This article originally appeared in the Jamaica
Observer.
My first, horror-struck reaction was to grab the phone.
Were any of my children on the trains or on that bus? Two of my
three children live in England and although they do not live in
London, it was entirely possible that they might have been there
on some kind of business.
I phoned and discovered that they were safe. I was lucky. There
are thousands of people who are not so lucky: those who died, those
who lost daughters, sons, husbands wives and other loved ones,
those who were maimed , their grieving friends, and people everywhere
who know that we are cannon fodder in the world war now in progress.
Mr. Blair made it explicit. He was shocked,
disappointed that the terrorists had not taken note of his and
Mr. Bush’s grand intentions
to alleviate poverty in Africa and hopefully, to make some palliative
statement about global warming. For him it was clear: the barbarians
against the civilized world. I couldn’t believe my ears.
I grieve, because, as John Donne said 500 years
ago, any man’s
death diminishes me. I am a part of the human race and any damage,
any loss anywhere, disfigures me, reduces my humanity, my variousness.
Global warming was here this week in the shape of hurricane Dennis.
It will be visiting us again and again in the shape of more frequent,
more destructive hurricanes. Hurricanes used to be acts of God.
Now they are to a measurable extent, acts of man. Melting glaciers,
icecaps, melting continents, sea level rise, hotter seas and more
violent and unpredictable weather are the products of global warming,
warming caused by the greed, selfishness and waste of a minority
of human beings.
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow your children and grandchildren
will pay for it.
When Mr. Bush repeated the riff about civilization,
I thought about the strange coincidences in this life: about
the fact that
September 11 represents not one but two horrific anniversaries – one
in New York, another, thirty years before in Chile. While that
thought was making its way through my head it was announced that
37 people had been killed in London by the agents of barbarism.
The figure 37 was immediately transposed in my head into
73, the number of innocents blown out of the Caribbean sky 29 years
ago because they happened to have been passengers in a Cuban airplane.
As in London, the selection was random: men, women and children,
Christians and non-Christians.
And I wondered, would Messrs Bush and Blair now be able to pay
proper attention to their latest charity agenda? What panacea would
they be able to offer to Africa after their concentration had been
so brutally distracted?
In the Guardian a few days ago John Vidal gave
a learned disquisition on the “kleptocracy” which had impoverished Africa. He was in the
noble tradition of Englishmen since Sir Francis Drake who have
found viable excuses for the enslavement of Africans. In the old
days, wicked Africans offered their kin for sale, and the
poor, Christian English, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had
no option but to buy them to prevent them becoming “bush-meat.” In
the process somebody, no doubt the Africans themselves, destroyed
countless nations, civilizations and cultures and even a university
or two. And Columbus, Pizarro and their brethren were clearly on
a civilizing mission when they destroyed the Aztec, Maya and Inca
civilizations in the cause of returning South American gold to
its rightful European owners.
And when American geographers discovered in
Mexico, ten-ton monolithic sculptures of African heads, they
were in no doubt that these heads
could not have been carved by people who had invented a calendar
more accurate than any available in the “West” for another 2,000
years.
So that I want to know, for instance, why it
is not reckoned as a crime the fact that the United Nations,
under the influence of
the United States, Britain and France, should have presided over
the starvation deaths of a million Iraqis, half of them children
during a 13 year “sanctions regime”? Or why nobody knows
how many Iraqis have been killed in the War Against Terror? Or
Palestinians?
Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush in their civilizing mission in Africa were
given a fine launching pad by the combined forces of pop music
and public relations in the Live 8 concerts. The cannon fodder
of the north coming to the aid of the cannon fodder of the south.
Now, the Lords of the Earth would step in and show that they meant
business. Africa would get some money, far less than it needed,
far less than has been extorted from its people, far less than
it repays in usurious loans. But Africa would get money, would
get AID to fight AIDS and Malaria; get AID if they behaved themselves,
if they pledged to become civilized adults.
The first Globalization
The history of the Congo is the most explicit demonstration of
African haplessness and irremediable wickedness.
Five hundred years ago Affonso, Mani-Kongo
(King of the Kongo) had, in tribute to his Christian proselytization,
changed his name
from Nzinga Mbemba It did him no good. In the year 1526 AD,
the Mani-Kongo wrote King John of Portugal as one Christian monarch
to another. He complained that his Kingdom was being corrupted
by the agents of King John who had abused the trading concessions
given to them, corrupting his subjects and buying their loyalty.
Worse, wrote the Mani-Komgo, “the merchants are taking every
day our natives, sons of the lands and the some of noblemen and
vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience
grab them… and get them to be sold; and so great is the corruption
and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated,
and you Highness should not agree with this nor accept it as in
your service.”
King John turned a deaf ear to Affonso. The
Portuguese tried
to assassinate him, deposed him and took over his kingdom
and began the mass export of slaves to the New World.
The Portuguese never fulfilled their promises
of foreign aid and technical assistance - never supplied the
artisans and teachers
they had promised Affonso as their part of the bargain which allowed
them to trade in his Kingdom. Later the Portuguese killed
another Mani-Kongo, Antonio I, and his kingdom broke up into a
number of small states, parts of what are present day Angola
and the Congo.
The extinction of civilizations on both sides of the Atlantic
provided the capital on which capitalism itself and the European
Empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were erected.
Over the years various European traders penetrated the Congo in
search of gold and slaves, but the vast area once ruled by the
Mani-Kongo was under the jurisdiction of no one power.
So enter King Leopold of the Belgians, just
over a century ago. He asked for and was awarded the Congo by
the British,
Americans, French and Germans at the Berlin Conference of 1886
According to King Leopold, his International
Association of the Congo was a sort of a “Society of the Red Cross …formed with the
noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested service to the
cause of progress” as he wrote in an article published by the Times
of London.
The noble cause was so effective that, according
to demographers, it reduced the population of the Congo by 10
million between 1880
and 1920. Jan Vansina, professor Emeritus of history and anthropology
at the university of Wisconsin said the Congo lost one half
of its population in those 40 years.
The Belgian government, in response to worldwide
disgust at the excesses of Leopold, took over the management
of the Congo and
ruled it so well that Antwerp became the centre of the world’s
trade in diamonds and Belgium, bereft of natural resources, became
a respectable European power. In the forty years between
1920 and 1960 the population of the Congo grew by about 3 million;
in the 33 years after Independence it more than tripled. The Congo
had been civilised: In a country one third the size of the
United states, the Belgians left behind five Congolese doctors.
When the Congolese decided they had had enough of the Belgians,
in 1960, the Belgians, terrified, ran away, leaving behind chaos
and confusion. The United States stepped in behind the skirts of
the United Nations.
The US National Security Council decided that
the answer to the democratic turmoil was to cut off the head
of the agitation. The
NSC ordered the death of Patrice Lumumba. Their stooge, Joseph
Mobutu, carried out the assassination on the instructions of Frank
Carlucci, first secretary of the US Embassy, later a patron of
Colin Powell.
Mobutu was always the Americans darling. As
Newsweek said in 1997 “It
was mainly the United States, France and Belgium that put Mobutu
in power and helped to keep him there as a bulwark against cold
war rivals. He was a ‘useful tyrant’ and as the West protected
him … it tolerated his corruption and autocracy. Mobutu earned
his keep. In his last great service to Washington, he allowed his
territory to be used for the CIA’s paramilitary operations in support
of anti-Marxist rebel Jonas Savimbi in Angola.”
President Reagan often welcomed Savimbi to
the White House praising him as a “voice of good sense and good will.” Savimbi
led a forty year war against his own people and in the process,
left
most of the country dangerously littered with land mines which
are still killing innocent people.
It is obviously a myth that an African king ruled not only the
Congo and Angola five centuries ago. And, when the British finally
conquered Nigeria just over a hundred years ago it is a myth that
they found functioning systems of government. Obviously, the Kings
and Chiefs they found were incompetent poseurs, incapable of ruling
anything and, probably, figments of their own perfervid imaginations.
The French made the point forcefully when they abandoned ship
in Guinea in 1958. They took every filing cabinet, every telephone
and every desk from every government office. Guinea did not deserve
a government.
So when Messrs Bush and Blair announce their assistance for Africa
we of the dark corners of the world, we lesser breeds without the
law, should be properly grateful.
And it is of course, no use contending – as some of us are wont
to do – that it was in Haiti, 200 years ago, that the
world first experienced the concept of universal human rights.
Like the Olmec/Aztec/Mayan calendar, that too is a myth – which
we will discuss next week.
John Maxwell of the University of the West
Indies (UWI) is a veteran Jamaican journalist and author
of How to
Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalists and Journalists.
Mr. Maxwell can be reached at [email protected].
Copyright John Maxwell ©2005 |