History at its most depressing

People are not all the same. Some are naturally drawn to athletics, some folks get music theory from an early age. Me, I speed read. Always have, from the point at which I learned to read at all. This is sometimes a useful skill, and if there ever was a need for it, this book is it. Meredith has been writing on this topic for decades, and this is, in fact, the third revision.  760 pages of what adds up to despair.

Those few of you who bothered to parse out the underlying themes of my general worldview will recall that I have said several times "Africa is screwed." This book is, as noted, 760-some pages of how and why that analysis is correct.

To simplify, decolonialization was a morally necessary thing, but it was bungled so badly that instead of giving millions of people their freedom, uhuru paved the way for dictatorships and ethnic / religious conflict. Then, when those things began to have an impact on economies elsewhere, a process of re-meddling on the part of the colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal) and new meddling by us, the Russians, and most recently the Chinese made things infinitely worse. Meanwhile, the population is expanding and the amount of arable land is contracting. People are moving en masse to ghettos around the cities. Meredith concludes:

"After decades of mismanagement and corruption, most African states have been hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good. Indeed, far from being able to provide aid and protection to their citizens, African governments and the vampire-like politicians who run them are regarded by the populations they rule as yet another burden they have to bear in the struggle for survival."

And the kicker? The revision was done three years ago. Boko Harum and the ebola outbreak in west Africa aren't even on Meredith's radar.

We did this, "we" being western Europe initially and later, the Cold War Kids and whatever kind of war we're in now. And even worse: no one can demonstrate that aid programs have done anything to help. In fact, many efforts to provide aid have been accidently or deliberately diverted to local elites and even back to non-African corporations, making the situation worse. Even the people who are in the business of providing aid are beginning to suffer from "donor fatique."

Sorry, Bill and Melinda. Nice try. But Africa is screwed.

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The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith.

54 Years Ago Last September

2014 04 20: Update:
I am now half way through the book referenced below (which isn't exactly new, it turns out. More like 2011), and the picture is even murkier.  I'll report when I'm done with it.

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In September, 1961, a guy named Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash in Africa.  Lots of people died in Africa, that year, many of them from the effects of post-colonialism, otherwise known as "Goodbye and thanks for all the money". Mr. Hammarskjöld's death would be just one among many except for his being Secretary General of the United Nations.  He was going to take charge of a situation that the UN's inexperience with proxy wars had created: UN troops were in actual offensive and defensive combat with the forces of a state, Katanga; it was trying to secede from the rest of what had been the Belgian Congo.  The rebels were mostly anti-communists, and the government they were trying to get away from were to some extent honeyed-up to the the Soviet Union. After the crash, many lengthy investigations took place, and nobody ended up pointing a finger at a cause -- hostile action, malfunction, operator error, weather: nobody could say conclusively what happened. 

Now, apparently spurred on by a book that collects all sorts of conspiracy hypotheses and previously-suppressed data, the UN is opening or pushing to open a new investigation.  But what's interesting to me is that one theory (and a pretty good one, based on limited knowledge and data) is that Hammarskjöld's DC-6 was shot down by another aircraft, and the aircraft may have been a relatively modern Fouga Magister jet trainer, flown by a Belgian mercenary, Jan van Risseghem.  Mr. van Risseghem was a WWII veteran, an accomplished pilot, and in charge of the Katangan "air force".  One source says he was "the pilot" of the rebel leader, Moise Tshombe.

It took me most of the morning to search my way through the various threads of this thing, and all I can conclude is the classic "we need more data". There are a number of smoking guns, including a radio transmission from someone flying a plane at the time and more or less the place, telling someone else that he saw a plane, yes it's the right plane, I'm making a run on it, (sound of guns,) I hit it.  That sounds a touch glib, but that's what's claimed.

So anyway, I'm going to read Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa shortly.  But I have to point out that another recent book, Clash by Night, by some guy named McConnell, has a lot to do with tiny African air forces and European mercenaries flying their planes around.  He swears he hadn't heard any of the above when he was writing it.