Product Description

The troubles of Africa today are severe and wide-ranging. Yet, too often, they are portrayed by the media in extreme terms connoting poverty, dependence, and desperation. Here Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a refreshingly unique perspective on these challenges, even as she calls for a moral revolution among Africans themselves.
 
Illuminating the complex and dynamic nature of the continent, Maathai offers “hardheaded hope” and “realistic options” for change and improvement. She deftly describes what Africans can and need to do for themselves, stressing all the while responsibility and accountability. Impassioned and empathetic, The Challenge for Africa is a book of immense importance.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45991 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-07
• Released on: 2009-04-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307377401
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a refreshingly unique perspective on the challenges facing Africa, even as she calls for a moral revolution among Africans themselves, who, she argues, are culturally deracinated, adrift between worlds.

The troubles of Africa today are severe and wide-ranging. Yet what we see of them in the media, more often than not, are tableaux vivantes connoting poverty, dependence, and desperation. Wangari Maathai presents a different vision, informed by her three decades as an environmental activist and campaigner for democracy. She illuminates the complex and dynamic nature of the continent, and offers “hardheaded hope” and “realistic options” for change and improvement. With clarity of expression, Maathai analyzes the most egregious “bottlenecks to development in Africa,” occurring at the international, national, and individual levels--cultural upheaval and enduring poverty among them--and deftly describes what Africans can and need to do for themselves, stressing all the while responsibility and accountability.

Impassioned and empathetic, The Challenge for Africa is a book of immense importance.

A Q&A with Wangari Maathai

Question: Why did you decide to write about Africa?

Wangari Maathai: I had been working in Africa for thirty-five years, and at all levels of society--in the academy and at the grassroots, as an activist and in the government, as a human rights advocate and an environmentalist. My experience is that dealing with the issues requires a holistic approach and a broad understanding of the issues at play, so that one feels challenged to keep going rather than giving up. I wanted to share my experience with others who, like me, want to see a better Africa. I hope that reading of my experience will help them understand why things are the way they are.

Q: You place as much blame on Africa’s post-independence leaders as on the legacy of colonialism for the failure of Africa to progress, and strongly advocate for better leadership. How do you feel this will be accomplished?

WM: First and foremost, it is important for the African leadership to let go of the excuse of the legacy of colonialism, and to accept that it is many decades since the colonial powers left Africa and some of the expectations of the African people should have been realized. It is the people in charge of the countries that should have made that possible, expcially since many of them were educated, enlightened, well-traveled, and well-exposed. Their people, however, were largely just the reverse and so put a lot of their faith in their leaders. My experience is that it is the leaders who let their people down, and it is they who must make a decision to work for their people. That is more likely to happen than their people having the capacity to hold them accountable and therefore to change the status quo. That’s why I emphasize leadership.

Q: You emphasize the loss of culture as one reason why Africa is not progressing. Why is this important?

WM: Every people in the world has a code of wisdom they have developed out of their experiences over the course of time. That code of wisdom is reflected in their ways of life: their worship practices; their sense of justice and fairness; their agriculture and the food they eat; their biological heritage and environment; their songs, language, and dances; and the way they mourn their dead and celebrate life. All of these are what we mean when we talk about the culture of a people.

The reason why I think culture is important in Africa, especially south of the Sahara, is that peoples’ cultures were deliberately demonized, trivialized, and destroyed, and people were encouraged to embrace a culture that was largely Western. Now the problem is that, when you deny people their cultural heritage, you render them vulnerable and make them feel inadequate. They become people with no ground to stand on, and they are disempowered. That is what happened to Africa during the colonial period, and because the cultures of Africans were largely unwritten when they got their independence, it was very difficult to go back to the pre-colonial cultures, and to a large extent many of them died with their ancestors. Because the people who were given power by the colonial administrators were devoted convertees to Western culture, they imposed that culture even more on their peoples.

As a result, when we look back and try to deal with the challenges that confront us, we don’t have one of the very important platforms we need to stand on to start. When I compare the experience of sub-Saharan Africa with Africa to the north, the reason why the northern Africans seem to have been able to pull out of the colonial legacy better than the southerners is, in my opinion, probably because they have a culture that is written, that wasn’t completely destroyed, and even if the colonial power tried they were able to resist. India also seemed to deal better with their post-colonial period than Sub-Saharan Africa. Gandhi removed his three-piece suit (which represented Western success) and put on a dhoti; he ate Indian food and adopted the symbol of the spinning wheel--all to appeal to the Indian peoples’ sense of themselves and their rich, written culture. This gives me reason to question aloud, and encourage Africans to do the same, whether culture may be a missing link in Africa’s failure to progress.

Q: You examine the negative perspective of Africa that is present in Western media. What do you believe the West doesn’t understand about Africa?

WM: I think there are people who understand Africa but like to present it in a distorted fashion. I also believe there are people who genuinely want to understand Africa, but don’t because they look at Africa through the eyes of the Western media. The African media are not able to penetrate the Western media to give their own story, and even if they did, sometimes that media are already very pro-West, because the journalists have been educated and acculturated in the West and are unable to present Africa as it really is.

Quite often in the case of Africa, people will just present one aspect--for example, poverty--without having the time or patience to explain that poverty is manmade and created both by the local leadership and the international community in the way it deals with Africa. A Western person looking at poverty makes a judgment, without understanding that that poverty is partly caused by the way their government is dealing with Africa. Another good example is the debt issue. Many of us who wanted to campaign for debt cancellation came to appreciate that Africa has already paid the principal on the debt many times over, but the way the debt was structured, Africa was going to pay it through several generations. This is unfair and exploitative. Yet most Westen people are only told that Africans have borrowed and are refusing to pay the money. They don’t get the whole truth.

Q: African leaders often use the phrase “African solutions to African problems.” Do you support this idea?

WM: I’ve yet to see it applied.

Q: You seem optimistic about Africa’s future, despite entrenched challenges. Why?

WM: I would have to accept defeat if, after so many years of committing myself to Africa, I arrived at the conclusion that Africa cannot be saved. My personality is that of an optimist, because I believe that almost every problem has a solution. There are very, very few problems in life that have no solution whatsoever. Where there is a will and a commitment we can always find a solution. I do believe Africa can change. I am an African, I am highly educated; I was educated in the West, I went back home. I worked at all levels of development--among the rich and poor.

If I was able to change and was willing to devote my life to trying to improve Africans’ quality of life and, in spite of all the obstacles, was able to accomplish some measure of success, which even the world came to recognize, why not another person? And not just two people, but four--and then a critical mass of Africans who think like me in every other African country? If that happened, we could change; indeed, it is how things change. There are countries who have been poor, colonized, and enslaved, and they have been able to get out of that situation--mostly due to the kind of leadership they enjoyed. I don’t believe that other people have a monopoly of good leaders. I know I’m not alone. We need to speak out. We need to hold our leaders accountable, so they can stop dividing us along ethnic and economic lines, and begin uniting us so we can have a respectable place at the table of the nations of the world.

(Photo © Brigitte Lacombe)

From Publishers Weekly
Africa's moral and cultural dysfunctions loom as large as its material problems in this wide-ranging jeremiad. Maathai (Unbowed), a Kenyan biologist and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for organizing the tree-planting Green Belt Movement, surveys Africa's struggle with poverty and disease, political violence, climate change, the legacy of colonialism and a global economy that's stacked against it. But the deeper problem she sees is the selfishness, opportunism and shortsightedness of Africans themselves, from leaders who exploit their countrymen and loot their nations' resources to poor farmers who ruin the land for short-term gain. Maathai means this as an empowering message aimed at a mindset of dependency that would rather wait for someone to magically make development happen; she urges Africans to recover indigenous traditions of community solidarity and self-help, along with the virtues of honesty, fairness and hard work. Maathai shrewdly analyzes the links between environmental degradation and underdevelopment, and floats intriguing proposals, like banning plastic bags as a malaria-abatement measure. But the challenges she addresses are vast and intractable—and sadly, many of the development and environmental initiatives she extols seem to have already fizzled. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Unbowed (2006) recounted Maathai’s courageous campaigns against environmental degradation in Kenya, an effort recognized by the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. This work elaborates her diagnoses of socioeconomic ailments and presents her prescriptions for ameliorating Africans’ lives. As do many analysts, she indicts misgovernment for, if not causing, assuredly aggravating woes that she roots in the legacies of colonialism. But while she exhorts the leaderships of African countries to adhere to standards of transparency and honesty, she characteristically not only argues for grassroots action to create a democratic space but also describes local development programs she promoted as a recent member of Kenya’s parliament and government. Defeated in the 2007 election, Maathai, referring to the communal violence that ensued from Kenya’s disputed presidential election that year, elaborates how she believes the ethnic allegiances of Africans ought to be “embraced” by their national governments. Dubious of top-down and foreign-aid approaches to development, Maathai’s confidence in locally oriented paradigms of progress to meet Africa’s health, agricultural, and environmental problems well may energize readers as well as advocates. --Gilbert Taylor

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Customer Reviews

A Gift--Properly Priced, Presented, and MOST Rewarding
Of the three of four books I have consumed so far for an introduction to Africa's current condition, this one is by far the best, and if you buy only one, this is the one. The other two, each valuable in its own way, are:
The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

Tomorrow I will plow through Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future and post a review.

The author, a Nobel Peace laureate for the Green Belt Movement, delivers a very straight-forward, practical "woman's voice" account of both the past troubles, present tribulations, and future potential of Africa. This book is replete with "street-level" common sense as well as a real sense of nobility.

Early on the author addresses the reality that uninformed subsistence farming, what 65% of all Africans do, is destroying the commons. I find that ignorance--and the need to educate and inform in their own local language (no easy task when speaking of thousands of local languages)--is a recurring theme in this book. I see *enormous* potential for the application of what the Swedish military calls M4IS2 (multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making).

The author provides an ample tour of the horizon of aid, trade, and debt imbalances, of the dangers of culture and confidence of decline, of the need to restore cultural and environmental diversity, and of the need to reprioritize agricultural, education, and environmental services instead of bleeding each country to pay for the military and internal security (and of course corruption).

CORE POINT: The *individual* African is the center of gravity, and only Africans can save Africa--blaming colonialism is *over*. The author's vision for a revolution in leadership calls for integrity at the top, and activism at the bottom, along with a resurgence of civil society and a demand that governments embrace civil society as a full partner.

CORE POINT: The environment must be central to all development decisions, both for foster preservation and permit exploitation without degradation. Later in the book the author returns to this theme in speaking of the Congo forests, pointing out that only equity for all those who are local will allow all those who are foreign to exploit AND preserve.

I am fascinated by the author's expected discussion of the ills of colonialism including the Berlin division, the elevation of elites, arbitrary confiscations of lands, and proxy wars, what I was NOT expecting was a profound yet practical discussion of how the church in combination with colonialism was a double-whammy on the collective community culture of Africa.

The author observes that any move away from aid, which has been an enabler of massive corruption at the top, and toward capitalization and bonds [as the author of Dead Aid proposes in part] will be just as likely to lead to corruption absent a regional awakening of integrity.

The author discusses China, observing that China has used its Security Council veto to protect African interests, and the author observes that the West continues to destroy Africa with arms sales, France and Russia especially, followed by China, with the US a low fourth.

I learn that patronage and the need for protection are the other side of corruption as a deep-seated rationalization for keeping power, and I learn that pensions in Africa are so fragile that retirement is fraught with risk, another reason to seek long-term power holding. I am inspired to think of a regional pension fund guaranteed by Brotherly Leader Muuamar Al-Gathafi.

On a hopeful note the author praises the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as leader of Liberia, and sees real promise in the AU leadership summits that she attends.

CORE IDEA: Leadership training at all levels must keep pace with the changes in technology and the complexity of Africa's engagements. Civil Society in particular must be understood and embraced by government leaders at all levels.

The author spends time around page 134 discussing her pilot project to create local empowerment, devolving decision-making to create a multi-layered structure that establishes priorities while also providing accountability and transparency, minimizing corruption. Using a trained facilitator, the author brought together around 40 fifteen-person committees to create a strategic plan, and that is now useful as a map regardless of turn-over.

On page 158 the author briefly discusses ECOSOC (Economic, Social, and Cultural Council of the African Union) founded in 2005 to bring the voices of the people into the AU deliberations; to educate the peoples of Africa on all aspects of African affairs; and to encourage civil society throughout Africa.

My reaction: ECOSOCC is a center of gravity and could be the lever needed to create a regional M4IS2 network that substitutes information for violence, capital, time, and space. A harmonization of investments to address regional cell phone access (Nokia ambient energy devices), regional radio stations using solar power; and a regional public information program on the basics of mosquito control and other key public health topics, all call out for action in partnership with ECOSOCC.

Later in the book the author equates misinformation with alcohol and drugs. Ignorance is a recurring theme.

The conclusion of the book is full of deep wisdom on re-imagining community, restoring family by returning the men, stopping the brain drain, and making it easier for remittances to return; of the need to create micro-nation forums within each macro-nation; of the need to create local radio stations in each of the local languages and dialects; of the need to address energy shortfalls while stopping the march of the desert; and finally, of the need to address the pressing twin issues of land ownership and tourism management so as to restore the primacy of African interests.

The book ends on a hugely positive note calling for Africans to reclaim their land; reclaim their culture; and reclaim themselves.

Other books I consider relevant to respecting Africa:
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era

Readable and informative
Wangari Maathai's The Challenge for Africa is a wide-ranging, erudite, essay that discusses some of the plethora of vexing problems facing Africans and her thoughts about how these problems might be addressed. Her approach seems even-handed, scholarly (but not pedantic), and directed at the goal of having Africans do whatever is necessary to solve their own problems. For me, the key point of the book was her discussion of the problems of tribalism, (which, I confess, seems to me to be the "elephant in the room" of African travails.) She euphemistically refers to tribes as micro-nations,and suggests that such micro-nations (numbering in the hundreds in certain countries and speaking dozens of languages) need to be brought together for the common good. It is obvious from her observations that Herculean effort will be necessary to achieve the goals she sets.

This book is written in easy to read English, is well-organized, has a decent index, and adequate endnotes. I read the book in one day in two sittings. It is worth the time.

Africa's Dilemma
I was very impressed with Dr. Maathai's book, "The Challenge for Africa". This was not just a book of complaints about Africa but also a book of solutions, ideas and suggestions for a greater and more inclusive populace. Africa's problems are numerous and complex and should be solved by Africans. The book reiterated that some nations are on the brink of collapse due to corruption, gross mismanagement and lack of the peoples' trust and faith in African leadership--this is one of Africa's biggest challenges.

I was particular pleased to read the juxtaposition of the "tradition" vs "modern" culture and how African culture was obliterated by the Europeans causing untold psychological and emotional damage. The lines drawn by the Europeans, in the late 19th century, to designate their domain, divided ethnic groups and destroyed family ties that existed for centuries. After the colonial period, the European system of governance was not suited for nor appropriately designed for African nations to use as a political template.

The vivid description of the micro-nation she described was extremely interesting. The "ethnic typing" correlates to the "kinship corporation" identified by Dr. Peter Ekeh where allegiance and loyalty are more associated with the "micro-nation"(tribes) than with the nation-state or "macro-nation".

Monetary gifts sent to assist African leaders in resolving the myriad of issues and problems have not worked. Dr. Maathai calls for African leaders to reject these "handouts". Further, she advocated that the political process include rural people to assist in building stronger infrastructures; economic, social and political.

One of the key highlights of the book is Dr. Maathai's vision and commitment to the environment which revealed information that should be widely disseminated. Her analysis of the deforestation in Africa's Congo Basin and the linkage to the Rain Forest in Brazil may be the cause for the unusual climatic conditions in many parts of the world. Her remarkable leadership in the Green Belt Movement played a key role in the planting of over a billion trees in Kenya and is a vital part of the structure for introducing farmers to proper techniques in soil conservation, crop rotation and diversification.

Globalization has had a negative impact on locally-grown products which have had limited success in competing with mass-produced goods distributed by transnational corporations. The African market place is the centerpiece for economic and political activities in most countries and has been unfairly affected by the international markets.

Dr. Maathai's book is a must read for those wanting to learn more and to know more about Africa and the challenges facing this huge and diverse continent.