Grasping Africa: A tale of tragedy and achievement, by Stephen Chan

摘要

Stephen Chan's accessible new book sets out to meld ‘official’ debate, scholarly debate, and humane writing, drawing on his own stories as well as those of African novelists and poets (pp. 5–6). In large part he succeeds, though he doubts his own impertinence at times, wary of sacrificing ‘precision and rigour’ for ‘adventurism’ (p. 4) in order to ‘gather my modes of writing’ (p. 5). Chan's caveats on choosing this path make his own ‘Introduction’ to Grasping Africa the best that one can have. Concise, witty, and forthright, Chan's charming professorial skill and eloquence frame his text with the perfect background. William M. Gumede commends the book to ‘the bedside table of every African policymaker in the West’ and it is this general Western audience that one must consider when reading it.