Africa by dead reckoning

In 1994, extremist Hutus of Rwanda killed one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Then it was the turn of two million Hutus to flee Rwanda. The dead and the dying are yet to be counted. In Zaire, Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime has given way to Laurent Desire Kabila and Co. They will doubtless give a figure of Zaireans who perished in the last 32 years, which will end with three zeroes, or four, five or six.

Could it be that when people get down to counting the African dead, the officials become so lazy that they just round off the figures? Or is it that non-Africans are simply unconcerned about the plight of the people living in countries where the meek shall never inherit the earth?

Why is it that the dead on other continents are counted to the last victim and in Africa, they are rounded off to the nearest thousand, or hundred thousand? Is it that Africans tend to die in such larger numbers than elsewhere that the head-count doesn’t really matter? Why should it be so difficult to count the dead? Surely they can’t run away like the fleeing targets of rampaging government troops or rebels.

The dead, as everyone knows, are perfectly immobile, except in special circumstances when they are floating down a river towards Lake Victoria.

Such corpses are, of course, hard to count, not merely because of the speed with which they travel but because they are likely to be counted twice, or cancelled out, thanks to the head being seen in one place and the torso in another. Even so, there is no excuse for failing to count the dead once the killers are through with their business.

People who die should be counted down to the last number. In other continents, even when the dead are buried under tons of bombed concrete, their exact number is given. Almost always.

When will Africa’s dead be treated with respect by statisticians? Perhaps the murderers of the African masses are such sticklers for round figures that after exterminating a politically-unwanted village of 9,725 people, they go on to the next village and kill another 275 to get a nice, manageable 10,000. And what if there are 276 people in that village? Does the chieftain of the genocide squad spare that solitary extra’ person for the sake of mathematical convenience?

Either African despots prefer their dead in convenient round figures or the statisticians are too callous to bother. The same people would not dare round off the dollars when counting money, mostly dirty. But when it comes to corpses, 264,000 may as well equal zero.

A UN statistician who invariably reckons $1,736,000 as $2 million invariably gets promoted, as does a peacekeeping official or refugee worker adept at making round-figure calculations about the dead and the displaced. With such a combination of statisticians, aid officials, despots and guerrilla chieftains, we may be heading towards a situation where a death toll of under 1,000 one day may not be reported at all.

The next day, reports might show that the toll has risen to 2,000 following renewed clashes. The textbooks say that the natural numbers begin with one. Yet, when counting the most significant thing in life, a life, counting starts at 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000. Chander Mehra