This was totally the wrong book on the Congo under King Leopold – I now realise should have read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, published inThis was totally the wrong book on the Congo under King Leopold – I now realise should have read King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, published in 1998, 36 years after The King Incorporated, when a ton more research had been done.
Only a single chapter covers the story of the awful atrocities that were perpetrated in the 1890s and 1900s to enforce the extraction of rubber. (You will all know that the horrors of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and therefore Coppola’s Apocalypse Now were based on reports from the Congo.)
The rest of the book is excruciatingly detailed accounts of the financial & political wheelings, dealings and outright swindlings perpetrated by this gruesome Leopold (one of history's most disgusting villains) who was able to throw dust in everybody’s face and rake in untold fortunes over the bodies of millions of Africans (minimum 3 million) for years.
The author turns a horror story into a technical plod. But it’s my fault, readers should find the right book not the one they happen to stumble over....more
Our young idealistic George Packer joins the Peace Corps and goes off to be an English teacher in a village in Togo, one of the African countries thatOur young idealistic George Packer joins the Peace Corps and goes off to be an English teacher in a village in Togo, one of the African countries that line the west coast to the north of Nigeria. Togo is the 8th smallest country in Africa. 80 miles across and 400 miles long – a little smaller than West Virginia. So we expect a lot of entertaining culture clashes, and we get them.
Difficulties surfaced fairly quickly. There was the problem of names. The Togolese teachers called the students by their last names, but after a week of stumbling over the Agbodjavous, Amegawovors and Kpetsus who proliferated in my classes, I broke custom and went to first names. But here was the rub: among the Ewe your first name is determined by the day of the week you’re born on. For example, a boy born on Wednesday is Kokou, a girl Aku; a boy born on Saturday is Kwame, a girl Ama. So the pool of first names is severely limited and in every class there were bound to be at least three or four of each name. In one class eight Koffis all sat in the same row.
George spends 18 months in rural Togo (in the 1980s that was a tautology, it was all rural). Then he takes a break and holidays in Barcelona and then back to New York. And then, in a most curious way, after 316 pages of detailed thoughtful month-by-month musings and anecdotes and adventures and encounters, that’s where the first edition ended.
Readers were outraged – what the hell happened next? A cliffhanger in a non-fiction book? Did George go back to Togo? Was the coup against Life President Gnassingbe Eyadema successful ? What happened to the village folks that we by now know so well? Don’t leave us this way! So in the 2nd edition George added a 30 page Afterword, which answers everything. Spoiler alert – no, he did not go back, he just couldn’t. And no, President Eyadema lasted from 1967 all the way to 2005, when he died and was replaced by his son, who is still there....more
1. If you’re a white guy who hangs around with a black dictator and the black dictator gets thrown out, you run out of friends rSo, what did we learn?
1. If you’re a white guy who hangs around with a black dictator and the black dictator gets thrown out, you run out of friends real fast. So fast it will make your head spin.
2. If you write a novel about Africa for western readers then you probably will want to have a white guy as the protagonist. Even if your story is as historically accurate as you can make it, except that there was no such white guy in this role of the Dictator’s personal physician, so that part has to be completely made up. It’s the only way to go.
3. If you make a movie based on this book you’ll probably want to take a minor but gruesome anecdote where a black guy has an affair with one of Idi Amin’s wives and they’re caught and killed, and you’ll probably want to rewrite this completely into a major part of the story and have the white doctor guy be the person who has the affair with the wife, so there can be some handsome-multiracial-couple-in-peril scenes. It’s the only way to go.
4. The Last King of Scotland has one really great thing about it, the picture of the grotesque, comical, horrible, frightening but 100% believable human His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular. Also ex light heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda. His gangster sophistry, his miraculous tongue. He had all the best tunes.
5. But The Last King of Scotland has too many bad things about it, mainly, the longwindedness of our doctor narrator Nicholas Garrigan. Also, the nervewracking spinelessness of our doctor narrator. Either longwindedness and a sprightlier doctor or crisp unflorid narration and a grovelling self-abasing doctor, one or the other. Both at the same time is a bit of a damper on the whole proceedings.
6. Idi Amin did have a way with words though :
The problem with me is that I am fifty or one hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers have had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.
I propose getting rid of conventional armaments and replacing them with reasonably priced hydrogen bombs that will be distributed equally throughout the world.
There is freedom of speech. But I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.
He was John Rowlands, a Welsh workhouse bastard, rejected by his mother and father, lowest of the low, poorest of the poor. And yet, when he got marriHe was John Rowlands, a Welsh workhouse bastard, rejected by his mother and father, lowest of the low, poorest of the poor. And yet, when he got married – finally, at the age of 49 – it was in Westminster Abbey by a bishop in the presence of the prime minister Mr Gladstone and the painters Sir John Millais and Sir Frederick Leighton and a fragrant potpourri of dukes & peers of the realm. These days people have careers, but in them days, people could invent themselves completely. There were no rules.
When he left the workhouse at age 17, he was unwanted by any relative and packed off to Liverpool and got work as a delivery boy. During one job he took provisions to an American ship and the captain took a liking to him, as they say, and offered him a job as cabin boy. And so in February 1859 he pitched up in New Orleans, and jumped ship. Scuffled around, got delivery jobs, picked himself a new name, ended up a storekeeper in Cypress Bend, near little Rock, Arkansas, which is where the American Civil War caught up with him in 1861, and he joined the 6th Arkansas Infantry on 26 July who were also known as the Dixie Grays.
Captured (not killed, lucky for him, but he was a lucky bastard) at the Battle of Shiloh, and taken to Camp Douglas, near Chicago, where along with all the other prisoners, an offer was made, that they switch sides. This was standard in those days, I don’t think this is done anymore. So he enrolled in the Artillery Service of the Union. At this point he began to claim to be an American, because he’d had to swear allegiance to the American government. Got dysentery, left behind in a hospital in Harper’s Ferry on 22 June. Listed as a deserter on 31 August and never went back to his regiment.
Walked to Sharpsburg, collapsed, a good Samaritan paid his train fair to Baltimore, and he shipped to Liverpool as a deckhand. Went to see his mother in Denbigh, she rejected him again as a worthless ne’er do well. Shipped back to New York, began clerking in Brooklyn. Decided to join the Army for a second time. 19 July 1864, enlisted for 3 years in the navy, assuming they wouldn’t find out about his army desertion. Got ship’s clerk. February 1865 at Portsmouth New Hampshire – deserted again. Hearing of the Colorado gold rush, sallied forth to St Louis and blagged his way into an occasional job with a newspaper, the Mississippi Democrat.
You get the idea. Like a lot of people, he was a great improviser. He stumbled crazily from one notion to another and finally came upon his DESTINY.
In 1868 there was a war which broke out between Great Britain and the Empire of Abyssinia, Ethiopia as was, because of a mislaid letter, which caused Emperor Theodore to take umbrage.
[image]
Stanley had talked his way into the offices of the New York Herald, biggest American paper of the time, and, promising to pay his own expenses, got the job of war correspondent for this ridiculous enterprise, where the elephant British Army was plodding off to swat the Ethiopan gnat. In the event, the British lost 40 soldiers and hundreds of Ethiopians were killed (precise numbers as usual not available). The Emperor committed suicide. All this because of a mislaid letter.
But the good news was that the Herald liked Stanley’s dispatches. So the next thing was that he got his Big Idea. Which was : to be the man who found Dr Livingstone, who had been lost in Darkest Africa ™. These white explorers had to think big. They had to travel with a party of around 250 people minimum. This was because they had to be a traveling bank (the currency was cloth, beads and wire) because they had to buy food all the time. So you needed many guys to carry all this stuff and other guys to be the protection. The guys had to carry the stuff because in Africa mostly you can’t use pack animals because of the tsetse tsetse fly which kills horses and donkeys. Also, there were no roads, only single tracks, and only sometimes. There was no satnav, no Google earth, no maps at all. Instead there were compasses and many unpleasant surprises including people who didn't want you to be there at all.
Signing up for one of these expeditions was a poor career move. About 25 to 35% of them died. Next time a Victorian explorer comes around sweet-talking you just say no. So many of them died on these expeditions! Death by disease (dysentery, dengue, cholera, all sorts of fever); by drowning; by being speared by hostile natives, by snake.
So this fake-American Welsh upstart found Dr Livingstone, and became a big celebrity & best-selling author, and then went back for Expedition No 2 which was to find the source of the Nile and figure out the other big river in the Congo called the Congo. They were so crazy for the source of the Nile in those days. I myself would not get up out of my Barcalounger to see the source of the Nile if it was found at the bottom of my garden, but it takes all sorts to make a world. On Expedition No 2 Stanley nearly died about 19 times, but he had the constitution of The Hulk even though he was petite.
It was now he got the reputation of being a big racist bastard who liked to encourage the blacks by shooting them. He gave himself this reputation by bigging up various exploits in his newspaper dispatches, and naively not realizing that if you did shoot a few natives and flog a few others, you’d best not to mention it, like all the other explorers, who flogged and shot much more but discreetly didn’t mention it.
Then King Leopold of Belgium decided Stanley was the very patsy he was looking for to make happen his dream of personally owning the Congo and creating the horror the horror ™ which Heart of Darkness and then Apocalypse Now were later based on. This King was thinking big. Stanley was hired to populate the Congo River with viable bases where white people could stay armed to the teeth and basically take over. So this was expedition No 3.
Stanley’s heart was in the right place, strangely. He was of the opinion that the Congo needed to be tamed to kill off the slave trade, which was a flourishing enterprise throughout the whole area. In fact King Leopold was maybe the greatest con artist the world has seen, and also one of the greatest gamblers, because when he started his whole Congo thing, there was no obvious way to make money from it. No gold, no diamonds. However, in 1887 a Scottish vet had an idea to make his little son’s tricycle riding a more pleasant experience and fitted air filled rubber whatchamacallits round the wheels. In doing so he invented
PNEUMATIC TYRES
His name was John Boyd Dunlop and his invention sparked off the Great Victorian Bicycling Craze
[image]
and immediately made the Congo a fantastically valuable place because rubber trees grew there all over the place.
So slavery wasn’t abolished in the Congo at all, it was made compulsory. Anyway, all that hadn’t happened yet when Stanley embarked on his last, most horrible expedition. It’s really hard to describe why he even went, it’s beyond our modern understanding. It was a rescue attempt. Some random guy called Emin Pasha… no, I haven’t the patience. It makes no sense. But anyway, guns & ammo had to be got to this guy, all of England was in a state of teeth gnashing angst until Emin Pasha had more guns & ammo to kill more native Sudanese people. There’s no logic.
This last expedition was a total catastrophe – it was a big one, and started with 708 people , and went from one side of Africa to the other side in three years, and of the 708 only 210 survived. And yet it was considered a heroic triumph.
This book gets into the grotesque twisted heart of white imperialism and it’s unflinching. But no one should be thinking that the Victorians had no qualms about any of this. From a contemporary review of one of Stanley's books :
The mounting of an expedition with aims and methods which almost necessitated the cruelties and slaughters that were incident to it… it seems better to remain in armchairs and pass resolutions than wantonly to embark on perilous enterprises which can only be carried out by means that degrade Englishmen
This story is amazing, a masterclass in tangled morality. Lives cannot be lived like this any more. Stanley preferred living with black people in Africa than the dimity drawing rooms of Bloomsbury yet he shot, flogged and hung black people, and was unembarrassed about it. He was not a bad man but through him many bad things happened. This is a great biography all about the inevitable evil and the evil inevitability of imperialism. The sorrow and the pity of it is breathtaking. ...more
I imagine many copies of this bestselling book lie around unread or abandoned. I did not read all 548 pages. It's huge and vastly detailed and extremeI imagine many copies of this bestselling book lie around unread or abandoned. I did not read all 548 pages. It's huge and vastly detailed and extremely narrowly focussed on what Romeo Dallaire did on a day to day hour by hour basis during the terrible period of the genocide.
This is what the whole heart and soul of the book is about - it's not about WHY the genocide happened, and how some Rwandans could slaughter 800,000 of their fellow citizens, it's about how the rest of the world, having been informed of the ongoing mass killings, didn't respond. This is from page 240:
The extremists had taken their cue from the grim farces of Bosnia and Somalia. They knew that Western nations do not have the stomach of the will to sustain casualties in peace support operations. When confronted with casualties, as the United States was in Somalia or the Belgians in Rwanda, they will run, regardless of the consequences to the abandoned population.
So much of this book is about Dallaire rushing about trying to get more resources for the pitiful UN peacekeeping force he was commanding, trying to do deals here and there, like a guy frantically trying to prop up a roof which is visibly caving in by cellotaping chopsticks together. It's just pitiful.
Here's where I stopped reading. Page 406 - at the height of the genocide:
That night I wrote a sharp letter of protest to Kagame over the mortar fire at the crossroads.
This is what the poor guy was reduced to. Sharp letters of protest, while the bodies piled up in the killing fields....more
A 1972 account of a mid-60s anthropological field trip to northern Uganda seemed like fairly intriguing but hardly spectacular stuff. But it turns outA 1972 account of a mid-60s anthropological field trip to northern Uganda seemed like fairly intriguing but hardly spectacular stuff. But it turns out that this was one of the all time most controversial books about Africa ever written. I didn't know!
Or as one blog puts it
EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS COMPLETELY FALSE.
And another blog says this:
What does it say about Western intellectual life that such obvious nonsense could spread so easily across the Anthropological borderline into popular culture and thence into the received wisdom of the age?
And yet, here’s a blurb by the all-time Margaret Mead : “A beautiful and terrifying book” and Ashley Montagu (another top anthropologist)
An important book, for it represents a…study of a unique people – a people who are dying because they have abandoned their humanity. The parallel with our own society is deadly.
Now, perhaps that last sentence has a clue in it. Whew. So let’s try to figure this thing. It’s a weird and complicated story.
What exactly happened anyway?
THE GARDEN OF EDEN
First Colin Turnbull, English anthropologist, wrote a book called The Forest People in 1961, an account of the idyllic life of the Mbuti, who are Congolese pygmies. CT loved loved loved the Mbuti and his book was a hit.
THE EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN
Then he made another two year field trip in 1965-6 to study an obscure Ugandan tribe called the Ik.
IK = HELL
The account he gives is horrendous. It’s a version of Hell. He says that the Ik were hunter gatherers originally, but because of the creation of national parks, the government had forced them to become subsistence farmers, penning them in the mountainous northern corner of the country where it rains only two or three years in every four, and where the soil is poor. He says that the destruction of their formerly sustainable hunter-gatherer life caused Ik society to crumble. Food became ever scarcer. A low-level famine was ever-present, and this led to behaviour becoming ever more viciously individualistic. The family unit practically dissolved. The young and the old were not cared for. Anyone who could not feed him or herself was useless, already dead.
A TYPICAL ANECDOTE WHICH SETS THE TONE BUT WHICH YOU MAY CHOOSE TO DISBELIEVE
[Up to the age of three, the Ik child is ] carried about in a hide sling wherever the mother goes, and since the mother is not strong this is done grudgingly. … whenever the mother is at a water hole or in her fields she loosens the sling and lets the baby to the ground none too slowly, and of course laughs if it is hurt. I have seen Bila and Matsui do this many a time. Then she goes about her business, leaving the child there, almost hoping that some predator will come along and carry it off. This happened once while I was there – and the mother was delighted. She was rid of the child and no longer had to carry it about and feed it… The men set off and found the leopard, which had consumed all of the child except part of the skull; they killed the leopard and cooked it and ate it, child and all.
ATUM’S WIFE DOES HIM A FAVOUR
Atum was an old Ik (i.e. over 40) who was very helpful to CT as he established himself in the village. One day he said his wife was sick. He asked CT for food and medicine for her, which CT gave him. After a while when she continued being sick CT suggested she should go to a hospital. Atum declined – “she was not that sick”.
Then after a while, when I still had not once seen her, his brother-in-law, the beady-eyed Lomongin, sidled up to me and said he supposed I knew that Atum was selling the medicine I was giving him for his wife. I was not unduly surprised, and merely remarked that that was too bad for his wife. “Oh no,” said Lomongin, enjoying the joke enormously, “she has been dead for weeks. He buried her inside the compound so you wouldn’t know.”
And later
I was told this was the best thing to do with old people who died. A funeral, it was said, was a nuisance to everyone, and made everyone upset with all the crying and wailing. I would have given quite a lot to believe that the Ik were capable of crying and wailing at that point.
And later, regarding another old man
In a very short time Loomeraniang was dead, and his son refused to come down from the village above and bury him; his sister hurried over and snatched his few belongings, leaving the corpse.
MORE TALES FROM HELL
caption on a photo
After eighteen years of age Ik women lose their ability to charm the cattle herders [who are a different tribe], and their fellow Ik have neither the energy nor the affection to spare. At eighteen a woman begins to enter the loneliness and isolation of old age.
Caption on another photo
Adupa, in the unused kitchen area of her compound, which was to become her grave. She made the mistake of thinking of it as a home. Her parents were unable to feed her, and when she persisted in her demands they shut her in. She was too weak to break her way out, and after a few days her dead body was unceremoniously thrown out.
Caption on another photo which shows a small boy and his taller brother
Liza, younger brother of Murai, died while his older brother thrived. He made the mistake of expecting more of family than mere tolerance. Murai would eat while his brother, starving, watched. Yet he showed no malice or hatred, no regret, nothing. As Murai said, surely, it is better that one lives than that they both should die.
CT remarks that in famine conditions
There simply was not room, in the life of these people, for such luxuries as family and sentiment and love. So close to the verge of starvation, such luxuries could mean death, and is it not a singularly foolish luxury to die for someone who is already dead, or weak, or old? This seemed to strike hard at the assumption that there are such things as basic human values, at the very notion of virtue, of goodness even.
The Ik present us with
an opportunity for testing the cherished notion that love is essential to survival. If it is, the Ik should have it. Whether it makes them or us any different from other animals is a matter of opinion, but I must confess that early during fieldwork I wrote back that I could not believe I was studying a human society ... I searched for evidence of love almost from the beginning, I found more of it in ... two baby leopards than I did among the Ik.
IS ANTHROPOLOGY A DIGNIFIED PROFESSION?
Of course the proper study of man is Man, man in this sense meaning woman too, of course, of course. But I dunno, the notion of a white intellectual paying the natives to build him a hut and a road to the hut so he can get his fucking Landrover up the hill, and living in this hut for a couple of years, and trying to learn all about this society, and then after this brief period trotting back to the University of Rich White America and writing down what he thinks about these poor benighted starvelings kind of sticks in my throat more than somewhat. And this particular book stuck in a lot of people’s craws, which made a lot of other people want to read it.
THERE WAS A VIOLENT REACTION TO THIS BOOK
One reviewer said
the author’s manner of presentation is distasteful and his general comments about the nature of man and society are both simplistic and questionable.
And
Rather than being a study of the Ik, this is an autobiographical portrait of the author utilizing the Ik as counters for expressing his personal feelings and experiences in the field. We are assured of the author's intrepidity (30), sensitivity (114), and given passages of embarrassingly purple prose (3o). Dr. Turnbull clearly had a dreadful field-trip and has succeeded in conveying this to the reader (Reviewer : T.O. BEIDELMAN)
Another colleague, Frederik Barth, entitled his review of The Mountain People “On Responsibility and Humanity: Calling a Colleague to Account” and he said (I will quote him at length, it's good)
It is emotionally either dishonest or superficial. It is deeply misleading to the public it sets out to inform. Most disturbingly, it is grossly irresponsible and harmful to its unwitting objects of study.
To give a key to some of my indignation, let me illustrate how named Ik are exposed in the anthropologist's text. Their illegal activities are publicized to anyone who bothers to read the book: named persons are accused of cattle theft or fencing stolen cattle (p. 110); the location of corrals for such purposes is given (p. 278); photographs are provided showing named persons forging forbidden spears or engaged in illegal poaching {facing p. 128). Perhaps the anthropologist trusts that the authorities (referred to as "Obote's specially trained thugs," p. 108) will be ineffective in utilizing such information.
And
the face which the anthropologist presented to the Ik seems strongly marked by the Bwana complex. One of the clearest expressions is found in his relationship to Kauar, who emerges from the description (pp. 88-89) as a true Uncle Tom, who used to volunteer to make the long two-day walk into Kaabong and the even more tiring two-day climb back to get mail for me. ... He was always pleased with himself when he came back, and asked if he had made the trip more quickly than the last time. ... Then he used to sit and watch while I read the mail, studying the expression on my face to see if all was well. When we drank tea together he always took exactly the same number of teaspoons of sugar that I took, and helped himself to exactly the same number of biscuits, never more, never less. When one day Kauar fell dead on his return marathon, Turnbull is indignant at the lack of compassion shown by the Ik, while "I still see his open, laughing face, see him giving precious tidbits to the children, comforting some child who was crying, and watching me read the letters he carried so lovingly for me. And I still think of him probably running up that viciously steep mountainside so that he could break his time record, and falling dead in his pathetic prime because he was starving" (p. 89).
GETTING IN TOUCH WITH YOUR INNER NAZI
Well, I have to agree with this reviewer from 1973. This whole thing begins to be nauseating after a while. CT portrays himself as a lover of Africa, and surely he did love parts of it, but the Ik freaked him out so much by their abjectness and squalor that the old judgemental colonial paternalism kind of rose up inside Colin and overwhelmed him, the old heart of darkness thing. He ends up saying that it would be better if the Ugandan government solved the Ik problem by forcibly rounding them up and dispersing them round the country in groups of ten or so. Since they no longer have any strong family bonds it would do them no harm. They could blend in with other tribes and that would be a final solution to the Ik problem.
What a book. I am most profoundly happy to be done with it.
With some books you get exactly what you expected, which in this case, was a bunch of ordinary guys from Rwanda talking about killing people with machWith some books you get exactly what you expected, which in this case, was a bunch of ordinary guys from Rwanda talking about killing people with machetes, a lot. They were all interviewed at length in prison.
During the killings I no longer considered anything in the Tutsi except the person has to be done away with. I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one.
For anyone who needs reminding, the events described in this so easy to read, so very difficult to think about book can be summarised quickly. Rwanda is a tiny African country, current population around 10 million. Here it is :
[image]
There were and are two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the minority Tutsi. In the 1970s there was a revolution and the Hutus threw out the Tutsi monarchy. In the 1990s ethnic relations went over the cliff into unknown territory, and culminated in the genocide of Tutsis over a three month period in Spring 1994. Approximately 800,000 Tutsi people were killed by machete, since all Rwanda men own machetes, since they’re all farmers, so they were handy. 800,000 was 75% of the entire Tutsi population.
Jean Hatzfeld makes a telling point about the nature of this event here:
After the genocide, many foreigners wondered how the huge number of Hutu killers recognised their Tutsi victims in the upheaval of the massacres, since Rwandans of both ethnic groups speak the same language with no discernible differences, live in the same places, and are not always physically recognisable by distinctive characteristics. The answer is simple. The killers did not have to pick out their victims: they knew them personally. Everyone knows everything in a village.
Yes, this was village by village. There were no concentration camps, no need for any of that paraphenalia. This was a low tech carbon neutral genocide. As one of the guys put it :
In killings of this kind, you kill the Tutsi woman you used to listen to the radio with, or the kind lady who put medicine plants on your wound, or your sister who was married to a Tutsi. Or even, for some unlucky devils, your own Tutsi wife and your children.
Of course genocide is pretty much sanctioned in the Bible, as anyone who recalls the exploits of Saul may remember:
1 Samuel chapter 15
Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt.
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
And Saul gathered the people together… And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.
So what was it like for the guys? Well, turns out that genocide can be tough on the perpetrators. Most people don’t think about that :
For someone plodding up the slope of old age, that killing period was more backbreaking than stoop labour. Because we had to climb the hills and chase through the slime after the runaways. The legs especially took a beating
But for the younger ones, it was great :
We overflowed with life for this new job. We were not afraid of wearing ourselves out running around in the swamps. We abandoned the crops, the hoes, and the like. We talked no more among ourselves of farming. Worries let go of us.
Killing 800,000 people by hand is a lot of work, you can believe that. This wasn’t Treblinka. Hatzfeld says that actually, this was more people killed in a three month period than the Nazis managed even at the height of the Holocaust. I’ll take his word for that, I have no desire to check the figures.
I think the dictionary definitions of certain words are ideologically motivated. Take the word inhuman :
Lacking kindness, pity, or compassion; cruel; deficient in emotional warmth; cold.
Well, no. This is wrong. These characteristics are absolutely, quintessentially human. It's inhumanity which makes us human.
I was glad that Hatzfeld pointed out the extreme strangeness of this Rwandan genocide. He says of black Africa that when seeming ethnic conflicts do break out, they’re actually regional (South against North, Sudan) or religious (Christian against Muslim, Nigeria) and usually for control of resources (Sierra Leone, Liberia). They’re not actually one ethnic group against another.
Black Africa is a formidable medley of willingly assumed ethnic identities of a diversity equalled only by the spirit of tolerance that keeps them in equilibrium.
That’s actually the loveliest sentence in the book. Well, it doesn’t have much competition. It’s not that kind of book.
So – this is an essential book which I am not recommending unless you were knocked out by the recent documentary The Act of Killing and/or you’re a fan of Christopher Browning’s great book Ordinary Men and/or you like to find out just how dreadful things can get here on Earth.
Last word goes to one of the guys :
I wrote short notes of apology to some families of victims I knew and had them delivered.
Last week I heard a billionaire African businessman on the radio. He was mocking the Western media for its distorted reporting of Africa – always famiLast week I heard a billionaire African businessman on the radio. He was mocking the Western media for its distorted reporting of Africa – always famine, war, pestilence, death, death. He said look at me, Africans do normal stuff too, they live in cities, they buy stuff.
That may be true, but also true is the endless torrent of aid which goes down the drain into somebody's Swiss bank account; the myth of the virgin-sex cure for Aids in South Africa; the scourge of female circumcision all over the horn and the north of Africa; and the limitless rapacity of the African ruling class. It was headline news when the president of Ghana lost the election in 2009 and there was no bloodshed. You could count the examples of that happening in Africa in the last 50 years on one hand.
The bad news on the tv is backed up by a stream of reportage books with titles like "Squandering Eden" and "Africa : A Continent Self-Destructs". The reporters are then backed up by the historians, such as Martin Meredith's brilliant jeremiad "The State of Africa".
BUT THEN
But then, on the other hand, we have a number of giant photo books about Africa, of which this present eyegoggling spectacular is but the latest. It's hard to made a bad photo book when your subject is Africa, but Olivier Follmi has created not just a not-bad book but a gorgeous brilliant one. Now, the irony of giant luxury photo books whose subject is the poorest countries on earth will not be lost on any of us readers. This book features Namibia, Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Ethiopia. This book like the other big ones I have by Steve Bloom and Stefan Schutz is all about rural Africa. The images are so beautiful and arresting that I can see why it might be next to impossible to wrench one's gaze from there to the cities and the shanty towns, but it does seem that there is a whole area remaining to be explored here – the littoral where the country (of traditional ways of life, traditional beliefs) meets the city (that signpost to the unknown future, that destroyer of what was once certain), where the country mouse meets the town mouse, where African Oliver meets the African Artful Dodger and takes on a whole new way of thinking.
GREAT PICTURES, BAD WRITING
I've noticed in thise photo books that the loveliness of the images is offset by the wretchedness of the prose which is added in the form of introductions and essays tacked on at the end. These are written either by the photographer or more often by his mates, who are universally sycophantic about the photographer and write about him like he was the second coming of Picasso. And at the drop of a zebra they start up with the New Age vapourising, like this :
Talent intuits that one can absorb the "other" without losing a sense of oneself; to dedicate oneself to work with constant care in order to better understand assures us of salvation.
Or
The word is a force. But if it is, it is because it created a bond between coming and going, a generator of life and action; however, so that the word can produce its full effect , it must be rhythmically scanned because movement has need of rhythm which, itself, is based on the secret of numbers.
That's from this book, but it could be from any of the others too.
STUFF YOU HAVE TO OVERLOOK
One thing about big photo books is the unfortunate effect of printing a photo on two pages – you can't avoid the distortions of the central crease, you have to overlook it; in the same way you overlook the unmusical squawk of the fingers on the acoustic guitar fretboard during a violent chord change; and the unrealistically wooden floor-pounding made by the actors on a stage; and the universal crackle to be heard in all old music; all to be kindly ignored; you can't have everything.
A DIFFICULT RELATIONSHIP
Although I love these African photo books, the big question, for me, is can we here in the West avoid patronising and stereotyping the Africans in these pages? Are we glad to find that poverty and extreme lack of resources can yet produce not only beautiful images and an aesthetic language we may wish to appropriate for our interior design but smiles on the African faces, demonstrating that these people don't need our own destructive infrastructures and and gadgetry to live good lives, and indeed, by their very resilience and cheerfulness in the face of limited life expectancy, are they not teaching us valuable lessons about what is essential and true, about bedrock humanity, mothers, babies, fathers, families, villages, animals, the land you are gifted, the work you do, which exposes again and again the tinsel we westerners engarb ourselves with, the glittery stuff, the leaning towers of currency, the boiling rivers of drugs to help us with our anxieties, the carnival of delight on the freeway to oblivion.
Oh well. Now I sound like the introduction to this great book.
I have a bookshelf called "This World Is Beautiful Too" - I need it, because it's so easy to forget when the news never has anything good to say aboutI have a bookshelf called "This World Is Beautiful Too" - I need it, because it's so easy to forget when the news never has anything good to say about anyone, or anywhere, and when the best authors, of the novels I read and the films I see, are filled with dismal revelation, and the better they are, the more perfectly do they express the bedrock tragedy of being a human being, triangulated as we all are between the possibility of love, the certainty of death and our own dangerous minds. So I need my big photography books, and it’s a lot cheaper than going there, too, and you won’t catch anything either. This one is a beauty (but really, it’s not hard when your subject is Africa). After a while you notice that Stefan Schutz’s Africa has no war, pestilence or famine. The four horsemen of the apocalypse had maybe cantered off somewhere else while he was there, off on their holidays in Iraq or Afghanistan, and they left Africa alone while Stefan Schutz was rattling around the continent, from Morocco all the way down to South Africa. More likely it’s because he avoided the middle bit, known as The Congo, where, I understand, the apocalypse is still cooking away, on a low light. There’s not much African photo-lovers won’t have seen before, you get the dunes, the old weathered doors in old weathered walls, the old weathered faces too, and the beautiful young ones full of hope and fun, there’s souks, sheep and dromedaries, footballers, matriarchs, patriarchs, monks, juju men, skyscrapers, pyramids, rivers dried up and in full flow, wedding parties, phlegmatic market-women, wide plains of grass with no one there, cramped interiors with too many people, women doing impossible things with their hair and other women balancing entire shopping trips on their heads, and then walking twenty miles, bicycles, boats, tears, resting, painting, fishing, dancing, bashing things to make a wall, bashing things to make dinner, crazy-ass trees, balancing and endurance, shamans, beggars and drummers, neat and eager schoolchildren in the blazing heat, scarification, guns, goats, grimaces, lobelias, longhorns and all the endless dust of Africa from which we came a few hundred thousand years ago. This world is beautiful too.
**
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Tim Butcher is officially a diamond geezer. He's just joined Goodreads and read my review below and still sent me a thank you message today. RerNote :
Tim Butcher is officially a diamond geezer. He's just joined Goodreads and read my review below and still sent me a thank you message today. Rereading the below review, I think some authors could have taken umbrage because, well, it's actually quite cheeky. The word pompous is used. Some fun is poked. Given some of the frankly unsavoury, if not downright ugly, author/reviewer encounters there have been on this site, I therefore salute Tim.
***
A BOOK WHICH DESERVES TWO REVIEWS – FIRST, THE CHURLISHLY CYNICAL
“My Congo journey deserved its own category : ordeal travel.” p216
I hereby announce my ordeal reading challenge. I will read the complete works of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and Georges Perec in reverse alphabetical order whilst listening to Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Helicopter Symphony, John Cage’s Atlas Elipticalis and Trout Mask Replica which will be played continually on a giant loop tape. All the time, ladies and gentlemen, I will be suspended – suspended I say - and gradually lowered into – a tank containing 127 tarantula spiders and a life-sized model of Richard Nixon. Surely corporate sponsors will be falling over themselves in a bid to offer me large amounts of sponsorship cash to fund my bizarre self-indulgent fantasy. Chat show host : “What was it like?” PB : "Well, my torso was firmly anchored to the ceiling by this ingenious contraption specially made by the brilliant engineers at Unilever (ka-ching!). Therefore I wasn’t too concerned I would fall into the tank of tarantulas manufactured by Pilkingtons Glass blah blah blab blab." Yes, I will be admired far and wide for my feat – I will explain that it was a challenge I had to take on, it came from deep within me, I had been wrestling for many years with the twin problems of how to bring 20th century avant-garde literature to a wider audience and also how to get on the chat show circuit and here I am being asked to explain Oulipo to a daytime TV audience – I feel I may say – mission accomplished!
SECOND REVIEW : TAKING TIM BUTCHER AT HIS WORD
As Tim Butcher grinds his way across the Congo by 100cc motorbike, dugout canoe and barge, he is filled with a rising sense of despair:
“the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141
Verond Ali Matongo : “I am the mayor of Kasongo, appointed by the transitional government in Kinshasa. But I have no contact with them because we have no phone, and I can pay no civil servants because I have no money and there is no bank or post office where money could be received and we have no civil servants because all the schools and hospitals and everything do not work. I would say I am just waiting. Waiting for things to get back to normal.” Tim Butcher : “And when was the last time things were normal?” VAM : “The 1950s. From what I hear, that is when this town was last normal.” p 162
“Some of the best coffee in the world used to be grown neat Kisangani but now the finest hotel in the city served only imported Nescafe” p256
This is the whole of the truth Tim has to tell us about the Congo (third largest country in Africa in size, fourth in population). It’s going backwards. Everything in the whole country – schools, roads, hospitals, trains, rivers, everything, was not just slightly but hugely better fifty years ago. Like previous white men in the Congo, Tim couldn’t get anywhere without Africans doing all the heavy lifting. Sometimes these helpers get paid, other times they’re just being kind. He steps from one situation to another like Harold Lloyd or Popeye stepping from one skyscraper girder to another. He finds some guys with pirogues (canoes) at the riverside, picks out the likeliest looking group, hires them on the spot to take him way way down the river where he has to get to a priest’s house in a particular town (the only safe place) in order to go from there to the UN compound the next day where he can cadge a ride to the next town. When they get to the town “Malike said he knew the way to the priest’s house and I was banking on him being right”. I bet you were, Tim! There’s a recurrent strangeness to these travellers’ tales – in the middle of a disaster zone you can easily find the kindness of strangers. I remember a famous BBC war correspondent being interviewed and the question was how the hell do you get around inside a war zone and he said “I just walk out of my hotel and ask the first few people I see what’s going on and how do I get there and they’re always very kind and helpful” – well, you have to take their word for it. But somebody must be doing all those bad things…
“time and again during my journey with Benoit and Odimba I was struck by just how much tougher and more resilient than me they were” p 148
“Kisangani.. I found it to be chaotically administered by inept, corrupt local politicians” p255
p309-10
This division of people into those Tim met (all good, strong, resourceful) and those causing all the problems (very bad people) was not altogether helpful in figuring anything out. Eventually Tim has to bite the bullet and ask the big question. He approaches it like this. He’s on a UN barge with Captain Ali who is from Malaysia.
Captain Ali : “I don’t know what it is about these Congolese people, or Africa in general, but look at this wasted opportunity… In Malaysia people make millions from palm oil. It is one of the most valuable commodities in the world right now… [and the plants from which it comes grow all over the Congo:]. But the Congo people. They don’t want to make money for themselves. They just wait to take money from others.” …he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?”
Tim dismisses the stock answers – neo-colonialism, foreign meddling, rapacious multinational companies – as so much liberal huffing and puffing. Yes, they are elements, but they are by no means the whole story. But he gives no answer of his own. He has no idea. It’s such a dangerous question to ask – there are, after all, a thousand racists out there who think they know the answer.
Apart from the hundreds of miles of the Congo where there is no single element of modern technology to be found, the towns which were thriving once and have been rusting and crumbling for 40 years, the forests which are empty of animal cries because the local villagers have eaten them all, Tim stumbles (often literally) on perfect examples of things profoundly not working. At one point he realises he’s on the Ubundu-Kisangani road. Before the trip, back in London, he’d been told by the British Government’s Department for International Development that this road had already been developed and upgraded following the 2002 peace treaty. British taxpayers’ money had been spent on it. Tim finds no such thing of course. The once-four-lane highway is now a single track footpath. Nothing has been done. The money had vanished, who knows where. Moreover, the British government department officials never come along to check, so they are still blithely telling anyone who asks that the Ubundu-Kisangi road has been upgraded and is now suitable for cars and heavy goods vehicles.
In the end Tim says : “in six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken”. He does himself no favours with this uncharacteristically pompous sentence, but still, I admire all who excavate difficult truths from such hard-won experience as this. I have to admit, grudgingly, that Tim Butcher has earned his chat show appearances.
Tom Myanwaya : “What makes you do this sort of thing? I would not travel anywhere in this country except by plane. I don’t think I can stand more than a few months and I will leave as soon as I can. There are some jobs in the aid world which you have to do to get on.” p156
I like books that take me out of my comfort zone – this one threw me out violently – within ten pages I no longer knew where my comfort zone was. I foI like books that take me out of my comfort zone – this one threw me out violently – within ten pages I no longer knew where my comfort zone was. I forgot I ever had one.
Here we have five stories set in five different African countries, each from the perspective of children, and each focusing laserlike on the most miserable circumstances :
A family supported by the 12 year old street prostitute daughter
An uncle who is in the process of selling his nieces and nephews to some criminal gang
Two best friends from different religions who find themselves in the middle of religious rioting
A 16 year old who’s fleeing on a long bus journey through a civil war
A nine year old girl from a mixed marriage in Rwanda in the middle of the holocaust of 1994
The styles of the stories shift and mutate, the language is breathtakingly detailed and audacious – the author is a Jesuit priest and often, as he flew effortlessly from Benin to Ethiopia to Nigeria I was thinking “how does he know all of this stuff?” But these stories are totally convincing.
There are two big issues with this book :
1. Poverty Porn
We are familiar with this idea from countless charity ad campaigns, and also from memoirs like Angela’s Ashes, displaying the destitution of the poor for the edification of the rich. There’s no doubt that this collection could be accused of displaying nothing but the very worst aspects of the African continent. Misery and squalor are everywhere. Kids are raped and killed. There is no law here, there are almost no reasonable adults at all. If it wasn’t for the trust Uwem Akpan earns by his authoritative voice (voices) I might agree. And I could imagine some readers throwing this aside in horror for this reason.
2. Phonetic speech
I never like this in any fiction – remember the pages of Yorkshire dialect in Wuthering Heights? Awful. It always has the effect of holding up the speech of poor people for us to laugh at, whether or not that was the intention. Father Akpan embraces this dubious technique fully, he doesn’t see any problem with it :
“Don’t wolly,” Ijeoma said. “When we reach home, we know wetin we go do to oil companies. For now, according to de Retter to de Lomans, even when we no fit play, de Spilit dey play for us! Dat’s why de Spilit descend on Emeka. Gabriel, dis Emeka is flom my virrage. You want mourn pass me? Stop clying.”
There is a whole lot of this stuff in the longest story “Luxurious Hearses”. I just had to set aside my prejudice, so I did. And it’s a devastating upsetting story, swirling crazily from terror to comedy and back again.
So this is recommended. It was sitting on my shelf for eight years before I finally read it, I don’t know why....more
I shall curse my addiction to giant photo books if I ever have to move but what the hell, some things are just too pretty, too terrifying, or too eyegI shall curse my addiction to giant photo books if I ever have to move but what the hell, some things are just too pretty, too terrifying, or too eyegogglingly weird to resist.
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Possibly you may say that super hi-def photos of very poor people living in very poor places packaged up as a huge coffee table book not that many Western people will bother to buy and no one who is actually in the book will ever see is in very questionable taste.
It's an argument.
But for Western people, Africa is mostly all about genocide, endless complicated war, famine and its attendent handwringing rock stars, and wildlife documentaries, with a side order of poachers.
This book and those like it are another Africa. It's a big place, as far as I can make out.
A book like this just shows how limited the aesthetics of modern interior designers, film-makers and body piercers are. Oh, and also how profoundly mismanaged our planet is, but that goes without saying. Steve Bloom rattles my formerly firm belief that photography is the perfectly democratic art. Even I think that if I was in that place at that time with Steve's very own camera I couldn't have got these pictures. When you're next in Barnes and Noble or Borders take a look through the display copy. Beautiful stuff.
"In the beginning, we had the land. Then the white man came and he had the Bible. So, he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our ey"In the beginning, we had the land. Then the white man came and he had the Bible. So, he taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened our eyes again, he had the land and we had the Bible."
This is a great little book about an English guy studying the Fulani people in Cameroon and getting drawn into their complex lives. The humour is spotThis is a great little book about an English guy studying the Fulani people in Cameroon and getting drawn into their complex lives. The humour is spot on, self-deprecating of course (he's English) and warm. Here's one of my favourite bits. Please note - animist religion isn't always the most politically correct thing. Neither is any religion for that matter. Just saying!
The circumcision-of-the-bow ceremony is just one of the complex rites by which a man moves from being a dead individual to being an ancestor available for reincarnation. ... The ritual involves the men running around naked except for penis sheaths and ends in a little play that all men can witness. It deals with the origin of circumcision in the beating of an old Fulani woman. She is played by one of the men, old, decrepit, excessively cantankerous and timorous. He dresses up in the bulky leaves favoured by old ladies and makes great play with bending down in such a way as to expose his genitals. This is hugely enjoyed by all the men present.
The highpoint involves the ambush of the woman by men who crouch down with sticks. All this has to happen under a special tree challed a Fulani Thorn. But sometimes there is no Fulani Thorn available and the tree must be played by a human actor. This part was assigned to myself.
Since the tree-actor is permitted only a penis-sheath as garb and has to wear certain branches of the unpleasantly thorny Fulani tree as a concession to naturalism, it is perhaps not a popular role. All the men sat around afterwards smoking and drinking warm beer. There was some discussion as to who should spit on the widows of the dead man, so releasing them for remarriage.
I see this book now seems to be out of print, in a world where bookshops are groaning with shelf-fulls of Twilight, The Da Vinci Code, The Slap, 50 Shades of Self-Loathing and all the usual nonsense. The world is what it is. I don't have to like it much....more
" Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles " Much has been written on the excellence of bats' navigation equipment. It is all false. Tropical bats spend their entire time flying into obstacles with a horrible thudding noise. They specialize in slamming into walls and falling, fluttering onto your face. As my own 'piece of equipment essential for the field' I would strongly recommend a tennis racket: it is devastatingly effective in clearing a room of bats." ...more
An overwhelming book. I have never been to Africa, never likely to go, and if I did, I sure wouldn't be invited to circumcision ceremonies by the MasaAn overwhelming book. I have never been to Africa, never likely to go, and if I did, I sure wouldn't be invited to circumcision ceremonies by the Masai of Kenya, or charm dances by the Wadaabe of Niger, nor yet the remote burial places of the Dogon of Mali. But Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher were, and for the past 30 years they have been taking their extraordinary photographs in 26 countries throughout the continent. This book shows you some of the Africa we never see on the news. There are no famines, no wars, no dictators, no cities. Instead, there are ceremonies, dances, "the incredible variety of African adornment", and all those extraordinary faces. Page 219 shows us the wildly elaborate beaded headdress, pendants and collars of a 16 year old Kenyan girl. In the middle of such multicoloured magnificence, we see with a jolt she is crying. It is because she is leaving her own family to go to her new husband's family, and she is scared. The strangeness of the rituals, the face paint, the lip plates, the scarifications, the masks, the neck rings cannot be denied, but nor yet can the immediacy of the emotions we see here - pride, joy, excitement, trance, two friends kissing, kids larking, it's all here.
"Barchini, with his chiselled features and long elegant body, was one of the handsomest and most seductive men we met in Surmaland, Ethiopia. After painting his body with beautiful chalk designs he would turn around and gaze at us intensely, seeking our approval. We were so disarmed by his powerful expression that we would sometimes forget to press our camera shutters." You have to hand it to these two. In a book celebrating the expressive possibilities of the human face they have a great line in deadpan : "As we slowly inched our way up a cliff face 300 feet above the ground we wondered if our visit to the ancestors might end up being more literal than symbolic... Aware of what might happen if the ladders slipped or the ropes broke, we had written out our wills the night before."
Anyhow, a gorgeous book for all of us armchair travellers. ...more
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