Where did it all go wrong? That is a question that a generation of liberals, both woolly and otherwise, have pondered when examining the plight of Africa in the aftermath of the ‘wind of change’ that swept the continent after the Second World War, transforming some forty assorted territories owned by a select clutch of European colonial powers into around fifty fully independent and sovereign states. Well might they have pondered it since questions relating to Africa have rarely been straightforward, dominated by moral and political contortionism, complicated by Western post-colonial guilt and Cold War realpolitik, clouded by images of swollen-bellied refugees and genocidal dictators.

Into this cauldron of self-doubt, uncertain pity and contempt steps Martin Meredith examining the story of fifty years of African independence. Meredith blasts away the stereotypes with cold fact and blunt candour in this magisterial yet concise history in order to demonstrate how what followed in the years after independence was in many ways disastrous for most of Africa’s nascent states. In his introduction, Meredith briefly outlines the structure of colonial Africa after the war. What appears remarkable about European colonisation is how its impact was often relatively limited, and however much it proved a curse for Africans, its rapid disintegration only sowed the seeds for the many misfortunes that were to follow.

In the great carve-up of territory that became known as the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late 19th Century, Meredith highlights the cruel absurdity of European statesman in country houses tearing apart ethnic groups with the stroke of a pen on a map along a line of longitude or latitude: ‘We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other,’ Meredith quotes of the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, ‘only hindered by the slight impediment that we never knew exactly where they were’. In the process, different ethnic groups, notably Arabs and black Africans in the Sahel region, were bracketed together into new territories such as Chad or Sudan, despite their naked hatred for one another: ‘Thus were born the modern states of Africa’.

Yet despite the brutality with which imperial authority was often stamped upon the locals, in many cases, European authority was relatively invisible. Most African territories did not prove financially lucrative in the short term and consequentially European states pushed for self-sufficiency. Meredith’s statistics; plentiful, informative and used impressively throughout the book without inducing boredom, make interesting reading:

‘The whole of British tropical Africa, where 43 million people lived, was governed by 1,200 administrators….Scattered across vast stretches of Africa, lone district administrators became virtually rulers of their domain, functioning simultaneously as police chief, judge, tax collector, head of labour recruitment, special agent and meteorological observer.’

Yet with so few personnel on the ground it was necessary for European powers to hire members of the local population to help in administration. Thus, from traditional African societies a new black middle class began to emerge of doctors, lawyers and civil servants, schooled in the Western pattern of government administration to fit with the modern world into which Africa was being thrust. Some of these men (for men they exclusively were) would eventually come to power. Individuals in French colonial Africa such as Senegal’s Leopold Senghor were brought up in the French tradition, expressed loyalty and admiration for France and copied European models of administration and democracy - in Senegal’s case with great eventual success.

But the legacy of the laissez-faire approach to colonial administration, combined with the inversely proportional forces of rising African nationalism and diminishing European willingness to stem the tide of de-colonisation in order to ensure that new states were properly ‘bedded in’ before independence, meant that this was a rare exception. Meredith captures well the excitement of the dawn of the era of independence, which meant that such concerns were often swept under the carpet:

’The honeymoon of African independence was brief but memorable. African leaders, riding the crest of popularity, stepped forward with energy and enthusiasm to tackle the tasks of development and nation-building.’

This current of hope and energy soon turned to despair as the nationalist leaders of Africa, instead of offering the leadership necessary to bind what had previously been merely colonial administrative blocs into nations, fell prey to the worst of vices; corruption, tribal antagonism, incompetence and the perpetration of genocide.

What is compelling is that out of the mass of statistics, Meredith teases some incredibly vivid portraits of the leaders who first made, and then betrayed, modern Africa. In a sense, it was the most obvious thing to do; these men were some of the most colourful and terrible to ever hold executive power, the ‘Big Men’ as Meredith puts it; much more exciting subject-matter for a book than Permanent Under-Secretaries of the Treasury for instance. Among the lesser known despots was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who in 1977 proclaimed himself ‘Emperor’, in true Napoleonic style from a gold throne in the shape of a giant eagle, of what had been the Central African Republic and its two million inhabitants,. Highlights of his ‘reign’ included political prisoners being fed live to the crocodiles inside the walls of the ‘imperial’ palace in Bangui. His tenure was ended after he was removed by the French for slaughtering schoolchildren protesting against his regime.

Then there was General Mobutu of Zaire. His regime, held together for over 30 years partly with the support and connivance of the CIA, so comprehensively looted his own country’s resources, that by the time his regime was toppled in 1997, Zaire ‘was little more than a rotting carcass…a world of cannibal capitalism, where most banks and public services and any logic of economic growth…ceased to operate’.

Meredith also does well to focus much attention on the showcases of modern African history that reflected the trends of the day. The downfall of white minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa takes its place, as does the rise of the blood diamond trade, propagated in West Africa by the Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, currently standing trial before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Through this Meredith ensures that Western governments and interests take a proper, and not disproportionate share of the blame for Africa’s misfortunes. Most damning is the history of the botched UN interventions in Somalia and Rwanda in the early 1990s. The heavy-handed intervention of the UN in Somalia, concocted by byzantine politicking of the ambitious Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali led directly to the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident and resulted in minimal benefit to starving Somali civilians.

The tragic results of this blunder became apparent when the UN failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Made timid by the Somalian debacle a year before, an over-cautious Security Council refused to listen to the warning signs. The UN commander on the ground, General Dallaire, was painted as an over-zealous troublemaker in an attempt to discredit his disturbing reports. Diplomats procrastinated over coming to terms with the truth of the ongoing genocide and then dithered over its response so that, as Meredith quotes of one diplomat: ‘While thousands of human beings were hacked to death every day, ambassadors argued fitfully for weeks about military tactics’.

Meredith’s achievement in creating such a wide-ranging, authoritative, yet highly readable account of modern African history should not be understated. He does not hesitate to place blame where it is due, yet refrains from the splutterings of moral outrage that can so often taint such historical works. What he does best is allow the protagonists to speak for themselves, to highlight the cruel absurdities of Africa’s post-colonial history, and ultimately the truth that as yet, there is no way out for its ‘hollowed out’ states, burdened as they are with the ‘vampire-like politicians who run them’. As he quotes poignantly of one of the characters of Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe:

’worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass…It wouldn’t be so bad if it was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another…just what is up and what is down.’