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I once hitched a ride on a beer truck in Cameroon. The journey, to deliver 30,000 bottles of Guinness to a thirsty town in the heart of the rain forest, was supposed to take less than a day, but it took four.
Swampy roads and a collapsed bridge were partly to blame, but the worst delays were caused by police road blocks, of which we met 47. Every few miles, we’d see a couple of oil drums in the middle of the road, and a plump gendarme would pick over our papers, hoping to find a fault he could demand a bribe to overlook.
One policeman invented a new rule about not carrying passengers in beer trucks. When I put it to him that the law he was citing did not, in fact, exist, he patted his holster and replied: “Do you have a gun? No. I have a gun, so I know the rules.”
Africa is poor today largely because it has been so badly governed since independence. Too few of its rulers are competent; too many are predatory. Those Cameroonian road blocks are not a bad illustration of how power is wielded on the continent. What Africans need is not more aid, but smaller and better government.
At the time of writing this review the book is number two in the top non-fiction bestsellers list in South Africa.
book reviews
- Anthony Daniels, Sunday Telegraph
"I doubt whether there is a better brief introduction to the travails of modern Africa and their causes." - Roger Bate, Wall Street Journal
"Rarely does an author combine experience, common sense and humour when writing about Africa. It's even rarer when the analysis is as hard-hitting as in the writing of Robert Guest." - RW Johnson, Sunday Times
"astute and clever…Guest asks all the right questions" - Anthony Sampson, The Guardian
"[Guest] is a lively and observant reporter. He portrays, with humour and some compassion, how nothing really works in most African countries. The reader can learn much from this lively and outspoken book." - Christopher Ondaatje, Literary Review
"Anyone who wants to be reminded of the horrors of Africa, economic or otherwise, will be interested to read this intelligent but light treatise." - Hernando de Soto, 'The Mystery of Capital'
"This is a brilliant book. Guest has taken a huge, complex issue and made it comprehensible. Unusually for a journalist, he has a strong grasp of economics. Unusually for an economist, he gets his boots dirty, showing how dry theories affect real people in Africa's slums, maize fields and war zones. And the most surprising thing about The Shackled Continent is that it is written with such humour, that at first you don't notice how serious he is. But this is the most serious subject imaginable." - Jeremy Gordin, The Star, South Africa
"It seems odd that Robert Guest causes as much trouble as he does. The 33-year old Africa editor of the influential Economist magazine is personable, witty [and] eminently reasonable. But [he] brings people’s blood to boiling point quicker than one can say The Shackled Continent." - Osei Boateng, New African
"This is the kind of book you read holding your nose. Even H.M. Stanley, the British journalist/explorer who lived fat on the weird stories about Africa he published in his journals, [would have been] ashamed of some of the views expressed by Guest."
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