Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and 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~]


Timely Insight Into Africa   August 3, 2004
Patrick Mc Coy (Tokyo, Japan)
22 out of 26 found this review helpful

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 argues the West is naive about African starvation   August 2, 2004
saskatoonguy (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada)
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.


The worst book on the Horn of Africa I have ever read   January 28, 2006
Ethiopianist (Spain)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful

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"!





Insightful but hard to follow look at a troubling time   November 22, 2005
Tanager (Durham, NC USA)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

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.