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Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil | 
 enlarge | Author: John Ghazvinian
Publisher: Harcourt
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $8.05
You Save: $16.95 (68%)
New (4) Used (6) from $7.56
Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 431586
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.3
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.8232096
ASIN: B00155EPVY
Publication Date: April 9, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oil skyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between major powers that recalls the nineteenth-century scramble for colonization there. Already the United States imports more of its oil from Africa than from Saudi Arabia, and China, too, looks to the continent for its energy security. What does this giddy new oil boom mean—for America, for the world, for Africans themselves? To find out, John Ghazvinian traveled through twelve African countries—from Sudan to Congo to Angola—talking to warlords, industry executives, bandits, activists, priests, missionaries, oil-rig workers, scientists, and ordinary people whose lives have been transformed—not necessarily for the better—by the riches beneath their feet. The result is a high-octane narrative that reveals the challenges, obstacles, reasons for despair, and reasons for hope emerging from the world’s newest energy hot spot.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 pimp economics + transition to democracy = disaster September 7, 2008
It turns out Africa is full of oil. Among other great natural resources. Why isn't Africa becoming as wealthy as Norway? There are many reasons for this, which John Ghazvinian discovers through his research and exploration of African oil exporting nations. the most exciting thing about this book is that the price of oil nearly doubled after the book was published.
He starts in Nigeria. Nigeria has been exporting oil for over 40 years. They've managed to lower the prosperity of most of its citizens through this. A few kleptocrats end up as billionaires, while the livelihoods most Nigerians are obsoleted. The worst aspects of American culture are imported to Nigeria: televangelism, tv gameshows, soap operas, american hip hop celebrity, and free trade. "dutch disease" sets in.
What can any African nation that finds itself with new oil wealth do to achieve greater prosperity? It will have to pass greater tariffs on food imports, so that its agriculture doesn't collapse. It can use the oil revenue to import more machine tools, bicycles, wheel barrels, and hand tools. This will allow more africans to improve their quality of life. Just like the Amish: the amish are not poor, and they are not on welfare. Within a generation or two they will be prosperous and literate enough and business savy enough to embrace greater democracy and make better business deals.
John Ghazvinian describes how the Chinese make better deals in Africa: they simply have more to offer in exchange and respect the sovereignty of the nations they are dealing with.
Democracy consistently fails in Africa because the elected officials are as incompetent and corrupt as the autocrats they replace. The most the West can do is give advice to African nations on how to use their oil wealth more effectively: import tariffs, slow industrialization, small scale markets, growth of trailing edge mechanical industries. Get them to where they can fix their own bicycles and plumbing, then build their own bicycles and plumbing and textiles.
The Africa you never knew... August 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book will answer and put into perspective a lot of the nagging questions you've ever had about Africa's colonial past, tribal struggles, economic booms and failures, and ideas on where she's headed in the not-too-distant future. Once read, you'll never see her (or the oil conglomerates) in news headlines the same again, for better or for worse.
 Quick and good August 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great book for anyone who wants to get a good overview of what is going on in The Central/ Western region on Africa and Oil. The reader meets people and actually travels and hence makes it a much easier and entertaining read. I had anticipated that there would be more talk on the Cameroon-Chad Pipeline project but it was just brushed over. Nevertheless, it provides a great insight of what is going on and how the growing Oil industry is affecting Africa.
quite good July 28, 2008
I enjoyed reading this book. It's not filled with tons of detail, but is more of a travelogue with a bit of history and economics thrown in. If you're really interested in Nigeria in particular, I'd recommend reading Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil which captures a lot more of the history, community-relations issues and details of production agreements with the state. It's not as fun of a read as this though. This is more a snapshot of the current state of affairs. Not preachy at all and not academic in style, I think almost anybody could get through it enjoyably. The one odd part I found was where he tried to draw a link between burning piles of trash by the side of the road and hellish living conditions. Not really the same thing.
 Barnstorming Africa's Oil Fields June 26, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Ghazvinian has taken on an interesting topic in an intense way, and I salute him for that. Here is a well-traveled and (by all appearances) well-educated author who took the time and made the effort to visit a handful of African nations to get an inside look at "the scramble" he describes in his subtitular reference. The undertaking could not have been an easy one, and I think the effort deserves respect and the derived opinions merit attention.
Further, he backs up his frequent flyer mileage with a solid historical analysis of the shifting political and social atmospheres in his target countries. One wouldn't expect much less from an Oxford man, but the research is impeccable and Ghazvinian's narrative reveals an author who is very comfortable with -- at least historically -- his subject.
The let down for me was in the book's overall organization and approach. Needless to say, there is not much sympathy for or effort at presenting the "development" side of the coin. I am in energy, and find that this is often the problem in discussions of the impact of energy production -- particularly in the extraction side of the business. Everyone can see the environmental, social and other impacts -- but no one cares to consider the alternative to a world without our prevailing energy models in place.
Allow me an anecdotal example, at one point in the barnstorming tour of Africa, the author makes some lament about "sporadic electricity," and at another he bemoans a nation's "lack of infrastructure." It is in these moments when the work's biases emerge and there seems to be ignorance or unwillingness to allow that the benefits of these relatively common Western amenities are prized in their absence while their impacts - in the same absence - are taken for granted. It would be enormously complex and disruptive to establish sophisticated electrical infrastructure or to construct transnational highways. These projects offer many of the same challenges logistically, politically, socially and environmentally that are set out as a scourge on Africans as part of oil extraction.
I suppose another possible excuse is that Ghazvinian did not or could not get access to oil execs and PR folks weren't willing to do much talking. To that I would reply that if one is able to insert themselves into Sudanese opposition militias, then it should be no great challenge to get a sit down with a couple of oil company mouthpieces.
Also, I think Ghazvinian got a little lazy in assembling the book as a series of vignettes about his visits to nations around the western sub-Saharan portion of the continent. There are obvious benefits to that approach, but given the often kaleidoscopic political histories of the nations he visits, I was longing for a more over-arching approach that divided the analysis into a more clearly comparative style organized by unifying themes -- my preferred organizing principle would have been geopolitical chronology.
I still admire Ghazvinian for the effort, but I think the purity of his journalistic motives lost out to the overwhelming force of his moral ones.
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