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