The heart of darkness is about to get darker. So designated by Joseph Conrad in his 18th novel, the African continent was unjustly portrayed as a savage and untamed land. Almost three centuries later, “progress” is making the former misnomer more of a fit.

Through official pronouncements celebrating the decolonization of one African nation after another, much of the world expected that populations long under foreign rule would settle into order and stability overnight. These drastically ingenuous prognostications quickly evaporated in a reality of chaos, war, genocide, dictatorships, and abject poverty.

Just as naïve was the political and economic science that predicted the discovery of oil in this part of the world would ease the severity of the aforementioned problems. With the increasing global demand for fuel, the influx of capital was assured. Counter to expectations, the extraction of fossil fuels in African nations is now associated with exacerbating the malign conditions of the past.

In his book, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil, author John Ghazvinian offers both anecdotes about and reasons for this mystery. He does not pretend to solve it, because Africa’s oil-rich misery is really more of a paradox, a very complex one. Early in the book he describes the situation in Nigeria, a country that was expected to be the crown jewel of postcolonial Africa, after companies began bringing oil out of the ground around 50 years ago.

“Along the way something went terribly wrong. The country’s overall economy has shrunk, and the standard of living among its 130 million people has declined steadily…. [T]he World Bank now rates Nigeria as one of the world’s 20 poorest countries.” Furthermore, the closer the people live to the drilling in the Niger delta, the poorer they are. In the shadow of the modern edifices and facilities of the oil companies are some of the most impoverished people to be found anywhere.

It would be easy to blame the companies. But while these corporations, according to Ghazvinian, genuinely get much of the blame, the situation is at a point where the blend of entangled motives, personalities, and social phenomena have spun out of the control of any one entity. Through a combination of analysis and anecdote Ghazvinian suggests a host of plausible factors.

Equatorial Guinea and Angola are two other countries that Ghazvinian visits, finding variations on the same theme: Not only does the discovery of oil not bring prosperity, it often brings grief: “…studies suggest that the real GDP and the population’s standard of living nearly always decline where oil is discovered. Between 1970 and 1993, for example, countries without oil saw their economies grow four times faster than those of countries with oil.”

Dealing with countless players, economic sophistry, and political entanglements that date back to the colonial era, Ghazvinian nonetheless produces an exciting read. His adventurous efforts to witness events firsthand makes for a page-turner. Unfortunately, his story has no ending in the foreseeable future.