November 15, 2025
A very long time ago, the beautiful ex-wife of a major Hollywood star mistook me for my father, a rich shipowner and industrialist. I was just out of school, 20 years old and without a penny to my name. But I was soon rich and able to afford her after borrowing thousands of dollars from a shylock who charged 100 percent interest. After I failed to pay him back, the creep somehow managed to get through to my father, informing him of my debt while telling him that it would be a pity to spoil his son's looks so early in life. Daddy paid and sent me to the Sudan as punishment. Khartoum back then turned out to be as punishing as being invited by Lily James or Keira Knightley to spend the night. The place was straight out of a Hollywood film, with a grand hotel facing the presidential palace, an outdoor nightclub called Gordon's, a friendly populace with hundreds of staff eager to serve all our needs, and, oh yes, it almost slipped my mind: the largest textile factory in Africa employing 5,000 who worked in air-conditioned comfort, owned by my father. General President Abboud of the Sudan visited regularly, and my job was to discreetly gift him with various currencies. Khartoum turned out to be heaven on earth, and I even won the Khartoum open tennis tournament in 1961. The evenings were straight out of Casablanca. I had my regular table at Gordon's, and next to me were people like Alfried Krupp, the German industrialist lobbying to build a bridge from Khartoum north to Omdurman, with tennis great Gottfried von Cramm buttering up the locals. One evening, the visiting Reinaldo Herrera senior and Winston Guest, on their way to a safari, were surprised to find me in deep Africa.
Then, suddenly, it all went to hell. Some bum who claimed to be a direct descendant of the Mahdi, the one who killed General Gordon in the siege of Khartoum some hundred years before, overthrew General President Abboud and was about to take little Taki hostage before the little one escaped to Egypt via boat up the Nile. Many years later, on my way to Kenya for a photographic safari-I do not shoot animals-I stopped in Khartoum and drove to the factory. It was a burned-out shell. The once-prosperous third-largest country in Africa soon followed suit.
"One needs anthropological detachment to even contemplate the recent horrors in Africa."
One needs anthropological detachment to even contemplate the recent horrors in Africa. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians have been slaughtered in the Sudan and in Nigeria, in the latter the Christians being the victims. The Rapid Support Forces in the Sudan, inheritors of the murderous Janjaweed who killed hundreds of thousands back in the early 2000s, have murdered about the same number twenty years later. Their depravity includes thousands upon thousands of children who have died of starvation. The heaps of corpses in the Sudan could be photographed from space, yet we in the West worry about racism in our universities. I did not know back then, or even at present, that human beings could act in such monstrous ways. The Sudan was always Christian in the south and Muslim in the north, and I leave it up to you to decide which side is killing which. Not to be left behind, Nigeria's Muslims are murdering Christians while the Pope and British King Charles agree that racism is our biggest threat.
How did all this come about? Don't ask the usual suspects like some lefty journalist because they'll tell you it was our fault, imperialism and all that. My father provided jobs and good salaries. The Mahdi who drove us out provided death, hunger, and misery. Of course, British foreign policy going back to the 19th century was wrong. Arab tribal societies with hereditary rulers worked best for Arabs.
The same goes for African societies. They worked better when they were strictly tribal-that is, before they were given Western exteriors and were burdened with a multiethnic population. According to Aristotle, a functioning society works best when those who rule alternate in power with those who are ruled. This is why tribal societies worked in Africa until the Brits, the French, and the awful Belgians came along. People revolt and kill their fellow man when a form of rule does not fit the customs and disposition of a people. The Germans and the Dutch in southern Africa are still popular because they left the tribes to themselves. Namibia is a haven compared with the rest of the continent.
So the next time some wise jerk complains about the killings, tell him they were because of people like him who tried to change tribes and tribal customs by civilizing them. My dad offered them jobs, not civics lessons in democracy, equality, and feminism.
This article was originally published on Taki's Magazine.