The Shackled Continent

This review of Robert Guest's The Shackled Continent was published in 2004 in the African Security Review, a publication from the Institute for Security Studies, based in South Africa. The author of the review is unknown.

Before I even opened it, I looked at this book with a rather confrontational attitude and looked forward to taking a well-aimed swing at what was sure to be another doom-laden, heart-rending victimology. The title alone worried me: why does Africa always have to be described as Shackled, Dark, Anarchic, Barbaric and Hopeless? But the book is well researched, and refuses to mince around issues, to follow the recent disturbing trend of pandering to flagrantly corrupt regimes or to entertain nostalgia for the catastrophic ideological experiments of Africa ’s post-liberation period.

Guest identifies corruption and trade barriers as two of the most important obstacles to African upliftment. He accurately points out the contradictions between anti-globalisation sentiments and the need to remove the trade restrictions that stifle African economic growth. He also describes the problem of African governments obstructing private business initiatives rather than tending to the business of administering and legislating as they are supposed to. These are familiar battle-lines, mismanagement from the inside versus exploitation from without, but Mr. Guest highlights the survivors more so than the slain and points out that small African success stories occur in windows of opportunity opened by good governance and fair markets, on the rare and fleeting occasions where the two exist simultaneously.

Chapter one, “The Vampire State”, chapter six “Fair Aid, Free Trade”, and chapter seven, “Of Potholes and Grasping Gendarmes”, represent the unholy trinity of African poverty, describing the ageing president/patriarch with delusions of immortality; the West’s co-existing misguided paternalism and insatiable appetite for natural resources; and the experiences of livelihood in climates where basic infrastructure is negligible and officials dive in to co-opt and micro-manage any new enterprise that gives off the slightest whiff of lucre. Private initiatives end up choked by surreal amounts of red tape and individuals scramble for a living against capricious, underpaid law-enforcers: ‘Do you have a gun? No. I have a gun, so I know the rules’, says one Cameroonian gendarme to a truck-driver at the umpteenth roadblock of the day.

Corruption is an important theme in this book, but unlike most talk-shops and policy forums that deal with the subject, Guest shows what it means at the micro-level. He highlights the costs to the individual citizens who must face indifferent government officials and police and in the process, depleting what little resources they have just to “legally” exist, let alone generate enough income to collectively make a difference in the GNP.

Crumbling infrastructure, the twin of corruption, is another significant topic. “The biggest losers from lousy infrastructure are ordinary Cameroonians”, says Guest. Coca-Cola does not suffer alone from the lack of roads through rain forests, it is kept company by small traders of food, agricultural tools and medicines.

Western misperceptions and responses arising from knee-jerk paternalism, he argues, have done Africa more harm than good. Ill-informed and misleading advocacy campaigns against development in rainforests, genetically modified food and globalization, for example, are hurting Africans More than they are protecting them. The underlying suggestion is that perhaps what is needed is some serious, contextualized, cost-benefit analysis in place of emotive campaign discourses and interestingly, a closer look at the motives of first-world trade unions protesting against free trade.

Guest singles out South Africa for special treatment in chapter nine, “Beyond the Rainbow Nation” and rightly so, given its status as one of the few countries in Africa that has managed, since the end of apartheid, to adhere to fiscal policies that are outstanding in relation to those of certain neighbours whose ideas of boosting the economy involve nationalization and printing more money. But his praise for South Africa is tempered by descriptions of the ‘palpable anger’ that seems to drive crime and responses to it, President Thabo Mbeki’s mysterious tolerance of Mugabe’s reign of terror and the reality that the country needs an entrepreneurial class that does not depend on government patronage. Although seemingly less “shackled” than the rest of the continent, one cannot help but fear for a country so burdened with racial baggage—a collective psychic handicap hat makes potholed roads and corrupt policemen seem like child’s play.

I enjoyed this book for its empathy and lack of Eurocentric moralizing. Guest promises a ‘punchy’ read. I was dubious of this in the beginning, wondering what light-hearted approach could possibly be taken to the HIV epidemic. This is, however, engaging read that does not sensationalize nor trivialize. The style is poignant, which is always more effective than ponderous if the objective is to get the reader to the end of the book without falling into despair, or worse, sleep. It managed to peer appreciatively into the bottomless reserves of patience and pragmatism that rules the lives of ordinary Africans. And unlike the man who called into the radio programme, Guest thankfully eschewed the political crutch/weapon of painting issues black and white.