My Beauty Best Teacher

Ben Simon writes in Prospect:

Tribe is certainly an overused explanation for conflicts in Africa, and to reduce the violence in eastern Congo to a replay of Rwanda's Hutu-Tutsi nightmare is a mistake. (When serious fighting broke out at the end of October, newscasters from major networks, including the BBC, Al Jazeera and CNN, took to labelling Nkunda’s men as “Tutsi rebels,” even though there are many Hutus among his ranks. One of the most prominent politicians to defect to his side in recent weeks, the former mayor of Goma Francois Gacaba, is a Hutu, as are a considerable number of rebel troops serving on the frontline.)
However, those who try to dismiss the importance of tribe also miss the point. There are countless militia groups roaming the province pursuing their own tribal agendas. The Mai Mai, nominally backed by the government, insist that because many of Nkunda’s soldiers are Tutsi, they “aren’t really Congolese,” and are deeply suspicious of their ties to Rwanda. And while Nkunda's men never describe themselves as Tutsi defenders or Tutsi freedom fighters, they single out tribe, or more precisely, an end to the tribalism that still dominates the region, as their signature issue...[continue reading]

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In a cautionary commentary Dana Blankenhorn analyses the causes of a lost democracy. "...No one can seize power alone, and toss a system of popular government on the ash heap. That only happens when there are enough people committed to the dictator's cause that they can overwhelm, through discipline, the vast majority. One of the most recent examples we have is in Zimbabwe...Without an open, transparent, and nominally democratic system, no country can move forward. All must regress into tribalism, into tyranny, into barely controlled chaos, starvation at the point of a gun..."

Michael Radu writes "...It does not seem that [Africa's] leaders even accept the notion of responsibility, let alone the idea of using what resources it has to address its own problems...For more than four decades, African elites and their intellectual mentors in the West have comfortably lived with a fiction: that whatever is wrong in the continent—tribalism, corruption, genocide, failing states, poverty, and HIV/AIDS—is somebody else's fault, i.e., the rich West's. Genocide in Rwanda? Blame the Belgians. Rampant anti-Asian racism in East Africa? Blame the British. Even more blatant anti-White racism in Zimbabwe? The British again. A string of spectacularly bloody tyrants, including Idi Amin in Uganda, Bokassa in Central Africa, Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea? The really guilty ones are in London, Paris, and Madrid; "Africa" is innocent..."