Recent BooksMarch/April 2020 189agent o the West; in others, he comes
across as a noble idealist who tried to
defend the interests o the less developed
countries and facilitate decolonization.
Melber, director emeritus o the Dag
Hammarskjold Foundation, clearly agrees
with the latter portrait and has produced
a nuanced defense o¤ Hammarskjold’s
tenure at the º². The core o the book is
concerned with the 1960 º² intervention
in the Republic o the Congo, launched to
defend the new postcolonial government
against Belgian-backed secessionists, and
Hammarskjold’s death in a mysterious
plane crash in 1961 in what is today
Zambia. On the former, Melber argues
that the secretary-general struggled to
ful¥ll his ambition o carving out greater
operational autonomy for both his o¾ce
and the º² in general; by 1961, Ham-
marskjold’s prickly independence and
sometimes sanctimonious eloquence made
him useful to virtually none o the main
actors in the process o decolonization in
sub-Saharan Africa. Regarding the plane
crash—about which there are many
conspiracy theories—Melber’s summary
o the multiple, inconclusive investiga-
tions breaks little new ground, but he
suggests convincingly that forces hostile
to decolonization, including southern
African white settlers, caused the crash.South Sudan’s Injustice System: Law and
Activism on the Frontline
BY RACHEL IBRECK. Zed Books,
2019, 264 pp.South Sudan has been at war for much o
the last several decades. In her analysis
o the South Sudanese legal system,
Ibreck claims with great optimism that
insecurity and violence have pushed
the population to depend on the law toThe Quality of Growth in Africa
EDITED BY RAVI KANBUR, AKBAR
NOMAN, AND JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ.
Columbia University Press, 2019, 480 pp.
This solid collection o essays assesses
sub-Saharan Africa’s economic perfor-
mance during the last two decades.
Recent growth has neither delivered
adequate improvements in individual
welfare nor produced more dynamism in
African economies. The book’s best
chapters carefully parse and interpret the
recent growth record and its achieve-
ments. High commodity prices have
played a big role in the region’s overall
growth. Political instability helps explain
the persistence o economic volatility.
Although economic growth has had a real
(i limited) impact on reducing poverty,
it has also contributed to a rise in in-
equality. The authors lament the poor
quality o the available data. One abiding
puzzle remains Africa’s persistently high
unemployment rates and the seeming
failure o economic growth to produce
more high-quality jobs, a problem several
chapters link to the limited development
o export-oriented manufacturing sectors
in the region. The essays are weaker in
their prescriptions; it may be right to call
for more considered industrial policies,
for example, but that suggestion is too
vague and aspirational to be useful.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations,
and the Decolonisation of Africa
BY HENNING MELBER. Hurst, 2019,
184 pp.
The second º² secretary-general remains
a controversial ¥gure in the history o the
Cold War. In some accounts, Dag Ham-
marskjold appears as a Machiavellian