Good review of new novel

 

Robert Gribbin, The Serpent of the Nile: A Novel of South Sudan.  A review by Alan G. Johnston.  Note:  both Robert Gribbin and Alan Johnston were in the Peace Corps group that arrived in Kenya in October 1968.  They both spent many years in Africa.

 

The last place that you want to end up is in a prison cell in some remote part of Africa, whether that cell is controlled by a rebel group, an opposition warlord, or a government.  Especially if you happen to be a journalist. Bad things happen in those cells. Yet that is exactly where we meet up with the protagonist of Robert Gribbin’s new novel, The Serpent of the Nile.  As he always does, Gribbin has used his lengthy experience in many parts of Africa, including South Sudan, to provide an authentic context for this tale of insurrection and intrigue in this unstable part of Africa.  By the time you have finished this short novel, much of which consists of a concise briefing on the history, culture and politics of South Sudan, you may feel ready to take up a diplomatic post in that country, but you will probably not want to do much investigative journalism there.

As it turns out, our as yet un-named journalist is soon let loose by his captor and led to the border by the captor’s son, Owino, so that the journalist can return to his base in Kenya to recover from this close call.  All the characters in this novel seem quite plausible, and Gribbin reviews a comprehensive list of foreign aid organizations, UN agencies, NGOs, and diplomats from across the globe that have assembled in Juba to somehow help build a new country.  The name Owino reminded me of my many Luo friends from Kenya who were serving in Juba as consultants and advisors; they even jokingly referred to Juba as “Little Kisumu.”  But after a short respite our free-lance journalist friend, Paul, who happens to be a Black American who served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and who can pass as a Kenyan when it serves his purposes, is back in Juba searching for a lead on some illegal Chinese dealings, a story that he can sell to the international press.

The main problem that I have with this novel is that it is too short.  It establishes a realistic context for the events of the novel, but three-quarters of the way through the book Paul is still not yet in the serious trouble that we know is coming.  A more elaborate rendition of the story would get us more invested in the characters and leave us even more astounded by the outcome.

It is quite possible to spend significant amounts of time in Africa and not realize the extent to which sorcery and various spirits have such a major influence for both good and evil.  Gribbin does not make that mistake.  The novel’s namesake Serpent of the Nile raises its head and has a practical impact at several key junctures in the story.  In fact, for many of the South Sudanese who we meet in these pages, their glimmer of hope for the future, in this otherwise forlorn country, rests in their eventual salvation by this very serpent.

A Peace Corps Death in Tanzania

 

A review of Every Hill a Burial Place – The Peace Corps Murder Trial in East Africa by Peter H. Reid, University Press of Kentucky, 2020.

On March 27, 1966, Peace Corps Volunteer teacher Peppy Kinsey died. She and her husband Bill went on a picnic to a rock outcropping near their home. They climbed the rock. Bill said he did not hear her fall, but realizing she was gone rushed to find her bleeding below, soon to die. Witnesses reported a struggle.  Police concluded the husband Bill Kinsey murdered his wife and not even from the top of the rock. Thus begins the saga of who said what, who saw what, what was the evidence, was there motive, and so forth. Most of the book is devoted to the case itself and how it unrolled in rural Africa where local police and prosecutors ended up facing off against sophisticated well financed experts – both in law and medicine. There is much redundancy. Author Reid goes over who said and saw what every time a different party provided input. It gets boring, especially the repetition of the medical evidence, but finally differences arising from that evidence proved crucial at the trial.  The author drew extensively from his own memories of the event, official transcripts, and notes of those who were engaged in the process. If nothing else the reader will learn a lot about East African jurisprudence.

A second part of the story relates how the Peace Corps as an institution reacted to the event. Was its responsibility to ensure justice for the dead woman and/or did Peace Corps have an obligation to support her volunteer husband against the charge of murder?  What to say publicly? What to communicate to PCVs in-country?  Initially the Peace Corps tried to walk a neutral line. Nonetheless, its staff both from Tanzania and Washington, were deeply involved in the case.  Peace Corps officials assumed that the very presence of Peace Corps in Tanzania was at stake. A murder conviction would besmirch and jeopardize the whole program.  They surmised that an extremely overt defense of Bill would antagonize the government of Tanzania as it would appear that the might of the U.S. government was being arrayed against an underdeveloped third world nation.  Washington officials also feared that a conviction and hanging would undermine the Peace Corps globally.

Part of the problem for the Peace Corps was that it did not have a policy for such an event. Although it scrabbled together a suitable response to this specific case, apparently, it never codified policies so would have to reinvent them in the years afterwards whenever PCVs got in similar predicaments.  A useful part of the long-after-the-fact analysis is a discussion of how Peace Corps responsibilities towards women volunteers – their health and safety – has evolved.

I won’t divulge the outcome of the trial. It indeed had some interesting twists. Readers who stick with the narrative will find this an engaging book. Based on the evidence, you get to arrive at your own judgement of what really happened.

As an aside, I wrote a book in novel form based on the murder of a woman in Mombasa, Kenya where an American sailor was accused and stood trial.  Ergo, I understood much of the arcana of East African jurisprudence and the tensions that arose when an American confronted a different judicial system and when political issues were also at play.  Murder in Mombasa (www.smashwords.com)