Lynne Duke Author Staff Writer ~ The Washington Post

"Mandela, Mobutu, and Me"
Mary Ann Wolfe Theater ~ FIU Biscayne Bay Campus
Tuesday, March 30th, 2004, 2:00 PM

For four years as her newspaper's Johannesburg bureau chief, Lynne Duke cut a rare figure as a black American woman foreign correspondent as she raced from story to story in numerous countries of central and southern Africa. From the battle zones of Congo-Zaire to the quest for truth and reconciliation in South Africa; from the teeming displaced person's camps of Angola and the killing fields of the Rwanda genocide to the calming Indian Ocean shores of Mozambique. She interviewed heads of state, captains of industry, activists, tribal leaders, medicine men and women, mercenaries, rebels, refugees, and ordinary, hardworking people. And it is they, the ordinary people of Africa, who fueled the hope and affection that drove Duke's reporting. The nobility of the ordinary African struggles, so often absent from accounts of the continent, is at the heart of Duke's searing story.

Mandela, Mobutu, and Me is a richly detailed, clear-eyed account of the hard realities Duke discovered, including the devastation wrought by ruthless, rapacious dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and his successor, Laurent Kabila, in the Congo, and appalling indifference of Europeans and Americans to the legacy of their own exploitation of the continent and its people. But Duke also records with admiration the visionary leadership and personal style of Nelson Mandela in South Africa as he led his country's inspiring transition from apartheid in the twilight of his incredible life.

"Because I had gone to South Africa in 1990 and also in 1994, surrounding first the release of Mandela in '90, and then the elections when he became president in '94, and I had been infected in a way that many journalists of that period were with this sense of momentum and hopefulness that was what South Africa was about then. And the chance to go back there and be based in Johannesburg and chronicle sort of the journey of this nation coming into its own and leaving behind the past of apartheid and moving on to become something different seemed to me like a fabulous story, but also something that would be personally fulfilling, to actually see this positive and really wonderful African story unfold. I was a bit naive because I did have this incredible optimism about, you know, Africa itself carrying over just from my experiences in South Africa. So during the four years that I was there, obviously my naiveté was tempered a bit by some real experiences.

I held Africa in awe. As I traveled, I felt as if Africa reached out and claimed me as one of its own. That sensation was brilliantly clarifying for who I am in this world, part of a bridge between continents, and connected as much to America as to a vast African narrative that resonates within me like an ancestral whisper. But sometimes the whisper was a scream, for I also had to grapple with ugly Africa: the Africa of horror and unspeakable brutality; the Africa that sometimes made me question the existence of God; the Africa that I could not ignore if I was to claim the continent as my own. I witnessed a terrible warping of the human spirit, and I loathed it."

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