I read Chinau Achebe's 'Things Fall Apart' a few years back, which amongst other things pitted the savagery of an African tribe (including systematic infanticide and sacrifice) against that of the colonial invaders, and to me it was all pretty damned repulsive.

But obviously the tract of the novel is that there is something more 'democratic' in the way the tribesmen conduct their slaughter (often as nothing more than local justice) coz it's a bit more 'indigenous'.

Hmmm.

I find it difficult to become so desensitised to any systematic taking of human lives that I can politicise it or write it off as pragmatism, coz really, isn't that what gets humanity in such a mess in the first place?

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