The White Man's Burden

Not surprisingly, someone at the Guardian doesn't like Blood Diamond, the film I spoke of here yesterday. Not because of its plot or direction or characters, but because it's racially incorrect. Or so says Joe Queenan, himself more than a little race-obsessed; he feels that Blood Diamond carrries on an iniquitous Hollywood tradition of portraying white men as something other than totally evil racist beasts.

Queenan's specific complaint is that the film shows Leonardo di Caprio's character helping "po' black folks," thus (in his paranoid imagination) implying that black people are incapable of helping themselves. Never mind that Hollywood has also churned out a host of films premised around the "magic Negro" concept, in which Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington or Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock help hopelessly befuddled and uptight honkies get their groove back and sort out the meaning of life, love and happiness. Never mind, too, that in real life, white people have occasionally been known to do things other than enslaving and exploiting decent and long-suffering black people. In fact, come to think of it, wasn't it white people who were largely responsible for abolishing the slave trade that had flourished in Africa for millennia?

But who needs facts, as the Guardian's unwritten masthead motto might very well proclaim, when we've got a hamhanded all-purpose ideology to resort to? And in that particular dream world, all white people, particularly those of the British and American ilk, are automatically suspect (curious, too, that the British and the Americans have both gone to war to end black slavery), and all citizens of the Third World, especially those "of colour," are to be considered wholly virtuous unless proven otherwise (and in the case of Third Worlders gone bad, like, say, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, it's almost always the devil, erm, the white man who made him do it.

I think reasonable people can agree that white people have done terrible things to Africa and its people, though not necessarily anything worse than Africans have done to themselves. This being so, shouldn't it be all the more imperative that white people do what they can to help out their African brothers and sisters when possible? Obviously so, though the means to accomplish this are not always clear. Certainly Fatass Bono's recipe of handing over loads of money, erm, excuse me, of browbeating other people to hand over loads of their money, is not an adequate solution, and in many cases has produced more harm than good.

Hundreds of millions in Western aid to the Horn of Africa, for example, may have kept some people alive, but has also made it possible, if not inevitable, for Ethiopia, Somalia and Eritrea to live in a near-constant state of warfare and brutality. The millions in "food" aid furnished to Zimbabwe's dictator Robert Mugabe have enabled the aging but still vicious tyrant to carry out a campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass starvation unrivalled since the days of Pol Pot. Writing in the Sunday Times, RW Johnson paints a chilling picture of the hellhole that once-prosperous country has become, and you need look no further than Johnson if you want a clearcut refutation of Queenan's thesis about the white man helping out the black man.

Johnson has risked both life and liberty to keep the story of Zimbabwe's ongoing agony before Western eyes, repeatedly sneaking back into the country after he, along with nearly all British correspondents, were barred by Mugabe. Not that it's likely to do a lot of good; Guardianista thinking has infected much of the media and academia, to the point where no Western politician would dream of doing anything to rescue the people of Zimbabwe for fear of being seen as neo-imperialists. So we see more ink spilled - on the occasion of his passing - on the crimes of Augusto Pinochet, whose miltary coup in 1973 killed about 3,000 people but left Chile with a functioning liberal democracy, than we do on Mugabe, who on any given day of the year is responsible for more deaths than that. Is it because, as Ali G would have put it, he is black? What do you think?

Of course white people do bear some responsibility for putting Mugabe in power in the first place, and even more so for turning a blind eye to his depredations through the years. Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream, which I'm sure I've mentioned here at one time or another, or should have, anyway, contains a barely fictionalised account of how Mugabe and other future Aftrican dictators like him were influenced and coddled by muddled Marxists and revolutionary playboys in 1960s London. To the drug-soaked theorists of the "New" Left, Africa was just as much a plaything and social laboratory as it had been for 19th century imperialists, and with consequences possibly even more dire. If this seems an extreme statement, consider the outcomes: after a century of European imperialism, Africa had, despite the many obvious injustices, the beginnings of an urban middle class, the rudiments of a physical infrastructure, growing and healthier populations, and relative peace. After a few decades of "liberation" struggle, Africa is beset by war and plague, with populations and life expectancies declining in many areas, and only a handful of countries possessing anything resembling stable, democratic governments.

Is this an argument for recolonising Africa? No, and for a variety of reasons, some moral, some pragmatic, no such thing is ever likely to happen. Unfortunately, tragically even, without some form of recolonisation, there is precious little that the West can do to alleviate some of Africa's most pressing problems. Can we furnish them with antiretroviral drugs to stem the rising death toll from AIDS? Sure, but the law of unintended consequences means that we're then likely to see millions more people starving to death instead, thanks to the inability or unwillingness of most African governments to maintain a functioning economy. Can we send in peacekeeping troops to separate the warring tribes and factions? Yes again, but unless we're prepared to stay for the long term - itself a form of neo-colonialism - we're only postponing, not averting the eventual bloodshed.

I remember reading a poignant story of some citizens of Roman-era Londinium, who, when the Romans evacuated Britain to deal with more pressing matters closer to home, set up something like a vigil for their departed colonial masters. Periodically they would send letters off to the Emperor, imploring him to come to the aid of his loyal subjects in far-off Britannia before they were completely swamped by the invading Saxon hordes. Something similar happened in Sierra Leone, the setting for Blood Diamond, when the (ahem, Joe Queenan) largely white British Army finally succeeded in halting the bloodbath that had devastated that unhappy country. Large numbers of Sierra Leoneans demonstrated in the streets of Freetown, asking to be taken back into the British Empire. Of course no such thing was going to happen, not least because the Empire itself is largely moribund, and as previously noted, there's absolutely no political will for such a thing, regardless of any good it might accomplish.

So what's the point, then? If there's little or nothing we in the West can do to alleviate Africa's suffering, why go on about it? Surely they'll eventually sort themselves out, much as Europeans did after a few centuries of mayhem and misery when they underwent their own decolonisation process following the collapse of Rome. The problem seems to be that we're not quite insensitive enough to sit by and watch a continent disintegrate, but at the same time not resolute or confident enough to do anything that might actually be of help.