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Our Books:
- How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs
- Dive South Africa
- Wreck Hunt
- Mercenary Invasion of Seychelles
- Jack Malloch
- Deadline Africa
- Battles of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879
- Diving with Sharks
- Neall Ellis
- Barrel of a Gun
- South Africa's Border Wars
- The 'Coloured' People of South Africa and Apartheid
About our Authors:
Al J Venter
John H. Visser
Charles Shapiro
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DEADLINE AFRICA
BY CHRISTOPHER MUNNION
A continent in turmoil as witnessed first hand by foreign correspondents.
Scheduled for publication early 2009
Few outsiders have had such unique opportunities as foreign correspondents assigned to Africa to witness first hand the tortured modern history of the continent. For three tumultuous decades, Christopher Munnion covered the unfolding story of post-colonial Africa for The Daily Telegraph of London, sharing the adventures – and misadventures - of fellow foreign correspondents as they reported first hand on the wars, revolutions and coups which saw the rise and fall of numerous despots and tyrants.
Deadline Africa is an extension of Munnion’s best-selling book “Banana Sunday” which, when it was first published in 1993, was hailed by London critics as a “classic” and “a masterpiece of the genre”. Banana Sunday recounted through anecdote and observation the earlier days as newly-independent African states struggled to find an identity in a world that seemed to have left the continent behind. The main problem in those days was one of communications and with correspondents trying to find working telephones or an ancient telex machine with which to transmit their graphic dispatches. The book went out of print after a second edition when the business of its original publishers collapsed. It has since achieved something of a cult status with young journalists and students of Africa searching second-hand bookshops around the world for the occasional copies which surface.
In Deadline Africa, Munnion still living and working as a journalist in Africa, explores, again through anecdote and observation, the state of Africa some 18 years on. Communications have advanced to an unimaginable level and foreign correspondents flock to breaking world stories in their hundreds, dominated by international television crews who transmit live by satellite events as they occur. Background information on every subject and most inidivuals of any note is available to all at the touch of a computer click. Newspapers increasingly are taking a back seat to the internet with its instant news available online and people sitting in their homes can air their views on every and any subject by the now ubiquitous blogs.
Unfortunately, such progress has done little to help bring peace or any form of democratic government to the African continent. If anything, the 21st century has brought little or no hope to most of the ordinary people in most states. Disease, particularly in the form of the HIV virus, is rampant. Natural disasters compound corrupt and inept governance to bring famine across vast swathes of the continent. Life expectancy has diminished dramatically for most. Despite glib talk of an African “renaissance”, the big men – the tyrants, the despots and the dictators – are the only individuals to flourish, lining their overseas bank accounts with proceeds from mining resources and foreign aid money.
Foreign correspondents often face great danger in covering Africa and many have been jailed, beaten, deported and, alarmingly, killed in the line of duty. Munnion gives a graphic account of his horrific time in Idi Amin’s notorious military prison in Uganda. The reporter’s eye view of Africa today is a grim one, although in Deadline Africa Munnion manages to find the black humour with which correspondents manage the most hair-raising assignments.
Scheduled for publication early 2009
Images from DEADLINE AFRICA
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