Africa

Tony King, a professor at the University of the West of England, uses this Guardian article on the currency crisis as a springboard to what strikes me as some reasonable commentary at H-SAfrica:

. . .  The government is running out of paper for banknotes, and is facing the prospect of losing the software licence as the German firm that supplies both is withdrawing from Zimbabwe, which means the army and police will go unpaid - and may well be contributing to Zanu-PF’s willingness to negotiate. This kind of thing doesn’t readily make the headlines, but it’s an example of how sanctions *can* work, an antidote perhaps to the received wisdom in some circles that sanctions are ineffective.

 The question should never simply be “Do sanctions work?” But rather the questions we should ask are more complicated: What sort of sanctions? Enacted how? To what ends? Proponents of sanctions can rightfully point to those levied against Apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Opponents can equally rightly look to the American policies against Cuba as an example of ineffective sanctions. Circumstances and conditions matter much more than blanket arguments for or against sanctions absent context.

To my readers in the United States: Happy 4th of July!

To my readers in South Africa and anywhere else on the globe: Happy Friday!

In the last dozen years I believe I have spent more American Independence Day holidays outside of the United States than within it, with most of those spent here in South Africa. Being abroad usually provides an interesting perspective on one’s own country. I consider myself to be patriotic in the most important and perhaps least jingoistic sense in that I love my country but I see its flaws. I honestly have no idea what people mean when they say that the United States is the “best country in the world.” I guess I do not dispute the assertion at its essence, but I have no idea what “best” means, and why those who make the assertion do as much with such totality. The best at what? The best by what measurement? Is patriotism simply the willingness to rank arbitrarily one’s country by some sort of flow chart or Olympic medal chart? I will grant that the United States is the most powerful nation on earth militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. And as a result I think it can be argued, and I would, that the United States is the most important nation on earth. But nation-states not being reducable to one’s favorite sports team or top-five pop bands, I see neither utility nor meaning in the “best country in the world” mania that strikes my most jingoistic countrymen and women.

At the same time, it is always telling to see what others think of one’s own country. I have found the supposed anti-Americanism that is supposedly pervading the world to be vastky overstated. I am certain there are places where that sentiment is strong, such as in much of the Middle East and in certain quarters in Europe, say. But on the whole what I find, especially once I convince the listener that I am not an agent of my state and that I do not represent American policy (even if I may defend elements of it or the larger framework within which that policy operates) I will have engaging, if occasionally lively, conversations.

The fiasco in Iraq has not done the US any favors abroad, nor has the arrogance our current administration has put forth in presenting the American face to the world. But at the same time most people in South Africa and elsewhere understand that our administrations are temporal where the American state is not. And so what I hear most often are questions about the current campaign for the presidency, and whether Obama can win, and if McCain is a Bush clone.

It is my experience that the rest of the world is very much interested in the United States and its role in world affairs and looks at America with a combination of awe and fear and respect and admiration and concern and envy. This may be impossible to quantify, but it is a lot more interesting, and telling, than simple assertions that America is “hated” or loved.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog and at dcat.]

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.] 

Is President Mugabe beginning to feel the increasing pressure from the outside? There is some indication that Mugabe’s overheated rhetoric of late comes at least in part because of increased scrutiny of his country from regional leaders. Thus his threat to go to war if he loses the run-off and his warnings that people will be too scared to vote seem less like typical Mugabe bombast and more like the desperation of a man who sees his power, and thus potentially his freedom, slipping away.

Meanwhile challenger Morgan Tsvangirai is at turns confident but also wary. He believes that despite Mugabe’s threats and the violence underway that is intended to cow the opposition the turnout on June 27 will be immense and he is confident that he will win. Nonetheless as he looks around his country he sees a nation and a people under siege. The news that the United Nations anticipates a severe food shortage in Zimbabwe, which is hardly flourishing as it is, cannot help matters any.

From the outside world leaders continue to condemn Mugabe’s regime. Leaders in Africa continue to deal with their Zimbabwe dilemma while more and more of them speak out against ZANU-PF. Even Thabo Mbeki has been roused to action, if only to question whether holding the runoff is a good idea and to encourage Mugabe, with whom Mbeki met last night, to engage in negotiations with Tsvangirai. Mbeki’s proposal seems a bit pie in the sky, and more than a little bit too late, but nonetheless reveals that the world is becoming engaged as the clock ticks down toward the scheduled runoff election.

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.

The United States’ Government Accountability Office has issued a report indicating that food aid to sub-Saharan Africa is woefully insufficient. This comes as no surprise. The optimist in me sees the timing of the report — which comes on the eve of a United Nations summit in Rome to address the global food crisis — as an opportunity to bring about real change in the approach the west takes to development. My pessimistic side simply sees status quo continuing to prevail, inertia being what it is, especially when it comes to policies toward Africa.  

This Kevin Cullen op-ed in The Boston Globe is so badly argued, so dumb and shallow, that I hardly even know where to begin. And what probably vexes me more than anything is that I agree with the fundamental premise behind the argument. But it is so terribly done that it does an injustice to the merits of the debate. In penning such a badly written, poorly argued, at times inane screed, Cullen manages to hurt the very cause he espouses and gives those of us who do the hard work of actually understanding Africa more work to do just to cover our own flanks. Let’s look at, deconstruct, if you will, just how monumentally bad this piece is. I will indent Cullen’s words and as appropriate will add my own running commentary, which I will precede with “***”:

So they’re finally getting serious about rescinding the honorary degree the
University of Massachusetts gave Robert Mugabe, the president of
Zimbabwe. About time, and props to the students and to state Representative Kevin Murphy who kept pushing this when all the beautiful people in
Amherst looked the other way.

*** So far, fairly innocuous, and as I said, I agree with the sentiment. But the gratuitous “beautiful people” ad hominem gives a sign of things to come.  

Mugabe, who led the struggle against white minority rule in what was Rhodesia, was the great black hope for postcolonial Africa when he became
Zimbabwe’s first democratically elected leader in 1980.

*** Him, Joshua Nkomo, and at the time, most presumed, others to come. Anyone who has read my writing on Zimbabwe here at the Foreign Policy Association and elsewhere knows that no apologia for Mugabe is forthcoming on my end.

It was a stroke of unwitting irony that UMass gave him a doctorate of law in 1986, because ever since Mugabe has been extremely good at thumbing his nose at international law, turning Zimbabwe, once Africa’s rose, into an autocracy as indifferent to human rights as Rhodesia’s British colonizers. At least the Brits stopped torturing people in the afternoon to take their tea.

UMass was entitled to honor Mugabe in 1986, but everything he’s done since has shown him to be a thug and a brute and a racist to boot. The UMass trustees responded to years of documented human rights abuses by yawning. Last year, they said they wouldn’t rescind the degree, but would write a letter expressing disapproval of Mugabe’s behavior. This, no doubt, bothered Mugabe no end.

*** Let us overlook the misuse of the word “irony” here. And the cliches — good God, the cliches. I am, frankly, beyond expecting journalists actually to use that word correctly. Let us instead look at the logic in this paragraph. You sneer at the idea of a sternly written letter causing Mugabe to feel chastened. Fair enough. Such a letter would be of no moment. But rescinding an honorary doctorate would? You are arguing for one meaningless symbolic gesture over another. Forgive me for feeling a bit underwhelmed by your intellectual gravitas, never mind the bizarre aggressiveness with which you make these distinctions not amounting to a difference.

The trustees said they were very, very upset with Mugabe. That’s like members of the Reichstag saying they didn’t like the tone of Hitler’s speech to them in 1933.

*** Actually, the two are not at all the same. Even if we ignore the invocation of Hitler – almost always a sign of a vacuous argument – the analogy is a mess. In the case that has you so worked up, the trustees of a university in the United States are, we can all hope, dismayed, furious, distressed, have your pick, about the actions of a foreign leader. But they may or may not choose to withdraw an honorary degree they gave before the vast majority of the class of 2008 was born. My guess is that they do not want to get involved in the business of going through all past honorees to test for similar perfidy.  In what possible way does that provide an analogue with Hitler and the Reichstag in 1933, given the role that the Reichstag and Hitler played and the relationship between the two after January of that year? I am taking a guess here, but based on what I have seen so far, you must have done terribly both on the analogy sections of the SAT and in history classes, because this comparison represents idiocy compounded by idiocy.

The trustees said they didn’t rescind the degree because they had never rescinded one before. Following this magnificent logic, if you stumble across a dying person for the first time in your life, you should just keep walking, because, well, you never stopped to help a dying person before.

*** This strikes me as either another dumb analogy or as a dumb metaphor. Which brings me to another complaint: This is a rather poorly written screed. It is turgid and nonsensical and angry and unfocused.

It’s high time they restore the Blue Wall as a full-fledged bar and offer two-for-one Powerhouses before trustee meetings at UMass-Amherst. Seriously, if these clowns got loaded before their meetings, could they do any worse?

*** I honestly do not understand this level of rancor toward the trustees of a university who have a million more important things to do than to engage in – and I cannot emphasize this clearly enough – empty symbolic gestures. Kevin (Mr. Cullen? I won’t make you call me Dr. or Professor – let’s be on a first-name basis here), this is between you and me: I understand the business end of ardently written attacks. I’d like to think I am pretty good at them. And Lord knows I’ve teed off on a few folks in the past myself. But basically you are referring to an entire body of people as “clowns” because they have not decided to enact your utterly meaningless withdrawal of a fake degree. Take a step back and you will realize the manifest silliness in all of this. Maybe you should go and have a drink at the Blue Wall yourself and just calm down. I do like the inside references though – it makes you seem sort of hip in the way that people who are not at all hip but wish to be present themselves.

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the UMass trustees to my pal Geoff Nyarota. When he was young, Nyarota worked as a teacher, because that was the only job the white Rhodesian government allowed educated blacks to hold. When Mugabe came to power, Nyarota was able to pursue his real calling, which was journalism. He became editor of the Daily News, which quickly became the best newspaper in
Zimbabwe.

After Nyarota exposed the corruption endemic to Mugabe’s regime, Mugabe did what any good despot would do: He had Nyarota arrested. Six times. When Nyarota wouldn’t back down, they bombed his printing press. When he still wouldn’t back down, they tried to kill him.

At that point, six years ago, Geoff Nyarota did what any good newspaperman would do: He ran. He didn’t stop running until he got to Massachusetts, where the flagship state university had bestowed its highest honor on the guy who wanted him dead. Harvard’s Nieman Foundation gave him a fellowship and a way to feed his wife and children.

The sanctuary is appreciated, but Nyarota wants to go home some day, and when he does, that will probably mean Mugabe is dead or in the dock at The Hague. When that happens, Zimbabwe will be better off.

*** Your friend’s is a great story and you tell it prosaically but effectively. You should have led with this. You should have let this be the basis for a rational argument about the real effects of Robert Mugabe’s regime. And you should have honored your friend by making an elegant case for the ways in which hundreds of thousand have suffered under the ills of Mugabe. Instead you use your friend to engage in a harangue that in some ways serves to dishonor him. Some way to treat a friend.  

Meanwhile, the traveling circus that is the UMass trustees will meet next month to sort this out. Luckily, they are not meeting in Amherst, which is located in a lovely part of Western Massachusetts known as Happy Valley because a disproportionate number of people there still wear Sandinista T-shirts and think Winnie Mandela was just swell.

*** And now back to our regularly scheduled inanity. Rather than engage in this sophomoric jibe against an entire, and not, by the way, insignificant, region of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts you should probably know that in Amherst there are almost assuredly dozens, probably hundreds, of people who know substantially more about the Zimbabwe situation than you do, which I would bet is a pretty low bar to jump. Rather than engage in some fatuous anti-lefty criticism you could have called some of these people, most of whom almost assuredly would have supported your case. Instead you insult one of the most important centers of learning in New England. Well played, sir.   

Instead, the trustees will meet in Lowell, a real city where people have real jobs and don’t have time to worry about tin-pot dictators who live off faded freedom fighter tales.

*** This is a single-sentence paragraph (don’t get me started on the ways journalists write) that is densely packed with foolishness. Lowell is a “real city,” as opposed, I guess, to Amherst. It has a perfectly respectable branch campus of the University of Massachusetts, but a branch campus nonetheless. But I would love to know more about the “real jobs” dichotomy that you – who, may I remind readers, is a newspaper columnist for one of the most elite newspapers in the country, which hardly entails heavy lifting, and in his case does not apparently involve making phone calls to talk to people who know vastly more than you do about the very things you choose to splatter on the op-ed page – so venerate. Oh – and aren’t you choosing to write about a tin pot dictator? So I do not get it – either Mugabe is worth writing about (and I’d propose that he is given that he is a ruthless tyrant actively destroying his country) or he is not. But it hardly edifies the discussion to create strawmen and presume that the good folks of Lowell have real jobs and thus do not care about the very topic that has you so exercised that you are writing about it. Dishonoring the suffering of the people of Zimbabwe by asserting that their leader is not worthy of being noticed by people with real jobs might prove your populist bona fides in Lowell, but it hardly convinces the rest of us of your seriousness.

When the trustees sit down, they should make quick work of this, pausing only to cross out Mugabe’s name and put Geoff Nyarota’s name in its place.

*** Sure, Geoff Nyarota, or my friends Mark or Douglas or countless other Zimbabweans. This is fine. And were the column otherwise not so cringe-inducing it might have even represented an eloquent closing. And indeed your larger point – UMass should pull Mugabe’s honorary degree – is a worthwhile one. But your overall presentation is so bad, so poorly presented, so full of itself and yet ultimately substanceless, that you actually undermine the cause you espouse. A sort of grandeur creeps into a newspaper column this wretched. In a way I feel as if I should thank you. It is rare to see a single example that captures the manifest awfulness of so much of modern commentary from people who veer too far from their areas of knowledge. I am in your debt, sir.

[Crossposted at dcat.]  

My work is a bit complicated. The best way to describe it is that I explore race, politics, and social movements in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. I wrote the following recently, which mostly involves the issue of race in the United States. I hope you will find it to be of some interest:

We are beyond race.
That is the comfortable little myth that many of us white folks like to spew to make ourselves feel better about a history that clearly indicates that we are not at all beyond race. These people (We?) like to believe in an accelerated curve, a Whiggish and inexorable belief in improvement on the one demonstrable blotch on our national escutcheon, that has somehow innoculated us from centuries of reality. The candidacy of Barack Obama allows even those who do not, will not, support him to claim perfectibility on the one issue about which Americans have been sadly, tragically, imperfect.
Unfortunately there are times when reality kicks us in the teeth, or at least ought to. What to make, after all, in this supposedly color-blind society, about the fact that our misguided drug wars disproportionately effect African Americans? What does this tell us about our racial myths, and more importantly, how we deal with them?
Many of us are wary of decisions, supposedly race-neutral, on, say, voting rights in light of America’s still demonstrably not race-neutral policies. Many of us are wary of claims that we live in a time when race is no longer a factor, because of the relative successes of Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama. Indeed, we are wary precisely because of the facile ways in which we allow the prominence of a miniscule number of black Americans to substitute for a real discussion of the country’s racial past.
Conservatives call such concerns “race hustling,” a phrase notable only for its cynicism, vacuousness, and, yes, racism. And yet how many other issues in American history actually manage to sustain as relevant without actually being relevant? Issues that do not matter fade into obsolescence. This one continues to vex precisely because it matters. Would that we had an honest discussion about it, as Obama has done more honestly, and more frontally, than any American in the country’s history has undertaken.

We can pretend that it does not matter. In fact nothing has ever mattered more.

If this is self indulgent, or if it strays from my mandate of discussing and commenting on African politics, I am truly sorry. I hope this will help establish my bona fides on this issue.

[Crossposted from the Foreign Policy Association South Africa Blog and dcat.]