The Fate of Africa
The land seizures and the destruction of commercial agriculture, in continental context.
Summary
Martin Meredith wrote a narrative history of Africa from independence in the late 1950s and 1960s to the present, covering the continent country by country and period by period.
The structure follows the arc from independence optimism through one-party states and military coups, the Cold War proxy conflicts and the support Western and Soviet powers gave to whichever regimes served them, the economic decline of the 1970s and 1980s and the structural adjustment programmes, the wars in the Congo, Angola, Sudan, Somalia and Sierra Leone, the Rwandan genocide, apartheid and its end, and the partial recovery and democratisation of the 1990s and 2000s.
Meredith's argument is that the pattern of failure was driven principally by what leaders did with the states they inherited: the concentration of power, the use of the state for personal and ethnic enrichment, and the destruction of the institutions that might have constrained them. He gives less weight than some historians to colonial legacies, to the structure of the international economy and to Cold War intervention, though he covers all three. The book is long, readable and heavily criticised by African historians for treating the continent as a catalogue of failure and for concentrating on leaders rather than on societies. It is the most widely read single-volume history and should be read with awareness of its perspective.
Key takeaways 7
- Meredith attributes post-independence failure principally to what leaders did with inherited states rather than to colonial legacy or external intervention.
- Independence transferred centralised colonial state structures to successors who used them without the constraints colonial administrations had faced.
- Cold War powers supported regimes according to alignment rather than conduct, which removed external pressure for accountability.
- Resource wealth funded conflict and personal enrichment more consistently than it funded development.
- Ethnic mobilisation was used by leaders to build constituencies rather than being a spontaneous source of conflict.
- Structural adjustment programmes were imposed on states that lacked the administrative capacity to implement them.
- African historians criticise the book for treating the continent as a catalogue of failure and for concentrating on leaders rather than societies.
Who should read it
Readers wanting a single-volume narrative history of post-independence Africa, read with awareness of its leader-focused perspective.
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Where it sits in the reference 2
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