A review of the new Africa: dispatches from a changing continent by Robert Press

Abstract

The New Africa: Dispatches from a Changing Continent is written by Robert Press and provides a very rich and extensive coverage on the place of the individual in the struggle for political as well as personal freedom in Africa. The book’s leitmotif of human rights and the human spirit in Africa, which runs throughout the book is parsed out into three themes: democratic struggle and a fight for political freedom (Chapters 1-3); world lessons in intervention and responding to humanitarian and political crisis (Chapters 4-6); the fight and struggle for personal freedom of one kind or another (Chapter 7). The book not only examines the individual in the context of socio-political and historical events, but also looks at the role various individuals have played in changing the face of African politics in the 1990s. It is an important book for those interested in the history and contemporary discussions on democratic movement in Africa and African politics, in particular on the different connections between politics, human rights and freedom in various parts of the continent.

The book focuses mostly on East and West Africa and employs the story-telling and narrative techniques in highlighting the role played by various actors in Africa politics and the extraordinary steps that they took to eke out and win freedom both for themselves and their countries. It is both analytic and illustrative and uses pictures from photographs taken by Betty Press, the author’s wife. The analytic flavor of the book is highlighted numerously in the way it draws on arguments, allusions and themes that are discussed by some prominent philosophical and literary writers. For example, it discusses Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Blaine Harden’s Africa to address the question of why the rest of the world perceives Africa’s image as bad. It draws on the Frostian themes in Robert Frost’s poems, “The Road Not taken” and “Death of the Hired Man”