40 Quotes by Tim Butcher

I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than sovereignty. It is used by dictators and undemocratic regimes to fend off criticism of their rule and to conceal their own maladministration and corrupt pilfering. They cloak themselves in it to dismiss the right of any outsider to hold them to account.

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.

One of my best friends in Johannesburg took great pleasure in arguing that crossing the Congo today would be more dangerous than when Stanley did it in the 1870s. ‘At least the natives back then didn’t have Kalashnikovs,’ he smirked.

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.

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.

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.

Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of Lumumba’s teeth as souvenirs.

I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the chaos, the bad management.

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.