Book Review: Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full
Bill Berkeley is a journalist who traveled widely in Africa
during the 1980s and 90s. This volume is a series of chapters on various places he visited and individuals he met. Berkeley attempts to shed more complex light on Africa than do many travel books. He has had access to many of the most infamous characters of recent African history, and he paints a vivid picture of a continent in the midst of terror. In Liberia, child soldiers loot teddy bears from shop windows and are lured out of their militias with offers of toys. In South Africa under apartheid, a favorite torture is to slam prisoners' penises or breasts into drawers. In Rwanda today, "life expectancy ... is twelve hours renewable" (p. 273).Berkeley's purpose is to show that all is not as simple in Africa as other journalists suggest. Africa is not simply a continent full of tribalists who kill each other because of primordial instinct. Berkeley also shows that Africans' problems are not the consequence of African ignorance. Some of the most brutal leaders are the most highly educated, as he shows in his chapter on Sudan and Uganda, titled "Three Ph.D.s and a New Kind of African Leader." Berkeley wants to show that the chaos and killings that characterize much of Africa today is the responsibility of individuals who choose to be tyrannical. By focusing on individual tyrants and criminals, he helps the current international movement to oblige perpetrators of human rights abuses or genocide to take responsibility for their actions.
Berkeley certainly makes a persuasive case that politics in Africa is not mere tribalism. Unfortunately, in so doing he does
not undermine, but rather reinforces, the simplistic analysis that leads many to abandon that continent in despair. If Africa is characterized by the rise of tyrants, how is that less simplistic than calling it tribal? Berkeley does not investigate the many reasons why it is possible for tyrants to rule in Africa when they have long since given up ruling elsewhere.One of the difficulties that readers who do not specialize in African affairs have in encountering Africa, is that of historical perspective. Africa is indeed a continent of tyrants, although some progress is being made in some countries toward political democracy, and indeed a few countries, notably Senegal and Botswana, have always been democratic. In so far as Africa does produce tyrants, murderers, and kleptocrats, it does so for reasons that resemble why such persons prevailed in Europe during its own early modern history. Nations are not yet consolidated; bureaucracies are rudimentary; militaries are not yet imbued with the principle of loyalty to civilian rule; and judges are not yet independent. Yet Berkeley dismisses too easily the idea of "failed states" as an explanation for Africa's seeming regression in the late twentieth century from the early optimism of post-colonial rule.
Add to these political conditions the last twenty years of economic regression in a continent already very poor, and it is
not surprising that strongmen emerge. Often in the 1980s and 90s, such strongmen were supported by the United States, the Soviet Union, or the ex-colonial powers. Only with regard to this last point does Berkeley consider more deeply the causes of Africaâs problems. His chapter 2, "The Assistant Secretary," is about Chester A. Crocker, President Reagan's most important policy-maker for Africa. He shows how the U.S.'s "destructive engagement" (p.69), based perhaps on cynicism, perhaps on racism, (p. 87) affects politics in Africa. This is by far the most enlightening chapter of the volume, delving carefully into U.S. foreign policy interests. Chapter 3, "A Voice of Good Sense and Good Will" (Reagan's characterization of Mobutu) shows how the U.S. favored Mobutu Sese Seko for so many years in Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) despite the way Mobutu ruined the Zairois economy.By contrast, the rest of the volume remains at the superficial level of describing, but not explaining, the horrors of Africa. Nevertheless, Berkeley does touch upon some factors often neglected when trying to understand Africa. He shows how inter-African racism, for example Arab racism against southern Sudanese, can influence politics there. He also demonstrates the importance of inter-African geopolitics, such as the role of Libya and Nigeria in Liberia, and the interest of post-genocide Rwanda in post-Mobutu Congo. As African politicians become more sophisticated and able to control their own societies, so they also can be as interventionist as any extra-continental power.
Berkeley's second analytical purpose is to show that Africa is characterized not only by tyranny, but also by anarchy. Here
again, he stretches his point too far. His chapter, "The Collaborator," on South Africa under apartheid reveals not an anarchic state, but a tightly-controlled one. Tyranny and anarchy are not necessarily companions. Rwanda, too, was very tightly controlled and ordered under the reign of Juvenal Habyarimana; the genocide unleashed by his successors was carefully planned and executed. Berkeley himself brings this planning to our attention in his last chapter, "The Defendant," about the Rwandan genocidaire Jean-Paul Akayesu, a mayor who organized the slaughter of the very people who trusted him to protect them. Anarchy may be an effective tool for some would-be tyrannical leaders, such as Charles Taylor in Liberia (chapter 1, "The Rebel"). By spreading terror among Liberians, Taylor eventually ensured his own election as President in 1997: better to have him in power, apparently, than running loose intimidating the population. But anarchy is no better an explanation for what is happening in Africa as a whole than is the idea of tribalism.The individual who would like to know more about African politics in a descriptive sense will find this book a very good read. It is extremely interesting, and gives the reader a vivid picture of both perpetrators and victims in some of the worst-case countries of Africa. But that same reader will then need to consult other works in order to understand the deeper causes of African state terror, civil wars and genocide. Three suggested works are George B.N. Ayittey, Africa in Chaos (New York: St. Martinâs
Griffin, 1999), Richard Sandbrook, Closing the Circle: Democratization and Development in Africa (London: Zed Books, 2000), and especially Taisier M. Ali and Robert O. Matthews, eds. Civil Wars in Africa: Roots and Resolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queenâs University Press, 1999).