History – African Countries – Page 2 – education and deconstruction.com

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

The Book of the Week is “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz, Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo” by Michaela Wong, published in 2001.

Various dictators have looted the Belgian colony alternately known as “Zaire” and “Congo” in recent centuries. The late 1800’s saw light-skinned people enslaving the dark-skinned to try to enrich themselves by poaching, harvesting, mining or drilling for the colony’s ivory, rubber, timber, cocoa, diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, uranium and oil on behalf of King Leopold II of Belgium. However, many died of malaria, typhoid or sleeping sickness.

Belgium was still greedy even after Congo, still racked by unrest, declared its independence in 1960. The Soviets wanted a piece of the action, sending troops in to pretend to quell the violence. The United Nations troops entered, throwing soldiers with good intentions, after bad. For the next thirty years, what did change was that the United States and other countries wasted an inconceivably large amount of money supporting the lavish lifestyles of the Congolese dictator and his family and friends, until the CIA discreetly decided it was time for the dictator to go.

In late September 1960, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga (Mobutu, for short) came to power. That translates to “the all powerful warrior who goes from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” He ran the nation’s one political party, called “Movement for the Revolution.” He had the charisma, and lack of academic-smarts but plethora of street-smarts of the late American president Ronald Reagan.

However, Mobutu used divide and conquer in his palace politics– telling naive individuals that others were slandering them behind their backs. They believed him. He also assigned the same tasks to subordinates who hated each other without telling the others of the duplicated project-teams. When they learned that the boss had favorites other than them, petty jealousies arose. The hostilities between Mobutu’s underlings kept them busy fighting among themselves, and kept him in power.

Mobutu held rallies all the time. He created jobs galore for his people, in the rubber and cocoa industries. Foreigners who had previously been running operations that exploited Congo’s resources, fled the country. The new native Congolese who were given businesses to run, had no clue how to run them. When the economy crashed, Mobutu, his family, his cronies and his private army had no worries, because their real estate in Brussels, Paris and South Africa, and their Swiss bank accounts remained safe.

In the mid 1980’s, the journalists and diplomats in Kinshasa could spot the Congolese elites by their SUVs and mobile phones from Telecel. Congolese peasants, in order to eat, were forced to grow vegetable gardens throughout the city.

In the 1990’s, desirous of a better life, native Congolese were able to obtain student visas that allowed them to secretly become low-level restaurant or construction workers, or drivers in Brussels. They fled their native country rather than collectively revolt in order to fight for it, having adopted the pessimistic attitude of every man for himself. They had seen with their own eyes that “… politics is a game played by conmen and hypocrites.”

Congo’s cycle of dictatorship had yet to be broken due to the education system, which didn’t teach Congolese history. The younger generation knew nothing of how their recent leaders had come to power. “Knowing nothing about the past of course, frees a population from any sense of blame for the present. How convenient was all this forgetting…”

May 1997 was crunch time similar to that in 1986 in the Philippines and Haiti. In Kinshasa, Tutsi youths were shot in the streets, Japanese journalists sought photo opportunities, journalists of other nationalities and Belgian tourists sought haven in the Hotel InterContinental.

Read the book to learn much more about the history of Congo and its one nuclear reactor, Mobutu, the Congolese people in the 1990’s– rich and famous, poor and unknown, their black markets, their Mutual Benefit Society, their religions, corruption at their airport and with the IMF and World Bank, and about the lingering colonialist nostalgia of Belgium and France.

The Incredible True Story of Blondy Baruti – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “The Incredible True Story of Blondy Baruti, My Unlikely Journey From the Congo to Hollywood” by Blondy Baruti with Joe Layden, published in 2018.

Baruti was born in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the late 1980’s. When he was three, his father– a banker and government official– abandoned his mother, him and his older sister.

In the late 1990’s, eight countries in Africa engaged in an extremely ugly war, ultimately leaving five million dead. The armed, sociopathic sadistic fighters drugged young males and turned them into soldiers like themselves, and young females, into victims of rape and torture. Naturally, Baruti’s family, like millions of others, fled their homes.

The death rate for everyone in the country was ridiculously high, what with rampant disease, animal or human violence, starvation, etc. To push the point, Baruti wrote, “I was sick and exhausted, and sadly accustomed to the sight and smell of death and so I barely reacted [when a bomb hit a village his family was in].”

Read the book to learn how Baruti’s goal-oriented behavior, positive attitude, unwavering faith, great skills and passion for two activities– which are highly coveted careers– led him to get invaluable assistance with changing his lifestyle radically for the better.

Twenty Chickens For A Saddle

The Book of the Week is “Twenty Chickens For A Saddle” by Robyn Scott, published in 2008. This autobiography described people who chose an adventurous lifestyle over one of comfort, safety and convention.

Botswana was a peaceful, well-fed nation, thanks to the government’s policy of designating more than three-quarters of the country as tribal trust land. It was a demilitarized zone where anyone could graze their animals.

In late 1987, the author’s parents decided to move with their two daughters and son from New Zealand to a rural area in Botswana. The author was the oldest, at seven. The father had been a homeopathic doctor but became a physician at five different government-run clinics (only one of which had a telephone; none had electricity and running water), flying to them by light plane on different days. The mother was a home-schooling mom.

The family fixed up a long-abandoned cowshed for their residence. They lived close to the father’s father– a colorful character– and his second wife; some miles away from an abandoned nickel/copper mine. He helped with their education– teaching them Latin names of all sorts of flora and fauna. For the most part, life-threatening dangers and primitive conditions abounded. There were heat, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes, HIV, wild horses and machine parts such as detonators that were supposed to be illegal. The kids did, however, take ballet and tennis lessons in town. And they had a home library. They even had a zipline over their swimming pool with a slide.

While the mother recovered from a medical problem, the author and her younger brother attended a free primary school for a term. Its student body was mostly white people; the government-run school that charged a fee was farther away and was mostly black people. Girls began school at six years old, while boys who had cow-herding to do, started at eight or nine.

The author loved the structure of a classroom, and the competition for gold stars. Her mother inspired a love of learning, but had a free-for-all curriculum and no government supervision whatsoever.

The author joined what would be equivalent to the Brownies in the United States; her brother joined the Cub Scouts. At term’s end, the kids returned to home-schooling. When they reached their early teens, they did self-directed projects for a New Zealand correspondence course in agriculture, architecture and transport. Then they entered boarding school. The author attended a Dominican convent school in Zimbabwe.

The author described the daily trials and tribulations her father encountered in seeing patients, as Botswanans believe in ancestor worship and witchcraft. He had an even tougher time beginning in the early 1990’s, when the AIDS crisis hit the nation.

At that time, the family moved to a nicer property, but it was near the border with South Africa. There was a block association of sorts, which had racist policies– “Newcomers mustn’t offer higher wages to their black servants, or else all the Tuli Block farmers would have to pay the price. Livelihoods might be ruined!” Most of the farmers had large plots of land and hundreds of heads of cattle.

Read the book to learn many more details of the author’s unique experiences and her entrepreneurial endeavors.

Madame President

The Book of the Week is “Madame President, The Extraordinary Journey of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf” by Helene Cooper, published in 2017.

In post-Civil War America, (White) slave owners who had secretly fathered offspring were afraid of further racial strife, so they sent manumitted slaves to Liberia. By the late 1860’s, there were 28 different ethnic groups living there.

Ellen Johnson was born in October 1938 in the country’s capital, Monrovia– ironically, a place that discriminates against dark-skinned people. Her mother was unusually lucky. Her mother’s poverty-stricken parents handed her off to foster care, where her fair skin was received favorably throughout her childhood. Johnson got her mother’s color. Her family predicted she would have a lucky life– a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even so, Johnson had to endure the difficulties females faced in her culture. These included: an arranged marriage (that allowed polygamy for the husband), the expectation that she would bear children; physical abuse, and sex imposed by males against the wills of females of all ages.

Fortunately, Johnson bore four sons and her husband was an attorney. He and she had valuable social connections that allowed them the chance to study in the United States. Childcare was handled by extended relatives.

When Johnson-Sirleaf was thirty years old, she had had enough of the barbaric practices heaped upon Liberian people of her gender. She obtained a divorce. Right up until the courtroom hearing finalizing the split, she was phobic that her ex would retaliate yet again with even worse domestic violence than before. Divorcing was a radical step for a Liberian female. But she was exceptional; in her life, every special advantage she got led to another. Yet, most of her later achievements were done on her own merits– not as a result of marriage to a powerful man.

The Liberian government had one political party, the True Whig Party, whose members used the government as their personal piggy bank. By the early 1970’s, there was a very wide income/asset gap between the government officials and military thugs, and the unfortunate Liberian citizens; there was no middle class. The nation had been drained of its major resources, rubber and iron, which had been exported to foreign countries by profiteers.

Johnson was academically skilled and played well with others politically. She got a job with the Liberian Debt Service Department at Treasury, and then the Ministry of Finance while radical changes were afoot. She studied accounting, and later, public administration at Harvard. However, her public speech could be inflammatory, because she told the truth. She called the system a “kleptocracy– corrupt to the core.” At a later time, she warned that a peasant revolt was in the offing.

In 1971, the new nepotistic “president” of the country was switching benefactors, from the United States to the U.S.S.R. Allegedly, he was going to help the downtrodden and eliminate corruption. Yet he practiced cronyism on a royal scale and angered the civilian Liberian people in numerous other ways.

Read the book to learn how the tide turned eventually through the ugly events that transpired; how, more than once, Johnson was very nearly killed but instead encountered a checkered fate; and how the United States played a major part in her and Liberia’s survival, despite having blood on its hands.

Chocolate Nations

The Book of the Week is “Chocolate Nations, Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa” by Orla Ryan, published in 2011. This slim volume described the situations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire at the book’s writing, with regard to growing the crop that ultimately becomes chocolate. Both countries had command economies and a large number of farmers with small landholdings growing the cocoa-bean trees.

Ghana has grown cocoa at least since the late 1800’s. Even after it declared its independence from Great Britain in 1957, it had a series of tyrannical leaders, each replacing the next via coups. They kept the farmers poverty-stricken by setting the price the government paid for cocoa. Some farmers illegally sold their harvests to Cote d’Ivoire for better prices. Around 2009, Ghana was producing approximately one fifth of the world’s cocoa; Cote d’Ivoire, about one third.

Even after independence in 1960, the latter’s former colonizer, France, invested in cocoa farming there. However, the dictator became well-liked by encouraging laborers from Burkina Faso and Mali to farm cocoa and coffee in his country. He gave land to those from the Baoule tribe who tilled it. His excessive spending to support his lifestyle and that of his loyal servants, resulted in huge debts, which he tried to reduce by cutting wholesale prices paid to cocoa farmers. The nation saw a bloody civil war from 2000 to 2003.

In the first decade of the 21st century, hysteria ruled the airwaves in the United States over the accusation of abusive child labor on the cocoa farms. It was unclear whether the accusation was true, as data were anecdotal, ulterior motives abounded among the accusers (such as NGOs, tabloid reporters and even a politician), and the culture of the cocoa growers provided plausible denial that truant children were being enslaved. For, farming families tended to be large so that the kids’ assistance could help keep the family in business.

It appears that cocoa farming is unlikely to change significantly in the near future in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire because “For smallholders, the cocoa market can seem little more than a plaything in the hands of a few large companies and speculators.”

Read the book to learn more details.

Chasing the Devil

The Book of the Week is “Chasing the Devil” by Tim Butcher, published in 2010. This volume’s author, a loyal fan of the British author Graham Greene, wanted to retrace the steps of Greene, who made treks on foot in Sierra Leone and Liberia in 1935. Greene went with his cousin to observe whether the countries were still practicing slavery. Butcher, accompanied by his friend’s son, insisted on having similarly primitive conditions on his trip in 2009. Both of the aforementioned countries have suffered bloody civil wars in recent decades.

Great Britain colonized Sierra Leone in 1807. In the 1940’s and 1950’s, many poor farmers abandoned their subsistence labor for a chance to get rich mining diamonds. Extreme greed prompted diamond smuggling. Although the nation achieved independence in 1961, it fell into disarray in the early 1970’s, as “… order collapsed and the pillars of society that I [Butcher] take for granted in a functioning state, such as the availability of fair-minded police or economic stability or unbiased journalism, crumbled away.”

The violence among white officials, black settlers and native Africans continued through 2002. Around then, a bloodless coup occurred, which represented progress. At the time of his visit, the author reported that Sierra Leone was fraught with corruption, and was suffering “brain drain” and “capital flight.” However, China became interested in building infrastructure and investing there due to untapped iron ore deposits. Modernization has been occurring, but not without growing pains. One part of that has been the advent of cars on the yet-to-be-constructed roads, causing extremely bad traffic jams.

Liberia became independent in 1847. In years prior, the United States launched a public relations initiative to assist freed slaves in returning to their homeland, just as the British did in Sierra Leone. However, the Americans did not colonize Liberia. This meant that the nation had black leadership much sooner than did Sierra Leone. Even so, in the early going, white men ran the campaign with hypocrisy and greed.

Read the book to learn more about Butcher’s trip and the histories of Sierra Leone and Liberia in the time of Graham Greene, and in the last twenty years.

The Black Nile

The Book of the Week is “The Black Nile” by Dan Morrison, published in 2010. The American author traveled along the Nile River for more than sixth months, “roughing it” just for fun. He spent time in Sudan, South Sudan, Egypt and Uganda.

Morrison spoke with people of all walks of life, including government officials. He visited farms, oilfields and night clubs. He was forced to deal with numerous delays of vehicles on water and land while traveling to his next destination. He wrote briefly of the recent history of tribal infighting, and the cultural, political and economic background of the region.

The economies of some villages, fueled by black markets, with high-priced accommodations, like Juba in Sudan, were frequented by aid workers and diplomats. In South Sudan alone, there are more than ninety different tribes and factions. The author visited just prior to the partitioning of Sudan. Most of the oil was in the south. The militias and corrupt local officials were forcing villagers to evacuate their land for the purpose of oil exploration. The oil companies used private security services and hired northerners. China, Malaysia and India were the major investors in the oil.

“Northern Sudan was almost entirely untouched by the civil war and, despite the combined effects of mismanagement and international sanctions, its main roads were paved, electricity reached the major towns and there was always a hotel to be found.”

The author summed up various American viewpoints, including: a) “No one in the United States cared about a months-old spell of terror and death in South Sudan. They barely cared about Darfur, and Darfur was the rage.” and b) Americans’ impression of the Middle East is one of veiled women and angry men.

Read the book to learn more about the author’s adventures.

Stringer – BONUS POST

This blogger read “Stringer” by Anjan Sundaram, published in 2014. The author studied mathematics at university but entered the field of journalism instead. He went to the Congo with the hope of getting paid for reporting news. Someone helped him become a freelance writer for the Associated Press.

However, this book is unclear about when any of his experiences occurred, as no dates– not even approximate ones– are provided. Not even during his description of Kabila’s historic election “victory” over Bemba. This appears to be a case of laziness and cheapness on the part of the author and his publisher. If dates were provided, then this book would need to have notes, references and possibly an index– entailing additional work, time and expense. Also, by omitting a timeline and confining the writing to the author’s personal experience, this work appears less credible and less literate than otherwise. Journalists are supposed to be recorders of history. History is all about when events occurred– so that there is context. This blogger has observed the lack of dates in other recent books written by foreign correspondents, too. It is a disturbing trend that bespeaks of the decrease in quality of personal accounts of “Darwin Award” candidates in war-torn countries.

Anyway, Sundaram stayed in Victoire, a section of Kinshasa with a reputation for “…gangs and disorder, and expatriate and embassy workers were banned even from visits.” As he was a stringer, he was paying his own expenses to collect news stories of the civil war. Competition in the region for getting stories published was fierce, as the AP bureau in Dakar covered 22 countries. “There was constant news of rape, child soldiers and violence.”

Congo was influenced by missionaries. When a child was misbehaving, and the family suffered a misfortune, it was thought that the devil was influencing the child, so a pastor would compel the child to confess.

“Congo’s minuscule 25 miles of coast was rich with oil.” Sundaram met an Indian whose land was allegedly seized illegally by the Congolese government and the Americans, because some natural resource was found in it. Sundaram avoided covering the story, as the situation was sure to be rife with corruption. The business community was comprised of Indians, Lebanese, Israelis, Belgians and politicians. These foreigners shamelessly engaged in conspicuous consumption; hence the common Congolese people rioted in wealthy neighborhoods.

Sundaram was present when the Congolese people were led to believe there might occur a historic political change in their nation, as they could vote for a presidential candidate. “From across the country came stories of villagers who had walked for days, supplies on their heads, families in tow, to reach a polling station… turnout was higher than 80 percent in many districts worst hit by the war.” However, as usual, their corrupt government took advantage of their lack of education and naivete.

Read the book to learn how Congo has historically been manipulated by foreign powers. But don’t expect to learn when.

The Zanzibar Chest

The Book of the Week is “The Zanzibar Chest” by Aidan Hartley, published in 2003. This is the autobiography of a foreign correspondent (journalist) in Africa. The diary of a late, close, adventurous friend of his father’s was found in a Zanzibar Chest. The author sought to interview all the people mentioned in it.

The author’s father was a British civil servant who helped colonize various African countries, and then supervise cotton growing with their independence movements and agricultural reforms. The light-skinned men destroyed the culture and economy of the dark-skinned men. The latter lost their livestock and crops, and began to starve. Toward the middle of the twentieth century, American Baptist missionaries aggressively pressured the natives to convert to Christianity in exchange for Western food and clothes.

Born in 1965 in Kenya, Hartley had two older brothers and an older sister. They were sent to boarding school in England. He started his career with the Financial Times in Tanzania in the mid 1980’s. After he got his sea legs– having learned to doctor his expense reports and stories– he became a “Darwin Award” candidate, covering wars in Ethiopia, Somalia, the Balkans and Rwanda. In that first country’s civil war in 1991, the rebels were supplied with arms by the Americans, Soviets, Chinese, North Koreans and the Israelis.

Hartley was also a freelance journalist, or “stringer”– “… he had flown four thousand miles without an assignment, immersed himself in a story about which he knew nothing, and would struggle until he improved his camerawork and got a good story.” For a while, he was with Reuters. However, it is expensive for a news service or newspaper publisher to pay for housing, armed guards and vehicles for a group of full-time reporters in a country full of desert and violence, such as Somalia. Other countries offer better business opportunities because they have a better climate and are resource-rich, in addition to being prone to violence, like South Africa.

Read the book to learn of Hartley’s adventures and how the nature of reporting of war and famine from Africa has changed through the decades.

The Queen of Katwe

The Book of the Week is “The Queen of Katwe” by Tim Crothers, published in 2015. This story focuses on Phiona Mutesi, a young female chess player in Katwe– a poor area outside of Kampala, Uganda.

Prior to her playing chess, Mutesi was destined for an empty life in which she was likely to die young from a fire, flood, disease, violence or famine, or bear many children starting in her teens, due to dependency on unreliable, polygamous men as providers of the basic necessities of survival. Education in Katwe was sporadic, as children attended only when they could afford the tuition. Not only priced out of schooling, but living a hand-to-mouth existence, Phiona (and her siblings) were compelled to “…walk around the slum, selling maize from a saucepan on her head.” She had to scrounge around for even one meal a day. Additionally, it was a three-hour round trip on foot between her home and the public well. Her family was evicted from numerous hovels due to nonpayment of rent.

Mutesi’s older brother happened to frequent a kids’ soccer program whose director started to also provide a bowl of porridge, and chess instruction. The soccer was introduced by a non-profit initiative called Sports Outreach Institute, started by Russ Carr. His goal was to teach kids “how to fish” and convert them to Christianity.

Around 2009, when she was approximately nine years old, Mutesi tagged along after her brother, walking the five kilometers to the eyesore of a venue, and became obsessed with chess. The food was a major draw for hungry kids. Their mothers, although grateful, were apprehensive that their kids might be kidnapped by the recreation coach who was a white man, according to local gossip.

Read the book to learn the details of Mutesi’s rise in Africa’s competitive chess culture, and the reasons for her uncertain future.