The American media and public, already intrigued by Somali piracy, is now in a full-on lather of interest due to the recent hijacking and rescue of an American ship and crew. Somalia is back in the news, a reprise of the Black Hawk Down period. The same questions are being asked: How could Somalia be so violent? How did it become a failed state? Is this another example of Muslim extremists run amok?
Like most Americans, I know very little about what is happening in Africa or much about African history. I probably know more than the average American (I doubt that is hard) but I don’t know much. Lately I’ve been trying to change that by diving into a number of books. I started with Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present by Michael Oren. Oren traces American involvement in the Middle East back to 1700s. The parallels between today and the early involvement are stunning, particularly the evangelical mindset with which Americans approached both religion and democracy in the Middle East. I’m still working on the book, but as is typical with me I have four going at the same time.
The second book is King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild. The book is not great, but it provides a very solid overview of the exploitation of Congo from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. Hochschild seems to relish both caricatures and unsupported speculation when describing people, something that I cannot stand when reading a work of history. That has slowed me down, but I am almost through the book and I am learning perhaps more than I’d like to know.
Chief of Station, a memoir by Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief to Congo during the early Cold War period, was a good, quick read and an informative first-person account of the early, post-colonial years in the Congo. The fourth book is by far the best and most compelling: The Zanzibar Chest by journalist Aiden Hartley. The book contains two stories. The first is of the author’s experiences as a journalist in Kenya, Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and the Balkans. The second story, which is embedded within the first, traces the experience of his own father and another British man named Peter Davey. From the first story you learn a lot about the nature of conflict in modern Africa, from the second you gain a telling perspective on the tragic consequences of European involvement in Africa during the 20th century. I have a few more chapters to read in the Zanzibar Chest, but as I don’t want it to end I have been finishing up King Leopold’s Ghost.
In concert the four books have been a wonderful, albeit depressing, primer in 20th Century African history. I can sum up what I have learned in a paragraph. During the colonial period forced labor, slavery, sadistic murder and disease decimated African populations and violently disrupted societies. The colonial powers extracted minerals, rubber, oil, and personal glory. During the post-colonial period the United States, Russia, and China pumped weapons and ammunition into the continent to fight the cold war and meddled with emerging governments and elections (including the funding mercenary armies for warlords). The result, more death and destruction, and the continued fraying of African societies. Then the United States decided Africa represented a battlefield in the war on terror and saw an Al Qaeda threat in numerous countries (something Al-Qaeda has made some effort to live up to, although with little success). Which brings us to the current period of chaos and misery across large swaths of Africa, with little prospect of change as long as the rest of the world continues to use Africa as a battleground for ideological and economic struggles.
The four-book African taster’s menu may not be for everyone, but I do highly recommend the Zanzibar Chest. It too, may not be for everyone. It is at times sad, depicts graphic violence, and chronicles the author’s relationship with drugs, sex, and alcohol. It is valuable because it provides an interesting first-person source from which you learn a lot about violent conflict that neither a traditional news story or a history book can show you.
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