Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches from White Africa

Rating:
Summary: Map to Coming Chaos in Africa
Review: Corruption, violence, and AIDS will throw most of Africa which is below the Sahara desert into chaos over the next 10-15 years, this book is an effective guide for it.

Rating:
Summary: Informative and entertaining reading
Review: I'm an avid reader of books on southern Africa, and this is one of my favorites -- I'm actually in the process of reading it for a second time. Boynton's stories about 'white Africans' of varying backgrounds come together to form a thorough picture of the decline of white minority rule in Africa from the 1960s to the present. The sections on Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the author's native country, are of particular interest and value. Boynton's conclusions are controversial, to be sure, but they are refreshingly so, adding a perspective to the debate on Africa's past, present and future that are rarely expressed. If you're interested in the subject, it's well-worth trying to find a copy of this great book.

Rating:
Summary: Map to Coming Chaos in Africa
Review: Now that we know Homo Sapiens come from Africa and Neanderthals are a native of Europe that became extinct, we can appreciate the complexities Graham Boynton is reaching for in this book. The white South Africans may have been greedy and grossly insensitive to the black Africans, but they brought them into the 21st Century and increased their lot materially though they eviscerated them spiritually. While most whites benefited from apartheid, many risked their lives opposing it while others viewed it as a guilt-inducing form of survival and they emerge a more complex and human breed than we were lead to believe -- especially, that is, the Afrikaner majority of the minority whites whose roots trace back to 1654. What were they supposed to think when the whites in power viewed the chaos of the Africa north of them? Boynton says that when the first refugees from Congo arrived in Zimbabwe with tales of unimaginable brutality they could have begun a program of educating the blacks so that when the day came, they would be better partners in a transition to majority rule. Instead, the whites closed the doors hoping to ensure blacks would never have power. But by trying to ensure they didn't give up power and go the way of the Neanderthals, the whites evincing a lot of Neanderthal behavior. Now, after black rule has come to South Africa as well as Zimbabwe, a residual Neanderthal behavior survives in the form of brooding Saturday night "razzes" and a taste for senseless barbrawls. Yet the sweet paradox of the book is that you wind up feeling sympathetic for this ill-fated white tribe. They are split in two: one part of them swearing they were right about "swart gevaar" (black danger), that predilection for African countries to go to hell in handbasket with corruption and crime (two big issues in South Africa today), and spending their evenings crying in their beer at out-of-the-way "bush bars." Others are willing, against great odds, to go on with the show as cops who really get the job done and game rangers who know how preservation really ought to work (hint: make it self-funding through legitimate game sales and let the do-gooders in New York and Oslo or wherever, stay there and shut up). While perhaps not as studied as Allister Spark's "The Mind South Africa", a standard liberal analysis of the Afrikaner personality, it is far more vivid. Boynton's book does not play to a political chorus line either, which is what makes it refreshing. Some will argue that anything less than adulation for the "cause"--black majority rule--and its lead players is "right wing" but then they haven't been hijacked lately or had to put their family on the next plane out of the country while praying to get a green card. Nor have they tried to start a political party in Zambia or buy their choice of car in Zimbabwe. Then there's the 20 year war in Angola..... You get the idea that the Neanderthals would have had a better chance if they had borrowed some good ideas from the Homo Sapiens and vice versa. And in a strange way you also get the idea that if both sides come to terms with the fact that while apartheid was wrong, the context was also forbidding: the whites were being asked to bridge a culture gap measured not just in centuries but in Ages. Underlying the stories of Cuckooland is the unexpected idea: that the last whites in Africa (the original title of the book) turn quiet, inward, feral and disappear in the wilds. The best white cops we hear about are the ones working in game control, while the most centered whites appear are the ones in animal conservation. Even the Afrikaners drowning their sorrows at bush bars suggest the possibility of going out into the wilds before getting their heads straight and getting back on track to take up a realistic role in the new South Africa. Unfortunately, its just a thought and is not one that any post apartheid writer has been able to make stick: Rian Malan's 1990 book, "My Traitor's Heart" which addressed the need for whites to confront their black majority not just as equals but as friends, could not (Death becomes the whites who went native and lived in the black countryside.) Sebastian Mallaby in "After Apartheid" (1992) affected a belief in true normality as what would happen after apartheid--nothing. Rather than end on a negative note Boynton lets his own dream give the finale: it is a kind surreal episode where the whites simply recede and then disappear, leaving one last white man who emerges, astonished at the sight of an all black South Africa. The question is whether that is a dream or a nightmare--and if it is a nightmare, whose nightmare is it, the blacks or the whites?

Rating:
Summary: Voortrek to nowhere?
Review: What a waste of valuable stoutheartedness the story of the Afrikaners is! These incredibly tough pioneers carved a stern Calvinist home for themselves out of native territories and raw bush, survived defeat at the hands of the British Empire at its peak, and hung on to their atavistic racial creed decades after it was abandoned elsewhere in the anglosphere.

In retrospect, the idea of a pluralistic democracy in Zimbabwe was foredoomed, given Africans' historic loyalty to their own tribes. The only example of democracy they saw firsthand was the Anglo-Afrikaner model, which had done them few favors in 350 years. And yet, majority rule swiftly became even worse. One watches current events in the new South Africa with apprehension, fearing a replay of Zimbabwe's slide into post-apartheid chaos.

Boynton honestly sets down his trepidation as lawlessness overtook former police state. He later details the corruption that the new government engaged in, and the reeling in of the press. Could things have possibly come out right?

South Africa and Rhodesia certainly had their chances. Boynton describes his love of his African home, his activist youth which ended with him being smuggled out of Rhodesia, evading arrest, and his homesickness during his exile. He also includes some vignettes about dissenters who were not so fortunate, low class Afrikaner desperadoes, and the fight against poachers on southern Africa's big game preserves. He closes with the quixotic incursion of some diehard Boer irregulars into a neighboring black homeland, in which three were killed. Thankfully, he doesn't try to sum up What It All Means, instead letting the spectacle speak for itself. Whether South Africa can truly become the multi-party democracy everyone hopes for, or if it will become a tribalism-driven dictatorship, is unknowable. But what a long strange trip it's been...

Rating:
Summary: Voortrek to nowhere?
Review: What a waste of valuable stoutheartedness the story of the Afrikaners is! These incredibly tough pioneers carved a stern Calvinist home for themselves out of native territories and raw bush, survived defeat at the hands of the British Empire at its peak, and hung on to their atavistic racial creed decades after it was abandoned elsewhere in the anglosphere.

In retrospect, the idea of a pluralistic democracy in Zimbabwe was foredoomed, given Africans' historic loyalty to their own tribes. The only example of democracy they saw firsthand was the Anglo-Afrikaner model, which had done them few favors in 350 years. And yet, majority rule swiftly became even worse. One watches current events in the new South Africa with apprehension, fearing a replay of Zimbabwe's slide into post-apartheid chaos.

Boynton honestly sets down his trepidation as lawlessness overtook former police state. He later details the corruption that the new government engaged in, and the reeling in of the press. Could things have possibly come out right?

South Africa and Rhodesia certainly had their chances. Boynton describes his love of his African home, his activist youth which ended with him being smuggled out of Rhodesia, evading arrest, and his homesickness during his exile. He also includes some vignettes about dissenters who were not so fortunate, low class Afrikaner desperadoes, and the fight against poachers on southern Africa's big game preserves. He closes with the quixotic incursion of some diehard Boer irregulars into a neighboring black homeland, in which three were killed. Thankfully, he doesn't try to sum up What It All Means, instead letting the spectacle speak for itself. Whether South Africa can truly become the multi-party democracy everyone hopes for, or if it will become a tribalism-driven dictatorship, is unknowable. But what a long strange trip it's been...