By Howard W. French
Africa first captivated New York occasions journalist Howard W. French greater than twenty-five years in the past, yet his wisdom of and keenness for the continent has the intensity of an entire life organization. His reviews there woke up him as not anything ahead of to the selfishness and shortsightedness of the wealthy, the affliction and dignity of the terrible and the makes use of and abuses of strength. And during this powerfully written, profoundly felt ebook, he supplies us an unstinting account of the disastrous outcomes of the fateful, centuries-old stumble upon among Africa and the West.
French delineates the betrayal and greed of the West–often aided and abetted via Africa’s personal leaders–that have given upward push to the expanding exploitation of Africa’s average assets and its humans. Coarse self-interest and outright greed as soon as generated a necessity for the continent’s rubber, cotton, gold and diamonds, let alone slaves; now the points of interest contain offshore oil reserves and minerals like coltan, which powers mobile phones.
He takes us inside of Nigeria, Liberia, Mali and the Congo, analyzing with strange perception the legacy of colonization within the lives of up to date Africans. He appears to be like on the tragedies of the AIDS epidemic, the Ebola outbreak and the genocide that ended in hundreds of thousands of deaths in Rwanda and the Congo. He makes transparent the systematic failure of Western political leaders–the nurturers of tyrants equivalent to Mobuto Sese Seko and Laurent Kabila, whose tales are informed the following in complete detail–and the brutal excesses of the CIA.
In aiding us to higher comprehend the continent, and certainly Africans themselves, French is helping us see in addition the desire and probability that lie within the myriad cultural strengths of Africa.
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Additional resources for A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
While the 1st settlers arrived aboard a brig named Elizabeth in 1822, 1 / 4 of the eighty-six freedmen aboard quick perished, forcing the survivors to escape to British-controlled territory. an identical destiny quick came about a moment shipload of settlers who set out from manhattan harbor. whilst a 3rd workforce of freedmen arrived within the position that may emerge as referred to as Liberia, the Colonization Society negotiated the acquisition of a sixty-mile strip of coastland from the Bassa, a neighborhood humans, marking the 1st everlasting payment of a spot whose selected identify, Monrovia, for James Monroe, already bespoke candy yet lost gratitude. the recent promised land was once one of many meanest environments in a continent packed with tough climes. Heavy rains fell for months at a time—forty inches in an ordinary June alone—and tropical illnesses took devastating tolls. To additional complicate issues, the Bassa humans, who had no figuring out of the agreement that they had signed, surrendering rights to their land, quickly all started mounting lethal raids opposed to the settlers. Beset with myriad problems, the hot kingdom started to founder, and American curiosity, tepid at most sensible even on the outset, waned. within the Nineteen Twenties, Washington refused to lend the Liberian govt $5 million to tide it over a critical monetary trouble, and the yankee millionaire tiremaker Harvey Firestone of Akron, Ohio, without notice stepped into the image, altering every thing. Firestone was once looking new assets of rubber to satisfy the booming call for from the era’s immense new undefined, vehicles, and in 1926 he was once given a ninety-nine-year rent on a one-million-acre tract. Firestone’s Liberian holdings immediately grew to become the world’s greatest rubber plantation, and it had rate the corporate merely six cents an acre, slightly a 3rd of what the British had paid for his or her competing plantations in Malaysia. regardless of the massive price virtue over his British rivals, Firestone imposed an competitive force to chop corners, and for years in a while the plantation was once dogged with fees of using slave hard work and coercive recruitment of employees, finally frightening a suspension of kin with Liberia by way of the Hoover management and an research of the plantation through the League of countries. For mile after mile as we drove during the oxygen-saturated air of the plantation, all lets see have been row after lush eco-friendly row of rubber timber slowly oozing their thick white sap into small cups spiked into their facets. in addition to the occasional bent previous guy wearing a damaged department domestic for firewood, or small teams of stunted, dwarflike ladies wearing heavy a lot on their heads and bundles on their backs, where was once completely abandoned. Sporadic roadblocks have been the single factor to remind us that we weren't within the Republic of Chlorophyll. yet even if we have been stopped, the temper used to be often unfastened. Taylor’s boy squaddies and their officials have been already partying over the obvious finish of the battle. every time we pulled up simply wanting the crude iron-spiked obstacles that have been laid around the highway, a number of phrases approximately an interview with the president frequently sufficed to get considered one of them to pull it lazily out of ways, letting us via.