Perspective: More on Africa

AFRICAN TRAVELOGUE: In 1980 Ann Jones, a middle-aged adventure writer hooked up with British photographer Keven Muggleton for an overland journey from one end of Africa to the other. They went in search of the Lovedu people, a legendary tribe ruled by a great rainmaking queen, the inspiration for H. Rider Haggard's novel, She. In Looking for Lovedu: Days and Nights in Africa, Jones chronicles their odyssey, their eventual split and her continuation of the journey which culminates with an audience with none other than Madjadji V, Queen of the Lovedu.

WHAT IS AFRICA TO ME?: Henry Louis Gates Jr. travels through Africa asking himself the question posed 75 years ago by poet Countee Cullen and perennially asked by African-Americans: What is Africa to me? In Wonders of the African World, now available in paperback (Knopf, $24.95), Gates' look at African achievements long ignored by the continent's exploiters goes a long way in answering that question for all people.

WOMEN WRITING AFRICA: Two novels by Kenyan writer Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye have been published for the first time in the United States by the Feminist Press at The City University under its Women Writing Africa project. Coming to Birth, Macgoye's first novel, won the 1986 Sinclair Prize, given to novels of social and political significance. The Present Moment is a portrait of seven women in a shelter for the aged homeless. Both paperbacks are priced at $11.95.

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