The United States Congress is finally undertaking to remove the African National Congress from various terrorism watch lists in the United States — a status the ANC, or even Mkhonto we Sizwe, never should have suffered in the first place.
Recent revelations that Nelson Mandela is still on the United States’ terrorist watch list (a list he never belonged on in the first place) does not exactly inspire confidence in America’s handling of its foreign policy, its approach to terrorism, or its grasp of African policy, does it?
[Crossposted at dcat.]
Tomorrow Kenyans go to the polls. In what is becoming an increasingly intense campaign (in what has almost certainly been the most open election in Kenya’s history) it appears that the opposition, led by 62-year-old Raila Odinga — a businessman and former political prisoner, is pulling ahead of President Mwai Kibaki, who has held office since 2002, and may well win. Both men are vital figures in the history of post-independence Kenya, and Africa observers are watching closely, even as evidence of strong-armed machinations emerge, to see if the election goes smoothly, and if the loser and his supporters go down without fomenting violence. Certainly it appears that a new, more sophisticated, money-driven politics has emerged in Kenya. It remains to be seen if this has a deleterious effect on the country’s political culture.
There is a subtext to this election, and to the political situation in Kenya generally, which is that as with much of the region, Islam is playing an increasing role in politics. Not problematic in and of itself, the rise of Islam nonetheless has seen accompany it strains of radical Islam, which does warrant scrutiny. Thus the west, and especially the United States, will likely be paying increasing attention to events in Kenya and elsewhere.
The problem is that when the United States and the rest of the West intervenes in Africa out of self interest African interests almost always fall by the wayside. This is yet another reason why many of us wish the United States would develop a comprehensive policy toward Africa, and not one based merely on self-interest, temporal concerns, piecemeal approaches, and half-baked understandings. That is unlikely to happen, of course, and so one can imagine sloppy, divisive, detrimental US policy emerging in response to the perceived threat of Islam in Africa that will inevitably do more harm than good and that will do little to address legitimate dangers of radicalism.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of Steve Biko’s death while in police detention.
Newsweek has a story on the United States’ efforts to step up anti-terrorism activities in the Horn of Africa as embodied in Africom, the military’s planned Africa Command.
The United States lauds the role that South Africa played in helping to bring about the conviction of Gerhard Wisser, who was deeply involved in the notorious Pakistani AQ Khan’s nuclear netowrk.
South Africa appears to have made some laudable progress on achieving a host of targets related to dealing with the country’s AIDS crisis. On the other hand, there is a cloud of mistrust that charecterizes much of the debate over AIDS policy that will have to be addressed for progress to continue to occur.
Is division within the ANC largely a creation of the media? Or do members of the party agree? The Mail & Guardian has one perspective.
At The New York Times Naruddin Farah, a Somalian writer who lives in Cape Town, provides some insight into the situation in Somalia from the vantage point as an insider-outsider who was tapped as a short term emissary between his native country’s two main warring factions. He is not optimistic that peace will take hold:
. . . [I]n the end, the only way out of the current impasse is to resume dialogue between the two principal parties to the conflict. I now know from personal experience how difficult this is. President Yusuf has said that the Islamists’ claim to represent a religious constituency does not sit well with his administration.
At the same time, the exiled Islamists are endorsing or openly engaging in violence. Assassinations of political figures, exploding roadside bombs in which peacekeepers or innocent bystanders lose their lives: these must stop.
Both sides must give. Most Somalis believe that the Islamists deserve a place at the table; they have been disempowered through invasion by an occupying force, which must withdraw, the sooner the better.
Genuine negotiations will not be easy. I found this out the hard way. But Somalis must consider the alternative: the violence will continue and the rest of the world will continue to use land as a playground for intervention.
While the world’s attention is so often focused on the conflicts in the Middle East, one of the next great testing grounds of radical Islam versus both its moderate counterpart and the non-Muslim world will play out in the Horn of Africa with Somalia at the epicenter. It would behoove the West to pay far more attention to this crisis.
I’m back from a week in England and am still absolutely buried with email and work and deadlines. But here are a lot of links on some of the crucial issues facing Africa and Africans:
The online news editor of The Economist is in Zimbabwe trying to get a feel for things there, to stay out of jail, and to report what he sees from a “Correspondent’s Diary”-cum-Blog called “Robert Mugabe, Man Or Monster?” Meanwhile, it probably should come as no surprise that Mugabe is “not losing sleep” over the prospect of western universities stripping him of honorary degrees they thrust upon him in a bygone era. I should think not.
Nigeria’s presidential election was a nightmare just as were the local and state elections that preceded it. As expected, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has declared Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, Governor of Katsina State, the winner of last Saturday’s presidential election. Equally predictably, international observers scoff at the credibility of the polls, the opposition parties continue to press for protests and resistance, and The New York Times similarly laments the recent farce, though it is tough to discern what real “democratic legacy” they find in Nigeria’s history. J. Peter Pham had an astute pre-election assessment in the World Defense Review (courtesy of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for which I have been a fellow).
World Politics Watch shows how the April 11 terrorist bombings in Algiers fit into al Qaeda’s larger global plan. Of course the implication of the article is that the real concern is the potential for future attacks in Europe, which reveals a remarkable willingness to pass off African suffering as of secondary significance. Maybe someone should , say, the Somalians that their suffering only serves as a prelude to something more important.
Closer to the putative focus of this blog (I’ve said all along that while my focus would be South Africa, I would try to place the country within its larger continental context) the Proteas advanced to the semi-final round of the cricket World Cup, but unfortunately barring some sort of miracle, the South Africans, who put up a pathetic 149 all out , their worst total ever in a World Cup and every bit as embarrassing as what they did to England last week, the Aussies are likely to reach the necessary 150 by somewhere around the 25th over. We should know soon enough. As I type this the Aussie juggernaut is at 27-1. South Africans should probably start to turn their attentions toward Amabokkobokko.
It doesn’t all have to be grim, though. Just imagine yourself isolated from it all, travelling along the Skeleton Coast, free of the cares of the world. There the bad news fades amidst the splendour of Africa.
One of the many reasons why Africa ought to matter more to the United States than it does is because it will continue to provide an important source of oil imports. This week Slate has been running four excerpts from John Ghazvinian’s book Untapped: The Scramble For Africa’s Oil. The excerpts include: Does Africa Measure Up To The hype?; Yes, We Have No Bananas; Will Oil Change Sao Tome and Principe?; and When ExxonMobil Came To Chad.
South Africa is not an oil-rich country. But that does not mean that these questions are not pertinent to South Africa. For one thing, South Africa is a regional power, maybe the regional power, and so continent-wide stability is of more than passing interest to the ANC government. Furthermore, South Africa imports oil and is involved in these economic questions. And as importantly, South Africa must look to the relationship “The West” is forging with wariness of the neocolonial implications, but also with a sense of concern that it might be supplanted as, by and large, the most important African nation in the eyes of the United States and its allies.
At The Mail & Guardian Virginia Tilley, a chief research specialist at the Human Sciences Research Council, speculates about Africa’s, and especially South Africa’s, role in a potential war against Iran and in the “War on Terror” generally. Her conclusions are probably not what the Bush administration would want to hear:
Renewed crisis in Somalia and the coming showdown with Iran suggest that the Bush administration’s agenda offers little but mounting expense and new dangers for African security. The urgent question for South Africa is not how to join that war, but how to help protect Africa from it.
Of course South Africa needs to walk a tightrope. On the one hand the South Africans want American support. At the same time the South Africans are not likely to go in for being a puppet for Bush administration policies. Most likely Thabo Mbeki cannot wait for the 2008 elections and the prospects of change in the American leadership.