Africa Memoir

The untold story of William Haas, pioneering missionary to central Africa and founder of Baptist Mid-Missions. In the early 1900s, a question loomed large: who would take the gospel to central Africa, one of the world’s last regions untouched by missions. Few people dared to explore this rugged frontier let alone bring the gospel. Central Africa’s untamed wildlife and virulent diseases brought the very real potential of death to outsiders.

From early childhood, Dr. Hannah Mumby has loved wildlife, especially elephants. Her first wild elephant sighting at 24 changed the course of her life. Since then, she has devoted herself to studying these incredible animals and educating humanity about them. Hannah's field work has taken her around the world, where she has studied many elephant groups, including both orphaned elephants and the solitary elephant males. These remarkable animals have so much to teach us, Mumby argues, and Elephants takes listeners into their world as never before.

In the grand scheme of things, very little is known of Mansa Musa’s life. We know that he was one of the greatest emperors of the Mali Empire. And we know that he was actually one of the richest men of all time due to the enormous gold deposits in West Africa that were under his dominion, but large parts of Mansa Musa’s life remain a mystery.

This is the story of Veronica Walker. A second generation white African. This is the story of how one woman learnt to accept loss and rebuild her life time and again and how she learnt to fight for herself against a society where women were deemed as second class citizens and the possession of their husbands or fathers. Fighting for her children's safety, Veronica learns to demand her voice be heard and she be accepted for the independent woman she was.

Risk and Return is the story of one man’s return to Africa - a journey that begins with a search for self-fulfillment, which then evolves into an entrepreneurial adventure filled with tribulations, triumphs, and many life lessons that will keep listeners engaged from start to finish. In a casual conversational voice, the author, Yomi Jemibewon, gives an honest, often hilarious and sometimes sobering account of what it feels like to chase a dream under highly uncertain circumstances.

Africa in the 13th century lay in ruins due to countless civil wars and the ensuing famine. Amid the hopelessness arose a man who began to rebuild the ravaged diaspora. He instituted a government that was so efficient at managing the country of Mali that soon it was the most progressive nation on the continent. Not long after, one by one, the neighboring countries began to join the fold, until all of West Africa constituted a single empire.

Pensieri, ricordi, poesie... Kuki Gallmann raccoglie i frammenti di una vita trascorsa in Africa. Una vita dove la felicità è stata distrutta dalla morte del marito, Paolo, e del figlio, Emanuele. L'Africa ha tolto moltissimo a Kuki Gallmann. Ma le ha anche dato molto. Forse proprio per questo lei in Africa è rimasta. La sua vita, oggi, è la vita della Fondazione Gallmann, creata per ricordare Paolo ed Emanuele. Un atto d'amore che lega il passato al futuro. Che è diventato una promessa di salvezza per la natura e gli animali in pericolo.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

This is the harrowing but triumphant story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, leader of the Liberian women's movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first democratically elected female president in African history.

Once a Hussar is a vivid account of the wartime experiences of Ray Ellis, a gunner who in later life recorded this well-written, candid, and perceptive memoir of the conflict he knew as a young man seventy years ago. His story is an honest and moving memoir that relays graphic eyewitness accounts of the horrors of warfare, but it also reveals the surprising triumphs of the human spirit in times of great hardship. Ellis's self-deprecating humor skillfully counters the harsh realities related in a personal recollection of a war that claimed so many young lives.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds - part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In Part of the Pride, Kevin Richardson, dubbed "The Lion Man" on 60 Minutes, tells the story of how he grew from a young boy who loved animals to become a man able to cross the divide between humans and predators, looking some of the world's most dangerous animals directly in the eye, playing with them, and even kissing them on the nose - all without ever being attacked or injured.

In 1849 Heinrich Barth joined a small British expedition into unexplored regions of Islamic North and Central Africa. One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.

Africa’s Child is the story of a mixed-race girl growing up in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, East Africa. Raised in an orphanage with no knowledge of her origins or family, she endured abandonment, hardships, severe illnesses, and bullying. Her experiences as a child and teenager included physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, social stigma, and racial discrimination. Yet Nhambu tells her inspiring story with warmth and humor.

During his years of reporting from the world's most savage and turbulent regions, Fergal Keane has witnessed the violence of the South African townships and the terror in Rwanda, the most extreme kinds of human behaviour, the horror of genocide, and the bravery of peacekeepers faced with overwhelming odds. As one of the BBC's leading correspondents, he recounts extraordinary encounters on the front lines.

Disequilibrium tells the story of the creation of the Quirimbas National Park and the author's simultaneous descent into the uncontrolled cycles of mania and depression that characterize bipolar disorder and threaten the lives and wellbeing of those affected. The author's struggles to establish the park in the face of widespread poaching and appalling human poverty parallel his painstaking efforts to regain both ‘a functional approximation of sanity’ and then the love and respect of his wife and family. A photo gallery accompanies the text.

In 2017, Kurt Davis traveled to Africa and volunteered at many business accelerators and humanitarian nonprofits. Finding Soul, from Silicon Valley to Africa gives listeners a detailed description of not only what Africa is like, but also how the experiences changed and inspired him. Each chapter comes across like a vignette while developing the key themes in the book: experiencing deep empathy for others, releasing ego and identity, and discovering a deeper meaning for life.

In her memoir, winner of the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize, Jill Kanel details her early days as a newlywed, accompanying her Dutch husband to Zambia and living in a village so remote that it takes an eight-hour canoe ride to reach. This book recounts Kandel's day-to-day experiences, exploring how she learns to navigate her life in this new culture and her relationship with her husband.

Henri lived only a few short years in Europe before the family moved to the Belgian Congo, a country deep in the heart of Africa. These were the early 1900s at a time when the colonial era was in full swing. The White Man ruled the native population with undisputed authority and many parts of the country were totally uncivilized. Henri adapted easily to his new surroundings and the memoir chronicles his unique experiences with surprising verve and stirring prose.

Based on years of investigative reporting and unprecedented fieldwork, Walking the Bowl immerses readers in the daily lives of four unforgettable characters: Lusabilo, a determined waste picker; Kapula, a burned-out brothel worker; Moonga, a former rock crusher turned beggar; and Timo, an ambitious gang leader. These children navigate the violent and poverty-stricken underworld of Lusaka, one of Africa’s fastest growing cities.