Customer Reviews

Africa in Chaos: A Comparative History

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Ayittey has written an excellent book. In fact, I'm just as critical of Africa's despotic and kleptocratic regimes in all the books I have written. But I don't entirely agree with his assessment of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Kenneth Kaunda.

He says his focus is not on the leadership qualities of any of the African leaders but on their policies. It is true that socialism failed to fuel economic growth. But an objective evaluation of what Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda did, shows that they had some success in a number of areas. Yet, Ayittey has almost nothing good to say about them in his book, "Africa in Chaos." In fact, these are the three leaders of whom he's most critical in his book, devoting several pages to them more than any other African leader.

Under Nkrumah, Ghana had the highest per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa. It was Nkrumah who laid the foundation for modern-day Ghana. He built the infrastructure that has sustained and fuelled Ghana's economic development through the years. It is true that there were also many failures under Nkrumah, and after he was gone; for example institutional decay and crumbling infrastructure. But who built those institutions and the infrastructure?

Nkrumah built schools, hospitals, roads, factories, dams and bridges, railways and harbors. Tens of thousands of people in Ghana who are lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses, teachers, accountants, agriculturalists, scientists and others wouldn't be what they are today had it not been for the educational opportunities provided by Nkrumah.

Ayittey talks about quality, saying that what mattered during Nkrumah's reign was quantity, not quality. What's the quality of the Ghanaian elite, including Ayittey himself, educated under Nkrumah? Are they not as good as anybody else? What was the quality of education at the University of Ghana, Legon? Did it admit and train students of mediocre mental calibre? Did it have inferior academic programmes? And an inferior faculty? Were more people dying in Ghanaian hospitals than they were being saved? Did the schools, hospitals, factories, roads and other infrastructure Nkrumah built do more harm than good? Would Ghana have been better off without them like Zaire under Mobutu?

In Tanzania, Nyerere also built schools, hospitals, clinics, factories, roads and railways, dams and bridges, hydroelectric power plants and other infrastructure. Although his policy of Ujamaa (meaning familyhood in Kiswahili) was not very successful, it did enable the country to bring the people together and closer to each other in order to provide them with vital social services. The people had easier access to schools, clinics, clean water and other services provided by the government, than they otherwise would have been, because they lived closer to each other; which would have been impossible had they been spread too thin across the country, living miles and and miles apart.

Also under Nyerere, education was free, from primary school all the way to the university level. Medical services were also free, in spite of the fact that Tanzania is one of poorest countries in the world. Still, under Nyerere, it was able to afford all that. Everybody had equal opportunity. Under his leadership, Tanzania also made quantum leaps in education. It had the highest literacy rate in Africa, and one of the highest in the world, higher than India's which has one of the largest numbers of educated people and the third largest number of scientists after the United States and the former Soviet Union.

One of the biggest achievements under Nyerere was in the area of adult education. Tanzania, on a scale unprecedented anywhere else in the world, launched a massive adult education campaign to teach millions of people how to read and write. Within only a few years, almost the entire adult population of Tanzania - rural peasants, urban workers and others - became literate. Almost everybody in Tanzania, besides children not yet in school, was able to read and write. And the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania became one of the most renowned academic institutions in the world, in less than ten years, with an outstanding faculty including some of the best and internationally acclaimed scholars from many countries.

Provision of vital services even to some of the most remote parts of the country - far removed from urban and social centres - was not uncommon although the services were, I must admit, curtailed through the years because of economic problems. Yet, all that was achieved under Nyerere who sincerely believed, and made sure, that everybody had equal access to the nation's resources. I know all this because I am a Tanzanian myself, born and brought up in Tanzania, and was one of the beneficiaries of Nyerere's egalitarian policies.

Tanzania has come a long way, and still has a long way to go. But give credit where credit is due, in spite of failures in a number of areas, and which must be acknowledged by all of us. I even admit that in my books. But also look at where we were before: At independence in 1961, Tanganyika (before uniting with Zanzibar in 1964 to form Tanzania) had only 120 university graduates, including two lawyers who had to draft and negotiate more than 150 international treaties for the young nation and handle other legal matters for the country. With 120 university graduates, Tanganyika was, of course, better off than the former Belgian Congo which had only 16 at independence in 1960, and Nyasaland (now Malawi) with only 34 at independence in 1964. Still, that was nowhere close to what Tanganyika would have been had the British tried to develop the colony; which was never their intention. None of the 120 university graduates got their degrees in Tanganyika. There was no university in the country. The British never built one, and never intended to build one. Tanganyika built one after independence, and it became internationally renowned as an excellent academic institution in less than a decade.

The 120 university graduates Tanganyika had at independence was nothing in terms of manpower for a country; not even for a province or region. As Julius Nyerere said not long before he died:

"We took over a country with 85 percent of its adults illiterate. The British ruled us for 43 years. When they left, there were two trained engineers and 12 doctors. When I stepped down there was 91 percent literacy and nearly every child was at school. We trained thousands of engineers, doctors, and teachers."

Nyerere stepped down in 1985. And all that was achieved within 24 years since independence. No mean achievement.

This is a devestating indictment of the small percentage of the African population that keeps the rest uneducated and in poverty. Yet it is Pro-Africa in that the solutions proposed are from the continent's tribal past.

African-Americans, who want a deeper understanding of what is happening in Africa today and why it is different from the pre-colonial past, will appreciate this book. Others, such as Cynthia McKinney and Carol Mosley Braun, who would prefer to rub shoulders with the same leaders who are causing so much harm to their countries, will feel better if they continue to keep their head in the sand.

I have to commend Mr. Ayittey for writing from fresh point of view. I liked the fact that he emphasized that Africa has to look inwards to solve its problems. I have two problems with the book a) Small factual mistakes which may not be serious but never the less undermine the confidence in the author's littany of figures and facts. One such example is the dedication to Mr. Joe Modise which the author claimed to be dead but an other reviewer mentioned that he is well and alive. One mistake I noticed is that the author said that North Somalia was colonized by the Italians and Southern Somalia by the British when the fact is exactly the opposite. b) The Author built a good case that African leaders are to blame for the misery in Africa. I kept asking myself through out the book "but what caused the majority of African leaders to take the wrong path?" I waited and waited for an answer through the whole book but the only explanation that Mr. Ayittey could come up was to fall back to the very thing that he claimed very vociferously at the start of the book that he is against, to blame colonialism. He explained the failure of African leaders is due to the fact that they are product of colonialism. I believe that Mr. Ayittey did dileneate the problems clearly and he did offer the obvious solutions but his analysis of the causes of the problems were not deep enough, even though I believe is started the right discussion, the debate of interaction of western/alien ideas and African ways of self rule. Also as an other reviewer put it, the Author should put himself in the shoes of millions of Africans who fight daily ( and lose their lifes often) for the ideals he is spousing.

Excellent book by Ayittey showing the yet again the failures of the liberal-left vision, and its cynical collaborators in business and government bureaucracies. Yet again and again Western taxpayers are called upon to prop up these vampire states- money down an endless rathole.
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The "leaders" of many of these failed states have been feted and celebrated in the liberal West, none more so than Nkrumah, Nyerere, and Kaunda. Buit it is all hypocrisy and delusion. Some claim glowing accomplishments by these leaders, but in fact things like high literacy rates are carry-overs from the colonial administrations. In short, the literacy rate and educational opportunities were ALREADY rising rapidly when the colonialists pulled out, rendering claims of "improvement" in these areas suspect. The same pattern is repeated in economic development. Agriculture and industry were ALREADY expanding when the kleptocrats and dictators took over. Under them this progress not only declined but in many cases simply vanished.

As for Nkrumah's or Nyere's much touted educational "progress" and "free" medical care, it was neither progressive or free. What use is "free" when your "health" clinics are chronically short of medicine, and competent staff? Just how much "improvement" is there when you don't have enough money to staff or maintain your "free" institutions to even minimal standards? What use is "education" amid cruimbling schools and unpaid teachers, or when you are herding forcibly herding people into dirty, poverty mired "ujamma" villages to be harangued by party hacks about "African socialism"? When has "socialism" fed starving people?

Ayittey exposes the bogus claims, and nonsensical fantasies, and cynical self-serving by Western elites and their vampire-like African compradors. A great read, but of course- no one will lesson while even yet more millions of Africans are needlessly sacrificed to fulfill the greed, corruption and self-congratulatory fantasies of Western elites and their African lackeys.

Cover to cover, this book portrays Africa as it is today. Growing up and living in Kenya, as well as having travelled significantly around sub-saharan Africa, I have lived the life portrayed in the book: a life of fear.

I would recommend this book strongly to anybody or institution interested in knowing THE true Africa today.

George B.N. Ayittey has articulated what many of us Africans experience in our daily lives. The accounts are factual. They are real.

I pity the innocent Africans that have lost their lives and those that live in misery, not knowing the reason why they live in chaos.

...and a much-needed counterblast to their towel boys in TransAfrica, The Nation of Islam, and too many American universities. The book is a litany of outrages, failures, and incompentence, linked together by the author's exposition of Africa's pre- and post-colonial history and economics. His picture of pre-colonial democratic Africa may be too rosy--the baroque cruelties reported by early European explorers do not figure here--but any surviving shred of tradition has to be better than the "vampire state" that most sub-Saharan Africans are saddled with now. The litany of horrors tends to get numbing after a while, but that's scarcely the author's fault. Blame the Western press and intellectuals for their silence, and Western aid, which helped prop up these terror-regimes for so long.

It has been said that there is nothing new in this book. Africa indeed has problems. That is exactly the point of this book and Keith Richburg's "Out of America." Africa has problems and it is not up to AID agencies (USAID could not fix anything even if they wanted to) or foreigners to fix those problems. It is up to "Africans" to fix their problems.

ALL nations have problems. The difference between most nations and the African continent is that Africa just gets worse, and worse and worse. I've lived there. I've lived it. I will never return.

As a black American that lived in Africa over a period of twenty years, I find the state just gets worse and worse and most African people continue to blame their problems on colonialism, they defect to Europe or the US or just take what their dictators dish out. A Kenyan friend of mine who was MD of the Kenyan Human Rights League, tired of being jailed and tear gased while the people he was demonstrating and fighting for looked on and pointed, said: "Kenya and Africa will never change until the average Kenyan or African is prepared to die for his freedom."

No, there is nothing new in "Chaos" or the other books on this subject. Again, that's the point. Contructively Africa: fix your problems. That's what these books are all about: YOU need to fix YOUR problems.

This is a great book. I will keep it and others like it for my children to read.

It takes some one with guts and intellectual acumen like Prof. Ayittey to break away from the pack of intellecutal hypochrites and patronizing nabobs in exposing forcibly Africa's malady. Like a skillful surgeon, he brilliantly dissects what ails Africa and offers some realstic prescriptions. Hopefully, the policy makers of U.S. State Department, British Home Office, the bureaucrats of the World Bank and IMF are paying attention before the whole continent implodes!

...and a much-needed counterblast to their towel boys in TransAfrica, The Nation of Islam, and too many American universities. The book is a litany of outrages, failures, and incompentence, linked together by the author's exposition of Africa's pre- and post-colonial history and economics. His picture of pre-colonial democratic Africa may be too rosy--the baroque cruelties reported by early European explorers do not figure here--but any surviving shred of tradition has to be better than the "vampire state" that most sub-Saharan Africans are saddled with now. The litany of horrors tends to get numbing after a while, but that's scarcely the author's fault. Blame the Western press and intellectuals for their silence, and Western aid, which helped prop up these terror-regimes for so long.

I resubmit this review, to link with my current list.

I enjoyed reading this book, because it helped me understand the political situation in Africa. The author should be commended on his bravery to write such an honest and stratight forward book.