Books this year: a book diary

My friend Caleb showed me this book in May 2009. I started reading it after he’d finished, but was unable to finish before he needed it back. The book was so good, I had to buy my own copy when I was in the US for holiday.

This is the story of post-independence Africa starting around 1950 until the 2000s. Although not completely organized in this way, most of the chapters cover one or two countries during a particular period. You then usually meet the same country again 10 or 15 years later in 10 chapters or so. It’s a little jarring sometimes, but probably the best way to respect chronology and the sequence of movements and ideas, as well as staying focused on one place at a time.
The problems confronted by Africa, as well as many other places in the world, are unfortunately usually presented in a vacuum by the media. This makes it very hard to understand cause and effect, so this book really helped me to understand why people are fighting and starving in this place or that. For example, one must understand the revolution in 1974 in Portugal if one is to understand the happenings in Mozambique and Angola shortly thereafter. And one must understand the happenings in those countries to understand things that happened in other sub-Saharan African countries.

I’m currently volunteering in Namibia. If you ask a Namibian, they portray their independence as a military victory won by a bloody struggle. In fact, independence for Namibia was part of a peace deal for Angola reached by the South Africans, Cubans, Russians, and Americans. So it is that in order to establish a sense of national unity and pride, Namibians and those living in other young nations have their own independence struggles grossly obscured and revised by central governments.

In the end, Meredith sort of ends in despair. He talks of all the times things have seemed extremely promising, and all the times we’ve been let down shortly thereafter. He identifies bad governance as the worst problem in Africa and doesn’t suggest how it can be repaired. He lists only South Africa and Botswana as nations that appear to be in good shape in terms of government at present and I agree with him, although both of those countries have huge problems with AIDS. I don’t really have answers either, but I do know that eliminating trade barriers would be worth much more money than all the aid we’re giving. I also think microfinance is a very much better way to handle the situation of aid. Empowering local people to solve their own problems, whilst still holding people accountable to repayment seems to me to be a much more sound policy for the future of Africa.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 9:37 am and is filed under Books read by Levi, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.