Peter Younghusband is among the legendary foreign correspondents, collectively known as the GOAHs (Good Old Africa Hands), immortalised in the classic book Banana Sunday by former Daily Telegraph man Christopher Munion. The GOAHs reported during the golden age of Africa coverage, between Katanga and the Ethiopia famine. Budgets were fat, as were the opportunities for fiddling expenses, and in those days African scoops got plenty of column inches in the foreign pages.

Peter Younghusband, a South African, was Cape Town editor of Drum in the early days of apartheid. At the age of 26 the Daily Mail poached him and he covered the big stories from Vietnam to Nixon’s White House. But clearly he was best as Our Man in Africa, and this book is exclusively about his home continent. His storytelling abilities are impressive. The late Lord Rothermere himself evidently believed so because he once had him flown out of Congo for a weekend in the Cotswolds just so that he could tell his grandson tales about the bundu.

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