In Foreign Native, RW Johnson looks back with affection and humour on his life in Africa. From schooldays in Durban — fresh off the plane from Merseyside — to later years as an academic, director of the Helen Suzman Foundation and formidable political commentator, he has produced an entertaining and occasionally eye-popping memoir brimming with history, anecdote and insight.

Johnson charts his evolution from enthusiastic, left-leaning Africanist to political realist, relating episodes that influenced his intellectual worldview, including time spent among the exiled liberation movements in London during the 1960s, a sojourn in newly independent Guinea and more recent forays into Zimbabwe. There are wonderful stories, some hilarious, others filled with pathos, about the multitude of characters — Harold Strachan, Tom Sharpe, Ronnie Kasrils, Helen Suzman, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, among many others — that he met along the way.

Perceptive, critical and full of verve, Foreign Native is leavened with a deep humanity that makes it a pleasure to read.

RW Johnson

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