The Poverty of Leadership in Africa

In this 700-page volume Meredith compiles a history of Africa from the anti-colonial period to the present. The Fate of Africa is a journalist's narrative of what has gone wrong in Africa since the nationalist movements of the early 20th century. What the book misses in terms of analytical and theoretical sophistication, it makes up for by prying apart a labyrinth of names, events, places, and wars that are pertinent to the portrait of Africa's contemporary plight. Although Meredith does not state the question in specific terms, the book surveys the entire continent, seeking to explain what dashed the immediate post-colonial hopes of freedom, thus leading to today's desperate conditions. There are few books that have attempted such an ambitious undertaking.

The book is divided into four parts: Part I describes the permutations and in most cases the violence of the nationalist struggles that marked the continent's liberation from colonial oppression. It provides particular case studies in Francophone Africa, such as Algeria, in Anglophone Africa, such as Kenya and Ghana, "the White South," including South Africa and Zimbabwe and the struggles of the Lusophone states of Mozambique and Angola. Because this is not an analytical exposition readers are left to draw their own conclusion—mine was that Africa's fate is partly a function of the anti-colonial (not democratic) nature of the nationalist independence struggles. This open-endedness both helps and detracts from the book. It is an advantage in that readers are allowed to discern their own views from the facts without being led one way or another. It detracts from the book's mission, particularly for those readers who have no background or context within which to place and comprehend the narrative. Part II presents the events of the immediate post colonial period—a time characterized by a short honeymoon and then immediately followed by the rise of tyrants and despots such as Jean Bedel Bokassa, Idi Amin, and Macias Nguema. This leadership vacuum presaged a period of economic decline and social upheaval. But the Zaire political and economic debacle topped them all, thus earning a chapter of its own. Part III gives an account of Africa's syndrome of leadership myopia, economic malaise and social disintegration known as the "lost decade" of the 1980s. Meredith uses a number of country vignettes to portray a continent in radical stress. Ethiopia registered a horrendous famine and thousands of deaths; religious cleavages threatened to tear northern Sudan away from the south; the AIDS pandemic claimed millions across the continent; and democratic movements clashed with autocratic leaders in Kenya, Gabon, Malawi, Senegal, Nigeria, Zaire, and Togo. The only sign of hope was the end of apartheid in South Africa and the triumph of Nelson Mandela. Finally, Part IV brings the reader to the present, providing colorful, albeit tragic, case studies of Africa's political jam. These include the toxic mix of Islam, politics and terrorism in Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria; the debacle of the failed humanitarian project in Somalia known as "Black Hawk Down"; the genocide in Rwanda and the ensuing tragedy in the Great Lakes region; the civil and interstate wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone and the senseless waste of diamond wealth to finance these conflicts; the civil wars in Sudan, first between north and south, and then Darfur; the (mis)use of oil to finance the Angolan civil war; the catastrophic collapse of Zimbabwe under the weight of an octogenarian fallen hero—Mugabe. Part IV concludes by highlighting the tragic consequences of the poverty of leadership in Africa. Meredith mourns the millions of AIDS victims who died in South Africa because President Thabo Mbeki for a long time denied the existence of AIDS and contested the established medical community's view that the pandemic was caused by HIV. The concluding chapter of the book reads like an addendum rather than a synthesis...