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"This is a book about evil," Bill Berkeley warns the reader at the beginning of The Graves Are Not Yet Full. "Its setting is Africa." Evil, he's reminding us, has no particular address: "These stories are a measure of how much Africans have in common with the rest of mankind, not how much they differ." Berkeley, who spent ten years reporting on Africa for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post, writes with an easy authority. His central argument is that—contra what we've been told repeatedly, especially in the wake of the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda—ethnic hatred is not the primary cause of bloodshed in Africa; rather, it is a tool deftly used by "Big Men" to create anarchy, which allows them to stay in power. Instead of focusing on victims, Berkeley meets and describes the tyrants. His aim is to describe how evil people operate and how they gain and stay in power. Most of his subjects are African warlords and political kleptocrats.

In Liberia, Charles Taylor attempts to legitimize his campaign of terror, which left 150,000 dead and half of the nation displaced in a prolonged civil war. One of Taylor's tactics was to recruit drug-addicted war orphans to serve in so-called Small Boy Units, fanatically loyal to Taylor (their "father") and willing to rape and kill without restraint. Yet Taylor blandly presents himself as a statesman dedicated to his people. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Berkeley and his wife are detained for four days by SNIP, Mobutu Sese Seko's secret police, after interviewing victims of state-sponsored ethnic aggression in the south of the country. We listen to General Pieter Hendrik "Tiene" Groenewald, South Africa's chief of military intelligence in the mid-1980s, explain his government's instigation of tribal violence to aid in the fight against Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. And we hear the voices of agents of genocide in Rwanda—from political leaders to villagers who acted in fear for their own lives.

In Sudan, Berkeley interviews the Arab religious leader and two independence fighters largely responsible for 2 million deaths since 1983 and a displacement rate of 85 percent in the southern part of the country. Hassan al-Turabi is the Islamic leader who issued a fatwa exhorting the Islamic faithful to jihad against the Christian and animistic South. The puppet-master behind several political leaders, al-Turabi is responsible for purges, torture, and state-induced famine. John Garang and Riek Machar fought together against the Arabic Islamic North, before turning on each other and inciting a war between the two largest black tribes in the country. Both factions are known for widespread human rights violations, for which neither leader seems willing to accept responsibility. "I don't feel responsible for the deaths. We all want to fight for our liberation. So we pay a high price," said Reik after one massacre. Garang also dismisses his role. "There are individuals who rape and steal. But what I want to underline is that is not the movement." Explaining his role to Berkley, Turabi said, "There is a vacuum now. That vacuum is being filled by an Islamist spirit. I just happened naturally to be on the track where history is moving." With a little tweaking, their words of self-justification could have come from Serbia. All three leaders have ph.d.'s, from England, the United States, and France.

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