White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Electricity Is the Gift That Can Keep on Giving in Africa

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Photo: South Africa – August 24, 2014: African woman with child collecting water from the river on the road leading to local Game Reserve.

He is generic Africa Man. You can see him everywhere, walking barefoot across the Savannah and desert landscapes. He is on a mission that gets harder as time goes on.

His mission is to find enough wood — a few dry sticks here, some roots there — to make a fire for a hot meal and to bathe. He walks and walks, adding a stick and a piece of scrub wood to the bundle carried, in the traditional way, on his head.

Generic Africa Woman is busy, too. Her mission is to draw water. She carries a container on her head, filled with water from a distant well, to make dinner — a meal of maize (corn) porridge with maybe a stew of some meat or even caterpillar — and to bathe.

African life is picturesque, but it is not pretty. Hardship is in daily attendance in much of Africa, blighted from deforestation and polluted water.

Yet Western aid has not been easily delivered. Much of it has been stolen, some of it has been misapplied and some of it has led to aid dependency.

So, as an old Africa hand (I was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and left when I was 20 years old), I was elated to learn of a new and critical partnership just announced between the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and the U.S. Department of State’s Power Africa initiative. Electricity anywhere is the gift that gives and gives, but especially when it begins to transform lives of hard struggle to ones that are less so.

When I was a boy, the opening of a power station or the building of a power line were events that brought forth celebration. Electricity signaled a better tomorrow.

When a village — whether it is in Bolivia, India or Uganda — is electrified, good things flow. A simple hotplate replaces days of firewood collection and those who can read can do so after the sun sets: hygiene improves, education is facilitated and expectations soar.

When the shantytowns that surround Johannesburg, South Africa, were electrified, the productivity of workers who flood into the city every day went up. Simply, they were saved from the drudgery of collecting animal droppings, wood scraps and other combustible stuff to burn.

The colonizers of Africa realized the need for electricity. Hence, in my part of the continent, two great dams were built on the Zambezi River: the Kariba, between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and the Cahora Bassa in Mozambique.

As a very young reporter, I covered the construction of the Kariba Dam, and its near destruction by unusually heavy flooding, in 1957. It has been the backbone of electricity supply for Zimbabwe and Zambia for more than 50 years.

But in recent years the dam, holding back the world’s largest, man-made impoundment of water, has begun to show deterioration in the concave wall, but especially behind the wall. The outflow has been eroding the plunge pool and threatening the wall. Hundreds of millions of dollars have had to be raised internationally for remediation, which is yet to begin in earnest. If the dam should fail, about 4 million people would die downstream.

The dam also has been producing much less electricity than it had been previously due to multi-year drought in the region. Copper production in Zambia, a vital industry, has had to be curtailed because of severe electric shortages. Blackouts are routine throughout the region.

Electricity is also a problem in South Africa, the industrial and commercial giant of Africa. Delay in ordering new generation, political interference in the decision processes and other problems, stemming from the end of apartheid, have damaged the system. Blackouts are affecting South Africa’s competitive posture.

Now the government is being romanced by Russia, hoping to sell it a new nuclear plant on favorable terms. It would join the two-unit, 1,860-MW Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, which has been operating since 1984. Unfortunately emerging countries have a fascination with big, showy projects, like the national airlines and steel mills that have cost them so dearly in their post-colonial phase.

EEI and the State Department need to guide the countries of Africa to today’s energy solutions, not yesterday’s. Africa needs to turn to its most abundant resource: sunshine. In North Africa, Morocco is building the world’s largest solar installation. Way to go.

Busting Statues Is Like Burning Books

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By Llewellyn King

Messing with history is not a cool thing to do. But there is a lot of it going on; particularly, pulling down monuments or going after other people’s religious statues. This kind of heresy goes from the grotesque to the downright evil.

Topping my list of the grotesque is Nkotozo Qwabe, a young South African now studying as a Rhodes Scholar, who leads a movement to pull down the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at Oxford and, among other things, to ban the French flag from the campus. Compatriots of this ingrate have already removed a statue of Rhodes at South Africa’s University of Cape Town.

On the evil side is ISIS, and its ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria — most recently, the monumental ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. With it, as with their razing of Hatra, Nineveh and Nimrud and other archaeological sites in Iraq, ISIS has turned to dust a world heritage: a cultural heritage and artifacts so precious that they rise above religion.

ISIS and the anti-Rhodes activists are trying to adjust history to passing present values. Knocking down an ancient temple or a statue is, in its way, book burning. It is destroying the record in order to distort the record.

Universities, here and abroad, are vulnerable to the demands of minority groups. Oxford has already removed one Rhodes plaque. At Princeton, students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be expunged for his support, as they see it, of white supremacy.

Decent people and institutions accede to the inane and foolish wants of minorities to appear reasonable to the unreasonable. Princeton has already gone some way down that slippery slope.

At Oxford, Qwabe is not content with just demonizing Rhodes. He has denounced the French for their colonial and current activities, and compared the French flag to the Nazi flag. And he has criticized Oxford for being Eurocentric. Why would it be anything else? Founded in 1096, it is the second-oldest European university.

Qwabe would have us, and the people of Africa, believe that Rhodes was a villain of unspeakable proportions, practicing racism and genocide. In reality, by today’s standards, he did some bad things and some very good ones, which include funding Qwabe’s attendance at Oxford.

Qwabe’s history is about as shaky as his gratitude. Rhodes was a controversial figure who believed absolutely in British exceptionalism as epitomized in the British Empire. He went to South Africa from England for his health and made a fortune in diamond mining. He entered politics and became prime minister of Cape Colony, on the tip of South Africa. There he seemed very enlightened, establishing a franchise that was open — as open as any at the time — and was not to be matched in South Africa until the fall of apartheid.

Where Rhodes’s dealings get murky is when he financed the push into what is now Zimbabwe. Rhodes defrauded the king of the Matabele, Lobengula, in the south of the country, but saved the Shona tribe, in the east and central region, from certain extinction at the hands of the Matabele, a newly arrived offshoot of the Zulus in South Africa who conquered lesser tribes, killed the men and boys, and forced the women into polygamous marriages.

Another good thing that Rhodes did was to cut off a chunk of South Africa, then known as Bechuanaland, now Botswana, from control by the Afrikaner Boers in 1895.

Rhodes also lavished his wealth on universities, including his alma mater Oxford and South African universities, including Cape Town, located on his former estate, and Rhodes, the eponymous university.

Rhodes did some reprehensible things but he believed in the public good as saw it — that being a manifestation of the British way of life, justice and values. Obliterating Rhodes’s historical role, and the few statues that point to it, is to meddle with the truth.

This same poison is at work on U.S. campuses, where student radicals bar speakers they disagree with from appearing. Punishing the memory of the great figures of history because they fail the social acceptability tests of the present is a disturbing part of the current academic scene, where free speech is under attack and free ideas are doctored to fit the values and prejudices of the moment.

There is a linkage between the thinking that is destroying the precious monuments of pre-Islamic civilization and punishing the memory of Rhodes and Wilson. The difference is only in degree. — For InsideSources


The Forces that Made Mandela, Africa’s Greatest Son

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It has been said that Nelson Mandela, when he was young, aspired to be an English gentleman, and that is very likely. Mandela was a nobleman from Thembu royal family of the Xhosa people. In understanding Africa's greatest son, this is important. Mandela derived his fortitude from knowing who he was. That sense of place never left him in 27 years of prison or in the years of adulation that followed.
 
I believe that Mandela was sustained by three forces: his British Methodist education, his ancestry and his Christian faith, also given him in the Eastern Cape Province by Methodist missionaries and teachers.
 
Throughout his life, Mandela conducted himself as that mythical English gentleman with an innate sense of justice, knowing his place in the scheme of things — even a lifelong love of gardening. Just being was mission to Mandela. It won over jailers and eventually enemies.
 
Even when it seemed he would never know a day in the sunlight of freedom, that inner dignity remained intact. He said: “We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
 
He was magnanimous in victory and conservative in battle. He opposed excesses in the African National Congress (ANC), which he headed before and after his imprisonment and which he inspired during his 27 years of captivity. He was especially critical of the incipient racism in the ANC and of its disinclination to recognize the efforts of white liberals, particularly South African Jews, in the struggle against apartheid, first in the courts, then through civil disobedience and finally through violence.
 
Mandela was born to social position. He could have been the king of the Thembu. if it had not be for a lineage issue with his mother. He was brought up after his father's death by the the tribal regent and Methodist missionaries.
 
The youthful belief in Britishness as a fount of social justice and decency, evaporated when he got to the gold-boom city of Johannesburg. Yet, like Gandhi, he treasured some of the British values all his life. Also, they were in competition with Afrikaans values which were more extreme with regard to race.
 
I know something about English education in Africa during the days of empire because I was lectured with the same theories by British teachers in the neighboring country of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. Albeit two decades later than Mandela's schooling, the creed was the same. It went like this: We were a chosen people, kind but paternal, fair and enlightened and we are the gold standard for gentlemen. It was the glorious myth of those times, as heady as it was false.
 
There was no place for a black gentleman in that scheme of things.
 
Mandela studied law but was drawn into politics, always tempered by his Christianity and that sense of noblesse oblige that his heritage and schooling had imbued him with. He was a restrained revolutionary; but when he saw that legal maneuvering and civil disobedience were not going to succeed, he was bravely the public defender of the anti-apartheid cause. Mandela admired Gandhi and would have done it without violence if he had thought there was a chance. He advocated sabotage not murder. His terrorism was against property rather than people.
 
As Mandela was growing into a revolutionary, agreeing to political violence to overthrow the regime only as a last resort, apartheid was growing. Racial segregation was not a new idea, but its rigid enforcement with the massive relocation of people into “homelands,” or Bantustans, was. About 3.5 million people were moved to what the government said were their traditional homelands. Cities were cut up without regard to property rights, family ties or tradition. Whites got the good parts, Coloreds (mixed-race people) a sliver and blacks got the slums with some state improvements. It was as rigid as it was diabolical. Blacks had to carry “passes” when out of their designated area for work or other reasons.
 
In and out of prison, Mandela was a brave light in a dark place. The miraculous thing is that he never grew bitter; he sought reconciliation not revenge. He said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
“Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrica” is the anthem of the ANC and much of Africa. It means “God Bless Africa.” South Africa has been blessed with Mandela. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Put the Kettle on, Sarah Palin

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Sarah m’dear, it’s not about the party. It’s about the tea.

For those of us of the British persuasion, tea is black tea. It was the tea on which the British built the empire.

It was also, I might add, the tea that Margaret Thatcher served at No. 10 Downing Street. I enjoyed some with her there. A Conservative traditionalist, she served it with milk for certain and sugar as an option.

Thatcher did not ask her guests, as bad hotels do now, what kind of tea they would like. Tea to Thatcher was black tea, sometimes known as Indian tea, though it might have been grown in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was neither flavored nor some herbal muck masquerading as tea.

The former prime minister knew that good tea is made in the kitchen, where stove-boiled water is poured from a kettle onto tea in a pot, not tepid water poured from a pot on a table into a cup with a tea bag.

Boiling water in a kettle, or pot, on the stove is important in making good tea. In a microwave, the water doesn’t bubble. Tea needs the bubbles.

While the Chinese drank green tea hundreds of years before Christ, the British developed their tea-drinking habit in the 17th century. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for the charter of the British East India Company, establishing the trade in spice and silk that lead to the formal annexation of India and the establishment of the Raj.

Initially, tea was a sideline but it became increasingly important and started to define the British. The coffee shops–like the one that launched the insurer Lloyds of London around 1688–continued, but at all levels of society tea was becoming the British obsession.

By the 18th century, tea drinking was classless in Britain. Duchesses and workmen enjoyed it alike.

Tea was the fuel of the empire: the war drink, the social drink, the comfort drink and the consolation drink. Coffee had an upmarket connotation. It wasn’t widely available and the British didn’t make it very well.

Also as coffee was well established on the continent, it had to be shunned. To this day the British are divided about continental Europe and what they see as the emblems of Euro-depravity: coffee, garlic, scents and bidets.

Although tea is standardized, the British play their class games over the tea packers. For three centuries, most tea has been shipped in bulk to various packing houses throughout the British Isles. But the posh prefer Twinings to Lipton.

Offering tea with fancy cakes, clotted cream and fine jams separates the workers from the ruling classes. One of Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting, Anna Maria Stanhope, known as the Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the creator of afternoon tea time; which the hotels turned into formal, expensive afternoon “teas.” The Ritz in London is famous for them.

The British believe that tea sustained them through many wars. “Let’s have a nice cup of tea. Things will get better.” I’ve always believed that America’s revenge against the British crown was to ice their beloved tea. Toss it into Boston Harbor, but don’t ice it. If you should have the good fortune to be asked to tea at No. 10, or at Buckingham Palace, don’t expect it to be iced.

Incidentally tea bags are fine, and it’s now just pretentious to serve loose tea with a strainer. Of course, if you want to read the political tea leaves you’ll have to use loose tea.

If you’re serving tea to the thousands at your tea parties, Sarah, remember that unlike politics, tea is very forgiving. It can be revived just with more boiling water.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Waiting for Zuma, Big Man

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What do you call a man who is a self-professed communist; has been accused of rape but the charges have been dropped, along with charges of fraud and racketeering; who practices polygamy and has 18 acknowledged children; and whose favorite song is “Mshini Wami” (Bring Me My Machine Gun)? You may call him a thug, but South Africans are about to call him Mr. President.

Step forward Jacob Zuma, 67, who led the African National Congress (ANC) to a resounding majority in the recent election and who will shortly be elected president by the South African parliament. This is a prospect that has delighted the poor black electorate of South Africa as much as it has terrified the rest of the population, including the country’s 5 million whites.

Once again, it would appear that Africa is throwing up a “Big Man” who will lead them into the Valley of the Shadow of Death–and leave them there. Think of Idi Amin of Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who are just three of Africa’s megalomaniacal villains.

Although much is known about his bizarre conduct and strangely contradictory pronouncements, nobody has any real idea of how Zuma will govern. Already he is suspected of getting a key ally out of a 15-year prison sentence, after 28 months, on alleged medical grounds.

In most things Zuma left a trail of wreckage behind him, such as when he operated out of the ANC office in Maputo, Mozambique, during the struggle against apartheid. Similar stories of wild conduct and corrupt goings on came from Lusaka, Zambia, where Zuma ran the ANC intelligence network.

Zuma did one incontrovertibly positive thing: as a Zulu, he was able to stop the fighting between the Zulus and the Xhosas that threatened to tear the ANC apart and with it South Africa itself, after the fall of apartheid.

This was not an inconsiderable achievement, considering the role of the Zulus in South African history. First the Zulus, at 11 million people, are the largest ethnic grouping among South Africa’s 48 million people. They are also the Prussians of South Africa: proud, warlike and with a distinct sense of superiority. They were formed into a cohesive nation in 1816, under Shaka Zulu; and were the only African tribe to decisively defeat the British at Isandalwana in l879.

For a while it looked as though the Inkatha Freedom Party, under Mangosuthu Buthelezi, would imperil the ANC’s grip on power. But Zuma, with Zulu credentials and a leadership role in the ANC, quieted the Zulu unrest and the ANC prospered.

Although for many years Zuma was a member of the Communist Party of South Africa and has talked of wealth distribution, recently he has been kinder to business and even appears to be fascinated by it.

Encouragingly, some of Zuma’s statements about President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe are stronger and more critical than anything said by Thabo Mbeki, the man Zuma is replacing. Mbeki was committed to “quiet diplomacy,” which meant say nothing and do less. He was part of Africa’s post-colonial omerta: an implicit vow never to criticize another African leader even when he is a problem to you–as Zimbabwe is to South Africa with millions of refugees flooding over the Limpopo River.

White South Africans, and particularly farmers, are terrified that Zuma may yet take a leaf out Mugabe’s book and introduce race-based land redistribution and begin the destruction of the country.

Another concern is Zuma’s attitude to AIDS. Mbeki famously did not support Western therapies for many years and believed in quack remedies that assisted in the spread of the disease. Zuma’s alleged rape victim, the 35-year-old daughter of a politician, is known to be HIV-positive. Zuma said the sex was consensual and he then took a shower to minimize his chances of catching the virus. That suggested that his knowledge of AIDS is not much better than Mbeki’s.

Zuma, who likes to sing and dance at political events, is a conundrum. But there is no mystery about the challenges facing him: his base is poor and believes in instant solutions. While it is in Zuma’s power to wreck his beautiful country as so many other Big Men of Africa have done to theirs, there is little he can do in a recession to fulfill the expectations of his neediest supporters. Will he, like Mugabe, try to deflect public opinion by blaming the prosperous?

 

Fatigue as the Ultimate Healer

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I first encountered the healthy corrective of fatigue when I was a young writer for a television news service in London. I was chronically late. Every interview I did started with an apology. Every day when I showed up for work, I was late. My supervisor would look at me and at the clock and sigh.

 

One day, I decided that the price of being late was too high: If you have to start with an apology, you never get a decent interview and the long face of my supervisor was painfully reproving. I was tired of my self-imposed misery. I was fatigued with my own sloth. Since that time, I have been fairly punctual.

 

Fatigue, it seems to me, can be motivator in governance and foreign policy. Take the three great revolutions of our time: accommodation in Northern Ireland, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. I submit that in all of these, fatigue played a critical if not seminal role.

 

I have been in and out of South Africa all of my life. Sure sanctions and international pressure played a role in bringing about change. But there was something else at work: fatigue. The people of South Africa were very tired of their own creation. Driving across South Africa in the 1970s with an African relief driver, I ran into what used to be called “petty apartheid”: segregated places to eat. As a result, we took out food and ate it in the car. But at two roadside eateries (they were few and far between), the owners apologized to me for the offensive law. The weight of the injustice was getting to them.

 

That was the first time I saw a sufficient glimmer of hope that peaceful change would come, as it did.

 

In Northern Ireland it appeared that the sectarian violence, which emerged in 1963, would go on forever. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in barbarous ways and terrorism was spreading into Britain. Over the 15 years I participated in a think tank in Ireland, I heard endless speeches from both sides about the hopelessness of the situation in which the Irish Republican Army, the right-wing Protestant “hard men” and the British Army fought a triangular terrorist war.

 

On a summer’s morning in 1982, there were two terrorist attacks in the center of London. A car bomb was detonated as 16 members of the Queen’s Household Cavalry trotted along a Hyde Park’s South Carriage Drive; and less than two miles away, in Regent’s Park, a military bandstand was blown up. Toll for the day: 10 soldiers killed, 55 injured. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for the strikes. All of Britain was on a terrorist footing, but that did not stop an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England two years later.

 

By the 1990s, you could sense a change in Ireland: People were tired of the killing and living in fear. Without that fatigue, that revolution, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and power-sharing, would not have happened.

 

Likewise by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union–the edifice of communism with its incompetence, its privations and its paranoia–had lost the loyalty of the people and the terror apparatus of the state was failing. Russians were tired of it and Poland was in near revolt. Mikhail Gorbachov loosened the reins and things hurtled forward.

 

Alas fatigue is not a policy, not even a strategy. It is just a reality; a factor in protracted disputes, oppressive governance and pervasive injustice.

 

When, then, will fatigue set in between combatants in the Middle East, the oppressed of North Korea or the misgoverned of Africa? According to my theory of fatigue, these things are overdue. But it is easier to fix your own timekeeping than history’s.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Men Who Should Stand in the Dock with Mugabe

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It is easy to work up a head of hate against Robert Mugabe, the cruel president of Zimbabwe. He has destroyed a beautiful country and inflicted untold suffering on his people. He has so mismanaged the economy that the country’s inflation rate is the world’s highest–over 100,000 percent. He has expelled the productive people from the country and others have fled. He has given choice land and accommodations to his family of thugs.

 

More, he is a murderer. In the early part of his reign of terror, he killed tens of thousands of the Matabele people in southern Zimbabwe, around the city of Bulawayo.

 

It is not hard to vilify Mugabe, who may now be at the end of his bloody reign. But there are other guilty men who should be named. They are the de facto co-conspirators up and down the continent of Africa, who lead countries, enjoy influence and have, to a man (the arrival of a woman leader in Liberia is recent), remained silent as Mugabe has become more maniacal.

 

The guiltiest are those in the frontline states that surround land-locked Zimbabwe. They are the leaders of Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Each one of them has some of the blood Mugabe has shed on his hands. Because of the silence that they have assiduously maintained, their complicity has been absolute. All four leaders have been the enablers of Mugabe.

 

Each country has suffered from the implosion of Zimbabwe. Each country has felt the pain from the lack of trade; unsatisfied debt; and the surge of people fleeing from the privations of Zimbabwe–once one of the richest countries in Africa, and the breadbasket of the southern region.

 

Botswana, on Zimbabwe’s southwest border, is currently the showplace of Africa. It is a functioning democracy, with a healthy economy based on mining and tourism. But Botswana could have used its economic leverage, as the host of the principle rail line carrying exports out of Zimbabwe into South Africa, and from there to the world, to put pressure on Mugabe. But it did not.

 

To the east, Mozambique hosts many of Zimbabwe’s exports and imports through the port of Beira on the Indian Ocean. If there had been some tightening of this relationship, Mugabe would have listened. Instead, there was silence.

 

Then there is South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki. If there is a judgment day, Mbeki will have much to answer for his connivance in tolerating Mugabe. Mbeki’s guilt extends beyond the suffering of the people to his north to his own people. More than 2 million refugees have fled from Zimbabwe to South Africa, where they have been no more popular than illegal aliens anywhere. The really hapless live on such charity as they can find; while those who are more capable of organization, particularly deserters from the Zimbabwe armed forces, have formed sophisticated criminal gangs, specializing in bank and armored car robbery.

 

Finally, Zambia has shouldered the burden of watching over the giant Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River, which provides electricity to both Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia has kept essential goods flowing into Zimbabwe, against the international sanctions; and it has seen its own Victoria Falls tourism plummet because of conditions on the Zimbabwe side of the falls. Yet, Zambia’s leaders have said nothing.

 

If Mugabe is forced from power by the ongoing election, and if he leaves without trying to annul the results of the election, milk and honey will not flow again in the country between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. Too much has been destroyed in 28 years of his rule. The infrastructure has been destroyed; soil erosion has carried away an incalculable amount of earth from the fragile plain that once produced corn for all of southern Africa; the professional class is scattered around the world, in what they refer to as the Zimbabwe Diaspora; and the people of Zimbabwe have lost confidence in the future. The most optimistic country in Africa has traded hope for fatalism.

 

Assuming Morgan Tsvangirai really has won the election in Zimbabwe, he will have to preside over a massive reconstruction, which will last decades simply to get the country back to where it was when Mugabe destroyed it through racism, megalomania, and economics so primitive that he thought he could print money and it would have value.

 

Tsvangirai will have to turn to the world for economic aid and technical assistance. But he will have to turn to Zimbabweans for goodwill and to resist corruption. And he will have to turn to another silent partner, China, for a better deal on the contracts Mugabe signed with Beijing.

 

Not since Idi Amin was feeding his opponents to the crocodiles has there been such a catastrophic head of state in Africa. And not since Amin’s days, have the leaders of Africa remained so quiet in the face of such palpable evil.