All posts tagged Swahili

Zanzibar by Giles Foden (2002)

‘My dear boy, this is Africa.’
(Beaten-up old Brit, Ralph Leggatt, to naive young American, Nick Karolides, in Zanzibar, page 97)

This is a 389-page thriller about the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa:

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998. More than 220 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many a thriller it opens with short, elliptical sections devoted to a handful of disparate characters. Only slowly do we find out more about them and begin to realise that their paths are ‘destined’ to cross. They are:

Khaled al-Kidr, native of Zanzibar who, aged 21, comes home to find his mother and father dead with their throats cut. He wastes his inheritance on drinking and women until an uncle figure, Zayn Mujuj, confides that his father worked for a secret Islamic organisation and was murdered by American-Israeli agents (p.53). At which point Khaled signs up for jihad, travelling to work for ‘the Sheikh. in Sudan and then onto an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where, after extensive training, he is flattered to be chosen for a special mission.

Jack Queller, a former CIA agent and expert on the Arab world, conduit of resources to the mujahideen in the 1980s (p.306), who had his arm amputated after a firefight in Afghanistan, is now a consultant at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (known as DS), in his personal life haunted by the death from cancer of his wife who we wasn’t there to support, lives an isolated depressed existence on a seafront property on Martha’s Vineyard (p.141).

Nick Karolides, an American of Greek descent, a marine biologist, taking up a new job on a coral reef protection scheme off the island of Zanzibar. Unhappily haunted by the death of his father who was a keen diver till a shark bit off his arm and he died on the way to hospital, whereupon his mother retreated into (Greek Orthodox) religious fervour.

Miranda Power, keen young American State Department trainee who, as we meet her, has been given her first posting, as an Executive Assistant, Logistical and Security, to the American Embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By about page 50 we’ve been introduced to these characters and have a strong feeling that their lives are going to intersect.

(Notice how all the western characters are American. So quite apart from the extraordinary range and depth of research demonstrated in the text – about life in Zanzibar or marine biology or al-Qaeda – Foden is also ventriloquising the lives and speech patterns and culture of a range of American characters, a distinct new departure from the British or African characters depicted in his previous novels.)

A book teaches readers how to read it. By about page 70, we’ve realised that Foden is going to be interleaving, interweaving and interspersing narratives about these different characters. It’s going to be very episodic. This leads to several results:

it creates narrative tension, because you realise they’re going to meet and interact so the interest is in seeing how, and with what results
it creates dramatic irony i.e. juxtaposing characters who see the same thing but from different angles (the huge example is the completely different interpretation the Americans and al-Qaeda give to the previous 20 years of history)
this irony can be used for comic effect, as in the chapter which juxtaposes very short, half-page fragments of dialogue of the two enemies: between, on the one hand, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in their Afghan hideout; and lectures being given about Osama bin Laden by a series of CIA and security experts (we see these lectures because they’re attended by one of the central character, Miranda)

This kind of jumping between scenes featuring characters who are going to eventually meet up in a fateful event is standard operating procedure for many thrillers. Or you could describe the effect as musical, the deliberate counterpointing of different characters, atmospheres and motifs. Or maybe compare it to collage, in art – like cutting out images from magazines and pasting them next to each other in unexpected juxtapositions.

Cast

Page numbers refer to when someone is first introduced, or first speaks, or when a significant fact about them is mentioned. I suppose it’s a kind of index of characters. Or cast list.

Khaled al-Kidr, young recruit to al-Qaeda
Queller, retired badly injured American agent (p.7), now works at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS (p.47), first name Jack, used to be top Arabist under Reagan (p.52), full title (p.52)
Lucy, Queller’s wife who died from cancer and he feels guilty about not having been around to support
Nick Karolides, marine biologist, born and raised in Florida – tall, tanned, handsome, fit from his daily swim
his mother (unnamed), who’s become a religious fanatic since the death of his father (p.14)
Nick’s dad (unnamed), keen diver, who had his arm bitten off by a shark and died on the way to hospital
Dino, wiry 60-year-old owner of Dino’s Wine Shop, was diving with Nick’s dad when the shark attacked (p.20)
Inspector Chikambwa, unfriendly and (it turns out) corrupt marine policeman on Zanzibar, the USAID contact for the project Nick goes to Zanzibar to work on (p.27)
George Darvil, Nick’s predecessor who died in suspicious circumstances, found drowned, his boat riddled with holes (p.28)
Mr de Souza, proprietor of the Macpherson Ruins Hotel (p.29), very short and extraordinarily beautiful (p.32)
Leggatt, European clove farmer who also does boat tours, Ralph by name (p.82), made his money in copper and silver then diamonds in Sierra Leone (p.121), runs a clove farm, owns a yacht, the Winston Churchill (p.96)
Zayn Mujuj, changes Khaled’s life by recruiting him for jihad (p.45), big man, ‘enormous’ (p.230), Palestinian (p.222)
Ahmed the German, Osama bin Laden’s companion and cameraman (p.45) wears a Sport Team Osnabrück t-shirt, which becomes a leitmotif identifying him as the bomber (pages 143 and 282)
Yousef, al-Qaeda bomb maker (p.45), last name Mourad (p.295)
Ayman al-Zawahari, leader of Egyptian Jihad (p.62)
Muhammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military commander (p.62)
al-Qaeda, first mentioned (p.43), described (p.66)
the Taliban, keeping guard over the al-Qaeda base (p.50)
Miranda Power, executive assistant, Logistical and Security, American Embassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (p.51), Boston Irish, dad a cop (pages 151 and 184)
Morton Altenburg, Director of Operations, FBI (p.55), young and successful and scornful of Queller’s obsession with al-Qaeda
General Tom Kirby, Department of Defence (p.56)
Osama bin Laden (p.62) described by Queller (p.66 and elsewhere)
Tim Catmull, Brit working for the Department for International Development (DFID) (p.78)
Sayeed, boy accompanying the thugs who beat up Leggatt and tie him up on Lyly before Nick comes to his rescue; who they coax down from the rigging of Leggatt’s yacht; and who Leggatt gives a job
Ray Delahoya, American comms guy at the Dar embassy (p.103), cheerfully vulgar, likes junk food and low culture, apparently gay (fancies the tough Marine guards, pages 245 and 249)
Turtle Mo, a big imposing East African trawler baron, who Nick hires his diving gear from (p.126)
Olivier Pastoreau, Belgian land reclaimer who works for the European Development Fund, proud owner of a handsome white motor cruiser, the Cythère (p.130), amusingly pessimistic
Clive Bayard, only African American in the Dar Embassy (p.244)
Nisha Ghai, Asian employee in the embassy (p.244), killed in the bombing
Lee Denham, the one intelligence officer at the Dar embassy (p.245)
Corporal Rossetti, Marine on duty when the bomb goes off, helps badly injured Ray (p.247)
Juma, gate guard at the embassy
Dr Macintyre, embassy physician (p.259)
President Bill Clinton phones the chargé d’affaires’ house where the wounded have been brought to condole with them (p.262), condemns the attacks on TV (p.270), makes an extensive speech on TV (pages 305 to 306), forced to defend himself in the Starr investigation that he perjured himself lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (p.325), announces retaliation against al-Qaeda (p.331)
William Cohen, US Secretary of Defence, seen on TV condemning the bombing (p.270)
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, seen on TV (p.270)
National Security Director Sandy Berger, explaining America’s retaliatory strikes against Sudan (p.332)
Omar el-Bashir, President of Sudan, calling the American attack on the pharmaceuticals factory ‘a terrorist act’ (p.339)

Part 1

Nick settles into his new post as USAID coral guy in Zanzibar, meeting locals friendly and unfriendly. Miranda flies out and settles into her new job at the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Khaled undergoes further training in preparation for his mission to blow up the same US Embassy.

As usual Foden is very, very good indeed, supernaturally good, at imagining these people’s lives and thoughts, and the hundreds of details, interiors, accessories, food and drink, cars and bikes and boats and tropical stuff they interact with. It is incredibly well imagined.

Nick gets to know a raddled, grumpy old Brit named Leggatt via an adventure. He had observed Leggatt’s yellow boat slowly cruising across the bay in the same direction every day. The hotel owner tells him he (Leggat) is visiting a small island named Lyly. Nick decides to go explore in his dinghy and outboard. He finds the island and beaches his dinghy and walks along the shore where, through binoculars, he spots Leggatt digging up turtle eggs. The bastard! But then a native dhow approaches and two men and a boy get out, swim ashore. Nick thinks they must be nature wardens so is astonished when they beat up Leggatt, tie him to a tree, and take all the eggs themselves. The attackers head back to their boat, Nick runs over and unties Leggatt (he’s bleeding from the beating), they run back to Nick’s boat and start the engine and motor round the coast to find the boy up in the sails of Leggatt’s boat, ripping up the sails and rigging with a knife. He has the idea to fire a safety/rescue flare at the bad guys’ dhow, where it sets fire to their sails. Nick and Leggatt get to the latter’s yacht, climb up the side ladder, Nick tying his dinghy to the stern, Leggatt starts the yacht’s motor and they chug away from the island and the burning dhow. Nick corners the boy who is quickly subdued.

Leggatt explains that he is not the bad guy, he is the one trying to protect the turtle eggs by digging them up and moving them to a secret location. When Nick naively suggests reporting the egg thieves and boy to the USAID contact, Inspector Chikambwa, Leggatt snorts with laughter an says he’s corrupt and commission the stealing of the eggs, among many other scams (p.97).

Leggatt tells him the island’s named Lyly which comes from the Swahili lala which means sleep. It’s 2 miles wide with a lighthouse on the highest point, built by a Brit in the 1930s. Nowadays it’s owned by a rich Saudi. Leggatt tells Nick about the Black African slaughter of Arab civilians soon after Zanzibar became independent i.e. 1964 (p.99).

Zanzibar: Arabs, Africans and a forgotten legacy of slavery and ethnic cleansing

Leggatt’s an old hand, he’s been fishing and monitoring these waters for decades, owns a house and several boats, made his pile from diamonds. He drops Nick and his dinghy off at the hotel. A few days later Leggatt takes Nick fishing for barracuda, a strong fighting fish. This fishing expedition is a set-piece which makes you think Foden must have done it, and been shown how to do it, in order to produce such a detailed description (pages 112 to 115).

There’s a lovely description of Nick rowing a rowboat back to his oceanside hotel (the Macpherson Ruins Hotel). I used to row at school, so I know exactly what he means (p.100).

Meanwhile Miranda settles into a completely new society. I think we are meant to register the decisions she makes as small moral compromises, accustoming herself to the grotesque poverty of most of the population, while she licks ice cream by the embassy pool. She soon hires a watchman and a ‘housegirl’ for her accommodation in Oyster Bay, as all the other ex-pats do. She falls in with Ray Delahoya, cheerful, fun, not a threat or boyfriend material (only a hundred pages later is it made explicit that he’s gay).

We’re shown security reports she files which are conscientious. If the reader is paying attention they’ll spot that a character described in bin Laden’s entourage is caught on security camera himself filming the Embassy layout, from outside the walls (p.123).

Part 2

Carries on in the same style. Khaled and the al-Qaeda team (Khaled’s mentor Zayn and Yusef the bomber) drive south through Afghanistan into Pakistan, fly to Dubai, to Muscat, then direct to Zanzibar (p.139). The movement of their van is picked up by spy satellites and the message sent to the CIA etc in America. Queller is asked to comment and thinks they’re embarking on an attack and need to be monitored. But his suggestion is shot down by his enemy within the CIA, Alternburg. Queller really hates Altenburg because he a) nixed a spy operation he’d set up and b) has been politicking to get Queller sacked as a consultant.

Nick and Miranda finally meet, as he’s in Dar to pick up the scuba gear he had sent on from the States. She bumps into him, they get talking, they go for a swim. She notices he is tall, dark, fit and handsome, almost like the hero of a movie. She gets into a bit of trouble in the sea; is pulled out by his strong arms etc. She gives him a lift into town and when he says he’s shopping, drives him past security into the Embassy where he fills up at the PX, the American supermarket found in all overseas bases.

Nick goes on a solo mission to Lyly, the deserted island where he and Leggatt had the adventure with the turtle egg thieves, ‘the island of sleep’. Beaching his dinghy he scratches his ankle. He has come surprisingly unprepared, without a toilet bag, for example or, more importantly, sunblock and a sunhat. He explores the small derelict house and abandoned mosque, manages to fire up the lighthouse light using paraffin he’s brought but half-blinds himself in the process. Diving through the spectacular coral, he finds a sea cave which, amazingly, appears to have Arab writing carved into the (slime-covered) walls (p.171). Later, Leggatt explains that it’s part of a whole cave and tunnel network where slaves used to throw recalcitrant or recaptured runaway slaves. Oubliettes. Hence the long-ago writing.

Nick invites Miranda to come visit Zanzibar from Dar for a weekend. He takes her (and the reader) on a tour of the sights. (I wonder if it’s a safe place for a tourist to visit, now, in 2023.) He takes the traditional male role i.e. showing her round, explaining history etc. She takes the traditional female role, passive, deferring to his knowledge. When they dance he has ‘strong hands on her hips’ etc. All very conventionally heteronormative and well mannered. In the refined, polite tone of this book no-one fantasises or masturbates or farts or menstruates, as they do in Leslie Thomas’s vulgar comedies. Makes me realise that the thriller genre is not only serious (obviously) but also, in a strange way, prissy, at some level, respectable. It’s the tiniest details but when Miranda is upset she doesn’t cry, as you or I might, but weeps, like the heroine of a Racine play. Even when it’s at its most gritty, there’s a kind of high-minded decorum about the thriller genre.

Anyway, I didn’t like this lovey-dovey stuff at all. Also the romance dialogue is very stilted and, well, boring. Next day, Nick takes Miranda to a beachfront restaurant then onto a tropical garden where he finally kisses her.

Something had happened, a change had taken place, the needle had swung around in the compass of her heart. (p.188)

Foden is a very savvy writer indeed, capable of deploying lots of different registers and styles. Surely he knows he’s writing Mills and Boon here. For the lolz I googled ‘Mills and Boon top titles’ and found the following: ‘Song of the Waves’; ‘The Emerald Garden’; ‘Tabitha in Moonlight’; ‘Rapture of the Desert’; ‘Whispering Palms’. To which could be added these passages from ‘Romance in Zanzibar’. The only slight fly in the ointment being that we know this is all heading towards a monstrous terrorist attack. I wonder if one or both of them will be killed in it. Or maimed. Both Foden’s previous novels contain scenes of brutal violence and bump off characters you’d become quite attached to. I suppose I should savour the kisses in the tropical garden while I can…

Nick persuades Leggatt to take him and Miranda back to Lyly. He shows her how to scuba dive, they frolic, find their way to an isolated spot of beach and have sex, mercifully passed over in silence and undescribed. Then an incident where they find a huge mamba snake uncovering the turtle eggs with a view to eating them, and Nick catches it with a forked branch and throws it into the undergrowth. More interesting that her being lulled and seduced is the way Nick starts to get on her nerves, a bit charmless, a bit clumsy, unempathetic, and then assuming masculine ownership of her.

The al-Qaeda cell

What happens next utterly transforms the tone and feel of the book. When they’d left Lyly, a powerful cruiser had crossed their path, apparently en route to the island. Miranda had looked at its crew and skipper through the telephoto lens of her camera and nearly taken a photo but then it veered away.

A day or so later Leggatt and Nick had gone back to the island and discovered there were two dhows and a cruiser pulled up. Nick had gone inshore in the diving gear and this section opens with him watching them from a distance, going in and out of the buildings where he slept, apparently Arabs, some sporting sub-machineguns.

Then a huge storm comes up which sinks the Churchill. Leggatt and Nick manage to abandon ship and get into the dinghy and cut the painted just before the big yacht goes down. With heroic strength Nick rows the dinghy through the coral barrier (guided by Leggatt) and ashore. Leggatt says they’ll never make it back to the mainland in a rowing boat; the only thing for it is to steal one of the dhows and to do it now, in the dead of night and while the aftersqualls of the storm are still making bad weather. They wade through the thick jungle, emerge on the side of the island where the Arabs are, try to sneak across the beach but are spotted. The Arabs open up with the machine guns, killing Leggatt and brushing Nick’s forehead. When he comes to, he is trussed up hand and foot and the enormous Arab, Zayn, whacks him with the flat of a machete, asking if he is American, hitting him, insulting him, till he says he’ll be back tomorrow to interrogate him and…throws Nick out the lighthouse window, attached by a rope, so that he is dangling upside down, his head bangs against the outside wall of the lighthouse and he loses consciousness again.

See what I mean by changing the tone of the narrative? We were in the western world of pampered tourists, all ice cream, skindiving and scotch on the veranda. Now we are in the world of jihad and unmitigated brutality.

Thing is, the way Zayn slit their throats reminded Khaled of how he returned home that terrible evening to find his parents’ throats cut. Zayn always told him it was done by Israeli-American agents but…but what if Zayn did it? Plus Zayn has been riding Khaled, pushing him and bullying and belittling him, on one occasion pushing his face right into their campfire. This isn’t jihad. This is sadistic bullying. And so…

So he goes up to the top of the lighthouse, hauls Nick’s unconscious body up and over the window sill, then leans down with a knife…Next morning the American is gone and Zayn angrily kicks and punches Khaled to find out what happened, at which Khaled shows him the American’s ear, says he cut it off as punishment then threw the body in the lagoon. Zayn is angry because he wanted to interrogate the American and also suspicious, as is the reader.

Miranda

Cut to Miranda at the US embassy and we discover that they didn’t have sex that time, on the island. I misread it. They were goofing in the waves, walked up the beach out of sight of Leggatt and lay down…there’s a gap in the text…which resumes with ‘Later, they walked back round to the fire’ (p.197). I misread this as them having sex. No. Because now, in this section, Miranda wonders whether she should have had sex with Nick, and worries whether the kiss she let him give her in the tropical gardens ‘meant more’.

I’m not sure, but I think all this fussing about lovey-dovey is meant to be an indicator of how shallow and naive Miranda is, on a par with her not understanding why America is so hated, and being upset by slavery and African poverty i.e. generally not understanding where she is. Conversely, maybe she is there to bring out the extraordinary distance between the poorest people on the earth and the richest.

7 August 1998: the bombing

Miranda is going about her normal day when, on page 252, the bomb goes off. It was 7 August 1998. The Wikipedia article gives forensic details about the make-up of the explosives then states that at Dar es Salaam 11 were killed and 85 wounded (p.260), considerably less than the bomb which went off at the Nairobi embassy, killing 213 and wounding about 4,000 (p.261).

Part 3

Hundreds of FBI, CIA, medical and forensics experts fly in from the Sates, including the prick Altenburg and kindly old Queller. These personality traits are on display when Miranda finds herself being given the third degree in an interview by Altenburg, and then horrified to find he has gotten her suspended for dereliction of duty for not inspecting the van which is now thought to have been carrying the explosives. Distraught, her world in tatters, her self confidence shot, she goes home weeping.

Queller sees all this and takes steps, calling up his old buddy Madeleine Allbright to ask for Miranda to be reinstated and assigned to him as his personal assistant. Which is what happens.

I thought the buildup to the explosion might be tense and exciting but it isn’t. It just happens, out of the blue, while Miranda’s going about a mundane morning’s work. If ‘grip’ or excitement there is, it comes from a completely different direction, which is The Hunt For Nick Karolides. Miranda becomes increasingly obsessed with the way he hasn’t been in touch, hasn’t replied to phone calls or emails. So flies from Dar to Stone Town (capital of Zanzibar) then taxis out to the Macpherson Ruins Hotel whose owner, Mr de Souza, is just as perplexed by Nick’s prolonged absence.

When she goes out to Leggatt’s farm she finds him also absent, but persuades the boy Leggatt hired, Sayeed, to organise a boat to take her back to Lyly. On the beach at Lyly they find the rotted body of Leggatt with an ear missing. So the reader realises it wasn’t Nick’s ear that Khaled cut off.

This happens on page 302. The book is 389 pages long. In these last 90 or so pages the interest focuses on two things: Miranda’s search for Nick; and the bitter contest between the two American intelligence operatives, Altenburg (who thinks the al-Qaeda connection is poppycock) and Queller, who is sure of it.

In a flashback we learn that Queller not only helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan but met Osama bin Laden several times, helped channel funds which not only armed the fighters but built airstrips, the cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains etc (pages 306 to 315). And then, extraordinarily, that it was Osama bin Laden himself who shot Queller in the elbow at their last meeting, as a warning to him, and all American ‘crusaders’ to get out of Muslim lands.

Where is Nick?

On page 317 (of 389) we discover what happened to Nick. We haven’t seen or heard of him since page 236, so he’s been absent for 80 pages or a fifth of the text. Presumably, one aim of this is to build up suspense about his fate, amplified by Miranda’s growing concern.

We find him cast adrift in a rowing boat without oars on the open ocean. He vaguely remembers someone bundling him into the boat then throwing away the oars and himself jumping overboard – presumably Khaled, saving his life. Over several pages we watch the effects of exposure, heatstroke, sunburn and dehydration. Nick has both ears and is unharmed except for the rope burns and where the bullet grazed his head but he quickly degenerates after a few days into a burned, blistered, hallucinating wreck.

Until he is picked up by a passing Greek cargo ship. He sees it emerge from the blurred horizon, stands up, waves his arms and shouts etc. The Greek crew wash him, slowly give him water, then soft food and restore him to health. Lucky, eh? Big ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Nick is of Greek heritage so when he starts speaking Greek, the crew and captain rally to his support. Presumably this is thrown in to explain/justify why the captain lets himself be persuaded to sail close to Zanzibar and not to dock in the main port – where he’d incur ruinous charges – but get close enough to the Macpherson hotel to be rowed ashore.

Which explains why, on the night when Miranda has flown to Zanzibar and taken a taxi to the hotel to enquire about him, and persuades the manager to let her sleep in Nick’s room…she hears the chalet door opening and…Grand Reunion! He staggers into her arms, tries to explain, she makes him have a shower while she gets a first aid kit from de Souza, makes him lie on the bed, tends his wounds like a good nursey, they lie facing each other, they touch, they make love.

His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more. (p.330)

Well…’Romance in Zanzibar’. Apparently, Mills and Boon novels are organised into sub-genres, one of which is ‘Heroes – Enjoy a thrilling story filled with danger and finding love no matter what.’ Well, these passages are a fine example.

He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her. (p.330)

I’m not sure this is what a man who’s just returned from days in an open boat, who’s still suffering from wounds to his head and knee, which are still bleeding, would be up for. But the conventions of the thriller genre override any kind of realism.

Bill Clinton

It’s a funny mix, this text, because it goes from ripe Mills and Boon-type soft porn to our newly committed couple watching President Bill Clinton on TV explaining why he ordered US air strikes on the al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a complex of training bases near Khost in Afghanistan (p.332). Nick and Miranda consume the TV news in puzzlement at the randomness of this target.

Passages describing the process whereby the targets were listed, assessed and agreed, and then the process of launching the missiles, read like magazine journalism, possibly from a military magazine. At one point Foden directly quotes a US Navy press release describing the operation of Tomahawk cruise missiles (pages 335 to 339).

Foden gives a roundup of responses to the US cruise missile attacks which reads like a Wikipedia article, giving quotes from the President of Sudan, the Taliban government, Arab newspapers etc, all of which describe the Americans as war criminals operating outside the law. Tony Blair gives Clinton his whole-hearted support. This is all very interesting but a) not really a novel and b) was all to be swept away in the vast tsunami of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The US retaliation prompted Foden to snide and snarky remarks about America being ‘one nation under God, indivisible etc’ which feel like cheap sarcasm, unworthy of his extraordinary gifts.

A passage describing Osama bin Laden’s thoughts as he rides a horse, far from where the missiles struck, with his closest lieutenants – Ayman Zawahari and Muhammad Atef – and personal bodyguards.

Khaled

A passage describing Khaled al-Khidr, praying in the mosque in Jambangona, on the island of Pemba where his parents came from and his jumbled thoughts, containing an impressive number of quotes from the Holy Koran and Khaled’s theological speculations, in particular whether Zayn, with his bullying and murder, led him from the path of righteousness.

The passage quoting Bill Clinton describing America as ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ (p.337) is deliberately paralleled by Khaled thoughts about the redeemed in Islam, ‘one nation, indivisible’ (p.345) – just one of many examples where Foden juxtaposes the value systems of ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ to bring out how their belief systems are so similar and yet so different.

Khaled is giddy with guilt, confused, wanders the streets of his home town in utter confusion, falls to his knees.

Cut to Zayn Mujuj, the big strong killer. He and Khaled had escaped after the bombing and gone to meet the cargo ship appointed to pick them up but it never showed. Instead they moored off the island of Pemba for a few days, Zayn calling the Sheikh for daily updates. We learn that Zayn, himself, is motivated by revenge, namely the wiping out of his family in Beirut, by the Israeli air force and the Christian phalange. Maybe he’s talking about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982. This is the source of his burning hatred. And now we learn Khaled was right to suspect that Zayn killed his (Khaled’s parents); he did, as punishment for embezzling al-Qaeda funds (p.348).

Now the boy has disappeared. Zayn phones the Sheikh on the sat phone. They speak in light code. Zayn says the boy (the finch) knows too much and must be eliminated. He takes a dinghy from the boat up the creek to Jambangona.

Exciting climactic chase

Foden reverts to small snippets giving different characters’ points of view: this is meant to jack up the tension. Thus, Queller gets a call from Altenburg back in Washington telling him SIGINT has picked up those sat phone calls off Pemba: could he go and investigate. He asks Nick and Miranda (instead of, say, some US marines or security forces) to help him. They putter off to Pemba in the Belgian guys’ boat (seeing as all the others have been lost earlier in the story). Meanwhile the killer Zayn has arrived in Jambangona with a big knife in his long boots. Who will get to Khaled first? Will Khaled recognise Nick as the American he saved? Will Nick recognise Khaled as the boy who saved him, dragging him half-conscious into the rowing boat and casting it adrift back on Lyly?

Zayn doesn’t find Khaled in Jambangona and so chugs upriver to Chake Chake, roaming the streets with murder in his heart. Nick, Miranda and Queller arrive at the map reference given by Alternburg to find nothing so they, also, chug upriver to Chake Chake, and here they spot the same motor cruiser they saw an age ago cutting them off as they returned from Lyly, the terrorist’s boat.

The climax comes when our heroes discover that they have arrived in town at the exact same moment when an annual festival takes place, the mchezo wa ngombe, the game of the bull, when brave youths taunt and try and jump onto two enraged bulls (named Bom-Bom and Wembe, I thought you’d like to know) in an arena. Lucky coincidence. Also improbable is that, at this moment of peril for his life, Khaled, throwing caution to the winds, tries his luck in the arena against the bulls. And that Zayn, attracted by the hullabaloo, sees him. And that Nick, amid the pressing crowd, sees both of them, tells Queller, and starts elbowing towards them. You can see how this has the logic more of a move than a novel.

Long story short: Zayn chases Khaled across the arena; one of the bulls gores and tramples him; Khaled escapes over the arena fence, through the crowd, and down backstreets, pursued by Nick, Miranda and Queller. First he’s cornered in a tourist shop, then escapes, then Nick tackles him, Queller steps forward with a gun, but Khaled grabs a dagger from a stall and Miranda and puts it to her neck, backing away as in ten thousand American movies. He drags her down to the quayside and into the terrorists’ boat, finds the key, powers up, casts off and motors away, hotly pursued by Nick and Queller, suddenly feeling his age, feeling tired, overcome by a sense of depression and failure.

Out of the crowded streets emerges Zayn, bleeding and furious to see his boat cruising away so he cuffs a white tourist off his jet ski and sets off in hot pursuit. Now the narrative has gone full James Bond.

Showdown on Lyly

Khaled steers out to the island of sleep, location of quite a few nightmares by now. Nick and Queller watch him beach and drag Miranda up the sand into the jungle. Queller shoots a way through the coral breach and they, also, beach their boat. Nick tells Queller to stay behind and guard the boat, takes Queller’s gun and sets off in pursuit. God, the excitement!

Khaled drags terrified Miranda through the caves at gunpoint. Nick gets lost pursuing. Queller investigates various jungle trails and on returning to the beach notices a jet ski lying on its side. Zayn is clearly badly injured, needs a stick to lean on. Queller, binocular distance away, takes a marlinspike out of the boat and slowly sets off in pursuit.

It’s called ‘suspense’ but what it boils down to is, Who is going to die? Khaled and Zayn, I’d guess, and possibly Queller, for his sins in aiding bin Laden. But it’s anyone’s guess; Foden is a brutal writer and hasn’t hesitated to wipe out sympathetic characters in previous books.

In the slimy caves Khaled undergoes a crisis, becomes hysterical , tells Miranda about Zayn killing his parents, admits involvement in the bombing, no longer knows what is jihad, what is righteous, drops the knife, pulls out a gun he found on Zayn’s boat, then disappears into the darkness.

On the beach Queller gets to the lighthouse then loses the trail. Turns round just as Zayn smacks him in the face with a plank of wood, grabs the marlinspike, lifts it to skewer Queller.

Nick finds Miranda cowering, shivering, in the caves.

Queller looks up at the man about to kill him when there’s a gunshot and, as in a thousand American movies, a hole appears in Zayn’s forehead, he shudders, and falls dead across the terrified American. Khaled appears, explaining – to Queller – who shot Zayn. He then delivers his Speech the speech which explains his Change of Heart. It is time for him to stop killing, to turn to do good work for Muslims. Queller asks him to come back with them but Khaled very reasonably says, just because I stop trusting al-Qaeda doesn’t mean I start trusting America. Then he’s gone.

Soon afterwards Nick and Miranda appear and pull the big heavy dead Zayn off Queller. Khaleed steals the Belgian’s very expensive cruiser and shoots holes in his own one, so our guys are stranded. Nick and Miranda wash the slime off themselves in the sea, they all sleep in the lighthouse, next morning helicopters find them.

The end

Nick, Miranda and Zayn’s body are choppered back to the mainland where they find themselves celebrities, the story of their chase and shootout somehow all over CNN. Then in a convoy of those huge black FBI SUVs which appear in all the movies, to some local base.

Miranda stares blankly out the window, Nick falls asleep and Queller has last thoughts about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Will he ever be tracked down? (Yes) Can such an organisation be defeated? (No) Queller reflects that globalisation only entrenches local elites, often working hand in glove with multinational corporations, to maintain most of their populations in resentful poverty, from which are spawned endless fundamentalisms (p.377). Improbably, he has an old man’s hope for a better world, more equality, defusing violence etc. Pipe dream. There are 8 billion humans alive today. In 20 years it will hit 9 billion. More crushing poverty. More grievance. More violence.

All improbable as it is an American security service official wishing for the end of capitalism or its superseding by a fairer system. Not very likely. Sounds more like the thoughts of some Limey pinko novelist.

(Oh, I spotted Foden’s placing of a micro-joke; the SUV convoy roars past a hoarding advertising ENVI skin cream (p.377). Now a hoarding advertising this same product plays a role at the end of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when Idi Amin, his regime overthrown, asks the novel’s protagonist, Dr Garrigan, to meet him at the ENVI hoarding to drive him to safety. Garrigan doesn’t go. I wonder if there are other sly echoes I didn’t spot.)

Coda

Miranda’s in Washington. Queller’s being investigated, for some reason. Nick didn’t want to stay, asked her to come back to Zanzibar but she didn’t want to leave, so they’ve split up and she wanders round Washington’s memorials feeling soulful.

Queller is being called for questioning in Washington about his links with al-Qaeda in the 80s. He knows he’s being set up as the fall guy. He writes a complete documentary account of his actions and sends it to Miranda. Tries on the latest spiffy prosthetic limb that’s arrived through the post. Has a drink. Reaches for his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

Nick after toying with staying in the States, has come back out to Zanzibar, done up the derelict cottage on Lyly and made it into a home. He is going to protect the turtles as homage to Leggatt. He is trying to be mindful. He is trying not to live in illusions. But he can’t help missing Miranda. It wasn’t true love but it was a lot.

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Because of the focus on the main characters at the start, because we are given such privileged access to Khaled’s life, tragedy, training and motivation, and because the book’s blurb says that Nick and Miranda become ’embroiled’ in a terrorist conspiracy – I thought they might have met Khaled, got to know and like him, then found out what he was going to do and there might have been some kind of agonising moral debate and so on when they try to talk him out of it, he goes ahead anyway… But no.

Inventive structure?

Again, Foden writes that ‘the event’ as the Americans quickly take to calling it, messed with people’s sense of time and place and identity, severely traumatising all involved, and so it crossed my mind that Foden could conceivably have run with that idea and created a postmodern jumping back and forth in time. At a few moments when Nick or Miranda were dazed and disorientated, the psychotic fictions of J.G. Ballard briefly came to mind.

But no. The narrative is much, much more straightforward than that, almost totally vanilla. This happened then this happened then this happened then this happened. The characters do stuff then there’s a big explosion then they rush off to catch the baddies. However brilliantly imagined and vividly written every scene is, and despite a few passages of tricksy juxtapositions, for the most part, structurally, it’s a very conservative book.

Al-Qaeda

The book contains several set-piece passages where the kindly old Queller gives straight explication about al-Qaeda’s history and aims, bin Laden’s speeches, the group’s structure and bases in Afghanistan. He describes how the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of training and munitions to the mujahideen, building secret hideouts, training them in guerrilla warfare etc, all skills and weapons which, with world-class irony, once the Soviets had finally quit Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda turned against their western backers.

I’m guessing that at the time Foden drafted the book, all this was relatively specialist, niche stuff, and his up-to-the-minute research was news, and it was cutting edge to include it in a novel.

Unfortunately for Foden, before his book could be published along came 11 September 2001 and the entire world’s media suddenly overflowed with everything known about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who became the subject of hundreds of books, thousands of documentaries, millions of articles – and the novelty of Foden’s book, its claim to shed light on a little-known terror organisation, evaporated overnight.

Must have been very galling. Then came the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq and the chaos they caused, covered on the telly and across all the media every night for years. So for the modern reader, the passages where Queller carefully explains bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Miranda (like pages 290 to 293), interesting refreshers though they are, can’t help but feel somewhat quaint and dated.

The risk of writing about contemporary politics or world affairs is that your text will be overtaken by events even as you write it. Compare with anyone half-way through writing a novel about Ukraine when Russia invaded and rendered the whole thing academic. Imagine you were just putting the finishing touches to your book about the current situation in Israel when Hamas attacked. It’s a high-risk strategy for a novelist. Safer to go that much further back in time, to when events are settled, complete, assimilated and contextualised – which is precisely what Foden did in his next novel, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika, set during the First World War. Can’t get more past, finished and over than that.

And yet…

For all my nitpicking, it’s an awesome book, an epic book. You really feel like you’ve been through the wringer, on a long journey, had an epic adventure. I felt quite shattered by the end of this long, dense book – informed about al-Qaeda and bin Laden, thrilled by the plot, and delighted by the thousand and one precise descriptions Foden encodes in his prose.

Swahili phrases

chamchela – hurricane squall (p.210)
chibuku – the local beer (p.252)
dar es salaam – haven of peace (p.243)
mlango – door
mnara – lighthouse (p.224)
mpuga za peponi – the gardens of paradise (p.220)
muzungu – white man
mchezo wa ngombe – the game of the bull (p.355)
pole-pole – slowly slowly
papabawa – Zanzibar vampire
twende! – let’s go (p.295)
zinj el-bar – coast of the black people (p.153)

Credit

Zanzibar by Giles Foden was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. References are to the 2003 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

The Last King of Scotland (1998)
Ladysmith (1999)
Zanzibar (2002)
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
Freight Dogs (2021)

Africa reviews

Africa reviews

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)

‘I should have known’, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgement.
(The narrator of The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan, looking back over the sorry series of events depicted in the book, page 119)

Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in 1967. When he was 5 his parents moved from Warwickshire to Malawi and he spent a lot of his early years in Africa, although he was sent back to Britain to be educated at public school (the very posh Malvern College) then Cambridge.

Foden has written six novels but is still best known for this one, his first novel, which won a clutch of prizes (the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize). It gained a significantly greater prominence when it was made into a powerful movie, in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy, himself just about to be propelled to superstar status in the X-Men movies.

The Last King: premise

The premise of the novel is simple: it’s a first-person narrative told by young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who goes to Uganda in 1971 on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, to see something of the world and, through a chance encounter, is selected by the country’s new military dictator, Idi Amin, to become his personal physician.

Over the next 200 pages Garrigan witnesses Amin’s descent into psychopathic dictatorship, the ethnic killings, the arrests and tortures, mysterious disappearances, the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community, the humiliation of the white community, the rising body count – he witnesses much of this in person, up close and personal, yet fails to intervene, at various key moments, to save friends and colleagues from horrendous fates, becoming more and more morally compromised and implicated in the process.

The reader accompanies Garrigan as he is dragged deeper into an inferno of violence, cruelty, torture, murder and terror until the narrative feels like it’s inhabiting a different kind of reality, one of endless melodrama and horror, war, destruction, evisceration, terrorism, random killings. The narrative turns into a gruelling nightmare.

It’s a solid book at 345 pages but I found it easy and pleasurable to read (at least to begin with) because of the narrative voice Foden creates. Garrigan’s narrative has a relaxed candid manner conveying an appealingly easygoing but observant, slangy but perceptive worldview. Basically, it’s enjoyable being in his company for a couple of days. (Compare and contrast with H.E. Bates’s classic ‘Fair Stood The Wind for France’ which I just finished reading and found a metallic, alienating, cold and heartless ordeal. By contrast, Garrigan is fun, chill and interesting.) Here’s what I mean by casual tone and easy-to-read style:

On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for a whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that. (p.100)

Apart from ‘sparsely’ it’s pretty much how someone would speak. Sometimes Garrigan’s tone can be consciously entertaining:

She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse. (p.101)

One of the ways the book challenges the reader is the way this easygoing attitude and approach, which we are encouraged to identify with from the beginning, turns out to be hopelessly inadequate for coping with the increasingly fraught situations Garrigan finds himself in.

Part 1

The narrative starts with a frame. Garrigan explains that he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, looking back over his mad time in Uganda as physician to Idi Amin and is determined to write a history of this period of ‘blood, misery and foolishness’ despite the fact that he seems to be the subject of scandal and criticism, for he tells us the newspapers ‘continue to execrate me’ (p.19). What for? We don’t know, it’s a teaser for what will emerge in the main narrative.

Very briefly Garrigan describes his boyhood and upbringing in the Scottish suburb of Fossiemuir, West Fife, his years as a student doctor. His father, George (p.41) was a stern presbyterian minister: ‘religion covered our family like a fine soot’ (p.19). But after just a few pages we’re on to him graduating as a doctor, to escape his parochial background and see the world, taking the civil service exam.

The narrative slows down to give more detail about his flight to Kampala, meeting the Embassy people (Nigel Stone and the eccentric Major Weir, intelligence officer, who builds model helicopters). He stays at the rundown Speke Hotel while he gets used to the heat, the street life, the food. Meets fellow guest Freddy Swanepoel.

He is posted to assist a Dr Alan Merritt at his hospital in the West Ugandan town of Mbarara. He takes an overcrowded minibus or matatu there, helped and advised by friendly local Boniface ‘Bonny’ Malumba (p.49). Soldiers stop the bus at a makeshift roadblock to demand bribes. When a Kenyan diplomat refuses to pay, the soldiers smash him in the face with a gun. After they’ve gotten off Nicholas goes to help him and is surprised when the Kenyan is very angry, saying ‘where were you when I needed you to stand up for me?’ (p.153) Why does this passage exist? Is it intended to be an early indicator of Nicholas’s cowardice or, to be more fair and accurate, his not knowing what to do in confrontation situations?

So he arrives at Mbarara, some kids guide him out to the medical compound, and we are introduced to Dr Merrit, his tutting wife Joyce (who calls her husband ‘Spiny’) and the servant Nestor. More importantly to the sprawling ‘hospital’ with its primitive facilities. Garrigan gives us an overview of the kinds of patients and diseases they’re called on to treat, which is very interesting (machete wounds, elephantiasis, vaginal fistulas in women caused by giving birth at home in primitive conditions, malaria etc pages 74 to 77).

Earlier Garrigan told us he arrived in Uganda on Sunday 24 January 1971 (p.21). The precise date is important because Amin carried out his military coup, overthrowing the government of President Milton Obote, the very next day, on 25 January 1971.

Why did Amin overthrow Obote? Because he learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds and, more generally, threatened the army’s lucrative corruption. In the words of Wikipedia:

The 1971 coup is often cited as an example of ‘class action by the military’, wherein the Uganda Army acted against ‘an increasingly socialist regime whose egalitarian domestic politics posed more and more of a threat to the military’s economic privileges.’

Of course none of this is clear to any of the characters because it’s only just happened, although Dr Merritt gives Harrigan the view of a jaundiced old hand:

‘It’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it having to get worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you.’ (p.60)

This little remark obviously plants a seed of expectation of the horrors that will come later. Prolepsis or the anticipation of something that comes later in a story.

Garrigan is introduced to Sara Zach, on secondment from a hospital in Israel, to two Cuban surgeons, and to a ravaged Englishman, Ivor Seabrook, with the ‘destroyed features of the long-term tropical alcoholic’ (p.71) and closet homosexual who seduces the various serving boys. He is taken on field trips by Merritt’s assistant, William Waziri, vaccination and anti-mosquito spraying (pages 79 to 80) on one occasion being stopped at another army roadblock by drunk soldiers demanding a bribe (p.81). Africa.

Altogether this first hundred pages or so give a vivid, fascinating and totally believable picture of an outback medical practice in rural Uganda, packed with fascinating details? How on earth did Foden find out all this stuff?

The new president, Idi Amin, comes to Mbarara to make a speech to an excited crowd. Garrigan records his incoherent thoughts about God, the crowd lap it up, Sara makes notes and hustles them off, scared of being attacked because they’re white.

Cut to a year later, so must be 1972, and he mentions June as the month, when he’s getting used to conditions and has, rather inevitably, started an affair with the tough, no-nonsense, attractive Israeli doctor, Sara, descriptions of picnics in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris mountain range, making love, spotting exotic flowers and birds.

There’s an attack on the barracks in town. The doctors learn that troops were sent from the north and massacred all the Langi and Acholi soldiers, supposedly because they’re from a different tribe than Amin (p.106). Some Americans came snooping round, supposedly journalists, and are themselves killed and buried.

A few months later there’s a mortar attack on the barracks which misses and kills a lot of civilians. Merritt and Sara tend to them. Garrigan’s friend Bonny, and his mother and father, are among the dead.

Garrigan and Sara take in Bonny’s kid brother, Gugu, but he is mute and never speaks again. Eventually his extended family come to collect him. His relationship with Sara breaks down: Garrigan is prone to psychoanalysing everything and comes to realise he and Sara liked having Gugu with them because it created a family feel, gave them both security. With Gugu gone Sara moved back to her own bungalow. The radio reports weirder and weirder speeches by Amin.

Garrigan describes Operation Mafuta Mingi, the name Amin gives to his campaign to intimidate and eventually expel the entire Asian population of Uganda, around 50,000 people. Garrigan watches them being rounded up, their belongings impounded, bullied by soldiers, then driven to the airport deprived of all their belongings.

He records the effects of the expulsion: shops closed because many of them operated on lines of credit from India which terminated overnight. Basic items like salt, matches, sugar or soap became scarce. The army slaughtered a dairy herd for beef and so milk disappeared. This happened in August 1972. Sara had been increasingly distant and one day in October she simply leaves, without telling anyone (p.119). It’s because Amin had also been making speeches attacking the Israelis in Uganda, mostly working on development projects, about 600 of them and so, overnight, they left.

A few weeks later Garrigan has his first personal contact with Amin, being fetched by soldiers because the great leader had driven his Maserati into a cow and sprained his wrist. Garrigan is bowled over by his primeval physical presence. Amin has a soldier pour them brandy which, on the hot day, makes Garrigan light-headed.

And so it is that a letter arrives from health minister Wasswa requesting that Garrigan becomes Amin’s private physician. By this time he’s fed up of the Mbarara hospital which reminds him of the sad affair with Sara so he’s happy to go.

Ominousness

As it progresses the text drops references to Garrigan’s current position, contrasting the time of writing (now) with the events he’s writing about (then) and emphasising how something has made him re-evaluate everything. The technique adds an air of ominousness, the sense that something dreadful happened in the interim:

I realise now that… (p.116)
Or so I thought back then… (p.118)
Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time… (p.128)
Looking back, it seems crazy… (p.144)

Part 2 (p.131)

Part 2 opens with a recap of Amin’s birth, boyhood, young manhood, rise in the colonial army, rise in the post-independence army of President Obote, his involvement in smuggling from Congo, his overthrow of Obote in January 1971.

The strange thing about this section is that it seems to be told in a completely different narrative voice from part one. It is mannered and strange in a style so different from the laid-back casualness of part one that I thought it must signal the arrival of a completely new narrator.

I have been able to find out little of the history by which Amin is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause?

This unusual phrasing, and the present tense, persist throughout this chapter (chapter 16), throwing me completely off-kilter, wondering if it was a different person talking, or a different type of text, like maybe the transcript of a recording. But no, chapter 17 returns to the normal voice of Garrigan, now installed in Kampala as Idi Amin’s personal physician and with very little to do. Odd.

Anyway, back in the narrative, every encounter with Amin is hair-raising. He is a big man, he dominates his courtiers who laugh with him, applaud his every word, out of obvious terror. He is painted as deeply stupid and illiterate but loving the sound of his own voice, capable of speaking at great length.

For it is true, also, out of my nature, I love to rule! (p.148)

Garrigan is mesmerised and hypnotised by Amin, like the rest of his retinue. The narrative continues to emphasise Garrigan’s gaucheness and insecurity – worry about what he looks like, what he says, how others perceive him, rising to stammering terror when faced with Amin. He is, after all, only a few years out of university. The book is a study in callowness.

After the weird opening chapter part 2 settles down into a series of brilliantly imagined scenes: Amin phones Garrigan to tell him his son is ill, come over immediately; Garrigan hurries over to discover the boy has put a piece of Lego up his nose, pulls it out and anti-bacs the nose (p.153). The wife is delighted and Amin sends him a Toyota van as reward (admittedly, still painted with the logo of the Asian fashion shop it was confiscated from).

As doctor to the Prez, Garrigan is now living in a bungalow in the State House compound, near Entebbe, a suburb of Kampala. He attends to Amin at the so-called ‘Command Post’, in fact a large suburban villa, or Nakasero Lodge where he spent most of his time (p.155), then at Cape Town, a property on Lake Victoria he awarded himself (p.165).

Garrigan works at the city’s main hospital, Mulago, filling us in on the kinds of patients you get in a big city compared to the countryside (car accidents), working alongside a fellow Scot, senior surgeon Colin Paterson, makes friends with a local surgeon, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa (p.157). The hospital is big enough to have foreign teams, from China, Algeria, Vietnam, Russia, and to be carrying out serious medical research. How did Foden get to know so much about tropical medicine? And not just knowledge but a feel for all the spin-offs and insights of doctoring:

Hospitals are like people, they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and die. (p.163)

He and Mbalu-Mukasa cruise the bars of Kampala and bump into the meaty, dodgy South African Freddy Swanepoel, Garrigan permanently afraid that Swanepoel’s outspokenness about the regime will get him into trouble.

Right from the start Amin had a bonkers fondness for Scotland, having spent some of his military training in Britain there, but it becomes ever more surreal, him outfitting regiments in kilts and making them learn the bagpipes; making booming speeches about how the Scots were like the Ugandans in having suffered from English imperialism. Now Amin invites Paterson and Garrigan for tea and tells them he is going to punish the English community in Uganda for its imperialism. As a local had told him back in Mbarara, ‘First wahindi, then muzungu’ (p.172). He forces some Brits to carry him in a litter through the streets, others to kneel and take an oath of fealty.

Stone, from the Embassy, invites Garrigan for a chat and works the conversation round to asking Garrigan to take advantage of his position to administer Amin with calmatives, tranquilisers, to try and bring him to his senses.

Merritt, his boss at the Mbarara hospital is kicked out, visits Garrigan on the way, says he if he’d stayed at the hospital it might have saved it. He is not the last to blame Garrigan for cowardice or failing to do the right thing.

In another demonstration of his gaucheness Garrigan takes Marina Perkins, wife of the British Ambassador, Robert Perkins, who he’s been chatting up at the swimming pool, on a fishing trip. All goes well till he makes a move to kiss her at which she is shocked and horrified, sits bolt upright and insists he take her home (p.177). He has completely misjudged the situation.

The famous scene (well, a centrepiece of the movie) in which Garrigan is summoned at night to Amin in his bedroom (carefully described) because he is in great stomach pain which, after extensive examination, Garrigan determines to be wind, and helps Amin into a position where he can release a great fart, thus relieving the pain, and overjoying the dictator.

Amin takes Garrigan into his confidence and talks about the burdens of office. He makes a feeble attempt to ask Amin to stop the army killing people which Amin swats aside.

Brief review: he tells us he was in Uganda for eight years in all, two in Mbarara, six in Kampala (p.191). A general overview in which he describes their many meetings, tea and conversation, naively thinking he’s getting to know him. The narrative begins to feel like summaries of a series of episodes:

There’s an attempt to assassinate Amin at an army review, which fails but kills the driver of his jeep. (In fact Amin survived eight attempted coups.)

In 1972 Amin gets married, to wife number four, and the text gives a detailed description of the ceremony and pen portraits of the previous three (chapter 24).

Amin phones Garrigan at all times for confidential chats and to let off steam. In public press conferences he announces he is training to be an astronaut. Also that he is assembling a pan-African army to attack South Africa. An excuse to quote (presumably actual) press meetings and outrageous quotes.

Amin sends inappropriate letters to world leaders, for example Mrs Thatcher on her election as leader of the Conservative Party (February 1975). He publicly states that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews. he did a deal with Colonel Gaddafi and Libyan businesses and soldiers become seen on the streets of Kampala. A lot later, after he’s escaped, in the novel’s aftertime, his sister Moira asks him why he stayed on so long, and let himself be portrayed as being close to such a lunatic. Garrigan can barely understand it himself. He was hypnotised. He’d fallen under Amin’s spell. He knew he was a monster but sometimes thought he loved him. Psychology of a dictator’s minions.

The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him – and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened. (p.213) (cf his ‘reluctance to get the hell out of there,’ p.222)

One stormy night his friend from the Kampala hospital, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, turns up. Tells him he’s been having an affair with Amin’s second wife, Kay, and has got her pregnant. Since Amin hasn’t been having sex with her, he’ll know she’s been unfaithful and murder her and any lover he can track down. The man is understandably terrified and asks Garrigan if he can perform an illegal abortion on Kay. Garrigan lets himself be driven to Mbalu-Mukasa’s apartment, encounters the terrified moaning woman, but realises he can’t do it. Not only is he also terrified of being discovered, but he’s never actually performed an abortion and will likely make a mess of it. With all kinds of excuses, he refuses, backs out, and makes his way home.

It’s the last time he sees either. Rumour had it that Mbalu-Mukasa botched the abortion, Kay died of blood loss, and Mbalu-Mukasa committed suicide (August 1974). Worse, Garrigan was invited by the mortuary assistant who shows him Kay’s body and how all four limbs and the head had been detached from it, then clumsily sown back on.

In a bar Garrigan is appalled to see fat oafish Freddy Swanepoel putting his paw on the knee of the trim woman who rejected him, Marina. Chagrin. Worse, at their next meeting Amin tells him Nicholas knows all about his attempts to seduce Marina, about her affair with Swanepoel, and his poor opinion of the South African pilot, who he thinks is a spy.

Stone calls Garrigan back to the Embassy. He makes clear that the Ambassador is just a front man, it’s he, Stone, who pulls the strings. He shows Garrigan a series of photos of Amin taking part in executions and torture. Hundreds of people are dying every day. Stone accuses Garrigan of being complicit in this mass murder. Then he asks Garrigan to murder Amin. Use whatever is necessary, poison, adrenalin or inject air into his heart, whatever it takes. Garrigan refuses, a) because he’s a doctor but b) because, on some level, he likes the man:

There was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was. (p.231)

To his amazement, Stone tells him the authorities have placed £50,000 in his bank account, with more to come when he achieves the murder. Garrigan turns him down. Next week Amin expels Stone, Perkins, the entire British Embassy.

Then Garrigan’s bungalow is burgled and his journal disappears, the one he’s been keeping notes in on all the events and all his opinions. He gets a midnight call from Amin to go see him immediately. Amin pulls a gun and terrifies a sweating Garrigan who grovels on the floor. Amin tells him that Weir, from the Embassy, told him about Stone’s request that Garrigan murder Amin! Then Amin summarises the contents of Garrigan’s journal and is disappointed at his lack of loyalty.

Then, in a scene which crosses the line from mundane reality into horror, Amin opens a secret door (in his bookshelves) and takes Garrigan deep into the cells and torture chambers which are just a short walk away, along dim concrete passages.

Here he is shown his colleague from the Mbarara days, William Waziri who used to take him on medical tours of local villages. He is pinned down, tied and gagged. Amin says he is associated with enemy guerrillas. Garrigan is forced to watch as soldiers press him to the floor, one stepping on his head, as they use a kitchen knife to saw open his throat, and Waziri’s eyes meet Garrigan’s as they do it.

Garrigan passes out and regains consciousness to discover he, also, is in a prison cell where he stays for a day, being insulted by the jailer who comes to deliver the disgusting food. Obviously all the worst thoughts in the world go through his mind, maybe he’ll be there forever, or be tortured or murdered. In fact, only a day later the door opens and the health minister, Wasswa, is there with clean clothes. He hustles Garrigan along the corridor, telling him he’s lucky to be alive. From the cells they pass along the corridor where prisoners shout at him to help them. Garrigan hesitates but Wasswa tells him there is nothing he can do. Along some more corridors and then through a concealed entrance and, bizarrely, back into Amin’s bedroom where the dictator is resplendent in an electric-blue safari suit and greets him like an old friend.

Amin tells Garrigan he has to renounce his British citizenship and become a Ugandan citizen. Then orders him to come back soon. Amin disapproves of Garrigan’s journal because it is informal and unofficial but approves the fact that he’s a writer. And so he orders Garrigan to come back so that Amin can dictate to him his Life and Achievements.

Next day Garrigan drives straight to the airport to discover Fate is against him. It is July 1976 and terrorists have hijacked a civil airliner and rerouted it to Libya, then Uganda.

Entebbe raid

Which is why Garrigan is an eye witness to the hostage crisis, and to the arrival of Amin at the airport where he congratulates himself on persuading the terrorists to release the non-Jewish hostages. The captain of the plane refuses to leave without the 40-something Jewish hostages who are being held in a separate room. There is an implied contrast between the professionalism and responsibility of this plane captain, and Garrigan’s shuffling out of all his responsibilities.

That night he is amazed to get a phone call from his Israeli lover Sara, the one who left without saying goodbye. She now reveals she’s a Colonel of the Israeli Defence Force and insists that he describes the layout of the airport at Entebbe, where the hostages are, how many terrorists are guarding them etc. She is obviously laying the groundwork for the famous Israeli raid which frees the hostages.

(The present: slowly we have been drip-fed details about where Garrigan is writing all this. We learn it is in the bothy (‘a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge’) left to him by a great-uncle [Uncle Eamonn, p.336], on a remote Scottish island. It’s from the peace and quiet here, that he is looking back, and trying to patch together, these last horrific months. Pages 249, 256, 263, 266)

As the Ugandan economy collapses, conditions at the Mulago hospital collapse with it. Garrigan continues to work, he considers he has no alternative. One day, during one of their tape recording sessions, Amin gives him a package contained a stuffed mounted lion’s head to deliver to a small plane at Entebbe airport, to the chairman of Rafiki Aviation who will be waiting for it. Garrigan nervously does so, handing it over to this man who gets into a small plane piloted by Freddy Swanepoel, and off it flies. Garrigan later finds out that the plane exploded and crashed for unknown reasons. He’s pretty sure there was a bomb in the package he gave.

It’s only 6 months later that he plucks up the guts to ask Amin about the package. By now their recording sessions have become well established. Garrigan comes close to witnessing examples of Amin’s cannibalism (p.260). Once or twice he has opportunities to kill Amin, one in particular when he is in reach of his holster and pistol. Something always holds him back.

Garrigan has of course been thinking about fleeing the country for years but doesn’t see how he can, now that the airport is tightly watched. His plans are paralleled by Amin’s increasing rhetoric about war with neighbouring Tanzania.

The escape attempt

Garrigan finally packs his necessaries in the van and heads off for the southern border, hoping to cross south into Rwanda via some remote mountain road. Unfortunately he runs into an army checkpoint. When he begins reversing, an army Land Rover comes charging towards him. Mad with panic he drives back the way he came and then wildly off into a road through the jungle which comes to a dead end at a deserted cabin. He leaps out of his van but has no idea what to do till he sees the cabin is slightly raised and wriggles under it. From here he watches the Land Rover arrive, the soldiers inspect the empty cabin, loose off some gunfire, then drive off with the Land Rover and his van, leaving him stranded.

He’s just wondering what to do when a huge snake rears up and bites him in the calf. He stumbles into the jungle and passes out. He comes round in a native village where the villagers have been feeding him and nursing his wound. Lying sick and delirious in a native hut he reflects on the long series of decisions which have brought him, an uptight, callow Scotsman, a ‘casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions’ to this catastrophic situation (p.275). When he’s recovered a man indicates that he should follow him along a jungle track.

Obviously Garrigan hopes this will come out at some highway where he can hitch a lift back to civilisation. Instead it’s a further step in the descent into barbarism. they come to a road alright, where there’s a huge pile of corpses, twenty feet high, many still showing the gunshot wounds that killed them.

Feeling like he’ll vomit, Garrigan goes blundering down the road and soon, to his amazement, realises he’s in the vicinity of Mbarara. He carries on to discover a great crowd of locals. Pushing through he sees soldiers beating a figure tied to a chair. Pushed towards the front of the crowd, Garrigan finds the soldier turning and swinging his rifle butt into Garrigan’s ribs. To his absolute horror he realises it’s Gugu, the orphan boy he and Sara took in all those years ago. Now he has become a sadistic boy soldier in Amin’s deadly army.

But even as the boy stands above him, gun pointing towards him, there’s an explosion, presumably from artillery fire, and he sees the boy blown backwards, his chest opening in a splurge of blood.

The Tanzanian invasion

This summary has gone on long enough already. Long story short, Garrigan is rescued by / comes into the custody of Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. In response to a feeble mini invasion of their land by Amin, Tanzania has repulsed the Ugandans and is no only invading, but on a mission to overthrow Amin.

Garrigan is bundled into an armoured personnel carrier (APC) and accompanies the Tanzanian Army, seeing action, coming under fire, seeing soldiers killed around him, protected and fed by the Colonel once he’s understood that Garrigan is a trained doctor, who he gets to tend to his wounded.

So Garrigan accompanies the Tanzanian army all the way to Kampala and is eye witness to its capture (and to the vignette of the destruction of the Volkswagen fleeing from the Embassy quarter across a golf course, which was carrying Dr Gottfried Lessing, East German ambassador and husband of Doris Lessing.)

He is with Tanzanian soldiers when they enter and ransack Amin’s formal residences. He realises he won’t be safe in the streets and makes it across town to the Mulago Hospital. Here it is chaos with the surgeons giving emergency care to all-comers. The head of surgery, Dr Paterson, barely contains his anger at him: ‘How very nice of you to join us, Nick’ (p.299). He, like everyone else, simply thought Garrigan had run away with Amin. Once again he seems to have done utterly the wrong thing at the wrong time. He scrubs up and helps out.

Later, out in the streets he sees rioting followed by looting, alongside bizarre victory marches. He follows the flow of the crowd towards one of Amin’s residences at Nakasero.

Amin redux

The novel builds up to a really weird climax. Garrigan follows the local mob into Amin’s residence, noting how everything has been smashed and looted, following them up to Amin’s bedroom where all portables have been pinched and his big waterbed exploded. But nobody knows about or has opened the secret doorway in the bookcase. So Garrigan does.

And once again, as in a horror movie, relives the experience of walking down the dank concrete corridor. And then, just as in a horror movie, he sees Amin. Standing in one of the chambers which controlled the electricity supply to the torture instruments. Amin is addressing a surreal monologue to a severed head on a plate. Only as he moves around does Garrigan realise with horror that it is the severed head of the Archbishop of Uganda, the same diminutive churchman we met conducting Amin’s fourth marriage way back earlier in the text. The horror.

And then Amin addresses Garrigan. He’s seen him hiding. They have a bizarre dialogue, Amin as relaxed and confident as ever. Amin is made to implicate all the western countries who helped train his army, and train and equip his dreaded security police, the State Research Bureau (p.312).

Finally, unbelievably, Amin asks Garrigan a favour. Turns out that one of the maze of tunnels from his residences comes out at a landmark on the way to the airport. There he has a plane waiting for him. Could Garrigan go to the landmark and collect him and drive him to the airport? Amin comes and stands over him and Garrigan experiences a dizziness and a complexity of emotions which is like drugs or arousal or love – and agrees.

In the event it takes him so long in the general chaos to get hold of a vehicle that he gets to the landmark and waits and waits but Amin never appears. Eventually he drives on in the vague direction of the compound and his bungalow, passes a lake, stops, notices a number of boats moored at the quay, gets down into one, kickstarts the motor and heads off north, casual as that.

It takes 6 or 7 hours, chuntering away all night till he arrives at a quayside in Kenya and quickly makes himself known to the police.

In fact his travails are far from over as a curt Foreign Office official informs him that a) he no longer has British citizenship so might easily be turned away from Britain b) he is universally thought to have been one of Amin’s closest henchmen, so is very unpopular in the press c) he might be charged for murder for his part in planting an explosive device on that small plane that blew up.

Stone forces him to sign a document swearing to be silent about all activities of the British government in Uganda i.e. the offer of payment to murder Amin, but other things as well. In return for signing these non-disclosure agreements, Stone says he will be reassigned his British citizenship.

Lastly, Garrigan has to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by a handful of chosen journalists in a hotel at Heathrow under the supervision of a PR ‘handler’ named Ed Howarth, who is there to ensure the interviews are a one-off event and that Garrigan says nothing which will compromise the British government – an illuminating process for Garrigan and the reader.

Then he is free to go and catches a train north to Scotland, then travels by hire car, then ferry, over to this little island where…he has been holed up in the bothy writing this long account and trying to exorcise his demons.

At the very very end of the narrative the phone rings in the little cottage and…he hears Amin’s voice, friendly and coaxing as ever, tutting about his treatment in the papers and telling him how much he is enjoying his quiet retirement in Saudi Arabia. Is this real? Can this be happening? Will he never be able to escape from dreams and phantasms of the monster? Either way, Garrigan puts the phone down and that’s the end of the narrative.

Summary

Amazing

This is a mind-bogglingly brilliant achievement, an awesome historical novel which not only recreates life in Uganda and Kampala with superhuman accuracy and vividness, but is also a searing insight into the twisted mentality of a psychopathic dictator and, above all, into the psychology of an educated Westerner who lets himself be manipulated into becoming complicit and acquiescent in horrifying atrocities. A terrifying but profound novel which leaves you reverberating with horror for weeks afterward.

Zelig

The main criticism of the novel would be that at some stage, maybe from the incident of Kay’s botched abortion, Garrigan begins to feel like a Zelig character who keeps popping up at key moments during Amin’s career: the death of Kay, then the Entebbe hostage situation, and then the Tanzanian invasion, Garrigan increasingly happens to be at the right place at the right time, with mounting improbability.

I think credibility snaps when he finds himself on the receiving end of Gugu’s rifle butt. That’s just one coincidence too far. From that point onwards Garrigan becomes less like a character and more like a cipher with which to dramatise a checklist of incidents during the invasion. And that realisation feeds backwards, making you think the same about the Entebbe terrorist situation, and other incidents, too.

Maybe it sort of has to be like this – in order to have a dramatic fiction Foden has to make Garrigan part of all these real historic events – but in doing so the story leaves behind plausible realism and becomes something else: first, in the torture cells beneath Amin’s residence, into a genuinely hair-raising horror story; and then follows the delirious sequence of his Land Rover escape, his bite by a snake, his recovery in a native village, his being taken to a huge pile of corpses, and then stumbling across Gugu beating a prisoner to death and, at that very moment, an artillery attack blowing Gugu to pieces etc. By this time the whole thing has become more of a hallucination than a narrative, piling agony on agony, one vivid hyper-violent scene after another, until the reader’s imagination is shredded.

Comparison with William Boyd

William Boyd is another Englishman brought up in Africa by ex-pat parents, sent to a pukka public school then Oxbridge, who also became a novelist tackling African themes. His first novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’, is about another Englishman completely out of his depth in a dire African country, who drinks too much, makes a fool of himself with women, and completely fails to understand what’s going on around him, leading up to a violent climax in riots and a coup.

So these are two books about useless Brits caught up in violent events in Africa, the difference obviously being that in Boyd’s books it’s played for laughs (‘A Good Man’ is a very funny farce) while in Foden’s the same basic subject is played for tragedy and horror.

Given the grim times we live in, I’d recommend people read the Boyd for its many hilarious scenes and smiling memories although, at the very end, it too has a bitter denouement.

Wikipedia on Idi Amin

The opening summary of Idi Amin’s Wikipedia article:

Idi Amin Dada Oumee (c. 1925 to 16 August 2003) was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history…Amin’s rule was characterised by rampant human rights abuses, including political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, as well as nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. International observers and human rights groups estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed under his regime.

Foden takes a middle estimate, that Amin’s regime killed 300,000 Ugandans (p.133).

Africa words

muzunga – white people

musawo – a doctor

Chapter 9, pages 84 to 90, gives an extended explanation of various Swahili terms

the wananchi – ordinary citizens

Credit

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden was published by Faber Books in 1998. References are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

The Last King of Scotland (1998)
Ladysmith (1999)
Zanzibar (2002)
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
Freight Dogs (2021)

Related reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on December 18, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged Acholi tribe, Africa, Archbishop of Uganda, atrocities, Boniface 'Bonny' Malumba, bothy, Cambridge, cannibalism, Cape Town, Colin Paterson, Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa, Colonel Gaddafi, corruption, Doris Lessing, Dr Alan Merrit, Dr Gottfried Lessing, Dr Merrit, Dr Paterson, economic mismanagement, Ed Howarth, elephantiasis, Entebbe, Entebbe raid, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, fiction, Forest Whitaker, Fossiemuir, Freddy Swanepoel, George Garrigan, Giles Foden, Gugu, Hitler, horror, human rights abuses, Idi Amin, Idi Amin Dada Oumee, Israeli Defence Force, Israelis, Ivor Seabrook, James McAvoy, Joyce Merrit, Kampala, Kay Amin, Kenya, Lake Victoria, Langi tribe, machete wounds, Major Weir, malaria, Malawi, Malvern College, Marina Perkins, Mbarara, military dictator, Milton Obote, Mrs Thatcher, Mulago hospital, musawo, muzunga, muzungu, Nakasero Lodge, nepotism, Nestor, Nicholas Garrigan, Nigel Stone, novel, Operation Mafuta Mingi, Overseas Development Agency, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, political repression, psychopathic, public school, Robert Perkins, Ruwenzori mountains, Sara Zach, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Speke Hotel, State Research Bureau, Swahili, Tanzania, Tanzanian Defence Forces, the Command Post, The Last King of Scotland, torture, Uganda, Ugandan Asians, Uncle Eamonn, vaginal fistula, wahindi, wananchi, Wasswa, West Fife, William Boyd, William Waziri, Zelig

Posted by Simon on December 18, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/the-last-king-of-scotland-giles-foden/

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier (2009)

The most murderous conflict since World War Two.
(Africa’s World War, page 352)

‘The incompetence of most [Congolese] politicians is only rivalled by their determination to keep their privileges.’
(French ambassador Raymond Césaire, describing the chaos of Congo-Brazzaville in 1995, page 169)

This is said to be the definitive book on the subject and it feels like it, a large-format, massive, heavy Oxford University Press edition, printed on beautiful high quality paper. It’s surrounded by impressive scholarly apparatus consisting of:

a glossary of African terms (49 entries)
4 maps
an impressively long list of acronyms (11 pages, 161 entries)
extensive notes (99 pages)
a huge bibliography (45 pages including not only books and articles, but reports from numerous official bodies and charities, plus films and works of fiction)
a long index

The great war

I’ve summarised the war, with maps, in my review of the relevant section of David Van Reybrouck’s great book, Congo: the epic history of a people. This is the briefest I can get it:

Rwandan Tutsis driven by low-level pogroms had fled during the 1980s into neighbouring Uganda
some of these served in the insurgent army of Yoweri Museveni during the Ugandan Bush War and helped him overthrow the dictatorial rule of Milton Obote in 1985
emboldened by their experience, some of these Tutsi exiles set up the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
in 1990 the RPF began small-scale incursions into northern Rwanda, fighting the army of the Hutu-majority government of Juvénal Habyarimana
after 4 years of civil war the parties were brought to a peace accord which Habyarimana signed and was about to implement when a plane carrying him was shot down in mysterious circumstances; most people think it was shot down by elements in the Hutu army and government which a) rejected the peace deal with the RPF b) wanted to implement the genocidal policy of the so-called Hutu Power group, which said that Rwanda would never be at peace until the Tutsis (about 15% of the population) were exterminated
they organised the Rwanda genocide, 7 April to 15 July 1994
as soon as the genocide started, the RPF recommenced military action, and successfully defeated the Hutu government forces, driving them into the south and west of the country and then over the border into Zaire
but it wasn’t just the Hutu leaders who fled; as cover and part of their ideological program, they forced up to 2 million Hutu civilians to flee, too, terrifying them with rumours of Tutsi massacres
having completely failed to prevent the genocide or halt it as it was carried out, the international community now over-compensated by flooding the refugee camps with aid
however aid agencies, UN officials etc quickly realised these vast camps were completely in the control of the extremist Hutu leaders and génocidaires
the génocidaires used some of the western aid to rearm and regroup and, as soon as possible, began raids back across the border into Rwanda, killing Tutsis and Hutu they accused of being collaborators
they also attacked, and caused others to attack, the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis living in eastern Congo, particularly the province of South Kivu
the new Rwandan government of national unity which had been set up after the RPF victory protested loud and long about this anti-Tutsi violence and asked ‘the international community’ to stop it and properly police the camps but to no avail
eventually, the RPF, along with forces from neighbouring Uganda, invaded Zaire and seized the camps; they a) forced the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and b) pursued the génocidaires who, reasonably enough, fled deeper into Zaire, often taking large groups of refugees with them as cover
before the RPF embarked on their campaign they and their Ugandan allies realised ‘the international community’ would react badly to a straightforward invasion and so came up with the plan of covering their actions by using a native, Congolese rebel group and their leader, as a front man for the invasion, to make ‘a foreign invasion look like a national rebellion’ (p.115)
the figure they chose was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, not very effective leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), who in reality spent most of his time smuggling gold and running a brothel
so the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) was invented, with Kabila as its supposed leader; Prunier remarks that Kabila’s subservience to ‘the tall ones’ (as everyone called the Tutsis) earned him the Swahili nickname Ndiyo bwana, meaning ‘yes sir’ (p.124) (cf David van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, p.418)
as the RPF-led alliance forces experienced success which surprised even them, the idea developed to permanently cut off Zaire’s support for Hutu extremists by the simple expedient of overthrowing its long-standing President, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been friends with Habyarimana and had supported the Hutu génocidaires running the camp
and so the border incursion developed into a full-scale march on the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, which Mobutu and his cronies fled in panic (16 May 1997) and where Kabila, much to his own surprise, was installed as third president of independent Congo (which now changed its name back from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo)
Prunier says this incursion could be seen as the first postcolonial imperial conquest of one African country (Zaire) by another (Rwanda), ‘the first case of clear-cut African imperialism’ (p.333)
the period from the invasion to the new regime became known as the First Congo War (October 1996 to May 1997)
trouble was Kabila found himself in a tricky position: he had to please his Rwanda-Uganda masters who had put him in power, but he now had all the political factions and the general population of Congo to please as well
to please these new constituencies, in July 1998, Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo, they were widely perceived as an invading and occupying force (p.178)
but Kabila’s masters back in Kigali (capital of Rwanda) and Kampala (capital of Uganda) were understandably miffed at their puppet’s ingratitude and so they launched a second invasion, this time to overthrow Kabila
Prunier explains that it was support from Angola and Zimbabwe which saved Kabila’s ramshackle regime, along with some support from Sudan, Libya and Chad;
it was this second incursion which came to be known as the Second Congo War, which commenced in August 1998 but which then unravelled into a wider conflict, eventually drawing in forces from half a dozen other African countries, and degenerating into the armed chaos which came to be known as the Great War of Africa, which dragged on until (supposedly) ended by peace treaties in July 2003, a five-year war in which some 350,000 people died in fighting and as many as 5 million died from massacres, disease and famine
and it is this, the Great War of Africa, whose complex origins and tangled course that this book sets out to explain

Prunier’s critical attitude

I associate serious history with a serious, professional tone so I was surprised from the start by Prunier’s tone of blistering cynicism and withering criticism, above all of the ‘so-called’ international community, in particular of the West and the ‘so-called’ international community, which he sees as behaving with stunning ineptitude at every stage of the crisis:

‘Western incompetence and vacillation’ (p.23)
western ‘guilt, ineptitude’
‘the Western world reacted with stunned incompetence’
‘the West…was caught napping at every turn’ (p.24)
‘nobody in the international community had done anything to stop the genocide (p.33)
‘the utter spinelessness of the international community before, during and after the genocide’ (p.35)
‘the cowardice of the international community’ (p.35)
‘stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence’ (p.38)
‘of course the international community remained totally passive’ (p.57)
‘the international community did not understand the nature of the problem’ (p.225)
‘the United Nations, that supposed repository of the world’s conscience…frantically doing nothing and avoiding any responsibility in the third and last genocide of the twentieth century…’ (p.331)

Humanitarian aid instead of political solutions

Prunier blames the spiral down to war on the international community’s failure to address the political causes of the Rwanda civil war, then the genocide in Rwanda, then the refugee crisis in Zaire, then the armed invasion of Congo. In all instances the West preferred to offer humanitarian solutions i.e. to send in the aid agencies and NGOs, but consistently ignored the political roots of the crisis. Sending loads of tents and emergency food is easier than trying to address the political problems. And so the fundamental political issues were left unresolved, festered and spread.

The international community rushed into humanitarian aid with guilty relief, never-too-late-to-do-good, thus greatly helping the perpetrators of the very crimes it had done nothing to stop. (p.30)

And:

‘The West treated what was essentially a political problem as a humanitarian crisis.’ (p.58)

cf p.347.

Critical of the RPF

Prunier is far more critical of Paul Kagame’s RPF than other accounts I’ve read, accusing the regime of developing into a dictatorship, and of its military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of carrying out numerous massacres of Hutus in Congo.

Prunier explains this by going back to the RPF’s origins in Uganda in the 1980s to describe the atmosphere of violence in which it was born and flourished a) fleeing anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda and then b) getting caught up in Uganda’s Bush War. When the Rwandan exiles helped Museveni win this war and come to power, it clinched their experience that disciplined violence works.

Prunier goes on to describe the RPA’s violent ethos more unforgivingly than other accounts. In particular he is at pains to emphasise, right from the start, that as it fought its way across Rwanda during the genocide, the RPA a) carried out its own massacres of Hutus and b) didn’t plan its campaign in order to stop the violence i.e. target the worst areas, but was more focused on eliminated the Rwandan army and securing complete control of the country.

He discusses the report drawn up by Robert Gersony for the UN which conclusively proved the RPA was carrying out massacres of its own and claims this report was suppressed by the UN and western nations (pages 31 and 350) because of its accusations against a force the West was championing as a solution to the genocide. The report was suppressed and Gersony was instructed to never discuss the findings, and has kept silent to this day. We are in the world of conspiracy theory. Mind you, it fits Prunier’s withering view of the United Nations generally:

As to the UN human rights operation, it was a sad joke. (p.18)
[The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was] despised by everybody in Rwanda as the embodiment of arrogant powerlessness. (p.33)

A key event was the Kibeho massacre, April 1995, in which up to 4,000 refugees were killed by RPA soldiers. Prunier describes it in detail and how it led to the collapse of the government of national unity which had been running Rwanda since the RPF victory. He draws the same jaded conclusion which he applies to the genocide and then the invasion of Congo as a whole:

Non-treatment of the consequences of genocide, well-meaning but politically blind humanitarianism, RPF resolve to ‘solve the problem’ by force, stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence, and, finally, a hypocritical denial that anything much had happened.

It was one of what Prunier calls ‘massive human rights violations’ by the RPA (p.126). Much worse were the mass killings in and around the refugee camps in November 1996. Prunier cites the report of Father Laurent Balas (p.124) and of Roberto Garreton, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights whose work was blocked by Kigali (p.157). At the end of the chapter dealing with the Alliance’s swift advances through Congo, and accusations of widespread massacre, Prunier calculates that as many as 300,000 of the refugees disappeared, died of starvation, disease, lost in the jungle or were murdered by RPA forces (p.148).

(Cf David van Reybrouck’s account of the RPF carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘massive carnage’, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 423 to 425, where he estimates that between two to three hundred thousand Hutus were murdered.)

Very broadly speaking, the idea is that ‘the West’, specifically America but others too, tried to downplay the massacres out of a) guilt at letting the genocide take place and b) the wish to believe that a clean, democratic new regime existed in Kigali. The massacres were embarrassing. It left the UN and others on a hook, not knowing how to react: so they consistently downplayed them (p.159).

Prunier makes this point, that Western guilt over having stood by and done nothing to stop the genocide, explains why the West gave large amounts of aid to Rwanda even as it was fighting an extensive war, and obstinately overlooked all evidence that RPF forces were carrying out large-scale massacres of their own (e.g. pages 246, 273). Rwanda was able, for years, to ‘surf’ on western guilt (pages 266, 350, 351).

And Prunier details the internal developments in Rwanda, namely the persecution of critics and the inevitable rise to power of Paul Kagame at the head of ‘a dictatorial minority government’ (p.273), his:

ruthless determination, his capacity to fine-tune white guilt as a conductor directs an orchestra’ (p.332)

and his creation of ‘an airtight authoritarian state’ (p.294).

[The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists in Afghanistan with the mujahideen singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country plunged into civil war from which arose the Taliban were those western journalists forced to change their tune. Moral of the story: don’t take sides in foreign wars; neither side is ever as squeaky clean as we childishly wish them to be. All sides in a war are compromised.]

Encyclopedic complexity

As early as page 40 the text has got so complicated that it becomes difficult to follow. Everything Prunier describes he does so in immense, encyclopedic detail. The events in Rwanda I have a rough handle on, having read half a dozen accounts. I found it more challenging to read his long, detailed explanation of the civil war in neighbouring Burundi, his examination of the political and ethnic roots going back to the colonial period, starting with the fact that there were four different Hutu guerrilla groups, moving through dense complexity to the killing of Burundi president (Hutu) Cyprien Ntaryamira by Tutsis soldiers in an attempted coup in April 1994.

A contemporary journalist summed up the resulting situation in a quote I include not so much to clarify but as an example of the sheer number of entities the reader has to get clear in their heads, along with their changing motivations and policies.

The present situation in Burundi is largely a result of Zairean support for PALI-PEHUTU and CNDD. The final attack on Burundi would be a catastrophe for Rwanda because the plan is to allow Nyangoma to take power in Bujumbura and to bring the Interahamwe back in Rwanda. (quoted page 68)

Even more so his hyper-detailed explanation of the complex ethnic situations in the eastern Congo provinces of North and South Kivu, which also have long, very complicated ethnic histories. You’d have thought it would be difficult for anyone else to ever go into as much detail or display such scary erudition as Prunier. The situation in the Kivus is important because they form Congo’s border with Rwanda and therefore played a key role in the escalating crisis which eventually led to the Rwandan invasion, but the histories of ethnic rivalries, conflict, massacres, numerous parties and militias – for example the key role played by the Banyamulenge – are mind boggling.

And then he has a chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This is where Prunier slowly and painstakingly goes round all the countries which border Congo and explains why many of them were already infiltrating armed forces across its borders or through its territory in order to achieve a kaleidoscope of military and political goals. Featured countries include Congo and Rwanda (obvz), Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania and Angola, each of which themselves hosted complex civil wars, generally going back decades, as far as independence.

A feature of all these conflicts is the extraordinary number of military groups they give rise to, all of which have grand titles and imposing acronyms, hence the 161 acronyms listed at the start of the book. I found myself referring back to it on every page. Just the 5-page backgrounder on Congo includes:

Mobutu’s Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR)
Étienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS)
the Conférence nationale souveraine (CNS) set up in 1990
replaced by the Haut Conseil de la République-Parlement de Transition (HCR-PT)
the FAZ or Forces Armées Zaïroises

By about page 75 the book was feeling less a history than a degree course in the history, politics, ethnography and sociology of half a continent. I think you’d have to read it at least twice, probably three or four times, stopping to consult histories of all the other countries mentioned, to stand a chance of getting your degree.

I particularly enjoyed the background sections on countries we don’t hear so much about in post-imperial Britain, such as Angola and, even more so, the Francophonie countries which you rarely read about, Central African Republic, Chad and Congo-Brazzaville.

Initially, I was surprised at the jaded bitterness of Prunier’s tone but after a while I began to realise that only the blackest of black humour can do justice to a continent whose rules have spent 60 years doing their damnedest to utterly destroy.

Angola is a much richer country than either the Sudan or Uganda, which allowed its process of national destruction to be carried out with an impressive array of military means quite unknown in other parts of the continent, apart from Ethiopia. (p.88)

The guts of the war are described in a chapter graphically titled ‘Sinking into the quagmire’. It’s challenging keeping track of all the state-backed militias and armed forces, but when these start splintering and fighting amongst themselves, it becomes almost too complex to understand. On page 201 Prunier humorously asks whether his exasperated reader is ready to give up, and he’s got a point:

Does the reader at this point want to throw in the towel and give up on the ethnopolitical complexities of the region? I would not blame him, although I can assure him that I am honestly trying to simplify the picture. (p.201)

The importance of Angola

The single biggest cause of the Great War of Africa is that Eduardo dos Santos’s MPLA government in Angola went to the defence of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa.

I’ve explained how Kabila was installed as a puppet ruler by the alliance of Rwanda and Uganda to replace Mobutu, who both countries wanted removed from power, but how, after a year, he then turned on his own backers and ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country. And how this triggered those two countries to make a second invasion and remove Kabila.

For a start, Prunier adds much more detail to the story by explaining that Kabila was a terrible leader, stuck in a Marxist timewarp from the 1960s, but also just shambolic, chaotic and unpredictable, managing to insult or irritate all the neighbouring regimes and running his own one in a deeply unpredictable way, arresting his own ministers on a whim etc. So when Rwanda-Uganda began their second incursion to remove him many were keen.

Kabila had sacked his (Rwandan) chief of the army staff, James Kabarebe, who returned to the east of the country and, in Goma, hijacked three commercial freight planes, filled them with RPA troops, and flew them to the government base of Kitona on the Atlantic coast where they quickly turned Kabila troops to their side. Towns around Kitona fell, as did the diamond centre of Kisangani. The rebels seized the Inga hydroelectric station that provided power to Kinshasa as well as the port of Matadi through which most of Kinshasa’s food passed. In other words, Kabila’s regime looked doomed.

Then Angola intervened to save it. Why? The answer has to do with conditions inside Angola. The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government based the capital Luanda had been fighting a civil war against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) since independence in 1975. In 1994 the Lusaka protocol tried to broker a ceasefire and in 1995 UN peacekeepers arrived. But Prunier explains in detail why, by 1998, the truce had broken down and fighting began again.

The point is that the MPLA had, originally, in the 1970s, been a Marxist movement and Savimbi had presented himself as a business-friendly ally of the West, meaning America. In the simple binary of the Cold War, the MPLA were supported by the Soviet Union and the Cubans, UNITA by America and South Africa. And because Mobutu, ruler of Zaire/Congo, was also a creature of the CIA, supported by America, Mobutu had, for 15 years or more, offered UNITA bases and sanctuary in south Congo/Zaire.

Therefore, as Rwandan forces and Congolese forces backed by Rwanda closed in on Kabila’s regime, the MPLA, after some delay, finally gambled that supporting Kabila and having the gratitude of his weak regime, would guarantee that he would not support the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA. Angola threw itself behind Kabila as part of its ongoing civil war. And the key fact? Angola had one of the largest economies in Africa, based on its huge oil wealth. It had lots of planes, helicopters and a well-trained battle-hardened army, which it now sent to start supporting Kabila. The MPLA’s support for Kabila ensured he would stay in power and that the war would continue for three long, bloody, increasingly chaotic years.

Five layers of conflict

Prunier suggests the war had five layers (pages 201 to 203):

Layer 1: Core conflict: the RPF regime in Rwanda trying, with partner Uganda, to overthrow the puppet ruler, Kabila, who they’d installed.

Layer 2: Powerful players: Angola, Zimbabwe, with Namibia along for the ride, who had no interest in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict but wanted Kabila to remain in power (for Angola, to prevent UNITA taking refuge in Congo; for Zimbabwe, to continue mineral contracts made with Kabila; Namibia just went along with its big powerful neighbour, Angola).

Layer 3: Secondary actors: Libya, Chad, the Sudan, no interest in Congo but it was a zone to sort out relations between themselves and core players, mostly Uganda, which was more or less at war with Sudan.

Layer 4: bordering countries: Burundi which sent a small number of soldiers into the conflict; Central African Republic which tried to stay out.

Layer 5: South Africa: had no military or political interest and never sent troops to the war, but had a strong economic motive in infiltrating the economy of collapsing Zimbabwe and consolidating its hold on Congo’s huge mineral reserves so, on the whole, supported the rebels as being more desperate to turn the assets (mines etc) into cash i.e. let South Africa get bargains. This changed when Joseph Kabila came to power and, unlike his father, let it be known that he was open to business. South African banks and mining corporations suddenly packed his diary (p.262).

From all this you can see why Prunier calls it:

a war fought among foreigners on Congolese territory for reasons of their own. (p.274)

The shift to economic motivation

Why did so many of the countries neighbouring Congo get involved in the conflict? Prunier explains the motivation in the chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This has the added benefit of giving fascinating brief profiles of the countries involved, from Congo itself, through Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Congo-Brazzaville and so on.

Then there are the two increasingly mind-boggling chapters describing the chaotic conflict itself, ‘A continental war’ (181 to 226) and ‘Sinking into the quagmire’ (227 to 255).

He makes a vital point: the war might have started out from geopolitical considerations but as it went on it became increasingly economic i.e. about seizing Congo’s mineral resources:

What mattered more and more as the war went on were the economic interests. (p.234)

And this had a big military-strategic consequence. The first war had been fought to overthrow Mobutu and gain control of the country, so the key battlezone, the target, had been the capital, Kinshasa. But in the Great War the motivation increasingly became to seize Congo’s assets and so the target areas were provinces like Kasai and Katanga, in which the warring parties disintegrated into ever-smaller entities, sometimes fighting over just one mine. These had nominal ties with other groups in other areas, or with various outside parties, then again often went independent. Hence the unravelling complexity of the conflict which eventually nobody understood or could contain.

A useful recap

In the chapter describing the beginning of the end, ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper’, he gives a useful recap of why they got involved in 1998 and what had changed by 2001 to make many want to withdraw. In other words, why did the war ramify out so disastrously in 1998, and what allowed it to be dragged to an end in 2001/2? Here’s a list of key intervening countries, giving their initial motivation and what changed:

Kabila supporters

Angola supported Kabila to ensure Congo wouldn’t give safe havens for UNITA. In 1998 Savimbi was still a threat. But by 2001 he was a spent force, militarily and financially, struggling to survive. The MPLA had achieved its aims.

Zimbabwe had allied with Kabila in order to protect the investments and commercial deals it had made with him on his rise to power, and also to block South Africa’s slow rise to economic dominance of the whole of southern Africa. By 2001 Zimbabwe’s economic plight had significantly worsened while South Africa’s commercial ascent continued unhindered, and Mugabe was coming under increasing internal pressure. While peasants starved Mugabe was blowing tens of millions of dollars on an unpopular war. Time to pull out.

Namibia had supported Kabila at the bidding of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but the latter was pulling out and the former never committed men or resources.

Anti-Kabila

Burundi a minor player, had always been most concerned with securing its Congo border and never taken part in the wider invasions.

Uganda was under strong donor pressure to reduce its military budget if it wanted to continue receiving Western aid. Senior members of the army and the regime had done very well out of the war, not least from illegal smuggling of diamonds, gold etc. But Uganda never had the urgent internal political pressure to sort out the Hutu / génocidaire issue that Rwanda did.

In addition, one aspect of the general chaos was the slow falling-out of Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni came to really dislike Kagami’s ‘arrogance’ (p.241). Their forces ended up coming to blows, specifically in several different episodes of street fighting in Congo’s main north-eastern city, Kisangani (p.242). This queered the relationship between Uganda and Rwanda.

Rwanda By 2001 the international situation had changed. The Clinton administration, crippled with guilt, had passively supported Rwanda and been accused of fine rhetoric about a New Africa but no practical follow-through (p.338). However, George W. Bush’s new US administration commenced on 1 January 2001 and took a much tougher line on Rwanda, condemning its ‘grave human rights violations’ (p.266).

By the start of 2002 all the main parties had reached the same conclusion: withdrawal was a certainty, it was just a matter of agreeing schedules (p.267).

Laurent Kabila’s assassination

Arguably, the single most important event – certainly the easiest to grasp because one very specific event – was the assassination of the man at the centre of the conflict, Laurent Kabila, on 16 January 2001. He was shot at point blank range in his office by one of his bodyguards.

Now, since he was the man at the centre of a huge and ruinous war, conspiracy theories have abounded. It’s a kind of African version of Who Killed JFK? The (fairly) straightforward answer is that, while running his guerrilla group out east Kabila recruited lots of boys, young boys, thousands of them, called kodogo (‘little ones’). Kabila trained them to become fighters, and they in turn looked up to him as their Father or Mzee, Swahili for ‘elder’. But once in power he betrayed them. In lots of ways, which Prunier details. He let some be massacred, some ended up on opposing sides and fighting each other. The bodyguard was one of these former boy soldiers.

Then again, Prunier thoroughly describes all the other conspiracy theories, which wander off into huge conspiracies, involving enemy countries, the CIA, the Rwandans, or the dark and shadowy forces which lots of people like to think are behind any disaster or assassination. The likeliest is that Kabila had done a deal with the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA, to smuggle diamonds through northern Angola.

135 people were arrested, tried and convicted, some given the death penalty although no-one, in the end, was executed (pages 249 to 255).

(cf van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 465 to 466.)

The key point is that, after a few days of confusion, the senior figures in the administration decided a compromise candidate who everyone could agree on temporarily was Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy taciturn man who had, however, been moved by his father through the ranks until he was number two in the Congo army, and had helped with various diplomatic and administrative tasks.

In the event Joseph Kabila was to prove a very shrewd operator, the complete opposite of his chaotic unpredictable father. He outwitted all his superiors and peers, serving as president of Congo from January 2001 to January 2019.

From the point of view of the Great War, he was open to savvy negotiations and deals, and it was this new spirit of compromise and negotiation, combined with the war weariness of the key allies, namely Angola, which allowed the war to stumble to an end, sort of. Well, certainly for a peace treaty to be signed in 2002.

Peace, or conflict control

Prunier gives a fascinating summary of the year-long negotiations which eventually, reluctantly, ended with the signing of an inclusive peace treaty on 17 December 2002. Prunier humorously quotes a commentator who wrote that the deal offered the Congolese people the show of a government which was really made up of:

‘a coalition of people who looted their own country, predatory rebels and corrupt civil servants.’ (quoted page 277)

By the time of the treaty maybe 3.5 million people had died, 90% from the collateral effects of war. Agriculture had collapsed. 64% of the population was underfed. Maybe 33% were malnourished (p.278).

Massacre

Three days after Kabila’s murder Ngiti and Lenu warriors attacked Bunia, killing about one hundred Hema. The next day the Hema militia took revenge on Lendu civilians, killing about 25. (p.281)

Hardest to keep track of is the number of Africans killed by Africans. Every one of the 364 pages records Africans murdering other Africans, generally armed men killing defenceless civilians. A continent-wide abattoir. Thus in Prunier’s fascinating background to Angola‘s involvement in the war (pages 88 to 99), he describes the failed democratic elections of 1992 which led to panic on the streets of Luanda where MPLA soldiers killed about 1,500 UNITA soldiers and cadres (p.96). When UNITA took the strategic oil town of Soyo, the fall of the city was blamed on the Bakongo tribe and so about 1,000 unarmed Bakongo civilians were massacred in the streets of Luanda, Bloody Friday (p.97).

There’s killing on every page. The suffering of the population of Congo is beyond words. For the most part Prunier lets the facts of massacre after massacre convey the enormity of the horror to the reader.

In the period October 1992 and December 1993 the UN estimated civilian deaths at 450,000 to 500,000. In mid-1993, the UN counted about 1,000 war-related deaths per day. (Tufts University mass atrocities website)

Towards the end of the book he cites research by the US International Rescue Committee which suggested that between August 1998 and April 2000 there were some 1.7 million excess deaths in Congo (p.242). Of these only around 200,000 were directly due to fighting, the rest being due to:

frequent forced population displacement
overexposure to the elements
near collapse of the health system
disease
impossibility to carrying out agriculture, obviously leading to starvation
plain despair

(p.242, cf p.338).

Your life in their hands. 2015 photo of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) fighters. The FDLR is the latest iteration of Rwandan Hutu army and Iterahamwe militia génocidaires who fled Rwanda in 1994, plus other Hutus who’ve signed up since. Gang rape and mass murder a speciality.

The colonial borders

Prunier calls his final chapter ‘Groping for meaning’. You can draw all kinds of conclusions. The one that impressed itself on me was the old chestnut about Africa’s colonial borders. More than any other book about Africa this one shows how the borders the colonial powers drew had little or nothing to do with tribes on the ground and how most Africans’ sense of identity, especially in rural areas i.e. most of the continent, remained based on tribe, clan, religion and family, complex multi-levelled identities, with ‘nationality’ an evanescent Western invention (p.360).

This really reinforces Prunier’s criticism that western models don’t work on ‘nations’ which are nothing like the western concept of a ‘nation’. If the traditional definition of a ‘state’ is an entity which has a monopoly of legitimate violence over a defined territory, then Congo isn’t a state at all, as there were and still are areas where numerous other groups carry out systematic violence (p.305). As you read this:

‘There are more than 120 different armed groups active in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’ (Kivu conflict Wikipedia article)

Just because an African leader wears a suit and tie and has a ‘cabinet’ made of ‘ministers’, Western leaders and bankers shake his hand and think he’s like them, has the same mindset, comes from the same background, is managing the same kinds of problems. But they’re really not. African leaders are trying to run ‘states’ which often barely exist or only exist in patches, across territories which aren’t states in the way we in the West are used to them, lacking infrastructure, modern economies, integrated populations, a high level of education and so on.

Hence the repeated point Prunier makes about the ‘reality gap’ between the fine words of the international community – the lovingly worked-out details of various peace accords, with their withdrawal of forces and integration of troops and civil society and so on – and the generally chaotic, anarchic, often incomprehensible situations on the ground (p.225).

One aspect of this is the point I made at length in my reviews of books about the West’s attempts to impose ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that the attempts revealed the complete lack of understanding, in the West, of what democracy actually is, where it came from, and what sustains it, in the advanced, economically developed nations.

Democracy as a form of government presupposes a certain degree of social integration, the existence of a political class with some concept of the national interest, and a minimum of economic development (p.xxxii)

All of which are as absent in a country like Congo as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably most of the Middle East and Africa. Lacking the social and economic prerequisites for full democracy, undeveloped countries tend to adopt democratic window dressing, which conceals simple power grabs by ethnic or religious or tribal groups. Thus Prunier commenting that, ahead of the first free elections in Congo in 2006, dozens of new political parties sprang up across the country, but that:

These were parties in name only, since they were mostly tribal or regional gatherings around the name of one or two well-known local politicians. (p.309)

With the recurring result that as and when governments are formed, they are more often than not little more than:

a coagulation of groups operating out of completely mercenary interests (p.315)

(Prunier explains the arbitrary nature of the borders right at the start, pages xxix to xxx, and then gives a concentrated summary along with the characteristics of weak states and strong tribal identities which will plague Africa for the foreseeable future, on pages 360 to 362.)

The Kivus

Throughout the narrative it becomes ever clearer that the hotspot, the trouble spot, the recurring source of conflict, is the two small territories known as the Kivus, North and South Kivu, both of which have complex ethnic, political and military conflicts. This troubled little area turned out to be the hardest to fully pacify after the 2002 peace agreement, then trouble flared up all over again in the mid-2000s which had to be fought to a standstill by UN and government forces.

Kivu conflict Wikipedia article

At the time of writing the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world, deploying some 21,000 soldiers.

Will the war happen again?

No. The conditions were unique, being:

the flight of the génocidaires and the refugees into eastern Congo provided a one-off motivation for the RPF government to invade, repatriate the refugees and wipe out the remaining génocidaires
– that whole crisis situation has disappeared
instead it turned into a mission to overturn the decrepit dictator Mobutu and then, in the sequel, to overthrow the unpopular puppet ruler Kabila – but Congo has had much more stable and effective leaders for 20 years
guilt over their role in the Rwanda genocide meant the West and the UN turned a blind eye to the RPF’s abuses and massacres – that wouldn’t happen again, indeed already with the arrival of the George W. Bush administration in 2001 the RPF had to start moderating its behaviour
but the key thing that turned it into a continental war was the decision by Angola to intervene and support Laurent Kabila in order to prevent their enemy, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, from using southern Congo as a base: but Savimbi died 20 years ago and the civil war ended with him, all parties are concerned with maintaining their grip on power and corrupt money, and any kind of war would only jeopardise that

So Congo will, like most African nations, continue to be a weak state for the foreseeable future; and violence may flare up in some its territory, especially the ever-troublesome Kivus. But a war on the same scale is extremely unlikely to be repeated. it was the result of one-off geopolitical forces which won’t recur.

Further issues

France’s shame

France sees all foreign affairs as a conspiracy of the Anglophone countries (mostly America and Britain) to undermine French glory and the superiority of French culture. Therefore, the French government stood by the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda even as the genocide was underway because they spoke French and the incoming Tutu forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, having been raised in former British colony Uganda, spoke English. Simple as that. The French supported the third great genocide of the twentieth century because its perpetrators spoke French (pages 341 to 343).

Viewing the war through European paradigms i.e. the Holocaust

The West could understand the genocide because they viewed it through the prism of European history and the Holocaust. This led to the tendency to blindly support the RPF, to regard the Tutsi regime as black Israelis, as a people who had suffered an appalling crime and so could be forgiven any behaviour in retaliation. The West tended not to understand the Congo conflict in its own right, for what it was, an imperialist attack by one African country (Rwanda) on another (Congo) which drew in a range of neighbouring countries who used the Congo as a battleground to fight their own conflicts (predominantly Angola).

Genocide narrative easy; Congo war narrative hard, complicated, sometimes impenetrable. Hence a) prolonged support for Rwanda and Kagame, whatever they did, b) long, long delay getting to grips with the political issues underlying the war.

Good guys

As remarked in my reviews about Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is plagued by a Hollywood simple-mindedness or regarding all foreign situations in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, consistently failing to understand complexities and shades of grey (p.340). Prunier sees this tendency to simplify situations and players into good guys/bad guys as distinctively American (p.357).

Credit

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. All references are to the 2010 OUP paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Africa reviews

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn (1992)

Frank McLynn

McLynn, 80 this year, has made a very successful career as an author, biographer, historian and journalist, having written some 30 books. He clearly aims to produce enjoyable, accessible and non-scholarly histories and biographies for a wide audience. This is suggested, among other things by his use of casual and rather boys’ own adventure story diction:

It was the Moors who had done for Major Houghton. (p.16)
His plight was grim. His horse was on its last legs. (p.16)
The Landers shook the dust of Badagry off their shoes with gusto and plunged into the wilderness… (p.27)
The master of the Thomas proved to be a blackguard. (p.30)
Speke would not have to fear the supercilious basilisk eye from a superior beetling brow, as with Burton, every time he wandered off to slaughter a few dozen of Africa’s wildlife.
Once again the expedition came within an ace of disaster… (p.104)
Meanwhile the Upper Nile was proving a hell on earth… (p.119)

I found McLynn’s book about the Mexican Revolution very useful, accessible and gripping, and was impressed by his talent for shaping the complicated facts into a compelling narrative. But that book had the advantage of telling the story of a huge social upheaval through the lives of just two legendary figures who are central to the entire drama, which itself only covered a period of about 20 years.

Here the challenge is the reverse: there were hundreds of European explorers to Africa, most of them undertook more than one expedition, many stayed for years carrying out complex sequences of explorations, and the total period of Western exploration lasted about a century (from 1788 to around 1890). In other words, there’s a lot more subject matter to cover and so it’s harder for this book not to feel more scattered and diffuse.

Brief history of exploration up to the European era

The ancient Greeks and Romans probed into Africa but never crossed the barrier of the Sahara or managed to penetrate far up the Nile. From the seventh century, Muslim Arab traders explored the east coast of Africa, set up numerous settlements and established a lucrative trade in black slaves. From the 1480s onwards the Portuguese created stopping off points on their circumnavigation of Africa to reach India. But McLynn tells us that the accepted date for the start of the ‘modern’ exploration of Africa is 1788. For it was in this year that the African Association was set up in London by a dozen London businessmen led by Sir Joseph Banks, the noted botanist who accompanied Captain Cook on his journeys to the South Seas.

The African Association (to give it its proper name, The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa) sponsored a series of expeditions throughout the 1790s, then activity went into abeyance for the duration of the wars with France (1793 to 1815) before being revived once peace returned. As soon as you google this subject you discover it is extremely well covered online and there is a recognised and much repeated canon of early explorers, namely:

Pre-Napoleonic war explorers

John Ledyard, set off 1788, died in Cairo aged 37.
Simon Lucas, departed Tripoli 1788; forced to abandon expedition south by tribal wars.
Daniel Houghton, 1790, penetrated deep up the river Gambia in West Africa before being robbed and murdered aged 51.
Mungo Park, 1795, penetrated further into West Africa than any European to date, discovering that the Niger flowed east, but died in the attempt to travel the length of the Niger by canoe, murdered or drowned it’s not clear to this day, age 35.
Friedrich Hornemann, 1797, set off from Cairo to travel across the Sahara to Timbuktu and was never heard of again; if he died around 1800, he would have been 28.

Post-Napoleonic war explorers

Alexander Gordon Laing, Scottish, first European to reach Timbuktu in 1826, being murdered by Tuareg soon afterwards, aged 31.
René Caillié, son of a convict (!) first explorer to visit Timbuktu (in 1828) and return to tell the tale, before dying of ill health and tuberculosis aged 38.
Heinrich Barth, considered one of the greatest of the European explorers of Africa for his scholarliness and commitment to learning Arabic, spent five years living in Sudan, crossing the Sahara to West Africa, first person to visit remote Timbuktu since Caillié (in 1853).
Charles John Andersson, explored south-west Africa from his base in Cape Town, at one stage was a war lord to the Damara tribe, died of fever aged 40.
Karl Mauch, son of a Bavarian carpenter, taught himself and scraped the money to travel to South Africa, where he worked to earn the funds to pay for an expedition up into south-east Africa. He discovered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in 1872, but was ignored when he returned to Germany and died in poverty aged 37.

General conclusions

McLynn draws a handful of conclusions from these early pioneers:

1. Exploring Africa was a young man’s game.

2. All the explorers fell ill, very seriously ill, multiple times, and a high percentage, even of the young and fit, died.

3. This didn’t stop the obsessive ambition of many of the most successful ones to be ‘the first man to see’ whatever feature they had been sent by the Association to discover: the fabled city of Timbuktu, the origins of the river Niger, various waterfalls and so on.

4. African exploration was connected to low birth. It presented an opportunity to people condemned to lifetimes of lowly obeisance in Britain’s class structure, to make a splash, to make a name for themselves, to achieve wealth and status. Simon Lucas was the son of a vintner. David Livingstone was one of seven children who grew up in a tenement in a grim Scottish mill town and was sent aged ten to a cotton mill where he and his brother John worked twelve-hour days as piecers, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. Henry Morton Stanley was abandoned by his mother and spent ten years from the ages of 6 to 16 in a remote Welsh workhouse.

5. Many of the explorers were Celts, outsiders to the English establishment: Mungo Park and David Livingstone came from lowly backgrounds in Scotland, Stanley from a wretched workhouse in rural Wales. Hugh Clapperton from Annan, Dumfriesshire (died of dysentery in Sokoto, aged 38). Richard Lander, son of a Truro innkeeper (died on the Niger river, aged 29) and so on.

6. Expeditions do not bring people together. Many of these trips are notorious for the extreme hatred and bitterness they engendered between the protagonists. Most notorious is the tremendous falling out between the famous Arabist Richard Francis Burton and the big game hunter John Hanning Speke on their 1858 expedition from Zanzibar into East Africa, during which they mapped Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, which lasted after they returned to England and pursued a feud against each other in the press right up till the day of Speke’s death (or suicide?) in 1860.

A blizzard of names and dates

McLynn plunges straight into accounts of these early expeditions, telling them in pared-down, summary style with the result that I felt bombarded by names – of European explorers and of the countless villages and towns they discovered/arrived at, and the plethora of Africa tribes with their kings and sheikhs who they encountered, traded with, fought against and so on. I soon realised I was never going to remember.

Much more interesting and enduring are the broader points he makes about Africa in general and the perils of European exploration in particular.

The African scene

Pitiful agriculture

Most African cultures lived right on the breadline, on the border of starvation (p.146). This was caused by poor soil, poor climate and erratic rains which, in the tropical regions, fell almost constantly all year round. Many Africans lived on a very basic diet of yams, manioc, corn, supplemented by berries and fruits, only rarely fish or meat protein. There was rarely the kind of guaranteed agricultural surplus which had allowed for the creation of complex civilisations in the Fertile Crescent and then across the Middle East and Europe for millennia.

Therefore, even a slight incursion by outsiders, let alone domineering white men leading a train of 300 porters, could upset delicate ecological balances and plunge villages and entire regions into famine. In fact the explorers regularly came across whole regions which were in famine conditions, where the locals were starving and where, therefore, no food could be bought for their huge trains for any amount of calico or beads (e.g. pp.217 to 219)..

And this explains many tribes’ fierce protectiveness of their territory and the often hostile response of African leaders to the arrival of the explorers and their huge hungry trains.

Tsetse flies

Tsetse flies were a menace to humans and livestock in Africa. They are to this day.

Tsetse flies, through the cyclical transmission of trypanosomiasis to both humans and their animals, greatly influence food production, natural-resource utilization and the pattern of human settlement throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that the annual direct production losses in cattle alone amount to between US$6bn and $12billion, while animal deaths may reach 3 million. (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization)

Lack of pack animals

There was a lack of pack animals or domesticable animals such as had underpinned the development of civilisation across Eurasia, which was home to oxen, cattle, donkeys but above all horses, which had performed a key economic function for millennia.

The evidence was overwhelming that all domesticated animals, whether oxen, camels, mules, horses or camels, succumbed very soon to the effects of climate and disease once taken north of 5°N. (p.132)

Later on he links the lack of pack animals to one central factor, the tsetse fly which transmitted the trypanasomes which caused ‘sleeping sickness’.

It was the tsetse that has barred passage to black Africa by killing off the Arabs’ horses and camels. The fly also kept the technology of black Africa primitive, since, deprived of animals, the African could hand plough only small plots of land, had no transport and lacked a source of first class protein. (p.240)

Lacking any kind of pack animals, most sub-Saharan cultures were primitive in the extreme. (The importance of domesticatable animals and of the wide range of edible grasses to the rise of Eurasian civilisations is explained in Jared Diamond’s 1997 classic Guns, Germs and Steel.)

Hundreds of porters

Therefore, an enduring feature of African exploration was simply that humans had to carry everything. (McLynn does describe a handful of explorations which experimented with horses, donkeys and even elephants, but in every case the animals wasted and died, leaving the human porters with even more to carry.) Hence native porters numbering in the hundreds. McLynn reports that of all the different tribes the Nyamwezi were head and shoulders the most reliable, foresightful and organised of porters. On the east Africa coast, at Zanzibar and the vital coastal town of Bagamoyo, huge numbers of porters were available and certain individual porters rose to prominence, were able to organise and manage their peers and so were hired by successive explorers and feature in accounts of successive expeditions.

Expeditions routinely included two to three hundred porters, and Stanley’s exceptionally well funded ones, up to 800! He had to be a master of organisation, man management and discipline, and McLynn gives examples of moments when European masters either a) managed to, or b) miserably failed to, maintain discipline and rank.

Lack of roads

Explorers discovered an almost complete lack of transport infrastructure. Most of the rivers were too large to be navigable or presented obstacles such as rapids and waterfalls. Roads through tropical jungle were impossible to maintain, so most people used narrow tracks.

‘The pathway seldom exceeded two feet in width, with tress and tall grasses growing up to its edges.’ (Alfred Swann, quoted on page 133)

There were few if any roads as understood in the developed world, nothing like canals and nothing remotely like Western railways. McLynn tells us Western-style tarmaced roads, and railways, didn’t really arrive in Africa till the 1930s.

The perils of European exploration

Sub-Saharan Africa remained unexplored for so long for a number of reasons.

No navigable rivers

Most African rivers debouch into sandbanks and have neither natural bays nor deep estuaries which characterise European and American rivers and allow ships to anchor and navigate upstream. If ships did anchor, water-borne explorers found it impossible to proceed far upriver because of rapids, cascades and waterfalls.

Violent humans

Anyway, chances are they would be attacked by any of the complicated patchwork of tribes and regional warlords who fiercely protected their territory. A simple motive for African violence and resentment was related to the dire poverty of most African communities but there were also continual low-level conflicts between neighbouring tribes; there are calculated to have been around 700 distinct tribes. But as MacLynn emphasises, Africans owed far more allegiance to their villages, village elders and traditions. There were hundreds of religions, mostly primitive ancestor or fetish worship.

What this amounts to in the book is a blizzard of names of the kings of umpteen different tribes and regions which the explorers pass through, most at war with all their neighbours, thus making negotiating with them for safe passage very dicey, plus all these rulers tended to want presents and dues. Hence the enormous trains of porters the explorers required to carry not only their food and weapons and tents etc, but also a sizeable treasury of Western goodies to be handed over to the series of rulers they had to mollify. The African word for it was hongo which translates as ‘tribute’ or ‘bribe’, depending on your worldview. As the (admittedly rabidly anti-African explorer) Samuel White Baker complained:

‘It is the rapacity of the chiefs of the various tribes that render African exploration so difficult.’ (quoted on page 75)

And plenty of explorers were just murdered outright by nomads, bandits, lawless tribals. McLynn gives a vivid account of the attack by the Eesa tribe on the expedition of Burton, Speke, Stroyan and Herne along with 42 porters encamped just outside the town of Berbera on the coast of Somaliland on the night of 19 April 1855. Lieutenant Stroyan was killed outright, Burton took a spear thrust through one cheek and out the other but managed to run to the beach and safety while Speke was captured, suffered spear thrusts in eleven places including right through one thigh, was tied up and threatened with castration until he was left in the care of one armed guard who he managed to knock out before also running to the sea where he was discovered by rescuers then following morning (p.255).

Violent animals

No continent has so many fierce animals as Africa. Lions routinely attacked and killed members of exhibitions. If travelling by water, crocodiles and the surprisingly aggressive hippopotamus were a peril. Aggressive birds attacked larger animals, for example camels, leaving wounds which festered and killed.

Heat

Explorers died of simple heatstroke or from the combo of heat and high humidity in forest regions.

Disease

But disease was the most obvious peril. All Europeans attempting travel into sub-Saharan Africa quickly became ill, often seriously ill. Malaria, typhoid, ophthalmia, and any number of causes of diarrhoea, afflicted almost all European explorers with devastating consequences. Half the explorers who set out were killed by disease; most of the survivors emerged severely weakened by prolonged illness with lingering debilitating effects. McLynn mentions smallpox, fever, ague, amoebic and bacillic dysentery, guinea worm, ulcers acquired when scratches (from thorn bushes or tall sharp grass) got infected and festered in the heat and humidity, bronchitis, pneumonia, rheumatism, sciatica, athsma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), bilharzia, filariasis, hookworm infestation (ankylostomiasis), river blindness (onchocerciasis), exanthematic typhus, yaws and leprosy.

Regularly you read that the explorers were laid up for months on end with fever and dysentery, or rendered so weak they literally couldn’t walk and had to be carried in hammocks. In fact McLynn devotes an entire chapter, chapter 11, to the subject (pages 227 to 252).

Attrition rates

Thus it was that all the expeditions suffered appalling death rates. For example, Stanley left Bagamoyo in mid-November 1874 with 4 white companions and 342 African porters. By the end of February 1875, 181 had been lost to famine, illness, desertion or attacks by tribesmen. On the Emin Pasha expedition, Stanley left Zanzibar in spring 1887 with 708 men. Two and a half years later only 210 returned (p.152). The situation was summed up by the German explorer Wilhelm Junker:

‘Famine and disease are the chief causes of the depopulation of Central Africa; in comparison with these the export of slaves is but a small item.’ (quoted on page 117)

No profit

And, despite all the rumours of treasure and secret cities and rare gems and valuable resources, it turned out to be impossible to make a profit from any of these expeditions. They were either sponsored by national geographic associations, by missionary organisations, or by wealthy backers (p.146). None of the explorers McLynn describes got involved in any businesses set up to trade with Africa, there were few if any businesses involved there. Stanley came the closest, in the sense that he was central to helping King Leopold of Belgium set up his evil and rapacious regime in the Congo, but that was more slave exploitation than a ‘business’. A number of explorers ended their days as colonial administrators, such as da Brazza, Frederick Lugard and Carl Peters. But most came home, wrote up their experiences and lived off their ublications and lectures.

The great British explorers

Having skated through the early pioneers McLynn slows down and pays more attention to the famous expeditions of David Livingstone, Richard Burton (the first European to see Lake Tanganyika, which he wrongly thought must be the source of the Nile) and John Hanning Speke whose joint expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society and lasted from 1856 to 1859.

Burton and Speke were involved in the great quest to find the source of the mighty river Nile. Speke won, showing that its main source is Lake Victoria, to the anger of the far more scholarly and conscientious Burton, who made the wrong call when he attributed the source to Lake Tanganyika. On their return to England in 1859 they embarked on a long and bitter war of words through the press and pamphlets.

And Samuel White Baker, who I’d never heard of but, apparently, was second only to Livingstone in popular fame, for his extensive 4-year-long explorations around the Great Lakes region of central east Africa (1861 to 1865).

Baker was the first European to see Lake Albert and a substantial waterfall on the Victoria Nile which he named Murchison Falls after the then-president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison. Back in Blighty he wrote a considerable number of books and published articles which bolstered his reputation as the grand old man of Africa exploration and an expert on the Nile, though he was almost as famous for his extravagant big game hunting on four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Suppressing the slave trade

Britain abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807. The actual state of enslavement i.e. slavery as a whole, wasn’t abolished, and existing slaves freed, until 1833. By the 1850s suppression of the slave trade carried on by other nations had become a major moral crusade for the British. The Royal Navy had an Africa squadron specifically tasked with patrolling the west African coast and intercepting slave ships, forcing them to return their captives to Africa.

In east and central Africa where the great competition to find the source of the Nile played out, there was a long established slave trade run by Arabs, capturing and transporting black Africans up the coast to the Muslim world. High-minded missionaries like David Livingstone raised funds and publicity by their stated aim of combining geographical exploration with steps to suppress the slave trade. Baker was another Brit who boosted his reputation among high-minded Victorians by emphasising his anti-slavery credentials, without much justification, in McLynn’s view.

Yet McLynn brings out how ambiguous the relationship between British explorer and Arab slaver could be on the ground, in reality. This is epitomised in the career of Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, better known by his nickname, Tippu Tip, which is Swahili for ‘gatherer of wealth’. Born in 1832 in Zanzibar, Tippu rose to become one of the wealthiest men of his time, based on his twin trades in ivory and slaves. Eventually he became the leading slave trader in East Africa, supplying the Muslim world with hundreds of thousands of black slaves and himself owning plantations worked by an estimated 10,000 enslaved blacks.

The point is that if you were a white man who wanted to explore central Africa from the most reliable starting point of Zanzibar, you had to reach an accommodation with Tippu who had established and ran the key trading posts, watering holes, provision stores and so on on the main routes inland from the coast to the great lakes, from Bagamoyo on the coast via the trading entrepot of Tabora, which was equidistant from Lake Tanganyika in the west and Lake Victoria in the north. And so David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, to name the most famous, were forced to forge working relationships with Tippu.

It was one thing to make grand declarations in Britain about abolishing the east Africa slave trade; it was quite another to find yourself amid rich, powerful men who ran it, who had everything to lose by its abolition, and try to reach practical accommodations with them.

Tippu Tip was famous enough to feature on the front cover of the Illustrated London News, 7 December 1889 issue.

Later, non-British explorers

After the high profile, super-publicised expeditions of Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, Speke and Baker, the narrative goes on to describe scores of lesser figures. The Big Names are big because they sketched out the really central issue of African geography, they were the ones who traced the paths of the major rivers (the Niger, Congo, Zambezi and Nile) and discovered the complex of great lakes in east-central Africa. The created the frame and established the broad shapes, like completing the border round a jigsaw.

But there was still a huge amount of work to be done to join the dots, for example to work out the order of flow between the umpteen lakes in the African lake district which eventually led into the sources of the Nile, or to identify each of the scores of tributaries of the river Congo – and this was done by a host of lesser names, most of them not British and therefore not enshrined in our national history.

McLynn notes that two other nationalities became prominent: Belgian explorers, once King Leopold had established his ‘right’ to the vast Congo basin at the 1885 Congress of Berlin; and the same event crystallised the urgency among German politicians and scientists to secure their slice of the African pie, so there was a notable upswing in the number of German explorers, for example George Schweinfurth.

This left the French who, as usual, burned with envy and at the successes of their hated rivals, the British, and spurred them on, post 1880, to map and seize as much territory as possible. The national rivalry was made plain in the individual rivalry between Stanley, who was contracted to explore and establish waystations along the river Congo by Leopold of Belgium well into the 1890s, and the lead French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who also explored the Congo basin in the 1870s and 80s, going on to become a French colonial administrator in the 1890s. The capital of the Republic of the Congo was named Brazzaville in his honour and retains the name to this day.

A body of work was done by ‘Gordon’s men’, a set of adventurers hired by General Gordon when he was governor of Equitoria province in the service of the Khedive of Egypt in the 1870s, who included Emin Pasha (despite his name, actually a German Jew born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer), Frederick Burnaby, Rudolph Slatkin, Romolo Gessi, Mason Bey, Gaetano Casati, Linant de Bellefonds, Carlo PIaggia and others. McLynn gives us brief pen portraits of these men and their exploratorial adventures.

Kenya, of all African countries the one with the climate most congenial to Europeans, was, surprisingly, one of the last to be explored, an achievement credited to the trio of Joseph Thomson, Harry Johnston and Samuel Yeleki.

The end of exploration

The era of exploration by dashing individuals drew to an end during the 1880s and may be considered over by 1890 (p.128). It was replaced by the era of colonialism i.e. the now-surveyed and mapped areas passed into the administration of the European nations which had drawn lines on maps and defined administrative areas at Berlin. Administrative regions were consolidated into ‘nations’. The map of Africa as we know it today crystallised during the 1890s and turn of the century. In most cases it was a continual process of ongoing accretion and centralisation.

To take Nigeria as an example. Britain annexed the coast region of Lagos as a crown colony in August 1861. At the Berlin Conference in 1885, Britain’s claims to a West African sphere of influence were recognised. The next year, in 1886, Britain set up the Royal Niger Company under the leadership of Sir George Taubman Goldie, which proceeded to subjugate the independent kingdoms along the Niger River, conquering Benin in 1897 and other regional leaders in the Anglo-Aro War (1901 to 1902). In 1900, the company’s territory came under the direct control of the British government which established the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. The British then moved north to subdue the Sokoto Caliphate, which was defeated at the Battle of Kano in 1903 and the British set up the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. By 1906 all resistance to British rule had ended. On 1 January 1914 the British formally united the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and the Northern Nigeria Protectorate into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. 46 years later, Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom on 1 October 1960.

A thumbnail sketch of how exploration passed on to patchwork colonial administration, government takeover, integration of various territories into a nation, which then fought for and gained its independence.

Bad maps

The maps are terrible. You’d have thought the people producing a book entirely about exploration would realise the importance of maps showing just what was explored, when and by who.

1. The book does contain about 14 maps but, as my vagueness implies, there is no list or index of them at the front.

2. Far worse, though, is that none of the maps have titles or numbers. So a map suddenly appears in the text but you have no idea what it’s meant to be showing. Of course, you can see it depicts a bit of Africa, but there’s no indication why, you have to deduce this from the text.

3. When I read the accounts of the first few explorers described, Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Joseph Ritchie, Hugh Clapperton and others, the text mentioned the African villages and towns they travelled to but none of these appeared in the map. I spent ten minutes trying in vain to find any of the placenames mentioned in these expeditions on the bloody map. There were lots of places indicated on the map but none of these appeared in the text! What?

4. Worst of all hardly any of the maps show the single most important thing you want to know, which is the routes of the actual expeditions. The first couple of maps, which show the river Niger and the region around Lake Chad appear to be there to show the first few explorations of the region in the late 1700s but there is no indication of the routes taken by the explorers named in the text. Later maps, relating to Burton and Speke or LIvingstone and Stanley, do bother to have routes marked on the maps but no title indicating whose journeys they were. In every instance a quick google of the expedition in question produced umpteen maps on the internet showing quite clearly the route you need to be able to see in order to make sense of the narrative.

The poorness of the maps is a real limitation of this book.

African words

Obviously, hundreds of languages were and are spoken across this vast continent. McLynn’s text mentions certain key words in Swahili:

askaris – soldiers
chikote – strip of hide used as a whip
hongo – bribes or tribute to chiefs
kanda – long, narrow canvas carry bag
karaba – a brass measure for rations
kitanda – litter (to carry people in)
madala – weights hung at each end of a pole carried over the shoulders
masika – season of heavy rain
mukongwa – slave fork in which the slave’s head was fastened
pagazi – porter
posho – daily rice ration
ruga-ruga – irregular troops or mercenaries
tembe – camp or base
wangwana – ‘sons of the free’

English words

McLynn enjoys writing and is a pleasure to read. Along with his occasional boys’-own-adventure register, he sprinkles the text with recherché terms which are a pleasure to look up in a dictionary and savour.

febrifuge – a medicine to reduce fever
feculent – of or containing dirt, sediment, or waste matter
fuliginous – sooty, dusty
lacustrine – relating to or associated with lakes
ophiolatry – worship of snakes
riverine – relating to or situated on a river or riverbank; riparian
rugose – wrinkled or corrugated
thaumaturge – a worker of wonders and performer of miracles, a magician
the veridical – the truth

Credit

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn was published in 1992 by Hutchinson. All references are to the 1993 Pimlico paperback edition.

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