Power struggles
Is disappointed by an insubstantial exposé of post-colonial Africa’s worst despots
Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon Head of Zeus, 480 pages, £25
The roll call of dictators who have strutted across the African stage since the independence era began in the 1950s is a long one. Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, set the pace, enforcing a personality cult, imprisoning opponents without trial and embarking on one grandiose scheme after another. From being one of the most prosperous tropical countries in the world at the time of independence in 1957, Ghana by 1965 had become virtually bankrupt.
Scores more African leaders followed the same path. By the 1980s, Africa was renowned for its ‘Big Men’: dictators who ruled the roost, tolerating neither opposition nor dissent, rigging elections, emasculating the courts, cowing the press, stifling universities, demanding abject servility and making themselves exceedingly rich. By the end of the 1980s, not a single African head of state in three decades had allowed himself to be voted out of office. Of some 150 heads of state, only six had voluntarily relinquished their power.
In the 1990s, protest movements demanding democratic reform spread from one country to another. Some succeeded in getting rid of old regimes. But many dictators survived the challenge, often by using brute force. Despite the risks, Africa’s struggles for democratic rule persist to this day.
A string of fine books have been written about Africa’s Big Men, by enterprising journalists tracking their nefarious activities for years on end. They include Michela Wrong’s vivid portrait of Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko and Peter Godwin’s compelling accounts of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. More recently, Tom Burgis’s endeavours have produced The Looting Machine, an extensive investigation into the systematic theft of Africa’s wealth.
Paul Kenyon’s Dictatorland, however, fails to make the grade. He claims to have travelled “all over Africa in the footsteps of the dictators”, discovering new insights. Yet his book focuses on just a handful of familiar tyrants such as Mobutu and Mugabe, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, Libya’s Gaddafi and the rulers of Equatorial Guinea: Macias and Obiang. No more than seven countries (out of a total of 54) get his attention, and large chunks of historical background and contemporary material in the book follow well-trodden paths.
The book also bears the hallmarks of being researched and written in some
Africa’s struggles for democratic rule persist to this day
haste. The origin of Dictatorland, says Kenyon, was a phone call from his agent while he was in Crimea, suggesting a project on Africa’s rapacious leaders. “It couldn’t have been further from my mind,” he writes. There followed a series of “whirlwind” research trips.
Even the title conforms to the commonly held stereotype version of Africa. “I wanted to tell the story of the continent with all the colour, all the intrigue, all the human stories that make it what it is today,” Kenyon says. Well, by that measure, he has fallen short. Africa is far more interesting and complex than Kenyon has managed to discover.