In an interview on White in Africa

A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd sounds a bit lighter, perhaps – more humorous.

It is. Boyd was brought up in Ghana and Nigeria. It’s about the white man in Africa again, but it is lighter. It’s not insensitive, it’s quite sensitive to African life, but it’s really a comedy. It’s about a young diplomat’s life: an undersecretary in the embassy of a country quite like Ghana. It has elements of an old theme, the white man being treated as something extremely special in Africa whether he wants to be or not.

And why do you think that is?

My own take is that Africans want to know how it is that white men have got their hands on all the money. They believe there’s some trick you can learn. It’s a bit like people asking you how you write – how you get your ideas. Well there’s a bit of that, and then there’s the hierarchical tradition in Africa. White people have always been pretty near the top, because they governed many countries in Africa for quite some time and because, even in post-colonial Africa, they always have a role which is among the governing classes, the managing classes, the banking classes. Of course the wretched white Zimbabweans belong to the farming classes which the government has no respect for whatsoever. But that’s a slightly different point.