The Fate of Africa

The Fate of Africa

From the Hopes of Freedom, to the Heart of Despair

Africa and Its Rapacious Leaders

By JANET MASLIN

In the words of an African proverb cited in Martin Meredith's Sisyphean new volume: "You never finish eating the meat of an elephant." That thought is summoned by the overwhelmingly difficult assignment that this historian, biographer and journalist has given himself. He has set out to present a panoramic view of African history during the past half century, and to contain all its furious upheaval in a single authoritative volume.

Everything about this subject is immense: the idealism, megalomania, economic obstacles, rampant corruption, unimaginable suffering (AIDS, famine, drought and genocide are only its better-known causes) and hopelessly irreconcilable differences leading to endless warfare. "The rebels cannot oust the Portuguese and the Portuguese can contain but not eliminate the rebels," read a typically bleak 1969 American assessment of a standoff in Guinea-Bissau.

For the author, even organizing this information is a hugely daunting job. How can such vast amounts of information be analyzed for the reader? One way was to follow parallel developments in different places - which is more or less how Mr. Meredith works, with attention to the hair-trigger ways in which one coup or crisis could set off subsequent disasters. He is able to steer the book firmly without compromising its hard-won clarity.

He might just as easily have divided the book's terrain into geographical regions and studied each one chronologically. But one of his initial points is that even the boundaries that once defined African nations lacked legitimacy. When European colonial powers carved up the continent - in the so-called "Scramble for Africa" - late in the 19th century, the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, remarked, "We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were."

"The Fate of Africa" does not even attempt to deal with such past outrages. In fact, its lack of range beyond the author's designated half century is a liability. But Mr. Meredith wisely begins his narrative on Feb. 9, 1951, a pivotal date in the history of what was then Britain's Gold Coast (but would soon reclaim its earlier name, Ghana). On that day the political prisoner Kwame Nkrumah was elected to political office as Britain began fulfilling its promises for the country's self-determination. Four days later, Nkrumah was designated the new prime minister. And the cycle this book describes - from the shadow of colonialism to the bloom of self-government, onward to tyranny, profiteering and vicious internecine warfare - had begun.

"What is so striking about the 50-year period since independence is the extent to which African states have suffered so many of the same misfortunes," Mr. Meredith writes, making the book's most striking point. So he must present many differently nuanced versions of the same story. Once the founding fathers, idealists and ideologues like Nkrumah (a lonely figure who shared an unlikely friendship with Queen Elizabeth) give way to a new breed of authority, the book becomes heavily dominated by the self-styled giant: "a flamboyant, autocratic figure, accustomed to living in style and demanding total obedience."

Africa has produced many different versions of this figure. And their collective tenacity has been extraordinary: by the end of the 1980's, Mr. Meredith points out, "not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office." Instead, these dictators - figures as different as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Idi Amin of Uganda, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who has boastfully called himself a tougher version of Adolf Hitler - "strutted the stage, tolerating neither opposition nor dissent, rigging elections, emasculating the courts, cowing the press, stifling the universities, demanding abject servility and making themselves exceedingly rich."

There is more than enough ignominy to go around. But the book reserves a special distinction for Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, whose reign "combined not only extreme greed and personal violence but delusions of grandeur unsurpassed by any other African leader." Bokassa's coronation in 1977 cost $22 million and took place in a country with only 260 miles of paved roads.

Although Mr. Meredith finds a few bright spots of economic viability (Botswana), uplift (South Africans coming out in droves to vote for Nelson Mandela's presidency), noble characters (the poet-president Léopold Senghor in Senegal) and worthwhile leadership (Vice President John Garang, the former rebel leader whose death in a helicopter accident last week set off paroxysms of grief in Sudan), almost all of his book involves copiously documented evidence of rampant graft and mind-boggling corruption.

This account might be accused of reckless pessimism if it were not so well documented. Sources here include African writers (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka), fellow journalists with African expertise (Michela Wrong, Philip Gourevitch) and reports by Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Joseph Conrad, who knew something about the heart of darkness, is cited too.

"The Fate of Africa" is all too eventful. General Amin may have been the most infamous, crocodile-fancying thug of his day, but he occupies only a few of this book's 700-odd pages. Also to be found here are France's struggle with Algeria (the subject of 3,000 books and 35 films, according to the author); the role and martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; Che Guevara's frustrating foray into Africa after Cuba's revolution; the first stirrings of an Islamic jihad in Africa; and the disastrous miscalculations behind American intervention in Somalia.

Mr. Meredith's frequent claim is that complicated African problems have been exploited and oversimplified for the benefit of the wider world. He points to rampant misconceptions that Hutu refugees were the victims, not the perpetrators, of Rwandan genocide. He sees a cynical political component to highly publicized starvation in places including Ethiopia and Biafra. The book underscores the frustration of famine relief organizations in trying to deal with governments cynical enough to use starvation as both photo opportunity and military tactic.

As for its title, "The Fate of Africa" finds woe there too. "Far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens," he writes, "African governments and the vampirelike politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival."

NY Times