5 comments about Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91.

1. Arthur Rimbaud was one of the most brilliant poets the human race has ever seen. He belongs in the company of Callimachus, Sappho and Catullus, the spoiled child from the north whose frank and erotic poems scandalized Rome: odi et amo, Catullus had written. I hate you and I love you. That says it all. About Rimbaud as well.

   Rimbaud was an illusion, a ghost, someone we conjure up and then spend the rest of out lives trying to shake off. Dead for more than a hundred years now, Arthur Rimbaud wrote poetry for a few brief years, while he was still in his teens, from about 1870 to 1873. He could never have imagined the extraordinary influence his slim collection of poems would have over the following century. Rimbaud. however, abandoned the world of literature at a very young age. When he was nineteen, he gave in to a mixture of rage and pride, and threw his marvelous talent onto a bonfire, along with his manuscripts. By the time his anger had eaten its way through his soul, he could not speak of poetry without contempt. He lived another eighteen years, wandering from one end of Europe to the other and as far afield as the East Indies. He joined the Dutch Colonial Army and was sent to Java, but deserted and returned to France. He got work in Cyprus, as an overseer of a stone quarry, but his temper got the better of him, "I have had some quarrels with the workmen," he wrote, "and I've had to request some weapons." He collapsed with typhoid and hurriedly returned home.

   In March 1880, when he was twenty-five, he left France for the last time. He found work in Cyprus again, as foreman of a construction gang in the mountains. He got involved in another quarrel and, it seems, threw a stone which hit a local worker and killed him. Rimbaud fled, traveling through the Red Sea, ending up in the British port of Aden, a sun-baked volcanic crater perched at the gateway to the Indian Ocean on the coast of Yemen. He spent the next eleven years in exile, working as a trader in Aden and Abyssinia.

   Charles Nicholl's book is chiefly the story of those years, from the time Rimbaud disembarks at Aden in 1880 to his death in Marseilles in 1891, at the age of thirty-seven, from the cancer which had started in his right leg. It is very stylish, thoroughly researched, and shows a great deal of insight into the character of this angry and bitter man. Arthur Rimbaud's adolescent rebellion was so brief and the flowering of his talent so violent and astonishing that it has overshadowed his essential character. His life is often seen through a romantic blur, and the astringent view of his career that Nicholl presents in this book is a useful corrective.

   Rimbaud was born in the northern French town of Charleville in October 1854, the son of an army captain and a farmer's daughter. There were two younger sisters and an older brother. The father, who had spent some years in Algeria and in different parts of France, found provincial life stifling and family life difficult. He was often absent. Rimbaud was six when his father left for the last time, never to return.

   His mother was a dour, hard-working woman of peasant stock, impatient with her husband's fecklessness, and embittered by his final desertion. For most of his life Rimbaud was like his mother--devoted to hard work. As a child he was obedient, studious and even rather prim. In his final school examinations he swept the board, winning all the prizes in his form except for two.

   In his sixteenth year, everything changed. Two catastrophic public events shook France, and a private calamity changed Rimbaud forever. The French emperor Napoleon the Third declared war on Prussia in July 1870. The German armies swept through north-eastern France, the countryside where Rimbaud had grown up, and within six months the French had been defeated.

   In the aftermath of the Armistice in January 1871, the people of Paris, republican to the core and disgusted with their government, set up a Commune. Eventually French government troops put it down, killing twenty thousand French men and women in the streets of Paris in a single week in May. Rimbaud had run away from home to join the Commune, though it's unlikely he was there during that week of horror.

   Rimbaud though, had his own, personal nightmare to live through. At some time during this visit to Paris he was raped, perhaps gang-raped, probably by a group of soldiers at the Babylone barracks. The evidence is indirect but, as Charles Nicholl says, and most biographers agree with him, it is persuasive. Rimbaud went home to Charleville in a state of profound shock and confusion. He sent batches of his poems to important poets in the capital, Banville and Paul Verlaine among them. Verlaine summoned him to Paris and to his fate. It was September 1871 and Rimbaud was sixteen; Verlaine twenty-eight. The two men--rather, the man and the schoolboy--became lovers. The older poet Banville lent Rimabud an attic flat for a while as a favor to Verlaine. Rimbaud became friends with the musician Ernest Cabaner, who also put him up for a while, the novelist Jules Claretie, and the poets Charles Cros and Germaine Nouveau. These bohemians were scandalizing the bourgeoisie with their sexual indiscretions, their immodest writings and their indulgence in absinthe and hashish and opium. Rimbaud outdid them in every respect.

   He made many enemies. Verlaine's future biographer Lepelletier disapproved of his influence on his old friend Verlaine, and Rimbaud responded by calling him an obscenity. When Lepelletier told Rimbaud to shut up, the boy threatened him with a table knife. He called poor Banville yet another obscenity, he stabbed the photographer Carjat with a sword-stick, he repaid the hospitality of Cabaner by going into Cabaner's room when he wasn't there and committing an unspeakable act. In short, Rimbaud was as arrogant and bad-tempered as one could get.

   In July 1873, less than two years after they had first met, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in a fit of drunken jealousy. The boy was wounded in the wrist, and Verlaine burst into tears and begged his forgiveness. The next evening while they were out walking in the street Verlaine turned ugly again and pulled the revolver from his pocket. This time Rimbaud called out to a passing policeman. They were in Brussels; the police discovered evidence of their homosexual relationship, and incriminating letters. Rimbaud tried to take back the charges, but it was too late. Verlaine was sentenced to two years' hard labour in a Belgian jail.

   Odi et amo. It is a phrase that sums up, not only Rimbaud's work but his life as well.




2. As another reviwer has already stated, this book will not definitively answer the question that so many lovers of Rimbaud ask. To wit, "Why did he stop writing?"-But the book is a well-researched and well-written account of Rimmbaud as "un autre," somebody else than a poet...But it's all so grindingly depressing. Yes, Rimbaud had incredible endurance and will and courage. But he had no business acumen as the accounts of his many endeavors in the world of commerce amply illustrate. The book is essentially a tale of his slow degeneration in body, if not spirit.-I used to have a friend who loved Rimbaud more than I do who would call me in the middle of the night drunkenly, tearfully asking me why he quit. Well, there was nothing I could say at 3 A. M. that he would remember the next morning.-But what I feel is that the answer lies in Rimbaud's most famous poem, "Le Bateau Ivre." At the end of the poem, he says that, after all the exhilarating and mystical insights, after all the rapturous visions amidst the mad seastorms, there is nothing he would like better now then to return to being a litle boat being pushed across a placid pond by a little boy. Rimbaud had been through more hell in his life by the end of his teens than would fit in the lives of many a tortured soul.-It's really not so remarkable when you consider it that, his poetry unrecognized, his soul tortured by the relationship with Verlaine and the other atrocities and privations he endured that the young man would flee the literary world that had given him nothing but anguish in the end.-Unfortunately , the world to which he fled offered little in the way of compensation, as this book sadly chronicles. I recommend this book to those who, like myself, had no clear idea of exactly what Rimbaud DID after he stopped writing besides vague ideas of his being a gun-runner, slave-trader and amputee (This book, by the way, casts serious doubts over whether he was ever either of the former two, except perhaps when forced to do so by bad luck and necessity).-So, all in all, a sad but informative work.-I still think the last lines of "Le Bateau Ivre" are the key to why he stopped writing. But, as is commmonplace, you can't go home again, as those last lines express a yearning for. This book is an excellent chronicle of the alternative Rimbaud was forced to accept.



3. Any attempt to chronicle Rimbaud's Africa years is an exercise in filling in the blanks- Rimbaud himself seemed intent on essentially disappearing. Nicholl's work is relatively short, but he manages to extensively mine the archives for the right nuggets. The book is well referenced - (sources are extensive and as complete as they can be), and at times quite poetically written.
   Nicholl is thoughtful with his subject and careful to tell us what is fact, what is rumor, and what is his own conjecture. He also gives us a look at what the social and political landscape was at the time of his writing (1997) for the relevant stomping grounds.
   Still, it is not an "easy read" due to the complexity of it all- the elusive subject, the many cameos by traders and natives, the deliberate enigma of Rimbaud. Nicholl also pulls passages from A.R.'s poetry to highlight his accidental prescience - fun, but a bit contrived. (Dare I be the first to say that the majority of Rimbaud's poetry is not good? That the minority that stands out is so brilliant that we tolerate the drivel and obscenity in hopes of finding another gem?)
   Yet there is a pull to the book, no doubt the same powerful forces that draw us to the work and life of A.R., always pulling us in as he runs faster and farther away.



4. I've never really appreciated Rimbaud's poetry. Perhaps that's understandable, given that I'm not a linguist and that, for me at least, there's always something a little suspect about poems in translation. This is no doubt my loss. However, I've always liked a good read, and the one about Rimbaud, poet and traveler, who gave up his muse while still in his teens and left Europe for Africa, where he was rumored to be a gun runner and slaver, is a damned good tale. Charles Nicholl, author of "Borderlines" and "The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe,' does it ample justice in his memoir "Somebody Else," subtitled "Arthur Rimbaud in Africa: 1880-1891." Actually, the first quarter or so of the book is given over to the poet's formative years, including his well-documented relationship with Paul Verlaine, the older poet who came under the spell of Arthur's often-violent persona (and strikingly beautiful eyes), regarding him as the quintessential poète maudit. Readers familiar with the Agnieszka Holland film, "Total Eclipse" (1995) may be forgiven for interpolating an image of Leonardo DiCaprio for that of the real Rimbaud, but one look at the Carjat photograph on the cover of Nicholl's book should be enough to set them straight. More reminiscent of Katherine Hepburn in "Sylvia Scarlet" than the ever-wholesome DiCaprio, the photo hauntingly portrays Rimbaud's "hooded frightening eye" and somewhat cruel mouth at age seventeen. But Nicholl is more concerned with the "somebody else," also portrayed on the cover of my Vintage (1998) edition of the book: a Rimbaud self-portrait (the poet briefly took up photography in Harrar), arms folded and wearing a white smock, that has him looking, a year or two shy of thirty, more like a product of Bedlam than Hollywood. This is the man who turned his back on poetry and dedicated himself to exile, settling for eleven years in East Africa, where he developed a single-minded desire to succeed at some aspect of trade. Whether he became a gun runner or slaver (Nicholl is ambivalent on both points, but his apology for slavery as it existed in the late 19th century fails to convince) is still debated, but Rimbaud's early death, at age 37, in 1891, renders the question essentially moot. "Somebody Else" is meticulously researched (quotes from later travelers such as Evelyn Waugh and Lawrence Durrell are especially welcome) and a pleasure to read. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the "other" Rimbaud.



5. Somebody Else is one of my favorite books. People tend to like Rimbaud for his excesses -- his drug and alcohol abuse. Or they admire him for being an "out" queer when to be "out" would and did earn Rimbaud social ostracism (although he did his best to earn it in every way he could). Or they admire his intelligence and the sheer brilliance of his poetry. Make no mistake about it, Rimbaud is a heroic figure, but many feel that what was interesting about his life ended when he laid down his pen.
   
   Not so. What made Rimbaud a brilliant poet is the same quality that made his entire life interesting, even when he was marooned in Africa. Rimbaud had an insatiable intellect and a need to understand and master EVERYTHING, both inside him and in the world without. This need made him uncompromising and fearless, which is why he is so attractive. Rimbaud could be nasty and cantankerous and amoral -- which raises the question just how charming he would be if we actually knew him at close quarters. However, Nicholl's account describes a man who NEEDS to know, who will stop at nothing to learn himself and the world, all the dark recesses and all the light. Rimbaud's life is a great adventure.
   
   In Harrar, Ethiopia, Rimbaud explores hostile territories from which no white man has emerged alive. He can do this because he has learned the language, the culture, the mannerisms -- he presents himself as a Koran scholar and his knowledge of the Koran is so extensive that he gets away with it, blue eyes and all. The character of Indiana Jones was a tourist compared to Rimbaud. Rimbaud walked the world.
   
   The last decade of his life, we see him stuck. He is marooned in a day job he can't afford to leave. He orders books from France on every field of endeavor, he wants to be an expert on everything. You can see his dreams, to bring plumbing and civil engineering and all the accomplishments of the European civilization to Africa, but he only gets so far. He dresses like a worker, lives like a pauper, sleeping on a roof. He sends money home in the hopes of one day returning to France, not as the peasant he was born to be, but as a rich man -- which he never becomes. He organizes trading expeditions into the African interior -- 100-camel caravans -- and still, he never makes the scale of money he wants. He'll trade anything -- garments, guns, slaves, anything, without morals, without values, anything to make money -- and in the end he loses his shirt. He never achieves the legitimacy he wants as badly as he wants knowledge.
   
   And he never finds love. You see him at the end, dreaming of the love of an innocent convent girl, an orphan, a hypothetical woman who could accept him as he is...
   
   Rimbaud is an Icarus. His fall is heartbreaking.
   
   Rimbaud's poetry was just one facet of his need to explore himself and the world around him. I think what Rimbaud feared most was stagnation. Somebody Else is the tale of his quest to always go deeper, always keep learning, fearlessly.
   
   He died hard. But he is still a hero, and still a role-model. He stopped making art in order to live. And his life was a piece of art.

3 comments about 21 Days in Africa: A Hunter's Safari Journal.

1. David Graham of the Flint Journal was the critic who recommended this book. He said it brought back the verve and honor to the safari genre. He couldn't have been more correct.
   
   This book is not just for hunters-- it is for anyone looking for an adventure tale that occurs in real time. Sure, there's good stuff for travelers to Africa to know, but the meat of this book is the journey. It is simply very well done.
   
   Oh, the photography is stunning. It should have been a coffee table book simply for the quality of the photos.
   
   Africa veterans will remember their first trip with smiles and tears, Africa virgins will have their dreams burn all the brighter.



2. I'm not a big-game hunter and am not interested in becoming one, but I knew I would love this book when I read an excerpt in Sports Afield. Hunters will find much to admire in it, but it is about much more than hunting. The author proves himself an amiable, enthusiastic, reliable, and knowledgeable companion as he blends his compelling stories with a great deal of useful information about traveling to and within Africa. He manages to do it all with skillful literary touches and enough light-hearted moments to keep a reader chuckling. And he never blows smoke up your skirt. This is the straight dope -- and it conjures up the sights, sounds, and smells of one of the planet's most magical places.



3. I read & collect everything I can find on hunting in Africa. I rate this as one of the best of the modern books on the subject.
   
   It is beautifully illustrated, nicely bound, and well-written - it is hard to believe an officer actually wrote this! (Tongue-in-cheek here.) It is both informative and entertaining.
   
   I hope it is a great seller for Donarski and for Stackpole. It is good to see them putting out a book like this.

No comments about Eritrea Map by ITMB.

1 comments about The Essential Africa.

1. Michael Poliza's AFRICA was hailed as one of the best photography books on the continent when it was published in its oversized volume: THE ESSENTIAL AFRICA is a more concise, portable edition of the large coffee table original and is even more highly recommended to libraries seeking photographic representation of the continent's wildlife. The close-up animal photos lose nothing in reduction to the more standard book size and even are enhanced, fairly leaping off the page with lots of color and striking close-up effects. THE ESSENTIAL AFRICA is even more highly recommended for library holdings: easier to file, easier to hold and display, and certain to be a popular pick for any general-interest collection where patrons enjoy wildlife pictures.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch

5 comments about Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue: Scenes from the Non-Christian World.

1. I must disagree with the review written by T. Ross. The essays on travel are not dated any more than Paul Bowles wonderful prose is, which borders on the poetic. Certainly these essays were written in the fifties, but Bowles portraits of North Africans (and European settlers) are so vivid one can almost feel them breathe. The essay concerning Mustafa, a male Muslim and his beliefs should be required reading for the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Administration. As a poet and writer I appreciated Bowles style and his skill in presenting physical, philosophical and emotional landscapes. I highly recommend this book.



2. I like this book better than some of Mr. Bowles' longer fictional efforts. He is good at relatively short accounts, where his rich life experiences are related through highly descriptive prose. Bowles captures the abnormal psychology of the planet itself moreso than that of the individual, which is better left to Camus or Faulkner. Also, he is able to find some humor and meaning in the Western-Arab relationship, which helps relieve some of the strain of our current showdown, which Mr. Bowles foresaw. Especially funny to me is an account by Bowles of finding a filthy rag at the bottom of a pail of murky water he and his Arab travelmate had been using for drinking water. They up and left the "hotel" (and town) that day.
   
   Also of interest are chapters on Ceylon.
   
   Bowles seems to be more capable writing about real people and events than he is when functioning in the only slightly altered world of his fiction. I think it has something to do with him being an emotional loner. Like Sartre, he is more of an observer, more of a thinker, than a writer, so his fictional characterizations are, like Sartre's, often wooden and unconvincing (to me at least). To this viewpoint, he would strongly object I think. But, notice I refrain from calling him a moralist or a philosopher. If he were a painter, I would classify him as a post-impressionist like Matisse (great colorist, intriguing designs, romantic, but limited by "decorative" priorities.) And, like Matisse, he never really shocks me like a true Fauve because, no matter how gruesome the details of the narrative, his narrative voice is always too cultivated. He can't help it; he's from New England. For his fictional style to match the content, his manner would need to be cruder, like Kirchner or Vlaminck. And he is really not a portrait artist like Dickens, Joyce or Faulkner either. Or, maybe it's that his portraits capture places and milieus moreso than individual psyches. In this book, it doesn't matter because he is truly in his element: he travels wildly, observes meticulously and remembers creatively.



3. Bought as a gift. Have not read it, though I will eventually



4. Unable to write a review of the above title; the book was given to someone as a gift. The book was chosen because the author is a favorite of the person who received it.



5. Paul Bowles's collection of travel pieces dating from 1950-1963 reveals a love of solitude and the unfamiliar road in a time when American influence began to dominate the post-war world. Seeking refuge from growing American conformity at home, Tangier, Morocco became Bowles's permanent address in 1947. Tangier made an ideal jumping-off point for Bowles, who visited Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1950, Cape Coromin, India in 1952, Istanbul, Turkey in 1953, and made frequent trips into Morocco and the Sahara, where he documented and recorded its music and musicians.
   
   His travel writing can be at once witty and withering. Many of his observations are about the discomforts and disappointments of traveling; reading the more sour reports one might wonder why he put himself through all the trouble. Bowles obviously relished his role as the cultural outsider, and enjoyed writing about drugs, sex, and traditions the West found taboo. The people he describes are individuals, sketched boldly and without reserve. A trip to Ketama, "the kif center of all North Africa," becomes a chance to provide an extensive description of Morocco's drug culture.
   
   His willingness to describe the whole of his experience makes Bowles's writing more than mere reporting -- from an unexpected swarm of flies, to the unrelenting sun, to the cool desert night and the noisy neighbors in an overcrowded hotel. He was blunt about writing these pieces for pay (and published in American travel magazines) but the result remains an engaging and entertaining collection.

5 comments about Lonely Planet Morocco (Morocco, 5th ed).

1. I am preparing to depart on my third trip to Morocco. This book is THE BEST travel guide for Morocco. It gives the first time traveler and the veteran good insight on where to go, what to see, and the all important how to act and how not to get taken advantage of.. My husband, a Moroccan native won't travel around his country without it.



2. Once more, Lonely Planet has managed to write a complete guide to the budget traveller. I've recently been to Morocco and this guide was very useful. But I think it should be more explicit when writing about how to avoid being robbed, harassed and how to drive among those crazy Moroccans.



3. I just returned from a wonderful stay in Morocco, and this book was most useful. One minor quibble - re the book's advice against men wearing shorts - it's quite acceptable now



4. Just returned from a 17 day trek to Morocco, and this LP guide never left our bodies. Prices, especially for hotels, were remarkably in line with the guidebook - a real shock, considering it's now two years old. Still, the quality of a couple of highly-touted good deal-rooms have deteriorated. An updated volume would be great; hope it's forthcoming. (Also Ñ and this might be streching it - while the book makes cursory mention of Morocco's huge unemployment rate and poverty ills, LP Morocco hardly paints the picture of the grim reality of life in some towns and cities. One can't expect a travel guidebook to completely prep you for those types of social problems, but I thought the authors glossed over those facts.) Other than these complaints, though, LP's Morocco is an essential, and much more informative, read than the Rough Guide Morocco. And compared to other LP guides, its Morocco edition is a cut above.



5. This was my third interaction with Lonely Planet books and I am impressed. The information and maps are more than fairly accurate (there is not much you can do about the winding narrow passages in the old towns).

   During our stay, we not only carried this with us to get better background information on all the sites we saw, but we also would spend part of the evenings reviewing the history and planning our next day's excursions. I concur with the other review about men wearing shorts. It didn't seem to be a problem for myself or my wife in many of the major cities (like Fes, Marrakech, and Rabat).

   I would recommend this guide before (to plan what you want to see), during (to understand what you are seeing), and after (to help you determine what exactly you photographed) your trip.

No comments about An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Volume 1.

1 comments about Lonely Planet South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland.

1. Just like the rest of the Lonely Planet tour guide books - it's awesome! Everything is the same in this book as the others, except it's about South Africa. So, if you liked their other tour guide books, as I do very much, you'll like this one too. Check it out!

5 comments about Culture Shock! Morocco: A Guide to Customs & Etiquette.

1. In anticipation of accompanying my close Moroccon friend to his homeland on a business trip with another American, I read this book in one sitting and read it twice more before leaving for Morocco. It proved to be an invaluable tool to better understanding my Moroccan friend here in the states and it provided knowledge, information and tips that proved priceless during my recent stay in Morocco. I have no doubt that had I not read this book, I would have had a very different experience. This book enabled me to have the most incredible travel experience of my life despite the fact that I don't speak arabic or french. At the very least I had an understanding of this wonderfully rich culture steeped in tradition. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Morocco whether for travelling or simply interested in the country, their people and customs. While this book is ideal for someone relocating, I found it to be more useful than any of the other travel companions I purchased for my trip. Any future travel plans of mine will start with a purchase of "Culture Shock..." for that country.



2. I have spent 3 summers in Morocco and 5 years with my husband who is Moroccan and this book clarified a lot aspects of Moroccan life for me. No matter how objective one may be about cultural differences, it helps to have a neutral party explain what is happening in a given interaction. I didn't even realize how much I suffered from culture shock until I read "Culture Shock!" Particually helpful were the author's comments on the difference in Western and Eastern concepts of personal space, public space and privacy.



3. After reading this book, now I'm all the more excited to go to Morocco. Hargraves paints such a vivid picture of the people, the culture. It is a complicated society, very foreign to my understanding and experience. And yet, as I read through it, so many times, page after page, I realize that the culture is so familiar, so like my experience. Most of all, I now understand that it will take a lifetime to learn to adapt to Moroccan culture. I am eager to see how the words lift off the pages and into reality.
   
   Almost every page has nuggets and key points to learn and understand, and my copy is mostly yellow from highlighting. One aspect that I wish were different, though- Hargraves appears too often to accept the stratification in Moroccan culture, and the mistreatment of the lower classes, as par the course, and something Moroccans accept, and therefore something that we should accept, and something culturally neutral. There is so much good in Moroccan society, but, just as in any society, some that is not as good as well.
   
   But that's only one small detraction in an otherwise great text. Particularly interesting is the quiz at the end of the book, where you test one's knowledge gained through reading. I've never seen this in any other culture or travel book, and it should really be more common! Hargraves doesn't just repeat information here either- rather, he asks the reader to intuit the answers not yet given, from the information that he's previously provided- and then of course, he provides all the possible correct answers.
   
   I want to learn how to live and eat and talk and think, Moroccan. I want to see what it means to be a Moroccan who is so adept at adaptation to so many different cultural situations. I want to learn to engage in real Arab relationship, and to learn how to politely refuse a request, and how to be a good guest, and a good host. I want to learn how to serve the Moroccan peoples. If you're interested in this as well, then this is a book you need to get.



4. It is all very well, but the main vehicle of culture is the language. This book is helpful in highlighting cultural features but a good section on the language would also be a good idea.



5. Very useful if you want to go there and understand the real Morocco. Well written, too.

5 comments about I Didn't Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation.

1. I read this book because one of my colleagues knows the writer. I wanted to know more about different countries throughout Africa and he suggested I read this and vouched the information was very accurate. I found the book to be 100% fascinating. I was intrigued by the way the Ethiopians and the rest of the world treated Eritrea. The terrible things the Eritreans had to endure not only from the Ethiopians but the British and the Italians. It so sad that all this went one with mere mentions of it throughout the world because no one cared enough. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history on Africa.



2. If you are an Eritrean and you are often at loss for words ( like me) to explain where, why, who, where and what of this small nation,
   say no more! Buy and give each of your audiences a copy of this book.
   
   Michela Wrong plainly expounds the intricacies of one of the longest wars in Africa, making this book to be exceptionally one of the best books ever written that comprehensibly states the Truth, The Whole Truth, Nothing but the Truth about the smallest nation in the world.



3. This is in some ways a good and necessary book. It spotlights a nation and a set of problems that most of the world doesn't pay much attention to. But there is a problem. Michela Wrong is too close to the subject and her emotional attachment at times results in the book not being as objective or as good as it might have been. In particular, she seems to have been far too close to Eritrean rebel groups and their leaders.
   
   Eritrea's history isn't about "betrayal". Its about the same problems that most African nations have faced. Rather than face the fact that the problems of Eritrea today are largely self-inflicted wounds, she falls back into blaming colonialism and cold-war politics in really unconvincing ways.
   
   In her coverage of Italian colonial rule, she confuses events in Eritrea with those in Ethiopia. She is also willing to judge Italy to a far higher standard than she applies to the pre or post-independence governments of both countries. She is also more than a little unwilling to understand the role that Italy played in creating Eritrea.
   
   The lowest point in the book is her coverage of Britain's wartime rule of Eritrea. She advances a theory that the british were racist than the italians because their rule produced fewer multiracial children. Somehow she sees superior morality in men who promoted widespread prostitution and produced children which they abandoned. It makes no sense to me. Her logic is also full of wrong assumptions about the number of British in the country and the nature of the occupation.
   
   She also isn't very good about the details of the war. The war in East Africa and in particular the victory at Keren was not a British victory, but a victory of the British Indian Army. Somehow she misses the basic fact that much of the army that conquered and occupied East Africa was Inidian.
   
   The British wanted out of Eritrea and got out of it seven years after the war ended (1952). As they got out, the issue of Ethiopia's historic and economic claims to Eritrea came to the surface. Wrong wishes to blame the united nations for betraying the people of Eritrea. But its not that simple. Eritrea's national identity has no particular good historical basis and arises mostly from the period of Italian rule and the money Italy spent on their colony. Furthermore, its independence results in two weak states in East Africa rather than one. Eritrea and Ethiopia need each other. Economically, independence is a disaster for both.
   
   The war for Eritrea's independence was a pointless waste of lives for everyone involved. Wrong wishes to see it as a justified noble struggle for "freedom", but as events since independence have proved, it was anything but that.
   
   After the overthrow of the Ethiopian government in 1976, horrible things were done in Eritrea and the author gets that part of the story right. Then she goes on to show the bright future Eritrea had before it in 1993 at independence and how everything went so terribly wrong.
   
   But she can't bring herself to hold the right people accountable. She can't bring herself to admit that the rebels she had admired so much once in power turned to be little better than a criminal gang. A gang that destroyed the economy of the country, introduced a dictatorship and then threw the country into a disasterous war with Ethiopia. The world didn't do these things. The world's "betrayal" didn't make these decisions. It was the rebel "freedom fighters" who are responsible.
   
   And thats the fatal flaw in the book. The author wants to give critiques of colonialism and the UN from on high. But the truth is that the country's problems are not a matter of "I didn't do it for you", they are "we did it to ourselves".
   
   The end result of the great "struggle" for Eritrean independence has been an economic disaster for both Ethiopia and Eritrea. The political result is a government running Eritrea that is as bad (or worse) than what the author claims were the "repressive" Ethiopian governments of the 1950s and 1960s. Eritrea's government budget is wasted in preparations for more war with Ethiopia. The country is trapped in a situation where things will never get better. Its not a situation that outsiders should be credited or blamed for.
   
   When the author says things like: "the national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea's face.", she in engaging in massive political self-deception. Her (dated) anti-colonial/anti-imperialism rhetoric leads her to excuse every bad decision made by an African as someone elses fault.
   
   She also goes out of her way to make the American soldiers stationed in Ethiopia in the past look like they were exceptionally bad. Having worked and travelled in Africa, she must know how soldiers behave in most countries. Go to the area around any military base (including those on American soil) and you will find all sorts of unpleasent things going on. I'm not trying to excuse the behavior of anyone, but the selective moral outrage in the book is of little value to anyone.
   
   I wanted to like this book and I want to see the author write more books about Africa. But she needs to put her political ideology to the side and report on Africa as it is. She did a far better job in "In the footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" than she did in this book.



4. I am from Ogaden, the Somali region still occupied by Ethiopia, and Eritrea's tortured history is pretty similar to ours.
   
   When I bought the book, I Didn't Do It For You, and read John Le carre's powerful commendation on the cover, I took his comments with a grain of salt, thinking he was putting a good word for a colleague. However as I delved into the book, I was surprised to find every laudatory remark made by Le Carre got instant affirmation from my own mind!
   
   This book is very informative and intensely honest. The author's tone is restrained and her style is modest. She avoids polemics because she obviously knows indulging in any propaganda variety tends to undermine one's credibility.
   
   Michela is sympathetic to the Eritreans. However she makes it clear, in her own austere way, that, Issayas, the Eritrean leader and his dictatorial tendencies, has squandered the fruit of the Eritrean struggle, the dream of its people, and the goodwill of Eritrea's friends throughout the world, and thereby rendered the once promising young republic into just another African heartbreak!
   
   Unlike many western authors and scholars who, when writing about the developing countries, tend to sanitize facts to protect the image of their own mother countries, Michela Wrong simply exposes the unpleasant facts for everyone to see. Of the three European countries(The French, Italians, and the British) that colonized the Horn of Africa, the British had been the worst. As a Somali, I know the British were pitifully stingy and penny pinching: for the 75 years they colonized Somaliland, for instance, they built or invested in it practically next to nothing, whereas the Italians built and invested in Eritrea all the machines, factories, and infrastructure, including state of the art railway system, and all the building blocks necessary for a modern state in the first part of the 20th century.
   
   However one of the explosive segments in this book is the part that exposes and gives British colonialist a real black eye, not because of their stinginess and selfishness, but because of their unabashed shamelessness of looting and stealing all the factories and machines and the modern equipment, including rail way wagons and wires that the Italians invested in Eritrea! Not only that, but the British also looted almost all the factories and machines that the Italians built in Ethiopia during its brief occupation of Ethiopia. That is, Ethiopia, the very country the British were supposed to be liberating!
   
   In light of these shocking facts about British proclivity for looting, stealing and pillaging, I was left wondering how many factories and machines and modern equipment the British forces looted from Southern Somalia when they defeated the Italians and occupied Southern Somalia in 1941?
   
   It is the exposure of these raw, unsanitized facts about the nature, greed and the attitudes of European colonialists that sets Michela Wrong apart from many western authors and scholars!
   
   My only wish is that she would, one day, be interested in the plight of the Somalis of Ogaden, who have been occupied, betrayed, and subjugated by none other than the very authors of Eritrea's horrendous history: the Italians, the British and the Abyssinians. Since she already extensively researched about history of both Eritrea and Ethiopia, writing about Ogaden which is still occupied by Ethiopia would be relatively easy.
   
   Alternatively, if I may digress, she could write about the cause of the Somali people in the horn of Africa. The Somalis have the misfortune of being the only people divided and dismembered into five limbs and each limb grabbed and swallowed by a different colonial master. And the tragic consequences of that dismemberment has been the complete collapse of the Somali Republic. Contrary to the popular notion, the principal factor responsible for the collapse of the Somali Republic in 1991 was the Ogaden war of 1977 and its consequences. The dictatorial rule of former President Siyad Barre, the epidemic of Qaat, and the curse of clanism were merely contribuiting factors. Theoratically, If Somalia stayed out of Ogaden, it could have remained peaceful, relatively prosperous, and strong. But Somalia could never have stayed out of Ogaden for very long. And if it didn't invade Ogaden in 1977, it could have invaded in 1987, or 1997, or 2027! And the reason is that the limbs of the same body tend to gravitate into the same direction! And every time Somalia mastered enough strength it will do everything in her power to regain its dismembered limbs, be it NFD or Ogaden. That is why the Horn of Africa will never see peace or stability so long the dismembered limbs of the Somali nation continue crying for one another.
   
   Certain peoples with numeric superiority such as Arabs, for instance, may withstand or whither division and dismemberment. However Somalia with a small country and smaller people cannot. As Farah Omaar, the well known Somali patriot said long ago, "My country is smaller than to be divided; my people are frailer than to be enslaved!"
   
   Now Somalia hit rock bottom. And because of its occupation of Ogaden and invasion of Somalia, Ethiopia is going to sink into a black hole! And Kenya will be next! And the vicious cycle for peoples of the Horn of Africa will continue unabated. Therefore for those who care about world peace, the most productive and cost-effective endeavor to restoring peace into this troubled region is to work for the reunification of the dismembered limbs of the Somali nation. But so long that objective is either neglected, ignored, or overlooked, the key to peace and stability in the Horn will be very difficult to locate.
   
   With her talent, courage, and honesty, Michela Wrong can take up this challenging issue, uncover the sad facts that the British and other western scholars have been sanitizing and glossing over for decades, and produce a groundbreaking must-read book for anyone interested in the Horn of Africa, and thereby not only make a significant contribution to enlightening people around the world, but also perhaps help finding a lasting solution for the never ending tragedy of the peoples of the Horn of Africa.
   
   To come back to this book, I Didn't Do It For You is impressive. And it is worth every penny and every minute of one's time.
   
   Mohamed Heebaan



5. What a book! Shall I call it a novel? For me it read like a suspensful novel rather than an ordinary narrative about an obscure Afrcan nation.I commend the young writer for her lucid style and insightful observation The narrative for the story takes place mainly in the Sahle Mountains and the main characters are the Eritrean fighters and the other charcters- the villains are the Ethiopian Army, the Italains, the British, the Russians, The Americans, last but not least the UN.Like in a good novel, at the end the protagonists- the heroes or the winners are the Eritreans