Terror and Civilisation

Common Sense
John Maxwell

My first horror-struck reaction was to grab the phone. Were any of my children on the trains or on that bus? Two of my three children live in England, and although they do not live in London, it was entirely possible that they might have been there on some kind of business.

I phoned and discovered that they were safe. I was lucky. There are thousands of people who are not so lucky: those who died, those who lost daughters, sons, husbands wives and other loved ones, those who were maimed, their grieving friends, and people everywhere who know that we are cannon fodder in the world war now in progress.


Mr Blair made it explicit. He was shocked, disappointed that the terrorists had not taken note of his and Mr Bush's grand intentions to alleviate poverty in Africa and hopefully, to make some palliative statement about global warming. For him it was clear: the barbarians against the civilised world. I couldn't believe my ears.

I grieve, because, as John Donne said 500 years ago, any man's death diminishes me. I am a part of the human race and any damage, any loss anywhere, disfigures me, reduces my humanity, my variousness.

Global warming was here last week in the shape of Hurricane Dennis. It will be visiting us again and again in the shape of more frequent, more destructive hurricanes.

Hurricanes used to be acts of God. Now they are, to a measurable extent, acts of man. Melting glaciers, icecaps, melting continents, sea level rise, hotter seas and more violent and unpredictable weather are the products of global warming, warming caused by the greed, selfishness and waste of a minority of human beings.

Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow your children and grandchildren will pay for it.

When Mr Bush repeated the riff about civilisation, I thought about the strange coincidences in this life: about the fact that September 11 represents not one but two horrific anniversaries - one in New York, another, 30 years before in Chile. While that thought was making its way through my head, it was announced that 37 people had been killed in London by the agents of barbarism.

The figure 37 was immediately transposed in my head into 73, the number of innocents blown out of the Caribbean sky 29 years ago because they happened to have been passengers in a Cuban aeroplane.

As in London, the selection was random: men, women and children, Christians and non-Christians.
And I wondered, would Messrs Bush and Blair now be able to pay proper attention to their latest charity agenda? What panacea would they be able to offer to Africa after their concentration had been so brutally distracted?

In the Guardian a few days ago, John Vidal gave a learned disquisition on the 'kleptocracy' which had impoverished Africa. He was in the noble tradition of Englishmen since Sir Francis Drake, who have found viable excuses for the enslavement of Africans.

In the old days, wicked Africans offered their kin for sale, and the poor, Christian English, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch had no option but to buy them to prevent them becoming 'bush-meat'. In the process somebody, no doubt the Africans themselves, destroyed countless nations, civilisations and cultures and even a university or two.

And Columbus, Pizarro and their brethren were clearly on a civilising mission when they destroyed the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilisations in the cause of returning South American gold to its rightful European owners.

And when American geographers discovered in Mexico, 10-ton monolithic sculptures of African heads, they were in no doubt that these heads could not have been carved by people who had invented a calendar more accurate than any available in the "West" for another 2,000 years.

So that I want to know, for instance, why it is not reckoned as a crime the fact that the United Nations, under the influence of the United States, Britain and France, should have presided over the starvation deaths of a million Iraqis, half of them children, during a 13-year 'Sanctions regime"? Or why nobody knows how many Iraqis or Palestinians have been killed in the War Against Terror?

Mr Blair and Mr Bush in their civilising mission in Africa were given a fine launching pad by the combined forces of pop music and public relations in the Live 8 concerts. The cannon fodder of the north coming to the aid of the cannon fodder of the south.

Now, the Lords of the Earth would step in and show that they meant business. Africa would get some money, far less than it needed, far less than has been extorted from its people, far less than it repays in usurious loans. But Africa would get money, would get AID to fight AIDS and Malaria; get AID if they behaved themselves, if they pledged to become civilised adults.

The First Globalisation

The history of the Congo is the most explicit demonstration of African haplessness and irremediable wickedness.
Five hundred years ago, Affonso Mani-Kongo (King of the Kongo) had, in tribute to his Christian proselytisation, changed his name from Nzinga Mbemba. It did him no good.

In the year 1526 AD, the Mani-Kongo wrote King John of Portugal as one Christian monarch to another. He complained that his Kingdom was being corrupted by the agents of King John, who had abused the trading concessions given to them, corrupting his subjects and buying their loyalty.

Worse, wrote the Mani-Kongo, "the merchants are taking every day our natives, sons of the lands and some of noblemen and vassals and our relatives, because the thieves and men of bad conscience grab them. and get them to be sold; and so great is the corruption and licentiousness that our country is being completely depopulated, and you, Highness, should not agree with this nor accept it as in your service".

King John turned a deaf ear to Affonso. The Portuguese tried to assassinate him, deposed him and took over his kingdom and began the mass export of slaves to the New World.

The Portuguese never fulfilled their promises of foreign aid and technical assistance - never supplied the artisans and teachers they had promised Affonso as their part of the bargain which allowed them to trade in his Kingdom. Later the Portuguese killed another Mani-Kongo, Antonio I, and his kingdom broke up into a number of small states, parts of what are present day Angola and the Congo.

The extinction of civilisations on both sides of the Atlantic provided the capital on which capitalism itself and the European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries were erected.

Over the years, various European traders penetrated the Congo in search of gold and slaves, but the vast area once ruled by the Mani-Kongo was under the jurisdiction of no one power.

So enter King Leopold of the Belgians, just over a century ago. He asked for and was awarded the Congo by the British, Americans, French and Germans at the Berlin Conference of 1886.

According to King Leopold, his International Association of the Congo was a sort of "Society of the Red Cross .formed with the noble aim of rendering lasting and disinterested service to the cause of progress" as he wrote in an article published by the Times of London.

The noble cause was so effective that, according to demographers, it reduced the population of the Congo by 10 million between 1880 and 1920. Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, said the Congo lost one-half of its population in those 40 years.

The Belgian Government, in response to worldwide disgust at the excesses of Leopold, took over the management of the Congo and ruled it so well that Antwerp became the centre of the world's trade in diamonds, and Belgium, bereft of natural resources, became a respectable European power.

In the 40 years between 1920 and 1960, the population of the Congo grew by about three million; In the 33 years after Independence, it more than tripled.

The Congo had been civilised: In a country one-third the size of the United States, the Belgians left behind five Congolese doctors. When the Congolese decided they had had enough of the Belgians, in 1960, the Belgians, terrified, ran away, leaving behind chaos and confusion. The United States stepped in behind the skirts of the United Nations.

The US National Security Council decided that the answer to the democratic turmoil was to cut off the head of the agitation. The NSC ordered the death of Patrice Lumumba. Their stooge, Joseph Mobutu, carried out the assassination on the instructions of Frank Carlucci, first secretary of the US Embassy, later a patron of Colin Powell.

Mobutu was always the Americans' darling. As Newsweek said in 1997: "It was mainly the United States, France and Belgium that put Mobutu in power and helped to keep him there as a bulwark against cold war rivals.

He was a 'useful tyrant' and as the West protected him. it tolerated his corruption and autocracy. Mobutu earned his keep. In his last great service to Washington, he allowed his territory to be used for the CIA's paramilitary operations in support of anti-Marxist rebel Jonas Savimbi in Angola."

President Reagan often welcomed Savimbi to the White House, praising him as a "voice of good sense and good will". Savimbi led a 40-year war against his own people, and in the process left most of the country dangerously littered with land mines, which are still killing innocent people.

It is obviously a myth that an African king ruled not only the Congo and Angola five centuries ago. And, when the British finally conquered Nigeria just over 100 years ago, it is a myth that they found functioning systems of government. Obviously, the Kings and Chiefs they found were incompetent poseurs, incapable of ruling anything and, probably, figments of their own perfervid imaginations.

The French made the point forcefully when they abandoned ship in Guinea in 1958. They took every filing cabinet, every telephone and every desk from every government office. Guinea did not deserve a government.

So when Messrs Bush and Blair announce this weekend their assistance for Africa, we of the dark corners of the world, we lesser breeds without the law, should be properly grateful.

And it is, of course, no use contending - as some of us are wont to do - that it was in Haiti, 200 years ago, that the world first experienced the concept of universal human rights. Like the Olmec/Aztec/Mayan calendar, that too is a myth - which we will discuss next week.