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Africa's Economic Ills
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17029 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
2,673 Words |
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George B.N. Ayittey
George B.N. Ayittey, a native of Ghana, is Distinguished
Economist at American University and president of the Free
Africa Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is the author of a
forthcoming book, The African Predicament (St. Martin's
Press). |
SOUTH AFRICA: The New Revolution
Don Caldwell Saxonwold, South Africa: The Free Market Foundation of South Africa, 1989
255 pp.
THE CUSTOMARY LAW OF THE DINKA PEOPLE OF SUDAN
John Wuol Makec
London: Afroworld Publishing Co., 1988
287 pp.
Africa continues to jail and kill its intellectuals: the tombstones of novelists, professors, journalists, and editors litter the continent. The dearth of African books is not due to lack of talent as much as to prevailing intellectual repression. Of the fifty-one African countries, only six (Botswana, Egypt, Senegal, Mauritius, Gambia, and arguably Nigeria) permit free expression.
The media in much of Africa are state owned. The smallest deviation from the official line elicits sanctions, often fatal. Beyond the punishments, the absence of freedom of expression itself has more far-reaching and pernicious ramifications than many realize. Homegrown solutions to a country's problems cannot be generated if people are afraid to express their opinions. Africa will not find the answers that it so desperately needs if its people are brutalized for thinking of alternatives. In fact, intellectual barbarism on the part of African leaders has held the region back.
Today civil wars and political strife rage in at least fifteen African countries, scattering refugees in all directions and leaving carnage across the continent. Some of these wars have been waged for ten years or more with no end in sight. Africa's refugees now exceed ten million, which is more than half the world's total. Should it surprise anyone that the latest World Bank Report on sub-Saharan Africa, released in November 1989, observed laconically that while all other regions of the Third World made economic advances in the 1980s, black Africa is the only region to have regressed?
Nevertheless, some interesting books published in Africa suggest solutions to Africa's economic plight.
South African economics
In 1989, the veil of intellectual darkness was lifted somewhat in South Africa. This came with the replacement of
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