John Ghazvinian’s Untapped is full of sentences that feel like a speedboat ride through the lawless waters of the Niger Delta, AK47s hoisted, low-slung shacks passing in a blur, major geopolitical storm clouds roiling into view… which pretty much damned if that wasn’t exactly what was happening as the man was writing. Ghazvinian jammed through the Delta on buses and planes and speedboats, went to oil industry seminars in swank Johannesburg hotels, met with execs in Lagos—he did his reporting old school, on the ground, with fixers and a money belt stuffed with $100 bills—to get the story behind all the emerging stories about Africa and oil right now. It’s a good story. It’s a terrible story. And it’s really well told.

The United States is going strong into Africa, that was one of the main angles of the Cheney energy commission, that we would shift dependence from the Middle East to Africa in the next decade or so. The Chinese are going in even stronger. It is right now a scramble that mirrors the colonial scramble for land and resources and geopolitical advantage that marked out the nineteenth century in Africa and that decided the fortunes of nations across Africa and Europe from then to now.

There will be more and more news about Africa in coming years. There will be films and books and spy craziness. This book is a primer. Read it today. It’s full of people and knowledge of the big picture and informational gems, like this one buried in a footnote, no less: “Up to 1.5 million tons of oil has been spilled in the Niger Delta over the past fifty years—the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez disaster every twelve months.”