Although 100,000 people passed through it each year, Cape Coast Castle, the Ghanaian capital of the British slave trade, was largely unknown to the outside world. A welcome addition to the study of trans-atlantic slave cargoes.
A compelling examination of the failure of foreign aid. William Easterly argues that “big pushes”, such as those proposed by Jeffrey Sachs and the UN, never work, and argues instead for a series of “little pushes”. You need only look at what drives some of the poorest parts of Africa.
The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working [politics]
By Robert Calderisi. Palgrave Macmillan; 256 pages; $24.95. Yale University Press; £18.99
Robert Calderisi has worked for the World Bank for more than 20 years, and is equally at home in Ouagadougou or Washington. Differing in style, if not in substance, from William Easterly’s book on the same subject, Mr Calderisi’s is a fluent, deeply personal account of how aid has failed Africa, and how Africa, so often, has managed to fail itself.
Wizard of the Crow [fiction]By Ngugi wa Thiong’o.
Pantheon; 784 pages; $30. Harvill Secker; £18.99
In this sprawling farce, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, translating himself from his original Gikuyu having stretched his language as no one else has done, portrays a wizard who brings about the demise of a dictator and gives hope to his country, the mythical Free Republic of Aburiria. Africa in all its splendour, squalor, economic malaise and venality, as portrayed by a theatrical magical realist who now lives in exile. In Africa, big men don’t care to be laughed at.
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