Since this is an original interview conducted for this site we will leave it at the top for several hours. NEWER posts are BELOW so keep scrolling.
Today – part two of the interview. To read part 1 go here. I’ll start by republishing the last question of yesterday…
MvdG: Africa continues to be the ‘black continent’. It’s mostly still ignored. Wars are being fought, people die of hunger and of AIDS, but the rich West is, somehow, still standing by and doing virtually nothing. Should Africa concern us Westerners?
HdB: Of course Africa should concern the West. If the planet is shrinking and we can talk of a “global village”, one of its neighborhoods is desperately badly off, and that neighborhood is Africa. African diseases ravage the realm’s population and have the potential to threaten the world (the next pandemic may not be as relatively limited as AIDS and could kill hundreds rather than dozens of millions); Africa is an incubator of diseases and its public-health picture is the darkest in the world. Africa lies open to an ideological struggle was well, and Islam is making rapid progress beyond the “Islamic Front” I display on my map of changing Africa. African economies are bedeviled by the trade barriers, unfair tariffs and protectionism of so-called “free-trade” nations like France (and other EU states) and the USA. Yet Africa has much oil and many other commodities the West needs — and the Chinese are there to buy from under its nose. For centuries Africa has had a worse deal than any other realm of the world, from slavery to colonialism and from proxy (Cold) wars to rapacious dictatorships propped up by the “democratic” West. It’s time to make some restitution.
MvdG: What kind of restitution are you thinking about (do you have clear, specific suggestion or more general ideas)?
HdB: By restitution I mean that African interests in some arenas should come first, not last; for example in Green-Revolution research in which rice and wheat were always the key foci (but Africa eats corn and millet and barley); in medical research (in which African diseases are now getting more attention but have been comparatively neglected for decades, including malaria); in provision of remedies (let Christian churches stop pressuring governments and NGO’s to attach conditions to anti-Aids campaigns such as condom use); in debt forgiveness (I realize that this can be a double-edged sword – the old habits that ran up the debts may return, but conditions can be attached to deter this); in small-scale entrepreneurial help (massive dissemination of small loans, especially to women, has had proven impact in parts of Africa and other areas of the world and should be instituted); in helping African students to attend foreign universities in fields their countries need and ensuring their return through loans and subsidies; in alleviating malnutrition through well-known methods of relief; in assembling a far more effective peace-keeping machinery than has existed during the Congo catastrophe and the Darfur tragedy. The cost would be a fraction of the $ 2 trillion (yes, $ 2,000,000,000,000) current estimates give for the Iraq misadventure.
MvdG: It seems to me that if one wants to help Africa, one should focus on developing certain specific countries first, key-countries one could say, before developing every African country. What are Africa’s key-countries?
HdB: If the West (and the world) were to select key countries for help in becoming growth poles and perhaps examples to the rest of Africa, I’d propose Senegal, Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia.
MvdG: From the perspective from geography, many mistakes have been made in run-up to the war in Iraq. What errors exactly – and how to bring peace to this troubled country? Is a three state solution viable?
HdB: The architects of the Iraq intervention not only were ignorant of key dimensions of the country’s cultural and regional geography; they misread what historical geography they knew. It’s clear now that the WMD ruse was just that, and that other reasons to go to war (I list seven in Why Geography Matters) were also devoid of substance. But the significance of Iraq’s external continuities (religious into Iran, ethnic into Syria etc.) were unclear; the minority issues (Turkmen, Assyrians, Christians) may have been appreciated statistically but not spatially, and the fact that Iraq was essentially a colonial state, that is: a state colonized by Sunni Baathists much as South Africa was internally colonized by Afrikaner Christians was never clear. Americans simply did not know enough about things geographers study — attitudes, perceptions, linkages, power — and were led to believe, by their leaders, that Iraqis overwhelmingly would greet American troops with joy (and flowers, as Vice President Cheney often said). When the American Embassy was established in the Green Zone and grew to 1000 staff members, only 6 – yes, six — were fluent in Arabic.
The misperceptions continue. I was the first, I think, to propose a Bosnia-like three-way solution for Iraq in my brief comment published in the New York Times on October 11, 2003, when things were still reasonably calm in Iraq. At the time, a three-way partition, temporary until the three parts had come to terms internally and were ready to rejoin the larger state, was feasible. But today, with Baghdad having burgeoned to between 6 and 7 million and thus containing more inhabitants than either the Sunni or the Kurdish parts of the partition, is a four-piece puzzle, and the heart of it, the capital, is no longer viable as an element of that geographic solution. A new geographic approach might recognize the Kurdish north (three expanded provinces) and the Shiite far south (five existing provinces) as possible autonomous entities, but that is only a small part of a larger solution that appears now to be beyond reach. I fear that Iraq faces a civil war whether the Americans stay or not; it was a legacy of the British post-Ottoman partition and has been simmering ever since. It will, as it was in post-Soustelle Algeria, be a dreadful transition, but it is in effect already underway. No American military “surge” will do anything but escalate the crisis and postpone the inevitable. It is the tragedy of our time, and it is incredible that it is caused by leaders of the same country that helped resurrect Europe after a heroic war effort, reconstructed Japan after a bitter war not of America’s making, and played the key role in ending the evil of repressive communism in Eurasia.
MvdG: What must people know about Iran, when they’re thinking about whether or not to use force against it?
HdB: Some Geography, obviously. Use your mental map to draw what you know of the Geography of Iran on a blank piece of paper. Who are the Sunnis in Iran? There are about 13 million — 9 million Kurds in the northwest and 4 million Arabs (yes, Arabs) in Khuzestan Province, which happens to be where much of the oil is drilled and exported (Saddam Hussein had his eye on it for annexation during the 1980s war). More Sunnis in the south and southeast, and Baluchis against the Paki/Afghan borders. And then there’s the Azeris, Shiites but emphatically not Persians, up north, maybe as many as 17 million of them. That leaves the Iranians in the center, and of course puts them between Russia and the West historically. Fact is, Shia Iran has an imperial history complete with colonies and other dependencies that is among the factors giving it much more in common with Western states than Arabs have. US overthrow of a democratically elected government in the 1950s under Eisenhower (communist under every bed) and forced resurrection of the hated Shah contributed to the sequence of events that brought the dreadful Ayatollah Khomeini to power and the sequence of events that followed is only now coming to a head. My personal view is that if the world can live with a Pakistani nuclear bomb it may have to learn to live with an Iranian one. On the other hand it would be better not to have to live with a leader as undiplomatic (shall we say) as Ahmadinejad.
MvdG: Lastly some questions about yourself / your career. Why did you decide to move to America and was it easy to adapt to American culture?
HdB: I had no say in leaving the Netherlands; my parents emigrated after World War II and I was just a teenager at the time (late forties). My father was a very successful violinist and my mother a concert pianist, and they could have gone almost anywhere but decided to go to South Africa (I tell this story in my little book Wartime Encounter that begins with the bombing of Rotterdam on May 14, 1940 and which I witnessed and ends with our takeoff from Schiphol to Johannesburg). I liked some of what I found in South Africa — the magnificent wildlife parks mainly — but the social situation was dreadful, apartheid having just been made the law of the land. But I got through high school (in Afrikaans), then through university (in English) and had just about given up hope of ever seeing America when a young U.S. geography professor appeared at the University of the Witwatersrand. He helped me get a “teaching assistantship” at an American university and in 1956 I sailed on an ore freighter to Baltimore to start graduate studies. I did go back to South Africa after getting my doctoral degree but was then invited to return to the United States as a lecturer, and I stayed. It has been incomparable to watch this country evolve over a half century from a front-row seat and even to participate tangentially.
MvdG: You were the Geography Editor on ABC’s “Good Morning America” for seven years and in 1996 you joined NBC News as Geography Analyst, appearing mostly on MSNBC. How did that come about and how was that?
HdB: Ronald Reagan made my television career possible by making a marvelous Geographic gaffe in South America, where he pronounced himself to be pleased to be in Bolivia when opening a conference in Brasilia. US newspapers reported it, complete with maps, and ABC, to whom I had been writing about its often-error-plagued maps on screen, dug up one of my letters and telephoned me to come to its New York studios to comment on the faux-pas. That led to seven years as “Geography Editor” and a great experience traveling the world with the program “Good Morning America.” When Disney bought ABC-TV my career ended and I went to NBC where I had two wonderful years as “Geography Analyst” in the high-tech world of cable-TV.
MvdG: You wrote more than 30 books. Which book are you most proud of?
HdB: I tend never to be terribly satisfied with my own books, so it’s hard to say. The best-received probably was Wine: a Geographic Appreciation which won a silver medal from the l’Office International de Vin in Paris. The best-selling has been my textbook, Geography: Realms, Regions and Concepts, whose 13th edition is in press and which has sold more than 1.3 million copies in America and around the world in several languages.
MvdG: Lastly: you are – like me – a soccer and a baseball fan. To my amazement, however, you’re a fan of……. The Cubs. What went wrong?
HdB: Having been born in the Netherlands and playing soccer there as a boy, I naturally became a fan as well and I follow Holland internationally (the 2006 World Cup was not one of the sterling moments in the team’s history). As to the Cubs, I am a proud member of the longest-suffering fan club in the world, and was smitten the very first day I rode Chicago’s elevated train past Wrigley Field and saw a game in progress (that was in 1956, when fans had already been waiting for a championship for decades). I fully expect to be the last living American who saw Ernie Banks hit home runs, still waiting for — well, for Ernie to come back and save another miserable season. Next year it will have been a century since the Cubs won the World Series, and I am sure we will have some sort of celebration somewhere, in a cemetery maybe. But we Cubs fans are statistically long-lived and psychologically sustained by hope, and when you join that crowd in Chicago’s Wrigley Field you know you’re part of history.
Harm de Blij’s book Why Geograph Matters can be purchased at Amazon by clicking on the image below.
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