Welcome to Africa

Does the Chaos of Post-Colonial Africa Hold Any Lessons for America?

As aired on the American Dissident Voices radio program.
Free Speech - December 1995 - Volume I, Number 12
by Kevin Alfred Strom

Massacre at a Rwandan Church, 1994

What is it like to live in Black Africa? Let's find out. I got a small taste of the reality of life in Africa when I did research for an engineering firm that was about to bid on a contract to build a radio network in Liberia. I discovered that in Liberia the roads between the national capital, Monrovia, and the provincial capitals were not maintained and were passable only for a few months every year. Its comic-opera, one-party state was dominated by such giants of political thought as the "True Whig Party" and Sergeant Samuel Doe. Not so comic was the fact that the current government had been installed after its opponents had been taken care of by the nice expedient of taking them down to the beach and blowing their brains out with pistols. I discovered that the standards of sanitation and safety at hotels and restaurants were so low that all travelers were advised to check with a trusted local resident (meaning an American or a European) before deciding on a place to stay. I found out that the country is a sink-pit of diseases of every description. I learned that government officials and those claiming to be government officials demanded bribes at almost every stage of the process of entry or movement of people or goods into or through the country. I learned that it is advisable to be present when the goods for which you are responsible arrive at the shipping dock or the airport, for gangs of armed thieves will steal them instantly if you are not. For a suitable fee, of course, you can hire one of the gangs to protect your goods from the other gangs and hope for the best. I advised the firm I was working for not to bid on the contract.

Since I did that research in the 1980s, a prolonged civil war has broken out among several armed factions in Liberia, travel to many parts of the country has become nearly impossible, and even in the capital city most of the water, sewerage and electric lines have been inoperative since 1989. After the European colonizers and civilizers were forced to leave due to internal subversion in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly all of sub-Sahara Africa has been gradually sinking back to the level of savagery that preceded the arrival of the Europeans. South Africa and Rhodesia, were, of course, shining exceptions to this rule. Both maintained a very high level of culture, industrial efficiency, scientific and technical progress, and the good quality of life that goes along with these things. That is, they maintained these standards until recently. When the New World Order elitists that rule the so-called "Free World" forced Rhodesia to capitulate to the Black Communist guerrillas, she quickly became a nominally Marxist dictatorship, changed her name to Zimbabwe, and began a precipitous slide downhill. Many of the White Rhodesians, abandoned by their kin in America and Europe, fled as refugees to South Africa. Many of those who did not make it were slaughtered, but you have never seen tributes to that holocaust on your television or in your movie theaters. Now that our hidden rulers have succeeded in imposing a multiracial Communist state on South Africa, it will only be a matter of time before the blood begins to really flow in earnest, and the great nation built by the Boer pioneers will either be resurrected as a White separatist state, or will disappear from history as South Africa declines into savagery.

In Rwanda, the state machinery built by the French and handed to the natives during the anti-colonialism madness three decades ago, has expired in rivers of blood. Aid workers there estimate 500,000 people have been killed by the militias and government troops since the fighting began there on April 6, 1994.

Piles of rotting corpses fill most villages. When the troops arrive in a village, their mission is simply to kill as many people as possible. The killers have not spared children and several times have attacked orphanages. There is no Geneva Convention in sub-Sahara Africa. Rwanda's rivers are swollen, but not due to floods. Observers report that the rivers are distended by blood and heavy with thousands upon thousands of bodies. Huge numbers of bodies have washed up in Lake Victoria, hundreds of miles away. And the Rwandan refugees, fleeing the warring forces, visit a kind of destruction of their own upon the landscape. As they sweep across the countryside, looting everything they can lay their hands on, they leave it bare, as if stripped clean by locusts. Lt. Col. Jacques Hogard of the French Army stated, "The refugees passing through are taking everything the original inhabitants left behind when they cleared out." Whole villages have been taken apart and stolen, brick by brick. Grand lakeside villas built by the Belgians in the 1950s have literally disappeared overnight. How many times have we seen this pattern in Africa? This isn't the first time there has been a bloodbath in Rwanda; it happened six times in the 1960s alone. In more recent times, Liberia, Somalia, Angola, and Mozambique come immediately to mind. Remember Biafra? Remember Katanga? And it isn't only the process of political change in Africa which presages a return to the jungle. Let us look at what was once one of the most prosperous and productive colonies in Africa, when it was called the Belgian Congo, the country of Zaire.

Keith B. Richburg of the Washington Post Foreign Service, who can hardly be described as a White supremacist, describes Zaire's current condition as follows:

KINSHASA, Zaire - The once elegant, European-style boulevards of this capital are overrun with debris. Largely abandoned government buildings are obscured behind elephant grass and overgrown trees. In a perverse reversal of the usual development maxim, an opulent colonial capital is being overtaken by the bush. Kinshasa was carved out of the jungle. Now the jungle is coming to claim the land back

Richburg goes on to describe the government corruption and incompetence, the economic decline, the disease, malnutrition, and lawlessness that appear endemic to Black Africa. "In state after state, public institutions have collapsed, health care has diminished, infrastructure has fallen into disrepair, and poverty has deepened. . . ." Why has Black Africa had so little success in statecraft? The article ends with a quote that gives one reason.

"These countries are artificial," said Michael Chege, a Kenyan scholar at Harvard University. "They have to be. What else do you do, with all these tribes and linguistic groups and so on? ... We might have to consider adjusting boundaries - or at least put it on the agenda."

I find it very interesting that we have to get such a gem of truth and wisdom, appearing in the Washington Post no less, from the mouth of a Black African. But he is right. The only hope for any people to have any kind of stable or just or successful society is for each ethnic group to control its own affairs and live under its own government.

Wounded Rwandan Hutu Refugee

The United States of America, by pursuing a conscious policy of multiracialism and multiculturalism, is following a dangerous path which is already resulting in racial and ethnic conflict and division. When will we learn the lesson which apparently has already been learned by a perceptive Kenyan -- the lesson that disparate ethnic groups and races, when they are forced by politics to live in the same society, do not unite -- they fight. When will we, as this Kenyan says, "adjust our boundaries"? After our rivers are choked with blood and bodies in a racial war which will make the Los Angeles riots look like a tennis match? Or before? Let us all look at history, let us all look at the disastrous results of artificial states like Yugoslavia, like most of Africa, and let us learn that lesson now. And there is another important lesson we must learn. Even if by some miracle our rulers could convert America from a free White republic into a multiracial, multicultural feeding and breeding zone without creating mass violence and ceaseless ethnic conflict, we would still be faced with the incontrovertible fact that the nature of every society is determined by the nature and quality of the people who make up that society. In essence, if we import more AIDS-infected Haitians, our society becomes, bit by bit, more and more like the society those Haitians are fleeing. As we open the floodgates to the immigrants of the Third World by the millions, our society changes, slowly at first, but now faster and faster, and it becomes less and less like the America of our youth and more and more like the pestholes of disease and crime and violence of the Third World. The freedom, prosperity and high culture that we Euro-Americans have enjoyed is a very rare thing on planet Earth. It is not so much a product of our geography as it is of our blood. America is a product of the particular mentality and abilities and spirit of the peoples of European descent who founded her and built her into the greatest nation ever known. I know as much as anyone that we Euro-Americans are far from perfect. But we have raised ourselves above the level of the savage, and we have built a civilization which is the envy of the world, and we have created a governmental system which combines freedom and order in a way especially well-suited to the mentality and natural way of life of our people. There is no convincing evidence that these things are suited to other peoples, or can survive their growing presence in our society. America as we have known her is a rare and precious jewel, and I want more than anything else to pass on this precious heritage to my children. But the present political establishment and the masters of the media are determined to destroy America and her great heritage in the name of World Government and multiculturalism. They are the real haters. They are the real bigots. They have no love for the races and ethnic groups which they subsidize and import to our land. Their policies will obliterate all races and cultures. You see, a polyglot and multiform assortment of peoples who are perpetually at each other's throats are never likely to coalesce into a political force to oppose the government. Had the patriots of 1776 been a random assortment of Hindus, Africans, Arabs and Cambodian tribesmen, I think that King George would have slept much more soundly.

The first step along the road to national renewal lies with you, dear reader. We have the educational tools to awaken you, your family, and your community to the dangers faced by America today. But if we Americans do nothing, then we will be swept aside by others who are more than willing to fill the vacuum created by our apathy.