African Reading Challenge - Book 1 - Mandela, Mobutu and Me
Hi -
Well, I have finished my 1st book for the 2008 challenge.
It turns out that this book was not on the original list that I submitted but I guess I knew that as soon I made the list another book would catch my attention.
The book is "Mandela, Mobutu and Me - A Newswoman's African Journey" by Lynne Duke.
It is a memior and covers south and central Africa.
Here are my thoughts on the book:
Lynne Duke was the Washington Post’s Johannesburg bureau chief for four (4) years during the late 1990’s. She wrote the book to help preserve her memories of Africa and to help her transition back into the United States. Her “beat” included south and central Africa during a time of great transition for this region.
Ms Duke writes from the perspective of a black American woman which added a welcome pov that I do not normally see in books written about Africa. During her stay in Africa, she covered the fall of Mobutu, the growing wars that were an outgrowth of the Rwandan genocide, the Mandela rule in South Africa. Ms Duke did not shy away from being in the midst of these conflicts to get to the truth of situation and at times was in very dangerous situations with people who do not value like.
The book does a good job of describing the conflicts without taking sides and provides the necessary background information on the main characters to help you follow the every changing position of the players. But like writing about the “situations” that we read about in the newspapers, I liked that she was interested in how all of these conditions affected the everyday people and how they just want to live in peace and provide for themselves and their families.
Also interesting was Ms. Duke’s writing about the American and other western countries role in these conflicts and how their backing has nothing to do with what is good for the country or the people but just want is good for the US or more specifically the President at that time.
Ms. Duke has some admiration for Nelson Mandela and expressed very much that she wanted him to succeed and transform South Africa in a manner and direction that has not happened to any of the other African countries once they were “granted” independence. During the course of the book we are told of the many challenges and decisions that South Africa faces as it tried to balance moving the country forward and getting the black and white South Africans to think differently and provide the necessary carrots for each of the groups to move towards forming a new society.
I very much enjoyed this book and now have a better understanding of the “conflicts” that happened in the late 1990’s so of which are still going on today. This was a faced paced book that provided an insight in what it was like to be a person living in this time period in this part of the world.
beachlover20855 started this discussion 1 year ago. ( )
