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.
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