The Challenge for Africa, Wangari Maathai (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 336 pp., $25 cloth.
“Africa,” Wangari Maathai writes, “is a paradox,” for “it is one of the richest continents on the planet, endowed with oil, precious stones and metals, forests, water, wildlife, soil, agricultural products, and millions of people. Yet most Africans remain poor” (p. 274). It is this paradox that Maathai explores in The Challenge for Africa. With analytical precision and clear, concise prose, Maathai catalogues the social, political, economic, and environmental ills strangling the continent. And they are many: excessive dependence on foreign aid, rampant corruption, the lethal inheritances of colonialism, desertification, the destruction of the rain forest—all working together in insidious synergy to prevent Africa from utilizing its myriad endowments.
Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and founder of the Green Belt Movement, an NGO devoted to sustainable development and women's empowerment, is at her most eloquent when discussing the continent's many environmental challenges, and her passion for the subject radiates through her words. Chapters on “Environment and Development ” and “Saving the Congo Forests” are particularly impressive, demonstrating Maathai's deep knowledge of the root causes of Africa's ongoing environmental degradation and offering sound policy prescriptions for an alternative and more sustainable environmental order.
In fact, it is Maathai's dual objective in The Challenge for Africa—to provide both a descriptive account of the present and a prescriptive framework for the future—that makes the work so compelling. Maathai is never satisfied to merely lament the current state of affairs in Africa; she is an idealistic pragmatist, offering innovative solutions throughout. Yet the personal is also very much political for Maathai. Her belief in the restorative power of political and environmental activism (“In seeking restoration for my continent, I am quite literally restoring myself—as, I believe, is every African—because who we are is bound up in the rivers and streams, the trees and the valleys” [pp. 287–288]) is a moving reminder of our intimate relationship to our natural and social environments. In this manner, the challenge for Africa is the challenge for us all.
