/books/The State of Africa
So, I've finally finished The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. It was one of the most eye-opening, gap-filling books I've ever read. It's something that should be read by everyone who donates money to African causes, or goes to protest concerts or considers aid issues when they vote.
It's big, and it's heavy. Meredith doesn't shy away from any of what happened, and presents Africa's recent history as a series of somewhat-interlocking narratives. It's heavily fact-based, and light on the editorializing.
There are three big things that totally changed my perspective on Africa. The scale of the corruption went (and continues to go) beyond anything I had previously understood. Many of the "Big Men" leaders in Africa shot anyone who opposed them. The more civilized ones just tortured and jailed them. Few survived the end of their reign, so they had little motive to leave anything in working order. Foreign reserves (the result of trading with other countries) were routinely transfered to offshore accounts, completely debilitating the ability of these countries to trade. Votes were suppressed, rigged, then ignored. Racial tensions were exploited as distractions, or to sow fear. Aid was stolen, diverted, or skimmed. There were no lengths to which some of the despots would not go in protecting their power and gutting the wealth and hopes of their fiefdoms.
The second, which in many ways comes first was the utter lack of educated personel in the countries as they all cascaded into independence in the late 50s. Some of them had couple dozen university-educated natives in the whole country. It's no wonder these countries collapsed in on themselves. Despite what was no doubt the immense political popularity of African independence amongst the intelligentsia at the time, colonial governments almost certainly chose an immoral path in letting these countries run themselves so quickly, though they may well have not known it at the time.
The third big surprise was France's participation, aid and abetting of the Rwandan genocide. Their diplomatic support for the Hutu leader, provision of guns, and general tunnel vision in supporting a pro-French leader really shocked me. They clung on, denying the ongoing genocide very late. Along similar but less surprising lines, I hadn't realized how much the Soviet Union and the US waged proxy battles in Africa during the cold war. It was an explicit policy of the US to try to drain Soviet resources in Angola.
It's no wonder the continent is as fucked up as it is, and sadly, having read this book, I don't have a lot of hope for its future.
Good book. Heavy reading, but an excellent summary of what's going on in Africa, and why.
New Albums from the Gallery
/books/Ishmael
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Daniel Quinn's Ishmael is good. As a piece of writing, it's mediocre; it feels like he wanted to wrap a philosophical treatise in a story, but the wrapping was too thin.
The book is about a student, the author, and a teacher. The teacher represents someone who has learned and understood our culture from the outside, from reading, but not from being raised in it. The teacher is embodied in a gorilla, intelligent and communicative through some means that we are supposed to suspend our disbelief about. It, like Lila, spends some time examining native north American culture, though primarily a subset of the "Leavers", roughly what we consider the hunter-gatherers and primitive peoples. It spends much time tackling the nature of "Takers", roughly the western cultures, though including India and generally those who have turned to agriculture. It examines what would be called our "consumerist" nature, though it avoids such po-mo terminology. (Po-mo is my favourite non-word.) The book uses clever analogies with the creation of flying machines and interesting re-interpretations of our creation folklore (both biblical and scientific) to construct a fresh philosophical framework for thinking about environmental, cultural and social problems. It is not a be-all-end-all, and I was very disappointed that the book spent so little time on the analogs to Bernoulli's principles -- laws about all living things that govern whether or not our systems will "fly". The end of the manifesto is cultish, and the end of the story is cliche, but the arguments and discussion in the book are insightful and sound. Only a few relatively small points irked me, one of which was discussions of overpopulation which I think were inadequate. After you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read this.
/books/Ender's Game
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I realized I wasn't reading any fiction, just philosophy and pure math, and so when my pure math started to drag I decided to fall back on fiction.
Funny. A bit over a year ago, I woulda said I didn't read fiction.
So, Ender's game is one of those books that every geek is supposed to read when they're 15. And I haven't read a book that fast (three days) since I was 15, but Josh says that's because it's a book for 15 year olds. :-)
Verdict: Good. Easy fiction, with a couple good points built into the ending.
(Severe) spoilers below.
/books/Lila
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. Only a partial recovery was possible from external copies on blog aggregators.
Lila, by Robert Pirsig, is the followup to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The latter I read about a year ago, and it has definitely influenced my thinking about things. Lila has too, although I struggle a bit more to believe what he says. Spoilers below.
/books/Practical Ethics - Not practical, but interesting anyway
This blog entry was lost by my ISP and they did not recover it. Only a partial recovery was possible from external copies on blog aggregators.
Practical Ethics by Peter Singer is basically an attempt to create a coherent system of ethics around modern ethical issues where the facts are not in doubt (or by making "reasonable assumptions" about the facts.)
