Who’s to blame?

Kathryn Tidrick

• The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State by Basil Davidson
  James Currey, 372 pp, £9.95, September 1992, ISBN 0 85255 700 0
• Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn
  Hutchinson, 390 pp, £18.99, August 1992, ISBN 0 09 177082 3
• African Silences by Peter Matthiessen
  Harvill, 225 pp, £7.99, September 1992, ISBN 0 00 271186 9

For a few years in the mid-Seventies I lived in Tanzania, my husband being at the time one of the horde of expatriate ‘advisers’ who flocked there hoping to be of service to Nyerere’s revolution, Even then it seemed the lights were going out in Africa, as country after country came under the control of greedy élites which used the power of the state to line their own pockets. Tanzania promised to be an exception to an already dreary tale of corruption and decline. Yet many of those who arrived in the early years of the decade feeling a modest hope for the future and a fine moral enthusiasm for the present, were to depart by the end of the decade sadder but not wiser men; or, if they did feel wiser, it was mostly because they had embraced that most conventional of all wisdoms, racism – this presumably being the only way they could find to account to themselves for Tanzania’s descent into a dark age from which it has only recently, with great difficulty, begun to emerge.