Tim Butcher > Quotes

“….So much crueller than any British colony, they say, so much more brutal towards the local Africans, so much more manipulative after begrudgingly granting independence. But the history of British colonialism in Africa, from Sierra Leone to Zimbabwe, Kenya to Botswana and else-where, is not fundamentally different from what Belgium did in the Congo. You can argue about degree, but both systems were predicated on the same assumption: that white outsiders knew best and Africans were to be treated not as partners, but as underlings. What the British did in Kenya to suppress the pro-independence mau-mau uprising in the 1950s, using murder, torture and mass imprisonment, was no more excusable than the mass arrests and political assassinations committed by Belgium when it was trying to cling on to the Congo. And the outside world's tolerance of a dictator in the Congo like Mobutu, whose corruption and venality were overlooked for strategic expedience, was no different from what happened in Zimbabwe, where the dictator Robert Mugabe was allowed to run his country and its people into the ground because Western powers gullibly accepted the way he presented himself as the only leader able to guarantee stability and an end to civil strife. Those sniffy British colonial types might not like to admit it, but the Congo represents the quintessence of the entire continent’s colonial experience. It might be extreme and it might be shocking, but what happened in the Congo is nothing but colonialism in its purest, basest form.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“And he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“the normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.” p141”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“The old man might have been drunk, but he was right. Outsiders have robbed and exploited the people of the Congo ever since the days of the first European and Arab slavers. The territory that Stanley staked in the name of Leopold witnessed what many regard as the first genocide of the modern era, when millions of Congolese were effectively worked to death trying to meet the colonialists’ almost insatiable demand for resources, most notably rubber. And since independence, foreign powers have toyed with the Congo, stripping its mineral assets and exploiting its strategic position, never mindful of the suffering inflicted on its people. And that really was the point. At every stage of its bloody history, outsiders have tended to treat Congolese as somehow sub-human, not worthy of the consideration they would expect for themselves. For progress to be made, outsiders must treat Congolese as equals and they could do worse than follow the example of an amazing white woman I discovered after we got back to Kalemie.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“When going on a journey it is not just the strength of a man’s legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“For those who think Africa’s problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt economics in the Congo. In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that the local economy grew or even stabilised.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“Stanley’s Congo expedition fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa. Before his trip, white outsiders had spent hundreds of years nibbling at Africa’s edges, claiming land around the coastline, but rarely venturing inland. Disease, hostile tribes and the lack of any clear commercial potential in Africa meant that hundreds of years after white explorers first circumnavigated its coastline, it was still referred to in mysterious terms as the Dark Continent, a source of slaves, ivory and other goods, but not a place white men thought worthy of colonisation. It was Leopold’s jostling for the Congo that forced other European powers to stake claims to Africa’s interior, and within two decades the entire continent had effectively been carved up by the white man. The modern history of Africa – decades of colonial exploitation and post-independence chaos – was begun by a Telegraph reporter battling down the Congo River.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“The normal laws of development are inverted here in the Congo. The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi’s cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa’s problems. Until the Congo’s economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“the most valuable asset stolen from the Congo was the sovereignty of its people.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“I was entertained with a song setting forth the delights of cannibalism, in which the flesh of the men was said to be good but that of women was bad and only eaten in time of scarcity; nevertheless, it was not to be despised when man meat was unobtainable.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“Slavery was a long-established practice among African tribes. Any raiding party that successfully attacked a neighbour would expect to return with slaves. But what made the Portuguese demand for slaves different was its scale. The simultaneous discovery of the Americas by European explorers created an apparently limitless demand for labour to work on the plantations of the New World, and in Europe’s African toeholds slavery was turned overnight from a cottage industry into a major, global concern.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.”
― Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

“We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low-budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“No longer do African regimes have to spend vast sums maintaining land lines and telephone exchanges, exposed to the perils of looting or climate damage. A few mobile-phone beacons, powered by solar batteries, cost a fraction of the old, fixed system. And the cash earned by mobile-phone systems is much easier to control. Gone are the days of relying on a failing mail system to send bills to users of landline systems to chase up payment for calls already made. Top-up cards have to be paid for in advance. Mobile-phone networks are among the most cash-rich and fast-growing businesses in today’s Africa. It is no wonder that the sons, nieces and confidants of Africa’s dictators vie for ownership of mobile-phone companies.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“Members of his crew knew dialects from further up the African coast, but they had never heard words like those spoken by these river people. Cao heard the name Kongo being repeated. Following the pattern of other African groups, they explained they were the BaKongo people and called their language KiKongo. Inland, they said, was the capital of their tribe, MbanzaKongo, where there lived a powerful leader or king, the ManiKongo.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: The Terrifying Journey through the World's Most Dangerous Country

“In the early 1960s, during the chaos after the end of Belgian colonial rule, the Congo was the world’s epicentre for mercenary activity. Soldiers of fortune came here to fight, at different times, for the government, against the government, against the United Nations, alongside the United Nations. Some of the mercenaries liked fighting so much they fought among themselves. There were those, like Che Guevara, who dressed up their involvement in ideological terms, arguing that it was part of an effort to spread socialist revolution, but many others (mostly, but not exclusively, white) had more venal motives – a passion for violence and loyalty that was transferable to whoever paid most.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga’s vast copper deposits that really powered the colony’s growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart

“I visited white-supremacist websites, designed by American racists, in which the Congo was held up as proof of the black man’s inferiority.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“Like many other African dictators, Mobutu won power by presenting himself as the only leader strong enough to unite the country.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo. It was Mobutu who robbed the country of its wealth, plundering national reserves on a scale economists have still not been able to gauge accurately. When he came to power, the Congo had a thriving mineral industry, reliant on copper from the south-eastern province of Katanga and diamonds from the central province of Kasai. When he was driven from office in May 1997 to die in exile a few months later, the country was broke and the output of the mines a fraction of what it had been fifty years earlier.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

“If you think you can solve Africa’s problems with money, then you are a bloody fool. You solve Africa’s problems by creating a system of justice that actually works and by making the leaders accountable for their actions.”
― Tim Butcher, Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart