Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches from White Africa

BOYNTON, Graham

ISBN 10: 0679432043 / ISBN 13: 9780679432043

Published by Random House, New York, 1997

About this Item

Black & white illustrations. 299pp. 8vo, cloth-backed boards, dust wrapper; d.w. lightly rubbed. New York: Random House, (1997). First Edition. Near fine. Seller Inventory # 208820

Bibliographic Details

Title: Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches ...

Publisher: Random House, New York

Publication Date: 1997

Binding: hardcover

Condition: near fine

Dust Jacket Condition: near fine

Edition: First.

About this title

Synopsis:

Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland is Graham Boynton's account of the final gasps of white culture on the continent, from the flight of the Belgian refugees from the Congo in 1960 through the first years of Nelson Mandela's presidency in South Africa. In a series of graphic accounts of the human dramas marking this disorderly retreat, he illuminates the complexity and ambiguity of the role of the whites in Africa. They "were never a unified gang of cold-hearted supremacists," he writes, "any more than the blacks in Africa have been a saintly group of idealists and altruists."
It is an evocative story, and as it unfolds the author is drawn toward a controversial conclusion. If the white colonials did a rather poor job of making Africa work, he argues, then their African successors have done considerably worse.

About the Author:

Graham Boynton was raised in Bulawayo, Rhodesia, and later emigrated to South Africa, where he attended Natal University and worked as a journalist. In 1975 he was expelled from South Africa because of his opposition to apartheid. He worked for many years as a journalist in London and now lives in New York with his wife and two children.