Africa Memoir

In 1994, 16-year-old Eric Irivuzumugabe climbed a cypress tree and remained there for 15 days without food or water. He wasn't trying to win a bet with his friends--he was attempting to save his life. Eric is a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide that claimed the lives of 800,000 people in just 100 days. In the midst of indescribable loss, and without a job, a home, or an education, Eric was determined to start a new life for himself and his two surviving brothers.

International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging themselves on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees.

One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Using the hashtag "Bring Back Our Girls", politicians, activists, and celebrities from all around the world - among them First Lady Michelle Obama and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai - protested.

It’s the early seventies in rural Zimbabwe. Three-year-old Mercy lives with her beloved grandma, helping tend the chickens and goats, learning the importance of growing the crops that will feed them throughout the year, and many other skills.

For the first time in history, the navies of the world have united against a common enemy - a couple of thousand rag-tag, underfed men and boys in the western Indian Ocean. Crammed into open boats and armed with ancient AK-47s, they range up to a thousand miles from home shores in Somalia. No one knows how many die at sea. But occasionally they hit the jackpot, seizing vessels and crews to be ransomed for millions of dollars.

I 1950 begyndte Hakon Mielche og dr. Anton Fr. Bruun en ambitiøs verdensomsejling på ekspeditionsskibet Galathea. Hakon Mielche fungerede som kronikør og udgav hele tre bøger om ekspeditionen. Bind 1 fortæller om afrejsen fra København, turen forbi Plymouth og Lissabon, før skibet nærmede sig Afrikas kyst og gjorde holdt på Tenerife. Nu går turen rundt om Det Mørke Kontinent, hvor skibet blandt andet lægger til kaj ved Dakar, Cape Town og på Madagaskar.

Rosemary Venter was born in the Transvaal in 1928. This is a long series of three books, covering a period of 72 years. My mother who produced the original manuscript is now over 95 years old. The story is, among other things, an attempt to portray the social history of the times. She believed it important that records were kept of those days, where economic and political change was rapid and unpredictable. This was her contribution to that history.

Foreign correspondent Neely Tucker and his wife, Vita, arrived in Zimbabwe in 1997. After witnessing firsthand the devastating consequences of AIDS on the population, especially the children, the couple started volunteering at an orphanage that was desperately underfunded and short-staffed. One afternoon, a critically ill infant was brought to the orphanage from a village outside the city. She'd been left to die in a field on the day she was born.

"Monkey Weddings & Summer Sapphires" is a lovely telling of a childhood spent in Johannesburg, South Africa, and of settling into adult life and motherhood in Nova Scotia, Canada. Recipes, collected from travels, family, and friends allows the story to be told with the foods and dishes as the conveyance. The changing seasons, the natural wild beauty that surrounds everyday life, the abundance of wild edibles and local produce all serve as the inspiration to each chapter.

In the space of a few days, Carrie loses her marriage, her career, and her home - all while working in Lagos, Nigeria. She is blindsided by the losses and realizes the story she painstakingly knit together over the past two decades - the story explaining her life and who she is - has unraveled. With no plan and only her deaf cat, Lucy, for company, Carrie decides to remain in Africa. What happens next is an awkward, amusing, and ultimately inspiring journey as Carrie slowly lets go of who she thought she was and starts from scratch at middle-age.

After a 25-year career spent fighting for women's rights around the globe at the expense of time with her family, Karen Sherman looked around and realized she didn't really know her children and felt little connection to her husband. With her world - work, marriage, family - crashing down, she made the rash decision to move to Rwanda with her three sons, an experiment she dubbed "our year of living dangerously".

Teresa O'Kane had always longed to see the world. She owned scads of travel books and maps and was about to buy yet another bookcase to hold the many Lonely Planet guides and travel essays that she had accumulated over the years when she turned to her husband and said, "I'm tired of storing our dreams. Let's live them!" Within a month, they bought one-way tickets to Morocco, leased out their home, and set out on a journey of the African continent top to bottom from Casablanca to Cape Town.

When Mosilo Mothepu was appointed CEO of Trillian Financial Advisory, in March 2016, the prospect of being at the helm of a Black-owned financial consultancy was electrifying for a Black woman whose twin passions were transformation and empowering women. Three months later, suffering from depression and insomnia, she resigned with no other job lined up. In October 2016, a written statement handed to Public Protector Thuli Madonsela detailing Trillian’s involvement in state capture was leaked to the media.

When Dr. Ellen Einterz first arrives in the town of Kolofata in Cameroon, the situation is dire: Patients are exploited by healthcare workers, unsterilized needles are reused, and only the wealthy can afford care. In Life and Death in Kolofata: An American Doctor in Africa, Einterz tells her remarkable story of delivering healthcare for 24 years in one of the poorest countries in the world, revealing both touching stories of those she is able to help and the terrible suffering of people born in extreme poverty.

For two decades, Robert Stone made his living on the high seas, as a diver, fisherman, treasure-hunter - and smuggler. He spent the last 10 of his smuggling years operating in the Niger delta under the most corrupt regime in the world, buying diesel directly from refineries and selling his illicit black cargo to legitimate and illegitimate businesses worldwide. Protected by the military, his smuggling empire made him millions of dollars - until a friend's betrayal and US law enforcement brought it all crashing down.

Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....

The founder of multibillion-rand financial services empire Sygnia Limited, Magda Wierzycka is South Africa’s most successful businesswoman. In this engaging and insightful book, she tells the story of her life, from her childhood in communist Poland, her family’s escape and relocation to South Africa, her early struggles in the male-dominated financial services industry and the formation and growth of her own company, Sygnia.

The memoir "From a small village, a journey through Africa into the world" reads like a gripping adventure novel. Alicja's experiences are amazing and adventurous - a girl from a small village who first becomes involved with a Nigerian man then copes well on her own in a distant, somewhat wild country. Her memories are also a large piece of Polish history and life in the Polish People's Republic, as well as the history of Nigeria. The cultural differences between our countries described are fascinating, as well as how the world has changed.

In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a 30-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So she went to find him. Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own.

Sarah Thebarge, a Yale-trained physician assistant, nearly died of breast cancer at age 27, but that did not end her deeply felt spiritual calling to medical missions in Africa. Risking her own health, she moved to Togo, West Africa - ranked by the United Nations as the least happy country in the world - to care for sick and suffering patients. Serving without pay in a mission hospital, she pondered the intersection of faith and medicine in her quest to help make the world "well".