A Guest is a stranger after all.

Robert Guest is the Africa editor of The Economist. He thinks Africa is poor because it "hardly produces anything that the rest of the world wants to buy". Even H. M. Stanley (1841-1904), the British journalist/explorer who lived fat on the weird stories about Africa he published in his journals, will be ashamed of some of the views expressed by Guest in his new book, The Shackled Continent--Africa's Past, Present and Future. Osei Boateng has been reading it.

**********

This is the kind of book you read holding your nose, so those who do not have handkerchiefs, please go to the nearest shop and get yourself one. Macmillan, the publishers, proudly tell readers on the book jacket: "Robert Guest is currently the Africa editor of The Economist, and regularly appears on CNN and the BBC. A graduate of Oxford University, he lived in Africa for three years reporting on wars, famines, crazy monetary policies and bizarre drinking games."

It tells a lot about The Economist's cynical coverage of Africa. Remember The Economists's infamous front cover of 17 January 2000 showing a picture of a black man with a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) superimposed on a map of Africa and the headline: "The Hopeless Continent". In the leader comment that accompanied the headline, The Economist suggested that Africa was genetically inclined towards chaos. "Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and incapable of development?," the magazine asked. "Some think so. They believe Africa's wars, corruption and tribalism are 'just the way Africa is', and that African societies are unable to sustain viable states. In the past, outsiders would have described Africa's failures in racial terms. Some still do. They are wrong, but social and cultural factors cannot be discounted."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The sheer anger from Africans all over the world that descended on The Economist for that racial slur, led to the eventual departurer of the magazine's then Africa editor, Richard Dowden, who felt hugely betrayed by his senior editors who wrote the leader comment and authorised the front cover without his knowledge.

Now we have Robert Guest, a young man so proud to say he lived in a diverse and vibrant place like Africa for three long years and only covered "wars, famines, crazy monetary policies and bizarre drinking games"? Did he set out in this book to outdo H.M Stanley? Or John Hanning Speke? Or the other 19th century British explorers who returned from Africa with weird stories of "savages" capering around boiling pots of human flesh?

You would think that having chosen a controversial title like "The Shackled Continent--Africa's Past, Present and Future", Guest would be bold to tell us clearly who shackled the continent, how and when it was shackled, and how this has impacted on Africa's current condition. But no, there is nothing of the sort in the book, apart from the usual reasons of bad and corrupt leaders and policies.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Yes, Africa has had some bad and corrupt leaders. But it hurts immensely if the same people who engineered the overthrow or the killing of the leaders who could have made a difference in Africa, and in their place imposed and supported buffoons like Mobutu, Amin and the soldiers in Ghana in 1966, turn round and accuse Africa of having had bad and corrupt leaders.

For an Africa editor of The Economist, Guest's analysis is shoddy, his grasp of geopolitics is no better, and his history even worse. He cannot even hold an argument--he says one thing and shoots himself down in the next two paragraphs.

He has three things in abundance, though: His disdain for Africa, his propensity to tell half truths, and the urge to rub his so-called riches in the face of the "poor" Africans. He tells the story of Nashon Zimba, a 25-year-old peasant he met in Malawi who took him to his home ("a house that is dark, cramped, cold in winter, steamy in summer and has running water only when tropical storms come through the roof").

"I thought of my own home, with its sturdy walls and modern kitchen," Guest says. "Mr Zimba is a skilled builder ... yet he lives in a hovel, while I, like most Westerners, live in a relative palace, built by a network of millions of people I have never met. In all my travels, I have never seen a more poignant illustration of why the world's poor people need capitalism".

Guest goes on to make the fantastic claim that "most Africans do not own their own homes", yet concedes that over 80% of Africans still live in rural areas. So who owns the homes in the rural areas? The government? Apparently, to him, African "homes" do not count as homes because they are built with "mud and sticks" and do not have "modern kitchens", whatever modern means.

His disdain for African food is expressed in these words: "Subsistence farmers grow most of the starchy food in Africa, [note the emphasis on starchy] but eat most of it themselves, barter much of the rest and make no impression on the continent's fledging stock exchanges."

Regrettably, you have to trudge through 255 pages of sometimes pure nonsense to hear Guest finally tell his readers that he is not of Africa but writing from an "outsider's point of view".

"I will always be an outsider in Africa," he deigns to inform us. "I have never been poor or oppressed, and I grew up in a country where African-style poverty has been unknown for generations. When I wander around Africa, I do so wrapped in the armour that money provides ...

"Africa constantly reminds me how lucky I am to have grown in a rich, peaceful country. If I'd been born in Africa, there's a good chance that I'd be dead by now, and almost no chance that I'd be racking up so many frequent-flyer miles. I'm a foreigner, so this is an outsider's perspective, for what it is worth."

"By Africa", he says, "I mean sub-Saharan Africa. This book does not deal with the Arab countries of North Africa". Why not, he doesn't say.

But listen to one of his reasons why Africa is poor: "Countries grow wealthy in much the same way that individuals do: by making things that other people want to buy, or providing services that others will pay for ... By and large, the route to prosperity is through thrift, hard work, and finding out what other people want in order to sell it to them. Britain first grew rich, in the 19th century, by using newly invented industrial techniques to produce cheaper and better textiles, steel, railways and other goods, which both locals and foreigners were keen to buy.

"Japan grew rich in the 20th century by adopting and improving manufacturing techniques invented elsewhere, in order to make better and cheaper cars, semiconductors and fax machines. America is the world's richest country today because so many people crave American movies, medicines, aeroplanes and banking services.

"Africa, in contrast, hardly produces anything that the rest of the world wants to buy ... To understand why Africa is so poor, we must first ask why Africa is so unproductive."

This indeed is hilarious stuff! "Africa is poor because it hardly produces anything that the rest of the world wants to buy?" Really? And this coming from the Africa editor of The Economist? So, who buys all those gold, diamonds, coltan, uranium, copper, cocoa, coffee, tea and the thousands of other minerals that Africa produces? Africans themselves?

Doesn't Guest know that much of the production of the "rich" countries he extols will not be possible without African raw material production? Africa does produce a lot of things that other people want to buy, except that they buy it too cheaply for African comfort.

Perhaps one of the best points Guest makes in the book is this: "If the example of most developed countries is anything to go by, Africa's future prosperity will depend in part on the speed with which it adopts and adapts to new technologies ... and industrialises." But even here, he fails to mention that the African leader who tried the most to industrialise as a model for the whole of Africa, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, was overthrown in a joint effort by the USA and UK. In 1961, within four short years of independence, 60 new factories were opened in Ghana thanks to Nkrumah's industrialisation policy.

But on 12 February 1964, according to American secret documents declassified in 1999, a high-powered American-British meeting to discuss the overthrow of Nkrumah was held at the White House, attended by (on the American side) President Lynden Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Under-Secretary of State Harriman, and Special Assistant to the President on National Security Affairs, McGeorge Bundy. On the British side were Prime Minister Douglas-Hume and Foreign Secretary Butler. "One could not be sure how long Nkrumah would last", Butler said at the meeting.

The plan was to manipulate the implosion of Ghana's economy by remote control. By 24 February 1966, Nkrumah was gone, and Robert W. Komer, the then special assistant to President Johnson was telling the president in a congratulatory memo: "The coup in Ghana is another example of a fortuitous windfall. Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black man." Perhaps Robert Guest is too young to remember this.

But he sure has some dodgy statistics. "Half of sub-Saharan Africa's 600 million people," he writes, "live on just sixty-five American cents a day, and even this figure is misleadingly rosy. Many Africans rarely have any money at all. They build their own homes, often out of mud and sticks. They grow their own food. When the rains fail they go hungry. And when the rains are too heavy, as in Mozambique, they lose their homes ... Just why is Africa so poor?"

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

To attempt an answer, you first have to look at his statistics again. If over 80% of Africans live in rural areas and grow their own food, then they surely must live on more than US$0.65 a day.

This is merely one of those misleading statistics used to insult and belittle Africans. Because the Africans do not go to a supermarket and buy the food they grow, which they get for free from their own farms; or the meat and fish and fresh fruits and vegetables they get for free from the rivers, streams, forests and their farms (which are all organic by the way, and Robert Guest knows how expensive organic produce is in the West), it serves the agenda of these statisticians and so-called experts to churn such absurd figures to humiliate the Africans.

To his own question: "just why is Africa so poor", Guests goes for a multi answer. "Some blame geography," he says. "It is certainly a factor. Many African countries are tropical. Rich nations tend to have temperate climates: roughly 93% of the people in the world's 30 richest nations live in temperate zones. The tropics tend to be poor ...

"The Victorians believed that hot weather drains a man's strength. A more likely link between climate and poverty is that hot countries are home to all manner of diseases that affect both people and their livestock. Africa has the worst of them."

He acknowledges, quite rightly, that "some readers may find my arguments too narrowly materialistic. Money is not everything. Despite their poverty, Africans are not obviously less happy than say, Japanese salarymen. The man in a suit on the Tokyo subway earns far more than a Cameroonian peasant, but the peasant seems less stressed, and has more time to sit in the shade eating papayas and enjoying the company of his family and friends. Which of the two is better off? There is no reliable means of measuring this."

There is, only that Guest and his ilk find it uncomfortable to talk about it. For example, he never asks himself "what is the purpose of life"? Is it to get richer and richer? After all their wealth, the Japanese have one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Compare that with how many Africans ever commit suicide because they are "poor".

According to Guest: "Another popular culprit for Africa's ills is history. Many Africans argue that the continent's current problems spring largely from the traumas that Europeans visited on Africa, such as slavery.

"It's an emotive argument," he admits, but dismisses it in the same breath. "Of course, slavery is evil. But it is implausible to blame it for all of Africa's modern problems ... [no African in fact blames slavery for all of Africa's problems]. Practically all nations have endured slavery at some point [and] the transatlantic slave trade ended in the 19th century."

He implies here that slavery ended a long time ago, forgetting that it is less than 140 years ago that the last slaves were set free. Even more important is the fact that no nation or continent underwent slavery for 400 continues years as Africa did. People tend to downplay the impact of the instability that those 400 years engendered in Africa. And then came 100 years of colonialism: "Long after slavery was abolished," Guest writes, "most of Africa remained subject to European colonial rule. Since most African countries were still colonies until the 1960s or 70s, it is easy to find colonial roots for modern problems." And here comes the dismissal. "The colonists left deep scars. But they also left behind some helpful things, such as roads, clinics and laws."

So Africa had no laws until the colonists arrived? What arrogance!

But Guest is not finished: "If colonialism was what held Africa back," he goes on, "you would expect the continent to have boomed when the settlers left. It didn't. Perhaps, then, the problem is that the legacy of colonialism remained, even after the colonists had gone. Up to a point, this is true ... Some Africans argue that their continent has been crippled by what Steve Biko, a South African revolutionary, called a colonisation of the mind".

Which is true, no matter how hard Guest and his ilk try to dismiss it. "Colonisation of the mind" is one of the most enduring problems which Africa still faces.

On Aids in Africa, which he says contributes hugely to poverty on the continent, Guest has a wonderful idea how to stop it. First, he quotes another of those misleading statistics to support the point that "nearly five Africans die every minute [of Aids]". If this were true, Africa surely would be an empty place by now. But even in the most desperate Aids areas in Africa, the population has been increasing instead of decreasing. For example, South Africa, reported to be one of the worst Aids areas, has added 4 million people to its population in the last 10 years.

But don't tell that to Robert Guest. After berating the South African president, Thabo Mbeki, for his stand on Aids, Guest yet supports Mbeki's view that "poverty speeds the epidemic's spread". And then he goes for another bombast: "Those who cannot afford television," he says, "find other ways of passing the evening ... Without frank discussion of what exactly people are doing in bed and behind bushes, it will be impossible to curb the epidemic."

Africa can forgive the "behind the bushes" insult, because Guest surely doesn't know that in most of the continent "doing it behind bushes" (as some people do elsewhere in the world), is a taboo, punishable by the gods.

Perhaps another of the few good points he makes in the book, is this: "Whatever the details, it is clear that the society most Africans want to build is an industrialised one ... And this will take time. Nations do not suddenly wake up industrialised. To join the modern world, Africans have to study, toil, save and invest.

"In Europe the process was excruciatingly slow. After the sack of Rome in 410, Europeans almost entirely forgot how to read, write or lay bricks. For 1,000 years, they huddled in freezing huts of sticks and straw, terrified of the wolves and evil spirits that lurked in the forests around them ...

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"During the 15th and 16th centuries, Europeans rediscovered the great works of classical literature and philosophy, and hauled themselves back up to the level of civilisation their ancestors had enjoyed in Roman times."

Here, he fails to add that the European rediscovery of the "15th and 16th centuries" coincided with transatlantic slavery.

On the bad coverage that Africa gets in the Western media, Guest tells how President Mbeki's former deputy press secretary, Parks Mankahlana, once threw him out of his office. "Why on earth did you let him in here"?, Mankahlana asked his deputy? "He then gave me a lecture on how much he hated The Economist for its arrogance and Afro-pessimism, before moving on to the subject of how much he hated the entire Western press corps for the same reason.

"Being a journalist in Africa", Guest continues, "is no way to make friends [which is not entirely true]. Many politicians have berated me for The Economist's Africa coverage, which they say dwells too much on wars, famines and Zimbabwe, and so scares off investors ...

"I can see their point, and I sympathise with it. Some journalists are irresponsible, some are lazy, some report in a highly misleading way. But most, in my experience, try quite hard to find out what is happening, and to convey that information as accurately as possible. They may oversimplify, they may sacrifice nuance to make the story gripping, but they don't usually lie.

"The reason they report that Africa is plagued by war, famine and pestilence is that Africa is plagued by war, famine and pestilence. They will stop reporting this when it stops being true." And then he turns on the African elite and New African for "their tendency to believe that African's problems are someone else's fault.

"I hear this argument often," he says, "at least from the educated middle class: civil servants, politicians, academics, journalists and so forth. African newspapers are full of it, as is my email inbox. A good way of keeping up with the trends in this school of thought, I have found, is to subscribe to the New African, a glossy magazine published in London. It makes fascinating reading.

"The magazine's editor, Baffour Ankomah, a Ghanaian with a colourful turn of phrase, acknowledges that many African governments are corrupt and undemocratic, but seems to resent it when foreigners point this out. If an African leader is particularly vilified in the West, Mr Ankomah tends to applaud him for standing up to the neo-imperialists. When interviewing such leaders, Mr Ankomah's journalistic scepticism tends to fail him."

Baffour told this reviewer: "If Robert Guest admits that the West 'vilifies', not criticises, selected African leaders, and there is a difference between vilification and criticism, then I rest my case. He should ask himself why the West chooses to vilify certain African leaders and not all of the so-called despots on the continent. He is a young man and has a lot more years ahead of him yet to learn his trade."

This certainly is a book that Robert Guest will one day regret ever writing.