Meredith examines the many challenges much of Africa has faced including civil conflict and lawlessness, government corruption and dictatorships.

Australian The Age newspaper writer Pamela Bone wrote that in "this big, exhaustive history Martin Meredith leaves us in little doubt as to what he believes is the primary cause of Africa's pain: its corrupt, tyrannical, incompetent, thieving, "vampire-like" leaders...

[1] While Bone wrote that the book is an "impressive history, well told" she criticised the fact that "the book misses the spirit of Africa, the joyfulness and strength of the people, which persists despite their appalling hardships, and which gives hope".

Writing in The Independent, Alex Duval Smith described The State of Africa as a "dispassionate analysis" that "does more than perhaps he (Meredith) realises to set the past 50 African years in a continuum"[2] Chris Nkwatsibwe, a human rights activist from Uganda praised the book.

Nkwatsibwe wrote that "Meredith works with the colossal spatial and temporal span of this subject with ease, weaving chapters together in a loose chronological order to present the narrative as a patchwork quilt of Africa, rather than as a rigid country-by-country timeline".