'Africa really is a mess', he says to me, after I told him where I usually work as a journalist. He recently saw a film on some African country where one tribe had all but annihilated another one, was it about Hutus and Tutsis or something? Such arbitrary violence between former neighbours the Serb finds impossible to understand. It's not often that I find myself without words, but last night my Serbian companion's remark on this barbaric African tribal war managed to silence me. Especially because the
Rwandan genocide took place in the nineties, the same period as when
former Yugoslavia fell to pieces so violently. We're on a New Year's Eve party and guests in Belgrade, so I don't pursue the matter a lot further. But this morning - it's been snowing for hours - I muse upon this rather surprising conversation.
My love and I are spending the holidays with
friends in Belgrade, Serbia. Journalists who've been covering the Balkan for a couple of years and who will return to the Netherlands now. I tell our Dutch host about my peculiar talk with the Serb, and he confirms what I had already guessed: it was a good idea for me not to react with a cynical remark on the parallels between the Rwandan violence and that on the Balkan. Amongst themselves young Serbs might crack pungent jokes about the war, but of outsiders such behaviour is not particularly appreciated.
Not for the first time it strikes me how violence in Africa is portrayed differently from violence in Europe. War correspondents in the nineties often were sent from Rwanda to exploding Yugoslavia. In many a foreign reporter's autobiography from that period both conflicts appear. The difference in tone at times is fascinating. In
The Zanzibar Chest Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley describes how the sight of white war victims on the Balkan moved him so much more than the black victims he was used to seeing in Africa.
The possibility of straight identification makes being a witness to violence and injustice much more disturbing. That's why I'm allergic to the exotism that tends to dominate Western writing about Africa. The illusion that Africa is totally different and that 'the African' is impossible to understand, wrongly suggests that the continent doesn't have a great deal to do with our part of the world. And that leads to the fact that the violence and tens of thousands of civilian victims in for example the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Somalia have no urgency whatsoever on the Western agenda.
Quite a heavy subject to be contemplating on a hungover New Year's Day, I admit, but Belgrade this time seems to evoke only serious thoughts in me. It doesn't help either that after tropical Maputo this place is bloody cold and gloomy - which made us decide that next year we'll be spending New Year's Eve in a considerably warmer climate. Nevertheless I am entering 2008 blissfully: my new book contract and the plane tickets for my next trip - to Angola - are waiting for me back home... Happy New Year!
'Africa really is a mess', he says to me, after I told him where I usually work as a journalist. He recently saw a film on some African country where one tribe had all but annihilated another one, was it about Hutus and Tutsis or something? Such arbitrary violence between former neighbours the Serb finds impossible to understand. It's not often that I find myself without words, but last night my Serbian companion's remark on this barbaric African tribal war managed to silence me. Especially because the Rwandan genocide took place in the nineties, the same period as when former Yugoslavia fell to pieces so violently. We're on a New Year's Eve party and guests in Belgrade, so I don't pursue the matter a lot further. But this morning - it's been snowing for hours - I muse upon this rather surprising conversation.
