Africa Unvarnished

Mandela, Mobutu, and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey, by Lynne Duke. (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 294 pp. $24.

What should we think about Africa? The conventional wisdom, nurtured by lurid media stories of war, famine, and disease, is that much of the continent is a basket case. And, to be sure, Africa has had more than its share of conflicts and crises.

But the steady stream of negative images from the continent has also led to something of a backlash among many friends and supporters of Africa in the United States. In recent years, it has become fashionable in the Africanist community—the informal collection of NGOs, academics, and advocacy groups focused on Africa—to decry what has come to be known as "Afro-pessimism," i.e. the tendency of many outside observers to think the worst of the continent and its future.

Lynne Duke states right at the outset of her African memoir, Mandela, Mobutu, and Me: A Newswoman's African Journey, that she does not want to be labeled an Afro-pessimist or an Afro-optimist. Rather, she asserts, she is an "Afro-realist." As the former Johannesburg bureau chief of the Washington Post, she is committed to maintaining a certain journalistic distance from her subject. But, at the same time, she does not pretend to be dispassionate about Africa. A proud African-American woman, she writes with what she describes as "an affectionate concern for and loyalty to the African struggle."

So while she guides us through the major developments in central and southern Africa from 1995-1999, with special attention to South Africa and the former Zaire, Duke seeks not only to convey the journalistic details, but to recount her own personal journey as a black, female, American witness to this slice of history.

The result is a breezy, engaging collection of essays in which Duke gives first-hand accounts of, among other things, the collapse of the Mobutu kleptocracy in Zaire, the humanitarian disaster in the eastern Congo, and the thrilling but fitful first years of post-apartheid South Africa. Her examinations of these topics are not so much in-depth analyses as vivid snapshots enlivened with the kind of personal observations that might have been inappropriate in her bylines at the time. For example, in her chapter on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Duke illuminates both the pathos and the moral compromises of this controversial mechanism, while at the same time making clear her disgust over the cynical way some unrepentant Afrikaners used the TRC to escape responsibility for their crimes.

Other highlights include Duke's gripping account of her forays into the bush of the eastern Congo in search of refugees on the run, and her retelling of the tragicomic, Mandela-mediated shipboard negotiations between Zaire's President Mobutu Sese Seko and then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila in late 1996. Her lengthy profiles of the enigmatic Kabila and of Winnie Mandela are also memorable. On the other hand, her descriptions of everyday expatriate life in Africa—e.g. the awkwardness of relations with household servants and the ubiquity of petty bribery—are sometimes rather banal.

Duke never does meet Mobutu and gets face time with Nelson Mandela only at the tail end of her four-year tour. Still, one can forgive her name-dropping book title in that the shadow of these two African giants—perhaps the most despotic and heroic African leaders, respectively, of the twentieth century—can be seen in almost every major event she covers.

There is yet another shadow present in this book whom Duke, somewhat surprisingly, does not even acknowledge: fellow Washington Post reporter Keith Richburg. In 1998, while Duke was still in Africa, Richburg, the Post's former Nairobi-based correspondent, wrote Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, a riveting and controversial memoir of his Africa posting in the early 1990s. Not unlike Duke, Richburg went to Africa eager to connect with the land of his ancestors. But while Duke came away...