A Glimpse of the World

The Great Debate: Whither U.S.-China Relations?

howard — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:05:03 +0000

Copyright TMP

This is the first post in a new TMP series titled “The Great Debate,” a round-up of opinions from experts, officials, professors and students on a pressing question in international affairs.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping concluded a significant trip to the United States last week. Speaking with his counterparts in Washington, traveling to the Iowa town where he spent part of his college years, and even taking in a Lakers game in Los Angeles, Xi presented an image of a confident, self-assured China.

Xi is expected to assume the leadership of his country later this year and his tenure comes at a particularly important moment in U.S.-China relations given the breadth of economic, military, and other international issues on which the two countries may collaborate or butt heads.

In light of his visit, TMP’s new series “The Great Debate” turned to the experts to ask:

Will US-China relations improve under Xi Jinping’s leadership? Or are they likely to deteriorate under the 5th generation of party leaders?

(Several experts weigh in on these questions. Here’s my take. The full article can be accessed via the link below.)

Howard French, Columbia University

There are simply too many variables and unknowns to confidently predict the direction of U.S.-China relations under Xi Jinping and the so-called Fifth Generation of leaders.

What stands out for me at this moment, nonetheless, are a number of signs that point more toward turbulence than to smooth sailing.

What are these signs? To begin with, leadership politics in China seem to be entering a major new phase with the prospect of increasingly open and contentious jousting between individuals and factions. There is every prospect of this extending beyond merely patronage, position and favors and extending into the realm of real contests over policy and direction. This will happen in the absence of a strong elder statesman figure to mediate and adjudicate matters.

The relevance for bilateral relations is indirect, but potentially important. A situation of such fluidity and turbulence could encourage leaders to play the nationalist card to shore up their credentials and popular appeal. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a new leadership under almost any circumstances staking its reputation and prestige on accommodation of the U.S.

This leads to a second and related consideration. There is a lot of tension inherent to a dynamic that involves the relative rise of a rising power at the expense, both real and perceived of the established superpower. This is an unavoidably awkward and potentially dangerous situation, with one side reluctant to concede and the other sometimes over-eager to assert its new prerogatives. In both countries, public opinion plays an important and sometimes capricious role, reducing the room for maneuver of leaders or pushing them toward bad decisions.

Having said all of this, ten years, which is the nominal term of the incoming Chinese leadership, is a very long time, during which much can happen, including not just unpleasant outcomes. Under the right circumstances, a successful beginning to the new leadership’s mandate could make it a much more confident and relaxed working partner over the longer term.

http://beta-site.themorningsidepost.com/2012/02/22/whither-u-s-china-relations/

Fragile China: The Fat Years, by Chan Koonchung

howard — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:47:52 +0000

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

What becomes of a nation when it attains its long-harbored goal of surpassing the world’s longtime economic leader?

Recent history offers two imperfect but instructive examples. In the early 20th century, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany interpreted its sprint past Britain as license to reshape the world in its image—by force.

Several decades later Japan began conquering the world with its goods, briefly surpassing the U.S., at least in per capita nominal GDP. This prompted much hand-wringing in the West about how to keep up with this new economic juggernaut and its rapidly acquired wealth. Almost as quickly as it had risen, though, in the 1990s Japan embarked on an extended navel-gazing walkabout from which it has never really returned.

Both of these episodes have been explored thoroughly in literature. But “The Fat Years,” an inventive and highly topical novel by Chan Koonchung, is among the first to explore a scenario that much of the world is speculating about today: What happens once China can boast having the world’s top economy? His descriptions of the excesses of contemporary China—the book is set in the very near future of 2013—are so vivid that the book was banned in China when it was first published in 2009, and the background of world economic crisis has the immediacy of journalism, a setup to which Mr. Chan adds a speculative dystopian twist.

Please follow the link to continue reading: http://on.wsj.com/AhIQoQ

Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend: The epic warfare of tennis’ big three

howard — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:41:09 +0000

Copyright Grantland… Great little essay on the 2012 Australian Open final

You have just played the match of your life, or one of them, one of the many matches of your life, in the Australian Open final, where you fought back from the brink of defeat against one of the most dominant athletes on Earth. You fought for almost six hours, clawing at chances, screaming at yourself and scowling, until your opponent, who never shows weakness, visibly started to weaken. While he gasped for air and crumpled to the ground after rallies, you somehow got stronger. (But then, that’s what you always do: You get stronger.) The power of your ground strokes, as measured by their average speed, was higher in the sixth hour of tennis than in the first. You broke the unstoppable champion early in the fifth set. The crowd believed in you. You had control of the match. And then, in a way that managed to seem both impossible and unsurprising, the champion got a second wind, and you lost.

How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today? The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men’s tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them. We’ve seen Roger Federer, probably the most effortlessly brilliant tennis player who ever lived, shattered and weeping on the court after losses that seemed to groan up from the Old Testament.¹ We’ve seen endless variations on “Andy Murray having his heart handed to him,” to the point that his career increasingly seems to be in the hands of some demented opera composer. Murray’s five-set loss to Djokovic in the semifinals last Friday was clearly both the best match and the most painful moment of this year’s Australian Open — or it seemed that way, until we saw Nadal play a match for the ages and still lose to Djokovic on Sunday.

Please follow link to continue: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7518166/the-epic-warfare-rafael-nadal-novak-djokovic-australian-open-final

Not Fade Away: The Myth of American Decline

howard — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:43:50 +0000

Copyright The New Republic

Is the United States in decline, as so many seem to believe these days? Or are Americans in danger of committing pre-emptive superpower suicide out of a misplaced fear of their own declining power? A great deal depends on the answer to these questions. The present world order—characterized by an unprecedented number of democratic nations; a greater global prosperity, even with the current crisis, than the world has ever known; and a long peace among great powers—reflects American principles and preferences, and was built and preserved by American power in all its political, economic, and military dimensions. If American power declines, this world order will decline with it. It will be replaced by some other kind of order, reflecting the desires and the qualities of other world powers. Or perhaps it will simply collapse, as the European world order collapsed in the first half of the twentieth century. The belief, held by many, that even with diminished American power “the underlying foundations of the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry has argued, is a pleasant illusion. American decline, if it is real, will mean a different world for everyone.

But how real is it? Much of the commentary on American decline these days rests on rather loose analysis, on impressions that the United States has lost its way, that it has abandoned the virtues that made it successful in the past, that it lacks the will to address the problems it faces. Americans look at other nations whose economies are now in better shape than their own, and seem to have the dynamism that America once had, and they lament, as in the title of Thomas Friedman’s latest book, that “that used to be us.”

The perception of decline today is certainly understandable, given the dismal economic situation since 2008 and the nation’s large fiscal deficits, which, combined with the continuing growth of the Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, Turkish, and other economies, seem to portend a significant and irreversible shift in global economic power. Some of the pessimism is also due to the belief that the United States has lost favor, and therefore influence, in much of the world, because of its various responses to the attacks of September 11. The detainment facilities at Guantánamo, the use of torture against suspected terrorists, and the widely condemned invasion of Iraq in 2003 have all tarnished the American “brand” and put a dent in America’s “soft power”—its ability to attract others to its point of view. There have been the difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many argue proved the limits of military power, stretched the United States beyond its capacities, and weakened the nation at its core. Some compare the United States to the British Empire at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars serving as the equivalent of Britain’s difficult and demoralizing Boer War.

With this broad perception of decline as the backdrop, every failure of the United States to get its way in the world tends to reinforce the impression. Arabs and Israelis refuse to make peace, despite American entreaties. Iran and North Korea defy American demands that they cease their nuclear weapons programs. China refuses to let its currency rise. Ferment in the Arab world spins out of America’s control. Every day, it seems, brings more evidence that the time has passed when the United States could lead the world and get others to do its bidding.

Powerful as this sense of decline may be, however, it deserves a more rigorous examination. Measuring changes in a nation’s relative power is a tricky business, but there are some basic indicators: the size and the influence of its economy relative to that of other powers; the magnitude of military power compared with that of potential adversaries; the degree of political influence it wields in the international system—all of which make up what the Chinese call “comprehensive national power.” And there is the matter of time. Judgments based on only a few years’ evidence are problematic. A great power’s decline is the product of fundamental changes in the international distribution of various forms of power that usually occur over longer stretches of time. Great powers rarely decline suddenly. A war may bring them down, but even that is usually a symptom, and a culmination, of a longer process.

The decline of the British Empire, for instance, occurred over several decades. In 1870, the British share of global manufacturing was over 30 percent. In 1900, it was 20 percent. By 1910, it was under 15 percent—well below the rising United States, which had climbed over the same period from more than 20 percent to more than 25 percent; and also less than Germany, which had lagged far behind Britain throughout the nineteenth century but had caught and surpassed it in the first decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of that period, the British navy went from unchallenged master of the seas to sharing control of the oceans with rising naval powers. In 1883, Britain possessed more battleships than all the other powers combined. By 1897, its dominance had been eclipsed. British officials considered their navy “completely outclassed” in the Western hemisphere by the United States, in East Asia by Japan, and even close to home by the combined navies of Russia and France—and that was before the threatening growth of the German navy. These were clear-cut, measurable, steady declines in two of the most important measures of power over the course of a half-century.

(Please follow the link to continue) http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/99521/america-world-power-declinism?page=0,0&passthru=ZDkyNzQzZTk3YWY3YzE0OWM5MGRiZmIwNGQwNDBiZmI

What does it mean to be fluent?

howard — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:00:09 +0000

Jon Hunstman’s insistence on trotting out bits of his Mandarin here and there (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPb-5AZuzXo) has provoked a lot of commentary and no small amount of ridicule about his proficiency, and whether it really rises to the level of fluency. A better question, and one which gets asked much less often, is what exactly does fluency mean? It is also a lot harder to answer in any definitive way.

I’ve come to this subject from the perspective of somewhat unusual personal experience. Due to life and career choices, in the course of things to one degree or another, I’ve come to speak a lot of languages: English, French, Spanish, bits and pieces of various Akan dialects (Twi, Baoulé, Nzima), Haitian Creole, Japanese and Chinese.

With every one of these languages at some point I got well beyond the phrase book level. Even now, I speak almost as much French in any given day as I speak English. With both Chinese and Japanese, after prolonged and very deliberate effort, I was able to sustain genuine friendships and do my work, meaning not just function in an everyday sense, but conduct extended interviews in the language. And after years of disuse, I was pleased to have been able to revive my once reasonably supple Spanish on the fly as a Rube Goldberg solution to needing to work and function in a Portuguese-speaking environment. This came recently during nearly two months of solo reporting in Mozambique. Hell, I even learned a good bit of this new language, and attained a decent comprehension level as I stumbled about with my crude Portañol.

But just what is fluency? In the end, it is a slightly foolish term, and one can (should?) feel foolish using it. Language learning is an endless process, and one’s comfort and degree of articulateness, never mind literacy in a foreign language is a dynamic and ever-changing thing.

I conducted nearly all of the many field interviews I did for my forthcoming book on the Chinese in Africa alone and in Chinese, and in the thick of it rarely had language problems of any kind. In the five months I’ve been back in the U.S., though, the Chinese space in my brain has shrunk dramatically, almost alarmingly so. No, I haven’t forgotten how to speak by any means, but my level has steadily gone down from disuse and from removal from a situation of immersion.

I remember a lunch I had with a Chinese friend right after my return from Africa in early September. “You sound amazing, so natural,” she said, to my delight, as we carried on in Mandarin. When I saw her again just a few weeks ago, I was already much less confident. In fact I was stunned and embarrassed to have to ask her in English to remind me how to say something relatively basic that I knew well but suddenly couldn’t summon in the middle of a sentence.

With Japanese, things have been even worse. I mixed a couple of Chinese words into a straightforward conversation with a baffled Japanese person in New York the other day, and didn’t even realize until it after I’d walked away, when I played the conversation back in my mind. I studied Japanese first, but I use it much less now. This “splicing” error used to happen a lot in the opposite direction, and it drove my early Chinese teachers crazy.

(On the other hand, many of my Africa interviews were transcribed for me by students or friends in Chinese, and reading them, while quite time consuming, has not been a problem. In fact, it was a lot of fun.)

Last summer, I got to use my Akan in Ghana again, managing to at least bluff my way through many situations (for most people, comprehension decays much less rapidly than speech) and to ingratiate myself to people in many others. It is a near universal rule that people almost always appreciate a sincere effort to speak their language. Unless I retire to a beach in Axim or Elmina, though, I’ll never really speak one of these languages again. Although I worked at them, I never studied them formally, and I’ve let them go for too long. The same is true for Haitian Creole, for which my exposure these days is mostly limited to song (which, it must be said in passing, is an underrated language tool).

For anyone wanting a sense of the process involved in language acquisition, I really enjoyed this article:

http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-howmuch.htm

Lunch with Zbigniew Brzezinski

howard — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:16:07 +0000

An excellent read about the shape of things to come in the world, American electoral politics, China and Tony Blair. When they do these well, as they have this week, this FT feature is one of the best reads in newspaper journalism.
“For most people in their eighties, life is a gradual winding down. For Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the key architects of America’s cold war strategy – “Jimmy Carter’s Kissinger”, as he was once called – being 83 isn’t much different from 43. Brzezinski plays singles tennis every day – “one of my partners is older than me,” he tells me with some amusement. At the crack of dawn he is often found opining trenchantly on Morning Joe, the MSNBC daily news show co-hosted by his daughter Mika. And he remains a much sought-after adviser to secretaries of state and presidential candidates, including Barack Obama, though nowadays Brzezinski finds it hard to conceal his disappointment with his former mentee. “I’m all in favour of grand important speeches but the president then has to link his sermons to a strategy,” Brzezinski says. “Obama still has some way to go.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4d03c5f6-3ac1-11e1-a756-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1jRhTvxSX

“India in Africa: Changing Geographies of Power” by E. Mawdsley and G. McCann

howard — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 03:44:57 +0000

Copyright Post-Western World

This highly informative collection of essays edited by Emma Mawdsley and Gerard McCann provides the reader with an excellent overview of India’s presence in Africa – a topic neglected by most books on Indian foreign policy (with the notable exception of Jacob’s and Chandran’s India’s Foreign Policy- Old Problems, New Challenges, which includes a short chapter on the issue). While the topic of China’s growing presence in Africa has long reached the mainstream media, India’s role is largely unknown outside of a small but growing circle of specialists. As the editors recognize in the introduction, “China is certainly a more potent player in most African countries and sectors than India at present, so in part this very uneven interest simply responded to an accurate assessment of their relative material powers and impacts” – at the same time, India’s influence in Africa is set to increase and it holds valuable lessons for other emerging powers active in Africa, namely Brazil and Turkey.

What the authors make clear early on in the book is that while international observers have a negative bias when analyzing China’s role in Africa, India is often portrayed as overly positive – for example, China was roundly criticized and shamed publicly for its ‘irresponsible hydrocarbon investments’ in Sudan, but few realized that India – behaving just like China – was not subject to the same scrutiny. As Sanusha Naidu writes in chapter 3, India is comfortable operating in China’ s shadow, although it is unclear for how long India can escape the criticism for such controversial moves such as large-scale farm acquisitions and subsequent near duty-free food exports of crops to India.

Is India’s role comparable to that of China? Are China and India engaged in a new version of the ‘scramble for Africa’?

Please follow the link to continue: India in Africa: Changing Geographies of Power

The Perils of American Exceptionalism

howard — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:59:56 +0000

As I listened to Mitt Romney’s victory speech in New Hampshire last night, I heard the clearest crystallization of a strain of American political discourse that has worried me for some time.

In Romney’s telling, Barack Obama is a socialist, who wants to transform the United States and make it more Europe-like. On the face of it, there’s nothing surprising about a campaign line like this coming from a Republican contender.

Romney takes things one step further, when he says, “This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America.” (I’ve put the full quote at the bottom here.)

As someone who spent the last decade living in Japan and then China, it strikes me as more than passing strange that a nation’s political elite should demonize the idea of scouring the globe for the best ideas in governance, in economic policy and development, in environmental practices, etc.. A willingness to learn this in way, to continuously compare notes with peer competitors and rivals, and to adopts and absorb best practices, even when inspired by example from afar, is an essential part of the playbook of any successful nation.

Today, China, even with all of its problems, and with an authoritarian political system that lacks appeal on many levels, is perhaps the world’s most vigorous practitioner of this approach, which might be described as: continuously learn, adopt, experiment and adjust. This has been true since Deng Xiaoping’s time, and it cannot be a coincidence that China’s economy has been the world’s most dynamic during this period. (China’s political system, though very slow to change, is not immune to this phenomenon of emulation and influence from afar, either, although that’s a subject fit for another post.)

The posturing claim that this is un-American, or that good ideas must be homegrown, or that we and our ways are and must remain pure and untainted by outside influences is a form of cultural and intellectual nativism. And as both China and Japan each learned the hard way, and at great cost after long periods of smug self-sufficiency and intellectual closure, it is also a recipe for stagnation and eventual decline.

Paper money was invented in China, during the Song Dynasty, 1,000 years ago. (The first European banknotes appeared in 1661, five centuries later.) Needless to say, no one need feel less American for using the dollar bill. By the same token, no Chinese need feel any less authentic for going to work on the subway (a British innovation), or using the Internet (U.S.), or incorporating any other of a whole host of foreign inventions that together help make the modern world.

To pretend otherwise would be silly, which is why it’s time to put this silly but persistent motif of American politics to rest.

The Romney quote:

“Make no mistake, in this campaign, I will offer the American ideals of economic freedom a clear and unapologetic defense.

Our campaign is about more than replacing a President; it is about saving the soul of America. This election is a choice between two very different destinies.

President Obama wants to “fundamentally transform” America. We want to restore America to the founding principles that made this country great.

He wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society. We want to ensure that we remain a free and prosperous land of opportunity.

This President takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe; we look to the cities and small towns of America.

This President puts his faith in government. We put our faith in the American people.”

China’s ‘Demographic Tsunami’ Begins

howard — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 03:06:11 +0000

I’ve been both reading and writing about this for years, and watched Japan enter demographic decline up close. For more thorough treatment, Vaclav Smil is a good read:

This, meanwhile, is a good, basic journalistic introduction:

“Wang Fuchuan lies in bed wearing a quilted black jacket, with two comforters pulled up to his chin to keep out the chilly November air. The heating at Beijing Songtang Caring Hospice is broken and the 90-year-old’s nostrils are stuffed with toilet paper to stop them dripping.

Cockroaches scurry across the floor of his room, which has no running water or toilet. His possessions, a few articles of clothing, are in a plastic bag under his bed next to a pink wash bowl with a sliver of soap. His only entertainment is a transistor radio.

Wang counts himself lucky. While he has no family or savings, he fought against the Japanese and Kuomintang in the 1940s, so the government pays the clinic’s monthly fee of 2,000 yuan ($318). His 200-yuan pension buys food.

“A lot of people my age can’t afford to be here,” Wang says. “The food isn’t too good, but I have nothing else to complain about.”

Wang is in the vanguard of a looming demographic shift for China, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Jan. 9 issue. The latest government census shows 178 million Chinese were over 60 in 2009. That figure could reach 437 million — one third of the population — by 2050, the United Nations forecasts. While the elderly were looked after in the past by their children, urbanization and the nation’s one-child policy have eroded the tradition of family care.

“It’s a demographic tsunami,” says Joseph J. Christian, a fellow at the Asia Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, and former DLA Piper partner in Hong Kong, who specializes in senior housing issues in China. “The whole multigenerational housing model has disappeared.

” …

Please follow the link to continue: China’s Demographic Decline Begins

The Writers that Shadow Us: on the ghost of Graham Greene.

howard — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:41:12 +0000

I had just arrived in Saigon — this was September 2004 — and, 15 hours out of sync after the long flight from California, I was wide-awake, adrenaline-quickened and eager to see everything as I hit the late-night streets. I dropped off my case at the Hotel Majestic and then began walking down Tu Do, or Freedom Street (the Rue Catinat, as it had been in French times, and now officially Dong Khoi, or Simultaneous Uprising Street).

The city had not changed much in the 13 years since I’d last been here, except that the sense of illicit energy, of movement, of underground whispering was more intense. “Layla” drifted up from an underground bar, and men along the sidewalks murmured promises of various exotic pleasures. A young woman sped up on a motorbike, took off her helmet and, shaking free her long hair, said, “We go my room?” Cyclo-drivers peddled slowly past, sometimes with a single woman in their seats, sometimes stopping to ask if I needed a friend.

I went into an internet café — they were everywhere, and everything was open, even after midnight — needing to transcribe this for someone. “I might almost be walking through Graham Greene’s Quiet American,” I wrote to a childhood friend who had become a novelist in a somewhat Greenian vein. “It’s uncanny. The Englishman Fowler and his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong might still be walking down the Rue Catinat.”

At that very moment a young woman came in, from the N.Y.-Saigon Bar next door, and took the stool next to mine. Business must be slow, I guessed, so she’d check her email for a while. She was long-legged, very young, and barely dressed. She logged onto her Hotmail account and I, shameless journalist, looked over to see what she was typing.

It was, of course, a love letter, from an admirer in Europe. “Dear Phuong,” it began, and then the changeless cadences of half-requited love came tumbling out.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/15294477704/the-writers-that-shadow-us

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES

howard — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:57:53 +0000

Fantastic commentary by George Packer in the New Yorker about political journalism during the primary season. I’ve been thinking about the vapid entertainment quality of American campaigning a lot these last few months, and wondering both how it looks to the country’s present and future challengers, and what the impact of the emptiness of our discourse may ultimate be on our direction and destiny?

“In the tenth paragraph of a page A15 Times piece, Rick Santorum accuses Barack Obama of engaging in “absolutely un-American activities.” What are they? The article doesn’t say. The quote appears without explanation or comment, in an article entitled “Santorum’s Challenge: Broaden His Appeal Beyond Evangelical Christians.” Nor does the line show up anywhere else on the Web—apparently no reporter in the mob following the candidates through the last days before the Iowa caucuses thought it worth writing down, and no blogger thought it worth repeating. It was just a throwaway line, a hunk of spoiled red meat tossed at the crowd in a Sioux City coffee shop, no more newsworthy than saying, “It’s a great day to be an Iowan!”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/01/santorum-and-the-republicans.html#ixzz1iV9k2iaN

Things I liked (to read)

howard — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 04:38:14 +0000

The Loneliest Plantest (WSJ)

We are indeed “alone” in the universe, this book argues:

“One leg of Mr. Gribbin’s argument rests on the theorized life expectancy of advanced civilizations, which he claims is much more fleeting, on a cosmic timescale, than we care to admit. Our species has inhabited this planet for about one hundred-thousandth the age of the galaxy, and it was merely a century ago that we began to transmit radio waves. If technological civilizations did arise before ours, they might have succumbed to war or environmental degradation well before our primate ancestors stood upright.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204552304577116570107579152.html?KEYWORDS=loneliest+planet

A daily double from Pico Iyer in the Times this Sunday, including this piece on the virtues of silence:

“ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness…”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Pico%20Iyer&st=cse

and a review of his new book, The Man Within My Head, about Graham Greene:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/books/review/the-man-within-my-head-by-pico-iyer-book-review.html?scp=3&sq=Pico%20Iyer&st=cse

“Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork.” Those who love Graham Greene — and their numbers are legion — will recognize this sentence, the first line of his quietly devastating novel “The Heart of the Matter,” published in 1948.

Why didn’t Wilson deserve an honorific? What terseness, scorn or unceremoniousness did the omission of “Mr.” imply? Why was a grown man wearing shorts, and why were his knees pink? Where was the Bedford Hotel and where, to be precise, was Wilson? Was he in England, the country of Greene’s birth? Hardly. Like the author, Wilson was spending a stretch ofWorld War II in West Africa. And who was Wilson? That would take longer to answer. This same aura of enigma-disguised-as-directness hovers over the meditation Pico Iyer has written about his lifelong obsession with Graham Greene, numinously titled “The Man Within My Head” — a nod to Greene’s first novel, “The Man Within.”

A fascinating look at Wang Yang and Chinese politics (NYT) in the runup to selection of new leaders this year: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/world/asia/chinese-official-wang-yang-tests-new-political-approach.html?scp=1&sq=wang%20yang&st=cse

A Chinese Official Tests a New Approach

In a year of China under lockdown, when dissident writers have received breathtaking prison sentences and the mere whisper of a “Jasmine Revolution” has spurred mass detentions, perhaps the riskiest thing a Chinese politician could do is put his iron glove on the shelf.

Which makes Wang Yang’s gamble this month in Wukan all the more interesting.

Mr. Wang, the up-and-coming Communist Party secretary of the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, faced a political turning point when 13,000 irate residents of Wukan evicted their leaders and barricaded themselves in their coastal village for 13 days in a last-straw uprising against local corruption.

Given a choice of storming the village with armed police officers or conceding that the villagers’ complaints had merit, Mr. Wang chose the latter. And in a single morning, he defused a standoff that had drawn unflattering worldwide news coverage.

The decision won him praise in the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily, which called it an act of “political courage” in a tense situation. Some analysts said it might have strengthened his already strong prospects to land a seat on China’s elite ruling body, the nine-member Standing Committee of the party’s Politburo, when a wave of mandatory retirements vacates seven of the seats this coming year.”

Tragic Island: Haiti – The Aftershocks of History, a review (NYT) by Adam Hochschild

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/books/review/haiti-the-aftershocks-of-history-by-laurent-dubois-book-review.html?ref=books

What’s the Capital of the World? (The Economist)

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/john-parker/what-capital-world?page=0,1

New Years

howard — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:49:03 +0000

I’m just back from north-central Virginia, where I took a break from writing, made minimal use of the internet and saw no television.

Although it was a very quick trip, getting away from my little 10 blocks of Manhattan scrubbed my eyes and gave me some fresh country energy — the kind you get from open spaces, and sere, fallow fields and star-crowded skies.

There is no end, meanwhile, to one’s sense of wonder about the directional flight of time.

This time last year, I was in the far northern reaches of Namibia pursuing the research for my current book project. I’d rented a car and driven deep into the night with my brother James to Ondangwa reaching our destination in eight or ten hours from Windhoek under skies that alternated between sumptuous views of a glittering universe and downpours of biblical intensity.

That was the 30th. We spent the next day and into New Year’s eve evening with partying Chinese traders in their comptoir in Oshikango, hard by the border with Angola, listening to tales of all manner of enrichment, both licit and illicit and trying to avoid drinking to too many of their endless toasts, as they carved up and devoured pigs roasted on slowly turning spits.

I’d ruptured and nearly blown out a tire during a long, bumpy and winding drive over an unmarked trail to get to Oshikango, and we proceeded gingerly into the night from there to Oshikati to what turned out to be one of the best New Year’s celebrations I’ve seen in recent memory. The little town put on an incredibly thumping party that drew young people, all dressed in their best, by the hundreds from all over the Owambo region, with live music, a beauty contest, dancing, fireworks and much excitement.

That Namibia visit came early in my book’s research, and would be followed by visits to a dozen or so other African countries spread out over the remainder of that trip, and two subsequent trips, including my summer marathon, when I spent four months continuously on the move.

Although I endured truly great hardships now and then, my overall experience was extremely positive, and this travel alone would have made 2011 an especially memorable year for me. I have been even further blessed, though, with an energetic start to my book, whose theme is China and Africa, and as I wade knee deep through a rare and momentary spell of writing doldrums, I take comfort in knowing that I’m in a good position to finish on schedule, which is to say by early spring. I’m also happy to say that Disappearing Shanghai, a long-due book of my photography about that city will be coming out right about then.

I plan to begin posting galleries of photography from my recent African travels over the next few weeks. I’ll also round out my best 2011 reads in the next few days. There are just a few more to go.

Speaking of China, this has been the first year since 1998 that I haven’t been to East Asia, and that has felt strange to me all year. I toyed here and there with contriving a quick trip to avoid breaking this happy streak, but the requirements of researching my current book meant travel in Africa, while the demands of writing it meant planting myself at my desk for long hours each day.

I’ve already made plans to go to China early in 2012, though, and will likely return in the summer. I’ve also got a medium range project that involves all of northeast Asia. More on that later.

My brother James is due in Manhattan any minute from Joburg via the SF Bay area and a quick stop in DC. The year has time for one last party.

Happy New Years to one and all.

On Lucretius: THE ANSWER MAN

howard — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:12:58 +0000

Copyright The New Yorker

When I was a student, I used to go at the end of the school year to the Yale Co-op to see what I could find to read over the summer. I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted titles for ridiculously small sums. They were jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage until something caught my eye. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs—the bodies were missing—were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/08/110808fa_fact_greenblatt#ixzz1i58NX700

Teju Cole | The voice of the mind

howard — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:03:44 +0000

Teju Cole’s Open City has been widely praised as one of 2011’s best novels, and deservedly so. It is a reflection on the experimental modernism of the early 20th century as well as a sharply political and contemporary novel. Cole’s erudition and intellectual curiosity are characteristic of all his writing, whether in the long-form Open City or the short, absurd “Small Fates” snippets from Nigerian life he posts regularly to his Twitter account (@tejucole).

Cole was born in Lagos and is a resident of Brooklyn, New York, where he teaches at Bard College and works as an art historian and photographer. He was at the Goa Arts and Literary Festival last week to talk about several of his wide-ranging and closely followed interests in art, urbanism, music and literature. Edited excerpts from his conversation with Lounge:

When did you start to think about writing and literature?

I haven’t always been a writer of fiction. Sometime in my mid-20s, 10 years ago, I realized that my desire to put experience into words was best matched by a very specific approach; trying to find the most layered and complicated thoughts and put them in the clearest language I could manage.

Earlier on, under the influence of people likeJames Joyce, people like Wole Soyinka and generally this idea of the shock of the new, my concept had been to be pyrotechnic, like Garcia Marquez andSalman Rushdie—make it new by making it noisy and furious. Clearly, there are people who can do that well. But In my mid-20s I realized that I needed to go back to (George) Orwell, (Ernest) Hemingway, (V.S.) Naipaul; Virginia Woolf, who’s a wonderful writer of the English sentence. A little bit of Henry James, not in the length of the sentences, but in the effort to be complex by being complicated without being needlessly loud.

Once that discovery was made I started to write. I did quite a bit of writing online: blogs, essays, writing to friends, writing for friends. If I travelled somewhere I would write about it, and a kind of voice started to emerge, and I started to write better and better sentences.

Tell us about your first book.

About six years ago, I went to Nigeria. I wrote a fictionalized memoir of my experiences of going back after a long time, which was published as Every Day Is for the Thief.

And so it started. It was never, “I have to be a writer.” Never that. I had a stark and pragmatic attitude to literary success.

We’re talking about success after publishing.

That’s right, not about success on the page. I suspected that would be within my reach or that it was worth fighting for. But the way the industry is set up, I’m not going to write what they want, and they’re not going to like me. I know: I’m an African, I’m in America, I’m supposed to write a multigenerational family epic. I wanted to write about resolutely contemporary experience.

Please follow the link to read the complete article: Teju Cole | The voice of the mind

Wealth and Poverty in Africa

howard — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:35:18 +0000

The Guardian on Africa’s economic growth and the emergence of new middle classes:

At the end of another of Kinshasa’s potholed roads, lined with shacks and crumbling matchbox houses, comes a sudden clearing. It is a sandy patch of land surrounded by water in which bare-chested boys in dugout canoes paddle among the hyacinths. A giant pump is working day and night, reclaiming land from the sandbanks and river beds, expanding the city in defiance of nature.

Welcome to La Cité du Fleuve – River City, or “the new Manhattan” as this multibillion-pound development has been hopefully described by newspapers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Just 15 hectares (38 acres) now, but aiming for 380, it is perhaps the most ambitious statement yet about Africa‘s improving fortunes – and the promise of a growing African consumer class.

River City is backed by a British hedge fund that specialises in counter-trend betting and, says the developer Robert Choudury, “a bigger counter-trend is hard to find”. Ravaged by war and disease, DRC ranks bottom of the UN’s human development index. More than half the population is living on less than $1.25 a day and only 2% of roads are paved.

Please follow link to continue: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/25/africas-middle-class-hope-continent?CMP=twt_gu

And this interesting Guardian graphic: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/interactive/2011/dec/25/wealth-poverty-africa-interactive?CMP=twt_gu

Han on A Minute: China’s Star Blogger on 2012

howard — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:29:43 +0000

The Economist

Han Han, one of the most widely read bloggers in a country that censors its independent voices, is a rebel who does not really seek to overthrow anybody, a troublemaker who does not want to cause too much trouble. He sees, with dismay, much the same limitations among his readers in China. Looking ahead to 2012, he sees harder times for the Chinese people, but he does not foresee any crisis, nor any hope for improvement from the coming new “arrangement” of party leaders, because the people ultimately are willing to accept hardship.

The Economist interviewed Mr Han in Zaozhuang, at the mid-point of the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line. He had just finished second in a weekend rally race, two seconds behind first place. When he explains why the coming change in Communist Party leadership does not mean much in itself, he underscores his point with racing terminology.

Please follow the link to continue: http://www.economist.com/node/21537011

Overgrown Boys: Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar Hoover

howard — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:39:45 +0000

Copyright The New York Review of Books

Clint Eastwood is now eighty-one, a mellow age that tends to breed a gentle tolerance, if not sardonic forgiveness, for life’s brutes and rogues. This may explain the curious lack of menace in the J. Edgar Hoover he conjures up in J. Edgar, his low-voltage cinematic speculation on the character of America’s most famous cop. J. Edgar Hoover without menace is like Boris Karloff without bolts in his head. Not an old softie, to be sure, but Eastwood’s Hoover—though a sly, neurotic, and occasionally vicious bureaucrat—is scarcely a patch on the real-life Hoover who, as creator and director of the FBI from 1935 to 1972, once lurked in the nightmares of almost everyone with an interest in government and many more who simply went through life feeling guilty.

That was a Hoover of dark presence, a man so scary that even presidents did not dare to fire him, the keeper of secret files on tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans who were subjected to FBI surveillance because they were deemed to be not above suspicion. Suspicion of what? This was not always clear, but suspicion of unorthodox opinion was thought to be cause enough for opening a file.

Nobody could be sure, of course. The FBI chief trafficked in fear, which flourishes best when the fog is thickest, the uncertainty deepest, and people who have always thought themselves above suspicion begin to wonder if perhaps there is some long-forgotten incident in their distant past that might be dug up, exposing them to public humiliation, congressional investigation, criminal indictment, destruction.

It is a rare life that hasn’t a few deplorable incidents in its chronicle. As Willie Stark observes in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, man is conceived in sin, born in corruption, and “passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud,” and when someone looks deep enough for dirt, “There is always something.”

Please follow the link to continue (subscription required).

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/overgrown-boys/

The World Must not Turn its Back on Democracy in the Congo

howard — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:24:18 +0000

Last week, the Supreme Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo upheld the result of what was by all accounts a deeply flawed election, marred by widespread irregularities, violent incidents, and reports of fraud. Despite calls from the international community to delay the inauguration of the anointed winner – incumbent Joseph Kabila – the swearing in ceremony went ahead on Monday, amid palpable tension in the capital, Kinshasa. As a clear signal of the uneasiness of the international community in response to the election, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was the only foreign head of state in attendance.

With the leading opposition candidate – Etienne Tshisekedi – planning his own inauguration “by the people” this Friday, the situation in the DRC is becoming more volatile by the minute. The international community must take urgent action to help avert further instability and bloodshed.

Following Kabila’s initiation yesterday, US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, issued a statement saying that the United States was “deeply disappointed” that the Supreme Count had upheld the election results without “fully evaluating widespread reports of irregularities.” Those words must now be met with action on the part of the US, the United Kingdom and other international actors. A group of highly respected NGOs, including the International Crisis Group, the Enough Project, and the Eastern Congo Initiative have called for the deployment of an independent international mediation commission, which would help facilitate a solution to the current crisis. British support for such a mission is urgently needed and the response must be more than to simply defer any recommendations for improvements for next time.

Meanwhile, the government of the Congo is keen to portray the situation as returning to normal. Police chief, General Charles Bisengimana, has recently said that the capital is “calm, life is getting back to normal and people are going about their business.” The General is undoubtedly correct, for now. Yet this period could very well be the eye of the storm. With so much at stake and amid allegations of widespread fraud, few were expecting ratification of the results to be met with quiet acquiescence.

Indeed, to those who have followed the elections in the DRC closely, it is clear that the situation is unlikely to be resolved peacefully without international pressure. Frustration has been mounting following the declaration of the election results. The blocking of SMS services across the country, lethal attacks on opposition supporters and the reported abductions of civilians by the security forces led France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppe, to describe the situation as “explosive” whilst US Senator, Christopher Coons, who presides over the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee for African Affairs, noted unequivocally, “this is a moment of great risk.” As tensions continue to rise in the DRC and the Congolese security forces prepare for possible clashes, the international community must make it very clear that violence from all sides will not be tolerated and call for restraint in handling any unrest.

The situation remains too complex to predict with confidence how the coming days will play out, but the propensity for escalation and for the armed forces to quickly lose control amid intense protests has already been observed. Human Rights Watch has recently recorded confrontations that resulted in at least 18 civilian deaths, whilst 100 more were seriously wounded – the majority of those killed were shot dead by the President’s Republican Guard soldiers. The potential for future violence clashes should not be underestimated and independent arbitration may now be essential to avoid a repeat of more lethal clashes.

At present, donor states should be left frustrated with what journalist, Howard French, has so eloquently described as “a bridge to democratization that was paid for but never got built.” But it is not too late to act and turn the tide in the DRC. With billions of pounds, dollars and euros heading for this central African republic over the coming years, now is not the time to blithely further instability and bloodshed. Our financial and moral commitments to the Congo mean that we cannot absolve ourselves from this responsibility. The DRC is a country of great promise, with an estimated natural wealth measured in trillions-of-dollars, but good governance must be recognized as the basis for which this African leviathan can be transformed into a functioning state with lasting infrastructure. If the Congo remains robbed of the opportunity for free and fair election, its potential will remain little more than a cruel illusion.

http://africanarguments.org/2011/12/22/the-international-community-must-not-turn-their-backs-on-democracy-in-the-dr-congo-by-william-townsend-free-fair-drc/

The Year of Frantz Fanon

howard — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:48:50 +0000

Fifty years ago, Frantz Fanon passed away leaving us with his last testimony, The Wretched of the Earth.

Written in the crucible of the Algerian war of independence and the early years of Third World decolonization, this book achieved an almost biblical status. It became a living source of inspiration for those who opposed the Vietnam War, marched with the civil rights movement, supported revolutionary black struggles in America, the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa and countless insurgent movements around the world.

Fanon’s life had led him far away from the island of Martinique in the Caribbean where he was born a French citizen. He took part at the age of nineteen in the war against Nazism only to discover that in the eyes of France he was nothing but a “Negro”, that is, anything but a man like any other man.

By any means necessary

He would end up feeling a deep sense of betrayal. Black Skin, White Mask – his first book – partly relates the story of this and many other fraught encounters with colonial forms of dehumanization.

But it was in Algeria where he worked as a psychiatrist that Fanon finally cut the cord that bound him to France. The country for which he had almost lost his life in the struggle against Hitler had started to replicate Nazi’s methods during a savage and nameless war against a people which it denied the right to self-determination.

About this war Fanon often said it had taken the look of an authentic genocide. Having sided with the Algerian people, France disowned him. He had betrayed the nation. He became an enemy and long after his death, France treated him as such.

For those committed to the cause of oppressed people or fighting for racial justice, his name nevertheless remained not only a sign of hope, but also an injunction to rise up. Indeed to Fanon we owe the idea that in every human being there is something indomitable which no domination – no matter in what form – can eliminate, contain nor suppress, or at least completely.

Fanon tried to grasp how this “something” could be reanimated and brought back to life under conditions of subjugation.

He argued that this irrepressible and relentless pursuit of freedom required the mobilization of all life reserves. It drew the human subject into a fight to the death – a fight he was called upon to assume as his own task, one he could not delegate to others.

Fanon was also convinced that colonialism was a force animated at its core by a genocidal drive.

To destroy colonialism could only be ensured by violent means, an “absolute praxis” whose goal was to produce life and to free the world from the burden of race.

Please click to continue: http://bit.ly/tGrvcU

The accidental universe: Science’s crisis of faith

howard — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:18:33 +0000

Copyright Harper’s

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic particles that orbit its nucleus. And we now know that all atoms heavier than helium were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars.

The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or to be the result of random events thereafter, have been explained asnecessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws discovered by human beings.

This long and appealing trend may be coming to an end. Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”

The scientists most distressed by Weinberg’s “fork in the road” are theoretical physicists. Theoretical physics is the deepest and purest branch of science. It is the outpost of science closest to philosophy, and religion. Experimental scientists occupy themselves with observing and measuring the cosmos, finding out what stuff exists, no matter how strange that stuff may be. Theoretical physicists, on the other hand, are not satisfied with observing the universe. They want to know why. They want to explain all the properties of the universe in terms of a few fundamental principles and parameters. These fundamental principles, in turn, lead to the “laws of nature,” which govern the behavior of all matter and energy. An example of a fundamental principle in physics, first proposed by Galileo in 1632 and extended by Einstein in 1905, is the following: All observers traveling at constant velocity relative to one another should witness identical laws of nature. From this principle, Einstein derived his theory of special relativity. An example of a fundamental parameter is the mass of an electron, considered one of the two dozen or so “elementary” particles of nature. As far as physicists are concerned, the fewer the fundamental principles and parameters, the better. The underlying hope and belief of this enterprise has always been that these basic principles are so restrictive that only one, self-consistent universe is possible, like a crossword puzzle with only one solution. That one universe would be, of course, the universe we live in. Theoretical physicists are Platonists. Until the past few years, they agreed that the entire universe, the one universe, is generated from a few mathematical truths and principles of symmetry, perhaps throwing in a handful of parameters like the mass of the electron. It seemed that we were closing in on a vision of our universe in which everything could be calculated, predicted, and understood.

However, two theories in physics, eternal inflation and string theory, now suggest that the same fundamental principles from which the laws of nature derive may lead to many different self-consistent universes, with many different properties. It is as if you walked into a shoe store, had your feet measured, and found that a size 5 would fit you, a size 8 would also fit, and a size 12 would fit equally well. Such wishy-washy results make theoretical physicists extremely unhappy. Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Please follow the link to continue: http://bit.ly/us7vak

China in 10 Words – from the best books 0f 2011

howard — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 23:57:59 +0000

It will be a very long time before Chinese writers cease to mine the seemingly inexhaustible vein of material that comes from the ten years of chaos and upheaval of the Cultural Revolution.

Indeed, Yu Hua, the author of the seventh book to appear on this list, China in Ten Words himself has come up with his own graphic way of taking note of this. If all the stories of fortunes reversed and lives thrust into chaos “were laid out one after another, they would stretch as endlessly as a highway and be as hard to tally as the forest.”

For people who follow China seriously, this produces something of an occupational hazard. After a while, so much that is written about this turbulent period (1966-’76) begins to sound familiar, and even when the stories are extraordinary, as they so often are, the effect becomes somewhat repetitive — even monotonous. This is made worse when people write about the period – and there are many of them – more or less to to pander.

Yu Hua, who hails from Hangzhou, a metropolis that few Americans have ever heard of and yet is bigger than almost any city in the United States, has none of these issues. As the previous author, most famously, of Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, he has long earned his stripes as a highly original writer, and one who revels in taking on big social and historical themes.

At 225 pages, China in Ten Words is so brief that one couldn’t be blamed for suspected it as one of those tossed off efforts that famous writers sometimes lend themselves to, whether out of boredom, or contract requirements, or the need for funds, or simply because they can, which means for the heck of it. To the contrary, the result is one of the most intriguing recent contributions on the subject of the Cultural Revolution that this reader has come across.

No, Yu Hua has not come up with some astounding new material, or even a genuinely new perspective on the period. All in all, his stories of growing up in that era of generalized violence, and of yet of striking innocence in terms of some things, such as social and sexual mores, sound rather familiar. The breakthrough instead, if it is not too grand a claim to call it that, comes in the form of the extended parallels he draws between that era in China and our own. And here, I believe, Yu Hu, ever the astute social critic, has stumbled upon something really quite interesting.

The Cultural Revolution was an era of extraordinary concentration of power in the person of Mao Zedong. The Party remains powerful, of course, but by the measures of the past, authority has become highly diffuse. Both result in great violence, both in great injustices, even if their nature and description vary dramatically.

Here and there, Yu Hua takes great pleasure in skewering a body of opinion that exists in China (and which is nursed by the state) which is smug and self satisfied. “Our economic miracle — or should we say, the economic gain in which we so revel — relies to a significant extent on the absolute authority of local governments, for an administrative order on a piece of paper is all that’s required to implement drastic change.”

He is speaking, of course, of the administrative hocus pokus that has propelled real estate speculation and made huge fortunes out of thin air, while cheating ordinary people, the nameless masses, out of their land and their homes or their livelihoods, fueling combustible anger in places like Wukan and many other places.

He is mostly impressed by the great waste that accompanied the economic boom, likening it to useless backyard steel furnaces of the Great Leap Forward that boosted statistics but left the countryside polluted and denuded of trees.

“When I left South Africa at the end of a visit during the 2010 World Cup, the duty-free shop at Johannesburgs airport was selling vuvuzelas — Chinese-made plastic horns — for the equivalent of 100 yuan each, but on my return home I learned that the export price was only 2.6 yuan apiece,” he writes. “One company in Zhejiang manufactured 20 million vuvuzelas but ended up making a profit of only about 100,000 yuan. This examples gives a sense of China’s lopsided development: year after year chemical plants will dump industrial waste into our rivers, and although a single plant might succeed in generating a thirty-million-yuan boost to China’s GDP, to clean up the rivers it has ruined will cost ten times that amount. An authority I respect has put it this way: China’s model of development is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP.”

There is an extended meditation here about the seemingly almost arbitrary reversals of fates that the two eras, the Cultural Revolution and now, have brought about in the lives of Chinese people. Back then, as Yu Hua notes, Wang Hongwen, a simply security guard, rose at age 38 to officially become the country’s third leading politician, after Mao and Zhou En Lai. Today, it is seemingly ordinary people from the grassroots who dominate the lists of richest people. They are people who “think and dare to act,” and who “will adopt any method,” legal or not, to get ahead.

In the popular idiom of the revolutionary 1960s China, this was called “flipping pancakes,” he tells us. “Everyone was just a pancake, sizzling on the griddle, flipped from side to side by the hand of fate.”

For Yu Hua, the forms of the past may have changed but the essence of so many things has remained the same. We have gone from an era of radical redistribution of political power to an era of radical redistribution of economic power, but the arbitrary nature of fate and the injustices that it inevitably deals have remained constant.

“What is revolution,” Yu Hua asks? “The answer I have heard take many forms. Revolution fills life with unknowables, and one’s fate can take an entirely different course overnight; some people soar high in the blink of an eye, and others just as quickly stumble into the deepest pit. In revolution the social ties that bind one person to another are formed and broken unpredictably, and today’s brother-in-arms may become tomorrow’s class enemy.”

Or indeed today’s.

Here’s a profile from the New York Times magazine of the author, written by the formidable Pankaj Mishra: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25hua-t.html?scp=1&sq=Yu%20Hua%20profile&st=cse

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters – a new best read

howard — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:19:42 +0000

As I hinted in my last post, this is more work than it might seem like, putting out a list of 10 favorite books that consists of more than just the title of the book and a link. It certainly involves more effort than I assumed when I set out to do this.

With a few of the books, the sense of excitement over the achievement of the authors, coupled with a deep sense of personal connection (in each case with both the author and the subject) greatly outweighs any of the fuss involved. That was certainly the case for The Invisible Line, Open City, and now with this sixth book, Jason K. Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa.

Great books written by foreigners about Africa are truly uncommon. The last, by my reckoning, was 2010′s The Teeth May Smile, but the Heart Does Not Forget, by Andrew Rice, which was an exceptionally fine exploration of Ugandan history and of the limits of reconciliation. One need not be fixated on Africa to enjoy and indeed to profit from the reading of Rice’s book. (links to all of the books named here appear below)

Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters takes place on a much vaster tableau than this, but the two authors nonetheless share an unfortunately altogether too rare quality among outsiders who write about Africa. Both of their work is built on a foundation of authenticity that can only come from listening to Africans, not as a matter of technique, or much less to check off a box on a to-do list, but rather because they are genuinely interested in knowing what Africans have to say about their own lives and experiences.

Every word of this is the truth, but even here I may not have given sufficient credit. African lives are not a story in their narratives, they are the story.

For Stearns, writing about the Congo in the wake of some of the most horrific violence and destruction the world has seen in recent decades, this commitment can be measured in the thousands of miles he must have traveled across a country as large as Western Europe, reaching towns and villages in seemingly every region.

I covered the first of the Congo’s wars, which brought the fall of Mobutu, and I know firsthand what a poor job WE in the Western media did, getting to the bottom of the story, really covering the action on the ground, understanding the local strategic and geopolitical implications of what was going on. I say we readily if not happily, because I must share some of the blame for this failure myself.

Part of this is down to the sheer size of the country, its lack of roads and other infrastructure, the danger involved, especially at the time, but even taken together, these explanations are not sufficient. The remaining piece of the failure was lamentably due to a lack of sufficient commitment to the story itself by news organizations and by the reporters ourselves. In this business, unfortunately, people measure the risks they are they willing to take in relation to the rewards: how important are the historical stakes, how big is the story, how great are the rewards?

If anything, the second war, and its aftermath in Congo, have been covered far worse, which is to say more lackadaisically and with less regard for big questions, for facts, and especially for history. In cynical moments I am reminded of the way a seemingly never-ending war in Lebanon was once covered, decades ago, as artillery barrages between rival factions, and other outrages, went from front page news to tiny briefs buried on the inside pages.

Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters shows the deepest regard for history, and not just in the necessary but too often neglected where Africa is concerned reading-up-on-books sense, although there is evidence of plenty of that. This regard shines through in the persistent way he has talked to the players he can find at every level, in finding where the bodies are buries, quite often literally, in taking the time to hear people’s stories of incredible suffering and survival, and finally, in weaving it all together in an accessible, compelling and lasting piece of writing. Bravo Jason.

Against All Odds: How ‘Crazy’ Kim Jong Il Outfoxed the World

howard — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:10:45 +0000

For years, almost any major news out of North Korea has been occasion for a special brand of grim humor about the country and its leader, Kim Jong Il. The man seemed to be wacky, we joked, and his style of rule was wild and crazy.

Kim’s death, announced yesterday amid unrestrained crying by a matronly television announcer on the country’s national network, was no exception. Official accounts attributed his demise to mental and physical exhaustion while riding on a train. Like so much about the country, this had an odd, even preposterous ring to it.

Today, as journalists, diplomats, and other analysts try to explain the workings of a country that has remained remarkably closed even as the world has grown hyper-connected, there is one story line, as commonplace as it is tempting, that demands refuting.

MORE ON KIM JONG IL’S DEATH

Michael Hirsh: How He Became the Most Successful Dictator in Modern History
Max Fisher: What If His Son Isn’t Ready?
In Focus: Inside North Korea
Kenji Fujimoto: I Was Kim Jong Il’s Cook

With his bouffant hair and elevator shoes, a fear of airplanes, an obsession with Hollywood movies, and an indulgent fondness for Scotch and caviar and other delicacies even amid famine, Kim was colorful and eccentric, and one might even argue evil. The one thing that he wasn’t, though, was crazy.

The focus on Kim’s foibles and on his reputed unpredictability always hampered understanding of the man and of the real nature of the regime. From beginning to end during 17 years of rule, he was capable of minutely sliced and, it must be stressed, rational calculations about how to stay in power and how to keep the world at bay.

The word rational will irk many, who find the images of craziness easier to swallow, given the immense suffering the Kim regime has visited on its people. Normally, most of us would like to believe that reason serves good ends and nudges people and nations toward relatively better outcomes. But that is a matter of our delusion, and not Kim’s.

To understand another person, it is usually helpful to try to put oneself in his or her place, and with countries I can think of few examples where this exercise is more useful than on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong Il inherited power on his father’s death in 1994, an era when the bloom had come suddenly off of the rose for North Korea.

It is hard to imagine this today, given the astonishing prosperity of South Korea, but during much of his father’s rule, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was more prosperous than its neighbor to the south. Even during the early years of relative decline, the economy remained fairly robust, thanks to the balancing act that Kim Il Sung, the regime’s founding father, played with his two big, mutually suspicious allies, China and the Soviet Union. It was on this foundation of success that the regime built much of its legitimacy.

By the time Kim Il Sung took power in 1994, though, the Soviet Union, along with its financial subsidies and spare industrial parts, was but a memory. The younger Kim was underestimated right from the start, but he keenly understood how weak his hand was and quickly learned how to play it to maximum advantage.

The shtick of apparent madness flowed from his country’s fundamental weakness as he, like a master poker player, resolved to bluff and bluff big. Kim adopted a game of brinkmanship with the South, threatening repeatedly to turn Seoul into a “sea of flames.” And while this may have sharply raised the threat of war, for the North, it steadily won concessions: fuel oil deliveries, food aid, nuclear reactor construction, hard cash-earning tourist enclaves and investment zones.

As a bureau chief for the New York Times in northeast Asia in the 1990s and 200′s, reporting from Japan, the Koreas, and later China, I had a front row seat for much of this. Up close, I covered the Nobel laureate and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung’s moneybags approach to the North, which he labeled Sunshine Diplomacy. It won the South’s Kim a summit meeting with his counterpart, which the “crazy” Kim hosted and managed to totally dominate. At the level of appearances, which was all-important for the internal propaganda purposes of a “hermit regime,” he reduced Kim Dae Jung to a mere supplicant.

I flew to Pyongyang with Japan’s most successful and assertive prime minister in a generation, Junichiro Koizumi, as he sought to confront Kim over Japanese citizens who had been kidnapped over the years and effectively held hostage by North Korea. Once again, Kim extracted maximum benefit, while conceding little.

In 2002, I took passage on a ship to the North Korean city of Kumho to witness work on a United States-backed $4.6 billion nuclear reactor that was being built as part of an elaborate diplomatic scheme to get the country to close down its two decrepit but proliferation-prone graphite-style reactors. American officials did not have an easy time explaining why the arrangement shouldn’t be considered appeasement, but the fact was that North Korea’s hardline approach to playing its very weak hand, otherwise known as brinkmanship, had won it these big concessions.

From China I watched as even Beijing, North Korea’s sole putative ally, grew frustrated as it tried to nudge its small, destitute neighbor toward less provocative behavior. Even though his country had no other powerful friends in the world, Kim managed to maneuver Beijing into the classic patron-client conundrum, where the former concludes that it mustn’t push too hard lest it risk losing its influence with the latter. In situations of such embarrassing impotence, the real question is whether the patron — in this case, China — actually has much influence at all.

Where does all this lead? Don’t believe anyone who says they have insights into who the new leader, Kim Jung Un, the baby son now dubbed “the great successor” really is or how he will rule. What we do know is that the country’s hand, in rational terms, is steadily weaker, making big concessions less, not more likely.

Imagine what the world looks like from the leadership compounds in Pyongyang. Embracing China means the risk of being smothered. Reconciliation or rapprochement with South Korea means admitting inferiority and the loss of legitimacy. Détente and disarmament in negotiation with the United States means becoming another Libya.

The country may sometimes look crazy to us, but count on its leaders doing everything they can to stay in power.

Against All Odds: How ‘Crazy’ Kim Jong Il Outfoxed the World

Václav Havel: director of a play that changed history

howard — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:27:58 +0000

Copyright The Guardian

Hands whirring like twin propellers, Václav Havel moved with his characteristic hurried, short-paced walk across the mirrored foyer of the Magic Lantern theatre, the headquarters of the velvet revolution. The slightly stooped, stocky figure, dressed in jeans and sweater, stopped for a moment, began to speak about some “important negotiations”; scarcely three sentences in, he was swept away. He gave an apologetic smile over his shoulder, as if to say “what can a man do?”

Often Havel talked as if he was an ironic critic watching the theatre of life, but there in the Magic Lantern, in 1989, he became the lead actor and director of a play that changed history.

Havel was a defining figure of late 20th-century Europe. He was not just a dissident; he was the epitome of the dissident, as we came to understand that novel term. He was not just the leader of a velvet revolution; he was the leader of the original velvet revolution, the one that gave us a label applied to many other non-violent mass protests since 1989. (He always insisted that a western journalist coined the term.)

Havel was not just a president; he was the founding president of what is now the Czech Republic. He was not just a European; he was a European who, with the eloquence of a professional playwright and the authority of a former political prisoner, reminded us of the historical and moral dimensions of the European project.

Looking at the mess that project is in today, one can only cry: “Havel! Europe hath need of thee.”

He was also one of the most engaging human beings I have ever known. I first met him in the early 1980s, when he had just emerged from several years in prison. We spoke in his riverside apartment, with its large writer’s tables and tableau view of Prague. Although the communist secret police then assessed the active core of the Charter 77 movement – probably realistically – at just a few hundred people he insisted that silent popular support was growing. One day, the flickering candles would burn through the ice. It’s important to remember that no one knew when that day would come.

In the event, it came just six years later, but it might have been 22 years, as it has been for Aung San Suu Kyi – whom Havel selflessly nominated for the Nobel peace prize, at a time when he might have won it himself. The dissident’s honour does not come from the political victor’s crown. Havel was the epitome of a dissident because he persisted in this struggle, patiently, non-violently, with dignity and wit, not knowing when or even if the outward victory would come. The success was already in that persistence, in the practice of “antipolitics” – or politics as the art of the impossible. Meanwhile, he analysed the communist system in profound but down-to-earth essays, and in letters from prison to his first wife, Olga.

In his famous parable of the Schweikian greengrocer who puts a sign in his shop window, among the apples and onions, saying “Workers of all countries, Unite!” – although, of course, the man doesn’t believe a word of it – Havel captured the essential insight on which all civil resistance draws: that even the most oppressive regimes depend on some minimal compliance by the people they govern. In a seminal essay, he talked of “the power of the powerless”.

When the chance came to practise civil resistance himself, Havel turned this into political theatre of an electrifying kind. Prague’s Wenceslas Square was the stage. A cast of 300,000 people spoke as one. Cry your eyes out, Cecil B DeMille. No one who was there will ever forget the sight of Havel and Aleksander Dubcek, the hero of ’89 and the hero of ’68, appearing side by side on the balcony: ‘Dubcek-Havel! Dubcek-Havel!’ Or the sound of 300,000 keyrings being shaken together, like Chinese bells. Rarely if ever has a tiny minority so rapidly become a large majority. May the same happen soon in Burma.

But Czechoslovakia – as it then still was – had the benefit of coming late to the 1989 party. The Poles, East Germans and Hungarians had done most of the hard work already, seizing the chance Gorbachev offered. When I arrived in Prague, and sought Václav out in his favourite basement pub, I joked that in Poland it had taken 10 years, in Hungary 10 months, in East Germany 10 weeks; perhaps here it would take 10 days. He immediately got me to repeat the quip to an underground video team. In the event, he was president within seven weeks. I vividly remember the moment when homemade badges appeared saying Havel for President. “May I take one?” he politely asked the student badge-peddler.

“People, your government has returned to you!” he declared in his 1990 New Year’s address as newly inaugurated head of state, echoing the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. Those first weeks in Prague Castle were manic, hilarious, uplifting and chaotic. He showed off the original torture chamber: “I think we will use it for negotiations.”

But then the hard slog of undoing communism began. All the poison accumulated over 40 years came seeping out. Harder-nosed political operators, such as Václav Klaus, thrust to the fore. So did nationalism, Slovak and eventually also Czech. Havel fought with all his eloquence to keep together Masaryk’s dream of a civic, multinational republic – in vain.

He came back as the founding president of today’s Czech Republic, which emerged from the so-called velvet divorce from Slovakia.

He felt, with good reason, that he had to be present at the creation. I think he stayed on too long in this role. Less would have been more. In diminished health, he was exhausted by the ceaseless round of ceremonial duties and petty political infighting, and, in time, his people became weary of him.

Continues here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/18/vaclav-havel-changed-history1?CMP=twt_gu

Havel, China and Africa

howard — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:14:41 +0000

I am eager to read Chinese news accounts of the life and death of Vaclav Havel, whose central message might be summed up as the necessity for individuals everywhere to cast off their apathy and assume their rights – and agency – as citizens.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/world/2011-12/18/c_131313633.htm

The death of this figure of major importance to the history of the late- and post-Cold War world will inevitably generate talk that is heavily focused on Europe, just as the attention of the Western media and foreign ministries tended to stay almost exclusively bracketed on this region (with China, for a time, serving as a crucial exception) as the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union crumbled.

Scarcely noted around that time, were citizens’ democratic uprisings in Africa (Benin 1990-’91, Mali and Zambia ’91) that opened history’s door for a new era of participatory representative politics around the continent. I say scarcely noted by the press, but also scarcely heeded by Western chancelleries, which judged such events to be small beer when compared to the exciting things happening in more “important” places elsewhere.

Little diplomatic energy was invested in supporting this early wave of African democratization. In part, this was due to the fact that it seemed to violate tenets of conventional wisdom in political science, and hence diplomacy, which held that democracy could not take root in countries that did not have a substantial middle class.

What contributes to making China so interesting today is that the country now boasts a large and fast-growing middle class, making it ever riper, some theorists hold, for the emergence of real citizens’ movements that can push back the frontiers of the state and win greater space for the individual, and for civil society.

Havel’s death coincides interestingly with an example of just what the tender green roots of such a movement might look like, meaning of course the protests underway in Wukan. Six years ago, I covered a remarkable, and remarkably similar uprising in Shanwei, in the very same part of southeastern China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/international/asia/11china-web.html?scp=1&sq=howard%20w.%20french%20shanwei&st=cse

It was ruthlessly put down by paramilitary police, and mention of it in the Chinese press and Internet was largely suppressed. In all likelihood, the state will find a way to quash the Wukan protests, as well, but even as it works furiously to censor the Internet, word of the uprising, and of its significance for the emergence of a broadening rights consciousness in China, is getting around.

In Africa, largely ignored and scarcely supported by the outside world, a similar kind of rights consciousness began to spread and take root in the 1990s. That it was able to do so without the existence of a robust middle class in so many places remains an important and largely untold story; a fertile subject awaiting book-length exploration by enterprising journalists and historians.

Western Europe and the United States ignored African calls for a Marshall Plan for the continent, as it emerged from the ruinous misrule common during the Cold War. Remarkably, in more recent times, Africa has gradually begun to harness its own wealth, so long stolen and misappropriated. Growth is said to be fast and accelerating on the continent, which finds itself in a demographic sweet spot, and courted by rich new players, conspicuously led by China. Middle classes, ever more familiarly globalized, are emerging nearly everywhere one looks.

Whether this growth will lead to real and solid development remains an open question. Outcomes will naturally be very different according to the country. Here’s my wager, though, that the emergence (or not) of the Havelian citizen, the networked individual who is jealous of his rights and demanding of the state, will be decisive.

Book 5 – Reads of the Year – Open City

howard — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:03:24 +0000

I’m realizing I’d better hurry up with this list. The year’s going to be over in a minute, and I’m running out of time.

I’d originally intended to save this choice for last on this list, which I’ve often said is given in no particular order. I’d thought of doing Open City last, though, because my experience of the book has been so special.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve come to realize, though, that if I don’t get this out more quickly, I’ll be the last person in the world to recommend this novel. In recent weeks, I’ve seen it touted in year’s-best lists just about everywhere, NPR, The New Yorker, The new York Times, Atlantic, and on, and on.

But anticlimactic as this might be in one sense, I feel good for having discovered this novel early in its publishing run, before many reviews had appeared at all. Indeed, I remember my puzzlement as I plugged it to friends and relatives while some of those early critics seemed not to know what to make of this highly original, deeply wonderful voice.

In retrospect, there’s little wonder. Teju Cole doesn’t fit easily into in the crude and reductionist landscape of American notions of race. Here is a man who is black, and yet European, African and yet American, luxuriantly at ease in the street, but as a purest sort of flaneur, and as someone unwilling to comply with anyone else’s projected notions of what, or who he should be.

We’re not used to this kind of stuff, and for some readers the effect is apparently confusing. What to make of a black man whose curiosity and learning are near universal, who loves classical music, and poetry, and visiting museums and is comfortably at home in the realm of ideas? For some of the early critics, Cole was pretentious. As I understood it, that meant that he was a kind of trespasser; someone who had no business straying from the themes we are accustomed to assigning to or expecting from black authors.

Open City is not a big novel, but it is a grand one, and that is down to the freedom of its author, and of its main character, Julius, to explore identity and beyond the question-asking, to assert identity as a genuine individual. In this, he is an equal opportunity defender of a hard-won independence. Witness, for example, the scene when an African taxi driver in New York City reproaches him for not engaging in a breezy “brotherly” banter when he enters his cab in a rain storm. “He said I’m African just like you, why you do this? He kept me in his sights in the mirror. I was confused. I said, I’m so sorry about it, my mind was elsewhere, don’t be offended, ehn, my brother, how are you doing? He said nothing, and faced the road. I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.” In some ways, this scene is characteristic of the entire book, which is built around encounters that bring Julius up short, or cause him to reevaluate things; to question himself and most certainly to question others.

Cole’s Julius calls himself “one of those people, the overinterpreters,” and this is an apt description for his way of being, for his M.O.

Alone, Julius goes to the movies and settles into his seat in the darkened cave. “The jaunty credit sequence featured music from the right time, but not from the right part of Africa: what had Mali to do with Kenya? But I had come prepared to like some things about the film, and I expected some other things would annoy me. Another film I had watched the previous year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, had left me feeling frustrated, not because of its plot, which was plausible, but because of the film’s fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa. Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities.”

It wouldn’t do to lay out a synopsis here, or even to give a clearer sense of the story. There is an important back story about a failed relationship, and there are many other meditations on loss. Give the book a chance, and you’ll be grateful to Cole for sharing his deeply layered world with you. One wishes to say a word about the writing itself, though, which is one of the book’s great pleasures.

Listen here, as Cole renders Manhattan:

“This strangest of islands, I though, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night. All was quiet and lights called from the Jersey shore across.”

Or this.

“I have always had a problem with the shoeshine business, and even on those rare occasions when I wished to have my scuffed shoes cleaned, some egalitarian spirit kept me from doing so… But on this occasion, I stopped and looked into the brightly lit interior which, with all its mirrors and tufted seats upholstered in vinyl, reminded me of an empty barbershop. An elderly black man I hadn’t noticed stood up, waved, and said, Come in, come in, I’ll shine them very well for you. I shook my head quickly, and raised a hand to decline but, not wanting to disappoint him, gave in. I stepped inside and got up on the little stepping stool, and sat in one of the buffoonish red thrones, toward the back of the shop. The air was laced with lemon oil and turpentine. His hair was curly and white, as were his sideburns, and he wore a dirty aprom, striped blue and white. It wasn’t easy to guess his age; he was no longer young, but he was sprightly. A bootblack, not a shoeshiner: the older term seemed right for him. He said, You just relax, I’ll make this black as black as night for you. And, with that peculiar sense of metamorphosis one experiences on waking up from an afternoon nap to find that the sun has set, I heard for the first time the faint trace of a Caribbean French accent in his clear, quiet baritone. My name is Pierre, he said…”

There are many, many such vivid and textured flourishes throughout the novel, which from start to finish this reader found acutely observed, refreshingly thoughtful and richly rewarding.

My other picks so far:

And Once More the World Shrugs at the Congo

howard — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:32:52 +0000

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s President, Joseph Kabila, has just perpetrated a massive hoax in order to retain power. Bowing in principle to the Western-driven demands to the famous but nebulous “international community,” Kabila has held just held elections, which he would like the world to believe he has won.

The overall tally, 49 percent for the “winner,” and 32 percent for the first runner up, had a ring to it that at first glance, at least for the uninitiated, sounded both plausible and competitive, which in such matters usually go hand in hand. The results proclaimed the Congo to be the latest African country to have traveled far away from the bad old past of continental elections, which authoritarian rulers once routinely “won” with upwards of 95 percent of the vote.

Closer glimpses reveal immense problems with this exercise, beginning with the fact that Kabila, the incumbent, has carried a number of districts by “old African” margins of 100 percent or close to it, in his favor.

If the problems ended here, this story would be bad enough. Unfortunately, they don’t. As made clear by the Carter Center, in the most authoritative review of the results by an international monitoring organization, in Kinshasa, an opposition stronghold, some 2,000 polling station’s results simply vanished. Another 1,000 or so more disappeared in other parts of the country.

The closer one looks at this electoral exercise, down to the composition of the electoral commission, which was stacked in favor of the sitting president, the more one is obliged to conclude that it was a farce. Such an examination may never suffice to overturn the results in favor of the leading opposition candidate, Etienne Tshisekedi, toward whom the Western diplomatic world has a marked, if rarely publicly avowed, distaste. But that is not the point here.

Why should anyone care? The Congo is a chronic, seemingly doomed basket-case. It takes a very short step to conclude that it would be unreasonable to expect much better from what has so long been a failed or failing state.

This kind of reaction, best described as a resigned shrug, is the international community’s reflexive, almost ritualized response to negative turn of events in Congo. It is typically followed by a fatalistic acceptance of the newest status quo, and if this reliable old pattern holds, that will mean de facto acceptance soon for Kabila’s election outcome, if not the precise details of the vote itself.

But just as it is dishonest to pin all of Congo’s problems on outsiders, it is equally untruthful to pretend that the international community’s silent tyranny of low expectations has nothing fundamental to do with the country’s cursed situation, or more so even than for most African countries, with its long term history of debilitation.

The resigned shrug — whereby powerful and deep-pocketed outsiders, largely concentrated in the West, come to live with and even support a situation they know to be deeply wrong — has been a signal factor of nearly every disaster the country has faced since the Rwandan genocide, in 1994.

This state of affairs began with the housing of armed Rwandan Hutu refugees in United Nations-run camps close to the Rwandan border, in violation of the UN’s own statutes. Things were done this way not because it was right, but because it was the cheapest and easiest way to proceed.

This chronicle of shrugs continued with the overthrow of the longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese-Seko, in 1997, which began with Rwandan mortar attacks against the UN refugee camps, which scarcely raised a peep from the UN. or the West. Here again, one senses that this is because they had decided that for a variety of reasons, Mobutu, whom they had long favored, had to go, and this was the cheapest and easiest way to proceed.

The West shrugged at evidence that, along the way to power, Mobutu’s replacement and the current president’s father, Laurent Kabila, had presided over the extermination (by Rwandan Tutsi-led units) of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees. A minority of those refugees would have been perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide and the feeling was that they had to be liquidated. If that meant also killing a distinct majority of people who were innocent women and children, along with men who were not perpetrators, well, shrug, so be it. This is Congo. It’s a tough luck place.

One could go on and on with examples like these. Suffice to say that things have continued much this way down to the present day, with the world giving the same reflexive response at each critical moment. But there must come a time when the international community, and the Western nations that provide so much of its direction, insists on more and better from the Congo, and from their own engagement with it. And that’s what makes this time potentially so different.

Elections are something that the West loudly professes to care about deeply. And here’s where we get to where Congo’s fraudulent outcome should really matter.

For several years now, Africa has been in the midst of both strong economic growth and a quiet democratic revolution. These developments have commanded few of the headlines dominated by subject like terrorists and pirates in Somalia or rape in eastern Congo, but increasingly vigorous democratic competition is becoming the rule rather than the exception on the continent.

There is any number of holdouts, though, and many of them are in Congo’s neighborhood. One might start with Rwanda itself, where President Kagame arranges to prevent opposition parties from competing, and now flirts with changing the constitution to perpetuate his already long rule. Zimbabwe, a near neighbor to the south, would be another case in point of an authoritarian figure, Robert Mugabe, clinging to power by every means possible.

What kind of standing would the international community have to criticize processes in places like these, or in other holdout countries, from Uganda to Cameroon, if it cannot find its voice in Congo?

A fact too easily lost in the election’s immediate aftermath, but unlikely to remain lost in the longer term, is that the shambling, dishonest way the vote was conducted makes a mockery of more than just the Congo. It casts well-deserved ill-repute on the international community as a whole, and particularly on those who financed the vote: the United Nations ($110 million), the European Union (47 million euros), and the UK (31 million pounds).

It’s tempting to conclude that, if this is the best that your money and technical assistance can achieve in the realm of elections, it would be better to invest in such badly needed things as primary health care or schools, and avoid spoiling the name of a good cause.

Here it is worth recalling the international context, which is newly competitive after years of fading Western interest in Africa after the Cold War. A resurgent China has been happy to mock the West’s obsession with elections and governance in Africa, as it touts the more tangible things it builds, such as roads, ports, and stadiums.

As the West shrugs, how much better for China to compare itself to a model that demonstrably doesn’t work and cannot deliver, as with Congo’s fraudulent elections, a bridge to democratization that was paid for but never got built.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/and-once-more-the-world-shrugs-at-the-congo/250055/

bit.ly/v8R1VZ

Book Four – My Best Reads of 2011

howard — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 16:48:35 +0000

My first choice of fiction in this list is Yiyun Li’s Golden Boy, Emerald Girl.

Li’s extraordinary book (published late in 2010) is a collection of dense yet luminous stories of women’s lives, alternately lived in claustrophobic or numbingly pragmatic ways in response to the brutal and alarming changes that China has undergone from late in the Cultural Revolution until the recent past.

The subtext throughout is about the coping mechanisms that these people adopt to manage their inner lives and shield themselves from despair, as they settle for far less n life than they once might have dreamed. Most of the stories pack intense emotional power, and yet the language is restrained and delicate and tightly controlled throughout.

Li’s unforgettable characters include a young female inductee into the People’s Liberation Army, whose childhood with unusually remote parents has forged its own distance from others in her. The results are seen through poignant, arms-length ties with her much older childhood tutor, and with a young female officer who eagerly seeks to befriend her.

In another story, a couple of emigrants to the U.S. have lost their child and return to China to ”replace” her. This results in search in one of China’s innumerable half-developed inland towns for a surrogate mother, who they find, with striking results in terms of the dynamics between husband and wife, and wife and birth mother.

These stories resonated with all the more emotional truth for me because I read them during a year of extensive travel in Africa, where I met with scores of uprooted Chinese who have been driven by a very similar pragmatism as they have traveled far from home in middle age in search of more livable lives; in search of relief from the untold, disorienting stresses of the booming China of newspaper headlines.

Many of them were uncomplaining survivors of the Cultural Revolution, each in possession of an extraordinary oral history, and yet often surprised in our encounters that their lives could be of interest to a stranger at all.

A Review from The Guardian: http://bit.ly/auSyTW

Yiyun Li interview, NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130538242

http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=34504

My other picks so far:

The Year’s 10 Best Book – Number Three

howard — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 00:11:27 +0000

My third book is Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

One doesn’t come across books that exhibit such extraordinary learning very often, and yet Mann, in the 535 pages he takes to tell his story, wears his deep erudition with uncommon grace. That’s because he is an unusually good storyteller, and as with all the books on this list, a fine writer.

At the simplest level, this is a book about the virtual recreation of Pangaea, a reference to the supercontinent that existed before the Americas split from the African landmass.

Christopher Columbus, through his trans-Atlantic voyages, is of course the agent who initiates the great reconnection of the continents. And we are all superficially familiar with the ecological consequences that flowed from this, i.e. the introduction of unfamiliar plants, animals and diseases from one locale to another, as well as the mass movement of peoples.

Mann takes his research so far beyond the superficial that he will have you reconsidering your understanding of globalization, along with whole chapters of history and of how regions of the world have related to each other over the last 500 years. Almost literally, nowhere is left untouched, from Ming Empire China, Tibet and Japan, to the Central Asian Khanates, to kingdoms like Songhai, Kongo and Mutapa in Africa, to the Native peoples of both North and South America.

One could give highlights with a book like this, but the problem would be where to begin and to end. The influence of malaria on the drawing of the Mason Dixon Line? The intricacies of African-Native American relations in the ‘New World’? A The possible Chinese origins of the game of golf? The history of global commodity crazes – first tobacco, then silk, then ceramics? The birth of the world’s first polyglot, world-encompassing metropolises, Mexico City (where Chinese immigrants drove down the cost of haircuts, pushing Spanish barbers out of business)? The role of sweet potatoes and corn in dynastic collapse in China?

Whether through direct argumentation or implicitly, historians have long held that the triumph of Europeans and of their civilization was due to their inherent superiority vis a vis Asians, Africans, and Americans. Mann’s ideas, which build on the theories of Alfred Crosby, hold that Europe triumphed largely out of a kind of ecological imperialism; in other words through advantages gained through the swapping and transplantation of organisms from one part of the world to another.

One would do better to listen to author’s fascinating interview on Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, which is what led me to the book.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/08/138924127/in-1493-columbus-shaped-a-world-to-be

The New York Times review: http://nyti.ms/pLsitm

My previous recommendations are:

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, by Daniel J. Sharfstein

and The Origins of AIDS, by Jacques Pepin

Adam Roberts on Civil Resistance

howard — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 00:35:58 +0000

From Tunisia to Tahrir, Moscow to Manhattan, civil resistance is back. The British Academy president, and eminent student of people power, tells us how modern non-violent action began, and where it’s most likely to succeed.

To begin our conversation about civil resistance, what is your reaction to the most recent news out of Tahrir Square?

The news from Egypt about the new, deeper hostility between the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and the army is very worrying. During the revolution earlier this year the benevolent neutrality of the army was a necessary condition for the success of the movement in Tahrir Square. They needed to have some confidence that they would be able to continue demonstrating and not be subject to mass slaughter by the army.

To me one of the most interesting pictures of that movement was of a demonstrator fast asleep in the tracks of a tank. Had that tank moved even a yard he would have been mincemeat, and yet he was sleeping in this position. So the evidence now of a harsh antagonism between the demonstrators and the army is worrying. One of the slogans that many of the demonstrators used earlier this year was “The army and the people are one”. Well the army and the people are not one, and one has to worry about that.

Where did non-violent struggle, as we think of it today, begin? Many would say Gandhi and the Indian independence movement.

It goes back even further. There was, for example, the very interesting movement of what they called “legal resistance” in Hungary under the Habsburg monarchy in the 19th century, where the Hungarians campaigned for more autonomy and national rights within Austria-Hungary. Eventually they had some limited success in 1867, and they saw that as having been more successful than the attempt at armed rebellion in 1848-49.

But it was Gandhi who brought civil resistance to wider attention. He was an absolute genius at symbolism and publicity. He brilliantly conveyed the sense that here was a new form of struggle which could claim a degree of superiority over other forms of struggle. When you think about the problem that he faced – conveying that sense to Indian followers who were widely dispersed and many of whom could not read or didn’t have access to modern media – his symbolic role was critically important.

More than anyone else, he forged the link between civil resistance and outcomes such as the independence and democracy for which he struggled. At the same time he left a legacy which is slightly awkward, because it’s not easy to sell Gandhi to a European public. They just don’t believe in ahimsa – complete harmlessness – nor in the total simplicity of living that Gandhi advocated.

You entered this field in the 1960s. What first piqued your interest, and did the political environment of the time influence you?

Human memory is always very dodgy, but I think that my first real encounter with this subject was when as a student at Oxford I went to a meeting about the Soviet Union at which Robert Conquest was speaking. I met there a graduate student called Gene Sharp, who is the author of the first of the books I am looking at today.

At the time [the early 1960s], I was involved in the UK Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Gene was writing a thesis about non-violent action under totalitarian regimes. He impressed me with his seriousness – some might even accuse him of being intense. At our very first meeting he gave me a reading list of things I absolutely had to read, and I thought there’s a subject here.

Please follow the link at the bottom for the entire interview. It strikes me that this material has great relevance for any number of African countries. http://thebrowser.com/interviews/adam-roberts-on-civil-resistance?page=1

Adam Roberts’ Recommended books:

Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle, by Gene Sharp

Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post Communist Societies, by Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik

Why Civil Resistance Works, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan

People, Power and Political Change, by April Carter

The Lady and the Peacock, by Peter Popham

My 10 Best Reads, Book 2

howard — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:12:43 +0000

The second appearance in this space is The Origin of AIDS, by Jacques Pepin. (As I’ve posted before, I’m not rolling these books out in any particular order.)

I learned of this book via a piece written by the fantastic writer on public health issues, Donald G. McNeil Jr., in the New York Times several weeks ago. It was unfortunately buried in the Science section of the paper, and has not received wide attention elsewhere. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/health/18aids.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Jacques%20Pepin%20AIDS&st=cse

Editors who make decisions about which books to review may have imagined that a title like this would be too technical or that as a nominally medical subject, a book like this wouldn’t interest a broad public. That is a pity.

This relatively slim volume is an extraordinary piece of work from any number of angles. It’s title, of course, promises to establish the origins of the HIV virus, and hence the cause of the epidemic that by now has killed an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide and left a similar number of people infected with the disease. And it must be said that the book does a brilliant job of doing just that.

As effective as Pepin’s epidemiological sleuth work is, however, for me this was in some ways the least interesting part of the story. What made this Origins truly special, and worthy of a much broader audience than I fear it will garner, were its rich veins of colonial and post-colonial history, especially in Central Africa, where all signs point to the disease having originated.

Pepin has eschewed the narrow, stick-to-what-my discipline-taught-me-in-grad-school approach to research that is all too common among academic writers. Or perhaps it’s just that he has taken his own field, epidemiology, to its logical limits, which has meant, in this case, becoming an avid historian and social scientist along the way.

This allows him to look probingly and to fascinating effect into such varied topics as the formation of new cities in Africa, the role of the slave trade and its displacement of populations in the propagation of disease, the complex history of the origins of commercial prostitution in West and Central Africa, and the consequent proliferation of venereal diseases.

Modern prostitution, such as we recognize it, got its start in the region from European colonial policies akin to the passbook system under apartheid in South Africa. Men were recruited into the money economy in new cities and towns where the presence of women was sharply restricted. The high male to female ratio led – as always and everywhere – to the commercialization and professionalization of sex.

Even before commercial sex became an African-driven phenomenon, though, the practice had begun to take root with Europeans acting as its principal catalyst and motor. The region’s new cities all had small European minorities whose populations were overwhelmingly male, and in one way or another, they were soon buying sex and helping spread disease.

In 1909, Pepin writes, “the medical officer in charge of the Hôpital des Blancs (the Hospital for Whites) in Leopoldville (Kinshasa) complained about the deplorable moral situation, noting that more than half of the ninety European civil servants in Léo were currently being treated for syphilis.”

Perhaps most fascinating of all the book’s many rich payoffs for me is its history of European-driven public health in Central Africa. Partly out of their desire to sustain a strong workforce, European powers early on began making substantial investments in health care delivery. Africa became the theater of much experimentation, and in a bid to keep down the costs of empire, much corner-cutting and haste.

Pepin shows how, fighting one disease after another, European colonial health officers reused the same quickly rinsed syringes on thousands of people, spreading new diseases even as they conquered or suppressed old ones. As you’ve probably already begun to suspect AIDS, tragically, became one of them.

There are fantastic little vignettes here and there, like the story of Eugène Jamot, the French colonial doctor who led an extraordinarily single-minded crusade against sleeping sickness in what is now Cameroon. In the space of 18 months in 1917-19, we learn “Jamot examined 89,743 individuals in Oubangui-Chari, diagnosing and treating traypansomiasis cases, and did all this with only three microscopes and six syringes.”

Jamot, whose famous slogan was, “I will wake up the black race,” was ultimately ousted by his jealous or resentful military and bureaucratic rivals and peers. “A free thinker, he repeatedly and publicly said that the dramatic epidemics of trypanosomiasis in Cameroun and AEF (Afrique Equatoriale Francaise) had been triggered by European colonization and the forcible displacement of large populations. This freedom of speech did not sit well with his military status. Other conservatives did not appreciate that while remaining legally married to his French wife, who never went to Africa, Jamot lived for many years with a Fulani from north Cameroon whom he married according to tribal customs and with whom he had three children.”

There are lots of little nuggets like this throughout. But as I read this particular passage, I thought that since Hollywood insists on having Western actors as the stars and centerpieces of its films staged in Africa, how much better it would be to see movies depicting complex figures like this than the hollow white savior dreck that we are usually served? http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/movies/machine-gun-preacher-story-of-sam-childers-review.html?scp=1&sq=machine%20gun%20preacher%20review&st=cse

A final, more personal thought goes to my memories of writing about AIDS and other public health issues in Africa years ago. I caught hell from Helene Gayle, then of the CDC, for this piece questioning the experimental protocols being tested on HIV-positive mothers. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/10/09/world/aids-research-in-africa-juggling-risks-and-hopes.html?scp=2&sq=howard%20w.%20french%20aids%20abidjan&st=cse

The Pepin book is a powerful and timely reminder of the many things done in the name of science and health in Africa, and their unforeseen and sometimes tragic consequences. It is also a reminder that one can never ask too many questions.

Discrediting Elections, Wasting Lives, Undermining the Congo

howard — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:02:29 +0000

Now that the international press is packing its bags, having duly noted that Joseph Kabila “won” re-election to the presidency in the Democratic Republic of Congo, perhaps its a good time to ask what use this exercise has served? What need has it fulfilled? What itch has it scratched?

The nebulous entity commonly known as the “international community” has invested untold amounts of money in nudging things along to this point, but to what effect? Along the way, the people in the rooms where decisions about places like this are made seem to have forgotten that for elections to have real meaning and worth, they must have credibility. And in order to have credibility, systems need to be put in place, people trained, procedures checked and re-checked, robust safeguards against fraud instituted, guarantees of transparency put in place.

None of this was done. Not even remotely. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with a result that few can believe in. It leaves Congolese with a deepened sense of cynicism about democracy and about the attachment of the West to the ideals constantly touted and proclaimed. It rounds out another chapter in an increasingly long tome, a dispiriting book for which a serviceable working title might be: “Congo: A Chronicle of Bad Faith.”

Remember the other chapters? They involved things like failing to bother to disarm Hutu soldiers and members of the Interahamwe in United Nations-run refugee camps on the border of post-genocide Rwanda. They involved feigning to ignore that a war to overthrow Mobutu was in reality an invasion mounted by Rwanda and others.

They involved failing to use diplomatic muscle or even raise a voice of protest to stop a campaign of reverse extermination, of Hutu by Tutsi in Rwanda, and later go so far as to block efforts to investigate, ostensibly out of guilt for having failed to stop the horrible genocide of Tutsi by Hutu in Rwanda a few years earlier.

These chapters involved turning a blind eye to the dismemberment and plunder of eastern Congo by its neighbors. There have been many, many more chapters, but I’ve cited enough already for you to get the drift.

Where this narrative leads us to is a world of magical fiction where people pretend that having an election, without bothering to worry about the integrity of the election, will somehow improve “stability” and maybe even help advance “development” in a country that has only continued to sink in recent years; a place where in fact there is no real state worthy of the name.

The just-completed exercise has delivered little to nothing, and certainly not legitimacy to Joseph Kabila, whose answer to people who asked whether he planned to address the country about the results was reportedly something to the effect of “what’s the point?”

What, indeed, was the point of the election? A friend whose connection to the country runs deep answered the question this way: “Dredging silted parts of the mighty river or distributing helicopter cash would be more useful to the Congolese citizenry.” Groups like the Carter Center, and Western-funded governance programs, he said, should be wound up as soon as possible. “But with so many jobs and contracts at stake I suppose that is fanciful thinking.”

The Congo today is like a critically sick patient suffering from multiple maladies. It is time for us to recognize that some of its ills have been induced or at least favored by its would-be well-meaning partners.

Life Upon these Shores

howard — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:57:25 +0000

Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor at Harvard University, author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History 1513-2008, and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, continues this month’s series on African American history with a discussion about the “New Negro Movement” of the early 20th century.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2011/dec/08/gates-new-negro-movement/

And a review of the book upon which this conversation was based.

http://nyti.ms/utBSCs

My Year’s 10 Best Reads

howard — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:39:53 +0000

I expect to be posting about a lot of things in this space, and not “just” on Congo, or even Africa, although there will naturally be a lot of the latter. In the weeks and months ahead, there will be things to share about American presidential politics, about China (I teach a seminar about the country each spring), about photography, perhaps music, and certainly many other unanticipated things that will come up along the way.
I’ve been thinking for some time about what I am beginning with this post, and that is my own modest entry in the proliferation of year-end lists of best books.
I obviously have none of the sway of the New York Times or Time magazine (ha ha), and these offerings are unlikely to move the book market more than a teeny blip, if that. But sharing is at the heart of the spirit of blogging, and since there are few things I love to do more than read, sharing about this pastime and vocation brings a particular pleasure.

I’m going to roll out my ten choices one by one, and in no particular order. They are all fantastic and truly special, each in its own way.

My first nomination is The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, by Daniel Sharfstein.

Invisible Line is a book about the experience of very light-skinned, mixed-race descendants of American slaves and how they negotiated the society’s “color line.” More precisely, it is an exploration of the phenomenon of passing, and of the unpredictably strange and powerful effects that attached to the highly personal, portent-laden choices made by people torn between racial identities.

This is simply the most profound and original book I have read on race in America for some time. Sharfstein, who teaches law at Vanderbilt, is an extraordinary reporter and researcher who manages to delve deeply into the most sensitive and even secret aspects of the history of the three families who bring his subject to life.

Their stories themselves will change the way you think about race, and indeed about American history from the Reconstruction down to the present.

One feels a remarkable and yet quiet intelligence on every page, and as if that were not enough, Sharfstein writes beautifully, as well.

A bit of personal disclosure is in order. Daniel worked for me as a stringer in Ghana in the mid-1990s, and we have remained friends ever since. Let that take nothing away from what is a truly impressive achievement.

Some reviews:

http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2011/02/20/tracing_lives_of_three_white_families_and_their_black_forebears/?page=full

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F02%2F25%2FRVVS1HFMPD.DTL

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/escape-whiteness/?pagination=false

Ralph Ellison in Tivoli

howard — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:37:24 +0000

Copyright The Los Angeles Times

May 10, 1998|SAUL BELLOW | Saul Bellow was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for literature. “Ralph Ellison in Tivoli” first appeared in “News from the Republic of Letters,” a literary magazine featuring fiction and commentary, edited by Bellow and Keith Botsford
Some 40 years ago I came into a small legacy and with it I bought a house in Tivoli, N.Y. “House” is not the word for it; it was, or once had been, a Hudson River mansion. It had a Dutch cellar kitchen of flagstones and a kitchen fireplace. There was a dumbwaiter to the vanished dining room above. The first floor had a ballroom but according to my informants, Tivoli’s townspeople, no one had danced in it for 80 years. Tivoli had been the birthplace of Eleanor Roosevelt. The villagers were the descendants of the servants and groundskeepers of the Duchess County aristocrats.

I shan’t be going into the social history of the township or the county. There were great names in the vicinity–the Livingstones, the Chapmans and the Roosevelts–but I didn’t know much about them. I had sunk my $16,000 legacy into a decaying mansion. To repair the roof and to put in new plumbing, I drew an advance of $10,000 from the Viking Press to write a novel called “Henderson the Rain King.”

There was a furnace of sorts and a warm-air system that took the moisture out of your nostrils. I was too busy with “Henderson” and with my then-wife to take full notice of my surroundings. The times were revolutionary–I refer to the sexual revolution. Marriages were lamentably unstable and un-serious. My wife, tired of life with me in the gloomy house, packed her bags and moved to Brooklyn.

I was naturally wretched about this. I now found the solitude (and the decay of the house) insupportable. Determined to save my $16,000, I threw myself into the work of salvage. I painted the kitchen walls and the bedrooms, as much for therapeutic reasons as to improve the property.

Then Ralph Ellison, who was teaching at Bard College, accepted my invitation to move in. I have always believed that this was an act of charity on his part.

We had known each other in Manhattan. I had reviewed “Invisible Man” for Commentary. I was aware that it was an extremely important novel and that, in what he did, Ralph had no rivals. What he did no one else could do–a glorious piece of good fortune for a writer.

Both of us at one time had lived on Riverside Drive. We met often and walked together in the park, along the Hudson. There we discussed all kinds of questions and exchanged personal histories. I was greatly taken with Ellison, struck by the strength and independence of his mind. We discussed Richard Wright, Faulkner and Hemingway. Ralph, it was clear, had thought things through for himself, and his ideas had little in common with the views of the critics in the literary quarterlies. Neither he nor I could accept the categories prepared for us by literary journalists. He was an American writer who was black. I was a Jew and an American and a writer, and I believed that by being described as a “Jewish writer,” I was being shunted to a siding. This taxonomy business I saw as an exclusionary device. Ellison had similar objections to classification. From his side, he saw the Negro as one of the creators of America’s history and culture.

(See the entire article via the link below.)

http://articles.latimes.com/print/1998/may/10/books/bk-48197

The Bastards We Know

howard — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 04:15:19 +0000

They seemed to say it forever during the Mobutu years, how “we” couldn’t get behind, or really even offer any encouragement to any number of individuals (or processes) that reared themselves up as alternatives to the rule of the Guide.
The Guide, you see, was safe and predictable, and everything and everyone else seemed like such a risk.
Even the Guide’s time eventually ran out, but did this get us to change our approach?
Not really, we just substituted a few names while sticking to the same formula.
An armed takeover of Zaire (the once and future Congo) was better than all other known alternatives such as, namely, any idea of democratic transition, some of the groundwork for which had already been laid.
Congo is too chaotic and the Congolese far too boisterous and querulous. Better to accept the “solution” of our friends, their orderly and reliable neighbors, Rwanda and Uganda. They’ll put the country to rights.
Have we already forgotten how well that went?
Today, we see all manner of ahistorical pseudo analysis as ready to accept a sort of corrupt insider’s conventional wisdom as the babbling heads who make the political horserace odds on our Sunday news shows back home.
The authors privilege the antipathies toward Congo’s main opposition leader, which are mouthed with neither courage nor accountability behind the veil of anonymity by Western embassies.
“We can’t really get behind Etienne Tshisekedi because ‘we’ dont like him very much.” The whys are never much explained. One notable recent piece called Tshisekedi angry, without bothering to explore what he might be angry about. Furthermore, after casting its aspersions, it broke the normal rules of our journalism by not bothering to include a quote from someone in the camp just criticized.
I know better than many first hand how frustrating it can be to deal with Congo’s politicians, none less so than Tshisekedi himself, but what is the real argument here?
Is there an argument that Joseph Kabila has delivered anything worth clinging so desperately to during his years of power? Does he offer a greater prospect for development or for rule of law? We’re speaking of a man who has mustered soldiers in the capital to enforce a favorable outcome, after having proven incapable for years of mustering soldiers for national security and territorial integrity.
One would like to hear it.
Is there an argument that the chancelleries of the West should have veto power here because they are comfortable, as always, with a bastard they know? Let’s hear it.
Is it that pushing for the closest thing possible to a genuinely democratic outcome in Congo isn’t worth the trouble, or wasn’t really the point from the start?
The ambivalence, not so much toward Tshisekedi, but toward the process itself is certainly glaring.
There are no easy outcomes in Congo, which has been diddled with as long and as tragically as any place in Africa. But a good starting point might be to insist on the respect of the ballot, of accounting for votes locally, circumscription by circumscription, by being good to “our” word that democracy in such places is important, and by embracing the true outcome, wherever the chips may fall.
Certainly nothing else “we” have tried has worked very well.

Addendum:
The indispensable (on Twitter) @jasonkstearns is the closest foreign observer of today’s #DRC. The post linked here gives insufficient weight, though, to basic questions about integrity of process, w/o which back of envelope calculations are pretty meaningless: http://bit.ly/vF6oRr

How Africa Gets Covered (or Doesn’t)

howard — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:56:40 +0000

As regions go, Africa has always been the stepchild of the American media.
It is the continent where inexperienced reporters have been historically sent for their first overseas assignments, on the theory that if they screw up in Africa, it won’t be much noticed.
The assignment required little-to-no preparation, no languages, no history or study. All you needed was a young reporter willing to plunge into chaos and mayhem and black mischief and serve up the goods, colorfully if you please.
It is the continent where newspapers and magazines, and long, long ago, American television networks, figured that they could get away with a single bureau to cover all of the “black’ part. (North Africa, the “white” part, was traditionally stripped off and arbitrarily attached to the Middle East, or to southern Europe.
To get an idea of how absurd these propositions are, maps can be quite instructive, especially if they’re not of the Mercator Projection variety, meaning that they show Africa relative to the other continents at its true size.
It is the continent where, once newspapers got around to promoting African-Americans to their foreign staffs, itself a painfully belated occurrence, Africa became for a long time and for many the obligatory “one-and-done” assignment.
Finally, it is the continent where editors have always stretched credulity and good sense to speak commonly of events or trends taking place “in Africa.” This, on the theory that something short of a major catastrophe happening in any given African country was too insignificant to warrant the commission of precious column inches. Hence the silly phraseology — and you should watch for it — “across Africa…”
The best test for whether this is prudent, or even coherent usage is to take the formula and alter it thusly: “across Asia…” or “across South America…”
To be sure, there are occasionally continent-wide phenomena worth chronicling — witness the European financial crisis. But absent unusual events such as these, the “across____” formulation invites due ridicule, which brings us back to its lazy and commonplace use on the subject of Africa. One wishes to ask why use such vacuous wording?
There was a more immediate source of inspiration for this brief item, though. Yes, I almost forgot.
It was the Washington Post‘s “coverage” of the Congo electoral crisis in today’s paper (link attached). The astute reader will see that it doesn’t come from the Washington Post at all. No. It is an Associated Press article.
I have nothing against the AP, but the last thing the big, and still rich and influential American news outlets need to be doing is outsourcing their coverage of what is already the worst covered part of the world.
The Post, in fact, has a great tradition of Africa coverage. Many years ago, I got my start as a stringer for them, inspired and mentored by the formidable Leon Dash.
Let me tick off some other names (and this is surely not an exhaustive rundown):
Blaine Harden, Neil Henry, Lynne Duke, Emily Wax, Karl Vick, Doug Farah, Stephanie McCrummen, John Pomfret, Keith Richburg.
There is immense value in the kind of investment that this list implies — value for American media, and value for a news consuming public that has been historically and woefully underserved in terms of African news and analysis.
These objections of mine are far from sentimental. Many times, we’ve seen the cost (a la Rwanda) of being underinvested in African news when a major historical crisis erupts on the continent. Anyone who re-reads coverage of the first 30 days of the genocide in that country — which is instructive on many levels — will immediately know what this means and understand its importance.
Today is a time of opportunity on the continent. It is a continent with a middle class larger than India’s. China knows this, but do Americans? Click to read more about African growth
By mid-century, Africa will have nearly as many people as China and India combined. Can farmed out news coverage, like today’s story on the Congo, really be justified under the circumstances? Can the lazy old posting patterns, of no languages or prior study or training really be justified?
Africa deserves better, and so does the American public. Click to read the Post piece

Africa’s New Engine: Looking to its middle-class consumers to drive prosperity.

howard — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:33:21 +0000

ONE of the noticeable things across Africa these days is how many people have cell phones—71 percent of adults in Nigeria, for example, 62 percent in Botswana, and more than half the population in Ghana and Kenya, according to a 2011 Gallup poll.
Cell phone use has grown faster in Africa than in any other region of the world since 2003, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Africa became the world’s second most connected region after Asia in late 2011, with 616 million mobile subscribers, according to U.K.-based Informa Telecoms & Media.
Of course, South Africa—the most developed nation—still has the highest penetration, but across Africa, countries have leapfrogged technology, bringing innovation and connectivity even to remote parts of the continent, opening up mobile banking and changing the way business is done.
Seeing the cell phone success, banking and retail firms are eyeing expansion in Africa to target a growing middle class of consumers. According to the African Development Bank (AfDB), one of the results of strong economic growth in recent years has been a significant increase in the size of the African middle class.
The middle class will continue to grow, from 355 million (34 percent of sub-Saharan Africa’s population) in 2010 to 1.1 billion (42 percent) in 2060, the bank says (AfDB, 2011a). And this middle class is the key to Africa’s future prosperity. (please follow the link above for the whole article.)

Newt Gingrich, Maureen Dowd and the Congo…

howard — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 18:01:16 +0000

It’s no fun having to come to Newt’s defense against Mo Dowd’s column, linked to here, especially because I so fundamentally disagree with the politician’s position, which is basically a defense of Belgium’s legacy in the country.
On technical grounds, however, one is obliged to offer this limited defense.
The position Gingrich laid out in his thesis was neither original nor even remotely rare for its time. Scholars, Western diplomats and plenty of “Old Africa Hands,” said much the same thing.
The argument went something like this: “Congo (and for many sub-Saharan Africa in general) had been decolonized too soon. Can’t you see, once the ‘blacks’ took over it’s all gone to hell…”
Even much more recently, say in the last 10 years, it has been common to see Western commentators promote the “solution” of recolonization of Africa, via the United Nations or via special international trusts that could be set up to administer countries or regions. How quickly we forget.
The best antidote for this kind of nonsense is better information about the continent. This begins with much better reporting; reporting that shows the rich political and demographic complexities at play, the fast changing economic dynamics (what Western publication bothers with serious business reporting in Africa?), etc.
What we mostly get instead is a very anachronistic approach focused on crisis, and parochial Western obsessions like terrorism and Islam. That’s how it comes to be, to take just one example, that Somalia heavily dominates East Africa coverage for some important publications, even while East Africa emerges as the fastest growing region of the continent.
The Dowd column: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/opinion/sunday/dowd-out-of-africa-and-into-iowa.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Reference Points

howard — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 04:15:00 +0000

One must simply call things by their name sometimes.
In this day and time, is unacceptable to have newspaper coverage of an African election in which there are few to no substantive comments from Africans of the country in question.
No foreign commentator, no matter how seemingly insightful or well-placed, can make up for this. Foreign-based Africans, even when they are from that country, are scarcely better as substitutes. Nor, for that matter, do random interviews with street vendors stand the test.
One presumably goes to a country to take the time and effort to understand the range of views on a topical situation of the people of that country. This is how reporters work all over the world – except too often, I regret to say, in Africa, where we forget the most basic rules of enterprise and balance.
The point of view of a foreign embassy should not be given pride of place in a political analysis, particularly absent a bilateral crisis with that embassy’s nation.
If a political figure from a nation is treated in a critical fashion by outsiders, we should also have the point of view of locals, both high (civil society, politicians, and in the obvious interest of balance, a response from members of the criticized party) and low (meaning what are often termed ordinary people)

Book Roundup

howard — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:27:43 +0000

It’s been a very busy time in the semester, with two classes going – Foreign Reporting and Photography. I’m in the thick of my book writing project, as well, and I’ve been able so far to maintain a fairly good pace. The hope is to be finished by early spring.

In lieu of even thumbnail impressions, here is a quick roundup of what I’ve been reading:

What Price for Privatization: Cultural Encounter with Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt, by Elizabeth C. Parsons;
The Rebel, by Albert Camus;
A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway;
Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power, by Yan Xuetong;
Delivering Delivering Development, by Edward R. Carr;
La Silenciosa Conquista China: Una Investigacion por 25 Paises para Descubrir Como La Potencia del Siglo XXI Esta Forjando Su Futura Hegemonia, by Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araujo;
Scouting on two continents, by Major Frederick Russell Burnham;
Copper boom in Zambia : boom for whom?, by Chola Mwitwa, Claude Kabemba;
Zambia, mining, and neoliberalism : Boom and bust on the globalized Copperbelt, edited by Alastair Fraser and Miles Larmer;
Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence, edited by Scott Strauss and Lars Waldorf.

Next up for me:
China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua;
Arrival City, by Doug Sanders;
The Origins of AIDS, by Jacques Pepin.
The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thomson and the American Way of War, by Joshua Kurlantzick

As I say whenever the opportunity presents itself, what a blessing it is to work in the midst of a great library, such as the Columbia system’s.

Columbia University’s African Diplomatic Forum (ADF) 2011

howard — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:48:35 +0000

I hosted the panel: BRICS: The New Roles and Relationships for African Development (Room 1501)

“The Resource Boom and FDI in Africa”

howard — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:46:02 +0000

I moderated a panel on this topic hosted by the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment.

Opening remarks: Karl P. Sauvant, Executive Director, Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment

Keynote Address: Jeffrey D. Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University

Session I: What are the defining and important features of the current resource boom in Africa

The rapid growth of the rising BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as well as other emerging markets such as those in the Middle East and the associated demand for raw materials is driving the growth of extractive industries worldwide. In addition to their growing role as consumers, these emerging markets are also increasingly entering the sector as investors. This trend is also true in Africa, where the BRICS will constitute 30% of the new foreign investment coming into Africa over the next decade (the bulk of FDI inflows and stock still comes from OECD countries). The new role of emerging markets in Africa, as both investors and consumers, is arguably impacting the nature of the current resource boom in Africa. For instance, emerging market investors are entering into new partnerships with African governments, including through resource-for-infrastructure contracts and other financing arrangements for infrastructure and energy production. The current resource boom has also brought new countries and resources to the fore; new discoveries have changed the landscape of host governments, and shifting interest in natural resources (for instance, in biofuels, land and agriculture, potash and phosphates, rare earths, etc…) are presenting new opportunities and risks for the stakeholders.

This panel addressed:

- What are the defining features of the current resource boom and how do they differ from earlier booms? Who are the new players, and what are the implications of their increasing role as consumers and investors? How do their corporate strategies and diplomatic relations differ from the traditional investors and diplomatic partners?

- Are there new trends in natural resource investments? Are investments in land, for instance, surging as much as some are reporting? How has the map of host countries been affected? Are related sectors (infrastructure, agro-processing, energy) also attracting these new investors?

- Do these new trends of FDI (in agriculture, infrastructure) present an opportunity for more sustainable and diversified growth than traditional FDI in mineral, oil and gas extraction?

Moderator: Howard French, Author, journalist and associate professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Panelists:

Harry G. Broadman, Leader, Emerging Markets Practice and Chief Economist, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
Richard Duffy, Executive Vice President Africa, AngloGold Ashanti
Rohit Malpani, Senior Campaigns Advisor – Private Sector Department, Oxfam America
Alais Ole-Morindat, Chair, Tanzania Natural Resource Forum
Peter Rosenblum, Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein Clinical Professor of Human Rights Law, Columbia Law School

Watch This Man: On Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

howard — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 12:34:37 +0000

‘Civilisation’s going to pieces,’ Tom Buchanan, the Yale-educated millionaire, abruptly informs Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? … The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.’ ‘Tom’s getting very profound,’ his wife Daisy remarks. Buchanan carries on: ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’ ‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ Daisy whispers with a wink at Nick. But there’s no stopping Buchanan. ‘And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilisation – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’

‘There was something pathetic in his concentration,’ Carraway, the narrator, observes, ‘as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more.’ The scene, early in the novel, helps identify Buchanan as a bore – and a boor. It also evokes a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class. Wary of Jay Gatz, the self-made man with a fake Oxbridge pedigree, Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race.

Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early 20th century, in which the Yellow Peril seemed real, the Ku Klux Klan had re-emerged, and Theodore Roosevelt worried loudly about ‘race-suicide’. In 1917, justifying his reluctance to involve the United States in the European war, Woodrow Wilson told his secretary of state that ‘white civilisation and its domination over the world rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact.’

Hysteria about ‘white civilisation’ gripped America after Europe’s self-mutilation in the First World War had encouraged political assertiveness among subjugated peoples from Egypt to China. Unlike other popular racists, who parsed the differences between Nordic and Latin peoples, Stoddard proposed a straightforward division of the world into white and coloured races. He also invested early in Islamophobia, arguing in The New World of Islam (1921) that Muslims posed a sinister threat to a hopelessly fractious and confused West. Like many respectable eugenicists of his time, Stoddard later found much to like about the Nazis, which marked him out for instant superannuation following the exposure of Nazi crimes in 1945.

The banner of white supremacism has been more warily raised ever since in post-imperial Europe, and very rarely by mainstream politicians and writers. In the United States, racial anxieties have been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’.

Ferguson himself is homo atlanticus redux. In a preface to the UK edition of Civilisation: The West and the Rest, he writes of being seduced away from a stodgy Oxbridge career, early in the 2000s, to the United States, ‘where the money and power actually were’. The author of two previous books about 19th-century banking, Ferguson became known to the general public with The Pity of War (1998), a long polemic, fluent and bristling with scholarly references, that blamed Britain for causing the First World War. According to Ferguson, Prussia wasn’t the threat it was made out to be by Britain’s Liberal cabinet. The miscalculation not only made another war inevitable after 1919, and postponed the creation of an inevitably German-dominated European Union to the closing decades of the 20th century, it also tragically and fatally weakened Britain’s grasp on its overseas possessions.

This wistful vision of an empire on which the sun need never have set had an immediately obvious defect. It grossly underestimated – in fact, ignored altogether – the growing strength of anti-colonial movements across Asia, which, whatever happened in Europe, would have undermined Britain’s dwindling capacity to manage its vast overseas holdings. At the time, however, The Pity of War seemed boyishly and engagingly revisionist, and it established Ferguson’s reputation: he was opinionated, ‘provocative’ and amusing, all things that seem to be more cherished in Britain’s intellectual culture than in any other… (Please follow the link to continue.)

Surviving Mao, Revamping a Nation

howard — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 02:53:52 +0000

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
From the outset of his hefty biography of the second most powerful leader in the history of modern China, Ezra Vogel wants readers to know that writing about Deng Xiaoping was not easy.

As a figure who for decades swam with the sharks—and survived—at the highest levels of Chinese politics under an emperor-like Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) relied on a prodigious memory rather than prepared texts when he spoke; he left behind no notes or personal papers; and in most matters he scrupulously observed party discipline. Even as he suffered through three purges, Deng was said to have refrained from speaking with his wife and children about political matters.

Such limitations on the aspiring biographer have not prevented Mr. Vogel from producing a lively portrait of the man who, the author believes, may have had the greatest long-term impact on world history of any 20th-century figure. Mr. Vogel argues that Deng was responsible for lifting 300 million Chinese out of poverty and launching a process of unprecedented urbanization that, during his era alone, saw 200 million people migrate to towns and cities from the poor countryside. While doing so, Deng “guided China through a difficult transition from a backward, closed, overly rigid socialist nation to a global power with a modernizing economy,” Mr. Vogel writes. The reforms that Deng engineered, Mr. Vogel argues, “rank among the most basic structural changes since the Chinese empire took shape during the Han dynasty over two millennia ago.”

The book is certainly not without defects. One wonders how the author’s privileged access to sources deeply invested in the prestige of China’s system and in the person of Deng himself may have contributed to a result that too often reads like an authorized political narrative, however richly informed. The diminutive man from Sichuan Province whom Mao described as a “needle inside of a ball of cotton” is sometimes lionized more than analyzed in the book, coming across as a truth-seeker who never favored friends and always placed China’s interests above all.

The Real Deng

howard — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:42:09 +0000

Copyright The New York Review of Books

When a scientific experiment uncovers a new phenomenon, a scientist is pleased. When an experiment fails to reveal something that the scientist originally expected, that, too, counts as a result worth analyzing. A sense of the “nonappearance of the expected” was my first impression of Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. The term “human rights” does not appear in its index, and it turns out that this omission was not an oversight of the indexer. Systematic nonconsideration of human rights is one of the book’s features.

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

Vogel, an emeritus professor of social sciences at Harvard, retells the story of the massacre in a chapter he calls “The Tiananmen Tragedy,” which ends with a meticulous—and, it seems, angst-ridden—review of all the ways one might evaluate the “tragedy.” In the end Vogel comes down to the following:

What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid—even spectacular—economic growth…. Today hundreds of millions of Chinese are living far more comfortable lives than they were living in 1989, and they enjoy far greater access to information and ideas around the world than at any time in Chinese history. Both educational level and longevity have continued to rise rapidly. For these reasons and others, Chinese people take far greater pride in their nation’s achievements than they did in the previous century.

Is China Drinking its Own Kool-Aid?

howard — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:55:49 +0000

Copyright Asia Times

This has been a strange and unsettling year for Chinese geopolitical strategists. Like French generals, they seem intent on fighting the last war, even as new challenges appear on their doorstep.

China recently issued a White Paper on “China’s Peaceful Development”. It revisits the old tropes of the “Chinese way” of apolitical commitment to economic development as the panacea for “win-win” peaceful world progress – and the basis for welcoming China into the world geopolitical order as a key

participant, not a detested competitor.
Peace and development are the two major issues of today’s world. Peace, development and cooperation are part of the irresistible global trend. The world today is moving towards multipolarity and economic globalization is gaining momentum. There is a growing call for change in the international system and the world is facing more historical challenges. To share opportunities presented by development and jointly ward off risks is the common desire of the people of the world.

Economic globalization has become an important trend in the evolution of international relations. Countries of different systems and different types and at various development stages are in a state of mutual dependence, with their interests intertwined. The problem is not that China doesn’t believe in – or practice – these lofty aspirations. [1]
In fact, while the West has cratered the world economy and blundered into a series of illegal and semi-legal and ill-conceived military ventures that have brought untold suffering to millions of people, the Chinese government has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and hasn’t fought a serious military engagement since the disastrous Vietnam incursion in 1979.

The problem is that most of the nations that matter don’t, or at least are unwilling to accept a world order that rewards China for its achievements in state capitalism with an important and respected voice in the affairs of the world.

EO Wilson’s Theory of Everything

howard — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:32:46 +0000

Copyright The Atlantic

MY FIRST GLIMPSE of E. O. Wilson came in July, in the late afternoon, when the light fades and dies with alarming speed in Mozambique. He had emerged from his cabin within Gorongosa National Park, one of southern Africa’s great, historic game reserves, just as the nightly winter chill was bestirring itself, and across an expanse of garden, he appeared almost spectral: tall, gaunt, white-haired, and possessed of a strange gait—slow and deliberate, yet almost woozy in the faint swerve described by each long-legged stride.

Wilson’s head was cocked sharply downward as he walked, as if he suffered a neck condition. (Later he would tell me this habit grew from a lifetime of scanning the ground for insect life.) In his right hand, he carried a flowing white net, like what Vladimir Nabokov might have used to pursue butterflies by Lake Geneva. Without fanfare, just before dark, on the first evening of his first visit to Africa below the Sahara, he had begun his first bug-collecting expedition.

In Africa, an Election Reveals Skepticism of Chinese Involvement (Atlantic)

howard — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:10:16 +0000

An excerpt:

On the eve of Zambia’s presidential elections last week, one of the most common tropes about the vote was to describe it as a referendum on China. For a long time now, Zambia has been at the leading edge of China’s drive to expand its relations with the continent. Chinese have migrated to Zambia by the thousands, setting themselves up in mining, farming, commerce and small industry.

Although China is a latecomer to Zambia’s decades-old copper industry, it has quickly established itself as an ambitious rival to “traditional” mining partners like Australia and South Africa. As almost everywhere in Africa these days, Chinese contractors are building highways, dams, and other large infrastructure projects. Zambia even boasts two Chinese-built special economic zones, and has recently allowed banking in the Chinese renminbi instead of the kwacha, dollar, or euro to facilitate trade with China.

But these are not the only developments that have set Zambia apart, or at least placed it ahead of the pack in terms of observable trends in its relations with China. Zambia was one of the first African countries where the role of China and of Chinese people in the country became an explicit and potent political issue. During the campaigning for elections in 2006 and 2008, the newly elected leader, Michael Sata, made a sport of baiting China, calling its businesspeople in the country “profiteers,” not investors, and denouncing Chinese for “bringing in their own people to push wheelbarrows instead of hiring local people.”

“Zambia has become a province of China,” Sata thundered in one campaign rally back then. “The Chinese are the most unpopular people in the country because no one trusts them. The Chinaman is coming just to invade and exploit Africa.”

How Qaddafi Reshaped Africa

howard — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:08:30 +0000

Whenever most of us think of oil-rich, Arab-speaking countries, our imagination performs a trick with our sense of geography, placing us by default in the Middle East.

Of the three North African countries at the heart of the popular uprisings that have riveted the world over the last several weeks, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi has always done the most to assert his country’s African identity, staking its prestige, its riches and his own personal influence above all on its place in the continent.

As a deep-pocketed and sparsely populated state ever in need of labor, it has always made sense for Qaddafi to look south. Libya is far too small and peripheral for it to ever aspire to real influence in the Arab world. By comparison, the almost equally small but far poorer countries of nearby West Africa, wracked as they are with chronic misrule and instability, loom temptingly on the horizon as fruit ripe for picking.

Whatever our loose or flawed sense of geography tells us, things have always been thus. For at least 1,000 years, Morocco’s kingdoms have periodically thrust southward, establishing shape-shifting realms from present-day Niger all the way to Senegal.

Qaddafi’s big idea was to meld a modern, anti-Western, anti-imperial discourse with an impassioned pan-Africanism, an ideal that still resonates deeply across the continent.

For decades in Africa, Qaddafi has put his money where his mouth was: showering petro-dollars on favored clients, funding liberation groups, nurturing political movements, and even paying civil servants. To make sure that no one missed the message, he has often paid a huge portion of the operating costs of the continental body, the African Union.

The problem with Qaddafi’s pan-Africanism, like his rule in general is that it has steadily turned into a vessel for his megalomania.

As a reporter with a career-long association with the African continent, I have been in a rare position to witness this trend beginning with some of Qaddafi’s earliest African exploits.

In 1983, I scrambled from Ivory Coast to Chad to witness the breakout of war between French and Libyan forces there. Qaddafi had recently spoken of fully “integrating” his country with its southern neighbor.

I quickly found my way to the eastern front, where I watched the conflict from a desert foxhole with French soldiers as they spotted screaming, low-flying Jaguar fighter bombers pounding Libyan positions nearby. That same year, I traveled to Burkina Faso, where Qaddafi had flown to celebrate the seizure of power by a charismatic young army captain, Thomas Sankara, who he clearly saw as a promising understudy.

Eye Contact, by Ed Kashi (NYRB)

howard — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 18:20:30 +0000

“These images represent moments I’ve always rejected during my editing work because someone was looking into the camera. I always refer to it as eye contact. I strive to disappear and find candid moments as a photojournalist. I want the line between documenter and documented to disappear. These are the overlooked images where I have become present in the picture.”

Children of the Mountain (Gorongosa, Mozambique – July 2011)

howard — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:45:28 +0000

Fela: Music Was His Weapon

howard — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:18:57 +0000

This is a link to my interview with Kojo Nnamdi of WAMU in Washington DC about Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

Revising Kagame: Myth and Reality After the Genocide in Rwanda

howard — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 16:07:12 +0000

On September 19, 2011, I took part in a panel discussion in New York about Paul Kagame’s post-genocide political record, hosted by the Open Society Foundations.

Summer Reading via the iPad

howard — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:12:09 +0000

I’ve been on the road in Africa, save for a week’s detour to Hungary, since May 15, and the odyssey will finally wind down in a couple of more weeks.
In the last few days I’ve given a bit of thought to my reading habits on the road and how they may or may not differ from earlier periods in my life as a correspondent and inveterate traveler. My iPad has been my sole source of book reading during these months away and mostly that’s been a very good thing, even if quite recently I’ve found myself longing for the pleasure of a physical book now and then.
I seem to read faster on the iPad, and it’s also great for highlighting and annotation. What is most revolutionary about it, though, is the ability to carry a real library around. I can remember trips in the ’80s and ’90s to far out of the way places, like Yemen and Sudan, to name just two, where I had to pace my reading for fear of being caught out in a lonely place without that best of companions, a good book (by which I do not mean the uninspiring paperback fare that can almost always be found on the road in a pinch).
To give an idea of how the iPad has revolutionized such matters, I thought I’d give a quick rundown of what I’ve read using it since leaving home. With no further ado and in no particular oder:

The Future of Life, Biophilia, and Anthill, all by EO Wilson, who I am profiling.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (excellent, and I’ll come back to this in a future post).
Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars, by Sonia Falerio (excellent, and again I’ll come back to this in a future post).
The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, by Francis Fukuyama (wonderful on many subjects, notably the comparative political development of China and India, which is illuminating, as is the discussion of political development in the Muslim world, the emergence of individuality, women’s rights and civil society in the West, among many other things).
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, luminous story telling by Li Yiyun.
Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding and How We Can Improve the World Even More, by Charles Kenney (a fantastic revisionist assessment of the economics and strategy of aid and development that I’ll use in the classroom).
The Fate of Africa: A History of 50 Years of Independence, by Martin Meredith. I’ve owned this for a while and have only now gotten around to completing it. Meredith didn’t inspire me. The book has some interesting moments, especially in vignette form, but it flies at 30,000 feet without giving much sense of any big picture or, what is worse, escaping the most conventional, newspaper-clipping kinds of analysis of Africa’s recent history.
How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor, by Erik S. Reinert (Fascinating if a little dated. I want to come back to this in this space.)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré. (One needs to escape now and then, and this is one of the best ways around. A reread.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, by Robert D. Kaplan (Someone get this man an editor. There’s some interesting stuff in here, but it’s highly repetitive and bangs drums on the inevitability of strategic competition annoyingly. Usually in the US publishing industry, the sub-title of a book is little more than a PR lie. Not so with this book. Kaplan would do well to slow down and dwell in fewer places and get to know more ordinary folks, however.)
Famine & Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid, by Peter Gill (indispensable background to contemporary Ethiopia, superbly informed).
Travels in Siberia, by Ian Frazier (Another form of escape for me. I’ve never been to Russia and have been particularly drawn to it as a subject. That’s why I chose this, and Frazier, whose work I’ve long enjoyed in the New Yorker, was a wonderful, luxuriant guide.)

What’s left? I hope to read John Darnton’s memoir, Almost a Family before I get home.

Koffi Olomide – Golden Star

howard — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 08:48:07 +0000

Although his rich and fluid tenor voice remains fabulous, and he continues to crank out the hits, it has been some time since Koffi Olomide has done any truly interesting work from an artistic standpoint – far too long, in fact.
I knew him a bit in the 1990s, when he was still evolving and taking risks, and I listen to his recent stuff in pain because it has become so generic, so repetitive, as he recycles his riffs and lives on his laurels.

That’s not what this post is meant to be about, though. Rather, I want to point fans of Congolese rhumba to what may be his greatest work, this obscure but still available disk, which is a melodic triumph of the first order. One listens and hears a young talent one can easily imagine becoming a sort of Sinatra of Central Africa, so rich is his voice, so sure is his phrasing and timing. The music itself is wonderful, too, not having yet devolved into the formulaic party patterns from his bands that we are so familiar with today.

A must for any fan or collector:

Inside Betty Carter

howard — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 22:32:35 +0000

Not one of the better known albums by the late BC, perhaps my favorite in the immediate post-Sarah, post-Ella generation of female Jazz vocalist.
Betty almost always sang in deeply personal ways about old-fashioned love for her man, but with an emotional truth that put her best work way over the top.
As I sat working on an article this afternoon, I was really struck by her rendition of Some Other Time, which is superb in both its timing and voicing:

“Yes, some other time I could resist you. Not now. There is no word, now that I’ve kissed you with all that is me, honey.
“Imagine me thinking you could never phase me; the tricks my imagination plays on me me.
“You smile and this heart of mine betrays me. You know it is so.
“Let’s take a vow to love forever, not some other time. Let’s wait no longer. Not some other time, but now.”

I must add that This is Always, the first track on the CD is the best version of this song I’ve heard.

Bill Evans – Live at the Village Vanguard

howard — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:02:00 +0000

I spend most of my portable music listening time playing my i-whatever on random, as frequently noted here. After wrapping up a lengthy, intense and idea-dense interview with E.O. Wilson here in Mozambique the device served me up this essential Bill Evans work from 1961.

Evans is almost always a special listen for me, inducing both attentiveness and relaxation somehow, and Village Vanguard excels in that regard. A favorite song here: Solar (perhaps Gloria’s Step, too). The bass work by Scott LaFaro is as distinctive as Evans’s exquisitely melodic piano. LaFaro died in an accident just ten days later, in one of those tragic fates that seem so concentrated in our Jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, and would soon enough snare Evans, too.

A must for any Jazz collector.

Survival by Bob Marley

howard — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:15:03 +0000

I let the iPod go random most of the time, and today, just after dusk in Maputo it served up two songs from this album, which I hadn’t listened to for quite some time. What powerful music! Could this be Marley’s best? Hard to say, but also hard to beat.
A favorite here? Babylon System.

A sample:
Babylon system is the vampire, yea! (vampire)
Suckin’ the children day by day, yeah!
Me say: de Babylon system is the vampire, falling empire,
Suckin’ the blood of the sufferers, yea-ea-ea-ea-e-ah!
Building church and university, wo-o-ooh, yeah! -
Deceiving the people continually, yea-ea!
Me say them graduatin’ thieves and murderers;
Look out now: they suckin’ the blood of the sufferers (sufferers).
Yea-ea-ea! (sufferers)

Complete lyrics: Click to read more

Yellow Fever

howard — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:01:46 +0000

Fela Kuti’s immortal attack on the obsession with light skin and hence with skin lightening.

The lyrics: Click to read more

The Slave Coast

howard — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:41:52 +0000

Dusk, Bonyere, Ghana's Western Region, where many Americans were embarked as slaves.

Books by E.O. Wilson

howard — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 11:15:42 +0000

I’ve been reading a lot of Wilson lately, in preparation for a meeting with him – details to come.
Other than in the general press, I haven’t done a lot of true science reading for a very long time, but what an extraordinary pleasure this has been. To be truthful, the books I’ve read have been written for the general public and bear no relationship to scholarly writing, but that takes nothing at all away from its value; quite the contrary.
Two titles that I think are fantastic introductions to this man’s work are: The Future of Life, and especially, Biophilia (links below). I also enjoyed Anthill: A Novel, Wilson’s late-career foray into fiction.

African Singles

howard — Sun, 10 Jul 2011 19:29:57 +0000

GOU

I will be photo blogging my trip around the continent this summer with occasional uploads, in no particular order. This image was made last week in Mali’s Niger River Delta.

Salute the General

howard — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 22:25:42 +0000

General Defao, that is, the source of some of the purest and least affected soukous to emanate from Congo.

A great place to start would be the album “Super Guitar Soukous,” where one finds one of my favorite cuts of his, the all-time classic, is Mosolo Na Ngai:

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Fela Kuti – Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense

howard — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 00:42:00 +0000
I listened to this song, Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense three times in a row this morning, on Lumley Beach, in Freetown, Sierra Leone. I’d heard the song before, of course. It’s on my iPod, after all. Nonetheless, it had never really registered with me. I happen to have just been doing some reading about Nigerian history in the early 1980s, when oil was booming and democracy was being tried on for size. In addition to being as rhythmically compelling as almost anything Fela recorded, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, is an unusually dense and powerful statement about the corruption of Nigerian spirits and processes during that era. Highly recommended. Fela’s Greatest Hits, a fantastic selection of songs from the musician’s …

Do We Have the Congo Rape Crisis All Wrong?

howard — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:58:16 +0000

Copyright The Atlantic

The international media lit up last week with news of a new study on rape in the Congo published in the American Journal of Public Health. The primary takeaway, that 48 women are raped every hour in Congo, was followed by larger questions: why is this happening, and can anything be done to stop it? But the story on the ground may be far different than how it appears in studies and in the media.

Reaction to the story was swift. Analyst Jason Stearns noted that this study is consistent with earlier reports and, while horrifying, not particularly surprising. Journalist Jina Moore pointed out that, since the data on which the study is based is about five years old, it may not accurately represent current reality. Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson asked a troubling question: “What if rape has actually become systemic — not a brutal act of conquest so much as a systemic, even rational occurrence in a system that has been built upon violence?” Charli Carpenter pointed out the problem with focusing only on women as victims and noted the need for more studies of the rapists themselves.

Activist Eve Ensler responded to the report with an angry editorial, in which she argues that the time for studying rape in the DRC is over. We already know that the Congo has a rape crisis, she wrote, and should focus instead on ending the violence once and for all.

The desire for action is understandable, but these studies are important for understanding the causes, and thus solutions, of the problems. A growing body of literature suggests that the prevailing journalistic and activist accounts of the nature of rape in the Congo are often incomplete, and, in many cases, simply wrong. While no one disputes that armed men engage in rape against civilian populations, the story of who is raping whom turns out to be significantly more complicated than the popular narrative suggests.

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Young And Dangerous: What can be done to prevent peacekeepers from having to fire on armed children?

howard — Tue, 24 May 2011 14:53:13 +0000

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Roméo Dallaire, the retired Canadian army general, is perhaps best known as one of the rare Western heroes of the Rwandan genocide: His insistent warnings about the scope and severity of that unfolding horror went unheeded. He is also a tireless campaigner against human-rights abuses in Africa, not least the use of child soldiers in the many wars there.

But a more intimate sense of Mr. Dallaire comes from a personal anecdote in “They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children,” where he reflects on his Canadian childhood and on the ways in which boys, even before reaching adolescence, can become acutely aware of tribal allegiances and enmities. Growing up in Quebec, he and the other children broke into hard-edged camps. The “French-Catholic/English-Protestant tension” was a constant in his parish. “At times, blood was spilt in the name of something we absolutely could not understand: they were the Anglos (les têtes ca rrées) and we were the French (frogs) and we had to be antagonists without question.”

However much those children battled, though, they remained children, free to indulge their imaginations, to develop their minds and revel in the freedoms that childhood affords. Later in the book, having attested to the potential for an awful tribalism that lurks in every young heart, he shows us what happens when “inhuman adults” strip away all the trappings of childhood and shove a machine gun into little hands.

Mr. Dallaire writes in chillingly personal terms about the experiences that have fueled his determination to take up this cause. Describing peacekeeping work in an African conflict zone, he writes: “You raise your own weapon and peer through the magnifying gun sight at the leader. Shock hits you as you realize this soldier is not your equal in age, strength, training, understanding. This soldier is a child.”

Such stunned realizations are at the heart of one of the book’s main inquiries: What can be done to head off confrontations that might put international peacekeepers in the position of having to fire on armed children? Mr. Dallaire tries to bring the subject to life with fictional sections in the book. One story involves the tragic encounter of a peacekeeper and a marauding militia member who approaches him with machine gun blazing. In their split-second confrontation, the peacekeeper’s instinct and training take over and he fires his weapon, killing the attacker—who turns out to be a young girl.

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New Ivorian Leader Faces Challenges, Criticism

howard — Mon, 16 May 2011 16:44:16 +0000

An interview I did with NPR, 5/12/2011:

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Video commentary on African rape

howard — Sun, 15 May 2011 18:57:26 +0000

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Rules for Writers

howard — Wed, 11 May 2011 02:09:45 +0000

Copyright The Guardian

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can’t do aren’t worth doing. Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won’t make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don’t confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Book Review: China: The Pessoptimist Nation

howard — Mon, 09 May 2011 16:02:37 +0000

Copyright The China Beat

You can supposedly tell a lot about a country’s psychology from the individuals it chooses to commemorate. The Scots celebrate the persevering Robert the Bruce who—on the run from English armies—drew inspiration from watching a spider try repeatedly, and eventually manage, to spin its web around a beam. The English are keen on the absent-mindedly cake-burning King Alfred. The Russians fete Ivan Susanin, a salt-of-the-earth peasant who in 1613 misled an army of marauding Poles away from the tsar and into a freezing bog, and Dmitry Pozharsky, the prince who organised the 1612 defence of Moscow to expel—you guessed it—the Poles.

China lionises a number of straightforwardly positive heroes: generals, emperors, and ministers lauded for their courage, doggedness, incorruptibility, and so on. Slightly more ambivalent, perhaps, is its fondness for one Goujian, a fifth-century BC king of the state of Yue. Having been captured by a rival ruler, the king of Wu, Goujian devoted himself to maintaining a duplicitous show of submissiveness: kowtowing before his conqueror, living amid piles of royal horse manure, even eating his captor’s excrement. Moved by Goujian’s capitulation, the king of Wu allowed him to return, a free man, to Yue. For the next twenty years, Goujian subjected himself to endless unpleasantnesses—spending his winters standing in cold water, hugging hot braziers in deep summer—in order to keep alive the memory of his humiliating discomforts in Wu and to feed his desire for revenge. He is renowned for sleeping on a bed of brushwood over which was suspended a bile-filled gallbladder which he would lick whenever he was in danger of forgetting his past bitterness. For some twenty years, he schemed and plotted until, finally, he succeeded in destroying Wu. The story of Goujian—much repeated through Chinese history but commemorated with particular intensity during the twentieth century—seems to highlight a Chinese interest in heroic attributes that are less than wholly wholesome: that are obsessed with humiliation, self-loathing, and vengefulness. [1]

This preoccupation with humiliation, William Callahan argues in his excellent book China: The Pessoptimist Nation, is a key part of the story of modern China. Since China’s modern nationalists began earnestly trying to manufacture a strong, cohesive nation out of a messy, failing empire, they have relied heavily on the discourse of “national humiliation”: on regularly reminding the Chinese people of their modern history of defeats at the hands of the imperialist powers (Britain, France, the U.S.A., Japan), to spur them to better things. On the one hand, China’s modern elites have believed confidently in China’s right to regain its traditional place in the sun; on the other, this quest to forge a vigorous nation-state has betrayed a powerfully self-critical strain in the modern Chinese psyche—what Geremie Barmé has termed the pull between “self-hate and self-approbation.” Thanks to the highly successful “patriotic education” campaign introduced by the Communist state after 1989—which has dwelled on China’s “century of humiliation” inflicted by foreign imperialism, from the Opium War to the Second World War—the Chinese humiliation complex shows little sign of abating.
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Pirates Choice

howard — Fri, 06 May 2011 21:20:10 +0000

Buy this!

Fantastic, early 1980s Senegalese jam. Hard to classify, except to say this is African Jazz with a distinct Afro-Cuban pulse. Orchestre Baobob is a club band that held forth on Dakar’s night scene forever. One easily understands their staying power.

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Duke University Youthful Futures Conference

howard — Sun, 01 May 2011 20:52:54 +0000
I was a panelist at this conference held at Duke April 29-30, 2011 Seven out of ten Africans south of the Sahara are under thirty, and four out of ten under the age of fifteen. What comparisons might be drawn with the Caribbean, a region that is transitioning from youthful to aging if it is not yet graying (along with the rest of the world)? The Center for African and African-American Research at Duke University invites you to join us to discuss the significance of population age structure in sub-Saharan Africa – the only part of the world which will continue to grow younger over the next two decades – and in the Caribbean, and to explore the broad social, …

Where does good come from? Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson tries to upend biology, again

howard — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 22:13:31 +0000

Copyright The Boston Globe
April 17, 2011
On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

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Wilson is 81, an age at which he could be forgiven for retreating to a farm and lending his name to the occasional popular book about science. Over the past year he’s tried his hand at fiction writing, publishing a novel about ants — his scientific specialty — and landing a short story in The New Yorker. But he has also been pressing a disruptive scientific idea, one he reckons is currently in phase two of the Schopenhauer progression: outrage.

What Wilson is trying to do, late in his influential career, is nothing less than overturn a central plank of established evolutionary theory: the origins of altruism. His position is provoking ferocious criticism from other scientists. Last month, the leading scientific journal Nature published five strongly worded letters saying, more or less, that Wilson has misunderstood the theory of evolution and generally doesn’t know what he’s talking about. One of these carried the signatures of an eye-popping 137 scientists, including two of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard.

His new argument, in a nutshell, amounts to a frontal attack on long-accepted ideas about one of the great mysteries of evolution: why one creature would ever help another at its own expense. Natural selection means that the fittest pass down their genes to the next generation, and every organism would seem to have an overwhelming incentive to survive and reproduce. Yet, strangely, self-sacrifice exists in the natural world, even though it would seem to put individual organisms at an evolutionary disadvantage: The squirrel that lets out a cry to warn of a nearby predator is necessarily putting itself in danger. How could genes that lead to such behavior persist in a population over time? It’s a question that bedeviled even Charles Darwin, who considered altruism a serious challenge to his theory of evolution.

The puzzle of altruism is more than just a technical curiosity for evolutionary theorists. It amounts to a high-stakes inquiry into the nature of good. By identifying the mechanisms through which altruism and other advanced social behaviors have evolved in all kinds of living creatures — like ants, wasps, termites, and mole rats — we stand to gain a better understanding of the human race, and the evolutionary processes that helped us develop the capacity for collaboration, loyalty, and even morality. Figure out where altruism comes from, you might say, and you’ve figured out the magic ingredient that makes human civilization the wondrous, complex thing that it is. And perhaps this is the reason that the debate between Wilson and his critics, actually somewhat esoteric in substance, has become so heated.

The currently accepted explanation for altruism is something known as kin selection theory. It says that an organism trying to pass its genes down to future generations can do so indirectly, by helping a relative to survive and procreate. Your brother, for example, shares roughly half your genes. And so, by the dispassionate logic of evolution, helping him produce offspring is half as good for you as producing your own. Thus, acting altruistically towards someone with whom you share genetic material does not really constitute self-sacrifice: It’s just a different way of promoting your own genes. Wilson was one of the original champions of kin selection theory, but 40 years later, he is calling it a “gimmick,” and is imploring his colleagues to give it up.

“Kin selection is wrong,” Wilson said. “That’s it. It’s wrong.”

In Ivory Coast, Democrat to Dictator

howard — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 13:35:50 +0000

Copyright New York Times
Published: April 7, 2011
Paris

IN 1982, when I was a student in Abidjan, I went on strike for Laurent Gbagbo. President Félix Houphouët-Boigny — Ivory Coast’s first president, who ruled for more than 30 years — had forbidden Mr. Gbagbo, then a democracy activist and history professor, from holding a conference. The government detained about 100 of us demonstrators at a military base, where we spent two days without food. We didn’t regret it; we had pinned our hopes for democracy on Laurent Gbagbo.

But look at Mr. Gbagbo now: Soundly defeated at the polls last November after a decade as president, he refused to concede, plunging Ivory Coast into chaos. Those who protested were tortured and killed; his soldiers fired on gatherings of women and shelled a market, killing dozens. It’s only now, after United Nations and French troops have intervened and he has been besieged in his home, that he may be prompted to give up his hold on power.

How did the man who was once seen as the father of Ivorian democracy turn to tyranny? Was it the corruption of power? The intoxication of going from having nothing to everything all at once? Only a year before he was elected president, in 1999, I remember him denouncing Slobodan Milosevic, saying: “What does Milosevic think he can do with the whole world against him? When everyone in the village sees a white loincloth, if you are the only person to see it as black, then you are the one who has a problem.” But in the space of 10 years, he became deluded by power, a leader whose only ambitions were to build palaces and drive luxurious cars.

After last fall’s election, Mr. Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, refused to accept the results, in part because they had become evangelical Christians, and their pastors convinced them that God alone could remove them from power. Every day on state TV, fanatical clergymen called Mr. Gbagbo God’s representative on earth, and the winner of the election, Alassane Ouattara, the Devil’s. Many young Ivorians, poor, illiterate and easily brainwashed, believed this.

More prosaically, Mr. Gbagbo and his cronies — guilty, among other crimes, of stealing from the public coffer — fear being brought to justice before an international tribunal, so much so that they have decided to hold on to power no matter the cost. The fear of losing everything can make a dictator, even one who once was a champion of democracy, lose his mind.

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China-Africa Migration: Contemporary movement and socio economic change

howard — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:41:50 +0000

April 7, 2011 – 17:30 – 20:00
Location: Wits Professional Development Hub, Wits University, CNR of Jan Smuts and Empire Road (entrance off Empire Road), Johannesburg, South Africa
Speaker(s): Wilf Mbanga (Founder and Editor of “The Zimbabwean” Newspaper); Howard French (Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism); Sanusha Naidu
The Open Society Foundation in partnership with African Centre for Society & & Wits Journalism is hosting a panel discussion on:

China-Africa Migration: Contemporary movement and socio economic change

Wilf Mbanga – Founder and Editor of “The Zimbabwean” Newspaper
Title: Sino-Zim relations: who are the real beneficiaries?
Howard French – Convener, Open Society Fellow and author of “A Continent for the Taking”
Title: New trends in Chinese Migration to Africa
Sanusha Naidu – Senior Researcher, Human Sciences Research Council
Title: China and the changing balance of Africa’s political balance: What does this mean for Beijing’s engagements?
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Dr. D.M. French Dies at 86; Treated ’60s Marchers

howard — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:28:40 +0000

Copyright The New York Times

Dr. D.M. French Dies at 86; Treated ’60s Marchers
By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: April 5, 2011

Dr. David M. French, who helped found an organization of doctors that provided medical care to marchers during the civil rights era and who later organized health care programs in 20 African nations, died on Thursday in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86 and lived in Barboursville, Va.
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Dr. David M. French
The cause was a pulmonary embolism, his son Howard said.

A surgeon, Dr. French was an organizer of the Medical Committee for Human Rights and in March 1965 led more than 120 of its members in the third, and finally successful, attempt by voting-rights advocates to march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, the state capital.

Only a few committee members had been in Selma on March 7 when state troopers used billy clubs to beat back marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Two days later, a second march was stopped when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. decided to obey a court order.

But after the injunction was lifted, hundreds of marchers completed the 51-mile trek, with Dr. French’s group providing care. The marchers were protected along the route by federal troops deployed, in part, in response to telegrams sent by Dr. French to Johnson administration officials.

In June 1966, as president of the medical committee, Dr. French organized another contingent that provided care to hundreds of marchers two days after James Meredith, the first African-American to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a roadside sniper while on a march from Memphis to Jackson, Miss.

Guarded by state highway patrol officers, the marchers were not attacked along the 220-mile route, though some were beaten when they ventured from the main road. With little possibility of local medical care, they were treated by members of Dr. French’s team. Dr. French and his wife, Carolyn, used their Dodge camper as an ambulance. The Medical Committee for Human Rights became the ad hoc health arm for many protest movements.

In his 2009 book “The Good Doctors,” John Dittmer wrote: “Wherever there was a demonstration or confrontation, be it at the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma or on the Meredith March in the South, in Resurrection City with the Poor People’s Campaign, at Columbia University during the student rebellion, in the streets outside of Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention in 1969, or at Wounded Knee with the American Indian Movement, men and women in white coats and Red Cross armbands were on the scene, providing ‘medical presence’ and assistance to the people who were putting themselves at risk.”

David Marshall French was born in Toledo, Ohio, on May 30, 1924, to Joseph and Bertha Dickerson French. The family later moved to Columbus, Ohio.

Dr. French’s wife of 64 years, the former Carolyn Howard, died in 2009. Besides his son Howard, a former reporter for The New York Times, he is survived by four daughters, Lynn French, Mary Ann French, Bertha French and Dorothy Boone; three other sons, David Jr., Joseph and James; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Dr. French was a pre-med student at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland when he was drafted into the Army in World War II. Sent to a camp holding German prisoners of war in Abilene, Tex., he and other black soldiers were assigned to pick cotton to be used in uniforms. “It was not lost on him that the German officers were better treated than he was,” his daughter Lynn said.

Under a military program, he was accepted by the Howard University School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1948. Dr. French and his family later moved to Detroit, where he became active in the N.A.A.C.P.

In 1969, after earning a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins, Dr. French was recruited by the Boston University Medical School to establish and lead its department of community medicine, which created a network of health centers in the city.

During a drought in Africa in the 1970s, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts asked Dr. French to tour the continent’s Sahel region. As a result, he created and led Strengthening Health Delivery Systems, which has since trained thousands of health care workers in 20 West and Central African countries.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 6, 2011, on page B14 of the New York edition.

David French; healed the sick from Roxbury to Africa

howard — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:22:23 +0000

Copyright The Boston Globe

When Roxbury residents began planning in the mid-1960s to open a groundbreaking clinic, they wanted more than just good doctors.

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While creating the first comprehensive health center in the nation that would be under community control, Roxbury residents on a planning committee paid particular attention to the attitude each job candidate had about the clinic and the neighborhood. In Dr. David M. French, they found a skilled physician who had set aside a potentially lucrative career as a pediatric thoracic surgeon to focus on community medicine.

“I became aware of overwhelming health problems in the marches in the deep South,’’ he told the Globe in 1969, “but later realized that urban health problems with regard to delivery of services are just as difficult.’’

Dr. French, the first medical director of the Roxbury Comprehensive Community Health Center and the first chairman of what then was Boston University’s department of community medicine, died of renal failure Thursday in University Hospital in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86 and had been living in Barboursville, Va., in the ancestral home of his late wife.

His career at BU took him in the mid-1970s to Africa, where he ran a 20-country health program launched by institutions and organizations that included the university and the World Health Organization.

For the Roxbury residents, though, Dr. French’s medical and academic credentials made him an appealing candidate. He was fresh from a fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he supplemented his medical degree from the College of Medicine at Howard University in Washington, D.C., with a master’s in public health.

He had also directed medical care for historic marches in the civil rights era, including one across Alabama from Selma to Montgomery. His daughter Lynn of Washington, D.C., said that for the James Meredith march from Memphis to Jackson, Miss., in 1966, Dr. French and his wife, Carolyn, used the family van as a de facto ambulance.

In 1969, when Dr. French arrived in Boston, the city was a few years from court-ordered busing to desegregate its public schools. He needed only to read the Globe headline heralding his arrival to know race drew public scrutiny: “Black Doctor to Head Health Center.’’

His jobs at the Roxbury clinic and as a professor at BU straddled the disparate worlds of academia and urban strife.

“A social contract is being established here between the community and a social establishment, Boston University Medical Center,’’ he told the Globe in June 1970. “There is suspicion on both sides.’’

Dr. French was a good choice to allay those fears, for reasons that went beyond his training and social justice background.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, he moved with his family to Columbus, the state capital, just before kindergarten. There were benefits, he believed, to growing up far from what he saw as the pretentiousness of the East.

“He would tell you in all seriousness that people from the Midwest are the best people in the world,’’ his daughter said, “and of those best people of the world, the crème de la crème are from Ohio.’’

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Dr. French’s father attended Howard University, but dropped out for financial reasons during the Great Depression. Though he landed a secure job with the US Postal Service, he and his wife emphasized education for their sons, David and Joseph, who both became physicians.

As a child, Dr. French was a talented violinist, but he wanted to pursue medicine. For two years he attended what was then Western Reserve University in Cleveland, until he was drafted by the US Army, which sent him to medical school at Howard.

While there, he met Carolyn Howard. They married in December 1945, and he graduated from medical school in 1948.

During postgraduate training, he was chief surgical resident at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington and practiced in Detroit before returning to teach at Howard. He established a division of pediatric surgery at Freedmen’s while becoming involved in the civil rights movement.

As a founding member of the national Medical Committee for Human Rights, Dr. French decided that working as a surgeon would not satisfy his need to focus on social justice, so he returned to school for a master’s in public health at Johns Hopkins, graduating in 1969.

In the early 1970s, he was part of a group that US Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts sent on a study mission to Southeast Asia. The group reported on the destruction by US bombing of schools, homes, and hospitals in North Vietnam and on the burgeoning refugee crisis.

When he directed the multi-country health program in Africa, Dr. French lived with his family for several years in the Ivory Coast. Nominally retired after returning to the United States in 1986, he went on to work on medical matters for Helen Keller International, a nonprofit in New York that works on health issues worldwide, and for the service and development branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

“Like few people I have known, our father was restless,’’ his son Howard of New York City said at a family graveside service where Dr. French was buried next to his late wife, who died two years ago, in the family cemetery in Barboursville.

“He was hungry for growth, insatiable even, and he had the unfailing courage to pursue this instinct wherever it led him. But what was most remarkable to me was his generosity of spirit. This was a man who lived a life of urgency, but never an urgency in the service of self, but rather in the service of the society, of mankind, of others. . . . Here was a man never overly impressed with his own achievements, however great; never once in my memory given to boasting.’’

In addition to his daughter and son, Dr. French leaves three other daughters, Mary Ann of Barboursville, Dorothy French Boone of San Antonio, and Bertha of Amsterdam; three other sons, David Jr. of Barboursville, Joseph of Oakland and James of Johannesburg; 14 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. April 26 in St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.

Having lived in Ohio and Boston, Detroit and Newton, Washington and Africa, Dr. French was an astute observer of how people view outsiders who arrive with good intentions.

“I think we’re perceived here as Americans first, blacks second,’’ he told The Los Angeles Times in 1979, while directing the health program in Africa.

“When I first visited Africa eight or 10 years ago, I had the feeling there was some disdain on the part of Africans toward black Americans. We were suspect, first, because we ended up in the United States in the first place and, second, because we put up with all we did for 300 years. Now, I get the impression that Africans are asking themselves, ‘Where are the most educated, prosperous, technically trained blacks in the world?’ Well, they’re in the United States. And the Africans are saying, ‘If you’ve got something to offer, come on over and join us.’ ’’

Explaining Congo’s Endless Civil War

howard — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 23:50:11 +0000

Copyright The New York Times

Published: April 1, 2011

Some months ago, in a ditch beside one of the main streets of Bunia, a dusty, war-battered city in northeastern Congo, I noticed a small, broken-down, dull green armored car, the gun barrel in its turret tilted awkwardly toward the sky. Removing war debris can be an expensive luxury in a poor country, and the wreck seemed an apt symbol of the indelible mark that 15 years of intermittent conflict has put on this nation.
DANCING IN THE GLORY OF MONSTERS
The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
By Jason K. Stearns
380 pp. PublicAffairs. $28.99.

Times Topic: Congo
The fighting has left tens or even hundreds of thousands of women gang-raped and led to what may be millions of war-related deaths; at its peak, some 3.4 million Congolese (the only one of these tolls we can be remotely sure of) were forced to flee their homes for months or years. But it draws little attention in the United States. As Jason K. Stearns, who has worked for the United Nations in Congo, points out, a study showed that in 2006 even this newspaper gave four times as much coverage to Darfur, although Congolese have died in far greater numbers.

One reason we shy away is the conflict’s stunning complexity. “How,” Stearns asks, “do you cover a war that involves at least 20 different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?” “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is the best account so far: more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitor, Gérard Prunier’s dense and overwhelming “Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.”

A fatal combination long primed this vast country for bloodshed. It is wildly rich in gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium, timber, tin and more. At the same time, after 32 years of being stripped bare by the American-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, it became the largest territory on earth with essentially no functioning government.