A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa

The former bureau chief of the New York Times in West and central Africa, Howard French has written a stirring account of his experiences reporting on African issues during the nineties. Moving from Bamako to Monrovia to Kinshasa, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa attempts to give a human face to the tragedies and coups d'etat—and to go beyond the themes of "crisis reporting" that contribute to the very limited view Americans have of Africa.

French's work belongs to several genres at once: journalism, travel writing, autobiography, and history. His chapters are organized geographically, and his hard-hitting reports are interwoven with brief cultural commentaries. The result is a book that provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African issues: politics, colonialism, neocolonialism, health, and culture. He touches upon historical achievements but spends much of his time exposing the machinations of governments, uncovering the complicity of Western foreign policy and capitalist intervention in Africa's many corrupt regimes.

A general New York Times readership and students can benefit greatly from French's insights, but what about African intellectuals and Africanist scholars? The latter, familiar with the political, social, and historical issues French explores, may be more interested in his personal engagement with Africa. As an experienced journalist and an African American, he has a point of view that unites the personal with the political. This aspect of his narrative is pithy and subtle, although in the end it is the journalist that prevails over the autobiographer or cultural critic.

French emphasizes the volatility and tragic history of Africa by focusing on the "hot spots," from Ebola in Congo to civil war in Liberia; he relegates to the periphery stories such as his interview with the novelist Sony Labou Tansi or his excursion to the great mosque and archaeological site at Djenne, Mali. This strategy leaves readers hoping for further commentary, especially those familiar with French's ability to probe more deeply beneath the surface than the "parachute journalists" who drop in only to document another in a series of "African crises." He does reflect upon the usual condition of reporters on the continent working "in nearly complete ignorance of their surroundings" (128), but for the most part such views must be read between the lines.

A Continent for the Taking begins with autobiographical reflections on French's youthful travels in West Africa with his brother. He describes the experience of wrestling with African difference and with African Americanness. "Why did people as light-skinned as we insist that we were black Americans every time they called us blancs?" he asks rhetorically (15), although he leaves the reader to wonder about this phenomenon; the question of race and of relations between Africans and African Americans is left unexplored. He goes on to chronicle the aura of exoticism that envelops him in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire) on a visit in the seventies: "For a young American out on the town by himself, the packed nightclub with its throbbing African sounds and colliding bodies seemed like the very definition of the exotic" (4). He and his brother search for the "real" Africa, in terms familiar to readers of modernist anthropology and modern media, but he comments, "Later I came to distrust this concept of authenticity deeply" (6). Without attempting to address the rich plurality of contemporary African cultures and identities as a counterpoint to limiting conceptions of an "authentic" Africa, however, French settles for themes all too familiar to media critics (and to readers of Fanon), such as the role of Tarzan in the shaping of Western views of Africans.

The reader may miss French's point about the problematic Western temptation to sustain ingrained notions about the exoticism of African culture. He hints at the psychological process he himself must undergo and later moves on to its more pernicious manifestations, borrowing Chinua Achebe's observation that Western psychology cannot resist the need to condemn Africa to "a place of negations," since "white racism against Africa is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked" (19). Again, while raising the crucial points that so many African theorists have made about this psychological phenomenon, he offers little in the way of a theoretical or personal perspective on the constellation of issues concerning Africa and the West: questions of intercultural understanding, African American identity, reparations, or Africanity. Unlike the Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg's startlingly pessimistic book Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (1997), French's account resists sweeping conclusions. He denies the overwhelming responsibility of "speaking for the race," to be sure, and usually leaves speculations on cultural identity to others.

In general, French deals in the currency of the journalist or historian: facts. Reporting that King Leopold's colonization of Congo killed as many as ten million Congolese in the space of a decade, he joins those who maintain that the Belgian ruler should be considered, along with Hitler and Stalin, among the twentieth century's most vicious dictators and killers. He frames the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, who stands with Nigeria's Sani Abacha and Liberia's Samuel Doe in the line-up of Africa's most rapacious heads of state, in the context of the tragic history of the mineral-rich Congo, from the Portuguese conversion and enslavement of Kongo to the Belgian–U.S. plot that destroyed Patrice Lumumba, arguably the most important leader to emerge in postcolonial central Africa.

There are moments in the text that seem to degenerate into a Graham Greenesque idiom of sun-drenched outposts ("I had dealt with more presidential goons than I cared to recall" [153]), on the one hand, and moments that blossom into full-blown historical analysis, on the other. French observes that "people who are ignorant of Africa, or merely hostile to the idea of black achievement, are quick to ridicule anyone who finds anything of merit in the continent's past.... A favorite prop in this endeavor has been to focus on the wildest theories of the so-called Afrocentrics, a mostly black group of scholars who have often painted ludicrously idealized pictures of the African past. At heart, what this ridicule amounts to is a clever game of concealment, whose aim is the erasure or covering up of what should be Europe's own great shame" (19). Musing on the architectural marvel that is the mosque at Djenne, Mali, French seems to concur with the Afrocentric agenda to document Africa's cultural achievements, but at the same time to assert that the ancient ruins of Djenné-Jeno reveal an advanced culture that borrows nothing from Europe or Egypt, reflecting instead specifically sub-Saharan achievement.

Reminding readers of the contemporary implications of colonialism and neocolonialism, French arrives at his primary thesis early in the work (18): "The question that goes unasked in Western news coverage of Africa, and in most of the other ritualized hand-wringing over the continent's plight, is why should anyone be surprised that the violent European hijacking of Africa's political development resulted in misery and chaos?" French persuades readers of all stripes to pose this question for themselves and shows that in documenting the tragedy, he can offer a message of hope—for the reinstatement of self-determination in Africa.