Killing the Wizards
Marget, Madeline
IN THE LAND OF HIS FOREBEARS KILLING THE WIZARDS Wars of Freedom from Zaire to South Africa Alan Cowell Simon and Schuster, $23, 267 pp. Madeline Margel Ming the Wizards, the result of New...
...Cowell delineates and explains both as he brings us closer and closer to apartheid's home...
...Commonweal cessible to a white person who minds his own business...
...In South Africa an easy, pleasant life is acSUZANNE KEEN is an assistant professor of English at Yale University...
...But the anger of black youth is intensifying, sometimes taking tragic and destructive forms that threaten to plunge the nation into anarchy...
...An unjust white South Africa only survives because of the support—perhaps it's fair to say the collusion—of the West...
...Cowell reports on young men who blame their parents, and their parents' generation, for not having thrown off the oppressor...
...To white separatist hardliners, the myths of Afrikaner history are a religion...
...Because of his frank reporting, Cowell was exiled from South Africa in 1987...
...Cowell is right-minded about the white presence in Africa, without being self-righteous about it...
...Servants, a gin and tonic at sunset, and a luxurious Johannesburg suburb make up his world for much of his time in Africa...
...Reuters sent Cowell to Zambia in 1976...
...The second half of Killing the Wizards is explicitly devoted to South Africa, but from the beginning of his narrative Cowell points us there...
...In Zaire, where President Mobutu's salary matches the national debt, the Belgians' ruthless plunder and precipitous desertion have left poverty, sickness, extreme disorder, and depravity behind...
...Other African countries, such as Angola and Mozambique—once Portugal's—are in ruins...
...His passionate feeling for Africa is another...
...Life's Blood (Simon & Schuster), was published earlier this year...
...The end of the cold war along with the economic pressure of the West have undermined the enactment of South Africa's shameful policies, but the consequences of South Africa's defense of apartheid are evident through all Cowell's time and travels in Africa...
...Though he's never intrusive, Cowell is always present...
...MADELINE MARGET ;.v a frequent Commonweal contributor...
...Both these empowering factors are slipping away...
...Still, at the very end of the book as he flies out of Johannesburg, Cowell writes: "I doubted I would ever be able to say— or want to say—it was all behind me...
...As apartheid is abandoned, that faith lacks not only an ethical foundation, but also an institutional one...
...Going to Africa was a return to the history that had drawn my forebears to a continent of which they were as ignorant as I. But it was also a venture into a modern 34:14 August 1992 I led the double life that produces the hypocrisy of the liberal equation: white privilege plus white conscience equals a very luxurious form of guilt— angst in the swimming pool, anguish on the golf course, righteous anger at the pass raid on the servants' quarters...
...I was scorned by the government for supposed bias toward the black cause...
...Cowell succeeds at understanding and explaining the troubled continent where he lived for so long...
...Cowell quotes Conrad's Mister Kurtz, "The horror...
...Greed, barbarism, the lust for power, along with the passionate, small-minded self-protec-tiveness that permits or engenders the other transgressions pervade the continent...
...The white tribe of South Africa—the tribe to which apartheid is a philosophy as well as a methodology— for years instigated, encouraged, and underwrote strife among its neighbors...
...Kill the wizards," instead of being a cry of black warriors against white invaders, has become one of black tribe against black tribe...
...His examination of his own actions and his own conscience are what make Killing the Wizards exceptional, and what connects those of us distant from Africa to it...
...He examines his conscience and reveals his feelings, making this journalistic work a valuable meditation as well...
...Confusion and evil have not disappeared from Africa, and Cowell concludes that some of the optimism he once had was not justified...
...But the book is not one of praise...
...But those same people 1 was purportedly championing threw rocks and gasoline bombs at my car because my skin was the color of the master race created by apartheid...
...It's not alone: in the Central African Republic, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the emperor, once kept human flesh in a cold room, ready to satisfy his Commonweal cannibalism...
...More important, it's about him...
...His loving hope prevails, a...
...He doesn't have to send his dispatches by carrier pigeon or, in order to travel, put a bribe in the hand that reaches under a whitewashed window...
...I was not killing for it, or dying for it, so I was not part of it...
...In the past, and today, it has relied also on its huge, enslaved, black labor force...
...Others turn to bombings and knifings and the heinous tire "necklaces" as necessary tools of revolution...
...In the subtitle, "to" is the operative word...
...White and black South Africa, Cowell observes, are today fraught with internal contradictions...
...Some young blacks refuse to go to school (admittedly, because first of all it teaches subservience...
...Her book...
...He's ashamed of his participation, however tangential, in the injustices privilege grants—as when, for example, he drives a short distance in the rain, while the black man guiding him walks outside...
...The horror...
...The African countries Cowell writes about have no real nationhood...
...Cowell, as a white man of position, is a beneficiary of racism, and he knows it...
...JAMES NEAFSEY is a retreat leader, spiritual director, and teacher of Christian spirituality from Berkeley, California...
...Among blacks, charismatic leaders like Nelson Mandela are giving strength and wisdom...
...And until very recently, most of the wars, too, were white men's inventions...
...Alan Cowell Killing the Wizards era stained with the conflicts that had been their bequest...
...Despite these dramatic changes—symbolized by Mandela's release from prison—the future is uncertain...
...the boundaries are the inventions of colonialists...
...But it is, of course, Cowell's mission to do the opposite, and he does so with a full heart: His longing for justice fuses with the great struggle he sees...
...to remind us that Zaire is still the Heart of Darkness...
...IRVING MALIN reviewed The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford for Commonweal in 1969...
...Thirty-two years after independence, no road runs all the way through Zaire from north to south, and the jungle is likely to overtake pipelines before they can be completed...
...People with AIDS lie untended, corruption and slaughter afflict the populace, and those in power cut their meat with solid gold knives and forks...
...He is currently writing a book on Waugh in Hollywood...
...ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS'v most recent books on Evelyn Waugh are Evelyn Waugh and the Forms of His Time (Catholic University Press, 1989) and Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed (Twayne, 1990...
...Ironically, South Africa does not have the astonishing, sometimes primitive, disarray and corruption Cowell finds elsewhere on the continent...
...Madeline Margel Ming the Wizards, the result of New York Times reporter Alan Cowell's ten-year immersion in Africa, is an informative, beautifully organized book, jam-packed with historical and current facts and with Cowell's educated and well-considered interpretation of them...
...He visited again in 1990, as the present government turned away from apartheid...
...Cowell's sensitive examination of his part in collective guilt is an important theme in Killing the Wizards...
...it was not my war, but I was drawn to it by covering it, far more intimately than many South African whites, so I could not help but feel the wrench of opposing forces...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
