Angola

Reviews / Votes

While most interpretations of the situation in Angola agree that the country suffers from deep divisions that will not easily be overcome, few analysts have been able satisfactorily to explain why one of the potentially richest countries in Africa should be in such a wretched state. Tony Hodges' book is the first analytically to link together the various economic and political strands that must be examined in order to provide a plausible account of Angola's post-colonial tragedy...Hodges, whose deep knowledge of the country is obvious, has managed here to provide us, finally, with a single volume that does make sense of what has happened in this former Portuguese colony since its independence in 1975. - -- Patrick Chabal * INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS * ...a brief account of how a state once run by Marxist poets, men of high ideals, has turned into another Nigeria. Hodges describes the ways in which the ruling MPLA disburses favours - contracts, kickbacks, access to foreign exchange, scholarships, medical care abroad - to the members of the grandes familias, families who are, on the whole, from Louanda. - -- Sousa Jamba * THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * ... this book alleges that Angola's culture of political patronage and cronyism, and a web of secret accounts (the so called Bermuda Triangle), ensures that the $4bn of annual income derived from oil sales is never properly and publicly accounted for... The US already imports roughly as much oil from Africa (principally Nigeria) as it does from the Middle East, and that figure is set to grow when the huge ultra-deep off-shore reserves on Angola's Atlantic seaboard come into stream. * AFRICAN BUSINESS * Where Tony Hodges' book is strong is in moving us forward from the sterility of the civil war and of the debate between the entrenched position of antagonists...the thrust of Hodges' book is about the grossly unequal economic arrangements in this potentially rich country whereby the elite creams off the massive wealth generated by oil and diamonds and the poor have nothing...Hodges deals well with the ambiguities and complexities of the ethnic question in Angola...Hodges is equally deft on the oppressive nature of the regime, particularly when it feels under threat, and its increasingly presidential (and occasionally bizarrely populist) trajectory under Eduardo dos Santos. - -- Steve Kibble * DEMOCRACY & DEVELOPMENT *