After David Livingstone and Henry Stanley, the trickle of missionaries and explorers with thick moustaches, some good, most bad, became a flood. Livingstone’s quest for a ”free, civilised and Christian” Africa, not in the least hampered by his lack of discussion with the Africans themselves, became the beacon for a motley crew of chancers from Europe.
It all began to fit together when the armies of the various European nations concerned began to show up in the areas of influence set up by the missionaries. Now it was to be ”No more Mr Nice Guy”. The struggle for black souls could continue in the background. Up front it was to become a struggle to take the land and its resources.
The ”free, civilised and Christian” model is still a work in progress. Africa went through harrowing phases of war, occupation, colonisation, anti-colonial struggles and finally, in the mid-1950s, began to see the glimmer of the dawn of ”freedom”.
But a new breed of missionary/journalist/explorer, many of them seemingly cut from the same Victorian cloth, with ideals and attitudes not a million miles from those of Livingstone, started invading post-independence Africa.
It is not often that you can say this, but I remember Martin Meredith walking with his optimistically springy step into Lusaka in 1964 — the year my family also arrived there. We were initially living in the same block of flats. He was 21, nary a whisker on his chin. He was working as a journalist for the Times of Zambia and would later go on to be foreign correspondent for various British publications.
After releasing nine books about various aspects of his African experiences — as he says, mostly concerned with wars, revolution and upheaval — he has now decided to bring his massed experience of Africa into a single book: The State of Africa — a history of fifty years of independence.
Well, I guess people have gone even further and written books with titles like The History of the World, A Brief History of Time and so on. One can tell with titles like these that there is some kind of conceit going on — that the authors were not aiming at more than broad brush strokes to give a sense of civilisations on the rise and in decline, or that some brilliant, mischievous mind was attempting to explain the unexplainable.
The great Polish writer and traveller Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his Shadow of the Sun, gathering together 40 years of writing about travelling through almost every part of Africa, pulls off the task with humour, passion, compassion and insight. Meredith takes himself rather more seriously.
The problem is, who can really grasp in the palm of one hand the extraordinary upheavals of a continent that is still in a state of unresolved ferment? A ferment that was set off by those first explorers trying to make the people of the continent, with their wildly varying customs, traditions and political systems, fit into a series of inappropriate boxes, to be shuffled around at will.
The other problem is that, while Kapuscinski takes you with him on a personal journey to which he has committed himself, from chance encounters in bars to hair’s breadth escapes from the most inconceivable dangers in a war zone, Meredith never lets his British reserve slip. His are not opinions and experiences. They are presented as facts.
This is not to say that there are not admirable sections of discovery, research and insight and reminders of the step-by-step progress from, say, the charm and confidence of the young Kwame Nkrumah emerging from a colonial jail to sit at the negotiating table with the previously distrustful British governor. The two men discover that their previous animosity has been based on each one’s obligation to take his own firm political stance and that they actually have the same goal in mind — get Britain out of Ghana’s hair and get Ghana out of Britain’s. Enough, already.
Similar intimate and revealing scenes emerge through the other African colonies as they move towards independence. But, as the book shows, the intimacy is soon to be shattered when the nice guys of the early years turn sour, with a growing lust for power and personal wealth, and are pushed aside by a new breed of Sandhurst, Moscow and West Point trained men with purely military mindsets and no romantic regard for the past.
Meredith’s facts are assembled with seemingly unchallengable attention to detail. But there are moments in The State of Africa when you are stopped dead in your tracks by discovering the most startlingly obvious omissions.
Two of these involve suspicious air crashes that removed men regarded as thorns in the side of a political process from the scene.
The first was that which killed the then United Nations secretary general Dag Hammerskjöld — a Swede who was the first and last in that position to take the job seriously. Hammerskjöld, chose to get his hands dirty and fly to the Congo in 1960. Having given us a graphic account of the last hours of Patrice Lumumba, Meredith moves on, without even a look over his shoulder at the hapless Hammerskjöld who lies in the smouldering wreckage of his aircraft in the forests of southern Congo.
The other is that of Samora Machel, president of Mozambique. As ever, Meredith goes into much detail about Frelimo’s war, victory and struggles with stabilising a shattered country. Then Samora vanishes from the scene without comment. No naughty guys are ever fingered.
There are serious errors in the most obvious story — the release of Nelson Mandela. Which makes you wonder how many other bloopers you’ve swallowed whole without noticing.
The author would argue, ”You can’t fit everything into one book.”
Then why try?