This small display celebrates the British Museum’s acquisition of ‘Insects’, a portfolio of six colour prints by the American artist Ed Ruscha, with a few other works to give them context.
Swarm of red ants from ‘Insects’ by Ed Ruscha (1972)
Ruscha came to prominence in the early 1960s when he was associated with pop art, the movement which made art out of the everyday, from adverts, hoardings, cartoons and newspapers and the mass media generally, movie stars etc. He has always been associated with printmaking. The series Insects was made in 1972. It’s a classic example of his tendency to create works in sets or projects.
Flies by Ed Ruscha from ‘Insects’ (1972)
Ed Ruscha biography
Ed Ruscha was born in 1937. In 1956, aged just 18, Ruscha moved from Oklahoma City in the South Central US to Los Angeles, the West Coast city with which he is most closely associated and where he has been based ever since.
The near 1,400-mile journey along Route 66 would become very familiar to him over years of travelling back and forth and inspire his first artist’s book, ‘Twenty-six Gasoline Stations’. Self-published in 1963, this cheaply printed paperback contained black-and-white photographs of the filling stations littered along the famous highway, and the worn-out, everyday modernism of their design.
Some of the 26 gasoline stations by Ed Ruscha (1963)
In Los Angeles Ruscha trained in commercial graphic design. Ever since those early days, roads, cars, gas stations, signs and billboard advertisements have occurred frequently in Ruscha’s art across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, photography, drawing and film.
Insects
Insects is a portfolio of six colour screen-prints depicting life-sized flies, ants and cockroaches. They are depicted with very prominent shadows to give the naturalistic illusion of three-dimensional bugs resting, swarming or scuttling across flat surfaces. Printed in 1972, the portfolio is displayed here in full. It was acquired by the British Museum in 2023 as a gift from a private collector in memory of Paul Thomson to the American Friends of the British Museum.
Cockroaches from ‘Insects’ by Ed Ruscha (1972)
The unexpected subject matter is refreshing, but so is the treatment. Although they’re insects we might encounter in everyday life, we would never see them staged and arranged in such a subtly artificial way. So they’re a pleasing mix of naturalism and contrivance.
Another very appealing aspect of the works is that some of them are painted on paper-backed wood veneer. This is like the fake wood finish you get on tables in cheap cafés but it makes an interesting surface to examine up close, far more interesting and suggestive than plain cartridge or print paper.
Rusty Signs
The display includes not only some documentary material from Ruscha’s early career, and the cover of the Insects portfolio, but also a portfolio of seven soft-ground etchings from 2001 titled ‘Los Francisco San Angeles’. In these Ruscha creates imaginary maps that intersect the principal roads of LA and San Francisco. These made almost no impression on me.
Far more impressive are the two prints from the six prints in Ruscha’s 2014 series of Rusty Signs. These were produced at the Mixografia Print Studio in Los Angeles, and bring together his interest in graphic design, signage, the American cult of the open road and visual illusions.
Dead End II from ‘Rusty Signs’ by Ed Ruscha (2014)
The prints were made using a proprietary process developed at Mixografia. Ruscha drew each sign using a font of his own design which he calls Boy Scout Utility Modern and superimposed them onto corroded metal before the printing plates were produced. The finished plates were carefully inked to suggest the weathering of the metal and passed through the press with wet handmade paper under great pressure.
Cash for Tools from ‘Rusty Signs’ by Ed Ruscha (2014)
I grew up in a petrol station with a tyre bay, amid the smells of petrol and oil, car exhausts, the smell of swarfega, the rainbow sheen of oil on puddles, the punching sound of the pneumatic machines which undid car wheel nuts or screwed tyres off their wheels.
Hence my strong partiality for industrial art, art made from industrial scraps like the Italian Arte Povera movement, for wrecked modern buildings like the ones in Louise and Jane Wilson’s brilliant black-and-white photos.
The curators say the Rusty Signs symbolise ‘downturn and decline’, and even make the grand claim that they’re some kind of statement about ‘the American Dream’. What American dream? Can they read the newspapers? Do they follow the news?
Anyway, backing off from that kind of social interpretation, these are lovely works and the art speaks for itself. The tiny ants, each casting a perfect shadow on the paper-backed wood veneer, say enough. The choice of subject matter, the medium and the perfect finish are the point.
Similarly, the almost physical sense of age and weathering given by the Rusty Signs, combines in the mind with the knowledge that they are not in fact real signs found by the side of the road, but entirely artificial creations, to create a complex psychological pleasure.
Understanding how they’re made and something about their intention is useful, probably, adding depth and resonance. But in the end the artworks speak for themselves, evoking unique memories and associations in everyone who sees them, in different ways – for me, with great emotional power and nostalgia.
al-asl huwa ‘l-hurriya ‘The basic principle is liberty’
Traditional Islamic jurisprudence assumes that everyone is free, based on the dictum: ‘The basic principle is liberty’ (al-‘asl huwa ‘l-hurriya). On this basis was slavery was an exceptional, and undesirable, condition.
Ronald Segal
Ronald Segal lived from 1932 to 2008. He was a white South African, born into a rich Jewish family. He became a committed socialist and anti-apartheid activist who fled South Africa after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre. He was a political activist, writer and editor, founder of the anti-apartheid magazine Africa South and of the Penguin African Library. He wrote 17 books, including a biography of Leon Trotsky, though he is best known for The State of the World Atlas (first edition, 1981), co-founded with Michael Kidron. Islam’s Black Slaves was his last book. It was conceived as a companion to his previous book, 1995’s The Black Diaspora: Five centuries of the black experience outside Africa.
The link with McLynn and Jeal
I was moved to buy this rather expensive book because my reading of Frank McLynn and Tim Jeal‘s histories of European (mostly British) explorers in nineteenth century Africa sparked my interest in a number of issues, among them their repeated descriptions of the impact of the non-white Arab slave trade on East and Central Africa. (They also piqued my interest in a) the large number of white slaves captured by Islamic slave traders and b) the central role of the Royal Navy in quelling the sea-borne slave trade after 1833, both subjects I hope to explore soon.)
Islam’s Black Slaves
Both Jeal and Adam Hochschild‘s accounts show that the capturing of black slaves in East Africa was a bloody, brutal business, with entire villages laid waste and thousands murdered for every hundred or so slaves (mostly women and children) who were finally transported down the slave trails to the east coast of Africa (specifically to the slave trading island of Zanzibar, owned and run after 1840 by the Sultan of Oman on the Persian Gulf).
Eye witness descriptions of widespread devastation and the brutality of the slavers on pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161.
The Atlantic slave trade
Slavery was probably part of pre-Islamic Arab life and economy.
Whereas the Atlantic slave trade only got going after 1500 as European explorers (at first mainly the Portuguese) visited the west coast of Africa, the slave trade in the realm of Islam existed since the 7th century, 900 years earlier. Whereas the British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, many Arab countries only formally banned slavery in living memory, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962, Oman in 1970.
According to the BBC, Muslim traders exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and North Africa.
However 1) the Islamic trade in African slaves was always a lot smaller than the Atlantic slave trade, especially when the latter was at its height in the 18th century:
There was no extensive and long-sustained commitment of black slave labour to the scale of commercial plantation agriculture that absorbed so many millions of black slaves in the Americas. (p.42)
In part this was due to memories of the Zanj Rebellion (869 until 883) when black African slaves who were put to work draining the salt marshes around then present-day city of Basra in southern Iraq, rebelled, gathering more and more followers, slaves and free, and presenting a major threat to the Abbasid Caliphate (pages 43 to 44).
The rebellion had a lasting impact. The use of a large number of black slaves in plantation agriculture and irrigation schemes sharply declined; it was considered too dangerous. (p.44)
2) The Islamic attitude to black slaves was markedly different from that of white Europeans, in a number of ways.
The Atlantic slave trade, particularly as it escalated in the 18th century, was a key element in the development of industrial capitalism, generating the profits from sugar and tobacco plantations which was then invested in new technologies in Britain (p.106; cf Eric Hobsbawm in Industry and Empire). But what makes capitalism different from all other social and economic models is the relentless focus on profit. If you take this as the be-all and end-all of social effort, then human beings can quickly come to be seen as mere units of productivity or consumption, totted up on dry accounts books.
Thus, according to Segal, African slaves were treated as units of productions, like donkeys, horses or steam engines, stripped of any individuality, faceless drones whose lives and deaths meant nothing to their owners.
The treatment of slaves in Islam was overall more benign, in part because the values and attitudes promoted by religion inhibited the very development of a Western-style capitalism, with its effective subjugation of people to the priority of profit. (p.5)
He then discusses slavery’s place in Christianity, which is highly problematic. If Jesus meant what he said about the brotherhood of man and so on then slavery was an outrageous blasphemy against Christian teachings. This had two broad consequences.
1) Slave owners and their propagandists scoured the Bible to try and find justifications for slavery (blacks being the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah who cast him out and curses him after Ham, saw his father drunk and naked, etc); or they simply denied that blacks were fully human, using any pretext which presented itself to argue that Africans were animals, savages, lower down the evolutionary scale etc.
2) The other consequence was those brave Christians who applied Jesus’s teachings consistently and so opposed the slave trade, generally evangelical ‘low’ Christians who formed the backbone of the Abolitionist movement and whose story is told in Adam Hochschild’s moving book Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.
Islam’s treatment of slaves
By contrast, slavery was accepted by the Prophet Mohammed and his successors but, being openly acknowledged, was provided for. Mohammed goes out of his way to insist that slaves be treated humanely. A slave’s master was enjoined:
not to show contempt for a slave
to share his food with a slave
to provide a slave as good clothes as his own
to set a slave moderate and achievable work
not to punish a slave excessively but forgive him ‘seventy times a day’
Of course slavery of any form is a wicked denial of the basic human rights of human beings as we now, in 2023, conceive of them. But Mohammed’s explicit insistence that slaves should be treated well established a venerable standard which all Muslim slave owners could be held to. Thus:
Slaves in the Ottoman empire were differently regarded and treated [than in the West]. In conformity with Islamic teaching and law, slaves were people who had stipulated rights. (p.106)
Two routes to slavery
According to the Prophet there were only two legitimate route to slavery: birth to a slave mother or capture in warfare (p.36). Warfare could only be against non-Muslims or infidels, as Muhammed assumed that Muslim would never fight Muslim, brother against brother. Enslavement of captives in war went some way towards repaying the losses of warfare but was also a means of assimilating and converting non-Muslims who could, ultimately, be freed.
Obviously these rules were flouted repeatedly through history, but at least there were rules, they were clear, and rulers could be held to account against them.
Islam’s anti-racism
There are other key distinctions between the two traditions. It follows from point 1) above, that the anxiety felt by European Christian slave traders and owners created and fuelled a vast ideology of racism. Christian slave owners could only square their consciences if they held to the view that black Africans were not fully human, less than human, or even a different species. Many, many commentators claim the legacy of these scandalous opinions lingers on today in numerous institutions and organisations and individuals.
The point is that the Prophet Muhammad explicitly forbade racism.
The Koran expressly condemns racism along with tribalism and nationalism. (p.6)
According to Arabist Bernard Lewis:
pagan and early Islamic Arabia seems to have shared the general attitude of the ancient world, which attached no stigma to blackness. (quoted p.46)
In his Farewell Sermon Muhammed said:
‘O people, your Lord is one and your father [Adam] is one. There is no superiority of an Arab over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab; no superiority of a white person over a black person, nor superiority of a black person over a white person – except in righteousness.’ (quoted p.46)
Indeed, the first official muezzin, personally appointed by Muhammed to proclaim adhan in Mecca, was Bilal ibn Ribah, an African slave who was emancipated when Abu Bakr (who was to be the first caliph or successor to the Prophet) paid his ransom on Muhammad’s instruction (p.46).
This, as I imperfectly understand it, is one of the great appeals of Islam through the ages. When a convert submits to Allah he or she joins the great international ulema, regardless of ethnicity or skin colour. This, as I understand it, explains the surge of interest in Islam among American black activists of the later 1960s such as Malcolm X, who thought the Christian tradition espoused by the Reverend Martin Luther King, was hopelessly compromised by its profound involvement in the slave trade for centuries.
Forty years later James Fergusson dwelled on the appeal of Islam to Somalis in his book ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia’. He cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, who said:
‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)
Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens.
[Islam] continued to encompass slavery long after slaves had been freed throughout Christendom. But while slavery was practiced in Christendom and Islam alike, the freeing of individual slaves by their owners was much more frequent and widespread in Islam. This was of particular relevance to the social assimilation of blacks. As slaves, they were subject to no special racial discrimination in law; and, once freed, they enjoyed in law equal rights as citizens. (p.9)
Something very much not true of freed blacks in America and their descendants, arguably, to this day.
However, that was the theory, and Segal goes on to describe how Islamic social practice and attitudes often fell far short. He traces the emergence of anti-black attitudes which might be attributed to 1) the Zanj rebellion; 2) contempt for the mainly manual labour many black slaves were condemned to in a culture which prized intellectual achievement.
He then goes on to cite an impressive roster of medieval Islamic scholars who authoritatively declaimed a series of hair-raisingly racist generalisations against black Africans. A lot of this was repetition with elaboration of Galen’s founding racist generalisations from the third century of the Christian era.
By the Middle Ages the Arabic word ‘abd had come to denote black slave and mamluk to mean white slave (p.49).
A last point about the racism or absence arising from the Islamic slave trade. As mentioned, the Atlantic slave trade a) prioritised men, for hard manual labour and b) the European owners erected a severe race barrier, which involved legal and cultural denigration of Africans.
By contrast, the Islamic trade prioritised female slaves which led to greater miscegenation or inter-breeding. I wonder if anyone’s done research to discover how much ‘black DNA’ is present in the Arab population. I came across this website online: it claims the DNA of the typical Egyptian contains 3% of African genes, Kuwaitis are 7% African, Lebanese are 2% East African and so on. I’ve no idea if this is correct or scientifically meaningful.
But Segal definitely asserts that over 1,000 years of interbreeding between black Africans and Arabs produced a population many of whose members are racially indistinguishable – in stark contrast to the situation in North America where the visual distinction between black and white was fiercely enforced until well into the 20th century and so remains, to this day, much more prominent and problematic.
Islam’s slaves in the service sector
Slaves in the Atlantic system were, classically, regarded as units of production in a brutally capitalist system, worked to death on plantations. Thus it’s calculated that the slaves were transported in a ratio of 2 men to every woman, because sheer brute strength was required on the plantations.
Whereas slaves in the Islamic world tended to be employed in the name of consumption, often very conspicuous consumption, as Segal’s profiles of numerous immensely rich caliphs and Muslim rulers indicate. The very rich tended to have vast numbers of concubines, servants, attendants and whatnot, many of whom were slaves. Segal tells us that Ahmad b Tulun, the Tulunid ruler from 868 to 884, left at his death 24,000 white slaves and 45,000 black ones (p.54).
Essentially, the distinction between Western and Ottoman – indeed Islamic – slavery was that between the commercial and the domestic. (p.107)
Thus it is that the gender ratio was reversed, with an estimated two female slaves transported into the Islamic world for every male, as slaves were most commonly used for household work (most conspicuously, concubinage, which modern scholars might describe as sex slavery).
Lower down the social order, many slaves worked in the service sector as cooks, porters, secretaries and so on. There is much evidence that, although their capture in Africa was a violent and traumatic experience, once they ended up in Arab Muslim households, many slaves were treated well.
Slaves in Islamic armies
Some slaves were trained to serve as soldiers. This was the case with the Mamluks, an Arabic word which literally means ‘owned’ or ‘slave (p.31). These were non-Arab, ethnically diverse (mostly Turkic, Caucasian, Eastern and Southeastern European) enslaved mercenaries, slave-soldiers, and freed slaves who were assigned high-ranking military and administrative duties, serving the ruling Arab and Ottoman dynasties in the Muslim world.
Mamluks became a powerful military knightly class in various Muslim societies that were controlled by dynastic Arab rulers. Particularly in Egypt and Syria, but also in the Ottoman Empire, Levant, Mesopotamia, and India, mamluks held political and military power. In some cases, they attained the rank of sultan, while in others they held regional power as emirs or beys. Most notably, Mamluk factions seized the sultanate centred on Egypt and Syria, and controlled it as the Mamluk Sultanate from 1250 to 1517. The Mamluk Sultanate fought the Christian Crusaders in 1154 to 1169 and 1213 to 1221, effectively driving them out of Egypt and the Levant (p.31).
Segal’s discussion of slaves in Islamic armies pages 45 to 46.
Talking of one-time slaves rising to power, the longest reigning of the Fatimid Caliphs, al-Mustansir (1036 to 1094) was the son of a black Sudanese concubine, whose mother, because he only came to power when he was seven, was the real ruler of the Caliphate for the 15 years of his minority (p.51); and Segal gives other instances of Africans who rose to positions of high power, especially black eunuchs.
Islam’s releasing of slaves
The technical term in English is ‘manumission’, from the Latin, meaning simply ‘release from slavery’.
The Koran teaches that it is virtuous to free slaves. It says one of the uses of zakat, a pillar of Islam, which can be translated as ‘alms’, is to pay for the freeing of slaves:
‘Alms-tax is only for the poor and the needy, for those employed to administer it, for those whose hearts are attracted to the faith, for freeing slaves, for those in debt, for Allah’s cause, and for needy travellers. This is an obligation from Allah. And Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise.
( Surah At-Tawbah 9:60)
Freeing your slaves can offset sins you have committed and hasten your entry to heaven.
‘The man who frees a Muslim slave, God will free him from hell, limb for limb.’ (quoted p.35)
The Koran describes a particular type of legal contract, the mukataba, which it encouraged slave owners to make with slaves, whereby they could work towards their freedom (p.36).
The Koran says slave owners can have sex with female slaves, but places on them an injunction to marry them off to male slaves, whereupon the husband has sole right. The Koran allots praise to a slave owner who educates his female slave, frees then marries her (p.36). Unlike America and other European colonies, it was expressly forbidden to separate slave mothers and their children.
Eunuchs
Islam expressly forbids mutilating the human body which is the image of God.
‘Whoever kills his slave, we will kill him; whoever mutilates (his slave), we will mutilate him; and whoever castrates his slave, we will castrate him.’ (Sunan an-Nasa’i 4736; Book 45, Hadith 31)
Nonetheless, eunuchs became an engrained part of wealthy Islamic culture and pious Muslims got around the ruling by having infidels do the castrating. Thus during the Middle Ages Prague and Verdun became castration centres supplying eunuchs to the Islamic market (p.40).
Possession of eunuchs was just one sign of the extraordinary conspicuous consumption which distinguished medieval Islam. Thus, Segal tells us, at the start of the 10th century, when Alfred the Great’s muddy successors were still fighting the invading Danes in East Anglia, the Caliph in Baghdad had seven thousand black eunuchs and 4,000 white ones, in his palace (p.41).
Vivid, stomach-turning description of castrating a boy (p.171).
Numbers and routes
There were three main routes of black African slaves into Islam:
across the Sahara
from Ethiopia across the Red Sea
from East Africa
Segal cites the calculations of scholars like Ralph Austen and Paul Lovejoy who estimate that the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century as 11 to 12 million. Raymond Mauvy calculates 14 million. This is directly comparable to the 11 or so million calculated to have been transported in the far shorter period of the Atlantic slave trade (pages 55 to 57). Scholar H.J. Fisher is quoted as saying the total number of black slaves transported in the Islamic slave trade was probably larger than the number involved in the Atlantic slave trade (p.61).
Segal points out that enormous though these numbers sound, the 14 million figure ‘only’ works out 10,370 slaves per year. All scholars agree that the 19th century saw a dramatic increase in volume in slave trading (in 1838 an estimated to 10 to 12 thousand slaves were arriving in just Egypt, each year), so the chances are that the figures for the previous 11 centuries are lower, a guesstimate of maybe 7,000 per annum (p.60).
Importantly, these numbers exclude the internal black-on-black slave trade, the intra-Africa slave trade. So, controversially, they don’t include the vast numbers of slaves captured in East Africa and transported to Zanzibar, owned by an Arab elite, to work on the clove plantations. Segal cites the figure of about a million black slaves set to work in Zanzibar during the nineteenth century. If you included the intra-African trade, the total would go up by at least 2 million.
If you add the Atlantic and the Islamic trades, you end up with a figure of around 25 million black Africans captured and taken off into slavery.
We will never know the precise numbers. All we can do, in this as so many other aspects of human history, is marvel, or reel, at the thought of so much human suffering.
Non-black slaves
Most of the above concerns black slaves. But Islamic rulers conquered and enslaved or bought slaves from many other ethnicities. Thus countless numbers of Turkish and Circassian people were enslaved, as were Slavs and others from the Balkans. Someone somewhere must have done research into this. Segal only mentions it in passing.
Chapters
The foregoing summarises the first 70 or so pages of the book, dealing in general principles, overall numbers and so on. Subsequent chapters deal with:
Chapter 5. The Farther Reaches
China
Segal brings together fleeting references to black people in medieval and early modern sources. Chinese porcelain has been found in ruined trading towns on the East African coast. There’s no records of an organised trade.
India
Islam expanded into north-west India through armed conquest. It brought black slaves, mainly for military service. They called themselves Sayyad, corrupted to Siddis who, when liberated, set up small kingdoms of their own, became employed as security on Muslim ships, some rose to become admirals. The story of the rise to power of Malik Ambar (1548 to 1626), a military leader who rose to the office of Peshwa of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate in the Deccan region of India, his military and cultural achievements.
Spain
North African Muslims invaded Spain in 611, overrunning almost the entire peninsula (apart from Galicia) by 620. The resulting kingdom of al-Andalus grew to legendary wealth. Black slaves were imported from Africa, but the realm was also famous for exporting white slaves from Gaul and Galicia. It became a centre for castrating male slaves to provide eunuchs (p.80). The career of the black poet and arbiter of taste, Ziryab (789 to 857).
Chapter 6. Into Black Africa
A very detailed look at the different routes of slave traders and the slave trade into the Islamic world, from Ethiopia across the Red Sea, from the coast of East Africa. Segal gives a long complicated account of the rise and histories of various black African empires in west Africa – the empires of Ghana, Mali, the Kanem and Songhai empires – many of whose rulers converted to Islam, and the complex history of black slaving along the major trans-Sahara slaving routes. It’s a complex, unfamiliar history.
Chapter 7. The Ottoman Empire
Of all the empires that rose and fell within the Islamic world, the Ottoman was the largest and longest lasting. Segal uses the Ottoman empire to really point the difference in attitudes to slavery between the Christian West and the Muslim East. Although many slaves may have held domestic positions in the Americas and some been released, the fundamental difference was the slaves in the West were used as units of production by fast-evolving capitalism. Whereas in the East, although some slaves were used in labour-intensive plantations and proto-factories, the majority were for domestic consumption. Plus the East had a more generous policy of freeing slaves. Many civil servants or soldiers who were, technically, slaves of the Sultan rose to become generals and governors (p.106).
He makes the simple crucial point that while the West pursued a model of nationalistic capitalism which encouraged aggressively competitive trade and enshrined in law the unbridled pursuit of profit, the Ottoman Empire cleaved to Islam’s disdain for trade, prioritising of military glory or scholarly achievement and its active discouragement, in law, of the kind of profit-seeking sought in the West. Merchants accumulated capital but their culture mandated them to use it charitably, to establish schools or hospitals. Lacking a central bank, or banks in general, which could be used to redistribute capital from its owners to speculative ventures, lacking the complex legal framework and definitions of property and company law which enabled Western capitalism, the Ottoman Empire condemned itself to slow decline.
While social, political and, above all, economic innovation swept the West, the Ottoman empire remained steeped in sterile ceremonial. (p.116)
Segal gives a lot of detail of Ottoman history, especially the role of black eunuchs at the highest level of the Ottoman court. As to general black slavery, there was a substantial and continuous trade but records are scanty.
He credits the British in particular for pressuring the Ottoman Turks to end slavery in their empire. In 1846 the slave market in Constantinople was closed. In 1855 moves to ban slavery throughout the empire led to a violent revolt in Arabia, led by an imam who declared the ban unIslamic. The revolt was put down but when the ban was promulgated, it made Arabia an exception, to the area continued to be a base for slavers. Slavery was banned in 1889 but kept its place in Sharia law. In 1923 the modern state of Turkey replaced the empire, with secular law banning slavery.
Chapter 8. The ‘Heretic’ State: Iran
Segal gives a thumbnail sketch of Persia’s resistance to Arab rule which came to be embodied in its espousal of a distinct brand of Islam, Shia Islam or Shiaism. There is scant evidence of black slavery in Iran; what there is suggests black slaves enjoyed good treatment and high status in households, especially of the wealthy. An English lady traveller speculated that between two and three thousand African slaves were imported each year (p.123).
A scholar estimates the number of slaves in mid-19th century Iran as 80,000. As late as 1898 the Anti-Slavery Society estimated up to 50,000 slaves in Persia. As with the Ottoman Empire, from the 1820s onwards the British brought pressure to bear to end the slave trade, but the exemption of Arabia allowed it to continue as a conduit of African slaves into Iran. Only in 1882 did the Persian government renounce slavery in a treaty signed imposed by Britain (p.126). Only in 1907 did the new National Assembly enact a law ensuring universal freedom.
Segal makes the interesting point that, as in the USA, colour prejudice might have intensified after the abolition of slavery.
Chapter 9. The Libyan Connection
The black slave trade into the semi-Ottoman state of Tripolitania. In 1818 a Royal Navy captain, G.F. Lyon, observed that the ruling Bey waged war on all his neighbours and carried away 5,000 slaves a year. Segal cites scholar Ralph Austen whose detailed calculations suggest that from 1550 to 1913 some 784,000 black slaves were transported through Libya. Given a 20% death rate on the journey from the South, this suggests 942,000 black Africans were kidnapped and enslaved by Arab and Muslim traders working the Tripoli route (there were numerous other routes).
In 1930 a Danish traveller to Libya reported that there was a slave market every Thursday in Kufra and a good adult slave cost £15.
Chapter 10. The Terrible Century
The nineteenth century saw an increase in volume and intensity of Islamic slaving across north and east Africa. In 1808 Britain withdrew from the slave trade and set about persuading other European nations to do the same. Britain also began to intervene in the Muslim world to abolish the trade, but tentatively, mindful of Muslim sensibilities.
East Africa
A European visitor stated that, around 1810, almost the entire income of the state of Oman derived from taxes on the slave trade. In 1840 the Sultan of Oman moved his court to the island of Zanzibar, main entrepot on the west of the Indian Ocean, principle outlets for black slaves captured in the interior.
By the 1840s up to 15,000 slaves a year were being trade. The Sultan himself needed huge numbers to work his clove plantations. In the 1850s it’s estimated that Zanzibar’s population included 60,000 slaves. A quarter of the Sultan’s income was said to derive from the trade.
The British protected the Sultan as their client but brought consistent pressure on him to abolish the trade. He signed a series of treaties to that effect but in the 1860s the British consul reported that 30,000 slaves were arriving annually at the coastal ports, some for Zanzibar, some shipped north to the Gulf. He also reported that for every slave who reached the coast alive, one had died en route. Other accounts claimed a far higher number.
Many of the slavers, the leaders of expeditions to attack and massacre African settlements, then take away prisoners in chains, were either Arab or, very commonly, of mixed Afro-Arab ethnicity. Segal, again, draws the distinction between the behaviour of the slavers, which was brutal and murderous, and slaves’ treatment in their destination households, which was often kind as per Islamic lore.
Sudan and Egypt
Khartoum was originally a small fishing village at the junction of the White and Blue Niles. After Sudan it was conquered by the Ottoman viceroy, Muhammed Ali, in 1840, it was turned into a major entrepot for African slaves. By 1838 12,000 black slaves were being imported into Egypt annually. Beyond the reach of the Egyptian authorities operated the Ja’aliyin, who raided west into Darfur and south into tropical Africa until well into the 1890s.
Huge enclosures for slaves were established in Cairo, where many died of smallpox and other infectious diseases. For every slave that made it to Cairo, it’s estimated that 5 died along the way (p.151). General Gordon calculated that in the area of Bahr el-Ghazal between 1875 and 1879, up to 100,000 slaves had been exported north. European explorers found entire areas which had been devastated and emptied of their populations by slavers (pages 152 to 153, 156 to 157, 161). Only in 1883, when Britain occupied Egypt, were they able to start cracking down on the trade. By 1904 the Viceroy, Lord Cromer, could claim that the systematic slave trade had been eradicated.
Ethiopia and Arabia
Slavery in Ethiopia thrived for centuries. Up to 500 slaves were sold at the market at Gallabat every day. King Menelik was alleged to take a 10% cut in the trade i.e. gifted one slave in ten. Most were sent across the sea to Arabia. After the Ottoman Sultan banned it, the trade increased because it was no longer taxed. A British reporter estimated in 1878 that 25,000 slaves a year were sold in Mecca and Medina and the trade continued into the early 1900s.
The trade through Kenya was ended when the British created the East Africa Protectorate in 1895. Slavery was only legally abolished in Zanzibar in 1897.
West Africa
Segal describes a confusing profusion of kingdoms and rulers, Muslim jihads, insurgencies, overthrows and new rulers, all across west Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries. The point is all of them engaged in the slave trade, sending slaves north into Muslim Arab lands, or collecting them for their own grandeur. As the nineteenth century raiding became more intense and destructive, not least due to growing access to Western arms, which resulted in the devastation of entire regions. It’s instructive to learn that black on black slave trading continued energetically right to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond. A French agent on the Senegal river reported that in 1889 some 13,000 slaves were transported along the river.
Chapter 11. Colonial Transactions
Northern Nigeria
The British claimed the former Sokoto Caliphate in 1906, naming it north Nigeria. Segal describes the economic, legal and social reforms which led to the erosion of slavery, not only the banning of the institution but the economic development of the colony which gave peasants paid work.
French Soudan
In 1848 the French National Assembly abolished slavery in all her colonies. But it wasn’t until 1905 that the Governor-General of French West Africa decreed an end to the slave trade and any person losing their liberty (p.181). The data suggests that slaves made their way back to their former towns and villages.
Mauritania
As the cost of accepting French rule (1905 to 1910), the leaders of inland tribes in this part of north-west Africa demanded that traditional tribal laws about slavery remain. Colonial attitudes and Islamic law favoured masters in this largely nomadic population. Drought and famine in the 1930s then again after the war, forced many to offer themselves as slaves in order to secure food.
Somalia
Italy seized part of Somaliland in 1892. They made noises about banning slavery but in 1903 a third of the population of Mogadishu were slaves. In 1906 when Italy took full control of the colony, they estimated the slave population at 30,000. When they freed the slaves in the city, the Italians discovered it led to unemployment and beggary, so were slower to act in the countryside. A complicated mesh of laws followed until the Fascists took power in 1922 and passed laws designed to liberate slaves but force them into low-paid labour on plantations.
Zanzibar and the Kenyan Coast
In 1890 the British declared the Sultanate a Protectorate but it wasn’t until 1897 that they passed legislation allowing slaves to claim their freedom and then take-up was patchy because for many ‘freedom’ meant loss of employment and home. Employers and ex-slaves had to negotiate new relations. Employers raised pay, many ex-slaves squatted on waste land or the edge of plantations. The authorities struggled with increased vagrancy, drunkenness and delinquency. The British supported the Arab minority, as small as 5% of the population, because they owned the land and the clove plantations. Resentment against this privileged minority would boil over at independence.
In Kenya Segal describes the long-running problem of ex-slaves who became squatters, had families, established squatter settlements, especially along the coast where there was likely to be more work, a problem which troubled the British authorities and carried on past independence in 1963.
In Zanzibar and along the coast anti-Arab feeling grew and in 1961 there were violent African-Arab riots which left 68 dead. In the election held after the British left, the Arab party won a majority through blatant vote-rigging. This led in January 1964 to an outbreak of politically-motivated African violence which massacred Arabs and seized property, overthrowing the Arab Sultan for good. As many as 4,000 Arabs were killed in the streets. President of Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere, offered the revolutionary leadership a union with their mainland neighbour and so the country of Tanzania was born.
Chapter 12. Survivals of Slavery
Stories of the ongoing existence of black slavery in Arab states such as Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Muscat. As recently as 1982 accusations that black Africans travelling to Mecca are captured and sold. On the west coast, evidence that African girls are trafficked to Lebanon.
Mauritania
At the time of writing the secretive government of Mauritania kept up slavery, with as many as a third of the population of about 2.5 million enslaved. Segal moves into the present era with a description of the racist activities of the Arab Islamic Mauritanian government in deporting, arresting, executing and generally harassing Mauritanians of black ethnicity. Especially the 1989 Mauritania–Senegal Border War which led to the expulsion of some 70,000 sub-Saharan African Mauritanians from the country. Wikipedia:
Modern-day slavery still exists in different forms in Mauritania. According to some estimates, thousands of Mauritanians are still enslaved. A 2012 CNN report, ‘Slavery’s Last Stronghold’, documents the ongoing slave-owning cultures. This social discrimination is applied chiefly against the ‘black Moors’ (Haratin) in the northern part of the country, where tribal elites among ‘white Moors’ (Bidh’an, Hassaniya-speaking Arabs and Arabized Berbers) hold sway. Slavery practices exist also within the sub-Saharan African ethnic groups of the south.
Sudan
The civil war in Sudan between the Arab north and the African Christian or animist south lasted for 40 years after independence in 1956. In 1972 the south was granted regional autonomy. South Sudan finally became an independent country in July 2011. Segal masters evidence for the ongoing practice of slavery in Sudan, generally practiced by Arabs on black Africans (pages 216 to 222). He mentions Christian Solidarity International which undertakes missions to buy slaves their freedom. At the time of writing CSI had freed more than 20,000 slaves, at an average price of $50 each.
Epilogue. America’s black Muslim backlash
This was by far the easiest part of the book to read and for a reason I often remark on – because it’s about America and we in the UK are bombarded with American culture, history and values. So when he writes about racism in Detroit or Harlem, about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King, these are people and places and issues I feel superfamiliar with, from books and TV shows, documentaries and radio programmes and movies, exhibitions, art and photography.
Whereas the information about the trans-Sahara slave routes or the rise and fall of the various empires of west Africa or even the history of Islamic Spain were just some topics I knew next to nothing about and found very informative indeed, and all the more rewarding for being so radically unfamiliar.
Reading the stuff here about the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X reminded me of watching the movie starring Denzel Washington, plus documentaries, plus articles, all (over)familiar stuff. Whereas I know nothing about the Fulani or the Hausa kings, about the Oyo empire or the royal court of Bornu, about Usman dan Fodio or Muhammed al-Amin al-Kanami or Yusuf Pasha of Tripoli. Here is a huge subject (the history of north and west Africa) of which I am pitifully ignorant, and need to learn more.
Thoughts
The biggest, general thought prompted by the book is the ubiquity of slavery, among all nations and all ethnicities, throughout most of history. The chapter on the Ottoman Empire routinely describes the numbers of white slaves seized from the Balkans in the Sultan’s palace, or more broadly. The chapter on Iran mentions that Iranians were themselves taken as slaves by the Ottomans to the West or the Uzbeks to the north. Iranians in turn seized Christian Armenians or Circassians.
Next is the Big Idea that slavery in Islamic was qualitatively different than the Western and Atlantic form, as described above.
Third thing is the leading role played by Britain throughout the nineteenth century in trying to stamp out slavery, across North Africa, in the Turkish heartlands, in Iraq and Persia, and along the East African coast. In all these places British diplomats, backed up by the Royal Navy, tried to stamp out the Arab slave trade.
Lastly, and tangentially, Segal’s passage about West Africa and its empires (chapter 10) was illuminating in itself, but also made me wish I could find a good, affordable account of France’s empire in Africa, not just the well-covered Algeria, but countries like Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger and Gabon, French Congo, the Central African Republic and Chad, which we in the Anglosphere never hear about.
Credit
Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal was first published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2001. All references are to the 2002 paperback edition from the same publisher.
‘Paul Kagame is without doubt the most ruthless politician operating in Africa today.’
(US Ambassador to Uganda, Johnnie Carson, quoted on page 321)
‘The entire country is a spying machine.’
(exiled Rwandan economist David Himbara, quoted on page 422)
This is a major, comprehensive and blistering attack on a contemporary African regime.
In a nutshell, the West and the international community for many years regarded the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as heroes for invading Rwanda and bringing to a halt the 1994 genocide of Tutsis being carried out by the psychopathic Rwandan government dominated by advocates of the extremist Hutu Power ideology.
Not only that, but the RPF and its leading figure – tall, ascetic intellectual Paul Kagame – were also praised for going on to invade eastern Congo where they 1) sorted out the problem of the massive refugee camps holding over 2 million Rwandans refugees where the Hutu genocidalists were regrouping, and then 2) pressing this invasion on to the capital of Congo, Kinshasa, where they overthrew the rotten old dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.
In the years that followed the West, the UN and the international community fell over themselves to lavish aid on Rwanda and fête its intense, driven president, Kagame, who presided over a peaceful multi-ethnic government and promoted his intention of turning Rwanda into a highly educated, high-tech economy, ‘the Singapore of Africa’.
For many years Financial Times and Reuters journalist Michela Wrong went along with this version of events and this highly favourable view of Kagame, ignoring the rumours and scattered reports which threw doubt on this image. Now she realises she was completely wrong. She has completely changed her tune.
This book is a comprehensive rubbishing of the historical record of Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing), the Rwandan Patriotic Army (the military wing) and President Kagame himself. It’s what Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie used to call a monstering, an exhaustive, scathing demolition of all the RPF’s claims; an indictment of its behaviour before, during and after the genocide; and a terrifying depiction of a paranoid, controlling, vindictive and murderous regime, which is still in power, still holding its population in a climate of fear, and extending the threat of assassination to exiles and dissidents around the world. Here are the key points.
Wrong’s indictment
The 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda was naive and destructive. Having contributed up to a quarter of the rebel army which brought Marxist leader Yoweri Museveni to power in neighbouring Uganda in 1985, long-term Tutsi emigrants from Rwanda and children of the refugees from anti-Tutsi pogroms conceived the idea of invading Rwanda and reclaiming their heritage.
This was a mistake. The Rwanda they wanted to return to, the ones their parents told them about, no longer existed. Instead, the invasion revived all the paranoid fears of the Hutu majority (Hutus make up 85%, Tutsis 14% of Rwanda’s population) that these violent invaders wanted to return Rwanda to the bad old days when a Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy lorded it over a subjugated Hutu peasantry. This paranoia was egged on by media outlets including Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines which was to play such a key role during the actual genocide (p.228).
The conventional view is that the Tutsi exiles just wanted to reclaim their heritage. The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion wasn’t about reclaiming anything, they wanted to seize absolute power, which is why the invasion marked the start of a four-year civil war, throwing the entire country into a state of crisis and edginess.
In other words, far from invading to stop the genocide in 1994, the RPF invasion in 1990 created the hysterical paranoid environment in which the genocide could take place.
The RPF made lots of mistakes from the start. First off was something which remains a mystery to this day, which is the unexplained death of their most charismatic leader, Fred Rwigyema. Wrong considers the two main versions of his death, plus the numerous minor variations, in great detail, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion (pages 207 to 213). A few weeks later two other RPF leaders, Peter Bayingana and Chris Bunyenyezi, were dead.
These unexplained deaths paved the way for the rise of Paul Kagame. Kagame was out of the country at the time, undertaking, of all things, a training course at Fort Leavenworth in the USA, so he is generally exonerated of these unexplained deaths, but they were very convenient, as was his swift elevation to strategic leader on his hurried return to the rebels base.
Anyway, these deaths were indicative of the failure of the RPF’s initial incursion into Rwanda. Not only did they meet stiff resistance from the Rwandan army but were dismayed to discover how much the ordinary Hutu peasants feared and disliked them.
The conventional story is that Kagame was a military genius who led the battered remnants of the RPF into the remote Virunga mountains where they regrouped and studied guerrilla tactics. Wrong’s debunking version is that most of these decisions were taken by people lower in command and that Kagame’s main contribution, then as right through to the present day, was to instil a regime of fear.
Ugandan journalist Sheila Kawamara, a frequent visitor to Mulindi (RPF headquarters), registered the staff changes taking place. ‘We heard about a policy of extermination of all the officers who had supported Fred. When you were with them you could sense this climate of fear. Those who were more ruthless rose through the ranks at that stage.’ (p.229)
Wrong goes out of her way to quote contemporaries, former members of the RPF, eye witnesses, who one and all testify that Kagame was a controlling, spiteful, sadistic man who used terror to control all around him.
In the revisionist version the holed-up-in-the-mountains phase is transformed from a glamorous Che Guevara idyll into a death camp where hundreds of new recruits would be taken off and killed in the middle of the night for the slightest reasons, sometimes simply because they spoke French which the Anglophone Ugandan Tutsis suspected. Wrong dwells on the way the kafuni or common farmer’s hoe was the weapon of choice used to kill suspects and undesirables.
When the RPF did come down out of the mountains in 1991 and fought their way through north Rwanda to within 50k of the capital, Kigali, it was not only the official Rwandan army they fought but many of the Hutu peasants whose land they passed through. Upset to discover the peasants didn’t welcome them with open arms, the Tutsi RPF got used to massacring entire Hutu villages if it was convenient. The accounts of massacres are disputed but no-one disputes that Hutu peasants retreated before the advancing PDF forces. Eventually as many as 950,000 people were uprooted by the RPF invasion and turned into internal refugees, 15% of the population (p.230).
The RPF’s advance, the civil war as a whole, was suspended by the Arusha Accords of August 1993 which gave the RPF representation in a new national government.
Then Wrong makes her biggest accusation, which is that it was the Kagame-led RPF, and not Hutu Power extremists in his own government, who shot down the plane carrying Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana. This was the trigger for the genocide which followed and which commended within minutes of news of the plane crash.
The shooting down of the plane carrying the Hutu president was the trigger for the start of the genocide so it’s always been a deeply contested event. It’s the ‘Who Shot JFK?’ of Central Africa. Amid hundreds of theories, three main ones:
White men did it, either Belgians, French or Americans. But why?
Conventional explanation: Hutu Power hardliners within the government did it because they feared Habyarimana was giving too much away by signing the Arusha Accords, and had the extermination plans ready to go.
Revisionist explanation: the RPF did it because they knew the elections demanded by the Arusha Accords would consolidate Habyarimana’s government in power, whereas chaos and confusion would allow them to continue their military conquest and seize power.
As you’d expect, Wrong leans heavily towards theory 3, assembling a raft of evidence but, more to her style, numerous interviewees who all claimed the RPF and Kagame planned it. Western investigators charged the RPF with it throughout the 2000s, for example in 2006 a French judge accused Kagame and his allies of then shooting down. Then in 2011 a leading RPF exile, Theogene Rudasingwa, from 2000 to 2004 Chief of Staff to Kagame, posted a frank admission of the RPF’s guilt on Facebook (p.375). In 2012 another former RPF top gun, General Kayumba, went public with the accusation. In 2013 ex-RPF intelligence officer Jean-Marie Micombero joined the chorus (p.376). In 2014 the BBC broadcast a documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, which contained the accusation.
So, again, Wrong’s pressing of RPF guilt is not exactly new, and nowhere does Wrong find a smoking gun. Like the controversy around JFK it will rumble on forever.
There’s no doubt that Hutu Power ideologues had a fully worked-out plan for exterminating the country’s Tutsi population in its entirety, and were responsible for passing orders and instructions for mass murder down through the chain of command to the remotest parishes. But Wrong’s accusation is that:
the RPF invasion created the unstable, feverish atmosphere in which many, maybe most of the Hutu population felt threatened by a Tutsi takeover
and that the RPF was responsible for downing the plane and so triggering the genocide
The conventional view is that the plane shooting and the abrupt start of the genocide triggered the RPF to restart their paused invasion and that they swept through the country in order to stop the genocide. Wrong counters that the actual route of the RPF was calculated not on the basis of saving Tutsi lives but purely with a view to securing power (p.242). The notion that the RPF heroically intervened to stop the genocide is treated as a joke by one of the RPF’s own diplomats (p.350).
The conventional view is that the RPF established law and order wherever they went and protected what Hutus remained, like the conquering allied forces established law and order in 1945. The revisionist view is that on the contrary, wherever they went the RPF massacred Hutu communities but that these massacres went unrecorded or unreported in the context of the wider holocaust.
The conventional view is that the RPF begged for outside help. The revisionist view is that when the UN discussed reinforcing its small demoralised force in Kigali the RPF objected, repeatedly claiming that all the Tutsis were dead and the genocide over. This was because they knew a major UN intervention would end up preserving the existing Hutu regime, albeit with new leadership, whereas the RPF was set on securing complete military control. In other words, senior RPF figures were prepared to let the killing go on and tens of thousands more Tutsis to die, if it meant securing power (p.243).
The conventional view is that once the RPF had secured control of the entire country, Kagame then established an enlightened government of national unity in Kigali, ensuring key posts went to Hutus to ensure balance and trust. The revisionist view is this was the case for a very limited period, 12 months at most, into 1995, before these Hutu ministers started being sacked or forced to quit, in all instances replaced not just by Tutsis but by Tutsis loyal to Kagame personally (p.251).
The conventional view is that this enlightened RPF government then begged the international community and the UN to do something about the Hutu genocidalists who had taken refuge in the huge Hutu refugee camps just across the border in eastern Congo, repeatedly asked the West to intervene but, eventually, being goaded beyond endurance by Hutu militias crossing the border and carrying out little village massacres, reluctantly invaded into eastern Congo, killing the genocidalists and shepherding the 2 million or so Hutu refugees back into their own country.
The revisionist view is that the RPF planned to invade Congo all along.
The revisionist view is that, in the process, the RPF themselves carried out numerous massacres of Hutu civilians, men, women and children. In fact some scholars estimate the total number killed at 300,000, well on the way to matching the 800,000 killed in the genocide.
The conventional view is that the RPF wanted the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and to their abandoned properties, guaranteeing them safety if they did so. The revisionist view is that in the meantime tens of thousands of Tutsi exiles returned to the country and seized vacant Hutu properties, farms and houses, urban businesses, thus feeding into the Hutu narratives of conquest and grievance (pages 260, 270, 285).
The conventional view is that the genocide was a one-off event with a datable beginning and ending (7 April to 15 July 1994). The revisionist view is that the genocide was just a kind of wild upsurge in an environment where ethnic killing had been going on as far back as the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959, with the most recent surge starting not in April 1994 but with the initial invasion of the RPF in October 1990.
‘The troubles between Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start in 1994. The genocide was part of a process which began much much earlier.’ (Robert Higiro, quoted on p.269)
And continuing long after. The conventional view is that the RPF brought peace. The revisionist view is that massacres within Rwanda, and then in Congo, continued on after the genocide.
Wrong details important evidence suggesting an RPF policy of systematic violence and intimidation which carried on after the genocide, but which was hushed up or downplayed at the time:
the Gersony Report (pages 269 to 271)
the Kibeho massacre (p.273)
The conventional view is that the RPF pursuit of genocidalists who fled west slowly, reluctantly changed a temporary incursion into eastern Congo into a campaign to carry on west as far as the capital, Kinshasa, and overthrow rotten old Mobutu, installing a nice new democratic regime, much to the applause of the west.
The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion of Congo 1) continued to be marked by RPF massacres, now not only of defenceless Hutus but often of Congo civilians too, 2) overthrowing Mobutu had always been the core aim of Kagame (and his ally, Uganda’s Museveni). Gérard Prunier calls it the first imperialist invasion by one African country of another, a sentiment echoed here by Polish journalist, Hrvoje Hranski:
‘They were colonisers, pure and simple, but we were sympathetic.’ (quoted page 301)
On this reading it was not just an incursion to stabilise a border region but a deliberate attempt to establish colonial control over an entire country, to take over Congo via Kagame and Museveni’s puppet ruler, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Wrong quotes her hero Patrick Karegeya as saying:
‘We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.’ (p.297)
The RPF atrocities inside Rwanda were difficult to document in the chaos of the genocide, but there were many more witnesses to their behaviour in Congo. In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ (p.300).
By 1998 Mobutu was overthrown, Kabila was installed as puppet ruler of Congo, the Hutu refugee camps had been emptied, and the prolonged security crisis was over. In February Kagame was elected RPF chairman, to go alongside his posts of Minister for War and Vice President.
The RPF regime claimed that relations only deteriorated with Kabila when he began reaching out to remnants of the Hutu regime and the Interahamwe. The revisionist view is that relations deteriorated when Kabila began ruling for himself and kicked his Rwandan advisers out of Congo. It was then that Rwanda and Uganda began planning a second invasion and only then that Kabila reached out to the genocidalists as a desperate resort.
In April 2000 Kagame arrived at the acme of power, being elected president (p.319). The Rwanda-Uganda alliance completely collapsed and the two armies fought a vicious urban battle in Kisingani. Kabila made the mistake of abandoning his child warriors, even ordering them to shoot fallen comrades. Thus it was an aggrieved former child soldier, Rashidi Kasereka, who shot him at point blank range in the presidential palace. Later, Wrong claims that Patrick freely admitted that Rwandan intelligence were behind the assassination (p.323).
By the time the Ugandans and Rwandans fell out, many of the journalists who’d been sympathetic to the RFP had fallen out of love with them. What had started as an attempt to hunt down the genocidalists had turned into a naked grab of land and resources. Wrong gives a fascinating account of Rwanda and Uganda’s blatant looting of Congo’s resources and then moving to the ‘active extraction’ phase i.e. controlling the mines, the extraction and export of precious minerals (p.328).
It was a great revelation and shock to the regime’s western supporters when a UN report revealed that this systematic looting and theft was carried out by a Rwandan state body called the Congo Desk (p.329). And guess who was in charge of the Congo Desk? The Zelig of central Africa, Patrick Karegeya.
When it was set up the RPF devised a solemn oath of loyalty which all members had to sear. By the end of the Second Congo War, this had mutated into a mafia with its oath of Omertà i.e., you talk, you die (p.331).
After the war
Kagame has been able to string along and play the international community and western donors (chief amongst whom is the UK) for several reasons:
the conventional view is that Kagame is a visionary New African Leader, committed to democracy and developing Rwanda into a modern, high education, hi-tech nation, ‘the Singapore of Africa’
western guilt about not doing enough to prevent the genocide, particularly afflicted Bill Clinton and Tony Blair
Clinton later delivered fulsome apologies for America’s failure to act quickly enough or acknowledge the killings amounted to a genocide.
The revisionist view is that throughout the post-genocide period and right up to the present day, Kagame, far from being a western-style democrat and visionary, was establishing a terrifying surveillance dictatorship.
Precisely how he did that is revealed by the central thread of the book, the life, career and murder of Colonel Patrick Karegeya.
Patrick Karegeya as central theme
This summary gives the impression that the book is a logical or chronological account of the historical events but it isn’t, at least not to start with. The first hundred pages are something completely different.
Wrong opens her narrative, and thereafter uses as a repeated reference point, the murder of Patrick Karegeya, former head of external intelligence in the RPF regime and, at one time, a key member of Kagame’s close-knit RPF elite. The idea is that Karegeya was murdered because he had become a critic, and then an outspoken critic, of Kagame and, in 2010, helped set up an alternative Rwandan political party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC).
Karegeya was murdered on New Year’s Eve 2013 in a room at the Michelangelo Hotel in the Johannesberg suburb of Sandton. But Wrong doesn’t just give an extended description and forensic analysis of the days and weeks leading up to the murder, then of the crime scene and the probable cause of events. Three things:
1. Wrong interviews everyone who ever knew Patrick Karegeya – his wife, his mother, his children, his friends from school days, his colleagues in the RPF, and those who joined him in exile and set up the RNC. And not once, but repeatedly.* Their eye witness accounts of Karegeya’s life and personality and career are quoted very liberally on every page. In fact we learn that Wrong met and got friendly with and interviewed Karegeya on numerous occasions from 1994 till his death. There’s so much about him that the first hundred pages or so of this book amount to almost a biography of the man, but also, there’s so many memories of him at home with his family, at bars laughing and chatting, so many of which are Wrong’s own memories, that at many points it feels like a personal tribute.
This would probably be my main criticism of the book. What with the tearful testimony of his loving wife, his adoring daughters, his admiring colleagues and the often gushing testimony of lots of other journalists who met and liked Karageya, quite regularly the book is in danger of turning into a hagiography. I was struck when she described a 5-page personal statement he wrote out for his daughter’s application for US citizenship as ‘precious’ (p.304). What, like the Turin Shroud or the Rosetta Stone? The tone of voice often verges on the gushing:
Someone with a bigger ego might have staged a sustained sulk. Not Patrick. (p.352)
And so, mulish, steadfast, defiant, Patrick served out his sentence [in prison] (p.361)
When Patrick is reduced to shaking rage by a journalist accusing the RPF of shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, his anger is explained away because he is under pressure to nobble the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (p.369). When a journalist jokily asked why Kagame won the 2003 election with ‘only’ 95% of the vote and Patrick threatens to have a journalist killed next time he visits Rwanda, this is excused as a joke (p.348)
But the man was a killer. He was head of RPF intelligence all through the 1990 invasion and civil war, through the genocide. He was paid to deceive journalists and the international community about the RPF’s own massacres and their ulterior motives in invading Congo, paid to lie to the world’s press about the failed attempt to capture Congo with Rwandan troops flown into the Kitona airport near Kinshasa (p.312). He continued to justify the regime even as he knew it was committing mass murder, charming and schmoozing foreign journalists while more and more RPF comrades were assassinated, fled the country or were thrown in prison.
He was ‘implicated up to the hilt’ (p.342). He was a highly paid part of the killing machine, and was rewarded with a big house, lots of cars, a jetsetting lifestyle, plasma TV when they were an unheard-of luxury, his kids sent to private school in South Africa or America, his wife forgiving him his multiple sexual partners (‘all part of the job’), liked for his high-living and charm by even the most sceptical journalists. So while we read another tearful tribute from his loving wife, my criticism of the book would be that Wrong lets Karegeya off very lightly and regularly risks sentimentalising him.
2. Anyway, amid the great sea of blood which was 1990s Rwanda, why such extravagant focus on just one man, when well over a million men, women and children died in terror or misery as a direct result of the actions of the government of which he was a key member and which he assiduously defended for so long?
Because Wrong uses her super-detailed profile of Karegeya as a tool, as a way into exploring the world of fear and paranoia which political exiles from the Kagame regime work under. And once this is established, Karegeya’s entire career becomes a scaffold or structure on which to hang a historical account of the RPF, going right back to its roots in the Rwandan Tutsi emigre or refugee communities in Uganda in the 1980s.
Rhus, in Wrong’s hands, Patrick emerges as a kind of Zelig figure, popping up at all the right places. He was the lynchpin middle-man between Kagame’s government and all manner of outsiders, whether journalists or NGOs or UN leaders, or heads of intelligence from neighbouring countries. He played a key role in the First Congo War, accompanying the clumsy tactless Kabila everywhere, acting as his press and PR supervisor, the central liaison between Kabila and Kagame, as well as liaising with all the governments in the coalition which had invaded Congo (p.301).
3. It dawned on me that ‘Patrick’, as he is referred to pretty quickly and then throughout, has another key advantage for a journalist like Wrong. People were prepared to talk about him. Half way through the book it dawned on me that Patrick’s story gives Wrong far more access to events than if she had chosen the more conventional route of writing a biography of Kagame. Kagame doesn’t talk, his friends and family don’t talk, lots of people interviewed, even the ones who worked closely with him, said they never really knew what was going on in his head. By contrast, Patrick was famously outgoing, chatty, had hundreds of friends and acquaintances, all of whom were happy to go on the record for this book. Their collective memories and anecdotes are far more free and effective at building up a kind of collage history of the RPF then any attempt at a biography at the notoriously tight-lipped Kagame could ever have been.
In other words, the more the book progresses, the more you realise what a clever strategic move it was to make Patrick the star and use him to shed light on the entire regime and Rwandan history from the 1980s right up to the present day.
After the Second Congo War drew to an ignominious close in 2002, Wrong’s narrative reverts, for the book’s last 100 pages, to the approach of the first hundred i.e. using a detailed look at Patrick’s career, his growing misgivings, how he was sidelined by Kagame, with extensive quotes from friends, family, colleagues, journalists and commentators, to shed light on Kagame’s growing paranoia and vindictiveness, and the slow enmeshment of the regime in more and more assassinations, scandals and accusations.
* Interviewees
In fact the book is jam packed with interviewees, its main feature, as a text, is the number of quotes on every page. Wrong must have put in what feels like thousands of hours of interviewing and annotating, then careful selection and ordering of hundreds and hundreds of quotes. At one point Wrong lists the types of people she interviewed for this book, which extends far beyond the friends and family of Patrick Karegeya. She lists: ‘serving and dissident members of the RPF, Rwandan and western journalists, diplomats, intelligence officers and military attachés’ (p.341).
Mossad assassination technique
Karegeya not only defected from the RPF but, in exile, set up the RCN. The implication of the whole book is that this kind of thing is not permitted by the tightly-controlled and vengeful Kagame regime, so he was targeted and assassinated using methods perfected by the Israeli security service, Mossad.
What is this Mossad assassination technique? Have your target approached by someone they know and trust, in this case a friend of the family. Make appointment for drinks and a chat in their hotel room. Let in two strangers, one of whom holds everyone up at gunpoint, while the other injects the target with a quick-acting tranquiliser. Then one assassin holds a pillow or towel over the target’s face, while the other strangles him with rope. The point of all this is it is completely silent, causing no fuss or attention. Then quietly leave the room, careful to leave a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door, check out of your own hotel, drive to the nearest airport, and be far away by the time anyone realises anything is wrong (p.29).
Do not disturb. The book is named after the sign the killers hung on Karebeya’s hotel door. But is also a wider indictment of the wish of western donors, the international community and Rwanda’s supporters, even up to the present day, not to rock the boat, not to reveal uncomfortable truths, not to ask difficult questions, not to disturb.
One among many state-sponsored murders
General Kayumba Nyamwasa
Wrong gives a similarly detailed account of the attempted assassination of former General Kayumba Nyamwasa. Nyamwasa had been Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army as well as head of Rwandan intelligence from 1998 to 2002 i.e. during the Second Congo War. He became increasingly critical of Kagame’s authoritarianism until he fled into exile in South Africa. Wrong describes the bungled attempt to shoot him in his car on 19 June 2010. This attack crystallised the General’s decision to join with Karagey and others to found the opposition Rwanda National Congress in December 2010 (p.69).
Seth Sendashonga
Wrong devotes an entire chapter to the career of moderate Hutu Seth Sendashonga, recruited into the RPF government with lots of promises of reconciliation, then witnessing the Tutsis takeover of everything, the scales falling from his eyes with the notorious massacre of unarmed Hutus at the Kibeho refugee camp. Soon afterwards he quit the government, then left Rwanda, going into exile. Two years later he was shot dead by assassins (p.277).
No other nation in Central or East Africa has witnessed an exodus of former insiders to rival Rwanda’s and their flight speaks volumes for an entire political class’s understanding of the regime’s capacity for violence. (p.277)
Other examples
Rwandan diplomat Alphonse Mbayire was recalled to Kigali and a month later a soldier with a grudge shot him twenty times
David Kiwanuka’s body was found in a car trunk in Nairobi, shot in the head (p.280)
Assiel Kabera, President Bizimungu’s adviser, assassinated (p.318)
She gives more examples and details of Rwanda’s policy of overseas assassination (p.432). Many more opponents simply fled, becoming exiles like Patrick. The general name for the several escape routes from the country was ‘taking the subway‘ (p.318).
Wrong has two long sections devoted to detailed description of two separate assassination conspiracies where the middlemen hired to cosy up to the targets in preparation for hits admitted to the targets what was going on. This resulted in the targets taping the numerous phone calls from the minders back in Kigali to their agents in the field. Wrong explains the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tapes, which in both cases were handed over to the local police as well as key western embassies, the FBI and so on (pages 395 to 401).
These cases amount to powerful evidence that the Kagame regime operates extensive assassination projects and teams to eliminate dissident and ex-RPF officials.
Buyer’s remorse
This book, then, is a case of buyer’s remorse, or an example of a western liberal fan of a third world political party, government and its leader, slowly coming to realise she’s been had.
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 on location with the mujahideen in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country collapsed into a ruinous civil war from whose ashes arose the Taliban did those western journalists reconsider their decade of enthusiastic support for Islamic extremists.
Wrong has form here because her book about Eritrea’s long war for independence describes how western journalists such as herself were entranced by the commitment of the rebel Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), young zealots who built an entire town in mountain caves, had daily education and self-criticism sessions in the best Maoist fashion.
Wrong says these western journalists wrote glowing accounts and counted themselves as ‘true believers’ in the cause. But, as so often happens, when the ELF zealots finally won independence and came to power, the intensity of their commitment and the harsh judgement of anyone in any way questioning the Party morphed into the paranoid dictatorship of ELF leader, Isaias Afwerki. Afwerki has been president of Eritrea for thirty years, during which he has turned it into one of the most repressive one-party states in the world, and all those ‘true believers’ and western supporters from back in the 80s…not so vocal now…
The moral of the story? It’s easy to be persuaded that one side in a foreign war, particularly if they’re the cool rebel underdogs, is standing up for justice and freedom, young and inspiring in their commitment and readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice etc. Wrong herself describes this psychological tendency as ‘the storyteller’s need to identify Good Guys and Bad Guys’ (p.299), the tendency I’ve ascribed to the influence of Hollywood movies on American foreign policy, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But wars are never simple. War is always brutal. All sides in a war are compromised. The Good Guys-Bad Guys dichotomy comes from the Second World War when the Nazis unambiguously were Very Bad Guys. But most wars since haven’t had the same moral clarity. In general there are no Good Guys, just less absolutely appalling guys. That kind of childish moral simplicity has to be left behind in order to engage with the horrible, cynical complexities of the real world. The moral of the story is – don’t take sides in foreign wars. Gaza-Israel.
Disillusion with the RPF regime is not new
Disillusion may be new to Wrong but not to many other commentators.
In 2008 the Economist questioned received opinion about Kagame.
In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ by the RPF (p.300).
A 2012 article in the Guardian observed that America was having second thoughts about supporting the Kagame regime and predicted that Britain would, too.
The HRW article gives the tone of the revisionist, critical point of view. The author is phoned by a journalist enquiring into the UK’s ongoing support of the RPF regime in Rwanda, ‘a fragile country ruled by fear’:
We began by talking about the 2010 elections, in which President Paul Kagame was re-elected with 93% of the vote after three opposition parties had been excluded from the race; one opposition leader had been imprisoned; another opposition party member and an independent journalist were murdered; and a prominent government opponent narrowly escaped assassination in exile.
(Wrong describes the sinister and farcical events surrounding the same election on pages 67 to 68).
In other words, Wrong’s book isn’t a drastically new and stunning revision. Specialist reports and general opinion (of the specialists who care about the subject) have been heading in this direction for 15 years or more. What Wrong’s book does is pull together all the evidence, rewrite the history in the most damning way possible and, above all, use hundreds and hundreds of quotes from eye witnesses, from interviewees who were in at the formation of the RPF, of its successes in Uganda, its 1990 invasion, its role during and after the genocide, candid interviews with people who’ve worked closely with Paul Kagame and the regime’s other leading figures – to build up into an extraordinarily powerful, thorough and blistering indictment.
In the last hundred pages the comparison Wrong keeps reaching for is Stalin, a megalomaniac who spent all his time scheming, playing subordinates off against each other, organising random arrests, holding show trials, issuing random periods of imprisonment to anyone he even suspected of holding independent opinions, then demanding complete obeisance, ritual humiliation (pages 343 (Beria) and 356).
By the end of the book the reader is left thinking that Paul Kagame is the devil in human form:
The ultimate class freak has created a state in his own image: introverted, suspicious, unaccountable and a prey to sudden violence. (p.418)
The last few chapters
The last few chapters address more recent events:
Chapter 18: Do not disturb
Explains in detail why ‘the West’, ‘the international community’ and foreign donors continue to support and donate generously to Rwanda, despite the mountain of evidence about its wicked ways. 1) Residual guilt, even after all these years, about letting the genocide happen. 2) Generalised guilt of Western governments that the terrible plight of Africa continues to stem from the European colonial era (p.383).
Above all 3) the Kagame regime has brought peace and stability to Rwanda, and its defenders, such as former DFID minister Andrew Mitchell, emphasise that this is the first requirement of any government and so how, in that part of the world, it is to be supported (compare and contrast South Sudan’s recent collapse into ruinous civil war).
On many of the metrics used by western governments and international institutions, the Kagame regime has been a remarkable success, notching up unprecedented economic growth lifting one million Rwandans out of poverty between 2008 and 2011, improvements in metrics in public health and education, support for gender issues (for example, in 2010 64% of Parliamentary MPs were women) and so on.
Diplomatically speaking, Kagame has successfully positioned himself as maybe Africa’s most high profile statesman. In 2014 Kigali hosted the African Development Bank’s annual general meeting. In 2016 the World Economic Forum chose it for an ‘African Davos’. The 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was held in Kigali.
So the continued support of western donors is explained by the way they focus on these positive achievements. And so the World Bank has invested more than $4 billion in Rwanda since the genocide (p.430) and the British government has given the Rwandans £200 million without, so far, sending a single refugee there.
Chapter 19: Song of the stool pigeon
The chapter explaining the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tape recordings made of senior figures in Rwandan intelligence recruiting then managing Rwandan emigres into assassinating outspoken critics in exile (pages 395 to 401). And the disappointing lack of response from western agencies and governments when presented with this evidence.
Chapter 20: The inquest
The long delay of the South African authorities in carrying out a proper investigation of or inquest on Patrick’s murder, the implication being they were leaned on by Rwanda. Progress only came when the case was taken up by campaigning lawyer Gerrie Nel of not-for-profit AfriForum leading to an inquest in 2019. Complex machinations amid which the South African state prosecutor justifies the decision not to prosecute those suspected of murdering Patrick because of the ties that exist between them and the Kigali regime (p.412). In August a verdict of death by strangulation i.e. murder, was returned.
The lost leader
The critics, obviously, say that all the achievements catalogued in chapter 18 (if they’re even true) could just as well have been achieved without the creation of a Stalin-level surveillance state and climate of fear based on arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and murder of political opponents.
You can see why so many of them still mourn the unexplained death of charismatic, caring Fred Rwigyema right back in 1990, the ‘lost leader’ that so many weave legends around. Wrong ends her book with a visit to her hero, Patrick’s, grave, but the very last paragraphs are a hymn to beautiful, innocent Fred, inexplicably dead before the civil war let alone the genocide took place, the lost leader so many dissident Rwandans mourn.
But that was 33 years ago, and we are where we are.
Thoughts
I know I should care about the minutiae of every one of the killings and assassinations, the tape recordings, precisely which RPF heavweight was implicated in which massacres or killings, but after a while it’s difficult to follow all the details. The overall impression is of a dazzling, long, immensely researched revelation of the RPF’s corruption and brutality.
But, when you put it like that, corruption and brutality, it sounds uncannily like most of the other African regimes I’ve been reading about for the last few years. Which African nation in the 60 years since independence has not had at least one murderous dictator, at least one civil war, elements of pogrom and massacre?
That’s a fairly trite thought but it leads onto a more interesting one which is how, stepping back, you can see how the uniqueness of the Rwandan genocide has dazzled many commentators and politicians into thinking Rwanda stands outside history, a special and unique case.
Wrong highlights (as does Prunier and other commentators) how lingering guilt about their inactivity during the genocide has led international bodies and western nations to give Kagame the benefit of the doubt despite the, by now, tsunami of evidence about the regime’s malfeasance.
Not unlike Israel, the Rwandan government has used the unspeakably horrific crime at the centre of its modern history to overawe commentators and silence critics (Wrong makes this point numerous times), to obscure the more everyday oppressions and dubious policies which are the stuff of most governments.
But considering the Rwandan genocide as a somehow one-off, unique, unparalleled and inexplicable mystery – as writers at the time like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch did – removes it from history, erases the troubled history which led up to it; which, of course, explains it; and the continuum of wars and further atrocities which has followed on from it. Focusing solely on the genocide in effect helps prop up a dictator and a terrifyingly repressive regime.
Overpopulation
A leitmotiv of the narrative is how packed, cramped and overpopulated Rwanda was and still is (pages 238, 293, 417). Wrong claims it was and is Africa’s most crowded country (p.239, 280). In an economy based on agriculture you either own enough land to make a living farming or you don’t. Every inch of fertile land is staked out and assigned so, in order to acquire more land you must dispossess someone else.
Decades of land shortage have reduced agriculture to a grim battle for survival. (p.417)
If you learn of an invasion by the enemy tribe that is driving people like you off the land, then your natural reaction will be to fear for yourself, your land, your family and, if ordered by the government and the local authorities, be prepared to kill in order to protect your own.
I wonder if, in a way, the overpopulation of Rwanda and the demented, pest-control killing of the genocide is an allegory of our species – or maybe a vision of its future, packed like rats into a limited space, driven by mounting crises into hysterical psychopathy, the mass murder of our neighbours, quickly, before they murder us.
Day after day I read in the liberal press hand-wringing articles about the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian regimes around the world (China, Russia, India, Brazil) and right-wing anti-immigrant parties across Europe (in Germany, Italy, France, Holland).
Liberal commentators are at a loss to explain these phenomena but I wonder if there’s a simple explanation. There are too many of us, us humans, and we are turning against ourselves like rats in dungeon.
Credit
Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong was published in March 2021 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2022 4th Estate paperback edition.
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.
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.
This is a very good book – scholarly, serious, authoritative. Newitt summarises the latest thinking in a whole range of issues which affect Africa’s prehistory, early modern history, colonial periods and contemporary history. It doesn’t aim to please. There are no fascinating anecdotes, colourful vignettes or pen portraits of key figures. Just the most up-to-date facts, dryly presented.
Born in 1943 (and so now 80 years old) Malyn Newitt had a long academic career during which he wrote over 20 books on Portugal and Portuguese colonialism. He was a professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London, and then deputy vice chancellor at Exeter University, before retiring in 2005. So this book is by way of being the summary of a long and distinguished academic interest in the subject.
Mozambique factsheet
The first European to land in Mozambique was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498.
The coast, territory inland and coastal islands were very slowly settled and colonised by Portugal over the next 200 years. Initially the refuelling ports scattered along the west and east coasts of Africa and onto India, later reinforced with defensive forts, were all part of the same entity, the Estado da India, way stations on the sea journey to India which was where the spices and wealth were.
In the early years the main Portuguese settlement was on the Island of Mozambique, lying off the coast at the northern end of the modern country. The sea between the island and the mainland is still known as the Mozambique Channel. The Portuguese established a port and naval base on the island in 1507 and it remained an important part of their maritime estate for centuries. It became the capital of what came to be known as Portuguese East Africa until 1898, when the administrative centre was moved to Lourenço Marques in the far south of the country, ‘reflecting the shift in economic and political importance’ (p.115).
The name of the island, and so the country, is derived from the name of Ali Musa Mbiki, Muslim sultan of the island when da Gama arrived. So never a western name, then.
For centuries a handful of coastal ports and some territory further inland were part of a huge tract of coast known as Portuguese East Africa. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, as rival European nations like Britain, France and Germany staked out their claims to Africa, was this huge territory pared away and reduced to the borders of the current Mozambique, which were only finally defined in 1891.
Mozambique is bisected by the Zambezi River, the fourth longest river in Africa (after the Nile, Niger and Congo) which rises in Zambia then flows through eastern Angola, along the north-eastern border of Namibia, the northern border of Botswana, then along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, until it enters Mozambique.
North of the Zambezi a narrow coastal strip gives way to inland hills and low plateaus, then onto rugged highlands further west. South of the Zambezi the lowlands are broader with the Mashonaland plateau and Lebombo Mountains located in the deep south.
Until the 1960s there was no paved road link between the north and south halves of the country. A railway bridge across the Zambezi linking north and south was only completed in 1932.
In 1964 guerrilla fighting broke out and developed into what became known as the Mozambican War of Independence. It lasted for ten years. The main independence fighters were the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) led by Samora Machal.
After ten years of conflict Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975, following the overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian regime in the so-called Carnation Revolution of April 1974.
Soon after independence a civil war broke out which was to last from 1977 to 1992 between FRELIMO and the anti-communist insurgent forces of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). Like so many African wars it was exacerbated by the Cold War: the Soviet Union and Cuba backed the Marxist government (cf Angola and Ethiopia) while the USA, South Africa and Rhodesia provisioned, helped and trained RENAMO.
Mozambique’s capital was for centuries known as Lourenço Marques after the 16th century Portuguese explorer who explored the area. (It was only made Mozambique’s administrative centre in 1898). Soon after independence, in 1976, the city was renamed Maputo and remains the country’s capital. The distinctive thing about it is that, instead of being in the centre of the country, maybe on the mouth of the mighty Zambezi, Maputo is way down at the southernmost tip of Mozambique, less than 75 miles from the borders with Eswatini and South Africa.
Mozambique has a land area of 801,590 square kilometres, compared to Portugal’s 92,225 km².
Newitt’s book
A Short History of Mozambique is a brisk, no nonsense, 225-page overview of the subject, written in a very dry, very academic style, a very theoretical style. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone as a history of Mozambique since it’s the kind of history which deals with issues and theories rather than dates and people. For example:
Newitt gives a sophisticated explanation of the concepts of language, ethnicity, empire, kingdom and tribe which Europeans have used ever since the Portuguese first landed on the coast of Mozambique to try and categorise and order and understand its inhabitants. He carefully explains why all of them are flawed and inaccurate. ‘Ethnicity’ is a notoriously slippery category. People’s identities change and even the idea of what an ‘identity’ is has changed over the period we have records for, roughly 1500 to the present.
It was interesting to learn that even right up-to-date contemporary linguists struggle with African languages. It is interesting to learn that modern linguists can’t agree a common definition of what a language is; some linguists consider some African languages as discreet languages, others consider them dialects of parent languages. This explains why even ‘experts’ consider there might be anything from 17 to 42 languages spoken in Mozambique. Just as confusing is the notion that ‘most Africans speak more than one local language or dialect’ (p.19) with the result that language isn’t a reliable indicator of ‘identity’.
You know how progressive critics complain that the Western imperialists imposed nations and categories and tribal names onto much more fluid African identities? Well, Malyn is their dream come true, deconstructing pretty much every type of western category and concept to indicate a fluidity of identity which is, by definition, hard to capture, and equally challenging to read about.
This carries on being the central theme for chapter after chapter. When he’s covering the historical records left by the earliest Portuguese traders and administrators in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even more so in the full-blown imperialist 19th century, Newitt goes to great lengths to explain that the names which westerners assigned to tribes were almost always wrong. Sometimes, to take a blunt mistake, they called tribes after native words which simply meant ‘king’ or ‘leader’. (The country of Angola takes its name from the title ngola, a formal title which was held by the kings of Ndongo and Matamba.)
Westerners assigned social structures familiar to their own history – of empires and emperors, kings and kingdoms – to societies which had completely different, alien structures and identities.
The Africans were organised in groups and social structures but modern scholars have to reach back beyond the distorted and error-ridden Portuguese records to try and piece them together. Some societies were matrilinear, but there appear to have been several types of matrilinearity. Archaeology is not much help, since Africans built so few towns and their villages, made entirely of organic materials, disintegrated back into the earth.
Incidentally, Hewitt’s history obviously focuses on the territory and towns (mostly the notable ports) of what is called Mozambique, but he is not the first to point out the arbitrariness of the borders the Europeans drew up – in Mozambique’s case, finalised in 1891 – and how the deep history of the peoples who lived in this randomly drawn territory obviously had a huge overlap with peoples in the surrounding areas.
His account gives a bewildering sense of a kaleidoscope of peoples, continually migrating, fighting, conquering and holding territory, establishing dynasties that ruled for a few generations before a handful of recurrent issues – drought and famine, flooding, invasion of outsiders – reshuffled the picture.
The result is an immensely detailed and complicated picture, consisting of a blizzard of unfamiliar names – using names the tribes in questions may not even have called themselves – which is very hard to follow. This is why I’m not recommending it as a practical history. Two names which recur are the Ngoni and the Karanga, but there are many more.
Another theme which emerges very strongly indeed is the role of slavery. Slavery was present well before white Europeans arrived. They discovered it to be an intrinsic part of many African societies’ strategies, not only of war and conquest but even of basic survival. Newitt tells us that drought and famine have been recurrent features of the huge territory now known as Mozambique and the region around it, often threatening tribes’ very existence (pages 31, 50). Thus slaves, especially women, could be seized from other groups simply to provide more breeding vessels in order for the group to survive.
What comes over is that all the African groups practised slavery before the Europeans arrived but (as in everything else in this complex account) in a multitude of ways. Some slaves were relatively high caste, and might even serve as warriors or leaders. Some were forced into menial agricultural work. There was a recurring category of sex slaves i.e. women taken from tribes defeated in war.
The capture of slaves, especially women, in warfare had always been a way in which communities that depended on agriculture rather than cattle herding increased their productive (and reproductive) capacity. (p.71)
For hundreds of years the Portuguese were just one more invader-warrior-trading group among many, in a region used to wars and incomers. Alongside the Portuguese were Arabs from the Persian Gulf. These set up trading stations manned by an Arab elite which traded heavily in slaves. For centuries before the Europeans came there had been a trade capturing African slaves and carrying them off to the Arab gulf kingdoms.
For many hundreds of years slaves had been exported from the ports of eastern Africa to markets in Arabia, the Gulf and India where they were in demand as soldiers, domestic servants and sailors. (p.52)
But the numbers were relatively small, maybe 3,000 a year. A sea change occurred when the French established plantation agriculture on the Mascarene and Seychelles islands after about 1710. The numbers jumped again in 1770. Between 1770 and 1810 around 100,000 slaves were exported. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, France only in 1848.
Another major shift occurred in 1840 when the Sultan of Oman relocated the centre of his kingdom from the Gulf to the island of Zanzibar. Arabs not only transhipped slaves to the Gulf but set up their own plantations which required African labour, setting in train the ethnic mix of peoples on Zanzibar which was to cause conflict at independence, hundreds of years later. As the years passed Arab slavers penetrated further inland, setting up bases of operation and converting natives to Islam (p.71). This combined with the many slaves working on Zanzibar or other Arab-owned plantations to spread Islam. Today about a third of Mozambique’s population is estimated to be Muslim.
The Royal Navy cracked down on the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. In response business boomed on the East coast. After the Napoleonic War Brazil boomed as an exporter of coffee and sugar, and importer of slaves. Between 1800 and 1850 Brazil imported around 2,460,000 slaves, mostly from Portuguese East Africa. Under increasing pressure from Britain, Portugal finally outlawed the slave trade in 1842 (pages 62, 67) and Brazil formally ceased to import slaves in 1851.
The peak of slavery from Portuguese East Africa around 1830 coincided with a bad drought. This disrupted local societies and led to invasion from outsider tribes: Ngoni warbands from modern-day Natal and groups of Yao moving from northern to central Mozambique. These a) conquered and enslaved their adversaries b) became involved in trading to the coast.
Although the external slave trade was severely dampened in the 1850s, explorers like David Livingstone arrived to discover it was still flourishing inside Africa, as native and Islamic warlords led militias which conquered and enslaved weak tribes, then sold them on to burgeoning plantations. Maybe 23,000 mainland slaves were exported to Madagascar every year till the end of the nineteenth century.
The hectic nineteenth century
1858 to 1864 – David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition.
1866 – Livingstone’s ‘Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries’ becomes a bestseller and inspires a generation of British explorers.
1867 – First gold and then diamonds are discovered in South Africa.
1871 – Discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines.
1874 to 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley undertakes his epic journey, crossing Central Africa from east to west, mapping the route of the river Congo.
1875 – The French president confirms Portugal’s right to Delagoa Bay, the best deep sea port in south eastern Africa. This encouraged the Boers in the Transvaal to think of it as an outlet to the sea rather than the Cape, which was owned by Britain.
1877 – Britain annexes the Transvaal.
1879 – Portugal helps Britain in the Zulu War.
1881 – The Transvaal Afrikaners rebel against Britain, which grants them independence.
1884 – Congress of Berlin called to clarify the rights of the colonial nations in the Congo and Niger regions, turns into a general carving up of Africa.
In the late 1880s there was a race between Portuguese authorities – who dispatched explorers and agents to sign deals with natives in a bid to create a band of Portuguese territory right across central Africa – and agents working for the British buccaneer, Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes won, his people planting flags and seizing territory in what came to be called north and south Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia) thus ruining Portugal’s plans to own one uninterrupted band of territory across Africa.
Prolonged negotiations about the frontiers of British and Portuguese south Africa began in April 1890 and continued until August 1891 when the borders of modern Mozambique and Angola were almost completely finalised (p.93). Failure to achieve their much-trumpeted goal of creating a ‘rose corridor’ across Africa was perceived in Portugal as a public humiliation and rocked the Portuguese monarchy.
The early colony 1891 to 1919
You tend to think of the imperial nations as large and mighty powers engaged in fierce rivalry to gobble up even more third world countries. It comes as a bracing surprise to learn that after its diplomats had fought hard to win these two huge new territories, Angola and Mozambique, they didn’t know what to do with them. They had developed coastal ports and trade networks up the rivers and licensed companies to develop some areas (fertile highlands). But most of the territory was undeveloped, there were few roads, even fewer railways, much land remained in the hands of native rulers, and some parts had never even been explored or mapped by white men.
Moreover, Portugal was very poorly placed to take on such onerous responsibilities. It had experienced not one but two civil wars earlier in the century and was currently the poorest and arguably the most backward country in Europe. People were leaving in droves. Newitt gives the striking statistic that between 1890 and 1920 some 750,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil, while 170,000 went to America.
It’s fascinating to learn that Britain and Germany signed not one but two secret treaties agreeing how they would carve up Portugal’s colonies if, as most expected, the country went bankrupt.
But Portugal’s solution to its challenge was to revert to a variation of the 17th century idea of leasing out land to individual landlords or businesses to develop. On a much bigger scale the government now divided Mozambique into half a dozen territories and leased them out to commercial companies to develop. The result was very mixed.
The big story in this period was the importance of South Africa. The details are complicated but it became ever clearer to the Portuguese authorities that its neighbour to the south was rich and getting richer due to the discovery of diamonds and gold. So three things:
1) South African mines needed miners and so a large number of blacks from southern Mozambique became migrant workers in South Africa, and the government established a steady stream of income by taxing them.
2) The Portuguese built a railway from the Transvaal into Mozambique and to the deep-water port at Delagoa Bay. This became very commercially successful, as the government raked off various taxes and fees.
3) It was these very close economic connections with South Africa which led the Portuguese to move their administrative capital from Mozambique Island in the north right down to the settlement at Delagoa Bay, named Lourenço Marques. The capital’s dependence on South Africa (it even got its power from SA) was to have big implications for the future (p.115).
Mozambique developed into a reserve of migrant labour for British South Africa and South Rhodesia, while also serving as an outlet (via the railway) to the sea.
The mature colony 1919 to 1974
In 1910 Portugal’s tottering monarchy was overthrown in a revolution and replaced by a liberal republic (pages 114 and 116). This promised all Portugal’s colonies greater autonomy though nothing like democracy. Even the whites had no say in how their colonies were run and the native population had no rights at all.
These plans had hardly got going before the First World War. Portugal joined on the Allies’ side in 1916 and emerged heavily in Britain’s debt. South Africa’s General Smuts wanted to annex the entire Delagoa Bay railway and Lourenço Marques into his country.
In 1926 the Liberal republic was overthrown in a coup. After two years of uncertainty the authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) regime of António de Oliveira Salazar emerged. In 1930 this published a Colonial Act declaring Portugal and all its colonies one political entity. The colonies were expected to balance their books without subsidies from the centre.
The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression confirmed Salazar’s regime in its theory of Autarky i.e. a protectionist policy of trading among themselves, which boiled down to: the colonies supplied raw materials, the metropole converted them to manufactured goods and sold them back. So the colony was divided up into sugar, cotton and rice growing areas, the investment in farms, the wages paid to natives, the prices sold to middle men and onto importers, all controlled and dictated from Lisbon.
The Second World War saw a spike in prices of raw commodities which greatly benefited Portugal, which carefully stayed neutral during the conflict. Using some of its profits, Portugal began to sketch out a network of health and education facilities across Mozambique.
It was only in 1942 that the last of the business concessions dividing the country into separate entities came to an end and the country came under one unified government, tax and business regime (p.147).
After much bureaucracy, a comprehensive 5-year plan was published in 1953, with two more to follow in the 1960s. Schools, hospitals, more railways, a huge dam across the river Limpopo.
All populations grow. At the First World War there were around 10,000 Europeans in Mozambique. In 1945, 31,000. By 1970, 164,000 (out of a population of 8.5 million). Half of these lived in the capital, many as administrators.
Independence movements
Ghana kicked off the rush to African independence in 1957. Between 1958 and 1962 the Salazar regime back in Portugal experienced a crisis of support and vision. A general stood in the presidential election against Salazar’s candidate and attracted a wide range of opposition movements. In January 1961 a revolt broke out in Angola. In March India unilaterally seized Goa, a move which staggered the Portuguese regime.
In June 1962 the various opposition groups in exile reluctantly agreed to come together to form Frelimo, which commenced a low-level guerrilla insurgency. Tensions between secular, left-wing modernisers and conservative, traditional ‘Africanists’. It was only at the second party congress in 1968 that the modernisers under Samora Machal triumphed. Dissidents fled abroad where some were assassinated. By 1970 Frelimo was a disciplined and effective fighting force that was successfully keeping the Portuguese army tied down.
In 1973 Frelimo moved into Tete Province and for the first time launched attacks south of the Zambezi. In the same year a Portuguese general published a book questioning the entire future of Portugal’s colonies. The army was tired of fighting in Angola and Mozambique. In April 1974 a military coup overthrew the regime.
Frelimo never succeeded in mobilising the general population let alone fomenting a mass uprising. They just fought the Portuguese army in the northern two provinces of the country for ten years with very little impact on the rest of the country, none on the capital far away in the deep south. Frelimo came into power because the Portuguese simply gave up and withdrew. But this left Frelimo lacking either military or political legitimacy (p.146).
The civil war 1977 to 1992
First of all, the transition to independence was bungled. Frelimo came into power with a programme of hard-core Marxism-Leninism with the result that 90% of the white educated population and an unknown number of the Asian business community simply left. Frelimo immediately made enemies of the white nationalist governments in South Rhodesia and South Africa. These set about training a combination of Frelimo dissidents and anti-communists into what became Renamo, short for Resistência Nacional Moçambicana i.e. Mozambican National Resistance.
Renamo’s insurgency against the Frelimo government lasted for 15 long years with atrocities committed, of course, by both sides. Peace was eventually made possible when Frelimo softened its doctrinaire communist ways in the later 1980s as the writing on the wall for the Soviet Union became clearer. Newitt doesn’t go into the relationship between Frelimo and the USSR, and how this changed with the advent of Gorbachev, which feels like a glaring omission.
Negotiations began in the late 1980s but the war dragged on because neither side was capable of ending it. Eventually Frelimo caved in to the demands of Renamo and the international community for a multiparty system and free elections.
These have actually been held, in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014. They were accompanied by violence, international monitors say they were rigged, but in each of them Renamo won 40% or so of the vote i.e. they weren’t a complete stitch-up. As communism faded away, Frelimo converted itself into your standard African corrupt, nepotistic patrimonial government, committed to staying in power forever.
However, Mozambican politics are notable for two exceptions to African traditions. One is that tribalism hasn’t reared its ugly head. Leaders on both sides refrained from playing the tribal card which so often, in the rest of Africa, led to massacres. Instead the country’s politics continue to be dominated by what have become entrenched regional divisions, with Frelimo being seen as the part of the south and far north, Renamo holding the centre and mid-north.
Second exception is that, whereas in most African countries presidents turned themselves into dictators-for-life (Mobutu, Mugabe, Kagame, Afwerki) in Mozambique, although Frelimo is committed to eternal rule, it has actually changed presidents after each has completed his two terms.
Interesting to learn that some 50% of the government budget is funded by international donors, over $2bn in 2014 (p.210). Frelimo has become dependent on staying in office on foreign aid (pages 187, 192). In fact Newitt drily comments that, seen from one angle, Frelimo’s chief skill has been dancing to the changing whims and fashions of western aid to ensure the money keeps flowing (p.212). The Frelimo elite then channels the aid to itself and its followers, who live a luxury, First World existence in one of the poorest countries in the world.
After twenty-five years the most striking consequence of the government’s policies is the huge disparity in living standards between rich and poor. A relatively small Mozambican elite, which includes many senior members of Frelimo and the foreign business, diplomatic and NGO communities, enjoy an exaggeratedly high standard of living. The modern buildings of Maputo are grand and even ostentatious, the city hotels are clad in marble with fountain courts and air conditioning. Expensive cars are parked outside to whisk businessmen to the ministries or the banks. (p.222)
I was interested to read that Frelimo set out in 1977, under Marxist puritan Machel, to create New Socialist Man, to force peasants off their traditional land into collective farms, to ban pagan religions and old spiritual beliefs, to educate the population into zeal for the revolution. Obviously all that failed, and Newitt quotes peasants (who make up 75% of the population), interviewed by researchers, who expressed relief at being able to return to their ancestral land, worship their ancestral spirits, practice polygamy, and so on. The African way.
Why, Newitt asks, are the bottom 25 countries on the Human Development Index all in sub-Saharan Africa (with the one exception of Afghanistan)? Because of the special style of patrimonial politics which has established itself as distinctively African, meaning rule by a corrupt elite which run national budgets to benefit themselves, their cronies, and keep themselves in power. Screw their actual populations (p.204).
The 1992 Peace Accord, and the aid bonanza that followed, rapidly transformed the Frelimo elite into a patrimonial political class which, in spite of the lip-service being paid to liberal democratic ideals, was determined to hang on to power at all costs. And the costs increasingly involved not only corruption, soon to achieve gargantuan proportions, but crime, fraud and political assassinations. (199)
Newitt is entertainingly satirical about the bureaucratic, organisation-speak of the countless plans and strategies and policies unleashed on poor Mozambique by a never-ending stream of western institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN with its utopian Millennium Development Goals. He quotes some of these documents purely to mock their high-minded rhetoric, which usually bears no relation to what’s happening on the ground.
Apart from killing each other, which they still do in periodic outbursts of renewed fighting between the last Renamo holdouts and government forces, the main thing happening on the ground in Mozambique is that its inhabitants, like humans all round the planet, are destroying the environment and degrading the ecosystems they rely on for their existence.
Forests are being cut down and the native iron wood and ebony has been plundered uncontrollably; illegal hunting is emptying the game parks and illegal fishing is plundering the seas; the Zambesi dams are radically altering the ecology of the river valley and illegal washing for gold is destroying whole landscapes. (p.211)
In 1964 when the war for independence started, the population of Mozambique was 7.3 million. Now it is 32 million. Human beings are like locusts, locusts with machine guns.
Credit
A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt was published in 2017 Hurst and Company. All references are to the 2017 paperback edition.
This book is great fun. Whereas Martin Meredith regards the history of Zimbabwe as a tragedy and loads every page with doleful hand-wringing, Rogers thinks it’s a hilarious farce.
Rather than thinking of every speech and law as a further nail in the coffin of 1960s dreams of African independence, Rogers is a child of the 1980s, carefree, at home in the modern world, all dark glasses and retro cars, smart phones, snapchat and WhatsApp.
This being the 21st century, you don’t kick a man when he’s down – you tweet insults at him. (p.155)
For Rogers, Harare isn’t the site of crushed dreams of a socialist dream, huge shanty towns and an impoverished populace, no, he’s interested in the upmarket suburb of Borrowdale where the Zanu-PF elite have their lavish mansions, complete with swimming pools, golf courses, fleets of sports cars, yeah baby.
Rogers’s characters aren’t boring old human rights lawyers and grim-faced opposition activists, but flashy international businessmen, like Ameerh Naran, a young Indian-Zimbabwean entrepreneur who owns a private charter jet firm, is a racing driver in his spare time, and holds the licence to import sex toys into Zimbabwe, a man at home in the jet set of Monaco or Miami or Aspen.
Again and again Rogers has his characters refer to ‘the game’ of high politics, intrigues and espionage which may, in the end, actually be the most realistic way of thinking about it.
The game they were playing had reached the highest levels and it made the heart race. (p.165)
It was a turning point in the great game. (p.176)
Such is life in the death game of Zimbabwean politics. (p.210)
And so the final stages of the great game began. (p.217)
Jacob Zuma was the most powerful and influential figure in the game at this point. (p.221)
Such was the surreal nature of the game. (p.235)
What it meant was that the game had to play itself out. (p.255)
History as thriller
The whole book is written as a tongue-in-cheek homage to airport thrillers:
On a bright afternoon in the spring of 2015, driving past the mall near his suburban Johannesburg home, Tom Ellis spotted his assassins. (p.37)
Right down to the classic American thriller’s obsession with precisely detailing and enumerating every piece of branded clothing which every character is wearing:
Ellis, wearing slim-fit jeans, short-sleeved checked cotton shirt and the trademark Veldskoens common to white Zimbabweans of his generation, led the way. (p.39)
His favourite adjective is the American ‘upscale’ meaning ‘expensive and designed to appeal to affluent consumers.’ It’s contemporary history in the style of ‘Miami Vice’.
Origin of the book
In November 2017, Robert Mugabe, decrepit ruler of Zimbabwe for 37 long, brutal, corrupt years, aged 93, was finally toppled from his position in an army coup. Rogers was a travel writer and had drafted half a book about the his latest African journey when he heard the news. A native Zimbabwean he had, like so many well-off whites: a) fled the country (to settle in Virginia, USA, in his case) and b) given up any hopes for reform or change to his country.
So he promptly returned to Harare and sniffed about a bit i.e. spoke to various contacts and, as he did so, an amazing story began to unfold. He was put in touch with people who put him in touch with more people who unfurled the nature of the complicated, multi-party coup which had overthrown the old dictator. At which point he rang up his publishers and told them he had something much hotter than another middle-aged road trip to write about and they graciously agreed to wait while he embarked on entirely new book, this book, a detailed exposé of the complex plot to overthrow Robert Mugabe.
And, because he clearly has a terrific sense of humour, and an ironic, detached approach to politics, Rogers has cast the story in the style of an airport thriller. It’s full of facts and figures and explanations of Zimbabwe’s history, Mugabe’s career, Zimbabwe’s steady decline under his management, the failed attempts to oust him by democratic means etc etc. But all told in a bright and cheerful, lollzy manner.
Above all, he zeroes in on the key players in the drama, giving us descriptions of them, their houses, spouses, children, roles in Mugabe’s administration or the Zimbabwe or South African spy agencies and so on, then describes secret meetings at restaurants, late-night flights, smuggling people across the border, clandestine meetings and all the rest of it, exactly as in a poolside spy thriller.
The plot
By the later 2010s the political party Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), which had ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, led by the wizened old dictator Mugabe, had split into two warring factions. Very simple reason – the issue of who was going to replace the old brute.
On one side his vice-president and long-time colleague at the top of Zanu, Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa – also known as ‘The Crocodile’, supposedly because he moved slowly but was deadly, but in fact due to his involvement with the so-called Crocodile Gang during the war of independence (p.131). Also known as ED. His supporters were nicknamed ‘the Lacoste faction’ after the stylish brand of polo shirts they sported (p.21). Note that, although Mugabe was a senile 93, ED was no spring chicken himself, at 75.
On the other side was Mugabe’s second wife, Grace Mugabe, forty-one years younger than him, a typist who he began an affair with while his first wife was still alive (though dying of cancer), who he’d married in 1996 and had three children with (p.66). For ten years or more she’d been widely mocked as interested only in bling and shopping and had acquired a series of nicknames including the First Shopper, Gucci Grace and Lady Gaga.
But at the turn of the 2010s, Grace began to show a more active interest in politics and by 2016/17 she was using public appearances to attack the opposing faction in the party, thus positioning herself to inherit Mugabe’s mantle. Her supporters became known as Generation 40 (G40) because they were the new, younger generation. Prominent in her clique were Jonathan Moyo (former Information Minister), and Saviour Kasukewere (ZANU-PF political commissar).
The two weeks in November 2017 began when Mugabe announced, obviously under pressure from his wife, that he was dismissing his long-time deputy, ED, with the threat that he would immediately be arrested, and the narrative proper gets started with the panic-stricken meeting of ED and his sons who spend a feverish evening figuring out escape routes to smuggle their dad out of the country.
It was one of these plans which ropes in Ameerh Naran who I mentioned above. Naran helps them get a doctor’s certificate vouching that ED is ill, which would allow him to be flown to South Africa on a medical flight (seeing as the airports are, by now, all being watched by Zimbabwe’s security service to ensure that ED doesn’t catch a normal flight leaving the country).
In the event, the panic-stricken conspirators ditch that plan half way through and instead drive in a convoy bearing ED, his wife Auxillia, sons (Junior, Sean and Collins), cousin Tarirai, a friend Hosea Manzunzu (aka Limping Jack), Jenfan Muswere andWise Jasi, along the highway east to cross the border into Mozambique.
At which point the narrative cuts back in time and to South Africa, where builder and fixed Tom Ellis (55) has for years helped out a network of anti-Mugabe people. He confronts two agents from Zimbabwe’s secret police who are tailing him, Kasper and Magic (p.57).
Backstory describing Zimbabwe’s decline. Between 2000 and 2010 4 million Zimbabweans left the country, most to go and live in South Africa. Ellis was an emigre but he wanted to heal his home country. At first he worked with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), founded in 1999 and which provided a viable opposition in the later 2000s, and actually won the 2013 election, but had itself splintered into factions and lost his drive.
It was then that the rivalry in Zanu-PF began to emerge and Ellis began to make approaches to the people around ED. No doubt his phone was bugged and this explains why he found himself being tailed by Zim secret service agents.
Thumbnail sketch of Kasper, real name Charles Wezhira, who had risen from a dirt poor background with the help of his policeman father, to become a secret service operative. He had fought in the Zimbabwean forces sent to intervene in the Great War of Africa in 1997, which is when he thinks the rot set in with Mugabe’s regime, triggering inflation for ordinary people while Mugabe and the elite made fortunes on military contracts and/or corrupt mineral concessions from Zaire’s short-lived president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Then in the early 2000s came the campaigns to dispossess white farmers and give their land to veterans of the liberation war, 1964 to 1979.
In response to increased opposition, which crystallised in the MDC, Mugabe expanded the operations of the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) to create a ‘Securocrat State’, until an estimated one fifth of the population were spying on the rest (cf the Stasi in East Germany) (p.54).
The role of Christopher Mutsvangwa, chair of the Zimbabwe National Liberation Veterans Association. After a long and distinguished career serving Zanu-PF (as cabinet minister, ambassador to China), by 2016 Mutsvangwa had had enough. In July he meets with Ellis the fixer, who introduces him to leading MDC members and exiles in South Africa. He made a big speech denouncing the cult of personality around Mugabe, announcing that the war veterans no longer supported him, and was promptly sacked.
The spy element comes in when Ellis’s CIO contact, Kasper, points out that one of the Zimbabwe exiles they’ve just met with in an SA pub is in fact a CIO spy, indeed took a pally, matey photo of the group with Mutsvangwa which he immediately sent back to the CIO for use in Zanu propaganda against him.
Cut to the scene where human rights activist and Zimbabwean exile in South Africa, Gabriel Shumba, is approached by Kasper and Magic who he initially assumes are going to assassinate him. Having been arrested, beaten up, tortured, arrested again and forced into exile, Gabriel isn’t surprised by anything. In fact, Kasper introduces himself as a CIO operative who is, however, working against Grace and G40, and for the replacement of the Old Man by the Crocodile.
Kasper has names for the phases of his operations: 1) The Move 2) Shock Tactics 3) The Final Push 4) Full Scale.
It’s only when, in February 2017, Kasper takes him to the hospital room of the dying MDC leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, who tells him to trust Kasper, that Gabriel signs up for the project. And learns that Ellis had already been signed up for 6 months.
Kasper turns his own assistant, Magic, and introduces a third CIO operative, Horse. He takes to guarding Mutsvangwa in SA, while making regular trips back to Harare to sound out colleagues and contacts. With Gabriel and Ellis working the Zim exiles in SA, they slowly build up a network of important contacts committed to blocking G40 and working for an ED succession. On a particular night after yet another meeting in a bar, Kasper and Tom make a formal agreement which they jokingly title the Northgate Declaration, because that’s the name they can see on a sign from the car park.
On 12 August someone tried to poison ED at a party rally in Gwanda. He was flown to hospital in South Africa and survived. When Kasper heard he knew the conspiracy had entered a new phase. Time to take it to the next level.
And so the narrative returns to where it broke off, with the exciting all night three-car convoy carrying ED and family towards the Mutari crossing into Mozambique. Twenty of more pages are devoted to the Hollywood thriller events which followed: the cars are stopped at the border, there’s a delay, it becomes clear their cover is rumbled and the border guards have called for reinforcements; at which point ED’s sons and cousins cause distractions, get into a brawl with the guards, just long enough for ED to jump into one of the cars and be driven away at high speed. They drive up to the hills and hide out in a village which remembers him from liberation war days. Via cell phones the three groups establish they all escaped.
They then enact an extremely complicated plan: they rustle up some dissident army men who drive them up to an illegal border crossing into Mozambique,,m some way north, but which involves crossing a minefield, which they’re able to do with the help of a local guide. Or so they hope. Then a long arduous trek through sweaty jungle top the nearest two-bit town, where they hole up in a flea-bitten hotel, while waiting for Mozambique contacts to meet them. Then they’re driven to an airfield where there is an immense delay which, in their paranoia, they think must be because the cops are being called but turns out to be because it’s late, there were no more scheduled flights, and all the computers had been turned off!
A private charter plane flies in from South Africa, loads up ED and Junior, and flies them into SA. Even here there are security guards who they think must be setting a trap, but no, they’re waiting for someone else. And, finally, after a 72-hour harem-scarem chase, ED and Collins are driven in black SUVs to a safe house belonging to Zimbabwe millionaire Justice Maphosa, where they join hands (and with the security guards) to pray, before tucking into a meal of chicken and salad.
Joice Mujuru
Zanu-PF’s attempts to ridicule, threaten, sack and hound ED and the long vitriolic ad hominem attacks made by Lady Gucci, were in fact identical tactics used to ruin and disgrace the previous vice-president, Joice Mujuru 2014 when she, too, looked like she was shaping up to be Mugabe’s successor. In other words, it was a repeat of a well worked-out playbook. Mujuru was disgraced and retired from politics. The differences this time were a) ED refused to take it lying down and b) Agent Kasper had for two years been working to create a support network for him, among friendly factions within Zimbabwe, and among the emigre community in SA, which was able to swing into action to support him.
What that means in practice is the Zim exiles call a press conference at a Sandton hotel, in which Mutsvangwa, former leading light of the Mugabe regime, sits next to Gabriel, high profile torture victim of the Mugabe regime, and they jointly declare the Mugabe regime must be overthrown, to a small audience of the world’s press (Times, BBC, CNN etc). More than that, though, it represented a very high official within Zanu-PF (ED), Christopher (head of the war veterans) joining forces with the MDC exile diaspora (represented by Gabriel and Ellis). In other words, a message to ordinary Zimbabweans that a broad front was now united in overthrowing the president.
Rogers then lets slip a lot of information he had been witholding about the scale of the military contacts Kasper had made; about a series of meetings Gabriel, as a lawyer, was invited to with an Zimbabwe army general and brigadier, who probed him about legal means of overthrowing Mugabe.
The team now adopt the Holiday Inn Johannesburg airport at their base. A lot of spooks had been hanging round the press conference; someone tried to assassinate Gabriel earlier in 2017; the rhetoric coming out of Harare about traitors and running dogs etc is hair-raising. The Holiday Inn has only one entrance and exit, through gated doors. Perfect.
Kasper commissions two emigre Zimbabwe commentators (Acie Lumumba and Tino Mambeu) to appear all over SA media saying Mugabe’s time was up. The team is given tasks, with some reaching out to contacts in America to gauge the US response if Mugabe were overthrown. The head of the army had only recently been sent to China; this overlapped with Muntsvabwa’s time as ambassador to China; he made calls to sound out the country which had become the biggest foreign investor in Zimbabwe.
But it’s the army that does it, confirming the reader’s suspicion that, although he has met and interviewed and noted exactly the interactions between Kasper, Ellis and Shumba, there’s a big hole at the centre of Rogers’ narrative, which is the actual planning and carrying out of the military coup.
What he pieces together is that General Chiwenga flew back into Harare airport where his forces, with perfect timing, disarmed the civilian police and the Police Support Unit, their paramilitary wing. Within minutes he is greeted off the plane, greeted by senior officers and whisked off to the main barracks in Harare.
Next day at 3pm, the General gives an unprecedented press conference saying the army will protect itself from insults and abuse, and ‘the revolution’ from counter-revolutionary elements. There is no coverage of all this on that evening’s national news. Next day, Tuesday 14, there is a response of sorts from the young head of Zanu’s Youth League, hardly adequate. Army units begin to leave their barracks.
That evening army units surround and disarm their most serious potential opponents, the PSU, then move to seize Parliament, State House, the Supreme Court, ZANU-PF headquarters and police headquarters. Meanwhile, back in Jo’burg, Gabriel is summoned by his military contacts and spends the next 8 hours giving legal advice, via the general and brigadier, to the forces on the ground in Harare. He has one massage: don’t shoot anyone.
Soldiers seize the headquarters of the state broadcaster. Gabriel is insistent in Jo’berg that the journalists must be treated well, and allowed to leave at the end of their shifts. Miraculously, this comes to pass and the soldiers let the broadcast staff simply walk away and go home. The army units then turn to trundle up the hill to the president’s mansion, known as the Blue Roof. Gabriel’s guys are radioing commanders on the ground to tell them to surround the presidential mansion but to let Mugabe et al come and go as they please. They are trying to avoid the appearance of a coup.
Troops do mount an armed assault on the luxury homes of Finance Minister Ignatius Chombo and of G40 leaders Moyo and Saviour. they phone Grace who sends a car which arrives just after the armed assault is, inexplicably, called off, and which takes the wives and children to the Blue Roof. Saviour and Moyo follow in the footsteps of ED eight short days earlier, and drive to the Mozambique border, crossing into exile.
At 4am on Wednesday 15 November Major General SB Moyo (who hadn’t hitherto appeared in the narrative) makes a broadcast assuring the country the president is safe and free to come and go and assuring viewers abroad that this is not a coup.
Rogers explains why this was so important. During the 1990s the Southern Africa Development Community set up a task force to prevent coups taking place and even overturning them (in Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome and Principe, in Gabon).
Therefore, it’s interesting to read that former ambassador Muntsvangwa’s role was to talk to South African president Jacob Zuma – well, Zuma’s people, anyway – and establish a clear narrative; that a coup had already taken place, Grace and G40’s seizure of power from Mugabe. What he and the military were doing was reversing that coup. Aha! He plays on their common background as military men who fought in liberation struggles, and points up the difference with Grace and the G40 faction who are unrepentant consumer capitalists.
Another ZDF had just been dispatched to the African Union in Ethiopia where he tells AU officials – also pledged to prevent or undo coups – that this is not a coup it is the reversal of a coup.
But a key element of a change of government is the approval of the people. Rogers gives a fascinating account of how the disparate members of the Core Group reached out to all their contacts and organisations in order to organise a million person march in support of the new regime in just 36 hours.
Rogers devotes a chapter to describing how he and his mates drive back into Zimbabwe and into Harare and took part in the massive march themselves, eyewitnesses to history. He shares some trite tripe about how people are emotional beings:
We like to believe that we are rational, sober-minded people, but we are all driven by emotion, and great political moments appeal to the irrational in us – the heart. (p.246)
So felt the crowds during the French revolution, the Russian revolution, the Iranian revolution, the Arab Springs, all of which led to even worse state terror and repression. Rogers’s lack of policy and reliance on emotion is identical to Mugabe’s reliance on revolutionary fervour and militant rhetoric instead of practical, workable policies. Heart and feeling aren’t enough, nowhere near enough. Then again, I can appreciate it must feel delirious to be in at the end of such a long repressive regime and full of hope for the future.
The real work is being done within ZANU-PF itself, with activists liaising with all its regional offices to send in requests for Mugabe to step down as president and Grace and the G40 to be expelled. A big live TV speech was set up, with cameras showing Mugabe surrounded by the military, looking old and frail. But to everyone’s absolute astonishment he refused to reign, just told the country they were going through a sticky patch, to all pull together, then he got up, shook a few generals’ hands and tottered off.
Mugabe rang political leaders, such as South Africa’s Jacob Zuma and Zambian president Edgar Lungi, but nobody would intervene to prop him up, a fact Mugabe would later bitterly criticise.
Having been let down, the authorities then commenced impeachment hearings against Mugabe on Tuesday 21 November. The proceedings are packed and complicated by last minute negotiations between ZANU-PF and the MDC and also about reluctance to be the individual to launch the impeachment as, if it failed, that person would be guilty of treason.
But proceedings had hardly got under way when a message was brought in that Mugabe had, at long last, officially resigned. Wild partying in all the cities till dawn the next day.
However, a dark note is cast over everything when Kasper and Magic, Horse and Gabriel are driving out to the latter’s farm and stop for refreshments when two carloads of intelligence people pull over and abduct Kasper and Magic, submitting them to a week of beatings and kickings before Gabriel, who escapes back across the border to South Africa, uses all his MDC and NGO and human rights contacts to have them tracked down and released.
Then it’s Friday 24 November and ED is sworn in as new president. And then Rogers tells us, as if it’s a big surprise, that when you overthrow a dictator, you unleash all kinds of forces, rivalries, political bitternesses which had been kept under wraps. Well spotted. I think the people of former Yugoslavia could explain this a bit more. Or Iraq. Or Libya.
Anyway, as he writes his text in February 2019, there have been ruptures within both the MDC (under new leadership since Morgan Tsvangirai died of cancer in February 2018) and ZANU-PF and the army and security forces, not all of whom were happy with the coup that wasn’t a coup.
Then when there were protests which turned to riots, the army shot at protesters, killing a number, and any international businesses or western donors will have thought that Zimbabwe was back to its old ways.
Timeline: November 2017
Sunday 5 – at a Presidential Youth Interfaith rally Grace Mugabwe makes a speech attacking the vice-president, talking about ‘crushing the head’ of the snake of opposition within the Zanu-PF party i.e. Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa (ED).
Monday 6 – ED receives a letter announcing the termination of his position as vice president, a fact announced on the national broadcaster, ZBC
Tuesday 7 – in the early hours ED, his sons and close friends escape down highway, but are stopped in a confusing fracas at the border
Wednesday 8 – having hidden out in the hills, they make another crossing on foot guided through minefields through local dissident soldiers into Mozambique
Thursday 9 – arrive at Beira airport and take charter flight to SA
Sunday 12 – General Chiwenga flies back to Harare from China
Monday 13 – General Chiwenga gives a press conference threatening counter-revolutionary elements in the party i.e. G40
Tuesday 14 – army units leave their barracks and seize key locations around Harare
Thursday 16 – decision taken to organise a people’s march; fake news flashes over social media that Mugabe has resigned
Friday 17 – Muntsvangwa decides they will relocate the SA team to a hotel in Harare, where his veterans have been assembling
Saturday 18 – vast peaceful protest march through the middle of Harare
Friday 24 – ED is sworn in as second president of Zimbabwe
Thoughts
Vivid
I assume the details of Rogers’s narrative are correct, although you can tell that he’s taking liberties inventing characters’ conversations and thoughts. But, despite any misgivings about the semi-fictional format he’s cast his story in, it felt much better at giving you a feel for life in contemporary Zimbabwe than the documentary books by Martin Meredith I’ve read. It gives you a real feel for the depth of corruption, the details of the high life lived by the elite, and the scariness of the secret security state which Mugabe created.
Meredith is on the outside, disapproving, while Rogers is on the inside, marvelling.
No policies
In chapter 12 there’s a lot of soppy maudlin stuff about long-time campaigners for a better Zimbabwe imagining that the way their motley coalition (the military, secret service, army veterans who had displaced white farmers, white farmers in the exile union etc etc) had all gotten together and created a rainbow alliance was somehow a model for a new reborn Zimbabwe.
What this sentimental horseshit shows is a) a complete lack of understanding of what a state is, the depths of corruption which authoritarian rule creates and how it takes generations to overcome and reform; and b) that nobody in the entire book at any stage mentions a single actual policy. The entire narrative and, apparently, all the players in it, see things solely as a political powerplay. Nobody has a clue what to do about reviving the agricultural sector, running state companies effectively, making the country attractive to western investors, restoring an independent legislature and freedom of the press.
The reverse: all the army’s statements continue with the hackneyed dusty old clichés about saving ‘the revolution’ from ‘counter-revolutionary elements’, of saving the Party etc. In other words, the key players in the coup are all operating within the fake-revolutionary ideology and rhetoric which Mugabe used to conceal his corruption and authoritarianism, can’t get out of that controlling mindset.
What happened next?
Even though Mugabe’s gone, his successors will inherit his security apparatus, the webs of surveillance, arrest and torture, and will be tempted to use it. I see from recent news stories that a) Emmerson Mnangagwa is still president of Zimbabwe and that b) he is deploying standard Mugabe-type laws to stifle free speech and opposition.
Plus ça change, plus c’est l’Afrique. Or, as Rogers’ mother tells him when news of the coup first breaks out, whoever takes over, it’ll be ‘same bus, different driver’.
Credit
Two Weeks in November by Douglas Rogers was published by Short Books in 2019.
‘The Coalition promised regime change but instead brought about state collapse.’
(Unnamed Iraqi general quoted on page 101)
This is a disappointing book.
Emma Sky is mentioned half a dozen time in Thomas E. Ricks’s book The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006 to 2008. Her story is extraordinary. Aged 35 she had travelled widely in the Middle East, working for various charities and NGOs. She was working for the British Council back in Blighty when the organisation sent round an email asking if anyone wanted to volunteer to work for the new Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) being set up in the immediate aftermath of the US-led victory over Saddam Hussein in Iraq (May 2003).
Although relying on the authority of the US Army, the CPA itself was an entirely civilian organisation, charged with reconstructing every aspect of Iraqi society, battered by 8 years of war with Iran (1980 to 1988) then 12 years of sanctions after the first Gulf War (1991 to 2003), and then a second bout of disastrously accurate US bombing designed to destroy its infrastructure. The CPA was desperate. Anyone from one of the main allies with experience of working in the Middle East was considered.
Indeed Sky describes the astonishing lack of professionalism about the process whereby she applied, was interviewed, was hired, and found herself on a plane to Baghdad. No-one met her at the airport and when she reported to the ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad where the new authority was still setting itself up she was casually offered the role of ‘Governorate Coordinator’ of the province of Kirkuk in the north of Iraq, and just as casually accepted it. Within days she found herself based in a military barracks in Kirkuk deep in Iraqi Kurdish territory, one of only a handful of women among over 3,500 US soldiers, and sharing an office with the military commander, Colonel William Mayville of the 173rd Airborne Brigade (p.60).
On pages 17 to 21 Sky gives a potted biography of herself. She came from a broken home whose mother, nonetheless, managed to send her to prep and private school, from where she went on to Oxford and then the British Council. So, poor but pukka. This makes the sequence of events which led to her running an Iraqi province a bit more understandable, but not much.
Little did Emma realise at the time that her destiny was to be intertwined with Iraq for the next ten years nor that she would rise to play a key role as adviser to the head of the US Army in Iraq, General Ray Odierno. To be a bit more precise Emma had two periods of work in Iraq, punctuated by roles elsewhere, before she left altogether to move into academia. Her CV goes something like:
2003 to 2004 Iraq: Governorate Coordinator of Kirkuk
2005 Jerusalem: Political Advisor to General Kip Ward, the US Security Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process
2006 Kabul, Afghanistan: Development Advisor to the Italian and British Commanding Generals of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force
2007 to 2010 Iraq: Political Advisor to US General Raymond T. Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps; and to General David Petraeus on the subject of reconciliation
2011 to 2012 UK: Visiting Professor at King’s College London and a Fellow at Oxford’s Changing Character of War Programme
2012 America: Senior Fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
2015: Director of the Yale World Fellows international leadership development program
So during her two spells in Iraq, Sky was a central figure. She worked with all the key players on the US side, and met all the powerful Iraqi politicians and religious leaders, as well as countless Iraqis lower down the pecking order, regional administrators, tribal chiefs and so on, right down to the man and woman in the street. She sat in on meetings which made key decisions about Iraq’s future, advised on many of them, had to implement ones she profoundly disagreed with.
It’s a chunky narrative (363 pages), with maps and glossary, which take us from the early days of the occupation in 2003 through to the withdrawal of US troops by President Obama in December 2011 and then through the years of Iraq’s collapse which led to the advent of Islamic State, which rose at great speed to take control of much of northern Iraq by July 2014, which is when Sky’s narrative ends.
Wow. She covers the entire period, she is a clever, independent woman with strong opinions of her own, she isn’t shy about criticising the leaders of the US civilian and military administrations to their faces. She has hundreds of good anecdotes to tell. So why is her book so disappointing?
Two reasons: the flat limited quality of her political analysis, and her pedestrian prose style. Thomas E. Ricks’s highly analytical account of the periods 2003 to 2006 (Fiasco) and 2006 to 2009 (The Gamble) proceeds by ideas or themes. Events out on the street are only mentioned insofar as they influence high-level American political or military policy, which is what Ricks is really interested in.
Sky’s narrative, by contrast, is more like a diary, like the diary of a very clever, independent-minded, sixth form schoolgirl. I did this. Then I did this. I attended dinner with so and so. I met so and so for the first time. Next day we went to meet tribal chiefs. I suggested we set up a committee to ensure better representation / rebuild the economy / provide more schools. That evening there was a formal reception. About this time a religious leader became prominent. I met him at a meeting of tribal chiefs. And so on.
Instead of being arranged by ideas or issue the narrative reads like one damn thing after another. It lacks detachment and analysis, an impression not helped by her often very naive impressions of people. She meets all the key players but her assessments are surprisingly shallow. Ricks portrays all the politicians and religious leaders in post-war Iraq jostling for power, focuses on their roles in Iraq’s poisonous power politics. It’s a rogues gallery of crooks and players. By complete contrast, Sky tells us they’re nice people and have lovely eyes (I’m not kidding, she has a thing about people’s honest trustworthy eyes). She makes friends with lots of leading sheikhs or clerics and is always bursting into tears when it’s time to leave (again I’m not exaggerating; there’s lots of crying).
Her prose style is dead in the water, flat and factual with overtones of The Little House on The Prairie.
We celebrated America’s Independence Day with the Kurds by the shores of Lake Dukan. It was apparently the largest lake in Kurdistan, created by the construction of a dam on the Little Zab River in the 1950s. I sat watching the sun set over the mountains. (p.15)
Or:
In the evenings I would often sit with Colonel Mayville in his office describing the state of the province. Our partnership developed into friendship. To my surprise I found myself growing to like the Colonel as a person and respecting him enormously. I came to realise that behind the bravado was a deep intellect – and a wicked sense of humour. (p.37)
Or:
Kara took me into Kirkuk city one afternoon. We ate in a restaurant and then walked through the market. It felt great to escape the cage from which I viewed Iraq and plunge once more into the Middle East, inhaling deeply the smells of coffee and vegetables, and feasting my eyes on the colours and peoples. (p.61)
‘Wicked sense of humour’, ‘feasting my eyes’. These are magazine clichés and have a cumulatively deadening effect. To quote linguist David Crystal, clichés are phrases which have ‘lost their meaning through overuse. They have become automatic reactions, verbal tics, a replacement for intelligent thinking…’ (The Story of English in 100 Words, 2012).
Every chapter has an epigraph. The epigraph to chapter 1 is: ‘All we are saying is give peace a chance,’ the John Lennon song. I realised at that moment that the narrative was likely to be as obvious and clichéd as that choice of song, and so it turned out.
Moments of thumping obviousness this occur again and again throughout the book and steadily lower your opinion of Sky. She comes over as the kind of person who’d think putting a sign in her office reading ‘Keep calm and drink tea’ was original and funny. Shame. This book cost a lot of money (£10), took 3 or 4 days to read, and wasn’t worth it.
Looking for father figures
In the Ricks book Sky is cited as coming to enormously admire the senior US military personnel she met; in fact she is quoted as saying the US Army is much better than the country it serves. In the hard-headed, cynical context of Ricks’s narrative that feels like an astonishing thing for an outsider, and a pacifist-minded British woman, to say. Unfortunately, once you enter the world of Sky’s narrative with its tendency to gush and hero worship, it doesn’t seem at all surprising.
In this respect I came to realise that the most important fact in the book is when she tells us, really early on in the narrative, that her father left her mother when she was very small. She never knew him, she grew up without a father (p.17). In fact happened not once, but twice. After he biological father walked out her mother fell in love again, and it was this step-father who organised Emma’s education at private schools and then onto Oxford. But while she was at university this step-father ran off with another woman, ‘leaving my mother heartbroken, penniless and distraught’ (p.20). So it happened twice, being abandoned by a father.
I was an only child from a broken-down family. (p.163)
So deep was the wound that she openly tells us it was this that made her, on graduating from university, decide to set out on an adventure to North Africa, ‘to escape the grief and anxiety that family seemed to cause’ (p.20).
I’m not projecting this into her narrative. It’s she herself who devotes several pages right at the start to explaining all this. So it seems pretty reasonable to see these traumatic childhood and teenage experiences as explaining why Sky is so quick to hero worship the big, strong military men she was working with, most of whom are old enough to be, er, her father.
After a while you realise that everywhere she goes, she’s looking for Daddy. Judge for yourself this description of her first meeting with the man who would become the head of the US Army in Iraq:
I could not believe my eyes when I first caught sight of General Odierno. I had never seen such a large human being. He almost seemed a different species. His head was totally shaven. His hands were massive. Yet his face was strangely striking and his eyes were kind. (p.46)
And:
General O was our undisputed boss. He was so big, so confident, so decisive and so determined. I was in awe of him. I thought he was indestructible. As I was sure he could not be killed I felt totally safe when I was with him…(p.163)
And:
I loved travelling with General O and the Sergeant Major. There was so much warmth between the three of us and respect for what we each brought to the mission. (p.171)
And it’s not just big lovable General O. Sky finds father figures everywhere. Take General Mayville.
One evening we went to the local orphanage that we visited from time to time…After the dinner we distributed the presents that had been sent out by the soldiers’ families, keen as ever to support our efforts. It was wonderful to watch the children’s faces light up, loving the attention and gifts. Mayville naturally fell back into the role of father, playing with the kids. (p.74)
Again and again she’s quick to establish father figure-daughter relations with strong or older or important men. Sky’s concern and ability to listen impresses all the Iraqis she comes into contact with (she tells us). But quite often it’s difficult to tell whether she’s being respected or patronised.
Colonel Mayville and I decided in October that it was time to visit [prominent cleric Abdel-Fatah] Mousawi in the al-Husseini Mosque. Sheikh Agar, who frequented the mosque, agreed to take us. He brought me one of his daughter’s abayas and gave it to me as a gift. As we climbed out of the car I covered myself in the abaya, much to everyone’s amusement. Sheikh Agar beamed approval. ‘You are my daughter,’ he said. (p.64)
Or:
Somehow I never felt totally at ease with General Farouq. He kept saying that I was like a daughter to him. (p.192)
Or the extended scene towards the end when it’s announced that General O is being promoted and moving on. He asks about her plans, for example does she intend to marry, have kids maybe, a topic she finds ‘uncomfortable’, maybe because it’s none of his damned business, but also, the Freudian reader by this stage realises, because her unconscious desires (for protection and affection) are projected onto him. ‘He was being all paternal’ (p.341).
Crying
Sky not only converts the men she’s engaging with into father figures, but repeatedly casts herself as a little girl lost. When the tour of duty of the 173rd Airborne Brigade comes to an end and they rotate back to the States, Sky attends the elaborate army ceremony marking the handover to the replacement regiment and makes an emotional speech to the assembled regiment on how much she’s come to respect and admire them all. When their commander, Mayville, shakes her hand and leaves, she is inconsolable with grief. She tells us she spent the entire afternoon crying. Why? Another Daddy has left her (p.89).
Throughout the book this keeps happening; she makes close friends with the locals (pretty much 100% men) or with senior US military figures (all men); then she or they have to leave – when she moves from Kirkuk on to work in Baghdad, or when she leaves Iraq altogether – and there’s lots of crying.
Ismail Abudi came round to see me at the Northern Oil Company in Kirkuk where I was staying the night. We sat on the roof chatting…We discussed the 30 June deadline [when the CPA was due to hand over authority to the Iraqi transitional government]. I told him I would be leaving. ‘No…tell me it is not true,’ he said. We sat on the roof in total darkness with tears streaming down our faces. (p.115)
The Chinook helicopter carrying members of the CPA out of Iraq takes off and:
I had tears streaming down my face. (p.127)
Much later, when she’s leaving for the second time, she goes to visit Sheikh Anwar al-Assi to say goodbye and he tells her to write a book about her experiences. And then:
There were tears in both our eyes when we shook hands. (p.339)
The only woman among men
The other pattern which keeps repeating is the way Sky finds herself the only woman among men. This, also, stems back to her childhood. In that autobiographical sketch she tells us that when she was four her mother got a job as matron at an all-boys preparatory school near Oxford. When she was 7 she was accepted into the school as a boarder, one of only five girls in an all-boys school. When she was ten the stepfather mentioned above entered her life and took her to a new school, The Old Ride, in Bradford-on-Avon. Here she was the only girl at the school (p.17).
She claims to have hated it, saying it was a Lord of the Flies-type experience, with the boys being beastly etc. Nonetheless, it sheds great light on the experience most of this book is dedicated to describing, the way she ‘found herself’ the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers in the remote north of Iraq, as if this is a completely unexpected surprise instead of, to the Freudian reader, a classic example of a lonely adult seeking to recreate the safe environment of their childhood.
What happens when you are the only woman in a US Army barracks of 3,500 soldiers? You are showered with attention. Lots of big tough men go out of their way to behave chivalrously, open doors, call you ma’am, shower you with attention. You become a very special and notable person.
Same happens when she attends the countless meetings of Kirkuki Arabs or Kurds or Turkmen, Sunni or Shia, religious officials, council meetings, army meetings, and so on: she is again and again the only woman in the room. From time to time she describes this as a great achievement but to the Freudian reader it feels like a situation she has engineered from deep psychological needs. She acquires affectionate nicknames, the Iraqis call her Emmasky, she is effusively greeted and hugged wherever she goes by sheikhs and mullahs.
On one level, obviously this all happened and she (presumably) performed an important function as adviser to the military and civil authorities, first in Kirkuk then in Baghdad. But because she herself has announced the themes of abandonment and loneliness, in some detail, right at the start of the narrative, it is hard not to read the book as the record of a partnerless young woman who again and again places herself in the almost exclusive company of men where she can be made to feel important, and showered with the male love and affection which she completely missed as a child.
I was met at the airport by an Italian colonel who greeted me with a big smile: ‘We are five hundred Italian men with no women to dance with.’ (p.134)
Thus after her friend Sheikh Agar is assassinated, she attends the funeral and goes on to describe the way she has been virtually adopted by his family:
As I walked in I heard the whisper, ‘Emmasky has come’ being passed down the line. I spoke to the sons. The younger one, who I had often seen around the government building, had aged years. ‘Allah yarhamu,’ (May God have mercy on him), ‘Inna lillali wa inna ilaihi raji’un‘ (We are all from God and to him we return). Family members spoke to me. ‘You are our sister.’ ‘You are my brother’s daughter’. Sheikh Agar, bless him, had told all his family about me. And they were touched I had made the journey from Baghdad to pay my respects. Grief lay heavy in the air. I sat in the tent, the sole woman among so many men. (p.106)
This is just one of the surrogate families she is seeking in order to make up for the one she never knew in childhood:
I was on General O’s team. And no matter how badly we disagreed or argued he was not going to throw me out. This was a family that worked through its problems and did not break down. (p.197)
And so when her second tour of duty as adviser to General Odierno comes to an end, at the end of December 2007, there is the characteristic departure ceremony, with speeches and presents, during which Odierno very graciously thanks Emma for all her help and advice.
His loyalty towards me was extraordinary. And I knew, if ever called on again, I would follow him to the ends of the world – and that he would listen to my advice on how to get there.
Odierno is Emma’s Super Daddy. Then it’s her turn to make a speech, telling the assembled soldiers it had been an honour and privilege to be part of their team. And inside she knew:
I meant it. Amid the horror of war, I had experienced more love and camaraderie than I had ever known. (p.241)
When she has her second farewell, because she’s not just leaving Iraq, the Americans are leaving Iraq, and so she attends the passing out parade held by General O, at which he gives a long heartfelt speech to the assembled troops, then:
A long line had gathered to shake General O’s hand and say goodbye. I hung around saying my farewells to the military men who had made me feel so much one of their band of brothers. (p.342)
Solecisms
This is trivial, really, but your faith in her narrative is frequently rocked by small but symptomatic mistakes in English phraseology. Here she is describing how you ought to avoid a particular seat in an American military helicopter, the one right by the open door which is nicknamed the ‘hurricane seat’:
Whoever sat in the back right seat would have the wind soar through their face, with cheeks and mouth flapping furiously. (p.30)
‘Soar through their face’?
Then again
Then again let’s stop and take stock: Sky is a bureaucrat and maybe this is how effective bureaucrats think and write – in stock formulae, obvious clichés, with a shaky grasp of English. Thomas E. Ricks is a journalist, so he’s paid to make stories sound gripping and important, he’s paid above all to write. Sky is a bureaucrat: her job is to invite people to committee meetings, distribute the agenda, manage relationships with key stakeholders, maintain the organisation’s values, defuse confrontations, find negotiating positions. In other words, her job is to use the safe and uncontroversial language of large organisations, not to rattle cages, to soothe ruffled feathers, to seek consensus, not to stand out or be original.
Having worked in UK government departments and agencies for 15 years or so, I recognise the type and recognise the tone of voice, full of terms borrowed from the private sector – where they mean something – and imported into the public sector where they are neutered of all meaning and verve.
Thus Sky tells us that she held a series of meetings with a view to improving the ethnic balance of the Provincial Council – fair enough – but when she goes on to tell us that ‘”No change” was not an option’ you can hear the tone of the civil servant or bureaucrat, quietly priding themselves on their no-nonsense attitude and tough talk.
In reality Sky seems to have been a people person. Her key achievements aren’t setting up this or that committee (though the narrative is larded with references to them) but getting people to trust her. The stories about local leaders accepting her as family, welcoming them to meals, festivals or funerals which I’ve cited, and more like them, testify to what seems to have been her key skill: this was getting suspicious people, in very perilous situations, to trust her sufficiently that they could talk to her, make their demands clear, and then she work her magic at getting the cumbersome CPA or the military-civilian government which replaced it, to actually accede to these Iraqis’ requests and get them what they want. At which point they trust her even more, and decide to try to get their way without resorting to violence.
In this way, as the narrative develops, Sky becomes a kind of one-woman embodiment of the policy of Reconciliation which accompanied the US military surge in 2007.
And seen from this angle, her readiness to fall into father-daughter relationships with important men was a positive asset, because strong men let their guards down around their daughters, share their feelings and wishes, admit their weaknesses and worries a bit more than they would around rivalrous sons, especially in a very traditional, patriarchal society like Iraq.
Maybe she tells us about her broken family background right at the start, and drops scenes of older men hugging her and calling her their daughter throughout the narrative, because she knows that this – above and beyond all the day-to-day admin and bureaucracy and setting up meetings and getting former enemies to talk – was her secret superpower.
Factual learnings
Lack of native politicians
America was always going to struggle to find politicians and administrators to step into the vacuum they created by ousting Saddam and banning the Ba’ath Party. Most of Iraq’s educated middle class had long since fled the country and had no wish to return. Or Saddam had killed them. He took great care to wipe out potential leaders who rose to prominent in any of the country’s many ethnic or religious minorities or among his own minority Sunni community (p.49).
Debaathification
Sky repeats the account of Ricks and every other reporter, that Paul Bremer’s rash decision to ban all members of the Baath Party from holding any official position ever again in effect decapitated Iraqi government at every level, made it very difficult indeed to find new people with authority or experience to run anything, and turned hundreds of thousands of clever, educated people against the occupiers.
The Kurdish return
Sky arrives in Kirkuk to find the Arabs very pissed off indeed at what they saw as the Kurdish takeover of every level of the administration. Many Sunni Arab families had received cash incentives from Saddam to settle in the north under his policy designed to water down the Kurdish majority (10,000 dinars, p.350). These were referred to as ‘new Arabs’. But now they found the police run by Kurds, local councils run by Kurds, Kurds who had left decades previously being offered incentives to return etc. So many of the new Arabs were looking to allies across the border in Syria to help them. Arab resentment of the Kurds is the persistent theme of the first 100-plus pages of the book, covering her time in Kirkuk, and carrying through to the very last pages, where she revisits a resurgent Kurdish region in 2014.
The sectarianism of Nouri al-Maliki
Sunni leaders were convinced that Nouri al-Maliki’s government was not only dominated by Shias (after all, Iraq as a whole has a Shia majority) but included Shia figures who had spent their exile from Saddam in Iran and were thought to be actively working for Iran. Not only that, but there was evidence al-Maliki protected the firebrand Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, figurehead of the murderous Jaysh al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army or Badr Corps. (On page 253 she describes al-Sadr as ‘rash and irascible’, on the next page refers to his many psychological problems.) If the book has one thread it’s the growing authoritarianism and unpopularity of Maliki which goes hand in hand with the Obama administration’s bad decision to give him their full backing.
The extremists overplay their hands
This explains why many in the Sunni community not only joined the insurgency against the American occupying forces, but also tacitly or actively supported al Qaeda in Iraq when they began recruiting and operating in Sunni areas. However, during 2006 into 2007 al Qaeda overplayed its hand and began killing Sunni leaders who opposed them. When, as part of the so-called surge, US forces made it clear they would amnesty Sunni insurgents who had been fighting them, and even set up a scheme to pay them to join local ‘citizen defence forces’, many Sunni fighters decided they preferred this option and turned on al Qaeda who, as a result, escalated their atrocities, which in turn brought more fence-sitting Sunnis into the process of Reconciliation.
Something similar happened on the Shia side. Sky reports being surprised when al-Sadr announced a ceasefire of his forces against the US and Iraqi Army but it was at least in part because many on his own Shia side had become sick of the violence the Shia militias brought and the apparently endless round of Shia attacks and reprisals either by US forces or Sunni insurgents. Sky describes the process with characteristic brevity i.e. in not enough detail, on page 238.
The surge
Other factors were at work too, such as 1) the huge shift in attitude among the US Army to the new mode of counterinsurgency, as described in such detail by Thomas E. Ricks, by the change in policy to break up America’s supercamps and set up small operating outposts embedded within towns and cities and communities. Also 2) the fact that the US government finally saw sense, realised they didn’t have enough boots on the ground, and allowed an additional 20,000 soldiers to be sent to Iraq.
British embarrassment
On page 232 she describes the British Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, in a meeting with General Odierno, and visibly embarrassed that the British more or less gave up in Iraq while the Americans persisted and, despite their ongoing losses, were able to learn and change their tactics. (Read Frank Ledwidge’s book ‘Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in the 9/11 Wars for a searing indictment of the British failure in Iraq.)
Terrible Iraqi politicians
Maybe so many of these countries are doomed because their leaders are blinkered and inept; their political class is irredeemably useless, incompetent and corrupt. This isn’t my view, it’s what many Iraqis say. Sky’s friend Abu Mohamed marvels at the way General Petraeus walked with them on a visit through the streets of a town named Jihad, not wearing body armour, talking to children, taking Iraqi dinars from his own pockets to pay for things in the market. Very clever, very savvy public relations, all of which leads a doleful Mohamed to conclude:
‘We don’t have leaders like that in Iraq.’ (p.250)
Other Iraqis make the same point. Abdul-Rahman Mustafa, former governor of Kirkuk, says:
‘Despite all the resources nothing gets done. Iraq is still going backwards. It is hard to see how the country will stay unified with such politicians in power. Iraq has good people but bad politicians.’ (p.354)
If your political class thinks only in terms of power grabs for themselves and their faction, your national politics will remain fractious. If, as soon as anyone gets power, they set about securing it for themselves, their family and clan, going to the extent of threatening and sometimes murdering rivals, then the only was a war of all-against-all can be brought to an end is by a very strong man, by authoritarian rule, by dictatorship. Which is what keeps happening again and again in Arab countries.
Iraqi politicians the problem not the solution
The American government kept hoping that once the level of violence had been brought down to an acceptable level, it would create the ‘political space’ in which Iraqi politicians could agree national plans of reconciliation and reconstruction. What the Americans were slow to grasp was that all the politicians put themselves and their tribes first and national Iraqi interest a long way second. In fact, many of the politicians were behind the violence the Americans were trying to control. They were using it to rally their own ethnic or religious communities behind them, to create followers and voting blocs to keep themselves in power. Rather as the nationalist leaders in Yugoslavia rallied their own communities and demonised other ethnicities, in order to remain in power (p.257).
Hollywood thinking
Mind you, the Americans have plenty of blind spots of their own. Sky puts into words something I noticed in Michael Ignatieff and Anthony Loyd’s accounts of former Yugoslavia and Ricks’s of Iraq which is that senior American politicians and military leaders have an astonishingly simplistic, black-and-white view of the world. They think in terms of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, as if life was a Western, or a Hollywood movie. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld-level leaders are quoted talking about getting ‘the bad guys’ and helping ‘the good guys’. This incredibly naive way of thinking explains why it took the Americans at least 4 years to understand the polyphonic, multi-stranded political, ethnic and religious situation in post-Saddam Iraq, which was not only complex in itself, but continually shifting (p.230). Where are the good guys, they kept asking? But what if there aren’t any good guys?
This explains something else which is the mistaken belief that if you take out the top ‘bad guy’ you solve the problem. This betrays a complete failure to grasp that societies are complex entities made out of multiple tribes and ethnicities and religious groupings, regions and classes. The Americans were hampered by this simplistic Hollywood thinking right from the start when they thought all they had to do was overthrow the bad guy, Saddam Hussein, and Iraq would promptly turn into a shiny modern democracy like France or Germany. World class idiocy. Breath-taking stupidity and ignorance.
The same magical thinking was revealed in their over-excitement at the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, the same naive belief that if you take out the so-called leader of ‘the bad guys’ then everything will be alright. Whereas, of course a) by 2011 (the year he was assassinated), bin Laden had become irrelevant to the situation in both Iraq and the wider Middle East, which remained as fractious, unstable and violent as ever and b) al Qaeda has gone from strength to strength after his death, extending its reach far across North Africa.
Fear
Fundamentally, what drives the desperation of so many of the politicians in these countries to stay in power at absolutely any cost, is fear of what will happen to them and their people once they lose power. Arrest, exile, prison, execution is the all-too-common fate of political leaders in developing countries once they leave office. In countries like this you don’t cling on to power to serve; you cling on to power to protect yourself and your clients and lackeys from what will happen once you lose it. Fear is the key to the entire political system. Thus:
Even before the last [American] soldier had departed [at the end of 2011] Maliki had launched a political coup aimed at crushing Iraqiya. (p.345)
And Maliki proceeds to arrest, intimidate, threaten or drive into exile most of his political opponents (detailed list on page 360). Abdul-Rahman Mustafa again:
‘[The Americans] should not have tried to transplant Western democracy to Iraq. It is not possible. Iraq is not a democracy. Change takes time. There are no democrats in Iraq.’ (p.358)
Betrayal by Obama and Biden
The most surprising thing about the book is its finale. Sky comes down heavily against President Barack Obama and his Vice-President Joe Biden. Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 7 March 2010 to decide the 325 members of the Council of Representatives who would elect the prime minister and president. However, the elections didn’t show a clear winner and so negotiations for those posts proved fraught with tension and delay. A final decision wasn’t taken till November of the same year – after eight months of divisive, sectarian bickering and intimidation.
Sky’s claim is that Obama’s regime, its ambassador and envoys, proved inept at managing the situation. They seemed unaware of Iran’s growing influence in the country, and sitting Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s tendency throughout the year to become more sectarianly Shia, more prone to Iranian influence, and more authoritarian. Sky meets opposition politicians who are scared that they will be arrested, even tortured by Maliki’s security services.
And yet it was this creepy figure, Maliki, who the Americans now threw their weight behind. Obama had been elected president in November 2008, took office in January 2009, and ratified the deal signed by George W. Bush to withdraw all US troops by the end of 2011. As the Iraqi politicians dragged out the backroom wheeling and dealing about the next Prime Minister for most of 2010 Obama became impatient. He was facing mid-term elections for Congress in November and wanted a foreign policy win.
Thus it was expedient, it was the simplest thing, just to confirm Maliki in the post of Prime Minister which he already held. Thus it was that the US administration averted its gaze from Maliki’s worrying tendencies, including the embarrassing fact that Maliki was Iran’s favourite candidate to continue as Prime Minister, given that the leaders of the other parties were Sunnis.
And so it was that during Joe Biden’s flying visit to Iraq in November 2010, Sky is in the room, and at the table, and makes several attempts to get Biden to change the administration’s approach. She then accompanies him to a meeting with senior members of the Iraqiya party, a secular and diverse grouping more appropriate than Maliki’s State of Law Party. by her account Sleepy Joe Biden was already gaga, repeating an utterly inappropriate anecdote about his Irish grandfather who grew up hating the British and then applying it to the attending notables, as if it somehow shed light on the sectarian problems of Iraq. After Biden finally tottered out some of the Iraqiya Party asked Sky what he’d been on about.
Biden was a nice man but he simply had the wrong instincts on Iraq. If only Obama had paid attention to Iraq. He, more than anyone, would understand the complexity of identities and how people can change. But his only interest in Iraq was in ending the war.
I felt sad, angry and very afraid for Iraq’s future. Washington had reneged on the promises it had made to Iraqis to protect the political process and it had betrayed the very principles the US military believed it was fighting to uphold. (p.338)
Summary
As a personal memoir of a unique experience, The Unravelling is possibly, maybe, an acceptable read. But if you want to understand how the war came about, why it went so badly wrong, and how the Americans struggled to fix a terrible situation, forget it. Read Fiasco and The Gamble. Read Frank Ledwidge and Jack Fairweather.
The looting
Concrete example of Sky’s inadequate treatment: on page 98 Sky deals, in one sentence, with the central fact that the occupying forces left a security and policing vacuum right at the start, immediately after the Iraqi army had surrendered, and that the CPA was never able to recover from that initial loss of initiative and control. One sentence! Ricks devotes half his book to this fact, explaining why it came about, how it manifested itself in the first days and weeks, what the full political, military and social consequences were, returning to them again and again to give you an ever-deepening understanding of this catastrophic failure. But in Sky, just one sentence.
Abu Ghraib
Similarly, Sky records in her characteristic schoolgirl diary way, a visit with other CPA staff to Abu Ghraib prison after the photos were leaked and the scandal broke. Here is her analysis in its entirety:
At Abu Ghraib I saw evidence of the worst side of human nature. With weak supervision in the jail, a number of American soldiers had used their power to create a perverse world, breaking the monotony of their days with sadistic acts on detainees under their control. It was truly sickening. Abu Ghraib was one of those places that exuded evil. (p.94)
This is a wholly inadequate analysis, in fact no analysis at all, it’s just a comment by a tourist. By contrast, Ricks gives a detailed explanation of the complex causes of the scandal, the two most notable ones being: 1) the huge numbers of ‘insurgents’ some American forces were rounding up and indiscriminately sending to prison, instead of questioning, assessing and probably releasing most of them in their own provinces; and 2) Donald Rumsfeld’s obsession with keeping the number of US forces cut to the bare minimum and his express refusal to send out enough US military police properly trained in running prisons. In their absence, inexperienced managers and completely untrained junior soldiers were lumbered with a job they didn’t know how to do, with the disastrous outcome the whole world got to see.
Ricks’s account is thorough, well researched, fascinating in its own right, and an illuminating insight into the importance of properly running prisons and interrogation facilities during a conflict. Sky – a one-page description of a tourist visit and a Daily Mail-level comment.
She was there. She worked with the key players. She got to know the country and the situation. And yet her analysis repeatedly feels inadequate and superficial. Making lots of lovely friends and repeatedly bursting into tears is sweet but no replacement for analysis.
Credit
The Unravelling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq by Emma Sky was published by Atlantic Books in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition.
From left to right: 1) ‘Sarah Lockett’s Roses’ (1997) by Ronald Lockett, made from cut tin, nails and enamel on wood. 2) ‘Stars of Everything’ (2004) by Thornton Dial, made from paint cans, plastic cans, spray-paint cans, clothing, wood, steel, carpet, plastic straws, rope, oil, enamel, spray paint and Splash Zone compound on canvas on wood. 3) ‘Oklahoma’ by Ronald Lockett (1995) made from found sheet metal, tin, wire, paint and nails on wood. All in room one of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
1. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation
There are two important points to grasp about this exhibition. The main one is that ‘Souls Grown Deep’ isn’t a fancy name dreamed up by the curators but the name of an organisation in America. The Souls Grown Deep Foundation (SGDF) is based in Atlanta, Georgia. It:
advocates for the inclusion of Black artists from the South in the canon of American art history
fosters economic empowerment, racial and social justice, and educational advancement in the communities that gave rise to these artists
Founded by Atlanta collector William S. Arnett in 2010, Souls Grown Deep derives its name from a 1921 poem by Langston Hughes titled ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’. The poem is one of Hughes’s signature works and is worth printing in its entirety:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The Souls Grown Deep Foundation stewards the largest and most eminent collection of works by Black artists from the Southern United States. It originally totalled some 1,300 works by more than 160 artists, two-thirds of them women.
Part of the foundation’s remit is publicise and promote these artists beyond America. To this end it energetically partners with galleries around the world and has placed more than 500 works from the collection in 32 museums globally. So this is an example of the foundation’s global outreach program. They came to an arrangement to display a selection of their works at the prestigious Royal Academy in London.
What exactly do we mean by ‘The Deep South’?
Map of the South featured in ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ at the Royal Academy
The artists live and work in this region, from communities in South Carolina to the Mississippi Delta, in isolated rural areas like Gee’s Bend, Alabama, and in urban centres like Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, all indicated on the map.
2. Outsider art
Obviously all the artists are Black Americans, that’s explained by point 1. But just as important is the idea that these artists, growing up in communities in the Deep South, come from outside the mainstream of American art schools and galleries. Some couldn’t afford art school, some were actively excluded on the basis of their colour, others didn’t know about the possibility or care.
So, with little access to formal art education, most of the works on display here were made by artists who developed their own artistic techniques and styles by learning from neighbours, friends and family. Both the foundation and individual artists make a big point of emphasising that these artists came from within very local traditions and communities. In this respect a bunch of photos at the entrance to the show capture the context and vibe of these works in their original settings.
Clockwise from top left: Ronald Lockett standing by ‘Sarah Lockett’s Rose’; Thornton Dial pointing at the camera; Doris Moseley and Mary Margaret Pettway working on a quilt; Purvis Young standing by a canvas; Lonnie Holley giving a thumbs up; Mary T Smith in the middle of a big yard show.
Some used skills they developed when working in industry, such as Thornton Dial and Joe Minter who were metalworkers. These skills were handed down – Dial trained his sons Thornton Dial Jr and Richard Dial and nurtured the talents of his younger cousin Ronald Lockett.
The women of Gee’s Bend, a remote settlement on the Alabama River, have handed down the skills of sewing and making quilts from generation to generation. Artist Loretta Pettway Bennett, featured here, recalls learning to sew by helping her mother and grandmother make quilts.
Raw materials
Coming from outside the mainstream art tradition, many of the artists here recycle and reuse materials available locally – like clay, driftwood, roots, soil, sawdust and all manner of cast-off items, old phones, bicycles, tools, shears, wire, trash and detritus. This gives almost all the works a rough and ready, hand-made appearance. For example this stunning work by Archie Byron (one of my favourites in the show) is made entirely from sawdust and glue!
Anatomy by Archie Byron
Or take these two sculptures, assembled from bits and pieces of bicycle (on the left) and an old tool box, spanner and wire (on the right).
Three-Way Bicycle by Charlie Lucas (c. 1985) made from bicycle wheels, metal machine parts and electrical wiring and Where is My Hammer? by Joe Minter (1996) made from welded found metal
The exhibition
The exhibition brings together 64 works by 34 artists from the mid-20th century to the present. There’s various media including assemblages, sculpture, paintings and drawings, reliefs, and video.
Artists
The artists include Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Hawkins Bolden, Bessie Harvey, Charles Williams, Mary T. Smith, Purvis Young, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Martha Jane Pettway, Loretta Pettway, and Henry and Georgia Speller.
Room 1. Friendships and family ties
The first room is, arguably, the best and showcases work by artists connected by close familial relations and friendships. Lonnie Holley, who had been working as a gravedigger and cotton picker, began sculpting in 1979, when he carved grave markers for a young niece and nephew following their tragic deaths in a fire. Through a former girlfriend he met Thornton Dial, who had worked in farming and as a steelworker before he became an artist. Both artists worked with discarded and salvaged objects and organic materials, transforming them into impressive sculptures and assemblages rich in personal, social and political symbolism.
The most impressive pieces here are by Dial including the biggest piece in the show, the fabulous ‘Stars of Everything’ (see above). But it was the relatively small piece, ‘Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music)’ by Lonnie Holley (1986) which the curators chose for the exhibition poster. Like all the assemblages here it is made from cannibalised waste and spare parts, in this case a salvaged phonograph top, a phonograph record and an animal skull.
Keeping a Record of It (Harmful Music) by Lonnie Holley (1986)
I don’t know what it’s saying, but it’s saying it very powerfully indeed, a brilliantly powerful, unnerving image.
Room 2. Personal stories, local sources
Working almost entirely without recognition from the wider art world, these southern Black artists drew inspiration from daily life and current events. The resulting works are intensely local in terms of materials, subject and audience, while also bringing out universal themes.
This room features the work of Sam Doyle, Henry Speller, Eldren M. Bailey, Georgia Speller, Jimmy Lee Sudduth. Lack of access to conventional art materials and tools often led artists to repurpose what
was around them. Sculptors including Bessie Harvey found artworks ready to be ‘drawn out’ from the twisted organic forms of roots and dead wood, a practice that became a distinct regional tradition.
Instinct drove visually impaired artist Hawkins Bolden as he searched the streets for items he could sense felt right for his ‘scarecrow’ sculptures, giving new life to materials that others would class as trash.
Installation view of ‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ @ the Royal Academy
By and large the sculptures were much more interesting and effective than the paintings. Many of the ‘primitivist’ paintings were just too basic for my taste.
Paintings from room 2.
For example, I couldn’t get on with any of the big, puke-yellow paintings by Purvis Young. Apparently, his scenes are populated by wild horses, warriors, angels, pregnant women, boats and prison bars but I still don’t like them.
Paintings by Purvis Young
By contrast with the paintings, I found almost all the sculptures wonderfully effective. In part this is, I think, because I’ve seen so much of this kind of thing before. Pablo Picasso made cubist sculptures before the First World War; Marcel Duchamps signed a urinal and put it in an art gallery in 1917; Dada artists created absurdist sculptures made mashed-up street junk in the early 1920s. Then lots of artists in the 1960s turned to making sculptures from found objects, and then the Arte Povera movement of the early 1970s, which took industrial waste products and cast-offs and made them into abstract sculptures.
My point is that recycling street junk into imaginative or surreal sculptures is hardly new but, on the contrary, feels like a venerable and well-explored strategy, which is why so many of the pieces here had such a reassuringly familiar feel to them. I really, really liked this piece by Hawkins Bolden but that’s partly because it reminded me so strongly of classic Surrealist sculpture. Could be by Picasso or Max Ernst.
Untitled by Hawkins Bolden (1989) Pot, drainpipe, cans, muffin tin, rubber hoses, nails, wood and wire
Room 3. The yard show
As most of the artists did not have access to formal art spaces, often the only place they could display their work was in their own back yards. The ‘yard show’ is a deeply rooted Southern tradition where artists would arrange their sculptures, paintings, and assemblages on their property.
One of the best known examples has been created over decades by Joe Minter (b. 1943), and is titled ‘African Village in America’, on a half acre site near Birmingham, Alabama. The show includes an impressive video featuring a panoramic scan over this huge area full of ramshackle constructions.
Room 4. The quilt-makers of Gee’s Bend
Gee’s Bend, officially known as Boykin, is a remote settlement on a hair-pin bend of the Alabama River. The Bend’s residents are descendants of the enslaved people who worked on the cotton plantation established there in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), many of the formerly enslaved people remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers, who were obliged to give part of their crop to the landowner, and many inhabitants today still bear the surnames of their ancestors’ enslavers. The community was able to remain intact due to Government loans provided during the Depression which enabled tenants to buy the land they farmed and protected them from forced evictions.
Installation view of Gee’s Bend quilts
This continuity allowed a unique tradition of quilt-making to survive and be passed down through generations of women. Most Gee’s Bend quilts are improvisational or ‘my way’ quilts. Quilt-makers start with basic forms then head off ‘their way’ with unexpected patterns, unusual colours and surprising rhythms. Not originally conceived of as formal artworks, quilts were both decorative and necessary objects, keeping families warm and making use of fabric scraps.
More Gee’s Bend quilts
I appreciate the enormous amount of time and energy which goes into creating patchwork quilts like this. I appreciate the communal nature of the work, and the deep local tradition which has bound successive generations of women quilt-makers together. But, to be blunt, I wasn’t that impressed by the quilts. Maybe it’s just not my medium or genre. I quite liked the couple which were made from corduroy, because the texture of the fabric was so tactile, and my favourite was the one made entirely from denim patches, maybe because it approached closest to being a painting in design.
Spending five minutes in the quilt room made me suspect I just don’t ‘get’ quilts and embroidery and sewn artefacts in the same way that I do paintings, sculpture and photographs. Well, my loss.
Marfa Stance and quilts for sale
‘Souls Grown Deep like the Rivers’ is a relatively small exhibition, but be warned that there’s an additional room, which is sort of part of the show but situated right at the other end of the Royal Academy building. I couldn’t find it and had to be shown the way by one of the Royal Academy receptionists. It’s through the members’ cafe, then up some stairs and in the Academicians’ Room on the first floor.
Here are displayed eight or so modern quilts from some of the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers. The difference between these ones and the works in the main exhibition is that these ones are for sale. They felt ‘better’, more elaborate and finished than the ones in the main show but, as I explained, I’m not a good judge of these kinds of thing. But be warned about the prices. The cheapest one will set you back a cool £25,000, the most expensive one, £30,000.
There’s a web page about them where you can not only read a bit more but buy one, if the fancy takes you and your bank balance can handle it.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize is not an open competition which anyone can apply to, like the BP Portrait Award or the Royal Academy Summer exhibition. The exact opposite: the curators choose just four finalists from what they consider to have been the best photographic exhibitions staged by individual photographers, in Europe, in the previous 12 months. To be precise, the stated aim of the prize is to ‘reward artists and their projects considered to have made the most significant contribution to photography over the previous 12 months.’
Therefore, if you visit the Photographers’ Gallery in the next few weeks you will find four rooms, each devoted to an in-depth display of work by just four international shortlisted artists. In alphabetical order these are Bieke Depoorter, Samuel Fosso, Arthur Jafa and Frida Orupabo. The winner of the prize was announced on 11 May and got a tidy sum of £30,000 (the other three entrants got £5,000 each). Who was the lucky winner? I’ll tell you at the end of this review.
I’m going to address the photographers in the order you actually encounter them in the gallery, rather than alphabetically.
1. Frida Orupabo
Frida Orupabo (born 1986) is a Norwegian of Nigerian heritage i.e. Black. She began posting photo collages on Instagram in the mid-2010s, cutting and pasting together images of Black bodies using historical and archive material; then in 2017 she took her approach into the real world (i.e. not just on a screen), creating the large collages you see here. All this led up to the exhibition which brought her to the curators’ attention, which was titled ‘I’ve seen a million pictures of my face and still have no idea’, which was held at the Photomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, February to May 2022.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
I immediately liked the results – very big, frameless, freestanding works which are more like sculptures hanging on walls than traditional photos. As far as I could tell, none of them had titles. Orupabo’s being Black and being a woman i.e. pressing contemporary art’s two big buttons of race and gender, sends the curators into a tizzy of artspeak:
The sculptural collages and digital works of Frida Orupabo are multi-layered formations, exploring questions of race, sexuality and identity. Orupabo, a Norwegian Nigerian artist and sociologist, grounds her inquiry in her own experience of cultural belonging. Utilising visual material circulating online, spanning colonial-era photographs and ethnographic relics to contemporary imagery, Orupabo’s hand-wrought works re-arrange and re-make the archive. The resulting images take the shape of fragmented Black, mostly female-bodied, figures.
These figures, first dislocated, are reassembled layer by layer in a complex and poetic manoeuvre that simultaneously denounces one-dimensional depictions of Black lives. Her collaged cutouts hold our gaze and invite various readings of the stories and lives of the people depicted, many of whom are entirely absent from the archives. In this way Orupabo invites a consideration of how photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence.
Does photography ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Isn’t that like saying books ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ or laws ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’? Surely any technology can ‘significantly contribute to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ if that’s how the people wielding it want to use it. Probably guns contributed quite a bit ‘to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’, probably quite a bit more than photography. In fact photographs of the atrocities carried out by the authorities in the Belgian Congo did as much to disgrace and discredit that authority, as the kind of photographs the curators have in mind, the kind used to measure and categorise the Indigenous peoples, did to define and control them. Photography is just a technology. I can be used for good or evil. Writing that ‘photography significantly contributes to the formation and perpetuation of colonial power relations and violence’ is just art school boilerplate, modish rhetoric, smart-sounding swank (definition: ‘behaviour, talk, or display intended to impress others).
Anyway, as so often, the curators’ obsession with the twin shibboleths of race and gender blind them to the specificity of the actual art in front of them. Two things struck me. One was the way the deliberate crudeness of the artefacts is intentional: heads are pasted onto bodies at anatomically impossible angles, a pair of legs are completely separated from a body. She is highlighting the utter dysjunctive effect of her collages, their complete artificiality, and that reminded me of Dada, of the deliberately unsmooth, jagged photocollages of George Grosz or John Heartfield from 100 years ago.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
But something not at all hinted at in the curators’ commentary is the horror tropes. In the top photo you can see that the loosely female figures are, from left to right, 1) attended by two sort of flying rabbit demons; 2) sitting on a monster’s head; 3) is shaped like a mermaid; and 4) in the most striking image, is a human head cut and pasted onto the body of a bat. A whole lot of stuff is going on here, but what strikes me is the invocation of imagery of Gothic tales and horror stories; it’s the stuff of Goya nightmares. What? Why? In this respect she reminds me of the way Kara Walker’s silhouettes of Black people in ante-Bellum Deep South morph into nightmare, monster images.
Installation view of Frida Orupabo at the Photographers’ Gallery
Anyway, it was the sheer weirdness of these big collages which grabbed me, not their alleged commentary on colonialist this, that or the other, and so I’ll tell you straightaway that, for the uncanny unexpected weirdness of her images, Orupabo was my favourite of the four artists: I wanted her to win.
2. Bieke Depoorter
Bieke Depoorter was born in 1986 in Belgium. She was selected for this prize on the basis of a 2022 exhibition titled ‘A Chance Encounter’, staged at C/O Berlin from April to September 2022. The display here consists of two parts, titled ‘Michael’ and ‘Agata’. Apparently:
In ‘Agata’, a first meeting [with Agata Kay] in a Parisian strip-club in 2017 evolves with complex tension into an intricate, changing narrative. The project explores questions of collaboration, the limits of a creative friendship, performance, boundaries and authorship.
I couldn’t find ‘Agata’. Possibly it amounted to one framed photo of a pink room, and maybe a collage of movie posters on one wall, but these weren’t labelled so I wasn’t sure. Going back to reread the introductory wall label more carefully I realised that the subject of Depoorter’s photos, the stripper Agata, eventually asked Depoorter to suspend their relationship and asked that all record of the photos, conversations and letters involved in it be erased. Maybe the Agata project is the absence of any materials about the Agata project. OK. That has a pleasing 1970s conceptual art feel about it.
But the reason I wasn’t too sad about not finding ‘Agata’ is because it was completely dwarfed by the other project displayed here, ‘Michael’. This is an epic, dense, absorbing and deeply unsettling work.
in 2015 Depoorter met a middle-aged, confused man named Michael on the streets of Portland, Oregon, USA. They got talking and Michael took her to his apartment which turned out to be covered from floor to ceiling with scrapbook-style cut-outs from magazines, books, newspapers, school reports, journals and diaries and all manner of bric-abrac.
As a result of this encounter Michael gave Depoorter three suitcases containing a trove of his personal items, sketchbooks and essays which she, for unexplained reasons, accepted. Then, presumably, she departed Portland, for the wall label explains that, at some point later on, she tried to contact him again and failed. When she flew back to Portland to find him she discovered his flat rented to someone else and that Michael had vanished, leaving no trace.
At which point Depoorter commenced what appears to have been months if not years of effort to track him down, the start of an obsessive quest to find Michael and to understand his life. As far as the labels tell us, to this day she still hasn’t found him, but along the way she has created the two big things which this darkened room is filled with. One is the way all the walls are even more covered in detritus and scraps of every kind than Michael’s apartment was, the records and ephemera of her hunt which Depoorter has acquired over the past 6 or 7 years.
Installation view of Michael by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
Post-its festoon multiple layers of documents and diaries and journals and magazine photos and contact sheets. Arrows connect different pieces of evidence. It’s exactly like the room of the crazed serial killer which the cops eventually break into in all those American psycho movies. She calls it ‘The investigation room’ and what we see here is just a fragment of the materials she’s accumulated in her obsessive, endless search. She has supplemented Michael’s own collection of ephemera with her own. The two sets of detritus are intimately interwoven. But spooky though this is, it isn’t the main thing: the main thing is the film.
Installation view of ‘Michael’ by Bieke Depoorter at the Photographers’ Gallery
It’s a 31-minute-long film detailing Depoorter’s obsessive quest so far. There are no moving segments. It consists entirely of still photos, so it’s by way of being a slideshow of places she’s been to and people she’s interviewed as she delves deeper into Michael’s life and past, her words and those of the interviewees appearing as captions on the screen.
So, in the sequence I watched, Depoorter spoke to some people who were at high school with Michael, who described his intense upbringing by nice but weird Mormons. We see stills of Michael’s high school yearbook with jagged, uneven hand-written notes scrawled across it. It has lots of overtones of serial killer movie, except Michael is no killer, just an oddball Depoorter bumped into and became slowly obsessed with.
If all this sounds weird (and it definitely is) after just a few minutes I found the pace and determination of Depoorter’s narrative drawing me into the film. Michael may have been just an insignificant nobody and yet, in Depoorter’s powerful telling, the memories of childhood friends and schoolmates become weirdly compelling. I realised I was being drawn into Depoorter’s own obsession. It’s contagious!
The curators comment that this work interrogates:
the complex ethical relationship and boundaries…between the photographer and their subject [and] questions the role and responsibilities of the photographer, the possibility or impossibility of truth in representation and grapples with personal and professional boundaries.
No doubt. But something deeper and weirder was also at work here. I was quite relieved to break away from the film and step back out into the light airy gallery space.
3. Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso was born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon. He was selected for the prize on the basis his exhibition ‘Samuel Fosso’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, from November 2021 to March 2022.
Since the mid-1970s Fosso has dedicated his artistic practice to self-portraits and performative photography. In vulgar language, he dresses up and photographs himself. At the tender age of 13 he set up a Studio Photo Nationale in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic. Alongside commercial work, Fosso began a series of self-portraits, and has carried on to the present day, hence a nickname he picked up along the way, ‘the man of a thousand faces’.
More recently Fosso has created a series titled ‘African Spirits’ in which he dressed up as – and recreated famous photographs featuring – Black celebrities such as (the ones on display here) radical activist Angela Davis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Haile Selassie and Tommie Smith, one of the African Americans who gave the Black Power clenched fist salute from the podium of the 1968 Olympics.
Installation view of ‘African Spirits’ by Samuel Fosso at the Photographers’ Gallery. Can you name all 6 of these famous Black figures?
According to the curators:
Playing the role of key historical figures and social archetypes in front of the camera, Fosso embodies a powerful way of existing in the world, and a vivid demonstration of photography’s role in the construction of myths.
There’s also a pair of huge colour photos of himself dressed as soldiers from the First and Second World Wars, tribute to the many African and Black soldiers who fought in those wars (see my blog post, Congolese soldiers in the world wars).
Compared to the previous two displays, photocollage sculptures and a weirdly compelling documentary film, Fosso’s exhibits – classic framed photographs – seemed, well, kind of obvious, kind of quaint.
4. Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa was born in 1960, Tupelo, Mississippi, USA. He is an artist and filmmaker. What is an American doing in an exhibition supposedly restricted to exhibitions in Europe?
Well, one answer is that art curators can’t stop themselves promoting the Great Yoonited States of America: after all, Depoorter’s ‘Michael’ project is about an American and entirely set in America and half of Fosso’s African Spirits are American. And now we have an actual American photographer. Three out of the four displays are heavily or entirely American.
Why do British curators love American art?
What can you do against the endless tide of American art and artists being promoted by British art curators and adding to the vast sea of American culture which floods all our channels? If Britain’s art curators are so hell-bent on promoting American culture and American values at every opportunity, all I can do is register my feeble protest and point out that there are, in fact, other countries in the world apart from America. Quite a few, actually.
Why do we rarely or never hear about them? Because America is easy, that’s why. American art comes pre-packaged with 1) fluent, articulate artists who are great in interviews 2) innumerable American critics who bubble over with rhetoric about race and gender and 3) political and cultural ‘issues’ which we all already know too much about about because they flood our TV, radio, movies, documentaries, newsfeeds, twitter and all the other American-run social media.
When an American artist gives an interview saying they’re addressing issues of #metoo or Black Lives Matter,everybody immediately knows what they’re talking about and nods in concerned sympathy because we’ve already seen and heard and read hundreds and hundreds of news items and newspaper stories and magazine features and documentaries interviews and tweets about just these ‘issues’.
American art is like McDonalds art. It’s smooth, pre-packaged, ready to consume, processed, pre-masticated, baby food. Just add water and you’re good to go. Compare and contrast the problems you’d encounter with the language barrier and with explaining all the little-known historical and cultural references if you tried to stage an exhibition of contemporary, say, Indonesian or Peruvian art. But another African American artist yakking about slavery or the institutional racism of American society – piece of cake, child’s play, no brainer, no mental effort required, just the appropriate amount of liberal sympathy.
Arthur Jafa
Anyway, Jafa is here despite not being European because his exhibition, ‘Live Evil’, was shown at Arles in the South of France i.e. a European venue, from April to November 2022.
There’s a video of an extended interview with Jafa. He’s very angry about racism, in America, Europe, everywhere. In the bit I watched he quoted Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. In a modern art gallery you’re never far away from the 1960s. My eyes glazed over because I have heard scores of Black artists complaining about racism in America and read hundreds of articles about racism in America. Black Lives Matter posters hang in the windows of concerned students round where I live.
The stories of Uyghurs Muslims locked up and tortured in Xinjiang, of the people dying and displaced in Yemen or Syria, of the 920,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar living in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, now as I write and you read? Are these packing the walls of the Barbican, Tate Modern, the Royal Academy, the Photographers’ Gallery? No. Silence. Nada. Their stories will never be told. They might as well not exist. But another American artist doing another show about how racist America is? Take your pick.
One last obvious point about the ubiquity of American artists: America is rich. It has the wealth to support a huge class of artists who, if they play their cards right, can become very wealthy, successful, appear in all the right magazines, and generally enjoy a great lifestyle. Makes me feel a bit sick when artists from the richest country in the world complain about their suffering and oppression. Go and live in Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, Afghanistan for a month then fly back to your air-conditioned studio in LA and tell me about the suffering of ‘your people’.
Anyway, according to the curators, Jafa’s work is another ‘extended meditation on the issues of race and the Black experience’. Just like Frida Orupabo’s display, then. I’d swear there are other ethnicities in the world apart from Black and White. There are quite a lot of Indians and not a few Chinese, for a start. But not in Curatorworld. Black, Black and more Black, preferably American Black, is the only experience, the only voice, the only art we are going to be shown. I’m not saying ‘the Black experience’ is not a thing to investigate. I’m just saying that maybe it’s not the only story in the entire world to be aware of, to listen to.
Anyway, to quote the curators:
Drawing from a rich collection of images, film footage and music, Arthur Jafa uncompromisingly articulates Black experience, providing us with an exercise in visual literacy, confronting us with a new Black aesthetic which avoids fixed hierarchies and linear storytelling
There are just six works in Jafa’s display, six very large photos. First, maybe a word of explanation about the tile. ‘Live Evil’ is the name of a Miles Davis album, released in 1971, a live recording of a concert performed in December 1970 in Washington DC. After the epoch-making ‘Bitches Brew’ of 1969, Miles was working with a large group of almost entirely electric instruments, producing a strange voodoo swamp sound, mashing up heavy funk grooves with Jimi Hendrix guitar, and his own trumpet heavily electronically distorted. During this period Miles cultivated a dark and brooding image. He revelled in the nickname ‘the Prince of Darkness’, in fact he released an album titled ‘The Prince of Darkness’ in 1971, same years as ‘Live Evil’. Anyway, ‘Live Evil’, which sounds like this:
Miles Davis (1926 to 1991) was without doubt one of the great musical artists, composers and performers of the twentieth century. In the show he is featured in a diptych (‘any object with two flat plates which form a pair’) alongside the godfather of the Delta Blues, acoustic guitarist and singer Robert Johnson (1911 to 1938), which looks like this:
Johnson died young leaving only 20 or so recordings behind which have, nonetheless, become legendary and inspired all the blues guitarists of the 1940s and since. Dying young, Johnson left a legend or urban myth about himself which is that, in order to play so amazingly, he had sold his soul to the Devil. This legend was fostered by tracks with titles like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’ or ‘Hellhound on my trail’:
So what does Jafa’s juxtaposition of these two Black musical icons tell us? Well for a start, they both made smoking look cool. To consider their music, although only about 40 years separate the photos (1930 to 1970) they seem musically and technologically galaxies apart. Then again, maybe they’re linked by the common thread of their devilish reputations, hellhounds and princes of darkness. Finally, maybe it’s simpler than that: Robert and Miles were both outstanding musicians, embodiments of Black excellence.
Across the room is another, bigger and more dramatic juxtaposition:
On the face of it, this is a straight contrast between an image of innocence and one of scary threat. Yet some other visitors I got talking to explained to me that they’re both images of identity masquerade: apparently, the earliest iterations of Mickey were based on white entertainers who’d blacked up as minstrels; while the figure on the right is actually a white actor who has blacked up using scary voodoo imagery (I assume this photo was shot on a film set but I can’t find out which one. Do you know?). They’re both lies, or deceptions, or multi-layered images of Blackness. Is that it?
tackles the complexity of African-American cultural identity, as defined by an existential paradox that places the Black subject ‘in essential intimacy with death’, as Saidiya Hartman explains in Jafa’s documentary ‘Dreams are Colder than Death’ (2013).
The endlessness of American pop culture
I liked the clarity of these dyptychs and also the fact that they were much deeper than they first appeared to be. The trouble, though, with popular culture, especially American popular culture, is that it is endless. Like the Bible, you can find a passage or quotes to prove anything you want to. I can cut and paste Homer Simpson next to Superman and straightaway I’m making important statements about masculinity, or something. Given such a vast sea of pop ephemera it would be hard to splice together two random elements and not find yourself raising interesting cultural or semiotic issues.
American culture combines technological wizardry with super-refined commercial strategising. Look at the Marvel Comic Universe movies, which are spectacular viewing, rank as the highest-grossing film series of all time, having netted over $29.1 billion, and have a mental age of around 9.
And American artists are trapped within this culture, condemned to try and imbue meretricious trash with meaning – and Black American artists are doubly trapped, trapped in a sea of Americana from which they (apparently, if someone like Jafa is to be believed) feel profoundly alienated. So I understand Jafa when he says that Black American artists are they trying to create narratives of Blackness which will help them navigate the bottomless dumpster of American pop culture, and the complex matrix of racist laws, assumptions and culture. I assimilate this kind of message because I’ve heard it hundreds, maybe thousands of times. It comes pre-packaged and ready to consume.
Anyway, the puzzling thing about the Arthur Jafa display is that the use of these two sly juxtapositions is not his only trick – only two of the six items use it; the other four items are single images and far more varied, not to say troubling.
One is a treated image of the Black singer of a rock band (HR of Bad Brains) jumping about onstage, which left me cold, having spent too much of my teenage year paying attention to images of rock performers to be impressed by one more.
But in a completely different tone from everything else, one entire wall is taken up with an enormous photo of what appears to be a room somewhere in Rwanda, empty of people, but filled with washing lines (?) from which hang the clothes and rags of people hacked to pieces in the terrible genocide.
Installation view of Arthur Jafa at the Photographers’ Gallery
Is this part of ‘the Black experience’? Or the African experience? Or the human experience? It was certainly part of this generation of Rwandans’ experience. Does it directly impact anyone who wasn’t there? If so, why more so than the Armenian genocide or the Holocaust or – the most disastrous civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion in China in which at least 20 million perished (which I’ve just been reading about at the new exhibition at the British Museum)? Or the Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962, in which anything up to 50 million Chinese starved to death? Or, during my lifetime, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Kampuchea in which up to 2 million people, a quarter of the population, were murdered or starved to death, 1975 to 1978?
I carry the images and histories of all these atrocities in my head, which not only gives me a very dim view of human nature, but also appears to be where I differ from someone like Jafa, because I don’t categorise these atrocities by the skin colour of the victims. They’re all human to me, each one an individual who suffered more than I can imagine, died in misery and terror, mounting up to a vast weight of guilt on the conscience of mankind. The collected atrocities of mankind don’t respect colour or ethnicity, which is why I find the foregrounding or privileging of some massacres or genocides over others morally repugnant.
Anyway, back to Jafa. The last piece in his display is a partial sculpture, a kind of bas-relief hanging on the wall of the whip-scarred back of a Black slave, a very potent image of man’s grotesque inhumanity to man or the atrocities of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
I get it, the Black slave trade was a very, very bad thing and generations of white exploiters captured, bought, transported and treated their African slaves with unbearable savagery and brutality. But I happen to have just finished reading Robert Hughes’s epic history of transportation to Australia, The Fatal Shore, and it is packed to overflowing with the unspeakably sadistic treatment meted out to the transported white convicts, especially in the penal colonies of Port Moresby and Norfolk Island. For even slight misdemeanours like looking at an overseer the wrong way, a convict could get three hundred lashes till bystanders could see their spine and ribs through the remains of their butchered back and the bystanders had to pick gobbets of raw human flesh off their clothes. Hughes repeats descriptions of British or Irish convicts who were whipped to death. So this, for me, is the image of a whipped human.
Most of human history is an abattoir. To limit notions of suffering and injustice to just one ethnicity or to one group or one class seems to me historically and morally questionable. It’s a form of boasting – my grievance is bigger than your grievance. It’s very much part of the grievance and victim culture which America has perfected and exported to the rest of the developed world.
But billions have suffered abominably, in every continent, at the hands of all races. The génocidaires in Rwanda weren’t white. The killers in Cambodia weren’t white. The people who implemented the Great Leap forward weren’t white. The murderers of 1.5 million Armenians weren’t white. The administrators of the gulags weren’t Western imperialists.
If these seem disproportionately enormous ideas for a photography exhibition that’s because Jafa is aiming to trigger big ideas about history. It’s just that I happen to be, maybe, more knowledgeable about the history of atrocity than the average gallery goer and so my frame of reference is wider, maybe, than he intends. Maybe it’s just me. I’ve read more widely about atrocities throughout history than is good for anyone, and so this powerful object triggers a wider, deeper historical response than he was, maybe, expecting.
I’m reading Emma Sky’s book about Iraq. She mentions General David Petraeus raising Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue in conversation. This was written about the siege of Melos in 416 BC, part of the wider the Peloponnesian War. When the Athenians finally took the city of Melos they executed the entire male population and enslaved all the women and children. My year of reading Roman history and literature drummed into me that slavery was a universal institution throughout the ancient world, that the civilisations of ancient Athens, Rome and Egypt entirely depended on it and that the huge slave population was subjected to terrible, awful lives of unending labour and liable to whipping, cutting, maiming and torture for the slightest infraction.
That’s what I know, that’s what an image like this triggers; not the suffering of one particular group, but the universal horror of human history.
Anyway, back from these vast horizons to a small room in Soho containing half a dozen artworks by Arthur Jafa. The conclusion from this small display seems to be that Jafa has at least two modes of operation, one consisting of the canny juxtaposition of images from popular culture, an astute form of curating and darkling satire; the other mode, flat-out horrific memorials of ‘the Black experience’.
This latter is, as you can imagine, catnip to modern white curators, driven by the bottomless resource of white bourgeois guilt:
By placing one resonant cultural artefact next to another Jafa references and questions the universal and specific articulations of Black experience. Eschewing a linear narrative, Jafa organises his material through formal and affective associations, linking his images through visual resemblance or thematic resonance. In this way Jafa aspires to an art that harnesses ‘the power, beauty, and alienation of black music.’
That’s from the press release. On the introductory wall label the curators say:
Embracing slippage and dissonance Jafa creates art that is as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.
‘…as fluid and multidimensional as Blackness itself.’ What I took from the four exhibits on show here is that ‘Blackness’ as an artistic, critical and curatorial concept is indeed so fluid and multidimensional that artists, critics and curators can say almost anything about it and sound convincing. It lends power and a sense of urgency and relevance to even the most anodyne exhibition. It adds the spice of the ‘radical’ to a medium which all curators are uneasily aware is overwhelmingly white and bourgeois. Along with Gender it is a power word and, more than that, a kind of ideological matrix or discursive machine, which will continue to generate works and words, art and discourse, with ever-proliferating effect, for the foreseeable future.
From one perspective, ‘the Black experience’ as an art category is not so much the product of Black people’s actual experiences (which I imagine are very varied and complex) as it is of the liberal guilt of the White art establishment.
Who won?
Who do you think should have won the prize? It was won by Samuel Fosso, ‘the man of a thousand faces’. Why? Shoair Mavlian, the (White, obvz) Director of The Photographers’ Gallery and Chair of the Jury said that Fosso’s:
‘sustained exploration of self-portraiture uses a traditional, studio-based approach steeped in history, while at the same time his work remains relevant and addresses contemporary political issues of today with humour and authenticity. His work has created an extraordinary platform for Black voices and artists throughout his career.’
It’s a difficult choice but I think I liked Frida Orupabo’s weird, Gothic photomontages more than Fosso’s dressing up; and, although I’ve just given him a hard time, actually the clarity and design of Arthur Jafa’s diptychs have stayed with me days later, but then that’s American art for you, as slick and efficient as a Spielberg movie.
Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.
Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.
In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:
1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World
His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.
But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.
Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.
But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:
exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)
Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.
(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)
Virtual warfare
Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.
1. The public
It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?
2. Air force screens
It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.
Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.
Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.
3. No army
Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?
And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.
Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?
How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:
1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?
2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?
3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.
Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.
On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.
4. No mandate
Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically atwar. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.
NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?
I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.
NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.
To intervene or not intervene?
Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.
Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.
The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.
Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.
He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligatedto intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).
And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.
In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Content
As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:
Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.
As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.
Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.
Critique
1. The idea of a screen war not so novel
For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.
But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).
And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.
2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict
At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.
But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).
OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.
So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’
In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.
It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.
In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?
These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.
Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:
This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)
His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.
But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:
the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)
America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.
The scale of the waste
Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.
One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).
But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.
Pleasure
Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.
He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.
Credit
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.
Books & Boots 