Africa

The Plot to Save South Africa:

The Week Mandela Averted Civil War and Forged a New Nation

BY JUSTICE MALALA. Simon & Schuster, 2023, 352 pp.

The assassination in 1993 of Chris Hani, a charismatic and popular young African National Congress leader, threw South Africa’s transition out of apartheid into a deep crisis. Radicals on both sides demanded that Nelson Mandela, the ANC head, and President Frederik Willem de Klerk not make any further concessions in negotiations. In this trenchant narrative of the days that followed the murder, Malala masterfully weaves the different threads of the story. The white supremacists who killed Hani hoped the murder would spark a wave of vengeful violence by Blacks that would convince the white minority it had no future in a majority-ruled country. The ploy failed. The ANC stirred popular protests but managed to limit the violence that ensued from them. It simultaneously worked to relaunch negotiations with the government. Malala’s account portrays de Klerk as a leader with limited vision and suggests that a crisis was averted thanks only to Mandela’s political skills and the ingenuity and pragmatism of the two leaders in charge of negotiations, the ANC’s Cyril Ramaphosa (South Africa’s current president) and the government minister Roelf Meyer. A speech that

Mandela delivered in the wake of the assassination, in which he appealed for calm and inclusion, established him firmly as the country’s moral leader. A year later, national elections would make him president.

Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria

BY EBENEZER OBADARE.

Notre Dame Press, 2022, 222 pp.

Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing religion not only in Nigeria but also across much of Africa. In his second book focused on the rising popularity of the faith, Obadare argues that Pentecostal preachers have become figures of national authority and prestige, exercising more influence over Nigerian society and politics. He argues that the decline of Nigeria’s universities and intellectuals, as a result of economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s, led to a transfer of prestige in the public sphere from scholars to pastors: a system of authority based on reason has transformed into one based on revelation. The most significant Pentecostal pastors are skillful political and religious entrepreneurs, developing new spiritual narratives to attract and influence parishioners and turning their churches into the engines of substantial revenue-yielding empires. The pastors’ prominence and wealth allow them to play an increasingly important role in national politics as power brokers.

China’s Rise in the Global South: The Middle East, Africa, and Beijing’s Alternative World Order

BY DAWN C. MURPHY. Stanford University Press, 2022, 408 pp.

Murphy assesses the aims and ambitions of Chinese policy in Africa and the Middle East based on a sweeping review of China’s diplomatic, military, trade, aid, and investment activities over the last 30 years. She argues that China’s actions should be understood as evidence of its desire to develop an alternative world order that will allow China to interact with these two regions on its own terms. This imperative necessarily entails ratcheting up competition with the existing Western-dominated regional order. Still, Murphy insists, the demands of this competition will not drive China to pursue any territorial ambitions in these regions, nor will it prevent China from cooperating with the United States in certain areas. Murphy’s discussion of how China uses the regular regional forums it organizes is excellent, as is her analysis of the relationships China has forged in military cooperation, foreign aid, and trade. Her book suffers, however, from neglecting to consider how growing sovereign debt issues in countries in both regions will affect their relations with China.

Ugandan Agency Within China-Africa Relations: President Museveni and China’s Foreign Policy in East Africa BY BARNEY WALSH. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2022, 232 pp.

Much of the recent literature on Chinese-African relations focuses on Chinese initiatives and policies but affords little agency to African actors, who are typically portrayed as passive, albeit willing, partners. Walsh’s well-argued book does the opposite. It considers how Uganda’s government under President Yoweri Museveni has proactively used its relationship with China to strengthen its hold on domestic power and project influence throughout east Africa. In particular, Walsh notes that Museveni has skillfully turned Chinese investments in infrastructure into a means of placing Uganda at the center of the regional integration efforts of the East African Community, an intergovernmental organization. Beijing’s policies in Africa are often improvised and not based on an overarching strategy, allowing Museveni to shrewdly manipulate the direction of Chinese efforts and investment to the benefit of Ugandan security. For instance, Museveni managed to piggyback on a joint Chinese-Kenyan project to build an oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean from South Sudan. The pipeline originally did not involve Uganda, but Museveni adroitly negotiated with his EAC partners to link it to Uganda’s oil resources.

Violence in Rural South Africa, 1880–1963

BY SEAN REDDING. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, 216 pp.

High levels of violence appear to have plagued rural South Africa in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The apartheid state understood this violence disdainfully as the result of the cultural proclivities of traditional African society. In this fascinating study, Redding uses court archives of legal proceedings to argue that, in fact, much of the violence of that era stemmed from African responses to the disruptions caused by the emerging apartheid state. She documents well how African powerlessness led to violent incidents over matters such as marriage and land rights. More interestingly, Redding suggests that over time, Africans found ways to explain this violence to the state so they could better navigate the logic of the apartheid judicial system. For instance, violence perpetrated by women appears in court records in the form of accusations of witchcraft, when that violence was much more likely the result of women struggling to cope with the harsh social realities imposed by white minority rule.