One of the missed teachable moments during the recent global outcry against Uganda's draconian anti-homosexual bill, has been the convoluted logic of colonialism and African pride injected into the discourse. While many have fittingly pointed to the role of recent U.S. conservative right-wing evangelicals--some of them elected officials--in the recent bill, not many have chosen to tackle why Uganda, and many other parts of Africa, have such seemingly retrogade policies towards the gay community. Advocates of the bill in Uganda claim homosexuality is traditionally "un-African," stating they don't want European norms being enforced on them. And they have invoked a new breed of anti-colonialism to fend off the criticism and threatened sanctions directed their way from Europe and the West--the very industrialized nations that keep the global poor impoverished. But wonder of wonders, Uganda's anti-homosexual laws don't have their origins in the traditional African past or the neo-colonial present. They arrived in Uganda just slightly over a century ago--under the banner of the white man's burden and British colonialism.
The tragic irony is that Uganda's anti-homosexual laws are not part of African culture--at least nothing indigenous. African cultures have long showed a diverse approach to sexuality, with gender sometimes extending far beyond the limited Western imagining of "male vs female." In fact, anti-homosexual laws in much of Africa--and elsewhere--were first instituted by European colonizers. In the case of Uganda it was the British, as a means to regulate what they saw as either deviant or gender-ambigious modes of sexuality that conflicted with their Victorian derived notions of morality and civilization. So we are left today with a bizarre situation, where Africans tout the values of their former colonial rulers as a valiant example of African pride and anti-colonialism.
Of course, there are other factors involved in Uganda's homophobia--a misdirected fear of HIV/AIDS which has decimated the country, disrupted families, increased poverty and left many searching for a reason for their troubles. Too long ignored by Uganda's rulers and much of the world, this desperation has opened the path for blame and hysteria. In the 1990s, some 100,000 Ugandans were dying of AIDS each year, with millions more infected. If 9/11 drove Americans just a little bit crazy and ruined their better judgment, imagine a prolonged 9/11 that happens everyday, doesn't seem to have an end, comes with an ostracizing stigma and which much of the world mostly just stands by and watches. Still, this is no excuse for the types of laws that have become so popular in places like Uganda. And most vexing are when so many, either willfully neglectful of the past or attempting to rewrite history, make erroneous claims that their actions are actually done in the name of "African pride" or "anti-colonial defiance."
As Chinua Achebe warned us when looking at the nexus of politics, culture and the colonial past--Things Fall Apart.
More about Uganda's proposed law here, the role of U.S. evangelicals here, and the diversity of traditional African sexuality here.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Uganda's Victorian Age
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The Forgotten "Greatest Generation"
For Africa, WW2 didn't begin in 1939. It began in 1935, as Italian forces under fascist Benito Mussolini invaded the only fully independent African nation--Ethiopia. Over much of the coming decade, the entire continent would be thrown into the tumult of the war between mostly European powers. With nearly every region colonized by the warring Europeans, Africans found themselves conscripts in battles that (with the exception of Ethiopia) weren't really their own. Over 1.3 million continental Africans would end up participating in the conflict. Yet, other than the exploits of German generals like Rommel in North Africa, the continent doesn't make it into many histories of the war.
Recently however, as part of the 70th anniversary of WW2, the BBC covered these forgotten members of the "Greatest Generation." Better late I suppose than never...
The Africans who fought in WWII
By Martin Plaut
BBC Africa analyst
The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?
Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.
For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, but in 1935.
Read full article here.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Regreening Africa
No matter what happens at Copenhagen or beyond, the world is locked in to decades of temperature rise and the associated climate impacts: deeper droughts, fiercer floods, more pests. How populations in the global South adapt to these changes will help decide whether millions of people live or die.
The tragic irony about global climate change, is that it will affect the poorest nations of the global south the hardest. This, despite the fact that these nations have contributed very little to the crisis. No wonder earlier this month African delegates threatened to upset climate talks in Barcelona if the US and rich countries don't live up to their committments and accept responsibility for global climate change. Activist Naomi Klein has even gone as far to declare that rich nations owe a debt to the poor nations of the world for the global climate crisis. In the midst of these developments, Mark Hertsgaard examines how many who live on the continent are sowing the seeds--literally--towards countering the damaging environmental effects of this looming man-made disaster.
Regreening Africa
By Mark Hertsgaard
November 19, 2009
The sun is setting on another scorching hot day in the western African nation of Burkina Faso. But here on the farm of Yacouba Sawadogo, the air is noticeably cooler. A hatchet slung over his shoulder, the gray-bearded farmer strides through his woods and fields with the easy grace of a much younger man. "Climate change is a subject I feel I have something to say about," he says in his tribal language, Moré, which he delivers in a deep, unhurried rumble. Though he cannot read or write, Sawadogo is a pioneer of a tree-based approach to farming that has transformed the western Sahel in recent years, while providing one of the most hopeful examples on earth of how even very poor people can adapt to the ravages of climate change.
Read full article here.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Remembering Dr. Ivan van Sertima: 1935-2009
On May 31st, it was announced that the historian, linguist and anthropologist Dr. Ivan van Sertima passed away in his homeland of Guyana. For anyone remotely acquainted with African history, especially that deliriously exciting movement of historical Afrocentricity in the late 1980s and early 90s, Dr. van Sertima was a giant.
I remember when I first heard Dr. van Sertima speak. It was thrilling to hear someone with a familiar West Indian accent speaking forcefully and powerfully on African history. Dr. van Sertima made no apologies nor did he indulge in nuanced watered-down African history. His position was clear--Africa had a rich history spanning from antiquity to the early precolonial period, that had been purposefully distorted, misrepresented and white-washed by modern Eurocentric historians. He attributed his profound interest in African history to his life under colonial rule, during which time he learned more about the history of the British Empire than his own homeland. Like many others he found himself wondering where exactly people like him--people who looked like him--fit onto the historical map. Not satisfied with an Africa described and depicted as a "Dark Continent," and breaking with mentors who attempted to steer him elsewhere, Dr. van Sertima took it upon himself to traverse an academic path that would help uncover Africa's often ignored past. An adherent of the theories of the Senegalese historian, scientist and anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop, the Guyanese scholar earned his doctorate and began teaching at Rutgers University in 1972.
As editor of the Journal of African Civilization, in the 1980s thru early 1990s he helped provide a voice for numerous black scholars--both inside and outside academia--who attempted to correct what they saw as a concerted attempt to devalue and erase pre-colonial African history. From dynastic Egypt to medieval Islamic Spain to modern black scientists, Dr. van Sertima and his colleagues followed the trail of black history wherever it led, and did not shy away from oft-times heated debates with mainstream academic counterparts. They were however not working with the funding, and in some cases the training, the academic world provided. In their writings you sometimes see the attempt of an artist trying to recreate a fine portrait from broken fragments--bits of linguistics here, some archaeology there, history, art, whatever helped make the final picture work. Some of these works were genius, such as the deconstruction of racial categories that had permeated academia for well over a century. Others were admittedly far-fetched, entertaining the fringes of historicity. But much of it, even when falling short of the mark or deserving criticism, opened up avenues of discussion that had previously been closed--expanding the boundaries of black historical study.
Dr. van Sertima's most famous work would be the 1977 book They Came Before Columbus, in which he put forth the hypothesis that African seafarers reached the Americas before Columbus: during the ancient period congruous with the Olmec period (1400BCE to 400BCE) and other meetings during the late medieval era of the Aztec Empire. Dr. van Sertima marshalled an array of evidence: from agricultural sea crossings and favorable Atlantic ocean currents, to Mesoamerican writings and religious symbology. Most famously, he looked to the famed several ton Olmec heads which--with their oft-times thick lips and high cheekbones--many previous European archaeologists had asserted must have been of African origin. They Came Before Columbus became a bestseller, and was met with acclaim in the popular press, especially those looking to unseat Eurocentric hegemony. On July 7, 1987 Dr. van Sertima even appeared before a United States Congressional committee to give testimony that challenged the conventional wisdom that Christopher Columbus "discovered" America.
In academic circles however, They Came Before Columbus was ignored or ridiculed. Some anthropologists and historians openly called it "rubbish." Mesoamerican researchers charged it ignored and omitted facts. I ndigenous activists asserted that theories of African seafarers arriving to "enlighten" native peoples robbed them of their own history. And, most stinging to someone like Dr. van Sertima, his critics claimed he sought to replace Eurocentric hegemony with an African-centered model. Some outright called him a racist. Dr. van Sertima refuted these charges, firing off numerous rebuttals, often meeting the "racist" charge by pointing out that he considered himself a person of multi-racial heritage--a product of African and indigenous peoples who shared similar fates in the Atlantic world. He denied he was asserting Mesoamerican culture fell out of what he called some "Egypto-Nubian heaven" and dissuaded other Afrocentric scholars from drawing such conclusions from his work. But he was resolute in his theories, and would not submit to what he saw as more of the Eurocentric drubbing he had endured throughout his life and academic career.
I first read They Came Before Columbus in the early 1990s, and was enthralled by its premise. A person searching like so many others for when and where people who resembled me entered the historical stage, I was a convert. And any theory that knocked Christopher Columbus--that symbol of slavery, genocide and the terror of modernity--from his lofty perch was like therapy for a lifetime of mental educational abuse. But the one thing Dr. van Sertima always promoted was honesty in scholarship--and I often admired that he chided those who took on the mantle "Afrocentric" only to put forth exaggerated or absurd theories of psychic ability or so-called faces on Mars. In Dr. van Sertima's mind, such things hurt the cause of African history which already had so much to go up against. And even in the books he edited, he warned contributors to be rigorous in their scholarship and called them out when he found them wanting. As he was often fond of saying, African history is rich enough; there's no need to make things up.
So it was with this type of advice in mind that by the late 1990s I began to question some of the key premises put forth in They Came Before Columbus. Ironically it would be some of the very ideas put forth by Dr. van Sertima, especially his ceaseless deconstruction of scientific racializations like the "Hamitic hypothesis" (which turns numerous East and Northeastern Africans into "dark whites"), that led me to question the evidence he had marshaled for African seafarers visiting the Pre-Columbian Americas. Olmec heads no longer looked "African" to my eyes, as much as they merely resembled the variety of phenotypes that define even modern Central Americans. And the cultural basis for pyramids, not to mention their architectural designs, no long seemed to have definitive similarities. If Africans had reached the Americas before Columbus, I was no longer comfortable with saying that Dr. van Sertima's theories provided the evidence. And on a few online message boards and with friends and colleagues, I said so openly.
But I was always respectful. After all, far more improbable assertions had been made previously by those still respected in varied genres. The progenitors of disciplines like Egyptology and Anthropology were often eccentric, bizarre in their theories and at times outright racist. Yet they laid the foundations for their respective fields, and we are expected today to acknowledge their accomplishments despite their other failings. Dr. van Sertima may have jumped wrong on They Came Before Columbus, but it didn't invalidate numerous other contributions he gave to African history. Nor has Christopher Columbus's lofty perch gone unchallenged by others.
Why in the face of competing evidence did he remain steadfast in his theories, I can't say. Maybe he was too arrogant to back down, and unable to take his own advice. Perhaps he was reacting to the often condescending and thinly veiled race-baiting approach his (usually) white critics took. Or maybe he just honestly believed that he was correct. In a speech he once gave, Dr. van Sertima spoke of his "skills" with his hands as a youth in Guyana, during which time he gained local recognition for his ability and willingness to take on any challenger. Even as a scholar, it seems that fighting spirit didn't leave him.
So it was a bit surprising when Dr. van Sertima, who usually forcefully replied to his critics, remained oddly silent when a 1997 Journal of Current Anthropology article criticized (in rich detail) They Came Before Columbus. By then the Journal of African Civilization was in decline or out of print. Afrocentric scholarship had been beaten and hounded from much of academia, labeled a threat so great one Classicist claimed "barbarians were at the gate." And when I heard mention of Dr. Van Sertima again a few years later, I was told shocking news---that he was suffering from Alzheimer's. That a mind so astute would end up with such a fate seemed surreal. Dr. van Sertima seemed to disappear from public view, until this past weekend when a friend rung me about his death in Guyana.
In the end, whatever one thinks of the theories he put forth and supported, Dr. Ivan van Sertima served as a beacon in a field where black and African peoples had been relegated to invisibility or mere spectators. As one historian put it, his greatest crime wasn't that whether he was correct or not--it was that he dared to put forth the "plausibility" of African accomplishment and African genius that rivaled and directly challenged some of the most cherished precepts of Eurocentricity. In this regard Dr. van Sertima allowed African histories to escape the meager parameters they had been assigned, taking us on treks from early Europe to medieval Asia. He allowed us to think of ourselves as valuable participants in both the past and modern world, and helped us believe we could shape the future. His courage helped give us self-worth, and perhaps in the end that was his most valuable contribution.
by Dr. Ivan van Sertima:
Malegapuru William Makgoba, ed., African Renaissance, Mafube and Tafelberg, Sandton and Cape Town, 1999
Runoko Rashidi and Ivan van Sertima, ed., African Presence in Early Asia, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995 (1985)
Ivan van Sertima, ed., African Presence in early Europe, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1985
____ Black Women in Antiquity, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988
____ Blacks in Science: Ancient and Modern, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1983
____ Early America Revisited, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998
____ Egypt: Child of Africa New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994
____ Egypt Revisited, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1989
____ The Golden Age of the Moor, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992
____ Great African Thinkers, Cheikh Anta Diop, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1986
____ Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988
____ They Came Before Columbus, New York: Random House, 1976
____ Early America revisited, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988
____Cheikh Anta Diop, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1988
____Van Sertima before Congress: the Columbus myth United States. Congress. House. Committee on Post Office and Civil Service. Subcommittee on Census and Population.; Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission. Highland Park, NJ : Audio Division, Journal of African Civilizations, 1988.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
The Gods (Representative) Must Be Crazy
Yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI gained headlines when during a tour of Africa, he pontiff claimed that condoms were not the answer to the continent's fight against HIV and AIDS. In fact, according to Benedict XVI, condoms could make the problem worse. Speaking to journalists on a flight frm Cameroon, the Pope stated that while HIV and AIDS was a terrible affliction, it is in the end "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems." Throwing science out the window, it's not certain what alternative means the Catholic pontiff is suggesting. And, deservedly so, he was swiftly rebuked by health officials, activists and others world wide. A rather good rebuttal posted below. And to think, it was written in 2003!
More after the fold...
Is the Pope Crazy?
By Katha Pollitt
www.thenation.com
There are many things to be said against condoms, and most people reading this have probably said them all. But at least they work. Not perfectly--they slip, they break, they require more forethought and finesse and cooperation and trust than is easy to bring to sex every single time, and, a major drawback in this fallen world, they place women's safety in the hands of men. But for birth control they are a whole lot better than the rhythm method or prayer or nothing, and for protection from sexually transmitted diseases they are all we have. This is not exactly a controversial statement; people have been using condoms as a barrier against disease as long as rubber has been around (indeed, before--as readers of James Boswell's journals know). You could ask a thousand doctors--ten thousand doctors--before you'd find one who said, Condoms? Don't bother.
But what do doctors know? Or the Centers for Disease Control, or the World Health Organization, or the American Foundation for AIDS Research (Amfar)? These days, the experts on condoms are politicians, preachers and priests, and the word from above is: Condoms don't work.
read full article here.
Monday, November 10, 2008
The War the World Forgot
In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace.
So reads the intro to a 2006 article in The Independent, which provides an informative look at this crisis.
The conflict in the East of Congo has flared up--again. Rebels backed by Rwanda are killing indiscriminately and executing civilians. Refugees are fleeing the fighting, only to end up in camps ravaged by disease. UN peacekeepers stand by, uncertain of what to do. In a sea of what has become both dismal and tragically routine, the only glimmer of hope is that this time it is actually making the news. It is war that has left millions dead, and claims 45,000 lives a month--yet, until quite recently, this horror has gone all but unnoticed on the world stage. The question is, will it remain so? Will it mean the world is finally ready to act?
In a rare bit of hope, the President-elect has actually been attuned to the Congo. In 2006, Barack Obama sponsored a bill to provide relief and promote democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was signed into law in December 2006. In October of 2007, he wrote Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice personally, "expressing his concerns about the growing number of systematic sexual assaults against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)." Of course, it will take more than hope to fix the Congo. And it will take more than a President Obama. But perhaps it's a start.
And there's no better time than NOW, for us to try and do something, and get this out as one of the top foreign policy issues of a new administration.
Tell the new Obama administration, the Congo should be a top priority at Change.gov.
The Independent article below the fold.
See also, Friends of the Congo.
Congo's tragedy: the war the world forgot
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/congos-tragedy-the-war-the-world-forgot-476929.html
In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. Johann Hari reports from the killing fields of central Africa
Friday, 5 May 2006
This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series Lost, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.
This war has been dismissed as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain's. No, this is not only a story about them. This - the tale of a short journey into the long Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded - is a story about you.
I Rapes Within Rapes
It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in eastern Congo. Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. "Around 10 per cent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them," he says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. "We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a long process."
We walk out into the courtyard and he begins to explain - in the national language, French - the secret history of this hospital. "We started with a catastrophe we just couldn't understand," he says softly. One day early in the war, the Unicef medical van he was using was looted. Coincidentally, a few days later, a woman was carried here on her grandmother's back after an eight-hour trek. "I had never seen anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no medicine."
She was only the first. "We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn't take in what these women had suffered." The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates that 45,000 women were raped last year alone. "It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society," he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret - the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. He became an Oskar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes.
As we walk down to watch 200 rape victims being taught to sew under a large, dark bridge, he tells me what they can expect now. "When the rapes begin, the husbands and fathers often just scarper and never come back. The women never hear anything from them again. Other times, the men blame the women and shun them. It's very hard for us to persuade the women to leave the hospital, because where are they going to go?"
He introduces me to Aileen, who is 18 but looks much younger. She holds her hands tightly in her lap. Her story is stark, the details sparse. Her village was raided by a militia on 10 October, and "they beheaded people in the central square". Her voice is high-pitched; she is almost squeaking. She was seized and taken back out into the forest by the militia where they kept her for six months. "I was raped every night. The first night my body really ached and hurt because I was a virgin," she says. She would be passed on from one man to the next. It is only as she speaks that I notice the large protruding bump sagging into her lap. The baby is going to be born next month. She says she has spoken to her family, but Dr Mukwege tells me later this is a fantasy. "What," she asks me with wide eyes as we leave, "do you think I should do? Where can I go?"
It is coldly appropriate to start here. The rape of Aileen and the rape of the thousands of women who stagger into the Panzi hospital are, I soon discover, merely part of a larger rape - the rape of Congo.
II The Last of the Belgian Colonialists
Bukavu is a cratered, shattered shack-city in eastern Congo that lies on the edge of Lake Kivu. In the street markets, people trade scraps of food for Congolese notes worth a few pence. In the houses, they stagger along without water or electricity. Wandering through this cacophony, I find a lone white woman, a lingering remnant of the origins of this war. She can reveal how all this began.
As we sit over lunch, Tina Van Malderen says, skimming the menu: "I don't drink water - only wine." Her hair is greying but her smile is warm. "I came to Bukavu as a little girl in 1951 when my father came to work for the Belgian administration," she explains. "It was paradise. There were only Europeans then. No Africans. Black people lived in the surrounding areas. It wasn't like South Africa, they weren't forced. They didn't want to live with us. They came into the town to work. They had their own market." She speaks of the days of the Belgian empire with a soft-focus sepia longing. "I have four sisters, and we would swim in the lake all day. It was like a non-stop holiday."
Her family owned a chain of shops, and the only castle in Congo. She is incredulous when I ask if there was any cruelty towards black people back then. "Absolutely not. We loved our blacks. When they had children, we gave them gifts." Perhaps sensing my scepticism, she adds: "Maybe on the plantations they were a little bit rude to them." The Belgians unified Congo in the first great holocaust of the 20th century, a programme of slavery and tyranny that killed 13 million people. King Leopold II - bragging about his humanitarian goals, of course - seized Congo and turned it into a slave colony geared to extracting rubber, the coltan and cassiterite of its day. The "natives" who failed to gather enough rubber would have their hands chopped off, with the Belgian administrators receiving and carefully counting hundreds of baskets of hands a day.
This system of forced cultivation continued until the Belgians withdrew in 1960, when Patrice Lumumba became the first and only elected leader of Congo. "He was a stupid man," Tina says swiftly. "On the first day of independence, he said we had beaten and humiliated the blacks. He signed his death warrant by doing that."
She's right - he did. Lumumba claimed to be a democratic socialist who wanted to overcome Congo's ethnic divisions. We will never know if he could have fulfilled this dream, because the CIA decided he was a "mad dog" who had to be put down. Before long, one of its agents was driving around Kinshasa with the elected leader's tortured corpse in the boot, and the CIA's man - Mobutu Sese Seko - was in power and in the money. Tina's family sold their castle to the dictator as he renamed the country Zaire. "People always ask if he paid. Of course he paid!" she laughs. Mobutu became another Leopold, using the state to rob and murder the Congolese people.
Tina's family started to worry in the 1970s when he announced a programme of "Zaireanisation" - a Mugabe-style transfer of the resources of foreigners to his cronies. "My mother arrived at work one day and there was a black man come to take possession of everything, including her car. She had to walk home," Tina says, glugging red wine.
"Everything began to fail after that. The food became disgusting. Even our dog didn't want to eat it." This is Tina's first visit home - she still calls it that - since they fled. "I saw the house we lived in. From outside it still looked nice but when I went inside..." she shakes her head. "The black people cannot live properly. If I had to compare Congo, I must say it hasn't changed at all. They are not naked any more, but they are still savages." Tina's countrymen established the nation-state in the Congo, and they designed it to be a vampire-state. The only change over the decades has been the resource snatched for Western consumption - rubber under the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and cassiterite today. "Cheers," Tina says, downing her wine.
III The War for Games Consoles
If you want to glimpse what all this death has been for, you have cross Lake Kivu and drive for four hours, on pocked and broken roller-coaster roads, until you reach a place called Kalehe. Scarring the lush green hills are what seem to be large red scabs that glisten in the sun. The term for these open wounds in the earth is "artisinal mines", but this dry terminology conjures up images of technical digs with machines and lights and helmets. In reality, they are immense holes in the ground, in which men, women and children - lots of children - pick desperately with makeshift hammers or their bare hands at the red earth, hoping to find some coltan or cassiterite to set on the long conveyor belt to your house, or mine. Coltan is a metal that conducts heat unusually brilliantly. It is contained in your mobile, your lap-top, your son's PlayStation - and 80 per cent of the world's supplies sit beneath the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As I crawl down into the mine - its cool, damp darkness is a strange contrast to the raging Congolese sun - the miners laugh. The idea of a muzungu - a white man - in their mine seems to them impossibly comic. But they soon get back to picking away at a roof that looks like it could collapse at any moment. Ingo Mbale, 51, explains how the West's hunger for coltan is fed. "We were enslaved three years ago," he says. "An RCD captain [from one of the militias] arrived and forced us to mine for them at gunpoint. They gave us no money, it was slave labour. There is nothing left in many of these shafts now, they exhausted them. They killed many people. Our gold and coltan and cassiterite went out to the world via Rwanda."
Watching these men, the shape of Congo's recent history becomes clear. There is an official story about the war in Congo, and then there is the reality, uncovered by a trilogy of bomb-blast reports from the UN Panel of Experts on the DRC. The official story is convoluted and hard to follow, because it does not ultimately make sense. But its first chapter is true enough, and goes something like this. In 1996, a Maoist with an eye for money called Laurent-Désiré Kabila grew tired of simply running his little fiefdom in eastern Zaire, where he peddled ivory and gold with a nice sideline in kidnapping Westerners. Kabila decided to depose Mobutu, the omnipresent and omni-incompetent tyrant, and seize power for himself. He cobbled together a ragtag army of child soldiers known as the Kadogo and, with the support of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, the edifice of Mobutuism collapsed even before their tinny, tiny advance. Kabila installed himself as another Leopold-alike, banning political parties and bathing in corruption.
But then in 1998 Kabila asked the Rwandans and Ugandans to withdraw their troops from Congo - so long, and thanks for the armies - and the official story begins to drift away from reality. The Rwandans pulled back for a fortnight, but then mounted a massive invasion of Congo, seizing a third of the country. The public reason for this assault sounds reasonable. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - a slaughter that made even Auschwitz look slow-paced - tens of thousands of the Hutu Power machete-wielders fled across the border to Congo and set up long-term bases. How could any country rest with its murderers armed and crazed on its borders? "We must prevent the génocidaires from regrouping," said Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, with the supportive Ugandan military following in tow.
From his palace in Kinshasa, Kabila appealed to his friends for help resisting this Rwandan-Ugandan attack. Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola obligingly sent armies marching into Congo to fight back, and Africa's First World War began. The armies and militias marauding across Congo then became rebels without a cause, fighting each other because they were there and because pulling out would be a humiliating concession of defeat. In this version, the war in Congo is a mess, started with the best of intentions - the Rwandans' desire to track down génocidaires - only to spiral out of control. It presents the mass slaughter as a giant cock-up, a cosmic mistake. This is strangely reassuring. It is also a lie.
Once the Congo was drenched in death, the UN commissioned a panel of international statesmen to travel the country and uncover the reasons behind the war. They found that the Rwandan government's story hid a much darker truth. The Rwandans had a clear intention, right from the beginning: to seize Congo's massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan mine I am standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel away from the news of this war with our coltan-filled remote control. The other countries came in not because they believed in repelling aggression, but because they wanted a piece of the Congolese cake. The country was ravaged by "armies of business", commanded by men who "carefully planned the redrawing of the regional map to redistribute wealth," the UN declared.
The UN experts knew this because the Rwandan troops did not head for the areas where the génocidaires were hiding out. They headed straight for the mines like this one in Kalehe, and they swiftly enslaved the populations to dig for them. They did not clear out the génocidaires - they teamed up with them to rape Congo. Jean-Pierre Ondekane, the chief of the Rwandan forces in Goma, urged his units to maintain good relations "with our Interhamwe [génocidaires] brothers." They set up a Congo Desk that whisked billions out of the country and into Rwandan bank accounts - and they fought to stay and pillage some more. The UN found that a Who's Who of British, American and Belgian companies were involved in the illegal exploitation of Congolese resources. The ones they recommended for further investigation included Anglo-American PLC, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers. The British Government - while boasting of its humanitarian goals in Africa - barely followed up the report, publicly acquitting a few corporations like Anglo-American whose subisidary AngloGold Ashanti has been shown by Human Rights Watch to have developed links with a murderous armed group in the region, and leaving others like De Beers in an "unresolved" category.
Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive popularity of coltan-filled Sony PlayStations. While Sony itself does not use Congolese coltan, its sudden need for vast amounts of the metal drove up the price - which intensified the war. As Oona King, one of the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel together for a few days: "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."
As I climb back out into the hard sunshine, the miners turn to me. "Could you send us a hammer? We really need one. The militias took all our equipment."
IV The Tyrant's Jeer
On the long journey in an armoured UN vehicle, the questions seem so obvious, so trite. How could a government led by genocide victims suddenly commit its own epic crime against humanity, for nothing more than money? The answer lies across the border, through the rainforest, towards Kigali. I meet Charles Muligande, the Rwandan foreign minister, on the top floor of the Hotel Des Milles Collines, the real Hotel Rwanda. This is where hundreds of Tutsis hid out the holocaust while their brothers and sons were hacked to pieces on the streets outside.
Muligande has a strange combination of a youthful, unlined face and graying hair (with matching moustache), and he carries with him the unimpeachable moral stature of the victim. The sadness around the eyes, the haltingly recounted story of being driven across the border to Burundi as a child refugee, the relatives slaughtered in the genocide - they are all cruelly present. How can I challenge him? He speaks softly about the trauma counselling that is happening in Rwanda, and the fragile attempts at reconciliation. And then it comes - the chuckle.
I ask him about Congo's future, and he lets out a strange, hard-to-place laugh. "The DRC is a country that for the last 45 years has had pockets outside the control of central government," he says. "Even on the eve of the election, there will by places that are beyond the control of central government. This shouldn't be a cause for concern." And again with the chuckle.
What about the people who pay the price of the instability he waves away so casually? How does he sleep at night, knowing Rwanda has inflicted on its neighbours suffering akin to the horrors he and his family endured? He chuckles harder now, almost coughing. "This is rubbish. If we do a balance sheet, we incurred a lot of losses in fighting that war."
He says it with such airy conviction I have to grope in my mind for the right response. Why then does the UN's report say that Rwanda's pillage was "systematic" and "deliberate"? "That is an invention," he snaps. By the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch? "Yes. It doesn't become true just because it is repeated. If you have such a blind faith in Amnesty International," - he spits the words - "and the UN and Human Rights Watch, there is nothing I can tell you. It is like you are asking me to believe Jesus Christ is not my saviour come to change my soul. It is a faith-based position." No amount of probing will shift him. When he talks about the genocide, he is compassionate, honest, brave. When he talks about his own country's crimes against Congo, he sneers. Their trauma, it seems, is worth nothing. As he speaks, I wonder - does he believe this, or does he, in midnight sweats, think about the children driven from their homes just like a baby Muligande was all those years ago?
The more I probe, the more his face contorts into the tyrant's jeer. I have seen this before, in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine - the furrowed brow and the rote claim that the evil UN and Amnesty have it in for us. Blood? What blood?
V Thomas Hobbes was Right
The victims of the war - of that laugh - are scattered everywhere in eastern Congo. By the roadside the next morning, I find the living remnants of Ramba village, a home to 15,000. They make up a clump of 400 starving people building a makeshift camp by the roadside. Maneno Mutagemba Justin, their chief - a young man with sore, reddish eyes - explains what happened. "The Interahamwe came into our village. They killed and they raped our women. Now they have stolen our houses and told us never to come back." People fled in all directions, losing their husbands or children. Nobody is quite sure how many relatives they have lost forever. "We have no food here, and we left everything behind. We have no pots, no pans, no water." These people live a long drawn-out postscript to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher who warned that in the absence of a state, life will be: "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Yet the most piercing image of pain I see in Congo is not in places like this. It is not in the pygmy village where children with sweet distended bellies sleep with their families in the tea-bushes because they are terrified of being beheaded by the militias. It is not even in the eyes of the man Oona King and I see being casually beaten to death by a mob on the road one moody afternoon, another unrecorded Congolese write-off that we swiftly speed away from. No, it is the women carrying more than their own bodyweight in wood or coal or sand, all day, every day. By every Congolese roadside, there are women with ropes tearing into their foreheads as they bind a massive load on to their backs. With so few horses, so few cars and so few roads, starving women are used here as pack-horses, transporting anything that needs to be moved on their backs for 50p a day. They are given the quaint title of "porters".
Francine Chacopawa is 30 but she looks much older, her faced lined and cratered in a complex topography of pain. Her spine is curved, her skin is rough and broken, her hands calloused. When she laboriously puts down the wood she is carrying, she has a red canyon in her forehead where the rope was, rimmed with sores that weep from the rubbing. "This is the rope that keeps my household alive," she says. It is the war that has reduced her to this state. "Since the war started, you can't farm in peace, and the children are starving, so I prefer to die in this work... My husband cannot get a job, so this is what I have to do. I leave at five o'clock in the morning and get back at seven o'clock at night. I am worried my children are running away to look for food, because we only get to eat once a day. When I get home, my husband gets angry and asks why I have been away so long. We have suffered so much. The children we bring into the world are forced to be porters as well. We are the most unhappy people in the world."
She tells me the pack she is carrying weighs 200lb, and I write this off as understandable hyperbole. Then my translator and the UN driver load her pack on to my back (with great difficulty). I immediately fall to my knees. I stagger up and manage to stumble a few feet before falling over again. I am almost crying in pain; my back aches for weeks. This is Francine's life. She does not even stop on Sundays. "How can I? We must eat," she says. Portering has made her miscarry twice, and Francine says she has seen women die by the side of the road, buckled under their loads. I ask her when she will stop portering. She shrugs, and says nothing. Her eyes say: "When I die." The wood is heaved back on to her back, and she staggers away, the rope rubbing against her sores.
VI The Head of State Without a State
Joseph Kabila is surrounded by crocodiles. We are standing by the back wall of the White House, the slimline presidential palace in Kinshasa, and the rippling, reptile-infested Congo river rings around us. His house looks like a well-kept municipal library in an American town, a world away from the psycho-kitsch of the Mobutu era. The President's eyes have narrowed. "How long have you been here, to think you can write about Congo?" he asks, unsmiling. I say I have been here a fortnight. He nods slightly. "Then that's OK."
Kabila does not like talking to journalists. Indeed, he does not like talking to anyone - he has conspicuously failed to turn up at his own election rallies over the past few months. I have been smuggled in at the end of his meeting with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region, a collection of decent British politicians who have come to try to erode the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by inches. "I want to see some quick wins [for the Congolese people] from the presidential election," he says, assuming he will win the looming polls - the first in Congo since 1960. He then rattles off a list of improvements he hopes to implement to prove that democracy works - better water supplies, better schooling.
He offers up these platitudes in absent English, his handsome face covered with a light sprinkling of stubble that seems to be greying in the sun. He became President at the age of 29 when his father was pinned down and executed in a failed coup in 2001. At that moment the reluctant son of the Big Man was thrust from a life of army drills and watching martial arts movies to being in a charge of the world's biggest war zone. Neckless and nervous, he says his two minutes' worth of stump speech now and then closes up. He signals to his Versace-suited security guards that it is time for him to leave. My five minutes of questions - more than any other journalist gets - have been greeted with a polite stonewall of banality.
The White House has a feel of unreality. It is a hologram of power, the simulacrum of a functioning country. Kabila is in the surreal position of being head of state without a state, President of the Democratic Vacuum of Congo. He has no levers of power to pull. As I discovered later in my journey, he has no army worthy of the name, he has no police force, he cannot guard his own borders or build his own schools. From the sealed calm of the palace, I look over a wall and see the real Congo walking past - people slumped against walls or busy doing nothing or frantically fending off hunger any way they can. The fantasy of a functioning country dies outside his own brickwork.
Since his father died, Kabila has been trying to glue together a nation from the shattered fragments. In 2002, he negotiated the Lusaka Accords, in which the invading countries promised to remove their armies. The global price of coltan had collapsed, so Rwanda's interest was waning. Besides, the withdrawing countries realised they could suck the mineral marrow from Congo without the costly business of occupation, simply by setting up Congolese militias as their proxies on their way out the door. Kabila tried to out-bribe powerful militia leaders by offering them a place at the heart of government. That's why, of his four vice presidents, three have their own private armies. To watch over this "peace process", the UN sent in 17,000 peacekeepers for a country the size of Western Europe.
At the core of Kabila's project to make Congo into one nation with one government is brassage - the integration of the militias. At squalid camps across the country, the militiamen who have been raping and murdering are invited to hand in their weapons and join the new national army. I head for Camp Saio, a camp outside Bukavu where men with Samuel L Jackson sunglasses and cheekbones that could cut butter are milling and mulling as they wait for "reintegration". Places like this are the key to Congo's future. The country's success stands or falls on whether the militiamen can be coaxed to come here and slowly build a state. Dr Adolphe Tumba, the head of the camp, takes me trudging through the mud on a tour.
In the first room I see, there are nine stinking beds. Men are sitting, rotting plaster covering their wounds. In the corner is a soldier shivering in his bed, his face covered with the lesions that come with the final stages of Aids. He opens his eyes - they recoil, wounded by the light. They close again as he curls wearily into a tight ball. I ask the men what life was like on the front line. "We ate. We had food there," they snap back. I ask again, assuming they misunderstood. "We had food at the front line. It was better. Why did you come here without something for us to eat?" They last ate two days ago. They have not received their $5-a-month wages for 40 days. They are starving.
A UN source warned me: "The people in that camp are going out and rampaging into the nearby villages. They do it for survival. They steal to get by. Yesterday they killed a man, the day before they killed a woman and some kids. It's all done by men in uniform coming out of that camp." Joseph, a 22-year-old, tells me he joined up when he was a teenager because his village was attacked by the Rwandans. "They killed my father, my grandfather and my little sister. So I decided to join Mai-Mai [a Congolese militia]. I can't count how many people I killed. I did it for six years."
His friends gather round, and some of them are more eager to brag about their kill rates. They remind me of kids on some estates I have visited, bragging about their Asbos. Are they telling the truth, or is this teenage display? As they become more and more animated describing their killing sprees, as their eyes become wider and their stories more vivid, our UN escort begins to panic and tells us we must leave. "Quickly!" he calls.
As we drive away, I realise it is not enough that our greed for resources started this war - it is vandalising any chance of bringing it to an end. While these state-building camps can offer only starvation and a sometimes-never $5 wage, Unicef says the militias are offering the same men $60 a month to carry on seizing and raping and killing. They can afford it because they still control most of the coltan, gold and diamond mines, and Western and Chinese companies are still snapping up the sparklers they offer. So long as the militias can continue to use our money to outbid the national government, there will never be a unified state in Congo, and life will continue to be a live-action replay of Thomas Hobbes' bleakest descriptions.
And yet, even the best case scenario - effective brassage, a unified army, a coherent state - carries with it blood-drenched risks. What if once Kabila gets control of the country, he morphs into a Mobutu or a Mugabe? Then all this nation-building will turn out to have been an exercise in capacity-building for a murderer. Who is this man with a neckless, nervous gaze? A rogue source at the British Embassy who has high-level dealings with the regime ponders over dinner: "There are essential two theories about Kabila," he says. "The first is that he is a good man surrounded by shits. The second is that he is one of the shits. Let's assume the first is true - what difference does it make? He is surrounded by Rumsfelds and Cheneys, friends of the father who would kill him if he stepped out of line. There is a large group around him whose finances and even their impunity from charges in the Hague depend on him staying in power. Would they allow him to lose power, or even to share it too much? Really?"
At times, it seems Congo is lost in a fog of moral ambiguity. Everybody agrees the state needs to be unified, and there seems to be only one state on offer - Kabila's - given the near-certainty he will win the election. An aid agency head says: "In this country, all you can ask about a politician is - is this person corrupt and self-seeking and doesn't give a damn about Congo, or is this person corrupt and self-seeking but wants what's best for Congo too? Of course Kabila's circle is corrupt. To have power in this country you must be corrupt. It's a corrupt system." The best hope, it seems, is to drag Congo up from being a broken stateless war zone where millions die to a bog-standard corrupt state. To the starving soldiers of Camp Saio, watching open-mouthed and hungry as we drive away, even this sunken ambition seems optimistic.
VII Spiritual Warfare
The coven of witches is dancing and cackling in the water. They have a hose-pipe and they are spraying each other's naked bodies, squealing and laughing. One of them comes up to me, wearing a worn-out Barney the dinosaur T-shirt, and splashes some water at my face. I am in a children's home, Chez Mama Coco, an hour's drive from Kinshasa, and the place is filled with starved witch-children who have been thrown out by their parents for displaying signs of being under the influence of Satan. Some have been burned and slashed, and some mutilated. One of the workers introduces me to a child - they do not know his name because he has not spoken since he arrived, but they call him Fidel - and tugs down his trousers. Where his penis once was, there is nothing but an angry red scab. "His mother cut it off during the exorcism," he says.
This is another consequence of our war. Herve Cheuzeville, the outgoing Head of Mission for Warchild, explains: "The idea of withcraft has always existed in Congo, but it is new to accuse children of it. It never happened before. It is a result of the terrible traumas of the past six years."
The Combat Spirituel church in Bukavu consists of an immense veranda filled with benches, with a neat white building attached. These churches have been pioneers of Congo's 21st-century witch-hunts, and when I arrive at their Sunday service, they greet me with whoops and hallelujahs. The evangelical preacher at the podium has a kind of Christian Pan's People dancing behind him, and he exclaims: "We salute God by dancing!" The congregation contains over 1,000 people, and they look more like the crowd at a football match than at a dreary Church of England ceremony. They blow whistles, jump up and down, and dance wildly. A man with a miraculous story about how he was cured of Aids through the power of prayer takes to the platform. I am told that if I want to talk witchcraft, however, I need to return late on Thursday, when the purgings and exorcisms happen.
I come back, and Papa Enoch Boonga - the "spiritual co-ordinator" - is waiting for me with a 14-year-old witch. I am led into the little house. The lights are switched off, and Papa Enoch produces a lantern that lights his face and casts a long shadow. In his slow, rhythmic French, he begins to tell me how: "Satan is waging war on the Congolese people. He comes to kill and hate. The answer to Satan's campaign against us is spiritual combat." That is his cue to drag out Clarice. She is a small girl wrapped in a big woollen cardigan. In a low, blank rote, her eyes cast down, she says: "I was taught sorcery when I was 12. My grandmother turned me into a witch by giving me a doughnut to eat."
Enoch looks at me triumphantly. "This is how it works! They give evil food!" He takes over from Clarice's halting speech. "Then the grandmother came at night in spiritual form and said, 'I gave you the doughnut to eat, now you must give me your little sister to eat.' She was so frightened she said, 'OK, OK,' and the next day her little sister fell ill and died. Then her grandmother demanded she break the leg of her mother, so when he mother was out gathering wood, she fell and broke her leg. Now the girl started to feel the power of sorcery and began to transform herself into a dog or a cat."
I keep looking at Clarice in disbelief, but then I realise she thinks I am glaring in condemnation and I look away. As Enoch speaks, the chanting behind us from the main service is getting louder and louder - "Out Satan, out!" hundreds of people cry, clawing at invisible demons in the air. He continues, "Her father is an artisinal miner and he stopped being able to find anything because of her sorcery. They fell into poverty."
I have to interrupt. I ask Clarice, softly: "Do you really think it is your fault your little sister died?" "Yes," she says. Her eyes remain fixed on the floor. "It was actually her parents who realised she was a witch," Enoch says. "They were very worried about their lives going bad, and they went to church and prayed and God told them what the problem was." He says they conducted an exorcism of Clarice, and, yes, it was tough. "When you cast Satan out, you almost destroy the person, but they come back with Jesus Christ in their heart."
As I look into Clarice's downcast eyes, I realise it is not only the physical landscape of Congo that lies in ruins. The psychological landscape has been trashed. The war has left girls like her in a society littered with superstition landmines that will not be cleared away for decades. She limps away, back to a life soaked in self-hate.
VIII - Packing Out the Albert Hall
The last time there was a holocaust in Congo, British and American people reacted with a great national revulsion. Books like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Crime of the Congo topped the bestseller lists, millions petitioned parliament to act, and the Royal Albert Hall was packed out with mass meetings detailing the Congo's long nightmare. A century on, the words and analyses of that great campaign still ring true. Joseph Conrad called it "the vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the human conscience" - words that would make a perfect introduction to the reports of the UN Panel of Experts now.
But today, these four million people have died in the dark, unnoticed and unmourned. The generations living in the West today have said nothing while the country has been reduced to near-Leopoldian levels of desperation by the scramble for loot, conducted on our behalf and for our benefit. The average life-expectancy in Congo is 43 and falling. I did not see any elderly people on my journey; they do not exist. In a country where the war is laughably referred to as "winding down", a World Trade Center-full of people is butchered every two days, and in the lost rural areas I could not reach, bubonic plague has made a triumphant come-back. A health minister says in despair: "I have been told by the UN to prepare a plan for avian flu. I had to write back and say I am powerless to deal with the plague, so what am I supposed to do about chickens?"
This war was launched by nations that sensed - rightly - that our desire for coltan and diamonds and gold far outweighed our concern for the lives of black people. They knew that we would keep on buying, long after the UN had told us time and again that people were dying to provide our mobiles and games consoles and a girl's best friend. Today, we still buy, and the British Government - along with the rest of the democratic world - obstructs any attempt to introduce legally enforceable regulations to stop corporations trading in Congolese blood. They ignore the UN's warnings that: "Without the wealth generated by the illegal exploitation of natural resources arms cannot be bought, hence the conflict cannot be perpetuated," and insist that voluntary regulations - asking corporations to be nice to Africans - is "the most effective route".
In Bukavu, a 29-year-old human rights campaigner called Bertrand Bisimwa summarised his country's situation for me with cruel concision. "Since the 19th century, when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an inconvenience." As he speaks, I picture the raped women with bullets burying through their intestines and try to weigh them against the piles of blood-soaked electronic goods sitting beneath my Christmas tree with their little chunks of Congolese metal whirring inside. Bertrand smiles and says, "Tell me - who are the savages? Us, or you?"
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Zimbabwe -Breaking the Silence from Across the Black Atlantic
Zimbabwe. I’ve neglected to speak on the situation in the Southern African country, despite the recent events that have taken place since the elections held back in late March. The situation is Zimbabwe a convoluted one. Here in the West, many in the black activist community have taken a strong stance, so much so that an opposing opinion is tantamount to some form of Pan African “race treason.” Far be it from me to care about being accused of such a thing. However as emotions tend to run high on the topic, I thought I’d give it a few weeks before I said anything. So this is my Zimbabwe commentary. However it is not so much about the elections that have recently taken place, the unheard of refusal to release results after almost a month, the recent run-off polls, or the bizarre cache of Chinese weapons (destined for Mugabe's government) that black union members refused to unload from a ship. Rather, this is about how we in the black western world view and talk about Zimbabwe—or better perhaps, how some attempt to stop us from doing so openly and honestly.
Zimbabwe. The recent elections have pitted two bitter forces against each other. On the one hand we have Robert Mugabe, hailed by many black activists around the world as a freedom fighter. On the other hand we have an opposition party, a hodge-podge of dissenting interests funded in party by a wealthy white minority, and backed by a former coloniser (the UK) as well as other Western powers. The 84 year old Mugabe and the ZANU PF have fought this election, and previous ones, by portraying themselves as freedom fighters against Western encroachment. And many blacks in the West, particularly the US, admire him and throw their support behind him based on this premise. It is an understandable choice, given the history of Zimbabwe under brutal colonizing regimes that massacred black Africans, engaged in whole-sale theft of land and set up oppressive regimes. Given that, I’d at first glance support Robert Mugabe and any leader in Africa who claimed to be fighting for African sovereignty. Only one problem with that analysis--the people most harmed by Mugabe's rule haven’t been the historical white oppressors. Rather, they’ve been other black Zimbabweans.
From shutting down the press, to destroying the shanty towns of hundreds of thousands of poor squatters, to torturing, beating and even killing dissidents (as reported by independent witnesses), the ZANU PF under Mugabe has oppressed more Africans than it has the minority of wealthy whites it is allegedly fighting against. By holding onto power for over two decades (a troubling sign in of itself) and declaring himself the only guarantor of Zimbabwe's sovereignty, the bitter irony is that Robert Mugabe went from freedom fighter to despotic autocrat, and has sowed the very seeds that allow foreign critics (Britain, the US and others) to both demonise him and ultimately gain control thru such groups as the MDC. What Mugabe should have done was groomed a legitimate and respected cadre of future leaders to take over, to take the struggle where he obviously could not, rather than holding onto the reins of power between himself and a handful of cronies. Now the people of Zimbabwe (on the face of it well over half of them, and most likely much more, given the intimidation tactics of the security forces loyal to Mugabe in suppressing the vote among rivals) have finally decided that enough is enough. And they're willing to go to the MDC--even with its troubling ties to the West--rather than endure another era of Mugabe/ZANU PF rule.
When the last round of elections were held in Zimbabwe, I had written then that the people of that country were between a rock and a hard place. Choose the oppressive autocrat they used to admire, or go with the opposition party whose ties they rightly question. What has always been needed is a choice that is not the MDC and certainly not Robert Mugabe. But given his tight grip on power, Robert Mugabe was the only person who could have seen to this, if his true concern was Zimbabwe in the first place. The sad fact is that Mugabe and the Western powers feed off each other. He casts himself as the black vanguard against Western encroachment and they cast him as a dictator. The more they push, the more he claims the enemies are at the gate and he is the only one that can save Zimbabwe. The more he tightens his hold on power, the more they demonise him, and place restrictive sanctions that only hurt the people of Zimbabwe. It has been a perfect symbiosis that groups like Africa Action pointed out do nothing to help the people of Zimbabwe, but keep Mugabe in power without his acknowledging his shortcomings, and simultaneously giving the West another “African despot” to rail against without having to acknowledge the harm of colonialism and neoliberalism.
Of course, listen to numerous black activists in the US, and they have decided they know what is best for the Zimbabwe people. To many black activists in the West who pay attention to such things, Mugabe is a revered figure who is beyond criticism. Usually if there is any criticism, it is glossed over as "well I know he does some things, but..." or "he may somehow abuse his power, but...." Either that, or some comparison is made by saying "well look at how much people Bush has killed,” as if that somehow makes oppression by Mugabe better. No actual refutable case is made when out-of-hand dismissing Mugabe's documented cases of torture, abuse, and silencing of black opposition members. When such evidence is ever presented, the usual retort is that independent observers, who are deemed worthy when they are pointing out abuse by Western powers, are allegedly no longer credible sources. The brutality of the 1980s carried out under Mugabe's watch in Matebeleland in which thousands of civilians died, is either ignored or excused in a myriad of ways--as somehow these black activists in the West know better about the goings-ons in Zimbabwe than the thousands of witnesses who have long reported on it. To Mugabe's black defenders in the West, they see the war veterans aligning behind Mugabe, and that's all they need.
The hard truth is that the Mugabe revered and romanticized by the black activist crowd in America is the one of the revolutionary that Bob Marley sang to during the hey-day of Zimbabwe independence. It is not the one with the sad and jaded history that followed in the two decades since. This new Mugabe who has aged with the time is something much of the black activist world remains in staunch denial about.
And, as I have personally learned, to voice criticism of Mugabe is to open one's self up to countless and ceaseless attacks from these black Western defenders of his legacy. Usually they sum up their support beginning with the seizure of white farm lands in the 1990s by Mugabe, and go no further. Anyone critical of Mugabe is accused of supporting the white farmers--naturally. Of course, people like myself who criticize Mugabe could care less about the seizure of white farms. Our problem is where the best farmland went exactly, the actual motives behind the land grab and a host of other abusive acts by the ZANU PF that have *nothing* to do with the land grab or the media-hyped "plight" of the rich white minority. The McCarthyist attack on black dissenters of Mugabe in the West became so high, that in 2003 The Black Commentator put out a special titled "The Debate on Zimbabwe Will Not be Throttled" to indicate that Mugabe’s stifling of the free press, was not about to reach across the Atlantic.
In a recent article for Black Commentator, Bill Fletcher, a past president of TransAfrica Forum, spoke of a recent visit to Zimbabwe, where he had to explain to perplexed black union workers that many black activists who had supported their liberation struggle, who had criticized apartheid in South Africa, were now backing Mugabe. As he put it, “they shook their heads in collective disbelief.”
So the question to be put to those who defend President Robert Mugabe so insistently, who can so easily and willlingly explain away his wrongs, gloss them over and then hurl accusations of treason and treachery at those who disagree, remains this: is it the people of Zimbabwe you’re fighting for—or is it just one man?
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The Global Gag Rule- A Matter of Life and Death
The Global Gag Rule (or the Mexico City Policy as it is best known) which restricts the use of funds on abortion and other related aspects of reproductive medicine, is having a detrimental effect on the health of women--specifically poor women of color--around the world. Chances are high that ending the GGR will hinge on who is in the White House. And for many women in developing countries, that choice will be a matter of life and death.
The Global Gag Rule came about as a backlash to Roe v. Wade. First formulated by Sen. Jesse Helms, it restricted access to abortions to women in developing countries where America was providing aid. It's most extreme implementation came in 1984, under President Ronald Reagan, in the form of the so-called Mexico City Policy. As a USAID states on their site, "The Mexico City Policy requires foreign nongovernmental organizations to certify that they will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning as a condition for receiving USAID assistance for family planning." Thus not only was American health aid not allowed to go towards such endeavors, but poor countries were themselves restricted from using their own public funding for abortion and related aspects of women's health. The GGR remained in effect until 1993, when newly elected President Bill Clinton repealed the policy, citing it as "excessively broad" and stated that it "undermined efforts to promote safe and efficacious family planning programs in foreign nations."
Upon taking office in 2001 however, President George W. Bush immediately re-authorized the GGR as US foreign policy through executive order, stating, "It is my conviction that taxpayer funds should not be used to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion, either here or abroad."
Since then, numerous domestic and international groups have been tracking the consequences of the reimplementation of the Mexico City Policy. What they've found is that across the board it has been dire, contributing to a lack of access for women in poor countries to comprehensive health services. By denyingNGOs from "actively promoting abortion," the GGR also restricts any attempts to aid local grassroots women's movements in foreign countries fighting to legalize or make abortion available as a method of family planning.
Dr. Ejike Oji of Nigeria testifying before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs states:"Women in Nigeria are dying and are maimed daily and needlessly from lack of access to reproductive health care and the all-too-often resulting unsafe abortions. U.S. policy – the Global Gag Rule – is directly at odds with efforts to address these threats to maternal health.
In Kenya, where abortion is illegal with the exception of rape and where the life of
the mother is at risk, unsafe abortion accounts for 30% of maternal deaths, and at least half of the hospitalizations in public gynecology wards. Because of this Kenyan doctors often take a very "liberal" approach to the interpretation of Kenya's restrictive abortion policy, with the knowledge that if they do not, women will be forced to conduct unsafe abortions that place their lives at higher risk. While local Kenyan women's groups have been pushing for greater reproductive rights, the GGR undermines their efforts at every turn. A January 2008 article in Ms. Magazine notes that this forces many such groups and physicians to make hard choices:Women's-rights groups in Kenya have been pushing for a new national law on reproductive rights, as well as supporting a continental protocol on the rights of African women and a patients' bill of rights. But they're not helped in their efforts to improve reproductive health care by the global gag rule, which has forced a number of clinics to turn down U.S. funds rather than stop discussing abortion. Three clinics of the Family Planning Association of Kenya (an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation) and two clinics of Marie Stopes International (the U.K.-based reproductive-health NGO) have been closed for loss of funds, according to a 2004 report from the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy in San Francisco.
As a 2006 article on Uganda from Off Our Backs points out, "Bush foreign policy, as seen in the Global Gag Rule, contributes to the silence that surrounds abortion.... The policy was meant to reduce the number of abortions; instead, women who need these services are dying from complications due to unsafe abortions."
Tied into women's reproductive rights, the GGR has also had a detrimental effect on varied aspects of sex education, so vital in fighting the global AIDS epidemic:The global gag rule has also led to a pullback in overseas delivery of contraceptives, according to recent testimony by Rep. Nita M.Lowey (D-N.Y.) before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "U.S. shipments of contraceptives have ceased to 20 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In some areas, the largest distribution centers for contraceptives have experienced decreased access for over 50 percent of the women they serve."
This decrease in funding for essentials such as contraceptives is already threatening to reverse positive results in high HIV-infected areas such as Uganda, where the impressive gains made in encouraging safe-education is now being replaced by "abstinence-only" programs--which is supported by the GGR's broad premise. This has often put conservative US policies in line with the policies of conservatives in Uganda, both tragically out of touch with what global and local physicians see as the pressing medical needs of the people.
University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty member John Ferrick, who organizes an annual Uganda Study Abroad trip, has noticed first hand how GGR has dismantled that country's effective fight against HIV spread and infection....in past years there were many condom advertisements and billboards. This was in accordance with Uganda's ABC program to fight HIV/AIDS: Abstinence, Be faithful, use Condoms. Their ABC program helped to make them a model for dealing with HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. During my trip this year, however, I saw only one condom billboard. There was, however, an abundance of abstinence billboards, sponsored by the First Lady of Uganda, JanetMuseveni. The switch from condoms to abstinence is not only because of the beliefs of President Museveni and his wife but also because of Washington, D.C
Local MD Fred Wabwire-Mangen, MD and professor at the Ugandan Institute of Public Health, agrees: "Washington will fund anything for abstinence," he says.
In early March 2008, Population Action International (PAI) and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) conducted a joint policy research trip to Zambia, to study the effects of the GGR and the conservative US foreign aid policy on women's health. Their findings paint a dire picture:By all appearances, reproductive health seems to have vanished from Zambia both conceptually and as a health service. At the policy level, there is no official framework forSRHR. At the program level, sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services are thin and fall far short of demand. Rates of maternal death, unplanned pregnancy and unsafe abortion -- especially among young women -- are persistently high. Contraceptivestockouts have become more frequent and community-based SRH outreach throughout rural Zambia is non-existent, thanks to the Global Gag Rule. While the U.S. is one of a handful of donors providing FP/RH assistance and donated contraceptives to Zambia (about $6 million in FY07, compared with $216 million in PEPFAR funding), this small amount of U.S. assistance is hamstrung by Global Gag Rule restrictions....
As recent as 2007, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to modify the GGR so that organizations that were ineligible for U.S. assistance under the restrictive policy could at least receive contraceptives. The Senate supported this provision and, additionally, passed a provision to overturn the entire policy. But faced with a Bush Administration veto of all the funding for foreign assistance programs, and lacking the numbers to override it, this language never made it into the final bill, and the Mexico City Policy remains intact. This month the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bill to increase funding for the fight against HIV/AIDS thru PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). At question is whether the final bill will reflect a substantial challenge to GGR, or maintain the status quo.
So what can be done?
For one, GET INVOLVED. There are numerous groups (listed below) who have been fighting to repeal the Global Gag Rule through lobbying and education.
Second, VOTE. There is a justifiable tendency to become cynical with politics, and especially in this overlong primary season, to become disenchanted. But the GGR was put into effect by people voted into office, on the Congressional and Executive level, and it is the only way to see it repealed. It's your money that's being used. You can decide on whether you want to have it spent further on such things as a 100 year occupation of Iraq, or whether it can possibly be used to save lives at home and abroad.
And third, VOTE SMART. Disillusion with the loss of a preferred primary candidate may lead some to sit out an election or--in what can only be called absurdity--vote for a candidate opposed to their political leanings. Before anyone walks into a booth to push a button or pull a lever out "sour grapes," remember that real lives are at risk. Find out where your candidate, and even your lesser preferred candidate, stands on this issue, before voting for someone who stands for an opposing principle.
It might just be another insignifcant vote for you, one that may not yield *all* that you were hoping for. But for many women across the globe, it's a matter of life and death.
See also:
Articles:
How the Mexico City Policy Perpetuates the High Rate of Unsafe Abortion in Nigeria- Dr.Ejike Oji
Reproductive Rights Without Borders
Are U.S. Policies Killing Women?
What Zambia Teaches Us About International AIDS Policy
Uganda and the "Global Gag Rule"- Off Our Backs
Organizations:
Free Choice Saves Lives 2008 Presidential Candidate Campaign
Access Denied: US Restrictions on International Family Planning
International Women's Health Coalition
Center for Reproductive Rights
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
45,000 Die Each Month in Congo- But What Do We Care?
A UN report released this week says that 45,000 people die each month in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the lingering effects of a war that was supposed to have ended five years ago. It's the most devastating loss of life due to war since WWII. Most of the dead are non-combatants, civilians caught up in the conflict. Half of these who account for the dead are children. But what do we care...
A UN report released this week says that 45,000 people die each month in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the lingering effects of a war that was supposed to have ended five years ago. It's the most devastating loss of life due to war since WWII. Most of the dead are non-combatants, civilians caught up in the conflict. Half of these who account for the dead are children.
As one news report states:"Congo's monthly death rate of 2.2 deaths for each 1,000 people — essentially unchanged from the last survey in 2004 — is nearly 60% higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study by IRC and Australia's Burnet Institute, which researches epidemiological disease."
The causes of death? Mostly disease and malnutrition--the aftershocks of a forgotten war, woefully ignored by both Clinton and Bush White Houses, that claimed some 4 million lives. Altogether, in the near decade long conflict that has now settled into a simmering status quo of sporadic violence in lawless regions, the death toll is thought to stand at 5.4 million lives. There are more UN peacekeepers in the Congo, a massive country in sheer size, than anywhere else in the world. But the resources needed to make them effective, on say a scale as done in Afghanistan or Iraq, is non-existent. So the beaten down giant of a fractured nation lurches from one conflict to the next, with the civilian populace caught in the middle, enduring mass displacement, starvation and disease.
Since before there was such a thing as a "blog," I wrote numerous news articles on the war dating back to at least 1998. I watched as what should have been the victorious overthrow of the Western backed dictator Mobutu Sesse Soku turned into chaos and then an utter nightmare, with its seeds ominously linked to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. I noticed how the mainstream news media failed to focus on the conflict, even as it thretaened to turn into a full continental power struggle, drawing in several nations, with even Libya and South Africa on the brink of joining the melee. When Ted Koppel's Nightline did decide to cover the story, he actually apologised, for not having done it sooner. Some three years after the war had begun, a major American news agency had finally dedicated a weeklong series to the devastating war in Congo. It was so little, so late, but still many were thankful. Unfortunately, that first episode aired on Sept. 10th, 2001. The events of the following Tuesday made certain the woes of the Congo would be buried and forgotten again, as American lives and the Mideast became all consuming.
The war in Congo in fact would end, ironically enough, when the many countries and factions found their sources of Western weapons drying up with the coming "War on Terror." They negotiated their own peace, but left the country in utter shambles. Imagine if after WWII, there had been no Marshall Plan, and the many Axis fighters had splintered into factions that could rape, pillage and plunder at will. Imagine if all the sides in the Yugoslavian conflict had been armed, and left to their own destructive devices. Imagine a broken and fractured Iraq, where every leader with a gun wants his own fiefdom, but a hundred times worse. That only begins to sum up the modern day problems in Congo.
And yet, I haven't seen anyone declare a "War on Poverty" for the Congo. I haven't seen massive debt relief for the DRC accumulated under Mobutu, in the same way Iraq's debt accrued under Saddam Hussein was forgiven. There's little talk of the DRC on the nightly news, or by pundits of the conservative or so-called "liberal" media. People who march against war in US cities aren't marching much for peace in the Congo. Aren't many actors and actresses wearing END CONGO WAR! buttons. There's no major peace plan launched in Annapolis to solve Congo's crises, which in a decade have taken infinitely more lives than over sixty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I haven't heard a single question put to any presidential candidate in either party regarding what ideas they might have to bring some resolution to the Congo's lengthy and disastrous conflict. It's amazing to think that over 5 million human lives could be snuffed out due to war, and hardly seem to make a ripple or sound in this increasingly connected and globalised world I keep hearing about.
Every once in a while the DRC makes it back into the headlines, when there's something so graphic and horrendous it titilates the Western pornographic gaze--be it tales of cannibalism or mass rape in Eastern Congo--and fulfills our racial fascination with "Darkest Africa." But unlike Darfur, for some reason, the Congo never stays long in the press. And as much as I at times grit my teeth at the "Save Africa" ONE crusaders who cry "poor Africa" without ever seeming to see our own neoliberal, weapons sales, post-colonial role in varied crises, a little attention and focus on the DRC might be a good thing. So every once in a while, when something like this report comes out, I type out a blog as a reminder to myself and others.
Because I figure some of us have to care...
More on the Congo:
Africa Action- DRC
Democracy for Congo
Congo: Plunder and Submission
The War on Women
Do Something!
Friends of the Congo
Congo Global Action Network
Standing With Our Sisters- Benefit for Rape Survivors of Eastern Congo
Panzi Hospital of Bukavu
50 Years is Enough
V-Day
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
What's Hardcore? Cry Somalia
So the news is reporting that the UN has named Somalia the most pressing humanitarian disaster in the world at the moment, overshadowing both more popular places of discussion like Iraq or Darfur. To date, some 1 million Somalis have been displaced as their country goes through another round of upheavals. What's most tragic about this, is that just a little over a year ago, Somalia was showing promise. An Islamist group calling itself the Islamic Courts had routed the dreaded warlords and brought peace and stability. While there were differences and controversies amongst the Islamists in their rule (some factions wanted to introduce Sharia law), for the most part they were welcomed by Somalis who had seen decades of chaos and were thankful for peace. Enter however the Bush administration. Deciding that anything with the word "Islam" in it must inherently be dangerous, the US declared the Islamic Courts "terrorists" in league with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration in fact backed the warlords--the very ones they had fought a decade ago--with money and weapons against the Islamist fighters. That gamble failed, as the Somali people chose the Islamic Courts who routed the warlords. Unable to deal with the reality on the ground, the Bush regime decided to change it.
They found a willing and eager ally in the despotic Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who when not oppressing his own citizens always has time to be a US lackey. In short time, American trained, American supplied and American backed Ethiopian troops, supported by US military gunships and intelligence, overran Somalia, pushed out the Islamic Courts and helped install the UN picked transitional government--made up, naturally enough, of former warlords. Since then, Somalia has deteriorated to a state of anarchy and war unseen in decades. The death toll mounts, a million refugees have been created, Islamic insurgents fight against America's proxy Ethiopian occupiers, and a weak propped up government sits in Mogadishu with no popular support. All we're missing to make this Iraq II are the car bombs. Somehow all of this--including the US machinations that have led to this latest set of tragedies--glided beneath the radar of the mainstream press.
Below are several articles or discussions on the issue, some dating back a year to give perspective. The song above is by Somali artist K'naan, who is trying as best he can to talk about the plight of his country. Question is, who's listening?
Destabilizing the Horn Jan. 07 The Nation
Somalia Victimized by U.S., Ethiopia and Their Warlord Allies - Jan. 07 Black Agenda Report
Bush's Somalia Strategy Enables an Ethiopian Despot - Feb. 07 The Nation
U.S. Made Mess in Somalia - Apr. 07 The Independent Institute
The Bush Doctrine in Somalia: Yet Another Success - Uruknet.info Nov. 07
Former UN Spokesperson Salim Lone: International Community Turning Blind Eye to Worsening Somalia Crisis - Nov. 07 DemocracyNow
