Africa: Land of Savagery & Violence

That little-remembered century— to —that began with the founding and foundering of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. I said it was a blur. Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today.

Bailyn has not painted a pretty picture. The skin is torn from the face and head and the prisoner is disemboweled while still alive. All the while shaping, and sometimes misshaping, the American character.

He goes to see the Pequot War battlefield and he is appalled. Bailyn is speaking of one of the early and bloodiest encounters, between our peaceful pumpkin pie-eating Pilgrims and the original inhabitants of the land they wanted to seize, the Pequots. Garang died in a helicopter crash, but people still talk about him like a god. Unfortunately, the region without him looks pretty godforsaken. I traveled to southern Sudan in November to report on how ethnic militias, formed in the new power vacuum, have taken to mowing down civilians by the thousands.

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After transforming minority white-run Rhodesia into majority black-run Zimbabwe, he turned his country into one of the fastest-growing and most diversified economies south of the Sahara — for the first decade and a half of his rule. These men are living relics of a past that has been essentially obliterated. What changed in one generation was in part the world itself.

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Where meddling great powers once found dominoes that needed to be kept from falling, they suddenly saw no national interest at all. The exceptions, of course, were natural resources, which could be bought just as easily — and often at a nice discount — from various armed groups. Suddenly, all you needed to be powerful was a gun, and as it turned out, there were plenty to go around. AKs and cheap ammunition bled out of the collapsed Eastern Bloc and into the farthest corners of Africa.

It was the perfect opportunity for the charismatic and morally challenged. In Congo, there have been dozens of such men since , when rebels rose up against the leopard skin-capped dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, probably the most corrupt man in the history of this most corrupt continent. In the anarchy that flourished, rebel leaders carved out fiefdoms ludicrously rich in gold, diamonds, copper, tin, and other minerals. Among them were Laurent Nkunda, Bosco Ntaganda, Thomas Lubanga, a toxic hodgepodge of Mai Mai commanders, Rwandan genocidaires, and the madman leaders of a flamboyantly cruel group called the Rastas.

I met Nkunda in his mountain hideout in late after slogging hours up a muddy road lined with baby-faced soldiers. The chopstick-thin general waxed eloquent about the oppression of the minority Tutsi people he claimed to represent, but he bristled when I asked him about the warlord-like taxes he was imposing and all the women his soldiers have raped.

Ethnic tensions are a real piece of the conflict, together with disputes over land, refugees, and meddling neighbor countries. Congo today is home to a resource rebellion in which vague anti-government feelings become an excuse to steal public property. Soon, he broke every one.

Why the continent's conflicts never end.

He used his supposed magic powers and drugs to whip his followers into a frenzy and unleashed them on the very Acholi people he was supposed to be protecting. The LRA literally carved their way across the region, leaving a trail of hacked-off limbs and sawed-off ears. Their mouths were always open, and you could always see their teeth. When Uganda finally got its act together in the late s and cracked down, Kony and his men simply marched on.

Child soldiers are an inextricable part of these movements.

History of Africa through western eyes | World news | www.newyorkethnicfood.com

The LRA, for example, never seized territory; it seized children. Its ranks are filled with brainwashed boys and girls who ransack villages and pound newborn babies to death in wooden mortars. In Congo, as many as one-third of all combatants are under Since the new predatory style of African warfare is motivated and financed by crime, popular support is irrelevant to these rebels.

So abducting and manipulating children becomes the only way to sustain the organized banditry. And children have turned out to be ideal weapons: The racialized aspects of colonial military doctrine and practice would be an obvious place to look if one were to examine the role of violence in the context of British imperialism, yet the subject has somehow managed to hide in plain sight.

Largely eschewed by most imperial and global historians, colonial military history has till recently been the prerogative of parochial military histories. While the pervasive nature of colonial violence is commonly accepted, or at the very least acknowledged, within British and imperial history, the same cannot be said for the way in which military historians have dealt with the subject. Quite the opposite in fact; concurrent with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after , military historians and practitioners have increasingly invoked a narrative concerning British expertise and proficiency in counterinsurgency, with particular reference to the colonial experience of its armed forces.

Illustrated London News , 26 July Key among these lessons was presumably a principle of restraint and according to Daniel Whittingham, who has produced the most extensive study of Callwell: Rather than being seen as a historical source to be analyzed and historicized, Small Wars is, with a few caveats, being read today much as it was a century ago — as a manual for counterinsurgency.



The forms and functions of what came to be known as savage warfare were not simply shaped by the tactical necessities of asymmetric fighting in the peripheries of Empire. Colonial military violence and the development of new technologies, such as the expanding Dum-Dum bullet, were based on deeply encoded assumptions concerning the inherent difference of local opponents and were as such underwritten by both imperial ideologies and a specific body of colonial expertise.

In putting together Small Wars Callwell drew upon an extensive body of literature; in many ways he merely reiterated pre-existing ideas among colonial officers who had served in various campaigns throughout the British Empire. In two lectures given at Royal United Service Institution both used the concept of savage warfare to deduce some general principles based on personal experience in Africa. Kafirs are individually brave, and devoted to their chiefs, but like most wild animals, a few will often make a much better fight in proportion than larger numbers.

You may chase a herd of buffalo with impunity, as long as your horse will last, but put up two or three old bulls, and they will provide you with occupation. The lower races are impressionable. They are greatly influenced by a resolute bearing and by a determined course of action.

Africa’s Forever Wars

Throughout Small Wars , the repetitive insistence on not merely defeating but destroying the enemy assumes a cumulative force. More than simply a theory of warfare, Small Wars constitutes a unique record of how the British themselves at the turn of the century interpreted their military campaigns throughout the Empire.



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The following section focuses on what might otherwise be presumed to be a purely technical issue, namely the curious convergence of racist discourse, ballistic technology and medical knowledge in savage warfare. Only a year before Small Wars was first published, troubling reports emerged from the Chitral Campaign then under way on the North West Frontier of India. The relief-force sent in to lift the siege of Chitral, where a small British garrison was surrounded by tribesmen, was armed with the new Lee-Metford rifle, which was for the first time seeing extensive service.

The conceptualization of non-white enemies within the Empire moreover combined different discourses relating not only to racial and cultural difference, but also to medicine, anatomy and ballistics. In an article in the British Medical Journal , in which he described the use of expanding bullets on wild game, Surgeon-Major J.

Hamilton thus referred to the Mark II: This bullet was complained of as not having stopping power — that is, it passed through the limbs or body without causing immediate collapse unless some vital part or important bone was struck. In European warfare this was of comparatively little consequence, as civilised man is much more susceptible than savages.

Many of the British officers in India and elsewhere were avid hunters and when it came to the development of a replacement for the Mark II on the front-line of Empire, the most obvious source of inspiration was the types of ammunition used to shoot dangerous game such as tigers and rhinos. The bullet that was eventually adopted by the British army in , known as the Mark III or the Dum-Dum bullet after the Indian garrison where it was manufactured, was in fact so closely modelled on expanding bullets used for hunting that Tweedie complained about patent infringement.

By this time, the public gaze was fully focused on the performance of the new ammunition and Winston Churchill, who covered the campaign as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph , provided a gleeful account of effect of its effect: The Dum-Dum bullet, though not explosive, is expansive.

The original Lee-Metford bullet was a pellet of lead covered by a nickel case with an opening at the base. In the improved bullet this outer case has been drawn backward, making the hole in the base a little smaller and leaving the lead at the tip exposed. The result is a wonderful and from the technical point of view a beautiful machine. The most memorable event of the Tirah Campaign, which was till then the biggest operation on the Frontier, was inarguably the charge of the Gordon Highlanders at Dargai Heights, on 20 October It was thus something of a shock when details of the wounds he had sustained were later reported in the press: British ammunition had fallen into the hands of the tribesmen who had been using the Dum-Dum bullet against its own inventors: The Piper hero, Findlater, was wounded in the ankle with a Dum Dum bullet.

His bones were knocked to pulp, and it was found imperative to amputate the foot some distance above the wound. Although the public debate about the expanding bullets provided ample ammunition for criticism of the incumbent Government, there was never any real question of its perceived efficacy in savage warfare.

History of Africa through western eyes

When the Dum-Dum was discovered to be faulty, in that it did not always cause as much damage as intended, a new expanding projectile, the Mark IV, was developed — just in time for its baptism of fire in the Sudan Campaign in The campaign reached its bloody climax at the Battle of Omdurman on 2 September , when the forces of the Mahdi launched a mass assault over open ground towards the well-positioned ranks of British and Egyptian troops.

Considering the manner in which Churchill had previously described the effects of the Dum-Dum bullets during the Tirah Campaign, his evocative account of the Dervish charge at Omdurman revealed a growing sense of discomfort about the imperial war machine being unleashed: Battalion by battalion … the British division began to fire … until by 6. They fired steadily and stolidly, without hurry or excitement, for the enemy were far away and the officers careful.

Besides, the soldiers were interested in the work and took great pains. But presently the mere physical act became tedious. The tiny figures seen over the slide of the back-sight seemed a little larger, but also fewer at each successive volley.