"weeeeeee-eeeeeee weee-uh-mum-bu-wai
In the jungle, the mighty jungle,
The lion sleeps tonight

"The Lion Sleeps Tonight," sung by The Tokens, was one of my favourite songs as a child. Back in the day when we only had AM radio, and as Everclear reminds us,
"I'd be in bed with the radio on
I would listen to it all night long
Just to hear my favorite song
You'd have to wait but you could hear it on the am radio…"

Scoring an opportunity to hear a favourite song might take hours, unless your song was current, and on heavy rotation.

My images of Africa as a child were defined by the Tokens' song, and by "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom," which I remember watching every week.

I knew nothing about political turmoil in Africa. My father, in disgust, would occasionally mention what was going on in Rhodesia and South Africa, but, for the most part, Africa was a continent of exotic animals, and beautiful, ebony-colored people who, as far as I knew, still lived in their villages, hunting antelope, and living in peace.

Now, I close my eyes, and a map of Africa comes into my mind. On that map, I see flames engulfing entire regions, blood dying the borders of the Congo and the Sudan red, and jagged scribble where Zimbabwe is—some kind of representation of the sheer insanity that is that country under the rule of Mugabe.

People are dying at disastrous rates in parts of Africa. In 1994, we sat on our hands while the Hutus and Tutsis slaughtered each other in Rwanda. The concept of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" was the gift of the Belgians, who told people with one physiognomy that they were more "white" than the others. We know what happened in Rwanda; we said that we would never allow such a thing to happen again. And yet, we lied.  
The Congo is burning. Wounded. Dragging itself into the tall grass to die.

In little more than 24 hours, at least 150 people would be dead, most of them young men, summarily executed by the rebels last month as they tightened their grip over parts of eastern Congo, according to witnesses and human-rights investigators.

And yet, as the killings took place, a contingent of about 100 United Nations peacekeepers was less than a mile away, struggling to understand what was happening outside the gates of its base. The peacekeepers were short of equipment and men, United Nations officials said, and they were focusing on evacuating frightened aid workers and searching for a foreign journalist who had been kidnapped. Already overwhelmed, officials said, they had no intelligence capabilities or even an interpreter who could speak the necessary languages.

The peacekeepers said they had no idea that the killings were taking place until it was all over.

The executions in Kiwanja are a study in the unfettered cruelty meted out by the armed groups fighting for power and resources in eastern Congo. But the events are also a textbook example of the continuing failure of the world’s largest international peacekeeping force, which has a mandate to protect the Congolese people from brutality.

You cannot convince me that we do not hold some lives more dear than others. When a European nation had riven itself by civil war and people were being massacred, NATO got its shit together and stepped in. But when nations in the middle of Africa—arbitrary lines drawn on a map that the West put there—well, when those people start slaughtering each other, we tut-tut our mouths and switch the channel. I mean, dead bodies are so depressing this time of year, don't you think?

I can't do much more than rant and rail here. I'll do what I always do: write to my congressional representatives, write to the president, and go off in search of a book that will help me understand. Two books were invaluable when I was trying to understand Rwanda. One, a novel, and the other, non-fiction.

A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali, by Gil Courtemache, broke my heart. And We regret to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families made me mad with grief.

</i>Perhaps you'll consider reading them, and perhaps as more of us know more, we can ask our government to stop being the world's bully, and start being a partner in the desire to guarantee basic human rights to all of us. After all, if "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is good enough for us, it should be good enough for the peoples of the world, too.