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Radio War Nerd #89 — Central African War Lit (Patreon)

Published:
2017-06-22 14:33:57
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

The War Nerd discusses some novels and "creative journalism" dealing with wars in Central Africa—Congo Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo/Zaire, Angola . . . But first we talk about some of the wild war events of the previous few days — from Syria to TrumpLand to Djibouti . . . 

At 38:00 minute mark, we discuss C Africa war literature: "Patriots" by Sousa Jamba; "Another Day of Life" by Ryszard Kapuscinski; "Johnny Mad Dog" by Emmanuel Dongala; "African Psycho" by Alain Mabanchkou; "Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah; "Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak" by Jean Hatzfeld . . . 

Total time: 2:16:41

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here 

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Comments

Isaac Suárez

Great episode (very out of time comment.) I really enjoyed Patriots- 7 years later a kindle edition became available. The one thing I’ll add re anti Tutsi bias- I think you make a good point about the NGO bias toward “helpless Africans.” That being said, I think an element of the bias reflects the complex and negative view many in the western ngo milieu have toward the Kagame government, Rwanda has punched far above its weight regionally- introducing a force that has had (and continues to have) a huge influence on DRC. Tutsi make up less than 1% of DRC’s population, but M23- a predominantly Tutsi group- has been able to challenge UN and DRC control over the Kivu region. Uganda and Rwanda are regularly accused of supporting M23- and the Kinshasa government has formed an alliance of opportunity with the Hutu genocidaire remnant- the FLDR and its descendants. There’s a great deal that isn’t clear about this conflict. I don’t know to what extent Rwanda supports M23- or if M23 is beholden to its potential backers. There seems to be a great deal of anti Tutsi sentiment in DRC (Kabila Sr. turned against Rwanda very quickly after taking power with their support- Tshekedi is also quite anti Tutsi) and much of this is connected in western coverage to supposed Rwandan and Ugandan interventionism. All that being said, the anti Tutsi bias you note is subtle, but quite pervasive, and- whatever the regional politics, are unjustifiable. As with so many things, submerged imperialist resentments, great power politics, and likely careerism and greed obscure a great deal. Thanks again for the episode!

Dorst Savijeski

Trampling on history and the dead just to sound interesting. I'm not going to go in depth but to assert the RPF are Anglo creation is stupid.

Xi

Honestly I remember the first time I heard about Angola it was from the first level in Call of Duty Black Ops 2. Savimbi was portrayed as this gregarious figure who would psyche you up while you mowed down a dozen black bald NPCs with machetes who stood in for the MPLA. Nothing much illuminating about the conflict itself you could imagine. Also there was this scene that weirded me out (I played this game back on 2013 when I was in High School), where this Cuban was training child soldiers. As if to emphasize the point your CIA comrade says "They're just kids!" I did some Googling and found out that UNITA out of all three of the groups had the most child soldiers. Did I forget to mention that fucking Oliver North was a consultant for this game???

Henry

The division of ISIS bit reminded me of a great book I read recently that might interest the War Nerd audience: Ottoman Endgame: 1908-1923 by Sean McMeekin who writes with a decent sense of humor.

eh

Lindqvist's Exterminate all the brutes is a decent piece of historical writing, framed as a kind of "literary travelogue" but mostly devoted to looking at European witness accounts from the era of colonialism in Africa, in particular the genocide in Congo but also discussing Sudan, the German East African colonies etc, winding up with a discussion of the roots of genocidal ideology in the colonial project. Regarding Congo's modern history this article seemed like a good survey to me at the time <a href="https://newleftreview.org/II/92/joe-trapido-africa-s-leaky-giant" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://newleftreview.org/II/92/joe-trapido-africa-s-leaky-giant</a>. Trapido also cites some of the modern academic literature on Congo, which seems to include some histories covering the last half century.

James Christensen

Lieve Joris' "The Rebel's Hour" is a book about the Congo Wars I really liked. It's told from the perspective of a Banyamulenge fighter. Joris based it on interviews she conducted. I'm not exactly sure how much of it is fictionalized, but I thought it was pretty useful. Also I think anyone who listens to this show would really like any of the books by the writer Ahmadou Kourouma.

big microbe

"Full of shit" is a great description of most of the characters in Patriots

Dave Dolle

Loved this episode. Wish one of you guys would write a book blog.

Joel

Thanks for linking to that excellent Trapido article. I have to admit that if you're familiar with this history, John's hard-on for the RPF (see ://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/tutsi-empire-interrupted) is pretty head-scratching, as is the framing of it as some sort of anti-Western imperialist stance.

michiganpizza

another excellent episode about events in a place that gets very little honest coverage.

Crazy B0nkers

Following eh's excellent recommendation above, please also add Joe Trapido, who knows his stuff about the Congo.

Crazy B0nkers

To me it looks like Gary simply let slip an emotional third-worldist outburst, along with the typical undying, yet always crushed hope to see a true hero of the people emerge. However he's right: Bono is a gobshite. [props to eh for the Trapido paper]

eh

Well, even if Kagame is a pretty conventional postcolonial leader the Hutu bloc did go genocidal, which would make most any style of governance look better. What I'm lacking here is a discussion of what made genocide acceptable outside of the ideological sphere though, most ethnic elimination only goes that way when displacement is impossible, even the Nazis at first "merely" planned to rob and expulse their minority populations (and interestingly had the support of a large number of right-wing Zionists before the outright genocidal shift).

Hugo Turner

You are completely wrong about the Rwanda/DRCONGO. You need to let go of the propaganda myths of this war. If there was no war and the Tutsis were helpless victims how is it that they won the war and seized power and later invaded DRCongo killing 6-10 million people. I wrote this on a slightly different topic but am posting it here

Hugo Turner

A piece I wrote spontaneusly a couple of months back in response to the discredited notion that the Rwandan tradgedy could have been avoided if only the US had gotten involved. And an attack on hollywood history as exemplified in Hotel Rwanda. Actually America was to blame not through inaction, but through action. Four years before the so called "100 days" current dictator of Rwanda Paul Kagame, was being trained by the US government in the arts of insurgency contra style ie death squad style if your to young to remember the contras and in propaganda. Prior to that he was a long time leiutenant to another long time US backed dictator in Uganda Paul Museveni who also was able to successfully overthrow the government of Uganda in the 1980's in the process inventing the child soldier. Kagame and other Tutsi expatriates (the Tutsis had formerly ruled the place for first the Germans and then after world war 1 the Belgians until independence) these former ruling elites had been waging a terror campaign against Rwanda for 20 years. In 1990 America decided to back the terrorists of the RPF the heroes of films like this one. Why? Resources, we wanted a piece of France's African sphere of influence. Far from uninvolved America provided massive assistance to the RPF. Films like these are one aspect of such support they create a completely false picture of what happened. Why is it that this is the only piece of African history Hollywood is interested other then the fall of apartheid. For an in depth look at this film in particular go to <a href="http://allthingspass.com/uploads/html-135Hotel%20Rwanda%20Corrected%20Final%201%20Nov%2007.htm" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://allthingspass.com/uploads/html-135Hotel%20Rwanda%20Corrected%20Final%201%20Nov%2007.htm</a> Basically what really happened was a civil war brought on by the assassination of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi by the RPF with technical assistance and the 4 prior years of atrocities committed by the RPF. These created the background for popular violence against the Tutsis. However things were much more complicated, then they are portrayed it was not just hutu vs tutsi. In fact some tutsis were even members of Hutu militias and since the RPF had been living in Uganda since 1959 they hated the Tutsis that stayed behind in Rwanda. It should be noted that the Ugandan Tutsis of the RPF killed Tutsis and Hutus and they didn't use machetes they used expensive weapons and had CIA advisers with them every step of the way. Most importantly they had the public relations muscle of the west on their side. Thus even when they slaughtered Hutus it was reported in the media that it the victims were Tutsis and of course the RPF role was never mentioned. We saw dead bodies and assumed they must be the Tutsis. So with American aid RPF won and far from stopping the genocide they actively engaged in it. After victory they mercilesslessly hunted the hutu refugees who fled to the congo where under the eyes of the UN and with the asssistance of US special forces they slaughtered 1.2 million refugees. But because of the genocide narrative nobody seemed to care. Hutus are all evil or so we were told so the international community covered it all up. Thus what separates this from just another ugly covert war is the that RPF and the Ugandans invaded the Congo where 15 years later they are still there killing 1500 people a day. People who had nothing to do with events in Rwanda. Under the disguise of various militias most famously M-23 they set out to seize control of eastern Congo. 10 million people have died and the truth is the RPF is an American proxy army like the Syrian rebels. In other words the RPF has killed ten times more people in the congo then died in the Rwandan civil war. The RPF have killed millions to insure that western mining interests people like Maurice templesman the owner of Tiffany diamond company have unrestricted access to the Congo's riches. Ever wonder where the uranium for the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima came from or the copper for alll those billions of rounds of ammunition fired in places like Vietnam or Iraq or the cobalt necessary for our fighter planes, or say the rare earth mineral coltan in your smart phone it all comes from the Congo far from being on the fringes of the world Congo has long been central to the global economy, a land of untold riches but nobody in the Congo seems to benefit except of course those rich colonialists that never left and are never mentioned in our papers. You can see why violence, destabilization anarchy chaos are in u.s. and European stratetigic interest in Africa any sane government might ask why the majority of people in Congo are starving when they live atop gold and diamonds as well as such strategically useful minerals. It happened long ago a man called Patrice Lumbumba who remembers him today? in the new frontier of globalization chaos is perhaps the future (as seen in Iraq Somalia and Libya coming soon to Syria) and the problems of Africa don't arise out of tribal savagery but imperialism and greed. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend the work of Keith Harmon Snow. His brilliant articles can be found at alllthingspass.com and consciousbeingalliance.com Or watch one of his lectures on you tube. In the article cited above he goes into the true story of hotel Rwanda. I've just scratched the surface your mind will be blown. And no America is hardly the only one to blame England, France, Belgium, Germany, Israel and even Canada are all involved in the plunder and masss murder of the Congo. As well as their rivals the Chinese. And of course local partners like Kagame and Museveni. And our own lack of curiosity or outrage as to why ten million people have been murdered. Investigate Africom and America's plans to vastly increase our military presence in Africa Ironically the first African American president is stepping up the recolonzation of Africa. If you've never heard any of this before investigate it for yourself the truth is slowly beginning to emerge, check out the friends of the Congo and voice of the Congo. Ignore big NGOs they are complicit.

Hugo Turner

P.S. no one hates Human Rights watch more then I but clearly you are ignorant of the fact tht da forge was the leading figure behind the propaganda war against Rwanda before later turning on Paul Kagame for his many crimes. She then died in a plane crash. While we are at it the war in Angola was not about tribalism UNITA was backed by apartheid south Africa and the CIA the Cuban/MPLA Victory lead to the end of Apartheid.

Hugo Turner

Brilliant and courageous reporting on Africa from Keith Harmon Snow

RK Upadhya

On the subject of ISKP (Islamic State's franchise branch in Afghanistan), check out this article (<a href="https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-islamic-state-in-khorasan-how-it-began-and-where-it-stands-now-in-nangarhar/)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-islamic-state-in-khorasan-how-it-began-and-where-it-stands-now-in-nangarhar/)</a> from Afghanistan Analysts Network, that gives a pretty in-depth and authoritative account of its history and the networks it rose from. My understanding of their analysis is that ISKP is largely drawn from Pakistani militants who fought under the umbrella of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and some of whom forged an alliance with the official Afghan government to fight the Afghan Taliban. These militants mutated into what is now ISKP. On the subject of militia/warlord names in central Africa, according to the book "Africa's World War", there was a Hutu street gang-turned-militia called the Chicago Bulls around the capital of Burundi. I was highly amused when I first read about this, but your comments about modern irregular wars fought by young males in a world saturated with American pop culture make that name make a hell of a lot more sense!

Darryl Cooper

Kagame is one of the great men of the 20th century.

Stefan

Re. fiction books on the Angolan conflict has anyone read “The Land at the End of the World" by António Lobo Antunes? Maybe it could be an interesting comparison to Sousa Jamba's "Patriots"...

radiowarnerd

Sorry but that's a disgusting article. This is what happens when you take a 'default' position 180 degrees away from the common view in a desperate effort to distinguish yourself from mainstream views. You end up justifying a genocide.