The graves are not yet full: race, tribe and power in the heart of Africa

Abstract

Bill Berkeley describes his fifteen years of reporting on Africa, providing a series of firsthand encounters with key players in six countries-Liberia, Zaire (now Congo), Sudan, Rwanda, Uganda, and South Africa. . Since 1983 journalist Bill Berkeley has traveled through Africa's most troubled lands to seek out the tyrants and military leaders who orchestrate these nations' seemingly intractable wars. Shattering once and for all the myth that ancient tribal hatreds lay at the heart of the continent's troubles, Berkeley instead holds accountable the Big Men who came to power during this period, describing the very rational methods behind their apparent madness. Weaving together insightful historical analysis and his own keen observations of ordinary men, women, and children struggling in the midst of terrible violence, Berkeley insists that what the world often sees as uniquely interethnic troubles are in fact rooted in the international politics of colonialism and the Cold War. The Graves Are Not Yet Full provides a convincing explanation for the last half-century's cycle of revolution and genocide in Africa, detailing the stirring history of these nations' quests for peace and independence over the last seventeen years. Berkeley's incisive analysis does much to bring recent African history into sharp focus while at the same time illuminating just what it is that allows societies-wherever they may be-to accept, and sometimes embrace, violence.