Tales from the Dark Continent: Charles Allen

1979 first edition hardcover with dust jacket and 166 pages in very good condition. Name in ink in front. Images of British Colonial Africa in the 20th century.

This is the second book of a trilogy based on the personal and recorded accounts of residents of the British Empire between the world wars and the closing stages of British rule. The first book is on India, Plain Tales from the Raj; the next, this work; and the third Tales from the South China Seas. These books are edited extracts from the British Broadcasting Company Radio archives. Charles Allen, the `oral historian' for the series was himself born (1940) in India to a family of six generations who served in the British Raj.

This book helps to preserve the memory of what it was like, at the grass-roots level of daily routine, to live and work in Africa in the first sixty years of the 19th century. Excerpts are grouped according to subject: colonial administration, living conditions, travel, spouses, etc. Differences in various British African colonies become apparent, e.g., in Nigeria the British were concerned mainly with governing a large African population, while the Kenya colony was developed with European settlers in mind. An important contribution to Britain's social and Imperial history.