Life here is inconceivable—quite enough to cure anyone of that
English feeling that there is something attractive & amusing
about disorder. . . . Public castration which is the usual
punishment for most infringements of law has been stopped until
the departure of the distinguished visitors. I have rarely seen
anything so hysterical as the British legation all this last
week. . . . I go to very stiff diplomatic parties where I am
approached by colonial governors who invariably begin ‘I say
Waugh I hope you aren’t going to say anything about that muddle
this morning.’

—Evelyn Waugh writing to Henry Yorke, November
1930, Hotel de France, Addis Ababa

It was around 1973 that my grandfather
ran into some trouble in Somalia. He had moved to the plains a
few years earlier intending to establish a game-hunting
lodge. “If it is done in Kenya,” he announced,

“why not Somalia?” This was a mistake. One night, with
his guards off-duty, my grandfather was joined in his half-built
hotel by two gentlemen. They were carrying machetes, and one of
them had decided to place his machete in my grandfather’s
eye. My grandfather managed to kill one of the marauders, scare off
the other, and drag his own bleeding body out of the hotel and up the
street, where he collapsed in a ditch. Yet in a twist of fate, my
grandfather survived, thanks to the care of a Russian
doctor—part of the Soviet team in Somalia that had
caused the region’s destabilization it the first place (and
led to the eventual loss of Hotel Panero):

“The patriotic cause in Ishmaelia … is the cause of the
coloured man and of the proletariat throughout the world. The
Ishmaelite worker is threatened by corrupt and foreign coalition
of capitalist exploiters, priests and imperialists. As that great
Negro Karl Marx has so nobly written …”


That was Evelyn Waugh, writing in the 1938 Fleet Street caper

Scoop, eight years before the start of the Cold War, and
many more before the Soviets staked their full African claims.

After his ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ back in Sese
Seko’s kooky Zaire, Muhammad Ali was famously asked “Champ, what
did you think of Africa?” to which the Champ replied, “Thank God
my granddaddy got on that boat.” It could have been a line out of
Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, who showed no greater compassion than to
unleash his full contempt, made a number of visits to
black Africa. A trip through East Africa in late 1930 yielded Black
Mischief (1932) and the travelogue Remote People

(1931). A reporter’s war assignment in Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936
produced the dead-aim of Scoop and another
notebook, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936). A final visit in 1958
and 1959, in the last gloom of the Empire, gave us Tourist
In Africa (1960).

What Waugh alit on during these brisk visits was not merely the
failures of the British colonial system, of Envoys Extraordinary
and Ministers Plenipotentiary. Waugh also knew the media’s
thirst for blood: “The Beast stands for strong mutually
antagonistic governments everywhere. . . . Self-sufficiency at home,
self-assertion abroad” (Scoop). Fleet Street’s
approach to small wars could have come out of the board room at
CNN: “The British public has no interest in a war which drags
on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of
personal bravery on the Patriot side, and a colourful entry into
the capital. That is the Beast Policy for the war”

(Scoop).

Perhaps most remarkably, Waugh foresaw the
bloody future that was in store for the post-colonial continent.
Waugh gets more than communism right. He deflated the
trappings of modernity that attracted just about every one of
Africa’s post-colonial autocrats (except perhaps for Idi
Amin, who didn’t bother with pretense in his
slaughter)—airplanes, the telephone, vitamins, railroads,
“the tank”: “My dear boy, you can’t take a machine like
that over this country
under the sun. The whole thing was red hot after five minutes.
The two poor devils of Greeks who had to drive it nearly went off
their heads. It came in handy in the end though. We used it as a
punishment cell” (Black Mischief).

Then there was tribalism—can we even use that word now?—so inscrutable and so
aimless (a belief in pan-Africa is like believing in the
happy reunification of Yugoslavia):

I spent one day with the Masai. . . .


Unlike
W. they paint themselves with ochre & spend all day doing their
hair & bedizening themselves. They all carry spears & shields &
clubs & live in mud bird-nests and are only waiting for the
declaration of independence to massacre their neighbours. They
had a lovely time during the Mau Mau rising. They were enlisted &
told to bring in all the Kikuyus’ arms & back they proudly came
with baskets of severed limbs. (Letter to Laura Waugh, March
1959, Tanga, Tanganyika).

Boris Johnson, editor of the
(London) Spectator, recently found himself contributing a
piece on “Blair, Bush and Iraq” to the op-ed people at
the New York Times. Johnson was elated to be working for
the Gray Lady, and he finished the piece within an hour. In a
now-famous telephone exchange, recreated in the March 27, 2003

Spectator, Johnson detailed his conversation over galley
pages with his amicable Times editor, whom we “shall
call Tobin, because that is his name.”

Johnson begins:

I had said something to the effect that you don’t make
international law by giving new squash courts to the President of
Guinea. This now read ‘the President of Chile.’ Come again? I
said. Qu??

‘Uh, Boris,’ said Tobin, ‘it’s just easier in principle if we
don’t say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and
since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security
Council, and since it doesn’t affect your point, we would like to
say Chile.’

With the battery on his mobile failing, Johnson wondered: “How
craven and mealy-mouthed can you get? Why is a mild insult more
bearable because it is directed at a crisis-ridden Latin American
country, rather than a crisis-ridden African country? Is it,
heaven forfend, because one country is Hispanic and the other is
black?”

If you listen to certain views, you
might be led to believe that Africa is a succubus in need of debt
relief, Prozac, a million pairs of Air
Jordans, and ‘We Are the
World’ EPs. It would be uncivilized
to suggest, for example, that Africa at times acts uncivilized. You
could never, of course, say that the continent has been on a big,
long, bloody downturn.
Goodness, you should never mention that Africa might have, don’t
say it, an Africa problem.

What I would like to offer, therefore, is that Africa has a Jimmy
Carter problem. Carter is the anti-Waugh.

Here is one passage, occasioned by the civil war in
Liberia, that Carter wrote for The New York Times in mid-July:

Rosalynn and I began our day at a large open-sided shed near the
capital, and we had tears in our eyes when we saw people,
overwhelming numbers of registered voters, lined up in the dark,
in a steady rain, long before the polls opened. At the end of the
day, Charles Taylor received about 75 percent of the total
vote—because of strong support of people whom he had
dominated in the rural areas and because others in Monrovia felt
that he might resort to violence if he lost.

Tears? Registered voters? An open-sided shed? In the rain? Early? It might
lead you to start a march on Selma. But what really delights in this
passage is of course the concession that “others in Monrovia
felt that he might resort to violence if he lost.” Open and
free elections can bring tears to anyone’s eyes.

The road
to hell is paved with Jimmy Carter’s good intentions. The
blood of Africa may be rising, but at least Jimmy
and Rosalynn shed tears. The killing fields of Rwanda? AIDS? Kabila
in the Congo? Mugabe in Zimbabwe? Savimbi in Angola? Taylor in
Liberia? Many, many tears. The reports of violence from Monrovia
and the City of Buchanan may have resembled a presidential history
lesson from hell, but where’s Jimmyville? Most likely
somewhere near Waugh’s Laku.

I spent the summer of 1992 in East
Africa, nearly twenty years after my grandfather returned to the
United States. Nothing much so terribly
life-threatening came my way, save some dysentery and a
malcontent baboon. What I witnessed was Africa from other side of
Waugh’s point of view: the backward Cold War alliances,
bogus elections, increased violence, recriminations against the
United States and the CIA, and President
Daniel T. Arap Moi’s cult of personality. Moi’s mug
stared out above every cash register; his profile was on the
Kenya Shilling; his name plastered on roads and airports. It was
straw man stuff, and it couldn’t be good. One day my sharp
guide in Nairobi arched his eyebrows and warned me not to
photograph the Presidential Palace. Then, in a haunting moment of
pro-American sentiment, he turned to the American Embassy nearby
and boasted that we could take pictures of that building.
Six years later, of course, from nearby where we stood,
al-Qaeda terrorists detonated a truck bomb that burst the windows
of the embassy and leveled the Kenyan office buildings around it,
mainly killing Kenyans. A similar attack went off that day in Dar
es Salaam, Tanzania. Africa had a new suitor:

Majesty, consider the distinguished general’s position. What
would he do? He might conquer Seyid and your majesty would reward
him, or he might be defeated. If he joins Seyid, Seyid will reward
him, and no one can defeat him. How would you expect a
distinguished gentleman, educated in Europe, should choose?
(Black Mischief)

I could only assume that the way to Africa’s heart is either through
strength or murder. Africa has its fill of murder. What
about strength, including the conviction to confront Africa
fairly?