The Fate of Africa

**** - The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith. Trying to write a comprehensive text on the history of post-colonial Africa is definitely an ambitious task. In just under 700 pages, he works to provide a bit of historical context and then study the past 50 years and how they have shaped modern Africa. For a continent of several dozen countries and 880 million people, this task is simply too ambitious. For example, I didn't really learn anything about Niger, Western Sahara, Guinea-Bissau and Benin, while the treatment of countries like Djibouti, Mauritania, Namibia, Burundi and several others was fairly bare. However, the main reason that this was so disappointing was that the story was so well told for some of the other countries on the continent.

Meredith does a great job providing anecdotes and compelling details that really add texture to the picture. He does a good job of reminding us that many of the cruelest dictators had broad support at one point or another, while remaining unsympathetic to their authoritarian practices and the powers that treated them as pawns in their diplomatic aims (not just Cold War battles, but also African leaders vying to strengthen their own diplomatic clout). Although the narration becomes a bit disjointed at times, jumping between countries and chronologies, but many of the episodes had such regional importance that he can be forgiven for some of the difficulties. Also, the book has a comprehensive bibliography at the back, although an annotated version of the bibliography would probably be much more useful.

The historical perspective also provides some useful insights into other modern debates. Many aid skeptics do not offer enough historical context into their analyses of why aid programs fail and how those programs could be improved. Also understanding why modern structures are in place and how they were developed is a very useful tool for people working to improve those structures and deliver better governance. Most importantly, the book is a catalog of failures of diplomacy that offer useful lessons to people in that line of work.

The book was not without flaws. There are only a few maps at the start of the book, while he regularly refers to places that are not market and paints a difficult geographic picture. The editors seemed a bit lazy at times, letting slip some minor errors, but also offering questionable judgment on chapter titles (a chapter which is 2/3 about the horrors and injustices of South Africa's apartheid regime and only at the end talks about the end of apartheid should really not be titled "A Time of Triumph"). Still, the book is definitely worth reading and the writing makes it easy to absorb the information in there.