Africa - Nonfiction
Top 10 Africa - Nonfiction
: They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, Out of Africa, Africa in History, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, The Sabi, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa, The Ukimwi Road, Race to Dakar, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America
| Author | Ivan Van Sertima |
| ISBN | 0812968174 |
They Came Before Columbus reveals a compelling, dramatic, and superbly detailed documentation of the presence and legacy of Africans in ancient America. Examining navigation and shipbuilding; cultural analogies between Native Americans and Africans; the transportation of plants, animals,...
| Author | Isak Dinesen |
| ISBN | 0679600213 |
Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover,...
| Author | Basil Davidson |
| ISBN | 1842122460 |
Prior to the original publication of Africa in History, the history and development of Africa had been measured by the European concept of "civilization," applying a Eurocentric approach to African art and literature. Basil Davidson's landmark work presents the inner growth of Africa and its worldwide...
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
| Author | Philip Gourevitch |
| ISBN | 0312243359 |
In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called on everyone in the Hutu majority to kill everyone in the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months, 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy...
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
| Author | Jean Hatzfeld |
| ISBN | 0312425031 |
During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony...
| Author | Diane Brown |
| ISBN | 1909740845 |
She does not know how, but has a sabi from her earliest memory that she was different. What she does know is that 'difference' had currency in the past, and it certainly still has currency today. The Sabi will have an effect on you - have no doubt about that. In her debut novel, Diane Brown takes a scenic and...
A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa
| Author | Howard W. French |
| ISBN | 1400030277 |
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...
| Author | Dervla Murphy |
| ISBN | 0006548024 |
The Ukimwi Road is the riveting account of renowned traveler Dervla Murphy's most intrepid journey yet - 3,000 miles by bicycle through the heart of sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has recently drawn the world's attention as an epicenter of the AIDS epidemic (ukimwi is Swahili for AIDS). Along her...
| Author | Charley Boorman |
| ISBN | 0316731927 |
In January 2006, 230 people raced in trucks, cars, and motorbikes from Lisbon to Dakar in the 28th annual Dakar rally—the most challenging race in existence. Taking part was a team of three bikers—Matt Hall, Simon Pavey, and actor and bike nut Charley Boorman. After his celebrated trip round the...
Darfur: A Short History of a Long War
| Author | Alex de Waal |
| ISBN | 1842776975 |
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...
This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President
| Author | Ellen Johnson Sirleaf |
| ISBN | 0061353477 |
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...
War Child: A Child Soldier's Story
| Author | Emmanuel Jal |
| ISBN | 0312383223 |
In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven year old Sudanese boy, living in a small village with his parents, aunts, uncles, and siblings. But as Sudan’s civil war moved closer—with the Islamic government seizing tribal lands for water, oil, and other resources—Jal’s...
| Author | Elizabeth Marshall Thomas |
A study of primitive people which, for beauty of...style and concept, would be hard to match." -- The New York Times Book Review
In the 1950s Elizabeth Marshall Thomas became one of the first Westerners to live with the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert in Botswana and South-West Africa. Her account...
| Author | Jeffrey Tayler |
| ISBN | 0609808265 |
Faced with an identity crisis in his work and his life, seasoned traveler and journalist Jeffrey Tayler made a bold decision. He would leave behind his mundane existence in Moscow to re-create the legendary British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the Congo in a dugout canoe, stocked with food,...
Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America
| Author | Francis Bok |
| ISBN | 0312306245 |
Winner of the Books for a Better Life/Suze Orman First Book Award
May 1986: Seven-year-old Francis Bok was selling his mother's eggs and peanuts near his village in southern Sudan when Arab raiders on horseback burst into the quiet marketplace, murdering men and gathering the women and young...
Lords of the Atlas: The Rise and Fall of the House of Glaoua, 1893-1956
| Author | Gavin Maxwell |
| ISBN | 1585746339 |
Set in the medieval city of Marrakesh and the majestic kasbahs of the High Atlas mountains, `Lords of the Atlas' tells the extraordinary story of the Madani and T'hami el Glaoui, warlord brothers who carved out a feudal fiefdom in southern Morocco in the early twentieth century. Quislings of the French...
Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda
| Author | Michael Barnett |
| ISBN | 0801488672 |
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,...
| Author | Ernie Pyle |
| ISBN | 0803287771 |
A wonderful and enduring tribute to American troops in the Second World War, Here Is Your War is Ernie Pyle’s story of the soldiers’ first campaign against the enemy in North Africa. With unequaled humanity and insight, Pyle tells how people from a cross-section of America—ranches, inner...
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate....
