Best of the Moment
africa
FiveBooks Interviews
Steve Bloomfield has been based in Nairobi since 2006, reporting from 25 countries across Africa. A former Africa correspondent for The Independent, he now writes for a range of publications including Monocle and The Observer and has also written for Newsweek, GQ and Esquire. His book Africa United: How Football Explains Africa (Africa-united.co.uk) is a political and cultural look at 13 African countries through their approach to football.
Award-winning South African writer Kevin Bloom is the author of Ways of Staying, a journey into the heart of a country that remains riven and undefined. From the murder of the author’s cousin in 2006, to the hills of Zululand after the death of historian David Rattray, from the fateful ruling party showdown at Polokwane in 2007, to the xenophobic attacks of winter 2008, it is a book that goes behind the headlines and into the marrow of a strange and troubled land. Do South Africa’s whites ‘deserve’ to feel at home in their own country? How does a white person assume a South African identity that acknowledges the past and takes responsibility for the compromised present? Is there a way that the white ‘I’ and black ‘other’ can talk outside, or around, the past?
Helon Habila was born in Nigeria in 1967. His first novel, Waiting for an Angel, won the Caine Prize in 2001. In 2002 he moved to England to become the African Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His writing has won many prizes including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, 2003. In 2005-2006 he was the first Chinua Achebe Fellow at Bard College in New York. He is contributing editor to the Virginia Quarterly Review and in 2006 co-edited the British Council’s anthology, New Writing 14. His second novel, Measuring Time was published in February 2007 and his latest novel, Oil on Water, is out soon. He currently teaches creative writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and children. He says Nigeria has a tradition of storytelling. ‘Before we were over taken by TV and video games it was very much part of our culture to tell stories. And this tradition still persists on the streets… you will see people spend hours just talking to each other!’
In 2002 Michael Peel moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to become the Financial Times’s West Africa correspondent. His first book, A Swamp Full of Dollars, is the story of how Nigeria was shaped by the oil that pumps through western cities. A mixture of reportage, oral history and investigative journalism, it exposes the unseen consequences of reckless resource extraction. It has been nominated for the Orwell Prize. He says that if you’ve lived in a country which isn’t under a dictatorship and move to a country that has been for most of the last decade, you inevitably wonder how it is that these bloodthirsty pantomime figures came to be running the place. The dictator doesn’t become a dictator overnight, it’s a step-by-step thing - people who were genuinely admirable liberation-style heroes can turn into despots over time.
Dan Morrison is the author of The Black Nile. He began his journalism career covering the Rudolph Giuliani mayoral era for Newsday. He has worked from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Cairo, where he wrote for US News & World Report, the San Francisco Chronicle and National Geographic News. He spent six months travelling the Nile for his upcoming book, which will be published in August.
Adam Foulds is a novelist and poet whose most recent novel, The Quickening Maze, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2009 and won the 2010 Southbank Show Award for Literature. His ‘verse novella’ The Broken Word, an epic poem set in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, won the Costa Poetry Prize in 2008. His first novel, The Truth About These Strange Times, won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2008.
Kenyan-born war correspondent Sam Kiley has covered 30 conflicts in more than 20 countries. He is the author of Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade. A country the size of Western Europe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it is now, he explains, was the private estate of King Leopold of Belgium until the Belgian government took it off him in 1909. ‘It was literally his private property. And the estimates vary, but he murdered the most gigantic numbers of people in forcing them to grow rubber.’ Kiley describes the sort of contemptuous arrogance of people like Rhodes – who conquered Rhodesia partly by introducing smallpox-infected blankets as gifts to the Matabele [now Ndebele].
Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet; the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers; White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award; The Promise of Happiness, winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, and, most recently, the acclaimed The Song Before It Is Sung, winner of the London Jewish Cultural Award for literature. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.
Adrian Tinniswood is obsessed with all aspects of 17th-century history. When he was researching his last book, The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in 17th-century England, he came across Sir Francis Verney, a Buckinghamshire squire who converted to Islam and became a Barbary Coast pirate. That is what led to his current fascination with pirates. Research for his new book, Enemies of Mankind: Tales of the Barbary Pirates, has shown him that the pirates of history are surprisingly similar to the pirates of today.
Philip Gourevitch is editor of the Paris Review, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and an author whose books include We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, an account of the Rwandan genocide that left 800,000 dead in 100 days. Tourism, he says, is booming in Rwanda and the country is one of the safest in Africa. ‘But don’t get too comfortable about it. Rwanda’s still a terribly complex and problematic place. It’s not an open society. It’s not a place without violence, and obviously the incredible, appalling legacy of the genocide colours everything.’