South Africa

To my readers in the United States: Happy 4th of July!

To my readers in South Africa and anywhere else on the globe: Happy Friday!

In the last dozen years I believe I have spent more American Independence Day holidays outside of the United States than within it, with most of those spent here in South Africa. Being abroad usually provides an interesting perspective on one’s own country. I consider myself to be patriotic in the most important and perhaps least jingoistic sense in that I love my country but I see its flaws. I honestly have no idea what people mean when they say that the United States is the “best country in the world.” I guess I do not dispute the assertion at its essence, but I have no idea what “best” means, and why those who make the assertion do as much with such totality. The best at what? The best by what measurement? Is patriotism simply the willingness to rank arbitrarily one’s country by some sort of flow chart or Olympic medal chart? I will grant that the United States is the most powerful nation on earth militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. And as a result I think it can be argued, and I would, that the United States is the most important nation on earth. But nation-states not being reducable to one’s favorite sports team or top-five pop bands, I see neither utility nor meaning in the “best country in the world” mania that strikes my most jingoistic countrymen and women.

At the same time, it is always telling to see what others think of one’s own country. I have found the supposed anti-Americanism that is supposedly pervading the world to be vastky overstated. I am certain there are places where that sentiment is strong, such as in much of the Middle East and in certain quarters in Europe, say. But on the whole what I find, especially once I convince the listener that I am not an agent of my state and that I do not represent American policy (even if I may defend elements of it or the larger framework within which that policy operates) I will have engaging, if occasionally lively, conversations.

The fiasco in Iraq has not done the US any favors abroad, nor has the arrogance our current administration has put forth in presenting the American face to the world. But at the same time most people in South Africa and elsewhere understand that our administrations are temporal where the American state is not. And so what I hear most often are questions about the current campaign for the presidency, and whether Obama can win, and if McCain is a Bush clone.

It is my experience that the rest of the world is very much interested in the United States and its role in world affairs and looks at America with a combination of awe and fear and respect and admiration and concern and envy. This may be impossible to quantify, but it is a lot more interesting, and telling, than simple assertions that America is “hated” or loved.

[Crossposted at the FPA Africa Blog and at dcat.]

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.

Michael Gerson has a blistering column in today’s Washington Post about the crisis in Zimbabwe and what he sees as South Africa’s enabling of Robert Mugabe’s despotism. There is little new in Gerson’s column for those who have been following the crisis for a while, but perhaps voices like his will lead to more pressure from the American government on Thabo Mbeki, whose last year in office has been characterized by myriad failures real and perceived.

My work is a bit complicated. The best way to describe it is that I explore race, politics, and social movements in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa. I wrote the following recently, which mostly involves the issue of race in the United States. I hope you will find it to be of some interest:

We are beyond race.
That is the comfortable little myth that many of us white folks like to spew to make ourselves feel better about a history that clearly indicates that we are not at all beyond race. These people (We?) like to believe in an accelerated curve, a Whiggish and inexorable belief in improvement on the one demonstrable blotch on our national escutcheon, that has somehow innoculated us from centuries of reality. The candidacy of Barack Obama allows even those who do not, will not, support him to claim perfectibility on the one issue about which Americans have been sadly, tragically, imperfect.
Unfortunately there are times when reality kicks us in the teeth, or at least ought to. What to make, after all, in this supposedly color-blind society, about the fact that our misguided drug wars disproportionately effect African Americans? What does this tell us about our racial myths, and more importantly, how we deal with them?
Many of us are wary of decisions, supposedly race-neutral, on, say, voting rights in light of America’s still demonstrably not race-neutral policies. Many of us are wary of claims that we live in a time when race is no longer a factor, because of the relative successes of Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Clarence Thomas and Barack Obama. Indeed, we are wary precisely because of the facile ways in which we allow the prominence of a miniscule number of black Americans to substitute for a real discussion of the country’s racial past.
Conservatives call such concerns “race hustling,” a phrase notable only for its cynicism, vacuousness, and, yes, racism. And yet how many other issues in American history actually manage to sustain as relevant without actually being relevant? Issues that do not matter fade into obsolescence. This one continues to vex precisely because it matters. Would that we had an honest discussion about it, as Obama has done more honestly, and more frontally, than any American in the country’s history has undertaken.

We can pretend that it does not matter. In fact nothing has ever mattered more.

If this is self indulgent, or if it strays from my mandate of discussing and commenting on African politics, I am truly sorry. I hope this will help establish my bona fides on this issue.

[Crossposted from the Foreign Policy Association Africa Blog and dcat.]

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.]

At The Mail & Guardian last week longtime observer of South African politics Mark Gevisser, author of Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, compares Thabo Mbeki to Barack Obama and wishes that the former would learn from the latter.  My only caveat: Beware analogies drawn too closely, as context matters.

Last week Roger Cohen wrote a column in The New York Times in which he used his childhood in South Africa as a way to frame his thoughts about Barack Obama’s (to my mind pitch-perfect) speech on race last week. I am afraid that in the United States right now we are going to start seeing a slow bleed-turned-deluge of stories that will allow lots of white folks their excuse not to vote for Obama without appearing racist per se even when their motivation will be not to vote for the black candidate.

South Africans, like people the world over, are beginning to take a great deal of interest in the primary campaigns taking place in the United States. According to a story on NPR (Click on the link to hear the full report.):

South Africans have been consumed with crippling nationwide power outages and other issues closer to home, such as a much-condemned racial incident involving four white students and some black university employees. But when asked about the U.S. presidential race, the name they seem most familiar with is that of Barack Obama.

This brief report does not portray the election, or South African views of it, with a great deal of depth. It is a man-on-the-street series of brief interviews. Nnetheless, it is probably not a bit surprising that South Africans a) Do not have much regard for the Republicans, and b) Support Obama in light of his African roots. However, Bill Clinton was a popular figure in many parts of the continent, and one wonders if that does not redound to Hillary’s benefit. In the end, South Africans will almost certainly be rooting from afar for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.

Here is a quick roundup of some Africa-related news stories that have caught my eye in recent days:

Despite the fact that the media lives by the age-old credo “if it bleeds it leads” with regard to crime stories, which serves to warp people’s perspectives on the nature and frequency of crime, violent crime rates are actually dropping in Gauteng.

Does the recent peace agreement in Kenya signal better days ahead? Roger Cohen of The New York Times thinks as much.

Robert Mugabe might be starting what he believes to be his “march to victory,” but increasingly members of Zanu-PF are throwing their support behind Mugabe’s intrepid challenger, Simba Makoni. I still do not see Mugabe allowing Makoni to wrest his crown away, but if somehow it happens, I envision many of even Mugabe’s most ardent supporters responding to Mugabe’s defeat in the same way that the Wicked Witch’s praetorian guard responded after Dorothy liquidated their boss: “Hail Simba!”

One trend that I have noticed in American sports is the increasing presence of African athletes making their mark on the playing fields. Many of these athletes came to the United States when they were young children, many others were born in the United States to African parents, and still others found themselves face-to-face with American college coaches whose recruiting tentacles extend wider and deeper with each pasisng year. The usual push-pull factors are at play in these immigrant cases: On the run from war or privation or political chaos, drawn to the idea of America as the land of opportunity. The New York Times has the story of one such athlete, Hasheem Thabeet, a 7′ 3″ center for the University of Connecticut’s men’s basketball team who has become something of a folk hero in his native Tanzania.

Finally, what does it mean to be a citizen of a country? Is it sufficient to be born there? must one’s parents also be citizens of the country? Ireland is one of many nations dealing with these questions, and African immigrants represent the political football being kicked around.

Not everyone shares the general belief that president Bush deserves some credit for his Africa policies. Josh Kurlantznick is decidedly unimpressed with the President’s approach toward Africa, as he shows in this piece at The New Republic. Here is a sample:

Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the Bush administration has backed whatever African leader claims to be battling militant Islam. For example, the White House has developed a close relationship with Ethiopia’s thuggish leader Meles Zenawi, supposedly an ally in the war on terror and a partner in battling militancy in neighboring Somalia. The administration has provided military aid to Ethiopia with virtually no conditions on the assistance. It has also offered advisers to support Ethiopia’s invasion of neighboring Somalia, an invasion which only led to more chaos in that benighted nation. Meanwhile, in recent years Zenawi’s government has overseen a massive crackdown on opposition activists and a brutal offensive in the country’s Ogaden region; in 2005, after disputed elections, the Ethiopian government arrested over 30,000 of its own people.

 

As in Ethiopia, so too across the continent. In building a string of counterterrorism allies, the White House has strengthened its links with some of Africa’s most brutal regimes, from Algeria to Chad.

For me, again, the case for Bush’s Africa policy is a relative one. From an absolute standpoint, this administration’s policies toward Africa have been fairly marginal. But from a historical perspective, Bush’s engagement still warrants some praise. I would like to see a foreign policy toward Africa that takes into consideration African needs and interests and in which Africans are partners, in the truest sense of the term, rather than appendages. But relative both to other administrations and to president Bush’s policies elsewhere, his approach to Africa warrants, if not praise, at least some recognition.