Great African Reads discussion

This is a great challenge! Since I'm a day late and the first number was announced, I am cheating by putting on the book I am currently reading-- and haven't been able to finish yet-- at number 12.

The first half of these are all sitting unread on my bookshelf, and the last half will help me catch up on the Tour d'Afrique I missed and a one longstanding TBR.

1 Tomorrow's Battlefield : U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa
2 Africa's New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes (Chad*)
3 What Is the What (Sudan)
4 State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic (CAR)
5 Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Kenya)
6 City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp (Kenya)
7 She Called Me Woman (Nigeria)
8 The Thing Around Your Neck (Nigeria)
9 Women and the War on Boko Haram: Wives, Weapons, Witnesses (Nigeria)
10 The Wretched of the Earth
11 Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (DRC)
12 Beneath the Lion's Gaze (Ethiopia)
13 Making Sense of the Central African Republic (CAR)
14 God's Bits of Wood (Senegal*)
15 Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Kenya (Kenya)
16 The travails of a first wife (Nigeria)
17 Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (CAR)
18 Black Moses (Congo Brazza*)
19 I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (Eritrea*)
20 A book TBD about the Rwandan genocide and aftermath (Rwanda*)
21 So Long a Letter (Senegal*)
22 Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe*)
23 Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon (Cameroon)
24 Who Fears Death

Swapped out in June due to limited availability:
- #15 Passage of Tears or The Land Without Shadows (Djibouti*)
- #16 Do They Hear You When You Cry (Togo*)
- #17 When Rain Clouds Gather (Botswana*)
- #18 African Psycho
- #20 Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (São Tomé and Principe*)

Read early:
- Hope's Wristwatch (Nigeria)

Great list! I enjoyed Nervous Conditions, So Long a Letter, and God's Bite of Wood.

Great list there, I read, The thing around your neck, The Wretched of the Earth, God's Bits of Wood, So Long a Letter and Nervous Conditions.

Finished number 12, Beneath the Lion's Gaze. This is historical fiction about the last days of Haile Selasse's empire in Ethiopia and the rise of the authoritarian communist regime known as the Derg, with particular focus on how the Derg turned on and targeted the revolutionary student movement that helped fell the emperor. I've spent several hours on different visits to Ethiopia in the haunting, hard to bear Red Terror Museum in Addis, which contains photos of the missing, the clothes clung to by loved ones and finally donated to posterity, skulls dug from mass graves, and wrenching art depicting the torture and the terror. It's all the more disorienting for lack of English, in-depth curation. A small, short tour packed with raw emotion focused on the cruelty of the moment but little in the way of story to connect what was before to the Terror to what is now. This book provides some of this, especially for the youth in Addis. They are my parents' age now.

Review is here.

Tinea wrote: "Finished number 12, Beneath the Lion's Gaze. This is historical fiction about the last days of Haile Selasse's empire in Ethiopia and the rise of the authoritarian communist regime k..."

Great book.

Very interesting list, thanks Tinea for the inspiration. I've also recently been recommended Making Sense of the Central African Republic so now I hope number 13 is going to come out so I can also read your review :).

Finished Africa's New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes after only 3 years!! Review to come, but feeling smart & also so glad to put this back on the shelf!

Tinea wrote: "This is a great challenge! Since I'm a day late and the first number was announced, I am cheating by putting on the book I am currently reading-- and haven't been able to finish yet-- at number 12...."

A great list! I also have State of Rebellion on my list for the Radom Reads challenge here in this group - it sounded promising!

Behind on reviews, but very happy to finally finish March's excellent and enriching Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, in time to better understand the Rwanda genocide commemorations. This book starts at the end of the genocide and carries the story forward into the global war in Eastern DRC.

Started on April's Congo-Brazza read, Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou. I'd originally had his African Psycho on the list but I couldn't find a library copy (and the one on my TBR shelf fell off some time ago...) so I went with anothe rby the same author & about the same country-- one I missed on the Tour d'Afrique. Sorry francophones, keep thinking I'll join you but I'm doing this one in English-- while chilling in a nearby francophone country for what it's worth.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Great books you're reading Tinea!
Always welcome to join us in French :)

Wow, that's some serious reading you're getting through!

Read and reviewed April's Black Moses, quick, lyrical, a little choppy. Would like to read more and longer by the author-- wanted more from him here.

Reviewed March's read, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, here.

Still waiting to collect May and June's novels from the library, but I think they'll both go quickly: Passage of Tears & Who Fears Death.

Completed May's I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation (Eritrea, replacing a book on Djibouti that kept getting recalled by interlibrary loan before I opened it) and June's Who Fears Death. Reviews pending. Reeling a little from Who Fears Death.

I read and reviewed July's Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon, which I found enjoyable and complex, but hard to penetrate.

Starting August's doozy: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, and also skipped ahead to read & review Hope's Wristwatch, short stories and poems that moralized annnoyingly while bringing other Nigerian annoyances to vivid life. Hopefully this buys me a free month in case Imperial Reckoning takes two!

I finished August's Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya on British mass atrocity (torture, internment, starvation, murder) in response to Kenya's militant anti-colonial movement. And. The intimate & systematized sadism, perversion, eliminationist white supremacy. I knew a lot but this is so much more. Review.

I also reviewed June's Who Fears Death (but this review by Zanna is better). Next up is Making Sense of the Central African Republic.

Ohhh, thank you, thank you reading group/challenge, without which I never would have finished this academic reader on the Central African Republic that has been staring at me from my shelf for the 4 years since it was published, and since I left CAR thinking about all these things, in that nice stage of ignorance where you really, really appreciate just how ignorant you are. It's a good book and it covers a lot of ground! Here is my review.

That was a 2-monther, so I skipped October's Tomorrow's Battlefield : U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. I may still make it up later as I have a lot of airplane and lonely hotel time coming up soon-- good for hard reads.

In the meantime, I've started November's God's Bits of Wood.

You're really going full speed ahead there! Well done

This was such a helpful challenge to push me to get through some of the more demanding books I've collected over the years! Some of these were really fantastic, 5-star reads, while others were informative or helped me meet a Tour d'Afrique country I missed. I really lucked out and loved most of these, even if they included some nonfiction slogs!

I ended up reading 10 of 12. 11 of 12 if you count one I read early and then substituted with another book when its number came up. The best case of cheating I did was to buy a book so I could put it on my shelf so it would count. :D Hope to do this again next year.

Africa's New Oil: Power, Pipelines and Future Fortunes (Chad*)
4 stars | Review

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Kenya)
5 stars | Review

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (DRC)
4 stars | Review

Beneath the Lion's Gaze (Ethiopia)
4 stars | Review

Making Sense of the Central African Republic
4 stars | Review

God's Bits of Wood
5 stars | Need to write review

Black Moses (Congo Brazza*)
3 stars | Review

I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation
4 stars | Need to write review-- it's complicated!

Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon (Cameroon)
3 stars | Review

Who Fears Death
5 stars | Review

Bonus: Hope's Wristwatch
2 stars | Review