Out Of America

Nothing in Keith Richburg's long and respected journalistic career at the Washington Post prepared him for what he would encounter as the paper's correspondent in Africa. He found a continent where brutal murder had become routine, where dictators and warlords silenced dissent with machine guns and machetes, and where starvation had become depressingly common. With a great deal of personal anguish, Richburg faced a difficult question: If this is Africa, what does it mean to be an African American? In this provocative and unvarnished account of his three years on the continent of his ancestors, Richburg takes us on a extraordinary journey that sweeps from Somalia to South Africa, showing how he confronted the divide between his African racial heritage and his American cultural identity.

Keith B. Richburg is the New York bureau chief for the Washington Post. In 1993 he won the National Association of Black Journalists' International Reporting Award, and the following year he won the George Polk Memorial Award for foreign reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C.