Book Review: King Leopold's Ghost

I haven't written any book reviews for about two years. Partly because I have been reading fewer books (although probably more online material) than I did before and partly because I've been less interested in writing reviews of what I have read.

Here is a review of Adam Hochschild's book King Leopold's Ghost.. I am out of practice when it comes to writing reviews so forgive me if I ramble or repeat adjectives too frequently:

 A Forgotten Genocide

King Leopold's Ghost was written to remind the world of a forgotten atrocity- as such it is both highly accessible and informative.

The atrocities in the Congo included mass murder, enslaving the local population and working them to death and stealing and burning their. Much of the cruelty was officially sanctioned- with secret instructions to the authorities on how to enslave the natives. Some of it was done by individual sadists who were free to execute Africans for trivial offences or massacre villages at will if they refused to collect rubber.

One of the frustrations that Hochschild repeatedly refers to is that the tale largely has to be told from the point of view of foreigners, as the Congo's native population was not literate at the time and left few direct testimonies. However the records of the colonial authorities, missionaries, traders and diplomats are used to great effect.

The portraits of individuals involved in the story are well done, the story of ED Morel who initiated the international campaign against King Leopold's rule is particularly inspiring- a lowly shipping clerk who used his powers of deduction to realise that the Congo must be a slave state and then devoted his life to exposing it.

Whilst I was vaguely aware of the atrocities in the Congo I had not realised how much of it was the doing of King Leopold II personally. He was a deceitful, manipulative and immensely greedy man and his personal culpability in the genocide is established beyond doubt. He deserves to be considered along with Mao, Hitler and Stalin as one of the great monsters of the 20th Century.

Lines On Maps

It looks as though the South of Sudan is going to vote to secede from the North- who will let it happen, which is nice for genocidal maniacs. This is a very good step in the right direction, like many countries in Africa all that links the country is a colonial history not a sense of nationhood. In fact nations in the European sense of the word that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries don't really exist in Africa.

Instead there are a hodge podge of multi ethnic polities based on who colonised them a 150 years ago, in which the prime goal of any aspiring is to improve the standing of his people relative to the other ethnicities. This breeds corruption and racial hatred. In Sudan the racial differences are obvious because the North is Arab and the South black African but the differences between different black groups in Nigeria or Zimbabwe are just as real.

Creating function ethnic based states won't be possible everywhere but in cases where it is it should be encouraged regardless of the vested interests opposed to reform.

Minorities Not Hardest Hit

On a weekly basis an article will appear in the Guardian or Independent claiming that ethnic minorities will be hardest hit by the cuts in public spending. However the coalition government's dedication to keeping the WaBenzi in the style to which they are accustomed belies the idea that they don't care about black people.

Polly & Harriet Go Fact Finding.

I see that Polly Toynbee, Harriet Harman and assorted other left wing women are going off to Ghana to learn about women's equality. Whilst I will never begrudge using taxpayer's money to send those two off to Timbuktu I can't help wondering whether Ghana is an obvious choice of destination to learn about women's equality. It seems like going to Bhutan to learn about coastal erosion.

Luckily the World Values Survey which I referred to in my previous post allows us to compare Ghanaian and British attitudes towards gender equality and it doesn't cost taxpayers a penny.

Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statements? When jobs are scarce, men should have more right to a job than women

Great Britain: Agree- 16.2%, Disagree- 76.1%
Ghana: Agree- 53.6, Disagree- 37.4%

Okay Polly, Harriet, you know what you have to do in these hard economic times, resign so that a man can have your jobs. Of course that's just one variable, the folk wisdom of the Ghanaians is far more enlightened than that of our capitialistic patriarchal society, we need to look at some more questions:

If a woman wants to have a child as a single parent but she doesn't want to have a stable relationship with a man, do you approve or disapprove?

GB: Approve- 33.5%, Disapprove- 34.7%, Depends- 31.7%
Ghana: Approve- 6.2%, Disapprove- 92.0%, Depends- 1.2%

I sure hope Polly and Harriet are learning from the vibrant cultural traditions of Ghana. I'm not even going to dwell on the results for " On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do", because I'm sure that if Ghana had Gordon Brown then their result would be closer to our 20% than their 77%.

(via Mr Eugenides)

Will Get Fooled Again.

The news that the "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was a continent" story turns out to have been a hoax, and not a particularly elaborate one at that is quite funny. The great thing about the story is that all those who repeated it as though it were plausible were trying to make a point about extreme stupidity and in their own special way they have!

Making Guests Feel At Home.

South Africans it seems like to make their visitors feel at home, which isn't so good when their home is Zimbabwe:

The violence in Alexandra started on Sunday evening when an enraged mob marched to a hostel in London Road, targeting foreigners mainly from Zimbabwe whom they accuse of stealing precious jobs and contributing to worsening crime rates.

The crowd beat the immigrants, forced others from their rooms and shot dead two men – one a South African who refused to take part in the attack.

I've heard about the supposed hostility between black South Africans and Zimbabweans before but had thought that it was to do with the South African sympathy for Robert Mugabe. Given South Africa's responsibility for sustaining Mugabe in power, and thus fueling the Zimbabwe exodus, the attention of the rioters should really be directed against themselves. Whilst recent actions such as the refusal by Durban dockers to unload Zanu weapons is welcome, it hardly makes up for the behaviour of the Rainbow Nation's political elite, who memorably gave Robert Mugabe a standing ovation at the infamous 2001 anti racism conference.

{Link via UK Commentators}

Zimbabwe.

These photographs of a victim of Robert Mugabe's torture regime are horrific, they are of the woman whom Peter Oborne writes about here. You can see why a mainstream newspaper wouldn't want to publish them but pictures show the evil of the Zanu PF regime better than acres of news print possibly could.

Buga Me, Mugabe Loses.

With the opposition surprisingly winning the parliamentary election in Zimbabwe and looking as though they ight even win the presidential election there are a few things worth saying now:

• If you are a corrupt dictator who relies on thugs and crooks to cling on to power then it is best not to be so inept that even the thugs and crooks can't be bothered to fix elections.
• Whilst the MDC is a vast improvement on Zanu PF it would be a mistake to expect too much of them.
  
• Morgan Tsvangerai is not necessarily going to be a savior, despite his undoubted courage. As an opposition leader he has repeatedly shown poor judgment and an unwillingness to listen to dissenting voices.
  
• Any successor to Mugabe will be an improvement but we shouldn't simply hand out money to Zimbabwe until the new leadership has demonstrated a commitment to freedom with action as well as words.
• Although it won't happen, the best thing that could happen to Zimbabwe would be to dissolve it into two countries to create nation states for the Shona and Matabele peoples.
• Whilst I'm usually sceptical when claims of racism get thrown about, it is quite appalling that until Mugabe started attacking white farmers he was treated as a statesman and a hero in the west and given numerous honourary degrees and knighthoods despite the fact that he had used death squads to murder tens of thousands of black Zimbabweans since he came to power.
  

No Demos = No Democracy.

This is a version of a comment I originally posted at Iain Dale's site about the chaos that is breaking out in Kenya at the moment, and the more general democratic failures in Africa.

One of the main problems that Africa has is a lack of nation states. Almost every country is an amalgam of several different and distinct ethnic groups which encourages politicians to pander to ethnic prejudices and encourages voters to overlook massive corruption as long as their local politician can divide some of the spoils to his own ethnic group.

Be honest, if the EU ever becomes a country and controlled most of the continents public sector revenues wouldn't you be more inclined to overlook a corrupt British politician if he brought home some of the wealth than you would if a current politician did so?

Botswana is an exception to the rule in that it is basically a nation state (there are small minority groups but they aren't numerous). Botswana is also prosperous and stable in spite of a sever Aids epidemic and I don't believe that this is a coincidence.

Update: Julia in the comments points out this map over at Laban's blog which illustrates the point about the ethnic mish mash that is Kenya:

Ian Smith

The death of former Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith is marked in todays Telegraph by David Blair, who was their Zimbabwe correspondent until the Mugabe regime expelled him. Blair, unusually for someone with that name, gets it right in my view:

Nothing can convey UDI’s monumental folly. Even in 1965, the reasoning behind Smith’s decision was obviously absurd. First, Smith assumed that white Rhodesians – a dwindling minority of four per cent in 1965 – could monopolise political and economic power into the indefinite future. "I don’t believe in majority rule ever for Rhodesia, not in a thousand years," he famously declared.

If UDI was to survive, Rhodesia needed allies, notably Portugal which then ruled neighbouring Mozambique. The two countries shared an 800-mile frontier which had to be kept secure.

So Smith gambled that Portugal’s African empire would last for another thousand years or so.

South Africa provided Rhodesia with oil and electricity. Smith assumed that Pretoria’s apartheid regime, dominated by Afrikaners with a deep suspicion of British settlers, would support Rhodesia forever.

Lastly, Smith presumed that Rhodesia’s black majority – 96 per cent of the population – would accept their status as second class citizens.

These assumptions were so wildly unrealistic that only a fantasist could have believed them.

.....

Thanks to Smith, white Rhodesia dealt with its most dangerous enemy at the moment when its hand was weakest. The outcome was a transfer of power to independent Zimbabwe in 1980 on terms far worse for the white minority than could have been achieved before UDI.

Far from preserving what Smith called "decent, responsible, Christian standards", UDI was the making of Mugabe.

Without Smith’s folly, Mugabe may never have come to power. It is impossible to avoid the verdict that Smith was the co-author of Zimbabwe’s tragedy.

Although Smith's personal qualities were in many ways admirable this seems an eminently fair summary of what he actually accomplished and is why trying to rehabilitate his reputation on the grounds that Mugabe and Zanu PF are far worse is not credible. As with the Tsars in Russia or the Batista regime in Cuba the fact that the successor regime is an order of magnitude worse does not diminish the old regimes failures but magnifies them.

Mandela- Does He Deserve A Statue?

Over at Comment is Free, David Cox's article arguing that Nelson Mandela doesn't deserve statue in Parliament Square is raising hackles as I'm sure it was intended to. I have some sympathy with his argument and I certainly think than Mandela is praised too highly. He opposed Apartheid which is obviously a good thing, but objecting to your own suffering is hardly exceptional especially when it doesn't seem to have imbued him with a principled rejection of tyranny. Similarly his forgiveness of his opponents is frequently praised, but no one seems to ask why it is considered a good thing to forgive people who murdered and tortured political dissidents, although rather conveniently it meant that his ex wife's crimes including child murder could also be ignored. Perhaps it was necessary in order to prevent South Africa descending into civil war and economic collapse, but he isn't praised for being an efficient pragmatist, but rather a moral exemplar. The only act for which Mandela deserves unambiguous admiration is his decision to retire at the end of his term, in a continent where leadership has traditionally been a job for life.

Mandela's record as a pragmatist is more impressive than as a secular saint, contrary to the view promulgated elsewhere the ANC inherited an economy that was moribund and turned South Africa into an economic success story with a growing middle class. The horrific murder rate that afflicts South Africa has actually been declining pretty steadily since the end of Apartheid, from 70 per 100 000 in 1994 down to 40 per 100 000 in 2005, the crime rate was not a problem created by Mandela's rule. If the Mandela boosters were simply claiming that he was a pretty competent president then I would have no objections. They go further than that though and treat any criticism of the man in much the same way that the Spanish Inquisition treated criticisms of the Pope.

This isn't to say that I have any great objection to a statue being raised in his honour, he compare perfectly well to the other recipients of this honour, except for not being British, but his nomination for canonisation is on rather shakier ground.

Environmentalists Whinge About Top Gear.

Some environmentalists are complaining about Top Gear because they filmed some scenes on some 'pristine wilderness' in Botswana, thus rendering it somewhat less pristine. It seems like a somewhat trumped up complaint:

Mary Rice of the Environmental Investigation Agency, which carries out conservation work in Botswana, said the BBC's example could lead hordes of "boy racers" to follow suit.

Guide David Dugmore was quoted in the Observer newspaper: "The thing that worries me is the viewers and public that are going to go out to the lakes, and we will end up with every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes up, with vehicles and quad bikes, which will absolutely spoil the place."

If television is so influential that simply watching Top Gear will persuade 'hordes' of people to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to drive about a bit in the middle of nowhere then I guess it is more powerful than I realised. There is a certain condescension in the tone of the tree huggers that is revealed by phrases such as 'hordes', boy racers' & 'every Tom, Dick and Harry', that reveals the actual source of concern. They think that Top Gear is watched by the sort of people who are stupid & vulgar who are too stupid to watch something on television without heading straight to the site. I doubt they would have been assumed that 'hordes' of visitors would descend to the Congo to stroke gorillas after watching David Attenborough do it.

The BBC's defence was pretty lame as well:

A BBC spokeswoman said: "We employed several environmental experts who advised us on where we could and couldn't go."

'Several' environmental experts were needed, not just one? Nice to know the BBC still provides value for money.

Dubious Fact Of The Day.

According to the CIA world factbook the wealthiest country in the world on a purchasing parity basis is Luxembourg, which is perhaps not too surprising. However number two on their list is, Equatorial Guinea. This is what I believe economists technically refer to as complete unadulterated bullshit.

Londonistan Again.

Wars in East Africa are so common that they are sadly rather boring and it takes something spectacular for thm to make headlines. A massacre at an Ethiopian oil facility that has left dozens of Ethiopians dead has been widely reported albeit mostly because of the chinese civilians who were killed.

Rebel gunmen have killed at least 74 people in an attack on an oil field in Ethiopia's remote Somali region, the Ethiopian government says.

Sixty-five Ethiopians and nine Chinese oil workers were killed, while seven Chinese were also taken captive in the incident, an official said.

....

A spokesman for a separatist group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, said it had launched the attack.

......

A spokesman for the ONLF in London, Abdirahman Mahdi,

Can someone explain to me why we are still allowing terrorists to operate out of the UK? Sure they aren't islamists but we really should have learnt our lesson by now.