On African Crap Holes

So it looks like they've finally run Mugabe aground. Zimbabwe is a crap-hole of course but it didn't have to be.

At one point the country was Africa's breadbasket.

Now its just a basket case.

Here's a pic of some Zimbabwe money a friend sent me:

What's with the rocks?

Zimbabwe's fall is an old story for Africa, one of Afro-nationalist politics which don't work any better in Africa than they do in Detroit, tribalism, and brazen Kleptocracy that would shame the most corrupt NAACP backed Chicago Alderman.

The story is the same in Nigeria, Congo, Uganda all three of which produced first rate psychotic dictators. Back in our professorial days we used to make the students write up African dictators.  Choose your Psychopath we called the assignment. The department asked if we could knock it off, since the assignment reinforced the stereotype of Africans not being able to govern. 'How can it be a stereotype if its true?' I asked. Hadn't these people ever scene the Gieco Caveman ads? Were we to shift the assignment to say, good African leaders we just don't know who the students would pick. Mandela? Haile Salaise? Hell, Nyerere and Nkruma are merely the least worst dictators, being contend to wreck the economies of Tanzania and Ghana without feeding their citizens to the crocodiles. 

[Well bully for them, Clap...Clap...Clap...-Ed].

Anyway, if the reader is interested in how and why Africa sucks we suggest Martin Meredith's excellent The Face of Africa.  Reading it will be something of a test. If this book doesn't kill your faith in humanity nothing will. It's all there, from the civil war that broke out three days after independence from Belgium to We are the World.

As for Zimbabwe, the nation was the scene of a counterinsurgency waged by Ian Smith's white minority government. They won every last battle but failed to win the war because they had no political program for blacks who might not have been interested in the guerrilla's Marxism. The white's lost the peace too. Of course most of the whites bugged out to all points of the empire. The blacks were stuck. For the Rhodesian Bush War, we've read and strongly recommend Moorecraft's work below.

Back in Congo, future psychotic Mobuto Sese Seko hired a mercenary named Mad Mike Hoare to clean things up. Read his memoir, it's great, like the Christopher Walken movie Dogs of War. Actually, Dogs of War is based on Mad Mike Hoare and Frederick Forsythe's history of the Nigerian Civil War.