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.

News (?) from Africa: Ebola aid money gone missing

What's wrong with Africa? Why is it that the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa are, almost without exception, worse off now than they were in the bad old days when the white colonists ran things? Agent 3, who is by way of being an OAH (Old Africa Hand) says the answer is simple. Africans don't know how to run a railroad, or anything else. And they steal. Incompetence and corruption, he says, are the twin scourges of the Dark Continent, and will ever be so.

Case in point: Sierra Leone, one of the west African countries worst affected by the Ebola plague. Almost 23,000 people have been infected since the outbreak in neighbouring Guinea in December 2013. 9000 have died. The good-hearted (and guilt-ridden) governments of Europe and North America pledged some £2.9 billion in aid, of which about 40% actually reached the affected countries.

Why have some of the donors held back on actually signing the cheques? Perhaps the answer has something to do with what happens to the aid money when it gets to Africa. An audit of Sierra Leone's Ebola funds have not been properly accounted for. According to an official report published today, 25 billion leones (= £3.7 million of US$5.7 million) was paid from various emergency accounts with no proper receipts or other supporting documentation.

Sierra Leone's national audit service said the country's health ministry had showed "complete disregard" for the law in its disbursement of emergency funds. The 25 billion leones not properly accounted for amounted to no less than a third of the 84 billion paid out by the health ministry between the beginning of the outbreak in Sierra Leone in May 2014, and the end of October.

Of the 25 billion leones -- the name means "lions", by the way -- 14 billion was completely unaccounted for and 11 billion only partially accounted for, according to the report. What the auditors called "lapses" in the financial management of the funds resulted in a loss of quality in the treatment of the disease.

The audit team said the health ministry failed to produce documentation for contract agreements for the purchase of 50 vehicles and ambulances. They also pointed out large gaps in the serial numbers listed for frontline health workers as "possible misappropriation" of hazard payments.

Frontline workers like those in the picture are eligible for extra hazard pay to compensate for the risk of infection. But the auditors' review of such payments at the Connaught Hospital revealed that soldiers and police officers were included on the list of eligible health workers, in spite of the fact that hazard funds had already been transferred to both forces separately. In other words, it looks like the workers got paid twice. Either that or the paymasters pocketed the extra.

The audit service has submitted the report to parliament for action, but are not holding their collective breath. As the OAHs say, MAWA -- "Mother Africa Wins Again".