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

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Less than a day after the African Union imposed sanctions demanding
a return to constitutional legality in Togo, Faure Gnassingbe
stepped down from the presidential post he had assumed after the
death of his father Gnassingbe Eyadema three weeks ago. Virtually
unanimous condemnation was followed by sanctions from Togo’s West
African neighbors and from the continent-wide organization. This
sent the unmistakable message, in the words of one commentator’s
headline, that there would be “no business as usual for Baby
Eyadema.”

Presidential elections have been promised within two months. As
opposition protesters in Lome clashed with police over the weekend,
however, it was clear that the coming period is unlikely to provide
an easy transition to democracy. While Gnassingbe handed over
interim authority to a newly chosen speaker of the national
assembly, Abass Bonfoh, critics demanded that the post be occupied
by the former speaker Fambare Ouattara Natchaba, as stipulated in
the constitution.

Both the regional West African organization ECOWAS and the African
Union are planning to play an active role in this transitional
period. But their capacity to be effective will depend on whether
there is scope for Togolese citizens and civil society
organizations, as well as political parties, to build a climate for
change that does not descend into political violence. There are
also large Togolese communities living outside the country, both
political exiles and other migrants, who are actively debating
their country’s future.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the February 25 press release
from the African Union announcing sanctions (now suspended) and a
February 19 position paper from a large coalition of civil society
and diaspora organizations. The paper includes contact information
for the National Congress of the Civil Society (CNSC-Togo) and the
Togolese Diaspora for Democracy and Development (DIASTODE), as well
as other websites (primarily in French) for additional information.

For links to background information, including a country profile
and timeline from the BBC, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/togo.php

Ongoing news updates from allafrica.com and IRIN are available at
http://www.africafocus.org/country/togo_news.php
and
http://www.africafocus.org/country/togo_irin.php

The commentary cited above, “No Business as Usual for Baby
Eyadema,” is from the Pan-African Postcard by Tajudeen Abdul-
Raheem, General Secretary of the Pan-African Movement and co-
director of Justice Africa. It is available at
http://www.justiceafrica.org/postcard.htm, as well as on
http://www.pambazuka.org

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Many thanks to those subscribers who have recently sent in
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And a reminder to others that this free service depends on those
among you who are able and willing to support it. See
http://www.africafocus.org/support.php for details.

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AU Condemns ‘Military Coup’, Suspends Togo

African Union (Addis Ababa)

Press Release By Peace and Security Council

February 25, 2005

Addis Ababa

The Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU), at
its twenty-fifth meeting, held on 25 February 2005, adopted the
following decision on the situation in Togo.

Council,

1. Reiterates AU’s strong condemnation of the military coup d’état
which took place in Togo and the constitutional modifications
intended to legally window dress the coup d’état, as well as its
rejection of any election that would be organized under the
conditions enunciated by the de facto authorities in Togo;

2. Demands the return to constitutional legality, which entails the
resignation of Mr. Faure Gnassingbé and the respect of the
provisions of the Togolese Constitution regarding the succession of
power;

3. Confirms the suspension of de facto authorities in Togo and
their representatives from participation in the activities of all
the organs of the African Union until such a time when
constitutional legality is restored in the country and requests the
Commission to ensure the scrupulous implementation of this measure;

4. Endorses the sanctions imposed by ECOWAS on the de facto
authorities in Togo and requests all Member States to scrupulously
implement these sanctions;

5. Mandates ECOWAS, in close coordination with the current Chairman
of the AU and the Chairperson of the Commission, to take all such
measures as it deems necessary to restore constitutional legality
in Togo within the shortest time;

6. Requests the Chairperson of the Commission to formally contact
the United Nations Secretary General and Security Council, the
European Union (EU), the International Organisation of la
Francophonie (OIF) and the other AU partners to lend their
unflinching support to the sanctions imposed by ECOWAS and the
initiatives of African leaders aimed at resolving the crisis
resulting from the coup d’état that took place in Togo;

7. Encourages the AU Commission and the ECOWAS Executive
Secretariat to agree on a mechanism for monitoring strict
compliance with the sanctions against de facto authorities in Togo
and to determine the political measures that need to be taken to
backstop the stabilization and reconciliation process in Togo once
constitutional legality is re-established, including more
specifically the holding of free, fair and all inclusive elections.
In this respect, Council stresses the primacy of the rule of law
and the need for the political leaders of Togo to agree on a
consensual management of the transitional period;

8. Decides to remain seized of the situation and to re-examine it
in light of new developments and the decisions that may be taken by
the de facto authorities in Togo.

*************************************************************

Position Paper of the Togolese Civil Society and Diaspora
Organizations’ on the Political Crisis in Togo

(http://www.diastode.org, February, 2005)

February 19, 2005

The death of Gnassingbe Eyadema on February 5th, 2005, after 38
years in power is a real opportunity for a democratic transition in
Togo. The internal civil society and Diaspora organizations are
mobilized, with the whole population of the country in order to use
efficiently this opportunity. But the decision by the Army to put
in power Faure Gnassingbé, in violation of the national
constitution is an unacceptable situation.

The National Congress of the Civil society and the Togolese
Diaspora for Democracy and Development, in the face of this
situation, called for a general mobilization of the Togolese
society and appealed for support of the international community.

The Current Situation in Togo

Three decades of dictatorship and fifteen years of unsuccessful use
of almost every traditional popular peaceful actions and strategies
for political change have severely exhausted the Togolese
populations and radicalized their attitude to the Eyadema regime.
The death of Eyadema offers a unique opportunity for a long lasting
solution of the political crisis that has paralyzed Togo for almost
four decades and has excluded it from the international community
for over ten years now.

The vast mobilization of the civil society and the Diaspora is
meant to attract the attention of the national and international
community, as well as of the heirs of dictator Eyadema that time
has come for a radical and sustainable resolution of the political
crisis and for an effective ending of dictatorial rule in Togo.

In order to consolidate their illegal power, Faure Gnassingbe and
his accomplices declared a state of emergency, sent out the
military to occupy public spaces, intimidate the populations and
prevent them from uprising and demonstrating. As a consequence, all
the demonstrations that have been organized during the last week
have been impeded or cracked down by the military; the most
remarkable use of the army was that of Saturday February 12th which
killed six civil society activists and wounded hundreds.

Another alarming fact is that the RPT party has started
distributing weapons to its private paramilitary groups and
militiamen commonly known as the death squadrons. The most probable
purpose of this act is to prepare their militia for the execution
of a mass murder plan against the democratic organizations that
will not wait too long: As the international community may well
see; and; drawing lessons from what happened in Rwanda and other
civil war zones of Africa; the situation in Togo is rapidly
deteriorating and may be expected to worsen within days.

Faure Gnassingbe and his junta’s lack of respect for the African
Union, the ECOWAS and the entire international community has
reinforced and justified the Togolese people’s radical rejection of
him and those who want to impose him as the next president of Togo.
As almost every traditional means of political resistance used by
the pro-democracy people’s organizations have failed in face of the
illegal government, one may fear that they be brought to reach/opt
for armed resistance, which is also recognized by article 150 of
our constitution. The Togolese people’s thirst for freedom and
democracy has been repressed to such a degree that leaves them no
other choices than radical positions; for they have come to the
conclusion that only an armed resistance can force Eyadema’s regime
to yield power to the people.

We highly value and appreciate the leading role that the African
Union, ECOWAS and the Nigerian government are playing in the
international condemnation and pressure against the illegal
government, and hope that this will continue under the form of a
military intervention to reestablish constitutional order, should
the illegal government maintain its strategy of terror, human
rights abuses, violation of democratic principles, and their
disrespect for international institutions. By violently repressing
popular pressure for a return to the constitution for a worthwhile
transition, the putsch by Faure Gnassingbe and his aides has
brought the political tension to its highest point since the 1992
general strike.

The Position of the Civil Society and the Diaspora

The internal and external civil society of Togo are not involved in
the power dispute. All they want is a quick and sustainable return
of their country to normality that provides a safe environment for
social, political, and economic life in which fair elections will
be organized, with an army and security force that respects the
constitution and truly protects the population in a stable and
prosperous country within a peaceful West-Africa.

In the face of the acute crisis generated by the coup perpetrated
by Faure Gnassingbe, backed by his group of military supporters,
and their defiant attitude vis-à-vis the national and international
communities, the Togolese people and the African community are
before a series of crucial challenges that have to be dealt with
promptly and efficiently:

1- Convince the authors of the brute coup which constitutes an
insult to Africa and to democracy to reverse and free the way to a
legitimate succession to the late president Eyadema.

2- Protect the Togolese citizens and the West African region from
bloodshed and social unrest induced by the strategy of terror used
by the putchists in their attempt to strangle any protest and the
probable military rebellion it will inevitably pave the way for as
the only alternative mean of opposition.

3- Reform and build a renewed, professional and republican National
Army freed from tribalism, the syndrome of electoral hijacking and
from lack of professionalism.

4- Create an environment for political, economic and social
stability through a legitimate interim government who will favor a
sustainable good governance through an open and fair electoral
system.

5- Implement national reconciliation and forgiveness of all
political crimes perpetrated during the late Eyadema’s regime while
at the same time enforce justice by prosecuting the instigators and
leaders of the killings and the illegal militias as well as their
neocolonial relays and advisors since 4 February 2005, date of the
coup.

The actual situation in Togo, with a putschistic regime
implementing a strategy of terror, defiant of the African community
and leaders and who tries by all means to buy as much time as
possible through diplomatic masquerades, are far from enabling an
effective tackling of the challenges mentioned above by the
national community alone.

It is the reason why the CNSC and DIASTODE, believe that the
West-African, the African and the International communities should
be more involved in the resolution of the crisis and accompany Togo
in facing those 5 challenges through:

1- The use of diplomacy for 15 days from the day of the coup to
convince the coup authors to renounce their action

2- If after 15 days time the illegal government does not renounce
power and keep on killing peaceful demonstrators and implementing
the terror strategy, we believe the only efficient dissuasive and
bloodless means will remain an African Union Military Mission
aiming at securing the premises for a legitimate government,
protecting the civilian population and encouraging the loyal
military personnel to joint the people’s side.

3- Reform and modernize the National Army with the assistance of
the above-mentioned African Union Military Mission, so as to ensure
that the army will not interfere in the electoral process and will
improve in professionalism

4- Establish a National Unity Interim Government comprising all
main political groups including the former ruling party; with the
aim of facilitating the holding of free and fair general elections
organized by a United Nation’s Electoral Mission in Togo and
supervised by ECOWAS, the AU and the EU. The interim government,
whose members should renounce running for upcoming elections,
should be backed by an Interim Parliament inclusive of all
political tendencies.

5- Implement a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission backed
by an African Union Political Support Mission in Togo. However, the
authors of all political crimes perpetrated after 4 February 2005
and their national and international accomplices should be brought
before the relevant national and international tribunals.

Our Organizations

The Togolese civil society is formed by both organizations and
social movements from the country and the Diaspora. This duality is
due to the fact that many activists of the civil society,
persecuted by the regime have been forced into exile. The most
important alliance of non partisan democrats in Togo is formed by
the National Congress of the Civil Society (CNSC-Togo) and the
Togolese Diaspora for Democracy and Development (DIASTODE). For
several years, the two organizations are co-operating for
democratic change in Togo. Their commitment in the social
mobilization facing the new political situation is decisive.

1) The CNSC-Togo

Founded in June 2002, the National Congress of the Civil Society is
a network of NGOs, community development associations, trade
unions, women coalitions, religious groups, students organizations,
etc dedicated to democracy, human rights and development. Since
then, CNSC has taken a leading role in the civic commitment for
democracy. More than 150 organizations are affiliated to the CNSC.

Since its creation, the CNSC has initiated various actions
regarding citizen mobilization for the political change.

- June 2002 May 2003: National Program for citizen mobilization;

- March 2003: International Colloquium on the political crisis in
Togo (Dakar, Senegal);

- June 2003: creation of the CONEL, an Independent National Council
for the Monitoring of the June 2003 presidential elections;

- Since January 2004: civil society’s participation in the
political dialogue;

- January-February 2004: Meeting of the internal civil society and
the Diaspora in Porto Novo, Benin, to elaborate and launch
“Alternative Togo,” a Program for the commitment of the Togolese in
the country and in the Diaspora for a sustainable solution to the
ever drifting political crisis.

2) DIASTODE

The Togolese Diaspora for Democracy and Development was created in
1992 in Hull-Canada, in order to coordinate the Togolese Diaspora
groups. DIASTODE includes organizations from various countries
where the community is important, such as Germany, France, Canada,
USA, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Scandinavia, Italy,
Spain, United Kingdom, Ghana, Benin, Burkina Faso, South Africa,
etc.

DIASTODE has organized several activities, involving the Togolese
Diaspora in the democratization process in Togo.

- Publication of the document, “Pourquoi Eyadema doit partir” (Why
Eyadema must quit power);

- Advocacy and diplomatic actions in favor of the democratic
process in Togo;

- Colloquia, conferences and open discussions on the political
situation in Togo;

- Financial and judicial support for persecuted journalists,
scholars at risk; and human rights activists.

- Financial and logistic support to the CONEL, the Independent
National Council for the Monitoring of the June 2003 presidential
elections

- Financial support to internal civil society congress, for the
implementation of various initiatives toward political change;

- Information and communication of the Togolese and international
opinion.

Since 2003, DIASTODE and CNSC have engaged in common programs for
an effective citizens’ participation in the democratization
process.

Additional References

Valuable information and supporting evidence on the situation in
Togo can be found on the following web sites:

http://www.diastode.org
http://www.togodebout.com
http://www.letogolais.com
http://www.icilome.com
http://www.togoforum.com
http://www.ablodeblibo-togo.com
http://www.amnesty.org
http://www.fidh.org
http://www.afp.fr

Posted at 10:23 PM · Comments (0)

Take the following as a health warning. I’ve spent the last month in
South Africa, but I was not reporting from there. I was in the country
on a writing break, with my ears and eyes open, but without ever using
my notebook in anger. What I picked up were impressions, rather than a
firm, detailed analysis. I know, as the nerds like to say, that the
plural of anecdote is not data - and what I have very much falls into
the former category. That’s the disclaimer. Here’s the unscientific
conclusion: I was disappointed.

I fall into the generation for whom apartheid was the dominant
international cause of our youth. If baby-boomers were galvanised by
Vietnam, then those who came of age in the 1980s were inspired by the
campaign to transform South Africa. Even if we were not manning the
24-hour picket at Trafalgar Square, apartheid formed a kind of backdrop
to the times. Cry Freedom was on at the movies, Free Nelson Mandela was
the anthem at every college disco. What Thatcherism was at home,
apartheid was abroad: the issue of the age.

That was nearly two decades ago. I assumed that a trip in the winter of
2005 would be to a wholly different country, with apartheid and all its
works a bad, fading memory. That’s where I was wrong.

Of course, and as everyone knows, the formal structures of that dreaded
system have long gone. The country is ruled by its second black
president; “Whites Only” signs are to be found behind glass in a museum
and nowhere else.

And yet, the rainbow nation, the “new South Africa” so constantly
invoked and effectively publicised, proved elusive. What I found, during
what one scholar calls the “banal encounters” of day-to-day life, was a
set-up remarkably like the one I had imagined back when I was a student
shaking a bucket for the anti-apartheid movement.

If you saw a smart car, its driver was white. If you saw a smart house,
its owner was white. Its cleaner and gardener were black. This was not
“many” or “most”. This was all. After a while, I made a little wager
with myself. Would I see, at any point in nearly four weeks in the
country, a white person serving a black person? I looked hard - at
restaurants, at petrol stations, in bars, in shops, in banks. I never
saw it. Not once. I looked at magazine covers and window-displays in
clothing stores. White, white, white. Occasionally, there would be a
token black face, usually very light-skinned.

I would ask white South Africans I met about this. Sometimes they would
be defensive, insisting that Britain or America were not much better.
It’s true: photo displays at Gap or Marks & Spencer might also have just
one or two black faces. The difference is, Britain has a non-white
population that accounts for no more than 7% of the whole. In the US,
African-Americans make up about 13% of the population. Yet three in four
South Africans are black. Looking around, you’d have thought the reverse
was true: that this was a white country, with a small, tolerated black
minority.

Others would tell me that I needed to get out more and they were surely
right. I did not travel much beyond Cape Town and I am ready to believe
that other cities - with Johannesburg the chief example - are advancing
much more rapidly. Nevertheless, it was striking to see how often,
outside the realms of formal politics, power and privilege remained in
white hands.

Cape Town itself was a shock. It is stunningly beautiful, a city framed
by mountains, two oceans and big, blue skies. All around were people
having relaxed, unending fun. It was not just the tourists: local
people, too, seemed to treat the city as a playground. When they weren’t
surfing or hang-gliding, they were sunbathing or heading off for a round
of golf. During the daytime, the cafes would be full, made noisy with
local accents: people with time on their hands and money in their
pockets. White people to be precise - their tables cleaned, their cars
watched, their shirts ironed, their coffee brewed by black people, most
of them paid a pittance.

Ah, but this is not apartheid, I would be told. It is an economic,
rather than a racial divide - the same gap between rich and poor one
might find in any country. Is California so different, where affluent
whites are pampered by Hispanic maids, janitors and valet parkers? Is
Britain so much better?

Well, yes. Because while economic and racial dividing lines often map on
to each other elsewhere in the world, in South Africa they seemed all
but identical, entrenched by a long political history that makes
movement across the divide punishingly difficult. I know there is a
white working class in the country and that, conversely, a few black
entrepreneurs are now emerging. But the overwhelming picture is of a
society where the goodies are still hoarded by one group - and withheld
from everyone else.

The government is doing its best, with a Black Economic Empowerment
programme designed to spread the spoils more fairly. That has run into
trouble though, with accusations that the chief beneficiaries have
tended to be friends of the ruling elite, shutting out the majority of
black South Africans. (On this point, one of the loudest critics has
been the president’s own brother, Moeletsi Mbeki.)

Nor is it encouraging that the African National Congress seems to have
developed a thin skin when it comes to criticism. While I was there,
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was locked in a very public row with the ruling
party. He accused the president of surrounding himself with yes-men,
rewarding only sycophancy and punishing dissent. Mbeki shot back,
questioning Tutu’s respect for the truth and his right to speak about
internal ANC matters when he is not a member. Later, the party branded
Tutu an “icon” of whites, as if he were no longer an authentic black
leader. It does not amount to a full case of Mugabe syndrome, far from
it. But these are uncomfortable warning signs.

Of course, any fair account has to recognise, as a just-published state
of the nation survey does, that South Africa has made enormous strides
in the 11 years since apartheid. The country did not descend into civil
war, and it is more peaceful and more prosperous than the sceptics ever
predicted.

Nevertheless, my experience has forced me to think again about the pace
of political change. While I was in South Africa, Nelson Mandela marked
the 15th anniversary of his release from jail. I remember watching that
moment on television along with the rest of the world. I thought then
that the end of apartheid would bring an end to the crude inequality
that made blacks the servants of whites. A decade and a half later and
it has not. Change, I realise, is glacially slow. As Paul Foot wrote in
his last book, revolutions do not take hours or weeks but many years -
and sometimes even longe

Posted at 10:21 PM · Comments (0)

This is a fascinating conversation about the strategic future from the January/February 2005 Foreign Policy magazine…

Is China more interested in money than missiles? Will the United States seek to contain China as it once contained the Soviet Union? Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Mearsheimer go head-to-head on whether these two great powers are destined to fight it out.

Make Money, Not War - By Zbigniew Brzezinski

Today in East Asia, China is rising—peacefully so far. For understandable reasons, China harbors resentment and even humiliation about some chapters of its history. Nationalism is an important force, and there are serious grievances regarding external issues, notably Taiwan. But conflict is not inevitable or even likely. China’s leadership is not inclined to challenge the United States militarily, and its focus remains on economic development and winning acceptance as a great power.

China is preoccupied, and almost fascinated, with the trajectory of its own ascent. When I met with the top leadership not long ago, what struck me was the frequency with which I was asked for predictions about the next 15 or 20 years. Not long ago, the Chinese Politburo invited two distinguished, Western-trained professors to a special meeting. Their task was to analyze nine major powers since the 15th century to see why they rose and fell. It’s an interesting exercise for the top leadership of a massive and complex country.

This focus on the experience of past great powers could lead to the conclusion that the iron laws of political theory and history point to some inevitable collision or conflict. But there are other political realities. In the next five years, China will host several events that will restrain the conduct of its foreign policy. The 2008 Olympic Games is the most important, of course. The scale of the economic and psychological investment in the Beijing games is staggering. My expectation is that they will be magnificently organized. And make no mistake, China intends to win at the Olympics. A second date is 2010, when China will hold the World Expo in Shanghai. Successfully organizing these international gatherings is important to China and suggests that a cautious foreign policy will prevail.

More broadly, China is determined to sustain its economic growth. A confrontational foreign policy could disrupt that growth, harm hundreds of millions of Chinese, and threaten the Communist Party’s hold on power. China’s leadership appears rational, calculating, and conscious not only of China’s rise but also of its continued weakness.

There will be inevitable frictions as China’s regional role increases and as a Chinese “sphere of influence” develops. U.S. power may recede gradually in the coming years, and the unavoidable decline in Japan’s influence will heighten the sense of China’s regional preeminence. But to have a real collision, China needs a military that is capable of going toe-to-toe with the United States. At the strategic level, China maintains a posture of minimum deterrence. Forty years after acquiring nuclear-weapons technology, China has just 24 ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. Even beyond the realm of strategic warfare, a country must have the capacity to attain its political objectives before it will engage in limited war. It is hard to envisage how China could promote its objectives when it is acutely vulnerable to a blockade and isolation enforced by the United States. In a conflict, Chinese maritime trade would stop entirely. The flow of oil would cease, and the Chinese economy would be paralyzed.

I have the sense that the Chinese are cautious about Taiwan, their fierce talk notwithstanding. Last March, a Communist Party magazine noted that “we have basically contained the overt threat of Taiwanese independence since [President] Chen [Shuibian] took office, avoiding a worst-case scenario and maintaining the status of Taiwan as part of China.” A public opinion poll taken in Beijing at the same time found that 58 percent thought military action was unnecessary. Only 15 percent supported military action to “liberate” Taiwan.

Of course, stability today does not ensure peace tomorrow. If China were to succumb to internal violence, for example, all bets are off.

If sociopolitical tensions or social inequality becomes unmanageable, the leadership might be tempted to exploit nationalist passions. But the small possibility of this type of catastrophe does not weaken my belief that we can avoid the negative consequences that often accompany the rise of new powers. China is clearly assimilating into the international system. Its leadership appears to realize that attempting to dislodge the United States would be futile, and that the cautious spread of Chinese influence is the surest path to global preeminence.

Better to Be Godzilla than Bambi - By John J. Mearsheimer

China cannot rise peacefully, and if it continues its dramatic economic growth over the next few decades, the United States and China are likely to engage in an intense security competition with considerable potential for war. Most of China’s neighbors, including India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Russia, and Vietnam, will likely join with the United States to contain China’s power.

To predict the future in Asia, one needs a theory that explains how rising powers are likely to act and how other states will react to them. My theory of international politics says that the mightiest states attempt to establish hegemony in their own region while making sure that no rival great power dominates another region. The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the system.

The international system has several defining characteristics. The main actors are states that operate in anarchy—which simply means that there is no higher authority above them. All great powers have some offensive military capability, which means that they can hurt each other. Finally, no state can know the future intentions of other states with certainty. The best way to survive in such a system is to be as powerful as possible, relative to potential rivals. The mightier a state is, the less likely it is that another state will attack it.

The great powers do not merely strive to be the strongest great power, although that is a welcome outcome. Their ultimate aim is to be the hegemon—the only great power in the system. But it is almost impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony in the modern world, because it is too hard to project and sustain power around the globe. Even the United States is a regional but not a global hegemon. The best outcome that a state can hope for is to dominate its own backyard.

States that gain regional hegemony have a further aim: to prevent other geographical areas from being dominated by other great powers. Regional hegemons, in other words, do not want peer competitors. Instead, they want to keep other regions divided among several great powers so that these states will compete with each other. In 1991, shortly after the Cold War ended, the first Bush administration boldly stated that the United States was now the most powerful state in the world and planned to remain so. That same message appeared in the famous National Security Strategy issued by the second Bush administration in September 2002. This document’s stance on preemptive war generated harsh criticism, but hardly a word of protest greeted the assertion that the United States should check rising powers and maintain its commanding position in the global balance of power.

China is likely to try to dominate Asia the way the United States dominates the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, China will strive to maximize the power gap between itself and its neighbors, especially Japan and Russia, and to ensure that no state in Asia can threaten it.

It is unlikely that China will go on a rampage and conquer other Asian countries. Instead, China will want to dictate the boundaries of acceptable behavior to neighboring countries, much the way the United States does in the Americas. An increasingly powerful China is also likely to try to push the United States out of Asia, much the way the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western Hemisphere. Not incidentally, gaining regional hegemony is probably the only way that China will get back Taiwan.

Why should we expect China to act differently than the United States? U.S. policymakers, after all, react harshly when other great powers send military forces into the Western Hemisphere. These foreign forces are invariably seen as a potential threat to American security. Are the Chinese more principled, more ethical, less nationalistic, or less concerned about their survival than Westerners? They are none of these things, which is why China is likely to imitate the United States and attempt to become a regional hegemon. China’s leadership and people remember what happened in the last century, when Japan was powerful and China was weak. In the anarchic world of international politics, it is better to be Godzilla than Bambi.

It is clear from the historical record how American policymakers will react if China attempts to dominate Asia. The United States does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the United States will seek to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of dominating Asia. In essence, the United States is likely to behave toward China much the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Nukes Change Everything - Zbigniew Brzezinski responds.

As an occasional scholar, I am impressed by the power of theory. But theory—at least in international relations—is essentially retrospective. When something happens that does not fit the theory, it gets revised. And I suspect that will happen in the U.S.-China relationship.

We live in a very different world than the one in which hegemonic powers could go to war without erasing each other as societies. The nuclear age has altered power politics in a way that was already evident in the U.S.-Soviet competition. The avoidance of direct conflict in that standoff owed much to weaponry that makes the total elimination of societies part of the escalating dynamic of war. It tells you something that the Chinese are not trying to acquire the military capabilities to take on the United States.

How great powers behave is not predetermined. If the Germans and the Japanese had not conducted themselves the way they did, their regimes might not have been destroyed. Germany was not required to adopt the policy it did in 1914 (indeed, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck followed a very different path). The Japanese in 1941 could have directed their expansionism toward Russia rather than Britain and the United States. For its part, the Chinese leadership appears much more flexible and sophisticated than many previous aspirants to great power status.

Showing the United States the Door - John J. Mearsheimer responds.

The dichotomy that you raised between theory and political reality is an important one. The reason that we have to privilege theory over political reality is that we cannot know what political reality is going to look like in the year 2025. You mentioned that you traveled to China recently and talked to Chinese leaders who appear to be much more prudent about Taiwan than the conventional wisdom has it. That may be true, but it’s largely irrelevant. The key issue is, What are the Chinese leaders and people going to think about Taiwan in 2025? We have no way of knowing. So today’s political realities get washed out of the equation, and what really matters is the theory that one employs to predict the future.

You also argue that China’s desire for continued economic growth makes conflict with the United States unlikely. One of the principal reasons that China has been so successful economically over the past 20 years is that it has not picked a fight with the United States. But that logic should have applied to Germany before World War I and to Germany and Japan before World War II. By 1939, the German economy was growing strongly, yet Hitler started World War II. Japan started conflict in Asia despite its impressive economic growth. Clearly there are factors that sometimes override economic considerations and cause great powers to start wars—even when it hurts them economically.

It is also true that China does not have the military wherewithal to take on the United States. That’s absolutely correct—for now. But again, what we are talking about is the situation in 2025 or 2030, when China has the military muscle to take on the United States. What happens then, when China has a much larger gross national product and a much more formidable military than it has today? The history of great powers offers a straightforward answer: China will try to push the Americans out of Asia and dominate the region. And if it succeeds, it will be in an ideal situation to deal with Taiwan.

America’s Staying Power - Zbigniew Brzezinski responds.

How can China push the United States out of East Asia? Or, more pointedly, how can China push the United States out of Japan? And if the United States were somehow pushed out of Japan or decided to leave on its own, what would the Japanese do? Japan has an impressive military program and, in a matter of months, it could have a significant nuclear deterrent. Frankly, I doubt that China could push the United States out of Asia. But even if it could, I don’t think it would want to live with the consequences: a powerful, nationalistic, and nuclear-armed Japan.

Of course, tensions over Taiwan are the most worrisome strategic danger. But any Chinese military planner has to take into account the likelihood that even if China could overrun Taiwan, the United States would enter the conflict. That prospect vitiates any political calculus justifying a military operation until and unless the United States is out of the picture. And the United States will not be out of the picture for a long, long time.

It’s Not a Pretty Picture - John J. Mearsheimer responds.

If the Chinese are smart, they will not pick a fight over Taiwan now. This is not the time. What they should do is concentrate on building their economy to the point where it is bigger than the U.S. economy. Then they can translate that economic strength into military might and create a situation where they are in a position to dictate terms to states in the region and to give the United States all sorts of trouble.

From China’s point of view, it would be ideal to dominate Asia, and for Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico to became a great power and force the United States to concentrate on its own region. The great advantage the United States has at the moment is that no state in the Western Hemisphere can threaten its survival or security interests. So the United States is free to roam the world causing trouble in other people’s backyards. Other states, including China of course, have a vested interest in causing trouble in the United States’ backyard to keep it focused there. The picture I have painted is not a pretty one. I wish I could tell a more optimistic story about the future, but international politics is a nasty and dangerous business. No amount of good will can ameliorate the intense security competition that will set in as an aspiring hegemon appears in Asia.

Zbigniew Brzezinski is a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison distinguished service professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he codirects the Program in International Security Policy. He is the author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001).

Posted at 1:17 AM · Comments (0)

When a once-in-a-century natural disaster swept away the lives of more than 100,000 poor Asians last December, the developed world opened its hearts and its checkbooks. Yet when it comes to Africa, where hundreds of thousands of poor men, women and children die needlessly each year from preventable diseases, or unnatural disasters like civil wars, much of the developed world seems to have a heart of stone.
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Not every African state is failing. Most are not. But the continent’s most troubled regions - including Somalia and Sudan in the east, Congo in the center, Zimbabwe in the south and Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the west - challenge not only our common humanity, but global security as well. The lethal combination of corrupt or destructive leaders, porous and unmonitored borders and rootless or hopeless young men has made some of these regions incubators of international terrorism and contagious diseases like AIDS. Others are sanctuaries for swindlers and drug traffickers whose victims can be found throughout the world.

In many of these places, poverty and unemployment and the desperation they spawn leave young men vulnerable to the lure of terrorist organizations, which, beyond offering two meals a day, also provide a target to vent their anger at rich societies, which they are led to believe view them with condescension and treat them with contempt. Training camps for Islamic extremists are now thought to be sprouting like anthills on the savanna.

“America is committed not only to the campaign against terrorism in a military sense, but the campaign against poverty, the campaign against illiteracy and ignorance.” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that. Well, America launched its war on terror after Sept. 11, but did not bother to look at some of the deeper causes of global instability. This country is going to spend more than $400 billion on the military this year, and another $100 billion or so for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that amount is never going to buy Americans peace if the government continues to spend an anemic $16 billion - the Pentagon budget is 25 times that size - in foreign aid that addresses the plight of the poorest of the world’s poor.
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For decades, most Americans either have preferred not to hear about these problems, or, blanching at the scope of the human tragedy, have thrown up their hands. But in terms of the kind of money the West thinks nothing of spending, on such things as sports and entertainment extravaganzas, not to speak of defense budgets, meeting many of Africa’s most urgent needs seems shockingly affordable. What has been missing is the political will.

This year, there is a real chance of scrounging up, and then mobilizing, this political will. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has stood resolutely by President Bush at Mr. Blair’s own political peril through the war in Iraq, has staked Britain’s presidency of the Group of 8 industrial nations this year on tackling poverty in Africa. Mr. Blair wants his ally, Mr. Bush, to stand beside him at the coming G-8 summit meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland this July. After the G-8 meeting there will be a United Nations summit meeting in New York in September, where the world’s leaders will examine progress made toward reaching the Millennium Development Goals of cutting global poverty in half by 2015. Chief among those goals was that developed countries like America, Britain and France would work toward giving 0.7 percent of their national incomes for development aid for poor countries.

If the progress made so far is any guide, it is going to be a short meeting. While Britain is about halfway to the goal, at 0.34 percent, and France is at 0.41 percent, America remains near rock bottom, at 0.18 percent. Undoubtedly, President Bush will point to his Millennium Challenge Account when he attends the summit meeting. He will be correct in saying that his administration has given more annually in foreign aid than the Clinton administration in sheer dollars. His Millennium Challenge Account was supposed to increase United States assistance to poor countries that are committed to policies promoting development. This is a worthy endeavor, but it has three big problems.
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First, neither the administration nor Congress has come anywhere close to financing the program fully. Second, the program, announced back in 2002, has yet to disburse a single dollar.

Most important, relying mostly on programs like the Millennium Challenge Account, which tie foreign aid to good governance, condemns millions of Africans who have dreadful governments (Liberia, Congo, Ivory Coast) or no government (Somalia) to die. No donor nation is, or should be, willing to direct money to despotic, thieving or incompetent governments likely to misspend it or divert it to the personal bank accounts of their leaders. Strict international criteria of political accountability, financial transparency and development-friendly social and economic policies need to be established and enforced, not just by outside donors but by prominent and influential African leaders, like South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki.

Help for people living under governments that fail these criteria will have to be channeled mainly through international and nongovernmental organizations. Bypassed governments will not like this, but they cannot be allowed to stand in the way of outside help to the victims of their misrule. It is not the fault of Africa’s millions of refugees that warring armies have burned their villages and fields and driven them into unsafe and disease-ridden camps, like those in the Darfur region of Sudan. And no fair-minded person would blame the victims of callous and destructive governments, like Zimbabwe’s, for the economic and social misery they create.

In the next few months, Mr. Bush could take a giant step towards altering the way the world views America by joining Mr. Blair in pushing for more help in Africa. It’s past time; the continent is dying. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is anything but, some 1,000 people die every day of preventable diseases like malaria and diarrhea. That’s the equivalent of a tsunami every five months, in that one country alone. Throughout the continent of Africa, thousands of people die needlessly every day from diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
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One hundred years ago, before we had the medical know-how to eradicate these illnesses, this might have been acceptable. But we are the first generation able to afford to end poverty and the diseases it spawns. It’s past time we step up to the plate. We are all responsible for choosing to view the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia as more deserving of our help than the malaria victims in Africa. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who heads the United Nations’ Millennium Development Project to end global poverty, rightly takes issue with the press in his book “The End of Poverty”: “Every morning,” Mr. Sachs writes, “our newspapers could report, ‘More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.’ “

So, on this page, we’d like to make a first step.

Yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty.

Posted at 10:17 PM · Comments (0)

This from a student named Jesse at Wesleyan University. Connect your wallets to your hearts.

I thought you would want to know about a project put together by a bunch of Wesleyan University seniors to raise money for the victims of the genocide in Darfur.  “ASAP: the Afrobeat Sudan Aid Project” is a compilation of mostly modern-day Afrobeat tracks (except for a classic Tony Allen track featuring Fela himself!) by artists from around the globe, who all donated their material to the project, which was sponsored initially by non-profit TrueMajority.org (founded by Ben Cohen).  The project has already raised over $100,000 for an Oxfam-affiliated charity based locally in Darfur to assist refugees with food, water, medicine, and shelter. You can order the CD online from the website: www.modiba.net.

Posted at 1:01 AM · Comments (0)

This is, unsurprisingly given the source, really incisive commentary on music from a genius.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times

IT was one of the coldest days of the winter and the guitarist Pat Metheny was only a few minutes late, but he had called ahead. When he arrived at our meeting place, a small recording studio within Right Track Studios in Midtown Manhattan, he arranged his stuff on the couch - including some musical scores - and sat down in a swivel chair before the 96-channel console. Mr. Metheny grew up in the rural Midwest but seems Californian: he has the inner glow. He had no socks on and looked comfortable.

“Basically, it’s impossible,” he said flatly, and smiled. “My taste, my general connection to music, I mean, you know, it just, I mean, even now, I think it just can’t be done.”

My proposal was that we listen together to a few pieces of music (not his) that affected him strongly. It could be any music: the point wasn’t desert-island endorsements or a strict autobiography of influence; it was to talk about how music works. I had defined “a few” as three, or even one long piece, like a whole record. But Mr. Metheny took the challenge seriously.

“For me to say I’m going to build a case that describes something, under the guise of, you know, three songs - it actually shuts me down a little bit,” he said, seeming pained. “The whole idea of style and genre is actually something I’ve willfully resisted from the very early stage. So if I pick this and then I pick that, it creates these two pillars. But I think I know what you’re looking for, which has nothing to do with what I’m talking about.”

He began to warm up. “I don’t think too much about stuff like this, and it’s been kind of a musical psychoanalysis. Most musicians are occasionally asked to put together their 10 favorite albums, but you’re looking for the undercurrents to it all.”

“You’ve got it perfectly,” I said.

He produced a disc, onto which he had burned six pieces of music. “Well, then, let’s start with Sonny Rollins and Paul Bley.”

Dealing with great jazz improvisers often means dealing with masters of certainty: people who for most of their lives have been trusting their impulses to make things up on the spot. Mr. Metheny, 51, extends that certainty to talking, exhaustively, about music - both in specifics and at a conceptual or historical remove.

He is ecumenical and opinionated, practical and quite idealistic, a cheery defender of his own causes. Although he is a jazz musician at the core and is generally thought of as such, he does not believe his purpose in life is to further the cause of the guitar in jazz, or even of jazz itself.

On the telephone before we met, I had asked him whether he would be talking about a lot of guitarists.

“The guitar for me is a translation device,” he answered. “It’s not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn’t a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination - a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.”

…

Sonny and Hawkins

In 1963 Sonny Rollins made a fascinatingly tense record with his saxophone-playing role model, Coleman Hawkins. Called “Sonny Meets Hawk!,” the recording had an almost transparently psychological subtext: Mr. Rollins wasn’t trying to best or outsmart Hawkins so much as to be very, very himself, with all possible eccentricities, in the face of his idol’s magnificence.

“He was a young guy at the time,” Mr. Metheny marveled, listening to Mr. Rollins’s emphatic, darting lines in “All the Things You Are,” harmonically at odds with Hawkins’s, on the opening chorus. “That feeling is such a great feeling - like ‘I can play anything, and it’s all good.’ Not to analyze it, but Hawk was kind of like his father. And it’s like Sonny’s saying, “yeah, but … .”

What especially attracts Mr. Metheny to the track, though, is Paul Bley’s piano solo. It is made of elegant, flowing phrases that dance in and around the tonality and the melody of the song; it builds momentum and becomes carried away with itself. Mr. Metheny calls the solo “the shot heard ‘round the world,” in terms of its aftereffects in subsequent jazz, especially through Keith Jarrett. He describes Mr. Bley’s solo as having an “inevitability.”

“His relationship to time,” Mr. Metheny said, “is the best sort of pushing and pulling; wrestling with it and at the same time, phrase by phrase, making these interesting connections between bass and drums, making it seem like it’s a little bit on top, and then now it’s a little bit behind.” (He held an index finger straight up, and moved it slightly to the right and left, like a bubble in a carpenter’s level, or an electronic tuning meter.)

“But there’s also this X factor,” he continued. “It’s the sense of each thing leading very naturally to the next thing. He’s letting each idea go to its own natural conclusion. He’s reconciling that with a form, of course, that we all know very well. And he’s following the harmony, but he’s not. It just feels like, ‘Why didn’t anybody else do that before?’ “

There is a plainspokenness, a kind of folkish natural feeling, to Bley’s lines and his harmony, I added. Is the idea of “inevitability” related to that?

“Well, for me,” he answered, “let’s keep jazz as folk music. Let’s not make jazz classical music. Let’s keep it as street music, as people’s everyday-life music. Let’s see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they’re living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around. It’s a cliché, but it’s such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal.”

A Lasting Impression

Next we hear “Seven Steps to Heaven” by Miles Davis, performed live by the Davis Quintet - including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams - in 1964. It is fast and confident, even in its improvised coda; Williams’s drum solo crackles like gunfire, and Davis’s solo is coolly imperious.

“This is the first record I ever got,” Mr. Metheny said, as a prologue. “I got this when I was 11. My older brother Mike, who’s a great trumpet player, had a couple of friends who were starting to get interested in jazz. He brought this record home. I always hear ‘jazz is something you really have to learn about, and you develop a taste for it, and da da da,’ that whole rap. But for me, as an 11-year-old, within 30 seconds of hearing this record” - he snapped his fingers - “I was down for life.”

We listened to it silently. “They were really rushing,” Mr. Metheny said when it finished - meaning the tempo was too fast.

“I know Herbie really well, and I knew Tony very well, too, and I’ve talked with them about what was actually going down that night. They thought it was one of the worst gigs they’d ever done. But I was listening to Tony here. The same way the Bley thing opened up this universe - well, Tony, too. It’s such an incredibly fresh way of thinking of time. It sums up so much of what that period was. The world was about to shift.”

Mr. Metheny redirected his thoughts. “What I was going to talk about is Miles’s solo. It’s this completely invented language that happens to line up perfectly with all the things we now have quantified in jazz, in terms of its language and grammar. It wasn’t quantified then, as it is now, that if you see this kind of chord, you’re going to play this set of notes. This is not an easy tune. It’s not like playing on a blues. It moves around a couple of keys, then a bridge, does a weird move that you’ve got to deal with. He deals with it in such an abstract, hip way. It’s melody, and it has this whole thing of glue - the way ideas are connected with other ideas on a phrase-by-phrase basis.”

Davis had to slow down his imagination to a much calmer tempo than the song’s, I suggested, to imply so much swing in each note and phrase.

Mr. Metheny took a deep breath. “Yeah. You know, that word swing is almost a political buzzword. To me, in the language I’m using here, that’s the glue I’m talking about. The connection of ideas.

“But there’s another way that music connects: with who the person is, the time he’s living in, how he’s able to manifest a sound that represents all that. To me, that’s swing, and it doesn’t have anything to do with jazz.” (His accent renders the word “jee-azz.”)

“Swing is kind of this quality? It exists in human interaction. In the way somebody talks and moves. I find its resonance in architecture, and literature.”

Acting?

“Yeah, acting. And refrigerator repair.”

A Pioneer of Bossa Nova

Mr. Metheny’s popularity jumped to a much higher level in 1979 with his record “American Garage.” For about 15 years afterward, he toured almost constantly, with no roots other than an apartment in Boston that kept the rain off of his answering machine. Now he lives in an Upper West Side high rise, with his French-Moroccan wife, Latifa, and their two young sons, Jeff Kaiis and Nicolas Djakeem.

For a few years during that touring period, he spent a lot of time in Brazil and got to know Antonio Carlos Jobim before the great composer died in 1994. (The influence of Brazilian music on Mr. Metheny, rather than the reverse, is an often-disputed point.) Mr. Metheny wanted to hear “Passarim,” a three-and-a-half minute condensed masterpiece from Jobim’s last album whose words protest environmental pollution; it appears on the CD of the same name in English and Portuguese, and we listened to the Portuguese version.

Mr. Metheny smiled as the music started. “It’s so much more than a tune. This is really like composition. Especially that little bit.” He backed up the disc to where the chorus of female voices, made up of Jobim’s friends and family members, repeated lines over descending and shifting harmony.

Jobim’s catarrhal voice re-entered. “See, you could call this part the bridge,” Mr. Metheny observed, “except that it keeps spinning off into this other stuff, kind of like in ‘Desafinado.’ It should end there, after he’s finished, but it doesn’t, and it goes into this whole other thing. Then it keeps modulating into these different keys.”

The music suddenly shifted from bossa to waltz time. “This is so advanced,” he said. “The beauty of the harmony - major triads moving down throughout this whole thing, with different kinds of voices. Plus, all that glue, melodic glue: it never stops, from the first note to the end. Where are we now? We’re almost two minutes into the track, and nothing has repeated yet. I mean, that’s advanced the way Paul Bley is advanced. There’s a connection there.”

It works because Jobim’s ideas are complete within themselves, I suggest, and he wills them to fit together, regardless of traditional ideas of structure.

“Yeah,” Mr. Metheny agrees. “It’s like when you first wake up in the morning and you don’t really think about what you’re doing, and maybe you write your best stuff. You’re not in the way. When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.”

Bringing the Music to Life

After Bley, his hallowed supernova - and then issues of rhythm, melody, harmony and extended composition - Mr. Metheny wanted to talk about touch. He put on Bach’s Fugue No. 22 in B-Flat minor, from the pianist Glenn Gould’s 1965 recording of “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Book I, and read along from the score.

“B-flat minor, the saddest of all keys,” Mr. Metheny said, at the end. “The main reason I picked this was the way he was able to invoke this almost lyrical, vocal, singing quality from an instrument that doesn’t involve breath. We all have the same mandate, in a way: we try to communicate the kinds of phrases that would be believable if somebody were singing them.”

Part of the reason that some people resist jazz guitar-playing, Mr. Metheny said, is because guitar players don’t convey that sense of breath. “Saxophonists have a very wide dynamic range. They’re dealing with a ratio of about that” - he spread his hands to indicate a foot. “With guitar we have a ratio of about this” - he spread his thumb and index finger to indicate about four inches - “in terms of what we can do with our touch.”

Mr. Metheny talked about how Gould made phrases of music come almost physically alive. “No two notes are ever the same volume. With the guitar, you really have to model in your mind this wider thing; you’re trying to create the illusion of a bigger dynamic range. The guy who defined that, on guitar, was Jim Hall, who opened up five or six degrees of dynamics on both sides by picking softer. He could then make certain things jump out a little bit more.”

Making Every Moment Count

Two hours into the marathon session, Mr. Metheny seemed as fresh as when he came in. Preferring to continue without a break, he produced a snack and kept talking. Near the end, we got around to his favorite guitar solo of all time: Wes Montgomery’s chorus and a half on “If You Could See Me Now,” from “Smokin’ at the Half Note,” recorded in 1965 by the Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery.

As a young musician, Mr. Metheny did everything he could to sound like Montgomery, including playing without a pick and improvising parallel lines an octave apart. “But when I was 14 or 15,” he said, “I realized that what I was doing was really disrespectful because that wasn’t me, that was him. I grew up in Lee’s Summit, Mo. I didn’t grow up in New York City. I’m white; I’m not black. I’m from a little town where you couldn’t help but hear country music, and I loved it. I always wanted to address those things with certain notes, qualities of chords, kinds of voice-leading.”

He cued the solo. We listened once, then listened again while he talked.

“This is such an incredibly strong melodic opening,” he said, during the first four bars of the solo, before Montgomery moves into triplet patterns in bars five through eight. “And also, that first phrase is pretty full, like a full speaking voice, but then he’s really soft here. It’s almost like Glenn Gould; every note’s a different volume.”

In the second chorus, the band starts to swing harder, and Montgomery plays powerful, earthy phrases in the second A section. “Then there’s the blues factor in all of this, too, which he just tucks in there,” Mr. Metheny said.

Toward the end of each section, Montgomery forecast the beginning of the next part, building some tension; each time, Mr. Metheny was ecstatic. “He’s starting a new thing, setting it up. And now, look at this” - during the second chorus - “just quarter notes. He gets two or three levels above the time, and then gets right back in the pocket.”

“It’s really hard to play a short solo,” Mr. Metheny said when the track ended. “Like an eight-bar solo. Every single thing about it has to count. And that’s like Bach, almost.”

Posted at 11:21 PM · Comments (0)

Over the last 50 years, we in the west have enjoyed unparalleled economic growth. We have better homes, cars, holidays, jobs, education and above all health. According to standard economic theory, this should have made us happier. But surveys show otherwise. When Britons or Americans are asked how happy they are, they report no improvement over the last 50 years. More people suffer from depression, and crime—another indicator of dissatisfaction—is also much higher.

These facts challenge many of the priorities we have set ourselves both as societies and as individuals. The truth is that we are in a situation previously unknown to man. When most people exist near the breadline, material progress does indeed make them happier. People in the rich world (above, say, $20,000 a head per year) are happier than people in poorer countries, and people in poor countries do become happier as they become richer. But when material discomfort has been banished, extra income becomes much less important than our relationships with each other: with family, with friends and in the community. The danger is that we sacrifice relationships too much in pursuit of higher income.

The desire to be happy is central to our nature. And, following the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, I want a society in which people are as happy as possible and in which each person’s happiness counts equally. That should be the philosophy for our age, the guide for public policy and for individual action. And it should come to replace the intense individualism which has failed to make us happier.

Utilitarianism has, however, been out of fashion for several generations, partly because of the belief that happiness was too unfathomable. In recent years, that has begun to change. The “science” of happiness, which has emerged in the US in the last 20 years, supports the idea that happiness is an objective dimension of experience. (One of its fathers, Daniel Kahneman, won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics.) At every instant we feel good or bad, on a scale that runs from misery to bliss. Our feeling good or bad is affected by many factors, running from physical comfort to our inner sense of meaning. What matters is the totality of our happiness over months and years, not just passing pleasures. The new science may enable us to measure this and try to explain it.

To measure happiness, we can ask a person how happy he is, or we can ask his friends or independent investigators. These reports yield similar results. The breakthrough has been in neuroscience. Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has identified an area in the left front of the brain where good feelings are experienced, and another in the right front where bad feelings are experienced. Activity in these brain areas alters sharply when people have good or bad experiences. Those who describe themselves as happy are more active on the left side than unhappy people, and less active on the right side. So the old behaviourist idea that we cannot know how other people feel is now under attack.

The challenge is to work out what this means for political priorities in free societies like ours. If we accept that governments can and should aim to maximise happiness, rather than simply income, how might this affect specific choices in public policy?

We must start by establishing the key factors affecting a person’s happiness. Family and personal life come top in every study, and work and community life rank high. Health and freedom are also crucial, and money counts too, but in a very specific way.

I will start with money—or more specifically with income tax policy. In any society, richer people are happier than poor people. Yet as a western country becomes richer, its people overall do not become happier. The reason for this is that over time our standards and expectations rise to meet our income. A Gallup poll has asked Americans each year: “What is the smallest amount of money a family of four needs to get along in this community?” The sums mentioned rise in line with average incomes. Since people are always comparing their incomes with what others have, or with what they are used to, they only feel better off if they move up relative to the norm.

This process can have counterproductive effects. I have an incentive to work and earn more: it will make me happier. So do other members of society, who also care about their relative standard of life. Since society as a whole cannot raise its position relative to itself, the effort which its members devote to that end could be said to be a waste—the balance between leisure and work has been shifted “inefficiently” towards work.

To reinforce the case, let me recast it in terms of status, which may derive as much from the earning of income as the spending of it. People work, in part at least, to improve their status. But status is a system of ranking: one, two, three and so on. So if one person improves his status, someone else loses an equal amount. It is a zero-sum game: private life sacrificed in order to increase status is a waste from the point of view of society as a whole. That is why the rat race is so destructive: we lose family life and peace of mind in pursuing something whose total cannot be altered.

Or so we would—if we had no income taxes. But income taxes discourage work. Most economists consider this a disadvantage. They say that when someone pays £100 in taxes, it hurts more than that—it has an “excess burden”—because of the distortion away from work. But without taxes there would be an inefficient distortion towards work. So taxes up to a certain level can help to improve the work-life balance of citizens and thus increase the overall sense of wellbeing in a society. They operate like a tax on pollution. When I earn more and adopt a more expensive lifestyle, this puts pressure on others to keep up—my action raises the norm and makes them less satisfied with what they have. I am like the factory owner who pours out his soot on to the neighbours’ laundry. And the classic economic remedy for pollution is to make the polluter pay.

People sometimes object to this argument on the grounds that it is pandering to envy or preventing self-improvement. It is true that such measures do reduce some kinds of freedom. But we cannot just wish away the pervasiveness of status comparisons; the desire for status is wired into our genes. Studies of monkeys show how it works: when a male monkey is moved from a group where he is top into a group where his status is lower, his brain experiences a sharp fall in serotonin—the neurotransmitter most clearly associated with happiness. So if the human status race is dysfunctional—from the point of view of the overall happiness in society—it makes sense to reduce freedom a small amount through taxation policy.

Those who want to cut taxes should explain why they think we should work harder and sacrifice our family and community life in pursuit of a zero-sum status race. They may say that hard work is good for the consumer. But workers are the same people as consumers. There is no point killing ourselves at work in the interest of ourselves as consumers.

And there is another consideration: if we work harder and raise our standard of living, we first appreciate it but then we get used to it. Research shows that people do not adequately foresee this process of habituation, or fully realise that once they have experienced a superior lifestyle they will feel they have to continue it. They will in effect become addicted to it. Once again, the standard economic approach to addictive spending is to tax it.

These are arguments for taxation not as a way to raise money, but in order to restrain activity which is polluting and addictive, and to help to maintain a sensible work-life balance. This should become part of the social democratic case against income tax cuts. There is also the issue of equity. The main argument for redistribution has always been that an extra pound gives less extra happiness to a rich person than a poor person. Until recently this was pure speculation; survey evidence now confirms its truth.

How else can we dampen the impact of the rat race? We have to start from human nature as it is, but we can also affect values and behaviour through the signals our institutions send out. An explicit focus on happiness would change attitudes to many aspects of policy, including in education and training, regional policy and performance-related pay.

In one sense, what people most want is respect. They seek economic status because it brings respect. But we can increase or decrease the weight we give to status. In an increasingly competitive, meritocratic society, life will become tougher for people in the bottom half of the ability range unless we develop broader criteria for respect. We should respect people who co-operate with others at no gain to themselves, and who show skill and effort at whatever level. That is why it is so important to enable everyone to develop a skill. In Britain, this means ensuring that all young people can take up an apprenticeship if they wish, so that those who have not enjoyed academic success at school can experience professional pride and avoid starting adult life believing themselves to be failures.

Equally, we should be sceptical of institutions which give greater weight to rank, such as performance-related pay (PRP). The idea of PRP is that by paying people for what they achieve, we provide the best possible system of incentives. Where we can measure people’s achievement accurately, we should pay them for it—people like travelling salesmen, foreign exchange dealers, or racehorse jockeys. And where achievement depends on a team effort, we should reward the team, provided their performance can be unambiguously measured.

But management gurus are often after something more: they want a year by year alignment between individual pay and individual performance. The problem is that in most jobs there is no objective measure of individual performance, so people must in effect be evaluated against their peers. Even if the scores purport to be objective rather than relative, most people know how many are in each grade. The effect is to put them into a ranking. If everybody agreed about the rankings, it would not be that bad. But studies have shown quite low correlations between one evaluator’s rankings and another’s. So a lot of self-respect (and often very little pay) is being attached to an uncertain ranking process that fundamentally alters the relationship of co-operation between an employee and his boss, and between an employee and his peers.

Some comparisons between people are inevitable, since hierarchy is necessary and unavoidable. Some people get promoted and others do not. Moreover, those who get promoted must be paid more, since they are talented and the employer wishes to attract talent. So pay is important at key moments as a way of affecting people’s decisions about occupations or in choosing between employers. Fortunately, promotions and moves between employers are still relatively infrequent for most people. In everyday working life, relative pay rates are not usually uppermost in their thoughts. PRP changes all that.

Economists and politicians tend to assume that when financial motives for performance are increased, other motives remain the same. But that is not so, as this example shows. At a childcare centre in Israel, parents were often late to pick up their children, so fines were introduced for lateness. The result was a surprise: more people were late. They now saw being late as something they were entitled to do as long as they paid for it; the fine became a price.

The professional ethic should be cherished. If we do not cultivate it, we may not even improve performance, let alone produce workers who enjoy their work. Financial incentives have useful effects on the careers people choose, and the employers they choose to work for. But once someone has joined an organisation, peer respect is also a powerful motivator. We should exploit this motivation. Instead, government over the last 30 years has demoralised workers by constantly appealing to motives which they consider to be “lower.”

If we want a happier society, we should focus most on the experiences which people value for their intrinsic worth and not because other people have them—above all, on relationships in the family, at work and in the community. It seems likely that the extra comforts we now enjoy have increased our happiness somewhat, but that deteriorating relationships have made us less happy. What should social policy try to achieve, notwithstanding its limited leverage over private life? Here are some examples.

Divorce and broken homes are ever more common. Research shows that the children of broken homes are more prone to depression in adulthood. To protect children, the state should act to try to make family life more manageable, through better school hours, flexible hours at work, means-tested childcare, and maternity and paternity leave. Parenting classes should also be compulsory in the school curriculum and an automatic part of antenatal care.

Unemployment is as bad an experience as divorce, as research shows. It offends our need to be needed. So low unemployment should be a major objective. Our government has done well, through sensible policies of welfare to work which have avoided generating inflationary pressures. Good policy has also halved unemployment in Denmark and Holland. But Germany and, above all, France, have been slow to adopt these policies. Poor policies towards the unemployed and bad wage policies are causing high European unemployment. Job security is not the main issue.

Job security is something people want, and reasonable protection is something a rich society can afford to provide. The same is true of good working conditions, if stress is not to drive many weaker souls into inactivity and dependence on the state. It is absurd to argue that globalisation has reduced our ability to provide a civilised life for our workers. On the contrary, it has increased it—provided that pay rises only in line with productivity.

The rise in crime between 1950 and 1980 is the most striking demonstration that economic growth does not automatically increase social harmony. This rise occurred in every advanced country except Japan, and its causes are not completely understood.

Posted at 11:03 PM · Comments (0)

They were once a strong, proud, race living fulfilled lives in small and great monarchies strewn across the continent. Oblivious to other worlds, they tilled the ground, hunted beasts for food and fun, fished on brooks and rivers and seas, and tended cattle down lush pastures. They fought internecine battles, conquered kingdoms with bows and arrows, with swords and spears.

In the evenings, children gathered to listen to stories and folklores in the moonlight. Millions dwelt in mud or plank-built huts with thatched roofs, patronised witch doctors, grew old and died or got killed by strange, herb-defying ailments. Many were they that lived and died by the sword, metamorphosing into deities and myths to be later worshipped by succeeding generations.
For the African, this was life. One that existed solely for them. It was a time the land was populated by its owners, when the people lived as they deemed fit. There were neither white skins (except the albinos) nor machines. No ambitious trips to Mars or the moon, no fear of a sudden Armageddon via a nuclear warhead. Such a time so graphically depicted by the Nigerian storyteller, Elechi Amadi, in his classic novel, The Concubine.

But that wasn’t destined to last forever. For the white man came with his Bible, and soon, his gun. And Africa has never been the same again.

This journey of Africa- from that initial visit of the Portuguese in the late 1490s, which culminated in centuries of a most ignominious slave trade, through the continent’s eventual capture and release (?) by Europe, to the decades of pillage in the hands of its own sons- is what Howard French passionately takes us through in his new book, A Continent For The Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.

French, a long-time correspondent of the New York Times in West and Central Africa, employed his several years as a reporter covering much of Africa’s most volatile recent past, to lay bare the promises and frustrations of an immensely fertile land tragically devoured by its own, a swarm of locusts egged on by an applauding West that would always turn the other way after its real goals have been achieved. A continent of great minds whose recent history is painfully replete with bitter pictures of strife, of diseases and death, of famine and drought, of weed-smoking kid soldiers wielding rifles down the streets of Monrovia. Gory pictures of brothers butchering brothers, of avaricious military despots and pot-bellied civilian dictators. Pictures of gloom and doom, of penury and despair, and a tomorrow clouded by palpable haze.

Indeed, as you turn each page of Howard French’s book, the words of that late Senegalese bard, David Diop, reverberating in the depths of your soul.
Africa, tell me Africa
Is this your back that is bent
This back that breaks under the weight of humiliation
This back trembling with red scars
And saying yes to the whip under the midday sun
But a grave voice answers me
Impetuous child that tree, young and strong
That tree over there
Splendidly alone amidst white and faded flowers
That is your Africa springing up anew
Springing up patiently, obstinately
Whose fruit bit by bit acquires
The bitter taste of liberty.
Diop had prophesied a life of bliss for Africa and its peoples after the long years of colonialism. Unfortunately, decades after all of Africa have been liberated from Europe, genuine liberty eludes its peoples, millions of whom are ruled with an iron fist by their countries’ civilian dictators.
But French, an African-American, would not just do a reporter’s diary of his 25 years’ romance with the Dark Continent. He gets himself involved in the continent’s plight. And apparently unable to keep containing those deep emotions long bottled up in his mind and notebook, he releases his fury on Europe and America. These countries, he claims, have always seen Africa as a mere huge dice on their ludo board, a gigantic plaything that could always serve whatever purpose that suits their minds. He queries America’s role in the plunder of the continent and it’s support for greedy dictators, especially during the cold war. He wonders why Washington would always look the other way while the Idi Amins, Mobutu Sese Sekos, Charles Taylors and Sani Abachas of this world were killing and maiming and looting, leaving their poor countrymen and women to suffer the consequences?

But this might be understandable. French is himself a black American, and his great grandfathers were born and raised in Africa, long before the vast continent was sliced and shared by Europe, and its best men and women shipped across the seas into bondage on sugarcane plantations in the Americas. And apart from living and working in Africa, French is married to an African. It then becomes more comprehensible that he appears, not as a mere, apathetic narrator of events, but as one fully involved, a man well situated at the epicenter of the perennially unfolding African tragedy.

And so French criss-crosses the continent, taking us with him into the streets of Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria. We follow him into Charles Taylor’s Liberia, into Mali, into the two Congos. He involves us, the readers, in his experiences in the power play and high-wire politics of the mid-1990s in Abacha’s Nigeria, in the Ebola plague in the Congo, in the Liberian civil war, in Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, He writes of poverty and hunger owing to decades of misrule, and of the people’s desperation for survival by whatever means.

In 1994, Nigeria was at a boiling point, and the journalist, who had only recently been posted to Abidjan as New York Times Correspondent in West Africa, had rushed to the country. What he met on arrival at the airport, and in his trips around the world’s most populated black nation, was however different from what had been on ground a decade earlier. He says it all on pages 26 and 27:

“Corruption had eaten away at everything here since that bygone era of pride and optimism. Most would say the rot had started under the elected government of Shehu Shagari, who was overthrown in a military coup in 1983, and things had gotten steadily worse under a succession of bemedaled generals.

“Nigeria had become one of Africa’s most tragic stories, as if a great family franchise had been run into the ground by decadent nephews prematurely handed the reins of management. The callow nephews in this tale were army generals, and like King Midas in reverse, the officers who had run the country for the last decade had debased everything they had touched, starting of course with politics, which they had turned into a contest of self-enrichment. The leader who ran the country in the mid-1990s, General Sani Abacha, stood out even in this crowd.”

Indeed, General Sani Abacha, who in November 1993 forced his way into the State House in Nigeria, had in 1994 become something akin to a motion picture monster to his countrymen. At the peak of his five-year tyranny, the diminutive, dark-goggled dictator without a middle name had either decreed the assassination of his perceived political foes, or had hurled them into jail. In his dungeon were, among others, Moshood Abiola, winner of the 1993 presidential elections, General Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler (now president) accused by Abacha of plotting to sack his regime, Shehu Yar’Adua, and all the popular members of the human rights community. Ken Saro Wiwa had been hanged, Kudirat Abiola and many others had been shot dead in a Lagos Street, and a thick, palpable dread filled the firmament.

French painstakingly takes us through the absurd political dance-drama of those days of gloom, up till Abacha’s mysterious death in June 1998 of a heart condition aggravated, reports said, by an all-out orgy with a couple of sluts imported from India.

But then, Abacha didn’t create those clouds that threatened Nigeria’s very existence. The garlands for such, many argue, should naturally be draped round the copious neck of the country’s former ruler, General Ibrahim Babangida. He it was who annulled the 1993 Presidential elections and nearly pushed his country into the abyss. Abacha, echo those voices, merely benefited from that treasonable venture.

Sadly, the people’s hopes that a democratic regime would put a balm on their battered lives are daily being punctured by the supposedly democratic government of General Olusegun Obasanjo. Blessed with a haughty mien and the fury of a typhoon, Obasanjo rules the land more like a medieval emperor. The president carries himself with a presumptuous, almost megalomaniac air, apparently seeing himself as the best gift Providence ever bequeathed to the country next to crude oil. In several fits of raw, uncontrollable ire, he has ordered the destruction of whole communities, verbally assaulted clergymen and single-handedly annulled an election meant to produce a king for his village.

And already, Babangida, whose action nearly led to the country’s collapse, is seeking a comeback in 2007. Arrayed behind him is a clan of clowns led by that disgraced ex-general, Mr Abdulkareem Adisa whom many insist would have had a more fulfilling career as an Elizabethan court jester.

French tells of his meetings with some notable Nigerians, including Baba Gana Kingibe, who would have been Abiola’s deputy, Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, Newswatch’s Ray Ekpu, Kudirat Abiola, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, among others. He writes of his trips to several volatile parts of the country. The author tells a story of political intrigues and power play, of treachery in high places, of dashed hopes and a country sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines.

But Abacha’s “Giant of Africa” was not the only country on the boil. A systematic carnage had gradually reduced Liberia, that once promising country founded by freed slaves from America in 1821, into a land of living ghosts. Enter Charles Taylor, described in The New York Times by Robert Rodberg, director of the Program on Interstate Conflict at the Kennedy School of Harvard University, as one of the more colorful thugs of West Africa’s recent past.

Having lived in the forest from where he waged war against the repressive regime of the marijuana-loving illiterate soldier, Samuel Doe, Taylor forced himself into world consciousness as a fiend who fed minors with dope and sent them to their death on the battlefield. Indeed, as commander-in-chief of a mostly under-aged, drug-addicted youth guerilla army, Taylor had waged a war not only against Doe’s government, but against any perceived threat to his ambition to rule Liberia. On the road to Monrovia, where he would later rule as President, this brutish ‘gentleman’ who stole his country’s as well as Sierra Leone’s diamond to prosecute his warfare, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his countrymen as well as foreigners to book a passage to the Presidential Palace. Among his victims were two Nigerian journalists, Tayo Awotusin and Krees Imodibe whose murder Taylor ordered because of Nigeria’s role in ECOMOG.
Ironically, Taylor, on Interpol’s wanted list for committing crimes against humanity, now lives in opulence in Nigeria, shielded from justice by President Obasanjo against the wishes of the free world.

Interestingly, Taylor’s one-time ally and Liberia’s former warlord, Prince Yormie Johnson was also offered refuge by Nigeria, a country that is fast becoming a safe haven for modern day Hitlers. Many would remember Johnson as Doe’s nemesis on September 10, 1990. Like a possessed demon straight out of hell, Johnson presided over Doe’s systematic slaughter, supervising his men as Doe’s ears, hands, legs etc were gradually sliced off even as the cameras beamed the despot’s long, agonizing death to the world.

French, in his book, captures Taylor’s grand entrance into Monrovia and his first press conference where he laboured hard to justify his war. “We must take a moment to thank God, for this popular, people’s uprising was, in reality, God’s war”, said Taylor.

Unable to stomach the glaring blasphemy, an angry French had queried the warlord: “Isn’t it outrageous for someone who has drugged small boys, given them guns and trained them to kill to call this God’s war? How dare you call the destruction of your country in this manner and the killing of two hundred thousand people God’s war?”
But Mr Taylor had replied with a calmness quite alien to many of his ilk: “I just believe in the destiny of man being controlled by God, and wars, whether man-made or what, are directed by a force. And so when I say it is God’s war, God has his own way of restoring the land, and he will restore it after this war.”

Another real tragedy for Africa in the last decade was Mobutu Sese Seko, the late grandiose ruler of the former Zaire. Mobutu’s story strikes a chord with those of his fellow travelers in tyranny. A former soldier in the Congo, the man named Joseph-Desire Mobutu seized power in 1965 and was ‘elected’ president in 1970. Donning a fake toga of an enforcer of cultural awareness, he changed his country’s name to Zaire, forced Europeans out of the country and rechristened himself Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Wa Za Banga (The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake).

A sick soul plagued with prostate cancer since 1962, Mobutu’s countrymen would discover soon after he stole power in 1965 that he also suffered from another malady: chronic kleptomania. The Leopard, as Mobutu was known, did little for his country but much for himself, looting his nation’s wealth and fortifying his personal fortune to an incredible tune of four billion dollars as far back as 1984.

In May 1997, a rebel group, led by Laurent Kabila was closing in on Kinshasha. Mobutu, ravaged by a deadly mix of cancer and the people’s odium, had little strength to counter the insurrection. The Great Man fled to Morocco, where he died like a dog four months later, booking a speedy, one-way passage to hell.
French takes us through the streets of Kinshasha, just as he does with the Ebola epidemic of the neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, describing Mobutu’s final fall and the rise of Laurent Kabila. His vivid account of the chaos that descended on the country would later win him the Overseas Press Club of America’s award for the best newspaper interpretation of foreign affairs.

Some might query French’s rationale for blaming the West for much of Africa’s woes. Such people would argue that the continent’s rulers should take most of the blame. French‘s position, in his book, is that the West has always aligned with African despots in order to achieve certain goals. If the West had taken a more decisive stand against these demons in human form, perhaps Africa would have risen beyond its present stagnant state.

Yet others might argue that the author doesn’t really proffer any solutions to Africa’s leadership problems. He however cites examples of certain African leaders who guided their countries through the democratic path. President Alpha Oumar Konare of Mali is singled out as a flourishing flower amidst a cluster of thorns. The lesson here is clear. Africa’s sun will never shine until its leaders have eschewed their desperation for power and greed for their country’s wealth, and begin to relate to their people like fellow humans.

Laced with various quotes and references, with 16 photo pages and a map, A Continent For The Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa in its 280 pages is a rewarding excursion into Africa’s recent past. Indeed, this book published by Alfred A. Knopf and sold for $25 is a rich guide for anyone with a remote interest in that continent’s checkered history. And in the unlikely event that the reader quarrels with French’s submissions in his book, the reader definitely won’t have any quarrels with his breezy style, his lucid presentation, his easy-to-grasp, free-flowing prose.
Even then, as one digests the last pages of this book, one just can’t expunge the nagging question off ones mind: will this Black Giant ever cease to totter?

Posted at 10:53 PM · Comments (0)

29 October 2004

Happy 40th birthday Zambia

On 24 October, a few of us had the privilege to join the government and people of Zambia as they celebrated the 40th anniversary of the independence of this sister African country. We undertook this journey north of the Zambezi as a labour of love.

During our days of struggle against the apartheid system, Zambia provided a second home to many of our people. Throughout the long years of our struggle, its citizens daily demonstrated their readiness to stand with us until freedom was won. This principled position in favour of peace, democracy and non-racism in our country, imposed many sacrifices on the Zambian people, including loss of life and subversion of its economy.

Even before independence in 1964, the Zambian liberation movement, led by Kenneth Kaunda, and originally constituted by the Northern Rhodesia African National Congress, had acted in solidarity with our own African National Congress. It received, protected and helped to transport to the then Tanganyika of Julius Nyerere the very first combatants of Umkhonto we Sizwe, who left our country from 1961 onwards, to train in Africa and elsewhere in the world as our people’s soldiers for liberation.

Subsequently, and for more than 20 years, Zambia hosted the external headquarters of our movement, the ANC. It was from its capital city, Lusaka, that in 1990 we flew back to our own country, in a Zambia Airways plane lent to us by President Kaunda and his government, to begin the process of negotiations and finally end the long years of exile and the even longer years of white minority domination. Even as we left this second home to return to our native land, we knew that the bonds of virtual kinship between us and the Zambian people would never be broken.

When we spoke during the 40th anniversary festivities, we also conveyed profound thanks to the Zambian people on behalf of the peoples of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola. This was because Zambia had played a pivotal role in the struggle for the liberation of these sister peoples and fellow combatants, as it had done with regard to ours.

It was therefore very moving to see among the honoured guests of the President of Zambia, Levy Mwanawasa, the first President of independent Zambia, and outstanding African statesman and patriot, Dr Kenneth David Kaunda - KK - the very first recipient of our esteemed Order of the Companions of O.R. Tambo, who had educated his people to accept the struggle for the total liberation of Africa as their own.

In his presence, surrounded by the happy celebratory mood so evident on the faces of the Zambian people, we could not but wish that two of KK’s comrades and close friends, Julius Mwalimu Nyerere and Oliver Tambo, could have been among the celebrants, mixing freely with the hero people of Zambia.

Two striking messages stood out among the sentiments the Zambian people communicated about the meaning to them of their 40 years of freedom from colonialism.

One of these was the repeated passionate reference to the gift of peace that Zambia had enjoyed in its four decades of freedom, even as the then colonisers and oppressors worked hard to impose the war on Zambia they were waging against those they had colonised and subjected to apartheid domination.

Even those in their twenties, born long after their country gained its freedom, gave thanks that free Zambia had been spared the pain of civil war and conflicts generated by military dictatorship brought about by coups d’ etat.

Those of the older generation who had fought for Zambia’s independence also spoke about the humiliation and indignity that colonial domination had imposed on the Zambian people. They spoke of 40 years during which their people had experienced a life free of the humiliation and indignity of racial superiority and oppression, and of the immeasurable value that attaches to the recovery of the dignity of the African masses.

Four decades of familiarity with the experience of domestic peace and human dignity had not bred contempt for these extraordinary gifts! Time has not dulled the sensitivity of the people of Zambia to the fundamental importance of the objectives of peace and human dignity for themselves and for all Africans.

None of us, pampered guests of the Zambian government and people, could fail to hear what these masses conveyed instinctively - that they are proudly Zambian and African, regardless of the problems they continue to experience, of poverty and underdevelopment.

Two of our white compatriots, Peter and Beverly Pickford, have just published an outstanding book that affirms an almost unfathomable love for Africa and celebrates the true and complex sense of humanness that the African humanity to which they belong - integrated within its habitat -spontaneously, and without reserve, bestows as a priceless gift to itself and all other human beings, everywhere. The principal character in the book is the African soul.

The book is entitled ‘Forever Africa: A Journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Morocco’. In vivid photographs and moving words it tells of the year-long overland journey the Pickfords took, travelling from the confluence of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans at the southern tip of Africa, to the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, where it washes the African coast at Tangiers in Morocco.

Early one morning, in the fading darkness before sunrise, Peter Pickford sat alone next to a dying campfire along the Gomoti Channel within the Okavango Delta, in northern Botswana, contemplating the inevitability of death and therefore his ultimate and final separation from everything that defined his being - Africa. He has written: “It would be well, I mused to myself, that when your time is called, it should be a good time. A time like this. For each person it would be different, their good time, but this was mine. I was alone, not lonely, but where being alone makes the whole world, all of life, pivot around your own senses. There is peace in it, and you must be silent and try not to think too much, but rather to feel and let yourself drift in it. It makes me happy, not to smile, but that gut happy contentment when for that while, you and the earth and the water and the trees and the stillness are all bound in one. Life in that moment is perfect.”

If death came at the moment when you and the African earth and the water and the trees and the stillness are all bound in one, it would not be death. It would be an expression of the contentment that the life that would not die, even after death, would be perfect, because to be African is to understand that even after death, the African soul would be guaranteed a place where it and the earth and the water and the trees and the stillness would all be bound in one. Like John Donne, Peter Pickford, an African, tells the world and mortality itself - death be not proud!

An earlier commentary by the Pickfords in the same book, which refers to the fact of their having been “born into one of the last strongholds of colonialism in Africa and lived in a privileged state of which, by default, (their lives) were made”, says:

“To regard the platform of one’s life as the platform of absolute truth is to wear blinkers so tight that the light of the world passes as a shadow before you. In Africa, it is so pervasive an affliction that the continent’s richness and potential remain hidden not only to the outside world but to us who live here (in Africa).

“This affliction of blinkered perceptions is contagious, so that, in the low turning of the wheel of Africa’s history from kingdoms, civilisations and tribalism to colonial rule and then back to self-government, the world has in a singularly successful indoctrination released on our continent the most destructive force of all: Africans themselves blinded to their own virtue.”

Happily, the Zambians seemed to break out of this mould, repeatedly reaffirming Zambia̵