The Fate of Africa: Trial by Fire - Hardcover

Harding, Jeremy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671723596 ISBN 13: 9780671723590

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1993

Synopsis

A journalist travels to six African countries to portray a continent in turmoil, from the battlegrounds of Cuito Cuanavale, to the armed rebels in Mozambique, to a huge fortified wall in the Western Sahara

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Reviews

Powerful eyewitness reporting distinguishes much of these accounts of conflict in six countries--four in Southern Africa, plus two unusual independence movements on the continent. Harding, a London-based journalist for the BBC and several publications, is best when capturing human stories, like that of Justino Goncalves, an Angolan hoping for reconstruction despite the confusao (confusion) of Angola's devastating civil war. In Mozambique, mired in an even more bizarre post-colonial civil war, the once-Marxist Frelimo regime, historically hostile to religion, is witnessed embracing a traditional prophet to win support from peasants. In Western Sahara, we see the guerrilla movement called Polisario fighting the huge sand wall built by Morocco's King Hassan to keep them in the desert. In Eritrea, Harding meets the internationally isolated local independence movement, and later has a tense conversation at Moscow's Africa Institute with a defender Ethiopian rule of Eritrea. The immediacy of these reports is not matched in the thin portrait of Namibia, which gained independence from South Africa in 1991, nor in the sketchy and outdated chapter on South Africa.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A series of set-pieces that graphically illustrate--but less successfully illuminate--the terrible tangle of ancient legacies and contemporary politics that threaten Africa. Harding (a British journalist who's both traveled and lived in Africa) writes about six very disparate and far-flung countries that share a common challenge of having to make themselves anew in the post-cold-war world: countries like Mozambique and Angola, which must not only restructure their economies to meet the requirements of the World Bank but also deal with the tremendous dislocation of people and production war has caused. Harding begins with Angola, still at war after 30 years, as rebel commander Jonas Savimbi refuses to accept the results of the recent elections. Namibia is next, newly independent after a 24-year war, bustling despite the scars: ``Everywhere you looked there was energy''--an energy that's also visible in Western Sahara, where the Polisario liberation movement is still fighting for independence from Morocco and where, in refugee camps, generations of nomads are trying to grow food in soil that's as salty as the water. In South Africa, the author's focus is the on-going violence in the townships, violence that's making it ``harder and more dangerous to get to work.'' Harding finds that Mozambique, despite peacemaking attempts, is still ravaged by bands of soldiers, and he takes as his final subject Eritrea, finally independent after a long war against Ethiopia, though a quarter of million people remain in Sudanese refugee camps. In each country, Harding visits battle fields, talks to victims of war, and notes everywhere the legacy of destroyed landscapes and economies. Harding's empathy for his subjects' suffering is creditable, but their fate, as well as that of the continent he so obviously loves, get losts in a text that wanders, jumps, and never quite gets in focus. (Maps) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0671723596
• ISBN 13: 9780671723590
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368