The extraordinary sounds and scenes of North Koreans wailing at the funeral of the Dear Leader ("The snow is endlessly falling like tears," one soldier was reported as saying on state television. "How could the sky not cry when we've lost our general who was a great man from the sky?") reminds me of an incident when I was editor of a newspaper in Uganda.

A man who said he was acting on behalf of the North Korean government came to the office in Kampala and put an enormous wad of cash on my desk and said it was to pay for a full-page advertisement.

The ad was a paean of praise to Kim Il-sung, the then Great Leader, and all his works. It was a ridiculous, unreadable, sycophantic text. We published it, and I subsequently noticed that the same ad had appeared in newspapers in many African countries. A colleague on of the publications told me they, too, had been paid in cash.

My impression was that the ads were collected by an official and shown to the Great Leader as evidence that the whole continent loved and supported him.

 

 

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