Tom Stacey
A Continent’s Curse
The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence
By Martin Meredith
Free Press 752pp £20 order from our bookshop
Africa: A Modern History
By Guy Arnold
Atlantic Books 1028pp £35 order from our bookshop
Two formidable books, in unwitting rivalry, present us with the chronicle of Africa’s politics, wars, disease, and political and tribal violence over the past half-century, during which forty-eight of its lands, islands and archipelagos were released into sovereign statehood from colonial rule or calved from greater neighbours (Namibia from South Africa and Eritrea from Ethiopia), a further four (Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia) being already independent.
Both works purport to give us histories. This is true to the extent that they lay out, with varying clarity, those events and statistics which provide a frame for the cascade of rule or misrule and the collapses or reassertions of order such as characterise the period, above all in
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George Mackay Brown's work 'not only captures the totality of Orcadian life but also draws from that life a humane vision of creaturely dwelling, of man’s symbiotic relationship with the land and its history'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/et-in-orcadia-ego
'Rather than concerning themselves with the machinations of great men', antiquaries 'sought to establish how people had lived, what they had worn, what stories they’d told and what games they’d played'.
http://ow.ly/abL350FcfW9
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