Strange Love

William Boyd

• The Africans by David Lamb
  Bodley Head, 363 pp, £12.50, August 1983, ISBN 0 03 703096 5
• African Princess by Princess Elizabeth of Toro
  Hamish Hamilton, 230 pp, £9.95, September 1983, ISBN 0 241 11002 5
• The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuscinski, translated by William Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowsa-Brand
  Quartet, 164 pp, £7.95, October 1983, ISBN 0 7043 2415 6

In an African country, an Englishman – a senior consultant engineer for an oil company – checks into the best hotel in the capital city. The next morning, eating his breakfast by candlelight (the electricity has failed), he is disturbed by a steady drip of water onto the table in front of him. An inquiry soon establishes that this is an overflow from malfunctioning lavatories on the floor above – quite a regular occurrence. At his request, the oil company moves him to the city’s second-best hotel, but this, he discovers, is full of prostitutes plying their trade among the businessmen and foreign officials who stay there. The Englishman finds the relentless soliciting uncongenial and wearing, and asks his employers to put him up in a house. This they duly do: he shares a pleasant house in a suburb with a colleague; the oil company lays on a car and driver to transport them the few miles to the city-centre office each day.