The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working [Paperback]

As a colleague and friend of Robert Calderisi, I looked forward to this book. He has written a skillful and comprehensive account of the issues, people, politics and economics of post-Independence Africa, from his vantage point of several assignments in various parts of the continent. He weaves his personal experiences with the African people and their leaders with carefully selected historical background needed to understand why things were bound to happen as they did. This book is hard to put down, and the human and political stories and the economics are told with care, and with humor. He was there, you are, too.

There is more than enough blame to go around, and Calderisi presents a balanced and, at times, embarrassing account of the excesses on all sides: the elites running these countries, the donors who came to help, and, in the chapter on the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, the foreign investors who sought alliances in the name of profit. His abiding respect and admiration for Africans comes through loud and clear, as does his distaste for their self-absorbed and often kleptocratic leaders. His recommendations for how Africans themselves must turn things around appear bolted to his readable and, very often, entertaining text, but they will stimulate the thoughtful aid practitioner or friend of Africa to think about how that might take place.

While Calderisi's book will not satisfy the reader seeking deep history (try Guy Arnold's impressive new "Africa: A modern history") rigorous economics, a call to arms (Jeff Sachs tried that in his "The end of poverty") or blame-mongering against NGOs, donors and corrupt elites, it is an excellent introduction to why Africa is the way it is, and why it deserves our help as the development challenge of the early 21st century.

Calderisi states early on that this book is "a personal essay." That turns out to be code for "This doesn't have to be particularly coherent, nor do I have to back up my recommendations with systematic evidence." Finally, the writing is not particularly inviting, with lines like, "unlike photographs, economies cannot be developed in a dark room" (p. 171) or "Africa has been in my blood since the age of fifteen" (p. 35).

However, Amartya Sen once wrote that "there is a strong case for judging a book by its best contributions, not its weakest points." [1] Calderisi worked for the World Bank in Africa for many years: he has many interesting stories and a great deal of perspective. He gives the World Bank's perspective on the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, the now notorious Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s, and many more personal stories. While there is certainly more to these stories than the Bank's perspective, understanding the Bank's reasoning is insightful.

In addition to these stories and perspectives, the author makes ten recommendations, many of them unfortunately unsupported by the body of the book. Most of the recommendations seem sensible (as do many recommendations that haven't worked, as William Easterly has indicated [2]), but Calderisi gives no detail as to how one would implement them nor does he successfully build up to them. I may not be confident that Jeffrey Sachs's plan [3] would be successful, but I give him credit for having thought it through and outlined it in significant technical detail.

The book begins much worse than it ends. In the first chapter, "Looking for Excuses," the author argues that many traditional arguments for African poverty are false; but the reasoning tends to be specious. Speaking of both the Cold War and colonialism, he argues that it is difficult to make the link between those events and Africa's problems, but then he attributes clear causality to what he calls the "benefits" of the Cold War and colonialism: it's not clear how we know that they caused benefits but not that they caused problems. In his argument that the manipulation of African peoples by Cold War movers is not responsible, he says, "there is little evidence that the superpowers did more damage than African states themselves." Even if they did the same amount of damage, that would be double the damage African countries would have done on their own. Elsewhere in the book, Calderisi relies on a few select quotes to demonstrate that every month in recent African history is "replete with tyranny and injustice" (p. 63). True or untrue, a statement like that deserves a decent standard of evidence.

I'm not sorry that I read this book, but I'd recommend you put William Easterly's White Man's Burden and Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty higher on your list.

[1] Amartya Sen, "The Man Without a Plan," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

[2] William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, MIT Press, 2002.

[3] Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, Penguin, 2006.

For Robert Calderisi, experienced development economist and ex-World Bank official, Africans would be a lot better off today if it weren't for their backward culture. "The Trouble with Africa" presents Calderisi's argument that the continent's scourges of poverty, corruption and mismanagement are of Africans' own making; "Africa's handicaps are inbred," he writes bluntly (143). The author believes aspects of what he calls "the African character" (e.g. fatalism, undue deference to authority and an ethic favoring collective distribution over private accumulation of wealth) must be corrected before African societies can develop. In making this case, he presents himself as a hard-headed realist doling out uncomfortable truths which other Africa specialists are too politically correct to utter--even if they secretly recognize they're true.

Many Westerners who've worked in Africa will recognize the cultural characteristics Calderisi describes; as a returned Peace Corps Volunteer I know them well. The problem I have with his approach is that it's based on an outdated concept of culture as a set of essential traits, and it confuses cause with effect. Culture is not some timeless essence passed down unchanged from the ancestors, but a dynamic system constantly being reshaped by politics, economics and history. As an anthropologist I'm uncomfortable with the author's reference to "the African character"--not because I'm concerned it might offend someone, but because a vast scientific literature accumulated over the last half century has shown the danger of viewing culture as an independent variable. Another ex-World Bank economist (Paul Collier in "The Botton Billion") convincingly outlines structural and historical explanations for Africa's plight which have nothing to do with culture and aren't even specific to Africa. Calderisi, alas, completely ignores such explanations.

"The Trouble with Africa" tries to account for the near-universal failure of Western development policies in Africa over the last four decades using little more than personal vignettes and anecdotal evidence; its author seems uninterested in rethinking the assumptions that underlay those failed policies. To apply a metaphor from my own profession, Calderisi is like a teacher whose students have all flunked the exam. Such a teacher should at least stop to wonder, "What's wrong with my approach? Where did my instruction fall short?" Calderisi, in contrast, asks only "What's wrong with them? Why don't they get it?" As long as he keeps focusing on these questions and grounding his answers in antiquated culturalist fallacies, he is not the hard-headed realist he thinks he is.

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