Category: Reading

pronouncing vowels in kikuyu

David Evans1 Comment

I’m reading Wizard of the Crow, the longest book ever written in an African language. It was written in Kikuyu, one of Kenya’s main languages, and then translated into English. The author is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. As you can see by his name, Kikuyu has some extra vowels. This afternoon I sat down with a Kikuyu colleague to figure out how to pronounce vowels in Kikuyu:

a as in car*
e as in egg
i as in me
o as in toe
u as in blue
ĩ as in day
ũ as in toe

You’ll note that I’ve given the same pronunciation for o and for ũ. She repeated the difference for me several times and I could finally hear it but the best I can characterize it is that the ũ sounds higher in tone whereas the o sounds lower. Very scientific, I know.

So Ngũgĩ is actually Go-gay: the n is at best very faint. One on-line writer suggests “place your tongue against the back of your front teeth and start to say ‘no.’ But instead of adding the ‘o,’ replace it instead with” go-gay.  But when my friend said it, I essentially couldn’t hear it.

*I’m (obviously) not a linguist; this is my best effort based on chatting with my friend.

book review: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Taleb

David Evans1 Comment

I’ve been interested in this since I read a good review in the Economist, and I recently discovered the unabridged audiobook.  With a book on risk and probability, one never knows how exciting the ride will be, but Taleb very pleasantly surprised me.  He needs a harsher editor, but overall I learned a lot and enjoyed the vast majority.  My thoughts:

a valuable book for reframing your thinking on reasoning and rare events

Not for some time has a book affected my thinking as much as this one. Taleb’s self-described “personal essay” is way too long and sometimes a little too angry, but his exposition of the flaws in our thinking has provided a new and useful lens for much of my own thinking. One salient example is the narrative fallacy: “our predilection for compact stories over raw truths” (p63). We tend to assign causes and reasons for events even when we lack any evidence of connections: We want to tell stories. Many of these stories are harmless, but others can keep us from being open to truth when it appears.

A second example is the problem of silent evidence: If one uses worshippers who prayed and survived a subsequent shipwreck as evidence of the efficacy of prayer, an observer might ask, What of those who prayed and then drowned? “The drowned worshippers, being dead, would have a lot of trouble advertising their experiences from the bottom of the sea” (p100). It’s not that I’ve never noticed these fallacies before, but having a name for them makes them much easier to identify. These points and many more like them make this volume a worthy read.

The titular Black Swans are events with three characteristics: (1) they are outside of regular expectations because nothing in the past convincingly points to their possibility, (2) they carry an extreme impact, and (3) they are explainable and predictable after the fact although not before (p. xvii-xviii). Taleb argues that many modern phenomena, including the distribution of wealth (Bill Gates’s income), book and movie success (the Da Vinci Code), and mortality in modern warfare (to name a few) are subject to Black Swan events. Many natural and historical phenomena (such as the distribution of human heights or mortality in traditional warfare) are not as subject to Black Swans.

None of the standard statistical tools used for analysis in finance, economics, and social sciences are capable of accounting for Black Swans, making them – according to Taleb – worse than worthless, as they give a false sense of knowledge and security. (For example, he demonstrates how wildly erroneous financial projections unfailingly are and asks why these are useful.)

Taleb makes his point in thirty different ways, gives his personal history, insults economists repeatedly, and creates a number of hypothetical characters. He sometimes expounds too informally given the paradigm-shifting point he is trying to make, but overall the book has much to offer. He outlines a whole host of psychological biases and reasoning fallacies (beyond the two I mentioned above) that affect our thinking and predicting, often blinding us to the possibility of black swans.

Most of the book is non-technical [not that I’m the best judge of that, with an advanced economics degree], but a few chapters towards the end get into more technical detail: Taleb warns us in advance.

I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by David Chandler [12 CDs], published by Recorded Books. The narration is very good (with the exception that the narrator always pronounces foreign names with a little pause and a flare, like it’s a separate performance; but that’s a small and entertaining flaw).

[Note on content: The book uses strong language a handful of times.]

beggars: good or bad for tourism?

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Within a couple of weeks, I encountered these portrayals of beggars and their interactions with Westerners in African literature.  First, in Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall’s The Beggars’ Strike (1979), a government minister explains his campaign to rid the city of beggars:

How can I explain… Well, you see, nowadays, people who live a long way away, in Europe and the United States of America, White people especially, are beginning to take an interest in the beauty of our country.  These people are called tourists.  You know, in the old days these White people came to rob and exploit us; now they visit our country for a rest and in search of happiness.  That is why we have built hotels and holiday villages and casinos to welcome them. … And when these tourists visit the city, they are accosted by the beggars and we run the risk of their never coming back here or putting out unfavourable propaganda to discourage others who might like to come. (p18)

A quarter century later, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o visits the issue in Wizard of the Crow (2006):

The government also had to be mindful not to upset tourism by sweeping too many beggars off the streets.  Pictures of beggars or wild animals were what many tourists sent back home as proof of having been in Africa.  In Aburiria, wild animals were becoming rare because of dwindling forests and poaching, and tourist pictures of beggars or children with kwashiorkor and flies massing around their runny noses and sore eyes were prized for their authenticity.  If there were not beggars in the streets, tourists might start doubting whether Aburiria was an authentic African country. (p35)

I suspect these are each true, depending on the traveller. 

Africa Reading Challenge: 25 participants + new recommendations

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In December 2007 I posted the Africa Reading Challenge and have greatly enjoyed the response: 25 readers have posted reading lists and 14 reviews have been posted on books dealing with countries as diverse as Senegal, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.  (The challenge goes throughout the year, so newcomers are welcome!)

Kathleen Sheldon, a researcher focusing on African women’s history, adds some nice suggestions I hadn’t encountered (for the most part), focusing on African authors:

My suggestions: Ousmane Sembene, God’s Bits of Wood (fantastic novel about a railway strike in Senegal); Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (South African autobiography); Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (Nigerian novel, she has written several other novels as well) ; and Doreen Baingana, Tropical Fish:Tales from Entebbe (Ugandan stories). For some further ideas about novels, have a look at the book African Novels in the Classroom, edited by Margaret Jean Hay, which includes essays on 24 novels by African writers. Also, see the Feminist Press publications on Women Writing Africa – they now have three regional volumes (southern, east, and west Africa) – these are extensive compilations are probably too much to read for this challenge, but will introduce you to many wonderful women authors.

Also, if you want to read more analytical non-fiction on Africa, Chris Blattman has two lists (one and two).  [I try not to link to Chris’s site more than once a day, but it’s tough.]

cuban joke

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“One Cuban young woman complains to another. ‘He lied to me! He told me that he was a luggage handler! It turns out, he’s nothing but a neurosurgeon!'”

This fits perfectly with the characterization of Cuba in Daína Chaviano’s excellent El hombre, la hembra, y el hambre [Man, Woman, and Hunger], in which an economics professor becomes a butcher (maybe we’d all be better off) and a literary translator becomes a prostitute, both in order to escape hunger.

The joke (and a detailed explanation) are here.  [HT: Marginal Revolution]

more on whether it matters if Ishmael Beah was telling the truth

David Evans5 Comments

A few weeks ago I blogged about whether it was important if Ishmael Beah’s account was not entirely accurate is his memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.  Chris Blattman has posted some thoughtful remarks on the topic.  I agree with his conclusion that it’s “better, I think, to take Dave Eggers’ approach, who penned a superb novel, What is the What, from the real experiences of a young refugee in southern Sudan.”

Still, I think we fool ourselves if we treat memoirs as less fictional than many other historical documents.  So while we wait for writers to admit to their novelization, I recommend a hearty helping of skepticism and a recognition of what we care about.  If Ishmael Beah has incorporated others’ stories within his, then his account still teaches me about the experiences of boy soldiers in Sierra Leone: That is what I was looking for anyway.  If, however, he has invented aspects of the tale, it’s more problematic.  I have no way of knowing, and so I enjoy the tale and assume it resembles the experience of boy soldiers.  Like any other non-fiction account would.

[Historian Aaron Sachs has a great piece on how a newspaper morphed his experience of encountering a dead body while out walking from fact to sort-of-fact.  Unfortunately, the piece is not available on-line so I can’t send you to it, but if you happen to be at Yale, check out “Cold, Hard, Facts,” Palimpsest, Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 2003).  The first page of Sachs’s piece is available as a sample.  What a tease!]

Africa Reading Challenge review: The Beggars’ Strike, by Aminata Sow Fall

David Evans71 Comments

While in the Gambia, I picked up several slim volumes of African literature; the first was The Beggars’ Strike, by Senegalese writer Aminata Sow Fall.  My thoughts:

light little satire of class dynamics and superstition

Mour Diaye, the Director of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene, clears the streets of his unnamed African capital of beggars. In return, he hopes to be promoted to vice-president of the nation. To ensure his appointment, he consults a marabout – a Muslim holy man (according to the book’s glossary) – who instructs him to offer a sacrifice to the beggars in their customary locations. But the beggars are all gone!

La Grève Des Bàttu was originally published in French in 1979. In this English translation (from Dorothy Blair) of the little novella, the author pokes fun at government bureaucrats, at superstition, and at hypocrisy of many sorts. The tone is playful and mocking; and the book is a fun, light read.

But the whole plot hangs on one magical assumption which never really worked for me: throughout, the beggars have significant leverage in that all kinds of powerful people are required by their marabouts to give sacrifices to beggars. So when the beggars go on strike, the people have to come and find them. Yet it doesn’t ring true, either in fact or as a plausible suspension of disbelief. While it is entertaining to see long lines of fancy cars pulling up to the home where the beggars have holed up, coughing up the wealthy to make their required offerings, the flight of fancy doesn’t feel quite airworthy.

If you come across this book and want to enjoy some mild satire, I recommend it: I encountered it in a little bookshop in Banjul, the Gambia, and at 99 pages, I figured I had little to lose. But I wouldn’t seek it out. It was made into a film (entitled Bàttu) in the year 2000 [amazingly not available at Blockbuster!], directed by Malian filmmaker Cheick Oumar Sissoko.

If you want satire, I’ve just started Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006): nothing mild there! And if you want another short but compelling example of Senegalese literature, I recently enjoyed Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (1981), which explores the travails of women in Senegal’s polygamous society.

Week 1 of reading The Wizard of the Crow, by Thiong’o

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Shelfari is hosting an on-line book discussion of Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s newest novel, The Wizard of the Crow. It begins this week with a mere ten pages a day, and I started this afternoon with some entertainingly extreme parody:

[Speaking of the fictional African nation’s ruler] It is said that when he was told that he could not be granted even a minute on the air [in the United States], he could hardly believe his ears or even understand what they were talking about, knowing that in his country he was always on TV; his ever moment – eating…, sneezing, or blowing his nose – captures on camera.

Oh wait, maybe that part isn’t so extreme…