The other kind of traveler kid.
I’ve lived/traveled in several countries across Saharan and Sahelian Africa, as a student/researcher, an NGO worker, and just being a kid. My stories from those travels and others, as well as criticisms and thoughts about NGO work and “international development” will come out on this blog in time, when I get the words and ability to write them. (blog themes, repeated to self over and over, and perhaps manifesting someday: resistance on three fronts: personal [sexual assault surviving, mental health healing, anarchy living], dismantling international neo-colonial capitalism [now with riot porn!], and searching for, building international solidarity especially with the people of Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, and the Middle East [how to practice? how to write it?]).
In the meantime, my favorite books about the continent and individual places within it, histories, economics, and that complicated, loaded word, development. Links refer to my review on Goodreads.
Updated list here.
African authors: memoirs & novels
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Anthills of the Savannah – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Taken together, these two novels tell the story of pre-colonialism to the British invasion, from Liberation to its corruption. Achebe is a master. Start here.
Segu – Maryse Condé (Mali, West Africa)
Technically, Condé is Guadeloupian, not African, but this novel of the origins of the African diaspora is her family’s history; she is telling her own story. Spanning 500 years and several generations of one family, Segu traces the same time period as Achebe’s, but focuses on the simultaneous invasions of French Christians and Muslim Arabs that destabilized the Bambara empire and resulted in enslavement and colonial rule. A history that is rarely told in the West.
Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood – Fatima Mernissi (Morocco)
The Joys of Motherhood – Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria)
African feminists writing proudly & critically. Mernissi is one of my favorite authors.
Weep Not Child – Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya)
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah (Sierra Leone)
Aké: The Years of Childhood – Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary – Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria)
Links – Nuruddin Farah (Somalia)
Desert Dawn – Waris Dirie (Somalia)
“International Development”: Poverty, health, economics, politics
Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa – Katherine Dettwyler (Mali)
Continent of Mothers, Continent of Hope: Understanding and Promoting Development in Africa Today – Torild Skard (West Africa)
My Maasai Life – Robin Wiszowaty (Kenya)
Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide – Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (global)
A troubled field but important, essential subjects to learn about. I recommend these four because they use their outsider perspectives intentionally, bridging the gap between Western audiences and a world of nuanced issues that escape the US press.
Place/history/travel
The Emperor – Ryszard Kapuściński (Ethiopia)
The Chains of Heaven: A Walk in the Ethiopian Highlands – Philip Marsden (Ethiopia)
The Barefoot Emperor: An Ethiopian Tragedy – Philip Marsden (Ethiopia)
Amedeo: A True Story of Love and War in Abyssinia – Sebastian O’Kelley (Ethiopia)
This last one is almost a joke. A lot of the English-language literature about Africa is horrible colonial garbage by adventuring, murderous explorers or self-congratulatory, pimped out settlers. I read it anyway because they’re one way to learn colonial history; sometimes colonial travel narratives are the only books available that describe a foreign place to English-speaking outsiders. This was particularly true when I lived in Ethiopia and had no real library access. But forget all that: Amedeo is one of the craziest motherfuckers who ever lived, and his story, as fucked up, fascist, and militaristic as it was, is one hell of a good one.