Michela Wrong

When presented with a title of this kind, many readers think they know what to expect: drugged-up child soldiers, wince-inducing brutality, ranting demagogues, rebels in women’s wigs. This, thankfully, is not that book. It is something more nuanced, elliptical and elegant. Ghana is in a different league from Liberia, Guinea or Sierra Leone, its traumatised West African neighbours. Even before the recent discovery that it was sitting on large oil reserves, it was routinely hailed as one of Africa’s success stories. As the ‘first’ in the title makes clear, it has certainly been through its share of political upheaval since independence from Britain in 1957.

A stomping bestseller is a hard thing to recover from. The author is doomed to see all future works compared and found wanting. Is his new book vivid? Certainly. Funny? Yep. Insightful? Sure — but not as good as that first, cherished work. Readers are loyal creatures. So it will always be for Rian Malan, whose My Traitor’s Heart came out in the dying days of apartheid, a tortured bellow of racial anguish that immediately found a place on the reading list of any student of modern Africa. An Afrikaner descended from a famous family of Voortrekkers and statesmen, the rebellious young Malan fled to Los Angeles, only to return eight years later, bored and homesick.

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled. The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday.

When I was a Reuters trainee, long hours were spent in Fleet Street pubs absorbing the folklore of journalism from seasoned veterans. One popular story concerned the hapless correspondent sent to verify that Dag Hammarskjöld, head of the United Nations, had safely landed at Ndola airport in Northern Rhodesia on his way to talks with separatist Congolese leader Moise Tshombe. A plane landed, the police confirmed it was the UN secretary general, the hack duly filed his story. Trouble was, the disembarking white man was someone else. Hammarskjöld was dead, killed as his DC-6 crashed on night-time approach to Ndola. Rival reporters, drinking at a nearby hotel, heard the news and rushed to correct their stories.

In Dreams From My Father, his exploration of race and roots, Barack Obama recalled the tales heard in childhood about the man who gave him his name. His father, they said, was a brilliant economist who grew up herding goats in western Kenya, then won a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he fell in love with a white woman. ‘There was only one problem: my father was missing. Nothing my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact.’ My boy, I thought on finishing this book, you have no idea how lucky you were. Sociologists may worry about the impact absent fathers are having on a generation of young black men robbed of male role models. But there are worse things in life than being abandoned by your father.

Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. Jason Stearns is a brave man. He once worked for the UN’s disarmament programme in eastern Congo, a job which required him to probe the forests around the town of Bukavu, seeking out members of the local Mai Mai militia. When the UN peacekeepers made contact — and there was always a risk they would run into Rwandan rebels with very different priorities — his job was to persuade twitchy, traumatised child fighters to down their weapons. Arguably, what he attempts to do in this book is even braver.

‘The trouble with most people,’ a reporter friend of mine once remarked, ‘is they just don’t grasp the funny side of genocide.’ He was a rather eccentric friend, possessed of a none-too-healthy fascination with guns and violent death, but he had a point. As any soldier knows, horror lends itself to black humour. An uncontrollable fit of the giggles is often a spontaneous reaction to the utterly grotesque. Gripped by post-colonial guilt, few Westerners have the nerve to admit this when it comes to Africa, which does a strong line in genocide, and the continent’s non-fiction suffers from the kind of po-faced earnestness that would make a missionary yawn. Jane Bussmann is a gloriously irreverent, genitally-fixated exception to the rule.

When I wrote a regular column on Africa for this magazine’s left-wing rival, I was always intrigued by the contrast in responses to any sceptical article on aid. ‘This reactionary bigot is clearly happy for millions of Africans to starve,’ pretty much summed up the fury of white readers at having their Oxfam direct debits questioned. ‘No, she’s right!’ replied my defenders. ‘These corrupt, thieving governments should be cut off without a penny.’ Those ones always came from Africans.