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

Book is clean and tight. Dust Jacket covered with mylar. Stated First Edition - first printing. 299 pages with index.

Seller Inventory # 005322

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland: Dispatches From White Africa
• Publisher: Random House, New York
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679432043
• ISBN 13: 9780679432043
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography
  • World History

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.