The Marketplace Magazine January/February 2023

Understanding Africa’s history, present and potential

Africa is Not a Country. Notes on a bright continent

By Dipo Faloyin (W.W. Norton & Company, 2022, 380 pgs., $30 US)

Not only is Africa not a country, but as Faloyin explains in his important book, many of the 54 nations that make up the world’s second-largest continent are artificial constructs.

Lines drawn on maps by European colonizers in 1884 ran illogical borders through ancient kingdoms and cultures, lumping together various ethnic groups in the name of making conquest easier.

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck gathered 14 nations in an exercise that led to decades of repression, pillaging, and massacres of indigenous populations.

Faloyin’s book recounts that tragic history and the persistent, oppressive impact of colonial legacy.

It also tells different stories of a region with two thousand languages and 1.4 billion people. Stories that go beyond Western stereotypes of poverty or safari. Stories of vibrant youth leaders and a handful of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Some of the stories are told in the cultural context of Lagos, Nigeria, where Faloyin was raised.

Others outline the failings of White savior charity campaigns, in the heyday of the 1980s megastar telethons and the present day. Faloyin also challenges Hollywood’s simplistic portrayal of complex societies.

He doesn’t gloss over atrocities committed by contemporary despots, detailing the stories of seven dictatorships. A section on the looting of African cultural legacy — 90 percent of artifacts are housed, often hidden, in museums around the world — is particularly sobering. World-leading museums have largely ignored widespread efforts to have stolen objects returned.

Well worth reading for anyone with an interest in the region. – MS