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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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Copyright The New York Times

A review of FROM COLONY TO SUPERPOWER U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776
By George C. Herring

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
November 23, 2008

Any book aiming to explore American diplomatic history from the Revolution until now necessarily involves some serious skimming. George C. Herring’s weighty yet fast-paced “From Colony to Superpower” is no exception. At 1,000-plus pages, its first achievement is its feat of inclusiveness, managed by making quick work of many interesting subplots of the United States’ rich and complex relations with the world.

What distinguishes the effort is not so much the sturdy précis that the author serves up on the traditional obligatory highlights in the American story but his narrative abilities. The narrative power lies partly in identifying themes that gradually give a strong organizational cohesion to his story.

Mr. Herring is a professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky who is best known for a history of the Vietnam War. In this latest book his themes are all the more refreshing because many of the ideas he returns to again and again are still largely ignored by our school curriculums and the popular history mills of the book industry.

“From Colony to Superpower” anchors its ideas through accretion. Where it works, it is revisionism of the best kind, quiet but insistent, reinforced by archival evidence and deftly drawn parallels.

The cascade of ideas begins with the rejection of the widely accepted notion that the United States has often been an isolationist power.

Right from the start, Mr. Herring says, the generation of founding fathers was outward looking and consumed by diplomacy. What is more, expansionism, first beyond the original 13 colonies, then into the Caribbean and Pacific and eventually culminating in a political and economic domain spanning the world, has almost always animated American leaders.

Already at the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, in 1787, no less than James Madison spoke of “laying the foundation of a great empire.” By 1821 John Quincy Adams was mocking the fast swelling British Empire: “I do not know what you claim nor what you do not claim.” When his British interlocutor replied sarcastically, “Perhaps, a piece of the moon,” Adams issued a blunt warning about North America: “Keep what is yours and leave the rest of the continent to us.”

Less than a decade later President Andrew Jackson had embraced gunboat diplomacy to East Asia and exploration of the South Pole, and spoke of showing the flag “to every portion of the globe, to give to civilized and savage man a just impression of the power we possess.”

Attitudes like this were steadily fed by a fast-growing population, an economy that became the envy of the world and by a creed of American exceptionalism, whose roots could already be discerned in the words of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson drew a sharp distinction between the “high moral purpose” of the United States and the “low motives of power and expediency that drove others.” At the time, Mr. Herring notes, one-fifth of the American population were slaves.

Less conventionally, in terms of the mainstream way history has been taught for generations, Mr. Herring paints a potent picture of the role of race as an important and frequently central motive behind American actions.

This story line begins with the annihilation of American Indians, who conducted lively foreign relations of their own, with the government in Washington, with the European powers and even with the Confederacy until its subjugation.

His story continues with the politics of black bondage, as the young nation pushed west, extending the frontier of slavery and precipitating the Civil War.

The narrative of frank racism, a word Mr. Herring employs frequently, gains momentum in a discussion of Manifest Destiny, which he says had more to do with an ideology of racial superiority than with altruism. The examples, in 19th-century dealings with continental neighbors like Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, are as painful as they are numerous.

A persistent target was Mexico, which lost huge chunks of its territory to American expansionism. “Americans scorned Mexicans as a mixed breed, even below free blacks and Indians, ‘an imbecile and pusillanimous race,’ ” Mr. Herring writes. He adds a few pages later, “The very racism that drove the United States into Mexico limited its conquests.”

Quoting Andrew Jackson Donelson, the former president’s nephew, Mr. Herring recounts, “We can no more amalgamate with her people than with negroes.” Much later, we learn, the same thinking prevented Puerto Rico from becoming a state.

When he gets to the 20th century, Mr. Herring labors to portray Woodrow Wilson as the figure who “towers above the landscape of modern American foreign policy.” But in Mr. Herring’s telling it is Franklin D. Roosevelt who leaves the biggest impression, despite his frequent criticisms of Roosevelt’s maddening management style.

Wilson and Roosevelt began their presidencies by minimizing foreign policy. Wilson spent six months in Paris pursuing a peaceful new world order. Through cunning and vision, Roosevelt dragged the United States into the next great war and not only emerged victorious but remade the world.

Trends of the past carry steadily forward throughout the book, with idealism, self-regard and seemingly ever-increasing power combining with condescension and arrogance, particularly toward non-Western peoples, causing the United States to underestimate others and overplay its hand, perhaps most notably in Korea and Vietnam.

In historical retrospect the stalemated United States war in Korea clearly heralds the emergence of China as the next big thing, while not long afterward Vietnam, which one of Andrew Jackson’s agents once called home to “the most filthy people in the world,” would become the place where America finally discovered its limits.

Mr. Herring concludes by advising Americans to prepare for their relative decline: “They must cast away centuries-old notions of themselves as God’s chosen people. In today’s world, such pretensions cannot fail to alienate others.”

Howard W. French is an associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of “A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa.”

Posted at 9:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

SHANGHAI — The heavy metal band Guns N’ Roses is roiling China’s music scene. But sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll aren’t the issue.

It has taken 17 years for the band to produce a new studio record. Now, even before it goes on sale Sunday, in a release heralded by its producers as a “historic moment in rock ’ n’ roll,” the disc is getting the thumbs down from Chinese authorities. It’s also causing anxiety among GN’R’s legion of loyal fans here, who aren’t sure they like what lead singer W. Axl Rose is trying to say about their country.

China’s government-owned music-importing monopoly has signaled that local record distributors shouldn’t bother ordering the GN’R production. Anything with “democracy” in the name is “not going to work,” said an official at the China National Publications Import & Export (Group) Corp., part of the Ministry of Culture.

For fans, the response is more complicated. GN’R developed a major following in China in the late 1980s, when the young Mr. Rose was recording early hit songs like “Welcome to the Jungle.” China was in the throes of its own rebellious era, and heavy metal was its protest music. GN’R’s popularity soared in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Learning the band’s 1991 ballad “Don’t Cry” was a rite of passage for a generation of Chinese guitarists.
Chinese Democracy

Listen to a clip of the title track from GN’R’s new album and, below, read some of the lyrics.

…

If they were missionaries
Real-time visionaries
Sitting in a Chinese stew
To view my disinfatuation

I know that I’m a classic case
Watch my disenchanted face
Blame it on the Falun Gong
They’ve seen the end and it can’t hold on now.

…

When your great wall rocks blame yourself
While their arms reach up for your help
And you’re out of time

“It was not only the music, the band’s clothes also pushed the craze,” says 30-year-old Chen Lei , one of Beijing’s best-regarded rock guitarists, who cites GN’R as a primary influence.

GN’R nostalgia remains strong. A program on state-run China Central Television last year ranked “Qiang Hua” (literally, “Guns Flowers”), as the group is known in Chinese, at No. 8 on a list of top rock bands of all time.

Chinese fans eager for news on the Web about the new album sidestep censors by using coded language. Many deliberately scramble the name, typing “Chinese Democraxy” or “Chi Dem.” They say they fear that typing the Chinese characters for the title will draw government scrutiny. Still, it’s not much challenge to find news about the record on the Web, where even the site www.chinesedemocracy.com is a discussion of GN’R, not politics.

Some fans in China relish how the album discomfits the establishment. “Rock ‘n’ roll, as a weapon, is an invisible bomb,” says one.

Leo Huang, a 25-year-old guitarist, just hopes it will retrace GN’R’s roots. “I prefer rock ‘n’ roll,” said the skinny 25-year-old guitarist after a recent gig with his band, the Wildcats, at a hard-rock bar below a Shanghai highway.

Yet, for some fans in this nation of 2.6 billion ears, the new album’s title is an irritation. Democracy is a touchy subject in this country. Elections are limited to votes for selected village-level officials, and senior leaders are all chosen in secret within the Communist Party. Many Chinese wish for greater say in their government. But others — including some rockers — think too much democracy too quickly could lead to chaos, and they resent foreign efforts to push the issue.

Mr. Chen, the guitarist, says the “Chinese Democracy” album title suggests “they don’t understand China well” and are “just trying to stir up publicity.”

Some Chinese artists, loath to be branded as democracy campaigners, declined valuable offers to help illustrate the album. “I listened to their music when I was little,” says Beijing visual artist Chen Zhuo . He was “very glad” when GN’R asked to buy rights to use his picture of Tiananmen Square rendered as an amusement park — with Mao Zedong’s head near a roller coaster. Then, Mr. Chen looked at lyrics of the album’s title song and, after consulting with his lawyer and partner, declined the band’s $18,000 offer. “We have to take political risks into account as artists in China,” says the 30-year-old.

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My photography of Shanghai is included, along with an essay, in a forthcoming book of essays bearing this title.

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Copyright The Guardian

In 1998, I met an ex-professional boxer and martial-arts expert in Japan, and we became friendly. He introduced me to these two yakuza, and we went for dinner in a small tempura place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.

My father was a racketeer type, so they got along with me and I got along with them.

I know their background of respect, and generally they’re polite. Some of the low-level yakuza that I’ve seen in an area of Tokyo called San’ya are really nasty and vicious, though - not nice people, and quite dangerous.

The guy who is having his cigarette lit is about 5ft 6in tall, and just as wide. When I first saw him, he was wearing a bright yellow suit. The other guy invited me to his house and told me all about his wife, who was a model and had just come back from Paris. He also told me that he can never get into the US because he’s got tattoos all over, and they don’t want yakuza in the country.

I don’t know exactly what these two guys do. I think they must keep order in the area. They work for some upper-echelon boss, and I’m sure they make good money. They have to cut their own finger joints off if they do something wrong, and my boxer friend was missing a piece of his finger. I didn’t look to see if these guys were, and you can’t quite tell in the picture.

After dinner, we went to a coffee shop, and I saw them lighting cigarettes. I took a picture with a Leica M6 and a hand-held flash while they were doing it, and then I asked them if they could repeat the gesture and I took three or four more. The big guy having his cigarette lit has the most fantastic expression. That’s what I love about it. The way he’s looking at us, like he’s looking right through us. You just know that these are tough guys.

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Posted at 10:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Economist

America’s president-elect needs to remake the case for humanitarian intervention abroad

IN AMERICA this has been a week for the drawing up of lists—lists of the virtues of Barack Obama, lists of big names for his administration, lists of big tasks for his bulging in-tray. But in Congo this week a million hungry and terrified refugees are in desperate need of food and protection (see article). The two things are connected, in a way that may surprise, and dismay, Mr Obama’s admirers. If he is to prove worthy of the near-universal exaltation with which his election has been greeted, he has to prepare America and the world for the possibility of further American military interventions overseas.

This is not to say that it is America that has to provide the 3,000 extra peacekeeping troops the United Nations has asked for in Congo. The French have troops available, and America is in no mood for new entanglements. With an overstretched army and an economy on life support, most Americans reckon this is a time to rebuild at home, not embark on new adventures in far-flung places. Most foreigners probably agree. In their eyes, George Bush’s wars were a disaster, if not a crime. They think that whatever Mr Obama says about winning in Afghanistan, he was elected to practise war no more.

A lovely sentiment. The trouble is that history does not take a holiday just because America needs a breather. Mr Obama will sooner or later face a question that has plagued all recent presidents. Forget about wars launched in the name of defeating terrorism, stopping nuclear proliferation or pursuing some other direct American interest. What should the world’s strongest and (still) richest country do when famine or conflict strike places whose own governments will not or cannot help, where America has no direct interest, but where averting a humanitarian disaster may require military intervention?

The answers of previous presidents have depended on temperament and circumstance. George Bush senior sent marines to feed Somalia. Bill Clinton used force to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo but not in Rwanda, where Hutus killed close to 800,000 Tutsis. The junior Bush decided against intervention in Darfur, even though his own administration called the ethnic cleansing there a genocide and the killing goes on.

It remains to be seen where Mr Obama’s temperament will lead, but it is easy to see how circumstances might dull any appetite for intervention. It is not just that America is stretched thin; the Bush years have also damaged the intellectual case for intervention. America did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq out of altruism, but those wars have shown how hard it is to rebuild broken countries. Congo itself is an example; even with the UN’s biggest peacekeeping operation it is still in danger. For several years The Economist has repeated like a stuck gramophone needle a call for intervention in Darfur, but we acknowledge the law of unintended consequences. In all such cases, the use of force should be the very last resort.

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Copyright The Columbia Journalism Review

The ethnic and political free-for-all in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has raged for over a decade, and has pitted over a half-dozen countries and numerous other paramilitary and militia groups against each other. An estimated five million people have been killed in the conflict.

In mid-October of this year, the UN brokered a tenuous cease-fire between the Congolese government and rebel leaders. A week later, that case-fire fell apart. And on October 24, Congolese rebels, led by General Laurent Nkunda, renewed fighting in the DRC’s eastern province of North Kivu.

This is a big story—a story deserving of front-page, in-depth coverage. Instead, we’ve gotten broad and relatively short articles on the subject buried in our newspapers of record. On November 10, The New York Times reported on the most recent of the conflicts between rebels and government-backed militias in Eastern Congo. But the piece did little to demystify the conflict. Take this paragraph about the DRC’s latest cassus belli:

Local Mai-Mai militias, who are aligned with the Congolese government and see themselves as protectors of their land, ambushed rebel soldiers with assault rifles. Several dozen men from the two sides then battled each other at close range, Colonel Dietrich said.

Readers wondering exactly who the Mai-Mai are (other than “protectors of their land,” apparently)—why they’re fighting the government, what they want, and how they’ve managed to displace a quarter-million people in the past few weeks—are given some help a few paragraphs down. But, at that, not much:

There are dozens of local militias in eastern Congo who call themselves Mai-Mai, a reference to a belief in spiritual powers, such as holy oil and amulets, which the fighters often wear in battle.

United Nations officials have said that Mai-Mai fighters are getting increasingly aggressive, in contrast to Congolese troops who seem to have calmed down.

“The government wants to stick to the agreement,” Colonel Dietrich said. But, he added, “the Mai-Mai seem to be getting frustrated. This is a problem.”

Now, this is slightly insulting to the Mai-Mai, whose ugly, decade-long war belies the seemly disorganized “dozens of local militias” characterization. But it’s even more insulting to readers. If these disparate “dozens of local militias” have gotten universally more “aggressive,” there is, assumedly, some kind of political or military development spurring them forward.

There is, but you’d have to be a pretty astute reader of the Times’s international page to know what it is. On November 3, Jeffrey Gettleman took a close look at the regional implications of renewed violence in Eastern Congo. In discussing Nkunda, he effectively distilled the causes of one of the most complicated conflicts on earth down to a few paragraphs:

Congo analysts say that Mr. Nkunda may have some legitimate political goals — and Congolese ones at that. For starters, he seems determined to eliminate the Hutu death squads who participated in the massacre of 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994 and then fled into Congo, where they continue to brutalize with impunity. The Congolese government has promised to disarm the squads. But the rebels — and many Western diplomats — say the government is actually giving the Hutu death squads guns.

“The Congolese Army is working hand in hand with these killers,” said Babu Amani, a spokesman for the rebels.

The rebels want to play a bigger role in governing eastern Congo and even possibly to carve the territory into ethnic fiefs…

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Copyright The Washington Post

November 14, 2008

BEIJING — Yang Jia slipped into the Zhabei Police Station in north Shanghai through the service entrance. A knife in his right hand and a mask over his face, he fatally stabbed four police officers on the first floor and one each on the ninth and the 11th before finally being subdued.

Yang, 28, has confessed to the crime and is destined for execution. But in a bizarre twist that reveals the fissures that run beneath China’s elaborately constructed social order, he is also an unlikely hero. Thousands of Chinese have lionized him for standing up to the security forces that are increasingly seen as a blunt instrument of the Communist Party’s chief aim: to ensure its authority by maintaining stability and stifling dissent.

At one of Yang’s hearings last month, hundreds of protesters descended on the Shanghai Higher People’s Court, carrying signs that read “Long Live the Killer” and shouting “Down with the Communist Party” and “Down with fascists.” Many of the protesters were educated and middle-aged.

More than 4,000 people have signed an open letter posted online urging that Yang’s life be spared. The letter has been erased from many Web sites by government censors, and coverage of the case in the state-run media has been strictly controlled.

As heinous as the July 1 crime reportedly was, and despite Yang’s confession, many Chinese still doubt the government’s findings. Public support for Yang has been bolstered by reports that he had been mistreated by police on at least two occasions and may have been seeking revenge…

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Copyright The Financial Times

November 11 2008

Rwanda has sought to portray itself as little more than a bystander to unfolding scenes of advancing rebels again forcing refugees to scatter across the border in eastern Congo.

But in interviews with the Financial Times, former rebels and independent observers on the ground said the uprising – led by Laurent Nkunda, the renegade Congolese general – relies heavily on recruitment in Rwanda and former or even active Rwandan soldiers.

Former rebels point to a close and, complex relationship in which Rwanda’s ­government is able to exert considerable leverage on Mr Nkunda.

Paul Kagame, the president, has sought to distance Rwanda both from the Congo crisis and international diplomatic efforts to resolve it. At a press conference in Kigali, the capital, last week he said: “What have I to do with what is going on in the Congo?”

The answer lies partly in the hillside villages and refugee camps in Rwanda that are a vital recruiting ground for Mr Nkunda’s CNDP movement. Former rebels say that in the past few years he has recruited Congolese Tutsi refugees there, as well as Rwandan nationals, who often are former soldiers acting as mercenaries. Military experts say Rwandans make up at least 25 per cent of his 4,000 to 6,000-strong army.

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Copyright The New York Times

Thirty years ago photography was art if it was black and white. Color pictures were tacky and cheap, the stuff of cigarette ads and snapshot albums. So in 1976, when William Eggleston had a solo show of full-color snapshotlike photographs at the august Museum of Modern Art, critics squawked.

It didn’t help that Mr. Eggleston’s pictures, shot in the Mississippi Delta, where he lived, were of nothings and nobodies: a child’s tricycle, a dinner table set for a meal, an unnamed woman perched on a suburban curb, an old man chatting up the photographer from his bed.

That MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, had declared Mr. Eggleston’s work perfect was the last straw. “Perfectly banal, perfectly boring,” sniffed one writer; “erratic and ramshackle,” snapped another; “a mess,” declared a third.

Perfect or not, the images quickly became influential classics. And that’s how they look in “William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1961-2008,” a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that is this artist’s first New York museum solo since his seditious debut.

Naturally we see the work more clearly now. We know that it was not cheap. The dye transfer printing Mr. Eggleston used, adapted from advertising, was the most expensive color process then available. It produced hues of almost hallucinatory intensity, from a custard-yellow sunset glow slanting across a wall to high-noon whiteness bleaching a landscape to pink lamplight suffusing a room.

And compositions that at first seemed bland and random proved not to be on a 2nd, 3rd and 20th look. The tricycle was shot from a supine position so as to appear colossal. The woman on the curb sits next to a knot of heavy chains that echoes her steel-mesh bouffant. The affable guy on the bed holds a revolver, its barrel resting on his vintage country quilt.

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Copyright The Guardian

Jumy Kasereka told his mother the Tutsi rebel soldiers would not harm him. After all, he was a schoolteacher, not a fighter, and they would see he was too sick from malaria to move. Kasereka begged his mother to leave with the tens of thousands of others who Laurent Nkunda’s rebels ordered out of the town of Kiwanga after they seized it from Hutu fighters. But Felista Maska refused to go. Hours later, one of Nkunda’s soldiers arrived at the door of the small earth and wicker home, pushed his way in, and, without a word, dragged the 26-year-old teacher out. He shot Kasereka through the head.

“The soldiers didn’t ask any questions. They just shot him,” said Maska as her son was lifted on to a blanket and carried for burial yesterday. “I think the object of the mission was to finish off all the young men. He was a teacher. I tried to tell them. They still shot him.”

Others in Kiwanga offer similar accounts of the systematic killings of adult men - some of them dragged from bed because they were too sick to walk - who remained in the town after Nkunda’s forces ordered it emptied.

The Tutsi rebels said those men who remained were enemies, including members of the Mai Mai traditional militia and Rwandan Hutu forces responsible for the 1994 genocide in their country.

Some were fighters. But many of the dead - the local Red Cross said the toll probably runs into the hundreds - included teachers, United Nations workers and elderly farmers who were too sick to leave or mistakenly thought the rebels would have nothing against them. Moving through the backstreets of Kiwanga, about 45 miles north of Goma, the distinct smell of human flesh decomposing in Congo’s tropical heat wafted from behind closed doors. Some bodies remained on the street. Others were removed by families who returned to bury them, leaving behind bloodstained patches as markers on the earth street.

George Nbavumoya was tending his vegetables in a field when he heard fighting in the town. Others lay down in the crops, but the 58-year-old agriculturalist, who was respected in his community as a supervisor at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, had two daughters at home. He feared for their safety and so headed back into town.

His family said that as Nbavumoya walked through the door, one of Nkunda’s soldiers came in, pushed his Kalashnikov up the man’s nose and pulled the trigger. It blew the back of Nbavumoya’s head off. He was buried in the back of the family plot yesterday.

Nbavumoya’s daughters, a teenager and a 24-year-old student, are missing.

In a one-room home across the earth street from where Kasereka’s body fell lay the corpse of 49-year-old Kapazata Katchuva, a carpenter. His brother, William, had returned to bury the body.

“When the soldiers came here, he stayed in the house and locked the door. The soldiers kicked it in and dragged him out. He stayed because he wasn’t strong enough to move. I found his body outside. They shot him in the side of the head. I can’t know why they did it.”

In another home nearby a crucifix hung on an apparently bullet-pocked wall. On a wooden table, a metal kettle stood surrounded by rags and pamphlets. On the floor four members of the same family lay, their limbs touching, entwined in death. Some houses were crowded with bodies. One had 12 corpses, another had five.

Some of the dead were government soldiers and others appeared to be Hutu militiamen. The bodies of two young men wearing military-style trousers lay on a street corner. Locals said Nkunda’s fighters put the trousers on the bodies. That may be true. Both were wearing civilian trousers underneath, an unusual amount of clothing in Congo’s heat. But no one could say who the young men were, suggesting they were not local.

Most of Kiwanga is deserted now after its 35,000 residents were forced from their homes, leaving pigs free to roam. Some who fled locked their doors with padlocks, but a number were kicked in and the homes looted.

In a tiny house with a bed and one chair, the dresser on which the most precious items were displayed - a few glasses, a bowl, a religious print - had been upturned and everything smashed.

Only the centre of Kiwanga is crowded, mostly by people who are refugees in their own town.

Nkunda’s forces seized Kiwanga when they took the neighbouring town of Rutshuru last week. Kiwanga was packed with Hutus and others who fled years of fighting to the north and west. The renegade Tutsi leader regarded Kiwanga has a hotbed of Hutu subversion. Nkunda says he has the support of the people by liberating them from an ineffectual government and Hutu militias who have plundered the local population. But that is not how it is seen among those forced from their homes.

A small crowd grows larger, and furtive comments become denunciations as anger pours forth against Nkunda’s National Congress for People’s Defence.

“The CNDP told everybody to get out. They took some young men away and shot them. Others they took and we don’t know what happened to them,” said one man. “The CNDP killed the people who didn’t leave their houses. They saw a man on the street, they killed him. CNDP said everybody who stayed is considered Rwandan militia or Mai Mai.”

Another man interrupted. “We don’t want the CNDP here. We don’t believe in CNDP. We want the government here.”

People are less outspoken in other areas recently seized by Nkunda. In Rugare, Joseph Rulenga has been appointed the new chief by the CNDP. Tutsi rebel forces stood by as villagers attended a meeting where Rulenga said he was instructing them on matters of development and security. As the crowd sat immobile and sullen, he ranted against Congo’s enemies. High on the list was France, which is pushing for European intervention to protect Goma from Nkunda. “France is the first enemy of the people of Congo. The special envoy of the UN who came to Goma is from France and he said something bad about us. If he comes here, we will eat him.”

But many Congolese regard Nkunda and his army as the foreign problem.

“They are Tutsis and we all know the Tutsis come from Rwanda. They should go back there,” said a man in Kiwanga.

That is not true, but Nkunda’s close ties to Rwanda, after he served in its army, have left many Congolese believing he is serving Rwanda’s interests. So has the fact that many of his soldiers do not speak French. In the town of Kibumba yesterday, Nkunda’s soldiers lined up dozens of local men by the road. Many are being used by the fighters to carry supplies. The soldier in charge offered a “good morning” and a few more words of English. Then he thought better of it, perhaps fearing it would give away that his origins are not Congolese and that he is a Rwandan Tutsi who grew up in exile in English-speaking Uganda.

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Copyright The Los Angeles Times

… Obama’s special charisma — since his famous 2004 convention speech — always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas. In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up — given an air of “change” — by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in.

This worked politically for Obama because it tapped into a deep longing in American life — the longing on the part of whites to escape the stigma of racism. In running for the presidency — and presenting himself to a majority white nation — Obama knew intuitively that he was dealing with a stigmatized people. He knew whites were stigmatized as being prejudiced, and that they hated this situation and literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma.

Obama is what I have called a “bargainer” — a black who says to whites, “I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me.” Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer. Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo.

Obama’s post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black advancement. Thus, whites became enchanted enough with Obama to become his political base. It was Iowa — 95% white — that made him a contender. Blacks came his way only after he won enough white voters to be a plausible candidate.

Of course, it is true that white America has made great progress in curbing racism over the last 40 years. I believe, for example, that Colin Powell might well have been elected president in 1996 had he run against a then rather weak Bill Clinton. It is exactly because America has made such dramatic racial progress that whites today chafe so under the racist stigma. So I don’t think whites really want change from Obama as much as they want documentation of change that has already occurred. They want him in the White House first of all as evidence, certification and recognition.

But there is an inherent contradiction in all this. When whites — especially today’s younger generation — proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer’s ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally…

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Copyright The Huffington Post

By Howard W French
Posted Nov. 6, 2008

In the momentary lull that follows a presidential election, between full-out campaigning and real decision-making, the media has a few time-honored rituals that center on parlor games and policy speculation.

This election has been no different. While we wait for an Obama administration to start taking shape, one of the favorite exercises has been gazing into crystal balls about the foreign policy crises the new president will face. Others, a bit more boldly, make forthright statements about what the incoming government’s foreign policy priorities should be.

Fred Kaplan’s take in Slate on Wednesday was a fairly typical offering of this kind. Under the heading, “A Foreign-Policy Repair Manual: Six priorities for President Obama,” he went on to detail a fairly typical laundry list of crises and opportunities, from getting out of Iraq to “laying the initial groundwork for renewed Israeli-Palestinian talks.”

As priorities, the lists were fine as far as they went. The problem is that for a new leader promising change, they have tended to reflect the most traditional sorts of Washington priorities, neglecting other parts of the world that are starving for American moral and political leadership; places where Obama, by virtue of his unique background, offers particularly compelling potential for impact.

The most obvious and important omission by list keepers like Kaplan is Africa, a continent of nearly one billion people today that according to United Nations projections will count an astounding two billion people by mid-century.

Today, for example, a new war looms in the Congo, a place where unbeknown to most Americans the United States has played a critical and mostly disastrous role since independence from Belgium in 1960. According to respectable international estimates some four million people have died in the Congo as a result of wars there since 1996, the greatest toll anywhere since World War II.

There is a powerful argument to be made that this disaster, along with the Rwandan genocide that preceded it, is Bill Clinton’s most important foreign policy legacy, and an Obama policy toward Africa run by many of the same people and carrying forward Clinton era thinking would be a sign of disdain for the continent and its problems.

The Congo’s apocalyptic dissolution began in earnest when Washington gave Rwanda the green light to invade the country, setting off a free for all that sucked in many of the Congo’s neighbors.

Washington has spent money on the crisis through the United Nations, but in terms of showing political leadership it has run from the problems of the Congo ever since, leaving a vast and potentially rich country that is the effective crossroads of north, south, east and west in Africa crippled and unattended.

Africa has never long retained the attention of our foreign policy elite, journalists included, and yet today this fast-growing continent, the homeland of our new president’s father, teeters on a fulcrum point, credibly capable of veering off in radically different directions in ways that will profoundly affect Americans and indeed mankind.

An Africa that can douse its conflicts, build functioning institutions and continue to lay the foundations of democracy stands to become an important player in the next phase of globalization, as labor costs rise in much of Asia, and capital begins to prospect for productive opportunities elsewhere.

An Africa pocked by neglected failing states will increasingly become a nexus of catastrophe, and contrary to the wishes of our foreign policy establishment, which always seeks to confine Africa to the realm of our lowest priorities, the blowback from its ever-larger disasters will inflict high costs and pain everywhere.

During the last decade of political neglect of Africa, China has made extraordinary inroads on the continent, eclipsing the commercial presence of Europe’s old colonial masters, and lapping fast at the heels of the United States as Africa’s most important trading partner.

China’s trade with Africa has more than doubled in the last two years alone, reaching roughly $120 billion this year. It is important to state that China is pushing into Africa not as some charity project, but because of two very carefully reasoned conclusions.
China, for one, badly needs priority access to Africa’s storehouse of minerals, petroleum and even farmland. Even more jarringly for Americans, who have embraced a deep and abiding bigotry of low expectations about the continent, though, China sees Africa as a frontier of opportunity; a place whose future is bright.

Today, all across Africa Chinese, not Western companies, are building vital infrastructure — ports, railways, roads, schools and hospitals — at a rhythm and scope that surpasses anything the continent has seen before, including during the heyday of colonialism.

For the most part, for Africa and for the world, this is good news. The problem with leaving the African playing field to China alone relates to the most profound shortcomings in Beijing’s emerging foreign policy, just as it relates to some of the United States’ most special qualities, as well as to the unique potential of our new president as a game changer in America’s relationship with the continent.

For reasons of deep-seated diplomatic tradition and because of its own underrated insecurities, China still clings to the idea that the so-called internal problems of other countries, be they harsh dictatorship, rampant corruption or even genocide are none of its business — or indeed even ours.

Africans are grateful for China’s intense interest in the continent, and they rightfully find inspiration in China’s example of a stirring rise from poverty largely on the strength of concerted and sustained national effort.

Africans have no illusions, though, of Chinese leadership in resolving the conflicts that continue to tear their continent apart and hold them back. And for good reason there is even less hope among the civil societies that have sprouted in country after country, even in the seemingly least fertile of soils, that China will help Africa democratize, which is a key to the continent’s future.

While much of the world has gone sour on the United States’ claim of being a beacon of hope, the 53 countries of Africa have by and large remained profoundly attached to a vision of America as land of justice, opportunity and freedom. Obama’s election will only make such feelings much more intense, a fact I can attest to from correspondence from friends across the continent of prayer vigils in every faith for his candidacy and for his success in office.

To waste this moment would be more than a lost opportunity. For the United States, for Africa and for the world, it would be a tragedy.

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Posted at 6:06 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

…During the presidency of Herbert Hoover, Congress appropriated funds for the mothers of soldiers killed in World War I to go to Europe to visit their graves. The government then divided the women by race. “White mothers sailed to Europe in style while black mothers whose sons had been killed in their country’s service were assigned to ‘cattle ships.’ ” This is from William E. Leuchtenburg’s forthcoming “Herbert Hoover,” a wonderful and instructive biography.

If you read history, you come across these ugly episodes all the time. Racism in America was not just about school segregation, or blacks in the back of the bus, or even the eruption of violence we hear so much about, but also an insufferable ordinariness, a daily slap in the face, thousands and thousands of cuts and abrasions and an attempt to crush the spirit.
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Harlem knows all about that. It is the capital of black America. The man up on the stage, Rangel, is the lineal-political descendant of Adam Clayton Powell, the first black congressman from New York. Powell, too, now has a street named for him.

Another book: In her memoir, Helen Gahagan Douglas wrote about hiring a black secretary. This was 1945, shortly after she had been elected to Congress and five years before she would be slimed by Richard Nixon as the “Pink Lady” in the dirtiest of all senatorial races. The secretary was named Juanita Terry, and she was forbidden, Douglas wrote, to eat in the “staff cafeteria or dining room of the House of Representatives… . I raised a storm and ended segregation” — and one of those to benefit was Powell’s own secretary.

In 1967, Powell was expelled from Congress for corruption. By then, his brilliance and fervor had turned to anger and entitlement — a mixture made toxic by the color of his skin. When voters returned him to office nevertheless, I went up to his headquarters in Harlem, and he said “Keep the faith, baby” and gloried in a sweet vindication. But by 1970 he had lost his seat (to Rangel), and by 1972 he was dead, only 63, a tall man brought low by a refusal to stoop…

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Copyright The Root

By Henry Louis Gates Jr. | TheRoot.com

Nov. 4, 2008—

A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

President-elect Barack Obama

We have all heard stories about those few magical transformative moments in African-American history, extraordinary ritual occasions through which the geographically and socially diverse black community—a nation within a nation, really—molds itself into one united body, determined to achieve one great social purpose and to bear witness to the process by which this grand achievement occurs.

The first time was New Year’s Day in 1863, when tens of thousands of black people huddled together all over the North waiting to see if Abraham Lincoln would sign the Emancipation Proclamation. The second was the night of June 22, 1938, the storied rematch between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, when black families and friends crowded around radios to listen and cheer as the Brown Bomber knocked out Schmeling in the first round. The third, of course, was Aug. 28, 1963, when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to the world that he had a dream, in the shadow of a brooding Lincoln, peering down on the assembled throng, while those of us who couldn’t be with him in Washington sat around our black-and-white television sets, bound together by King’s melodious voice through our tears and with quickened-flesh.

But we have never seen anything like this. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia,” as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.

My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can’t quite believe it!

How many of our ancestors have given their lives—how many millions of slaves toiled in the fields in endlessly thankless and mindless labor—before this generation could live to see a black person become president? “How long, Lord?” the spiritual goes; “not long!” is the resounding response. What would Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois say if they could know what our people had at long last achieved? What would Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman say? What would Dr. King himself say? Would they say that all those lost hours of brutalizing toil and labor leading to spent, half-fulfilled lives, all those humiliations that our ancestors had to suffer through each and every day, all those slights and rebuffs and recriminations, all those rapes and murders, lynchings and assassinations, all those Jim Crow laws and protest marches, those snarling dogs and bone-breaking water hoses, all of those beatings and all of those killings, all of those black collective dreams deferred—that the unbearable pain of all of those tragedies had, in the end, been assuaged at least somewhat through Barack Obama’s election? This certainly doesn’t wipe that bloody slate clean. His victory is not redemption for all of this suffering; rather, it is the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle, the grand achievement of a great, collective dream. Would they say that surviving these horrors, hope against hope, was the price we had to pay to become truly free, to live to see—exactly 389 years after the first African slaves landed on these shores—that “great gettin’ up morning” in 2008 when a black man—Barack Hussein Obama—was elected the first African-American president of the United States?

I think they would, resoundingly and with one voice proclaim, “Yes! Yes! And yes, again!” I believe they would tell us that it had been worth the price that we, collectively, have had to pay—the price of President-elect Obama’s ticket…

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Copyright Reuters

Fri 31 Oct 2008

ABUJA, Oct 31 (Reuters) - Nigeria has suspended a railway deal with China and threatened to revoke two oil licences awarded to South Korea in the latest move by President Umaru Yar’Adua to review contracts signed by the last administration.

The authorities suspended the rail contract with one of China’s biggest engineering firms because the cost was inflated and there were no funds for the project, meant to modernise Nigeria’s century-old rail system, Yar’Adua’s spokesman said.

Former President Olusegun Obasanjo awarded the contract worth $8.3 billion in 2006 to China Civil Engineering Company (CCEC) and promised the firm an oil block in return as an incentive.

“The federal government had suspended the execution of the Chinese railway contract because this administration had discovered that the contract was over inflated,” presidential spokesman Olusegun Adeniyi said.

“Everything about the contract was wrong. There was no fund allocated for the project other than a promise by the immediate past administration to give the Chinese company an oil block,” he said.

He said the government had asked CCEC to submit a new proposal detailing its funding plans.

Foreign industry executives say widespread reviews of existing contracts by Yar’Adua’s 17-month old administration have heightened investor uncertainty. The government says it wants to ensure that all deals are in Nigeria’s best interests.

Adeniyi said Nigeria would revoke two offshore oil blocks, Oil Prospecting Licences 321 and 323, awarded to the Korean National Oil Company if the firm failed to pay a signature bonus of $231 million waived by the last administration.

“This waiver is not acceptable (to) this administration because the constitution does not allow a waiver,” he said.

“The oil minister is dialoguing with the Korean oil firm to pay the signature bonus due … (if) they still refuse to pay, the company stands to lose the licences.”

Obasanjo had made developing infrastructure central to the award of new oil acreages in Africa’s top oil producer, but the policy was widely criticised as lacking transparency and not following due process.

Obasanjo offered preferential rights to mainly Asian firms during oil block auctions in 2005 and 2006 in exchange for promises to invest in infrastructure. The policy drew huge bids from several companies, many of which never produced the cash. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/ ) (Writing by Tume Ahemba; Editing by Nick Tattersall and Sami Aboudi)

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