It’s no secret that blacks dominate much of the world of sports. In track, the purest test of athletic ability, runners of African descent hold every single men’s world record at every standard distance, from the 100 meters (where no non-black athlete has held the world record since 1960) to the marathon. In pro football, the positions that require the greatest combination of speed, power and explosiveness — wide receiver, cornerback and running back — are almost entirely played by blacks. In pro basketball — the sport that requires the greatest combination of leaping ability, power bursts and agility — almost all the starters and virtually all the superstars are black. In baseball, blacks are also disproportionately represented, although not to the same degree that they are in the more athletically demanding basketball and football.
None of this is news to anyone who watches American sports or track and field — and it hasn’t been news for over 30 years. You have to go back to the early ’60s, if not earlier, to find a time when blacks didn’t completely dominate basketball and, to a lesser degree, football. The days when NFL teams routinely started two white wide receivers (remember Boyd Dowler and Carrol Dale?) seem as paleolithic as the jump pass and the quick kick.
Black athletic domination is so accepted today that it’s easy to forget how astonishing it is. But what is even more astonishing is that everyone — with the exception of the athletes themselves — is afraid to talk in public about it. Even acknowledging that blacks are superior athletes veers uncomfortably close to a question still too traumatic for America’s delicate racial sensibilities: Why are they?
The politically correct answer is that blacks dominate sports not because of a biological advantage, but because of an environmental disadvantage. Black athletic achievement is a direct result of racism: For blacks, athletics was practically the only way out of the ghetto, so they had extraordinary motivation to succeed.
There is obviously much truth in this answer. Before scoffing at the idea that environment alone could produce so many world-class black athletes, we would do well to remember that cultural and environmental factors are notoriously easy to underestimate. No one suggests that Ashkenazi Jews or Asians are genetically selected to be superior classical musicians, yet they are disproportionately represented in that field. (For that matter, no one suggests that blacks are genetically selected to be virtuoso improvising musicians — yet they dominate jazz as much as they do football or basketball.) Why not run out looking for Japanese genes that select for flower-arranging, or Southern American Scottish-Irish genes that lead to NASCAR driving?
Moreover, there are good reasons to wantto believe that black athletic domination has no physiological basis. Science has a long and disreputable history of making false extrapolations from inconclusive hard data — extrapolations that often merely parrot the prejudices of the age. In the case of blacks, whom whites have perniciously associated with “brute animality” ever since they first encountered them, those prejudices have gone underground, but can be easily reawakened. And certainly with a “soft” social phenomenon like athletic domination, as opposed to a “hard” one like blacks’ genetic susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia, hard-science explanations must be looked at with skepticism.
But setting a world record in the 100 meters is a more quantifiable achievement than ripping through a Rachmaninoff concerto or blowing a trumpet solo on “So What.” And as both black athletic domination and our knowledge of genetics, physical anthropology and physiology have grown, it has become increasingly hard to assert that environmental factors alone can explain black superiority in sports. Jon Entine’s “Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It” will make it even harder.
Entine, a journalist and TV producer, makes a compelling, if not absolutely conclusive, case that blacks are naturally better athletes. Their extraordinary athletic achievements are due in large part, he argues, to certain genetically based physiological traits that are common to two African-descended populations — the first population originating in West Africa, the second in East and North Africa. The West Africans (most black Americans trace their lineage to West Africa) are exceptionally fast and can jump high. The East and North Africans excel in endurance. It’s hard to say which population has dominated more: West African-descended blacks hold an astounding 95 percent of the top times in sprinting, while athletes from just one East African country, Kenya (and most of them from just one region), hold an incredible one-third of the top times in all long- and middle-distance races.
To avoid misunderstandings, Entine makes it clear from the outset that he is talking about groups, not individuals: It is not the case that all or most blacks are better athletes than members of other racial groups, only that over the entire population, there are higher odds that some individuals will be faster or able to jump higher than individuals from other populations. The black guy playing corner in a pickup football game may or may not be a better athlete than the white wide receiver lined up opposite him, but there’s no statistical reason to assume he is — genetics doesn’t work that way. But when you leave the sandlot and move up to the level where the world’s elite athletes compete — world-class track meets, the Olympics, the NFL and the NBA — genetics confers the tiny advantage that separates starters from bench-warmers, world record holders from also-rans.
Entine also addresses an even more volatile subject: the unfair devaluation of black athletes’ blood, sweat and tears that can all too easily accompany encomiums to their “natural abilities.” He is at pains to point out that having a genetic advantage doesn’t automatically confer success: Black athletes have to work as hard as athletes of other races if they want to reach the top. Their success is a result of a “unique confluence of cultural and genetic forces.”
“The importance of the individual remains paramount,” Entine emphasizes. “Winning athletic competitions does not make one superior in any moral sense. It does signify that you have hit on your lucky number playing the roulette wheel of genetics, cultural serendipity, and individual drive.”
Both great genes and great discipline are required to reach world-class athletic status. The greatest wide receiver of all time, the 49ers’ Jerry Rice, might have been gifted with West African genes that gave him speed and explosiveness, but those genes didn’t make him design and stay with an offseason hill-sprinting exercise regimen so brutal that superbly conditioned teammates vomited and collapsed while trying to stay with him. Rice made a catch for a key first down in one of the great drives in pro football history, the legendary 92-yard, fourth-quarter, game-winning drive in Super Bowl XXIII. On 2nd and 25, facing another world-class athlete perhaps carrying similar genes, when Rice’s exhausted body needed to come up with one final burst, one more cut executed at full speed with no give-away body lean, with enough concentration left at the end of the pattern to reach far out and up and make the grab, it wasn’t his genes that allowed him to do it — it was those agonizing hours spent running up that mountain, hours of pain spent so that at the end of a game, sucking air, he would have maybe 2 percent more left in his tank than the guy covering him.
Most important of all, Entine refutes the idea that there is any sinister corollary to black genetic superiority in athletics. This is, of course, the real reason why this subject is so loaded. “The elephant in the living room is intelligence,” Entine notes. “In the familiar if erroneous calculus, I.Q. and athleticism are inversely proportional.” Entine points out that there is no scientific support for this idea and dismisses it out of hand. Whether it will find fertile ground for a rebirth in books like Entine’s is another question.
In support of his thesis, Entine relies on two different bodies of evidence: the undeniable, but scientifically “soft,” record of black athletic achievement, and the still contested but increasingly accepted theories of anthropologists, physiologists and geneticists. Neither alone is decisive, but taken together, they are — to a layman — pretty convincing.
Entine breezes through an endless list of stellar athletic achievements by blacks. Track records are the most impressive, of course, but he also throws in some fascinating lesser-known studies, like one undertaken by the famous baseball “sabermetrician,” the statistics-obsessed baseball analyst Bill James. In a 1987 study, trying to figure out what factors best predicted which rookies would become baseball stars, he compared the careers of 54 white rookies against those of 54 black rookies with comparable statistics. Greatly to his surprise, he found that, on the whole, the black rookies went on to have better major league careers than the whites; the black players hit 66 percent more home runs, stole 400 percent more bases, etc. He repeated the study with 49 more pairs and got similar results. Race, it turned out, was the single best predictor of stardom — and this in a sport in which blacks dominate less than in football or basketball, perhaps at least partially because West African genes confer less of an advantage in baseball. Such studies are obviously not going to end up in the New England Journal of Medicine, but they aren’t meaningless, either.
Entine doesn’t pursue this, but his theory could also explain why there might never be as high a percentage of black quarterbacks in the NFL as, say, black free safeties. Historically, the dearth of black quarterbacks was clearly due to the racist assumption that blacks lacked “the [intellectual] necessities,” in the immortal words of baseball executive Al Campanis, to play the position.
As those idiotic assumptions fade, the percentage of black quarterbacks is certain to increase (a process that has already begun: Entine points out that the number of black QBs taken in the first round of the NFL draft this year equaled the number of black first-rounders in the draft’s entire history). But the number of black quarterbacks might never reach that of halfbacks or defensive backs, simply because speed and strength, though advantageous and more sought after at the position now than before, don’t confer as great an advantage as they do at other positions.
Case in point from the upcoming Super Bowl: The Rams’ big, cannon-armed, slow-footed white quarterback, Kurt Warner, is a throwback to the Roman Gabriel era. He isn’t half the athlete his black counterpart, the Titans’ Steve McNair, is. But regardless of who is the better quarterback — a question that has not yet been answered — the point is that there will always be room in the NFL for quarterbacks like Warner (and, of course, like McNair), whereas there will never again be room for cornerbacks like the slow, can’t-jump white guys of the ’50s.
So why are blacks, as a group, better than whites or Asians at sports? The answer is simple: It’s in their genes. “There is extensive and persuasive evidence that elite black athletes have a phenotypic advantage — a distinctive skeletal system and musculature, metabolic structures, and other characteristics forged over tens of thousands of years of evolution,” Entine writes. “Preliminary research suggests that different phenotypes are at least partially encoded in the genes — conferring genotypic differences, which may result in an advantage in some sports.”
So what are those phenotypic (i.e. observable) advantages?
His findings: “Blacks with a West African ancestry generally have: relatively less subcutaneous fat on arms and legs and proportionally more lean body and muscle mass, broader shoulders, larger quadriceps, and bigger, more developed musculature in general; smaller chest cavities; a higher center of gravity … faster patellar tendon reflex; greater body density … modest. but significantly higher, levels of plasma testosterone … which is anabolic, theoretically contributing to greater muscle mass, lower fat, and the ability to perform at a higher level of intensity with quicker recovery; a higher percentage of fast-twitch muscles and more anaerobic enzymes, which can translate into more explosive energy.”
With genetic research still in its infancy, of course, no one can assert with certainty that these phenotypic advantages are in fact encoded genetically — the research hasn’t been done yet. But Entine argues that with “dramatic advances in quantitative genetics,” it’s only a matter of time. (Africa has greater genetic variety than any other continent, which helps to explain why people of African descent can be genetically gifted.)
It might be objected that Entine’s entire argument is conceptually flawed from the outset, because “race” itself is a meaningless concept. In a lucid discussion, Entine demolishes the voguish assertion that “there’s no such thing as race,” explaining that the argument over the word is little more than semantic. “Limiting the rhetorical use of folk categories such as race, an admirable goal, is not going to make the patterned biological variation on which they are based disappear,” he argues.
Regardless of what we call them — and he acknowledges that the concept of “race” is “fuzzy,” fraught with popular misconceptions and mythologies — there are different human populations that have in fact clustered and developed, through geographical separation, natural selection and perhaps catastrophic geological events, different heritable characteristics. A Nigerian and a Swede are not the same.
But aside from skin color, are there meaningful genetic differences between members of different racial groups? Left-wing critics like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, opposed to race-essentialist arguments, have argued that those differences pale compared to the things members of different races have in common. Racial differences between individuals are so small as to be genetically meaningless, Lewontin argues; skin color is only one marker of race — along with other markers like fingerprints and resistance to malaria — and it can be misleading. (In support of Lewontin’s claim, Entine cites the example of the Lemba, a Bantu-speaking tribe in Africa; although their skin is black, they are genetically related to white Sephardic Jews.) In similar fashion, Gould has argued that “the differences between the races are small, just tiny compared to the variation within races.”
Entine acknowledges that “Lewontin’s finding that on average humans share 99.8 percent of genetic material and that any two individuals are apt to share considerably more than 90 percent of this shared genetic library is on target.” But he argues that Lewontin, driven by an acknowledged “mission to reaffirm our common humanity,” interpreted these facts in a tendentious fashion. The crucial point, Entine insists, is that “the percentage of differences is a far less important issue than which genes are different.”
He points out that humans share 98.4 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, and that just “50 out of 100,000 genes that humans and chimps are thought to possess … may account for all the cognitive differences between man and ape.” The so-called regulatory genes, which make up only 1.4 percent of the total genes, can have a “huge impact on all aspects of our humanity.” And those genes, he argues, are overwhelmingly likely, because of evolutionary logic, to be different in different populations.
It’s hard to regard Entine as having dubious motives for writing this book. He approaches the subject with neutral curiosity about the fascinating variety of the human race. But despite this, “Taboo” is certain to provoke cries of outrage in some quarters. Entine notes that he got a taste of that uproar when he worked with Tom Brokaw on an NBC documentary on this subject that aired in 1989 — he quotes Brokaw as saying that a distinguished black friend “quietly withdrew our friendship for about two years” after the show. But he argues that “open debate” beats “backroom scuttlebutt” in combating the “virulent stereotypes” that continue to swirl around blacks and sports.
For some critics, who regard white America’s interest in the subject as suspicious at best and blatantly racist at worst, such arguments may not be enough. “The obsession with the natural superiority of the black male athlete is an attempt to demean all of us,” Entine quotes writer Ralph Wiley as thundering. New York Times sportswriter William Rhoden called interest in black athletic superiority “foolishness,” an “obsession” and “an unabashed racial feeding frenzy” — rhetoric exceeded by Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, who wrote that it was “a genteel way to say nigger.”
For Entine, such reactions are understandable but out of date. There’s no longer any serious dispute on this subject, he believes, and people who refuse to face facts will end up as ostriches, hiding their heads not just from outcomes they don’t like but from science itself. (Entine takes several gratifying swings at postmodern academic fog machines, who in their scholastic zeal to make sure everything comes out racially rosy simply throw science overboard.)
Since at this point the science is not conclusive (although it tends to support Entine’s thesis), the question may in the end come down to what one wants to believe. Is being prepared to believe that blacks as a group have a genetically based athletic advantage over other races a sign of racism? Or is it a sign of scientific enlightenment, a willingness to open oneself up to the truth, wherever it leads? There is also an instrumentalist question: Will merely raising this subject set back the course of racial enlightenment? What happens to the brotherhood of man if some brothers can run faster than others?
Old-school liberals, confronting a legacy of scientistic racism, tend to assume that those who believe that different human populations are fundamentally different in any meaningful way (aside from genetic markers like those for sickle-cell anemia and the like) are either racists or perverse positivists, wrongheadedly seeking to extend the dominion of hard science beyond its possible reach (to bolster retrograde assumptions, no doubt). This is essentially the argument Gould and his like-minded colleagues make against evolutionary psychologists and others who seek to find a Darwinian imprimatur for men behaving badly.
This assumption was valid once — and in part it still is. Racists still cloak their bigotry beneath a lab coat. But, as Entine argues again and again in “Taboo,” the mere fact that legitimate arguments may also have been advanced by racists, or that scientific facts may play into invidious stereotypes, is not sufficient reason to abandon those arguments or deny those facts. The mania against “essentialism,” taken to its logical extreme, is nothing but an assault on the spirit of scientific inquiry itself.
Yes, some bigots will rejoice in Entine’s book and try to resurrect the “mind that’s weak, back that’s strong” canard. And some weak-minded resentful people will find in it confirmation of their resentment and fear. But the days when those kind of simplistic, Manichaean, zero-sum appeals could take hold in the public mind are long over.
In fact, after an initial flurry, the notion that black athletic superiority is natural shouldn’t change much of anything. When and if it is definitively established, it will simply label blacks as physically blessed, gifted by the extraordinarily rich variety of genes found in the “mother continent,” Africa. It’ll be a fascinating but minor human reality, a lucky roll of the evolutionary dice, only slightly more significant than the genetic fact that some Asians get cherry red in the face when they drink. The spectrum of human knowledge, of humanity itself, will be expanded. And that advance will be remembered when the idea that because blacks were fast they couldn’t be smart has gone the way of the dinosaurs.
BENTIU, South Sudan — As fears mount that Sudan and South Sudan will return to war, a South Sudan army commander here says he does not intend to withdraw troops from the disputed Heglig oil fields and he is prepared to fight.
On April 9 the South Sudan army seized Heglig on the border between the two countries. Heglig, a major oil producing area, is internationally recognized as Sudan’s territory, but South Sudan has always claimed it.
The South Sudan army is now 30 miles north of Heglig and does not plan to pull back, said Maj.-Gen. Mac Paul of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army. He said he is not worried about recent threats by Sudan President Omar al-Bashir that the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) will attack to regain Heglig.
“We are not concerned about a SAF counter-attack, we are at war. When you are fighting you can go wherever you need to defend yourself,” he said. Paul said the South Sudan forces could move further into Sudan, but he said they would not advance all the way north to the capital, Khartoum.
Paul said he was not worried about Sudan’s superior air power.
“We’ve been fighting this war for 22 years as guerillas, all those mighty weapons have always been there, it is about who has the will,” he said.
Even as Paul was speaking, Sudan President Omar al-Bashir made belligerent statements that appeared to move the two countries closer to outright war.
Bashir vowed to teach South Sudan a “final lesson by force” for occupying Heglig, reported Reuters.
Wearing a military uniform covered with medals at a large rally in El-Obeid, the capital of Sudan’s North Kordofan province, Bashir threatened the leaders of South Sudan, which became independent from Sudan last year after more than two decades of civil war.
“These people don’t understand, and we will give them the final lesson by force,” said Bashir. “We will not give them an inch of our country, and whoever extends his hand on Sudan, we will cut it off.”
Bashir suggested the looming fight over the oil-producing area would spark a full-scale conflict. “Heglig is not the end, but the beginning,” he said.
A day earlier Bashir said that his government’s “main target from today” was to “liberate” the people of South Sudan from their government, made up mostly of former rebel soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
“We say that it [SPLM] has turned into a disease, a disease for us and for the South Sudanese citizens,” Bashir said, reported the Telegraph. ”The main goal should be liberation from these insects and to eliminate them once and for all. Either we end up in Juba (South Sudan’s capital) and take everything, or you end up in Khartoum and take everything.”
South Sudan’s Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin responded angrily to Bashir’s insults.
“Mr. President, we are no insects and if you are launching your genocide activities to the Republic of South Sudan to kill the people of South Sudan … we can assure you we will protect the lives of our citizens,” reported Reuters.
He did offer one conciliatory gesture, saying that South Sudan was willing to resume talks immediately on all outstanding issues. “The Republic of South Sudan is not in a state of war, nor is it interested in war with Sudan,” he said.
The threatening rhetoric has been matched by troop movements and air strikes. Both sides are moving forces toward the border area, according to the Satellite Sentinel Project, which is monitoring the border area by satellite photos. Last week Sudanese planes bombed Bentiu killing five civilians and just missing a strategic bridge.
The escalating violence and the antagonistic statements have raised the prospect of two African states in outright war against each other for the first time since Ethiopia fought Eritrea in 1998 to 2000.
The threat of war between the two countries has already disrupted nearly all the oil production upon which both countries’ economies depend.
In addition to fighting over which country controls the oil production, the two countries are arguing over transport of the oil. Sudan controls the pipeline which pumps the oil to Port Sudan. But South Sudan objects to how much Sudan charges for use of the pipeline. South Sudan accuses Sudan of siphoning off a large amount of oil passing through the pipeline. In January, South Sudan stopped production of its oil so that it would not have to use the pipeline. There are plans to build a new pipeline which would traverse South Sudan and go across Kenya, but that is years from completion.
Until recently many analysts have said that Sudan and South Sudan would indulge in rhetoric but would not return to war. The two sides fought a bloody civil war that was Africa’s longest running conflict until a 2005 peace pact ended the hostilities. Eventually, under the terms of the peace agreement, South Sudan voted to become independent from Sudan and the new country was born in July, 2011.
The two countries did not agree on the exact border, however, and now they threaten to return to war over control of the Heglig oil fields.
The issue is further complicated by rebel groups which are armed by both Sudan and South Sudan, according to a recent report by the Small Arms Survey.
Bentiu, the provincial capital of South Sudan’s Unity State, sits at a strategic point along the Bentiu sits on the southern banks of the Bahr al-Ghazal River. This city is close to the border and movements of army troops can be seen going to the barracks.
This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen and Ian McEwan. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out
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Nelson Mandela was a most unusual, and unusually astute, leader, says author and journalist John Carlin. He used forgiveness as a political tool, in so doing ensuring that South Africa avoided what could have been a bloodbath.
You’ve had a professional interest in South Africa as a writer and journalist for more than 20 years. Can you tell us more about it?
I’ve been a journalist for 30 years now. I’ve mainly been a foreign correspondent. I’ve been based in half a dozen places and I think I’ve actually worked as a journalist in about 50 countries. South Africa is the one that left by far the deepest imprint on me. I was there at an extraordinary time, during the transition from apartheid to democracy. I arrived in 1989 as a correspondent for the Independent in London, which meant that I caught the last year of full-on, hard apartheid. Then after that there was Mandela’s release and the very painful birth pangs of the new nation, leading to the elections of 1994.
It was a period of immense drama and continual doubt as to whether the country was going to go down the road to war or to peace. You had this extraordinary character of Nelson Mandela center stage, and as a journalist I had the privilege of watching him from front row seats and at times actually talking to him one-on-one. There was an element of happy ending, which is so unusual in life generally and in particular for a journalist covering a particular story as a correspondent. I’ve had a lot of adventures in many different parts of the world and I’ve been moved by lots of people and places, but none like South Africa.
How well have you got to know Mandela? What’s he like?
I consider it to be one of the great privileges of my life to have got to know Mandela about as well as a journalist could reasonably hope to. I have interviewed him one-on-one probably half a dozen times and in addition to that I’ve had lots of small chats in and around public events and been at dinners with him. He just stands above every other political person I’ve encountered by some distance. It’s uncanny that every single person that I know who has spent time in Mandela’s presence shares my sense of admiration, bordering upon awe, for him.
It’s nearly 20 years since apartheid ended in South Africa. Has the post-apartheid era failed to deliver for most South Africans or is there a tendency to focus too much on the failings of ANC [African National Congress] rule?
The simple fact that you don’t really hear about South Africa in the international news gives you a clue that things are going reasonably well. Had it not been for the football World Cup in 2010, South Africa would have almost disappeared entirely from the international news map. When I was living in South Africa in the early 1990s, the possibility of a racial bloodbath was very much on the cards. The fact is that we haven’t come remotely close to that. South Africa remains today an impressive democracy with free and fair elections, changes of leaders, a functioning judiciary and an extremely, almost outrageously, outspoken free press. These are the big picture things that are great. You do have other things, such as corruption, crime and inefficiency, but I choose to see the glass half full. Other people choose to see it half empty.
The first book you recommend, “The Washing of the Spears,” is an historical account of the rise and fall of the Zulu nation. Can you tell us more about it?
This book has really stayed with me, and one thing I like about it is there is a continual undercurrent of deep respect, if not admiration, for the Zulu nation. The narrative has something of the rattling good yarn about it, while at the same time being extremely meticulously researched and scholarly at its core, but there is a lightness of touch in the tone and there are occasional wry asides. You put it all together and it adds up to a very satisfying and rich cocktail.
Can you tell us a little more about the history of the Zulu nation?
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Zulu people imposed themselves as the dominant tribe in southern Africa through being extraordinarily ruthless and disciplined in war. They were the Romans of southern Africa. It was an environment of extraordinary cruelty and barbarity, and there was an awful lot of witchcraft. In the first part of the book this pre-colonial Zulu world is conjured up. On reading it you have a keener understanding as to why the Zulus have been so attracted to Shakespeare’s play “Macbeth.” You have the elements of treachery, wizardry, bloodthirstiness, scheming and at the same time the powerful ritual, kings and hierarchies. That “Macbeth”-type world conveys something of what the Zulu nation was like before the arrival of the Europeans. That is conveyed richly, and often harrowingly, in the book.
Then there is the real drama, which is the arrival of the European settlers and the inevitable clash between the two. It’s told in a richly anecdotal way, but there is also an awful lot of historical material that the author draws on. The whole thing reaches its climax with the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879. The first great battle between the British Redcoats and the Zulu impis, or battalions, was an appalling defeat for the British at Isandhlwana. It was one of the very few times in the 19th century that British imperial forces were crushed. Immediately after that there was the famous Battle of Rorke’s Drift, immortalized in the movie Zulu starring Michael Caine. In the end, the Zulu nation is defeated by the British at the Battle of Ulundi and after that begins a period of relative ignominy.
The Zulus are still the largest ethnic group in South Africa aren’t they?
They are, but only marginally bigger than Mandela’s group, the Xhosa. The Zulus are definitely the mythical group, the mythical tribe of South Africa and regarded as such by everybody else. They are certainly perceived as the warriors. King Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, is the Homeric Achilles-type figure who resounds through history.
From the mid-1970s, the Zulus have ostensibly been represented politically by the Inkatha Freedom Party led by Mangosuthu Buthelezi, which in the 1980s and early 1990s aligned itself to a certain extent with the apartheid government against the ANC. How powerful a political force are they now?
You’ve touched upon a subject that stirs me and moves me deeply. If there’s one thing that I wrote about with more passion than probably any other when I was in South Africa it was Inkatha. Inkatha was a conservative, right-wing Zulu political organisation and – in one of the most shocking things I have seen in my travels anywhere – they aligned with the forces of reaction in South Africa. They were basically fighting and killing in order to stop the transition to democracy and yet they were black. It almost beggars belief. I consider the leader of Inkatha, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, to be a monster. But one should bear in mind that they did not represent the entirety of the Zulu nation – one can’t be so lacking in respect to imagine they were all mindless monoliths. Actually, half the Zulus were supporting Mandela’s ANC, and what you’d get in those days were the rural Zulus siding with Inkatha and the urban Zulus tending to support the ANC.
Increasingly, the sense of the Zulus being a separate people unto themselves has been dissipated with time. The sense of Zulu pride still exists, yet one of the great things about the ANC is how they’ve managed to merge and mix all races and tribes in there. Right now the [South African] president, Jacob Zuma, is a Zulu. But he’s surrounded by people from all the other tribes. The reactionary Inkatha group is fast disappearing from the scene.
Your second book, “Move Your Shadow,” is by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times journalist Joseph Lelyveld. One reviewer in 1985 said this book “provides the kind of authentic evidence of the ordeals of black life that few white South Africans discover.” Would you agree?
That’s certainly one important point to make. I think “Move Your Shadow” was actually the first book on South Africa that I ever read. I moved to the country in 1989 as a correspondent from Central America, where I had spent the previous six years. I really knew very little about South Africa. It wasn’t a place I had any prior interest in but the foreign editor of the Independent, in his wisdom, decided I should go there. Everybody told me that “Move Your Shadow” was the current book I had to read. So I read it, and it left a lasting impression on me.
To pick up on what you said about that review, what Lelyveld did that was most striking is that he really immersed himself in black culture and black society. He would go and spend time living in people’s huts in the countryside or in squatter settlements. He would travel vast distances across the country in buses – in fact, I think it was illegal for white people to travel on those buses. There’s that line from King Lear – “expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” – and that’s what Lelyveld did, with extraordinary integrity and courage. He really conveyed the ignominy of life for black people under apartheid but at the same time salvaged from that the tremendous courage and nobility, and indeed good humour, that people maintained, despite being submitted to what Mandela called the “moral genocide” of apartheid.
As you say, the book tells of the hardships of the black majority under apartheid. But it also shows how these hardships were the consequence of meticulous planning by the government.
That’s right. He does a good job at conveying the bureaucratic fastidiousness and overarching madness of the whole apartheid exercise. It was somewhat reminiscent of what the Nazis did. The Nazis had a tremendously efficient bureaucracy that organised the whole Final Solution to the so-called “Jewish problem.” It was a similar bureaucratic mind-set and insanity that led to the grand apartheid idea of separateness, and this is what Lelyveld looks at in his book. In particular, he examines the ghastly phenomenon of forced removals, where it was decided by bureaucrats that, for example, 5,000 people living in an area of Johannesburg, where they had been living for the past 50 years, had to return to their ancestral lands. So, in the middle of the night a whole lot of police come along in trucks and knock down their houses, tell them to pick up as many belongings as they can, put them in lorries, drive them overnight for seven hours, dump them in the middle of the veldt somewhere and say: “Right, this is now your home.” And this was happening systematically. Like I say, there was something of the spirit of the Nazi Final Solution about it, though obviously with nothing like the same degree of horror or annihilation.
Lelyveld also gets into the madness behind apartheid, especially the Biblical justification that apartheid’s deeply Christian masters sought to find in what they were doing. They would look up the Old Testament and find that – as they saw it – there were actually separate heavens for black people and white people. So if there were separate heavens, according to a particular reading of the Old Testament, therefore it made perfect sense, indeed it was morally incumbent upon them, to have separateness on earth too. So in Move Your Shadow you get both the sense of the macro-madness of apartheid with a deeply close-up view of what it was like to live as a black person under apartheid. I think probably nothing like it has been written before or since.
Your third book, “Age of Iron,” is a novel. Please tell us more.
The author is J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning author and, in my view, one of the top five living writers in the English language. “Age of Iron” is quite a short book – you could probably read it in a couple of hours. It’s set in mid-1980s South Africa, a time of tremendous political ferment. Mandela was imprisoned in 1964 and what followed for the next 10 years was a grave-like quiet of resignation by black people. In 1976 the first simmerings of rebellion occur and by the mid-1980s you had clashes daily in practically every township all around the country. You had the black political movement in full-on insurrectionary mode. It’s against that background that the novel is set. But Coetzee doesn’t go out and give you vivid descriptions, he’s never overtly political, he’s concerned much more with conveying a moral atmosphere.
He tells the story through the first-person voice of an older woman, Mrs Curren, who’s dying of cancer. The disease gives her this sharper focus on life and she feels with extremeness and horror the age in which she’s living. She feels the awfulness of apartheid and she conveys a tremendous sense of shame and disgrace, and that’s what Coetzee talks about. There are lots of powerful lines and powerful observations, but he does so in that extremely pithy, lean Coetzee style. There’s no fat in Coetzee’s books whatsoever – you just have this sense of there being bone all the way through. There’s one particular line when she’s reflecting and she says: “The times call for heroism; being good is not enough.” She laments the fact that just being a good person at that time in South Africa is not enough. The attitude towards these young blacks who, off-stage, are giving up their lives and showing extraordinary courage, combines on the one hand a very Coetzee sense of life’s futility and complexity, but at the same time underlying that is a real admiration. It’s very, very layered. But what really shines through is a sense of disgust with the people who have invented this apartheid system, which he conveys as a sort of disease, a contagion. Indeed, the woman’s cancer is itself a metaphor for this disease of apartheid.
Do you have any thoughts on Coetzee himself? He has a reputation for being rather intense and humourless.
It’s funny you should say that. My sense of him is of a person who makes no effort whatsoever to be liked. Most of us, in a cowardly and impish kind of way, do aspire to be liked. He doesn’t seem to give a damn about that. There’s just something sort of grim and joyless about him. I’ve known a number of people who’ve known him and he’s certainly not “Mr Personality.”
This is the only novel you have chosen. Is the literary scene thriving in post-apartheid South Africa?
I’ve been told that there are some interesting young black writers emerging who are telling the stories of their lives, the stories that were previously told by white people. Going back to Joseph Lelyved’s “Move Your Shadow,” the point about him was that he really got under the skin of black life in South Africa. What I’m hearing is that increasingly the stories are now being told by articulate, eloquent young black South Africans themselves.
But I do wonder whether maybe the golden age of South African writing might be in abeyance at the moment. With writers such as Coetzee and maybe Nadine Gordimer and André Brink, the ones who really had an international impact, I wonder whether you needed to have that atmosphere of conflict in order to generate the powerful drama that makes for a successful novel globally. Now there is nothing like that powerful moral battle going on in South Africa anymore. It’s no longer a parable for the struggle between good and evil. It doesn’t have that moral force. My suspicion would be that we are going to go through a fallow period before we return to the greats, the Coetzees and the Gordimers and so on.
Why have you chosen Anthony Sampson’s biography of Mandela and not Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”?
I was very torn, and I feel very guilty and indeed treasonous towards Mandela for not choosing his autobiography. I guess that if I have to go to a desert island and take one Mandela book with me I think it would be Anthony Sampson’s one. It covers all of the same chronological and biographical ground as Mandela’s autobiography but what it does is add Anthony Sampson’s eye. He knew Mandela very well when he was a young man during the 1950s and they remained good friends until Anthony Sampson’s death four or five years ago. So he has the credibility of knowing Mandela as well as any biographer could be expected to get to know him. But, at the same time, he was able to reflect on Mandela. And the thing about Mandela is that he’s not a man to reflect upon himself. Mandela is an actor on stage. He’s a performer. He’s a man of action. He’s not someone who pauses and reflects – at least he’s not someone who’s going to reflect publicly in a book. And so in order to analyse and draw reference from Mandela, to stand back and think about him, I think you get more guidance, very authoritative guidance, from Anthony Sampson’s book.
What sort of picture does he paint of Mandela?
At least a third of the book, if not more, takes place during Mandela’s 27 years in prison. Mandela in his autobiography will tell you about encounters and clashes he had with the prison warders and with other prisoners, but what Sampson does is put it into the context of his life. He explains the very important degree to which prison was a laboratory or school for Mandela, in which he quite consciously prepared for what he knew would be the day when he would have to sit down and negotiate the transition to democracy and try to persuade the white government to cede power rather than to do so by force of arms. That was the realisation he reached in prison, and in his relations with his jailers and the heads of the prison he was continually learning and making notes about all the aspects of the Afrikaner personality. He learned about their history; he read their books; he learned their language. He prepared himself in prison for the great political game that lay ahead. Sampson explains that very well.
On another level, what Sampson’s book does is demythologize Mandela. It talks about his private life and his first wife, whom he left for Winnie Mandela. It talks about his extraordinary passion for Winnie Mandela and his evolving, appalling disappointment, as he understood that Winnie had really been corrupted over the years by, no doubt, the very unpleasant experiences she herself had suffered at the hands of the security forces. He considers Mandela’s pain there. He also talks about his estrangement from his family, who resented in many cases the fact that he was dedicating so much of his life to the nation – to the children of the nation – and not so much taking care of his own biological children. He examines that in a way that Mandela is simply incapable of doing. There’s a great line about Mandela that Sampson quotes in the book: “He combines an extreme heartiness with an impenetrable reserve.” I think that captures Mandela very well and it tells you why he would have a problem in an autobiography of going beyond a certain surface telling of the story.
There are two things that really strike me about Mandela, looking at him from the outside. First is his extraordinary self-control, and the other is his capacity for forgiveness of his political enemies.
He has been known to have flashes of anger, certainly in meetings of the ANC leadership. There were certainly times at press conferences when, if a journalist were to ask a question that betrayed a certain foolishness or lack of information, he would snap at them. He did not suffer fools gladly.
The point about forgiveness is very important. Sampson addresses this in his book and I myself have written a lot about this. Essentially, what Sampson does is offer a corrective to the notion that Mandela just offers forgiveness for forgiveness’s sake, and is driven above all by a Gandhi-esque or Christ-like moral vision of life. The thing about Mandela that is absolutely critical to understand is this: He is over and above all else a political leader. He’s a political leader with a very clear sense of what his objective is. In prison he understood that force of arms, that revenge, that throwing the whites into the sea, was not going to be the way he was going to achieve his life’s goal of installing democracy, stability and peace in South Africa. Therefore, what I’m saying, and Sampson says this too, is that forgiveness became in Mandela’s hands a political tool. It became a key instrument to achieving a political objective. Happily, of course, forgiveness was something that meshed wonderfully with his own nature. He’s a person who’s generous by nature. But let’s not forget he was the man who founded the armed wing of the ANC in 1961, and had Mandela emerged from prison and judged that the most effective and swiftest way to achieve the liberation of his people was through force of arms and revenge, he would have gone for it. But he had it very clear in his mind that forgiveness was the tool to achieve his ends.
Let’s move to post-apartheid South Africa now and to your final book, “After Mandela,” which is written by the journalist Alec Russell. Why have you chosen it?
The 1980s and up until the elections in 1994 was in a sense the heroic age, and one that will probably resound through South African history. Quite a lot of books have been written about that period. Fewer books have been written about the post-apartheid period. It’s a period that is much more morally complex. Before, it was literally black and white. It was humanity’s great parable – nobody had any doubt about who was good and who was evil and who we should all be supporting. Now everything has become murkier and more complex, but at the same time no less fascinating.
As Alec Russell writes from the very beginning, Mandela was always going to be a hell of an act to follow. And, regrettably, the person who took over from Mandela as president [in 1999], Thabo Mbeki, failed pretty abysmally. He was not Mandela’s first choice, which in turn imbued Mbeki with a certain measure of resentment towards Mandela. Mbeki was, in many ways, the polar opposite of Mandela. Mandela is a big, generous man, confident of his authority, at one with himself, comfortable in his own skin. Mbeki is the opposite of all that. Quite a lot of the divisions he fostered in society once he became president were very much a response to that anti-Mandela personality of Mbeki. Alec Russell describes that post-Mandela period of disillusionment with rich anecdote, with very intelligent and consistently measured analysis. Russell writes in a very readable, easy style. He’s the opposite of pretentious. He’s lucid and he really gives you a sense of the post-Mandela period under Mbeki before moving on to his successor Jacob Zuma, and how corruption has crept in, and the worry that the ANC will forget its moral roots.
He addresses the issue of the “Zanufication” of the ANC, doesn’t he – the fear that it might come to resemble Robert Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF in next door Zimbabwe?
The concern is that they are going to become a party that just wants to stay in power for power’s sake. And that has actually been my own concern pretty much from the time they came to power. But, in terms of drawing an analogy with Zanu-PF, Alec Russell says in the book pretty much what I think: That to make an analogy between South Africa and Zimbabwe is both simplistic and insulting. There is an enormous difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa as societies and as political bodies. Certainly, at this stage, to imagine and to say that South Africa is going to go the way of Zimbabwe is way off the mark. Who knows what could be the case in 50 years’ time, but the fact is that today South Africa is a country with powerful institutions, a very powerful judiciary and a fundamental respect for the rule of law. There is also a very outspoken free press and there are powerful trade unions. Civil society is strong and carries with it a very fresh and vivid memory of what it was that the ANC fought for. I think one of the more encouraging things that Alec Russell describes in the book is the ANC meeting at which Thabo Mbeki was ousted. And as Russell describes it, a very large part of the impetus behind the move to oust him was that South Africa shouldn’t become like Zimbabwe. “No Zimbabwe here” was one of the slogans in the hall. They did not want a repetition of what had happened in Zimbabwe, of one leader entrenching himself in power for ever. That democratic impulse remains strong in South Africa.
So, as you said earlier, the glass is half full in South Africa, not half empty.
I certainly think that. As I said before, South Africa is not in the news. It’s not a country where you are seeing the slightest glimmer of a notion of political conflict, of civil war. And having lived in South Africa in the early 1990s, having seen what the potential there was for an appalling bloodbath, I never cease to be amazed that South Africa today remains a solid and stable democracy.
Although I was 16 and knew nearly nothing, my heart had sense enough to start racing the moment he took the seat next to me on our tour bus.
William, as he introduced himself, was tall and handsome, and his hair had a slight red tint to it as if it were burnt around the edges. I guessed he was maybe a year older than me, although it was hard to tell because all the Namibian students wore the same uniform, a polo shirt and khaki pants.
“You’re from the United States!” he announced upon sitting down. “New York or Los Angeles?”
“Chicago,” I said. Now on my third week in Africa, I had learned this could not pass without some explanation. “It’s in the middle of the country.”
It was the kind of school field trip that seemed perfectly natural during the boom years of the late ’90s. My cohort of 15 high schoolers had traveled through South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland. Namibia’s dusty capital, Windhoek, was our final stop — and on this, the second-to-last day of the trip, our group leader launched a last-ditch effort to get us to actually interact with African people, by offering the students of a local school seats on our bus for a lift across the city.
“Chicago.” William’s Adam’s apple rode up and down on the word. “I have heard of it, and I would like to go there. I’m nearly finished with my studies, and I’ll travel. I’ll do it when I have the money.”
Delivered as it was to a well-off American sitting in an air-conditioned bus, William’s comment felt pointed. But he kept it light after that. We spoke for a while about whether or not Chicago was colder than certain European cities. Straying from the foreign-language-textbook dullness of the conversation, I noted how the muscles and tendons in William’s arms differentiated themselves as he moved his hands.
“And you,” he asked. “What are you traveling for?”
It was a good question. While the tour had some vaguely defined educational goals about international understanding, these lavish receptions undermined anything but the shallowest impulses to travel. We wanted adventure, extra stamps in our passports, to be somewhere our classmates hadn’t been. I wanted all of this as much as anyone — but more than that, I was just happy to be in places where I didn’t seem like a fag.
—-
I found it difficult to believe that I was gay. This itself is pretty difficult to believe, in retrospect. My dossier included all the stereotypes: a secret love of show tunes, zero athletic ability and even a drag turn as a baroness in a fourth-grade German play. More to the point, there was the matter of my sexual desires. As young as 9, I found myself looking thirstily at the illustrated men’s underwear ads Marshall Field’s ran in the front section of the Chicago Tribune. That tendency didn’t abate with age, and had increased by what was to me a frightening order of magnitude by the time I reached high school.
But I was a good kid, a high achiever, judicious and careful. I couldn’t imagine I was something as out there as a homosexual. I grew up in a relatively accepting community and I didn’t fear being outcast or disowned; I just didn’t want to disappear into the unexplored country of gayness, with its strange language and shadowy customs.
Sometimes I thought that my desires were simply a phase, a stop on the way to normalcy. Sometimes I thought I could correct myself by weaning myself off thoughts of boys and towards girls. And sometimes, most of the time, I just hoped against hope it would disappear and I would just be normal.
Around the time I started high school, my father had on his nightstand a novel called “The Man Without Qualities.” Although the book was unreadably long with a title that practically advertised boringness, the phrase stuck with me. It was the state to which I aspired.
This self-erasing impulse is what led me to Africa. The winter of my junior year of high school, my friend Natalie had found out about the trip, and I took to the idea immediately. Africa seemed like the perfect place to be the nonindividual I wanted to be: a place so foreign, with people so different, that I would become just some American, a traveler. My gayness would be bleached out by the sub-Saharan sun.
Over the trip’s three weeks, I was the man without qualities, as I imagined him. In Soweto I refused to giggle with everyone else at the condoms available for free in every restaurant bathroom; on safari I stayed as silent and watchful as a meerkat while my cohorts laughed and whispered around me; walking on a smoky hill in Swaziland, I asked our guide dry questions about the tiny country’s monarch.
From bustling, run-down Maputo to the windswept veldt, it was gratifyingly easy to lose my personality once I was out of my milieu. (Chalk it up to naïveté that I never noticed how firmly planted in my milieu I remained, my group’s American privilege being a moveable feast that glided through southern Africa in chartered buses and prop planes.) By the time we rolled into Windhoek, no one had ever been happier to be a cipher. I had no desires, only observations about the landscape, and my little identity problem was the furthest thing from my mind. After our conversation had died, William and I rode in silence through Windhoek, past empty, sandy parks dotted with scrubby palms. In the stillness, my heart was still racing for a reason I couldn’t identify.
—-
And then William identified it for me. He grabbed my leg hard, just above the knee.
“I’m not like other boys,” he said in a tone without any helium. There was no need for him to speak — I got his meaning when he touched me and, without meaning to, I leaned in against him hard. But nearly as soon as he had spoken, I was ready with a denial.
“I am,” I said reflexively. “I am like other boys. But that’s OK with me. I mean, it’s OK that you’re not.”
William looked at me, slightly surprised. “That’s good. That’s nice. People here aren’t like you, with even normal boys being OK with — boys like me.”
I smiled to show him there were no hard feelings, I just wasn’t that way. “What’s it like in Windhoek? I mean, to be gay,” I whispered with as much matter-of-factness as I could muster.
“Not very good. There is a youth center, but people found out and started throwing bricks through the window, so we meet in secret now.”
“That’s awful,” I said. But if my voice betrayed any concern, it was purely for myself. I already had the last minutes on instant replay. Had William fingered me as the trip’s sole homosexual immediately upon entering the bus, or had that just become clear upon talking to me?
“My parents do not know, my friends don’t.” Neither did mine. “I could never tell them. This is why I need to go to America.”
“It’s better there,” I said stupidly, and turned towards the window. All the progress I had made out here was imaginary. Culture, geography, school bus, chartered bus, none of it made any difference: Even teenagers the world over could tell what a fag I was, which meant I really was one.
My speeding heart didn’t slow after William took his hand off my leg, or even after he left the bus. He was still a threat: In the evening we’d be visiting William’s school, for a barbecue in our honor. I wished as hard as I could that William wouldn’t be there. I didn’t want to talk any more about how he was gay, didn’t want anyone to see me with him.
But when night came and he didn’t show up at the barbecue, I wasn’t relieved. I was disappointed — and finally, my shame reached me. Not shame that I was gay, but something worse: Someone braver than me, and in far more dire circumstances, had asked me for help — not even help, really, just a little fraternity — and I refused it outright. I had pushed him away just to hold on to my nonidentity.
Had he showed up at the barbecue, I could have made good and told him the truth about me. He would have been the first person I had come out to. I could have talked to him, or kissed him, or — well, it wasn’t a possibility anymore.
As the sun set on our farewell barbecue, I watched Kim, a young teacher who had come with us on the trip, flirt with an Angolan French teacher with solid arms. His hand lingered in hers when he handed her a beer. Soon, he was leaning over her with his hand on a wall, and she was moving in toward him.
It looked like something I wanted. Something I might someday deserve to have.
A Freetown street vendor watches a live broadcast of the Taylor verdict being delivered. (Credit: Reuters/Finbarr O'Reilly) 
This photo of Saturday, April 14, 2012, shows the aftermath of a bombing by the Sudanese Air Force in Bentiu, South Sudan . Two Sukhoi jet fighters dropped 6 bombs in the area, killing 5 and wounding 4 others. Two Sudanese warplanes dropped "many bombs" Monday April 16, 2012, on the oil-rich city of Heglig, as long-range artillery targeted southern army positions in the disputed town, said southern army spokesman Col. Philip Aguer. He did not give a casualty figure. He also said Monday that Sudan's air force killed five civilians in aerial attacks Sunday over Heglig. Aguer also said that the town of Bentiu in South Sudan's Unity State was hit and that the conflict has spread to several southern states bordering Sudan, including Western Bahr el Ghazal. (AP Photo/Michael Onyiego) (Credit: AP) 
Nelson Mandela 
(Credit: Lerche&Johnson via Shutterstock/Salon) 
Donald Trump, Jr. and Eric Trump (Credit: huntinglegends.com) 
