MANDELA, MOBUTU, AND ME

Reporter Duke, who covered Africa for the Washington Post in the 1990s, sheds her journalist’s mantle to give a personal, emotive account of those extraordinary years.

The images are familiar: the doped and deadly child soldiers; the pervasive corruption, brought to its worst heights by Mobutu; an entire continent rampant with AIDS. But Duke tells the story with vigor, and her chronicling of South Africa’s struggle for political and economic balance, its attempt to find some harmony between the African National Congress’s ideals and globalism’s reality, is a neat and idiosyncratic summation of the decade’s buffeting of that nation. She provides just enough of the surreal encounters (like the “weird Kabuki” of someone obliquely requesting a bribe) waiting in a land strange for those reared in the US, as South Africa, Angola, and the Congo certainly are, even to that rare creature, an African-American, female foreign correspondent. Duke wears her feelings on her sleeve, and they can be as conflicted as the land she is reporting on: she bemoans the absence of Western intervention in Rwanda or Zaire yet knows that such intervention never comes without strings, and she never forgets that “my people, African people, were suffering again. And [that] my people, African people, were the cause.” While she may inflate the effect her articles will have on readers (they’ll “rub people’s faces” in Africa’s travails, she says, while people really need only turn the page for her to vanish entirely), she does provide a glimpse into the shortcomings of today’s foreign correspondents whose “mission wasn’t to put down roots.” One may fairly ask how reporters can truly come to know a place when they rely on intermediaries and retreat each evening to the Intercontinental Hotel.

Despite the relative shortness of her stint, Duke discerns some of both the truthful kernels and sweeping ramifications—economic, political, social, cultural—of what independence has brought to parts of southern Africa.