The nightly news paints Africa as a continent in chaos, at war and at risk. In a vivid, sympathetic chronicle of civilians and soldiers, winners and losers, dreamers and activists, Jeremy Harding provides a remarkable narrative - both explosive and intimate - of six countries under siege, battling the legacy of ethnic conflict and colonial abuse and fighting for their future. In 1975, the Portuguese beat a hasty retreat from their African colonies, leaving Mozambique and Angola in virtual ruins. In Angola, the vacuum was quickly filled by foreign armies and large consignments of weapons, with warring factions shaping up as superpower proxies. In the same year Morocco rolled into Western Sahara, preparing to steal the country from its people, and the world barely noticed. Thus began some of the wars that have plagued the continent for nearly twenty years.^
Harding takes us beyond the tangled current affairs of Africa in a way that headline journalism never can, on distinct journeys to six countries, weaving a compelling book from the war-torn fabric of ongoing conflicts in South Africa, fragile ceasefires in Angola, peace in Namibia, tentative elections in Mozambique, and victory for the guerrillas in Eritrea.^
His journeys take him to some of the farthest reaches of a vast and active continent: from the Portuguese hotels in Angola, tended by impeccable waiters for nonexistent guests, to the battlegrounds of Cuito Cuanavale, where South Africans have demolished the town with lethal accuracy; along the road and rail lines in Mozambique, where a local prophet leads a bulletproof militia against a murderous rebel movement; across a vast fortified wall in Western Sahara built by an obstinate king to keep the people from their homeland and its valuable mineral deposits; to a small room in an Ethiopian hotel, where an exiled Eritrean nationalist has returned home, unnoticed, while U.N. delegates negotiate agreements downstairs. Not since John Gunther's classic Inside Africa and Sanford Ungar's Africa have the continent's scenes of strife and steps toward peace been so stirringly and carefully described.
