Cry the beloved continent: Africans are poor because they're poorly governed.

• Author: Ammann, Melinda
• Position: The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives - Book Review

The Shackled Continent: Power, Corruption, and African Lives, by Robert Guest, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 288 pages, $27.50

At independence in 1964, Zambia's people earned an average annual income, in 2001 dollars, of just $540. By 2000, according to the World Bank, they made only $ 300. This was despite foreign aid the bank estimates at nearly $6 billion from 1980 to 1996 alone.

Life expectancy in Angola, which UNICEF rated the world's worst place to live in 1999, is a mere 45 years, about the same as the developed world a century ago. In AIDS-wracked Botswana, average life expectancy has diminished since independence to under 35 years.

In most of sub-Saharan Africa, self-government remains a foreign notion and prosperity an unattainable dream. With rare exceptions such as Botswana, which held peaceful and fair regularly scheduled elections late last year, democracy has proven more a ruse than a reality. Africa's people remain among the world's poorest and sickest, in some cases having become poorer and sicker since their colonial masters departed in the 1960s and '70s.

Has the legacy of colonialism kept Africa down? If the Congo's current leaders treat citizens as prey and Sudan subjugates its people by exploiting tribal divisions, these may well be lessons learned from colonial masters. On the other hand, colonialism also left behind roads, clinics, and laws that have helped countries elsewhere in the world flourish. Some suggest that a "colonization of the mind," a sense of inferiority, is stifling Africa. Yet more than 70 percent of Africans alive today were born after their nations achieved independence. Moreover, the fates of many former colonies in Asia argue against such an excuse. South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore all once had foreign masters and are now prosperous.

Robert Guest, Africa editor for The Economist, begins The Shackled Continent by asking why "Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades." After six years of covering the continent's civil wars, genocide, famine, and disastrous monetary policies, his answer boils down to this:Africans are poor because they are poorly governed.

If African governments did a better job of upholding the rule of law, enforcing contracts, and safeguarding property rights, Guest argues--if, that is, they put more stock in freedom than in force--then the people of Africa would be richer. His 258-page tour of the continent, from Zimbabwe to Tanzania to Nigeria, brings the point home with forceful anecdotes that illustrate the hellishness of war, the blessings of specialization, and the impotence of living in...