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There are help-the-poor projects by well-meaning outsiders all over Africa. Some are by huge multinational organizations pouring millions of dollars into alleviating poverty, disease, hunger, agricultural needs, and so much more. A growing number are by private groups who just want to help in any way they can, and so they choose their cause and begin small, even tiny projects in the African country of their choice. After reading John Reader's 800-page book cover to cover, I have a better understanding why many, if not most, of these projects may not be successful in the long term. Reader begins with the evolution of the continent itself stating that "Africa is the Earth's oldest and most enduring land mass." The other continents broke off and drifted away from it, and there is a theory that the continents are now as dispersed as they can get and may, at some time in the very distant future, begin drifting towards one another again. He moves his narrative into climate, soil, evolution, and disease, and goes into virtually every area of Africa to show how it differs from every other. He writes "Indeed, the tropical rainforest is so efficient at keeping available resources at work within the living community of plants that the soils in which they stand are virtually devoid of nutrients." Yet as the earth shifted in those earliest days of existence, so did the rainforests moving across the planet as climate changed. While land bridges still joined the continents, African wildlife crossed them and moved in and out of Africa. With great detail, Reader outlines the evolution of animals and humans and how some survived and developed and others did not. Every person alive today, he says, is descended from a population of human beings that existed only in Africa until about 100,000 years ago, then migrated in small numbers out of this continent, and due to the more friendly climate with fewer diseases, began to populate the earth. During the second half of this massive work, John Reader moves into the history of slavery, colonization, and the creation of African nations. I wish I could adequately summarize the content of this excellent book, but a summary could never do it justice. For every person working directly or indirectly in an African country, this book should be required reading. There is nothing even remotely "Western"-like in the way that Africa functions, and there are indigenous reasons why this is so. If all one has done is to fly in and out of an African city or an African game park, one has not seen Africa at all. John Reader gives us a very good start in beginning to understand this continent and why poverty here seems so intractable.
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