Jonny Steinberg

A Man of Good Hope

Notify me when the book’s added
To read this book, upload an EPUB or FB2 file to Bookmate. How do I upload a book?
IN JANUARY 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militiaman, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept — alone — into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. This extraordinary book tells Asad's story. Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical. He lived in a bewildering number of places, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to the desert towns deep in the Ethiopian hinterland. By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of seventeen, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler, brokering relationships between hard-nosed businessmen and bewildered Somali refugees. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya and, to the astonishment of his peers, seduced and married her. Buoyed by success in work and in love, Asad put $1 200 into his pocket and made his way down the length of the African continent to Johannesburg, South Africa, whose streets he believed to be lined with gold. And so began a shocking adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined. A Man of Good Hope is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human — personal possessions, parents, siblings. And yet Asad's is an intensely human life, one suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something of permanence on this earth. Jonny Steinberg was born and raised in South Africa. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Three-Letter Plague as well as Midlands and The Number, both of which won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Steinberg was also a recipient of the inaugural Windham Campbell Prizes. He teaches African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University and is an Associate at the Institute for the Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town.
This book is currently unavailable
400 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
Publisher
Jonathan Ball
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
👍👎

Quotes

  • Elena Yelessinahas quoted9 years ago
    He grabbed these questions gratefully, as if they were gifts of milk and bread.
  • Elena Yelessinahas quoted9 years ago
    I did not lose her despite her death. I am not sure that words can describe what I am trying to tell you. I mean that by the time I was seven, she had already made me.’
  • Elena Yelessinahas quoted9 years ago
    While his internal eye peers into his childhood, the eyes on either side of his nose scan the stre
fb2epub
Drag & drop your files (not more than 5 at once)