Broken Promises

It is a mark of Stephen Lewis’s irrepressible optimism that he called his book about helping the world’s poorest people Race Against Time when “Broken Promises the World Has Made to Africa” might have been more apt. The word “race” implies that world leaders are seized with an urgent desire to halt the spread of disease, discrimination, poverty and ignorance across the continent of 900 million people. It suggests that only the rate of speed, and not momentum itself, is in question. Lewis’s own experience and the rather disheartening events last summer following the G8 summit would seem to indicate this is not so. What, then, is the source of his optimism?

The former Ontario leader of the New Democratic Party is no starry-eyed innocent. He has spent much of the last two decades deepening his understanding of Africa through various roles at the United Nations, including his current position as the Secretary General’s special envoy for HIV/AIDS. He has...