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Beautifully written yet highly controversial, An Image of Africa asserts Achebe's belief in Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and his conviction that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness only serves to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black people. Also included is The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe's searing outpouring of his frustrations with his country. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
It is often taken for granted that "the West's image of Africa" is a dark and savage jungle, the "white man's grave" which formed the backdrop for Joseph Conrad's hyper-canonical Heart of Darkness. In the wake of decolonization and independence, African writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o provided alternate accounts of the continent, at a moment when doing so was rightly seen to be "The Empire Writes Back." Yet in the years since then, "going beyond the clichés" has itself become a kind of cliché. In the last decade in particular, the global investment class has taken up the appeal to "Re-brand Africa" with a vengeance. Providing positive images of Africa is not necessarily a radical critique of empire's enduring legacies, in other words; it can also be an effort to brand and market "Africa" as a product for capital speculation. In White Men's Country: The Image of Africa in the American Century, I describe how American literary investments in Africa grew, alongside the slow decline of European cultural imperialism. If European writers and artists worked to legitimize violent conquest by represent the continent as "darkest Africa," the informal American empire of capital created an American counter-narrative, showing Africa to be a brilliant frontier of unbounded future possibility. When this self-consciously American tradition pictured "Africa," I argue, they turned their gaze away from the equatorial rain forests of West and Central Africa that Joseph Conrad had made famous and instead focused on the Great Rift Valley of present day Kenya and Tanzania. There, they looked for and found a renewed vision of the closing American frontier, a "brightest Africa" of rebirth, redemption, and recovery. My first chapter locates the beginning of this tradition in the United States' emergence from the Civil War, and in Henry Morton Stanley's world famous 1872 exploration narrative, How I Found Livingstone. Stanley was born a Welsh orphan--and in his later years, he returned to this identity as a British gentleman--but when he "found" Livingstone, he was pretending to be an American and his narrative pictures Africa by explicit analogy to the American Southwest. Stanley employs the same narratives and images he had used to describe General Hancock's war on the plains Indians, when he first made his name as a journalist. By omitting the American chapter in Stanley's career, historians have allowed the British author of Through the Dark Continent and In Darkest Africa to represent the entirety of the Anglo-American exploration tradition. In this chapter, by contrast, I recover how Stanley's most famous and influential text explored and exploited the fracture between British and American, asserting the imperial destiny of the rising American state as it symbolically rescued the ailing and elderly British. In my second and third chapters, I show how Theodore Roosevelt invented himself, on the American frontier, and then repeated the gesture in Africa, popularizing (if not inventing) inventing the big game safari. Before his 1910 bestseller African Game Trails, the word "safari" had signified the dependence of European explorers on their Arab-African guides and interpreters, but Roosevelt introduced the word into global English by transforming the safari into a globally comprehensible practice of seeing, as well as popularizing the sense of Africa which it presumes: an "Africa" which is open and available to be seen and shot. By focusing on the tourist's power to see and comprehend, he made the visibility of skin-color the epistemological dividing line between those who actively see and shoot and those who are passively seen and shot. And by adapting the frontier persona he had created in his "Western" memoirs--Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail, and The Wilderness Hunter--he made Africa a site where Americans could still experience the pleasures of the now-closed Western frontier. In the 1930's, the safari tradition was divided between the campy fantasy of the Tarzan cinematic franchise--which sought to domesticate, rehabilitate, or render invisible the racialized violence of the Rooseveltian safari--and Ernest Hemingway's nostalgic "realism," which sought to mourn the impossibility of Roosevelt in the modern era. In my final chapter, I stage Tarzan against Hemingway as two sides of the same coin, the fantasy which could not find grounding in fact and the reality which had no room for romance. For both, the problem was the non-existence of what Roosevelt took to be his primary aesthetic problem: transforming racialized violence into paternalistic (and patriarchal) love.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Bloomberg • Forbes • The Spectator Recipient of Foreign Policy's 2013 Albie Award A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty "The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty—disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development." In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea. For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs's formula for ending global poverty. THE IDEALIST is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the reality of human life.
From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality “A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian “Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.” Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. This groundbreaking collection brings together, for the first time, Wainaina’s pioneering writing on the African continent, including many of his most critically acclaimed pieces, such as the viral satirical sensation “How to Write About Africa.” Working fearlessly across a range of topics—from politics to international aid, cultural heritage, and redefined sexuality—he describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of his home country and continent. These works present the portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy.
An Enchanting Darkness: the American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century is more than just another look at racism, cultural bias, and the images that under-gird widely held misconceptions about an entire continent. Going beyond convention, this important new work analyzes the way truisms and stereotypes have perpetuated negative and naive images of Africa and its people. Dennis Hickey and Ken Wylie probe the reasons why such unfortunate views have persisted, even among groups of supposedly well-educated Americans. They examine the concept of the "Noble Savage" and trace its evolution within the media of our popular culture and within the literature produced by scholars. American perceptions of Africa are shown to have been influenced by French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's ideas, research undertaken by anthropologists Franz Boaz and Melville Herskovits, and by nine decades of pervasive imagery presented by twentieth-century writers like Saul Bellow, Laura Bohannan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alex Haley, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Theroux, Maria Thomas, John Updike, and Alice Walker. Finally, An Enchanting Darkness examines the symbolic conventions presented to the American public that also have been manipulated to create counter-myths that are as hollow and destructive as the older shibboleth of Africa as a "dark continent".
For many Americans the mention of Africa immediately conjures up images of safaris, ferocious animals, strangely dressed "tribesmen," and impenetrable jungles. Although the occasional newspaper headline mentions authoritarian rule, corruption, genocide, devastating illnesses, or civil war in Africa, the collective American consciousness still carries strong mental images of Africa that are reflected in advertising, movies, amusement parks, cartoons, and many other corners of society. Few think to question these perceptions or how they came to be so deeply lodged in American minds. Mistaking Africa looks at the historical evolution of this mind-set and examines the role that popular media plays in its creation. The authors address the most prevalent myths and preconceptions and demonstrate how these prevent a true understanding of the enormously diverse peoples and cultures of Africa. Updated throughout, the fourth edition covers the entire continent (North and sub-Saharan Africa) and provides new analysis of topics such as social media and the Internet, the Ebola crisis, celebrity aid, and the Arab Spring. Mistaking Africa is an important book for African studies courses and for anyone interested in unraveling American misperceptions about the continent.
Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries.