Word: less
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Will Africa, fabulously rich in natural resources, ever end the cycle of war, disease and overpopulation that helps to keep it poor and famished? Most African governments, including those much less radical than Ethiopia, continue to be wedded to quasi-socialist, postcolonial economic policies that reduce agricultural productivity, even as populations soar and create a voracious demand for more food. "In contemporary Africa, both rural starvation and rising levels of urban employment are the outcome of a set of agricultural policies designed to subsidize the cost of living of urban consumers at the expense of rural producers," says Michael Lofchie...
That is more or less the question that bedevils Western officials as they face the horrors of another famine in the Ethiopia of Lieut. Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. All too clear in the public memory are those televised pictures from 1984-85 of starving children with their matchstick arms, their swollen bellies and their huge, staring eyes. The public may also remember reports of relief shipments being taxed $50 a ton to help finance Mengistu's 225,000-man army, the largest in black Africa, and of sacks of Western grain rotting on the docks or disappearing into the black...
...rest of Ethiopia. Yet the country as a whole contains more than 80 distinct ethnic groups, and poverty-stricken Eritrea could hardly survive as an independent entity. It is also likely that Mengistu's motives for forcibly transporting 600,000 peasants from Eritrea and neighboring Tigre to the less populated southern part of the country were more political than humanitarian. Nonetheless, a number of Western experts have agreed that those parched and eroded northern provinces cannot support their inhabitants as well as the more fertile south...
...were true, Fitzpatrick adds, "to the extent that food given to a country saves the government of that country the foreign exchange it would have to spend on that food -- O.K., food aid helps support that government. But you have to ask, 'Without food aid, would the government spend less on its war effort, or would it let these people starve...
Where Kiefer rises to greatness is in his simpler and less conceptually turgid images like The Book, 1979-85, and Osiris and Isis, 1985-87. The former takes as its point of departure one of the canonical images of German Romanticism, Friedrich's Monk by the Sea, 1808 -- a tiny figure contemplating infinity, culture lost before the magnitude of nature. In Kiefer's painting this is almost reversed; the main motif is a lead book without writing, its silvery pages full of light and as big as a medieval hymnal, an object as imposing as the seascape behind...