Africa is too vast and too various for any single book to capture. But the right book before a trip can transform what you see when you get there. Here are some of the best reads for travelers heading to the continent, whether you want narrative, history, or fiction that puts you inside a place more vividly than any guidebook could.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is the starting point for African literature, and for good reason. Set in a pre-colonial Igbo village in what is now Nigeria, it tells the story of a proud man undone by the arrival of missionaries. It is short, devastating, and will change how you think about colonialism. If it grabs you, follow it with Achebe's No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God.
For East Africa, pick up Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen). Her account of running a coffee farm in Kenya in the early twentieth century is gorgeously written, full of landscape and light. It romanticizes plenty, but the prose is extraordinary and the sense of place is real. Pair it with I Dreamed of Africa by Kuki Gallmann for a more modern take on the Kenyan highlands, or with Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat for a Kenyan perspective on the struggle for independence that Blixen's world never acknowledged.
If you want to understand how Africa got to where it is today, read The State of Africa by Martin Meredith. It covers the entire continent from independence to the early 2000s, country by country, leader by leader. It is thorough without being dry, and honest about both the failures of African governments and the damage done by outside interference. You will arrive better informed than most of the people you meet.
For southern Africa, J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace is a spare, unsettling novel set in post-apartheid South Africa that captures a country in painful transition. And if you are heading to Botswana or Namibia, Laurens van der Post's The Lost World of the Kalahari is a classic account of traveling through the desert in search of the San people. It is dated in places, but the descriptions of the landscape are unforgettable.
For pure travel writing, Paul Theroux's Dark Star Safari follows a journey overland from Egypt to South Africa. Theroux is grumpy and opinionated, which makes him entertaining company. He is hard on the aid industry and not always fair, but he actually travels the buses, trains, and boats rather than flying over everything, and the book is full of encounters you will recognize if you travel the same routes. For something wilder, try Redmond O'Hanlon's Congo Journey, an account of trekking into the swamp forests of northern Congo in search of a possibly mythical dinosaur. It is funny, terrifying, and deeply strange.