Parent Times

When the U.S. secretary of state wants to know what's happening in Africa--whether it's a war, coup or election--chances are that Stephen Weigert is behind the scenes providing both political and military insights.

An analyst on sub-Saharan African affairs, Weigert has tracked events ranging from genocide in Rwanda to peacekeeping missions in Somalia. "The ongoing civil wars in Sudan and Angola have been getting a lot of my attention, while other analysts are interested in peacetime issues like the process of democratization in Nigeria and Liberia," he explains. In years past, Weigert also has focused on the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid in South Africa, concerns about genocide in Burundi and other prolonged crises.

An African military and political analyst for two decades, Weigert spent 12 years at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and has been with the Office of African Analysis in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as INR, for nine years. His job entails writing about African affairs for daily publications and providing in-depth analysis to support the secretary of state's office in making U.S. policy on Africa.

Surprisingly, the post does not require frequent travel to Africa, though Weigert has made several trips to better understand the culture and geography. "We rely on reporting from embassies on the continent and a variety of other intelligence sources. We gather information and put it into digestible form, sift through it and make sense of it."

In a job that straddles the journalistic and academic disciplines, Weigert says American media coverage of Africa is "disappointing." Fortunately, the Internet is beginning to fill in some of the gaps that the U.S. media have left open in their reporting, he says. "The Internet has kicked off a real revolution in the quantity and quality of information about what's going on in Africa," he explains. "There are growing numbers of news and academic sites that can provide a person with a good deal of information."

During his 20 years of studying African affairs, Weigert says the most surprising developments have been concerns about the environment, AIDS and ecological issues that weren't prominent in the late 1970s. While technology has provided greater access to information about Africa, it also is shaping both peacetime and wartime developments there. "There are different weapons that weren't available 20 years ago and different ways of communicating that have an impact on both war and peace issues," he notes.

In 1995, Weigert published a book, Traditional Religion and Guerrilla Warfare in Modern Africa, which contains case studies of several insurgencies in Africa since the late 1940s.

On his few visits to the continent, Weigert has been most struck by the variety in culture, politics, intellectual perspectives and philosophic issues. "It's a rich, rich continent in many ways," he says. "What I appreciate most is the character of its people. I come away realizing that, once again, there is only so much you can get from reading."