African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence

by Peter Dwyer, Leo Zeilig

Three leading Africa scholars investigate the social forces driving the democratic transformation of postcolonial states across southern Africa. Extensive research and interviews with civil society organizers in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia, and Swaziland inform this analysis of the challenges faced by non-governmental organizations in relating both to the attendant inequality of globalization and to grassroots struggles for social justice.
Peter Dwyer is a tutor in economics at Ruskin College in Oxford.
Leo Zeilig Lecturer at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London.

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa, Social Movements, History

260 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2011

Reviews

[Camille McCarthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was dry, difficult to read, and in the end I'm not sure I learned much from it. I appreciate the thought behind the book and the reasoning for writing it, but it was both too broad and too specific to be that interesting or informative. It picked a handful of African countries to focus on and talked about some of the changes they'd experienced in the last few decades, then focused on these World Social Forum events and whether they were having an impact politically. There was a lot of discussion of the various strengths and weaknesses of organizations involved -NGOs, IFIs, trade unions, and religious groups - and that was informative, but again, they didn't delve deeply into any specifics so it was difficult to keep things straight and I didn't really like the way they lumped several different countries into the same chapter and switched back and forth interchangeably between them - it got very confusing. The book also feels dated, because it is talking about events that happened ten years ago. I do not think I would recommend this book unless you already knew a lot about social movements in Africa and even then, you probably know more than is mentioned in this book.

[Tinea · Rating 2 out of 5]

A useful documentation of histories of social movement organizations, mostly socialist and mostly in Southern Africa. As too often is the case with Marxist-socialist nonfiction, it is just too boring and the author does little to situate his own perspective or acknowledge the limits of the work. I'm an anarchist, give me roses with literary bread! I would have gotten more from this as part of a course. I didn't finish all of it.