allAfrica.com: Africa: Africa's Lost Decades - A Reporter's Lament (Page 1 of 2)

1 A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
Howard W. French
April 23, 2004
Alfred A. Knopf

New York Times correspondent Howard French's relationship with Africa has been both personal and professional. His father ran a World Health Organization programme in West Africa. French later reported from the region for, among others, Africa News Service (the predecessor of AllAfrica), eventually becoming the Times' regional bureau chief. Always keenly interested in the interaction between Africa and the West, French has written a book that explores the responsibilities for Africa's plight, for which he apportions blame widely, along with the prospects for recovery and what might be called redemption. Arguing that the West has always benefited materially from its African engagements, French also reminds the reader that the world community -- after saying "no more Rwandas" -- has largely ignored the continuing Congo conflict, which has killed over three million people in the last five years. Akwe Amosu reviewed the book for AllAfrica.

If ignorance can be described as darkness, then Africa is indeed a dark continent in the minds of most Western readers.

That they know so little about such a huge, important continent is part of Africa's tragedy and part of the reason Howard French has written this book. But he is not only inviting them to acquire more knowledge: he would like them to discover the profound connection between their ignorance and Africa's troubles.

This makes A Continent for the Taking a far better book than it might have been, although I predict that it will also discomfit some critics who might feel more comfortable with the more usual Africa traveller's "no strings" offering of exotic locations, frightening experiences, extremes of misery, violence or both, leavened nonetheless with accounts of individual Africans' profound humanity and generosity and the reassuring fact that the writer gets to leave the continent in the end.

This formula - it is all too commonly deployed - has the comforting effect of confirming to those outside that the heart of Africa is still dark and there is nothing we can do about it, yet promising that Africans may produce solutions some day, thus releasing outsiders from responsibility.

French's project is quite the opposite. Although bearing many similarities to other books in the genre, his determination to include explanations for what happens in Africa sets him apart.

Far from being in the dark, he argues (deploying en route a great quote from John Le Carre), Western governments and their agents have long been fully aware of what is happening on the continent and are active players in seeking outcomes which often condone, or even provoke, the very misery and violence we are led to believe are Africa's own contribution to its plight.

As he explains in his introduction: "...this book is a chronicle of the disastrous continuum in the encounter between Africa and the West." He aims to "help remedy our complaisant forgetfulness and our hypocrisy."

America, says French, has chosen friends on the continent such as Idi Amin, Hastings Banda, Samuel Doe and Jonas Savimbi: "It bears repeating, given their disastrous legacy," he comments, "that we supported leaders like these for our own strategic reasons, and for those reasons alone, during the long years of the Cold War."

Those who have long felt comfortable in the West's very own heart of darkness may well choose to put the book down at this point; it isn't going to get any easier.

A number of different narratives weave their way through the book, reflecting French's own experience as a reporter, switching between countries and stories as they shift in and out of the spotlight.

Central Africa after the 1994 Rwanda genocide dominates, with four detailed chapters out of the book's eleven, although by not focusing our attention on the political-economic issues there until chapter six, French manages to give other sub-narratives their place in the sun before they are overwhelmed by events in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He begins with his personal African odyssey as a young man - a long trek from the West African coastal city of Abidjan in Cote d'Ivoire to Mali, an African American on the way to find out what Africa might mean to him. It is a journey of self-discovery that will initially resonate with many of his readers, who may assume they are on familiar territory.

French turns the tables by suddenly ditching his discovery of Africa's dignity and culture in favour of an economic history lesson, which readers familiar with conventional accounts of African history will find clarifying, boiling down hundreds of years of relations between Africa and the West. By the end of Chapter 1, (which acknowledges a debt to John Reader's excellent Africa: A Biography of the Continent) it is obvious that French is a man on a mission.

There follow - in no particular order - a chapter on Nigeria under Sani Abacha, the Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, two chapters on Liberia, as it is torn apart by warlords, and a troubling excursion to visit Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi dying of Aids in a village.

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