Rotberg draws on more than sixty years of his own research and reporting in southern Africa, beginning with a doctoral year in Northern Rhodesia in 1959, to follow the region from settler rule to self-government and then through what the new rulers did with it. The Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, sold in London as an experiment in multiracial partnership, he treats as a device for keeping some three hundred thousand whites in charge of more than seven million Africans while deferring majority rule indefinitely. Most of the book concerns what followed liberation. Country chapters on Zambia, Malawi, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Namibia describe single-party states, closed economies and elaborate forms of theft, from over-invoiced procurement and kickbacks to ghost employees on public payrolls. Botswana is the exception he keeps returning to, and he credits its record to leaders who put the public interest ahead of family and ethnic claims. Leadership carries the explanatory weight throughout.