President of Ghana dies

Guest blog post for Suffragio:

Ghanaian President John Atta Mills, 68, passed away on July 24, 2012.  The former vice president of Jerry Rawlings, the longtime charismatic military ruler of Ghana turned democratically-elected head of state, Professor Mills was deferential to and often overshadowed by Rawlings throughout his political career.  The modest and scholarly Mills, who taught law at the University of Ghana, first ran for the presidency himself in 2000, when Rawlings was term-limited, but lost to opposition leader John Kufour of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in Ghana’s first peaceful change of power since independence.  In 2008, when Kufour himself was term-limited, Mills ran against Kufour’s vice president, Nana Akuffo-Addo, whom he trailed after the first round by a margin of 47.92% to 49.13%.  However, Mills ultimately defeated Akuffo-Addo in the second round, with a margin of 50.23% to 49.77%, making it the closest peaceful election of its scale in modern African history.  Perhaps even more surprising, closely following the 2007 elections in Zimbabwe and Kenya, the vote led to Ghana’s second peaceful transition of power without a single life lost.

Professor Mills, said to have been at heart an academic rather than a politician, was a stickler for the constitutional rule of law.  By the end of his term Ghana was the fifth least corrupt country on the African mainland according to Transparency International.  When Ghana began offshore oil production for the first time in 2010, Mills vowed to avoid the waste and corruption associated with the oil industry in nearby Nigeria.  Last month, Mills accepted nearly all of the recommendations of the Constitutional Review Commission (CRC) to comprehensively update Ghana’s constitution, with proposed amendments to be submitted to popular referendum.  The CRC’s White Paper called for, among other issues, abolition of the death penalty, protection of consumer rights, constitutionalization of the right to a healthy environment, and establishment of a comprehensive legal aid scheme.  Whether the CRC’s recommendations will be implemented remains to be seen should Mills’s ruling party, the National Democratic Congress, lose the upcoming elections in December 2012 to the NPP.

Even at his death, the rule of law triumphed in Ghana when Vice President John Dramani Mahama was sworn in within hours.  In this way, Ghana avoided the same uncertainty as when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika passed away in office last April, sparking speculation that Vice President Joyce Banda would be passed over for the presidency in defiance of the constitution.  But unlike Ghana, Malawi’s change in power was dramatic—Mutharika ran an unpopular regime, one bleeding support from foreign donors and dogged by street protests, and Banda had previously been expelled from the ruling party.  Nonetheless, the peaceful transfers of power across the continent over the past year in Zambia, Senegal, Malawi, and Lesotho may well prove that democracy is maturing in Africa for one simple fact: three of these four countries, like Ghana, have experienced not just one but two peaceful transitions of power since independence.

Andrew Novak is the adjunct professor of African Law at American University Washington College of Law.  He has a J.D. from Boston University and an M.Sc. in African Politics from the London School of Oriental and African Studies—President John Atta Mills’s alma mater.

Nlg book review

This is a republished copy of my book review, entitled "Anatomy of a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer: Reflections on Legal Representation and Reform in Three Biographies." It was published in the National University of Juridical Sciences Law Review earlier this month. This one appears at 66(4) National Lawyers Guild Review 205 (2010). The review is on three excellent memoirs by death penalty defense attorneys: David Dow's Anatomy of an Execution; Andrea Lyon's Angel of Death Row; and John Temple's The Last Lawyer. If you have any suggestions for other books to review or any review copies, please let me know!

Nlg book review

View more presentations from IndyJ02.

Nujs death penalty book review

My book review on three death penalty defense attorney memoirs was published this month in the National University of Juridical Sciences Law Review (Kolkata, India).

Nujs death penalty book review

View more documents from IndyJ02.

Book Review: The Flame Lily Weeps

The Flame Lily Weeps: An African Autobiography, by Ross Gordon Cooper is the latest addition to a growing micro-genre of reflective, even at times confessional, writing by children who grew up in late wartime Rhodesia and witnessed the transition of Rhodesia to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s.  Authors such as Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Lauren St. John, and Wendy Kann have each written memoirs that narrate their childhood impressions of war, white settler rule, and a traumatic independence.  All of them, and Cooper as well, inevitably leave a collapsing Zimbabwe and--to varying degrees--reflect on their role (that is, the role of Zimbabwe's white minority community) in engineering/resisting Zimbabwe's economic and political collapse.

Cooper tells a much less succinct and descriptive narrative than the professional authors like Fuller and Godwin, but, as someone who has self-published (and/or subsidy-published) a book in the past, I find that more amateurish writing conveys a kind of honesty that may be lost in more professional writing.  Cooper is a scientist, not a journalist as are Godwin, Fuller, and St. John, and he does not sacrifice truth for the sake of the narrative.  This is not to say the book does not have limitations.  The voice of the memoir is emotionally distant and glosses over seemingly-important plot points.  It relies too heavily on objective impressions (like the author's report cards and comments on his school papers) and less on the author's subjective impressions--what life was actually like in growing up in wartime Rhodesia.  On the other hand, the book lapses into discussions on Zimbabwe's economic and political collapse that are more subjective than objective (i.e., President Robert Mugabe as personal demon) and, though interesting, ultimately not entirely convincing.  The book also has minor amateurish flaws in its construction and design, but I forgive these as someone who has self-/subsidy-published in the past (it's hard!).  At the end of the day, reading the book was ultimately fulfilling.  It certainly provided an intimate account of daily life in Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, and I learned from it.

The reason I read the book, as I have with the other books in the micro-genre, is that I am fascinated with how white narratives of wartime Rhodesia are helping to organically reconstruct the history of Zimbabwe by repudiating (partially in some instances) the white "myths" of the war and this later romanticization by white Zimbabweans of Ian Smith's Rhodesia.  Fuller, Godwin, and St. John do this more or less pretty well, by describing how, as naive children, they cheered the Rhodesian army and condemned black Africans as "terrorists," before coming to realize, many years later, that they were actually on the wrong side of a losing war.  The authors later learn how brutal Ian Smith's Rhodesia was, and they attempt to reconcile their Rhodesian identity with their Zimbabwean one.  Kann does this also, but less effectively.  Cooper only makes hints in the general direction: "I was, 23 years later, to visit the graves of Chipinga residents killed in the war.  They were all brave peple and deserving of the highest accolade and respect.  Whilst looking at their headstones, I wondered if all this blood shed [sic.] had been necessary" (p. 44).  Coming to terms with loss in the Rhodesian war, particularly in modern Zimbabwe where such losses do not really have a place in public discourse, is important to this reconciling.  However, Cooper doesn't go far enough: "Rhodesia had every right to defend its sovereignty and to protect its citizens from Marxist rule" (p. 45).  In that sense, he is reproducing a Rhodesian stereotype.

Elsewhere, he does provide some childhood recollections of the war, seared in his memory.  He discusses how the guerrilla forces blew up a large oil stockpile in Salisbury (now Harare), Rhodesia's capital.  "I remember the black smoke from the burning oil rising high into the clouds," he recalled, noting his fright that the guerrillas had finally made it to Salisbury (p. 60).  However, he makes a political judgment soon after: "It's a pity that Mugabe and Nkomo chose to continue the war...with the ultimate objective of the complete riddance of white rule.  It cost the country many lives" (Ibid).  I might doubt that the "riddance of white rule" was actually the objective of Mugabe and Nkomo--it is not self-evident that this is true--but my bigger concern here is that Cooper does not explain why a scheme in which white rule was preserved in some fashion would have been preferable to the post-1980 Zimbabwean regime.  The other political statements in the book are likewise simplistic.  Writing of post-1980 Zimbabwe, Cooper notes, "[g]enerally blacks, whites and Indians got along, although there was the occasional, disturbing talk of politics usually fuelled by Mugabe" (p. 79).  Other politicized statements in the book single out Mugabe personally, as monolithic head of ZANU-PF (see p. 89 as well).  It is not clear that Mugabe's rule over ZANU-PF, or of Zimbabwe, was monolithic, given the personal rivalries of his potential successors throughout much of his reign.  Still, the personal blaming of Mugabe and ZANU-PF for Zimbabwe's collapse (and not a more complex set of factors) feeds into certain media-created stereotypes of Zimbabwe.

In short, the book is a good effort as a well-documented microhistorical narrative.  It provides evidence as to a child's impressions of war, white rule, and a traumatic transition, which is always fascinating to me and certainly under-documented.  However, the book does reproduce some stereotypes of Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, and the ruling regime.  Some of this may be forgiven, as the book is the author's first work and not professionally developed, but some of it is undoubtedly his honest perspective showing through.  To his credit, he may have had a longer experience in Zimbabwe than the other authors in the genre, and he lived through the economic collapse while the other authors did not.  The book has strengths and weaknesses.  Recommended, with these limitations in mind.

Conference Presentation: Rhodesian Olympic Team

This video is from the Politics of Sport in Africa Conference at Ohio University in March 2010. My presentation was entitled "New and Continuing Research on the Rhodesian Olympic Team," and wrote a paper drawing in newspaper articles and primary sources on Rhodesia's invitation to and exclusion from the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the threatened African boycott. The paper attempts to put the Rhodesian debate into a broader historical context of South African exclusion from international sport and African unity on the International Olympic Committee, which peaked in the early 1970s.

Book Review: African Gifts of the Spirit

My book review on African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement by David Maxwell has appeared in African Studies Quarterly. The book, published by Ohio University Press in 2006, traces the history of the Pentecostal sect Zimbabwe Assemblies of God Africa (ZAOGA), which now has branches on several continents and in a handful of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book is well-sourced and the comparative methodology the author uses to explain Pentecostalism's rise in apartheid South Africa and Southern Rhodesia is illustrative. As the book's narrative progresses into independent Zimbabwe, institutional aspects of the authoritarian and conservative ZAOGA begin to blend in with political aspects of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The book summarizes Pentecostalism's place in Zimbabwean society, as a means of social mobility and protection in the face of political instability.

The review is available here (pdf).

Book Review: The Metrosexual by David Coad

My book review on David Coad's The Metrosexual: Gender, Sexuality, and Sport appeared this month in print in Sport History Review. The book looked at changing gender roles in sports such that the rugged, masculine athlete of the past has now become a perfume and underwear model/passive object of sexual desire. Undergarments have become accessories themselves; nakedness has become mainstream (something Coad calls "spornography"). The "nakedness" of athletes today is not replicating the gendered, ritual sport roles of ancient Greece; it is subverting them. However, Coad focuses much more heavily on changes in gender roles that allowed this phenomenon to take place. He focuses less on economic changes in the world of sport. Athletes may be advertising their new wealth as much as they are advertising their bodies and accessories. Coad's theory may even be becoming outdated: I argue that sport is becoming post-metrosexual very rapidly; openly gay star Matthew Mitcham now has an underwear modeling deal with aussieBum, a gay "sex object" marketed toward straight men.

The article is available by subscription only, but I have posted a copy in my Slidespace. My review starts on page 6.