Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles Richard Dowden Richard Dowden is perhaps our leading journalist of African affairs. Since first arriving in Idi Amin's Uganda in 1971 he has never stopped learning about and reporting on real Africans and the realities of life in Africa's many and varied lands. For Africa is a continent, a continent of peoples. The West so often treats Africa as if it were merely one country, and its interventions therefore often misfire. Africa is complex. It takes a guide as observant, experienced and patient as Richard Dowden to reveal its truth in a way that is comprehensible to outsiders. Dowden teases out the web of history, myth, rivalry, alliance, ambition and protest that comprises present reality for the bankers of Kenya or the oilmen of Nigeria, for the judges of Congo or the herdsmen of Sudan, or even the Chinese miners in Zimbabwe. His account of their various ways and dreams is more illuminating than any number of charities' pleas or World Bank projections. Dowden combines a novelist's gift for atmosphere with the unblinking scholar's grasp of historical change to produce one of the most compelling and revealing accounts of modern sub-Saharan Africa yet. His experiences there required him to re-evaluate all he had been taught to believe, and his landmark book enables its readers to see and understand this miraculous continent in a new light too. Richard Dowden is Director of the royal African Society. He first went to Africa as a teacher in 1971, and then as a journalist in 1983, working for The Times. In 1986, he became Africa Editor of the Independent and in 1995 took up the post of Africa Editor for the Economist. He has also made three television documentaries on Africa, for the BBC and Channel 4.