Africa addio Page #6

The initiative,

clearly based upon good intentions

is certainly not adequate

for the amount of damage and butchery.

Africa is afflicted by a hundred evils

and no one

vigorously combats their causes.

Only a few, here and there,

do their best to heal the effects.

There's nothing to do.

They won't give us permission to land.

We decide to try it anyway

on an old landing strip further north.

We're preceded by our sister plane,

rented by three German journalists.

We've flown here together

from Tanganyika.

Neither they nor we want to turn back

without first having done

everything possible

to document the worst genocide

in the history of Africa.

It all started last night

when an African named Okello,

backed by Russia

overthrew the thousand year old

government of the Sultan

and, naming himself

revolutionary general,

ordered the massacre of

the entire Arab population of Zanzibar.

All communications have been broken off.

The radio is silent

and the airports are closed.

The only way to know anything

about what's happening in Zanzibar

is to come in person,

as did we and our German colleagues

whom we glimpse for a moment as

they are hauled away by the insurgents.

For today, it's better to skip it.

That cloud of smoke down there

rising from the runway

is the Germans' airplane that's burning.

At least we know

there's no one on board.

We try again a day later, January 19,

with a helicopter.

We waive a red flag

to confuse the rebels.

They direct us toward

the interior of the island,

where it appears that during the night,

Okello has distributed 850 guns

that mysteriously arrived on the island

which the Africans

do not yet know how to use.

It's open hunting season for Arabs.

The propaganda tells the new generations

the Arabs are cursed slave traders

who sell Africans to slave merchants

along the coast.

It, of course, omitted that

this all happened ten centuries ago.

This footage

is the only existing documentation

of what happened in Zanzibar

between January 18 and 20, 1964.

Entire villages destroyed,

trucks filled with corpses,

testimony that's uncomfortable

and embarrassing for all...

for those in Africa today,

spreading false promises,

fomenting a new African racism

and for those

hastily abandoning Africa to itself

in the false modesty

of antique colonialism

authorizing a new Africa

flooded with misery and blood.

Look at these images.

Look at them with pity.

But above all,

look at them with shame.

Endless lines of prisoners marching

toward the site of the massacre.

Hundreds of motionless Arabs,

waiting for death

wrapped in their white sheets,

already more similar to ghosts than men.

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