amazon.co.uk 2022 Africa Is Not A Country: Breaking Stereotypes of Modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin
‘Warm, funny, biting and essential reading.’ Adam Rutherford
‘Hilarious, ferocious, generous and convincing. It made me reconsider almost everything I thought I knew about Africa.’ Oliver Bullough
Africa Is Not A Country is a bright portrait of modern Africa that pushes back against harmful stereotypes to tell a more comprehensive story.
‘This book should be on the curriculum.’ Nikki May, author of WAHALA
You already know these stereotypes. So often Africa is depicted simplistically as an arid red landscape of famines and safaris, uniquely plagued by poverty and strife.
In this funny and insightful book, Dipo Faloyin offers a much-needed corrective. He examines each country’s colonial heritage, and explores a wide range of subjects, from chronicling urban life in Lagos and the lively West African rivalry over who makes the best Jollof rice, to the story of democracy in seven dictatorships and the dangers of stereotypes in popular culture.
By turns intimate and political, Africa Is Not A Country brings the story of the continent towards reality, celebrating the energy and fabric of its different cultures and communities in a way that has never been done before.
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“But when you infuse this story with context, you see the bigger picture and understand why what has happened has happened. When you remember the cards the region was dealt as a result of colonialism, and the way European empires divvied up the fruitful and fertile land, tore apart 10 per cent of all ethnic groups – forcing grossly different cultures to form singular nations against their will – and stole 90 per cent of the continent’s material cultural legacy; when you remember all this is recent history, and that my parents are older than the country they were born in; when you discover the high prevalence of dictatorships is a multifaceted tale of colonial powers deliberately playing tribal groups off against each other, with Western nations propping up their favourite strongman, and it’s not that we are naturally bloodthirsty and ungovernable; when you taste Jollof rice for the first time, or see the work that activists and generations of reformers have put in since the independence era, you begin to understand that Africa is a region that is fundamentally rooted in human stories – which, like everywhere else, can be anything and everything, from a celebration of greatness to an act of barbaric cruelty. The continent constantly surprises, because every country is just trying to make the best of – to put it mildly – an awkward situation.”
reviews
amazon.co.uk 2020 Age of Anger: A History of the Present – by Mishra Pankaj
gg/caw 2021 Branco Milanovic mentioned this author as non-eurocentric. Sure is. A decolonizer disecting the Pantheon of Euro “Dichter und Denker” . And it’s a history of resentment. Again ? Just read Joseph Vogl : perlentaucher.de/ 2021 Kapital Und Rressentiment
https://www.soziopolis.de/buchforum/kapital-und-ressentiment.html