One of the more profound questions of recent times comes from - of all people - Dutch crown prince Willem-Alexander: why don't more leaders let themselves be photographed with a toilet?

It's earned him the nickname 'Prince Poo', but never mind. He was addressing African leaders at a summit in Egypt, and he wanted to drive home the point that five thousand people die each day for lack of sanitation. Time to break the taboo, the prince said, and start calling a spade a spade and a toilet a toilet.

It's not just Africans, though, who are finding that difficult. In his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's son. Yakov Stalin committed suicide in a POW-camp during World War II, utterly humiliated after the other inmates had complained about his messiness in the latrine.

Kundera explains that for Soviet communism and other ideologies that dream of an ideal world, excrement is a fundamental problem. Because its very existence proves that man wasn't designed for perfection. As the old joke goes: what kind of engineer would run a waste pipeline right through the middle of a recreational area?

It's even more problematic when a group or leader won't accept that man can't be perfect. Before you know it, you end up with a pile of guillotined heads taller than the Eiffel Tower, or with holiday snaps of a woman with the IQ of a lobotomized parakeet teaching Iraqis about democracy by parading them around naked on a leash.

Or, as the case may be, you end up with reports of how a baby's legs are smashed to bits against the wall of a house in Harare by armed thugs, for no other reason than that the baby's father was rumoured to be voting for the opposition.

One of the African leaders invited to the summit in Egypt where prince Willem-Alexander delivered his historic speech was in fact Robert Mugabe. And I'm guessing that the only way the Zimbabwean leader would let himself be photographed with a toilet is if it had opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai's head rammed down it.

Robert Mugabe, too, dreams of an ideal world. And he's convinced that once his project for a new Zimbabwean century comes to fruition, it will have been worth the famine his people are currently suffering and the brutality he's using against opposition supporters to stop them squandering a glorious future.

In this he's no different than the twentieth-century cargo cult whose members removed the fillings from their teeth and aborted their unborn children to have a better chance of beaming aboard the spaceship that they believed would carry Jesus back to earth. And of course no different than Stalin's communist terror.

As the philosopher John Gray puts it, "the use of inhumane methods to achieve impossible ends is the very essence of revolutionary utopianism." And that's also the reason that while I'm sympathetic to the argument that the west should finally shut up about Africa, I don't think it should be applied in Mugabe's case.

Because, as Gray points out, the pursuit of salvation in history is nothing if not a western phenomenon, rooted in that most western of ideologies, the Enlightenment. Mass murder may not be peculiarly western, says Gray. "But what's unique to the modern west is the faith that violence can save the world."

Poor Robert Mugabe, in the end he can't even manage to be a real African leader, for all his post-colonial bluster. And as if that isn't bad enough, history's getting ready to lump together his doomed utopian ideal with those of Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and George Walker Bush.

It's extra ironic of course that the grand brotherhood of man that all these utopian death cults dream of actually does exist, only it lies in the very thing that they're all trying so hard to deny in their pursuit of perfection.

As one of the characters in the film Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead puts it: "the only good movement is a bowel movement." Now wouldn't that make a nice title for Prince Poo's next speech?
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the opinions of Radio Netherlands.

8 July 2008

[Copyright Radio Netherlands]