From your serpentine, churning namesake river to your beautiful mist-shrouded mountains to your inscrutable steaming jungles and your rolling savannas, in appreciation for your incredible sinuous soukous music, the beautiful artistry of your carved masks and the power of the literature of writers like Sony Lab'ou Tansi and also in appreciation of delicious cosa-cosa served with pili-pili, the view from Chez Tintin at sunset and, most of all, your indomitable, courageous people, Happy 53rd Birthday, Democratic Republic of Congo. May we all work to give you a brighter future.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
"The only thing they gave us was a stadium"
Some São Paulo protesters explain why they took to the streets.
Monday, June 17, 2013
CAR rebel victory throws resource deals into doubt
12/06/2013 9:02 am
CAR rebel victory throws resource deals into doubt
By Michael Deibert
FDI Magazine
(This article first appeared in FDI Magazine. Please read the original article here.)
As the Central African Republic reels from the instability brought about by the overthrow of its government, observers are questioning South Africa’s role in the country, resource deals signed by the previous regime could be undone.
When François Bozizé, the president of the Central African Republic (CAR), was overthrown in March 2013 by a ragtag band of militiamen and child soldiers, few observers thought it heralded a brighter chapter in the history of one of Africa’s more tragic countries.
The Central African Republic, or Centrafrique, as it is known in French, is a former French colonial territory whose colonial history was marked by widespread forced labour and often outright slavery. The country's first prime minister died in a mysterious plane explosion in 1959, and independence eventually saw a coup by French-trained general Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a recipient of the Croix de Guerre who went on to become one of the continent’s most garish tyrants, crowning himself emperor in 1977 as his countrymen starved. Coups and counter-coups continued before elections in 1993 saw Ange-Félix Patassé ascend to the presidency, only to be overthrown by his former chief of staff, François Bozizé, a decade later.
Rise to power
Mr Bozizé had been orbiting around circles of power for years before his victory. The background of the man who has replaced him, however, is more obscure. Michel Djotodia is a former low-level government official who lived and studied for many years in the former Soviet Union, and who was only one of many leaders of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement, a rebel group that preceded the Séléka rebel coalition he led to power. Mr Djotodia was unanimously elected CAR’s president in mid-April by a transition council after a ballot in which he was the only candidate.
By the time the Bozizé government fell in March, nearly 300 South African soldiers were in the CAR defending his regime. As rebels stormed the capital Bangui in March, 13 South African soldiers were killed and 27 wounded. South African soldiers later expressed anguish when they realised that many of those they were fighting were mere children (the recruitment of children under the age of 15 to fight in combat is a war crime prosecutable by the International Criminal Court).
South African presence
South Africa’s involvement in the CAR has as much to do with business deals linked to the former's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party as it does with regional solidarity. A report by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper concluded that the country’s “military involvement in the Central African Republic has from the start been entwined with ANC-linked deals”.
The South African oil exploration company DIG Oil, which is closely linked to the ANC, boasted a Bozizé-era oil concession in CAR’s south-west, near the town of Carnot.
A public-private partnership company, Inala Centrafrique, was registered in 2006, with ownership divided between the South African entity Serengeti Group Holdings (65%) and the CAR government (35%). The former company was majority owned by ANC grandee Joshua Nxumalo. The venture appeared chiefly designed to gain access to diamond mines in CAR. The DIG Oil and Inala Centrafrique deals appear to be only two of many.
Shortly after Mr Bozizé was overthrown, Mr Djotodia announced that the new government would be reviewing all resource deals signed by the previous regime, including DIG Oil’s and the contract awarded to the China National Petroleum Corporation for rights to explore for oil near CAR’s border with Chad. The move is somewhat reminiscent of a special parliamentary commission chaired by Christophe Lutundula in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose 271-page June 2005 report found that many contracts signed during that country’s civil wars were either illegal or of little value.
Mr Djotodia’s public comments have also indicated a possible shift toward seeking investment in CAR from the EU. Whether or not the Djotodia government’s review of foreign investment marks a serious attempt to increase transparency in the country’s resource deals remains to be seen, but the signs of good governance are thus far not encouraging.
The UN high commissioner for human rights says that a pattern of violence has continued in the country following Mr Bozizé’s overthrow, including cases of summary executions and sexual violence. Disgruntled members of the Séléka rebel coalition have been demonstrating in the capital over pay they say they were promised, and angry citizens recently killed a 17 year-old Séléka fighter, as resentment of the rebel coalition – now ensconced at the five-star Ledger Plaza Bangui hotel – continues to grow.
CAR rebel victory throws resource deals into doubt
By Michael Deibert
FDI Magazine
(This article first appeared in FDI Magazine. Please read the original article here.)
As the Central African Republic reels from the instability brought about by the overthrow of its government, observers are questioning South Africa’s role in the country, resource deals signed by the previous regime could be undone.
When François Bozizé, the president of the Central African Republic (CAR), was overthrown in March 2013 by a ragtag band of militiamen and child soldiers, few observers thought it heralded a brighter chapter in the history of one of Africa’s more tragic countries.
The Central African Republic, or Centrafrique, as it is known in French, is a former French colonial territory whose colonial history was marked by widespread forced labour and often outright slavery. The country's first prime minister died in a mysterious plane explosion in 1959, and independence eventually saw a coup by French-trained general Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a recipient of the Croix de Guerre who went on to become one of the continent’s most garish tyrants, crowning himself emperor in 1977 as his countrymen starved. Coups and counter-coups continued before elections in 1993 saw Ange-Félix Patassé ascend to the presidency, only to be overthrown by his former chief of staff, François Bozizé, a decade later.
Rise to power
Mr Bozizé had been orbiting around circles of power for years before his victory. The background of the man who has replaced him, however, is more obscure. Michel Djotodia is a former low-level government official who lived and studied for many years in the former Soviet Union, and who was only one of many leaders of the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement, a rebel group that preceded the Séléka rebel coalition he led to power. Mr Djotodia was unanimously elected CAR’s president in mid-April by a transition council after a ballot in which he was the only candidate.
By the time the Bozizé government fell in March, nearly 300 South African soldiers were in the CAR defending his regime. As rebels stormed the capital Bangui in March, 13 South African soldiers were killed and 27 wounded. South African soldiers later expressed anguish when they realised that many of those they were fighting were mere children (the recruitment of children under the age of 15 to fight in combat is a war crime prosecutable by the International Criminal Court).
South African presence
South Africa’s involvement in the CAR has as much to do with business deals linked to the former's ruling African National Congress (ANC) party as it does with regional solidarity. A report by South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper concluded that the country’s “military involvement in the Central African Republic has from the start been entwined with ANC-linked deals”.
The South African oil exploration company DIG Oil, which is closely linked to the ANC, boasted a Bozizé-era oil concession in CAR’s south-west, near the town of Carnot.
A public-private partnership company, Inala Centrafrique, was registered in 2006, with ownership divided between the South African entity Serengeti Group Holdings (65%) and the CAR government (35%). The former company was majority owned by ANC grandee Joshua Nxumalo. The venture appeared chiefly designed to gain access to diamond mines in CAR. The DIG Oil and Inala Centrafrique deals appear to be only two of many.
Shortly after Mr Bozizé was overthrown, Mr Djotodia announced that the new government would be reviewing all resource deals signed by the previous regime, including DIG Oil’s and the contract awarded to the China National Petroleum Corporation for rights to explore for oil near CAR’s border with Chad. The move is somewhat reminiscent of a special parliamentary commission chaired by Christophe Lutundula in the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose 271-page June 2005 report found that many contracts signed during that country’s civil wars were either illegal or of little value.
Mr Djotodia’s public comments have also indicated a possible shift toward seeking investment in CAR from the EU. Whether or not the Djotodia government’s review of foreign investment marks a serious attempt to increase transparency in the country’s resource deals remains to be seen, but the signs of good governance are thus far not encouraging.
The UN high commissioner for human rights says that a pattern of violence has continued in the country following Mr Bozizé’s overthrow, including cases of summary executions and sexual violence. Disgruntled members of the Séléka rebel coalition have been demonstrating in the capital over pay they say they were promised, and angry citizens recently killed a 17 year-old Séléka fighter, as resentment of the rebel coalition – now ensconced at the five-star Ledger Plaza Bangui hotel – continues to grow.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Congo Mask
I bought this mask while living in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of about a dozen that I own. Beautiful, I think, in its craftsmanship and simplicity.
Photo © Michael Deibert
Sunday, June 09, 2013
Los Zetas spend all drug profits fighting off the Cártel del Golfo?
Here's a drug war statistic for you, courtesy of Mexico's Reforma newspaper: Los Zetas earn $350 million annually by importing 40 tonnes (80,000 pounds) of cocaine a year into the United States alone, but since 2010 have had to spend practically all that money trying to fight off their former employers, the Gulf Cartel.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Reinaldo Arenas on Miami
The typical Cuban machismo has attained alarming proportions in Miami...[It] was like a caricature of Cuba, the worst of Cuba: the eternal gossip, the chicanery, the envy. I also hated the flatness of the scenery, which could not compare with the beauty of an island, it was like a ghost of our island, a barren and pestiferous peninsula, trying to become, for a million exiles, the dream of a tropical island, aerial, bathed by the ocean waters and the tropical breeze...I was used to a city with sidewalks and streets, a deteriorated city but where a person could walk and appreciate its mystery, even enjoy it at times. Now I was in a plastic world, lacking all mystery...An exile has no place anywhere, because there is no place, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams...The exile is a person who, having lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and forever deceiving himself, thinks he has found it.
-Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca
Monday, May 20, 2013
Monday, May 13, 2013
On Writing
In
going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing
what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with.
But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on
the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it,
and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright
and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet,
but unused.
-Ernest Hemingway, Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)
Friday, May 10, 2013
Thursday, May 02, 2013
Wednesday, April 03, 2013
Thanks to the International Studies Program...
...At Franklin & Marshall College for hosting my talk on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the most interesting Q&A session that followed it. Cheers!
Photo © Michael Deibert
Monday, March 25, 2013
BOOK REVIEW: What Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez left behind
(Note: The Miami Herald published a somewhat-mangled edit of a review I wrote of the fine new book on Venezuela by Guardian reporter Rory Carroll. I don't know if wires got crossed with the Herald's impending move or what, but the version of the text that was agreed to - and which they somehow forgot about - is below. MD)
BOOK REVIEW: What Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez left behind
By Michael Deibert
Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
Rory Carroll.
Penguin. 320 pages. $27.95
In his new book Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Irish journalist Rory Carroll delivers an authoritative account of the complicated legacy of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died earlier this month.
Carroll — who served as The Guardian correspondent in Caracas from 2006 until 2012 — describes in minute detail how Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death on March 5, created something unique, “an authoritarian democracy . . . . a hybrid system of personality cult and one-man rule.” Here is Chávez not as a one-dimensional symbol but in all his complexity: The utopian socialist, the voracious reader, the vainglorious militarist, the bad husband, the doting father.
Even as he describes how Chávez empowered poor communities in Venezuela by creating communal councils and built homes for thousands of people who had never known decent shelter, Carroll succinctly outlines how the president squandered the great opportunity for durable development afforded to him by record-high oil prices, failing to diversify the country’s economy.
At the heart of this failure proves to be a desire — above all else — for power. Chávez had a digital record of the names of three million people who had voted against him in a 2004 recall referendum which was then used “to purge signatories from the state payroll, to deny jobs, contracts, loans, documents, to harass and punish, to make sectarianism official.” The mastermind behind the list, Luis Tascón, went on to become a strident critic of government corruption and was banished from Chávez’s inner circle before his own untimely death in 2010.
Giving the reader a brief tour of the Venezuela’s tangled and often violent history, Carroll shows how intimately Venezuela’s underclass knew — or thought they knew — the country’s wealthy and how the wealthy understood that underclass not at all and cared still less.
Chávez’s opposition - a diffuse and disorganized group of former military allies, civil libertarians, the country’s besieged middle class and what Chávez would doubtless refer to as the country’s rancid oligarchy - never managed to unseat him through means fair or foul. This is perhaps not surprising as they were faced with the cheerleading omnipotence of state media — its ubiquitousness the result Chávez’s war against Venezuela’s virulently hostile private media — and massive slush funds paid for with money siphoned off from the state oil company.
Chávez did not ascend to and retain power alone, though, and contained in Carroll’s book are revealing snapshots of those who accompanied the president during his time in office: The Machiavellian academic turned government official Jorge Giordani; the gruff bus driver who would become foreign minister (and now President) Nicolás Maduro; the slippery former army officer Diosdado Cabello.
Outside the sphere of officialdom, those in the Chávez camp are a diverse bunch, with some appearing earnest and committed, such as members of an agricultural cooperative Carroll visits in Chávez’s native state of Barnias, Others, such as the Venezuelan-American attorney and government apparatchik Eva Golinger, coming across as slightly mad in their cultish devotion to El Comandante. Those who fall out of favor, such as former Minister of Defense Raúl Baduel, who helped crush a 2002 coup attempt against Chávez but then denounced the president’s 2007 bid for perpetual reelection, are dealt with harshly.
But despite Chávez’s political domination of the country, so many of his grandiose ideas came to naught
After the 2002 coup attempt, Chávez fell ever-more under the spell of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (“The Cubans took us over” states a former ally glumly), who supplied revolutionary manpower in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil. Cuban doctors poured into Venezuela to provide their services in the slums of Caracas, but soon enough they returned to Cuba, moved on to work in Bolivia or defected to Colombia or the United States, leaving their clinics abandoned. Government officials, meanwhile, sought care from elite private hospitals. Roads, bridges and factories all crumbled due to mismanagement and lack of maintenance.
And as Chávez’s revolution went along, Venezuelans killed one another in ever greater numbers. In 1998. there were 4,500 murders in Venezuela. In 2008, there were more than 17,000, less than 1% of which were ever solved. The prison population tripled to 50,000 in a prison system built for 12,000.
“The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse,” Carroll writes. “The maximum leader who liked to micromanage everything lost control of society’s most fundamental requirement, security.”
To compare Chávez’s, as some did, to his allies such as Castro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was absurd, and Carroll does not fall into this trap. Rather, even before Chávez died after ruling Venezuela for 14 years, Carroll reveals a creaking authoritarian edifice that may or may not outlive its maker. A leader who once filled the television screens of his country non-stop has now fallen silent. And Venezuela is left to wonder what will come and fill the void.
Michael Deibert is the author of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
BOOK REVIEW: What Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez left behind
By Michael Deibert
Comandante: Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
Rory Carroll.
Penguin. 320 pages. $27.95
In his new book Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, Irish journalist Rory Carroll delivers an authoritative account of the complicated legacy of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, who died earlier this month.
Carroll — who served as The Guardian correspondent in Caracas from 2006 until 2012 — describes in minute detail how Chávez, who ruled Venezuela from 1999 until his death on March 5, created something unique, “an authoritarian democracy . . . . a hybrid system of personality cult and one-man rule.” Here is Chávez not as a one-dimensional symbol but in all his complexity: The utopian socialist, the voracious reader, the vainglorious militarist, the bad husband, the doting father.
Even as he describes how Chávez empowered poor communities in Venezuela by creating communal councils and built homes for thousands of people who had never known decent shelter, Carroll succinctly outlines how the president squandered the great opportunity for durable development afforded to him by record-high oil prices, failing to diversify the country’s economy.
At the heart of this failure proves to be a desire — above all else — for power. Chávez had a digital record of the names of three million people who had voted against him in a 2004 recall referendum which was then used “to purge signatories from the state payroll, to deny jobs, contracts, loans, documents, to harass and punish, to make sectarianism official.” The mastermind behind the list, Luis Tascón, went on to become a strident critic of government corruption and was banished from Chávez’s inner circle before his own untimely death in 2010.
Giving the reader a brief tour of the Venezuela’s tangled and often violent history, Carroll shows how intimately Venezuela’s underclass knew — or thought they knew — the country’s wealthy and how the wealthy understood that underclass not at all and cared still less.
Chávez’s opposition - a diffuse and disorganized group of former military allies, civil libertarians, the country’s besieged middle class and what Chávez would doubtless refer to as the country’s rancid oligarchy - never managed to unseat him through means fair or foul. This is perhaps not surprising as they were faced with the cheerleading omnipotence of state media — its ubiquitousness the result Chávez’s war against Venezuela’s virulently hostile private media — and massive slush funds paid for with money siphoned off from the state oil company.
Chávez did not ascend to and retain power alone, though, and contained in Carroll’s book are revealing snapshots of those who accompanied the president during his time in office: The Machiavellian academic turned government official Jorge Giordani; the gruff bus driver who would become foreign minister (and now President) Nicolás Maduro; the slippery former army officer Diosdado Cabello.
Outside the sphere of officialdom, those in the Chávez camp are a diverse bunch, with some appearing earnest and committed, such as members of an agricultural cooperative Carroll visits in Chávez’s native state of Barnias, Others, such as the Venezuelan-American attorney and government apparatchik Eva Golinger, coming across as slightly mad in their cultish devotion to El Comandante. Those who fall out of favor, such as former Minister of Defense Raúl Baduel, who helped crush a 2002 coup attempt against Chávez but then denounced the president’s 2007 bid for perpetual reelection, are dealt with harshly.
But despite Chávez’s political domination of the country, so many of his grandiose ideas came to naught
After the 2002 coup attempt, Chávez fell ever-more under the spell of Cuban leader Fidel Castro (“The Cubans took us over” states a former ally glumly), who supplied revolutionary manpower in exchange for cheap Venezuelan oil. Cuban doctors poured into Venezuela to provide their services in the slums of Caracas, but soon enough they returned to Cuba, moved on to work in Bolivia or defected to Colombia or the United States, leaving their clinics abandoned. Government officials, meanwhile, sought care from elite private hospitals. Roads, bridges and factories all crumbled due to mismanagement and lack of maintenance.
And as Chávez’s revolution went along, Venezuelans killed one another in ever greater numbers. In 1998. there were 4,500 murders in Venezuela. In 2008, there were more than 17,000, less than 1% of which were ever solved. The prison population tripled to 50,000 in a prison system built for 12,000.
“The revolution inherited grave social problems and made them worse,” Carroll writes. “The maximum leader who liked to micromanage everything lost control of society’s most fundamental requirement, security.”
To compare Chávez’s, as some did, to his allies such as Castro, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran or Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus was absurd, and Carroll does not fall into this trap. Rather, even before Chávez died after ruling Venezuela for 14 years, Carroll reveals a creaking authoritarian edifice that may or may not outlive its maker. A leader who once filled the television screens of his country non-stop has now fallen silent. And Venezuela is left to wonder what will come and fill the void.
Michael Deibert is the author of Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Michael Deibert's Haiti Bookshelf
18 March 2013
Michael Deibert's Haiti Bookshelf
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Despite its image of relentless poverty and political unrest, Haiti is the most beguiling and charming of destinations for foreign observers, but also one of the most maddeningly complex. From broad brushstrokes outlining the surface of events, outsiders, often devoid of context, are sometimes forced to draw not-always-accurate conclusions. As the place that gave me my start as a foreign correspondent and which was the subject of my first book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005), Haiti has always had a special place in my heart and trying to inject some history into the discussion of the country has become something of a personal mission. Below are several books that I think would add greatly to our general understanding of Haiti. Though I am sure readers would care to add their own to this list (and though I am sure I have forgotten something essential), this strikes me as a good place to start. MD
Nonfiction
Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren
This book, poetic and impressionistic much like the author's more-famous experimental cinema, was the result of years of immersion in Haiti's religious culture, and acts as a worthy companion to the film of the same name.
Papa Doc: Haiti and Its Dictator by Bernard Diederich & Al Burt
This book by two veteran journalists bring to life the tyranny of the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1971 and set a bloody benchmark for despots ever since.
Island Possessed by Katherine Dunham
A memoir by the famous African-American choreographer, who lived in Haiti and became the lover of its future president, Dumarsais Estimé, this book is eloquent testimony to the power of Haiti to move and change those who visit her.
The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti by Alex Dupuy
This important book by the Haitian sociologist and Wesleyan University professor looks with an unsentimental lens at the the second mandate of Haiti's twice-ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti by Gerry Hadden
A former National Public Radio correspondent who covered Haiti's chaotic 2000 to 2004 era gives us an eyewitness account of how the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide came to an end amidst a tidal wave of corruption, violence and dashed dreams.
Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492-1995 by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl
The best general history of Haiti available in English comes from perhaps an unlikely source, a former chief of the U.S. naval mission to Haiti who ran afoul of dictator François Duvalier. Nevertheless, over a gripping 889 pages, the military man and his journalist wife sustain a compelling narrative of Haiti's tumultuous history, resurrecting names and events that have been all-but-forgotten in most English-language writing on the subject.
Voodoo in Haiti by Alfred Métraux
The result of travels through the Haitian countryside by the Swiss Métraux along with his friend, the great Haitian author Jacques Roumain, this decades-old work remains the best overview of Haiti's syncretic indigenous religion.
Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith
This book by a young Jamaican historian covers the period between the departure of the U.S. Marines after a 20-year military occupation and the coming to power of François Duvalier. In doing so, it demonstrates how the dysfunctional nature of Haiti's politics cannot be blamed on a single source, but is rather the product of decades of political and economic miscalculation and ill-intention on the part of both Haiti's leaders and the international community.
Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti by Ian Thomson
The English author's experiences traveling through Haiti may be 25 years old, but this book reveals the colour, grime exhilaration and despair which foreigners often experience when ranging through Haiti better than almost any book before or since.
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by Amy Wilentz
A beautifully-written account of the years immediately following the fall of the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship, this book also served to bring to international prominence a young Haitian priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose depressing legacy once he entered politics gave lie to the man's once-rich promise.
Fiction
General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis
A timeless novel of poverty, oppression and flight, this enthralling work is the most famous by the author, who died in an unsuccessful 1961 attempt to overthrow François Duvalier.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories by Ben Fountain
This PEN Award-winning 2007 collection of short stories contains several set in Haiti that are obviously the work of someone who has experienced the country at great length.
Vale of Tears: A Novel from Haiti by Paulette Poujol Oriol
A vivid depiction of Port-au-Prince and the life of a woman whose existence has been one of endless struggle, this book is one of the key works from one of Haiti's most important novelists.
Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain
This 1943 novel by a Haitian author and diplomat eloquently addresses the plight of Haiti's peasantry in terms that sadly are as relevant today as when the book first appeared.
Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot
A short novel by the man who is probably Haiti's greatest living author, sensitively translated by Linda Coverdale, this book tells the bleak story of two children attempting to flee a Port-au-Prince slum after killing their abusive father.
En français
The works of the Haitian scholars Roger Gaillard, Suzy Castor and Laënnec Hurbon, novelists such as Gary Victor, and others such as the French anthropologist Gérard Barthélemy, are indispensable to any serious understanding of Haiti.
Michael Deibert's Haiti Bookshelf
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
Despite its image of relentless poverty and political unrest, Haiti is the most beguiling and charming of destinations for foreign observers, but also one of the most maddeningly complex. From broad brushstrokes outlining the surface of events, outsiders, often devoid of context, are sometimes forced to draw not-always-accurate conclusions. As the place that gave me my start as a foreign correspondent and which was the subject of my first book, Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press, 2005), Haiti has always had a special place in my heart and trying to inject some history into the discussion of the country has become something of a personal mission. Below are several books that I think would add greatly to our general understanding of Haiti. Though I am sure readers would care to add their own to this list (and though I am sure I have forgotten something essential), this strikes me as a good place to start. MD
Nonfiction
Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren
This book, poetic and impressionistic much like the author's more-famous experimental cinema, was the result of years of immersion in Haiti's religious culture, and acts as a worthy companion to the film of the same name.
Papa Doc: Haiti and Its Dictator by Bernard Diederich & Al Burt
This book by two veteran journalists bring to life the tyranny of the dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1971 and set a bloody benchmark for despots ever since.
Island Possessed by Katherine Dunham
A memoir by the famous African-American choreographer, who lived in Haiti and became the lover of its future president, Dumarsais Estimé, this book is eloquent testimony to the power of Haiti to move and change those who visit her.
The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti by Alex Dupuy
This important book by the Haitian sociologist and Wesleyan University professor looks with an unsentimental lens at the the second mandate of Haiti's twice-ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Never the Hope Itself: Love and Ghosts in Latin America and Haiti by Gerry Hadden
A former National Public Radio correspondent who covered Haiti's chaotic 2000 to 2004 era gives us an eyewitness account of how the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide came to an end amidst a tidal wave of corruption, violence and dashed dreams.
Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492-1995 by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl
The best general history of Haiti available in English comes from perhaps an unlikely source, a former chief of the U.S. naval mission to Haiti who ran afoul of dictator François Duvalier. Nevertheless, over a gripping 889 pages, the military man and his journalist wife sustain a compelling narrative of Haiti's tumultuous history, resurrecting names and events that have been all-but-forgotten in most English-language writing on the subject.
Voodoo in Haiti by Alfred Métraux
The result of travels through the Haitian countryside by the Swiss Métraux along with his friend, the great Haitian author Jacques Roumain, this decades-old work remains the best overview of Haiti's syncretic indigenous religion.
Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957 by Matthew J. Smith
This book by a young Jamaican historian covers the period between the departure of the U.S. Marines after a 20-year military occupation and the coming to power of François Duvalier. In doing so, it demonstrates how the dysfunctional nature of Haiti's politics cannot be blamed on a single source, but is rather the product of decades of political and economic miscalculation and ill-intention on the part of both Haiti's leaders and the international community.
Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti by Ian Thomson
The English author's experiences traveling through Haiti may be 25 years old, but this book reveals the colour, grime exhilaration and despair which foreigners often experience when ranging through Haiti better than almost any book before or since.
The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by Amy Wilentz
A beautifully-written account of the years immediately following the fall of the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship, this book also served to bring to international prominence a young Haitian priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whose depressing legacy once he entered politics gave lie to the man's once-rich promise.
Fiction
General Sun, My Brother by Jacques Stephen Alexis
A timeless novel of poverty, oppression and flight, this enthralling work is the most famous by the author, who died in an unsuccessful 1961 attempt to overthrow François Duvalier.
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories by Ben Fountain
This PEN Award-winning 2007 collection of short stories contains several set in Haiti that are obviously the work of someone who has experienced the country at great length.
Vale of Tears: A Novel from Haiti by Paulette Poujol Oriol
A vivid depiction of Port-au-Prince and the life of a woman whose existence has been one of endless struggle, this book is one of the key works from one of Haiti's most important novelists.
Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain
This 1943 novel by a Haitian author and diplomat eloquently addresses the plight of Haiti's peasantry in terms that sadly are as relevant today as when the book first appeared.
Children of Heroes by Lyonel Trouillot
A short novel by the man who is probably Haiti's greatest living author, sensitively translated by Linda Coverdale, this book tells the bleak story of two children attempting to flee a Port-au-Prince slum after killing their abusive father.
En français
The works of the Haitian scholars Roger Gaillard, Suzy Castor and Laënnec Hurbon, novelists such as Gary Victor, and others such as the French anthropologist Gérard Barthélemy, are indispensable to any serious understanding of Haiti.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Spring, 1932
The committee shattered the image of the investment banker as a man of probity whose first concern was the welfare or his customers and who operated in an institution that was a model of fair play...[It] was revealed that the most respected men on Wall Street had rigged pools, had profited by pegging bonds prices artificially high, and had lined their pockets with fantastic bonuses. The leading financial houses...invited insiders to purchase securities at a price much below that paid by the public...The bankers seemed bereft of a sense of obligation even to their own institution.
-William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940
-William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940
A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti
01/18/2013
A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
In 1996, freshly graduated from university, I went into a local bookstore in Pennsylvania and picked up a volume that ultimately changed my life.
The book was The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by journalist Amy Wilentz. Published seven years earlier, it was a chronicle of the fall and aftermath of 29 year Duvalier family dictatorship in that tumultuous Caribbean nation. The writing was crisp and insightful, the political and social drama it depicted Shakespearean, the long struggle it described of a nation trying to form a responsive democracy in the face of local tyrants and international meddling was Sisyphean. Within a year I was in Haiti, a relationship that continues to this day.
Now, 23 years after The Rainy Season, Wilentz, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, returns to the Magic Island with her new volume, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti.
Much has transpired since The Rainy Season, not least of all the apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake that leveled much of the capital and surrounding towns, killing tens of thousands of people. Haiti's two-time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a figure who, as much as anything, Wilentz's first book helped solidify in the international imagination, was overthrown not once but twice, in 1991 and in 2004, in circumstances that couldn't have been more different. A United Nations peacekeeping mission, largely unloved and convincingly linked to a strain of cholera that has killed over 7,000 people, has been on the ground for nearly a decade.
Unlike many commentators on Haiti, Wilentz genuinely likes and is stimulated by the Haitians themselves, and, in between despairing observations, in both The Rainy Season and Farewell, Fred Voodoo, she manages to capture the beauty of Haiti, physical and spiritual, something that foreigners writing about the place rarely do.
But despairing and pessimistic would indeed seem to be the most apt adjectives for the book's take on Haiti's post-earthquake landscape.
After Wilentz adroitly points out that what was often commented upon as Haitian "resilience" after the earthquake was in fact more likely post-traumatic shock, she goes on to conclude that "misery in Haiti today is a job creator for the white man" and that "the aid superstructure in Haiti...has created exactly the circumstances in which it becomes indispensable." Acidly and perceptively, she compares the thousands of aid workers, journalists and others who descended on Haiti after the quake as the equivalent of loup garous, the parasitic werewolves of Haitian folk legend.
She wonders why, if in the earthquake's aftermath the international community was able respond so quickly to so many chronic needs in Haiti as access to clean water, these problems could not be addressed before. As she did in The Rainy Season, Wilentz also pays tribute to the political significance of vodou, Haiti's syncretic religion that is too often ignored or caricatured.
Some of the book's anecdotes - from a hapless Haitian-American couple trying to buy land to a relentlessly self-promoting American journalist to a rather overdone portrait of an American doctor - run a bit long, but Wilentz can be darkly humorous in the margins. One American adventurer is described as having "liked to drink a quart of whiskey a day and to chain women up...[His] marriages did not last long." When Wilentz delves into the details of the 2010 privatization of Haiti's state telephone company, Teleco, and the state's torturous relations with the communications giant Digicel and its Irish chairman Denis O'Brien, the book is revelatory.
The book's major shortcoming is an unwillingness to address directly the tangled legacy of Aristide, a man whom Wilentz, as much as any writer, helped to bring to international prominence.
Though in one passage she tellingly recalls Aristide truculently complaining that hundreds of checks sent from abroad to fund his "projects" were not large enough - "not worth cashing," in fact - Wilentz's rather forgiving view gives rather short shrift to voluminous evidence that complicates any benign picture of the former president.
When Wilentz writes about Aristide's paternal relationship with street boys when he was a priest, she omits the far darker turn that relationship eventually took, with Aristide's political party and government helping to organize youth gangs as a bludgeon to use against his political opponents. Those looking for an examination of why virtually the entire top command of Aristide's police force and the upper management of Teleco during his tenure subsequently ended up in prison for drug trafficking and corruption offenses will look in vain, as will those looking for an accounting of the government's often horrific collective punishment against its rivals.
Wilentz herself treads very close to an apt, though inexact, parable for Aristide's rise and fall, when she accurately concludes that, culturally and politically, Haiti most closely resembles "French West Africa."
Like Aristide, Côte d'Ivoire's former president Laurent Gbagbo was once viewed as a champion of democracy as he led opposition to the long dictatorship of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. And like Aristide, once in power Gbagbo began to mimic in every particular the very worst and most anti-democratic tendencies of those he once railed against. After serving as president from 2001 until 2011, Gbagbo was extradited to the International Criminal Court in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in 2011. He is currently being sued by account holders ruined in a government-endorsed cooperative scheme during his administration and some of those same street children he once allegedly championed.
Writing in a marriage of memoir and critique, Wilentz's true strength is in honestly documenting the Haiti that foreigners who visit there construct for themselves, concluding that, despite its image of misery, for the misfits, idealists, adventurers and opportunists that wash up on its shores, Haiti is "a welcoming, accepting place where you can be yourself."
A hard sell, perhaps, to those who know only the Haiti of violence and calamity, but a sentiment that rings very - almost painfully - true to those who have seen and been moved by one of the nation's many other faces. Farewell, Fred Voodoo shows us a few of them and hopefully will provoke readers to look still further.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
A journalist ventures back to a troubled, seductive Haiti
By Michael Deibert
The Huffington Post
(Read the original article here)
In 1996, freshly graduated from university, I went into a local bookstore in Pennsylvania and picked up a volume that ultimately changed my life.
The book was The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier by journalist Amy Wilentz. Published seven years earlier, it was a chronicle of the fall and aftermath of 29 year Duvalier family dictatorship in that tumultuous Caribbean nation. The writing was crisp and insightful, the political and social drama it depicted Shakespearean, the long struggle it described of a nation trying to form a responsive democracy in the face of local tyrants and international meddling was Sisyphean. Within a year I was in Haiti, a relationship that continues to this day.
Now, 23 years after The Rainy Season, Wilentz, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, returns to the Magic Island with her new volume, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti.
Much has transpired since The Rainy Season, not least of all the apocalyptic January 2010 earthquake that leveled much of the capital and surrounding towns, killing tens of thousands of people. Haiti's two-time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a figure who, as much as anything, Wilentz's first book helped solidify in the international imagination, was overthrown not once but twice, in 1991 and in 2004, in circumstances that couldn't have been more different. A United Nations peacekeeping mission, largely unloved and convincingly linked to a strain of cholera that has killed over 7,000 people, has been on the ground for nearly a decade.
Unlike many commentators on Haiti, Wilentz genuinely likes and is stimulated by the Haitians themselves, and, in between despairing observations, in both The Rainy Season and Farewell, Fred Voodoo, she manages to capture the beauty of Haiti, physical and spiritual, something that foreigners writing about the place rarely do.
But despairing and pessimistic would indeed seem to be the most apt adjectives for the book's take on Haiti's post-earthquake landscape.
After Wilentz adroitly points out that what was often commented upon as Haitian "resilience" after the earthquake was in fact more likely post-traumatic shock, she goes on to conclude that "misery in Haiti today is a job creator for the white man" and that "the aid superstructure in Haiti...has created exactly the circumstances in which it becomes indispensable." Acidly and perceptively, she compares the thousands of aid workers, journalists and others who descended on Haiti after the quake as the equivalent of loup garous, the parasitic werewolves of Haitian folk legend.
She wonders why, if in the earthquake's aftermath the international community was able respond so quickly to so many chronic needs in Haiti as access to clean water, these problems could not be addressed before. As she did in The Rainy Season, Wilentz also pays tribute to the political significance of vodou, Haiti's syncretic religion that is too often ignored or caricatured.
Some of the book's anecdotes - from a hapless Haitian-American couple trying to buy land to a relentlessly self-promoting American journalist to a rather overdone portrait of an American doctor - run a bit long, but Wilentz can be darkly humorous in the margins. One American adventurer is described as having "liked to drink a quart of whiskey a day and to chain women up...[His] marriages did not last long." When Wilentz delves into the details of the 2010 privatization of Haiti's state telephone company, Teleco, and the state's torturous relations with the communications giant Digicel and its Irish chairman Denis O'Brien, the book is revelatory.
The book's major shortcoming is an unwillingness to address directly the tangled legacy of Aristide, a man whom Wilentz, as much as any writer, helped to bring to international prominence.
Though in one passage she tellingly recalls Aristide truculently complaining that hundreds of checks sent from abroad to fund his "projects" were not large enough - "not worth cashing," in fact - Wilentz's rather forgiving view gives rather short shrift to voluminous evidence that complicates any benign picture of the former president.
When Wilentz writes about Aristide's paternal relationship with street boys when he was a priest, she omits the far darker turn that relationship eventually took, with Aristide's political party and government helping to organize youth gangs as a bludgeon to use against his political opponents. Those looking for an examination of why virtually the entire top command of Aristide's police force and the upper management of Teleco during his tenure subsequently ended up in prison for drug trafficking and corruption offenses will look in vain, as will those looking for an accounting of the government's often horrific collective punishment against its rivals.
Wilentz herself treads very close to an apt, though inexact, parable for Aristide's rise and fall, when she accurately concludes that, culturally and politically, Haiti most closely resembles "French West Africa."
Like Aristide, Côte d'Ivoire's former president Laurent Gbagbo was once viewed as a champion of democracy as he led opposition to the long dictatorship of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. And like Aristide, once in power Gbagbo began to mimic in every particular the very worst and most anti-democratic tendencies of those he once railed against. After serving as president from 2001 until 2011, Gbagbo was extradited to the International Criminal Court in the Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity. Aristide returned to Haiti from exile in 2011. He is currently being sued by account holders ruined in a government-endorsed cooperative scheme during his administration and some of those same street children he once allegedly championed.
Writing in a marriage of memoir and critique, Wilentz's true strength is in honestly documenting the Haiti that foreigners who visit there construct for themselves, concluding that, despite its image of misery, for the misfits, idealists, adventurers and opportunists that wash up on its shores, Haiti is "a welcoming, accepting place where you can be yourself."
A hard sell, perhaps, to those who know only the Haiti of violence and calamity, but a sentiment that rings very - almost painfully - true to those who have seen and been moved by one of the nation's many other faces. Farewell, Fred Voodoo shows us a few of them and hopefully will provoke readers to look still further.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
Monday, January 14, 2013
Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake
Reporter depicts events surrounding Haiti earthquake
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
Jonathan M. Katz, Palgrave Macmillan, 320 pages, $26.00
(Please read the original article here)
Jonathan M. Katz’s new book about the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010 is fascinating but frustrating. An Associated Press reporter who lived in the country for two years before the disaster, Katz brings an on-the-ground flavor to his depiction of events that is more vivid than those in the more ponderous tomes published in the wake of the calamity.
Katz’s description of the day of the earthquake — a day that could have killed him — is wrenching and terrifying, and his descriptions of the often-callous diplomacy in its aftermath are bitterly convincing. His minute dissection of the failure of most of the promised aid and the misdirection of much of what did arrive is a valuable contribution to understanding how the international community should respond to such crises in the future. Even more chilling is his account of the indifference and subsequent obfuscation of the United Nations mission in Haiti and the fact that its troops introduced a cholera epidemic to the country that killed at least 7,000 people.
But Katz’s sharp lens turns fuzzier when he writes about the Haitians themselves. Early on, he states that he relied on his fixer — a driver/translator/guide — “for everything” during his time in Haiti, and so the account we see is what that fixer showed him, not the account of a journalist venturing forth to immerse himself in the country on its own terms. That’s a pity; Katz is a talented writer, and surely he had interesting thoughts about the subject. His window into Haiti’s byzantine political culture also seems to come from a single source, a former government minister who cannot on his own puzzle out the entire riddle of Haiti’s venomous political landscape.
Katz’s desire to see straight lines where tortuous twists and turns lie means that he tends to oversimplify complex situations. This habit become most problematic when he tries to assess Haiti’s history before he got there. Puzzlingly, nowhere in The Big Truck That Went By does he mention one of the events that probably more than any other destroyed Haiti’s rural agriculture and accelerated the urban migration to the destined-to-be-wrecked capital: a U.S.- Canadian funded program that, in the 1980s, succeeded in destroying 1.2 million of the Kreyol pigs that formed the backbone of the peasant economy.
Legislative elections in 2000 that saw journalists and opposition politicians murdered and their homes and party headquarters burned down are said to have suffered from “alleged fraud.” The chronology of the late-2003/early-2004 armed rebellion that (along with massive street demonstrations) would eventually bring down the government of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is also fudged, with Katz blaming the action on a “small band of well-armed rebels.” In fact, the movement began among a street gang of former loyalists in the northern city of Gonaives, incensed in their belief that Aristide had murdered their chieftain.
Even given Katz’s admirable doggedness as a journalist, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of love for Haiti in this book. Not for its mist-shrouded mountains, its azure coastal waters, the seductive gingerbread architecture that still rears up unexpectedly in its provincial towns or — with the exception of his fixer and the story of an earthquake-displaced family he movingly chronicles — the Haitians themselves. The Haitians in fact seem to rather irritate Katz, constantly bending his ear with unwanted conversations to the point where he can “hardly ask for directions.” At one moment, he admits that, despite having lived in the country for almost three years, he had rarely “let his guard down” with Haitians, which translates into a lack of intimacy with and insight about the people at the heart of the story.
Katz is a writer of considerable talent, with an often mordant and memorable turn of phrase. Had he schooled himself more thoroughly in Haiti’s history and immersed himself to a greater extent among its people before setting pen to paper, he could have produced a knockout of a book. Despite its many virtues, ultimately The Big Truck That Went By represents another example of what Katz himself exposes so thoroughly of the international community’s involvement with Haiti: Something of a missed opportunity.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
By Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster
Jonathan M. Katz, Palgrave Macmillan, 320 pages, $26.00
(Please read the original article here)
Jonathan M. Katz’s new book about the aftermath of Haiti’s devastating earthquake in 2010 is fascinating but frustrating. An Associated Press reporter who lived in the country for two years before the disaster, Katz brings an on-the-ground flavor to his depiction of events that is more vivid than those in the more ponderous tomes published in the wake of the calamity.
Katz’s description of the day of the earthquake — a day that could have killed him — is wrenching and terrifying, and his descriptions of the often-callous diplomacy in its aftermath are bitterly convincing. His minute dissection of the failure of most of the promised aid and the misdirection of much of what did arrive is a valuable contribution to understanding how the international community should respond to such crises in the future. Even more chilling is his account of the indifference and subsequent obfuscation of the United Nations mission in Haiti and the fact that its troops introduced a cholera epidemic to the country that killed at least 7,000 people.
But Katz’s sharp lens turns fuzzier when he writes about the Haitians themselves. Early on, he states that he relied on his fixer — a driver/translator/guide — “for everything” during his time in Haiti, and so the account we see is what that fixer showed him, not the account of a journalist venturing forth to immerse himself in the country on its own terms. That’s a pity; Katz is a talented writer, and surely he had interesting thoughts about the subject. His window into Haiti’s byzantine political culture also seems to come from a single source, a former government minister who cannot on his own puzzle out the entire riddle of Haiti’s venomous political landscape.
Katz’s desire to see straight lines where tortuous twists and turns lie means that he tends to oversimplify complex situations. This habit become most problematic when he tries to assess Haiti’s history before he got there. Puzzlingly, nowhere in The Big Truck That Went By does he mention one of the events that probably more than any other destroyed Haiti’s rural agriculture and accelerated the urban migration to the destined-to-be-wrecked capital: a U.S.- Canadian funded program that, in the 1980s, succeeded in destroying 1.2 million of the Kreyol pigs that formed the backbone of the peasant economy.
Legislative elections in 2000 that saw journalists and opposition politicians murdered and their homes and party headquarters burned down are said to have suffered from “alleged fraud.” The chronology of the late-2003/early-2004 armed rebellion that (along with massive street demonstrations) would eventually bring down the government of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is also fudged, with Katz blaming the action on a “small band of well-armed rebels.” In fact, the movement began among a street gang of former loyalists in the northern city of Gonaives, incensed in their belief that Aristide had murdered their chieftain.
Even given Katz’s admirable doggedness as a journalist, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of love for Haiti in this book. Not for its mist-shrouded mountains, its azure coastal waters, the seductive gingerbread architecture that still rears up unexpectedly in its provincial towns or — with the exception of his fixer and the story of an earthquake-displaced family he movingly chronicles — the Haitians themselves. The Haitians in fact seem to rather irritate Katz, constantly bending his ear with unwanted conversations to the point where he can “hardly ask for directions.” At one moment, he admits that, despite having lived in the country for almost three years, he had rarely “let his guard down” with Haitians, which translates into a lack of intimacy with and insight about the people at the heart of the story.
Katz is a writer of considerable talent, with an often mordant and memorable turn of phrase. Had he schooled himself more thoroughly in Haiti’s history and immersed himself to a greater extent among its people before setting pen to paper, he could have produced a knockout of a book. Despite its many virtues, ultimately The Big Truck That Went By represents another example of what Katz himself exposes so thoroughly of the international community’s involvement with Haiti: Something of a missed opportunity.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).
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