NationStates Jolt Archive

NOTE: Foreigners who ruled Africa from abroad (i.e., King Leopold II, etc.) do not count.

NOTE: Foreigners who ruled Africa from abroad (i.e., King Leopold II, etc.) do not count.

Then this is a sham of a poll.

Is there a poll coming? My initial answer would be Idi Amin.

Then this is a sham of a poll.

He wasn't African, so why would he count?

Is there a poll coming? My initial answer would be Idi Amin.

Amin is the guy who comes to mind first, but maybe only because I'm not educated enough about the Dark Continent to provide a better answer. Are there any Africa experts out there who'd care to take a crack at this?

He wasn't African, so why would he count?

Because he was an African ruler.

Also, North African leaders do not count, since they are Arabic/Middle Eastern, not African.

So this is a racial thing, and not a continental thing?

Paul Kruger.

Because he was an African ruler.

So this is a racial thing, and not a continental thing?
An African ruler must be African. Leopold was not an African ruler, he was a ruler of Africa.

I agree with you on the North Africans though. They should count.

Okay, I changed my mind, North African rulers count.

While I agree foreigners should not be counted, are you sure excluding North Africans is wise? Sure, they're from different ethnic stock, but so long as they're 1) eeeeeevil and 2) from Africa, what does their exact race matter?

Okay, they can count, then.

An African ruler must be African. Leopold was not an African ruler, he was a ruler of Africa.

Exactly.

Charles Taylor is the former ruler of Liberia, correct?

Charles Taylor is the former ruler of Liberia, correct?

Correct.

NOTE: Foreigners who ruled Africa from abroad (i.e., King Leopold II, etc.) do not count.

However, Idi Amin, despite being the self-proclaimed King of a country outside Africa, does count?

If North African rulers count you should put Qaddafi on the poll. I wouldn't say he's the worst, but he should be an option.

I would actually choose Akhenaton. Destroying an entire religion takes some guts.

Eating your own people is pretty bad.

Idi Amin Dada(The Butcher of Uganda)

He commited ethnic cleansings and tortured his own people. He slaugthered Tanzanians when he tried to invade the country. He haboured and supported international terrorists financially and he bankrupted Uganda.


Here (http://alexanderband.jegergud.dk/diktator/d2/index.htm) is a fun cardgame with a dictator theme. I thought you might get a laugh out of it :)

However, Idi Amin, despite being the self-proclaimed King of a country outside Africa, does count?

He is an African, and he ruled an African country.

He is an African, and he ruled an African country.

The whole King of Scotland thing is no problem here then?

The whole King of Scotland thing is no problem here then?

I suppose not.

Mugabe or Amin, I can't decide.

Mugabe or Amin, I can't decide.

Agreed.

I choose Idi Amin. Anyone who gives himself the title Big Daddy and indulges in canbalism is pretty much the pinacle when it comes to Dictator of The Century Awards.

He would regularily execute people by having them form a single file line, give each a hammer and forcing them to dash out the brains of the person in front of them. They were told he would have their children and loved ones raped and killed if they didn't go along with the execution method. Then he'd have the children raped and killed anyways. I can't beleive the international community let Saudi Arabia get away with harbouring the asshole. He should have been skinned alive, dipped in salt and then have his skin stitched back on, suspeneded from a cage above a cesspit, administered food through IV and small doses of Meth to keep him awake and alive long enough to die from lack of sleep.

I choose Idi Amin. Anyone who gives himself the title Big Daddy and indulges in canbalism is pretty much the pinacle when it comes to Dictator of The Century Awards.

He would regularily execute people by having them form a single file line, give each a hammer and forcing them to dash out the brains of the person in front of them. They were told he would have their children and loved ones raped and killed if they didn't go along with the execution method. Then he'd have the children raped and killed anyways. I can't beleive the international community let Saudi Arabia get away with harbouring the asshole. He should have been skinned alive, dipped in salt and then have his skin stitched back on, suspeneded from a cage above a cesspit, administered food through IV and small doses of Meth to keep him awake and alive long enough to die from lack of sleep.


uhhh, nice creative punishment :)

I choose Idi Amin. Anyone who gives himself the title Big Daddy and indulges in canbalism is pretty much the pinacle when it comes to Dictator of The Century Awards.

He would regularily execute people by having them form a single file line, give each a hammer and forcing them to dash out the brains of the person in front of them. They were told he would have their children and loved ones raped and killed if they didn't go along with the execution method. Then he'd have the children raped and killed anyways. I can't beleive the international community let Saudi Arabia get away with harbouring the asshole. He should have been skinned alive, dipped in salt and then have his skin stitched back on, suspeneded from a cage above a cesspit, administered food through IV and small doses of Meth to keep him awake and alive long enough to die from lack of sleep.
I like your thinking on the punishment part, only you really can't mete out the suffering that he inflicted on others,unless you kept him alive for a thousand or so years. The one who seems to me to deserves the the nod hands down as the single most destructive as far as fomenting hatred and single-handedly destroying the economy is Robert Mugabe. If half the reports i read about him are true it is surprising that no -one has killed him yet.

Thabo Mbeki, more people have died because of his misrule than any genocide Idi Amin ever carried out.

Mbeki has allowed South Africa to fall into chaos, he allows his neighbors to the North (Namibia and Zimbabwe) to be run into the ground.

He surely ranks up there with F.W. De Klerk and Mandela.

Figure about 60,000 South Africans of all races are murdered each year in crime, and this started around 1990, so in the last 15 years, nearly 1,000,000 have fallen to crime. That sounds like a genocide of sorts to me, most of the criminals were Xhosa, and most of the killed were either white or zulu.

I don't know how to break it to you people, but most who voted on this are either American or ignorant.

Idi Amin was probably voted because he was the bad guy in Black Hawk Down, plus a threat to American interests. Mugabe because of the recent news events.

However, anyone with a passing knowledge of the continent's history will choose Mobutu over those two. He exploited his position by gathering millions while literally starving his own people in slave labour, over a reign far longer than most dictators ever enjoy. He had curious personal habits, exceptional cruelty and disregard for life. He also hated several ethnic groups and casually condoned their oppression. He was an ego-maniac and crafted flamboyant titles to glorify himself.

I know that some consider him an embarrassment and would rather forget him. After all, he was supported by the CIA during the Cold War. Congo was led by Lumumba's moderate leftist government which the Americans saw as a security threat, so they assisted Mobutu's coup.

I say Don King

You ever see rumble in the jungle? Only some one totally evil would wear his hair like that.

I don't know how to break it to you people, but most who voted on this are either American or ignorant.

Idi Amin was probably voted because he was the bad guy in Black Hawk Down, plus a threat to American interests. Mugabe because of the recent news events.

However, anyone with a passing knowledge of the continent's history will choose Mobutu over those two. He exploited his position by gathering millions while literally starving his own people in slave labour, over a reign far longer than most dictators ever enjoy. He had curious personal habits, exceptional cruelty and disregard for life. He also hated several ethnic groups and casually condoned their oppression. He was an ego-maniac and crafted flamboyant titles to glorify himself.

I know that some consider him an embarrassment and would rather forget him. After all, he was supported by the CIA during the Cold War. Congo was led by Lumumba's moderate leftist government which the Americans saw as a security threat, so they assisted Mobutu's coup.


Um... no. Idi Amin was not the bad-guy in Black Hawk Down. By the time U.S. forces were involved in Somalia he was ten-years room-temperature and rotting. Amin ruled in Uganda, which is on the other side of the continent from Somalia (where the events upon which the movie was based occurred.)

Further: Amin was an African Ruler in the 1970's, and was removed from office prior to 1980.

Time and Space combine to say that your very first opening statement is, likely, incorrect.

Americans remember Amin, because the Carter Administration yanked the U.S. support for that cannibalistic father-raping bastard and (via CIA's refusal to assist) allowed him to be toppled.

My own vote would have to go to Charles Taylor, who managed to make sure that Liberia would remain poor, ignorant, and a pariah.
(nice going, Chuck).

Mugabe isn't even in the same leaguewith either Amin, or Taylor-he's just playing to his constituency and doing the normal "Avowed Marxist-violates-his-promises" shuffle we've seen in Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, Uganda, etc. etc, a pattern first set by the Soviets between 1917 and 1925. The whites in Zimbabwe are in the same position as the Kulaks in the Ukraine were, and the same result (Death, suffering) is happening-for slightly different reasons, but roughly the same methodology.


The real shame of it is, he waited until the targeted group thought they were secure enough to toss their plans to leave, before turning the whole bundle inside-out. If the Whites had known what was coming twenty-years ago, they could have gotten out with their savings mostly intact, and gone to another Commonwealth country to start over again. Likewise for the educated African-Africans.

You know what they had in Zimbabwe before they had candles? Electricity, running water, and a functioning and sustainable surplus in agriculture. They don't have that now that Mugabe's decided to hand out the farmland to his ignorant buddies. Now they have famine. Nice going, Bob.

So...slightly off topic, but, would you say that in the main it's African rulers who are responsible for the poverty in many African countries? Obviously many of these countries have been exploited as colonies, but many Asian countries have pulled them out of the same situation (eg South Korea).

Damn, Gage, you're right. I short-circuited and mistook Amin for Aidid.
On a further note, I don't see Mohamed Farrah Aidid on the list at all...

Damn, Gage, you're right. I short-circuited and mistook Amin for Aidid.
On a further note, I don't see Mohamed Farrah Aidid on the list at all...

Of course not, after killing those American Soldiers, he had lunch with President Clinton at the White House!

So...slightly off topic, but, would you say that in the main it's African rulers who are responsible for the poverty in many African countries? Obviously many of these countries have been exploited as colonies, but many Asian countries have pulled them out of the same situation (eg South Korea).

I would say it's a decent bet... except for one thing: Africa is unusual in that it's a very hospitable environment for being a primitive-the temperatures never drop below freezing for sustained periods, and while the wildlife will eat you, there's plenty of things a person can eat that don't require tilling the soil in most of the continent.

This is most unlike Korea,where the environment, left unmodified, can and will kill you.
There's also the difference in cultural development to consider-the bulk of Asian nations have rationalistic religions as dominant. Buddhism, for instance. "Lawful" cultures tend to handle Economics and technology a bit better than cultures grounded in superstition and chaos. Lawful cultures tend to come about in places where the very environment is apt to kill you if you don't do the remarkably clever thing.

You'll note that the only area of Africa to have extensive, literate, civilizations develop on their own is the Northern part-where the environment itself is trying to kill you.

I Hypothesize that if the climate in most of africa would just get really bad for a couple of generations, and the International Community would just withold both commerce, and aid, a lot of these problems would sort themselves out, and the Africans could stop being basket-cases and start truly dealing with their problems themselves.
It's not an overpopulation problem, it's cultural laziness. People who don't want to be responsible for themselves, and don't want to work on changing their own lives for the better using reason instead of superstition.

You can't force someone to do the smart things, or the right things, and enabling a failure to continue onward in self-destruction is only putting that failure's children on the same path.

Africa has the leaders it does, because the Africans will tolerate those leaders, and the Africans tolerate those leaders, because the International Community props their regimes up either directly, or indirectly. Aidid had power in Somalia, because he could control the flow of Humanitarian Aid through force-of-arms. Same was true in Ethiopia in the '80s, and in Sudan today.

The only way these people are going to have a chance to be more than 'developing' countries, is for the rest of the world to let them fail on their own until they get it right.

This, of course, is as likely to happen, as the moon sporting a breathable atmosphere and liquid water on its surface tomorrow morning. There is simply too much money to be made in the Aid Trade.

Another important contributor to Africa's plight is, ironically, its seemingly endless supply of natural resources.
Of course, there are places like Norway that enjoy political stability while possessing such riches, but in Central Africa, there are diamonds just waiting to be picked by hand. Where Norwegians needed advanced technology and concentrated effort to exploit the oil, basically any two-bit slave driver can get rich from staking out a diamond claim in the Congo.
Since there's much to be gained from brutal, short-sighted tyranny, it's seen as a more attractive option compared to long-term nation building. A Northern European will immediately understand that education leads to prosperity, but try convincing the warlord who can rack up a cool million per month with his mining camp (guarded from child soldiers by child soldiers).

Who is the most evil African ruler of all time?

George W. Bushmen of the Kalahari.

Does Muhammad Farah Aidid count?

Does Muhammad Farah Aidid count?

I'd classify him as a warlord rather than a ruler, but that might be splitting hairs. At any rate, he can't match the inhumanity of some bosses on that list.

Idi Amin Dada by far.

I would say it's a decent bet... except for one thing: Africa is unusual in that it's a very hospitable environment for being a primitive-the temperatures never drop below freezing for sustained periods, and while the wildlife will eat you, there's plenty of things a person can eat that don't require tilling the soil in most of the continent.

This is most unlike Korea,where the environment, left unmodified, can and will kill you.
There's also the difference in cultural development to consider-the bulk of Asian nations have rationalistic religions as dominant. Buddhism, for instance. "Lawful" cultures tend to handle Economics and technology a bit better than cultures grounded in superstition and chaos. Lawful cultures tend to come about in places where the very environment is apt to kill you if you don't do the remarkably clever thing.

You'll note that the only area of Africa to have extensive, literate, civilizations develop on their own is the Northern part-where the environment itself is trying to kill you.

I Hypothesize that if the climate in most of africa would just get really bad for a couple of generations, and the International Community would just withold both commerce, and aid, a lot of these problems would sort themselves out, and the Africans could stop being basket-cases and start truly dealing with their problems themselves.
It's not an overpopulation problem, it's cultural laziness. People who don't want to be responsible for themselves, and don't want to work on changing their own lives for the better using reason instead of superstition.

You can't force someone to do the smart things, or the right things, and enabling a failure to continue onward in self-destruction is only putting that failure's children on the same path.

Africa has the leaders it does, because the Africans will tolerate those leaders, and the Africans tolerate those leaders, because the International Community props their regimes up either directly, or indirectly. Aidid had power in Somalia, because he could control the flow of Humanitarian Aid through force-of-arms. Same was true in Ethiopia in the '80s, and in Sudan today.

The only way these people are going to have a chance to be more than 'developing' countries, is for the rest of the world to let them fail on their own until they get it right.

This, of course, is as likely to happen, as the moon sporting a breathable atmosphere and liquid water on its surface tomorrow morning. There is simply too much money to be made in the Aid Trade.

Nothing will happen in Africa until Africans are governed by people who respect their rights, and will govern wisely, and democratically.

They also need to embrace free trade, so does Europe, and North America.

With Governments that respect rights, and govern wisely, and no tariffs on either end to stop trade, Africa can make it.

Can't decide. They are all horrible people ...

I agree completely. Corrupt government, debt and restricted international trade cripple Africa. Could be a damned nice place without them.

Edit: Sorry, that's me agreeing with what Disraeliland said, and I promise, that's the last off-topic thing I'll say!

I'm going to pick France's darling, Bokassa, by a hair over Idi Amin. He was an emperor and all.

From the list I chose Amin Dada but I'm no expert. Cannibalism is regarded evil in my book.
Haile Selassi (sp?) may have been high on the list too.
Do Egyptians count too? Building pyramids (Nile=Africa) at the expense of a few hundred thousand slaves appears pretty evil to me.
In that case it'd be some pharaoh, dunno which one.

Damn, Gage, you're right. I short-circuited and mistook Amin for Aidid.
On a further note, I don't see Mohamed Farrah Aidid on the list at all...

Never heard of him.

Never heard of him.

*cough*

I don't know how to break it to you people, but most who voted on this are either American or ignorant.

Idi Amin was probably voted because he was the bad guy in Black Hawk Down, plus a threat to American interests. Mugabe because of the recent news events.



Idi Amin was the ruler of Uganda in the 70s. He was NOT the bad guy in Black Hawk Dawn.

You're thinking of Muhammed Farrah Adid.