Four Guineas

A journey through Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and Nigeria in the early 1950s, just before the great wave of African independence began. Elspeth Huxley was one of the sharpest observers of late-empire Africa, best known for The Flame Trees of Thika. This is her dispatch from the four British West African dependencies on the cusp of becoming nations. Ghana would gain independence in 1957, just two years after this was published.