The Mirror at Midnight:
A South African Journey
By Adam Hochschild
Viking, 309 pages, $19.95
Africa:
Dispatches from a Fragile Continent
By Blaine Harden
Norton, 293 pages, $22.50
Adam Hochschild`s passionate, thoughtful book appears at the right time. Recent news reports from South Africa have concentrated on a wave of black-on- black violence in which hundreds of people have been shot, knifed and clubbed to death. The crocodile tears from many white South Africans and their government are no surprise. But others, no friends to apartheid, may well be wondering if South Africa is about to descend into chronic tribalistic violence that would make majority rule a nightmare even worse than the present.
Hochschild first visited South Africa in 1962. He has returned several times since, writing articles for Mother Jones, the Nation and other mainly left-wing publications. His tenacious interest has been motivated in part, he says, by guilt; his family`s fortune was made in mining in southern Africa. This book draws on his experiences over the years, capped by a two-month trip at the end of 1988.
During that visit, he passed through the upland city of Pietermaritzburg, where the worst black-on-black fighting began. There he learned that the violence did not break out as random tribal clashes; it was the result of a concerted campaign of terror carried out by forces loyal to Chief Gatsha Buthelizi.
Hochschild points out that the violence could not be ”tribal”-all black people in that area are Zulu-speaking. But during the 1980s many of them had grown steadily more attracted to the African National Congress, the liberation movement whose most well-known leader is Nelson Mandela. In May 1987, organizations linked to the ANC declared a two-day general strike in Pietermaritzburg. Ninety percent of the black people in the city stayed home. The successful mass action humiliated Buthelezi and his organization, called Inkatha. His supporters began attacking their neighbors. The ANC sympathizers responded with violence of their own, but the South African police enforced the law with one-sided zeal. The violence, Hochschild concludes, makes good propaganda for the regime by implying that ”these volative people aren`t ready for all the freedoms you mushy-headed liberals overseas want for them.”
Hochschild reveals the intolerable conditions under which most black South Africans still live, conditions guaranteed to turn a certain number of the brutalized victims to violence. He reminds us that since 1960 the regime has forceably moved more than 3 million black South Africans, some of them hundreds of miles from their original homes.
He visits Mogopa, once a prosperous black farming community in the northern Transvaal where several hundred families had owned their own land for 70 years. The government bulldozers arrived in 1984. Four years later, he discovers that ”the stone rubble lies in the orderly rows of the village grid of streets, as if after a carpetbombing.”
Hochschild effectively conveys the ferociousness of the police repression, although the spirit of resistance survives. He tells of 150 former detainees and others wedging themselves into a little community center for a
”social” gathering because political meetings are outlawed. It is a necessarily stiff event because the security policeman are also there, taking notes and videotaping.
One of the hosts, a white anthropologist named David Webster, tells Hochschild that he is worried that the armed policeman will intimidate the guests into leaving before food is cooked. A few months later, Webster will be murdered by a death squad.
Hochschild welcomes the release of Mandela and the legalizing of the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups. But he reminds us that South Africa is terribly unequal; a decade-long Carnegie Commission study reported that its distribution of income is the most unfair in the entire world. And he points that what South African President F. W. de Klerk and his allies, the white mineowners and other businessmen, are offering is a deal:
”Their proposals will be cloaked in all sorts of rhetoric about ethnic integrity and private property and free enterprise, but basically the deal will be this: an offer to share political power with blacks, while keeping economic power in white hands-and the rather small number of hands that now control it.”
Those who speak out against U.S. corporate and government support for apartheid often hear this rejoinder: ”Why do you just care about South Africa? Look at the terrible governments in the rest of black Africa.”
Washington Post correspondent Blaine Harden spent four years criss-crossing the continent, reporting on those governments. He did find corruption and brutality in many high places, and he also found that America has supported some of the worst tyrants. But he looked beyond the governments. He went into the cities and out to the villages, listening to the people, and he has produced an intensely human book.
By western standards, Africa can be maddeningly inefficient, and some previous accounts have been dominated by descriptions of government offices filled with bribe-taking paper shufflers and of chaotic airports in which planes leave late or early but never on time.
But in Harden`s view the ”continent is not a hopeless or even a sad place. It is a land where the bonds of family keep old people from feeling useless and guarantee that no child is an orphan, where religion is more about joy than guilt, where when you ask a man for directions he will get in your car and ride with you to your destination.”
Exploring the African extended family, Harden accompanies a Ghanaian professor, Ksasi Oduro, back to his home village. Oduro has delayed the trip because he cannot afford the demands that he will face at home. His mother needs money to install electrical wiring in her house. His sister wants him to pay school fees for her five children. His brother wants to take truck-driving lessons. His aunt has to go to the dentist.
These people helped send Oduro through school, and now they expect help. They do not understand that his $83 a month salary is barely enough for his own immediate family (which includes several country cousins who are staying in his home on campus).
Another chapter shows why Western foreign aid schemes often fail. The Turkana people of northern Kenya have lived by herding animals. After a terrible drought kills off much of their livestock, well-meaning Norwegians decide to help the Turkana settle around a lake, become fishermen and sell their catch in the cities. After the Norwegians build a $2 million frozen fish plant, they realize the cost of running it will far exceed the potential profits. Then, part of the lake dries up, leaving the 20,000 newly settled Turkana high and dry.
Dealing with Africa`s despots, Harden skillfully explains the contexts in which these men emerge and proves they are not wholly African creations. A telling examples is Liberia, the West African nation created by freed American slaves in the 19th Century that is today torn by a civil war in which dictator Samuel Doe was killed.
Doe himself had executed and tortured opponents over the last decade and had stolen the 1985 election. But during that period the United States gave him a half-billion dollars, more aid than it provided to any other African nation. Harden asserts that America backed Doe only to protect its investments there-Voice of America radio transmitters and a navigation tracking station.
American expediency contrasts with African resilience. Harden includes a powerful example: the aftermath of Nigeria`s harsh decision in 1983 to force 1.3 million Ghanaian workers to return to their own country. He explains, ”It was as if 20 million penniless immigrants had poured into the United States-within two weeks-at the height of the Great Depression.” International relief agencies arrived immediately, certain that the mass deportation would provoke hunger and violence. But within two weeks, the deportees were absorbed safely into their extended families. Harden concludes, ”What was potentially the greatest single disaster in Ghana`s history was defused before foreign donors or government policy makers could figure out what to do about it.”
This book is among the best introductions to the continent available.
