More than 20 years of writing about and photographing Africa has left me with indelible impressions, and while polemics sit uneasily with potted histories, a few facts here might be helpful. It is indisputable that, since the late 1950s, no continent has seen more conflict and instability. The phenomenon is often blamed on a combination of the European slave trade and colonialism.

While there is some merit to the argument, it ignores at least four millennia of conquest and enslavement by internal forces, from the ancient Egyptians to the Zulus. Also rarely mentioned are the Arabs, who, beginning in the 7th century A.D. and for the next 800 years, controlled the market in human beings from Zanzibar to Mali. Even today, the Arabic slang for a black person remains abd – slave – and well-documented raids against the southern Sudanese Dinka and Nuer tribes continued into the 21st century.

By contrast, Europeans were relatively late arrivals. Although the Portuguese had established a presence as early as 1482, followed by the Dutch 170 years later, it wasn’t until 1885, decades after they had outlawed slavery, that France, Britain, Belgium, Italy, and Germany moved inland from coastal settlements to claim the rest of Africa.

Prompted as much by national prestige as the scramble for natural resources, the process was not gentle. Armed rebellion was ruthlessly put down, as was centuries-old inter-tribal warfare that threatened to disrupt the flow of raw materials. The British and French adopted systems of indirect rule, giving power to traditional chiefs whose loyalty to their colonial rulers was rewarded with honors, decorations, and even knighthoods. Overall and contrary to popular perception, the period between the 1880s and 1960s may have been the most peaceful in Africa’s history.

The first half of the 20th century saw bright students, often the sons of chiefs, educated in the church- or state-sponsored schools. Many went on to take degrees abroad, where the lure of Marxism was irresistible and gave rise to dozens of tribally-based liberation movements supported by China or the Soviet Union. However feted the elite were by East or West, the vast majority of Africans continued to live in pre-colonial iron-age cultures defined by tribal allegiance and extreme brutality. It was fertile ground for what was to come.

Following WWII, demands for independence gathered voice, the ‘winds of change’ became a storm, and by 1975 no African country was ruled from Europe. Elections were held, presidents installed and the West congratulated itself for the peaceful transition to democracy. The satisfaction was premature. With rare exceptions, the former colonies became paradigms of cruelty unknown in the previous 100 years.

Most were marked by a succession of coups d’etat that exchanged one tyrant for another, whose belief in ‘African socialism’ saw infrastructure collapse and previously self-sufficient net exporters turned into economic failures.

Representative examples include the Central African Republic, where Jean-Bédel Bokassa, wearing a $5m diamond crown while his people starved, declared himself ‘Emperor’ and made it a crime to utter the words ‘democracy’ and ‘elections’. Tens of thousands were murdered and Bokassa personally took part in beating to death scores of children who protested over the cost of mandatory school uniforms.

A follower of ritual cannibalism, he was said to keep heads in his freezer because he liked the taste of human brains. In Uganda, Idi Amin Dada and Milton Obote, one overthrowing the other, declared themselves presidents for life and murdered between 300,000 and 500,000 of their people. President Ahmed Sékou Touré of newly-independent
Guinea aligned himself with Moscow banned further elections and established concentration camps, where at least 50,000 political opponents were killed.

After declaring independence from Britain in 1965, the predominantly white-ruled Rhodesia was subject to international sanctions that eventually led to majority rule. In the newly-named Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe imprisoned thousands and used his North Korean-trained 5th Brigade to slaughter at least 20,000 tribal enemies. As de facto president for life, he confiscated white-owned farms that had been the backbone of the economy and built multi-million-dollar residences as his people struggled to feed themselves. A country once described as the breadbasket of Africa is today dependent on foreign aid.

No more horrific example exists than Ethiopia – ironically the only country never colonized – where, supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, Mengistu Haile Meriam’s ‘Red Terror’ killed at least a million people between 1977 and 1991. Human Rights Watch called it ‘one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa.’ Yet Western media ignored the root causes – Stalinist collectivization, forced population displacement, and mass executions – focusing instead on drought and famine, while a complicit United Nations delivered millions of tons of food and said nothing as it was confiscated to feed an army responsible for the genocide.

These are not unique examples. What they and at least a score of other tyrannical regimes had in common was a UN that rewarded their crimes with billions of dollars in aid, most of which went into the pockets of transparently corrupt governments, and an international media unwilling to report the truth.

By the perverse logic of the time, the industrial-scale murder of black Africans by black Africans was a ‘cultural issue’ that only the perpetrators were qualified to judge. The political disenfranchisement of black Africans by white Africans, however, was a crime against humanity. Thus was the spleen of the international community, who were complicit in the deaths of millions, eventually focused on South Africa, which has since joined the rest of the continent as a symbol of corruption and indifference to the needs of its people.
As Winston Churchill observed, ‘Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.’

Thus, has the tragedy of Africa been allowed to perpetuate?

PS: This contribution by extreme right-wing author and photojournalist Jim Hooper was received in 2017. I have not been able to reach him since then. I requested a meeting in January of 2019, while in London for my mom’s funeral, but it never materialized. The map, courtesy of GGA(Good Governance Africa), shows conflicts by tribes in Africa.

Map Credit: Peter S. Larsen blog. http:peterslarsen.com/2011/01/19african-conflict-and-ethnic-distribution/

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