“I wanted to suggest by this that the entire region and the way its parts interact is full of complexities and contradictions. So that Nelson Mandela is not a saint, but a skiving , jazz-freak student radical, lately given to wearing stupid shirts; so that Thabo Mbeki did not fail by simply lack of efforts in his ‘quiet diplomacy’ with Robert Mugabe, but was driven by complex and highly learned patterns of reasoning; so that Robert Mugabe himself did not become a tyrant because of a love of tyranny, but lost himself in the contradictions of his convictions until his stubborness became malignant and finally malevolent; so that Jacob Zuma did not gain the leadership of the ANC by sheer vulgar populism , but by harnessing an unlikely allience of brilliant political and business minds who helped him for the sake of their revenge. The ambition of this book is to endow what the Western media has turned into black caricatures with the same sort of life we would automatically assume was inherent in Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, George Bush, Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy. It was also to repay some debt to a region that helped form me”
# Earlier today , I bought this book. I chuckled when I read these sentences of the book’s introduction but I can already tell that this is going to be good read.
