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Book Review

The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair

Martin Meredith

Public Affairs, 2005

For several years, this reviewer has kept clipping files on a large number of

subjects, among them Africa. Without a retention of the news reports, it is almost

impossible to recall the many events that have come along piecemeal. Even with theclippings, the process of putting the events together into a coherent whole is impossible

without taking on the prodigious job of compiling the information under a variety of

headings. Most often, the compilation remains unmade, since it only seems worth the

effort if it fits into a larger project, such as writing an article or a book.These thoughts are pertinent to show the value of Martin Merediths work, which,

in addition to its title and sub-title, bills itself as a history of fifty years of [African]

independence. Its virtue lies precisely in Merediths having put the whole history of post-

World War II Africa together in one telling. It is, accordingly, a gold mine of informationthat a reader can hardly have supplied for himself. Meredith is well equipped by

background to write this history. The Fate of Africa is his tenth book about Africa. At onetime a reporter for the Times of Zambia and for fifteen years a foreign correspondent based

in Africa, Meredith has most recently been a research fellow at St. Anthonys College,

Oxford.This review will eventually mention Merediths own biases and areas of

shallowness, but those will be left for later because they hardly affect his primary task. His

purpose has been to render, as readable history, a chronological account of the modern

history of Africa, beginning with the initial euphoria that Africans (and many outsideAfrica) felt about Africas prospects for a short time after the African nations received their

independence from the European powers soon after the middle of the twentieth century,and continuing with the bloody story of the long downward spiral that followed that initialhope and that continues to this very day. It will be helpful to give an overview of the

history Meredith recounts (with the caveat, of course, that a brief overview doesnt fit all

the specifics). To do so differs from Merediths own method, which is, on something of adecade-by-decade basis, to mix an overview of Africa as a whole with the specifics about

42 (weve counted them) separate countries.

Meredith focuses almost entirely on events after 1945, but it is necessary for him to

explain first how it was that many of the African countries came into existence and therebybecame candidates for eventual independence. The European powers scramble for

Africa in the last third of the nineteenth century established the colonies. The colonial

boundaries brought together in single entities a heterogeneous multitude of tribes,ethnicities, religions and languages. (As a result, when the colonies were granted

independence as states, they hardly constituted nations in the conventional sense, since

their populations in no sense constituted a single people.) The European presence didmuch to bring both Northern and sub-Saharan Africa into the modern age. Infrastructure of

many kinds was created, often where there had hardly been any before. Relatively soon,

however, the European powers came to feel that administering the colonies was more a

drag than a benefit, and they began to look to the colonies to pay their own way and often


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relied on local chieftains for the details of governance. This explains in part why the

European powers, exhausted by World War II and feeling the pressure of a worldwide

awakening of the peoples of color, were willing with relative haste to divest themselvesof the colonies in the 1950s and 1960s. This is not to say that the Europeans gave up their

role altogether; economic spheres of influence continued, and the European powers more

than once intervened out of a continuing sense of relatedness.The Africans were anxious to receive their independence; and as they received it,

there were high expectations for the future. Western aid flooded into the continent. It

wasnt long, however, before two things happened. One was the rise of charismatic strongmen, often backed by a dominant tribe or elite, who established personality cults, belied the

optimistic (albeit often socialistic) ideologies they at first proclaimed by establishing

unthinkably bloody dictatorships and one-party systems, used the state for monumental but

foolish projects, and made themselves and their cronies incredibly rich by corruption andbribery. The other was the advent of the Cold War struggle, which was a three-sided affair

in which primarily the United States sought to bolster any non-Communist regime, and the

Soviet Union and Communist China competed with each other to establish their individual

brands of Communism. This struggle in some instances produced Marxist-Leninistmonstrosities, such as under Mengistu in Ethiopia, but also warped the relation of the

United States and the West toward the African nations, since the exigencies of the struggleprompted support for even the worst of dictators where that was necessary to prevent a

void that would invite a Communist victory. African strong men often took opportunistic

advantage of this competition by playing one side against the others.The result was decades of repression, mass killings, long-standing dictatorships,

assassinations, coups, and enveloping economic and social chaos. Meredith tells us there

had been some improvement of conditions in the 1960s (the decade in which most were

given their independence) but that the 1970s brought a series of calamities. By the1980s, whatever industry there had been was largely gone, and the outcome for

agriculture was even worse, all despite immense amounts of aid from outside. Most

Africans lived from hand to mouth through subsistence agriculture, diseases ran rampant,and most of the population was illiterate and innumerate. Notwithstanding all this,

between 1950 and 1980, Africas population tripled. This brought calamities of its own

as vast numbers of desperate people flooded into the cities, creating miserable slums andhigh unemployment. The stage was set for the AIDS/HIV epidemic which began in 1985

and which has ravaged the continent ever since. By 1989, within a mere four years,

800,000 Ugandans, for example, were infected with HIV.

The cessation of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s changed the mix, and therewas again a resurgence of hope. Marxism-Leninism instantly lost its attraction and outside

support; and there was a radical redirection toward free-market reforms and

democratization. Or at least those were the aspirations of the international donorcommunity, the International Monetary Fund, and the western democracies. The results

were disappointingly cosmetic. A new breed of dictators emerged, adept at maintaining a

faade of democracy sufficient for them to be able to obtain foreign aid. The effect wasthat democratic change brought no amelioration to the economic crisis that virtually all

African states faced. Wars and genocides spread like cancers. In 2000 there were more

than ten major conflicts underway in Africa. And now, as the denouement of it all,

Meredith says, In reality, fifty years after the beginning of the independence era, Africas


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prospects are bleaker than ever before (emphasis added). Except that there can really be

no denouement as such; the play cannot simply come to an end, with the actors and

audience packing up and leaving. The wretched millions will continue to eke out theirlives, while continuing to multiply, and the outside world at least in part recoils, not

without reason, with aid fatigue.

This is it in a nutshell. The Fate of Africa is, however, more than an overview.It gives the detail about the progression of this woe within Africas many countries, with

particular emphasis on Algeria, Angola, Chad, the Congo (under its various names as The

Congo, then Zaire, and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Egypt, Ethiopia,Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda and

Zimbabwe. We are able to follow the careers of such men, among others, as

. Ahmed Ben Bella and Col. Houari Boumedienne in Algeria;

. Mathieu Kerekou in Benin;

. Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic;

. Francois Tombalbaye and Hissein Habre in Chad;

. Patrice Lumumba, Moise Tshombe and Joseph Mobutu in the Congo;

. Col. Gamal Nasser, Anwar al-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt;. Maj. Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia;

. Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry Rawlings in Ghana;

. Ahmed Sekou Toure in Guinea;

. Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi in Kenya;

. Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor in Liberia;

. Muammar Gaddafi in Libya;

. Hasting Banda in Malawi;

. Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and Gen. Sani Abacha in Nigeria;

. Leopold Senghor and Abdou Diouf in Senegal;

. Gen. Mohammed Siyad Barre and Gen. Muhammed Farah Aideed in Somalia;

. Hendrik Verwoerd, John Vorster, P.W. Botha, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela

and Thabo Mbeki in South Africa;. Gaafar Numeiri and Gen. Omar al-Bashir in Sudan;

. Julius Nyerere in Tanzania;

. Milton Obote, Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda; and

. Ian Smith, Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

Many of these are world-famous names, and it isnt too much to say that educated

individuals everywhere feel a need to know what these men stood for and did. That, of

course, is an insurmountable task without a book such as Merediths.So far, we have recounted the content ofThe Fate of Africa. The history brings to

mind several points that merit discussion:

1. In historical perspective, it is remarkable how brief the period of Europeancolonialism was. The slave trade had long produced contact on at least the periphery of

black Africa by some European powers, and a much more penetrating contact in the north

and east by the Arabs. But it will be surprising to someone not familiar with the historythat the scramble for Africa didnt occur until the final third of the nineteenth century.

Then the colonial period was over by shortly after the middle of the next century, thus

spanning a period of significantly less than a hundred years. If it werent for the fact that

the colonization had a profound effect in matters of infrastructure and administration, this


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would hardly seem more than a blip in the long history of the continent. And in many

fundamental ways, that is all it was. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular was extremely

primitive before the colonization, steeped in tribalism, animistic religions believing inmalevolent spirits, cannibalism, war, internal slavery, and ignorance. We should note that

the history that Meredith has to tell seems to reveal, in effect, a continuation of that

primitivism. This is made most evident when we read of post-independence cannibalismnot in some remote backwater, but by people at the topin places like the Central African

Republic, Uganda and Liberia.

2. Interestingly, despite the contemporary worlds near-universal condemnation ofcolonialism as having been a terrible imposition, there was no movement among

Africans themselves, upon receiving independence, to return to the decentralized tribalism

that had preceded the colonial period. Rather, the nations whose boundaries were

arbitrarily drawn by European powers on colonial maps were embraced as now beingnations as such, even though they contained a polyglot mixture of peoples. This

remarkable fact is surely worthy of comment; it means that there was a tacit recognition by

Africans themselves that the pre-colonial condition of Africa was not something to which

they wished to return. Though much condemned, the colonialism had at least offered abridge to the modern world.

It is true, however, that even though the Africans themselves accepted the colonialdivisions as the basis for their newly-independent states, they took over a nearly-impossible

situation. How to govern such impossible mixtures? The strong men who seized power

often justified their one-party rule as being the only way the mix could be madegovernable. Quite possibly they were righton this score, at least.

3. The loss ofesprit de corps, or what the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y

Gasset called elan vital, by Europeans during the sixty years since World War II is itself

a major fact worth noting. Europeans were no longer commanders of all they surveyed.They came to lack a tribal sense of their own, and withdrew into themselves. This left

out to dry the many thousands of whites who had gone to live in Africa and who had

supposed they were an enlightened element that would simultaneously serve themselvesand bring much good to an otherwise dark continent. There were some vestiges of white

solidarity at first, but it wasnt long before the West in general succumbed to the moral

pressure of the worlds people of color. This cut the ground out from under Europeanbastions everywhere, and most especially in Rhodesia and South Africa, both of which

were forced eventually to turn themselves over to black majority rule.

4. It is hard to read Merediths history without asking whether this submergence of

the European bastions not only produced tragedy for the white populations, but also ill-served the black majorities. It is fair to ask whether black Zimbabweans (erstwhile

Rhodesians) are nowand will be in the futurebetter off for having jettisoned the white-

centered civilization they inherited. The same question applies to South Africa.Merediths deep pessimism about the depths to which contemporary Africa has sunk

doesnt seem to suggest that South Africa in twenty, thirty or fifty years will necessarily

retain much resemblance to the advanced civilization that was delivered first to NelsonMandela and successively to Thabo Mbeki. Will the black majority itself be better off?

It is understandable, as perhaps a universal human yearning, for people to want to

be independent and self-determiningand the proud peoples of Africa certainly went in for

that in a big way in dethroning first the European powers and then the white remnants. But


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a wiser course, in terms of their own self-interest, would almost certainly have been to have

allowed themselves some concern about what it takes to maintainmuch less to advance

incivilization. It has been said that ideas have consequences; and Merediths historyseems to show that black pride, without more, has long-since proved its insufficiency.

5. The West in particular is full of benevolent regard for the African peoples, and

will no doubt give them much aid in the future, as it has in the past, despite the aidfatigue induced by the evident futility of past efforts. Memories are short, and as this is

written it is already being urged that the United Nations and the United States intervene in

the slaughter in Darfur in western Sudan even though the situation there is hardly morethan the chaos in Somalia writ large. We recall that it was that insufferable tangle that led

the U.S. and U.N. to withdraw so ingloriously from Somalia just a few short years ago.

Notwithstanding the outsides aid and attempted interventions, it is apparent that

the time has finally arrived when Africans of both the north and south will be put to thetest. What can they do with themselves? It could be said that they are at a cross-roads.

But it is more accurate to think that their mettle will be tested by the long grind ahead.

Will they be part of the modern world? At bottom, and in the due course of time, only

Africans can answer.6. Global implications are revealed by seeing Merediths The Fate of Africa in the

context of Amy Chuas discussion of worldwide ethnic animosities in her bookWorld onFire (which this reviewer examined in these pages in the Fall 2005 issue). Chua examines

34 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and even North America

(Mexico), giving the specifics about how in many cases minority ethnic groups have longdominated the economies and often the politics of nations that are otherwise inhabited by

much larger impoverished masses. This poses a dilemma for outsidersWilsonians, in

American parlancewho would presume to make the affairs of those many peoples their

business. It is a dilemma that is rarely, if ever, discussed, but that should be at the heart ofany debate over the wisdom of outside intervention. One horn of the dilemma is that a

populist approach, crusading for democracy, will (if democracy means anything at all)

champion the impoverished majorities, even if in doing so it will in many cases overturnthe productive strata that keeps a given societys head above water. The other horn is that

if the outsider champions the small, dominant (and often most productive) elite, the

intervener runs the risk of swimming in the face of a revolutionary tidal wave. SamuelHuntington told us in his The Clash of Civilizations that an outsiders attempt to refashion

those societies is both culturally presumptuous and physically dangerous. Now we see that

there is even more to itthat there is a fundamental policy dilemma that the outsiders (and

those who disagree with them) should consider quite seriously. To do so would go fartoward eliminating much of the naivete that underlies so much of what passes for

idealism in global meliorism.

7. We are shifting into a much lower gear when we mention the following subjects,but facts revealed by Merediths history have a distinct bearing on both:

The Congress of the United States in 1977 enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices

Act which outlawed the bribing of foreign governmental officials or political candidates.One wonders what world the sponsors of that legislation were thinking of, since they

hardly seem to have had their feet planted in this one. We see about Africa, first, that since

the nations received their independence a great many of their economic undertakings have

been conducted by (highly inefficient, corrupt) state-owned enterprises. This means that


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most people active in the economies of those countries have been government officials.

Second, we are told that it has hardly been possible to participate in those economies

without paying bribes, since bribery has been so integral a part of their web of cronyismand corruption. Meredith says, for example, that in Zaire nothing could be accomplished

without a bribe. He tells us that in many parts of West Africa there had been a long

tradition of dashof gift-giving for services rendered Foreign firms and localbusinessmen alike budgeted for the extra 10 per cent that had to be paid either to politicians

or to the ruling party. Given these conditions, thanks to the Act, an American firm has

had a choice either of treating such a country as off-limits (impairing the United Statesposition in world commerce) or of violating the law against bribery.

Some time ago, this reviewer wrote a monograph entitledLynchingAHistory and

Analysis. Among other things, the monograph offered evidence against the oft-repeated

truism, asserted within most of the literature on lynching, that the United States is the onlycountry whose people have engaged in lynching. The rebuttal of the truism wasnt hard to

come by. It is evident to anyone who has read much history that extra-legal executions

have been carried out with public condonation at some time or other in many countries.

Consistently with this, it is relevant to note that Meredith tells about a mass-lynching inLiberia in 1980: Amid much jubilation, watched by a crowd of thousands laughing and

jeering and filmed by camera crews, thirteen high-ranking officials were tied to telephonepoles on a beach in Monrovia and executed by a squad of drunken soldiers, firing volley

after volley at them The soldiers rushed forward to kick and pummel the corpses. He

also tells about the killing of the criminal element in Nigeria in 1999, where an Igbovigilante force known as the Bakassi Boys became infamous for its use of jungle justice

but was widely popular According to a report by the Civil Liberties Organisation in

2002, the Bakassi Boys were estimated to have executed as many as 3,000 people in

Anambra State over an eighteen-month period.8. Earlier, we said we would hold until later our mention of Merediths own biases

and the shallowness of some of his analysis. These shouldnt be omitted from our review,

even though they dont seriously impair his telling of the history.His principal bias reflects his premise of moral equivalency between the Soviet and

Chinese efforts to impose Marxism-Leninism in Africa and the United States activities

that opposed those efforts. Meredith rarely, if ever, says anything good about theCommunist interventions and tyrannies; but this does not keep him from casting repeated

aspirations on anti-Communist endeavors. When Mobutu in the Congo joined with the

United States in resisting Lumumbas bringing in of the Soviet Union, what it amounted to,

in Merediths words, was that Mobutu was a willing accomplice in the intrigues ofWestern governments. This moral equivalency that looks askance at both sides finds its

roots, perhaps, in his view that in a place like Angola each superpower was pursuing its

own prestige and preoccupation with the global balance of power. This is in line withwhat has been commonplace among foreign affairs realists, who have preferred to look at

the world as it was at the time of World War I, as a struggle among nation-states, and to

ignore ideology as a facade. This reduces the Cold War to a competition betweensuperpowers, not between the free world and an expansionist totalitarianism.

Meredith is similarly disposed in judging the remnants of European civilization in

Africa in contrast to the depravity he so vividly describes elsewhere. He doesnt hold

anything back in recounting Mugabes brutality in Zimbabwe, for example, but neither


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does he think well of Ian Smith, who sought to maintain the white-dominated social order

that preceded Mugabe. He details Mugabes atrocities, but sees no inconsistency in calling

Smith a die-hard. About South Africa, Meredith reports that it now has one of thehighest crime rates in the world and that by 2001 one million people had died of AIDS

and 5.3 million were infected with HIV, but this doesnt suggest to him that perhaps he

shouldnt take so jaundiced a view as he does of the white South Africa that existed underP. W. Botha. We realize, of course, that Merediths attitude about white South Africa is

fully in line with well-nigh universal conventional wisdom. That in itself isnt surprising,

but what is remarkable is that someone who is so well versed in the facts about Africa isntmoved to suggest a reevaluation of that wisdom.

Turning now to the shallownesses we perceive in Merediths history, we see that

they are not so much reasons to criticize him as they are a recognition that even a history as

comprehensive as his is significantly incomplete. As a good reporter, he has told the mainevents that have occurred. A complaint about historiography as it was written before the

age of empirical science is that there is a vast substrate of humanity, culture, mores,

religious beliefs, economic and demographic factors, etc., that lies under the surface of the

more attention-getting actions of political leaders. To Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace,Napoleon and Katusov, the two opposing generals in Russia, were merely bubbles riding

on historical waves far larger than themselves. Meredith inevitably gets into that substrateto a certain extent, such as when he tells of the AIDS epidemic; but mostly he is concerned

with the political historyactions at the top, so to speak. He gives abundant detail about

AIDS, without, however, giving any attention to African sexuality. Readers who want toget a feel for the gritty realities of African life below that surface will do well to read Paul

TherouxsDark Star Safari (2003), which was reviewed in this journal in the Winter 2004

issue. A powerful portrayal of the unfathomable complexities of ethnic strife and of a

primitive mentality can be found in Rian Milans excellentMy Traitors Heart(1990).Beyond the contemporary human substrate, there is a need to place Africas recent

history into historical perspective. What was African life like before the European

scramble for Africa? The many reports that came to the West from missionaries andexplorers in sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-nineteenth century told credible stories of

immense brutality, ignorance and superstition. With that as prologue, it is easier to

understand why post-independence Africa has been such a mess. The strong menthemselves reflected that earlier condition. (One example of their ignoranceor perhaps it

was just a perverse lust for poweris that so many embraced Marxist-Leninism long after

most people in the West and even among Communists themselves had heard the screams

and turned from it.) And even if they personally had not, they were trying to build in aswamp, with crocodiles all about.

Merediths discussion is ambitious in covering so well sixty years of recent African

history, and it is asking too much to expect him to have covered, also, the human substrateand the historical prologue. He is to be applauded for the job he has done.

Dwight D. Murphey

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