Rushton: Race and Racism in History

A useful corrective to the oft-heard ‘racism originated during the enlightenment to justify oppression by Europeans of other races’ canard. From J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1997), chapter five, ‘Race and Racism in History’:

For millennia, racism was not a word, it was a way of life. Ethnic nepotism and prohibitions against hybridization are a matter of historical record. Downgrading the importance of race not only conflicts with people’s evolved tendency to classify and build histories according to putative descent, but ignores the work of biologists studying other species. In his 1758 work, Linnaeus classified four subspecies of Homo sapiens: europaeus, afer, asiatic, and americanus. Most subsequent classifications recognize at least the three major subdivisions considered in this book: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid.

Racism

The most fundamental relationship recognized by tribal man is that of blood, or descent; in many cases anyone not made a relative becomes an enemy. Primitive society often seems to be organized on two major principles: that the only effective bond is a bond of blood, and that the purpose of society is to unite for wars of offense and defense. Sometimes tribes take the name ‘men,’ meaning we alone are men, whereas outsiders are something else, often not defined at all. […]

Identification of racial variation in man based on differences in morphology and pigmentation is as old as recorded history. As referenced by Loehlin et al. (1975), in 1200 RC. the Egyptians of the Nineteenth Dynasty painted polychromatic human figures on the walls of their royal tombs depicting peoples of different skin color and hair form: red (Egyptians), yellow (Asiatic and Semitic), black (sub-Saharan African), and white (western and northern European, also shown with blue eyes and blond beards).

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In the Bible, from a single ancestor, the three sons of Noah are mythically divided into the descendents of Shem (Semites), Ham (non-Semitic Mediterraneans, sometimes said to include Negroids), and Japheth (northern peoples, sometimes said to mean Indo-Europeans, or Aryans). The Jews were descended from Shem and were warned by Jehovah to preserve themselves as ‘a special people unto himself, above all the people that are upon the face of the earth’ (Deut. 7: 6). The patriarch Noah condemned Canaan, one of Ham’s sons and his descendents to be ‘a servant of servants ... unto his brethren’ (Gen. 9: 25-27). This verse was used by the Israelites to sanction their subjugation of the Canaanites when they conquered the Promised Land and later by both Christians and Muslims to justify their slavery of blacks.

In the Bible, from a single ancestor, the three sons of Noah are mythically divided into the descendents of Shem (Semites), Ham (non-Semitic Mediterraneans, sometimes said to include Negroids), and Japheth (northern peoples, sometimes said to mean Indo-Europeans, or Aryans). The Jews were descended from Shem and were warned by Jehovah to preserve themselves as ‘a special people unto himself, above all the people that are upon the face of the earth’ (Deut. 7: 6). The patriarch Noah condemned Canaan, one of Ham’s sons and his descendents to be ‘a servant of servants ... unto his brethren’ (Gen. 9: 25-27). This verse was used by the Israelites to sanction their subjugation of the Canaanites when they conquered the Promised Land and later by both Christians and Muslims to justify their slavery of blacks.

Other groups generated their own religious justifications for separateness. The Aryan or Indo-European people who invaded India 2,500 years ago built up a complex caste system to preserve their original physical type. They began to compose the Rig-Veda, a distillation of their religious beliefs. Eventually these were combined in the Upanishads (composed c. 800 RC., first written c. 1300 A.D.) which, among other things, placed strong social barriers against free hybridization. The caste system may have been the most elaborate and effective barrier against the mixing of contiguous ethnic groups that the world has ever known. It continues to this day despite the attempts of governments to dismantle it. Nonetheless, the once fair complexions of the Brahmans have darkened considerably.

At the Battle of Blood River in Zululand, South Africa, on Sunday, December 16, 1838, the White Boer Voortrekkers entered into a covenant with God. If he would deliver them from the overwhelming numbers of Zulu warriors that surrounded them, they would observe the day as an anniversary every year and conduct their lives in accord with the spirit of the covenant. In the battle, 4,000 Zulu soldiers armed with assegai and shields were killed while one member of the small force of Boer soldiers, armed with rifles and a cannon, suffered a cut hand. The Boer nation had become a theocracy.

Caucasoids, of course, are not the only ethnocentrics. It is impossible to understand modem Africa without comprehending the nature of tribal rivalry. For example, The Times Higher Education Supplement (August 30, 1985: 8) reported that the Kenyan government had warned lecturers and administrators at the University of Nairobi to stop awarding higher marks to students of their own tribe.

The character yi, ‘barbarian,’ has been the normal Chinese word applied to all non-Chinese peoples for over 2,000 years. The Chinese had always felt superior to the rest of the world, long before women of the Roman Empire craved the alluring effects of Chinese silk to the point of alarming the Roman Senate about the drain on its treasury. The European traders, priests, and soldiers who came later gave the Chinese no reason to

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doubt their judgment about themselves. The very name that the Chinese called their country, Chung Kuo, the centrally located ‘Middle Kingdom,’ from whence culture radiated outward, was ethnocentric. Today China is convinced that her communism is the only right and true communism, and that her way out of communism is the only right and true way forward.

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Islamic Ethnology

Hostility and hybridization both characterized ethnic relations among those ancient Middle Eastern groups who affected history -- the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Israelites, the Hittites, the Persians, and later, the Greeks and the Romans. The nobility and leadership of the varying factions often urged against hybridization. The Bible provides many examples of the Hebrews being enjoined to avoid it. Tribes and nations thought it natural and legitimate to despise, conquer, enslave, and displace each other. Slavery is attested from the very earliest written records among the Sumerians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, as well as the Greeks and the Romans. The wall paintings of ancient Egypt, for example, typically depict the gods and pharaohs as larger than life while Negroes and other outlanders were posed as servants and slaves.

In the seventh century A.D. Islam arose among the Arabs. Under them, and later under the Ottoman Turks, a universal civilization was created from the Atlantic Ocean to China, and from Europe to West Africa. The creation through conquest of far-flung empires into which different races and ethnic groups were pulled, especially through the institution of slavery, led to a considerable body of writing, extending over almost a thousand years, about the characteristics of the various groups. Written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, discussion focused on the suitability of various races for different tasks and occupations.

Among Arabs, where intense tribal loyalties spilled over into feuding and warfare, there existed the usual ethnocentrism. In his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Lewis (1990) examined the common stereotypes that emerged for various national groups. In early Arabic poetry, many nuances of human coloration are described. The Arabs saw their own olive coloring as generally preferable to either the redder color of the Persians, Greeks, and Europeans or to the black and brown peoples of the Horn of Africa and beyond. As Ibn al-Fagih al-Hamadani, an Iraqi Arab author put it around A.D. 902: ‘The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 46). One exception was the preference for blondes as concubines; these typically brought the highest prices.

Sa’id al-Andalusi (d. 1070), writing from the then Muslim city of Toledo in Spain, classified ten nations as having achieved distinction in cultivating civilization: the Indians, Persians, Chaldees, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, Jews, Chinese, and Turks. But the northern as well as the southern barbarians were seen as more like beasts than men. It was thought that the Slavs and Bulgars, because of their distance from the sun, had a frigid temperament and dull intelligence. In the South Sa’id thought that the blacks, because of the hot thin air, lacked ‘self control and steadiness of mind and are overcome by fickleness, foolishness, and ignorance’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 47-48).

Lewis (1990) examined Arabic relations with blacks with whom the Muslims had dealt as slave traders for over 1,000 years. Although the Koran stated there were no superior and inferior races and therefore no bar to racial intermarriage, in practice this pious doctrine was disregarded. Arabs did not want their daughters to marry even hybridized blacks. The Ethiopians were the most

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respected, the ‘Zanj’ (Bantu and other Negroid tribes from East and West Africa south of the Sahara) the least respected, with the Nubians occupying an intermediate position.

The negative views of black people are traced by Lewis (p. 52) to Mas’udi (d. 956) who quoted the Greek physician Galen (A.D. c. 130-c. 200) attributing to the black man ‘a long penis and great merriment. Galen says that merriment dominates the Black man because of his defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.’ This description is later repeated, with variations.

Most Arab geographers speak of the nudity, paganism, cannibalism, and primitive life of the Africans, particularly of the Bantu-speakers of East Africa alongside Zanzibar, which the Arabs had colonized in 925 A.D. Maqdisi depicted blacks as having the nature ‘of wild animals ... most of them go naked ... the child does not know his father, and they eat people’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 52). A thirteenth-century Persian writer, Nasir al-Din Tusi, remarks that Negroes differ from animals only in that ‘their two hands are lifted above the ground ... the ape is more teachable and more intelligent’ (cited in Lewis, 1990: 53). In the fourteenth century, Ibn Butlan held a musical rhythm stereotype, suggesting that if an African ‘were to fall from heaven to earth he would beat time as he goes down’ (cited in Lewis, p. 94); another stereotype held that black people may be particularly pious because of their simplicity.

Throughout Islamic literature there is also the image of unbridled, sexual potency in blacks, as related, for example, in stories and illustrations from The Thousand and One Nights. Black females, as well as males, are portrayed with greatly endowed genitalia. One Persian manuscript from 1530 A.D. (Lewis, 1990: 97, and color plate no. 23) contains a pictorial illustration accompanying a poem in which a white woman watches while her black maidservant is able to accommodate to copulation with an ass; when the white woman tries do so, there are disastrous consequences.

In the main, black people are considered destined for menial occupations. Whereas slaves and their offspring from other parts of the empire were able to, and did, rise to the highest levels of office, black slaves did so rarely. Black slaves were seen as unintelligent, a view not held of non-African slaves, nor of those on the empires’ borders, including the European Christians, the Indian Hindus, and the Chinese.

Racial characteristics were often attributed to the environment. Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) whom Lewis describes as the greatest historian and social thinker of the Middle Ages, devoted a chapter to climatic effects. Even the merriment attributed to black people was considered climatic rather than genetic in origin (Lewis, p. 47). One writer, Jahiz of Basra (ca. 776-869) attributed the widely perceived low intelligence of black people to their existing socioeconomic position and asked his readers whether they would have anticipated the existence of the achievements in Indian science, philosophy, and art from their

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experience of Indian slaves. Since the reply was likely to be no, then the same argument might apply to black lands (cited in Lewis, p. 31).


Reference: Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

More of their Myths

In I’m a racist no more and Myths of Oppression I wondered just how much of the nonsense written by ‘anti-racist’ academics they themselves believe. Consider these quotes from an essay by Bob Carter, Clive Harris and Shirley Joshi, ‘The 1951-1955 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’ -- is it plausible that they really do not see that their justifications for exonerating Black immigrants of the charges laid against them by certain natives are bogus?

On welfare ‘scrounging’:

The attempt to portray higher levels of black unemployment as evidence of welfare ‘scrounging’ was scotched by the National Assistance Board Working Party representative. She pointed out that though some of the recent Caribbean migrants were , like sixty thousand Irish workers, in receipt of national assistance this was because of their ineligibility for unemployment benefits.

(Got that? ‘Welfare scroungers’ are people who receive welfare benefit x, not welfare benefit y. Really?)

On crime:

The undesirability of black migrants on grounds of a ‘racial’ predisposition to criminality had been a longstanding concern of government departments and Parliament. In the House of Commons in November 1954, secretary of state for the colonies Alex Lennox-Boyd was asked by Sir Jocelyn Lucas ‘what machinery exists to ascertain the proportion of Jamaican immigrants who have police or criminal records’. Hansard is studded with questions of this nature. Likewise in the questionnaire sent to Ministry of Labour regional offices area officers were asked: ‘Can any distinction be drawn between the coloured workers who come here as fare-paying passengers and those who come as stowaways or deserters?’

The general tenor of responses was: Not enough evidence to make a judgement. Behind this question lies a clear assumption that the manner in which the stowaway came to Britain was a confirmation of a criminal proclivity. No attention was given to the way in which increasingly stringent administrative measures introduced by Labour and Conservative governments criminalized the stowaway.

(Brilliant. Quite apart from denying the validity both of concern about the criminal record of immigrants and the notion that Blacks are predisposed to high crime levels, they would have us believe that a demonstrated willingness to resort to crime is not a reliable indicator of ‘criminal proclivity’).

The essay ‘The 1951-1955 Conservative Government and the Racialization of Black Immigration’ appears in Winston James and Clive Harris (eds), Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain (London: Verso, 1993). The title of that book - ‘Inside Babylon’ - again calls attention to the way we are asked to believe something transparently absurd, that Britain is both a place of hostility and oppression for Caribbean Blacks, yet also a place they voluntarily came and come to.

Myths of Oppression

Quote:

Some of the worker emigrants to Britain were active participants in the People’s Progressive Party and the People’s National Congress in Guyana, the Gairy Party, the Grenada Manual and Metal Workers Union, the Butler Party, the People’s National Movement, the People’s National Party, the Jamaican Labour Party, the St Kitts Labour Party, the Antigua Labour Party, the Barbados Labour Party, the West Indian Independence Party and in trade unions and other more radical sections of the nationalist movement which were Marxist and stood for revolutionary social change . They were also active in trade unions and peasant organisations.

All these groupings have also been the leavening here for the early cultural, social and political activity of blacks in Britain. The encounter with white racism and the manoeuvres of the British capitalist power did not begin in England but in the Caribbean.

John La Rose, ‘We Did Not Come Alive in Britain,’ Race Today (8:3, March 1976)

So they fight a heroic battle for independence from ‘white racist’ Britain and its supposedly capitalist system, yet the minute they win independence vast hordes of the perverted masochists turn up here to suffer more exploitation and abuse. It’s difficult to say of any individual responsible for this kind of stuff whether or not he believes the crap he writes, but it’s safe to say that some of them must know it’s purest nonsense. And just as assuredly it only gets promoted to orthodoxy because it serves the interests of the powerful.

From one of Yggdrasil’s classic lessons:

Imagine yourself an impartial visitor from an isolated civilization studying the United States.

The popular press and politicians recite that majority European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet people of color, by the boatloads and by the hundreds of thousands, are clamoring to get into the U.S. If the word ‘oppression’ has any meaning, you would expect that people of color would be moving in the opposite direction.

The popular press claims that European-Americans exploit and oppress people of color. Yet tax dollars, on balance, flow disproportionately in the other direction - from European-Americans to people of color.

U.S. history texts and Supreme Court opinions state that majorities always oppress and exploit minorities. And yet, if the proverbial visitor from an isolated civilization were to pick a group to exploit based on economic motives, the visitor would choose the group that is the most productive and the most numerous. After all, that is where the money is.

The popular press constantly excoriates rich ‘WASPs’ (or European-American Protestants) as the prime movers in this exploitation of people of color. Yet when you measure actual income and education levels, you find out that Jews are the most prosperous ethnic group, followed by Japanese and Chinese Americans. European-American Protestants rank below European-Americans of Italian, Polish and Irish descent, and are only marginally above African-Americans.

Many civilizations have their myths. Ancient Greeks and Romans were taught, and perhaps believed, that their secular rulers were descended from gods.

But the myths which America recites every day are contrary to easily observable fact. Any myth that is contrary to clearly observable fact must be very important to the elites it serves. For such a myth takes a great deal of energy to sustain, and can serve as grounds for dangerous rebellion when overthrown.

Independent Uganda

September 8th 1962 was the day Uganda achieved independence from Britain. 2009 is not a major anniversary so we wouldn’t expect any particular commemoration in the media (absence of which on the occasion of Zimbabwe’s 30th birthday I noted), but let’s be honest, even were this the 100th anniversary the media would prefer to let Uganda’s progress under Black rule pass without comment. Uganda, you see, is another of those examples of Black people conforming to the racists’ stereotypes about them, disappointing the racedoesnotmatter crowd who insist we’re all equally capable of building and maintaining civilisations. But also significant in this story is the British Empire’s strategy of ‘divide and rule’ -- especially for those who realise the empire hasn’t ended and wasn’t British anyway.

As I did on Zimambwe’s 30th I’ll post here a meaty passage from David Lamb’s classic 1983 travelogue, The Africans. This from chapter 4, ‘The Ghost of Idi Amin’:

The date was January 25, 1971, and by the tens of thousands Ugandans poured into the streets of Kampala to celebrate the overthrow of their president, Milton Obote, a hard-drinking tyrant who had ruled the country since independence. The mastermind of the coup d’etat had once been, as is often the case in African revolts, the president’s trusted ally. He was a military man who had worked his way up through the ranks, establishing rapport with his troops and keeping his distance from politics and ideology. ‘I am not a politician but a professional soldier,’ the general said in his first address to the nation. ‘I am, therefore, a man of few words, and I have been brief throughout my professional career.’ He went on to say that his was only a caretaker administration, that power would be transferred to a civilian government as soon as elections could be organized. Ugandans were relieved. Neighboring African countries were reassured. The West was pleased. Almost everyone, in fact, agreed that this new man, Idi Amin, would make a steady, decent president.


Idi Amin was forty-six years old then, a mountain of a man with a cheery disposition and an earthy, barracks-style sense of humor. He had a second-grade education and spoke the smatterings of five languages, but handled only his tribal tongue with any degree of fluency. His former commanding officer in the British army, Colonel Hugh Rogers, remembers him as ‘a splendid and reliable soldier and a cheerful and energetic man.’ Others described Amin as a man with neither pretense nor ambition. What no one mentioned, though, was that Amin had all the qualities that make a dangerous leader in Africa: his instincts were primitive, his loyalties tribal, his orientation military.


Strange things started happening in Uganda almost from the day he took over. First, Brigadier General Suleiman Hussein, the army chief of staff and a potential rival to Amin, ‘disappeared.’ Permanently. Then Uganda’s chief justice, Benedicto Kiwanuka, was dragged from his chambers in broad daylight by Amin’s soldiers and was never seen alive again. The vice chancellor of Makerere University also disappeared, and the beaten body of Amin’s personal physician was found dumped along a road. Bodies floated down the Nile and turned up by the hundreds in Mabira and Namanve forests. The prisons filled up and prisoners were forced to stand in line and beat each other to death with ten-pound sledge hammers; the last man was shot. Entire villages populated by the Lango and Acholi tribes, which had supported Obote, were wiped out. The screams emanating each night from Amin’s secret-police headquarters became so regular and so blood-curdling that the French ambassador, who lived next door, lodged a complaint, and his wife, unable to sleep for nights on end, returned to Paris. Cabinet ministers, university professors, Christians, Asians, Jews - almost everyone except Amin’s inner circle of Moslems and Kakwas - experienced the wrath of a man gone crazy with power, a man obsessed with reducing Uganda to the lowest common denominator, his own.


Ugandans coined a word - Aminism - to describe the terrible happenings in their country, and by the time the Aminisms ended in 1979, an estimated 300,000 Ugandans - or one Ugandan in every forty - were dead. The carnage was tantamount to murdering the entire population of Louisville, Kentucky. It was as though Amin had studied presidential protocol in Papa Doc’s Haiti or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. And in the process the Ugandan people learned how to survive but forgot how to feel. ‘Killing was so commonplace,’ a grocer in Kampala told me, ‘that if you heard your brother had been picked up by the police, you knew that was the end of him. You’d say, “Too bad,” and you’d feel bad for a few days, then you’d just go back to work and forget about him.’ A single human beast, as playful as a kitten, as lethal as a lion, had managed almost single-handedly to destroy a nation of 13 million people.

Eight years after the celebrations that marked Amin’s rise to power, Ugandans once again returned to the streets of Kampala in joyous revelry. Old friends embraced, and surprised to find the other alive, exchanged an eerie greeting: ‘You still exist!’ Their nightmare was over. Amin - the non-politician who became president-for-life, the professional soldier who became a common murderer - had fled to Libya, chased from Uganda by a ragtag army of invading Tanzanians and a handful of Ugandan rebels. It was V-J Day in Times Square, African style, and standing there on the steps of the parliament building, among thousands of dancing, singing Ugandans, I thought I was witnessing the rebirth of a nation. I felt good for Uganda and good for Africa. If ever an African nation had a chance and a reason to set aside personal ambitions and tribal suspicions in order to reconstruct a heritage, Uganda did.

The sun had just broken through a heavy overcast in Kampala that afternoon, April, 1979, and from the shadows of Parliament House an elderly man stepped forward, removed his glasses, bowed his head and asked his gathered countrymen to pray silently ‘for those who have died at the hands of Idi Amin.’ The crowd fell silent in prayer.


Yusufu L. Lule’s fingers fidgeted at the side of his blue safari suit as he prepared to take the oath as Uganda’s interim president. His eyes swept the crowd in Parliament Square and he spoke slowly, his voice quivering. The horror, he said, had ended. With the overthrow of Amin a new era of national reconciliation had begun. Lule, a distinguished academic who had come home from exile in London, stepped down and the throng went wild. They hugged, cheered, kissed and hoisted the Tanzanian soldiers to their shoulders, snaking through the parliament courtyard to the beat of drums. The leader of the Ugandan guerrillas, David Oyite-Ojok - who Amin once said was the ‘only man besides God’ he feared - waved his rifle overhead as he was swept onto a mass of shoulders and a thousand voices joined in the country’s new national anthem: ‘O Uganda, the land of freedom, our love and labor we give ...’ In the distance a church bell sounded. Then another and another, until finally a clanging chorus from the steeples swelled through all Kampala.


‘If they will only bring Amin here,’ shouted a former Kampala city councilman, Rashid Kawawa, ‘we will eat him on the spot. Yes, we’ll roast him and sear his skin and pass around chunks of him. He was a cannibal, so he would understand what we were doing.’


Amin's modest four-bedroom home was in the hills overlooking Kampala, only a mile or so from Parliament Square, and the next morning I walked through its open front door. I felt as though I were entering a hallucination.


His bedroom, like that of a child, was covered with pictures of military aircraft, scotch-taped to the walls. There were cartons of hand grenades under Amin’s bed and bottles of pills for venereal disease on his bureau. One closet was stacked with reels of ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons, and a file cabinet was stuffed with black-and-white photos of tortured Ugandans, gaunt, maimed creatures who hardly resembled human beings at all. Amin’s health records were strewn about the floor; they contained no mention of the degenerative syphilis that an Israeli doctor claimed he had, but they showed that he had been suffering from gout and obesity for years. ‘You need a rigid exercise program,’ one doctor advised. Piles of never opened letters from foreign governments and his own embassies abroad littered the room.



‘I think it is safe to say that medically Amin was crazy,’ Solomon Asea, a doctor who had been Amin’s ambassador in Washington, told me. ‘He had a split personality. He could kill a person one minute and the next he’d be laughing and playing the guitar and he had no recollection of what he had done. In a medical sense, he wasn’t responsible for much of what he did. He should have been a patient, not a president.’


Sadly, the euphoria that engulfed Uganda in those first days of life without Idi Amin was short-lived and it soon became clear that there would be no miracles of reconstruction or reconciliation in Uganda. One nightmare had ended but another was about to begin. Uganda itself was about to complete the mission of destruction on which Amin had embarked.


The Tanzanian army that had come to save Uganda now set out to ravage it, the unpaid soldiers taking at gunpoint what they wanted. Soon every soldier had a Seiko watch and a shortwave radio. The economy collapsed, the food supplies ran out, the morgues filled up, and the stench of death hung about. Honest men became thieves, and gangs of Ugandan bandits roamed the cities, killing and looting to survive. Western diplomats armed their homes with shotguns, German shepherds and grenades, and on occasion fought off attackers from their bedroom windows. Matts Lundgren, a United Nations representative, stationed two guards with machine guns in the garden of his Kampala home, and Joseph Bragotti, a Roman Catholic priest, started packing a .38-caliber revolver under his cassock. Chaos had given way to anarchy.


At Makerere University, professors stopped showing up for classes and spent their days scrounging for food. The hospitals ran out of medicine, and operations ceased because there were no anesthetics. Emergency supplies of food and medicine from international relief agencies poured into Uganda by the truckload but were hijacked almost as soon as they crossed the border. In the north, where drought and famine held the people hostage, and the cows seemed to have fared better than the humans, the Karamojong cattle herders routinely tossed the withered corpses of their little boys outside the villages each night. There were so many that the hyenas grew fat and lazy and the packs no longer fought and squealed over each feast. The boys were allowed to die because, when rations are meager, the Karamojong give the available food to their girls, who can be traded for cattle.


From their exile homes in Europe and the United States, thousands of young, ambitious and intelligent Ugandans answered President Lule’s call to come home and help rebuild their country. But the task overwhelmed them and, in the end, defeated them. The law of the jungle had reclaimed the soul of Uganda. There were no obtainable national causes left, only personal ones, and within weeks of becoming cabinet ministers and presidential advisers, the former exiles were demanding their 20 percent off the top of foreign grants and contracts. When someone spoke of ‘my people,’ he didn’t mean Ugandans in general; he meant the people of his particular tribe. If he said things were improving, he wasn’t referring to the national economy; he was talking about his overseas bank account.


Lule was the one man who had a chance to save Uganda. He was honest, intelligent and, at the age of sixty-seven, cared little for the trappings of power. More important, he was a Baganda, Uganda’s largest and best educated tribe, and thus commanded the allegiance of the majority. Had he been a dictator instead of a humanist, he might have succeeded. But Julius Nyerere, the Tanzanian president and Uganda’s de facto ruler, had installed Lule as his socialistic stalking horse. When Lule started speaking with a voice that was both independent and capitalistic, Nyerere spirited him out of Uganda, locked him up in a room without a telephone in Dar es Salaam and announced that Uganda would have a new president.

That man was Godfrey Binaisa, an attorney who had lived in New York and fallen on tough times, handling not much more than an occasional divorce case. I met him in the lobby of Kampala’s International Hotel, just after he had returned to Uganda. A once important official in the pre-Amin government, he was now portly and balding, and he wore a rumpled suit. Asked by an American journalist how to pronounce his name, he replied, ‘Be nisa to me.’ He hung around the lobby, bumming cigarettes, chatting with the Western reporters, saying no, he didn’t know what he would do now that he was back, but he hoped he could find some work. The next day he was as surprised as anyone to learn that he had a job -- as president of Uganda, having been appointed by a local committee, which decided that he seemed as harmless and as reliable as anyone available. One of his first moves was to hire an American public relations firm for $400,000 to clean up Uganda’s tarnished international image. An account executive from Washington, D.C., flew into Entebbe, brimming with confidence, carrying business cards that bore the notation ‘We can solve any problem.’ He left a few days later, shaking his head. What Uganda needed was a mortician, not a flack.


The cycle was soon to be complete. Binaisa was ousted from office by Nyerere, and the military returned to power. Idi Amin was thrown out of Libya after his bodyguards had a shoot-out with some of Muammar Qaddafy’s soldiers. He moved to Saudi Arabia, with two wives and twenty-three of his children, and announced his willingness to return to Uganda ‘for the good of my people.’ Meanwhile Obote, whom Nyerere had kept in waiting for just such a moment, had come home from Tanzania, won a fixed election and became Uganda’s president for a second time.* ‘Today we raise the banner of democracy once more and proclaim the rule of law,’ he said at his swearing-in ceremony. ‘The past is gone. We start a new future.’ This time, though, there were no celebrations. Within a few weeks Obote re-established the State Research Bureau, the security agency that was to Amin what Savak had been to the Shah of Iran. Torture became common again in the crowded prisons, people once more started ‘disappearing.’ The newly independent newspapers were closed down, dissent was muzzled, the International Red Cross and resident Western journalists were expelled. Uganda teetered on the brink of civil war that would pit tribe against tribe, and in the outlying districts a new guerrilla group, composed mostly of Baganda, launched its first attacks against the government installations in an attempt to bring down the Obote regime.

[* Obote’s people were in firm control of the ruling Military Commission. Even before the Ugandans cast their first ballot, the electoral commission simply awarded seventeen seats in parliament to Obote’s Uganda People’s Congress Party. When early returns showed Obote trailing, the chairman of the Military Commission, Paulo Muwanga - a front man for Nyerere and Obote - announced that he alone would count the ballots and decide the validity of the election. Two days later Obote was declared the winner.]


Had the psychology and attitudes of an entire nation changed during its long nightmare?


‘No,’ the vice chancellor of Makerere University, Senteza Kajubi, told me one day after some thought, ‘I wouldn’t quite say that Uganda has produced a generation of moral cripples. But on the other hand ...’


He fell silent, searching for the words. ‘On the other hand,’ he repeated at last, ‘we obviously have been greatly affected by the experience of Amin and what came afterward. We have fallen so low that I wonder if we can ever climb back.’


To realize just how far Uganda did sink, it is worth taking a brief historical look at the country Winston Churchill described as ‘the pearl of East Africa.’ Landlocked Uganda is one of Africa’s most beautiful countries. It is a fertile land of high plateaus and lush green foliage that reach from the shores of Lake Victoria - the source of the White Nile - to the dry plains of the north. Blue crater lakes are tucked among the terraced hillsides, and within a day’s drive of Kampala, like Rome a capital built on seven hills, some of the most splendid wildlife herds in all Africa roamed through national parks as large as Rhode Island.

‘Uganda is a fairy tale,’ Churchill wrote in 1908 after arriving by train from the Kenyan coast. ‘You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk, and at the top there is a wonderful new world. The scenery is different, and most of all the people are different from anywhere else in Africa.’


The early Ugandan people were farmers and warriors who developed five centralized, prosperous kingdoms: the Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, Toro and Ankole. From the mid-nineteenth century through to independence in 1962, the Baganda dominated Uganda. They were a proud, elitist people who considered themselves superior to other Bantu kingdoms in the Lake Victoria basin and to the Nilotic cattle-herding tribes of the north, the Acholi and Lango. They were ruled by a kabaka (king) and represented about 20 percent of Uganda’s population.


In 1894 Uganda became a British protectorate, and colonial administrators, utilizing the policy of ‘divide and rule,’ bestowed special favors on the Baganda. They became the backbone of the civil service and the vehicle for carrying out colonial policies. The other tribes sought, but did not receive, similar privileges. Unable to win responsible jobs in the bureaucracy or to dent the Baganda-dominated commercial sector, these outsiders had the choice of remaining neglected or finding new avenues into the mainstream of civilization. The Acholi and Langi, for instance, cast their lot with the military and became the tribal majority in the colonial army.


Unlike neighboring Kenya and Tanzania, Uganda moved toward independence without any united nationalistic front. Indeed, the Baganda even considered secession rather than risk the loss of dominance in a new nation. This absence of central authority would later prove to be a major obstacle to political stability. But Milton Obote, a Lango schoolteacher, promised the Baganda autonomy and managed to put together a loose coalition that led Uganda to independence, with himself as prime minister and the kabaka as president.


It soon became apparent Uganda was missing another element that was to become important in Kenya’s success - European settlers. There were 43,000 whites in Kenya at independence, and more than 5,000 of them were farmers who had settled in the highlands north of Nairobi. Kenya was their home and they had a stake in making the new republic work. In Uganda the 8,800 whites were administrators, professionals and technicians. They would stay for three or four years, then move on when their contracts were up. The settlement of whites in Kenya had been a conscious decision of the British government for two reasons: Kenya was on the coast and more accessible to travelers than landlocked Uganda; and Kenya’s farmland, though not as fertile as Uganda’s, was less densely populated and thus did not require the displacement of large African groups. If the British had settled Uganda instead of Kenya, it is entirely possible there would have been no Life-President Idi Amin and no socioeconomic debacle in Uganda - and no mini-miracles of progress in Kenya. For, however much European settlers retarded the Africans’ advancement, their presence represented strong authority, law and order, political stability - concepts that African colonies could carry with them into independence.


As it turned out, Obote had no intention of sharing power with the kabaka, Freddie Mutesa, a slight, elegant figure who had once served as a lieutenant in England’s Grenadier Guards. Obote wanted absolute control, and his accord with the Buganda kingdom erupted into confrontation; secession again became the Buganda cause. In 1966 Obote called on his army chief, Idi Amin, to put down the rebellion with minimum force. Instead Amin blasted through the kabaka’s palace with tanks, and King Freddie, the last in an unbroken line of ruling royalty dating back to the sixteenth century, escaped over a wall and fled to London, where he died a penniless alcoholic five years later. The monarchy was abolished, Obote became president, and Amin was now a man to be reckoned with.


Despite tribal rivalries, Obote’s misdirected leadership and the absence of exploitable minerals, Uganda had a great deal working for it in those early days of independence. Makerere was a superior university, referred to as ‘the Harvard of Africa.’ The economy, based on agriculture and buoyed by the presence of 70,000 Asians, was healthy, the tourist industry was booming. The health system was one of the finest in the Third World: there were forty-eight hospitals, several hundred rural dispensaries staffed by paramedics, a surprisingly sophisticated facility for psychiatric care, a tropical-medicine institute of international note, and black Africa’s best city hospital, Mulago in Kampala. There were excellent hotels and game lodges, 1,000 miles of paved roads, and an extensive rail network that stretched to Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, six hundred miles away. Even more important, there were the Baganda, a people far less primitive than most other Africans in the neighboring countries.


The man responsible for Uganda’s destruction was born in 1925 to peasant parents who scratched a meager living from their two-acre plot. Idi Amin was a Moslem and a member of the small backward Kakwa tribe, a people noted for little except their lack of education and their penchant for soldiering. His parents separated shortly after his birth and Amin was raised by his mother, who lived sometimes in the barracks, with a succession of military men.


In 1946 Amin joined Britain 4th King’s African Rifles as a kitchen helper. Knowing that the British did not favor the Kakwa,

he listed his tribe on the registration forms as Acholi. Amin never fought in India and Burma, as he later claimed to justify the medals dripping from his uniform, but by all accounts he was a tough, courageous, unquestioning soldier. He fought well during the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s and later was promoted to lieutenant, an unusually high rank for an African in the discriminatory colonial promotion system. ‘Idi was a fine chap,’ one of his British officers remembered, ‘though a bit short on the gray matter.’


By 1962, the year of independence, Amin had displayed the first signs of the brutality that was to become his trademark. As a platoon commander, he was assigned the task of ending a tribal war between two neighboring people, the Turkana of Kenya and the Karamojong of Uganda. He accomplished that job, but a month later several bodies were disinterred from shallow graves in the village where Amin’s unit had operated. Villagers had been tortured and beaten to death; others had been buried alive.


‘Some pretty fearful things have been going on in Turkana,’ Kenya’s deputy governor, Sir Eric Griffith-Jones, said, ‘and it looks as if there is some evidence apparently that one of the Uganda army people has so brutally beaten up a complete Turkana village, including killing, that I think we shall have to take criminal proceedings against him.’



The name he mentioned was Idi Amin. But Sir Walter Coutts, the British governor of Uganda, on the advice of Prime Minister Obote, quashed the charge. Amin was one of only two African officers with the British army in Uganda, and with independence only weeks away, a court-martial could have been embarrassing to all concerned. It was the gravest misjudgment the British made during their sixty-eight years in Uganda.


The Uganda flag replaced the Union Jack over Kampala on October 9, 1962. The new banner bore the national emblem, a crested crane, and a series of horizontal stripes: a black one for Africa, a yellow for sunshine, a red for brotherhood. There was irony in each symbol, for in time Obote’s country would slaughter much of its wildlife for food and profit, Africa would turn its back on Uganda, sunshine alone would not be sufficient to make the farmlands flourish, and brotherhood would become fratricide.


Obote was a resourceful and strong-willed man, a socialist and a theoretician. A decade earlier he had been offered a scholarship to study law in the United States, but the colonial authorities refused him an exit visa on the grounds that knowledge of American law would be useless in Uganda. Now Obote had his chance to experiment. He crushed the monarchy and nationalized the economy. He got his attorney general - the Bagandan who would later resurface as president, Godfrey Binaisa - to rewrite the constitution, consolidating virtually all powers in the presidency. Uganda, Obote said, was putting distance between itself and the stereotyped European systems. Indeed it was. And the tribes grew restive, the economic foundations quivered, the army waited.


In January 1971 Obote flew to Singapore for a Commonwealth meeting to rally support against Britain’s decision to sell arms to South Africa. Before he left he made a fateful mistake: he ordered Amin and his defense minister, Felix Onama, to explain in writing the disappearance of $4 million in army funds and weapons. The demand hastened the inevitable, and on January 25 Amin and his soldiers seized power. The result was tantamount to arming a mob of twelve-year-olds and telling them they were now running a country.


Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Amin the buffoon, not Amin the butcher, who first caught the world’s attention. A hulking six-foot-four 240-pounder, he raced around Kampala in a red sports car, plunged fully clothed into swimming pools during diplomatic functions and promised to make Uganda more prosperous than Japan. He divorced three of his five wives en masse in 1974 - the dismembered body of one of them, Kay, was later found in the trunk of a car - and fired his winsome foreign affairs minister, Elizabeth Bagaya, accusing her of having had sexual intercourse in a lavatory at Orly Airport in Paris.


‘The problem with me,’ Amin said, ‘is that I am fifty or a hundred years ahead of my time. My speed is very fast. Some ministers had to drop out of my government because they could not keep up.’


To students at Makerere University he said: ‘Now I have got a couple of rockets for you. You are responsible for teaching people hygiene. You must make yourself very smart, very clean, very healthy. I find that the VD is very high. If you are a sick man, sick woman, you had better go to hospital, make yourselves clean or you will find that you will infect the whole population. I like you very much and I don’t want you spoiled by gonorrhea.’


And to Lord Snowdon, after the breakup of his marriage to Princess Margaret, he wrote: ‘Your experience will be a lesson to all of us men to be careful not to marry ladies in very high positions.’


The world chuckled, Africans applauded, and Ugandans died, often at the rate of 100 to 150 a day.


From politician to peasant, no one was immune. Education, money or influence was enough to mark a person for death. Social gatherings, even close relationships, were best avoided because Amin’s spies were everywhere, in the ministries, the shops, the airports, the bars, the hotels, the taxis, the schools. To survive, one stayed quiet and unnoticed, melting into the crowds regardless of his station in life.


‘Sometimes my husband and I would talk quietly in our bed about what was happening to Uganda,’ said Judith Mulondo, the mother of two young boys. ‘But we’d never mention our feelings or Amin’s name in front of our children. They might have let it slip at school. Then there would be a knock on your door, and those knocks were the same as death notices.’


One undercover agent, in a document found in Amin’s house, used these words to pass along an execution order to his superiors: ‘This person is so close to me that I cannot take any action on him. So if action is to be taken, it should be carried out in such a way that I am not discovered.’


An attorney told me of walking to work every morning in a T-shirt and tattered slacks so that he would not draw attention to himself as a member of the upper class. A businessman left his Mercedes-Benz in the garage and bicycled to work for the same reason. University students interviewing for jobs would identify themselves as high school dropouts because Amin apparently was intent on eliminating the country’s intelligentsia.


Big Daddy, as the international press called him, evoked a peculiar response in black Africa and became for a time a sort of perverse folk hero. Savage though he was, he had qualities that Africa’s unsophisticated leaders rather admired: he dealt with anyone who crossed him as casually as a child would squash an ant; he said all the right things about nationalism, economic development and human dignity, and the fact that what he said was either outrageous or spurious was immaterial to his presidential peers; he humiliated the Asians, expelling Uganda’s entire community of 70,000 in 1972;* and he toyed with the Europeans, once forcing British residents in Kampala to carry him on a throne-like chair. Many African presidents would have loved to have the gall to be as crudely blunt.

[* Amin gave the Asians’ shops and businesses to his army cronies. As happened in Zaire, many of them simply sold the existing stocks and closed up permanently. The Asians were never compensated for the loss of their businesses.]

But the price Uganda paid! Amin declared himself a doctor of philosophy and the chancellor of Makerere University, and the onetime ‘Harvard of Africa’ became a university of semiliterates, acquiring not a single book for its library or classrooms between 1976 and 1979. Inflation rose more than 1,000 percent during Amin’s eight-year reign, while basic wages went up only 54 percent. By the time Amin was overthrown, a man earning the minimum wage of $34 a month had only enough money to buy ten loaves of bread.


The roads cracked and filled with potholes; the factories closed; the wildlife herds were machine-gunned by soldiers for meat and ivory; the coffee plantations stood idle; Mulago Hospital became a scandal, its toilets stopped up, its water taps dry, its sixty-bed wards jammed with three times that many patients and filled with rats, cockroaches, lice, fleas and bedbugs. The country’s sixteen psychiatrists - along with as many as 100,000 other Ugandans - went into exile, the rural health clinics closed, the tourist industry evaporated.


Even in its dying days, Kampala was a lovely city, laced with tree-lined avenues, waving palms and municipal gardens. The skyline was dominated by the sixteen-story International Hotel and a fine mosque. The Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals stood atop two of Kampala’s hills, and on a third, Kasubi Hill, were the tombs of four kabakas, including King Freddie, whose body Idi Amin had had exhumed in England and flown home to Uganda in an early attempt to win Buganda backing. On the sides of the hills, just a five minute drive from the downtown square, were some of the most gracious suburbs in all Africa, their stately mansions covered with ivy and set back from the road, surrounded by gardens that seemed always in bloom. There were sidewalk cafes such as Chez Joseph to enjoy on warm summer nights, frequent choral and dance performances at the National Theater, and the campus grounds of Makerere University were as pleasant and as pampered as those of any rural American college.


If you had flown over Kampala in a helicopter, the capital would have looked as tranquil and attractive and everyday normal as, say, Medford, Oregon. It was only on ground level that you realized what was happening. In the shop windows were impressive stacks of cans of paint, cartons of small electric appliances, boxes of liquor; but the contents all had been emptied and the displays were only a facade. The 300-room International Hotel - formerly called the Apolo, Obote’s middle name - looked like any Holiday Inn, but the restaurant served only bread and instant coffee. The electrical generators had broken down and guests huffed up fourteen flights of stairs by matchlight. The water system was out of service too, and if you wanted to take a bath, you pulled the fire hose down the corridor and filled your tub from the emergency tank on the roof. The performances ended at the National Theater; waiters in white jackets stood in the cafes with soiled napkins over their arms but with no customers to serve; the large clock in Independence Square stopped, ticking off not a second over the course of several years.

Amin’s Entebbe State House on the shores of Lake Victoria - the Ugandan equivalent of the White House - appeared immaculate outside to passers-by. Inside, though, sofas were covered with cigarette-burn holes, drapes had been pulled off the windows, beer bottles cluttered the closets, grease covered the kitchen floor and bullet holes dotted the ceiling of the living room, where Amin regularly used to blast away with his revolvers to summon his staff.


The worse things became in Uganda, the more adaptable and accepting the Ugandans seemed to become. If there was no food in the stores, they picked fruit and ate steamed, mashed bananas, which are served with local spices and are known as matoke. If the phones didn’t work, they did their business in person. If friends and relatives died for making ill-chosen comments, they became silent. If there was no public transportation to get them to their city jobs, they walked. They did so without complaint or apparent anger. ‘Shauri ya Mungu,’ they said - Swahili for ‘It’s God’s will.’ To a Westerner, such fatalism might be dismissed as passivity. But there is more to it than that. Like so many Africans, the Ugandans had lost control of their lives. They lived in a feudal-style system in which one’s well-being depended on an allegiance to a man or a group of tribal barons, and that attachment did not include the right to question. The tradition of giving all power to a village chief, the era of colonialism, and the repressiveness of men like Obote and Amin had taught them obedience, even servitude. They had learned the art of survival.


Tragically, Amin would not have lasted as long as he did if Africa had had the courage to isolate him, and if the East and West had cared less about their own interests and more about Uganda’s. But Libya helped train Amin’s army and sent military advisers and civilian technicians. Saudi Arabia promised Amin $2 million in the dying days of his regime in the name of Islamic brotherhood. The Palestine Liberation Organization provided personal bodyguards as a reward for Amin’s anti-Israeli ravings. Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh sent university professors for Makerere, doctors for Mulago, engineers and other professionals. The Soviet Union gave sophisticated weapons, East Germany trained the secret police.

The West’s interests were economic. The United States - which to its credit did institute a trade embargo shortly before Amin was toppled - was for years the biggest purchaser of Uganda coffee. Western companies supplied the country with petroleum. Britain, Uganda’s largest trading partner, sold Amin everything from radio technology to drugs to military uniforms. It was not until Amin ordered the murder of Uganda’s Anglican archbishop and two senior cabinet ministers in 1977 - Amin said they died in a car accident - that world opinion turned solidly against the man who had once seemed such a good-natured oaf.


Amin was facing pressures at home, too, at the time he killed the archbishop. His army was restless, and tribal fighting broke out in the barracks. Amin needed to put his soldiers to work. The solution he came up with was to start a war. On October 30, 1978, the Ugandan army invaded northwest Tanzania, annexing 710 square miles without opposition. The occupation, Amin announced, was ‘a record in world history,’ completed in the ‘supersonic speed of twenty-five minutes.’ Julius Nyerere responded that Amin was a ‘snake’ mentally damaged by syphilis. He summoned his generals and ordered a counterattack. The initial results were a case study in how not to wage war.


The first day the Tanzanians mistakenly shot down three of their own planes. A week later the counteroffensive had to be halted entirely because no one was sure where the ammunition stockpiles were. One Tanzanian battalion never got the word of the delay and headed off for Rwanda, planning to veer north into Uganda. But the unit got lost in the Rwandan forests and wandered for days, unable to find its way either into Uganda or back to Tanzania. Most of the Tanzanian military vehicles broke down, so the generals had to commandeer buses, Land-Rovers and cars in Dar es Salaam, 850 miles from the front. The convoy finally got rolling. Many of the vehicles ran out of gas en route. The soldiers abandoned them and finished the journey on foot.


When the two armies at last caught up with each other a few weeks later, there was little enthusiasm for any fighting. Soldiers just set up camp on either side of the Kagera River. Nyerere, though, was determined to complete the job, and in the spring of 1979 he brought the twenty-eight Ugandan exile and liberation groups to a conference in Moshi, Tanzania. They included Marxists and monarchists, socialists and capitalists, tribalists and nationalists, men who were united only in their resolve to rid Uganda of Amin. Nyerere scraped together a 50,000-man people’s militia, composed largely of illiterate youths pulled off the streets and out of the bush. It was more a mob than an army, for its members had no rank and little training, but together with a handful of Uganda rebels they pushed north, crossed the Kagera River and moved into Uganda. Amin’s soldiers - supposedly the best armed and trained in East Africa - threw down their weapons at the first sound of gunfire and fled. Several hundred Libyan soldiers, dispatched to Uganda by Colonel Muammar Qaddafy in an eleventh-hour attempt to save Amin, took up the front-line positions around Kampala. They broke and ran too, and the capital fell without a battle. Amin escaped on a military flight to Tripoli, and Yusufu L. Lule stepped out of the shadows of parliament to speak about the new beginning that was never to be.


Uganda no longer exists today as a viable nation. It has disintegrated into a cluster of tribal states. Its cities have become frontier towns, terrorized by bandits who will kill for a Seiko watch. Its government is a collection of outcasts and misfits serving only themselves. Most of the bright young Ugandans who came home after Amin’s overthrow already have returned to exile. There was nothing left to rebuild. The economy, the governmental infrastructure, the spirit of reconciliation had all been destroyed. The Ugandans had committed national suicide and by the summer of 1983, upwards of 200 people a day - most of them women and children - were dying as government troops and anti-government guerrillas leveled villages, ambushed buses, shot up churches, raided houses and did their utmost to make sure the legend of Idi Amin was not forgotten.

David Lamb, The Africans (Methuen, London: 1985) pp.77-92.

‘Five million are Ugandan adults illiterate’

Headline at ‘The New Vision: Uganda’s Leading Website’

MSM perspectives

I do my best to avoid the mainstream media but occasionally check in to see what they’re up to.

In the middle of last night’s Newsnight was an extended feature on a Black African immigrant in Russia running for mayor in the small country town he now lives in. The reporter began by describing the town, ‘conservative, rural, dull’ (and this was said with real venom - do view the link), before introducing the watermelon salesman (I kid you not) who was bringing some much needed vibrancy to this awful place. It was never explained why, if the place is so miserable, this African chose to go and live there in the first place. This became especially puzzling when the remainder of the report was given to describing how much hostility Africans and other immigrants in Russia endure, the would-be mayor even finding it necessary to hire a full-time bodyguard. Predictable comparisons with America and Obama followed, the theme being that as regards race Russia has a long way to go to catch up with its old ‘Cold War’ foe. So a silver lining, then.

Later I caught the last few minutes of a ‘Hardtalk’ interview with filmmaker Tom Hooper discussing a movie he has in the can about Nelson Mandela. Interviewer Stephen Sackur wondered how Hooper had approached the material given that, quote: ‘Mandela is the closest thing we have to a living saint.’ I didn’t hear the answer for laughing.

Maybe the MSM isn’t so bad after all.

The Joy of Reading

One of the pleasures of my life is browsing in bookshops, especially second-hand bookshops where the chance of surprise delights is highest. There is an extra anticipation and pleasure in the exercise since I became a political rebel: in older books you often find perspectives and language forbidden to today’s authors. On Saturday I found a book whose title and jacket-blurb provide an example (see below), it was published in 1978, the same year this statement appeared in The Times:

We, as library workers, agree that it is a major function of librarianship actively to combat racism and fascism and we advocate the following: that stock selection for libraries should be guided by anti-racist and anti-fascist principles. That staff recruitment should reflect a similar policy. That local authority buildings should not be used for racist or fascist organisations.

-- ‘Librarians against Racism and Fascism’ quoted in The Times, 30 May 1978.

I daresay the purchasing and repository power of libraries contributed little to the survival of the book I picked up on Saturday. Still, it did survive for me to buy it and I had to buy it just to have proof of the author’s bibliography - it’s hard to believe books with such titles were published in the 1970s. From the jacket:

The Return: Homecoming of a Negro from Eton by Dillibe Onyeama

This is a gripping account of a cultural shock. The author had the rare privilege of being one of the first Africans to be educated at Britain’s exclusive public school Eton College, the result being his resoundingly successful Nigger at Eton.

After eighteen years of ‘Anglicisation’ since he first came to Britain in 1959 aged eight, he visits his home Nigeria, reputed to be Black Africa’s most progressive nation and, by virtue of its oil, a potential super-power and one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

But Onyeama is shocked to discover that the glamorous pictures painted of his country by the Western media are totally false and merely subtle attempts to protect Western investments in the vast nation. He is horrified to find his home in a state of chaos and retrogression.

Here, in this brief but comprehensive story of his experiences, he paints a vivid and concise picture of poverty, deprivation, callousness, corruption, primitive existence, slavery, fear, suspicion and jealousy on a scale witnessed in very few countries in the world.

In his attempts to explain this tragic state of affairs, he offers remedies to thwart the very real threat of communism facing the country.

He reveals, too, that he is one of ‘thousands’ of relations descended from a Chief said to have had fifty wives and seventy-eight children. He tells how he coped with the widespread jealousy of his privileged circumstances, the intrusive curiosity of many of his folks, the impossible expectations they imposed on him.

He explains, also, what prompted him to take a white wife in the face of widespread opposition from his relatives, he tells what occurs when he took his wife home and how she adapted to the many primitive habits and customs of his underprivileged countrymen.

This is the fascinating story of one educated African’s cultural dilemma in a major African nation of today.

By the same author

Nigger at Eton

John Bull’s Nigger

Sex is a Nigger’s Game

The Book of Black Man’s Humour

I’m the Greatest: The Wit and Humour of Muhammad Ali

Juju

and

The Secret Society

****

Innocent days.

Freedom come / Freedom go

In Gang-Raping Liberian Arraigned in Arizona Courtroom, Brenda Walker questions the compatibility of Liberians with America:

In addition, the refugees’ home cultures may be incompatible with our values; for example, Liberia made rape illegal only three years ago and the crime is still endemic there. Of all the people we could invite into the national community, surely Liberians would fall at the bottom of the list of desirables.

True enough, but I would also have thought that life in America is incompatible with fundamental Liberian values, isn’t that why Liberia exists?.

The same thoughts occurred when I saw Rastafarian Benjamin Zephaniah interrogating the BNP’s Rev. Robert West and Andrew Brons on ‘The Big Questions’ a couple of months ago - what is this guy even doing in Britain? Quite apart from the general problem I have with people like him living in my country, how does a Rastafarian square his religion with his presence here? My Hutchinson Encyclopaedia defines Rastafarianism as being

based on the ideas of Marcus Garvey who preached that the only way for black people to escape their poverty and oppression was to return to Africa. (my emphasis)

It seems odd that no matter how racist, exploitative, and oppressive we are these people just won’t leave.

The Barbary terror

From the introduction to Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War Against the Pirates of North Africa (Oxford University Press, 2006):

Almost everywhere in the eighteenth century, men were in chains…

In Russia, millions of serfs lived a brutish existence tied to the land and at the sufferance of their manorial lords until Tsar Alexander II freed them in 1861. In the Levant and Istanbul, the burgeoning population needed bread, leading the Tartar rulers of the Crimea to raid the Ukraine, Russia, and Caucuses for hundreds of thousands of white Christians to work as slaves growing wheat in the steppe.

[…] slavery had existed in Islamic North Africa, the so-called Barbary states, for centuries, and was a constant threat to Europe. From dozens of ports in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, Islamic corsairs darted out in their row galleys, and later, in their sailing xebecs and feluccas, to seize European ships with their Christian crews and passengers (and cargoes). They boldly landed bands of armed pirates on the coasts of southern Europe and carted off peasant farmers and nobles, fishermen and goat herders, clerics and tradesmen, to slavery in Barbary. The corsairs sometimes seized the entire population of a village; coastal areas of Andalusia, Sicily, Calabria, Tuscany, and the Greek islands were depopulated by “manstealing” over the course of several hundred years.

Barbary slavery differed from slavery elsewhere both in the spirit in which the corsairs operated and the way Barbary societies used slaves. As historian Robert C. Davis notes in Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, “in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad—for the wrongs of 1492 [when Ferdinand and Isabella finally expelled the Moors from Spain], for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim. . . .” But the Barbary slave trade was driven as much by economics as by religious ideology. The corsairs needed oarsmen for their row galleys, and the captives were even more valuable when traded for ransom. Factoring in losses from the plague, malnourishment, mistreatment, and periodic ransomings, Professor Davis estimates that in the 250 years of peak slave-taking by the Barbary corsairs, from 1530 to 1780, at least one million, and perhaps as many as one and one-quarter million, white Christians were enslaved in Islamic North Africa. Even in the eighteenth century, as the number of slaves the Barbary pirates needed dwindled because sailing ships had replaced galleys, approximately 175,000 white Christians were carried off into slavery.

[…] The governments of Europe either paid tribute to them to prevent their subjects from being enslaved, or were too poor to do so. For the United States, free trade was both a policy and a belief: trade would increase wealth even as it increased freedom. But with no navy and little money, the new republic’s merchant ships and crewmen were prime targets for capture and enslavement. The promises of free trade were imperiled.

John Foss, a seaman in the brig Polly out of Newburyport, Massachusetts, which sailed from Baltimore bound to Cadiz, Spain, in September 1793, was one of those who became enslaved. Like many who experienced slavery in Algiers, Foss wrote a detailed account of his experience.

After being captured at sea, Foss and his fellow Americans were

taken to the palace of the ruler, the dey of Algiers, through a surging crowd which stunned them “with the shouts, clapping of hands and other exclamations of joy from the inhabitants; thanking God for their great success and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers. . . .” The dey greeted them with a speech declaring he would never make peace with their country, finishing, “now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.” The next morning, a heavy chain link was hammered around each man’s ankle, and Foss called the “dreadful clanking” sound of the iron chain each man had to carry “the most terrible noise I ever heard.” The captured men then began their work as slaves, mining rocks in the nearby mountains and hauling them by bodily force down to the port to repair or extend the seawall at the harbor, or working at the port carrying freight on their backs, goaded along by guards with pointed sticks, like cattle prods, with dreadful beatings or death never a distant possibility.

Mindsets

Philadelphia fitness expert, David Sylvester, joins 39 other professional and amateur bikers for Tour d’Afrique, a 100-day cycling event beginning in Cairo, Egypt, and ending in Cape Town, South Africa. Sylvester rides to raise money for a scholarship honoring his dear friend and fellow African American Kevin Bowser, who died in the 9/11 tragedy. Near the end of the trip he arrives in Lilongwe, Malawi, where he discovers a hip-hop clothing store called “Niggers.” Thinking at first “this is a very bad joke,” Sylvester investigates further. After talking with the two attending salesmen, Sylvester concludes, “This is no joke. . . . The bottom line is this: I rode over 12,000 miles on two continents through 15 states and 13 countries and broke two bikes in the process, to get to a store in Africa called Niggers.”

He feels guilty for his role in the vulgar ritual grammar that has grown to infect the continent he calls the motherland. “I am willing to step [up] and admit my part in the havoc that we have wrought on our mindset,” he writes in an email now posted on his website, “but I think that we all are to blame.”

Quote from article ‘The Not-So-Harmless Social Function of a Word that Wounds,’ Debra Walker King in The Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations

Concern with his race’s ‘mindset,’ racial identification with the homeland, sensitivity to verbal slights against the race; Mr Sylvester is a better man than most Whites. But he has no idea how good Blacks have it. European man’s mindset either denies his race exists or says it does not matter; his mindset determines that his race should welcome being displaced by other races in his homeland; and how wonderful it would be if our fortunes and self-confidence had turned around to such extent that we could ironically embrace other races’ slurs against us.

Still, I did laugh.

Waugh on Slavery

Was He Right to Free the Slaves?

by Evelyn Waugh

Published in the Daily Express, 15 July 1933

The celebrations now being organized for the centenary of William Wilberforce are likely to command very tepid enthusiasm in the countries principally affected by the philanthropist’s work. On the one hand, the present generation of negroes would sooner not be reminded of their antecedents, while the few responsible whites are well aware that the emancipation of the slaves created a series of economic, social and political problems that are no nearer solution now than they were a hundred years ago.

If William Wilberforce could return to public life today and see the effects of his work, the speeches shortly to be made in his honour would ring in his ears with peculiar irony. None of the great movements of the nineteenth century is more typical of its age than that for the freeing of the slaves. It depended on all those fallacies that are being abandoned today: the idea of a perfectible evolutionary man, of a responsible democratic voter, of the beneficial effect of mechanization, and, above all, on sentimental belief in the basic sweetness of human nature.

There are always honourable exceptions in any general racial condemnation, and, heaven knows, the white people of the north have not made such a success of their own civilization that they can afford any extravagance of phrase. But it is not too much to say that in general character the descendants of the Negro slaves in the British Empire are a thriftless and dissolute lot. It is an unexpected development from the simple, woolly-headed, golden-hearted Bible-reading old darky that was held up as an example to European subscribers - the good old Uncle Tom who was to grow in the air of freedom in to an educated, prudent and pious family man and citizen. The sugar plantations have been ruined or mechanized, and the Negroes, instead of following the example of the indentured coolies and becoming small proprietors, working long hours in the country, drift to the intermittent employment of the towns. They have proved quite unfit for retail trade: they are clumsy mechanics, a superstitious and excitable riff-raff hanging round the rum shops and staring listlessly at the Chinese, Madeiran and East Indian immigrants, who outstrip them in every branch of life.

In Liberia, where they have been put in political power, they have erected a rigid racial bar between the immigrant and the aboriginal Negroes, and have introduced a system of forced labour more onerous than the slavery from which they were themselves freed. It was interesting, when the report on conditions in Liberia was published, to notice the concern that it aroused. The greater part of the British public had no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world. We had so often been told in school that the British people had stamped out slavery that we had come to look on it as something wholly obsolete - as until a few weeks back we imagined the persecution of Jews was obsolete. I have no first-hand experience of Liberia, but from all accounts I should say that slavery there exists in a far more offensive form than anywhere else, for it is the process of degrading a free people in their own country.

It is not the state of slavery so much as the process of enslavement that is intolerable: and it is worth noting that the European slave trade was principally for the transport of people already enslaved. That is to say, the traders purchased captives from the warrior tribes. Undoubtedly the trade stimulated the raiding, but free blacks first captured other free blacks and then sold them to the whites.

I have seen slave-owning communities in Abyssinia and Arabia and got the impression that the slaves are far better off than wage-earners in those countries. For one thing, there is no unemployment. In a country which is not socially organized on an industrial basis - that is to say, with old-age pensions, free hospitals, unemployment relief, etc. - the employer of free labour uses his workers on a subsistence wage for the best years of their life, and then turns them off without further obligation. In the houses I visited in Abyssinia the courtyards were full of decrepit old men and women, long past any useful service, who were fed regularly and sufficiently, and had no other duties than to prostrate themselves once or twice a day when their master went in or out. It is a matter of prestige to support a large household. In the old days of West Indian slavery the charge of ill-treating his slaves was one of the most odious that could be brought against a planter, and in many islands was tantamount to a challenge to a duel.

William Wilberforce was inflated by the true nineteenth-century arrogance of thinking a little local uplift could reverse the development of centuries. Slave raiding has from remotest times been the hobby of the warrior tribes of Africa: slave ownership has been one of the postulates of every civilization. British wealth and British sentiment were strong enough to upset a system which, like any other, had abuses but also many redeeming virtues, but British intelligence was not up to anticipating the problem it created.

More on Mullard

In my last post I quoted Professor Chris Mullard, then a radical Black activist now a radical Black activist member of the establishment, on what would happen should White Britain not cede power to people like himself:

The battle will be a bloody one. Black and White will have no choice. The liberals… will be caught in the middle. In the end they too will have no choice - they will have to side with black or white…

Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment, which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street-fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting. Critics will argue smugly that this cannot possibly happen here. Most of them will be white, blind to what is already happening, wrapped in cocoons of isolation and utopian dreams of multi-racialism, confident that white is might.

To these I say ‘Watch out Whitey, nigger goin’ to get you!’

***

Here is another statement by Mullard:

‘...we … reject the white myths about ourselves - we are not lazy; we do not live off the dole; we do not breed like rabbits; we are not the cause of this country’s social and political problems; we do not smell; we do not bring down house values; we are not maladjusted; we are not educationally sub-normal; and emphatically we are not inferior or ugly.

‘Our habits, customs and values are just as civilised as anybody else is. We are beautiful. We are just as intelligent as others. We are industrious. We possess a sense of morality. The work we do is of vital importance to society. We are proud.’

***

If you have trouble reconciling aspects of the two quotes, perhaps this passage from Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’ will help:

“Monsieur … Madame … We’ve come to help you. Since midnight, you can see the handwriting on the wall. No more of those special rights you’ve always enjoyed. Or, at least, you’re going to have to share them. First, with the Third World workers, and later, with anyone else who decides to join their cause. The streets are full. They’ve already taken over. Who knows? In a few minutes whole families may show up at your door. And, like it or not, you’ll have to make room. They’ll pitch camp in your parlor. Of course, we don’t begrudge our poor, desperate brothers. The ones who break their backs working for you folks, the ones you couldn’t live without. But the rest of us (students, princes, professors, diplomats, intellectuals, artists, trainees in this or that or nothing—take your pick) “…the rest of us are men of taste, steeped in your culture, your style, your way of life. Naturally, we want to preserve that elegance and refinement that we feel we owe so much.” (Clever argument, that. It usually got them.) “Now, the best thing would be if we moved in here with you. Two or three of us, that’s all. Better to share with us—thinking alike, the way we do—than to be invaded by a bunch of poor, ignorant beggars, who don’t mean any harm, Heaven knows, but who just won’t respect things, if you see what we mean. Madame … Monsieur … It’s getting late. When the others come and ring your bell, you’ll really be much better off if they see a black face or two at the door. Come, let us take care of it. You go hide, and leave everything to us …”

Royal Agricultural College: Make us more like Brixton Poly

At the website of the Royal Agricultural College, a profile of Visiting Professor Chris Mullard:

The pathways of Chris’s career to date have produced considerable experience at a high level of management, organisation and the development, modernisation and multiculturalisation of national and international agencies.

His academic career (principally in the political sociology of race relations, education and development) reached its peak in the late eighties/early nineties when he held the Royal Chair in Ethnic Studies and Education at the University of Amsterdam. Since the publication of ‘Black Britain’ (Allen & U 1973) and ‘Race, Power and Resistance’ (Routledge 1985) he has been published extensively and provided keynote speeches at national and international gatherings.

But perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Chris’s passion, drive and ability can be found within Focus Consultancy, which he co-founded in 1986 as a multiracial agency, specialising in the provision of research, development, social marketing and other key consultancy services in the field of the social management of change within global and multicultural contexts.

Chris received his CBE in 2004 for services to race relations from the 1960s when he was Secretary of CARD (the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination). He recently resigned as Chair of London Notting Hill Carnival after a tenure of six years and he is currently Honorary Consul for South Africa for the South West of England and a Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Wiltshire.

He is a keen golfer and his other hobbies include gardening, travel and theatre.

****

It seems unlikely that anybody at the Royal Agricultural College really thinks the countryside needs the blessings of diversity that our cities have ‘enjoyed’ or wants our village fetes to more resemble the Notting Hill Carnival. Yet none can say so. Every organisation must act as though diversity is beneficial even though most of its staff know full well that it’s a nuisance at best. I wouldn’t be surprised if his colleagues and students quietly despise Professor Mullard; no-one ever comes out of a pro-diversity lecture thanking God for diversity, it’s all about making it plain to the White folks that they better just shut up and take what’s coming. That’s what is meant by ‘the social management of change’ and on occasion Mullard has spelt that out all too clearly.

In the early 1980s he was Director of the Race Relations Policy and Practice Unit at the London University of Education, the country’s largest teacher-training college. In that role he wrote about what would happen if institutions and businesses, public and private, did not institutionalise anti-White attitudes and put people like him in charge of race policy:

The battle will be a bloody one. Black and White will have no choice. The liberals… will be caught in the middle. In the end they too will have no choice - they will have to side with black or white…

Blacks will fight with pressure, leaflets, campaigns, demonstrations, fists and scorching resentment, which, when peaceful means fail, will explode into street-fighting, urban guerrilla warfare, looting, burning and rioting. Critics will argue smugly that this cannot possibly happen here. Most of them will be white, blind to what is already happening, wrapped in cocoons of isolation and utopian dreams of multi-racialism, confident that white is might.

To these I say ‘Watch out Whitey, nigger goin’ to get you!’

(quoted in Anti-Racism, an Assault on Education and Value, ed. Frank Palmer, Sherwood Press, 1986).

David Lamb on Zimbabwe

Another short history of Rhodesia’s becoming Zimbabwe (read Roland Oliver's here). David Lamb wrote his brilliant African travelogue in the early nineteen eighties so we must forgive the naïveté. After all, no-one could have predicted that the Blacks would destroy what the White man had built. [sarc.]

All that follows is from David Lamb, The Africans: Encounters from the Sudan to the Cape (Methuen Books, London 1985) pp 332-336

I first arrived in Rhodesia (as it was then called) on Pioneers Day in 1978, a national holiday that celebrated the hoisting of the Union Jack over Salisbury eighty-eight years earlier. At that time the flag was raised by 180 pioneers who had traveled in ox carts from South Africa, moving through country unknown except to a handful of traders and missionaries. Most were “British” South Africans, not “Dutch” South Africans, and they came, like frontiersmen settling the Old West, in search of land and a better life. Their trek, led by Frederick Selous and organized by Cecil Rhodes, a Briton who had made a fortune in South African gold and diamonds, was made under the auspices of the British South Africa Company.

Now the whites, including six surviving daughters of the founding pioneers, gathered in Cecil Square on that September morning in 1978. The women wore broad-brimmed hats, spring dresses and white gloves. In the parks of Salisbury there was a profusion of purple jacaranda in bloom, and the broad boulevards - designed by Rhodes to be wide enough for an eight-team ox wagon to make a U-turn - ran along rows of low white shops with overhanging steel awnings that shaded the spotlessly clean sidewalks. Whereas Johannesburg is a real city, Salisbury (now called Harare in honor of a Shona Chief) is really a large country town. It feels very British, reminding me of what York would look like if it were stuck in the middle of the Montana plains. The soft spring sun beat down on the whites in Cecil Square and on a small group of blacks, watching impassively from across the street. There was a roll of drums and a bugle call as the great-grandson of a founding pioneer raised the Union Jack - a ceremony that would be repeated in 1979 but never again. White heads bowed. The words were brave, even defiant, but everyone knew the end was near. The whites had overcome great odds and built an amazing country. Now the lessons of Africa had caught up with them, and Rhodesia, racked by a liberation war that would claim 27,000 lives between 1972 and 1979, was in the throes of transition.

“Our hearts are heavy,” said the Reverend C. W. A. Blakeley, “for there is sadness and pain and fear and war in our land, and a terrible desire for destruction has been thrust upon us. God, give us all the courage to be part of the solution to our problems and not part of the problem itself.”

Prime Minister Ian Smith - accused by the liberal whites of attempting to maintain white supremacy and by the conservatives of trying to turn Rhodesia over to “Marxist thugs” - moved among the descendants of the pioneers. “How nice to have you here, to see you looking so well,” he said, and ninety-eight-year-old Maria Mooman smiled back and patted his hand. Then Smith, a farmer-turned-politician, walked to his limousine, one hand clutching his hat, the other on the shoulder of his wife, Janet, and sped away without looking back.

Rhodesia had done well under the early settler farmers; there was at the time only one country in sub-Sahara Africa more prosperous than Rhodesia - South Africa. In 1923, when the charter of the British South Africa Company was abrogated, the whites in Rhodesia were given the choice of being incorporated into the Union of South Africa or becoming a self-governing entity within the British Empire. They chose the latter. The whites never institutionalized racism the way the South Africans did, but the blacks in Rhodesia didn’t fare much better than their counterparts in the country next door. The best farmland was reserved for whites. All the top jobs and every seat in parliament were held by whites. The whites’ per capita income in 1975 was $7,800, the blacks’ was $716. The whites’ literacy rate was 100 percent, the blacks’ 30 percent.

“These Africans in Salisbury don’t have anything to do with the terrorists in the rest of the country,” a white housewife told me. “To my mind, they’re terribly lazy and inefficient - much too inefficient to be terrorists - and sometimes difficult to handle, but they’re good people. They’re part of our family, even when they’re working as servants. We tend to their aches and pains and we treat them like we do our own children.”

After World War II, thousands of immigrants from England moved to Rhodesia, attracted by one of the world’s most pleasant life styles, and in 1963 Rhodesia began negotiating with London for its independence. In 1964 the United Kingdom granted independence to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) but demanded that the whites in Southern Rhodesia first demonstrate their intention to move toward eventual majority rule. They refused, and on November 11, 1965, Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front Party unilaterally declared independence. In March 1970 Smith proclaimed a State of Rhodesia.

The world responded by isolating Rhodesia with political and trade boycotts. But Rhodesia, with the help of South Africa and some Western oil companies willing to ignore sanctions, continued to prosper. Its 6,000 white farmers - who produced 80 percent of the country's food - were as industrious and ingenious as any in America’s Corn Belt. They fed the California-sized country and had plenty of food left over to export. Agriculture became a $500 million industry as the farmers moved away from their one-crop economy (tobacco) and diversified. By the late 1970s Rhodesia ranked first in the world in per-hectare yield of groundnuts, second in maize and soybeans, and fourth in wheat. Denied legal trade with the developed world, Rhodesia started making its own wine (not bad) and whiskey (terrible, but the Rhodesians drank it with pride) and producing everything from air conditioners to radios. Despite the international sanctions, a young married couple setting up a home could meet 85 percent of its needs with Rhodesian-made products. (There was even a locally produced version of Monopoly, but since that name was patented, the Rhodesians called their game Around The Boardwalk.) The Rhodesian economy was further buoyed by important supplies of chrome, coal, copper and nickel.

Nevertheless, Rhodesia reverted to the status of a British colony in 1979 and became the independent, black-ruled nation of Zimbabwe in April 1980. What forced the whites to reluctantly surrender power was not sanctions but a guerrilla war that ended up costing the country thirty lives and $1.5 million - or 40 percent of the national budget - each day. The black nationalist forces of the Patriotic Front just wore the country down, economically and spiritually. One faction of the front was headquartered in Zambia, armed by the Soviet Union and led by Joshua Nkomo, a 300-pound former railway worker whose high living raised some eyebrows; the other was in Mozambique, equipped to a large extent by China and led by Robert Mugabe, a Marxist who once said, “Genuine independence can only come out of the barrel of a gun.”

Mugabe, a disciplined scholar and non-practicing Catholic, spent ten years in detention or under restriction until 1974 in Rhodesia, and the whites’ greatest fear was that he would persecute his former tormentors, turn Zimbabwe into a Communist state aligned with Moscow and preside over the disintegration of another African economy. None of those things have happened, and Mugabe has shown far more respect for the due process of law than Ian Smith ever did. As the elected prime minister, Mugabe deftly juggled black hopes and white fears, and in the process proved himself to be perhaps the most capable leader in black Africa. His brand of Marxism thus far has been no more radical than social democracy in Europe and appears no more revolutionary than the demand that the exploitation of blacks must end. He has taken a page from Jomo Kenyatta’s scenario in Kenya and attempted to accommodate the whites, knowing that their presence is essential if Zimbabwe is to prosper. He has remained aloof from the Soviet Union, not even allowing Moscow to set up an embassy in Salisbury until more than a year after independence. In short, this former teacher whom the West called a Marxist terrorist is no more than a socialist and nationalist trying to serve the entire country on a basis of equality.

One of his early moves, after relegating Nkomo to a minor cabinet post, was to convene a conference of thirty-six nations in Zimbabwe to raise money. The scene was similar to a TV telethon in the United States in which viewers make pledges to combat various diseases or to finance political parties. But this one was a bonanza and Mugabe netted $1.4 billion for Zimbabwe. The United States, recognizing that a successful multiracial Zimbabwe could influence the future of South Africa and diminish Soviet pressure in all of southern Africa, pledged $225 million over three years. Even the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone kicked in $90,000. No Communist countries were invited, although a Soviet delegation flew into Salisbury and cooled its heels for two days at a local hotel, waiting for an invitation that never came.

The creation of Zimbabwe was in itself a rare achievement and the government’s accomplishments have not been insignificant. It has paid fair-market prices to whites who sold their farms and left the country, unable to tolerate a place where black cabinet ministers called each other “comrade.” Majority rule has seen the school enrollment more than double, from 800,000 to 1,760,000, and the reopening of 2,000 schools closed by the war. The minimum wage has risen 50 percent, and health care is now free for anyone earning less than $235 a month, which covers the majority of the 6.8 million blacks. The government has subsidized food prices by $385 million to make staples cheaper for the poor. Black employment has increased by 100,000.

Under the constitution, whites are guaranteed twenty of the hundred seats in parliament until 1987. No other African colony has entered independence with similar assurances for the minority race. About half of the original 270,000 whites chose to stay in Zimbabwe, but by the summer of 1983 events had taken a decided turn for the worse in Africa’s youngest country, and Mugabe’s dream for a prosperous, multi-racial society had been derailed by tribalism and was in jeopardy.

Joshua Nkomo, the father of independence who had been cheered by thousands when he made a triumphal return to Rhodesia in January, 1980, had been thrown out of the cabinet and had slipped across the border to Botswana one night, making his way back to London - and another home in exile. What he left behind was an army from the Ndebele-speaking minority, which represents 17 percent of Zimbabwe’s people.

Nkomo had fallen from favor after arms caches were discovered in his tribal district of Matabeleland, where there had been much banditry and terrorism, including the killing of white farmers. Mugabe dispatched the government’s North-Korean-trained elite unit, known as the Fifth Brigade, there with vague instructions to restore order and apprehend deserters who had fought in Nkomo’s liberation army. The Fifth Brigade undertook its assignment with enthusiasm, killing several hundred unarmed civilians in a matter of weeks.

The fragile fiber of society seemed to be unraveling around Mugabe, a member of the Shona-speaking majority that comprises about 80 percent of all Zimbabweans. The economy had been scorched by drought and the world recession, and the departure of whites had reduced productivity. South Africa appeared intent on doing what it could to ensure that there would be no black success stories in next-door Zimbabwe. Mugabe, however, did not overreact as most African presidents do in time of crisis and personal challenge. He continued to preach that blacks and whites, if they worked together, could still create the Zimbabwe that was promised during the war of liberation.

Zimbabwe’s future is far from settled, but a nation of great economic potential has emerged from the ashes of war and racial inequality - a feat that seemed impossible just a few years ago. I would like to think that South Africans will learn from the lessons of what Mugabe has tried to do in Zimbabwe - and what other leaders have done in Kenya, the Ivory Coast and a handful of former colonies. The Afrikaner has only to look across his borders to see the advance of history’s tide.