Reddit reviews The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence

There's a very approachable book which discusses Africa's recent history: The Fate of Africa by Martin Meredith.

Before the 19th century rush to colonize Africa, some parts of it were relatively well off (notably west Africa, with empires like Songhai and Mali and advanced city-states like Hausa or Timbuktu) and others were still fairly isolated and primitive (most of eastern sub-Saharan Africa). There are various theories as to why - one common but controversial theory is that Africa's north-south geography limited the plants, animals and diseases that could spread in its climates (it varies from European temperate in South Africa to jungle to desert to Mediterranean in Algeria and Morocco), so it failed to make the most of its natural resources until explorers such as the Polynesians brought crops that had high yields. Others have suggested that tsetse flies made it hard to spread domesticated animals to sub-Saharan Africa, or that jungle soil is particularly bad for growing crops, or that they were simply unluckily late in adopting gunpowder and that European imperialism retarded the growth of democracy and modern infrastructure in the continent by 50+ years.

It's probably too facile to argue that imperialism caused all of Africa's problems, but there's some truth to it: all three countries you mention suffered problems because of it. In general, when Europe left its colonies, it drew nice, straight lines on the map that rarely conformed to ethnic or religious divisions. Rwanda is a country with two very distinct, very different ethnic groups forced to live together in a small country - a recipe which Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia found abhorrent. Liberia was created by the U.S.A. as a place to send freed slaves to in order to get them out of the U.S. and "back" to their homeland - no matter that there were already people living there who spoke no English and were not Christians, no matter that the blacks they were shipping there were not used to the climate, the plants or animals of the region...is it any wonder they had ethnic problems?

Fate and State

>We are advised to buy 'Fate of Africa' together with 'State of Africa', but they are the same book - 'Fate' is the US edition, 'State' is the UK edition. It's a very good account of the history of Africa, but I for one don't need two copies and would not have bought 'Fate' if I'd known it was the same as 'State', which I bought from Amazon 2 years ago. This is not the first time I have been misled in this way; Amazon really needs to provide better bibliographic details to help customers avoid wasting their money. From Amazon review

In any case, I read the "Fate" version and I thought it was a fantastic read. Like rickhunter333 said, it did seem to be a little repetitive as he goes through each region where similar events unfolded, but that is as it must for the history of the region.

He also does a very good job in (briefly) summarizing the entire colonial history of Africa and the state of the African continent prior to colonialism before getting into the specifics of the last 50 years.

Disclaimer: I've not read much about the continent and don't have much to compare it to aside from university history textbooks, but I was happy with the book and would recommend it.

Edit: grammar