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Obama, the African Colonial
American Thinker ^ | June 25, 2009 | L.E. Ikenga

Posted on 06/24/2009 10:54:57 PM PDT by neverdem

Had Americans been able to stop obsessing over the color of Barack Obama's skin and instead paid more attention to his cultural identity, maybe he would not be in the White House today. The key to understanding him lies with his identification with his father, and his adoption of a cultural and political mindset rooted in postcolonial Africa.

Like many educated intellectuals in postcolonial Africa, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was enraged at the transformation of his native land by its colonial conqueror. But instead of embracing the traditional values of his own tribal cultural past, he embraced an imported Western ideology, Marxism. I call such frustrated and angry modern Africans who embrace various foreign "isms", instead of looking homeward for repair of societies that are broken, African Colonials. They are Africans who serve foreign ideas.

The tropes of America's racial history as a way of understanding all things black are useless in understanding the man who got his dreams from his father, a Kenyan exemplar of the African Colonial.

Before I continue, I need to say this: I am a first generation born West African-American woman whose parents emigrated to the U.S. in the 1970's from the country now called Nigeria. I travel to Nigeria frequently. I see myself as both a proud American and as a proud Igbo (the tribe that we come from -- also sometimes spelled Ibo). Politically, I have always been conservative (though it took this past election for me to commit to this once and for all!); my conservative values come from my Igbo heritage and my place of birth. Of course, none of this qualifies me to say what I am about to -- but at the same time it does.

My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel. Many conservative (East, West, South, North) African-Americans like myself -- those of us who know our history -- have seen this movie before. Here are two main reasons why many Americans allowed Obama to slip through the cracks despite all of his glaring inconsistencies:

First, Obama has been living on American soil for most of his adult life. Therefore, he has been able to masquerade as one who understands and believes in American democratic ideals. But he does not. Barack Obama is intrinsically undemocratic and as his presidency plays out, this will become more obvious. Second, and most importantly, too many Americans know very little about Africa. The one-size-fits-all understanding that many Americans (both black and white) continue to have of Africa might end up bringing dire consequences for this country.

Contrary to the way it continues to be portrayed in mainstream Western culture, Africa is not a continent that can be solely defined by AIDS, ethnic rivalries, poverty and safaris. Africa, like any other continent, has an immense history defined by much diversity and complexity. Africa's long-standing relationship with Europe speaks especially to some of these complexities -- particularly the relationship that has existed between the two continents over the past two centuries. Europe's complete colonization of Africa during the nineteenth century, also known as the Scramble for Africa, produced many unfortunate consequences, the African colonial being one of them.

The African colonial (AC) is a person who by means of their birth or lineage has a direct connection with Africa. However, unlike Africans like me, their worldviews have been largely shaped not by the indigenous beliefs of a specific African tribe but by the ideals of the European imperialism that overwhelmed and dominated Africa during the colonial period. AC's have no real regard for their specific African traditions or histories.  AC's use aspects of their African culture as one would use pieces of costume jewelry: things of little or no value that can be thoughtlessly discarded when they become a negative distraction, or used on a whim to decorate oneself in order to seem exotic. (Hint: Obama's Muslim heritage).

On the other hand, AC's strive to be the best at the culture that they inherited from Europe. Throughout the West, they are tops in their professions as lawyers, doctors, engineers, Ivy League professors and business moguls; this is all well and good. It's when they decide to engage us as politicians that things become messy and convoluted.

The African colonial politician (ACP) feigns repulsion towards the hegemonic paradigms of Western civilization. But at the same time, he is completely enamored of the trappings of its aristocracy or elite culture. The ACP blames and caricatures whitey to no end for all that has gone wrong in the world. He convinces the masses that various forms of African socialism are the best way for redressing the problems that European colonialism motivated in Africa. However, as opposed to really being a hard-core African Leftist who actually believes in something, the ACP uses socialist themes as a way to disguise his true ambitions: a complete power grab whereby the "will of the people" becomes completely irrelevant.

Barack Obama is all of the above. The only difference is that he is here playing (colonial) African politics as usual.  

In his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father -- an eloquent piece of political propaganda -- Obama styles himself as a misunderstood intellectual who is deeply affected by the sufferings of black people, especially in America and Africa. In the book, Obama clearly sees himself as an African, not as a black American. And to prove this, he goes on a quest to understand his Kenyan roots. He is extremely thoughtful of his deceased father's legacy; this provides the main clue for understanding Barack Obama.

Barack Obama Sr. was an African colonial to the core; in his case, the apple did not fall far from the tree. All of the telltale signs of Obama's African colonialist attitudes are on full display in the book -- from his feigned antipathy towards Europeans to his view of African tribal associations as distracting elements that get in the way of "progress".  (On p. 308 of Dreams From My Father, Obama says that African tribes should be viewed as an "ancient loyalties".)

Like imperialists of Old World Europe, the ACP sees their constituents not as free thinking individuals who best know how to go about achieving and creating their own means for success. Instead, the ACP sees his constituents as a flock of ignorant sheep that need to be led -- oftentimes to their own slaughter.

Like the European imperialist who spawned him, the ACP is a destroyer of all forms of democracy.

Here are a few examples of what the British did in order to create (in 1914) what is now called Nigeria and what Obama is doing to you

  1. Convince the people that "clinging" to any aspect of their cultural (tribal) identity or history is bad and regresses the process of "unity". British Imperialists deeply feared people who were loyal to anything other than the state. "Tribalism" made the imperialists have to work harder to get people to just fall in line. Imperialists pitted tribes against each other in order to create chaos that they then blamed on ethnic rivalry. Today many "educated" Nigerians, having believed that their traditions were irrelevant, remain completely ignorant of their ancestry and the history of their own tribes.
  2. Confiscate the wealth and resources of the area that you govern by any means necessary in order to redistribute wealth. The British used this tactic to present themselves as empathetic and benevolent leaders who wanted everyone to have a "fair shake". Imperialists are not interested in equality for all. They are interested in controlling all.  
  3. Convince the masses that your upper-crust university education naturally puts you on an intellectual plane from which to understand everything even when you understand nothing. Imperialists were able to convince the people that their elite university educations allowed them to understand what Africa needed. Many of today's Nigerians-having followed that lead-hold all sorts of degrees and certificates-but what good are they if you can't find a job?   
  4. Lie to the people and tell them that progress is being made even though things are clearly becoming worse.  One thing that the British forgot to mention to their Nigerian constituents was that one day, the resources that were being used to engineer "progress" (which the British had confiscated from the Africans to begin with!) would eventually run out. After WWII, Western Europe could no longer afford to hold on to their African colonies. So all of the counterfeit countries that the Europeans created were then left high-and-dry to fend for themselves. This was the main reason behind the African independence movements of the1950 and 60's. What will a post-Obama America look like?
  5. Use every available media outlet to perpetuate the belief that you and your followers are the enlightened ones-and that those who refuse to support you are just barbaric, uncivilized, ignorant curmudgeons.  This speaks for itself.

America, don't be fooled. The Igbos were once made up of a confederacy of clans that ascribed to various forms of democratic government. They took their eyes off the ball and before they knew it, the British were upon them. Also, understand this: the African colonial who is given too much political power can only become one thing: a despot.

L.E. Ikenga can be reached at leikenga@gmail.com.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Foreign Affairs; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: africa; african; africancolonial; africancolonialism; auntzeituni; bho44; bhoafrica; blackhistory; blackstarline; blockbuster; investigateobama; jihad; june2009; kenyanbornmoslem; kgb; malcomx; marcusgarvey; obama; obamafamily; obamaorigins; odinga; patricelumumbaschool; russia; stanleyanndunham; uncleomar
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To: Albertafriend

Mau mau rebellion
Despite plenty of overt pressure on Kenya’s colonial authorities, the real independence movement was underground. Groups from the Kikuyu, Maasai and Luo tribes vowed to kill Europeans and their African collaborators. The most famous of these movements was Mau Mau, formed in 1952 by the Kikuyu people, which aimed to drive the white settlers from Kenya forever. In true African fashion, the Mau Mau rebellion was a brutal war of attrition on white people, property and ‘collaborators’. The various Mau Mau sects came together under the umbrella of the Kenya Land Freedom Army, led by Dedan Kimathi, and staged frequent attacks against white farms and government outposts...

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/kenya/history#44020


721 posted on 06/29/2010 11:49:07 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)
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To: Fred Nerks; LucyT

Yesterday Glenn Book mentioned that Barry’s grandfather who had been a cook in the British Army later allegedly was tortured severely by the British and may be the reason Barry returned the statue (bust?) of Churchill back to England after he got his foot into the W.H. because of anger!!!


722 posted on 06/29/2010 11:51:18 PM PDT by danamco (")
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Dedan Kimathi statue in Narobi

Dedan Kimathi, Mau Mau Leader

723 posted on 06/30/2010 12:00:22 AM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)
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To: Fred Nerks

I sent this off to Glenn Beck earlier today. EVERYONE who cares should send it and keep sending it until he pays attention.


724 posted on 06/30/2010 12:13:53 AM PDT by MestaMachine (De inimico non loquaris sed cogites- Don't wish ill for your enemy; plan it)
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725 posted on 06/30/2010 12:23:42 AM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)
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To: Red Steel

Thank you. :)


726 posted on 06/30/2010 12:35:02 AM PDT by thecodont
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To: LucyT; Fred Nerks

Great research!

You may find some of the comments at this link interesting.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:31wEr77UEnoJ:ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/01/09/mau_mau_and_irgun_descendants_head_for_the_white_house+freerepublic+%22Beatings+and+abuse+made+Barack+Obama%E2%80%99s+grandfather+loathe+the+British%22&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a


727 posted on 06/30/2010 4:55:43 AM PDT by maggief
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To: Fred Nerks

You just know the mother by the warning sign would have cast her vote for Hussein if she could. You sure that kid isn’t a cousin of Corrie? Kumbaya mentality.


728 posted on 06/30/2010 6:09:28 AM PDT by bgill (how could a young man born here in Kenya, who is not even a native American, become the POTUS)
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To: LucyT; Fred Nerks

Thanks for the ping and for the historical timelines.

I was a schoolboy at the time these things were happening, but I took an interest in it and remember it well.

What I found very difficult to accept was what I thought of as a parallel to what happened during the great Indian Mutiny of the previous century, which I had also read about.

Namely, Indian Muslims and African Mau Maus who were sworn in honor, as soldiers or as servants in families, to protect and obey them. Instead, they suddenly up and murdered them: notably, the women and children in the absence of the men.

Muslim soldiers who suddenly turned on their officers and murdered them. Muslim cooks and nannies who suddenly turned on the families who housed them, and murdered them.

There were some exceptions, but I always thought that it was particularly horrible to unexpectedly turn on the peoplel who were housing you and paying you, to whom you owed your service, often under oath.


729 posted on 06/30/2010 8:16:51 AM PDT by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
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To: Fred Nerks

Thanks for your speedy reply. That does leave the door open to a legitimate claim by Granny Sarah. It would be interesting for someone to check into the records of the prison that the alleged grandpa was kept in to see if he really was there, for how long, on what specific charges etc. I’m sure it’s all there because of the British meticulous record-keeping. Oh if only I were a millionaire the places I would go!


730 posted on 06/30/2010 9:42:41 AM PDT by Albertafriend
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To: danamco

“Yesterday Glenn Book mentioned that Barry’s grandfather who had been a cook in the British Army later allegedly was tortured severely by the British and may be the reason Barry returned the statue (bust?) of Churchill back to England after he got his foot into the W.H. because of anger!!!”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Here’s another reason he may have a dislike for Churchill, as follows:

Churchill on Mohammedanism

“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Individual Muslims may show splendid qualities - but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.”(Sir Winston Churchill : ‘The River War’ )

We all know he was raised a Muslim and that most of his family are Muslims.

He doesn’t cotton to your “typical” bible thumping gun toting Christian :)

He prefers the racist and genocidal “black liberation theology” that he was taught by his “former” mentor, Reverend Wright.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1990117/posts

STE=Q


731 posted on 06/30/2010 12:04:58 PM PDT by STE=Q ("It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government" ... Thomas Paine)
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To: STE=Q

And I received this by e-mail:

Subject: Why does the first lady not accompany president to arab country?

Sheppard Smith, Fox News.

“If you check President Obama’s last trip over-seas, his wife left just after their visit to France . She has yet to accompany him to any Arab country. Think about it. Why is Michelle returning to the states when ‘official’ trips to foreign countries generally include the First Lady.”

Here’s one thought on the matter.

While in a Blockbuster renting videos I came across a video called “Obama”. There were two men standing next to me and we talked about President Obama.

These guys were Arabs, so I asked them why they thought Michele Obama headed home following the President’s recent visit to France instead of traveling on to Saudi Arabia and Turkey with her husband. They told me she could not go to Saudi Arabia , Turkey or Iraq . I said “Why not,(?) Laura Bush went to Saudi Arabia , Turkey and Dubai .” They said that Obama is a Muslim and therefore he is not allowed to bring his wife into countries that adhere to Sharia Law. Two points of interest here:

1) I thought it interesting that two American Arabs at Blockbuster believe that our President is a Muslim,

2) who follows a strict Islamic creed. They also said that’s the reason he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia. It was a signal to the Muslim world, Acknowledging his religion.

For further consideration, here is a response from Dr. Jim Murk, a Middle Eastern Scholar and expert on Islam. This is his explanation of what the Arab American’s were saying.

“An orthodox Muslim man would never take his wife on a politically oriented trip to any nation which practices Sharia law, particularly Saudi Arabia where the Wahhabi sect is dominant. This is true and it is why Obama left Michelle in Europe . She will stay home when he visits Arab countries. He knows Muslim protocol; this includes, bowing to the Saudi King. Obama is regarded as a Muslim in the Arab world, because he was born to a Muslim father; he acknowledged his Muslim faith with George Stephanopoulus. Note that he downplays his involvement with Christianity, by not publicly joining a Christian church in D.C. And only occasionally attending the chapel for services at Camp David . He also played down the fact that America is a Christian country and said, unbelievably, that it was one of the largest Muslim nations in the world, which is nonsense. He has publicly taken the side of the Palestinians in the conflict with Israel and he ignored the National Day of Prayer, something no other President has ever done.

He is bad news! He conceals his true faith to the detriment of the American people.” -—

Jim Murk, Doctor of Philosophy in Middle Eastern Culture &
Religion.

ACTIONS speak louder than words.

Another interesting item regarding Sharia Law..

Why has Barack Hussein Obama insisted that the U.S. Attorney General hold the trials of the 911 Muslim Terrorists in Civilian Courts as Common Criminals instead of as Terrorists who attacked the United States of America ?

If the Muslim Terrorists are tried in Military Tribunals, convicted and sentenced to death, by LAW, Barack Hussein Obama, as President of the United States , would be required to sign their Death Warrants. He would not be required to sign the death warrants if they are sentenced to death by a Civilian Court . Recently, Muslim Jihadist, Army Major Hassan slaughtered non-Muslim, soldiers at Ft. Hood , Texas rather than go to Afghanistan and be a part of anything that could lead to the deaths of fellow Muslims. He stated that Muslims ‘could not and should not kill fellow Muslims’.

Is the motive for Barack Hussein Obama’s insistence on civilian trials, to make sure he doesn’t have to sign the death warrants for the Muslim Terrorists? Why would he, as President of the United States , not sign the death warrants for Muslim Terrorists who attacked the United States and murdered over 3,000 U. S. Citizens on 9/11? Could it be that he is FORBIDDEN by his RELIGION to authorize the execution of Muslims?

Think about that! Open your eyes, ears and mind to who the President is, how he behaves and what he is doing.


732 posted on 06/30/2010 4:37:49 PM PDT by danamco (")
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To: LucyT
Two post for you in one post.

First "Three articles showing "The Mind of Obama".



There's NO "ENIGMA" ... to Barack Hussein Obama II.

You want to know WHO Obama IS?

The DemocratsNational Socialists, and FASCIST Obama are DOING IT ON PURPOSE!!!!




Here's the mind of Fascist Obama, from another poster LomanBill.


So you see, FASCIST Obama is currently on stage III of their plan "bring the country to the verge of crisis".

Don't you see it?

Wasn't it Thomas Jefferson who wrote

And then again when he wrote



Second is "Witnesses To The Kenyan Birth Of Barack Hussein Obama".

Let's examine
I refer you to Birth Certificate Vs. Certification Of Live Birth.
But you STILL WON'T ACCEPT THE TRUTH that

Here is some more information and links


I have several witnesses, that have proven to me that Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Kenya.

First witness, Barack Hussein Obama II himself:
The above artice is also found at FreedomsPhoenix.com.
They have a great spoof Birth Certificate you just gotta' see.
Also view the video at Proof Obama Admits He Was Born In Kenya.


Second witnesses, his mother and father, indirectly through their divorce papers. I believe that "indeterminate person" probably SAW the Obama Dunham Divorce Documents BEFORE Page 11 disappeared and viewed the Kenyan Birth Cerfiticate,
thereby telling Ed Hale
The Obama Dunham Divorce Documents are viewable at this location.
There's a great assumption of the time lime at at link.

Third witness, is Barack Hussein Obama II's grandmother,Sarah Hussein Obama:
View the video Barack Obama - Born in Kenya II at Youtube.com.
Watch and LISTEN to the video BARACK OBAMA - BORN IN KENYA - The Documentary - STUNNING!
and prove it to yourself.
Also watch Affidavit and Tape-Proof Obama Born in Kenya.

The fourth witness, Tim Adams,
(It is now confirmed by Hawaii that Tim Adams did indeed work as a senior elections clerk in 2008)The Fifth witness, Michelle Obama.
The Sixth Witness, Kenyan Ambassador Peter Ogego:
The Seventh Witness, James Orengo (the Kenyan Parliament Minister of Lands):

The Eighth Witness, Lucas Daniel Smith,


Case CLOSED!!!



I hope this fills your request.
733 posted on 07/01/2010 12:24:20 PM PDT by Yosemitest (It's simple, fight or die.)
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To: Yosemitest; RaceBannon; Fred Nerks; null and void; stockpirate; george76; PhilDragoo; Candor7; ...
Image and video hosting by TinyPic

. . . . Check out # 733:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2278969/posts?page=733#733

[Thanks, Yosemitest. Fantastic research, and your posting of a copy on "The Long Thread" is appreciated, also.]

734 posted on 07/01/2010 1:33:55 PM PDT by LucyT
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To: Yosemitest

Thank you for your #733

“If someone called and asked about it, I [Tim Adams] could not tell them that [Obama] was born in the state.”

Nor could any member of the January 2009 Congress, all of whom were sworn to defend the Constitution, when they certified Obama as qualified; simply because there was no credible evidence of that fact.

Suppose our new crop of Republicans will launch an effective inquiry when they take office?


735 posted on 07/01/2010 2:48:21 PM PDT by frog in a pot (Wake up America! You are losing the war against your families and your Constitution!)
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To: frog in a pot

I doubt it.


736 posted on 07/01/2010 3:25:36 PM PDT by Yosemitest (It's simple, fight or die.)
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To: Yosemitest

Outstanding work! Many thanks.


737 posted on 07/01/2010 3:41:26 PM PDT by Faith
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To: Yosemitest

Thank you!


738 posted on 07/01/2010 7:41:55 PM PDT by MestaMachine (De inimico non loquaris sed cogites- Don't wish ill for your enemy; plan it)
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To: Fred Nerks

Placemark. Thanks!


739 posted on 07/01/2010 7:50:25 PM PDT by little jeremiah
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To: little jeremiah

DARK STAR SAFARI. HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK. NO REVIEW CAN DO IT JUSTICE:

Reviewed by Robert D. Kaplan
Sunday, March 30, 2003; Page BW08

DARK STAR SAFARI
Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
By Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin. 472 pp. $28

Africa, because of its poverty, presumed hopelessness and racial overtones, is prone to elicit more sympathy than analysis. Indeed, given the dreadful legacy of slavery, Americans and Europeans have often journeyed to Africa, and written about it, to demonstrate their own humanist credentials. The result is that Africa may be less well-known than the African extensions of our own racial and national obsessions. As he explains in his new travel book, Dark Star Safari, Paul Theroux went to Africa for a more matter-of-fact and politically ambiguous reason: Like the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who found in Ethiopia the ultimate anti-European, anti-Western place, Theroux likes Africa simply because “there [is] nothing of home here.”

Riding bush taxis for months in places far from mobile phone towers and reliable electric current for cybercafés, he was able to escape from the cushy tedium of his daily existence. “Who cares about the Nasdaq,” he writes, “when shiftas [bandits] on the road between Addis Ababa and Nairobi will kill you for the shoes you are wearing?” His happiest moment was being stuck on the “shifta road” after a truck broke down, with no schedule to keep, passing the time drinking beer and helping a village woman peel potatoes while “talking about salvation.”

Looked at another way, Theroux’s journey to Africa was an act of pure integrity. Nearing his 60th birthday, he gave up the material comfort and social prestige of a well-known author in order to spend up to a year traveling alone, in some of the least comfortable parts of the world’s poorest continent. His journey was also a homecoming: He had worked in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1960s and afterward lived in Uganda. He went back for the “sweetness,” he says, and partly to refute the horror stories about the continent he had read in newspapers. He came away a bit burned by the experience.

“Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it,” he writes, “hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can’t tell the politicians from the witch doctors.” It is also more urbanized. In discussing the disease growth of African cities, Theroux demonstrates how a traveler’s finely wrought observations of people and landscape sometimes offer the best political and social analysis. He portrays these African “snake pits” as “miserably improvised ant-hills, attracting the poor and the desperate from the bush and turning them into thieves and devisers of cruel scams.” “Scamming,” he goes on, “is the survival mode in a city where tribal niceties do not apply and there are no sanctions except those of the police,” a class of Africans for whom he has few kind words. In 2005, he notes, 75 percent of Africans will be living in such cities. As for the trains, he writes that “most trains in Africa look as if they are on their way to Auschwitz.” Nevertheless, he boarded them, always with good humor.

Few recent books provide such a litany of Africa’s ills, even as they make one fall in love with the continent. Theroux’s descriptions are rarely neutral. They are either ugly and bitter, or beautiful and erotic: Watching a woman in the street in Khartoum untangle her gown from her stiletto heel, he sees “the filigree of dark henna all over her foot and her ankle and reaching up her leg . . . as though she were wearing the sexiest French tights.”

Theroux’s respect for individual Africans plays off against his documentation of social catastrophe: In his beloved Malawi, the Indian shops were gone and vandalized, and the end of Hasting Banda’s dictatorship merely replaced political violence with civilian crime. Unfortunately, the individual honesty and friendliness he encountered on the road were simply insufficient to provide the social discipline for maintaining modern infrastructure such as railway systems, and for making cities and public spaces habitable. He notes that the tribal mores that allowed for a variant of civil society in African villages through the mid-20th century have been destroyed in the course of urban migration. And because the deeper the dissolution, the more extreme the corrective, it appears that social discipline in Africa is now most effectively reemerging in the form of Islamic fundamentalism, as religion is reinvented in starker, more ideological form to meet the challenges of urban existence. Such new and rigid group identities — replacing the more fluid tribal ones — are a factor in the north-south splits bedeviling places such as Nigeria and the Ivory Coast.

Rather than adequately flesh out these and other issues, though, Theroux rails against one of the early messengers of the bad news: his former friend V. S. Naipaul, whose “contempt” for Africa is, in Theroux’s words, the result of Naipaul’s “insecurity” as an ethnic-Indian “outsider who feels weak.” Yet the insecurity felt by an economic middleman-minority such as the ethnic Indians in East Africa and the Caribbean, the Lebanese in West Africa and the Jews in Eastern Europe often provides an acute vantage point for perceiving trouble ahead. Despised peoples acquire a tragic premonition about the human condition that others lack. Naipaul’s books of a generation ago uncannily intuited the continent’s decline, a decline that Theroux nowhere in his book denies. His unnecessary tirade against Naipaul makes for the weakest part of a relentlessly engaging narrative. In fact, it demonstrates Theroux’s own limits at insight.

Theroux is best at shorthand dissections of trends that have already become obvious. In no other book will one find such entertaining and penetrating comments about the ironies, as well as the historic failure, of foreign aid. In an earlier age, he writes, Westerners “would have been businessmen or soldiers or visiting politicians or academics. But this was an era of charity in Africa, where the business of philanthropy was paramount.” Like other kinds of businessmen far from home, the aid workers subsidize an army of prostitutes. “Wherever the expatriate economy was strong in African countries — the aid-heavy economies in Addis, Nairobi, Kampala, Lilongwe, and Maputo — there was prostitution, usually pretty girls dressed in peculiarly Western fashion to attract expatriates — the bankers, the aid experts, the charity bureaucrats. There was no mystery to this. The prostitutes followed the money.”

In the course of his travels, the author describes one foreign-assistance stupidity after the other, comparing the bigger projects to “inspired Christmas presents, the sort that stop running when the batteries die.” He admits that while he and others have been — and will be — “enriched by the experience of working in Africa, nothing at all would change as a result. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa.”

Theroux is no reactionary, or even a conservative, as he reveals elsewhere in the narrative; he simply won’t tolerate easy truths or sanctimony. He reserves his greatest and most hilarious vitriol for the missionaries he meets. As he tells an earnest young Western proselytizer on a train in Mozambique, “Stop calling these poor people sinners. As if they haven’t got enough to worry about!”

Despising the ability of people to be transported overnight by plane from New York to the middle of Africa “to gape at gorillas,” Theroux believes you can know a place only by “scuttling past razor wire” at the frontiers. Having paid bribes and dealt with drunken and drug-crazed soldiers at land borders in both West and East Africa, this reviewer can only concur. It is the getting there that reveals the truth. And the most fundamental truth of Dark Star Safari is that Africa is too vast and intractable ever to be socially and politically engineered by outsiders, no matter their good intentions. To wit, the author tells of three FBI agents, in Nairobi to investigate the 1998 American embassy bombings, who were relieved of their wallets and pistols by local pickpockets.

Having just been robbed himself in Johannesburg, Theroux nevertheless managed to be upbeat. The “kindest Africans had not changed at all” in the four decades since he lived there, he writes, and “the best of them” were still “bare-assed.”


740 posted on 07/01/2010 11:08:55 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (fair dinkum!)
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