This book is the outcome of a year spent travelling in Africa, from Casablanca to Kinshasa, from Bamako to N'Jamena...
"The Rond-point Charles de Gaulle in the title is not in France, and it's not a roundabout, but a flat piece of desert between tall dunes, in no way different from the surrounding Sahara landscape. We're in northern Chad, an African country which the French foreign minister once called 'a fiction created for the use of diplomats.'" ("Tygodnik Powszechny")
This book is the outcome of a year spent travelling in Africa, from Casablanca to Kinshasa, from Bamako to N'Jamena, a record of the following issues: slavery in Mauretania, the drama of the Tuareg, the conflict in Chad. But above all it's a record of the unending encounter with another human being - for this is what becomes of the solitary journey across the continent which Graham Greene once said had the shape of a human heart.
"Bitten by Africa. Just like Ryszard Kapuściński, before her, and Joseph Conrad even earlier. But none of the bitten have gnawed and nibbled into Africa with as much taste as Olga Stanisławska." (Wojciech Giełżyński)
Olga Stanisławska has been travelling in Africa and the Near East for some years. Her reports and essays have appeared in the principal Polish periodicals for social and cultural affairs.
In 2002, the Rond-Point Charles de Gaulle was awarded with the very eminent Kościelski Prize - a cash prize awarded every year to Polish authors aged under 40.
- Olga Stanisławska
Rond-Point Charles de Gaulle / Rondo de Gaulle'a
Wydawnictwo Książkowe Twój Styl, Warszawa 2001
translation rights: Olga Stanisławska, rights available
160 x 209, 208 pages, paperback
ISBN 83-7163-206-1