On Africa

The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985
By Charles Van Onselen. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996. 649 pp., $35.

Heart of Whiteness: Afrikaners Face Black Rule in the New South Africa
By June Goodwin and Ben Schiff. New York: Scribner, 1995. 414 pp., $27.50.

South Africa is, by most accounts, a huge success story, overflowing with hope and promise. But societal transformation often lags behind political change. Are race relations part of the postapartheid success story? Both Van Onselen and Goodwin and Schiff rely on testimonial evidence to better understand the often misunderstood relationship between black and white South Africans.

When Kas Maine died, he willed his son his tools and farming equipment. A sharecropper for almost a century, Kas Maine had, as Van Onselen notes in a particularly touching and ironic moment, "given him everything and nothing. Had it not always been so?" The Seed is Mine is a massive undertaking that records the life of a black South African man, dignified, repressed, resourceful, and yes, ordinary. Van Onselen guides us carefully and often methodically through Maine's ancestry and his time on some 24 farms, using years of interviews and records to reconstruct and illuminate Kas Maine's transition from successful sharecropper to near-destitute victim of nearly 40 years of institutional apartheid. Van Onselen allows Maine's story to unfold, sometimes slowly but always eloquently and respectfully.

Although similar in method and purpose, Van Onselen's reserved authorial voice stands in contrast to Goodwin and Schiff's comprehensive look at Afrikaner culture in the aptly named Heart of Whiteness. Where Van Onselen's epic is a work of detail and method, meant to inspire, through its clarity of language, an understanding of man in his world, Schiff and Goodwin's interviews ask ordinary people extraordinary questions in their attempt to glean general fears, beliefs, and hopes from the Afrikaner people. Their insight into the minds of the Afrikaners is probing, fascinating, and invaluable to any student of Afrikaner religion, nationalism, or politics. But they seem a bit too committed to the use of personal commentary with occasional and somewhat condescending reminders of the way we should react to the often unflattering words and sometimes inhumane deeds of the Afrikaners. Author imposition can often be helpful as a directorial tool; in a collection that relies as heavily on interview as Heart of Whiteness does, more subtle direction might have better benefited the narrative.

In the end, both Kas Maine's story and Heart of Whiteness achieve new heights of respect for black and white South African culture. Van Onselen says that the "troubled relationship of black and white South Africans cannot be fully understood by focusing on what tore them apart and ignoring what held them together. The history of a marriage, even an unhappy one, is inscribed in the wedding bands as well as the divorce notice." Goodwin and Schiff, by the very nature of their work, would have to agree. They are more predictive in their outlook-they are a writer and a political scientist, while Van Onselen is clearly dedicated to the power of oral history as a sufficient and independent means of storytelling-but their works are sure to be shelved side by side as two original views on South African history and culture that take into account not only the divisive nature of the former peculiar state but also the cohesiveness and the tolerance that just may allow the newly born state to remain viable.
Claudia Burke

The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
By Gérard Prunier. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. 389 pp., $29.95.

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying Presidents Agathe Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was destroyed by a missile as it tried to land at Kigali airport. Within hours the killing started. As French researcher Gérard Prunier observes in this groundbreaking study, "Rwanda had fallen off the cliff." In weeks 800,000 dead would lie at the bottom. Mostly minority Tutsi and pro-democracy Hutu, they were butchered by machete in churches, burned to death in schools, or shot by the roadside. The killers were the majority Hutu. Though the slaughter was planned by government officials and begun by loosely organized militiamen, most of the murderers were ordinary peasants. Fueled by ideology, greed, jealousy, and fear, they killed 11 percent of their countrymen in three months.

Prunier has written a fine history, an insightful analysis, and a damning critique. His thorough, readable narrative of the genocide and its origins shows how France, Rwanda's patron, and the UN, the country's putative peacekeeper, ignored repeated warning signs and, when the blood started to flow, wrung their hands. Though both knew of Hutu plans for a "final solution," the UN took no preventive action and the French lavishly supported the Hutus, even arming them for several weeks after they began killing. When they-and the rest of the world-finally recognized the Tutsis as victims, the effort was too little, too late.

The book also punctures the West's media-created myths about Rwanda. It demonstrates that the genocide was not an ethnic "civil war"-since 1991 the Habyarimana government had been creating "enemy lists" of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Nor was the violence an unavoidable consequence of ethnic hatred-the Hutu and Tutsi "ethnicities" were originally social classes (German and Belgian colonialists fabricated the racial distinction and encouraged animosity to disunify their subjects).

Perhaps Prunier's greatest contribution is his ability to analyze the genocide as both a scientist and a humanitarian. The scholar who can convincingly weave personal accounts into sociopolitical analysis is a rarity. Prunier does this best in a section called "The Genocide," in which he explains the larger nature of the slaughter without losing sight of the horrific personal suffering it engendered.

Prunier concludes that Rwanda needs "justice and cash-in that order"-to prevent another round of death. Given the cynical behavior of the West in the latest round, he is not hopeful.
Michael Brus

Losing Mogadishu:
Testing U.S. Policy in Somalia
By Jonathan Stevenson. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995. 208 pp., $24.95.

Like all writers, journalists are as concerned with how they say something as they are with what they say. They too can be seduced by the sound and the inexorable pull of language and allow metaphor, meant to reveal the deeper truth, to instead obscure and create a picture that captures the writer's skill-but not reality.

Jonathan Stevenson, a lawyer turned reporter, falls prey to this seduction in Losing Mogadishu. He avoids the excesses found in the writing of fellow journalist Robert Kaplan (there are no cabinet ministers with eyes like "egg yolks" suffused with an "irrefutable sadness"), but he is equally adept at the well-turned phrase that says less than meets the ear. Thus, in describing the superpower flip-flop that saw the Soviet Union drop Somalia as a client and the United States embrace it, Stevenson tells us that "Jimmy Carter had just taken over the White House with a mandate for a nonimperial presidency that necessarily enervated executive power at its constitutional synapse-namely, foreign policy." We also learn that the "Somalia mindset is indeed baleful machismo bootstrapped from attitude into ethic."

Stylistics aside, the last comment captures an unsettling attitude. A relative newcomer to the region, Stevenson offers pithy pronouncements on Somalia in an authoritative voice that resonates with colonial condescension. For Stevenson, the Somali people are "by inclination gregarious-a trait that adds to their seductiveness and therefore their cunning." They "prefer killing to maiming. Calculation sums up character." There is more: "They were not used to rationalist learning, much less to taking instruction from benevolent masters, having only had a written language since 1973." "[Thus the] Somalis were simply doing what was inbred. . .and lacked the moral frame of reference necessary for wholesale reform."

What is one to make of these Kurtz-like observations? (In the book's acknowledgments, Stevenson thanks Matthew Bryden-who has contributed to Current History-"for teaching me about one-tenth of what he knows about the Somali people." It is unfortunate that Stevenson never learned the other nine-tenths.) Are they an example of the "cultural peculiarities" that American "military personnel from general to private should be thoroughly and topically briefed on" in order to avoid another ill-fated intervention like that in Somalia?

The answer seems to be yes. Stevenson, who covered Somalia for Newsweek, the Economist, and the London Sunday Times, believes that the United States got Somalia wrong; Losing Mogadishu is intended as a prescriptive postmortem of an operation that was a failure both in conception and execution. Stevenson, however, is unable to carry out his self-assigned task; his narrative flounders amid the sieved history, the colorful anecdote, and, especially in the concluding chapters on how to avoid future Somalias, the boldly stated banality ("Let Soldiers Be Soldiers"; "Know Your Enemy").

This, like the crass generalizations about the Somali people, is unfortunate, since Stevenson does provide strong reporting on the political and military games warlord Aidid, the United States, and the United Nations played, but it is not enough to rescue Losing Mogadishu from its defects.
William W. Finan, Jr.

Networks of Dissolution: Somalia Undone
By Anna Simons. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 246 pp., $55, cloth; $19.95, paper.

Simons, an assistant professor of anthropology at UCLA, offers an antidote to the Somaliawfulization encountered in Stevenson's Losing Mogadishu. Here the Somali people exist as individuals, not as "opportunists incapable of a functioning state."

Networks of Dissolution argues that "Somalia came undone thanks to a conjunction of events, institutions, and individuals." As with many other third world states that failed with the end of the superpower competition and the patron-client ties it nourished, the proximate cause of Somalia's dissolution, according to Simons, "would seem to have emerged from competition over the control of resources." For Westerners, the Somali state's breakdown because of this competition meant that chaos reigned. Simons notes, however, that "although it may have looked on the surface as though there was confusion-and anarchy-that did not mean there was no structure to what was occurring." Simons' book struggles to present a lucid exposition of this structure, but it is bogged down by the organizational remnants of the doctoral dissertation from which it evidently originated.
W. W. F.