This is a revised and updated edition in which the author examines the problems of post-colonial Africa. He contends that the problems have existed since independence in the sixties and have been made worse through the years by a combination of factors. It is a blunt assessment and prescribes some solutions to Africa's problems focusing on internal factors but without exonerating external forces from what has happened on the continent through the decades.
Is the West to blame for the agony of Uganda and its neighbors? In this powerful account of Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni's 30 year reign, Helen Epstein chronicles how Western leaders' single-minded focus on the War on Terror and their naïve dealings with strongmen are at the root of much of the turmoil in eastern and central Africa. Museveni's involvement in the conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, Rwanda, Congo, and Somalia has earned him substantial amounts of military and development assistance, as well as near-total impunity. It has also short-circuited the power the people of this region might otherwise have over their destiny. Epstein set out for Uganda more than 20 years ago to work as a public health consultant on an AIDS project. Since then, the roughly $20 billion worth of foreign aid poured into the country by donors has done little to improve the well-being of the Ugandan people, whose rates of illiteracy, mortality, and poverty surpass those of many neighboring countries. Money meant to pay for health care, education, and other public services has instead been used by Museveni to shore up his power through patronage, brutality, and terror. Another Fine Mess is a devastating indictment of the West's Africa policy and an authoritative history of the crises that have ravaged Uganda and its neighbors since the end of the Cold War. "A stunning new book of reportage and analysis." --Pankaj Mishra, Bloomberg
Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries.
This book examines the role of the emerging African nations in the new international order of the twenty-first century. Since the end of the Cold War, little significance has been placed on the African continent in the security and political considerations of the Western world. However, post-9/11 international security has been redefined, and new challenges have been identified. Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Africa is facing a variety of new security challenges. Africa has become an increasingly important battleground in the fight against terrorism. Since the beginning of 2011, the new revolutions, now known as the Arab Spring, that swept through North Africa have created new challenges for the African continent and are compounding the African peoples’ struggles for poverty alleviation, state stability, security, socio-political and socio-economic development, democracy, and good governance. In addition to these crises of civil war, ethnic conflict, state insecurity, and rampant corruption at all levels, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has ravaged the continent for the past four decades. The only major pan-African organization—the African Union—is unable to lead and defend the continent effectively. At this crucial period when the continent is confronted with these myriad of security challenges, it needs effective, strong leadership that possesses both human and natural resources to play a leadership role in Africa and lead the continent in the new global order of the twenty-first century. The contributors to this volume analyze many of these issues and place them in the wider context of global security.
"We Are the Poors follows the growth of the most unexpected of these community movements, beginning in one township of Durban, linking up with community and labor struggles in other parts of the country, and coming together in massive anti-government protests at the time of the UN World Conference Against Racism in 2001. It describes from the inside how the downtrodden regain their dignity and create hope for a better future in the face of a neoliberal onslaught, and shows the human faces of the struggle against the corporate model of globalization in a Third World country."--Jacket.
Each week the oil and gas fields of sub-Saharan Africa produce well over a billion dollars' worth of oil, an amount that far exceeds development aid to the entire African continent. Yet the rising tide of oil money is not promoting stability and development, but is instead causing violence, poverty, and stagnation. It is also generating vast corruption that reaches deep into American and European economies. In Poisoned Wells, Nicholas Shaxson exposes the root causes of this paradox of poverty from plenty, and explores the mechanisms by which oil causes grave instabilities and corruption around the globe. Shaxson is the only journalist who has had access to the key players in African oil, and is willing to make the connections between the problems of the developing world and the involvement of leading global corporations and governments.
In A Continent for the Taking Howard W. French, a veteran correspondent for The New York Times, gives a compelling firsthand account of some of Africa’s most devastating recent history–from the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, to Charles Taylor’s arrival in Monrovia, to the genocide in Rwanda and the Congo that left millions dead. Blending eyewitness reportage with rich historical insight, French searches deeply into the causes of today’s events, illuminating the debilitating legacy of colonization and the abiding hypocrisy and inhumanity of both Western and African political leaders. While he captures the tragedies that have repeatedly befallen Africa’s peoples, French also opens our eyes to the immense possibility that lies in Africa’s complexity, diversity, and myriad cultural strengths. The culmination of twenty-five years of passionate exploration and understanding, this is a powerful and ultimately hopeful book about a fascinating and misunderstood continent.
In Africa, progress can be seen across the board. But the important question is whether this so-called progress is sustainable. The continent is a powder keg: the powder is demographics and unemployment the detonator. By 2050, the number of young people of working age in Africa is expected to be three times that of China’s. But will there be enough jobs for them? What is troubling for the continent is even more dramatic for the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants where insecurity is spreading like a bushfire. Despite major differences in geography and culture, there are huge similarities between the Sahel and Afghanistan: a demographic impasse, stagnating agriculture, widespread rural misery, high unemployment, deep ethnic and religious fault lines, weak states, regional instability, drug trafficking, and the spread of radical Islam. And unfortunately the same recipes that failed in Afghanistan are being rolled out in the Sahel. Are we headed to a ‘Sahelistan’ and to an ‘Africanistan’? Serge Michailof helps us find the answer to this important question.
This work focuses on the early years of independence and the problems African countries faced soon after the end of colonial rule. Many of those problems still exist today. They include poverty and underdevelopment; adoption of alien ideologies and economic and political systems; structural flaws of the modern African state and its institutions inherited at independence; nation-building, democratization, national integration, and ethnoregional rivalries among others. It is also a historical study of the continent since the partition of Africa by the imperial powers and of the struggle for independence. It also focuses on the continent's demographic composition, shedding some light on the complexity and diversity of the world's second largest continent. The history of Africa's indigenous peoples and their earliest contact with foreigners provides a background to this telescopic survey. The sixties was one of the most important decades in the history of Africa and this work provides a balanced perspective on those years when Africans celebrated the end of colonial rule on their continent. It is a compact study covering a vast expanse of territory from the advent of imperial rule to the attainment of sovereign status for African countries during the sixties and the problems they faced in those years. As a demographic portrait, it excels in depicting the continent as a tapestry that reflects the racial diversity and multiethnic composition of this vast land mass, the second largest after Asia. And as a historical and political analysis, it addresses some of the most important issues in the post-colonial era including the Cold War, with the Congo figuring prominently in the analysis as thefirst theatre of combat and super-power rivalry in the early sixties on the African continent. The dawn of freedom provided opportunities and challenges for the young African nations as they tried to modernize and consolidate their independence in a world dominated by major powers and contending ideologies. It was a rude awakening to the harsh realities of nationhood. One of these was the desire by the major powers to turn African countries into client states as the two ideological camps, East and West, competed for world domination. As Julius Nyerere warned, "We are not going to allow our friends to choose our enemies for us." One of the most contentious grounds for this hegemonic control was, of course, the Congo, right in the middle of the continent. It became the bleeding heart of Africa as the country was turned into a combat theatre mainly between the surrogate forces of the West and the Congolese nationalist forces supported by a number of African countries and by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The Congo imbroglio since the turbulent sixties mainly as a result of foreign intrigue and intervention is one of the most important subjects addressed in this book. And it raises serious questions that have profound implications even today for a continent mired in conflict; this time ignited by the Africans themselves in many - but not in all - cases. Yet, prospects for the world's poorest and most embattled continent are not bleak if Africans seek their own solutions to their own problems in this post-Cold War era of globalization dominated by the industrialized nations. The book includes many photos from the early sixties, the dawn of a new era when Africancountries won independence, which Oginga Odinga described as "Not Yet Uhuru."
