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The Observer, The Scotsman, Black & White, and extracts from court documents, letters and other ephemera, published and unpublished.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
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.
