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280 pages, Paperback
First published April 20, 2004
The question that goes unasked in Western news coverage of Africa, and in most of the other ritualized hand-wringing over the continent’s plight, is why should anyone be surprised that violent European hijacking of Africa’s political development resulted in misery and chaos? How could it be that in America, a country where 12 percent of the population traces its ancestry to African slaves, the vast majority of the population remains totally unaware of this derailment, except by a deliberate and long-term burial of the truth?
In little more than a generation, the Belgian king’s yearning for empire and fortune may have killed ten million people in the territory—half of Congo’s population, or more than the entire death toll in World War I. Even today Japan continues to face international ostracism for its brutal imperial conduct in China, Korea and other parts of Asia in the 1930s, which followed Leopold’s Congo holocaust by a mere two decades. And yet there has never been any remorse in the West over the fallout from Europe’s drive to dominate Africa. Indeed, few have heard these grim facts. In view of the vastly larger scale of Leopold’s atrocities, it is worth asking how he escaped remembrance alongside Hitler and Stalin as great criminals of the twentieth century. If Leopold’s legacy had been millions of deaths alone, the impact of Belgium’s takeover of the Congo would have been horrible enough. But the Belgians also created a tragic example of governance, essentially teaching Zairians that authority confers the power to steal. And the practical corollary to this lesson was that the bigger the title, the bigger the theft.
A barely literate master sergeant, Doe had disemboweled his predecessor, William Tolbert, in a 1980 coup and summarily executed twelve senior government officials on a Monrovia beach. Thus, as enthusiastic street kids cheered the firing squad, 111 years of Americo-Liberian rule came to an ignominious end. The slayings took place just one year after the Ghanaian military leader, Jerry Rawlings, a young junior air force officer, who had recently seized power, publicly executed three of his predecessors.
The scramble to do some rudimentary ethnic detective work brought to mind just how normal it was for reporters to operate in nearly perfect ignorance of their surroundings on this continent. Africa remained terra incognita for most within my profession, whose job it was to inform the world, and for many of us an assignment here involved little more preparation than thumbing through a Lonely Planet guide. Anywhere else in the world we would have been judged incompetent, but in Africa being able to get somewhere quickly and write colorful stories was qualification enough. It was a repeat performance of the same contemptuous glossing over that characterized so much of Europe’s colonial involvement with the continent, and though I had more experience here than most of my peers, I was in no way exempt.