Customer Reviews

Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book details Kaplan's reporting from the African famine zones in the mid-1980s. While specific events are getting outdated, Kaplan does provide plenty of insight and realism about famine and power in Africa. This book mostly covers developments in Ethiopia, with important details on the separatist provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. Despite the book's subtitle, there is only some tangential coverage of Somalia as it related to events in Ethiopia at the time. Note that Somalia's well-publicized disasters hadn't happened yet. The same is true for coverage on Sudan, except for the latter parts of the book when obscure struggles in the inaccessible southern parts of the country caught Kaplan's attention. Also note that this new edition is supplemented with an enlightening update from the newly independent nation of Eritrea.

What matters most in this book in Kaplan's use of realism when interpreting events in the Horn of Africa, as he has done in all his other books covering various hellholes around the developing world. While the famines in the mid-80s shocked the world, most Western people (and governments) thought that drought was the unavoidable culprit. However, Kaplan proves through ground-level experience that the famines were really the outcome of murderous political policies, as food (and the withholding of it) was used as a weapon by the ruling regimes to control dissident groups, while never-ending civil wars and power politics impeded distribution of aid money and supplies.

Beware that this book nearly collapses in Part 4 as Kaplan analyzes the actions of the US and USSR when the Horn became embroiled in Cold War politics. Kaplan behaves like a Monday morning quarterback in criticizing the actions of both sides, with a rather bigheaded display of second-guessing toward the actions of international leaders, that only demonstrates Kaplan's unfair advantage of 20/20 hindsight. Fortunately, this problem (which also infects several of Kaplan's other books) does not sink this mostly powerful study of how ground-level knowledge from such Third World hot spots, and a truly realistic outlook, are the only ways to understand what's truly going on behind attention-grabbing stories of war and famine. [~doomsdayer520~]

When I recently bought a book on Rwanda, it was from a book display with books about Africa, I also picked up Surrender Or Starve by Robert D. Kaplan, since I was a fan of his writing for Atlantic Monthly and his other books (The Coming Anarchy, The Ends of the Earth, and Balkan Ghosts). His journalism reads like a travelogue with interesting asides about the history and culture of the region supplemented by political analysis. I find his writing extremely informative. This book is no exception. He sets out to explain the reasons behind the famine that gripped sub Sahara Africa in the early-mid 80s. It is a reissue, but important if you consider what is being done the black African southerners in Sudan and the fact that Sudan and Yemen are home to some of the most dangerous terrorist in the world.

I find two observations quite profound. One, the famines that received some much notoriety in the 80s from Live Aid and other charitable organizations werenÕt caused by droughts, but were mainly due to ethnic civil wars and politics. Kaplan meticulously describes the factors that resulted in widespread famine. He points out that more often than not the real reasons weren7t printed due to lack of motivation and the inaccessibility of gathering facts from remote regions where this story was taking place.

The other revealing observation concerns the Africans themselves. It seems that 1000s of people dying of hunger caused little concern or outrage among the middle/class elite in the countries described. One aid worker described it to being like the Russian noble in pre-revolutionary Russia that walked the streets and only saw people like themselves. As usual Kaplan provides an interesting portrait of a little known region and give expert political analysis on the region. I think that Kaplan is one the best foreign correspondents around.

Kaplan takes Henry Kissinger's concept of "realpolitik" to another order of magnitude: Kaplan argues that the West has been incredibly naive in obsessing over starving Africans. The theme of his book is that the African elites themselves don't care about starvation among out-of-favor minority groups, and in many instances, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, governments intend starvation to happen. In such cases, foreign aid does not reach the intended recipients and does not win any friends for the West. The book's scope is limited to the countries named in the title. The title is a bit misleading, however, in suggesting that this is a travel narrative. Instead, it is a political analysis, although Kaplan does describe what it is like to visit impoverished, war-torn regions of Sudan and Ethiopia where few journalists dare to tread.

Eritrea is the one country that receives unabashed, effusive praise from Kaplan. I question whether any nation can be as noble and high-minded as Kaplan portrays the Eritreans, but if there is any truth in his descriptions, Eritrea provides an example of what Africans can accomplish despite war, colonialism, religious diversity, and starvation.

Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts" was described by slavist H. Cooper (Slavic Review 52, 1993) as "a dreadful mix of unfounded generalizations, misinformation, outdated sources, personal prejudices and bad writing". The same can be applied to "Surrender or starve". Any specialist could point dozens of minor errors in this book, but lack of scholarship is not the worst. Kaplan is exasperatingly tendentious and partial and his extraordinary simplification and misunderstanding of the conflict in the Horn is outrageous. He overemphasizes the ethnic component, sometimes dangerously approaching racism in his contempt for the Amharas (they are all intrinsically bad). To be sure, the Derg (the communist regime) was evil, but linking a particular culture (the Amharas) with a transient political regime that was imposed against the people's will is absolutely wrong. Besides, anyone minimally informed knows how many Amharas suffered by the resettlement policies of the Derg.
Worst of all, Kaplan embraces the politics he presumedly criticizes: "Surrender or starve" is not the slogan of the former Ethiopian communist regime, it is Kaplan's own motto. According to the author, we should have left 10 million Ethiopians starve in 1984-85, so as to foster a local rebellion against communist rule! To put it bluntly, this book is scholarly defective and morally despicable.

Forget Kaplan. If you really want to be informed about the complex reality of Ethiopia and neighboring countries, take a look at any of the books written by historians Bahru Zewde and Harold G. Marcus or by anthropologist Donald Donham. And if you want to be informed and at the same time enjoy a superb literary experience go for Ryszard Kapuscinski's "The Emperor"!

Kaplan's Surrender or Starve is a fascinating, albeit difficult at times, read on the war-torn Horn of Africa during the late 70s and early 80s. I grew up during those years, and I remember reading horrific stories of starvation and death in Ethiopia, but I had no real awareness of the whys and whos involved in the tragedy. Kaplan attempts here to address just those points, and his basic thesis is the debunking of the idea that this was a "tragedy" in the sense that most of us would use that world - this wasn't some unavoidable fallout from nature and outdated farming practices, it was the intentional result of years of systemic oppression and subjugation of various ethnic groups to collectivization and the like. The book does not deal with events in strictly chronological order - it is rather an overview-by-travelogue introduction to the various players and groups involved in the messy conflicts that leap across borders which seem tenuous at best. As a tyro in the history of this area, I was at times confused by this approach - it was hard to divine the common thread of Kaplan's these at times, and the book has a disconcertingly disjointed feel to it. But this approach also works well in some other respects, namely in the way it lets Kaplan pull in so many players onto one stage without turning the book into a mere catalogue. It's fairly readable, and I was torn between giving it three and four stars. In the end, I decided that Kaplan's realpolitik approach to how things should have been done, in his opinion, smacked at times too much of facile armchair quarterbacking - this is where a deeper chronological approach would have, I think, helped him make his points better and tie them more clearly to the narrative. But don't get me wrong - this is very much a worthwhile read about a neglected region.

This book is almost completely about how the Communist government of Ethiopia misled the West into thinking that a small harvest was the reason for the mass starvation of 1984. Most remember this as the time when the charitable West stepped in with huge donations of grain and musician celebrities formed to perfom Band Aid. It is bad because the main culprit was the dictator Mengistu and his Communist buddies doing forced resettlement, collectivization, and centralized villages. They wanted to win the civil war raging in Ethiopia and install a Marxist government. Millions died, the Hollywood establishment blamed bad weather, and leftists told the West they weren't doing enough. Well the Ethiopian government could have stopped the genocide by stopping its failed policies.

This is an eye awakening book about how the West was deceived by a Marxist Third World government. There is some material in the book about Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen but the main focus is Ethiopia. The fallen Ethiopian government failed the people it governed.

I have enjoyed reading a half-dozen books by Robert Kaplan, a journalist who writes about foreign affairs for the Atlantic Monthly, and this one was no exception. Although some critics consider Kaplan's analyses as overly pessimistic, most give him high praise for his skill in combining first person travel narrative, history, geo-political analysis, and a street-level view of what is unfolding in the farthest corners of our world. Surrender or Starve was first published in 1988, right after the epic famines that devastated the Horn of Africa from 1984-1987; this new edition includes a new foreword and a postscript on Eritrea (which declared independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a thirty-year war).

Kaplan is an unapologetically opinionated writer. Most of the media covered the famines that devastated eastern Africa as caused by horrible droughts, which is partly true. But Kaplan insists that Africans, and not only God, were also to blame, because the famines were greatly exacerbated by ethnic conflict and class warfare. In Sudan, the northern Muslim government in Khartoum ignored the plight of Christians in the south. In Ethiopia, the ruthless Marxist regime of Mengistu Hailie Mariam (1977-1991) turned the famine into a weapon of war against the ethnic Oromos, Tigreans and Eritreans. Massive "villagization" or forced collectivizations that displaced five million people were hailed by Mengistu as "famine relief." In 1986, for example, the World Human Rights Guide "gave Ethiopia the lowest rating of any country in the world" (p. 81). Today Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. What makes Kaplan such an engaging writer is his stated intention to think and write about Africa in "a bold, unpopular, but more realistic way, judging Africa by the same standards of moral conduct that would apply to any other part of the globe" (p. xii). Characteristic of all his books, Kaplan thus places himself squarely in the tradition of realpolitik as opposed to all forms of political idealism.

The book takes a view of one side approach. I lived in Ethiopia in the 1980's and most of the staff Mr. Kaplan talked about never happened. The historical facts are missing. Emperor Menelik was not the first Amhara king there was Emperor Tewdros form Gojam which is the main Amhara region who united Ethiopia from Red Sea to Showa. Reading the book makes me think that the author had a good close relationship with then gorilla fighters now the people in power in Ethiopia and its former province Eriteria.

Surrender or Starve is a solid book that deserves reading, especially if you knew nothing of the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict. When I was young, I distinctly recall images of the famine in Ethiopia, calls to action from within the United States but, like Kaplan emphasizes, the West did not appreciate the true root cause of these problems: ethnic conflict. At the very least, I was ignorant of these factors. Kaplan made me investigate deeper and in doing so, I found a lot of interesting material on the Internet. One mild example of the two countries animosity of one another was found when I was looking for a good Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant in NYC. I found one, incidentally, and the food is different but good--first time for Ethiopian for me. At any rate, a listing of Eritrean restaurants on an Eritrean-American website showed several but apparently 2-3 were "bought by an Ethiopian" and were blocked out with those words bolded in red. I guess for the time being with the struggle still fresh in everyone's memory (and likely to ignite again), it's not appropriate to patronize your enemy.

I was not particularly impressed with this book. Kaplan tend to repeat the same thoughts (and phrases) in each chapter. Obviously, he did not want to do much research into the area as the same handful of sources are referred to. It is a shame that such short shrift is given to this region as it is one continuously neglected by the popular media.