The Worst Date Ever (2009) By Jane Bussmann
Jane Bussmann is a north London girl who moved to LA and ended up as a showbiz correspondent. Disillusioned with being a celebrity journalist, she’s pining for meaning when she sees John Prendergast on television—he used to be an adviser on Africa to Clinton—and develops a massive crush on him. To impress him, she goes to Uganda to write about the Lord’s Resistance Army, the rebel group that is—with the army’s help—devastating northern Uganda. So she goes from interviewing Britney to interviewing child soldiers and refugees, and she does it brilliantly well. She doesn’t change her tone of voice and there is no attempt to be earnest or worthy—she just transfers her sarcastic and foul-mouthed writing style to Uganda. It’s a story that doesn’t often get told and, because it’s incredibly funny, you have to keep reading. She never does get off with Prendergast, though.
Dreams from My Father (1995) By Barack Obama I’m glad I read this after writing my own book on Kenya, because it goes to the heart of something that I try to capture but probably don’t do quite as well. My book is about corruption and Obama’s is about more than that. But the point he makes is that corruption is not about personal greed, it’s about compassion for the extended family—whose members put incredible pressure on those who do well. Since they don’t trust the state to do anything, they are dependent on family. Obama tells the story of Auma, his half-sister, who is educated, hard-working and has succeeded abroad, and recounts the way the family basically leeches off her. It’s not good for either side. She resents it because her projects are undermined, but the family don’t like being beholden to her. The extended family is both a blessing and a blight—Obama captures that conundrum.
Britain in Africa (2008) By Tom Porteous This slim booklet has hardly been reviewed, but deserves to be. Porteous is a former BBC journalist who worked for the foreign office but now runs Human Rights Watch UK. He knows Africa extremely well. Over the past 12 years, the humanitarian imperative has come to dominate British policy. It is an approach rooted in the American economist Jeffrey Sachs’s work, but then supported by Bob Geldof, Bono, Live Aid and Band Aid. The theory is that Africa needs to be jolted out of the poverty trap with a massive injection of aid. No realpolitik is necessary—we can just do good. That approach was part of the bubbling optimism of Blair and Bush, who thought they could sort out the world’s problems. This book which tracks the good intentions that lay behind this policy. Things are now going to change. That vision of global intervention finally crashed on the rocks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Antelope’s Strategy (2009) By Jean Hatzfeld The Rwandan genocide is not only one of Africa’s big stories—it is one of humanity’s. Hatzfeld is a journalist for the French newspaper Libération, and this is the third of his books on the subject. He goes to the village of Nyamata and talks to victims and perpetrators, now living cheek-by-jowl. In 2001, President Paul Kagame introduced the gacaca system of justice to deal with the overflowing prisons. If you were a suspected killer you were offered a deal—you could go to the place of your crime and confess in public. If you were telling the truth, you were released. But if someone said, “No! You killed 15 more people up the road,” then you went back to prison. This is a searing, poignant and poetic book, uncluttered with facts and figures. What you realise is that while there is cohabitation, there is no real reconciliation. Yet there is no better alternative.
Africa Dances (1935) By Geoffrey Gorer The longer you spend travelling and writing about Africa, the more you appreciate that the roots of today’s problems lie in colonial times and that the scarring goes deeper than you once thought. You start to notice the difference in the legacies left by the colonial powers. This book, first published in 1935, is about a young anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, and an African-American dancer, Feral Benga, on a trip across west Africa to study the native dances. They start in Senegal and head east. It’s a kind of road trip, and dance only plays a small part in the book. Gorer finds the people in French colonies to be fearful and cowed—while, to my surprise and, I think, to his as well, the British administrators are better informed, more humane, and have a better grasp of the region. It’s very much his own perspective, but it’s a fresh and interesting one, even if the language of the time frequently jars. Interview by Anna Blundy for the website FiveBooks. More at fivebooks.com
Dreams from My Father (1995) By Barack Obama I’m glad I read this after writing my own book on Kenya, because it goes to the heart of something that I try to capture but probably don’t do quite as well. My book is about corruption and Obama’s is about more than that. But the point he makes is that corruption is not about personal greed, it’s about compassion for the extended family—whose members put incredible pressure on those who do well. Since they don’t trust the state to do anything, they are dependent on family. Obama tells the story of Auma, his half-sister, who is educated, hard-working and has succeeded abroad, and recounts the way the family basically leeches off her. It’s not good for either side. She resents it because her projects are undermined, but the family don’t like being beholden to her. The extended family is both a blessing and a blight—Obama captures that conundrum.
Britain in Africa (2008) By Tom Porteous This slim booklet has hardly been reviewed, but deserves to be. Porteous is a former BBC journalist who worked for the foreign office but now runs Human Rights Watch UK. He knows Africa extremely well. Over the past 12 years, the humanitarian imperative has come to dominate British policy. It is an approach rooted in the American economist Jeffrey Sachs’s work, but then supported by Bob Geldof, Bono, Live Aid and Band Aid. The theory is that Africa needs to be jolted out of the poverty trap with a massive injection of aid. No realpolitik is necessary—we can just do good. That approach was part of the bubbling optimism of Blair and Bush, who thought they could sort out the world’s problems. This book which tracks the good intentions that lay behind this policy. Things are now going to change. That vision of global intervention finally crashed on the rocks in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Antelope’s Strategy (2009) By Jean Hatzfeld The Rwandan genocide is not only one of Africa’s big stories—it is one of humanity’s. Hatzfeld is a journalist for the French newspaper Libération, and this is the third of his books on the subject. He goes to the village of Nyamata and talks to victims and perpetrators, now living cheek-by-jowl. In 2001, President Paul Kagame introduced the gacaca system of justice to deal with the overflowing prisons. If you were a suspected killer you were offered a deal—you could go to the place of your crime and confess in public. If you were telling the truth, you were released. But if someone said, “No! You killed 15 more people up the road,” then you went back to prison. This is a searing, poignant and poetic book, uncluttered with facts and figures. What you realise is that while there is cohabitation, there is no real reconciliation. Yet there is no better alternative.
Africa Dances (1935) By Geoffrey Gorer The longer you spend travelling and writing about Africa, the more you appreciate that the roots of today’s problems lie in colonial times and that the scarring goes deeper than you once thought. You start to notice the difference in the legacies left by the colonial powers. This book, first published in 1935, is about a young anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer, and an African-American dancer, Feral Benga, on a trip across west Africa to study the native dances. They start in Senegal and head east. It’s a kind of road trip, and dance only plays a small part in the book. Gorer finds the people in French colonies to be fearful and cowed—while, to my surprise and, I think, to his as well, the British administrators are better informed, more humane, and have a better grasp of the region. It’s very much his own perspective, but it’s a fresh and interesting one, even if the language of the time frequently jars. Interview by Anna Blundy for the website FiveBooks. More at fivebooks.com
