Africa burning

Over at Foreign Policy Jeffery Gettlemen looks at Africa's slide into utter barbarism where warfare is giving way to unending banditry. The picture Mr Gettleman paints is harrowing, but it gets a bit odd when he waxes nostalgic about the "liberation" leaders of the last century who, in Mr Gettleman's words, had "class" and puzzles at how their sterling example gave way to the current Grand Guignol.

The answer isn't all that puzzling. The reason for this barbarism is obvious in hindsight. This is what happens when you have idealistic nitwits like Mr Harold McMillian bleating on about "winds of change," walking away from their responsibilities in a fug of pointless post-colonial guilt, and imaging that all you have to do to turn a colony into a state is to build a parliament building. It also doesn't help when you leave in place all the paternalistic mechanisms meant to protect a backward people that in the wrong hands become the instruments of oppression. Small wonder that instead of leaping into the 21st century Africa can barely hold on to the 18th. "Liberators" like Mugabe weren't the spiritual descendants of George Washington, but rather a collection of thugs, tyrants, murderers, thieves, and fanatics whose only interest was their own prosperity and lust for power. The insanity of cheerfully turning over an entire continent of long-suffering people to these psychopaths staggers the imagination.

Pace Mr Gettleman, what we see here is not a failing to live up to the "liberators'" shining example, but the inevitable fruit of their bloody labours.