World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [51]
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CHAPTER 4
The “Ibo of Cameroon”
Market-Dominant Minorities in Africa
Of all the world’s regions, scarcity-stricken Africa has the greatest abundance and variety of market-dominant minorities. Some of these minorities are indigenous Africans. Others are “entrepreneurial” immigrant groups like the Indians or Lebanese. Still others are former European colonizers. All are deeply resented and, at times, the objects of homicidal fury.
The problem is starkest in southern Africa. In country after country, a handful of whites engorged themselves on natural resources and human labor, creating enclaves of spectacular wealth and modernization, surrounded by mounting, justifiable hatred among the indigenous black majority. The typical result has been horrific violence.
A tragic example is Angola, now largely forgotten in the West. For many the country, with its shocking death tolls and endless atrocities, is simply too depressing to think about. But Angola’s problems can be traced to a familiar colonial history.
Under the Portuguese, Angola suffered from one of the most oppressive forms of colonial rule: Until the nineteenth century, Portugal used the area as a “slave pool” for its more lucrative colony in Brazil while plundering Angola’s precious gemstones and metals. Even just thirty years ago, 335,000 Portuguese colonialists ruthlessly ran and controlled the virtual entirety of Angola’s economy. In Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski describes their almost overnight departure in 1975, when Angola was granted independence in the midst of rising chaos and violence:
At the airport in Lubango a group of terrified, sweaty, apathetic Portuguese sat on kit bags and suitcases beside their even more terrified wives, and their children asleep in the women’s arms. They rushed for the plane before it had even shut off its motors. . . .
Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. . . . People lived in the open, perpetually soaked because it was always raining. They were living worse now than the blacks in the African quarter that abutted the airport, but they took it apathetically, with dismal resignation, not knowing whom to curse for their fate. . . .
At about this time, someone brought news to the hotel that all the police had left!
Now Luanda, of all the cities in the world, had no police. When you find yourself in such a situation, you feel strange. On the one hand everything seems light, loose, but on the other hand there is a certain uneasiness. The few whites who still wandered the city accepted the development with foreboding. Rumors circulated that the black quarters would descend upon the stone city. Everyone knew that the blacks lived in the most awful conditions, in the worst slums to be seen anywhere in Africa, in clay hovels like heaps of smashed cheap pottery covering the desert around Luanda. And here stood the luxurious stone city of glass and concrete—empty, no one’s. . . . But according to the terrified Portuguese who passed themselves off as experts on the native mentality, the blacks would burst in, swept up in a madness of destruction and hatred, drunk, drugged with secret herbs, demanding blood and revenge. Nothing could hold back that invasion. . . . Everyone is lost and it will be the most hideous death—stabbed to death in the streets, hacked with machetes on their own doorsteps.
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Most of the Portuguese got out safely, leaving the country to disintegrate into a civil war of unspeakable