Russell Warren Howe
Capsule Review
Apr
1976
Essay
Oct
1969
In civil war, hatreds are more intimate than in international conflict. The enemy is less awesome; he is killed with more conviction that he deserves it. Invariably-inevitably-the death tolls are higher. The American Civil War set records for its day. Despite the limited weaponry and skill, the Biafran war has taken the lives of an estimated two million people, mostly starved children. And now a war that is already engaging about 26,000 black guerrillas and approximately a quarter-million white or white-officered troops in Mozambique, Angola, Rhodesia, South Africa and Namibia (the United Nations' new name for South West Africa) offers such a prospect of escalation that it can hardly help but be bigger, in cemetery terms, than Viet Nam. In this corner of the globe, whose fair hills make a savage contrast with the ugliness wrought by man, the restless spirit of Nazism, with its accent on genetic myth and legal caste, will perhaps be put to rest in a swamp of blood.
Essay
Apr
1968
It is the privilege of the famous and the infamous to be little known: their myths are often so much more convincing than the men themselves. Africa, a fruitful field for detractors and apologists, has produced myths about people and events that fiction would disown. The gilding and blackening of characters have disregarded widely known and widely reported facts. And the great open book of African history, where our ignorance still exceeds our knowledge, has been used with impunity to justify different sentimental attitudes.
