Murder in Central Africa

 

A review of The Soul Murderer by Timothy Lenderking. 

This novel set in a fictious country that closely resembles Equatorial Guinea tells an embellished tale of men with fictious names who were involved in a murder inside the U.S. embassy. The real event happened in 1971 after which principal officer Alfred Erdos was convicted of stabbing to death his administrative assistant, Donald Leahy. Author Lenderking’s telling of the story tracks the facts even though he goes way beyond them to enhance the plot, fill in backgrounds of the victim and murderer and their families, plus spin new elements into the turbid and never completely understood saga. The author adds twists and turns to the event – as if it weren’t sensational enough on its merits – that transform a good foreign service story into an interesting novel. It is worth a read. 

Wonderous Feet, Remarkable Journey!

 

A review of Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gapah, Simon Shuster, NY.

 

This imaginative and intriguing novel relates tales from the group of Africans who accompanied and/or were employed by Dr. David Livingstone on his final voyage into central Africa.  Livingstone died while on the journey. His team debated before deciding to carry his body, his maps, and papers fifteen hundred miles across forbidding terrain to the coast so that everything, especially the corpse, could be returned to England.

The novel is written in the voices of Livingstone’s companions. First his cook Halima, who cynically observes all around her, their foibles and motives. Secondly, the pious Jacob Wainright who struggles between leadership, Christian morality, and his own failings. Truly, these voices see Africa from their own perspective, and with great insight.  The mystery that is never satisfactorily unraveled is why? Why cart a desiccated corpse for months? Plausible explanations are offered as to why this disparate group would undertake such an arduous journey – loyalty, devotion to the doctor, fear, superstition, Christian faith, confidence in each other – but there is no definitive summation, just the complexities of what they did.

The plot aside, the novel offers a realistic glimpse of Africa in the latter part of the Nineteenth century. The slave trade was ever present. Its terror loomed over the land. Territories and villages were controlled by warlords or chiefs.  Negotiations were necessary for all travel, and no one could be hurried. The group dynamics of the bearers are intrinsic to the story.  The author invents marvelous scenarios of how they coped with the task before them and with each other.   

Author Gapah, a Zimbabwean, has done a remarkable job of weaving together the strands of known history with the fictional reality of how they did it. Out of Darkness, Shining Light is an impressive read.