Books

23 December 1995

Filed under Books

African Deadlines: "Twenty Two Years in the Long Grass of Central Africa without a break"

African Deadlines: "Twenty Two Years in the Long Grass of Central Africa without a break" is a selection of articles from The Financial Times, New Statesman, Sunday Independent, The Observer, The Scotsman, Black & White, and extracts from court documents, letters and other ephemera, published and unpublished. 

London
December 23, 1995

Download and read the full text of African Deadlines

Short Introduction

by Patti Waldmeir
FT Bureau Chief, Johannesburg 1989 - 1994

Michael Holman does not interview African Leaders. They interview him.

They recognise in him, the rarest kind of lover of Africa: one who feels its misfortunes but is not blinded by sympathy; one who condemns its barbarism without branding it barbaric; one who believes in a continent which has lost faith in itself. 

You will also see other sides to the personality which is Holman of Africa; the master pshychologist and manipulator of men (and women); the evil schemer, whose mischievous pranks make him often seem more boy than man; the subtle humourist whose irony somehow manages to avoid cynicism.

He teases, and ribs and chides and berates, in a way no other journalist would dare do. But then he is Holman of Africa. No ordinary journalist. No ordinary man.