The “history of decolonization and independence in Africa,” explaining “the historical process out of which Africa’s position in the world has emerged. Bridging the divide between colonial and post-colonial history, it allows readers to see just what political independence did and did not signify and how men and women, peasants and workers, religious leaders and local leaders sought to refashion the way they lived, worked, and interacted with each other.”
This book is printed on high-quality paper and includes photographs, maps, graphs and other illustrations that support the related information. The chapters cover worker relations and colonial rule, post-war citizenship, post-colonial changes, inequality, segregation, gatekeeping crisis, and on developments in the twenty-first century. This book is clearly designed as a textbook for a modern African history class, as the chapters provide suggested reading lists and additional information on Cambridge’s website. The content in these pages is also useful for those researching or practically assisting with setting Africa-related government policy. For example, a section describes IMF’s response to a drop in export-crop prices of forcing the government to “tighten its belt in the 1980s” (12). Section headings break up the narrative and help readers find the topics that interest their research. Many of these sections are chronologically organized, while others address gender, race, class and other topics across wider timeframes. Most of the details described are likely to be shocking and unfamiliar to American readers. For example, a section describes: “In the Johannesburg area ‘squatter invasions’ were frequent, and between 1944 and 1950 somewhere between 60,000 and 90,000 South Africans organized themselves into bands, seized a piece of vacant land somewhere in the peri-urban sprawl, built their shacks as quickly as possible, and defended themselves against police raids” (74). This explains some of the haphazard near-city shacks that are built in South American and African regions, but are typically prevented from forming in western Europe and America by their stronger militarized police forces. Armies of poor people taking collective actions not only to temporarily live on city streets, but to build permanent structures and move into these spaces, even defending themselves against city officials demonstrates their desperation and social organization. The narrative is related dramatically with plenty of specific details on the main actors, locations and the ideals of the sides in conflicts; a limited number of quotes and a reliance of historic summaries and political explanations makes this book easy to read both for general readers and those searching for specific evidence. The failures in infrastructure or government projects that have attempted to help “develop” Africa are explained succinctly. For example, to “find alternatives to cocoa exports”, Ghana’s leaders built a “huge dam over the Volta River” to “produce the electricity to transform Ghana’s abundant bauxite and aluminum.” This led to “thousands of Ghanaians” losing “their land to the lake behind the dam”, but the promise to them that “modern” farming would offset this loss never materialized (142).
If I ever write something that covers a stop in Africa, I would definitely refer to the information in this book. In fact, if my characters were not going to stop on this continent before, the manner this history is related welcomes all readers to come inside and explore it (if not by a physical visit) in its lively and guiding pages.