One of the time waster sites that I read published, 6 Real-Life Vigilantes Crazier Than Batman and 5 Real World Criminals Who Were Certified Super-Villains. They're pretty wild lists, but maybe a bit incomplete, because if they're going to mention Papa Doc as a Super-Villian, then they should probably list Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo who is the current president-for-life of Equatorial Guinea. If you're not familiar with this country, that's not surprising. While it's on the west coast of Africa, it's rather small and it happens to be the only country in Africa with Spanish as its official language. Not a lot of information comes out of the country and this is mostly due to Obiang who seems quite happy to run the place for nearly 30 years and amass $600 million in ill-gotten money from plundering the state in a small homage to Mobutu.
But beyond being corrupt, the man is a bit nuts and drunk with power. For instance he believes that he is "in permanent contact with the Almighty" and "can decide to kill without anyone calling him to account and without going to hell." Of course this only natural given that he declared himself to be a god, although he still swears he's Catholic. I suppose it's in case the whole self-deification thing doesn't pan out. Then of course there are the rumors circulating that he's a cannibal as well, although that's most likely just to keep the masses in line. It's rather surprising how Robert Mugabe gets all the press these days, when Obiang is far, far worse.
Maybe it's because of this or maybe it was just because Spain, South Africa, and maybe the US and UK thought that they wanted to have more of a hand in governing the third largest oil producing country in Sub-Saharan Africa that they decided to set in motion and assassination attempt. And if it wasn't enough to have several large countries backing this, why not toss in Mark Thatcher (yeah, the son of former British Prime Minister, Marget Thatcher) in to the mix as well. But wait, that's not really enough. Let's hire one of the most impressive mercenaries I've ever heard of in the form of Simon Mann. Take a look at that guy's Wikipedia page. While he's more mercenary than vigilante, he still should have been on one of the lists I mentioned earlier. He's like a real life manifestation of any lead character in Michael Bay film.
I'm not going to get in to intricacies of how the whole assassination plot when down, but needless to say, it failed and failed hard when the mercenaries involved were in Zimbabwe of all places and got captured by Mugabe's forces. If you want to read all the gritty details, take a look at CNN and Reuters . Then read up on Executive Outcomes. Due to the fact that Mann was extradited to Equatorial Guinea and is now serving time in Black Beach Prison (where he'll probably die), I see a good chance of a movie being made of this beyond the British production of Coup! in 2006. Something big. Something with a lot of money. Something with Michael Bay as the director perhaps? I like the odds.
The always insightful giraffe wrote about a talk given by Ory Okolloh awhile back at TED Africa. The talk was interesting as she brought up the very important issue of perception. She was pointing out that because we in the West have a view of Africa as being the horrid, asshole of the world (that's from Apocalypse Now, not her) type of place that it ultimately fulfills this idea. Watch the video and you'll see her explain it better than I can summarize because she shows that it is very easy to view the West in just as bad a light as it is Africa.
Curious to expand on this, I took a look at BBC News yesterday as Monday is typically a big news days. I did a screen capture of BBC News - Americas and BBC News - Africa. Now, I happen to like BBC News a great deal as they and Reuters are some of the few large news outlets that really cover Africa with any depth. With that in mind, take a look at the headlines. I did a rough calculation. On the Americas page, about 81% of the articles were good news as compared to 19% bad news. For Africa, it was 80% bad news to 20% good. See a slight issue there?
This portrayal of Africa is unfair. Yes, a lot of bad things happen there like Malaria and the LRA, but there are good things happening there as well, except that you just don't hear about them as there is seemingly no outlet. It really is easier to report about the bad things and when you report about the bad, it's easier to sell things, which in this case is the constant need for aid to poor, poor Africa. I'm not saying that African countries don't need aid, but they don't need it as it currently is packaged as this system has shown to do very little in the decades since Colonial Rule was ousted in the continent.
Big Media really has little vested interest in showing a different side to Africa. Aid groups also have little interest because despite their altruism, if things don't look bad, the donations don't come in and admittedly some aid groups are far, far worse with this than others. This is one of the reasons why we've been working to create Maneno.
