An often humorous, generally cheerful, occasionally exasperated account of a trek through eight African countries, all with British or South African colonial pasts. At the same time it is a journey through the characters of those countries, comparing them with one another, assessing their relative strengths and weaknesses, their Britishness and their Africanness, and looking at their post-independence histories through the sceptical and cynical yet fresh eye of someone born at the time that many of them achieved independence. The book is a blend of discovery and discomfort, hope and happiness, establishing finally that even if everybody in those countries holds a view on most things and none of them knows what it means to be South African (or, in many cases, that it is possible to drive to Johannesburg) a South African is, all in all, a good thing to be.