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

Since 1983 journalist Bill Berkeley has traveled through Africa's most troubled lands--Rwanda, Liberia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire--seeking out the tyrants and military leaders who orchestrate seemingly intractable wars. Shattering the myth that ancient tribal hatred lies at the heart of the continent's troubles, Berkeley instead holds accountable the "Big Men" who came to power during this period, describing the very rational methods behind their apparent madness.

A New Republic Book

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.


If you read one book...   September 6, 2001
David Shorr (Muscatine, Iowa)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

...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.


On Familiar Ground, With Telling Details   July 4, 2001
Paul Frandano (Reston, Va. USA)
18 out of 22 found this review helpful

Bill Berkeley begins with an interesting idea social scientists have mined deeply: that politics--most frequently of the exploitative tyrannical stripe--and "ethnic competition" provide a far more compelling explanation of ethnic violence than threadbare notions of "primordial conflict"--"that's just the way those people have always been"--which constitute the conventional wisdom underlying most accounts of of ethnic strife in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Berkeley expressly criticizes popular writers like Robert Kaplan for keeping the conventional--and easily controvertible--wisdom in circulation. In doing so, and in writing to correct the record, Berkeley deserves a pat on the back.

After these introductory passages, the book heads for mostly well worked territory in accounts of African ethnic conflicts Berkeley has, at some point, covered as a reporter (for Atlantic Monthly and other publications). He does this through the lens of six "types"--"the rebel," "the collaborator," "the assistant secretary"--each with its own chapter, some of which work better than others (such as the ones on Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for African for the entire Reagan Administration and errant practioner of Kissingerian realpolitik, and Gatsho Buthelezi, the Zulu leader who collaborated with South Africa's White Apartheid regime against the Mandela's African National Congress). In other chapters, however, Berkeley is hard-pressed to maintain this focus, especially since he seems determined to cut or stretch his material to give roughly equal attention to each conflict. Still, Berkeley provides reliable, informed overviews, filled out by personal anecdotes, interview material, and occasional gleanings from other scholarly or popular writers.

Some things irritate: I found his use of "tribe" and "tribalism" to be inconsistent, at times diffuse, first criticizing these terms as Western categories imposed on subservient peoples, and later using them conventionally (and, I would add, insensitively), without any suggestion that such usage may be in any way objectionable (at a time when "tribe" has been widely abandoned among Africanists in favor of, say, "people" or "ethnic group"). From time to time the text repeats itself, and Berkeley often returns to home themes artlessly (a problem of structure: if each of your chapters has the same basic point, you'll tend to repeat your punchlines unless you factor them into a common front end or conclusion). And Berkeley is at times too much the "new journalist," gratingly front and center of his own narrative, wearing his progressive credentials and editorial opinions (he's now an editorial writer at the NY Times) on his sleeve, hatband, shoulderbag, and anywhere else he can hang them.

This is nevertheless a book that, apart from its other merits, gets its big concerns right, and for that reason alone I would recommend it as a corrective to a lot of the nonsense on ethnic strife now in circulation.


Refreshing Insight into African Politics   October 12, 2001
12 out of 14 found this review helpful

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.