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Into Africa
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi

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by Will Reno '84

Though hard to believe for those who encounter him on the jogging path, the start of Rob Mortimer's career as a student of Africa predates the independence of many African states. Though years of running have kept Rob youthful, the endurance and fortitude of the runner is reflected in a career which has spanned four decades and witnessed - often first-hand - the radical shifts and immense breadth of African politics.

Fresh out of the classroom at Wesleyan and equipped with a year-long Fulbright fellowship, Rob originally intended to study French politics. But this was also 1960, the "Year of Africa" during which 17 countries, about half of the continent's people, acquired independence. 1960 was also a signal year in French politics. The Algerian war for independence was at its height. The tectonic plates of colonialism and struggles for national liberation were clashing close to French shores and at the center of French politics. France granted independence to most of its sub-Saharan colonies, but had still not discovered its exit from Algeria, just opposite France across the Mediterranean. Rob's nose for politics took him to the epicenter of this clash.

"I just got completely caught up in the politics surrounding that conflict and the issue of decolonization," he explains. "It was a very turbulent year - going to demonstrations, being chased by French police. They were basically calling into question the whole colonial edifice." Fascinated with the story of France's relations with its soon-to-be former colonies, Rob's transition to a student of Africa was underway.

(At this point, and in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit a heavy dose of self-interest. For me, Rob's shift was more than academic. As a freshman new to the Haverford campus, 1980 would turn out to be my own "Year of Africa." By the end of the year, the differences between Bobo-Dioulasso and Bujumbura, between Addis Ababa and Abuja, were made plain to me. The eventual outcome has been my own career as a professor of African politics.)

Well before all of that, however, young Rob and his wife Mimi found themselves in 1964-65 in the capital of newly liberated Algeria, just in time for the next major shift in African politics. Ahmed Ben Bella, one of the world's premier anti-colonial nationalist leaders and Algeria's leader at independence in 1962, was deposed in a coup in 1965 - overthrown by less radical elements of his military precisely, as it happens, at the time that Rob and Mimi were having their first child. "We immediately wondered," Rob recalls, "what was happening downtown. What's it like when, you know, a coup occurs? It was the first coup we'd been present at." While he chuckles at his tourist-like excitement about the overthrow, the day spent "pounding the streets of Algiers" was enough to send Mimi into labor - and a delivery accompanied by the sobering sounds of gunshots and rioting outside the clinic. There were no prizes for that year's first "coup baby," but Rob claims that they've nonetheless always considered Amy a "daughter of the Algerian coup."

The Mortimer family stood witness to the struggle for civil rights and opportunity here in the States as well: they arrived on Haverford's campus in 1966 after a one-year stint at Prairie View A&M, a historically black institution in East Texas. Rob joined Harvey Glickman and others in Haverford's political science department, and was appointed chairperson of the department the next year. (Haverford was a smaller place then, so no doubt Rob was less often mistaken for an undergraduate than would have been the case at a large university.) Regardless, his thoughts were overseas, as his academic interests turned towards the influence of the first wave of movements of national liberation on sub-Saharan African regimes.

Rob's year at the University of Algiers had coincided with an expansive era of "Afro-optimism" in Third World ideological leadership. In spite of Algeria's coup, the ideas of more radical nationalist movements continued to transform the ideological map of Africa in the mid 1960s. Through agencies like the Organization of African Unity, more radical nationalist leaders articulated criticism not just of colonialism, but also of inequality between rich and poor countries. And although the difficulties of delivering on the promises of national liberation were beginning to show, some (including Algeria's new leaders) rejected Cold War divisions and argued for a "Third Way" for a bloc of Third World countries.

"I just got completely caught up in the politics surrounding that conflict and the issue of decolonization," he explains. "It was a very turbulent year - going to demonstrations, being chased by French police. They were basically calling into question the whole colonial edifice."

Rob's viewpoint on these problems was shaped further by a year in Senegal in the early 1970s. In the process, Haverford students gained what I would later find is a rare perspective on African politics: the analysis of North African and Sub-Saharan African politics together. This approach made perfect sense to us students at the time - this was the juncture at which I began studying African politics at Haverford with Rob and Harvey - but the two are often studied separately in most North American academic institutions. "One of the things that became clear to me very quickly," says Rob, "was how important sub-Saharan Africa was in Algeria's view of the world. Because of my personal itinerary, they were always closely linked in my own mind."

The eighties were difficult years for much of Africa. The Senegal to which Rob returned in 1991 stood along the sidelines of a civil war that raged in Liberia and Sierra Leone. During that year, Senegalese soldiers joined the multinational West African peacekeeping force that had intervened in Liberia's war. Rob began writing and speaking about this peacekeeping force in West Africa in the early 1990s. It was at this time that our professional lives crossed paths, as I began meeting Rob at professional conferences. Long interested in the foreign affairs of states promoting national liberation (and now in the 1990s, trying to keep the peace), Rob was writing about Liberian affairs from the perspective of the peacekeepers. I had begun my research career in Africa, amidst the war in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and was writing about the politics of the factions fighting in each of these countries.

In 1992, Algeria's government agreed to hold democratic elections after a period of political violence. Regime hardliners and military officers, however, were unwilling to hand power to the victors. When the results of the poll became apparent, they called off the election, beginning a new, more intense round of political violence. Rob returned to Algeria in 1993 during this period of dramatic bloodshed. Research became difficult, to say the least - insurgents had declared war on intellectuals, assassinating people Rob had planned to meet and others he and Mimi knew. Soon after they left, foreigners became the target of violence as well.

Africans have traversed a long political road: from the promise of anti-colonial struggles for liberation to the collapse of government administrations and warfare in several countries. Rob's most recent writing on Algeria paints a more hopeful picture, however. Some members of the government show signs of moving beyond the impasse of the aborted 1992 election. Algeria shows signs of yet joining a few other African countries in moves toward more open and accountable government. Liberia's civil war has been over for four years. Senegal just held an election in which the outcome was not a foregone conclusion.

Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, said Pliny the Elder: There is always something new out of Africa. Africans of the future may regard the last four decades of "newness," both optimistic and tragic, as an epic and transformative period. Readers of Rob's work and generations of Haverford students have the privilege of learning about it from a frontline observer. And if Africa turns out to have its day in the sun, Rob will likely be there to tell us how it turns out.

So much the better for all of us that the young Wesleyan grad decided that Algeria was more interesting than France! It is strange that the choices that my major adviser made - before I was born, no less - would have such an impact on my own life and career. But that is the kind of place that Haverford is. At least I now realize that I was a student of Africa from the start. But I still wonder - how did Harvey Glickman go from writing about government policies in Great Britain to African politics too? Ex Haverford semper aliquid novi...

Will Reno is a professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He specializes in the political economy of war in Africa, and is currently in Uganda studying the war in Central Africa.