Martin Meredith's The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence is an unbiased chronological record of failed leadership in post-colonial Africa. The book tracks the continent's journey from the euphoria of liberation in the 1950s and 1960s, through the violent darkness of dictators and civil wars until the 1990s when the path to true democracy and good governance began to be cleared. Meredith's journey takes the reader from Ghanaian independence and leader Kwame Nkrumah in the late 1950s to South Africa and its second post-apartheid president Thabo Mbeki, and builds a substantial body of evidence of mistakes and abuse which should provide all Africans with examples of how not to lead.

At the height of post-independence euphoria, Africa's new leaders and their cronies were looting their countries at an unprecedented rate. A 1964 study of 14 francophone African countries showed that the cost of imported alcoholic beverages outweighed that of fertilizer imports by a factor of six, and imports of luxury cosmetics and perfumes cost twice as much as imports of machine tools. The 'platinum life' lived by so many of Africa's new elite in the 1960s came at the price of proper economic management and the total neglect of the majority of Africans living in the newly independent states.

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