SACW - 19 Oct 2014 | Bangladesh: How to Rob a Bank / Pakistan: Death sentence for Aasia Bibi; Sending Pakistan to Mars / India: Love & religious divide; anti labour devices; Allow foreign workers in Cinema
Harsh Kapoor
aiindex at gmail.com
Sat Oct 18 20:36:21 EDT 2014
South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 October 2014 - No. 2836
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. Pakistan: Lahore High Court's upholding of the death sentence for Aasia Bibi is a dark stain - Statements and Commentary
2. India, Pakistan should focus on children — not bullets : Beena Sarwar
3. Pakistan: When Some Feminists Took on the Right Wing Jamat e Islami on TV
4. India: Allow foreign workers and artists to work in film and TV - An Appeal to members of Cine and Television Artistes Association (CINTAA)
5. Briefings by India Study Group
6. India: Love, control and punishment | Tanika Sarkar
7. India: Love, Jihad and Political Lust - Colonising India's Muslims | Farzana Versey
8. India: Love Jihad and targetting of religious minorities | John Dayal
9. Denial won't wish away “Indian” racism against North Easterners | Avinash Pandey
10. India: 1969 CPI pamphlet by S.A. Dange on 'Shiv Sena and the Bombay Riots'
11. A common terror pool | Javed Anand
12. Modi’s Victory 2014: Paradigm Shift of Indian Politics | Ram Puniyani
13. India: Notes on the Leader | Mukul Dube
14. India: Shramev Jayate etc - and other anti labour schemes under Modi
15. Recent posts on Communalism Watch:
::: URLs and FULL TEXT :::
16. Support Manifesto for Secularism and establishment of International Front for Secularism
17. India: Our floods, their floods | Sanjib Baruah
18. How to Rob a Bank in Bangladesh | Tahmima Anam
19. Sending Pakistan to Mars | Pervez Hoodbhoy
20. Book Review: Ça va un peu | Adam Shatz
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1. PAKISTAN: LAHORE HIGH COURT'S UPHOLDING OF THE DEATH SENTENCE FOR AASIA BIBI IS A DARK STAIN - STATEMENTS AND COMMENTARY
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http://sacw.net/article9813.html
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2. INDIA, PAKISTAN SHOULD FOCUS ON CHILDREN — NOT BULLETS : Beena Sarwar
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Beena Sarwar is a Pakistani journalist and documentary filmmaker. As an Indian and Pakistani together win 2014's Nobel peace prize, Sarwar spoke with Anahita Mukherji about the joint award, tension at the LoC
http://sacw.net/article9780.html
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3. PAKISTAN: WHEN SOME FEMINISTS TOOK ON THE RIGHT WING JAMAT E ISLAMI ON TV
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A video excerpt from a 2011 TV show in Urdu in Pakistan
http://sacw.net/article9816.html
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4. INDIA: ALLOW FOREIGN WORKERS AND ARTISTS TO WORK IN FILM AND TV - AN APPEAL TO MEMBERS OF CINE AND TELEVISION ARTISTES ASSOCIATION (CINTAA)
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The undersigned would like to lodge a strong protest against this attitude of narrow nationalism in India's entertainment industry, and would like to request everyone to welcome and support international artistes, regardless of their nationality, as long as they follow the required Indian visa rules. We are definitely in favour of the artistes complying with Indian laws of immigration and work permit etc., but monitoring its compliance should be left to the Indian government authorities. How can a private entity such as CINTAA dictate terms to the artistes without taking into account the larger opinion of the Indian arts and entertainment industry, and of course, the audience?
http://sacw.net/article9801.html
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5. BRIEFINGS BY INDIA STUDY GROUP
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As India enters into one of the most complex and unprecedented periods in its history, getting a clear picture of what's happening is harder than ever. Every month, we connect the dots between the recent news and events. We release two data rich briefings, with links to additional information. Our briefings give you the long view, combining public information with perspectives drawn from ground experience and diverse professions:
http://sacw.net/article9790.html
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6. INDIA: LOVE, CONTROL AND PUNISHMENT | Tanika Sarkar
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‘Love jihad' became a tool of open political mobilisation in the Uttar Pradesh bypolls in September. It reopened some old and fundamental questions about individual choice, community lines and the politics of identity and anxiety in a fast-changing, young country.
http://sacw.net/article9786.html
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7. INDIA: LOVE, JIHAD AND POLITICAL LUST - COLONISING INDIA'S MUSLIMS | Farzana Versey
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Chanting hymns and spraying holy Ganga water, a group of religious leaders and students from the rightwing conducted the purification ritual of a 26-year-old woman inside a police station in Dehradun, Uttar Pradesh. Her crime was that she married a Muslim and was allegedly forced to convert to Islam. Her saviours felt that bringing her back home and into the fold was not enough; she needed to be cleansed of any traces of Muslimness to be acceptable again.
http://sacw.net/article9806.html
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8. INDIA: LOVE JIHAD AND TARGETTING OF RELIGIOUS MINORITIES | John Dayal
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The recent outpouring of support for the “development” agenda of the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, by several leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches may possibly stave off the immediate attention of the dreaded Intelligence Bureau and the Ministry of Home affairs, but it is not likely to reduce the deep and seemingly abiding distrust the Indian political and social system has of what is popularly called the “Missionaries”. Nor will it mitigate the hate that is now erupting in India against religious minorities.
http://sacw.net/article9788.html
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9. DENIAL WON'T WISH AWAY “INDIAN” RACISM AGAINST NORTH EASTERNERS | Avinash Pandey
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They did not speak Kannada, the language of the state they live in. They, therefore, were “legitimate” targets of violence in a city that has benefitted the most from India's shift from Nehruvian Socialism to free market economy.
http://sacw.net/article9789.html
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10. INDIA: 1969 CPI PAMPHLET BY S.A. DANGE ON 'SHIV SENA AND THE BOMBAY RIOTS'
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This is a scanned copy of a pamphlet from February 1969 by S.A Dange a prominent leader of the Communist Party of India on the communal violence in Bombay organised by Shiv Sena and the need to resist it.
http://sacw.net/article9787.html
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11. A COMMON TERROR POOL | Javed Anand
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To effectively counter the ISIS and sundry other violent Islamist outfits, Saudi Arabia and Muslims elsewhere must question the three modern-day ideologues of political Islam: al-Wahhab (Arabia), Syed Qutb (Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt), Abul A'la Maududi (Jamaat-e-Islami, Indian subcontinent). One way or another, the world-view of Muslims still hallucinating about khilafat (caliphate), shariat (Islamic law), jihad and shahadat (martyrdom) can be traced back to one or the other of these worthies.
http://sacw.net/article9781.html
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12. MODI’S VICTORY 2014: PARADIGM SHIFT OF INDIAN POLITICS
by Ram Puniyani
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The elections of 2014 were different in more ways than one. More than in any previous election the campaign launched by Modi was preceded by heavy propaganda at every stage of his elevation, his being nominated the chief of campaign Committee, his being named the Prime Ministerial candidate and finally the electoral campaign itself. He had prepared ground for his campaign through social media, where dedicated team of hundreds kept working for him. He had hired the US based agency APCO for building his image.
http://sacw.net/article9775.html
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13. INDIA: NOTES ON THE LEADER
by Mukul Dube
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It is well known also that the BJP fought this general election with the vast sums of money provided by capitalists. For one thing, the funds were enough to buy up nearly all the media. For another, the resources of companies were made available for the campaign — a good example is the aircraft of Adani used by Modi himself. Modi wasted no time in starting to pay his debts. Wherever you look — the dislodging of people from their homes, the rape of the environment in the interests of industry, the unfettered plundering of natural resources, the severe dilution of laws meant to protect the interests of workers — everywhere there are clear signs that the country is now run by a stooge of capital.
http://sacw.net/article9771.html
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14. INDIA: SHRAMEV JAYATE ETC - AND OTHER ANTI LABOUR SCHEMES UNDER MODI
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Statement by CPM on the release of the Shramev Jayate Scheme (Oct 2014); also a July 2014 video recording of Colin Gonsalves the well known lawyer explaining the proposed amendments to the labour laws in India in June 2014.
http://sacw.net/article9802.html
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15. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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available at: http://communalism.blogspot.in/
- India: RSS legitimised (A.G. Noorani)
- India - Audio recording: Real story of the Meerut Love Jehad - In the words of the 'victim'
- India: Purification ritual on a 26-year-old woman inside a police station in Dehradun, Uttar Pradesh
- India Health Line service by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad has big plans
- The sad story of South Asian secularism (Ramachandra Guha)
- India: How BJP got Dera Sacha Sauda's support for the 2014 state elections in Haryana?
- Wearing a Cowboy hat and dhoti - India's new look home minster [The minister should also consider equiping himself with a degree in Home Science]
- Why Emperor Akbar haunts Hindutva (Jawed Naqvi)
- India: 6 day RSS Gita festival week at Red Fort in New Delhi
- India: A moral policing campaign organised by the ABVP recently attacked live-in relationships on Delhi university campus
- India: Press Release by CCATD on continuing violence against people of the North East
- India: Love Jihad and targetting of religious minorities by John Dayal
- India: 1969 CPI pamphlet by S.A. Dange on ’Shiv Sena and the Bombay Riots’
- India - Maharashtra state election campaign 2014: Man of Maharashtra Match is Amit Shah, Not Modi (Rana Ayyub)
- India BJP bribe to kin of girl who alleged 'love jihad'
- Racism Everyday Against Indians from the Northeast of India: two recent incidents from South and North of India
- India: RSS man Suresh Soni Ousted from Job to coordinate with BJP
- India - Bihar: Madrasa bans admission of Girls - calling co-education unislamic
- Remembering Khurshid Anwar and Release of his Books - Photos from 15 Oct @ IIC Delhi
- Is media painting a true picture of Assam's displaced Muslims?
- Intermarriage is not jihad, it is India: Saif Ali Khan
- India: The nativist’s dilemma (Rajeshwari Deshpande)
- 'Love jihad': War on romance in India (Neha Dixit)
- India: Xenophobia blossoms every where including in trade unions - CINTAA doesn't want foreign artistes in Indian films
- India - Jobat: A hate story (Milind Ghatwai)
::: URL's and FULL TEXT :::
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16. SUPPORT MANIFESTO FOR SECULARISM AND ESTABLISHMENT OF INTERNATIONAL FRONT FOR SECULARISM
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http://www.change.org/p/world-citizens-join-international-front-against-religious-right-and-for-secularism
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17. INDIA: OUR FLOODS, THEIR FLOODS
by Sanjib Baruah
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(Asian Age - October 15, 2014)
The coverage of the J&K floods had the frenzy of 24/7 news channels multiple angles, replays and ‘Here is How You Can Help’ guides. Coverage of the floods in Assam and Meghalaya was low-key, matter-of-fact.
There was a time when the charge of neglect by the central government was the staple of Northeast India’s politics. That is no longer the case. The region now features prominently on the national agenda. Complaints against the central government are less frequent. Yet there is a deep reservoir of suspicion that the country’s governing elites do not take the region’s concerns seriously. And the feeling is that the attitude is the same no matter who is in power in Delhi.
These suspicions surfaced recently when floods and landslides caused large-scale devastation and misery in Assam and Meghalaya. The late September floods occurred just as floodwaters were receding in Jammu and Kashmir. The timing brought home the dramatic contrast between the media coverage of the two flood stories. The national electronic media covered the J&K floods with all the frenzy of the 24/7 cable news channels multiple angles, relentless replays, and the “Here is How You Can Help” guides. Its coverage of the floods in Assam and Meghalaya, on the other hand, had none of those bells and whistles: it was low-key and matter-of-fact.
Floods in Northeast India and in Assam in particular are of course, more common than floods in Srinagar. To that extent the conventional distinction between unusual and infrequent events that constitute “news” in a way that ordinary, everyday occurrences do not, might explain the difference in coverage. But it also says something about the calculations that media houses make regarding their “home markets” in terms of audiences and advertisers. There the media’s self-representation as a societal institution with a vital role in a democracy comes in conflict with the reality of media houses as businesses. Whatever the reason, in a democracy media coverage has consequences.
Assam chief minister Tarun Gogoi complained that the Modi government responded more promptly and generously to the J&K floods than it did to the floods in his state. He expressed regret that the Prime Minister visited J&K, but he did not come to the Northeast.
But whether it is the Northeast or J&K, how much money is available for flood relief may not be that important in the long run. What is crucial is the intellectual investment that the country makes to understand the causes of these “natural” disasters. For so-called natural disasters are rarely just natural; man-made factors always play a role. That flood destruction has become routine in Assam is no comfort to an Assamese. It is only a reminder that what has been done so far in the name of flood control has been either awfully inadequate, or profoundly wrong-headed.
After the J&K floods, the Supreme Court asked the central government for a report. In 2013, it had ordered an inquiry into the floods in Uttarakhand. Those floods also received significant media attention because major Hindu pilgrimage centres like Kedarnath and Badrinath were affected, and thousands of pilgrims were stranded. The expert body submitted its report earlier this year. It concluded that the hydroelectric dams under construction had contributed to the flood disaster and recommended the cancelation of 23 proposed projects on the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi river basins.
One aspect of Assam’s frequent floods has been relentless riverbank erosion. It does not produce dramatic one-time losses associated with temporary submergence during a flood, but the permanent loss of land and property. Over the years erosion of riverbanks has led to the loss of livelihood of thousands.
Flood control in Assam has mostly consisted of structural interventions such as embankments and dykes. Between 1953 and 2004, 4,500 kilometers of embankments were built in Assam making it the state with the third most extensive flood control embankments in the country. At the same time, flood damages and the total flood prone area in the state have increased significantly. Embankment breaches have been the cause of a number of devastating floods. There are now efforts to raise and strengthen embankments. In recent years there has been talk of geo-tube constructions to reclaim lost embankments and build new ones.
Could it be that structural interventions of this sort are inappropriate in the particular conditions of the Brahmaputra river system?
Geo-hydrologist Dulal Goswami tells us how, as the Brahmaputra enters the plains of Assam after cascading through deep Himalayan gorges, because of the sudden dissipation of its immense energy it unloads enormous amounts of sediments downstream. The Assam earthquake of 1950 has dramatically changed the river regime. Massive landslides in the Himalayas blocked the downstream flow of a number of its tributaries and when the trapped water burst through a few days later, it caused catastrophic floods downstream. The enormous volume of landslide debris carried downstream raised the Brahmaputra’s riverbed. Near the city of Dibrugarh it was estimated that it went up initially by about five feet, and by another five feet five years later. Floods in the Brahmaputra Valley have been more frequent and destructive ever since.
In recent decades, in the wake of construction projects such as bridges on the river Brahmaputra, there has been evidence of increased riverbank erosion and floods in areas downstream of the construction sites. There has been large-scale deforestation in the hills of Arunachal Pradesh. On top of it there have been major structural interventions in rivers entirely unrelated to flood control, such as the hydropower dams. More of them are in the planning stage.
Is it reasonable to expect that more robust embankments would be able to withstand the Brahmaputra’s growing fury under these conditions? Surely there are limits to the protection that embankments can provide. One can hardly ignore the increasing flow resistance that the water encounters from the growing number of formidable man-made obstacles.
This does not mean we should not build bridges and dams. But the cumulative effect of these structures has to be thought through more carefully than we have in the past. Understanding even a single aspect of the floods in the Brahmaputra system requires a kind of serious interdisciplinary intellectual investment that we have been unprepared to make so far.
Would more media attention have made a difference? This is a counter-factual question to which we’ll never know the answer.
The writer is professor of political studies, Bard College, New York.
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18. HOW TO ROB A BANK IN BANGLADESH
by Tahmima Anam
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(The New York Times, October. 10, 2014)
In Bangladesh, we sometimes play We Also Have. This is a parlor game in which we can say, with pride, that we now have the things that could previously be found only in other countries.
In the 1990s, it was satellite television (we also have MTV!); in the 2000s, it was shopping malls and high-rise buildings and multiplex cinemas. This year, it was a Hollywood-style bank heist.
In January, a man going by the name of Sohel and his accomplice Idris successfully stole 169 million taka (about $2.2 million) from a branch of Sonali Bank in Kishoreganj, 70 miles north of the capital, Dhaka.
Although “Sohel,” later identified as Yusuf Munshi, his brother Idris Munshi and a number of other accomplices were arrested within days of the robbery, it was all anyone could talk about for weeks afterward. We devoured the details of the heist: how Mr. Munshi had plotted for two years to rob the bank, how he had rented a house next door and dug a 30-foot tunnel to reach the bank’s vault.
It was even reported that he had had an affair with a bank employee as part of his scheme. Social media exploded with comparisons with Hollywood movies such as “The Bank Job.”
It appears Mr. Munshi has started a trend. In March, 3 million taka (about $40,000) was stolen from Sonali Bank’s Adamdighi branch in Bogra, when thieves used the same technique — digging a tunnel into the vault from a nearby furniture shop. And last month, criminals made away with almost 20 million taka ($260,000) from a Brac Bank branch in the small town of Joypurhat by boring a hole from a neighboring building. When renting the office next door, the robbers had claimed to be starting a nonprofit agency called Poor Development. Oh yes, in Bangladesh, we also have irony.
But while our attention is drawn to this proliferation of movie-style heists, the larger irony is that Mr. Munshi and his copycat criminals are not the real bank robbers. No, the bigger thieves are hiding in plain sight, and sanctioned by the banks themselves. They are the loan defaulters: people and businesses who borrow money from banks with no intention of repaying the debt.
The problem, it seems, is the way Bangladesh’s banking sector is organized. There are broadly two types of banks: private banks, which are overseen by the central bank, and state-run commercial banks, which fall directly under the aegis of the Finance Ministry. While private banks have had their share of loan defaulters (sometimes those who sit on the boards of these banks), it is overwhelmingly the state-run banks that have allowed bad loans to multiply to an unsustainable degree. The international standard for loan defaults is currently at about 2 to 3 percent. In Bangladesh, it is over 12 percent. In a recent study conducted by the Bangladesh Institute of Bank Management, the percentage of nonperforming loans in state-run banks is as high as 29 percent.
The situation is only getting worse. The World Bank’s 2013 Bangladesh Development Update states that “weak internal controls, poor corporate governance, and slackening of credit standards resulted in irregularities in loan approvals,” which caused state-run commercial banks to classify more than half a billion dollars’ worth of loans as “nonperforming.” In the past six years, the four major state-run banks have seen sharp spikes in defaulted loans; the total amount of credit in default held by these four banks is about $2.45 billion (not including nearly $2 billion already written off).
Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
This means that an enormous amount of capital is taken out of the banking system, and banks must compensate for this loss by keeping interest rates high. Currently, Bangladeshi banks’ interest rates range between about 9 percent and 16 percent, while deposits earn between 6 percent and 12 percent.
There is much talk about the government’s attempting to crack down on defaults. The new chairman of Basic Bank, one of the worst culprits with outstanding loans of over $1.45 billion, has publicly named and shamed a list of the top 100 loan defaulters. The bank has attempted to recover some of the bad debt, but has thus far been largely unsuccessful. Ultimately, there appears to be little legal recourse because the justice system is overwhelmed: There are more than 800,000 cases against loan defaulters pending in the courts.
The only way to alter this broken system is for the state-run banks to come under the control of a single body that is entirely separate from the executive branch of government. Having a set of banks that are controlled by political appointees, which report directly to the Finance Ministry and run no risk of being audited by impartial agencies, will always result in a corrupt system.
When the rather terrifyingly named Rapid Action Battalion recovered the money that the Munshi brothers had stolen from Sonali Bank, about 20 million taka was missing. Yusuf Munshi claimed to have spent the money buying a truckload of rice for a local religious leader. That money was never found.
Since the Munshis’ heist, the Bangladesh Bank has suggested that banks beef up their security, and yes, it sounds as though their vaults could use some more cement. But while we can barricade bank branches themselves, we need to step up efforts to stop those who steal from within, the sharp-suited businessmen who raid our banks in broad daylight.
Tahmima Anam, a writer and anthropologist, is the author of the novel “A Golden Age.”
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19. SENDING PAKISTAN TO MARS
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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(Dawn - 18 October 2014)
When spacecraft Mangalyaan successfully entered the Martian orbit in late September after a 10-month journey, India erupted in joy. Costing more than an F-16 but less than a Rafale, Mangalyaan’s meticulous planning and execution established India as a space-faring country. Although Indians had falsely celebrated their five nuclear tests of 1998 — which were based upon well-known physics of the 1940s — the Mars mission is a true accomplishment.
Pakistanis may well ask: can we do it too? What will it take? Seen in the proper spirit, India’s foray into the solar system could be Pakistan’s sputnik moment — an opportunity to reflect upon what’s important. Let’s see how India did it: First, space travel is all about science and India’s young ones are a huge reservoir of enthusiasm for science. Surveys show that 12-16 year olds practically worship Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, are fascinated by black holes and Schrödinger cats, and most want a career in science. They see more prestige in this than becoming doctors, lawyers, financial managers, or army officers. Although most eventually settle for more conventional professions, this eagerness leads India’s very best students towards science.
Ten years ago, I had personally experienced this youthful enthusiasm during a four-week lecture tour across seven Indian cities that took me to all sorts of schools, colleges, and universities. In places, hundreds turned up for my talks on scientific subjects. Every city had at least one much-visited science museum, and sometimes two or three. Student scientific societies, which appeared active, were everywhere.
How can we Pakistanis get to our bit of the solar system? Or establish a presence in the world of science?
Second, Indian universities have created the necessary backbone for advanced scientific projects. University quality goes from moderately bad to very good, with the median lying around fair. Many mediocre ones produce rotten science PhDs and publications prodigiously, suffocating growth. On the positive side, research in the theoretical sciences carried out in India’s very best universities — as well as institutes such as TIFR and IMSC — compares favourably with that in the world’s top universities.
Rigorous entry standards for students, and a careful selection of faculty, have been important ingredients for this relative success. National examinations for entrance into the Indian Institutes of Technology would make the best students anywhere in the world sweat.
Third, India values — nay, venerates — its top mathematicians and scientists. There is scarcely an Indian I’ve met who doesn’t know the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the child prodigy from Madras who astonished the world of high mathematics but tragically died at the age of 32. India is dotted with institutes bearing such names as S.N. Bose, C.V. Raman, M. Saha, and Homi Bhabha.
Back to space: a developing country looking at faraway Mars can take either the Arab way or the Chinese-Indian way.
The first needs a ticket. Petrodollars paid for Prince Salman ibn Saud, the first Arab in space, and put him aloft an American space shuttle in 1985. Recently the UAE announced plans for a Mars mission within 18 years. Just as cash and foreign experts built Dubai and its mega-sized airport, they will also put sheikhs on planets.
But how can we cash-strapped Pakistanis get to our bit of the solar system? Or establish a presence — which we so far lack — in the world of science? The process will be slow, but here is how to do it.
First, create enthusiasm in our young people for science. Space exploration is only a part of the larger whole. Instead of TV channels saturated with dharna news and random political “experts”, have good educational programmes. Standards of English in Pakistan must improve; they have fallen so low that English-language TV channels no longer exist. Sadly, the world of science is closed to those who can only read or understand Urdu.
Second, we must re-educate ourselves to know the difference between science and “cargo science”. This phrase, borrowed from anthropology, was introduced by the physicist Richard Feynman during his 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology.
Feynman said: “In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During [the Second World War] they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
We must stop teaching a kind of science in Pakistani schools which is science only in name but which bypasses its essence — evidence and reasoning. Students experience mathematics as a bunch of cookbook prescriptions, physics and chemistry are mountains of formulae, and experimental science has been almost totally banished.
Our universities need even more drastic reform. Desperate to show evidence of improvement, government organisations such as the Higher Education Commission and Pakistan Council for Science and Technology have institutionalised a reward system that has led to armies of cargo PhDs — with wooden pieces sticking out of their heads — as well as mountains of cargo publications. Serious de-weeding is needed else academic fakes will crowd out the few genuine academic scientists around.
Third, and last, individual scientific achievement must be recognised while narrow prejudices, both religious and ethnic, must be firmly rejected. India has had many, but Pakistan has had only one great scientist — Abdus Salam. His tragic marginalisation must be reversed. This will be a strong signal that the country is finally prepared to move into the future.
The author teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.
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20. BOOK REVIEW: ÇA VA UN PEU
by Adam Shatz
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(London Review of Books, Vol. 36 No 20 · 23 October 2014 | pages 31-33 )
The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck
Fourth Estate, 656 pp, £25.00, March, ISBN 978 0 00 756290 9
Africa, it’s said, is the mother of modern civilisation, but it’s probably more accurate to say that Congo is. Consider your mobile phone. Before it was assembled in a Chinese factory, the coltan in its capacitors may have been dug by miners in the Eastern Congo, where millions have died in a series of wars over ‘conflict minerals’, though we give this no more thought than previous generations of Westerners gave to the Congolese origins of the ivory in their piano keys, the rubber in their tyres, the copper in their bullet casings or the uranium in their bombs. The mobile phones and computers that connect us to the world also conceal our relationship to it. Some would say that’s just as well. ‘The conquest of the earth,’ Conrad wrote, ‘is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’
Today Congo – which was described as a ‘geological scandal’ after copper was discovered in Katanga in 1892 – accounts for less than 1 per cent of the world’s minerals in terms of value. The Democratic Republic of Congo (its latest incarnation) suffers from Western indifference as much as from Western exploitation. Prospectors for minerals are more likely to be African – or Chinese – than European. Yet our image of Congo hasn’t evolved a great deal since Conrad’s time. The river itself is a flowing signifier for colonial greed, rapacity and, of course, horror. As Michela Wrong wrote in her memorable book about Mobutu, any Westerner who journeys to Congo follows ‘in the footsteps of Mr Kurtz’.
And not only Kurtz. After Conrad came Gide, Greene, Kapuściński, Mailer and Naipaul. Congo is endlessly fertile literary terrain. Seven years of war there – in a country the size of Western Europe with a population of almost seventy million – occupied fewer column inches in the Western press than seven weeks of war in the Gaza Strip, yet nowhere in Africa has inspired such an outpouring of accomplished writing, from Wrong to Gérard Prunier, from Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated.
David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was working as an electrical engineer in Katanga at the time of Moïse Tshombe’s secessionist uprising in 1960. The one-word title of Van Reybrouck’s book is an indication of its singular ambition. The subtitle – ‘the epic history of a people’ – is equally important. The Congolese, he believes, have been written out of their own history, and he means to write them back in. He draws vividly on interviews with musicians, former child soldiers, political activists and people old enough to remember the days of the Belgian Congo, including a man who claimed (plausibly) to be 126 years old. Congo, Van Reybrouck insists, is more than the ‘world’s storehouse’: it has ‘played a crucially important role in the tentative definition of an international world order’.
In the process the Congolese have paid a high price. When Henry Morton Stanley arrived in 1876 the huge landmass, mostly covered in forest and coinciding with the drainage basin of the river, had been ravaged by the slave trade and the hunt for ivory; tribal chieftains had lost out to Portuguese merchants and African-Arab warlords, notably the slave trader known as Tippu Tip. After reading of Stanley’s adventures, King Leopold II invited him to come to Belgium and told him of his grand plan to break the power of the Muslim slave traders, and to spread free trade and Christianity. But what he really wanted was a slice of ‘ce magnifique gâteau africain’. When he and Stanley sat down in 1884 to decide on Congo’s borders, Leopold ‘simply doodled’ Katanga into the map: the Free State was assembled in a fit of imperial caprice. It was Leopold’s personal property, not Belgium’s. He never once set foot in it. He celebrated its establishment in 1885 at the Conference of Berlin by sitting on his throne while a group of Congolese children sang and danced for him.
The voices of Leopold’s ‘children’ have been inaudible in even the most scathing histories of Belgian rule, but Van Reybrouck has unearthed the memoirs of Disasi Makulo, who dictated his story to his son just before he died in 1941. Born around 1870, Makulo was enslaved as a little boy by Tippu Tip, then purchased at 13 by Stanley. Instead of returning him to his parents, Stanley took him to Europe and placed him in the care of a missionary. Back in Congo, Makulo attended a missionary school ‘run like a Belgian military academy’: four out of every five male students at these schools were obliged to enter the Free State’s army, the Force Publique. Slave, servant boy, missionary pupil, soldier: not an unusual trajectory, and by Congolese standards a lucky one.
Kidnapping and then converting liberated slaves was state policy. Many were educated in isolated ‘chapel farms’ in order to prevent ‘backsliding’. Leopold hoped to transform children like Makulo into mindele ndombe, ‘black white men’. Church and Force Publique worked hand in hand to produce mindele ndombe and to ensure that Congo’s resources were extracted to Leopold’s satisfaction. The king was a shareholder in the companies that were given mining concessions, and benefited greatly from the fin-de-siècle rubber boom.
Leopold’s claim to enlightened leadership rested on the defeat of the Muslim slave traders, but the forced labour system in the Free State was far more brutal than the slavery it replaced. Millions of Congolese were forced to abandon their native crafts and gather rubber under the supervision of black soldiers in the Force Publique and their white officers. Indiscipline was punished with the chicotte, a sharp-edged whip made of dried hippopotamus skin. Summary execution was common; so were rape and forced concubinage. In one rubber expedition, 162 villages were torched, and 1346 people killed. Between five and eight million died during Leopold’s 23-year rule.
In the first few years of the Free State, Leopold’s ‘burning noble words’ (as Conrad wrote of Kurtz) seduced most Europeans, and even got him elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, but by the early 1890s the atrocities could no longer be hidden. Eventually the Belgian parliament forced him to hand the territory over: it was annexed as a Belgian colony in 1908. Most people in Congo found little reason to rejoice. Labour conditions were hardly less oppressive, though there were fewer deaths; a new regime of ‘scientific colonisation’ emerged, based on the control of African bodies in the name of public safety. Victims of sleeping sickness were confined in remote laboratories where the Belgians tested possible cures on them, such as atoxyl, a derivative of arsenic that sometimes resulted in blindness. For the colonised inhabitants the state was, as Van Reybrouck writes, ‘the gleaming, sterile hypodermic needle that slid into your arm and injected some kind of mysterious poison. The state literally got under your skin.’
It also kept you in your place. If you wanted to travel from your region of birth for more than a month, you needed to carry a medical passport. Restrictions on movement fixed people in their regional, ‘tribal’ identities, which were in turn theorised by Belgian ethnographers and promoted in mission schools – Van Reybrouck calls them ‘factories for tribal prejudice’. Congolese children learned to be grateful that ‘the Belgians set us free.’ But the Belgians wanted to lift their subjects only so high: education never went beyond primary instruction. A tiny group of évolués was permitted to emerge, but they were never allowed to assume positions of authority in the civil service or the army; at the time of independence only 17 Congolese had university degrees. Congo’s human potential was deliberately underdeveloped, on the assumption that white rule would last for ever.
Colonial rule, however, had its contradictions. As Congo industrialised, people left their villages to take jobs in factories and in white homes. Though crowded into slums and forced to leave white neighbourhoods after dark, they were exposed to a standard of living they could scarcely have imagined. Their horizons were widened further by Belgium’s wars. The First World War gave soldiers in the Force Publique their first opportunity to fight, not just to police other blacks. In 1916 they helped defeat the Germans at the Battle of Lake Tanganyika. In the Second World War they restored Haile Selassie to the throne, and defeated the Italians at Saio in Abyssinia, near the Sudanese border. ‘We shot only at white people,’ one veteran told Van Reybrouck.
That experience gave the Congolese a forbidden taste of their own power. In the 1920s, Congolese intellectuals began to write about the ‘Congolese nation’ and to imagine a post-colonial future. In 1931 the Pende tribe launched a violent rebellion; in the 1940s there were strikes in Léopoldville and a mutiny by soldiers refusing vaccination (they were afraid of being poisoned). The Belgians responded brutally to such challenges, using the soldiers of the Force Publique. The Congolese expressed their resilience in culture and religion, creating parallel worlds insulated from their persecutors.
The first of these was the nightlife of Léopoldville, birthplace of the Congolese rumba, an exuberant adaptation of Cuban son. The death of Belgian Congo was first announced on a dance floor in 1954, six years before independence, when a black man, Jamais Kolonga, saw a white woman dancing at a wedding party and asked her husband if he could cut in. ‘Just like that! It was an impulse, an obsession. But her husband nodded.’ Jamais Kolonga was memorialised in a hit song; Van Reybrouck found him living in a shack.
The sacred version of this otherworldliness was Kimbanguism, an Africanised Christianity that swept Congo in the 1920s. Simon Kimbangu was a self-styled prophet at a time when it seemed that only a saviour could deliver the Congolese from oppression. Born in 1889, he attracted a following as a young man by performing miracles; an elderly Kimbanguist told Van Reybrouck that Kimbangu had made his hunchback disappear. Kimbangu’s rhetoric had a powerful messianic streak; he spoke of a time when ‘the whites shall be black and the black shall be whites.’ Kimbangu ‘said that did not literally mean that the Belgians were to pack up and leave,’ but the Belgians weren’t taking any chances. He was imprisoned in 1921, and died in jail in 1951. More than a hundred thousand of his followers were deported in cattle cars to work camps in the rainforest, where the mortality rate was 20 per cent.
*
Secular and messianic time converged only once in Congo’s history, during the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s charismatic first prime minister. Lumumba, a beer salesman in Stanleyville who came from a small village in Kasai, was not a Kimbanguist; but he resembled Kimbangu, Van Reybrouck writes, in his prophetic manner of expressing Congolese longings for freedom. Born in 1925, a member of the small Batela tribe, he emerged as a leader in the late 1950s, calling for a unified nation free of Belgian colonialism and of the tribalism that the Belgians had done their best to foment. His closest ally was his secretary, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a former Force Publique soldier. Van Reybrouck imagines the two of them on a scooter in January 1959 just after Lumumba’s return from a meeting with Nkrumah in Accra: ‘They ride together in the muggy afternoon air … Two years later, one of them will help to murder the other.’
Mobutu couldn’t have eliminated Lumumba without the Belgians, who didn’t want to see their assets fall into Congolese hands, and the Americans, who were keen to protect their access to the Shinkolobwe mine, which had supplied the Manhattan Project with uranium. An electrifying speaker but a poor tactician, Lumumba did little to calm Western fears. At the Independence Day ceremony on 30 June 1960, King Baudouin paid fulsome tribute to Leopold’s work and implored the Congolese to prove ‘we were right to have confidence in you.’ Lumumba replied with a withering denunciation of Belgian rule that was right on every count except its timing. Such impertinence wouldn’t go unpunished.
Van Reybrouck provides a wrenching account of the plot against Lumumba, a conspiracy that involved the Belgians, the CIA, white mercenaries and Western-backed secessionists in the mineral-rich provinces of Katanga and southern Kasai. Two weeks after he took office, as the Belgians responded to the killing of five Europeans in Léopoldville by shelling the strategic port city of Matadi, Lumumba pleaded for assistance from the UN, then from the Americans, before going to the Soviets. He was a middle-class nationalist, not a communist, but the spectre of Soviet penetration alarmed Washington. In August, Allen Dulles cabled Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Léopoldville, to say that Lumumba’s removal was ‘an urgent and prime objective’. A month later, Mobutu staged his first coup. Lumumba came under UN protection but he was a dead man walking: Eisenhower had already authorised the CIA to kill him. Arrested by Mobutu’s men in December, he was taken to Katanga, where Tshombe’s secessionist rebels wanted his head. On 17 January 1961, he was shot dead and dumped in a well; four Belgians took part in the murder.
For African nationalists, Lumumba’s assassination was like the passion of Christ for the church fathers. Van Reybrouck instead sees Lumumba as a false messiah who knew the way to rouse the masses but not how to organise them. He acknowledges that Congo’s army was still led by racist commanders from the colonial Force Publique, but dismisses Lumumba’s attempt to Africanise its leadership as ‘sympathetic but disastrous’; his panicked overture to Khrushchev was ‘understandable but frighteningly frivolous’. He says Lumumba won no friends in Washington when he asked a CIA officer to send him a blonde prostitute at Blair House. It’s not clear why this alleged request should have mattered, or how, in his two and a half months in office, Lumumba could have dealt differently with a Belgian invasion, two secessionist uprisings and a covert American campaign to destabilise his government.
Van Reybrouck is better on Mobutu, whose rise he likens to ‘the classic story of the errand boy who becomes a Mafia kingpin’. Larry Devlin, for whom he ran a lot of errands, watched him in his role as army chief of staff and picked him as Lumumba’s replacement. The CIA paid the salaries of his allies, supplied him with planes piloted by Cuban exiles when a Lumumbist uprising erupted in eastern Congo in 1964, and helped him end the Katangan secession – with support from the UN, which had denied Lumumba’s request for assistance against Tshombe. In 1965, Mobutu declared himself president; he would rule for 32 years. His character was no secret to the Americans. In a 1968 cable, the US ambassador to Congo, Robert McBride, wrote that Mobutu ‘has apparently risen in soufflé-like grandiloquence’.
He continued to rise, thanks to his Western allies, who appreciated his hostility to national liberation movements in Africa. The pillars of his regime were the security services and the parti unique, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution, or MPR – ‘mourir pour rien’, dissidents called it. Mobutu collected the secrets of his cabinet ministers by sleeping with their wives, and liberally exercised the droit de cuissage in rural villages. With his leopardskin hat and ivory cane, he cultivated the air of an African chief, but in his reliance on spectacle and terror he was a studious pupil of the Force Publique.
Like Leopold, Mobutu thought of himself as a man of ideas. But where Leopold wanted to make black men white, Mobutu wanted to make them black again. He changed his name to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga: ‘the powerful warrior whose stamina and willpower carry him from victory to victory, leaving behind only fire’. In 1971 the country was officially renamed Zaire; Léopoldville became Kinshasa; Stanleyville, Kisangani; and Elisabethville, Lubumbashi. Western hairstyles and dress were banned in favour of the Afro and the grim, lapel-less jacket called the ‘abacost’: à bas le costume. All this was advertised as authenticité, though little of it was authentically African, least of all the country’s new name, a Portuguese bastardisation of the Kikongo word for the river. Still, the affirmation of blackness struck a popular chord after more than seven decades of white supremacy, and Congo’s best musicians embraced Mobutu’s cultural revolution. Authenticité culminated in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, an extravagant pan-African festival where everyone from Miriam Makeba to James Brown came to perform at the football stadium in Kinshasa.
Still, ‘it wasn’t all circuses,’ Van Reybrouck writes, ‘there was also bread.’ Mobutu achieved some of Lumumba’s principal goals, restoring Congo’s territorial unity and nationalising the mines. For the first time in their history, ‘people truly began feeling like part of a greater whole,’ though he left them with little more than the feeling: theft became a way of life under Mobutu. ‘Steal cleverly, little by little,’ he told his people, and so they did. The state ‘lost out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue’, but the permission to steal helped keep it afloat.
‘There are no opponents in Zaire, because the notion of opposition has no place in our mental universe,’ Mobutu said; few Zaïrois were inclined to argue. Once again the country’s suppressed potential found expression in a defiant subculture, notably in La Sape, the Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elégantes. The sapeurs were dandies who rejected the dour abacost in favour of European styles; authenticité was turned upside down, and personal luxury became a form of defiance against the squalor of the shanties. Like Kimbanguism, La Sape wasn’t so much a rebellion as a counter-life. But it couldn’t save the Zaïrois from the rot of Mobutism. As the Belgian roads crumbled, food could no longer be brought to market; scandalously fertile Zaire became dependent on imported produce. Mobutu was rumoured to be the seventh richest man in the world, but the currency that bore his image, the zaïre, was worthless.
So was Mobutu’s army. Like the Force Publique, it was trained to suppress internal dissent rather than defend the country’s frontiers. When there was trouble on the borders, Mobutu turned to his foreign friends. During the Shaba wars of the late 1970s, when Katangan exiles invaded from Angola in the hope of staging a secession, he was saved by troops from France, Belgium and Morocco. When Van Reybrouck asked a former Mobutu fighter pilot about the Shaba wars, he replied cryptically that he had been there, but ‘not as a pilot’. Alphonsine Mosolo Mpiaka, Zaire’s first female parachutist, spent the war cooking for Mobutu on his yacht. ‘Mobutu played us, and his environment, like a Stradivarius,’ Chester Crocker, the former US assistant secretary of state for Africa, said. ‘If we dared to mention IMF and World Bank concerns it would be: “Do you really expect me to think you’re asking these questions of Israel and Egypt? Perhaps I should convert to Judaism.”’
Mobutu’s garish spending habits – his palace in the jungle included a Chinese pagoda village – enraged his patrons, but they didn’t cut him loose until the end of the Cold War. By then the kleptocracy in Kinshasa had become as embarrassing to the US as the Free State had been to Belgium. In 1990, after his friend Nicolae Ceauşescu was killed by a mob, Mobutu agreed to a reform process and dragged it out as long as he could. A Cold War fossil, he still knew the way to contain the internal opposition.
*
What he couldn’t contain was the impact inside Zaire of the catastrophe in neighbouring Rwanda. In 1994 the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front swept to power in Kigali after Hutu génocidaires murdered more than 800,000 people, most of them Tutsi. A million and a half Hutu refugees crossed into Eastern Congo, settling in camps around Goma on the northern shore of Lake Kivu. Rwanda’s new leader, Paul Kagame, lean, driven and possessed of martial discipline, was furious that Zaire had provided shelter for Hutu killers. Very few of the Hutu in Goma took part in the murders, but the death squads were regrouping in the camps, and Kagame saw them as an existential threat. The West could scarcely stand in his way after having failed to prevent the genocide. An invasion, it was thought, might also provide an opportunity to dispatch Mobutu, a friend of the former Hutu regime.
Kagame’s appraisal was shared by the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, another modernising autocrat who believed in African solutions to African problems. With assistance from Ethiopia, Tanzania, Eritrea and Angola, they set up the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo. Many of the AFDL soldiers were Congolese Tutsi from the Kivus whose ancestors had migrated from Rwanda in the 18th century but who were still stigmatised in Congo as a Rwandan fifth column. Some of them were children, like Ruffin Luliba, who was playing football when he was kidnapped by a man who offered to give him a new kit. Luliba and his teammates were driven to a training camp in Rwanda, where they were forced to crawl in the mud while a drill sergeant harangued them: ‘You are the new liberators of your country.’
Luliba’s kidnapper was Déogratias Bugera, one of the AFDL’s four leaders, all of whom were chosen by Kagame and Museveni. Their spokesman was the guerrilla Laurent Kabila, a Katangan who covered his bald head with a wide-brimmed straw hat and spoke in Marxist-Leninist clichés. Che Guevara, who fought with him in eastern Congo in the 1960s, had expressed ‘very great doubts about his ability to overcome his defects’. Exiled in Tanzania for years, he had supported his ‘resistance’ by acts of banditry, notably the kidnapping of a group of Western students working at Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research camp. Kagame and Museveni resurrected him because – as Rwanda’s intelligence chief later explained – ‘we just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.’
Kabila’s leadership lulled Mobutu into a false sense of security. ‘I know Kabila,’ he said. ‘He’s nothing. He’s a petty smuggler who lives in the hills above Goma.’ But the Rwandans meant business, and they were the ones who did most of the fighting when the invasion began in October 1996. The AFDL’s real leader was not Kabila but a 27-year-old Rwandan colonel called James Kabarebe; his bodyguard was Ruffin Luliba. In May 1997 Mobutu was abandoned by his generals and Kabila became the president of a new country, the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kinshasa welcomed the arrival of the AFDL, but the AFDL’s victory proved a false dawn. Kabila was capricious, arrogant and intolerant of opposition. ‘Liberated’ Congo was a Rwandan client state: the commander of the Congolese army was Kabarebe, and the intelligence services were dominated by Kigali. Kabila had been installed by the Rwandans but he had no desire to be Kagame’s man in Kinshasa – or to take the blame for war crimes committed by Rwandan troops. During the war of liberation the Rwandans had massacred tens of thousands of Hutu refugees. Kabila initially refused to let the UN investigate the killings. His troops weren’t responsible for them, but he couldn’t blame the Rwandans since that would be to admit that the AFDL was under Rwandan control. In a desperate bid to break free of his patrons, he replaced Tutsi commanders with fellow Katangans, trained Hutu génocidaires, and ordered all Rwandan troops – including Kabarebe – to leave. In August 1998, a week after they were expelled, Kabarebe and his men made a spectacular assault on the capital. Thus began the second Congo war, which would involve nine countries and nearly forty militias.
Kabila gave Hutu refugees weapons to fight the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a proxy force set up by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, and headed by an American-educated Marxist professor who knew more about Sartre than about guerrilla warfare. By early 1999 the RCD had seized more than a quarter of the country. Like Mobutu, Kabila was saved by friends from abroad: Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad and, above all, Angola, which was furious at Rwanda for sending thousands of troops to its border without asking permission. On the surface, the war looked staggeringly complex, a maze of similar-sounding acronyms for guerrilla groups. But it soon became a crude war over resources: a new scramble for Africa, this time by the Africans themselves. In May 1999 the Rwandan-Ugandan alliance collapsed in the diamond-rich riverbeds around Kisangani, where their armies fought ‘the way a jackal and a hyena might tug at the same carcass’. In 2000 Rwanda exported coltan worth $240 million, dug by Hutu prisoners of war. The profits from ‘conflict minerals’ peaked that year, fed by increased demand for mobile phones and the release of the Sony PlayStation 2. The higher the profits, the fiercer the fighting. The troops were largely foreign, the dead largely Congolese: by 2004 nearly four million of them. The vast majority died from easily treatable diseases, rather than bullets or knife wounds: another reason to ignore them. Kabila paid the salaries of the foreign troops defending his government with profits from the state-controlled company Gécamines.
No one was there to protect Kabila when a teenage bodyguard shot him dead early in 2001. The news was greeted with glee in Kigali. An influential theory, however, sees his assassination as the result of a conspiracy by Angola and local Lebanese diamond traders, who were angry that Kabila had awarded a monopoly over diamond sales to the Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler. He was replaced by his son Joseph Kabila, a protégé of Kabarebe. Kabila fils presided over the end of the war in 2003, and won two elections. His second victory came just after his government sold off shares in mining concessions worth nearly six billion dollars for a tenth of their value. They were bought up and then resold at market price by newly created companies based in the British Virgin Islands, many of them linked to Gertler.
*
Vladimir Drachoussoff, a Russo-Belgian agricultural engineer who kept a remarkable diary of his years in the province of Equateur in the 1940s, wrote that Belgian rule ‘will finally be judged less by what it has created than by what will remain of it once it has disappeared’. What remains is a barely governable country that ranks fourth in a recent list of failed states, just above Sudan; where one child in five dies before the age of five and less than half of the population has access to drinking water. While the evangelical églises de réveil popping up throughout Congo promise salvation, its leaders cling to power the old-fashioned way: by selling mining concessions to foreigners. The biggest investors today are the Chinese, who began setting up foundries in the late 1990s. In 2007, Congo signed a deal with three Chinese state-owned companies, which acquired the rights to a massive share of Gécamines’s output in return for help improving the country’s devastated infrastructure. Van Reybrouck admires China’s long-term vision for Congo; this time, he thinks, it will be different, because China is ‘not out to plunder the Katangan substrate in the short term’. The wind from the east has been blowing over Congo for some time. In the early 1890s Leopold dreamed of building five Chinese villages with two thousand Chinese labourers. The idea never came to anything, but in 1892 more than five hundred Chinese helped build the railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool. (The Chinese viceroy was perplexed when he met with an all-white Congolese delegation: ‘Am I right in thinking that Africans are black?’) Five years later, Leopold invested Congo state profits in a railway in China, with the hope of buying the route itself: ‘This is the spine of China; if they give it to me I’ll also take some cutlets.’ Instead, China is taking a substantial piece of Congo.
You might expect the Congolese to express anger at this state of affairs. Yet, Van Reybrouck writes, if you ask them how their country is doing, most will say, ‘ça va un peu,’ the verbal equivalent of a shrug. He’s not the first visitor to be impressed by Congolese stoicism. Norman Mailer claimed to see in the Congolese ‘some African dignity’ he had never seen elsewhere, ‘some tragic magnetic sense of self as if each alone and all were carrying the continent like a halo of sorrow about their head’. This apparent fatalism has exasperated some visitors. Writing about La Sape, Michela Wrong wondered why ‘the generation holding out hope for the future was busy fussing about the colour of their socks.’ But the channelling of energy into rumba, Kimbanguism and La Sape reflects a shrewd grasp of the ‘reverse Midas principle’ of Congolese politics: everything you touch turns to shit. Those who have defied this law have usually ended up in an unmarked grave, like Lumumba. Congo’s history has been ‘epic’, except in the one respect that might have lent a redemptive cast to its many troubles: the heart of Africa is still very far from seizing control of its destiny.
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South Asia Citizens Wire
Buzz for secularism, on the dangers of fundamentalism(s), on
matters of peace and democratisation in South
Asia. Newsletter of South Asia Citizens Web:
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