Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back [Hardcover]

Monique Maddy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 13, 2004

From the remote mountains of Liberia to the epicenter of New York City, Monique Maddy's life has been an extraordinary journey from an idyllic community to the chaos of city living. But Learning to Love Africa is far more than an exile's dream of return. Sent to the west at the tender age of six by her doting father, Maddy has spent her entire life struggling to reclaimher father's dream of progress in his beloved homeland.

Born in Yekepa, a tiny village transformed into a utopian global community by a Swedish multinational corporation, Maddy introduces us to her remarkable father, Emmanuel, an enterprising driver-turned-restaurateur, and her mother, Julia, the descendant of an equally remarkable family of Mandingo entrepreneurs. With loving descriptions of life in this developing world, Maddy introduces us to the sophisticated business skills of her ancestors and shows how her family's acumen and emotional strength became a launching pad for her own ambitions.

In haunting passages that describe her schooling first in England and then in America, we see Maddy's gradual transformation from country girl to savvy intellectual. But her first attempt to return to the continent of her birth, under the auspices of the United Nations, leads only to embittered frustration when it becomes clear to her that the bureaucracy of the international organization will do little to actually improve the lives of Africans -- and will often make their already difficult existence even more miserable.

Disillusioned, Maddy returns to the United States to attend Harvard Business School where she hatches a bold plan to start a telecommunications company in Africa.

Rallying her fellow Harvard students, Maddy sets off to the continent of her birth once again. Learning to Love Africa tells the story of her two-fisted battle against the corruption of African politics and economic life on one hand and the complacency of her Harvard intern team on the other. Unbowed by the obstacles in her way, Maddy tells a rousing tale of what it takes to build a business where the political framework for capitalism doesn't exist, and how to persevere in bringing Africa into the twenty-first century.

Along the way, Maddy recounts with poignant regret and horror how her homeland slips into anarchy and civil war while her father's dream of a better life evaporates and his business and home are destroyed in the conflict. Emotionally charged, vividly described, and deeply felt, Learning to Love Africa is a memoir of despair for Africa, which seemingly has been written off by the developed world, and of tempered optimism for the future Maddy knows Africa can achieve.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With the fine sauciness of a marathon winner (Boston 2002) and start-up champion (Adesemi, a sub-Saharan African wireless communications service), Maddy combines a warm memoir of growing up in "a middle-class, two-car nuclear family in the tropical jungles of Africa" with an instructive manual for entrepreneurs in developing countries. It's a tale of brilliant success and miserable failure, spiced with a jeremiad against the international agencies (U.N., IMF, World Bank) that are supposed to help but depend "on the careful nurturing and preservation of global poverty." Maddy grew up in Yepeka, Liberia, a town built by a Swedish mining company, moving from there to English public school, the American Ivy League, global corporations and high finance. Her happy childhood gave way to a sad Liberian tale: Pappi's restaurant, dream house and garden were destroyed; the town, once "a miracle in the forest," was reduced to "nothing more than bush and ruin" thanks to the region's tumult. Her concurrent business tale is striking and cautionary. Maddy raised millions in venture capital, established an "integrated virtual phone network" in Tanzania and Ghana, and reached toward Côte d'Ivoire and Sri Lanka before the company's collapse, which was brought on not so much by the usual local villains (corruption, red tape) as by the irrationality of one of the international agencies. Maddy's take on these problems is surprising: "given the choice, the vast majority of the people living in poverty, almost four billion, would choose to be run not by their governments and the U.N. but by a global corporation, as economic security trumps nationalism." Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Upon graduating from Harvard Business School, Maddy, born in Liberia and educated in Britain and the U.S., relocates to Tanzania to execute a start-up business providing telephone service. With the excitement attendant to starting a new company and the soul-searching of a young woman on a mission, Maddy brings personal experience and a different perspective on the troubled history of conquest and colonization of Africa, including the resettlement of American slaves in Liberia. Having worked for the UN, Maddy also brings a perspective on capitalism versus the benevolent efforts of world organizations. She contrasts their ineffectiveness with the entrepreneurial heritage of the Mandingo, who have an extensive network of trade and finance throughout Africa, as well as her father's business enterprises and the foreign investment of Firestone and other companies in small, isolated towns that stand in stark contrast to the chaos of the surrounding country. Maddy is ultimately disappointed when her enterprise fails owing to local corruption, ineptitude, and bureaucracy, and she struggles to maintain her vision for self-reliance and entrepreneurialism in Africa. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (April 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066211107
• ISBN-13: 978-0066211107
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,950 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Following a dream, May 18, 2004

By 

Verity G. Norman "Verity Norman" (Cambridge, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back (Hardcover)

"Learning to love Africa" inspired me to keep going with the start-up I'm involved with. Despite the huge obstacles that plagued her start-up, Monique Maddy kept following her dream of starting a company in Africa - despite warnings from everyone that it was not possible. This story of persistence and perseverance will inspire anyone involved in a start-up organization.

Maddy's style of writing is really personal and informative. She takes you on both her physical, as well as emotional journeys. So much so, that you feel like you're reading her journal, or are a good friend of hers. She is refreshingly frank and honest when talking about her experience with the UN, and she doesn't mince her words when giving her opinion of organizations such as the UN, the World Bank or the IMF. Her book helped me gain rare insights into these global policy-making institutions.

I also felt like I learnt a lot about the history of Liberia and Tanzania. Although she really educates the reader in detail about the history of the different countries, organizations, and situations she comes into contact with, you never feel like she's being patronizing. Or even that you're being educated. I found myself just wanting to know more.

This is a book I couldn't put down, because I really really wanted to find out what happened at the end. By the end I felt like I'd been on a long, challenging, but gratifying journey to and from Africa, and was more savvy as a result. "Learning to love Africa" shows how much one person can do if they not only set their mind to it, but persist in the long-run.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiring and insightful, May 17, 2005

By 

Jared Lebel (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back (Hardcover)

As someone who grew up overseas much like Monique, i deeply admire how she chose to use her acquired skills and network to give back to a continent in dire need of what rare individuals like her have to offer.

The book is enjoyable to read and deeply inspiring to anyone interested in contributing to third world development.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars www.ghanaweb.com: Business News of Monday, 1 October 2001, February 17, 2006

By 

David Fick "Author: Africa: Continent of Econ... (Overland Park, Kansas USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back (Hardcover)

REVIEW BY IAN MOUNT
www.ghanaweb.com: Business News of Monday, 1 October 2001

The Last Place to Start a Company
Monique Maddy tried and failed to launch a telephone service in Africa. She's moving on. Africa isn't.

Three short years ago, Monique Maddy was boasting that her company was going to "change people's lives" and "revolutionize things." Adesemi, the wireless pay-phone company she founded in 1993, had raised $37 million dollars, built a network in Tanzania, and moved into Ghana, and was planning to expand its service to the Ivory Coast. Maddy was the new face of African business. A Wall Street Journal article in September 1998 even proclaimed, "If the disenfranchised of Africa ever join the global economy, it won't be diplomats, politicians, or church people leading the way. It will be entrepreneurs like Monique Maddy."

It hasn't turned out that way. Maddy walked away from her company in disgust in the fall of '99. Her story is a familiar one, full of the government corruption that has become an African clichi, but the 39-year-old Maddy doesn't blame her company's demise on the bribery requests or Kafkaesque red tape. For the Liberian native, who's writing a book about third-world entrepreneurship to be published by HarperCollins next year, the real reason for Adesemi's failure and Africa's continental mire can be traced to the international development agencies that are designed to help the region. "Africa is worse off today -- in many countries -- than it was at independence, even though billions and billions have been spent," says Maddy, who herself served for five years as a United Nations Development Program officer. "As long as you have these kinds of institutions, you won't have any change."

Take Maddy's experience getting a pay-phone license. In mid-1995, a year after the Tanzanian national phone company granted Adesemi the license (and Adesemi had spent $1.5 million on its network), the phone company president said that it was no good because Adesemi's pay phones were wireless. Only after an acquaintance at the Harvard Business School, her alma mater, put her in touch with World Bank president James Wolfensohn did the matter get settled. The World Bank pushed the government just so far, however. The phone company insisted on charging Adesemi inflated rates to use its infrastructure. "When we asked the World Bank to do something about the rates, they said they couldn't tell the government what to do -- but they could lend them millions of dollars," says Maddy, referring to a $75 million interest-free loan the World Bank made to the national phone company. "They had a conflict of interest," she says.

Still, Adesemi kept at it, eventually building its network up to 600 pay phones and a pager service with 5,000 customers. The sell was easy, Maddy says, because Adesemi's phones actually functioned (the street nickname for the system was "the phones that work," she says).

When an Adesemi backer, CDC Capital Partners, refused to invest more money for the company's expansion into what Maddy argued were more profitable markets -- it wanted to see profitability in Tanzania first, despite the stacked odds -- she finally gave up. Maddy, who now lives in Boston, hasn't been to Tanzania since; her investors are selling off the network.

Not surprisingly, Maddy says her book will call for a radical departure from a system based on an international aid bureaucracy. "You basically have bureaucrats trying to develop countries," she says. "How many bureaucrats started Microsoft?"
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Source: Ian Mount