True North: African Roads Less Travelled

Louis looked at me, ‘So you want advice?’ He put his fork down. ‘Look here,’ he told me. ‘You’re lucky, things are changing just at the right time for someone like you. The whole of Africa is opening up to you. If I were your age, the first thing I would do is put on a rucksack and go north. I would go and see Africa, and write about what I saw. This is a portrait of a different time in a changing continent. A record of how things were in a time before cellphones, before the internet, before social media. Hamilton Wende returned to Africa in 1991. He travelled and reported on a continent facing changes in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid. He travelled from the war torn battlefields of Angola where ageing Soviet jets broke the sound barrier on their way to strafe UNITA positions against a backdrop of palms and an azure sea, to the boy in the Angolan town of Viana whose leg had been blown off by a landmine but whose hope and trust stood firm against the pain of war and loss, to the haunting beauty of the Tete corridor in Mozambique whose green bush veld hid burnt-out trucks and the possibility of ambush, to finally witnessing the indescribable horror of the Rwandan genocide.