In a study that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets ou
t to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a
location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained med
itation on themosaic of peoples and practices we call 'Africa', and an impassion
ed attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from
foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politic
s as theft.
