Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back by Monique Maddy

From the Publisher

From the remote mountains of Liberia to the epicenter of New York City, Monique Maddy's life has been an extraordinary journey from an idyllic community to the chaos of city living. But Learning to Love Africa is far more than an exile's dream of return. Sent to the west at the tender age of six by her doting father, Maddy has spent her entire life struggling to reclaim her father's dream of progress in his beloved homeland.

Born in Yekepa, a tiny village transformed into a utopian global community by a Swedish multinational corporation, Maddy introduces us to her remarkable father, Emmanuel, an enterprising driver-turned-restaurateur, and her mother, Julia, the descendant of an equally remarkable family of Mandingo entrepreneurs. With loving descriptions of life in this developing world, Maddy introduces us to the sophisticated business skills of her ancestors and shows how her family's acumen and emotional strength became a launching pad for her own ambitions.

In haunting passages that describe her schooling, first in England and then in America, we see Maddy's gradual transformation from country girl to savvy intellectual. But her first attempt to return to the continent of her birth, under the auspices of the United Nations, leads only to embittered frustration when it becomes clear to her that the bureaucracy of the international organization will do little to actually improve the lives of Africans -- and will often make their already difficult existence even more miserable.

Disillusioned, Maddy returns to the United States to attend Harvard Business School, where she hatches a bold plan to start a telecommunications company in Africa.

Rallying her fellow Harvard students, Maddy sets off to the continent of her birth once again. Learning to Love Africa tells the story of her two-fisted battle against the corruption of African politics and economic life on one hand and the complacency of her Harvard intern team on the other. Unbowed by the obstacles in her way, Maddy tells a rousing tale of what it takes to build a business where the political framework for capitalism doesn't exist, and how to persevere in bringing Africa into the twenty-first century.

Along the way, Maddy recounts with poignant regret and horror how her homeland slips into anarchy and civil war while her father's dream of a better life evaporates and his business and home are destroyed in the conflict. Emotionally charged, vividly described, and deeply felt, Learning to Love Africa is a memoir of despair for Africa, which seemingly has been written off by the developed world, and of tempered optimism for the future Maddy knows Africa can achieve.

Booklist

Upon graduating from Harvard Business School, Maddy, born in Liberia and educated in Britain and the U.S., relocates to Tanzania to execute a start-up business providing telephone service. With the excitement attendant to starting a new company and the soul-searching of a young woman on a mission, Maddy brings personal experience and a different perspective on the troubled history of conquest and colonization of Africa, including the resettlement of American slaves in Liberia. Having worked for the United Nations, Maddy also brings a perspective on capitalism versus the benevolent efforts of world organizations. She contrasts their ineffectiveness with the entrepreneurial heritage of the Mandingo, who have an extensive network of trade and finance throughout Africa, as well as her fatheršs business enterprises and the foreign investment of Firestone and other companies in small, isolated towns that stand in stark contrast to the chaos of the surrounding country. Maddy is ultimately disappointed when her enterprise fails due to local corruption, ineptitude, and bureaucracy, and she struggles to maintain her vision for self-reliance and entrepreneurialism in Africa. (4-15-04)

Publishers Weekly

With the fine sauciness of a marathon winner (Boston 2002) and start-up champion (Adesemi, a sub-Saharan African wireless communications service), Maddy combines a warm memoir of growing up in "a middle-class, two-car nuclear family in the tropical jungles of Africa" with an instructive manual for entrepreneurs in developing countries. It's a tale of brilliant success and miserable failure, spiced with a jeremiad against the international agencies (U.N., IMF, World Bank) that are supposed to help but depend "on the careful nurturing and preservation of global poverty." Maddy grew up in Yepeka, Liberia, a town built by a Swedish mining company, moving from there to English public school, the American Ivy League, global corporations and high finance. Her happy childhood gave way to a sad Liberian tale: Pappi's restaurant, dream house and garden were destroyed; the town, once "a miracle in the forest," was reduced to "nothing more than bush and ruin" thanks to the region's tumult. Her concurrent business tale is striking and cautionary. Maddy raised millions in venture capital, established an "integrated virtual phone network" in Tanzania and Ghana, and reached toward C te d'Ivoire and Sri Lanka before the company's collapse, which was brought on not so much by the usual local villains (corruption, red tape) as by the irrationality of one of the international agencies. Maddy's take on these problems is surprising: "given the choice, the vast majority of the people living in poverty, almost four billion, would choose to be run not by their governments and the U.N. but by a global corporation, as economic security trumps nationalism." Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• Read a Sample Chapter

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Mutiny in Dar es Salaam

June 1993. The British Airways Boeing 747 began her gradual descent through the thick layer of clouds, bringing into full view the majestic snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro. After more than 24 hours of travel, the six of us all looked and felt pretty ragged. But I could feel the sense of adventure rising in the others. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they had already achieved their primary objective for the summer, even before we had done a day of work. They were in Africa.

Barely a week earlier I had been attending commencement exercises at Harvard. Now here I was, a freshly minted MBA, seizing a second chance at realizing my dream of giving back to Africa, the continent where I was born. I had tried once before, going through the United Nations, and had been disillusioned horribly by the experience. But now I was a little older (thirty), a little wiser, and armed with the knowledge, skills, and valuable contacts that I had acquired during my two years in Cambridge.

General Colin Powell, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had urged us in his commencement speech to "take from Harvard not just knowledge, but wisdom; not just intelligence, but also humanity; not just a drive for self-fulfillment, but as well a sense of service and a taste for hard work." I was leading the charge, accompanied by what I presumed was a battalion of like-minded troops: five eager and idealistic first-year HBS students. They had chosen to intern for me and my shell of a start-up rather than for one of the well-established and lucrative consulting firms such as Bain or McKinsey, or for the prestigious investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, all of which were eager to snap up fresh HBS talent. These firms were professional meccas for most HBS students; in 1993 a job offer from one of them was validation that you had arrived, that your $100,000 investment in higher education had paid off, and that you were set to achieve greater and greater things in life. During the spectacle of "hell week," a frenetic five-day period of intense interviews, an overwhelming majority of otherwise smart and rational human beings at HBS subject themselves to humiliating boot-licking sessions that masquerade as interviews, typically conducted by HBS alumni who come seeking new Harvard blood for their companies. This cycle guarantees that many of the best and brightest are processed efficiently, like blue-chip cogs in the corporate top-executive manufacturing process. These firms are not for everybody; they certainly were not for me. Even at the best of them, differentiation is a liability, and I was different -- and had no desire to conform.

I was certain that my five interns were different too, that they shared my vision to change the world: to build Africa's first transcontinental communications company. I had spent my entire second year at business school obsessed with pursuing this goal. I launched the effort in earnest in September 1992. As part of the elective second-year MBA program, HBS students can opt to conduct field studies, usually in teams of three to six students, that allow them to study a particular area of interest and apply some of the basic management and analytical tools that are learned in the first year. Some of these studies are funded by major corporations, which have particular projects they want an MBA team to work on. Other studies are sponsored by smaller companies, and yet others, such as my own, are initiated by students, who either absorb the costs of the field study themselves or, if they are particularly industrious, raise funds from anyone who will back them. I sent letters to six major U.S. communications companies seeking money for my study, and whenever possible, I addressed my correspondence to someone with a connection to the business school, usually an alumnus in a top management position. For example, one such person was Henry Schacht, then the CEO of Cummins Engine Co., a graduate of the business school, and a close friend of John McArthur, the HBS dean at the time. Henry was also a member of the board of directors of AT&T, then the largest long-distance carrier in the United States.

Through Henry, my proposal eventually found its way to an executive who headed up AT&T Submarine Systems, a division that was working on a proposal to build a fiber-optic cable around the continent of Africa. But I soon learned that AT&T did not care how many people had access to basic telephone service in Africa. What the company needed was political influence with the governments of the African countries to ensure that what little telecommunications had already penetrated the continent would benefit AT&T. Thus, the division head informed me, my field study was not the right fit for AT&T.

Even so, I received a total of almost $50,000 from sponsors including Sprint International, the Lockheed Co., General Electric, and Motorola. I needed $100,000 to conduct the full study, however, and time was running out to submit my proposal for faculty approval. I had to find another $50,000 fast.

Having worked for the UN for five interminable years before I went to Harvard, I knew that UN money was always available for new ideas, as most of the old ones had failed. The organization was reinventing itself constantly to become relevant to poverty reduction -- or merely to stay alive. I knew exactly what made a successful proposal in the eyes of the UN and similar development organizations. Certain topical buzzwords had to be included: poverty alleviation, small-business promotion, environmental protection, and empowerment of women in developing countries. These were the ones most in vogue in the early 1990s. For me, applying for a grant from the UN was like shooting fish in a barrel ...