Rapacity + Depravity = Humanity

Sometimes, I wish that every history book I read didn't reinforce my natural predilection for cynicism, or, worse yet, manage to enhance it. C'est la vie, as the French were saying as they subjugated the indigenous people of their own colony, in what is now the Republic of the Congo.

I feel like it's hard to be shocked by the events described in King Leopold's Ghost. Appalled, saddened, and angered, but not shocked. How can a world that's witnessed, even secondhand, the dual horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be shocked by anything, ever? Belsen in the 1940s, My Lai and East Timor in the 1970s, El Salvador in the 1980s, Kurdistan and Bosnia in the 1990s, Sudan and Abu Ghraib in the 2000s. While differing in severity and scale, infamous episodes such as these have proved that the 20th and 21st centuries can hold their own in terms of man's inhumanity to man.

The thing that disturbs me the most about the systematic slaughter in the Congo is that it took place not because of ideologies, however radical or twisted, but because of simple avarice. For the luxurious profit of a few, some of the worst sufferings imaginable were perpetrated on millions, destroying lives and ways of life. And the sun still came up the next day, as it has every day since. People move on, societies move on , movements moves on.

The world moves on.

But let us not think that all it took to salve the wounds left by Leopold and his like was for the imperialist troops and rubber exporters to abandon their holdings and cede control back to the natives. The legacy of brutality and authoritarian oppression left in Africa by the "civilized" nations of Europe is one that has still not been resolved today.

Mauritania has had at least 10 coups or attempted coups since 1960, the year they achieved independence from the French. The most recent, a successful one, took place on August 6, 2008. No less than 25 African nations have been ruled by a military dictatorship at some point in the post-colonial period (Libya and Zimbabwe are currently ruled by one). Others, such as Gabon, Burkina Faso, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ugunda, the Republic of the Congo, Ethiopa, and the Central African Republic have been or are currently governed by good old fashioned Stalinist dictatorships, with or without the reactionary feel-goodery of a military junta. What European colonization bestowed upon Africa was not the glory of Christian democratic civilization, but decades of bloodshed, political destabilization, and oppression. Nice work, guys!

The people of Africa, like oppressed and powerless people the world over, have consistently paid the price for the fact that humanity's darkest nature, that which needs it the most, is the one that we are the least willing to confront.


Postscript: Don't make the same mistake I made. The film Congo is not a moving and powerful indictment of Leopold's colonial dreams and nightmares. In fact, it mostly concerns vicious, supersmart gorillas.