![]() The satirists of the eighteenth century are in fact Waberi’s most evident formal predecessors his short chapters open with such archaic and mellifluous titles as “In which the author gives a brief account of the origins of our prosperity and the reasons why the Caucasians were thrown onto the paths of exile.” If there is a sharp glimmer of the absurd in Waberi’s premise, it suits his satire as well as the absurdity of the Lilliputians did Swift’s or that of Pangloss did Voltaire’s. ![]() The World Health Organization is now headquartered in Banjul, Gambia ecologists and intellectuals from sub-Saharan Africa vie for the Arafat Peace Prize and if all this seems just too improbable, well, nobody said this was nonfiction. Waberi isn’t much interested in offering explanations. ![]() Thankfully, Djiboutian novelist Abdourahman A. There’s too much history to reshape, too many explanations to offer. To name your book In the United States of Africa, and to present readers with a vision of the world turned completely on its head, in which the urbane citizens of Rwanda, Nigeria, and the eastern Cape are given to fretting over a chronic glut of working-class immigrants from the war-torn and disease-ridden hamlets of Europe and North America, is to suggest a project barely containable in this volume’s hundred-odd pages. ![]()
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