The Fate of Africa

If you’re looking for a well-written, evenhanded, comprehensive political history of Africa since 1960 that clocks in at under 700 pages (without the notes), it would be hard to do better than Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa. Still, to read this book from cover to cover would be a weariness of the flesh, and would present a more discouraging picture of Africa’s future than I think is warranted. (It is not for nothing that the book is subtitled “From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair.")

Having said that, Meredith does take care to enliven his story with bits of local color and colorful characters such as the Bey of Tunis, a man who seems worthy of a biography, or at least a novella.

Frustrated by the resistance of the white community of 250,000 to any political reform, nationalists organised violence across the country. In this struggle the Bey of Tunis played no role. An eccentric figure who filled his palace with clocks and kept a private troupe of dwarfs, he spent much of his time indulging his passion for astronomy and alchemy, mixing secret brews and potions in his laboratory.

Of the many beys of Tunis, Meredith is apparently referring to the last, Muhammad VIII Al-Amin. More details about him are available in a Time magazine article from 1957:

With a down payment of 100,000 francs to buy himself a new uniform (weighing 60 Ibs. before being loaded with medals) and a promise of $2,500,000 a year in salary and allowances for himself and his family, aged El Amin played his part to perfection. He was regal and dignified at hand-kissing ceremonies, built fancy palaces and went roaring through town in a royal limousine with a screaming siren (reports have it that El Amin Bey had a foot pedal in the back of his car with which he himself could sound the siren). Most important, El Amin kept himself out of political mischief by spending his days tinkering with old clocks and watches and later, when his hobbies turned more modern, with an expensive X-ray machine and a do-it-yourself kit for making blood tests on his relatives.