Last days in cloud cuckooland
Subtitle: dispatches from white Africa
By: Graham Boynton.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 299
Subjects: Boynton, Graham; Apartheid -- South Africa; Anti-apartheid movements -- South Africa; Journalists -- South Africa -- Biography; South Africa -- Race relations; Zimbabwe -- Social life and customs; Zimbabwe -- Race relations
Description: Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland is Graham Boynton's account of the final gasps of white culture 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, "any more than the blacks in Africa have been a saintly group of idealists and altruists." It is an evocative story, and as it unfolds the author is drawn toward a controversial conclusion. If the white colonials did a rather poor job of making Africa work, he argues, then their African successors have done considerably worse.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [279]-282) and index.