Race, tribe, and power in the heart of Africa By Bill Berkeley

Berkeley, Bill. "Race, tribe, and power in the heart of Africa." World Policy Journal 18.1 (Spring 2001): 79-87. History Study Center. ProQuest LLC. 12 Feb. 2009

This is an essay about evil. Its setting is Africa. The characters are mostly African, with an American narrator and Americans in supporting roles. The time is the last decade of the twentieth century, post-Cold War. But the questions are timeless and universal: How do evil people operate? What accounts for their power? Why do people follow?

I first went out to Africa in 1983 as a wide-eyed freelance newspaper correspondent drawn to the great emancipation drama then unfolding in South Africa. I had fancied myself a budding specialist on race relations when, fresh out of college a few years earlier, I had gone to work for newspapers in Alabama and Georgia. But I was born too late to witness the wrenching traumas of the civil rights era. I had studied history in college, and as a journalist I wanted to watch history in the making. I was also the sort of person who, while shopping for fitted bed sheets in a Kmart in suburban Atlanta, felt myself suffocating, yearning to explore some of the grittier precincts of the globe. The struggle to bring down apartheid was my kind of story: a stirring crusade against manifest evil, the infamous system of racial tyranny helpfully delineated in black and white.

As is often the case in Africa, things didn't work out the way I had planned them. Visa problems kept me out of South Africa for a time, and so I wound up taking the slow road down the continent from Cairo: trains, buses, boats, trucks, taxis packed so tightly that my arms and legs fell asleep. There is a joke among expatriates in Sudan that once you have drunk from the White Nile, you're infected for life. In spite of myself, I had to agree. There was something about Africa that got into my blood and stayed there.

Partly it was the magnitude of the dramas sweeping the continent. Africa is a part of the world, I discovered, where multiple eras of history are taking place simultaneously: biblical plagues and famines, genocide, slavery, revolution, emancipation, nation building. In Sudan, I learned, a civil war had begun the year I was born and lasted until I was in high school. Half a million southern Sudanese had died. This was ten times as many casualties as Americans suffered during roughly the same period in Vietnam, out of a population one tenth the size. I considered myself reasonably well informed, with as good an education as money can buy. Yet I had never heard of this war.

In February 1983, I bounced and lurched for three days on top of a coffee truck that broke down eleven times between Costi and Juba, the heart of what had been Sudan's war zone. In a mud-walled town called Malakal, I was told that Sudan's war might start all over again, and a few months later it did. The latest round of war has lasted seventeen years and so far has claimed another 2 million lives-the greatest number of civilian casualties in any conflict since World War II. And it has featured devastating famine, locust plagues and AIDS, slavery, genocide, ethnic cleansing, warlordism, feudalism, capitalism, communism, terrorism, military dictatorships, Cold War intrigue, radical Islam-even five chaotic years of multiparty democracy.

Mostly, though, what gripped me in Sudan and across much of the rest of the continent was the people I was meeting. From afar, the Africans who appear in news photographs and on our television screens come across as an undifferentiated mass of pathetic victims. Up close, the personalities I was encountering were as vivid and alive as any I had ever met. The awesome struggles of their lives, the extreme, all-consuming dramas in which they were entwined, seemed to draw out human qualities that were unusually stark, larger than life.

Those whom I came to admire most displayed not just the stoicism for which Africans are justly renowned, but bravery, idealism, generosity of spirit, a capacity for forgiveness, outrageous humor. I worked for a time as an investigative reporter for a human rights organization in the mid-1980s. I found myself working alongside African journalists who routinely risked arrest and beatings, or worse, while they hunted and pecked on clattering manual typewriters under ceiling fans, amid the din of electric gen. erators, speaking the truth to power. There were doctors and nurses tending to mine victims in grimy, fly-ridden wards without the benefit of basic medicines or even running water. There were priests and lawyers diligently documenting the latest summary killings, beatings and gang rapes. And there were the witnesses and survivors themselves, recounting unimaginable horrors with austere dignity.

Then there were the bad guys. Up close, there was little evidence that Africa's villains were any more venal than scoundrels elsewhere in the world through the ages. On the contrary, from the boy "fighters" looting toys and sweets in Monrovia to the dimwitted careerists in the old South African Police, there was more than a little evidence for Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. Yet there seemed to be something about the arenas in which they were operating that rendered their calculations and miscalculations hugely destructive. There was something about Africa that seemed to bring out the worst in people-or at least, in the Darwinian sense, to select for the worst among them.

America's awareness of Africa focuses overwhelmingly on the victims. I found I was interested mostly in the perpetrators: the "Big Men" and their acolytes, the warlords and militiamen, smugglers and con artists, gangsters and spies. I wanted to meet as many of these people as I could: the cast of characters at the top, especially, whose interests and machinations and evasions of responsibility might help explain the suffering of so many below. They became the main targets of my reporting.

In 1997, at the height of the war that brought down Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, The New Republic published a special issue devoted to Africa. The cover featured a striking black-and-white photograph of ragged refugees in flight, and an ominous headline across the top in appropriately grim, gray letters: "AFRICA IS DYING." The headline captured the conventional American conception of Africa as a unitary landscape of unremitting despair. But this and other attempts at apocalyptic concision hardly squared with my experience of a continent churning with passion and rage. Most Africans I encountered, far from passively succumbing to their fate, were struggling mightily, and ingeniously, to survive. Others, for reasons of their own, were killing, raping, torturing and looting. On the ground, at least, Africa felt less like a terminal ward than a seething, writhing, operatic drama charged with intrigue, dominated by larger-than-life characters trapped in Macbethian logic, compelled to shed ever greater quantities of blood merely to survive.

A Black and Incomprehensible Frenzy

My first newspaper dispatch from Africa appeared in May 1983 in the Atlanta,JournalConstitution. It was an account of a massacre in Uganda. This was in the final stages of Uganda's descent into huge-scale mass slaughter-the work of Idi Amin, and of the less notorious but no less wanton Milton Obote. Possibly a million Ugandans were murdered in two decades of sheer terror. The massacre I reported on was a lurid affair in which seventy men, women and children were hacked to pieces in the region north of Kampala known as the Luwero Triangle. Between 1980 and 1986, a quarter of Luwero's children were orphaned by Obote's notorious Uganda National Liberation Army. For my readers back in Georgia, I explained the massacre with a cursory paragraph summarizing what I called "complex tribal, religious and political divisions that have crippled the country since independence from Britain in 1962."

I had no idea what I meant by "tribal," or what "tribalism" had to do with politics, or what politics had to do with religion, or why any of this had become violently problematic since the demise of British colonial rule. For that matter, I knew next to nothing about the mechanics of British colonial rule.

For me, and no doubt for most of my readers, this latest massacre in Uganda fit the familiar image of Africa as a "heart of darkness," a primitive world where the law of the jungle obtains, as if the jungle were unique to Africa or inherent in its people. Unspeakable," "mysterious," "a black and incomprehensible frenzy "-these were the words Joseph Conrad himself used to evoke the image of black Africa in a white man's mind, an image of what he called "an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention."

Many Americans still imagine that Africa's seemingly chronic carnage flows from some mysterious, exotic savagery. Much of American media coverage of Africa conveys an impression of "age-old hatreds." Not a few books and articles I carried in my rucksack on that first trip down the continent fed the perception that Africans are different, possessed of an inherent, unknowable impulse toward violence. David Lamb's survey, The Africans, had just been published that spring. An admirable book in many ways, it nevertheless reinforced this notion of the Africans as a breed apart. Lamb wrote: "Below the paper-thin veneer of civilization in Africa lurks a savagery that waits like a caged lion for an opportunity to spring."

One might have hoped we civilized white folks had long since learned as much about ourselves. Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Stalin killed 20 million Soviets. Japanese imperial troops machine-gunned, bayoneted, raped and beheaded some 300,000 Chinese civilians in just six weeks in the Rape of Nanking.

The worst genocide in recorded African history was perpetrated not by Africans but by the Belgians, in what came to be known as the Belgian Congo-Europe's richest colony in Africa and the actual setting for Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Between 1885 and 1912, King Leopold's private army, composed primarily of African conscripts led by European officers, shot, starved, and worked to death between 5 million and 10 million native inhabitants.

More than a decade after The Africans was published, two more widely read books by American journalists, one black, one white, echoed Lamb's theme of inscrutable otherness. Keith B. Richburg, a correspondent for the Washington Post, reflected on the slaughter he witnessed in Rwanda in Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Richburg described young killers "carrying clubs and machetes and Panga knives and smashing their neighbors' skulls and chopping off their limbs," and he concluded: "Fully evolved human beings in the 20th Century don't do things like that."

Robert D. Kaplan, in an influential article in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy," wrote that "in places where the Western enlightenment has not penetrated and where there has always been mass poverty, people find liberation in violence.... Physical aggression is part of being human. Only when people attain a certain economic, educational and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized." In his subsequent book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the New Century, Kaplan speculated that Liberia's civil war was a product of "new-age primitivism" born of "superstitions" that supposedly flourish in tropical rain forests.

The book from which this essay is drawn is intended in part as a pointed rebuttal to that sort of nonsense. In a decade of reporting from East, West, Central and Southern Africa, in which I traveled some 25,000 miles through two dozen countries, seeking answers from Africans-soldiers and priests, politicians, scholars, diplomats, lawyers, doctors and nurses, journalists, anthropologists, civil servants, market women, street children, money changers, bartenders, truck drivers and all manner of victims and perpetrators high and low, left and right, black and white, rich and poor-I found no evidence of "new age primitivism" or "superstitions" that could explain mass murder.

The key actors who appear in the pages of my book are sophisticated, highly intelligent, and well educated. Many have graduate degrees from elite universities in England, France and the United States, and several have Ph.D.s. A conspicuous feature of Africa's seemingly primitive conflicts is the central role played by intellectuals in fomenting them. The killers themselves, like Fran;ois Sibomana of Rwanda, may be illiterate, dressed in rags and rubber flip-flops. Their leaders, when I met them, were notably suave, clean-shaven, smartly dressed, with soft hands and sensible shoes. Charles Taylor, the Liberian "rebel," wore shiny black Oxfords. So did South Africa's Zulu 11 chief," Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. His co-conspirator, General Pieter Hendrick "Tienie" Groenewald, former chief of South African Military Intelligence in Pretoria, wore light-gray soft leather Hush Puppies. Jac Buchner, one of apartheid's most notorious covert operatives, wore Topsiders and blue kneesocks, his golfing attire. Chester Crocker, President Reagan's assistant secretary of state for African affairs, wore brown suede wingtips.

It took a few more years and more than a few massacres, but by the time I met Franqois Sibomana in 1994, I had come to understand that the forces that drove men like him to barbarism are no more peculiar to Africa-and no less evil-than the forces that drove fascism a half century earlier are to Europe.

The ultimate question I put to Francois -"How is such a horror possible?"-is no more readily answered in Central Africa than it has been in Central Europe. Yet in Africa as in Europe there are elements that can be understood. This thing called "tribalism" is barbarous, it is evil, but it is not exotic. In each of the conflicts I came to know best in the decade after that first massacre in Uganda in 1983, I found a constellation of factors and events and personalities that obeyed a recognizable logic. These catastrophes are not as senseless as they seem. They are not inevitable products of primordial, immutable hatreds. There is method in the madness.

Kinship Corporations

But what do I mean by evil? The individuals encountered here are not all evil people. What they have in common is not the depth of their venality as individuals but the extent to which, collectively, they personify some of the roots and requirements of largescale mass slaughter. Each in his own way is a creature of evil, and each has magnified the potential for evil in the arena in which he has operated. Each embodies a history, a culture, a symbiosis of interests, calculations, and assumptions which, taken together, add up to a catalog of essential elements that can transform latent evil into reality. And each has been a survivor, a well-adapted creature of a malignant environment.

Ethnic conflict in Africa is a product of tyranny. By "product" I mean in both an immediate sense-it is a tactic that tyrants use to divide and rule-as well as in a deeper, historical sense: ethnic conflict is a legacy of tyranny.

The countries I examine-Liberia, Congo-Zaire, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda-are diverse in many ways, but they have this much in common: all have at least a century-long history of racial or ethnically based tyranny. Belgian and British colonial rule, apartheid in South Africa, Arab domination in Sudan, and the oligarchy of the Americo-Liberians, descendants of freed American slaves-all were race-based tyrannies, and all relied upon institutionalized mechanisms of coercion and co-optation that were inherently divisive. Ethnically based militias, ethnically skewed education systems, arbitrary justice, and, above all, "indirect rule"-the widespread colonial practice of dominating a majority by investing power and privilege in a favored minority-had a way of outlasting the tyrannies they were designed to preserve.They seeped into the social and political fabric of society, and into the minds of its inhabitants. They rendered these countries especially vulnerable to the divisive tactics of those just cynical and reckless enough to exploit this vulnerability for their own ends.

This interplay between the man and the moment, the reckless individual and his combustible environment, the one shaping the other and vice versa in a fusion that yields huge-scale mass murder-this is what I mean by evil.

There is a widespread assumption that "tribalism" is an indelible remnant of traditional, precolonial Africa, reflecting ancient, atavistic enmities. The opposite is the case. What we think of as tribalism in Africa is a relatively modern phenomenon that evolved in response to outside interventions rather than in spite of them.

The Nigerian historian Peter Ekeh has argued that the spread and reinforcement of "kinship ties and manipulations"-what we think of today as "tribalism"-became a dominant mode of political life in Africa in the major slaving years, in the eighteenth century or earlier, when the existing states either failed to defend citizens from violence and enslavement or collaborated with the slave traders. Tribalism was a form of selfdefense. Slave-trading African states became dependent for their viability on external sources, whether to export captives for enslavement or to import the firearms that slaving raids (or defense against them) required. As these slaving states became increasingly predatory, Ekeh concluded, "Kinship systems were strengthened and elaborated as a means of providing protection against the dangers of the violence created by the slave trade."

The very term "tribe"came into general use in the colonial era. The term was associated with stereotypes of Africans as primitive brutes. For evolutionist anthropologists in their nineteenth-century heyday, "tribal" society conjured up an early stage of human development with minimal state organization, class structure, literacy or other features of "civilized" societies.

But the gathering of Africans into identifiable "tribes "was also a convenient administrative tool. Particularly under British administration, in countries like Uganda, Kenya and South Africa, administrative subdivisions were built upon this image of "tribal" blocks. Tribalism solved the colonial dilemma of how to dominate and exploit vast numbers of indigenous inhabitants with a limited number of colonial agents, by mobilizing groups on the basis of linguistic and cultural similarities that formerly had been irrelevant.

Ethnic consciousness has grown since the demise of colonial rule, along with uneven development and individual and group competition within the borders left behind by the colonial powers. In just the same way as "kinship corporations "were strengthened as a means of protection against a predatory state during the slave trade, the predatory nature of postcolonial or "neocolonial "states provoked self-defense by means of kinship ties and their bureaucratic equivalents, and with this, a corresponding subversion of the state by smuggling and related kinds of economic crime. The deadly conflicts I examine all occurred in situations of acute economic competition and deep poverty, where the state was perceived as representing the interests of a single dominant group.

There is nothing "primitive"or irrational about this. The eminent British historian Richard Sandbrook, in his seminal work, The Politics of Africa's Economic Stagnation, put it this way: "Ethnic consciousness, we must affirm, is neither irrational nor ephemeral. From the perspective of ordinary people, ethnicity appears no less sensible a basis for political mobilization than class. Ethnic mobilization, after all, is just a means to an end, a way of forging a coalition to pursue scarce material benefits."

Not least among these benefits, he might have added, is security. For among the most important legacies of a century of colonial tyranny was the absence of legitimate institutions of law and accountability. Justice was in the eye of the colonial power, and served its interests. Police powers were all but completely unchecked. The coercive arms of authority-police and army, secret police-were often ethnically based, and they tended to outlast the tyrannies they were created to defend.

It should also be stressed here that although "tribalism"-what the Kenyan scholar Michael Chege has called "neofascist ethnic extremism"-is widespread in parts of Africa today, my own experience across the continent has taught me that Africans in ever greater numbers favor ethnic and racial tolerance, the rule of law, and the sanctity of individual rights. Hate mongering in Africa, no less than elsewhere in the world, is an acquired skill.

Kill the Slave through the Slave

Africa in the decade since the end of the Cold War has been in thrall to embattled tyrannies. Some of its worst tyrants have been rendered especially vulnerable-and therefore especially dangerous-for reasons of history and circumstance much akin to those in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and parts of the former Soviet Union. In all of these regions the divisive potential of ethnicity has been magnified amid the shifting ground between tyranny and anarchy.

Many suppose that tyranny and anarchy are at opposite ends of a linear spectrum. But often they are side by side on what might better be described as a circle: the one is a product of the other, and vice versa. The law of the jungle does obtain in parts of Africa, but the jungle is inhabited by men. Anarchy is a vacuum that brings out the worst in men and selects for the worst among them. The pursuit of power is a life-and-death struggle. Those who excel distinguish themselves through nothing more exotic than boundless cunning and ruthlessness. The most successful of all become tyrants, and the anarchy in which they thrive is called tyranny.

Even the most rigidly institutionalized tyrannies-Rwanda was one, South Africa another-rely above all on the total absence of lawful accountability for the criminal abuse of power. They harness the forces of anarchy to their own ends, the forces of lawlessness and terror, murder and rape, arson and theft. For them, anarchy is an instrument of tyranny.

In South Africa, where "black-on-black" violence killed 20,000 between 1985 and 1994 and nearly derailed the transition to majority rule, they called it "informal repression." The Afrikaner police who fueled the fighting called it the "kleur teen kleur beginsel" -the "color-against-color principle."

In Sudan, where northern Arabs through the ages have dominated the state and decimated the south by pitting one black African tribe against another, they say "Aktal al-abid bil abia"-"Kill the slave through the slave."

It is a phenomenon that runs like poison through all of Africa's seemingly senseless wars: Big Men using little men, cynically maneuvering for power and booty while thousands perish. Harnessing proxies, arming ethnically based militias, cultivating warlords, propagating hate and fear, preying on ignorance, manufacturing rumors and myths, stacking the police and army with ethnic kinsmen, demonizing dissidents as traitors to the tribe, or faith, or "volk"these are the tactics of the crafty despot with his back against the wall.

Call it "tribalism," call it "nationalism," call it "fundamentalism"-the role of political leaders in fomenting civil conflicts has been the paramount human rights issue of the post-Cold War era. Africa is merely that part of the world where it has been most destructive by far.

Inflamed ethnic passions are not the cause of political conflict, but its consequence. In a lawless world, ethnicity is a badge of legitimacy and protection-and justice. It is the bond by which men high and low adhere to a vigilante code. Lesser men like Frangois Sibomana may appear to be acting on mindless, "primitive" impulse; in fact, they are making rational calculations of their own self-interest-not least, survival. The depth of their preexisting prejudices may explain the potency of the symbols their leaders choose to exploit, but it is the logic of their lawless environment that transforms those prejudices into terror.

Ethnic conflict in Africa is a form of organized crime. The "culture" driving Africa's conflicts is akin to that of the Sicilian Mafia, or of the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles, with the same imperatives of blood and family that bind such gangs together. Africa's warring factions are best understood not as "tribes" but as racketeering enterprises, their leaders calculating strategy after the time-honored logic of Don Vito Corleone.

It is the stakes in Africa that are different-multiplied exponentially in circumstances where the state itself is a gang and the law doesn't exist. It is as if men like Vito Corleone seized control of not just "turf" on the margins of society, but of the state itself and all of its organs: police and army, secret police, the courts, the central bank, the civil service, the press, Tv and radio.

A widespread misconception of the postCold War era is that ethnic conflict is a byproduct of "failed states." Rwanda represented the opposite: a state-albeit criminal -that was all too successful in mobilizing along rigidly hierarchical lines from the top down, from the head of state and his ruling clique down to the last village mayor, making possible the slaughter, mostly with club, and machetes, of hundreds of thousands in barely three months.

"The message from the top was passed down," Francois Sibomana told me. Indeed, it is by now well established that Rwanda's catastrophe was "more than a simple tribal meltdown," as Time magazine put it. All too often, however, the calculated quality of Rwanda's genocide is cited to distinguish it from other, presumably spontaneous African slaughters. But there is no such thing as a "simple tribal meltdown." There were elements in Rwanda that distinguished it from other African calamities, but calculation was not among them. Nor was the depth of evil. All of Africa's conflicts are orchestrated from on high. They are all products of calculated evil.

The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend

"I killed nobody," Francois Sibomana was telling me now. It was March 1998. Four years after our first encounter in Kabuga, I had returned to Rwanda and tracked Francois down in the huge Nsimda Prison in his native Kibungo Prefecture. The middle-aged father of eight, who in June 1994 had told me he was "forced to kill" his brother-inlaw, was one of 125,000 accused genocidaires languishing in densely crowded, stench-- filled, disease-ridden jails across Rwanda.

He looked fitter than he had four years earlier, dressed now in the standard prison-- issue pink cotton tunic and shorts, with white rubber flip-flops. And like nearly all of the accused in custody four years after the slaughter, Fran;ois now denied participating in genocide.

Had he not, after all, killed his brotherin-law? I asked.

"It's not true," he replied. "That's not what happened. I did not tell you that."

In fact, he had told me that and I believed him. I don't believe his denial. But who is to know, and how? Franqois said he had yet to be charged, had never seen a lawyer, and knew of no plans for a trial. The Rwandan government, for its part, was estimating that at its current rate, genocide trials would be completed in four hundred years.

There are many challenges for Africans to surmount if they can ever hope to reverse the multiple afflictions besetting their continent. Most of them are beyond the scope of my book. But none is more important than justice, and none will amount to much at all in the absence of justice. By that I mean, among other things, justice in its most basic sense: accountability to law for criminal acts -not least those committed by the Big Men on high. This is not a policy prescription from afar. It is what Africans themselves across a broad spectrum routinely risk their lives and livelihoods for.

A common illusion of the post-Cold War era is that the superpower rivalry suppressed traditional ethnic rivalries that have since resurfaced with a vengeance. In fact, all too often the opposite has been the case. The superpowers did precious little to suppress ethnic conflicts and much to spawn them-by elevating, financing, and arming tyrants who would one day exploit ethnicity as a means of clinging to power. Buffeted by history's changing winds, bereft of their superpower backing, one by one the embattled creatures of the old world order have struggled to survive in the new by playing the ethnic card.

Until the end of the Cold War the United States paid scant heed to the rule of law in Africa. Understandably perhaps, given the global competition with communism, we threw in our lot with the meanest of the meanest, embracing the logic that 11 the enemy of our enemy is our friend." We rationalized our choice of clients with patronizing references to the "standards of Africa." But those were the standards of gangsters and tyrants throughout history. We neglected a basic lesson taught by all of Africa's wars: bigotry is fueled by injustice, and injustice causes conflict.

Americans tend to think of Africa's wars as remote from our history and irrelevant to our interests. In fact, the United States is deeply implicated in all of the tyrannies examined here. And it was not just Cold War zealots who armed and financed, apologized, rationalized or looked the other way. Private American interests ponied up essential capital. Firestone, for example, operated the world's largest rubber plantation in Liberia for nearly a century. At the time of Burundi's genocide in 1972 when a Tutsi-- dominated army murdered between 100,000 and 200,000 Hutus, Folgers, the American coffee giant, accounted for 65 percent of Burundi's foreign exchange earnings. Cold Warriors and industrialists were abetted for years by the quiet collusion of many liberals and African Americans, who for reasons of their own refrained from pointing the finger at black African tyrants.

The Clinton administration was justly condemned for turning a blind eye as Rwanda descended into genocide. But President Clinton's belatedly acknowledged brush-off of Rwanda was consistent with a centurylong involvement with Africa by Americans left and right, black and white, characterized less by mere neglect than by active complicity in tyranny. We were the enablers.

In the spring of 2000, the entire continent did seem to be spiraling into chaos. A broad swath of interconnected, mutually reinforcing conflicts extended all the way from the Horn of Africa in the northeast down to Namibia in the southwest. Sierra Leone was the crisis of the moment, as rebels infamous for chopping off the limbs of civilians, led by the notorious warlord and diamond smuggler Foday Sankoh-Charles Taylor's protege-took hostage a hapless contingent of U.N. peacekeepers and besieged the capital, Freetown. Congo, formerly Zaire, was being torn asunder by a veritable kaleidoscope of outside predators and proxies. The erstwhile rebel Laurent Kabila, who had succeeded in ousting Mobutu Sese Seko ofter a seven-month war in 1997 was now fighting against his former allies, Uganda and Rwanda, and they in turn were fighting each other. The U.N. estimated that 1.7 million Congolese had died in just two years of war and related famine and disease.

In the Horn of Africa, meanwhile, Ethiopia and Eritrea, former allies, were reigniting a horrendous border conflict that featured trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. All but forgotten in the rush of depressing news were the old perennials, Sudan and Angola, where the decades of war and pillaging carry on with no end in sight.

Nearly 2 million dead in Sudan, as many as 800,000 killed in Rwanda, 150,000 in Liberia-numbers like these defy comprehension, and they may make a figure like 20,000 killed in South Africa look like, well, a "peaceful" transition to majority rule. Yet the number killed in South Africa's embattled province of KwaZulu-Natal since the historic 1994 election exceeds the total number killed in thirty years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland; it's more than the number of Palestinians killed in the entire seven-year Intifada against Israeli occupation. The value we attach to numbers is often arbitrary. The element of race has a way of coloring our judgment. Virtually all of those casualties in KwaZulu-Natal were black. Yet they were most assuredly produced by the tactics and legacies of white tyranny-the most recognizably evil of any of the tyrannies examined here. The bad guys in Africa are black and white, and shades in between. So are the good guys. These stories are a measure of how much Africans have in common with the rest of humankind, not how much they differ. The Kenyan scholar Michael Chege, long since exiled from his homeland, put it this way: "Today there is genuine cultural diversity in the gallery of twentieth-century demonology, the late arrival of black fascism providing the ultimate testimony that political sin, as with all other kinds of sin and virtue, truly knows no color."