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Africa Betrayed

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I was a geographic specialist concerned with the mapping of Africa from 1964 to my retirement in 1998. I well remember the high hopes we once had that the newly freed Africans would be able to develop and join the developed world on equal terms. The author, of African heritage himself, has covered in great detail what went wrong. Resulting in the current anarchial state of affairs,with international and civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and economic ruin. With the end of the Cold War and the cutting back of aid from the First and Second Worlds, the Third is greatly the worse for it. This is a dam sad book and I never could finish it.

George Ayittey (born 1945) is a Ghanaian economist, author and president of the Free Africa Foundation in Washington DC. He is also a professor at American University, and an associate scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He has also written Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future, and Africa in Chaos: A Comparative History.

He writes in the Prologue to this 1992 book, "This book does not assess the leadership qualities, aims, or achievements of individual African heads of state or attempt to evaluate their objectives and policies for development. Nor is this book written to titillate the Western cultural palate. Rather, it offers an African perspective on the crisis plaguing the continent---a perspective which is often lacking in news coverage of African events. No apologies are offered, as the pertinent theme of this book is straightforward---FREEDOM."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"Economically, politically, AND culturally, Africans today are worse off than they were at the time of independence in the 1960s." (Pg. 7-8)
"Africa has been betrayed. Freedom from colonial rule has evolved into ghastly tyranny, artibrary rule, denial of civil liberties, brutal suppression of dissent, and the wanton slaughter of peasants." (Pg. 10)
"Each African country celebrated its day of independence with unbounded euphoria. Freedom at last!... But not for long. That fresh breath of freedom from colonial rule was to prove emphemeral. 'One man, one vote' came to Africa only one time." (Pg. 100)
"Despite their rhetoric, most African leaders did not value their own heritage and the significance of their indigenous systems. Instead, they copied alien systems to develop their countries. The new leaders stripped the traditional chiefs of their authority and actually set out to destroy indigenous systems through various government policies and civil wars... These new leaders acted as if Africa had no history, no culture, no native institutions, and no indigenous revolutionaries for its people to salute... These black neocolonialists were no different from the white colonialists." (Pg. 110-111)
"(Mobutu's) query made the real motives of many of Africa's leaders abundantly clear: to impose themselves on their people and loot their countries' treasuries for deposit in foreign banks. It may be noted that these were the same leaders who virulently denounced colonial exploitation and plunder." (Pg. 259)
"In black Africa color was not the issue. Blacks ruled themselves. Although in the past their oppressors and exploiters were white colonialists, today they are black." (Pg. 284)
"The most effective aid the West or the world could ever give Africa is to help reinstitute its native freedom of expression... This freedom of expression cannot be overemphasized, because without it Africa will never find solutions to its problems." (Pg. 354)