Avuncular American

14 Kilometers, But Oceans Apart: Trans-Mediterranean Migration

Spanish writer/director Gerardo Olivares' film 14 Kilómetros tells us how far the Moroccan coastline is separated from Spain.  Tantalizingly close, visible from your window whether you're in Tangier on the African side or Tarifa on the European coast.  But if you are one of the thousands of desperate African migrants who has spent your last cent crossing the Sahara getting to the jump off point, you are not going to let 14 Km get in your way.  Or you are going to die trying, as thousands do.

Dr. Bichara Khader of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CERMAC) at Belgium's Université Catholique de Louvain knows this world of mass migration, and has made the study of it his life's work.  Today's presentation at MEDEA's "Mediterranean Midday" was largely devoted to Maghrebi migration to Europe, but the Africans of 14 Kilómetros were never far from our minds.

The fictionalized trio of francophone Africans in Olivares' film (amateurs recruited on the streets of Mali and Niger) start a little hesitantly, and at first appear to be reciting their lines a bit mechanically.  But that impression passes, and the viewer is left with just the three protagonists and the utter vastness of the Sahara.  One of the film's most lingering images is of the impossibly overloaded truck (Olivares was reminded of "boat people" on wheels) lumbering through the desert, dropping people off at some unmarked crossroad in the sand: Libya to the right, Algeria and Morocco to the left.

Our trio takes the latter route, and add to the 100,000 or so sub-Saharan Africans living in the limbo of the Maghreb.  Their Algerian and Moroccan "hosts" may still attempt to make the crossing themselves, but the heyday of North African migration to Europe in the boom time of the Sixties and Seventies is long over.  With Maghrebi birthrates dropping to European levels, how long will it be, asks Dr. Khader, until the Africans simply start to replace the missing Maghrebi workers and give up on their dreams of Europe?

For the crossing is increasingly difficult.  Whether it is 14 Kilometers in the Strait of Gibraltar or hundreds of kilometers to the Italian coast from Libya, European nations are increasing their pressure on the countries of the Maghreb to prevent the African migrants from crossing.  With their detention centers and increasingly sophisticated patrol boats, are the North African countries becoming, in Dr. Khader's words, "the gendarmes of Europe?"

In Olivares' film, the characters are shunted between border posts, safe houses, and brothels.  We come to care for the characters, and to root for them as they confront traffickers whose only interest is in their well-hidden wads of Euros.  We hold our breath as they risk being discovered by Algerian, Moroccan, or Spanish border guards.

For what?  To spend their lives on the edge of society, performing "Difficult, Dirty, Dangerous" jobs shunned by Westerners?

Gerardo Olivares' amateur actors have no such illusions.  As the director told Nicolas Crousse of Le Soir, at the Madrid opening of his film, they saw how African migrants lived in the Spanish capital.  "If it's like that," they told him, "we prefer staying in our own countries."

(Image: Strait of Gibraltar, NASA Earth Observatory)

Obama Challenges Africa's "Big Men"

 

Kente cloth, Ghana

Across Africa, we have seen countless examples of people taking control of their destiny and making change from the bottom up. Make no mistake: history is on the side of these brave Africans and not with those who use coups or change Constitutions to stay in power. Africa doesn't need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.

President Barack Obama, Accra, Ghana, 11 July 2009 (text)

In Chinua Achebe's 1966 novel A Man of the People, "Chief the Honourable M. A. Nanga, M.P." calls the shots, pulls the strings, does everything for His People that a Big Man is supposed to.  All the while helping himself to public money and quashing dissent.  As Somali journalist Abdi Guled recently wrote, confronting the "Big Man Syndrome" in Africa is one of the Obama Administration's major challenges on the continent.  Today's speech was a good step in that direction.

Many Africans might look at Mr. Obama himself as the biggest of Big Men, as a son of Africa who has made it in the West (understatement), and might now be counted on, in time-honored African fashion, to be the Big Benefactor and send more money back "home."  But the President is having none of it:

[T]he true sign of success is not whether we are a source of perpetual aid that helps people scrape by — it is whether we are partners in building the capacity for transformational change.  Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it is no longer needed.

Though much anticipated and well-received, the speech appears to be continuation of many programmatic themes of US policy.  Obama gave due credit to George W. Bush's initiatives on health care, though it must be said that even in a country as democratic as Ghana, the best health care is available to elites, and is usually found in the Military Hospital, in capital cities across the continent.

That other Bush initiative - the establishment of AFRICOM - was put in proper perspective, just after diplomacy: "our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world."  Obama's mention of "foothold" may be seen by Africans as a reference to Bush Administration frustration in its early attempts to get African support to site AFRICOM headquarters on the continent.

The strength of Obama's "Good Governance" speech, as former Ugandan Foreign Minister Olara Ottunnu said on a BBC program, may come from his "moral authority as a son of an African intellectual."  His reminding African audiences that poor leadership - not colonialism - is responsible for "the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy," for the use of child soldiers, for tribalism, nepotism, or corruption, is made all the more credible because of who he is.

The Big Man in Africa is a reality, and the realist in Obama knows that he will have to continue to work with African Big Men, in presidential palaces and governor's mansions from Cairo to Katanga.  But today's speech mentions Africa's unsung heroes, "these brave Africans" - people from civil society and the civil service who fight injustice and corruption.  Obama's singling out of those courageous people and organizations should provide encouragement to young Africans who hang on his every word.  And make the Big Men feel slightly less comfortable in their plush palaces.

Africa Welcomes Obama

Photo: TouringGhana.com

Barack Obama chose well for the venue of his first sub-Saharan Africa visit as President.  Ghana, as the BBC's Martin Plaut writes, "ticks all the boxes"

Not only is Ghana clearly democratic, but it has some of the African oil on which the US increasingly depends, and there is the symbolic link with slavery, from which so many African-Americans trace their heritage.

Plus Ghanaians deserve to be put forward as a model for other Africans who live in countries not quite as enlightened.  Their country's reputation was not always quite as positive as it has been in recent years.

(Photo, Ghanaian slave "castle" Fort Good Hope, 2005)

The public diplomacy people who helped prepare this inaugural trip had an inspired thought when they invited Africans' comments, which have been pouring in by SMS, email, etc.  Using the best texting shorthand, this is one of my favorites:

Dear Mr President B Obama! Welcome 2 Africa! Congrats 4 ur election! N greetings n blessings 2 ur family! Wat will b ur new foreign policy towards z Islands of SWest of Indian Ocean including Diego Garcia ? Take care ! All z best n God bless!
Mauritius

Actually, I have been wondering the same thing (about Diego Garcia and its exiled inhabitants).

Presidents have very limited time on these foreign trips, and the Obamas are fortunate to be able to visit the Cape Coast Castle, much more spectacular than my little castle here, which has been turned into a very modest hotel (possibly brothel) on a seldom-visited part of Ghana's coast.

Too bad they don't have enough time to make a pilgrimage in Accra to the final resting place of W.E.B. Du Bois, the African-American writer and one of the founders of the NAACP, who decided to settle in the newly-independent Ghana of Kwame Nkrumah in the late 1950s early Sixties.

I will be listening to the President's speech, to be broadcast live on the BBC.  Stay tuned for comment.

Avast, Somali Pirates: Payouts, Prosecution and Projectiles

As soon as you start using the term pirate, unfortunately cute or nostalgic images of Johnny Depp and Long John Silver come to mind - "Avast, me hearties!" ("avast" means to stop or cease) and other lusty lingo.  All that is best relegated to the world of children's stories (image, Playwood Toys).  Today's real-world piracy is, as a Somali pirate phoning the wife of a European hostage said, all about "money, money."

We returned to Brussels over the weekend, as news came out about the liberation of the Belgian ship Pompei, which had been captured in April by Somali pirates operating as far away as the Indian Ocean waters of the Seychelles.  No secret was made of the fact that a ransom had been paid, though the exact amount was not revealed.  Belgian police and military personnel set forth to join up with the liberated crew, part of an investigation in pursuit of the pirates, who violated a 1928 Belgian law which provides for international jurisdiction by Belgian courts in matters of piracy committed against nationals.

Somali pirates may not exactly be quaking in their skiffs at the prospect of Belgian prosecutors dragging them off to Brussels, but Belgium's legal approach is at least novel.  The payment, by the shipping company and/or its insurers, was made under duress, and was motivated as much by wanting to avoid physical harm to the crew as to protect its investment in this very specialized "side stone dumping vessel" (used in port dredging operations).  And how many Somali pirates have simply been released after capture by international forces?  At least the Belgians are setting the stage for prosecution.

Payouts to pirates have been made from time immemorial (see Richard Zacks' The Pirate Coast for an account of early U.S. travails with the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, which included ransoming of hostages), and given NATO and EU naval forces' inability to prevent all such incidents, will likely continue when Somalis successfully pick off unescorted vessels.  La Libre Belgique tells us that recently the pirates have even taken to using Somali refugees as human shields when launching their assaults.

Naval patrols, ransom for hostages and vessels, prosecution in the (unlikely) event that names, fingerprints, and perps are matched up ... all these responses are in the panoply of the world's reactions to this scourge of international shipping (see the ICC's Live Piracy Map for a look at how the Horn of Africa is piracy ground zero).  But how about the "kinetic" response?  As Zacks' quotation of an old Barbary pirate maxim - "Whoever acts like a sheep, the wolf will eat" - a more muscular response - "Blow them out of the water!" - should be an important part of the international community's toolkit.

Classic criminals after "money, money," rather than Johann Hari's description in The Independent of the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia," are nonetheless an outgrowth of the anarchic conditions that have prevailed in Somalia for the better part of two decades.  As Alain Lallemand in Brussels' Le Soir reminds us, it is in the West's interest to prevent Somalia from sinking under the weight of its multiple dysfunctionalities.

Taking the threats from Somalia seriously and using the impressive firepower on board all those naval vessels (Belgium, by the way, has offered to station armed military on board commercial vessels) has to be part of a wider strategy to encourage Somalia to rejoin the community of nations.  And while the West is righteously indignant over piracy's threat to international trade, it must ensure that its own commercial vessels are not using the free-for-all in Somali waters to dump hazardous waste and rape the country's fisheries, as Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, UN envoy Somalia, alleged last year.

No need to give the "Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia" any patriotic pretexts for its piracy.

Katanga Business

To lead the mineral-rich Congolese province of Katanga, you don't have to be named Moïse.  But Moïse Katumbi, the current governor and "star" of Katanga Business, and Moïse Tshombe, the leader who tried to break away from newly-independent Congo in 1960, have the French version of the name "Moses" in common.  And this: the ground they rule(d) is the source of international competition, a contemporary Scramble for Africa over precious cobalt, coltan, tungsten, and plain old copper.

Like the hero of Chinua Achebe's novel, "A Man of the People," Governor Katumbi is a "Big Man," the kind of African leader who, as long as he continues to distribute largess to his people, remains popular.  He's the guy - you guessed it - in the black cowboy hat on the poster.  Katumbi is a sort of reverse Obama; his father was a Jewish exile from Hitler's Europe who took refuge and thrived in then Belgian Congo.

Belgian documentary film maker Thierry Michel's latest work, just released in Belgium and France, is a "sort of economic parable via an industrial saga," according to the director.  Michel knows the Congo (DRC) well; he's been making films there on and off for the last 17 years, and shot Katanga Business over five separate trips.  Note to self: must go and rent DVDs of his other Congo films; two of the latest were Congo River and Mobutu, King of Zaire.

For francophones, the film's official website offers an interview with Michel, where he gives credit to Governor Katumbi for being a "modernist, extracting agreements from international mining companies to develop the province's agriculture," but at the same time calls him "an ambivalent figure, a capitalist/populist mix of Silvio Berlusconi and Hugo Chavez." Colette Braeckman, Africa correspondent of Le Soir, paints a lively portrait of the man's ambiguities here.

In an extensive interview with Fabienne Bradfer of Le Soir, Thierry Michel expands on his fascinating Governorator:

He's a wealthy businessman, who governs like he runs his businesses (like Berlusconi, he too has TV station and football club).  He was elected because he was very rich; for the Congolese, being rich means he's less likely to try to enrich himself and therefore better able to govern the province.  He's visionary, charismatic, and a communicator.

But Katanga Business is not a biopic of a provincial African governor, photogenic as he is.  It's about globalization, capitalism, and economic colonialism.  Thierry Michel turns Chinese wildcat investors, Belgian holdover industrialists, and Canadian "pension fund" investors into a rich mix, but none are caricatured as they might be in a Michael Moore film on similar ground.

The most dignified players - though some of them are reduced to begging for handouts from "papa" the governor - are the Congolese miners.  Creuseurs or diggers, they try their best to maintain discipline (it's their byword) in set-piece confrontations with politicians, employers, and police.  The odds are always against them - anyone would be intimidated by the armored, helmeted, and masked Congolese police, bearing down on the workers with tear gas, batons, and bullets.

Hemmed in between Chinese and Western investors, cajoled by politicians in suits or cudgeled by police looking like Samurai warriors, the barefooted miners have only one choice: work, for whatever pittance their masters deign to hand out.  The word "slavery" is used more than once - not by the narrator, but by the men who provide the world what it needs to keep its mobile phones charged.

In places from Katanga to Kazakhstan, "business" (often pronounced beeznis with a leering grin), is synonymous with corruption, exploitation, and destruction.  It's a long way from nostalgic Main Street notions of private enterprise.  In other words, a timely film, one that presents lessons beyond Lumbumbashi.

Former African Granaries, Algeria to Zimbabwe

Today is Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's 85th birthday.  To read about his "obscenely" lavish party, read Martin Fletcher's report in the Times of London.

You've seen the TV footage of the misery reigning in the country where he holds the reins of power; here is what (Obama advisor) Samantha Power wrote in The Atlantic in December 2003, "How to Kill a Country."

A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.

Imagine - the above was written when Zimbabwe's inflation rate was reaching an "unprecedented" 700 percent.  In other words, in the golden days of 3 digit inflation, before today's 6.5 quindecillion percent (I confess I didn't know of this measure) inflation and cholera epidemic.  Wait a minute - inflation may have reached 10 sextillion percent.  Hard to keep track.

How does a country go from being a "net exporter" of food to a situation where 7 million of its citizens require international food aid?  "Governance" practiced as "power grab" is the point of departure.  Then you dispossess the heretofore productive farmers of their land, to the point where they seek refuge in Nigeria, which welcomes their agricultural know-how.

Normally I wouldn't put Zimbabwe and Algeria in the same post, except if I were listing African countries in alphabetical order.  But the latter was also a breadbasket, and you don't even have to go as far back as the days when it was "the granary of the Roman Empire" (above left, map of the Roman Province of "Africa," from a site dedicated to subjects Roman, UNRV.com).

In the early '90s when we lived in Oran, Algeria's second city and major port, the American Consulate overlooked the harbor, where the grain facility was located (photo at right, Wikipedia).  When it was built by the French, its purpose was to export Algeria's considerable wheat production.  When we lived there, some thirty years after Algerian independence, it served to import huge quantities of foreign grain.  Here's what an upbeat (for grain farmers) Canadian Government site says about the Algerian market:

Algeria is the largest importer of agricultural goods in Africa, making it an attractive market, holding immense potential. Agricultural imports provide for most of the consumption needs due to unfavorable harvest conditions often resulting from drought. In 2007 Algeria imported $4.8 billion in foodstuffs from all countries; of these, $1.8 billion (38%) were grains, $1.1 billion (22%) dairy and $348 million (8%) was sugar. Algeria's largest import in 2007 was wheat at $940 million.

Don't get me wrong: whatever problems Algeria has, and they are legion (canceled elections leading to terrorism, huge youth unemployment, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the ruling class), it is not a Zimbabwe.  But through a combination of hubristic industrialization and its leadership equating "agriculture" with "French colonialism," it threw away its indigenous source of sustenance.

Algeria, Zimbabwe - Africa's list of granaries and breadbaskets, past, present, and future is mainly a matter of good governance.  But talk to African economists, and you'll hear that American and European farm subsidies hurt African farmers.  In the new world of recession and retrenchment, let's see where the "trade not aid" argument takes us.

But don't count on those white Zimbabwean farmers in Nigeria returning "home."  That home exists no more.

Giving Information Ministers a Bad Rep

Cholera is a calculated, racist attack on Zimbabwe by the unrepentant former colonial power, which has enlisted support from its American and Western allies so that they can invade the country.

Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, Zimbabwe Information Minister (CNN, 15 December 2008)

There are no American troops in Baghdad! The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad.  We slaughtered them.

Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, aka "Baghdad Bob," Iraq Information Minister (USA Today, April 2003)

It's unfair to all those earnest information ministers out there in the world to quote two of the most notorious deniers-of-reality of this century.  Just Google ministry of information and see what you come up with.  Links to information ministries in all manner of countries with little or no press, free or otherwise, but a helpful ministry to provide whatever meets their approved version of reality.

During the two World Wars, Britain had a Ministry of Information, which, according to the UK National Archives, was "the central government department responsible for publicity and propaganda."

The United States has no such "central government department," though some would argue that it needs one.  Public Diplomacy, the responsibility of the State Department, vies with "Strategic Communication," which increasingly has a military accent.  In such quality blogs as "Mountain Runner," observers like Matt Armstrong engage readers to ponder what institutional and legislative arrangements best suit the U.S.  Ex-USIA officers Patricia Kushlis and Patricia Lee Sharpe in Whirled View show how much of the experience acquired under the defunct United States Information Agency has been lost after its forced absorption into the State Department almost a decade ago.

This post is not really intended to give proper treatment to a very weighty subject (Matt is doing that in a big way next month in a conference in Washington).  But last week's outburst from the Zimbabwe Information Minister blaming cholera on everyone but his own president's misrule underlined again that it's not the messenger, nor the medium, but the underlying reality that counts.

America's progress in "the war of ideas" will depend - as has its failure in the last eight years - on the content of its policies.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Practice what you preach.  What goes around, comes around.  Reap what you sow.

It matters much less whether the Minister of Information or the White House Spokesman provides the (dis)information.  Credibility, once lost, takes ages to restore. Among the many things that must be done starting January 20, restoring America's reputation will take everything that a President Obama can give it.

Fewer Coups, But Men-With-Guns Thrive

"Why coups are less and less popular," a fascinating chart on The Economist website, is worth a look.  It's a snazzier version of the report put out by the very serious HIIK, the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research, as part of the Human Security Report Project (HSRP).

It shows how "le coup d'etat" is way down as a means of toppling governments.  From its heyday in 1963, when there were 25 coups, through 2007, when there was just one.

Of course you never know: there used to be a joke in US embassies about how a CIA station in West Africa would submit an annual coup prediction, knowing that they'd eventually get it right.

I only experienced one coup, whose initial stage was largely bloodless: the Algerian Army's overthrow of one of its own, President Chadli Bendjedid in 1992, and its subsequent cancellation of elections that the Islamist FIS party was poised to win.  We had a view from the living room of the tanks below our window, streaming down the waterfront boulevard in Oran.

Though the coup itself was relatively bloodless, the aftermath has been more than a decade and a half of bloodletting: Algeria descended into a spiral of terrorist violence and reprisal from which it has yet to fully emerge.

I'm sure that the people who developed the coup chart are meticulous in their methodology, and have footnotes to annotate instances of regime-change, where, like in Iraq in 2003, the coup was administered from the outside.

And then there's the category of regime-change in a stateless territory, like the overthrow of the Somali Islamic Courts by US surrogate Ethiopia, which Aidan Hartley ("The Zanzibar Chest") describes so well in the current Vanity Fair.  That's a "coup" for you: the only group which is capable of reining in on the anarchic warlords and pirates is overthrown.

Sometimes militaries don't need to carry out a coup to exert their power, as Steven Cook illustrates in his book "Ruling But Not Governing."  In which he shows how the militaries in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey, in ways both overt and subtle, exercise the real power behind the scene.

Coups beget coups.  My diplomatic career began in 1979, in the same month that the Shah of Iran was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution.  His career had begun in a coup, helped to power in 1953 by the CIA.  Some of my diplomatic classmates wound up as hostages in the 1979 US Embassy takeover.

I went off to the "quiet" Caribbean, and just missed witnessing the pro-Cuban coup on the island of Grenada in March 1979.  During my time in the Eastern Caribbean, I dealt with some of the aftermath of Maurice Bishop's coup.  He in turn was killed in a 1983 coup, which precipitated (presaged is another word) Ronald Reagan's "rescue" of the island from the Cuban menace.  Live by coup, die by coup.

This is beginning to resemble something from Forrest Gump, interloping on history.  Sorry.

So I will end with today's "Analysis" from BBC World Service, which you can listen to here.   It's full of examples - like Condoleezza Rice meeting first with Army chief General Kayani during her recent visit, before she even sees the elected civilian leaders - of why in Pakistan, it's still the Army that calls the shots.

Coups: they may be falling out of favor, but their absence is not proof of democracy's rise.  In much of the world, men-with-guns, whether of the respectable kind that have traded their uniforms for business suits, or those who command child soldiers, are still very much with us.

African Reputations: Ghana & Zimbabwe

There was never a better time to prove the point - Governor Palin, are you paying attention? - that Africa is a continent and not a country.  The news coming from two widely separated corners shows the contrast:

Ghana: the country's fifth democratic, contested presidential elections are taking place today, and the country is debating how best to manage an oil bonanza due to start in the next two years

Zimbabwe: starvation has exacerbated the cholera epidemic, which is added to the endemic hyper-inflation and political violence.  Now even some African leaders are calling for armed international intervention to save the country from Robert Mugabe's calamitous rule.

If you are looking for the latest information on Ghana's elections, check this wonderful page from the BBC World Service, which provides audio and text background and results starting 1830 GMT on Sunday.  For local flavor and minute-by-minute updates, read "Think Ghana" and its Decision '08 blog, by three enterprising young Ghanaians.

Personally, I want Ghana's winning streak to continue, for it is a very impressive country.  Airports tell you something about a country, and Accra's international airport is clean and calm - extremely reassuring in a region where air travel is sporadically deadly.  Ghana - even before the discovery of oil - was fast on its way to becoming a regional center; French is increasingly overheard, thanks to francophone businessmen seeking a safe place to do business near sometimes war torn Ivory Coast.

But it was not always so.  I returned from a series of trips to Ghana a couple of years ago, and was enthusing about the country's progress with a friend who had served in the Peace Corps in the French-speaking Sahel in the Eighties.  She was surprised at the change from her time in the region, as Ghana's reputation then was one of military coups, corruption, instability, and firing squads.  Today, an interested visitor might see the seaside firing ranges that the very professional Ghanaian Army now only uses for target practice.  In 1979, that's where they carried out the execution of the losers in a military coup.

This oscillation in the reputation of African countries is nowhere more evident than in Zimbabwe, which was known as the "jewel of Africa" in better days.  Before its 231 million percent annual inflation rate and $200 million Zimbabwe Dollar note (AFP photo at left from yesterday is already outdated).  For an idea of the extent of the paradise that was lost, read "How To Kill a Country" in the December 2003 Atlantic by (current Obama State Department Transition Team adviser) Samantha Power:

The country's economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women. How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent's basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe... who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction.

Dr. Power likely thought that five years ago Zimbabwe had reached its nadir; today it's impossible to say just how much lower the country can go.  And unless Mugabe himself contracts the rampant cholera, it's hard to imagine what - short of his army turning on him - can put an end to the misery.

"Nation branding," or the cultivation of a country's reputation, requires more than a marketing effort for African countries.  No PR campaign on CNN International or BBC World can erase the total failure of governance and the evident misery of Zimbabwe's population.  But Ghana, which returned from the precipice of failed statehood, offers hope to a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.  The question is: what will be left to govern?

"The Belgian Solution" to Leopold's Congo: 15 November 1908

Can't let this centenary pass unnoticed: 100 years ago today, King Leopold II's "personal property" of the Etat Independant du Congo became a Belgian colony.  This was the "Belgian Solution" that even human rights campaigners at the time saw as an improvement over the bloody personal rule by a sovereign who never set foot in his African domain, but who profited enormously from its rich natural resources. [Stamp image source: Congoposte.be, "Septante-sept ans d'histoire postale en Afrique centrale"]

The "Belgian Solution" to what had become a worldwide firestorm of protest against Leopold's rule was to last another half century, until Congolese independence in 1960.  Thousands of Belgians have roots in the Congo, and much of the country's wealth - certainly its store of mansions and monumental architecture built from the proceeds of mineral extraction and rubber plantations - dates from the "Congo Belge" era, whether under Leopold's personal rule or its time as a colony.

Leopold II's quarter century of direct rule over his "Congo Free State" saw the colony become, according to Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghosts, "one of the major killing grounds of modern times."  Statistics vary on the number of Congolese killed, starved, maimed, raped, or infected at the hands of the Belgians and their private/public militias, but Hochschild cites a figure used by a contemporary source, Mark Twain, at between 5 and 8 million people.

Consider that number, and then remember that "Africa's World War" in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, which was known as Zaire in the Mobutu years) in the last decade has killed an estimated 3.8 million additional people.  Whatever the actual numbers, it is fair to say that in the century since Leopold first left his mark on the Congo, the legacy of colonization and its aftermath has been deadly for millions of Congolese.

But in today's Le Soir three page special on the centenary of Leopold's handover of his Congo Free State, there is still nostalgia among the former colons for their "lost paradise" (handover is too modest a term; after making a billion dollars from his exploitation of Congolese slave labor, Leopold II "sold" his personal colony to the Belgian state and was thanked for "his great sacrifices made for the Congo.")

You can get a sense of this Congo-Belge nostalgia in the pages of the "Union Royale Belge Pour les Pays d'Outre-Mer" UROME, which publishes a trilingual website (though it has an English link, the French appears the most complete).  The "good old days," when an ambitious young Belgian (or Luxembourger) might study "sciences coloniales" and head off on the two week steamer trip to a life of adventure in Belgium's African colonies of the Congo and "Ruanda-Urundi," today's Rwanda and Burundi.  Beyond pure nostalgia, Belgian history professor at V.U.B. Guy Vanthemsche provides some statistics on the legacy Belgium left independent Congo in today's La Libre Belgique.

A hundred years on from Congo's "graduation" from private royal fiefdom to full-fledged colony, and on to eventual independence and civil war, relations with the former colonial power are strained.  Belgium hosts thousands of Congolese immigrants, and there are still a few thousand Belgians in the DRC.  It's hard to say how things might have turned out for the Congo had its transition to independence been better prepared; as it happened, Belgium in the late Fifties and early Sixties could not resist the tide of independence sweeping Africa.

Congo, 1908-2008.  Plus ça change... Adam Hochschild, angry a couple of years ago that George W. Bush referred to having read his "Leopold's Ghosts" without seeing the right historical parallels, drew them for the President in an open letter in the Los Angeles Times:

The long effort by King Leopold II of Belgium to bring Congo under his control was driven by his avid quest for a commodity central to industry and transportation: rubber. Does that remind you of anything?

Hochschild saw the resource grab behind Bush's invasion of Iraq, just like Leopold cloaked his rape of the Congo in "philanthropic" terms.  For present-day Congo, it's no longer rubber, but a "coltan rush" and "blood tantalum" for our mobile phones that has the warlords killing and enslaving Congolese.  The "Scramble for Africa" continues.