Middle Passages

Keith Richburg stood on a bridge above the falls and watched the procession. As East African bureau chief of The Washington Post, Richburg should have been in Rwanda, covering the story. But as a dark-skinned African American, he feared that he might be mistaken for a Tutsi and find himself among the floating corpses. So he had come instead to this bridge over the Kagera River, on the Tanzanian side of the border. He tried to time the flow—a body every minute or two, sometimes clumps of two or three—but soon recognized the folly of the exercise: “Because this is Africa, and they don’t count the bodies in Africa.”

It was not supposed to be like this. When Richburg accepted the East Africa desk in the early 1990s, the continent was awash in hope. The end of the Cold War in 1989 freed Africa from four decades of superpower meddling. In February 1990, Nelson Mandela strode triumphantly from a South African prison, tolling the end of Africa’s last white supremacist regime. Bloody, decades-long civil wars in Mozambique and Angola had come to negotiated ends (temporarily, in Angola’s case). All over the continent, the dictators who had dominated African politics since decolonization, or at least since the first wave of postindependence coups—Félix Houphpouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, Hastings K. Banda of Malawi, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Mengistu Haile Mariam of Ethiopia, Mohamed Siad Barre of Somalia—were gone or going, swept from power by a combination of old age, international pressure, and domestic insurgency. Politicians and pundits spoke of an “African Renaissance,” of a dawning era of democracy and development in a beleaguered continent.

By the end of the 1990s, the wreckage of Africa’s renaissance lay strewn across the land. While a handful of nations succeeded in creating democratic dispensations and functioning economies, their achievements were swallowed up in a new wave of violent upheaval and economic collapse. The annulment of a democratic election by Nigeria’s military government threw Africa’s most populous nation into chaos. In Somalia, a United Nations peacekeeping mission launched after President Barre’s forced departure devolved into a brutal counterinsurgency war. Sierra Leone and Liberia were ravaged by rebel armies, featuring soldiers as young as ten years old. The greatest carnage, however, occurred in the heart of the continent, in a swath of Central African states stretching from Uganda in the east to Angola in the west. In Rwanda, Hutu militiamen perpetrated the most rapid genocide in human history: more than eight hundred thousand people killed in ninety days, most of them dispatched with machetes and clubs. At least three million more perished in the slow, surreal implosion of Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire. In virtually every measure of human welfare—per capita income; infant mortality; access to clean water, education, and primary health care—Africa experienced stagnation or decline. Diseases all but eradicated in the West—cholera, tuberculosis, polio—continued to decimate Africans. Malaria alone killed more than a million people per year, most of them children. As if all this were not enough, Africa found itself the epicenter of the AIDS pandemic. In Zimbabwe, one of the nations hardest hit by the disease, average life expectancy declined from sixty-five to thirty-nine in a single decade.

As Africa’s agonies multiplied, a legion of journalists descended on the continent. Though they carried satellite phones and fax machines rather than Maxim guns and Bibles, these reporters were the lineal descendants of the explorers and missionaries of the nineteenth century, the latest participants in the long tradition of Western writing about Africa. Like their pith-helmeted predecessors, they sought out the continent ’s most harrowing corners, creating through their daily dispatches a new Dark Continent narrative to edify and horrify readers in their comfortable homes in Europe and the United States. Several members of the journalistic corps were African Americans, three of whom—Keith Richburg and Lynne Duke of The Washington Post and Howard French of The New York Times—would later publish memoirs of their experiences. Their accounts, similar in scope yet radically different in substance and tone, offer a final meditation on Africa, America, and the tangled ties that bind them.

RICHBURG, DUKE , and French were all products of the post-civil rights era, a period of unprecedented hope and unexpected perplexity. Born within a short time of one another—Duke in 1956, Richburg and French in 1958—they came of age after the great battles over public accommodations and voting rights had been won. By the standards of their parents, let alone of more distant ancestors, they inherited a world of unimaginable opportunity. In 1960, only about 130,000 African Americans attended college, virtually all of them in segregated institutions; a generation later, the number of black matriculants had grown tenfold, to more than 1.3 million. Though still underrepresented in most professions, African Americans were a conspicuous and growing presence in law and medicine, on university faculties, and in the business world. The very fact that African Americans reported for The New York Times and Washington Post was an index of how much had changed. Despite perennial complaints about “the liberal media,” newsrooms historically have ranked alongside churches and country clubs as bastions of segregation. As late as 1960, the number of African Americans writing for major metropolitan daily papers could literally be counted on one hand. A generation later, every self-respecting newspaper in the nation had at least one black reporter; many had special programs to recruit and mentor African Americans.

Yet this best of times was also, in curious ways, the worst of times. Even as the black middle class grew in size and visibility, millions of African Americans remained trapped in blighted urban ghettoes, where they bore the brunt of poverty, joblessness, inferior public services, and violent crime. The rapid deindustrialization of the American economy after 1970 had a devastating impact on African Americans, who had only recently gained access to the industrial jobs that had long provided the ladder of upward mobility for European immigrants and their descendants. Segregation, abolished in law, persisted in practice, most dramatically in public education. By the 1990s public school systems in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Dallas were more than 90 percent black and Latino, as whites fled to the sanctuaries of suburbia or private schools. A generation after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, African Americans continued to face significant discrimination in hiring, access to housing, medical care, criminal sentencing, even the interest rates they were charged for mortgages and car loans. In contrast to the injustices of the Jim Crow era, however, such discrimination was typically not inscribed in law but rooted in the operation of ostensibly race-neutral institutions, making it much harder to document and combat.

The African American predicament was complicated further by sweeping changes in American politics. While the post-Jim Crow era produced an increase in the number of black elected officials, it also saw a dramatic erosion of racial comity, as the civil rights coalition fragmented and a new Republican majority gained control of the federal government. If the civil rights movement of the 1960s represented the second Reconstruction, as numerous historians have suggested, then the resurgent conservative movement of the 1970s and 1980s might fairly be characterized as the second Redemption, though with Republicans playing the role Democrats had played a century before. While the two periods differed sharply in levels of violence, they had a similar dynamic, with conservatives in both cases tapping into a deep reservoir of white resentment against a federal government that had allegedly been captured by black people and their irresponsible white allies. Programs associated with the racial liberalism of the 1960s—affirmative action, Job Corps, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (welfare, in common parlance)—came under withering attack. In the new conservative catechism, such programs were poisoned gifts, sapping personal responsibility and reinforcing a “culture of poverty” characterized by dependency, indolence, and family disintegration.

For the most part, proponents of the new conservative orthodoxy eschewed explicitly racial appeals, attributing the predicament of the so-called black underclass not to race per se but to cultural pathologies and the perverse incentives of the welfare state. Indeed, some of the most prominent purveyors of the analysis were themselves African American. Individuals such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Glenn Loury were only the most conspicuous of a cohort of black conservatives that emerged in the 1980s to denounce welfare, affirmative action, and other vestiges of 1960s-era liberalism. Like George Schuyler, the conservative gadfly of an earlier generation, they took particular delight in skewering other African American political leaders, whom they accused of betraying Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, dream of color-blind democracy in favor of special pleading and perpetual victimhood.

The end result was a world undreamed by King and other apostles of the civil rights era, a world of formal equality and persistent inequality, of increased familiarity and diminished empathy. For the first time in history, African Americans enjoyed full civil and political rights in the land of their birth. Yet they also faced the continuing wages of institutional racism, as well as a raft of daily indignities and affronts, some so subtle that one might wonder whether they were real or imagined: arbitrary traffic stops by police; taxi cabs that failed to stop; sidelong glances by coworkers, wondering whether one owed one ’s position to “merit” or the operation of some “racial preference.” Compared to the horrors endured by black people during slavery and Jim Crow, such afflictions might seem petty, but they exacted a heavy emotional toll, breeding frustration and a kind of chronic ambivalence, a sense of living between two worlds yet belonging fully to neither. This ambivalence, paradoxically, tended to be most acute among members of the burgeoning black middle class, those seemingly enjoying the fruits of an integrated America.

AS SO OFTEN IN THE PAST, the perplexities of black life in America would play out on the terrain of Africa. The last decades of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of African American interest in the continent, a renewed sense of identification expressed in everything from fashion to the names that families gave to their children. The herald of this new era was Alex Haley, whose best-selling book, Roots: The Story of an American Family, appeared in 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial. Haley retold American history through the life of his own family, whose descent he traced to an African captive from the Gambia, Kunta Kinte. The book became an immediate sensation, claiming the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award and spawning an entire African American genealogy industry. A television version, aired over a week in January 1977, became the most watched program in American history. Though subsequent scholarship would raise serious doubts about the historical accuracy of Haley’s work, there is no disputing its impact on African Americans, who glimpsed in the figure of Kunta Kinte the previously unthinkable possibility of discovering their true names.

While the genealogy fad subsided, Africa’s grip on the black imagination did not. Books such as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena and Molefi Asante ’s Afrocentricity, both published in the 1980s, proclaimed the rise of Afrocentrism, a scholarly movement emphasizing the African roots of Western civilization, as well as the essential Africanity of African American people. Kente cloth, a colorful woven fabric from Ghana, emerged as both a fashion and political statement. Thousands of families adopted Kwanzaa, a “traditional” holiday invented in the late 1960s by black nationalist Ron Karenga and marketed as an African American alternative to Christmas. Each of the seven days of the festival was dedicated to what Karenga regarded as an essentially African principal, each rendered in KiSwahili: umoja (unity); ujama (cooperative economics); kuumba (creativity), and so forth.

But the best evidence of Africa’s salience in African American life was simply the term “African American” itself. Rarely heard before the 1970s, the term emerged in the 1980s as the preferred, and soon the prescribed, designation for people of African descent in the United States. As with previous changes in collective address, the shift provoked controversy. Conservative critics decried “African American” as a further sign of the nation’s ethnic balkanization; others debated whether the term properly belonged to American-born black people or to new immigrants from Africa, whose numbers had grown exponentially in the years after 1965. But by the early 1990s, the new term was embedded in the style guides of U.S. newspapers and publishing houses, as well as in common parlance. Though few observed it at the time, black nomenclature had now come almost full circle, returning the nation to the 1830s, when free people of color, anxious to assert their status as American citizens in the face of the colonization movement, renounced “African” in favor of “Negro” or “Colored.” A century and a half later, their descendants, having finally achieved full American citizenship, reclaimed the identity their ancestors had relinquished.

But what precisely was the identity to which African Americans laid claim? What was the substance of this new solidarity? In contrast to previous periods of African enthusiasm, the late twentieth century spawned no substantial emigration movement; for all the invocations of “home,” few African Americans proposed to resettle permanently in Africa. Nor did the era engender much in the way of political solidarity, certainly nothing to compare with the radical Pan-Africanism that flowered in the springtime of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The antiapartheid movement of the 1980s represents an exception, but it may be the exception that proves the rule. Not only was South African apartheid an unusual case, offering a literally black and white example of injustice, but the movement against it was also waged chiefly on the terrain of domestic politics, with activists pressuring American corporations and universities to demonstrate their commitment to racial justice at home by divesting from a racist regime abroad. South Africa aside, the period produced little sustained African American engagement with African politics, indeed little engagement with the realities of postcolonial Africa at all. In donning the mantle of African American, Americans of African descent were not claiming identity with contemporary Africans as much as reclaiming their own ancestral past—in Haley’s terms, their roots.

The character of African American interest in Africa was starkly revealed in the rise of an African tourist industry. For most of history, the number of African Americans traveling to Africa in a given year has been very small, growing from mere handfuls in the early nineteenth century to a few hundred in the days of decolonization. In the 1990s, the number soared to tens of thousands per year. The roster included individuals from every walk of life, from students to diplomats to development specialists, but the lion’s share were tourists making pilgrimages to their ancestral land. An entire black heritage tourism industry emerged, complete with chartered flights, air-conditioned buses, and other amenities. In some ways, this new tourism paralleled developments within white America, where expanding middle-class affluence and a yearning for ethnic identity propelled millions back to the old country, but the peculiarities of African American history gave African tourism a different valence. However desperate the circumstances of the huddled masses arriving in America from Europe, they did not come as slaves, nor did their descendants experience the continuing discrimination and degradation meted out to African Americans. For white Americans, treading the old sod was chiefly an exercise in nostalgia. For African Americans visiting Africa, the emotional palette was inevitably darker.

Black and white heritage tourism differed in one other respect. Americans of European descent generally know where their ancestors came from, if not the specific village then at least the country. African Americans do not. In the absence of such information, the heritage tourism industry quickly came to focus on a handful of representative sites, each associated with the history of the slave trade. Initially, the most popular destination was Jufurre in the Gambia, the village reputed to be the home of Haley’s Kunta Kinte. By the 1990s, the traffic was centered on old slave forts, particularly Goree Island in Senegal and Cape Coast castle in Ghana, places recommended not only by their intactness but also by their proximity to international airports and Western-standard hotels. Whether a particular individual’s ancestors passed through these sites is obviously impossible to know, but there is no gainsaying their impact on visiting African Americans, for whom they have acquired the character of religious shrines.

All these contradictory processes and pressures would come to a point in the experiences of Keith Richburg, Lynne Duke, and Howard French. As products of the African American middle class in the post-civil rights era, as black reporters for white-owned newspapers, and as African Americans in Africa during the bloodiest decade in the continent ’s history, all three faced complex questions of intepretation and identity. They would answer these questions in very different ways.

PUBLISHED IN 1997, Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa was the first of the new journalistic accounts of Africa and surely the most controversial. Based on the author’s three years as Washington Post bureau chief in Nairobi, Out of America was, like Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, a tale of disillusionment, but one rendered not in irony or wistfulness but in an outpouring of rage and horror. Assailing what he called the myth of “Mother Africa,” Richburg sketched a landscape of misery and senseless slaughter, full of people who “look like me,” yet whose behavior and wretchedness he found unfathomable. By the time he left Africa, he counted himself a different man, “devoid of hope . . . drained of compassion,” and determinedly indifferent to the continent ’s never-ending sorrows.

By his own account, Richburg was an unlikely pilgrim. The son of a union official, he grew up in a solidly working class neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. He did not have “a particularly ‘black’ childhood—just a childhood, an average American childhood.” He and his brother bought candy at the corner store and escaped the summer heat in an air-conditioned movie house up the street. His parents, who had converted to Catholicism after arriving in Detroit from the South, attended weekly mass at St. Leo’s, the local parish, and sent their children to St. Leo’s School, alongside the children of their Irish and Polish neighbors. It was, in Richburg’s rendering, an idyllic boyhood, which came to an abrupt end on July 23, 1967, with the eruption of the Detroit riot, the bloodiest of the “urban disturbances” that roiled the United States in the late 1960s. By the time the U.S. Army and National Guard had restored order five days later, forty-three people had been killed, seven thousand had been arrested, and several square miles of the city had been reduced to ashes. Richburg’s father took him to see the flames. “I want you to see this,” he told him. “I want you to see what black people are doing to their own neighborhood.”

While Out of America includes only a few pages about Detroit, it is worth attending to the account, since it anticipates Richburg’s later portrayal of Africa. Presented without explanation or historical context, the 1967 riot appears as unaccountable as a thunderclap, a senseless act of black self-destruction that gutted a functioning, comfortably integrated city. In fact, Detroit was one of the most segregated cities in America, with a long history of violent racial conflict. While Richburg’s family appears to have been spared, most black families moving into white neighborhoods encountered intense resistance, ranging from restrictive covenants and redlining (the refusal of banks to provide mortgages to black families outside designated neighborhoods, a policy virtually mandated by federal law) to outright terrorism. More than two hundred black families in Detroit had their homes bombed in the 1940s and 1950s, and countless others endured vandalism and verbal abuse. When such tactics failed to stem the tide, whites decamped for the suburbs. By the time the riot occurred, some 40 percent of white Detroiters, more than six hundred thousand people, had already left the city.

The decades of Richburg’s childhood also saw an accelerating process of deindustrialization. The auto industry, long the engine of the Detroit economy, began to shed jobs in the 1950s, initially because of a deliberate decentralization policy, later because of automation and rising international competition. Inevitably, the layoffs bore hardest on African Americans, who were not only the first fired but who possessed fewer accumulated assets with which to weather long periods of unemployment. The deepening poverty of black neighborhoods, in turn, exacerbated tensions between residents and the Detroit police force. Inevitably, the 1967 riot began with a confrontation with police, who raided a Twelfth Avenue blind pig—an after-hours drinking establishment—where neighbors had gathered to welcome home two soldiers just returned from combat tours in Vietnam. None of this context excuses looting and arson, nor is it meant to deny the momentous importance of the riot in the history of the city, and indeed the nation. But it does suggest that the riot, and the baleful consequences that followed, flowed from something more than black people ’s own violent irresponsibility.

Richburg’s neighborhood was spared by the flames, but it did not escape the riot’s aftermath. Whites fled to suburbia. Merchants shuttered their shops. St. Leo’s High School closed. The riot also had an impact on Richburg’s own life, catapulting him into the privileged white institutions in which he would spend the rest of his life. With the closing of St. Leo’s, his parents enrolled him in a private school, University Liggett, in the posh suburb of Grosse Pointe Woods. One of a handful of black students at the school, he had mostly white friends, most of whom had only the “vaguest sense” of where he lived. Suspended between worlds, he became a master of not taking sides, insisting, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., that individuals should be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” He continued to steer to that lodestar at the University of Michigan, where he retained both black and white friends and resisted what he calls “voluntary resegregation” or, more prosaically, “the dining hall test.” In his early years at The Washington Post, he angrily rejected suggestions that he should temper criticism of local black officials in the interests of his race.

When his editors at the Post offered him an African assignment, Richburg hesitated. Aside from one or two undergraduate courses, he had always given the continent a wide berth. How would he respond to the poverty? What if Africans rejected him? How would it feel not to be a minority, to be just another “face in the crowd?” Above all, Richburg feared that Africa would compel him to confront his own racial identity, force him “to choose which side of the dining hall I would sit on.” But in the end he accepted the offer, having been assured by various “well-meaning academics and Africa specialists” that the continent stood on the verge of an economic and political renaissance.

PREDICTIONS OF A continental renaissance were first put to the test in Somalia. In early 1991, Siad Barre, the dictator who had ruled the country for more than two decades, was toppled from power by a coalition of rebel armies. But instead of prosperity and democracy, his ouster brought a complete dissolution of civil order. As Richburg noted at the time, Somalia represented the first great challenge of post-Cold War Africa, a test case of the international community’s ability to provide political and humanitarian assistance to nations still “teetering between strongman rule and violent anarchy.” With the commitment of a massive U.N. peacekeeping force, spearheaded by twenty thousand American troops, the country became something grander still, a proving ground for what President George H. W. Bush called the “new world order.” Basking in the glow of victory in the First Iraqi War, Bush prophesied a world “where the United Nations, freed from Cold War stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders; a world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.” Scarcely a year later, the new world order had been consigned to the historic rubbish heap, and Somalia had devolved into yet another kind of test, measuring America’s capacity to sustain an urban counterinsurgency war against a determined adversary.

Somalia became Richburg’s first great story and, in time, his obsession. Yet in all his dispatches and in his extended account in Out of America, he included virtually no mention of the country’s history. Neglect of history is hardly unusual among journalists—there is only so much one can fit in a thousand-word story—but Richburg elevated this occupational hazard into something like a political principle. To him, Africans were ill served by their “backward-looking attitude,” their penchant for placing the onus for their predicament on colonialism and superpower meddling rather than on their own failings. Yet if the Somali debacle of the early 1990s illustrated anything, it was that past and present are not so easily disentangled.

A union of former British and Italian colonies, Somalia obtained its independence in 1960, the so-called “Year of Africa,” in which seventeen African territories achieved national independence. Among the seventeen, Somalia inherited one of the least promising legacies. Though united by a common language and a widely shared religion, Islam, Somalia possessed little in the way of economic development, infrastructure (more than 60 percent of the population was nomadic), or exploitable natural resources. Few Somalis had ever seen the inside of a school or experienced running water, much less participated in a parliamentary system of government. In retrospect, it is surprising that the government created in 1960 lasted as long as it did—until 1969, when it was overthrown in a bloodless coup led by General Siad Barre.

One asset Somalia did possess was a strategic location on the Horn of Africa, guarding the approaches to the Red Sea, a situation that naturally excited the interest of the superpowers. In 1970, on the first anniversary of the coup, Barre declared Somalia a Socialist state, and the country entered the orbit of the Soviet Union. The governing ideology of the new Somalia was what Barre called “scientific socialism,” his own eccentric blend of Marxism-Leninism and the Koran, supplemented with bits borrowed from Mussolini and Mao. In 1977, in the midst of a border war with Ethiopia that Barre had launched, the Somalis were betrayed by their Soviet patrons, who concluded a new alliance with the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia, an alliance sealed by the arrival of Soviet military advisers and ten thousand Cuban troops. The United States stepped into the breach, and Barre became an American client, receiving military assistance and a hundred million dollars a year in aid in exchange for basing rights for American forces. The United States continued to support him through 1989, even as the country descended into a brutal civil war. Determined to cut off rebel militias from popular support, Barre launched a scorched-earth policy in the countryside, killing literally hundreds of thousands of Somali civilians. But the rebel drive to the capital continued, and Barre fled in early 1991. Richburg arrived later that year.

By the time Richburg arrived, Somalia was “a nation in meltdown.” Unable to agree on a successor government, the rebels carved the country into fiefdoms, each under the control of a clan militia. All the normal appurtenances of civil life—government, police, schools, basic public services—collapsed. Rival militias, often little more than armed bandits, operated unchecked, especially in Mogadishu, the capital, where more than five thousand civilians died in anarchic street battles. In the countryside, the combination of war, banditry, and stubborn drought brought food production to a halt. With the airport and ports under regular shelling, little food aid could enter the country, and what stores did arrive were quickly looted. More than half of the nation’s eight million people faced the imminent prospect of starvation.

Yet few in the West seemed to care. In contrast to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, which commanded the attention of the international media and prompted the dispatching of international peacekeepers, Somalia’s slow death scarcely merited a mention in American and European papers. Richburg set out to change that. By his own account, he became “fixated” on Somalia, churning out articles on the impending famine and browbeating his editors to give the story more coverage. Doubtless there was an element of journalistic self-promotion here—every reporter believes that his or her story deserves more play—but Richburg’s efforts also flowed from a perverse kind of “racial pride,” a conviction that the suffering of Africans was as newsworthy as the suffering of Europeans in the former Yugoslavia. “If ever there was a reason for being in Africa—for being a black journalist in Africa—this seemed like one,” he later wrote. “The world, and Washington policy makers specifically, may not have cared about Somalia in early 1992. But I could force them to care by rubbing their faces in it every day, by shoving the pictures of starving kids in front of people ’s noses as often as I could, in the newspaper seen daily by the White House and members of Congress.”

Richburg got his wish. In August 1992, President Bush announced an emergency airlift of food and medical supplies, the distribution of which was to be overseen by U.N. peacekeepers. (The fact that the U.N. was compelled to bribe a local warlord to allow the troops to land was an index of how topsyturvy Somalia had become.) Four months later, with food still not finding its way to the needy, Bush announced Operation Restore Hope, deploying twenty thousand American troops under a U.N. mandate. Richburg hailed the move, which he saw as an opportunity “to raise the flag for a new kind of American interventionism, a benevolent, selfless interventionism” motivated only by the “desire to relieve human suffering.” The idea that the Somalis would defy the military might of the United States scarcely occurred to him. Like television viewers around the world, he had “marveled at the pinpoint accuracy of America’s high-technology weaponry” in the recent Gulf War, and he anticipated little trouble from a bunch of ragtag bandits with rusty weapons. Indeed, he predicted that Mogadishu’s militias would “scatter in terror” at the first sight of an American helicopter or well-equipped marine.

While that assessment was too optimistic, the intervention initially showed every sign of success. Violence abated. Food was distributed through the country. The danger of famine passed. In May 1993, most of the U.S. troops were withdrawn from Somalia, leaving an international peacekeeping force representing two dozen nations, including about three thousand Americans. Mission accomplished, or so it seemed.

THOUGH RICHBURG MADE MANY VISITS to Somalia, his base of operations was not Mogadishu but Nairobi, Kenya. With its relative stability, functioning international airport, and easy proximity to various trouble spots in the region, Kenya was the chief staging area for the international community in East Africa, home to offices of the United Nations, Red Cross, and an alphabet soup of N.G.O.s and development agencies. As Richburg put it, the city offered “the perfect ringside seat on Africa’s chaos.” A journalist based there could grab an early morning taxi to the airport, fly to Sudan or Somalia, and be back to file before nightfall, leaving time for a shower, dinner, and drinks at the Carnivore Disco, Buffalo Bill’s, or “any of the handful of sleazy bars where reporters rubbed elbows with aid workers and U.N. bureaucrats and crazy white expat pilots and assorted adventurers out here for the cold Tusker beer and the easy African women.”

While shocking, the final comment perfectly captured the ambiance and attitude of the foreign press corps, the community within which Richburg lived during his years in Africa. One of the abiding truths about foreign correspondents is that they usually spend as much time talking with one another as they do with the folk whose countries they cover. Correspondents in Nairobi not only frequented the same parties and bars but most also operated out of the same building, Chester House, a grungy, two-story block where the Post kept its office. When a story broke elsewhere on the continent, they embarked en masse, reconvening in the bars of the Sheraton Lagos, Kinshasa’s Inter-Continental, or, in the case of Mogadishu, the Al-Sahafi, a bullet-pocked high-rise with a makeshift rooftop bar and a contingent of Nigerian peacekeepers. Though competing against one another, members of the correspondents’ fraternity—and most, though not all, were men—shared sources, drivers, even girlfriends. Inevitably, shared experience produced shared points of view, helping to create a kind of collective “story” about Africa, a story that privileged certain aspects of life (killing and dying preeminently) over others.

As the local correspondent of one of the world ’s premier papers, Richburg was quickly gathered into this motley fraternity and baptized in its distinctive rituals and beliefs. While members of the Nairobi press corps wrote about Africa’s travails with insight, eloquence, and passion, they proved to be far different in person, cultivating a “rampant cynicism” that could, when lubricated with alcohol, devolve into something close to racial contempt. Correspondents argued over “Africa’s dumbest country” and proposed mock titles for their memoirs. (A reporter for the London Times, an expert on rebel movements, offered Baboons with Rifles.) Inevitably, some of this sensibility rubbed off on Richburg, though he was also astute enough to see it for what it was—a way to blow off steam, a defense mechanism for people overexposed to death and suffering. “It wears you down,” a reporter for Newsweek warned him, in a rare bout of seriousness. “You just keep running and running to one shithole after another. After a while, you feel like a rat on a treadmill.”

The places to which members of the African press corps traveled were not simply depressing; they also tended to be extremely dangerous. The African stories that captivated Western readers in the 1990s were, almost without exception, violent—military coups, civil war, ethnic cleansing—and covering them often put journalists in harm’s way. Like most of his peers, Richburg learned what it felt like to stare down the barrel of a gun. He also learned that most of the people holding the guns did not shoot journalists, deferring to their professional neutrality or perhaps simply to the color of their passports or skins. Living in such circumstances inevitably took a psychological toll, breeding not only depression and fear but also recklessness and a strange sense of immunity. To Richburg, it felt like living in a “parallel universe,” which permitted reporters to observe the suffering around them yet shielded them from its consequences. “I was always on the outside looking in,” he later wrote, “like a stranger who had wandered aimlessly into a movie set and ended up in the middle of the film.”

The quality of surrealism was greatest in Mogadishu. The day’s stories filed, reporters made their way up to the roof of the Al-Sahafi, where they drank whiskey sours (concocted with lemon Kool-Aid from the U.S. Army PX) and loudly rehashed the latest turn in the American intervention. One evening, on a lark, Richburg brought up his portable stereo and blasted Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” over the darkened streets. “We all found it hilarious and played it over and over,” he recalled, stopping only when a sniper in the neighborhood whistled a few rounds over their heads. No anecdote better captures the universe of the Africa correspondent or Richburg’s own ambivalent relationship to his ancestral continent.

BUT MOGADISHU WAS NOT A MOVIE SET, and neither U.N. peacekeepers nor journalists were as invulnerable as they imagined. In June 1993, Richburg made a flying visit to the city to close down the Post’s temporary office. Most of the U.S. troops had withdrawn the month before and the Somalia story seemed played out. Eating breakfast with a few of the reporters still in the city, he heard the sound of gunfire. Supporters of Mohammed Farah Aidid, leader of one of Mogadishu’s clan militias, had ambushed a contingent of Pakistani peacekeepers, killing twenty-four, whose bodies were then mutilated. The ambush marked a watershed in Somalia’s history. Exhibiting new defiance, militiamen began to fire on U.N. officials and troops, including the remaining Americans, who made easy targets as they rolled slowly through the narrow streets in unarmored vehicles. U.S. officials responded by announcing a manhunt for Aidid, complete with WANTED posters offering $25,000 for his apprehension. They also launched a half dozen special-forces raids to capture or kill him, but succeeded only in elevating his prestige. A “humanitarian mission to feed starving people” had devolved into “an embarrassing manhunt for an egotistical baldheaded warlord.”

In October, U.S. forces made a seventh attempt to capture Aidid. The raid, which later became the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster, became a bloodbath. Two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down by ground fire; the relief columns dispatched to rescue the pilots were pinned down by snipers. Mogadishu became a free-fire zone. By the time the battle ended a day later, more than a thousand Somalis had been killed or wounded, including hundreds of women and children caught in the crossfire. But the figure that mattered to the American public was eighteen U.S. soldiers dead, including one whose trussed and mutilated body was captured by television cameras as it was dragged through the city. A few days later, President Bill Clinton announced plans to withdraw the remaining American troops. The U.N. followed, leaving Somalia to its own devices. Today, more than a decade later, the country still lacks a government. It is also alleged to be a major staging area for insurgents fighting American soldiers in Iraq.

While it was the Black Hawk Down debacle of October that turned the tide of American public opinion against the Somalia mission, the turning point for Richburg came earlier, in July, when U.N. forces attacked a house in which Aidid’s chief lieutenants were reportedly meeting. A squadron of Cobra helicopters poured sixteen TOW missiles and more than two thousand rounds of heavy-caliber ammunition into a residential neighborhood of Mogadishu, killing at least seventy people. Four journalists, all friends of Richburg’s from Nairobi, arrived at the scene a few minutes later. They were surrounded by a crowd of Somalis and beaten, stoned, and stabbed to death.

Richburg was not in Mogadishu when the raid occurred, or he would likely have been with his friends. While other correspondents mourned, he “became obsessed” with the episode, hoping to “pin the blame” for the disaster, and thereby to restore his “protected little journalistic universe.” He interviewed the commanders who ordered the raid, as well as leaders of Aidid ’s faction. He visited the scene of the killings over and over, “letting the anger roil up again.” Part of his anger was directed at American officials for launching an ill-considered assassination under the U.N. flag. But most was focused on Somalis—not just on the murderers, but on Somalis in general, who, in resisting a benign American intervention, had shattered the hopes of a continent, as well as Richburg’s own “reason for being a reporter in Africa—a black reporter in Africa.” “And I’m hating them, the Somalis,” he wrote. “Hating them because they betrayed me.”

LOOKING BACK, Richburg would identify the murder of his friends as the “turning point” of his career in Africa, “the start of a bitter wake-up call that would forever alter my view of Africa and how the continent could—or could not—be saved from itself.” Though he covered innumerable other stories—the collapse of Zaire; the Rwandan genocide; rebel wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone—Somalia remained his point of reference, the “prism” through which he viewed “the rest of Africa.” Everywhere he traveled, he found the same themes: self-destructive violence; governments led by “buffoons and misfits”; the breakdown of all codes of “civilized behavior between human beings.” Again and again, he asked himself how such things—how such people—could exist in the twentieth century.

The only nation to escape Richburg’s all-pervading scorn was South Africa, the last bastion of white supremacy on the continent. Richburg had written editorials on South Africa in his college days, demanding that the University of Michigan divest itself of all ties with the apartheid regime. Fifteen years later, he came to the country hoping to recover that certainty, to cover a story that offered “moral clarity” rather than the “vexing emotional and moral dilemmas of black Africa.” There certainly was much to report. Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners had been released from jail and negotiations for ending apartheid were under way, but the nature of the new dispensation was still bitterly disputed. In the meantime, the country bled. Hundreds died in urban commuter trains and rural kraals in attacks orchestrated by operatives of the military and the police. Violent crime spiraled out of control. Yet very little of this found its way into Richburg’s book. What appeared instead was a place “that looked and smelled . . . like home, like America,” a nation with “modern” airports and “refreshingly efficient customs and immigration procedures,” “supermodern freeways,” and a plethora of sleek suburban shopping malls, indistinguishable from “shopping malls everywhere from D.C. to Detroit to Dallas.” Expecting to loathe white South Africans, Richburg instead found himself feeling empathy for them, as they watched the eclipse of their illusory world. “It’s an illusion,” he wrote, “because no matter how ‘Westernized’ their lives seem, they live in Africa, and I know what darkness lurks out there, beyond the fence, beyond the borders, further north, in the ‘real Africa’.”

Anticipating objections to his account, Richburg adopted the standard defense of the traveler: “I’ve been there . . . I’ve seen it.” In his book, he frequently resorted to direct address, usually at the grimmest moments of the narrative. “Is this depressing you? Do you want to put this book down now? No, please, press on. . . . I want you to walk with me, hold my hand as we step over the rotting corpses.” “I’m tired of lying,” he wrote at another point in the text. “And I’m tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who’ve never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the corpses.”

It is a compelling technique. Yet if attending to two centuries of African journeys had taught us anything, it is that seeing is not so simple a thing, that even “open-minded” travelers (as Richburg claimed to be) view the world through specific cultural and historical lenses. This is especially the case when confronting a place like Africa, which has long figured in the Western imagination as a netherworld of violence and irrationality, disease and sexual license. The fact that some travelers possess black skin does not necessarily inoculate them against this influence, though it often complicates their reactions. In Richburg’s case, the combination of inherited discourse and personal disillusionment yielded statements that would fit easily in even the most lurid nineteenth-century Dark Continent travelogue. Tribalism seethed through Africa, and “the potential for a violent implosion is never far from the surface.” Club-wielding Hutu genocidaires were not “fully evolved human beings” but “cavemen.” Africa itself was pestilential, a “breeding ground for myriad viruses, germs, plagues, parasites, bacteria and infections that most people in the West probably never knew existed.” These “unseen enemies” paved the way for AIDS, which spread rapidly through Africa because of “rampant prostitution and the Africans’ free-and-easy attitude toward sex.” (Sex was “almost a way of life in Africa,” Richburg reported.)

So powerful were these inherited discourses that they seemingly blinded Richburg to complexities in his own account—complexities suggesting a far more nuanced picture of African life and character than the book as a whole allowed. He acknowledged Africa’s dizzying geographical, cultural, and linguistic diversity, even as he indulged sweeping continental generalizations. He conceded that terms like “anarchy” and “chaos,” favorite words in the African press corps’ lexicon, often reflected reporters’ superficiality, their failure to grasp “the norms and rules and codes of conduct” in unfamiliar circumstances. He acknowledged the “heroism, honor and dignity” of ordinary Africans, as well as the “endless little acts of kindness” he encountered everywhere he traveled in Africa. Yet ultimately the force of such insights was swallowed up in his rage and despair.

The limits of Richburg’s vision came most sharply into focus when he set out to explain why Africa was in the shape it was. Was there “something in the nature of Africans that makes them more prone to corruption?” Whence came this “maddening propensity to accept all kinds of suffering while waiting for some outside deliverance”? Having rejected in advance all structural and historical explanations as “platitudes” and “excuses,” Richburg had no choice but to seek his explanation in Africans’ own flaws—indiscipline, promiscuity, irresponsibility, and lack of initiative. This unpromising culture was further compromised by decades on the “aid dollar dole,” courtesy of the continent ’s supposed friends in the West.

If all this sounds familiar, it should, for it was precisely the battery of charges forwarded by neo-conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s to explain the poverty and pathology of America’s so-called ghetto underclass. On a few occasions, Richburg made the linkage explicit, arguing, for example, that African leaders had come to view foreign aid “the same way many American blacks see government assistance programs as a kind of entitlement of birth. In both cases, you’re left with black people wallowing in a safety net of dependency.” The problem, in both cases, was exacerbated by the “hypocrisy” and “double standards” of guilty white liberals and “do-gooders,” as well as by black leaders who habitually blamed white racism for their predicament rather than confronting the “enemy within.” “Most Africans were born in independent black countries,” he wrote, “but their leaders still harp about colonialism the way black America’s self-described ‘leaders’ like to talk about slavery and Jim Crow.”

Needless to say, Richburg exhibited little patience with the contemporary African vogue in African American life, with all the people who “hanker after Mother Africa, as if Africa is the answer to all the problems they face in America.” And he was utterly contemptuous of the “self-anointed spokesmen” who came to Africa and pronounced on its problems from the vantage of presidential receptions. He described with telling effect a 1993 black “summit” in Libreville, Gabon, where a bevy of black American leaders heaped praise on African strongmen like Nigeria’s Ibrahim Babangida, extolled by Jesse Jackson as “one of the great leader-servants of the modern world.” (A few months later, Babangida annulled the results of a national election, sending Africa’s most populous country into a spiral of violence and repression.) “Maybe I would have been better off if I had never come to Africa at all, except on a weeklong tourist trip, staying in five-star hotels, buying tourist souvenirs, wearing African kente cloth,” Richburg mocked. “Maybe then I, too, could have spouted the same vacuous criticisms of American meddling as the sole root of all the continent’s ills. I, too, could have been a fervent supporter of the land of my roots.”

The emotional climax of Richburg’s journey came at Goree Island in Senegal. By the standards of the transatlantic slave trade, Goree was not a major embarkation point, but its location in Dakar, Africa’s most delightful city (together with the aggressive marketing of the Senegalese tourism board) has turned it into the premier pilgrimage site for African American heritage tourists. Richburg arrived “hoping to feel that same kind of spiritual connection, to find some emotional frame of reference,” but nothing came. While feeling “revulsion at the horrendous crime of slavery”—he compared the site to Auschwitz—he experienced “little personal connection or pain.” What bubbled up instead, “so unspeakable, so unthinkable,” was thankfulness—thankfulness to the forgotten ancestor who made it out, thankfulness that he was an American and not one of the nameless, faceless bodies left behind in Africa.

Again anticipating objections, Richburg emphasized that he was “not making a defense of slavery” or suggesting that it was anything other than a monstrous crime. “But condemning slavery should not inhibit us from recognizing mankind ’s ability to make something good arise in the aftermath of this most horrible evil,” he declared. Such distinctions, however, cut little ice in the climate of 1990s America. Published in 1997, Out of America became an instant touchstone in the nation’s ongoing “race wars.” While some conservatives commended Richburg for speaking unpopular truths, most reviewers lashed into the book, deriding him as a race traitor, a brainwashed black man whose diatribes against Africa betrayed his own self-hatred. Most offered his reflections at Goree as exhibit A. Viewed in the long context of African American history, of course, Richburg’s sentiment were hardly unusual. The idea that slavery was progressive, part of an unfolding providential plan, was an axiom of African American thought for more than a century, from the era of the American Revolution to the age of Booker T. Washington. But in our own more secular age, an age schooled in cultural relativism and skeptical of Western narratives of progress, such a sentiment represents the gravest of heresies. Perhaps historical context matters after all.

Richburg’s journey ended where it began—with a young, idealistic black journalist arriving in Nairobi to assume the role of Washington Post bureau chief. And just as the old Africa hands broke in Richburg, so did Richburg break in his successor, starting with dinner at the Carnivore Disco, followed by a flying visit to Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where most of the blood had been scrubbed from walls and stairwells. A few days later, he boarded a British Airways flight to London, leaving Africa for the last time. A BBC news program on the flight carried a story about renewed fighting on the Rwanda-Zaire border, but Richburg switched his headset over to a music station. “And why should I feel anything more?” he asked, indulging direct address one last time. “Because my skin is black? Because some ancestor of mine, four centuries ago, was wrenched from this place and carried to America, and because I now look like those others whose ancestors were left behind? Does that make me still a part of this place? Should their suffering now somehow still be mine?”

RICHBURG’S BLEAK VISION OF AFRICA was challenged, in different ways, by two other African American journalists working in Africa in the 1990s, Lynne Duke and Howard French. Like Richburg, Duke was a descendant of the Great Migration, though her forebears came not to Detroit but to southern California. Her parents, both children of domestic servants, attended state universities and found careers as public sector professionals. Lynne, the youngest of four children, was born in 1956. The family initially lived in Watts, but left there just before the cataclysmic 1965 riot. They settled in a middle class, previously all-white neighborhood called Windsor Hills. Duke went to integrated schools, briefly attended U.C.L.A., and went on to take bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Columbia.

Though her background was as middle class as Richburg’s, Duke ’s politics evolved differently. She was deeply influenced by the black nationalist wave that swept through southern California in the wake of the Watts riot, even though she was too young to be involved directly. With their appeals to armed self-defense and global black revolution, organizations such as the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga’s U.S. Organization attracted large followings, especially on local college campuses, where Duke ’s older siblings were then enrolled. “The way I grew up, issues of civil rights [and] social justice . . . always included Africa,” she later recalled, especially “in terms of South Africa and the struggle against apartheid.” She carried her interest in the continent with her to college, taking courses on Africa and becoming involved with activists working for the liberation of South Africa and Namibia. The Africa of Duke ’s imagination was not a land of “grass skirts, Tarzan, bare breasts, [and] starving people” but the front line in a global black struggle for justice and equality.

Duke ’s first opportunity to travel to Africa came in early 1990, a few years after she joined the staff of The Washington Post. Asked to provide a ground-level view of the end of apartheid, she spent nine weeks in South Africa, living in townships, squatter camps, and rural reserves, speaking with ordinary people about their experiences and aspirations. The assignment resulted in a four-part, front-page series, published to coincide with Nelson Mandela’s triumphal tour of the United States. If the series offered no earth-shaking revelations, it did provide a different perspective on African life, a vision of Africans’ “normality and humanity,” even in circumstances of great injustice and deprivation. Many of the individuals discussed in the series were women, a fact that distinguished Duke ’s reporting from that of male peers like Keith Richburg (whose entire book referenced only one African woman by name). Duke would bring this same attention to quotidian life—what she dubbed “the poetry of ordinary Africa”—to her work when she was returned to the continent in 1994 as the Post’s Johannesburg bureau chief.

Howard French developed an even more intimate connection with Africa. Born in 1958 in Washington, D.C., French grew up “in a strong African American family, where pride and self-respect were passed on daily and in abundance—together with lots of history.” In 1975, as he enrolled at the University of Massachusetts, his family moved to the Ivory Coast, where his father, a doctor, directed a World Health Organization rural clinics project. French spent summers in Ivory Coast, and moved there after his graduation. He remained six years, teaching English at the university in Abidjan and writing freelance articles for newspapers and magazines. The experience not only converted him to the profession of journalism but also instilled in him a deep affection for Africa—for the food, the music, the “beauty and unfussy grace of the people.” His bond was deepened still further when he met and married an Ivorian woman.

In reflecting back on his developing relationship with Africa, French would focus in particular on a trip that he took soon after his graduation from college. Sporting “billowy Afros” and the blessed recklessness of youth, he and his younger brother set out to discover the “real Africa,” something they did not find in Abidjan, with its highways and skyscrapers. French would later come “to distrust this concept of authenticity deeply,” but the trip, which carried the brothers deep into the interior of Mali, left a lasting imprint. He marveled at the routine gestures of hospitality—of offers of food and lodging and other courtesies that Americans would never imagine extending to strangers. He learned local patois, as well as the elaborate protocol that was sometimes required to cross a border, hire a car, or complete other tasks that might take only minutes in the efficiency-minded West. In the process, he learned the unwestern art of “surrendering control,” of drifting with events. When he returned to Abidjan some years later as bureau chief for The New York Times, French would see “many foreign correspondents tearing their hair out in frustration over Africa’s chaos or cursing the venality or supposed incompetence they claimed to see everywhere,” but he would rarely join them.

Though they settled on different corners of the continent, Duke and French both arrived determined to represent Africa differently from their journalistic peers, to render Africans as rounded human beings rather than as characters in the “theater of misery and suffering.” In reporting “the kinds of stories of African people and culture that do not often get told,” they hoped to plant a germ “of understanding, or at least of feeling for a continent so many others were content to damn.” At the same time, both recognized the danger of the opposite fallacy, of turning Africa into the “Disney-fied cradle of civilization” beloved of some African Americans. In the course of their travels through Africa, both would meet many black tourists caught “in the emotional throes of the ‘motherland ’,” and they would exhibit as little patience with them as Keith Richburg had. The stories they sought lay in “the space between the archetypes,” stories that confronted suffering and trauma but also conveyed the resilience and dignity of real people.

In the course of their tenures, Duke and French were able to write many such stories—accounts of the opening of the first bookstore in Soweto, the sprawling black township outside Johannesburg, or of the gala premiere of the African Film Festival in Ouagadougou, the dusty capital of Burkina Faso. Duke was particularly fortunate, arriving in South Africa in the midst of its first free elections, as inspiring a story as Africa had offered since the heady days of decolonization. A long-time supporter of South Africa’s liberation struggle, Duke churned out dispatches on the election and its aftermath, many of them focused on Nelson Mandela, for whom she developed an extravagant admiration. Mandela was the good shepherd, an icon of courage and integrity for “a new Africa in the making.” By her own account, she came to imagine a “symbiotic relationship” between herself and South Africa’s new president, akin to what Richard Wright had briefly imagined between himself and Kwame Nkrumah, with Mandela cast “as a leader destined to lead his nation out of bondage, and I as one of the key correspondents on hand to report South Africa’s progress to the world.”

But other, less hopeful stories beckoned, stories that had to be covered, regardless of personal preferences. In Angola, ravaged by thirty years of civil war, a painstakingly negotiated peace treaty crumbled. Nigeria spiraled ever deeper into chaos, as the regime of General Sani Abacha executed the nation’s leading human rights proponent, poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, in open defiance of the international community. The simmering civil war in Liberia, which had already given the world the terrifying spectacle of drugged child soldiers, erupted anew, engulfing neighboring Sierra Leone. All the while, the AIDS pandemic ravaged the continent, as if to confirm every Dark Continent stereotype of African contagion, hypersexuality, and death.

Yet all of these horrors would pale before events in Zaire, or, as it has been known for most of its history, the Congo. The land that William Sheppard had watched bleed in the 1890s would hemorrhage anew a century later, as the phantasmagoric regime of Mobutu Sese Seko, born in a C.I.A.-sponsored coup more than thirty years before, entered its death throes. The conflict spawned by Zaire ’s collapse eventually engulfed a dozen nations, claiming the lives of more than three million people. This was precisely the kind of story that French and Duke had hoped to avoid writing, yet it fell to them to report it.

IN HIS BRIEF DISCUSSION OF ZAIRE, Keith Richburg refused to rehash history. He said nothing about the slave trade or King Leopold, and mentioned the coup that brought Mobutu to power only in order to dismiss it. “Of course, I know the history of the C.I.A.’s complicity in the overthrow and assassination of Zaire ’s independence hero, Patrice Lumumba,” he wrote. “But that was thirty years ago!” It was a characteristic position, rooted not only in Richburg’s own neoconservative beliefs about individual responsibility but also in deeply engrained American beliefs about freedom and the human capacity for reinvention. From the first Puritan errand into the wilderness to the Extreme Makeover reality television show of our own time, Americans have clung to the belief that people can be born again, that it is possible to draw a line under the past and move on. Whether that faith is America’s virtue or its vice (or perhaps a bit of both) depends on one ’s point of view, but in any case it has little relevance to the Congo, where history is not so easily eluded.

Like Somalia, the Congo achieved independence in 1960. In terms of natural resources, it was the most blessed of new African nations, but in other respects it was the most accursed. Over the centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, something between three and four million captives were shipped from the Congo region, more than a quarter of the total number carried to the Americas; another million or more were marketed through the Indian Ocean by Arab and Swahili traders. The onset of European colonialism brought an even greater holocaust. In the thirty years following the Berlin Conference, half the inhabitants of King Leopold ’s Congo Free State, some ten million people in all, lost their lives. The Belgian colonial government that succeeded Leopold was less deadly but scarcely less rapacious, pursuing diamonds and copper (and later uranium) with the same reckless greed with which Leopold ’s minions had once pursued ivory and rubber. The lesson of this long and terrible history was not lost on the Congo’s postcolonial rulers: political authority was a license to loot.

Though the coming end of colonialism was obvious by the mid-1950s, Belgian authorities made no effort to prepare the Congo for self-government. At independence, the country’s population of fifteen million people included a hundred-odd high school graduates and just seventeen university graduates. There was one Congolese lawyer, a half dozen doctors, not a single engineer. The country possessed no infrastructure, save what was needed to get minerals rapidly to transshipment points in Angola and Zambia. An area equivalent in size to the United States east of the Mississippi boasted less than eight hundred miles of paved roads, less than a middling American city. The population was divided among more than 250 different ethnic groups, speaking a babel of languages. Most Congolese continued to live under some semblance of chiefly authority, but chieftaincy had long been evacuated of political meaning. The country had no tradition of parliamentary democracy or the rule of law—only a tradition of political parasitism.

In retrospect, it is hard to imagine any scenario under which the Congo would have survived, let alone prospered. Nonetheless, most Congolese greeted independence with pride and hope—emotions captured in an independence-day speech by the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. A child of Kasai Province, the one-time home of William Sheppard, Lumumba prophesied a Congo of “peace, prosperity, and greatness,” where every citizen would enjoy “just remuneration for his labor,” as well as “the fundamental liberties foreseen in the Declaration of the Rights of Man,” the idealistic charter of the French Revolution. He would not be given the opportunity to bring this vision to fruition. While much about the Congo crisis remains opaque, it is clear that in the days after Lumumba’s independence speech both the Belgian and American governments determined to overthrow him, the Belgians in deference to multinational mining interests, the Americans out of fears of communism. Both nations found a useful ally in an ambitious army colonel named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. In September 1960, three months after the coming of independence and two months after a Belgian-engineered secession movement in the mineral-rich Katanga Province, the Congo government was toppled in a military coup, the first of some eighty coups in postcolonial Africa. Lumumba was apprehended by troops loyal to Mobutu, tortured, and executed by a firing squad composed of Congolese and Belgian soldiers, all with the connivance of the American C.I.A., one of whose agents reportedly stashed Lumumba’s body in the trunk of his car. It was this assassination that prompted disruptive protests at the U.N. headquarters by Maya Angelou and other African Americans.

Lumumba was replaced by Joseph Kasavubu, with Mobutu, now head of the army, hovering in the shadows. In 1965, Mobutu staged a second coup and declared himself president, an office to which he was nominally reelected in 1970. He continued to enjoy the support of the United States, which twice intervened militarily to defend him against advancing rebel armies. During the Reagan presidency of the 1980s, Mobutu enjoyed his closest links with the United States, which used his country as a staging area to provide weapons and supplies to rebels opposing Angola’s Marxist government. With the end of the Cold War, however, Mobutu’s stock plummeted, and he was forced by the international community to accept multiparty democracy in preparation for elections. But through deft political maneuvering, he managed to cling to power until 1997, even as terminal cancer ate away at his body—an apt metaphor for the nation he ruled.

Though Mobutu would in time become the poster child for African misgovernment, he initially enjoyed considerable support in the West, not only because of his staunch Cold War support but also because of his mastery of political symbolism. As Howard French noted in one of his early dispatches (aptly entitled “An Ignorance of Africa as Vast as the Continent”), Americans, blacks as well as whites, have a history of accepting authoritarianism in Africa as long as it is cloaked in the mantle of “cultural originality.” Mobutu was a master of the game. In 1971, he inaugurated his Authenticité policy, designed to purge the nation of the decadent cultural influence of the West. The Congo became Zaire. Neckties and other accoutrements of Western dress were prohibited; Mobutu himself took the lead, appearing ever after in his signature leopard-skin pillbox hat, a carved wooden scepter in his hand. Zaireans were also required to change their Christian names to African ones. Thus Joseph Mobutu became Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku wa za Banga, which roughly translates as “Mobutu, the all-powerful warrior who, through his endurance and inflexible will, shall go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake.” By that time, the once reluctant autocrat had banned all political opposition. Newspapers were prohibited from mentioning the names of any Zaireans other than Mobutu or, as he preferred to be known, the Guide.

Mobutu sealed his international reputation in 1973 by offering a then unprecedented ten-million-dollar purse to stage a heavyweight championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. (The inimitable Ali dubbed the fight the Rumble in the Jungle.) For two memorable months, Zaire and Mobutu basked in the international limelight as symbols of African culture and pride. Few Americans, black or white, troubled to ask where the ten million dollars had come from. Fewer still reflected on the irony that the man providing the purse, the apostle of Authenticité, was the same man who, just thirteen years before, had been denounced by protestors at the U.N. as the murderer of Patrice Lumumba.

In the long run, however, there was no disguising the nature of Mobutu’s regime. The term “kleptocrat” was virtually invented to describe the man, who during his tenure accumulated one of the world ’s great fortunes, including palaces and luxury yachts, a collection of European chateaux, and Swiss bank accounts running to billions of dollars. Over the same period, Zaire ’s gross domestic product fell by more than two thirds, while per capita income plummeted to less than $150 per year. The local currency, the zaire, pegged at two to the dollar when it was introduced in 1967, was trading at more than two million to the dollar by early 1993. By then, fiscal policy, such as it was, was dictated less by the state than by “Wall Street”—the name given to female currency traders in Kinshasa’s main market, who determined what notes to accept and how to value them. (When the government introduced a new currency in 1997, the women refused to accept it, dubbing the notes prostates, in reference to Mobutu’s terminal cancer.) Unable to pay his soldiers, Mobutu ordered them to “live off the land,” igniting two sustained looting sprees, known locally as les pillages.

By the time Howard French and Lynne Duke arrived, the Zairean treasury was empty, civil authority was nonexistent, and daily life had devolved into what Zaireans called debrouillez-vous or simply système D—essentially, fend for yourself. Every interaction became an occasion for extortion, especially when foreigners with hard currency were involved. Passengers flying into Kinshasa were greeted by le protocole, fast-talking fixers who, for a fee, negotiated the necessary bribes with customs officials, baggage handlers, cab drivers, and so forth. Policemen and soldiers set up arbitrary roadblocks, shaking down anyone unfortunate enough to drive by, though with fuel supplies exhausted there were few cars on the road. Schoolteachers, paid irregularly if at all, demanded bribes before accepting children into their classrooms. Surely the most enterprising practitioner of débrouillez-vous was the Zairean ambassador to Japan, who sold the country’s embassy in Tokyo and pocketed the proceeds.

French and Duke both entered Zaire in suitably surreal circumstances. French first came in May 1995, to report on an outbreak of the Ebola virus. For weeks, Zairean doctors in the Kikwit district had appealed in vain for international assistance in containing a mysterious virus that was killing local people. When the virus was identified as Ebola, a contagion with no known cure, the world suddenly took interest. Doctors from a dozen different international agencies flooded into Kikwit, looking like some kind of alien invaders in their respirators and decontamination suits. A horde of journalists followed, many of whom were “getting their first taste of Africa.” It was exactly the sort of story that French had hoped to avoid, “yet here I was, just like everyone else, rushing toward another lurid African mess that, thanks to the magic of television, had become the global story of the week.”

For French, the visit to Kikwit offered an opportunity to assay not only the state of Zaire, but also the operation of the foreign press corps. He outlined his conclusions in a blistering Sunday Week in Review essay, provocatively entitled “Sure, Ebola Is Bad. Africa Has Worse.” In the essay, French posed a series of troubling questions about the latest “celebrity virus.” Why did Ebola attract journalists’ attention when nearby outbreaks of polio, cholera, and sleeping sickness, all easily preventable diseases, went unreported? Why did the ravages of a preventable disease like malaria, which killed ten times more Africans per day than the total number of people who died in the Kikwit outbreak, provoke not “a flicker on the screen of the world ’s conscience?” Was it simply the possibility that the virus might spread to Europe and America? (Ebola, a British reporter opined, was just one of the “savage African diseases ready to break out anywhere at any time.”) Or had Western audiences become so jaded that they needed “cinematically compelling” fare like Ebola, with its “massive hemorrhaging and projectile vomiting,” to keep them stimulated? What did it say about Africa’s place in the global imagination that it required Ebola, the Rwandan genocide, or some other extreme of “human catastrophe or primordial exoticism” for Westerners to pay attention? In the course of his subsequent travels through Zaire, French would have many occasions to revisit these questions.

Lynne Duke had an equally bizarre introduction to Zaire. In January 1996, an Antonov cargo plane taking off from a military airport in Kinshasa crashed on takeoff, plowing into a crowded market, killing at least three hundred people. Duke caught a flight to Kinshasa the next day and, after running the gauntlet of bribe-seeking officials at the airport, proceeded to the scene. Expecting an American-style crash site, with a police cordon and a team of investigators combing the wreckage for clues, she was astonished to find no authorities in sight, just a swarm of people, picking through the debris for scrap metal and other useful tidbits, occasionally turning up a human head severed by the plane ’s propellers. To use Keith Richburg’s phrase, Zaire was clearly a place where they no longer counted the bodies. Yet there was a broader story behind the crash, which became clear in the ensuing months. The plane and airfield were part of a system created by Mobutu and the United States to ferry arms to antigovernment rebels in neighboring Angola. With the end of the Cold War, the United States had cut off support for the rebels, who agreed to lay down their arms under a U.N.-brokered peace agreement. But as the Antonov crash revealed, the arms traffic continued, no longer financed by the C.I.A. but by the trade in conflict diamonds, a burgeoning contraband traffic that linked war-ravaged countries like Zaire, Angola, and Sierra Leone with cities like Antwerp, Brussels, and New York. Zaire may have been a circus, but not all the ringmasters were in Kinshasa.

MEDIA ACCOUNTS OF THE 1994 Rwandan genocide portrayed it as a singular event, a paroxysm of unfathomable horror and savagery. It was certainly all of that, but it was also the culmination of a long history of violent ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis reaching back all the way to the fifteenth century, when Tutsi pastoralists first migrated into the region. The division was exploited and exacerbated by German and Belgian colonizers, both of whom discriminated in favor of the minority Tutsis, whom they regarded as a superior “Nilotic” racial stock. In 1959, shortly before independence, the Hutus rose against their African overlords, sending more than a million Tutsis into exile in Uganda, Burundi, and the eastern Congo. The years that followed brought persistent ethnic conflict and several local exercises in ethnic cleansing, culminating in the genocide of 1994.

The timing of the genocide would prove critical. At the moment the killings began, there were virtually no Western journalists in the country, the entire international press corps having gone to South Africa to cover the election there. More important, the genocide began just one month after the final withdrawal of American troops from Somalia. Determined to avoid further African entanglements, the Clinton administration deliberately turned a blind eye to Rwanda. U.S. officials ignored a mountain of evidence of the planned killings; they refused to jam radio broadcasts inciting the genocidaires; they vetoed proposals to deploy peacekeepers. (Indeed, the United States sponsored a U.N. Security Council resolution to withdraw the peacekeepers that were already in the country.) As the scale of the killing became apparent, administration officials carefully avoided the word “genocide,” a term that would have entailed an obligation to act under prevailing international treaties, as well as potential political complications. Susan Rice, an African American member of the National Security Council (later promoted to undersecretary of state for African Affairs), betrayed the administration’s priorities at an interagency meeting when she asked, “If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November election?” In the end, the killings stopped not because of international action but because of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a Tutsi army that entered from neighboring Uganda and wrested control of the country from the Hutus.

The R.P.F. victory ended the genocide but it did not resolve the underlying conflict. Fearing retribution, more than two million Hutus fled Rwanda, most into eastern Zaire, where they found refuge in some forty massive U.N. refugee camps. Determining who in the camps were genocidaires was an impossible task. While many refugees were women and children, others were clearly veterans of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia that had taken the lead in the killing. Shielded by the large civilian population and the flag of the U.N., the Interahamwe regrouped and rearmed. By 1996, the U.N. camps had become staging areas for raids into Rwanda, as well as for attacks on the ethnic Tutsi population in eastern Zaire, known locally as the Banyamulenge. Mobutu, a past master at exploiting ethnic instability in neighboring countries to advance his own interests, supported the Hutus, whom he saw as a counterweight to the increasingly powerful Rwanda-Uganda axis. Initially, he was content to ship arms to the Hutu camps, but in November 1996, he went a step further, ordering all Tutsis to leave Zaire.

Mobutu had finally overplayed his hand. The Banyamulenge rebelled. Their uprising provided the government of Rwanda with a pretext to address the threat of the Hutu refugee camps. In a carefully planned campaign, the Rwandan Defence Force, backed by units from Uganda, swept into eastern Zaire, overrunning the U.N. camps and sending hundreds of thousands of refugees spilling into the forest. With the remnants of the Zairean army melting before them, the Rwandans continued to drive westward, transforming the incursion into an outright invasion. It made for an extraordinary spectacle: one of the smallest nations on the continent, still reeling from a gruesome genocide, overrunning one of the largest. The Rwandans were supported by a phalanx of states in the region—not only Uganda, but also Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola, all of which had scores to settle with Mobutu.

Recognizing that the international community would never ratify the outright conquest of a neighboring state, the Rwandans portrayed their force as an indigenous insurgency against Mobutu rather than as an invading army. They found an unlikely fig leaf in the figure of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a figure as garish in his way as Mobutu. A one-time supporter of Patrice Lumumba, Kabila had fought against Mobutu in the so-called Simba rebellion of 1964. After the Simba rebellion was crushed (with the help of the C.I.A., which supplied Mobutu with aircraft and Cuban exile pilots left over from the Bay of Pigs fiasco), Kabila retreated with a few followers to a remote region in eastern Congo to continue the fight. He was briefly joined by Che Guevara and a contingent of Cuban revolutionaries, but they soon left in disgust, convinced that Kabila was more interested in drinking and womanizing than revolution. In 1967, Kabila cast his lot with the People ’s Republic of China, refashioning himself as a Maoist and declaring his small fief an independent nation. In practice, he was little more than a local warlord, living off illegal diamond and ivory trading and, in one case, kidnapping and holding for ransom a group of American university students. By the late 1980s, most observers assumed he was dead, but the Rwandans found him in Tanzania, dusted him off, and presented him to the world as leader of “the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire.”

If the Rwandan invasion exposed the inadequacies of the Zairean army, it also revealed the limitations of the international press corps. Even veteran journalists had no idea who Kabila was, and most had never heard of the Banyamulenge. The Western diplomats and relief agency officials to whom they habitually turned for answers were no better informed. Recounting the early days of the invasion in his book, French was scathing of journalists’ performance, including his own. “The scramble to do some rudimentary ethnic detective work brought to mind just how normal it was for reporters to operate in nearly perfect ignorance of their surroundings on this continent,” he wrote. “[F]or many of us an assignment here involved little more preparation than thumbing through a Lonely Planet guide. Anywhere else in the world we would have been judged incompetent, but in Africa being able to get somewhere quickly and write colorful stories was qualification enough.” To add to the bewilderment, the Rwandan invasion flew in the face of the prevailing “story line,” in which Mobutu was a villain, the Hutus were genocidaires, and the Tutsis were outraged victims. Such preconceptions made it possible for many reporters to overlook the atrocities perpetrated against Hutu refugees by the invading army, or at best to accept them with “a journalistic shrug.”

The situation was complicated still further by Washington’s not-so-subtle support of the Rwandans—support that French and Duke both worked to expose. As French noted at the time, acceding to the invasion became a kind of perverse “penance” for Washington, a way to atone for American inaction during the Rwandan genocide and for decades of support of Mobutu Sese Seko. At the same time, the invasion was consistent with American geopolitical interests in the region, which, with memories of the Cold War fading, increasingly focused on international terrorism and the “failed states” that allegedly bred it. The new hope for American policy makers was a cohort of strong African leaders emerging in a belt of states across central Africa: Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba, Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. None were democrats in any meaningful sense of the word, but all were pro-Western and committed to market economies, political stability, and at least a semblance of good government. Not coincidentally, all were involved in the invasion of Zaire. And so the United States endorsed the invasion, accepting the fiction that Kabila was the leader of an indigenous movement. As for reports of mass killings of Hutu refugees by Kabila’s forces, American officials consistently downplayed them, arguing that refugee numbers were exaggerated or that most of the refugees were genocidaries anyway, and hence beyond the world ’s concern. “They are the bad guys,” the U.S. ambassador to Zaire replied when French pressed him on the refugee issue.

Duke and French were among a small number of journalists who refused to accept the administration orthodoxy. With American officials declaring the refugee crisis substantially over, both set out for eastern Zaire to see for themselves. French accompanied the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to a place called Tingi Tingi, a makeshift camp housing some 150,000 displaced refugees, including many children who had been separated from their parents in the trek through the forest. A few days later, many of those people were dead, killed by the advancing rebels and buried in hastily dug mass graves. Duke took a more reckless approach. She and four other Johannesburg-based correspondents somehow persuaded the director of Air Zaire to lend them a plane to fly to Kisangani, the erstwhile Stanleyville, at the great bend of the Congo River. The plan was to rent a small plane to look for refugees in the forest below, though Duke later confessed that she also coveted a Kisangani dateline, to feed her “swashbuckling self-image” as a foreign correspondent. What she and her companions found was a city overrun with retreating Zairean troops, from which they were lucky to escape with their lives.

Duke tried again a short time later, this time driving into the war zone with a few colleagues in a hired Land Cruiser. They soon came upon a group of Hutu refugees, about seventy people in all, including children and women, at least one of whom was heavily pregnant. A man named Jean, a former postal worker, stepped forward to speak, brushing the dirt and twigs from his incongruous double-breasted blazer. Jean explained how the group had been on the road for a month, herded along by Hutu militiamen as human shields against the advancing Rwandans. Those who refused to go were shot. During the last battle, Jean and his group had slipped into the forest and escaped the main column, but now they found themselves stranded between the two forces, sick and starving. “There are many bodies in the mountains,” he said. “Can you tell people that we need help? We need something to eat. We are very tired. And medicine, we need.” Duke passed along the request in her next dispatch, probably the most poignant story she wrote during her years in Africa. Yet she also knew the story would make no difference, for Jean and his companions had been sacrificed long before.

AS THEY CHRONICLED Zaire ’s slow implosion, Duke and French experienced fury, frustration, and all the other emotions that had consumed Keith Richburg during his years in Africa. Richburg eventually took refuge in indifference, repudiating any sense of fellow feeling for Africans. Given their different temperaments and politics, neither Duke nor French sought that resort, but they often struggled against despair and hopelessness. Duke confessed to spending many nights crying in her hotel room; tears became her “private release,” though one she never indulged “in public, and certainly never around a male colleague.” She also found solace in South Africa, where she could still bask in a vision of hope and possibility, of an independent Africa that was prosperous and democratic. She recognized some of the problems of the “New South Africa” and did not shy away from reporting them—the escalating violent crime rate; the rightward turn in economic policy; the government’s criminally slow response to the AIDS crisis—but as long as Nelson Mandela remained in office, her hope endured. Mandela, father to his country, also became a reassuring father figure to her, her “personal talisman.” “[W]hen I felt especially hopeless about Africa’s fate,” she later recalled, “I needed only to remember one of its most remarkable sons.”

French had a different, though equally personal, response. The continent he had come to love in the 1980s “had now settled into a spiral of bloody traumas and chronic disorder. I needed to understand why.” Clearly part of the answer lay in the venality and brutality of Africa’s own “woeful leaders,” as Keith Richburg had insisted, but part of it lay beyond the continent, in recurring “patterns of treachery and betrayal of Africa by a wealthy and powerful West.” Both lines of explanation converged in Zaire. For his last two years in Africa, French wrote incessantly about the country, delving deeply into its past, exposing the long history of Western, and particularly American, support for Mobutu. In his memoir of his years in Africa, he would trace the story even further back, all the way to the late 1400s, when the first Portuguese ships arrived at the mouth of the Congo River. More than five centuries later, the pattern continued, as Western officials opportunistically embraced another authoritarian despot, Laurent Kabila, leaving the Congolese to bear the consequences.

Mobutu Sese Seko fled Zaire in May 1997, ending a thirty-two-year reign. Soldiers of the Rwandan “Alliance” arrived in Kinshasa a few days later. Under President Kabila, the name of the country reverted back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but little else changed. Political parties were banned and opposition leaders jailed. Soldiers continued to rule the streets of the capital, a fact made more galling to residents by the fact that most of the soldiers were ethnic Tutsis, who spoke no Congolese languages. Still the United States endeavored to put the best face on things. In December 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright embarked on a seven-nation tour of Africa, intended to solidify the emerging alliance of pro-Western African leaders—what some were already calling the African Renaissance club—in advance of an upcoming visit by President Clinton. Albright included the Congo on her itinerary, essentially inducting Kabila into membership. At a bizarre joint press conference, covered by both French and Duke, the secretary stressed the importance of “open markets, honest government, and the rule of law,” praising Kabila, who was standing at her side, for making “a strong start toward these goals.” Kabila, however, strayed from the script. Asked by journalists about the arrest of a political opponent, he suggested that the man might soon have company in prison, ending the tirade with a sarcastic: “Long live democracy. Ha-ha-ha.”

The alliance of African leaders acclaimed by Albright did not last long. In 1998 a border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea, two charter members of the club, escalated into full-scale war. At the same time, Kabila and his Rwandan patrons fell out spectacularly. Anxious to demonstrate his independence from his patrons, Kabila ordered all Tutsis to leave Zaire, the same order that had led to Mobutu’s downfall. Rwanda responded by launching another attack, again supported by Uganda and Burundi. For the second time in two years, a Rwandan army rolled west across the Congo. This time, however, the Rwandans were stopped, after the governments of Angola and Zimbabwe, both of which had supported the original invasion, intervened on the side of Kabila. By the time Duke and French left Africa in late 1998 and 1999 respectively, ten nations were embroiled in the war. Kabila himself would soon depart the scene. Struck down by an assassin in 2000, he was succeeded by his son Joseph.

Given the nature of the conflict, it is virtually impossible to determine how many people died in what some have dubbed Africa’s First World War. French estimated the death toll between 1996 and 2002 at 3.3 million. Others put the total higher. By any measure, the war represented the deadliest conflict in the world since World War II, a distinction made even more remarkable by the fact that few in the West have any idea that it even occurred. While an international war crimes tribunal continues to examine the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the more recent and far bloodier conflict in the Congo has been virtually forgotten by the world community, like so many previous horrors in that beleaguered land.

Meanwhile, there are profits to be made. The coveted commodity today is not ivory or rubber or copper or uranium or cobalt but columbite-tantalite—coltan—a heat-resistant metal harvested from muddy streambeds deep in the Congo forest. Coltan is an essential component in the manufacture of cell-phone circuit boards. Just as previous generations of Americans tickled ivory piano keys and pedaled about on rubber bicycle tires, so do we today carry in our pockets traces of a commodity gathered by hand by hungry Congolese workers.

There is much to ponder in all this. A century ago, a single African American missionary, armed with a portable Kodak camera, aroused the moral conscience of the West. Today, when satellites beam words and images instantaneously around the globe, the death of millions in the same country passes virtually unnoticed. Perhaps the problem lay in the absence of white actors; part of what made the atrocities in King Leopold’s Congo so shocking to Americans and Europeans was the fact that the perpetrators were themselves white. Perhaps it is the lack of a clear story line, of easily identifiable villains and victims, especially after the departure of the cartoonish Mobutu. Or perhaps the problem is simply boredom, a kind of moral fatigue that comes from having seen too much mass death, particularly of the African kind. As Howard French put it, “Serving up atrocities is a business of diminishing returns.”