A Good Man in Africa

Morgan Leafy is a hapless, misogynistic, overweight, oversexed First Secretary of the British High Commission in Nkongsamba, a rural city in the fictitious African country of Kinjanja. Leafy has spent three years in this corrupt, oil-rich country, the world's seventh-largest importer of champagne. It's the eve of elections taking place on Boxing Day, and the British through Leafy are meddling, crassly, the Duchess of Ripon, the queen's third cousin twice removed, is making an Independence Day visit to the city and there's a dead body on the High Commission grounds that no one dares to move.

By novel's end, sees Leafy, his singed hair resembling an atrocious candyfloss perm and a missing eyebrow covered in an oblong Elastoplast, the show more result of an unfortunate incident involving the problematic corpse, about to bed his boss's wife after failing with his daughter having recently recovered from a dose of gonorrhoea caught from his local mistress. Leafy's personal life is as complicated as Kinjanjan politics.

Boyd, who spent his childhood in Ghana and Nigeria, is unflinching in his critique of British attitudes during early post-Colonial years. In one scene, the Kinjanjan elite are invited to view a film about the British Royal family at play, to remind them "precisely just what it is they didn't possess and why, therefore, they just weren't quite such special people." Such observations place this book in the category of social satires that derided Western, but chiefly British, behaviour abroad.

Whilst I cannot say that I actually laughed out loud I did read this book with a smile on my face as Leafy bumbled his way to the madcap finale. And despite his imperious condescension of almost everybody around him I still found myself rooting for him. Overall I found this an enjoyable farce. show less

(12) This was excellent. I loved 'Brazzaville Beach' and got this book shortly after reading that but it has taken me awhile to get to. This is about a diplomat, Morgan Leafy, who has a post in some African nation that maybe seems like the Congo but it is never really named. Post-colonial instability, corruption, with a mix of superstition, subservience, bugs, heat, and graft. The atmosphere is well drawn and Leafy is such a pathetic character, a true anti-hero yet everyman. We come to see from the initial opening scene how Leafy is caught up in a crisis in which he is trying to cover up his own misdeeds and becomes an unwitting tool for others schemes. We initially go back in time a few months until the narrative catches up with itself show more and rollicks into the hilarious and sad conclusion. Boyd is a fantastic writer.

Boyd has this gift of being able to write the absurd while also making room for poignancy. The Santa outfit, hiding in the bathtub, the pidgin English, Morgan's frizzled widows peak and his outlandish explanations. But he effectively juxtapositions this with descriptions that pluck at your heartstrings a bit with the description of shared human flaws. Morgan's wide sweaty freckled back, Mrs. Fanshawe's gross vast white thighs, the Duchess's sagging breasts, ... and Innocence, jeez. Murray's son - "Dad, why was that man crying" It all makes for an unforgettable reading experience and I remember feeling similarly after I read 'Brazzaville Beach.'

I will definitely look for a few of his other acclaimed novels and will pass this along to friends who appreciate good literature that is actually funny but affecting. Bravo! show less

I laughed (out loud, as if there were any other kind of laugh) several times at the misadventures of Morgan Leafy in post-colonial Kinjanja. As satire-cum-farce this reminded me of Lucky Jim and Black Mischief, with Graham Greene and Tom Sharpe representing its tonal extremes. It's not subtle — a major subplot involves the corpse of a woman named Innocence, struck down by lightning and therefore untouchable, decaying not-so-gradually in the street — but it is satisfyingly cruel and, in the pathetic figure of Leafy, boasts a delightful antihero.

At the start of this novel the main protagonist, Morgan Leafy, is a loathsome creature. A British diplomat serving as First Secretary to the Commission in the fictional West African country of Kinjanja, he is pretty much a caricature of all the worst elements of the role. Racist, selfish, jealous and quite over-bearing. It's a wonder his local mistress can stand to stay with him or he with her after she gives him a nasty dose of gonorrhoea and just at the wrong time too as he's just started going out with Priscilla, the daughter of his boss.

Leafy is also involved with a local politician, Sam Adekunle, and his wife and with elections coming up his boss has charged him with overseeing the British interest for the most favoured party. So show more when he's found in a compromising position by Adekunle, he ends up getting it from both sides. Adekunle wants Leafy to bribe the head of the university as he needs a land deal to go through to help with funds for his election campaign and now he has a hold over Leafy he uses him as a go-between.

The first part of the book sets the scene before then travelling backwards in time to describe how these events came to pass with the whole kit and caboodle ending up in the hands of one Morgan Leafy and by the end of the book you're actually feeling quite sorry for the man. That's quite an achievement in itself by the author and when you throw in some highly amusing scenes as well as some cringe-worthy moments and it all adds up to a fairly decent read. show less

[A Good Man in Africa] - William Boyd.
That Good Man in Africa is Morgan Leafy; sexist, racist, usually drunk and very British who gets to play the hero in the end, but it's all OK because it's satire. The black Africans are either corrupt or stupid or both, while the white British consulate staff are just as stupid, but know when they need to assert their authority. This book comes from a long line of British satire writers on the lives of their hard pushed countrymen who are trying to make sense or make their way in the Dark Continent. Boyd who was educated at Gordonstoun and Oxford follows in the footsteps of successful authors such as Evelyn Waugh, and Kingsley Amis, but Boyd writing his first novel in the 1980's has no excuse in show more treading this well worn path.

Satire as I understand it is the use of humour, irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticise peoples stupidity or vices. It seems to me that Boyd works very hard to convince his readers that for the most part a small African country that was under imperial rule is just like he says it is. Our hero Morgan Leafy is quite content as long as he has a steady supply of beer and sex and he doesn't have to work too hard or think too hard to keep the supply coming. He is open to corruption, he throws his ever increasing weight around and thinks only of himself. I felt that Boyd wants his readers to have a soft spot for this racist, misogynist. Poor Morgan Leafy with all the weight of the world's troubles on his shoulders largely caused by his own actions is just looking to survive. This is not a bildungsroman or a novel about redemption, the satire does not bite it is just played for the readers amusement, with plenty of sexual titillation.

I suppose you should know what you are getting when British journals like The Times call it "Wickedly funny" or the Spectator 'Splendid rollicking stuff' and the novel won the 1981 Whitbread Literary Award and later the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award. The writing is certainly of a good standard and Boyd furnishes plenty of detail while keeping the story moving along. It is easy to label this novel as just good fun, but good harmless fun I don't think it is, I might have enjoyed this forty years ago, but not now; I almost felt like I needed to take a shower to wash away the underlying sleaze that rises up from this book. 2.5 stars. show less

A comic Heart of Darkness for the post colonial period, mocking much of the pretension of the European in Africa and reminding us that, whether we recognise it or not, Africa's heart (or better said, our understanding of it) is still shrouded in darkness. I ended up grudgingly feeling some sympathy for the struggles of characters I initially held in mild distaste as the author skillfully revealed just how out of depth they were in their African environment. 15 November 2015

"Like Rome, Nkongsamba was built on seven hills, but there the similarity ended. Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of crapulous vomit on somebody's expansive unmown lawn. Every building was roofed with corrugated iron in various advanced stages of rusty erosion, and from the window of the Commission -- established nobly on a hill above town -- Morgan could see the roofs stretch before him, an ochrous tin checker-board, a bilious metallic sea, the paranoiac vision of a mad town planner."

Morgan Leafy is the protagonist of this comedy set in the fictitious town of Nkongsamba, state capital of the Mid-West region of Kinjanja, West Africa. As the second in command to the Deputy show more High Commissioner, he occupies what could be considered an important post in Her Majesty the Queen's diplomatic service, if only Nkongsamba could be considered a posting of any consequence. As the story begins, Leafy's many trials are just beginning with the announcement that his new assistant, just recently arrived for the UK to give a helping hand, has gotten engaged to his boss's daughter, which he himself had had high hopes of marrying. This is only a minor setback though, because there are more pressing matters to attend to, mainly the business of bribing a high official, a task which he's been blackmailed into taking on, and also getting rid of the body of a local woman recently hit by lightning, which her compatriots absolutely defend anybody from touching for fear a local wrathful deity will take offence. Caught between a boss who uses him to take care of any and all unpleasant and humiliating tasks he can come up with and a megalomaniac local politician who threatens to reveal his most compromising secrets, not to mention the amorous attentions of the politician's wife, and a nice dose of ghonorrea passed on to him by his local girlfriend, Leafy's trials and tribulations truly make for a comical read as he tries to extricate himself from a mess that just keeps getting more complicated and unpleasant with every move he makes.

I'm not altogether sure what to make of [A Good Man in Africa]. It was certainly entertaining, and I guess I should take into consideration that it was William Boyd's first published effort (for which he won both a Whitbread and a Somerset Maugham award), and also that it was hardly a story I could expect to end with all loose ends perfectly tied up and neatly tucked in. While this book certainly works well as high comedy, I couldn't help but feel a slight discomfort about the way in which the locals are depicted as either unscrupulous power hungry manipulators or superstitious simpletons content to live in squalor and stinking decay, but in all fairness, all the characters in this biting satire receive evenhanded treatment as unlikeable individuals, all the better to reflect Leafy's own cynical view of humanity, which he may or may not be forced to reconsider by novel's end. show less