LEARNING TO LOVE AFRICA: My Journey from Africa to Harvard Business School and Back

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 Côte 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.)