Africa

Podcast • August 12, 2018

V. S. Naipaul’s ‘Gloomy Clarity’ about Africa, and Himself (rebroadcast)

This interview with V.S. Naipaul was released October 25, 2010. We are re-posting the podcast on the occasion of the author’s death Saturday. V. S. Naipaul, in the winter of his long writing life, doesn’t ...

This interview with V.S. Naipaul was released October 25, 2010. We are re-posting the podcast on the occasion of the author’s death Saturday.

V. S. Naipaul, in the winter of his long writing life, doesn’t disguise his melancholy or his frailty. Still, his inquisitorial eye and his magic with a prose sentence have not abandoned him, nor the organ tones of his mesmerizing voice. In conversation he relishes my suggestion of magic — his new book on Africa is full of it. But when I cite some favorite examples of his inspired sentence-making, he recalls only hard labor in the cause of “gloomy clarity,” his signature effect. “I wrote that very carefully,” he intones. Of his non-fiction process — combining reading, field observation and interviewing — he says: “I see what is to be done, and I do it.” At a public reading the night before we spoke, the question came: what was the happiest moment of your writing career? “I suppose it would have occurred when one was very young. Because, you know, there are no happy moments now. When you are young the future is a great big ball, and anything is possible. So if you do a good review for The New Statesman and you feel good, it can make you quite happy, although it is a petty business… I know the future is small and eternally shrinking around me.”

Naipaul’s new book is called The Masque of Africa: it’s an inquiry not into politics or progress but into religion broadly: the magical systems of belief in Old Africa. “The new religions, Islam and Christianity, are just on the top,” says a classic Naipaul informant, a lawyer and former university dean in Gabon; his punchline is a perfect short Naipaulian thematic sentence: “Inside us is the forest.” Africa might well be better off today, Naipaul supposes, had its “forest beliefs” been spared foreign intrusions. Africa is a “wounded civilization,” he reflects, applying the phrase he used in one of several books on his ancestral India. But there is no going back, and perhaps no recovery from the loss of self and sovereignty. Naipaul was not at all impressed with my own “fantasy” that in both India and Africa it may be time, for some anyway, to rediscover the village possibilities, the chance that “Things Come Together.” Naipaul himself, of course, fled the colony (Trinidad) for the capital (London) long ago. His verdict is final: “the village is an awful place.”

On his best behavior, V. S. Naipaul knows how to be entertainingly grumpy. He does not forgive the English literary establishment for cold-shouldering him these many years, for snubbing even his Nobel Prize in 2001. He remembers one official personage sniffing: “It isn’t as though it’s the Booker Prize.” He is proud to have marked Tony Blair as a “pirate,” long before the Iraq War. “A calamity,” he judged. Wouldn’t he care, I asked, to offend somebody before we were done? “No, no, no, no,” insisted. “That is not part of my job.”

Podcast • January 21, 2011

Howard French on Africa in a Chinese Century

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Howard French. (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo — a Cold War murder ...

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Howard French. (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo — a Cold War murder by Belgium with help from our CIA — the journalist Howard French is sketching an alternative path ahead for African development today. China is the big investor in 21st Century Africa. China sees Africa as yet another “natural-resource play” but also as a partner in growth — not a basket-case but a billion customers who’ll be two billion by mid-century. With the West and Japan deep in a post-industrial funk, China is keeping its focus on manufacturing, exports and markets, “and we’ll have them largely to ourselves,” China calculates, “because the West doesn’t make the stuff middle-class Africans are buying — cars and houses and shopping malls and airports and all the things associated with a rise to affluence. Those are the things that China makes.”

For the New York Times Howard French covered Africa and then China, where he learned Mandarin. He returns to Africa now on a book project, observing and overhearing Chinese migrants to places like Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Liberia.

HF: I was struck every time I got on a plane: the Westerners tend to be rich American tourists on their way to seeing lions and giraffes; or aid workers and NGO people — coming with a mission to minister to Africans about capacity-building or democracy and what my father used to do: public health. I say none of this with scorn, but the Chinese have a very different mission. The Chinese that I saw on the planes — and by the way, ten years ago I saw no Chinese; now they’re maybe a fifth of all the passengers — are all, almost to a person, business people. They’ve pulled up their stakes wherever they lived — in Szechuan province or Hunan province — and they have come to make it in Africa. And they’re not leaving until they do. Whatever it takes for them to make a breakthrough in farming or in small industry, they’re going to work 20 hours a day till they make it. They see Africa as a place of extraordinary growth opportunity, a place to make a fortune, to throw down some roots. These are not people who’re there for a couple of years. They’re thinking about building new lives for themselves in Africa. So you have this totally different perspective between the Westerners and the newcomers. One sees Africa as a patient essentially, to be lectured to, to be ministered to, to be cared for. The other sees Africa and Africans as a place of doing business and as partners. There’s no looking down one’s nose or pretending to superiority. It’s all how I can make something work here.

CL: I just wonder: among those development geniuses who argue about Trade vs. Aid as America’s next gift to Africa, in the face of all the Chinese activity buying forests, or building railroads, or planning the sale of billions of cellphones, what is the West’s better bet? Do we have one, or are we still asleep?

HF: I think we’re still asleep.

Yes, Howard French observes a Chinese style of racism in Africa, both familiar and different. “There’s a certain discourse about Africans being lazy or lacking in intelligence or unready, variations on a theme. One guy said to me just last week in Liberia essentially: ‘there’s a thousand-year gap between them and us,’ meaning… culturally, educationally, just sort of temperamentally; the ability to save, to sacrifice, to commit to a long-term project. But there’s an important distinction to be made. Western racism was instrumentalized to justify the sale of black people and their enslavement across the ocean to work as animals of labor on other continents. Chinese racism is, comparatively speaking up until this point, a largely rhetorical phenomenon…”

And what are Africa’s chances of doing well in the new Chinese “deal”? Howard French sees “an incredible opportunity for Africa,” but no guarantees. States with a vigorous civil society, strong elites and an informed view of “how people’s daily and longer-term interests will be served” stand to get good results. “In states that are stuck in the kleptocratic authoritarian mode, the Chinese will pay cash on the barrel for whatever they want and all of the contracts will go through the state house and none of the money or very little of it will enter the public budget. Twenty years from now, China will say: it’s not our fault if the money is frittered away on Mercedes and villas in France and Swiss bank accounts. We paid you exactly the amount we said we were going to pay you. Don’t blame us if you have twice as many people and all of your iron ore is finished.”

Podcast • June 15, 2010

Vishwas Satgar: the Political Economy of FIFA

Vishwas Satgar has a half-time message from South Africa for World Cup watchers. It’s a quick introduction to “the political economy of soccer” that won’t dent any grown-up’s pleasure in the athletic or human spectacle — no more than, say, the endless buzzing of those vuvuzelas. Short form: most of the money that comes with the games will leave with the games. South Africa will be stuck with four new white-elephant stadia and public deficits and debts much worse than California’s. The engine of Africa’s development will still be a site of rising unemployment, falling life expectancy (at just under 50 years, below Sudan and Ethiopia), and a health-care system in shambles. There’s money in those Budweiser and VISA ads around the World Cup matches that might have been invested in universities, not in FIFA, the football federation.

Vishwas Satgar is a labor lawyer and leftwing activist, an insurgent ex-Secretary of the South African Communist Party who’s way out of alliance with the ANC on the uplift politics of the World Cup. Satgar’s message resonates with the remarkably fair-and-balanced film Fahrenheit 2010 by South Africa-born Craig Tanner. Archbishop Desmond Tutu feels “a world of good — well worth the price” in a South Africa’s month in the sun; “if we’re going to have white elephants,” he says in the film, “so be it.” But the argument that lingers is that “public funds have been looted for a moment in our history. People are still going to be living in shacks.”

Like the Beijing Olympics in Summer ’08, this World Cup is a coming-out party, and a historic marker for Africa at the center of the maximum stage… without anything like the long-term strategic planning China put into its primetime debut, Satgar argues:

This World Cup has been done, technically and in terms of construction, in sort of record time. There was a grand display of engineering capability and technology and so on. And people in South Africa’s squatter settlements, and in what we could call our slums, I am sure are wondering, ‘If they could do all this grandiose stuff, why haven’t they built us houses over fifteen, sixteen years of democracy?’ So I think these contradictions are going to come back to haunt the political forces that have stood by this.

Vishwas Satgar in conversation with Chris Lydon at Brown University, June 15, 2010.

Consciousness-raising is over. You may now watch Spain v. Switzerland, then South Africa v. Uruguay in peace.

Podcast • February 10, 2010

Ghana Speaking (III): Kofi Sam’s Model of African Self-Sufficiency

We are making the full village rounds here in Aburanza, near Cape Coast, with a strong-minded, strong-willed modern chief. From furniture works to dress-making class to palm-nut oil pots, Dr. Kofi Sam is barking out variations on his evangelical theme: West Africa can provide the essentials for itself (food, clothing, shelter and healthcare) if only it first licks a second AIDS crisis — the Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome.

Kofi Sam, who graduated from high school in the 1950s with Kofi Annan of the UN, is a cheerful misfit in the Ghanaian elite. He is an engineer with English training and now a compelling Ghanaian vision, however eccentric. He ran steel works in Ghana back in the day, and held the Housing ministry in Jerry Rawlings’ military government in the 1980s. But he was all the while getting more focused on “appropriate technology” for tropical Africa — on finding modern designs and materials, that is, for the climate and culture of a hot, poor place. Tight denim blue jeans make an interesting Western fashion statement, as he might say, but what is their place in Africa? And what is all that Scandinavian concrete doing in new Ghanaian housing?

How is it, Kofi Sam asks, that “for 50 years we haven’t been able to design a building that doesn’t use air conditioners?” Kofi Sam laughs a lot through what can sound like a stand-up routine getting heavy and deep:

Why is Africa waiting for Germany and Japan to go solar? Because we are copy cats.

Whatever the master in England does, we copy it. Our buildings should have big open windows. That’s how the imperialists, the white men, built their bungalows. We knocked them down and replaced them with glass houses, sealed glass.

Africans wear suits with neckties! With socks! With underwear! We cover ourselves so we feel the heat, then we go to the office and call our secretaries to bring us hot coffee, not cool cocoa, using an air conditioner that could light forty homes…

We only wear what we make on Fridays — Friday wear! That’s the problem…

There is a tunnel called ‘Western education.’ We enter it and learn how to forget. We go to Accra and forget about the village…

The African intellectual is like a bee who has forgotten how to make honey.

The governmental system in Africa only caters to Western-educated people, even though they’re less than 15 percent of the population. From the president right down to the teacher, they get paid at the end of every month.

No villager gets paid for anything. They get up in the morning, they go to their farms, they produce their cassava or yam or plaintain. Nobody guarantees them a market. Nobody gives them loans. All the taxes raised in the country are for Western-educated people, like Kofi Sam.

The villagers don’t get anything.

Dr. Kofi Sam with Chris Lydon, in Aburanza on the Atlantic coast of Ghana, January 28, 2010.

We spend the day surveying some good old alternatives. At one smoky, blistering-hot open-air work site, a dozen women are time-sharing a machine that cracks palm nuts, and in their individual vats they’re slowly cooking the cherished red oil that Africa uses for soap and cooking. No corn oil here, thank you. In his home village of Aburanza, Kofi Sam has sponsored a cane furniture works, hand-weaving of kente cloth, and machine-assisted grinding of cassava flour. His sister’s henhouse looks spotless and contented. “You asked what should aid agencies do,” Kofi Sam remarks. “How about a little capital so that my sister and her kind can each construct 100 henhouses and start with ten layers apiece. Whole villages improve that way.”

At a hilltop prayer meeting at mid-day in Aburanza, families answer my greeting (“He’s real! He’s alive! He’s on time!”) with “Hallelujah!” A pastor is offering pint-sized bottles of an herbal remedy. As for those basic necessities that Africa can provide itself, I challenge my host on one big point: “Native medicine isn’t going to cure malaria, Dr. Sam,” I say. “You’re wrong,” he fires back. “I made the same mistake you’re making.” What he learned eventually is that malaria wiped out mainly white newcomers; West Africans had developed an immunity and boosted it with natural medicines. Malaria was a weapon, he said, that forced the British to adopt “indirect rule” in West Africa, rather than settle as they did in Kenya and Southern Africa.

You’ll hear Kofi Sam inviting me back to Aburanza — and me promising to return before Christmas. “I want people like you here,” he says, “to let the world know that the aid they give doesn’t get to us. It’s in Accra — in the swimming pools of Accra, in the golf courses of Accra, in the lawn tennis courts of Accra, in the restaurants of Accra…”

And then, for $20, he sells me that striking handmade blue shirt off his beautiful brown back. Thank you, Kofi Sam. We will meet again.

Podcast • October 1, 2009

Tracy Kidder: "…faith that looks through death"

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tracy Kidder. (51 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tracy Kidder. (51 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains.

The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, hard by the killing fields in the Congo today.

The inspiration in Tracy Kidder’s sudden best-seller is a young man named Deo – short for the Latin “Deogratias,” meaning “thanks be to God” – who goes back to his blighted roots in Burundi to found Village Health Works, putting his medical education at the service of war’s survivors.

How we long — writers, book-buyers, interviewers, too — for bulletins from abroad without US Marines or drones in the picture. I like the moment in our conversation when I refer to one of Deo’s signature stories, about the need to build a six-kilometer road to his new health clinic in Kayanza. Tracy Kidder leaps up. “Can I read this?” he asks, reaching for his own book. In the anecdote, Deo, in Africa, was saying that a Belgian construction company would want US$50,000 to build the road, when a Burundian woman with a baby crying on her back interrupted him.

She said: “You will not pay a penny for this road. We become so much sick because we are poor, but we are not poor because we are lazy. We will work on this road with our own hands.”

The next day a hundred sixty-six people showed up with pickaxes, hoes, machetes, and other tools. The road was finished before the Belgian road builders got to bid on the job.

“Who did it?” the professionals asked. “We are the only road construction company in the entire region!”

“Not anymore,” Deo responded.

From Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains, pages 255-6.

What I am asking Tracy Kidder here is how to generalize that Deo story to the scale of Africa’s problem and the policies from Washington, the West, and now China, that have been anything but a solution:

It’s not tremendously complicated but it is difficult work. And it’s not the kind of work that some people like to do [because] you can’t do it in Washington D.C.

Too often what happens is that people start out with good intentions and raise substantial sums of money to do their work. Then things start to go wrong: they buy fleets of SUVs for their own use in that country, they call for big huge conferences with experts who don’t speak the language, and then they realize that it is really hard to work in a place like Haiti or Burundi and pretty quickly declare defeat. Before they leave they blame the people they had come to help …

I don’t think the conclusion should be that we give up because it is impossible. I consider effective foreign aid as a debt that is owed by the West to many of these countries, such as Haiti, which has been a virtual colony of the United States. Certainly Europe owes some big debts to many countries in Africa …

The fact is that to have a Burundian leading this effort in Burundi is a really important aspect … I mean you’ve really got to speak the language. You have got to understand connotation and so on. You’ve got to be able to cultivate a local base: people you can trust. I think the effective projects are the ones that, while they have big goals, start with the individual. Let the individual patient teach you how to treat their family, and let that family teach you how to treat a village, and let that village teach you how to treat a province and the province: the nation. You can be working from both ends but you can’t forget the essential part: the local. I mean it’s where we all live.

Tracy Kidder with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, September 22, 2009.

Podcast • April 3, 2009

Mahmood Mamdani: You (and I) got Darfur Wrong

Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (“we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (“Darfur today is the world’s capital of human suffering”), Nat Hentoff, Bob Geldof, George Clooney, Angelina Jolie, Harold Pinter, Oprah Winfrey, the gold-medal speed skater Joey Cheek, Tony Blair and Dario Fo might be profoundly shallow in its reading of the brutal warfare in Sudan five years ago… and just as wrong-headed in its drum beat for an American intervention?

Mahmood Mamdani: on the “pornography of evil”

Mahmood Mamdani can. We are talking here about his book Saviors and Survivors and his argument that the Darfur rescue campaign, which became a sacred cause of our civil religion, was not so much the moral alternative to Iraq, the Bush “war on terror,” and Cheney-think as it was a variation and extension of the same toolkit. I begin with a sort of confession that I may be a sample of Mamdani’s problem — having drenched myself in Nicholas Kristof‘s New York Times columns and largely absorbed the common framework that Darfur was about Arabs slaughtering Africans, and that somebody had to something about it.

If you represent my problem, then I think you also represent my solution. If you interviewed Nicholas Kristof, then you participated in shaping to some extent that audience which is the constituency of Save Darfur. I need to get to that audience because I need to turn a sermon into a debate and a discussion. I need to sow some seeds of doubt about what have been presumed to be simply goodwill gestures. I need to convince that audience that there is a politics around this — not simply good intentions and moralism and a fight against evil. I need to tell them that there is no such thing as a trans-historical evil in the world in which we live; that, in fact, all violence without exception has causes, and the causes are historical. And if you want to do something about the violence, we need to do something about the causes. The idea that violence is its own explanation is an idea which will take us nowhere except into a cycle of violence.

Mahmood Mamdani in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, April 2, 2009.

What held the Save Darfur campaign together? In his book, Mamdani concludes that inside the hyped numbers and moral spin was a sort of conspiracy of prejudices and neo-imperial impulses to head off the unity and independence of Africa.

The Save Darfur lobby in the United States has turned the tragedy of the people of Darfur into a knife with which to slice Africa by demonizing one group of Africans, African Arabs…

The Save Darfur lobby demands, above all else, justice, the right of the international community — really the big powers in the Security Council — to punish “failed” or “rogue” states, even if it be at the cost of more bloodshed and a diminished possibility of reconciliation. More than anything else, “the responsibility to protect” is a right to punish without being held accountable — a clarion call for the recolonization of “failed” states in Africa. In its present form, the call for justice is really a slogan that masks a big power agenda to recolonize Africa.

Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror., p. 300. Pantheon, 2009.

Mahmoud Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman professor of government at Columbia, is a socio-historical anthropologist of Africa and also of American media and fashions in public wisdom. He is taking apart American attitudes that took hold around Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” and that will surely affect our path to Afghanistan and the Obama team’s reconception of our American place in the world.

I loved this conversation as a short course in how to think like an anthropologist — how to peel back events to find unwritten rules and unseen implications in a social order — Africa’s and ours.

Listen for the ideas here that reach beyond Africa, anger and accustion. The most challenging may be the argument that “survivors’ justice” (“inside” repairs, modeled on South Africa’s “truth and reconciliation” process) comes to seem much more promising than “victors’ justice” (“outside” punishment, as in the Nuremberg Trials, and de-Baathification in Iraq) as means of reforming politics and remaking broken societies.

Open Source with Christopher Lydon