In the back of Mark Bowden’s “Black Hawk Down,” there is a list of articles and books he used as sources during the writing of the book, which was published in February of 1999. As I was looking through this list, reading Bowden’s commentary on each, I was struck by his description of “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa” by Keith Richburg, in which, if I recall correctly, he describes Richburg’s writing as overly pessimistic or biased because of trauma or something like that—I can’t find the copy of the book I was looking at, and the PDFs I’ve found online don’t contain this section.
Interested, I got a used copy of the book from Amazon and found it to be, because of its conversational tone and surface-level analysis, a fairly light read–in spite of the fact that it details some of the most gruesome and nightmarish scenes of black Africa in the 90s: the mindless violence in Somalia, the Hutu genocide of Tutsis and subsequent cholera outbreak, and so on.
Richberg is a black American from a sensible working class family in Detroit. This background grants him access to a high end private school, which he parlays into a solid college education and a career in big city journalism.
My thesis is as follows.
Richburg is an American liberal–uneasy with black nationalism–who appears to identify more as a journalist than as a black American, a phenomenon one sees more in the real world than online; that is, if I didn’t have a real-world familiarity with this kind of person, I wouldn’t understand that it were possible based on my internet experience. Still, he assumes–like most Americans–that race relations in America are a kind of historical process, which will progress from the worst possible evil–chattel slavery–through to full “equality” or “equity.” This book represents the process of his realization that one of the implications of the black nationalist historical claim–that Europeans and their descendants were and are uniquely savage in their treatment of Africans and their descendants–is wrong.
To establish who Richburg is, I’ll just quote him and leave most of the analysis to the reader. It’s fairly straightforward.
Of his childhood in Detroit, he says,
I didn’t really know what a riot was–I was only nine years old in 1967. I remember my father taking me up the road to West Grand Boulevard and Grand River Avenue, a main commercial center a few blocks from my house where we used to go to buy comic books at Cunningham’s drug store on weekends, or ornaments and wrapping paper at Kresge’s before Christmas. Now the whole block was on fire.
“I want you to see this,” my father said. “I want you to see what black people are doing to their own neighborhood.”
He describes race relations within his high school, which was “more like a small college campus…with its manicured lawns, spacious parking lot, tennis courts.”
I was not the first black kid in the school, not by a long shot. Nor was I the only one at the time. In fact, there were quite a few of us–a doctor’s daughter, the son of a Detroit school principal, the son of a Michigan state senator. A minority, surely, but never made to feel unwelcome, never subject of any hostility. We were all just kids. We complained about the school dress code–neckties for the boys, skirts for the girls. We used fake IDs to buy beer on weekends, went to house parties, drove too fast on the freeways. Not exactly Boyz ‘N The Hood.
He describes race relations “about a block and a half” from his house. I’ve added the emphasis.
After the game, I decided to walk the short distance home. But as my classmates were coming out of the arena to board the bus back to Grosse Pointe, they crossed the path of a group of black kids. Kids from my neighborhood. One of the white girls saw one of the black girls with an Afro comb, a pick, stuck in the back of her hair, and made some ill-advised comment, like “Why do you have that comb in your hair?” Probably not hostile–I didn’t hear it. Maybe she was really just curious. But of course, all hell broke loose.
So now you’ve got a bunch of white kids, clambering onto their bus back to the suburbs, and a bunch of angry black kids hitting at the windows with chains and bottles and anything else they can get their hands on. There were shouts and slurs flying in both directions. And there I was, on both sides, on neither side–not wanting to have to take sides. I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.
Later, he describes race relations among blacks at University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Again, I’ve added emphasis.
So here’s the picture: Me, then a skinny black kid with big glasses, and Judy Rakowski, this lanky blond gymnast, walking together, late, into an African politics class and having to jostle for a couple of open seats. I don’t think she was the only white person in the class–but pretty darned close. And certainly the only white person, white woman, who was friends with a black guy. No, who came in every day with a black guy, who sat next to a black guy, who whispered to me during class and laughed at my jokes. Maybe it was my imagination, but you could cut through the thick layers of hostility with a butter knife. Hostility toward her just for being there, a white woman in a black studies class. And hostility toward me, it seemed, for breaking rank, for preferring the company of the enemy, the oppressor.
So, we have a portrait of a black American who apparently feels embarrassed by the race nationalism of some black Americans (and, let’s be clear: the hostility towards whites per se), described by the author in marital terms (“breaking rank,” “the enemy”). In the face of this crude tribal mentality, he maintains and nurtures a sense of individuality, which is admirable.
Later, he describes his perspective on moving to Africa–emphasis mine.
But to be black in Africa?
Would they be able to tell that I was not from the place? Would I still be accorded that preferential treatment that foreigners abroad enjoy? A friend of mine named Debbie Ichimura, a fourth-generation Japanese American, once confided to me her own private fears of going to Japan, her ancestral homeland. “I don’t know what it would be like to be just another face in the crowd,” she said.
Yes, that’s it. Without intending to, Debbie captured the essence of my anxiety: the fear of being one in the crowd. Losing my identity. My individuality.
So, you get the picture: he’s a reasonable, thoughtful American liberal who happens to be black, and he is about to move to Africa.
It’s not hard to imagine the coming confrontation: one cannot take for granted Western Liberalism, which is the culmination of a number of centuries-in-the-making civilizational triumphs: order, reason, broad literacy, morality rooted in natural law, and so on; one cannot take for granted the cultural idea of every individual person has a rich, spiritual interiority, of being independent of clan, tribe, nation, etc; one cannot take for granted the civilizational refinement of Europe and America, no matter how chintzy and plastic and Starbucks-ified you think they’ve become.
In Somalia, he sees what an absence of order looks like.
When you stepped off a plane in Mogadishu, a horde of young kids–sometimes no more than twelve or thirteen years old–instantly surround you and the plane, leveling their AK-47 assault weapons and grenade launchers at your chest. They were usually shouting incomprehensibly, at you and at each other, as they demanded what often amounted to hundreds of dollars in bribes–landing fee, airport tax, baggage handling fee, security for the plane, even “entry” fee into the country.
In the margin of the book, I see that I wrote: “imagine this.” For me, the idea of flagging someone with a rifle–that is, allowing the barrel to pass over a person, even for a second–results in major, possibly physical, consequences. Not so in Somalia.
Here’s another story from Somalia.
My friend Sam Kiley of the London Times recounted a particularly close call he had when he went to do a story on arms trading at a notorious gun market on Mogadishu’s south side. While he was standing there chatting with a gun merchant about the price of arms and ammo, some vendor decided to have some fun with the foreigner–he tossed Sam a hand grenade. Sam caught it one-handed and tossed it back, so the vendor pitched him another one. Sam caught that one too. Soon, Sam was in a hand-grenade-juggling contest with the Somali, tossing grenades back and forth between them, faster and faster.
If someone tried something approaching this at an American gun shop or show, he would be hogtied and dragged to a police station, lectured all the way about gun safety by a man in a Vietnam Veteran hat.
Eventually, Richburg realizes that the problems in Somalia are more fundamental than food scarcity.
Solving this growing crisis would require more than the world simply throwing money and food at Somalia. It would require restoring some semblance of order and control, breaking the grip of the gun-slingers and the so-called warlords who were willing to let their people starve.
During this period, he turns to the developed world for intervention and describes the obnoxious tenor of activist journalism. In these passages, he sounds not so much like an idiot as like a spoiled Western liberal, who simply does not understand how the world works.
And what better place than Africa, in the midst of a devastating famine, to raise the flag for a new kind of American interventionism, a benevolent, selfless interventionism with no American interest at stake other than the collective revulsion at violence and a desire to relieve human suffering?
Throughout the course of the book, we contend with this variety of naive–even childish– idealism. Part of it, I suspect, is for effect: there’s a kind of narrative pay off in dialing up the idealism before smashing it against stone cold reality. Part of it is because Americans really are radically insulated from the reality of “developing,” tribal societies.
In terms of activist journalism, Richburg says,
[Support for military intervention] was an increasingly common sentiment at the time. Some aid agencies were openly advocating [military intervention]. Well-timed opinion pieces were appearing in America’s major newspapers calling for it. Many of the reporters in Nairobi had dropped all pretense of objectivity and were openly demanding it. I remember Julian Ozanne once pounding a table in anger that the UN and the world were doing so little to help Somalia when it was clear a major military intervention was needed. And I was nodding in full agreement.
Having lived abroad and having had conversations like this with expats, I can easily imagine myself among these people. I remember in 2015, for instance, at a bar in Ho Chi Minh City, a whole table of Europeans were smugly convinced that Trump was going to drop out of the race. I remember a young woman from India similarly banging the table over a pro-life senator who had been profiled by John Stuart. I asked her, “Doesn’t your country have a rape epidemic you might concern yourself with?” I was the only American at the table, and there was a sense of embarrassment among these Euros and other internationals who were just as deranged by the Trump phenomenon as so many Americans. But, they insisted that American politics were important for the rest of the world, which looked to America as the bleeding edge of global liberalism. This was part of my own personal realization that America is a global and historical stronghold of the left–I would later learn that even the right for citizens to keep and bear arms was a left tendency among revolutionaries in France. The framing of America as a rightwing empire is first and foremost false, but the impressive thing is how widespread that false framing is. Living abroad, I also learned how much of the educated world is also guided by the priorities of American media, which is steered by guys like Keith Richburg–who are, in turn, hardly any different than these gap year travelers in Asia. In Richburg’s case, his absurd belief is that he would be tough enough to report soberly and fairly on (a.) overwhelming force against Somalis by outsiders and (b.) the suppression of local cultural/tribal practices and affinities that lead to the daily insanity, murder, rape, etc. that were part and parcel of life in Somalia in the 90s.
Of course, he–like so many Americans–is too delicate of sensibility to approve of this kind of thing in practice. Because of this daintiness, Richburg becomes critical as soon as there is an intervention. For instance, the American marines erected a “Potemkin village that grew and spread with every passing day,” and so on. He suddenly wonders how much it all costs, and the negative tone of his perception indicates anxieties and second thoughts about the intervention. Later, things just get “ridiculous.”
I knew the UN bureaucracy had finally crossed the line into the ridiculous when I arrived once in Mogadishu and we were met at the plane by a little minibus to shuttle us the few hundred feet from the plane steps to the “terminal building.” I had come in on a Kenyan Airways plane that had been chartered by the UN to bring in still more bureaucrats and soldiers back from weekend leave. Before we landed, a stewardess got on the microphone and said, “We have just landed in Mogadishu. We hope you have a pleasant stay.”
See how this works? I demand that someone, anyone bring civilization and order to Somalia, yet when they do, I laugh at the effort. I mean, a minibus to transport UN personnel around the airport I’ve described earlier as being swarmed by teenagers with AK-47s and grenade launchers? What’s next, a Rolls Royce dealership?
Finally, American soldiers actually kill someone, and Richburg has had enough.
With each interview, with each American justification for the attack, I grew more and more angry; after a few weeks, I was seething. My own moral universe had just been turned completely upside down. We were the United States of America, and my country, I believed, did not go around assassinating people in houses and using the convenient cover of the UN flag to get away with it. We were supposed to be the good guys, the ones who always surrounded the house and told everybody inside to come out with their hands up. We read people their rights, gave them the chance to defend themselves in the court of law. But, something had happened to the United States in this first postwar military expedition in Africa–we were behaving like they were. We had come into the jungle (or, in this case, the desert) and adopted their survival-of-the-fittest rules. We had lost the moral high ground
…
Somalia dashed the world’s hopes–and mine–that Africa might somehow become the testing ground for the New World Order and the idea of benign military intervention.
Americans had lost the moral high ground to…whom exactly? America once detonated two nuclear devices over two separate Japanese cities, and even then the other great powers were arguably worse. America, the global font of life-sustaining civilization, has not lost the moral high ground to anyone, in my opinion, and I’m not even that pro-American.
Here’s the reality about intervention: if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to go full bore; you’ve got to have the kind of undemocratic governments seen in Russia, China, and elsewhere which don’t have to worry about lügenpresse inflaming the domestic population. American politics are far too beholden to this kind of childish vacillation. That said, oppositional media might actually be an important component of advanced societies: it’s hard to say. That’s why it would be nice if an undemocratic country–like Saudi Arabia–could produce some enduring civilizational advancements so that they are in a position to show us how to live happily without a pointlessly adversarial press.
Soon, Richburg travels to Rwanda. He begins this section with a corny hook: “The young men with the machetes and the pistols had beer on their breath and murder in their eyes.” Then, he gets quickly to the point.
To make the clubs more deadly on impact, the Hutu militiamen drove long nails into the end. That’s what Rwanda had become, I thought. The country has reverted to prehistoric times, to a kind of sick version of Bedrock. And could these be fully evolved humans carrying blubs and machetes and panga knives and smashing their neighbors’ skills and chopping of their limbs, and piling up the legs in on pile, and the arms in another, and lumping the bodies all together and sometimes forcing new victims to sit atop the heap while they clubbed them to death too? No, I realized, fully evolved human beings in the twentieth century don’t do things like that. Not for any reason, not tribe, not religion, not territory. These must be cavemen.
These strike me as normal, natural thoughts in the face of this kind of messy, barbaric slaughter: are we dealing with actual human beings here? The behavior is so animalistic that you really have to wonder. Unfortunately, the easy answer–no–is the wrong answer; the right answer implies some very hard questions about how to approach this kind of person. At some point, he describes how they carve off arms and legs and leave the still living stump of a person on a pile of other torsos.
The Rwanda experience leads Richburg to one of his defining epiphanies about Africa. He has this thought while looking out over innumerable bodies floating down the Kagera river. He wonders who they are, their names, etc.
I remember my first training as a reporter, when I was a summer intern covering the night police beat. If a body–a single body–was discovered in the city, there would be a full-scale investigation. The police would find a name, contact a family, determine a cause of death. I remember one story of a murder victim whose corpse was discovered with a severed limb, an arm I think it was, and that’s how the police reporter phrased it, and that’s how I called it into the city desk. But I immediately got a call back from the alert night editor, Gene Bachinski, shouting at me in his characteristic baritone: “Which arm was severed?” Which arm? Right or left? I had no idea. But I went back to the police and found out because it mattered. But that was Washington, D.C., where every murder victim had a name, an identity, and it mattered how they died and which limb was severed. This is Africa. These are just bodies dumped into a river. Hundreds. Thousands. No one will ever count. No one will ever try to check an identity, contact a family, find out which limb was severed. Because this is Africa, and they don’t count the bodies in Africa.
Soon, the Tutsi rebels seize the initiative and drive the Hutus–a million of them–west to a little town in Zaire called Goma. There was then, of course, a cholera outbreak.
Once, I went to interview a Canadian nurse working in one of the medical tents at a refugee camp. She asked to step outside, behind the tent, so she could have a cigarette while we talked. And as I stood there taking notes while she explained to me the various stages of cholera, I glanced down and suddenly realized that we were standing in a field of corpses. They were dragging the dead from the tent and depositing them directly outside…
I’m not sure how many dead bodies I saw there in Goma during the cholera epidemic. Estimates are that some fifty thousand people died, but even that is just a guess. No one is ever really counting, because this was Africa, and you don’t count the bodies in Africa.
Thoughts of the cholera epidemic lead Richburg to a discussion of African sexual behaviors and subsequent AIDS pandemic. This is a particularly crazy chapter, which I’d like to quote at even further length than I will below, but I am conscious of the length of this review. Still, here is Richburg’s take.
Whereas AIDS infections in the United States and Western Europe are largely concentrated in the so-called high-risk groups–homosexuals and intravenous drug users–the disease in Africa is found almost exclusively in the heterosexual population, and infected women outnumber infected men by a six-to-five margin.
…
One of the obvious reasons the pandemic has spread so far and so fast in Africa is the rampant prostitution and the Africans’ free-and-easy attitude toward sex. Sex with prostitutes and sex with neighbors, co-workers, or almost anyone else is almost a way of life, especially in many of Africa’s sprawling urban centers…[Today], monogamy still seems an alien concept.
…
Another hindrance to fighting the disease is that many Africans who do think about the AIDS problem tend to become defensive. There’s still a large school of thought that AIDS and HIV are a “Western” phenomenon that has been foisted upon unsuspecting Africans. There is a widespread belief in a Great White Western Conspiracy to keep Africans down by unleashing deadly plagues, and more than once I picked up a Kenyan newspaper with some ridiculous commentary or editorial decrying the West over AIDS or claiming–in total disregard of the statistics–that Africans were being unfairly singled out as the largest group of carriers.
None of this is surprising to adults who know anything about African political ideas and politics. Still, it’s interesting that this guy who is now on the board of the Washington Post was willing to be this frank on this subject. The reality is that a native culture of sexual promiscuity created a dire situation in some African countries, especially in the urban cores.
I’m going to begin to wrap up this review, which has been extensive, but does not cover all of the really fascinating and frank discussion of problems in black Africa in this book. This final section will cover Richburg’s extremely bold criticism of African Americans who heaped praise on the dictator of Sierra Leone, Valentine Strasser.
Strasser seized control of Sierra Leone in his 20s, and he knew how to speak to the West, making promises to transition to democracy as soon as possible, etc. Of course, this never happened. But, Richburg describes seeing Strasser speak in Libreville, Gabon at a summit between Africans and African Americans, “organized by the Reverend Louis Sullivan, the veteran civil rights campaigner and anti-apartheid activist who had authored the ‘Sullivan Prinicples’ outlining fair employment practices for U.S. firms doing business in apartheid-era South Africa.” There were a number of important African Americans there, including Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and Louis Farrakhan.
When Strasser entered the meeting hall, sporting his now-trademark sunglasses and his camouflage battle fatigues, the crowd of mostly middle- and upper-middle class black Americans went wild with cheering, swooning from the women, some hoots, and frenzied applause. Sitting in that hall, you might be forgiven for thinking Strasser was a music celebrity instead of a puny-boy dictator. These black Americans were obviously more impressed with the macho military image Strasser cut than with the fact that he represents all that is wrong with Africa–military thugs who take power and thwart the continent’s fledgling efforts to move toward democracy. The chanting and hooting was a disgusting display, and to me it highlighted the complete ignorance about Africa among America’s so-called black elite.
One wonders if the cheering would have been less intense had these black Americans known what Richburg knows. After all, he is unique among black Americans being from a family that condemned the riotous blacks in Detroit in the 60s; he has mad a comfortable life for himself among whites, jews, and asians; as a college student, he looked askance at the latent anti-white hatred and militant black nationalism that is not uncommon among activist blacks.
He continues,
The reception for Strasser wasn’t the only thing sickening about that summit meeting. I sat there and listened as speaker after speaker heaped a nauseating outpouring of praise on some of Africa’s most brutal and corrupt strongmen and their repressive regimes. An uninhibited listener might not have noticed the farcical nature of Jesse Jackson’s tribute to Nigerian strongman Ibrahib Babangida. Jackson called Babangida “one of the great leader-servants of the modern world in our time,” proclaiming, “You do not stand alone as you move with a steady beat toward restoring democracy.”
Is it really a surprise to hear that black civil rights activists screamed like teenagers for murderous dictators, who merely share their skin color?
…Black Americans were most vocally at the forefront of the calls for immediate democratic reform in South Africa, but when the subject turns to the lack of democracy and human rights elsewhere in Africa, those same black Americans become defensive, nervous, inarticulate They offer tortured explanations as to why America shouldn’t criticize Africa, why America shouldn’t impose its standards, and why reform must not be immediate but gradual, step by step.
It’s as if repression comes only in white.
To his credit, Richburg apparently posed this question to a number of these prominent people: Louis Sullivan; Doug Wilder, Virginia’s first black governor; Reverend Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.; and Jesse Jackson. He has each one on the record with some evasive bullshit about why lack of democracy in South Africa is the most pressing social issue in the world, but in other black African countries, things are headed in the right direction, we shouldn’t “superimpose a Western standard of democracy,” etc.
This chapter contains a lot of clearly personal writing by Richburg, and for this chapter alone, the book is worth buying. He describes the question of his identity as one of the central struggles of his life: can he just be a journalist without being a black journalist? Can he report fairly on black political corruption without being called a race traitor by blacks? He ends the chapter with a description of his visit to Goree Island, which was “the main transit point for African slaves heading off to America” in the 17th and 18th century. He decides that it strikes him like Auschwitz, which he visited as a student backpacker: “a powerful historical setting, one that makes visitors reflect on the evil nature of mankind. But for me it was nothing more.” This is a bold–and, to me, familiar–sentiment. I am an Irish American, and when I reflect on anti-Irish sentiments among English or American historical people, I feel like some of the sentiments were likely warranted. I’m happy enough to be an Irish American, but I absolutely couldn't care less about English colonial rule, etc. In fact, I imagine it was likely for the best that it happened. When I hear another Irish American complain about this kind of thing, I know I am dealing with a dumbass. So, all of this is to say, I see my own thoughts in Richburg’s writing on this subject, though, of course, I think it’s a lot more acute in his world: black American race resentment is one of the most powerful social forces in America; resisting it requires a lot of energy.
I’ll end with what I think is one of the most powerful observations in the entire book. He addresses the excuses for African dysfunction in the context of Asian economic success stories.
Talk to me about Africa’s legacy of European colonialism, and I’ll give you Malaysia and Singapore, ruled by the British and occupied by Japan during World War II. Or Indonesia, exploited by the Dutch for over three hundred years. And let’s toss in Vietnam, a French colony later divided between North and South, with famously tragic consequences. Like Africa, most Asian countries only achieved true independence in the postwar years; unlike Africans, Asians knew what to do with it.
Talk to me about the problem of tribalism in Africa, about different ethnic and linguistic groups having been lumped together by Europeans inside artificial natural borders. Then I’ll throw back at you Indonesia, some 13,700 scattered islands comprising more than 360 distinct tribes and ethnic groups and a mix of languages and religions; Indonesia has had its own turbulent past, including a bloody 1965 army-led massacre that left as many as a million people dead. But it has also had thirty years since of relative stability and prosperity.
Now talk about some African countries’ lack of natural resources, or their reliance on single commodities, and I’ll ask you to account for tiny Singapore, an island city-state with absolutely no resources–with a population barely large enough to sustain an independent nation. Singapore today is one of the world’s most successful economies.
He then describes his frustration with Western and White academics to hold Africa to a reasonable standard.
The reason, of course, is that Africans are black. Too much criticism from white countries in the west comes dangerously close to sounding racist. And African leaders seem willing enough to play that card, constantly raising the specter of “neocolonialism.”
Then he’s onto America.
Ever try to have a meaningful conversation in America about the problems of the black underclass? About drug abuse and teenage pregnancy in black neighborhoods? About the breakdown of the black family, the school dropout rates, the spiraling black-on-black crime?…
If white people are uncomfortable talking about problems plaguing the black community, you sure as hell don’t find much straight talk among blacks themselves. I try to talk about these things all the time, every time I’m back in Detroit for one of those family holiday gatherings. I hear a lot of talk about white racism. I hear all about Jim Crow and legal segregation and unfair housing practices and all the rest. I hear a lot of excuses, but not much more…”
Anyway, there is a lot more in this book. It’s also worth noting that he is on the editorial board of the Washington Post, and he openly advertises this book in his website biography. Somehow, I’m surprised he’s kept that job in the aftermath of the revolutionary black nationalist violence that brought the country and its institutions to their knees in the summer of 2020; I’d have figured he’d have been purged. But, apparently not. He appears to continue to toe a kind of internationalist liberal democratic line, which certainly makes him a candidate for big jobs within American journalism. This appears to be his only article from the George Floyd period. One wonders what his thoughts were about the lawless zones in Minneapolis and Seattle, filled as they were with black teenagers firing guns at random. Meanwhile, his newspaper and its peer institutions were actively supporting this insane movement.
This is a superb review. I’m going to buy this book as a result.