Castigation of the Raj

 

A review of Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux, Mariner Books, NYC, 2024

 

Theroux jumps back in time to take the actual sojourn of Eric Blair, later known by his pen name of George Orwell, in Burma in the 1920s and turn it into a novel.  Blair was a policeman for Britian, the imperial power of the country.  Theroux grafts onto the facts of Blair’s five years there to create a novel. Perhaps some of the internal machinations - places, people, and introspection - of the sojourn are drawn from records of the era.  But to his credit, Theroux exercises literary license in compiling a gripping and insightful novel.

Let there be no mistake this book is an indictment of the British Raj, of British rule in Asia.  Blair is a willing pawn in the oppressive imperial rule. Yet throughout, in his mind he questions most everything about his and his government’s presence in the Asian backwater.  The book tracks Blair’s thinking, his reactions, his rejections, his muses, his lusts, and his memories as the story progresses. Needless to say, Blair is a bundle of contradictions.  As with all of Theroux’s characters in his many books, no one is pure. All characters are complicated, and many are venal. That is certainly true in this story.  Theroux never seems to find many redeeming features in the people he creates.  This harsh criticism of people lends veracity to the story, but makes a reader wonder if the world is really that bleak?

There is no real plot to this book. It just tracks the five years that Blair spent in Burma. The reader wonders if the man will ever adjust or quit, but that is about it for suspense. 

Above criticism notwithstanding, I enjoyed the book. It is a well written page turner. It elucidates in fictional form a period in George Orwell’s life that helped shape his antiauthoritarian views that surfaced years later in Animal Farm and 1984.  More than that it cast a realistic perspective on British classism, racism and imperialism. We all need to learn from the past.

Terrific history of Kenya's Coast

 

A review of Kenya’s Swahili Coast – From the Roman Empire to 1888 by Judy Aldrick, Old Africa books, 2024.

This book provides a general overview of centuries of the politics and culture of Africa’s east coast. It is quite readable. Various sections cover key events, rulers, wars, squabbles, invaders, explorers, missionaries, and personalities. The sum is a good appreciation of what happened on the coast and how it evolved, prospered, and declined, until the end of the 19^th century. 

The east African coast was known to the outside world – Romans and Chinese – thousands of years ago. However, it became a more active trading destination during the spread of Islam. Various independent city states peopled by a polyglot of persons from Arabia, India, and Africa, who became known as the Swahili people, traded slaves, ivory, grain, mangrove poles and other products to and from Arabia and the Indian sub-continent via the annual change in the monsoon winds of the Indian Ocean.  The Swahili towns were trading entrepôts, they did not control the hinterland.  Little written has descended from this era, but ruins and oral stories indicate well-developed self-contained societies.

All that changed with the arrival of the Portuguese beginning with Vasco Da Gama in 1488. Better ships and weaponry enabled the European invaders to assert control of the coast. Stark evidence of Portuguese power is Fort Jesus in Mombasa. Completed in 1593 this bastion still dominates Mombasa’s old harbor.  Portuguese fortunes all along the coast waxed and waned as its garrisons struggled to govern the various towns and control trade with the east.

As Portuguese sea power gave way to Dutch and English prominence, its political control of the coast passed to Arab potentates from Oman and Zanzibar. In turn, the succession of Sultans often resorted to indirect rule, relying on local families to govern coastal entities.  The Mazrui family of Mombasa, for example, produced 10 successive liwalis (governors) who effectively controlled the key city for a hundred years.

Yet, as this book reports, never was everything peaceful and happy.  Squabbles, intrigue, fighting, ruling family dynamics, competition between the Swahili towns, loyalty to contesting overlords or protecting powers, economic fortunes – especially the devastating impact of the elimination of slavery – all combined to render the scene changing and complex.  Author Aldrick delves into this morass of confusion and provides a coherent compendium of key events and personages.

Comment: I lived in Mombasa for three years and got to know the author, and the modern city, and some of the past, but this book has many revelations. I enjoyed the vignettes about individuals.  I had not realized there were so many quasi-independent Swahili towns with their own liwalis.  Similarly, I learned that many neglected settlements like those on Pate Island were once important players.

This book is a must read for those interested in Kenya’s history. It provides a long-needed layman’s look at the storied past of the coast. 

   

 

Loss, Pain and Mystery in Uganda

 

A review of The Atlas of Forgotten Places by Jenny D. Williams, St. Martin’s Press, NY, 2017

 

This intriguing novel revolves around the Lord’s Resistance Army, the movement led by rebel warlord/messianic leader Joseph Kony that terrorized northern Uganda for decades beginning in the 1980s.  The author set her story and her characters accurately in the context of wariness and suspicion that typified the Acholi homeland in 2006, just after the fighting migrated to Sudan and the Congo. The Acholi people were traumatized by conflict. All were victims of one sort or another. Especially vulnerable were returnees, those who had escaped from the LRA.  Back home, they lived with the stigma of mistrust.  Rose, the best drawn character in this story, is one of those folks. She harbors memories, fears and secrets, which leak out slowly as the plot progresses.

The basic plot, however, involves the disappearance of Lily, a young American woman. Her aunt Sabine comes to Uganda to find her.  Has Lily simply disappeared or been taken against her will?  Sabine has lots of baggage from her earlier work in Africa, even in Uganda. Sabine investigates, perseveres, enlists others to help, and along the way confronts her own demons.  After-the-fact, the plot seems contrived, but it does push the tale along. There are several nice, unexpected twists as the story comes to fruition.

Author Williams’ strengths are in her descriptions of Acholi life and the introspections of her characters as they confront the obstacles before them.  

Readers will undoubtedly come away with improved knowledge of the trauma that Ugandans experienced. The personalization of that trauma via the characters of this story adds immeasurably to the impact of such understanding.

Disclaimer: As readers of this blog know I too am an author. Two of my books, The Last Rhino and Finding Kony, also deal with the predations of the Lord’s Resistance Army in the region. I commend Ms. Williams for getting it right in penning a significant contribution for outside comprehension of the terrible – and continuing - pains that afflict the Acholi people.

  

Opinion, Criticism and Satire

 

A review of How to Write About Africa – Collected Works by Binyavanga Wainaina, One World, New York, 2022.

 

Kenyan writer Wainaina is a puzzle. Outspoken, even outrageous, his métier is criticism and sarcasm. This is shown both in his fiction and his essays, which share this tome.  Wainaina spares no quarter in portraying excess human foibles, including greed or misplaced humanitarianism.  His satire bites deep and certainly reflects an obsession with pointing out erroneous western perceptions about Africa and Africans.  The title of the book comes from an early essay to that effect. Yet, Wainaina is an equal opportunity critic in that he also diatribes against the motivations of fellow Africans in playing to western stereotypes or in their relations with each other.  He delights in showing warts and all.  His characters are very human.

The fiction pieces allow the author to develop realistic but purposely overdrawn characters. I liked Ships in High Transit about tourists at the coast being bamboozled by folks pretending to be Maasai. Real truths about both sides emerge.  Equally entertaining is An Affair to Disremember. It is sort of a sad story about lives and expectations gone awry. 

Most telling of the essays is Beyond River Yei which is a report of a sojourn in South Sudan as part of an effort to eradicate sleeping sickness. In that piece Wainaina demonstrates legitimate chops as a feature writer.

Readers won’t want to miss key satires of How to Be a Dictator and the title piece How to Write about Africa.

Throughout the collection there is plenty for a reader to think about, muddle over, agree with, reject, or object to. That, in fact, is the author’s goal.  And, it is well accomplished.  

Coda: Nakuru born son of a Kikuyu father and a Ugandan Tutsi mother, after secondary school Binyavanga fled to South Africa where he began his writing career, and came out. Subsequently, he returned to Kenya to rattle cages there via Kiwani?, a magazine he published. Sadly, Wainaina died young in 2019.

Folly in Accra

 

Turquoise – Three Years in Ghana: A Peace Corps Memoir by Lawrence Grobel, HMH Press, 2022.

This is a candid memoir. I was offput by revelations of sex and drugs in initial chapters but reading on found that the totality of the chapters – not really chapters but sequential anecdotes or observations – began to build a comprehensive picture of the Ghana that Grobel experienced.  It was indeed a place that operated by its own set of confusing cultural constraints. Some were legacies of traditional village life, but others were mechanisms that modern Ghanaians developed to cope with each other within a corrupt system where getting ahead was the principal objective.  Sex, graft, nepotism, fatalism, humor, relationships, obligations, misunderstandings, all got mixed up in the quests of Grobel’s subjects: first to survive and then to thrive.

Author Grobel was a full participant in the scene around him and acute observer of it. His sketches of life and people in his life in Accra are trenchant. Some chapters are connected in a desultory manner, others stand alone.  Grobel was acutely aware of his foreignness and how that figured into how people saw and dealt with him and how he dealt with them.  He was generally sympathetic to Ghanaians but scathing regarding diplomats and outside do-gooders.  During his years in Ghana Grobel developed lasting friendships; one with a young man named Atar and another with girlfriend Akua. The saga of their interactions tracks throughout the book.

The overall impact of the memoir is to paint Ghana and Ghanaians in unvarnished terms. Despite Grobel’s cynicism, a genuine affection for Ghana and its people shines through.

Folly and Madness in the Congo

 

 

A review of The Last Expedition – Stanley’s Mad Journey through the Congo by Daniel Liebowitz and Charles Pearson, W. W. Norton, NY, 2005.

 The popular facts - In 1886 word began to spread that Emin Pasha, a German national who was the governor of Equatoria Province of Egyptian Sudan, was under siege by Mahdi jihadists who in 1885 had executed British Governor General Charles Gordon and stuck his head on a pole in Khartoum. The British public was outraged by this atrocity so rallied to support the relief of Gordon’s last remaining lieutenant.  Because the Mahdists controlled the Nile, an overland expedition was conceived designed to resupply Emin Pasha and to offer him an escape from the marauding jihadists. The best-known explorer of Africa, Henry Morton Stanley, was designated to lead the expedition.

It began to go wrong from the beginning.  The major decision that backfired was Stanley’s bullheaded determination to approach Equatoria from the west, that is starting at the Atlantic Ocean. The shorter alternative was from the east along the slave caravan trails from Zanzibar.  Stanley’s iron will prevailed and the column of nearly a thousand men – nine Europeans, some Sudanese soldiers, some Somali fighters and hundreds of Zanzibari porters, augmented by hundreds of African carriers – both hired and enslaved – began the 2000-mile journey from the mouth of the Congo River, up the river and its Aruwimi tributary. They hacked through hundreds of miles of oppressive, dank, dark, wet jungle to Lake Albert. Beginning in March 1887, they sought to transport hundreds of tons of ammunition, weaponry, and supplies as well as an eighty-foot-long metal boat. Materiel was divided into sixty-pound loads carried by men. Those who survived the rigors of the journey finally arrived at the Lake in December 1887.

The going was hell. Rivers became impassable. The Ituri jungle was impenetrable, and native tribes, including pygmies, cannibals, and indigenous slavers, were hostile. Harassment and conflict plagued the column. Food ran out and little was available. Men starved, were wounded, weakened, and became susceptible to disease. Hundreds died. Stanley badgered and berated his officers. He brutalized slackers and laggards, and had thieves and deserters hung. Given the almost insurmountable obstacles, it is amazing that the column crept onwards, seemingly empowered by Stanley’s unbending will.

Upon finally reaching Lake Albert, the southernmost part of Equatoria, Stanley and Emin Pasha finally met.  Each privately recognized the irony of Pasha rescuing Stanley rather than the other way around.  However, Pasha exercised diminishing control over his Egyptian troops who, at first, refused to believe that their sovereign the Khedive of Egypt had abandoned them.  Secondly, they opted to rebel against Pasha and his so-called savior Stanley. Pasha was a weak, indecisive administrator and while he dithered, Stanley returned into the forest to reclaim what was left of his rear column and supplies. That took a year!

Finally, back at Lake Albert Stanley set a deadline and Pasha realized he had no option. He had to leave. Another huge column set out for Zanzibar. This column moved excruciatingly slowly as well but did not suffer from the horrors of the jungle. Twelve hundred miles later on December 4, 1889, they arrived at Bagamoyo, on the Indian Ocean coast across from Zanzibar Island.  There during a joyful welcoming dinner celebration, Emin Pasha unwittingly stepped out of a second story window and smashed his head on the stones below. (Pasha survived but never left Africa). Stanley, who had more than enough of the dithering gentle soul, left him and returned to a tumultuous reception in England. 

Reality – The authors of this book recount the facts of the expedition but reveal the maneuvering, the backbiting, the antagonisms, the politics, the scheming, the betrayals, the bravery, the motives, the competence, the incompetence, and the character of all involved. The first narrative of the expedition was Stanley’s best seller In Darkest Africa. In that book Stanley painted himself as hero and protagonist without peers. In fact, Stanley was aloof, selfish, and haunted by his humble origins. He was motivated by the prospects for fame and fortune. He focused on results. He had no friends or colleagues on the expedition, only subordinates.

Later publications of letters, diaries and memoirs by his British companions cast considerable doubt on Stanley’s version of events, especially his leadership and management styles. The authors of the book used the various accounts of the expedition throughout the saga to paint an authentic portrait of the expedition, of its people, of the hardships, and of the decisions made and not made.  Especially revealing are the roles that Stanley’s British subordinates played. Indeed, without them – and Stanley gave them little credit in his opus – the expedition would not have survived.  Major Barttelot, William Bonny, James Jameson, Arthur Jephson, Dr. Parke, Lt. Stairs, Herbert Ward, and even notorious Arab slaver Tippu Tib, all played important roles in the expedition’s various fortunes.  Consequently, The Last Expedition provides contemporary readers with an accurate recitation of the reality of the expedition to rescue Emin Pasha. It is terrific readable history!

Afterword – Readers will note various citations, not just from Stanley, but from others mentioned above, employed to underline points in the text. Indeed, as the authors later explain, in the years after the expedition was completed, the contrasting points of view provided fodder for Britian’s popular press. The sanctimonious anti-Stanley hoopla certainly tarnished his reputation but could not refute the fact that he was the 19^th century’s most intrepid explorer.  

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.