An Auschwitz for Africa

Tourists wait to enter the main gate at Auschwitz, Poland, and a  sketch of how it looked during the war
PLEASE CREDIT ALL PHOTOS : GEOFF HILL
How should we mark the places where acts so terrible occurred that even now visitors are left in tears?
Auschwitz and Birkenau are notorious throughout the world as camps where the Nazis gassed and burned the Jews in World War II. But what about Darfur, Matabeleland, Rwanda, Somaliland, the British concentration camps in South Africa and other sites where Africans were butchered, mostly by their own leaders.
Zimbabwe journalist and author, GEOFF HILL, has visited many of Africa’s killing fields.
Last month I was in Poland, an inspiring place with a can-do attitude to rival America. I was researching a book I have in mind about the reaction to genocide and why some crimes gain world attention while others are ignored, even covered up.
At Auschwitz, near the city of Krakow, two hours by train south of Warsaw, the evidence of Nazi atrocities has been preserved both at the main concentration camp and the satellite death zones like Birkenau a few kilometres away.
Entrance is free. There are book shops, guides and chilling exhibits including a haystack of hair cut from gassed victims and piles of spectacles, shoes, clothes, and suit cases that once held the few treasures Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and German dissenters were allowed to take from their homes before being jammed into cattle cars on trains bound for hell.
From Hungary, France, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium, Italy and, of course, Germany itself, more than a million souls arrived at Auschwitz. Those who could not work were gassed; those who could died from hunger, beatings, typhoid and frost bite.
I spend much of my time working in the rest of Africa, places where under the rule of thugs like Banda, Mobuto, Menghistu of Ethiopia, Amin and so many others, millions were killed, abused, or locked up at re-education camps as happened under Machel in Mozambique where an estimated 30 000 died: same horror with a new name.
In the early ’80s Mugabe sent his North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade into Matabeleland where they murdered somewhere between 12 000 and 20 000 civilians and tortured maybe four times that number … in camps ringed with barbed wire.
In Somaliland, the breakaway democracy north of Somalia, I have climbed the banks of the Maroodijeex River that flows through the capital, Hargeisa, where in 1989, troops of the late President Said Barre gunned down men, women and children from the town. The skeletons are still there, just below the sand.
In Rwanda, the government of Paul Kagame has decided to leave tons of human bones where they fell in the genocide of 1984, so that future generations can be shocked by them and no one can ever deny the truth.
As for the 1.7 million who died at Biafara in Nigeria in the 1960s, thousands of Arabs slaughtered in Zanzibar or four million and counting in the DRC, there’s barely a headstone.
Places like Robben Island, the Boer War concentration camp at Kimberly and bone-gardens of Rwanda are so few, one might forget the horrors that African leaders of every tribe, faith and colour have unleashed on their people.
At Auschwitz they like to say, “Never Again!” but how long is never? And if the Holocaust happened today, what would be our reaction? If Darfur is anything to do by, a new Hitler might kill six million before the United Nations even made a statement, let alone tried to stop him. Given Pretoria’s reaction at the UN to atrocities in Burma and Sudan, South Africa would almost certainly vote against debate on the issue.
This is nothing new; in 1983, there was barely a word against Mugabe’s ethnic cleaning of Matabeleland. Those who rightly criticise Thabo Mbeki’s quiet diplomacy, said nothing back then, despite the story making headline news. Helen Suzman has apologised for this, Desmond Tutu has made up for it in recent speeches against Mugabe, but at the time the only sounds were cries of the dying.
Former Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, so vocal on apartheid, were silent and the murders were kept out of their own state-controlled press.
That’s why we need more places like Auschwitz, Birkenau, Robben Island, the Boer camp at Kimberly; ever-more memorials in Rwanda, Somaliland and fresh ones in Mozambique, Matabeleland, Biafara, Uganda, Zanzibar, and, when it’s over, Darfur. – Geoff Hill is bureau chief Africa for The Washington Times. His latest book is What Happens After Mugabe?  (Zebra/New Holland)