A Continent for the Taking

Since arriving in Sierra Leone, I have rediscovered my love for reading. It is a passion that I have harboured for as long as I can remember, one that led me to pursue an undergraduate degree in English literature and one that seems to have survived in spite of that, albeit just barely.

Having to read and deconstruct five or six novels for almost every class of my degree took something of the magic out of reading for me. Though my syllabuses included many of the great classics that I'd long wanted to consume anyway, the past-time had nonetheless been drained of its element of freedom and I found myself doing less and less leisure reading.

Enter Salone, a world of few distractions with frequent and sustained stretches of sitting around, and my consumption of the written word has thankfully regained some its previous glory. It is one of the few activities that I know I can partake in here, regardless of electricity supply, even if it is occasionally only by the glow of my cell phone.

But I've noticed one noteworthy asterisk to my return to reading: fiction is no longer my master. Outside of the required readings of my distance education course in children's literature, the only novel I've consumed was Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and even that is semi-autobiographical.

I also breezed through a much-anticipated poetry collection called A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, but otherwise I've been drawn exclusively to non-fiction.

Mariatu Kamara's The Bite of the Mango. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. Chuck Klosterman's IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. Road Work by Mark Bowden. A collection of essays entitled The Impossible May Take A Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear. My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd. Chuck Thompson's Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer. James Frey's A Million Little Pieces.

Okay, so that last one has some fictive elements. Still, my Salone reading list has been overwhelmingly populated by memoirs and other writing based in real events. This, I suppose, should come as no surprise for an aspiring journalist, and I'm finding that 'personal memoirs of foreign correspondents' is quickly overtaking 'biographies of dead musicians' as my favourite very narrowly defined genre.

Still, if this trend in my leisure reading continues - and the lengthy list of must-reads I've gleaned from conversations with fellow expats gives me every reason to believe it will - I may end up with a small library in itself of classic literature that I own but have never read.

Hopefully, I can continue to keep up a decent reading pace when I return to Canada to allow for both forms. If not, it doesn't bode well for the Dickens and Joyce by my bedside, as this new literary passion has seduced me too deeply to turn back.

Take, for example, my favourite book of the last six months: Howard W. French's A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa. French is an African-American journalist from D.C., who moved to Cote d'Ivoire after finishing college and ended up spending the better part of his next 20 years in Africa.

Simply stated, this is a must-read for anyone interested in the African subcontinent. French grounds his dazzling writing in a keen historical understanding of the myriad factors underscoring the difficulties that Africa faces today, and makes no effort to hide his unadulterated vitriol for the West throughout.

By now, living in Africa was not only required for my job but had also come to involve an intensely personal quest. The continent I had known in the early 1980s, poor and politically backward to be sure, had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas and chronic disorder. I needed to understand why, and over and over again this question drew me back to Central Africa, a region that, together with a small cluster of West African states, with Liberia at its epicenter, rested atop the continental hit parade of mayhem and decay.

Because of the scale of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda was the site of the one African tragedy people in the farthest reaches of the world knew of. But in political terms, Rwanda's nearly bipolar society of Hutu and Tutsi made it more of an anomaly than a paradigm for the rest of the continent.

More than any other place, Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of Congo] - a country as vast as the United States east of the Mississippi, which shares land borders with eight other countries and is separated by a lake from a ninth, Tanzania - seemed like the country where I might find answers. By African standards, its contact with Europe had been extraordinary both for its duration, going back to the time of Columbus, and its destructiveness. From the earliest days of independence, in 1960, with the destabilization and overthrow of Patrice Lumumba, the country's first prime minister and only democratically elected leader, Western meddling had been persistent and profoundly destabilizing. And like most African countries, only even more spectacularly, Zaire had been misruled for decades ever since - in this case by Mobutu Sese Seko.

Reading this book is sure to raise the ire of even the most tepid African sympathizers at the complacency and outright culpability of the West in creating the disastrous state of affairs that currently embroils much of the continent. It pretty much makes me hate white people and colonialists.

More than a million Africans die every year from malaria without raising a peep in the wealthy countries of the world. Struggling for a way to depict the scale of this disaster, the Tanzanian researcher Wen Kilama said, Imagine seven Boeing 747s filled mostly with children crashing into Mount Kilimanjaro each day, and you get an idea of malaria's horrifying toll.

In some countries, 30 percent or more of the population is infected with AIDS, and yet the common bonds of humanity that are said to exist between us have never drawn the rich and the wretched of the world together in an emergency ...

He continues, turning his condemnation towards his colleagues in the media ...

But the massive hemorrhaging and projectile vomiting associated with Ebola were such cinematically compelling new grist for the world media's insatiable market in images of horror that African disease was guaranteed a spot on the nightly news for as long as the epidemic lasted.

Besides sheer prurience, though, the outside world's interest was being driven by old-fashioned fright and narrow self-interest. Ebola aroused the fear in America and Europe that in today's shrunken and interconnected world, a deadly virus like this was only a plane flight away (like the SARS virus) from the lives that truly mattered - those of Westerners.

"Where Africa is concerned, there is a constant search for tragedy with a new face; it's like 'What else is new in genocide'," Ali Mazrui, a prominent Kenyan scholar, told me on the telephone a few days into the Ebola panic ...

All too often, Africa coverage has come to resemble the cowboys and Indians games of my boyhood. We are quick to find heroes in the Westerners who are always seen as rushing to the rescue, while unconsciously concluding that the Africans served better in the role of, at best, passive spectators. We have too often gotten our explanations from the outside experts and the Western diplomats who professionally wander these parts, rushing right past the very subjects of Africa's dramas, the Africans themselves.

I could keep posting brilliant excerpts until I'd essentially transcribed the entire book to this blog, so consistently offensive to one's sense of justice and fairness are the stories detailed by French. This book is extremely informative about the history, in particular, of the DRC, Nigeria, Mali and Liberia - but its true magnificence lies in how it draws out the continent's overarching tragedies in a way that leaves the reader no recourse but moral indignation.

I'll finish with a quote that I think is especially instructive to any remotely nuanced understanding of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa.

[Congolese novelist Sony Labou] Tansi's concerns were never with the cookie-cutter countries bequeathed by Europe's arbitrary partition and colonial subjugation of the continent. Subtly underpinning all of his art, but always at the forefront of his increasingly rabid politics, was a deeply felt nationalism. It harkened back to what was for many African intellectuals a myth-infused antidiluvian past, before the time, that is, when Europe's imperial mapmakers and colonizing armies destroyed Africa's nascent states.

There was tragic irony in Tansi's rage for redemption. Europe had undoubtedly wreaked untold destruction by shoehorning Africans of different languages and cultures together inside arbitrarily drawn boundaries at the end of the nineteenth century, by halfheartedly imposing its models of governance and economics on the continent for a few short decades in the twentieth century. Then, by washing its hands of Africa and walking away long before the mold had set, it vastly compromised matters even further.

Though born of the indignities of domination by Westerners, Tansi's passions were nonetheless based on a narrow, ethnically driven sense of identity. Everywhere one looked in Africa, runaway ethnicity in politics had the same impact: blinding carnage and chaos. Surely this was not the germ of African renaissance. An ideology like Tansi's struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace - a recipe for death and destruction.

Here in SL, politics are divided along ethnic lines in precisely the manner French describes. At the risk of oversimplifying, if you're from the North, chances are you're Temne and support the governing All People's Congress. If you're from the South, you're likely Mende and back the opposition Sierra Leone People's Party.

Of course, there are many more tribes - Fula and Limba are two of the other big ones in a country of 16 ethnic tribes - and with the splintering of the SLPP before the 2007 elections, there is now a third party, the People's Movement for Democratic Change, who managed to grab 10 of the 120 seats in parliament (though they've since lost one in a bye-election).

Still, I'd have to agree with French's assessment that such ethnically-driven politics are something of a ticking time-bomb, or at least a negative influence on a country's governance.

I still remember with clarity a conversation I had with ABJ in my first week in Sierra Leone, where he explained that very few people actually stopped to analyze the policies and platforms of the country's political leaders, instead mindlessly voting along ethnic lines. It's tempting to grow excited over the fact that political discussions here can often elicit passion, unlike back home, but if that passion has nothing to do with ideology and progress and everything to do with loyalty along an ethnic divide, it's hardly something to be celebrated.

It's easy to become caught up in the depressing realities of modern African politics, rooted as they are in tribalism, corruption and violence, and to adopt a detached cynicism. A few weeks back, my buddy Rob posted sardonically on my Facebook wall regarding the fact there's been a military coup and a presidential assassination in two neighbouring countries (Guinea and Guinea-Bissau respectively) during my first six months in Sierra Leone.

"Usually you would have to wait at least a year for that to happen ... you must be lucky," he quipped.

The comment was an example of the type of dark humour that you sometimes need to avoid becoming crestfallen in the face of such disheartening realities, and I know that Rob is more interested in the plight of African countries than the vast majority of Westerners.

But at the end of the day, I think it's also important to remind ourselves of our moral imperative to try to help improve the situation here, and not simply out of some noble concept of empathy for our fellow human being. The West as a whole needs to stop shrouding its various missions in Africa in altruistic veils and recognize them for what they are: attempts to undo the enormous damage we have wreaked on scores of once proud cultures.

Yes, the ruling systems in many sub-Saharan African countries are unmitigated disasters. But when the West came in with superior technology and exploited the hell out of the continent for strictly selfish motives ranging from the plunder of its resources to the enslavement of its people, ripping asunder sophisticated societies such as the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana or the Kongo kingdom of Central Africa, and, by drawing borders with blatant disregard for existing tribal divisions, created a Babel-like potpourri of neighbours speaking dialects incomprehensible to one another ... well, what the fuck did we expect?