Africa

At 4:00 am tomorrow (or five hours from now) I’ll get up and begin a winding journey that will land me in South Africa Thursday afternoon. I’ll be there for three weeks, will be traveling extensively for two conferences, some research, travel and holiday, and reportage. I may be out of touch for a bit, but will be updating the blog all along the way as internet access allows.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog.]

At 4:00 am tomorrow (or five hours from now) I’ll get up and begin a winding journey that will land me in South Africa Thursday afternoon. I’ll be there for three weeks, will be traveling extensively for two conferences, some research, travel and holiday, and reportage. I may be out of touch for a bit, but will be updating the blog all along the way as internet access allows.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.] 

The dueling headlines tell of the tricky course South Africa has chosen for itself with regard to the situation in Zimbabwe. It is widely recognized that South Africa has the potential to be the biggest external power broker, whether through sticks or carrots, words or deeds. And so far, it is no secret, South Africa has chosen to act so tepidly that the country’s virtual inaction can only qualify as appeasing Robert Mugabe.

And so for readers of, say, the Cape Argus, it may have been reassuring that At Last, SA Condemns Mugabe. But for readers of The New York Times the message was quite different: A.N.C. Rejects Pressure on Zimbabwe. So which is it?

Well, as the Argus story makes clear, while South Africa did finally speak out against Mugabe, it also helped to block even stronger statements from the United Nations Security Council, which has unanimously rebuked Zimbabwe.  And in so doing, South Africa’s leaders have once again forced the world, which little understands the situation to begin with, to wonder, rightly, what on earth Thabo Mbeki could be thinking? Loyalty, even fairly blind loyalty, to the revolutionary generation is one thing. But at some point that currency was long ago spent. The idea that South Africa owes fealty to ZANU-PF at the expense of the masses of Zimbabweans desperate for change is absurd. Mbeki’s approach mystifies and infuriates much of the rest of the world. It is hard to see how either Zimbabweans or South Africans benefit from such an approach to the gravest regional crisis in years.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog.] 

This week The Washington Post “Book World” profiles Africanist Alex de Waal, who contributes a piece in Book World’s “The Writing Life” feature. De Waal is best known for his work on the Sudan and the Darfur crisis. I met de Waal at this year’s Sudan Studies Association meeting. He has a fierce intellect and an unquestionable commitment to his work.

I am no supporter of President George W. Bush. I voted against him twice and would vote against him again if given the chance. I believe that he has done irreparable harm to the United States and to the world and that he has left a mess that future generations will have to clean up. Not to put too fine a point on it, but he has been a terrible president.

That said, I am pleased to see president Bush press the other leaders of the G8 to honor their commitments  to fight HIV/AIDS and malaria on the continent. On this point he is right, and in asking the other leaders of the world’s most prominent industrialized nations to match the commitments President Bush has made is taking the sort of leadership that his administration has so often lacked.

At H-SAfrica, the scholarly listserv on southern Africa, editor Peter Limb notes that there appears to be traction on the part of regional leaders becoming more vocal in their criticism of Robert Mugabe and his regime:

There certainly are signs of stronger views from Africa leaders:

In Kenya, PM Raila Odinga says the run-off is a sham and called for Mugabe to stand down.

Paul Kagame attacked Mugabe: “For me the question that it raises is why do you even call for elections?” Mr Kagame said.

ANC President-General Jacob Zuma says: “I think we’ll be lucky if we have a
free election,”; would it be fair: “I don’t think so.”

As John Leaver notes, the problem is more than Mugabe: namely, the military.

One wonders if this criticism will accelerate leading up to the runoff and if it will result in action in the very likely event that Mugabe simply seizes the election.

How does a country reconcile itself after horrific paroxysms of violence? Numerous countries have had to deal with precisely this dilemma. South Africa, through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), did so most famously and most extensively. And the TRC process has served as a model, an inspiration, and as a template for several other countries that have followed with processes of their own to reconcile the past with the present and with a hoped-for future, though the process was also fraught with imperfections and faced sometimes intense criticism from across the political spectrum.

Zimbabwe will almost surely have to go through a comparable process, whether in a matter of weeks and months or years. And today Kenya is trying to deal with its relatively brief but still nightmarish political violence of a few months ago. President Mwai Kibaki has declared categorically that his coalition government will not provide blanket amnesty for the perpetrators of post-election violence, once again putting him at odds with his erstwhile rival and uncomfortable supposed government coalition partner Raila Odinga. Kenya’s violence did not endure like that in most of the countries that have gone through formal reconciliation processes, but the chaos that exploded nationwide nonetheless reveals fissures in Kenyan society that runs deeper than the mere electoral divide that provided the proximate causes of violence. At some point Kenya is going to have to address those divisions in something other than a patchwork manner.   

The costs of food and fuel are hurting Africa perhaps more than any other continent, and of course on the whole Africans can least afford the economic disruption. South Africa’s Mail & Guardian has a feature revealing the myriad ways Africa is effected and how different countries are responding to the newest global economic crisis to disproportionately impact the continent.

The United States has announced a fairly serious scaling-back of its plans for AFRICOM, the American African Command. Is the US finally responding to the will of Africans on the ground? Or is it merely taking the most expedient path? The answer is probably a combination of factors, but it is clear that the ambitious scale of AFRICOM butted against realities on the ground and the realities on the ground seem to have prevailed.  

In a short “Editorial Notebook” piece in The Boston Globe Donald MacGillis explores the problem of brain drain in Uganda, which is a nearly universal problem across the continent, and what the west might be able yo do to stanch the flow of talented doctors (and others) without limiting personal freedoms of those who so often choose to leave their native lands for the lures of the West.