On Africa First!

I received this book as an ARC through NetGalley, although it appears that the book was published over a year ago. Perhaps it is also coming out in paperbook soon.

This book is definitely one best suited for readers interested in public policy and development studies. Cilliers captures a solid snapshot of the African continent as it exists today, looks at trends in a number of different areas, and seeks solutions for the most troubling areas—demography, labor productivity, economics, climate change, international aid (which appears to be lessening), political violence, and so on.

That being said, Cilliers has an unabashedly positive vision of the potential held by the African continent and his optimism is infectious. I never had doubts about this before, but I feel a bit more secure in this view.

One of the weak points of Cilliers’s analysis is that the vast majority of his solutions come from the angle of public policy or state-building. While there are some suggestions for private companies, this is much more muted compared to advice for policy-makers. I’m hesitant about this sort of approach because, while states are powerful forces that are capable of doing a great deal, there are other factors at play that may have a much larger role. For instance, community is one component that immediately comes to mind. The rapid urbanization of many African cities leads to sprawling, anonymous metropolises. Might some of these problems be better solved by community engagement—whether it be by religious groups, organizations, NGOs, or something else? To me, this seems like a major blindspot.

In addition, Cilliers’s text seems a bit “thin.” While there is a massive amount of information here rooted in statistics and data, there is very little human component involved. I know that a personal view of Africa is not the book that Cilliers was trying to write—instead he’s diagnosing problems and offering solutions—but some sort of “thick description,” or anecdotes with real people and analyses showing the larger pictures, would go a long way.

One final qualm with my personal copy is that my digital edition of this text did not show any graphs or figures. The graphs and figures clearly existed, but either Kindle was unable to show them or the .mobi file that NetGalley sent did not have them fully embedded. This is not a make-or-break critique, but it was something that I noticed.