"Mano Vision," Issue 23, London, book review:
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Title: "The Modern African State: Quest for Transformation"
Reviewer: Ronald Taylor-Lewis
Managind Editor
"Mano Vision"
6 Cromarty Court
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Email: manovision
Website: http://mano-vision.com

Mwakikagile's work is a masterpiece of fact and analysis. In the one book he manages to extensively cover the "rebirth" of Liberia, the "powerless" state of Sierra Leone, "ethnic cleansing" in Rwanda, "stateless" Somalia, slavery in Mauritania and Sudan, and the fall of Mobutu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire). Any one of the topics is the subject of a book in itself.

Mwakikagile uses the precedents of the history of other African countries, as well as other countries around the world, to make a case for the fragility of the "African State" as an institution owing to structural flaws.

In his introduction he states, "In a very tragic way, Sierra Leone is Africa, and Africa is Sierra Leone. So is Somalia, Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic, Kenya and Angola. And so is Rwanda, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, and Nigeria."

This sets the tone for the rest of the book that is full of comparisons between countries. At times this can be confusing for someone trying to concentrate on a single issue. But then Mwakikagile deliberately does this to bring home the fact that Africa is not, or should not be, considered a collection of numerous unrelated states, but a continent with a common experience much closer than many would care to admit.

Mwakikagile does not pull any punches in condemning those he considers guilty of causing the current woes of Africa. He also does not hesitate to name the continent's heroes.

The whole book is a great read for scholars and people merely interested in affairs on the continent. Some scholars may quibble with some of the facts as he presented them, but in general the book reads as a piece put together by someone who has taken the trouble to research his facts properly.

Recommended reading for anyone wishing to get up to speed on African affairs.

Review by Ronald Taylor-Lewis
Managing Editor
"Mano Vision"
London, UK

"The Modern African State: Quest for Transformation": published 2001 in the USA by Nova Science Publishers Inc., Huntington, NY.
ISBN 1-56072-936-8

sounds like another author making a name for himself among europeans and (anglo) americans who want to dehumanize and substain the common stereotypical view of africans and african inferiority. back in the twenties, and even now we have some like that in america. (conservative) americans will practically jump on to any of there words and take them as if writting right out of the new testimant. its a shame fewer and fewer people can capture the beauty in africa, but then again that may be for the best. If africa became i cool spot, you owuld have foreign bankers and investors, not to mention ravaging tourism and forien corruption (which is much worst than local corruption) raping africa of all it has. since africa is the last 'un europeanized' place on the planet, you already have mining, lumber and resortists salivating and waiting for enough people to die and the govt to collapse enough for them to walk in and loot. ask mexico, or jamaica or trinidad or nicaruagua, theyll tell you.

When you say black African writers like Godfrey Mwakikagile who criticize Africa are only trying to make a name for themselves among Europeans and Anglo-Americans - as well as other whites, of course, and even Asians, by logical extension - you might as well include in this blanket condemnation Bishop Tutu for telling the truth; Nelson Mandela for being honest about failures in black African countries; Julius Nyerere, hailed as "The Conscience of Africa," for being honest and saying "Africa is in mess." It was a liberal American publication (you sound like a liberal) which paid Nyerere the highest compliment when he died, remember? This is what "Newsweek" said about Nyerere: "The world has lost a man of principle."

One of those principles is telling the truth. Is Wole Soyinka, in his bitter condemnation of Africa's rotten governments, writing to please racists and feed on their racist fantasies and stereotypes? Or is he doing so to help redeem Africa? He went to prison for two years for that. Read his prison diaries, "A Man Died." So did Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Locked up by the Kenyan government for telling the truth.

Your argument that conservatives - and not just American - stereotype Africa has some validity. But not in all cases. And don't forget there are many liberals who also do that. And there is no question, of course, about conservatives like the late Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, authors of the incendiary work, "The Bell Curve," in which they contend that blacks are genetically - hence intellectually - inferior to whites and members of other races.

Remember, when the book became a best seller in the United States when it was first published in march 1994, not all those who snapped it up were white conservatives. Many white liberals, probably just as many as white conservatives, bought the book for the same reason, feeling vindicated in their belief about the inferiority of black people, while rubbing their hands with satisfaction: "See? I told you so!"

And for your information, I'm liberal myself, a black liberal, New Deal, in FDR's tradition. And I have families on both sides of the Atlantic: in the African diaspora in the United States, including the ghetto where many of our people have been confined in virtual concentration camps - that's what ghettos are to us, concentration camps; and also on the African continent where I have just as many relatives, if not more so.

Yet, I also face reality, however painful. Professor Thomas Sowell, a renowned economist and conservative, is black himself and knows what it means to be black in America as much as I do. He grew up poor in North Carolina, and in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and was the first in his family to go to college; another well-known black conservative, Professor Walter Williams who also teaches economics and is chairman of the economics department at George mason University and is a friend of Sowell, also grew up in Philadelphia, in the Adams projects, for poor blacks. He knows what it means to be black in America.

Yet, even many black liberals now concede - however grudgingly - that many of these conservatives tell the truth about the black condition. Few have refuted Sowell's central thesis. In his books he explains, with empirical evidence, why some ethnic groups do better than others, in spite of discrimination; why Africa is more backward than other regions of the world; why culture is important in development; why values conducive to achievement, even if you are poor, are important; and why human capital, not just money and technology, is critical to development. Read his books, if you haven't already: "Race and Culture: A World View"; "Migrations and Cultures: A World View," and others. Where liberals, especially black liberals, disagree with them the most is on the significance of racism in the American context, as African-American Professor Cornel West has eloquently argued in his best-selling book, "Race Matters," and in his other writings including his devastating critique of Thomas Sowell's book, "Race and the Market," first published in 1975.

Now, when African writers like Godfrey Mwakikagile, George Ayittey and others tell the truth about Africa, they are villified by so-called Africanists - many of them ivory tower intellectuals in the citadels of western academia - as well as by some fellow Africans for making Africa "look bad." It already looks bad! It's not their fault for telling the truth and trying to point the way out of this fetid swamp of misery caused by inept leadership more than anything else.

You also erroneously - may be deliberately or ingeniously - contend, in your response to my other posting as well, that the statistics I cite about Africa come from Europeans. No, they come from Africans. Read again what I said. They come from Godfrey Mwakikagile, a highly respected and even if controversial black academic author from Tanzania; George Ayittey, a black Ghanaian professor of economics at The American University and advisor to the World Bank as well as the US State Department and White House and former professor of economics at the University of Ghana before he fled the country in 1974 because the miltary regime was after him for telling the truth. They also come from Keith Richburg, an African-American from Detroit, Michigan, and former bureau chief of "The Washington Post," based in Nairobi, Kenya, in the 1990s. As he also bluntly states in his book, "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa," pp. 170ff:

"Before my arrival in Africa, I had spent four years reporting from Southeast Asia....What I found in Asia was a region of amazing economic dynamism, a place largely defined by more than a decade of steady growth and development, vastly improved living standards, and expanded opportunities. Almost all the Southeast Asian countries had risen from poverty to relative prosperity, creating huge and stable middle classes and entering the first tier of newly industrialized economies.

Why has East Asia emerged as the role model for economic success, while Africa has seen mostly poverty, hunger, and economies propped up by foreign aid? Why are East Asians now expanding their telecommunications capabilities when in most of Africa it's still hard to make a phone call next door? Why are East Asians now wrestling with ways to control access to the Internet, while African students still must use cardboard drawings of computer keyboards because they don't have real computers in their classrooms? Why are East Asian airlines upgrading their long-haul fleets, while bankrupt African carriers let planes rust on weed-strewn runways because they can't afford fuel and repair costs? Why are the leaders of Southeast Asia negotiating ways to ease trade barriers and create a free-trade zone, while Africans still levy some of the most prohibitive tariffs on earth, even for interregional trade?

There was nothing inevitable about Asia's success and Africa's despair. Both regions emerged from colonialism at about the same time and faced many of the same obstacles....

It's an ugly truth, but needs to be laid out here, because for too long now Africa's failings have been hidden behind a veil of excuses and apologies. I realize that I'm on explosive ground here, and so I'll tread carefully. It's all too easy to stumble into the pitfall of old racial stereotypes - that Africans are lazy, that Asians are smarter, that blacks still possess a more savage, primitive side. But I am black..., and so I am going to push ahead here, mindful of the dangers, knowing full well that some will say I am doing a disservice to my race by pointing out these painful realities....

First let's look at the statistics, the cold and hard realities, many of them depressingly familiar. According to the World Bank, Africa is home to the world's poorest nations - and that doesn't even really count places like Somalia, where no meaningful statistics are available because there is no government around to collect them. Africa's children are most likely on earth to die before the age of five. Its adults are least likely to live beyond the age of fifty. Africans are, on average, more malnourished, less educated, and more likely to be infected by fatal diseases than the inhabitants of any other place on earth.

Africa's economy has contracted. Its share of world markets has fallen by half since the 1970s, and the dollar value of the continent's global trade actually declined during the 1980s. African trade accounts for less than 0.1 percent of American imports. With the exception of South Asia, the African continent has been largely relegated to the economic sidelines, to the irrelevant margins of the world trading system.

Talk to me about Africa's legacy of European colonialism, and I'll give you Malaysia and Singapore, ruled by the British and occupied by Japan during World War II. Or Indonesia, exploited by the Dutch for over three hundred years. And let's toss in Vietnam, a French colony later divided between North and South, with famously tragic consequences. Like Africa, most Asian countries only achieved true independence in the postwar years; unlike the Africans, Asians knew what to do with it.

Talk to me about the problem of tribalism in Africa, about different ethnic and linguistic groups having been lumped together by Europeans inside artificial national borders. Then I'll throw back at you Indonesia, some 13,700 scattered islands comprising more than 360 distinct tribes and ethnic groups and a mix of languages and religions; Indonesia has had its own turbulent past, including a bloody 1965 army-led massacre that left as many as a million people dead. But it has also had thirty years since of relative stability and prosperity.

Now talk to me about some African countries' lack of natural resources, or their reliance on single commodities, and I'll ask you to account for tiny Singapore, an island city-state with absolutely no resources - with a population barely enough to sustain an independent nation. Singapore today is one of the world's most successful economies.

I used to bring up the question of Asia's success wherever I traveled around Africa, to see how the Africans themselves - government officials, diplomats, academics - would explain their continent's predicament. What I got was defensiveness, followed by anger, and then accusations that I did not understand the history. And then I got a long list of excuses. I was told about the Cold war, how the United States and the Soviet Union played out their superpower rivalry through proxy wars in Africa, which prolonged the continent's suffering. And I would respond that the Cold War's longest-running and costliest conflicts took place not in Africa but in Korea and Vietnam; now tell me which continent was the biggest playing field for superpower rivalry.

When the talk turns to corruption - official, top-level plunder - then at last we are moving closer to brass tacks. Corruption is the cancer eating the heart of the African state. It is what sustains Africa's strongmen in power, and the money they pilfer, when spread generously throughout the system, is what allows them to continue to command allegiance long after their last shreds of legitimacy are gone....

So endemic is African corruption - and so much more destructive than its Asian counterpart - that the comparison has even spawned a common joke that goes like this:

An Asian and an African become friends while they are both attending graduate school in the West. Years later, they each rise to become the finance minister of their respective countries. One day, the African ventures to Asia to visit his old friend, and is startled by the Asian's palatial home, the three Mercedes-Benzes in the circular drive, the swimming pool, the servants.

'My God!' the African exclaims. 'We were just poor students before! How on earth can you now afford all this?'

And the Asian takes his African friend to the window and points to a sparkling new elevated highway in the distance. 'You see that toll road?' says the Asian, and then he proudly taps himself on the chest. 'Ten percent.' And the African nods approvingly.

A few years later, the Asian ventures to Africa, to return the visit to his old friend. He finds the African living in a massive estate sprawling over several acres. There's a fleet of dozens of Mercedes-Benzes in the driveway, an indoor pool and tennis courts, an army of uniformed chauffeurs and servants. 'My God!' says the Asian. 'How on earth do you afford all this?'

This time the African takes his Asian friend to the window and points. 'You see that highway?' he asks. But the Asian looks and sees nothing, just an open field with a few cows grazing.

'I don't see any highway,' the Asian says, straining his eyes.

At this point, the African smiles, taps himself on the chest, and boasts, 'One hundred percent!'

The joke was first told to me by an American diplomat in Nigeria who had also spent time in Indonesia. It carried a poignant message about the debilitating effects of corruption in Africa versus its more benign counterpart in Asia. 'In Indonesia, the president's daughter might get the contract to build the toll roads,' the diplomat told me, 'but the roads do get built and they do facilitate traffic flow.' In Africa, the roads never get built. It was the difference, he said, between 'productive corruption and malignant corruption.'"

Now, let's hear more excuses for Africa's predicament and self-inflicted pain.

telling me your political views here isnt really going to prove anything, because on the net, anyone can claim to be black, or white or liberal of conservative. I seriously doubt your 'liberal' in any matter of the sense, since your wording is 180 degrees from the left.

anyway, your pretty much indicating that your an american, which leads me to the logical conclusion that your one of the types of people which i mentioned in my previous post, looking for a quick and easy way to dehumanize and attack africa. any african in africa (i have spoken to MANY) would disagree with your posts just as i have, and since you have so many american references, the odds are your attacking africa from an anglo american point of view.


rather than giving a long drawn out counter to you words, ill just give you SPECIFIC college texts (thats college approved, not written by any single author, and therefore not subject to single mindedness)-

Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction-1st ed.
Donald Mitchell,Donald Mitchell

The Human Mosaic : A Thematic Introduction to Cultural Geography-8th ed.

Human and Cultural Geography: A Global Perspective-1st ed.

Essentials of World Regional Geography-3rd ed.

World Regional Geography: The New Global Order 2nd Edition-2nd ed.


and before you go about and give me links or references to various books written by single authors, let me cite again that these are college text books written by MANY people in their approved fields, not a single author attempted to sell books, or with a single mind frame on the issue being spoken of.

"You hardly find any white liberals in black neighborhoods. And I bet you, it's the same situation in post-apartheid South Africa. They deeply resent when successful blacks move into what were once all-white neighborhoods."

What white South Africans object to is their neighbourhoods becoming extensions of the black ghettos, because that unfortunately is exactly what they become - ghettos. Take a drive throught the once beautiful suburbs of, Bezuidenhout Valley, Berea, Kensington (West) & Yeuoville all in Johannesburg. Alot of the houses don't even have rooves or doors or windows anymore.

All it takes is one, then property prices plummet, crime goes throught the roof, the drug dealers move in, and well you have another ghetto and sorry for you if you didn't sell in time. The successful blacks are fine. They also avoid predominantly black areas as the results are always the same - decay. They move to areas like Houghton (where Mandela lives), Bryanston etc were the people are wealthy enought to butt out any threat.

here in the US thats called 'white flight'. the reason they become 'ghettos' is because thats what anglos deem any neighborhood, regardless of its statue, with more than one black family living there. prices go down because anglos start to move out, and in real estate market, people moving out a neighborhood devalues the whole nieghborhood.

more likely in south africa post aparthied (as it is here in US post-jim crow/segregation), whites movedout because they either didnt want to associate with blacks, or more likely (especially in SA case) they were afriad of blakcks moving in due to their previous treatment and imposed status by whites.

this was a problem here in america, and to some extent it still is, but now when it happens, and whites move out of a neighborhood, black buisness owners (in few not, but more and more frequent cases) buy up the houses, and sell them to black home buyers at the same price they would of payed without the large outward migration devaluation. as a result, there are more and more black neighborhoods that are nice and newish, and there ends up being more black political power in former white areas.

its very bad for whites to do this, becuase often they move into other, more expensive areas, and pay more for brand new houses than they did at their previous brand new house. while this encourages homebuilding, which is good, unfortunately for the whites it spreads their political power thin and drains their wallets having to pay more and more when hispanics or blacks move into their neighborhoods. in the end, often whites end up moving into former black 'ghettos', where usually most of the black population has moved to better neighborhoods and usually asians or hispanics have taken abode.