With his nineteen-year-old daughter, a collection of maps and the help of an opinionated GPS, Peter Midgley sets out across Namibia. Visiting small-town museums and gravesites, crossing border checkpoints and changing tires, they travel its length and breadth. Stories about Portuguese explorers and the first genocide of the twentieth century collect on the back seat of their car alongside the author's earliest childhood memories of growing up in the country. By the end of the journey, the ...

With his nineteen-year-old daughter, a collection of maps and the help of an opinionated GPS, Peter Midgley sets out across Namibia. Visiting small-town museums and gravesites, crossing border checkpoints and changing tires, they travel its length and breadth. Stories about Portuguese explorers and the first genocide of the twentieth century collect on the back seat of their car alongside the author's earliest childhood memories of growing up in the country. By the end of the journey, the ...

In the polyglot world of Eaten by White Ants, poet Peter Midgley explores the ways in which language can hide, obscure, and falsify pasts and heritages. He engages with what it means to learn, unlearn, and relearn language, and grapples with his own implication in the erasures caused by what has been eaten, literally and metaphorically, by greedy white ants. Midgley’s poems reflect a deep concern with human rights and equity and meditate on the multiple legacies of a complex, colo...

Finalist for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry at the 2020 Alberta Literary Awards!Peter Midgley’s let us not think of them as barbarians is a bold narrative of love, migration, and war hewn from the stones of Namibia. Sensual and intimate, these evocative poems fold into each other to renew and undermine multiple poetic traditions. Gradually, the poems assemble an ombindi—an ancestral cairn—from a history of violent disruption. Underlying the intense language is...

DisPlace: The Poetry of Nduka Otiono engages actively with a diasporic world: Otiono is equally at home critiquing petroculture in Nigeria and in Canada. His work straddles multiple poetic traditions and places African intellectual history at the forefront of an engagement with Western poetics.The poems in this selection are drawn from Otiono's two published collections, Voices in the Rainbow, and Love in a Time of Nightmares, and the vol...

Hope lives in Africa. Twenty years after the genocide that left Rwanda in ruins, Giller Prize-winning author Will Ferguson travels deep into the once-mysterious "Land of a Thousand Hills" with his friend and cohort Jean-Claude Munyezamu, a man who escaped Rwanda just months before the killings began.From the legendary Source of the Nile to Dian Fossey's famed "gorillas in the mist," from innovative refugee camps along the Congolese border to the world's most escapable priso...

After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downwards into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in t...

Set in both the wilds and slums of Kenya, a powerful story about a brother and sister's brave journey to find a place to call home.13-year-old Muchoki and his younger sister, Jata, can barely recognize what's become of their lives. Only weeks ago they lived in a bustling Kenyan village, going to school, playing soccer with friends, and helping at their parents' store. But sudden political violence has killed their father and destroyed their home. Now, Muchoki, Jata,...

No Stopping for Lions is an unforgettable adventure that is sure to inspire us all to step outside our comfort zone. When Joanne Glynn and her husband Neil travelled around Africa for a year, the warmth of the people, beauty of the landscape and awe-inspiring diversity of the wildlife soon worked their way into the travellers' hearts and souls.From encounters with waterlogged warthogs to conversations with street kids orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and Maasai warriors grapp...

Banff Award Winner: "Like David Grann's The Lost City of Z, this is two stories, of an explorer and of the author's search for him, and both are compelling." — Library JournalIn 1898 the dashing British adventurer Ewart "the Leopard" Grogan fell head-over-heels in love—but before he could marry, he needed the approval of his beloved's skeptical aristocratic stepfather. Grogan, seeking to prove his worth and earn her hand, set out on an epic quest t...

In 1949, Rosamond Halsey Carr, a young fashion illustrator living in New York City, accompanied her dashing hunter-explorer husband to what was then the Belgian Congo. When the marriage fell apart, she decided to stay on in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation*. Land of a Thousand Hills* is Carr's thrilling memoir of her life in Rwanda—a love affair with a country and a people that has spanned half a century. During those years, she has experienced everything from stal...

A highly personal story of the eminent British writer returning to her African roots that is "brilliant . . . [and] captures the contradictions of a young country." — New York Times Book ReviewA rich and penetrating portrait of Lessing's homeland, African Laughter recounts the visits she made to Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992, after being exiled from the old Southern Rhodesia for 25 years for her opposition to the minority white government. Lessing uses memory and reminisce...