African Children in Peril : The West's Toxic Legacy

Why do millions of African children die before their fifth birthday?

In African Children in Peril, Brian Waller takes his enormous experience in working with children and families, both home and overseas, and looks critically and boldly at why enormous numbers of infant children in sub-Saharan Africa die so young. This is a mortality rate of up to thirty times greater than in the West. It hasn’t been an accident of climate or corruption or geography. It has happened because of the West’s systematic subjugation and exploitation of the region over the centuries without regard to how this might impact on the region’s families and very young children.

African Children in Peril shows emphatically and meticulously how Britain has been at the centre of this catastrophe involving many millions of child deaths as a consequence of its involvement in the slave trade and its Imperial and colonising history. It goes on to describe both America''s indifference to African children''s health needs and its readiness to profit from the continent at every turn. 

But there can be hope. Alongside this tragic detailing of research and conclusions, Brian Waller explores Africa’s positive responses to these events and suggests how the West, and particularly the United States and Britain, might now assist African leaders in helping them to make the curse of child malnutrition and early deaths history. The time is now.