African Curriculum
BOOKS
“A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah
I stayed home for three days without leaving my bed to finish this book. It’s a true story about a brave, clever young boy whose whole loving family is massacred by Sierra Leone’s RUF rebels. He runs through the jungle for something like 6 months to escape them, and his only salvation is a rap tape of “OPP” in his pocket that amuses villagers who would otherwise burn him at the stake (as in, “You down with OPP man? You know me!”). He’s a hero, anyone would like this book whether they care about Africa or not. It’s also a great way to learn about Sierra Leone and west African values in general, which are quite impressive.
“Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis” by Gerald Hanley
If you don’t get why on earth I am so keen on Somalia, read this book. Gerald Hanley is a soul searcher who imparts precious insights about the human condition and I think he saved me from five nervous breakdowns. His memoir is about his five years working as a British military captain in Somalia during WWII, and accounts brilliantly the character of his endlessly charming Somali soldiers.
“Another Day of Life” by Ryszard Kapuscinski
This guy is the original badass. He drives across embattled Angola dodging ambushes, land mines, roadblocks and South African mercenaries, then does some calisthenics. (He also manages to explain the convoluted roots of the Angola’s 20-year civil war in a non-boring way.)
“The Graves Are Not Yet Full” by Bill Berkeley
Bill is one of my mentors and in this comprehensive tome of African politics in the 1980s he gets into the nitty gritty of corruption, war and genocide. It’s not an easy read but it’s edifying. All of those vague African tragedies from McNeil Lehrer or whatever that old news show was called in 1980’s are here in this book — a great service to all of us who were just kids at the time. Bill illuminates all the disgraceful blunders of the Reagan administration and the various ethnic cleansing campaigns that we inadvertently funded with our tax dollars.
“Whites” by Norman Rush
Okay, so this dude Norman Rush has gotta be one of the driest writers around, and his books scream social criticism with their silences in the place of expected narrative judgement. This one is about expats in Botswana. You want to hate the expats, but you also empathize, uncomfortably, and you sort of love them because they’re totally colonialists and living this sick romantic ideal. Each short story is like a documentary film. The one long story by a young (African) orphan/street child in Botswana called “Thieving” might just be the best thing ever captured on what it’s like to be an African. I’m not African, but I think I know.
“Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures” by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson
This is not a book about Africa, but it has a long and significant segment on Operation Restore Hope/UNISOM in Mogadishu, 1993, a joint U.S./UN military effort to pacify Somalia’s capital. That mission is still heavily referred to in geopolitical dialogue, and worth understanding if you’re a curious person. This book’s inside angle is easier to follow than “Black Hawk Down,” which is a boring and creepily patriotic book best-suited to retired U.S. military officials. “Emergency Sex” is riveting, it’s pop, it’s sincere, and a little unecessarily sordid. Poor Heidi’s agent probably forced her to talk only about sex because “that’s what sells” and women aren’t supposed to know about wars anyway. It’s alternating journal entries by three civilian UN peacekeepers in the 1980s and 90s. It’s about war, aid workers, and badasses. Andrew is a doctor who actually windsurfed on ponds in Cambodia on the weekend when he was working there as a doctor for some aid agency, called by God to cure the ravaged. And he built his own house on an island of natives, with no other expats around. These are things you may not immediately admire, but I can tell you that keeping up developed-world habits like windsurfing or tennis in a developing country is extremeley brave and difficult but by all means a right of expats. Those who manage usually charm the communities, even though the jealous expats say they are sick for enjoying themselves with such bourgeois sports in such unfortunate milieus. We all say this at some point, actually, but we all wish we had the guts to windsurf on a pond in Cambodia, and live among natives on a marshy island in a hand-made house.
MUSIC
Ethiopiques Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale 1969-1974, by Mulatu Astatqe
You never knew Ethiopia was one of the coolest places on earth right? You will learn.
Club Sodade, by Cesaria Evora
This album would make the perfect soundtrack to Kapuscinski’s book if it were made into a black and white art film. Cesaria Evora is from Cape Verde in west Africa so she sings in Portuguese. I like the remix album as much as her acoustic stuff, it’s got a really poignant cinematic vibe.
MOVIES
“Blood Diamond”
This is a damn good Hollywood product. It also manages to really teach about the problem in Sierra Leone and depict the enduring wholesomeness of so many Africans even after being subjected to the most cynical war crimes. Leo’s soldier of fortune is not a fantasy. They really exist, because I know one named Juan. Only thing is most foreign correspondents are colder than Jennifer Connely’s character, a deep and winsome aberration.
“The Lost Boys of Sudan”
This loaded documentary about South Sudanese refugees moving to the U.S. for a better life and then realizing they’d rather be refugees in their own country than live in Texas shows why it’s not necessarily benevolent for celebrities to adopt poor African children and move them to Beverly Hills. It also shows how empty American culture can be. And how important it is for African countries to retain ambitious young people rather than lose them in a brain drain.
“The Lord of War”
Appealingly rebellious premise and protagonist in this Nicholas Cage movie about an arms dealer during the cold war. It’s handsomely edited and depicts the Liberian problems of the 1980s and 90s. See it if you want to understand Charles Taylor, an epic villain. A friend of mine also wrote a great article about Charles Taylor’s equally sinister dum-dum son, Chuckie, which you can read here. And my badass friend, veteran Africa correspondent Massimo Alberizzi, says he wrote the articles that inspired this screenplay.