Since I first visited Africa in 2004 I’ve found it difficult to tear myself away. I’ve lived in South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, and Sudan and travelled in all corners of the continent. I’ve participated in a revolution, hung out with the illegal fishermen of Lake Victoria, been cursed—and protected—by witch doctors, and learned Swahili. I’ve also read extensively about the place, written three books about it, and broadcast from it for the BBC World Service. In my other life I research and write about international development for universities and global organisations. This too has a focus on Africa.
I wrote...
The Ringtone and the Drum: Travels in the World's Poorest Countries
Tucked away in a remote part of Africa, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, and Burkina Faso, three of the world's poorest countries, are in the throes of great upheaval. Globalisation has shown their people that a more comfortable life is possible, but climate change, the population boom, and corrupt politicians block their way. The clash between old and new is explosive. Civil wars erupt without warning. Islamist terror groups have infiltrated Burkina Faso. Colombian drug gangs are destabilising Guinea-Bissau, while religious fanatics prepare their converts for Armageddon. In The Ringtone and the Drum, Mark Weston dives into this maelstrom. Combining the remarkable stories of the people he meets with his deep knowledge of Africa's development, the book sheds new light on a neglected corner of the globe.
This short book is without doubt the best introduction to African travel (and in my opinion one of the greatest travel books ever written).
Ranging across the whole continent, Kapuscinski’s evocative writing, although not always sticking religiously to factual details, captures the essence—and the magic—of the place like nobody else can. The book, along with his other great works on Africa Another Day of Life and The Emperor, was a major influence on both why I wanted to get to know Africa and how I write about it.
'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In astudy that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself…
This isn’t strictly a travel book—it’s about how the author’s father was brought to his knees and finally executed by the Sierra Leonean dictator Siaka Stevens—but it brilliantly conveys how life and politics work in West Africa and is therefore a must-read if you’re thinking about travelling to the region or want to know more about its post-colonial trajectory.
An extremely moving story, its portrayal of the horror of Stevens’ regime amid the beauty of Sierra Leone encapsulates the fascination of a part of Africa few tourists visit. Tragically, as I discuss in my book, the demise of Stevens’ regime wasn’t the end of Sierra Leone’s troubles.
Praised as “a shining example of what autobiography can be: harrowing, illuminating and thoughtful” (USA Today), Aminatta Forna’s intensely personal history is a passionate and vivid account of an idyllic childhood which became the stuff of nightmare. As a child she witnessed the upheavals of post-colonial Africa, danger, flight, the bitterness or exile in Britain and the terrible consequences of her dissident father’s stand against tyranny.
Mohamed Forna was a man of unimpeachable integrity and enchanting charisma. As Sierra Leone faced its future as a fledgling democracy, he was a new star in the political firmament, a man who had…
Mungo Park’s journeys into West Africa at the end of the 18th century were probably the toughest undertaken by any of the Europeans who explored the continent.
The trials he underwent, from disease to hunger to attacks by local leaders make modern-day travellers like myself look pampered.
As I recount in my book, I was eventually worn down by travelling in West Africa and succumbed to what was known by the region’s French colonisers as “soudanité”, so I could relate to the depressions Park suffered in much more gruelling circumstances. His account of his travels manages to be both epic and full of humility at the same time.
The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. The eighteenth-century fascination with Greek and Roman antiquity followed the systematic excavation of the ruins…
Tanzania is a country I have fallen in love with over the past few years and my most recent book is about the Tanzanian half of Lake Victoria.
Vassanji’s book tells the story of his upbringing in Dar es Salaam as well as his travels around the country, from Lake Victoria to Zanzibar. It’s particularly interesting on the subject of East Africa’s South Asian communities, which the author grew up in, and their interactions with both European colonisers and black Africans.
I lived in Dar es Salaam for a while and loved observing this ancient community’s traditions (and eating at the city’s excellent Indian restaurants). Vassanji’s novel, The Gunny Sack, is also worth a read.
From M.G. Vassanji, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and a Governor General's Literary Award winner for Non-fiction, comes a poignant love letter to his birthplace and homeland, East Africa—a powerful and surprising portrait that only an insider could write.
Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor in an old coastal village to memories of his own childhood in the streets of Dar es Salaam…
This is a beautifully written tale of the author’s time living in rural Egypt in the 1980s.
Ghosh’s accounts of his meetings and friendships with Egyptians unused to foreigners resonate with my own experiences in rural Africa, and the way he pieces together the long-forgotten history of an anonymous twelfth-century Indian slave and his Arab Jewish trader master and weaves it into the story is astonishingly deft.
I read it again recently and enjoyed it just as much as the first time.
Once upon a time an Indian writer named Amitav Ghosh set out an Indian slave, name unknown, who some seven hundred years before had traveled to the Middle East. The journey took him to a small village in Egypt, where medieval customs coexist with twentieth-century desires and discontents. But even as Ghosh sought to re-create the life of his Indian predecessor, he found himself immersed in those of his modern Egyptian neighbors. Combining shrewd observations with painstaking historical research, Ghosh serves up skeptics and holy men, merchants and sorcerers. Some of these figures are real, some only imagined, but all…
Gabrielle found her grandfather’s diaries after her mother’s death, only to discover that he had been a Nazi. Born in Berlin in 1942, she and her mother fled the city in 1945, but Api, the one surviving male member of her family, stayed behind to work as a doctor in a city 90% destroyed.
Gabrielle retraces Api’s steps in the Berlin of the 21st century, torn between her love for the man who gave her the happiest years of her childhood and trying to come to terms with his Nazi membership, German guilt, and political responsibility.
Api's Berlin Diaries: My Quest to Understand My Grandfather's Nazi Past
"This is not a book I will forget any time soon."
Story Circle Book Reviews
Moving and provocative, Api's Berlin Diaries offers a personal perspective on the fall of Berlin 1945 and the far-reaching aftershocks of the Third Reich.
After her mother's death, Robinson was thrilled to find her beloved grandfather's war diaries-only to discover that he had been a Nazi.
The award-winning memoir shows Api, a doctor in Berlin, desperately trying to help the wounded in cellars without water or light. He himself was reduced to anxiety and despair, the daily diary his main refuge. As Robinson retraces Api's…
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