Category: Reading

how to write about africa

David Evans1 Comment

This is absolutely brilliant; it made my night.  Read Binyavanga Wainaina’s whole essay in Granta 92.  Here are a few passages I identified with.

Always use the word ‘Africa or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat.

mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love — take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

And so much more!  That’s why we recommend reading books by African writers.  Lots of recommendations here (plus a few offenders).

Hat tip to Blattman, the one blog I take time to read in the field (I’m in Tanzania, by the way).

airport (non)observations

David Evans2 Comments

In the last 48 hours, I have been in four airports: Washington Dulles, London, Nairobi (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania).  As I wandered around these airports, I felt like I should have some witty observation about airports.  Or – short of that – like I should be gathering some data.  What kind of data would be interesting to gather in airports?  Ideas are welcome.

 

Since I don’t have any insights like Pico Iyer would, I’ll share this quote in the front of an Iyer book that a friend lent me:

 

“Philosophy is really homesickness: the wish to be everywhere at home.” – Friedrich Nietzche

 

I don’t know anything about philosophy,* but this idea of being everywhere at home seems deeply appealing.

 

* I know this because on the plane, I tried to read philosopher Nancy Cartwright’s Hunting Causes and Using Them on my flight and – even though it is about intersections between philosophy and economics – I mostly had no idea what she was talking about.

 

Hat tip to Blattman for getting me thinking, not about the presentation I’m giving in 14 hours.

book review. At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

David Evans2 Comments

My sister gave me this for Christmas, and over the last six months my wife and I read this aloud.  How can I not love a book with an illustration like the one above on the cover!  My thoughts:

a beautifully written, thoughtful mix of experience and research; like chatting with a bright and engaging friend

I have felt that I will read any book that Anne Fadiman writes; this confirms that conviction.

What’s a familiar essay? Fadiman doesn’t give a precise definition in her preface, but she characterizes the genre: “The familiar essayist didn’t speak to the millions; he spoke to one reader, as if the two of them were sitting side by side in front of a crackling fire…. His viewpoint was subjective, his frame of reference concrete, his style digressive, his eccentricities conspicuous, and his laughter usually at his own expense. And though he wrote about himself, he also wrote about a subject, something with which he was so familiar, and about which he was often so enthusiastic, that his words were suffused with a lover’s intimacy” (p. x).

These essays live up to the genre: most start with one or more personal stories, which Fadiman uses as a starting point to speak about a subject more generally. The form is the only common theme of the book; the topics are wonderfully eclectic: insomnia, the American flag, coffee, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I enjoyed each of these essays, from Fadiman’s fascinating history of the mail system (yes, really) to her reflections on what she calls “the culture wars” (questions like: should the life of the writer affect our valuation of the work? should we value literature for some inherent esthetic value or because of what it teaches us?) to her thoughts on…ice cream. [Only the last essay didn’t grab me.]

Ultimately, Fadiman brings wonderful prose and delicious diction to any topic. I love her vocabulary’s propensity to send me scurrying repeatedly to my dictionary – “oleaginous,” “solipsistic,” “insouciance,” “omphalos” – artfully meshed with an informal, unpretentious style. (She cleverly hides her sources in the back without footnotes, so you can enjoy the book as a leisurely conversation but then know where to learn more.)

This is Fadiman’s third book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down was Excellent but very different (a classic work of medical anthropology), and Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader – the bibliophile’s manifesto – had the benefit of a common theme. In that sense, this was slightly less compelling than those two but marvelous just the same. She also edited and wrote the first essay for Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love, a collection of other people’s essays about re-reading books they loved as children; I enjoyed that very much as well.

I recommend it. [My wife and I read this aloud to each other; I highly recommend that, too.]

Africa Reading Challenge review: Challenge of the Barons, by Lekan Are

David Evans2 Comments

My thoughts on this angry battle cry of a Nigerian novella.  (I love a battle cry that takes place in the halls of academia… once in a while.)

searing critique of aid to Africa tied to services from the donor country, wrapped up in university faculty intrigue

I was at a tiny bookshop in Banjul, the Gambia, picking up novels by African writers when the bookseller showed me this slim volume and said, You wouldn’t like this one! Why not? Because it speaks out against you guys. (I work for an international aid agency.) How could I resist?In 158 pages, Nigerian writer Lekan Are tells a story exemplifying how aid can hurt the people it is intended to help and pad the pockets of the most incompetent from the donor countries. Dr. Onaola Jungu, our protagonist with a PhD in horticulture, accepts the offer to move from his native Nigeria to the fictional country of Kato,* where he will be chair of the Department of Horticulture at the University of Serti.

However, when he arrives he finds the university faculty largely populated by poorly qualified Americans and other ex-pats, hired only because of strings attached to American aid to Kato. Dr. Jungu is unjustly deprived of the promised chairmanship in favor of an American and is made a mere professor. The rest of the book details the intense battle between – on the one side – Jungu and his African colleagues, who seek to improve the education environment and perform research that will help the country, and – on the other side – the American “experts” (and a few African cronies) battling to protect their special interests.

The book is heavy handed, the right and wrong are too stark, and the prose is clumsy.

BUT the story engaged me throughout (except the long account of the dog dying), and many of the critiques ring true. An absurd amount of American foreign aid (much more than most other countries**) is still “tied,” meaning that we “give” to poor countries but only in the form of American goods and services. Lekan Are paints a picture of just how inefficient and counterproductive that can be.

* It’s always a bad idea to move to a fictional country, unless it’s Brigadoon and your true love lives there.

** The Center for Global Development’s Commitment to Development Index states that 57% of our aid is tied to American goods and services, which puts us at 20 of 22 in that category (just above Greece and Japan).

 

 

 

Africa Reading Challenge review: Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

David Evans5 Comments

I enjoyed pretty much all of this book, which is saying something for a tome of 765 pages.  That said, it took me months to finish (which has been my previous experience with Ngugi).  My thoughts:

rarely lags, many laughs: Thiong’o hits the mark

Ngugi has here written a weighty but engaging tale of … well, it’s a little hard to describe. There’s an African dictator, three sycophantic government ministers (so sycophantic that one had his eyes surgically enlarged to be able to spot the Ruler’s enemies, another his ears…), a traditional healer, an activist, an opportunistic businessman, a wife fed up with beatings, condescending representatives from the “Global Bank,” and Much, Much More.

Having worked in and read about African countries for a number of years, many of the players seemed familiar: for example, the former revolutionaries co-opted into the ruling party reminded me of Richard Leakey, the Kenyan opposition politician who lost credibility by joining the ruling party.

In short, I really enjoyed this piece: part farcical satire, part magical realism (as the Ruler blows up like a balloon and begins to float – yes, really), part political activist’s anthem, and occasionally just a drama. In the drama occasions, I usually wished for more farcical satire, but still, I highly recommend this book.

I’ve read three novels by Ngugi wa Thiong’o: The River Between, Petals of Blood, and this one. This is definitely the most fun (okay, it’s the only remotely funny one). I’d recommend Petals of Blood for a much more serious and depressing account of post-colonial disillusionment with local leadership. Another novel that I found illustrative of post-colonial African politics was Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People.

Note on content: the book has a bit of strong language and lots of absurdity.

a fresh definition of multi-party democracy

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I just finished Wizard of the Crow, a 765 page satire by Ngugi wa Thiongo.  The Ruler of the fictional Aburiria introduces his political philosophy of multiparty democracy:

There are no moral limits to the means that a ruler can use, from lies to lives, bribes to blows, in order to ensure that his state is stable and his power secure.  But if he could keep the state stable through sacrificing truth rather than lives, bending rather than breaking the law, sealing the lips of the oustpoken with endless trickeries rather than tearing them with barbed-wire and hot wax, if he could buy peace through a grand deception rather than a vast display of armored behicles in the streets, which often gave his enemies material for propaganda, it would be the sweetest of victories. (p703)

reseña del libro: El vigilante, por Felipe Montes

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Escuché esta novelita por autor mexicano Felipe Montes. Mis pensamientos:

la perspectiva de un miembro de la comunidad que es – a la vez – observador íntimo y forastero completo

Pasamos un rato en la vida de un vigilante en Monterrey, Mexico (el local no se revela en el cuento pero todos los cuentos de Montes ocurren en Monterrey). El vigilante protege el vecindario pero no es parte del vecindario. Observa a todos, conoce a todos, pero nadie realmente le conoce a él.

Saltamos entre el presente y los recuerdos del pasado. En el presente, el vigilante camina, anda en su motocicleta, mira la gente del barrio, mira las ventanas de la gente, mira los carros de la gente [ves como es], y rememora los viejos tiempos cuando tenía un enamoramiento (ya no: el vigilante tiene que estar sólo) y una familia (ya no: ¡el vigilante tiene que estar sólo! Pero justo cuando te relajas, cuando piensas que la vida del vigilante es un aburro, se mete en una pelea con una banda de patineros malvados o intenta salvar la vida de un hombre que va a ahogar o trata de rescatar a una niña perdida. A lo mejor, es una ilustración fiel de la vida del vigilante: largos ratos en los que nada pasa, seguidos por arranques de violencia. «La sangre va a correr siempre sobre estas avenidas oscuras, y tus botas van a mancharse con ella.» [Nota: Este libro tiene bastante violencia gráfica.]

El autor intenta hacernos experimentarlo a través de su narración en segunda persona (o sea, tú – el lector – eres el vigilante). Después de todo, no lo encontré tan absorbente: largos ratos de nostalgia yuxtapuesta con violencia intensa. A la vez, Montes sí logró hacerme sentir lo solitario, lo invisible, lo afuera que es el vigilante aunque sea – de otra perspectiva – él que ve más que cualquier otro en el pueblo. Y la prosa es linda: veo que quiere decir Montes cuando dice en su sitio web: «La novela es una más de las formas de la poesía.»

Escuché el audiolibro narrado por Darío Tangelson y publicado por Recorded Books Audiolibros [4 CDs]. La narración es bien hecha pero no excepcional.

Herbst’s States & Power in Africa – the heavily abridged version for the concentration-challenged

David Evans1 Comment

Jeffrey Herbst’s States and Power in Africa has been recommended to me by various sources, not least of which is Chris Blattman’s recommended reading in Africa list.  But while everyone tells me it’s excellent, I haven’t made much progress.  It’s too dense for my pleasure reading (hello Wizard of the Crow, which I’m still reading), and too off the topics of my own research to read for work.

So today I was pleased (more than pleased: almost giddy) to encounter Harvard professor James Robinson’s ten-page review of Herbst from the Journal of Economic Literature.  Better yet, this ten-page review has a two-page summary of the book in the middle (as well as some interesting analysis).  If you’re not sure you want to invest in Herbst (or if you’re just lazy like me), I highly recommend the Robinson article.  I reproduce an abridged and highlighted version of the two-page summary here:

The starting point of Herbst’s analysis is that Africa is plagued by “state failure.” A state is meant to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement,
and infrastructure. Yet in Africa most states provide very few of these.  They are unable to exercise control over much of their territory; they do not provide order or public goods. The literature talks dramatically about state “failure,” even “collapse.” What then is different about African states that leads them to diverge so radically from our ideal?

Continue reading “Herbst’s States & Power in Africa – the heavily abridged version for the concentration-challenged” →

book review: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost

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Some of you have read funny stories that I post on this blog while traveling in Africa.  If I made those stories into a book (and if I were a better writer), they might be like this book.  Maybe I’ll stick to the blog.  My thoughts:

alternate title: funny stories from life as an ex-pat on a tiny Pacific island

Having finished graduate studies in International Relations, Troost (he’s Dutch) finds himself unclear on the next career step, so he accompanies his girlfriend who takes a job as an aid worker in Kiribati (pronounced Kiribas), where he tries to write a novel and has funny experiences.

Troost is funny, sarcastic, and self-deprecating. I enjoyed much of the book. If I were reading the stories periodically (e.g., on a blog or in an occasional email), I would have found it even more funny, but in rapid sequence the style got tiresome (especially in the middle of the book). At times the humor felt unpleasantly smug (although I give him credit for being as deprecating to himself as to others).

He also sheds some light on a part of the world that I know very little about: life on a tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific? It’s a whole different world, one very different from other poor countries. When he includes history, he succeeds in making it entertaining. Ultimately, though, most of the book felt like a trifle: I enjoyed it on net but considered stopping halfway and am not rushing out to read his two more recent books (about life in Vanuatu and travels in China). Sort of like he says himself: “I like my entertainment not too serious, not too stupid, sort of like this book” (p84).

I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by Simon Vance (British accent) and published by Blackstone Audio (7 CDs). The narration was good.

[Note on content: This book is not about anyone’s sex life, has very little sexual content, very little violence, but a significant amount of strong language.]