100 Books Like The Canal House

A novel that reads like a reportage, almost a documentary, on contemporary (the Nineties) life in Kenya for the small and influential (but not rich) community of “white Kenyans”: some native of Kenya, some adoptive sons and daughters of the country that invented the safari a century ago and that is the main hub for all news organizations in the continent. So, reporters, conservationists, dreamers, adventures, misfits, eccentrics populate this hugely evocative and partially autobiographical book that has some of the best “sound bites” on the question we are often asked: Why You Love Africa?

This sleeper of a novel creates the fictional East African country of Umbika, with its charismatic strongman who everyone refers to as “His Excellency, the Life President”, in a thinly veiled resemblance to Malawi under the dictatorship of the late Hastings Banda. Small wonder for the comparison, since the author was a foreign service officer in Malawi before turning full-time to writing. The journalist in this fast-paced story is an outspoken African-American activist and columnist named Maurice Hightower, and the story revolves around the career American diplomat, Joe Kellerman, who gets the unwanted job of escorting Hightower around Umbika in the middle of an escalating civil war.

Spies, lies, love, coups, what more do you want? In the book we encounter Marie Mitchell, now under threat of assassination, but previously a CIA spy who had fallen in love with–and collaborated in the downfall of–Thomas Sankara.

For Marie, the transition to the CIA is a way of escaping the stifling and misogynistic FBI of the 1980s. For the CIA, a black, attractive woman is ideal to snoop in and undermine a charismatic leader. The book, told by Marie as a letter to her children, moves back and forward between her spying missions and her (self)exile in Martinique.

It is fast-paced, realistic, and able to portray the daring aspects, the bureaucratic obstacles, and the moral compromises of spying for the CIA.

Set in the fictitious West African country of Kinjanja, the hapless exploits of an ill-fated British High Commission delegate in the wrong place at the wrong time left me exhausted from laughing out loud so hard.

It’s a sliding-door adventure thriller about the comic yet tragic downfall of a good man trying to do his best in the face of unrelenting adversity. I read it while living in Nigeria (Kinjanja is a cross between Ghana and Nigeria) and found it to be the perfect fusion of exotic location and sense of place, combined with a headlong descent into mayhem and madness.

This is a true story about a little girl in Africa, named Beatrice. Her family is poor and cannot afford to send her to school. Until the day when her family is given a goat, which gives the family the ability to earn an income. Hilary Clinton has written the Afterword to this beautiful kid’s picture book. I actually know Beatrice personally, and her life is a real-life Cinderella story that inspires such hope.

Idi Amin Dada is one of the “best known” African dictators. So many books, documentaries, and films have depicted him as a bloody, megalomaniac leader on the verge of craziness. He was even portrayed by Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. Alicia Decker shows a different story, starting by asking what if we take Idi Amin’s seriously? What if we explore the way he turned his (brutal) “hyper-masculinity” into a political resource? To me, this book was eye-opening, there are so many ways to write about African presidents, their politics, their ideas, and their resources. And of course, there are many ways to “gender” their histories and look for the women who stand in the president’s shadow.

The First Woman is perhaps the best novel you haven’t yet read. Kirabo has never known her mother and she is looking for answers at the same time as she is becoming a woman. She is guided first by the village’s blind witch Nsuuta, who has her own reasons for getting involved. Nsuuta tells Kirabo that women were once, “huge, strong, loud, proud, brave, independent. But it was too much for the world.” The writing in this ambitious novel is sometimes funny and sometimes poignant.

This book taught me about the necessity of doing queer research that not only challenges cisheteronormativity, but also colonialism and coloniality as well.

Rao’s book is a masterclass in transnational and transtemporal storytelling, narrating plural stories of the (post)colonial politics of queerness, gender, and sexuality. I was especially gripped by his chapter tracing the colonial spectres of atonement that underpin the British government’s apologies for anti-sodomy laws, which resonates with a broader homocolonial discourse Western countries have used to denounce former colonised countries as backward and queerphobic. 

Queer IR can and should attend to these imperial histories and afterlives, and how they are underpinned by and uphold particular gendered and sexual norms. This book shows how global politics is a story about (post)coloniality and queerness.

George Schaller’s pioneering popular Year of the Gorilla, set in Rwanda, is part history, travelogue, and accessible behavioral biology. This book was my model for how to write about my own seven summers living with killer whales off northern Vancouver Island, Canada. Travelling with wife Kay, Schaller in his mid-20s was among the first to get into the field with primates when few even considered it. Rich with stories, his book included his own beautiful line drawings of gorillas and tantalising maps. The story uncovers a misty kingdom—he climbed the volcanoes—as much as revealing the intimate details of the gorillas, with their food gathering, nest-building, relationships, their emotional lives. This book has human and gorilla characters. You feel like you are right there.

The White Nile is another classic, telling the story of how European explorers “discovered” Africa’s greatest river in the second half of the nineteenth century. It’s a rollicking tale, featuring cameos from everyone from Herodotus to Churchill, packed with wild tales of bull-headed men marching into areas which were, for them, literally blank spaces on the map. Some of the prose inevitably feels a little dated these days, but it overflows with drama and detail, and provides a fascinating insight into the history of a region which many people still know too little about. I lived near the source of the Nile in Uganda for quite a while, and have many happy memories of reading this before heading out for a swim.