This lucid exploration of Africa's crisis focuses on the absence of well-defined economic classes in Africa and the dynamic operation of ethnic groups

This lucid exploration of Africa's crisis focuses on the absence of well-defined economic classes in Africa and the dynamic operation of ethnic groups there. Within this political-economic context, Sandbrook demonstrates, regimes characterized by personalist leadership have almost everywhere presided over the deterioration of African economies. Readable and concise, the study illuminates the economics much less than the politics of Africa's crisis, but it is from within the latter, arguably, that the chief remedies must originate.