African Update

Young American journalist Bryan Mealer was looking for adventure and Africa seemed to be the perfect place.  Originally it was the more benign experiences of the continent’s wildlife that he had in mind but soon he was thrust into a different sort of escapade—indeed one that turned out to be the very antithesis of Africa’s natural beauty.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a mess.  Millions of its citizens have died as a result of war there in recent decades—more deaths than in any other conflict on earth since World War II—and the country has more or less lost its long struggle for stability.  Like his friends back home Mealer knew almost nothing about the Congo before he was asked to cover the sprawling nation and its plight for the Associated Press.  But he dives right in and soon finds himself—both figuratively and, sometimes, literally—mired in the muck of Congo’s history and recent political situation.

Like a modern-day Joseph Conrad, Mealer comes back from the abyss and brings us All Things Must Fight to Live.  It is a somewhat disjointed collection of his three years as a  reporter in Congo where he covered an election, cycled through the jungle, and meandered in broken-down boats and trains to document just how much of a failed state the country really is.

Mealer is a gifted writer who reports his harrowing experiences with humility and humanity.  He wisely leaves himself out of most of his writing, except to remind his readers often about how frustrated he feels that such atrocities are occurring in the Congo without anyone really knowing or caring, and to note how difficult it is for him to adjust to life back home after being witness to such events.  Fair enough.  But it’s a bit ironic that after finishing All Things Must Fight to Live the reader is left with little more than a collection of unimaginable human carnage, inhumane suffering, and almost laughable dysfunction.

Mealer does his best to sprinkle in some of Congo’s complex and cruel history—from Belgium’s King Leopold, to the dictator Mobutu, to the present day—but it isn’t really enough to provide the context necessary to understand, even slightly, why Congo is in such disarray.  As a result this precludes any discussion or analysis of a way forward for Congo and leaves the uninitiated reader with very little to take away except a deep sense of dispair.

In the end, while All Things Must Fight to Live is a well-reported catalog of the Congo’s recent troubles, it proves to be little more than that.  Instead it amounts to yet another story of a young, white, writer making his way through the jungles of Congo and living to tell the tale.  And we’ve read about that before.

At one point well into Chris Abani’s haunting novella Song For Night, the story’s protagonist, a fifteen-year-old veteran soldier named My Luck fighting in an unnamed civil war in Nigeria, asks a very good question: “If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice?”

The issue of children fighting wars, particularly in Africa, has come to light in a big way recently thanks to Ishmael Beah’s bestselling book about his life as a child soldier in Sierra Leone and his work with UNICEF to help raise awareness of this tragedy.  Now Abani, an award-winning Nigerian novelist and poet living in Los Angeles, offers this swift and gritty tale of a young soldier who has been separated from his platoon.  As he desperately tries to find his way back to them—his adopted family—he recounts some of the gruesome stories from his past few war-torn years with a matter-of-fact tone that is both chilling and heart breaking.  Tales of cruelty, torture, and death abound but they are gut-wrenchingly fused with stories about love, kindness, and lost-innocence.  Together it creates a difficult yet compelling brew that is both painful and, quite naturally, much less cut and dry than we wish it could be.

Although Song For Night is a work of fiction it is an excellent companion to Beah’s book and offers a brief, yet terrifying, look into the psyche of what most certainly could be described as a typical child soldier—My Luck is just one example of the hundreds of thousands of children fighting on the African continent today.

But what about My Luck’s important question? It is a difficult one to answer—there simply isn’t any easy answer—but Chris Abani skillfully provides a glimpse into a world that is almost too grim to bear yet far too tragic to ignore.

The United States, a country with an insatiable thirst for oil, currently imports about ten percent of its petroleum supply from West Africa.  In less than a decade that number will increase to one quarter of its supply.  With the Middle East in turmoil and with China’s economy booming and in need of vast new sources of energy, African oil is hot and two new books take a close look at this twisted, messy world.

Tens of billions of dollars have been invested in African oil in recent years, largely in countries like Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Sudan, Congo, and even the tiny island nation of Sâo Tomé and Principe.  The patriarch of African oil production, Nigeria, the continent’s largest producer, is also in the mix.  Oil in Africa is serious business to the United States, Europe, and Asia but oil is also important to ExxonMobile, Shell, BP and the dozens of other oil companies and petroleum-based businesses worldwide that stand to gain enormously from its boom.  And, of course, oil and the billions of dollars that it adds to their coffers is an African leader’s best friend.

All of this adds up to one terrible mess.

John Ghazvinian’s Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil and Nicholas Shaxson’s Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil both cover very similar ground in different ways.  Ghazvinian’s book, which is more lively and cohesive than Shaxson’s, tackles African oil issues from a beginner’s point of view: these countries have oil, this oil is becoming more important to the world, so what does this mean for these countries, their citizens, and the world at large?  While these questions may seem simple they are very important questions that have largely gone unanswered.  Petroleum may indeed be the single issue that finally gets the rest of the world to pay attention to Africa.

Ghazvinian, like Shaxson, travels throughout Africa’s oil-rich regions, particularly the countries on the Gulf of Guinea, and generally finds a unifying theme: the massive wealth gained from oil has not trickled down to improve the lives of the vast majority of people living in these regions.  He also sees opportunistic oil companies living in a bubble—building self-contained, walled compounds outside of grimy slums—and African dictators and their friends and supporters welcoming them with open arms and stuffing their pockets with the plunder.  Ghazvinian also illuminates the curse of African oil and widespread occurrences of “Dutch Disease,” an economically disastrous phenomenon that happens when a country relies too much on a single natural resource leading to the decline of other economic sectors such as agriculture.

Shaxson, a veteran reporter of African affairs, takes a slightly different approach in his book.  Each chapter focuses on a single individual who, in some way, can be traced back to Africa’s petroleum and its effect on Africans.  It is an ambitious, insightful, and often entertaining style but all too often Shaxson ends up missing the mark.  It isn’t that his conclusions are wrong or unimpressive (the chapter on how dirty oil politics in Gabon permeated the French political system is particularly eye-opening) but they tend to lack a cohesive focus, leaving the reader feeling disoriented.

Like most books about modern Africa, Untapped and Poisoned Wells both come loaded with a healthy dose of that ‘can you believe things are this bad’ style that is so typical of the genre.  Page after page in each book reveals familiar anecdotes about people who are desperate, poor, corrupt, or greedy.  While both authors tend to be pessimistic about what African oil will ultimately mean for Africans, Ghazvinian, perhaps because Africa is newer to him than it is to Shaxson and he is less cynical, ends up a bit more optimistic in the end.

African oil is an important topic and, like most things in Africa, it is complex, perverse and difficult to grasp.  Both books adequately address the issue in their own way and they both provide valuable and timely, if not perfect, insight into what oil in Africa really means.

Until recently Peter Godwin assumed that his family had come from the typical Anglo-African stock that made up most of Zimbabwe’s small white population.  His father was a meticulous and stoic engineer and his mother was a doctor.  Both came to Africa from Britain following WWII, settling in the then-British colony of Rhodesia.  The Godwin’s became immediately smitten with their new home and settled into a comfortable, yet modest, life in the suburbs.  When Rhodesia separated from Britain in the 1960s and, after a long struggle, gained majority rule in 1980 the Godwin family stayed on in the newly christened Zimbabwe rather than leave as so many other whites did at the time, proud to be a part of the new, and now fully democratic, nation.

Peter Godwin who, much to his father’s dismay, gave up a career in law to become a journalist, wrote the magnificent memoir Mukiwa about his life growing up in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.  He most certainly never suspected that he’d write another memoir about his African legacy ten years later but, after returning to Zimbabwe to tend to his elderly (and relatively sick) parents, he discovers a family secret that had been swept under the rug for fifty years.  It is revealed to Peter that his father—with his perfect British manners and perfectly manicured British accent—is in fact a Polish Jew whose family shipped him off to England just months before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.  The grandparents, aunts, and uncles that Peter never knew had been killed in the Holocaust and his father had spent the last five decades cultivating a successful rebirth as an Anglo-African Christian.

While this shocking information by itself is movingly unique, the true strength of this memoir is the way in which Godwin weaves the revelation of his father’s secret past with the sad and desperate situation of Zimbabwe’s present and his parent’s unwillingness, at all costs, to leave it behind.  Even though his parent’s fixed government pensions can’t keep up with the quadruple-digit inflation that requires Zimbabwe’s citizens to carry suitcases of cash to the market to purchase a loaf of bread, Godwin eventually begins to understand why it is that they cannot leave a country that is so clearly broken.  Despite the danger of violence against them, food and fuel shortages, lack of money, and the constant threat that their land will be taken away by “war vets” embolden by the country’s dictator Robert Mugabe who set into motion a disastrous and haphazard land reform policy that has essentially destroyed Zimbabwe’s economic structure, the elderly Godwin’s stay in their crumbling home because Zimbabwe is their savior.  They could never leave it behind.

Godwin’s narrative skillfully traces how the complexities and contradictions of our lives can intertwine to reveal our consciousness and our way of thinking.  Ultimately Godwin is faced with his own thoughts about Zimbabwe, his beloved yet ruined home which he has since abandon for the greener pastures of New York, and what it all means for his own family and his own future.

Raw, honest emotion spills over ever page of this memoir yet, in so many ways it is the perfect metaphor for Zimbabwe and indeed much of the entire African continent: a sad and difficult tale that is filled with images of love and strength, and an unbelievable amount of inspiration.

Do not miss this truly breathtaking memoir.

For nearly all of its forty-seven year history as an independent nation the Congo has been engulfed in turmoil.  Plagued with chronic political instability, corruption, and ethnic strife culminating in recent years with a civil war that has claimed the lives of millions of people; the Congo has had an intimate relationship with chaos.

Larry Devlin was there at the very beginning.  He arrived as the new CIA station chief in Leopoldville, the Congo’s capital, just five days after the country had gained its independence from Belgium during the summer of 1960.  As the African continent began to de-colonize in the late 1950s the United States and the Soviet Union discovered this new battlefield for the Cold War and soon the two superpowers were scrambling to gain influence in these newly independent nations.  None was more important than the Congo, a sprawling central African nation that was viewed by many as a linchpin for influencing much of the rest of the continent.  But when Devlin arrived, less than a week after the Congo’s independence, things were already in disarray.  The army, which had mutinied, was threatening, beating and robbing everyone in sight and soon the economically important southern province of Katanga succeeded from the country and a major political struggle ensued.  Devlin certainly had his work cut out for him.

His memoir is filled with the sort of racy cloak-and-dagger details that you’d find in any good spy novel.  From jumping a gunman who was about to assassinate the Congo’s future president, to talking his way out of multiple situations at gun point, Devlin’s two tours in the Congo where anything but boring.  Perhaps his most important insight is his recollection of the United States’ role in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister who also happened to have communist sympathies and a partiality for the Soviet Union.  Devlin recalls his eerie encounter with the mysterious “Joe from Paris” who, at the direction of President Eisenhower himself, came to the Congo to order Devlin to assassinate Lumumba, even going so far as to provide him with an array of discreet poisons for carrying out the task.  While Devlin agreed that Lumumba posed a threat to US interests he disagreed with the need for assassination and, without openly opposing the order, Devlin did not carry it out.  Lumumba was soon assassinated by his own Congolese opponents.

The Congo was clearly a fascinating, important, and lively place during the 1960s and Devlin’s account offers a unique behind-the-scenes perspective of this harrowing episode of Cold War history.  The book’s biggest flaw, however, comes in its final chapter where Devlin becomes an apologist for the Congo’s notorious dictator Mobutu Sese Seko whom Devlin had a close relationship with.  Devlin calls Mobutu, a man who ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom for thirty-two years, turned it into a one-party state, and effectively ran the economy into the ground while funneling billions of dollars of aid money into his personal bank account, a “courageous” person.  Devlin also kindly notes that Mobutu was “no worse than most African leaders and probably better than many.”  Not exactly a ringing endorsement but shouldn’t we expect more from our leaders?

This is an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise intriguing and absorbing memoir written by a truly masterful spy.

Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war featured some exceptionally brutal tactics, even by the callous standards of war.  The severing of hands became a trademark of this conflict which ravaged the small, diamond-rich, West African nation from 1991 until 2002 and resulted in the death of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of millions more.

Perhaps one of the worst atrocities of Sierra Leone’s war, however, was the use of child solders.  Recent estimates suggest that Africa now has more than 200,000 children fighting on its soil, and in Sierra Leone in the 1990s both the Revolutionary United Front rebels and their Sierra Leonean army counterparts actively engaged in the forced ‘recruitment’ of child solders.  While the thought of a 10-year-old boy struggling to tote around an AK-47 presents a chilling image, the complete story behind such a shocking image—the horrific, dehumanizing story about what child solders have actually done in battle—has yet to be told, until now.

Ishmael Beah was just twelve years old when he found himself caught in the crosshairs of Sierra Leone’s civil war.  He spent several months fleeing the violence and hiding in the bush before he was eventually picked up by government troops and ‘recruited’ to join the fight.  After losing his family and living on the run and in fear Beah, like most of his fellow child soldiers, had nowhere else to turn.  The boys were quickly put into circulation and fed a steady diet of amphetamines, marijuana, and a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder known as “brown brown.”  They were then given AK-47s and told stories by their commanders about the evil atrocities that their enemies had committed, often against the children’s own families, and sent off to battle.  Their fellow soldiers became the children’s new family.

Beah graphically recalls his three years as a solider with astonishing detail.  The banality with which he could carry out even the most horrifying acts of violence and torture is certainly alarming but when you remind yourself that these are the acts of a young teenager it becomes truly astonishing.  The thought of these young children running around with automatic weapons, strung out on drugs, casually slicing the throats of men and watching them die seems incomprehensible to most of us but, sadly, this is often how wars are fought now, particularly in Africa.

Thankfully Beah’s story, unlike those of most of his comrades-in-arms, has a happy ending.  He is eventually released to UNICEF workers who send him to a rehabilitation center where he spends several very difficult months being weaned off of drugs and violence.  After being forced to run from the war once again Beah eventually makes his way to the United States where he finishes high school and then graduated from Oberlin College in 2004.

Ishmael Beah is truly one of the lucky ones but we owe a debt of gratitude to him too for telling his tragic, unforgettable, and important story in a way that is both lucid and unrelenting.  A Long Way Gone doesn’t gloss over the things that we don’t want to hear and it should help open the world’s eyes to the appalling catastrophe of child soldiers.

As someone who has spent a thirty year career in the international development community, most of it in Africa, it is difficult to question the authority that Robert Calderisi has on such matters.  Much of Calderisi’s career has been spent with the World Bank where he was the Bank’s spokesperson for Africa for three years (1997-2000) and where he worked closely on major African aid projects like the massive and controversial Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline.  He has been on the ground and on the front lines of Africa’s development community for many years, working directly with African governments and the various agencies that have provided aid to them for a long time.

While it is no great revelation to say that foreign aid to Africa isn’t working—the numbers don’t lie, Africa has received some $600 billion in aid since 1960 yet it has actually gotten poorer since then—Calderisi, perhaps surprisingly, is one of the first people with direct experience in the aid community to actually speak out about the elephant in the room.

The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working is a refreshingly honest and well-written book yet, more than that, it might just be the most important book written about Africa in years.  Calderisi pulls no punches and makes it clear that the time for finger-pointing and blame about Africa’s troubles has long since passed.  Calderisi believes, quite correctly, that most of Africa’s troubles today are self-imposed by ruthless, corrupt, and inept African leaders who prey on Western guilt and fill their bloated bank accounts with the booty.  This is not new information, it has been going on for decades, but Robert Calderisi is one of the few people with extensive experience in Africa to actually speak up out about it.

Calderisi doesn’t stop at simply telling us why foreign hasn’t worked in Africa, he provides several prescriptive solutions that, he believes, will help to correct the problem.  His suggestions range from requiring African officials to open their bank accounts to public scrutiny and the promotion of democracy, to cutting direct aid to individual countries and merging the various United Nations aid organizations.  In fact, Calderisi’s suggestions are so straight forward and plausible that most people will wonder why it has taken two generations for anyone to suggest them.

Despite its negative premise it must be said that The Trouble with Africa is still a very hopeful book.  Calderisi’s belief in the people of Africa, so many of whom scratch to survive in ingenious ways despite the hurdles placed in front of them by their own governments, shines through in his writing.  He, like many who care deeply about Africa, is hopeful for the future.

The Trouble with Africa deserves a very wide readership and we should all hope that policymakers everywhere will take what Robert Calderisi has written to heart.

(please also see our interview with Robert Calderisi here)

George Packer’s The Village of Waiting should be required reading for anyone looking to spend some quality time in a tiny African village.  Packer, who is the author of The Assassins’ Gate his recent and masterful account of the war in Iraq, spent nearly two years in the petite West African nation of Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1980s.  It was a time when the honeymoon of African independence was ending and the unadulterated desperation that is so prevalent on the continent today had yet to completely set in.

Packer’s writing, as always, is a joy to read and his honesty and frankness about his experiences in Togo and his travels in Africa are both refreshing and valuable.  While some may find Packer too negative others will relish his realistic and unromantic assessments of what he sees.  No matter what the reader thinks of Packer and his account of Africa it is impossible not to recognize and appreciate his emotion and depth of feeling for the people he meets along the way.

The Village of Waiting ranks highly among the best first-person accounts on Africa available today.

As one of the smartest people on the face of the earth it is easy to want to believe everything that Jeffrey Sachs says.  Sachs is an internationally renowned economist who has made it his life’s work to help end global poverty.  His book The End of Poverty is a practical attempt at showing how, by 2025, we can end the extreme global poverty (or as Sachs refers to it “poverty that kills”) that inflicts over one billion people worldwide—most of whom live in Africa.

There is much to be learned from reading Sachs’ optimistic, thoughtful, if sometimes self-congratulatory treatise on the reality of ending global poverty—which is probably the greatest scourge in the world today—within our lifetime.  Yet Sachs’ proposal contains a serious and unforgivable flaw, at least in regard to Africa, which does nothing less than throw a monkey wrench into his plan: He fails to accept the roles that corruption and poor governance play in the failure of African economies.

Sachs writes that “politics, at the end of the day, simply cannot explain Africa’s prolonged economic crisis.  The claim that Africa’s corruption is the basic source of the problem does not withstand practical experience or serious scrutiny.”

Tell that to the people of Zimbabwe Prof. Sachs.

Whether we’re taking about corruption or simply poor governance in general, it is completely wrong and misguided to dismiss it out of hand as a long-term cause for Africa’s economic woes.  Sachs seems to disregard the long-standing cycle of poor and marginal governments that sub-Saharan Africa’s poor populations have had to endure for decades, and he doesn’t seem to recognize the cumulative effects of these poor governments either.

Sachs’ answer in The End of Poverty essentially amounts to more money and it’s hard not to agree that rich nations can and should give more.  But shouldn’t it be established by now that simply giving more money to end poverty in Africa (and elsewhere) is not enough?   We must actually do more to support governments that care for their citizens—governments that spend money feeding their people and creating jobs for them rather than spending it on new fleets of Mercedes and personal body guards.  Yes, poor and corrupt government isn’t the only reason for Africa’s economic troubles, but it most certainly plays a leading role. 

Unfortunately Jeffrey Sachs’ dismissive response to corruption and bad government is a fatal flaw in this otherwise hopeful and optimistic book.

As the former African editor for the Economist magazine one might suspect that Robert Guest believes that the answer to the continent’s problems resides largely in economic issues, namely the freedom of Africa’s population to engage in free enterprise and strive for economic opportunity unhindered. Selfish and thuggish leadership has long exploited Africa’s vast natural resources, neglected such important economic issues as individual property rights, siphoned off international aid, and scared away private investment, among other things according to Guest and one would be very hard pressed to argue with his conclusions.

Robert Guest has written an excellent and courageously honest book about Africa’s troubles since independence and despite its overwhelmingly negative subject matter he provides a realistic and optimistic prescription that might just offer real hope for the future and gives his Africa-loving readers something to look forward to.

While much of what Guest prescribes isn’t exactly new—competent, unselfish leadership being at the top of the list, for example—he doesn’t pull any punches, which makes this book a refreshing and lively read. One of his more lucid and important conclusions, if rather simple, is that Africa and those who care about it should stop pointing fingers and laying blame at others for its troubles.  The time for assigning blame has long past its usefulness and it’s now time to search for real solutions to these very real and deadly problems. 

Robert Guest might just have some good ones here.

Jeffrey Tayler, who is a masterful traveler and observer of out-of-the-way places and the author of several books including Glory in a Camel’s Eye (2003), provides this lively and engrossing look at one of the world’s most out-of-the-way regions: the Sahel—the southern border region of the Sahara Desert encompassing the countries of Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Mali.

The Sahel is a harsh and foreboding region, even by African standards, and the difficulties faced by the people that live there are some of the greatest in the world: drought, hunger, religious and ethnic strife, etc. Tayler, a frequent contributor to The Atlantic and other publications, speaks fluent Arabic which allows him to venture a bit deeper than the average Westerner into the psyche of the people of the Sahel and thankfully the reader reaps the benefit of this.

Tayler’s journey took place not long before the United States-led invasion of Iraq and his focus is to illuminate the African brand of Islam and to remind his readers of this long neglected and long suffering region of the world.

Although Tayler’s conclusion that the world’s neglect of the Sahel region could eventually lead to a growth of militant views of Islam and possibly—in this post 9/11 world—more terrorist sympathizing states could very well be true, his strongest aspects are his straight-forward and honest views of this troubled yet oddly alluring and unique region of Africa.

Like any good travel writer Tayler is not given to romantic hyperbole and he isn’t afraid to challenge those he meets about the various dogma and traditions of the region. But, he also truly cares about his subjects, patiently observing and admiring how they persevere despite the odds being stacked against them.

Angry Wind is an enthralling and remarkably rewarding book to read. Filled with spine-tingling descriptions of the people and places of the Sahel it is a book that one will not soon forget.

Meredith, a British journalist and historian who has authored several books about Africa most notably Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe (2002), has written an extensive treatise on the history of much of the continent since colonial independence—roughly the last fifty years.  Although it is very long, and doesn’t include much that any well-read Africanist wouldn’t already know, the book provides an extremely readable overview of the tragedy that makes up most of recent African history.  This book will likely stand as one of the most important single-volume histories of recent Africa for many years to come.

If there is a downside to this otherwise remarkable book it is that it lacks the perspective and analysis that a veteran like Martin Meredith could surely provide.  Still, this hefty book is well worth your time.

As a well credentialed foreign correspondent Michela Wrong, whose previous book In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (2001) won the PEN award for nonfiction, has seen first-hand the penetrating and thorny troubles of Africa. Her readers will not be disappointed with her efforts here. Delving deeply into the fascinating and unique history of the tiny East African nation of Eritrea whose result to date—as is often the case in Africa—is not really a positive one. Wrong’s flowing narrative style and admirable ability to sift through and keep up with layer after layer of complexity is impressive. While she occasionally ventures a bit too deeply into her sidebar topics—the chapter about the American G.I.’s in Eritrea during the 1960s, while valuable, seems to get somewhat off track—Wrong seems to skillfully and successfully capture the unique psyche of the Eritrean people.

I Didn’t Do It for You does an excellent job of explaining the complicated mess that Eritrea, along with so many other African countries, found itself mired in through the colonial, post-colonial, and post-cold war periods—and she rightly spreads the blame around.

Wrong’s book tells a remarkable and sad story but it isn’t without its hints of optimism either, all of which make I Didn’t Do It for You well worth the effort.