Saharan Journey | Granta

  • Published: 02/02/2012
  • ISBN: 9781847082329
  • 130x20mm
  • 352 pages

Saharan Journey

Sven Lindqvist

Translated by Joan Tate

Published for the first time in one volume, Sven Lindqvist’s uncategorizable, beautiful and angry books about the African continent and the legacy of colonialism. Exterminate All the Brutes takes us on an intellectual trip to ‘the heart of the darkness’ of the European mind and its attitude towards Africa, tracing the legacy of European explorers, missionaries, politicians and historians in Africa from the late eighteenth century onwards. Its sequel, Desert Divers, describes Lindqvist’s journey through Algeria and Morocco, and explores the way European writers of the early twentieth century plunged into the stony, baking expanse of the Sahara, drawn by their own strange dreams.

This powerful book has haunted me for months

Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

Sven Lindqvist is a brilliant and original writer as well as a fierce polemicist

Geoff Dyer

Lindqvist's concise prose and detailed accounts of European acts of cruelty make for compelling, if horrifying reading ... Exterminate All the Brutes is bracing, instructive reading ... it will be widely read

Rolling Stone

The Author

Sven Lindqvist (1932-2019) was born in Stockholm, and travelled extensively through Asia, Africa and Latin America. He was the author of thirty books, including A History of Bombing, Desert Divers, which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and Exterminate All the Brutes, which formed the basis of a major HBO four-part documentary series by Academy Award-nominated writer and director Raoul Peck.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Sven Lindqvist on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.