The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
Book Review: So much more...
Summary: 4 Stars
A riveting narration of African troubled history
Textbook material turned into a moving revelation
Objective and thorough yet compelling and captivating
Book Review: Great Book
Summary: 5 Stars
As a student of Africa and a former peace corps volunteer in Mali, I have read many titlbooks with titles that have words like "Hope", "Fate", Future", "Poverty", "Horror", and "Famine", but this one is the best so far. I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious thirst for understanding this continent and I am grateful for Mr. Meredith's wisdom concerning this very important part of our world. Book Review: A Journalist's snapshot is not History
Summary: 5 Stars
The important thing to remember about this book is that Martin Meredith is a very good 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 put 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 author's nearly 800-page, almost 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 true, 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 without a context, it isn't even a good travelogue -- of the genre of Sanford Unger's and other wandering Afrophiles of the past. These travelogues, one may recall, came with an extensive context that demonstrated the author'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 wrong in suggesting that "The Fate of Africa" may be the best evidence yet available that, however 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 focused grip, African history after independence has been reduced to what the Mayans have described as the Pacific Ocean: "it is a world without 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 author describes as Africa's fate since independence. And most importantly, it is history that alone can account for the devastation 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?"
Without the support of history, without a proper context, there is of course only one possible answer to this question, and it is a resounding 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 fair to insinuate such a question about Africa's Fate in the abstract -- as if Africa had no past, especially no colonial past? I believe the answer to this question is an equally resounding, no. It is not fair.
And here is at least one reason why:
Any reasonable reader will not fail to see hidden in the shadows of this text the old 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 almost 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 without a direct appeal to and confrontation with history and without serious historical analysis. It is simply unfair to leave as an unstated insinuation that history, historical background and context, and historical analysis play no part in these respective fates, and thus are unnecessary to explain either Africa's or Black America's desperate conditions.
Why must history be invoked? Because without dismantling and destroying the structures that supported colonialism and that continue to support American style racism and Apartheid, African independence and Negro freedom, reduce 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 journalism.
As Meredith's facts so aptly demonstrate. To a man, the creatures of horror continuing to stalk and ravage Africa - the so-called Big 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 those 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 favored by the West. This is history, not isolated facts, not mere journalism.
The same is true 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 aristocracy" was made up of those 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 ugly and brutal past. This too is painful history, not mere journalism.
The Uncle Tom Aristocracy whether in Africa or the U.S. is the wedge 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 address 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 Big Men and their associated "Vampire Aristocracies" rake off the cream of African resources and ships them to the West in exchange for Mercedes Benzs and other 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 interesting reading but they do not add up to a full history. Five stars.
Book Review: The rape of Africa
Summary: 5 Stars
Martin Meredith has written a highly erudite history of Africa since independence of Ghana in 1957. Before then Africa had been broken up into countries that had neither natural borders nor contained peoples that could be expected to form a nation. Upon independence, there was considerable hope that Africa would break the yoke of colonialism and rather flourish among the world community of nations. Unfortunately just the opposite happened. He shows that most African nations have been cursed by a succession of rapacious leaders who have ensured that the resources of the nation are used first for their personal benefit and that of their family and associates. The people can only expect the crumbs if any. Even when a country was blessed with a benign leader, the political decisions often led to an economic disaster. The book makes gripping reading for the extremes of horror that each country was exposed to. The future of Africa can only improve with the right leadership. This book should be read by every person concerned about the people of Africa as well as visitors to the continent.
Book Review: fifty years of failure
Summary: 5 Stars
In the late 19th century, in the space of fifty years or so, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Belgium carved up Africa among themselves in an orgy of violence and greed. Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness (1902) was one of the first to narrate the devastating legacy of European exploitation and colonialism. More recent studies have included Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, and Barbara Kingsolver's novel The Poisonwood Bible, both treatments of the Congo published in 1998. With nearly a dozen important books about Africa to his credit, Martin Meredith's massive tome begins where Thomas Pakenham left off in his panoramic book, The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (1991).
There are very few bright spots for the 880 million people who live today in Africa's 53 countries. Nelson Mandela showed what sound judgment, integrity and a conciliatory posture can accomplish. Even so, most people in South Africa remain abysmally poor, and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, defended the psychopathic dictator Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and alternately claimed that HIV did not exist or that it was a white conspiracy. Compared to South Africa, most of Africa fares far worse. With only four independent states in Africa in 1945, Meredith documents this continental disaster country by country, beginning with Ghana's independence on March 6, 1957. Conventional wisdom argues that nothing could have been worse than colonial rule. Meredith demonstrates how and why this conventional wisdom is probably false.
After nearly 700 pages of meticulous research (and moving prose), Meredith finishes with a concluding chapter. Despite rhetoric about an African "renaissance," by almost every conceivable index Africa today faces complex problems of epic proportions. Fifty years after independence, its prospects, he believes, "are bleaker than ever before." As for politics and democracy, for example, "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." Half of all Africans live on less than US$1 a day. Its world trade has plummeted by half since 1980. It is the only part of the world where school enrollment is falling--40% of all Africans and 50% of African women cannot read. Life expectancy is dropping. AIDS has taken a devastating toll. Worst of all, Africa will never succeed without significant aid from the West, but these countries, having poured $300 billion into Africa with very little to show for it, are more reluctant than ever to invest. Even if the West did help, Meredith believes, "the sum of Africa's misfortunes--its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts, its everyday violence--presents a crisis of such magnitude that it goes beyond the reach of foreseeable solutions." Ultimately, in his opinion, Africa's own "Big Men" dictators are to blame, for they are the ones who have plundered the continent for personal gain and political power.
I am interested to see what Meredith's study does to conversations about Africa, especially in light of outspoken advocates for vigorous intervention like Bono and Jeffrey Sachs (The End of Poverty, 2005). Further, given the magnitude of Africa's dysfunction, this book renewed my appreciation for all the many NGOs, Christian and otherwise, that have not given up but have served Africa with expertise, passion, and love. Finally, having traveled to Africa five times, I echo Meredith's tribute to "the resilience and humor with which ordinary Africans confront their many adversities."