Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Copyright The Christian Science Monitor

Africa’s improvements have created thriving markets. US firms should enter this last great investment frontier.

September 29, 2009

Washington - Here’s some good, if counterintuitive, news for American investors.

Normally, by the time an investment tip makes its way into a newspaper, conventional wisdom says the money is already off the table. Not so in the case of sub-Saharan Africa. American investors and companies are overlooking an investment opportunity in plain sight. And the smart money will climb aboard before the economic tide rises. The rest will miss a fast-moving boat.

Market-friendly reforms in Africa are happening at a faster pace in this decade than at any time since most African nations achieved independence in the latter half of the 20th century. They reflect a serious and sustained commitment by African governments to meet the needs of local entrepreneurs as well as foreign investors – because they recognize that the fastest path to prosperity for their people is through investment and self-sustaining economic growth.

Western media typically cast sub-Saharan Africa in terms of conflict, corruption, AIDS, and poverty – and the present food and energy picture understandably dominates the news. But read behind the headlines and you can see some of the most attractive investment environments in the world. Foreign direct investment from all countries into sub-Saharan Africa grew by 60 percent in 2007, to nearly $27 billion. Total private capital flows have grown eightfold since 2002.

Investment-led growth in Africa will enable that continent to contribute to the recovery from the global recession affecting individual Americans as well as improving the lives of Africans.

The opportunity isn’t going unnoticed by investors in other parts of the world. China is poised to overtake the US in pace of investment in Africa. Kuwaiti interests purchased Africa’s Celtel for $3.4 billion. Moscow investment bank Renaissance Capital announced plans to double its investments in Africa to at least $1 billion. French firm SoSuMar is building a sugar-processing factory in Mali, where they expect an internal rate of return of nearly 58 percent.

The territory in most business sectors is wide-open. Prime areas include agriculture, healthcare, infrastructure, information technology, tourism, telecommunications, and textiles.

Are US investors aware of striking changes in Africa? Sweeping reforms have been launched in 40 African nations since the 1990s: pro-business policies, strong judicial systems, better standards, respect for intellectual property rights. Debt relief has markedly improved Africa’s credit worthiness. Monetary policies have pushed inflation down from the 19 percent average of the 1980s, to 7 to 8 percent today. Fiscal policies have turned country budget deficits into an average budget surplus of 2 percent of Africa’s gross domestic product.

Despite the headlines in Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Congo, the great majority of African countries enjoy thriving democracies and stability, with governments that have earned public confidence through audited elections. Last year more than 54 million Africans voted in 19 peaceful presidential and parliamentary contests.

The result? Real economic growth in 2 out of 5 sub-Saharan countries was triple that of the US economy last year, on a pace that rivals that of Southeast Asia in 1980. African economies from Senegal to Benin to the Democratic Republic of Congo are more diversified. Growth in the region is expected to hit 6.5 percent this year.

To be sure, there are still serious risks, challenges, and constraints for smart money to navigate: shortages of electricity and skilled talent; countries where reforms are fragile and postconflict governments less secure. Successful investors and entrepreneurs enter these markets aware that differences in culture and shortages of investor-ready information and institutional capacity put a premium on patience and collaboration. There is no substitute for due diligence.

But help is available. By working with USAID, American firms can help shape programs that serve both the aspirations of Africa’s citizens and the interests of investors. Most African governments have streamlined business registrations and launched one-stop shops to help potential investors.

The Overseas Private Investment Corporation makes loans of up to $250 million for projects in emerging markets. The Millennium Challenge Corporation provides powerful incentives to countries promoting good governance. And for US exporters, the Trade Information Center offers targeted country and market research as well as counseling and export assistance centers.

This growth story is in its first chapter, much as Asia’s was three decades ago, with all of the attendant risks and potential rewards. Investors worldwide are aggressively entering and operating in sub-Saharan Africa as the last great investment frontier. American firms should take a much closer look.

Alonzo Fulgham is serving as acting administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

An excert from a brilliant piece by Bell in response (largely) to Denis Dutton’s book, The Art Instinct.

… I would emphasize that for much of the way, The Art Instinct is an unusually stimulating venture in aesthetics, an antidote to the bleariness that a panoramic investigation such as Art Without Borders may induce, with its bewildering excess of evidence. (“So many positions, so many problems,” Scharfstein at one point sighs.) Maybe Dutton’s lively wit and shapely drafting depend on the contrivance of a combat situation: such are the instincts of a fiction-driven sensibility. Like his mentors in science writing, Dutton feels impelled to dramatize the story he believes in, the story of evolution. He himself notes that “stories are essentially about agency and emotion.” I would gloss that. Think of stories as necklaces: the linking thread being agency (or causation), and emotion (or lived experience) being the beads it is passed through. Consider also that the success of the binding operation is independent of the color—the specificity, the sensuous quality—of those beads.

I reach for the metaphor to try to pinpoint the blind spot many a reader must have sensed in the passage of The Art Instinct I quoted a few paragraphs above. “Provide this sexually selected mind with a piece of wood and it can use its hands and tools to carve an animal.” Yes, the proto-artist may—or may not—happen to be interested in impressing a potential sexual partner. But what he or she (he, in Dutton’s distinctly macho hypotheses) most certainly does find interesting is (a) the log and the way its grain resists his implement, (b) the thought of bison, and (c) the way that the emerging artifact both is wood and is bison. With respect to immediate experience, that is to say, art is an engagement with a specific sensual object; art is the miracle of symbolism; art is, above all, an act of attention. These experiential facets of aesthetics are given exultant expression by that Liberian mask-maker whom Scharfstein quotes; but they are also borne out almost tragically by Scharfstein’s own response to the question of why we need art—that all these acts of attention are quite literally a filling of time, a staving off of ennui. All such considerations are in effect bypassed by Dutton’s narrative hardwiring.

That does not mean that his explanations need be incorrect in their own terms, or that it would be impossible to account for those facets of visual art on evolutionary lines. What it does serve to underline is that narration has a resistant grain of its own, a bias that sets it at odds with focused contemplation. Hence the age-old wrangles over the “reductionism” of scientific narration. In principle the abstract, colorless lines of causation that evolutionary theories trace should smoothly complement the bright beads of our sensuous and aesthetic experiences. Yet they cannot be traced except by narration; and narration is always a flavorsome performance by some human voice, some wit, some artist in words.

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Copyright The New York Times

(A snippet from an interesting review of the book, “The Death of Conservatism,” by Sam Tanenhaus. For the entire article, please follow the link below.)

… “The Death of Conservatism” is a persuasive intellectual history of the right, but it omits a lot of institutional history and ignores money and power altogether. A fuller history would have paid attention to Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s 1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Powell, soon to be a Supreme Court justice, urged friends of capitalism to retake command of public discourse by financing think tanks, reshaping mass media and seeking influence in universities and the judiciary.

This did happen in the decades to follow. What had once been far-right fantasies — abolishing welfare, privatizing Social Security, deregulating banking, embracing preventive war — became legitimate policy positions, emanating from institutions that cost a lot of money to maintain: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Fox News Network, as well as numerous corporate lobbying organizations and university professorships. Money talked.

None of this ideological infrastructure has disappeared. Whether the Obama administration can stand up to its power remains to be seen. Despite popular support for a robust public option in health care coverage and even a single-payer system, the airwaves are pervaded by the buzzwords of the market — competition, incentives, consumer choice. Foreign policy, too, remains dominated by right-wing assumptions. Whatever President Obama’s intentions (and it would be a mistake to underestimate him), he will find the imperial presidency difficult to repudiate. The bureaucratic labyrinths of the national security state will be dismantled no more easily than the hundreds of American military bases around the world, many of them shrouded in secrecy. Nor will it be easy to challenge the assumptions that underlie empire: the humanitarian dreams of interventionists in Mr. Obama’s own party and the relentless Republican demands for toughness. Here as elsewhere, the right wields far more power than its weak popular support warrants. Reports of its death have been exaggerated.

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Posted at 10:47 PM · Comments (0)

As mentioned elsewhere here, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the countryside in Virginia, at the family home where most of my books are kept. This library, consisting of books read between high school and my life in Tokyo, which spanned 1998-2003.
One of my deepest pleasures of the last year has come from opening the storage boxes filled with books and tucking into familiar old titles. This weekend, I read large chunks of these three, each very different, but all of them favorites. A very brief excerpt from Lévy-Strauss follows. I’ll return to the other two titles in a future comment.

“Freedom is neither a legal invention nor a philosophical conquest, the cherished possession of civilizations more valid than others because they alone have been able to create or preserve it. It is the outcome of an objective relationship between the individual and the space he occupies, between the consumer and the resources at his disposal. And it is far from certain that an abundance of resources can make up for a lack of space, and that a rich but overpopulated society is in danger of being poisoned by its own density, like those flour parasites which manage to kill each other at a distance by their toxins, even before their food supply runs out.”

Camera Lucida
Link

Tristes Tropiques
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Viceroy of Ouidah
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Posted at 7:14 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve neglected this spot on my page lately - for several months now, in fact. That is in large part due to the fact that I’ve done a lot of book reviewing in the last year, for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and others. I still read plenty of books for my own pleasure, though, as well as quite a few in relation to other types of non-reviewing work.

Having done a lot of driving back and forth from New York City to Virginia in the year since I’ve relocated to the States, I’ve renewed my acquaintance with another kind of book enjoyment: the audio book. One thing I’ve always enjoyed about long flights, train and bus rides (or even the 1/2 hour daily subway commute each way when I lived in Tokyo) was opportunity for deep reading. I’ve found that with a little patience, the audio book achieves much the same for me and I now count myself as a convert, if only for the purposes of long road trips.

My choices have centered on books that I somehow figure I would have little time or inclination to read in their traditional form. This says nothing of their worthiness as literature, only that they lose out in the mix of things I need or want to read in book form. Today, during a 5 1/2 hour drive, I listened to the Iliad, which has languished on my bookshelves for an eternity, occasionally producing feelings of guilt, as unread books often do in me. It was a delicious experience, and I’m looking forward already to my next trip south in order to complete it.

The book tagged for mention here, though, is Steven Pinker’s title, which I found learned, predictably enough, quirky and highly entertaining, covering everything - vividly - from the subject of generative metaphors to the uses of the word “fuck.”

Highly recommended.

Link

Posted at 6:46 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

Joris Luyendijk covered the Middle East for Dutch newspapers and Dutch state television from 1998 to 2003. Then he went home to the Netherlands and tried to write the usual correspondent’s book: an attempt to explain the Middle East. He found that he couldn’t, however, because he himself didn’t understand the Middle East. “I didn’t want to write a book explaining how the Arab world could become democratic, how tolerant or intolerant Islam is, or who is right or wrong in the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Instead, he wrote a book that explained, in the casual style of a man chatting to a friend in a bar, that it was impossible for TV in particular or indeed for any journalist to explain what was happening in the Middle East.

A book that takes perhaps three hours to read changed the way readers thought about the Middle East and the media. The Dutch edition of People Like Us, published in 2006, sold 250,000 copies. Now this important book has broken beyond the Netherlands. That’s a feat in itself: a Dutch Moscow correspondent once complained that if the Messiah returned to earth and he reported the event in Dutch, the world would never find out.

In 1998, Luyendijk began work as a 26-year-old newspaper correspondent in Cairo, where he had studied at university. He dutifully covered summits and presidential speeches, and interviewed “talking heads”. He gradually realised this did not convey Egyptian reality, however. Hardly anyone in Egypt who was allowed to speak in public could be believed. The “talking heads” – academics or human rights activists, for instance – were paid by the government or by western NGOs, or were terrified of the secret police. Whenever Luyendijk did manage to interview the “common man”, he heard weird things. One man answered a question about an Egyptian “referendum” by telling him that Hitler had been subsidised by Jews who charged 38 per cent interest, we learn here. Was this common man typical? In a country without polls or fair elections or freedom of speech, it was impossible to know.

As he recounts, Luyendijk came to understand that covering an Arab country while saying little about ordinary life under dictatorship was like covering the Netherlands in 1943 while saying little about the Nazi occupation. Dictatorship was the story. The western media depicted the Arab world as a chessboard, but it was more like a poorhouse run by corrupt thugs. Luyendijk didn’t manage to convey this to his Dutch newspaper readers, because in a dictatorship it’s hard to get anyone to describe what life in a dictatorship is like..

…Israel excels at baking the bread. It knows just how to package a soundbite or image for TV, whereas Palestinian spokesmen drone on in incomprehensible language. In fact, the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat deliberately kept articulate Palestinians off air for fear that they would acquire their own power bases.

Luyendijk acknowledges that a few serious publications, such as the New York Review of Books and a handful of others, carry accurate reporting on the Middle East. Unfortunately, hardly anyone reads them. TV, the dominant medium, distorts the picture and rarely explains how it gets “the story”.

Much of Luyendijk’s argument is familiar from the field of media studies. However, what sets People Like Us apart is that it is theory written by a practising journalist about a fantastically misunderstood region. The book applies beyond the Middle East: in Russia, where journalists trot around Kremlin press conferences as if that was the way to find out what was happening; and in South Africa, where journalists living in white Johannesburg suburbs were stunned by popular support for Jacob Zuma. Luyendijk’s next project is to try to propose a new way of doing journalism. Judging by certain recent misreadings of the world, it might help.

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Copyright The Financial Times

As China prepares for its big military parade next Thursday, when it will celebrate 60 years of Communist party rule with a display of power, it is clear the country has come out of the global crisis with its prestige greatly enhanced.

It is not just the strong rebound in the economy. China is becoming more influential and confident overseas, shaping events rather than reluctantly reacting. President Hu Jintao even stole the show this week at the United Nations climate change summit with his pledge to restrain carbon emissions. Two years ago, environmental groups were terrified by China’s galloping energy demand and addiction to coal: now they brandish it as an example for others.

Amid all the praise and trepidation that China is currently generating, it is a good time to point out some of the many reasons why China will not come to dominate the world any time soon. Even proponents of “China’s century” do not think it will arrive in the next few years. If this sounds a little curmudgeonly, Chinese officials make some of the same points themselves, usually when they are asked to hand over a large chunk of their reserves to some worthy international project.

For all the cosmopolitan affluence of Beijing or Shanghai, with their luxury shopping malls and Champagne-soaked gallery openings, it is easy to forget just how poor China still is. One of the more surprising statistics about the Chinese economy is that, in terms of per capita gross domestic product, it is still not in the top 100 countries. According to the International Monetary Fund, China ranked behind Cape Verde and Armenia in 2008, and only just ahead of Iraq and the Republic of Congo. Despite the remarkable reduction in poverty, daily life for most Chinese families is still a struggle to get by.

The crisis has also given China, with its $2,000bn-plus foreign exchange reserves, a lesson in the harsh realities of economic power. Many developing countries have sensibly built up a foreign currency pile to insulate themselves from financial crises. Yet real power lies not with the country with the most reserves, but with governments that can easily borrow in their own currency. After all, who does the US borrow from? China.

Beijing has moved from a sullen resentment of the US and its dollar privileges to plot a different international monetary system – hence the proposal from central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan to replace the dollar as the global reserve currency eventually. But before the renminbi can play a large international role, it will need to be fully convertible and China will need a deep domestic bond market – two reforms that could be a question of decades rather than years.

Chinese citizens know too well how arbitrary political power can be: it always surprises me how many well-to-do Beijingers I meet have quietly arranged a foreign passport, just in case. This year has been a wake-up call for multinationals operating here. Rio Tinto’s bosses thought the mining group was involved in a tough negotiation with the Chinese steel industry over iron ore prices; then one day in July they found four of their China executives had been arrested for stealing state secrets. That the charges were later reduced to bribery and information theft will not have changed their view on China’s legal system.

The Xinjiang riots over the summer were another important warning. Like the turmoil in Tibet the year before, they exposed how large parts of the local population on China’s western frontier does not feel included in the new economic dynamism, or feel part the grand national project. By treating almost all dissent as a form of “evil separatism”, these provinces seem destined to face years of instability.

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An compelling package: Click to read more

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Copyright The Financial Times

September 19 2009

On the sun-bleached heights of the Asmara plateau, July is beles season, a few weeks of wild cactus fruit and ostentatious metropolitan chic. It is when the fig cacti, the beles, yield their knobbly pellets of fruit to sure-handed children, who pick them to earn their families some cash. July is also when Eritrea’s diaspora engine goes into reverse and expat families hustle through Asmara’s tiny airport and out on to the tiled streets of the capital, where they parade in the Gucci glamour and hip-hop bling of London and New York. Because their arrival coincides with the ripening of the cactus fruit – and because they have disappeared by the time the fruit is gone – they, too, are dubbed beles by the compatriots they leave behind.

The two cross paths on street corners in Asmara, where plastic buckets filled with the pickings from the cactus fields sit at the knees of female traders, swathed like mummies in the white cotton shawls of the Christian highlands. Some diaspora families sweep past, Dad speaking to the kids in Tigrinya, the local language, the kids replying in English or Swedish or Dutch. Others pause to buy handfuls of the fruit, whose yellow skin conceals a fleshy orange core that tastes of mango.

At 2,300m above sea level, this is one of Africa’s cleanest, calmest, most crime-free cities, a home above the clouds for 400,000 people and the capital of the continent’s newest nation-state. It’s a cauldron of cultural influences – domestic and foreign, old and new, beles and beles – but ranks as an outlier in Africa. It’s a sliver of rock that clings to the continental shelf like it’s afraid of slipping into the Red Sea, but its four million people refer to their neighbours as “Africans” with a cool detachment.

Eritrea’s admirers praise the dignity of its people, lean, elegant and proud. The critics lament the character of its geopolitics, belligerent, bossy and headstrong. Both are rooted in a powerful belief in Eritrean exceptionalism, the driving force behind a 30-year armed struggle for liberation from Ethiopian rule that finally ended in independence in 1993. It was a remarkable victory for a guerrilla army of Marxist fighters after the rest of the world had written off their cause as hopeless, or simply stopped caring. But in the years since, Eritrea has become a study in what happens when the heroes who win the war cannot recast themselves to live in peace.

…

Six o’clock on a Monday evening and the poky members’ room of the Casa degli Italiani was full. Half a dozen Eritrean men, all past their 60th birthdays, sat in corduroy blazers and leather jackets behind battered wooden school desks, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The men grew up when Eritrea was an Italian colony, as it was latterly under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Some even fought for Italy during the second world war. They spoke fluent Italian and greeted each other at the club that evening with “Come stai?” and “Bene, bene”. Then they sat down, slipped into silence, and locked their eyes on to the television, which was tuned into the Italian channel Rai Due and beamed out the final kilometres of stage 16 of the Tour de France.

British and French colonies rarely absorbed the habits of their colonial masters with ease, but Eritrea did – in spite of a humiliating fascist apartheid system. The colonisers wanted to make Asmara a home from home, so they built a city of pastel shades, mottled brickwork and ornate stone mosaics. It was also a laboratory for bold architectural styles – rationalism, futurism, monumentalism – that would never pass muster in Italy. The result is a cocktail of convex façades, jutting balconies and porthole windows. Ancient Fiat 850s still trundle down Harnet Avenue, the main drag, which is lined with palm trees reminiscent of southern Italy. And when the sun sets, the avenue floods with Asmarinos out for the passeggiata, or evening stroll, which they punctuate with espressos in cafés, plates of lasagne or scoops of ice-cream from the gelaterias. No wonder so many travel writers write glowing accounts of an African dolce vita.

But they omit the country’s dark side. The guerrillas of the liberation struggle have become the ministers of an autocratic regime whose secrecy, sealed borders and intolerance of dissent have attracted the same “pariah state” labels often applied to Kim Jong-il’s North Korea. “They have always been control freaks,” one Eritrean told me in Nairobi before I left for Asmara. In that conversation, I first felt the shadow of fear cast by the regime’s iron rule.

Michela Wrong, a former FT journalist and author of I Didn’t Do It For You, which charts the country’s history, told me by e-mail: “Trouble is, no one will want to be seen talking to you inside Eritrea itself. And you need to be very careful not to quote people and not to get people into trouble by even being seen with them.” A United Nations official who has worked in the country warned: “People may sidle up to you and say critical things to test you. Best to respond positively and say how great Eritrea is.” When I tried to fix a meeting with another Eritrean in Nairobi via a friend of a friend, I first had to persuade him I was not an Eritrean government agent; he was convinced there was no other way I could have got a visa. (I got it by sending an e-mail request to the information minister and following it up with a phone call a week later.) By the time I arrived at Asmara airport, where a flunky from the information ministry tapped me on the shoulder as I was changing money, I had been sucked into the culture of suspicion. Then I opened my hotel wardrobe. It was lined with an old copy of the Financial Times.

Diplomats in Asmara said they took it for granted that some of their Eritrean employees were spying on them. The manager of a café told me his regulars included security agents who sat eavesdropping on conversations. I was warned there were informers on every corner. A taxi driver expressed the mood by clenching his fist into a trembling ball of tension. “The generals, the colonels, they are sooo…” he said with a grimace, struggling for the word as his knuckles looked ready to snap. “So straight.”

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Copyright The Washington Post
September 20, 2009

The 96-year-old woman with mild-to-moderate dementia pinned a piece of paper to her clothing each day to remind herself of the date. She posted scores of notes throughout the house to remember other details of life. “Cut toenails” and “take medication” read notes in her bathroom. And in the kitchen: “Cook the food [daughter-in-law] brought over.”

But the notes that detectives later found in her home contained other, more complex reminders: Thur jan 8 2:40 pm sitting on side of bed. Thinking of [the gardener] and how I love him and it is returned. Friend love.

And: think it is Tues, Jan 12 9:15 PM can’t think what has happened has happened. [The gardener] is unbelievable Is all a dream so much sex! sex! sex! Wonder what will happen next. Think he comes on Tuesdays. Help! …

For more than 20 years, the gardener had tended her yard. When he finished, she had often invited him in for a glass or two of wine. Each considered the other a friend. The woman’s son and daughter-in-law lived nearby and helped her with finances, meals and transportation; the daughter-in-law said the woman often talked of the gardener, who was in his mid 50s, as if he were a long-lost son.

But that changed Jan. 13 of this year when, according to a police report, she alleged that he had raped her.

Page Ulrey, the elder-abuse prosecutor in the King County prosecutor’s office in Seattle, wasn’t sure what she was looking at: Was it sexual assault, or consensual physical intimacy that hadn’t worked out as intended? Was the woman capable of making a decision about intimacy? Was she a victim? Had a crime been committed?
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The tension between preserving freedom and assuring safety is not the exclusive domain of old age, nor is it limited to matters of sex. The challenges of the teenage years, when independence waxes, are well-known: Driving, drinking, sex and curfews are just a few of the battlegrounds. The balancing acts at the other end of life, when independence wanes, are not so dissimilar: driving, living independently and making decisions about care. But we are perhaps in greatest denial about issues that lie at the intersection of intimacy and dementia. Until a note on the wall, or a police report, or the surge in the number of people with dementia confronts us.

Already, 5.3 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia, and the number will rise as the nation’s population ages. At current rates, it’s projected that 7.7 million people will have dementia by 2030 and 11 million to 16 million by 2050. A 2007 New England Journal of Medicine study confirms that for most older people, sex remains an important part of life. And some organic brain changes of old age are characterized by increasingly sexualized behavior. The disability rights community has grappled with issues of consent and intimacy. But issues relating to sex in old age, whether consensual intimacy, or sexual assault, or the nettlesome netherworld in between, receive scant attention. They should receive more.

Earlier this year, two teenage girls, whose newspaper photos looked less like mug shots than like glam yearbook pictures, were charged with physical, sexual and emotional abuse of seven Alzheimer’s patients over four months at the Good Samaritan Society nursing home in Albert Lea, Minn., where they worked. Four other girls younger than 18 were charged with failing to report the conduct. The girls allegedly poked residents’ breasts, hit their genitalia, stuck gloved fingers in their noses and mouths until they screamed, spit into their mouths, rubbed men until they became erect and laughed about their exploits later at school or driving around town. According to the detective’s report, the girls saw their conduct as “something fun to do at work.” They believed they wouldn’t be caught, the detective wrote, because the “residents did not have their minds.”

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

An excerpt.

…Frank essentially abandoned conventional still photography not long after the book came out. He went on to make films, as well as montages and assemblages that employ photographs that are physically altered, sometimes violently. The ultimate success of “The Americans” seems to have cut him much deeper than its transient early failure—he didn’t want to replicate the book, for one thing, and yet every picture he subsequently took would lie in its shadow. Although much of his later work is significant—some of the movies, in particular, are extraordinary, such as “Pull My Daisy” (1959), “Me and My Brother” (1967), and “C’est vrai/One Hour” (1992)—Frank remains so completely identified with “The Americans” that it has threatened to overwhelm his entire life and career. He has been, as they say in entertainment, branded by it, and that’s not necessarily helpful for an artist who wishes to change and grow.

The overt influence of the book on the young may be on the wane these days, in large part because of the different possibilities and demands of digital photography. Among art photographers there may be more interest in manipulation, narrative, scale and deliberate control of the image. In documentary photography, on the other hand, its influence is deep-rooted and seemingly permanent. “The Americans” might be said to have brought agnosticism to photography; it forcefully introduced doubt, as expressed by asymmetry, overlaps, tilts, radical cropping, out-of-focus foregrounds and the use of massed shadows and pulsing glare. That quality has come to be synonymous with truth-telling, even if it has been abused over the years. Until someone comes up with a transformative new way of taking pictures that can convince us it has an even stronger mimetic relationship to the way we actually see, it is likely to stand as such. Even if art photographers are for the nonce more interested in creative ways to concoct falsehoods, the legacy of “The Americans” remains evident and even necessary in journalistic photography. More than a subjective portrait of a particular country at a particular time, the book is an essential treatise of visual vocabulary…

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Copyright The New York Times

An excerpt:

… “Now he’s [Obama] at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

The state that fired the first shot of the Civil War has now given us this: Senator Jim DeMint exhorted conservatives to “break” the president by upending his health care plan. Rusty DePass, a G.O.P. activist, said that a gorilla that escaped from a zoo was “just one of Michelle’s ancestors.” Lovelorn Mark Sanford tried to refuse the president’s stimulus money. And now Joe Wilson.

“A good many people in South Carolina really reject the notion that we’re part of the union,” said Don Fowler, the former Democratic Party chief who teaches politics at the University of South Carolina. He observed that when slavery was destroyed by outside forces and segregation was undone by civil rights leaders and Congress, it bred xenophobia.

“We have a lot of people who really think that the world’s against us,” Fowler said, “so when things don’t happen the way we like them to, we blame outsiders.” He said a state legislator not long ago tried to pass a bill to nullify any federal legislation with which South Carolinians didn’t agree. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

It may be President Obama’s very air of elegance and erudition that raises hackles in some. “My father used to say to me, ‘Boy, don’t get above your raising,’ ” Fowler said. “Some people are prejudiced anyway, and then they look at his education and mannerisms and get more angry at him.”

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Copyright The Financial Times

As our speedboat casts off from Yenagoa, in the heart of the Niger Delta, I feel as if I am being propelled into a more welcoming world. A bracing wind replaces the humid closeness of the town, a monument to disorder clustered around a single, thunderous main road. The foliage on either side of the water is thick and lush, with oil palms peeping over the top of the tree line. The river traffic – mainly canoes loaded with goods such as fish, wood and plantains – clings to the banks to avoid being capsized by our wake.

I am travelling with a few guides and a fellow journalist, Glenn ­McKenzie, in search of the Niger Delta’s main militant movement: the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or Mend. The organisation had attacked oil installations and kidnapped dozens of oil workers, prompting the big companies to send non-essential staff home and shut down hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of production.

Members of Mend
Members of Mend. The white flag signifies the Ijaw god, Egbesu
Soon we pass a village where a long white flag flutters from a post. It’s a symbol of Egbesu, a water spirit central to the culture of the Ijaw people, the largest ethnic group in the region. Simeon, one of the guides, explains that white flags represent peace; red, fighting spirit. If you are killed in battle, it means not that Egbesu has failed you, but that you have violated its laws. As Simeon puts it bluntly, “You oppress, you steal, you will die.”

For the western oil majors, long used to a bit of heat, the security crisis was as bad as they had known. By this summer, estimates of Nigerian ­production ranged from 1.6 million barrels a day to as low as 800,000 barrels a day, all far distant from the 4 million barrels-a-day target for 2010. In July, an increasingly desperate government announced a two-month amnesty in an effort to tempt the militants out of the creeks. Mend has since threatened to resume hostilities from September 15.

It all reminded me of a similar amnesty five years earlier, when I’d first started to chart the Delta militancy that now rivals scam e-mails as the phenomenon most defining Nigeria in the eyes of the world. Then, as the FT’s west Africa correspondent, I’d been awoken to the dark story of ­Nigerian oil through a series of encounters with a flamboyant militant leader known as Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari. In 2004, he’d sent tremors through world oil markets after his threat to launch an attack known as “Operation Locust Feast” against industry installations in the Delta. His activities – abruptly curtailed when he was imprisoned for alleged treason – helped propel the world oil price above $50 for the first time.

The Delta’s torments – pollution, corruption and widespread poverty, despite decades of oil exports worth hundreds of billions of dollars – had continued to multiply since 1995, the year that the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and eight other activists first brought the region to the world’s attention. The situation had grown more venal, more violent and more desperate. Foreign oil interests were now being confounded by the turmoil that their own behaviour over decades had helped create.

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Two brilliant essays here. Readers must follow the link below.

Man vs. God

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call “God” is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to “the God beyond God,” Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.” Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton’s Mechanick and, later, William Paley’s Intelligent Designer essential to Western Christianity.

But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God’s existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resource.

Symbolism was essential to premodern religion, because it was only possible to speak about the ultimate reality—God, Tao, Brahman or Nirvana—analogically, since it lay beyond the reach of words. Jews and Christians both developed audaciously innovative and figurative methods of reading the Bible, and every statement of the Quran is called an ayah (“parable”). St Augustine (354-430), a major authority for both Catholics and Protestants, insisted that if a biblical text contradicted reputable science, it must be interpreted allegorically. This remained standard practice in the West until the 17th century, when in an effort to emulate the exact scientific method, Christians began to read scripture with a literalness that is without parallel in religious history.

Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.

In the ancient world, a cosmology was not regarded as factual but was primarily therapeutic; it was recited when people needed an infusion of that mysterious power that had—somehow—brought something out of primal nothingness: at a sickbed, a coronation or during a political crisis. Some cosmologies taught people how to unlock their own creativity, others made them aware of the struggle required to maintain social and political order. The Genesis creation hymn, written during the Israelites’ exile in Babylonia in the 6th century BC, was a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion. Its vision of an ordered universe where everything had its place was probably consoling to a displaced people, though—as we can see in the Bible—some of the exiles preferred a more aggressive cosmology.

There can never be a definitive version of a myth, because it refers to the more imponderable aspects of life. To remain effective, it must respond to contemporary circumstance. In the 16th century, when Jews were being expelled from one region of Europe after another, the mystic Isaac Luria constructed an entirely new creation myth that bore no resemblance to the Genesis story. But instead of being reviled for contradicting the Bible, it inspired a mass-movement among Jews, because it was such a telling description of the arbitrary world they now lived in; backed up with special rituals, it also helped them face up to their pain and discover a source of strength.

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Copyright The New York Times

TOKYO — In the post-Cold War period, Japan has been continually buffeted by the winds of market fundamentalism in a U.S.-led movement that is more usually called globalization. In the fundamentalist pursuit of capitalism people are treated not as an end but as a means. Consequently, human dignity is lost.
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How can we put an end to unrestrained market fundamentalism and financial capitalism, that are void of morals or moderation, in order to protect the finances and livelihoods of our citizens? That is the issue we are now facing.

In these times, we must return to the idea of fraternity — as in the French slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité” — as a force for moderating the danger inherent within freedom.

Fraternity as I mean it can be described as a principle that aims to adjust to the excesses of the current globalized brand of capitalism and accommodate the local economic practices that have been fostered through our traditions.

The recent economic crisis resulted from a way of thinking based on the idea that American-style free-market economics represents a universal and ideal economic order, and that all countries should modify the traditions and regulations governing their economies in line with global (or rather American) standards.

In Japan, opinion was divided on how far the trend toward globalization should go. Some advocated the active embrace of globalism and leaving everything up to the dictates of the market. Others favored a more reticent approach, believing that efforts should be made to expand the social safety net and protect our traditional economic activities. Since the administration of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006), the Liberal Democratic Party has stressed the former, while we in the Democratic Party of Japan have tended toward the latter position.

The economic order in any country is built up over long years and reflects the influence of traditions, habits and national lifestyles. But globalism has progressed without any regard for non-economic values, or for environmental issues or problems of resource restriction.

If we look back on the changes in Japanese society since the end of the Cold War, I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the global economy has damaged traditional economic activities and destroyed local communities.

In terms of market theory, people are simply personnel expenses. But in the real world people support the fabric of the local community and are the physical embodiment of its lifestyle, traditions and culture. An individual gains respect as a person by acquiring a job and a role within the local community and being able to maintain his family’s livelihood.

Under the principle of fraternity, we would not implement policies that leave areas relating to human lives and safety — such as agriculture, the environment and medicine — to the mercy of globalism.

Our responsibility as politicians is to refocus our attention on those non-economic values that have been thrown aside by the march of globalism. We must work on policies that regenerate the ties that bring people together, that take greater account of nature and the environment, that rebuild welfare and medical systems, that provide better education and child-rearing support, and that address wealth disparities.

Another national goal that emerges from the concept of fraternity is the creation of an East Asian community. Of course, the Japan-U.S. security pact will continue to be the cornerstone of Japanese diplomatic policy.

But at the same time, we must not forget our identity as a nation located in Asia. I believe that the East Asian region, which is showing increasing vitality, must be recognized as Japan’s basic sphere of being. So we must continue to build frameworks for stable economic cooperation and security across the region.

The financial crisis has suggested to many that the era of U.S. unilateralism may come to an end. It has also raised doubts about the permanence of the dollar as the key global currency.

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Yukio Hatoyama heads the Democratic Party of Japan, and would become prime minister should the party win in Sunday’s elections. A longer version of this article appears in the September issue of the monthly Japanese journal Voice.

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Copyright The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo
By Howard W. French

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier

Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
by René Lemarchand

University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
by Thomas Turner

Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)

Although it has been strangely ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold, diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in manufacturing electronics.

Few realize that a main force driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda, along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now, the US and other Western powers have generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January, Congo president Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the violence in eastern Congo over the years.

Rwanda’s intervention in Congo began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000 square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.

Following Kagame’s consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by Mobutu Sese Seko, whom they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the country.

Kabila’s hold on power was saved at this point by Angola and Zimbabwe, which rushed troops into Congo to repel the Rwandan invaders. Angola was motivated by fears that Congolese territory would be used as a rear base by the longtime Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, following the renewed outbreak of that country’s civil war. Zimbabwe appears to have been drawn by promises of access to Congolese minerals. The protracted and inconclusive conflict that followed has become what Gérard Prunier, in the title of his sprawling book, calls “Africa’s World War,” a catastrophic decade of violence that has led to a staggering 5.4 million deaths, far more than any war anywhere since World War II.[1] It also has resulted in one of the largest—and least followed—UN interventions in the world, involving nearly 20,000 UN soldiers from over forty countries.

Throughout this conflict, Rwanda—a small, densely populated country with few natural resources of its own—has pursued Congo’s enormous mineral wealth. Initially, the Rwandan Patriotic Front was directly operating mining businesses in Congo, according to UN investigators; more recently, Rwanda has attempted to maintain control of regions of eastern Congo through various proxy armies. Among these, none has been more lethal than the militia led by Laurent Nkunda, Congo’s most notorious warlord, whose record of violence in eastern Congo includes destroying entire villages, committing mass rapes, and causing hundreds of thousands of Congolese to flee their homes.

Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who is believed to have fought in both the Rwandan civil war and the subsequent war against Mobutu. In 2002, he was dispatched by the Rwandan government to Kisangani—an inland city in eastern Congo whose nearby gold mines have been fought over by Ugandan and Rwandan-backed forces. Nkunda committed numerous atrocities there, including the massacre of some 160 people, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2004, Nkunda declined a military appointment by Congo’s transitional government, choosing instead to back a Tutsi insurgency in North Kivu near the Rwandan border. He claimed that his actions were aimed at preventing an impending genocide of Tutsis in Congo. Most observers say that these claims were groundless.

Nkunda’s insurgency was put down, but clashes between his rebels, government forces, and other groups continued to foster ethnic tensions in eastern Congo, including widespread sexual violence against women; in 2005, the UN estimated that some 45,000 women were raped in South Kivu alone.[2] And in the fall of 2008, Nkunda—apparently with Kagame’s encouragement—led a new offensive of Tutsi rebels in North Kivu that uprooted about 200,000 civilians and threatened to capture the city of Goma, near the Rwandan border.

In January 2009, however, the Rwandan government made a surprise decision to arrest Nkunda. Kagame’s willingness to move against Nkunda appears to stem, in part, from increasing international scrutiny of Rwanda’s meddling in eastern Congo. The arrest took place just after the release of a UN report documenting Rwanda’s close ties to the warlord, and concluding that he was being used to advance Rwanda’s economic interests in Congo’s eastern hinterlands. The report stated that Rwandan authorities had “been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers, including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces,” while giving Nkunda access to Rwandan bank accounts and allowing him to launch attacks on the Congolese army from Rwandan soil.

Following Nkunda’s arrest, Congo president Joseph Kabila agreed to allow Rwandan forces to conduct a five-week joint military operation in eastern Congo against Hutu rebels.[3] But attacks against civilians have increased precipitously since the joint operation, and with Hutu and Tutsi militias still active it remains unclear whether there will be a lasting peace between Rwanda and Congo.

Africa’s World War is the most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Along with René Lemarchand’s The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa and Thomas Turner’s The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, Prunier’s Africa’s World War explores arguments that have circulated among scholars of sub-Saharan Africa for years. Prunier himself, who is an East Africa specialist at the University of Paris, has previously written a highly regarded account of the genocide. But these books will surprise many whose knowledge of the region is based on popular accounts of the genocide and its aftermath. In all three, the Kagame regime, and its allies in Central Africa, are portrayed not as heroes but rather as opportunists who use moral arguments to advance economic interests. And their supporters in the United States and Western Europe emerge as alternately complicit, gullible, or simply confused. For their part in bringing intractable conflict to a region that had known very little armed violence for nearly thirty years, all the parties—so these books argue—deserve blame, including the United States.

The concentrated evil of the methodical Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 is widely known. For many it has long been understood as a grim, if fairly simple, morality play: the Hutus were extremist killers, while the Tutsis of the RPF are portrayed as avenging angels, who swooped in from their bases in Uganda to stop the genocide. But Lemarchand and Prunier show that the story was far more complicated. They both depict the forces of Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front as steely, power-driven killers themselves.

“When the genocide did start, saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority,” Prunier writes. “Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly declared in September 1994 that the ‘interior’ Tutsi”—those who had remained in Rwanda and not gone into exile in Uganda years earlier—”deserved what happened to them ‘because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich doing business’” with the former Hutu regime. He also notes that the RPF “unambiguously opposed” all talk of a foreign intervention, however unlikely, to stop the genocide, apparently because such intervention could have prevented Kagame from taking full power.

Moreover, slaughter during the one hundred days of genocide was not the monopoly of the Hutus, as is widely believed. Both Lemarchand and Prunier recount the work of RPF teams that roamed the countryside methodically exterminating ordinary, unarmed Hutu villagers.[4] This sort of killing, rarely mentioned in press accounts of the genocide, continued well after the war was over. For example, on April 22, 1995, units of the new national army surrounded the Kibeho refugee camp in south Rwanda, where about 150,000 Hutu refugees stood huddled shoulder to shoulder, and opened fire on the crowd with rifles and with 60mm mortars.[5] According to Prunier, a thirty- two-member team of the Australian Medical Corps had counted 4,200 corpses at the camp before being stopped by the Rwandan army. Prunier calls the Kagame regime’s use of violence in that period “something that resembles neither the genocide nor uncontrolled revenge killings, but rather a policy of political control through terror.”

Some commentators in the United States have viewed Kagame as a sort of African Konrad Adenauer, crediting him with bringing stability and rapid economic growth to war-torn Rwanda, while running an administration considered to be one of the more efficient in Africa. In the nine years he has led the country (after serving as interim president, he won an election to a seven-year term in 2003), he has also gotten attention for the reconciliation process he has imposed on villages throughout Rwanda.

Firmly opposed to such views, the three authors reviewed here characterize Kagame’s regime as more closely resembling a minority ethnic autocracy. In a recent interview, Prunier dismissed the recently much-touted reconciliation efforts, calling post-genocide Rwanda “a very well-managed ethnic, social, and economic dictatorship.” True reconciliation, he said, “hinges on cash, social benefits, jobs, property rights, equality in front of the courts, and educational opportunities,” all of which are heavily stacked against the roughly 85 percent of the population that is Hutu, a problem that in Prunier’s view presages more conflict in the future. In his book, Lemarchand, an emeritus professor at the University of Florida who has done decades of fieldwork in the region, observes that Hutus have been largely excluded from important positions of power in Kagame’s Rwanda, and that the state’s military and security forces are pervasive. “The political decisions with the gravest consequences for the nation…are undertaken by the RPF’s Tutsi leadership, not by the political establishment,” he writes.

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