Last Days In Cloud Cuckooland Dispatches

by Graham Boynton

"Last days in cloud cuckooland" is Boynton's's account of the final gasps of white of power on the continent, from the flight of the Belgian refugees from the Congo in 1960 through the first years of Nelson Mandela's presidency in South Africa. In a series of graphic accounts of the human dramas marking this disorderly retreat, he illuminates the complexity and ambiguity of the role of the whites in Africa. They "were never a unified gang of cold hearted supremacists," he writes," anymore then the blacks in Africa have been a St. the group of idealists and altruists." It is an evocative story, and as it unfolds the author is drawn toward a controversy old conclusion. If they white colonials did a rather poor job of making Africa work, He argues, then their African successors have done considerably worse." It was in Africa that my identity was forged," Boynton writes." Somewhere amid the rapid dismemberment of colonial rule, the wars, the triumph of Black nationalism, I became a white African, and will remain so for the rest of my life, wherever I live."

Genres: Africa

Paperback

First published August 19, 1997

About the author

GRAHAM BOYNTON was raised in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and later emigrated to South Africa, where he attended Natal University and worked as a journalist. In 1975 he was expelled from South Africa because of his opposition to apartheid. He worked for many years as a journalist in London before translocating to New York where he worked for a decade for Conde Nast as a writer and editor. Since 1998 he has lived in London working as an author and newspaper and magazine journalist.

Photo Credit: Håkan Ludwigson

Reviews

[Ian Hefele]

Little dated now, but good contemporary reading of the tumult of 1990s southern Africa

[Marc]

Part memoir, history lesson, political commentary, cultural study, conservation narrative, Boynton tries to capture white African life but it’s all a bit messy

[Thomas Lang]

Each chapter is its own stand alone story. Some chapters would probably be two star worthy. Some better.