Central Africa: Crises, Reform and Reconstruction (review)

This is a multidisciplinary book, which addresses two major sets of issues pertinent to Central Africa: (1) nation-building and regional integration, and (2) democratization and governance. Although it focuses more on Cameroon than any other country in the region, it covers a range of issues that are more generally relevant to the contemporary African condition. Thus, among fourteen individual contributions, the coverage includes the problems facing regional economic blocs (Arsene Honoré Gideon Nkama), the paucity of anglophone newspapers (Victor Cheo and Henry Muluh), the management of ethnic diversity (Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo), the NEPAD initiative (Ntangsi Max Memfih), lessons of the DR Congo conflict (Oladiran W. Bello), the tribulations of democratic transition (Valentine Ameli Tabi), and protection against human-rights abuses (Margaret Ayike).

The volume is the result of the CODESRIA thirtieth-anniversary conference, held with a focus on Central Africa in Douala in 2003. The contributors, with one or two exceptions, are scholars from the region. It is testimony to the vitality of the academic community, especially in the host country, Cameroon. The editors are senior scholars at the University of Yaounde. Most of the contributors are younger scholars, working in the same university or other institutions of higher learning in Cameroon, including the University of Buea and the University of Tschang. Although the book centers primarily on economic and political issues, contributors represent a variety of disciplines, including history, journalism, economics, sociology, law, and political science.

The book is a testimony to the facilitating and catalyzing role played by CODESRIA, which continues to ensure that African academics have a reliable outlet for their research, one that reaches not only countries on the African continent, but also interested fellow academics in Europe and North America. For this reason alone, I am pleased to have had a chance to read and review this book.

Like other edited volumes, this volume has its problems. One is the coverage. As the editors point out, Central Africa has never been single political entity. It is more a geographical notion, covering as vast an area as Angola, the Congo Basin, and the Sahelian belt east of Nigeria and west of the Sudan. It is not easy to find a set of common criteria for comparison—an ambition that the editors also avoid. The contributions are held together by their focus on a single country, Cameroon. The issue that the book does not address directly is how representative the coverage of that country is for the rest of the region.

Another problem is coherence. There are some contributions, notably one on youth and environmental education, that really are marginal in relation to the thrust of the book. Even a fascinating narrative, about what happened to a piece of village art with local religious significance—the Afo-a-kom, which was stolen in 1966 and has been lost ever since—is not, despite its focus on the extent to which the theft helped generate a national consciousness in Cameroon, really integrated into the whole. In short, the editors do not strive for a coherence derived from a common theoretical framework. The volume is a loose assemblage of individual contributions, most of which for the benefit of the reader are well researched and interesting in their own right.

A third problem is several contributors' tendency to be overly prescriptive. While their concern for recommending reforms and changes in the economic and political systems is understandable, given the frustrations that academics have suffered in Cameroon for many years, their prescriptions typically rest on shallow or insufficient analysis. Even if the reader sympathizes with the authors' recommendations and conclusions, it is usually unclear how they are arrived at and what empirical evidence backs them up. I wish the authors had been more careful and circumspect in treating the economic and political issues that they cover.

These reservations notwithstanding, this is a book that deserves attention. It is not necessarily a textbook to be used in...