Africa General
Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
by Mark Mathabane, New American Library Trade, 1995
Into the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa
by Karl Maier, John Wiley & Sons, 1997
Inside the New Africa by Karl Maier, carries a powerful and surprising message about Africa: people at the grassroots throughout the continent are taking control of their lives and their destinies in inspirational ways, by forging a quiet revolution that holds immense promise for the future of the region.
Into Africa: A Journey Through the Ancient Empires
by Marq de Villiers, Sheila Hirtle
Into Africa is a marvelous exploration of Africa that will shatter any preconceptions readers may have. A compelling narrative describes the adventures and discoveries of a modern journey through African but it is equally a journey through Africa's past. The Africa that emerges is rich, exotic, complex and endlessly fascinating.
The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity
by Michael Maren, Free Press, 1997
A stunning personal narrative of best intentions gone awry, Michael Maren, at one time an aid worker and journalist in Somalia, writes of the failure of international charities, such as CARE and Save the Children, who he claims does anything but. Maren also attacks the United Nation's "humanitarian" missions are controlled by agribusinesses and infighting bureaucrats.
My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe and His Conscience
by Rian Malan, Vintage Books, 1991
Critically acclaimed throughout America, My Traitor's Heart is an astonishing work of reportage, at once beautiful, horrifying, and profound--a book unlike any other about South Africa. Rian Malan, former crime reporter, searches for the truth behind apartheid, and finds it not in the way blacks and whites live, but in the way they die at one another's hands.

Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
by Malidoma Patrice Some, Penguin USA, 1995
One of the most astonishing and intimate accounts of spiritual transformation ever written, this is the true story of an African's shaman's initiation--a remarkable sharing of living African traditions, offered with compassion for those struggling with our contemporary crisis of spirit.

Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent
by Blaine Harden, Houghton Mifflin Co, 1991
Blaine Harden's Africa: Dispatches From a Fragile Continent is at once fascinating and sobering. A former Washington Post bureau chief in sub-Saharan Africa from 1985 to 1989, Harden grabs the reader with his vivid prose which weaves together a clear grasp of depressing and repressive African politics; eye-catching facts that plague the continent, diligently dug up; and tales of one character after another that together provide a sharp snapshot of Africa in the eighties.

Yorugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior
by Marimba Ani, Africa World Press, 1994
This is a text that ought to be compulsory reading in African universities because one real problem with the way we deal with Europe and the white diaspora is that we have never really taken time off to study and understand the European collective consciousness. Marimba Ani is one of those writers who has. An exciting and well-researched text.
Recommended by: Mudasia Kadasia (kamu.stolav-vgs@mail.rogaland-f.kommune.no

From Africa Readings recommended by Philip Gourevitch at LOCAL COLOR: RECOMMENDED READING ON AFRICA

(Of course, most of the best novels, memoirs, and essays about Africa are written by Africans, and if you only have time to read one short and perfect novel, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart would be it (1994, paperback from Doubleday). Achebe's superb essay collection, Hopes and Impediments (1988, recent paperback frrom Heinemann) — which offers powerfully direct critiques of the blinders that afflict much European and American writing about Africa and includes Achebe's essential essay on Heart of Darkness — is equally indispensable.

Nigerian literature also boasts Amos Tutuola's wizardly novel The Palm Wine Drinkard (1953, recent paperback from Greenwood Press), and the work of playwright and novelist Wole Soyinka, whose memoir of his village boyhood during World War II, Ake: The Years of Childhood (1983, recent paperback from Random House) helped to win him the Nobel Prize.

In a more essayistic vein, the Ghanian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House (1993, paperback from Oxford University Press) mixes memoir with meditation on the challenges of African identity amid the rapid transformations of the late 20th century.

South Africa adds to the mix of African literature the works of white writers whose only identity is African. Two plays by Athol Fugard, Sizwe Banzi is Dead and The Island (1987, Theatre Company), are especially powerful. Fugard's journals, simply titled Notebooks (1990, paperback from Theatre Communications Group), also make for compelling reading.

Nadine Gordimer's July's People (1982, paperback from Viking Pen) is a novel among the Nobel laureate's very best, and the many powerful novels of James M. Coetzee include the astonishing Waiting for the Barbarians and The Life and Times of Michael K. (1982 and 1984 from Viking Pen).