Crawford Young has earned the right to engage a topic as large as this by studying African politics since 1955; by writing some of the major works in the discipline including Politics in the Congo, Ideology and Development in Africa, and The Colonial State in Comparative Perspective; and by supervising over sixty doctoral dissertations.

This volume deserves our special attention because of the reputation of the author, because of the ambitious scope of his enterprise covering the entire continent for the past 50 years, because of the detailed summaries of the political histories of many African states, because of the rarity of this type of endeavor which is so difficult and requires so much expert knowledge, and because of the glowing reviews the book has already received in major journals. Without in any way disparaging the author and his past accomplishments, I must, however, from the outset declare that I have found the current effort unsatisfactory because Young does not shed light on what I consider to be the key problems of African states in this century: growing inequality; inadequate democratic processes that effectively sideline growing numbers of people from gaining their substantive rights; a new radical Islam that is unconcerned with economic development or the nation-state or procedural democracy; the creation of a “deep state” in every African country that enables the simultaneous advancement of popular participation in constrained government institutions and the safeguarding of oligarchic interests; the on-going process of creating and entrenching traditional and new classes in ways that differ and deserve special attention in every African country.

Young’s major accomplishment in this book is to tell us in much detail what happened politically. Getting these narratives across to a general audience is not easy. To make these changes more understandable, Young has also developed a thoughtful schema of historical periods. He has then added a way of looking at developments within those periods in terms of whether Africans felt “optimistic” or “pessimistic’ about their “times.” He has tried to be even more precise by, above all, dealing with the politics and the political nature of the state.

I think that these categories are superficial. They do not get to the root causes of the issues with which I am concerned. They do not address Harold Laswell’s definition of political science as the study of who gets what, when, how (Harold D Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, 1936) to tell us which Africans benefit, by what means, and who suffers. Catherine Boone in her Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics (2014) does this by showing how property institutions define political authority and shape hierarchy. Leonardo R. Arriola does it in his Multi-Ethnic Coalitions in Africa (2012) by showing the development of business support of opposition parties in elections. And the best recent overview of African politics is Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention In Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror (2013), because of her simple but elegant categorization and periodization of historical developments since the advent of independence that enables us to again see which Africans benefited in each of these periods.

Sections of the book, such as those dealing with ethnicity, are insightful. Young explores the complexity of ethnic identity including overlapping ethnic identities and variations in intensity. He says, “…[e]thnicity cannot serve as the master explanatory factor. Ethnicity is salient in most African countries, yet in only a few does it operate as key precipitant of insurgent uprising” (p. 324). Young says “there was strikingly little change in the set of state actors” over the last five decades (p. 248). That is a very interesting contention, but there is no effort to substantiate it: There is very little depiction of who “the state actors” are and were. I don’t think that this accidental (e.g., p. 1). I think that this is built into Young’s analytical approach. Of course it would not be surprising if, in a project of this scope, one did not have disagreement with some of the specific contentions within this arrangement of categories. I would question, for example, his declaration: “After a number of false starts, Britain and France at the end of the day developed a reasonable mastery of the statecraft of decolonization” (p. 103). But I must admit to a bigger problem and that is with the analytical scheme itself. Ambitious in scope and intent, I found key concerns of the book unpersuasive and unsatisfying. The volume provides a mass of information about lots of individual African states. Yet there is too much that is left unspecified. Above all, which Africans is Young talking about?

Some features of Young’s approach that struck me as special or atypical—not necessarily ones that Young would himself highlight—are: the inclusion of the whole continent from top to bottom in his purview; the severe negativity about the early nationalist, anti-colonial African leaders—especially their attitudes toward violence and Marxism; a surprising emphasis on the importance of Pan- Africanism; the advancement of a neutral view of civil society that I find quite problematic; and the somewhat “technical” attitude toward “accumulation.” He quotes Ali Mazrui: “Africa is a concept, pregnant with the dreams of millions of people” (p. 4). Most Africanists would say that the states of North Africa had qualitatively different cultures, ethnicities, social structures, and histories from the peoples and states below the Sahara and that they were joined in basically conflictual, exploitative relationships. Yet Young goes on in an exploration of “three pillars of identity” (p. 292) to say that “Pan-Africanism, whatever its limits, is the essential cement of the African state system” (p. 293) and that “from the outset of the continental quest for pan-African institutions, Arab states, initially especially Tunisia and Egypt, were active participants” (p. 297). He provides little evidence, however, for this and what he does offer turns out to undercut his argument (p. 297). He nevertheless finds “the pan-African dream is surprisingly robust in the face of its institutional shortcomings and disappointments” (p. 4).

I would like to believe that Pan Africanism was a widely held belief—both within African states and from North to South on the continent, but I did not find the evidence in this book. Surprisingly, Young downplays the significance of African revolutionary movements. Nowhere does he acknowledge that “the third wave” of democratization—begun in 1974 with the overthrow of the Salazar regime—was the culmination of the failure by that regime to repress the liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies. Instead, Young tells us that, “liberation wars were never won. Armed liberation struggle was at once marginal in purely military terms, except in Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, and Algeria, and yet a decisive vector in the dynamic of decolonization as a whole. The military threat [could not] seriously challenge the South African Defense force” (p. 4). Even if one abhors the use of violence for political purposes, it is hard to deny that armed up-risings were important.

There are a few instances when Young brings class into his analysis, and he does so to good effect. He tells us: “…the emergence of an African capitalist class was blocked in colonial times by imperial economic interests, European settlers, and immigrant mercantiles from South Asia and the Mediterranean. The state itself became the primary instrument of African class formation: the initial ascendant category was an essentially bureaucratic bourgeoisie. The road to wealth was through political power or access to state favor” (p. 73). But what was this “African capitalist class” and where did it exist? Was it the same everywhere? Who opposed it? What were the other classes? (One can no more picture a single class than one can have one hand clapping.) What was “the bureaucratic bourgeoisie”? (Full disclosure: I have myself discussed “the organizational bourgeoisie,” a term that I preferred, inter alia, because it included business but only of a certain size and type.)

Young suggests that limited capitalist development was caused in large part by the independence leaders: “The long dalliance with socialist orientation in many countries generated a perception that the African private bourgeoisie was a political threat” (p. 74) but, in recent years, the tide has turned: “The dominant state model after the crisis decade thus became the liberal democratic state based on a market economy” (p. 65). What happened, he said, was that “[i]ndigenous capital, of slender consequence during the first developmental state phase and deeply suspect under the integral state, now merited nurture” (p. 65). Young does want to “consider the haunting question of why African developmental performance has fallen well short of other world regions” (p. 8). This is a good question, but this book doesn’t really provide answers. Actually, since publication of this volume, African gross national production has soared, and commentators now talk about “Africa Rising” and the African miracle (e.g.: Ian Taylor. Africa Rising? BRICS—Diversifying Dependency, Curry, 2014). Key questions remain, however, about who exactly benefits, and whether or not inequality has actually increased since independence. Inequality is one of the fundamental questions that Young’s approach cannot really get at. Rather than “exploitation,” rather than a conflict of interests, Young talks about “the accumulation imperative” as an objective, technical necessity (p. 49).

Young astutely raises the issue of Islam as ideology. Islam, however, was not necessarily unifying: “Religious diversity was the most frequent pattern; even in the overwhelmingly Muslim states of northern Africa, divisive understandings of Islam make it a problematic defining element of the nation” (p. 247). ISIS, nevertheless, we might note, has a unifying doctrine, simple and appealing regardless of ethnicity or status, clearly rising above national identity towards a new unity sanctified by God that does not have to worry about economic growth or any material measure of advancement. Today in contemporary Africa—and the world—it is not “Arabhood,” but rather ISIS that provides “a millennial process of incorporation of dominated populations” through the power of violence and the demands of a new religious purity (p. 247). ISIS is vastly different from Al Queda. ISIS calls for a caliphate—not a nation-state; governance by a religious elite who know the truth and the purpose of government—not a democracy; preparation for life after death, for paradise—not for higher standards of living and economic growth; and demands that all of this be achieved now, in our lifetime. Their method of gaining power is through the sword and terror—beheadings, suicide-bombings, burning of enemies—not through elections and the ballot box.

Mass movements seeking control of the nation-state, democracy, and economic development (three major issues of the last century—and of this book) are not the issues of today for increasing numbers of those who feel displaced, un-needed, dis-satisfied, and unfulfilled. Young concludes his book with an evaluation of the postcolonial African states in terms of their “performance” and whether or not they have been “failures.” Have a majority of the people in a majority of the states benefited? Young’s book does not tell us. The last words in the book are: “… my reading of the last half century is that the most certain avenue to a performing, efficacious state is through constitutional democratic rule-of-law governance that is respectful of universal values of human rights and authenticated by a grounding in an African heritage” (p. 374). I strongly agree, but unfortunately, this book is not clear on how and why this is going to happen and what has stopped it from happening in the past.