by Martin Meredith
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| List Price: | $21.95 |
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Product Description
An epic biography of postcolonial Africa illuminates its current devastating problems. What happened to this vast continent, so rich in resources and history, to bring it so close to destitution and despair in the span of two generations?
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A thorough and compelling survey of post-Colonial Africa, 2008-11-17
Anyone clinging to the notion that Africa's current ills are primarily the legacy of Western colonialism needs to read this book ASAP.
From Ghana, where the post-colonial era began mid-century, to Zimbabwe (currently circling the drain with 200 million per cent inflation), a narrative has played out over and over that points to a different culprit.
Meredith tracks the advent of independent governance in one African nation after another and somehow keeps things from collapsing into a blur of identically disastrous rulers and one-size-fits-all mayhem after their inevitable President-for-Life declarations.
In a sense this is a disturbing book, as it makes you wonder if Africa's problems might not be permanently intractable. I for one prefer this sort of unbiased catalog of events over "We Are the World" sentimentality or rheteoric from agenda-driven dissemblers like Jeffrey Sachs. You know the drill: whatever the problem, America is either the prime causal agent or at best a callously indifferent bystander.
This book fundamentally changed my outlook. I grew up with a romanticized notion of Africa informed by little more than Edgar Rice Burroughs and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. The romantic view is gone but I am as fascinated as ever by Africa, and I still hope to visit.
In the meantime, I've read a handful of related books of widely varying scope. "When a Crocodile Eats the Sun," "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," "Dark Star Safari," "King Leopold's Ghost," "Blood River,"
"Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone;" all of these were compelling to one degree or another. But "The Fate of Africa" is just about indispensable, and it's at least as entertaining as the more personal accounts I just mentioned.
Buy this book if you care at all for the topic. If nothing else, you'll be able to hold your own in cocktail party debates on the relative hideousness of Bokassa versus Nguema versus Amin, to name just a few notables on the nightmare continuum of African Big Men.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Instant classic, 2008-08-21
It is understandably difficult to write a one-volume history of a continent as diverse as Africa. Nonetheless, I think Mr. Meredith has written a fine example. In the process, he avoids the pitfalls commited by many Third Worldist ideologists who paternalize Africa and place the majority of the blame for its current state on external actors. Although Cold War rivalries certainly played a part, the reality, as Mr. Meredith ably documents, is that the continent's problems since independence have been first and foremost an indigenous leadership class often displaying stunning incompetence, greed, and bloodthirstyness.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Amazing Book, 2008-07-30
This is by far one of the best books I have ever read on African politics. It is the perfect book for someone who is starting to learn about African politics, wants to improve their knowledge, or just wants to learn about African history. This is a passionate, well-written book that I strongly recommend reading-you will not be sorry you did.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Africa , 2008-07-07
A compendium of African history from the partition to present day. If you are interested in knowing about African leadership and economic issues - this is the book.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Raises even more questions.., 2008-06-27
=== Summary ===
"This book follows the fortunes of Africa in modern times, opening in the years that it sped towards independence and encompassing the half-century that has since passed. It focuses in particular on the role of a number of African leaders whose characters and careers had a decisive impact on the fate of their countries." (13)
"Although Africa is a continent of incredible diversity, African states have much in common, not only their origins as colonial territories, but the similar hazards and difficulties they have faced. Indeed, what is so striking about the fifty-year period since independence is the extent to which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes."
"In reality, fifty years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa's prospects are bleaker than ever before." (681)
"Half of Africa's 880 million people live on less than US$1 per day. Its entire economic output is no more than $420 billion, just 1.3 per cent of world GDP, less than a country like Mexico." (682)
"Sub-Saharan Africa is home to just 10 per cent of the world's population but bears more than 70 per cent of the world's HIV/Aids cases... Teachers die at a faster rate than replacements can be trained. the skill shortage grows worse." (682)
"When Abdou Diouf of Senegal accepted defeat in an election in March 2000, he was only the fourth African president to do so in four decades." (679)
"After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival." (688)
=== Main Argument ===
Meredith only ventures to make one claim: the failure in Africa is due to a failure in leadership (inexperience/incompetence, stubbornness/personality, corruption/greed, even downright tyranny.) He is more concerned with providing a morass of personalities, events, and statistics and letting the reading wade through it themselves. "It suffers from a tendency to emphasize the lurid details rather than examine why such patterns of behavior persisted."
== Contentions (Agreements/Disagreements) ==
Meredith's argument begs the question why leadership failed on such a spectacularly wide level in the first place. It is implausible to attribute this failure to individual personalities (it cannot be that every African statesman was of lower quality than their Western counterparts.) So what environmental factors were there? He briefly touches on many of them, but gives no idea as to their relative importance:
* Contemporary factors: idea of nationalism quickly snowballs.
* Historical factors: ethnic tensions, lack of national identity, types of colonial management.
* Foreign policy factors: meddling by former colonial masters, Cold War tensions.
* Cultural factors: use of military power to settle scores (?), steal from government for factional gain.
* Economic factors: poverty, wide-spread discontent, uneducated masses. (Newly capitalist countries are likely to create the conditions for first generation greed. See China.)
* Political factors: no frameworks to limit corruption (free media, checks and balances, political experience/history, good civil servants).
=== Contentions (Part II) ===
He also talks about the mass movement towards democratization, but is incoherent in explaining how/why it materialized and unconvincing in labeling it as the new lodestar. "During the 1990s, at least 25 countries established 'multi-party democracies.'" (677) Part of this, I am sure, is because we are in the middle of this new phase. Here are some of the factors regarding democratization:
* Contemporary factors: first batch of dictators die of old age, resign, coup'd, find more pleasure in telling stories, etc.
* Foreign policy factors: regional powers emerging, regional policing, increased usage of (surprisingly effective!) international sanctions.
* Cultural factors: people are tired of dictators and war, groundswell of movement.
* Economic factors: nothing left to plunder.
* Political factors: ...
=== Insights Raised (wrt present-day Africa) ===
Meredith mostly does not offer solutions. But, one can examine the past to see what commercial failures existed:
* Corruption and contractual "fees" create operational difficulties/slowness.
* History of "nationalizing" commercial/Western property to fund corrupt governments.
* Even good governments become corrupt or have the constant threat of being overthrown.
* Groundswell of discontent against all signs of Western capitalism is a cultural theme and continental paranoia (justified or not).
=== Raised Questions ===
* Why did Africa fail? What are the relative importance of factors behind the decline of African states between freedom and present-day? And where does colonial history, indigenous society, trade barriers, etc. come into play?
* Given how shared the fate of the continent is, are these factors shared between all the nations on the continent? Or did the factors only impact a handful of nations and cause a snowball effect (see: land-lock hypothesis)?
* What about the countries that did do well (eg. Botswana, Senegal)? These are glossed over. What caused their exceptional performance?
* Why didn't South Africa decline like its neighbors? Did the white rule there help? All the whites clamoring for "no majority rule" or claiming Africans weren't equipped to govern themselves are painted as ignorant. But it is true that there was no institutional knowledge of political systems upon freedom; knowledge takes time to transfer over.
* Where do we go from here? What time period are we currently in and what can we learn from the past to move forwards in the present?
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