The rogue government soldiers apparently aren't the only ones thus availing themselves of pygmies in the steamy jungles of Congo. (That's a pygmy woman and her two kids in the photo, by the way). The article also fingered the Rwandan Hutu Democratic Forces (the chaps involved with the genocide of those 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda back in '94) among other groups of roaming rapers and pillagers.
On an aid agency's website I read that the groups with the guns are even keeping pygmies (a tribe indigenous to the Congo) as slaves - just as in the old days before the Arabs and the whites came along to show them how a cottage industry could go global. Scuds, a former Journal colleague of mine, was recently employed as a flak by the UN's food distribution arm in Goma, near the unrest in Kivu province. In an email, he confirmed my facile estimation of the place: "Yes, this truly is the asshole of Africa," he wrote, then described a recent trip he'd made:
I was recently up in a town called Dungu, near the spot where the Congolese, Sudanese and Ugandan borders meet. There's a military offensive up there against the "Lord's Resistance Army" a militia group led by a psychotic Christian mystic who loves capturing young boys to turn them into child soldiers and/or sex slaves. One of his favourite trips, when his group was based in Uganda in the 1990s, was to cut the lips, noses and ears off his captives and force them to eat their own body parts - on pain of death. I have seen photos of the survivors. it's not a pretty sight.It probably isn't fair to single out the DRC as the asshole of Africa. How can one bestow the definite article on a single location in a 51-country continent that's thick with sphincters? Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Somalia, Sudan, Angola ... You name 'em, they're shit holes. But like volcanoes, some are active, some not.
Dungu must have been a lovely town at one time. A big coffee producing area back in colonial times, with Belgians, Greeks, Spanish and Portuguese in the town. There is still a Greek Orthodox church there with Greek writing, but since there's not a single white left in town, it's been taken over by some evangelistic cult. The hydroelectric plant on the river hasn't run in decades. The power lines have all been looted for their copper. The brick buildings in town are falling to pieces. Most people now live in mud, thatch-roofed huts. To export what little coffee is now produced, the coffee is put in 30 kg. bags, loaded onto motorcycles and transported to Uganda. The roads are too bad to allow cars or trucks.
Burundi, which I believe ranks as the second-poorest, third most-violent, fourth most-corrupt nation in the world (though I may have the rankings switched around), is currently in its dormant phase. Nonetheless, my old chum CFF, who runs the orphanage in Burundi, has finally, I think, come to his senses and decided to pull out. This decision was prompted by the realization that he will never find anyone trustworthy or reliable to run the place or operate the business (imported used clothing) that was to pay its upkeep. He'd signed agreements with an assortment of what to him appeared promising partners and all have been disappointments - either absconding with the inventory or just drinking and doing nothing. "Eet's a fucking nightmare," CFF has told me several times - though he does like the hyperbolic phrase. Partly because of the unreliability of his native associates, partly because he has prostate cancer and may or may not live much longer - he's taking female hormones and jokes that he can now indulge himself in the PMS of which he had so often been a victim - the Frenchman is now trying to figure out a way of unloading the 50-kid orphanage near Bujumbura. (If any of you have the $50,000 a month to support this coterie of cute African kids - pictured being taught how to smoke by CFF during a 2007 visit - and their pain-in-the-ass minders, drop me a line.)
It's probably best that he gets out while the getting is - relatively speaking - good. Burundi - like the Congo and Rwanda, a remnant of Belgian colonialism - had its own round of Hutu-Tutsi troubles just
prior to Rwanda's. Around 300,000 were killed, but in Burundi's case the Hutus stuck around and they now dominate the Burundian government. There's a hostile faction of Tutsis in the government, and it and the Hutus maintain rebel groups in the bush who periodically assassinate cabinet ministers and occasionally massacre civilians. It's hard to figure out the dynamics from the less-than-comprehensive news coverage, but no doubt there'll be another full-scale civil war before long. Invariably child soldiers are part of the mix - which I guess can provide a career for CFF's orphans when the orphanage closes. What is it about Africa that makes it such a hopeless mess? The standard liberal explanation puts the blame on the colonial powers: Rapacious and racist, they drew borders where none had been drawn, lumped together tribes that should never have been lumped, and thus set the stage for the vicious inter-tribal rivalries that have occurred since independence. The colonial subjugation, the slavery, further retarded future growth by instilling in the people a sort of infantilism that is now being exploited by the new black aristocracy of Oxford- or Paris-educated kleptocrats - generally putative Marxists - who keep the masses is a state of pathetic dependence (meet the new boss, same as the old boss; two legs good, four legs bad - pick your cynical allusion.)
Meanwhile, now able to avoid the bother of running their own colonial governments, the Western powers use their embassies to help corporations make deals with the kleptocratic rulers to extract the worthwhile resources. To assuage our western guilt, the UN, the churches, and other assorted NGOs import corn-rowed twenty-somethings, up for a little adventure and some easy balm for the soul, to putter about in Land Cruisers distributing band aids, condoms and solar-powered laptops to the unwashed. A trillion dollars in aid has been sunk into Africa by western governments since the 1950s. But still the populations explode, the diseases rage, the famines come with regularity, and the bum-fucking of pygmies continues apace. What can one do?
(John Le Carré, once a favourite writer of mine, gives full vent to all of this in his later, somewhat preachy, but solid two novels, A Constant Gardner and Mission Song. Another well-done book for those seeking an understanding of Africa's colonial past is King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild's non-fiction telling of how Leopold of Belgium [shown here with wife Henrieta], a late-comer in the rape-of-Africa sweepstakes, manipulated popular opinion in Victorian Europe, co-opted certain contemporary personages - including the reporter and Dr. Livingstone-locator Henry Stanley - and acquired the great big Congo and all of its rubber-producing riches without ever having to leave Brussels.)
* * *
I have a Palestinian masseuse called Manal. She's sturdy woman in her early 40s who expertly irons the kinks out of my shoulders, neck and arms put there by the exertions of scaffolding. As I lie face down on the table, occasionally grunting with the pleasurable pain that makes massage such a joy, we'll have conversations about the state of the world, especially that part of the world in which Mohamed holds sway. Manal is an unapologetic Islamacist. She and her engineer husband left their then home of Libya, via Dubai, for Canada with the aim of staying here just long enough to obtain the innocuous Canuck passport that makes international travel so much easier than does the problematic Palestinian issue. (O Canada, our home and native land ...)
Whilst waiting, they had a couple of kids and kind of got rooted. The kids are now in high school, heading towards one of those cheap Canadian universities, and hubby has a good job with Lockerbie & Hole. Thus their frigid country of convenience has become a more or less permanent prison. (...true patriot love, in all thy sons command..)
Manal doesn't wear a hijab but does prostate herself towards Mecca five times a day, and believes alcohol to be evil. She is also no fan of what could be called Canadian-US foreign policy vis-as-vis Israel, the Taliban, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The US and Canada, in her opinion, have no business crusading in Arab territory, imposing their decadent western practices - democracy, feminism, homosexuality, etc - on the flower of Islam. (...with glowing hearts... Okay, I'll stop.) As for Israel, she grew up in Gaza, still has friends and relatives there, and talked to them on the phone as the Israeli rockets were landing last winter. "Israel has no place there!" she said, delivering a vicious rhetorical jab with the heel of her hand to my lower trapezius. I grunted. "Is zat sensiteef?" she asked in the flat voice that somehow brings to mind the James Bond villainess Irma Bunt, though she was eastern bloc..
Somehow we got onto the subject of Africa - I think it had to do with the Islamic government in the Sudan and its annihilation of the blacks in Darfur. I steered the conversation to the matter of Africa's general hopelessness and wondered aloud about Manal's thoughts on the matter? "Well, zey're all blacks," she said with a shrug in her voice, as if nothing more need be said.
Sometimes we in the liberal west forget that there is a whole big unenlightened world out there that doesn't share our evolved views on the equality of the races. It's probably fair to say that most of Arab, Oriental and South Asian society would be horrified to see its daughter bring home a black fiance. (I wonder how I'd feel were one of my daughters to do so? Probably okay if he were like Barrack Obama; not so much if he were like the rap artist 50 Cent. The photo below is clipped from his video "P.I.M.P." and shows the hip-hop artiste with a couple of his 'hos. I'd bet the pygmy-rapers of the DRC listen to Mr. Cent on their cheap Chinese MP3s, probably seeing in him the apotheosis of black achievement. )
There is some rogue science out there that purports to prove the intrinsic mental differences of the races. When I worked at Maclean's magazine in the late 1980s I wrote a story about a University of Western Ontario professor who'd produced a paper on relative brain size. It suggested Orientals were the smartest, least aggressive and least sexed; blacks were the dumbest, most aggressive and most sexed; whites occupied the middle ground. As one might imagine, this professor - Rushton, I think his name was - was, excoriated by all the all the powers of Canadian liberaldom, was censured by the university administration, and has not been heard of since. The fact is, even if it were true, there is no way anyone in his right mind - certainly in the Western World - could publicly advance such a notion unless he wanted to be relegated to the nether land where banjos play and canned goods are stored in the basement under the portrait of Hitler. As my son John said, during a Sunday dinner visit a few months ago when I suggested the possibility of intrinsic intellectual differences between the races, "So what if it was true? How would that help anything?"
He has a point. If there were empirical proof that black Africans were 10% less intelligent on average that white Europeans, how would it help solve the problems that plague the continent?
I suppose such a revelation might give impetus to a movement by an unscrupulous outside power to re-colonize, and that re-colonization might be the only hope for some of these countries - the DRC being an example - that might otherwise disappear into their own asshole. I wonder if the People's Republic of China - a country I visited three years ago, seeing not a single black face - is in the fledgling stages of such an adventure.
In the last half decade, China has been busy forging relations with African countries shunned by others - countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola ... - in order to get at their oil, platinum, bauxite and those other resources needed to fuel the big Yellow Engine. So far it's all been relatively innocent - at least according to the Chinese, who assure everyone that they are not about to interfere in the internal affairs of their new best friends. But by means of payments for resources, the issuance of loans, the sale of weaponry, the building of roads, and the export of more productive Chinese labour into the workforces of their African "business partners," the Chinese seem to have hit upon a a backdoor route to what King Leopold needed troops and Col. Kurtz-type station bosses to achieve.
Enthusiastic African dictators, sterling chaps like Robert Mugabe, speak of their relationship with China as that of one developing nation with another - two jolly ships rising together on the fair tide of mutual cooperation. Given China's GDP of $8 trillion, an annual growth projection (even after the recent hits) of 8%, and its military strength (2.7 million troops and nuclear weapons), such comparisons are either disingenuous or naive.
Compared with China, even the biggest African countries are pygmies. Still, I guess it remains to be seen whether they are about to get it up the ass. Yet even if figurative sodomy is part of the plan, it may just turn out that the totalitarian government of the PRC will have a far more salutary effect on African development than all of guilt money from the western democracies ever did.
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