Fans pick 100 books like Th Scramble for Africa

Like old color slides flicking in and out on a projector screen, grainy and yellowed but still evocative, Isak Dinesen’s poignant little book captures scenes from more than a decade of life as an outsider who loved the place she had made home and left it to return to the land of her birth against her will.

Elisabeth Elliot read Out of Africa just months after leaving behind her own expatriate life and work in Ecuador, where she had hoped to spend the rest of her life. In her journal, she called Dinesen’s book striking, beautifully written, and right. 

As entertaining as the PBS series about Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriott (pseudonym for author James Alfred Wight) is, the book is even better.

A blend of memoir, travelogue, and journal, Herriott’s tales of life among the farmers of England’s Yorkshire Dales are heartwarming, hilarious, and riveting. From his familial relationships with the Farnon brothers, with whom he lives, to the sometimes endearing, sometimes mercurial encounters with his patients—both the 2-legged and 4-legged variety—reading the adventures of this country vet is both informative and engaging.

You’ll go places you never imagined, want to watch the series—original and remake—all over again, and will, if you’re like me, make a solemn pledge to visit the Dales before you die! 

The Sunbird was Wilber Smith’s first book. It was one of the first books on Wild African Adventure that I read and has kindled in me a lifelong passion for Africa, African animals, and the love of wildlife. It was a reason that I became a veterinarian and that I wanted to work with African Wildlife. It is a mix of contemporary and historic African Fiction. It is memorable because it is a wonderful story that I would want to share around the fire in a camp somewhere in the heart of the African bush. I would want Wilbur Smith to tell me the story as we sit around the fire. It evokes all that is magical and wonderful about Africa, the continent I love and live on. The book taught me that the story is paramount. Not the skill of the author as a literary giant. I want to… show more.

This is the true story of a game ranger who worked with African Wildlife in the early part of the history of the Kruger National Park. It is a well-written account of a bygone error where the heroic deeds of one man could make a difference. I loved this book because it evoked in me a sense of the dramatic history of the Southern African Game Reserves and the struggle to attain recognition during the early days when animals were a resource only to be hunted. There were a few brave men who recognized the value of conservation and preservation of wildlife, leading to the wildlife game reserve industry as we know it today. If not for the efforts of these few brave souls our world today would be a poorer place.

A mere 172 pages, this book examines the brutality of European colonialism in the 19th century, uncovering genocides I had never heard of that were perpetrated by so-called “civilized people” on so-called “primitive people.” 

The justification for this barbarism was that they for the benefit of the people annihilated because they could not live in the modern world. 

That justification is the same one often used on this side of the ocean for the genocide or “removal” of Indigenous people from their ancient lands and for the enslavement of African people who were “improved” by being around white people. 

Part travelogue, part history, part literary analysis – Lindqvist focuses on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness – the book cannot be easily categorized and when reading it I often wondered what he was doing. 

But my understanding of both colonialism and what the Europeans did when they came to… show more.

Africa as a Living Laboratory is a far-reaching study of the thorny relationship between imperialism and the role of scientific expertise—environmental, medical, racial, and anthropological—in the colonization of British Africa. A key source for Helen Tilley’s analysis is the African Research Survey, a project undertaken in the 1930s to explore how modern science was being applied to African problems. This project both embraced and recommended an interdisciplinary approach to research on Africa that, Tilley argues, underscored the heterogeneity of African environments and the interrelations among the problems being studied. While the aim of British colonialists was unquestionably to transform and modernize Africa, their efforts, Tilley contends, were often unexpectedly subverted by scientific concerns with the local and vernacular to the understanding of imperial history, colonial development, and the role science played in both.

I didn’t find it an easy book to read, but it’s a powerful telling of a brutal time in Tanzanian history—the beginning of the 20th Century, and a tender love story.

As unflinching as Gurnah is about what war and violence do to the human body and mind, I really admired how he focused on the impact on the lives of ordinary people caught up in war and how the opposing realities of violence and love can coexist simultaneously.

I liked this hundred-year-old novel because it explores some darker doubts and concerns I have always had about “the hidden heart of mankind unrestrained.” What’s more, the theme of Heart Of Darkness is reflected in the movie Apocalypse Now, with stark modern-day observations on the wounds the violence of war can inflict on the hearts and minds of humans.

A brand-new gripping, revealing history of German colonialism, focused on the brutal diamond trade in Southwest Africa on the eve of World War I. With pellucid prose, Press tells how the Germans cordoned off a so-called “forbidden zone,” behind which rapacious explorers, colonial authorities, miners, and businessmen carted off these precious, if largely useless rocks, for which there was a huge, artificially created demand, especially in the United States.

Fanon’s analysis of how Black people in colonized Africa and in the United States were one oppressed people was part of my political education. This book was formative to my politics, which are rooted in Fanon’s combination of Marxism and resistance to racial oppression.

Reading Fanon allowed me to accept my culture and who I was as a Black person. I started reflecting on assimilation and how we changed our hair and skin to look more acceptable to white people. He was also my friend Nate’s favorite author.

After Nate got out of prison, he became an attorney and director of prisoner legal services at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. There’s a memorial to him there still, in the jail lobby, and Fanon’s book is in there.