Contemporary Africa: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The focus has been on developments in sub-Saharan Africa, with the main themes ranging from the lack of peace and security, limited protection of human rights, the debt crisis, increased levels of unemployment and poverty, and gender inequality to the deteriorating health care standards a situation compounded by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. The book has some shortfalls, the most notable being the omission of developments in North Africa, the home of the Arab Spring (in terms of conditions prior to, during, and after the uprisings), which began in Tunisia in 2011 but surprisingly did not spread to sub-Saharan African countries with similar challenges.

Toyin Falola and Emmanuel M. Mbah, eds. 2014. Contemporary Africa: Challenges and Opportunities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 261 pp.

The editors of this book have assembled contributions from various scholars with competences in history, political science, international studies, and anthropology. In general terms, the contributors adopt a pessimistic approach to political and socioeconomic developments in Africa since the era of decolonization between 1945 and the mid-1960s. The focus has been on developments in sub-Saharan Africa, with the main themes ranging from the lack of peace and security, limited protection of human rights, the debt crisis, increased levels of unemployment and poverty, and gender inequality to the deteriorating health care standards a situation compounded by the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

The book is organized into two main parts. The first, consisting of chapters two to five, focuses on the legacies of colonial rule on postcolonial Africa. The second part, chapters six to ten, deals with some of the notable socioeconomic changes in sampled African countries. Mickie Mwanzia Koster, who wrote chapters two and nine, has focused on the history of Kenya, discussing the Mau Mau uprising of 1952-1960 and the Mungiki Movement that appeared in the 1990s. She argues that despite the fifty years of independence for Kenya, some of the contestations over land distribution and political space still linger on from the era of colonial rule, exemplified by the claims for compensation by former Mau Mau fighters in 2009 (p. 23), and the threat posed by the Mungiki Movement (p. 210).

There are also chapters that deplore the inefficiency of the postcolonial state in Africa. In chapter three, Julius O. Adekunle argues that despite the modernization of African civil service systems, most of them still remain as huge drains on state resources, through inefficiency, corruption, and also their politicization and entanglement in ethnicity (p. 58). In chapter four, Tokunbo A. Ayoola, laments the neglect of the Nigerian Railroad system by both the colonial state and the postcolonial state, leading to its collapse in the 1990s due to lack of proper maintenance (p. 74). The fifth chapter, by S.U. Fwatshak, continues on the same subject of neglect, but pushes the blame to the Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR. The author posits that while Asian countries benefitted from Western technological, security, and economic support (for them to disregard USSR propaganda), African countries did not get a similar treatment. Africa witnessed a rise in insecurity due to civil wars fuelled by the Cold War (such as the wars in the Congo and Angola); lack of economic opportunities; and the rise and sustainability of dictatorial regimes supported by the West (pp. 104-05). In that atmosphere, African states also incurred huge debts, as outlined by Augustine E. Ayuk in chapter six, leading to a debt crisis by the 1980s and 1990s, which was only alleviated by the HIPC program launched in 1996 (p. 136). One other interesting narrative is Austin C. Okigbo's contribution (chapter eight), in which he continues with the same pessimistic approach by tackling the question of racial tensions in post-apartheid South Africa. He argues that despite that the country is no longer under white minority rule, there is still more that needs to be done to bring about racial harmony, and he uses the issue of providing HIV/AIDS remedies as a case study (p. 177).

The book has some shortfalls, the most notable being the omission of developments in North Africa, the home of the Arab Spring (in terms of conditions prior to, during, and after the uprisings), which began in Tunisia in 2011 but surprisingly did not spread to sub-Saharan African countries with similar challenges. The contributions have also fallen into the trap of looking at African affairs from a pessimistic perspective, with less emphasis on the positive economic and political developments the continent has undergone. The question of insecurity also deserved an extensive discussion, as it has just been mentioned in passing in the book's introduction (p. 11). Certainly more should have been discussed on this theme, with regards to the threat posed by terrorist groups such as Boko Haram (in West Africa) and Al Shabaab (in East Africa).

Despite these shortfalls, I would recommend this book to scholars and other readers interested in the history of modern Africa, especially those interested in colonial and postcolonial continuities, the changing roles of the state, and also foreign intervention in African affairs.