Africa through clear, but optimistic, eyes

People talk about the God-shaped hole, and I don't know about that. What I do know is that, even though too many books are published, sometimes you see or sense a book-shaped hole in the world. Before the publication of Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, I keenly felt the lack of a general recent survey of the sub-Saharan part of the continent. I toyed with the idea of trying to do something like it myself, but knew deep down I had nothing like the expertise or range of experience.

I do share with Dowden a passion for the continent, and like him I have cultivated what might be described as a hopeful realism about it: hopeful about its prospects, realistic about certain aspects. One wants, somehow, to hover in between the wide-eyed naivety of some donor and government actors and the cynicism of many old colonial hands. The position is a hard one to maintain. I remember seeing it very elegantly done by Dowden when, along with him, I was summoned to give a briefing on Tanzania to the then head of the Africa desk at the Foreign Office.

What, though, has been missing from the bookstores is a title that focused on African affairs in the 1980s and 90s but stretched back to independence and beyond, a volume that was alert to the play of complex detail (the human factor amid the topographical and social immensity) but was also comfortable with big, cross-continental structural adjustments.

Well, here is the absent book, and how. It is as if this is something Dowden's whole life - as a teacher in Africa in the 1970s, as a foreign correspondent, and now as director of the Royal African Society - has been leading up to.

The potent life/book combination may be broken down into its constituent fractions. The teaching gave Dowden exposure to ordinary people: he arrived at a village school in Uganda in 1971, a few months after Idi Amin's coup. The journalism gave him exposure to extraordinary events: Dowden started off with the Times in 1983, becoming Africa Editor of the Independent three years later, taking up the same post at the Economist in 1995. At the Royal African Society, he has led a renaissance of the organisation, while being personally exposed to the kind of academic depth and cultural breadth that is generally absent from journalism.

All these currents feed into Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. It's a big book with virtues too many to list here, but the basic practice can easily be described: in lively reportage, Dowden dramatises some event from the past 20 years that he witnessed, then uses this experiential insight as a springboard for what Chinua Achebe calls in his foreword "serious critical analysis".

The method works well, enabling Dowden - who is clear-eyed about Africa's problems but rightly optimistic about its future - to establish some general observations without losing local exactitude.

The general observations include (as suggested African commonalities): weak nation states with very old cultures lying behind them; the hard-learned precept that only Africans can develop Africa (however much others may help); the importance of extended family over individualism; a complex response to imperialism, but usually involving either an Africanist or Marxist theme; a corrosive recursion to particular ethnicity, often tied to corruption and favouring of specific groups; a deep sense of spiritual power, one that partially explains some Africans' "lack of political or social agency".

But that list, taken in the abstract, makes this seem like a different book than it is. For all the doomy bits, it's a great pleasure to read, passionate and exciting at the same time as being accurate and rigorous. I agree wholeheartedly with his diagnosis that aid money is not the answer to Africa's problems. I also agree that things are getting better, aided in no small part by the coming of the mobile phone, which has had a surprisingly powerful effect on both trade and governance. What is needed next is an equally portable power source. I pin my hopes on a flexible fabric-like solar device, currently being developed.

You can hear the tones of a genuine moralist in Dowden's writing, but also a mischievous timbre. For example, as irritated US Navy Seals come up the beach into journalists' flash bulbs and microphones during the ill-fated 1993 invasion of Somalia, Dowden's bodyguards reveal with shrieks of laughter that 'seal' means 'vagina' in Somali. (The only time Dowden has been assaulted in Africa, through some pretty hair-raising adventures, is by US troops.)

I have read a lot of books about Africa and can confidently say this is well out of the ordinary run. It's as rare as hen's teeth, in fact. So no wonder, after all, that the book which was lost and is now found took so long to appear. ·