Heartbeat Africa: True stories from a reporter's notebooks

These are true stories of a reporter's journeys through Africa. Pieced together as a memoir with the help of notebooks stored over many years, here you can smell the coming rains and read the omens all the way from the Cape to Cairo, and across Africa from the parched Ethiopian highlands to the whispering sands of Timbuktu.

Travelling through time, flames, and blood, these are accounts of illegal sex, body snatching, official misogyny, dangerous small boys with big guns, genocide and senseless killing, including the brutal murders of some famous friends and colleagues of the author. Sense here the great beauty of Africa, the cradle of humankind, as we follow the earliest steps of a human being ever recorded in an ancient fossil bed near Cape Town.

Like a first draft of history Heartbeat Africa provides a front-row seat to the uprisings against apartheid race discrimination in South Africa, the last days of colonial Mozambique, and modern Africa's worst famine in Ethiopia. In Rwanda, we find a new word in the lexicon of horror, the "cruocracy", a regime that exists to commit genocide.

It is all part of a quest to remember, to show why a truthful record is necessary. And above all, why good, objective and independent journalism is so essential and always will be.