[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 102 (Wednesday, June 21, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8831-S8833]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                        WHO CARES ABOUT AFRICA?

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, recently, the magazine America, 
published by the Society of Jesus, ran an article by its associate 
editor, Father James Martin, titled ``Who Cares About Africa?''
  Because it contains so much common sense about a continent that we 
are not paying enough attention to, I ask to have it reprinted in the 
end of my brief remarks.
  The reality is every continent on the face of the Earth is making 
gradual improvement in its quality of life and standard of living, with 
one exception: Africa.
  The irony is as democracies have spread in Africa recently--an almost 
totally unrecognized phenomenon--instead of helping those fledgling 
democracies, we are cutting back on aid in general and aid to Africa 
more specifically.
  It is a flawed policy both in humanitarian terms and in political 
terms.
  I urge my colleagues to read Father Martin's article.
  At this point, I ask that the article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:

                        Who Cares About Africa?

       ``Kwanza begins today,'' the radio announcer said, 
     launching into an explanation of the cycle of January 
     African-American feast days. ``The word Kwanza,'' he said 
     brightly, ``means `first' in African.'' I groaned. He meant 
     Swahili, of course.
       Can you imagine any reasonably educated person saying that 
     primo means ``first'' in European? But not knowing beans 
     about Africa is taken for granted among many Americans. 
     Before I went to Kenya for a two-year stay, a (well-educated) 
     friend asked me if Kenya was in Nairobi. This is, to continue 
     the analogy, like asking if Italy is in Rome. After I 
     returned to the States, someone mentioned how exciting it 
     must have been to be in Kenya when they elected Nelson 
     Mandela.
       But on this count, I had been just as guilty. When I began 
     working with refugees in Nairobi, I had to ask them where 
     their home countries were. ``Sudan is, uh, north of here, 
     right?'' I finally bought a map.


                           the dark continent

       American interest in Africa, it would seem, is piqued only 
     during times of crisis: Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda. Some of 
     this is laudable. Only the most cynical would say that 
     Americans were not moved to compassion after seeing pictures 
     of the Rwandan refugees or starving Somalis.
       The problem is that once the United States ceases to be 
     involved, we no longer hear anything about it. It's the 
     flavor-of-the-month syndrome. For example, as soon as the 
     United States pulled out of Somalia in March 1994, Somalia 
     dropped out of the news, giving the false impression that 
     things were just fine there. And, just as predictably, when 
     U.S. troops returned to Somalia in March of this year to 
     escort the remaining U.N. troops out, it was back in the 
     news. As a result, the American public's understanding of 
     Africa is based primarily on these short-term involvements. 
     And while U.S. policy mavens may be more well informed, the 
     public's misunderstanding often drives policy makers into 
     responding inappropriately.
       Even the level of involvement and awareness among African 
     Americans has been a disappointment to Africans. Some Kwanza 
     celebrations, important as they are for fostering a sense of 
     values and cultural continuity, can end up as grab bags of 
     various traditions--Kente cloth from Ghana, Swahili from East 
     Africa, history from Egypt--and may sometimes run the risk of 
     cultural tourism. Many agree. Makau Mutua is a Kenyan who 
     runs Harvard Law School's Center for Human Rights and also 
     serves as chairman of the Kenyan Human Rights Committee. ``I 
     think the knowledge of African Americans about Africa has to 
     be based on fact, not fiction,'' he told me in a recent 
     conversation.
       But what can we expect? For even the most diligent 
     Africaphiles, it is difficult to find news about Africa in 
     the mainstream media--unless, of course, the United States is 
     involved. They don't call it the Dark Continent for nothing.
       With the exception of a few major newspapers, and magazines 
     like The Economist, the print media all but ignore the 
     tremendous richness of African cultures, to say nothing of 
     the continent's variegated politics. There are 52 African 
     countries, comprised of thousands of ethnic groups with their 
     own languages, spiritualities, traditions, and arts. Even 
     speaking of things ``African'' is misleading, since that 
     adjective is forced to encompass the long-literate Christian 
     traditions of Ethiopia in addition to those of the semi-
     primitive, nomadic East African Maasai tribe in addition to . 
     . . well, you get the picture. By any measure it is a 
     fascinating mix of cultures that is, for the most part, 
     ignored.
       As for television, its coverage runs heavily to the 
     following: famine, poverty, war and especially animals--
     National Geographic-style. (One example: How many stories did 
     you read about Rwanda before last year that didn't have to do 
     with Diane Fossey's gorillas?)
       During my first week in Kenya I met a Somali refugee named 
     Amin. I assumed from my prior CNN education that, like any 
     ``typical'' refugee, he was poor and uneducated, probably 
     illiterate. He certainly looked the part: an unkempt, older 
     man wearing a faded blue suit, shiny with age. I had already 
     started a language course, so I asked him if he would be more 
     comfortable speaking Swahili.
       ``Actually,'' he said in the King's English, ``I would be 
     equally comfortable in English, French or Italian.'' As it 
     turned out, he had received his doctorate in philosophy at 
     the University of Florence. He was, in short, far more 
     educated than I was. Meeting him made me realize how poorly I 
     understood Africa.
       My point is not that we should all dash out and buy armfuls 
     of books about Africa (although it's not such a bad idea). 
     The point is [[Page S 8832]] rather that this ignorance 
     inevitably affects U.S. responses to the various crises that 
     we say concern us so.


                            received wisdom

       Let's take two recent examples: Somalia and Rwanda. As with 
     much of the reporting about Africa, both countries have been 
     viewed through certain lenses, or ``angles,'' replicated over 
     and over by much of the media. Somalia, we were told, is a 
     violent tribal society whose warfare exacerbated a natural 
     shortage of food, causing widespread famine. The United 
     Nations, led by the United States, went in, distributed food 
     and restored some order--that is, until the ungrateful 
     Somalis starting fighting us. Then we had to get out.
       Similarly, Rwanda was presented as a society divided into 
     violent tribes--Hutu and Tutsi--that degenerated into 
     lawlessness when, after the President's assassination, the 
     people rose up and massacred one another. Fortunately, the 
     West came to help out the Rwandan refugees who had fled to 
     Zaire and Tanzania.
       This is not the place for a full explication of the 
     complicated politics of Somalia and Rwanda. But it is 
     instructive to review how accurate the received wisdom was--
     by asking a few experts.
       First, what about the ``violent'' Somali culture? ``This 
     invocation of `mysterious primordial violence' is 
     repellent,'' said Gregory White, professor of political 
     science at Smith College in Massachusetts and a specialist in 
     African politics. ``Somali culture is certainly not bereft of 
     violence, but the intensity of the violence you see today is 
     a decidedly modern phenomenon. It must be seen within the 
     context of the arms infusions--the modern weaponry--provided 
     by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.''
       How about another bit of received wisdom--the West's 
     generous and timely response to Rwanda? I asked Timothy 
     Longman, who teaches at Drake College in Iowa. Professor 
     Longman spent 1992 and 1993 in Rwanda finishing his doctoral 
     thesis on church-state relations in Rwanda. He is one of this 
     country's leading experts on Rwanda. What did he think of the 
     West's response?
       ``It was shameful,'' he said bluntly. ``We could have 
     prevented the disaster and we chose not to.''
       Clearly this is not the familiar media angle. And his 
     explanation of this particular point demonstrates how far the 
     media stories sometimes stray from a more complex truth. 
     According to Professor Longman, the killings were initially 
     carried out by a very small group of Rwandans and could have 
     been stopped. There were, he noted, U.N. troops already in 
     Rwanda at the time, and they could have expanded rather than 
     shrunk their presence.
       ``The people I know who were killed were killed some three 
     weeks after the violence started in Kigali,'' he explained. 
     ``The later massacres happened because they got away with it 
     in Kigali. The West's only concern was to protect their 
     nationals and pull them out of the country--though they were 
     never really threatened. So the message given to the Rwandans 
     was that they could literally get away with murder. And 
     because it was so systematic, because it was not random 
     violence, and because it was not spontaneous violence coming 
     from the people, it could have been stopped. That's something 
     the world community had fully within its capabilities. But 
     they chose not to.''
       Why not? The first reason, he said, derived from our 
     experience in Somalia: not to get involved in a hopeless 
     ``tribal conflict'' with ungrateful people. Smith Hempstone, 
     U.S. Ambassador to Kenya from 1989 to 1993, said in a recent 
     conversation, ``To some degree, I think that's why there 
     wasn't the reaction to Rwanda that there was to Somalia.''
       Which brings us back to a conflict that, according to some, 
     we may have never understood in the first place. ``I think 
     the lessons we learned from Somalia were the wrong ones,'' 
     said Makau Mutua. In other words, misunderstanding bred 
     misunderstanding.
       These admittedly isolated examples point out the difficulty 
     of making judgments about the complex environment of Africa 
     based on the simplistic presentations provided by the 
     mainstream press. Once the media-driven ``angles'' take root 
     in the public mind they become difficult to dislodge and 
     force policy to go where it perhaps should not. Our 
     perceptions of Somalia influenced our response to Rwanda, and 
     will undoubtedly influence the U.S. response to other crises 
     on the continent.


                             other wisdoms

       One touchstone for all of this, I think, is the 
     identification of African conflicts as ``tribal'' and 
     European ones as ``ethnic.'' Have you ever heard of 
     ``tribal'' violence in Northern Ireland? Well, that's 
     religious, you might say. So how does one define a ``tribe''? 
     And do such groups exist only in Africa?
       Professor Longman summed up this idea: ``It is viewed as a 
     `tribal conflict' because Africans are basically a 
     `tribalistic' people, because they're seen as `savages'; 
     they're black. Therefore, they're just going to fight one 
     another and there's nothing we can do. And I think it's a 
     mistaken notion.''
       Why? ``It is a view driven by racism,'' said Makau Mutua. 
     His conclusion was echoed by Professor Longman: ``The more I 
     get into this, the more I interpret it in racial terms, and 
     the more it seems that black people are considered to be 
     expendable. This was what was used to justify colonialism in 
     the first place, and I think the attitudes are still there.''
       The hard facts show that U.S. support for Africa is 
     shockingly low and may fall even lower. According to Terence 
     Miller, director of the Maryknoll Society's Justice and Peace 
     Office in Washington, D.C., U.S. aid to sub-Saharan Africa 
     (all but five African countries) was $802 million in 1994. At 
     first blush that may sound high, but consider the amount that 
     goes to just two countries--Israel and Egypt--$5.2 billion. 
     In other words, 45 countries in Africa receive about one 
     fifth the amount of aid given to those two countries.
       Overall, total U.S. aid to Africa represents a paltry one-
     twentieth of the foreign aid budget, which itself is only 1.3 
     percent of the Federal budget. And the push in Congress, 
     especially among people like Senator Mitch McConnell (Rep., 
     Ky.), incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, 
     is to reduce even this meager amount, while maintaining aid 
     to the Middle East at current levels. ``The world around 
     Africa is fast coming together, and this continent risks 
     becoming the odd man out,'' said Anthony Lake, President 
     Clinton's national security adviser, in The New York Times on 
     March 17.
       Is Africa, then, to be consigned to the dustbin? A recent 
     article by William Finnegan in the March 20 issue of The New 
     Yorker focused on the depressing post-U.N. Somalia legacy of 
     no infrastructure, no government, intense poverty and, as his 
     wrenching article points out, no education for an entire 
     generation of Somali youth. He paints the now familiar 
     African scene of crumbling school buildings surrounded by 
     hundreds of idle children, their formative years slipping 
     away like the sand that blows through the empty classrooms.
       I asked Tim Longman if he planned to return to Rwanda. 
     ``Someday,'' he said. ``But most of the dynamic and inspiring 
     people I worked with are dead.''


                             horror fatigue

       At this point, the concerned but skeptical reader might say 
     either ``Well, it really is their own fault'' or ``There's 
     nothing we can do.'' To respond to the first reaction, it is 
     helpful to remember not only the West's role in propping up 
     various dictatorships throughout the cold war and providing 
     arms, but also its earlier imposition of colonial boundaries, 
     which threw traditionally separate ethnic groups together. 
     Here is a thought exercise: Imagine a foreign power 
     conquering Mexico and Texas, and calling this resulting 
     amalgam of two separate cultures, say, Mexas. After 100 
     years, Mexas gains independence. Do you think the former 
     Mexicans and Texans would get along very well? Probably not.
       Indeed, when Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm were drawing 
     the borders of their East African colonies in 1884, both 
     decided they wanted a big mountain. To provide for this, 
     their ministers simply took out a ruler and drew a line 
     between Mt. Kenya and Mt. Kilimanjaro. The line divided 
     various tribal lands; thus were British East Africa and 
     Tanganyika created. These artificial boundaries endure today 
     as Kenya and Tanzania. Tribes that traditionally lived apart 
     were thrown together against their will. So saying the ethnic 
     tension is the Africans' own fault is more than a little 
     simplistic.
       The second reaction--``There's nothing we can do''--
     reflects a familiar sentiment. Ambassador Hempstone put his 
     finger on this feeling: ``I think that we may have reached 
     the sort of `horror fatigue' situation in which, when you've 
     seen one starving baby, you've seen them all. And that 
     bothers me.''
       Certainly the apparent ingratitude on the part of the 
     Somalis engendered indignant reactions from the American 
     public and the press. Some of this represented righteous 
     indignation, as when Somalis dragged the body of an American 
     soldier through the streets. This is barbaric. But much may 
     be a result of the media's incessant focus on Mogadishu, 
     rather than on other areas where the famine-relief strategy 
     helped to save an estimated 300,000 lives.


                              Into africa

       What can be done in the future? This is a broad question 
     but one that warrants consideration, given that the African 
     continent is, as the director of the Jesuit Refugee Service, 
     Mark Raper, said recently, ``in a state of chronic collapse'' 
     (Am., 3/25).
       Many feel that some sort of limited engagement must be part 
     of our future involvement with Africa, and gone is the hubris 
     of ``nation-buidling'' that went awry in Somalia. Ambassador 
     Hempstone, for example, thinks we must confine ourselves 
     largely to humanitarian efforts. ``I think one of the lessons 
     I've learned is that you don't want to try to re-create a 
     society--nation-building and all that. I'm not sure we're 
     competent to do that.''
       Tim Longman points to another mode of engagement,``I was at 
     a conference a year and half ago with Cardinal Christian Tumi 
     of Cameroon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Protestant and 
     Catholic leaders from Africa. Their unanimous agreement was 
     that if the West wants to help Africa, the best thing they 
     could do right now is stop the international arms trade.''
       Most agree that the mental isolationism that allows 
     Americans to think of Africa as alien has to end. ``I think 
     it's difficult for Americans to be interested in other 
     countries unless they feel that their own futures are 
     interconnected with the futures of others,'' said Makau 
     Mutua. He looks to the various constituencies that have 
     traditionally been concerned with African affairs--church 
     groups, the Africanist community in academia and especially 
     African Americans--to [[Page S 8833]] inform people better 
     about Africa. ``The critical point is that the lack of 
     information in this society about Africa has to be laid at 
     the door of those groups who have the ability to inform 
     people better.''
       One hopeful sign is that the African-American community is 
     increasingly finding its voice on African politics beyond 
     South Africa. Randall Robinson's TransAfrica lobby, created 
     in 1977, has intensified the influence of African Americans 
     in foreign policy. In March Mr. Robinson created a coalition 
     of prominent African Americans who pledged to put pressure on 
     Nigeria's military dictatorship to restore democracy.
       TransAfrica also might do well to pressure the media to 
     cover the continent more thoughtfully. A few newspapers 
     already do. The New York Time's Donatella Lorch has provided 
     consistently good coverage of Rwanda, including insightful 
     reporting on the massacre in late April of 2,000 people in 
     the Kilbeho camp. An excellent series of articles in March in 
     The Philadelphia Inquirer, ``Remnants of a Nation,'' focused 
     on Rwanda one year after the genocide of 1994. The reporter, 
     Glenn Burkins, included the standard angles--refugees, ethnic 
     strife--but also discussed lesser-known aspects of the 
     situation in Rwanda, such as the prison system and the urgent 
     need for international aid to the Rwandan Government. The 
     media can help keep Rwanda from sliding back into oblivion.
       Similarly, the media can help by more fully explicating the 
     problems of current African trouble spots. Thousands are 
     fleeing from ethnic unrest in Burundi; Christians are being 
     massacred (and, recently, crucified) by Government troops in 
     southern Sudan, and 2,000 people have already lost their 
     lives in the past two years in ethnic land clashes in Kenya. 
     Though the Western powers are not yet involved in these 
     crises, learning more from the media could help prevent the 
     sort of spasmodic, misinformed responses to crises that will 
     continue to dog Africa in the future.
       In the end, the problems of Africa remain our problems. The 
     people are, as Jesus would undoubtedly point out, our 
     brothers and sisters, and many of them suffer tremendously. 
     Fully 54 percent of the people of Africa live in absolute 
     poverty. Furthermore, the West has been, to some degree, 
     complicit in Africa's troubles today, not only because of the 
     colonial past but also because of our recent actions there--
     the arms trade and our activities in the cold war. Finally, 
     as Professor White pointed out, ``Even if you just want to be 
     self-interested, the concomitant ignorance of Africa is 
     shortsighted, because in the long run, as more problems 
     continue to emerge, our ignorance will come back to haunt 
     us.''
     

                          ____________________