{"id":71046,"date":"2015-07-14T08:48:36","date_gmt":"2015-07-14T16:48:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71046"},"modified":"2015-07-14T09:49:14","modified_gmt":"2015-07-14T17:49:14","slug":"race-social-engineering-in-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71046","title":{"rendered":"Race & Social Engineering In Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his 1983 book Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The great temptation of colonialism, the worm in its free-market
\napple, was the itch to indulge in social engineering. It was so fatally
\neasy for the colonial administrator to persuade himself that he could
\nimprove on the laws of supply and demand by treating his territory
\nas an ant-hill and its inhabitants as worker-ants who would benefit
\nfrom benevolent organizing. The Belgian Congo, where white settlers
\nwere given no political powers at all for fear they would oppress the
\nnatives, was a monument to well-meaning bossiness. The law
\ninstructed firms to behave like *a good head of family’. As in Soviet
\nRussia, there were restrictions on native movement, especially in the
\nbig cities, and in Elizabethville natives had to observe a curfew. The
\nnotion was that the African could be shoved around for his own
\ngood. Practice, of course, was much less benevolent than theory.
\nUntil 1945, the French used social engineering on a huge scale in the
\nform of forced labour and native penal codes. It was infinitely less
\nsavage and extensive than the Gulag Archipelago but it rested on
\nsome of the same assumptions. <\/p>\n

The most dedicated of the social engineers were the Portuguese,
\nwho ran the first and the last of the empires. In Angola and
\nMozambique they adopted slavery from the Africans, institutiona-
\nlized it and integrated it with their administrative system. The
\nslave-trade, especially to Brazil, was the economic mainstay of these
\ntwo territories for three hundred years. The treaties the Portuguese
\nsigned with the African chiefs were for labour, not products (though
\nin Mozambique the Arabs acted as middlemen). The Portuguese
\nwere the only primary producers of slaves among the European
\npowers. They defended the trade desperately and resisted its suppres-
\nsion, abolishing it only when compelled by the British, and replacing
\nit by a commercialized system of forced labour. This they maintained
\nto the end in the 1970s, still with the co-operation of the African
\nchiefs, who in the slave-days ran the labour-gangs or shabalos. <\/p>\n

Cecil Rhodes wanted to absorb Angola and Mozambique in the
\nfree British system, regarding Portuguese colonialism as an ana-
\nchronism: in his innocence he did not realize it was a portent of
\ntwentieth-century totalitarianism. In the post- 1945 period the Portu-
\nguese provided every year 300,000 contracted labourers from Mo-
\nzambique and 100,000 from Angola, mainly for South Africa. Every
\nAfrican who had not been assimilated and granted citizenship (the
\nPortuguese had no colour-bar as such) had to possess a caderneta or
\npass-book with his work record. Bad workers were sent to the local
\njefe de posto for corporal punishment on the hand with a palmatoria
\nor perforated ping-pong bat. The ultimate deterrent was hard labour
\non ‘the islands’ (Sao Tome or Principe). Like the Belgians, the
\nPortuguese had a curfew, and Africans could not normally leave the
\nhouse after nine. 35 <\/p>\n

The Portuguese authorities hotly defended their methods on moral
\ngrounds. They argued that in return for exporting labour, the two
\ncolonies were getting ports and railways and other investment
\nunobtainable by any other means. They claimed they took their
\ncivilizing mission seriously: Africans were not children but adults
\nwho must be made to accept social responsibilities. This meant
\ntaking the men out of idleness into work, and the women out of the
\nbondage of the fields into their proper role in the home. 36 But like
\nmost forms of moralizing interference it had unforeseen side-effects.
\nIn 1954 the Bishop of Beira complained that exporting labour was
\ntotally destructive of family life since 80 per cent of the men in his
\ndiocese were habitually away from home, either in Rhodesia and
\nSouth Africa or on work-projects within the territory. 37 <\/p>\n

Even the British-influenced territories used large-scale social en-
\ngineering in the form of land-apportionment to underpin racial
\ndivisions. In Kenya the expulsion of the Kikuyu from the ‘White
\nHighlands’ between the wars (which we have noted in Chapter Four)
\nraised some of the same moral objections as Stalin’s collectivization
\nof the farms. It was the direct cause of the ferocious Mau Mau
\noutbreak in the 1950s. Land apportionment legislation in Southern
\nRhodesia, a similar policy, was one of the underlying causes of the
\nguerrilla war there which dominated Rhodesian history in the 1970s
\nand was ended only with the change to black rule in 1979. But the
\noutstanding example was South Africa, where social engineering was
\nraised into the central principle (indeed philosophy) of government
\nin the form of apartheid. <\/p>\n

In South Africa pass-laws (and books) as forms of social control
\nwent back to the eighteenth century, being supposedly abolished in
\n1828 but creeping back in again, until in the 1970s arrests under
\nmovement-restriction laws averaged more than 600,000 a year. 38
\nTheir origins lay in Elizabethan regulations to control ‘sturdy
\nbeggars’, themselves provoked by rapid population increase. But it is
\nironic that South Africa’s first positive measures of social engineering were the work of Jan Christian Smuts, who was one of the principal architects both of the League of Nations and of the UN, and who personally at San Francisco in 1945 drafted the UN Declaration on
\nHuman Rights. <\/p>\n

Smuts was one of the Boer moderates who, in the liberal peace
\nsettlement after the Boer War, were associated with the British in the
\nre-creation of the country. These men laid the legislative foundations
\nof a semi-totalitarian state based upon the principle of racial-
\nordering. In 1911 strikes by contract workers (i.e. blacks) were made
\nillegal, while the Mines and Works Act reserved certain job-
\ncategories for whites. In 1913 the Natives Land Act introduced the
\nprinciple of territorial segregation by skin-colour. This Act was the
\nkey to all that followed, not least because it determined the nature of
\nthe African response which was to create their own proliferating
\nvarieties of Zionist religious sects. 40 In 1920 the Native Affairs Act
\nintroduced segregated political institutions for Africans, setting up
\nthe Native Conference of African leaders, nominated by government,
\nand guided by the all-white Native Affairs Commission of ‘experts’.
\nIn 1922 an Act restricted skilled apprenticeships to those with
\nminimum educational qualifications (i.e. non-Africans). In 1923 the
\nNative (Urban Areas) Act created segregated African residential
\nareas in and near towns. In 1925 the Industrial Conciliation Act
\ndenied collective bargaining rights to Africans. The 1925 Wages Act
\nand the 1926 Colour Bar Act were specifically designed to draw a
\ngulf between poor whites and the African masses. 41 <\/p>\n

It was Smuts, again, who moved South Africa in a directly
\nopposite direction to that followed by the government of India after
\nAmritsar. In 1921 he massacred an African ‘Israelite’ sect which
\nengaged in a mass-squat on forbidden land at Bulhoek, and the
\nfollowing year he put down a black labour rebellion in the Rand with
\n700 casualties. This ruthless policy was reinforced with further
\nlegislation. The 1927 Native Administration Act made the Gov-
\nernor-General (i.e. the government) Supreme Chief over all Africans,
\nwith authoritarian powers to appoint headmen, define tribal boun-
\ndaries, move tribes and individuals, and control African courts and
\nland-ownership. Its Section 29 punished ‘any person who utters any
\nwords or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to
\npromote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans’.
\nGovernment police powers were further increased by the Mines and
\nWorks Act and Riotous Assemblies Act of 1930. 42 This granitic
\nmassing of totalitarian power took place at exactly the same time
\nStalin was erecting his tyranny on the Leninist plinth, gave govern-
\nment comparable powers and was designed to produce the same
\nresults. <\/p>\n

During the Second World War, Smuts, who had earlier destroyed
\nthe hopes of the coloured and mixed races of securing political equality with white voters, extended social engineering to them. In 1943 he set up a Coloured Affairs Department to ‘administer’ the Cape
\ncoloureds, and the same year he introduced the Pegging Act to stop
\nIndians moving into white areas. Far from making common cause
\nbetween the whites, Asians and coloureds, against the overwhelm-
\ning majority of blacks, it was Smuts’s United Party which drove
\nboth into the arms of the black nationalists (who hated them more
\nthan whites), and the Indian element was vital in swinging Asian
\nand UN opinion against South Africa. 43 Hence all the structural
\nessentials of white supremacy and physical segregation existed
\nbefore the United Party lost power to the Boer Nationalists in May
\n1948. <\/p>\n

What the Nationalists did was to transform segregation into a
\nquasi-religious philosophical doctrine, apartheid. In many ways
\nthey were a similar development to African nationalism itself. Their
\nearliest slogan, Afrika voor de Afrikaaners, was identical with the
\nblack ‘Africa for the Africans’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Their
\nreligious sectarianism flourished at the same time as African Zion-
\nism and for the same purpose: to bring together in collective
\ndefence the oppressed, the unwanted and the discriminated against.
\nIt was remarkably similar to Jewish Zionism too, in both its origins
\nand consequences. The Boers created their own Zion, which then
\nserved as the focus of hatred and unifying force for the Africans, as
\nIsrael did for the Arabs. The first Boer nationalist institutions,
\n1915\u201418, were created to provide help for poor whites through job
\nagencies, credit banks and trade unions. They were fiercely anti-
\nSemitic as well as anti-black and anti-British. The movement began
\nwith the defence of the underdog, then broadened to promote the
\npolitical, economic and cultural interests of the Afrikaaners as a
\nwhole, then in 1948 suddenly made itself overdog, with a ven-
\ngeance. 44 <\/p>\n

Apartheid first appeared as a political programme in 1948,
\ntreating the Reserves as the proper homeland for Africans where
\ntheir rights and citizenship were rooted, but its origins went back to
\nthe foundation in 1935 of the Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rasse-
\nstudie. It was therefore directly influenced by Hitler’s racial ideas
\nand his plans for segregated settlement in Eastern Europe, though it
\nadded a Biblical underpinning lacking in Hitler’s atheist panorama.
\nBeneath the surface, apartheid was a muddle, since it combined
\nincompatible elements. As pseudo-scientific racism, it derived, like
\nHitlerism and Leninism, from social Darwinism; as a religious
\nracism, it derived from fundamentalist beliefs which denied Dar-
\nwinism in any form. On the surface, however, it had a certain
\nclarity and simplicity; and the political system Smuts had created,
\nreinforced by the Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951),
\nwhich knocked the coloureds off the Common Roll, gave the
\nNationalists a secure tenure of power which is now well into its
\nfourth decade. They have thus had the means to embark on a course
\nof social engineering which, for consistency and duration, is rivalled
\nonly by Soviet Russia’s own. <\/p>\n

The object of apartheid was to reverse the tide of integration and
\ncreate wholly separate communities. The Prohibition of Mixed
\nMarriages Act (1949) extended the ban from white-African to all
\nunions across the colour lines. The Immorality Act made extra-
\nmarital sex illegal in any circumstances but more severely punished if
\nit involved miscegenation. The Population Registration Act (1950)
\nallocated everyone to a racial group, like the Nuremberg Laws. The
\nGroup Areas Act, the same year, empowered the government to
\ndesignate residential and business areas for particular racial groups.
\nIt began the process of shoving human beings around like loads of
\nearth and concrete, and flattening their homes and shops with
\nbulldozers. The first phase of apartheid was consolidated by the
\nsecurity provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950),
\nwhich defined Communism not only as Marxism-Leninism but ‘any
\nrelated form of that doctrine’ and any activity whatever which
\nsought to bring about ‘any political, industrial, social or economic
\nchange within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or
\ndisorder’. This turned the authoritarian elements of the state, for the
\nfirst time, against a significant portion of the white population. <\/p>\n

The second phase followed the appointment of the ideologist
\nH.F.Verwoerd as Minister of Native Affairs in 1950. He was an
\nintellectual, Professor of Social Psychology at Stellenbosch, who
\nsignificantly was not an inward-looking old-style Boer but had been
\nborn in Holland and educated in Germany. He gave the system a new
\nunity, especially after he became premier in 1958. 45 His Bantu
\nEducation Act of 1954 imposed government control over all African
\nschools, brought the missions to heel, introduced differential sylla-
\nbuses and an educational system specifically designed to prepare
\nBantu-speakers for their place in society. At the same time, the
\nsystematic creation of separate living areas, the ‘Bantustans’, was
\nbegun. Segregation began to penetrate every aspect of life, including
\nsport, culture and, not least, church services; and by 1959 the
\ngovernment had effectively segregated higher education. <\/p>\n

During the years 1959-60, which in effect created the black
\nAfrican continent, many observers believed apartheid was doomed
\nto collapse in the near future. That was Harold Macmillan’s view
\nwhen he gave his ‘Winds of Change’ speech in Pretoria on 3 February
\n1960, followed almost immediately by the Sharpeville shooting, in
\nwhich sixty-nine Africans were killed. 46 It was thought that an
\nAmritsar syndrome would now at last set in, that the tide of African
\nadvance was irresistible, that the Boers would lose their will and their
\nnerve. There was a flight of capital. South Africa left the Common-
\nwealth. There was likewise a belief that apartheid, even on its own
\nterms, was unworkable. It conflicted with many of the demands of the
\nmarket economy, on which South Africa depended for survival. It
\nconflicted, too, with the ineluctable logic of demography. The central
\nblueprint for progressive apartheid was the so-called Tomlinson
\nReport of 1956, probably the most elaborate description of and
\njustification for large-scale social engineering ever put together. It
\nstated that ‘the dominant fact of the South African situation’ was that
\nthere was ‘not the slightest ground for believing that the European
\npopulation, either now or in the future, would be willing to sacrifice its
\ncharacter as a national entity and a European racial group’. And it
\nproceeded from there to knock the country into an appropriate shape. 47
\nThe Report was criticized at the time for its absurd over-optimism, both
\nabout the ease with which industry could be sited near Bantu areas and
\nabout the growth of the black population. The accumulating evidence
\nof the 1960s appeared to confirm these caveats. In 1911, when race
\npolicy started, Europeans were nearly a third of the black population
\n(1,276,242 whites against 4 million blacks, 500,000 coloureds and
\n150,000 Asians). In 1951, when apartheid had got going, there were
\n2,641,689 whites, 8,560,083 blacks, 1,103,016 coloureds and
\n366,664 Asians. By 1970 the whites had risen only to 3,752,528, the
\nblacks had jumped to 15,057,952, the coloureds to 2,018,453 and the
\nAsians to 620,436. It was calculated that, by the year 2000, Africans
\nand coloureds would outnumber whites by ten to one. 48 This made the
\nrelative areas assigned to whites and blacks seem unrealistic, particu-
\nlarly since the creation of industrial jobs near Bantu areas was
\nproceeding at only 8,000 a year against the Tomlinson projection of
\n50,000. The moral inequities of the system were gruesomely apparent.
\nBy 1973 only 1,513 white families had been forced to move out of the
\n‘wrong’ race areas, while 44,885 coloured and 27,694 Indian families
\nhad been engineered out of their homes, some of them occupied since
\nthe days of the Dutch East India Company. 49 There was a constant
\nprocess of African squatting in forbidden areas, accompanied by
\nequally constant bulldozing, under heavily armed police and army
\nguard, horribly reminiscent of Russia, 1929-32. Presiding over this
\nexercise in perverted Utopianism were Boer intellectuals, trained in the
\nsocial sciences. Granted its internal contradictions and implausibilities,
\nand the fact that African, and increasingly, world opinion were
\nmobilized against it, the experiment seemed destined to collapse. <\/p>\n

Yet the lesson of Soviet collectivization has been that such schemes,
\nhowever morally and economically indefensible, can endure, if pursued
\nwith sufficient ruthlessness and brute physical power. Moreover, there
\nwere certain factors working in favour of the regime. Like Russia,
\nSouth Africa is immensely rich in minerals: gold, coal, diamonds,
\nmanganese and copper (in order of importance), plus antimony,
\nasbestos, chromium, fluor-spar, iron ore, manganese, mica, plati-
\nnum, phosphates, tin, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc and many
\nothers. 50 Far from declining, as had been predicted in 1960, the
\nSouth African economy flourished mightily from 1962 onwards,
\nthroughout the boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. When the boom
\nended in 1973\u20144, world inflation produced a price-revolution in gold
\nfrom which South Africa, the world’s largest producer (gold forms
\nmore than half the total of her mineral wealth), was the principal
\nbeneficiary. While incomes over virtually all the rest of Africa,
\nincluding those of her most dedicated and active enemies, fell, South
\nAfrica’s rose. Between 1972 and 1980, for instance, a standard
\nsixty-pound gold ingot rose in retail value from $250,000 to $2.5
\nmillion, a tenfold increase. 51 The price-revolution benefited govern-
\nment revenues by over $1 billion a year and also provided funds for a
\nhuge rise in capital investments. <\/p>\n

This steady growth in South Africa’s income in the two decades
\nafter the ‘Winds of Change’ struck the continent enabled the regime
\nto construct shelters against it in the form of a self-contained arms
\nindustry, which made South Africa virtually independent of reluctant
\nforeign suppliers, and a military nuclear-weapons programme. By
\nthe early 1980s South Africa was spending $2.5 billion annually on
\ndefence, but this was no more than 6 per cent of gnp, a tolerable
\nburden (by this point many black and Arab African countries were
\nspending 25-50 per cent of gnp on their armed forces). 52 South
\nAfrican forces were periodically involved in maintaining security in
\nSouth- West Africa, a former German colony Smuts had failed to
\nsecure outright at Versailles in 1919, South Africa being given it in
\ntrusteeship, a formula which (by another irony) he had invented
\nhimself. But in general South Africa survived with remarkably little
\ndamage, either to the military power or to the morale of the white
\nruling class, the decolonization by force of Angola, Mozambique and
\nSouthern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the 1970s. <\/p>\n

The Boer nationalists, as opposed to Smuts, had always criticized
\nhis unrealized scheme to create a ‘great white dominion’ including
\nRhodesia and Mozambique, and running from the Cape up to
\nKenya. They argued in the 1920s that this would merely ‘engulf the
\nwhites in a future black Africa. In the 1970s their caution was proved
\njustified, when the ratio of white to black even within South Africa
\nfell to 1:5. The South African regime refused to commit its own
\nfortunes to the preservation of the crumbling bastions of colonialism
\nto the north. When, in due course, they fell, the white laager
\ncontracted. This brought triumphant, militant and armed black
\nnationalism to South Africa’s own frontiers, backed by overwhelm-
\ning majorities in the UN, the Organization of African Unity and a
\ngrowing measure of Soviet-bloc physical support, chiefly in the form
\nof Cuban troops and advisers. <\/p>\n

Yet the ‘confrontation’ between South African apartheid and
\nblack nationalism was verbal and political rather than military, still
\nless economic. The nearer the African states were to South Africa, the
\nmore they felt the pull of her immense and prosperous economy and
\nthe less inclination did they display in carrying their resolve to
\ndestroy apartheid further than words. Ordinary Africans voted with
\ntheir feet, not indeed in favour of apartheid but for the jobs the South
\nAfrican economy provided. At the time of the boycott organized by
\nthe auo in 1972, the South African Chamber of Miners employed
\n381,000 blacks, one-third of whom came from north of latitude 22
\ndegrees S, and one-third from Mozambique. The number of blacks
\ncoming to South Africa increased steadily in the 1970s, not least
\nbecause real wages for blacks in the Rand rose rapidly at a time when
\nthey were falling in most of black Africa. The neighbouring regimes
\ncalled themselves ‘front line states’ and kept up the anti-apartheid
\nrhetoric, but in practice the governments of Zambia, Malawi,
\nZimbabwe and, above all, Mozambique made themselves systematic
\ncollaborators with the apartheid system by deliberately increasing
\ntheir exports of labour to the Rand. Malawi, Botswana and Zambia
\npulled out of the auo boycott; other states simply broke it, as they
\nhad earlier broken the boycott of Southern Rhodesia. South Africa
\nbuilt Malawi’s new capital at Lilongwe and the Cabora Bassa dam in
\nMozambique; and when one front-line president, Seretse Khama of
\nBotswana, fell ill, he was immediately flown to a ‘whites only’
\nhospital in Johannesburg. 53 <\/p>\n

It is significant that by the early 1980s the most active of South
\nAfrica’s enemies was remote Nigeria, the only major black oil
\nproducer. Its royalties, which exceeded $23 billion in 1980, pres-
\nerved it (as gold did South Africa) from the 1970s recession and gave
\nit the luxury of preserving an independent foreign-economic policy.
\nBut states south of the Congo and the Great Lakes could not resist
\nthe pull of the Rand magnet and, in practice, adjusted their ideologi-
\ncal policies accordingly. <\/p>\n

In any case, differences between Pretoria’s policy and those of
\nmost black African states were more theoretical than real. All
\nAfrican states practised racist policies. In the 1950s and 1960s,
\nEgypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a
\nquarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who
\nremained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its
\nArabs or deprived them of equal rights. In the 1970s Asians were
\nexpelled from most states in the Horn and East-Central Africa and
\nthey were discriminated against everywhere; even in Kenya they were
\nthreatened with expulsion in 1982. In most cases race-discrimination
\nwas a deliberate act of government policy rather than a response to
\npopular demand. When the Uganda government expelled the Asians
\nin 1972 the motive was to provide its members and supporters with
\nfree houses and shops, not to please ordinary black Ugandans, whose
\nrelations with the Asians had been friendly. 54 Anti-Asian racism was
\nusually propagated by official or semi-official newspapers controlled
\nby governments. In the 1970s they regularly published racist mat-
\nerial: that Asian women had feelings of superiority, hence their
\nrefusal to sleep with black men; that Asians smuggled currency out
\nof the country in suitcases; that Asian businessmen were monopolists
\nand exploiters; a typical headline read ‘Asian Doctors Kill their
\nPatients’. 55 <\/p>\n

From independence onwards, most black African states practised
\nanti-white discrimination as a matter of government policy. In the
\nsecond half of the 1970s Kenya and the Ivory Coast were virtually
\nthe only exceptions. Houphouet-Boigny, President of the latter, drew
\nattention to anti-white racism at the oau, telling the other heads of
\nstate: <\/p>\n

“It is true, dear colleagues, that there are 40,000 Frenchmen in my country and that this is more than there were before Independence. But in ten years I hope the position will be different. I hope that then there will be 100,000 Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us to meet again and compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend.” 56 <\/p>\n

But the commonest, indeed the universal, form of racism in black
\nAfrica was inter-tribal, and it was this form of racism, for which one
\neuphemism is social control, which led a growing number of African
\nstates, in the 1960s and still more in the 1970s, to exercise forms of
\nsocial engineering not unlike apartheid. One of the merits of colonial
\nrule in Africa (except where white supremacy policies dictated
\notherwise) was that it geared itself to tribal nomadic movements,
\nboth cyclical and permanent. It permitted a high degree of freedom
\nof movement. As populations rose, and pressures on food resources
\nincreased, this laissez-faire policy became more difficult to maintain.
\nBut it was a tragedy that, when independence came in the early
\n1960s, the successor-states chose to imitate not colonial-style liberal-
\nism but white-supremacist control. The Bandung\u2014 Leninist doctrine
\nof the big, omnicompetent state joined in unholy matrimony with
\nsegregationism. But of course the Soviet state had always controlled
\nall internal movement and settlement, not least its own Asian tribes.
\nLeninist and South African practice fitted in comfortably together.
\nThroughout black Africa, the documentation of social control –
\nwork permits, internal and external passports, visa requirements,
\nresidence permits, expulsion orders \u2014 proliferated rapidly with
\nindependence. And, as South African experience testified, once
\ndocuments appear, the bulldozer is never far behind. In the early
\n1970s it emerged in many places in West Africa, to shift squatters
\nfrom coastal towns back into the interior. 57 <\/p>\n

The great drought which struck a dozen Central African countries
\nnear the desert-bush border in the 1970s increased nomadic
\nmovement and so the practice of violent social control. There had
\nlong been racial enmity along the desert line, since nomadic tribes
\n(especially Touregs) had seized southerners for slavery. One of the
\nfirst acts of independent Mali, which straddled the line, was to
\nmassacre its northern Touregs. When drought-relief funds became
\navailable, Mali (and other states) used them to finance control
\nsystems. As the Secretary of the International Drought Relief Com-
\nmittee in Mali put it: ‘We have to discipline these people and to
\ncontrol their grazing and their movements. Their liberty is too
\nexpensive for us. This disaster is our opportunity.’ 58 Control of
\nmovement, in Mali and elsewhere, was accompanied by other forms
\nof social engineering. In such states development plans were delib-
\nerately drawn up in the late 1960s and 1970s to force everyone,
\nnomads included, into the money economy by taxation. They did not
\ndiffer in essentials from the old forced-labour system devised by the
\nFrench, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgian colonizers. 59 <\/p>\n

The most suggestive case of a new African state moving towards
\ntotalitarianism was provided by Tanzania. Its leader, Julius Nyerere,
\nwas a professional politician of the Nkrumah generation. In the
\n1960s, when the politicians were bowled over by the soldiers, he
\ncontrived to survive by militarizing his rhetoric and his regime. In
\n1960, in reaction to the Congo crisis, he said: There is not the
\nslightest chance that the forces of law and order in Tanganyika will
\nmutiny.’ 60 In January 1964 they did so, and Nyerere barely survived
\nwith the help of white British troops who disarmed his black army.
\nHe then disbanded it and recreated it from scratch as a party army: ‘I
\ncall on all members of the Tanu Youth League, wherever they are, to
\ngo to the local Tanu office and enrol themselves: from this group we
\nshall try to build the nucleus of a new army.’ 61 Four days later he
\nannounced the appointment of a Political Commissar for the Tanza-
\nnia People’s Defence Forces. <\/p>\n

This conscious imitation of Leninism was accompanied by the
\nerection of a one-party state. In 1961 Nyerere had said he would
\nwelcome an opposition party to Tanu: ‘I would be the first to defend
\nits rights.’ 62 But in January 1964, with the party youth being
\nreorganized as an army, he appointed a commission to design what
\nhe termed ‘a democratic one-party state’, observing that its job was
\nnot ‘to consider whether Tanzania should be a one-party state. That
\ndecision has already been taken. Their task is to say what kind of a
\none-party state we should have.’ 63 At the subsequent election, there
\nwas a choice of candidates, but under the same party label (meaning
\nthey needed Nyerere’s approval to stand) and they were not free to
\nraise issues. 64 <\/p>\n

The way in which Nyerere, the former pacifist, used militaristic
\nterminology to further his authoritarian state was ingenious and
\nhelped to explain his remarkable appeal to the Western intelligentsia,
\nwhich led one black sociologist to coin the term ‘Tanzaphilia’. 65
\nDefending his suppression of human rights, such as the freedom of
\nspeech, of the press and of assembly, Nyerere observed: ‘Until our
\nwar against poverty, ignorance and disease has been won, we should
\nnot let our unity be destroyed by somebody else’s book of rules.’ But
\nof course such a ‘war’, by definition, could never be ‘won’.
\nMoreover, such a ‘war’ was easily extended from internal to external
\nopponents: Nyerere followed Sukarno’s advice to find an enemy.
\nFrom the post-mutiny period onwards he was in the forefront of the
\nAfrican leaders who demanded a concerted politico-military cam-
\npaign against Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories and South Africa.
\nThe philosophy of his new authoritarian state was summed up in the
\n‘Arusha Declaration’ of February 1967, which stated bluntly: ‘We
\nare at war’ and was full of militaristic imagery and sloganizing. 66 <\/p>\n

Of course Tanzania was not at war with anybody. But the fiction
\nwas used to justify wartime restrictions and suspension of rights. The
\nArusha Declaration was an updated and Africanized version of
\nBandung, and similarly redolent of the higher humbug. Anything
\n‘inconsistent with the existence of a classless society’ was banned.
\n‘No one must be allowed to live off the work done by others’: that
\npermitted widespread arrests of ‘capitalists’, especially Asians. The
\ngovernment ‘must be chosen and led by peasants and workers’: that
\nallowed Nyerere to exclude anyone he wished from political activity.
\n‘Laziness, drunkenness and idleness’ were condemned: a pretext for
\nforced labour. ‘It is necessary for us to be on guard against internal
\nstooges who could be used by external enemies who aim to destroy
\nus’: a pretext for a permanent political witch-hunt. ‘Loitering’ was
\nspecifically condemned: a pretext for the sweep-and-search opera-
\ntions beloved of all black African governments, slavishly copied from
\nthe South African police-manuals. The machinery for control was
\ncontained in the party structure: ‘the ten-house cell’ being the basic
\nunit, moving up through the ward, the district, the region to the
\nnation. The philosophy behind Arusha was termed by Nyerere
\nujamaa, ‘familyhood’, based upon a mythic past: ‘In our traditional
\nAfrican society, we were individuals within a community. We took
\ncare of the community and the community took care of us. We
\nneither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men.’ 67 Ujamaa was
\ndesigned to recapture that spirit. Yet in practice it was as anti-family as any other totalitarian doctrine. Offenders were brought before
\n‘ten-house cell’ courts. ‘Political education officers’ handed out tracts
\nwhich, for example, stated: <\/p>\n

The cell leader has to keep a close watch so as to detect any new faces in his
\nten houses. When he sees a stranger, he must make enquiries and find out
\nwho he is, where he came from, where he is going, how long he will remain
\nin the area and so on. Usually the host reports to the cell leader about his
\nguests and gives all the necessary information. If the leader doubts the
\nstories of these strangers, he must report the matter to the branch officials
\nor to the police. 68 <\/p>\n

Cell-leaders were given the right to detain anyone classified as
\n‘runaway’ (usually from forced labour) and to order ’round-ups’ of
\n‘miscreants’. A favourite phrase was e serikali yeze kuyesula, ‘the
\ngovernment know how to unearth’. Indeed, after the 1964 mutinies
\nNyerere seems not only to have flung off his British democratic
\ntrappings but to have descended into the colony’s Prussian past. His
\nparty militia learned the goose-step. He introduced sumptuary
\nlegislation and sartorial uniformity. In 1968 he decided that the
\nMasai could not be allowed into Arusha wearing ‘limited skin
\nclothing or a loose blanket’ or indeed any kind of clothing termed
\n‘awkward’ or ‘soiled pigtailed hair’. 69 But having banned the tradi-
\ntional African garb, he switched the attack eight months later to
\n‘remnants of foreign culture’, authorizing the Tanu Youth League to
\nmanhandle and strip African girls wearing mini-skirts, wigs and tight
\ntrousers. 70 So girls were forbidden to wear trousers while men had to
\nput them on: more or less the old white missionary standard. When
\nthe Masai complained, they were told God had forced Adam and Eve
\nto dress before he drove them out of Eden. 71 But the missionaries had
\nnot set political spies in everyone’s house. <\/p>\n

Nyerere’s ujamaa was merely the most elaborate and sanctimoni-
\nous of the new authoritarian philosophies developed by the charis-
\nmatic petty tyrants of black Africa. At the village level it was merely a
\neuphemism for forced collectivization. In Zambia, the same process
\nwas termed ‘village regrouping’. Its one-party dictator, Kenneth
\nKaunda, termed the national philosophy ‘humanism’. This was
\nderived, he said, from the truth that all people are ‘human under the
\nskin’. But some turned out to be more human than others. ‘Zambian
\nhumanism’, he declared, ‘aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in
\nMan . . . the attainment of human perfection’, by ridding society of
\n‘negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy,
\nindividualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, national-
\nism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, diseases, igno-
\nrance and exploitation of man by man’. 72 The list gave the state
\nendless scope for authoritarian action. Elsewhere, other ‘isms’ ap-
\npeared. Ghana produced ‘Consciencism’, Senegal ‘Negritude’. In the
\nCongo, President Mobutu was at a loss until he hit upon the ideal
\nideology: ‘Mobutuism’. <\/p>\n

Once the tyrannies began to appear in the early 1960s, they swiftly
\ngraduated from the comparatively sophisticated (and bloodless)
\ndespotisms of Nyerere’s Tanzania to resurrected horrors from
\nAfrica’s darkest past. The gruesome comedy Evelyn Waugh had
\nfabricated in Black Mischief became fact. On ‘Kenyatta Day’,
\nOctober 1965, the President of Kenya, once termed by the British
\ngovernor ‘the leader of darkness and death’, now called by relieved
\nwhite settlers ‘the old man’, held a ‘Last Supper’, to commemorate
\nthe meal before his arrest as a Mau Mau terrorist. 73 In Malawi, Dr
\nHastings Banda, known as ‘Conqueror’ and ‘Saviour’, used witch-
\ncraft to sacralize his rule. In Zaire, Joseph Mobutu banned Christian
\nnames and re-named himself Monutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa
\nZa Banga, freely translated as ‘the cock that leaves no hens alone’. 74
\nPresident Bongo of Gabon banned the word pygmy (he was under
\nfive feet tall) but kept a bodyguard of giant German ex-Foreign
\nLegionaries, whose delight was to sing the Horst Wessel Lied at the
\nmain hotel. 75 As the 1960s progressed, violence struck the new
\nAfrican elites with increasing frequency. Two Prime Ministers of
\nBurundi were murdered in quick succession. The 1966 Nigerian
\ncoup cost the lives of the Federal Prime Minister and two of the three
\nregional premiers. Would-be Caudillos died too: in the Congo
\nPeople’s Republic an executed brass-hat was displayed dead on TV,
\nhis mouth crammed with dollars. Rulers showed an inclination to
\ncarry out retribution personally. The President of Benin (formerly
\nDahomey) murdered his Foreign Minister when he found him in bed
\nwith the Presidential wife. Another Foreign Minister, this time
\nin Equatorial Guinea, was clubbed to death by his own head of
\nstate. <\/p>\n

This last incident was one of the innumerable crimes committed by
\nPresident Francisco Macias Nguema. In the poorer African states, of
\nwhich there are nearly thirty, rulers set up one-party states and in
\ntheory disposed of absolute authority. But in practice they tended to
\nhave little power to influence intractable events or even to arbitrate
\ntribal quarrels. All they could do was to tyrannize, usually by
\npersonal violence. Macias was a case in point. He was born in the
\nSpanish colony in 1924, served in the administration, became
\nPresident on independence in 1968 and made himself President for
\nlife in 1972. During the next seven years he turned the country into a
\nvirtual prison-camp; many of its inhabitants simply fled for their
\nlives. A Spanish-mounted coup overthrew him on 3 August 1979,
\nand he was tried for ‘genocide, treason, embezzlement and systema-
\ntic violation of human rights’. His execution was carried out by a
\nMoroccan firing-squad flown in when local troops complained his
\nspirit was too strong for mere bullets and would return ‘as a tiger’. 76 <\/p>\n

The case of President (later Emperor) Bokassa of the Central
\nAfrican Republic was similar. When the French gave the colony
\nindependence they put in a hand-picked professional politician,
\nDavid Dako, as president. Ineffectually he tried to balance the head
\nof the police, Izamo, against Bokassa, who led the army, and Bokassa
\nproved the most agile of the trio. 77 From 1965 Bokassa was life
\nPresident and from 1977 Emperor, holding an elaborate coronation
\nceremony in December attended by 3,500 foreign guests and featur-
\ning an eagle-shaped throne, a crown with 2,000 diamonds and
\nregalia modelled on Napoleon’s coronation. It cost $30 million, a
\nfifth of the country’s meagre revenues. His friendship with the
\nexpansive President Giscard d’Estaing of France, to whom he gave
\ndiamonds, was not the least of the factors which buttressed his
\nregime. He celebrated his first anniversary by sacking and exiling his
\neldest son, Prince Georges, for anti-paternal remarks. Two months
\nlater, in January 1979, he slaughtered forty schoolchildren who
\nrioted when forced to buy uniforms made in Bokassa’s factory. In
\nApril, between thirty and forty more children were murdered in the
\nNgaragba prison, apparently in Bokassa’s presence and partly by
\nhim, a fact established by a commission of Francophone lawyers
\nunder Youssoupha Ndiaya of Senegal. When Giscard, alarmed by
\nthe publicity, sent out his adviser on African affairs, Rene Journiac,
\nto ask the Emperor to abdicate, he was whacked on the head by the
\nimperial sceptre. In retaliation Giscard landed troops at Bangui on
\n21 September 1979, with Dako in their luggage as replacement-
\npresident. Bokassa was given asylum in the Ivory Coast at Giscard’s
\nrequest, and was later condemned to death in absentia for murder,
\ncannibalism, ‘intelligence with Libya’ and fraud in gold and dia-
\nmonds. <\/p>\n

The Sekou Toure regime in the Republic of Guinea was little
\nbetter; Colonel Gadafy’s in Libya considerably worse; both commit-
\nted the additional crime of exporting their horrors to their neigh-
\nbours. The most instructive case, however, was that of ‘General’
\nAmin in Uganda, because it illustrated so many weaknesses of the
\nworld system in the 1970s. It was also the most tragic, for it virtually
\ndestroyed Uganda, once the most delightful country in Africa.
\nChurchill, who visited it as Colonial Under-Secretary in 1908, called
\nit ‘that paradise on earth’, ‘that tropical garden’. ‘Uganda is a
\nfairy-tale,’ he wrote. ‘You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk
\nand at the top there is a wonderful new world.’ 78 Uganda’s indepen-
\ndence was rushed through in October 1963 in accordance with
\nMacmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ policy. The Baganda ruling tribe
\nwere well-educated and always impressed Europeans by their charm.
\nBut the country was in many ways primitive, riven by complex tribal
\nrivalries, racial enmity between Muslim north and Christian south
\nand long-standing sectarianism within the Christian communities.
\nViolent magic was ubiquitous. The Kakwa and Nubi of the Muslim
\nnorth drank their victims’ blood and ate their livers and believed in
\nthe Mahdist ‘Yakan of Allah water’, which when drunk makes
\nsoldiers invulnerable. But the sophisticated Baganda kings also
\nmutilated bodies for purposes of politico-religious terror. 79 To make
\nmatters worse, Milton Obote, the professional politician installed as
\nPrime Minister on independence, was a narrow-minded anti-Baganda
\nsectarian of exceptional administrative incompetence. In 1966 he
\ndestroyed the constitution by using Amin to storm the Kabaka’s
\npalace and eject him by force. When Obote, in turn, was toppled by
\nAmin in January 1971, many people greeted military rule with
\napproval as the lesser of two evils. <\/p>\n

It is important to grasp that even at this stage Idi Amin was known
\nto be an exceptionally cunning and wicked man. The giant son of a
\nLugbara witchwoman, he had become a Muslim at sixteen and drew
\nhis power from the northern Kakwas and Nubis. He enlisted in the
\nKing’s African Rifles as a boy and his promotion to officer, though
\nhe was virtually uneducated, reflected the desperate need to avoid a
\nCongo-type mutiny as independence neared. He quickly acquired an
\nevil reputation in Kenya, fighting against cattle-rustlers. It was
\ndiscovered he had murdered Pokot tribesmen and left them to be
\neaten by hyenas, got information from Karamajog tribesmen by
\nthreatening to cut off their penises with a panga, and had actually
\nsliced off the genitals of eight of them to obtain confessions. He was
\nalso known to have murdered twelve Turkana villagers. The British
\nauthorities were themselves reluctant to prosecute one of the few
\nblack officers on the eve of independence, and referred the case to
\nObote, already Prime Minister-designate. Obote settled for a ‘severe
\nreprimand’, a curious punishment for mass-murder. 80 Indeed, he
\npromoted Amin colonel, used him to put down the Baganda and
\npermitted him to build up a military tribal base in the north, to
\nengage in large-scale smuggling of gold and ivory, to recruit Muslims
\nwithout reference to the government, to murder the only other senior
\nblack officer, Brigadier Okoya (and his wife) in January 1970, and
\nthereafter to treat the army as his own. When Obote was told by the
\nauditor-general that \u00a32.5 million was missing from army funds, the
\nPrime Minister left for a conference in Singapore, telling Amin he
\nwanted a ‘full explanation’ by his return. That was to invite a coup,
\nwhich Amin had already been pressed to undertake by Colonel
\nGadafy and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who wished to oust
\nObote’s Israeli advisers. <\/p>\n

Amin’s was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim-Arab interest
\nfrom the start, since he began massacres of the Langi and Acholi
\ntribes within weeks of taking over. In July 1971 he asked the Israelis
\nto help him invade Tanzania by seizing the port of Tanga; they
\nresponded by pulling out. The British repented their support at the
\nsame time, and thereafter Amin was Gadafy’s client. Muslims form
\nonly 5 per cent of the population and only Libyan support made the
\nlong tyranny possible, though Palestinian terrorists provided Amin
\nwith his personal bodyguard and the most adapt of his executioner-
\ntorturers. Gadafy persuaded Amin to throw out the Asians, and it
\nwas at that point, in August 1972, that the real looting of the country
\nbegan. But it ought to be on record that Britain was shipping
\narmoured cars to Amin as late as December 1972. 81 Indeed, freight-
\ning of scarce luxuries to Uganda from Stansted airport, an important
\ntraffic which enabled Amin to keep up the morale of his soldiers,
\ncontinued with British government approval almost to the end of the
\nterror. <\/p>\n

Surviving cabinet minutes give a unique glimpse of the emergence
\nof a primitive tribal tyranny in the outward forms of British
\nbureaucratic constitutionalism. Thus cabinet minute 131, dated 14
\nMarch 1972, read: ‘Should any minister feel that his life was in
\ndanger from unruly crowd or dissatisfied persons, he was at liberty
\nto shoot to kill.’ 82 In fact it was not dissatisfied persons but the
\nPresident whom ministers feared. His Minister of Education, Edward
\nRugumayo, who escaped in 1973, sent a memorandum to all African
\nheads of state which claimed Amin had ‘no principles, moral
\nstandards or scruples’ and would ‘kill or cause to be killed anyone
\nwithout hesitation’. 83 His Attorney-General, Godfrey Lule, wrote:
\n‘He kills rationally and coolly.’ Henry Kyemba, Minister of Health,
\nsaid that it was the murder of Michael Kagwar, President of the
\nIndustrial Court, in September 1971, which ‘revealed to the country
\nas a whole that the massacres were not to be limited to the army or
\nthe Acholi and Langi’. 84 The dead soon included any public figure
\nwho in any way criticized or obstructed Amin: the governor of the
\nBank of Uganda, the vice-chancellor of Makerere University, the
\nForeign Minister, the Chief Justice, dragged out of his court in broad
\ndaylight, Archbishop Janan Luwum \u2014 the last beaten to death, along
\nwith two cabinet ministers, by Amin himself. Amin often partici-
\npated in atrocities, sometimes of a private nature. Kyemba’s wife
\nTeresa, matron-in-charge of Mulago hospital, was present when the
\nfragmented body of Amin’s wife Kay was brought in: Amin appears
\nnot only to have murdered but dismembered her, for he kept
\ncollections of plates from anatomical manuals. He is also said to
\nhave killed his son and eaten his heart, as advised by a witchdoctor
\nhe flew in from Stanleyville. 85 There can be little doubt he was a
\nritual cannibal, keeping selected organs in his refrigerator. <\/p>\n

The image of refrigerated cannibalism encapsulated the regime,
\nwhich was a grotesque caricature of a Soviet-type terror. The
\ntraditional police simply faded away, as their senior officers were
\nmurdered for investigating Amin’s crimes. Like Stalin, Amin had
\ncompeting security services. They included his personal creation, the
\nPublic Safety Unit, the military police and his equivalent of the kgb,
\nan organization called the State Research Centre which had evolved
\nout of the old Cabinet Research Section and still retained its bound
\nvolumes of the Economist. The src was run on the advice of
\nPalestinians and Libyans who had themselves, in some cases, had
\nRussian training. It usually killed with ‘sledgehammers but it was by
\nno means primitive in all respects. It was linked by tunnel to Amin’s
\nvilla so that intended victims who came to see him (he liked to ask
\nthem to cocktails) could be taken away without being seen again.
\nsrc beatings were regular affairs, carried out at specific times every
\nday. In contrast to Amin’s impulsive nature, there was an element of
\ntotalitarian routine and bureaucratic order about the terror. As in the
\nSoviet bloc, at least two src agents were attached to Ugandan
\noverseas missions. Like the kgb, the src financed itself by commer-
\ncial activities (including drug rackets) and often killed for hard
\ncurrency. 86 Amin was not just a case of a reversion to African
\nprimitivism. In some respects his regime was a characteristic reflec-
\ntion of the 1970s. His terror was a Muslim-Arab phenomenon; his
\nregime was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians
\nand Libyans. <\/p>\n

It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the
\nugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the
\norganization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for
\nprolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one
\nauthority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the
\nnature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of
\n200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The src
\nrecords revealed how important the ‘Stansted whisky run’ was to the
\nregime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when
\nAmin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling
\nhim ‘a village tyrant’. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even
\nby the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair
\nwith a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew
\nto Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue
\nuntil 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin’s overthrow. The only
\ngovernment to emerge with credit was Israel’s, which acted vigo-
\nrously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an
\nairliner at Entebbe in June 1976. <\/p>\n

Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with
\nthe old Latin- American principle of ‘Caudillos stick together’. Des-
\npite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the
\noau elected him its president and all except three of its members
\nattended the oau summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not
\nso much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and
\nrightly feared an Amin invasion. ‘By meeting in Kampala,’ he
\nprotested, ‘the heads of state of the oau are giving respectability to
\none of the most murderous administrations in Africa.’ Furious, the
\noau even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of
\nstate showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when,
\nhaving consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a
\ngo-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded
\nwhen Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a
\nSwede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air
\nForce made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a
\ntarget labelled ‘Cape Town’ (the bombs all missed and the Air Force
\ncommander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left), oau
\nheads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there
\nwas no criticism of Amin whatever by the oau until 1978; even then
\nit was muted. 87 <\/p>\n

Most members of the UN, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet
\nblocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of
\nthe oau, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a
\nrabid speech which denounced the ‘Zionist-US conspiracy’ and
\ncalled not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its ‘extinction’ (i.e.
\ngenocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he
\narrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when
\nhe left. The following day the UN Secretary-General and the President
\nof the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin’s honour. 88
\nAttempts to raise Uganda’s violation of human rights at the UN in
\n1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin
\nthe same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even
\nwhen he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to
\nhis downfall five months later, the oau refused to condemn him and
\ntold Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist
\ndictator dropped his verbal guard: <\/p>\n

Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in
\nRhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in
\nAfrica that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans …. Being
\nblack is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans. 89 <\/p>\n

That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic
\nprinciple introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans
\nwas not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking
\nthe UN had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide.
\nThe Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the
\nBandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of
\nAfrica. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It
\nwas claimed the applause which greeted him at the UN was ‘ironic’.
\nThe terror was being linked to ‘imperialism’. 90 Nor did Uganda’s
\nsorrows end when Tanzania’s ‘army of liberation’ arrived, with
\nObote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they
\ngot to Kampala was to loot it. Though Amin himself was given
\nsanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal
\nforces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With
\nNyerere’s armed backing Obote ‘won’ the 1980s elections. Obote’s
\nupc party and the Nyerere-controlled ‘military commission’ gerry-
\nmandered constituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats un-
\ncontested upc victories; killed one opposition (Democratic Party)
\ncandidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning
\nofficers who were not upc stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and
\nother officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became
\nclear on election night that the dp was nevertheless winning,
\nannounced on the official radio that all results would be ‘vetted’ by
\nthe military \u2014 whereupon the secretary to the election commission
\nfled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of dp
\nvictories and Obote was declared the winner. 91 The result was
\nregional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisci-
\nplined and mostly unpaid ‘armies’ prolonged indefinitely the agony
\nof Churchill’s ‘fairy-tale land’. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in his 1983 book Modern Times: The great temptation of colonialism, the worm in its free-market apple, was the itch to indulge in social engineering. It was so fatally easy for the colonial administrator to persuade himself … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12477,29615,19674],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-nationalism","category-south-africa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71046"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71050,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71046\/revisions\/71050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}