Book review: "How De Body?", by Teun Voeten

The poke in the ribs to write "War is Africa's natural condition. Can we change that?" (WWW 16/10/18) came from How De Body? (St. Martin's Press, New York, 2002), Dutch journalist Teun Voeten's account of his terrifying journey through the very uncivil "civil" war in Sierra Leone (west Africa) in the late 1990s.

"How de body?" is a customary greeting -- like "How's it going?" -- in Krio, the pidjin widely spoken in Sierra Leone. Mr Voeten apparently chose it as the title of his book because the bodies he saw and photographed -- and they were many -- were in pretty bad shape. His powerful photographs speak volumes about the sad state of Sierra Leone  at the turn of the century, and of the nature of Africa itself. As I said yesterday, war is Africa's natural condition.

The purpose of the author's first trip to west Africa, in 1998, was to photograph and write about the child soldiers who were fighting on both sides of the conflict that had raged in Sierra Leone for nearly a decade. Mere boys (and girls too) like this one.

A scrawny kid like this, when carrying a Kalashnikov, can make a pretty big hole in you, and as the clash between the military junta and ECOMOG -- the West African peacekeepers -- raged around him, Mr Voeten was forced to hide in the bush, fearful of being robbed, tortured and/or killed by drug-crazed, gun-toting "soldiers" of either side.

ECOMOG -- the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group -- was a west African multilateral armed force established by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The idea was that separate armies of Africans would work together to make and keep the peace in an African state. ("Nation" is the wrong word to use here. The concept of the nation state doesn't really exist in Africa, divided as it is by tribalism, language and religion.) To no-one's surprise, it didn't work very well, which is why the United Nations eventually felt compelled to involve itself in the conflict.

That didn't work very well either. Mr Voeten tells us that by 2000, "the situation in Sierra Leone...again deteriorated. The 25,000 UN peacekeepers that were stationed in the country...proved to be largely ineffective. Civil war flared up; cease-fires and treaties were broken, and...the fighting has spilled over the border to Guinea and Liberia."

But UN intervention, the globalists and progressives think to this day is better than leaving the Africans to exterminate one another. Hence the UN mission in Mali, which was the subject of yesterday's post.

What's wrong with Africa that bloody conflicts of the kind Teun Voeten saw up close and personal keep recurring? They seem to be unavoidable natural phenomena -- the work of evil "big men", full of ambition and greed, with no moral compass or concept of civilization to guide them. Mr Voeten quotes English cultural anthropologist Paul Richards: "What we are seeing in Sierra Leone is the total collapse of the nation-state. Criminal netyworks rush in to fill the power vacuum, which is an oasis of lawlessness and institutionalized corruption. Those networks have every reason to make sure the state of chaos continues. And vice versa."

Teun Voeten concludes How De Body? by saying that he won't give up on Sierra Leone. "Despite the difficulties," he writes, "I believe there is hope.... Eventually peace will come. ...'We just have to be patient.'"

I understand his feelings. Having lived there for years in the 1990s, I can attest to the saying that Africa gets in your blood ...sometimes literally, but forget about that. It's easy to love the land and the ordinary people, when they are left alone by foreign interventionists and by their own corrupt and cruel leaders.

Where I disagree with Mr Voeten is in thinking that the "big men" will give way to leaders like Nelson Mandela -- he was an exception -- or that the UN and the legions of western do-gooders will ever leave Africans to develop (or not) at their own pace and in their own way. I believe there is no hope for Africa, and that we westerners do Africa and ourselves a disservice by trying to change human nature.

Footnote: The Deutsche Welle website has a report from the World Bank, which sez (headline news!) "Poverty rates remain high in Africa". "Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where the overall number of extremely poor people is increasing rather than decreasing, according to the World Bank's latest Poverty and Shared Prosperity report." No kidding! But don't worry. The white folks at the World Bank believe things can be turned around, with their help of course. Just like Teun Voeten.