Saul moves from the broadest kind of evaluation of the prospects for capitalist development in Africa as a whole to an especially detailed (and markedly sobering) reading of the present situation in post-apartheid, neo-liberal South Africa. In the course of doing so, he painstakingly confronts central questions related to the practice of war and peace and to the prospects for democracy and development throughout the continent—while also emphasizing that the problems of Africa continue to be powerfully shaped by the particular mode of the continents insertion into the wider global capitalist system. Saul's conclusion: that African countries are most unlikely to realize either substantial economic growth or a significant measure of humane development under conditions so defined. In investigating South Africa, for example, he emphasizes the recent reinforcing of social inequalities, shaped both by external and internal compromises, that has produced a particularly bleak denouement to that country's heroic struggle against apartheid. This suggests, in turn, that in South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, the struggle for socialism -- however difficult such a socialism may be both to define and to practice -- must be part of the solution in contemporary Africa.

And yet, as Saul also argues in these pages, much of contemporary "African Studies" is of limited assistance in advancing along these lines our understanding either of Africa's difficulties or of their possible solutions. By increasingly abandoning the insights of political economy in favor of a more "realistic" political science on the one hand, or of a more eclectic post-modernism on the other, Africanists have too often made their separate peace with the grim process of capitalist globalization. In sharp resistance to this trend, Saul concludes with a ringing defense of the kind of radical and committed approach to an understanding of Africa that the various essays in this book themselves seek to exemplify.

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