The book review:
 This novel about the Congo traces the life of a fictional main character, Assani Zikiya, a Munyamulenge, i.e., a Congolese Tutsi, during the very recent turbulent times in the Congo. The device of telling real history via a composite character, rather than an accurate biography of the man on whom Assani is based, permitted the author to humanize the story as well as to provide broader background on the various conflicts and, most importantly, to comment wryly on real events, problems, and people. In sum, through this novel a reader can learn contemporary history and gain insight into the brutality and reality of war and politics in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

 

The book review:

Airlift to America: How Barack Obama, Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya, and 800 East African Students Changed Their World and Ours

 

There is a lot of history in this book that chronicles the times and story of an irregular, spontaneous, ad hoc, but still carefully organized process that steered hundreds of Kenyans and other East Africans to the United States for college studies.

The book review:

This is kind of an odd but nonetheless interesting little book. Philo Pullicino, a Maltese national who served during the pre-independence and early independence years in the British colonial service in Zanzibar and Uganda, wrote the original manuscript some years ago.

The book review:
This memoir by Kenya’s most famous author is exactly what it purports to be: a recounting of childhood in Limuru, just outside of Nairobi. Indeed the times—World War II followed by the Mau Mau emergency—were a time of war in Ngugi’s Kikuyu home. The uncertainty of far off, and not so far off, events impacted upon rural society. Matching that were the changes wrought by modernization—the railroad, education, colonialism, religious controversy, wage employment and burgeoning political awareness.

The book review:
This is a feel-good novel. Politically correct, it won’t offend anyone. Virtues of understanding, tolerance and compassion permeate the story, but still there is a plot inhabited by vivid characters.

The book review:

This complex story uses the death of a prominent Ugandan chief at the hands of Idi Amin’s henchmen in 1972 as a mechanism to explore current Ugandan history along with the larger issue of justice. What is justice and who can obtain it or not and how? Further, why has Uganda seemingly chosen to avoid careful reckoning for atrocities that occurred over the past forty years? The answers are deeply embedded in Ugandan society, in the violence that successively swept across the nation and in the politics of power, then and now.