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    Why did the political use of the mass grave sweep across Africa

    to begin with?

    When the former African colonies were granted their freedom,

    each new nation began life with a constitution that guaranteed civil

    rights to its minorities.  Some of those minorities were white or Asian.

    Most were black.  In the first few years of independence, the

    constitution of virtually every free country was altered.  Altered to

    remove the guarantees of liberty to minorities.  Altered to put all

    power in the hands of one man at the top.  Altered to give unopposed

    authority to the party the "chief executive" ruled, and to the friends and

    kinsmen among whom he divvied up the country's wealth and power.

    Needless to say, the minority populations who had been stripped of all

    rights often objected.  Their protests were usually violent.  And they

    were dealt with harshly.

    Burundi was typical.  The country won independence in 1962.  In

    1972, the Hutu attempted to rebel against a government dominated by

    their rivals, the Tutsi.  During the Hutu uprising, 2,000 people were

    killed.  President Michel Micombero declared martial law, mobilized

    his army and his revolutionary youth brigades, then went on the attack

    against Hutu of any kind, whether they'd taken part in the rebellion or

    not.  Micombero's squads rounded up local administrators, chauffeurs,

    clerks, skilled workers and (in the words of a Tutsi witness) "almost all

    the Hutu intellectuals above the secondary school level," herded them

    into jail cells and either shot them or beat them to death with clubs and

    rifle butts.  4,000 were killed in the town of Bujumbura alone.  At the

    Université Officielle, the President's armed forces and youth squads

    showed up in classrooms, read off the names of Hutu students, and

    took them away...to their deaths.

    A third of the school's students were slaughtered.  Thousands of

    Protestant pastors, teachers and school directors were murdered.

    When the killing was over, 150,000 had died.94  In 1993 when a Hutu

    was elected president, the Tutsi's went on the rampage again.  This

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