African Chronicles - a memoir
                                                                                    

The Dahomeykust, Holland-West Africa Line

So begins the African journey of Burris and Louanne Devanney which leads us through a series of historic events of the mid 1960s.  We listen to the doomed declaration of independence by a white minority government in Rhodesia; we walk the city streets of apartheid South Africa and into its racially divided hotels and banks; and we re-live events leading to the creation and fall of the independent state of Biafra. The narrative’s cast of characters ranges from cooks to ships’ captains, from students and headmasters to spies and diplomats, from a knife-wielding female butcher in rural Rhodesia to a couple of Canadian Prime Ministers. Devanney takes us on hazardous road trips, exotic sea journeys and river crossings on make-shift rafts, as the couple navigates without maps to unsure destinations. . . .Yet he brilliantly extrapolates from the narrative and many years of development work a critical review of North-South cooperation . . . . The memoir is required reading, considering our present day fixation on evaluations, results and numbers as the main ingredients for development strategies. - David Walker, Consultant, international development and audio/video production, Vancouver, Canada

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Stan Kutcher in Malawi

African Chronicles is a wonderful story, full of compassion and constructive criticism about parts of a continent that I have also had the opportunity to work in. It is a personal lens on the history of some of the most complicated and turbulent “growing up” of countries, societies and individuals on that continent.  It should be a “must read” for anyone who is interested in Africa.  It comes from the heart and at the same time comes from the head.  – Dr. Stan Kutcher, Director World Health Organization Collaborating Center, Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Center, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

A searing indictment of the “Masters of Development” – recounted with the wit, clarity, and brevity that only a true literary craftsman could possess. . . . To those who care about Africa and Africans, African Chronicles is undoubtedly a volume that will eventually earn its place on the shelf beside works by [such writers as Nobel laureate] Wangari Maathai. – Uzoma Esonwanne, Ph.D. (UNB), Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, Ontario

Devanney’s account fills an important gap in our understanding of Africa with personal experiences and trenchant observations relating to a historically significant time for Africans, enhanced by the valuable perspective of one who has returned time and again to assist in Africa’s development goals. . . . It is also in a sense a love story – of the pragmatic, dry-witted Louanne trying to balance the enthusiastic zeal of her husband. – James H. Morrison, Ph.D. (Ibadan) Professor of History and former Dean of Arts, Saint Mary's University Halifax, Nova Scotia

I am totally enamoured with this book. . . . As one of its ‘cast of characters’, I have been transported back to a part of my youth that now seems like a dream. Yet these years were life-changing for all of us. . . . I have always loved listening to Burris Devanney’s stories, but African Chronicles is not just entertaining and enlightening. In true Devanney style, it is a memoir written with perception, clarity and an abiding respect for Africa and Africans.  – Natalie Peck-Chapman, Executive Director, West Island (Montreal) Association for the Intellectually Handicapped, Pointe-Claire, Quebec

Natalie Peck-Chapman

Barbara MacDonald Moore with students in Accra, Ghana

They say that “life is lived forward but understood backwards”.  This well-written memoir lives in the past, present and future with intuitive professionalism, keen observations and eye-witness accounts such as the momentous first-raising of the flags of Zimbabwe and Biafra. The audacity that comes through in the ventures of Burris and Louanne is rooted in the “secular work of missionaries”, has survived through 50 years of “development hopscotch” and flourishes as the best of Canada-Africa collegiality and mutual mentoring. - Barbara MacDonald Moore, Director, International Programs, Canadian Teachers Federation

Julius H. E. Uzoaba

African Chronicles: a memoir is not only a work that tells a gripping story of adventure and discovery by an expatriate who has a firsthand knowledge of Africa after many years in the continent, it is also an important must read by all those seeking knowledge of Africa in a variety of ways:

• For would-be diplomats on how and how not to conduct their business,
• For lovers of knowledge who would like to understand why Africa is still held in the doldrums of poverty years after colonialism is ended,
• For individuals seeking a general knowledge of Africa: its culture, ethos and nuances South of the Equator
• The book is a fascinating, timely and useful source that will satisfy the information needs of people dealing with issues of African development.
• It provides a detached perspective on the events that led to the military coup in 1966 in Nigeria and the subsequent Biafran secession and the civil war.

The personal observations and experiences of Devanny in Africa distilled in this book from the late 1960s are still true and valid today as they were then. They are revealing and discomfiting. The book provides a deep and fascinating insight into the contradictory and predatory relationship between African countries that are ‘loaned’ billions of dollars and the Western governments and their lending institutions- the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. These loans are meant to lift them out of poverty but they end up keeping them in unending financial indebtedness to the donors. They allow the donors to dictate and impose intolerable conditions in the operations of the recipients’ economies. A well researched work that draws a clear contrast between the approaches of the early missionaries in Africa whose works were largely successful and the post-colonial, short-term and ill-conceived policies of the huge money donors and development experts that displaced the missionaries  and whose works have proved mostly a failure and unsustainable. A great work and an invaluable contribution to the understanding why the billions of dollars of loans to Africa has proved to be ‘ a rising tide that is incapable of lifting a single boat’.  - Julius H. E. Uzoaba, Ph.D. Senior Research Manager (Rtd.), Correctional Service Canada, Nigerian-Canadian

Burris Devanney. African Chronicles: a memoir. New World Publishing: Halifax, 2010. 

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