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

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.

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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