Book Review

Continent on the way to recovery

Africa: altered states, ordinary miracles

ALMOST four decades ago, a young Briton arrived in Uganda to teach in a village school and was instantly captivated by the landscape and, above all, the people who greeted him. Today, Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society and one of the few British journalists to have made Africa the focus of his entire professional life. In Africa: altered states, ordinary miracles, Dowden weaves his experiences, journeys and reflections into an acutely perceptive, always sympathetic and defiantly hopeful portrait of a continent he loves.

An immensely important theme runs through this compelling book. Dowden argues that decades of colonial rule inflicted a "wound that parted Africa from its soul" by destroying or denigrating every indigenous culture and institution. But this scar is now healing and the continent's people are, Dowden believes, recovering from the experience of foreign domination by reconciling their way of life with modernity and progress.

While the West regards Africans as objects of charity - with the "make poverty history" crowd unwittingly portraying them as helpless victims, worthy only of pity - they are moving on, rediscovering their identity and "integrating" their "past and present".

Dowden's writing becomes most passionate when he describes what Africa offers the world, namely its essential "humanity", symbolised by the altruism and deep sense of obligation inherent in the extended family. This book amounts to a heartfelt tribute to the virtues of ordinary Africans, who humble the rest of us by their stoicism, selflessness and exuberant delight in company.

Dowden has witnessed more than his share of Africa's wars and calamities. Some of his chapters are thematic and others focus on particular countries, taking us from the frontline of the terrible conflict in southern Sudan to America's ill-fated intervention in Somalia - where Dowden was roughed up by US soldiers. His two chapters on Uganda describing his coming of age in the time of Idi Amin's tyranny are especially moving.

As a correspondent of The Times, The Independent and The Economist, Dowden has written extensively on Africa's most traumatic events. Yet his sparse, concise prose, which branches into vivid description and reminiscence, suggested to me that he has always been bursting to convey the essential goodness of Africa's people. Having spent five of the last 10 years reporting from the continent, I can testify to the truth of Dowden's words: "Westerners arriving in Africa for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size - even the sky seems higher. And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open. They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived." Yet this book answers a question which anyone who has lived in Africa will have pondered: how can this continent still be a place of laughter and hope despite all the suffering?

Dowden's great achievement is that he provides an uplifting tribute to Africa without excusing or minimising its catalogue of wars, dictators, famines and disasters. Nor does he offer a plea for more Western aid. Dowden believes that, left to itself, Africa will make its own way in the world and the West's only guiding principle should be to "do no harm".

Sadly, there are two reasons why I cannot simply recommend this book wholeheartedly. The first is a lacklustre chapter on Zimbabwe that depends largely on secondary sources, notably Dinner with Mugabe by Heidi Holland, and amounts to little more than a brisk canter through recent events. The first-hand portraits and piercing insights which enliven every other chapter are glaringly absent from Dowden's treatment of Zimbabwe. The only examples of first-hand reporting are a description of an interview with Robert Mugabe in 1976 and, oddly, a meeting with the dictator's information minister in 2000. Both of these encounters took place in London. I assume that Dowden has been to Zimbabwe - but nothing in this chapter would suggest that he has. I would hazard a guess that it was only included because publishers tend to think that a book about Africa in the present climate must cover Zimbabwe. However, Dowden brings nothing original to the subject.

My second reservation concerns the sheer number of factual errors found throughout the book. Dowden is surprisingly careless about dates and chronology. The author is clearly entranced by his subject and swept along by the power of his narrative. His book does not purport to be a modern history of Africa. So does it matter if he gives the wrong year for pivotal events?

On reflection, I think it does. The reader is entitled to assume that an expert on Africa will give the correct date for a crucial episode in African history. Dowden's failure to do so might shake the reader's confidence. So let me offer the following (by no means exhaustive) litany: Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader, was killed in 2002, not in 1998; Mobutu Sese Seko, the Congolese dictator, was overthrown in 1997, not in 1996; the British reached Khartoum and won the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, not in 1899. As for Zimbabwe, the referendum on a new constitution was in 2000, not in 2001 and Robert Mugabe and Tony Blair could not have met at a Commonwealth summit in 1998 because there was no such gathering in that year; their one and only encounter was actually at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Edinburgh in 1997. Mrs Thatcher's first trip to Africa as prime minister was not in 1988; she went to a Commonwealth summit in Lusaka within a few months of taking office in 1979 and danced a waltz with Kenneth Kaunda, then Zambia's president (who thereafter referred to her as "my dancing partner"). And Idi Amin never paid a state visit to Britain, despite Dowden's claim (the only state visitors in 1971, the year Amin seized power, were Emperor Hirohito of Japan and King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan). An attentive editor should have spotted other slips, notably where Dowden writes that Mrs Thatcher was "very comfortable in Conservative circles", which is rather like saying that the Pope gets along well with Catholics.

All these errors could, of course, be corrected for the paperback edition. If Dowden puts them right and has another go at the Zimbabwe chapter, he will turn a magnificent book into a masterpiece.

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