Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Keith Richburg, a reporter for the Washington Post, had paid his dues covering the urban neighborhoods of our capital city. But nothing prepared him for the extraordinary personal odyssey that he would embark upon when he was sent to Africa to be the Post's chief correspondent on the continent. As he journeys from Somalia to Rwanda to South Africa, and observes with increasing horror the routine of murder, brutal dictatorship, and warfare, he is forced to face directly the divide within himself, between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.

FROM THE CRITICS

Wall Street Journal

Striking in both its honesty and horror...A gripping memoir. Out of America is a passionate reminder to a multiethnic democracy that human dignity, not banal notions of cultural identity, is the source of enduring civic and personal esteem.

USA Today

This may well be the most important book to come out of Africa since Isak Denisen's classic Out of Africa, published 60 years earlier...the most honest book to emerge from Africa in a long time.

Newsweek

A brave work that is not afraid to go against the grain....An important and original book.

Publishers Weekly

Richburg spent three years (1991-1994) covering Africa for the Washington Post, and his tour of crisis zones like Somalia, Rwanda and Liberia left him disgusted and disheartened by the carnage, corruption and ungovernability that he observed. Moreover, faced with his self-identity as a black man- "there but for the grace of God go I"-and what he sees as black Americans' unthinking invocation of Africa, the jaded author concludes with an embrace of his essentially American identity. Indeed, his pungent narrative shoves African violence in our faces, while his encounters with African locals are inevitably distanced by culture and class. He takes a crusading journalist's pleasure in cross-examining visiting American black luminaries who excuse Africa's lack of democracy. Among evasionists, he finds one straight talker, Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, who, after citing the usual litany of explanations (colonialism, etc.), which Richburg deems excuses, for African failures, criticizes his own people's lack of discipline. Richburg in turn applies that analysis to the problems plaguing black Africa. The author's harsh words, backed by experience, should stir controversy. But his report is too thin. His conclusions might have been tempered by reports that some black groups (like TransAfrica) have recently pressured Nigeria on human rights, and the no-longer-hopeful author doesn't acknowledge how the West might use aid to leverage political change. Richburg's crisis-based experience also ignores some other stories about the ambiguous black American African encounter, such as those told in Eddy Harris's Native Stranger. First serial to U.S. News & World Report. (Mar.)

Newsweek

A brave work that is not afraid to go against the grain....An important and original book.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"Black America has always imagined Africa like the adopted child imagines the birth parent. The dream is that Africa holds a truth for us. Keith Richburg marches through that dream and finds that he was an American all along."  — HarperCollins

"Striking in both its honesty and horror...A passionate reminder to a multiethnic democracy that human dignity, not banal notions of cultural identity, is the source of enduring civic and personal esteem."  — HarperCollins