Last week in an op-ed in The Washington Post Rwandan President Paul Kagame put forward an argument as to why the United States and Africa need one another. It’s a compelling argument, one that many of us have been making for years yet has not gained all that much traction.

At the FPA’s Human Rights Blog Kimberly Curtis has a great post on how recent comments by Gambian President Yahaya Jammeh threaten human rights not only in in his country but regionally.

My travel continues with a trek to LA tomorrow to play the role of talking head for a documentary that you may see on PBS someday soon. In the meantime, you might want to check out this article in The Economist arguing that Jacob Zuma is confounding some of his most concerned critics by not jumping on the crazy train. I never really understood the paranoia, but I suppose it was logical that people who saw Zuma as a wild card based on his personal life and behavior might also expect him to be a wild card as president. It always struck me that the populist pose was largely that, and that Zuma was comfortably within the Mandela-Mbeki mold of left moderation, albeit with more charisma and charm than Mbeki and more of a hands-on inclination than Mandela.

Sorry for the silence. The perfect storm of family, travel, and work has buried me. Tomorrow I head to New Hampshire for a wedding and a couple of days in the old hometown. Hopefully these links will keep you off the streets:

The debate continues as to whether this is the greatest Springbok side ever. There are many reasons to support the assertion, but I cannot quite get the desultory loss to the British Lions in the (admittedly meaningless) third game earlier this year, or the Australia game from a couple of weeks ago when the Boks could have clinched the Tri-Nations (which, of course, they ultimately took in pretty convincing fashion all in all). We live in a temporal world where we are quick to anoint the most recent as being the greatest, the worst, the most appalling, and what have you. Suffice it to say that the 2009 Boks stand among the greatest of all South African teams, a fairly substantial accomplishment in its own right.

Gabon’s myriad opposition party leaders are, at minimum, unified in defeat, as they are challenging the country’s recent election results that declared victory for Ali Bongo, the son of Gabon’s long-ruling dictator Omar Bongo. Bongo supposedly won about 42% of the vote, a dubious total, to be sure, but then again, in a race with candidates numbering in the dozens, something like this was bound to happen. Perhaps some sort of united front before the election would have made sense.

Due to a threat of unknown provenance the United States kept all of its government facilities in South Africa closed for the second day in a row on Wednesday.  Two quick points: 1) Do not conflate this with South African issues of crime. This is an American security issue, albeit one involving the South Africans as well. Do not categorize this story in the “problems in Africa” file. 2) Does the secrecy really help? It seems to me that just about the best way to foment suspicion and mistrust and paranoia is to keep everyone in the dark, thus allowing their worst suspicions to percolate.

Last Friday the African Union announced its plans to impose sanctions on Guinea’s junta leader, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, over his intention to run in upcoming presidential polls despite Camara’s earlier promises not to do so. Obviously there is little that the AU can do other than sanctions, but experience usually indicates that your typical junta leader does not quiver at the idea of economic isolation. The people of Guinea will suffer, to be sure, but Camara? Not so much.

Oh, Julius Malema, will your antics never cease to both vex and amuse? The latest? The ANC Youth League leader has been charged with assault. Apparently Malema klopped a neighbor at a party he hosted in Sandton over the weekend.

Finally, speaking of crime: The sun will rise, the sun will set, and every couple of weeks a story will appear indicating that folks are worried that violent crime will upstage the World Cup in South Africa next year. Sigh. Here is an open letter to two constituencies:

Dear Western Tourist: The chances that you will be beaten, stabbed, robbed, shot, raped, crucified, plundered, pillaged, burgled, eye-gouged, or clopped are quite small. You will, however, be price gouged, something that will drive those of us who travel to South Africa regularly quite mad, though not as mad as being confused with the dim, xenophobic lot of you.

Dear Media (Westyern and South African): Please stop fetishizing South African crime.

Thx — Yours in Fellowship and Football –

Derek

There. I feel better.

The ANC’s week of recriminations and bad news continues. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) has lashed out at both President Zuma and National Planning Commission (NPC)  head and Minister of the President Trevor Manuel for alleged transgressions against the union movement, which is angry at not having the power it expected to have when Zuma took the reins from Thabo Mbeki and seems to be implying that it might shift its attentions toward the Congress of the People (COPE). This, of course, would precipitate the dissolution of the Tri-Partite alliance, something I have been predicting for years.

Meanwhile Democratic Alliance leader Helen Zille is annoyed that Zuma supporters have indicated that Zuma is immune to prosecutions during his time in office. Now such prosecutions would be a disaster for South African governance, but thinking from the perspective of a minority party, this is exactly the sort of thing she is expected to be outraged about, even if it is “fakerage.”

The movie version of JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize winning novel Disgrace is now out in limited release in the United States. It is hard to imagine that this grim reflection of contemporary South Africa will gain much traction with the masses, but if the review in The New York Times is any indication, readers of this blog will probably want to see it if only to make their own judgments.

No one in the last decade has gotten rich betting that stability would come to Somalia or that all the fractured country needs is the right leader to emerge. So I’d be cautious in the message I draw from Jeffrey Gettleman’s New York Times profile of President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed.  Sheik Sharif might warrant a nice burst of cautious optimism — Gettleman asserts that his moderate Islamist government is widely considered to be Somalia’s best chance for stability in years — but I’d put the brakes of talk of him representing a telling sign of stability to come.

The election of Barack Obama captured the imagination of many around the world, nowhere more than in Africa. And now many across the continent, and especially in Kenya, hope that Obama’s Presidency will result in concrete economic benefits. But expectations are outpacing reality and probably will for some time, if not for the duration of the Obama presidency. Once the health care debate reaches either a bill or failure, and if things reach some sort of acceptable state in Afghanistan and in Iran, maybe Obama will be able to give Kenya and elsewhere in Africa more attention. But Obama’s roots will probably not place Africa so high up on Obama’s and America’s list of priorities that small villages will reap great benefits. That is a sad reality, but it is a reality nonetheless.

Chester Crocker, who was Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, has an op-ed piece advising President Obama on the idea of “engagement” with Iran and, presumably, others. Crocker’s article itself is not bad (nor is it earth-shatteringly good) but perhaps we should consider the source. Crocker is an incredibly smart and talented guy. But he will be forever associated with the idea of “Constructive Engagement” with Apartheid South Africa, a concept that he did not invent but for which he became the biggest advocate, defender, and implementer. To this day he still defends it, the demonstrable noxiousness of the policy with regard to South Africa and the rather clear evidence of the effect that sanctions ended up having on Pretoria notwithstanding. He hangs his hat mostly on the successes the policy had with regard to Namibia, which shows a remarkable lack of perspective. Yes, Namibia was important. But in no way, shape, or form was it as crucial or as tragic as South Africa in the 1980s, the decade when the Reagan Administration fiddled as South Africa burned.

The Eastern Cape ANC is struggling financially as a result of the one-two punch of the economy and the inroads that the Congress of the People (COPE) has made in the region. The Eastern Cape is a historical stronghold for the ANC, so COPE’s inroads have to be particularly worrisome.

Um, COPE? I’d wipe that smug grin off of my face if I were you. The leader of your party’s youth wing, Anele Mda, has been accused of calling COPE deputy general secretary Deidre Carter a “stupid, white token bitch” during an altercation in Johannesburg just after last weekend’s congress national committee meeting.

By the way — What’s with the young turks in South African politics? Between Mda and the foot-in-mouth syndrome of the ANC Youth League’s Julius Malema (who at least one observer feels is being groomed as the country’s future president) it seems that the parties are spending as much time dealing with self-inflicted wounds as with addressing real issues. Here is a hint: those who undermine from within one’s own ranks are always worse than the opposition. If someone on my side of a debate lies or says something inflammatory or just acts like an idiot it does a lot more harm than anything the other side could do.