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What books should you read on Africa?
Chris Blattman offers up his list in two parts, here and here, the second relying on suggestions from Elliot Green. I'll add a few suggestions to these lists, including P.T. Bauer's West African Trade, Stanislav Andreski's The African Predicament, The Da Capo Guide to African Music, Martin Lynn on the palm oil trade, and Robert Klitgaard's Tropical Gangsters.
But I am forgetting lots so please help out in the comments...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 6, 2008 at 01:45 PM in Books | Permalink
Comments
How about Robert Bates' "Market and States in Tropical Africa"?
Posted by: Alejandro Hope at Mar 6, 2008 1:49:25 PM
did i miss _king leopold's ghost_ somewhere?
Posted by: anon at Mar 6, 2008 1:53:51 PM
It's a novel but "A Bend In the River" by V.S. Naipaul is very good, in my opinion.
Posted by: Ted Craig at Mar 6, 2008 2:17:32 PM
For the adventure freaks, you have to read "Sufferings in Africa" by James Riley. An amazing story.
Posted by: mike at Mar 6, 2008 2:57:03 PM
For Africa from an outsider's perspective, how about Norman Rush's Mating?
I also like Ted Craig's suggestion of _A Bend in the River_ and would add "Things Fall Apart."
Posted by: Jake at Mar 6, 2008 2:58:24 PM
The Okapi: Mysterious Animal of Congo-Zaire
Posted by: John at Mar 6, 2008 3:27:00 PM
Easterly's The White Man's Burden
Posted by: sidereal at Mar 6, 2008 3:35:34 PM
I second King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild as a great one.
We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch is really good.
The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sach is also good.
Posted by: Alex at Mar 6, 2008 3:40:31 PM
Bend in the River is great, as is John Updike's underappreciated The Coup.
Posted by: Dan Akst at Mar 6, 2008 4:07:30 PM
Black Mischief. Evelyn Vaughn?
Posted by: karl at Mar 6, 2008 5:16:16 PM
Yes, I probably should have included King Leopold's Ghost, which is a great read.
Another more recent one is Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It for You, which is an extremely well-written history of Eritrea, with lots of fascinating anecodotes about Italian colonialism, World War II battles in Africa, the presence of the US during the Cold War and Ethiopia-Eritrea relations.
Posted by: Elliott Green at Mar 6, 2008 5:22:01 PM
John Updike's "The Coup" is often brilliant (and often ridiculous). If you want to understand the marriage of Barack Obama's parents, it's all in The Coup.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 6, 2008 5:27:18 PM
I enjoyed Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil, by John Ghazvinian. The author travels to various locations in Africa and has some very interesting accounts of what oil does to the local economies.
Posted by: Asa at Mar 6, 2008 5:55:15 PM
Good list. I would add Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux and Peter Godwin's two books.
Posted by: Owen at Mar 6, 2008 7:49:46 PM
Thanks for mentioning The Coup! Who better to tell us about African politics--as well as the marriage of Barack Obama's parents--than John Updike.
Posted by: monboddo at Mar 6, 2008 8:13:32 PM
+1 for Dark Star Safari
Very sad. The best of intentions leading to the worst of results.
Should be able to create an economic model and game around DSS that students can manipulate to test assumptions and outcomes.
Posted by: Ari Tai at Mar 6, 2008 9:03:30 PM
I just finished Martin Meredith's The Fate of Africa, which is a pretty good political history of the past 50 years that came out a couple years ago.
P.J. O'Rourke's bit on Zimbabwe in Eat the Rich is also amusing.
Posted by: Tom at Mar 6, 2008 9:57:38 PM
The Wizard of the Crow by Nagugi wa Thiongo is an allegory for post-colonial Africa and one of the best novels I have ever read.
Posted by: Sean at Mar 6, 2008 10:56:19 PM
The Shackled Continent by Robert Guest
Posted by: Frank at Mar 7, 2008 12:20:42 AM
I'll offer up Diana Davis' recent Resurrecting the Granary of Rome. And of course Conrad's Heart of Darkness, or was that about Viet Nam?
Posted by: Eric H at Mar 7, 2008 12:38:53 AM
Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart for an apocalyptic read on South Africa.
Any of the books that came out of the Sophiatown Renaissance in the late 1950s. Anthony Sampson's Drum and Mike Nicholl's A Good-Looking Corpse retell the story (Sampson was editor of Drum) but the original works are great - anything by Can Themba, Casey Motsisi, Bloke Modisani, Nat Nakasa.
For African music, I'd recommend Volume 1 of the Rough Guide to World Music, which covers Africa and the Middle East with incredible thoroughness - though be prepared to follow up by spending a fortune on CDs.
Posted by: David Honigmann at Mar 7, 2008 3:29:09 AM
The Shackled Continent by Robert Guest and Mukiwa by Peter Godwin. Also William Boyd's African novels: The Ice Cream War, Brazzaville Nights, and the other one...
Posted by: Stuart at Mar 7, 2008 4:45:57 AM
The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski is one of my favorite books. He was a correspondent for the Polish foreign service through decades of African history. I read this at the tail end of 7 months in South Africa then Ghana, though I imagine I would have loved it without my own travels.
States and Power in Africa by Jeffrey Herbst is a really great analysis of African political economy. Definitely read this too.
Posted by: Seth Blumberg at Mar 7, 2008 5:43:28 AM
Blattman's excellent lists focus largely on challenging non-fiction works. I recently tried to compile a list of Informative books about Africa that Arent's Slow Reading, which some may enjoy.
I'm currently thoroughly enjoying Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow, the sharpest satire of African politics I've seen.
Posted by: dave at Mar 7, 2008 8:14:14 AM
Basil Davidson's The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State
Posted by: JT at Mar 7, 2008 9:11:44 AM
The Scramble for Africa: White Man's Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham.
For fiction, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart strikes me as the obvious choice.
Posted by: Ned at Mar 7, 2008 9:51:56 AM
For a serious research read, get the Americana Encyclopedia Annual which is published each year and has a review for each country. Provides great continuity of subject.
Posted by: jorod at Mar 7, 2008 11:33:52 AM
Next to Things Fall Apart in the fiction category, I would add Cry, The Beloved Country.
Posted by: e at Mar 7, 2008 1:42:37 PM
"Who better to tell us about African politics--as well as the marriage of Barack Obama's parents--than John Updike."
Updike has an African son-in-law and an African daughter-in-law, so his knowledge is extensive and personal. Thus his uncanny foresight into what we know now about Obama's parents' marriage -- e.g., that it was illegally bigamous -- is all in The Coup.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Mar 7, 2008 3:09:35 PM
+1 Dark Star Safari
+1 The Shadow of the Sun
Sunday by the Pool in Kigali
Posted by: Angelo at Mar 7, 2008 10:26:28 PM
+1 Dark Star Safari
+1 The Shadow of the Sun
Sunday by the Pool in Kigali
Posted by: Angelo at Mar 7, 2008 10:27:40 PM
John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent. One of the grandest and most informative books I've read on any subject.
Posted by: CG at Mar 8, 2008 1:30:48 AM
This is great; I am reading from Liberia at the moment.
"The State of Africa" by Martin Meredith is a really nice, recent journalistic/historical overview of political events across the continent since Independence.
And "Africa Works" by Chabal and Daloz is essential reading for anyone interested in political economy and patronage.
Posted by: josh at Mar 8, 2008 7:54:58 AM
I found "The Graves Are Not Yet Full" by Bill Berkeley to give a good introduction into the history and reasons of several so-called "ethnic" conflicts. Frightening how many names from in resurface.
Posted by: pdb at Mar 8, 2008 11:55:17 AM
Dark Star Safari is amazing, and so is The Soccer War by Kapuscinzki.
If anyone reads in french, a very subversive book by Cote d
Ivoire's Axelle Kabou called "Et si l'Afrique refusait le developpement?" ("What if Africa refused development?"), is a really great read.
For "fiction" - What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is stunning. It's a first person account of one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
Posted by: pc at Mar 9, 2008 10:15:57 AM
My traitor's heart. I read it everytime I'm seduced by the thought of returning to Africa.
Anything by Doris Lessing on Africa
Posted by: gweipo at Mar 11, 2008 7:56:51 AM
