Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (40 page)

Notes

INTRODUCTION

“the global architects”: John le Carré,
New York Times,
May 4, 1993.

CHAPTER ONE

Prehistory

“How do you think we can fight”: Chinua Achebe,
Things Fall Apart
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1984), p. 162.

“[Ghana] was manifestly a national state on its way”: Basil Davidson,
The Black
Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
(New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 76.

“King Coffee is too rich a neighbor”: Robert B. Edgerton,
The Fall of the Ashanti
Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa’s Gold Coast
(New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 167.

At the end of World War II: John W. Cell, Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis, eds.,
The Oxford History of the British Empire,
vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 232.

“the desire—one might indeed say the need”: Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
”
Massachusetts Review
18 (1977).

“The world of the West basks”: Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
Silencing the Past: Power
and the Production of History
(Boston: Beacon, 1995).

Africa has little history worth recalling: “Obituary of Lord Dacre of Glanton, Regius Professor of History at Oxford and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Who Resisted the Narrow View,”
The Daily Telegraph,
Jan. 27, 2003.

“The prehistoric man was cursing us”: Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
(New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 107.

But in the end: Patrick Manning,
Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental and
African Slave Trades
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

“For Africans, enslavement was a threat”: John Reader,
Africa: A Biography of the
Continent
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997), pp. 437–38.

“Each day the traders are kidnapping our people”: Adam Hochschild,
King
Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 13.

“These goods exert such a great attraction”: Ibid.

CHAPTER THREE

Plague

“Had Leopold been a different kind of man”: Pagan Kennedy,
Black Livingstone:
A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo
(New York: Viking, 2002), p. 27.

“His political insignificance made him invisible”: Ibid.

In little more than a generation: Hochschild,
King Leopold’s Ghost,
p. 280.

“the claim of the stranger—the victim on the TV screen”: Michael Ignatieff,
The
Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
(New York: Holt, 1997), p. 14.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Golden Bough

“Your situation is rich with rewards”: Sony Labou Tansi,
La Vie et Demie
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979), p. 24; my translation.

“tomorrow with the eyes of today”: Ibid., p. 10.

“In this country, night has the appearance of divinity”: John Updike, “A Heavy World: Fury Haunts a Late Novelist’s Work,”
The New Yorker,
Feb. 5, 1996.

CHAPTER FIVE

Greater Liberia

“I started with a shotgun and three rifles”: Denis Johnson, “The Small Boys’ Unit: Searching for Charles Taylor in a Liberian Civil War,”
Harper’s,
October 2000, p. 137.

“Your American ambassador came”: Ibid.

“Perhaps I made a wrong career choice”: Mark Huband,
The Skull Beneath the
Skin: Africa After the Cold War
(Boulder: Westview, 2001), p. 62.

CHAPTER SIX

Falling Apart

Here again were unmistakable echoes: Hochschild,
King Leopold’s Ghost,
p. 88.

Abundant hydroelectric potential already existed: Jonathan Kwitney,
Endless
Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World
(New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 23.

“The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur”: V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 103.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Where Peacocks Roam

The aversion to the word “genocide”: Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen,”
The Atlantic,
September 2001, p. 96.

The music grew ever louder: Crawford Young and Thomas Turner,
The Rise and
Decline of the Zairian State
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 153.

By the time most of the dust had settled: The International Rescue Committee, April 8, 2003: “The four and a half year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has taken more lives than any other since World War II and is the deadliest documented conflict in African history, says the International Rescue Committee. A mortality study released today by the IRC estimates that since August 1998, when the war erupted, through November 2002 when the survey was completed, at least 3.3 million people died in excess of what would normally be expected during this time.”

“Despite Rwanda’s size”: Philip Gourevitch, “Forsaken: Congo Seems Less a Nation Than a Battlefield for Countless African Armies,”
The New Yorker,
Sept. 25, 2000, p. 56.

“Valuable real estate for a while”: Naipaul,
A Bend in the River,
p. 27.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Castles in the Sand

Like General Touré before him: Robert M. Press, “Mali Elections Break New Ground,”
Christian Science Monitor,
Feb. 2, 1992.

Washington’s spending patterns were no mere abstraction: Howard W. French, “In France, Savvy Candidates for President Take a Trip to Africa,”
New York
Times,
Mar. 13, 1995. Speaking to a colloquium of Francophone mayors, held in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris and a former prime minister, said: “For developing countries, multiparty politics is a political error . . . a sort of luxury that developing countries, which must concentrate their efforts on economic growth, cannot afford.” Albert Bourgi, “Jacques Chirac et le sens de l’histoire,”
Jeune Afrique,
no. 1523, Mar. 12, 1990, p. 18.

The whole process reeked of cynicism: Joseph E. Stiglitz,
Globalization and Its
Discontents
(New York: Norton, 2002), p. 6.

CHAPTER NINE

Tough Love

Washington and its European partners were preoccupied: United States State Department,
USIA Electronic Journal,
vol. 2, no. 2 (May 1997) and the United Nations.

“We deployed a large marine amphibious force”: Bill Berkeley,
The Graves Are
Not Yet Full
(New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 83.

On the ground in Liberia, American officials rejected all requests: Neil Henry, “Doctors’ Group Criticizes U.S. for Not Intervening in Liberia,” Washington
Post,
Aug. 16, 1990.

CHAPTER TEN

Long Knives

Week after week, though, the American Embassy in Kigali: Peter Rosenblum, “Irrational Exuberance: The Clinton Administration in Africa,”
Current History,
May 2002.

Just days before, the United Nations had reported: Hrvoje Hranjski, “100,000 Refugees Are Missing in Eastern Zaire,” Associated Press, Apr. 26, 1997.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: Ibid.

Che Guevara, who had come to the Congo: Piero Gleijeses,
Conflicting Missions:
Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 154.

Ultimately, Kabila forced his way: William B. Cosma,
Fizi 1967–1986: Le
Maquis Kabila
(Brussels: Institut Africain-CEDAF, 1997), pp. 111–12; my translation from the French.

In the months immediately prior: United States Department of Defense,
Reports
to Congress on U.S. Military Activities in Rwanda, 1994–August 1997.

Senior officials from the American Embassy: Joseph Farah, “Did U.S. Help Zaire’s Rebels?” WorldNet Daily, May 5, 1997.

Later I learned that Ambassador Simpson: A colorful account of Ambassador Simpson’s role as catalyst and intermediary is contained in Michela Wrong,
In
the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the
Congo
(London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 276.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Le Roi Est Mort (Long Live the King)

“Oddly, a number of recent reports”: Philip Gourevitch, “The Vanishing: How Congo Became Zaire, and Zaire Became the Congo,”
The New Yorker,
June 2, 1997.

“For weeks now, the U.N. sleuths”: Philip Gourevitch, “Stonewall Kabila: Why the U.N.’s Word Is as Unreliable as the Congo Leader’s,” The New Yorker, Oct. 6, 1997. (Emphasis mine. To speak of “Kabila’s forces” is to prudishly avert one’s eyes from the generally acknowledged reality that the AFDL rebellion was essentially conducted by an army on loan from Rwanda.)

“Townspeople say they little suspected”: Robert Block, “Blood Stains: Kabila’s Government Is Tainted by Reports of Refugee Slaughter—Rwandan Troops That Aided Congo Leader in Victory Sought Tribal Vengeance—Deal Made or No Control?”
Wall Street Journal,
June 6, 1997.

“It aggressively worked to block”: Samantha Power, “Bystanders to the Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen,”
The Atlantic,
September 2001, p. 86.

“He is not a politician,” Kabila said: Transcribed from the author’s notes, supplemented by BBC Worldwide Monitoring.

Three years later, long after Rwanda had turned: Philip Gourevitch, “Forsaken: Congo Seems Less a Nation Than a Battlefield for Countless African Armies,”
The New Yorker,
Sept. 25, 2000, p. 54.

“The ‘new African leaders’ policy”: Peter Rosenblum, “Irrational Exuberance: The Clinton Administration in Africa,”
Current History,
May 2002, p. 196.

“This is the most sordid time”: Sony Labou Tansi, L’Anté-peuple (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1983), quoted from John Updike, “A Heavy World: Fury Haunts a Late Writer’s Work,”
The New Yorker,
Feb. 5, 1996.

Acknowledgments

Space does not allow me to thank all of the many people whose intelligence, friendliness, love and criticism helped me carry this project to fruition.

Because this book is in some sense the work of a lifetime, my thanks must first go to my parents, David and Carolyn French, and to my wife, Avouka Koffi, who, in their different ways, introduced me to the continent.

I also cannot express enough thanks to my sons, William and Henry. They put up with many long absences as small children, and yet encouraged me to persevere in the writing of this book as they developed into young men.

Robert Grossman, whose pictures illustrate my text, was a fine and steady traveling companion throughout much of the story that unfolds here. His questions often prodded me to challenge my assumptions.

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, another colleague and frequent travel companion, did much the same. Her pluck and her grace with language, like her respect for the facts, inspired me greatly.

For whatever defects and shortcomings that are contained herein, I alone am responsible. This book has been immeasurably improved, however, by the comments and suggestions of a core group of readers, starting with Robert and Ofeibea, who began reading the earliest pages of the manuscript when I was still plagued with many doubts. Their generosity helped sustain me.

Other critical readers whose patience and thoughtfulness helped me improve this work include James French, my brother, whose love of Africa is equal to my own; Peter Rosenblum, associate projects director of Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program, whose knowledge of Central Africa is matched by his knowledge of African policy circles in Washington; and René Lemarchand, of the University of Florida, whose work on democracy and authoritarianism has always challenged conventional wisdoms about Africa. As someone who has traveled widely in Asia, but never to Africa, Stuart Isett, a close colleague in Tokyo, helped me eliminate many points of potential confusion. The suggestions of Daniel Sharfstein, my former stringer in Ghana, inspired countless refinements.

Bill Keller, who was my foreign editor at the
New York Times,
showed a rare appreciation for Africa that helped make the hardships of the road worthwhile.

Thanks also go to my editor, Jonathan Segal, whose deftness often amazed me, and to production editor Ellen Feldman, for her exemplary care for detail.

Finally, thanks to my agent, Gloria Loomis, who believed early and persisted.

The Grand Mosque of Djenné (Mali)

General Sani Abacha, president of Nigeria, addresses the nation.

An unclaimed body lies on the roadway in Lagos, Nigeria.

Fela Anikulapo Kuti performs at the Shrine, in Lagos.

Shell Oil flares unwanted gas near a village in Nigeria’s Delta region.

An open-pit diamond mine in Mbuji-Mayi, (Congo)

National Highway No. 1, just outside of Kinshasa, Zaire

Sony Labou Tansi, the late Congolese novelist, in Foufoundou

A victim of the Ebola virus being wheeled to a grave in Kikwit, Zaire

The Liberian president Charles Taylor at James Spriggs Payne airfield, Monrovia, Liberia

Lawrence Moore, a Liberian boy soldier, Broad Street, Monrovia

Children wandering across the runway at Spriggs Payne

Squatters in Monrovia