Africa Notes: To Demystify and Unsimplify - July 1982

Some Observations on Strategic Realities in the Horn of Africa

With the publication of this first-issue of CSIS Africa Notes, a new dimension is added to the Center's African Studies Program. Not all articles we publish over the next year will be as irreverent as Gerald A. Funk's tour of five countries of East Africa featured in this issue, but all will be concerned in one way or another with destereotyping. The problem with boxing and labeling African leaders and states as "good guys" and "bad guys" as Mr. Funk demonstrates, is that boxes and labels devised in either Moscow or Washington tend to disintegrate in the African sun. Thus, we will be looking through a variety of prisms at African political configurations, personalities, conflicts, economic pressures, relationships with the industrial nations, and policy options for the United States.

Helen Kitchen & Gerald A. Funk