Last updated on September 27, 2026 by Shannon
In 2014, I traveled across Africa for five months, from late January to early June. I did all of the bucket-list activities, but I was also researching social enterprises and expanding what Grassroots Volunteering could offer, at a time when colonialist attitudes in travel and aid were really being challenged.
I started in South Africa, visited Lesotho, and saw Victoria Falls from both the Zimbabwe and Zambia sides. Then I flew to Nairobi for a loop around the popular East Africa circuit, traveling independently and far more slowly than the big overland tours. I swapped stories and book recommendations with plenty of those travelers in hostels along the way.
I read widely on the continent before and during that trip, including a lot about aid and development, so as not to perpetuate the white savior complex. Visiting projects like the Maji Moto Maasai Cultural Camp showed me a model for engaging with Africa authentically. I was there to learn, and to spend money on social enterprises where locals were figuring out their own solutions to the problems facing their communities.
This list is a mix of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction about sub-Saharan Africa, where I spent those months. I’ve traveled in Morocco too, but North Africa deserves its own list.
If you only read one before your trip, make it Dark Star Safari. Theroux travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and it’s the best preview of the route and the vibes.
5 Novels and Memoirs to Understand Modern Africa
Africa is 54 countries, so no short list covers it all. These five cover the history behind the places most travelers visit. I’ve read four, and the fifth is next on my list.
1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Colonialism arrives in an Igbo village in Nigeria, told from the inside. Achebe wrote it partly to answer the way Europeans had been writing about Africa. It was assigned reading in my IB program, and I read it again years later.
Pair it with Heart of Darkness. Achebe famously called Conrad’s novella racist in a 1975 lecture, and reading the two together shows the same era from opposite sides. I finally read Conrad about a year ago, a free-bin find that’s still on my shelf in Málaga. I knew I needed to push past the beginning to get hooked.
2. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
An American missionary drags his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959, just as the country fights for independence. I love Kingsolver. No one has made me want to grow heirloom vegetables more than her Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and here she offers a unique outsider perspective.
3. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Noah was born in Johannesburg to a Black mother and a white Swiss father, when their relationship was illegal under apartheid—his birth was literally a crime. It’s known for being funny and fast, and for showing how apartheid shaped daily life. It’s on my list. For the full story from the man himself, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom is the classic, though at more than 600 pages it’s a commitment.
4. A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
Beah was a boy when civil war reached his village in Sierra Leone, and he was soon fighting as a child soldier. I knew what I was signing up for with this one, because I’d read First They Killed My Father before visiting the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I needed a similar, haunting reality check before bearing witness to the genocide memorials in Rwanda. It’s dark, but it’s a compelling read. You turn each page incredulous as the reality of this life unfolds.
5. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Two teenagers fall in love in Lagos, then scatter to America and England, and the novel follows what migration does to them and to their idea of home. Understanding the reality of life for the African diaspora is just as important as understanding life for those still on the continent. It keeps you from building what Adichie calls a “single story” of Africa, a point she makes in her terrific TED talk about seeing Africa and its people as multi-faceted.
African Safari Books and Travel Memoirs
I arranged a budget, four-day safari in Tanzania through Tarangire, the Serengeti, and the Ngorongoro Crater, and saw all of the Big Five. The moment I still think about: waking on the crater rim to the most incredible sunrise, as clouds seemed to pour over the edge and the mist lifted.
6. Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Theroux travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town by bus, truck, and boat, through much of the same territory as today’s overland tours. He’s famously cranky about aid agencies, which is worth knowing going in. I read it once, right before my own trip.
7. Out of Africa by Karen Blixen
Blixen’s memoir of running a coffee farm outside Nairobi from 1914 to 1931. It’s an easier read than I thought given how big it is, and though the story lags in places, this free book-swap-shelf find was the perfect way to see how regular people approached colonialism back in the day. You can visit her farmhouse, now the Karen Blixen Museum, in Nairobi. The 1985 film with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford is worth watching afterward. Read it alongside Unbowed below.
8. Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
Maathai grew up in Kenya’s central highlands under British rule, became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted tens of millions of trees across Kenya. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Her memoir covers colonial land grabs, independence, and the fight to protect Kenya’s land—the same country Blixen romanticized, told from the Kenyan side. It’s on my list.
9. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
Fuller’s childhood on farms in wartime Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then Malawi and Zambia. It’s known for being both funny and gutting. Since I saw Victoria Falls from both the Zimbabwe and Zambia sides, it’s high on my list.
Movies About Africa to Watch Before You Go
Hotel Rwanda
A hotel manager shelters more than a thousand people during the 1994 genocide. It’s impeccably acted and gripping. I watched it on a spotty mobile hotspot one night from my hotel in Kigali. For a book, The Girl Who Smiled Beads by Clemantine Wamariya is on my list. She fled the genocide at six and spent years as a refugee across several countries before landing in the U.S.
Blood Diamond
Sierra Leone’s civil war and the diamond trade that fueled it. It pairs with A Long Way Gone.
Beasts of No Nation
A boy is pulled into a rebel army in an unnamed West African country, with Idris Elba as the commander.
The Last King of Scotland
Idi Amin’s Uganda, through the eyes of his young Scottish doctor. Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing Amin.
Invictus
Mandela uses the 1995 Rugby World Cup to pull a divided South Africa together.
The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
A Malawian teenager builds a windmill from scrap to save his village from famine.
Skip: The Gods Must Be Crazy
A Coke bottle falls from a plane into the Kalahari. I had only fragments of the story lodged in my head from childhood, and only learned about its complicated reception many years later: it’s widely criticized for portraying the San people as childlike and “primitive.”
Next up, read my favorite travel books of all time.
Best Travel Books: By Country, Region, & Review
I’m passionate about the value in reading books about the specific places you’re traveling. For that reason, I’ve rounded up a number of guides to books about countries like Spain and Ireland, regions like Africa and Central America, and a fair number of individual travel book reviews.
