Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent

"Dipo is largely addressing contemporary Africa, but he starts the book with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 to show how African countries only really came into being at that time—with some exceptions, like Egypt. I suppose he wants to show how the difficulties that Africa encountered were set in motion by that conference, and how Africans were excluded. Even though slavery had been ended for some decades by the time of the Berlin Conference, that didn’t mean it was the end of Africa’s ills. The colonial powers were still there, carving up Africa for their own interests. So he wants to show how there has been a continuity of that unfair balance of power between Europeans and Africans. He also looks at recent history of African leaders—Idi Amin, Muammar Gaddafi, and so on. It’s not a history book exactly, but he picks up on the slanted way that the world looks at Africa, and he does that by focusing on the coups, the wars, the famines, and how these negative perceptions of Africa have become the whole perception. He tries to show that Africa is a varied continent of 54 countries, all with different histories, different languages, different peoples, different ethnicities. Because it is still the case that, if there is a coup in West Africa, it will stop investors investing in East Africa or Southern Africa, because they see it as all one. He takes the knee-jerk view of Africa and debunks it."