Granta 48

Granta 48 Synopsis

What is happening on the continent of Africa? What are its images? The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the President of the Republic of South Africa.

A pile of discarded machetes, their blades broken off, on a road in Rwanda. A hot, still election day in Angola, ending a seventeen-year civil war - and followed, the next morning, by another civil war. A rebel in Liberia, strolling the streets of Monrovia, wearing a neglig�e as a head-dress.

An American soldier being dragged through a street in Somalia. The skeletal remains of the capital of Uganda, a third of its population infected by HIV. Is it possible to describe a continent undergoing such change?