May 23, 02:12 PM
Reading on the Road
Part of an incredible and life-changing trip also includes the books you read along the way.
Here are some of the good Africa-related books we’ve enjoyed while bouncing along in all those busses or crouching under mosquito nets.
- Africa: A Biography of the Continent, by John Reader, explores the formation of the continent, including colonisation, decolonisation, and African nationalism. Mark’s read it twice.
- Petals of Blood, is a novel about villaging changing in the decades after independence by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Kenya’s most famous author. It’s sort of experimental prose, and Mark couldn’t get past the ever-changing points of view, the flashbacks in flashbacks in flashbacks, etc., and decided just to read the last half. It’s an important book that’s not, to Mark’s mind, very readable.
- The Constant Gardener, by the famous spy novelist John Le Carre, and now a major motion picture, is a great read! Not having seen the movie yet, Mark and I are both glad we read the book first. Based largely in Kenya, the novel explores love, globalization, corruption, and leaves you hanging on every word.
- The Coup, by John Updike, is a satire that had Mark laughing out loud. It’s about a fictional dictatorship in northern Africa, but somehow it ends up being a loveletter, and middlefinger, to America.
- The Zanzibar Chest, by Aidan Hartley, is a memoir of a war correspondent and his fellow cronies as they trekked through some of Africa’s most volatile and dangerous times in Somalia, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. Also follows his family’s long history of love for the African continent and the reasons he stayed. We both thought it would have been more interesting if it had focused more on the countries he covered and the difficulties he had trying to write about them and less on his sexual exploits (which, except for those involving prostitutes, were a little difficult to believe, given that the pictures of him in the book reveal a man who has the look of a complete spaz.)
- We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda is Philip Gourevitch’s rich account of the history of the Rwandan genocide, including stories from specific people he met in his travels in Rwanda after the most recent and horrific 1994 genocide, when at least 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu extremists. Gourevitch’s coverage of the genocide and portraits of people who survived it or committed it are great, but his praise for the democratic aspirations of Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and Uganda’s Yuweri K. Museveni have not aged well since the book’s 1997 publication.
- King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa is Adam Hochschild’s account of Belgium’s infamous King Leopold’s reign of terror from late 1890 to the early 1900’s in the Congo.
Provides a background of colonial Africa as it relates to the horrors experienced by native Congolese during the fight for a piece of the “African cake.” I’ve just finished it and Mark is excited to read it next.A few books we read in preparation for the trip:
- Dark Star Safari is written by the great travel writer Paul Theroux and a must read for anyone interested in Africa or travelling in general. Going by bus, cattle truck, boat, rail, and “chicken bus,” Theroux takes you on a great journey from Egypt all the way to the tip of South Africa. He had been in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer and college literature professor in the 1960s, and much of the book is about his bitter disapointment that the countries he came to love seemed to him to have moved backwards in human development since then. Controversial, opinionated, funny.
- Evelyn Waugh’s A Tourist in Africa is a long-forgotten travelogue by Britain’s arch-snob that deserves to be taken from your library shelf, dusted off, and enjoyed.
- Gurnah Abdulrazak’s Paradise is historical fiction about a Swahili boy who is taken as a slave by an Arab merchant on a trading expidition into the interior. Great character development. We read this on the way to my mom’s house for Thanksgiving in 2005.
- The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith is a masterful account of the recent history of the entire continent. He ends with a note of pessimism for its future.
Books we’re starting on our flight from Nairobi to Rome:
- In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo by Michela Wrong, herself a correspondent who witnessed Mobutu’s last days, traces the steps of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ fictional character, Mr. Kurtz, while highlighting the 32 year rule of Mobutu “the Leopard” Sese Seko’s reign of domination and corruption. We picked this up yesterday and I’m going to start it tonight on the flight after finishing the last 20 pages of the gripping King Leopold’s Ghost.
- King Solomon’s Mines is H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure story.
hee hee … i’m imagining you both with a whole suitcase of books that needs it’s own seat on the bus.
(cool that you linked ‘em to powells, not amazon)
i hope you both are well!! Just wanted to say hi.
— jane palmer May 31, 04:49 PM #