10 November 2004
interview
Howard French began writing about Africa in the early 1980s as a freelance journalist and professor based in Ivory Coast. After six years in West Africa, he took a permanent position with the New York Times. Many years passed as he negotiated what he calls the "cutthroat environment" of the Times' newsroom before he returned to West Africa as a foreign correspondent in the mid-1990s.
French has just published his first book, "A Continent for the Taking: The Hope and Tragedy of Africa," about his experiences as a reporter in Africa. He shared his insights with AllAfrica's staff.
Why did you write the book and why are you spending time promoting it?
I wrote the book, not for fame or fortune, but because I thought I could perhaps affect the discussion about Africa in the United States, to help create a healthier awareness of the continent and the political and historical realities surrounding Africa.
Why is that important to you?
Before I went to West Africa for the Times, I was working in Haiti. My assignment was Caribbean and Central America correspondent for the Times. A book came out then called "The Coming Anarchy" by Robert Kaplan. This book was terribly influential in academic and policy circles in the United States. I thought it was ill-informed and somewhat shallow in its take on the continent.
I thought, this is really unfortunate. This guy doesn't really know anything about Africa. He is going to ambassadors' cocktail parties and riding around in swaddled conditions and selling himself as the opposite - some guy who is really out there on the edge, seeing 'the real Africa,' which is a way of thinking about Africa that I have always distrusted.
I thought, I have to write a book. Now it's not just something I want to do, it is something I have a responsibility to do, because I have seen more of the continent than the kinds of people who have began to influence the debate about Africa who are writing essentially wrong-headed things about the continent. I felt a tremendous sense of responsibility to pull this off.
What were some of the biggest stories you covered in Africa?
The central story of my stay was the fall of Mobutu and the early part of Laurent Kabila's rule in the Congo. I wasn't holding back. I was doing my best to cover that story for the Times but I was contending with other forces. A colleague based in East Africa, who was part of that coverage in our newspaper, had a very different take on the conflict. I had editors who trusted me for the most part - as has always been the case in my career as a foreign correspondent - who were influenced by another writer who I thought had a very wrong-headed take on the conflict on Central Africa. This is a person who had visited occasionally and was relying on his relationships he had formed very high in the Rwandan government - essentially a friendship with Paul Kagame and some other people around him. I am talking about Phillip Gourevitch, a New Yorker correspondent.
I began to describe the Congo conflict as an invasion of Congo by Rwanda in which the United States very much cooperated. I was running into resistance both from my colleague, who I shared the story with, and from my editors, who were reading Gourevitch. Gourevitch had not too long before that written a very influential book about the Rwandan genocide. It was very well-received. He had a certain amount of prestige. My editors were saying, 'This kid's view of the war can't be all wrong. There must be something to it.' I just felt this tremendous tension in terms of being able to tell the story as I understood it and as I saw it. I was seeing it in immediate terms on the ground, as a witness in the fullest sense of the word.
Later we became aware of a figure of 3.3 million people who died as a result of that war. I didn't have that figure at my fingertips at that time, but I did have a very real sense that something akin to a reverse genocide was taking place with regard to the floating Hutu refugee populations in the Congo. They were Hutu and we had so completely bought into the argument of good/bad: Tutsi equals good, Hutu equals bad.
We are seeing it right now in Darfur, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people will die there. These are not criminals. Nobody makes the case that they've done anything wrong. Yet the world doesn't really seem to feel any great sense of urgency in terms of coming to the help of these populations. If that can happen to people not tainted with any crime, [just think] what the attitude would have been toward the Hutus, who in their majority were women and children. I was following these populations around Congo as they were fleeing the assault of Tutsi troops, who were nominally Kabila's troops. It was very difficult to get people to take this seriously. The Darfur people are invisible. These people were worse than invisible. They are not just Africans, but they were African bad guys.
When did you begin writing the book?
I left the continent at the end of my assignment personally traumatized by a lot of this. And I mean really traumatized. I was never diagnosed by a doctor in any medical sense, but I had the great privilege of going to Hawaii for a year of language training and school to study East Asian Affairs. I thought, `I will spend this year and I'll at least write the basics of the book down on paper.' I just couldn't do it.
Thinking about Africa during those months back in Hawaii - the first extended time I was able to spend with my family in two years - was just too difficult for me. It was still too close to me. It took Japan to be able to bring Africa back in some strange way. I got to Japan and after about a year of working there, all of these feelings and memories began to well up in me and I thought, `I have a responsibility to bear witness to the things that I saw and to tell this story that I think no one else was in a position - at least in the western press - to do.'
I began writing one Christmas holiday. I told my family, `I'm to wake up every morning and write from eight until noon. After noon we are on holiday; we'll do whatever we want, but from eight until noon every day I am going to write.' In three weeks, I wrote the first four chapters of the book and sent it off to my agent who then showed it to Knopf and they agreed to publish it on that basis. The rest is, as they say, history.
In one passage from Madeline Albright's book, she writes about an incident that you witnessed, "During a press conference with me in Kinshasa, Kabila exploded in anger when asked why an opposition leader had been detained, his policies, grimly reminiscent of Mobutu's produced economic disaster, had contributed to the widest and perhaps deadliest cross-border war in African history." Based on the way you describe U.S. policy during that time, her account sounds a bit revisionist. What do you think the U.S. government could have done differently during that period when Mobutu was clearly on the way out and Kabila was moving towards Kinshasa?
At several moments in this long, drawn-out crisis there were things the United States could have done. I would start before the Kabila war actually began. My essential view is that Washington's long-standing attitude towards Africa is we should maintain relations with the continent as cheaply as possible. If anything happens in a country that's a former French colony, emphasize French responsibility and as long as the French aren't doing anything too outrageous, back them diplomatically. If anything happens in another part of the continent, try to ignore it. If it becomes impossible to ignore, then try to get the United Nations to take care of it. If the United Nations becomes overwhelmed by it, try to get NGOs involved.
Only if all of these things become insufficient and the news media accords a certain prominence to whatever the crisis is, then do we become involved. This is where the role of the journalist is so important, because if you understand that, then it gives a new meaning to the sense of what your responsibility is as a reporter. Not to simply take your direction from what the government, the UN or the NGOs, for that matter, are saying what is happening on the ground, but you are an agent. You are an actor. You are in a position to actually force things to happen.
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