New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Why is African
violence ignored?

Thursday, April 10th, 2003

A couple of days ago, I went to a lunch to celebrate Paul Theroux's new
book, "Dark Star Safari: Overland From Cairo to Cape Town."
"One of the epiphanies of my trip," he writes, "was the realization that
where the mode of life had changed significantly in the Africa I had
known, it had changed for the worse."

When Theroux and I talked, he observed that he had noticed something
very strange in The New York Times in the last couple of days - a short
Associated Press story about "966 victims [who] were killed in an April
3 assault on the Roman Catholic mission in Drodro and 14 surrounding
villages, 50 miles northeast of Bunia, the provincial capital [of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo]."

Theroux was disturbed because he had seen another story in the same
edition - twice as long, by my word count - in which great concern was
expressed about the declining gorilla and chimpanzee populations of
Central Africa; they are being killed off by the Ebola virus and
poaching.

To me, his observation is not about a greater concern for animals than
for people. It is about the double standard for oppressive behavior. In
other words, if those 966 people had been victims of a white colonial
regime as opposed to being victims of tribal warfare, it would be a
front-page story.

Black journalists, TransAfrica, the Congressional Black Caucus, the
NAACP, the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the Nation of Islam and
every leftist periodical and radio station would be screaming bloody
murder, and for good reason: It would be bloody murder. But it takes
some imagination to blame everything, yet again, on the white man as
opposed to the ever-ready demons of human nature. So such atrocities are
met with silence.

That silence was also exposed on Oprah Winfrey's March 12 show about the
female sex slaves of Africa who have been kidnapped, raped, mutilated,
made into erotic toys and slaughtered by the thousands by tribal
warriors and rebel units as brutal as any violent men in recorded
history.

Again, if those women were the victims of Europeans, you can be sure
American Negroes and their leftist compatriots would, correctly, scream
down the moon.

But it seems we have no loud concerns about what is going on in Sierra
Leone or Uganda, the two examples discussed on the Winfrey show with
Naomi Wolf, the writer and journalist, and Catherine Wiesner, head of
child protection programs for the International Rescue Committee in
Sierra Leone.

Wolf described what she saw in Sierra Leone as an unprecedented sexual
holocaust, then introduced Wiesner, whose team sends videotaped messages
between abducted girls and their families. The emotional tapes have led
to the release of 50 girls. "It's the most rewarding job I can think of
having," Wiesner said.

Such atrocities prove that we need a single standard, let the chips fall
where they may. Or we need to shut up and stop pretending we are so
concerned about the troubled fates of Africans.

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