By Stephen Williams

A passage to Africa

By George Alagiah

£16.99 Little, Brown

ISBN 0-316-85554-5

In this book the author, broadcast journalist George Alagiah, combines a biographical approach with his account of Africa.

This is the Africa he has known, reported from and had an enduring passion for since, as a five-year-old child, his Tamil family fled the ethnic conflicts of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) to settle in newly independent Accra, Ghana.

He describes the heady atmosphere of Ghana’s capital when the first OAU summit was hosted by President Nkrumah. Seeing the limousines carrying Africa’s leaders driving through Accra to the summit, the young schoolboy was swept up in the dream. His adoptive home, Africa, was on the cusp of great change. It would be a new era dawning, a new era when everything might be possible. Africa was drunk on hope.

George and his young friends had already assumed that the new, post-colonial, united Africa would overnight end poverty, hunger and disease. Their future would see the continent come of age to rival the Americans, Europeans, Chinese and Russians. They turned their minds to the challenges ahead, debating what were for them burning issues of the day - such as what to name Africa’s first space rocket.

An age of innocence maybe, but formative nonetheless. Throughout the book, as George Alagiah recalls the various assignments he undertook as the BBC’s African Correspondent, that childhood vision of Africa’s potential greatness permeates his narrative. While the nature of his work obliged him to chronicle the tragic and horrific events unfolding on the continent, but he never loses sight of that early optimism.

George Alagiah is one of Britain’s better known news reporters. His face became familiar with BBC viewers when his satellite link reports from Africa’s news hot-spots, the crises of the moment, were aired on a regular basis. Today, he is even better known as a TV studio ?anchorman’ on BBC news.

His domestic British TV audience - who, for the most part, view Africa as a deeply mysterious and frightening place - watched reports delivered in an unfailingly elegant and dignified style. While these reports were never particularly contentious, they were nevertheless humane, incisive and totally professional.

How much his reporting, often undertaken at considerable personal risk, actually served to inform public opinion ?back home’ is difficult to quantify. There is simply no easy measurement. But it would be fair to say George Alagiah became one of Africa’s most highly respected broadcast reporters.

What was notable was his reporting skills in dealing with the constraints of time and editorial control, and making relatively simple what was often a very complex situation. This was particularly evident in his reporting of the momentous events in South Africa when he was based in Johannesburg between 1994 and 1998 as the BBC’s Africa Correspondent.

The world’s major news gathering agencies, such as the BBC, are sometimes criticised for providing ?news of the lowest common denominator’, but Alagiah’s ability to offer insight by the use of a well chosen couple of sentences firmly counters that criticism.

Nor was he averse to putting a human face to his reports, by telling the story of a particular individual, family or community caught up in the news of the day, and inviting these African participants in unfolding dramas to tell their own story.

This gave his news reports additional integrity, and countered that tendency of the Western press to report from Africa in an abstract terminology that somehow denies Africans their own humanity. Here, similar skills are transferred to the printed page.

His reporting experiences are almost underplayed for the sake of a candid political analysis of the events he has covered. He describes the last days of Mobutu, South Africa’s township uprisings, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the child soldiers of Liberia, Rwanda’s ?94 genocide, and the Somali conflicts three years earlier (which provided a close shave with a violent end).

The narrative is both intimate and well-paced, but like his TV reports, there is little in the book that could be considered truly contentious - unless you count an appreciative (but today rather unfashionable) chapter describing Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni’s achievements in turning around his country’s fortunes after decades of war.

Most moving

Perhaps the most moving of Alagiah’s recollections concerns his relationship with a Seth Ngarambe in Rwanda. Like all news journalists working in foreign countries, the BBC crew needed local knowledge. Often, they employ a guide, sometimes known as a ?fixer’ to serve as a translator, driver, navigator, mechanic, and general organiser. The crew chose Seth Ngarambe, and together they documented the post-genocide turmoil of the Great Lakes region.

A year after this stint, Alagiah returns to Kigali to report on how Rwanda was coping, and attempts to find Seth again. Through Seth’s son, he discovers that Seth is in jail, accused of participating in the genocide. Seth (a Hutu) was accused of giving up his Tutsi wife to the Hutu Interahamwe death squads months before joining the BBC crew. It’s as if the shadow of the genocide has tapped Alagiah on the shoulder.

He describes his sense of betrayal, and his determination to confront the man he came to know as a friend face-to-face, to look him in the eye and ask for the truth. He, and his cameraman, were the first journalists to get a TV camera into Gitarama jail.

Despite this, and the many other harrowing and dispiriting events he experiences, the author tells us that he has learnt not to judge Africa by its worst excesses. ?When I see injustice in Africa it hits me in the guts; every small victory notched up by the sons and daughters of this continent is one I celebrate with them. If I have trained my head to be dispassionate, my heart remains with Africa’s people?. This book confirms that.e.

The Graves Are Not Yet Full

Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa

By Bill Berkeley

$27.50 Basic Books (US)

ISBN 0-456-00641-8

Bill Berkeley gets straight to the point. The first sentence of the introduction to this book reads: ?This is a book about evil?. What follows is an analysis of the underlying causes of Africa’s teeming conflicts over the past two decades, and reference to historical contexts. He writes of six countries specifically, countries that he has travelled to since he first visited Africa as a freelance newspaper journalist in 1983: DRC Congo (then Zaire), Liberia, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan and Uganda.

One of the author’s central contentions is that African ?ethnic conflict’ wars would be better described as gang warfare perpetrated by tyrants aligning themselves with ethnic identities. ?They use ethnicity to mobilise constituencies. ...arming ethnically-based militia’s, cultivating warlords, propagating hatred and fear - these are the tactics of the crafty despot.? He also rejects the idea that Africa’s conflicts are the product of some irrational mindset. ?There is method in the madness,? he claims, ? It’s not an exotic habit of hatred but rather a method: a cynical means of acquiring or holding power by exploiting or magnifying ethnic differences?.

There is much to this book’s arguments that rings true. How else do you explain that in 1990, while the Krahn and Gio peoples were engaged in a bloody civil-war in Liberia, across the border in Cote d’Ivoire the two ethnic groupings continued to live in peace?

Appropriately, Berkeley looks beyond Africa for clues to this phenomenon, and his focus falls on Washington. Listing Doe, Mobutu, Nimeiry, Siad Barre and SA’s apartheid regimes as sufficiently qualified to fall into the tyrant category, he offers two possible answers for why the US supported regimes that were little more than criminal enterprises (in fact, the American author directly compares these regimes to mafia crime families).

The first answer, often cited, is that in pursuing the Cold War campaign and using Africa as a proxy battle-ground to engage the Soviet Union, the US were prepared to put up with ?any bastard’, as long as he was ?their bastard’.

A less convincing argument is also put forward: that the US, struggling to come to terms with its own racial and civil-rights history, was persuaded to tolerate the flaws of Africa’s black leaders.

More interesting than these two hypotheses is the contribution Chester Crocker makes to the book in a number of revealing interviews. Crocker joined the US government in 1970, barely 30 years old, and served for three years under Haig and Kissinger during Richard Nixon’s notorious presidential terms of office.

During an eight-year term as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Reagan, he came to be particularly reviled by anti-apartheid activists for his support of ?constructive engagement’ with South Africa’s regimes.

He might equally have been reviled for his unswerving support for despots such as Liberia’s Samuel Doe, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko and others tyrants. They appeared to have the US’s blessing to do what they liked, with impunity, as long as they didn’t let the communists in.

Crocker’s answers to Berkeley’s probings reveal that the appeasement of dreadful regimes was deemed far more vital than any consideration of Africa’s human rights.

They also reveal an appaling disregard by those in the highest echelons of power in Washington for those universal values and principals that Americans claim to hold so dear.

The Graves Are Not Yet Full draws much other evidence from the extensive interviews the author has undertaken in nearly two decades of Africa watching, mainly for the US magazine Atlantic Monthly. While he never met Mobutu, he got to speak with a whole range of other major players like Charles Taylor, Buthelezi, Garang and Museveni.

The result is a powerful and disturbing work which should be required reading for those that would dismiss many of Africa’s conflicts as the result of ?ancient ethnic hatreds’.

Wildlife Wars

My Battle to Save Africa’s Treasures

By Richard E Leakey and Virginia Morell
£20.00 Macmillan

ISBN 0-333- 73566-3

Richard Leakey, the famous paleontologist and former director of Kenya’s Museums, appears to have been as surprised as anyone when in May 1989 he was chosen by President Daniel arap Moi to become the director of the Kenya Wildlife Department. He and his family were better known as researchers into fossil evidence of the origins of early man. While Leakey was not an obvious candidate for this post, it turned out to be one of the Kenyan President’s shrewdest appointments.

Long recognised as one of the most corrupt and inefficient government bodies, the KWD was under-funded and demoralised. Leakey’s arrival was like a hurricane that had come calling. Out went superfluous, incompetent or corrupt staff. In came new wage structures that addressed the chronically low salaries that civil-servants were paid, tackling one of the root causes for low-level corruption. World Bank funding was also secured.

The most immediate problem was the plight of the elephant and the bandits that were poaching them and robbing tourists in the National Parks.

The elephant population was in critical decline, and the market for tusks continued to drive a sinister, shadowy cartel of ivory smugglers, closely linked to the illegal arms industry, who were making huge hard-currency profits from exporting overseas. Indeed, it was alleged that in a number of African countries corrupt military bartered small arms for rhino and elephant tusks.

Leakey devised a three-prong strategy. First, he managed to cut his way through Kenya’s government bureaucracy and, changing the status of the Kenya Wildlife Department renamed the Kenya Wildlife Service, he trained and armed Park Rangers, gave them logistical back-up and a firm mandate to take on the well-armed poachers.

Secondly, he realised the power of public relations and cultivated the press to his campaign. His masterstroke was to persuade arap Moi to publicly burn 12tons of seized tusks captured from poachers. The last strategy was to lobby the CITES convention, in the face of fierce opposition from Southern African countries, for a complete ban on ivory sales.

Rumour had it that certain government figures and their business associates and family members were involved in ivory smuggling. Leakey had secured the President’s word, when accepting the director’s post, that he would receive his total backing, but political interference was almost immediately his major problem, as when Leakey tried to ensure that park-gate entrance fee revenues were not corruptly diverted to local ?big men’, he made some bitter and politically powerful enemies.

For some years Leakey managed to outflank his enemies but almost overnight he fell out of favour with the President, was marginalised and came close to resigning.

Events were to take an even more serious turn when his light-aircraft crashed on landing and injuries required the amputation of his legs. Finally, after many battles, Leakey resigned.

This is a book that will fascinate Leakey watchers. There is an even more fascinating episode of his life that demands a book to be written. Leakey went on to form an opposition party, and later, at the behest of the international financial institutions, joined government to head the civil-service. Barely a year ago he became embroiled in a huge scandal (allegedly, for using political influence on behalf of an overseas bank) and again resigned from public office.
.

Back to the top
Contents