The Rebels' Hour

Following is my review of The Rebels’ Hour by Lieve Joris, Grove Press, NY, 2008.

This novel about the Congo traces the life of a fictional main character, Assani Zikiya, a Munyamulenge, i.e. a Congolese Tutsi, during the very recent turbulent times in the Congo. The device of telling real history via a composite character, rather than an accurate biography of the man on whom Assani is based, permitted the author to humanize the story as well as to provide broader background on the various conflicts and, most importantly, to comment wryly on real events, problems and people. In sum, through this novel a reader can learn contemporary history and gain insight into the brutality and reality of war and politics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Without a father, disowned by uncles, Assani grew up a self-reliant loner herding his cows on the high pastures of South Kivu, an area to which his Rwandan Tutsi ancestors had moved a hundred years earlier. A bright lad, he got some schooling, even moving on to university studies in Butare, Rwanda just after the genocide. There the call came. He was needed to return to Congo, to protect the Banyamulenge people, to combat genocidaires and to join the effort to oust Mobutu. Assani became a soldier. Ascetic by nature, he found his métier. He was a good leader, a strict disciplinarian, and ever conscious of the bigger picture. Through his eyes and exploits readers see and better understand the overlapping circles of violence, hatred, politics, tribalism and ambitions that under grid the catastrophe of the modern Congo.

Because of his competence Assani moved upwards in rank and responsibility. After victory, he joined Mzee Kabila in Kinshasa, but fled when the new president turned against the Tutsi. Assani joined the second rebellion and fought for the rebels in the east. After the peace, he returned to Kinshasa and again was caught up in the roiling uncertainty of politics and corruption. Assani became a hard man, but he retained a conscience. He pondered the morality of the times and was especially repulsed by tribalism, of which he was also a victim. As his story progresses Assani repeatedly has to choose – go along or get out – knowing that either choice could be fatal.

As mentioned above this book in novel form is history with a perspective. I suspect that the author herself is represented by at least one, and probably two, of the women characters to whom Assani confides during the course of his journeys.

Apparently the author Lieve Joris, a Belgian journalist, went to the Congo to be a journalist, but decided that this form of reporting better suited the story she wanted to tell. The result is a powerful book, one of the best on the Congo.

Book review - Africa's World War

A book review by Amb. Robert Gribbin


Africa’s World War – Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

By Gérard Prunier, Oxford University Press, NY, 2009

African scholar Prunier’s latest, Africa’s World War, purports to be the definitive study of the conflict arising from the Rwandan genocide that ultimately spread into the Congo twice as open warfare. That conflict still continues today in the Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. By and large Prunier got the narrative correct. The war began in 1996 with covert operations by the Rwandan Patriotic Army designed to dismantle the refugee camps and squash the threat of genocidaire insurgency. Then, fighting expanded under the aegis of the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération (AFDL) and its odd leader Laurent Kabila with participation by forces from Uganda, Burundi and Angola that culminated in the overthrow of Mobutu in 1997. New president Kabila then turned on his masters thus igniting a second round of nationwide strife that flowered into a contest pitting Kigali and Kampala, and their rebel proxies, against Kinshasa supported by Zimbabwe, Angola and Sudan. Respective control of territory split the nation for years while internal machinations amongst all the players led to divisions and sub-divisions according to various motives and interests. The 1999 Lusaka Peace Agreement paved the way for a return to normalcy – withdrawal of foreign forces, containment of militia, UN peacekeeping operations, internal Congolese dialogue and ultimately elections. All of which, in some fashion or other, occurred during the last ten years. But Congo today still suffers the effects of warfare. Skirmishing with Hutu genocidaire elements continues as does confrontation with various Mai Mai groups. Hundreds of thousands of persons remain displaced while perhaps millions have died, largely not from bullets, but from the collapse of social and economic infrastructure, i.e. medical services, farming, markets, transportation, schools, etc.

Prunier’s detailed recitation of events provides some insight into political personalities and the motives that he imputes to them. His grasp of the situation, however, is muted by the reality that many of his facts are simply wrong. In one section of the book Prunier ruminates about how African leaders successfully hoodwinked western governments and how easy that was given the indifference of such governments to the crisis. Yet he himself seems to accept every comment or observation by Africans (usually cited as confidential sources) as fundamental truth, whereas he discounts on the commentary either on the record or off from westerners as tainted spin.

My major squabble with Prunier’s “facts” has to do with his portrayal of American activities and motives. I was the U.S. ambassador in Kigali from 1996-1999 and can speak authoritatively (and I have in my book In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda). Simply put, Prunier spins out, and thus perpetuates, a series of lies and misrepresentations. He seems drawn to the idea that the United States mounted a large covert military operation (using black misfits recruited by the CIA) to support Rwandan fighting in Congo in 1998 and 1999. Of course, Prunier apparently believes that I was complicit in, if not the author, of such black ops. Even so, he managed to misspell my name in the several citations in his book and footnotes.

Prunier cites as proof: the presence of black English speaking soldiers in Kivu, their base at a former Peace Corps site near Bukavu, two bodies of dead soldiers handed over to American officials in Uganda, and airdrops by USAF C-130s to re-supply rebel AFDL forces in Congo. All of this is pure fabrication. None of it occurred. Prunier also asserts that the small $3 million U.S. de-mining program in Rwanda was simply cover for supplying the RPA with military wherewithal for the war effort, and that dozens of U.S. Air Force flights carried in the goods. Again, fiction! Although a few military flights did land in Rwanda during my three year tenure, their cargoes were high level visitors, humanitarian goods and surplus items – a C5A for example brought lots of recycled computers, office equipment and medical supplies for civilian entities. As for the de-miners, they did what they were supposed to, i.e. de-mine. Similarly, Prunier joined other conclusion-jumpers in assuming that the small joint training exercises (less than a dozen US troops) conducted with Rwandan forces were aimed at preparing for or sustaining conflict in the Congo. To the contrary, that was not the objective and furthermore as soon as the Congo imbroglio began, to demonstrate our dismay we cancelled such activities as well as planning for a quite large package of non-lethal military communication and transportation items.

Among other assertions of American complicity in the Congo war was a statement that my deputy the late Peter Whaley met with Laurent Kabila “thirty or forty times.” Peter was indeed our initial channel for communicating with Kabila, with whom he met only about a dozen times. The purpose of such communication was to restrain the rebel war effort, not to advise on political or strategic tactics as Prunier implies. Prunier’s exaggeration, however, underlies his thesis that the United States, feeling guilty on account of inaction to halt the genocide, afterwards sided blindly with Rwanda both in that government’s internal transgressions, but especially in its invasion of Congo and the ouster of Mobutu, whom, Prunier says, we had finally gotten tired of. (I concede elements of truth regarding sympathy for the new regime in Kigali, as well as the belief that change was needed in the Congo, but orientation should not be confused with actions. We provided no substantive support for Rwanda, AFDL rebels or others engaged in conflict in the Congo. We constantly sought a halt to the fighting and indeed sought accountability for human rights abuses that occurred during the violence. ) In attributing and analyzing nefarious U.S. motives, Prunier offers little evidence other than “confidential sources” to buttress his opinion. On the one hand, he seems to fall unfortunately into the French academic camp that simply assumes that the U.S. is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-managing of events in Africa (for example, he states that Rwanda adhered to the Lusaka withdrawal agreement only because the new Bush administration cold-shouldered President Kagame); while on the other hand, Prunier attributes U.S. policy and missteps to indifference to the fate of the continent. He wants it both ways when it suits his argument.

In light of the grave transgressions of fact with regard to the United States, and those are the issues that I know the accurate side of, I cannot help but wonder how badly skewed Prunier’s other information is. He relates lots of juicy details of meetings, encounters, massacres, troop movements, etc. but are they accurate? One must doubt. In conclusion, this book could and should be an important contribution to the history of the Congo crisis in all its complexities. There is some good stuff in it and an excellent bibliography, but its fatal flaws require that “truth” always be annotated with an asterisk.

Book Review - The Zanzibar Chest

Following is a book review:

The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
By Aidan Hartley; Atlantic Monthly Press, NY, 2003


This book is half memoir and half biography. The Kenyan connection comes via the memoir. Author Aidan Hartley was born to a British family in Nairobi. His childhood was spent in Tanganyika, at school in England and at the family home in Malindi. Scion of a family of empire builders, Hartley’s father was a colonial official, rancher, aid agricultural advisor and humanitarian worker. Rarely at home, Hartley’s father was constantly seeking adventure on the dusty plains of the continent. Thus, the son mythologized his father and imbued himself too in the call of Africa. Aidan followed the family path, but in the ways open to him in the 1980s and 1990s. He became a foreign correspondent for Reuters.

In the book Hartley reflects nostalgically on the Africa he knew as a child, an Africa that passed away due to independence, corruption and population pressures. Yet Hartley does not criticize much, he just reports. As a young adult Hartley signed on as a journalist and was soon smothered in the adrenalin of the profession caught up in a never ending series of wars, famines and disasters. He recounted marching for months with Tigrean rebels as they toppled Mengistu in Ethiopia. He was there in Somalia off-and-on for years as warlords – Hartley claims to have coined the term for Somalia – battled each other, looted the nation and ravaged humanitarian assistance. Hartley was also there in Rwanda as genocide swept the land. He walked into Kigali with rebel forces, bunkered down as fighting raged about and chronicled in very human terms the unfolding catastrophe.

The memoir gives an inside look at foreign correspondents. Home based in Nairobi, they were a colorful lot, fueled not just by the constant flow of new horror, but also by liquor, drugs and sex. They called the impetus of needing vibrant new copy every day, “feeding the beast.” And they did their best to comply.

Hartley’s talent as a writer is clear. His taunt prose paints vivid pictures of violence, death and famine. The details – for example, rescuing a still twitching child from a mass grave or a conversation with an abandoned stringer in the ruins of his Mogadishu home - provide the realism that makes the narrative compelling. Additionally, Hartley’s honesty, reflections on his actions, motives and feelings provide credible depth to his journal.

Juxtaposed among the journalistic memoir is another story - that of Peter Davey, a colonial era friend of his father who died in 1947 in Aden. Burned out from war, Hartley found Davey’s diaries carefully stashed in a Zanzibar chest in the family home in Malindi. Hartley then tells Davey’s tale of intrigue and mystery on the Arab peninsula filling in connections to his own family and even his name – the Irish spelling of Aden. Strangely enough, the mix of stories works. As did Hartley, the reader too needs respite from the flow of degradation, misery and violence of the reporter’s memoir.

The Zanzibar Chest is gripping read and highly recommended. The book is a couple of years old. Copies are available from on-line bookstores, but also check out your local library.

Nigeria - book review of Half of a Yellow Sun

Book: Half of a Yellow Sun

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Published: Farafina, Lagos 2006

Reviewer: Robert E. Gribbin

I spent the last three months in Nigeria. It was indeed a fascinating place. Under new President Yar'Adua it was full of energy and the expectation that problems can be solved and that the nation can look forward to a brighter, more prosperous future. Nigeria today has moved far beyond the passions of the 1967-70 Biafran civil war, yet some of the issues of disenfranchisement and tribalism remain as troublesome impediments to true national unity. Chimamanda Adichie's novel, that all of Nigeria is reading, is a haunting reminder of the enmity of the war, the arrogance, the violence and the hardship that was visited upon the Igbo people.

The title of the novel evokes the half of a yellow sun that was the central emblem on the Biafran flag. The sun also figured on the uniforms of Biafran soldiers. The half sun initially is symbolically seen as a rising sun representing the hopes and expectations of the new state. However, as the story progresses and Biafra descends into a besieged hell of poverty, starvation and collapse, the sun is clearly setting. Dreams are over and lives are irreparably changed.

The story focuses on a rich Igbo family, especially twin sisters, Olanna and Kainene, whose personalities are quite different. Tracking them and their various relationships to family, lovers and friends provides background for the war and a soap operatic setting for the plot that finally gathers together and moves forward seriously to delve into what happens when the normal stresses of living are overwhelmed by senseless violence. Much of the novel is viewed through the perspective of Igwu, a young naive houseboy called to service in the home of Professor Odengigbo, a fervent believer in the Biafran cause, who becomes Olanna's husband. Although Igwu does not understand his social superiors, he carefully observes them and gets to love them (and they him). Several delightful passages in the novel reflect Igwu's village naivete when he puzzles about middle class life style.

Hanging over the domesticity of Odengibo and Olanna's university household in Igbo territory were the tribal politics of Nigeria in the sixties. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Balewa (a northerner) in 1966 by Igbo officers, a series of pogroms and massacres were visited upon Igbo migrants in northern Nigeria. Thousands died and tens of thousands retreated to the Igbo heartland. Another coup d'etat brought northern officers to power. Rejecting that change, Igbo nationalists declared Biafra independent. The Federal Government responded by beginning a "police action" that morphed into civil war.

Although it only presents the Igbo perspective, this book is not about the politics of the war. Rather, it is about people - rich, middle class and peasant alike - all of whom become victims of forces beyond their control. Part of the tragedy of the Biafran civil war was the absolute conviction by the Igbo people, as represented by characters in the novel, that their destiny was to be free and independent. Consequently, they stoically accepted the enormous hardship visited upon them as Biafra was battered and starved into submission. This is that story: the pride, the courage, the resourcefulness and the initiative as folks coped with the collapse of their lives, with death, disease, starvation, betrayal and ultimately, defeat.

The central characters of the novel fill out nicely as the story progresses. They become real as they struggle with circumstances and against the doom that the reader knows lies ahead. Dramatically told, Chimamanda Adichie has written a compelling narrative of human resilience in the face of tragedy.

Sudan's Lost Boys - a book review

What Is the What – the Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng

Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, San Francisco, 2006

Whew! In novel form this book tells all you ever needed to know about the Lost Boys of Sudan. The story begins with the civil war violence in 1983 that shattered the peaceful villages where Sudanese of various backgrounds lived together more or less harmoniously. Fleeing destruction of their world by Arab marauders, first hundreds, then thousands, even ten thousands of black African youngsters – mostly boys, but a few girls and later whole families - began to trek from their villages into the unknown in search of safety and peace. Months and hundreds of miles later, these refugees found little succor in squalid camps in Ethiopia. Later they were forced to move hundreds more miles back through the Sudan into northern Kenya. There they settled into a teeming camp that became home for ten years. Finally, several thousand of these wanderers were granted refuge in America.

Their walk was of epic proportions. The traumatized children were afflicted by disease, weariness, malnutrition, hunger, lack of leadership and rogue SPLA soldiers. They were pursued by raiders, shunned by most villagers, attacked by government warplanes and some were eaten by lions. Yet they mustered their courage, buried their dead along the way, supported one another and buoyed by hope, they marched onward across the swamps and deserts of Sudan. Pinyudo camp in Ethiopia was not the paradise they envisaged, but offered a year’s respite. Yet that too unraveled in an orgy of violence. Again the boys trudged onward. Beset by troubles and responsibilities that most children never encounter, they grew up on the walk and in the camps.

They settled into a more predictable limbo in Kakuma camp in northern Kenya where they went to school and became young adults. Ultimately as word of their travails spread, several thousand Lost Boys and Girls were admitted into the United States to begin new lives in America. It was a dream, but the reality of the dream was fraught with new obstacles of how to cope with America and how to come to terms with themselves and their pasts.

The novelization of Achak’s story with him as an engaging narrator permits the Lost Boys saga to be told in detail and with great emotion. The author uses flashbacks from present day Atlanta to recall events. Achak’s insight into himself and his relationships with others is genuinely touching. Not only are readers educated on the terrors of Sudan and the trek, but also on the reality that unsophisticated young African men confront in contemporary American society.

Geographical fault finder that I am, I noted two errors: Kitale, Kenya was referred to as Ketale in several passages and Kenyatta Airport was regularly misspelled as Kinyatta.

In summary, the saga of the Lost Boys is overwhelming. This book delivers a full dose of intensity - at times it was too much. I had to take a few breaks. Even so, What is the What is a worthy read. Finally, even though it was mentioned from time to time during the narrative, I never really understood what the what might be – perhaps some sort of universal truth - so the title of the book escaped me entirely.