The Shadow of the Sun

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a respected Polish journalist and traveller. At one time I owned three of his books:

Imperium (1994) - the USSR

The Shadow of the Sun (2001) -Africa

Travels with Herodotus (2004) - matches his own travels with those of Herodotus

Unfortunately in downsizing for a move to a smaller place, I let go of the last two. Recently I regretted this and had to borrow them from the library. In doing so I noticed that neither book had a table of contents, and they're organized in a way that made it difficult to track down the information I wanted, so for my own use I put together a rough version for each. What follow is what I have for The Shadow of the Sun.

The front cover deserves comment. The head of the man in the photo is out of sight because he is bent over paddling. (What looks like his head is actually a hand.) Beyond him on shore is a camel, almost in the position where his head would be. My interpretation of this odd picture is that it's a comment on how difficult it is to get an accurate picture of that vast continent. The author says in an untitled preface:

I lived in Africa for several years. I first went there in 1957. Then, over the next 40 years, I returned whenever the opportunity arose. I traveled extensively, avoiding official routes, palaces, important personages, and high-level politics. Instead, I opted to hitch rides on passing trucks, wander with nomads through the desert, be the guest of peasants of the tropical savannah. Their life is endless toil, a torment they endure with astonishing patience and good humour.

This is therefore not a book about Africa, but rather about some people from there--encounters with them, and time spent together. The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say "Africa." In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.

(Page numbers in brackets are from the hardcover edition.)

 

Ghana

The Beginning: Collision, Ghana, 1958  (3) -  arrival in Accra, Nkrumah, politics

The Road to Kumasi (14) - travelling by bus in Africa

The Structure of the Clan (24) - colonialism, importance of greetings, African relationships

East Africa

I, a White Man (35) - Dar es Salaam

The Cobra's Heart (44) - an Egyptian cobra, arrival in Uganda

Inside the Mountain of Ice (53) - Kampala, cerebral malaria, lions & elephants

Dr. Doyle (62) - living in Dar es Salaam

Zanzibar (71) - turmoil in Zanzibar, Abeid Karuma, John Okello, influence of slavery

Nigeria

Anatomy of a Coup d'Etat (98) - 1966, Lagos

My Alleyway, 1967 - life in Lagos, robberies

Mauretania

Salim (118) - a breakdown in the desert

Ethiopia 

Lalibela, 1975 (127) - travel by road

Uganda

Amin (137) - the rise of Amin

The Ambush (147) - child soldiers, Soroti, the Karamajong

There Shall Be a Holiday (156) - African roads, life in a village

Rwanda

A Lecture on Rwanda (165) - an account of the Tutsi-Hutu conflict

Uganda

The Black Crystals of the Night (183) - why drivers avoid travelling at night

Sudan

These People, Where Are They? (192) - war in Sudan

Somalia

The Well (202) - "the Somali is born somewhere on the road"

Senegal

A Day in the Village of Abdallah Wallo (211) - "the village was like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean"

Ethiopia

Rising in Darkness (219) - Addis Ababa

Liberia

The Cooling Hell (233) - life in Monrovia, a brief account of the country's gruesome history

 

Cameroon

The Lazy River (261) - digging for gold in the Ngabadi River

 

Senegal

Madame Duif Is Coming Home (270) - Dakar and the changing nature of cities

 

Mali

Salt and Gold (280) - from Bamako to Timbukti, the Tuareg

 

Nigeria

Behold, the Lord Rideth on a Swift Cloud (289) - a temple in Port Harcourt

The Hole in Onitsha (298) - the largest market in Africa

 

Eritrea

Eritrean Scenes (306) - a war-torn state

 

Ethiopia/Tanzania

In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa (314) - an enormous mango tree in the village of Adofo is a meeting place, an elephant invades a Christmas party in Tanzania  

 

"Nothing creates a bond between people in Africa more quickly than shared laughter."

 

Last Train from Zona Verde

 

Paul Theroux is best known for his accounts of train travel, and this book tries to cash in on that interest with a misleading title and dust jacket photo. The only travel he does by train occurs in two chapters, "The Train from Khayelitsha" and "Night Train from Swakopmund," and is described in just a few sentences. Late in the book he passes up the opportunity for another trip by rail. So what's going on?

The journey in this book was conceived as a followup to Dark Star Safari, when he travelled from Cairo to Capetown. This time his intention was to travel up the west side of Africa, heading north from Capetown. The idea had a pleasing symmetry to it and would be the capstone of his long association with Africa, where he spent some of his happiest years. As the trip begins he writes, "I was hurrying away from my routine and my responsibilities and my general disgust with fatuous talk, money talk, money stories, the donkey laughter at dinner parties.... It was travel as rejection, as though in leaving I was saying to those fatuous people, Take that."

At first he is happy to be back in Africa, and from Capetown he heads north by bus into Namibia, where he joins a group of people he was keen to meet, the !Kung who live at the western edge of the Kalahari. He visits the Hoba meteorite, a 60-ton hunk of iron that did not shatter when it impacted, and the Veterinary Fence (aka the Red Line) which stretches across the entire width of northern Namibia to stop the threat of rinderpest. He slips across the border into Botswana to visit a posh tourist resort called Abu, located close to the Okavanga delta. The cost is $4000 a night, and though he is often scornful of tourists and has a hatred of "the taming of wild animals, especially large ones," he finds riding an elephant "a transcendent experience and an unexpected thrill." The owner is a friend of his, and its ultimate purpose is to restore orphaned elephants to the wild. Later one of the trainers was crushed to death by his favourite elephant.

The trip turns bad at the border crossing into into Angola. Although he does not realize it at the time, his credit card is cloned and runs up a bill totalling US $40,000. It's just a foretaste of what's to come, for Angola is a country that was ravaged by civil war from 1975 to 2002. A former Portuguese penal colony, it thrived on the slave trade which later was transformed into "forced labour," a practice that continued into the 1960s. Now "Angolans lived among garbage heaps," and the government was "corrupt, predatory, tyrannical, unjust, and utterly uninterested in its people." In the capital, Luanda, xenophobia was "on an official scale, institutional alien-hating." The streets of the "joyless" city are filled with "thousands of homeless children" and "countless numbers of war amputees." The penultimate chapter is entitled "This is What the World Will Look Like When It Ends."

In the final chapter -- "What Am I Doing Here? -- Theroux, in his 70s and suffering from gout, justifies his decision to discontinue the trip, which had become a "toxic tour through the bowels of West Africa, along the Côte d'Ordure." To travel there needed the "skills and temperament of a proctologist." It was only then that I became aware of the full meaning behind the book's title. "Zona verde" refers the bush, and he turns down an opportunity to travel by train into the bush on the Benguela Railway. The word "ultimate" in the subtitle did not mean, as I had assumed, "the very best," but "the last." I have no doubt that Theroux, often a sly writer, was fully aware of the potential confusion. He's having a little joke at the reader's expense.

This is not to say I did not enjoy the book. As usual, I enjoyed Theroux's great curiosity, his focus on details, his vast reading, his caustic comments. For example, he dismisses Laurens van der Post as "a posturing fantasist and fake mystic" and "an unreliable witness." He says the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy was anachronistic and "made anthropologists apoplectic with rage." He compares the herds of tourists unfavourably with wild animals placidly drinking at a waterhole. "Don't get between a tourist and the buffet," observes a friend.

I'm looking forward to his newest book, Burma Sahib, about another of my favourite writers, George Orwell.

Shakespeare in Swahililand

The author spent his youth in Kenya, and returns as an adult to track the spread of Shakespeare in East Africa. 

The book is packed with historical and literary detail, and at times reads like a travellogue as the author slips into the first person to describe the places he visits and recall some youthful experiences in Kenya.

The Lake Regions

Early travellers like Richard Burton and Henry Morton Stanley carried pocket versions of Shakespeare's works as a "talisman of Englishness."

Zanzibar

A British missionary, Edward Steere, translated into Swahili four of the stories in Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. He published them as Hadithi za Kiingereza.

Mombasa

A "vibrant culture of East African Shakespeare performance in the early years of the twentieth century" was brought from India by the labourers who built the railway from Mombasa to Nairobi. Travelling theatre groups performed versions of the plays in Hindustani, Gujurati, and other Indian languages. 

"This made these Indian communities in those years a considerably more concentrated centre of Shakespeare performance than London's West End." The plays received peevish reviews by the English.

Nairobi

This section is enlivened by quotes from Karen Blixen and Evelyn Waugh. The political awakening of Jomo Kenyatta is mentioned, as described in a novel by Peter Abrahams, A Wreath for Udomo.

Kampala and Dar es Salaam

At Makerere University in Kampala the future first president of Uganda, Milton Obote, played the lead role in a production of Julius Caesar. 

In Tanzania, Julius Caesar and Merchant of Venice, were translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere while he was president of Tanzania.

Miscellaneous Bits

• The half-year that Che Guevara spent hiding out in Dar es Salaam.
• The "uncannily parallel lives" of Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey'

Quotes

"It is inescapably true that the story of Shakespeare in East Africa is one caught up in colonial history and its failings."

"The breakthrough novel (A Grain of Wheat,1967) of Kenya's most celebrated writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, includes the story of a local official in the colonial administration whose grand plan to Anglicize the local Africans is laid out in a tract entitled PROSPERO IN AFRICA."

 

Welcome to Lagos

Several people in the Niger Delta are thrown together by chance. Two of them are army deserters, Chike and Yemi, unwilling to participate in violence against innocent people.

They encounter a boy with an AK47. He belongs to a militant group fighting for a share of Nigerian oil profits. His name is Fineboy and he is keen to be a radio presenter.

They are joined by two women, Isoken and Oma, one a young hairdresser fleeing the fighting near her village, the other fleeing her abusive husband.

The five of them form an uneasy alliance and travel by bus to Lagos where they end up sleeping under a bridge. By chance they discover a secret underground apartment, uninhabited but fully furnished. One night the owner shows up, a high-ranking government official named Sandayo. He too is in flight. Learning that he was about to be sacked and disgusted with government corruption, he absconded with ten million dollars.

The story takes a delightful turn when the group, after taking Sandayo prisoner, decide to spend the money on much-needed supplies for schools. Information is leaked to a local journalist, the story shifts to London where the BBC get involved, and a pompous newscaster is sent with a crew to Lagos.

I enjoyed the novel most when the focus was on the original five characters and the tumultuous day-to-day life in Lagos: the sights and sounds, the snippets from a newspaper that head the Lagos chapters, and especially the pidgin spoken by many. When Yemi, who has found work as a traffic warden, is asked where he learned the moves he makes while directing traffic, he replies:

“Nah me teach myself. I dey learn some new moves I go soon display.” 
“Chike doesn't see to dance,” Sandayo said.
“No o. You dey look him face think he's a small boy but inside nah old man.”

The result is a rich tapestry of life in contemporary Nigeria, as hinted at by the cover. If you take a close look at the hoarding, you'll see next to the author's name, Chibundu Onuzo, a thumbnail of the author herself.


BBC has a website in Nigerian pidgin.

Mimi and Toutou Go Forth

A slightly daft fellow named Spicer-Simson was stuck at a desk job in 1915 when a slightly daft assignment fell into his lap: he was to lead an overland expedition from South Africa to the Belgian Congo, transporting a pair of armed motorboats to neutralize the German naval presence on Lake Tanganyika.

He christened the motorboats Mimi and Toutou (after his original names had been rejected, Miaou and Bow-wow). They were transported from Captetown to Elizabethville by train, but after that had to be dragged by steam-tractors and ox-teams over a difficult terrain.

Spicer-Simson had been court-martialled twice and had a "reputation for disaster." Vain and full of preposterous boasts, he smoked monogrammed cigarettes, claimed to speak Chinese, used a form of semaphore unknown to anyone else, and took to wearing a khaki skirt (not a kilt) to better show off his heavily tattooed body.

Africans called him Lord Bellycloth and some regarded him as a god, worshipping clay statues of him. His men had a different view, and by the end of the expedition he was communicating with them only in writing.

After the war he was awarded a DSO but never another command. Years later he settled in Canada and died in Courtney BC in 1947.

The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika

Despite Spicer-Simson's eccentricities, Mimi and Toutou captured the first German vessel they encountered and renamed it Fifi. They also took prisoners, including an African stoker who switched sides and remained on the job when the Mimi and Fifi attacked and sank a larger German vessel.

With a British land force advancing toward Bismarckburg (now Kasanga), Spicer-Simson was ordered to prevent the Germans from fleeing by water. Intimidated, however, by the fort's wooden cannons, he took no part in the operation. For this, he received a dressing down from the commander of the British column and fell into a lethargy, taking to his bed for months.

Literary Echoes

There are passing references to Livingston and Stanley, both of whom travelled through the area around Lake Tanganyika searching for the source of the Nile, and to Joseph Conrad who made his Congo River journey in 1890 (which provided him with the material for Heart of Darkness) approximately 25 years before Spicer-Simson's expedition. There are several quotes from Remote People by Evelyn Waugh, who visited the area in 1930.

The penultiimate chapter in Mimi and Toutou Go Forth is devoted to The African Queen. Spicer-Simson's expedition was the inspiration for C.S. Forester's book. Scenes for the movie version were filmed in the Congo, with Katherine Hepburn recording her memories of the shoot in The Making of the African Queen, or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Houston, and Almost Lost My Mind. 

Peter Viertel, a screenwriter who worked with director John Huston on the film in Africa, portrayed Huston in a novel, White Hunter, Black Heart, which itself was subsequently filmed.

The Author

The final chapter of Mimi and Toutou ends with an account by the author, Giles Foden, of his own visit to the area and a trip on the MV Liemba on Lake Tanganyika. The vessel was originally the Graf von Gotzen, the Germans' largest asset on the lake and which they scuttled. Refloated by the British after the war, it now serves as a passenger ferry.

Foden received the Somerset Maughan award for his first book, The Last King of Scotland. Mimi and Toutou Go Forth was published in 2004 and has helpful maps and delightful illustrations for chapter headings drawn by his wife, Matilda Hunt.

At the back are silhouettes of the vessels involved and a useful bibliography. The endpapers of the hardcover edition show a fuzzy photographic image of Spicer-Simson in semaphore mode -- a nice touch for an entertaining and well-researched book.

The Lower River

"All news out of Africa is bad," Paul Theroux says at the beginning of Dark Star Safari (2003), and in Malawi he takes the news personally.

He taught school there as a young man with the Peace Corps, and now 35 years later he finds a betrayal of that hopeful time. Things have only gotten worse.

The country is poorer, the people more venal, his old school a shambles. He decides that international aid is the chief culprit, and discards a cherished desire to "spend a week or so teaching, helping out, doing something useful." He vows never to send another book to Malawi and concludes that "only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa."

That visit fuelled a recent novel, The Lower River (2012), whose protagonist, like Theroux, grew up in Medford and taught in the Lower River district of Malawi.

For Ellis Hock, those were "the happiest years of his life." He "craved that simple, older world he’d known as a young teacher, which was also a place in which hope still existed, because it was a work in progress." And so at the age of 62 Hock returns to Malawi hoping to recapture those magical years which still "cast a green glow in his memory."

Instead the trip goes from bad to worse with terrifying inevitability. The tension does not let up until the final page, and fulfills the promise of Theroux's picture on the dustjacket. He never smiles in these photos, but in this one he looks positively menacing. His glare is a challenge delivered from a blurry tropical river, as though warning the reader he means to exact full revenge for the mess the world has made of Africa.

Fiction vs Non-Fiction

I usually prefer Theroux's travel books to his novels, but the way in which Dark Star and Lower River overlap gave the novel an added dimension that I really enjoyed. For example, Theroux travels by dugout canoe down the Shire and Zambesi Rivers and into Mozambique, during which he hears vague mention of "bad people" on the river. When Hock makes the same journey, these "bad people" are brought to life in the novel's most chilling episode.

In Dark Star Theroux writes, "I seldom saw relief workers who did not in some way remind me of people herding animals and throwing food to them, much as rangers did to the animals in stricken game parks." In Lower River he dramatizes this observation.

In Dark Star Theroux notices a "small ugly man" with a "hideous face, bumpy with boils and growths and seeping wounds, and withered fingers." He was like "the Fool in a Shakespeare play, the court jester who is licenced to do or say anything he likes." He is the model for a Lower River dwarf named Snowdon, who plays a key role at the novel's climax.

Some reviewers have found echoes of Heart of Darkness (and Handful of Dust) in Lower River. Any such resemblances strike me as rather superficial, though they did remind me of that dustjacket photo, and the observation of an old friend in Dark Star, who is surprised by Theroux's griping: "He suspected that I had turned into Mister Kurtz."

Medford and Malabo

Malabo is the name of the village that Hock travels to, but before he gets there Theroux sets up several sly scenes that foreshadow Africa.

Hock meets a flaky New Ager who attends a Witch Camp and takes part in a Mud Ritual. She also owns a python that's been acting strangely. Hock's warning is similar to the one he himself receives in Malabo: "They will eat your money and then they will eat you."

Hock and his wife have several sessions with a marriage counselor named Doctor Bob, whose effectiveness is on a par with that of a snake doctor in Malabo.

In a delicious irony, Hock throws his cellphone into the Mystic River flowing though Medford.

A Nest of Snakes

The most obvious culprits in Lower River are a relief organization patronized by celebrities, and a former employee, now a village headman, who mulcts Hock of his last cent through artful fawning and appeals to tribal custom.

But Hock is also complicit, for he considers himself an expert on Malawi despite his decades-long absence. In fact, his delusions extend back to his first visit when, motivated by local superstition, he gets the loopy idea of catching snakes as a way of impressing villagers. It earns him the dubious name of Snake Man.

In America his knowledge seems impressive, but in Africa it becomes suspect. He refers to puff adders as "not especially venomous," when in fact they are responsible for more deaths in Africa than any other snake. And the casual way in which other deadly snakes are handled, or referred to -- mambas, boomslangs, the innocent-sounding twig snake -- exposes him as a chump.

His interest in snakes scuttles a couple of cherished dreams -- as a teacher, attaining an African woman he has fallen in love with ("Snakes are afraid of me," he tells her); and on his return, restoring his old school, which has fallen into ruin and become a "nest of snakes." Finding a black mamba there...

...he prodded it, let it whip and coil, and pressed its head with the end of the stick, quickly snatched, keeping its frothy mouth just above his fist. Then he brought it outside to show the boys, a trophy they'd remember.

The boys, who were sent by the headman to help clean up the school, flee with good reason, for the black mamba is one of the fastest and most lethal snakes in Africa.

It should be no surprise that Hock's hobby is viewed with suspicion by the villagers. A snake doctor is sent for and a snake dance performed. When the headman shows Hock the protective scars around his wrist, he says, "You see, we are not fearing you."

Perhaps even more interesting are the hands of the 16-year-old girl who risks her life for Hock. They are "scaly, slick...almost reptilian."

Further Reading

It is worth remembering that Theroux is a crafty and provocative writer who enjoys confounding readers with, as he puts it in Hotel Honolulu, "autobiographical fantasies."

Chapters 14-16 are the relevant ones in Dark Star.

An early excerpt from Lower River appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. In it Theroux's alter ego is named Altman.

The Ukimwi Road

From Kenya to Zimbabwe

The word "intrepid" scarcely seems adequate to describe Dervla Murphy. In 1992 she set out on a four-month, 3000-mile, bicycle trip through East Africa -- alone, and at the age of 60.

Early on she is challenged by an African pastor to speak out about AIDS (ukimwi in Swahili). "There's no medicine for this plague, only information to stop it," he says, and his words are borne out by people who believe the disease is caused by alcohol, or witchcraft, or American biological experiments. Condom use is widely disdained, one reason being the belief that only inferior ones are sent to Africa, another that they are part of a Western plot to slow African population growth.

AIDS thus becomes the book's leitmotif, and Dervla reports on the devastation she glimpses and the tangled ethical and moral issues it has stirred up. She also voices some pet peeves -- the IMF, the World Bank, and "UN free-loaders." At one point an FAO Land Cruiser whizzes past her, "vividly illustrating the reality of Western 'aid' to Africa. Hundreds of such vehicles, normally carrying only one or two expatriates, zoom around rural areas; but the locals, to whom transport would be a boon, knew better than to expect a lift."

Yet the book is not shrill or single-minded, and contains the usual elements of good travel writing -- description, anecdote, conversation, historical context, economic status report, observation both sympathetic and caustic -- as well as her own somewhat eccentric behaviour. She tipples Nile beer in Uganda, Tusker in Kenya and Tanzania, and Carlsberg in Malawi. She registers herself as a Russian astronaut at a police station, and alters a date on her vaccination booklet to facilitate a border crossing.

Throughout her travels she is repeatedly cautioned by concerned Africans about her safety, yet the only violence she witnesses are two episodes of brutal government repression in Kenya. True, she is harassed by belligerent louts, jeering children, and uncooperative officials, yet such acts are overshadowed by many instances of friendliness and generosity, people who go out of the way to help her when she has a flat, gets lost, falls sick.

Kenya (2 chapters)

From Nairobi she heads west to the port of Kisumu on Lake Victoria, then continues on to Uganda. While in Kenya she observes that "a half-century of White settlement created a racial chasm," and mentions the legacy of paternalism exemplified in the writings of Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley.

Uganda (4 chapters)

She "salutes the Nile" at Jinja, visits friends in Entebbe, and tours the Sese Islands in Lake Victoria. She spends time in Kampala, then heads west to Fort Portal and skirts the Ruwenzoris.

Tanzania (2 chapters)

After a stop in Bukoba, she takes the ferry to Mwanza at the southern end of Lake Victoria. The road is so corrugated that she departs from it at Old Shinyanga and (in my favourite part of the book) heads overland to Dodoma -- on a footpath! She camps out four nights in succession after being reassured that leopards and hyenas are rare in the area. After this detour she returns to the road system and continues on to Iringa and Mbeya in the beautiful southern highlands.

She blames much of "Tanzania’s drab and uniform poverty" on Nyerere's disastrous ujamaa policy.

Malawi and Zambia (3 chapters)

Faced with visa limitations in Malawi during a time of upheaval, she departs from her planned route and takes a rough mountain road which turns out to be one of the highlights of the trip. She delights in Malawian charm, and in Zambia declares, "The good news, in Zambia, is the Zambians – warm-hearted, open-minded, high-spirited against all the odds."

After a stay in Lusaka, she crosses the Zambesi into Zimbabwe where she is immediately felled by malaria and the book ends in Karoi (where the family of Alexandra Fuller once farmed, as described in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight). When she recovers she heads back to Nairobi by public transport, a journey that regrettably she does not describe, for part of it was on the Tanzam railway from Lusaka to Dar, which I very much would have enjoyed reading.

Dark Star Safari

Paul Theroux replicated part of this route about 10 years later, as recounted in Dark Star Safari. He was about the same age as Dervla at the time of her trip, and though he didn’t travel by bike he was as intrepid as her in his own way, and equally scathing about aid workers. Moreover, as a young man he lived and taught in Malawi and Uganda, and still retains a grasp of Swahili. It’s interesting to compare the two books.

Links

Dervla's Website
CBC "Writers & Co." interview (podcast)

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

An African Childhood

Much of this book is a child's-eye-view of Africa during the civil war in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

There's the constant threat of bloodshed plus the usual exotic risks -- snakes, scorpions, leopards, etc.

The family drives a bomb-proofed Land Rover, and the children learn how to clean and load their father's assault rifle, their mother's Uzi.

When the war ends they remain in Zimbabwe, though many other white settlers leave and their farm is sold out from under them. Eventually they relocate to Malawi and then to Zambia.

The author's portrayal of her family and herself is vivid, unflinching, and firmly cemented into place by the b&w photos that head each chapter. She writes:

I felt as if I needed to find a way to explain the racism I had grown up around, to justify the hard living of whites in Africa, to expunge my guilt over the injustice I had witnessed in my youth.

Not an easy task, delivering a sympathetic portrayal of her flawed but hard-working parents, along with her own dawning awareness of native Africans as fully rounded human beings, and tempered with a few glimpses of the excesses of post-Independence Africa.

Her descriptions of the sights, sounds and particularly the smells of Africa are rich and evocative.

When the ship veered into the Cape of Good Hope, Mum caught the spicy, woody scent of Africa on the changing wind. She smelled the people: raw onions and salt, the smell of people who are not afraid to eat meat, and who smoke fish over open fires on the beach and who pound maize into meal and who work out-of-doors. She held me up to face the earthy air, so that the fingers of warmth pushed back my black curls of hair, and her pale green eyes went clear-glassy. "Smell that," she whispered. "That's home."

Many sad, humorous, poignant, tense and uncomfortable moments fill the book. Clueless missionaries and hitchhikers pop up, border officials are either welcoming, venal or dangerous. There is a pot-smoking cook and a man with an almost preternatural skill as a tracker. The mother -- beautiful, feisty, eccentric -- suffers a nervous breakdown after the loss of her third child (two of whom rest in unmarked graves).

I wonder what sort of book Jane Austen would have produced if she had grown up in Africa.

The Author

Though Alexandra Fuller attended university in Canada (Acadia here in Nova Scotia), and now lives in the US, she still thinks of herself as an African. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight was a New York Times notable book, and finalist for the Guardian First Book Prize.

You can find out more about her at her website.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town

The subtitle provides an accurate glimpse into this strange book, which describes an epic quest with mythic elements drawn from Yoruba folk tales.

The hero's name is "Father of gods who could do anything in this world." One day he sets out "to find out whereabouts was my tapster who had died." Thus begins a surreal journey through an African underworld.

Some of his adventures:

He rescues a beautiful woman from a "complete gentleman" with rented body parts.

After he marries her, the woman gives birth to a fully grown child from her thumb.

He turns himself into a canoe, which his wife paddles across a river.

They sell their "death" and lend out their "fear."

They are captured by a giant who tosses them into a bag.

When they finally arrive at the Deads' Town, the tapster gives them a magical egg.  They return to the land of the living when the hero changes himself into a pebble and throws himself across a river. At home they put an end to a famine.

The journey is so phantasmagoric that the imperfect English becomes a key element. If the language were brushed up, the book would not be the same. Here's a typical passage:

His fingernails were long to about two feet, his head was bigger than his body ten times. He had a large mouth which was full of long teeth, these teeth were about one foot long and as thick as a cow's horns, his body was almost covered with black long hair like a horse's tail hair. He was very dirty.

Critical Analysis

Margaret Laurence notes that the book "has been compared to Orpheus in the underworld, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to Dante, to the journey of Odyseus."

Gerald Moore says that all of the author's "heroes or heroines follow out one variant or another of the cycle of the heroic monomyth, Departure -- Initiation -- Return."

Chinua Achebe (in the first Equiano Memorial Lecture) calls Tutuola "the most moralistic of all Nigerian writers." The Palm-Wine Drinkard describes the consequences of inverting work and play, and though the events are grotesque and surreal, there are always boundaries to a monster's power. Thus:

...anarchy is held at bay and a traveller who who perseveres can progress from one completed task to the domain of another and in the end achieve the creative, moral purpose in the extra-ordinary but by no means arbitrary universe of Tutuola's story.

References

Margaret Laurence, "A Twofold Forest," in Long Drums and Cannons.

Gerald Moore, "Amos Tutuola: A Modern Visionary," in Seven African Writers.

Chinua Achebe, "Work and Play in Tutola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard," in Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, No. 14.