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The Return of the Dark Continent

"whites will soon be extinct in Africa"

In this controversial article, Max Hastings argues that the whites will soon be extinct in Africa. Its corrupt nations are going backwards, and the outside world couldn’t give a damn. The dark continent’s story will become an exclusively black disaster...

Robert Mugabe, by contrast, terrorizes his white subjects under floodlights. Farmers are driven from land they have tilled for decades. Brutality is the nation’s staple diet and heaven knows, there is little enough to eat. Zimbabwe is sinking into a slough of corruption, starvation and bankruptcy to satisfy the megalomania of one man.

neither Britain nor the United Nations will depose Mr Mugabe

If Tony Blair announced tomorrow that Britain intended to invade Zimbabwe and remove Mr. Mugabe from power, I suspect that the news would be far more enthusiastically received than a declaration war on Saddam Hussein.

Yet of course, neither Britain nor the United Nations will depose Mr Mugabe. Many miles and the colonial legacy divide us from his crumbling country. His tyranny poses no aggressive threat to the outside world. His victims are his own people.

All the sentiment expended upon Zimbabwe’s white farmers, most people In Britain recognize that their fate was sealed more than two decades ago when majority rule came to the former Rhodesia.

Since 1980, it has merely been a question of how long the dwindling number of Rhodesians could stick it. I know Zimbabwe well. After the bitterness of the civil war, there never seemed a realistic prospect that a multi-racial society would survive there for long. Or 100 years, the white man lorded in the old Rhodesia. Now a black tyranny does so.

The remaining whites will be driven out of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Be wise ones will leave while they still have the skin on their backs. Just or unjust, that is reality. I would go further and suggest that the game is up for the white man throughout Africa. It does not matter whether this is a good or bad thing - it represents the tide of history.

For four centuries, white immigrants and their descendants have pitched camp to Africa. ‘We belong here. we are as much Africans as any of Mugabe’s 'war veterans',’ a Zimbabwean farmer will say.

Yet, in the eyes of Africa this is not true. The white man is always the alien, the outsider, and the former ruler whose very competence is a painful embarrassment even to most educated black Africans. However much those Zimbabweans, or their South African counterparts, love the countries in which they live, few black Africans today acknowledge that the white man belongs among them. He is perceived as a leftover from past, flotsam drifting on the beach of history.

The remaining whites will not be driven out in a single dramatic purge. Over the next 30 years, they will simply be prodded, frightened and squeezed until they slip away piecemeal, as the children of good many lends of mine have done already. In a succession of lurches and surges, Africa is reverting to a dark continent.

African rulers have systematically removed 95 billion pounds from the continent since the colonial rulers departed

Over the past 40 years, since the colonial powers began to depart, all the worlds efforts to provide advice and aid have been frustrated by cultural resistance, lack of education, population explosion and, above all, corruption on a vast scale.

Many Western nations suffer from political corruption. But they are rich enough, and the corruption modest enough, and the corruption modest enough for their economies and their political systems to co-exist with it.

Across Africa, however, rulers have systematically stripped national treasuries of their wealth. It has recently been estimated that national rulers have illegally removed 95 billion pounds from the continent since the colonial rulers departed.

Such a figure puts 'cash for questions' in our own dear House of Commons into perspective, doesn’t it? We talk of sleaze yet it is inconceivable that Gordon Brown could divert 4 billion pounds from the Treasury’s resources to his private account in Zurich.

But such things are happening in Africa every year. No society can prosper amid corruption on is scale. We take for granted the honesty of our judges, accountants yes, even after Enron - banks and bureaucrats. Honesty is not only the best policy; it is indispensable if any economic system is to prosper.

In Africa, the only wholly successful modem industry is the theft of cash from businesses, aid funds, government coffers, utilities, mines, wildlife charities and for all we know church poor boxes.

In the days when I travelled in Africa a lot, an old hand in Nairobi explained a few home truths to me. ‘In this society, If you don’t use power to enrich yourself and your family you are not merely behaving foolishly, you are thought to be acting wickedly,’ he said.

‘There is absolutely no understanding here of the ideal of a community, of the people at large. There is only the family, the tribe and yourself.’

National bankruptcy does nothing to diminish a bottomless appetite for first-class air travel and absurdly pretentious embassies abroad. Look at the roll call in London, some of the most expensive real estate in the capital is occupied by the diplomatic missions of some of the poorest nations in the world: Malawi in Grosvenor Street; Tanzania in Hertford Street; Zambia in Palace Gate; Zimbabwe in the Strand.

By almost every economic measure Africa has gone backwards, not forwards, since the 1960s. Three years ago, America’s then resident, Bill Clinton, toured the continent and delivered a series of supremely cynical speeches, proclaiming that the West would hence force be coming to Africa’s aid. It sounded like rubbish then and it is rubbish now.

The West has no intention of bailing out Africa, even if Blair has surges of compassion for the place. Donors are tired of giving cash of which only a smidgen reaches the people for whom it is intended. Food deliveries to starving people will continue, but these do nothing for collapsing economies.

The end of the Cold War means that no great power feels a need to buy influence here. For many years, African leaders bitterly denounced imperialist interference in their countries. Today they are learning international indifference is far more painful.

For most of Africa's people, the future looks even grimmer than the past. Aids is ravaging populations. The statisticians expect its consequences to grow much worse before they get better. The influential academic Philip Bobbitt, in his recent book The Shield Of Achilles, observed that he sees only misery ahead for Africans in 21st century, as disease, famine and corruption relentlessly assail them.

There was a vivid moment a couple of years ago during the first stage of the British intervention to support the struggling government of Sierra Leone. Its prime minister asked a visiting British politician, in the presence of journalists if it might be possible for his country to become part of the British Empire again. Most of those present believed that the Leonese leader was serious. The problems of African societies are so huge, so ay deep-rooted, that the few honest and decent politicians despair. They grasp at any straw to rescue their countries.

Zimbabwe’s remaining whites farm the land incomparably more efficiently than there black counterparts which makes their presence more intolerable

It is a tragic spectacle, and few expert onlookers see a way out. When the West does intervene in any African society it is essential to stay for at least ten years to have any hope of making lasting progress.

The Americans failed miserably in Somalia a decade ago, because they treated it as a short-term military problem. The British Army training team in Sierra Leone has done a good job but the lasting need is for civil assistance - to teach the people how to collect taxes, administer courts and run infrastructure costs.

Many Africans would be delighted if there was more of it about. But the political obstacles remain overwhelming, the imperial memory too fresh.

It is still far to soon to judge whether Britain’s intervention even in tiny Sierra Leone will accomplish anything of value. There is much to do and it is bound to take a long time.

Almost every Western attempt to help Africa flounders, sooner or later, amid the morass of political prejudice and cultural division. Zimbabwe’s remaining whites farm the land incomparably more efficiently than there black counterparts. But this makes their presence more intolerable, not less so to the likes of Robert Mugabe.

The big fib, propagated at the time of African independence was that local people wanted the right to vote. Not so. They scarcely cared a fig for the ballots, most of which were soon rigged anyway. They wanted the land, cars, houses, and swimming pools of their erstwhile white rulers. They still want these things, in Zimbabwe and South Africa generally.

Sooner of later most African leaders find it expedient to hand over the white man’s toys to their own people, without all the bother of explaining that these things should be won through education, skills, enterprise, and hard labour over generations.

I was never a supporter of Ian Smiths Rhodesia, which was founded upon a huge injustice to the blacks and sustained by cruelties as horrible as those of Mugabe today. White minority rule in South Africa was a loathsome thing. Thank God it has gone. But it remains a tragedy a tragedy to see black ruled Africa sinking into the swamp of history.

African rulers are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their personal cravings for wealth. Their subjects merely struggle to survive.

Outsiders can do little to save it from itself as long as it remains a continent of tyrants and democracy is making no headway at all. There is one striking oddity about Africa’s misery today, passions remain entirely internally directed.

Whereas in the Middle East resentment of the rich west spawns terrorism and active hostility, above all towards the United States, even Mugabe’s denunciations of Blair lack conviction. African rulers are overwhelmingly preoccupied with their personal cravings for wealth. Their subjects merely struggle to survive. Some observers believe that this may change as the power of Islam grows across the continent.

The influence of the Moslem religion may generate a new assertiveness, even aggression a decade or two onwards. For now, however, African passions focus exclusively upon their own societies and upon futile thrashings to make some brand of authoritarian Socialism blossom amidst the failing crops. You may have noticed that even as more and more whites are obliged to quit Africa, growing numbers of black Africans seek to migrate to Europe and the United States - refugees from the economic catastrophes their own rulers have created at home.

On every plane that bears sorrowing whites away from the continent of their birth into exile in Europe or Australia, there are also many seats occupied by departing blacks who are just as much victims. It is a bitter historic irony.

I believe that the remaining whites will continue to trickle away from Africa until there is only a handful of communities left between Cairo and the Cape.

Then the outside world may notice less, and care less, what happens to the continent because we will perceive no kin there. Africa’s story will have become and exclusively black disaster.

Last 25 Visitor Comments
Name	Email	Subject	Date
Chichi	Anonymous	Dick	12/23/2004
I would like to tell you that I eant to have
MALDEN	mladen19_at_hotmail.com	HI	11/23/2004
MUGABE IS DIRTY DOG greetings from Croatia
Mark Julian	julian2005_at_webmail.co.za	this is a stupid article	8/11/2004
As Pietr Dirk Uys said "Im a White south African so fuck you all! All you wimps who immigrate to Canada or New Zealand are just racists who think that black people are incapable of running anything. You can have your crummy sheep-shagging or moose-humping gay countries. aSouth africa will be a shining success. We are approach R5 to the dollar - what all you afro=pessimists have to say about that? And even if SA goes to the dogs Id rather live here than have my kids speak with a fucked up half SA Sol Kerzner accent! Nicholus Jooste why dont you just admit that you find dark men in Turbans attractive and that is the real reason you are living in the Mid-East???
nicholas jooste	nick_at_victoryteam.org.ae	africa	6/7/2004
South Africa has seen my last tax dollar.I will have to find a new home when I leave the middle east,like so many thousands of my compatriots.Bullshit yourself about Africa if you like,but by stealth the Anc will achieve what they think they want,and the white man will indeed be squeezed and frightened into relinquishing his position in Africa.Anyway,life is in fact better elsewhere
invinoveritas	spesbona@webtopmail.com	Max Hastings	1/5/2003
An all too rare and brutally honest article by a high-profile British journalist (and newspaper editor)who made his name as a front-line reporters in the Falklands war. Unfortunately - and this a very serious criticism - Hastings reveals the shallow side of his journalistic nature by being unable to resist the ritual cowardly swipe at "loathsome" white minority rule (wmr). Coming hard on the heels of his forthright denunciation of black majority rule (and, he virtually says it, the lack of a black sense of morality which produced this mess) it is utmost hypocrisy to lambast the only political system (wmr) which has ever worked in Africa. This is bad enough(though sadly predictable) but incredulously he goes on to slander Ian Smiths Rhodesia as "a huge injustice to blacks" and "sustained by cruelties as horrible as those committed by Mugabe today..". What a load of bullshit..! This is a gross absurdity which is totally insupportable by any evidence. This is so bizarre that I am sure JOHN PILGERM must have craftily sneaked in a paragraph of his own without Hastings knowledge..! Aside from the usual irrational desire to brown-nose the false black saint - the "glittering exception of Mandela" -swoon and puke..! I cannot understand why Hastings would want to undermine his credibility with this grotesque lie. If Smithy had done 1% of the crimes which Mugabe has committed he would long ago have been tried and executed by Mugabe - if not the International War Crimes Tribunal where Mugabe should be sitting in dock were he not exempt by his being black. I imagine that everyone (Mugabe included)is amazed by Smithy's stubborn refusal to take the "Chicken Run" and remain in his collapsing country as if he had never been its ruler. To Smithy's many detractors I offer this - name one other long-term African leader who (after being deposed by his enemies)lives simply and frugally without any state privileges or protection, etc, and who (it must be obvious) has not squirelled away millions of ill-gotten state funds..? I'll answer the question.....PJ Botha is probably the only other. Need any more be said..?
Jaco Strauss	feedback@strauss.za.com	Max Hastings article	10/17/2002
I sincerely hope your optimism holds true Terry. The problem I have with the continent is that although there are major differences between South Africa and the rest of our continent the ANC government is throwing away chance after change to create the dynamo to uplift the continent. Look for e.g. at their hopeless handling of the destruction of our neighbouring state! Mbeki's own Nepad blueprint promises 'peer reviews' Who do you think will take Africa seriously is not even the SA leaders show any signs of statesmanship. As a matter of fact, rather the opposite.
Terry Canin	terry@panmacmillan.co.za	Max Hastings article	10/16/2002
Although I found this article interesting, with some brutal truths, I felt it was a dangerously lop-sided article. To lump the whole continent together with broad-sweeping statements and accusations is to endanger the good things that have been built up and exist in especially in countries like South Africa, to which an article like this can be very damaging.If everyone took the same cynical view as Hastings and many others like him there would be no chance of any hope on a rich and vast continent with much to offer.
Pierre Matthee	pmatthee@shaw.ca	Africa	10/1/2002
This article explains exactly why I have moved to Vancouver to "start all over again".

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