Africa themed books - with some reviews culled from Amazon.co.uk

These reviews are not my won but I strongly recommend these seven books to you. I will try to add more. I knew little about Darfur until I read The Translator. It reminds me of how little information we are actually provided with by television news. No explanations of the reasons or motivations of the perpetrators, the roles of the world powers and so forth. Here are some of the best non-fiction books I can remember having read about Africa.

Translator: A Tribesman’s Memoir of Darfur

The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world–an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time. Using his high school knowledge of languages as his weapon–while others around him were taking up arms–Daoud Hari has helped inform the world about Darfur. Although Hari’s village was attacked and destroyed by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups, he himself escaped with his family decimated and dispersed. Roaming the battlefield deserts on camels, he and a group of his friends helped survivors find food, water, and the way to safety. When international aid groups and reporters arrived, Hari offered his services as a translator and guide. In doing so, he risked his life again and again, for the government of Sudan had outlawed journalists in the region, and death was the punishment for those who aided the “foreign spies.” The Zanzibar Chest by Aidan Hartley 'We should have never come!' So said Aidan Hartley's father in his final days, rising from a bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before. His words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back over 150 years through four generations of one British family. From great-great-grandfather William Temple, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in defending British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer in Africa in the 1920s and a builder of dams in Arabia in the 1940s, the Hartleys were intrepid men who travelled to exotic lands to conquer, to build, and finally to bear witness. In The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley weaves together his family's history, his childhood in Africa and the dark world of the continent's horrendous wars, which he witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again-in Ethiopia, in Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo, terror and genocide prevailed. In Somalia, three of Hartley's close friends are torn to pieces by an angry mob. Then, after walking overland from Uganda with the rebel army, he saw the terrible atrocities in Rwanda, arriving at the sites and interviewing survivors just days after the massacres. Finally, burnt out from a decade of horror, he retreated to his family's house in Kenya, where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved and smelling of camphor, the chest contained the diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances more than fifty years earlier. Tucking the papers under his arm, Hartley embarked on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davey's life, but of his own. He travelled to the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia where his father served as a British officer. He began to piece together the disparate elements of Davey's story, a man who fell in love with an Arabian princess and converted to Islam, but died tragically. At once a modern and a historic love story, The Zanzibar Chest is also an epic narrative charting the fates of men and women who interfered with, embraced and were ultimately transformed by twentieth-century Africa. Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog Although this deals with the South African Truth & Reconciliation Commission and contains harrowing personal testimonies of suffering, it is a surprisingly uplifting book. The author, an Afrikaner woman journalist and poet, writes with such sensitivity, intelligence and integrity about her country’s agony and the ways it is reflected in herself. While one is made all too aware of the capacity for evil in ordinary people, stories of courage, steadfastness and devotion to others (not least from Desmond Tutu) are inspiring. It is interesting to compare this experience with that of post-war Germany or the experiences of the Congolese (told vividly in Adam Hochschild: King Leopold’s Ghost) which have never been resolved. Blood River A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart by Tim Butcher This is more than your average travelogue. It's a real adventure following in the footsteps of a great explorer. I tend to go for travel writing about safe Western destinations -- like Bill Bryson, Tony Hawks, Tim Moore, etc. -- where the greatest danger faced is slipping on the soap in the hotel bath, and the greatest inconvenience is a delayed train! Often the idea behind the travelling is some sort of gimmick (like carrying a fridge or leading a donkey) which is amusing but lacks a certain depth. With this book, however, there is a historical journey which the author tries to follow: Henry Morton Stanley's exploration of the Congo. Along the way he shares with the reader the most interesting parts of the prodigious research he immersed himself in before setting off and, throughout his "yomp", he tells the history of the region. I thought this was a very interesting read even if it was terribly sad. We are All the Same by Jim Wooten This book is about a white South African woman from Johannesburg who adopts an HIV+ boy around 1998 or so - before the antiretroviral drugs were available (they weren't available in South Africa until about 2004). It is about the boy's courage in the face of bigotry and misinformation and the determination of the adoptive mother to help him despite everything. A Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela Needs no introduction. After a long time of good intentions, I finally read this book and it did not disappoint. Dances with Devils by Jacques Pauw Having cut his teeth on investigative journalism in print, Jacques Pauw moved into the electronic media in 1994. A founder member of Vrye Weekblad, he lifted the veil on Vlakplaas and ‘dirty tricks’ funded and authorised by the apartheid government. He has published two books on the subject: In the Heart of the Whore and Into the Heart of Darkness. Pauw has travelled the length and breadth of Africa to bring television viewers stories about conflict, corruption and human rights abuses. Currently executive producer of the hard-hitting weekly television series Special Assignment, he has won numerous South African and international journalism awards, twice being named CNN’s African Journalist of the Year and also winning the Vodacom Journalist of the Year award. Mukiwa by Peter Godwin With humor, portent and melancholy, Godwin (Rhodesians Never Die) recreates his 1960s youth in white Rhodesia. The son of relatively liberal whites, Godwin, through family servants, gained a sense of black African culture, language and religion. His mother, a doctor, helped African women with contraception; Godwin, in one of his wistful flash-forwards, observes that after the country became Zimbabwe, the government saw family planning as racist-but women in this still patriarchal society mutinied. He describes his strange private school-"racial enlightenment within a system of extreme conservatism"-and how he learned, in a job at his father's mine, that he fit in neither with racially unquestioning whites nor with restive blacks. As a policeman sworn to defend his renegade homeland against black guerrillas seeking independence, Godwin found himself pained by guerrilla cruelties to civilians, but shamed by his own role in arresting local leaders. Godwin soon concluded that a black victory was inevitable, and escaped the deepening war for studies in England, trailed by bad dreams. When he returned three years later as a lawyer and journalist, he experienced some peace-a black soldier he met absolved him offhandedly. However, his efforts to uncover the new government's human rights abuses led him to be declared an enemy of the state.