All posts tagged Nairobi

Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)

What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!
(Going Solo, page 92)

In my simplicity I had thought that Going Solo was an account of Roald Dahl’s time in the RAF in Africa; I hadn’t realised it is simply the continuation of his autobiography, which had begun with Boy: Tales from Childhood (1984), that it picks up precisely where that book ended, and that the RAF memoirs form only a part of the book.

To be precise, the text starts with Dahl setting off in 1938 at the age of 22 for his first job, a three-year contract with the Shell Oil company in East Africa. Little did he or anyone else know that the Second World War would break out only a year later and that Dahl would volunteer for, and be accepted into, the Royal Air Force.

The book therefore falls naturally into two halves: his experiences as a civilian in East Africa and the RAF period. This latter can itself be sub-divided into half a dozen or so parts:

  • training in Nairobi
  • more training in Iraq
  • his crash in the North African desert and the long hospitalisation and recovery which followed
  • fully recovered and returned to service for aerial combat in Greece
  • aerial combat over Vichy Syria

Before he becomes increasingly incapacitated by blinding headaches and is invalided home, arriving back at his mum’s house three years after he left, and that’s where the narrative ends.

I also hadn’t expected it to be a children’s book. Even Dahl’s ‘grown-up’ stories have an element of cartoon simplicity about them. They tend to be packed with eccentric characters who perform grotesque actions except that, in the ‘adult’ books, in the Tales of the Unexpected stories or a book like Uncle Oswald, these often involve sex. In this book there are, as you would expect, quite a few deaths, some pretty gruesome. And yet the same cartoon simplicity, the noticing of odd characters with silly names, the sense that situations and people are rounded and simple, is basically the same as he uses in his famous children’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and so on.

Thus the narrator of this book portrays himself as ‘a conventional young lad from the suburbs’ (p.3) and, in the Africa section especially, the main content focuses on the oddballs, eccentrics and freaks that he meets. This air of an innocent boy abroad in the crazy adult world is emphasised by two notable features of the text:

1. The way that each of the generally short chapters ends by including the text of one of the many, many letters he wrote home to his beloved Mother throughout the three year period, often repeating what we’ve just been told in the main text.

2. The photos. At various points Dahl tells us about cameras he’s bought (and which get stolen from him, as on a Greek airfield) and it’s clear he was a compulsive snapper. The book is liberally sprinkled with photos illustrating every step of his adventures, images which become increasingly dramatic when he sees action in Greece and which include photos of improvised airfields, crashed Messerschmitts and burned-out Hurricanes. The photos of him also bring out what a devilishly handsome young man he was, and freakishly tall, at a strapping six foot six.

Roald Dahl wearing flying helmet, goggles and scarf standing in front of a hedge

Roald Dahl aged 24 training to fly with the RAF in Nairobi

By ship to Tanganyika

In the opening chapters the narrator travels by ship, the SS Mantola, in the old, lazy style, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, but the focus isn’t on places and atmosphere or history. It is on the peculiar upper-class types who, back then, in the 1930s, ran the British Empire and were, without exception, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’. There’s Major Griffiths and his wife who, every morning, run round the ship’s deck stark naked to keep fit; the elderly Miss Trefusis who eats fruit with a knife and fork so as to avoid the beastly germs on one’s fingers; Dahl’s cabin-mate, the improbably named U.N. Savory, manager of a cotton mill in the Punjab who, it turns out, is bald but wears a series of four wigs, each thicker and fuller than the one before, in order to give the impression his luxuriant black hair is growing, before its monthly trim, all to impress the Sikhs he employs.

  • On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain (p.3)
  • Everyone on this ship was dotty (p.12)
  • The man was as potty as a pilchard. (p.19)

These chaps and chapesses had generated a special lingo, a dialect incorporating numerous words from Swahili, Hindi and so on.

  • sundowner = evening drink
  • chota peg = drink at any other time of day
  • the memsahib = the wife
  • a shufti = a look around
  • shenzi = poor quality
  • tiffin = supper

Dahl arrives in Dar es Salaam, the Red Sea port of what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania, which he describes as made up of small white and yellow and pink buildings set on a sweeping bay of golden sand against luxuriant tropical jungle. Wow. Reminder that it is 1938, before the world was ruined by over-population, tourism and pollution. The whole book is like this, conveying a fairytale sense of wonder and joy at everything Dahl sees and everyone he meets, he is continually reflecting:

what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it. (p.23)

The clarity of his prose and the untroubled enthusiasm of his schoolboy mentality makes this an extremely enjoyable book to read. Coming from such a modest background he doesn’t feel any class entitlement to the wonders of the Empire but is continually amazed and astonished at it – precisely as a schoolboy traveller back in time from our day might be.

Working for Shell in Dar es Salaam

Thus he is amazed to discover the Shell office in Dar es Salaam is run by just three Englishmen but set in a grand villa with an astonishing cohort of native servants, a cook, a gardener, and a ‘boy’ each. He is a personal valet who looks after every aspect of your clothes and shoes and rooms etc, but in return you were expected to look after him, his wives (at least two) and children. Dahl’s ‘boy’ is Mdisho. Dahl describes how one day he saved their ‘shamba-boy’ Salimu from being bitten by a black mamba snake and thus secured his undying loyalty.

He gets to be driven all around Tanganyika, visiting Shell customers in a wide range of farms and businesses, and revelling in the scenery and the wildlife, which is described as a boy would describe the wonders of a zoo, for there are lions! and hippos! and elephants! and zebra! Apart from the snakes. Dahl hates snakes.

Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! (p.44)

He is taking a sundowner on the terrace of a district officer, Robert Sanford, and his wife when a servant comes running round the corner of the house yelling that a lion is carrying away the cook’s wife. Sanford grabs a gun and gives chase so we have the comic sight of the lion loping along with cook’s wife between his jaws, chased by the cook, chased at a distance by Sanford brandishing his rifle, followed by Dahl wondering what he’s doing. Sanford fires a shot into the ground ahead of the lion who turns round and, seeing all these humans chasing him, drops the cook’s wife and canters off into the jungle. The cook’s wife is perfectly unharmed and gets to her feet smiling, and the whole crew return to the house where another drink is served and the cook gets on with preparing dinner.

Can this possibly have happened? Surely not as pat and neatly as he describes. The book is like this all the way through, perceived, imagined and written in the style of a crisp, clean children’s book. But, regarding this particular story, he goes on to write that the story became a legend and he was eventually asked to write up his version for the local paper, the East African Standard which paid him £5, his first published work. So maybe it did happen.

But whereas events like this in the hands of, say, Hemingway would have become a gripping insight into the eternal contest between man and beast, or in the hands of Graham Greene would have had a much messier ending involving someone’s adultery and guilt – under Dahl’s light touch it becomes a neat children’s story with a happy ending.

War breaks out

After a few more colonial adventures (the main one featuring ‘the snake man’, i.e. a little old European who specialises in catching poisonous snakes as and when they enter people’s homes) the Second World War breaks out on page 66 of this 223-page edition i.e. about a third of the way through.

To Dahl’s horror, he is conscripted by the captain of the King’s African Regiment and put in charge of a platoon of native soldiers (‘askaris’), armed with rifles each and one machinegun. He tells us that, as it had originally been a German colony (‘German East Africa’) there are far more German citizens in Tanganyika than all other European nationalities put together, and the army officer expects that, as soon as war is declared, all the Germans will try to escape on the one road which heads south towards Portuguese East Africa (nowadays called Mozambique). Dahl is ordered to stop them, and send them back to Dar where the men will be interned in a camp for the duration and the women and children remain free.

So he heads south in a lorry full of askaris. Like so many inexperienced young officers he has to rely on the experience of his (black) sergeant, who tells him where to stop and how to set up a roadblock. They camp for the night and the platoon cook makes a delicious meal of boiled rice and bananas.

Next day they get a phone call telling them war has, indeed, been declared and later that morning a convoy of German citizens in cars and vans arrives at the roadblock. In this account the German men get out of their cars holding guns and a young inexperienced Dahl finds himself confronted by the bullish leader of the convoy who refuses to return. He tells his comrades to start dismantling the roadblock and points his gun directly at Dahl. At which point a single rifle shot rings out and the man’s head explodes, his body falling to the road like a puppet. Dahl’s askaris emerge from their hiding places and the civilians mutely put down their guns, get in their cars and turn round, to be escorted to the camp by his lorryload of native soldiers (pages 59 to 70).

The thing is, in a story Dahl wrote a decade earlier, Lucky Break (1977), the shooting doesn’t happen. The Germans meekly turn around and return to Dar. Is this later version the true, unabridged version of events? Or a deliberately more violent and garish version, reflecting the uninhibited nature of culture as a whole, which became steadily more interested in graphic violence from the 1970s onwards? Or an old man (Dahl was 70 when this memoir was published) enjoying giving his readers the shivers?

Dahl joins the RAF and trains

In December 1939 Dahl enrols in the RAF. His employer, Shell, release him and continue to pay his salary for the duration of his service (!).

Dahl gives a beautifully boyish description of the long solitary drive from Dar up to Nairobi in Kenya, stopping to marvel at giraffes and elephants.

At Nairobi he is quickly inducted and taught to fly a Tiger Moth, which you started by swinging the big wooden propeller by hand, making sure not to topple forwards because then it would chop your head off. The text radiates boyish glee in the macabre and violent.

How many young men, I kept telling myself, were lucky enough to be allowed to go whizzing and soaring through the sky above a country as beautiful as Kenya? (p.90)

Once he can fly he is sent by train to Kampala, flown to Cairo, which was lovely, and then on to Habbaniya in Iraq, ‘the most godforsaken hellhole in the whole world’ (p.94) where he spends six months, from 20 February to 20 August 1940 (p.98) training in Hawker Harts.

Finally he ‘gets his wings’ and is transferred to RAF Ismailia on the Suez Canal, and posted to 80 Squadron, who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. He is boyishly fascinated by the way the Gladiator’s two fixed machineguns fire bullets through a propeller rotating at thousands of times per minute (p.99).

He is stunned to be told no-one is going to show him either how to fly a Gladiator nor anything at all about aerial combat. He’s just going to be plonked in one and given the map co-ordinates of 80 Squadron and told to make his way there by himself. Here he makes the first of what become many comments and criticisms about the RAF and army’s lack of imagination and planning.

There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and that, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. (p.101)

He crashes

Dahl is at pains to point out that, although it was reported in the press that he was shot down by enemy planes, this was propaganda cooked up to make the incident sound patriotic.

On 19 September Dahl was ordered to fly his new Gladiator from RAF Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. He refuelled at Amariya near Alexandria and flew on to Fouka. It is mind-boggling to learn that he had no radio and only a map strapped to his knee for guidance. The CO at Fouka gave him the co-ordinates of his final destination, the current 80 Squadron base, and he set off. But it wasn’t there. He flew up and down and round and round looking for it, as the desert dusk drew in and he ran short of fuel. He realised he had to make an emergency landing, tried to find a flat long stretch of desert and took the Gladiator down.

The plane hit a boulder at about 75 miles an hour. He regained consciousness to discover his nose was smashed, his skull fractured, he’d lost a few teeth and he couldn’t see. In one of the most vivid parts of the book, he describes the incredibly lethargy he felt, he just wanted to sleep, but the plane was on fire and eventually the scorching heat persuaded him to undo his straps and reluctantly leave the nice cosy cockpit and crawl onto the sand. Here he just wanted to curl up and sleep but, again, the fierce heat persuaded him reluctantly to crawl away towards the cool desert night.

Later he discovered the area he crashed in was no man’s land between the Italian and British front lines and that three brave British soldiers ventured out after nightfall to check the wreckage and were surprised to find the pilot had survived. They carried him back to British lines and thence began the long, complicated journey back to hospital in Alexandria.

Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Alexandria

In his clear, boyish style, Dahl vividly describes his prolonged hospital treatment. He spends around six months recovering from his injuries, under the care of the hospital staff, in particular nurse Mary Welland whose gentle ministrations to the swollen flesh around his eyes is calming and reassuring. He has various operations, including an adventure with a spanking new anaesthetic, sodium pentathol, which turns out not to work at all (pages 112 to 116).

Then one day, as Mary is laving his swollen eyes, one opens a crack and light floods in. For six weeks he had been blind, his other senses heightened. The return of light is a revelation (pages 118 to 122).

Dahl was discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after he was admitted, and goes to stay with a wealthy English family in Cairo, the Peels.

When he reports to RAF Ismailia he is told 80 Squadron are now in Greece, and are no longer flying Gladiators, but Mark I Hurricanes. Once again he is thrown in the deep end, given just two days solo practice, the first time he’d flown a modern, super-speedy plane, the first plane with retractable undercarriage, with wing flaps, with a variable pitch propeller, with machineguns in the wings, that he’s ever flown.

Two days to teach himself then he’s ordered to fly solo across the Med to Greece. The Flight-Lieutenant tells him they’re fitting it with extra fuel tanks, but if the pump doesn’t work, he’ll run out and be forced to ditch in the sea. Then swim home.

Fighting in Greece

As soon as he lands his Hurricane at Elevsis airfield near Athens, the ground crew set him straight about the parlous situation. The entire RAF has just 15 Hurricanes and four clapped-out Blenheims. Dahl explains the background: the Italians invaded Greece in October 1940 but ran into unexpected resistance. The British government took a vital slice of Field-Marshall Wavell’s Eighth Army and planes and sent them to Greece in March 1941. When it was just the Italians to hold off, this was fine. But on 6 April 1941 the Germans invaded and began a steady advance which was to bring them to Athens just three weeks later on 27 April. The German Luftwaffe outnumbered the measly little RAF outfit by anything up to 100 to 1.

So Dahl had flown into an utterly hopeless situation, and the pilots and ground crew let him know it straightaway. Sending British forces to Greece had been a colossal miscalculation. Now the best that could be hoped for was managing their withdrawal. It was like Dunkirk but was being hushed up in the press.

Dahl immediately made friends with David Coke, in line to inherit the title Earl of Leicester, who is appalled to learn that Dahl has absolutely no idea about air combat whatsoever. Over a couple of pages he fills Dahl (and the reader) in on the basics.

There follow a sequence of absolutely thrilling and terrifying descriptions of aerial warfare. On his first flight he takes on a pack of 6 Junker 88s, apparently downing one but making every mistake in the book. The Squadron CO barely looks up when he tells him. Every day more men and planes are being lost. In the small ‘mess’ there are no friendships, people don’t talk. They are all alone with their thoughts, convinced they will all die within days.

Next day he tries to defend a British ammunition ship from attack, engaging with Stukas and being chased by what he says felt like 30 or so Messerschmitts to avoid which he descends right down to tree level, then fence level, terrifyingly dangerous. Did this actually happen or is the professional author in Dahl giving the reader a thrill for their money? It’s noticeable how many times he directly addresses the reader, as if in one of his children’s books:

You may not believe it but I can remember having literally to lift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was a herd of brown cows in front of me and I’m not sure I didn’t clip some of their horns with my propeller as I skimmed over them. (p.153)

There follows a chapter packed with incident as he details the four consecutive days leading up to the Battle of Athens:

  • 17 April he went up 3 times
  • 18 April went up twice
  • 19 April went up 3 times
  • 20 April went up 4 times

They try to defend ships in Piraeus harbour from German bombers. On 20th the entire squadron of 12 Hurricanes is sent up to fly over Athens to try and bolster morale, led by legendary air ace Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle, but of course the Germans send hundreds of Messerchmitts after them and it turns into a mad bloodbath. His description of the intensity of split second perceptions required continually is amazing.

Dahl survives but five of the 12 Hurricanes were lost. After he lands he finds he is drenched in sweat. His hands are shaking too much to light a cigarette. He has stripped and is washing alongside his friend David when the airfield is strafed by Me 109s.

Amazingly all seven planes survive and the Messerschmitts don’t return, probably expecting the little airfield to be heavily defended, not knowing it is only protected by one measly Bofors gun.

Next thing Dahl and the other 6 are ordered to fly to a new landing strip along the coast, near Megara. The existing ground crew will decamp with all tents etc that evening. Next morning the seven pilots awaken to a camp stripped almost bare. There’s no mess tent, no cooks, no food. As dawn breaks they climb into their planes, assemble at 1,000 feet and fly down the coast to Megara.

They land in a field which has been rolled flat. There is absolutely no-one else about. They wheel the planes into the cover of olive trees and climb a ridge from where they can see the sea. There’s a large oil tanker 500 yards out. They watch as Stukas dive bomb it, blow it into a fireball, and watch as the crew leap off into the flaming water and are roasted alive (pages 174 to 175).

The ground crew and other ancillaries arrive in lorries and set up tents. Again the pilots ask why the devil they’re not being sent straight to Egypt. They conclude it’s so that propagandists/the Press/the government can claim that the RAF stayed till the bitter end to protect ‘our troops’. Words like ‘mess’, ‘balls-up’, ‘muddle headed’, ‘incompetent’, ‘terrific cock-up’ sprinkle the text. The Commanding Officer unhappily tells them they have to stay.

A flight of Messerschmitts flies over. Their new base has been rumbled. They calculate they have an hour and a half before a bombing raid returns but the commanding officer idiotically refuses to let them take off and be prepared. Instead they must wait till 6pm on the dot and then fly off to cover the evacuation of troops. a) this gives the Germans exactly the right amount of time to return and shoot up the new airbase, killing one pilot in his plane as it is taking off and b) when they get to the location where they’re told they’re meant to be protecting the troops, there’s nothing there: no troops, no ships. In actuality the troops were being disembarked down the coast at Kalamata where they were being massacred by Ju 88s and Stukas. Another complete cock-up.

When they return from this pointless errand they find the new landing base has indeed been heavily bombed and have to land in smoke. In a hurry the Adjutant finally orders five other pilots to fly the five remaining Hurricanes to Crete, all other pilots to take a lorry and cram into a de Havillande Rapide. This includes Dahl. He carries his Log Book and crams in next to his buddy David.

Two hours later they land in the Western Desert and catch a truck back to Alexandria where the superbly well-mannered Major Peel and his wife immediately put their entire mansion at the disposal of nine filthy, hungry, smelly, penniless pilots.

‘The whole thing was a cock-up,’ someone said.
‘I think it was,’ Bobby Peel said. ‘We should never have gone to Greece at all.’ (p.195)

Although whether Bobby Peel actually said that, or even existed, is a moot point, given the neat roundedness of so many of the facts and anecdotes in this account.

So what comes over very powerfully indeed is the stupidity and futility of the short-lived British expedition to Greece. On the last page of this section Dahl gives his opinion straight, which is that diverting troops and planes from the African desert to Greece fatally weakened the Eighth Army and condemned it to years of defeats against the Germans under Rommel who at one stage threatened Cairo and thus the entire Middle East. It took two years for the British Army’s strength to be rebuilt sufficiently for them to drive Rommel and the Italians back into Tunisia and ultimately win the war in the desert.

Fighting in Syria

Lebanon and Syria were French colonies. When the Vichy government came to power in France, the French forces in Lebanon and Syria switched to the Vichy side and became fanatically pro-German and anti-British. They could obviously provide beachheads for the Germans to land in the Middle East and so threaten a) our oil supplies from Iraq b) the Suez Canal, our gateway to India (and large numbers of Indian troops). Which is why there was a bitter and hard-fought battle for control of Lebanon and Syria which pitched British, Australian and South African forces against the Vichy French.

In May 1941 80 Squadron were redeployed to Haifa in northern Palestine. They consisted of 9 pilots and Hurricanes and their task was to protect the Royal Navy as it pounded Lebanon’s ports. Dahl briefly describes a series of run-of-the-mill sorties, during which 4 of the 9 pilots were killed.

He spends much more time describing a solo mission he was sent on, to go, land and reconnoitre a satellite landing field 30 miles away. Here he discover a strip of land which has been flattened but has absolutely no other facilities whatsoever. It is ‘manned’ by one tall old man and a surprising legion of children.

It’s a peculiar scene, whose sole point is that the old man and the children are Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Dahl goes out of his way to demonstrate his naivety on the Jewish Question, and emphasises that he has been totally out of touch with European news for 2 years, and so simply doesn’t know about the escalating Nazi attacks on Jews (p.208). Which explains why he doesn’t understand what the man means when he says that he and the children are refugees, and really doesn’t understand it when the man says this is his country. What, you’re going to become a Palestinian, asks Dahl in his naivety. But the man is clearly a Zionist, clearly a believer that the Jews have a right to a homeland the same as every other nation on earth, and clearly believes that he and his comrades are going to build that homeland right here, in Palestine. Dahl is ‘flabbergasted’ at his attitude and, maybe, this is a good indicator of the lack of understanding of many British people and armed forces during and immediately after the war, as the Jews’ struggle to establish the homeland of Israel reached its climax.

Demobilised and return to England

Dahl continues dutifully flying missions from the Haifa base but during the month of June 1941 begins to suffer increasingly intense headaches, including ones which lead him to black out. The base medical officer reads his history, particularly the fractured skull from his crash, and orders him to cease flying. He is demobilised, takes a bus back to Cairo, catches a luxury liner to South Africa, then a troop ship which makes the perilous journey up the west coast of Africa, threatened by enemy planes but especially U-boats, eventually docking in Liverpool.

From here he makes phone calls to relatives and discovers his mother’s house in Kent was bombed out and so she’s bought a cottage in rural Buckinghamshire. It’s worth reminding that every few pages of this text includes excerpts from the letters he wrote to his mother regularly as clockwork throughout this period. Cumulatively, these convey a very close bond between mother and son. He catches a train to London, stays overnight at a relative’s place in Hampstead, then catches a train and a bus to his mother’s village, steps down from the bus and into his mother’s waiting arms, and it is with this moment that this exciting, eye-opening, boyish and fresh-faced memoir comes to a dead halt.

Credit

Going Solo by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. All references are to the 2018 Centenary Collection Penguin paperback edition.

Roald Dahl reviews

War flying reviews

Second World War reviews

1 Comment
by Simon on May 29, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Second World War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on May 29, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/29/going-solo-roald-dahl/

The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1965)

The ways of the ridges, the ancient wisdom of the land, its song and ritual.
(Traditional tribal values as expressed by the wise old man, Chege, page 52)

The River Between is Thiongo’s second novel (although the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition tells us he wrote it first).

It opens with a description of the land, a land of ridges, two in particular, Kameno and Makuyu, between which flowed Honia, the river of life, ‘the river between’ the two ridges with their different settlements and people.

Back in prehistory here lived Gikuyu and Mumbi, father and mother of the tribe (p.17). They were made by Murungu, the Creator, who told the people he gave them the land in perpetuity. Here heroes arose, such as Mugo wa Kibiro the great seer, Wachiori the glorious warrior, Kamiri the powerful magician.

Two boys are fighting on the plain, Kamau and Kinuthia. Young Waiyaki with the goat scar tries to break it up. Waiyaki is the son of Chege who is a respected elder of the tribe, knows the history of the people and the land and the meaning of all the rituals. He warned against the coming of the white men but his peers didn’t listen.

It is the time when Nairobi was still growing and the railway was being built into the interior, so the Edwardian era? Some notable elders of the people of the ridges convert to the white man’s religion.

[To be honest I found the opening of the book, its description of the land and the two ridges with the river between, confusing. It was only by about page 50 that I had a clear sense that the village on one ridge – Kameno – will come to represent the old tribal ways, while the village on the other ridge – Makuyu – comes to be associated with Christianity and the new white man’s values.]

The day of Waiyaki’s ‘second birth’ arrives. Elders assemble, wine is drunk, a goat is slaughtered. Waiyaki sits between his mother’s legs, attached to her by an umbilical cord made from tendons from the slaughtered goat. A midwife cuts this symbolical cord and Waiyaki is born again.

Chege lives apart, in his thingira, the man’s hut. It’s pretty primitive, shared with sleeping goats and sheep. At daybreak wrinkled old Chege takes Waiyaki along the Honia river, then up the valley side, along a path to a holy hill, with a sacred tree and a great view across the land of ridges, with Mount Kerinyaga in the distance, the mountain of He-who-shines-in-holiness (p.17). Chege repeats the story of Murungu, the Creator, creating Gikuyu and Mumbi. Chege tells him about the great seer Mugo wa Kibiro, how he predicted the coming of the white man but nobody believed him. It is a visionary setting in which Chege predicts the coming of a ‘saviour’ who will drive the white man and restore the tribes to their rightful place.

In this visionary setting, Chege tells Waiyaki he must go to school at the Siriana Mission and learn the ways of the white man. And so he does, and is a star pupil, learning fast.

Cut to two young girls, Nyambura and Muthoni, daughters of Joshua, drawing water from the river Honia, river of the cure. Their father is Joshua who has converted to the white man’s religion. All of a sudden Muthoni confesses to her sister that she wants to be circumcised. The Christian tradition they’ve been baptised into isn’t enough for her. She wants to be ‘a real girl, a real woman’ (p.25). To get a man and be married, she must be circumcised ‘or how does a girl grow into a woman?’ (p.25).

Nyambura is worried because she knows their father will be furious if he finds out, considering it a throwback to pagan ways. But she agrees to keep it a secret and maybe even aid her visit to their aunt at Kameno, where she can get the deed done.

p.27 Profile of the girls’ father, Joshua, and the fervour of his Christian faith. Among the traditional round mud thatched huts on Makuyu, his house stands out for having four walls and a tin roof. He thinks most of his people, unconverted to Christianity, live in ‘the depth of darkness’.

Joshua’s Christian zeal means he intends to make his home a beacon of Christian values, which he enforces very strictly on his wife, Miriamu, and two daughters, to the extent of routinely beating his wife when she breaks any of the rules (p.30) (cf the monster controlling father in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus).

Christmas is approaching when he, of course, will celebrate the Christian feast, but most of the villagers, unconverted, will celebrate pagan festivals, particularly the annual ceremony of female circumcision which is, for Joshua, a particular abomination.

[The sense of the missionaries from the distant white city just beginning to impinge on traditional villages, making odd converts here and there who stick out in the sea of paganism, learn to despise their peers and pray for the white man’s ways to triumph, all this a) echoes descriptions of the exact same phenomenon in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and b) are obviously setting us up for a clash between zealous Joshua and his headstrong daughter. Whether this leads to tragedy, as in Things Fall Apart, or just domestic conflict, remains to be seen.]

It is a number of months after Muthoni confessed to her sister that she wants to be circumcised. It is a Sunday and Joshua gives a particularly long sermon. Afterwards Muthoni is nowhere to be seen. Joshua sends his wife and remaining daughter out to find her but she has gone. Under pressure, Nyambura admits that Muthoni has gone to the aunt in Kameno to be circumcised. Joshua goes mad.

Before she could run out Joshua was on her. He glared at her, shaking her all the time. He was almost mad and small foams of saliva could be seen at the sides of his mouth. (p.34)

Joshua orders Nyambura to go to her aunt’s at Kameno, to demand that Muthoni come home. Nyambura does so and returns the next day to announce that Muthoni will not come home. At which point Joshua declares that she is no longer his daughter.

Chapter 9 returns us to Chege, the elder of Kameno, giving us back story about how he survived a famine though his first wives died. The theme of circumcision is repeated.

Circumcision was the central rite in the Gikuyu way of life. Who had ever heard of a girl that was not circumcised? (p.37)

[So Joshua and Chege are non-too-subtly being lined up as polar opposites, new white values versus traditional tribal ways.]

Chege has great hopes for his son Waiyaki who is the last of his line and who Chege hopes will be the great saviour of his people prophesied by tribal seers. Admittedly he has sent him to the missionary school at Siriana (run by a missionary named Livingstone), but that is solely so he can absorb the ways of the white man in order to become more powerful, return and continue the life of the tribe. It is pretty obvious that Waiyaki is destined to grow beyond his tribal background and disappoint his father.

Waiyaki’s perspective: he is attending the tribal dances leading up to the ceremony of male circumcision. He is looking forward to testing his endurance and courage in the ceremony. The dance involves the whole tribe moving and swaying provocatively, going into a trance, possessed by the chanting and music.

At the same time Waiyaki has heard the news that Muthoni has run away from Joshua’s house. it isn’t a trivial domestic matter but a major piece of news which is gossiped about and commented on. And now she appears in the dance, doing what is traditional which is, apparently, telling stories of sex and acting them out, ‘scenes and words of love-making’ (p.41).

Waiyaki gives himself up to the rhythm of the dance, shaking his hips, then finds himself face to face with the rebel Muthoni. They dance wildly, passionately. But then Waiyaki notices his mother watching him from the crowd and the spell snaps. He leaves the dance, wanders through the gyrating crowd. He finds himself on the edge of the forest and then Muthoni is there too. If you’re expecting them to go into a passionate clinch, you’re disappointed. Instead he boyishly asks her why she ran away from her father’s house and she explains that she passionately wants to be circumcised, to become a woman, to be one of the tribe, to be like every other girl of her generation. Then leaves. Waiyaki goes to bed troubled.

Chapter 10: Waiyaki waits, sitting in the cold water of the Honia river, along with other boys, waiting for the circumcision ritual. [Presumably this is because cold shrinks the penis and makes the foreskin more labile and easy to stretch and cut. And numb so the boys don’t feel it?]

The village elder cuts Waiyaki’s foreskin off with a knife. Village women shout and cheer. He is wrapped in a white sheet. His penis drips blood onto the earth. This is important because it signifies the bond between himself and the tribal land which will never be broken.

The circumcised boys stay in a mud hit with grass for bedding while their inflamed penises well up and they moan in constant pain. If they complain the attendants threaten them.

[One threat is that they will bring a woman to the hut and have sex with her in front of the initiates. The point being they will get erections at the sight, the hardness pressing the swollen cut flesh, and make them howl in agony, page 45. There is a similar scene in Leslie Thomas’s novel The Virgin Soldiers, where three dim squaddies circumcise themselves under the misapprehension that this will get them a few weeks R&R. Instead they are just send to hospital where the nurses amuse themselves by bending low over the injured men or lightly caressing their feet and flirting, which gives the men erections, which makes them cry with pain, which makes the nurses stroll off laughing.]

All the boys make a full recovery and return to normal life. Chege is pleased his son passed the test. All the girls, too, except for Muthoni. Chege and the other elders discuss her case. they say it is the curse of the white man. If Joshua was still one of them he would simply sacrifice a black ram under the Mugumo tree and Muthoni would be healed.

Waiyaki goes to visit Muthoni in the dirty hut she’s sleeping in. [With the best will in the world it’s impossible not to be repelled by the extremely primitive conditions the tribe lives in and these barbaric practices. Both boys and girls risk fatal infections from the operation. Muthoni is sleeping on a ‘bed’ made of bamboo poles with grass, sacking and banana leaves for bedding. Long skeins of black soot hang from the ceiling.]

This is all in Kameno, presumably the hut belongs to the aunt? [Yes, this is finally explained on page 50.] Anyway, Waiyaki goes down into the valley and up the ridge opposite, to Makuyu to tell Nyambura that her sister is unwell, so Nyambura takes to visiting her every day. As Kameno is only half an hour’s walk away, and she knew Muthoni was staying with her aunt, it’s difficult to understand why Nyambura wasn’t visiting her already. Many times in Thiong’o’ books the characters just seem to be exceptionally stupid. For example, when she visits, all Nyambura is capable of saying, again and again and again, is ‘Why did you do it?’ ‘Why did you…?’ ‘Why?’ In fact she carries on mindlessly asking it even after Muthoni dies (p.51).

So Nyambura waits days and days, as Muthoni becomes iller and iller, until she’s actually gone into a delirium, before telling her mother who, very reasonably, cries: ‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Having waited until Muthongi was raving delirious, only then do Waiyaki and Nyambura decide she should maybe be taken to the nearest hospital, at the mission. The narrative is obscure. I think Waiyaki and ‘ten men’ carry her there, but we skip that part, skipping forward three days to when Waiyaki returns to tell the aunt, then Joshua’s family, that Muthoni died in the hospital.

All this has happened by page 52 of this 143-page novel so I think we could categorise the first third as The Tragedy of the Girl Who Wanted to be Circumcised and, in future, whenever I read about female genital mutilation, I’ll think of Muthongi and her motives for wanting to have it done (peer pressure, to be part of her year group, part of her tribe, part of her culture, accepted as a woman no longer a girl etc).

Still, I can’t help being struck by the basic stupidity of the characters. If they’d taken Muthongi to the white man’s hospital as soon as the wound became swollen and infected, they’d have cleaned and disinfected it and she would have lived. Instead they trusted to nature and the aunt’s herbal remedies, and she died. The whole thing is presented by Thiong’o as a Great Moral Choice that Muthongi had to make between the old world and the new world. I read it completely differently, as a symbol of ignorance, needless suffering and death.

Chapter 11

p.52 Chege ponders Muthongi’s death. In the doom-laden, symbolism-heavy, spirit-dominated worldview of the traditional tribal it is taken as a portent and the novel, of course, is soaked this worldview. In a sense the narrative is the story of young Waiyaki’s journey to liberate himself from this worldview, to step outside it and critique it.

p.53 Cut to the first description of Livingstone, the man who runs the Siriana Mission. Livingstone plays the same structural role as Mr Howlands in Weep Not, Child, namely The White Man, whose history, personality, motivation we have explained to us. But whereas Howlands was an angry landowner who turned into a sadistic District Officer during the Mau Mau rebellion (1952 to 1960), Livingstone is a different animal. Twenty-five years earlier he came to the land of the ridges as a missionary full of vigour and high hopes. Now he is old and fat and bald, with a double chin and much lowered expectations.

He has seen too much of ‘these people’, their witchcraft, superstition, leaving the bodies of cursed men who’ve died out to rot. He attended some of the dances preceding religious rituals and was horrified at their sexual explicitness, their ‘immorality’. And now this monstrous death of a young girl from circumcision without anaesthetic or medicine.

Then an assistant brings the news that Muthongi was the daughter of the famous convert, Joshua. For some reason this crystallises Livingstone’s dislike of ‘these people’, his feeling that he needs to combat their savage customs and barbaric practices more aggressively. The chapter closes with the typically melodramatic sentence, ‘the war was now on’ (p.54).

Chapter 12

Muthoni’s death crystallises opposition to the Christians among the traditional elders. One of the boys who carried her to the mission even claimed to have seen the Christians poison her. Rumours swirl. For them it is proof that associating with the white man and his religion brings only evil.

On the other side, Joshua preaches with fire in his eye, convinced that Muthoni was seized by an evil spirit as a warning to the faithful. He thunders that anyone associated in any way with circumcision will be cast out.

Waiyaki watches the two sides crystallise into sides, people being forced to choose a side. Some of the previous Christians, led by Kabonyi, abandon the faith and revert to tribal belief. Waiyaki, being the young hero of a novel, is unsure where he stands in the debate, as he has a foot in both camps, being the son of one of the most vehement tribalists (Chege who is, incidentally, ill with a stomach complaint) but attending the Christian Mission school where he likes the white teachers.

Livingstone strikes the next blow, declaring that anyone who defied the church and continued with their tribal customs, especially any part in circumcision, would be expelled from the Siriana school. Waiyaki returns home to find his father has just died.

Chapter 13

Three years later Waiyaki never went back to the mission school and in fact set up his own school, consisting of his office and one other building divided into four classrooms. It’s raining and the rain is coming through the thatched roofs forming pools of water.

The other major thing that’s happened is the alienating of all the land around the two villages to white settlers. Many families have been pushed off ancestral land they’ve inhabited for ages, or forced to work for the new white owners.

The two boys we encountered fighting on the plain at the start of the narrative, Kamau and Kinuthia, they are now Waiyaki’s teachers i.e. he is in charge of this little village school. And they still quarrel and Waiyaki is still the peacemaker. [It shows a fairly elementary sense of structuring for Thiong’o to open with a scene between boys which is then cannily echoed like this, 50 pages and ten years or so (?) later; reminds me of the same sort of thing being done in umpteen movies cf p.71[=-.]

They are said to have regular arguments about politics, but their understanding is painfully simple-minded. Kinuthia thinks it was a mistake to ever let the missionaries into the land because, once established, they invited their white brothers to come, who have now taken the land away from its rightful owners. This is bad, and the Giyuku people must take their land back. That’s it. Not much of a political analysis or program, is it?

So Kinuthia is one of many saying they must band together in order to clear the white man out. They will form a Kiami.

Chapter 14

Waiyaki’s school is called Marioshoni. It has become famous throughout the country as the first self-help school. The people are hungry for learning, hungry to acquire ‘the white man’s secret magic and power’ (p.65).

Use of the word ‘magic’ immediately alerts you to how very, very far they are from understanding the world, since the entire point of the white man’s learning is that it is utterly dis-enchanted, utterly secular, materialistic, mechanistic. The narrator describes the tribal people not wanting to abandon their old tribal ways but to acquire the white man’s learning. They don’t realise that the two cannot be reconciled.

Anyway, for his role in setting up the school Waiyaki finds himself being lionised as the man who will save his culture, ‘the champion of the tribe’s ways and life’ (p.67).

Chapter 15

Waiyaki can’t sleep, troubled by worries about the conflict brewing in his culture, about memories of Muthoni, gets out of bed, steps out of his hut, is dazzled by the big moon in the sky, enchanted, holds out his arms and wants to hold her, wanders down the ridge to the river, crosses it and climbs the other side towards Joshua’s village, Makuyu. Suddenly he bumps into Nyambura, and realises she is the ghostly figure who has been haunting his dreams…

Then we are shown Nyambura’s perspective, namely that she is lonely. Her sister, Muthoni, was her best friend and confidante. She’s still her father’s daughter i.e. a Christian, but she associates her father with her sister’s death. As to Waiyaki, he is now a name in the land but she finds him cold and aloof (we know he’s just nervous and shy).

Well, I’d bet £20 from this set-up that they end up falling in love. They walk a little together, under the mellow moonlight, both thinking their own thoughts, both strongly attracted. Then they go off to see family or friends they were en route to, but thinking about each other…

Chapter 16

Waiyaki had invited Nyambura to come and see his school but she fails to turn up. It is Njahi, the season of the long rains, the season which makes people happy because crops bud and grow. Women laugh as the do the field work. But in the last few years the seasons have become less predictable, Maybe it is the evil influence of the Christians.

Waiyaki is bothered by his father’s prediction that he would be the saviour of his people. Is it him, or is it Kabonyi, the one-time Christian convert who broke away and led the recidivists. Much older than Waiyaki, Kabonyi is a governor of the school and blocks Waiyaki’s wishes at every opportunity.

Sometimes he feels bound to endless service in the name of the tribe and yearns to be free. Then again, he knows his father would be proud of him setting up a school. And it doesn’t stop there, Waiyaki dreams of establishing a college for higher education.

Kinuthia comes to visit. They go to his mother’s hut where she’s made dinner, as all mothers and wives ought to. Kinuthia tells Waiyaki to watch out for Kabonyi, who is jealous of him.

Chapter 17

Two weeks later. Waiyaki goes to see Joshua preach. He is stronger than ever, more vehement and confident of his faith. Waiyaki has the same thoughts he always does, a feeling of yearning, the confusion of whether he is or isn’t the savour his father predicted. His thoughts are boring, the same one issue round and round. Also, he had hoped to see Nyambura in church.

Afterwards he walks a way with Kamau and they both see Nyambura walking in the distance. Kamau says she’s a beautiful woman and Waiyaki is stricken with jealousy. A little further on the track, once Kamau has left, Waiyaki and Nyambura meet. He desperately wants to tell her he loves her. She feels the same. Puppy love.

Chapter 18

Waiyaki is now known throughout the land of ridges as The Teacher. He is going to cross the learning of the white men with the values of the tribe. [We have been told this lots and lots of times without any indication whatsoever what this learning the white people involves. It’s not just a handful of tricks like reading that can be put in a box marked learning. It is an entire worldview and accompanying technical, scientific, mathematical, engineering, legal, accounting and financial knowledge. The more the narrator and Waiyaki talk about ‘the magic of the white man’ without giving any detail whatsoever as to what this involves, the more pathetically dim and naive they come across as.]

Parents day at the village school. The narrator rams home, yet again, that Waiyaki is now revered as THE TEACHER, the man who can infuse traditional ways with the white man’s magic.

The children sing a song about learning. Their parents burst into tears. Yet again the narrative tells us that Waiyaki is the saviour. The white man has come and appropriated their land. But now their children will be educated and will take it back from the white man. The sleeping lions of the ridges will awake yada yada yada.

When all the singing is over Waiyaki makes a speech saying the school buildings need a metal roof; the children need desks, pencil, paper; they need to build more schools; they need to train more teachers.

Kabonyi stands and makes an effective speech against Waiyaki, saying the land is oppressed and they live in poverty because of the white man. They must unite now to kick him out, not ignore the issue by building new schools. Who needs the white man’s education anyway?

But the people don’t cheer and when Waiyaki stands to make an impassioned reply, the crowd of parents and elders cheers him and starts chanting ‘The Teacher! The Teacher!’ (p.91)

Kabonyi makes his son, Kamau, help him home. He is seething after the public humiliation in front of the entire community. He openly says he wishes Waiyaki dead, and Kamau himself is angry that he and his father both are always being humiliated by Waiyaki.

Within months more schools are built on the surrounding ridges on the model of Waiyaki’s pioneering one and the people far and wide come to revere him.

Chapter 19

Things seen from Joshua’s perspective, namely that Waiyaki, having become the figurehead of the old tribal ways, is the biggest threat to Joshua’s Christian mission. So he 1) sets up some Christian village schools of his own and 2) takes his fight to the enemy, organising a large Christian rally in Kameno at which he preaches with marvellous fervour (p.95).

Waiyaki is conflicted (as he has been for the last 20 or 30 pages) between a self appointed mission to reconcile the two ridges, to reconcile Joshua and Kabonyi, and his deeper vocation, to spread education education education.

Waiyaki can see the big meeting going on from his own hut but goes for a walk. Walking down to the river he sees Nyambura. She is feeling this and he is feeling that. God, the trouble with these novels is the themes and ideas are really, really, really trite, I can feel myself becoming stupider as I read them. Not only that but the characters have the same handful of stupid thoughts and worries, over and over and over again until you want to scream.

Chimamanda Ndozie Adichie is an absolute joy to read because each sentence is elegantly shaped and freighted with intelligence and insight. Thiong’o is torture to read because his themes are obvious, his characters are stupid and his prose is clumsy. It figures that the central figures of this and the preceding novel are both children turning into teenagers, because their thoughts and ideas are so very juvenile. Nyambura feels alienated from her father. She feels sad about her dead sister. And she loves Waiyaki. We know this because the text tells us this again and again and again.

She could only be saved through Waiyaki. Waiyaki then was her Saviour, her Black messiah, the promised one who would come and lead her into the light. (p.98)

She is filled with doubt. Should she stay true to her father? Or give herself to Waiyaki? But she is afraid of her father. And she loves Waiyaki. Except she won’t allow herself to call it love. She asks God to help her. She asks God to forgive her. Should she stay true to her father? Or should she cleave to Waiyaki? But Waiyaki is a big man now, the Saviour of his people. Would such a big man be prepared to marry a woman who isn’t circumcised? She is filled with doubt. Should she stay true to her father? Or should she give herself to Waiyaki? She asks God to help her. She asks God to forgive her.

Round and round and round and round go the same tuppenny, trite thought process in these immature, uneducated peasants.

She walks away from her father’s house down to the river and prays. Waiyaki happens to be there and sees her. A kind of holy light emanates from her. She’s not far from where he was circumcised all those years ago. ‘The place would forever remain sacred to him’ (p.99).

He tries to sneak away but treads on a dry twig which cracks – as in thousands of cheesy TV shows and movies.

She raised her head and saw him. Waiyaki stood and looked at her. Nyambura still knelt. Their eyes met and they did not utter a word. Nyambura was afraid of the intense excitement that possessed her. (p.99)

Etc. Maybe I’m missing the point and this is all intended to be what publishers nowadays call Young Adult Fiction, written for people between the ages of 12 and 18. But even a 12 to 18 year old would burst out laughing when Waiyaki asks Nyambura whether she comes here often (p.100).

Waiyaki finally bloody takes her hand and declares that he loves her. Nyambura is confused, excited, embarrassed, feels a painful sorrow come into her heart, lets herself be embraced ‘in a moment of passion’ etc, and Waiyaki asks her to marry him.

She pushes him away and whispers ‘No’. Because of her father. She wants to stay loyal. She explains, crying. He stands stunned, crying. Then they part. As soon as they’ve left the clearing or spot where they were standing…out of the bush steps Kamau, Waiyaki’s deadly rival, who overheard every word of their conversation.

I smiled, because it’s as contrived as a scene from a Shakespeare comedy or a cheesy TV show. Kamau had followed Nyambura because he intended to tell her he loved her, but had been foiled by his rival! And Kamau then utters the cheesiest, tritest, most clichéd sentiment imaginable, when he says: ‘He’ll suffer for this!’ (p.102)

Chapter 20

Waiyaki goes from ridge spreading the news about education and meets final year students at Sisiana who he begs to join his crusade for education. His efforts are paralleled by Kabonyi, now the leading figure in the kiami, the group of elders representing the people. He is going from ridge to ridge making people take an ‘oath of allegiance to the purity of the tribe’ (p.103). Both sides, the traditionalists and the Christians, are growing and hardening their positions.

Waiyaki feels guilty (‘moments of self-blame’) that he didn’t carry out the work of reconciliation he kept thinking about but delaying in his fervour for education (just as he did in the previous chapter and the one before that).

Kinmuthia comes to see him and warns him that all kinds of rumours are spreading about Waiyaki, that he is betraying the tribe, that he was regularly attends Joshua’s services (he went once), that he is going to marry Joshua’s daughter (he proposed, she turned him down), that he went for a long meeting with the young men at the Siriana Mission (he went to ask them to join him as teachers). Kabonyi and Kamau are behind these rumours and they have loads of young men who have sworn to kill traitors.

Then the hut of one of Joshua’s newest followers is burned down. The Kiama have power everywhere. And now it looks like they’re about to put their extreme rhetoric into action.

Chapter 21

With the predictability of teen fiction, Nyambura comes to regret saying No to Waiyaki, and wishing she could relive the lovely feeling of wellbeing and safety she felt in his strong embrace etc. She loves him, she wants him, he is her saviour etc but she is scared of her father, scared of rebelling against her upbringing, as Muthoni did etc etc.

She goes to that patch of bush next to the river then sits in her favourite spot all day long hoping Waiyaki will come. But he doesn’t. When she gets home Joshua is furious with her, refusing to believe she hasn’t spent the day with him, and yelling that if he hears of her being seen with Waiyaki, he will disown her like he disowned Muthoni.

She is bitterly angry and mortified. She rejected Waiyaki precisely to stay loyal to her father and now her father is punishing her for it. She cries herself to sleep, as many a mooning teenager has before and since.

Chapter 22

Waiyaki delivers new teachers recruited from Siriana and becomes the god of the tribe and the region. Description of Kinuthia’s joy and awe at working for such a great man. But he knows the movement afoot throughout the people goes wider than education into political agitation to get rid of white farmers, white government, white missionaries.

Waiyaki, as for the last 70 pages or so, is wracked by uncertainty about whether he is the saviour (‘Was he that saviour? Was he the promised one?’ p.113) foreseen by the old prophet and his father or just a gifted educationist.

Christmas is coming, peak time for the Christian contingent but also the day of the festivals and rituals devoted to the circumcision.

Waiyaki goes to see his mother who is an old widow now, but wants to know if the rumours are true that he’s going to marry Joshua’s daughter. She warns him the Kiama is the voice of the people.

She’s barely finished doing this than, as in a cheesy TV show, Kamau arrives from the Kimia and says Waiyaki’s presence is required at a meeting of the elders and the Kimia going on right now.

Chapter 23

Kamau takes him to what turns out to be a kangaroo court of the Kimia and the Elders. Kabonyi mounts a sustained attack on Waiyaki, bringing up all the accusations we have, by now, heard loads of times – that Waiyaki attends Joshua’s church, he is going to marry Joshua’s daughter, he spends long meetings at the Christian Mission, in short he is conspiring to damage the purity of the tribe and the people contrary to the oath he’s taken.

Waiyaki loses his temper and storms out, handing victory of Kabonyi and his hate-filled son Kamau. The last few bits of dialogue record some of the worried elders aggressively saying that all the young girls and boys must be circumcised, by force, if necessary.

Chapter 24

A few days later Kinuthia bursts into Waiyaki’s hut and excitedly tells him the Kimia has relieved him of his status as The Teacher and they are talking about mounting an attack on Joshua’s house. Waiyaki immediately sets off down into the valley, across the river and up the other side, bursting into Joshua’s house as they are singing ‘When shepherds watched their flocks by night’. They are outraged at this blasphemy. Waiyaki says he only came to warn them there may an attack on them. Joshua stands and execrates Waiyaki, blaming him for his daughter’s death etc, and Waiyaki, mortified, steps to the doorway.

As he does so Kamau and the four tribesmen who had come to kidnap Nyambura and are hiding in the bush outside Joshua’s house, see Waiyaki exiting it. So he is a traitor! They will go back and inform the Kimia. Now it really is war between the tribe and Waiyaki (p.127).

Back inside Nyambura has watched all this and finally, thank God, makes her decision to opt for Waiyaki. She stands, walks between the congregation, takes Waiyaki’s hand and declares the loves him. Her father rails against her, disowns and banishes her from his house.

Nyambura and Waiyaki walk out into the darkness of the night. Kamau and his gang have gone. Both feel waves of conflict and emotion. They walk down the hill to the river and to their favourite spot and lay down on the grass where ‘a stronger throb, heart-rending, was sweeping away their bodies. Their souls joined into one stillness; so still that their breathing seemed to belong to another world, apart from them.’ (p.131). Does this mean they had sex?

They get up and continue up the hill to Mayuku where Kinuthia is waiting. Waiyaki tells him that the next day he will return to the sacred grove where his father made his prophecy, that a saviour of the tribe would arise and free them.

Chapter 25

Cut to the next day and Waiyaki at the sacred grove, in front of the ancient fig tree. He repeats all the doubts and self blame we’ve heard him recite so many times before. He then itemises the various factions, namely the Christians led by Joshua and the tribals represented by Kibonya and Kamau. the Montagues and the Capulets. The Jets and the Sharks.

Then he has a revelation. He realises Education is not enough, it was never enough. Education is only of value if it leads to political action to right the injustice of the people being thrown off their land by the whites. He sees it as a slogan or mantra: Education for Unity. Unity for political freedom. Education, Unity, Political Freedom. This finally squares the circle and unifies his interests and the needs of the people.

The novel climaxes with Waiyaki addressing a large meeting of the people he asked Kinuthia to organise, which Thing’o prepares in typically over-the-top tones:

Then there was a whisper which made everyone rise in excitement: ‘The Teacher! The Teacher!’ Then they sat down again and let Waiyaki pass, his head and broad shoulders indeed caught against the yellow beams that passed through the trees. And he looked powerful and beautiful and they were tense on both sides of the Honia river. Great hush fell over the land as he strode towards a raised piece of ground where the Kiama sat, where his destiny would be decided. (p.138)

Chapter 26

The confrontation scene where first Waiyaki and Kanyobi trade accusations. It’s the same stuff we’ve heard half a dozen times: Waiyaki took Muthoni to the white man’s hospital where they poisoned her; he came back without cleaning himself and so brought uncleanness into the tribe; he consorted with the white men at Siriana; he is going to marry Nyambura, and so on.

Waiyaki rebuts all this then goes on to remind them of the basics, repeating the creation story, how Murungu the Creator created Gikuyu and Mumbi, father and mother of the tribe, then gave the people the land in perpetuity (p.141).

He does all this in order to make his one big political pitch: they must unite, overcoming the differences between Joshua and Kabonyi, because only by being united do they stand a chance of kicking the white man off their land.

However, his best efforts are defeated by Kabonyi, who makes a massive deal about the central importance to their values of keeping an oath, especially the oath administered by the Kimia to maintain the purity of the tribe – and then shocks everyone by declaring that Waiyaki is going to marry Joshua’s daughter, thus bringing impurity into the tribe and breaking his oath. And at this moment he gets his son, Kamau, to bring Nyambura before the meeting and dares Waiyaki to renounce her.

Waiyaki steps over to Nyambura, takes her in his arms and there is a great big expectant silence. He is about to declare his love and explain that no oath can prevent love, when a woman screams ‘The oath!’ and the cry is taken up by all the others and all his efforts to speak are drowned out.

On the last part of the novel’s final page Waiyaki realises all his efforts have been for nothing, as he is drowned out in a torrent of catcalling and abuse. Members of the Kamia rise to say that he and Nyambura will be placed in the hands of the Kimia who will judge them and decide what to do.

The crowd melts away, guilty at what it has done to their great Teacher, until everyone has left the meeting place and night falls once again over the ridges of Makuyu and Kameno and only the steady throb of the river that runs between can be heard in the darkness.

What will happen to Waiyaki? In a sense it doesn’t matter, because his whole political pitch for unity among the people has been rejected for the shorter-term aims of Kabonyi who wants to beat the other black faction (the Chsistians). And Thiong’o doesn’t have to draw the moral that this is exactly what happened to post-independence African governments, who consistently put the triumph of their own ethnic, tribal or regional faction over the interests of the nation as a whole.

Thoughts

African disunity

That’s what the novel is a parable of, the inability of Africans to unify against the common enemy, the same theme as in Weep Not, Child where the black landowner throws in his lot with the white men against his own people. And this disunity carried on after independence in the form of political parties which reflected tribal and regional groupings and so could never be reconciled to work together. Divided they fell.

Thiong’o’s writing

African literature and Kenyan literature in particular, had to start somewhere, and Thiong’o went on to produce reams of novels, essays, plays, political commentary and criticism, setting an early model for Kenyan authors and activists. Well and good. And these early novels amply explain traditional tribal values from the inside, while dramatising the issues raised by the initial coming of the white man, and then the land theft of full-blown colonialism, with the agonising choices individuals caught in a changing world had to make. Good.

But, to be honest, these novels are weak. Weak with strong moments. At moments his intentions mesh with his limited style and produce scenes of force and conviction. But mostly his text lapses into laughable melodrama, simple-minded psychology and his prose becomes a tissue of clichés. All the characters experience their experiences and feelings directly, like children, with no detachment, irony or sophistication. They are angry. They are sad. They are happy. Like characters in a Janet and John book. No depth, no subtlety to savour and enjoy. Which makes them profoundly, stultifyingly boring.

And then I think I’m being too critical, and that Thiong’o was the first guy to really achieve this level of articulacy and publication in his entire country and culture, so maybe instead of picking nits I should be celebrating his achievements. Probably. But unlike Achebe, I wouldn’t recommend these books to anyone.

Credit

The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was first published by William Heinemann in 1965. References are to the 2002 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on February 12, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 12, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/12/the-river-between-ngugi-wa-thiongo/

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd (1982)

Nothing today had been remotely how he imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.
(Gabriel Cobb reflecting on the chaos of the Battle of Tanga, An Ice-Cream War, page 172)

This is a long, deeply researched and immaculately described historical novel, set during the Great War in British East Africa, filling 383 densely printed Penguin pages.

Boyd is a lovely writer. His style is clear and polite, in a very English way. It’s obviously less funny than ‘A Good Man in Africa’, which is a full-on comedy, but it also feels more formal, somehow more old fashioned, appropriately for its historical setting. There are moments of psychological acuity or observational detail or deft phrasing to give pleasure on every page.

Part 1. Before the war

Chapter 1. 6 June 1914, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Introduces us to Temple Smith, ‘a very fat man with a thick black walrus moustache’ (p.310), the American owner of a sisal plantation in the south of British East Africa (what will later become Kenya). Smith has travelled down to Dar es Salaam, which is in the adjoining colony of German East Africa, in order to collect a consignment of coffee plant seedlings. He is ambitious and wants to expand his farm from just growing and processing sisal

Through his eyes we see Dar as it was in 1914 and the arrival of several German ships at the harbour. Smith is greeted by his nearest neighbour from across the border in the German colony, one Erich von Bishop. An efficient crop-haired man, Bishop is here to greet his wife, Liesl, who has been on an extended holiday to her relatives in Europe (where she has put on a lot of weight).

(There’s a bit of backstory, which is that we learn why Smith is in Africa. He was bored being manager of an iron foundry in Sturgis, New Jersey, and had applied to an advertisement to be the manager of a big game hunt to Africa, in this case for the ex-US president Theodor Roosevelt and his son Kermit when they came on a big game safari back in 1909. When he questioned the need to massacre quite such huge numbers of wild game he was sacked but had come to like Africa and decided to stay on and try to make it as a farmer.)

There is an odd, apparently inconsequential episode, when Smith visits a local prostitute in a bordello. She is rake thin, covered in bangles and ointment and smells. When she spits something out the window which lands with a clatter on some nearby roof he chickens out and doesn’t go through with it…

Chapter 2. 8 June 1914, The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Bishop invites Smith to share the train journey from Dar back inland to the nearest station to their farms. We see the long uncomfortable railway journey through the eyes of Liesl von Bishop who is not happy to be back in Africa and, as angry women do, finds both the men pitiful and pathetic. Smith alights at Moshi station where he is met by his native foreman, Saleh.

Chapter 3. 10 June 1914, Taveta, British East Africa

Smith’s farm (which he has named Smithville) with its acres of sisal plants, barns, warehouse to house the massive decorticator machine, some tramlines. His placid wife, Matilda, and two yapping little boys, Glenway and Walker (p.45).

Chapter 4. 24 July 1914, Ashurst, Kent, England

Long chapter introducing us to the Cobb family through the eyes of the spoilt younger son, Felix, who’s just left private school before going up to Oxford next term. Felix has come under the influence of a charismatic boy called Holland, at school, and so fancies himself as a fashionable, progressive intellectual.

Holland’s sway over Felix had been established in their final year at school, and Felix had accepted it with the zeal of a disciple acknowledging the messiah. (p.189)

With the result that Felix finds his family, and everything about the impressive country estate in Kent, unbearable – his father the permanently bad-tempered retired Major Hamish; his sisters Cressida, Yseult and the twins Albertine and Eustacia; his conventional mother and his various male in-laws, namely:

  • Lieutenant Nigel Bathe married to Eustacia
  • Sammy Hinshelwood
  • the honourable Greville Verschoyle married to Albertine
  • Lt Col. Henry Hyam, married to Yseult (who, when war starts, bags a job in the Committee of Imperial Defence)

The only person he likes, adores even, is his older brother, 27-year-old Captain Gabriel Cobb who collected him from the station and with whom he goes for a swim in the old willow pool while filling him in on the latest family gossip. As part of their banter Gabriel chats about his time in the army in India where he hasn’t seen any fighting but he has stuck a few wild pigs. Felix is disgusted and asks whether they squeal. Well, you’d squeal if you were stuck with a spear, laughs Gabriel. This is a characteristically clever piece of prolepsis by Boyd for Gabriel will, himself, be stuck like a pig in the upcoming war (in Part 2, chapter 6).

This grand country pile is, we learn, the reward from a metal company in Wolverhampton which produces items like Felix’s electro-plated nickel-silver cigarette case (pages 52 and 209).

Chapter 5. 25 July 1914, Stackpole, Kent, England

Felix’s jaundiced jealous view of his brother’s marriage to Charis. He is mightily pissed off because at the last minute brother Gabriel told him he was being replaced as best man by Sammy Hinshelwood, Felix being downgraded to chief usher.

Chapter 6. 26 July 1914, Trouville-sur-mer, France

Gabriel and Charis’s honeymoon, filled with details about hotels and seabathing in 1914, but centring on Gabriel’s inability, on two successive nights, to get an erection, despite clambering on top of Charis and sort of rubbing his groin against her (still in his pyjamas) to her complete bewilderment. It’s only on the third night that he bangs his knee, navigating across the bedroom in the dark, she loses her temper and tells him to ‘come and let mummy rub it, you silly boy’ when, to both their surprises, he suckles her like a baby and gets a proper erection, which is a definite improvement, even if he then ejaculates prematurely before he has penetrated her. Sigh. A vivid imagining of the bad old days of total ignorance about almost every aspect of sex.

Next morning he reads a French paper and announces to an astonished Charis that Austria has declared war on Serbia and they must return to Britain immediately, that same day.

Part 2. The war

Chapter 1. 9 August 1914, Smithville, British East Africa

Officious army and customs officer Reggie Wheech-Browning – ‘a ludicrous beanpole of a man’ (p.338) – drops by to tell Smith that war has broken out and to leave his farm immediately. Smith thinks it’s stuff and nonsense and doesn’t budge.

A week later a force of German askaris (African soldiers) led by two German officers marches onto his land and up to his beloved factory. It is von Bishop who he met in the opening chapter. Very politely von Bishop announces he is commandeering Smith’s farm, as his men set fire to his sisal crop and start pulling up the short length of tram track he had lain down. It’s all he can do to prevent von Bishop from vandalising his precious decorticating machine. When asked, von Bishop very politely signs an affadavit itemising all the things he’s burned or is confiscating, but insists he will also be commandeering the farmhouse. Smith has one hour to pack his belongings, wife and two small boys into a mule-drawn buggy, and told to shamble off down the track towards Voi.

On the outskirts he is, ludicrously, fired on by the ramshackle force of askaris led by Wheech-Browning. Once he’s yelled who he is he’s allowed to proceed to Voi where he puts his family up at the government dak, with a view to himself journeying on to Nairobi to establish who’s going to pay him compensation.

Chapter 2. 20 August 1914, Nairobi, British East Africa

Ensconced in snobbish, pretentious, half-built Nairobi, Smith discovers that well-heeled Brits and various foreigners have set up a volunteer defence force while they wait for the relief force to arrive from India but have become disillusioned by two weeks of inactivity. In Voi he’s been greeted by Matilda’s father i.e. his father-in-law the slope-shouldered Reverend Norman Espie.

Smith goes to see his insurance company, the grandly named African Guarantee and Indemnity Company which is in fact a small office above a butcher’s shop on Sixth Avenue run by one immigrant Indian, Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire. Essanjee explains that Smith’s claim of theft of his farm and equipment will have to be confirmed the company’s assessor who is also Goolam Hoossam Essanjee Esquire.

Chapter 3. 30 August 1914 ,Voi, British East Africa

10 days later. Wheech-Browning drives Smith and Essanjee in an early motorbike with sidecar out of Nairobi, past Voi. They stop in the open scrub an hour or so from Smith’s farm when they suddenly come under fire from Germans hiding in a rocky hill 600 yards away. As the reader anticipated, the Indian, Essanjee – the lieutenant dispensable of the situation – is hit twice and dies. Wheech-Browning and Smith bundle his body into the sidecar, and hightail it away from the ambush.

Chapter 4. 26 October 1914, SS Homayun, Indian Ocean

56 days later, and we join Gabriel aboard a tramp steamer sailing from Bombay to British East Africa. He had hung around in Britain waiting for news, then been sent out to India, to Bombay then up to Rawalpindi to join his regiment, the West Kents. But then to his disgust he was separated from them and posted to a subaltern regiment, the 69th Palamcottah Light Infantry, part of Indian Expeditionary Force B, and has to entrain all the way back down to Bombay and then board the smelly old SS Homayun for a hot slow boring voyage across the Indian Ocean.

Everyone is seasick. Incidents including a concert party interrupted by a rainstorm and the flogging of a mutineer. Sammy Hinshelwood distinguishes himself by his coarse stories about sex which, of course, embarrass but also arouse the only recently blooded Gabriel. He becomes friendly with the eccentric, intense Dr Bilderbeck who gives him the best advice for life in the front line: always have a pillow and a basin.

Chapter 5. 2 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Tanga was a major port on the northernmost part of German East Africa, close to the border with British East Africa. Description of Gabriel and his troop loading into a lighter, being towed to the beach, jumping into the neck-high water, making their way to the beach and a little inland. Then the confusing long delay as they wait all through a hot day for instructions, their air of chaos when Gabriel goes up to the ‘red house’ on a hill which is staff headquarters. The constant sound of gunfire from ahead of them. Initial intelligence said the town had been abandoned. Now they realise the Germans have heavily fortified it and are fighting off all attacks.

Chapter 6. 3 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

Plausible sounding account of the battle Tanga in that it’s mostly Gabriel stuck in charge of his 70 or so scared Indian soldiers with a cheerfully naive number two, Gleeson. When they are told to go forward they blunder through dense undergrowth, are dispirited by a flight of Indian troops running back from the front, then blunder into an area of bees nest which attack and sting them very severely. At one point in the sequence of events he bumps into Bilderbeck again, who orders the handful of remaining Indian sepoys to advance. When they don’t move Bilderbeck calmly shoots one in the head at point blank range, a spatter of fresh brain landing on his boot.

Eventually it’s just Gabriel and Gleeson left as they make their way forward, are shot at by people with northern accents who they realise are the Lancashire regiment, identify themselves and discover the Lancs are pinned down by a load of Indian soldiers who take shots every time they try to retreat. Gleeson can speak Hindi so he is sent to the side of the house facing the Indians and starts shouting to them that they’re British.

Around then Gabriel sees a German officer emerge from a house a few hundred yards away, leading his men, in plain view and takes the opportunity to fire a shot. It completely misses but triggers an immense fusillade on the house they’re holed up in. When it dies away Gabriel turns to escape the house and comes across Gleeson lying on the floor with his lower jaw show away to reveal the enormous human tongue, glugging down his own blood and still blinking and moving his eyes.

Dazed with horror Gabriel leaps out the back window of the house and runs for the tree cover, telling himself all the time that he’ll come back to rescue Gleeson which we know he won’t. En route back to the beach he stumbles across a troop of German askaris who chase him, (grotesquely enough, through a graveyard), catch up, then slash at him with bayonets, one severing a thigh muscle so that he falls to the ground, taking two other severe stab wounds in the abdomen before he passes out. I assumed he was dead.

Chapter 7. 6 November 1914, Tanga, German East Africa

The Germans win the Battle of Tanga i.e. repulse the British attack. Bilderbeck is the British representative sent to supervise the handing over of British stores to the victorious Germans and ferrying the British wounded back to the ships, liaising with a German officer named Hammerstein, assisted by von Bishop whose eyes we see everything through. After the British had been forced to flee from the beaches, their battleships subjected the town to a heavy barrage. A shell landed near von Bishop giving him loud tinnitus so he asks the German medic Dr Deppe to examine him. Bilderbeck discovers Cobb is still alive though severely injured from the pig sticking he got from the bayonets and has a few words with him, in his hospital bed, before he returns to the beach and thence the British ships.

Chapter 8. 16 March 1915, Oxford, England

Six months later. Cut back to Felix who is now in his second term at Oxford. Things are not well. He continues to copy his hero, Holland, but neither of them make much impact in wartime Oxford. All the able-bodied students have volunteered and gone off to war. Felix has a slight astigmatism, Holland an unspecified ailment. Both are regularly handed white feathers by old Edwardian ladies in the street for being cowards. Felix is horribly embarrassed by this and has taken to wearing an eye patch to visibly excuse himself; Holland, true to his provocative aesthetic attitude, wants to be given white feathers and is jokily jealous because Felix has more than him. It’s that kind of jokey, studentish relationship.

But other things about Oxford are disappointing, too. Felix is at war with his scout, a wizened con-man named Sproat and his mute son, Algy. And his tutor is an ancient decrepit don named Jock Illiffe whose overheated rooms pong of cats. Once Felix read him the same essay that he’d read the previous week and Illiffe, sitting back in his chair with his eyes closed, didn’t even notice. With the result that he’s failed his Moderations or ‘Mods’ in History.

To cap it all he’s developed a cold sore at the corner of his mouth, the size of a sixpence, which refuses to go away, which solidifies into a scab, which breaks when he smiles and bleeds. Very unsightly.

So this chapter is a successfully evocative painting of Oxford in the first year of the Great War. It also gives us a Felix-eye view of the Cobb family. The splenetic Major has pinned up a big map of northern France in the study and forces the entire family and all the servants to attend a daily update on the progress of the war. The family have, of course, taken the news about Gabriel being severely wounded, very badly. There’s also news about the various other brothers-in-law and family hangers-on.

Holland has acquired a mistress in London, an artist’s model named Enid who takes morphine and makes his life hell, so he’s writing some jolly good poetry about it. Felix, very much still the shy virgin, has a crush on Holland’s sister, Amory, who’s at art school, and is invited to a party she’s giving.

Chapter 9. 18 March 1915, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix catches the train back to the family home in Kent. Charis is living there, now, in the former servant’s cottage, which was to have been her and Gabriel’s newlyweds home. She keeps bursting into tears about Gabriel. His father is still short and angry, but his flesh hangs off him. He looks like a demented Victorian cleric.

What a horrible old man, Felix thought. (p.199)

The Felix chapters are drily comical, with overtones of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. Cyril, the sweary working class man Felix liked, his son now tells him has been killed on the Western Front. Felix is genuinely shocked and upset. Then Charis springs it on him that the family have arranged a birthday party for her on 29 March, he’s invited, in fact everyone’s expecting Felix to ‘squire’ Charis. But it clashes with Amory’s party. Family duty or the (remote) possibility of sex. Decisions decisions for a young man.

Chapter 10. 29 March 1915, Café Royal, London

We meet Felix and Holland in the stylish Café Royal, whence they catch a cab to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and upstairs to a sordid flat where Amory lives and which is hosting a very bohemian party, packed with artists and models, all smoking and drinking heavily, a girl playing guitar to an adoring coterie etc. Felix is introduced to Pavelienski or ‘Pav’, the east European model Amory models for. Amory herself is a thing chestless woman who almost completely ignored Felix and is irritated when Holland insists he accompanies them to the famed bohemian nightclub, the Golden Calf, as Amory had booked a table for 16 and Felix is supernumary.

(The Cave of the Golden Calf was a real nightclub, a consciously bohemian creation decorated by leading artists of the time – Wyndham Lewis, Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore – praised by Ezra Pound and frequented by Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and Augustus John. Wikipedia)

Anyway, Felix’s attempts to seduce Amory go disastrously awry as she shakes him off and calls him a ‘silly boring little boy’, getting up to go and dance with Pav. Suddenly sober and realising what a fool he’s made of himself, Felix goes wandering through the dark streets of London feeling poetic and soulful till he comes to a baked potato stand, buys one, is propositioned by an old prostitute, taken back to her squalid digs, is fleeced £2 for a horrible experience, unable to get an erection (like his brother Gabriel, in Trouville) so the hooker starts to masturbate him and he climaxes almost immediately (like his brother in Trouville), ejaculating over the sheets, prompting the outraged prossie to tell him to ‘fuck orf out of it’. Felix stumbles into his clothes and down the steep stairs and out into the bleak streets. Sex, eh.

Cut to Felix having taken the milk train back down to Kent and, having been cleaned out by the whore, forced to walk through the dew-drenched countryside to Stackpole. Here he’s surprised to see the light on in the cottage, knocks and is admitted by Charis who is still wearing her gown from the night before, the night of her party, the party Felix rudely missed in order to undergo his series of humiliations in London, as he now ruefully thinks. Sitting in her small front room in front of the fire sipping tea he suddenly feels intimately close to her, his brother’s wife, and tries to stifle the thoughts. The reader wonders whether they’ll end up becoming an item, two damaged ingenues…

Chapter 11. 17 June 1915, Nanda, German East Africa

Three months later. We discover that von Bishop’s wife, Liesl, has been nursing the injured. Kicked out of her house on the border with the British colony, she spent a few months in Dar until, out of boredom, she volunteered to help at the hospital but was then evacuated with all the long-term patients to a hospital far in the south and inland, at a place called Nanda.

A new clutch of patients arrived along with their doctor, Dr Deppe. One is Captain Gabriel Cobb. He is still alive, recovering from severe wounds, learning to walk with crutches. Liesl is a bad-tempered fat woman. So pale and freckled, she sweats continually. Her only pleasure is the brief shower at the end of the day when her maid, Kimi. pours several buckets of water over her head. Then she dries on a frayed towel, slips into casual clothes, eats and goes to bed early. Teutonic joylessness.

Chapter 12. 21 November 1915, Voi, British East Africa

Back to Temple Smith. It’s about a year after he was evicted from his farm. He joined the East African Mounted Rifles but has done nothing except practice drills and acquire more bits of uniform which barely cover his fat frame, while Voi expands into a vast armed camp containing Indian force B, South African coloureds and whites, Kings African Rifle blacks, a huge heterogeneous force.

He’s been called in to meet the head of this force, Brigadier-General Pughe. He’s s short pompous man who turns out to be drunk on brandy and promptly ignores his advice about the lie of the land. Serves the stupid British right.

Talking of which Smith walks back towards the enormous camp, past the fenced areas for donkeys and horses (dying by the dozen due to tsetse fly) to the aerodrome which amounts to a big area of flat, cleared scrubland and a couple of warehouses made out of canvas awning. The entire presence of the Royal Air Force is just two BE2C biplanes.

To Smith’s immense irritation the officious twerp Wheech-Browning is dressed up in flying gear with a reversed cap and flying goggles and about to go for his first flight with flying officer Drewes. it’s a disaster. They bounce along the ‘runway’ but after lifting about 12 feet slowly sink back to the ground. It’s too hot, the air is too thin. But it carries trundling along towards a drainage ditch, pitches head first into it and Drewes is killed. Bystanders rush over to the wreckage to pull his body out but Wheech-Browning, indestructible, emerges as blithe and jolly as ever.

Chapter 13. 10 December 1915, The King’s Arms, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

Felix and Charis have ended up becoming an item. We find them in bed in a pub 30 miles or so away from Stackpole. They have had eight sexual encounters and are familiar with each other’s body. We watch Charis inset a tiny sponge dabbed in an unnamed solution attached to a fine thread into her vagina, the thread just sticking out. Contraception 1915. They both know the ghost of Gabriel hovers over their couplings but neither has the guts to raise the subject.

Nigel Bathe came back from Mesopotamia where he lost both arms in a bomb-throwing training exercise when one went off in his hand. Christ. The casual horror not of war but the incompetent preparations for it.

A recap of how Charis and Felix became lovers i.e. he repeatedly kissed her and wore down her rejections. In the end she’s lonely want wanted comforting. They devised stories about visiting distant relatives as excuses for meeting up in remote inns for weekends of love.

On the train back from Aylesbury to London Felix admits he feels dreadfully guilty. Charis reassures her that they have created their own bubble of love. But inside she is full of remorse and guilt. Humans and their ridiculous emotions. But then this is a novel. A verbal artifice created with the aim of describing extreme or complex emotions, all for our entertainment.

Chapter 14. 11 March 1916, Salaita Hill, British East Africa

Detailed description of the war in Africa. Temple Smith is obviously going to be our eyes and ears for this. On 12 February the Brits launch a headlong assault on Salaita Hill where 600 South Africans are mown down by German machine gunners. A second attempt finds the hill abandoned, the Germans have withdrawn from the town of Taveta to scrub country and two hills beyond General Smuts from South Africa is put in charge of the campaign. A month later, against Smith’s advice, the Brits insist on trying to storm the two hills. He watches the whole sorry fiasco and watches the obstinate stupid British officer in command, Colonel Youell, shot in the neck and quickly bleed to death.

Smith accompanies his body in a field ambulance back to staff HQ, reports to General Pughe who is completely drunk then, in utter disgust, goes into town, gets his mule-handler to saddle up his mule and heads off towards Smithville, his homestead which he hasn’t seen for 18 months.

First of all, there are no Germans there. After a lot of tense creeping towards the farmhouse in expectation of being shot he discovers that every surface in every single room has been covered in human faeces. Then he encounters Saleh, the old chief servant, Saleh shows him that a) the grave of his dead baby daughter has been opened and the bones scattered everywhere (they collect them together and rebury them) and b) the Germans have taken the decorticator – almost as soon as Smith left, according to Saleh. Smith vows revenge against von Bishop. The tone and intemperance of his vow reminded me fleetingly of Morgan Leafy’s tone of permanent rage in Boyd’s novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’…

Chapter 15. 24 June 1916, Nanda, German East Africa

Back at the German hospital several things have happened to Gabriel. He has recovered enough to be able to walk around freely. The research base had been converted not only into a hospital but a prisoner of war camp. The British officer in charge had conceived a plan for Gabriel to keep infecting his thigh wound with dirt in order to remain an invalid and therefore outside the prison camp and in the hospital. He also suggested that Gabriel help out with basic nursing activities, for example washing German wounded or holding them as they evacuated their dysenteric bowels – because from this privileged position he was able to a) pilfer supplies and b) find out the latest military situation (which is that the Germans are slowly withdrawing along the railway line in face of solid British advances, towards Dar).

But the chapter starts a few weeks after all the British POWs have been evacuated to the coast. There is no military reason why Gabriel should continue malingering. The truth is he’s fallen in lust with Liesl. She doesn’t give a toss about him, is a big, solid, no-nonsense German Frau who goes about her duties with angry efficiency. but a few weeks previously Gabriel, dropping off some of the cigarettes he’s taken to rolling from local tobacco for both of them, glimpsed her stripped naked having her evening shower – and was seized with raw lust. Now he can barely be in her presence without trembling although she, of course, is completely oblivious to his behaviour.

Chapter 16. 25 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Charis is finding the affair unbearable. She’s spent 18 months writing letters to Gabriel and never had a reply. She stops and feels dreadfully guilty, so guilty that she has a second wind and writes Gabriel a long letter explaining that she’s been having an affair and why – but not naming Felix as the lover, and posts it to the Ministry of Defence as usual.

As usual, Felix drops by the cottage late that night. He’s taken to doing this, taking Charis’s sexual availability more and more for granted. After their latest midnight sex and Felix has returned to his room, Charis writes Felix a simple note saying she is going away, she has written Gabriel telling him everything.

Except that she didn’t tell Gabriel everything in her letter to him, she didn’t identify Felix as her lover. I predict the discrepancy between the two letters will cause trouble. I predict Felix will think Charis has written to Gabriel about naming him and be stricken with panic.

Chapter 17. 26 June 1916, Stackpole Manor, Kent

Felix opens Charis’s letter at an otherwise typical family breakfast, reads its few lines, jumps to his feet yelling ‘Jesus Christ!’ and runs down to the cottage to find Charis long gone. Turmoil. Panic. He is of course distraught that she’s told Gabriel everything but something in the tone of the note makes him panic think she’s killed herself so her runs to the ornamental fish ponds they spent so much time mooning beside. Notices the big stone bust of the emperor Vitellius is missing. Leaps into the freezing water and discovers her body. She had tied round her neck with twine then tied it multiple times round the bust and chucked it in. She looks peaceful in submarine death, her hair floating calmly round her face. Well, this is a fine pickle!

Chapter 18. 1 July 1916, Sevenoaks, Kent

There’s an inquest. Felix lies his face off and claims to have lost the letter in the frenzy of searching for Charis, maybe in the pond. Everybody believes this except the local doctor who Charis had been doing refugee work with, Dr Venables. Venables asks him for a drink at a bar in a hotel not far from the magistrates’ court in Sevenoaks where the inquest is held. Here he asks Felix point blank if he was having an affair with Charis. It takes all Felix’s self possession to try and appear calm as he pretends to be outraged and deny it. Venables then asks whether Charis was having an affair with anyone else, which Felix says he doubts. Thoughts are rampaging through his head. The calm reader, used to this sort of thing, realises that Charis was probably pregnant.

Part 3. The Ice-Cream War

Chapter 1. 25 January 1917, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

It is six months later. Unsurprisingly Felix has enlisted. Equally unsurprisingly, it’s in a regiment which is fighting in Africa and we now meet him on deck the troop ship as it steams into Dar es Salam harbour. He’s with the Fifth Battalion, the Nigerian Brigade, being cobbled together from African conscripts, not at all fashionable. But it is Africa. He is driven by guilt, the need to do something, out of which slowly formed the idea of a quest to find brother Gabriel.

Anyway, long uncomfortable train journey to a station in the middle of nowhere called Mikesse. He’s collected her by a Scot with an impenetrable accent named Gilzean. Five hours bumpy driving to a camp where he’s informed his regiment are the other side of the river Rufiji. Since the British invaded German East (as it’s known) at Kilimanjaro in the campaign Smith had witnessed the scrappy start of, they had driven the Germans steadily south and across the Rufiji river when the rains came and fighting stopped.

From this camp Felix has to continue riding a mule along muddy tracks alongside porters, sometimes through swamps, eventually reaching the wide Rufiji river, across which he is taken by ferry, then into his regimental camp, outside which porters are burning a huge mound of horses and mules which are killed off in epic numbers by tsetse fly. He’s arrived at the dump named Kibongo.

Chapter 2. 15 April 1917, Kibongo, German East Africa

Three months later it has rained every single day, food has run low because the trails to the river on the north side have been flooded and the ferry has been washed away. Felix and his battalion are stuck on the south side and on emergency rations. They’re all wasting away, reduced to eating the few monkeys they can shoot. Some black troops regularly die from eating the corpses of horses or mules. Wretched. Except for the ongoing comedy of Felix’s inability to understand Gilzean’s impenetrable Scottish accent.

Chapter 3. 15 July 1917, Nanda German East Africa

With Gabriel in Nanda. The Germans are losing the campaign. Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears. Dr Deppe has been moved on and Gabriel has stopped rubbing dirt in his wound to keep it infected. Deppe’s replacement tries to get Gabriel incarcerated with the new contingent of POWs but Liesl insists he is left free to carry on his medical assistance. Ongoing comedy because Liesl appears to have no idea that Gabriel burns with almost uncontrollable lust for her big full-breasted, thunder-thighed body.

The British have landed at Kilwa south of the mouth of the Rufiji so will be fighting their way towards Nanda. Something about the way the narrator keeps reminding us that Gabriel is keeping a secret record of everything he hears begins to make me suspect it will be found and Gabriel will be arrested and shot as a spy. Will he get to kiss Liesl before then or cup her huge breasts in his shaking hands? Doubt it.

Chapter 4. 19 October 1917, Lindi, German East Africa

The British advance, fighting increases, more Germans are taken prisoner, but it is the fate of Felix’s company to do peaceful duties far from the fighting, building latrines or walls, flattening land for airfields, accompanying supplies to supply depots near the front line etc. Felix gets time off from supervising the digging of latrines to go to HQ at Lindi on the coast to see if he can discover anything about Gabriel. Here he bumps into fat Smith and, in a coincidence, it turns out they’re both looking for Bilderbeck. And in an outrageous coincidence the first (unmarked) door Smith opens is to an office occupied by Reggie Wheech-Browning, his nemesis.

Wheech-Browning is able to inform Smith that von Bishop is still alive or that the British Army has no notification of his death (so Smith can continue his quest to kill him for despoiling his farm) and Felix that no news has been received of Gabriel’s death (so Felix can continue his quest to find him).

He tells them about Bildebeck’s end; he was in a siege of some German troop, went up onto the walls to harangue them every night, and one night snapped and charged the German lines shouting how they were preventing him from ‘finding his girl’, one of the many odd obsessions which made Bilderbeck such unnerving company for Gabriel and everyone else on the ship from India.

Chapter 5. 19 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

Chapters 5 to 10 take place over the course of 6 days and form one continuous episode, the arrest, escape and trek of Gabriel Cobb.

The German army in German East has been commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now his HQ has arrived at Nanda which is swollen with staff, soldiers and askaris. Liesl and Gabriel discuss the fact that the British are now only 50 miles away. In a few days, chances are, he’ll be liberated. Gabriel is surprised to discover this makes him unhappy. Here in the hospital, as a glorified orderly, he feels safe and secure. He decides to sneak round the back of Liesl’s bungalow for one last surreptitous look at her nakedness but when he sees it packed with German officers realises his folly.

He is caught, lightly interrogated, found guilty of spying but not shot as I expected. Instead he is locked in an old mealie sack shed for several days. On the first night Liesl comes to see him. She says they’re going to take him with them. He almost cries and begs her help. She comes back the next night with a metal hinge. It takes Gabriel ten minutes to dig a channel under one of the loose wooden walls.

He trembles with lust and fear and panic standing so close to that large body, those trembling breasts. Liesl, apparently still unaware of his feelings, gives him a sack containing food and water and tells him not to try to get through the lines to the British but hide somewhere for a couple of days till the Germans have left, then slip back into Nanda and find her.

Chapter 6. 22 November 1917, Nanda German East Africa

To his vast irritation von Bishop is tasked by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, head of the entire East German Army no less, with recovering the escaped prisoner. He says goodbye to Liesl and notices how big and manly she has become. He doesn’t know her any more. He chooses three of the ruga-ruga, natives with filed teeth reputed to be cannibals, and sets off north to find the fugitive.

Chapter 7. 22 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Day one of Gabriel’s trek north. He is in poor shape generally, worse after three days locked in a shed. It’s hot, the thorn bushes scratch him, his injured leg starts to seize up. Locals in villages he passes notice him, the children throw stones. His plan is to press on across the wide flat plateau till nightfall.

Chapter 8. 22 November 1917, near Nambindinga, German East Africa

Unusually for once Felix’s company is in the vanguard of an advance. Much good it does them as one of his fellow officers, young Loveday with the irritating habit of peppering his conversation with French phrases, is blown in half by a landmine.

Anyway, suddenly arrives Wheech-Browning, that bad penny, ‘that ludicrous bean-pole of a man’, to inform Felix they’ve heard news of Gabriel. Smith was in an advance force which has taken Nanda, discovered the POW camp and some of the soldiers told them Gabriel had been there for years, had been arrested, had escaped just the day before.

Wheech-Browning drives Felix into Nanda, where they come across Smith questioning Liesl who, of course, he met right back at the start of the novel. He wants to know where Bishop is but now, as WB and Felix arrives, informs them of the enormous coincidence that von Bishop (who Smith is after) is chasing Gabriel (who Felix is after).

Felix introduces himself and asks the all-important question: Did his brother ever receive a letter from home? Liesl answers promptly and authoritatively NO, and Felix feels a wonderful sense of sweet relief flood his body. So Gabriel never learned about his affair with Charis. In fact, the reader knows he wouldn’t have in any case, as Charis never mentioned Felix by name. But Felix doesn’t know this.

He needs to go out into the bush to find Gabriel. Smith wants to find Bishop. They both ask WB but the latter says that if, as they claim, it’s a case of security / intelligence well, he’ll jolly well have to come, too. Is there no limit to the man’s irritatingness?

Chapter 9. 24 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Exciting description of Bishop and the ruga ruga’s pursuit of Cobb across the plateau. They see a fire as dusk falls. They creep up but one trads on a stick, the mule hears and starts hee-hawing, and they see the figure flee. By the time they get there the small base by the fire is deserted, with Cobb’s sack of stuff, bread, a book, abandoned. Bishop sends the three natives to capture Cobb. Why does the book Cobb had belong to von Bishop. Mysteries. He falls asleep, wakes at dawn next morning. After some time the three natives return. One is carrying a sack. As Bishop sits with his rifle, one of them throws severed Cobb’s head into the dirt at his feet.

And that, children, is what you get for peeping at naked women having a shower!

Chapter 10. 25 November 1917, The Makonde plateau, German East Africa

Smith, Felix and Wheech-Browning come across the camp the next day. There’s a small burial mound. Half a mile away a business of vultures and big birds. When they ride over to it they see it’s a body without a head, already half eaten. Going back to the camp they dig into the mound and find Gabriel’s head buried wrapped in a blanket. Felix is convulsed with weeping. Both he and Smith are plain puzzled: who would do a thing like that?

Part 4. After the war

Chapter 1. 15 May 1918, Boma Durio, Portuguese East Africa

Six months later and the German forces have retreated into Portuguese east Africa but are still at large. Felix’s Nigerian regiment is decommissioned, the men sent back to Nigeria, but he wants to stay on and hunt von Bishop, so he takes up Wheech-Browning’s offer of a job in Army Intelligence. But, in the classic style, instead of being anywhere near the fighting he is turned into a supplies officer at a nowhere dump in the middle of rich agricultural land, Boma Durio, where he makes ragged friendships with some of the Portuguese officers

The chapter opens with the arrival of, you’ve guessed it, Intelligence Officer Wheech-Browning. He gets Cobb to give instruction to the Portuguese officers in how to use the (very simple) Stokes mortar. It doesn’t work very well so he goes to pace out the distance and is horrified when he hears the lick and sees a puff of smoke meaning a mortar has been launched. He yells at the Portuguese captain who’s accompanied him to run but the mortar detonates, ripping his clothes off, covering him in bruises and cuts. Dazed he staggers to the crater and realises it was a direct hit on Captain Pintao who has been vaporised.

Then appears Wheech-Browning who apologises profusely and explains that he had the lanyard in his hand when he sneezed. Terribly sorry, old chap. Wheech-Browning, his rise and rise, might, in a funny sort of way, be emerging as the central subject of the entire novel.

Chapter 2. 13 November 1918, Kasama, Rhodesia

Von Bishop is still with the German army commanded by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. After going south into Portuguese, capturing supplies, they’d doubled back north into the German colony then headed west into Rhodesia which is where they now are, having captured a town full of provisions.

Many men and some of the officers are coming down with and quickly dying from the Spanish flu. Von Bishop is still haunted by the horrible killing of Cobb on the plateau. The ruga ruga spoke no English and he didn’t speak their language. They did what they thought would please him (like Pharaoh beheading Pompey for Caesar). Next night the three natives disappeared, leaving von Bishop to rendezvous with von Lettow-Vorbeck’s main force at the river crossing into the Portuguese colony. He lied that they found Cobb’s body dead from exposure and buried it.

Von Bishop is strolling round town when a motorbike courier arrives. He is British so von Bishop informs him he is arrested while the courier gets out his case and hands von Bishop a note announcing that the war is over and hostilities have ceased. At last, he thinks, with huge relief.

Chapter 3. 2 December 1918, Nairobi, British East Africa

Felix is recuperating at a convalescent home for officers in Nairobi. He’s just received a letter from his mother telling him his father has been sent to a sanatorium, and that his friend Holland recently telephoned from Russia to announce that he’s joined a revolution there. Turns out Felix was hit in the occiput by shrapnel from the mortar and it badly affected his sight, which was fragmented but has, mercifully, almost completely recovered as the wound healed. He regrets not writing earlier to inform them of Gabriel’s death.

He had been reading a newspaper when the letter arrived. It had an account of the final surrender of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and his vexatious German Army. They had all been transported to Dar. It listed the 30 or so officers and included von Bishop’s name. At that moment Felix conceived a plan. He was going to travel to Dar, find von Bishop and shoot him dead in revenge for the gruesome murder of his brother.

Chapter 4. 5 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

Description of how von Bishop, along with the other captured officers, surrendered at Abicorn, were shipped up Lake Tanganyika to the port of Kigama and then the long train journey to the coast. Here they are greeted as heroes by the German community and von Bishop is reunited with Liesl who, he immediately notices, has lost a lot of weight, is back to the slim figure she had when he saw her off to Europe in 1913. They go to the small bungalow she is being allowed as a German civilian. The maid gets him a beer and almost immediately Liesl asks what happened to Gabriel.

Von Bishop tells the prepared lie, that he found Gabriel dead of exposure. Liesl apparently believes him. For a second she was going to say something – ‘Erich, I…’ – probably going to admit that she helped Gabriel escape, but Erich doesn’t want to hear it and talks over her. Liesl changes tack and goes on to say that she recognises one of the British men who came after von Bishop, saw him here in Dar just the day before. We know she’s referring to Felix.

Chapter 5. 9 December 1918, Dar-es-Salaam, German East Africa

The climax of the book. A few nights later Felix sneaks up on the bungalow now inhabited by von Bishop and his wife. He is full of confused moral contradictions like human beings so often are, at least in fictions. He has a great big service revolver. He climbs noisily in through an open window and sees a prone body on the bed and whispers, then pokes, then shouts at the unresponsive German. The door opens a light goes on and von Bishop’s wife tells him Erich is dead. Died three hours ago of Spanish flu.

Felix improvises an excuse for being there, something about wanting to talk to him about his brother’s death. He asks Liesl if Erich told her how Gabriel died and she says ‘Yes’ in a calm manner, so calm that Felix instantly realises she knows nothing about the beheading. Erich must have lied to her. She is ignorant. On the spot, he decides not to tell her. It doesn’t matter any more. Why carry on spreading suffering?

Epilogue

Epilogue. 3 January 1919, Mombasa, British East Africa

Felix and Temple Smith have met up and review the whole story. They’re on the quayside at Mombasa as Felix prepares to get his boat back to England.

Both smile wryly at the flu beating them to the revenge they wanted to wreak on von Bishop. The narrative ends on a comic note for while Felix is still puzzled by Liesl’s complete indifference to her husband’s death, Smith is vexed about the disappearance of his precious decorticator. He’s scoured the farms of the entire region round his homestead and never found it.

They wave him off as he gets the small lighter out to the steamer and he mounts to the railings. Then the decorative canon onshore fire a salute to a battalion of Indian troops preparing to embark on a steamer. The loud noise triggers Felix’s optical problem, the result of the mortar injury, his sight becomes fragmentary and patchy, the sea and sky, the land and the people on it, all reduced to jagged fragments.

Thoughts

English scenes

Of the 18 chapters in the section titled ‘The War’, no fewer than seven are set in England and feature Felix Cobb. Of the total 40 chapters, 10 are set in Britain (or Trouville). My point is there’s a lot of scenes and events set in England for a book supposedly about the war in Africa. Not complaining or criticising, just pointing out that a lot of these scenes are as – if not more – effective than the African ones. I felt I got to know Charis, Felix and Holland better than most of the African characters.

Conveying information

Giles Foden has written five novels set in Africa, each incorporating large chunks of history, including one set in the same region of East Africa during the Great War (‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’). So I’m able to do a direct comparison and say Boyd is much better at integrating lots of factual backstory with a complex plot. In Foden it feels like the plot stops while a character clumsily invokes the historical facts. In Boyd the third person narrator tells us everything we need to know then smoothly goes on with the plot. Boyd is a much smoother, more accomplished writer in this technical sense of arranging his plot and integrating factual material. His prose is also much more smooth and finished and not odd and cranky as Foden’s is. He also has a continual dry sense of humour which peeks out at all kinds of moments, unlike Foden who is heavy and humourless throughout. When Foden tries to be amusing, as in ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’, it’s like watching Gordon Brown try to tell a humorous anecdote i.e. you feel embarrassed for him.

Comic coincidences

Stories need coincidence of a kind which don’t happen in real life: old lovers bumping into each other etc. In Foden’s stories the coincidences are unbelievable because he takes them, like everything else, with deadly seriousness. Boyd has a lovely sense of humour which helps you accept his coincidences. Thus, Smith’s life is bedevilled by a tall officious British officer named Wheech-Browning but the way they keep bumping into each other, instead of undermining the story (as it does in Foden), because Boyd plays it for dry laughs, somehow the comedy takes the edge off the improbability and laughs you into believing it. It has (it occurs to me) the same kind of comedy of coincidences Waugh deploys so well in his novels, with the same scapegraces popping up in unlikely places.

Influences and echoes

Isn’t there a scene in D.H. Lawrence where posh people die in the pond of their big posh house? I remember it from the movie version of ‘Women in Love’. The memory of this made me think of the English scenes as a kind of nexus of tropes from Lawrence (for the passion), Huxley (for the social comedy) and Waugh (for the withering satire). Boyd is a very good, very entertaining writer, but maybe the reason he’s never had a breakthrough work and never become a really big name is because what he’s good at is refreshing existing tropes and memes: the comedy of ‘A Good Man in Africa’ contained multiple echoes of English farceurs from Kingsley Amis to Tom Sharpe. I’ve mentioned the English writers who the English scenes in this book bring to mind. Even the war scenes, in their ridiculous futility, remind me of Evelyn Waugh’s (surprisingly numerous) war scenes.

So he’s a very good, very entertaining writer, full of echoes.

Credit

An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd was first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1982. References are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

William Boyd reviews

  • A Good Man in Africa (1981)
  • An Ice-Cream War (1982)

Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 10, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Novel, Sex, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 10, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/10/an-ice-cream-war-william-boyd/

Zanzibar by Giles Foden (2002)

‘My dear boy, this is Africa.’
(Beaten-up old Brit, Ralph Leggatt, to naive young American, Nick Karolides, in Zanzibar, page 97)

This is a 389-page thriller about the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa:

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998. More than 220 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many a thriller it opens with short, elliptical sections devoted to a handful of disparate characters. Only slowly do we find out more about them and begin to realise that their paths are ‘destined’ to cross. They are:

Khaled al-Kidr, native of Zanzibar who, aged 21, comes home to find his mother and father dead with their throats cut. He wastes his inheritance on drinking and women until an uncle figure, Zayn Mujuj, confides that his father worked for a secret Islamic organisation and was murdered by American-Israeli agents (p.53). At which point Khaled signs up for jihad, travelling to work for ‘the Sheikh. in Sudan and then onto an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where, after extensive training, he is flattered to be chosen for a special mission.

Jack Queller, a former CIA agent and expert on the Arab world, conduit of resources to the mujahideen in the 1980s (p.306), who had his arm amputated after a firefight in Afghanistan, is now a consultant at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (known as DS), in his personal life haunted by the death from cancer of his wife who we wasn’t there to support, lives an isolated depressed existence on a seafront property on Martha’s Vineyard (p.141).

Nick Karolides, an American of Greek descent, a marine biologist, taking up a new job on a coral reef protection scheme off the island of Zanzibar. Unhappily haunted by the death of his father who was a keen diver till a shark bit off his arm and he died on the way to hospital, whereupon his mother retreated into (Greek Orthodox) religious fervour.

Miranda Power, keen young American State Department trainee who, as we meet her, has been given her first posting, as an Executive Assistant, Logistical and Security, to the American Embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By about page 50 we’ve been introduced to these characters and have a strong feeling that their lives are going to intersect.

(Notice how all the western characters are American. So quite apart from the extraordinary range and depth of research demonstrated in the text – about life in Zanzibar or marine biology or al-Qaeda – Foden is also ventriloquising the lives and speech patterns and culture of a range of American characters, a distinct new departure from the British or African characters depicted in his previous novels.)

A book teaches readers how to read it. By about page 70, we’ve realised that Foden is going to be interleaving, interweaving and interspersing narratives about these different characters. It’s going to be very episodic. This leads to several results:

  • it creates narrative tension, because you realise they’re going to meet and interact so the interest is in seeing how, and with what results
  • it creates dramatic irony i.e. juxtaposing characters who see the same thing but from different angles (the huge example is the completely different interpretation the Americans and al-Qaeda give to the previous 20 years of history)
  • this irony can be used for comic effect, as in the chapter which juxtaposes very short, half-page fragments of dialogue of the two enemies: between, on the one hand, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in their Afghan hideout; and lectures being given about Osama bin Laden by a series of CIA and security experts (we see these lectures because they’re attended by one of the central character, Miranda)

This kind of jumping between scenes featuring characters who are going to eventually meet up in a fateful event is standard operating procedure for many thrillers. Or you could describe the effect as musical, the deliberate counterpointing of different characters, atmospheres and motifs. Or maybe compare it to collage, in art – like cutting out images from magazines and pasting them next to each other in unexpected juxtapositions.

Cast

Page numbers refer to when someone is first introduced, or first speaks, or when a significant fact about them is mentioned. I suppose it’s a kind of index of characters. Or cast list.

  • Khaled al-Kidr, young recruit to al-Qaeda
  • Queller, retired badly injured American agent (p.7), now works at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS (p.47), first name Jack, used to be top Arabist under Reagan (p.52), full title (p.52)
  • Lucy, Queller’s wife who died from cancer and he feels guilty about not having been around to support
  • Nick Karolides, marine biologist, born and raised in Florida – tall, tanned, handsome, fit from his daily swim
  • his mother (unnamed), who’s become a religious fanatic since the death of his father (p.14)
  • Nick’s dad (unnamed), keen diver, who had his arm bitten off by a shark and died on the way to hospital
  • Dino, wiry 60-year-old owner of Dino’s Wine Shop, was diving with Nick’s dad when the shark attacked (p.20)
  • Inspector Chikambwa, unfriendly and (it turns out) corrupt marine policeman on Zanzibar, the USAID contact for the project Nick goes to Zanzibar to work on (p.27)
  • George Darvil, Nick’s predecessor who died in suspicious circumstances, found drowned, his boat riddled with holes (p.28)
  • Mr de Souza, proprietor of the Macpherson Ruins Hotel (p.29), very short and extraordinarily beautiful (p.32)
  • Leggatt, European clove farmer who also does boat tours, Ralph by name (p.82), made his money in copper and silver then diamonds in Sierra Leone (p.121), runs a clove farm, owns a yacht, the Winston Churchill (p.96)
  • Zayn Mujuj, changes Khaled’s life by recruiting him for jihad (p.45), big man, ‘enormous’ (p.230), Palestinian (p.222)
  • Ahmed the German, Osama bin Laden’s companion and cameraman (p.45) wears a Sport Team Osnabrück t-shirt, which becomes a leitmotif identifying him as the bomber (pages 143 and 282)
  • Yousef, al-Qaeda bomb maker (p.45), last name Mourad (p.295)
  • Ayman al-Zawahari, leader of Egyptian Jihad (p.62)
  • Muhammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military commander (p.62)
  • al-Qaeda, first mentioned (p.43), described (p.66)
  • the Taliban, keeping guard over the al-Qaeda base (p.50)
  • Miranda Power, executive assistant, Logistical and Security, American Embassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (p.51), Boston Irish, dad a cop (pages 151 and 184)
  • Morton Altenburg, Director of Operations, FBI (p.55), young and successful and scornful of Queller’s obsession with al-Qaeda
  • General Tom Kirby, Department of Defence (p.56)
  • Osama bin Laden (p.62) described by Queller (p.66 and elsewhere)
  • Tim Catmull, Brit working for the Department for International Development (DFID) (p.78)
  • Sayeed, boy accompanying the thugs who beat up Leggatt and tie him up on Lyly before Nick comes to his rescue; who they coax down from the rigging of Leggatt’s yacht; and who Leggatt gives a job
  • Ray Delahoya, American comms guy at the Dar embassy (p.103), cheerfully vulgar, likes junk food and low culture, apparently gay (fancies the tough Marine guards, pages 245 and 249)
  • Turtle Mo, a big imposing East African trawler baron, who Nick hires his diving gear from (p.126)
  • Olivier Pastoreau, Belgian land reclaimer who works for the European Development Fund, proud owner of a handsome white motor cruiser, the Cythère (p.130), amusingly pessimistic
  • Clive Bayard, only African American in the Dar Embassy (p.244)
  • Nisha Ghai, Asian employee in the embassy (p.244), killed in the bombing
  • Lee Denham, the one intelligence officer at the Dar embassy (p.245)
  • Corporal Rossetti, Marine on duty when the bomb goes off, helps badly injured Ray (p.247)
  • Juma, gate guard at the embassy
  • Dr Macintyre, embassy physician (p.259)
  • President Bill Clinton phones the chargé d’affaires’ house where the wounded have been brought to condole with them (p.262), condemns the attacks on TV (p.270), makes an extensive speech on TV (pages 305 to 306), forced to defend himself in the Starr investigation that he perjured himself lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (p.325), announces retaliation against al-Qaeda (p.331)
  • William Cohen, US Secretary of Defence, seen on TV condemning the bombing (p.270)
  • Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, seen on TV (p.270)
  • National Security Director Sandy Berger, explaining America’s retaliatory strikes against Sudan (p.332)
  • Omar el-Bashir, President of Sudan, calling the American attack on the pharmaceuticals factory ‘a terrorist act’ (p.339)

Part 1

Nick settles into his new post as USAID coral guy in Zanzibar, meeting locals friendly and unfriendly. Miranda flies out and settles into her new job at the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Khaled undergoes further training in preparation for his mission to blow up the same US Embassy.

As usual Foden is very, very good indeed, supernaturally good, at imagining these people’s lives and thoughts, and the hundreds of details, interiors, accessories, food and drink, cars and bikes and boats and tropical stuff they interact with. It is incredibly well imagined.

Nick gets to know a raddled, grumpy old Brit named Leggatt via an adventure. He had observed Leggatt’s yellow boat slowly cruising across the bay in the same direction every day. The hotel owner tells him he (Leggat) is visiting a small island named Lyly. Nick decides to go explore in his dinghy and outboard. He finds the island and beaches his dinghy and walks along the shore where, through binoculars, he spots Leggatt digging up turtle eggs. The bastard! But then a native dhow approaches and two men and a boy get out, swim ashore. Nick thinks they must be nature wardens so is astonished when they beat up Leggatt, tie him to a tree, and take all the eggs themselves. The attackers head back to their boat, Nick runs over and unties Leggatt (he’s bleeding from the beating), they run back to Nick’s boat and start the engine and motor round the coast to find the boy up in the sails of Leggatt’s boat, ripping up the sails and rigging with a knife. He has the idea to fire a safety/rescue flare at the bad guys’ dhow, where it sets fire to their sails. Nick and Leggatt get to the latter’s yacht, climb up the side ladder, Nick tying his dinghy to the stern, Leggatt starts the yacht’s motor and they chug away from the island and the burning dhow. Nick corners the boy who is quickly subdued.

Leggatt explains that he is not the bad guy, he is the one trying to protect the turtle eggs by digging them up and moving them to a secret location. When Nick naively suggests reporting the egg thieves and boy to the USAID contact, Inspector Chikambwa, Leggatt snorts with laughter an says he’s corrupt and commission the stealing of the eggs, among many other scams (p.97).

Leggatt tells him the island’s named Lyly which comes from the Swahili lala which means sleep. It’s 2 miles wide with a lighthouse on the highest point, built by a Brit in the 1930s. Nowadays it’s owned by a rich Saudi. Leggatt tells Nick about the Black African slaughter of Arab civilians soon after Zanzibar became independent i.e. 1964 (p.99).

Leggatt’s an old hand, he’s been fishing and monitoring these waters for decades, owns a house and several boats, made his pile from diamonds. He drops Nick and his dinghy off at the hotel. A few days later Leggatt takes Nick fishing for barracuda, a strong fighting fish. This fishing expedition is a set-piece which makes you think Foden must have done it, and been shown how to do it, in order to produce such a detailed description (pages 112 to 115).

There’s a lovely description of Nick rowing a rowboat back to his oceanside hotel (the Macpherson Ruins Hotel). I used to row at school, so I know exactly what he means (p.100).

Meanwhile Miranda settles into a completely new society. I think we are meant to register the decisions she makes as small moral compromises, accustoming herself to the grotesque poverty of most of the population, while she licks ice cream by the embassy pool. She soon hires a watchman and a ‘housegirl’ for her accommodation in Oyster Bay, as all the other ex-pats do. She falls in with Ray Delahoya, cheerful, fun, not a threat or boyfriend material (only a hundred pages later is it made explicit that he’s gay).

We’re shown security reports she files which are conscientious. If the reader is paying attention they’ll spot that a character described in bin Laden’s entourage is caught on security camera himself filming the Embassy layout, from outside the walls (p.123).

Part 2

Carries on in the same style. Khaled and the al-Qaeda team (Khaled’s mentor Zayn and Yusef the bomber) drive south through Afghanistan into Pakistan, fly to Dubai, to Muscat, then direct to Zanzibar (p.139). The movement of their van is picked up by spy satellites and the message sent to the CIA etc in America. Queller is asked to comment and thinks they’re embarking on an attack and need to be monitored. But his suggestion is shot down by his enemy within the CIA, Alternburg. Queller really hates Altenburg because he a) nixed a spy operation he’d set up and b) has been politicking to get Queller sacked as a consultant.

Nick and Miranda finally meet, as he’s in Dar to pick up the scuba gear he had sent on from the States. She bumps into him, they get talking, they go for a swim. She notices he is tall, dark, fit and handsome, almost like the hero of a movie. She gets into a bit of trouble in the sea; is pulled out by his strong arms etc. She gives him a lift into town and when he says he’s shopping, drives him past security into the Embassy where he fills up at the PX, the American supermarket found in all overseas bases.

Nick goes on a solo mission to Lyly, the deserted island where he and Leggatt had the adventure with the turtle egg thieves, ‘the island of sleep’. Beaching his dinghy he scratches his ankle. He has come surprisingly unprepared, without a toilet bag, for example or, more importantly, sunblock and a sunhat. He explores the small derelict house and abandoned mosque, manages to fire up the lighthouse light using paraffin he’s brought but half-blinds himself in the process. Diving through the spectacular coral, he finds a sea cave which, amazingly, appears to have Arab writing carved into the (slime-covered) walls (p.171). Later, Leggatt explains that it’s part of a whole cave and tunnel network where slaves used to throw recalcitrant or recaptured runaway slaves. Oubliettes. Hence the long-ago writing.

Nick invites Miranda to come visit Zanzibar from Dar for a weekend. He takes her (and the reader) on a tour of the sights. (I wonder if it’s a safe place for a tourist to visit, now, in 2023.) He takes the traditional male role i.e. showing her round, explaining history etc. She takes the traditional female role, passive, deferring to his knowledge. When they dance he has ‘strong hands on her hips’ etc. All very conventionally heteronormative and well mannered. In the refined, polite tone of this book no-one fantasises or masturbates or farts or menstruates, as they do in Leslie Thomas’s vulgar comedies. Makes me realise that the thriller genre is not only serious (obviously) but also, in a strange way, prissy, at some level, respectable. It’s the tiniest details but when Miranda is upset she doesn’t cry, as you or I might, but weeps, like the heroine of a Racine play. Even when it’s at its most gritty, there’s a kind of high-minded decorum about the thriller genre.

Anyway, I didn’t like this lovey-dovey stuff at all. Also the romance dialogue is very stilted and, well, boring. Next day, Nick takes Miranda to a beachfront restaurant then onto a tropical garden where he finally kisses her.

Something had happened, a change had taken place, the needle had swung around in the compass of her heart. (p.188)

Foden is a very savvy writer indeed, capable of deploying lots of different registers and styles. Surely he knows he’s writing Mills and Boon here. For the lolz I googled ‘Mills and Boon top titles’ and found the following: ‘Song of the Waves’; ‘The Emerald Garden’; ‘Tabitha in Moonlight’; ‘Rapture of the Desert’; ‘Whispering Palms’. To which could be added these passages from ‘Romance in Zanzibar’. The only slight fly in the ointment being that we know this is all heading towards a monstrous terrorist attack. I wonder if one or both of them will be killed in it. Or maimed. Both Foden’s previous novels contain scenes of brutal violence and bump off characters you’d become quite attached to. I suppose I should savour the kisses in the tropical garden while I can…

Nick persuades Leggatt to take him and Miranda back to Lyly. He shows her how to scuba dive, they frolic, find their way to an isolated spot of beach and have sex, mercifully passed over in silence and undescribed. Then an incident where they find a huge mamba snake uncovering the turtle eggs with a view to eating them, and Nick catches it with a forked branch and throws it into the undergrowth. More interesting that her being lulled and seduced is the way Nick starts to get on her nerves, a bit charmless, a bit clumsy, unempathetic, and then assuming masculine ownership of her.

The al-Qaeda cell

What happens next utterly transforms the tone and feel of the book. When they’d left Lyly, a powerful cruiser had crossed their path, apparently en route to the island. Miranda had looked at its crew and skipper through the telephoto lens of her camera and nearly taken a photo but then it veered away.

A day or so later Leggatt and Nick had gone back to the island and discovered there were two dhows and a cruiser pulled up. Nick had gone inshore in the diving gear and this section opens with him watching them from a distance, going in and out of the buildings where he slept, apparently Arabs, some sporting sub-machineguns.

Then a huge storm comes up which sinks the Churchill. Leggatt and Nick manage to abandon ship and get into the dinghy and cut the painted just before the big yacht goes down. With heroic strength Nick rows the dinghy through the coral barrier (guided by Leggatt) and ashore. Leggatt says they’ll never make it back to the mainland in a rowing boat; the only thing for it is to steal one of the dhows and to do it now, in the dead of night and while the aftersqualls of the storm are still making bad weather. They wade through the thick jungle, emerge on the side of the island where the Arabs are, try to sneak across the beach but are spotted. The Arabs open up with the machine guns, killing Leggatt and brushing Nick’s forehead. When he comes to, he is trussed up hand and foot and the enormous Arab, Zayn, whacks him with the flat of a machete, asking if he is American, hitting him, insulting him, till he says he’ll be back tomorrow to interrogate him and…throws Nick out the lighthouse window, attached by a rope, so that he is dangling upside down, his head bangs against the outside wall of the lighthouse and he loses consciousness again.

See what I mean by changing the tone of the narrative? We were in the western world of pampered tourists, all ice cream, skindiving and scotch on the veranda. Now we are in the world of jihad and unmitigated brutality.

Thing is, the way Zayn slit their throats reminded Khaled of how he returned home that terrible evening to find his parents’ throats cut. Zayn always told him it was done by Israeli-American agents but…but what if Zayn did it? Plus Zayn has been riding Khaled, pushing him and bullying and belittling him, on one occasion pushing his face right into their campfire. This isn’t jihad. This is sadistic bullying. And so…

So he goes up to the top of the lighthouse, hauls Nick’s unconscious body up and over the window sill, then leans down with a knife…Next morning the American is gone and Zayn angrily kicks and punches Khaled to find out what happened, at which Khaled shows him the American’s ear, says he cut it off as punishment then threw the body in the lagoon. Zayn is angry because he wanted to interrogate the American and also suspicious, as is the reader.

Miranda

Cut to Miranda at the US embassy and we discover that they didn’t have sex that time, on the island. I misread it. They were goofing in the waves, walked up the beach out of sight of Leggatt and lay down…there’s a gap in the text…which resumes with ‘Later, they walked back round to the fire’ (p.197). I misread this as them having sex. No. Because now, in this section, Miranda wonders whether she should have had sex with Nick, and worries whether the kiss she let him give her in the tropical gardens ‘meant more’.

I’m not sure, but I think all this fussing about lovey-dovey is meant to be an indicator of how shallow and naive Miranda is, on a par with her not understanding why America is so hated, and being upset by slavery and African poverty i.e. generally not understanding where she is. Conversely, maybe she is there to bring out the extraordinary distance between the poorest people on the earth and the richest.

7 August 1998: the bombing

Miranda is going about her normal day when, on page 252, the bomb goes off. It was 7 August 1998. The Wikipedia article gives forensic details about the make-up of the explosives then states that at Dar es Salaam 11 were killed and 85 wounded (p.260), considerably less than the bomb which went off at the Nairobi embassy, killing 213 and wounding about 4,000 (p.261).

Part 3

Hundreds of FBI, CIA, medical and forensics experts fly in from the Sates, including the prick Altenburg and kindly old Queller. These personality traits are on display when Miranda finds herself being given the third degree in an interview by Altenburg, and then horrified to find he has gotten her suspended for dereliction of duty for not inspecting the van which is now thought to have been carrying the explosives. Distraught, her world in tatters, her self confidence shot, she goes home weeping.

Queller sees all this and takes steps, calling up his old buddy Madeleine Allbright to ask for Miranda to be reinstated and assigned to him as his personal assistant. Which is what happens.

I thought the buildup to the explosion might be tense and exciting but it isn’t. It just happens, out of the blue, while Miranda’s going about a mundane morning’s work. If ‘grip’ or excitement there is, it comes from a completely different direction, which is The Hunt For Nick Karolides. Miranda becomes increasingly obsessed with the way he hasn’t been in touch, hasn’t replied to phone calls or emails. So flies from Dar to Stone Town (capital of Zanzibar) then taxis out to the Macpherson Ruins Hotel whose owner, Mr de Souza, is just as perplexed by Nick’s prolonged absence.

When she goes out to Leggatt’s farm she finds him also absent, but persuades the boy Leggatt hired, Sayeed, to organise a boat to take her back to Lyly. On the beach at Lyly they find the rotted body of Leggatt with an ear missing. So the reader realises it wasn’t Nick’s ear that Khaled cut off.

This happens on page 302. The book is 389 pages long. In these last 90 or so pages the interest focuses on two things: Miranda’s search for Nick; and the bitter contest between the two American intelligence operatives, Altenburg (who thinks the al-Qaeda connection is poppycock) and Queller, who is sure of it.

In a flashback we learn that Queller not only helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan but met Osama bin Laden several times, helped channel funds which not only armed the fighters but built airstrips, the cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains etc (pages 306 to 315). And then, extraordinarily, that it was Osama bin Laden himself who shot Queller in the elbow at their last meeting, as a warning to him, and all American ‘crusaders’ to get out of Muslim lands.

Where is Nick?

On page 317 (of 389) we discover what happened to Nick. We haven’t seen or heard of him since page 236, so he’s been absent for 80 pages or a fifth of the text. Presumably, one aim of this is to build up suspense about his fate, amplified by Miranda’s growing concern.

We find him cast adrift in a rowing boat without oars on the open ocean. He vaguely remembers someone bundling him into the boat then throwing away the oars and himself jumping overboard – presumably Khaled, saving his life. Over several pages we watch the effects of exposure, heatstroke, sunburn and dehydration. Nick has both ears and is unharmed except for the rope burns and where the bullet grazed his head but he quickly degenerates after a few days into a burned, blistered, hallucinating wreck.

Until he is picked up by a passing Greek cargo ship. He sees it emerge from the blurred horizon, stands up, waves his arms and shouts etc. The Greek crew wash him, slowly give him water, then soft food and restore him to health. Lucky, eh? Big ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Nick is of Greek heritage so when he starts speaking Greek, the crew and captain rally to his support. Presumably this is thrown in to explain/justify why the captain lets himself be persuaded to sail close to Zanzibar and not to dock in the main port – where he’d incur ruinous charges – but get close enough to the Macpherson hotel to be rowed ashore.

Which explains why, on the night when Miranda has flown to Zanzibar and taken a taxi to the hotel to enquire about him, and persuades the manager to let her sleep in Nick’s room…she hears the chalet door opening and…Grand Reunion! He staggers into her arms, tries to explain, she makes him have a shower while she gets a first aid kit from de Souza, makes him lie on the bed, tends his wounds like a good nursey, they lie facing each other, they touch, they make love.

His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more. (p.330)

Well…’Romance in Zanzibar’. Apparently, Mills and Boon novels are organised into sub-genres, one of which is ‘Heroes – Enjoy a thrilling story filled with danger and finding love no matter what.’ Well, these passages are a fine example.

He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her. (p.330)

I’m not sure this is what a man who’s just returned from days in an open boat, who’s still suffering from wounds to his head and knee, which are still bleeding, would be up for. But the conventions of the thriller genre override any kind of realism.

Bill Clinton

It’s a funny mix, this text, because it goes from ripe Mills and Boon-type soft porn to our newly committed couple watching President Bill Clinton on TV explaining why he ordered US air strikes on the al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a complex of training bases near Khost in Afghanistan (p.332). Nick and Miranda consume the TV news in puzzlement at the randomness of this target.

Passages describing the process whereby the targets were listed, assessed and agreed, and then the process of launching the missiles, read like magazine journalism, possibly from a military magazine. At one point Foden directly quotes a US Navy press release describing the operation of Tomahawk cruise missiles (pages 335 to 339).

Foden gives a roundup of responses to the US cruise missile attacks which reads like a Wikipedia article, giving quotes from the President of Sudan, the Taliban government, Arab newspapers etc, all of which describe the Americans as war criminals operating outside the law. Tony Blair gives Clinton his whole-hearted support. This is all very interesting but a) not really a novel and b) was all to be swept away in the vast tsunami of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The US retaliation prompted Foden to snide and snarky remarks about America being ‘one nation under God, indivisible etc’ which feel like cheap sarcasm, unworthy of his extraordinary gifts.

A passage describing Osama bin Laden’s thoughts as he rides a horse, far from where the missiles struck, with his closest lieutenants – Ayman Zawahari and Muhammad Atef – and personal bodyguards.

Khaled

A passage describing Khaled al-Khidr, praying in the mosque in Jambangona, on the island of Pemba where his parents came from and his jumbled thoughts, containing an impressive number of quotes from the Holy Koran and Khaled’s theological speculations, in particular whether Zayn, with his bullying and murder, led him from the path of righteousness.

The passage quoting Bill Clinton describing America as ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ (p.337) is deliberately paralleled by Khaled thoughts about the redeemed in Islam, ‘one nation, indivisible’ (p.345) – just one of many examples where Foden juxtaposes the value systems of ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ to bring out how their belief systems are so similar and yet so different.

Khaled is giddy with guilt, confused, wanders the streets of his home town in utter confusion, falls to his knees.

Cut to Zayn Mujuj, the big strong killer. He and Khaled had escaped after the bombing and gone to meet the cargo ship appointed to pick them up but it never showed. Instead they moored off the island of Pemba for a few days, Zayn calling the Sheikh for daily updates. We learn that Zayn, himself, is motivated by revenge, namely the wiping out of his family in Beirut, by the Israeli air force and the Christian phalange. Maybe he’s talking about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982. This is the source of his burning hatred. And now we learn Khaled was right to suspect that Zayn killed his (Khaled’s parents); he did, as punishment for embezzling al-Qaeda funds (p.348).

Now the boy has disappeared. Zayn phones the Sheikh on the sat phone. They speak in light code. Zayn says the boy (the finch) knows too much and must be eliminated. He takes a dinghy from the boat up the creek to Jambangona.

Exciting climactic chase

Foden reverts to small snippets giving different characters’ points of view: this is meant to jack up the tension. Thus, Queller gets a call from Altenburg back in Washington telling him SIGINT has picked up those sat phone calls off Pemba: could he go and investigate. He asks Nick and Miranda (instead of, say, some US marines or security forces) to help him. They putter off to Pemba in the Belgian guys’ boat (seeing as all the others have been lost earlier in the story). Meanwhile the killer Zayn has arrived in Jambangona with a big knife in his long boots. Who will get to Khaled first? Will Khaled recognise Nick as the American he saved? Will Nick recognise Khaled as the boy who saved him, dragging him half-conscious into the rowing boat and casting it adrift back on Lyly?

Zayn doesn’t find Khaled in Jambangona and so chugs upriver to Chake Chake, roaming the streets with murder in his heart. Nick, Miranda and Queller arrive at the map reference given by Alternburg to find nothing so they, also, chug upriver to Chake Chake, and here they spot the same motor cruiser they saw an age ago cutting them off as they returned from Lyly, the terrorist’s boat.

The climax comes when our heroes discover that they have arrived in town at the exact same moment when an annual festival takes place, the mchezo wa ngombe, the game of the bull, when brave youths taunt and try and jump onto two enraged bulls (named Bom-Bom and Wembe, I thought you’d like to know) in an arena. Lucky coincidence. Also improbable is that, at this moment of peril for his life, Khaled, throwing caution to the winds, tries his luck in the arena against the bulls. And that Zayn, attracted by the hullabaloo, sees him. And that Nick, amid the pressing crowd, sees both of them, tells Queller, and starts elbowing towards them. You can see how this has the logic more of a move than a novel.

Long story short: Zayn chases Khaled across the arena; one of the bulls gores and tramples him; Khaled escapes over the arena fence, through the crowd, and down backstreets, pursued by Nick, Miranda and Queller. First he’s cornered in a tourist shop, then escapes, then Nick tackles him, Queller steps forward with a gun, but Khaled grabs a dagger from a stall and Miranda and puts it to her neck, backing away as in ten thousand American movies. He drags her down to the quayside and into the terrorists’ boat, finds the key, powers up, casts off and motors away, hotly pursued by Nick and Queller, suddenly feeling his age, feeling tired, overcome by a sense of depression and failure.

Out of the crowded streets emerges Zayn, bleeding and furious to see his boat cruising away so he cuffs a white tourist off his jet ski and sets off in hot pursuit. Now the narrative has gone full James Bond.

Showdown on Lyly

Khaled steers out to the island of sleep, location of quite a few nightmares by now. Nick and Queller watch him beach and drag Miranda up the sand into the jungle. Queller shoots a way through the coral breach and they, also, beach their boat. Nick tells Queller to stay behind and guard the boat, takes Queller’s gun and sets off in pursuit. God, the excitement!

Khaled drags terrified Miranda through the caves at gunpoint. Nick gets lost pursuing. Queller investigates various jungle trails and on returning to the beach notices a jet ski lying on its side. Zayn is clearly badly injured, needs a stick to lean on. Queller, binocular distance away, takes a marlinspike out of the boat and slowly sets off in pursuit.

It’s called ‘suspense’ but what it boils down to is, Who is going to die? Khaled and Zayn, I’d guess, and possibly Queller, for his sins in aiding bin Laden. But it’s anyone’s guess; Foden is a brutal writer and hasn’t hesitated to wipe out sympathetic characters in previous books.

In the slimy caves Khaled undergoes a crisis, becomes hysterical , tells Miranda about Zayn killing his parents, admits involvement in the bombing, no longer knows what is jihad, what is righteous, drops the knife, pulls out a gun he found on Zayn’s boat, then disappears into the darkness.

On the beach Queller gets to the lighthouse then loses the trail. Turns round just as Zayn smacks him in the face with a plank of wood, grabs the marlinspike, lifts it to skewer Queller.

Nick finds Miranda cowering, shivering, in the caves.

Queller looks up at the man about to kill him when there’s a gunshot and, as in a thousand American movies, a hole appears in Zayn’s forehead, he shudders, and falls dead across the terrified American. Khaled appears, explaining – to Queller – who shot Zayn. He then delivers his Speech the speech which explains his Change of Heart. It is time for him to stop killing, to turn to do good work for Muslims. Queller asks him to come back with them but Khaled very reasonably says, just because I stop trusting al-Qaeda doesn’t mean I start trusting America. Then he’s gone.

Soon afterwards Nick and Miranda appear and pull the big heavy dead Zayn off Queller. Khaleed steals the Belgian’s very expensive cruiser and shoots holes in his own one, so our guys are stranded. Nick and Miranda wash the slime off themselves in the sea, they all sleep in the lighthouse, next morning helicopters find them.

The end

Nick, Miranda and Zayn’s body are choppered back to the mainland where they find themselves celebrities, the story of their chase and shootout somehow all over CNN. Then in a convoy of those huge black FBI SUVs which appear in all the movies, to some local base.

Miranda stares blankly out the window, Nick falls asleep and Queller has last thoughts about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Will he ever be tracked down? (Yes) Can such an organisation be defeated? (No) Queller reflects that globalisation only entrenches local elites, often working hand in glove with multinational corporations, to maintain most of their populations in resentful poverty, from which are spawned endless fundamentalisms (p.377). Improbably, he has an old man’s hope for a better world, more equality, defusing violence etc. Pipe dream. There are 8 billion humans alive today. In 20 years it will hit 9 billion. More crushing poverty. More grievance. More violence.

All improbable as it is an American security service official wishing for the end of capitalism or its superseding by a fairer system. Not very likely. Sounds more like the thoughts of some Limey pinko novelist.

(Oh, I spotted Foden’s placing of a micro-joke; the SUV convoy roars past a hoarding advertising ENVI skin cream (p.377). Now a hoarding advertising this same product plays a role at the end of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when Idi Amin, his regime overthrown, asks the novel’s protagonist, Dr Garrigan, to meet him at the ENVI hoarding to drive him to safety. Garrigan doesn’t go. I wonder if there are other sly echoes I didn’t spot.)

Coda

Miranda’s in Washington. Queller’s being investigated, for some reason. Nick didn’t want to stay, asked her to come back to Zanzibar but she didn’t want to leave, so they’ve split up and she wanders round Washington’s memorials feeling soulful.

Queller is being called for questioning in Washington about his links with al-Qaeda in the 80s. He knows he’s being set up as the fall guy. He writes a complete documentary account of his actions and sends it to Miranda. Tries on the latest spiffy prosthetic limb that’s arrived through the post. Has a drink. Reaches for his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

Nick after toying with staying in the States, has come back out to Zanzibar, done up the derelict cottage on Lyly and made it into a home. He is going to protect the turtles as homage to Leggatt. He is trying to be mindful. He is trying not to live in illusions. But he can’t help missing Miranda. It wasn’t true love but it was a lot.

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Because of the focus on the main characters at the start, because we are given such privileged access to Khaled’s life, tragedy, training and motivation, and because the book’s blurb says that Nick and Miranda become ’embroiled’ in a terrorist conspiracy – I thought they might have met Khaled, got to know and like him, then found out what he was going to do and there might have been some kind of agonising moral debate and so on when they try to talk him out of it, he goes ahead anyway… But no.

Inventive structure?

Again, Foden writes that ‘the event’ as the Americans quickly take to calling it, messed with people’s sense of time and place and identity, severely traumatising all involved, and so it crossed my mind that Foden could conceivably have run with that idea and created a postmodern jumping back and forth in time. At a few moments when Nick or Miranda were dazed and disorientated, the psychotic fictions of J.G. Ballard briefly came to mind.

But no. The narrative is much, much more straightforward than that, almost totally vanilla. This happened then this happened then this happened then this happened. The characters do stuff then there’s a big explosion then they rush off to catch the baddies. However brilliantly imagined and vividly written every scene is, and despite a few passages of tricksy juxtapositions, for the most part, structurally, it’s a very conservative book.

Al-Qaeda

The book contains several set-piece passages where the kindly old Queller gives straight explication about al-Qaeda’s history and aims, bin Laden’s speeches, the group’s structure and bases in Afghanistan. He describes how the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of training and munitions to the mujahideen, building secret hideouts, training them in guerrilla warfare etc, all skills and weapons which, with world-class irony, once the Soviets had finally quit Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda turned against their western backers.

I’m guessing that at the time Foden drafted the book, all this was relatively specialist, niche stuff, and his up-to-the-minute research was news, and it was cutting edge to include it in a novel.

Unfortunately for Foden, before his book could be published along came 11 September 2001 and the entire world’s media suddenly overflowed with everything known about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who became the subject of hundreds of books, thousands of documentaries, millions of articles – and the novelty of Foden’s book, its claim to shed light on a little-known terror organisation, evaporated overnight.

Must have been very galling. Then came the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq and the chaos they caused, covered on the telly and across all the media every night for years. So for the modern reader, the passages where Queller carefully explains bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Miranda (like pages 290 to 293), interesting refreshers though they are, can’t help but feel somewhat quaint and dated.

The risk of writing about contemporary politics or world affairs is that your text will be overtaken by events even as you write it. Compare with anyone half-way through writing a novel about Ukraine when Russia invaded and rendered the whole thing academic. Imagine you were just putting the finishing touches to your book about the current situation in Israel when Hamas attacked. It’s a high-risk strategy for a novelist. Safer to go that much further back in time, to when events are settled, complete, assimilated and contextualised – which is precisely what Foden did in his next novel, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika, set during the First World War. Can’t get more past, finished and over than that.

And yet…

For all my nitpicking, it’s an awesome book, an epic book. You really feel like you’ve been through the wringer, on a long journey, had an epic adventure. I felt quite shattered by the end of this long, dense book – informed about al-Qaeda and bin Laden, thrilled by the plot, and delighted by the thousand and one precise descriptions Foden encodes in his prose.

Swahili phrases

  • chamchela – hurricane squall (p.210)
  • chibuku – the local beer (p.252)
  • dar es salaam – haven of peace (p.243)
  • mlango – door
  • mnara – lighthouse (p.224)
  • mpuga za peponi – the gardens of paradise (p.220)
  • muzungu – white man
  • mchezo wa ngombe – the game of the bull (p.355)
  • pole-pole – slowly slowly
  • papabawa – Zanzibar vampire
  • twende! – let’s go (p.295)
  • zinj el-bar – coast of the black people (p.153)

Credit

Zanzibar by Giles Foden was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. References are to the 2003 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 22, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Novel, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 22, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/22/zanzibar-giles-foden/

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

  1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
  2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
  3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
  6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
  7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

  1. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
  2. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
  3. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
  4. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

  1. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
  2. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
  3. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
  4. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

  • A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
  • Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

  • Hawiye, 25%
  • Isaaq, 22%
  • Darod, 20%
  • Rahanweyn, 17%
  • Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

  • 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
  • 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
  • 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

Related links

More Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 27, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, Islamic terrorism
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 27, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/27/the-worlds-most-dangerous-place-inside-the-outlaw-state-of-somalia-james-fergusson/

The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuściński (1998)

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932 to 2007) was foreign correspondent for the Polish News Agency during the communist era and so one of the few Polish journalists allowed to travel freely outside the country. He first visited Africa in 1957 and returned periodically. As he explains in the brief foreword, although he attended on the state events and interviewed the national leaders he was tasked with reporting, he also went out of his way to explore byways, hitching lifts, travelling on local buses, wandering with nomads in the desert, staying with peasants on the savannah, curious about all aspects of African life.

So this book is not a factual or historical survey. It’s not a collection of his printed articles and reporting. Instead, Kapuściński’s text has more in common with a novel, or the kind of allusive, literary and thoughtful short texts of someone like Italo Calvino. They are more like meditations, in which he mingles personal travels, meetings and interviews, with serious factual points (about slavery or the creation of the African states), along with ‘deeper’ reflections on Africa’s history, geography, customs and plight, mingled with consciously beautiful and lyrical descriptions.

Written over a forty year period, they’re like snapshots, impressions, pegs and pretexts for very ‘literary’, semi-philosophical reflections and musings. So although it contains quite a lot of facts about Africa, they’re not in the form of dates and data, but of generalisations, thoughts and musings.

It struck me that this explains why the book doesn’t contain any maps. That would give it an inappropriate specificity and humdrum factuality. Kapuściński’s Africa is an Africa of the mind, of the imagination.

And because the text has a meandering, sumptuous feel, it’s not a book you read in a hurry in order to process the information, but rather one you pick up and reread to enjoy the thought and style and the civilised, ruminative worldview. Here’s a representative slice of Kapuściński.

Both sides of the road are dense with greenery. Tall grasses, thick, fleecy shrubs, spreading umbrella trees. It’s like this all the way to Kilimanjaro and the two little towns nearby, Moshi and Arusha. In Arusha we turned west, towards Lake Victoria. Two hundred kilometers on, the problems started. We drove onto the enormous plain of the Serengeti, the largest concentration of wild animals on earth. Everywhere you look, huge herds of zebras, antelopes, buffalo, giraffes. And all of them are grazing, frisking, frolicking, galloping. Right by the side of the road, motionless lions; a bit farther, a group of elephants; and farther still, on the horizon, a leopard running in huge bounds. It’s all improbable, incredible. As if one were witnessing the birth of the world, that precise moment when the earth and the sky already exist, as do water, plants and wild animals but not yet Adam and Eve. It is this world barely born, the world without mankind, and hence also without sin, that you imagine you are seeing here. (p.43)

1. The Beginning: Collision, Ghana 1957 (11 pages)

Ghana A vivid description of what it’s like to step off the plane from dark and rainy northern Europe into the dazzling glare of the African sun. A week getting to know Accra, capital of Ghana, especially its intense foetid smell. Kapuściński attends a speech by the new Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, informal, joyful. The friend who took him introduces him to Kofi Baako, the 32-year-old Minister of Education and Information, who he goes to visit the next day in his office, the ramshackle telephone exchange, his books and enthusiasms, he was unemployed till Nkrumah called him, his ambition to drive up literacy rates. Baako invites him to a party where he shows him his collection of cameras.

2. The Road to Kumasi (10 pages)

Ghana He catches a bus from Accra’s chaotic bus station, which is the peg for meditations about the three worlds the African inhabits: the palpable visible world; the world of the ancestors, who lived and died, but not completely; and then the world of the spirits. And standing over all three, God.

African time and Western time. Western man is dominated by time, a slave to time, which is an inflexible machine. For the African time is more flexible, elastic, comes into being as required. Time appears when we need it, hibernates when we don’t.

Hence the Africans’ incredible ability to wait, sitting, squatting, lying passive, on pause, hibernating in the hot sun. Kapuściński fantasises African history, small clans, impermanent and nomadic in a vast continent. They didn’t have the wheel and, south of the Sahara, no pack animals, because of ferocious tropical diseases. Trade was primitive, exchange of goods and ideas and therefore technology, non-existent. Hence the almost complete absence of towns or cities or the indicators of civilisation found on other continents. It was a continual migration, which also explains why the ancestors are the key figures, because they are carried from place to place in oral tradition.

3. The structure of the clan (11 pages)

Ghana In the industrialised West the individual is king and individualism is the dominant ideology, taken to its furthest extremes in America. In Africa, it is the extreme opposite; life is about the clan, which means the extended family. A clan comprises all who believe they share a common ancestor. A clan has a chief whose job is not only to rule the living but to mediate with the much larger number of clan members who are dead, with the ancestors.

The clan chief is expected to share out what he has and any wealth he acquires with the extended family of the clan (like a Viking warlord, like a Roman aristocrat besieged with suppliants). This is basic to the structure of society and explains what the West describes as corruption i.e. as soon as a prominent citizen acquires place and power, they direct money, opportunities and jobs to their extended clan. That’s how it works. Those are traditional African values.

4. I, a White Man (9 pages)

Dar es Salaam, 1962. Kapuściński as correspondent of the Polish Press Agency. He is crushed by his consciousness of being white i.e. the same skin colour as the colonial oppressor. He sees the prominence of skin colour, and generalised forms of apartheid, everywhere. Thus the three zones of Dar es Salaam, white luxury, busy Asian shops, black slums. He feels guilty even though his nation, Poland, never colonised everywhere; the reverse, Poland was itself divided and conquered by its neighbours.

5. The Cobra’s Heart (9 pages)

Tanzania With a Greek colleague, Leo, he hires a four-wheel-drive to drive from Dar to Kampala, capital of Uganda, which is about to be awarded independence, 9 October 1962. They get badly lost in the endless savanna where there are few roads but a bewildering matrix of tracks. They stay overnight in an empty trackside hut. Only when he’s lying on the bed does he realise there’s a poisonous cobra placed directly under it, which he and Leo attack with an empty metal canister.

They drive on for another day and through the night. Kapuściński reflects on how Uganda was carved out in the Scramble for Africa, its borders forcing together different and rival kingdoms. He checks into the converted barracks where journalists covering the independence day celebrations are being house, but feels tired and dizzy, then passes out.

6. Inside the Mountain of Ice (9 pages)

Uganda Kapuściński comes to in a hospital where an Asian doctor tells him he’s for cerebral malaria. He describes the chill and fever and light-headedness of malaria. After an attack you feel like ‘a human rag’.

Reflections on how European settlement of Africa for hundreds of years amounted to little more than ports on the coast. There were no cities or towns, no broad roads, all the rivers are hard to navigate and the interior is purulent with fatal diseases. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did the various European nations who’d carved up Africa make an effort to create railway lines into the interior. Since the Africans couldn’t be persuaded to do this, the British imported thousands of labourers from India. One of them was the grandfather of the Dr Patel who’s now treating him.

Dr Patel tells him stories of the Asian immigrants’ terror of the lions who preyed on them, and then how you never see a dead elephant because the old weak ones tend to fell into waterholes or lakes and get sucked down into the muddy bottom.

7. Dr Doyle (9 pages)

Tanzania Having returned from Kampala (we hear nothing about the independence ceremony he went to cover) Kapuściński carries on feeling ill. When he wakes one night to find the pillow covered in blood he goes to see a Dr Laird who tells him it’s tuberculosis. Laird is packing up to go back to Blighty and passes him on to an Irish doctor, Dr Doyle.

He takes one of the male nurses, Edu, as an example of the extended family which is so important to Africans, and gives a comic account of the enormous fuss a clan or family member makes when greeting another member.

8. Zanzibar (27 pages)

January 1964. There’s a coup in the island state of Zanzibar. The black Africans overthrow the Arab Sultan. Kapuściński tells us he knows the main press guy in Nairobi, Felix Naggar, chief of Agence France Presse in East Africa, the kind of guy who knows everything and everyone.

A humorous account of the desperate efforts of the 40 or so Western correspondents in Nairobi to get to the island, seeing as how the airport is closed and the coup leaders threaten to shoot down any planes. Very handily, Kapuściński puts in a call to Abeid Karume, leader of Zanzibar’s Afro-Shirazi Party. After a bit of cajoling, Karume says he’ll allow a plane carrying Kapuściński (and Naggar) to land. That’s how you get scoops! The coup was led by 25-year-old John Okello, who Kapuściński manages to visit in his chaotic extended household.

Which turns, unexpectedly, into an extended meditation on the slave trade and it’s long-tern impact on Africa i.e. ruinous not only in economic social terms, but psychologically, embedding a sense of humiliation and defeat.

He and colleagues had only been in Zanzibar a week or so when, during the last week of January 1964, the armies of Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya mutinied, in rapid succession. The half-comic, half-terrifying story of their attempt to escape Zanzibar in a motor dinghy and getting caught in a terrifying storm which drives them back to the coast. Eventually, they catch a plane out.

9. The Anatomy of a Coup d’Etat (10 pages)

Lagos, Nigeria, 1966. Kapuściński’s notes on the key facts. The coup came after a bitter civil war in Western Nigeria. In the coup about 8,000 soldiers were deployed to all the main cities and politicians in Nigeria’s 5 major towns were arrested and, in some cases, shot. The country seems pleased with the coup. He quotes press releases by the military which claim this is the second, true liberation, after the first one of 1961; this time it is a liberation from black imperialists, civilian politicians having, in five short years, become a byword for corruption and greed.

Kapuściński casually makes quite a big point I hadn’t seen before; that because free enterprise commercial economy was still in its infancy, and because all of the raw material extraction corporations, as well as all of the banks, are still in foreign hands – politics, in many African countries, was one of the few careers where an ambitious, money-minded person could actually make money.

A withering pen portrait of Chief Samuel Akintola, Prime Minister of Western Nigeria, who had done just that, siphoned money from public finances into his own accounts, stealing millions, with the result that he had houses everywhere, a fleet of twelve limousines, while his troops fired on protesting, starving crowds.

10. My Alleyway, 1967 (10 pages)

Lagos, 1967. How he chooses not to live in the gated white community of bankers and diplomats at Ikoyi, but above the warehouse of an Italian businessmen who’s sold up and left, up an alleyway in a very poor slum quarter where he interacts with normal Nigerians, although he has to get his own water from a street pump and avoid the street gangs. Power outages. The stifling heat at night. ‘Merely existing in this climate is an extraordinary effort’ (p.111). Extreme poverty among the workless who often have only one possession. Real hunger. Paralysis by heat. Cheap booze. He describes the amazing creation of slums from whatever junk is lying around in the street. A man called Suleiman helps him buy a voodoo charm at the magic market, which he hangs over his door and from that moment on is never burgled again.

11. Salim (9 pages)

Mauretania Kapuściński is at an oasis which has one solitary petrol pump and so is a stopping place for trucks travelling through the Sahara. He’s picked up by a trucker called Salim driving a French Berliet truck. They break down in the desert. Description of the blinding heat as Salim ineffectually tinkers with the motor. They take shelter under the truck from the sun. That night another truck arrives and rescues them, at least he thinks it does, he’s hallucinating exhausted.

12. Lalibela, 1975 (10 pages)

Ethiopia. By the mid-70s the optimism of the 1950s and 60s about Africa had evaporated. Optimists and ideologues had believed that independence, by itself, would bring wealth to over-populated, poverty-stricken places. But it didn’t. Instead it brought the immense corruption of the first generation of independent politicians, who used tribal and ethnic conflicts to stay in power, till overthrown in military coups, which arrived with disillusioning regularity.

Kapuściński knows Teferi, owner of a truck company in Addis Ababa. He sets out to travel to Lalibela which is experiencing a drought and famine. Roads are primitive and everywhere throw up a thin volcanic dust which is as fine as mist, and gets into every crevice of your clothes and body. Alleyways full of still, emaciated people dying of hunger.

On through the parched terrain and the furnace-like gorges to Lalibela, where a series of 11 churches have been carved into the body of a mountain. Ought to be one of the wonders of the world. Kapuściński watches as a crowd of the sick and emaciated surge towards him and his driver. Over a million died in the prolonged drought and famine which during the rule of Haile Selassie and the man who overthrew him in 1974, Mengistu Haile Mariam.

13. Amin (10 pages)

Uganda Kapuściński visited Uganda many times and met Idi Amin several times. This chapter is a potted history of his murderous career, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. During his reign of terror an estimated 300,000 Ugandans died, usually painfully, many tortured to death.

14. The Ambush (9 pages)

Uganda 1988. Kapuściński is one of three journalists accompanying a mission of three Ugandan government ministers to parlay with the rebel soldiers who are laying waste the north of the country.

A passage explaining the prevalence of child soldiers in Africa. In really long-running conflicts it’s because a lot of the adult men are dead. There are lots of orphans and they gravitate to whoever will feed them. And modern weapons are designed to be light and handy. Lacking an adult sense of consequences or conscience, African child soldiers slaughter each other in huge numbers.

15. There shall be a holiday (9 pages)

Uganda, 1990s. Godwin, a journalist from Kampala, takes Kapuściński to his home village. A study in rural poverty of a depth and misery none of us in the West can understand.

16. A Lecture on Rwanda (18 pages)

Precisely that – an unusually detailed, historical explanation of why the two ethnic groups, the minority but often wealthy Tutsis and the majority, mostly peasant farmer Hutus, descended into a spiral of mutual hatred and ethnic massacres, starting at independence in 1959, with another outbreak in 1963, then 1965 all paving the way, though no-one knew it, for one of the most horrific genocides in history, 7 April to 15 July 1994. He mentions France and President Mitterrand’s role in the whole terrible thing (sending French troops to protect the genocidal government because they were French-speaking and the Rwandan Patriotic Front – who sought to end the genocide – had grown up in exile in Uganda and so spoke English. To protect their precious ‘Francophonie’ the French government let the genocide go ahead, and the protected its leaders. Evil scum.)

I’ve read better factual accounts, but Kapuściński tries to give a feel for what it felt like for two mutually hostile, resentful and fearful peoples to be stuck in the same small, claustrophobic country.

17. The Black Crystals of the Night (9 pages)

Uganda Being driven through western Uganda, and forced to stop for the night at a strange village, Kapuściński reflects on the African’s fear of the night, and their completely different causology which attributes events to supernatural forces and magic. The difference between witches and sorcerers. Years later he reads a paper by the anthropologist E.H. Winter about the Amba people of East Africa who are unusual in living in fear that the witches are among them, live in their own communities with the result that their communities are prone to internecine conflict.

18. These People, Where Are They? (10 pages)

Ethiopia 1991. Itang, a place in western Ethiopia near the border with Sudan, has for several years been site of a camp for refugees from Sudan’s civil war. They belong to the Nuer people. Kapuściński has travelled here with the UN Commissioner for Refugees but they have arrived in the pouring rain to find a mystery: the camp is empty.

Kapuściński recounts how the British stapled together two completely different peoples, the Arab Muslim North and the Christian or animist, black South into the country they called Sudan. The first civil war broke out in 1962 and lasted till 1971, when an uneasy ceasefire took hold. When in 1983 the Muslim government in Khartoum tried to impose Sharia law on the entire country the south erupted in rebellion. The war has been going on ever since. Kapuściński reflects on the way wars in Africa are seldom reported, not even recorded by the participants, and their details quickly fade and are lost:

History in these parts appears suddenly, descends like a deus ex machina, reaps its bloody harvest, seizes its prey, and disappears. (p.198).

The military regime in Khartoum is deliberately trying to starve the Southern rebels, led by John Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), into submission. During the second Sudan Civil War an estimated 1.5 million people died, mostly unarmed civilians.

19. The Well (9 pages)

Somalia He hitches a lift with Hamed, a merchant from Berbara, to Laascaanood, in northern Somalia. In fact ‘lift’ means joining a camel train through the blisteringly hot desert, all of which Kapuściński describes with great vividness and goes on to describe the mental world of the nomad tribes whose most precious possession is their camels.

20. A Day in the Village of Abdallah Wallo (8 pages)

Senegal A village by the Senegal river which forms the border with Mauretania to the north. Description of the rhythms of a typical day which starts with girls getting up to go fetch water, then the women go off in search of firewood in a landscape which has been denuded of all trees, bushes and vegetation, looks like the moon, even as time moves towards the unbearable heat of midday.

21. Rising in the Darkness (14 pages)

Ethiopia 1994. Addis Ababa. Mengistu’s Soviet-backed Marxist regime fell in 1991. With Soviet help he had built up one of the biggest armies in Africa. But as fighters from the rebel province of Eritrea approached the capital, Mengistu unexpectedly fled (to Zimbabwe) and his army, just as unexpectedly, disintegrated.

Kapuściński goes to Addis Ababa prison to speak to the imprisoned intellectuals and ideologues behind the disgraced regime.

One of Africa’s problems is that its intelligentsia emigrates. Addis doesn’t even have one bookshop, for a country with a population of 60 million. Invincible illiteracy and ignorance reigns. In the impressive Africa Hall Kapuściński meets impressive, smart new Africans who work for international organisations (the UN etc) and speak fluently and plausibly about Africa’s problems. Like all well-paid consultants they are smooth talkers with plans and schemes and timelines and development goals and gender equality strategies and completely divorced from reality (cf books about the Americans in the Green Zone of Baghdad after the 2003 invasion, notably Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran).

In the real world the biggest change made to African lives in the previous decade has been the widespread availability of lightweight plastic containers for carrying water, the stuff of life, from rivers or streams or wells to settlements. So this carrying can now be done by children. (p.229)

Over half the population of Africa is under 15. In 1998 when this book was published, the population of Africa was 780 million. Today, in 2023, it is 1.4 billion, nearly double in 25 years. By 2050 it is predicted to be 2.5 billion. The poverty, the fighting over resources, the famines and the droughts, will be cataclysmic.

22. The Cooling Hell (28 pages)

Monrovia, capital of Liberia. Incredibly hot and humid.

A large portion of Liberia is covered in jungle. Thick, tropical, humid, malarial, and inhabited by small, impoverished, and weakly organised tribes. (p.239)

At the airport he walks down into a jostling crowd who swiftly steal his passport and return ticket. Two hustlers offer him their protection and drive him to a sleazy hotel packed with prostitutes run by a Lebanese. His room is packed with astonishingly huge cockroaches. Cut to an extended history of Liberia, land of freed slaves from the American South. The amazing thing is how the freed slaves returned to Africa immediately set about recreating the slave society they had experienced in the American South in Africa, depriving the local Africans of political rights, confining them to bantustans.

William Tubman was president of Liberia from 1944 until his death in 1971. He was replaced by his vice president, William Tolbert who was considerably more corrupt and brutal. Tolbert was overthrown in 1980 by a group of army non-commissioned officers who went to the presidential palace to demand back pay, found it undefended and Tolbert asleep in his bed, so they murdered him, chopped his body into pieces with bayonets and threw it in the courtyard for animals to eat.

Their leader was 27-year-old Samuel Doe so he became president. He was an illiterate from a small tribe deep in the jungle, the Krahn, and didn’t know how to run a country so there followed ten years of misrule and drift until:

The First Liberian Civil War began in December 1989 when the National Patriotic Front of Liberia led by Charles Taylor invaded Liberia from the Ivory Coast to overthrow him. A former deputy, Prince Johnson, led another militia, so two armies ended up fighting for control of the capital, Monrovia. When a contingent of Nigerian troops arrived to try and bring order on 9 September 1990, Doe drove to the port to meet them but was captured by Johnson on the way.

Kapuściński describes the two hour long video which shows explicit details of Doe being tortured (after being beaten bloody, his ears were cut off with bayonets) by soldiers while Prince sits at a nearby table asking Doe for the numbers of his bank accounts.

Whenever a dictator is seized in Africa, the entire ensuing inquisition, the beatings, the tortures, will inevitably revolve around one thing: the number of his private bank account. (p.247)

You can watch the video of Doe’s torture YouTube. A few hours after this Doe died and his body was thrown on a municipal tip. But instead of ending with Does’ death, the Liberian civil war intensified, ruining the country’s economy as it collapsed into territories run by brutal warlords.

All of which leads into a meditation on the power of modern African warlords who are responsible more than anyone else for the ruin of entire countries. Who do they prey on? The weakest in their own societies, recruiting children to drug and train as soldiers, raping peasant women or stealing all their food and belongings leading their societies into a downward spiral into barbarism (pages 254 to 256).

Africa too is changing, growing poorer and more wretched. (p.225)

The number of warlords is growing. They are the new power, the new rulers. (p.256)

23. The Lazy River (9 pages)

Cameroon. He drives to a place in the jungle called Ngura, the parish of a priest named Father Stanislawek, who lives in an old ruined barrack and whose life’s work it is to try and build a church, although there are no building materials and no workers. A digression on the fundamentally religious (or superstitious) nature of all Africans.

They drive on to a settlement for gold prospectors working in a deep river gorge and occasionally selling the small dust sized specks of gold they find to Arab merchants lazing in their tents above the gorge.

24. Madame Diuf Is Coming Home

Senegal Kapuściński catches the train from Dakar (Senegal) to Bamako, the capital of Mali. In his compartment are a young Scottish couple, and a ‘heavy energetic’ woman, Madame Duif. At first the train puffs through the attractive colonial buildings on the seaboard. Suddenly there is an eruption of shouting and the scene changes to shanty town slums. Turns out the poor people have their market on the train tracks as it’s one of the few open spaces in the slums, and the train has just ploughed through it, sending stalls merchandise and shoppers flying. Prolonged meditation on the poverty, lack of hope, meaning and purpose, the surviving from day to day, of tens of millions of nameless Africans.

25. Salt and Gold (9 pages)

Mali Bamako, the capital city. He wants to seek out the war with the Tuareg. Description of the centuries-old conflict between the nomadic Sahara-dwelling Tuareg and the land-bound, cattle-raising Bantu. The Tuareg used to capture and trade the Bantu as slaves. Mutual hatred.

He catches a local bus to Mopti, on the Niger river, and then bribes his way onto a plan to Timbuktu, marvelling at the strangeness of the Sahel landscape below. Timbuktu is built of clay the same colour as the sand so it is as if the desert has risen up and adopted the shape of a city.

26. Behold, the Lord Rideth upon a Swift Cloud (9 pages)

Southern Nigeria, Port Harcourt. He attends a revivalist Christian church service. A vivid description and a meditation on the difference between the African and the Western sense of sin and guilt.

27. The Hole in Onitsha (8 pages)

Eastern Nigeria The town of Onitsha is said to host the biggest market in the world. Descriptions of and thoughts about African markets. Only in such a vast teeming place do you fully realise to what extent:

the world is swamped with material tenth-rateness, how it is drowning in an ocean of camp, knockoffs, the tasteless and the worthless. (p.300)

In fact Kapuściński and his driver soon get caught in a massive traffic jam, reduced to a complete standstill. He walks into town to find out what’s causing the holdup and discovers the only road through town has a huge muddy hole in the centre, down into which cars and lorries are gingerly driving, and then have to be pulled out using ropes and winches. Around this event a carnival crowd has assembled with hawkers and vendors and itinerant sorcerers.

28. Eritrean Scenes (8 pages)

The perilous journey, along mountain switchback roads, from Asmara to Massawi, Eritrea’s major port. Eritrea only gained de facto independence from Ethiopia in 1991 and legal independence in 1993, having fought the longest independence war in Africa, for 30 years, since 1961.

During the war the Eritreans built an entire alternative nation underground. They have a museum of abandoned military hardware in Asmara which Kapuściński visits, but it is nothing compared to the vast plain full of ruined military equipment at Debre Zeyit.

29. In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa

The last chapter is a meditation on the importance of trees, often isolated, giant survivors, in remote hot African villages: a place where children are taught in the morning, women meet and gossip at lunch, men sit smoking and chatting in the evening, a symbol of the enduring multifacetedness of African life.

Which morphs into a final meditation on the way the limited languages of Europe, and the simplistic racist worldview engendered by colonialism, limits to this day our understanding of this huge continent, its hugely diverse peoples and spirits and ancestors.

Sample passages from the book

Here are some examples of Kapuściński’s swirling, lyrical, philosophical way of thinking and writing.

Western individualism versus African communalism

This is Africa and the fortunate nouveau riche cannot forget the old clan tradition, one of whose supreme canons is share everything you have with your kinsmen, with another member of your clan or, as they say here, with your cousin…Whoever breaks this rule condemns himself to ostracism, to expulsion from the clan, to the horrifying status of outcast. Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivist for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles continually thrown up by nature. (p.36)

Ryszard Kapuściński on time

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside of man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton time is absolute: ‘Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.’ The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function he must observe its ironclad, inviolable laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days and hours. He must move within the rigours of time and cannot exist without them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat – time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy towards it. It is a subservient, passive essence and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview. (pages 16 and 17)

Compare and contrast with his description of the African attitude towards the deep, dark African night, as a hopeless realm in which men are prey to unspeakable fears (p.184). And his comparison of the African and the Western sense of guilt (p.294).

Ryszard Kapuściński on history

Experience has taught me that situations of crisis appear more dire and dangerous from a distance than they do up close. Our imaginations hungrily and greedily absorb every tiny whiff of sensational news, the slightest portent of peril, the faintest whiff of gunpowder, and instantly inflate these signs to monstrous, paralysing proportions. On the other hand, however, I also knew something about those moments when calm, deep waters begin to churn, and bubble into general chaos, confusion, frantic anarchy. During social explosions it is easy to perish by accident because someone didn’t hear something fully or didn’t notice something in time. On such days the accidental is king; it becomes history’s true determinant and master. (p.78)

And:

History is so often the product of thoughtlessness: it is the offspring of human stupidity, the fruit of benightedness, idiocy and folly. In such instances it is enacted by people who do not know what they are doing – more, who do not want to know… (p.252)

The bayaye

Here’s Kapuściński describing the long trek made by Samuel Doe, an unemployed man without a future, from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the distant capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food, a purpose.

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. but nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (p.244)

So the brute demographic fact of all these unemployed young men goes a long way to explaining the instability of African states, the ease with which warlords can recruit ‘soldiers’, the complete indiscipline so often shown by these ‘soldiers’, who murder, rape and loot at will at every settlement they come to; and the way they often melt away when their warlord is killed, returning to the sullen apathetic groups you see lining the streets of every African city.

In a later chapter Kapuściński continues the theme, explaining that during his lifetime Africa’s cities have become swollen and contorted out of all recognition. He knew the often sweet, provincial cities in the early 1960s. Nowadays some of them are ten times the size, mostly consisting of shanties and slums.

Kapuściński explains two major reasons for the grotesque hyper-expansion of the cities:

  1. Drought and famine in the 1970s, then again in the 1980s, drove millions off the land where they were starving, and into the cities where there was at least a thin thread of hope.
  2. Conflict. People fled the countryside in tens of millions because it was the scene of never-ending conflict, with rampaging militias arriving out of the bush, raping and murdering everyone then moving on. That doesn’t happen, in the same way, in towns or cities. So millions of peasants to the towns travelled looking for security. Who can blame them? (p.273).

Results? Vast teeming slums and tens of millions of unemployed bayaye.

Kapuściński’s questions

In Mary Beard’s book about Rome, she drove me nuts by littering every page with sets of rhetorical questions which aren’t designed to search and enquire but merely to introduce the next pre-arranged part of her lecture (which she then, very often, didn’t explain very well).

In complete contrast, Kapuściński uses series of questions to really dig into the roots of the issues he’s discussing. His questions help build up the sense that, even after forty years of visiting, Africa, Africans, and the African mentality are still impenetrable mysteries to a white European like Kapuściński.

Kapuściński’s compassion

I think of the camp we passed leaving Dakar, of the fate of its residents. The impermanence of their existence, the questions about its purpose, its meaning, which they probably do not pose to anyone, not even to themselves. If the truck does not bring food, they will die of hunger. If the tanker does not bring water, they will die of thirst. They have no reason to go into the city proper; they have nothing to come back to in their village. They cultivate nothing, raise nothing, manufacture nothing. They do not attend schools. They have no addresses, no money, no documents. All of them have lost homes; many have lost their families. They have no one to complain to, no one they expect anything from. (p.274)

Klara Glowczewska

A word of praise for the translator, Klara Glowczewska. I don’t speak Polish so can’t vouch for what the original text is like but Glowczewska has turned it into lovely, flowing, rhythmic and evocative English prose. There are none of the surprises or quirks you often find in English speakers writing in English. Instead, everything is turned into a lovely mellifluous, sometimes vivid and arresting, prose which allows Kapuściński’s thoughts and observations to unfold luxuriously, or startle and confront the reader, as appropriate. This book is a deep pleasure to read.

The African interior is always white-hot. It is a plateau relentlessly bombarded by the rays of the sun, which appears to be suspended directly above the earth here: make one careless gesture, it seems, try leaving the shade, and you will go up in flames. (p.280)

Credit

The Shadow of The Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński was published in Polish in 1998. The English translation by Klara Glowczewska was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2001. All references are to the 2002 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

  • The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)
  • Africa reviews
Leave a comment
by Simon on November 15, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, Translation
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 15, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/15/the-shadow-of-the-sun-my-african-life-ryszard-kapuscinski/

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh (1931)

How wrong I was, as it turned out, in all my preconceived notions about this journey.
(Remote People, page 97)

Waugh is a wonderful writer, clear and smooth – admittedly with occasional old-fashioned locutions and sometimes antiquated word order which makes you realise he was closer to the Victorians than to us – but he is nonetheless a deep pleasure to read because of his calm, clear, quietly cynical, drily humorous attitude. For his sophistication and style. For his combination of super-civilised manners and bright heartlessness. For his permanent alertness to the absurdity of life.

We sat in the open under an orange-tree and drank chianti and gossiped about the coronation, while many hundreds of small red ants overran the table and fell onto our heads from above. (p.72)

We saw a bridge being built under the supervision, apparently, of a single small boy in gumboots. (p.153)

[Jinja golf course] is, I believe, the only course in the world which posts a special rule that the player may remove his ball by hand from hippopotamus footprints. (p.156)

Temporary correspondent

Waugh establishes his a) posh, country house party persona and b) all-important membership of the network of posh public schoolboys who ran everything in 1930s England, by telling us that he was travelling by train back to London from a splendid country house in Wales when he bumped into an old chum who worked for The Times and, by the time the train journey had ended, his chum had promised him a job as a temporary correspondent to cover the upcoming coronation of the new emperor of Ethiopia, scheduled for November 1930.

So that’s why the reader opens the book to discover Waugh aboard a steamship, the Azay le Rideau, which has sailed from Marseilles across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and is now docking at Djibouti on the coast of French Somalia. The ship is packed with dignitaries, royal guests, diplomats, journalists and cameramen, plus a unit from the Foreign Legion down in 4th class, and even military bands, all heading for the coronation.

There is ample Carry On comedy about the behaviour of guests on the ship, fuss about porters and baggage, and endless complications about who’s going to get priority places on the very occasional train service which runs from Djibouti up to the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie

A few words about Haile Selassie. He didn’t inherit the ancient throne of Ethiopia in a straightforward manner, by being the eldest son of the previous emperor, it was much more complicated than that. His most notable forebear was the emperor Menelik II (ruled 1889 to 1913) who extended and consolidated Ethiopia’s imperial rule over its neighbouring territories and defeated the invading Italian forces at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Menelik left no immediate male heir and was succeeded on his death in 1913 by young Lij Iyasu (Lej Yasu, in Waugh’s spelling), who was the son of Menelik’s eldest daughter.

However, Lij Iyasu quickly alienated the powerful Ethiopian aristocracy with his erratic behaviour and the last straw came when he abandoned the millenium-old Ethiopian Christianity for Islam. He was dethroned and replaced by his aunt, his mother’s half-sister, Zewditu (or Zauditu as Waugh spells it). (Waugh also mentions that many of Lij’s Muslim followers were massacred at the town of Harar, p.18.)

Zewditu is an interesting figure in her own right, the first female ruler of Ethiopia in its history, she ruled as empress till her death in 1930. However, long before that, she had appointed young Ras Tafari Makonnen her heir.

Ras is a traditional title in Ethiopia. It translates somewhere between ‘duke’ and ‘prince’, which explains why accounts of its history are full of people with ras in their names. Tafari is a personal name which means ‘one who is respected or feared’. Makonnen was his family name.

Tension arose between Empress Zewditu and Ras Tafari because she was a deeply conservative and devout Christian whereas the young Tafari thought Ethiopia needed to modernise. In 1928 conservative elements in the court tried to overthrow Tafari and have him exiled, but they were defeated by a majority of the more progressive aristocracy. Zewditu was forced to confer on him the title of Negus or king, confirming his position as regent and heir to the throne.

Renewing the feud, in 1930, Zewditu’s own husband Ras Gugsa Welle led a rebellion against Negus Tafari in Begemder, hoping to end the regency in spite of his wife’s repeated pleas and orders to desist. But Gugsa was defeated and killed in battle by the Ethiopian which Tafari had devoted the previous decade to modernising, at the Battle of Anchem in March 1930.

A few days later the empress died, whether as a result of long-term illness or from shock at the death of her husband remains a subject of speculation to this day. Either way the path was now clear for Ras Tafari to inherit the throne and he was officially recognised by his peers as Negusa Nagast which translates as ‘King of Kings’. It is this title which is usually translated into English as ‘Emperor’.

It took 6 months to arrange for the actual coronation to be organised. It took place on 2 November 1930. It was traditional that, upon his coronation, the emperor choose a regnal name and Tafari chose to retain the name given to him at his baptism, Selassie, and incorporate it into his full imperial name – Haile Selassie. In the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez, Haile means ‘power of’ and ‘Selassie’ means Trinity – so Haile Selassie means ‘Power of the Trinity’.

So much for his names. They’re just one aspect of the way that, the more you study it, the more the history of Ethiopia and Selassie’s place in it, become complicated and flavoursome.

Waugh at the coronation

Ethiopia was, at the time, more or less Africa’s only independent country, untainted by colonial rule. Italy had tried to colonise it in the 1890s but the Italian army was massacred at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 and signed a peace treaty with Ethiopia recognising its borders and independence.

Once news of this grand imperial coronation became known, the European countries sent their own princes and dukes to attend the ceremony of a fellow royal. There were also ambassadors quietly jostling for position, and the Americans sent business representatives to try and do deals with the new ruler. Hence the presence of the Duke of Gloucester (King George V’s son), Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey of France, Prince of Udine representing King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and representatives of the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium and Japan.

This all explains the atmosphere of colourful and confused diplomatic parties and Ethiopian ceremonies which were held during the official week of celebrations leading up to the coronation and which Waugh reports with glee and satire.

He emphasises the surreal atmosphere of posh Westerners in top hats and monocles walking through streets full of white-robed locals riding mules and wearing bandoleers and antiquated rifles.

Every man in Abyssinia carries arms; that is to say, he wears a dagger and bandolier of cartridges around his waist and has a slave boy walking behind with a rifle.

The nearest thing he can compare the ‘galvanised and translated reality’ of Addis Ababa in coronation week to is Alice in Wonderland. In fact surreal details crop up throughout the narrative, making the reader gasp. I was particularly struck when, later in the story he goes for a stroll round the shabby town of Harar and discovers that a lion in a wooden cage is kept behind the courthouse (p.83).

The text continually teeters on the edge of fiction. I mean it is continually turning into a novel. Presumably most of what he reports actually happened but Waugh’s account dwells on characters and incidents which feel like they’re from a fiction. Thus (characteristically showing off his intimacy with the aristocratic Bright Young Things of his generation) he falls in with ‘old friend’ Irene Ravensdale, the fantastically posh Mary Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, Baroness Ravensdale of Kedleston, and they go on trips together to local attractions. They spend an afternoon scrambling through the forest of Jemjem ‘in hopeless pursuit of black-and-white monkeys’ (p.71).

He also becomes friendly with an American professor – Professor W. – who is depicted as a comic character because he is supposedly an expert on Ethiopian history and culture yet doesn’t speak the language and consistently misunderstands what is going on – particularly at the coronation service itself where he gives a running commentary on proceedings which turns out to be wrong in every detail.

Despite this Waugh decides to go on a mini expedition with the professor, to Debra Lebanos, a remote monastery which has for four centuries been at the heart of Ethiopia’s spiritual life. The chapter describing this little jaunt exemplifies many of Waugh’s strengths as a traveller, observer, writer and, dare one say it, thinker.

First of all there are the colourful characters: the Armenian taxi driver they hire to take them on the long, gruelling desert journey, with his no-nonsense attitude and catchphrase, repeated at every crisis: ‘Ça n’a pas d’importance.’ The professor, who’s brought along a crate of empty Vichy water bottles to fill with holy water from the sacred spring but which keep rolling underfoot or falling out the car every time they stop. Then, once they get to the ‘monastery’ there are extended descriptions of the priests who turn out to be a pretty shabby lot, though not as shabby as many of the ‘monks’ who are, in reality, the sick and the halt and the lame who came on pilgrimages and stayed on to populate the place.

One aspect of these blunt descriptions is Waugh’s lack of pretence. About two things he has sentimental blind spots – the Catholic faith and a shamelessly sentimental, William Rees-Mogg-style fantasy about an Old England of enlightened paternalistic squires. But about everything else he is pitilessly, inexorably accurate.

Thus he doesn’t hesitate to describe the sacred monastery as a filthy dump, full of shabby undisciplined ‘monks. Even when they deign to take him and the professor up to the sacred stream, their guide gives a good indication of their general level of piety by pausing the walk to shuffle off into the nearby rocks and have a crap.

The chapter makes a more general point about travelling, or about the kind of travelling Waugh is doing, to very out of the way places – which is he doesn’t hesitate to show that a lot of these ‘legendary’ places turn out to be nothing like they’re cracked up to be. It is refreshingly not the tourist brochure or movie version, but a pitiless gaze at the impoverished, scrappy reality. Same goes for the various coronation scenes and religious ceremonies he witnesses which are often chaotic and shabby.

Then there’s broad comedy, epitomised by the honey scene. Waugh and the professor have brought with them a hamper full of choice Western delicacies (jars of olives, tins of foie gras, crackers), but when the priests offer them food they can’t, of course, refuse.

At first the priests insist that they sacrifice a beast, either a sheep or a goat, despite our heroes’ protestations. It takes the Armenian driver to make them understand that the priests exist on a very scanty diet and so killing a goat for visitors is a big treat for them, the priests. It is typical sly satire that, even when he knows this, Professor W.’s high-minded Boston principles – he is a vegetarian – make him refuse the gift, to the priest’s obvious disappointment.

But what happens next is brilliant. The priests offer to put them up in the only spare room they have, which they describe as a great honour, so Waugh and the professor are horrified to discover it is a filthy shack full of lumber and junk and pullulating with fleas.

Worse is to follow for the priest then returns with some traditional food, namely some rounds of disgusting local soggy grey ‘bread’ and, worse still, a jar of local ‘honey’. This is not the honey you buy at Harrods; it is authentic Ethiopian honey collected the traditional way, scraped off the trees where wild bees have their nests. And so the jar of translucent gloop visibly contains bits of bark, dead insects and bird poo.

Our heroes are horrified but the priest hunkers down and then looks on expectantly, evidently waiting for his honoured visitors to tuck into the monks’ bounty. Stymied and refusing to touch the poisonous viands, our heroes are at a pass, until the professor overcomes his scruples and feigns an attack of severe stomach upset, holding his tummy, pretending to be faint, mimicking throwing up.

Suddenly all attentive, the priest goes to fetch some water, then makes sure they are comfortable for the night, condoling with the poor professor. As soon as he’s left the squalid little hut, our starving heroes tear open their hamper, pull out tins of grouse and bottles of beer and have a feast – being very careful to tidy every scrap of evidence back into the suitcase before the priest returns a few hours later (pages 63 to 64).

And the last point to be drawn from this chapter, is that on occasion Waugh rises to the level of really serious insight. Not allowed into the inner sanctum of the monastery to watch the priests perform their hidden rituals, Waugh has an epiphany. He realises the enormous contrast between the obscure, secret and hidden rites of the pagan East and the bright, open, public ceremonies of Western Christianity. He spends a page explaining how Roman Christianity performs its rituals in the open, in the light, for all to see and participate in and, the corollary of this, how its liturgies and theology give clear, hard-edged verbal definition to the hazy, murky intuitions, the holy terrors and ecstasies of the East.

Obviously whether this is precisely true is debatable, but it’s a big, thought-provoking idea and it arises naturally from the bed of pitiless observation and dry comedy which he creates for it. The unflinching gaze, the comedy and satire, are all based on deeper ideas, which you may or may not agree with, but which provide a serious, substantial foundation for the comedy.

Gentlemen of the press

Waugh is well aware he is masquerading as a foreign correspondent aware that he has no experience of such a role and nothing to qualify him except the self confidence inculcated at a jolly good public school and Oxford. He is alert to the ridiculousness of his own position but also to the farcical aspects of the job. For example, the assembled press cohort realise that the coronation itself is going to take place too late for their copy to make the first editions. Waugh gives a comic survey of the way the entire press corps responds by deciding to make up descriptions of the coronation and gives us choice excerpts of detailed descriptions of the exotic ceremony which were published in various British newspapers and which were entirely fictional. There are also grace notes, as it were, describing the unruly pushing and jostling of the cameramen, especially the one and only film crew in attendance (from America, of course).

The point for Waugh fans is this sets the tone for the even more farcical description of the press and foreign correspondents which he gives in the book’s sequel, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) and which formed the basis for what is often described as the funniest satire ever written about the British press, the magnificent comic novel Scoop (1938).

Harar

The assignment to cover Selassie’s coronation forms the first part of the book but it is only the start of an odyssey in which Waugh takes the opportunity to visit a number of British colonies in East Africa. All in all, the trip was to take 6 months (p.84) and take in an impressive list of countries, namely Aden, Kenya, Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo and South Africa.

He explains how, once he had filed the requisite number of reports via telegraph back to The Times his contract came to an end and he was a free man. In London he had booked passage by boat from Djibouti to Zanzibar, but now finds he has ten days to kill and is uncertain what to do. Until, that is, the British Consul in Harar, Mr Plowman, kindly invites him to come and stay.

In fact the consul has to remain a few more days in Addis, so Waugh decides to make his own way overland to Harar, travelling by train and taxi. Harar was the first Ethiopian town visited by the famous Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and one of the first territories conquered by the warrior emperor Menelik II. It was the town where the caravans met between highlands and coastal lowlands; where Galla, Somali and Arab interbred to produce women of outstanding beauty.

Or so Waugh fantasised. In reality, he finds it to be a dingy medieval town. He is visited by the bishop of Harar and quizzes him about the French poet, the boy wonder Arthur Rimbaud, who lived here after he fled France and became a gun runner to the emperor Menelik II. He is disappointed to learn that the bishop remembers him only as a solemnly serious man, who took a native wife and had a gammy leg (p.79).

The owner of the hotel where he stays, the Leon d’Or, is ‘an Armenian of rare character’, Mr Bergebedgian, who has a wonderfully relaxed attitude to life. The Armenian takes him to all the shops in the town, where he incites himself in, has a coffee and chat with the owner, moves on, telling Waugh all the gossip of the town, shows him the town prison and courthouse (the one with a lion in a wooden cage behind it).

In an aside Waugh says he grew to really admire this man’s character: he thinks he is the most tolerant man he has ever met. Bergebedgian takes him to a hilarious local party at the governor’s house, and then on to a wedding party, which he only dares visit when fully armed and accompanied by two armed police.

Slavery

Last point about Ethiopia. When Haile Selassie ascended the throne, slavery was still legal and common in Ethiopia. An estimated 2 million of the population were slaves. As a modernising ruler the King of Kings moved quickly to abolish it but, inevitably, it lingered on in remote rural areas for decades.

First nightmare

This is the name Waugh gives a short 6-page section describing his unbearable tedium at missing a train connection and so being marooned in the dull dusty town of Dirre-Dowa and then, when he did manage to get a train to the coast, just missing the steamship to Zanzibar and so being marooned in Djibouti.

It is a dithyramb on the excruciating dullness of being stuck in a tropical town with nothing to do and no-one to visit. His attempts to alleviate the boredom are accurate and funny, including a painstaking attempt at reading the complete works of Alexander Pope which he has (for some reason) brought with him. When he gives up Pope, he is reduced to reading through a small French dictionary in alphabetical order. Then he sits staring out the window in a state of stupefaction. As he accurately notes, most travel books don’t honestly recount the amount of time that is spent in boredom and inanition and frustration and, occasional, depression.

This short chapter certainly rang a bell with me, reminding me of many moments of boredom and loneliness on my various foreign travels. It’s another aspect of Waugh’s unflinching truthfulness.

Aden

It is very surprising to discover the importance which politics assume the moment one begins to travel. (p.120)

His description of Aden as a shabby rundown dump is a masterpiece with many laugh-out-loud moments. He meets the usual cast of eccentrics, or people who, in his novelist’s hands, become eccentrics, such as the two enterprising young German engineers who are working their way round the world. He finds the bachelor world of chaps dining at their clubs very congenial. After all, he says, it’s the womenfolk who ruin colonies, insisting their menfolk stay at home in the evenings, indulging in ferocious snobbery and pooh-poohing the natives.

Waugh describes going to the open air cinema where, a few minutes into the black and white comedy he realises almost everyone around him has fallen fast asleep. He attends a scout meeting where the patient British scoutmaster hopelessly tries to teach Arab youths how to build a fire or the ten rules of scout law.

He attends a council of local Arab chiefs and goes into great detail about the social and political situation of Yemen and southern Arabia. It was barely ten years since the entire area was taken over by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire which had run it for centuries. There is a detailed analysis of the complicated rivalries among the tribes, exacerbated by Ottoman rule and now complicated by British attempts to bring peace between internecine feuds. The council is a jurga hosted by the Sultan of Lahej and attended by Sir Stewart Symes, Resident at Aden from 1928 to 1931. He gives detailed insight into the challenges of trying to manage such a fissiparous people.

The tendency of Arab communities is always towards the multiplication of political units.

Disintegration, tribalism, feuding, rivalry, enmity and war. Britain withdrew from South Yemen in 1967. Since September 2014 (seven years and 2 months) Yemen has been torn apart by a brutal civil war in which about 380,000 people have died, including some 85,000 children who have died of starvation. Still. Independent of the ghastly British.

Zanzibar

Zanzibar turns out to be an ordeal. Sweltering oppressive heat and the subterranean prevalence of black magic. December is the worst time of year to visit. He spends all day sweating, only achieving peace a few times a day for a few minutes under a cold shower.

The general point he makes about Zanzibar is that it was taken over by the British with the express aim of abolishing the long-standing East African slave trade run by Arabs, which had increased in volume after the Sultan of Oman relocated his court to Zanzibar in 1840.

Now, in 1930, Waugh sees all around him evidence of the decay of Arab rule and ownership and the steady buying up of everything by merchants and businessmen from India. Waugh overtly likes the old aristocratic Arab culture and deprecates the ascension of what he sees as the ‘mean and dirty’, lower middle class merchant culture of the Indians (p.128) (but then he dislikes the sharp-elbowed middle classes of every race).

Kenya

He has an unpleasant experience with two officious British passport control officials at Mombasa on arriving at the Kenya coast, but once he gets to Nairobi he starts to have a wonderful time. It is Race Week and he has letters of introduction to top chaps, such as the Governor’s aide-de-camp, and spots various chaps and chapesses he knows from school and London (the benefits of being part of that network of public schoolboys and their sisters, wives and girlfriends), and so is swept away in a whirl of race meetings, parties, gambling, cocktails and nightclubs. It is London’s Bright Young Things nightclub society recreated on the equator.

This chapter contains a long serious section about the race issue in Kenya, about race and imperialism and the problems of the white settlers. It is fascinating to read an account from the period, as he grapples with what, to him, are recent developments, such as the government White Paper on the future of Kenya published in 1923.

Basically, Waugh comes out strongly in favour of the colonial settlers. He thinks they acquired the land legitimately, by buying it at fair auction. He thinks most of the land was waste and uncultivated before white farmers invested their life savings to buy it, then reinvested their profits to develop it. He accepts at face value the idea that the whites have a special ‘love’ for the country and its people.

He brings in the broader argument that all of human history has been a record of mass migrations and so the white settlement of the best parts of Africa is just another form of migration and time will tell whether it works out or not.

And finally, he makes the case that many of the white settlers represent a model of the traditional English squirearchy which has died out in the motherland, that they represent something fine and noble, with a patriarchal concern for the natives who they are slowly lifting out of savagery and into civilisation.

More than that, he thinks the way the mindset of the white settlers is so at odds with the socialising ideology of the modern they live in that they have a sort of special connection with the figure of The Writer, who is also at odds with his time.

Hmm. He’s wrong and the settlers were wrong. They might have had legal right on their side, but it was a system of law imposed by the conquering empire, a system which, notoriously, took no account of the African natives.

Waugh’s account is valuable and interesting because it isn’t an out-and-out racist, white supremacist argument, it’s much more mixed and nuanced than that. He happily criticises the whites, saying Anglo-Saxons are peculiarly prone to paranoid fears of other races. He says the appropriation of Masai land was a great injustice. He dislikes incidents of overt anti-black racism when he sees them. But, at the same time, his depiction of the white settlers as country-loving squirearchy is laughably sentimental and rose-tinted.

His account is valuable because it takes you into the complex dynamic of the situation circa 1930. There are:

  • the hard-working white settlers and farmers
  • the white professionals living in Nairobi and the towns who have made a killing out of property speculation
  • the distant government and civil service in Whitehall who all the settlers think don’t understand them and are gagging to sell them out
  • the colonial government on the ground in Nairobi which tries to mediate between London and the settlers, while also taking into account the interests of the natives
  • the native Africans who remain almost completely invisible and silent in Waugh’s account
  • much more visible and vocal are the Indians, successful businessmen who outnumber the whites, are often richer and more successful than them, but are infuriated at the way they are excluded from all aspects of white colonial life by a solid colour bar

In this account it is the Indians who are subject to pronounced racist attitudes. Waugh gives a tendentious account of three Indians he has a conversation with in Mombassa who get very heated. They are angry that they have no rights in Kenya, no legal or political rights and are discriminated against. Then they get angry about Indian independence. Waugh clearly dislikes them.

But they’re in the right. And he acknowledges the fact when he spends half a page dwelling on the hysteria which perfectly ordinary Anglo-Saxon people are driven into when abroad, when part of this absurd empire and their white privilege is threatened. He finds it incredible that the merest speculation that the governor might amend the law to allow Indians a vote in the Kenyan government has hot-headed whites muttering in their clubs about kidnapping the Governor and staging an anti-London protest similar to the Boston Tea Party.

He concludes the 4 or 5 pages he devotes to the subject by saying the entire colonial thing is an experiment. It’s perfectly possible that in the next 25 years the whole thing will be swept away. And, of course, eerily enough, that is just what happened. The entire ants nest of squabbling interest groups was swept away in the great tide of African independence which reached Kenya just 30 years later in 1963, to be replaced by an entirely new dynamic of tribally based political parties and much more severe problems.

Race and class

It comes as no surprise that a public schoolboy travelling the British Empire in 1930 occasionally betrays a condescending and patronising tone towards the ‘natives’. The two obvious things to go on to say are:

1. That he regularly expresses more or less the same condescending criticism towards Europeans, royalty, the English middle classes, colonists and so on, in fact about the entire enterprise of Empire which, like so many of his generation, he finds endlessly ridiculous. When he has dinner with a Quaker doctor and his wife there was ‘no nonsense about stiff shirts and mess jackets’; they eat dinner outside in their pyjamas.

2. For every negative comment about this or that group or tribe, there are plenty of positive remarks about other groups or nations or races or tribes.

For example, he goes out of his way to remark that the two most impressive and congenial people he met in his entire 6-month trip were Armenians and gives extended descriptions of their characters.

When I came to consider the question I was surprised to realise that the two most accomplished men I met during this six months I was abroad, the chauffeur who took us to Debra Labanos and Mr Bergebedgian, should both have been Armenians. A race of rare competence and the most delicate sensibility. (p.84)

No white supremacy there. He is full of admiration for the beauty of the women of Harar. And what prompted me to write this little section was a remark he makes à propos of his time in Zanzibar.

The Arabs are by nature a hospitable and generous race… (p.128)

He very much enjoys the company of a Turk he met on the boat to Zanzibar, enjoys discussing history and hearing history from an intelligent man born and bred entirely from the Mohammedan point of view (p.124).

The dividing line for Waugh isn’t race, as such: it is the line between civilisation and barbarism. Black men who can read and write, are educated, or maybe neither but still have manners and decorum are, for him, civilised. The Arabs demonstrate tremendous courtesy and hospitality. His two favourites among the hundreds of people he met were Armenians for their tolerance and capability. So it’s not to do with race, it’s to do with culture and civilisation.

On the other side of the line are what he calls the savages, the uneducated, illiterate, filthy and threatening natives, the ‘savages with filed teeth’ with long hair glued together by rancid butter dressed in rags. And then the homicidal behaviour of natives remote from all townships, who murder strangers on sight, sometimes eating them. For Waugh it’s not about skin colour as such, but behaviour and values, and these can be shared by anyone regardless of skin colour or ethnicity.

There is a third category which is the pushy, angry, Indian merchants and the occasional Jewish entrepreneur he encounters, and who he takes an instinctive dislike to. But again this isn’t necessarily about race. He just dislikes money-minded merchants of any culture: he is reliably contemptuous of British businessmen, especially lower-middle-class shopkeepers, and deprecates the commercially minded Yanks who hang round the emperor’s coronation. It’s not racism, it’s snobbery.

Alert and malicious

One contemporary described the young Waugh as having the appearance of ‘an alert and malicious faun’. Exactly. He is always alert. He notices (or invents) details which give his descriptions and accounts a tremendous specificity.

But this alertness of observation only ‘exists’ because of the way it is embodied within the text by the preciseness of his vocabulary and the timing of his phrasing, which themselves enact the aloof, scrupulous, alertness of attitude.

After a profoundly indigestible dinner, Mr Bergebedgian joined us – the unsmiling clerk and myself – in a glass of a disturbing liqueur labelled ‘Koniak’. (p.80)

I’m not claiming Shakespearian mastery of the language for Waugh, but pointing out the accuracy of observation and description. The way he casually mentions that the dinner was ‘profoundly indigestible’ is funny, continuing a theme about the general poverty and dirtiness of most of the places he stayed in – the hotel kept by the affable Armenian Mr Bergebedgian is described in the only travel book of the region as one to be avoided at all costs.

But it’s the placement of the adjective ‘disturbing’ which made me burst out laughing. The unexpectedness but preciseness of the word.

It is also part of the stylised vocabulary of the public school Bright Young Things. It is part of the pose they are trained in to underplay disasters and setbacks. ‘Oh I say, how unfortunate / how regrettable / how simply ghastly’ they say as their plane falls out of the sky, canoe goes over the falls, or the roast beef is a trifle overdone.

‘Disturbing’ is typical of that public school understatement: why say something as crudely explicit as ‘disgusting’ or ‘unpalatable’ when you can achieve humour and mastery of the situation with English understatement? So this one word raises a host of connotations. It is a complex effect delivered with immaculate timing, and it is this combination of a) surreal detail described with b) English understatement c) with perfect timing, which is such a key part of Waugh’s reliably entertaining style.

On other occasions it is just the sheer beauty of his descriptions. On the ferry across Lake Tanganyika he is forced to make a rough bed on the deck, all the cabins having gone to the savvy passengers who had bribed the captain:

As we got up steam, brilliant showers of wood sparks rose from the funnel; soon after midnight we sailed into the lake; a gentle murmur of singing came from the bows. In a few minutes I was asleep. (p.170)

It’s not the most dramatic scene, but he describes it with such smoothness and style. Having taken a few overnight ferries I recognise the mood, I felt I was there. When it is appropriate to be simple and descriptive, he is.

At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes it is the extended caricatures of the people he meets:

Soon after five the captain appeared. No one looking at him would have connected him in any way with a ship; a very fat, very dirty man, a stained tunic open to his throat, unshaven, with a straggling moustache, crimson-faced, gummy-eyed, flat-footed. He would have seemed more at home as the proprietor of an estaminet. (p.168)

Variety and innocence

This leads into my last point which is that the book contains a great diversity of characters. Alright, there aren’t any speaking parts for Africans once he’s left Ethiopia; but this large caveat aside, I found it wonderful that wherever he went, there was this diversity of races and nationalities: the two Armenians stick out, but plenty of Italians, French, Belgians, Germans, the Indians in Zanzibar, the Arabs and Jews in Aden.

And it’s not just nationalities, but a florid variety of characters and types, ranging from the shabby ship’s captain mentioned above to the most correctly dressed Governors and ambassadors, via Quaker missionaries in pyjamas, the monks of Debra Labanos in their filthy tunics, Kikuyu serving ‘boys’, Abyssinian bandits dressed in white gowns and riding donkeys, the historically-minded Turk, any number of demoralised Greek hotel keepers.

It has the same abundant mix of nationalities and types all rubbing along together which you get in the Tintin books of the 1930s and 40s. One of the things I loved about Tintin when I was a boy was the way all the characters are so colourful, come from different countries, speak different languages, cook different cuisines, are so wonderfully varied. The argumentative sea captain, the dotty professor, the dignified butler, the unstoppable opera singer, her timid assistant, the piratical South American dictator, the nitwit detectives – how unlike the boring, samey suburban English people I grew up among, what a wonderful escape into a realm where everyone has a vivid and distinct character.

The same variety is evident right from the opening scenes of this book, on the cruise ship bringing Waugh to Djibouti with its colourful cast of passengers, from princes to Foreign Legionaries.

I’ve just read half a dozen books about African countries where, at independence, almost the entire European population fled (Congo, Angola) or, soon afterwards, was expelled and all their businesses nationalised (Zaire, Uganda).

Buried in the chaos of the Second World War were huge ethnic cleansings and attempted genocides. The Cold War saw ideological differences stop being entertaining and become murderous. In Africa (and South America and South-East Asia) communist guerrillas kidnapped and murdered foreigners, dictatorships ran death squads, the world became a much more dangerous place. In Africa, specifically, successive nationalist regimes nationalised all foreign businesses and expelled their owners. The Greek hotel owners, the Armenian taxi drivers, the Russian who runs a hide company in Addis Ababa, the other European oddballs who’d fetched up in remote corners and, of course, the large Indian business communities in many African countries – all expelled, all banished, all swept away. Replaced by much more homogeneous societies, 100% black, 100% African.

I think that’s what happened. By the time I went a-travelling in the late 1970s it felt like the colourful bricolage or personalities you regularly encounter in Tintin or pre-war travel books had vanished: in Egypt I met only Egyptians, in Thailand only Thais, in Turkey only Turks, in Greece only Greeks.

The colourful world in which you pulled into an Ethiopian or Ugandan town to find the only hotel run by a morose Greek and the only taxi in town driven by a cheerful Armenian taxi driver and got chatting with a jolly Turk happy who explained the Mohammedan view of history – that colourful world of variety and diversity had gone for good.

Credit

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1931. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions, memoirs and travel writing set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

2 Comments
by Simon on November 29, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, British Empire, Travel writing
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/remote-people-evelyn-waugh/

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)

‘It should be an interesting few weeks, old boy.’
(The words of David, Fergal Keane’s tall, elegant, 60-year-old BBC producer, as they arrive at the border of Rwanda, page 42)

Fergal Keane, reporter and moral superstar

Keane is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and writer. This is a short 190-page book which recounts the journey undertaken by him, his 3-man BBC TV news crew, with a couple of South African security guys  (Glen and Tony) and two African drivers (Edward and Moses), as they crossed into north Rwanda from Uganda. It follows this team as they drove through the devastated countryside only weeks after it had been pacified by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and saw for themselves the corpses produced by the Rwandan genocide (April to July 1994). They saw hundreds and then thousands of dead bodies, clogging rivers, littered across the countryside and packed into buildings, houses and churches in villages and towns.

However, although the book contains many descriptions of bodies hacked to pieces, of mothers trying to protect their children who had their skulls cleaved open by machetes, children’s bodies cut clean in two, and so on – a kind of Pompeii of corpses caught in all manner of strange, poignant and horrifying postures as the murderers did their work – the horror is mixed with another element which I couldn’t  help finding irritating at first and then broadly comic, which is Keane’s humourless self-importance.

Keane the sensitive reporter is front and centre of the entire account, which opens not with any African or Rwandan voices, stories, facts or history or events, but with pages and pages of Keane impressing on the reader how he is such a sensitive man that even now, a year after his journey, as he writes his book, he is still haunted by dreams and nightmares of what he saw; how he struggles to put it into words, how he struggles to make sense of the horror of mass killing and so on.

My dreams are the fruit of my journey down the dirt road to Nyarubuye. How do I write this, how do I do justice to what lies at the end of this road? As simply as possible. This is not a moment for fine words. (p.76)

But the fact that he even has to tell us that he is agonising about how to write it, how to describe the scene, and shares with us his heroic decision not to use ‘fine words’, this is all grandstanding, showboating, foregrounding his wonderful scrupulousness as a Man and as a Writer. He may claim not to use ‘fine words’ (although, in fact, he often does) but he certainly uses fine feelings.

He could have just described what he saw and been a simple, factual, objective observer. But Keane is incapable of keeping himself out of the picture and swamps everything with his first-hand impressions, all recounted in a lulling Irish brogue.

This self-promotion extends beyond himself to encompass his BBC news crew (producer, cameraman, soundman) and fixers (the two SA security men), describing them as the best in the world, top of their trade, ace professionals – sensitive (very sensitive), creative, reliable, hard working – a great bunch of guys!

These passages dwelling at length on what a caring, sensitive fellow Keane is, and what a fantastically hard-working but sensitive crew he was privileged to work with – made me smile and occasionally burst out laughing at their self-importance, their lack of self-awareness, their complete inappropriateness in what purports to be a record of one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.

So Season of Blood can be broken down into three elements:

  1. The syrup-thick self-congratulation and oh-so-sensitive descriptions of how Keane felt, at the time and for months after the journey was over, which start and end the text and feature liberally throughout.
  2. The series of incidents which made up his actual journey across Rwanda: names of the people they met (generally from the RPF, sometimes the UN) who showed them sites of numerous atrocities where the bodies were still piled up in streets and fields, houses and churches, and interviews with (often very badly injured) survivors, and the genocidal Hutu authorities who dismissed it all as exaggeration and the inevitable casualties of war.
  3. Historical background – Keane’s solid reworking of the standard history I’ve read in all the other accounts.

1. A song for the sensitive

On the 1974 album ‘Monty Python Live at Drury Lane’, Neil Innes introduces his song ‘How sweet to be an idiot’ by whispering, ‘And now…a song for the sensitive’, to much laughter from those with a sense of humour. This phrase kept echoing round my head as I read the confessional parts of Keane’s text.

I thought New York journalist Philip Gourevitch had done a good job of showing off how sensitive and deep he was in his 1998 book about the Rwandan Genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, but he is blown clean out of the water by BBC journalist-superstar and softly-spoken Irishman, Fergal Keane. Here is the opening paragraph of Keane’s Rwandan Journey, for best effect to be intoned in a mellifluous Irish accent, very quietly and very sensitively:

I do not know what dreams ask of us, what they come to collect. But they have come again and again recently, and I have no answers. I thought that after the bad nights of last summer the dead had abandoned me, had mouldered into memory. But the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers and children, all the great wailing families of the night are back, holding fast with their withering hands, demanding my attention. Understand first that I do not want your sympathy. The dreams are part of the baggage on this journey. I understood that from the outset. After all, four years in the South African townships had shown me something of the dark side, and I made the choice to go to Rwanda. Nobody forced or pressurised me. So when I tell you about the nights of dread, understand that they are only part of the big picture, the first step backward into the story of a journey that happened a year ago. (page 1)

Personally, I think it was very considerate of the Rwandan people to stage an epic bloodbath in order to provide Mr Keane with a splendid backdrop against which to display his sensitive soul, his simple but poetic prose, his knowledge of ‘the dark side’ (guffaw) and his fine moral scruples. Just recently I notice the arrival in the language of the phrase ‘humble-bragging’, which means:

the action of making an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.

So when Fergal says he doesn’t want our sympathy, it was hell but he’ll be OK, no, no, he really doesn’t want our sympathy, not at all, really he doesn’t, the dreams, the dreams are sometimes hard to bear, but, shucks, he was just doing his job, no, no sympathy thank you — it’s hard not to burst out laughing at his self-important humble-bragging.

And not just him. He says there were many of ‘us’ who went there, many tip-top international journalists like Fergal. Some claim they don’t have bad dreams, but Fergal knows better. They, all of them, this band of brothers, this close-knit community of sensitive reporters, according to Fergal, they still ‘mourn the dead of Rwanda’. They still suffer at nights from that special feeling. What special feeling? Well:

How can I best describe it? It is a mixture of dread fascination, sorrow for what we learned and lost in the short few weeks of chaos, a mind weariness that feeds itself by replaying the old tapes over and over. We reach for the off switch but in the darkness cannot find it. (p.3)

Portentous and pretentious, humourless self-importance. Note the deliberately ‘poetic’ language. Given the choice between the ordinary functional word and the archaic, poetic equivalent, Fergal always plumps for the latter. He and his crew don’t get up at the start of the day; they ‘rise to start another day’ (p.44). The crooks they meet with in Nairobi are ‘rogues’ (p.48). The rains don’t prompt new growth, they ‘bring forth’ great tangles of vegetation, as if touched by the staff of Moses (p.49). David doesn’t start crying when he thinks about his daughter back home; he is ‘in the thrall of this fatherly emotion’ (p.35). Every page is blessed with a gem of pretentious and high-sounding diction.

And the journey itself is not just another old hack’s trip to cover another grim African tragedy: it is a knight of the round table on a quest, it is a pilgrim’s progress, it is the odyssey of a Great Spirit, greater, finer, more sensitive than the humble likes of you and I.

My journey into Rwanda was about following the lines of blood and history; about sleeping with the smell of death, fear and hatred; about exhaustion and loss and tears and in some strange ways even love. For me to make sense of that journey, however, I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valleys of the heart and mind and soul… (p.3)

What a wanker. And the Rwandans? The genocide? You want to know about them? Hang on, first there’s another fifty pages while we follow the road down into the valleys of Fergal’s heart and mind and soul…

Padding

So Keane comes over, fairly regularly, as a self-important so-and-so. But the emphasis on the personal nature of his text and the amount of time he spends describing his travelling companions may have a more banal cause. For he tells us early on that he only spent a few weeks in Rwanda (p.4) (later on he tells us that his brief trip started in early June 1994; p.123).

So there may be an embarrassingly simple reason why so much of the text describes his fine feelings, his doughty companions and the logistics of their journey rather than the history or politics of Rwanda – this preening might simply be padding, padding out a book which, even with all this bumf, barely stretches to 190 pages.

In fact it’s only on page 48 of the 190 pages that Keane and his team actually cross into Rwanda and the journey proper begins. So the actual travelogue through Rwanda is barely 140 pages long. Season of Blood is an often intense but, ultimately, quite thin and superficial account.

Top chaps

Fergal went to Rwanda with a BBC team to make a film for Panorama and what a team he took with him! He is accompanied by one of the BBC’s most respected producers ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’; by a soundman who is also a novelist; by a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’. Goodness! What special people Fergal surrounds himself with! What heroes! What legends!

And it takes one top chap to know another top chap. Thirty seconds on Fergal’s Wikipedia page tells us that Keane attended the Presentation Brothers College in Cork, a private, fee-paying Catholic school which is ranked the number one boys’ secondary school in Ireland. Maybe this is where he got his overweening sense of superiority from, his indestructible confidence in what are, in the end, pretty banal observations written in humble-bragging prose.

Rather snipingly, Fergal points out that most other TV journalists and crews are, unfortunately, just mercenary hacks who fly wherever the bodies piling up, knock out superficial stories about a situation they barely understand and then, as soon as the fighting stops, move on.

Where television is concerned, African news is generally only big news when it involves lots of dead bodies. The higher the mound, the greater the possibility that the world will, however briefly, send its camera teams and correspondents. Once the story has gone ‘stale’ i.e. there are no new bodies and the refugees are down to a trickle, the circus moves on. (p.7)

TV news is sensationalist and superficial!? Who knew? This must be why the BBC pays its top correspondents the big bucks, for coming up with wonderful insights like this.

But Saint Fergal is making this point in order to emphasise that he is not like all those other TV correspondents and that his crew are not like all those other horrible mercenary crews. No, his crew includes a sound man who is also a novelist; and a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’; and a producer ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’!

And they work for the BBC so they must be the best! And they are fronted by a sensitive soul who still has dreams, all these months later, of the terrible things he saw but no, thank you, no, he doesn’t need your sympathy. Very kind, but he’s man enough to take it.

Admittedly, this band of heroes only flew into Rwanda when the story began to involve lots of bodies – exactly like the other crews he criticises. Admittedly, they only stayed for a few weeks – exactly like those other crews he criticises. Admittedly, his team also moved on once the story had gone stale –exactly like those other crews he criticises. But his crew did it all in a specially sensitive and rugged and heroic way, in a noble BBC kind of way, which completely separates them from all the other media riff-raff. This isn’t just any old reporter and his camera crew; this is an M&S reporter and his camera crew.

David the producer is tall, silver haired and works harder than anyone Fergal has ever met! He is steady as a rock, ‘not given to exaggeration or panic’! Whatever situation they find themselves in David can always fix it, with a few discreet words and a shrewd wink. What a top chap!

David never reveals his feelings because he’s that kind of steady, dignified, old-fashioned type of fellow. Right up until, one day, barrelling along in their Land Rover, Fergal shares the Yeats poem, ‘Prayer For My Daughter,’ with him, at which point a quiet tear comes to David’s eye, as he thinks of his own beloved daughter back home in Blighty (p.35). Poetry! Yeats! A quiet tear! Yes, what a fine and sensitive chap he is, what fine chaps they all are!

Perhaps more than anything I admired his old-fashioned journalistic honesty. David believed in going to places and finding out what was happening, talking to as many sides as possible, and only then making up his mind. In this he was different from many producers who arrived with their own predetermined ideas of what the story should be and then sought out the voices to support their theories. He wasn’t a glamorous media figure, nor was he political in the sense of fighting internal battles within the BBC. Although it is hard to guess at the true motives of a colleague, I liked to think that David Harrison was moved ultimately by the oldest and most noble journalistic aspiration of all: to seek the truth and report it whatever the consequences. (p.67)

Shucks. Saint Fergal and noble David are travelling with old Africa hands Tony and Glenn. Tony is a short story writer and novelist who went to ‘one of Johannesburg’s top public schools’. Need Fergal say any more? I’m sure we are all prepared to bow down before this great achievement and, if more praise were needed, Fergal tells us that Tony was his college rowing champion! Just what I need to know in a book about the Rwandan genocide.

Glenn, by contrast, worked his way up from a tough, deprived and petty criminal background, via a spell in the South Africa Defence Force, on to become ‘one of the best news cameramen in the country’ and ‘the most sensitive cameraman I have ever worked with’ (p.40). The sensitivity and camaraderie ooze out of this book like ectoplasm. I washed my hands after reading it but I couldn’t wash my brain.

Carlsberg doesn’t make world-beating TV news crews, but if they did…

Basically, Saint Fergal is trying to write a novel, except it is a novel full of hilariously pretentious and stereotyped moments (before they leave Kenya for Rwanda, Keane gets drunk with a fellow journalist in a hotel bar in Nairobi who ominously warns Keane that he is heading towards a realm of ‘spiritual damage’, p.43).

This novel manqué features a cast of noble, high-minded chaps (top public school, best cameraman in the country, champion rower, noble producer etc) and is written in a pretentious mash-up of late-Victorian diction (‘we rose to begin our journey’ – that’s actually what he writes on page 44) and the Bible (‘The rains had brought forth a great tangle of vegetation’). The prose reads like the stained glass windows in the chapel of his elite Catholic boarding school – simple, over-coloured, larger than life, sentimental and repellently high-minded.

Buried in this short book is some excellent reportage, some vivid encounters and some stomach-churning scenes – but all swamped by a kind of rehashing of a Victorian, boys’ own adventure novel.

2. Rwandan history

Fergal tells the same outline history I’ve read in David van Reybrouck, Philip Gourevitch and Jason Stearns. Nobody really knows their origins, but eventually Rwandan society came to be split between three ethnic groups, the Hutu from the west (85%), the Tutsi from the north (15%) and smattering of the Twa, descendants of the pygmies who probably lived in the Rwanda-Burundi region first but are now marginalised.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans first arrived, they discovered a society where the Tutsi formed a cattle-rearing elite, ruled by a Tutsi king, who lorded it over the four-fifths of the population who were Hutu peasant farmers. The stereotype has it that the Tutsi are tall and thin, with thin lips, long noses and lighter skins, while the Hutu are shorter, stockier with more classical ‘Negro’ features – although, like all the other writers on the subject, Fergal emphasises that, after centuries of intermarriage, plenty of the population was impossible to assign to one group or the other.

The German colonisers in the 1890s, and then the Belgians who were allotted Rwanda after Germany lost World War One, both these European colonisers sided with the aristocratic Tutsi. In the 1930s the previously fluid demarcation between the ethnic groups was destroyed when the Belgians issued identity cards which required Rwandans to specify which racial group they belonged to.

At this point Fergal does what Gourevitch does: he speeds over the history of ethnic tension between the two groups because he is concerned to make the genocide seem unique, unprecedented, a freak, impossible to understand. In its scale it certainly was, and in the way it was very deliberately planned, managed and organised by Hutu extremists it certainly was, and in its aim at total extermination of the enemy, it was. And yet the insistence of both Gourevitch and Keane on making it sound exceptional is a  serious distortion of the facts. Because, as both writers concede, there had been a long history of inter-communal violence before 1994, which continued well after 1994.

Thus when the Tutsi monarch Mwaami Rudahigwa died in 1959, the Hutus rose in rebellion against Tutsi rule and between ten and one hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred. The rivers were full of bodies. That’s a lot of people. It begins to undermine the claim of the genocide to complete uniqueness.

In neighbouring Burundi the Tutsi held on to power through the 1960s and, to forestall a Hutu revolt, in 1973 the Burundi army murdered nearly a quarter of a million Hutus. A quarter of a million. That’s a lot of people, isn’t it? Once you start reading Rwandan history you realise the genocide may have been unique in conception and ambition, but it is, at the same time, part of a continuum of Hutu-Tutsi massacres and pogroms, both in Rwanda and Burundi, which go back at least as far as independence if not before.

Gourevitch and Keane both come on as if the 1994 genocide was a one-off, uniquely wicked and evil event, and it is its perceived uniqueness which prompts in both writers a great deal of hand-wringing and virtue signalling. Why oh why did they…? What oh what made them…? How could anybody behave like this…? and so on.

But hang on – isn’t massacring 100,000 Tutsis in 1959 also a bit, you know, evil? And what about the murder of nearly a quarter of a million Hutus? Also, pretty violent and pretty evil, too.

Why aren’t there books about those massacres? Does a hundred thousand not register? Is quarter of a million not enough? Is it as simple as the fact that back then, in the 60s and 70s, there was less TV coverage, less satellite technology to flash footage round the worlds, that it was harder to travel to these remote countries, so the massacres didn’t get covered and so…all those dead Africans don’t count?

Keane goes on to explain that by 1990 the kleptocratic crony regime of Rwandan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana was so corrupt that it found it very convenient to use the century-old bogeyman of ‘the Tutsi oppressor’ to stir up their power base among the Hutu majority. They needed to stay in power so that top figures in the regime could carry on happily creaming off aid money and World Bank loans into their personal Swiss bank accounts.

Keane supports the mainstream theory the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane wasn’t shot down, killing all on board, by Tutsi wrong-doers but by extremists within his own Hutu government. Habyarimana’s sudden death allowed Hutu supremacists to seize power and, within just one hour of the president’s death, to start issuing orders to implement the plan for the total extermination of the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda (maybe 1.5 million people) which senior members of Hutu Power had been carefully working on for years.

I take the point that what sets the 1994 massacres apart was the entirely political nature of the genocide, and the existence of a detailed plan, and the use of all the levers of the state to mobilise people to the killing, and the fact that the stated ambition was total annihilation of the Tutsis…

But I felt uneasy that Keane, like Gourevitch, devotes two hundred pages and a lot of hand-wringing to the killing of 800,000 people, but skims over the murder of 250,000 people or of 100,000 people in a sentence – as if their murders don’t matter so much because they weren’t massacred in such an organised way.

Are some campaigns of mass murder more important, more meaningful than others? Are the dead in one mass murder campaign less important than the dead in another one? The short answer, on the evidence of these books, appears to be yes.

3. What Fergal saw

Keane and his crew cross the border and are met with polite and intelligent RPF soldiers, part of the well-disciplined force which has driven the Hutu army from the country. David the noble producer had contacted the RPF from Belgium and so an army liaison officer, Lieutenant Frank Ndore, is waiting for them at the first checkpoint inside Rwanda. From here onwards, Frank will be their polite and helpful guide.

Frank takes them to meet Rose Kayitesi who’s switched from being a rebel fighter to setting up a refuge for 50 or so orphaned children aged 6 to 8 in an abandoned hotel (p.68). Some of them tell their stories, like the young girl who describes seeing her entire family hacked to death by the Interahamwe, herself is badly injured but left under a pile of corpses where she remains still till the attackers have left. Their guide, Frank explains why the Interahamwe were so keen to exterminate all children and hid in wait for them or silently listened out for whimpers and crying before moving in for the kill (p.71). Which has resulted in some of the child survivors in his care withdrawing, refusing to eat and, literally, dying of grief (p.72).

Fergal sees the river clogged with corpses (p.74). Many rivers were clogged with bodies. Lake Victoria became so polluted with corpses that Ugandan fishermen dragged them out and buried them to stop them killing off the fish (p.75).

Frank takes them to the town of Nyarubuye where some 3,000 people were hacked to pieces in and around the parish church (p.76). Keane describes lots of human bodies which have been hacked to death from every possible angle, displaying every possible wound.

They meet small groups of refugees on the road, clustering together for safety, each one generally the sole survivor of the massacre of their family, their village, their entire community.

The offices of the mayor of Rusomo have been converted into a makeshift hospital for survivors with terrible wounds. There is no medicine, no painkillers. The mayor or bourgmestre was Sylvestre Gacumbitsi and many of the poor Tutsis of the town turned to him for help as the atmosphere became tense on the buildup to the genocide. Not only did he turn them away, but a few days later he led Hutu death squads round the homes of Tutsis and directed the mass murder, using the identity cards he had in the filing cabinets in the office. Flora Mukampore only survived, badly cut and bleeding, because she hid under a pile of fresh corpses (p.89).

On the spur of the moment Keane and is producer decide to try and track down this génocidaire and mass murderer, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, and so drive east, across the border into nearby Tanzania, and to Benaco, one of the biggest refugee camps which sprang up as hundreds of thousands of terrified Hutus fled the advancing RPF.

Bencao camp turns out to be a vast mudbath, organised into ‘roads’ between groups of tents made from tarpaulin supplied by the UN and aid agencies. They spend the night and then, next morning, assiduous questioning does in fact lead them to Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. He is surrounded by young men with machetes who are carrying out his orders as he manages the distribution of rice to refugees from his canton. Keane questions him as hard as possible, putting to him the accusations of eye witness who saw him (Sylvestre Gacumbitsi) directing the killing. But the big man denies it, dismisses it all as Tutsi propaganda, and his surly followers mutter agreement.

In a flash Keane realises the génocidaires have brought their entire social system into the camps, recreated their networks of clientilism and patronage and intimidation. And the international community is going along with it, funding them, feeding them, allowing them to recreate their murderous Hutu militias (p.107).

Keane realises the international community which did sweet FA to prevent the genocide has been only too happy to jump into action when confronted with a huge refugee crisis. Setting up camps, flying in vast amounts of food, publicity photos of the faces of happy aid workers helping happy refugees, this is what everyone wanted. Keane thinks well-armed Western soldiers could have easily identified leading génocidaires and arrested them. Their failure to do so was a complete moral failure. The international community was ‘giving comfort to butchers’ (p.110).

That same night the team drive back over the bridge by the Rusomo Falls into Rwanda. They see soldiers looting refugees. Reading this, it occurs to me that most of the world is like this, and most of history has been like this: bullies preying on smaller bullies who prey on the absolutely helpless.

Drunk Tanzanian soldiers try to stop them crossing the bridge and then to confiscate their video camera, but, like their fairy godmother, Lieutenant Frank appears and gets the RPF soldiers his side of the river to pay the drunk Tanzanian soldiery a few hundred dollars and a tricky situation is defused (p.113). Really makes me want to go to Africa. Sounds like a wonderful place.

Lieutenant Frank organises a tour of the abandoned and ransacked presidential palace. (This is reminiscent of Michela Wrong touring the abandoned and ransacked palace of Joseph Mobutu or Philip Gourevitch in the abandoned and ransacked palace ditto. It’s a kind of standard element or trope of ‘the overthrow of dictators’ journalism.)

Then the team are staying at the UN offices along with all the other correspondents, journalists and news crews. (They do tend to stick together, journos and news teams.) Keane is in Kigali when half the city was still in the Hutu government hands and the RPF was shelling and mortaring its way into the government half.

At short notice the team is invited to visit a Red Cross hospital. To nobody’s surprise a hospital in a war zone is packed with terribly injured soldiers and civilians. He sees a small Tutsi boy whose arm has been cut off. Details like that, snapshots, say more than all Keane’s editorialising.

When they leave to drive back through roadblocks to the rebel side of Kigali, they are hustled into smuggling with them two European missionaries who have escaped from a mission up country because Brother Otto’s arm was wounded and he needs treatment. Nerve-racking moments as they smuggle the two missionaries out of the Hutu side and into the RPF side. If the Hutus stop them, maybe they’ll arrest the missionaries, maybe the whole team, or maybe just shoot them all.

Later, Keane hears the missionaries’ story. To seek out help they left behind a mission full of Tutsi children they had been protecting. The children knew it was coming. They asked to be locked in a room. A week later the militia came and slaughtered all 50 of them. Brother Henri tells Keane all this though tears.

That night the team get drunk with their faithful guide Lieutenant Ndore who insists, like all the RPF they’ve met, that it’s not about ethnicity, it’s about power and politics. A political cabal and their clients had made personal fortunes creaming off the nation’s wealth and turning the civil service into a party machine (p.20). They wanted to carry on doing so under the dictatorship and didn’t want to be forced to accept a multi-party, multi-ethnic constitution which the ‘international community’ was forcing Habyarimana to accept.

Without political power the whole system of patronage and clientelism would collapse. (p.23)

The politics of ethnicity

Throughout the book Keane repeats the same notion, which is that the genocide may have been defined in terms of ethnicity but it was at bottom politically motivated. It took expression in ethnic cleansing but it was about one group, one party, the extreme wing of the president’s MRND party and its extended clients, clinging on to power and consolidating its power for ever.

Keane’s insistence can be interpreted several different ways: one is that he is sticking to a humanistic conviction that ethnicity isn’t the be-all and end-all because this optimistic conviction allows him to hope that ethnicity can be overcome and so that the genuinely multi-ethnic state which the RFP promises can be brought into existence.

But it is possible to devise a kind of reverse interpretation of the same set of facts, which is: what if, in many countries, ethnicity is politics? In the 25 years since Keane wrote this book ethnicity hasn’t disappeared as a defining factor in political cultures around the world, it has grown, particularly in the last decade. All round the world we have seen the rise of nationalist leaders waving their national flag and liable to attack minorities: the BJP demonising Muslims in India; the military junta in Myanmar ethnically cleansing the Rohingya; China brutally clamping down on the Xinjiang Muslims. And anti-immigrant rhetoric becoming widespread across the West.

Keane’s book was written before any of this happened but, at various points, it emphasises that these kinds of divisions between ethnicities are not inevitable but are always stirred up by politicians with essentially political motivations i.e. using ethnic differences in order to stir up their base and remain in power. And in the money.

Back to the journey

Anyway, back in the narrative, it’s time to say goodbye to the helpful, intelligent Lieutenant Ndore and so Fergal gives him the edition of Yeats’s poetry which he’s been carrying round, as a thank you present (p.141).

He writes a half-page note about visiting the Amohoro stadium in Kigali, which the UN forces managed to secure during the genocide and where they protected thousands of terrified refugees.

And the second half of the same page records a visit to the Milles Collines Hotel, also guarded by a small contingent of UN soldiers, where hundreds of refugees were still living in terror that the Interahamwe lounging at the roadblocked entrance would one day simply walk in and hack everyone to pieces, the hotel which was to become famous because of the movie, Hotel Rwanda (p.142).

Keane and his crew are assigned a new RPF minder named Ernest to replace Lieutenant Frank, but he is a kid, unreliable and always wants to sleep. He is meant to guide them on the route south into Burundi. They get into their Land Rovers and drive to the town of Kabuga, which saw heavy fighting. Every building is damaged, bodies, not just of humans. A dead cow is wedged into a doorway (p.145).

Ernest then tells them he knows the route to the border with Burundi and sets them off down a road which gets smaller and more jungley until they pass two wrecked vehicles and realise the road is landmined. As this is sinking in, they see two figures ahead burying something and, in a sweaty panic, hurriedly turn the jeep round and drive all the way back to Kabuga.

After recovering from this stressful experience back in Kabuga, they set off south again, this time by a different route. Hours of nervous tension driving through jungle with one of the crew’s two Land Rovers making bad sounds as if it’s about to break down. They arrive at the village of Zaza, held by the RPF, who are guarding several hundred Hutu prisoners. Keane quotes an African Rights report which estimates that 800 people were murdered in the commune of Zaza, and quotes one woman survivor who watched the children being hacked to death and was, again, buried under a pile of bodies, covered in blood and so thought dead by the attackers (p.154).

They spend a nerve-racking night in this village, given a few rooms in an abandoned house by the RPF officer, who commands just 15 men to hold a remote village filled with 300 or more Hutu prisoners, while everyone knows the Interahamwe are out there in the jungle.

Next day, 12 June 1994, they finally make it to the Burundi border and are checked through by drunk Tutsi Burundi soldiers. They say goodbye to the two Ugandan drivers, Edward and Moses, who have to turn round and drive right the way across Rwanda and back across the northern border, into Uganda, before it gets dark.

They are met in Burundi by Rizu Hamid, a South African-born Asian who’s worked as Fergal’s fixer before, during his time in South Africa. She is, of course, ‘tough and dedicated’. He is awestruck by her ability to smooth talk even the most difficult, dangerous soldiers at roadblocks (p.167). But then we long ago learned that everyone Fergus works with is an epitome, world beating, top of their profession, and so on.

Rizu has arranged for a young government soldier named Sergeant Patrice to be their minder as they penetrate back north into the government-held areas of west Rwanda to meet and interview, well, murderers.

After a series of nerve-wracking encounters at no fewer than 30 roadblocks, the crew finally arrive in Butare and put up in a basic hotel. David and Fergal interview the Rector and Vice-Rector of Butare University. Like other Hutus they’ve already met, this couple are far from stupid, but believe the government’s line entirely: that the nation was under threat from the RPF’s 1990 invasion, that war was the only way to defend themselves, that the RPF only seek to reassert Tutsi paramountcy and restore the Hutu serfdom of pre-1959.

Next day they go to interview the town prefect, Sylvan Nsabimana. They ask him about the fate of the last few hundred Tutsi left alive in the whole region who are being held in a camp right outside the prefect’s office. Nsabimana is all reassurance and tells them that, in fact, he is planning to evacuate the children to nearby Burundi, the following day.

Keane presses him on the murders, on the genocide but, like every government official they meet, Nsabimana repeats the government line that there was no genocide, that the government was protecting the country against attack by the RPF, who are wickedly planning to restore their oppressive rule. If confronted with examples of actual killings, Nsabimana gives the stock answer that, alas and alack, casualties happen in time of war.

The next day Fergal, Rizu, David and the rest attach themselves to the convoy of lorries carrying Tutsi children to freedom in Burundi. they pass through a series of nerve-racking roadblocks, which Nsabimana himself negotiates their way through and then, finally, they cross the border into Burundi for good and Keane’s Rwandan journey is at an end.

Thoughts

How long did Fergal’s Journey last in total, then? Two weeks? Three weeks? Less than two weeks? He doesn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t long and he didn’t really get to talk to that many people, 20 to 30 maximum. Compare and contrast with Philip Gourevitch who visited Rwanda for a total of something like nine months and gives the impression of having spoken to hundreds of people.

Keane’s book is shorter but it is much more intense. The descriptions of his anxiety in long trips through the jungle and his terror at roadblocks manned by drunken soldiery are very vivid. And his first-hand account of seeing the actual bodies piled up in streets and fields and offices and churches is powerful. Almost powerful enough to make you forget the preening opening of the book.

For all his feeble inability to really grasp the scale and depth and meaning of the genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s book is a lot better. It has far more history and context than Keane’s and he includes testimony and interviews from far more people, including lots of UN officials and, crucially, the brains behind the RPF, Paul Kagame.

And Gourevitch also continues the story on past the genocide itself, for quite a few years, up till 1998, so he gives a far better sense of the ongoing political importance of the huge refugee camps in Zaire, and how they came to trigger the first Congo War – a depth of perspective which is necessarily missing from Keane’s account which, in essence, boils down to vivid reportage of a hurried, stressful 2-week visit to the country in June 1994, smack bang in the middle of its combined civil war and genocide.

He didn’t have to go

The very force of Keane’s candidly described terror keeps prompting the same thought. He undergoes ordeals of tension and stress, bursts out swearing at the drivers, has to get drunk at night to obliterate the sights he’s seen or take pills to get to sleep. He thinks forlornly of his family. He wishes he were back home. The rector of Butare university invites him to his house to watch Ireland play in the World Cup, in New York, and Keane desperately, desperately wishes he was there.

Well, OK, the reader thinks: so go on, then – leave. Hire a taxi, get driven clean out of the danger zone, catch a plane home, be with your family. Tell the BBC you’d like to be the Westminster correspondent. Or work on Strictly Come Dancing. If you hate your job so much, if it means you end up seeing too many corpses, meeting too many evil people, having too many nightmares, here’s an idea – quit being a foreign correspondent and go home.

No-one is forcing Keane to repeatedly travel into war zones and risk getting casually murdered by drunk soldiers at a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. This is a choice he has made.

When he keeps telling us how wretched and awful and terrifying and lonely and damaging it is to be in such horrific zones and see so many corpses and confront so much evil, the reader thinks: well, don’t do it, then. But don’t willingly and voluntarily choose this line of work, hustle for the job, undertake the assignments – then bleat about how horrible it all is and expect my sympathy.

The shameful record of the Americans

The US administration of Bill Clinton did its best to ignore the genocide. America (and Belgium) insisted on reducing the UN presence from 2,500 to 250 on the eve of the genocide, guaranteeing that the UN could not intervene, and reinforcing them with a mandate which stipulated no military intervention. Even when they could see Tutsis being hacked down from their offices, they were unambiguously instructed not to intervene to save anyone.

‘Never again must we…. All it requires for evil to flourish is good men to do nothing…We must never forget the victims of the Holocaust… blah blah blah.’ Whenever you hear public figures spouting that kind of feel-good cant, remember it’s bullshit.

Once alerted to the killings, the Americans deliberately delayed sending what UN troops remained in Rwanda a consignment of arms and armoured cars to help them. America insisted on charging full market rate for the vehicles and their delivery, which the UN couldn’t afford (p.123).

On President Bill Clinton’s orders the Americans refused at every level of government to use the word ‘genocide’ for, if they did, America would have been legally obligated to intervene and America did not want to intervene.

When the victims of a genocide were being murdered in front of their eyes, the Americans did everything in their power to avoid giving any help. Beyond shameful. Complicit.

French support for the genocidal regime

The French continued to support the genocidal Hutu regime after the genocide was well under way and opposed the Tutsi RPF which ended the genocide, because partly because the génocidaires spoke French, and the PDF (hailing from the former British colony Uganda) spoke English. Seriously.

The French had long supported Habyarimana and had no wish to see him driven from power by the rebels. The pro-Habyarimana faction in Paris was led by François Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe, who saw Rwanda as part of a Francophone Africa under threat from the encroachments of the English-speaking nations to the north and east i.e. Uganda and Tanzania. Among Jean-Christophe’s gifts to the Rwandan president was the personal jet which was shot out of the sky on 6 April. The implication of this friendship was clear: if the price for maintaining some degree of French influence was the preservation of despots and kleptocrats, then Paris was always more than willing to pay.

In contrast to Habyarimana, the leaders of the RPF were largely English-speaking. The long years of exile in Uganda had forced them to abandon the French language. For their part the French maintained a military mission and a sizeable detachment of intelligence officers in Rwanda. With their contacts inside the army and at every level of government and the state media, Paris could not have been ignorant of the genocidal intentions of many of the senior officers and officials. For the French to suggest otherwise would be a lamentable comment on the abilities of their own intelligence services and diplomats. (p.26)

As part of a sustained effort to discredit the invading RPF and continue support for the genocidal Hutu Power regime, a French security agent claimed he had the black box from Habyarimana’s shot-down jet which proves it was the RPF who fired the missiles. But he provided no actual evidence and soon disappeared from view (p.117).

[President Habyarimana’s] brother-in-law Protais Zigiranyirazo was up to his neck in the trade in endangered species. Protais was a founder member of the Zero Network and an original shareholder in Radio Milles Collines. A book David has brought with him on our journey, Murder in the Mist, alleges that Protais was involved in the murder of American naturalist Dian Fossey because of her attempts to save the gorillas of the Rwandan rain forest. To date he has not even issued a rebuttal, much less attempted to sue the author. Protais is currently enjoying the sanctuary provided by the government of France, along with his sister Agathe and several other family members. It is not likely that they will see the [presidential] palace again, but they have the security of foreign bank accounts and the sympathy of the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) to console them in exile. I can see what sickens Frank. (pages 119 to 120)

That last sentence refers to the way the entire RFP up to its leader Paul Kagame were sickened at the absolute inaction of the ‘international community’ to prevent the genocide. The inaction was led by America which blocked every attempt to intervene, and by France, which energetically supported the genocidal regime, gave it arms and weapons even as the genocide was taking place and set up safe havens in the west of the country for genocidal Hutus fleeing the advancing RPF.

As the RPF rolled through the country and brought the genocide to an end, the French government flew the genocidal regime’s leaders to safety in Paris, where they’ve been leading lives of luxury ever since, right up to the present day, 2021. What’s not to despise and loathe about the despicable French government and security apparatus?

Mistaking genres

Lastly, maybe my negative reaction to Keane’s book is my fault. Maybe I’m being dim. Maybe I’m getting my genres mixed up. Maybe I’m expecting the objectivity of a history from a text which, right from the start, declares it is going to be an entirely subjective account. Only right at the end of the book did it occur to me that this kind of subjective journalism is maybe a variety of confessional literature.

When Keane writes at length about the nightmares he’s suffered ever since his Rwanda trip, about his drinking, about how scared he was at numerous points, about how he lost his temper with the driver and came to loathe their irresponsible RPF guide Albert, how much he missed his wife and how much he wished he could just go home – I found all this tediously subjective, but maybe I’m being an idiot for expecting anything else. The book is sub-titled a journey and clearly states right from the start that it is going to be a highly subjective account of one man’s experiences of a nightmare situation.

And, after all, maybe Keane’s prolonged descriptions of his feelings and psychological struggles are a deliberate strategy to take you with him right into the belly of the beast, to make you feel the fear and see the bodies, designed to be an immersive experience which combines historical background and political analysis with stomach-churning descriptions of what it was like.

I still didn’t like this book, but maybe my allergic reaction is my fault because I was continually judging it by the wrong criteria, assessing a work of confessional journalism as if it was a factual history. Anyway, I’ve given you enough evidence to make up your own mind.

Credit

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane was published in 1995 by Viking. All references are to the 1996 Penguin paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on October 18, 2021  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on October 18, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/10/18/season-of-blood-a-rwandan-journey-fergal-keane/

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré (2001)

‘It’s time educated men and women had some balls to speak out for truth instead of cringing in the shit-house like a bunch of craven cowards.’
(The Constant Gardener, page 424)

This is a long novel at 560 pages in the paperback edition. It deals with serious social, medical and political issues, and also includes sections of great suspense and tension, but I found it very difficult to read because, like most of le Carré’s later novels, the focus is very much on a handful of terrifically upper-class chaps and chapesses.

The main protagonist is blessed with the ‘good manners and ancient chivalry that were bred in him from his Etonian cradle’ (p.439) – and the relentlessly upper-class patois, speech rhythms and habits of thought evinced by him and almost all the other characters (unless foreigners or servants), almost made me throw the book away more than once. But I’m glad I soldiered on to the end because there are lots of good, and even brilliant, things in it.

Part one: the High Commission

Like most late le Carre’s novels this one starts in media res, in the middle of the plot, and then cunningly interweaves multiple flashbacks and memories to paint in the backstory and build back up to ‘the present’ while also moving the action moving forward, with the result that multiple timeframes interpenetrate each other. This always makes for a satisfyingly complex and interesting reading experience.

The Constant Gardener opens by introducing us to Sandy Woodrow, Head of Chancery at the British High Commission in Nairobi and his gossipy wife Gloria. Sandy has been lusting after Tessa, the young, free-spirited wife of Justin, the Old Etonian British representative on the East African Donors’ Effective Committee (EADEC) at the Commission. But Tessa appears to have been having a long-term affair with a black doctor, Arnold Bluhm, and now – the central event in the novel which triggers everything else – she has been found dead, murdered in a jeep on a trip into the back country along with Bluhm, who is missing, apparently on her way to visit the (real life) Dr Richard Leakey.

Posh characters

In these early pages we realise with a sinking feeling, that we are, once again, among the very posh. All the main characters went to private school:

– When Sandy goes to the hospital to identify Tessa’s body it reminds him of the dormitory at his boarding school, the trestle the corpse is lying on like ‘matron’s ironing board’. Sandy’s father was a British Army General and he reads his two young sons bedtime stories from Biggles (p.144).

– His wife Gloria keeps in touch with her old boarding schools, likes to play act the school prefect, channeling her inner ‘head girl’ (p.472), and her thoughts – which we are given far more of than we could possibly want – are peppered with jolly hockeysticks expressions – Well played, that man! (p.52) Singing at Tessa’s funeral reminds both of them of chapel back at boarding school (p.138). And Justin is not just an Old Etonian, he is ‘the right sort of Etonian’ (p.98). (It is taken for granted that we all know how beastly it can be having to deal with the wrong sort of Etonian.)

– The High Commissioner’s jacket labels still say ‘P. Coleridge, Balliol’, to remind him of his jolly days at Oxford. Bernard Pellegrin, the Permanent Secretary, is always referred to as ‘the Pellegrin’ in that ho-ho public school drawl they all use, but he is always ready to take a chap to lunch at his club.

In other words, all the main characters dress, speak and think in the tones of Britain’s white, public school élite.

Part of their superior attitude is looking down on the lower classes. The impertinent secretary to the High Commissioner, Mildren (with typically mirthless ‘humour’ nicknamed Mildred, ha ha) has, in Sandy’s view, ‘the insolence peculiar to lower class secretaries’ (p.128). The police who arrive to interview Sandy also display tiresome characteristics of the lower classes, such as expecting their questions to be answered. Tut tut, what can one do about such ghastly people, darling?

I laughed out loud when Sandy drifts off during the church service for Tessa and a stained glass depiction of St Andrew reminds him of ‘Macpherson the gillie that time we drove the boys to Loch Awe to fish the salmon’ (p.139). Like the older Richard Hannay in John Buchan’s later novels, le Carré’s very pukka protagonists are only really comfortable with members of the working classes if they are servants or Victorian-style retainers. (Of the peasant fisherman who ferries Justin across the lake at the novel’s end, Justin thinks ‘this fellow was your born family retainer, which was why, to be honest, it was easy to confuse him with Mustafa’, p.564 – to even categorise the wily old peasant as a family retainer seems patronising and narrow-minded, and then to say it’s so easy to muddle up these helpful old black chaps…).

Because of course, here in Africa, each High Commission official has a large house staffed with plenty of servants who they forge sentimental bonds with. Justin in particular is held up as some kind of paragon for his close paternal friendship with his houseboy and his head servant Mustafa et al. The characters pour lofty scorn on their Victorian imperialist ancestors (and everything else) but their patronising self-regard, and their fondness for servants, seems absolutely unchanged since 1870.

The plot

Wayward young diplomat’s wife uncovers corporate misdoings in Africa, namely a pharmaceutical company recklessly trialling an experimental drug on Africa’s poorest. Big corporation bumps her off. Husband goes on quest to discover reason for her murder, uncovering conspiracy which includes FO staff and high-ups back in London. Just as he has satisfactorily dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, he is himself murdered and everything he’s discovered rubbished in a corporate cover-up.

Father a judge, mother a contessa, sent to boarding schools and Cambridge, Tessa Quayle showed her spirit and independence by rebelling against her privileged upper-class background. (I think she is meant to be a great romantic heroine – the stern Lara is made to say Tessa was ‘very beautiful and very tragic’, p.435 – but her breath-takingly privileged background and 100% saintly character made me laugh more than once.) Tessa falls in love with dry-as-dust Justin Quayle, an Old Etonian, who reminds her of her father (natch) and accompanies him as a ‘diplomatic wife’ on his next posting to Nairobi, capital of Kenya.

Here her rebellion takes the form of feeling sorry for the miserably poor Africans around her and angry at the outrageous corruption of Kenya’s ruling class and disgusted by the pusillanimous failure of the British to highlight their failings or hold them to account.

She harangues Sandy for his cowardice while he can only think about her firm young breasts. She has a more respectful relationship with her husband Justin, who lets her go off doing her charity work all day then spend all night tapping feverishly away at her computer, denouncing corruption and wrong-doing. It is understood that he maintains a presence inside the system while she is free to do whatever she wants outside it.

Tessa gets pregnant and insists on showing her solidarity for Africa’s impoverished women by having the baby in a local hospital, where it is promptly stillborn. Such is her commitment that she suckles the baby of a Kenyan mother, Wanzi, so poor and malnourished that she can’t herself produce milk. It is the wasting away, death and disappearance of this mother under the treatment of sinister Europeans in white coats, and then her complete erasure from the hospital records, which sets Tessa suspecting the drug she was being treated with in fact poisoned her, and Tessa’s strong-willed determination to get to the bottom of it which triggers the fateful sequence of events described in the novel. Tessa (and loyal black doctor and aid worker, Arnold Bluhm) become convinced that the mother was maltreated, was given some kind of experimental treatment by the sinister pharmaceutical conglomerate, ThreeBees, who dominate Kenya’s economy and sell everything from petrol to pills.

After burying her stillborn son, Tessa returns from hospital with a new determination to name the guilty men, and so she sends countless letters to various bodies, and tries to personally buttonhole the fat CEO of ThreeBees, Sir Kenneth K. Curtis. (He is a baddy and a symbol of corrupt Westerners bleeding Africa dry, so he is ‘vastly overweight’, p.186.)

Before, during and after the stillbirth she is accompanied everywhere by the legendary Dr Bluhm, godlike African activist, hero of Médecins sans Frontières, who has himself suffered, having been arrested and tortured in Algeria. Their relationship is so close that idle tongues in the ex-pat community (is there any other type) speculate that they are lovers and even that the baby was his.

Part two: a thriller

Elba

But around page 250 the novel emerges from the stiflingly posh atmosphere of the High Commission and develops some real pace. The main protagonist is still an Old Etonian with a network of posh friends, his wife is still the daughter of an Italian contessa, but the novel acquires the speed and nerve-racking edginess of a genuine thriller, something le Carré’s previous half dozen novels have (for me, at any rate) mostly lacked.

Justin goes on the run. He is recalled by the Foreign Office to London where he has what is clearly intended as a satirical debriefing from a senior woman in Personnel, who offers counselling, a rest break and other support for the bereaved husband. But Justin has his own plans. He gets his posh lawyer friend, Ham, to validate a fake passport, name of Peter Atkinson. Then he catches a ferry to France, travels incognito down to Italy and across to the island of Elba, where Tessa’s family own several ‘estates’ (handy). Here he greets the loyal old retainer (how nice to have these old retainers to smooth your passage through life) who manages the estate and unpacks. Now he has time and space to go through the haul of Tessa’s files and letters, piecing together the story of her investigations and, in the process, sharing it with the reader, namely:

The experimental drug Dypraxa is effective against multi-drug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis. The novel claims (with unfounded alarmism) that MDR TB will arrive in the West in the near future and that a handy treatment for it will make its owners a fortune. Dypraxa was discovered and developed by scientists in Canada working for a Swiss drug company, KVH (Karel Vita Hudson). Tessa’s documents identify the two women and man who worked on it. However, as it was rolled out for field trials in the developing world, reports began coming in of severe side effects, including blindness and death. Nonetheless large scale trials went ahead, although at least one of the drug’s inventors protested. KVH licensed the drug for distribution in Africa, and in Kenya, to the multinational, ThreeBees. Tess and Bluhm uncovered a trail of trials whose results have been systematically suppressed, patient deaths removed from the records, entire villages terrified into silence. Kenyan politicians were so corrupt they were happy to take the bribes from ThreeBees and ignore the deaths. KVH and ThreeBees insisted full and proper clinical trials had established the drug’s safety. Tessa and Bluhm had assembled an extremely detailed dossier of evidence and were travelling to northern Kenya to hand it over to Dr Richard Leakey, who they considered the only safe and independent voice in the country who could publicise their findings, when they were ambushed and murdered and all their documents disappeared.

The incorporation of different document types – magazine articles, newspaper reports, scientific papers, emails, letters, scribbled notes – though hardly a new device, gives the narrative a welcome sense of urgency and pace.

Holed up in one of the old buildings on the estate, Justin asks the 12-year-old son of the estate manager, Guido, to hack into Tessa’s computer. But when they open Tessa’s email program something has been sent to it which wipes the computer completely. Spooky.

Posh neighbours turn up unannounced with wine and commiserations, and peer over his shoulder, trying to see what old Justin is up to and old Justin is by now so spooked that he suspects they’ve been sent to spy on him. All good paranoid stuff.

In an interlude back at the High Commission we see Sandy Woodward struggling with his conscience, but not too hard, before delivering a speech to the assembled staff in which he has been ordered to lie for his country, and promote the official ‘line’, namely that the Kenyan police have issued an arrest warrant for Bluhm, who is obviously going to be made the scapegoat for Tessa’s murder, and going on to inform his staff that Justin has gone rogue, disappeared and, suffering from shock, appears to have concocted some cock and bull conspiracy theory. If he contacts anybody at the Commission, they must let him, Sandy, know immediately. Meanwhile part of him is sweating at the lies he knows he’s telling:

Who did this to me? he wondered while he talked. Who made me what I am? England? My father? My schools? My pathetic, terrified mother? Or seventeen years of lying for my country? (p.346)

Throughout the book the Foreign Office is depicted as populated by lickspittles, liars and corrupt politicians. It’s an amazing indictment from a man who once worked for it.

Bielefeld

Justin travels incognito to the little town of Bielefeld, near Hanover, in Germany. Here he arranges to meet someone mentioned in Tessa’s correspondence, Birgit, who works for a pharmaceutical-watching charity called Hippo. She tells Justin their charity was burgled a week before – the computer, all disks, and files of correspondence were taken, no money or valuables. More importantly she adds detail to the portrayal of Dypraxa and the scientists involved. First of all she explains the roles of its inventors, Dr Lara Emrich and Dr Kovacs overseen by a man named Markus Lorbeer, an odd character much given to quoting the Bible. Then she explains how big pharma companies bribe and seduce doctors with free trips and goodies, and other techniques of persuasion. But then she adds an important caveat:

Not all doctors can be seduced, not all pharmaceutical companies are careless and greedy. (p.370)

And more words to the effect that pharmaceutical companies contain many good and noble men and women researching the medicines that save all our lives. Maybe passages like this had to be put in at the insistence of lawyers, because the fictional indictment, the imaginative power of the novel, is so monumentally anti-pharma.

Convinced now that every passing car or pedestrian is spying on him, Justin makes it back to the hotel and walks into his room – only to be abruptly assaulted, have a hood slipped over his head, and be badly beaten up. A foreign voice warns him to lay off. His attackers eventually leave, allowing Justin to slowly recover and set about trying to untie his bonds…

Ghita’s quest

A junior member of the High Commission is Ghita Pearson, who Tessa had taken under her wing. Revolted by Sandy Woodward’s lecherous approaches, and then by his blatant lying about Tessa, Bluhm and Justin in the Big Speech he gives the Commission staff, she decides to find out what happened to them for herself. She makes an excuse to fly north to the same place Tessa visited, but under the pretext of having been asked by the WHO to check out a feminist support group. She flies to Lokichoggio, where she finds the aid camp where Tessa and Bluhm stayed. (Here – incidentally – there is lots of detail about what it’s like to be white people running this kind of place, designed to help African women be more independent, and the white women characters she meets, Sarah and Judith, are vividly described.) And Ghita is able to flesh out the Tess and Bluhm’s precise movements in their last days…

Switzerland

Justin just has the energy to stand, clean himself up, catch a cab to the station and a train to Zurich. It reminds him of childhood visits with his parents. He recuperates in a hotel with a trip to a medical clinic to be patched up. Then catches a train to Basel, home of many big pharmaceutical corporations. He struggles across town to the site of the huge gleaming KVH headquarters building.

Throughout this 250-page quest, Justin imagines that Tessa is with him. He jokes with her, shares his discoveries, asks her questions and, when he is dispirited, she spurs him on. His sections of the novel are marinated in her (fictional, hallucinated) presence. This is often very powerful and affecting.

Saskatchewan

Suddenly he is in Canada, in the town of Saskatchewan. This is one of the research centres of KVH pharmaceuticals (Canadian HQ in Vancouver) and he has come to meet one of the women involved in the original research, the fierce, humourless Dr Lara Emrich who, he discovers, has been hounded out of the university science department for criticising Dypraxa. KVH funds all kinds of research programs at the university, and so her out-spoken criticism a) jeopardises that b) leads quickly to her dismissal.

Emrich had done extensive research on the adverse side-effects of Dypraxa on 600 patients, submitted it to a learned journal where it was rejected, but the (supposedly independent) peer reviewers tipped off KVH and a) her contract was cancelled b) she received threatening notes in the post c) she started being followed. Emrich gives a summary of the situation:

  1. Dypraxa’s side effects are being concealed in the name of profit
  2. the world’s poorest communities are being used as guinea pigs by the world’s richest
  3. legitimate scientific debate is being stifled by threats and intimidation (p.429)

She and Justin are both so paranoid that they arrange to meet at neither her house nor his hotel but at the house of a third party, who turns out to be the fat, straight-talking Amy and her grumpy husband Ralph (p.423). As so often in a le Carré novel, it is this secondary character, a rumpled, foul-mouthed old geezer, who delivers the sweary ‘message’ of the book, that it’s time for all good men to speak out against corporate wickedness (see epigraph at the top of this review).

As they walk to Justin’s car, they see its wheels have been slashed. Two prowling cars approach, then one accelerates and tries to run them over. They jump into the car and drive off, the two flat tyres flumping against the road, just managing to evade the pursuing men long enough to make it to the ambulance station at the hospital. Here Emrich introduces Justin to an old Russian ambulance driver who has a soft spot for her, as a fellow Eastern émigré. This old man agrees to drive them back to Emrich’s house, where they are safe for the night and Justin sleeps.

Donohue and Curtiss

A creepy character who has appeared at the edges of various scenes is the tall, gaunt, childless Tim Donohue who is what the diplomats refer to as one of the ‘Friends’ ie works for British Intelligence. In a central scene we witness the head of ThreeBees, the obese very sweary Sir Kenny Curtiss yelling at Donohue, and the nature of their relationship is laid bare. Donohue of British Intelligence helps ThreeBees. This is made very explicit: Curtiss supplies good intelligence about dodgy arms deals or drug trading or other wrong-doing, and in exchange expects protection and support from the Commission and Donohue. He is, therefore, from his point of view, justified in being furious to discover that the High Commissioner, Porter Coleridge, has gone back to London to in person, to deliver a folder of Tessa’s evidence and demand a parliamentary enquiry into Dypraxa and ThreeBees. This scene would be a lot more plausible if Curtiss hadn’t been made into an obese monster who says ‘fuck’ in every sentence. The CEOs of big pharma companies are slender, well groomed and very clever men, to judge from their pics in the FT.

Leaving Curtiss with his threats to stop helping MI6 ringing in his ears, Donohue encounters his side-kick, Crick, a scary ex-soldier who says he has a friend who has a friend who heard a little something about a contract being put out on Tess and Bluhm. Donohue has a bad feeling that Crick might have been directly involved himself.

Part three: death and cover-up

With a hundred pages still to go the reader has now got a very good sense of the story. Tess and Bluhm were murdered by contract killers hired at a remote distance by ThreeBees and/or KVH because they had created a detailed dossier proving that Dypraxa, although a potentially good drug, was being trialled irresponsibly which was leading to unreported deaths among its African patients. And the generally ominous, tragic atmosphere of the book (when it is not being laughably posh and legendary) strongly suggests that Justin himself will come to no good. Therefore, the book has little sense of the unexpected or of suspense.

Kenya

In the final hundred pages Justin returns to Kenya under a false passport for the last part of the tragedy.

Dismayingly, this section returns to the point of view of the sweatily lecherous and duplicitous Sandy Woodward as he hosts a gala party organised by his wife, part of his bid to replace the High Commissioner who – as far as he and the staff know – is on an extended trip to London (only we know, because of the previous scene, that he is arguing with the people at the top about the enquiry into ThreeBees and Tessa’s murder.)

Sandy is busy eyeing up Tessa’s young Asian assistant, Ghita, who has returned from her trip up north with information about Bluhm and Tessa’s last movement – when Tessa and Justin’s loyal servant, Mustafa, hands him a note asking him to come to the gate. Here he is hussled into a car containing the well-disguised Justin, who proceeds to make it clear that he knows all about the conspiracy, all about Dypraxa. Devastatingly, he knows that Tessa entrusted a copy of her findings to Sandy to give to someone trustworthy to publicise, but that instead Sandy simply handed them over to his boss, Coleridge. Justin takes Woodward to an empty house and gets him to confess everything, blubbering like the cowardly reptile he is. Above all, he confirms that the evidence Tessa and Bluhm had collected was ‘massive’ – interviews, dates, places, scope of trials, secret documents, and then full documentation of the cover-up, dead bodies disappearing, whole villages intimidated into silence.

These pages confirm the corrupt intertwining between the ThreeBees corporation, British officials in the High Commission, the corrupt Kenyan government and powerful forces back in London. All of them have a vested interest in hushing up the story and thus are, to some extent or other, complicit in Tessa’s murder.

Immediately following this Justin has a final interview with Donohue, who fills in the rest of the picture. At some risk to his own career, Donohue fills in the gaps about the links between Curtiss, Crick and the murderers. But he also emphasises that Curtiss is himself in big financial trouble. The City has got wind of bad news about Dypraxa, ThreeBees shares are falling, Curtiss is in financial meltdown.

Lokichoggio

In the last act of the novel Justin takes a plane up to the northern outpost from which where Tessa and Bluhm had gone on their ill-fated drive, Lokichoggio, where Ghita had earlier visited. He meets the tubby man Brandt – ‘everyone loves him, everyone knows Brandt’ – who manages the arrival of food aid and its distribution. But Justin confronts him because now he knows that Brandt is also the villainous Lorbeer, who oversaw the development of Dypraxa, who is in cahoots with KVH. In fact, now Justin recognises him as the furtive figure in a white coat who sometimes attended on the dying African mother Wanzi, when Justin was visiting Tessa in the maternity hospital

In a hot sweaty African tent Justin confronts him with all the evidence and Lorbeer collapses in tears, weeping and wailing and calling on God to forgive his sins etc. Along with Ghita’s earlier visit to the Women’s Refuge, this long section gives the reader a good feel for the nitty gritty, for the dusty outhouses and drops of food aid from twin-prop airplanes, for the pride of local tribesmen and the appallingness of the never-ending feuds and tribal wars which underpin African poverty, and for the pressures such aid officials are under. But its main purpose is for the chivalrous Etonian Justin to confront the wicked Germanic baddy. Buried beneath the modern trappings, is the spirit of John Buchan.

In the final sequence Justin flies in the little propellor plane further north and is dropped at a remote outpost, from which he charters a peasant fishing boat to take him across the lake, the only way of getting to the very remote location of Tess and Bluhm’s murder – where Tessa’s car was ambushed, where she was raped and murdered, and the driver killed and Bluhm dragged off into the desert to be tortured and killed.

While sitting there he hears, first the little fishing boat tactfully putting back across the lake, abandoning him – and then the sound of vehicles drawing up. He knows it is the same collection of mercenaries. He hears them scrabbling towards him over the loose sand and rock and knows he is going to die.

The cover-up

In a nifty bit of structuring le Carré has actually described the aftermath of Justin’s death before it happens. He gives a dismaying account of how, following his death, Justin is systematically rubbished by the system, how the press & PR ‘machine’ makes sure a consistent message is broadcast from the High Commission, the Foreign Office back in London and by ThreeBees, carefully co-ordinated to portray Justin as an irresponsible loner, sadly unhinged by the murder of his wife, who had rejected help from the FO, shown signs of mental disturbance, disappeared on a faked passport to visit a number of discredited ex-employees with a grudge, before making a raft of wild and unfounded accusations against ThreeBees etc. Porter Coleridge – who, we are told, tried to present Tessa’s case – is ‘retired’ early. Bernard Pellegrin, the Foreign Office’s Head of Africa, takes early retirement and slips very neatly into a place on the Board of ThreeBees.

A court case is launched using the documents Justin had, throughout his investigation, been posting to a safe house in Italy, where his lawyer friend Ham could access them. But it is quickly silenced by powerful lawyers acting for ThreeBees which will ensure the case drags on forever. Nobody escapes the corporate ‘monstering’, or uncrushed by the courts or discredited by paid-for journalists and corporate spokespersons. Or murdered. Evil wins.

The novel is designed to leave you terrified at the power of Big Pharma, at the scale of the links between big business and government, at the ease with which they can repress the truth.

Issues raised by the novel

1. Third World corruption

Nobody reading the novel can be unaware that corruption is endemic throughout the developing world. It comes as no news that some African rulers are corrupt, that a lot of the foreign aid given to Third World countries is siphoned off by corrupt officials, that white ex-pats in Africa live like kings while the majority of Africans around them subsist in squalid shanties and die like flies. And, a little closer to the content of this novel, no surprise that multinational corporations screw profits out of the poorest of the poor, that drug companies have not always behaved charitably in Third World companies, nor that Britain’s embassies and high commissions are stuffed with upper class twits.

2. Neo-imperialism

Throughout the book JLC’s white, upper-class characters routinely look back at the folly of their Victorian forebears, with their arrogant assumption that they could run African countries. Yet they just as routinely deplore the corruption and inefficiency of the current regime, reflecting, by implication or overtly, on how much better they would run the damn place. Tessa is on a one-woman mission to save Africa, especially all African women. If only African women could be empowered to run the place, what a better job they’d make of it than the men (a sentiment powerfully echoed by Lorbeer in his isolated aid station).

Doesn’t she realise she is the latest in a long line of do-gooding Imperial wives, from the same kind of lofty background (the Contessa mother, boarding school, Cambridge), with the same exuberant idealism and with the same burning conviction that something must be done which, in the end, doesn’t change anything.

3. Big pharma, bad pharma

The most controversial aspect of the novel must be the central claim that one or some pharmaceutical companies unscrupulously trial new drugs in developing countries, happy to use poor Africans (who were going to die anyway, as Sir Kenneth Curtiss angrily points out) as guinea pigs to establish safe dosages which will then be used back in the Western world. Could such things happen? I know various scandals about pharma behaviour in Third World countries have been documented, especially around the pricing of life-saving drugs (particularly for AIDS). The second accusation is that these companies, or high-up people associated with them, could have a word with someone who has a word with someone who puts the word out that so-and-so public critics of said company should meet with an unfortunate accident. Could such things happen? No doubt. Have I ever read of such a thing? No, but then I haven’t spent a career following the behaviour of large pharmaceutical companies.

British physician and academic Ben Goldacre has made such a study, resulting in his book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. That would be one place to begin an exploration of the subject, and I don’t doubt it’s full of hair-raising stories. But it was published. And he’s still alive.

Unlike in this novel, where the central whistleblowers die horrible deaths.

Issues in the novel

The novel, with its baggy definition as a long piece of prose fiction, can include any amount of fact, history, politics, denunciation and journalism. The question is – or a question is – do these accusations work in the context of this novel? For a young person who is new to these issues I can imagine this book might be a devastating wake-up call. As a grown-up who’s spent thirty years reading about the wickedness of multinational corporations and the hopeless plight of the Third World I don’t think I read anything I hadn’t read before. In fact the one thought which I hadn’t seen expressed so well, is where one of the High Commission officials angrily tells the idealistic Tessa that it is not the job of the Foreign Office to save the world, it is not the job of the High Commission to set itself up as judge and jury over its host government and spend all its time carping and criticising. Their job is to protect the persons of the 30,000 or so British citizens living in Kenya and their business interests. What else would you expect? What else would she expect?

If these issues were new to you, maybe you would be drawn into the sense of horrible dark revelations and the ominous atmosphere the novel is, presumably, setting out to create. But for me:

  • I’d heard a lot of the ‘big issues’ before
  • in a sense the plot was given away early on – Tessa is dead and I felt we learned that she was bumped off by someone acting in the pharma company’s interests also very early, and so it didn’t come as any surprise that Justin himself ends up being bumped off – it didn’t create the frisson of fear which, I think, was intended
  • the style – the upper class cant of most of the characters – kept me repelled, or amused, or distracted so continuously that I never had any real sympathy for them

Is the thriller a suitable vehicle to make serious political points?

No, is the short answer. The thriller genre takes for granted scheming baddies, evil drug dealers or arms dealers, Blofeld or the KGB. The idea that the good guys themselves turn out to be penetrated by corruption and evil goes back at least as far as the 1970s and the outburst of conspiracy thrillers following Watergate, in fact probably back to the Kennedy assassination in the 1960s, maybe to the McCarthyite paranoia of the 1950s, or possibly to John Buchanite concerns about communists and Jews in the government of dear old Blighty. In a thriller, you expect there to be assassins in doorways and mystery cars trying to run over our hero, and all the computers to be hacked, and the government to deny any knowledge of your devastating findings because they’re in fact part of the dreadful conspiracy.

In other words, le Carré is writing his serious indictments of great social evils (the arms trade in The Night Manager, bad pharma here, American hyper-power in Absolute Friends) in a genre which teaches you not to take its grandiose conspiracies seriously; which is based on the idea that you thrill to the scale of some absurd conspiracy (like the computerised plan to invade and conquer Russia in Len Deighton’s Billion Dollar Brain), then put the book down and completely forget about it.

Thoughts about le Carré’s style

Everyone is a ‘legend’

As usual, the characters are all legends in each other’s minds, routinely hyped up and overegged by the myth-making narrator. Sandy’s wife, Gloria, is ‘famously loquacious’ (famous to who?), Tessa’s aristocratic mother and sister were ‘fabled beauties’ (p.198), Justin visits ‘that fabled valley of the upper Rhine where pharma-giants have their castles’ (p.412), the repellent Kenny Curtiss turns on ‘the fabled charm’ (p.461), when Donohue refers to Tessa’s killers, he offensively calls them ‘the celebrated Marsabit Two’ (p.510), we read of Foreign Office mandarin Bernard Pellegrin’s ‘fabled skills at networking’ (p.549). And Tessa’s co-conspirator, Bluhm, is not just a doctor, he is:

Bluhm the Westerner’s African, bearded Apollo of the Nairobi cocktail round, charismatic, witty, beautiful. (p.35)

His colleague in an aid camp in the north of the country is ‘Reuben the legendary camp organiser’ (p.392). And so on.

Tessa, who the plot rotates around is – as you are continually reminded – the daughter of a High Court judge and an Italian contessa! She has a ‘teasing, foxing, classy voice’ (p.57). She comes from the same ‘thoroughbred stable’ as her husband, Justin. She isn’t, in other words, any old totty. She is phenomenally posh totty. She is a legend to everyone who’s met her.

God forbid le Carré’s stories should happen to ‘ordinary’ people. His characters come from Britain’s social élite and are gods and legends in their own minds. If you like this exalted atmosphere of privilege and entitlement, if you like characters talking like they are still at Eton and Harrow and Winchester and convinced they are the only people in the world who matter, then you will enjoy this book, old boy.

Lechery

Sandy Woodward is a middle-aged man with wife and children, but the opening of the novel is drenched in his unrequited leching after Tessa.

I tried not to notice her naked silhouette… trying to wrest the lower half of his gaze from the shadow of her breasts through the puff of her dress… shoulders back, dress stretched across her breasts… her naked silhouette still taunting his memory… (pp.58-63)

She is cradling the child to her left breast, her right breast free and waiting. Her upper body is slender and translucent. Her breasts, even in the aftermath of childbirth, are as light and flawless as he has so often imagined them. (p.83)

Bit of a boob man, old Sandy.

This is before we get on to Justin’s memories of meeting Tessa. How it happened is he was called up at the last minute by a chap in the FO who he knew at Eton, asking if he could deliver a lecture at Cambridge at short notice. Tessa is there, half his age, asks feisty questions, they go for a stroll by the Cam, then a spot of punting, then she takes him back to her little apartment for heady ‘sexual delights’ (p.164). She is sick of boys her own age and looking for a kindly father figure; and he, a confirmed bachelor (although with an impressive track record of affairs, of course) is blown away by her life and enthusiasm. And body. They make a pact that Justin will carry on being Mr Dull and Conventional on the inside of the diplomatic service, giving Tessa a free hand to do her thing.

Fuck

All the characters say ‘fuck’. The High Commissioner, Head of Chancery, Foreign Office Personnel, Permanent Secretary, the police, all say fuck and shit a lot.

‘You try,’ Amy said. ‘If you don’t try, you’re fucked.’
‘Fucked if you try, fucked if you don’t.’ (p.424)

As far as I can remember this is the first le Carré novel to use the word ‘fart’ (the Permanent Secretary at the FO takes Justin for lunch at his club and explains that the fish makes him fart). The opening words of the first scene in which we finally meet Sir Kenny Curtiss, head of the villainous ThreeBees pharma company, are:

‘What the fuck does your man Quayle think he’s playing at, Tim?’ (p.451)

What made George Smiley a totemic character was his quiet dignity, his restraint, his subtle intelligence. In these later novels all the characters roar:

‘This is Turkana we’re talking about, not fucking Surrey.’ (p.452) ‘I’m Sir fucking Kenneth Curtiss! I have subscribed – last year alone – half a fucking million quid to party funds. I have provided you – British fucking Intelligence – with nuggets of pure gold.’ (p.457)

Italics

This loss of self-restraint (either in the characters or by the author) is mirrored by another, which is the eruption of italics throughout the text. For some reason everyone starts emphasising every third or fourth word they say in order to really ram home the importance of what they’re saying. Get it?

‘I’m sure Justin would like me to write to him… I mean I wouldn’t tell him anything that was going to hurt him… I mean Justin knows that Tessa and Arnold were travelling together… Whatever was between them, he’s reconciled to that… There must be something you remember that she did or said… Well, I won’t say she did contribute to that discussion…

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper le Carré spoke about how angry he’s become as he grows older. It’s unfortunate that this wrath and frustration at the wicked world spill over into continual emphasis of almost everything that everybody says.

‘I just don’t see how you could survive like that… Would that be your feeling, basically?… You negotiate with other countries, don’t you? You cut deals with them. You legitimise them through trading partnerships… We really like Bluhm… Bluhm’s as close as you’ll ever get to a good man… With those big fireplaces she always had an eye for soot! And no, Mr Justin, the chimney sweep certainly didn’t have a key… Don’t tell me you’ve abandoned your computer, Guido!… But that’s awful, Guido!… You cover this bit up, then out pops another bit. So you cover that bit up… I am quite sure there was nothing of the kind on either side… What were the side effects?…

The excessive use of italics throughout the text becomes quite wearing quite quickly, but is also indicative of characters – and a narrative – which are increasingly shouting to get your attention.

‘But why did you sign the wretched contract in the first place?’…
‘Because I trusted them. I was a fool.’ (p.426)

Timeframes

If we accept that the main characters are off-puttingly posh and privileged, and that the love triangle at the heart of the novel is described with a lachrymose sentimentality that would make Mills and Boon blush, that the ‘political’ insights about the book are the kind of thing my son learns in school (Africa poor & corrupt, big business bad etc), then the most interesting thing left about the book is its structure.

In a way which reminds me of his major influence, Graham Greene, le Carré is very canny, very clever about the way the narrative of his novels are constructed from multiple timeframes. The ‘present’ of the book is the High Commission as news of Tessa’s murder comes in, followed in forward chronological order by Justin coming to stay with Sandy, both being questioned by the cops, then flying back to London.

From the vantage point of this stretch of ‘present’ narrative, both Justin and Sandy scan back over the past, remembering key moments in their lusting after or marriage to, Tessa. The plot, what happened, is relatively straightforward – but the sophisticated flashback structure allows le Carré to move at will between different key moments, building up their emotional resonance by repetition of scenes or phrases, or to suddenly reveal a previously unsuspected past of the puzzle, taking the reader by surprise with a new twist.

Interview

The interview or interrogation is a key location for this kind of timeshift and for a long stretch at the start of this novel, both Sandy and Justin are questioned at length by the two police officers who’ve flown out from London to investigate Tessa’s death. The official interview is such a handy device for an author because it allows him or her to insert long sections of narrative and plot dressed up as reminiscence, memory or just answers to the interviewers’ questions. Thus Justin replies to the cops’ persistent questions about Tessa, but also drifts off into reveries, remembering their meeting and courtship etc. Very handy, very effective.

The way a beautiful, wilful young woman falls into bed with a dowdy old diplomat I found laughably like middle-aged male wish-fulfilment, as I found the revelation that Big Pharma employs dodgy business practices in the Third World tiresomely familiar – but the structure of the narrative, the way moments and scenes from multiple moments in the past are juggled and ordered to create a multi-layered timeframe, I found immensely skilful and rewarding.

The movie

If only there was some way to enjoy the structure and pacing of this well-thought out and dramatic story without having to wade through le Carres’ highly mannered and irritating prose, without having to endure the smug self-satisfaction of his intolerably posh characters… How about – making it into a movie?

Released in 2005, the film at a stroke removes the pukka prose style and upper-class twit dialogue (what a relief, darling) to make it acceptable to an audience which was not lucky enough to attend one of England’s top public schools. It converts the long-winded, multi-levelled and circuitous text into a fast-moving action thriller with a heart-stopping soundtrack à la Bourne Identity.

It was directed by Fernando Meirelles and the timid, old bachelor Justin Quayle is transformed by the magic of the movies into the impossibly handsome Ralph Fiennes, while Rachel Weisz perfectly recreates the gorgeous, headstrong heroine, a performance which won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe award.

My little pony

Rummaging in the dead woman’s room, Sandy finds a photo of Tessa as a ten-year-old riding her first pony (p.69). In his previous two novels key characters have shared memories of their first ponies and gymkhana (Oliver in Single & Single, posh totty Francesca in The Tailor of Panama). I am winning a bet with my son that all le Carré’s later novels will turn out to have a my-first-pony moment.

Credit

The Constant Gardener by John le Carré was published in 2001 by Hodder and Stoughton. Page references are to the 2005 Coronet paperback edition.

Related links

John Le Carré reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on March 12, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Thriller
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 12, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/the-constant-gardener-john-le-carre/