The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence
Martin Meredith
Revised and Expanded Edition
PublicAffairs, 2011 [2005]
Martin Meredith’s massive tome on the history of Africa since the 1950s was originally published in 2005, in the UK as The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence and in the US under the much more pointed title The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair (this subtitle was later changed). The American publisher released it with the following marketing copy:
Today, Africa is a continent rife with disease, death, and devastation. Most African countries are effectively bankrupt, prone to civil strife, subject to dictatorial rule, and dependent on Western assistance for survival. The sum of Africa’s misfortunes — its wars, its despotisms, its corruption, its droughts — is truly daunting. … What went wrong? What happened to this vast continent, so rich in resources, culture and history, to bring it so close to destitution and despair in the space of two generations?
Focusing on the key personalities, events and themes of the independence era, Martin Meredith’s riveting narrative history seeks to explore and explain the myriad problems that Africa has faced in the past half-century, and faces still. From the giddy enthusiasm of the 1960s to the “coming of tyrants” and rapid decline, The Fate of Africa is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how it came to this—and what, if anything, is to be done.
Africa, in this telling, is not just a collection of nations, some of whom have “failed”—it’s an entire continent of failure. Moreover, as this copy suggests, it’s a failure of its own making, as Africans fought wars (often internal to the new nations), allowed despots to come to power, and let corruption run rampant, leading to poverty, disease, and famine. It probably didn’t help that, in this presentation, African anticolonialists were, like children in a candy store, “giddy [with] enthusiasm” over the prospect of independence from former masters.
In a barely critical review for Australian paper The Age, the late editor Pamela Bone criticizes Meredith for “miss[ing] the spirit of Africa, the joyfulness and strength of the people, which persists despite their appalling hardships, and which gives hope,” and summarized the book as follows:
In this big, exhaustive history Martin Meredith leaves us in little doubt as to what he believes is the primary cause of Africa’s pain: its corrupt, tyrannical, incompetent, thieving, “vampire-like” leaders. His book charts the history of African states in the half-century since the colonial powers either left or were kicked out. It documents, country by country, decade by decade, a depressing litany of wars, revolutions, dictatorships, famines, genocide, coups and economic collapse.
Bone’s vision, here, is of an Africa beset by its own failures but populated by strong, tough people who smile through the hardships, whose joys will lead them to better days.
The view from reviewers and the book’s own publishers suggests a familiar vision of Africa: a problem of monumental proportions brought about purely internally, what a sad place, but the children still smile, so maybe we should send some money this month—after all, as a gaggle of the West’s biggest pop stars reminded us in 1984, nothing ever grows in Africa and no rain or rivers flow, only the bitter sting of tears; they need us to fix their problems. There’s no sense of history, ironically, to either the framing of Meredith’s 800-page history, or to our general cultural understanding of the monolith we call Africa. Seen through whatever we might call Africa’s version of Orientalism, Africa is The Bad Place, one that proved any of the following, to name just a few, depending on who’s trying to make a point:
- why post-colonial nations failed
- why maybe colonialism was better
- why Islam is bad
- why communism or socialism is bad
- why foreign aid doesn’t work
- why planned economies fail
- why large-scale economic reform fails
- why tribalism and ethnic differences cannot be overcome
Meredith is a British—possibly South African, maybe even Zimbabwean? online details are scant—journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent in Africa for British papers, before trading his experience for a cushy research fellowship at Oxford, and is the author of a roughly a dozen books on Africa, from broad-ranging histories like The Fate of Africa to biographies of leaders like Mandela and Mugabe. Prior to 2005’s The Fate of Africa, he wrote mostly on southern Africa: South Africa under apartheid, the white supremacist state Rhodesia, and later Zimbabwe, as well as their leaders.
The Fate of Africa was intended as a meditation on the “fate” of independence in Africa after (roughly) half a century and was intended as a popular history; indeed, it became a best-seller. Given the state of conversations around Africa in the mid-2000s—a decade after the Rwandan genocide, in the midst of a widely publicized genocide and civil war in Sudan, and at a moment that many saw as a period of economic revival, with nations like South Africa, chosen to host the FIFA World Cup in 2010, and Nigeria, with its massive oil reserves, seen as leading the way—it’s not surprising that a history offering (by virtue of its ominous title) a judgment on just how well the whole independence thing had gone, would go over well. It was revised and expanded 6 years later in 2011 (I don’t know why, since 6 years is an awkwardly small time span, though I imagine Meredith wanted to make some observations about South Africa and the Arab Spring).
To be sure, The Fate of Africa is an incredible accomplishment. Its 800 pages offer a traditional but publicly accessible political and economic history of Africa from the period of decolonization to the then-present. It is relatively well-balanced, engaging all regions of Africa and detailing the major political and economic changes of most nations, though Meredith has his favorites both for reasons of sourcing (I imagine) and the wider relevance of national stories to regional, continental, and global history. A few nations are either hardly or never discussed, including Madagascar, the Seychelles, and Djibouti, and some nations have their story told once, when it becomes convenient for the narrative, rather than across the entirety of the roughly chronological history; here I’m thinking of Liberia, which appears as the subject of one chapter and is only mentioned in passing thereafter (a mere 28 pages out of 800). Of course, writing a history of all of Africa is a major burden, and one which cannot really be done, but Meredith works well within the constraints of even an 800 page book and the amount of detail provided on the number of nations he does cover in depth is impressive.
The Fate of Africa stands out as one of the few histories to offer a pan-African political history from independence onward; most books are either regional or, for an even more baffling reason, attempt to tell the entire story of Africa from prehistory to the present. While there are a handbook of the latter, The Fate of Africa is the only recent-ish book I’ve found that tells the continental story of post-independence Africa. Richard J. Reid’s A Modern History of Africa, 1800 to the Present (Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed., 2020) comes the closest, though it covers a much broader period and is half the length. Still, it is written as a textbook for students and likely (I haven’t read it yet!) offer a better overview of colonialism and the ways that it contributed to some of the supposed “failures” of Africa that Meredith spends his time detailing. There is also John Parker and Richard Rathbone’s African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007), though it is understandably limited—all the more so for covering all of African history in 185 pages. Similar histories of Africa “since the beginning” have been written by Kevin Shillington (4th ed., 2021), John Reader (1999), and Meredith himself (2014). Notice all of these are by white men… Only in 2024 the such a history come out by a woman, and no less an African woman, the Sudanese-born Zeinab Benawi’s An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence (forthcoming in the US in 2025). While it seems a curious choice for Benawi to stop at independence, this is the most recent in a wave of popular histories, mostly by African and African diaspora authors, that have tries to recover the earlier history of Africa, that is, its major contributions to global history in the ancient, medieval, and early modern periods.
What all of this shows is that, even nearly 20 years since Meredith’s The Fate of Africa debuted, it still remains one of the only texts to cover, in significant detail and in such breadth, the period of African history after independence. It’s thus an important primer on Africa for anyone who studies the postwar world order and especially the Cold War. That said, Meredith’s book should only be a starting point, but like its marketing and its reviewers, it offers a rather uncritical appraisal of the history it tells. That is, it is not curious about the narratives of African history, especially the narratives of African failure in the post-independence period, but instead provides the canonical history as told mostly by journalists, African elites who wrote memoirs and were quoted in foreign papers, and the international elites who were involved in African diplomacy and wrote about it later. It is therefore a standard outsider’s version of history that obscures its wholly liberal politics by claiming to have no political stakes, thus Meredith sees not the effects of centuries of wealth theft, of distribution of colonial power with a small African elite in most countries, or the geopolitical mettling of Cold War powers that led to greater political destabilization or the propping up of dictatorial regimes.
Meredith is a strikingly ungenerous teller of history, aligned often with a Western understanding of Africa as a sui generis failure, and ultimately uninterested in the ideas and political strivings of Africans themselves. It is clear that he doesn’t take seriously the African thinkers and leaders who populate his book. Regardless of the successes and failures of the various political leaders of post-independence Africa, Meredith casts a disparaging eye on nationalist movements, communists, socialists, revolutionaries of any stripe, even minor reformers; he sees their ideas as pointless to engage with because, after all, they failed. How or why they failed is rarely the point; they just did. This lack of engagement with the intellectual history of post-independence Africa is crucial to Meredith’s approach because it allows him to dismiss every political leader as either having worked under the presumptions of a failed ideology or having an ideology so weak and ill-defined as to be destined to fail when implemented in governance.
This is not to say that there weren’t many failures among African leaders and within African revolutionary and nationalist movements, or that even the most lauded leaders on the Left were infallible, whether Nkumah or Sankara or Lumumba. But so were there many failures among leaders across the world in the same period. What is particularly striking is Meredith’s insistence that it is Africans’ fault for failing when the deck was so thoroughly stacked; or, better yet, the deck was stripped of all the good cards to begin with. Meredith treats US, Western, and Soviet intervention, for example the proxy wars in the Congo and Angola, as simple facts rather than evidence of a system of neocolonialism at work that might, just maybe, have had some role in destabilizing African efforts to build a future. At every turn, Meredith is an ungenerous reader of history, looking down over his glasses at the disappointing children who dare to ask for their allowance without having finished the chores.
I therefore found myself in a love-hate relationship with this book. Love, because Meredith provides, in short, the kind of introduction to major issues, figures, and periods in African history that would take reading two dozen other books to get a basic grasp on. Love, because he’s given me a starting point for a much deeper understanding than I had, one I can now build on with greater confidence in how individual national histories feed into a larger estuary of African histories. Hate, because Meredith cannot take a moment to think of empire as a net negative, as an endless atrocity committed daily for decades, and in some cases, hundreds of years on African peoples across the continent. Hate, because Meredith has no sense of the Africanness of the histories he is telling, only the foreign correspondent’s view. Hate, because even when the histories Meredith is telling are so blatantly tied up with colonial and neo-colonial regimes of regional and global power that are actively depriving Africans of social, economic, and political agency, he cannot see the lumbermen, only the felled trees, and so claims they must have fallen by themselves.
And so it is with histories of the post-colonial world, especially Africa, where narratives of colonialism and neo-colonialism still take precedent and the telling of history resists justice because the injustice of history is too political, too great, too disruptive.
Sean Guynes 