Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa

Abstract

This is an essay about evil. Its setting is Africa. The characters are mostly African, with an American narrator and Americans in supporting roles. The time is the last decade of the twentieth century, post-Cold War. But the questions are timeless and universal: How do evil people operate? What accounts for their power? Why do people follow? I first went out to Africa in 1983 as a wide-eyed freelance newspaper correspondent drawn to the great emancipation drama then unfolding in South Africa. I had fancied myself a budding specialist on race relations when, fresh out of college a few years earlier, I had gone to work for newspapers in Alabama and Georgia. But I was born too late to witness the wrenching traumas of the civil rights era. I had studied history in college, and as a journalist I wanted to watch history in the making. I was also the sort of person who, while shopping for fitted bed sheets in a Kmart in suburban Atlanta, felt myself suffocating, yearning to explore some of the grittier precincts of the globe. The struggle to bring down apartheid was my kind of story: a stirring crusade against manifest evil, the infamous system of racial tyranny helpfully delineated in black and white. As is often the case in Africa, things didn't work out the way I had planned them. Visa problems kept me out of South Africa for a time, and so I wound up taking the slow road down the continent from Cairo: trains, buses, boats, trucks, taxis packed so tightly that my arms and legs fell asleep. There is a joke among expatriates in Sudan that once you have drunk from the White Nile, you're infected for life. In spite of myself, I had to agree. There was something about Africa that got into my blood and stayed there. Partly it was the magnitude of the dramas sweeping the continent. Africa is a part of the world, I discovered, where multiple eras of history are taking place simultaneously: biblical plagues and famines, genocide, slavery, revolution, emancipation, nation building. In Sudan, I learned, a civil war had begun the year I was born and lasted until I was in high school. Half a million southern Sudanese had died. This