Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

The San Francisco Chronicle and the St. Louis Post Dispatch each named “Continent” one of the best books of 2004. Here’s what they had to say:

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The year’s finest
In a year of conflict, the sublime rises to the surface
- Oscar Villalon, Chronicle Book Editor
Sunday, December 12, 2004

It was all so grubby.

Looking back on the books of 2004, it couldn’t be clearer that we were in a presidential election year, one in which the descriptions “high stakes” and “fever pitch” would serve as understatements. Name your partisan stance, and there were at least a couple of dozen books out there that told you what you wanted to hear.

That’s not to say that much wasn’t at risk this year, nor that these books were slight and hollow (though many were). It’s just that as 2004 comes to a close, the dirty cloud kicked up by all the head-butting and eye-gouging — the thumping bar brawl that crashed into the shelves of bookstores — has left a film of ash on the tongue.

But as our Best Books of 2004 list shows, there was so much more out there, works of restrained passion and eloquent intelligence that got lost behind the giant dustup. Engrossing entertainments you could use a dose of, what with all the general ugliness of the times. More exciting work by local authors — Marc Bojanowski’s The Dog Fighter, Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy, to name only a few of many; further proof that the Bay Area rivals New York City as the country’s true literary center.

There were books that breathed sweetness into life. Think of the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Collections, that the Library of America put out in three volumes. Think of Gary Snyder’s bracing new collection of poetry, Danger on Peaks. And a batch of exquisite novels such as Snow and The Swallows of Kabul — works rooted in the grim quotidian, yet elevating our predicaments beyond the gum-spattered, sole-scuffed floor of politics and into the realm of something finer and true.

And, yes, there are books here that could be called political (even Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America could, if you really wanted to), but they’re far from clumsy and self-righteous. (One worthy book that immediately comes to mind happens to be on a topic far from most Americans’ minds, but of sobering importance just the same: Howard French’s A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.)

What we present in this issue is a list that will perhaps remind you of all the stuff that ignites the mind and flutters the heart. Titles that offer respite — such as the prose found in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty and Julian Barnes’ The Lemon Table — and may help you slough off the grime of the past year.

E-mail Oscar Villalon at ovillalon@sfchronicle.com.

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Howard French lived in an Africa whose wrongs are not ripe for absolution. H would like the rest of us to share his anger at what is happening in Africa and what i being done to it. And he is right, especially in the swathe of the continent he know best, which is West Africa and the Congo basin. For many years, he was the New York Times man there and his reports, even in the sober style required by the Times, drew much admiration. American administrations knew that he was telling them true things that they did not want to hear. Other experienced journalists who worked in the region respected him deeply.

He was apparently not an easy man to know. But his African contacts and his political instincts were envied. And (I take this from old Congo hands in the press) he had two other advantages. He spoke excellent French, unlike most other American correspondents. And he had rare courage. It takes something exceptional to follow the Howard French principle: never pay when threatened and never give away your possessions, even on the frequent occasions when some screaming, doped-up teenager in tattered uniform is shoving a Kalashnikov muzzle into your face. Once, he confesses, he did surrender something he cared about. It was in Liberia, only hours before a coup d’?tat, and the roadblock soldiers were demanding food. Howard French gave them The New York Review of Books instead, because he had finished reading it. At once, the barricades were pulled aside.

He is evidently a complicated, unusual man. Howard French’s African-American parents moved early in his life to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, where his father worked for the World Health Organization. He was seventeen years old when he first went to visit them, and it was in West Africa ?still, as he admits, “his” Africa? that he learned fluent French and began his experience of the continent. There is a beautiful, gently comic account here of his first journey when, with his brother, he set out by train, bus, and collective taxi to reach northern Mali. The two boys, with their big Afro hair and jeans, puzzled the Malians, but they pressed on and finally reached the Dogon country, a barren land of plains and cliffs where the Dogon people have contrived to maintain their old way of life.

At this early point in the book, Howard French makes a fundamental statemen about Africa. He puts it in the form of a question, which may even have occurred t him then as a backpacking American teenager but which is now the “question tha haunts me.” He asks

If the Dogon, a smallish ethnic group with modest lands, could win the struggle to keep their culture and identity intact in the midst of persistent encroachment by outsiders, what might Africa have become if larger, even better-organized ethnic groups had been afforded the geographical space or other means to resist foreign domination? I have in mind ancient kingdoms like Kongo in Central Africa, or Dahomey and Ashanti in West Africa, just three out of numerous examples of African peoples who created large, well-structured states, with codified legal systems, diplomats and many other kinds of bureaucrats, and a range of public services from customs to mail delivery. One can easily imagine proto-states like these taking their places among today’s modern nation-states, if only they had been given the opportunity to develop. Instead…they were willfully and utterly destroyed, as were invaluable cultural resources and much of Africa’s self-confidence.

This is the right question, asked in the right way. It’s not, of course, the first time it has been put. Prophets of the old anticolonialist generation, such as Basil Davidson (whom French quotes), asked it too. But French revives it at just the right time, when most of the rich world assumes that Africa carries a disaster gene and when Europeans, especially, are wallowing in a bath of ill-informed nostalgia about the “benevolent” impact of their colonial empires on indigenous peoples. Another virtue of French’s version of this question is that it’s dynamic rather than sentimentally static. He does not assume that these societies could or should have been preserved unchanged. Instead, he is suggesting that they were capable of entering the torrent of nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformation on their own terms, with a fair chance of survival.

Finally, Howard French is tentative about this fateful “as if,” and he is wise to be so. Africa has been developing organized state-forms for at least six hundred years, but it is a big step to conclude that state formation was the most important feature of Africa when it was faced with modernization and outside contact. And one counterfactual question generates another. Most people on the continent did not inhabit highly structured polities such as medieval Mali or nineteenth-century Buganda, which were the exception rather than the rule. Instead, most of them lived in a multitude of smaller, less organized or defined societies. What would have been their fate as those “proto-states,” often hotly militaristic, set out on their own track to “catch up” with industrialized Europe and America?

This theory of disrupted progress underlies French’s approach to what he saw heard, and reported during his years in Africa. He is not short of loathing for some o the dictators and warlords he encounters, from General Sani Abacha in Nigeria to th late Laurent Kabila in Congo. But the evil they represent is ultimately an import, th infection after the unhealed fracture inflicted by the impact of colonization. It is not th subsequent exploitation or white settlement that did the damage; they merely inflame and perpetuated the severance of Africa from its natural political development

Above all, for French, it is the disastrous mistakes of United States policy in Africa that have prevented recovery. He does not make the US directly responsible for the horrors of recent decades. But

it would be dishonest to pretend that there is no link between what has perhaps been the least accountable and least democratically run compartment of America’s foreign policy?African affairs?and the undemocratic fortunes of the continent.

These blunders began in the cold war. In 1960, America covertly sponsored the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and later supported the rebellion of Jonas Savimbi in Angola against the “communist” government. In both cases, an entire country was condemned to years of devastating and unnecessary civil war. But the mistakes persisted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the Clinton administration?claiming to foster an “African Renaissance”?backed one authoritarian monster after another, among them Mobutu and Kabila in the Congo and Abacha in Nigeria. An insincere philosophy of “disengagement” from direct interference did not conceal Washington’s share of responsibility for the catastrophes that ensued.

Liberia, home of “one of Africa’s liveliest peoples,” lost 200,000 out of a population of 2.6 million in a series of atrocious civil wars. French saw much of this at first hand. This tiny country, which America had helped to found, became a cold war base for strategic airfields and signals intelligence. Ruled after 1980 by the abominable Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, it became the biggest recipient of American financial aid in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

Doe was eventually dismembered alive in front of a video camera by a rival in 1990. The subsequent blood-bath brought the warlord Charles Taylor to power in 1995, but the fighting went on in spite of the arrival of a Nigerian peacekeeping force. In 1996, Monrovia, the capital, exploded again into an orgy of killing and looting, shortly after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had visited Liberia (or at least the secure areas of the airport) and told Liberians that “the civil war is your war.” French found streets littered with corpses. Wash-ington, he reflected, had unwittingly “helped grease the path of Africa’s first republic towards another, far more ignominious, record: the world’s first failed state.”

But this book is much more than indictments. Howard French decided to go bac to Africa as a journalist “because I wanted to dig into the kinds of stories abou African people and culture that do not often get told.” The demands of breaking news in the times of the Rwanda genocide and Africa’s “first world war” in the Congo made that hard for him. And ye so many loves…kept me going here: the beauty and the unfussy grace of the people, the food?yes, the food?music rich beyond comparison, the sheer immediacy of human contact….

In one memorable chapter, he describes how he went in search of the novelist Sony Labou Tansi in “Congo-Brazzaville,” the collapsed but once Frenchified republic north of the great river. Tansi, “Congo’s greatest writer, a man whose brave satirical fiction had subverted dictatorships throughout the region,” had plunged briefly into ethnic politics on behalf of his own Bakongo people. Then AIDS grasped him and his wife. After vain treatments in Paris, he had returned home and vanished up-country to die.

French set out to find Tansi, beginning a long, meandering journey through mud and jungle, following one false trail after another, traveling by car, canoe, and finally on foot across a land whose roads had melted into sandy ruts and bush. In the end, in a remote huddle of mud huts, he discovered him. Half-crazed and close to death, he was in the care of a white-robed prophetess who spoke in Pentecostal tongues. For Tansi, she was the reincarnation of Dona Beatrice, the eighteenth-century saint and seer of the Bakongo nation who had been burned for heresy on Portuguese orders. French saw that Tansi understood his priestess to be the living resurrection of his “Kongo,” for which he had struggled for so many years. “You must understand why I am feeling better now. I am home at last. Finally I am in my own land.” Two weeks later he was dead.

The hope French places in the survival of African culture pervades what he writes about Mali, the land he had fallen in love with as a young backpacking stranger. Here, in 1995, he found a democracy. Alpha Oumar Konar?, an archaeologist and the president, had overthrown a dictatorship at the head of a “citizens’ movement” of students, labor leaders, and the mothers of the military regime’s victims. (So much, reflects French, for the theory that a democracy can only be built by a developed middle class.) Konar? moved easily among his people with the minimum of security. There were huge problems, he told French. Locusts were massing, there was unrest among the Touareg nomads, half the population was unemployed, and the West overlooked Mali in its eagerness to fund kleptocratic monsters like Mobutu in Zaire. But French found that the Malians were proud of a freedom they felt they had won by themselves. For him, this was a precious example of an African society which had survived that sever-ing trauma of colonialism and had kept a sense of historic identity intact. “Mali…had become one of a select group of African countries that had succeeded in cobbling together its own cultural space….”

To reassure himself, Howard French headed north in Mali. He stood in awe before the vast mosque of Djenn?, “the world’s largest earthen structure,” and remembered the taunt of a colleague who had asked: “Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?” This was a building which could stand comparison with any cultural monument in the world. (See illustration on page 37.) From the mosque, he went on to the mile-long mound of Djenn?-Jeno, the site of a fabulously wealthy trading city where perhaps 20,000 people had lived in the eleventh century. President Konar? himself had worked there, with the American archaeologists Susan and Roderick McIntosh (who are still appealing to the world to help stop the looting of the city’s figurines, pottery, and metalwork, and the laundering of this irreplaceable heritage through the art salesrooms of the world). Much moved, French writes:

In a world where the achievements of Africans get scant recognition, Djenn?-Jeno’s archaeological treasures resonate with the message that the people of this continent are capable of great things, and indeed always have been.

But the central theme of his book is his experience of the Congo, the colossal territory at the center of the continent which dissolved under his eyes into chaos and misery. French provides a brief, bitter summary of its story. In the nineteenth century, as the “scramble for Africa” developed, Leopold II of the Belgians fooled the rest of the world into giving him personal control of the entire Congo basin, from the Atlantic almost as far east as the Great Lakes. He promised to run it as a free trade zone, devoted to the repression of the Arab slave trade. In practice, it became his own private estate, plundered for its ivory and wild rubber by a regime which relied on state terror to extract its wealth.Nobody will ever know the human cost, but some historians calculate that the population had dropped by ten million by the time Leopold was forced to hand the Congo over to the Belgian state in 1908.

There followed fifty years of harsh colonial rule, during which the Belgians made no attempt to train an African elite to succeed them. When nationalist protest exploded in 1960, the Belgians abandoned the Congo almost overnight. Patrice Lumumba, the only leader who might have held the place together, was kidnapped and murdered with American and British connivance, while Western governments encouraged the secession of the wealthy mining province of Katanga. The Congo, renamed Zaire, was entrusted to the safely anti-Communist Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled it for thirty-six years under the most monstrous and unscrupulous kleptocracy Africa had yet seen.

Howard French encountered Zaire in the mid-1990s, in Mobutu’s last years. Th dictator was dying of cancer, spending much of his time with his court in the Bea Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva at a cost of $16,000 a night. In Kinshasa, his capital there was growing political unrest, but also fear for the future. A thousand miles to th east, a puzzling little rebellion had begun, as an army of boys with smart Wellingto boots and AK-47s marched about the rain forest. People said they were th Banyamulenge, an insignificant ethnic minority

It turned out that they were the vanguard of Zaire’s destroyers. The genocide in Rwanda, when some 800,000 mostly Tutsi people became the victims of planned extermination by their Hutu neighbors, had taken place in 1994. The outside world, which had done almost nothing to stop it, now settled down to bewail its own guilt and offer support to the Tutsi survivors. But the madness which had driven the genocide was still burning, and the flames were moving westward.

Howard French was a witness to the appalling second act of the Rwandan tragedy which now followed. Outside Africa, few people even today understand the connection between the genocide and the Congolese wars that followed, and it is a pity that French does not provide a fuller analysis of the 1994 disaster itself. What cannot be ignored is that the Tutsis were out for revenge. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus, many of them participants in the massacres, had fled across the border into Zaire. Not without good reasons, the Rwandan Tutsis accused them of forming new armies in the refugee camps. Some NGOs refused to work in refugee camps dominated by Hutu gangs. The Tutsis crossed the border to crush the Hutus.

The “Banyamulenge rebellion” was a mere cover story. Its troops turned out to be units of the “Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo,” led by the veteran Congolese troublemaker Laurent Kabila. But his leadership, too, turned out to be largely fiction. Throughout the campaign that immediately followed, real control stayed in the hands of the Rwandan commanders. French disarmingly admits that he too was fooled at first. When he realized what was going on, “I felt a deep, physical sense of embarrassment at my own ignorance.”

As Kabila’s forces advanced, capturing one city after another, the Hutu refugees fled into the forests. They knew what the Tutsis would do to them. In late 1996, French flew with Sadako Ogata, the UN high commissioner for refugees, to Kisangani and to a temporary camp at Tingi-Tingi where 150,000 desperate Hutu fugitives begged in vain to be rescued. But slaughter followed slaughter. A Zairian friend said to French:

Anyone who follows the itinerary of the rebels knows that this is a campaign to exterminate the Hutu refugees…. Those who suffered a genocide are committing one in their turn.

At the end of the year, Mobutu returned to Kinshasa in scenes of ecstatic welcome. But he was finished. The United States, which had armed and bankrolled Mobutu for so many years, now decided that change was inevitable and began to make contact with Kabila as his armies approached Kinshasa, murdering Hutu men, women, and children as they came. On May 17, 1997, Mobutu bolted. The next day, French went to watch Kabila’s men enter the city down almost empty streets. “We headed for Avenue 30 Juin, the city’s weed-filled Champs-Elys?es. The only other people about were glue-addicted street children….”

What followed was only an exchange of old tyranny for new. Soon war resumed, this time on an international scale, as Laurent Kabila fell out with the Rwandans and other African states pitched in on different sides of the conflict. In the six years after 1996, 3.3 million people died in these wars, about four times the toll of the original Rwanda genocide. Howard French always detested Kabila (who was to be assassinated in 2001), referring to him as “a frontier bandit and small-time terrorist” with a “braggadocio strut [that] seemed straight out of the South Bronx.” But his real anger throughout this book, above all over the fate of Zaire/Congo, is aimed at American policy and its makers.

He argues that the Clinton administration, which had downplayed the Rwand disaster as it took place and even avoided the use of the word “genocide” to describ it, became demoralized by guilt and a sense of failure as the truth emerged. I Washington, the most popular source of information was the New Yorker journalist Philip Gourevitch, whose powerful book on the genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), compared the cause of the Rwandan Tutsis to the “survival struggle” of Israel. The comparison was false, but unnerving. The administration now fell into the fatal American habit of reducing complex struggles to “good guys” and “bad guys,” and tilted decisively toward supporting whatever the “good guy” Tutsis undertook.

In French’s opinion, Gourevitch has a lot to answer for. As the Rwandan invasion of eastern Zaire began, he

played an important role in selling Laurent Kabila in Washington, ironically by restoring him to the Lumumbaist tradition of respectable nationalism. In his writings, Gourevitch curiously airbrushed the old Congolese highwayman and mountebank, minimizing his ideology and avoiding unpleasant details of his dodgy past.

Howard French goes on to accuse Gourevitch of playing down the reported massacres of refugees committed by Kabila’s soldiers as they advanced across Zaire, and of ridiculing United Nations efforts to investigate the killings. Even allowing for a foreign correspondent’s natural resentment of visiting star correspondents who have a president’s ear, these are serious charges.

By now, in the early summer of 1997, the administration had anointed Laurent Kabila as its next “good guy” in Zaire. Mobutu had to go. Bill Richardson was sent to Kinshasa as President Clinton’s special envoy. “You are out!” he told Mobutu. “Do you want to leave with dignity or as a carcass?” Then he went to see Kabila in the bush, and reported that he was “a street-smart, charismatic person with a quick intelligence.” Next, his plane with the press party made for Kisangani. A few miles down the road, Alliance troops were butchering the inhabitants of one of the last refugee camps and burning the corpses. But there was time only for a photo opportunity. A refugee woman was found clutching a sick baby. She was persuaded to let the caring American visitor hold it. Richardson put out his arms, but in that instant the baby died. As French puts it in his economical way, “It took us all a few minutes to gather our composure….”

It was the Clinton administration’s slogans, its constant, chirpy insistence that it had a policy when in reality it had none, that infuriated Howard French. “African solutions to African problems,” or “America has no vital or strategic interests in West Africa,” or “Trade Not Aid”?what did all that mean? To him it meant “an exercise in moral bankruptcy arguably more crass and even more complete than the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide.”

The United States seemed to be in denial about its own influence in the region French especially resented the “African Renaissance” rhetoric from the Stat Department, which seemed to be anointing a row of one-party tyrants as embry democrats. When Madeleine Albright came to Kinshasa in December 1997 to let th world see that Kabila had America’s blessing, French turned down an invitation to fl with her on an “African Renaissance” tour. “I had seen…too many hollow slogans an broken promises to be cooped up in a small airplane and slathered in spin.

His dislike of Madeleine Albright has an almost physical edge, as he pelts her with adjectives. She had “hawkish eyebrows, immediately on the defensive,” “she was arch,” “she was rambling, almost incoherent.” In the end, he was able to hit her where it hurt. At her joint press conference with Laurent Kabila, French primed a colleague to ask a deadly question.If America was happy with Kabila’s commitment to democratic rights, then what about the fate of the opposition politician Zahidi Ngoma, who was being beaten and tortured in prison? As French guessed, Madeleine Albright had never heard of the case. But Kabila exploded with rage, shouting that those who tried to divide the people would all be arrested. The conference ended in disaster; Albright was humiliated, and French, without expressing open self-congratulation, reckons that from that moment the American investment in the Kabila regime began to wane.

This scene is exhilarating for its frankness. And yet it reveals the only weakness of A Continent for the Taking, which is otherwise a triumph of passionate reporting. The wrath of journalists (speaking as one of them, who has also seen some death and much evil) can be one-dimensional. There is generous rage at those who do terrible things, and at those in distant seats of power who allow such things to be done and then lie about them. But other fallible human beings have to devise policies and try to make them work in the teeth of all the storms of human misery and baseness that strive to blow them down.

The Clinton team was ignorant and arrogant about Africa, and frequently hypocritical. Its policies in West Africa and the Congo made nothing better, and some things worse. Nonetheless, I wish that French had made clear, on the basis of his impressive empathy and experience, what was the alternative line that the administration?any American administration? should have taken and should be taking now. His point about the historical severing of African political development is well worth making, and so is his complaint that modest democratic achievement in places like Mali went unrewarded and unrecognized. But how should these perceptions be translated into action by a superpower? There has to be an answer to that question. Howard French has not provided it, but any future American leadership which takes Africa seriously will have to do so. If it tries to prepare an answer, this book should be the first item on its reading list.

Copyright � 2004 NYREV, Inc.

This is a reporter’s account, and French calls things as he sees them. He reflects the lifelong passion of an African American who reveres his roots. But he notes the irony of being a black man with skin so light that Africans call him European; blanc; or, in Liberia, “wha [white] man.”

French first toured West Africa as a young man with Freud in his backpack for light reading. He picked up a taste for boogieing all night at dance clubs where, at tables awash in beer, basic truths were told. “My understanding of Africa would gradually transform the way I saw the world,” he writes. “It awakened me as nothing else before to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the rich and the dignity of the poor in their suffering, and to the uses and abuses of power… .. Africa is the stage of mankind’s greatest tragedies, and yet we remain largely inured to them, all but blind to the deprivation and suffering of one ninth of humanity. We awaken to the place only in fits of coarse self-interest and outright greed.”

In Liberia, he covered a war that killed 200,000 people in a nation of 2.6 million. That is as if 20 million Americans, mostly innocent bystanders, were hacked to death or sprayed with bullets. At a news conference, French railed at President Charles Taylor: “Isn’t it really outrageous for someone who has drugged small boys, given them guns and trained them to kill to call this God’s war?”

Much of the book details the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire in 1997, when the Clinton administration finally pulled the plug on that thieving megalomaniac, whom the CIA had put in place in 1965 and whom successive U.S. officials had supported for the sake of stability. As French notes, the roots of the conflict run deep. For the most part, the world started noticing only in the 1990s, but ethnic tensions in Central Africa go back far before Europeans. Tutsis, tall herdsmen who lorded it over the diminutive Hutus, kept their distance from Belgian colonizers. As a result, Hutus inherited political power when Belgium left. Periodically since the 1960s, tribal conflicts have erupted in massacre. Meantime, rebellion in neighboring Congo produced such disaffected exiles as Joseph Kabila.

Mobutu was dumped after Paul Kagame, the Rwandan Tutsi leader, backed Kabila in a march across Congo that captured Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire. Kagame sought revenge against Hutu tribesmen who had fled to Congo after slaughtering 800,000 Tutsis in 1994. French reveals how President Clinton’s policies were implemented. Bill Richardson, the president’s special envoy, briefed him on a meeting with Mobutu: “I told him you are living in a dreamland, pal. You’ve got a bunch of advisors who are not telling you the truth. You are out. Do you want to leave with dignity or as a carcass?”

French maintains that writings by Philip Gourevitch helped U.S. officials to brush aside complex nuances in charting post-Mobutu policy. Gourevitch saw Tutsis as the good guys, French says, simply because the Hutus were the bad guys. At the bend-in-the-river city of Kisangani, he says, “Richardson never insisted that we be allowed to travel down the dirt road that reportedly led to the killing fields. Whether it was the United States or the United Nations, no Westerner would ever push hard enough to lift the veil over this crude little Auschwitz. In fact, just a few months later, Washington would be pushing to make sure that no Western investigator ever made it down that road.”

When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Congo in December 1997, French says that he was given a lecture on African realities by James Rubin, her closest aide and spokesman. French says that Rubin quoted various officials and then added, “Actually a lot of my take comes from an even better source, and it comes to me directly. Philip Gourevitch is my sister’s boyfriend.”

French is less convincing in using a broad brush, as when he blames Africa’s plight on colonialism, which mostly ended by 1961. And he chooses for one of his epigraphs a quote from Camara Laye: “A white man can’t see everything: and he has no need to see everything either, because this land is not a white man’s land.” That is a bit like saying Europe is not a black man’s land. True enough, artificial borders and generations of plunder destroyed much that Africans had put in place. But the subject is vast, and such simplicities carry little weight.

It is French the reporter who is most persuasive. As he goes about his work, facing bribe-hungry airport officials and doped-up children with assault rifles at roadblocks, he reveals much about West Africa and Congo today. The tone is grim, but French also finds an unquenchable African spirit. In the Congolese region of Kasai, a 51-year-old former copper mine manager named Kalala Budimbwa survived ethnic strife. Now, having fled to a new home, he was working on a new life. As he explained:

“Our dreams are the dreams of people everywhere, aren’t they? … We want to be able to turn on the lights and read to our children at night. We want affordable cement so that we can build houses for our families. We want roads so that we can truck our produce for sale in other markets, instead of seeing it spoil. We want to be able to put money in the bank and know it won’t be stolen or have its value melt away.”

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Complete review available here.

French takes the reader at a lively pace through the background to the political implosion and war in Congo and the sordid tale of Liberia’s descent into factional fighting. His vivid descriptions benefit from his position as The New York Times’ Africa correspondent through most of the 1990s. This is a man who takes taxis and walks, a far cry from much of the “drive-by” journalism that finds its way into bookshops. He has met many of the characters about whom he writes. In one of the best passages in the book, he introduces readers to Charles Taylor, the cynical and manipulative Liberian warlord who escaped from a U.S. federal prison where he was held for fraudulent business dealings, then shot and connived his way to power with legions of child soldiers. French does not dwell on the lurid features of these conflicts, however. He has a lot to say about international—particularly U.S.—reactions to these events, as he does about the events and characters themselves. His analysis of U.S. stakes in Africa’s problems is sobering and is the book’s most valuable contribution.

In looking at Africa on its own terms, French sees that Africans get down to solving problems and are not just a continent of bloodthirsty dictators and child soldiers. This is not a novel observation, yet is remarkable for its absence in so many books about Africa’s politics. This is brought home to him as a young man in the 1970s while he is traveling with his brother in Mali. There he discovers that in one of the world’s poorest countries, people actually are proud of their language and culture. As a young man traveling on the cheap he needed help from these people and had to live with them as equals. Without the expense accounts or entourages that seal off so many so-called experts, including some journalists, French gets close enough to Africa’s societies to see how they work quite well at solving everyday problems. His own experiences cause French to wonder whether Africa’s violent past, especially under colonial rule, then its unfortunate place as a strategic backwater that is well-endowed with natural resources—and not some flaw in the cultures of people there—might be at the root of Africa’s problems.

French’s book is most valuable for showing how recent crises play out in Washington. In the case of Nigeria, which suffered under a horrible dictatorship in the 1990s, U.S. concerns appeared to be centered on oil. This left U.S. policymakers in a dilemma. The American economy needed Nigerian oil, and dealing with dictators was the most efficient way to maintain access to it, regardless of whether Nigeria’s government was repressive and its citizens received nothing from the proceeds of the oil’s sale to the U.S. French also suspects that Africa’s people are so unimportant to policymakers that they simply did not care enough to pursue more-sensible alternatives to getting oil.

The theme of low levels of caring also appears in French’s account of the fall of a corrupt dictator and war in Congo. There Western interest lay in extracting resources. During the Cold War, the corrupt dictator’s alliance with the West against communism was deemed more valuable in distant capitals than the welfare of Congo’s people. At least during the Cold War, the West’s response almost makes sense, if in a cynical fashion. In the 1960s and 1970s, Africa was a serious arena of superpower competition.

There is no Cold War excuse for U.S. behavior toward Africa in the 1990s. French shows how the Clinton administration pursued a calculated policy of ignoring the 1994 Rwanda genocide to keep it out of the pages of newspapers and its images away from TV. Otherwise it could have become an inconvenient foreign-policy crisis and interfered with U.S. efforts to resolve a smaller crisis—in sheer numbers of people affected—in Bosnia. Then, several years later, when Rwandan armies were committing mass killings in eastern Congo in reprisal for 1994, the U.S. Embassy in Rwanda suppressed the flow of information about this event. The hypocrisy of inaction at this stage was especially breathtaking as it occurred while officials were condemning the earlier genocide and amidst official apologies for past Clinton administration inaction.

Betrayal and disregard were a Clinton administration specialty. The president of Uganda, an advocate of a no-party dictatorship, received considerable official support from Washington, while true democrats in Mali received no special aid. Meanwhile, in the midst of Liberia’s war, a sizable democratic movement was gathering steam. Washington officials ignored it, relying instead on its contacts with the faction leaders and corrupt politicians in a half-hearted and ultimately failed attempt to stop fighting. French suspects that this reflects officials’ persistently low expectations of Africans, which blinds them to the strength of indigenous solutions French sees.

French attributes this U.S. lack of depth of engagement with Africa, especially on the part of the State Department’s Clinton administration appointees, to intellectual laziness and the subsequent attractions of trendy analysis. The writings of one journalist were cited to justify ignoring the human-rights violations of the new Rwandan government, depicted as a virtuous victim of genocide and deserving unquestioned support. After visiting Sierra Leone for a few days, another wrote an influential article that explained Africa’s wars as a consequence of rootless young men and ecological failure. This cursory analysis obscured the historical and political grievances, and decades of Western support for corrupt dictators, that lie at the heart of these conflicts and are the subject of French’s book. Unquestioned consumption of this type of analysis reflects the hardened insensitivity of many to what goes on in Africa and leaves them almost completely blind to the ideas of experts from Africa, if such people can be thought to exist.

Lest the reader think this is yet another book of doom and gloom about Africa, French offers a reasonable sense of what might come next. Everywhere he goes he finds evidence of an Africa under design and construction by Africans themselves, even in the worst situations. This is a messy process that suffers frequent setbacks in the worst-off areas from which French reported. Even though many Africans are ruled corruptly and should expect little real help from the West, they have not lost their potential to make better lives for themselves.

For the money, this is the best book about Africa to come out in some time. French receives high praise from this reader for producing a book that not only shows how that continent arrived at the state it is in but has the insights and experiences that show how the U.S. played a role in these events, even as most of us did not know it. It serves as a warning that we ought to watch more closely how our elected officials devise these sorts of policies in our name.

©2004, Chicago Tribune

It has become something of a tradition for the correspondents of America’s major newspapers to write a tour d’ horizon upon concluding a stint on the continent. After David Lamb’s The Africans was published to commercial and critical success in 1983, we had Blaine Harden’s Africa: Dispatches >From a Fragile Continent in 1991; Alan Cowell’s Killing the Wizards: Wars of Power and Freedom From Zaire to South Africa in 1992; Keith B. Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa in 1997; and Bill Berkeley’s The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa in 2001. Since Lamb’s time, the books have grown progressively bleaker, and French’s may be the bleakest of all. Although French abhors the war porn he believes dominates most coverage of Africa, the continent’s rot has advanced to a point where it is almost impossible to look beyond it. It is a situation that angers and sickens French all the more because he has a deeper and more profound connection to the continent than most journalists.

French fell in love with Africa before he gave any thought to journalism. Growing up in the United States, he was reminded by his proud African-American parents of black achievements at every turn. His father, a doctor, moved the family to Ivory Coast so that he could run a regional health program. After graduating from college, French spent six years living in Abidjan, first as a translator and university lecturer and finally as a freelance reporter. He married an Ivorian, learned several African languages and read widely and deeply about African culture and history.

He writes that he accepted the Times’s West Africa bureau in 1994 “as a personal challenge.” He would not become a “fireman” chasing one disaster after another to satisfy what he regarded as “the world media’s insatiable market in images of horror.” He would not make heroes out of Westerners rushing to the rescue. He would show his readers Africa’s strengths as well as its weaknesses.

It was not to be. The blaze already licking at West Africa when French returned burst into an inferno, forcing French to play the fireman after all and eventually burning him so badly that he felt lucky to escape. Sent to Mobutu’s Zaire in 1995 to cover the outbreak of the ebola virus, he was wary of “rushing toward another lurid African mess that, thanks to the magic of television, had become the global story of the week.” Within a year, he would find himself covering the collapse of Zaire itself and the death of millions sucked into its conflicts. As he struggled to make sense of what was happening—and especially the disastrous consequences of the Clinton Administration’s decision to hand a wide swath of the continent over to a brand-new set of dictators (often euphemistically described as “strong-men”), starting with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame—Africa fell further and further outside the orbit of world attention.

Following US foreign policy is part of a Times correspondent’s job, and French’s book gives an unusually depressing account of American hypocrisy and mendacity toward Africa. The Clinton Administration wished Africa well. But it was not willing to risk American lives, treasure or votes even to halt the most gargantuan African tragedies, much less to foster African democracy, human rights or economic development. The “African Renaissance” the President was eager to trumpet turned out in large part to amount to opening the doors for American corporations eager to extract the continent’s resources. Struggling democracies such as Mali’s received little or no help (though when one considers the fate of such countries as Nigeria and Angola, which attracted more solicitous notice, perhaps indifference is a blessing in disguise). After the killing of eighteen US Rangers in Somalia, the Administration declined in 1994 to intervene when Rwandan Hutus began slaughtering their Tutsi compatriots by the hundreds of thousands, or even to call what was happening a genocide. “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [Congressional] election?” French quotes Susan Rice, a rising young black star who would soon be named Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, as saying in April of that year.

For the full review please see TheNation.com.

French was desperate for a foreign posting. The Times wanted to send him back to Africa, but French resisted. �It was not that I thought poorly of Africa�but I knew that they did,� he said. He was worried that his stories would get little play, and besides, he wanted to go somewhere new. The Times offered him the Caribbean post, and he felt he couldn�t say no. Midway through his time there, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first elected and then overthrown�making Haiti one of the biggest foreign stories of the year. French covered it intensely, and when his time was finished, he was offered Africa once again.
This time, French accepted and he and his family returned to Abidjan. After about a year, the war to overthrow long-time Zaire strongman Mobutu Sese Seko began. Once again, French, who won an OPC award for his coverage of Mobutu�s downfall, was in the middle of a major international news story.
At first, the official story�the one accepted by Washington and the UN, and reported by the international press � was that an obscure ethnic group, fed up with being pushed around, was behind the uprising. Something about that story, though, didn�t seem right to French. It didn�t make sense to him when he saw young rebels kitted out with slick gear and high-tech weaponry. �What was really happening,� he said, �was the invasion of Zaire by Rwanda, led by the post-genocide Tutsi government.� The war that followed resulted in the largest death toll of any conflict since World War II. �What ensued was a campaign of destruction and a looting of resources, resulting in the deaths of 3.3 million people,� said French.

Now, seven years later, French�s account of the war is widely accepted, but at the time, it defied conventional wisdom. �The international press never reflected on the gravity of what was going on,� he said. Even now, some people question the number of dead. �Even if that number were halved,� said French, �it doesn�t make me feel much better.� The massive human devastation was largely what compelled him to write the book. �I felt I needed to bear witness,� he said. �It needs to be felt and thought about, and lessons learned.�

French read a chilling passage about a visit to a refugee camp in Tingi-Tingi. There, he encountered Hutu refugees�many of whom were �notionally associated with the Rwandan genocide.� At the same time, they themselves were �almost certainly going to die.� And indeed, days after French�s visit, rebels attacked the camp, slaughtering thousands of people. The dead were buried in mass graves, which were kept off limits to the international community by the Rwandan-backed president, Laurent Kabila.

French harshly criticizes the U.S. government, multinational corporations, international lending agencies, and the press for their tragic inattention to Africa. Members of the Clinton administration, he says, weren�t even allowed to use the term �genocide� as hundreds of thousands were dying in Rwanda and later Zaire, because to do so would have eliminated any excuse for inaction. Bush was elected saying that Africa held no �vital� interests for the US�and yet, French says, any quarter of Africa�the North, South, East or West�alone had more trade with the U.S. than the entire former Soviet Union. �We need a lot of things that Africa produces,� said French. �And we can get them without paying anything.�

�What�s wrong with us?� he asked. �What can we do to change this?�

And the �hope� in the book�s subtitle? French acknowledges that the book is heavier on tragedy than hope, but says there are some reasons for optimism. He cites the continent�s cultural resilience, despite decades of war, brutality, and oppression, as well as recent democratic advances, particularly in places like Mali. He also thinks that simply focusing the world�s attention on Africa�as he attempts to do in his book�could improve the situation. �We need to re-imagine the way we think of Africa, and get it out of the cellars of our imaginations,� French said. �We need to think about them as humans.�

Africans believe. In the hard rules of fate. In themselves and in better futures. They have hope. They also flock to evangelical preachers, seek out traditional healers and sometimes put their faith in exotic nostrums. They look after one another, too, and altruism flourishes amid surprising circumstances of adversity.

Howard French’s reporting from West Africa for The New York Times in the mid- and late-1990’s superbly captured much of this maelstrom. He outwitted bribe-seeking functionaries and obstreperous soldiers, fled from mobs, wangled interviews in dangerous circumstances from marauders and mercenaries, and followed important research trails.

“A Continent for the Taking” recalls much of his path-breaking coverage of West and Central Africa for The Times. He had become acquainted with the wiles and seductiveness of Africa as a college student and in the 1980’s as a teacher, translator and writer. It was in Ivory Coast and then by traveling overland, goats and chickens tied to the roof, to bedraggled Bamako, the capital of neighboring Mali, and beyond that he gained a first infatuation with the chameleonlike glories of the continent.

But there was too little time and space for communing with inner Africa when he was writing about it professionally. Politics and real trouble rapidly loomed. First and always, there were the horrors of Gen. Sani Abacha’s murderous regime in Nigeria. Moshood Abiola had won an election, but General Abacha and his soldiers had imprisoned him, and the United States was paying little attention. Mr. French recounts his attempts to reveal the inner workings of the autocrat, about the Abacha administration’s attempts to deal with prominent African-Americans, and about the brutal ways the military government eliminated dissidents.

Oddly, General Abacha’s soldiers had helped for a time to quiet the deadly civil war in Liberia. Families of ex-slaves from the American South had ruled there over the “country” people since the 1820’s. A coup in 1981 gave power to ill-educated soldiers, then to a collection of warlords, and finally to Charles G. Taylor, one of the more colorful thugs of West Africa’s recent past. Mr. French sketches Mr. Taylor and his rivals well, including a bitterly hypocritical news conference, and is critical of what passed for United States policy during the worst days of the Liberian retreat from sanity into butchery.

There was as much mayhem in Congo (formerly Zaire). Mr. French’s arrival there coincided with the final death rattle of Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocracy. Thousands of miles of colonial roads were no more. Schools and clinics were gone. Disease was prevalent. (Mr. French writes movingly of the town of Kikwit, during an outbreak of ebola.)

The country’s vast copper, cobalt and diamond mines were divulging their riches to the ruler only and paying for palaces in Switzerland and France. Congo had become a lamentably failed state. “Something definitely smelled,” he writes, “and the country’s decomposition had become an open secret.”

Civil war followed. In 1996 Laurent Kabila, an orotund sometime trader and kidnapper of Americans, emerged out of nowhere at the head of a ragtag army heading westward from Africa’s great lakes toward distant Kinshasa. “Life was breathed” into Kabila, Mr. French reports, “by the jubilation his rebels met in Mobutu’s long-neglected countryside, and by Kabila’s own treachery in eliminating potential rivals.” But the real secrets were the hollowness of what was left of Zaire’s army, and the support ?indeed direction ?that Kabila received from Rwanda. (“We in the press,” he understates, “were far too slow in seizing upon the recklessness of Rwanda’s invasion.”

Mr. French saw much of Zaire’s disarray in upriver Kisangani and its surrounding refugee camps, witnessed “ethnic cleansing” of a typically nasty variety and realized how little Washington cared about the underlying mayhem.

Kisangani fell in early 1997, and Lubumbashi and Mbuji-Mayi succumbed a few days later. All of Zaire was “opening up like a crocus.” Mr. French’s account of the envoy Bill Richardson’s attempt to take the measure of a strutting Kabila, in Lubumbashi, is unwittingly comic. Mr. Richardson told Kabila to clean up his human rights act, warned him that he would need help from the United States and gave the future president of Congo a New York Yankees baseball cap. After the United States and South Africa failed to arrange a soft landing, Mobutu fled overseas to die, chaos descended, and Kinshasa finally fell, hard, in May.

Amid the despots and desperados, Mr. French also saves time for a few democrats, notably President Alpha Oumar Konar?of Mali. There are vivid portraits, too, of ordinary Africans trying to find safe havens or integrity amid the wild maelstrom of war. The book also has bleak messages about the Clinton administration’s foreign policy failures in Africa and some trenchant words on Africa’s own responsibility for the slave trade. Mr. French clearly cares about Africa’s fate and writes compellingly without providing more than implicit recipes for recovery.

© Copyright, The New York Times

This is an informed, deeply sympathetic portrayal of Africa, a continent that is endlessly fascinating and incredibly compelling. I go through periodic phases these days during which I lose all hope for Africa ? it just seems so mpossibly clouded with the thick smog of several lifetimes’ worth of lost chances. But French ? French has hope. And so do the people he tells us about. And that’s pretty darn refreshing, not to mention inspiring. Now all we need to do is make this book required reading for the rest of the world ? and then to get off our butts and start actually listening to what Africa is trying to tell us.

Complete review available here.

“A Continent for the Taking” offers a rogue’s gallery of venal dictators who brought an extraordinary level of destruction to the people under their authority.

French offers an eloquent chronicle of the decline and fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the Zairian dictator who stole Washington’s foreign aid to buy extravagant mansions and fatten his European bank accounts. His nation saw very little of the American funds. Mobutu was deserted by America when Rwandan forces, primarily of the Tutsi heritage, who were allegedly in pursuit of Hutu militia hiding in Zaire’s forests, invaded Zaire and ignited a civil war that brought the rebel leader Laurent Kabila to power.

Complete review available here.