Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs

Rating:
Summary: Death warmed over
Review: As one can guess from its title, this assessment of Africa at the start of the new millenium is a virtual laundry list of what's wrong with the continent. Schwab rounds up the usual suspects: "Privation, corruption, the neglect of AIDS, ethnic horrors, civil turbulence, murder, oppression of dissidents, a refugee emergency, hunger, famine, and genocide are the social norms that reverberate within the geography of Africa," he writes (p. 67). Schwab is a master of sweeping statements like that, or this one: "In Africa, clean water is an oxymoronic concept" (p. 75).

Reading "Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs," one rapidly gets the impression that all Africans lead lives of constant suffering, forever at the mercy of armed thugs, deadly pestilence and malnutrition. This, of course, is absolute bunk. It's not that the plagues Schwab describes are imaginary; they are quite real. It's just that they are not all there is to know about Africa. The overwhelming majority of Africans go about their daily business unhindered by them, and many even have clean water to drink. But their stories are not the one Schwab chooses to tell in this book. He pieces his dire outlook together using the worst cases, as illustrated here: "Somalia is a striking example of how African governments are at war with their own people" (p. 75). But Somalia has no government, and can scarcely be compared even with other African basket-cases like Sierra Leone, let alone the many peaceful if impoverished nation-states that never make the headlines. Schwab's argument is a little like saying "The horrors of Kosovo are a striking illustration of how Europe is falling apart." It's a stretch, to say the least. Unfortunately, Schwab is hardly unique among Africa specialists in making such broad and empty generalizations.

"Africa: A Continent Self-Destructs" concludes that Africa has broken down, perhaps beyond repair. Schwab finds nothing salutary in African culture, viewing it only as an obstacle to progress: "unless the negative vitality of tradition and tribalism is vitiated, the future of globalization in sub-Saharan Africa remains bleak indeed" (p. 139). The final chapter title is "Will Africa Survive?"--as if continents, or societies, could die.

I disagree with almost every idea here, but that's not why I would not recommend this book to a friend, nor assign it to students. The main problem with Schwab's book is that it contains nothing new; it's a stale serving of gloom-and-doom reheated for the 21st century. His litany of Africa's social, political, and economic ills is comprehensive, but anyone who's been paying attention already knows what's gone wrong. The more interesting and important questions--which this book largely ignores--are what these problems signify, why African governments are so often inefficient and corrupt, and why all these problems seem immune to the outside fixes that people like Schwab offer so readily.

Along with its myopic focus, the book is burdened by a disjointed writing style peppered with quotes from a grab-bag of sources (some from recent newspaper articles, others from hoary 20-year-old U.S. Army country profiles, others from fiction, presented side by side as though they all had equal authority). Add in some of the author's quirks (a fetish for the word "eviscerate," for example, and a fixation on the noble but historically irrelevant figure of Amos Sawyer) and you get a recipe for a scholarly disaster. Schwab's book completely misses the point: Africa WORKS (to quote the title of another, far better, political analysis of the continent). But it works toward ends that observers like Schwab have precious little grasp of.

Rating:
Summary: telling it like it is
Review: Like many Americans, I scan the news of the third world more than I read it. So I opened this book in part to see if the sweeping generalizations about sub-Saharan Africa I'd come to believe, more through osmosis than analysis, were true or needed revision. The conclusion, unfortunately, is that it's even worse than I thought. Corruption, disease, political instability, economic chaos, genocide are all part-and-parcel of Africa four decades after independence (give or take a few years, country to country). Schwab catalogues the horrors, citing statistics, anecdotal evidence, his own visits to the continent, and colors his reporting with excerpts from African novelists (going a little bit overboard with those references, actually).

He's careful to introduce the book with a review of the hand Africa was dealt: slavery; colonialism; and the treatment of African countries as pawns on the capitalist vs. communist chessboard of the cold war. However, the author's implicit argument is that this should not have led inevitably to the current situation. The title after all says self-destructs. Schwab's criticism is largely of greedy and brutal African dictators that have pillaged their own countries. While he hardly lets the industrialized world off the hook, and is especially critical of U.S. foreign-policy neglect of sub-Saharan states (South Africa excepted), he lays much of the blame clearly at the feet of African despots.

While not discounting the enormity of the problems, he does lay out some actions the U.S. can take to reduce the misery and privation. Debt relief and support for the few honest and forthright heads of state who are in place or rise to positions of leadership are prime recommendations.

...

This is an important book, a Western book and a personal book. Important, because it should be read by many in Washington. The cynic in me doubts that it will be -- Africa's off the radar screen right now, and I shudder to think what might put it back on. Western, because an argument can be made for a more Zen or "Star Trek" approach to societies less technologically developed: leave them alone to work it out on their own. Our own predispositions, today's political threats and the humanitarian instincts of many in the West probably preclude that happening now. Personal, because toward the end, Schwab eloquently describes the spirit of hope, idealism and opportunity that Peace Corps volunteers, businessmen, and academics carried with them on their visits to Africa immediately following independence. It's hard not to wonder, in a moment of armchair psychology, about the emotional effect Africa's current morass must have on someone like Schwab who was in the vanguard during that hopeful time of the 1960s.

Rating:
Summary: To better understand Africa
Review: The current condition of Africa is in pretty bad shape, lagging behind other parts of the thirds world. How did Africa reach this condition since it is where civilization began? Peter Scwab tries to to figure out what's wrong with Africa. He first visited Africa as a peace core volunteer in the early 1960s and has returned to the continent after that. He goes through time looking at the problems the contient has had. He starts by looking at the slave trade and how it perpetuated war among the various different ethnic groups so they could aquire slaves to sell to slave traders. Often, guns were brought in as payment only further increasing the warfare. Then colonialism came to basically economcially exploit the continent and creating an infrastructure that was better suited for the mother country then the colony. As a result of colonial lines, waring ethnic and religious groups were put toghether. Intentional or not, these divisions still cause problems to the present day. The Cold War came in bringing new military aid further increasing warfare. Compound Africa's problems with numourous civil wars, brutal dictators and constant warfare amoung nations only makes the continent worse off. AIDS is a crises in sub-Sahara Africa will large numbers of people becoming infected with no signs of it stopping which places a large number of people at risk for early deaths. Compound this with the countries inability to pay for AIDS medications the legal barriers they have had to obtain these drugs through generic prescripation manufactorors. The growing level of globilization is leaving Africa behind more so than other parts of the third world. Africa faces problems with instable government and transportation problems. Other problems that Schwab deals with are famine, disease, problems with rainfall.

Provides a good account of African problems past and present.

Rating:
Summary: Some choose to bury their heads in the sand...
Review: Where present day Africa is concerned, it is easier to ignore what is unpleasant or to minimize it and to discredit those who present an accurate view of it. Dr. Schwab presents a well-organized body of information about recent history and political and social conditions in a country-by-country analysis with specifics that one would have to search for in a variety of sources, all in a concise and easy-to-navigate book. Clearly, one of his main concerns is the denial of both individuals and nations that the conditions in many African countries are relevant to us. His account of historical events is laced with relevant and appropriate quotes from notable African authors. This serves, not as a distraction to the astute reader, but rather as a reminder that these are human beings being affected by these events and not just statistics. Dr. Schwab's suggestions as to what the role of the superpowers should be and how the self-destruction of the nations he discusses could be averted, is, I believe, realistic and is based on the author's many years of scholarly work and direct experience which have provided him with extraordinary insight in this area.