Home > Work > A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
1 " To my eyes, the presence of a few families like these only brought into sharper relief the ambiguous morality of the evacuation. The marines were doing their job with typical efficiency and even dignity, but there was no escaping the ugly fact that America was swooping into this country once again to conduct a triage, neglecting precisely those who were least able to fend for themselves. Ordinary Liberians were being relegated to a category of subhuman existence whose intimate workings I had first learned about as a young reporter covering police headquarters in New York. There, I quickly deduced how certain murders were automatically classified as nickel-and-dime cases—‘jobs’ that required little follow-up by detectives, and by inference, by the press as well. It was another insidious form of triage, and it took only a few days on the assignment to understand that the ‘garbage’ cases almost invariably involved people of color "
― Howard W. French , A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
2 " The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State, Crawford Young and Thomas Turner’s seminal 1985 study of Zairian politics and history, which should have been a prerequisite for any reporter. "
3 " In little more than a generation, the Belgian king’s yearning for empire and fortune may have killed ten million people in the territory—half of Congo’s population, or more than the entire death toll in World War I. Even today Japan continues to face international ostracism for its brutal imperial conduct in China, Korea and other parts of Asia in the 1930s, which followed Leopold’s Congo holocaust by a mere two decades. And yet there has never been any remorse in the West over the fallout from Europe’s drive to dominate Africa. Indeed, few have heard these grim facts. "
