Customer Reviews

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

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"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.

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.

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

As I read this book I couldn't help but notice how similar Monique's tale is to the story of Africa. She weaves us through a maze of emotions as we feel her joy, hope, determination only to be suddenly brought to earth with frustration, anger, desparation.

For anyone ever been to Africa rarely has a book come along that so perfectly captures the daily difficulties of survival in Africa. Though tongue-in-cheek Monique certainly understands clearly the difficulties facing that part of the world and I would hazard we'll be hearing more from her on this subject.

Oh by the way did I mention that she became a World Class marathon runner in her spare time?

READ THIS BOOK!


Monique Maddy has written a comprehensive visionary memoir of her native country, Liberia, her family, her father's dedication to the education of his children, her work with the United Nations, her telecommunications venture, and her marathon running.

Describing Africa, a continent of contradictions and complexities, Maddy poses a Swiftian measure stick for personal and international efforts to ameliorate conditions of poverty, civil war, disease, and to prosper African gifts of hospitality, conflict resolution, cooperative living. Can these peoples and polities overcome arrogance, corruption, and exploitation? Or will Africans perish for lack of will, respect and resources marshalled on the planet to survive disease, warfare, severe climate? How can individuals and nations help without hurting?

African people greet each other, drink tea or coffee communally, extend to the traveller and stranger unparalleled courtesies, often in the presence of great scarcity. African music is particular and globally influential. That accounts for the love in her title. She believes also, that "For all its horrors, miseries, and calamities, Africa remains the one place on this planet where one can still find Eden."

I hope her work will be translated into French to extend her reach to West Africa. Read her book: it is powerful, honest, heart-rending. We are all connected. Maddy reveals hidden ties and writes with hope, clarity and love.

The publishing house of HarperCollins seems to have a knack for finding first-rate authors, writing worthwhile books. One of the latest from their treasure-trove is Monique Maddy's Learning to Love Africa, which this reviewer would recommend to Everyman and Everywoman, the young and the young at heart, with a curiosity about the world around them. It is one of the best autobiographies, I have read in the last five or ten years. It is not one of the run-of-the-mill self-aggrandizing accounts in order to make oneself more interesting than one is. Neither is it any of the tear-jerking Confessions of an Opium Eater, or whatever people get indigestion from.

This is a real book for real people by a real writer. Its condensed, yet highly readable 343 pages of text in a handy format, which allows you even to read it in bed, without the volume falling heavily on your nose after two minutes. It will guaranteed keep you awake and thrilled. You will find in it, not only a fascinating and touching life story of a young lady marathon runner, whose ways have lead her across the whole world, in the pursuit of human happiness and prosperity as an entrepreneur. This not so much for herself, other than in terms of professional satisfaction, but so as to transform her skills and knowledge into action and business, to benefit in the first place the people of the continent, where she was born and raised -- Africa.

The Library of Congress catchwords in the colophon do not make justice to the amount of information and inspiration this book provides. In reality, the content gives an unusually vivid insight in life, learning, and history on two continents with the most starkly contrasting quality of life between both of them: North America and Africa. What Monique Maddy describes in a highly literary style, is her Odyssey, taking her from her original home country, Liberia, by the way of the Harvard Business School, a spell of several years in economic development work with the United Nations system in several African countries, to entrepreneurship in East Africa, eventually back to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Each section of Learning to Love Africa contains material, enough for a separate book, so full is it of facts, and the underlying complex of issues and -- in a historical sense -- emotions, not sentimental ones, but the reactions and reflections of a young, but mature and highly intelligent human being. The present reviewer can lay certain claims to be able to judge both the accuracy, and the relevance of the writings, since by sheer coincidence he shares with Monique Maddy at least two of the spheres, in which both of us have moved and been active.

One is Liberia, and the iron ore mining company, LAMCO, where her "Pappi", Emmanuel Maddy, worked for many years as Chief Accountant, well-known to me and many colleagues from years around the Nimba Mountains, forty years and more back in time. Matter of fact, the undersigned is afraid that he was the geologist, responsible for what in page 191 is mentioned as "vastly [having] overestimated the iron ore content in the mines in Yekepa".

Taking into account the later mining of some other orebodies nearby, it did not prevent the mining company to maintain mining operations and export of iron ore for over twenty-five years. The operations could easily have continued to this day, had it not been for the utter, sad destruction of Liberia, and the terrible ordeal of its own population for the last decades. This latter is one of the many facets of that country, admirably described by Ms. Maddy. At any rate, this reviewer might -- and I am not facetious in this -- take some credit for this book to be written at all. Had we been able to make our ore calculations more accurately, which was not possible with the means and geological experience of those days, there might never have been any mining company. Monique Maddy might have been born somewhere else, and perhaps had a different career, although most certainly as distinguished and interesting as the one, she has described, and continues to live through.

The other sphere in common for both of us, is the United Nations system, of which she gives her own impressions and feelings, which are realistic and, no doubt correct, as dependent on as what, and where in the world she was working. Our experiences are to quite a degree different, both as for objectives, tasks, tactics, and surroundings -- they relate to each other as the proverbial apples and oranges, but then the UN system does so many different things between its political and development mandates. It would lead too far for this review to go into detail -- there is a mountain of very differing literature on this subject, including ongoing memoir-writing by the present reviewer on his angle of work for UNICEF during some twenty years!

In addition to all this, I found the other principal parts, precisely because they lay completely outside of my personal and professional experience, most fascinating. This concerns the ways of studies and life with the Harvard Business School, and the vagaries and vicissitudes of entrepreneurship in Africa, trying to introduce the concepts, technology, and use of modern means of communication to a continent, where in the interior, up to a few decades ago, in many places this was done only by word of mouth, letters carried at the end of a cleft stick by a runner afoot on paths in the bush, or by talking drums.

Her description of her studies, and her brave attempt as a business-person, to go against the grain of wide-spread corruption in a male-dominate world, should be mandatory reading for anyone, undergoing or dealing with higher studies, not only in the realm of Business Administration, but for any field of human endeavour. To those punctilious souls, who look for cost-benefit ratios in their personal investment, I can only say that this book is an investment, which would repay its cover price many times over. For the benefit of the rest of humanity I would just note that this is a memoir, which combines most interesting factual features with an intensely personal profile, all making for unusually fine reading...

For someone with little familarity with the history of Liberia (and most African countries), I found this book both insightful and enlightening. The text is written in a very organized and easy to read manner. The insight into the political, economic and social environment really draws the reader in. Her story is exceptional and should be read by all interested in conducting any business in Africa.

Learning to love Africa is a great read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, Africa, and international development. On the one hand, the book is a fascinating and moving personal story of a woman born in Liberia who, helped by the great sacrifices of her entrepreneurial family, gets educated in England and the US, and sets out to contribute to African development. The story of her childhood, her experiences as an African child in an English boarding school and later American high school and college, and especially the story of her entrepreneurial venture in telecommunications is highly engaging and told with wit and humor.
But Maddy is interested in more than telling her own story. She wants to contribute to the international development debate. Based on her personal experience growing up in a company town built by an international corporation, her stint at the UN and her experience with international development agencies that provided funding for her entrepreneurial venture she argues that Africa would have been better off without foreign aid, and that the development of the continent should be left to local entrepreneurs and international corporations.
The chapter that blasts the UN and other international development bureaucracies appears to have been written largely from the gut. It doesn't quite fit into the rest of the book and breaks up the flow of the story. Other books have been more effective than this chapter in pointing out the weaknesses of international aid, because they've been more thoroughly researched and provide specific evidence. Surely for the many failures of the UN one could cite many contrary examples of achievements. And surely, for every LAMCO that was a model of taking care of its employees there are other multinational corporations that have violated human rights and damaged the environment in the interest of short-term profits.
Aside from this one chapter,the story of Maddy's own experience at the UN and her description of Africa's entrepreneurial and trading cultures do make a compelling case for market-based development in Africa.
Maddy's book is provocative and adds a fresh perspective to the debate on international development and the future of Africa. I plan to assign the book in my international development class this fall.

This book is for the many Africans living in the diaspora, longing to return home and make a difference/dent toward many of the problems that face us. As one who feels torn between economic self-preservation and answering the call to return home and make a difference, this book has inspired me to no end.
Thank you.
This book will also touch anyone and everyone who feels socially responsible no matter where they are from.
Read it!

Maddy provides probably the best description of the ground-level problems facing entrepreneurs in Africa I have ever read.

The chapter on how her father was forced to reverse-integrate every aspect of his restaurant business in order to offer anything like a decent service was fascinating. Maddy points out how the struggling sole entrepreneur must surmount many of the same barriers that multinationals face, but with limited resources and no ability to just pack up and go home when things fall apart.

That chapter alone should be required reading in every graduate course on development economics and at every Davos Forum.

It's nice to see someone finally challenge the not just the efficacy but the legitimacy of Laputa, Inc. (the aid industry, NGOs, the UN bureaucracy) from the free-enterprise end of the spectrum. She doesn't just thrown down gauntlet, she slaps them in the face with it. It's a confrontation that is long overdue and I hope Maddy gets the fight she seems to be looking for.