_The Fate of Africa_ by Martin Meredith is a impressively through (688 pages) and yet highly readable account of the history of Africa - all of Africa, including North Africa - since independence, beginning (after a good introductory chapter on general African history) with the independence of the Gold Coast (becoming Ghana) in 1957 all the way up until events in the mid 2000s, including such issues as the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, the civil wars in Liberia and Angola, the collapse of Joseph Desire Mobutu's Zaire, Nigerian delta oil politics, the genocide in Darfur, Robert Mugabe's ruinous reign over Zimbabwe and his seizure of white-owned farms, the AIDS epidemic, the advent and role of conflict diamonds, and post-Apartheid and post-Mandela politics in South Africa.
Though this book could have been a sprawling if interesting mess, trying to cover fifty years of history of a huge continent, it isn't, as Meredith did a good job with the material. Part of it is from his excellent writing style and his vivid and engrossing portrait of Africa's often quite colorful leaders, but part of it is sad to say from a theme that gets hammered home again and again with many examples from fifty years of African history. With a special emphasis on the role of African leaders and their role in the fate of their countries, Meredith examines why, "after the euphoria of the independence era, so many hopes and ambitions faded and why the future of Africa came to be spoken of only in pessimistic terms." Though acknowledging the diversity of Africa, he noted that African states have much in common in terms of their origins and the problems they face. Time and again, Meredith in his country by country history of the continent provided tragic examples of states with vast economic potential being ruined by the "predatory politics of ruling elites seeking personal gain," often exploiting ethnic tensions for their own ends (it was sickening to read the political and economic motivations of those who helped fan the flames of genocide in Rwanda for instance, or how Mugabe essentially ended up ruining Zimbabwe, blaming and in the end chasing away the vital white farmers in order to cover up his own massive mistakes). Many though not all colonies at independence were often able to produce nearly all their own food and had a functioning infrastructure of roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, and a civil service as well as in many cases a thriving export industry, but after often epic mismanagement and corruption, massive embezzlement, squandering of national budgets on useless prestige projects, and ruinous involvement in foreign wars, most African states "have become hollowed out," no longer able to provide basic services, able to feed themselves, mired in debt, dependent upon international aid, the only ones in the country wealthy are governments themselves and the "vampire-like" politicians who run them as personal fiefdoms and who come to regard the populations they rule over "as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival." You can count on one hand the number of times African leaders have peacefully allowed themselves to be voted out of office, and even when regimes do change, as the result of either a military coup or a popular uprising, that despite initial hope and euphoria, the only result is a different group of politicians and their friends siphoning off a nation's resources and often times a different ethnic group being persecuted. Africa in the 1980s was dominated by Big Men, dictators who tolerated no opposition or dissent and whose faces appeared on currency notes and their faces looming over stores and offices. While many dictatorships in Africa fell in the early 1990s, a new breed of dictators emerged, adept at maintaining the appearance of a democracy in order to appease foreign aid donors while maintaining the same systems of patronage and autocratic rule of their predecessors, replacing "Big Man" rule with "Big Man democracy." Even attempts at reform backfired; when the IMF and the World Bank pushed African states towards parastatal reform, notably the privatization of public companies and factories, what instead emerged was "Crony capitalism" as government assets were instead sold off to select businessmen and friends on highly favorable terms (often ruinous to the government). In worse cases "cannibal capitalism" emerged as state-controlled industries were looted for the gain of politicians (so bad was the plundering in Zaire for instance of state-owned mining companies that copper production fell from 450,000 tons in the 1970s to 30,600 tons in 1994 and diamond production was nearly halved).
Much of the book as noted is a country by a country account of the main points of recent African history. Some of the events might be fairly well known to the general reader, such as Algerian war of independence in the 1950s and 1960s and the1980s famine in Ethiopia (though I wager many of the details will be quite surprising). Other events a good deal less so, such as the insane regime of Francisco Macias Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (among other things, he personally hoarded all foreign currency, ordered foreigners ransomed to generate income, banned the use of the word "intellectual," and decreed that priest must reiterate slogans such as "There is no God other than Macias"), Julius Nyerere's socialist experiments in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania (which included mass nationalization and a gathering of the scattered rural population into poorly planned and poorly run communal "ujamaa" villages, a movement of some 11 million people, the largest mass movement in African history), and how the Rwandan genocide and resulting conflict's aftermath lead to a massive four year war in the late 1990s in Zaire in which 3 million people died and "like vultures picking over a carcass," Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola, and Zimbabwe engaged in a scramble for "the spoils of war," tearing apart the country fighting each other and trying to secure Congolese mineral wealth and their own private business empires.
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Top reviews from other countries
Stephen
This is the US edition of 'The State of Africa'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 28, 2007Valerie Ashbourne
A depressing read in smany ways but an apparently well ...
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