| BOOK
REVIEW
African Politics and Society: a Mosaic of Transformation
Author: Peter J. Schraeder
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin’s,
75 Arlington Street, Boston, MA 02116. 1999
Pages: 378. Price: US$35.00
(Hardcover)
Reviewer: Kofi
Akosah-Sarpong in Montreal, Canada
This book reveals that despite
developments in Africa, mainly negatively reported by the Western
media and their Africa accomplices, Africa is transforming in all
its facets. The author, Peter J. Schraeder, an associate professor
at Loyola University Chicago, before writing the book had traveled
extensively in Africa, covering more than half of the 53 countries.
He dined, wined, talked, slept, walked, traveled and interacted
with Africans of various social standing in order to get the correct
feel and sense of this vast continent, which is the laboratory of
foreign theories and models, and very much misunderstood by non-Africans
and confused African elites.
The book has 14 chapters, divided
into 6 parts. It is a dense, rich work. Well-written, the issues
range from "Understanding the African Renaissance" to
various development theories that had been aimed at studying Africa
to putting Africa in its historical context to the political and
economic impact of colonialism to continuity and change in governance
to foreign policy making and the pursuit of Pan-Africanism to Africa
in world politics. There are many illustrations, tables and boxes,
including how to research Africa from the Internet. There are also
pictures of notable Africans and Africanists like Nelson Mandela.
The major transformation occurring
in Africa is captured in the opening of the book in the African
Renaissance process. Schraeder says the African Renaissance is seen
in Nelson Mandela becoming the first democratically elected president,
which symbolized the on-going pro-democracy campaigns across Africa,
and Mandela’s embracing of his former captors to construct the new
South Africa embodied the new vision of a new generation of African
leaders-"a generation committed to creating multiracial and
multiethnic societies based on an ethnic tolerance, the protection
of universal human rights, and the rule of law."
Also African policymakers are
restructuring the once-moribund African economies to unleash the
African entrepreneurial spirit. Africans are now feeding themselves,
with rising positive projections of food output. Added to this is
flourishing of newspapers, radio and television, and literature
that is "accompanying the progressive decline of state-sponsored
censorship. A new generation of African reporters, writers, and
scholars remain firmly committed to protecting and strengthening
the democratic achievements of the last decade of the twentieth
century." And all these are occurring in a climate of debate
for the need for Africa-centric development paradigm.
That there are brewing changes
and opportunities for the future evolution of Africa and its peoples
are undeniable. Schraeder indicates that to study Africa one has
to look at its rich mosaic of diversity grounded in continental
perspective, and to understand the present Africa one must understand
the African past. And despite the impact of the international system
on Africa, the author talks, analytically, about the central importance
of the domestic dimension. "The international environment may
provide the context within which decisions are made, but one must
not overlook the impacts of individual African leaders, citizens,
and social movements," writes Schraeder.
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