The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair
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Product Description
An epic biography of post-colonial Africa, and illuminating insight into its current devastating problems, by one of its most authoritative scholars
Fifty years ago, as Europe’s colonial powers withdrew, Africa stirred with enormous hope and vehemence toward democracy and economic independence. Dozens of new states were launched amid much jubilation and the world’s applause. African leaders, popularly elected, stepped forwards to tackle the problems of development and nationbuilding. In the Cold War era, the new states excited the attention of the superpowers. Africa was considered too valuable a prize to lose.
Today, Africa is a continent rife with disease, death, and hurt. Most African countries are effectively bankrupt, prone to civil strife, theme to dictatorial rule, and dependent on Western help for survival. The sum of Africa’s misfortunes-its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts-is truly daunting.
What went incorrect? What happened to this vast continent, so rich in resources, culture and history, to bring it so close to insolvency and despair in the space of two generations? Focusing on the key personalities, events and themes of the independence era, Martin Meredith’s riveting narrative history seeks to explore and clarify the heap problems that Africa has faced in the past half-century, and faces still. From the giddy enthusiasm of the 1960s to the “coming of tyrants” and rapid decline, The Fate of Africa is essential reading for anyone seeking to know how it came to this-and what, if anything, is to be done.
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I have just opened this book and establish a pathetic error. I have yet to start reading the book but it recieves a “3″ off the bat. In the front of the book, where it has maps of Africa in 1955 and 2005, THE MAP OF 2005 DOES NOT INCLUDE THE COUNTRY OF MALI!!!!!!! IT IS LEFT OFF THE MAP!!!! It’s limits are within Mauritania and Mali is not labeled. How does this get past the editors of what is suppose to be the best book written on Africa in ten years! wow.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
The vital thing to remember about this book is that Martin Meredith is a very excellent journalist but he is not an historian; and thus this book is not history. It therefore should not be misconstrued as a history of Africa since African independence. It is a very well place together chronicle, a snapshot of one man’s selection of key events at one point in Africa’s history, accompanied by his own brief interpretation of them.
The leader’s nearly 800-page, nearly clinically dispassionate, country-by-country analysis of Africa after independence is easily recognizable for what it is: the “memory dump” of the logbook of a traveling journalist. And in as much as this is right, no one should be surprised at the book’s rather narrow “fact-based focus.” Thus, “The Fate of Africa” is neither history nor political science. And since it is lacking a context, it isn’t even a excellent travelogue — of the genre of Sanford Unger’s and additional wandering Afrophiles of the past. These travelogues, one may recall, came with an wide context that demonstrated the leader’s interactive facility with the cultures in question. Pure and simple, “The Fate of Africa” is political commentary “at a safe distance from Africa,” minus any semblance of being African history.
It is this, at precisely the time in Africa’s history when the one thing that is sorely needed is not more “analysis at a distance” about Africa’s fate, but serious, sober analysis and explanations of the causes of the current continent-wide cultural melt down. One would not be too incorrect in suggesting that “The Fate of Africa” may be the best evidence yet available that, but accurately facts are arrayed and strung together, arrangement of facts alone, “does not a history make.”
Thus it is unfortunate that the skilled hands of a fine journalist like Mr. Meredith, has not translated into being an asset to this book. In his much too tightly all ears grip, African history after independence has been cut-rate to what the Mayans have described as the Pacific Ocean: “it is a world lacking a memory; it has no past.” By design, it seems, Mr. Meredith’s coldly calculated fact-based version of African culture and politics since independence has been cutoff from, and completely stripped away from, African history – especially from its recent colonial past, which, arguably is at least as sordid as the events the leader describes as Africa’s fate since independence. And most importantly, it is history that alone can account for the hurt Mr. Meredith so accurately describes.
The clear implication, left dangling in the air as a pregnant hypothesis and part of a familiar subtext about Africa (and the African Diaspora more generally), is the suggestion that: “having achieved their independence, shouldn’t blacks on the continent (and by extension in the Diaspora) be doing much better?”
Lacking the support of history, lacking a proper context, there is of course only one possible answer to this question, and it is a loud yes, Africans everywhere should be doing better, much better. But just as “The Fate” leaves one pregnant question dangling, it begs another one: Is it really honest to insinuate such a question about Africa’s Fate in the abstract — as if Africa had no past, especially no colonial past? I judge the answer to this question is an equally loud, no. It is not honest.
And here is at least one reason why:
Any reasonable reader will not fail to see hidden in the shadows of this text the ancient familiar lament of the black man being “The White Man’s Burden.” This is of course the real subtext of Meredith’s book. It is about the white man’s belief in congenital black inabilities – about the similarities between the melt down since “African independence” and the companion melt down in America’s ghettoes since “Black slaves were freed.” The subtext is sort of an unstated global smear of blackness, an nearly existential slander that is deeply encoded in Western thought and its primordial racist ideology.
But there is no way either of these twin subtexts can be addressed lacking a direct appeal to and confrontation with history and lacking serious past analysis. It is simply unfair to place as an unstated insinuation that history, past background and context, and past analysis play no part in these respective fates, and thus are unnecessary to clarify either Africa’s or Black America’s desperate conditions.
Why must history be invoked? Because lacking dismantling and destroying the structures that supported colonialism and that continue to support American style racism and Apartheid, African independence and Negro freedom, lower to mere empty abstractions. They do not become real until the structures that gave rise to them are dismantled and eliminated. And, in either the case of Africa since independence; or America, since emancipation, this dismantlement has not occurred. And that fact is about history, not about television journalism.
As Meredith’s facts so aptly demonstrate. To a man, the creatures of horror continuing to stalk and ravage Africa – the so-called Huge Men or Kleptocrats (Mubuto, Amin, Bokassa. Lumumba, Nguema Mobutu, Nyerere, Banda, to name only a few) all had “made in the West” stamped on their foreheads. And persons who failed to tow the Western line such as Mugabe, Kaunda, Kenyatta, Mengistu, Nasser, and Nkrumah were either set up for economic failure, overthrown by Western intelligence, or ridiculed and isolated and deposed by puppets privileged by the West. This is history, not isolated facts, not mere television journalism.
The same is right of Africans in the U.S.
Out of necessity, an Uncle Tom Nation of “accommodationists Negroes” has evolved as the desperate global response to entrenched and persistent unending racism. In the past, this “black landed gentry” was made up of persons all too willing to accept Jim Crow and Apartheid in exchange for a reduction in the freedoms that had been promised but which were unlikely to ever be delivered, in any case. Today, it is only cosmetically different from that hideous and brutal past. This too is painful history, not mere television journalism.
The Uncle Tom Landed gentry whether in Africa or the U.S. is the lock that separates backwardness from progress. It is redeemed and paid off in personal perks, and individual entitlements, and awards to the surrogates of white supremacy, in lieu of not having to take up wider Black concerns and issues. Therefore we still have the dramatic ghettos of Detroit, Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago and LA. Exactly the same phenomenon that occurs in Africa, where the Huge Men and their linked “Vampire Aristocracies” rake off the cream of African resources and ships them to the West in exchange for Mercedes Benzs and additional gaudy Western trinkets. What is left in each case is a prostrate populous with an exceedingly dim future.
In Africa, this is called “independence” in the same way that America’s “Uncle Tom Nation” is called “democratic freedom.”
In the end a journalist snapshot is a mere detail, a thumbnail sketch of a much larger picture, a factual abstraction of a much larger and deeper human drama. Such details make appealing reading but they do not add up to a full history. Five stars.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Content is informative and well-written. Editing is disgraceful. At least four times I establish myself reading what appeared to be a section that belonged in a different chapter.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I have not read the book because it was a Christmas gift to my son. He is reading it and enjoying it at last report.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
The blurb from Publishers Weekly on the back of the book has it right: this is but a digest of Africa’s woes – it describes everything and clarifies nothing. I was hoping for an explanation of why Africa has gone backwards as they rest of the world has progressed – why Africa’s leaders have been so exceptionally venal, cruel and megalomaniacal, why its people have submitted to such misrule for so long. But you won’t find it here.
As a digest of African post-colonial history the book is a fine one, the writing clear and the organization sensible. It just wasn’t the book I was hoping for.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5