Get into the vibrant mood and rhythm of Africa before and during your safari with the LCCA favourites list: an eclectic mixed bag of old classics, popular favourites, politics, humour, guide’s tales and fantasy.

Download onto Kindle or build a playlist, and feel it: Africa awaits!

  1. Cry the Beloved Country: Alan Paton (South African politics by a South African legendary writer)
  2. Jock of the Bushveld: Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Timeless original bushveld adventure story)
  3. Africa Bites: Lloyd Camp (my scrapes and escapes in Africa)
  4. Things Fall Apart: Chinua Achebe (the first truly global novel that everyone read about Africa)
  5. Death in the Long Grass: Peter Capstick ( safari stories from an American Great White Hunter)
  6. Long Walk to Freedom: Nelson Mandela (no introduction needed)
  7. Whatever you do, Don’t Run: Peter Allison (you will not read a more amusing collection of bush stories)
  8. Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad (the origin of the term “Black Continent”)
  9. The Scramble for Africa: Thomas Packenham (the most comprehensive and readable of the histories of Victorian Africa)
  10. The Poisonwood Bible: Barbara Kingsolver (highly acclaimed thoughtful novel about living in Equatorial Africa)
  11. The Green Hills of Africa: Ernest Hemingway (typically bloodthirsty but written in his inimitable style)
  12. Dark Star Safari: Paul Theroux (a modern look at the political travails of Africa)
  13. Into Africa: Martin Dugard (the epic adentures of Stanley and Livingstone)
  14. The Power of One: Bryce Courtenay ( a story of resilience and hope)
  15. Mukiwa: Peter Godwin (growing up as a young white boy in Zimbabwe)
  16. Don’t lets go to the Dogs Tonight: Alexandra Fuller (brutally honest look at a family trying to survive the pressures of a changing Africa)
  17. The Story of an Africa farm: Olive Schreiner (magnificently written South African classic)
  18. A Bend in the River: V.S. Naipul (one of the best novels about Africa of the twentieth century)
  19. My Traitor’s heart; Rian Malan (autobiographical story about an apartheid exile who returns to live in a changed South Africa)
  20. The No.1 Ladies Detective agency: Alexander McCall Smith (very amusing gentle prod at the characters of a dusty Botswana town)
  21. Disgrace: J.M. Coetzee (Nobel winning effort by the esteemed South African writer)
  22. African Game Trails: Theodore Roosevelt (the way it was when white hunters exploited the teeminh herds of Africa game a century ago)
  23. Cry of the Kalahari: Mark and Delia Owens (well written story about two naïve young Americans who took on the Kalahari desert)
  24. The Snows of Kilimanjaro: Ernest Hemingway (typically spare descriptions of life in the African colonies during a time of plenty)