出版社：Glendora International im African e-Journals Project
摘要：In the chapter focused on UNSEEN ENEMIES the Aids scourge is given a description that levels up to slander. No reader in Africa will recognise the African continent that is presented in these passages. He says, Whenever I picked up a kenyan newspaper, or any local paper from Lusaka to Lagos, I was always stunned to see the obituary pages and how many young people, in their late twenties and thirties, were prematurely dead "After a long illness", the reports always cryptically said, and I knew what that phrase meant'!!! (pp.123) He also suggests that even malaria fever reaches their epidemic heights often wiping out populations. He insists on commenting on nearly everything, from local politics to polygamy, ascribing causes that bear no semblance with reality. The narration descends and descends into outright abuses that spared no institution, no townscape or personalities and saw no good in any of the nations he so much as stopped briefly in. It was here that we learnt for the very first time that - 'my yearly bill for dog food and veterinary bills probably exceeded what most African governments spend on health care.'(pp.128) He trades his 'truths' on two unsullied grounds: his blackness which intended him to be on the African side; the other of having been a journalist on the continent who saw, heard and grasped with his bare hands. Richburg is however not any more critical or nearly as trenchant as voices within Africa itself decrying the excesses of governments or the misrunning of economies, for which they are hauled into jails and chased into exile; even so, these stay solidly within the confines of fact - primed against the 'painted masks' of visionless politicians and inept leaderships fanning ethnic embers; illegal appropriations of power, antisocial bureaucracies, poor healthcare. Some not really peculiar to African states but overblown in the face of poor management, clear testaments to African postcoloniality.
