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After compiling a list of the most serious electoral fraud in recent history, and

noting that authoritarian regimes continue to be buttressed by rigged polls to

which the international community turns a blind eye, we might expect Cheeseman

and Klaas to be pessimistic about the importance of elections in a 'post-democracy

future' (p. 211). Instead they remain sanguine, echoing the usual call for overlap-

ping reform, regulation and enforcement within democratic institutions, whilst

also proposing a series of realistic, practical solutions that could be immediately

adopted, not least redoubling eff orts to improve voter education and community

organizations' oversight whilst tolerating (in the short term) vote buying and com-

promised electoral commissions. They reserve their ire for the farcical system of

international election observation (which they have seen fi rsthand), rebuking the

prevailing ostrichism and calling for gutsy changes in policy and funding.

To off er a digestible synthesis of such a large subject, Cheeseman and Klaas

could not cover everything. Nonetheless, it would have been useful to fl esh out the

challenges to the electoral infrastructure with more emphasis on how this fi ts with

other democratic institutions such as independent media, law enforcement and

civil registers, which are mentioned but not examined. The focus is inevitably on

presidential elections for which the most resources and attention are marshalled.

Further analysis about variations in the defrauding of different types of elections,

such as mayoral or parliamentary polls, would therefore have been a useful

comparative.

Cheeseman and Klaas set out to investigate the secret of continued electoral

success for authoritarian regimes. Despite illuminating examples from their coun-

terfeit democracies, such as Malaysia or Turkey, however, the illustrative lode-

stone is the 2016 US presidential election, and American democracy more

generally. Not (yet) a victim of counterfeiture, nonetheless Cheeseman and Klaas

off er compelling evidence of voter suppression, distorted campaign fi nance, hack-

ing and gerrymandering, to which allegations of voter registration fraud, tabulation

error, machine failure and more in the recent 2018 polls can only be added.

Rather than tempering their argument, these discussions demonstrate the pertin-

ence of Cheeseman and Klaas' analysis. This is an important, timely book that

exposes the frailties of elections everywhere.

Independent Researcher ANNA C. RADER

anna.rader@gmail.com

doi: 10.1093/afraf/adz013

Advance Access Publication 24 April 2019

Inside Al-Shabaab. The secret history of Al-Qaeda' s most powerful ally,

by Harun Maruf and Dan Joseph. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018.

Xiii + 323pp. $ 18.84 (paperback). ISBN 100 2 53037 492. $ 66.50 (hardback).

ISBN 13: 978 0 253037 497.

Harun Maruf and Dan Joseph provide an insightful account of Al-Shabaab, the

Somali extremist organization fi ghting in Somalia and conducting terror attacks in

the country and beyond, in the Horn of Africa. The authors embed the group's

history into the larger history of political Islam in Somalia and beyond. They also

clearly show Al-Shabaab' s relevance within the global jihadist scene. More specif-

ically, they follow the biographies of several men, some rank and fi le, some leaders

of Al-Shabaab, to shed light on diff erent aspects of the Islamist spectrum in

Somalia.

408 AFRICAN AFFAIRS

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The text outlines they journey of Dalha Ali, a young student in a Tabliq

madrassa in Mogadishu, into the group until he, after four years, dies in an

aborted suicide mission in the middle of Villa Somalia, the presidential compound

in Mogadishu. Dalha Ali and some others represent ordinary, very often quite

young, Somali men who are caught in the mayhem of Somali civil war and military

interventions. They search for orientation in the midst of violence, insecurity, cor-

ruption and harsh survival conditions for most Somalis. One strength of the book

is the manner in which it explains how at certain moments, like when Ethiopian

forces brutally intervened in Somalia end of 2006, it can seem the best choice for

intelligent, sensible young men to exchange books with Kalashnikovs to defend

their beliefs and their people.

Besides these accounts of ordinary lives, the book by Maruf and Joseph also fol-

lows up the biographies of several key-fi gures in the extremist Islamist scene in

Somalia, such as Ibrahim Al-Afghani, Ahmed Abdi Godane and Mukhtar Robow,

who, often after education and/or training in Pakistan and/or Afghanistan turn up

as leaders of Al-Shabaab. Omar Hammami aka Al-Amriki, a US-citizen of Syrian-

American origin, is featured as important actor who represents the foreign fighters

who at one point played a major role in Al-Shabaab. Other central members of the

group, such as Mahad Karate, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, or the current emir,

Ahmed Diriye aka Abu Ubaidah, are characterized in their political positions.

Through this detailed insight into numerous individuals within Al-Shabaab the

authors manage to show the diversity of the hardcore Islamist scene in Somalia.

They also point at the puzzle that Al-Shabaab stayed over more than a decade a

powerful force despite massive internal divisions and partly bloody in-fighting

between its leading personal (let alone the powers of clannism at work in Somali

society, that militates against overarching solidarity in the name of religion, and of

course massive external military challenges mainly by AMISOM and also Somali

government forces and, increasingly, US-drone operations).

Al-Shabaab is portrayed as a resilient group that functions in complex ways

which are not in line with a cliché image sometimes drawn about such groups as

manned by brainwashed, death-affi ne 'zombies ' . In seventeen chapters the book

by Maruf and Joseph outlines the emergence and the year-by year developments

of Al-Shabaab. It draws on sources that are accessible mainly to Maruf as the lead

author who is a Somali and Arabic-speaker and who is a seasoned journalist work-

ing for Voice of America Somali Service with a good reputation on the ground.

Over the years, he has interviewed several key Al-Shabaab actors and thus came

closer to them than most other people researching militant Islamism in Somalia.

What is missing from the book are female voices. It would have been good to

hear more ordinary Somali women, but also wives and mothers and sisters of

fighters. There are also prominent female politicians in the Somali government

such as Maryam Qaasim or Fowsia Yusuf Haji Aden, who have been MPs and

ministers during the height of Al-Sahabaab' s struggle for control of the capital.

Their voices, contrary to the voices of numerous men, are missing from the book.

Another point of criticism is that the book focusses in-depth on Al-Shabaab but

only marginally touches on the structural conditions that provide the framework

for the emergence and continued importance of militant extremism in Somalia:

military interventions, top-down and externally-driven 'state-building ' and violent

counter-terrorism. Looking at the Somali history since 1991, it can be read as his-

tory of violence in which internal and external actors are closely intermingled and

co-produce the mayhem of Somalia. While it would be too simple to establish

mono-causal lines of explaining phenomena such as Al-Shabaab, it is clear that

409 BOOK REVIEWS

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without the military intervention of Ethiopia at the end of 2006, Al-Shabaab most

likely would not have become such a powerful group. It is also clear that up until

today the misguided policy of the Somali government, which indeed is largely

dependent on external backers, is a main reason why Al-Shabaab is still so relevant

in Somalia.

These issues are hinted at in the book (particularly when the Somalia-expert

Roland Marchal is cited in the conclusion, who provides much creative-critical

thinking about the current situation in the country), but they could have been

spelled out more forcefully to add to the analytical strength of the text (which also

is largely void of academic references). As it stands, the book by Maruf and Joseph

is a very readable, very informative and in passages thrilling account that provides

partly unknown details for Somalia-specialists and a basis for refl ection and com-

parison for counter-terrorism experts. Due to the style of writing, it is even access-

ible for interested non-specialists. The book is recommended strongly for thinking

about and beyond the Somali setting.

University of Leipzig MARKUS HOEHNE

markus.hoehne@uni-leipzig.de

doi: 10.1093/afraf/adz012

Advance Access Publication 24 April 2019

From surviving to living: Voice, trauma and witness in Rwandan women's

writing, by Catherine Gilbert. Montpellier: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée,

2018. 296 pp. € 27 (paperback). ISBN 978 2 36781 268 7.

How do genocide survivors communicate their experiences of loss? Who are the

audiences for these testimonies? These are the central questions animating

Catherine Gilbert' s book exploring Rwandan women' s written testimonies of the

1994 genocide. Examining a mainly French-language corpus – ranging from the earli-

est published testimony, Yolande Mukagasana' sLa mort ne veut pas de moi (1997) to

Élise Rida Musomandera' s more recent Le livre d' Élise (2014) – Gilbert explores the

ways in which these women write about the genocide from their subject positions as

Tutsi genocide survivors based in the West (for the most part) and writing for

Western audiences. Drawing heavily on trauma theory, Gilbert argues that these

women work through their trauma by bearing witness to the atrocities they endured;

writing allows them the possibility of moving from ' surviving 'to 'living' .Importantly,

Gilbert stresses how tenuous and diffi cult such a process is.

In the fi rst chapter, Gilbert explores the fi gure of the witness, highlighting the

multiple ways in which Rwandan women experienced the genocide. Here Gilbert

proposes the categories of 'survivor-witness ' (direct witness); 'secondary ' witness

(indirect witness or outside observer); and 'reader-witness ' ( ' the engaged receiver

of testimony') (p. 54). Not only do these categories capture the range of positions

survivors occupied during the genocide – some women directly witnessed violence

while others witnessed it in exile – they also point to the necessity of an audience if

the trauma is to be successfully communicated.

The second chapter examines how the testimonials ' give voice' to trauma and

questions trauma as a universal experience. The Western trauma framework is

problematic, Gilbert argues, because it assumes two things: 'fi rst that language is

inadequate to convey the traumatic experience, and second that the unassimilable

nature of trauma is universal' (p. 87). Rather than assume pain is inexpressible or

incommunicable, Gilbert looks at the particular narrative strategies the writers

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