Here are 100 books that In Idi Amin's Shadow fans have personally recommended if you like
In Idi Amin's Shadow.
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I write about inequality in international development, American communities, environmental movements, and workplaces. I’ve been doing this reporting for over a decade. I’ve also worked in global health, an experience that has given me a first-hand glimpse into the depths and texture of inequality we have manufactured in our current world, including within the organizations and movements that purportedly challenge such global inequality. As a reader, I’m equally passionate about immersive nonfiction and fiction. I’ll dive into anything that’s driven by a good story.
I should start by saying that Thiong'o has recently been accused, by his son, of beating his former wife, claims I take very seriously (and which has put my reading of Thiong'o’s female characters in a new light).
In this book, I found a sharp, cunning satire of despotic post-colonial governments working with and shaped by international funders and Western policymakers. Having worked in NGOs, I found Thiong'o’s characterization of “development” to be darkly funny and cringe-worthily accurate.
Informed by traditional African storytelling, discover Ngugi wa Thiong'o's masterpiece.
To honour the Ruler's birthday, the Free Republic of Aburiria set out to build a tower; a modern wonder of the world that will reach the gates of Heaven. But behind this pillar of unity a battle for control of the Aburirian people rages. Among the contenders: the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank.
When I was a university student, I wanted to know how African presidencies function, not only how African presidents acquire and keep power, but also how they imagine it, how they anticipate political battles, who they trust, and who they fear. All too often, the literature focuses on colonial legacy and neo-colonization and describes African presidents with too little agency. As a doctoral researcher, I stumbled on a biography of Jomo Kenyatta and got caught by the intricacies of his political career. Since then, Kenyan political history has become my area of specialization, and while my background in political science keeps inspiring me, I have a passion for historical writing.
This book stands as a reference when it comes to the early life of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and it is one of the first biographies of an African president that I read. Beyond the extreme richness of this book, I have always been struck by how little the author wrote about Senghor’s political career as president (which remains quite controversial). For a long time, biographies of African presidents were grounded in an idea of greatness and exceptionality rather than unraveling political intricacies.
When I was a university student, I wanted to know how African presidencies function, not only how African presidents acquire and keep power, but also how they imagine it, how they anticipate political battles, who they trust, and who they fear. All too often, the literature focuses on colonial legacy and neo-colonization and describes African presidents with too little agency. As a doctoral researcher, I stumbled on a biography of Jomo Kenyatta and got caught by the intricacies of his political career. Since then, Kenyan political history has become my area of specialization, and while my background in political science keeps inspiring me, I have a passion for historical writing.
When one hears “African president”, one tends to imagine a man in power. What about women in power? This is one of the rare biographies dedicated to an African female president, and one that is easily accessible to a broad readership. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of independent Liberia, is a fascinating figure. She is a shrewd politician who understands the gendered dynamics of African politics, but also of the international economic scene (she worked for the World Bank and the United Nations before becoming president). Still too little is known about African women in or around the Office of the President.
In this timely addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Pamela Scully takes us from the 1938 birth of Nobel Peace Prize winner and two-time Liberian president Ellen Johnson through the Ebola epidemic of 2014-15. Charting her childhood and adolescence, the book covers Sirleaf's relationship with her indigenous grandmother and urban parents, her early marriage, her years studying in the United States, and her career in international development and finance, where she developed her skill as a technocrat. The later chapters cover her years in and out of formal Liberian politics, her support for women's rights, and the…
When I was a university student, I wanted to know how African presidencies function, not only how African presidents acquire and keep power, but also how they imagine it, how they anticipate political battles, who they trust, and who they fear. All too often, the literature focuses on colonial legacy and neo-colonization and describes African presidents with too little agency. As a doctoral researcher, I stumbled on a biography of Jomo Kenyatta and got caught by the intricacies of his political career. Since then, Kenyan political history has become my area of specialization, and while my background in political science keeps inspiring me, I have a passion for historical writing.
There is one thing historians cannot always document: the rumors and supernatural beliefs that surround presidential politics. Though Ahmadou Kourouma’s book is inspired by real presidential figures, it transcends them to illustrate how the president’s political (and masculine) authority sometimes turns into a sacred aura. Just like Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, Kourouma depicts a violent presidential system built on fragile fundaments.
Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora - storyteller and king's fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical beasts, and is a shape-shifter, capable of changing himself into beasts and birds. He fights in the French colonial armies, in Vietnam and Algeria, but on his return he mounts a coup and becomes ruler and dictator of the Gulf Coast. For thirty years he runs…
I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and when I moved to the United States, I felt separated from myself. Learning how to be American was exhausting and so I disappeared into books. I’m now more settled, but I still travel through fiction. These days, I am reading fiction by African women. You should be, too! There is so much stunning literature out there. These five books are just the beginning, but they are novels I can’t stop thinking about.
The First Woman is perhaps the best novel you haven’t yet read. Kirabo has never known her mother and she is looking for answers at the same time as she is becoming a woman. She is guided first by the village’s blind witch Nsuuta, who has her own reasons for getting involved. Nsuuta tells Kirabo that women were once, “huge, strong, loud, proud, brave, independent. But it was too much for the world.” The writing in this ambitious novel is sometimes funny and sometimes poignant.
'In Jennifer Makumbi, we have a giant of literature living among us.' Peter Kalu, Jhalak Prize Judge
Longlisted for the Diverse Book Awards, 2021
'Jennifer Makumbi is a genius storyteller.' Reni Eddo-Lodge
A SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, DAILY MAIL, BBC CULTURE & IRISH INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR
At once epic and deeply personal, the second novel from prize-winning author Jennifer Makumbi is an intoxicating mix of Ugandan folklore and modern feminism that will linger in the memory long after the final page.
As Kirabo enters her teens, questions begin to gnaw at her - questions which the adults in her…
My Globetrotter Book’s creative adventure originated from a deep desire to show the world to my son... I am from Quebec, Canada, but I have lived and traveled across the globe with my family for 20+ years and – so far – have lived in Montreal, Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Bangkok! I work as an international consultant on water security issues with the United Nations and other international organisations. My son has grown up, so now, I continue to inspire other kids to explore the myriad beauties and cultures of the world and, as of 2022, to "journey within" with the creation of My Bodytrotter Book.
This is a true story about a little girl in Africa, named Beatrice. Her family is poor and cannot afford to send her to school. Until the day when her family is given a goat, which gives the family the ability to earn an income. Hilary Clinton has written the Afterword to this beautiful kid’s picture book. I actually know Beatrice personally, and her life is a real-life Cinderella story that inspires such hope.
This illustrated book offers the true story of how a poor African girl was able to attend school after receiving a goat as a gift through a special international project and then sell its milk to get the money needed to buy her books. Reprint.
I grew up in Uganda and Kenya, and when I moved to the United States, I felt separated from myself. Learning how to be American was exhausting and so I disappeared into books. I’m now more settled, but I still travel through fiction. These days, I am reading fiction by African women. You should be, too! There is so much stunning literature out there. These five books are just the beginning, but they are novels I can’t stop thinking about.
Doreen Baingana’s novel Tropical Fish is smart and empathetic, with a keen eye for details. The story is set in post-Idi Amin Uganda and is primarily Christine’s coming of age, but we also read chapters from her sisters’ points of view. The novel is a page-turner with an innovative structure, but it’s the characters who will stay with you.
In her fiction debut, Doreen Baingana follows a Ugandan girl as she navigates the uncertain terrain of adolescence. Set mostly in pastoral Entebbe with stops in the cities Kampala and Los Angeles, Tropical Fish depicts the reality of life for Christine Mugisha and her family after Idi Amin’s dictatorship.
Three of the eight chapters are told from the point of view of Christine’s two older sisters, Patti, a born-again Christian who finds herself starving at her boarding school, and Rosa, a free spirit who tries to “magically” seduce one of her teachers. But the star of Tropical Fish is Christine,…
I’ve spent most of my life since the 1970s working with whales and dolphins. I was lucky to get involved in one of the first field studies for killer whales and since then have led other research in the Russian Far East. I have worked with entomologists in Costa Rican rainforests, blue whale scientists in Québec and Iceland, humpback whale scientists in Hawaii. I’ve searched for rare North Atlantic right whales in the Bay of Fundy, measured Canada’s tallest trees in British Columbia and seen the wild plant ancestors of maize growing in the mountains of Mexico. Field research—studying and living in nature—makes us empathize with Planet Earth.
George Schaller’s pioneering popular Year of the Gorilla, set in Rwanda, is part history, travelogue, and accessible behavioral biology. This book was my model for how to write about my own seven summers living with killer whales off northern Vancouver Island, Canada. Travelling with wife Kay, Schaller in his mid-20s was among the first to get into the field with primates when few even considered it. Rich with stories, his book included his own beautiful line drawings of gorillas and tantalising maps. The story uncovers a misty kingdom—he climbed the volcanoes—as much as revealing the intimate details of the gorillas, with their food gathering, nest-building, relationships, their emotional lives. This book has human and gorilla characters. You feel like you are right there.
This seminal work chronicles George B. Schaller's two years of travel and observation of gorillas in East and Central Africa in the late 1950s, high in the Virunga volcanoes on the Zaire-Rwanda-Uganda border. There, he learned that these majestic animals, far from being the aggressive apes of film and fiction, form close-knit societies of caring mothers and protective fathers watching over playful young. Alongside his observations of gorilla society, Schaller celebrates the enforced yet splendid solitude of the naturalist, recounts the adventures he experienced along the way, and offers a warning against poaching and other human threats against these endangered…
After working as a foreign correspondent in Italy and France I was sent by Reuters news agency to Cote d’Ivoire and what was then Zaire, the latter posting coinciding with the shocking start of the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. It was the kind of assignment you don’t forget, and when I moved to the Financial Times I continued following the larger-than-life dramas unfolding in Africa’s Great Lakes region. I’ve now written five books, the first – In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz - about Mobutu Sese Seko's imprint on the Democratic Republic of Congo and the latest – Do Not Disturb - looking at personalities and events I first started writing about a quarter of a century ago. You keep going back.
A multi-generational novel which starts in 1750 with the heroic figure of Kintu, a provincial chief setting off with his entourage to pay ritual obeisance to the feared Kabaka (king), and culminates in bustling, hustling, modern Uganda. It’s an epic story that explores the imprint family bonds and ancestral legacies - including curses that travel down through the decades – leave on daily life. The kind of book which, because of its sheer heft, seems more than a little daunting at the start. But by the last page, you’re left wanting more, reluctant to have to say goodbye to all the characters you have come to know and love, hungry to know the end of their various journeys.
"A soaring and sublime epic. One of those great stories that was just waiting to be told."—Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-winning author of A Brief History of Seven Killings
First published in Kenya in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim, Kintu is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Divided into six sections, the novel begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance…
I’ve been a journalist since high school and I spent 33 years as a reporter for The Washington Post, mostly as a foreign correspondent based in Asia, Africa, and Paris. My book Out Of America chronicled my three years as a correspondent in Africa during some of its most tumultuous events, the Somalia intervention, and the Rwanda genocide. I’ve always thought a well-crafted novel often captures a place or a time better than nonfiction — books like The Quiet American about the Vietnam War, and The Year of Living Dangerously about Indonesia. I now teach a university course on The Role of the Journalist in Popular Fiction, Film and Comics.
Okay, this fine novel is only partially set in Africa, in Uganda, where intrepid fictional journalist Daniel McFarland treks into the jungles to find and interview the leader of a rebel group based on the Lords Resistance Army. Told from the vantage point of world-weary photographer Nicky Bettencourt, the action later shift to East Timor during the fight for independence against Indonesia. This novel comes as close as any to describe the real lives of foreign correspondents — the unnecessary risks, the loneliness of life lived constantly on the road. It’s beautifully written, a good read, and reeks of authenticity.
Photojournalist Nicky Bettencourt thinks he's seen everything until he teams up with the legendary war correspondent Daniel McFarland. To Daniel, the story is everything; people come later. But after a plane crash nearly takes his life, Daniel begins to see the world in a different way. He falls in love with Julia Cadell, an idealistic British doctor, and together they find refuge at an old canal house in the center of London. Soon after, Nicky, Daniel, and Julia are called to East Timor, where the government has fled and the entire country is a war zone, and Daniel must decide…
