About Africa
Explore the best books on Africa with our curated reading list, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel to Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari, offering deep insights into African history, travel, and biography.
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A Bend in the River
by V. S. Naipaul
Widely hailed as the Nobel Prize-winning author’s greatest work, this novel takes us into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. • "Brilliant." —The New York Times In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. "Confirms Naipaul's position as one of the best writers now at work." —Newsweek
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Out of America
by Keith B. Richburg
This soul-searching personal journey into the African-American identity, written by an award-winning reporter for the "Washington Post", takes readers behind today's cultural battlefields. Map.
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Dark Star Safari
by Paul Theroux
In his first new travel book in eight years, the endearingly irascible Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry and train.
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The Blue Nile
by Alan Moorehead
In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead continues the classic, thrilling narration of adventure he began in The White Nile, depicting this exotic place through the lives of four explorers so daring they can be considered among the world's original adventurers -- each acting and reacting in separate expeditions against a bewildering background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and all-out war.
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Infidel
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her life story. An advocate for free speech and women's rights, Hirsi Ali lives under armed protection because of her outspoken criticism of the Islamic faith in which she was raised.