Need book recommendations? Check out all 301 (and counting) books that I've read at Dad's Bookshelf.
Exploring African literature and history? Follow my continent-wide reading journey at Beyond Achebe.
Below are my highlights from a selection from my 2014 Reading List selection.
Location 29Thousands of days and nights spent in wildernesses taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying.
Location 49I once told a chief that I would kill him myself if he let his warriors go killing again (something he was planning to do). He liked that. He smiled, after studying my face. After all he could understand that far more easily than the kind of government he thought I represented.
Location 76‘When all your machines, and ships, and aircraft, and all those things you make, when they are all finished, our Arab dhows will still be sailing the seas, and we Arabs will hold together the world that we made, from India and farther East too, to here and to Europe. We are not finished yet, even though we are beggars now.’
Location 305But of all the races of Africa there cannot be one better to live among than the most difficult, the proudest, the bravest, the vainest, the most merciless, the friendliest; the Somalis.
Location 355He did not go far beyond the towns of British Somaliland, a fairly quiet little area, never entered the real desolation, but his report said that nearly every officer was slightly to violently unbalanced.
