Torrents of Vitriol

In the early fall of 2006, while I was on assignment for CBC Radio in the West African country of Mali, several unfortunate circumstances sandbagged me. As I exited a car surrounded by overzealous teenage vendors, my wallet and $450 disappeared forever; after eating fish in western Mali, I became ill; and I cancelled an interview with a Cabinet minister after being told by an airline the departure time had changed, only to see the flight take off three hours later than scheduled. As much as I liked Mali and would gladly return, the thought of that first trip inspires horror.

Nevertheless, the experience returned to mind when reading Joan Baxter’s Dust from Our Eyes: An Unblinkered Look at Africa.

Mali, through its people, politics and social mores, is a protagonist in her book. The country barely exists on the radar of the western media outlets and although Baxter, a Canadian, is not the first western journalist to delve into Mali’s history of empire, her perspective is sharper, because she spent six years living in the country, reporting for the BBC and other media outlets.

Better than her coverage of history is her illuminating reportage on the modern state of Mali, demonstrating that it is less democratic than its international image suggests. To Baxter’s surprise, the country clings to a class system of nobles, griots (bards) and slaves as a means of protecting its strong culture against the western influence of money. This informs her belief that Mali is the most cohesive country she lived in during her 25 years in sub-Saharan Africa. According to Baxter, everybody appeared to be related to everyone else, if you went far back into history, and most Malians did tend to reach back.

But not unlike my opening anecdote, far too much of Dust from Our Eyes uncomfortably involves Baxter and her philo-African, anti-capitalist, conspiracy-minded beliefs. Her thesis is certainly reasonable and hardly tendentious to credible observers of African affairs. She examines the ways in which the West is culpable and complicit in sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty and lack of democracy. Actors cloaked in benevolent clothing actually are “much more concerned with creating policies orchestrated to re-chain Africa, to reshape it to fit rigid and unhelpful economic and political doctrines—with increased profits at home.” A complementary idea rails against a western mindset that condemns other continents and cultures that deviate from its path and definition of progress.

It must be said that neither of these beliefs is novel. Skewering wrong-headed western policy toward sub-Saharan Africa is a robust tradition in academia and in corners of mainstream journalism such as the monthly New African and Graham Hancock’s caustic but somewhat outdated Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business. Indeed, Baxter’s first argument invokes dependency theory, which posits that resources flow from poor and underdeveloped states to a core of rich states, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. As for her second point, it is true that there is no excuse for the continuing western ignorance of African history. Notably, we are aware now of crucial 19th-century thinkers such as Edward Blyden and Africanus Horton, who emphasized the continent’s achievements before and after the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, when the colonial “scramble for Africa” formally began.

Still, Dust from Our Eyes is intended as a corrective to the recent books of Martin Meredith (The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair), Ghanaian-born and Canadian-trained economist George Ayittey (Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa’s Future) and former World Bank official Robert Calderisi (The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working). What unites all three of these works, according to Baxter, is their focus on Africa’s underdevelopment as the product of poor leadership since independence.

She writes:

Certainly Thomas Sankara, the charismatic leader of Burkina Faso who was assassinated in a coup d’état in 1987—some say at the behest of France, although Baxter suggests American involvement—advocated gender equality and tried to aid subsistence farmers. Yet the notion that the West turns on leaders who attack the neo-colonial status quo in defence of their people does not quite conform to reality across the continent. Despite obvious double standards, international concerns over corruption and human rights abuses often possess great merit. The decline of Uganda under President Yoweri Museveni, accompanied by the occasional rebuke from the West, is hardly mythical. Eritrean president Issaias Afewerki is at odds with the U.S., but his defiance stems from regime self-interest, not citizen well-being.

When Baxter focuses on Mali, Burkina Faso during Sankara’s revolution, failed western inventions in agriculture and how western cotton policy undermines West African producers, she exemplifies the fundamental rule of journalism: show, don’t tell. In these instances, her reportage depicts the situation on the ground during fascinating times and bolsters her thesis. Her writing here is lively, at times approaching lyricism. A memorable passage is the author’s description of the “parklands,” the traditional agroforestry system in the Sahel that extends from Senegal to Chad. Her vivid descriptions of native trees such as the baobab, the dawa dawa, shea nut and Faidherbia albida entranced this reader. Baxter’s chronicling of the success of small-scale agroforestry operations in villages across Cameroon, where farmers interspersed crops such as cocoa with valuable trees whose seedlings were sold, is equally wonderful.

But the flaws emerge when she deviates from her strengths. Rather than laying out a well-founded case to support her thesis, she unleashes torrents of vitriol against western governments and corporations operating in sub-Saharan Africa. It is not that all of her anecdotes are wrong: Tony Buckingham, the CEO of the TSX-listed Heritage Oil, used to belong to the expired mercenary outfit Executive Outcomes, which entered countries such as Angola and Sierra Leone to protect natural resource exploration and secure concessions; in 2006, former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice did call Equatorial Guinean despot Teodoro Obiang Nguema a “good friend” since that small African country supplies more than 3 million barrels of crude oil per month to the United States. The larger problem is that Baxter’s venom overwhelms her evidence, draining it of impact and meaning. In my mind, all that remains is a blur of allegations and facts, positing an inexorable link between elite networks of political and economic power in the West. This may explain the author’s intercontinental framework, as she seems to believe that Iraq is emblematic of a historical pattern of failed neocolonial interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.

While aspects of Baxter’s reporting are entertainingly strange—she notes how intelligence agencies recruit aid workers, journalists and missionaries, leading some Africans to think there is a spook behind every one of these professions—a more pressing mystery is why Dust from Our Eyes was edited so shabbily. At one point, the author appears to be engaged in an internal dialectic with herself by asking three paragraphs of rhetorical questions. At a later juncture, a question-and-answer session with an ex-Malian Cabinet minister emerges in a transcript format. It would appear that someone in the editorial chain settled for lazy writing since it is easier to transcribe interviews and ask questions than to construct an argument.

The shame is that Baxter boasts the ability to write a terrific book about Mali or about the impact of western agricultural and cotton policies in West Africa. It may have been a tougher sell for agents and the public, but it would have been a far better read. More’s the pity.