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Book Reviews

Crude Continent:  The Struggle for Africa’s  Oil Prize 
By Duncan Clarke , Profile Books , €50, ISBN 9781846680977 

The miracle of this almost 700-page tome is that it exists at all, authored as it is by someone so ‘on the ground’, so immersed in the infinitely complex realities of Africa’s oil business, that one wonders how he found time to put pen to paper at all. The result is certainly more than the sum of its parts. Very little literature exists charting the oil story of Africa, which is frequently encountered only as a lurid account of Nigeria, Shell and dire poverty all mixed up in a ghastly heart of darkness.  

Chairman of a private advisory firm in London but counting Africa as his home and life over 40 years, Clarke’s account makes for fascinating if detailed reading that unselfconsciously blends first person narrative with a sweeping structure. For anyone connected with a rapidly expanding African hydrocarbon universe, the second part is compulsory reading. 

The broader battle Clarke wages is with all Africa’s well-meaning but generally deluded ‘fixers’, very few of whom have any first hand experience of the subject they talk about. He quotes Paul Theroux with enormous relish, who spoke of “Poor Africa, the happy hunting ground of the mytho-maniac, the rock star buffing up his or her image, the missionary with a faith to sell, the child buyer…the experimenting economist, the diamond merchant, the oil executive…the Mandela-sniffer, the political fantasist, the buccaneer, and your cousin the Peace Corps Volunteer.” 

The point that comes across in myriad different ways, typically elucidated through an effortlessly empirical reference or amusing episode, is that we’ve all got a plan for Africa  and it cannot stack up against a reality as  crude is it is fragmented. The result, before you’ve even realised it, is that liberal economists such as Jeffrey Sachs come off looking naïve because their clinical, rational approach to aid is daftly at odds with the larcenous medievalism  of governance in many African states.  

Inevitably, Clarke’s thesis ends up being a defence of the industry he works in. “The oil industry is an advanced leader in African modernity, within its capitalist nodes. It  offers Africa a chance to move beyond medievalism, one that Africans must decide upon and manage best…”  

If this is wincingly off-message to the academic community, they can at least solace themselves with Clarke’s dazzling breadth of his engagement with their writings on the subject, so many of which seem to have been cooked up in a seminar where the only condiment was arcane theory or political correctness.  

Globalising Hatred: The New Antisemitism 
By Denis MacShane , Weidenfield & Nicholson, €15, ISBN 100297844733

Noting that the idea of a Jewish conspiracy is an essential premise in Islamist radicalism, MacShane is surprised how little attention is paid in the West to the open antisemitism in the Islamic sphere – even despite our oil dependency. But it is not just places such as Saudi Arabia or Iran, where antisemitism is state-nourished, that should concern us all, he says. This book, which grew out of the UK’s 2005 All-Party Commission of Enquiry on antisemitism which the author, a Labour MP, chaired, shows a rise in anti-Jewish feeling in nearly every country. Scarier still, says MacShane, is how so many liberal intellectuals seem to think that anti-Israel rhetoric is now okay; the trouble with loose rhetoric, he notes, is that “Zionists” means “Jews” to many extremists

Africa:  Altered States, Ordinary Miracles 
By Richard Dowden , Portobello, €30, ISBN 101846271541

Drawing on 30 years as a teacher in Uganda, Dowden delivers an engaging portrait of a continent, while attempting to discover why its development is so slow. Although he examines the economic effects of wars, Aids and misguided international aid he ends up asserting that colonial rule inflicted a “wound that parted Africa from its soul”. However, the continent’s people are now, he believes, reconciling their way of life with modernity and progress. Dowden’s is an uplifting tribute to Africa and a forceful plea to Make Patronage History.

Sustainable Investing 
Edited by Cary Krosinsky  and Nick Robins , Earthscan , €35, ISBN 9781844075485

There is no recognised discipline called ‘sustainable investing’. Rather, there are swathes of new emerging asset classes from water to carbon that can no longer be ignored. The strength of this book is that it brings specialist voices to bear on all of those emerging niches, from private equity to carbon trading. The impassioned undertow, that the whole investment industry must be reinvented around long-term value instead of short-term profit depends on regulatory reform and cultural changes that remain in their infancy.

Climate Change Financing Global Forests 
Johan Eliasch , Earthscan , €35, ISBN 9781844077731

This is the published version of the ‘Eliasch Report’ submitted late last year to the British government, and arguably one of the most important books to be published in recent months. The results are both daunting and encouraging: the sort of Google Earth satellite images we have become familiar with permit accurate mapping of forestry. If every country carried out a forest ‘carbon census’, baselines could be drawn up from which cap and trade carbon trading could begin to include forestry for the first time in a post-Kyoto agreement  (see our feature on page 40).