Books in 2014: A Personal Selection

These are a few of the books that, for good or ill, made an impression upon me this year. MD


Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention by Séverine Autesserre

An important book that minutely deconstructs both the structural and day-to-day weaknesses of the current model of international peacebuilding, and with recommendations should be seriously considered by peace builders who do not wish to replicate the mistakes of the past.

Nan Domi: An Initiate's Journey into Haitian Vodou by Mimerose Beaubrun,

A welcome addition to the canon of vodou scholarship and a deeply felt inside account of a faith of often daunting complexity by one of the leaders of the Haitian vodou-rock band Boukman Eksperyans.

A Lost Lady by Willa Cather

Amid some beautiful descriptions of the natural world of the Western plains rests finely observed character sketches that are distinctly, recognizably American, and which present two competing - even warring - visions of American identity. One is of “unpractical... dreamers, great-hearted adventurers” and one of “men...who had never dared anything, never risked anything” seeking to destroy a magnificent land and to “cut [it] up into profitable bits, as the match factory splinters the primeval forest.”  The nasty, gossipy spitefulness of small-town America is also displayed in what is, finally,  an elegy for the end of the era of the pioneer.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

A little gem of a book telling the story of a young American woman in the France of the 1950s, this tale is, despite being very funny, a story of unexpected depth, suffused through with the excitement, energy and wistfulness of youth.

China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa by Howard French

The veteran journalist French paints a picture of China venturing forth into Africa that is not a pretty one. Despite banal slogans of a “win-win” relationship, the Chinese he meets seem surprisingly unaware of how often the ground they have entered has been trod before, and many appear casually racist about the inhabitants of their new home in a way that one might have thought had largely disappeared from public discourse (if not private thought). But by the end of the book, though, it is hard to argue with French’s conclusion that “here [are] the beginnings of an empire, a haphazard empire, perhaps, but an empire nonetheless."

For Whom the Bells Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

One of the American author’s very best books, this remains, in many ways, the fictional counterpoint to George Orwell’s brilliant Homage to Catalonia, detailing the bravery of those fighting on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War (and the humanity of some of those on the other side), the squalid politicking of those directing it (on both sides) and containing some of Hemingway’s finest writing, such as the wrenching account of the last stand of a Spanish guerilla fighter, made all the more so because it is utterly drained of sentimentality.

The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940-1944 by Radu Ioanid

An important work that documents what, far from being a sideshow to the campaign of extermination against Jews elsewhere in Europe, represented perhaps the most frenzied episode of all in violence during fascism’s ascendance. By documenting in grim detail the atrocities committed by Romanian military forces, paramilitary elements and ordinary civilians (often working in tandem with elements of the German military) Ioanid brings the reader vividly back to the madness of such incidents as the 1941 pogrom at Iasi, and reminds the reader that the fever that took over Europe was by no means a German-only affair.

George Groz: Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic by Beth Irwin Lewis

A fascinating biography of a truly politically-engaged artist , a singularly powerful and committed creative soul living through a chaotic national crisis and responding to it the best way he knew how, by creative defiance.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer

A glimpse of a pivotal moment in U.S. history, the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions (in Miami and Chicago, respectively) penned by the sometimes intriguing, sometimes thuddingly dull literary lion, this book is in many way about the author confronting his own fear; fear of where America was heading, fear of the meagre talents of the politicians tasked with shepherding it to a new day and, perhaps, fear of what he saw when he looked within himself.  Also a glimpse of two American cities that, for all purposes, have ceased to exist in the form that Mailer describes them decades ago.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle Book by Haruki Murakami

A deeply strange novel that suffused with disappearing spouses, precocious schoolgirls, echoes of World War II and wayward cats, this was the first book I had read by the man who is perhaps Japan’s foremost modern author. A longtime fan of Japanese writers such as Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Osamu Dazai, I found this book a fascinating if sometimes perplexing evocation of that country, particularly Tokyo, one that made me interested to delve into the author’s works further.

House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East by Anthony Shadid

A memoir by a truly great journalist - who died while covering the war in Syria at the tragically young age of 43 - this book is by turns moving, very funny and eerily prescient as Shadid recounts his effort to reconstruct his long-abandoned ancestral home in the Lebanese village of Marjayoun. Written by the author of Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War, the greatest on-the-ground account of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, this book points to the great things that Shadid might have accomplished had he lived longer, a fact that adds a great and at times deeply sad poignancy to the book’s account of a veteran rover who seems to have finally found home. and observing that  “part of me was so wary of that old life of guns and misery.”

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez

This book, penned by the well-known Colombian author, came with many glittering endorsements, but I’m afraid I found it contrived (fake might be a better word), curiously unengaging and with devices to move the plot along that one could see coming a mile away. The rather whiny, narcissistic characters never felt real to me, and the setting - tangentially amid Colombia’s drug war - to me felt like a fictional conceit rather than something being written about with any level of authority. It does pick up towards the end, though. 

Florida in the Great Depression: Desperation and Defiance by Nick Wynne and Joseph Knetsch

A diffuse but interesting account of a time when the peninsula once looked upon as a promised land for its residents became something of a Canaan, the book educates the reader about such details as the devastating hurricanes of 1926 and 1928, how ticks and screw worms nearly wiped out the state’s population of cattle and how by 1920 nearly 50% of Miami’s black population was Bahamian. Reading it, ones is struck by how the casino-like fixation on land/real estate speculation as a lynchpin of the state's economy never in fact left.

Imperialism 2.0? Review of Howard French’s ‘China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa’

Imperialism 2.0? Review of Howard French’s ‘China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire in Africa’ 

By Michael Deibert  

Posted on July 9, 2014 by AfricanArgumentsEditor

(Read the original article here)

When, midway through the American journalist Howard French’s new book, a Zambian politician tells him dejectedly that “we are not a poor people but we have crowned ourselves with poverty,” the phrase resonates with the experience of many countries is modern-day Africa. Resource rich but often misgoverned by autocrats who refuse to leave office – and whose depredations have been bankrolled by Western governments – Africa, despite some bright spots, remains a continent of unrealised hopes and unfulfilled potential. It is that potential, French demonstrates in his new book, that the Chinese have arrived to tap.

Between 2003 and 2013, China’s investment in Africa grew from $77 million to $2.9 billion, and the ostensible “million migrants” from China (a figure that, after reading the book, seems wildly conservative) arrived in Africa with their government’s blessing to continue their country’s transformation, in French’s words “from being a vessel” of globalization “to becoming an increasingly transformative actor in its own right.”

French, a former New York Times bureau chief in both West Africa and China, brings a nuanced and familiar understanding of both regions to this tale. The book is scrupulously even-handed to its subjects and steers well-clear of anything smacking of jingoism.

The author meets many people, including a foul-mouthed farmer from Henan dreaming of building an empire in Mozambique, a factory owner from the ancient city of Chengdu in Senegal, and a Francophile construction company official in Mali. Almost all appear casually racist about the inhabitants of their new homes in a way that one might have thought had largely disappeared from public discourse (if not private thought).

With a middle class larger than that of India, the African continent is not simply a repository for much-needed natural resources to fuel Chinese economic expansion, but also as a market for the country’s exports. Africa’s population is expected to double over the next 40 years, taking us to just about the time that newly-discovered mineral reserves are expected to run out.

As French writes, “the continent’s rapidly rising population means lots of new mouths to feed, lots more people to be clothed, devices and appliances and goods of all kinds to be sold.”

The Chinese were aided in their quest to expand in Africa by a US government which, during the critical juncture in the early-mid first decade of the millennium, was led by George W. Bush, a man completely uncurious about the world except in the most broad terms, and whose diplomats seemed equally taken by surprise by the rapid expansion that many on the ground had seen coming for some time.

In truth, for nearly a decade before Bush – at least since the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia during which 18 US servicemen were killed by Somali militias – America had put Africa on the back burner. This has changed somewhat during the presidency of Barack Obama, but not dramatically so.

The picture that French paints of China venturing forth into Africa is not a pretty one, and despite banal slogans of a “win-win” relationship, the Chinese he meets seem surprisingly unaware of how often the ground they have entered has been trod before.

The reader is treated to a vivid account of a short-sighted policy of non-transparent deal-making in Guinea, the rebuffing or insulting of civil society in various countries (generating no small reservoir of ill will) and engagement in the payment of starvation (and often illegally low) wages and non-existent workplace safety.

For the government of China, Africa is just one backdrop among many where new opportunities lie and where much money can be made. But by the end of the book it is hard to argue with French’s conclusion that “here [are] the beginnings of an empire, a haphazard empire, perhaps, but an empire nonetheless”

There are a few unexplored strands of this story that one wishes French had also included. The Chinese presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s most iconic and tragic countries (and one that French knows well, having devoted a large part of his 2005 book to it) goes unexamined. But perhaps this was a conscious decision on the author’s part to highlight some of the rather less-known corners of the continent, such as the aforementioned Zambia, Mozambique and Namibia.

Towards the end of his book, French quotes the historian Peter Duus’ history of Japan’s colonial project in Korea: “[imperialism] requires an available victim – a weaker, less organized or advanced society or state unable to defend itself against outside intrusion.”

Africa, bedeviled as it may be by misrule, today has a more vibrant civil society than at any time in its history. One that robustly confronts the excesses of local governments and also the intrigues of outsiders of many nationalities and political persuasions – all linked by their desire to profit from the continent’s wealth.

Who will prevail in this David versus Goliath battle is unclear, as is whether the democratic gains made in countries like Ghana and Senegal will create the space needed for this side of the debate to succeed. As French clearly recognises, this remains one of the more pressing questions in Africa today.

Michael Deibert is the author of In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America’s Drug War in Mexico (Lyons Press), The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books) and Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press).

Ai Weiwei at the Pérez Art Museum Miami

Ai Weiwei's commentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which killed nearly 70,000 people, a death toll blamed largely on government corruption and shoddy contruction. On the ground, rebar recovered from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses and then painstakingly straightened again. On the wall to the left, a list of names of Chinese students who died in the earthquake. On the far wall, photos of the construction of the Beijing National Stadium, constructed for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Papua New Guinea: Time to explore

Papua New Guinea: Time to explore

Published: June 12, 2009

Foreign Direct Investment

Remote yet resource-rich, Papua New Guinea has started to spark the attention of foreign investors, although tenacity is paramount, reports Michael Deibert.

(Read the original here)

In Papua New Guinea’s Madang province, hundreds of Chinese workers at the vast Ramu Nico nickel and cobalt project are the face of a remote nation confronting its ever-more attractive position on the global investment market.

Consisting of ethnic groups speaking more than 800 languages, Papua New Guinea (or PNG, as it is ubiquitously referred to in-country) has been richly endowed with other natural resources of a sort that international firms have only recently begun to fully explore.

The Madang mine, a $1.4bn undertaking by the China Metallurgical Group Corp (MCC), is the largest construction project in the country; it employs between 3000 and 3500 workers and will employ more than 4000 people when it is fully operational.

Bridging gaps

Consisting of a pair of sites that overlook some of the world’s most virgin tropical forests, accessibility to the mine has been vastly improved by MCC’s construction of a 250-metre bridge across the Ramu River, which ranks as one of the longest bridges in the country. A trip that once necessitated an eight-hour walk through dense forest now takes about 40 minutes from the river.

“When I first came here, there was no infrastructure and sometimes the road wasn’t passable,” says Liu Tian Hua, an engineer working on the project. “Living and working conditions are still very hard here but I think that we are making a profit both for MCC and for the local people, so I am very proud to work on this.”

PNG is often referred to as ‘the land of the unexpected’, and MCC has certainly found that to be the case. There have been strikes at the Madang mine by workers complaining of low wages and in November 2008, 213 Chinese employees were arrested, accused of entering the country with improper permits. However, MCC is gradually learning how to do business in the country, and cites a 2.5% ownership stake in the Madang mining that has been granted to a quartet of local landowner groups.

“In China, land belongs to the government, but here, land belongs to the landowners,” says James Wang, MCC vice-president for operations in the PNG capital, Port Moresby. “We need to make them see a real benefit from this, otherwise we can’t survive here. The Chinese team is becoming familiar with these issues and more confident with them.”

Political stability

One issue in PNG’s favour in recent years has been the relative stability brought to the country’s often-turbulent political scene by the seven-year tenure of prime minister Michael Somare, the longest period in office by a national leader since the country achieved independence from Australia in 1975. Veteran observers say that this political calm has been beneficial to the country’s economic development.

“We’ve had booms and busts, but the whole drive has been to keep the exploration and the resource industry going,” says Greg Anderson, executive-director of the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum, an association that collectively represents the interests of those industries in the country. “PNG is in one of the most healthy macro-economic states it has been in for a long time because we’ve had a period of stability. And for the past three or four years we have had very good prices right across the board for agricultural products as well as mineral resources,” he says.

PNG’s GDP was estimated to have grown in 2008 by a robust 6.3%, while its GDP per capita was estimated to be a modest $2300. The country’s links with former colonial power Australia remain extensive, with Canberra supplying $300m in aid, almost 20% of the national budget, during fiscal year 2007/08.

The biggest foreign investment partnership with Australia in recent years is perhaps the PNG government’s involvement in a $11bn liquid natural gas (LNG) project operated by ExxonMobil Corporation and designed to filter gas southward via a pipeline to Australia.

Pipeline potential

An economic impact study on the LNG programme, prepared by Australian consultant ACIL Tasman, said that the project “has the potential to transform the economy” of PNG, potentially doubling the country’s GDP from K8.65bn ($3.17bn) in 2006 to an average K18.2bn a year. With the country’s mining revenues predicted to begin declining in about 2013 when many mines reach the end of their economic life, projects such as the LNG endeavour could become increasingly important to the country’s economic livelihood.

“We see this project as being potentially viable in a range of economic areas where the state would continue to benefit,” says Peter Graham, venture manager for ExxonMobil’s PNG LNG project. “The project is developing more than just the gas, it is also about developing PNG’s capacity, to leave a sustainable positive influence on the country.”

One hindrance in the country’s development, however, has been a persistent, pervasive nucleus of corruption that has had a strong influence on PNG’s body politic.

A 2007 report by PNG’s Public Accounts Committee, a constitutional body responsible for monitoring the spending of public money and quoted by the Berlin-based international corruption watchdog Transparency International, said that it found “evidence of misapplication, fraud, negligence, dishonesty and disregard for the law and for the welfare of the state and its citizens by public servants at every level in every inquiry held”. The lone exception, the report said, was PNG’s department of labour. The report also criticised “a clear web of organised and systemic illegality, designed to access public money in an illegal manner”.

Both Prime Minister Somare and the minister for public enterprises, Arthur Somare (the prime minister’s son), declined requests for comment for this article.

“The resources available to the PNG government are considerable and they should be much wealthier than they are,” says Jenny Hayward-Jones, director of the Myer Foundation Melanesia Programme at the Lowy Institute, an international policy think tank based in Sydney. “They’ve managed [the resources] quite well, but they haven’t actually delivered many benefits to their people. They are not making any progress on social indicators, health indicators are going backwards, education indicators are going backwards – they have been in decline over the past 10 years,” she adds.

Health issues

In contrast to all the development and international interest in the country, many of the country’s statistics remain grim, with an infant mortality rate of 46.67 deaths per 1000 live births and an estimated 6% of the population infected by the HIV virus. However, it is anticipated that the country’s vigorous mineral potential will help it to ride out the global financial crisis to construct a more economically viable and diversified state.

“We’ve got a very high level of exploration at the moment,” says Greg Anderson, whose Port Moresby office overlooks a backdrop of construction cranes. “And we hope that we’ll be able to nurture that through the current downturn,” he adds.

EU Seeks to Subdue Competitive China

TRADE-AFRICA: EU Seeks to Subdue Competitive China

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

JOHANNESBURG, May 15, 2008 (IPS) - With the ascendance of China as a robust force on Africa's economic and political scene, plans are afoot in the European Union (EU) to pre-empt the Asian nation's dominance on the continent by forming a trilateral partnership that places Europe squarely in the centre.

The idea of a multilateral triumvirate was conceived by Louis Michel, the EU's commissioner for development and humanitarian aid, and seeks to lay out common ground in what has occasionally been a contentious relationship between these three actors.

''There are three fields where the partners can work together: peace and security, infrastructure and natural resources,'' says Veronika Tywuschik, a research assistant at the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) in Brussels. The ECDPM is a non-governmental organisation that assists African, Caribbean and Pacific countries with policy processes.

With Michel set to step down as commissioner in 2009, pressure is building for him to come up with a workable platform in the next few months.

A public consultation period which started on April 16 and will end on July 13 this year is seeking to gather a wide variety of views on how the proposed relations should be constructed.

A public consultation document has been released in the form of a questionnaire asking European citizens which sectors the cooperation should focus on and why.

Read the full article here.

Extraction from chaos?

Extraction from chaos?

By Michael Deibert

Foreign Direct Investment

April 10, 2008

Embattled by war and corruption but laden with large deposits of diamonds and copper, DR Congo is largely avoided by investors. Might that change? Michael Deibert reports.

Blessed with natural resources and occupying a vast swath of central Africa as large as the US east of the Mississippi River, the Democratic Republic of Congo is home to some of the word’s largest deposits of diamonds, copper, cobalt and coltan. Despite a fecund climate encompassing everything from dense, nearly impenetrable rainforests to fertile plains, the country has remained one of Africa’s most tragic. Held in the grip of a predatory state culture of corruption and the often nefarious designs of its neighbours and unscrupulous business dealers with little long-term interest in developing its infrastructure, DR Congo has struggled to attract investors.

The country’s president, Joseph Kabila, first assumed office in 2001 following the assassination of his father, Laurent, who led a rebel movement that toppled the 32-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko.

Elected for the first time during a violent ballot in 2006, President Kabila is an often mute presence on the Congolese political scene, going for weeks at a time without appearing in public. Nevertheless, the government has begun to take small steps to regularise the often anarchic foreign investment climate in the country, and in February completed a review of all international mining contracts, many of which were signed by President Kabila’s father under circumstances of questionable transparency during DR Congo’s 1998-2002 civil war.

Read the full article here.

Hope, Concern Greet China's Growing Prominence in Africa

Hope, Concern Greet China's Growing Prominence in Africa

By Michael Deibert

Inter Press Service

PARIS, Jul 23, 2007 (IPS) - While China's growing trade and investment flows to Africa have sparked a sometimes contentious debate with the United States and Europe over who has the continent's best interests at heart, a closer look at the dynamic developing reveals a political landscape where the rhetoric is rarely in line with the reality, observers say.

Read the full article here.