Africa: The People and Politics of an Emerging Continent, and: The Africans (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 255 the intelligence process. In fact, the history of U.S. intelligence has been one of technological accomplishment. Turner's stress on congressional oversight and use of technology is often cited as the most important difference between him and the old school. This may be misleading. Turner distinguishes himself most by his focus on the domestic tension between democracy and intelligence. While acknowledging a threat to free institutions from totalitarian forces, he seems more concerned to protect democracy from its own supposed guardians. The proposals for reform at the end of the book are, with one major exception, not novel. Calls to write a new charter, increase the director's authority, and guarantee his political independence have all been heard before, although Turner's former position lends them added weight. Some suggestions, such as merging the analytical and espionage branches of the cia, reflect a penchant for organizational neatness that may have questionable results. Turner goes beyond the pale, however, when he puts forth a rather bizarre scheme to transform U.S. intelligence into a supranational "Open Skies Agency"—a conception so Utopian that its inclusion will merely serve to frighten wary bureaucrats. Africa: The People and Politics of an Emerging Continent. (Third Edition.) By Sanford J. Ungar. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. pp. 527. The Africans. By David Lamb. New York: Random House, 1982. pp. 363. Reviewed by Gilbert Khadiagala, Ph.D. candidate, SAIS. For over two decades the study of sub-Saharan Africa has been the exclusive province of social scientists. By the end of the 1970s the number of scholarly disputations on Africa's future development patterns was growing in almost direct proportion to the deepening decay of the African systems. Refreshingly, the authors of the books under review treat the ensemble of African political, social, and economic conditions usingjournalistic rather than social science tools. David Lamb's The Africans and Sanford Ungar's Africa proceed from the premise that the contemporary crises bedevilling African development are a function of the diversity and complexity of its history. But while this may sound familiar enough, the extensiveness with which this theme is explored constitutes a marked departure from standard journalistic travelogues. More fundamentally , these books are intended to bridge the gap between African specialists and the general public in the United States. Noting that Africa is still enigmatic to a majority of Americans, Lamb posits that the aloofness that has characterized American policy toward Africa is no longer tenable in an era in which events in that part of the world could reverberate to American domestic life. In similar fashion, Ungar assails both the scholarly and popular misconceptions that, although fashioned when Africa was considered the "dark continent," continue to inform American thinking about Africa. In a succinct historical survey Ungar underlines characteristic American perceptions of Africa. Appropriately titled "An Undistinguished History," this chapter traces the most important strains in U.S. policy toward Africa from the time of slavery, through the Berlin Conference in 1884, decolonization, and up to the contemporary policy of constructive engagement. Throughout this exposition the author contends that Americans have sacrificed African sensibilities for the 256 SAIS REVIEW appeasement of Western powers. Except when a moral constituency has formed around such issues as slavery, starvation, and apartheid, American perceptions of Africa have relegated it to the status ofa "strategic backwater." To set up a framework for comparative analysis of African political systems, both Lamb and Ungar detail the external penetration of traditional African societies, especially the imposition of Western institutions through colonial rule. For Lamb, the persistent problems of young African nations are rooted in the indiscriminate division of Africa into modern states by colonial powers whose interests were primarily economic. Hence, a central difficulty in the transformation of African political forms has been the tension between the creation of viable states and the tradition of tribal regions and primordial loyalties. However , as African governments are unable to undo these artificial boundaries, nationalism exacerbated by interethnic conflicts remains a dominant problem in African politics. Divisive regime changes, symptomatic of a range of deep tensions in the African body-politic, thus impede the process of nation-building, which is a prerequisite...