Love in Africa - Jeffrey Gettleman

Summary

• Jeffrey Gettleman was the New York Times East Africa bureau chief, and this is his memoir of how he feel in love with Africa, as well as an inside look at the hazardous job of being a war journalist.

How I discovered it

• I always remember him being interviewed on CNN whenever there was something newsworthy happening in Kenya, so when I heard he had a book out I was interested.

Details

• I enjoyed this book a lot as I learned a lot about some of the conflicts in the region, but also about journalism and how people perceive life in Africa.

Quotes

• "My feeling is you don’t really know a place until you drive it, so early on we forced ourselves to get behind the wheel, which, by the way, is mounted on the other side here, though that was the least of our problems. Nairobi possessed no working traffic lights. Busy intersections were a philosophical study, game theory, a Kenyan version of the prisoner’s dilemma, four cars staring at each other, traffic backing up behind them, an endless combination of altruistic or selfish moves. It wasn’t like the police were any help. If anything, they were a menace. They erected checkpoints all over the city, often at night, placing a blinding flare in the middle of the road next to a set of gnarly metal spikes. They were armed with assault rifles, and you had to slowly weave around them, giving them time to peer into your car."
• 'Matatus are Kenya’s public transport, “Nairobi’s subway,” as Dan put it, the weathered army of hundreds of minibuses that circulated commuters around the city. Their drivers were paid for each passenger and therefore drove as close to death as possible, cutting off other vehicles, zooming by on the shoulder, plunging headlong into traffic on the wrong side of the road to snatch up a single fare, aspirational names decaled on the windshield or airbrushed on the backside: Sniper, Slayer, Prince of Peace, I Feel Nothing, Paragon the Road Veteran, and one plain white van with the typical yellow matatu stripe that blasted 1980s house music while flitting through traffic like a flea on methamphetamines, Laptop. I can’t tell you how many times I was cut off by Laptop."'