A truly monumental work, this is the history of post-colonial Africa.
Arnold is very sympathetic towards Africa. He analyses various
influences on newly-independent African states, including the Cold War,
and neo-colonialism - the unwillingness of the former colonial powers
to give up economic power even though they had surrendered political
control. His analysis of the emergence of the one-party state is very
good. He is critical of the aid industry, a position I agree with
wholeheartedly.

He makes some errors in his treatment of Sudan, which is my own
area of specialist expertise. On p649 he refers to the 1985 overthrow
of Numayri as a "coup", whereas it is generally regarded as an intifada
(popular uprising). More seriously, on p650 he attributes the 1989 coup
(which was a coup) to "army officers who had been pressing for peace in
the South". This was erroneously believed by many during the first few
days after the coup, particularly as army officers had issued an
ultimatum to the government shortly beforehand demanding peace in the
south. However it quickly became clear that this was an Islamist coup
by a different group of officers, deliberately intended to pre-empt
moves towards peace which resulted from the earlier ultimatum. I was in
Sudan during all these events and witnessed all of this first hand.
Spelling mistakes such as "Rumbuk" for Rumbek (p840) and "Hegliz" for
Heglig (p841) should not have passed the proof-readers. "Western aid
agencies... pulled their operations..." (p841) during the infamous
Memorandum of Understanding dispute in 2000 is a gross
over-simplification and reproduces the propaganda of those same
agencies. In fact, as I documented at the time, only around six out of
forty or so agencies actually withdrew. The section on Sudan on
pp838-843 is actually one of the weakest in the whole book. It reads
like a list of short facts with no real attempt at analysis.

A more general criticism is that the book could have benefited from
a little more editing for continuity. In many instances successive
paragraphs seem to have been researched separately and put together
without regard for repetition of some facts and phrases.

But for all this, it remains an excellent book. ( )