The State of Africa — Martin Meredith

Meredith surveys sub-Saharan Africa from independence in the late 1950s and 1960s to the early 2000s, tracing the patterns — the coups, the civil wars, the economic collapse, the famine — that repeated themselves across the continent with depressing regularity. The book does not reduce this history to a single explanation, but it is frank about the roles of leadership failure, Cold War interference, and the legacies of colonial borders in producing the crises it describes.