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Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge

10 best books like Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge (William Powers): The House at Sugar Beach, Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman, This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President, When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda, Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood, Evita: In My Own Words, Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa

The House at Sugar Beach
AuthorHelene Cooper
ISBN0743266242
Journalist Helene Cooper examines the violent past of her home country Liberia and the effects of its 1980 military coup in this deeply personal memoir and finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Helene Cooper is “Congo,” a descendant of two Liberian dynasties—traced...
Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
AuthorMpho M'Atsepo Nthunya
A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's voice is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world...
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President
AuthorEllen Johnson Sirleaf
ISBN0061353477
In January 2006, after the Republic of Liberia had been racked by fourteen years of brutal civil conflict, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Africa's "Iron Lady" was sworn in as president, an event that marked a tremendous turning point in the history of the West African nation.
In this stirring memoir, Sirleaf...
When She Was White: The True Story of a Family Divided by Race
AuthorJudith Stone
ISBN0786868988
During the worst years of official racism in South Africa, the story of one young girl gripped the nation and came to symbolize the injustice, corruption, and arbitrary nature of apartheid. Born in 1955 to a pro-apartheid Afrikaner couple, Sandra Laing was officially registered and raised as a white...
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
AuthorHoward W. French
ISBN1400030277
In A Continent for the Taking Howard W. French, a veteran correspondent for The New York Times, gives a compelling firsthand account of some of Africa’s most devastating recent history–from the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, to Charles Taylor’s arrival in Monrovia, to the genocide in Rwanda and the...
Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
AuthorAlex de Waal
ISBN1842776975
In the predominantly Kobe village of Girgira close to the Chad border, local people said that Antonovs, gunships, troops, and militia from West Darfur killed 148 people in January 2004. [the quote relates the story of one woman who was held and raped for 7 days, whose handicapped brother was shot and...
Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda
AuthorMichael Barnett
ISBN0801488672
Why was the UN a bystander during the Rwandan genocide? Do its sins of omission leave it morally responsible for the hundreds of thousands of dead? Michael Barnett, who worked at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1993 to 1994, covered Rwanda for much of the genocide. Based on his first-hand experiences,...
Notes from the Hyena's Belly: An Ethiopian Boyhood
AuthorNega Mezlekia
ISBN0312289146
Winner of the Governor General's Award
A Library Journal Best Book of 2001

Part autobiography and part social history, Notes from the Hyena's Belly offers an unforgettable portrait of Ethiopia, and of Africa, during the 1970s and '80s, an era of civil war, widespread famine, and mass...
Evita: In My Own Words
AuthorEva Perón
ISBN1565843533
I went into Evita: In My Own Words with no knowledge of Eva Perón other than that there was a rock opera about her, and that the Simpsons parodied it. I didn't know who she was in history, or as a person. I didn't know of the controversy that rocked her world.

In general, I tend to loathe introductions...
Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa
AuthorTanya Shaffer
ISBN1400032598
“It's my life, and if I want to run from it I can,” quips Tanya Shaffer. An incorrigible wanderer, Shaffer has a habit of fleeing domesticity for the joys and rigors of the open road. This time her destination is Ghana, and what results is a transformative year spent roaming the African continent....
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village
AuthorSarah Erdman
ISBN0312423128
The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn't yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she...
Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival
AuthorFadumo Korn
ISBN1558615318

This powerful memoir portrays the life-altering transformation of a feisty nomad girl who undergoes genital excision. Crippled with rheumatism as a result of the cutting, Fadumo Korn, who once freely roamed the deserts of her native Somalia, is sent to live with a wealthy uncle, brother to the...
The Village of Waiting
AuthorGeorge Packer
ISBN0374527806
Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, this book is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped...
Looking for Lovedu: A Woman's Journey Through Africa
AuthorAnn Jones
ISBN0375705333
The adventure began when a young British photographer, Kevin Muggleton, suggested driving from one end of Africa to the other–“You know, the old ‘Cape to Cairo’ sort of thing.” For the renowned feminist writer Ann Jones, it soon became an expedition with a mission: to find the legendary...
Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea
AuthorRobert D. Kaplan
ISBN1400034523
Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for...
Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel
AuthorJeffrey Tayler
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working
AuthorRobert Calderisi
ISBN0300120176
After years of frustration at the stifling atmosphere of political correctness surrounding discussions of Africa, long time World Bank official Robert Calderisi speaks out. He boldly reveals how most of Africa's misfortunes are self-imposed, and why the world must now deal differently with the...
Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing
AuthorRob Spillman
ISBN0143114735
A one-of-a-kind collection showcasing the energy of new African literature

Coming at a time when Africa and African writers are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance, Gods and Soldiers captures the vitality and urgency of African writing today. With stories from northern Arabic-speaking...
African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe
AuthorDoris Lessing
ISBN0006546900
In this portrait of Doris Lessing's homeland, the author recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992, after being banned from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her political views and opposition to the minority white Government. The visits constitute a journey to the...
The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa
AuthorAdam Roberts
ISBN1586483714
Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country roughly the size of the state of Maryland. Humid, jungle covered, and rife with unpleasant diseases, natives call it Devil Island. Its president in 2004, Obiang Nguema, had been accused of cannibalism, belief in witchcraft, mass murder, billiondollar corruption,...
The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo
AuthorErnesto Che Guevara
ISBN0802138349
Ernesto "Che" Guevara was one of the greatest exemplars of the revolutionary 1960s, a man whose heroic adventures were essential to the success of the Cuban Revolution and whose legend fired the imaginations of a whole generation. In 1965, amid worldwide conjecture, Guevara left Cuba, where he was...
Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil
AuthorJohn Ghazvinian
ISBN0151011389
Although Africa has long been known to be rich in oil, extracting it hadn’t seemed worth the effort and risk until recently. But with the price of Middle Eastern crude oil skyrocketing and advancing technology making reserves easier to tap, the region has become the scene of a competition between...
The Challenge for Africa
AuthorWangari Maathai
ISBN0307377407
Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, offers a refreshingly unique perspective on the challenges facing Africa, even as she calls for a moral revolution among Africans themselves, who, she argues, are culturally deracinated, adrift between worlds.

The...
The Unlikely Secret Agent
AuthorRonnie Kasrils
Reading like a spy thriller, this biography tells the remarkable story of a young woman’s courage in apartheid-ridden South Africa. As the book opens, in 1963, South Africa is in crisis and the white state is under siege. On August 15, the dreaded security police swoop down on Griggs Bookstore—Durban’s...
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