Books in Brief: Burden of Empire

Burden of Empire: An Appraisal of Western Colonialism in Africa South of the Sahara, by L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan (Praeger, $8.50). The Hoover Institution publications on international Communism are widely respected and their African Program will maintain the same level of excellence, to judge from this book. The appraisal of the subtitle is cool. The isms—colonialism, imperialism, Pan-Africanism, neocolonialism, Communism, African socialism—are cleanly dissected. African history—precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial—is reviewed without ideological prejudice. It is in short a scholarly book. A dull book, then? Decidedly not. “The new rulers,” observe the authors “were asked to honor political checks which they had endorsed during the independence struggle as against the postcolonial future. . . . After the completion of the nationalist victory, many of these checks began to bounce.” Why the checks bounced is an engrossing story, unravelled here in all its complexity.