Subsaharan Africa

The title of Mark Huband's The Skull Beneath the Skin. Africa After the Cold War (Westview, 2001, pp 376) is deliberately gruesome.. The cover is illustrated with picture of a black soldier with a submachine gun standing over a pile of corpses. The book is really about black Africa, with little reference to the Arab world, which Huband covered in his earlier book Warriors of the Prophet: the Struggle for Islam (Westview, 1998). Huband has spent twelve years in Africa and the Mid East as correspondent for the Financial Times. As a journalist, he writes in an informative and readable way, and his book has received due praise. One of the eulogies comes from Boutros Boutros Ghali, who failed to win a second term as Secretary General of the UN because of US opposition. To show its support for this victim of Anglo-Saxon brutality, France made him Secretary General of the International Organization of Francophonie. How Francophone is the French of this Egyptian? I doubt that he speaks with a Tours accent.

The takes us to chapter 13, the most interesting of the lot: "France, Africa, and a Place Called Fashoda". The French and the British were literally at cross purposes. The British, thinking vertically, planned a Cairo to Cape Town railway. The French, thinking horizontally, wanted to control north Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The two plans clashed at the small town of Fashoda (now called Kodok),700 miles south of Khartoum on the Upper Nile. In 1898 a British Army under Kitchener forced a French army to withdraw. The incident is forgotten in Britain, but the French continued to brood over it, just as the Spaniards brooded over their defeat in Cuba by the Anglo-Saxons the same year.

The amazing thing is that French President François Mitterrand, whose activities in World War II are the subject of critical scrutiny, continued to resent the British presence in Africa; Huband says "The Fashoda complex obsessed Mitterrand tjhroughout his life", To assert the French presence, Mitterrand took advantage of the funeral of Félix Houphouet-Boigny, the president of Côte d'Ivoire. He rented a Concorde to take him to Yamoussoukro, the nation's capital and the birthplace of Houphouet-Boigny. The Concorde circled the capital several times so that the people would be duly impressed, The French presence at the funeral in the basilica of Notre Dame de la Paix was elaborately staged. Huband watched in amusement from the balcony,

The French/Anglo-Saxon rivalry was only one of the many which used Africa as a cockpit. We remember the Cold War and the civil war in Angola which was one pf its consequences. Huband thinks that Africa would have been better of it it had been left alone, but that is not now a viable policy. Practically all of sub-Saharan Africa is dependent on Western aid, and coordinated intervention is necessary to make sure that the aid reaches the people. In fact, steps should be taken to make African leaders, or rather misleaders, disgorge their loot. Huband does not go into this. In any case, his informative book is a delight to read. I plan to consult it regularly.

Christopher Jones comments on the review of Mark Huband, The Skull Beneath the Skin. Africa After the Cold War: "Certainly the publication of Huband's book is good news -- anything that highlights the plight of post colonial Africa is very necessary. Regarding the French of Boutros Ghali I can say that it is excellent. His proficiency dates back a long while, he was educated in France and although he doesn't speak with a Tours accent, it is not Parisian also. Frankly, he has no real accent.

As for Mittérrand, he was a very curious character. Founder of the modern Parti Socialiste, he wasn't really very socialiste. He was a dirigiste like De Gaulle and a closet monarchist (with himself as monarch). But what disturbs me more than his personal relations with Vichyites was how the sycophantic press in and outside France ate up this "socialist" propaganda, without any real desire to find out who the other guy at the table really was (I am referring to the famous picture of Mittérrand at his country home with René Bousquets, seated at the kitchen table with the chief reporter of the Figaro Magazine). In this strange world, if you say you're socialist, social democrat or Democrat, a sort of curtain falls in front of normal criticism. For me, these are the parties of the average bureaucracy.

As much as Huband loves to poke fun at French policies in Africa, I think that France has played a "stabilizing" role on the black continent and not a neo-colonial one. Let's not forget that other, far more dangerous countries have intervened in Africa, and France's presence was a deterrent. Of course I am referring to Cuba and its ally, the Soviet Union".