Martin Meredith : the state of Africa [book review]

Abstract

Let me start this book review with a prediction. As your eyes ran over the title of this page just a few seconds ago, a flurry of thoughts and images raced through your mind: hunger, illness, HIV/AIDS, Boko Haram, migrants, elephants, gazelles, and lions, slavery, Joseph Conrad’s novel about the horrors of the Belgian Congo, Heart of Darkness. These images, I argue, are about as representative of Africa as the moustache and the baguette are of France. While clichés might hold an element of truth, they surely reflect a profound unfamiliarity with France if one thinks only of these caricatures. The state of our ignorance about Africa—a continent of some 30 million square kilometers that houses well over a billion people—is immeasurably worse.