Top 35 Tim Butcher Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “That is what we need more than anything. A sense of the law and the sense that there is someone to enforce it. Without that there is chaos.”

— Tim Butcher

2. “Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.”

— Tim Butcher

3. “I come from east Africa, Kenya, where people die of starvation because of drought. There is never enough rain for the crops or the animals. But here in the Congo, they have all the rain they need, rivers full of fish, and soil that is unbelievably rich. If you stand still here in the bush you can actually see plants growing around you, the growth is that powerful, that strong. And yet somehow people still manage to go hungry here because of the chaos, the bad management.”

— Tim Butcher

4. “I was born here in the Congo. When my parents took me as a child back to Greece, it was more primitive than here. I used to look forward to coming back to the Congo because it was more advanced than Greece. Can you imagine that?”

— Tim Butcher

5. “Members of his crew knew dialects from further up the African coast, but they had never heard words like those spoken by these river people. Cao heard the name Kongo being repeated. Following the pattern of other African groups, they explained they were the BaKongo people and called their language KiKongo. Inland, they said, was the capital of their tribe, MbanzaKongo, where there lived a powerful leader or king, the ManiKongo.”

— Tim Butcher

6. “Somewhere to our north ran the Ebola River, a tributary of a tributary of the Congo River, but a name that is associated with a horrific medical.”

— Tim Butcher

7. “What made it so galling to me, the outsider, was that of the large sums paid by the various mining companies, brokers and traders, only a tiny fraction ever reached the local economy. The vast bulk was lost in bribes demanded by corrupt officials at all levels. Lubumbashi’s cobalt bonanza brought home to me how money alone will not solve Africa’s problems. Until the Congo’s economy is underpinned by the rule of law and transparency, it will remain stagnant, chaotic and unproductive.”

— Tim Butcher

8. “Even in Africa, the Congo has few rivals for corruption.”

— Tim Butcher

9. “For those who think Africa’s problems can simply be solved by the injection of money, I would recommend a crash course in cobalt economics in the Congo. In 2004 the cobalt boom meant there was plenty of money in Lubumbashi, but the presence of money did not guarantee that the local economy grew or even stabilised.”

— Tim Butcher

10. “It taught me a lesson about one of the Congo’s chronic problems, its lack of institutional memory.”

— Tim Butcher

11. “I had bought a plastic bottle of petrol to run his small generator and I could hear the delighted screams of his children gathered around a television inside, watching a low-budget Nigerian-made film about adult women falling in love with a magical eight-year-old boy.”

— Tim Butcher

12. “One of the great fallacies about white rule in Africa was that when it ended, power was handed back to the people of Africa. I saw in the Congo how this simply is not true.”

— Tim Butcher

13. “The uranium for the atom bombs dropped by America on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from a mine in Katanga, and it was Katanga’s vast copper deposits that really powered the colony’s growth when the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after the Second World War drove a surge in demand for copper.”

— Tim Butcher

14. “As my history teachers drilled into me, the First World War provided the preconditions for the Second World War and thereby the tension of the Cold War. The war of 1914–18 was Ground Zero for modern history, the end of an old order that had held sway for hundreds of years, the fiery forging of a new world.”

— Tim Butcher

15. “The statesmen leaving the Berlin Congress smugly convinced themselves that the people of Bosnia would benefit from the diplomatic finesse of having the Western Austro-Hungarians replace the Eastern Ottomans. What they had actually done, however, was quite the opposite, sowing seeds of resentment that would eventually destroy the status quo of the entire Western world.”

— Tim Butcher

16. “Like many other African dictators, Mobutu won power by presenting himself as the only leader strong enough to unite the country.”

— Tim Butcher

17. “I visited white-supremacist websites, designed by American racists, in which the Congo was held up as proof of the black man’s inferiority.”

— Tim Butcher

18. “It did not quite do it justice to call it adventure travel, and it certainly was not pleasure travel. My Congo journey deserved its own category: ordeal travel.”

— Tim Butcher

19. “When going on a journey it is not just the strength of a man’s legs, but the provisions he prepares for the trip.”

— Tim Butcher

20. “In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.”

— Tim Butcher

21. “Then the mob parted and there was the boy, with his arms twisted behind his back and the foot of a man, a petrol attendant in Cohydro cap and uniform, stamped firmly on his neck. The boy’s mouth was bleeding and the side of his face was squashed flat on the uneven concrete of the forecourt. It was a scene I had witnessed numerous times during my stint covering Africa. Quick and brutal, African mob justice is a terrifying thing.”

— Tim Butcher

22. “I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than sovereignty. It is used by dictators and undemocratic regimes to fend off criticism of their rule and to conceal their own maladministration and corrupt pilfering. They cloak themselves in it to dismiss the right of any outsider to hold them to account.”

— Tim Butcher

23. “Democracy was shunned by Mobutu, who defied calls for free and fair elections and centralised power into the hands of a close-knit cabal of friends, family and cronies.”

— Tim Butcher

24. “I had covered wars in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Iraq and elsewhere, but the work had started to feel routine. I wanted to leave the journalistic herd, to find a project that would both daunt and inspire me. Facing down the Congo was just such a project.”

— Tim Butcher

25. “My favourite was a T-shirt that had obviously been given to contestants in a 1994 pistol-shooting competition in Dallas, Texas, only to end up, more than a decade later, as the main component of a Congolese villager’s wardrobe.”

— Tim Butcher

26. “Belgian colonial law barred Congolese from reaching senior positions in the army, civil service, judiciary or other organs of state, and by the time the colonialists left, the country had barely a handful of graduates. Control of the Congo fell into the hands not of a cadre of trained, experienced, educated leaders, but of young turks who suddenly found themselves vying for positions of enormous influence.”

— Tim Butcher

27. “I was entertained with a song setting forth the delights of cannibalism, in which the flesh of the men was said to be good but that of women was bad and only eaten in time of scarcity; nevertheless, it was not to be despised when man meat was unobtainable.”

— Tim Butcher

28. “It was one of the defining moments of my journey through the Congo. I was travelling through a country with more past than future, a place where the hands of the clock spin not forwards, but backwards.”

— Tim Butcher

29. “We are seeing malnutrition levels here as if this place was suffering from a full famine.”

— Tim Butcher

30. “One of my best friends in Johannesburg took great pleasure in arguing that crossing the Congo today would be more dangerous than when Stanley did it in the 1870s. ‘At least the natives back then didn’t have Kalashnikovs,’ he smirked.”

— Tim Butcher

31. “And he had distilled the quintessential problem of Africa that generations of academics, intellectuals and observers have danced around since the colonial powers withdrew. Why are Africans so bad at running Africa?”

— Tim Butcher

32. “If you think you can solve Africa’s problems with money, then you are a bloody fool. You solve Africa’s problems by creating a system of justice that actually works and by making the leaders accountable for their actions.”

— Tim Butcher

33. “The forest, not the town, offers the safest sanctuary and it is grandfathers who have been more exposed to modernity than their grandchildren. I can think of nowhere else on the planet where the same can be true.”

— Tim Butcher

34. “Under cover of darkness on 22 January 1961 two Belgian brothers, with connections to the Belgian security forces, returned and exhumed the body for a second time. They used a hacksaw and an axe to dismember the decomposing corpse, before dissolving the remains in a 200-litre petrol drum filled with sulphuric acid taken from a nearby copper-processing plant. One of the brothers later admitted he used pliers to remove two of Lumumba’s teeth as souvenirs.”

— Tim Butcher

35. “Mobutu’s dictatorial reign between 1965 and 1997 created the violent free-for-all of today’s Congo.”

— Tim Butcher

36. “I can think of no concept more abused in modern Africa than sovereignty.”

— Tim Butcher

37. “But his only advice to me, the novice, was: ‘Just two things to remember in Africa – which tribe and how many dead.”

— Tim Butcher

38. “Sure, doing business in the Congo is unconventional, but try to look at it from a strictly business point of view. The fees we pay to the government are no different from taxes paid in other countries. Everything we do is legal to the extent that there is any law in this country. If the regime says we pay for this licence, we pay for the licence. It just so happens the money might be paid in a big, black plastic bag delivered at night to a politician’s house.”

— Tim Butcher

39. “In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.”

— Tim Butcher