The State of Africa - Martin Meredith

This is the most depressing history book I have ever read, apart from accounts of the holocaust. It is a damning indictment on Africa’s political leaders of the last fifty or so year, and the short sighted naïve 1960 liberals, supported by the jealous empire hating Americans, who allowed it all to happen. From north to south, east to West, as the colonialists left, so dictators supported by tribal cronies took over and established regimes specialising in economic rape, terror, and war. Nkrumah, leader of the first country to get independence, was hailed as a saviour, jailed his opponents, turned Ghana into a one party state in 1964 and utterly ruined the economy with useless projects and constant corruption. The army eventually took over, but to know effect. After a string of coups by 1982 the country ‘was a wasteland, crumbling in ruins at every level’. Eventually Rawlings established a viable dictatorship. In the Congo the first ruler Lumumba was brutally murdered by his tribal enemies in 1961, with the connivance of the Belgians. The revenge from Lumumba’s tribe was awful. Over a million died. Out of this blood bath emerged General Mobuto, who ruled by terror from day one and was soon considered a semi god, ‘who grew the trees and plants…’. Actually he bankrupted this rich country, shifting millions to those notorious Swiss banks. Corruption and waste spread, making men in the words on one bishop into ‘assassins’. Kenyatta turned Kenya into a one party state in 1969, but under his watch, apart from the slaughter of 70,000 elephants for the profitable ivory trade, the country stayed reasonably intact. Moi took over after his death and tightened the screws of the dictatorship, and corruption became epidemic and critics disappeared. In Uganda the brutality of Idi Amin is well known, though the suspicion of blood rituals over his victims and even eating their body parts was new to me. At least 25,000 had been killed before he was removed from power in 1979. If Haile Selassie had died in 1972 when he was eighty he would have been remembered as a firm but sensible autocratic ruler: unfortunately he lived on and utterly failed to deal with the famine that killed thousands in 1973. There was an uprising and the old emperor was ousted. Major Mengistu Mariam took over and made Marxism the country’s new religion. The result was economic chaos and constant war, both internally and with neighbouring Eritrea. And then in 1984, while Mengistu’s stooges were preparing lavish celebration for the revolution’s tenth anniversary, famine again struck, not just because of precarious mother nature, but also because of the inefficiency of the new state farms, and most damningly because Mengistu used food as a weapon against rebels. During the anniversary celebrations not a word was said about the appalling famine. But then came surely one of the BBC’s finest hours, or rather ten minutes, when their correspondent Michael Buerk made a short news film on the famine. The Western agencies (and Bob Geldof) moved in, but were too late to save the estimated million who had perished while Mengistu had sipped champagne in praise of his revolution. And so in country after country – Somalia, Zimbabwe, the Sudan, Ruanda, Algeria -Meredith takes us on this hugely depressing journey, and there’s no time here to get onto AIDS. He is a superb writer, and while the detail is never lacking, he never loses the wood for the trees and keeps on reminding us of different parts of the stories, so at the end we really have just one depressing canvas of Africa’s last fifty years. There is no political posturing, he just lets the account speak for itself. Sane people should come to two conclusions. First of all the depravity of man is a reality; and secondly benign colonialism operated by people who know how to rule fairly and set up stable institutions is a million times better than rampant tribalism. The rush to get out of Africa was a disgrace caused by the fact Europe could not afford to rule there anymore if it meant keeping down nationalistic insurgencies, and by a woeful naivety on the part of the Americans who on the basis of biased history about the tragedy of their separation from England, had concluded all colonialism was wrong, so a part of the deal for their joining in the Second World War was that Europe got rid of her empires. What a happier place Africa and the world would have been if they had joined the colonial enterprise. They should have taken the mantle from the Europeans; instead they have relied on quick fix solutions that have proved disastrous. But we are straying from Meredith’s outstanding book, an absolute must if you are interested in world history and don’t want to waste money on aid.