Quote of the Day

Pink Guerillas

"Very soon this topography will be radically altered. The Tutsi will clear the primeval jungle to make way for rolling pastureland, and cows will be herded illegally across the porous Rwandan border. These fields defy any traveler’s expectations, appearing like the bucolic meadows of Northern Europe on equatorial steroids. But don’t be fooled. This spectacular farmland is really the scorched jungle of tribal battlefields masquerading as a Tutsi Elysium, built on the bones of massacres and ethnic cleansing."

                              --Richard Mosse, Through a Glass Brightly: Eastern Congo by Infrared 

Oy. In my ideal world, no one would be allowed to write about or make policy for Congo--or anywhere else in Africa, for that matter--without having spent a couple of years in country, living with and among ordinary Africans, learning the language, and trying to get some modest thing done, like setting up a sustainable library or children's soccer league.