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Cry Havoc Simon Mann For the first time since he was released from five years' incarceration in some of Africa's toughest prisons, making worldwide headlines, Simon Mann breaks his silence to tell everything Simon Mann's remarkable firsthand account of his life reads like a thriller, taking readers into the world of mercenaries and spooks, of murky international politics, big oil and big bucks, action, danger, love, despair, and betrayal. On March 7, 2004, former SAS soldier and mercenary Simon Mann prepared to take off from Harare International Airport. His destination was Equatorial Guinea; his was intention to remove one of the most brutal dictators in Africa in a privately organized coup d'etat. The plot had the tacit approval of Western intelligence agencies and Mann had planned, overseen, and won two wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. So why did it go so wrong? Here he reveals the full involvement of Mark Thatcher in the coup d'etat, the endorsement of a former prime minister, and the financial involvement of two internationally famous members of the House of Lords. He also discusses how the British government approached him in the months preceding the Iraq War, to suggest ways in which a justified invasion of Iraq could be engineered. He also discusses the pain of telling his wife Amanda, who gave birth to their fourth child while he was incarcerated, that he believed he would never be freed. |
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My Friend the Mercenary James Brabazon In a fly-blown bar in West Africa, British war reporter James Brabazon found himself being briefed by South Africa's most notorious mercenary, Nick du Toit, on covert military plans to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea-a tiny country fabulously rich in oil. The botched coup and its tragic consequences left a host of guns-for-hire victims of their own avaricious schemes and ruthless double-crosses. Mark Thatcher, only son of the former British prime minister, was famously implicated in the plot. My Friend the Mercenary is both an account of James's courageous journey into the Liberian civil war-where he reported from behind rebel lines with Nick du Toit as his bodyguard-and the inside story of the most infamous coup attempt in recent history. 'An outstanding memoir about the power of friendship in the morally complex theatre of war. James Brabazon is a fearless reporter and a brutally honest narrator. I couldn't put this book down.' Andy McNab |
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Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience With Development And Decadence In Deepest Africa Robert Klitgaard Selected as one of the six best nonfiction books of 1990 by the editors f the New York Times Book Review, this is a compelling and entertaining account of the author’s two-and-a-half year adventure in Equatorial Guinea, and his efforts to get this small bankrupt African nation on the path of structural development. |
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The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa Adam Roberts Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country roughly the size of Maryland. Humid, jungle covered, and rife with unpleasant diseases, natives call it Devil Island. Its president in 2004, Obiang Nguema, had been accused of everything from cannibalism, belief in witchcraft, mass murder, billion-dollar corruption, and terrorism. With so little to recommend it, why in March 2004 was it the target of a group of salty British, South African, and Zimbabwean mercenaries, traveling on an American-registered ex-National Guard plane? The real motive? Oil. In The Dogs of War, Frederick Forsyth described a 1972 attempt by mercenaries to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. The chain of events surrounding March 7, 2004 is a rare case of life imitating art--or at least, life imitating a 1970s thriller--in almost uncanny detail. The Wonga Coup is a shocking tale of venality, overarching vanity, and greed whose example speaks to the problems of the entire African continent. |
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The Wonga Coup Adam Roberts |
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Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa Mary-Alice Waters, Martín Koppel,
- Transforming production and class relations
- The Cuban revolution's internationalist road
In the decades of wars, economic crises, and explosive class battles that lie ahead, the weight of the toilers of Africa in shaping the future will be greater than ever before. Reporting from Equatorial Guinea in central Africa, the authors focus on the social transformations unfolding, as revenues from offshore oil extraction are used to build infrastructure on which rising labor productivity, industry, and progress depend. Pulled into the world market as never before, both a capitalist class and a working class are being born. Here also, in accounts of the work of volunteer Cuban medical brigades in Equatorial Guinea, is the living example of Cuba s socialist revolution made possible by workers and farmers who were led five decades ago to take power into their own hands. Woven together, these seemingly disparate threads the beginning transformation of production and class relations in Equatorial Guinea, and the proletarian course of the Cuban Revolution show a future to be fought for today.
Introduction by Mary-Alice Waters, photos, maps, index.
Also available in: Spanish |
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Africa on the Move Ahmed Sekou Toure In this book, Ahmed Sekou Toure expresses the ideology of the Guinea Revolution. Beginning with an historical analysis of the condictions in pre-Independence Guinea, he goes on to examine the " groundwork of the revolution" and to define the principles, orientation and methods of the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG). Among the subjects covered are socialist economic planning, education, the position of women, justice, pan-African and foreign policies, political and administrative structures, and revolutionary culture. The Guinea experience is of great relevance to all peoples engaged with replacing the structure of exploitation with those of socialism, and, in this Panaf edition of Sekou Toure's important work, the author provides a valuable account of the philosophy and progress of the Guinea Revolution in the Pan-African context. |
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Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain (Studies of World Migrations) Michael Ugarte What differentiates emigration from exile? This book delves theoretically and practically into this core question of population movements. Tracing the shifts of Africans into and out of Equatorial Guinea, it explores a small former Spanish colony in central Africa. Throughout its history, many inhabitants of Equatorial Guinea were forced to leave, whether because of the slave trade of the early nineteenth century or the political upheavals of the twentieth century. Michael Ugarte examines the writings of Equatorial Guinean exiles and migrants, considering the underlying causes of such moves and arguing that the example of Equatorial Guinea is emblematic of broader dynamics of cultural exchange in a postcolonial world. Based on personal stories of people forced to leave and those who left of their own accord, Africans in Europe captures the nuanced realities and widespread impact of mobile populations. Ugarte illustrates the global material inequalities that occur when groups and populations migrate from their native land of colonization to other countries and regions that are often the lands of the former colonizers. By focusing on the geographical, emotional, and intellectual dynamics of Equatorial Guinea's human movements, readers gain an inroad to "the consciousness of an age" and an understanding of the global realities that will define the cultural, economic, and political currents of the twenty-first century. |
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Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships (African Modernization and Development Series) Samuel Decalo |
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From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930 Ibrahim K. Sundiata Fernando Po, home to the Bantu-speaking Bubi people, has an unusually complex history. Long touted as the “key” to West Africa, it is the largest West African island and the last to enter the world economy. Confronted by both African resistance and ecological barriers, early British and Spanish imperialism foundered there. Not until the late nineteenth century did foreign settlement take hold, abetted by a class of westernized black planters. It was only then that Fernando Po developed a plantation economy dependent on migrant labor, working under conditions similar to slavery.
In From Slaving to Neoslavery, Ibrahim K. Sundiata offers a comprehensive history of Fernando Po, explains the continuities between slavery and free contract labor, and challenges standard notions of labor development and progress in various colonial contexts. Sundiata’s work is interdisciplinary, considering the influences of the environment, disease, slavery, abolition, and indigenous state formation in determining the interaction of African peoples with colonialism.
From Slaving to Neoslavery has manifold implications. Historians usually depict the nineteenth century as the period in which free labor triumphed over slavery, but Sundiata challenges this notion. By examining the history of Fernando Po, he illuminates the larger debate about slavery current among scholars of Africa. |