US Relations With Africa -- Self Indulgence Alert

It happened a while ago, but in August I did my second appearance on China Radio International's "Today Show." The topic was "US Relations with Africa" and in addition to myself the guest's included John Bailey, South Africa's ETV correspondent to Beijing, and Liu Guijin, the former Chinese Ambassador to South Africa. You can listen to it here.

And while you're at it, check out my latest FPA Africa Blog post, "What Do You Do About a Problem Like Malema," which looks at the political ramifications of the legal charges that expelled ANC Youth League President Julius Malema faces. Malema, once a supporter of President Jacob Zuma now sees himself as the populist antagonist against Zuma leading into the ANC's elective conference at Mangaung in December.

From China to Columbia (Misc. Self Indulgence)

Last week I appeared on China Radio International's "Today" show to discuss political reforms in South Africa. I also was quoted recently in an article about the state of contemporary Africa in the Colombian news and opinion magazine Semana. (This piece is in Spanish.)

The NRO's Descent Into Badness

The sun will rise, the sun will set, and The National Review will continue its descent into farce. National Review Online’s editorial about President Obama winning the Nobel Prize is far from the worst effort NRO has put forward lately. Faint praise aside, we’re going to look at this magnificent piece of scat bit by bit. As is my custom, I will blockquote theirs and preface mine with ***:

Well, that didn’t take long. But it was almost inevitable: the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. As “the world” hated Pres. George W. Bush, “the world” loves President Obama.

*** Scare quotations marks: the domain of shitty college writers and, well, shitty journalists. Good start.

What do we mean by “the world”? We mean the editors of Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian. The faculty at Brown University.

*** Brown University? What the fuck? This is an odd non-sequiter. But I see where you are going here. You’re going to list “stuff we don’t like” knowing your readers will all follow you, nodding in rhythm.

The secretariat of the United Nations. We mean Lord Malloch-Brown, not Václav Klaus.

***Oooh – name dropping. NRO hates the rest of the world. Except when it does not.

When President Bush visited Iraq for the last time, a foe of his threw a shoe at him. The shoe-thrower was taken to be “the world.”

*** By whom? One citation, please. I would like one fucking citation asserting that the shoe thrower = the world. Oh, sorry, “The world.”

Hugo Chávez even made laughing reference to him recently at the U.N.

*** This is incoherent. To whom is the “him” referring to in this sentence? We must assume Bush, even though between “him” and Bush come both Chavez and the shoe-thrower, not to mention the passive construction “was taken” which must allude to some subject of some sort, though sentence structure is not a strength in this particular editorial.

Many Iraqis admire and appreciate President Bush. They do not count as “the world.”

*** This is just a peculiar sentence. I am sure some Iraqis admire President Bush. But since it is NRO that is making such hay out of this “the world” conceit, it is perhaps not surprising that they are able to come up with a vague example in opposition. Kudos for defeating that straw man you so bravely created, editors! Now kick him when he’s down.

Very much counting as “the world” is the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.

*** Ok. This is really getting to be bizarre. We are talking about the Nobel Prize. So the Nobel Prize Committee is going to play a role. Yet rather than simply go after the Nobel Prize Committee to begin with, the chosen subject of this editorial is “the world.”

They practically define it.

*** For fuck’s sake, learn how to use pronouns. And as importantly, how not to. This editorial (see how it works?) is a complete jumble.

Every year since 1901, the peace prize has been given by a committee of five Norwegians. They are appointed by the Norwegian parliament, the Storting. The Nobel Peace Prize always reflects the consensus of Norwegian politics.

*** This strikes me as generalization, but again, it also strikes me as seeming more damning than it really is. I am not certain what is so shocking about a Norwegian body reflecting the consensus of Norway.

And that consensus is, in a word — a word the Norwegians might well choose — “progressive.”

*** Just when I thought the writing could not get any worse . . . .

Others might call it left-wing.

*** I wonder who these "others" might be.

In any case, the Nobel Peace Prize almost never disappoints the editors of Le Monde, the faculty at Brown, etc.

*** This is the second reference to Brown. This makes absolutely no sense in the context of an editorial about the nefariousness of “the world.” Yet NRO is doubling down on their inapt argument.

The committee has said, “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

*** Naturally the least objectionable paragraph in this entire piece is almost entirely a quotation.

That is true (at least in part). The Nobel Committee appreciates Obama for his repudiation of all things Bush.

*** Well, repudiating all things Bush makes sense both on the merits and in the politics. Nonetheless, this reductionist argument brings us right back to that straw man again. Poor bastard, being revived only to be beaten up again.

The new president has frozen out America’s allies in Eastern Europe, causing great consternation among them.

*** Actually, the new president has done no such thing. What he did was scrap a program that has never for one brief and shining second shown any signs of working in favor of allocating resources to something that might work. It seems perplexing that now conservatives want to set the bar of international relations down to “consternation” when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Or “the world.”

He has put “daylight” between America and its No. 1 Middle Eastern ally, Israel.

*** Perhaps. Or perhaps he has “put daylight” between America and the utterly unjustifiable policy of continuing to build settlements in the West Bank. These are not the same things. Binyamin Netanyahu is not Israel. And Obama’s view is one that has support in many Israeli circles.

He kept almost mum when Iranian democrats massed in the streets to demand a more decent life — the American focus is on negotiating with the regime.

*** This is reductionist piffle. The internal politics of Iran are first and foremost an Iranian matter. Obama spoke out – not loudly enough for some, to be sure – against the crackdowns on the opposition. The American focus is not on negotiating with the regime – that is a tactic, one of several in the arsenal, which also includes the sanctions that the administration just helped impose. This is the sort of profound dishonesty that has come to characterize The National Review.

He gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, the U.N. official who presided over Durban, that hate-Israel jamboree.

*** Yep. Many of us opposed that move, though reducing Mary Robinson to the Durban conference ignores a far more complex person with a far more complex history. Asserting that the most important thing we need to know about Robinson is her role in Durban is akin to asserting that the most important thing we need to know about Ted Williams was that he was a lousy bunter.

He yukked it up with Chávez, giving him a soul-brother handshake and calling him “mi amigo.”

*** He did no such fucking thing. He engaged in the niceties of diplomacy. Sometimes that involves holding hands with Arab heads of state, sometimes that apparently involves peering into the soul of despots, and sometimes it involves using rudimentary Spanish and not being a dick to foreign heads of state. And who the fuck uses the term “soul-brother handshake” in the year 2009? Honkies, I guess. (Honkies who write for magazines that opposed the Civil Rights Act. But that’s tracing a history of the magazine’s relationship with race that can wait for another day. But don't think I am not on to your little game, NRO.)

He went along with an invitation to Cuba to rejoin the Organization of American States — this despite that fact that the OAS is supposed to be for democracies, not police states.

*** Have you seen the countries on the OAS member list? Haiti? Venezuela? I thought conservatives were the ones who took stock of the real world. That “supposed to” shit is pure “progressive” squishiness I tells ya. Our Cuba policy has been stupid for more than a generation by the way.

He had America rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, under Bush, we bowed out of: because it was dominated by such lovely regimes as the ones in Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Syria, and Sudan; because it existed almost solely to defame Israel.

*** The UN Human Rights Council sucks. It also is almost certainly not going anywhere. Better to be on it and reform from within. We get it though – you’re the one true voice for Israel.

All these moves of Obama, the Nobel Committee appreciates immensely.

*** Holy fucked up syntax, Batman, what is the subject of that sentence?

This is an American president in their own image, the kind of president they will cheer and honor.

*** I know this is supposed to be an insult. It’s not. Just FYI.

For them, Obama is a dream president, just as Bush was a nightmare president. He is the first “post-American president,” as John Bolton and others have said.

*** Ah, yes, the old impugning his Americanness trope. And naturally John Bolton is the most useful person to use to define a president he opposes.

For “the world,” that is a dream president.

*** Seriously – did they farm out the writing of this thing to an intern? And not their best one?

Our Declaration of Independence speaks of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” A decent respect is not a need for approval.

*** And since no one is saying that it is, I have no idea why this quotation and the assertion that follows is included in this essay.

Besides, who is mankind? Merely the Nobel Committee and the shoe-thrower, or Bush-loving Iraqis, too?

*** To whom is this question aimed? Again: Give one citation, just one, from the administration, or indeed from the Nobel Committee, implying that Iraqis do not matter or bolstering the case of the show thrower. You cannot just make shit up. Well, sadly, you can and do. But it’s still made up.

We might ask another question: Whose approval would President Obama rather have: that of the Nobel Committee or that of the Rotary Club in Butte?

*** Well, yes, as far as false dichotomies go, this is a particularly terrible one. Why is Obama being asked to choose?

In recent years, the Nobel Committee has done everything possible to express its abhorrence of Bush and his ways.

*** To which I say: Good job Nobel Committee. George W. Bush was a shitty president. Let’s go have a drink. As long as the Rotary Club of Butte does not want to go – they get priority.

In 2001, they gave the peace prize to Kofi Annan and the U.N. The message, in part, was: “America, you’d better not respond to 9/11 by yourselves, or too aggressively.”

*** Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. Going virtually alone in the wrong war at the wrong time was all kinds of dumb, though. I’m no huge Kofi Annan fan, though, so: whatever.

The next year, they gave the prize to Jimmy Carter, and, here, the chairman of the committee was refreshingly candid: saying that they were honoring Carter in order to give Bush “a kick in the leg,” or, in our own parlance, a black eye.

*** What, are your readers so fucking dumb that they would not have been able to figure out that complex leg-kicking metaphor? Actually, strike that question as unnecessary.

A more honorable president might have refused that award, if given for the purpose of bashing the current president.

*** This is certainly my favorite argument: That others should reject the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the equivalent of being pissed at your favorite indie band for having an album that sells a lot of copies and thus spoiling your view of their purity. Jimmy Carter does lots of things that drive me mad. I oppose many of his politics, including many of his views on Israel. But taken as a whole, the man has given his all for humanity. Dispute his receiving the Nobel if you’d like. But to ascribe malign motives for something like this reveals someone as being small and petty. Sand it ain’t Carter.

Another black eye came in 2005, when the committee gave the award to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency. ElBaradei has said explicitly that his goal — his only “brief,” as he has put it — is to prevent military action against Iran. Accordingly, he has repeatedly downplayed that country’s nuclear progress. And the IAEA has repeatedly looked foolish, and blind. In Beijing the other day, ElBaradei said that the number-one threat to peace in the Middle East is . . . Israel, and its nukes.

*** More reductionism. When you use words like “only,” a single exception destroys your case. Given that ElBaradei took his post with the IAEA in 1997, the argument that his sole concern has to do with the Bush administration or its successors is a Goldbergian use of history, which is to say: wrong. Furthermore, the IAEA did work to try to prevent the spread of nukes after 9/11. Again: debate the case on its merits. Don’t lie and misrepresent just to make your case easier to win in the echo chamber. (Especially when you have a decent case.)

In 2007, the Nobel Committee went with Al Gore and the U.N.’s global-warming people.

*** Um, yes. Is there an argument here, or have you just given up?

And now, in 2009, Obama.

*** I have no objections to this sentence. Well, it does not really have a subject. Or a verb. But it’s probably still the best crafted sentence in the essay.

This award will cause people — will cause “the world” — to say that America is back in the fold, back in the good graces of “the world.” After a season apart, under the cowboy Bush, America is a citizen of “the world” once again. In the Nobel Committee sense of “the world,” we are.

*** The funny thing is that there is an argument here that a better writer and more intellectually honest editorial board could have put together. And it could be a good one. But the scare quotation marks, the unwillingness to consider that global opinion toward the United States has improved dramatically with the emergence of Obama (or what some would call “facts” – I can use those little quotation marks too!) and the bizarre and random hopping from lily pad to lily pad have all obscured that argument.

The committee would never have given the award to Ronald Reagan, much as he did for peace, and much as Mrs. Reagan may have wanted it for him. (The committee did award Gorbachev, however.)

*** Gorbachev did more than Reagan did on the issue at hand. And Reagan countenanced Apartheid South Africa and noxious regimes throughout South America. But a Reagan-Gorbachev pairing would have been a good one – and in the future that is the approach the Nobel Committee would take, only to take incredible grief for it.

Years ago, National Review made the editorial quip that the Nobel Peace Prize, every year, should be given to the Defense Department: because the American military was the world’s foremost guarantor of peace.

*** Blah blah blah. It wasn’t as clever as you thought it was then and did not warrant repeating now. In any case, who is the Commander in Chief of the military right now? Or is 2009 the one year it does not hold despite your invoking it now?

A few days ago, there was a rumor that Harry Wu, the anti-Communist dissident from China, would win the peace prize. That was terribly unlikely. Would the committee ever honor Oscar Biscet, the Afro-Cuban political prisoner who is a symbol of hope, defiance, and decency in that country? A virtual impossibility.

*** Counterfactuals are fun. Because they are incontrovertible. Lots of people don’t win the award. John Lewis is a personal favorite of mine. He will never win it. That does not make the exercise an ignoble one.

President Bush gave a Medal of Freedom to Biscet (in absentia, of course); Obama gave one to Mary Robinson. That neatly illustrates the difference between those two presidents, and between types who win the Nobel prize and those who don’t.

*** No. No it doesn’t. It does no such thing. What it does is shows that the editors at NRO sure can cherry pick to make the most fucktarded of arguments in a piece full of developmentally challenged assertions.

Alfred Nobel, a great man, wanted his prize to go to “champions of peace,” men and women who genuinely contributed to peace in the world. He deplored the “absurd and futile efforts of windbags who are capable of thwarting the best of aims.” Can Barack Obama really make a contribution to peace, the way the Reagans of the world genuinely do? Reagan got no peace prize, but he made a huge positive difference, and the world, along with “the world,” should know that Oslo doesn’t always know best.

*** Why was Reagan then not the foundation of this piece? Why did he not appear in the first paragraph? How the fuck can the editors of the National Review have no idea how to structure a fucking opinion piece? (Ronald Reagan vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1985 and individuals in his administration brokered illegal arms for hostages deals with . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . Iran!!!!)

Feeling Old

Every year Beloit College sends out the "mindset list" which is, essentially, geared to make faculty members feel old. Here is this year's list (take your antidepressants now) of what this year's typical college freshman knows of the world:

1. Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.

2. The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.

3. They have never used a card catalog to find a book.

4. Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.

5. Salsa has always outsold ketchup.

6. Earvin "Magic" Johnson has always been HIV-positive.

7. Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.

8. They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.

9. Rap music has always been mainstream.

10. Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.

11. Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.

12. The KGB has never officially existed.

13. Text has always been hyper.

14. They never saw the “Scud Stud” (but there have always been electromagnetic stud finders.)

15. Babies have always had a Social Security Number.

16. They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.

17. Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.

18. They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.

19. American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.

20. Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled.

21. State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.

22. The European Union has always existed.

23. McDonald's has always been serving Happy Meals in China.

24. Condoms have always been advertised on television.

25. Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.

26. Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap.

27. The American health care system has always been in critical condition.

28. Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta Braves.

29. Desperate smokers have always been able to turn to Nicoderm skin patches.

30. There has always been a Cartoon Network.

31. The nation’s key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

32. Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.

33. They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.

34. Women have always outnumbered men in college.

35. We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.

36. Brits have always owned The New York Daily News.

37. Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code.

38. Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations.

39. It's always been official: President Zachary Taylor did not die of arsenic poisoning.

40. Madonna’s perspective on Sex has always been well documented.

41. Phil Jackson has always been coaching championship basketball.

42. Ozzy Osbourne has always been coming back.

43. Kevin Costner has always been Dancing with Wolves, especially on cable.

44. There have always been flat screen televisions.

45. They have always eaten Berry Berry Kix.

46. Disney’s Fantasia has always been available on video, and It’s a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television.

47. Smokers have never been promoted as an economic force that deserves respect.

48. Elite American colleges have never been able to fix the price of tuition.

49. Nobody has been able to make a deposit in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

50. Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on.

51. Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations.

52. They have never been Saved by the Bell.

53. Someone has always been asking: “Was Iraq worth a war?”

54. Most communities have always had a mega-church.

55. Natalie Cole has always been singing with her father.

56. The status of gays in the military has always been a topic of political debate.

57. Elizabeth Taylor has always reeked of White Diamonds.

58. There has always been a Planet Hollywood.

59. For one reason or another, California’s future has always been in doubt.

60. Agent Starling has always feared the Silence of the Lambs.

61. “Womyn” and “waitperson” have always been in the dictionary.

62. Members of Congress have always had to keep their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.

63. There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.

64. CDs have never been sold in cardboard packaging.

65. Avon has always been “calling” in a catalog.

66. NATO has always been looking for a role.

67. Two Koreas have always been members of the UN.

68. Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed.

69. The NBC Today Show has always been seen on weekends.

70. Vice presidents of the United States have always had real power.

71. Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been slowly winding down.

72. Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.

73. Nobody has ever responded to “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

74. Congress could never give itself a mid-term raise.

75. There has always been blue Jell-O.

I feel ancient, and to the incoming freshman, I probably am.

Hillary at the CFR

Because of my affiliation with the Foreign Policy Association I am able to access media events, though to this point I have not really done so. But today I decided to partake in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's on-the-record speech and presser at the Council on Foreign Relations. I am going to write a piece for the FPA and wrote a blog post for the Africa Blog, but I thought I'd share my notes (and that is all these are, so they are pretty fragmented) here:

Hillary Clinton On-The Record Event and Conference Call – Council on Foreign Relations

*Clinton is a much better, and frankly, more palatable and likable speaker in this capacity than she is on the stump.

*Advice she once received: Don’t try to do too much. But today this is impossible.

*The question today isn’t whether America should, but rather how it should lead.

*Obama – caused us to think outside traditional boundaries.

*We will exercise American leadership that no nation can do alone.

*While the idea that shape our foreign policy are critically important, this is not just an intellectual exercise.

*Does not make sense to utilize 19th c concert of powers, 20th c balance of powers, Cold War containment, etc,

*Countries face many of the same issues and “obstacles that stand in the way of turning commonality of interest into common action” – no nation can face these challenges alone but none can face them without America.

*A combination of boilerplate and heady rhetoric – clear break from previous administration in many areas – emphasis on coalitions and working with international community, climate change and nonproliferation, torture, talking with enemies, etc.

*Economic turmoil changes the calculus – normally economic matters not a major factor for SecState, but in these times she believes that there needs to be a restoration of State role in economic outreach, trade issues, etc.

*Good speech, to be sure. Coherent, well presented, smart, but certainly broad and even diffuse.

*Very little on Africa. Mentioned Ghana but in context of larger policy goals.

Q&A:

Israel/Palestine peace prospects in 2010? She carries forward hope. Wanted a skilled negotiator and got it in envoy George Mitchell. Not just responsibility of Israel, nor even of Palestinians, but of Arab States as well. Will not make predictions, but commitment is deep and durable.

Could Hamas play a role in the peace process? Firmly committed to quartet process. Would expect Hamas to recognize Israel, denounce violence, and support peace process. (Yeah, right.)

Elaborate on administration’s willingness to engage with Iran – any response from Khamenei to letter sent in May, and if they do show interest, what if they stonewall with no give? Has there been a green yellow or red light sent to Israel (re: Biden) with regard to attacking Iran? Troubled by repressive actions post-election, but there is no path opened up right now. There is a choice for the Iranian government to make. Will wait to see how they decide. This would not be an open-ended engagement, a door that stays open no matter what. Re: Biden: White House clarified the next day (ie: punt).

What do you expect from trip to India, especially foreign policy/global aspects? Delighted to be engaging in broad comprehensive dialogue – most wide ranging ever put on table between India and US. India has an opportunity to play a greater global role. There are a number of areas where we would welcome Indian leadership or involvement.

Reports that in discussions between Mitchell and Ehud Barak there was some agreement to allow construction to go forward – can you comment? Not going to step on the process – will announce decisions that have been made.

Talk a little more about Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review? Served on armed services committee for 6 years. This (QDDR) seems to be a very important discipline and tool for Defense Department. Allows us to justify what we are doing and to show concrete results. This is both a policy approach as well as an attempt to explain and justify what they are doing – wants this to become long-term policy put into place by Congress.

Dividends being received from recommitment to alliance relationships – early on it seems that some allies are still skeptical? She agrees that we are still dealing with the “down payment” process where we are taking unrequited steps without clear responses. But in the long run she is quite optimistic. We have intense ongoing discussions with allies trying to implement our strategies. Economic downturn plays a role. Furthermore, after eight years we are actually adding troops to Afghanistan and both at home and abroad we still have to answer questions and clarify our positions. We still need to assuage fears and anxieties (referenced loss of 8 British soldiers and Gordon Brown’s political difficulties as a result). Slow development and change in Afghanistan indicative of the difficulties we are facing. Of course she cannot say that all of our allies are going to come through to our thinking, but she is optimistic.

Previous Presidents from Carter to Clinton have set out to reach out to Iran and has been rebuffed – what happens if this attempt fails – are we prepared to live with a nuclear Iran? We have consistently said that we cannot accept a nuclear Iran. But we are not going to negotiate with Iran sitting here. Policy to Iran in last eight years was a mistake – we basically outsourced our policy to Iran and it failed. It’s not just US that should be concerned, but many others in world, including some much closer to situation for whom consequences are much more dire.

Expand on point about State Dept approach to economic issues – trade agreements, but also exports, etc. – what is the role of State in commercial advocacy? Takes commercial advocacy seriously, as it is part of State Dept. role, and trade policy is certainly an important issue for State. We are a trading nation and we need to make that clear, but economic policies also seen as important part of the diplomacy of nations. Role of State’s economic agenda needs to be strengthened, work with Treasury, work with Economic Council. Why would State say it is not part of economic mix when economics are so vital to our relations with other countries. Have worked to make ties with China comprehensive because economic issues are at the forefront.

In six months what has struck you most about your job? Excitement of new administration, this has also allowed us to improve our image in the world. Shocking that we do not Have full gov’t in place after six months. Realizes how shortsighted she was in Senate when it came to asking a ton of questions of every nominee! It’s been a real privilege and an honor and she is proud of what the gov’t has done so far.

Thoughts on Iran

A longtime reader and friend sent me the following email the other day about the ongoing situation in Iran:

I have been spending a fair amount of my newspaper/internet time reading about the protests in Iran and what strikes me is the way that the press and photo/video journalism have been used in previous protests (civil rights movement as the first and most powerful) to accelerate change and how it has the potential to make meaningful change in Iran as well. I thought you might be well-positioned to be thoughtful on the subject given your background and focus. The one thing that it is so difficult to get a grasp on is how much "Americanized" spin is being put on the protests. Given that Americans have such a skewed conception of the middle east and Iran in particular, it is tough for me to know if the protests are the precursor to meaningful change or are just two different sides of what amounts to a relatively minor disagreement over the pace of gradual reforms, and whether this is Soweto or Tianamen Square.

Here are the thoughts I sent to him, though looking at it, I do not know if I answered the last part of his question, and so I will do so toward the end of the post:

1) I think it is clear that both the protesters and the state are well aware of the power of media. This explains why the state has been so deeply committed to crushing not only dissent, but especially to controlling the media access. Outside reporters have been banned, the media, circumscribed already, has been virtually shut down. There is no doubt that the protesters, meanwhile, are trying to counter the crackdown by using new media -- the state has tried to respond by shutting down blogs and the like, and so we see the Twitter aspect. What I wonder about that is just how pervasive the Twitter aspect is -- I cannot help but wonder, for example, whether or not Andrew Sullivan (who turned his blog into virtually all Iran all the time) is overstating the actual concrete importance of Twitter. But it is clear that those using the new (and otherwise pretty annoying and self indulgent) technology see it as one way to control the story as best they can.

2) As for the comparative framework, obviously it is hard to tell now. But certainly the awareness of the importance of getting the story -- and as important the images -- out to the larger world indicates that they are cognizant of how important images are. During the Civil Rights Movement, as you well now and alluded to, the media played a vital role, and more to the point, the civil rights activists knew this. During the Freedom Rides the protesters were well aware of the important of images, indeed, of promoting the sorts of conflicts that would garner attention, and thus sympathy. If the media was not there to cover it, it did not happen. The CRM was tremendously successful at this, but the segregationists learned as well. two examples will suffice. During the Freedom Rides when one of the first batches of students and their allies were dropped off at Parchman Farm in Mississippi, a couple tried to go limp and use the nonviolent technique. The police said, in effect, what the hell are you guys doing? There are no cameras here. John Lewis conceded that they had a point. The second example comes with the Albany campaign. Sheriff Laurie Pritchett had read about and paid attention to the contours of the movement and especially to King's nonviolence, including reading King's books. As a result, he knew that a Bull Connor-esque confrontation was the surest way to draw media attention and thus bring the crisis to a boil. So there was little no no violence under his watch. Arrests were orderly, even polite. And the media did not descend on Albany, changing the narrative of that struggle considerably.

3) in South Africa certainly the media was a factor as well, though much of the appeal was to the global media, as the apartheid state had the capacity to respond by cracking down on the media in the country. Interestingly, one of the main motivations for politicians during the Cold War was to prevent the American civil rights movement from becoming international news -- futile in the face of Bull Connor and others, during the 1963 campaign in his city but also during the Freedom Rides. Those events making front page news in the US was bad enough, but when that burning bus was splashed across newspapers the world over? As my friend Jaime would say, no goodo.

4) I'm not sure how much Americanized spin is being put on the events, certainly a lot from our vantage point. This is most obvious in the (to my mind silly) criticism of Obama that he has not been ardent in addressing the situation. This is not our fight. Though it has enormous ramifications for the US, that is a struggle that is still Iranian in nature. Obama recognizes this in a way that Bush/Cheney would not have and Netanyahu does not. Now does this mean we will never act? No. but it means bellicosity is not the right approach.

5) One thing that somewhat vexes me is the amount of attention this incident has gotten relative to other similar crises. I am especially thinking of Africa, in particular Kenya and Zimbabwe. Now those situations received their share of attention relative to African issues normally, but nothing compared to what this is getting. Andrew Sullivan giving his blog over? C'mon. I am not denigrating or downplaying the Iranian situation. I simply cannot see why it is so much more outsized than the situations in Zim or Kenya. Or I do, but I disagree -- the answer is tied to realpolitik. Iran has more strategic value in the minds of most people. And that belief may well be true. But intrinsically, the events in Africa are no less important or fraught or complex (or violent) than those in Iran.

That is my response to him. Now, as to the question of whether this qualifies as a precursor to meaningful change, I am not especially optimistic. The reader astutely posed two situations -- Soweto or Tiananman -- both of which certainly have some parallels. In the case of the Soweto Uprisings, the effect was to invigorate the anti-Apartheid movement that had been quiescent in the wake of the South African government's response to activists in the post-Sharpeville Massacre period. Soweto started a long process that led to the crises in the 1980s in South Africa and that in turn fueled the negotiations and ultimately the fall of apartheid and rise of Mandela and the ANC. Tiananman, meanwhile, simply showed the length the Chinese leaders would go to to maintain control and crush opposition. Though it is worth noting that post-Tiananman things have opened up considerably in China, even if it is far from a free nation, and even if the Chinese authorities rarely concern themselves with the niceties of human rights either within China or outside of it. My suspicions are that it will be more like Tiananman inasmuch as there are two factors reinforcing one another: The role of the state as an authoritarian presence and the role of religion as quite literally a higher power within Iranian politics. I hope, of course, that I am wrong.

Blog Meme: Stuff You've Done

Via Itinerant Thinker comes this blog meme. Highlight in bold all the stuff that you've done. (I've added bold parenthetical asides for those I've come close to but not actually done in the most literal sense):

1. Started my own blog
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than I can afford to charity
7. Been to Disneyland/world
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sung a solo
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched lightning at sea
14. Taught myself an art from scratch
15. Adopted a child
16. Had food poisoning
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown my own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a Marathon
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person
34. Visited the birthplace of my ancestors
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught myself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had my portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (I echo IT's question: why are so many of these about Paris?)
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling (I'm assuming that grabbing a snorkel and swimming in shallow water at the beach as a kid does not count)
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Visited Russia
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Donated blood, platelets or plasma (Though donating blood, or even having blood tests where they take more than trace amounts really makes me sick)
65. Gone sky diving
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (You can order Bleeding Red here or Freedom's Main Line here! Yes, I'm shameless.)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car (Closest is my current car, which was basically a dealer car that I bought with 4000 miles on it. I'll probably never buy a brand-spanking new vehicle if there is something available with really low mileage on it.)
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had my picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House (Like IT I've never gone inside)
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox (I honestly have no idea)
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury (I have done jury duty but have always gotten excused before the moment of truth)
91. Met someone famous
92. Joined a book club (I'm assuming they mean some sort of reading club, and not History Book Club or something like that.)
93. Lost a loved one
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a cell phone
99. Been stung by a bee
100. Ridden an elephant (Though I do have some good elephant stories from Africa.)

By my count either 53 or 54 depending on my chicken pox status.

Let the Games Begin

I love the Summer Olympics. My track and field background certainly plays a role in my devotion to the quadrennial games, as this is the one time every four years when the jumpers and throwers and runners take center stage. NBC is planning about a billion hours of coverage, and I plan to watch a million of those hours over the next fortnight or so.

One curiousity that even casual viewers will have is how NBC and its several component stations will address the China question. Will NBC remain largely mum, making the fatuous (and demonstrably false) claim that politics have no place in the Olympics? Will any athletes use the medal stand, starting blocks, or any other platform to speak out against China's human rights abuses? Will China shoot itself in the foot by proving its critics' point?

And then there is the much-discussed issue of air quality. Everything you have heard is true. The air is nasty in China. When I was in Beijing a couple of years ago the smog was ubiquitous. On my last day, however, a mucous-thick yellow haze draped the city so that on the way to the airport early in the morning visibility was near impossible. Barring great luck, expect this environmental worry to be a legitimate question, especially when outdoor endurance events are in play.

My guess is that the main theme we'll see the most over the next couple of weeks will involve that precarious line between cultural exploration and cultural streotype. There will be myriad stories and images exploiting the differences between China and the West that will inevitably hint at the idea of ther inscrutable Chinese. And this is understandable -- China is very different from what most of us know. But how this is handled will be telling. There will be very real transportation and language issues for athlete and spectator alike. And China is fascinating. But this sort of endeavor is fraught with landmines. The line between caricature and picture is finer than most think.

Here are a few links that caught my eye this morning: Bob Ryan's column in The Boston Globe is, as should be expected, fine. The New York Times has a blog, Rings, covering all things Olympics (and here is an interesting interview on odd Olympic events with NYT sports magazine Play's John Tayman). The Washington Post scours its archives and samples excerpts from more than a century of opinions on the Olympics. The Council on Foreign Relations spotlights how the Games are part of a larger plan to augment China's peculiar brand of authoritarian capitalism. Here is an article from South Africa's Mail & Guardian discussing the "spectacle and controversy" that will be these games.

Enjoy the Games, USA! USA! Etc.

The Reasons I Travel

At the end of the day, travel is, for me, about people. Whether I am returning to Africa or to the UK, places I visit regularly, where I have lived and worked, or whether visiting someplace for the first time, such as when I went to China a couple of years back, the most important component to me is always the people I meet, and friends new and old. This is not to say that there are not other factors -- work, for example, certainly requires me to travel quite regularly, and provides the justification for these trips. And like anyone who leaves home a lot, I like experiences as well, whether cultural, aesthetic, adventure, or what have you.

But the most important element of travel is people. I am staying in Sea Point, in Cape Town, with my good friend Doug, a black Zimbabwean who has lived in South Africa for more than a decade. We met in 1997 when we were at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, and he is one of the people I always try to meet up with when I return. The time here will be too brief, but it is important, indeed crucial, that I spend it here. The conference in Stellenbosch provides another example. I walked into the conference venue knowing of a handful of the people there but actually knowing only one, a grad student at The University of Texas who I nonetheless always seem to see in South Africa. By the time I left Stellenbosch yesterday I had made a handful of new friends, some of whom I'll maintain contact with professionally, a few of whom I will likely remain friends with over the years.

In some ways I think I'be grown almost sanguine about the opportunities travel affords me. I brought my camera on this trip, have been able to see some new places and revisit old ones, and have yet to snap a single shot, which probably seems like a waste, but in my eyes just remonds me of all of the time I have spent here and the ways in which I try to immerse myself.

In any case, Cape Town is raw this morning -- rainy and damp, cold -- and I have decided to devote a day to trying to catch up on work. I apologize for the fundamentally personal nature of this entry, which lacks much insight into South African politics or history or culture. But South Africa is, for me, more than simply a tableau for politics and work. It is a real flesh and blood place where I've spent a large proportion of my life and energies for nearly a dozen years. So today I'll just work for a few more hours until Doug, my friend, gets home from work, and we'll go out to eat and for a few drinks before tomorrow, when all too quickly, I'll be leaving again.

[Crossposted at the FPA South Africa Blog and the FPA Africa Blog.]

Over at the South Africa Blog (Self Indulgence Alert)

I've been industrious of late at the Foreign Policy Association's South Africa Blog where amidst a lot of emphasis on Zimbabwe I have used the Wizard of Oz as a model to understanding why an invasion of Zim from the UK or the US might be a bad idea. But I've also looked at issues related to development, to China's role in Africa, and much more. If you have anyinterest in current African affairs, please go check it out.

Africa Updates

Some updates follow on stories about which I have recently written: On Guinea's state of siege, the slowly emerging Lesotho vote count, chaos in eastern Chad, China as a dubious patron of Africa, and always more and more on Zimbabwe.

China's African Dreams and The Potential Downsides

Over at the Foreign Policy Association Robert Nolan has a piece titled "China's African Dreams," which gives another viewpoint on this increasingly significant issue. Meanwhile the Mail & Guardian speculates that Chinese Aid to Africa may do more harm than good.

China, Railroads, Roads, and Africa

One of the issues that has captured my attention since my trip to China this past summer, and subsequent travel to Africa, is the role that Asia's behemoth is increasingly staking across the continent. I have written about the issue here, here, here, and here. In The New Republic Michael Currie Schaffer has an article exploring China's newfound interest in building railroads in Africa. His article is actually more a fascinating slice of travel writing than an especially astute geopolitical observation -- he is long on description and short on argument -- but his observations provide another example of how China has targeted Africa for development.

Africa & China, China & Africa

One of the issues we try to address here at dcat is African linkages with the rest of the world. There is a new Yahoo group, "FeiZhou-AsSiin - Africa & China, China & Africa," that is dedicated to examining more closely a significant global trend on which I have been focusing more closely since my trip to China last summer. In the word's of the group's founder(s):

This group is created to facilitate consideration of connections and interactions between China and Africa, and Africans and Chinese - historic, present, and future. It draws its name from the Chinese (Mandarin, Puthonghua) for Africa, "Fei Zhou," and the name in Arabic for China, "Al Siin" (pronounced as-siin). Arabic ws chosen since it is one of many maternal languages in Africa, and one that has influenced a number of other languages on the continent (notably in the Sahel and east Africa). The main language of this list is English. Postings in other languages such as Chinese, African languages, and French are welcome but please accompany them with an English summary to assure a wider understanding.

China is increasingly going to play a role in the rest of the world with Africa as a particular focus. It is in all of our interest to watch as this geopolitical relationship develops.

More China and Africa

In this week's New York Times Magazine James Traub has a long feature on "China's Africa Adventure." I addressed the issue of "China's Dual-Edged Sword in Africa" a couple of weeks ago. Africa will represent a pretty good backdrop for China's intended global policy over the course of the next few decades and our policy makers would be wise to keep a close eye on what goes on there. This is yet another of many reasons why Africa matters.

China's Dual-Edged Sword in Africa

To put it in the simplest terms, China is countenancing genocide in the Sudan. But equally simply, China might be emerging as the best partner Africa has, a country committed to Africa's development in ways that the rest of the world ought to observe and from which we ought to learn. earlier this week the New York Times emphasized China's growing role in Africa in an important article, "China Courts Africa, Angling for Strategic Gains."

China's role in Africa allows us a glimpse at our China dilemma in microcosm. China is vast, powerful, and pretty much immovable. The Chinese policy (a few notable exceptions -- Taiwan being the most prominent -- notwithstanding) of national sovereignty above all coupled with their sometimes callous disregard for human rights and human lives makes them a vexing world power. That China is reaching out to the rest of the world holds out both promise and peril. Let us hope that we can help promote the former while curbing the latter, but we need to be aware that force and coersion are simply not on the table as viable options in dealing with Beijing.

Inaction in Sudan

Susan Rice (a former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa during Clinton's second term), Anthony Lake (national security adviser from 1993 to 1997 and Rice's boss when she was at NSC during that time), and Donald Payne (D-NJ) ask a very good question in their Washington Post article "We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?" Noting that the Sudan appears willing to do everything within its power to keep foreign troops or peacekeepers out, and that we seem perfectly willing to acquiesce to their demands, they note, "Will world leaders continue to give the perpetrators of genocide a veto over international action to stop it? Unless something changes dramatically, the answer seems to be yes."

This is the unfortunate reality in the Sudan -- the powers in Khartoum know that they can ignore the powers of the west because we are unwilling to back our demands with action. We dither, Africans die. This has been the story in the Sudan as it has been the story elsewhere in Africa, such as in Rwanda. We need to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Unless we force Khartoum's hand, the carnage and dispossession in darfur will continue apace, the turmoil will spread into Chad, and ten years from now we'll get to hear about what we should have done, didn't do, and what we will for sure this time do in the future. As Rice, Lake and Payne argue:

Lost in the diplomatic bustle is reality: First, the U.S.-brokered peace deal for Darfur, fatally flawed from its signature, is dead. Second, Sudan has broken every pledge to every envoy to halt the killing in Darfur. Third, China is unlikely to compel Sudan to admit the United Nations -- 7 percent of its oil is at stake, and China may figure we value its help on Iran and North Korea more than on Sudan. Fourth, it's too late for sanctions; even if China miraculously relented, it would take months before their bite was felt. By then, Sudan will have completed its second wave of genocide in Darfur.

History demonstrates that there is one language Khartoum understands: the credible threat or use of force. After Sept. 11, 2001, when President Bush issued a warning to states that harbor terrorists, Sudan -- recalling the 1998 U.S. airstrike on Khartoum -- suddenly began cooperating on counterterrorism. It's time to get tough with Sudan again.

The question is, how credible would such a threat appear to be? If we are going to make the threat, we need to be able to back it up. We need to develop a coalition that will act in our name and with our backing and that will have the ability to use credible force to an extent that will make the Sudanese listen and take our promise to act seriously.

China and Africa: An Amoral and Asymmetrical Relationship

Over at TNR online Joshua Kurlantzick has a fascinating and important article on "How China Controls African Politics." When I was in Beijing this past summer one of my concerns was that China couched any behavior, however dispicable, in terms of national sovereignty. It is a remarkably resilient and amoral argument: China can do wahetevr it likes and no one can judge them because of their unabiding belief in the principles of national sovereignty. The issue that most vexed me was China's involvement in the Sudan, which I referred to in one meeting with a Chinese official as "countenancing genocide." But China needs and wants oil, and they simply do not care about Sudan's internal affairs. Khartoum is more than happy to work with the Chinese, and so, based on their principles, voila! the outside world has no right to judge either the Sudan or the Chinese. This is a very convenient way to promote atrocity while simultaneously not caring about gross violations of human rights, all the while benefiting handsomely.

Kurlantzick's article focuses on Zambia and the recent elections. Here are some key excerpts:

[M]uch of the Zambian debate centered on a completely different topic: China. Opposition candidate Michael Sata accused Chinese companies, which have invested heavily in Zambian copper mining, of exploiting Zambian workers and undercutting Zambian goods. "Chinese investment has not added any value to the people of Zambia," Sata told a Zambian radio station, also threatening to toss Chinese companies out of the country. In response, China's embassy in Zambia became directly involved in the election, very unusual for foreign diplomats in any country, warning that Beijing might sever ties to Zambia if Sata won. The incumbent president, Sata's opponent in the election, reportedly apologized to Beijing for Sata's comments. [. . .]
Zambia, in fact, offers a window into a phenomenon American policy makers have only just begun to discover. In a short period of time, China has become a major donor and investor in Africa, and it has begun to play a major role in domestic African politics--not only in Zambia but also across the continent. In fact, China has so quickly amassed power in Africa that it now rivals the United States, France, and international financial institutions for influence--and potentially damages Africa's economic and political renaissance.

This is where China can be a profoundly destabilizing force -- in pursuing a grand strategy that amounts to geopolitical passive-aggressivism couched in very realpolitik western terms. They are not about to mount an attack on the United States or any of our interests. In military terms, China poses little danger, and almost never has -- though potentially it could. But where China can be massively destabilizing is by joining forces with states that either do not much care about its people (ie -- Big Men love Bigger Partners) or with those states so desperate for anything resembling development that they will sell out the safety and security of their people for short-term gain that holds immense appeal even as the repurcussions hang like Domocles' Sword over the heads of the teetering state.

By The Bedside Table: Travel Edition

When I travel, I read. Actually, when I do anything, I read. But multiple 12-hour-plus flights, lots of airport downtime, solitary hours in hotels, eating alone: These circumstances lend themselves to ploughing through a lot of books and journals and magazines and newspapers. I unrepentantly travel heavy as a consequence -- better to bring a book or two too many than one too few even if you know you will buy books along the way. I am pretty much guaranteed to pay luggage overage on the way home because I have purchased a good five or six kilos of written pages, not to mention research and gifts.

In any case, here is a travel edition of my semi-regular feature, "By the Bedside Table," a compendium of mini-reviews of books I've been reading. In addition to these books I have also been staying on top of a newspaper or two a day, plus the weekly Mail & Guardian and Sunday Independent, several magazines, including the recent 20th anniversary issue of South African Sports Illustrated, which just recently entered into a formal partnership with the US version of the magazine, and thus has adopted the familiar format from the US, which is a bit disjunctive. I've also been working my way through the latest Dissent and Foreign Affairs (well, they were the latest issues when I left anyway) and a small book I purchased to try to teach myself some Zulu. On this latter front, I am not doing all that well. I have also finished a book that I am reviewing for Aethlon, the journal of the Sports Literature Association, and have started another that I am reviewing for H-South, but I don't want to annoy my editors by pre-empting myself here. In any case, away we go:

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China: As you might imagine, I brought several books on China to supplement the reading I did before I got here. I might have even written about this book in the past, as I started it, then set it down for a while, then recommenced in the days before I came on this trip. Theroux, who had travelled through China before, and who had developed a decent grasp of the language (he is something of a linguistic savant, it seems, from all of his books that I have read), spent a year (centered around 1986) travelling by train through China. I enjoy Theroux's travel writings. He seems like a bit of a crank, and I sometimes think his breezy generalizations go too far, but he is a remarkable observer, a fine writer, and an intrepid traveller. This is not the first of his books that I have read and it surely will not be the last. His China is now two decades past, and so many of his observations seem not to hold, but there is value to older travel writing. If you want a guidebook, go to Lonely Planet or Rough Guides. If you want a travel companion, Theroux produces the kind of literature that won't let you down, even when he annoys you, as almost all travel companions do at some point along the way. A-

Will Randall, Botswana Time: Randall has written a number of travel books as well. I found this at a bookshop in Beijing and since I was bound for southern Africa and had travelled through the very area about which he writes in Botswana Time, I figured it might make for a good read. Randall is a pretty keen observer, he is an ebullient fellow, and occassionally he is a wonderfully descriptive, if a bit purple, writer. I imagine that many of you have surmised that there is a "but . . ." attached to all of this guarded praise, and you are right. In the wake of the James Frey imbroglio I wondered why people were so shocked: I've rarely read a memoir that did not make me pause and say "wait a second . . .". In some ways, it is the nature of the genre. One of my major pet peeves is nonfiction authors in non-footnoting works who recount conversations. I know it may be a trifling complaint, but this book provides a prime example that almost led me to flush the book down a plane loo. You see, Randall travelled to southern Africa to attend a friend's bachelor party and wedding. He had no intention of staying, certainly no intention of living in Botswana, a place he knew nothing about, and above all, if his chronology of events and happenstance is to be believed (and since it takes up about half of his book, it had damned well better be believable) he had no idea that he would write a book. Yet somehow he is able to recount drunken pub conversations, two-year-old discussions, and inconsequential asides in full. Furthermore, and this is most vexing of all, his characters all speak with stock national characteristics. For example, he has an Aussie travel companion who apparently says "mate" every sentence, oftentimes twice. I'd have to beat him with a wallabee carcass after about two days if he really talked like that all the time. It is as if Randall feels the need through these little tics to remind us that this is the rugged-outback-travelling-gung-ho-Aussie. This is the proper but intrepid Brit headmaster. This is the racist Afrikaner. Fortunately, this trend has gotten better as the book has progressed, but at the stage I have reached he is now ensconsed in the Botswana school that he is going to teach in and that makes up the brunt of the book, and I wade trepidatiously into his inevitable conversations with Africans. By the way, Theroux is a conversation quoter as well. And at times it is unbelievable. But there are two caveats: First, Theroux knew full well precisely what he was doing and that a book or other project would come from his travels. Thus, he took notes. Second, compared to those in Randall's book, Theroux's conversations don't noisomely remind us of cartoonish traits that supposedly embody anyone from place X. For all I know, his conversations might all be imagined as well, but Theroux is better with the sleight of hand if that is the case. Whatever the situation, writers, please, if you are producing nonfiction, there are ways to make clear what was said in conversations without imagining them or stuffing everything into quotation marks that imply a reality that does not exist. If you are reading this, Bob Woodward, it really is sage advice. B-

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go: I am only seventy-five pages in, so lots can happen. But to put it in the simplest terms possible, I have not been this affected by a book since I read Ian McEwen's Atonement, my favorite new work of fiction in the last decade. This is my first exposure to Ishiguro, who is probably most famous for The Remains of the Day, and I can already tell that more of his books will pass through my hands. His pacing is brilliant, his storytelling masterful, and his characters sympathetic and realistic (given that Randall's supposedly real characters are not realistic, this is high praise). Told from the vantage point of Kathy, a former student at a British boarding school, Never Let Me Go has a constant undertone of pending heartbreak, or perhaps simply of foreboding. Kathy drops little hints throughout her recounting of her school days to let you know that hers is not an ordinary school, theirs were never intended to be ordinary lives, and their futures are likely already spelled out for them. As I say, I have many pages to go, and books have promised but not delivered before. But unless he inserts fighting robots or something (and even then, maybe he can write his way out of it), Ishiguro earns an A+ so far. Go buy this book.

V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas: I think I have written about this one before as well. I started reading it the last time I was in southern Africa, in December or January, and for whatever reason, it never really grabbed me. I'm sure it was my fault, not Naipaul's. In any case, I stopped reading it because I had assigned his wondrous A Bend in the River for my Modern Africa class in the spring and I knew that would cast its spell on me. But I picked Guerrillas up again for this trip, and while it still never fully took hold, one does get a reminder of why Naipaul is so exalted. He is an exquisite writer. Basically the novel follows the tumultuous political and personal circumstances faced by a couple of expats in an unnamed chaos-torn caribbean nation. One expat is a woman from London who falls for a somewhat inscrutable white former political prisoner and resistance fighter from apartheid South Africa. Things devolve quickly. There is violence. I think Naipaul's intended statement is a little fuzzy, but that may well be the point. B

Geoffrey Douglass, The Game of their Lives: The Untold Story of the World Cup's Greatest Upset: Want to annoy a Brit? Of course you do! Bring up the 1950 World Cup to them. That was the one in which a plucky band of overmatched underdogs who played for local clubs funded by funeral homes and car dealerships somehow managed to upset the mighty British soccer empire. Douglass intersperses a rehashing of the game with the far more compelling stories of the men who played for that US team. In particular his book is an homage to an America long gone (if it ever was -- there is a bit of a sepia-toned coat to his telling) in which neighborhoods, flag, and family are cherished. I wanted to read a couple of books on soccer during the World Cup, and I got this one from my friend and colleague Jaime. It is a very short book (maybe 150 pages) and a fast read, though it still lasted longer for me in this World Cup than the US team did. (Ouch.)B+

I am happy that the French beat the Portuguese. My early prediction: Italy 2, France 1 in regulation time. But I am wavering -- Zidane looks like a man possessed right now. And to all of my English readers: 1950 World Cup.

The Break?: South African Politics and the Potential Earthquake

I have said it for years. The dominance of the African National Congress will not wane as the result of a challenge from the right. The days of the National Party and its inconsequential successors is past. There is room and a need for true conservatism (which I will then heartily oppose) in South Africa, but it cannot rise from the ashes of the Afrikaner Broederbond, the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or the Nats, new, old, gereformeerde or otherwise. The challenge, then will come from the left. More accurately it will come as the result of a break in the tripartite alliance that makes up the ANC -- the ANC, the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). I am certainly not an original thinker on this point, but these are observations I have been making since 1997 so I feel some sense that my construction of the discussion, at least, is my own.

The reason one can envision such a break is because recently both COSATU and the SACP have been making noise indicating that they could, possibly, at some point, consider breaking fron the alliance and going forward on their own in the political waters. That it has taken this long, and that it might never come to pass, is testament to the hold that power has on any constituency that has it. Being in the ANC fold is a virtual guarantee of access, status, and viability -- of, in essence, the concrete benefits of being in the catbird seat. COSATU and the SACP have always been second among equals, however, and this has long chafed the leadership of these organizations that, rightly, remind us of their vital role in the long liberation struggle.

This last point cannot be overstated. I know that many of my readers place themselves in the ardent anti-Communist camp, a standing that generally is the right one. For reasons too obvious to explore here, when Americans think of Communists we think of the Soviets, or possible China. Those, especially the Soviets, posed a real and serious threat and embodied the ultimate evil. In that context, I too am an anti-Communist. But the South African example is a significant exception, because almost universally the Communists in South Africa subsumed the idea of class revolution to the necessary fight against racial dominance. In so doing, they contributed greatly to providing both an intellectual framework and a multi-racial dynamic that proved vital to the ANC. It is worth noting that the SACP was virtually the only organization to which white South Africans could belong and contribute to the long fight against apartheid. On top of all of this, the explanatory apparatus of socialism really did resonate in South Africa, and for good reason: The apartheid system was many things, most of them bad. One of the most significant of its grotesqueries was that its very existence was based on the existence and ruthless exploitation of masses of black labor. Capitalism, free markets -- these quintessential components of liberalism were a farce for black South Africans. There was nothing free about South Africa's markets, a point that a succession of American presidential administrations never understood, which is remarkably obtuse. Furthermore, white South African anti-Communism was ardent -- in significant ways, far more so than in the US. This too made the National Party's rule seem appealing to the United States. The problem was that it was an anti-Communism borne of the most vicious racism, yet another point that myopic American governments failed to grasp in their simplistic use of Africa as a Cold War battlefield. In sum, then, as long as they subsumed Communist ideology to the anti-Apartheid fight, and they did for the duration, the SACP were the good guys in the decades after 1948.

It is in recognition of this that the ANC has bent over backward to accomodate, or at least pay lip service to the SACP and to the socialist-sympathetic unions of COSATU. Plus the ANC has always known that keeping these groups in the fold maximized their own power. But times are changing. This relationship that for so long has been fruitful is wearing out its usefulness. It may finally be time for a change.

The SACP is antsy to push a socialist agenda. It is an agenda that, while it has some fruitful points, would, if implemented in toto, be an utter disaster in the one country that Africans across the continent simply cannot afford to go awry. COSATU rightly emphasizes the rights of workers, but like all unions is largely unconcerned with masses who live on the agricultural fringes and with those not within its ranks, which is to say, a majority of South Africans, apoint that COSATU elides because to do otherwise would raise some uncomfortable questions.

South Africa has a parliamentary legislature that the ANC has dominated since 1994. I surmise that even after a break of the alliance the ANC will continue to do so. But its support levels will surely drop to or below where they were after the 1994 elections when the Nats and Inkatha Freedom Party, the one defunct the other irrelevant, drew support. This is to my mind a good thing. The ANC with too much support, which translates to too much power, frightens me. I'd like to think that South Africa is different from other African states, its leaders more sage, its democracy more stable, its juduciary and military more independent. But power is power, and when too much of it is consolodated for too long, such power becomes dangerous. Such a break would be especially good if it could be amicable -- if COSATU and SACP can maintain an alliance on a large number of issues while pursuing their own course where there is divergence.

This is all by way of description -- what I see happening -- rather than prediction, though I have long held that in the long run the alliance would be untenable if the partners ultimately chose to care about more than simply maintaining their grip on the levers of control. It is a dynamic well worth watching in the weeks, months and years to come.

On matters seemingly more prosaic, but almost assuredly of more immediate interest to a huge number of South Africans, the Springboks face off against the French in a rugby test match at 2:00. Just enough time for me to head back, drop some things off, and hit a (hopefully warm) pub for the clash.