"A Passage to Africa" by George Alagiah

Date: 18 November 2012 18:45:56

"A Passage to Africa" by TV foreign correspondent George Alagiah is my most recently finished read. It starts off detailing his own family's emigration from then-Ceylon to newly independent Ghana when he was 5, and then subsequent chapters detail some of the countries he worked in as a correspondent - including Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda, Zaire (now DRC), Zimbabwe, South Africa. He talks about stuff that happened while he was working and reporting and his impressions of the wider history/context - it's interesting, though of course harrowing too. It was published in 2001 and it was really interesting reading it a decade later with subsequent knowledge about what happened - I think he's rather too optimistic about Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, for example - and I would love to see him write an updated version giving his take on the last decade. As I was reading it you could tell he was a foreign correspondent, a lot of the phrases were very TV news-friendly I thought, he's good at distilling complex issues into a short paragraph, although of course in the distillation a lot of important detail is lost, as with any TV news report. Worth a read.