This has been the year of Africa. Despite the tsunami in South Asia, the New Orleans floods and the spreading civil war in Iraq, Africa has this year ceased to be the marginalized continent. It has become the prime policy concern of the G8 meetings, the focus of world compassion for social activists and the central subject of most writing on international development.

Now Stephen Lewis, in this year's Massey Lectures series, adds his always articulate and emotional voice to this concentration on Africa's struggles and hopes.

With his magnificent prose and slashing wit, Lewis has become a Canadian icon over the years. Recently we have shared him with the world, as he came to be the most dramatic prophet sounding the alarm on the spread of AIDS in Africa, now as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy on HIV/AIDS.

In this book, Lewis broadens the target of his alarm to the eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted in 2000 and to be achieved by 2015. These aim at providing universal primary schools, cutting poverty rates in half, decreasing child mortality rates by two-thirds, reducing maternal mortality rates by 75 per cent, promoting gender equality, reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, assuring environmental sustainability and establishing a global partnership for development.

Built on vivid anecdotes that convey the need to reform the UN system, drawing on ground-level insights from African villages where Lewis has been, the book is remarkably candid -- not just on the international agencies where Lewis has worked, but on failures of his own. After criticizing UNICEF for failing to push hard for free primary education, for instance, he admits he could have been more aggressive on the issue himself as deputy executive director of that organization. And why, he asks, did he not speak out publicly during an HIV/AIDS news conference with the King of Swaziland about the way his polygamous lifestyle contradicted safe-sex messages to his subjects?

It is especially strong on the importance of universal access to primary education -- not just to teach children to read, but also because the effects are so positive on health, on countering HIV/AIDS and on promoting gender equality. It has taken real battles in African countries to establish this priority, as in Tanzania, where the Poverty Reduction Committee told me last year how Tanzanian MPs worked with local communities to get enough new schools built and teachers trained to handle the doubling of students.

Lewis is also excellent on the struggle for gender equality, outlining in detail how the key UN agency on this, UNIFEM, is constantly undercut and excluded from decisions. And his criticisms are effective on Canada's "inexplicable" failure to commit to a timetable to meet the aid target of 0.7 per cent of GNP.

Another strength is Lewis's refusal to be relentlessly bleak. He conveys some small hopeful strands even within the grim nightmare of the HIV/AIDS tragedy. Access to antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) is becoming more widespread in some countries, spurring dramatic improvements in the health of some of those living with HIV/AIDS; the stigma associated with the condition is being tackled successfully in some places.

For Lewis, Africa's problems, and the answers to them, come overwhelmingly from the outside. External debts are too heavy. Trade access to developed-country markets is too difficult. There is not enough foreign aid. African governments are "profoundly deficient" on protection of women's rights because there is no fully fledged UN agency whose job is to "ride herd" on them. The "destructive power" of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund did "extraordinary damage" to Africa.

This undue focus away from what African states themselves are doing leads Lewis to denigrate one of the more significant positive efforts within most countries: the development under their own control of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers. Lewis sees these as just one more case of World Bank-IMF domination. My experience is very different. Canada is working with parliamentary committees in 15 African countries that ensure poor people's groups participate in developing these papers and monitoring results to see that benefits actually reach the poor. It was in such a strategy paper, for instance, that Tanzania took the decision to establish free access to primary school for all, with MPs then checking carefully to see that the decision was fully implemented.

So read this book and support its fundamental call for fairness for Africa. But recognize that more leadership in this fight for justice is coming from African institutions themselves than this book suggests.

Steven Langdon is director of Africa programs at the Parliamentary Centre in Ottawa. His main work has been in Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Malawi and Kenya (where he lived for three years). He is the author of Global Poverty, Democracy and North-South Change.

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