Sub-Saharan Africa Summary

In the first few lines of Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, you are enthralled. Enthralled since in 1994 people, black South Africans, were allowed to vote. Vote to decide who would govern their country (p.1). A country that knew only colonial empires and apartheid. So in April, 1994, they voted, breaking through the chains of segregation and becoming democratic in order to have one voice. Fredrick Cooper’s preface alone is stimulating. He offers the readers a chance to question all that has happened and is happening, to see that “history doesn’t come to an end point.” He beckons the reader to go forward, to go back, to think and to seek and understanding of more than what you may have already been taught. He starts in the …show more content…
Moreover, he believes that the sub-Saharan Africa history from when it was developed during 1940 through 1973 had Africans recognize and pursuing their political and economic potentials. It was a time to focus on agriculture, economics, politics and infrastructure. While this meant separating a “new generation” of workers from the “backwardness” of the countryside, the exploitation of the African peasants’ labour poverty deepened. Consequently, there was downturn from 1973-1990 wherein African countries were taking on more debt wherein many of the countries did not recover, a “colonial system” that “broke apart at its internal cracks” (p.66). Nevertheless, Cooper talks about how as a “gatekeeper state” the leaders of the newly-independent nations in Africa, saw themselves as “the interface between the territory and the rest of the world, collecting and distributing resources that derived from the gate itself” (p. 157). This happened because the establishment, according to Cooper, “made the stakes of control at a single point too high. Politics was an either/or phenomenon at the national level; local government was almost everywhere given little autonomy” (p.