Kennedy & Boyd - Essays and Journalism 4

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Essays and Journalism 4 - Botswana


	Naomi Mitchison. Introduction by Moira Burgess. With a contribution by Sandy Grant.
	ISBN 9781849210133
	SERIES The Naomi Mitchison Library
	Paperback 498 pages

	Published December 2023 UK Price £24.95 US Price $29.95
Volume 4 in the seven-volume edition of Naomi Mitchison’s Essays and Journalism collects her writing about her life in Botswana in the 1960s. "The British know nothing about Botswana because it seldom gets a mention in the press; and because it's 'simply not interesting'. So says Alfred Dube, Botswana's High Commissioner in London. As a generalisation, he may be right. But turn the coin and realise that many thousands of people in Britain, with no direct contact with this country, owe their knowledge of it to a single person, Naomi Mitchison, its one time, self appointed, prolific publicist and unofficial ambassador. Articles rarely appear in the British press today for the simple reason that Naomi is in her mid 90s and no longer provides them. Unsurprisingly, no one of equivalent abilities and interests has stepped forward to fill her shoes. Perhaps they realised what little value the government placed on Naomi's earlier efforts. She may have been an irritant to many. But how many of the newly independent states of Africa had a friend like her? Someone who had the contacts, the ability and the motivation to argue a point, paint an image or present a human need?" -- Sandy Grant, 1995 The writing career of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) stretched over some seventy years, encompassing at least seventy works of fiction as well as non-fiction, poetry and plays. Almost unknown, however, is the mass of shorter prose pieces - journalism, essays, polemics, reminiscences - which Mitchison produced during her long career. There are many hundreds of these pieces, covering a tremendously wide range of topics, an untapped resource both in Mitchison biography and in the wider field of social history.