Category: Africa
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The Boer War (1979) by Thomas Pakenham
Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War, first published in 1979, remains one of the most absorbing accounts of imperial warfare ever written. It is at once sweeping and immediate: a grand chronicle of armies clashing across South Africa’s high veldt, yet also a study of private fears and petty ambitions that together reshaped the British Empire’s…
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Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure (1989) by Stuart Stevens
My in-laws were medical missionaries in north east Cameroon back in the late 1990s. They were urged to read this travelogue as a preparation for life in sub Saharan Africa. I read it for fun, mainly because after flipping through a few pages I realized that it was a lot like the blog I kept…
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King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) by Adam Hochschild
A century before the campaign to support Darfur and the anti-Apartheid struggle of the 1980s there was the Congo, an international humanitarian movement propelled by celebrity endorsements (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain) and stoked by graphic images of the atrocities that happened there, which horrified and outraged and inspired action. Adam Hochschild tells…
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