Book Review: Adekeye Adebajo, The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War (London: Hurst and Company, 2010, 384 pp., $50.00 pbk)
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298110400011208 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Suda Perera |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews 199
Adekeye Adebajo, The Curse of Berlin: Africa after the Cold War (London: Hurst and Company,
2010, 384 pp., $50.00 pbk).
Many enquiries into the legacy of colonialism in Africa concentrate on the political and
social structures that have beleaguered post-independence leaders’ effectiveness in main-
taining state control, and the internal struggles that have emerged from this. In The Curse
of Berlin, however, Adebajo specifically focuses on the ‘curse’ of colonial partition
imposed by the 1884–5 Conference of Berlin, and the impact that this has had on the
nature of African international relations since the end of the Cold War. In an interesting
and insightful volume, albeit one which perhaps over-romanticises the notion of pre-
colonial African unity and post-colonial leadership, Adebajo explores the various ways
in which Africa may lift the ‘Curse of Berlin’ and reverse the fragmentation of the
continent – which he argues it precipitated. Lifting the curse, Adebajo argues, would
result in a more unified Africa which could subsequently become a powerful and signifi-
cant actor in the international arena. He argues that this could be achieved by Africa
forging for itself ‘three magic kingdoms’ (p. 23) – security, hegemony and unity. The
book is accordingly divided into three sections which deal with Africa’s attempts to seek
these three kingdoms, respectively.
The first section on Africa’s quest for security begins with a chapter on African
attempts to foster a ‘Pax Africana’ – advocating African attempts to solve African dis-
putes (a type of African Monroe Doctrine). He also discusses the role of the African
Union (AU) in coordinating this Pax Africana – highlighting in particular the reluctance
of the more established organisations, such as the Economic Community of West African
States (ECOWAS), to take direction from the AU, which has less concrete security expe-
rience. Despite acknowledging the operational and resource difficulties that regional and
pan-African organisations encounter, Adebajo sees them as a favourable alternative to
the colonially imposed nation state in the quest for security. The stand-out chapter of this
section is his examination of global apartheid, ‘which describes the political and socio-
economic inequalities that exist between the rich countries of the industrialised North
and the poor countries of the global South’ (p. 53). Arguing that global apartheid could
be ended by the United Nations (UN), Adebajo goes on to discuss the African contenders
for the new permanent membership positions on the UN Security Council: Egypt, Nigeria
and South Africa. Building on this discussion, Chapter 4 examines the successes, failures
and legacies of the two African UN Secretaries General, Egypt’s Boutros Boutros-Ghali
and Ghana’s Kofi Annan. One might question the prominence that Adebajo gives to
Egypt when addressing Africa’s quest for security, as Egypt is generally considered part
of the Middle Eastern security complex, and not representative of the (far more obvi-
ously linked) security concerns of sub-Saharan Africa, which are the main subject of his
enquiry. In fact, a main criticism of this book is its failure to explicitly make the distinc-
tion between the varying security needs of North Africa and those of sub-Saharan Africa.
In the second section of the volume, which deals with Africa’s quest for hegemony, one
could argue that Adebajo himself implicitly acknowledges that Egypt (and the other North
African countries) should perhaps be dealt with separately. In an analysis of potential
African hegemons, Egypt is conspicuous by its absence as he deals with the issues that the
two more credible African leaders, South Africa and Nigeria, must overcome before they
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