World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. . . . People lived in the open, perpetually soaked because it was always raining. They were living worse now than the blacks in the African quarter that abutted the airport, but they took it apathetically, with dismal resignation, not knowing whom to curse for their fate. . . .

  At about this time, someone brought news to the hotel that all the police had left!

  Now Luanda, of all the cities in the world, had no police. When you find yourself in such a situation, you feel strange. On the one hand everything seems light, loose, but on the other hand there is a certain uneasiness. The few whites who still wandered the city accepted the development with foreboding. Rumors circulated that the black quarters would descend upon the stone city. Everyone knew that the blacks lived in the most awful conditions, in the worst slums to be seen anywhere in Africa, in clay hovels like heaps of smashed cheap pottery covering the desert around Luanda. And here stood the luxurious stone city of glass and concrete—empty, no one’s. . . . But according to the terrified Portuguese who passed themselves off as experts on the native mentality, the blacks would burst in, swept up in a madness of destruction and hatred, drunk, drugged with secret herbs, demanding blood and revenge. Nothing could hold back that invasion. . . . Everyone is lost and it will be the most hideous death—stabbed to death in the streets, hacked with machetes on their own doorsteps.1

  Most of the Portuguese got out safely, leaving the country to disintegrate into a civil war of unspeakable brutality. According to the World Bank, the Portuguese took “with them the skills needed to run the economy; this lack of capacity has exacerbated Angola’s political and economic woes.”2 Although the United States was involved in Angola’s strife in the 1970s and 1980s, it lost interest when the Cold War ended.

  The question for the other countries of southern Africa—all of which still have starkly market-dominant white minorities—is whether they can avoid Angola’s fate. In Zimbabwe, millions of dollars worth of sugar, tobacco, and maize has gone up in flames as gangs of landless “war veterans” continue to invade, loot, and burn white-owned commercial farms. In Namibia, widely praised for its racial harmony, President Nujoma recently condemned his country’s white farmers for their imperialist exploitation. “We have the capacity to fight you,” he declared at another point. “We will get you. I warn those whites it is the first and last time I hear you insulting us.”

  Meanwhile, all hopes are on South Africa. Perhaps, inspired by Nelson Mandela’s inclusive vision, the country can beat the region’s bloody record. This was not the view expressed by the African National Congress (ANC) official who, stopped in November 1997 for driving while intoxicated, told the policeman: “When Mandela dies, we will kill you whites like flies.”3

  Market-Dominant Whites in Southern Africa

  In September 1997, I was invited by a young Afrikaner professor whom I’ll call Lucien to give some lectures at the University of South Africa, better known as UNISA, in Johannesburg. When I walked into UNISA’s lecture room I was taken aback. I had of course expected racial imbalance. Everyone knew that seventy years of white-minority rule would have lasting, nefarious effects. Still, I was not prepared to see an entire room filled with only white faces (and perhaps one person of South Asian descent). South Africa’s demographics are roughly the opposite of America’s: 77 percent of the population is black and 11 percent is white. In 1997, Mandela and his ANC party had been in power three years. Yet in one of the country’s major universities—at a lecture on democracy and race, no less—there was not a single black professor or student in the room.

  After the lecture I asked to see Soweto, one of the unimaginably squalid, teeming black “townships” that surround South Africa’s urban centers. (Soweto, whose name originated as an abbreviation for South Western Township, was the site of the famous 1976 police massacre.) My hosts looked stricken. This could probably, possibly, perhaps be arranged, they equivocated, mumbling something about the difficulty of finding cars and drivers. But for the moment something else had already been planned. Along with a few other professors, I was going to Lucien’s house near Pretoria, the country’s genteel capital, for lunch. Lucien’s wife and family were waiting.

  I’m not sure exactly what I expected Lucien’s home to be like, but I wasn’t close. Lucien’s “home” turned out to include a private safari park, covering not tens or hundreds, but thousands of acres of breathtakingly serene grassy slopes filled with waterfalls, streams, zebras, giraffes, hippo pools, ostriches, kingfishers, impala, kudu, gemsbok—seemingly every species of bird and antelope. Lucien’s wife Marina, a beautiful woman with some Italian ancestry, greeted us at the lodge with a rifle and three adorable daughters and gave us a private tour in a jeep she drove herself. We picnicked outside an 1800-era stone and timber-beamed farmhouse, which Marina’s brother operated as an inn. Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches and warthog pie—I thought they were kidding, but it was a specialty of the house—served to us by a black manservant in a white jacket.

  The really amazing thing was that, among whites in South Africa, Lucien and Marina didn’t count as wealthy. Lucien described himself to me as a struggling, middle-class descendant of Boer farmers. Land, yes, they had—he and his family never ceased being grateful for, and humbled by, the beauty of their surroundings. But truth be told, his professor’s salary was barely enough to cover his daughters’ tuition and music lessons. Like many Afrikaners, Lucien was not at all interested in business. That was the province of the so-called “English-speaking” whites, including most prominently the Oppenheimer family (of De Beers fame), who historically controlled the country’s most lucrative industries: gold, platinum, and diamond mining, finance, insurance, technology.

  South African whites fall into two general categories: Afrikaners, descendants of seventeenth-century Dutch and French Huguenot settlers, and “English speakers,” most of whom have British origins. The English speakers have more of a claim to being “entrepreneurial.” Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century the Afrikaners were a rural, economically backward underclass compared to the commercially dominant British.4 (This changed with the aggressive pro-Afrikaner affirmative action policies pursued by the Nationalist Party between 1948 and 1976). But the main reason that South Africa’s present-day whites are so overwhelmingly market-dominant, vis-à-vis the black majority, is not because of any superior “entrepreneurialism.” It is because they have a gargantuan economic head start.

  They have this head start because generations ago, their forebears turned the black majority around them into a mass pool of uneducated, disenfranchised, dehumanized labor held in check by a police state. For seventy years, while whites advanced and luxuriated—South Africa has fabulously engineered roads, first-class hospitals where some of the world’s first heart transplants were performed, and resplendent vineyards—the apartheid regime deliberately and systematically destroyed the human capital of the black majority. So-called Coloureds (people of mixed African and European descent) and Asians, together about 11 percent of the population, occupied an intermediate niche, above blacks. They too, however, were disenfranchised and barred from living and mingling with whites.

  Catching up will not be easy. Any way you look at them, the statistics are awful. Sixty-five percent of South African blacks today live in abject poverty. Eighty-eight percent have less than a high school education. A quarter over the age of twenty have had no formal schooling at all. In townships like Soweto, it is common for four thousand residents to share five toilets; electricity, where it exists, is generated with car batteries. There is almost no intermarriage between blacks and whites. AIDS is pandemic—in recent years, 40 percent of all adult deaths in South Africa have been AIDS-related—and strikes blacks extremely disproportionately. Seven years after the end of apartheid, whites still own 80 percent of South Africa’s
land and account for 90 percent of the country’s commercial agricultural production.

  Economic liberalization has produced some success stories. The case everyone knows is that of Cyril Ramaphosa, who went from trade union leader to chief negotiator for the ANC to media tycoon. A few former township dwellers have made it to Harvard. But while the hope is that in the long run free market policies will create thousands more such success stories, at the moment the unemployment rate among blacks is a frightening 48 percent. The townships are not shrinking but growing, at a rate of a million black Africans a year. As of August 2000, blacks controlled only 1.7 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s total capitalization. According to a recent report released by South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment Commission, almost all of South Africa’s mines, banks, and major corporations remain in white hands.5

  Like South Africa, both the neighboring countries of Namibia and Zimbabwe have a market-dominant white minority who, because of their huge and hugely-undeserved head starts, would under laissez-faire market conditions overwhelmingly economically dominate the black majorities around them.

  Unknown to most Americans, Namibia is one of the most mysteriously beautiful places in the world, from the wild Skeleton Coast in the north (vast stretches of foggy beach punctuated by eerie, rusting shipwrecks) to the brilliant red dunes of the Namib Desert to the immense Fish River Canyon in the south. Namibia was colonized by the Germans, who starting in the late 1890s turned the dozen or so major ethnic groups constituting black Namibia into forced labor—almost annihilating the particularly rebellious Herero tribe. Following the Second World War, Namibia was annexed by a belligerent South Africa. The country’s arable land was parceled into some six thousand lavish farms for white settlers. Members of the black majority were relegated to newly demarcated “tribal homelands,” where they received an offensively inferior education. Until the 1990s, 75 percent of Namibian children completed less than five years of schooling.

  Today Namibia’s population of about 1.6 million has one of the African continent’s highest GDPs—but also, according to a recent World Bank report, one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. While the great majority of black Namibians engage in communal subsistence farming, a tiny minority of roughly eighty thousand whites own the most productive land and control all the most lucrative and globally-oriented sectors of the economy. A decade after the end of apartheid, Namibia’s business community is still almost entirely white.6

  Meanwhile, South Africa’s Oppenheimer family has controlled Namibia’s diamond mines—the richest in the world—since 1908. (De Beers entered into a joint venture with Namibia’s current government in 1994). The Oppenheimers have been called “pioneers of globalization”; De Beers has offices all over the world and currently controls 60 percent of the global trade in rough diamonds. The conglomerate’s latest technological gambit is deep-sea diamond mining. “Special drill bits,” marvels Fortune’s Nicholas Stein, “23 feet in diameter, burrow into the ocean floor, releasing a mix of diamond and ore that is sucked through 300 feet of tubing to the surface, where machines separate the diamonds from the surrounding material and pack them, like chunky soup, into aluminum cans.”7

  In 2000, De Beers recovered roughly 570,000 carats of high quality diamonds off the Namibian coast. That same year, roughly 60 percent of Namibia’s black majority had no access to sanitary toilets. Namibia also has what may be the world’s largest uranium mine. It, however, is owned by a British company.8

  Zimbabwe, too, previously known as Rhodesia, is a country of glorious natural beauty. But you would never know it from our newspapers, which for decades have had nothing to report but human ugliness in Zimbabwe: from Ian Smith’s grotesquely oppressive white rule; to the guerrilla downing of two civilian airplanes in the late seventies, followed by the rape and hacking to death of crash survivors; to the recent confiscations and violence instigated by President Robert Mugabe.9

  The British initially colonized Zimbabwe in the late nineteenth century, and whites continued to control the country’s economy and politics until 1980. Unlike South Africa, where Afrikaners own most of the land, the majority of Zimbabwe’s forty-five hundred white farmers are of British and Irish ancestry. Only fifty or so are of Dutch heritage.

  For a variety of reasons, outside observers tend to regard the Anglo elite throughout southern Africa with greater sympathy than the descendants of the Boers. In South Africa the Afrikaners are viewed as the chief architects and perpetuators of apartheid, with many Anglo whites belonging to the opposition. In the case of Zimbabwe there is no doubt that Anglo whites were responsible for the worst oppressions. Yet the general impression, it seems, is that Zimbabwe’s white farmers, with their sun-leathered skin and khaki shorts, do not—despite their multiple servants and ownership of the country’s best land—live in the aloof luxury of their Afrikaner counterparts in South Africa. “With Zimbabwe’s whites,” mused a U.S. Justice Department official, “there seems to be more of a feel of a hard-working, dirt-under-the-fingernails, landowner class rather than a true idle upper or gentry class.” Along slightly different lines, London’s Guardian recently observed, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that “Zimbabwe’s white landowners, being of British and Irish ancestry, get a much better press than do Afrikaners. Those sandy-faced Boers, with faces out of rural scenes by obscure Flemish painters, never sat well with British liberals. But the white elite of Zimbabwe, 0.6% of the population owning 70% of the land, seem to be a jolly good bunch: nice foreheads, English names, English accents even.”10

  However affable, Zimbabwe’s whites did not come by their wealth legitimately. The original British settlers duped, killed, and expropriated their way to control of the country’s best land, leaving the indigenous majority to scrubby, marginal areas infested with the dreaded tsetse fly. In the 1930s white supremacy was legislated in the form of laws excluding black Africans from ownership of arable farmland, from skilled trades and professions, and from settling in “white areas,” including all towns and cities. The result was that Zimbabwe’s blacks were forced to work on white-owned farms, in white-owned mines, and in white-owned factories.

  Although political power finally changed hands in 1980, the hard fact of white market dominance remains. With their vastly superior education, land, technological skills, foreign investment connections, and corporate and horticultural experience, members of Zimbabwe’s tiny white minority have a century-old edge that makes them as market-dominant as the Chinese in Southeast Asia. Throughout the eighties and nineties, forty-five hundred white commercial farmers produced more food than a million black farmers. In Hippo Valley, for example, two large-scale sugar estates, both white-owned, together produced about five hundred thousand tons of sugar annually, half of it for export. As late as 2000, Zimbabwe’s whites, not even 1 percent of the population, essentially owned and ran the country’s modern, immensely productive, commercial-agriculture-based economy, thriving on global markets, employing over two million people, and fueling the country’s high growth rates.11 Predictably, this enormous racial concentration of wealth and market expertise has produced combustible political conditions, not just in Zimbabwe but in Namibia and South Africa as well.

  Kenyan Cowboys and “Capitalistic” Kikuyus

  Ever since Hugh Cholmondeley, England’s third baron of Delamare, arrived in 1897 after a two-thousand-mile camel ride from Somalia, Kenya also has had an inordinately prosperous, disproportionately skilled white minority. Today numbering only about five thousand, they live, completely segregated, in the beautiful Nairobi suburbs of Langata and Karen, named after the Danish settler Karen Blixen. They live in large houses with small windows (to keep out the sun) and magnificent, sprawling gardens filled with fuchsias and English roses and avenues of jacaranda and eucalyptus trees.

  Back in the days of Happy Valley—Nairobi’s legendary enclave of witty, winsome, morphine-and-orgy-addicted expatriate aristocrats—Kenya’s whites included luminaries like
Evelyn Waugh, Edward, Prince of Wales, and the American millionaire Northrop MacMillan. After the dashing Josslyn Hay, earl of Erroll, was found murdered on the floor of his Buick with a bullet in his head—sixty years later the mystery remains unsolved—Happy Valley was never the same again.12

  Today these aristocrats are mostly gone. Nowadays the most prominent white Kenyans are probably the Leakeys: a family of paleontologists and conservationists who first arrived in Kenya from Great Britain three generations ago. In the 1990s, Richard Leakey transformed the Kenya Wildlife Service, crucial for the country’s tourist trade, from a shabby, demoralized department into the pride of Kenya’s public sector, with its own efficient paramilitary force. Leakey’s recent foray into electoral politics, however—off-limits to whites since independence—prompted angry charges of “recolonization” from President Daniel Arap Moi and led to Leakey being whipped and beaten by Moi supporters. The two men have since made up. Astounding everybody, Moi appointed Leakey head of Kenya’s civil service in 1999, to help root out the “twin evils” of “corruption and inefficiency.” Most observers interpret Moi’s move as an attempt to court Western foreign aid donors, who have grown increasingly disgusted with Kenya’s kleptocratic politics.

  Meanwhile, the so-called “Kenyan Cowboys,” or “KCs,” try to maintain the legacy of Happy Valley. Fun-loving, decadent, bafflingly immature, these young men and women are stuck in a time warp, somewhere in the heyday of British colonialism. While the great majority of Kenya’s roughly 31 million blacks struggle to survive on less than two dollars a day—45 percent are unemployed—the KCs spend their days sipping tea and playing bridge, polo, or cricket. Weekends, they go on safari. In the summer they jet set to Europe. The rest of the time they frequent anachronistic private clubs like Nairobi’s Muthaiga Country Club, where their predecessors amused themselves in the 1930s by swapping wives, throwing gramophones out the window, or shooting bullets into the stuffed lion still displayed in the hallway. The KCs strive to carry on this tradition, mainly through drinking and such activities as putting “butter pats on the carnations on the dinner table and throw[ing] them up at the ceiling to see if they will stick.” Although discrimination against Africans and Asians officially ended in the 1960s, the Muthaiga Club’s membership remains predominantly white. All the staff are black.13