Banana Sunday: Datelines from Africa

From the horrific to the humorous, the adventures - and misadventures - of journalists assigned to the continent have produced a wealth of yarns, anecdotes and legends. These are the stories behind the headlines, retold and relayed time and time again wherever correspondents forgather to relax, but rarely finding their way into print. This book chronicles the swashbuckling era of the old Africa hands as they set forth to illuminate for their readers the mysteries of a dark continent emerging into the dubious daylight of indeterminate independence and polyglot manhood. From the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's "great redeemer", through the bloody chaos of the Congo and the agony of Nigeria's civil war, inside the death camps of Idi Amin's Uganda, under the lash of Hastings Banda's fly whisk in Malawi to the frontiers of white hegemony in Rhodesia, the hacks of Africa hardened into an elite as eccentric as the beat they had been sent to cover. Most survived; some were killed or wounded "in action", and this book is dedicated to their memory. This book weaves such anecdotes through the sanguine history of Africa's post-colonial trauma and turbulence. There are heroes and villains, champions and cheats, saints and sinners, all finding themselves thrown together in the most unlikely situations in search of the Africa story.