Includes bibliographical references (p. [551]-553) and index.

Africa is a night flight away: Images and realities--- Africa is different: Uganda I--- How it all went wrong: Uganda II--- The end of colonialism: New states, old societies--- Amazing, but is it Africa? Somalia--- Forward to the past: Zimbabwe--- Breaking apart: Sudan--- A tick bigger than the dog: Angola--- Missing the story and the sequel: Burundi and Rwanda--- God, trust and trade: Senegal--- Dancers and the leopar men: Sierra Leone--- The positive positive women: AIDS in Afric--- Copyng King Leopold: Congo--- Not just another country: Soth Africa--- Meat and money: Eating in Kenya--- Look out world: Nigeria--- New colonists or old feriends? Asia in Africa--- Phones, Asians and the professionals: The nes Africa.

Richard Dowden is perhaps our leading journalist of African affairs. Since first arriving in Idi Amin's Uganda in 1971 he has never stopped learning about and reporting on real Africans and the realities of life in Africa's many and varied lands." "For Africa is a continent, a continent of peoples. The West so often treats Africa as if it were merely one country, and its interventions therefore often misfire. Africa is complex. It takes a guide as observant, experienced, and patient as Richard Dowden to reveal its truth in a way that is comprehensible to outsiders. Dowden teases out the web of history, myth, rivalry, alliance, ambition and protest that comprises present reality for the bankers of Kenya or the oilmen of Nigeria, for the judges of Congo or the herdsmen of Sudan, or even the Chinese miners in Zimbabwe. His account of their various ways and dreams is more illuminating than any number of charities' pleas or World Bank projections." "Dowden combines a novelist's gift for atmosphere with the unblinking scholar's grasp of historical change to produce one of the most compelling and revealing accounts of modern sub-Saharan Africa yet. His experiences there required him to re-evaluate all he had been taught to believe, and his landmark book enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent in a new light too.