"The Fate of Africa" - 1951-Present

[Kire]

Books of The Times | 'The Fate of Africa'
Africa and Its Rapacious Leaders

By JANET MASLIN
Published: August 8, 2005

In the words of an African proverb cited in Martin Meredith's Sisyphean new volume: "You never finish eating the meat of an elephant." That thought is summoned by the overwhelmingly difficult assignment that this historian, biographer and journalist has given himself. He has set out to present a panoramic view of African history during the past half century, and to contain all its furious upheaval in a single authoritative volume.

Everything about this subject is immense: the idealism, megalomania, economic obstacles, rampant corruption, unimaginable suffering (AIDS, famine, drought and genocide are only its better-known causes) and hopelessly irreconcilable differences leading to endless warfare. "The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain but not eliminate the rebels," read a typically bleak 1969 American assessment of a standoff in Guinea-Bissau.

For the author, even organizing this information is a hugely daunting job. How can such vast amounts of information be analyzed for the reader? One way was to follow parallel developments in different places - which is more or less how Mr. Meredith works, with attention to the hair-trigger ways in which one coup or crisis could set off subsequent disasters. He is able to steer the book firmly without compromising its hard-won clarity.

He might just as easily have divided the book's terrain into geographical regions and studied each one chronologically. But one of his initial points is that even the boundaries that once defined African nations lacked legitimacy. When European colonial powers carved up the continent - in the so-called "Scramble for Africa" - late in the 19th century, the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked, "We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were."

"The Fate of Africa" does not even attempt to deal with such past outrages. In fact, its lack of range beyond the author's designated half century is a liability. But Mr. Meredith wisely begins his narrative on Feb. 9, 1951, a pivotal date in the history of what was then Britain's Gold Coast (but would soon reclaim its earlier name, Ghana). On that day the political prisoner Kwame Nkrumah was elected to political office as Britain began fulfilling its promises for the country's self-determination. Four days later, Nkrumah was designated the new prime minister. And the cycle this book describes - from the shadow of colonialism to the bloom of self-government, onward to tyranny, profiteering and vicious internecine warfare - had begun.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/books/08masl.html?8bu&emc=bu

dear mods, I included a fifth paragraph because the fourth one didn't really complete the thought, IMHO