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Current Affairs: Barely a few pages into Bay of Tigers, Pedro Rosa Mendes's chronicle of travels in Angola in 1997, we learn that "there are more than 100 million mines buried in 70 countries, close to a tenth of them in Angola". Colin Murphy reviews Pedro Rosa Mendes's Bay of Tigers: A Journey through War-Torn Angola.

It is a depressing start, but in ways that may not be immediately apparent. Mendes is wrong: the people removing the mines from the ground in Angola commonly cite estimates of between 300,000 and one million mines. And in any case, statistics are the bane of understanding, the foil of insight. One million? Ten million? Either way, we are immediately straitjacketed into the conventional responses to the conventional African news: shock and pity.