Martin Meredith

Understanding the present requires understanding of the past. And Meredith tries to achieve exactly this in his new book for Africa. This time it is about the economy - and by proxy the politics - of the continent that is so close to Europe but could as well had been on one of the poles for most of history.

Most books on similar topics dismiss or just mention in passing the smaller states in Africa. For Meredith no state is too small, no tribal skirmish too unimportant (ok, we do not hear show more about all of the skirmishes but it feels like we do at some point). It's a historical overview of a very long period of time on a land mass that at the end contains ~50 separate countries. But not all started like that.

Understandably the early chapters are about the old empire that everyone had heard of - Old Egypt and its neighbors. But the focus moves fast through the continent and the empires that appear and disappear; the tribes that migrate and lead wars. Even though the book technically covers the whole history of the continent, the 18th century is reached relatively fast - although by then the European big players had already started what will ultimately lead to the modern Africa.

With the hindsight of the 21st century it is even harder to read some of the stories and decisions being taken. When you read about the tribes in Rwanda that had found a way to live together and actually to mingle and start a process of assimilation, it is almost cruel to read how it was the Europeans that stopped that process - and you can see the path that will lead to the genocide. When the first diamonds are found in South Africa or the gold ores or the oil reserves in the States that have them, you know what is coming and that what could have made a country rich enough never materialize. It's a non-stop litany of internal and external factors sabotaging any emerging country in the area - if it is not a local war, it will be one of the colonial forces; if not that, it will be a dictator; if not that, it will be religion; and when all seems to be line up (the independence for most countries), things still go horribly wrong. And slowly, a century after century, the same mistakes happen over and over again. It is a parade of tribes and rulers, some show up for a paragraph never to be heard from (and their mark in the history is almost as fleeing), some show up a few chapters later - usually to make even a bigger mistake.

The structure of the book changes with the times - while at the start the regions discussed are geographical, it shifts to be based on who owns the colonies (and the differences in how the different countries handle their colonies is obvious without even being pointed out) and then back to geographical in the late 20th century. The book finishes in early 2014 for some countries, a little earlier for others but the panorama of the greed of the human race is complete.

What is being sold changes (slaves (and the Africans are willing participants as sellers of people from the tribe next door), diamonds, ivory, anything that grows under the sun), but things do not. Countries come and go, colonial rule starts and ends, things in Africa continue happening. The colonial split of the continent makes it impossible for most of the countries to survive - when a border is drawn in a map with no regards of ethnicity and languages, things are bound to go wrong. Add to this the big religions, the greed of the big colonial powers and the local leaders that learn the worst from the newcomers and just add it to their own arsenals of cunning and things are bound to explode. A lot.

At 675 pages, with 71 chapters, the book is just an overview. Each chapter can be expanded to multi-volume works. But this kinds of overviews are needed - I doubt that a lot of people will read a book about the history of Malawi for example but it is important to understand it - so that recent events in the news make sense. Meredith understand Africa and writes with a lot of respect about it - but he is not trying to be politically correct as a lot of the authors these days - black is black and white is white. And mainly - the world is covered in grey and trying to make it either black or white will never work. Maybe we all will finally learn our history lesson. On the other hand - it's the human race - there will always be someone that is not well-educated enough to repeat an old mistake.

There is nothing really new in the book - the information can be found elsewhere if one so chooses. And Meredith allows the reader to make their own decisions and to understand the actions - there is no analytical chapters where the author tries to explain to you what just happened. But it is a well researched and extremely well written story of a continent that still struggles with decisions that others had made for it for centuries. show less

It's important that you realize one thing about this book: it is a history of how the peoples and land of Africa have been exploited from Egypt to the present; it not a history of Africa. I'd like to read Meredith do the latter, but this isn't it.

It's important to mention this because I can easily imagine someone criticizing this book for its focus on the various peoples who have done the exploiting, whether ancient Egyptian, Muslim, African or European. There's a great deal less in here show more about the good and great things that the various African peoples have done for themselves. Also, he's writing about thousands of years of history of a place that isn't really coherent at all. If you get nothing else out of this book, you'll get the huge differences between the regions of Africa. That means he has to make some big generalizations, and they can probably be picked apart by specialists. That's okay. We need the specialists. We also need the generalists.

With those caveat in mind, this is a glorious book. Meredith writes well, the structure is intuitive (i.e., though he jumps around in time and space, the jumps are never jarring, and are always signaled with section breaks etc...) I cannot explain how much I learned from this book.

And if you're concerned about political bias, which you should be in any book of this kind, know that Meredith is seriously biased against everyone. A typical string of argument leads from, say, the horrors of the intra-African slave trade, to the horrors of the slave trade to Europe, to the greater horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here most accounts fall silent. Meredith, instead, proceeds to discuss the ways that African leaders, from the earliest contacts with Muslim states through to the end of the American slave trade, used their people as a way to make wealth and consolidate their power. Most slaves, in other words, were sold by Africans. The trade only ended once the entire continent (minus Abyssinia) was colonized by European powers who opposed the slave trade.

Such is the history of the exploitation of Africa: if you think something's getting better (e.g., slave trade ends), rest assured that something else is getting much worse. show less

I’ve been to Johannesburg, Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Botswana (Bechuanaland), but had only a vague understanding of how these countries came into existence and evolved. I was familiar with the Boers and their “trek” into the South African interior. I had heard of the Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal, but knew nothing of their boundaries. I knew of the Kimberley diamond mines and the Johannesburg gold fields, but wasn’t aware of their political show more significance. I was passingly familiar with Paul Kruger and Cecil Rhodes, and of course the Boer War, but none of the particulars.

Having traveled to this area, I was curious about its evolution and I chose this book in order to be better educated on the subject. I had previously read another history by this author which covered the more recent history of sub-Saharan Africa and the independence movements in those countries. I recently read Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, which is what compelled me to seek his history.

I can say that the book served its purpose. While not outstanding, it covered the period in question (from settlement of the Cape Colony until 1910) in a very satisfactory manner. From settlement of the Cape Colony, to the founding of Natal and the subsequent push of the Boers into the interior. From the founding of the Boer Republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, to the British conquest, Boer independence and subsequent Boer War. The economic and political machinations of Cecil Rhodes and finally the formation of what would become the modern South African state.

If you are curious about the political and economic history of the region, you could do worse than this history. show less

What happens when an author has two different ideas about how he wants to write a book? Most authors will simply write two books or make a choice between the two ways. Or find a middle ground. Martin Meredith decided to write one book with two parts. Each part is a very good short book that I would recommend at any time... but package them together as one book and things do not work that well.

The first part of the book is a chronological overview of all the fossils found in Africa - in the show more order they were found and with a lot of details about the scientists that found them and the reasons why some of them were not found earlier. Rivalries and making tricks on each other seem to be more important than finding the fossils to some of those scientists... and sometimes you are left to wonder if they really believe that their fame is more important that finding the answers. Don't get me wrong - anyone that works deserves recognition for what they are doing but the people that are looking for the past seem to have egos to match the age of the bones they are finding. And the book is using these scientists as a center of the story - the bones sometimes feel like being the secondary topic.

But all that makes the account even more fascinating - because before the reader's eyes, the story comes alive. I had been reading a few books on the topic so there was almost no new information there but the few nuggets here and there were pretty interesting. And the style is very readable, making an otherwise tense topic enjoyable - to the point that if I did not know what the next fossil will be, I would be wondering "now what?".

The second part is a more synthesized analysis of what had happened - a chapter on the found bones and ancestors in the order they had lived (just in case someone did not read the first part of the book or is unable to order the years properly I guess?), followed by a chapter on tools and what is found and how it proves that humanity started in Africa (and unlike the very ordered progression of the first part of the book, here times are mixed whenever needed to support an argument), followed by the emergence of the Homo Sapiens and its dispersal around the world (in pretty broad terms - although the DNA parts were pretty interesting).

This second part is a great introduction to the topic on its own - even if you disagree with some of the more radical ideas, it is a very good short introduction. But as a second part to a book where the first part made the start of the book, it is a repetitive list (in its early part) and the lack of details and full chronology comes very sharply in focus compared to the details of the first book.

Meredith is a historian and journalist that had been writing about Africa for years. So his position on where the humanity started is not unexpected. And the fact that the first people emerged there is something that I believe based on everything I had read so far. But he seems to be pushing too much for the fact that everything started in Africa and there is nothing that first happened somewhere else (the emergence of culture, paintings and so on). Even if that is the case, the argument is just not defended properly - there is not enough data at this point to prove or disprove the hypothesis and he is pushing the data that makes it look like that as the only data available.

When I started reading the book, I expected the one-sided argument - this is why I got the book. But even like that, it felt a bit heavy-handed in the middle chapters of the second part. At the same time in the rest of the book it almost sounded as if Meredith is trying to defend a position which as universally accepted as the fact that gravity exists. But then... I suspect that there are still people that think that Asia or Europe gave birth to humanity.

Overall a decent book made up from a great part and a good one... and one example of a whole that is less than its parts. show less