Customer Reviews

The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa

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As an african who is tired of reading self-fulfilling in-anities in the western press about how africans are programmed to commit "tribal violence" on each other, this book is a refreshing breath of clean air. It shows how political elites, and their backers use ethnicity as a means for holding on to power. It details how conscience is completely absent in the people who draft the foreign policies to support the dictators of the day, taking former assistant secretary of state Chester Crocker as an example. It also looks at the cynical manipulation of ethnic tensions by erstwhile "leaders" to get power (such as Charles Taylor of Liberia), or to maintain it (Mobutu of Zaire). (Mobutu is given praise by president after president in his 33 years of looting, one calling him "an uncommonly wise leader). The author repeats his observation that most african "tribes" live together in peace, but that conflict is manufactured by the elites. He gives the example of Liberia, where two "tribes" were involved in killing each other, but how just across the border, which is nothing more than a dried out this river bed, the same two tribes live together with no problem. This book is a must read for Africans, africanists, and most of all, western journalists who only superficially write on Africa.

Although I share Berkeley's concern for the people of Africa, in my opinion he is way to eager to prove an initial thesis - that Africa's basic problem is "outside" influence. Like many young idealists who care passionately about their cause, Berkeley is highly selective about what is included in the book, although he does make an admirable effort to give targets of his criticism an opportunity to state their case (no small concession).

Over one-third of the book - nearly 100 pages - is devoted to Liberia, a tiny country with less than three-tenths of one percent of the continent's population. The reason for this is that it is simply not chic to criticize the West unless you can find some way of demonizing the U.S. in the process. This is hard to do in the case of Africa, since the U.S. was never a colonial power there, but Liberia is a country in which the U.S. has had a special interest over the years, which makes it a juicy target. It doesn't hurt that Liberia's worst problems began just as the Reagan administration was being installed, although connecting the dots becomes a bit of a stretch (Berkeley criticizes the U.S. both for supporting the Doe regime in 1986 and then failing to support the regime three years later).

This touches on the main problem with the book, namely that it is a long litany of skin-deep complaints without any exploration of alternatives. Certainly it is easy to criticize the U.S. for supporting the kleptocratic Zairian dictator Mobutu, but how would the country have been any better without Mobutu? Zaire would most certainly have fallen under Soviet influence (if not outright anarchy) and, as we see in places like Guinea and Ethiopia, this would not have been any better for the people or the economy. Failure to hold the line in the Third World would simply have prolonged the Cold War, and the Marxists were far less supportive of human and political rights than was the West.

Berkeley does not mention any Communist countries or African disputes that fail to fit the model, such as that between the Shona and Matabele. His foray into South Africa is an amazing piece of gerrymandering that manages to portray the ANC as a victim of Inkatha aggression. He accomplishes this by focusing only on the Natal area, an Inkatha stronghold in "Zululand." Tough questions are put to the Inkatha leadership on the violence in their district, yet there is no mention of what was happening in the rest of SA. ANC atrocities, such as the Shell House and St. James's church massacres, are neatly sanitized from Berkeley's version of events. One wonders if he ever heard of the Black Consciousness movement and why it no longer exists in SA.

Perhaps instead of trying to fit Africa into a politically correct cliché, Berkeley would have done better to challenge his own preconceptions and educate the reader in the process. There is no harm in providing the total picture, but a dedication to do otherwise, simply for the purpose of influencing the audience, insults those who feel that they can be trusted with the true details of a complex situation.

I bought this book along with Michela Wrong's "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz." Both are must-reads for anyone interested in Africa. The difference is that Wrong's book is a straight-forward narrative of Zaire's descent into anarchy, whereas Berkeley considers several instances of anarchy and goes one step further by attempting to explain how and why these grim situations came about. His central thesis - that anarchy is a tool used by tyrannical "Big Men" to secure and enhance their own power - helps to dispel the myth that Africa's problems are the result of "age-old hatreds" or "tribal conflicts." Berkeley does a great job of explaining the motives and methods of a diverse array of players (ranging from Mobutu to South African generals to American politicians), thus demonstrating their complicity in creating so many of Africa's past and present problems.

Best of all, Berkeley handles all this weighty material in a very user-friendly manner. The book is well-organized, the points are made clearly and strongly, and his first-hand accounts are vivid and fascinating - more than enough to keep you turning the pages. Highly recommended for anyone looking to understand modern Africa.

This oft quoted remark the president made last year is the epitome of what Berkeley calls the "conventional American conception of Africa as a unitary landscape of unremitting despair." The president and his conventional...wisdom? is not the target of Berkeley's book though. The author says that part of the purpose of THE GRAVES ARE NOT YET FULL is a "pointed rebuttal" to Afro-pessimists, the prime example being Robert D Kaplan and his book THE ENDS OF THE EARTH.

Similarly to Michela Wrong and her book - IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR KURTZ, Berkeley sees a lot of the problems in Africa as having foreign origins. Much moreso than Wrong though, he develops on the theme that violence and ethnic warfare are not the results of some "ancient tribal hatreds" in the words of Kaplan, but are in fact organized, manipulated, or orchestrated devices used by various African leaders as a means of exerting control and maintaining power. Ethnic conflicts in Africa he plainly says "are all provoked from on high."

He illustrates this point by developing a series of profiles on the manipulative leaders and tales about the victims of their crimes. Berkeley is pretty blunt in his reporting and with his words. He starts off by saying that "this is a book about evil". It should be no surprise then that he is willing to put names to these "creatures of evil". Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire is here, but again, this book is broader than Wrongs', - hers stopped there, but Berkeley looks at South Africa, Liberia, Angola, Sudan and Rwanda. He names Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Jonas Savimbi, Hasan Turabi and John Garang. It's not just Africans that are responsible though and in an entire chapter devoted to the role of former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the Reagan administration Chester Crocker, we see Berkeley's thesis developed to the full. While not calling the man a war criminal he nevertheless says that he was "the kind of figure many war criminals depend on: an articulate front man, capable of putting an intellectual gloss on otherwise crude power politics." Berkeley believes Crocker is morally guilty of crimes against humanity for supporting the despotic and murderous rule of Samuel Doe in Liberia in the late 1980's.

With all these examples of criminal regimes, evil rulers, and morally corrupt and culpable supporters, it's possible to believe that this is an unremittingly bleak book and that the author holds out no hope for Africa. Not so at all. Berkeley says that "not all the news from Africa is bad, and much of it is hopeful." Yoweri Museveni and Uganda are put forth as an example of what a peaceful, democratic, African future might look like.

All told this is a well researched, broad ranging book which develops an interesting thesis on the causes of what seems to be such an unyielding problem. Berkeley's rational, well written and very plausible argument does offer hope for Africa. While it is true that despotic regimes and evil rulers are a significantly widespread and sometimes well embedded sore, the truth is that once identified and named, a cure can be sought for any disease. This is a much more manageable (and realistic) beginning point than the hand-wringing, non-solution offered by viewing Africa as a single entity plagued with irrational violence and unfathomable tribal slaughters.

I have lived in East Africa, on-and-off, for over 5 years. Having lived in both Ethiopia and Uganda, I was blown away by Berkeley's accurate depiction of the modern history of this region. Berkeley's descriptive narrative of an American observing the madness of Afirca was amazing.

This book is a must read for anybody wanting to learn about current affairs in Africa, and Africa's stance in the modern geo-political arena.

...about ethnic conflict with all its tragic consequences, power-and spoils-hungry predators, and outsider opportunists, this is the one.

Berkeley is very effective at showing how chaos is the fertile ground in which warlords sprout and tyranny and terror are the means through which they exploit the circumstances to the maximum.

I rate him alongside Michael Ignatieff as one of the best writer-analysts of the humanitarian crises that present perhaps the most compelling international (and moral) challenge of our time. I have work on these issues for the past decade and would put this book at or near the top of any reading list.

Bill Berkeley, who has reported on Africa for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, provides us with an in depth, first-hand account of the last decades of the twentieth century in some of the most violent places in the world. Interspersing interviews with the powerful and humble with historical sketches, he conducts a harrowing tour of Liberia, Congo-Zaire, South Africa, the Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda. Despite the endless slaughters, Africa, he shows us, is not the "dark", mysterious or frighteningly "other" place we commonly think. It is unfamiliar. For that we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Berkeley's thesis is that Africa's problems do not originate in ancient "tribal" animosities. Without providing historical background (though he indicates where it is to be found), he begins by observing that, before the arrival of colonizing Europeans, Africa was a functioning continent, that is, neither heaven nor hell, but functioning. The colonizers - he speaks primarily of the British and Belgians - ruled through what might be called "divide and exploit." Where there were tribal differences, the Europeans created animosity by using one group as their proxy to oppress another. Where there were no tribes, the Europeans created them, as in Rwanda, and set one over the other. The colonizers thought this worked well, and, from their skewed view, it did. They made their money and got out, telling themselves that ripping off a continent was the same as civilizing it. Those who'd been unfortunate enough to have served their colonial sentence at the bottom of the heap tended toward resentment. Those who has served as the Euroman's proxies tended toward fear. What we like to call "tribal" is nothing more than post-Colonial class war.

And we all - Americans, Europeans, Soviets and Africans - love to manipulate the situation for private gain: the ripping off of Africa, chapter two. That's the story Berkeley tells and tells very well. Whether he's interviewing an American policy expert who invokes "tribalism" to justify supporting the most evil thugs and refusing to stop the slaughter, or the South African police who use "tribalism" to set African against African to keep South Africa under white domination, or the African leader (who is likely to possess a degree, even a doctorate, from a prestigious American university) who rises to power on a slogan of "tribalism", Berkeley shows that "tribalism" is a myth for all seasons.

Berkeley is not shy about confronting leaders with the massive death their quests for power have spawned. Each bemoans the violence, yet each answers that he has no regrets about his role in it. None. Most of those interviewed are now dead, dead of conflict or "natural" causes. Those who remain among the living will, in the not too distant future, be dead. Their lives, their slaughters, their shallowness and indifference can be summed up in a few dozen pages. They created nothing except death.

The Africa Berkeley reveals is not so different from the "rest of the world." "Tribes", corporations, governments tend to fall somewhere along the spectrum of mafia-like organizations. Africa is like everywhere else, only, for now, a little more so.

The only criticism I would offer is I would like to have learned about the resisters, those who struggle for food, housing, medical care, freedom and human rights. That Berkeley thought them outside the scope of the book tends, despite his own best efforts, to reenforce the stereotype of the "African."

I liked this book, more because it shed several spotlights on how several things happened that have contributed to past and present conditions in Africa. Much scorn should be rained down on several generations of leaders of the so called industrialized world for prepetuating the continued patronage of really bad people who seem to hold no regard for thier fellow man outside of thier clan or tribe. How divide and conquer is used repeatedly. When the cold war ended, Africa was suddenly abandoned as a front and more support for bad people was prepetuated. Five areas that continually recieve attention for good and bad, mostly bad are the key hotspots, we have to the northeast, Sudan and Somalia, though not much mention of the latter here, in the southwest; Liberia and all of the hate and discontent that a sucession of this leaning and that leaning despots created. In the centre, we have Rwanda, Zaire( the Congo) and Uganda and the very bottom, South Africa. Much of the cause for many of these turmoils seems to be a result of a half hearted attempt to extract the wealth from the country, and leave the mess for some one else to deal with, a general misunderstanding of history and the legacy of colonialism past and present.

This book is first of all an excellent bit of research by the author. In each of the African nations he profiles, he goes to great lengths to interview the major and minor figures in each crisis, in order to get as full a picture as possible of the situations. He also fully seeks out US officials who work in the region. Unfortunately, where he loses me sometimes (though not all the time) is to pass the blame back on to outsiders for the atrocities committed during each conflict. I do agree that many of the dictators and regimes in question actively sought to use chaos as a weapon against their enemies, but rather than put the blame squarely on the Taylors, Bashirs, and Does that enacted this policy, he goes back to blame the legacy of colonials or US support for these regimes.

This legacy and American support for crackpot dictators is deplorable, but there comes a point in any society when its people must stand up and take responsibility for their own actions. That means owning up to the killing. . .not matter who sold you the guns or the machetes.

There is no escaping the seemingly overwhelming amount of evil and suffering that has gone on over the last century in Africa. Although it is not usually displayed on our nightly news casts, the continent has been in a state of near to constant warfare, criminal control and colonial game playing for far too long. This author attempts to give the reader somewhat of an overview of the situation and his views as to why it has and continues to take place. From plagues to genocide, Africa seems to have a monopoly on some of the worst that can befall man.

So how did the author approach the topic. It was interesting to me that he focused so much on the effect, both due to supposed active participation and more broadly due to ignoring the place, the U.S. has had there. I am not one who thinks of the past episodes of American foreign policy as all light and good, but if there is one part of the world that the U.S. has had the smallest effect on it has to be Africa. Just about every European country shy of the Vatican has spent time colonizing, "liberating" and in general messing around with governments and populations in Africa. If there needs to be a hard look at who should be getting most of the blame I think we need to spend a bit more time exploring our friends in Europe.

With this point said the book is dramatic. It is well written and many times interesting. Keeping the authors politics and biases aside, he does cover some truly horrible conditions that would make all but the most hard hearted individual think that we can do more to help. If you are looking for a book that would get you into the history of the problems in Africa then this is not that bad of a place to start even if the scope is a bit limited.