Africa, Africa!

Info
cloth $23.95
Catalogue #:176 ISBN:1-885942-17-6
paperback $14.95
Catalogue #:184 ISBN:1-885942-18-4

Description
A collection of stories that depict Westerners encountering Africa—its people, its mysteries, its beauty and bafflements. Often those encounters change the Westerners, leading some to wisdom, others to heartache. The stories take the reader from the heart of the Congo to modern Madagascar, from a village in Nairobi to the mountaintop palace of the Mwami of Kabare, from a train in South Africa to a dinner party in Ouagadougou. Journalists, diplomats, and teachers experience the problems and fascinations of life in Africa.

Author's Bio
"Creative writing has always been second nature to Frederic Hunter: a column for his college newspaper in Illinois; essays while in the army in Alaska; corporate public relations materials for the old Bell System; letters (seven pages long, single-spaced) from his US Information Service post in the Congolese jungle. After his time in the Congo, he developed a fascination with the African continent and its people, and he jumped at the chance to return as a journalist working for The Christian Science Monitor. "When I served as The Monitor’s Africa man . . . I wanted to show Africa as more than exotic and savage and dysfunctional, which was the impression most reportage offered. I found Africa beautiful." He is currently living in Santa Barbara, working as a screenwriter.

Excerpt
From At the Edge of the Jungle: An Introduction
The country was called the Congo then, as it is now once again. I was living in Coquilhatville, a tiny place, now known as Mbandaka. It was a river port squatting at the confluence of the mighty, tawny Congo, so wide that some days you could not see the opposite bank, and a tributary called the Ruki. A Belgian explorer-adminstrator called Camille Coquilhat had opened a Congo Free State trading post there in the 1890s.
     Coq existed outside of time; its only realities were the sky, the river and the jungle. Living there, it was hard later to comprehend reports of rebel advances somewhere out in that vast, swampy, and river-laced jungle. It was hard to believe that Coq was a place those rebels would want to capture on their path to Leopoldville, the capital.
     But it was.
     Although in 1964 it was a shrinking island of civilization, Coq had only a few years earlier served as the capital of the Equateur, one of the Belgian Congo’s six colonial provinces. So it was deemed important enough by the United States government to merit an "American presence." Not a diplomatic mission, mind you, just a US Information Service post, an American Cultural Center.
     I arrived in the Congo from a training tour in Brussels just at the time the married officer assigned to Coquilhatville flatly refused to accept the posting. He would not take his wife to that remote and lonely and pestiferous place. So I was sent instead. My job was to open the post.

More Excerpts from Africa, Africa!

Waiting for the Mwami
Madagascar
Dr. Kleckner
Night Vigil
Laban and Murugi
The Barking Dog (complete story)
A Newsman Scratches an Itch
Pepper
North of Nairobi
Equateur (complete story)
Card Players
Lenoir
Elizabeth Who Disappeared
Africa, Africa!

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