Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, By Richard Dowden

In 1971, a youthful Richard Dowden went to teach in Uganda. By the time he bailed out, when the grip of Idi Amin's maddened xenophobia became too tight, he had discovered at first hand the paradox of Africa's beauty and evil: "Here I lost my virginity, physical, spiritual, moral, and found Africa's huge patience and humanity – and its cruelty and violence." Returning to a cold, dank London was like being dragged out of a wonderful theatre and thrown into a dungeon.

The excitement, adventure, danger and cautious optimism of that first sortie are wrapped into this huge book gestating three decades of dispatches from sub-Saharan Africa. Dowden's core philosophy is as obvious and simple as it is widely ignored: "You cannot achieve anything in Africa unless you work with Africans. To do that, you need to understand Africa and how it thinks and works." Africa documents his robust, grass-root engagement with the continent's diverse and sophisticated cultural dynamics – although his authorial plea to rise above negative media imagery of indigence, monstrous greed and brutality is somewhat beggared by the meaty chapters detailing grand larceny and vicious internecine warfare.

The key to much of Africa's stalled development despite its resource wealth, Dowden plausibly suggests, is the notion of the Big Man. A lad who stole £10 from Dowden's Ugandan school and returned in a cheap suit lavishing drinks on fawning peers, heedless of consequence, is paradigmatic: public demonstrations of personal wealth are culturally respected. Why vote for the scrupulously honest candidate cycling around town, Dowden is asked in one election, when the guy in a shiny new SUV is clearly going to have more presents and preferment to dish out to others of his family or tribe? In a continent of fierce ethnic allegiances superimposed with often arbitrary national boundaries, pathologically nepotistic governance has a strong logic for personal security.

Dowden draws convincing parallels between early colonial powers that appropriated and asset-stripped massive territories, and post-independence African dictators who use their country's treasury as a personal bank account. Examples are legion: Robert Mugabe at least set out with revolutionary fervour before seizing white farms in a panic and handing them over to his veteran political cronies, while Daniel arap Moi's salting away of hundreds of millions of Kenyan taxpayers' dollars was condoned by western financial institutions. Congo's President Mobutu had an international airstrip built near his grotesquely lavish village palace so that his family could charter Concorde for New York shopping trips. In this context, top-down governmental aid projects and World Bank loans have time and again simply poured cash into despots' personalised coffers, which have then been squandered with impunity.

Such ignorant "aid" misapprehends the drivers of African governments, Dowden demonstrates, who prize visible wealth and self-preservation above economic competence. Successful entrepreneurs are often viewed in Africa as a direct threat to the ruling elite's monetary and ethnic power base rather than a positive input into the nation's economy.

Despite Dowden's stated optimism, there's little discussion here of bottom-up aid and the positive stories are few. Beside the trusting Mouride mercantile networks of Senegal and the peaceful growth of Botswana, Dowden's clear-sighted, sympathetic accounts struggle to avoid the thrill of disaster reportage. His Congo essay opens in a dug-out canoe packed with ammunition, with a nervous minister and a helmsman in a black nylon wig. He dodges bullets in Nigerian elections and endures shelling in "quarrelsome" Somalia, where security guards' spare banana clips are attached to their AK47s with Save the Children sticky tape – leading to meditations not on child soldiering, a subject noticeably absent from this book, but on the desperate inefficacy of the UN, which most spectacularly failed in Rwanda.

The scale and organisation of the 1994 Rwandan bloodletting differed from the typical pattern of few military deaths and huge civilian casualties, Dowden reflects with numb horror, because here the civilians were fully enrolled in the killing. The infamous broadcasts from Radio Milles Collines were less an instruction to go out and kill, so much as a permission. "The awful truth about the genocide is that it was democratic."

But is democracy (albeit in less grisly forms) the right model for Africa's diverse ethnic body politic? Dowden challenges this sacred (western) cow, and questions his own "youthful arrogance [in] believing that principles such as equality were universal and self-evident". Though occasionally hurrying through ethnic complexities, the trenchant essays in this engrossing, illuminating work pick over the Aids debacle, the fast-growing Chinese influence and the catch-22 ethical dilemma of relief aid (does it alleviate distress or prolong violence?), ending with a surprisingly upbeat conclusion.

In the last decade, mobile technologies have demonstrated what initiative and transparency can be achieved when Governments can't censor communication networks. Dowden pinpoints this as one of several tipping points towards a brighter African future.