2013 Virginia Festival of the Book: Christianity

Historian Robert Louis Wilken gave a presentation about his most recent book, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, at the 2013 Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville on March 22.

The book festival's web site offers this biographical note on Wilken:

Robert Wilken, author of The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the History of Christianity Emeritus. He taught at UVa from 1985 to 2009 and is the author of many books, including The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought, and The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. He is also the editor of The Church's Bible, a series of commentaries based on writings of the church fathers.

Speaking to a packed auditorium in the Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections on the grounds of the University of Virginia, Wilken gave an engaging and entertaining lecture that spanned topics from apostolic succession to Christianity's intellectual confrontation with Islam to the necessity of bishops for the survival of the church (taking a dig at Garry Wills for asking "Why priests?" in a book of that name).

Wilken explained that he wanted the book to include a full range of the Christian communities from the first 1,000 years of the church, including the Syriac churches of the Middle East, the Greek churches that expanded into Slavic lands, and the Latin church based in Rome, with stops along the way among the Coptic churches of Egypt and Christian churches farther south in Nubia (Sudan) and Ethiopia. He said that he wanted to keep the chapters short for readability's sake and, for the same reason, decided not to include footnotes. The book, he noted, is meant for general audiences, not academic readers.

A video of Wilken's complete remarks, including a question-and-answer session with the audience, is here:

The program on "Christianity: The First Thousand Years" was hosted by the St. Anselm Institute for Catholic Thought, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church, and the Center for Christian Study.

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Author Interview: Greg Mills Discusses African Poverty and Solutions

Why is Africa poor? What can Africans do about it?

These two questions are combined in the title of a new book by South African scholar Greg Mills, who discussed his work at a forum hosted by the Cato Institute in Washington on October 6.

Mills is director of the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, which “was established in 2005 by the Oppenheimer family,” he told me in an interview after that book forum.  He is also the co-author, with David Williams, of Seven Battles that Shaped South Africa.

The foundation’s objective, Mills said, is to “try to strengthen African economic performance. Essentially we operate at a strategic level with African presidencies, at their request,” providing research and advice “based on primary fieldwork in African countries” and drawing “a lot of good and bad examples from around the world: things to avoid and things to try to replicate.”

Describing his new book, Why Africa Is Poor and What Africans Can Do About It (released in hardcover by Penguin Global on November 17), Mills explained it has three parts.

“It tries to understand, firstly, why Africa is poor, and it advances the idea that this is a choice of African leadership. It’s an option that they have taken; it’s a result of their poor decisions,” he said.

It also tries to explain, Mills added, “why those decisions have been made. It often relates to the fact that African electorates are apathetic. In many cases, they don’t hold their leaders to account.”

The book also relates how economic aid from developed countries – or lack of it, depending on how one looks at it – “provides an opportunity for Africans to externalize their problems and also their solutions.

The second part of the book, Mills said, “focuses on international experiences and the best examples that Africa can draw” upon, while “the third part of the book really focuses on some of the opportunities in Africa [and] how these ideas might be implemented.”

That third section, he explained, examines the coming “demographic dividend in Africa and what this means [as] a huge opportunity for Africa, and what we have to do to realize this.” It also focuses on issues like agriculture, mining, and tourism, “three areas of great comparative advantage for the continent.”


Huge Potential for Tourism
With regard to tourism, Mills noted, “Africa currently gets about 4 percent of the global one billion-person tourism market,” meaning that Africa is wildly underrepresented in that economic sector, even though “in terms of wildlife and other beach and safari-type options, we have tremendous potential.”

He gave the examples of “a country like Kenya has a million fly-in tourists a year. Tanzania has 500,000 fly-in tourists a year, [while] Mozambique just has 50,000,” despite being “right next door to South Africa. There’s clearly a lot of potential in terms of an increasing that market.”

To increase tourism, Mills said, “we need to make it easier to get to Africa, cheaper to get to Africa, [and provide] higher quality resorts when people get there,” as well as assure “safer conditions where people don’t have to be worried about what surprises they’re going to find en route.”

He said that “the way to do it is to try to make it cheaper for South African tourists, in particular, to fly” to other African countries, “and then to relax visa restrictions on other external tourists.” In his formal remarks, Mills had pointed out that the Republic of Georgia no longer requires tourist visas for visitors from countries that have a bigger GDP than Georgia has, because such people are unlikely to stay there looking for work.

“Unfortunately,” Mills lamented, “most African countries have a very onerous visa regime and the air flights are not only unreliable, but relatively sparse in terms of their coverage and penetration of African markets.”

Still, he concluded, there is “certainly a huge amount of unrealized potential in tourism with all the multiplier employment prospects that it offers.”


‘Ditto’ for Agriculture
“Ditto,” he said, “in terms of agriculture,” which is extremely underdeveloped in relation to its potential in Africa.

“Africa’s agricultural yields have been two-thirds below that of the rest of the world,” Mills explained, due to “a huge lack of investment in extension services and fertilizer and seed programs.”

African agricultural output, he said, has “more or less flat-lined since independence in terms of its yield increases. This means that 38 of 48 sub-Saharan African countries are net food importers. It’s a staggering statistic.”

With more and more Africans moving to urban areas, he warned, “if we are to develop in our cities and if we are able to reduce food costs, we need to up our game.”

That means “addressing questions about land title, it means improving extension services, it means getting the private sector involved. It means upping scale in terms of agriculture, because that obviously brings certain efficiencies, and it means introducing technologies.”

In essence, Mills said, Africa must move “from a subsistence, peasant-type farming environment to a large-scale commercial involvement, [with] all the steps in between, particularly in mid-level farming.”

Despite this current underutilization of agricultural resources, Mills continued, “there’s huge potential on the continent. We shouldn’t be stuck at 5 percent growth. We should be looking at 10 percent growth and find out and understand the reasons why we’re not doing 15 percent growth,” since Africa is starting “from such a low base.”

(This article originally appeared in two parts, and in somewhat different form, on Examiner.com, on October 7 and October 8, 2010.)

'Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships'

This book review first appeared in The New York City Tribune on March 6, 1989.


Tales of Three African Dictators That Spin a Cautionary Lesson
Richard Sincere

Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships, by Samuel Decalo, Westview Press, 197 pp., $29.95.

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” were the words Thomas Hobbes used to describe life in the “state of nature,” which he also called a “war of all against all.” Hobbes, writing in the 17th century, was probably remembering the not-so-distant history of Europe in the Middle Ages. In the absence of strong central government, anarchy ruled the land. Feudal barons, ready to feed their own venal appetites, warred against each other, against the king, against the Church. Each generation experienced at least one war that, through battle or disease, cut down large fractions of the population.

That is all in the past. Or is it? Psychoses of Power, three frightening case studies by Samuel Decalo, currently visiting professor of comparative African government at the University of Natal, reveals that the 20th century does not lack Hobbesian anarchy. Neither are the subjects of his study – Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin of Uganda, and Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic – necessarily anomalies. The germ of economic decay and political disarray that grew into their monstrous personal dictatorships exists in other African countries, ready to sprout under the right conditions.

These personal dictatorships differ substantially from merely authoritarian or autocratic regimes elsewhere in Africa (and elsewhere in the Third World, as well). Authoritarian dictators see fit to delegate power when necessary. Although they may be corrupt and dispense patronage for their own financial benefit, they do allow others to make policy decisions and exercise the authority granted them by the dictator. Personal dictators like Nguema, Amin, and Bokassa insist on excercising total authority, making all decisions, and dispensing all patronage. Chaos results.

In the case of Nguema and Amin, and partially in the case of Bokassa, men fundamentally unprepared to hold responsible public office became leaders of strife-ridden former colonies. Amin was totally illiterate and found policy discussions among Cabinet ministers boring and irrelevant. Nguema was a sycophant and drug addict who hated knowledge and success. Bokassa, although by all accounts a courageous and competent soldier, was greedy and lacked judiciousness.

Although the rise to power of these three men was largely accidental, the parallels are startling.

Amin started as a cook’s assistant in the Ugandan colonial army; the British, anxious to Africanize the services, on several occasions overlooked bad reviews of Amin’s suitability and promoted him. He eventually became chief of staff, the post that allowed him to lead the coup that ousted Milton Obote when Obote’s economic policies failed and he began to lose political legitimacy.

Nguema began as a petty local bureaucrat. The Spanish colonial rulers and Spanish expatriate businessmen liked him, because unlike his fellow Fang tribesmen, he supported Spanish interests. With the support of his relatives, he became the most bloodthirsty dictator in recent African history.

Bokassa, as noted, was a brave soldier. He fought in the French army in Vietnam and was decorated for valor. The French authorities respected Bokassa and named him to head the Central African Republic’s army upon independence. Economic and social confusion under the president of the CAR made it apparent that a new regime might sack Bokassa. To forestall that, he led a coup on New Year’s Eve in 1965, and installed himself as dictator.

Although the least known of the three, Nguema was probably the bloodiest. He exterminated all of his subjects who had better than a third-grade education. Refugees from Equatorial Guinea flooded neighboring countries. Nguema personally ruined the country’s economy, keeping all foreign (and much domestic) currency in suitcases in his bedroom. He retreated into sorcery, threatening any opposition that upon his death he would return as a vicious tiger to destroy them.

Amin’s story is better known, perhaps because he became an international joke. His buffoonery, however, resulted in genocide. Because he lacked interest in public policy, no genuine policies were made during his reign. One significant decision, however, did have substantial impact on Uganda’s future. In 1973, he expelled all Asians from the country. In one fell swoop, Uganda’s entrepreneurial class left. Shops, factories, and services ended, as did exports and imports. Although politically popular for racist reasons, this decision destroyed the Ugandan economy, and recovery is unlikely in our lifetimes.

Bokassa made world headlines in 1977 when he proclaimed himself emperor of the Central African Empire. Modeling his coronation after Napoleon’s, he crowned himself when the Pope declined to do the job. At first the French supported him, but even they could no longer be relied upon after Bokassa himself clubbed to death schoolchildren who in 1979 protested the mandatory wearing of school uniforms with Bokassa’s image on them. French paratroopers moved in, deposing Bokassa. Several thousand French troops remain today, making the Central African Republic a virtual French colony, despite the rhetoric of independence.

Life has not improved for the residents of these African countries since their dictators were deposed. In Equatorial Guinea and Uganda, new dictators came to power. In Equatorial Guinea, Nguema’s own henchmen ousted him when he became too unpredictable. They remain in power and continue the terror. In Uganda, Milton Obote returned and after presiding over the genocide of as many as 400,000 Ugandans, he was again overthrown. Tyranny has been tempered by the French presence in the CAR, but there is little hope for the future.

The lessons of these three case studies are not clear. Certainly the three dictators were idiosyncratic, maladjusted, and just plain mad. But other dictators remain in Africa, even if slightly more benign: Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, Kamuzu Banda in Malawi. Yet it is frightening to note that while heads of state, Nguema, Amin, and Bokassa each retained a measure of respectability within the international community.

Their crimes were ignored for raison d’etat. An eerily similar respectability was granted Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin in their time, and the international community pays little attention to what goes on in places like Zambia, Zaire, and Malawi today.

Psychoses of Power deserves whatever attention it gets from policymakers, human rights activists, and international bureaucrats. I fear that too many readers will look at it as an interesting case study of political freaks with little to say about the present or future. They should look more carefully at current conditions in the Third World and ask themselves: Are these personal dictatorships really so strange?

Richard Sincere is a research associate at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

'Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique'

This book review was published in Volume 3, Number 2, of International Freedom Review (Winter 1990).

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY OPTIONS IN ANGOLA AND MOZAMBIQUE


Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique 
edited by Richard J. Bloomfield.
(Reference Publications, Inc.: Algonac, Mich., 1988. 261 pp., $24.95 hdcvr, $12.95 ppb)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Sometimes even well-informed Americans have trouble understanding the differences between Angola and Mozambique, despite their location on opposite sides of the southern African continent. The similarities are readily apparent: Angola and Mozambique were Portuguese colonies from the late fifteenth century until 1975. Both are poor. Both are in Africa. Both have had troubled relations with neighboring South Africa. Moreover, both have been ruled by Marxist-Leninist parties since independence.

However, the similarities do not go much beyond these few points, especially since after independence Angola and Mozambique have followed different paths and have come upon unique problems and opportunities. Each will have a decidedly different future.

The World Peace Foundation, which describes itself as “a private, non-profit foundation based in Boston that conducts studies of international issues,” has collected a number of essays on Angola and Mozambique in Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique, edited by Richard J. Bloomfield, the World Peace Foundation’s executive director. Bloomfield served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal from 1978 to 1982. Strangely enough, considering Portugal’s ongoing (if uneven) ties with its former African colonies, Ambassador Bloomfield confesses In the Introduction to being “a neophyte” in the region, an odd position for a former U.S. envoy to Lisbon to invoke.

The essay contributions to this book vary in quality and substance and there is also a certain imbalance in the collection. For instance, an excellent and comprehensive survey of Mozambican history by Gillian Gunn does not have any counterpart dealing with Angolan history, a lacuna that really should have been addressed by the editor.

Moreover, as a book, this anthology is poorly produced. There are numerous typographical and editing errors, there is inconsistency in the typefaces and type-styles used, the leading (space between lines) on some pages is tighter than on others, and the text on some pages is longer than on others for no apparent reason (such as the beginning of a new section or chapter). Overall, this book gives the impression of being someone’s first effort at desktop publishing.

The contributors, for the most part, represent the best of liberal and center-left thinking on African issues. Their names are recognizable to anyone who deals with these issues frequently:  Gerald Bender, Kurt Campbell, Carlos Gaspar, Kenneth Maxwell, Robert I. Rotberg, Wayne S. Smith, in addition to the previously mentioned Gillian Gunn and Richard J. Bloomfield.

In his opening essay, “The Legacy of Decolonization,” Kenneth Maxwell, director of the Camões Center for the Portuguese Speaking World at Columbia University, makes a valid criticism that many analysts of African issues often overlook because they themselves are guilty of the sin he identifies. The literature on decolonization falls into two categories, he says: either it has been “classically Africanist” or it has been “overly concerned with grand strategy—with East-West Issues and foreign interventionism.”

Consequently, the Africanists tend to see all events through the prism of “Africa” (in the abstract), undiluted by other considerations, while the other group focuses “almost exclusively on the actions of the superpowers and their allies.” Since the twain seldom meet, there is little interaction or understanding between the two groups. Rarely, Maxwell asserts, “does either side listen to the other, let alone accept that in both positions there is much truth.”

Certainly, this condition has affected the way American analysts and policymakers have approached Angola and Mozambique. There are some people who refuse to believe, for instance, that the MPLA and Frelimo (the Marxist parties ruling Angola and Mozambique) are driven by anything other than their Marxist ideology and therefore there should be no accommodation with them even in the interests of regional stability. There are others who think that the Marxist nature of the governments of Angola and Mozambique should be no cause for concern at all and that Americans should continue “business as usual.” Still others, wearing the blinders of anti-apartheid activism, think that Washington should ally itself with Luanda and Maputo against the aggressive-imperialist-racist South African state: their feeling is, “Any enemy of Pretoria is a friend of ours.”

Long-Standing Communist Ties
It is nevertheless difficult to set aside superpower considerations when dealing with Mozambique and, especially, Angola. Leaders of the future Marxist governments in Portuguese Africa were active members of the Portuguese Communist party and its allies during Portugal’s fascist period. These included Marcelino dos Santos of Frelimo and the MPLA’s Agostino Neto, who, according to Maxwell, “knew the Portuguese Left from the inside,” a characteristic lacking in rivals Holden Roberto of the FNLA and Jonas Savlmbi of UNITA.

From the beginning, Moscow supported the anti-Portuguese liberation movements. Maxwell reports:

[T]heir support for the MPLA went back to 1958; and despite a cooling of the’ Soviet relationship with Neto during the 1970s, Soviet support went to one or the other of MPLA’s factions throughout the period of armed struggle against the Portuguese.

This Soviet connection was sufficient to stimulate U.S. concern. He cites Helmut Sonnenfeldt’s view that the United States had had “no intrinsic interest In Angola” but that even a remote and unimportant territory acquires American interest once it “becomes a focal point for Soviet, and in this Instance, Soviet-supported Cuban military action.” The derivative U.S. interest that results is something “which we simply cannot avoid.”

Maxwell’s account of Soviet interests in southern Africa differs in tone if not in fact from that of Kurt Campbell, whose essay in this volume has also been published, in slightly different form, as an Adelphi Paper by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Campbell notes from the outset, however, the significant difference between U.S. and Soviet interests in the region:

Since its dramatic entrance into southern Africa in 1975 to bolster the MPLA during the fractious Angolan civil war, the Soviet Union has played a central role in the military affairs of the region. While the counsel and pressure of both the United States and Britain have been heeded in various southern African capitals and boardrooms, only the Soviet Union, with Its allies Cuba and East Germany, has made its influence felt and demonstrated its commitment on the battlefield.

Campbell adds that “Angola and Mozambique are the Soviet Union’s oldest surviving allies in black Africa, and have been the primary focus of Moscow’s energies to date.” Nonetheless, over the past three decades, Soviet moral, political, financial, and military support has benefited the African National Congress in South Africa, Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army, and the South West African People’s Organization. Angola and Mozambique merely represent the Kremlin’s first successes In installing revolutionary governments in southern Africa.

Mozambique, however, has not turned out to be quite the success the Soviets had hoped for. Frelimo came to power in 1975, essentially unopposed during its struggle against Portuguese colonialism, and in 1977 signed a twenty-year treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union. Frelimo promised to become an orthodox “Marxist-Leninist vanguard party” (no small task in a country with no industrial proletariat to speak of) and by 1978 Soviet, East German, and Cuban advisors “were busy shaping Mozambique’s internal political system, assisting in party organization, ideological education, propaganda coordination, and the training of the internal security police.” The Soviets offered substantial military assistance, and Samora Machel, Frelimo’s chief, followed the Moscow line in international forums on all manner of issues unrelated to southern African politics.

Not ten years later, Campbell reports, despite this Soviet assistance:

Mozambique was in a shambles—the result of a concerted South African policy to destabilize the country, combined with a lethally incompetent Marxist economic system.... Currently, the Soviets stationed In Mozambique behave more as prisoners than as protectors of the faltering regime.

What had happened was that the Soviet Union was unable or unwilling to deliver on its promises, particularly in the area of economic assistance. Although Joaquim Chissano, Machel’s successor, has maintained good relations with the Soviets, he “himself appears to look more to the West rather than to the East for economic assistance.”

Indeed, it seems that the Soviets were the exploiters rather than the saviors of Angola and Mozambique. For instance, Campbell points out:

[I]n the late 1980s the Soviet Union was taking 75 percent of the fish catch from the territorial waters of Angola and Mozambique, even while both countries were suffering from serious food shortages.

The Cuban Connection
Wayne S. Smith made a name for himself in 1982 when, as head of the U.S. interests section in Havana, he publicly dissented from Reagan administration policy toward Central America. His essay in this book, “The Cuban Role in Angola,” argues the case that the Cubans are not Soviet puppets but are conscientiously pursuing their own interests in Angola. He blames the United States for “shattering the Alvor agreement” (which was supposed to provide for free and open elections among the three competing liberation movements in Angola upon independence) despite the admissions of Admiral Rosa Coutinho, Portugal’s last colonial governor, that he had himself gone to Havana to get the go-ahead to install the MPLA as the post-independence government in Luanda in direct violation of the Alvor agreement.

The crux of Smith’s argument is this: Fidel Castro wanted to revivify his revolution and strengthen his position vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Smith says:

Castro was -- had always been -- interested in winning political influence, and In that sense Cuba’s intervention was perfectly consistent with the policies and objectives it had pursued in Africa since the early years of the Revolution.. . . Cuba was suddenly—if briefly—seen as a major Third World power to which other progressive but weaker governments could turn in times of trouble…. Thus, Castro doubtless calculated, if Cuba could save the day in Angola, that would strengthen its bargaining power with Moscow. Cuba would have advanced the cause of socialism and thus would be in a strong position to ask for better terms of trade and increased assistance from Moscow.

Smith concludes from this that Castro acted on his own, without Soviet prodding. In a sense, that is probably true. Yet the reason for his action — sending 30,000 troops to Angola between November 8, 1975, and March 1976— was part of his traditional and necessary kowtow to the Kremlin. Interfering in Angola’s internal affairs was Fidel Castro’s way of toadying up to Leonid Brezhnev, so that Cuba could get a better deal on its sugar and gasoline to run its 1955 Buicks.

In defending Cuba’s continued military presence in Angola, Smith castigates the United States and South Africa for prolonging the war by supporting Jonas Savimbi and UNITA. “One can hardly imagine greater folly,” Smith writes. “Such an undertaking serves to help South Africa perpetuate the fighting In Angola. It Is a prescription for continuing the turmoil and bloodshed, not for ending them.” He does not seem willing to accept the suggestion that Savimbi and his Angolan supporters have legitimate grievances and a right to participate in a unified Angolan government, free of outside interference. Like other contributors to this volume, Smith believes that the United States should recognize the MPLA regime in Luanda and abandon the UNITA Freedom Fighters, in deference to Cuba’s wish for “a secure Angola. . . at peace with its neighbors, with its civil conflict resolved, and with its doors open to Western economic influence.."


Focus on Mozambique
Easily the best contribution to this collection is Gillian Gunn’s tightly-packed essay on the history of Mozambique, “Learning from Adversity: The Mozambican Experience.” Tracing developments In Mozambique from the early fifteenth century to the present, Gunn demonstrates how a confluence of regional and East-West interests affect Mozambique today.

One important difference between Angola and Mozambique is that in Angola there were three major liberation movements struggling against Portuguese rule (FNLA, MPLA, UNITA), while in Mozambique there was only one, Frelimo. As a result, the transition from colonial rule to independence was much smoother. At the time of independence, there was no organized resistance to Frelimo’s control of the government. It did not take long, however, for a resistance movement to come about, thanks in part to the connivance of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia (then fighting its own guerrilla war and fearful of Marxist neighbors). However, Gunn points out, there were internal considerations as well:

Three developments had created the conditions for the growth of an armed dissident movement should Frelimo gain power. First, factional fighting had led a number of middle and low level ex-Frelimo members to feel they had been badly treated. Second, the leaders of the defeated conservative movement stood ready to mobilize this anti-Frelimo sentiment. And third, Rhodesian intelligence had started to formulate the mechanism to organize and arm these elements.

Renamo, as the resistance group came to be known, had fertile ground on which to operate. Frelimo became ideology-ridden and, as a result, Mozambique’s economy and political stability suffered. As Gunn writes:

By the end of 1977 Frelimo was drifting away from the traditions it had developed in the guerrilla war [against Portugal]. Instead of developing ideology from experience, a process which at least ensured some link between policy and reality, it began to impose ideology upon reality.

The consequence? “The balance of payments fell from its 1976 surplus of $41 million down to a 1978 deficit of $244 million, and an even more serious $360 million deficit in 1980.” The story observed in nearly every Communist country repeated itself in Mozambique. For example, Gunn writes,

[T]he ideologically motivated emphasis on mechanized state farms. . . was disastrous.... It came to cost more foreign exchange for a state farm to produce a ton of grain than it would have cost simply to import the crop.

In any case, a good many fanners were intelligent enough to by-pass the official, ideology-driven market, for “by 1982 one half of all peasant production was being sold on the black market.”

So the resistance movement had plenty of reasons to gain support in the countryside. Unfortunately, several self-generated factors worked against Renamo’s interests. One was its brutality. Gunn asserts that Renamo’s “behavior hampered the development of true popular support. Rape and severing of breasts, ears, and lips in retaliation for non-cooperation became common.” Perhaps more important, “Renamo’s inability to articulate a coherent political platform, beyond anti-communist rhetoric, also lessened its chances of developing firm grassroots support.” (And, I might add, its chances of acquiring support from democratic countries abroad. The same people who unstintingly support UNITA or the mujahideen in Afghanistan hesitate to do the same for Renamo.)

Gunn concludes that “Mozarnbique is not a classic Marxist state serving Soviet interests” because Frelimo has gradually returned to “its pragmatic habits.” The belief of many (on the American right, for instance) “that continuation of Frelimo in power means expansion of Soviet influence in the region is not supported by the recent factual record.” The character of Renamo—its lack of credentials as an indigenous movement, its brutality—lead to severe questions about its ability to lead. A Renamo-run Mozambique, says Gunn. “has little chance of being more stable than a Frelimo-run Mozambique.”

Gunn makes the case for increasing U.S. economic aid to Mozambique, because without such aid, “Mozambique is more likely to remain chronically unstable, and therefore unable to control ANC guerrilla infiltration into South Africa.” She asserts that “on several issues that really matter to the West,” such as excluding Cuban troops from Africa, “Frelimo has already shown that its definition of national Interest can overlap with the definition by the United States of Western interests.”

The Trouble with Ideology
The title of UCLA Professor Gerald J. Bender’s essay sums up his thesis: “Washington’s Quest for Enemies in Angola.” He argues, for instance, that Angola under the MPLA is more pluralist and freer than pro-Western neighbors.

It would appeal that In Angola under dos Santos there is greater freedom to criticize the party and government without suffering arbitrary arrest, torture, or death than Is the case in the six non-Marxist states [of Gabon, Zaire, Togo, Malawi, Cote d’Ivoire, and Kenya].

In his conclusion, Bender criticizes U.S. policy toward Angola as confused. “What is clear,” he argues, “is that not only has there been a great divergence of perceptions about whether the Angolan government represents a danger to the United States but there have also been diametrically opposed policies proposed to address the situation.” Various parts of the Executive Branch and Congress have pursued policies “that reflect little, If any, consideration” of the policies pursued by other offices and agencies. He continues,

The result has been a series of confusing, contradictory, and futile policies that have displeased Americans from left to right and that have had almost no impact on engendering change in Angola. Clearly, this state of affairs is good neither for the United States nor for Angola.

Editor Richard Bloomfield takes as his task the distillation of the wisdom imparted by his fellow contributors In a concluding essay, “U. S. Policy: Doctrine Versus Interests.” His views become clear early on when he asks, “Why should normal relations with Angola depend on a Namibia settlement? South Africa is the outlaw in Namibia, not Angola. Why should normal relations with Angola depend on the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola? These forces play a defensive role.”

Bloomfield seems to believe that ideology and political doctrine are opposed to U.S. national interests, rather than elements that inform interests and strategy. If that is the case, then the whole Carterite structure of human rights and democracy opposed to “an inordinate fear of Communism” that informed U.S. strategic interests from 1977 to 1981 comes tumbling down. From the very beginning, American values—political, moral, and economic— have helped to shape the national interest and national strategy.

Bloomfield turns the whole issue of U.S. relations with Angola and Mozambique into a stalking horse for U.S. attitudes toward apartheid in South Africa. He writes:

Let us imagine that the regime in Pretoria were one that accorded political rights to the black majority. If that were the case, it is likely that the guerrilla movements in Angola and Mozambique would be weak, if they existed at all. There would be no Cuban troops in Angola and the Soviet bloc presence in both countries would in all likelihood be minimal and largely civilian.

This is, if nothing else, a non-sequitor. The existence or nonexistence of apartheid in South Africa is irrelevant as far as the political rights of Angolans and Mozambicns go. The dos Santos regime in Luanda does not exclude Jonas Savimbi and his supporters from political participation because whites control the government in South Africa. He excludes Savimbi because he and the MPLA covet their currently held political power and fear losing It. Joaquim Chissano has adjusted his economy and relations with the West not because of apartheid in South Africa, but because his reliance on Soviet assistance and Marxist ideology proved disastrous.

For Bloomfield, U.S. policy toward Angola and Mozambique should be motivated as much by how it will affect American goals for the elimination of apartheid as it is by U.S. relations with the Soviet Union or U.S. disdain for Cuban imperialism in Africa. He argues:

U.S. objectives in each country must be consistent with U.S. interests. This seems obvious, but in the policy debate it is often as not disregarded. Thus, the objective of replacing governments that are ‘Marxist’ and friendly to the Soviet Union with their enemies in these two instances would only lead to governments that would be even less likely to cooperate with U.S. policy vis-à-vis South Africa.

This may be true with Renamo, but it certainly is not true with UNITA. Jonas Savimbi has long been on record in opposition to apartheid and even, at one time, supported the African National Congress. His acceptance of military and financial assistance from South Africa was a prudential move designed to advance his interests in Angola. Similarly, the United States allied itself with the Soviet Union during World War II in order to defeat Hitler; that alliance did not imply approval for Stalin’s purges or any Marxist policy. A truly democratic government in Angola featuring Savimbi’s participation would probably support U.S. goals in South Africa without the baggage of ties with the Kremlin and an ideological need to undermine liberal democracy in post-apartheid South Africa.


The Quickening Pace of Events
Events in southern Africa have caught up with, and, in some cases, passed by the analysis presented in this book. The independence of Namibia is just around the corner. Election results announced in November 1989 indicated that SWAPO garnered just 57 per cent of the vote in elections for a constituent assembly; 67 per cent was needed to bulldoze through its own constitution. The peaceful transition to independence in Namibia is supposed to be accompanied by the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. There may be good reason to adopt a policy of “watchful waiting” as far as that goes. Castro does not especially want to take back these troops, some of whom have contracted the AIDS virus, and may send them on some other mischievous adventure In Africa or elsewhere before he throws them a ticker-tape parade in Havana. American policymakers should beware of any Cuban adventurism in the future.

There is some hope for a negotiated settlement in Angola, too. Savimbi and dos Santos shook hands at a meeting of African heads of state and government in Gbadolite, Zaire, in mid-1989. Though a disagreement arose over just what transpired at Gbadolite*, pressure from the United States and its friends in Africa may just force dos Santos to agree to meet Savimbi at the bargaining table.

In Mozambique, the Chissano government continues to seek and receive Western economic, and even military, aid. Despite Renamo’s lack of ideological bearings, it has had some military successes that are worrisome for the Frelimo regime. David Hoile reports (in The World & I, December 1989) that Renamo “now probably controls more than 50 per cent of Mozambique and operates in some 80 per cent of the country,” adding that “factions within Frelimo itself have conceded the legitimacy of negotiating with Renamo.” So there is plenty to watch in Mozambique as well.

Regional Conflict and U.S. Policy: Angola and Mozambique is not the best book on the region. Neither is it the worst. The essays by Kurt Campbell and Gillian Gunn may be, as they say, worth the price of the volume But except for those with a die-hard interest in southern African affairs this is probably a book that can be passed up.

* See 1FF publication Angola Peace Monitor, Volume 1, Number 2—Ed.

Richard Sincere is a Washington-based issues analyst and author of The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1987).

Book Notes 4

Continuing the “book notes” tradition begun during my tenure as books editor of terra nova, this review essay appeared in The Metro Herald of Alexandria, Virginia, on January 23, 2004. (There was no “Part II” published subsequent to this article.)

2003: BOOKS IN REVIEW – PART I


Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

The close of 2003 left us at The Metro Herald with a backlog of books that had landed on our review desk during the year. Although far too many books came our way for us to commission full-fledged reviews of each, we decided to clear the decks for 2004 by offering a number of capsule reviews, just enough to offer our readers a taste of what’s out there and available for purchase at their favorite bookshops or to borrow from their local libraries.

ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN LIFE

In City: Urbanism and Its End (Yale University Press, $30.00), Yale professor Douglas W. Rae expands upon the tradition of Jane Jacobs’ classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, draws from more recent research like Robert Putnam’s much-cited Bowling Alone. Using New Haven, Connecticut, as his main exhibit, Rae comprehensively examines the shortcomings of “urban renewal” programs, which have more often than not had a counterproductive (and counterintuitive) effect on the cities where they have been imposed. This book belongs on the shelf next to Jacobs’ books and Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist’s The Wealth of Cities (a personal favorite).



There is a hidden gem in Africa, a city-size museum in the unlikeliest place: the capital of Eritrea. In Asmara: Africa’s Secret Modernist City (Merrell Publishers, $65.00), authors Edward Denison, Guang Ya Ren, and Naigzy Gebremedhin have produced a coffee table book that is far more than a collection of pretty pictures. Long an Italian colony before being occupied by neighboring Ethiopia after World War II, Eritrea became independent in 1991. During the colonial era, Italian architects used Asmara as a sort of blank canvas to practice modernism that was somewhat frowned upon under Mussolini’s fascist regime back home. (Socialists of all stripes prefer muscular, pragmatic, and traditional forms, particularly in public buildings.) As a result, Asmara is dotted with well-preserved modernist buildings that, had they been constructed in prewar Europe, might well have been destroyed in the calamity that was the Second World War. Instead, they were saved simply by their existence in a remote, dry, little-visited, seldom-remarked-upon outpost in the Horn of Africa. If the publication of this book does not double Eritrea’s tourism within a year or two, nothing can.

Across the Atlantic, near the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, another city, New Orleans, has preserved its own unique architecture. Architect Lloyd Vogt both wrote the text and created more than 150 line drawings in Historic Buildings of the French Quarter (Pelican Publishing, $23.95). Looking at the various streams of art and style that influenced New Orleans through settlers (and rulers) from France, Spain, the United States, and the Caribbean, Vogt finds the amazing architecture to be a parallel to Creole cuisine—a mixture that is greater, and more delectable, than the sum of its parts.

In any college community, there is some intersection of ‘town and gown.” In Charlottesville, that link with the University of Virginia is literally called “the Corner,” and author Coy Barefoot has, through keen research and affectionate dedication, given us a book of that name, The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia (Howell Press, $39.95). While the potential readership for such a book might seem limited—UVA students, alumni, faculty, and Charlottesvillians— anyone interested in urban growth and “local” history (in the broadest sense) will appreciate Barefoot’s work. Surely there are equivalents to “the Corner” in East Lansing, Amherst, Tuscaloosa, and dozens of other college towns—a comparative analysis of their development and their effect on urban life could be fascinating and informative, perhaps a topic for some bright historian’s doctoral dissertation.



ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Renowned photojournalist Bob Willoughby has produced a handsome coffee table book aimed at the film buff—The Star Makers: On Set with Hollywood’s Greatest Directors (Merrell Publishers, $49.95). With a bare minimum of text but overflowing with both color and black-and-white photographs, this book is also a quick-reference guide to the careers of such filmmakers as Orson Welles, George Cukor, and John Frankenheimer. Willoughby’s presence on location and in studio soundstages gives the whole enterprise a “You Are There” feeling. As Oscar®-winner Sydney Pollack notes in his foreword, Willoughby’s “understanding of the material he was photographing, coupled with his extraordinary technical skill and his instinct for sensing the right moments, has made his photographs extremely specific and powerful. As you look through them, there is an immediacy and an evocative power that is very, very specific to each of the films he is documenting.”

There is something oddly untimely about publishing a new book about Richard Rodgers in 2003. Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a year late—the centenary of Rodgers’ birth (1902) was celebrated in 2002—or a year early—we commemorate the 25th anniversary of Rodgers’ death (in 1979) this year. Still, Geoffrey Block’s Richard Rodgers (Yale University Press, $32.50) is a welcome addition to the new raft of books exploring Broadway composers’ careers and works, rather than engaging in retrospective psychoanalysis of their lives. (In this, Block’s book on Rodgers has more in common with Stephen Banfield’s Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals than with, say, Meryle Secrest’s Stephen Sondheim: A Life.) That’s not to say that the book is bereft of personal information. Tidbits of that sort, including newly uncovered ones, are there— but only if they shed light on Rodgers’ life as an artist. There is no gossip for gossip’s sake.

Last fall, the Boston Red Sox came within inches of winning the pennant and, had they won the World Series, of repudiating the “Curse of the Bambino.” (The Yankees, of course, gave that Curse life for one more season.) Recently Pete Rose has admitted his gambling in hopes that he will be elected, as he deserves to be based on his performance on the diamond, to baseball’s Hall of Fame. Back in 1975, the Red Sox met Rose’s Cincinnati Reds in an unforgettable, seven-game World Series. In The Boys of October (Contemporary Books, $24.95), Doug Hornig explores (as his subtitle says) “how the 1975 Boston Red Sox embodied baseball’s ideals—and restored our spirits.” Hornig, a novelist as well as a writer of short- and book-length nonfiction, spent months tracing alumni of the ’75 Red Sox, interviewing them about that magical season and inquiring about their careers—and private lives—since then.



An amateur ballet company in Loudoun County, Virginia, is one of the foci of Jennifer Fisher’s Nutcracker Nation (Yale University Press, $27.00 ), which, as its subtitle explains, looks at How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. Fisher, a dance historian and ethnologist, treats us to morsels of information about the history of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, beloved in America but largely snubbed in its native Russia. The Nutcracker is seen by more people in more audiences, it seems, than all other ballets performed in the United States in any given year. In fact, annual Nutcracker performances often are the cash cows for dance companies that lose money throughout the rest of the year; the Nutcracker underwrites their repertoires. Richly outfitted with a wide array of photographs, Nutcracker Nation also reminds us that this particular ballet has served as an introduction to dance for children and teenagers; as a result, it has featured such disparate and unexpected performers as Macaulay Culkin and Chelsea Clinton.

Kathleen E.R. Smith takes a colorful topic—the songs created to raise morale during World War II—and renders it mundane in God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War (University Press of Kentucky, $45.00). While the book is uneven, it still adds useful information (and an occasional insight) about wartime propaganda and in terms of social history, helping to answer the broad question, “What was it like on the home front during the War?,” within a specific sphere. Moreover, Smith indirectly provides a contrast to today’s music industry, in which a typical hit song is attached to a single artist, while in the 1940s, hits were recorded by several artists— singers, Big Bands, a cappella groups—and released simultaneously on different labels, often riding the charts side by side. One thing that could have enhanced this book immeasurably: an accompanying CD with recordings both of the well-known songs of the Second World War era (those that make us nostalgic) and of snippets from some of the more obscure songs, especially the early attempts at writing the anthem that would win the war (those that make us ask, “What were they thinking?”).

There is more to come as we review books on current affairs, history and biography, and miscellaneous topics.

'Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times on Monday, June 1, 1987, and in the New York City Tribune on Wednesday, June 3, 1987.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Doctor’s Story Of Deliberate Famine And an African Hitler 

Breakfast in Hell: A Doctor’s Experiences of the Ethiopian Famine, by Myles Harris, Picador, London, $4.85, 221 pp. 


In the play Man of La Mancha, the poet Cervantes explains what impelled a plain country squire toward becoming the knight Don Quixote: “Being retired, he has much time for books. . . . All he reads oppresses him, fills him with indignation at man’s murderous ways toward man.”

This is one of those books. Breakfast in Hell came to my attention through an article by the author in The Spectator, the British public affairs weekly. The title was “The Regime That Kills Ethiopians,” and that sums up the whole story. It would be extraordinarily difficult to come away from Myles Harris’s account of the state-imposed famine in Ethiopia without profound anger and indignation.

Myles Harris is a medical doctor who has worked all over the world caring for the malnourished, ill-housed, poorly clothed and impoverished people who make up such a large number of us. Prior to his six months in Ethiopia with the Red Cross, he and his wife Janet had worked in undeveloped regions in Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Kalahari Desert.

It is clear from the outset that Harris went to Ethiopia with few, if any, preconceptions of what he would encounter there. The Red Cross needed medical personnel to work in famine areas, and he responded to their call. He had no trouble adopting the apolitical life of a Red Cross delegate and wanted only to help suffering Ethiopians.

He emerged from the country half a year later with bitter feelings toward the Mengistu regime, toward international aid agencies and toward petty Communist Party officials who blocked genuine humanitarian relief; he has fond and loving memories of his Ethiopian co-workers and the farmers, townspeople, young mothers and children he encountered in the feeding camps and medical stations.

Harris writes vividly and pulls no punches. He compares the Emperor Mengistu (as he calls Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictator) to Hitler and Stalin; indeed, reading some of the descriptions of Mengistu’s atrocities makes one think Adolph and Joe were mere pranksters.

For instance: The Soviets, as part of their aid to keep him on his throne, sent a unit of the East German Volkspolizei, “a secret police force with one of the finest pedigrees in suppression in the world. . . . At the time of the Ethiopian terror in 1977, some of the most senior Volkspolizei officers had once been serving members of the Gestapo. For, at the end of the Second World War, the capitulation of half the Third Reich to the Russians had meant little more for them than. . . swapping a swastika for a red star, before it was business as usual.”

The business these ex-Gestapo henchmen taught Mengistu was the need for a memorable terror to bring all Ethiopians into his iron grip. “Mengistu searched his heart for the most terrible thing he could do to bring his people through fear to the truth of Marxism-Leninism, and he thought of burial. Ethiopians hold burial to be one of the most important rites of life. To die unburied, to be forgotten in death, is so awful that even today those who whisper to you their memories of the Terror can hardly bring themselves to speak of this part of it…. [Mengistu] ordered that the bodies of the slain should lie unburied, and that those who tried to take them for burial were themselves to be slaughtered. One morning, the people of Addis woke to streets filled with corpses and a sky dark with vultures.” Later, “the lampposts were strung with corpses, not of men, but of young school boys who had tried and failed to rescue their fathers’ and brothers’ bodies for burial. . . . When it was over, of the 5,000 students at the University of Addis Ababa, only 1,500 were still alive.”

That excerpt exposes the minds of men who would, among other things, padlock food warehouses for days and weeks, refusing to give relief workers access to the tools of their trade; who would refuse hospital admission to obviously sick and dying children whose parents lacked the proper papers from the local farmers’ association, papers that took five days or longer to obtain; who would ship truckloads of grain from the famine-stricken north of the country to the healthier and more fertile south, where it was stored for unknown reasons -- perhaps for later shipment to the masters in Moscow. These are men who forbid the sale of yeast to Ethiopian citizens in order to secure a government monopoly on the baking and selling of bread.

Harris spares nearly no one from his understated but strongly felt wrath. The Red Cross and other relief agencies get criticism for trying too hard to work with and please the government -- a government that wants to keep the Red Cross from doing its job. At one point, he tries to explain this to his superiors:

“We had done exactly what we had been instructed to do by Geneva: emptied the camps of all except the very ill and returned the rest of the people to their villages.

“But each success would have found little favor with the Ethiopians. Suddenly, they had been washed into the center of a disaster worse than the First World War.

Confused and frightened, their only remedy -- huge feeding programs -- seemed the only rock to cling to. Then we came along and tried to close down their camps. Closing down their operation implied their failure, and, as in most aid programs, threatened bureaucratic livelihoods. Famine camps meant foreign aid, foreign aid meant jobs.”

Hitler, Stalin and Mao share one positive characteristic — they are all dead. But Mengistu and the communists who rule Ethiopia with him are alive and dripping with the blood of their countrymen. Why, then, do Western governments, the United Nations and Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid continue to send them money that perpetuates their tyranny?

Richard Sincere, a Washington writer, is currently pursuing post-graduate studies in international relations at the London School of Economics.

'Politics and Government in African States, 1960-1985'

This review originally appeared in the Washington Times Magazine on Monday, August 17, 1987.  This version was published a few weeks later in the New York City Tribune, on Wednesday, September 23, 1987. The bio-line is slightly inaccurate; I had finished my degree at the LSE in June 1987. This article must have been submitted to the newspaper before I left London but was not published until after my return to the United States.

RICHARD SINCERE
A Hefty But ‘Uneven’ Compendium of African Issues

Politics and Government in African States, 1960-1985, eds. Peter Duignan and Robert H. Jackson, Stanford, California, Hoover Institute Press, and London, Croom Helm, $36.95, hardcover; $20.95, paperback 434 pp.

In his comic novel Scoop, Evelyn Waugh describes the foreign editor of a major newspaper searching frantically and unavailingly on a map of Africa for the country of Ishmaelia, so that he can send a war correspondent to cover the revolution there.

Things have not changed much. In many American minds, the map of Africa stretches from Cape Town in the south to Pretoria in the north. The rest of the continent, because it tends to be forgotten by the major media, remains unknown to the American voter— and to students, businessmen and even political activists.

To be sure, a few rare instances of trouble in Africa outside South Africa have reached our television screens— Idi Amin’s hideous Uganda, the genocide in Ethiopia, ethnic strife in Nigeria — but these events merely scratch the surface.

In the 25 or so years since most of its countries became independent states, Africa has been a cauldron of political activity: exciting, disgusting, heartening, backward, progressive, tyrannical, and benign.

For these of us concerned with civil rights, personal dignity, and human freedom, most of Africa since 1960 presents a sad case. One-party systems and military dictatorships are the rule; ethnic conflicts tear many African states apart; governments teem with corruption; negative growth rates and reduced standards of living are the product of centralized planning in a socialist mold.

This hefty volume examines about half of the states of Africa. As might be expected in a multi-author work, the result is uneven. Some chapters, for instance, are quite good on colonial history and weak on current economics; others provide nearly no background on the colonial period yet give detailed accounts of recent political developments.

The book, unfortunately, has many faults. It lacks maps, even a single map of the continent; its many references to geography had me jumping up regularly to consult a wall map. Moreover, nowhere in the book are any of the nine authors identified.

It is apparent also that the Hoover Institution Press lacks a good copy editor — the volume suffers from numerous typographical errors, inconsistencies and impenetrable sentences that diminish readability and reduce credibility. (This, despite a long production process. Some of the essays indicate that they were written in late 1984, others in mid-1985, with publication late in 1986.)

Despite its flaws, this is a volume worth consulting. Once one had been warned of the potential inaccuracies -- and the fact that several of the essays have been overtaken by events, it is possible to find a wealth of information about and interpretation of politics in Africa over the past quarter century.

Political developments in individual African countries can be remarkably similar or remarkably different. All (except Ethiopia and Liberia) were colonies of Europe. All (except Somalia) are multinational states, with multiple languages and dialects, various religions, competing customs and legal traditions and burgeoning populations. All (except South Africa and, to some extent, Zimbabwe), are non-industrialized, economically underdeveloped, and lacking the capability to feed themselves.

There are some success stories. The Ivory Coast, Senegal, and Kenya have been politically stable and have to one degree or another been able to press ahead economically.

But as long as other African states persist in statist “solutions” to their economic and demographic problems, such as forced collectivization of agriculture, stagnation and poverty are inevitable results.

It took Europe and North America hundreds of years to rise from the grime and contagion of the Middle Ages to the political stability and economic prosperity they enjoy today. It was surely too much to expect that the fledgling African nations could do the same in less than a generation.

What the next 25, 50, or a hundred years will bring is anybody’s guess, but the story of sub-Saharan Africa since independence cautions us to be pessimistic.

Richard Sincere is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science as a Richard M. Weaver Fellow.

Book Notes 1

For about one year – mid-1991 through early 1992 – I was books editor of terra nova, a quarterly journal published by the International Freedom Foundation. (I later became editor-in-chief, succeeding Mark Franz.) One of the recurring features in the books section of terra nova was “Book Notes,” short blurbs about (then) current books. I contributed several of these over the short period that terra nova was published.

These “notes” appeared in Volume 1, Number 1 of terra nova (Summer [North] Winter [South] 1991).

Book Notes
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Development in Practice: Paved with Good Intentions by Doug Porter, Bryant Allen, and Gaye Thompson. (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, April 1991). 247 pages, $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.
Three Australian researchers looked at a major aid project in Kenya funded by the Australian government over a period of thirteen years. The authors note that “the failure of a great many development projects to achieve even their most fundamental objectives is due to a reluctance on the part of development practitioners to appreciate the significance of history. Projects are frequently designed as if time began with the project implementation schedule. Past lessons are seldom examined and still fewer professionals bother to inquire into the historical circumstances of the people their interventions seek to assist.” To fully explain the failure of this project—the Magarini Settlement Project in Kenya’s Coast Province— the authors look at the 70 years of social, political, and economic history among the Giriama people that preceded the launch of the initiative. They examine the project’s implementation, its review and accountability back home (in Australia), and the effects of the project’s failure on Australian development aid policy.

Foreign Aid in Practice by Stephen Browne. (New York: Columbia University Press, July 1990). 283 pages, $60.00 cloth.
Attempting both to explain and justify current foreign aid programs and practices, Foreign Aid in Practice is in many ways a primer for readers unfamiliar with the wider literature on development. As such, it is a trap for the uninitiated, for it accepts as a given that development aid actually works, contrary to the findings of economists and other experts. To the extent that the volume explains the inner workings of the World Bank, IMF, and various countries’ development agencies, it is useful, but its overly rosy view of the purposes and potential of foreign aid renders it a dubious source of critical insights.


The Political Economy of Senegal Under Structural Adjustment, edited by Christopher L. Delgado and Sidi Jammeh. (Westport. Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991), 232 pages, $45.00 cloth.
Twelve essays by African, American, and European experts on the political economy of West Africa comprise this volume, an examination of one of Africa’s few multiparty democracies. The essays look at external economic forces affecting Senegal’s economic performance, internal political events and trends that influence economic decisionmaking, and the role of international development agencies. The editors note in the introduction that “if it is correct to characterize Senegalese nation-building from colonial days to the end of the 1970s as using economic strategies to address complex political issues, it would be equally correct to characterize the period since then as using political strategies to address nearly insoluble economic dilemmas.” This book uses that conceptualization to examine a transitional phase in the development of Senegal’s political economy.

Effective Sanctions on South Africa: The Cutting Edge of Economic Intervention, edited by George W. Shepherd, Jr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, March 1991). 160 pages, $39.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.
The editor of this volume contends that, unlike sanctions strategies in the past, which have had a consistent record of failure, economic sanctions against South Africa have been effective in promoting change in that country. While he notes that there has been a continuing debate about the effectiveness of sanctions and whether they will actually hurt the cause they are meant to help, he brushes aside the objections and states baldly that even in the wake of substantial reform and the opening up of the South African political process since February 1990, “the case for ongoing, effective sanctions seems clear.” The contributors contend that “the movement for racial equality in the world is not spent,” which leads them to offer the South African sanctions as a model for policy elsewhere in the world, a prospect that should make wary anyone who supports unfettered commercial intercourse and non-coercive political relations between sovereign states.

'The Struggle' and "Dialogue in Williamsburg'

This review essay originally appeared in Volume 3, Number 4 of International Freedom Review (Summer 1990).

Book Review
NEGOTIATING IN SOUTH AFRICA:
NEW TIMES DEMAND NEW APPROACHES
The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress
by Heidi Holland
(New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1990, 256 pages, illus., cloth. $19.95)
and
Dialogue in Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?
edited with commentary by Michael Briand
(San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press, 1989, 165 pages, paperback, $10.95)
Reviewed by Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

The people who write books on South African issues, and their American publishers, must be quite pleased these days. Since the election of F.W. de Klerk as South Africa’s president in September 1989, political conditions in that country have been changing at a dramatic, if not literally breathtaking, pace. The legalization of the African National Congress and other banned anti-apartheid groups in February 1990, along with the long-awaited release from Victor Verster Prison of Nelson Mandela, brought South Africa back into an international spotlight it had successfully tried to avoid for several years.

Indeed, after the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. which imposed severe economic sanctions against South Africa, American interest in events there languished. Since Americans had the sense that Congress had already “done something,” there was no need to think about South Africa or apartheid, the system of separate development and racial discrimination, or to “do anything” else. Despite the best efforts of some American anti-apartheid groups, South African Issues played only a marginal role—if any at all—in the 1988 presidential campaign. College campuses became quiescent as demands for divestment In South Africa-related stocks slowed and then ceased. Ritualistic protest demonstrations in front of the South African embassy in Washington failed to get covered on the evening news, except on such occasions as Nelson Mandela’s birthday, when media interest could again be aroused.

All that has changed now. With negotiations beginning in earnest after a several-month period of hesitation and—to put it bluntly—grandstanding among all the parties involved, the legalization of the ANC is beginning to have its full impact. De Klerk’s National Party government has announced that it is willing to share power but unwilling to submit to majority rule. Nelson Mandela has been named Deputy President of the ANC for purposes of leading the negotiating team. With the parties around the table, the question becomes: What are they negotiating about?

It is in this context that two recent books become relevant and informative. One, Heidi Holland’s The Struggle, helps to answer the question of who (or what) is the ANC. The other, Michael Briand’s Dialogue at Williamsburg, provides a microcosmic insight into what the negotiating process itself is all about and what we might expect during the long bargaining period ahead.

Holland’s new history of the African National Congress was published in the same month as the ANC was legalized after nearly thirty years in exile and underground in South Africa, and as President F. W. de Klerk released ANC leader Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison.

The African National Congress has long been recognized as the pre-eminent voice of South Africa’s blacks in the struggle against apartheid, imposed by the National Party in 1948 and now being disowned by that same party.

However, the ANC is not the only voice. Many black South Africans vehemently disagree with the ANC’s policies and dislike its personalities. For instance, Dr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Chief Minister of KwaZulu and leader of the Inkatha organization, argues that the ANC is wrong in calling for economic sanctions against South Africa. Buthelezi shares this view with many blacks displaced from their jobs when American and other foreign companies left the country after the 1986 sanctions.

On the other side, the Pan-African Congress takes issue with the ANC because the ANC believes in a non-racial South Africa, a country where both whites and blacks have a home. The PAC believes only blacks should have political, civil, and economic rights in South Africa. This belief is shared with the Azanian People’s Organization and the followers of the late Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness Movement.

Currently, the PAC—also unbanned by de Klerk in February 1990—is actively opposing negotiations, saying that whites should have no role in shaping the future South Africa. This is a curious mirror-image of the position taken by members of the (white) Conservative Party, whose MPs walked out of Parliament on the day negotiations began (May 2, 1990), protesting what they called an “act of treason” by President de Klerk.

Holland, a South African journalist, chronicles the birth and growth of the ANC In a readable, non-academic fashion. Her narrative could easily be understood by a high school student. This simplicity, however, might be considered a drawback to its rendering a realistic account at a desperate, intense moment in history.

In the early chapters especially, Holland’s history reads like a hagiography of Mandela and Walter Sisulu, two of the founders of the youth wing of the ANC In the 1940s and of the military wing (Umkhonto We Sizwe, or “Spear of the Nation”) in the early 1960s. Holland tells stories of Mandela that echo Parson Weems’ story of George Washington and the cherry tree: how ten-year-old Nelson saved pennies for his school fees, how teenage Nelson participated in a tribal puberty rite, or this description of Nelson the young man when he first arrived in Johannesburg:

Crowing roosters scuttled away to clear a path for Nelson in the hour before sunrise when, as a budding boxer, he jogged around the houses In his daily fitness routine.

Even the animals make way for this messianic leader! This type of presentation makes it difficult to accept Holland the author as Holland the unbiased journalist.

Still, she does offer some unexpected Insights. Though she does not draw the connection herself, there are some interesting parallels between the (white) Afrikaner Nationalists, who openly sympathized with the Nazis during World War II, and ANC activist Walter Sisulu. After war was declared in 1939, Sisulu “helped campaign to stop Africans from volunteering for the army. He became an admirer of the Japanese, hoping they might someday invade South Africa.”

Holland does not hide the fact that the ANC has been heavily influenced by Communist ideology. She traces Communist infiltration of the ANC to 1928, soon after the South African Communist Party led white workers in the Rand Rebellion under the banner, “Workers of the World, Unite and Fight for a White South Africa.” Seeing that this proletariat form of class struggle was bound to fail, the Communists joined forces with black activists. Ultimately this probably set back the cause of democracy in South Africa by several generations, giving paranoid Afrikaner nationalists an excuse to deny blacks their civil rights.

Holland does, however, suggest strongly that Mandela and his close friends—including current ANC president Oliver Tambo— fought the Communists. This is strange, because Mandela in the 1960s proclaimed himself a Marxist. Tambo, until very recently, embraced the assistance of the Kremlin, speaking glowingly of Communism as the cure for South Africa’s ills.

Now out of prison, however, Mandela seems a changed man— more moderate, more conciliatory, more dignified than the terrorist who was sent to prison In 1964. Tambo, incapacitated by ill-health, is out of the picture. Those who sat glued to their televisions on February 11, 1990—the day of Mandela’s long-awaited release—know that a new day has dawned in South Africa, and that Mandela’s cooperation with Nationalist leader F. W. de Klerk is key to a peaceful, permanent settlement to South Africa’s long struggle to create a democratic system for all its citizens.

Mandela’s commitment to peaceful change and the deeper understanding he may have regarding the issues involved was indicated by his remarks about guaranteeing the rights of Afrikaners in a Cape Town press conference on May 2, 1990. As if to demonstrate the sincerity of his pledge, he made his remarks in Afrlkaans rather than English or Xhosa. Perhaps out of the woodwork, operating as a political party alongside the Democrats, the Conservatives, Labour, and others, the ANC can find its place in South African society without recourse to violence.


At the Negotiating Table: Where Do We Go from Here?
Of course, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. On what experiences can South Africans draw for achieving compromise after so many years of severely dichotomized conflict?

One is the negotiating experiment conducted in Williamsburg, Virginia, by Michael Briand, president of the Center for Public Philosophy. Based on his experience at this meeting—which brought together South African thinkers, politicians, and activists—Briand believes that substantial constitutional change can occur in South Africa and that an end to the conflict there can be achieved through negotiation, not violence.

It was no accident that the meeting took place in Williamsburg, one of the cradles of American democracy. The earliest American politicians learned the art of compromise at Williamsburg and, when pressed against the wall, resolved to fight against tyranny. It was there that Patrick Henry proclaimed. “Give me liberty or give me death!” The spirit permeating Williamsburg had to be felt among the participants.

Briand’s concept of the gathering was a small-scale practice session for eventual constitutional discussions—indeed, even negotiations—that will require the participation of representatives of all competing groups in South Africa. This meeting itself was not designed to negotiate a settlement, nor to pass resolutions that would be trumpeted by the participants upon their return to South Africa. It was instead a low-key affair, and those who participated did so in an almost anonymous fashion: no names of participants were published in the book that resulted from the meeting, Dialogue In Williamsburg: The Turning Point for South Africa?.  However, those familiar with the South African political scene can probably guess the identities of some, if not most, of the participants quoted.

Twenty-seven South Africans participated at the meeting. They ranged from Conservatives wanting the country partitioned along racial lines, to liberal Afrikaners and English-speaking whites preferring a federal or unitary system with a universal franchise and free market economics, to black South Africans in accord with the African National Congress, calling for universal suffrage, multiracial representation in a single parliament, and nationalization of major industries.

In a paper circulated among participants before the meetings, Briand set out the conditions necessary for a successful constitutional settlement, not only in South Africa, but anywhere that seemingly irreconcilable conflict prevents peaceful disposition of political matters. The most important point to remember, Briand says, is that:

a simple majority cannot suffice to establish a society’s fundamental legal framework. At this level—the constitutional level—something approaching unanimity is both a theoretical and a practical requirement, at least In the first instance. Thus delegates to a constitutional convention might agree to adopt provisions of a new constitution by majority vote. But the legitimacy of the decision would depend on a prior unanimous agreement to relax the unanimity requirement.

Both inside South Africa and elsewhere, the purpose of negotiations is misunderstood. Briand writes:

Many people, South Africans not least of all, act as if a solution must be found before negotiations can begin. As one South African put it, ‘negotiate about what?’ The answer is, negotiate an end to the conflict, Sit down with the representatives of every point of view and every set of interests and try to identify proposals that would protect the most important interest of each constituency. The solution will emerge from this process of discussion and negotiation.

For some South Africans, negotiations cannot take place until certain conditions are met. For Instance, the National Party government has long insisted that the African National Congress must renounce violence before it can be admitted to the negotiating process. For its part, the ANC has called for the unbanning of certain organizations, the release of certain prisoners, and ending the prohibitions against certain forms of political activity.

The National Party representatives made clear their commitment to the concept of “power sharing,” which they argued:

is not tantamount to domination by the majority. It is not the takeover of South Africa by the ANC. Power sharing is the assurance that tone-party] domination In South Africa will not come about.

The Nationalists also see “power sharing” as a transitional phase: “Power sharing, as a basis for the future, must be exercised In such a manner as to allow that shared power eventually to grow into a proper democracy.”

Yet black nationalist groups such as the ANC fear that “power sharing” is a white ruse to hold onto power and to continue white domination over blacks. In the meantime, one black participant warned:

it is becoming riskier in black politics to remain reasonable. It is becoming more fashionable to be unreasonable. Those of us who try to be reasonable are under attack from both left and right. We are called puppets by the left. We are called revolutionaries and communists by the right.

A liberal English-speaking South African argued that:

South Africa is at the moment visionless. It is directionless. Politics is unpredictable for both Blacks and Whites. On both sides, people distrust the Government. The National Party has no credibility because it will not say clearly where it is going, and why. It tries to appease everyone by talking and acting vaguely or contradictorily.

The discussions also addressed the topic of individual rights versus group rights, and the shape a new constitution would take based upon the consensus on that issue. Dr. Briand comments:

Like Americans (who ought to know better). South Africans habitually confuse the ideas of liberalism and democracy. Liberalism concerns the degree of liberty that persons enjoy and the spheres of activity in which they are free to act (i.e., the scope of liberty). In other words, liberalism addresses the question of the relative size of the private and public realms. . . . ‘Democracy’ is not synonymous with the form of government that we in the Western political tradition have come to value so highly. Properly speaking, democracy is only one element in that tradition. The more fundamental element is liberalism.

Briand believes, as a result of the Williamsburg meeting, that “in the South African conflict, mutual understanding (which facilitation fosters) is still desperately needed.” South Africans of different backgrounds still have difficulty coming to terms with the different ways of looking at life and the different goals that their adversaries and fellow-countrymen have. He concludes that “prudence as well as justice requires that South Africans seriously contemplate—and contemplate soon—Initiating genuine negotiations for the purpose of reaching a fair and viable resolution of their conflict.” He draws from his experience of meeting South Africans of varied backgrounds and persuasions that “a fair and self-enforcing settlement is possible” if dialogue and negotiations can be initiated and sustained.

Now Briand’s predictions can be put to the test: Mandela and de Klerk are sitting across from each other at the same table, discussing the future shape of South African politics and society. A joint statement issued by the ANC and the government after the first round said the discussions were characterized by “openness and straightforwardness on both sides.” Mandela said he wanted to see the remaining obstacles to full negotiations removed “so that we can together move forward as rapidly as possible to end the inhuman system of apartheid.” For his part, de Klerk noted that “the vast majority of South Africans desire the negotiation process aimed at a new constitution to get started in all earnest,” adding that confrontation will get South Africans nowhere. Our joint destiny demands that all of us steer clear of it.”

To succeed, however, negotiations must include more parties than just the ANC and the National Party. The Conservatives, Inkatha, the PAC, churches and religious organizations, business groups, and labor unions must all be invited to take part. As Briand points out, a constitutional structure decided by anything short of consensus is almost guaranteed to fail. Neither South Africans nor Americans should grow complacent simply because Mandela and de Klerk are talking to each other.

Richard Sincere, a frequent contributor to the book review pages of International Freedom Review, is author of Sowing the Seeds of Free Enterprise: The Politics of U.S. Economic Aid in Africa (International Freedom FoundatIon, 1990) and The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment In South Africa (Ethics and Public Pbllcy Center, 1987).