Why Africa can't catch a break: Malaria, ebola, and Gen. Butt Naked.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa - Book Review

A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa By Howard French Knopf, $25.00

Early in his rambles through West Africa as a correspondent for The New York Times, Howard French arrived in Lagos, the steamy financial capital of Nigeria. The most populous nation in Africa had just been taken over by Gen. Sani Abacha, a sinister figure who concealed his eyes behind dark sunglasses and who had a predilection for ordering" Mafia-style hits against political opponents. Nigeria's promise had long since been frittered away by a succession of corrupt military dictators and civilian rulers, but under Abacha, who seized power in 1993, the thievery had become ever more brazen. Within minutes of his arrival, French was set upon by both a rapacious immigration official and a soldier who demanded his passport and threatened him with arrest. Then the reporter's Nigerian "fixer," David, stepped in, rebuking the assailants and holding firm even as the soldier raised his gun. As the soldier beat a retreat, David offered French some cogent counsel. "You must never fear those people," he says. "If you do, you are finished."

It is a piece of advice that French had repeatedly to fall back on in the course of his four years as the Timed roving bureau chief based in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. A Continent for the Taking: The Traged and Hope of Africa, his vivid, disquieting memoir of those times, conjures up a succession of flailed states in which the shakedown is a way of life, destitute soldiers terrorize civilians at will, and the slightest display of weakness becomes an invitation for predation. In chapter after evocative chapter, he chronicles the murderous kleptocracy of Abacha in Nigeria, the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), the drug-and-diamond-fueled carnage in Liberia, and the epic fall of Zairian dictator Mobutu. It's depressing, Hobbesian stuff. Yet in sharp contrast to Out of America, Keith Richburg's bitingly pessimistic account of his years as an African- American correspondent covering the Rwandan genocide and clan warfare in Somalia, French, also an African American, sees Africa as a continent still dense with possibility. The tug of war between ordinary citizens yearning for democracy and ruthless leaders determined to squelch those aspirations is one of the driving themes behind French's book. So, too, is the often-destructive role played by the United States, which, as lie documents...