Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Love Africa A Memoir of Romance War and Survival by Review: Love, Africa – A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival by Jeffrey Gettleman. “It’s easy to explain why you like something. But love? That’s tricky. That’s a story, not a sentence,” writes Jeffrey Gettleman, a foreign correspondent for , in his first book, Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival . This is the story of two “obsessions”: a woman and a continent. As a young man, Gettleman travels to Africa for the first time and meets Courtenay, a fellow Cornell student. Both encounters shape the rest of his life. Now in his late forties, Gettleman has come to call his home; and after many ups and downs, he and Courtenay married and started a family in . In the early days, one of Gettleman’s friends and mentors, , asks at a campfire in the Mikumi National Park: “You guys ever wonder what to do with a landscape like this? It’s, like, beautiful food you can eat; a beautiful woman you can kiss; but what are you going to do with a landscape this beautiful?” You can love it. If you are a journalist, you can also attempt to capture it in words. Gettleman credits Eldon for making “that all-important introduction: Jeff, World. World, Jeff.” It is through his journeys to Africa and the people he encounters here that Gettleman decides to become a reporter and dreams of being a foreign correspondent in . “But writing is like travelling. Often you have to pass through a bunch of places you don’t want to visit in order to arrive where you do.” After interviewing the likes of Desmond Tutu and Salman Rushdie for a student newspaper as a graduate, Gettleman eventually cut his journalistic teeth in Brooksville, central Florida, at the St. Petersburg Times where he covered “small-town carnage, one-on-one war”. One of his big stories at the time was about the child molester and murderer, Willie Crain – “the ultimate depths of depravity”. In 1999, Gettleman became a general assignment reporter for the . Soon after, he was writing from and the , and in 2002, he transferred to the New York Times – initially as a domestic correspondent, before he was sent to . It was only in 2006 that his Africa dream came true as he took over as chief of the East Africa bureau of the newspaper in Nairobi. Gettleman won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2012. Even if you don’t know his journalism, reading the memoir you will understand why. His writing is visceral; it is impossible to remain unaffected. He states: “There’s exactly one difference between an adventure and a tragedy: death.” Right from the tense opening pages of Love, Africa you know how tightly these two are intertwined, how high the stakes. The memoir exemplifies a hard lesson Gettleman learns – the one that contrasts a life wasted and a life lived: “Or maybe the lesson was simpler. It wasn’t about death. It was about life. It’s never long enough. So get it while you can.” Gettleman is not the first mzungu to fall hook, line and sinker for this continent. Many have written about their experiences. What makes Love, Africa stand out among the diverse accounts is the vulnerability that Gettleman allows to underpin his writing. He constantly challenges, and accepts when necessary, his limitations as a journalist: “I didn’t have the capacity to absorb all that was being asked of me, nor the courage to tell these men who were putting their hand on my heart the truth. I wasn’t a conduit to a just world. I was simply a reporter.” But there is no doubt that he and others can make a difference, whether in small ways to individual lives they touch or on a grand scale when reporting leads to deeper awareness and changes in policy making. At one stage Gettleman notes: “if we could break Iraq, just imagine what we could do to a really poor place where few were watching.” He is fearless in his criticism, whether of his own or other governments – the right and the courage to do so should never be taken for granted. There is no way of escaping helplessness in the face of the atrocities Gettleman has to cover as a reporter, and searching for the right way to do it is one of the most vital tasks. When writing, he finds himself having to fight editors for single words like “hacked” to express what he’d witnessed. But as he points out, “just because there was a million questions about what exactly you should do, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do anything.” Some of his observations seem simple, but go to the heart of conflicts we hear about on the news or experience in our everyday. The following struck me in particular: “Elections are anxious in most Africa… They are not just a race. They are a test. The key questions is never who wins. It’s whether the loser accepts.” And this: “The only African countries that succeeded in overcoming this [colonial divisions] and building anything close to a national identity were those that took forceful steps to neutralize ethnicity or tribe (I use the terms interchangeably).” Exploitation and betrayal mark our socio-political legacies. Gettleman’s greatest achievement in the book is to trace his own personal, intimate history of both against the background of the global story. His honesty is disarming as he recalls his path towards loyalty and integrity. It is strewn with the suffering of others, especially Courtenay. “I have few regrets in life,” he writes, “but here I wished I could redo everything. But I couldn’t, which left me simply hoping that that clumsy, hurtful time would slip deeper and deeper into a softly entombed past, like the tracks we left behind in the desert that the evening winds gently erased.” In the end, he is redeemed by the ancient truth: “This is all I need, my freedom and you. Take everything else from me. It doesn’t matter.” Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. by Jeffrey Gettleman. HarperCollins, 2017. Edited version of this review was first published in the Cape Times on 24 November 2017. [PDF] Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival Book by Jeffrey Gettleman Free Download (368 pages) Free download or read online Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival pdf (ePUB) book. The first edition of the novel was published in May 16th 2017, and was written by Jeffrey Gettleman. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of 368 pages and is available in ebook format. The main characters of this cultural, africa story are , . The book has been awarded with , and many others. Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival PDF Details. Author: Jeffrey Gettleman Original Title: Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival Book Format: ebook Number Of Pages: 368 pages First Published in: May 16th 2017 Latest Edition: May 16th 2017 Language: English category: cultural, africa, non fiction, autobiography, memoir, biography, travel, history, eastern africa, kenya, biography memoir, audiobook, politics Formats: ePUB(Android), audible mp3, audiobook and kindle. 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Review of Jeffrey Gettleman’s Love, Africa: A memoir of Romance, War and Survival (Harper, 2017) I was asked by the CIHA Blog to write a review of Jeffrey Gettleman’s memoir, Love , Africa , after ranting on Twitter about foreign correspondents who spend years in Africa, write books on the continent and somehow manage not to recount friendships with Africans as part of their experience. Such was the handling of Africa by Keith Richburg, formerly of the Washington Post, in Out of America : A Black Man Confronts Africa . I reviewed that book almost 20 years ago, while studying for my MA, comparing it to Blaine Harden’s Dispatches from a Fragile Continent , which had been published five years earlier. I promised to buy Gettleman’s book to read for myself whether this offense of non- African friendship had been committed. And so, here we are. Like Gettleman, Richburg and Harden, I am a journalist; unlike them I am an African. I chose to go into journalism because of my frustration with the portrayal of Africa in the Western media. Much of my career has been spent in international media organisations, covering Africa for a primarily African audience, because I was concerned about the stories we as Africans were telling and hearing about ourselves. I also naively believed that the problem with international portrayals of Africa and Africans was due to the lack of Africans working in international media. Twenty years down the line, I no longer believe this. Children and rape victims are identified if they are African; Africans are interviewed as victims, rarely as authorities unless they are corrupt or inept; and images of Africans in vulnerable states will almost certainly be intrusive when compared to images of Westerners in similar states of vulnerability. Westerners will parachute into Africa and become ‘Africa hands’ (alleged experts) but no African journalist who has lived in the West will ever be seen as a credible authority on the West. African journalists are either assumed to be not good enough, their accents too strong to be understood by international audiences or they are deemed to be too emotionally attached to parochial subjects that international audiences care little about. Gettleman caught what he tells us is the “Africa disease,” a term coined by the French, as a teenager on a college trip to East Africa in the 1990s. He wrote his memoir, Love , Africa , to document his conflicted pursuit of his two great loves, Africa and his wife, Courtenay, and the tensions, mostly self-inflicted, between these two. He met Africa first and describes the ease of human connection in , all under the mentorship of Dan Eldon, who went on to become a photojournalist with the – then News Agency, and who was killed by a mob while on assignment in . Courtenay, Gettleman meets on campus; they are both students of , one among the prestigious Ivy League. She understands his fascination with Africa while his peers do not; puts up with and eventually supports his journalistic ambitions by retraining as a videographer when he lands the plum assignment of East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times; she manages to protect footage she filmed in ’s Ogaden Region when they are detained by government authorities. Where Gettleman’s love for Africa is steadfast and only briefly threatened by a stint in Afghanistan while working for the LA Times; his love for Courtenay is sacrificed for his career ambitions, betrayed by multiple affairs on his part and consequent dumpings by her. That is the romance part of the memoir. After his first visit, Gettleman finds his way back to Africa, as a back-packer with his best friend. Africa inspires him to try his hand as an aid worker in Ethiopia, and it is here that he works out that journalism will be his path. His evolution as a journalist is relatable. He starts small, at a local newspaper, works his way up to a national and then international newspaper. He suffers applications that receive no response, the pain of editors, the conferring of accelerated status and opportunities that arise from being in favour with organisational powers-that-be, and the fall from grace for shaving a quote. There are multiple theatres of war: Afghanistan, Iraq, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Eritrea. There are close encounters with kidnapping and death, and what could be post-traumatic stress. There is also the challenge of professional distance, bearing witness versus wanting to intervene in the situations that he finds some of his subjects, as he eventually does for Bahram and later for Peacock. These constitute both the war and survival aspects of the memoir. The survival theme also overlaps with the romantic as his marriage survives into parenthood. Gettleman is painfully honest about the consequences of American politics and policies backing the wrong side around the world, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia; he’s seen and survived them. This is particularly powerful as today’s world grapples with the politics of identity. His honesty about nominating himself for the Pulitzer Prize and the response to his self-nomination is also powerful. But there is a different cadence to the honesty about his self-discovery and his affairs compared to the honesty of being involved in a hit-and-run that kills an Ethiopian soldier and the sloppiness during the Ogaden assignment that allows his contacts to be tracked down. The personal disclosures sound confessional, verging on self-flagellation for which he expresses remorse, while the latter seem matter-of-fact and inflict no emotional toll. The reference to “ooga-booga” is vexatious as is the reference to Joseph Conrad’s fictional Heart of Darkness . Ooga-booga, we learn, is the stereotypical depiction of Africans in costumes, dancing and chanting around a fire. A colleague warns him to stay away from those depictions. Another colleague urges him to include those depictions because they are “what makes Africa Africa.” Thus, Jeffrey Gettleman finds himself having to tread a fine line between the Africa of suffering, diseases, deprivation and poverty, which he acknowledges is only part of the picture. He says that stereotypes are easy especially under deadline pressure. He admits that he was not so strong on stories of African progress and reflects that he could have written more about culture, sports, economies and technology. These would have provided a more complete picture of the continent. That Heart of Darkness , a book written in the 19 th century, is still referenced in today’s Africa of the 21 st Century is deeply troubling. Gettleman attempts to balance that trouble by citing the late Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s objections to Conrad’s portrayal of the continent. However, there are several contemporary African writers who have similar objections such as Kenya’s Binyavanga Wainaina, whom he quotes but does not seem to bother to reach out to, even though he is based in Kenya. Most telling of all is the absence of African peers in Gettleman’s network. The only African intellectual featured is in the blurbs endorsing the book; one from a former Sierra Leonean child-soldier, himself an author based in the US; an Indian-American doctor and author who was brought up in Ethiopia offers his praise as well. More support comes from notable : all of them writers of repute, straddling entrepreneurship, technology, psychology and journalism, in this case Harden. The first story Gettleman covers in Kenya is the murder conviction of Thomas Cholmondeley, the descendant of a British aristocrat who settled in Kenya four generations prior. Cholmondeley has killed twice by the time of the story, local men in both instances. Gettleman quotes a white friend of Cholmondeley; does not challenge the friend’s threat to kill black men as Cholmondeley has done; and does not seek out the families of the slain men, experts on land politics or Cholmondeley’s lawyer even though he recounts his appearance in court. Gettleman’s tenure included seminal moments in Kenya’s history: the violence that followed the general election of 2007 and the Westgate terrorist attack of 2013. Both of these showed Kenyans at their worst and most vulnerable. But little is said about the best of what the country offers. Despite speaking Kiswahili, spending ten years based in Kenya, and covering a patch of 13 countries, Gettleman could find no artists, writers, thinkers, innovators or techies to give voice to events in their countries and on the continent. He attends cocktail parties but could find no local birthday or wedding parties to attend or get himself invited to, never mind how colourful and joyful these celebrations are. His close friends, the Da Vinci Brothers, are involved in film-making but he could find no directors and thespians to speak to nor performances and movies to watch. This trend is discernible much earlier, during his stint as an aid-worker in Ethiopia where he is lonely and miserable, and only finds solace in the companionship of other expatriates. Gettleman talks about the ease of human connection in Africa, but the only connection he offers readers is that with Peacock. He does indeed therefore commit the offense of not having or perhaps failing to feature strong friendships with Africans. Two Kenyan names feature in the book acknowledgements, but the trusted source for most of his stories out of East Africa is the French diplomat, Louis. African diplomats are mentioned but not quoted. Gettleman’s memoir therefore seems written for a Western audience since the reader is told on the book sleeve endorsement that Africa is “…the most terrifying and beguiling continent in the world.” This is an Africa that many of us Africans are unfamiliar with. And yet, as we watch international news, the same could be said of the world’s other continents, including North and South America, and Asia. These dichotomous statements are typical of Western writing about Africa and thus the continent is yet again cast as an anthropological canvas for adventure, self-discovery and career progression. But the continent has changed and Africans are now more confident on several fronts, including the use of technology. Kenyans on more than one occasion have, for instance, taken to Twitter to express their anger at some of Gettleman’s reporting using the hashtag #SomeonetellGettleman. Love , Africa is a memoir and so Gettleman is the hero of his own book. He follows his dreams against all odds, survives kidnapping and wars, gets the girl and is apparently living in their happily ever after. However, Gettleman’s memoir stifles African voices, African agency and African development especially because as he tells us, he writes for “the paper of record, read by diplomats, intelligence services and decision-makers around the world.” And so opportunities to fill this Western record with up-to-date, balanced and nuanced pictures from the continent, which determine business opportunities, inform various policy engagements and foster understanding of other cultures, communities and races were lost. Gettleman claims to love Africa, but it would seem, not Africans. About the Author: *Uduak Amimo is a Kenyan journalist. She hosts the current affairs talk show, Cheche, on Citizen TV (Kenya). Before returning to Kenya and taking up her current position, Amimo worked for several international media organisations, including the BBC World Service, Voice of America and Reuters. She was one of the moderators of Kenya’s first presidential debates, held during the 2013 general election. Amimo serves as a trustee on the board of Uraia, a national civic education organisation. She is a 2017 Bloomberg ALI Media Fellow, a 2015 Tutu Fellow and a 2014 GSIH Fellow. Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. Download Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival or Read Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival online books in PDF, EPUB and Mobi Format. Click Download or Read Online Button to get Access Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival ebook. Please Note: There is a membership site you can get UNLIMITED BOOKS, ALL IN ONE PLACE. FREE TO TRY FOR 30 DAYS. In order to Download Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival or Read Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival book, you need to create an account. Category: Book Binding: Paperback Author: Gettleman, Jeffrey Number of Pages: 371 Amazon Page : https://www.amazon.com/dp/006228410X Amazon.com Price : $9.69 Lowest Price : $$0.01 Total Offers : 53 Rating: 4.6 Total Reviews: 235. keyword : Read Online Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival pdf Download Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival epub Download Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival kindle Download Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival ebook.