Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the past three decades. Why? Robert Guest's fascinating book seeks to diagnose the sickness that continues to hobble Africa's development. Using reportage, first-hand experience and economic insight, Robert Guest takes us to the roots of the problems. Two fifths of African nations are at war, AIDS has lowered life expectancy to as young as forty and investment is almost impossible as houses that could be used as collateral do not formally belong to their owners. Most shocking of all is the evidence that the billions of dollars of aid, given to Africa has had little perceptible effect on the poor. "The Shackled Continent" offers insightful, and occasionally controversial, explanations for this state of affairs. In this magnificent and engaging book, Robert Guest provides an invigorating history and an inspired commentary on the enigma of modern Africa and this paperback edition includes a new chapter. 'I doubt whether there is a better brief introduction to the travails of modern Africa and their causes.' - Anthony Daniels, "Sunday Telegraph". 'He is a lively and observant reporter who can describe, in a breezy no-nonsense style, the horrors and miseries of Africans in the interior...The reader can learn much from this lively and outspoken book.' - Anthony Sampson, "Guardian".
The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"'I doubt whether there is a better brief introduction to the travails of modern Africa and their causes' Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph 'He is a lively and observant reporter who can describe, in a breezy no-nonsense style, the horrors and miseries of Africans in the interior...The reader can learn much from this lively and outspoken book' Anthony Sampson, Guardian 'A provocative read' The Glasgow Herald"
About the Author
Robert Guest is currently the Africa Editor for the Economist and regularly appears on CNN and the BBC. A graduate of Oxford University, he lived in Africa for three years reporting on wars, famines, crazy monetary policies and bizarre drinking games. He lives in London.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rays of hope in the darkness of despair,
By
This review is from: The Shackled Continent (Paperback)
In this captivating book, the author shares his experiences of Sub-Saharan Africa by exploring the reasons for the region's abject poverty and suffering. Guest takes into account factors like for example climate and history, whilst quoting African writers like Chinua Achebe, Themba Sono and Chenjerai Hove. The text often focuses on rays of hope amidst the despair so the book is not a relentless tale of woe. Guest identifies negative issues like tribalism and corruption and the waste of aid money while pointing out positive developments in places like Botswana, South Africa, Uganda and Senegal. He examines the good results in countries that follow sound fiscal and monetary policies as opposed to the vampire state in places like Zimbabwe or the failed state in e.g. Congo (Zaire). A very important point that Guest makes is that Africa can develop and improve the lives of its people without sacrificing its culture. Japan is proof enough that modernity does not necessarily threaten an indigenous culture. Guest discusses Rwanda's holocaust and religious clashes in Nigeria, takes a balanced look at South Africa's successes and its failures like its lack of an AIDS policy and criticises western countries for their agricultural protectionism that is holding Africa back. More Western aid is not the answer, and in some places mineral wealth has been more of a curse than a blessing. He makes a plea for increased trade and praises the stability that exists in those countries where property rights are respected. He also surveys the situation of the media, where both oppression and lack of money are impediments to a free press. The book ends on an optimistic note with the example of a young man in the KwaZulu province of South Africa having become a successful businessman after abandoning a life of violence. The book concludes with bibliographic notes and an index. The Shackled Continent can be heartbreaking at times, but the overall tone is optimistic, and realistically so. The book leaves an impression of hope and the reader can only pray that good government may soon come to Africa. The title of South Africa's national anthem by Enoch Sontonga, says it all: "Nkosi sikelele i'Afrika", meaning God bless Africa.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Africa in Crisis,
By
This review is from: The Shackled Continent (Paperback)
One cannot help get the impression that Africa only surfaces in the news whenever there is famine in that continent, another pogrom, or when the bizarre excesses of one of its many despots is exposed.
In this highly readable and provocative book complete with detailed footnotes and a useful index, Robert Guest, African editor of the Economist, draws on his vast experience as a correspondent in sub-Saharan Africa. He chronicles the endemic poverty, egregious corruption and blatant cronyism, vicious inter-tribal feuds (including a harrowing account of the Rwanda genocide), and the squandering of millions of dollars of foreign aid in the breezy, informal style one has come to associate with the Economist. Why is Africa so poor, indeed becoming more of a `basket case', asks Guest? Afterall, Africa has received the equivalent of six Marshall plans since 1960 (p.150). Despite this infusion of $US400 billion in aid, all but four of the 34 countries on the UN list of Low Human Development indicators are in Africa. From the outset, Guest concedes that Africa has suffered at the hands of rapacious Western powers which ruthlessly exploited cheap labour and carved up the continent without consideration for tribal loyalties. Quoting historian, Basil Davidson, these loyalties have eclipsed any allegiance to the nation-state which have hindered efforts to govern Africa's 600 million citizens. Nor has geography been kind to Africa (pp.7-8). Extreme, warm climates contribute to the prevalence of malaria and other debilitating tropical diseases which cripple large segments of the African workforce and stall economic progress. Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Guest is in no doubt that Africa's malaise is primarily due to the incompetence and abuse of power by its authoritarian leaders whose kleptomania has prevented the continent from modernising and reaching its full potential. The wealth generated from Africa's immense quantities of natural resources, as well as billions of dollars of Western aid, have been siphoned off by `vampire' states. He is particularly scathing of African elites and Western apologists who reflexively assign blame for Africa's abject poverty on imperialism arguing that many non-African nations have overcome their own legacy of colonialism, and that this experience has not been an unmitigated evil (p.9). Guest might have explored the argument that the behaviour of developed nations perpetuates the cycle of bad governance and diverts overseas aid from those states most in need. Governments and corporations in wealthy countries rarely seem to question the legitimacy of unscrupulous and corrupt rulers in the developing world to forge deals on buying and selling of oil or minerals that belong to the peoples of those nations. Nor do they demur when the resultant windfalls are used to purchase arms - from manufacturers in the developed world. These fuel the wars and civil strife racking Africa. By the end of the 1990s, one in five Africans lived in a country engulfed in a civil or cross-border war (p.54). The book's coverage of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa reinforces Guest's recurring theme that factors such as denial, neglect and superstition are key impediments to tackling the crises it faces. AIDS has lowered life expectancy, devastated families and is draining resources from communities and local economies. Hardest hit are Zambia and the otherwise successful, Botswana. With the notable exceptions of Uganda and Senegal, African governments have generally been loathe to admit the ruinous potential of the HIV virus and failed to prevent its spread through public health campaigns. Some of Guest's observations on the spread of AIDS can seem a little trite, such as his suggestion that `[T]hose who cannot afford television find other ways of passing the evening' (pp.16, and in case we missed it, repeated on p.99). Nevertheless, his account of this ongoing tragedy is as comprehensive and compassionate as could be expected in a book of this scope. Having catalogued Africa's woes, mixing anecdote with analysis, Guest advances several solutions to address the continent's ills. Two countries, Zimbabwe and South Africa, are telescoped in Guest's assessment of Africa. He recounts how the post-liberation governments and their supporting elites in those countries have taken the short cut of expropriating assets instead of developing their own - and have suffered economically as a consequence. The Mugabe regime is condemned as being symptomatic of all that is wrong in Africa - a nation with great potential thwarted by despotism. On South Africa, Guest is less convincing, especially his political analysis of that country's recent history. In one of his last pieces of journalism, the late Anthony Sampson, maintains that it is flawed to assert, as Guest does, that the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted the ANC, the main black liberation movement, to renounce Marxism. Rather, it was the American banks, and the sanctions imposed by the US Congress - pressed by Christian and student lobbies - that undermined apartheid long before the collapse of the USSR. Guest recommends wholesale economic modernisation throughout Africa. This is where the book stumbles. As one would expect of a journalist from the Economist, he is an unashamed advocate of the `free' market as an antidote to the ills plaguing Africa. To be sure, any economic regeneration must entail some adherence to the market, if only because Africa cannot prosper and attract badly-needed foreign investment without participating in the global economy. And regressing to a command economy or the failed model of collective farming - ujama - followed by Tanzania under the benign reign of Julius Nyerere, would only deepen Africa's underdevelopment. However, Guest fails to examine whether the unswerving adherence to market solutions promoted by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund do more harm than good by entrenching economic inequality and engendering social instability. A new work by Chang and Grabel ('Reclaiming Development: An Alternative Economic Policy Manual', London, Zed Books, 2004) challenges the `myths' of neoliberal economic policies in both the developed and developing world have contended that interventionist policies that regulate the market are entirely compatible with economic growth and national well-being. The author does acknowledge, though, that trade remains slanted in favour of the developed world, and that subsidies and import barriers imposed by many developed countries need to be dismantled. He notes that agricultural protectionism amounts to an astonishing $1 billion a day - equivalent to the GDP of all of sub-Saharan Africa (p.165). Guest only briefly touches on debt relief, a cause popularised by rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof. Recently, the British Government offered an assistance package to Africa doubling bilateral aid to £1 billion in 2005 and writing off 100 per cent of the debts of the globe's poorest countries. Guest would approve the conditions that are increasingly being attached to such generosity: namely, that African leaders embrace political reforms that enshrine openness, transparency and the rule of law, as well as democratic advances that hold these leaders accountable to the people they serve. In other words, economic reforms must be accompanied by wide-ranging restructuring of African political institutions. A more far-reaching proposal from Jeffrey Sachs, head of the UN Millennium Project and special adviser to the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, aims to convince the G8 countries that $75 billion per year in aid till 2015 is required to eradicate extreme poverty. Guest favours trade as a more reliable vehicle to curb poverty than yet more infusions of foreign aid (p.162), but remains surprisingly sanguine about Africa's future. It is likely that a combination of these two views - massive outside assistance, and radical internal political and economic reforms - is needed to lift Africa from perennial squalor to the prosperity Guest believes that continent is capable of achieving.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sharp and entertaining analysis of Africa's problems,
By
This review is from: The Shackled Continent (Paperback)
Why is Africa the only continent that has not seen economic growth in the last 40 years? It is all too easy to blame just AIDS and the legacy of colonialism for all the problems. In this razor-sharp analysis Robert Guest uses examples from his experience as a traveling journalist for The Economist to explain his view on Africa's problem. Sure, AIDS and other infectious diseases is one of them, but far more important are corrupt leaders, warlords fighting for the raw mineral reserves in many countries and the enormous amount of red tape in combination with the impossibilities to get loans when you want to start a company. The appalling infrastructure (especially roads) together with policemen and other officials one has to bribe along the way do not help either to get from A to B. And often it is in the interest of the political leaders to steer up tribalism to divert people's attention from the misdeeds of the government.
Robert Guest not only describes the problems, but also discusses possible solutions, which in his opinion mainly lie in giving people opportunities to develop themselves and trade freely. A very well-written book with a lot of recognizable examples for a regular Africa traveller like myself. It's not often that I read a book like this in 1 day, but this one I did.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
