Martin Meredith

It's important that you realize one thing about this book: it is a history of how the peoples and land of Africa have been exploited from Egypt to the present; it not a history of Africa. I'd like to read Meredith do the latter, but this isn't it.

It's important to mention this because I can easily imagine someone criticizing this book for its focus on the various peoples who have done the exploiting, whether ancient Egyptian, Muslim, African or European. There's a great deal less in here show more about the good and great things that the various African peoples have done for themselves. Also, he's writing about thousands of years of history of a place that isn't really coherent at all. If you get nothing else out of this book, you'll get the huge differences between the regions of Africa. That means he has to make some big generalizations, and they can probably be picked apart by specialists. That's okay. We need the specialists. We also need the generalists.

With those caveat in mind, this is a glorious book. Meredith writes well, the structure is intuitive (i.e., though he jumps around in time and space, the jumps are never jarring, and are always signaled with section breaks etc...) I cannot explain how much I learned from this book.

And if you're concerned about political bias, which you should be in any book of this kind, know that Meredith is seriously biased against everyone. A typical string of argument leads from, say, the horrors of the intra-African slave trade, to the horrors of the slave trade to Europe, to the greater horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here most accounts fall silent. Meredith, instead, proceeds to discuss the ways that African leaders, from the earliest contacts with Muslim states through to the end of the American slave trade, used their people as a way to make wealth and consolidate their power. Most slaves, in other words, were sold by Africans. The trade only ended once the entire continent (minus Abyssinia) was colonized by European powers who opposed the slave trade.

Such is the history of the exploitation of Africa: if you think something's getting better (e.g., slave trade ends), rest assured that something else is getting much worse. show less

In the late 19th century, European powers went to work dividing up the continent of Africa among themselves. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, and Italy each took a piece in hope of increasing their own economies and their own power. By the 1950s, however, African population groups began to declare independence from their European overseers. One by one, countries emerged to form a modern Africa, but then, one by one, those same countries began to crumble under their own show more problems. Rampant cronyism, unmitigated illness, poor education, and a severe lack of infrastructure have led the continent of Africa to the state it’s in now. Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa is an unflinching look at the people and processes that have formed Africa as we know it today.

Each chapter of Meredith’s enormous treatise is a case study in poor governmental choices. Dictator after dictator emerges, corruption plagues the populace, and proper services cannot reach those that need them. Meredith makes no apologies for his views, but neither does he offer solutions. The problems are too complex for easy, book-length answers. It is true that the global community is still sending aid to Africa, but improper oversight of that aid means that it oftentimes ends up in the wrong areas or the wrong hands. Meredith’s history is replete with sadness, misery, and pain, but we as readers should not look away. In some cases, it is the only time we do look. A heavy but eye-opening book. show less

An impressive work, covering the post-war experience of a number of African countries in a set of short, crisp chapters that makes it easy to read despite its length. The subject matter, however, makes for grim reading, and may be traumatic for the average reader, although the author narrates the history in a dispassionate and methodical manner. The reader is left wondering whether there is some deficiency in human nature that makes such awful and self-defeating cruelty possible. The chapter show more on South Africa's search for freedom and reconciliation is one of the few causes for hope.
A massive work, over 700 pages, as demanded by the subject. However, the style is crisp and engaging, individual chapters are to the point and workmanlike, making the overall reading less arduous than it could have been. show less

From now on, when I'm trying to explain to someone what 'irony' does not mean, I'll use this example: while I was on a plane between LA and Phillie, the entire world was watching a half hour documentary about a repulsive lunatic, and being encouraged to start a war in Uganda (i.e., the wrong country) in order to 'bring him to justice.' I finished this book just as we landed (I'd started it before I flew; it's very, very long), checked my email, and... you can guess the rest. That is not show more irony. It's just sad.

This book should be mandatory reading for human beings. Meredith writes beautifully about the twentieht century's biggest cluster-cuff, patiently showing how pretty much everything that could have gone wrong for Africa did go wrong; how almost every legitimate attempt to help out was ruined by African politicians, Western politicians and businessmen, and Soviet/Chinese politicians. It's incredibly depressing, but you know what? It is depressing. It's no use banging on about how 'we have to believe in hope' and 'you shouldn't deny Africans' agency'. Of course we do. But the history of Africa's problems is complex, and so is the present; part of that complexity is the fact that the heads of state in Africa are almost inevitably 'cut the Gordian knot' types; that type of person tends to deny the 'agency' of his/her population. Hope without some understanding of the situation leads to... Kony2012.

It's a little frustrating that Meredith offers no solutions to even localized problems, but it's also to his credit that he avoids simplistic solutions or explanations. Creating 'civil society' won't help much when rich countries pay their farmers to produce food that could be produced more cheaply, for export, in Africa. Cutting those tariffs won't do much good unless someone puts a stop to the insanity that is African politics. Improving leadership won't do much good if 'investors' continue to treat the continent like their own private money tree. And so on. This is not a rejection of hope, it's a demand that *everyone* accepts their part of the blame, and works to pay off their debts to the unluckiest people on the planet.

Note: there's a new edition of this book out, which, as far as I can tell, lengthens the chapters on Sudan, Zimbabwe and South Africa, for obvious reasons. show less