Rites of Power in Africa

...The problem of succession is more an effect than a cause—a symptom of the fragility of African governments...

...by Carol Polsgrove About two-thirds of the way through his new book, Africa, Sanford J. Ungar drops this interesting fact: In 1980, more than twenty years after the wave of independence began to sweep over Africa, Senegal's Leopold Sedar Senghor became the first African leader to give up power voluntarily to a constitutional successor...

...African nations did not inherit governments from the colonial powers...

...It is not at all the product of political ineptitude, of some natural inability to govern...

...Such, say Jackson and Rosberg, was the pattern Carol Polsgrove, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, grew up in Nigeria and has made several return visits to Africa as a journalist...

...Prices for African exports tend to fall, while prices for imports tend to go up...

...The great value of Ungar's Africa lies not in his analysis but in his straightforward telling of contemporary African history...

...involvement in Africa, he says, approvingly, "A large amount of overseas development aid comes back to the donor country in the form of construction and other contracts...

...Ungar is a former host of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and a special correspondent of The Economist of London...

...Africans will have to deal with this problem before they can proceed to solving others," he says...

...of state-building in Europe, and so, too, it appears to be in Africa...

...It is the product of history...

...beyond that, however, a more highly developed Africa is a better customer for American goods...

...Opponents, lacking legitimate means of taking control, fall back on violence...

...Arguing for greater U.S...

...Such comments seem naive, considering the enormous abuse of aid projects-abuse that he acknowledges—and considering, too, the sorry state of current African trade with the West...

...African leaders typically hold on to power until they are forced, by natural death or a coup, to give it up...

...His accounts of individual countries below the Sahara (he does not cover North Africa) are careful, clear, and cool-headed...

...It is hard to see how further economic entanglement with the United States would, per se, be a good thing for Africa...

...I miss, in his account, the rough texture of daily life—the telling detail, individual rich moments like those in Patrick Marn-ham's wonderful Dispatches from Africa: a bakery cart lumbering through a drought-stricken Sahel city, bearing food-aid flour to be used in "the bakery's excellent French croissants, which are popular among the technical advisers who inhabit the District of the Drought...

...Academic writers Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg say the commonest way is for a single ruler to gather power in his hands...

...Countries great and small, from giant Nigeria to its tiny neighbor Benin, have ridden the rollercoaster of coup and countercoup...

...The postcolonial years, particularly the years of soaring oil prices, have thrown African nations so deeply in debt that the International Monetary Fund is almost a cabinet member in African governments...

...When that power was no longer there, how could the new national governments, of essentially new states, hope to begin establishing authority...

...In colonial times these bureaucracies were backed by the power of the empires...

...The fragility itself is understandable...

...Institutionalizing political succession is, for Ungar, the key political issue in Africa...

...When he encounters real terror, like Idi Amin's blood-soaked regime, he certainly tells us about it, but his voice is still moderate, his outrage neutrally put...

...If he gathers enough, and uses it wisely, he may be able to pass it on...

...Nor is his book the place to go for sophisticated economic insights...

...they inherited bureaucracies...

...Ungar is not really interested in offering such long-term historical analysis...

...Still, Ungar's Africa is worthy and interesting, full of facts plainly put—a sound introduction, and, I suspect, a labor of conscience and love...

...This is true enough, but it is an evasion of sorts...

...That experience shows in his impersonal voice...

...Africa's economic encounters with the industrial world thus far have been unfortunate for Africa...

...He takes African politics seriously, and has tried hard not to add one more book to the storehouse of white men's horrified tales of the dark continent...

...Thus he makes a beginning at converting personal power to institutional power...

...But there are times when his calm and sensible tone almost turns Africa into an almanac...