About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

52 Comments

  1. Granger: I’m not looking to bring back slavery. Not because it is some moral wrong, but because of economics. U are right. I say leave the turd world to themselves, let them stew in their shit. Of course, EC and his ilk would not have that! No sir! Have to feed them, breed them and import them.

  2. @Wayne
    I don’t want slavery, because I want to live around my own kind.

    I just found these videos of research robots on Youtube. I give it 10 years at most, before you see them in the streets.

    Boston Dynamic’s PETMAN humanoid robot

    Military Research – Terminators: Human-Like Robots

  3. All life is a struggle for resources. As much as the anti-whites hate to admit it, Weetern civilization has benefitted the majority of people whereever it was introduced. Western civilization=abundance. Egalitarianism is unnatural and is skewing the natural order of things.

  4. The egalitarian fruitcake fanatics need to decide whether it is better to have “freedom and democrazy” or starvation and blight. Based on what I saw in Haiti, they are not to enchanted with all the freedom.

  5. “America was 90% White in 1965 and like all White countries, was opened without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Nativist in 1860: “America was 90% Anglo-Saxon Protestant in 1840 and was flooded by Irish Catholic heathens without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Nativist in 1920: “America was 90% Celtic-Teutonic in 1890 and was flooded by Southern and Eastern Europeans without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Immigration has always been central to [non-Southern] American history, with the exception of 1924 to 1965. This is not some form of “genocide”. America started out with a core group of British settlers, and our immigrant stocks have been coming from places progressively far from Britain ever since.

  6. “Western civilization=abundance”

    Yes. Whites are the only people on Earth, that solved the problem of starvation.

    We have given the world so much technology and you would think they would be thankful, but instead they chant “White Privilege”.

  7. “The egalitarian fruitcake fanatics need to decide whether it is better to have “freedom and democrazy” or starvation…”

    Why would liberty necessarily lead to starvation?

  8. @E C
    “Immigration has always been central to [non-Southern] American history,”

    Wrong again anti-White. Whites only immigration up until 1965 and it still says so in the preamble to the Constitution.

    UN Law forbids Genocide which you are arguing for and it is global law.

    Why are you justifying Genocide for my people in the United States? Do you hate us?

  9. @E C
    You aren’t lobbying to change Asian countries into non-Asian countries.

    You aren’t lobbying to change Black countries into non-Black countries.

    You are only trying to turn White countries into non-White countries.

    I would feel very uncomfortable making arguments in public, that lead to the genocide of an identifiable group.

  10. “He has no clue, because they don’t teach real history in “anti-racist” school.”

    I did learn about the Haitian Revolution in high school.

    “The answer is the Blacks killed every White man, woman and child in Haiti.”

    Haitian slavery was far more brutal than Southern slavery. When a group is oppressed so viciously for so long, the backlash is bound to be terrible, like a suddenly released compressed spring. The atrocities against white women, children, and innocent men are horrendous and unjustifiable, but blacks are far from the only race to commit such atrocities throughout history. The French revolutionaries, for example, killed off their entire aristocratic class. The Russian revolutionaries killed off entire aristocratic families, including the tsar’s family. More recently, the Serbs massacred Bosnian Muslims as backlash against the historical Bosnian Muslim collaboration with the Ottomans who oppressed the Serbs for hundreds of years.

    “Make Whites a minority in all of our own countries and you get what happened in Haiti.”

    The current crop of immigrants is less violent than the European immigrants who came to New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries. If those immigrants did not end up committing genocide against old stock Americans, why would the current group do so?

  11. “Whites only immigration up until 1965 and it still says so in the preamble to the Constitution.”

    Flat-out untrue.

    Neither the Preamble, nor any other part of the Constitution, mentions any specific race by name, other than “Indians not taxed”.

    Until 1882, immigration to America was freely allowed from all parts of the world. In fact, during the California Gold Rush, 10% of the settlers were Asian. Immigrants also freely arrived from all over Latin America.

    In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed barring immigration from China. However, immigration from other countries was still freely allowed, and significant numbers of non-Chinese Asian immigrants (especially Japanese and Filipinos) arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

    The late 1910s and early 1920s is the first time when America moved to a whites-only immigration policy. In 1917, immigration from Asia was banned, and finally in 1924, immigration from outside Europe was banned immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was severely restricted.

    Therefore, the only time when we have had a whites-only immigration policy was from 1924-1965.

  12. “You are only trying to turn White countries into non-White countries.”

    I am definitely not advocating for non-European immigration into Europe.

  13. You claimed one third of Jews died in the holo-hoax, and that that explains Jewish support for egalitarianism. You are quite ignorant.

  14. “When a group is oppressed so viciously for so long, the backlash is bound to be terrible, like a suddenly released compressed spring.”

    You should mull over your own words very carefully, anti-White.

  15. E C says:

    Why would liberty necessarily lead to starvation?

    It’s a perplexing question, which has newly-freed (and starving) African nations scratching their collective heads. My own theory is that it’s not the liberty, but those evil hotel buildings that create the conditions of crime and poverty that bedevil their occupants. They need to be demolished.

    Thanks for those pictures, Hunter. I first saw these years ago. I’ve been looking for them.

    To hell with the damned kaffirs, wherever they are. EC and Silverstein seem to think that White people are blameworthy for not leaving adequate infrastructure or “pro-people social systems”, whatever the hell that means, when they left Africa. So explain this to me:

    Ghana and Malaya were both British colonies, with similar colonial administrations, economies, similar infrastructure, educational systems, resources, size, climate… both given independence within months of each other. Compare them today. What happened? Did Ghana also lose some god-like figure like Patrice Lumumba who would have surely saved it from the fate of every other African state?

    We owe them nothing. Quarantine Africa.

  16. “Why would liberty necessarily lead to starvation?”

    If people with an average IQ of 70 are in charge they will not be able to maintain what more advanced people created.

  17. “Therefore, the only time when we have had a whites-only immigration policy was from 1924-1965.”

    You hardly needed it before then. Outside of Asians on the West coast there was very little non-white immigration.

    Any non-white immigration should at least be conditioned on the sending nation opening up to an equal amount of white immigration. But for some strange reason, Mexico, Korea and even Haiti like their own nations for their own people.

  18. “Haitian slavery was far more brutal than Southern slavery. When a group is oppressed so viciously for so long, the backlash is bound to be terrible.”

    I don’t know that they were oppressed. Slavery has always existed in black Africa and probably always will. White slave owners treated black slaves better than black slave owners. And black slaves undoubtedly benefited from white food, shelter and medicine.

  19. “The late 1910s and early 1920s is the first time when America moved to a whites-only immigration policy”

    The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to whites. What would be the point of moving here without citizenship?

  20. EC and Silverstein seem to think that White people are blameworthy for not leaving adequate infrastructure

    Where did I say anything like that?

    Thanks for those pictures, Hunter. I first saw these years ago. I’ve been looking for them.

    Why don’t you look at the pictures I linked to, Analog?

    I’ll hazard a guess. Because in the twisted mind of people like Analog unless you say the very, very, very worst things about Africans that can possibly be said it means something like you want to flood white countries with blacks, and you want whites to mix with blacks until there are no whites left, and you want whites to suffer all the way down because, you know, you’re ‘anti-white’ and all that.

    I can just imagine the ‘tards over at Whitaker’s forum, if they were to read this, high-fiving each other with claims that “that’s exactly what we want these anti-whites to say!!!” yeehaw. Well, enjoy the euphoria while it lasts. Because there’s nothing anti-white about me at all and the moderate stance I take offers a vastly more attractive model of racial reform than what WNs and nutzi lunatics propose. It won’t satisfy WNs and nutzis, but I don’t care what WNs and nutzis want. They won’t be given a say if I can help it. And the beauty of it is that all it takes to beat them is let to let them talk. They always end up talking themselves into irrelevance with their weirdo loonie obsessions that mystify normal people.

  21. “America was 90% White in 1965 and like all White countries, was opened without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Nativist in 1860: “America was 90% Anglo-Saxon Protestant in 1840 and was flooded by Irish Catholic heathens without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Nativist in 1920: “America was 90% Celtic-Teutonic in 1890 and was flooded by Southern and Eastern Europeans without a vote or discussion allowed.”

    Citing that this has happened 2 previous times doesn’t change the fact that when the people actually voted on mass immigration, they shut it down, and that shutting it down proved beneficial to those very same people.

    Nor is the implication that everyone assimilated true either, the most important part of shutting down mass immigration was that those who left were not replaced by new arrivals.

    Lastly, there was an actual frontier back then, bringing a new person here didn’t necessarily mean displacing someone else. That has changed.

  22. Forced labor was used to extract rubber, ivory, copper and other natural resources to build up the economy.

    “To build up the economy.” You’ll have to tell us more about that forced labor.

  23. “The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to whites. What would be the point of moving here without citizenship?”

    I am glad you brought this up.

    First, even today, large numbers of immigrants live out their entire lives in America without ever acquiring citizenship. There are many reasons to come to America other than citizenship for oneself: liberty, economic opportunity, better lives for one’s children, etc.

    Secondly, what has always distinguished America from Europe was our policy of birthright citizenship. Right from the time of the Revolution, the vast majority of states recognized jus soli, instead of the European jus sanguinis. The 14th Amendment finally codified the jus soli concept into the Constitution. This was a critical motivating factor even for immigrants who knew that they themselves would never become citizens, but their children born in America would.

    Thirdly, the definition of “white” was different in our early history. Mexicans, as the vast majority of Latinos in general, were considered “white” at that time and were freely naturalized.

    In 1870, black immigrants were given naturalization rights.

    This left only Asian immigrants, who had to wait until 1952 to acquire naturalization rights.

  24. more of the same says:
    June 26, 2013 at 2:26 pm
    “What are “nutzis”?”

    Nutzi, racist, etc are just one of several hate words used by so called “anti-racists”, against any White person that says no, to their core demand for White Genocide.

  25. Re: E C

    1.) First, it wasn’t until 1952 that “whiteness” was finally eliminated as the basis of U.S. citizenship, and before that time Asian immigrants were denied citizenship and the eligibility of groups like Syrians was contested in court cases.

    2.) Second, neither blacks or Indians were born as citizens of the states. There were only five states – Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – that recognized black citizenship before the War Between the States. Even after the 14th Amendment, American Indians didn’t become U.S. citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

    3.) The 14th Amendment had to be passed in order to overturn the Dred Scott decision which had ruled that blacks and non-Whites could never be American citizens.

    4.) If that were true, then the Tejanos in Texas and the Mexicans in New Mexico would have been U.S. citizens, but New Mexico was denied statehood until the 20th century because of its Hispanic population and the Tejanos were disenfranchised in Texas under state law.

  26. Re: E C

    The purpose of the Constitution was to create the structure of U.S. government and define its powers, not to define the foundations of our culture which didn’t come under sustained assault until decades later.

  27. E C says:
    June 26, 2013 at 7:57 pm

    “First, even today, large numbers of immigrants live out their entire lives in America without ever acquiring citizenship. There are many reasons to come to America other than citizenship for oneself: liberty, economic opportunity, better lives for one’s children, etc.

    Secondly, what has always distinguished America from Europe was our policy of birthright citizenship. Right from the time of the Revolution, the vast majority of states recognized jus soli, instead of the European jus sanguinis. The 14th Amendment finally codified the jus soli concept into the Constitution. This was a critical motivating factor even for immigrants who knew that they themselves would never become citizens, but their children born in America would.

    Thirdly, the definition of “white” was different in our early history. Mexicans, as the vast majority of Latinos in general, were considered “white” at that time and were freely naturalized.

    In 1870, black immigrants were given naturalization rights.

    This left only Asian immigrants, who had to wait until 1952 to acquire naturalization rights.”

    The above is his justification for the Genocide of Whites in America. Are you convinced? 🙂

    And when he used what “white”, what he is saying is White people do not exist and hence have no human rights at all.

    It is a calculated form of dehumanization so called “anti-racists”, use only against White people. Dehumanization is one of the 8 Stages of Genocide listed at the Genocide Watch website.

    This is the true nature of “anti-racism”: Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White.

  28. And while the “anti-racists” say with a straight face, ‘There is no such thing as White people’, they target each and every White country and ONLY White countries for this massive immigration and forced integration.

    Just another coincidence!

  29. Re: E C

    1.) Sugar was a far more labor intensive crop than tobacco or cotton. Haitian slavery wasn’t anymore brutal than slavery in Cuba or Jamaica or Barbados or Guyana and elsewhere in the Caribbean and South America.

    2.) The Haitian Revolution was a race war. The same cannot be said of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. In the aftermath of the war, Jean-Jacques Dessalines exterminated the remnants of the French population in Haiti.

    3.) Black crime hasn’t changed much over the last two hundred years. It was already a problem in Northern cities by the antebellum era.

  30. Re: E C

    1.) The fact that no specific tribes were targeted for extermination by King Leopold II falsifies your claim that there was a “genocide” in the Congo Free State.

    2.) The river basin was not well known at the time. Until the late 19th century, Europeans had never explored the Congo Basin beyond the Yellala cataract. David Livington and Henry Morton Stanley (the former died in Africa) were among the first to explore the region and when the Congo Free State most of the interior was still a mystery to the Royal Geographic Society.

    3.) I don’t need a link to read about the Congo. I have most of the books in the English language that have been written about that country either on my bookshelf or in my Kindle.

    4.) We know that Lumumba would have made the Congo a Soviet satellite like Ethiopia under Mengistu or Tanzania under Julius Nyerere or the Republic of Congo directly across the Congo River in Brazzaville. If you search the OD archives, you will find a review of the movie Lumumba.

    5.) It’s true that Congo could easily be one of the richest countries in the world. The Congo River could produce enough hydroelectric power to light up most of the African continent. There is enough arable farmland in the Congo to feed all of Africa. Katanga alone has more mineral wealth than Western Europe.

    6.) In the 1950s, the Belgian Congo was well on the way to realizing its potential. The country was pacified. There were hospitals, schools, and roads. There was employment in agriculture and manufacturing. There was a judicial system. The uranium that was used in the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan had been mined in Congo.

    7.) Congo had an infrastructure that had been built under the Belgians.

    8.) Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola – like the Democratic Republic of Congo – have all had their oil fields developed by Western corporations and have all suffered tremendously from civil wars and incompetent governments.

  31. EC: Answer–because all peoples of the world cannot handle the responsibility of freedom and actually have their own definitions of it. Why? Because races exist and are substantially different physically and mentally. Why? Because each adapted survival traits specific to their environments? Why? Because nature and or Nature’s God made it so, God-hater!

  32. “First, it wasn’t until 1952 that “whiteness” was finally eliminated as the basis of U.S. citizenship, and before that time Asian immigrants were denied citizenship and the eligibility of groups like Syrians was contested in court cases.”

    There was never any racial basis of US citizenship. There was a racial basis for US naturalization, which did not apply to people born in the US.

    Even before 1952, blacks had a right to naturalization. Black immigrants were granted that right in 1870. The only group of immigrants affected by the 1952 law was Asians.

    “Second, neither blacks or Indians were born as citizens of the states. There were only five states – Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – that recognized black citizenship before the War Between the States. Even after the 14th Amendment, American Indians didn’t become U.S. citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.”

    American Indians who were members of tribes living on tribal land obviously were not citizens, because they did not desire it and wanted autonomous status instead. They were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

    Blacks received full citizenship after the Civil War as a result of the 14th Amendment.

    As far as I know, no state had any restrictions on Asian or Latino voting rights (with the exception of Texas) even before the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed.

    “Tejanos were disenfranchised in Texas under state law”

    Then Texas was probably the only state to ever disenfranchise Latinos. The federal government considered Latinos to be white then, as evidenced by their categorization as “white” in the 19th Century Census results.

    It is also important to remember that Tejanos and New Mexico Hispanics were not immigrants to the United States. Their status was rather similar to that of the Indians.

    • Re: E C

      1.) The Dred Scott decision reads as follows:

      http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/case.html

      “A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a “citizen” within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States.

      When the Constitution was adopted, they were not regarded in any of the States as members of the community which constituted the State, and were not numbered among its “people or citizens.” Consequently, the special rights and immunities guarantied to citizens do not apply to them. And not being “citizens” within the meaning of the Constitution, they are not entitled to sue in that character in a court of the United States, and the Circuit Court has not jurisdiction in such a suit.

      They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”

      2.) It is true that blacks acquired U.S. citizenship under the 14th Amendment. They had acquired U.S. citizenship even earlier under the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but Congress had to pass the 14th Amendment because of its questionable constitutionality under Dred Scott.

      3.) From 1878 until 1952, the eligibility of non-Whites to become U.S. citizens was dealt with in the racial classification cases:

      http://www.modelminority.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=284:how-the-us-courts-established-the-white-race-&catid=42:law&Itemid=56

      “In its first words on the subject of citizenship, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to “white persons.” Though the requirements for naturalization changed frequently thereafter, this racial prerequisite to citizenship endured for over a century and a half, remaining in force until 1952. From the earliest years of this country until just a generation ago, being a “white person” was a condition for acquiring citizenship.”

      4.) The only two states which had a large Hispanic population were Texas and New Mexico.

  33. Re: Hunter

    From your review of “Lumumba”:

    “Lumumba was assassinated by a CIA and Belgian backed execution squad. President Dwight Eisenhower had personally ordered his execution and Allen Dulles funneled money to Lumumba’s political rivals to have it arranged.”

    Do you acknowledge that this event, along with United States support for Mobutu later on, contributed at least partially to the Congo’s sorry state today?

    • “Do you acknowledge that this event, along with United States support for Mobutu later on, contributed at least partially to the Congo’s sorry state today?”

      No, I don’t.

      The proof of this is the Republic of Congo directly across the Congo River which was a Soviet satellite. See also Guinea, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozambique. What’s more, the Congo was plunged into chaos under Lumumba’s inept leadership, and order wasn’t restored until several years later. Mobutu was a corrupt leader, but so was his successor Joseph Kabila, and so is Kabila’s son.

      The U.S. intervened in numerous other countries during the Cold War: France, Italy, Chile, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, and South Vietnam to name a few. Unlike Vietnam or South Korea or Italy or Germany, the Democratic Republic of Congo is the way it is today because of the Congolese people.

  34. The Republic of the Congo is one of the richest countries in Africa today. It has a GDP per capita on par with Ukraine, and its Human Development Index is roughly on par with India.

    The Democratic Republic of the Congo, despite having much more resource wealth than the Republic, has one-tenth of the Republic’s GDP per capita and has the world’s lowest ranking on the Human Development Index.

  35. Nutzi, racist, etc are just one of several hate words used by so called “anti-racists”, against any White person that says no, to their core demand for White Genocide.

    Very often true, but not necessarily so.

    I use ‘nutzi’ as shorthand for ‘a white man whose racial passion vastly exceeds his racial prowess.’ Sadly, such people abound.

  36. “In its first words on the subject of citizenship, Congress in 1790 restricted naturalization to “white persons.” Though the requirements for naturalization changed frequently thereafter, this racial prerequisite to citizenship endured for over a century and a half, remaining in force until 1952. From the earliest years of this country until just a generation ago, being a “white person” was a condition for acquiring citizenship.”

    This information is inaccurate.

    Once again, the racial prerequisite was for naturalization, not citizenship by birth.

    Also, the Naturalization Act of 1870 granted naturalization rights to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent”.

  37. “The only two states which had a large Hispanic population were Texas and New Mexico.”

    California? And not just the original rancheros. California received more Latin American immigrants during the 1850s than any other state in the country.

  38. The Republic of the Congo is one of the richest countries in Africa today. It has a GDP per capita on par with Ukraine,

    The Republic of Congo owes its wealth overwhelmingly to oil resources. DRC possesses nothing comparable.

    Botswana is much wealthier still than Ukraine. It’s a genuine African Success Story. Both countries are Google Maps Street View. Take a tour of their towns and tell me which you think looks more developed. Such visual evidence isn’t everything, of course, but it does give one pause that such indisputable wealth has not translated into living conditions much different to the slums of S. Africa for large chunks of the populace.

    and its Human Development Index is roughly on par with India.

    In other words, nothing to brag about at all.

  39. EC, that the American revolution based itself so much on the concept of freedom yet was unwilling to grant anything like that freedom to the Africans that came under American jurisdiction demonstrates clearly that the project was a racialist/nationalist conception.

  40. Re: E C

    Like Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and Angola, the Republic of Congo is a hellhole whose oil wealth has been tapped by Western companies:

    http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/congo/overview

    “The economy remains heavily dominated by the oil sector, which accounted for approximately 70% of GDP in Congo in 2011, over 84% of exports, and 79% of public revenue.”

    The Democratic Republic of Congo was ripped apart during the Congo Wars of the 1960s, 1990s, and 2000s. The wars started when Lumumba was president. While Mobutu was corrupt, his reign was relatively peaceful.

  41. The Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses 80% of the world’s supply of coltan, a mineral essential in manufacturing capacitors for cell phones and computers. Its total untapped mineral wealth is estimated to be higher than $24 trillion. Although its oil reserves are largely unexplored, some studies estimate that DROC has the second highest level of oil wealth in Africa, after Angola.

    As for the Republic of the Congo: it is not a panacea. It is, however, far better off than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  42. “EC, that the American revolution based itself so much on the concept of freedom yet was unwilling to grant anything like that freedom to the Africans that came under American jurisdiction demonstrates clearly that the project was a racialist/nationalist conception.”

    The treatment of blacks in the early years of America was unfortunately the great exception to the American ideal. The passage of the 13th Amendment marked the point when we truly accomplished the ideal stated in the Declaration of Independence.

    In my opinion, December 6, 1865 should be recognized as the Second Independence Day.

  43. It’s a shame that such a potentially rich country – one which was peaceful and was being rapidly developed under white supremacy by the Belgians until 1960 – has been allowed to descend to this level:

    This excerpt comes from Michela Wrong’s book on the Congo:

    “The minerals are undoubtedly there, in concentrations high enough to make a metals analyst weep. But the rusting factories scarring Katanga’s landscape, the abandoned yards, the stilled conveyor belts and dour expressions of the few technicians still at work are more accurate indicators of the province’s prospects than any number of statistics-laden company reports …

    There has never been a better example of the curse of natural riches than Congo. The mineral belt that fans out from Katanga’s dry savannah into neighbouring Zambia contains copper and zinc in concentrations rival nations can only dream about and enough cobalt to corner the global market …

    The Belgians left behind a supporting network, an empire made up of mines, refineries, hydroelectric installations, factories producing anything from cement to explosives and sulphuric acid; town houses for its employees; farms to produce food – even mills to grind flour – for the country’s biggest single workforce: all the elements required to ensure Katanga was one of the world’s most efficient copper-producing units. …

    In the healthy years of the early 1970s, with copper output hovering at between 400,000 and 470,000 tonnes a year and production of the far more valuable cobalt at between 11,000 and 15,000 tonnes, Gécamines alone could be counted on for annual revenues of between $700 million and $900 million. Until the world copper price collapsed in 1974, it must have seemed like a bottomless Horn of Plenty waiting to be emptied time and again …

    According to an indictment drawn up by the public prosecutor’s office, the former head of Gécamines’ commercial subsidiary unilaterally boosted his monthly travel allowance from an already hefty $15,000 to $30,000 during his final years in office, granting himself an additional $1,000 for every day spent off base. Setting aside several ‘unjustified withdrawals’ which ran into hundreds of thousands of dollars, this system allowed him to pocket 15.5 million Belgian francs in 1991 and 10 million in 1992.

    Gécamines’ huge network of associated activities also opened it up to abuse. The company acted as a guarantor for state debts that went unmet, picked up hospital and hotel bills for its executives’ relatives and sent its private planes shuttling across the country at their request. No wonder than by 1990 Zairean copper – so pure, so theoretically easy to produce – actually cost nearly twice as much to produce as its foreign equivalent.

    With the firm’s receipts rarely making their way back to Katanga, there were no funds left to maintain and renew the infrastructure left behind by the Belgians. Much of the equipment dated back to pre-independence and was constantly either out of service or being repaired. In the general climate of what is known in French as ‘je m’en-foutisme’ (‘I don’t give a damn’), managers began cutting corners. In the rush to get at the ore, underground tunnels were hurriedly excavated, their roofs held up with a minimum of props. In September 1990, the inevitable happened. The mine of Kamoto caved in, eliminating more than a third of Gécamines’ output at a stroke.

    The blows came in quick succession: a round of pillaging, echoing the anarchy breaking out up north; the departure of the company’s experienced Katanga workforce, expelled from Katanga in a bout of ethnic cleansing whipped up by the local governor and condoned by Mobutu, who wanted to send a warning signal to Tshisekedi, a Luba from Kasai, of how bad things could get for his tribespeople; and yet another orgy of looting.

    But by then the company had already been crippled by a series of liberalisation measures that launched a new smuggling industry by making it legally possible for any Zairean to set himself up as a copper or cobalt dealer. ‘Suddenly, everyone became a copper miner,’ a white haired Belgian manager, remnant of an expatriate workforce that once numbered 3,000, told me on a visit to Likasi’s copper installations. ‘The whole population began to steal from us.’

    He had been in Katanga since 1960 and was clearly a member of that school too old to learn new codes of behaviour with the Africans who were once his country’s subjects. Sitting in his dark office, he barked at his assistant to bring tea and expanded on the uselessness of post-independence government, which, he said, had not built a single house in the nearby town since the colonial power left. ‘Everything here, the roads, the factories, the schools, was left by the Belgians.’ As for the workforce that replaced departing white technicians, his racist contempt ran so deep it was no longer even tinged with anger. ‘Give an African a job and he wants three wives, a nice suit and his status in society,’ he said. ‘But there’s never anything to go with it. No commitment to the job in hand. Most of our workers have seven or eight children and they all have to be provided for. It’s each for himself and devil take the hindemost.’

    The corrosive scorn seemed a little more understandable when you considered what it must have been like sitting in that gloomy office year after year, witnessing the systematic cannibalization of Gécamines by its own workforce. Having watched Mobutu and his cronies thoroughly milk the system, officials in Katanga saw little reason to hold back in the canter to self-enrichment. Lorries loaded with cobalt concentrate, officially labelled as ‘tailings’, were dispatched for sale across the nearby Zambian border with the benevolent collusion of local customs men. Vital equipment and spare parts were removed, peddled to operators in Zambia and South Africa who would then cheekily sell them back to Gécamines, the original owners. As one engineer acknowledged: ‘We bought them twice.’ But for this man the most outrageous incident came the day staff turning up for work discovered that 30 kilometers of high voltage cable supplying the plants had been snipped from the giant pylons during the night, presumably to be sold as scrap. ‘The thieves had to switch off the power plant to do it, so the security forces must have been involved. It’s not a job a small operator could have carried out.’ By 1994 around a third of Gécamines production was being smuggled south of the border…

    Less obvious, perhaps, because there was little left to steal. It took over thirty years, but by 1994, when copper production had sunk to 30,000 tonnes a year – less than a fifteenth of what it had been at its height – and cobalt output was 3,000 tonnes, the Horn of Plenty had effectively run dry. Revenue was zero. ‘Gecamines,’ in the words of Daniel Simpson, former US ambassador to Kinshasa, ‘was as clean as a whistle. Mobutu had not only killed the goose that laid the golden eggs, he’d eaten the carcass and made fat from the feathers.’ Gécamines was placed on what its chief executives described as ‘a survival program’ and relieved of its crippling tax obligations. With the exception of the occasional quick-in, quick-out joint venture that barely scratched the surface of Gécamines potential or its problems, the concession ground to a virtual standstill, with skeleton crews keeping the facilities ticking over in expectation of some far-off resurrection. In order to restore Gécamines production to about 300,000 tonnes a year, the World Bank had estimated, any investor would have to assume debt in excess of $2 billion and invest another $1 billion.

    Driving from one site to another, that figure seemed almost low. This was a landscape of quiet yards, empty skips, mysteriously dripping ceilings; plant after plant that looked as though its sole purpose was to breed rust in industrial quantities. I won’t forget the vision of an overalled worker straddling a grating, pounding slowly with a hammer at a rock too larger to through a giant sieve. It was a job for an industrial crusher, but the crusher was out of order, so with a colleague holding the end of a rope wrapped around his waist to prevent a fall, he was reverting to the oldest mining technique known to man. Watching him sweating, I was reminded of a job told south across the border. ‘What did Zambia use before candles came along?’ it goes. ‘Electricity.

  44. The Democratic Republic of the Congo possesses 80% of the world’s supply of coltan, a mineral essential in manufacturing capacitors for cell phones and computers. Its total untapped mineral wealth is estimated to be higher than $24 trillion. Although its oil reserves are largely unexplored, some studies estimate that DROC has the second highest level of oil wealth in Africa, after Angola.

    Coltan is important for the element tantalum. Tantalum production was around 1000 metric tons a year over the last ten years. Let’s double production, attribute 100% of it to DRC and assume a price of $500,000 per ton. That amounts to $1 billion, or a whopping $13 per DRC inhabitant.

    If DRC’s oil reserves are unexplored I’d be leery of putting my faith into any ‘estimates,’ but in any case Nigeria has nearly four times the proven reserves of Angola. Assuming that DRC produces as much as Angola, at a price of $100 per barrel that would contribute less than $1000 per inhabitant to the economy – a welcome gain for a country as poor as DRC, but by itself not nearly enough to match the Republic of Congo.

  45. How much “racial prowess” does it take to repeat all the anti-White clichés and apologize for black run countries?

  46. Japan and elsewhere in the region. For 200years of western influence and introduction of technologies. Not only were they able to maintain the infractures. But improve it as well. Africa 400 years of euro-colonization. They neither maintained nor improve it. It is what it is; to say that nature error. It won’t be long before reality sets in/has in Detroit.

  47. “Africa 400 years of euro-colonization.”

    Quick correction: Africa was colonized over the last 200 years, not the last 400, although there were a few coastal European settlements that dated back 400 years (e.g. Cape Town).

Comments are closed.