Product Description

'An excellent book. Timely, provocative and written throughout with a passion for Africa and Africans' BOB GELDOF

Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades. Why?

The Shackled Continent, Robert Guest's fascinating first book, seeks to diagnose the sickness that continues to hobble Africa's development. Why are so many African nations at war? Why has AIDS affected Africa so much more than any other region, causing life expectancy in several countries to plummet below 40 years? Why are so many African governments corrupt, inept and despotic? Why has foreign aid proven such a failure?

With an engaging combination of first hand experience and economic insight, Robert Guest offers trenchant and sometimes controversial explanations for this state of affairs. The Shackled Continent examines the logic behind the chaos in Congo and the economic madness of Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. With vivid reporting from big slums and small villages in Malawi, the book explains why so few Africans own their own homes. To illustrate how bad roads and bribe-hungry policemen affect African business, the author rides a beer truck into the Cameroonian rain forest, and is stopped at road-blocks forty-seven times.

There are stories of hope here, too. Uganda, for example, has managed to curb the spread of AIDS. Botswana is peaceful and prosperous. South Africa, the continent's economic engine, has avoided a full-blown civil war. Robert Guest puts such triumphs in a wider context, and asks why there are not more of them. This magnificent book provides an invigorating treatise on how Africa can wake from its slumbers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2862 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-01
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Bob Geldof
'An excellent book. Timely, provocative, written throughout with a passion for Africa and Africans.'

Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph
I doubt whether there is a better brief introduction to the travails of modern Africa and their causes

R. W. Johnson, Sunday Times
Astute and clever . . . The Shackled Continent is a lively and provocative read

Customer Reviews

A hard hitting view on Africa
By its own admission, this book sets out to answer the problem, "Why is Africa poor?". The writer makes no apologies for his answer. It has little to do with any of the usual suspects- geography, slavery or colonialism. In the most part, the poverty of the continent can be traced to the greed or/and ineptness of its leaders. Pages of first hand evidence are laid out in support of this view- Mugabe's politics in Zimbabwe, Mbeki's passive attitude towards HIV/AIDS, Nyerere's policy of socialism. Bad governance has conspired to create an environment be-devilled by violent trbal conflicts, failing infrastructure and a strong dis-incentive to productivity.

Guest is adamant in his insistence that Africa's long term development hinges on its ability to grow its economy and until the proper policies are put in place by Africans themselves to do this, no amount of foreign intervention would help. He is not altogether negative. He points out that, where Africa has made progress, it has been because the leaders in question practised good governance. He gives the example of Botswana's economic record, Uganda's success with dealing with HIV/AIDS and recent democratic developments in Nigeria.

On the whole, it is a cutting analysis which emphatically states what many Africans hate to hear- Africa is poor because of Africa.

A fascinating one by one examination of Africa's challenges
Chapter by chapter, Guest takes up a number of the challenges facing Africa and examines them. Beginning with the rapacious and rabidly corrupt power lechers who have headed up the governments of many, if not most African countries since independence, he then moves through topics such as how abundant mineral wealth and foreign arms supplies have lengthened the violent power struggles that have wracked the continent, the social and economic devastation of the AIDS plague, how tribal loyalties have been exploited by those wishing to seize or maintain power, why Western aid policies have largely failed and how trade would be a better alternative.

The book's portrait of Africa is not all negative. The remarkable economic growth of Botswana and the huge (though belated) success by Uganda and Senegal in tackling the AIDS problem are discussed. The post-apartheid successes and challenges in South Africa are examined and some cautious reasons for hope are put forward.

Within each of the topics examined, Guest uses a mixture of illustrative historical examples and stories from his own personal experience as a journalist for The Economist in Africa to support his arguments. His style is engaging and very easy to read and his comments are perceptive and enlightening. If I have one criticism of the book, it would be that each of the topics discussed is largely self-contained with few threads connecting the various arguments. Overall an extremely informative read, however.

ok, a little wishy-washy at times
This is a synopsis of only a few of the major trials and tribulations of the African continent but its style is simplistic and this is not a book which should be read in isolation.

Guest makes sweeping statements such as pg19 when he talks about South Africa's problems he says "....re-polarized South African politics along racial lines. This is unlikely to lead to violence; whites who don't like it can emigrate."

Really, South Africans (of any racial background) can just up and leave like that? And is that an effective solution, a minority group must just leave? Rwanda is still paying the price now for the international community supporting the Hutu majority for 30 years which then lead the 1994 genocide - should the Tutsis who didn't like the Hutu racial policies (i.e. 9% of school and unversity places, etc. only for Tutsis) have just up and left?

This is just one example of Guest's sweeping statements, not to mention his mass generalisations.

The book does give someone who hasn't been to Africa or hasn't studied Africa a flavour, but don't take it all as fact. He is a journalist, and while at times entertaining, a lot more opinion than fact makes it on to the pages.