Central Africa Books

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hay House Amazon Marketplace: 70 new & used starting at $7.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Religious
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 381 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee’s family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans.

Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other women huddled silently together in the cramped bathroom of a local pastor while hundreds of machete-wielding killers hunted for them.

It was during those endless hours of unspeakable terror that Immaculee discovered the power of prayer, eventually shedding her fear of death and forging a profound and lasting relationship with God. She emerged from her bathroom hideout having discovered the meaning of truly unconditional love—a love so strong she was able seek out and forgive her family’s killers.
The triumphant story of this remarkable young woman’s journey through the darkness of genocide will inspire anyone whose life has been touched by fear, suffering, and loss.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

Philip Gourevitch

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Picador Amazon Marketplace: 140 new & used starting at $7.49

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Rwanda
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 215 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Hutus kill Tutsis, then Tutsis kill Hutus--if that's really all there is to it, then no wonder we can't be bothered with it," Philip Gourevitch writes, imagining the response of somebody in a country far from the ethnic strife and mass killings of Rwanda. But the situation is not so simple, and in this complex and wrenching book, he explains why the Rwandan genocide should not be written off as just another tribal dispute.

The "stories" in this book's subtitle are both the author's, as he repeatedly visits this tiny country in an attempt to make sense of what has happened, and those of the people he interviews. These include a Tutsi doctor who has seen much of her family killed over decades of Tutsi oppression, a Schindleresque hotel manager who hid hundreds of refugees from certain death, and a Rwandan bishop who has been accused of supporting the slaughter of Tutsi schoolchildren, and can only answer these charges by saying, "What could I do?" Gourevitch, a staff writer for the New Yorker, describes Rwanda's history with remarkable clarity and documents the experience of tragedy with a sober grace. The reader will ask along with the author: Why does this happen? And why don't we bother to stop it? --Maria Dolan

Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

Tim Butcher

Amazon Price: $16.50 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Grove Press Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $14.86

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa
Subjects -> Travel -> Africa -> General
Subjects -> Travel -> Africa -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Published to rave reviews in the United Kingdom and named a Richard & Judy Book Club selection—the only work of nonfiction on the 2008 list—Blood River is the harrowing and audacious story of Tim Butcher's journey in the Congo and his retracing of renowned explorer H. M. Stanley's famous 1874 expedition in which he mapped the Congo River. When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the legendary Congo River and the idea of re-creating Stanley's legendary journey along the three-thousand-mile waterway. Despite warnings that his plan was suicidal, Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vehicles, including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a pygmy-rights advocate, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. An utterly absorbing narrative that chronicles Tim Butcher's forty-four-day journey along the Congo River, Blood River is an unforgettable story of exploration and survival.

A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It

Stephen Kinzer

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Wiley Amazon Marketplace: 58 new & used starting at $9.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Presidents & Heads of State
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, June 2008: Fourteen years after the 1994 genocide that claimed 800,000 lives in 100 days, Rwandans continue the daily work of rebuilding their shattered country. In light of recent reports that one in four people suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder--which Rwandans aptly describe as ihahamuka or "breathless with fear"--how is recovery even possible? In search of answers, foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer traveled extensively throughout Rwanda where he observed an astonishing economic and political transformation based surprisingly on Asian models, and the implementation of unconventional reconciliation efforts. The author also conducted extensive interviews with Rwanda's enigmatic president, Paul Kagame. The result of Kinzer's quest is A Thousand Hills, a page-turning story of a society desperately trying to regain its breath, and an ambitious and autocratic leader's unrelenting efforts to breathe life into its future. This is essential reading, even if you've read earlier accounts by Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, journalists Phillip Gourevitch and Samantha Power, and the heroic Paul Rusesabagina immortalized in the film Hotel Rwanda. --Lauren Nemroff

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

Gerard Prunier

Amazon Price: $18.45 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $17.08

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> General
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 1.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval.
Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-Desire Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world.
Here then is a gripping eyewitness account of the most bloody upheaval of recent times, a book of passionate and unblinking intensity that is our best record to date of one of the great tragedies of the post-Cold War era.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda

Roméo Dallaire, Samantha Power

Amazon Price: $13.11 List Price: $17.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Da Capo Press Amazon Marketplace: 68 new & used starting at $6.71

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Rwanda
Subjects -> History -> Military -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 75 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

For the first time in the United States comes the tragic and profoundly important story of the legendary Canadian general who "watched as the devil took control of paradise on earth and fed on the blood of the people we were supposed to protect." When Roméo Dallaire was called on to serve as force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, he believed that his assignment was to help two warring parties achieve the peace they both wanted. Instead, he was exposed to the most barbarous and chaotic display of civil war and genocide in the past decade, observing in just one hundred days the killings of more than eight hundred thousand Rwandans. With only a few troops, his own ingenuity and courage to direct his efforts, Dallaire rescued thousands, but his call for more support from the world body fell on deaf ears. In Shake Hands with the Devil, General Dallaire recreates the awful history the world community chose to ignore. He also chronicles his own progression from confident Cold Warrior to devastated UN commander, and finally to retired general struggling painfully, and publicly, to overcome posttraumatic stress disorder—the highest-ranking officer ever to share such experiences with readers.

Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass

Isak Dinesen

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 97 new & used starting at $2.98

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Arts & Literature -> Authors
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> Women
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Out of Africa is Karin Blixen's love letter to the country she called home for nearly 20 years. Arriving in British East Africa (now Kenya) from Denmark in 1914, Blixen--Isak Dinesen was her pen name--was immediately seduced by the landscape of the Ngong hill country, not to mention the animals and people who inhabited it. Her descriptions bring this wonderland alive for readers: out on safari, she recalls the movements of a group of giraffes, "in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing." Blixen laces into her reverie the account of her coffee plantation--which ultimately succumbed to high altitude, droughts, and tumbling international coffee prices--and tales of her friendships with other colonials in Nairobi. But one should read her memoir for the stories she tells of cooking with her Kikuyu chef (who almost never ate any of the European delicacies he so expertly created), adopting an abandoned infant antelope, flying over the countryside in her lover's plane--"the greatest, most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm"--and watching the children of her tenant farmers collect at her house each day at noon for the spectacle of her cuckoo clock.

Though some of her references to native Africans will likely make today's readers uncomfortable, Blixen can also be perceptive, particularly in her articulation of the differences between European and African culture and her excitement over what she learns from "her" Africans. It is not long before she is attuned to the rhythms of nature: she can foresee when the rains will come, can spot the new moon before anyone else on the farm, and knows exactly what the silence of night should sound like. Though her sorrow is almost unbearably palpable when at last--after the collapse of the farm, the loss of her lover, and the war looming--Blixen leaves Africa, the reader will close the book richer for her sojourn. --Jordana Moskowitz

The Translator: A Tribesman's Memoir of Darfur

Daoud Hari

Amazon Price: $15.64 List Price: $23.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 91 new & used starting at $7.99

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

I am the translator who has taken journalists into dangerous Darfur. It is my intention now to take you there in this book, if you have the courage to come with me.

The young life of Daoud Hari–his friends call him David–has been one of bravery and mesmerizing adventure. He is a living witness to the brutal genocide under way in Darfur.

The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world–an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time. Using his high school knowledge of languages as his weapon–while others around him were taking up arms–Daoud Hari has helped inform the world about Darfur.

Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman, grew up in a village in the Darfur region of Sudan. As a child he saw colorful weddings, raced his camels across the desert, and played games in the moonlight after his work was done. In 2003, this traditional life was shattered when helicopter gunships appeared over Darfur’s villages, followed by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups attacking on horseback, raping and murdering citizens and burning villages. Ancient hatreds and greed for natural resources had collided, and the conflagration spread.

Though Hari’s village was attacked and destroyedhis family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped. Roaming the battlefield deserts on camels, he and a group of his friends helped survivors find food, water, and the way to safety. When international aid groups and reporters arrived, Hari offered his services as a translator and guide. In doing so, he risked his life again and again, for the government of Sudan had outlawed journalists in the region, and death was the punishment for those who aided the “foreign spies.” And then, inevitably, his luck ran out and he was captured. . . .

The Translator tells the remarkable story of a man who came face-to-face with genocide– time and again risking his own life to fight injustice and save his people.

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak

Jean Hatzfeld

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Picador Amazon Marketplace: 63 new & used starting at $8.21

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Rwanda
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

500,000 not 50,000 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

There's a blazing typo in the editorial Booklist review. Approximately 500,000 to over 1,000,000 human beings, not the stated 50,000, were murdered in the Rwandan massacre.

The Murderers Speak 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The author interviewed in prison a group of friends,a seemingly ordinary crosssection of Rawandan Hutu farmers, who willingly and enthusiastically participated in the brutal extermination of their Tutsi neighbors. The book draws parallels with previous genocides such as perpetuated by the Nazi's and others thruout history. The killers seemed to look upon the massacres as pretty much of a job. With an added benefit often of rape and plunder. An incredibly disturbing, but true story. An interesting sidenote was the significant role played by radio broadcasts in inciting the mobs. Also, how The Church and U.N. and the rest of the world pretty much left the victims to their fates. Amazing as it may seem there were virtually no instances in which Hutus tried to save Tutsis who had been former friends. This whole dark blot on history must not be forgotten.

Editorial Review:

During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated. As Susan Sontag wrote in the preface, Machete Season is a document that "everyone should read . . . [because making] the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda . . . is part of being a moral adult."

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography

Tepilit Ole Saitoti

Amazon Price: $17.95 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 56 new & used starting at $5.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General AAS
Subjects -> History -> Africa -> Central Africa

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

sitting here with the author 5 out of 5 stars.
29 of 29 people found this review helpful.

I read this book 12 years ago and was so moved that I wrote a letter to to the author - something I have never done before or since. I was so struck by his ability to navigate between two cultures that seemingly had little in common. His book is a testimonial to the flexibility of the human spirit and the power of education. Last week, out of the blue, I received a telephone call from the author. Apparently, he had saved my address all these years. Saitoti is currently in the US as a visiting scholar. He will be speaking in various institutions and he has just started writing a follow up to The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior (The Worlds of a Maasai Elder). I have just shown him these amazon reviews. He is sitting here beside me and
would like to take this opportunity to say: "Thank you to the reviewers of my book for such beautiful reviews and to amazon.com for posting such a wonderful display of my work."

The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Excellent book, very accurate and really worth the money. It gives the picture of a boy growing up as a real Maasai and the new life in civilized world of Germany and USA - a man between two cultures and the difficult question to decide which way to go along. Makes yourself wondering about the way we Western people are living and gives a chance to see our world with other eyers.

After having visited the Maasai area some months ago a good opportunity to compare facts with my own experience and found it even more interesting. Go for it!