Slashing Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"

The few rare specimens among the endangered species of Congolese
readers ought to like, nay, LOVE Mark Twain. For one obvious reason:
Mark Twain campaigned against the genocidal rule of the Belgian King
Leopold II in what was then the Congo Free State (1885-1908).

Mark Twain's contribution to the international humanitarian campaign
against the horrors taking place in the Congo Free State included his
little known but gripping play-pamphlet "King Leopold's Soliloquy."

A miracle of writing: in that play, Mark Twain calls King Leopold II a
"dinosaur"--uncannily, the very same word was used by Zairians for
Mobutu, who, historians and social scientists inform us, in his
predation, followed in the footsteps of the Belgian monarch!

I call this coincidence an uncanny miracle because I doubt that anyone
in the Radio-Trottoir that spread the word "dinosaur" across Zaire had
ever read "King Leopold's Soliloquy."

Mark Twain is therefore my hero. That's why I'm mad at the recent
assault on Mark Twain in the U.S. where some wacky editors have just
taken upon themselves to replace in his "Huckleberry Finn" the words
"nigger(s)" and "Injian(s)" with respectively "slave(s)" and
"Indian(s)"... (This reminds me that on this very blog I once took
exception at a similar revisionist attempt directed against "Tintin au
Congo" by a Brussels-based crazy Congolese keen on turning it into his
cause célèbre!)

Anyway, if it only depended on these latter-day self-appointed editors
of Mark Twain, all "nigger" words would vanish not only from hip-hop
songs but on African-America's streets as well; and all "Injian" words
would be blipped in Western movies! And while we are at it, let's
erase the offensive and politically-incorrect word "fuck" from all
printed materials! We could even enlist Google in this
"civilizational" undertaking!

I remember that when Mike Barnicle was still a Boston Globe columnist,
he once wrote a column in which he savaged this kind of extreme
"political-correctness." He gave a few examples of some expressions
that could be changed by these preciosity-inclined scumbags of the
first order. One of these expressions was: "Oh, man!"--an interjection
which is also found in Shakespeare, btw! Well, quipped Mike Barnicle,
maybe political-correct extremists would now ask people to exclaim:
"Oh, person! Oh, person!" How ridiculous...

I mean, this is beyond ridiculous; this ill-conceived initiative is an
insult to "political-correctness" and would only provide ammunition to
its foes (Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and their peers).

This truncation of a classic such as Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn"
is at best scatological! At worst, this is a cheap attempt by these
uninspired editors to insert themselves as co-authors of "Huckleberry
Finn." A shortcut to immortality with the proxy of Mark Twain. A lame
aesthetic ploy... The senseless act of deranged minds walking into a
museum to slash a timeless and priceless painting.

Anthropologist Alfred Gell (citing D. Freedberg) gives a memorable
example of such an act of criminal iconoclasm that happened at the
National Gallery in London in 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson
("Slasher Mary") walked into that vestigial institution and attacked
Velásquez's "Rokeby Venus" with a "kitchen knife!"

In his commentary of the attack, Gell says, among other interesting
things (such as the fact that the then not yet restored slashed
"Rokeby Venus" had in effect two authors: Velásquez and Slasher Mary)
:

"Examining the photograph of 'Rokeby Venus' after the attack, we note
that the deepest slash is at the heart; Venus has been stabbed in the
back--a very political way to die" (Alfred Gell, "Art and Agency: An
Anthropological Theory").

These nutty editors of nigger-less and Injian-less "Huckleberry Finn"
are cowardly slashers who've stabbed Mark Twain in the back--a very
"politically-correct" way to kill this great American writer!... Well,
a greatly exaggerated report of Mark Twain's demise though...

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1) Kinshasa Cardinal Laurent Mosengwo at loggerheads with the Raïs; and 2) 71 Mobutu's ex-Presidential Guards arrested in Bas-Congo

1. Kinshasa Cardinal Laurent Mosengwo Pasinya at loggerheads with the Raïs

The AMP, the presidential majority cartel of political parties,
unveiled this week a project of constitutional amendment that would
change the 2-round mode of presidential election. The AMP official
talking point to explain the constitutional change is that two rounds
of election are onerous to be sustainable. But Radio-Trottoir claims
that this mode of dispatching things in the very first round is done
in order to avoid a scenario à la Côte d'Ivoire where Gbagbo, the
first-round winner, is now the loser in the second round.

The opposition, led by the President of the MLC Parliamentary Bloc, MP
François Mwamba, rejects flat out the project on the grounds that
rules are never changed in the middle of the game. Vital Kamerhe, the
ex-Speaker and now vocal critic of the regime, says that what the
"people of God" are witnessing in this project is "cheating" in
progress.

The new personality to join this "rejectionist" chorus is Cardinal
Laurent Monsengewo Pasinya who, at a press conference on Wednesday,
January 5, said:

"I only want to tell politicians to remember what's called the letter
of the law and the spirit of the law. The Constitution states that
there must be two rounds in the [presidential] election. If the
candidate wins in the first round, mathematically it means that he
would have won at most with 20% of the votes. This isn't
representative enough... How could you be satisfied being a president
with 20% out of a population of 100%? The president must have
sufficient support in the country, so that he may be recognized
everywhere. [That's why there's the requirement of] 50% + 1, hence
51%. The spirit of the law invites us to think hard on this issue and
to not rush things."

Well, AMP legislators are have read Montesquieu and, in their view,
Cardinal Monsengwo ain't Montesquieu. They first point to the
vitiated argument of the Cardinal by countering that the greatest
democracy on earth, the United States, has a one-round presidential
election--with the added flaw of an indirect suffrage by the Electoral
College. One of the AMP stalwarts even added that Al Gore won the
popular vote in 2000. Moreover, some other AMP stalwarts mock the
Cardinal's alarming ignorance of elementary arithmetic. As it happens,
50% + 1 vote doesn't equal 51%!

For its part Radio-Trottoir remembers that in the waning years of
Mobutu, Monsengwo's tenure as chairman of the National Sovereign
Conference (CNS) was fraught with suspicions of collaboration with the
dictator and the prelate's once publicly stated ambition of being one
day DRC's head of state! This question of the presidential ambition of
the prelate was in fact fired upon the Cardinal at the press
conference, which Mosengwo skirted with an incomprehensible pun.

Congolese prelates have historically had a rocky relationship with the
powers that be. The immediate predecessor of Monsengwo, Cardinal
Frédéric Etsau, after marrying the Raïs to First Lady Olive Lembe aka
Mère-Capable, wrote, a few weeks before his death in Europe, a much
publicized damning letter that read like a fatwa in which he accused
the Raïs and the international community of rigging the 2006
presidential election! Well, the man was a native of the opposition
stronghold of the Equateur Province and close to the Paris-based
radical opposition leader and erstwhile Mobutu's chief spy Honoré
Ngbanda aka Terminator aka Prophétator (he's now a preacher too), who
also hails from that western province.

And Etsau's predecessor, Cardinal Joseph Malula, a renowned
polygamist, went for some months in exile at The Vatican for opposing
the Zairian mercurial dictator's "African Authenticity" policy.

As for Cardinal Monsengwo, he'd already used his political capital
under Mobutu to be of any consequence to the regime... With a
comfortable majority in the National Assembly, the AMP will in all
likelihood soon vote into law the projected constitutional revision.

2) 71 Mobutu's ex-Presidential Guards arrested in Bas-Congo

In the days prior to this past Christmas, people in Tshela, a
southwestern small town about 360 km from Kin, began seeing suspicious
men who'd crossed the Congo River from neighboring Congo-Brazzaville.

The men moved briskly about in small groups and were often seen
hanging out at night by the river and scrutinizing movements on the
right bank of the river, Congo-Brazzaville's side.

Before long, the population tipped the local "securocrats" of the
Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR) who swiftly arrested at first
21 men. Upon interrogation (the methods employed at such sessions are
left to one's gory imagination), these men revealed the whereabouts of
the remaining 50 of their comrades.

It turns out that these men were members of Mobutu's Division Spéciale
Présidentielle (DSP) who at the fall of the Zairian strong man had
crossed into Congo-Brazzaville where they had helped Gen Denis Sassou
N'Guesso depose (with the help of the now defunct French state-owned
oil giant Elf) the democratically elected President Pascal Lissouba.
They have ever since been living large in Congo-Brazzaville under the
protection of N'Guesso. Their constant strolls along the river bank
was to await weapons that were to be shipped in pirogues from
Congo-Brazzaville.

Congo-Brazzaville has often been the originating point of armed
incursions into Congo-Kinshasa. The more recent such incursion was the
leadership of the Enyele insurgents in Dongo, through the Oubangi
River, in Equateur Province.

In announcing the arrest of the 71 DSP elements earlier this week,
Lambert Mende, DRC Communication Minister, warned that if Congolese
exiles want to return home with good intentions, they would be welcome
home with open arms. But if they intend to sow unrest, they'd be
promptly arrested and take the full brunt of the law. Mende didn't
however reveal where the men are now being held.

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The gods must be crazy: Ivorian generals pledged allegiance to Gbagbo before God at a "military-religious" low mass!

Jeune Afrique reporter Baudelaire Mieu reveals that in mid-August 2010
Ivorian military and security top brass pledged allegiance to Gbagbo
at a "military-religious" meeting at the United Methodist Temple in
the Abidjan neighborhood of Cocody Ambassades (Jeune Afrique, 12-18
December, 2010).

Beside the fact that this shows that Gbagbo did plan to stay in power
way before the presidential election was held, the weird thing that
leaps out is that religion was factored in the political and military
equation. Weird but a more and more common phenomenon in Africa. In
the DRC, politicos use The Holy Bible as a political reference book
and last year the tearful Congolese First Lady was shown on TV leading
a revivalist prayer at the opening of her 3-day countrywide fast for
national redemption! In Burundi, the head of state is also an
evangelical pastor who preaches every Sunday in front of huge
tongue-speaking audiences. In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni wears his
religion on his sleeve. During his years in exile in France, Gbagbo
was also a part-time Methodist preacher. How he now reconciles
Judeo-Christian tenets with his two wives (Véronique Gbagbo and Nadie
Bamba) is anybody's guess. My guess is that Gbagbo has gone syncretic
like his fellow African preachers... An exception that confirms the
rule: President Ali Bongo of Gabon was recently made a Freemason Grand
Master in replacement of his deceased father!

With the steady rise of evangelical fundamentalism in Africa, maybe in
20 years time "Christian republics" will sprout up all over the
continent. This isn't far-fetched at all: during his tenure the
deposed Malagasy president, also an evangelical, had the constitution
amended to have "Christianity" as the state religion!

The senior officers at Gbagbo's mid-August 2010 low mass included: 1)
Gen Philippe Mangou, chief of staff of the Forces de Défense et de
Sécurité (FDS), the Ivorian army; 2) Gen Guiai Bin Poin, chief of
CESOS (Centre de Commandement des Opérations de Seconde Zone), rumored
to be the real boss of the army; 3) Gen Dogbo Blé, chief of the
Presidential Guard; 4) Gen Firmin Detoh Letho, infantry commander; 5)
Commander Jean-Noël Abehi, head of the armored unit; 6)Gen Bruno
Dogbgo, head of the Republican Guard; 7) Rear-admiral Vagba
Faussignaux, commander of the national naval force; 8) Commander
Boniface Konan, marines commander; and 9) Colonel-major Nathanaël
Brouaha Ehouman, head of the Presidential Security.

Little wonder then that Guillaume Soro, the PM-designate of Ouattara,
said that Gbagbo's "coup d'etat" was actually carried out by some of
these generals. Btw, the joke now in Côte d'Ivoire is to call the
Hôtel du Golfe, where Alassane Dramane Ouattara and his cabinet are
holed up, the Hotel Republic of the Gulf.

Gbagbo may hold countless more low masses at the United Methodist
Temple with senior army and security personnel, but in Africa
allegiances are bought with monies. And these will soon be scarce in
Gbagbo's coffers.

African senior military officers are often nouveaux riches living in
the here and now, who as rule are unwilling to stake their fortunes in
such flimsy allegiances, as one security source told reporter
Baudelaire Mieu:

"Within the general staff, a good number of officers don't feel like
going to war. People have so much enriched themselves that they won't
take risks. They seek above all to protect their patrimony and to
preserve their lives."

No wonder then that France and the European Union go out of their way
in wooing these generals: most of them (including Gen Philippe Mangou)
are not on the list of Gbagbo's entourage targeted for sanctions. Some
of these generals are even alleged to have already told Gbagbo they
wouldn't order their troops to fire upon unarmed civilians--not on the
basis of some intangible humanitarian principles but in order to avoid
being dragged one day at the International Criminal Court at The
Hague...

Well, that's it then. Nigerian troops could as well storm Abidjan
anytime they feel like doing.

That's why detailing the respective forces involved amounts to
engaging in a futile academic exercise.

At any rate, according to Baudelaire Mieu, with a 4,000-strong elite
force, Gbagbo's FDS are in theory stronger than Ouattara's Forces
Armées des Forces Nouvelles (FAFN) with only 4,000 troops. (This means
that there are in fact two warlords vying for power.)

Additionally, FDS can count on thousands more troops of the anti-riot
police, the CESOS, the infantry, the navy, and other paramilitary
units.

Gbagbo forces have also at their disposal a tiny air force made of
Sukhoi warplanes, drones, as well as Mi-24, Mi-8 and Puma copters.
These forces have antiaircraft batteries, rocket launchers and a dozen
armored vehicles. The "securocrats" in charge of arms procurement are
Bertin Cadet, Gbagbo's military advisor, and Henri Damalan Sama,
appropriately a one-time defense attaché of Côte d'Ivoire in Russia.

In contrast, the rebel Forces Armées des Forces Nouvelles (FAFN)
backing Ouattara and led by Gen Soumaïla Bakayoko, chief of staff, and
Issiaka Wattara aka Wattao, deputy chief of staff, have mostly light
weapons (machine guns and AK-47)--though this may soon change, with
French supplies.

The FAFN have an additional wild card in Abidjan, Baudelaire Mieu
claims, with many heavily armed "sleeping cells" in the neighborhoods
of Abobo, Port-Bouët 2, Koumassi and Adjamé.

Despite the ongoing dangerous crisis, the prevailing mood in Côte
d'Ivoire is that cool-headedness would pull the country from the
brink, as Mourou Ouattara, FAFN commander in the northern city of
Bouna, seems to think:

"We won't be the first to launch an attack, we'll do everything to
spare Côte d'Ivoire a bloodbath, Ivorians are tired [of war]."

But, as Baudelaire Mieu says in the conclusion of his report, "The
great fear remains an autonomous action by warmongering diehards from
both camps."

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Côte d'Ivoire: War for democracy in post-military age

I recently heard on Radio France Internationale (RFI) a
thought-provoking discussion by two members of an extant school of
Parisian geostrategists about the increasing irrelevance of wars in
solving problems nowadays. In fact, according to one of them, we now
live in a POST-MILITARY AGE!

This sounds paradoxically counter-intuitive as there are so many flash
points and armed conflicts of varying intensity around the globe. But
the argument is instead to be understood in this wise: with the rise
of guerrilla and insurgency capabilities that military invasions by
Western powers invariably obtain in their wake, military solutions
have become increasingly unsustainable due to the costs in lives,
money, time, and (domestic) political capital that quagmires entail.
(The unsustainability of military costs, though not elaborated, is
however contained in the claim of the French futurologist and one-time
president Mitterrand's advisor Jacques Attali that future wars will
mostly be waged by mercenaries, now called by the euphemism "military
contractors".)

Military victories have become so elusive even for the world's sole
superpower despite its several mighty branches and formidable defense
budget that (to Obama's credit) it now sets its own arbitrary
definition and threshold of victory: for example, the withdrawal from
Iraq; soon, the drawdown and, ultimately, a "disengagement" from
Afghanistan (in effect, an utter fiasco of all COIN doctrines).

But, the theory of the Parisian geostrategists notwithstanding,
large-scale wars and invasions are still likely to occur--as the
recent crisis in the Korean Peninsula amply demonstrates. What's more,
a regional war is about to be waged against Côte d'Ivoire by NIGERIA
in the coming weeks, with massive U.S. logistical support.

I single out Nigeria because Ghana, the other significant military
power within ECOWAS, has already ruled out its participation in the
projected military adventure and there's a split in the regional
organization between hawks and doves.

This being said, the question at issue is whether the Nigerian
president has fully considered the basic definition of war that Carl
von Clausewitz couches in his cautionary maxim: "war is simply the
continuation of policy by other means."

What exactly is the "policy" that the permanently and firmly capped
Goodluck Jonathan wants to achieve in Côte d'Ivoire in the guise of
ECOWAS?

If the policy is to enforce "democracy," Jonathan will have to think
again and come up with a clear and satisfactory definition of that
notion within the context of West Africa. I already showed in my
previous posts on this subject, that there is no definable standard of
the term in that neighborhood, let alone in the world at large, as the
Honduran coup demonstrates. But I'd reiterate as an illustration to
flesh up my argument here just two examples I have previously given:

1) Blaise Compraoré, the president of Burkina Faso, has so
successfully emptied the notion of democracy of all its substance that
he's been clinging to power for more than two decades (thanks to his
own definition of democracy);

2) In Niger, a military junta has actually saved democracy by staging
a coup against a democratically-elected president who was about to
subvert democracy by changing the constitution so as to allow him to
stand for re-election indefinitely, just like his colleague in Burkina
Faso. And the Niger example also shows that there's nothing that
guarantees that when the time comes Ouattara wouldn't repeat his
predecessor's malpractice.

Would then Nigeria intervene in Côte d'Ivoire again and again?

Carl von Clausewitz also qualifies his definition of war by saying that:

"No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do
so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve
by that war and how he intends to conduct it."

It is obvious to me that Goodluck Jonathan has taken leave of his
"senses" as "democracy," as I have briefly shown, is not a clearly
definable notion, let alone an achievable policy goal warranting war
in the region. Even in a country with a strong civil society such as
Nigeria, democracy is still teetering on the brink of sharia,
inter-ethnic and religious violence and terror, as well as a
separatist pull in the Niger Delta. If anything, that's where Jonathan
ought to start his war for democracy, according to the old adage:
"Charity starts at home." Besides, the fact that there's not so much
of a domestic debate over the advisability of Nigeria starting this
war is in itself a commentary on Nigerian democracy.

Closely related to this point is the questionable self-appointment of
Nigeria as the "democracy" cop in the regional precinct of West
Africa. A self-appointment that shows Nigeria's hubris and ambition at
dominating West Africa. I predict that this naked ambition would end
up breaking up ECOWAS, preventing further integration within the
regional organization, and serving as a deterrent to other African
states from joining what they'd perceive as "imperial" regional
organizations...

There are also what Clausewitz calls "frictions" (impediments or
imponderables) once war starts, as no war unfolds according to plan.

Well, Abidjan and other major cities could fall without much
resistance as some anticipate that the Ivorian army might suddenly be
incentivized with money to switch sides, and Gbagbo killed or
captured.

But what if "frictions" turn out to be much costlier than anticipated,
with, among other developments, a full-blown insurgency that could
paralyze the country's economy and government, and get Nigerian troops
bogged down in a war of attrition? There's also the dangerous notion
being contemplated by some others, of having the northern rebel Forces
Nouvelles fight alongside Nigerian troops, just as the Northern
Alliance did alongside coalition troops in the invasion of
Afghanistan. Left to their own devices, Nigerian troops and security
forces are natural-born barbarians renowned for their ruthlessness and
their summary executions of civilians; summary executions which did in
fact routinely occur when Nigeria participated in ECOMOG forces in
Liberia in 1990 and still occur in Nigerian cities every day. Add to
that unstable mix the unruly Forces Nouvelles, and you get an
explosive mess that would render the military intervention a murderous
undertaking.

The solution to the Ivorian crisis doesn't lie in a military
intervention, but in the "natural" implosion of the Gbagbo regime, as
the international community is keen on seeing it fall. There are
already UN and French forces on the ground who, if given the right
mandate, are able to make sure that chaos doesn't ensue in the
process. Inviting Nigerian soldiers into the imbroglio would result in
hefty collateral damage that would discredit democracy being
brandished about so menacingly...

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