahore city. (p.14)

A boy who can dodge over the roofs of Lahore city on a moonlight night, using every little patch and corner of darkness to discomfit his pursuer, is not likely to be checked by a line of well-trained soldiers. (p.73)

This is one reason for Kim’s lasting appeal. It is a vividly sensory description of life in 1890s India.

A second reason is Kipling’s extraordinary ability to depict the complex, multicultural strands of Indian life which, then as now, contained people of many faiths (Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain) speaking many languages (Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu, Punjabi, Tibetan, Persian and so on). Kipling’s text revels in religious, historical and linguistic complexity.

A third reason is the story’s appeal to children of all ages who want to roam free, who want to escape the trammels of parents, guardians, social services, school or (for adults) jobs, careers, family responsibilities, and roam wild and free through a never-ending phantasmagoria of exotic sights, sounds and adventures. It is an epitome of escapist fantasy.

Clipped language

A fourth and major element of the book is its style. I tried to analyse this in my essay on Kipling’s style. I tried to bring out the way Kipling doesn’t write like most other writers but has a very distinctive and idiosyncratic approach to the language. Above all it is very compressed and very allusive.

Compressed

By compressed I mean that he doesn’t spell things out in an ordinary accessible way. In his autobiography Kipling describes writing out a story in full, then going back later and deleting half the words. Then going back, again, and cutting even more words. At its worst this means that reading a Kipling text feels more like doing a cryptic crossword than reading clear, coherent prose.

Allusive

By allusive I mean his clipped prose continually alludes to or refers to specialist knowledge as if his readers should already know it, knowledge about native customs, beliefs, regional traditions, religious practices, types of clothing and so on, very often described in native Indian terminology which he explains once then expects you to remember for the rest of the book.

Mosaic style

I suppose there’s a third element which derives from the allusiveness, which is that Kipling lards his texts with quotations. But these emphatically aren’t the placid, civilised tags from French or Latin which other well-behaved late-Victorian writers use. Instead he creates a crazy mosaic text made up of Biblical quotes, schoolboy or military or technical slang, but above all, lots and lots and lots of native Indian words.

Understatement

Finally, there is his trademark understatement, which is another kind of allusiveness. Sometimes Kipling describes events or actions in such a radically understated way that you struggle to understand what he’s intending to say. All these elements sometimes make his prose quite a challenge to read.

Opening paragraph

Take the opening paragraph from Kim:

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.

A lot is going on here. Let’s try to analyse out the different types of verbal activity. First there are the names in a foreign language. Zam Zammah is mentioned in the first sentence with typical allusiveness, almost as if we’re expected to know what it means. Fortunately, Kipling translates it for us in the second sentence as meaning ‘fire-breathing dragon’ but, with typical understatement, he doesn’t really make it clear that he’s referring to a large, old-fashioned cannon. Similarly, he refers to the museum first off by its native name, ‘Ajaib-Gher’, which, admittedly, he then explains means the Wonder House, itself a local name for the Lahore Museum.

But the use of these non-English terms first, as the standard phrase, with the English translation coming second, immediately throws us into a foreign context, a foreignness which is then confirmed by mention of Lahore Museum, Kipling assuming his readers will know where Lahore is (north-west British India, now inside modern Pakistan).

There’s a similar expectation in the second sentence, that his readers will know where the Punjab is, but the real point of this sentence is to repeat the proverb about the Punjab. This is classic Kipling in five ways.

1. Mosaic text It is, in the broadest sense, one of the quotes or references I mentioned above, which make up so much of his text.

2. Cultural feel It ties into what I mentioned about the book’s skill at depicting the traditions, languages and mindsets of the many different cultures which inhabit his teeming multicultural India.

3. History Alongside the synchronic view of multiple cultures in the present, these two sentences also indicate a diachronic view of history. Kim’s world is the result of history, and not in a vague sense, but in a blunt Realpolitick kind of way: ‘The conqueror’s loot’ gives not only historical context but indicates the narrator’s cynical realistic attitude. The world Kim inhabits is one where winner takes all, as is made plain in the very next sentence:

There was some justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English.

The imperialist suprematism of this is obvious. But just as typical is Kipling’s aggressively knowing reference to ‘trunnions’. Do you know what trunnions are without looking it up? (‘A pin or pivot on which something can be rotated or tilted. especially : either of two opposite gudgeons on which a cannon is swivelled’ – Mirriam-Webster dictionary)

4. Rebel Kim isn’t named in this opening paragraph, but his attitude is: ‘ in defiance of municipal orders’. He’s a rebel, a defier or ignorer of the law. (A notion not very subtle reinforced by the way his now-dead father is said to have served with ‘the Mavericks’, nickname for a regiment in the British Army which is entirely fictitious. A ‘maverick’ is ‘an unorthodox or independent-minded person.’)

5. Clipped prose Above all it demonstrates what I mean by compression, by Kipling’s inveterate habit of cutting, and then cutting again, his prose until it starts to read almost like a foreign language. ‘Who hold Zam-Zammah…hold the Punjab’ is clearly not standard English prose. There are two ways of fixing it: you could write :

‘Whoever holds Zam-Zammah…holds the Punjab’

Or, a bit more archaically:

‘They who hold Zam-Zammah…hold the Punjab’

Both would be acceptable grammatically correct English – but Kipling rejects both and has invented a new kind of prose. By deleting either ‘-ever’ (version 1) or ‘They’ (version 2) he makes the sentence significantly harder to parse (meaning ‘to resolve a sentence into its component parts and understand their syntactic roles’), harder to process.

This defining aspect of Kipling’s style makes many of his stories hard to read but here, in Kim, his allusive, clipped style meets an appropriate subject matter and the two weld. His dense, clipped, allusive, jargon-ridden, foreign word-strewn style finds a fitting match in a protagonist who is a young street urchin at home in half a dozen different cultures and languages, always in a hurry, always leaping onto the next thing, with a restless juvenile energy.

The never-still, restless bounding of the protagonist from one excitement to the next, like a hyper-active toddler, is perfectly dressed in Kipling’s restless, jumpy, allusive, densely compressed style.

It occurs to me that Kipling’s style has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This made it profoundly unsuitable for the telling of long sustained narratives with an interest in subtle psychological changes, such as we find in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. It explains why he wrote so many jumpy, nervy short stories and so few novels. But in this one, ADHD style met ADHD hero.

At one point, as Kim comes to recognise Colonel Creighton’s qualities, he thinks:

Here was a man after his own heart – a tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game.

And the reader wonders whether this is a self-portrait of Kipling himself, his rather tortuous approach to English prose, his crabwise manner of conceiving and conveying his plots.

Archaic speech

Another element which adds to the sense of a foreign place and time, exotic setting and so on, is Kipling’s decision to render speech, often translated from one of the many Indian languages, in the style of the King James Bible. So, in the opening chapter, here is the Tibetan lama talking to the curator of the Lahore Museum:

‘We are both bound, thou and I, my brother. But I’ – [the lama] rose with a sweep of the soft thick drapery – ‘I go to cut myself free. Come also!’
‘I am bound,’ said the Curator. ‘But whither goest thou?’

It ought to feel arch and contrived, and maybe to some modern readers it does. But 1) Kipling uses it so consistently throughout the book that you soon get used to it and 2) if you buy into it, it is quite an effective way of conveying that they are talking a foreign language.

Indian speech

More obvious than the quirks of Kipling’s narrative voice is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the text is direct speech, and that is it packed to overflowing with native Indian words; rarely entire phrases, just individual words, which Kipling often includes a translation for within brackets. But lots and lots and lots of them.

‘And he is a stranger and a būt-parast (idolater),’ said Abdullah.

‘There was with me when I left the hills a chela (disciple) who begged for me as the Rule demands.’

‘Thy man is rather yagi (bad-tempered) than yogi (a holy man).’

‘Pardesi (a foreigner),’ Kim explained.

At first Kim had been minded to give the alarm – the long-drawn cho-or—choor! (thief! thief!) that sets the serai ablaze of nights.

‘My sister’s brother’s son is naik (corporal) in that regiment,’ said the Sikh craftsman quietly.

‘Three kos (six miles) to the westward runs the great road to Calcutta.’

And so on, many hundreds of times. The reader isn’t going to learn Hindi or Pashtun or Urdu from the book. On the other hand, you do begin to pick up a feel for the kinds of sounds these words make, a feel for the sound world of Indian languages.

The plot, chapters 1 to 9

Kim is the poor street urchin orphan of a Irish sergeant and a poor serving woman. With them dead, he makes a living as a scamp and jack of all trades on the teeming streets of Lahore.

The story opens with Kim playing with two other boys on a disused cannon outside the Lahore Museum when a strange figure walks into view. He turns out to be a lama, a holy man from Tibet who is searching for the River of Life aka the River of the Arrow (p.11), where, he has been promised, he will be able to free himself from the Wheel of Things.

The lama is shown round the museum by its curator (modelled on Kipling’s own father who was the first curator of the Lahore museum) who very kindly gives him his own good quality spectacles to replace the lama’s which are worn and scratched. (At the very end of the book the lama remembers the curator’s courtesy and kindness. I am touched by Kipling’s filial affection, p.225.)

The lama emerges into the heat and falls asleep in the shade of the big cannon. When he awakes, the boy Kim appears to him to be a vision, a presentiment, one sent to guide him. In a slight daze, the lama adopts Kim as his chela or disciple, telling him they must find the river in which he will be cleansed. For his part, Kim has a dim memory of his drunken father telling him his life will change when he meets a red bull on a green background. So he decides to fall in with the lama’s delusion, and act as his chela.

Out of general conversation emerges the idea that the river might by the mighty Ganges far away to the East. So step one is to catch a train East, to the town of Umballa. Near the train station is the Kashmir Serai. Here are shop and stables of the Pashtun horse trader Mahbub Ali, one of the many businessmen Kim survives by doing favours for. Kim takes the lama to go and see him, mainly because he wants to chivvy dinner out of him, and in this succeeds, Ali’s Balti servants feeding lama and boy. But learning of his journey, Ali gives Kim a message to deliver to a British officer in Umballa, a certain Colonel Creighton. Ali says it is about a white stallion he’s sold the officer and gives him a folded up piece of paper.

Kim knows there’s more to this than meets the eye but doesn’t know the full story. Because the narrator tells us that Ali is a British spy, codename C25 1B and the piece of greasy folded paper he gives Kim is a report from another operative, R17, and that it:

most scandalously betrayed the five confederated Kings, the sympathetic Northern Power, a Hindu banker in Peshawur, a firm of gun-makers in Belgium, and an important, semi-independent Mohammedan ruler to the south.

I.e. five independent Indian princes in the north of the country are friendly to the Russian Empire (the ‘sympathetic Northern Power’) and are in league with the others mentioned for some nefarious purpose, never clearly defined.

This is what moviemakers would later call the McGuffin, defined as ‘an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.’ Thus Kim has, without knowing it, been recruited into the so-called ‘Great Game’, the name given to the cold war which developed between the British Empire and the Russian Empire as the latter expanded its territory through Central Asia and tried to extend its influence into Persia and Afghanistan (and first mentioned in chapter 7, p.110).

I dealt with this in my review of Andrew Roberts’s biography of Lord Salisbury. From Salisbury’s view, as Prime Minister back in London, the British authorities in India were in a permanent state of hysterical over-reaction about Russia. It was paranoia about Russian interference in Afghanistan which had led to the Second Afghan War of 1878 to 1880, a wholly unnecessary and futile conflict. Salisbury was exasperated by Indian Viceroys who kept sending panic-stricken messages about the threat from Russia and demanding London to be more pro-active. Salisbury, wisely, thought Russian imperial expansion was more interested in annexing the central Asian republics than starting a war with Britain.

So the most important fact about the Great Game is that, despite the sweaty paranoia of Brits on the ground in India, a conflict between Russia and Britain over India never broke out. A huge amount of influence buying and espionage went on by both sides with, in the end, very little result.

Kipling was, of course, on the side of the Indian authorities and so the entire novel is set within the worldview of threatening Russian influence. In this respect it’s like a Cold War thriller or like Indiana Jones and the ever-present threat of the Nazis. A thriller needs baddies, ideally a network of baddies, Reds under the beds, Islamic terrorists everywhere etc, in order to create that enjoyably spooky sense of threat.

There’s a bit more spy stuff in that Ali knows he is being watched and all his messages are being opened and read. For him it is a stroke of luck that this street urchin who he uses to run errands has now decided on some cock and bull mission to help some lama head East, it suits him down to the ground to give him the secret message to deliver to Colonel Creighton in Umballa. And so, in a nice little scene, Ali, having divested himself of the folded up letter, goes along to one of his favourite prostitutes, ‘the Flower of Delight’, in a bordello, where he allows himself to be completely stoned on opium, knowing that the prostitute is a spy, knowing she is in league with foreign agents, knowing that, once he has passed out, these mystery men – ‘a smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit’ and ‘a sleek young gentleman from Delhi’ – will appear and thoroughly search his clothes and belongings, which is what they do. Not only that but they lift his keys and go to his stall/shop and search that very thoroughly – but are puzzled and frustrated to find nothing. Kim is pretending to be asleep, alongside the lama and the Balti servants, but sees all this taking place, and realises Ali is involved in something and that the message and piece of paper he’s to deliver to Creighton in Umballa are probably much more important than an innocuous message about a horse Ali has sold. (Later, in chapter 8 he tells Ali about this episode and how it was his first inkling that more was going on, pages 113 to 115.)

Next morning Kim helps the lama navigate a modern train station and get on a steam train and off they set, amid much local colour and much conversation on the train from the other travellers. One of the women takes to the lama and offers to put them up in the courtyard of the house in Umballa she’s heading to.

So they alight at Umballa and this woman very kindly sees them settled in her courtyard. But Kim explains he has to do an errand and makes his way to the luxury compound of this Creighton, clearly a man of influence. He comes out onto the veranda for a smoke, clearly a big social do is planned for that evening. His wife calls through the French windows so we learn his name is William Creighton.

a) Kim hiding in the shrubbery whispers that he’s there and he’s got a message from Ali. He throws the piece of folded paper onto the veranda where Creighton steps on it just as a servant enters. b) Kim then witnesses a carriage pulling up and another white man talking to Creighton, from the tone of his conversation his deputy. Then, apparently, the Commander in Chief of the Indian Army arrives and Kim watches them in conference, discussing this report, how it confirms their suspicions about the Russians etc. Kim doesn’t understand all the references but the reader realises they’re preparing for war, mention of two regiments being prepared, 8,000 men.

Characteristically, Creighton is made to say it isn’t a war, it’s a punishment (p.35). This is characteristically self serving, as if the British Empire alone has the right to adjudicate any other country’s behaviour and to allot punishment like a schoolmaster. It is also characteristically mendacious because, if this refers to the Second Afghan War of 1878 to 1880, then the Lord Salisbury book makes it clear that London regarded the whole thing as the fault of the aggressive policy of the British authorities on the ground, of the Viceroy overstepping his authority.

Thirdly, it is also very characteristic of Kipling’s sadistic streak which makes many of his stories unpleasant to read. This is a good example. There is a strong element of gloating in the narrator (Kipling)’s voice, as he looks forward to giving ‘the sympathetic Northern Power’ a damn good thrashing.

Kim returns to the compound of the friendly wife who gave shelter to the lama, and the next couple of chapters describe their onwards travels and the wide variety of Indian types they meet as they journey through India’s huge hot flatlands, then arrive at the legendary Grand Trunk Road.

‘Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters – all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood.’ And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles—such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world. (p.51 cf p.56)

Lovely descriptions including their overnight stay at a parao or resting place where all types of Indians stop, make camp, light little fires. Here the lama is requested by a grand lady riding in a covered bullock wagon. She asks if the lama will bless her and accompany her on her mission to visit her son. the lama, in his simple way, agrees.

The next plot development is a few days later they are sheltering in a grove when they see advancing towards them a few men who peg out the flat land, followed by a horde who turn out to be a regiment of the British army. And their regimental flag is the image of a red bull on a green background. Kim is transfixed. It’s his father’s prophecy come true!

Once the compound is staked out and hundreds of tents erected, Kim sneaks past the guard and closer to spy what’s going on. But he is caught, after a scuffle, by the Anglican chaplain, Bennett (p.73). Having secured his prisoner, Bennett calls for the Catholic chaplain, Father Victor. In their different ways they interrogate Kim (Father Victor is by far the more sympathetic and forgiving). During the scuffle the necklace Kim has worn all his life with a little pouch of documents comes free and when the two priests examine them they are flabbergasted to discover that Kim is the orphan son of a former sergeant in their very regiment! (p.74) Well, what a coincidence – or kismet, as the Roman Catholic chaplain insists.

There’s a very long scene where the two priests detach Kim from the case of his lama, both of them very upset, until the lama concludes he was a fool to let himself become attached to things of this world, stands and disappears into the night.

Kim is given to the care of the drummer boys with a sergeant to guard and ensure he doesn’t try to escape. When Kim asks where the regiment is headed they say back to barracks but he contradicts them, telling them they will soon be heading off to ‘thee war’ as he pronounces it. Everyone laughs. But the next day the regiment does receive orders to move to the front (presumably up to the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan) and Bennett and Victor, in particular, are flabbergasted.

So they march back to the regimental barracks at Umballa. Here most of the fighting men entrain for the frontier and disappear, leaving the barracks half empty and echoing. Kim hates it. He hates the scratchy uniform they force him to wear, hates the ‘education’, the ‘discipline’ which consists of beatings, hates being humiliated by the teachers, and hates the other drummer boys he’s in class with. They are ignorant and vulgar, their stupidity indicated by the casual racism with which they insult the locals, in a way which is a kind of blasphemy to native-born Kim.

He manages to get a local letter writer to write a letter to Mahbub Ali and a few days later is strolling at the edge of the barracks when he is scooped up by a dark clothed native on a horse and whisked away. This is Ali. But in another far-fetched coincidence, when Ali has come to a halt and is discussing with Kim what to do with him, an English horseman rides alongside and who should it be, but Creighton!

He and Ali maintain a facade that he is simply a customer for Ali’s horses but Kim knows better, if not what’s really going on. Creighton accompanies Ali as he rides Kim back to the barracks. As they arrive at the main office, Father Victor comes out and recognised Creighton as Head of the British Ethnological Survey (p.94).

Creighton sits on the veranda and rather patronisingly listens to Father Victor spell out everything he knows about the boy, while watching Ali and Kim yarning under a nearby tree. The more Creighton hears, the more special he realises Kim is, and the more he begins to realise how he can be useful in his (Creighton’s) schemes. So he ‘charitably’ volunteers to the Father to personally supervise the passage of young Kim to St Xavier’s College in Lucknow (which Kim and Ali mock by mispronouncing ‘Nucklao’). The deal is done, the Colonel tells Kim to stay put and wait just three days, then he’ll come for him.

(Later on we discover that, surprisingly, the lama will pay the fees for the top notch private college, 300 rupees a year. This is because, again surprisingly, he is revealed to be the abbot of his lamasery back in Tibet (in Such-zen), and so has access to funds. It’s just that he chooses not to spend them on himself. But ‘Education is greatest blessing if of best sorts’, as he later writes in a letter to Kim.)

The way Ali and the Colonel speak loudly in the code of buying and selling horses, but really referring to information or about how to handle Kim, is amusing in its rather naive spyishness.

Three days later they travel south by train to Lucknow, the Colonel in First Class, Kim ill at ease in second. He preferred the sociability of third class when he travelled with the lama. He notices how white people have a special kind of detachment and loneliness.

Creighton gives him a cab to take to the Xavier College, but while cruising round this big city, Kim is astonished to see his lama sitting on a kerb. They are joyfully reunited. But Kim sticks to his promise and eventually arrives at the College.

Here, for the first time, the narrative ceases to be a moment-by-moment description and goes up a level to describe the passage of an entire term. Kim thrives. He is quick and canny. He learns to read and write in the company of three hundred other precocious youths. Kipling gives an extraordinarily knowledgeable overview of their classes and backgrounds:

They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as commanders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajah’s army; of captains of the Indian Marine Government pensioners, planters, Presidency shopkeepers, and missionaries. A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollah—Pereiras, De Souzas, and D’Silvas. Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St Xavier’s. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar; lost tea-gardens Shillong-way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona-plantations south of all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy’s hair. They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have bathed in the English Channel in an English August than their brothers across the world would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin. There were boys of fifteen who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge, as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine. There were seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah’s elephant, in the name of St Francis Xavier, when the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father’s estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand. There was a boy who, he said, and none doubted, had helped his father to beat off with rifles from the veranda a rush of Akas in the days when those head-hunters were bold against lonely plantations.

This is also by way of being in praise of the native-born, boys of white ancestry who are, nonetheless, born and bred in India and so a) lacking the nervous racism and racial supremacy of whites born and imported from England; and b) understanding the country, have a natural gift of command.

When the holidays come Kim goes walkabout, goes travelling round India, using the railway pass Creighton had given him. Creighton meets with Ali and bemoans this but Ali contradicts, saying it is good for one training to be a spy to keep up his talent for blending in; he’ll come back. Sure enough, a month later, Ali actually bumps into Kim on the Kalki road, they talk, Kim assures him he’s going back to Xavier’s for the new term.

There are a lot of chance, coincidental meetings in this narrative.

Ali invites him to join his team, giving him a thumb-stamped piece of paper which makes his servants accept him, where they’re gathered round the horse boxes to sleep for the night. The incident where Kim overhears the two agents who searched opium-zonked Ali back in chapter 3, now conspiring to assassinate him. Kim slips away and intercepts Ali as he’s riding back to his camp. Ali then cannily persuades the British station authorities that thieves are lying in wait in the sidings, so a British officer and policeman go in search and find them leading to a fight with guns and knives. Meanwhile Kim is back in his sleeping blanket, well pleased with his service to Ali. ‘Thy fate and mine seem as on one string’.

Ali takes Kim with him by train and road up to Simla, the Raj’s summer resort in the mountains. Here he is interviewed by Lurgan. Lurgan turns out to be an eccentric whose profession is jeweller – specifically, repairing worn out old gems and pearls – but he also keeps an old curiosity shop full of masks and bric-a-brac. He tests Kim’s nerve on the first night by revealing all the devil masks by lamplight then making him go sleep among them. Lurgan’s boy assistant of jealous of the new arrival and he and Kim fight, while Lurgan watches on, amused.

Kim stays with Lurgan for ten days, watching the variety of his customers, and playing games of memory in the evenings. We and Kim realise that it’s all part of his training to become a field agent.

At the end of the day, Kim and the Hindu boy…were expected to give a detailed account of all that they had seen and heard – their view of each man’s character, as shown in his face, talk, and manner, and their notions of his real errand.

They spend much time using make-up to adopt various disguises and Lurgan gives long lectures about the specific attributes of different tribes and castes and religious or ethnic groups.

The Hindu child played this game clumsily. That little mind, keen as an icicle where tally of jewels was concerned, could not temper itself to enter another’s soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing dresses, and changed speech and gesture therewith. (p.135)

‘Therewith’? Typical of Kipling’s crabbed, archaic prose style. Anyway, Kim comes to realise that Lurgan, too, is part of the network of operatives, part of the ‘Great Game’. When it’s time for Kim to finally go back to school, Lurgan tells him he’s welcome to return at the next holidays.

One of the visitors to the shop had been a Babu (a term of address for an educated man which, in English hands, became a sort of insult), a morbidly obese man who, Lurgan tells Kim, is one of the top 10 secret operatives in the country. His name is Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and (the narrator tells us) his agent number is R.17. If you’ve got a good memory (or can check an online text) you find that this is the same R.17 who produced the report that Mahbub Ali passed onto Kim to pass onto Creighton i.e. he really is a key operative.

Lurgan tells him there is a price on the Babu’s head as there is on the head of Mahbub Ali. Kim is boyishly excited, looking forward to the day when there is a price on his head!

This fat man is one of the members of the convoy which sets off four days later from Simla, heading back down into the plains. Before they split up Hurree gives Kim a betel box as reward for his achievements so far.

The narrative again moves up a level in order to skate through Kim’s school career. He is proficient in maths and practical knowledge, learns to play cricket, wins prizes. He is 14 years and ten months old, then fifteen years and eight months i.e. we are zipping forwards. Altogether Kim is 3 years at St Xavier’s College (p.139).

Remember the Tibetan lama? During this whole period he is offered hospitality at the Temple of Tirtankars in Benares, going on pilgrimages and travels, but always returning there, from where he and Kim exchange letters. (In fact we are told that the Curator of the Wonder House i.e. Lahore Museum, currently possesses a written account of all his journeyings.)

In holiday times he goes many journeys with Ali, who gets him to start doing small espionage tasks. Then he stays with Lurgan where he learns to recite the Koran, various spells and cures etc. Spycraft. The Colonel tests his ability with surveillance equipment and skill at making maps.

The past

There’s a very important paragraph on page 144. This says that a particular report Kim wrote (a survey of a town he visited with Ali):

was on hand a few years ago…but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible.

This is important because it’s the first indication that all this happened some time ago, long enough ago for the pencil characters to have faded and become illegible. There’s been a few hints earlier but this really rams home the sense that all this happened in the historic past. Until this moment the reader had the sense it was happening right now, in the present.

Continued in Part Two.

Scenes and descriptions

Odd and clotted though Kipling’s prose often is, he strews the book with beautiful word paintings.

The teeming city

The hot and crowded bazaars blazed with light as they made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned through it like a man in a dream. It was his first experience of a large manufacturing city, and the crowded tram-car with its continually squealing brakes frightened him. Half pushed, half towed, he arrived at the high gate of the Kashmir Serai: that huge open square over against the railway station, surrounded with arched cloisters, where the camel and horse caravans put up on their return from Central Asia. Here were all manner of Northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles; drawing water for the evening meal at the creaking well-windlasses; piling grass before the shrieking, wild-eyed stallions; cuffing the surly caravan dogs; paying off camel-drivers; taking on new grooms; swearing, shouting, arguing, and chaffering in the packed square.

Lahore train station

The sleepers sprang to life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.

Portraits

The horse-trader, his deep, embroidered Bokhariot belt unloosed, was lying on a pair of silk carpet saddle-bags, pulling lazily at an immense silver hookah.

A black-bearded man, with a green shade over his eyes, sat at a table, and, one by one, with short, white hands, picked up globules of light from a tray before him, threaded them on a glancing silken string, and hummed to himself the while.

The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck, wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heavy native jewellery. When she turned it was like the clashing of copper pots. A lean cat in the balcony outside the window mewed hungrily.

India

All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.

The countryside

They followed the rutted and worn country road that wound across the flat between the great dark-green mango-groves, the line of the snowcapped Himalayas faint to the eastward. All India was at work in the fields, to the creaking of well-wheels, the shouting of ploughmen behind their cattle, and the clamour of the crows.

In the shade

The lama squatted under the shade of a mango, whose shadow played checkerwise over his face; the soldier sat stiffly on the pony; and Kim, making sure that there were no snakes, lay down in the crotch of the twisted roots. There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields.

Dusk in the countryside

By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the lower branches of the mango-trees; the parakeets and doves were coming home in their hundreds; the chattering, grey-backed Seven Sisters, talking over the day’s adventures, walked back and forth in twos and threes almost under the feet of the travellers; and shufflings and scufflings in the branches showed that the bats were ready to go out on the night-picket. Swiftly the light gathered itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the cartwheels and the bullocks’ horns as red as blood. Then the night fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes.

Simla by night

Together they set off through the mysterious dusk, full of the noises of a city below the hillside, and the breath of a cool wind in deodar-crowned Jakko, shouldering the stars. The house-lights, scattered on every level, made, as it were, a double firmament. Some were fixed, others belonged to the rickshaws of the careless, open-spoken English folk, going out to dinner.

Dawn

The diamond-bright dawn woke men and crows and bullocks together. Kim sat up and yawned, shook himself, and thrilled with delight. This was seeing the world in real truth; this was life as he would have it—bustling and shouting, the buckling of belts, and beating of bullocks and creaking of wheels, lighting of fires and cooking of food, and new sights at every turn of the approving eye. The morning mist swept off in a whorl of silver, the parrots shot away to some distant river in shrieking green hosts: all the well-wheels within ear-shot went to work. India was awake, and Kim was in the middle of it, more awake and more excited than anyone…

Educated to command the empire

One must never forget that one is a Sahib, and that some day, when examinations are passed, one will command natives. (p.107)

Background characters

I like counting and the book’s availability online makes it easy to make a list of secondary or background characters, who pop up as context and colour:

  • Lala Dinanath’s boy
  • half-caste woman who looks after Kim
  • little Chota Lal
  • Abdullah the sweetmeat-seller’s son
  • Mahbub Ali, the horse-trader
  • his Baltis (servants from Baltistan)
  • the Flower of Delight, a prostitute
  • a smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit, a spy
  • a sleek young gentleman from Delhi, another spy
  • a sleepy railway clerk
  • a burly Sikh artisan
  • the blueturbaned, well-to-do cultivator – a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur district
  • his shrill wife
  • a fat Hindu money-lender
  • an Amritzar courtesan laden with head drapery
  • a young Dogra soldier ‘of the Ludhiana Sikhs’, going south on leave
  • a market-gardener, Arain by caste, growing vegetables and flowers for Umballa city
  • the village headman, white-bearded and affable elder, used to entertaining strangers
  • the ‘old withered’ retired soldier who stayed true during the Mutiny, ‘Rissaldar Sahib’
  • the village priest
  • a Punjabi constable on the Great Trunk Road
  • ‘thin-legged, grey-bearded Ooryas from down country’
  • ‘duffle-clad, felt-hatted hillmen of the North’
  • the virtuous and high-born widow of Kulu or Saharunpore, travelling in the ruth or bullock cart attended by servants
  • a dark, sallowish District Superintendent of Police, faultlessly uniformed (who jokes with the rich widow)
  • the Reverend Arthur Bennett, Church of England chaplain of the Mavericks
  • Father Victor, Catholic chaplain of the Mavericks
  • at the barracks, the drummer-boy who had been hanging round him all the forenoon—a fat and freckled person of about fourteen

How Kim plays people

  • Kim changed his tone promptly to match that altered voice.
  • Kim knew what the faquirs of the Taksali Gate were like when they talked among themselves, and copied the very inflection of their lewd disciples.
  • ‘Nay, what is it?’ Kim said, dropping into his most caressing and confidential tone—the one, he well knew, that few could resist.
  • ‘True. That is true.’ Kim used the thoughtful, conciliatory tone of those who wish to draw confidences.
  • ‘It is permitted,’ said Kim, and threw back the very tone.
  • ‘God knows!’ said Kim cheerily. The tone might almost have deceived Mahbub Ali, but it failed entirely with the healer of sick pearls.

Kim’s character

  • ‘No white man knows the land and the customs of the land as thou knowest.’ (The lama to Kim, p.79)
  • ‘He was born in the land. He has friends. He goes where he chooses. He is a chabuk sawai (a sharp chap). It needs only to change his clothing, and in a twinkling he would be a low-caste Hindu boy.’ (p.93)
  • ‘Thou wast born to be a breaker of hearts!’ [a houri painting Kim with walnut juice so he appears native]
  • often in the past few months had caught himself thinking of the queer, silent, self-possessed boy. His evasion, of course, was the height of insolence, but it argued some resource and nerve. [Creighton thinking about Kim, p.109]
  • ‘Colonel Sahib, only once in a thousand years is a horse born so well fitted for the game as this our colt. And we need men.’ (Mahbub Ali to Colonel Creighton describing Kim’s aptitude, p.142)

On the nature of a spy

In Simla the pearl jeweller Lurgan explains to Kim that:

‘From time to time, God causes men to be born – and thou art one of them – who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some near-by men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best.’ (p.136)

Eighteen proverbs

The Norton edition includes a letter from Kipling to his favourite cousin, Margaret Burne-Jones, dated Lahore 28 November 1885, in which he answers her questions about life in India and, in doing so, summarises his own attitudes. He says the Indians are:

Touchy as children; obstinate as men; patient as the High Gods themselves; vicious as Devils but always loveable if you know how to take ’em. And so far as I know, the proper way to handle ’em is not by looking on ’em as ‘an excitable mass of barbarism’ (I speak for the Punjab only) or the ‘down trodden millions of Ind groaning under the heel of an alien and unsympathetic despotism,’ but as men with a language of their own which it is your business to understand; and proverbs which it is your business to quote (this is a land of proverbs) and byewords and allusions which it is your business to master; and feelings which it is your business to enter into and sympathise with. (Norton edition, page 269)

Well that explains his liberal use of proverbs throughout the text. They are just one of Kipling’s many strategies to create a sense of authenticity, a sense that we are inside Indian culture, listening to Indian people speaking in their own languages, using their own references, phrases, ideas and…proverbs.

  1. ‘Who hold Zam-Zammah, hold the Punjab’
  2. ‘Those who beg in silence starve in silence’
  3. ‘Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi’ (a Northern proverb)
  4. ‘Two arrows in the quiver are better than one; and three are better still’
  5. ‘For the sick cow a crow; for the sick man a Brahmin’
  6. ‘The husbands of the talkative have a great reward hereafter’
  7. ‘Never make friends with the Devil, a Monkey, or a Boy. No man knows what they will do next.’
  8. ‘Never speak to a white man till he is fed’
  9. ‘Trust a Brahmin before a snake, and a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan’
  10. ‘I will change my faith and my bedding, but thou must pay for it’
  11. ‘Who looks for a rat in a frog pond’ (p.117)
  12. ‘When one can get blind-sides of a woman, a stallion, or a devil, why go round to invite a kick?’ (Ali, p.152)
  13. ‘Where there is no eye there is no caste,’ the Kamboh (p.165)
  14. ‘One priest always goes about to make another priest,’ the Kamboh (p.167)
  15. ‘Who goes to the hills goes to his mother.’ (p.192)
  16. ‘There are more ways of getting to a sweetheart than butting down a wall.’ (Hurree Babu, p.201)
  17. ‘So I should lose Delhi for the sake of a fish’
  18. ‘God made the Hare and the Bengali. What shame?’

Whiteness

The word ‘Sahib’ occurs 336 times, ‘white’ 121 times, ‘English’ 115 times.

The novel is very far from promoting white triumphalism. For sure, Colonel Creighton is depicted as a moral and administrative anchor, representing all that is stern and dutiful and wise in the Raj, but all the other white people come in for quite a lot of scrutiny or criticism.

Two types of whiteness are dramatised in the two chaplains, Bennett and Father Victor. Bennett, the only representative in the novel of the state religion, the Church of England, comes in for sustained criticism. He is thin, bony, aggressive, rude, completely unsympathetic to Kim, refuses to believe anything he says, would have offended the lama by giving him money to go away, until the Irishman Father Victor, far more sympathetically portrayed, intervenes to stop him. Kim and the lama remain the centre of the narrative and the reader’s sympathies. When Kim tells the lama that Bennett and Victor want to make him a Sahib like them, the lama strongly disapproves:

‘That is not well. These men follow desire and come to emptiness. Thou must not be of their sort.’

Later the lama described his loyalty to his monastery and his devotions and rather waspishly declares:

‘The Sahibs have not all this world’s wisdom.’

Kipling has the high-born widow, the woman from Kulu who adopts the lama, deliver trenchant criticism of different types of British administrator. After encountering an older, relaxed English official, she remarks:

‘These be the sort’ – she took a fine judicial tone, and stuffed her mouth with pan – ‘These be the sort to oversee justice. They know the land and the customs of the land. The others, all new from Europe, suckled by white women and learning our tongues from books, are worse than the pestilence. They do harm to Kings.’

Sahibs are often portrayed as stupid, racist, ignorant casually insulting. At St Xavier’s College Kim is warned not to treat the natives as lazy and stupid, the implication being that all too many of the colonial English do just that, damaging the reputation of the regime (p.121).

What makes the arrogant rudeness of so many of the whites harder for the natives to take, is that they are often so stupid themselves.

No man could be a fool who knew the language so intimately, who moved so gently and silently, and whose eyes were so different from the dull fat eyes of other Sahibs.

Mahbub Ali is a horse trader and has observed that, although most white men know next to nothing about horses, that doesn’t stop them from making all kinds of ignorant and sometimes insulting remarks:

That was the reason that Sahib after Sahib, rolling along in a stage-carriage, would stop and open talk. Some would even descend from their vehicles and feel the horses’ legs; asking inane questions, or, through sheer ignorance of the vernacular, grossly insulting the imperturbable trader.

Later, during Kim’s school years at the college, Ali remarks:

‘Son, I am wearied of that madrissah, where they take the best years of a man to teach him what he can only learn upon the Road. The folly of the Sahibs has neither top nor bottom.’ (p.145)

Ali is a reputable character, who grows in sympathy and status throughout the novel, so this is a credible view.

In other words, the creation of Kim as a character, and his easy way of mingling with numerous native Indian types – travellers, widows, soldiers, families, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, traders, spies – enables Kipling to depict the entire range of white British presence in India from the outside, from the native point of view – and find it very wanting indeed. I wonder whether, when he started writing the book, Kipling realised just how much the creation of the boy outsider would enable him to mount quite such a sustained critique of Englishness, whiteness and Sahibdom.

White boys

White boys abound in the book but not at all as heroes, almost entirely as bad comparators with plucky Kim. The worst are the ‘drummer boys’ of Kim’s father’s regiment, depicted as fat, stupid, monosyllabic, lonely, bullying. They will never have Kim’s immersive knowledge of Indian cultures and street life. Again and again Kipling depicts them as ignorant, given to casual insults and racist abuse of the natives, while they themselves wouldn’t survive five minutes if thrown out into the real India. Compare and contrast with out plucky hero.

Now a bed among brickbats and ballast-refuse on a damp night, between overcrowded horses and unwashed Baltis, would not appeal to many white boys; but Kim was utterly happy. Change of scene, service, and surroundings were the breath of his little nostrils.

It’s true that in some of his summaries of Kim’s peers at Xavier’s, Kipling is sympathetic to the specific professions and jobs of their fathers. They are seen as doing good and worthy, unglamorous but necessary jobs for the regime. Nonetheless, they are all utterly eclipsed by the glamorous protagonist.

Stalky and Co.

I suppose it’s obvious, but these middle passages describing Kim’s schoolboy years at St Xavier’s College also bear direct comparison with the schoolboy stories collected in Stalky and Co which Kipling published a few years previously. There are reminiscences of the same snideness, the same facetious depiction of schoolmaster, the same sense of unpleasant schoolboy rivalries.

Talking of echoes, Kim also recalls one his two other novels, Captains Courageous from 1897, which is also about a schoolboy, in fact another fifteen-year-old – in this case Harvey Cheyne Jr, the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon.

Most of Kipling’s stories are about adults, obviously. But it tells you something about his not-quite-serious engagement with the world that four of Kipling’s five sustained narratives (the novels The Light That Failed, Captains Courageous and Kim, and the sequences of linked stories, The Jungle Book and Stalky and Co) are about boys.

The movie

Here’s the trailer for the 1950 movie version of the novel, starring the 14-year-old Dean Stockwell and Errol Flynn as Red Beard, Kim’s protector and British spy in the Great Game, a figure largely invented to make the film more dramatic.

Credit

Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. All references are to the 2002 Norton Critical Edition edited by Zohreh T. Sullivan.

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by Simon on September 11, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, India, Literary criticism, Novel
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Posted by Simon on September 11, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/11/kim-rudyard-kipling-part-1/

Virtual War: Kosovo and beyond by Michael Ignatieff (2000)

Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.

Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.

In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:

  1. 1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
  2. 1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
  3. 2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
  4. 2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
  5. 2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
  6. 2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World

His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.

But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.

Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.

But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:

exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)

Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.

(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)

Virtual warfare

Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.

1. The public

It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?

2. Air force screens

It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.

Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.

Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.

3. No army

Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?

And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.

Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?

How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:

1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?

2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?

3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.

Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.

On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.

4. No mandate

Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically at war. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.

NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?

I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.

NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.

To intervene or not intervene?

Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.

Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.

The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.

Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.

He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligated to intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).

And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.

In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Content

As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:

  • Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
  • Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
  • General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
  • Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
  • Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.

As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.

Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.

Critique

1. The idea of a screen war not so novel

For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.

But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).

And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.

2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict

At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.

But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).

OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.

So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’

In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.

It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.

In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?

These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.

Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:

This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)

His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.

But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:

the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)

America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.

The scale of the waste

Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.

One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).

But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.

Pleasure

Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.

He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.

Credit

Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 15, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/15/virtual-war-kosovo-and-beyond-michael-ignatieff/

The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3

It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)

This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.

Book 5: The second rebellion

The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.

1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels

At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.

By this point we’re getting used to certain things.

  1. This is a world made up of scores and scores of tribes who co-exist uneasily, continually liable to be invaded or go invading themselves.
  2. Raiding other tribes’ territories seems to be a common occurrence so presumably is a standard way of making a living, acquiring land or loot.
  3. Caesar has a standard methodology. Where possible, meet and threaten representatives of the erring tribe. If they persist in troubling the peace, attack and defeat them. Either way, you insist on them sending hostages to be kept as security against good behaviour.

This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.

He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.

9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain

Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.

They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.

They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.

He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.

He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.

He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.

Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.

Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.

The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.

Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.

When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.

Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.

Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.

26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion

Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.

The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).

Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.

It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.

38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero

Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.

The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.

Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.

By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.

Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.

Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.

But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.

In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.

Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.

When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.

Book 6: (53 BC)

1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul

Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.

Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.

Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.

9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi

Another Rhine crossing:

  1. to punish the Germans who had sent the Treveri reinforcements
  2. to prevent Ambiorix finding asylum there

The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.

11 to 20: Description of the Gauls

Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).

When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.

Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)

21 to 28: Description of the Germans

More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.

The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.

He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.

The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.

29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul

Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.

The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.

Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.

Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.

Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.

The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.

This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.

Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.

Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)

By far the longest book.

1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader

The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.

This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:

compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.

In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.

8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni

But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.

This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.

15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum

Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.

So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.

Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.

34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia

The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men

This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.

54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.

58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.

63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.

They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.

68 to 89: The siege of Alesia

The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.

Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.

Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC

The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.

Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.

The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.

The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.

A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.

The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)

Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.

Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.

Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.

(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)

Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.

Book 8

This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.

Preface

Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.

He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.

1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul

Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.

At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.

Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.

49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate

Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.

Thoughts

Political consequences

1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.

2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war

The war itself

1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.

2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.

3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.

Anti-imperialism

One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.

It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.

Slavery

Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:

Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)

At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.

In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?

Eternal war

The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.

The stupidity of war

Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn down their own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.

War crimes

In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.

Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.

On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:

Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)

There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).

At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.

The scarlet cloak

Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).

Video

A useful video summary.

Related link

Roman reviews

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Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern (2004)

“You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”
(Radio Milles Collines)

“Go everywhere, spare no one, not even babies.”
(Lieutenant Bizumuremyi)

“No amount of its cash or its aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.”
(Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, talking about the UN’s guilt)

Linda Melvern

Melvern is a seasoned investigative journalist who worked on the Sunday Times in the 1980s. In her introduction, she tells us she was putting the finishing touches to The Ultimate Crime, a history of the United Nation’s first fifty years, at the UN headquarters in New York, when the first reports of the Rwanda genocide started to come in in April 1994.

She was able to interview people within the UN hierarchy and monitor the institution’s ham-fisted response as events unfolded, and this forms the basis of her first book on the subject, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (1995).

So why write another book on the same subject ten years later? The central reason is that during that time the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was set up and went to work, tracking down and bringing to justice the Rwandan army and government officials responsible for the genocide. The ICTR’s work resulted in a wealth of new evidence, the coming to light of countless documents, letters, faxes and so on, as well as extensive eye-witness accounts of key meetings and events.

In addition, documents and paperwork regarding the role of Western nations such as Belgium, France, the US and UK had emerged, as well as memoirs by central players, most notably Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and whose book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was published in 2003.

Using her contacts at the UN Melvern has amassed extensive records of communications, faxes, memos which passed between its senior officials, such as the Secretary-General himself, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and his appointment as head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, who didn’t get on at all with Dallaire, and did everything to subvert his authority.

And then there are documents and quotes from the international charities involved such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Africa Watch and more.

In other words, this book is an update of her previous one which takes account of the huge number of new documents and testimonies which had become available, and this explains why the book is littered with references to witnesses, witness accounts, interrogations, statements under oath, quotations from papers, memoirs, faxes, interviews and much more.

Scholarly apparatus

This explains why there is such a scholarly apparatus to the book, which has 100 pages of notes and appendices. The notes themselves are very thorough and I enjoyed reading some of the random factoids as much as the main text (such as the fact that ‘There are no surnames in Rwanda. Women do not take the name of their husbands, and children do not bear the name of their parents.’ p.285; or that Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana had his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, who he overthrew in a coup, locked up and starved to death because Habyarimana had a voodoo superstition that if he spilled Kayibanda’s blood in any way, he would be haunted by his spirit, p.287).

The notes are followed by a long section on sources, detailing books, reports, papers and journals relating to the genocide. I can imagine these would be very useful for a scholar setting out to study the genocide.

There’s a 13-page chronology of Rwanda which starts in the colonial period, but once it arrives at the commencement of the civil war with the invasion of the RPF in October 1990 becomes surprisingly gripping.

And, most striking of all, Melvern includes the full text of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It’s only five pages long. And – according to my present understanding – completely failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, Saddam’s attempts to exterminate the Kurds, the mass murders in former Yugoslavia (Srebrenica, Kosovo), the Darfur genocide, mass murders in the Syrian civil war and what, nowadays, seems to be accepted as China’s repression and mass murders of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Apart from these blips, it’s been a roaring success.

It’s worth quoting the official UN definition of genocide in full:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

  • Killing members of the group
  • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
  • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
  • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
  • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

I’m interested to see the words ‘in part’. I thought genocide meant the intent to completely wipe out a group; I’m interested to see it’s significantly broader than that. I bet there’s vast scholarly debate on the subject…

Conspiracy to murder – the downsides

Terrible style

So much for the provenance of the book, what’s it like to read? Well unfortunately, despite the huge amount of research which Melvern has obviously put into the book, it suffers from some severe deficiencies. Very quickly you realise she writes a clunky, repetitive form of English, with odd, uncomfortable phrasing of even simple facts. Quite a few sentences felt like they’d been translated from another language and I frequently wondered whether English is Melvern’s first language, she sometimes struggles so badly to express herself in it.

Poor narrative skills

Bigger than that, though, is Melvern’s struggle to fully work through the material she’s amassed. The clunky English is often the expression of tortuous thinking.

The opening chapters giving the earlier history of Rwanda through the colonial period, the Hutu Revolution of 1959, the Habyarimana coup of 1973 and the build-up to the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990, all these are basic facts which are admirably described in the books by Philip Gourevitch, Fergal Keane, David van Reybrouck or the Wikipedia entries.

But in Melvern’s hands they are told in a contorted way which I sometimes found hard to follow. For example, it was only because I’d read the other, much more clearly expressed accounts, that I could follow her description of the RPF’s origins in Uganda. She doesn’t bring out the key role played by the RPF leaders in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which overthrew Uganda’s dictator Milton Obote, and how that experience inspired them to think about attempting to overthrow their dictator, Juvénal Habyarimana.

The facts are all here but Melvern often lacks the ability to bring to the fore the ones that matter while leaving others in the background, to shape the facts into a narrative. Reading a book like this which completely lacks that skill makes you realise how important it is, particularly in factual-historical narratives.

Lack of interpretation

The same goes in spades for the end of the book. One of the concluding chapters looks in detail at the numerous (conspiracy) theories which have arisen around the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s private jet, which was what triggered the crisis. Melvern lists all the theories which have been put forward over the previous ten years by an impressive roster of interested parties, but she never manages to come to a conclusion. The more I read, the more confused I became. She doesn’t state which one she, as an investigative journalist who’s given it more time than you or I will ever manage, believes in (pages 260 to 266).

Even more glaring is the crude and clumsy way the book ends. The final chapter describes the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but fails to stand back and give us an overview of its work. Instead it dives right into a detailed account of the proceedings against one of the central figures, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, drilling down to such a detailed level that she quotes the cross-questioning Bagosora was subjected to in court by prosecuting council, Canadian lawyer Drew White (pages 281 to 283).

And then the book just stops, not quite in mid-sentence, but right in the middle of quoting the accusations White put to Bagosora and the latter’s indignant denials. It just stops, without any attempt at a conclusion or perspective.

I think all these flaws stem from Melvern’s apparent inability to think about the events she’s describing, to step back and place them in a wide-ranging intellectual or conceptual framework. Compare and contrast the terrific books on international affairs by Michael Ignatieff which I’ve just read. Ignatgieff is an intellectual to his fingertips, which means that he can’t describe any event in the real world without bringing to it fascinating and thought-provoking insights, placing it in a rich intellectual context, broadening individual moments out to make useful and interesting generalisations about civil war, humanitarian intervention and so on.

Melvern, by contrast, rarely if ever provides any insight into anything. She has amassed an awesome amount of documentation and arranged it in precise and accurate order, but this book doesn’t really reflect on any of it in any significant way.

Conspiracy to murder – the upsides

So far, so negative, and at moments in the first 50 or so pages I was tempted to put the book down for good and move on to something less clunky and more thoughtful. However, around page 60 the narrative is transformed with the UN decision to set up the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). From this point onwards the book becomes first interesting and then absolutely riveting. I found myself gripped and thrilled by the narrative.

As explained, this isn’t because of any storytelling skills on Melvern’s part – selecting light and shade, carefully modulating the pace, dropping in selected insights and context – no, it’s because she has assembled a precise and specific and detailed account of the events of the genocide and these are, in themselves, gripping, horrifying and addictive. I went from feeling very meh about her so-so attempts to describe the historical background, to being utterly riveted. From page 60 to 260 I couldn’t put the book down.

The documents she has so carefully assembled allow Melvern to put together a meticulous day-by-day, and often hour-by-hour account of the key decisions made by the key players. Since she uses eyewitness testimony which emerged during ICTR trials, we are taken right into the rooms where the key decisions were made. You can see the sweat on the foreheads of the army chiefs as they agonise over what to do in the emergency meeting called as soon as news of the president’s plane crash (on 6 April 1994) arrives. You can smell the cigarette smoke and the paranoia.

Eyewitnesses testify to the specific words and phrases used by the senior army figures as they debate who should assume power, as they agree it must not look like a coup, as they allow Hutu Power exponents like Théoneste Bagosora to insist that the civilian Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (a moderate Hutu) must not be allowed to take power. Witnesses testify to adjutants being sent into side rooms to phone through orders to the Presidential Guard. Within the hour Uwilingiyimana’s house was surrounded, then she was beaten and murdered (p.163).

Melvern includes transcriptions of phone calls made by ministers in the supposed interim government as the Presidential Guard knocked on their doors, made them and their families lie on the floor, then murdered them (p.151). It is terrifying.

On the government side, Melvern explains more clearly than anything else I’d read how the shot-down plane was carrying not only the president but the army chief of staff and key ministers so a real power vacuum appeared at the top of the Rwandan state (p.137). She shows how, although the exponents of Hutu Power had for a long time been developing a detailed plan for the complete extermination of the 10% or so of the population who were ethnic Tutsi, there was nonetheless initial confusion about who was to do what, and where power ultimately lay. It took some days before Jean Kambanda, a regional leader of the Hutu extremist party, the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), was appointed Prime Minister of the caretaker government and was its nominal leader throughout the genocide.

In fact one of the many fascinating things that comes over from her super-detailed account is that power shifted throughout the three month period of the genocide. By the end even the senior army officers were scared of the lawless, murderous Interahamwe militia and the men who controlled it who are, at one point, named as Robert Kajuga, Bernard Maniragaba, and Ephren Nkezabera (p.232) with their political master being Mathieu Ngirumpatse, chairman of Habyariman’s party, the MRND (p.198).

One of the absolutely key things which comes over in her account is the centrality of the Rwandan Civil War. I hadn’t quite grasped that UNAMIR was solely set up to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, which gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army.

Thus Dallaire arrived in the country 6 months before the genocide occurred and the early sections about his arrival are devoted to a very detailed consideration of what the accords demanded and how the Hutu Power die-hards within President Habyarimana’s cabinet and army absolutely refused to implement them. They would literally rather die than see RPF Tutsis in positions of power in the cabinet or the army.

Habyarimana’s government put as many obstacles as possible in the way of implementing the accords, and Melvern’s detailed explanation of how they did this, and which ministers in the government were responsible, and General Dallaire’s exasperated attempts to get the two side to co-operate, make for fascinating reading.

It also reinforces everything I’ve read in other accounts which is the idea that, as the Western sponsors of the peace deal, namely France, Belgium and America, brought pressure on Habyarimana, and as he showed signs of buckling, giving in and starting to implement the accords (i.e. integrating the Tutsi RPF into the Rwandan army and cabinet) that’s when the hardline Hutu faction decided to get rid of him. Hence the widely-held theory that it was soldiers, militia or even mercenaries following orders from Hutu Power extremists, who assassinated their own president and then blamed it on the Tutsi RPF.

And immediately put into force a long-gestated plan to exterminate the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda, some 1.5 million men, women, children and babies.

Radio Milles Collines

Her treatment of Radio Milles Collines is a good example of Melvern’s strong points. All the other accounts certainly mention the radio station and its role in spewing poisonous racist genocidal propaganda from its founding in July 1993 and then going into overdrive during the period of the actual genocide (7 April to 15 July 1994).

It is typical that Melvern gives it its full name – Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – and thereafter refers to its proper initialism (RTLMC).

But, more importantly, Melvern explains who founded it, how it was funded, how it was run. She names the director-general Félicien Kabuga; the director Ferdinand Nahimana who was a respected historian; Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, chairman of the executive committee, who was also policy director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so provided a direct conduit from the genocidal government; editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi, and the day-to-day manager, Phocas Habimana. She gives us pen portraits of the four main broadcasters:

  • Kantano Habimana, who called for “those who have guns [to] immediately go to these cockroaches [and] encircle them and kill them…”
  • Valérie Bemeriki, the only female presenter, who encouraged the use of machetes not guns to eradicate the Tuti, telling her listeners to “not kill those cockroaches with a bullet — cut them to pieces with a machete”
  • Noël Hitimana
  • and Georges Ruggiu, a white man from Belgium who urged listeners to kill Tutsis and told them that “graves were waiting to be filled”

So Melvern’s great strong point is that, in the words of the old cliché, she names the guilty men. And by naming them she makes the entire thing incredibly more real and present. Instead of being a faceless emitter of toxic propaganda, Radio Milles Collines becomes a much more real institution, populated by flesh and blood people with specific personalities. Via eyewitness accounts we sit in on some of the editorial meetings, we are told how the poison messages were sent by named officials in the army or Hutu Power leadership, she quotes from the broadcasts.

We get a feel for the smirkingly jokey style of Valérie Bemeriki and we get several pages of the account Ruggiu gave years later to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of, on several occasions, being shown round roadblocks in Kigali by the side of which were piles of bodies of people who had been hacked to pieces. He noticed that some of them were still breathing and suggested to the Interahamwe that they shoot dying to put them out of their misery, but the blood thirsty young men just laughed and said the ‘cockroaches’ weren’t worth a bullet (p.209).

So every element of the genocidal regime is treated in much more detail than in other accounts, and the repeated references to specific named individuals responsible for specific genocidal decisions and actions begins to build them up into real people. You can see why Melvin’s research was quoted in court proceedings against the génocidaires and why she is liberally quoted on the Wikipedia pages about many of them. It’s because she does such a good job of associating named individuals with specific meetings in specific locations which took specific murderous decisions.

She appears to have set out to document every single instance in which Tutsi were killed, even when it was ‘only’ a handful, documenting the time and place and numbers and the police or militia or army leaders in charge. In this sense the book is like a very long charge sheet.

The trials

And this brings us to another positive aspect of the book, which is the way she then follows these named individuals into their afterlives, on the run from the authorities, arrested, and then their court proceedings at the ICTR.

All the other books I’ve read roll straight on from the genocide to the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, to the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps, to the eventual invasion of eastern Zaire by the RPF, on to the overthrow of President Mobutu and so on, in a continuous sweep of unfolding history.

Melvern ignores all that, ends her main narrative with the victory of the RPF in July 1994, and then switches her focus to the efforts to bring the génocidaires to justice. And because she has named them so consistently throughout the text and, as far as the evidence allows, pinned them to specific meetings and decisions, by the end of the book these guys are more than just names, they have the same kind of monstrous reality as Goebbels or Himmler.

Image

Twelve of the leading Rwandan génocidaires and the sentences they received at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

This focus on trials prompted me to do a bit of searching on the internet and Immediately discovered  the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s website. As far as I can see this shut down in 2015, along with the court, some 20 years after it was set up. But it contains a simple but fascinating page listing all 92 genocidaires who were brought to with full details of the charges and their sentences.

Once I discovered this I began to look up the individuals Melvern mentions, for example the man who emerges as the closest thing to a mastermind of the genocide, Bagosora and then go on to surf through the documents relating to his trial.

Fascinating to see how so many of the people she mentions in the book were indeed brought to justice (including the popular singer Simon Bikindi, who wrote songs and made speeches inciting the Hutu majority to liquidate the Tutsi.)

We learn about the trial of Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine which published the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ in its December 1990 edition and played a key role in spreading Hutu supremacist ideology. During the genocide, Ngeze helped organise the Impuzamugambi militia and is  said to have personally supervised and taken part in torture, mass rape and killings of Tutsis.

About Matthieu Ngirumpatse and Edouard Karemera, key figures in organising the genocide who were both sentenced to life imprisonment. The RTLM directors Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, mentioned above, were both given life sentences.

Venturing beyond the ICTR website, I discovered that the smirking RTLM announcer Valérie Bemeriki was convicted by a gacaca or local community court and sentenced to life imprisonment which she is currently serving in Gikondo prison, Kigali.

Main findings and insights

The Rwandan genocide was preventable. Decisive intervention by a sizeable and properly armed force could have stopped it.

The West behaved shamefully. After ten of its peacekeepers were murdered, Belgium withdrew the rest and the Belgian foreign minister Willy Claes rang round other nations telling them to withdraw their troops as well, claiming they’d all be massacred (p.219).

It’s a complicated series of events, and Melvern documents how arguments and debates and discussions influence a body like the United Nations, but there was a catalogue of failings which she anatomises in great detail. One of these was that Dallaire’s alarmed messages were often intercepted and superceded by the far more calm and complacent assessments of the situation by Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh.

I knew the US not only downplayed the genocide but actively undermined the UNAMIR force. As the genocide got underway, the Americans argued for downscaling the UN presence against all Dallaire’s protests.

The US put every obstacle in the way. (p.234)

But it was news to me that the UK took America’s side and also made every effort to downplay the situation, to resist requests for help, only reluctantly sending a fleet of clapped out lorries towards the end of the murdering. David Hannay, Baron Hannay of Chiswick (Winchester and New College, Oxford) was our man at the UN, arguing that we shouldn’t intervene to save the genocide victims. John Major was British Prime Minister. Eternal shame.

To be fair to the Western powers, Melvern’s account brings out how a number of players, starting with the Rwandan government, managed to hoodwink people for some time by portraying the violence as a fresh outbreak of the civil war. In other words, some Western officials and most of the Western media thought it was just a resumption of the hostilities which had characterised the country since the October 1990 invasion.

These people, exemplified by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, later claimed they weren’t properly briefed by the UN bureaucracy, and she shows how there’s a flicker of truth in this, for example the way Booh-Booh doctored and toned down the accurate factual briefs an anguished Dallaire was sending daily from Kigali.

But it doesn’t hold up as much of a defence, because the foreign ministers of some other countries quickly grasped what was going on and spoke out against it early and strong, notably Colin Keating ambassador from New Zealand and the ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Spain, Argentina who lobbied hard for the massacres to be formally defined as a genocide. But the representatives of America and Britain vetoed this and they had the decisive say. Shame.

It goes without saying that the French government:

  • helped the genocidal regime at every opportunity
  • had military advisers at every level of the Rwandan army and Presidential Guard who did absolutely nothing to intervene or prevent the massacre
  • continued to break sanctions and fly in weapons to arm the murderers even after the genocidal massacres had begun
  • offered refuge to the wife and relatives of the assassinated president – some of the hardest core promulgators of racist, supremacist, genocidal Hutu Power ideology – in Paris
  • and then sent in a massive consignment of troops and equipment, not to stop the genocide, but to set up a safe haven in the western part of Rwanda into which over a million Hutu refugees, including the entire genocidal government, leaders of the murderous militias, could flee and be safe from the advancing RPF

“It was the French government which facilitated the cohesive migration of the interim government, in effect the political, military and administrative leadership of the genocide.” (p.250)

  • and then, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established, sent emissaries, journalists and historians to meet its new head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, to tell him that the stories about the genocide were simply untrue (p.275)

And then when the genocide was over… the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, blamed the UK and the USA for everything (p.260)

The French government stood shoulder to shoulder every step of the way with the administrators of the greatest genocide since the Holocaust. Even after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had conquered the whole of the country and brought the genocide to a halt – the only power on earth which acted to do so – the French continued to undermine them in every way possible, blame them for shooting down the president’s plane, accusing the RPF of massacres while conveniently sheltering, supporting and overlooking the crimes of their own Hutu clients. Viva la France!

RPF official Tito Rutaremara documented fifty-six ways in which the militias killed people in the genocide the French claimed never happened, including using machetes, clubs studded with nails, screwdrivers, hammers, hoes, spades and so on (p.253). Pregnant women were commonly disembowelled. Men had their penises cut off. Young children were chopped in half.

Accounts tend to focus on the anti-Tutsi propaganda and massacres, but Melvern brings out in some detail that many of the victims were moderate Hutus, who the Hutu fanatics saw as traitors to their own race, starting with the Hutu Prime Minister and all the moderate members of Habyarimana’s cabinet who were murdered in their homes within hours of the plane crash.

She also brings out the north-south divide in the country. The Hutu Power heartland was in the north and sometimes Hutus from the south were murdered indiscriminately simply because they were southerners. Up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, but as many as 200,000 Hutus were, too.

Main conclusion

Arriving exhausted at the end of the book, after 284 pages of gruellingly detailed evidence, one big conclusion leapt out at me. Gourevitch and Keane’s accounts both betray their nice white guy bewilderment and incomprehension at the scale and ferocity of the killing. Both men say, in effect, I have no idea why this happened.

Reading Melvern’s book totally explains why it happened. She explains how Hutu-Tutsi tension was over a century old, but received its modern animus as long ago as 1959 when the Hutu Revolution swept away the Tutsi monarchy, amid the usual feverish revolutionary rhetoric about overthrowing the exploiters and taking back their country for themselves.

She shows how this rhetoric never subsequently went away but became entrenched and embedded at every level of Rwandan society. Hutu propagandists, of which there were many, tried to make it a central plank of state education that the Tutsi were not Rwandan at all, but invaders from the North who had oppressed and enslaved the virtuous Hutu.

There was continual low-level harassment of Tutsis from independence in 1962 right through to 1994, which occasionally rose to the higher level of localised massacres. Real massacres. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of innocent Tutsis were hacked to pieces or hammered to death at intervals and various locations throughout the 1960s and 70s.

“I would like to inform the chamber that this hatred existed for a very long time, since 1959 in particular, until the time when the genocide took place in 1994.” (Militia leader and ICTR prosecution witness Omar Serushago, quoted on page 169)

So this was emphatically not a harmonious society living in peace. It was a society riven with inter-ethnic tension, in which localised pogroms broke out again and again, in which media at all levels – papers, magazines and radios – pumped out a continuous stream of anti-Tutsi propaganda.

In other words, closer familiarity with the problems of Rwandan society turns your attitude around 180 degrees, from wondering how such a thing could ever have happened, to wondering why it didn’t happen sooner.

In a sense the interest in the story is that such ferocious hatred had to wait so long to burst out into the open. And it’s interesting that it only did so under the stress of three Big Events:

  1. In 1989 there was a worldwide glut of raw materials which led to a collapse in the price for Rwanda’s main exports, tea and coffee, which itself led to widespread poverty, misery and the traditional search for scapegoats. The government encouraged the 90% Hutu population to blame ‘Tutsi exploiters’ in much the same way the Nazi government encouraged the German population to blame all their tribulations on the Jews. So: Economic stress.
  2. In October 1990 the small Rwandan Patriotic Force, soon to be led by Paul Kagame, invaded the north of the country, starting what became known as the Rwandan civil war, which underwent fluctuating fortunes for the invader and the government but led, eventually, to a peace treaty, the Arusha Accords, signed in the autumn of 1993. So: Civil war.
  3. Assassination of the president. On the night of 6 April 1994 Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down as it came in to land at Kigali airport. It was the middle of the night so families across the country heard about it on the TV news, which spread the rumour that the country was once again, suddenly, under treacherous attack. All the people the journalists spoke to remember where they were when they heard the news. It was a JFK or 9/11 moment. Everyone knew something terrible was going to happen, a state of extreme crisis was created. So: mysterious assassination of the country’s leader.

And then there’s the fourth factor or element, which isn’t quite an event but rather the thing Melvern devotes her book to, which is:

  1. The plan. Rwanda was a highly regimented, hierarchical and organised society. Since the RPF invasion of October 1990, influential elements in the cabinet, the civil service and above all the military, including the sinister Zero Network, had been making detailed plans to carry out a systematic, well-organised extermination of all the Tutsis which would end the Tutsi Problem forever.

So if you want a summary of why the Rwandan genocide took place, it goes something like this:

  1. Generations-long inter-ethnic hatred directed from the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority.
  2. Deep rural depression, affecting the living standards of most of the population and exacerbating existing tensions and resentments.
  3. Invasion of the country by a largely Tutsi force leading to civil war which could easily be portrayed as an attempt to reverse the Hutu revolution and re-subject the Hutu population to slavery and serfdom.
  4. The sudden, terrifying and mysterious assassination of the president leading to widespread panic and hysteria.
  5. At which (perfect psychological) moment the Hutu Power strategists immediately began implementing a far-reaching and well-worked-out plan for mass extermination, rousing a hard core of about 100,000 fanatical Hutu nationalists, at all levels of local government, who used lists of Tutsi names and addresses to drive from one neighbourhood to another, from one village to another, systematically rounding up all the Tutsi ‘spies and traitors’ who they accused of planning to help the invaders complete the reconquest of their country, and methodically hacking them to pieces with machetes, in a bid to end the ‘Tutsi Problem’ forever.

Surely if you put it like that, the Rwandan genocide is far from incomprehensible but can be seen as the result of a series of stresses (poverty, civil war) applied to a society already boiling over with seething hatred, all of which were ruthlessly exploited by the genocidaires who Melvern goes to such lengths to identify and provide evidence directly relating them to the killing.

Surely a good grasp of the background and the sequence of events makes the genocide seem the reverse of incomprehensible – it comes to seem human, all too human.

Credit

Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern was published by Verso Books in 2004. All references are to the revised 2006 paperback edition.

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Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)

‘It should be an interesting few weeks, old boy.’
(The words of David, Fergal Keane’s tall, elegant, 60-year-old BBC producer, as they arrive at the border of Rwanda, page 42)

Fergal Keane, reporter and moral superstar

Keane is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and writer. This is a short 190-page book which recounts the journey undertaken by him, his 3-man BBC TV news crew, with a couple of South African security guys  (Glen and Tony) and two African drivers (Edward and Moses), as they crossed into north Rwanda from Uganda. It follows this team as they drove through the devastated countryside only weeks after it had been pacified by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and saw for themselves the corpses produced by the Rwandan genocide (April to July 1994). They saw hundreds and then thousands of dead bodies, clogging rivers, littered across the countryside and packed into buildings, houses and churches in villages and towns.

However, although the book contains many descriptions of bodies hacked to pieces, of mothers trying to protect their children who had their skulls cleaved open by machetes, children’s bodies cut clean in two, and so on – a kind of Pompeii of corpses caught in all manner of strange, poignant and horrifying postures as the murderers did their work – the horror is mixed with another element which I couldn’t  help finding irritating at first and then broadly comic, which is Keane’s humourless self-importance.

Keane the sensitive reporter is front and centre of the entire account, which opens not with any African or Rwandan voices, stories, facts or history or events, but with pages and pages of Keane impressing on the reader how he is such a sensitive man that even now, a year after his journey, as he writes his book, he is still haunted by dreams and nightmares of what he saw; how he struggles to put it into words, how he struggles to make sense of the horror of mass killing and so on.

My dreams are the fruit of my journey down the dirt road to Nyarubuye. How do I write this, how do I do justice to what lies at the end of this road? As simply as possible. This is not a moment for fine words. (p.76)

But the fact that he even has to tell us that he is agonising about how to write it, how to describe the scene, and shares with us his heroic decision not to use ‘fine words’, this is all grandstanding, showboating, foregrounding his wonderful scrupulousness as a Man and as a Writer. He may claim not to use ‘fine words’ (although, in fact, he often does) but he certainly uses fine feelings.

He could have just described what he saw and been a simple, factual, objective observer. But Keane is incapable of keeping himself out of the picture and swamps everything with his first-hand impressions, all recounted in a lulling Irish brogue.

This self-promotion extends beyond himself to encompass his BBC news crew (producer, cameraman, soundman) and fixers (the two SA security men), describing them as the best in the world, top of their trade, ace professionals – sensitive (very sensitive), creative, reliable, hard working – a great bunch of guys!

These passages dwelling at length on what a caring, sensitive fellow Keane is, and what a fantastically hard-working but sensitive crew he was privileged to work with – made me smile and occasionally burst out laughing at their self-importance, their lack of self-awareness, their complete inappropriateness in what purports to be a record of one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.

So Season of Blood can be broken down into three elements:

  1. The syrup-thick self-congratulation and oh-so-sensitive descriptions of how Keane felt, at the time and for months after the journey was over, which start and end the text and feature liberally throughout.
  2. The series of incidents which made up his actual journey across Rwanda: names of the people they met (generally from the RPF, sometimes the UN) who showed them sites of numerous atrocities where the bodies were still piled up in streets and fields, houses and churches, and interviews with (often very badly injured) survivors, and the genocidal Hutu authorities who dismissed it all as exaggeration and the inevitable casualties of war.
  3. Historical background – Keane’s solid reworking of the standard history I’ve read in all the other accounts.

1. A song for the sensitive

On the 1974 album ‘Monty Python Live at Drury Lane’, Neil Innes introduces his song ‘How sweet to be an idiot’ by whispering, ‘And now…a song for the sensitive’, to much laughter from those with a sense of humour. This phrase kept echoing round my head as I read the confessional parts of Keane’s text.

I thought New York journalist Philip Gourevitch had done a good job of showing off how sensitive and deep he was in his 1998 book about the Rwandan Genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, but he is blown clean out of the water by BBC journalist-superstar and softly-spoken Irishman, Fergal Keane. Here is the opening paragraph of Keane’s Rwandan Journey, for best effect to be intoned in a mellifluous Irish accent, very quietly and very sensitively:

I do not know what dreams ask of us, what they come to collect. But they have come again and again recently, and I have no answers. I thought that after the bad nights of last summer the dead had abandoned me, had mouldered into memory. But the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers and children, all the great wailing families of the night are back, holding fast with their withering hands, demanding my attention. Understand first that I do not want your sympathy. The dreams are part of the baggage on this journey. I understood that from the outset. After all, four years in the South African townships had shown me something of the dark side, and I made the choice to go to Rwanda. Nobody forced or pressurised me. So when I tell you about the nights of dread, understand that they are only part of the big picture, the first step backward into the story of a journey that happened a year ago. (page 1)

Personally, I think it was very considerate of the Rwandan people to stage an epic bloodbath in order to provide Mr Keane with a splendid backdrop against which to display his sensitive soul, his simple but poetic prose, his knowledge of ‘the dark side’ (guffaw) and his fine moral scruples. Just recently I notice the arrival in the language of the phrase ‘humble-bragging’, which means:

the action of making an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.

So when Fergal says he doesn’t want our sympathy, it was hell but he’ll be OK, no, no, he really doesn’t want our sympathy, not at all, really he doesn’t, the dreams, the dreams are sometimes hard to bear, but, shucks, he was just doing his job, no, no sympathy thank you — it’s hard not to burst out laughing at his self-important humble-bragging.

And not just him. He says there were many of ‘us’ who went there, many tip-top international journalists like Fergal. Some claim they don’t have bad dreams, but Fergal knows better. They, all of them, this band of brothers, this close-knit community of sensitive reporters, according to Fergal, they still ‘mourn the dead of Rwanda’. They still suffer at nights from that special feeling. What special feeling? Well:

How can I best describe it? It is a mixture of dread fascination, sorrow for what we learned and lost in the short few weeks of chaos, a mind weariness that feeds itself by replaying the old tapes over and over. We reach for the off switch but in the darkness cannot find it. (p.3)

Portentous and pretentious, humourless self-importance. Note the deliberately ‘poetic’ language. Given the choice between the ordinary functional word and the archaic, poetic equivalent, Fergal always plumps for the latter. He and his crew don’t get up at the start of the day; they ‘rise to start another day’ (p.44). The crooks they meet with in Nairobi are ‘rogues’ (p.48). The rains don’t prompt new growth, they ‘bring forth’ great tangles of vegetation, as if touched by the staff of Moses (p.49). David doesn’t start crying when he thinks about his daughter back home; he is ‘in the thrall of this fatherly emotion’ (p.35). Every page is blessed with a gem of pretentious and high-sounding diction.

And the journey itself is not just another old hack’s trip to cover another grim African tragedy: it is a knight of the round table on a quest, it is a pilgrim’s progress, it is the odyssey of a Great Spirit, greater, finer, more sensitive than the humble likes of you and I.

My journey into Rwanda was about following the lines of blood and history; about sleeping with the smell of death, fear and hatred; about exhaustion and loss and tears and in some strange ways even love. For me to make sense of that journey, however, I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valleys of the heart and mind and soul… (p.3)

What a wanker. And the Rwandans? The genocide? You want to know about them? Hang on, first there’s another fifty pages while we follow the road down into the valleys of Fergal’s heart and mind and soul…

Padding

So Keane comes over, fairly regularly, as a self-important so-and-so. But the emphasis on the personal nature of his text and the amount of time he spends describing his travelling companions may have a more banal cause. For he tells us early on that he only spent a few weeks in Rwanda (p.4) (later on he tells us that his brief trip started in early June 1994; p.123).

So there may be an embarrassingly simple reason why so much of the text describes his fine feelings, his doughty companions and the logistics of their journey rather than the history or politics of Rwanda – this preening might simply be padding, padding out a book which, even with all this bumf, barely stretches to 190 pages.

In fact it’s only on page 48 of the 190 pages that Keane and his team actually cross into Rwanda and the journey proper begins. So the actual travelogue through Rwanda is barely 140 pages long. Season of Blood is an often intense but, ultimately, quite thin and superficial account.

Top chaps

Fergal went to Rwanda with a BBC team to make a film for Panorama and what a team he took with him! He is accompanied by one of the BBC’s most respected producers ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’; by a soundman who is also a novelist; by a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’. Goodness! What special people Fergal surrounds himself with! What heroes! What legends!

And it takes one top chap to know another top chap. Thirty seconds on Fergal’s Wikipedia page tells us that Keane attended the Presentation Brothers College in Cork, a private, fee-paying Catholic school which is ranked the number one boys’ secondary school in Ireland. Maybe this is where he got his overweening sense of superiority from, his indestructible confidence in what are, in the end, pretty banal observations written in humble-bragging prose.

Rather snipingly, Fergal points out that most other TV journalists and crews are, unfortunately, just mercenary hacks who fly wherever the bodies piling up, knock out superficial stories about a situation they barely understand and then, as soon as the fighting stops, move on.

Where television is concerned, African news is generally only big news when it involves lots of dead bodies. The higher the mound, the greater the possibility that the world will, however briefly, send its camera teams and correspondents. Once the story has gone ‘stale’ i.e. there are no new bodies and the refugees are down to a trickle, the circus moves on. (p.7)

TV news is sensationalist and superficial!? Who knew? This must be why the BBC pays its top correspondents the big bucks, for coming up with wonderful insights like this.

But Saint Fergal is making this point in order to emphasise that he is not like all those other TV correspondents and that his crew are not like all those other horrible mercenary crews. No, his crew includes a sound man who is also a novelist; and a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’; and a producer ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’!

And they work for the BBC so they must be the best! And they are fronted by a sensitive soul who still has dreams, all these months later, of the terrible things he saw but no, thank you, no, he doesn’t need your sympathy. Very kind, but he’s man enough to take it.

Admittedly, this band of heroes only flew into Rwanda when the story began to involve lots of bodies – exactly like the other crews he criticises. Admittedly, they only stayed for a few weeks – exactly like those other crews he criticises. Admittedly, his team also moved on once the story had gone stale –exactly like those other crews he criticises. But his crew did it all in a specially sensitive and rugged and heroic way, in a noble BBC kind of way, which completely separates them from all the other media riff-raff. This isn’t just any old reporter and his camera crew; this is an M&S reporter and his camera crew.

David the producer is tall, silver haired and works harder than anyone Fergal has ever met! He is steady as a rock, ‘not given to exaggeration or panic’! Whatever situation they find themselves in David can always fix it, with a few discreet words and a shrewd wink. What a top chap!

David never reveals his feelings because he’s that kind of steady, dignified, old-fashioned type of fellow. Right up until, one day, barrelling along in their Land Rover, Fergal shares the Yeats poem, ‘Prayer For My Daughter,’ with him, at which point a quiet tear comes to David’s eye, as he thinks of his own beloved daughter back home in Blighty (p.35). Poetry! Yeats! A quiet tear! Yes, what a fine and sensitive chap he is, what fine chaps they all are!

Perhaps more than anything I admired his old-fashioned journalistic honesty. David believed in going to places and finding out what was happening, talking to as many sides as possible, and only then making up his mind. In this he was different from many producers who arrived with their own predetermined ideas of what the story should be and then sought out the voices to support their theories. He wasn’t a glamorous media figure, nor was he political in the sense of fighting internal battles within the BBC. Although it is hard to guess at the true motives of a colleague, I liked to think that David Harrison was moved ultimately by the oldest and most noble journalistic aspiration of all: to seek the truth and report it whatever the consequences. (p.67)

Shucks. Saint Fergal and noble David are travelling with old Africa hands Tony and Glenn. Tony is a short story writer and novelist who went to ‘one of Johannesburg’s top public schools’. Need Fergal say any more? I’m sure we are all prepared to bow down before this great achievement and, if more praise were needed, Fergal tells us that Tony was his college rowing champion! Just what I need to know in a book about the Rwandan genocide.

Glenn, by contrast, worked his way up from a tough, deprived and petty criminal background, via a spell in the South Africa Defence Force, on to become ‘one of the best news cameramen in the country’ and ‘the most sensitive cameraman I have ever worked with’ (p.40). The sensitivity and camaraderie ooze out of this book like ectoplasm. I washed my hands after reading it but I couldn’t wash my brain.

Carlsberg doesn’t make world-beating TV news crews, but if they did…

Basically, Saint Fergal is trying to write a novel, except it is a novel full of hilariously pretentious and stereotyped moments (before they leave Kenya for Rwanda, Keane gets drunk with a fellow journalist in a hotel bar in Nairobi who ominously warns Keane that he is heading towards a realm of ‘spiritual damage’, p.43).

This novel manqué features a cast of noble, high-minded chaps (top public school, best cameraman in the country, champion rower, noble producer etc) and is written in a pretentious mash-up of late-Victorian diction (‘we rose to begin our journey’ – that’s actually what he writes on page 44) and the Bible (‘The rains had brought forth a great tangle of vegetation’). The prose reads like the stained glass windows in the chapel of his elite Catholic boarding school – simple, over-coloured, larger than life, sentimental and repellently high-minded.

Buried in this short book is some excellent reportage, some vivid encounters and some stomach-churning scenes – but all swamped by a kind of rehashing of a Victorian, boys’ own adventure novel.

2. Rwandan history

Fergal tells the same outline history I’ve read in David van Reybrouck, Philip Gourevitch and Jason Stearns. Nobody really knows their origins, but eventually Rwandan society came to be split between three ethnic groups, the Hutu from the west (85%), the Tutsi from the north (15%) and smattering of the Twa, descendants of the pygmies who probably lived in the Rwanda-Burundi region first but are now marginalised.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans first arrived, they discovered a society where the Tutsi formed a cattle-rearing elite, ruled by a Tutsi king, who lorded it over the four-fifths of the population who were Hutu peasant farmers. The stereotype has it that the Tutsi are tall and thin, with thin lips, long noses and lighter skins, while the Hutu are shorter, stockier with more classical ‘Negro’ features – although, like all the other writers on the subject, Fergal emphasises that, after centuries of intermarriage, plenty of the population was impossible to assign to one group or the other.

The German colonisers in the 1890s, and then the Belgians who were allotted Rwanda after Germany lost World War One, both these European colonisers sided with the aristocratic Tutsi. In the 1930s the previously fluid demarcation between the ethnic groups was destroyed when the Belgians issued identity cards which required Rwandans to specify which racial group they belonged to.

At this point Fergal does what Gourevitch does: he speeds over the history of ethnic tension between the two groups because he is concerned to make the genocide seem unique, unprecedented, a freak, impossible to understand. In its scale it certainly was, and in the way it was very deliberately planned, managed and organised by Hutu extremists it certainly was, and in its aim at total extermination of the enemy, it was. And yet the insistence of both Gourevitch and Keane on making it sound exceptional is a  serious distortion of the facts. Because, as both writers concede, there had been a long history of inter-communal violence before 1994, which continued well after 1994.

Thus when the Tutsi monarch Mwaami Rudahigwa died in 1959, the Hutus rose in rebellion against Tutsi rule and between ten and one hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred. The rivers were full of bodies. That’s a lot of people. It begins to undermine the claim of the genocide to complete uniqueness.

In neighbouring Burundi the Tutsi held on to power through the 1960s and, to forestall a Hutu revolt, in 1973 the Burundi army murdered nearly a quarter of a million Hutus. A quarter of a million. That’s a lot of people, isn’t it? Once you start reading Rwandan history you realise the genocide may have been unique in conception and ambition, but it is, at the same time, part of a continuum of Hutu-Tutsi massacres and pogroms, both in Rwanda and Burundi, which go back at least as far as independence if not before.

Gourevitch and Keane both come on as if the 1994 genocide was a one-off, uniquely wicked and evil event, and it is its perceived uniqueness which prompts in both writers a great deal of hand-wringing and virtue signalling. Why oh why did they…? What oh what made them…? How could anybody behave like this…? and so on.

But hang on – isn’t massacring 100,000 Tutsis in 1959 also a bit, you know, evil? And what about the murder of nearly a quarter of a million Hutus? Also, pretty violent and pretty evil, too.

Why aren’t there books about those massacres? Does a hundred thousand not register? Is quarter of a million not enough? Is it as simple as the fact that back then, in the 60s and 70s, there was less TV coverage, less satellite technology to flash footage round the worlds, that it was harder to travel to these remote countries, so the massacres didn’t get covered and so…all those dead Africans don’t count?

Keane goes on to explain that by 1990 the kleptocratic crony regime of Rwandan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana was so corrupt that it found it very convenient to use the century-old bogeyman of ‘the Tutsi oppressor’ to stir up their power base among the Hutu majority. They needed to stay in power so that top figures in the regime could carry on happily creaming off aid money and World Bank loans into their personal Swiss bank accounts.

Keane supports the mainstream theory the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane wasn’t shot down, killing all on board, by Tutsi wrong-doers but by extremists within his own Hutu government. Habyarimana’s sudden death allowed Hutu supremacists to seize power and, within just one hour of the president’s death, to start issuing orders to implement the plan for the total extermination of the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda (maybe 1.5 million people) which senior members of Hutu Power had been carefully working on for years.

I take the point that what sets the 1994 massacres apart was the entirely political nature of the genocide, and the existence of a detailed plan, and the use of all the levers of the state to mobilise people to the killing, and the fact that the stated ambition was total annihilation of the Tutsis…

But I felt uneasy that Keane, like Gourevitch, devotes two hundred pages and a lot of hand-wringing to the killing of 800,000 people, but skims over the murder of 250,000 people or of 100,000 people in a sentence – as if their murders don’t matter so much because they weren’t massacred in such an organised way.

Are some campaigns of mass murder more important, more meaningful than others? Are the dead in one mass murder campaign less important than the dead in another one? The short answer, on the evidence of these books, appears to be yes.

3. What Fergal saw

Keane and his crew cross the border and are met with polite and intelligent RPF soldiers, part of the well-disciplined force which has driven the Hutu army from the country. David the noble producer had contacted the RPF from Belgium and so an army liaison officer, Lieutenant Frank Ndore, is waiting for them at the first checkpoint inside Rwanda. From here onwards, Frank will be their polite and helpful guide.

Frank takes them to meet Rose Kayitesi who’s switched from being a rebel fighter to setting up a refuge for 50 or so orphaned children aged 6 to 8 in an abandoned hotel (p.68). Some of them tell their stories, like the young girl who describes seeing her entire family hacked to death by the Interahamwe, herself is badly injured but left under a pile of corpses where she remains still till the attackers have left. Their guide, Frank explains why the Interahamwe were so keen to exterminate all children and hid in wait for them or silently listened out for whimpers and crying before moving in for the kill (p.71). Which has resulted in some of the child survivors in his care withdrawing, refusing to eat and, literally, dying of grief (p.72).

Fergal sees the river clogged with corpses (p.74). Many rivers were clogged with bodies. Lake Victoria became so polluted with corpses that Ugandan fishermen dragged them out and buried them to stop them killing off the fish (p.75).

Frank takes them to the town of Nyarubuye where some 3,000 people were hacked to pieces in and around the parish church (p.76). Keane describes lots of human bodies which have been hacked to death from every possible angle, displaying every possible wound.

They meet small groups of refugees on the road, clustering together for safety, each one generally the sole survivor of the massacre of their family, their village, their entire community.

The offices of the mayor of Rusomo have been converted into a makeshift hospital for survivors with terrible wounds. There is no medicine, no painkillers. The mayor or bourgmestre was Sylvestre Gacumbitsi and many of the poor Tutsis of the town turned to him for help as the atmosphere became tense on the buildup to the genocide. Not only did he turn them away, but a few days later he led Hutu death squads round the homes of Tutsis and directed the mass murder, using the identity cards he had in the filing cabinets in the office. Flora Mukampore only survived, badly cut and bleeding, because she hid under a pile of fresh corpses (p.89).

On the spur of the moment Keane and is producer decide to try and track down this génocidaire and mass murderer, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, and so drive east, across the border into nearby Tanzania, and to Benaco, one of the biggest refugee camps which sprang up as hundreds of thousands of terrified Hutus fled the advancing RPF.

Bencao camp turns out to be a vast mudbath, organised into ‘roads’ between groups of tents made from tarpaulin supplied by the UN and aid agencies. They spend the night and then, next morning, assiduous questioning does in fact lead them to Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. He is surrounded by young men with machetes who are carrying out his orders as he manages the distribution of rice to refugees from his canton. Keane questions him as hard as possible, putting to him the accusations of eye witness who saw him (Sylvestre Gacumbitsi) directing the killing. But the big man denies it, dismisses it all as Tutsi propaganda, and his surly followers mutter agreement.

In a flash Keane realises the génocidaires have brought their entire social system into the camps, recreated their networks of clientilism and patronage and intimidation. And the international community is going along with it, funding them, feeding them, allowing them to recreate their murderous Hutu militias (p.107).

Keane realises the international community which did sweet FA to prevent the genocide has been only too happy to jump into action when confronted with a huge refugee crisis. Setting up camps, flying in vast amounts of food, publicity photos of the faces of happy aid workers helping happy refugees, this is what everyone wanted. Keane thinks well-armed Western soldiers could have easily identified leading génocidaires and arrested them. Their failure to do so was a complete moral failure. The international community was ‘giving comfort to butchers’ (p.110).

That same night the team drive back over the bridge by the Rusomo Falls into Rwanda. They see soldiers looting refugees. Reading this, it occurs to me that most of the world is like this, and most of history has been like this: bullies preying on smaller bullies who prey on the absolutely helpless.

Drunk Tanzanian soldiers try to stop them crossing the bridge and then to confiscate their video camera, but, like their fairy godmother, Lieutenant Frank appears and gets the RPF soldiers his side of the river to pay the drunk Tanzanian soldiery a few hundred dollars and a tricky situation is defused (p.113). Really makes me want to go to Africa. Sounds like a wonderful place.

Lieutenant Frank organises a tour of the abandoned and ransacked presidential palace. (This is reminiscent of Michela Wrong touring the abandoned and ransacked palace of Joseph Mobutu or Philip Gourevitch in the abandoned and ransacked palace ditto. It’s a kind of standard element or trope of ‘the overthrow of dictators’ journalism.)

Then the team are staying at the UN offices along with all the other correspondents, journalists and news crews. (They do tend to stick together, journos and news teams.) Keane is in Kigali when half the city was still in the Hutu government hands and the RPF was shelling and mortaring its way into the government half.

At short notice the team is invited to visit a Red Cross hospital. To nobody’s surprise a hospital in a war zone is packed with terribly injured soldiers and civilians. He sees a small Tutsi boy whose arm has been cut off. Details like that, snapshots, say more than all Keane’s editorialising.

When they leave to drive back through roadblocks to the rebel side of Kigali, they are hustled into smuggling with them two European missionaries who have escaped from a mission up country because Brother Otto’s arm was wounded and he needs treatment. Nerve-racking moments as they smuggle the two missionaries out of the Hutu side and into the RPF side. If the Hutus stop them, maybe they’ll arrest the missionaries, maybe the whole team, or maybe just shoot them all.

Later, Keane hears the missionaries’ story. To seek out help they left behind a mission full of Tutsi children they had been protecting. The children knew it was coming. They asked to be locked in a room. A week later the militia came and slaughtered all 50 of them. Brother Henri tells Keane all this though tears.

That night the team get drunk with their faithful guide Lieutenant Ndore who insists, like all the RPF they’ve met, that it’s not about ethnicity, it’s about power and politics. A political cabal and their clients had made personal fortunes creaming off the nation’s wealth and turning the civil service into a party machine (p.20). They wanted to carry on doing so under the dictatorship and didn’t want to be forced to accept a multi-party, multi-ethnic constitution which the ‘international community’ was forcing Habyarimana to accept.

Without political power the whole system of patronage and clientelism would collapse. (p.23)

The politics of ethnicity

Throughout the book Keane repeats the same notion, which is that the genocide may have been defined in terms of ethnicity but it was at bottom politically motivated. It took expression in ethnic cleansing but it was about one group, one party, the extreme wing of the president’s MRND party and its extended clients, clinging on to power and consolidating its power for ever.

Keane’s insistence can be interpreted several different ways: one is that he is sticking to a humanistic conviction that ethnicity isn’t the be-all and end-all because this optimistic conviction allows him to hope that ethnicity can be overcome and so that the genuinely multi-ethnic state which the RFP promises can be brought into existence.

But it is possible to devise a kind of reverse interpretation of the same set of facts, which is: what if, in many countries, ethnicity is politics? In the 25 years since Keane wrote this book ethnicity hasn’t disappeared as a defining factor in political cultures around the world, it has grown, particularly in the last decade. All round the world we have seen the rise of nationalist leaders waving their national flag and liable to attack minorities: the BJP demonising Muslims in India; the military junta in Myanmar ethnically cleansing the Rohingya; China brutally clamping down on the Xinjiang Muslims. And anti-immigrant rhetoric becoming widespread across the West.

Keane’s book was written before any of this happened but, at various points, it emphasises that these kinds of divisions between ethnicities are not inevitable but are always stirred up by politicians with essentially political motivations i.e. using ethnic differences in order to stir up their base and remain in power. And in the money.

Back to the journey

Anyway, back in the narrative, it’s time to say goodbye to the helpful, intelligent Lieutenant Ndore and so Fergal gives him the edition of Yeats’s poetry which he’s been carrying round, as a thank you present (p.141).

He writes a half-page note about visiting the Amohoro stadium in Kigali, which the UN forces managed to secure during the genocide and where they protected thousands of terrified refugees.

And the second half of the same page records a visit to the Milles Collines Hotel, also guarded by a small contingent of UN soldiers, where hundreds of refugees were still living in terror that the Interahamwe lounging at the roadblocked entrance would one day simply walk in and hack everyone to pieces, the hotel which was to become famous because of the movie, Hotel Rwanda (p.142).

Keane and his crew are assigned a new RPF minder named Ernest to replace Lieutenant Frank, but he is a kid, unreliable and always wants to sleep. He is meant to guide them on the route south into Burundi. They get into their Land Rovers and drive to the town of Kabuga, which saw heavy fighting. Every building is damaged, bodies, not just of humans. A dead cow is wedged into a doorway (p.145).

Ernest then tells them he knows the route to the border with Burundi and sets them off down a road which gets smaller and more jungley until they pass two wrecked vehicles and realise the road is landmined. As this is sinking in, they see two figures ahead burying something and, in a sweaty panic, hurriedly turn the jeep round and drive all the way back to Kabuga.

After recovering from this stressful experience back in Kabuga, they set off south again, this time by a different route. Hours of nervous tension driving through jungle with one of the crew’s two Land Rovers making bad sounds as if it’s about to break down. They arrive at the village of Zaza, held by the RPF, who are guarding several hundred Hutu prisoners. Keane quotes an African Rights report which estimates that 800 people were murdered in the commune of Zaza, and quotes one woman survivor who watched the children being hacked to death and was, again, buried under a pile of bodies, covered in blood and so thought dead by the attackers (p.154).

They spend a nerve-racking night in this village, given a few rooms in an abandoned house by the RPF officer, who commands just 15 men to hold a remote village filled with 300 or more Hutu prisoners, while everyone knows the Interahamwe are out there in the jungle.

Next day, 12 June 1994, they finally make it to the Burundi border and are checked through by drunk Tutsi Burundi soldiers. They say goodbye to the two Ugandan drivers, Edward and Moses, who have to turn round and drive right the way across Rwanda and back across the northern border, into Uganda, before it gets dark.

They are met in Burundi by Rizu Hamid, a South African-born Asian who’s worked as Fergal’s fixer before, during his time in South Africa. She is, of course, ‘tough and dedicated’. He is awestruck by her ability to smooth talk even the most difficult, dangerous soldiers at roadblocks (p.167). But then we long ago learned that everyone Fergus works with is an epitome, world beating, top of their profession, and so on.

Rizu has arranged for a young government soldier named Sergeant Patrice to be their minder as they penetrate back north into the government-held areas of west Rwanda to meet and interview, well, murderers.

After a series of nerve-wracking encounters at no fewer than 30 roadblocks, the crew finally arrive in Butare and put up in a basic hotel. David and Fergal interview the Rector and Vice-Rector of Butare University. Like other Hutus they’ve already met, this couple are far from stupid, but believe the government’s line entirely: that the nation was under threat from the RPF’s 1990 invasion, that war was the only way to defend themselves, that the RPF only seek to reassert Tutsi paramountcy and restore the Hutu serfdom of pre-1959.

Next day they go to interview the town prefect, Sylvan Nsabimana. They ask him about the fate of the last few hundred Tutsi left alive in the whole region who are being held in a camp right outside the prefect’s office. Nsabimana is all reassurance and tells them that, in fact, he is planning to evacuate the children to nearby Burundi, the following day.

Keane presses him on the murders, on the genocide but, like every government official they meet, Nsabimana repeats the government line that there was no genocide, that the government was protecting the country against attack by the RPF, who are wickedly planning to restore their oppressive rule. If confronted with examples of actual killings, Nsabimana gives the stock answer that, alas and alack, casualties happen in time of war.

The next day Fergal, Rizu, David and the rest attach themselves to the convoy of lorries carrying Tutsi children to freedom in Burundi. they pass through a series of nerve-racking roadblocks, which Nsabimana himself negotiates their way through and then, finally, they cross the border into Burundi for good and Keane’s Rwandan journey is at an end.

Thoughts

How long did Fergal’s Journey last in total, then? Two weeks? Three weeks? Less than two weeks? He doesn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t long and he didn’t really get to talk to that many people, 20 to 30 maximum. Compare and contrast with Philip Gourevitch who visited Rwanda for a total of something like nine months and gives the impression of having spoken to hundreds of people.

Keane’s book is shorter but it is much more intense. The descriptions of his anxiety in long trips through the jungle and his terror at roadblocks manned by drunken soldiery are very vivid. And his first-hand account of seeing the actual bodies piled up in streets and fields and offices and churches is powerful. Almost powerful enough to make you forget the preening opening of the book.

For all his feeble inability to really grasp the scale and depth and meaning of the genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s book is a lot better. It has far more history and context than Keane’s and he includes testimony and interviews from far more people, including lots of UN officials and, crucially, the brains behind the RPF, Paul Kagame.

And Gourevitch also continues the story on past the genocide itself, for quite a few years, up till 1998, so he gives a far better sense of the ongoing political importance of the huge refugee camps in Zaire, and how they came to trigger the first Congo War – a depth of perspective which is necessarily missing from Keane’s account which, in essence, boils down to vivid reportage of a hurried, stressful 2-week visit to the country in June 1994, smack bang in the middle of its combined civil war and genocide.

He didn’t have to go

The very force of Keane’s candidly described terror keeps prompting the same thought. He undergoes ordeals of tension and stress, bursts out swearing at the drivers, has to get drunk at night to obliterate the sights he’s seen or take pills to get to sleep. He thinks forlornly of his family. He wishes he were back home. The rector of Butare university invites him to his house to watch Ireland play in the World Cup, in New York, and Keane desperately, desperately wishes he was there.

Well, OK, the reader thinks: so go on, then – leave. Hire a taxi, get driven clean out of the danger zone, catch a plane home, be with your family. Tell the BBC you’d like to be the Westminster correspondent. Or work on Strictly Come Dancing. If you hate your job so much, if it means you end up seeing too many corpses, meeting too many evil people, having too many nightmares, here’s an idea – quit being a foreign correspondent and go home.

No-one is forcing Keane to repeatedly travel into war zones and risk getting casually murdered by drunk soldiers at a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. This is a choice he has made.

When he keeps telling us how wretched and awful and terrifying and lonely and damaging it is to be in such horrific zones and see so many corpses and confront so much evil, the reader thinks: well, don’t do it, then. But don’t willingly and voluntarily choose this line of work, hustle for the job, undertake the assignments – then bleat about how horrible it all is and expect my sympathy.

The shameful record of the Americans

The US administration of Bill Clinton did its best to ignore the genocide. America (and Belgium) insisted on reducing the UN presence from 2,500 to 250 on the eve of the genocide, guaranteeing that the UN could not intervene, and reinforcing them with a mandate which stipulated no military intervention. Even when they could see Tutsis being hacked down from their offices, they were unambiguously instructed not to intervene to save anyone.

‘Never again must we…. All it requires for evil to flourish is good men to do nothing…We must never forget the victims of the Holocaust… blah blah blah.’ Whenever you hear public figures spouting that kind of feel-good cant, remember it’s bullshit.

Once alerted to the killings, the Americans deliberately delayed sending what UN troops remained in Rwanda a consignment of arms and armoured cars to help them. America insisted on charging full market rate for the vehicles and their delivery, which the UN couldn’t afford (p.123).

On President Bill Clinton’s orders the Americans refused at every level of government to use the word ‘genocide’ for, if they did, America would have been legally obligated to intervene and America did not want to intervene.

When the victims of a genocide were being murdered in front of their eyes, the Americans did everything in their power to avoid giving any help. Beyond shameful. Complicit.

French support for the genocidal regime

The French continued to support the genocidal Hutu regime after the genocide was well under way and opposed the Tutsi RPF which ended the genocide, because partly because the génocidaires spoke French, and the PDF (hailing from the former British colony Uganda) spoke English. Seriously.

The French had long supported Habyarimana and had no wish to see him driven from power by the rebels. The pro-Habyarimana faction in Paris was led by François Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe, who saw Rwanda as part of a Francophone Africa under threat from the encroachments of the English-speaking nations to the north and east i.e. Uganda and Tanzania. Among Jean-Christophe’s gifts to the Rwandan president was the personal jet which was shot out of the sky on 6 April. The implication of this friendship was clear: if the price for maintaining some degree of French influence was the preservation of despots and kleptocrats, then Paris was always more than willing to pay.

In contrast to Habyarimana, the leaders of the RPF were largely English-speaking. The long years of exile in Uganda had forced them to abandon the French language. For their part the French maintained a military mission and a sizeable detachment of intelligence officers in Rwanda. With their contacts inside the army and at every level of government and the state media, Paris could not have been ignorant of the genocidal intentions of many of the senior officers and officials. For the French to suggest otherwise would be a lamentable comment on the abilities of their own intelligence services and diplomats. (p.26)

As part of a sustained effort to discredit the invading RPF and continue support for the genocidal Hutu Power regime, a French security agent claimed he had the black box from Habyarimana’s shot-down jet which proves it was the RPF who fired the missiles. But he provided no actual evidence and soon disappeared from view (p.117).

[President Habyarimana’s] brother-in-law Protais Zigiranyirazo was up to his neck in the trade in endangered species. Protais was a founder member of the Zero Network and an original shareholder in Radio Milles Collines. A book David has brought with him on our journey, Murder in the Mist, alleges that Protais was involved in the murder of American naturalist Dian Fossey because of her attempts to save the gorillas of the Rwandan rain forest. To date he has not even issued a rebuttal, much less attempted to sue the author. Protais is currently enjoying the sanctuary provided by the government of France, along with his sister Agathe and several other family members. It is not likely that they will see the [presidential] palace again, but they have the security of foreign bank accounts and the sympathy of the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) to console them in exile. I can see what sickens Frank. (pages 119 to 120)

That last sentence refers to the way the entire RFP up to its leader Paul Kagame were sickened at the absolute inaction of the ‘international community’ to prevent the genocide. The inaction was led by America which blocked every attempt to intervene, and by France, which energetically supported the genocidal regime, gave it arms and weapons even as the genocide was taking place and set up safe havens in the west of the country for genocidal Hutus fleeing the advancing RPF.

As the RPF rolled through the country and brought the genocide to an end, the French government flew the genocidal regime’s leaders to safety in Paris, where they’ve been leading lives of luxury ever since, right up to the present day, 2021. What’s not to despise and loathe about the despicable French government and security apparatus?

Mistaking genres

Lastly, maybe my negative reaction to Keane’s book is my fault. Maybe I’m being dim. Maybe I’m getting my genres mixed up. Maybe I’m expecting the objectivity of a history from a text which, right from the start, declares it is going to be an entirely subjective account. Only right at the end of the book did it occur to me that this kind of subjective journalism is maybe a variety of confessional literature.

When Keane writes at length about the nightmares he’s suffered ever since his Rwanda trip, about his drinking, about how scared he was at numerous points, about how he lost his temper with the driver and came to loathe their irresponsible RPF guide Albert, how much he missed his wife and how much he wished he could just go home – I found all this tediously subjective, but maybe I’m being an idiot for expecting anything else. The book is sub-titled a journey and clearly states right from the start that it is going to be a highly subjective account of one man’s experiences of a nightmare situation.

And, after all, maybe Keane’s prolonged descriptions of his feelings and psychological struggles are a deliberate strategy to take you with him right into the belly of the beast, to make you feel the fear and see the bodies, designed to be an immersive experience which combines historical background and political analysis with stomach-churning descriptions of what it was like.

I still didn’t like this book, but maybe my allergic reaction is my fault because I was continually judging it by the wrong criteria, assessing a work of confessional journalism as if it was a factual history. Anyway, I’ve given you enough evidence to make up your own mind.

Credit

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane was published in 1995 by Viking. All references are to the 1996 Penguin paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 18, 2021

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We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998)

‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)

Disappointment

Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.

The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.

Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.

And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.

The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the  thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.

With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.

The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.

But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.

And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.

The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.

He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.

Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.

Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.

In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:

“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)

Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.

He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.

A literary account, alas

Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).

So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.

Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.

On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).

Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life  is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.

His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.

And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:

I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)

Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…

I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.

So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.

Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.

The facts

The book consists of three elements:

  1. Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
  2. interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
  3. actual historical facts

When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).

In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.

Rwandan history

In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.

Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.

Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.

Hutus and Tutsis

For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.

The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)

Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.

Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.

When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.

The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.

The Hutu revolution

Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.

1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)

Independence 1962

Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)

More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.

The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.

To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.

Habyarimana’s coup 1973

In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.

Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).

In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda

But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.

Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.

With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.

Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.

You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.

In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.

But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to  think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.

The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994

At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.

The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.

Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).

Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.

The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.

Fragile peace 1993

By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.

It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).

When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.

Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.

On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).

Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).

The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi  presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.

Trigger for the genocide 1994

On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister,  Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.

The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.

The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.

You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.

The genocide – 100 days in 1994

Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:

1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.

2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.

3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:

The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)

I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!

Number killed

At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.

What’s Somalia got to do with it?

Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.

This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.

A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.

French involvement and guilt

By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.

From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)

Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:

‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)

The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.

The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)

Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.

End of the genocide July 1994

By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.

The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)

Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)

Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)

Aftermath – flight of the Hutus

As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.

And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.

But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.

Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996

The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.

In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.

First Congo War 1996 to 1997

Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.

But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.

France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)

Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).

Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.

Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.

In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).

When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:

  1. protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
  2. to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
  3. to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure

The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.

But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.

Fall of Mobutu May 1997

It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).

As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.

The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003

Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.

The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.

The post-genocide period

The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).

He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.

At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.

Stupid remarks

Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.

Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)

Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)

They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.

Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.

He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.

We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)

(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.

If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.

He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:

I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)

I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.

There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.

The big takeaway

Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.

In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).

But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.

For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.

Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.

But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.

In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…

A correct understanding of human nature

The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.

But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.

We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.

For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)

The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.

Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.

Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.

It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.

The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?

Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.

Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)

It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.

The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.

It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)

Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).

On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?

The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”

But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.

In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the  exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.

It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).

Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.

Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.

For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.

Cecile Kayirebwa

We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.

Credit

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 11, 2021

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In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong (2000)

Comparing Michela Wrong and David van Reybrouck

David van Reybrouck’s account of Congo’s modern history is basically an orthodox chronological account and political analysis interspersed with interviews with the many veterans and eye witnesses he has tracked down and spoken with at length.

Wrong’s account feels completely different, less chronological or, indeed, logical, more thematic. Instead of historical analysis, she brilliantly conveys what it felt like to live in Zaire under Mobutu as she sets about systematically exploring and describing different aspects of Zaire society and culture. Her vividness of approach is demonstrated by the way the book opens with the fall of Mobutu in 1997, going light on political analysis and strong on vivid descriptions of what it felt like to live in a crumbling, corrupt third world country.

Chapter one dwells on the role played in so many African states by key international hotels in their capitals, in Rwanda the Mille Collines, in Zimbabwe the Meikles, in Ethiopia the Hilton, in Uganda the Nile, hotels where presidents mingle with mercenaries, dodgy diamond deals are struck between smartly dressed middlemen, security goons lurked in the background muttering into their lapel mics, and the corridors were cruised by the most expensive hookers in town. And how it felt to be one among the pack of foreign correspondents living in Kinshasa’s Intercontinental Hotel as rumours swirled, troop carriers arrived, the president’s son turned up with a pack of soldiers furiously trying to track down the men who betrayed his father. And then suddenly, overnight, all the military figures switched to wearing tracksuits and casual wear in anticipation of the arrival of the rebel troops.

That’s the kind of picture painting and atmosphere Wrong is ace and conjuring up. How a country’s decline can be measured by the way the expensive carpeting in its hotels starts to smell of mildew, the lifts stop working, the blue paint on the bottom of pools comes off on the swimmers’ feet. Van Reybrouck takes an essentially academic approach spiced with extensive interviews. He is a historian whereas Wrong is a journalist, with a telling eye for detail and snappy one-line quotes.

Obviously, in this 314-page book she tells us an awful lot about the origins, rise and fall of the Mobutu dictatorship which lasted from 1965 to 1997, but it is the fantastically evocative way she conveys what it felt like that makes this book such a classic.

Van Reybrouck gives a detailed explanation of the ethnic tensions in eastern Congo which were exacerbated by the Rwandan genocide and then the constellation of political forces which led the Rwandan and Ugandan presidents to decide to invade eastern Congo and create a military coalition (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, the AFDL) and select as its leader the long-time Maoist guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This is to the good. His account is worth reading and rereading.

But Wrong tells you what it felt like to be in Kinshasa as the rebel army drew ever closer. The panic among Mobutu’s cronies, the so-called mouvanciers up in their gated mansions in the smart Binza district, the rush by the city’s moneyed classes to get visas for foreign destinations, the way the various western embassies practised evacuating their staff across the river Congo to Brazzaville, capital of the once-French colony the Republic of Congo which was unaffected by Mobutu’s fall.

Van Reybrouck gives you high-level analysis, Wrong gives you the sweat and the fear, the paranoia. She tells us everyone knew the game was up when the grizzled old piano player who’d been playing cocktail jazz in the bar of the Intercontinental for as long as anyone could remember one day disappeared.

She describes how the shopkeepers and population prepared for the mass looting which always accompanies regime change, and passes on the advice of an old hand that it’s best to select in advance one and only one item you want to loot and, once the anarchy begins, focus on getting that and only that. Wrong selects a $1,000 leather jacket for when the great pillaging begins.

She describes the way rumours are spread by ‘Radio Trottoir’, Pavement Radio i.e. word on the street. She conveys the mad, feverish atmosphere of a city about to be taken by rebel forces (p.27).

Another difference is that van Reybrouck sees the history of Congo as a tragedy, or series of tragedies, and he affects the reader with his sense of high seriousness. Wrong, on the other hand, has a lively sense of humour and an eye for the absurd detail. She finds almost everything about Zaire farcical, but then she appears to find all of Africa farcical and hopeless.

As for rebuilding the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, the tower blocks of Freetown, the faded boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down. (p.20)

As this quote indicates, another difference is that whereas van Reybrouck’s account is focused with laser-like precision on the history of just the Congo, Wrong’s anecdotes and comparisons freely reference the many other African countries she’s visited and worked in as a foreign correspondent. There’s a lot more international comparison and perspective. Wrong visits places around Congo but also Brussels to interview historians, to visit the Congolese quarter, and Switzerland to track down some of Mobutu’s luxury properties.

And whereas van Reybrouck is optimistic, on the side of Congo’s bloodied but resilient people, Wrong is both more humorous and more pessimistic. According to her, the story is the same all across Africa, one of unstoppable decline and fall.

Talking to the melancholic Colonel, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of tragic waste, of crippled potential that so often sweeps over one in Africa. (p.178)

In Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist the Belgian colonials who describe the Congolese as ‘children’ who need order, discipline and control and will make a horlicks of their country if granted independence are condemned as racist bigots – so you must never say anything like that. However, Wrong’s book freely refers to African politics as farcical, its politicians as clowns, and that, apparently, wins prizes.

At times, too many times, politics on Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an imposter. Arrrest him!’ (p.66)

So it’s OK to mock Africans as long as you use the correct phraseology and attitude. Calling them children is a no-no; calling their countries farcical, absurd, ludicrous, surreal, Alice in Wonderland – that’s fine.

And perfectly acceptable to be tired and bored of the absurdity of Africa’s rulers, the comical proliferation of rebels and freedom fighters and guerrilla movements, the bleak iteration of yet another massacre or round of ethnic cleansing somewhere on this blighted continent, like the western media’s news producers and sub-editors ‘shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis’ (p.7). Africa is for Wrong, ‘a disturbing continent’, ‘Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint’, whose countries brim with ‘anarchy and absurdity’ (p.10).

When the AFDL’s representatives started calling the BBC office in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions – yet more acronyms – only to disappear with equal suddenness. (p.245)

Several times she mentions Liberia’s drugged freedom fighter who wore wedding dressed and pink lipstick as they mowed down innocent civilians and gang-raped the women. She describes the teenage  FAZ recruits preparing to defend Kinshasa who were so drunk they could barely lift their grenade launchers. When the AFDL rebel soldiers arrive they turn out to be mostly teenagers wearing flip-flops or no shoes at all. Kabila promised to relinquish power once he’d overthrown Mobutu but of course does nothing of the sort. In turn Kabila was himself assassinated (in 2001), replaced by a family member even more corrupt and the whole of East Congo engulfed in a huge, often incomprehensible and seemingly endless war. Farce and tragedy.

The Latin Quarter hit, ‘I’m hearing only bad news from Radio Africa‘ seems as true when Wrong was writing in 2000 or now, in 2021, as when it was released in 1984.

Chapter by chapter

Introduction

Wrong arrived in Zaire as a foreign correspondent in 1994, found her way around, did features on Mobutu and his corrupt circle, the prostration of the economy (‘a country reverting to the Iron Age’, p.31) the uselessness of the army, the universal vibe of fear and poverty. Less than three years later, in autumn 1996, the AFDL seized eastern Congo and began its systematic assault on the country, seizing the mining centre of Lubumbashi in the south while other forces marched on the capital Kinshasa in the west. Wrong is perfectly placed to report on the paranoia of the last days, to fly out to the hot spots, to interview soldiers, shopkeepers, street traders, as well as army officers and government spokesmen.

So the introduction gives us tasters, snapshots: Wrong flying to the pretty lakeside town of Goma which was pillaged by its own inhabitants when the occupying army left. Wrong wandering through the rooms of Mobutu’s legendary palace at Gbadolite, now ruined and looted, the five black Mercedes, the Ming vases.

And she explains the title which is a quote from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness about the madness and barbarism he, personally, encountered, in the Congo Free State in 1890, epitomised by the fictional character of Mr Kurz, the high-minded exponent of civilisation who is sent to man an ivory station up the Congo, far from civilisation, and decays and degrades to become an epitome of barbarism and nihilism. Wrong sees herself literally following in Kurz’s footsteps as she explores all aspects of the absurd rule of Mobutu in the mid-90s, then watches his regime collapse in ruins.

Chapter 1

Plunges us into the endgame with a wonderfully evocative description of the atmosphere in Kinshasa and the Intercontinental Hotel where all the foreign correspondents stayed, during the last few days in 1997 October 1997 before Laurent Kabila’s AFDL took the city and Mobutu and his cronies were forced to flee. Snapshots of a city under siege, with brief explanations of Mobutu’s rule, the character of the AFDL and its leader Kabila, their determination to clean up the pigsty and abolish corruption.

Chapter 2

Gives a brisk but effective summary of Stanley’s exploration of the Congo (with backstory about Stanley’s biography) and King Leopold’s disgustingly barbaric regime of cruelty and exploitation, which he called the Congo Free State, 1885 to 1908 (with backstory explaining why Belgium was a relatively new country – founded in 1830 – and its king wanted a colony so as to be taken seriously by the big boys.)

In Brussels she visits the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, once a whip-wielding colon himself, who has devoted his life to editing and publishing definitive records of the Congo Free State. She visits the Royal Museum for Central Africa and is shocked by the complete absence of references to the atrocities the Belgians carried out there, and to learn that Belgian colonial history is not taught in Belgian schools (p.55).

She takes a tour of buildings by the noted Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, before pointing out that all the raw materials crafted into these beautiful buildings – the hardwood, onyx, marble, and copper – all came directly from the forced labour of Congolese blacks. Horta was rewarded for his services to Belgian architecture with a barony.

She describes how many of the Free State’s exploitative practices continued after the colony was handed over to Belgian government rule in 1908, including forced labour and use of the dreaded chicotte, the whip made of dried hippopotamus hide. It was only after the Second World War that Congo became less brutally exploitative and a tiny black middle class began to emerge, but if anything the colour bar or informal apartheid against this new breed of évolués or ‘evolved’ blacks grew worse.

Which moves into a description of the appearance, sights and sounds and mentality of the Congolese quarter in Brussels. She ends by making a strong case that Leopold’s atrocities, many of which continued under Belgian colonial rule, acculturated an entire region for 85 long years to abject humiliation, subservience, black market, illegal operations and corruption. Prepared the way, in other words, for just such a dictator as Mobutu.

No malevolent witch doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator. (p.57)

Chapter 3

Interview with Larry Devlin, the long-retired former CIA station chief in Kinshasa, who emphasises that Wrong only saw the regime at its bitter, pitiful end. She never knew the young, vibrant, charismatic Mobutu or knew the situation of anarchy between elected politicians which his 1965 coup rescued the country from (p.61).

She makes clearer than van Reybrouck or Bennett that Lumumba had actively invited the Soviets to give arms and advisers to crush the secessions. Devlin thinks Lumumba was never a communist, but he was naive. He thought he could invite in thousands of communist advisers at no cost. Devlin says he’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe after the war: your country falls to a communist coup and then Moscow is in charge. So Mobutu’s first coup of September 1960 was not just to bring political peace but to keep the Congo out of Soviet hands – and it worked. Soviet bloc personnel were given 48 hours to leave the country (p.67).

His account emphasises not just that, when the UN and US were slow to respond, Lumumba turned to the Soviets to supply him with arms and strategic advice to put down the secession of two major provinces – but that people of Devlin’s generation had seen this happen before. This was how the Soviets effected their coups in Poland and Czechoslovakia. This is how they established their tyrannies, by taking control of the army and placing personnel in key administrative and political positions. It had never been done in Africa before, but the Americans weren’t about to sit back and watch the Soviets make the experiment. So that’s why the Americans, backed by his political enemies within the country, decided he had to be eliminated. President Eisenhower personally approved CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba (p.77).

Then she backs up to give us the hasty run-up to independence from Belgium in June 1960, the army mutinying for better pay and promotion within days, triggering a mass exodus of the Belgian administrators and technicians who kept the country running, the political rivalry between ‘lethargic’ President Kasavubu (p.66) and passionate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and how the deadlock between them was broken by young Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, previously Lumumba’s personal secretary, who Lumumba himself had put in charge of the army and who, very bravely, faced down the army mutiny and restored order. Mobutu was encouraged then and ever afterwards by America.

A detailed look at the boyhood and young manhood of Joseph Mobutu from the Ngbani tribe, one of the smaller of Congo’s 250 ethnic groups, emphasising his brightness, reasonableness and extraordinary charisma; educated by Belgian priests, expelled for being a trouble-maker, a few years in the Force Publique rising to rank of sergeant, then contributing (anonymous) articles to new magazines set up for the Congolese, before he committed to becoming a journalist and then came to the attention of Lumumba who was looking for a secretary (pages 68 to 76). Devlin, the CIA man explains how Mobutu was really the best man available when he staged his 1965 coup.

Soon after the 1965 coup Devlin was posted to Vietnam. When he returned to Zaire in 1974 he found a drastically changed man and country. Surrounded by yes men, drinking pink champagne in his palaces, Mobutu was ‘already round the bend’ (p.82).

Chapter 4 Economics

In the immediate aftermath of the coup there were hangings, a new secret police was set up and so on. But the fundamental fact about Mobutu’s regime was he was an economic illiterate. Therefore his sole economic policy was to loot and plunder his country’s natural resources (when the going was good in the late 60s and early 70s) and then creaming the top off huge loans from the World bank and aid agencies. In other words, he didn’t know how to create or run a modern economy. He built a few high-profle white elephants, like the Inga dam, but when the builders left Zaire had no technicians to run it and there was never any coherent plan to create the infrastructure to distribute the electricity to where it was needed. Thus Congo has the greatest hydro-electric potential in the world in the shape of its huge and mighty river – and yet is a country whose cities suffer continual power cuts and outages.

He took up the creed of Pan-Africanism pioneered by Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana (who made himself president for life in 1964 and was overthrown by a military coup in 1966 supported by the CIA).

Mobutu promulgated his policies of authenticité, forcing everyone in the country to drop their European Christian names and adopt African names, renaming the state Zaire, renaming Leopoldville Kinshasa and Elizabethville Lubumbashi. He forced everyone to stop wearing European suits and mini skirts and adopt traditional African dress (p.90). He persuaded promoters to hold Miss World and the Ali-Foreman boxing match in Zaire (described in detail in van Reybrouck’s book).

In other words, he demonstrated how facile it is to address ‘cultural’ issues, fuss over ‘identity’ and language and culture. Meanwhile, in the absence of an economic or development plan, the economy tanked and the infrastructure rotted. The first years of his rule were bolstered by the high prices for Zaire’s raw materials created by the Vietnam war, but the end of the war in 1974 combined with the oil crisis to plunge Zaire into an economic hole it never crawled beck out of (p.94).

In 1973 he launched ‘Zaireanisation’ i.e. all foreign held businesses were confiscated by the state with a view to handing them over to ‘the people’ (p.92). The only problem was that ‘the people’ turned out, as when Robert Mugabe did the same thing 20 years later in Zimbabwe, to consist entirely of cronies and clients of Mobutu, who needed to be paid off or kept onside. None of them had a clue how to manage anything and ran businesses large and small into the ground, selling off the assets, living high off the proceeds, then needing further bribes or corruption money when they ran dry. $1 billion of assets were confiscated then squandered. It was gangster economics, ‘Alice in Wonderland finances’ (p.124).

And run on a massive system of cronyism. Mobutu needed so much money because he had to distribute gifts to all his important stakeholders in the manner of a traditional chieftain. Mobutu bought properties for himself around Europe, but he encouraged a system where hundreds of thousands of people scrabbled into the state administration, into the army or civil service, and then used their positions to embezzle, steal, demand bribes and generally be as corrupt as possible. By the mid-1990s Zaire had 600,000 people on the state payroll, doing jobs the World Bank calculated could be done by 50,000 (p.97).

The ambassador to Japan, Cleophas Kamitatu, simply sold the Zairian embassy and pocketed the proceeds. France sold Zaire a fleet of Mirage jets and ten years later, Defence Ministry officials simply sold them and kept the money (p.256). Ministers allotted themselves huge monthly salaries, lavish per diems, and insisted on having two of the very latest Mercedes, and their example was copied all the way down through their ministries, in state-run businesses and onto the street. Everyone stole everything they could, all the time. That’s what a kleptocracy is.

Chapter 5 Congo’s ruined mineral industries

Wrong flies to Katanga to report how nationalisation, corruption and utter mismanagement ran Congo’s mineral industries into the ground, beginning with astonishing stats about the country’s mineral huge wealth, then on to how Mobutu nationalised the Belgian mining corporation, Union Minière, consolidating it into the state-run company Gécamines. Sounds good, doesn’t it, one in the eye for the old imperial power, claiming the nation’s resources for the nation.

Except the nation never saw any of the profits. By 1978 the central bank had ordered Gécamines to transfer its entire annual profit of $500 million directly into a presidential bank account. By 1980 American researchers discovered that company officials were stealing $240 million  a year from Gécamines. Not only stole but smuggled, with huge amounts of diamonds, gold and other precious metals never reaching the books because they were stolen and smuggled abroad. In such an environment, nobody at any level gave a damn about investing in the company, in its stock and infrastructure, and so everything the Belgians had bequeathed the Congolese slowly rotted, decayed, was stolen, till the entire plants were rusting skeletons.

Wrong tours these sites giving us eerie descriptions of entire towns full of abandoned workings, derelict factories, rusting railways. That’s what she means when she described the entire country as slipping back into the Iron Age.

Wrong testifies to the decrepitude of the Shituri plant, describes the white elephant of Inga dam project built solely so Kinshasa kept control over Katanga. Pays an extended visit to the diamond town of Mbuji Mayi in the neighbouring province of Kasai, and interviews traders who explain the deep-seated corruption at every level of the diamond trade and ‘controlled’ by the Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA). She interviews its long-standing government representative, Jonas Mukamba (p.118) who paid Mobutu a hefty slice of the profits and in exchange was allowed to run Mbuji Mayi as he liked.

Eventually the infrastructure of Mbuji Mayi crumbled and collapsed, as had the mining infrastructure of Katanga. World mineral prices slumped but also, what was being produced was now being almost entirely smuggled. The rake-off from official trade collapsed because official trade collapsed. As the 90s progressed Mobutu lost his power of patronage.

She visits the central bank and the alleyway behind it jokingly referred to as Wall Street because it’s lined with unofficial street money changers. As Mobutu borrowed more and more from abroad and printed more money inflation soared and the currency collapsed. Wheelbarrows full of notes. A 500,000 zaire (the currency) note was printed to general resignation. Printing money led to mind-boggling inflation 9,800% and printing of the 500,000 zaire note. Mobutu had presided over the utter ruination of the economy.

Chapter 6

The collapse in Kinshasa epitomised by 1960s high-rise ministries without functioning lifts. The collapse of public phone system which was replaced by mobile networks, Telecel, for the wealthy. The collapse of the health system exemplified by Mama Yemo hospital which employs guards to prevent patients leaving without paying their bills.

Wrong pays a visit to Kinshasa’s small nuclear reactor, built on sandy soil liable to landslips, hit by a rocket during Kabila’s takeover of power, which had no security at all on the day she visited, and where one or two nuclear rods have recently gone missing.

Chapter 7

An explanation of ‘Article 15’, which is, apparently, the much-quoted ironic dictum by which most Congolese live their lives.

When the province of Kasai seceded soon after independence, it published a 14-article constitution. So many ethnic Luba people returned to the region expecting to become rich that the exasperated secessionist ruler made a speech in which he referred to a fictional, hypothetical 15th article of the constitution, which basically said, in French, ‘Débrouillez-vous!’ meaning ‘get on with it’, ‘figure it out yourself’, ‘deal with it’ or ‘improvise’. Since 1960 has become a universal expression throughout the country to explain ‘the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy’ (p.11) they find themselves living in.

And so Wrong gives an overview of the hundred and one street professions of a people struggling to live in an economy with no jobs and no wages. Wrong gives an extended description of the Mutual Benefit Society run by the disabled street people of Ngobila Beach and the tiny loopholes in the law they exploit to smuggle and sell items.

She meets a fervent Kimbanguist, the religion described by van Reybrouck. Van Reybrouck’s account of Kimbanguism is much more thorough, lucid and logical, but Wrong’s is an in-your-face explanation via one particular believer, Charles, a Zairian who combines high moral principles (‘we are never naked’) with the profession of ‘protocol’ or fixer of bribes at Kinshasa’s notorious N’Djili International Airport.

Chapter 8

Le Sape, Congo’s equivalent of Mods, snappily dressed proles. The origin and purpose of the Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance (SAPE), as explained to Wrong by self-styled ‘Colonel’ Jagger (p.176) as a protest against poverty and the drabness of the constricting African authenticité style demanded by Mobutu.

Then she gives a portrait of the ex-pat community of European idealists and chancers and romantics who came out in the 1950s or 60s and stayed on past independence and into the Mobutu years. This focuses on the example of Daniel Thomas a French construction worker who has repeatedly tried to start small farming businesses only to be repeatedly looted and ruined by his neighbours, and now all of his money is tied up in a farm he can’t sell and who has lost all hope. His wife is exhausted and disillusioned and wants to leave this sick land but they are stuck.

Chapter 9

Wrong details the vast sums loaned or given to Zaire over the years by international banks and especially the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She interviews insiders who explain that during the 1960s, 70s and 80s very few conditions were attached to vast loans which, predictably, disappeared straight into the bank accounts of Mobutu and cronies.

Chapter 10

Details of the vast palace Mobutu had built for himself at Gbadolite in the jungle in the north of the country, right on the border with Central African Republic. It’s said to have cost $100 million, with an airstrip big enough for Concorde to land on. Musical fountains, ornamental lakes, model farm, gilt, marble. This is what a lot of Western aid paid for. Eventually it came to seem too big and imposing so… he had another one built a few miles away at Kwale, with an olympic size swimming pool,

The story of Pierre Janssen who married Mobutu’s daughter, Yaki, on 4 July 1992, and so became the only white person in Mobutu’s inner circle and a few years later revealed all in a kiss-and-tell memoir. The Moules flown in from Belgium, huge bouquets of flowers flown in from Amsterdam, cakes flown in from Paris along couturiers and barbers.

The weirdness that after his first wife, Marie Antoinette, generally reckoned to be a restraining influence on him, died in 1977, he married his mistress Bobi Ladawa, and took as a new mistress…her twin sister, Kossia. They socialised together, were seen together. Wrong speculates that there might have been a voodoo, animistic belief that the twins would ward of the nagging spirit of his first wife, for twins are regarded in Africa as having totemic powers (p.223).

Chapter 11

A brisk account of the Rwandan genocide which is in a hurry to explain the longer and more significant consequence, which was the creation of vast camps for Hutu refugees just across the borders in Zaire and how these camps, supported by huge amounts of foreign aid, were reorganised by the thuggish Hutu genocidaires who set about planning their revenge attack on Rwanda. By 1995 there were some 82,000 thriving enterprises in the camps which had become mini-towns (p.239), no surprise when you consider that the UNHCR and aid organisations had pumped at least $336 million into them, more than the Kinshasa government’s total annual operating budget.

In early 1996 the Hutu leadership undertook a mission to ethnically cleanse the North Kivu region of its ethnic Tutsis, massacring those it could find, forcing the rest to flee. In late 1996 it was south Kivu’s turn to be cleansed. The local Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge had watched the Hutus slowly take control of the region, launch revenge raids into Rwanda, and had called on the UN and Kinshasa to neutralise the Hutu genocidaires but the UN did nothing and Mobutu gave them tacit support.

Which is why in October 1996 four rebel groups, with the backing of the Rwandan and Ugandan governments formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) and took the fight to the Hutus, forcing the genocidal Interahamwe to flee west and majority of the refugees to traipse back into Rwanda.

Chapter 12

The main thing about the so-called First Congo War is there was hardly any fighting. The Zairian army, the Forces Armées Zairoises, the FAZ, was a joke and ran away at the first threat of conflict. The only violence came from the FAZ as they looted, burned and raped their way through the villages en route back to Kinshasa. There were a few set-piece battles but for most of the AFDL forces the war consisted of a very long march through jungle, sometimes using Zaire’s decaying roads, mostly using the jungle paths which have replaced tarmacked roads in many areas.

Wrong interviews Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Arumba, for five years the feared head of Zaire’s security service who explains why the FAZ was so useless. It all stems from Mobutu’s basic management technique which was to keep the army divided between different factions, to create a series if confusingly titled security and military units, to have a multitude of generals and security ministers and to keep them all guessing. To set them in deliberate rivalry, to give them contradictory orders, to create permanent confusion, suspicion and paranoia. Why? Simples: to prevent any single person or unit from becoming a centre of real power and so a threat to his rule.

Also, most of these units were kept down in Bas Congo, close to Kinshasa. Zaire had almost no border guards or forces. Why? Because the army was not designed to fight other countries or protect the country’s security; it was an internal security machine whose sole raison d’etre was protecting the president.

Another reason was simple corruption. The many generals and senior ranks Mobutu created, solely with a view to placating the numerous tribes and/or keeping prominent figures onside, to a man practiced various forms of corruption and graft, the simplest of which was to take the soldiers’ pay for themselves. Which explains why soldiers went without any pay at all for months on end, sometimes half a year. Which was the central reason why they mutinied and not only mutinied but went on great rampages of looting; they were claiming their back pay, taking what they though society owed them. That was the root cause of the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

And then there was greed raised to the level of comic farce. Most officers or army administrators had been selling off stock for cash for years. Thus the FAZ had out of date East European guns, the wrong ammo for their guns. Initially army commanders in Kivu sold the best of their munitions to the AFDL for a quick profit, arms and ammo the AFDL then turned back on the FAZ, who turned and ran.

Lastly, the neighbouring countries turned against Mobutu. Rwanda and Uganda were the AFDL’s main backers, but the Angolan government had for decades resented Mobutu’s support for the UNITA rebels and took the opportunity to send forces into Zaire to crush their base camps. Zambia co-operated by letting the AFDL cross its land to reach the south. Zimbabwe and Eritrea sent the rebels modern arms and Tanzania turned a blind eye to rebel bases on its territory.

By March 1997 the AFDL had taken Kisangani, next came Mbuji Mayi, then Lubumbashi, capital of the mining region in the south. It took just seven months from the launch of their campaign till the first AFDL troops arrived outside Kinshasa prompting the atmosphere of paranoid panic Wrong describes in the first chapter of this book.

Chapter 13

As so often happens with tyrants, Mobutu’s overthrow coincided with his final fatal illness. It’s as if their imminent fall from power triggers a collapse in their bodies. King Leopold II lasted barely a year after he handed the Congo Free State over to the Belgian government (February 1908) and in an eerily parallel way, the AFDL’s seven-month advance on Kinshasa coincided with 66-year-old Mobutu’s diagnosis with prostate cancer.

As the rebel forces relentlessly advanced westwards, Mobutu was in and out of the most expensive private clinics in the world in Switzerland. Thus his personal intervention and decision making was almost entirely absent during the crucial months. When he returned to his capital in March 1997, he could barely walk and had to be supported from the plane.

On 16 May 1997, following failed peace talks chaired by President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, Mobutu fled into exile and Kabila’s forces proclaimed victory. Mobutu died in exile in Morocco 3 and a half months later, 7 September 1997.

This is where Wrong places a fascinating interview with Mobutu’s son by his second wife Bobi Ladawa, Nzanga Mobutu. He mourns his father and insists he loved his family and loved his country. Wrong gives her account of the very last few days, especially negotiation with the Americans who tried to broker a deal with Kabila, partly through Nzanga’s eyes, partly through the account of US ambassador Daniel Simpson who took part in the actual discussions, and Bill Richardson, the troubleshooter US President Bill Clinton handed the tricky task of persuading Mobutu to relinquish power and tell his troops not to fight the AFDL as it entered Kinshasa, a confrontation which would have led to a bloodbath, anarchy and another Great Pillaging (p.271).

What comes over is the absolute centrality of the Americans as power brokers in the situation, but the refusal of a very sick Mobutu to formally abdicate and of Kabila to make any concessions. Right at the last his generals abandoned him. The knackered Russian Ilyushin jet Mobutu and his close family flew out of Kinshasa to Gbadolite in was peppered with machine gun fire by his very pissed-off personal guard, the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP) who he was abandoning to their fates (p.279).

Chapter 14 Ill-gotten gains

A few months after Kabila took power, he set up the quaintly named Office of Ill Gotten Gains (OBMA) to identify Mobutu’s looted assets, including his multiple properties abroad (p.286). Wrong meets the first director of OBMA, former nightclub owner turned rebel soldier Jean-Baptise Mulemba lists and visits some. Three years after his fall, Wrong visits his large Swiss mansion at Les Miguettes, now falling into neglect.

Epilogue

The epilogue reminds us that this book was published in 2000, when Congo was still in the toils of what became known as the Second Congo War and Kabila was still president. She was not to know Kabila would be assassinated in 2001 and the war drag on for years.

Wrong shows us the dispiriting process whereby the initial high hopes about him and his crusade to undo corruption soon faded, as he found himself having to resort to all Mobutu’s old techniques for trying to hold his wartorn country together, namely creaming money off foreign loans, the mining companies, and even introducing tougher taxes on ordinary Congolese, in order to keep the regional governors and all manner of fractious stakeholders onboard.

Anyway, as Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 it ends with a survey of the many depressing tokens which indicated that Kabila was falling into Mobutu’s old ways, only without the dictator’s charisma or shrewdness. Blunter. Cruder. She calls Kabila a ‘thug’ (p.300).

And she ends with an assessment of whether Mobutu’s missing billions will ever be recovered. The short answer is No, for the simple reason that they don’t exist. All the evidence is that millions went through his hands but en route to the key stakeholders, political rivals, regional warlords, he needed to pay to follow him.

At a deep structural level, the corruption and gangster economy run by Mobutu and then Kabila may be the only way to keep such a huge country, divided into starkly different regions, populated by some 250 different ethnic groups, together.

God, what a thought. The population of Congo in the 1920s when the first estimates about how many died during Leopold’s rule, was said to be 10 million. By the date of independence 1960 described in Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist it had only risen to 15 million or so. When Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 she gives Congo’s population as 45 million. And now, in 2021? It is 90 million! Good grief. What future for a ruined country overrun by its own exploding population?

France

The French come out of this account, as usual, as scumbags. France was ‘Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend’ (p.287), ‘always the most loyal’ of his Western supporters (p.258). From the 1960s Zaire came to be regarded by the French government as part of its ‘chasse gardée’:

that ‘private hunting ground’ of African allies whose existence allowed France to punch above its weight in the international arena. (p.196)

The French believed they understood the African psyche better than the Anglo-Saxon British or Americans. They clung on to belief in their mission civilisatrice despite their not-too-impressive record in Vietnam and Algeria. Since the 1960s the French government has promoted la francophonie “the global community of French-speaking peoples, comprising a network of private and public organizations promoting equal ties among countries where French people or France played a significant historical role, culturally, militarily, or politically.” (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot of this high-sounding policy was that the French government promised Mobutu their undying support, no matter how corrupt and evil he became. The French government funded schools and media – so long as they promoted the French language. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French president from 1974 to 1981, was a great friend of African dictators and secured them many loans which just happened to coincide with a building firm run by Valery’s cousin winning quite a few contracts to build Zairean ministries and bank buildings and so on (p.131). Very handy.

It meant military aid, too. When rebels invaded Shaba from Angola, France parachuted legionnaires in to fight them. During the First Pillaging of 1991 France flew in troops to police the streets.

After his downfall, when the OBMA set out to track down the billions of dollars Mobutu had sequestered abroad, the lack of co-operation from the French government stood out.

Confronted with the AFDL’s legal and moral crusade, the silence from France, Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend, was deafening. (p.287)

But France’s standout achievement in the region was to protect the Hutu instigators of the great genocide of Rwanda. This is a hugely controversial subject, which I’ll cover in reviews of specifically about the Rwanda genocide, but in brief: the French government supported the Hutu government. The French president was personal friends with the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, so when his plane was shot down and the Hutu government went into panic mode, the French government’s first response was to support them and to carry on supporting them even as they carried out the 100-day genocide. When the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda to put an end to the genocide, France continued to support the Hutus and helped the genocidaires escape, along with millions of other Hutu refugees into eastern Congo, where they continued to support them, even after the evidence was long in the public domain that they had just carried out the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Because for the French government, all that matters is the glory of France, the prestige of France, the strength of the Francophonie. Morality, justice, human rights, all come a poor second to France’s unwavering commitment to its own magnificence.

Hence France’s unwavering support for the evil kleptocratic dictator Mobutu right up till his last days; hence France’s support of the Hutu government, even after it became clear they were carrying out a genocide. A guilt France has taken a long time to face up to, has finally admitted, albeit hedged with reservations and caveats.

Repeated stories

Stories, gossip and educational facts are learned through repetition. Wrong repeats the description of big statue of Henry Morton Stanley, long ago torn down and lying rusting outside a warehouse in Kinshasa. Several times she refers to the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

She repeats the story about the Congo’s store of uranium dug from the mines of Shinkolobwe being sent by a foresightful colonial administrator to New York where it was discovered by scientists from the Manhattan Project and refined to become the core of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (p.140).

Her chapter about King Leopold’s rape of Congo under hypocritical claims of freeing it from slavery and barbarism repeats much of the material I’ve read in Hochschild and van Reybrouck. She repeats Hochschild’s mentions of Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem’s estimate that 13 million died or fled the region during Leopold’s rule.

Van Reybrouck thought the tragic story of Lumumba betrayed by his secretary and friend Mobutu was like a Shakespearian tragedy. Wrong thinks it is Biblical like Cain and Abel, two beloved brothers who end up betraying each other. It certainly haunts the imagination of novelists and historians and commentators in a way the later, long rule of Mobutu rarely did, and the rule of Laurent Kabila not at all.

Credit

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong was published by Fourth Estate in 2000. All references are to the 2001 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on October 7, 2021

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