Each written because the account already in circulation was inadequate.

In the 1960s the end of colonial rule raised a genuine expectation across Asia and Africa that independence would bring democracy and prosperity. Sixty years on, most of sub-Saharan Africa is watching the race from the roadside while Asia’s new industrial economies have joined it.

The book asks why, and refuses the two easy answers. It moves across the continent’s geography, cultures, colonial history and present economics, and argues that what is generally called underdevelopment is better understood as an arrangement — trade terms, resource contracts, currency and debt that outlived the empires that built them, held in place by political settlements that benefit from them.

It is written for the general reader, in Turkish, by someone from the continent rather than about it.

The second book turns from the continent to its generation. Young Africans are told, with some sincerity, that they have every opportunity — and are then measured against images they cannot reach, sold certainty by people who have none, and educated for institutions that do not open.

It reads the resulting damage where it actually occurs: in expectation, in self-regard, in the private conviction that the failure is personal rather than structural.