Great Lakes of Africa

I spent a good portion of my undergrad years studying and being in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Here’s a few of the best books I’ve read about it, plus a few other, more general African-history books I liked.

• I Didn’t Do It For You Michela Wrong Eritrea’s hisotry, told through a profile-heavy, narrative nonfiction style. This book made me fall in love with the idea of Eritrea — I actually booked a flight to the capital, Asmara, when I finished. (I haven’t actually been though; the true story here is a bit longer.)

• West with the Night Beryl Markham The romance of small planes coupled Out of Africa-style expat hijinks. It’s hard not to like &mdahs; or want to have been in — this book.

• The Seasons of Thomas Tebo John Nagenda Sort of Animal Farm, but by a Ugandan and about that country. I stumbled across this book randomly — on a shelf at Powell’s! — and wish I’d found more like it.

• In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz Michela Wrong The most sensible account of the last days of Mobutu’s role in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) — which sounds an entirely upside-down, incomprehensible time.

• Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda Alison des Forges The book on the Rwandan genocide, if you wanted such a thing. des Forges was an anthropologist who made a career on Rwanda before anyone, anywhere (nearly) had heard of the country

• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Jason Stearns The best and most comprehensible history of the decade-long Congo wars that I’ve come across. The conflict itself is monstrous (more people (four million!) killed than any conflict since a world war, most of whom were civilians) but this book humanizes it all (as much as can be done.) It’s also pretty accessible; you can read this one without having spent years paying attention to what had been going on in the region.

• Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Gerard Prunier The other “best book” I’ve read on conflict in the Great Lakes region, though this one is denser and (much) more inside baseball than Jason Stearns’ book.

• The Scramble for Africa Thomas Pakenham Long and dense, though the best take on Africa-during-early-colonialism of which I know.

• The Origins of AIDS Jacques Pepin An epidemiologist’s take on from where the AIDS virus came and why it jumped to humans. Super interesting (I found) history that criss crosses Haitian blood donations, Belgian infrastructure, Norwegian aid, and some bad bush meat.