Africa is a continent which, in a global perspective has, by and large, fallen behind in economic and, as a consequence of that, social development. During the early days of independence - the 1960s - the future looked bright. There was a sizeable economic growth and hence money to invest in industry, agriculture, education and health care. By the late 1970s the tide had already changed and in many sub-Saharan countries it is still low ebb.
There are, of course, many books on “development” but since early 2005 there is a new and, in my opinion, excellent one: Adam Szirmai’s The Dynamics of Socio-Economic Development. An introduction. The book is published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge and has its own web site: www.dynamicsofdevelopment.com.
Africa and African development is in itself a subject with which you can fill a number of libraries. The following general books on Africa include some of my own favourites.
- Paul Bohannan’s Africa and Africans was first published in 1964 by Doubleday & Company in New York but has seen a number of reprints since. The chapters on African art, family life, land and labour and politics and law and still eminently readable.
- Basil Davidson’s The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State is a provoking book on the role of the state in contemporary African history. First published in the UK in 1992, a Dutch translation appeared in 1994 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Jan Mets).
- Manuel Castells in his book End of Millennium (volume 3 of the series The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture published by Blackwell Publishers in 1998) elaborates further on the role of the state in Africa and coins the term “predatory states”. If you have little time, read only chapter 2: The Rise of the Fourth World: Informational Capitalism, Poverty, and Social Exclusion.
- Ali A. Mazrui’s The Africans: a triple heritage (London: Guild Publishing, 1986) makes excellent reading and was published on basis of the BBC television series The Africans.
- Africa since 1800, written by Roland Oliver and Anthony Atmore and published by the Cambridge University Press in 1994, presents an overview of Africa’s recent history.
- In 1997, the journalist John Reader published Africa: A Biography of the Continent (London: Hamish Hamilton). It is an interesting book and luckily (in view of its 840 pages!) is available in a soft cover edition as well.
In the months to come we will update our “preferred list” with books and articles on the countries we will visit during our road tour.
