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Robert Bates, who is one of my favorite authors on all things post-independence Africa, wrote a great book, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa. He doesn't talk extensively about Benin but it seems like whenever he does he cites Christopher Allen's Benin/the Congo/Burkina Faso: Economics, Politics and Society.

I know you're looking for more recent stuff but I've read bits and pieces of Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640-1960.

Hope that helps. Safe travels and enjoy your time there.

Pakenham has a GREAT book on Baobabs.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Remarkable-Baobab-Thomas-Pakenham/dp/0393059898

Confidential and trustworthy sources tell me they are giant nuclear powered trees, so we have that going for us, which is nice.

Not sure if this is what you are after I have always found the aid situation quite interesting. I'm trying to track down the books I have read [aid and other dirty business] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Aid-Other-Dirty-Business-Intentions/dp/0091914353) and [dead aid] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dead-Aid-working-another-Africa/dp/0141031182/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y/277-5170026-2328035) there are many others.
There was one more that I really liked but can't think of the name. anyway they all give quite a good overview about the continent and the cultures and their histories as well as western influence.

Obviously there's Arabic but there's a bunch of other scripts : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

There's no such thing as "truthful history" because history is always viewed through a prism, but I've heard good things about John Reader's Biography of the Continent:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/067973869X/ref=pd_aw_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZC56YTYN2PH4VYTDAQCT&dpPl=1&dpID=51vnkPaUS6L

The State of Africa by Martin Meredith is a great place to start. Gives you a fairly comprehensive overview of how countries in Africa transitioned to independence, and the problems that arose therein. Will really help you understand the complexities in different regions and gives perspective regarding current-day conflicts.

To help stop the downvotes:

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

The Dungeons of Nakasero is about the legacy of Idi Amin's rule in Uganda.

Sounds like we're looking for a survey and there is an appropriately broad book that comes to mind. Will Reno (of Northwestern U) published a slam-dunk analysis of the history of conflict in post-independence Africa, organizing it into ±6 distinct taxons. Most impressively, he explains these different patterns in conflict through the forces that produced them, be it international tensions, governance, inequality, or resource exploitation.

http://www.amazon.com/Warfare-Independent-Approaches-African-History/dp/0521615526

Really glad to hear it. Her larger (but generally similar) work, The Trouble with the Congo, is widely available as an e-book. I was able to borrow it as such from my local public library.

You probably already know, but some great relatively academic DRC resources are:

• Africa’s World War, by G. Prunier.
  
• The Texas in Africa blog.
  
• The Congo Siasa blog.
  
• Anything by David Newbury.
  
  It’s obviously not about DRC proper, but Re-Imagining Rwanda, by J. Pottier, really helped me cut through a lot of the misleading rhetoric about the Rwandese side of things and understand just how much this is an information war. It gets pretty controversial and I wouldn’t believe everything it implies.

I hope that anyone reading the above comment is as disgusted as I am.
Your thinking is parochial and dangerous...you are on the brinks of suggesting a 'counter-genocide'.

The 1994 Genocide, took place in the context of a much larger Civil War and Regional Conflict. It was terrible, however hundreds of thousands of Hutus were killed as well. The situation was complicated and finding out the 'truth' about what really happened becomes more complicated the further away we become from the events.

My suggestion to anyone interested in finding out more information is to check out some of the works that explore what happened in Rwanda, and how it is today....

Pottier's Re-Imagining Rwanda, or
Straus & Waldorf's Remaking Rwanda, or
Clark and Kaufman's After Genocide are good places to start.

In addition to Rwanda's role in the violence in Congo, we must be critical of the human rights deterioration and crackdown on speech and politic opposition in Rwanda by Kagame's government which has been evidenced by any of these reports Amnesty International has conducted on Rwanda.

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