The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa

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Summary: Refreshing Insight into African Politics
Review: ...about ethnic conflict with all its tragic consequences, power-and spoils-hungry predators, and outsider opportunists, this is the one.

Berkeley is very effective at showing how chaos is the fertile ground in which warlords sprout and tyranny and terror are the means through which they exploit the circumstances to the maximum.

I rate him alongside Michael Ignatieff as one of the best writer-analysts of the humanitarian crises that present perhaps the most compelling international (and moral) challenge of our time. I have work on these issues for the past decade and would put this book at or near the top of any reading list.

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Summary: Frustrating but informative
Review: Although I share Berkeley's concern for the people of Africa, in my opinion he is way to eager to prove an initial thesis - that Africa's basic problem is "outside" influence. Like many young idealists who care passionately about their cause, Berkeley is highly selective about what is included in the book, although he does make an admirable effort to give targets of his criticism an opportunity to state their case (no small concession).

Over one-third of the book - nearly 100 pages - is devoted to Liberia, a tiny country with less than three-tenths of one percent of the continent's population. The reason for this is that it is simply not chic to criticize the West unless you can find some way of demonizing the U.S. in the process. This is hard to do in the case of Africa, since the U.S. was never a colonial power there, but Liberia is a country in which the U.S. has had a special interest over the years, which makes it a juicy target. It doesn't hurt that Liberia's worst problems began just as the Reagan administration was being installed, although connecting the dots becomes a bit of a stretch (Berkeley criticizes the U.S. both for supporting the Doe regime in 1986 and then failing to support the regime three years later).

This touches on the main problem with the book, namely that it is a long litany of skin-deep complaints without any exploration of alternatives. Certainly it is easy to criticize the U.S. for supporting the kleptocratic Zairian dictator Mobutu, but how would the country have been any better without Mobutu? Zaire would most certainly have fallen under Soviet influence (if not outright anarchy) and, as we see in places like Guinea and Ethiopia, this would not have been any better for the people or the economy. Failure to hold the line in the Third World would simply have prolonged the Cold War, and the Marxists were far less supportive of human and political rights than was the West.

Berkeley does not mention any Communist countries or African disputes that fail to fit the model, such as that between the Shona and Matabele. His foray into South Africa is an amazing piece of gerrymandering that manages to portray the ANC as a victim of Inkatha aggression. He accomplishes this by focusing only on the Natal area, an Inkatha stronghold in "Zululand." Tough questions are put to the Inkatha leadership on the violence in their district, yet there is no mention of what was happening in the rest of SA. ANC atrocities, such as the Shell House and St. James's church massacres, are neatly sanitized from Berkeley's version of events. One wonders if he ever heard of the Black Consciousness movement and why it no longer exists in SA.

Perhaps instead of trying to fit Africa into a politically correct cliché, Berkeley would have done better to challenge his own preconceptions and educate the reader in the process. There is no harm in providing the total picture, but a dedication to do otherwise, simply for the purpose of influencing the audience, insults those who feel that they can be trusted with the true details of a complex situation.

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Summary: At last, a western reporter who doesn't condescend to Africa
Review: As an african who is tired of reading self-fulfilling in-anities in the western press about how africans are programmed to commit "tribal violence" on each other, this book is a refreshing breath of clean air. It shows how political elites, and their backers use ethnicity as a means for holding on to power. It details how conscience is completely absent in the people who draft the foreign policies to support the dictators of the day, taking former assistant secretary of state Chester Crocker as an example. It also looks at the cynical manipulation of ethnic tensions by erstwhile "leaders" to get power (such as Charles Taylor of Liberia), or to maintain it (Mobutu of Zaire). (Mobutu is given praise by president after president in his 33 years of looting, one calling him "an uncommonly wise leader). The author repeats his observation that most african "tribes" live together in peace, but that conflict is manufactured by the elites. He gives the example of Liberia, where two "tribes" were involved in killing each other, but how just across the border, which is nothing more than a dried out this river bed, the same two tribes live together with no problem. This book is a must read for Africans, africanists, and most of all, western journalists who only superficially write on Africa.

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Summary: An Unpleasant, Well-Done Look at Evil
Review: Bill Berkeley has taken an unpleasant subject and poured his life time's work into this examination of evil and distilled it into this well done book, The Graves are Not Yet Full (Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa). The author has earned the right to tell these stories and does well by them as a journalist. He concentrates on the Big Men, the tyrants whose personalities are behind the anarchy and slaughter in Africa, and shows how the situations are manipulated by these men (and this includes, pointedly, a representative of the United States in the chapter on the assistant secretary of state) to maintain their persoanal power at the expense of the people of whom they are responsible. It is frightening story and, despite the author's small ray of hope added at the end, seemingly impossible to change. This is a great book for those who want to see the situation in Africa beyond the meager news reports of victims and villians.

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Summary: Genocide without regrets
Review: Bill Berkeley, who has reported on Africa for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Washington Post, provides us with an in depth, first-hand account of the last decades of the twentieth century in some of the most violent places in the world. Interspersing interviews with the powerful and humble with historical sketches, he conducts a harrowing tour of Liberia, Congo-Zaire, South Africa, the Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda. Despite the endless slaughters, Africa, he shows us, is not the "dark", mysterious or frighteningly "other" place we commonly think. It is unfamiliar. For that we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Berkeley's thesis is that Africa's problems do not originate in ancient "tribal" animosities. Without providing historical background (though he indicates where it is to be found), he begins by observing that, before the arrival of colonizing Europeans, Africa was a functioning continent, that is, neither heaven nor hell, but functioning. The colonizers - he speaks primarily of the British and Belgians - ruled through what might be called "divide and exploit." Where there were tribal differences, the Europeans created animosity by using one group as their proxy to oppress another. Where there were no tribes, the Europeans created them, as in Rwanda, and set one over the other. The colonizers thought this worked well, and, from their skewed view, it did. They made their money and got out, telling themselves that ripping off a continent was the same as civilizing it. Those who'd been unfortunate enough to have served their colonial sentence at the bottom of the heap tended toward resentment. Those who has served as the Euroman's proxies tended toward fear. What we like to call "tribal" is nothing more than post-Colonial class war.

And we all - Americans, Europeans, Soviets and Africans - love to manipulate the situation for private gain: the ripping off of Africa, chapter two. That's the story Berkeley tells and tells very well. Whether he's interviewing an American policy expert who invokes "tribalism" to justify supporting the most evil thugs and refusing to stop the slaughter, or the South African police who use "tribalism" to set African against African to keep South Africa under white domination, or the African leader (who is likely to possess a degree, even a doctorate, from a prestigious American university) who rises to power on a slogan of "tribalism", Berkeley shows that "tribalism" is a myth for all seasons.

Berkeley is not shy about confronting leaders with the massive death their quests for power have spawned. Each bemoans the violence, yet each answers that he has no regrets about his role in it. None. Most of those interviewed are now dead, dead of conflict or "natural" causes. Those who remain among the living will, in the not too distant future, be dead. Their lives, their slaughters, their shallowness and indifference can be summed up in a few dozen pages. They created nothing except death.

The Africa Berkeley reveals is not so different from the "rest of the world." "Tribes", corporations, governments tend to fall somewhere along the spectrum of mafia-like organizations. Africa is like everywhere else, only, for now, a little more so.

The only criticism I would offer is I would like to have learned about the resisters, those who struggle for food, housing, medical care, freedom and human rights. That Berkeley thought them outside the scope of the book tends, despite his own best efforts, to reenforce the stereotype of the "African."

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Summary: A Look At Another Side
Review: This book is a stunning and gruesome portrait of genocide in Africa. Reporter Bill Berkely travelled to the war zones of Africa to meet the victims of racial violence and the inflictors of such violence. Berkeley's focus is more on the criminals and their actions that effect their nation. The interviews and experiences Berkely had with these evil individuals are fascinating and terrifying. If you have never come into real and forceful evil, you should read this book and learn what is going on on the other side. It is also good to be informed on this subject so that help can be given where it is needed.

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Summary: "Africa is a nation with a lot of diseases" - George W Bush
Review: This oft quoted remark the president made last year is the epitome of what Berkeley calls the "conventional American conception of Africa as a unitary landscape of unremitting despair." The president and his conventional...wisdom? is not the target of Berkeley's book though. The author says that part of the purpose of THE GRAVES ARE NOT YET FULL is a "pointed rebuttal" to Afro-pessimists, the prime example being Robert D Kaplan and his book THE ENDS OF THE EARTH.

Similarly to Michela Wrong and her book - IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR KURTZ, Berkeley sees a lot of the problems in Africa as having foreign origins. Much moreso than Wrong though, he develops on the theme that violence and ethnic warfare are not the results of some "ancient tribal hatreds" in the words of Kaplan, but are in fact organized, manipulated, or orchestrated devices used by various African leaders as a means of exerting control and maintaining power. Ethnic conflicts in Africa he plainly says "are all provoked from on high."

He illustrates this point by developing a series of profiles on the manipulative leaders and tales about the victims of their crimes. Berkeley is pretty blunt in his reporting and with his words. He starts off by saying that "this is a book about evil". It should be no surprise then that he is willing to put names to these "creatures of evil". Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire is here, but again, this book is broader than Wrongs', - hers stopped there, but Berkeley looks at South Africa, Liberia, Angola, Sudan and Rwanda. He names Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, Jonas Savimbi, Hasan Turabi and John Garang. It's not just Africans that are responsible though and in an entire chapter devoted to the role of former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa in the Reagan administration Chester Crocker, we see Berkeley's thesis developed to the full. While not calling the man a war criminal he nevertheless says that he was "the kind of figure many war criminals depend on: an articulate front man, capable of putting an intellectual gloss on otherwise crude power politics." Berkeley believes Crocker is morally guilty of crimes against humanity for supporting the despotic and murderous rule of Samuel Doe in Liberia in the late 1980's.

With all these examples of criminal regimes, evil rulers, and morally corrupt and culpable supporters, it's possible to believe that this is an unremittingly bleak book and that the author holds out no hope for Africa. Not so at all. Berkeley says that "not all the news from Africa is bad, and much of it is hopeful." Yoweri Museveni and Uganda are put forth as an example of what a peaceful, democratic, African future might look like.

All told this is a well researched, broad ranging book which develops an interesting thesis on the causes of what seems to be such an unyielding problem. Berkeley's rational, well written and very plausible argument does offer hope for Africa. While it is true that despotic regimes and evil rulers are a significantly widespread and sometimes well embedded sore, the truth is that once identified and named, a cure can be sought for any disease. This is a much more manageable (and realistic) beginning point than the hand-wringing, non-solution offered by viewing Africa as a single entity plagued with irrational violence and unfathomable tribal slaughters.