It's not all darkness

Africa: Last year was supposed to be the year of Africa, when debt write-offs would wipe the slate clean and allow for a fresh start for a beleaguered continent. Sustained pressure from Sir Bob Geldof's Live 8 campaign produced promises of greater aid flows and a fairer deal in trade and a new dawn was announced - again.

And yet as I write at the start of 2006, the news wires hum with renewed warnings of famine in southern Africa, in the Horn and in western Africa. Robert Mugabe continues to destroy Zimbabwe. Ethiopia, once the poster-boy for progressive regimes, is shooting its citizens and locking up dissidents.

In Africa, despair springs eternal, it seems. Or does it? As John Ryle points out in his introduction to this latest edition of Granta, in general there are fewer civil wars on the continent and wealth production is increasing. "The mistake is to generalise," he points out; just because Africa has a clear geographical unity doesn't mean that it is uniform in other respects. In truth Africa is far less homogenous - geographically, culturally, religiously and politically - than Europe or the Americas. South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan. To say that Africa has "never been more dangerous" because of wars in Congo or Sudan, is like saying Eurasia has never been more dangerous because of Chechnya".

True to this dictum, this volume eschews grandiloquence and generalisation in favour of less ambitious yet telling slices of life from Africa, both fiction and non-fiction. It thankfully spares the reader the sweeping statements, over-optimistic cliches and glib panaceas so often served up in other books on the continent; instead, The View from Africa is a rewarding compendium of personal explorations of identity, belonging, urbanisation and violence.

Journalism, for all its strengths, fails many people. Africans know this better than most; generally, their interests are too remote, their economic insignificance too great, to interest the media. The profession's failings are savagely set out in Binyavanga Wainaina's sarcastic and funny How to Write about Africa.

"Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title," Wainaina begins, before advising would-be writers to "treat Africa as if it were one country. . . Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: 54 countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book."

The modern African, his advice goes, is "a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa". Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as "well rounded, complex characters . . . never ever say anything negative about an elephant or gorilla". And: "Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows and renaissances. Because you care."

Even the most sensitive reporter struggles to convey the complexities of African life, but longer journalistic reportage sometimes succeeds better than daily newspaper articles. One thinks of Blaine Harden's despatches from various African countries or Philip Gourevitch's take on post-genocide Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.

In this volume, another American, Daniel Bergner, succeeds in a similar vein in Policeman to the World, a considered look at the work of Mark Kroeker, the UN's police commissioner in post-civil war Liberia. A missionary's son, Kroeker returns to Africa to put a semblance of order on a collapsed state where corruption, vigilantism and violence are rampant. More than 10 per cent of fighters during the war had raped more than 10 times and now, Kroeker understandably frets, many of these men are in his police force and about to be armed.

The societal decay recorded by Ivan Vladislavic in Joburg is far slower yet unmistakable. Rising crime in the South African megalopolis generates an obsession with security, as "walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes". Vladislavic paints a bittersweet portrait of a city in decline, where life is increasingly conducted in fortified homes and shopping malls and everywhere else is out of bounds.

There are other fractured visions in this volume. Adewale Maja-Pearce, the son of a Scottish nurse and a wife-beating Nigerian doctor who trained in Dublin in the 1950s, relates his experience of life in London and Lagos. Kwame Dawes, born to a Ghanaian mother and Jamaican father, finds that being black is no bar to suffering discrimination, even in Jamaica.

Nadine Gordimer aside, the fiction writers in this Granta are not household names. Yet the growing reputation of the likes of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Moses Isegawa make this volume a must-read for aficionados of new African literature.

So for anyone travelling to Africa and anxious to learn about its present, my advice is: ditch your copies of Karen Blixen or Pakenham's The Scramble for Africa and pack this edition of Granta instead.

Paul Cullen is an Irish Times journalist

Granta 92: The View from Africa Granta, 256pp. £9.99