Last Orders at Harrods: An African Tale

Charity Mupanga has a problem. The widowed owner of Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot), the most popular meeting place in the shantytown of Kireba can handle most of life’s challenges, but threatening letters from those powerful London lawyers are beginning to fluster her.
How dare a London store, no matter how big and famous, claim exclusive use of the first name of her late father, Harrods Tangwenya, gardener to successive British high commissioners for nearly twenty years? Well-meant but inept efforts to foil the bog city lawyers bring Harrods to the brink of disaster, and Charity close to despair. But an accidental riot, copupled with some quick thinking by Titus Ntoto, the 14-year-old leader of the slum’s toughest street gang, leaves both lawyers and locals happy with the outcome in this sharply observed satirical look at contemporary Africa.
Michael Holman was brought up in Zimbabwe and now lives in London. He was Africa editor of the London Financial Times from 1984 until 2002; between 1977 and 1984 he was the Financial Times’ Africa correspondent, based in Lusaka, Zambia.