Thursday, June 2, 2016

The Fortunes of Africa by Martin Meredith

This book's full title is The Fortunes of Africa, A 5000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour. This book is basically how Africa has plundered over the past 5000 years. Africa is a vast continent and to do an overview of it you probably need a theme. The plundering has been down local rules and foreign adventurers.

I have always been interested in Egypt and Egyptian history. He talks about the Arabs invading Egypt in 639 AD and they replaced the Roman Overlords. He says within a century Egypt changes because over a million Arab immigrants go to Egypt and many Egyptians adopt Islam and business is done in Arabic. By 750AD only a third of the population is Coptic Christians and Coptic has become a liturgical language.

Howard French gives a good review of this book on the Wall Street Journal. There is also an excellent review at The Economist. As with all Economist article, there is no name of reviewer given. I often go to look at the reviews at Good Reads. The reviews are often varied and well written.

Martin Meredith is interviews on SABC Digital News . Bruce Whitfield interviews Martin Meredith on CNBC Africa. This is an interview of Martin Meredith at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) Kgosi Monametsi.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.

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