The Hearts of Darkness: How
European Writers Created the Racist Image of Africa
Part Seven
by Milton Allimadi
Mr. Allimadi is CEO and Publisher of The Black Star News, based in
New York City. He has graciously given BAR permission to serialize his work.
Time Magazine Denigrates Congo Nationalism
Time magazine was once the mouth-piece for Western
domination of Africa, serving as apologist for the British in Kenya during the
Mau-Mau uprising, and later in the Congo when Patrice Lumumba
was agitating for independence, and later when he was fighting for his life.
One memorable Time magazine article was published on
December 4th, 1964, when the Simba guerrillas were defeated by a
mercenary army backing the Belgian stooge, Moise Tshombe, who led the
secessionist Katanga province. Time magazine's cover carried the
photograph of Paul E. Carlson, a 36-year-old American doctor, who had volunteered
to work in the Congo and had reportedly been murdered by the Simba. He had been
killed along with 26 other whites in Stanleyville (now Kisangani), in the
north.
"Lumumba was demonized by Western media as a pro-Soviet
Communist leader."
The Congo at that time was torn by chaotic civil war
following Lumumba's murder, with at least four rival administrations in place.
Belgian mining and business interests, determined to continue their colonial
exploitation of the Congo's resources, had backed Tshombe and other
secessionists amenable to their business interests. Tshombe, in turn, had
declared himself prime minister of mineral-rich Katanga. He was favored by the
Belgian mining companies and backed Western occupation of the Congo, so he
became a darling of the Western media.
Lumumba, the elected leader of the central government and a
nationalist, was demonized by Western media as a pro-Soviet Communist leader.
This paved the way for the military intervention of Colonel Joseph Desire
Mobuttu (later Mobuttu Sese Seko) and Lumumba's eventual murder with backing
from the Central Intelligence Agency and the Belgian government.
The United States assisted Belgium when it mounted a
paratroop mission to "rescue" 1,300 Europeans reportedly trapped in
Stanleyville as a result of the fighting reported by Time magazine. After the paratroopers landed on the
outskirts of the city, the Simba rounded up 250 whites, Time
reported. Also foreshadowing the use of
radio to incite violence, as occurred in Rwanda 30 years later, Radio
Stanleyville broadcast a simple message, "Ciyuga! Ciyuga! (Kill them all),"
according to Time, and the targets were presumably meant to be whites.
The message was from a "major Babu," described by Time
as a "deaf-mute ex-boxer addicted to hemp." The article added, "Babu's order
could not have been a scream, but in its strangled, inarticulate, ferocity must
have expressed the blood lust of the Simbas." According to the article, all but
60 of the whites were rescued by the paratroop operation. Twenty-five of the
dead were identified as Belgians, along with two Americans, including Dr.
Carlson - the others were not accounted for.
Perhaps recognizing that it needed to explain why one
American's death commanded so much attention in the publication, while an
entire country was aflame and disintegrating, Time magazine explained it
this way: "A single life, or even a hundred may not appear to mean much in the
grim reckoning of Africa. The tribes butchered each other for centuries before
the white man arrived and in colonial days when white soldiers killed
countless, nameless Africans. Dr. Carlson's murder, along with the massacre of
another hundred whites and thousands of Blacks, had a special tragic meaning."
"Time magazine: ‘The rebels were, after all, for the most
part, only a rabble of dazed, ignorant savages.'"
Why was this? "Carlson symbolized all the white men - and
there are many - who want nothing from Africa but a chance to help," the
article stated. "He was no saint and no deliberate martyr. He was a highly
skilled physician and who, out of a strong Christian faith and a sense of
common humanity, had gone to the Congo to treat the sick." Then came the punch
line that the magazine had wanted to deliver all along: "His death did more
than prove that Black African civilization - with its trappings of half a
hundred sovereignties, governments and U.N. delegations -- is largely a
pretense. The rebels were, after all, for the most part, only a rabble of
dazed, ignorant savages, used and abused by semi-sophisticated leaders."
When Tshombe's brutal mercenaries, led by major Mike Hoare,
described by Time as "a starchy South African," committed atrocities
when they retook Stanleyville, the magazine glossed over their violence. "They
were not above searching bodies for cash or blowing a few safes in the
Stanleyville banks," the article stated. "But a great many of them are fighting
for Tshombe's government out of conviction. Certainly, the ‘mercenaries' are no
more mercenary - and far less brutal - than the African soldiers on either side
of the Congolese civil war."
The article added, "Tshombe's tough Katangese gendarmes
hunted down Simbas. Black residents of Stanleyville took to wearing white
headbands to show their allegiance to the Leopoldville government, but that did
not always work, and many a headband was soon stained red."
The article also accused every African of "insanity" because
African presidents had backed the Simba "without even a hint of condemnation
for their bestialities." It continued, "Virtually all these nations echoed the
cynical Communist line in denouncing the parachute rescue as ‘imperialist
aggression.' When this happened, the
sane part of the world could only wonder whether Black Africa can be taken
seriously at all, or whether, for the foreseeable future, it is beyond the
reach of reason."
Finally, anyone who knows anything about Africa will attest,
no Western writer ever departs from a visit to Congo without invoking that
racist novel, Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. "Stanleyville, the
‘Inner Station' of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, stands at the very center
of the continent," the Time magazine article stated, obligingly. "As
Conrad wrote of the journey upriver to Stanleyville, ‘It was like traveling
back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rotted on earth
and the big trees were kings. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. You
thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known
once - somewhere - far away - in another existence perhaps.' So it must have
seemed to the soldiers who last week made the voyage to the Inner Station." One
can almost envision the Time writer flipping feverishly through Conrad's
novel to lift a suitable section for his article.
"Tshombe was praised effusively by the writer as the
antithesis of the savage African."
Tshombe, on the other hand, was praised effusively by the
writer as the antithesis of the savage African because he pursued a "patient
formula" and recognized that white men "will hold as many positions as possible
for as long as it takes to mold an effective army and administration." For that
reason, Tshombe was "beyond the pale of his peers in other African nations."
Thankfully for the rest of the world, concluded the article,
"Africans respect a winner and so Tshombe banked on his firm stand against the
rebels in Stanleyville. If he succeeds, the Congo could become a watershed in
the history of emerging Africa. For five years, African politicians have
indiscriminately whip lashed the Western world with such airy phrases as
‘African personality' and ‘African socialism.' Tshombe - that rarest of
Africans who seems to have no complexes about being black - recognizes the
brutal side of the African personality, and the phony side of African socialism."
Africa's Coming Anarchy & Doom
Responding to the spread of civil conflict in Africa during
the 1980s and the early 1990s major Western publications including The New York Times intensified their
tribalization of Africa. Finally, the series of disastrous wars in Africa had
paved the way for frustrated racists to openly express themselves again.
An article by Alan Cowell - the same Cowell the Zimbabweans
had denied permission to cover their country while based in South Africa - was
published in The New York Times Magazine
under the headline "Mobuttu's Zaire: Magic and Decay," on April 5, 1992. The
article began with the author informing readers about his adventures with "new
friends" through La Cite which he described as a "reptilian slum" in
Kinshasa where the "music throbbed with primal energy."
"All the worn truths about modern Africa," Cowell explained,
"it's myriad tribes and fake boundaries, its recourse to tyranny; the absence
of hope or accountability - seem to tumble together in the streets of Kinshasa,
the hot moist capital."
"The bush has grown over the Belgian-built roads so that no
one can even find them," he continued, without noting that Belgium was more
notorious for chopping off the hands of Congolese rather than building the
country. "There is no single highway or railroad connecting north and south.
The best route to the interior is by a river ferry laden with whores and
traders dabbling in parrots and monkeys and booze and dope. Somewhere out there
are Pygmies and rebels, diamond smugglers and jungle."
"There are many others like him," Cowell wrote, of Mobuttu,
without focusing on the fact that this kleptomaniac and Patrice Lumumba's
assassin was created and sustained by the United States. "In Zambia, before his
fall in 1991, President Kenneth Kaunda devised ‘one-party participatory
democracy' and decreed that the country's currency bear his portrait, as a
symbol of national unity. In Guinea, President Ahmed Sekou Toure's image
likewise adorned the national currency, which was called the Syli (pronounced
silly) - a frivolous sideshow to a bloody despotic rule."
Cowell's portrayal of Zaire was not any different from
Homer Bigart's contemptuous representation of the Congo and Nigeria more than
30 years earlier. "Julius K. Nyerere in Tanzania became the Teacher, although
the lessons were only in how to run an economy to the ground. Kamuzu Hastings
Banda in Malawi - the conqueror - waved a fly whisk. At festivals, he had
big-bottomed women dance around his diminutive figure so that all the spectators
could see was the fly-whisk - the wand of power - held magically, quiveringly,
irrepressibly aloft."
"The author lamented that British colonial rule in Africa
had ended prematurely."
Western writers cannot resist the temptation of dumping on
Pygmies whenever they write about the Congo. In his article, Cowell recalled
that many years earlier, in 1977, he had gone in search of Pygmies when he
learned that Mobuttu employed a crack military unit to help fight rebels. "When
later in the campaign, in the town of Kasaji, I found a man of no great stature
clad in government uniform, carrying a bow and poisoned arrow," Cowell wrote,
"I felt obliged to ask him: Are you a Pygmy? ‘No,' he replied, politely but
firmly and with wry dignity. ‘I am a small Zairian.'"
On April 18th, 1993 The New York Times Magazine published an article under the
pernicious headline, "Colonialism's Back - And Not A Moment too Soon." The
article, by Paul Johnson, praised the intervention by the United States and the
United Nations to try and restore order in Somalia, a mission initially
supported by many Somalis and other Africans. Might not this intervention serve
as a model for other operations in African countries facing similar political
collapse, the writer wondered? The author lamented that British colonial rule
in Africa had ended prematurely.
It never occurred to Johnson to argue that preparation for
self-rule had never been part of the agenda in all the years of colonial
misrule. After dominating the Congo for more than a century, Belgium managed to
produce only a half-dozen college graduates to take over a country of millions
when they left the vast territory. In almost four centuries of contact with
Mozambique and Angola, the Portuguese were unable to produce educated Africans.
Now, suddenly, these countries were to be blamed for their political, economic
and social malaise after 30 years of self-rule, following more than a century
of ruin in some cases? "There is a
moral issue here," Johnson insisted, in his article. "The civilized world has a mission to go out
to these desperate places and govern."
When editors believe there is a vigorous organized
constituency, they often solicit an opposing opinion when they publish
controversial, pernicious, or outright racist viewpoints. By 1993, with several
African countries engulfed in conflict, with images of starvation, death and
destruction flashed all over the world, editors felt no need to offer
counter-balancing arguments. After all,
Africa was simply reverting to its natural state - barbarism.
The Times' magazine
article paved the way for the publication of similar articles. "The Coming
Anarchy," by Robert D. Kaplan, the
most apocalyptic of them all, was published by The Atlantic Monthly magazine in its March 1994 issue, and years
later, it was published as a book.
"Kaplan wrote that people in West Africa no longer
resembled human beings."
Kaplan's gloomy Malthusian observations and doomsday
prognoses were similar to those found in Richard Burton's Wandering In West Africa
(1862), a book he happily consulted, and quoted from. "Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources,
refugee migrations, the increased erosion of nation-states and international
borders," Kaplan warned, "are now most tellingly demonstrated through
a West African prism." Things
became so bad that people in West Africa no longer resembled human beings, he
emphasized.
Wherever he traveled in a taxi, Kaplan wrote, young men,
with "restless scanning eyes" surrounded him. "They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a
fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting." In order to protect himself against the
diseases, the author complained that he had spent $500 in inoculations. Even
then, he was not sure whether this precaution was sufficient since mutation in
malaria and AIDS made Africa more dangerous today than in 1862 when Burton
traveled there before antibiotics were available. As Burton had observed in the 19th Century, and as
Kaplan repeated in 1994, the health conditions in Africa were "deadly," "a
golgotha," "a jehanum."
The Rwanda war, beginning with the 1990 invasion by
Uganda-backed Tutsi insurgents, and the subsequent genocide four years later,
offered the best case study of stereotypical Western reporting on Africa. The
Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) insurgents, many of whom were soldiers in the
Ugandan national army, cultivated and exploited the sympathy of gullible, or
culpable, Western reporters, years before the 1994 genocide.
One of the earliest apologias that romanticized the RPF
insurgents, "Rwanda's Aristocratic Guerrillas," by Alex Shoumatoff, appeared in
The New York Times Magazine on Dec.
13th, 1992. As already demonstrated in a previous essay,
historically, Western writers portrayed Africans with "European" features
relative to those with emphatic "negroid" features more sympathetically. In the
Rwanda conflict the Tutsis, with their leaner frames and narrower facial
features relative to the Hutus' became "honorary" whites.
Shoumatoff traveled to Uganda where the RPF had its
headquarters and had been met at Entebbe airport by RPF officials who led him
to areas inside Rwanda that they controlled. Shoumatoff comfortably resorted to
the 18th Century travel writers' style, contrasting the "noble"
Africans (Tutsis in this case) with the "true negroes" (the Hutus). He wrote
that the Tutsis were "refined"
with "European" features, while
the Hutus were "stocky" and "broad nosed." Once the article was
placed in this context who do you imagine the majority of white readers all
over the world wanted to prevail in this conflict?
"In the late 19th
Century," Shoumatoff continued, describing the Tutsis, "early ethnologists were fascinated by these
‘languidly haughty' pastoral aristocrats whose high foreheads, aquiline noses
and thin lips seemed more Caucasian than Negroid, and they classed them as
‘false negroes.' In a popular theory of the day, the Tutsis were thought to be
highly civilized people, the race of fallen Europeans, whose existence in
Central Africa had been rumored for centuries." He added: "They are not a race or a tribe, as often
described, but a population, a stratum, a mystical, warrior-priest elite, like
the Druids in Celtic society." As
for the Hutus, they were far from resembling warrior priests; they were the "short, stocky local Bantu agriculturalist."
The New
York Times was irresponsible and had no justification for publishing
such racist nonsense, particularly when the editors knew that Shoumatoff was
married to a Tutsi woman who was a second cousin to an RPF spokesperson.
Shoumatoff may have as well been an RPF press agent posing as an independent
journalist; he employed all the ugly words that have historically been used to
denigrate and dehumanize Africans for centuries. Shamefully, he was aided and
abetted by one of the world's most influential and powerful media companies.
Shoumatoff published a second article in another major
American magazine, The New Yorker, on
June 20th, 1992. On that occasion, he wrote about how he reflected
upon the difference in physical features between Tutsis and Hutus while he was
in Burundi that year. While traveling in a taxi in Bujumbura, the capital, he
turned around and "checked out the
ethnic mix" of the passengers,
he recalled. "There were three obvious
Tutsis. Tall, slender, with high foreheads, prominent cheekbones, and narrow
features," Shoumatoff wrote. "They
were a different physical type from the five passengers who were short and
stocky and had the flat noses and thick lips typical of Hutus."
"Shoumatoff employed all the ugly words that have
historically been used to denigrate and dehumanize Africans for centuries."
The Hutus were thoroughly and effectively demonized by
Shoumatoff, and many subsequent writers covering the conflict followed this
racist theme. Suddenly there was no need for Shoumatoff to explain a critical
point to his readers: How would the RPF, essentially a Tutsi insurgency, govern
effectively, were they to seize power in Rwanda where Hutus made up 85 percent
of the population? Shoumatoff had reduced the conflict to simplistic terms that
uninformed readers in the West could relate to; a contest between the
"beautiful" versus the "ugly." So many Western writers, following a similar
simplistic theme, ignored the critical role that Ugandan president Yoweri
Museveni's militarism and expansionism played in the conflict, with his
training and arming of the RPF.
Shoumatoff had simply resurrected the Western writers'
tendency to venerate "European" looking Africans, which has been employed for
centuries, including in Aphra Behn's 17th century novel, Oroonoko,
The Royal Slave. In the more recent era, three decades before
Shoumatoff's articles about the Tutsis, the notorious Elspeth Huxley used
similar linguistic skills while glorifying Tutsis in her reports from Africa. "Their small, narrow heads perched on top of
slim and spindly bodies," Huxley
wrote, in a report in The New York Times on February 23rd,
1964, "remind one of some of Henry
Moore's sculptures." She went on to compare the original Tutsi conquest
of Hutus in the 16th Century to the Norman invasion of Anglo-Saxon
England.
Next week, Part Eight: Why
Africans Are Not Tribesmen
Part One in BAR's January
24 issue
Part Two in the January
31 issue.
Part Three in the February
7 issue.
Part Four in the February
14 issue.
Part Five in the February
21 issue.
Part Six in the February 28 issue.
The Hearts of Darkness: How European Writers Created the
Racist image of Africa
Published by The Black Star Publishing Co.
P.O. Box 64, New York, N.Y., 10025
www.BlackStarnews.com
To order copies call (212) 481-7745
Or visit the author's site: www.theheartsofdarkness.com