The Calamitous Continuum: On Howard French and Twenty-Five Years of Looking Away

I read this book in the same month I finished Jason Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, and the experience was like watching the same catastrophe through two different instruments. Stearns gave me the system — the wiring diagram of how five million people die inside a structure designed, across centuries, to produce exactly that outcome. French gives something harder to hold: the texture of what it felt like to stand inside that structure as it operated, notebook in hand, for twenty-five years. Stearns is the engineer who maps the circuit. French is the man who touched the wire and felt the current.

A Continent for the Taking is not a history. It is a memoir of witness — a journalist’s confession that the story he spent a career covering was, at every turn, larger than what any single observer could carry.

Too Large to Be Grasped

French begins with an epistemological warning that doubles as an indictment. The West does not misunderstand Africa through ignorance alone. It misunderstands Africa through the active habit of simplification — a habit so deeply ingrained that even the names we use for the continent are instruments of erasure:

The continent is simply too large and too complex to be grasped easily, and only rarely, in fact, have we ever tried. Instead, we categorize and oversimplify, willy-nilly, ignoring that for the continent’s inhabitants the very notion of Africanness is an utterly recent abstraction, born of Western subjugation.

The implications of this opening are immense. “Africanness” is not a fact about Africa. It is a fact about the West — a label imposed for administrative convenience by the same powers that drew the borders, installed the dictators, and then professed bewilderment when things fell apart. French does not merely state this. He spends the entire book demonstrating it, country by country, crisis by crisis, body by body:

Africa is the stage of mankind’s greatest tragedies, and yet we remain largely inured to them, all but blind to the deprivation and suffering of one ninth of humanity. We awaken to the place mostly in fits of coarse self-interest and outright greed. Once upon a time, these brief awakenings involved a need for rubber or cotton, gold or diamonds, not to mention the millions of slaves, branded and ferried like cattle across the Atlantic, whose contributions to the wealth of Europe and its coveted New World are scarcely acknowledged.

This is not rhetoric. It is a historical claim with a specific mechanism: the West engages with Africa when it wants something, and disengages when the cost of that engagement becomes visible. The pattern has not changed in five centuries. Only the commodity has.

The Music and the Monsters

The Nigeria chapters are the book’s most vivid, and they begin with Sani Abacha — a dictator so thoroughly monstrous that even in a region of monsters he stands out. French’s portrait is cinematic in its precision:

Abacha rarely appeared in public, working by night and sleeping well into the day. He reportedly kept long lists of enemies, real and imagined, whom he methodically tracked, executed or jailed. Gradually he came to take on the aura of a motion picture monster, and in a society notable for bold individualism, for a people who were not intimidated easily, Abacha lurked menacingly in the popular imagination, like Jaws, a hidden leviathan that gave people the chills.

Against this leviathan, French places two figures of extraordinary moral clarity. The first is Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni playwright and activist whose execution by Abacha’s regime became a global scandal. Saro-Wiwa’s final statement before the tribunal is one of the most remarkable documents in the literature of resistance:

“I am a man of peace, of ideas. Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living … I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief and from which I cannot be blackmailed or intimidated.”

And then, pivoting from the courtroom to the dance floor, French gives us Fela Kuti. The account of attending a Fela concert at the Shrine is the book’s most electrifying passage — a scene where political fury and physical ecstasy become indistinguishable:

Sweating profusely, Fela stripped down to his red underpants and began working his saxophone furiously, clearly influenced by both James Brown and Pharaoh Sanders. He was fifty-seven, but appeared to have the stamina of a man in his twenties as he blew his way through the chord changes, riffing against the insistent beat.

Fela died of AIDS in 1997. Saro-Wiwa was hanged. Kudirat Abiola, wife of the man who likely won the annulled 1993 election, was murdered in a gangland-style hit. French watched all of it from close range, and the toll is visible in his prose — a gathering weight that makes each subsequent chapter feel heavier than the last. The Cowenesque takeaway is blunt: Nigeria under the generals was a society where cultural genius and political savagery coexisted at the highest pitch, and the world noticed only the oil.

Système D

French’s chapters on Mobutu’s Zaire are a masterclass in the anatomy of deliberate dysfunction. The Congo was not a failed state. It was an unfailed kleptocracy — a system that worked exactly as designed, extracting wealth upward while ensuring that no institution existed that could challenge the man at the top. The French verb débrouiller — “to make do” — became the operating system:

Outsiders might call it corruption, or perhaps even anarchy, but for Zairians the games officials played with “formalities” was an unremarkable part of what was called “Système D,” for débrouiller, the French verb meaning “to make do.” Stealing was not just all right in Zaire; it had become an absolute imperative — a matter of survival, especially for unpaid officials assigned to distant provinces.

Mobutu understood that functional institutions produce rivals. So he destroyed them all — cannibalizing his own army, pitting security services against one another, and maintaining power through a personality cult borrowed from Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung, then localized with soukous and leopard-skin caps. The currency collapsed so thoroughly that dollars were worth 59,000 zaires, with rates changing twice daily on “Wall Street” — the warren of streets where plump matrons sat on stools trading foreign exchange.

French’s most devastating observation is about scale. The sixteen-story Ministry of Information building — built with French money under Giscard d’Estaing — had no working elevators, no functioning telephones, and no lights. To reach the offices on the sixteenth floor, you climbed the pitch-black staircase, “passing breathless stragglers on our way up” and “receiving news from people on their way down, happily confirming that the people we needed to see were in their offices.” The building was, like the country itself, a shell — a facsimile of modernity erected over a void.

Mimicking Leopold once again, Mobutu had dreamed big. For a time, during the 1970s and early 1980s … Mobutu’s hold on the country, no less than that of his European predecessor, was built on a foundation of seductive, but ultimately outlandish, lies.

The V. S. Naipaul line French quotes could serve as the epitaph for every development project on the continent: “The Domain, with its shoddy grandeur, was a hoax. Neither the president who had called it into being nor the foreigners who had made a fortune building it had faith in what they were creating.”

The Pappy’s Children

The Liberia sections are the hardest to read. French arrives in a country where the distance between farce and atrocity is measured in seconds. At the airport, grifters and bribe-takers work the arriving passengers; a few miles down the road, child soldiers man roadblocks with automatic rifles and vacant stares. Charles Taylor — “Bossy” since childhood — has already transformed West African warfare by making generalized use of drug-addled children as instruments of slaughter.

French interviews a boy soldier named Lawrence, and the testimony is as methodical as it is devastating:

“They were always feeding us opium, ganja and crack. At first, I didn’t want to smoke, but there was no way that you could refuse. We were forced to smoke those things, and after a while there was no way you could stop.”

“While we were fighting, there was plenty of food for all of us, there was opium and there was medicine if we got sick. When we weren’t fighting, we had to fend for ourselves. So all we wanted to do was fight.”

The logic is airtight and horrifying. The system creates fighters by making combat the only context in which basic needs are met. Drugs eliminate fear. The absence of alternatives eliminates choice. Lawrence’s company was ordered to overrun his own village. He obeyed. “Our job was killing, and I’ve killed a lot of people … plenty.”

When Taylor finally enters Monrovia for a press conference, French confronts him directly about calling the destruction “God’s war.” Taylor, “unaccustomed to being in the company of anyone but sycophants or people terrified of him,” sputters through a non-answer. But the confrontation changes nothing. The snake was inside the capital, and the world was content to let it stay:

For all of the inequality under its Americo-Liberian apartheid, a half generation ago Liberia had been one of Africa’s most advanced countries. Now people were living in abject poverty and degradation, without a formal economy or even a government. For all of this, the only thing Taylor saw fit to say about the destruction he had wrought was that it had been God’s plan.

African Solutions to African Problems

The phrase “African solutions to African problems,” as French deploys it, is not a policy. It is an alibi. Washington coined it to justify disengagement from the Rwandan genocide and then applied it to the Congo wars — a formula that allowed American policymakers to express concern while funding the very armies doing the killing.

The numbers are staggering. By the time the dust settled, 3.3 million Congolese had died in the eastern half of the country alone — more than four times the Rwandan genocide’s toll. The Clinton administration’s response was to avoid the word “genocide,” block UN investigators, and run political interference for Kabila in the Security Council. Susan Rice, then on the National Security Council, articulated the calculus with breathtaking clarity:

“If we use the word ‘genocide’ and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional] election?”

French identifies the psychological mechanism that enabled this abandonment: a Tutsi-as-Israel analogy that paralyzed moral reasoning. Because the Tutsi had suffered a genuine genocide in 1994, their subsequent military adventures — including the systematic killing of Hutu refugees in the Congo — were treated as defensive measures by a traumatized people. The analogy was emotionally overpowering and intellectually catastrophic:

Americans are overly fond of good guy/bad guy dichotomies, especially in Africa, which for many already seems so unknowable and forbidding. But analogies like these paralyze debate over Central Africa rather than clarify it.

Bill Richardson, visiting Mobutu in his final days, delivered a line that could serve as the epitaph for fifty years of American Africa policy: “The mess you are in is not our mess. You didn’t govern your country.” Given the thick ropes of complicity that had tied Mobutu’s Zaire to Washington’s Cold War agenda, French notes acidly, “these were self-serving half-truths at best.”

A Premium for Young Democracies

In the midst of all this wreckage, French finds a counterexample so improbable it reads like a fable. Alpha Oumar Konaré, the president of Mali, had done something almost unheard of in Africa: won a free election, governed responsibly, warned against the perils of a landslide, and told his people the truth — that his party “did not have money to distribute right and left.”

Mali under Konaré proved that democracy could function in one of the world’s poorest countries, with a literacy rate in the single digits. French invokes a Haitian proverb that captures the point with devastating economy: Analphabète pas bête — “illiterate does not mean stupid.”

But the West refused to invest in what worked. Konaré’s complaint to French is one of the book’s most important passages — important because it articulates, from the African side, the precise mechanism by which democratic experiments are allowed to fail:

“They once spoke of providing a premium to assist young democracies, but we haven’t seen anything remotely like that… . Rather than help us now, they will wait until the crickets have finished off our crops, and then they will send us food… . Three years might not seem like a very long time to people dressed in expensive suits who sit around conference tables and discuss the fortunes of countries like ours, but for Malians, three years makes all the difference in the world.”

Meanwhile, a Western diplomat at a cocktail party asked French, with no apparent shame: “Has Africa ever produced anything memorable? … Have Africans ever produced anything more than mud huts?” French, standing in front of the Great Mosque of Djenné — one of the world’s most extraordinary architectural achievements, made entirely from renewable local materials — felt pity and anger at the arrogance of a world that has always denigrated Africa while ignoring what it has built.

Konaré’s parting words carry the weight of five thousand years: “Our people have produced great empires. Djenné and Timbuktu are there for all to see. People who know their own history, as we Malians do, develop a strong personality.”

The Fabulist Dying in His Village

One of the book’s most haunting threads is French’s search for Sony Labou Tansi, the Congolese novelist whose hallucinatory fiction had predicted his country’s collapse with more accuracy than any policy paper. French crosses the Congo River by pirogue to find the dying writer in his village, and what follows is one of the finest portraits of an artist in extremis I have encountered anywhere.

Tansi’s novels — La Vie et Demie, The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez — had satirized the excesses of Central African power with a surrealist’s eye and a prophet’s fury. John Updike, writing in The New Yorker, said his late works were haunted by a “personal dying.” The diagnosis was literal: Tansi and his wife Pierrette were both dying of AIDS. But even in his final months, the fire had not gone out:

“I’ve been writing a lot. Some of my best work,” Tansi said. “But the French people don’t want to publish it. They said I am too hard on France, but in their egotism, they’ve missed the point. Asia has come into its own. Latin America has come into its own. Africa alone has failed, and I will not mince my words about the reasons why: We are still sick from a sort of contamination that began under colonization.”

And then, a moment later, discussing Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, which he had read over and over in his Paris hospital room, Tansi delivered a line that functions as a credo for everyone in this book who refused to stop bearing witness:

“We are all doomed, fated to die. But in the meantime there is nothing to stop us from living.”

What makes this encounter devastating is not just Tansi’s courage but his tragedy. His passionate ethnic nationalism — born of legitimate rage against colonial borders — had the same destructive potential as the ideologies he condemned. French sees this clearly: “An ideology like Tansi’s struck me rather more like a stick of dynamite thrown into a crowded marketplace.” The artist who diagnosed the disease was himself infected by one of its symptoms. There is no clean position in this story. There never was.

The Crude Little Auschwitz

The final third of the book follows Kabila’s march across Zaire, and here French’s prose acquires the grim momentum of a war correspondent who knows the ending. Kabila was a puppet — chosen by Rwanda’s Paul Kagame precisely because he was weak. Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s intelligence chief, was blunt: “We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.” Che Guevara, who had spent a year with Kabila in the 1960s, had already written the definitive assessment: the man had “qualities of a mass leader” but lacked “revolutionary seriousness, an ideology that can guide action, a spirit of sacrifice.”

The puppet got legs. The jubilation in Mobutu’s neglected countryside gave Kabila an audience, and his own treachery — eliminating rivals, accumulating titles until he held more than Mobutu himself — gave him power. But the killing never stopped. At Tingi-Tingi, 150,000 Hutu refugees were camped along a road. French arrived by airplane:

On either side of this road, pressed to its very edges and sometimes spilling onto the highway itself, was a sea of refugees — 150,000 people or more, dressed in tatters and jumpy with excitement over the arrival of a special visitor bearing desperately needed relief supplies.

Days later, most of them were dead. At Mbandaka, soldiers sorted Congolese from Rwandans by shouting in the local language for Congolese to lie down: “The Zairians dropped to the ground … while the Rwandans remained standing. ‘They shot them. They shot them. They shot them.’”

French calls the killing fields near Kisangani what they were: “this crude little Auschwitz.” The UN was never allowed to investigate. Washington blocked condemnation in the Security Council. Kabila dismissed the massacres as “a petit problème.” And a survivor named Christophe, speaking to French at a river crossing where the doomed waited for a ferry that would not come, articulated the only remaining hope:

“Dying here at least has one merit. If people like you bear witness, sooner or later the international community will have to accept its responsibility.”

What This Book Teaches

French never writes a thesis statement. But two hundred and forty highlights, spread across twenty-five years of reporting, yield patterns that function as principles — the kind of hard-won, Cowenesque takeaways that survive contact with reality because they were forged by it:

• Complexity is not an excuse for inaction; it is an invitation to humility. The Congo wars involved nine armies and forty rebel groups. The response — “it’s too complicated” — was itself a policy choice, and it killed millions.

• The absence of institutions is never an accident. Mobutu did not fail to build a state. He succeeded in destroying one. Every hollow ministry, every unpaid soldier, every phone line ripped out for scrap was a feature, not a bug.

• Democratic experiments die of neglect, not of impossibility. Mali proved that elections can work in the poorest countries on earth. The West’s refusal to invest in Konaré’s success — while pouring billions into dictators — was the real policy signal.

• Witness is not neutral. French’s presence at Tingi-Tingi, at the Shrine, at Saro-Wiwa’s trial, did not change outcomes. But Christophe’s plea — “if people like you bear witness, sooner or later the international community will have to accept its responsibility” — asserts that the act of recording is itself a form of resistance against forgetting.

• The commodity changes; the pattern does not. Slaves, rubber, ivory, diamonds, coltan, oil. Each era’s resource produced the same cycle: extraction, complicity, abandonment, amnesia. Recognizing the pattern is the first step toward breaking it.

Broader Implications

This book was published in 2004, but its mechanisms are still running. The questions it raises have only grown sharper:

What if the international community had invested in Mali’s democracy the way it invested in Mobutu’s dictatorship? What if three years of patience and a single fighter jet’s worth of aid had been enough to anchor a democratic precedent in the Sahel — a region now consumed by coups and jihadist insurgencies?

What if the reflex to simplify Africa into “too complicated” or “too corrupt” is itself the most dangerous form of ignorance — not because it is wrong about the complexity, but because it uses complexity as permission to do nothing?

What if the real lesson of French’s twenty-five years is not about Africa at all, but about the West’s capacity for selective blindness — the ability to look directly at suffering and classify it as someone else’s problem, not because the suffering is invisible, but because seeing it clearly would require changing behavior?

French does not ask these questions explicitly. He does something more effective: he places you inside the situations where the questions become unavoidable. You are in the stairwell of the Ministry of Information, climbing sixteen flights in the dark. You are at the Shrine, watching Fela rage against the machine while the machine watches back. You are at the river crossing, listening to a doomed man ask you to remember. The questions are not on the page. They are in the room.

Lies Come Up in the Elevator

In my review of Stearns’s Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, I ended with a Congolese proverb from the singer Koffi Olomide: Lokuta eyaka na ascenseur, kasi verite eyei na escalier mpe ekomi — “Lies come up in the elevator; the truth takes the stairs but gets here eventually.” I return to it now because French’s book is, in its entirety, the staircase.

Where Stearns mapped the system, French walked through it. Where Stearns analyzed the mechanisms that produced five million dead, French sat with the survivors and the perpetrators and the bystanders and the diplomats, one at a time, and asked them to account for themselves. The answers were rarely satisfying. Richardson peddled half-truths. Kabila blustered. Mobutu wept onstage and then went back to his champagne and prostitutes at $16,000 a night. The boy soldiers smoked crack and killed because it was the only context in which anyone fed them. The Western diplomats cycled through their postings and wrote their cables and went home.

What French brought back from twenty-five years of this was not a theory but a transformation. “My understanding of Africa would gradually transform the way I saw the world,” he writes early on. “It awakened me as nothing else before to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the rich and the dignity of the poor in their suffering, and to the uses and abuses of power.”

The dignity of the poor in their suffering. That phrase — quiet, almost buried in the book’s opening pages — is the load-bearing wall of the entire work. French does not sentimentalize the people he writes about. He does not need to. The Malian archaeologists protecting their heritage from looters, the Congolese doctor in Kikwit sounding alarms about Ebola that no one would hear, the schoolteacher at Tingi-Tingi who had walked eight days with seven children and asked French, “Are all of us guilty of genocide, even these little children?” — each of them carries a dignity that requires no adjective.

Two hundred and forty highlights. Not because this is the most perfectly constructed book I have read, but because it is the most honest. French does not pretend to have solved anything. He does not assign blame in a way that satisfies. He does not even claim to fully understand. He claims only to have been present, to have refused to look away, and to have written down what he saw. In a world that has made looking away from Africa its default setting for five hundred years, that is not a small thing.

The vendor on the steamship, offering cognac to a journalist in a country where the phones had been ripped out for scrap, said it best: “Monsieur, I do not recommend profound sleep around here.”

Neither does this book.

Further Into the Archive

If this book stays with you — and it will — the reading extends naturally in several directions:

• Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters — The systemic companion piece. Where French gives you the texture, Stearns gives you the wiring diagram. Together they are the most complete account of the Congo wars available to a general reader.

• Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb — Picks up the Kagame thread and follows it into the present, documenting how Rwanda’s post-genocide moral authority became a license for authoritarianism and assassination.

• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost — The deep backstory. Everything French describes in Mobutu’s Zaire has its roots in Leopold’s Congo Free State. Hochschild makes those roots visible.

• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart — The literary foundation. Before the journalists came the novelists, and Achebe’s portrait of colonialism’s first contact remains the essential text.

• Sony Labou Tansi, La Vie et Demie — The hallucinatory novel French discusses at length. Read it and you will understand why French crossed a river to find a dying man.