297. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) was one of the books I read last year or two. Again, I am not truly reviewing them. I am only talking about it.

The story is about a woman who fell in love with a man with a genetic disorder that allows him to unpredictably travel through time. This unpredictability of his travels led to several problems in that relationship. However, through some means involving the future self of Henry, the man, Clare - the woman - got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter, Alba. Alba was also diagnosed with chrono-impairment, the genetic disorder that causes time travel; however, Alba was able to control her destinations and the times of her travels.

The story seems to be about waiting for love and the problems that arise from such waiting. It is weird. This novel defies classification: is it a love story? Is it a science fiction? Have you read this novel? What's your opinion?

295. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

Usually, when I read a book I make an attempt at reviewing and sharing with my readers. Sometimes attempt fails. Sometimes it feels like smugness: why should anyone pay attention to you when there are a thousand splendid reviews on the same book. This feeling becomes worse when I am talking about a non-African book. Consequently, I am changing the tack today. Today, we are all going to review this beautiful, and yet unsettling, book together. Yes, you and I - we; that is, if you have read it.

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Kafka on the Shore is a story of two strands: the story of the 15-year old Kafka Tamura around whose neck, or on whose head, lay a huge chunk of Oedipal curse; and an old Nakata who lost a large part of his mental faculties when he survived a long coma induced by strange lights somewhere in the forests during the World War II, when he was a child. Nakata, however, gained the ability to talk to cats and to make strange things happen, like making leeches fall from the sky.

Kafka on the Shore is not the usual story that seems to provide answers with nicely tied-up endings. In this, Murakami tested the boundaries of belief and of the novel itself. He stretched the horizons of reality and the paranormal. To western readers satisfied with realist novels, this book will not be interesting as they cannot imagine how people - like Johnnie Walker or Colonel Sanders - could just appear and act, the latter says he is just a 'concept'. These individuals will marvel how walking through a forest could lead you to a place that is between this world and the world beyond, perhaps Dante's Limbo. They will scratch their heads to understand how a self-confessed cat-killer could collect the souls of cats and make flutes with them or how a 'concept' Colonel could suddenly become a pimp. However, for readers used to Latin American literature and for African readers, this will not be difficult to fathom for these are the stories we tell every day.

Even though this book borders on the surreal, it purveys modernity. In it you will meet characters who discuss music - classical music, poetry, philosophy both Eastern and Western, among others; you will meet individuals with so much America in them that sometimes you will wonder if the book is set in one of these western countries instead of Nakano, Shikoku and those in between. There is even a transgender gay who dresses like a man and who was referred to with masculine pronouns throughout the book. Juxtaposing modernity and such 'absurdity' to get a novel so complex and yet so easy to read is not a task the novice novelist can attempt. It, truly, is the work of a master.

So I am inviting you to a discussion of the novel. What did you take from this novel? Did you like it? Anything you have to say is welcome. I will respond to comments.

294. Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco

Abracadabra! And I appeared. As suddenly as I 'disapparated'. Blogging became boring. I got other interests. I learnt (still learning) a computer language, took up some courses related to my 'profession', Kofi - my son, came along etc. But I also (re)read a few books, about which I did not blog. Hence, I will be attempting to go back in time to just talk about (not review) some of the books I read. 

Prague Cemetery falls into the kind of books that could hold your attention span for longer periods of time. Those books that are exactly as you perceived them to be. For those Dan Brown fans (of which I am not excluded), take any of Dan's books, add more intriguing plots, and crank up its literary value. To this, add the fact that almost every character in this novel has a historical counterpart, and you will get an amazing book that takes you through the historical development of conflicts, assassinations, and much more. The book sought to portray how individuals working for nations, organisations, churches, secret societies are able to conjure non-existent enemies just to justify their employ and in doing so cause mass delusion.

This is the first book I read in the year and though I have forgotten the details, I remember smiling and staying up to read it. A commercial assessment of Prague Cemetery and any of Dan Brown's novels shows how bad product can become popular through effective marketing and advertising, for there is no way the any of the latter can stand up to the latter in terms of its literary value, denseness of the plot among others.

I enjoyed this novel. Have you read it? What do you think?

272. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote by Ahmadou Kourouma

Waiting for the Wild Beast to Vote (Vintage, 2003; 445) is a quintessential Ahmadou Kourouma. Like the previous book, Allah is not Obliged, it is about political failures on the African continent. Like Wizard of the Crow, it mixes voodoo and African mysticism with politics to satirically tell the story of the evolution of dictatorship and its subsequent metamorphoses into questionable democracies, on the continent of Africa.

The story traces how Koyaga developed from a pro-French soldier to become the president and dictator of Republique du Golfe, through a series of prophecies, coups and counter-coups. Fricassa Santos became the president of Republic du Golfe, after independence following an election whose supervision by the United Nations and with Fricassa's own sorcery prevented the French from rigging it to suit their preferred candidate, J.-L Crunet, who had been the country's Prime Minister for the last ten years of colonial rule. Having assumed power, Fricassa's voodoo men had informed him that he should be fearful of one of the members of the Naked People of the Mountain, for he would be the one to overthrow him. Consequently, Fricassa further fortified himself with voodoo, thick walls, and a phalanx of commandos. So when Koyaga, a former pro-French soldier, son of Tchao - the first man to fight for the French, to wear clothes, and to lead his people against French invasion when they attempted to capture and bring the people of the mountain under French colonial rule - and Nadjouma - a woman of such physical powers that no one could face her and in whom even the famous and extraordinarily strong Tchao met his match - after years of service demanded his pension which the French government had paid into the country's coffers, Fricassa decided not to pay and also not to integrate Koyaga and his men into the country's army. According to Koyaga, such pro-French forces, stooges of the colonialist, who fought against the Nationalists freedom fighters in all the French colonies do not deserve to serve in the country's army. But the real reason of his decision was the prophecy.

However, as the Biblical story of Joseph and his brothers shows, preventing and suppressing a prophecy is the fastest route to its fulfilment. Koyaga, who was oblivious of the existence of any prophecy - though there was one about him which professed great tidings for him and his people, decided to use force to obtain what was due them from the government. Steeped in the voodoo of his mother and Bokano - a Muslim spiritualist and a marabout, Koyaga's mission suddenly morphed into a plan to takeover the country, of which he succeeded. However, there were four of them who could become leaders: Koyaga; the former Prime Minister, J.-L. Crunet; Bodjo (later Ledjo); and Tima. 

Bodjo (or Ledjo) was a disappointed priest who ran into exile when on the eve of his investiture he was virtually killed by a man who accused him of sleeping with his wife. In exile he fought for the French in almost all their colonies: Madagascar, Morocco, Vietnam, Algeria.

Everywhere he proved himself a formidable leader and a pitiless foe of colonised people struggling to be free. During his travels, he acquired the prestigious rank of Warrant Officer Second Class and the conviction that, in life, only treachery and deception triumph and that they always pay. This credo informed his conduct and, on his return to his country, he played the game of intrigue.

However, even though Ledjo fought against the nationalists he was a quasi-nationalist who believed in certain nationalist ideologies as the non-eternalness of white supremacy and also that the black man was not inherently evil. This ability to believe one thing and do another emphasised his cunningness and his ability to fluidly change beliefs. These socialist tendencies, in a time of the Cold War, lost him the presidency. The power-sharing agreement that followed made him the president of the National Security Committee; ironically, the committee became more powerful than the government and the National Assembly. 

Tima who was openly a communist and an anti-colonialist and had studied under the tutelage of a homosexual patron in France became the president of the National Assembly. To J.-L Crunet, a mulatto who was "unhappy not to be white, but happy not to be black" [116], was given the position of head of government. And Koyaga became the Minister of Defence. Crunet and Koyaga became the liberal conservatives, influenced by the West (during the Cold War) and Ledjo and Tima became the nationalists and progressives (influenced by the East).

However, because "if you pull off a big robbery with someone, you will never truly enjoy the spoils until the other person is dead [Allah is not Obliged, 95], there were counter coups and insurrections, which resulted in the deaths of the three and the elevation of Koyaga into the presidency. Having achieved this, he sought to visit his peers to learn from them the trade of becoming a president in Africa. 

As a quintessential Ahmadou novel, there is a large dose of political history of Africa in the story. In fact, it could easily be described as a historical novel, if not for its surrealism. What he wrote about some of the leaders, beginning from their childhood and their route to the presidency, made it easy to identify them; they are information that Wikipedia easily provides. Through Koyaga's visits to these leaders, Ahmadou describes how leadership worked in that given period in Africa and the type of people who sought it. He also described how leadership was taken away from the people who fought for independence and given to the colonialists' stooges, who continued with the colonialists' policies of oppression and therefore changed nothing in the country. He adds that, like a con artist, these new leaders put on charades to present themselves to the world as leaders who were ready to represent their people; leaders who had denounced communism. Gradually, when they had obtained the peoples' acceptance, and an absolute hold on power, they moved on to call themselves father of the nation, his excellency, and such, turning their countries into one-party states, themselves the only rulers. Ahmadou labelled almost every leader on the continent, directly or indirectly, whose political party was the only one and who had ruled for some time, a dictator. With this generalisation, Kwame Nkrumah and others became dictators. 

According to Kourouma a people are defeated only if they allow themselves to be defeated regardless of the opposition. Thus, Africans complicit in their own colonisation were also complicit in their subjugation by these leaders.

In all these, Ahmadou discussed the role of the colonialists in creating these monstrous leaders; more importantly he pointed to the consequential effect of Cold War policies on African leadership. So that leaders with socialist beliefs, or presumed to be socialists because of what they might have said, but of great capabilities were denounced and killed to be replaced by anti-communists of doubtful capabilities and insatiable lust for power. Yet ideologies are useless if they are strategised to benefit a few individuals under the pretext of helping the people - the masses. It is useless if it does not address the people's needs, for an ideology is nothing but a tool to shape lives, behaviours, thoughts and their outcomes (or effects). The intellectuals who should have remained true to their training, in an attempt to gain positions and enjoy the perks of power, rushed to legitimise the positions of these new leaders in histories, poems and with their words. Though political allegiances and ideologies shift, the motive for the quest of power does not shift; thus, an anti-colonialist's (or a nationalist's) motive is usually not different from a colonialist's (a stooge of the colonialists): one to enrich himself and his bosses, the other himself and his bosses. The end of both situations is the suffering of the masses.

Like Allah is not Obliged, this novel has received glowing reviews. It was described by the Spectator as 'a witty and wholly authentic chronicle of black African atrocity...spellbinding' and the Guardian as 'a thoroughgoing indictment of African way of leadership'. How dictatorship is a black African atrocity is difficult to understand, as if there has never been such type of leadership anywhere in the world, as if these dictators just appeared from nowhere. There is no African way of leadership. There is good leadership and bad leadership. Strangely, what these reviewers at the Guardian and Spectator forgot to add was the fingerprints of the West on all the dictators mentioned in this story. They suddenly suffered amnesia on those part of the story that showed that Emperor Bossouma of Pays du Deux Fleuves (Jean-Bedel Bokassa, later Emperor Bokassa, of the Central African Republic), the man whose totem was the leopard of République du Grand Fleuve (Mobutu Sese Seko of Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire), and the dictator whose totem is the caiman of République du Ébenes (Houphouet-Boigny of Cote d'Ivoire), all three fingered in the story, were supported and maintained massively by the imperialists in their East-West dichotomous game. In fact, these leaders chose their allegiances carefully and brutally declared their anti-communist stand during the Cold War, staunching the flow of Communism into Africa with all their might.

Democracies will only help people who are anti-communist. Even if the Cold War, the struggle between communists and the West, is just a friendly scuffle between white men, between the rich, we have to get involved. We Africans get involved so we can reap the fruits of victory! [286-7]

The relationship between these leaders and their Western counterparts, and the stance of the latter during the Cold War was highlighted throughout in the text. In fact, it is common knowledge how undemocratic the relationship between the West and Africa was at the time. It was clear that had the Devil declared himself anti-communist, these leaders would have found a way to work with him, as they did the world over. According to Wikipedia

In 1975, the French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing declared himself a 'friend and family member' of Bokassa. By that time France supplied its former colony's regime with financial and military backing. In exchange, Boskassa frequently took d'Estaing on hunting trips in Central Africa and supplied France with uranium, which was vital for France's nuclear energy and weapons program in the Cold War era.

The 'friendly and fraternal' cooperation with France - according to Bokassa's own terms - reached its peak with the imperial coronation ceremony of Bokassa I on 4 December 1977. The French Defence Minister sent a battalion to secure the ceremony; he also lent 17 aircraft to the new Central African Empire's government, and assigned French Navy personnel to support the orchestra. The coronation ceremony lasted two days and cost 10 million GBP [Great Britain Pounds], more than the annual budget of the Central African Republic. The ceremony was organized by the French artist Jean-Pierre Dupont. Parisian jeweller Claude Bertrand made his crown, which included diamonds. Bokassa sat on a two-ton throne modeled in the shape of a large eagle made form solid gold.

Of Mobutu Sese Seko, it says 

Installed and supported in office primarily by Belgium and the United States, he formed an authoritarian regime, amassed vast personal wealth, and attempted to purge the country of all colonial cultural influence while enjoying considerable support by the United States due to his anti-communist stance. ... 

During the First Republic era, France tended to side with the conservative and federalist forces as opposed to unitarists such as Lumumba. ... During the presidency of Charles de Gaulle, relations with the two countries gradually grew stronger and closer. In 1971, then Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing paid a visit to Zaire; later becoming President, he would develop close personal relationship with President Mobutu, and became one of the regime's closest foreign allies. During the Shaba invasions, France sided firmly with Mobutu: during the first Shaba invasion, France airlifted 1,500 Moroccan troops to Zaire, and the rebels were repulsed; a year later, during the second Shaba invasion, France itself would send French Foreign Legion paratroopers to aid Mobutu (along with Belgium).

Additionally, Kourouma narrated the long history of the DR Congo, from the role of King Leopold II and his use of mercenaries in running a country that was his personal property. Again, these narratives are not different from what is available in public domain. Again, quoting Wikipedia

Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price in rubber in the 1890s, by forcing the population to collect sap from rubber plants. Villages were required to meet quotas on rubber collections, and individuals' hands were cut off if they did not meet the requirements. His regime was responsible for the death of an estimated 2 to 15 million Congolese. This became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the Belgian government.

Consequently, the  idea to describe this evil repelled by the people, and supported and maintained by the West, as 'authentic African leadership...' is borne out of a prejudiced and warped mind bent on misinforming and putting the continent in that light. One could understand if this is meant as a marketing tool, for the publishers, to get as many Westerners, who turn to Africa to satisfy their love for the macabre and who think that is all the continent is good for, as possible to purchase it. But this goes beyond that. This is a deliberate attempt by those reviewers to skew the story to suit the West's construct of Africa. If anything at all, this is an authentic chronicle of Western influence in African politics and the effects of that acrimonious and sulphuric Cold War on governance in Africa.

The end of the Cold War marked the end of the usefulness of these dictators. Overnight, they became excess baggage that needed to be disposed off to save the sinking ship. They lost their appeal and their wickedness and lies - using communism as an excuse to crushing insurrections in their countries - were no longer countenanced. The new stories were reforms and democracy. However, as experienced politicians these leaders were able to transform themselves into the new governance system which became a condition for economic aid. And this is what happened to Koyaga, whose celebration of his thirtieth anniversary in power used up the entire resources of the country leading to protests and widespread violent demonstrations. When he shouted communism, he was told it had already been defeated, it no longer existed. He must reform if he were to receive any assistance. He must allow political parties to be formed and must go for elections, which he did in a spectacular manner, thus becoming the first democratic president of the country.

The narrative structure is somewhat complex. The story was narrated by Bingo, a griot, with interjections by Tiécoura, his assistant and Koyaga - the President, and his aide, Maclédio. But it was written down by a different person who occasionally appeared but largely remained anonymous, writing the story directly as Bingo reported, making it seem as if it is Bingo writing his story.

However, this story could have been half its size and would still have told all that it told. The extra stories were too long. It was almost as if Kourouma was writing the complete history of every figure or character in the story, even when it does not add to the story. This made some parts seem unnecessary and repetitive. For instance, excluding the entire lateral story of Maclédio and how he became Koyaga's right-hand man would have benefitted the story.

Furthermore, Ahamadou's penchant of intruding into his novels with his own understanding and point of views, though minimal in this story, was present. This always takes away from the novel. His personal influence could easily be distinguished from the characters'. It lacks that fluidity with which an author merges his desires with that of his characters so that the reader sees only the characters and not the author. However, his use of hyperbole in this story is accepted as griots are allowed to tell their stories in their own fashion.

On the side, it has been suggested elsewhere that the parodied the late Togolese Gnassingbé Eyadéma. For those who want a scathing read on African leadership during the Cold War read this book. However, if you want the same thing with much more bite read Wizard of the Crow.

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Click to read about Ahmadou Kourouma

271. Allah is not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma

African literature now has two unnecessary camps - Afropolitanism and Poverty Porn - and the discourse has been on which of the two represents the continent, sort of. But does it matter? Can one narrative represents the second largest and the second most populous continent of a whopping 1.033 billion grouped into "54 recognized sovereign states and countries, 9 territories and 2 de facto independent states with very little recognition"? [World Population Review, 2013]. That one theme cannot represent the continent is perhaps known by both 'camps'. So what incited this discourse? (By the way, there are several others who do not believe in either of the two and whose writings are not influenced by them.)

African writers who wrote in a particular style about wars, poverty, deaths, hunger, and such depravities have often been singled out for awards, even when the quality of their prose does not support the award adequately. It became (and is) the magic formula to fame and awards for the African writer who wants to see a meteoric rise in his fortunes. These writers have been accused of telling stories to suit the West's construct of Africa in order to get published, win awards, and become famous. Jose Eduardo Agualusa in his book The Book of Chameleons, described someone as having 'built up his whole career abroad, selling our national horrors to European readers. Misery does ever so well in wealthy countries.' (Pg 68 ).

Sometimes these accusations may seem justified; sometimes they may not. Most often they are debatable: the continent has had its fair share of difficulties and one cannot easily discount the diseases, deaths, poverty, and wars which it has come to represent. In fact, the continent has become synonymous with these. However, no group is happy to keep this narrative up than Africans themselves, especially the few privileged ones. They play this up so that any comparison with (to) themselves will weigh in their favour. They become our spokesmen and women, our representatives - the physical embodiment of what we could become should the continent be aided.

However, in no other book does the macabre and the praise converge than in Ahmadou Kourouma's Allah is not Obliged (Vintage, 2007 (FP: 2000); 215). Described as 'a work of luminous humanity' by the Financial Times with the author himself described as 'one of Africa's pre-eminent novelists' by the Guardian, Allah is not Obliged is a book that tell the story of a young boy of ten who, in embarking on a search for his auntie in Liberia following the death of his cripple mother, gets caught-up in a tribal war of historical proportions; civil wars that would see him trek between two countries - Liberia and Sierra Leone. The recent conviction of Charles Taylor, a Liberian War Lord and a major player in both wars, for war crimes in Sierra Leone shows the enormity and savagery of these wars.

According to Birahima - the narrator and an ex-street child,

The full, final and completely complete title of my bullshit story is: Allah is not obliged to be fair about all the things he does here on earth.

Thus, it is this unfairness combined with human stupidity and depravity that Ahmahou explored when he uncovered one of the large and deeper wounds that festered and nearly crippled the western part of the continent. The Sierra Leonean and Liberian wars were bitterly fought and because of the complexity of the factors that led to the war, it was just too difficult to disentangle. Together with his relative Yacouba, a confident trickster who would ply his trade as a jujuman to several mini warlords, Birahima would move from camp to camp, village to village and country to country in a war that would cruelly murder the leftovers of his innocence with their unwarranted massacres.

The war motif gives this book all the characteristics of what an African novel has come to be known and perceived. From a priest turned rebel to dead bodies being fed to dogs, Allah is not Obliged has it all, and more. Captain Papa le bon was trained as a priest in the United States. His ordination was to take place in Liberia; however, when all was set, war broke. He stayed in Liberia and became a soldier-cum-priest seeing to the spiritual and physical needs of the people under him and the emotional needs of the women. As a priest, Captain Papa le bon preached and exorcised spirits; as the alpha-male he slept incessantly with people's - including his soldiers' - wives. As a rebel leader, he trained and used child soldiers; took bribes from traders before allowing them to trade in stolen goods; killed whomever he wanted; and represented Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) in the Eastern part of Liberia. How much more classic than this get? Captain Papa le bon, in addition to carrying a Bible and Qu'ran in his hands, covered himself in magic talismans with Kalashnikovs hanging across his shoulders.

Though the narrative is at times sarcastic with its matter-of-fact tone exposing the stupidity of adult behaviour in such periods of war (when they are overrun by their animalistic passions instead of their brains), the praises this book received had nothing to do with the prose; it has everything to do with the content. One could see an attempt at filling every page with the macabre. For instance, the stories Ahmadou told before the war and those set in non-warring countries were themselves gruesome. This is the story of Sarah prior to the war and her path to becoming a child soldier: Sarah's mother was knocked down by a drunk driver. Her father who was a sailor did not know what to do with her so he sent her to live with his sister. Sarah's auntie physically abused her for the slightest offence. She was beaten and starved when she could not account for the fruits a gang of boys stole from her; when it happened the second time, Sarah stayed away from home and became a street child. On the street, she was raped and left for dead. She was hospitalised and upon her discharge ended up in an orphanage. The orphanage was attacked at the onset of the war, all the nuns were either murdered or raped, and Sarah ended up becoming a prostitute and from there graduated to a child soldier. Or rather, like almost all the child soldiers whose stories Birahima told, asked to be a child soldier. The stories of the other child soldiers were not any different, filled with rape and death. Even in Togobala in Cote d'Ivoire, Birahima's story was macabre and bloody. He described how his mother's leg was going to be cut and given to dogs. And there were a lot of dogs doing the munching in this novel. The men in Togobaland, like Yacouba, Sekou, and their friends, were crooks and thieves who swindled people out of their wealth. There is enough gruesomeness to make the skin grow carbuncular goosebumps.

The characters are one dimensional, that is if one can refer to them even as characters. They pass through the narrative like ghosts, leaving no impression. They were emotionless, unfeeling, like zombies, like automatons, like they are portrayed in African war movies. The only emotion they exude is an unquenchable urge to kill. He describes both the people and the countries as 'fucked up'. Every president in the story was a dictator, from Houphouet-Boigny to Qaddafi and those in between.

There are some inconsistencies which make the story come across as a sort of childhood braggadocio, especially since Birahima had once been a street guy who loved the thrills. Captain Papa le Bon was described as someone who went everywhere without his Kalashs; he carried them with him in his sleep and when he was having sex. However, in another breath, Ahmadou says Captain Papa le bon took his Kalash every morning and before going on his rounds. This may not be much since Birahima was just ten year old. However, it counts for something when it is compared to the other things Birahima talked about.

For instance, the kind of historical information provided at some places was not things a ten-year old illiterate could conceive. Birahima knew almost every date, place, and detailed occurrences that took place at the war fronts and in the conferences and meetings organised in hotels away from the countries during the two civil wars. He knew the histories of both wars like they were his mother's hut.

The second round of negotiations in Abidjan opened on 29 and 30 July 1997, back on the twenty-third floor of the Hotel Ivoire. ... Surprise! The Junta's new proposals are completely in opposition to the points established in the first round of talks on July 17. Now the Junta wants to suspend the constitution and stay in power until 2001. ... 

And it was not as if Birahima was a War Lord with a stake in the war or that he participated in those meetings and historical moments he described with such vividness. He was just a boy looking for his auntie who in the end turned out dead (with all the deaths going on, everybody could predict this).

Ahmadou most often forgot that he was telling a story through the eyes of a child. He could be virtually seen jumping in to vent his personalised anger, emotions, and perceptions about the war to the reader through his narrator. Thus, one is unsure if this is an essay or story; a treatise or thesis. Birahima mixes facts with fantasy and complete falsehood making it difficult for the reader to trust him, He makes his personal beliefs the facts and his facts history. The story, in this way, loses its status as a story. It becomes something else. A child narrator should be believable or at least should not say things he has no means of knowing in a story meant to be realistic. If it were fantastical images of the netherworld, or any of such things that only children see, it would have been acceptable and believable. He talked about Qaddafi having a lot of military camps training terrorists, with authority. How did Birahima get to know these things if it were not Ahmadou saying what he wanted to say through him?

Attempts were made to make the book sound street-tough with its excessive use of street-lingua such as 'fuck' and swear words such Faforo, Gnamokode, Walahe and others. Natives, niggers, savages, bushmen, and other such descriptions used in the book sounded too forced and artificial. And the frequent references to the use of dictionaries to justify Birahima's use of 'big words' was a let down. Whilst some very 'big words' were not at all defined, some other equally unnecessary ones like 'stuff', 'army ants', and others were defined. In fact, a person should know the word to search for it. A person cannot just pick the dictionary and suddenly discover the right word. There should be a starting point. Besides, how could an illiterate ten-year old read the dictionary? Similarly, the frequent use of certain refrains in the telling of the story was not only forced but annoying.

This is a story of a street child who found himself locked up in an unfortunate situation; however, it is more about the story of the wars than it is about the narrator's role or himself. There was too much an attempt at the macabre, which would have been acceptable had it been restricted to the war parts. However, from the first page to the last, the macabre was present in its graphic detail. In this way, it lost its significance and the war sections became just mere attempts at shocking readers the more. The story is written in a tongue-in-cheek manner with the intention to deride and scorn and to be sarcastic. However, the fact that the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars occurred, the fact that the wars resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands (Sierra Leone, 200,000; Liberia, 220,000; according to Wars and Casualties of the 20th and 21st Centuries), and the fact that the book itself records some historical  moments makes it an important book worth the read. If one take away the poor use of the child-narrator, the failed attempt at scatology, one will come out from reading this book with an average understanding of the history of the wars in those two countries.

______________________________

About the Author: Ahmadou Kourouma (November 24, 1927 - December 11, 2003) was an Ivorian novelist. From 1950 to 1954, when his country was still under French colonial control, he participated in French military campaigns in Indochina, after which he journeyed to France to Study mathematics in Lyon. He returned to Cote d'Ivoire after it won independence in 1960, yet he quickly found himself questioning the government of Felix Houphouet-Boigny. After brief imprisonment, Kourouma spent several years in exile, first in Algeria (1964 - 1969), then in Cameroon (1974 - 1984) and Togo (1984 - 1994), before finally returning to live in Cote d'Ivoire.

His first novel Les soleils des indépendences (The Suns of Independence, 1970) contains a critical treatment of post-colonial governments in Africa.Twenty years later, his second book Monnè, outrages et défis, a history of a century of colonialism, was published. In 1998, he published En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, (translated as Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote), a satire of post colonial Africa in the style of Voltaire in which a griot recounts the story of a tribal hunter's transformation into a dictator, inspired by Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo. In 2000, he published Allah n'est pas obligé (translated as Allah is Not Obliged), a tale of an orphan who becomes a child soldier when traveling to visit his aunt in Liberia.

In France, each of Ahmadou Kourouma's novels has been greeted with great acclaim, sold exceptionally well, and been showered with prizes including the Prix Renaudot in 2000 and Prix Goncourt des Lycéens for  Allah n'est pas obligé. [Source]

270. Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Stories of the atrocities and ills committed during colonialism most often seem fictional to people's ears, especially those who never lived within the period and never directly experienced them. To those twice removed from the action, it sounds like a fantastic tale told to children around the firelight, beneath the full moon. This might have occurred because for the larger part of the twentieth century, this has been the motif for several African writers - poets, novelists, dramatists. However, nothing is as real as the wanton devastation of the people by the colonists and colonialists in their bid to own the land and subjugate, or in their own way civilise, the people. It is through the biographies and memoirs of those who lived the times that the true effects of what was meted out to our fathers and grandfathers come alive. It is easy for one to disregard fiction, but not too easy to ignore a memoir. 

And in the childhood memoir of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, one of Africa's eminent chronicler of socioeconomic changes, the atrocities come alive at a rate that discombobulate the reader. Dreams in a Time of War (Vintage, 2011 (FP: 2010), 257) tracks Ngugi's life from his father's compound to his mother's-cum-grandfather's compound to the point where he miraculously left for school. It deals with loss and rejection, and a mother's foresight to educate a son, at all cost.

Ngugi's true tale of his life in a Kenyan village clearly showed the role of the church in the colonisation of the indigenes - or the natives, as they were derogatorily referred to by the settlers. It emphasises that what we have read all too often in works of fiction, including the author's own oeuvre, are not mere writers' fantasies. If anything at all, they are watered-down versions, for most often facts are stranger than what fiction could conjure. The role of the church in subjugating the people, through their religious tales, through their preaching, which dehumanises blacks, through the portrayal of their seafarers who landed on the shores Africa, in the classrooms they monopolised and in their churches, cannot in no way be underestimated. In having the sole control of education, they were armed with the single most effective tool of subjugation. It is for this reason why some believe that the Christian God is a white god, and cannot represent blacks.

Even when the natives showed leadership and foresight by creating their own schooling system teaching their students their own syllabuses, the colonialists closed it down when they realised that the nationalists elements are overreaching their bounds; allowing those that agreed to teach the colonialist's approved subjects and syllabuses to open. The priests who manned the religious-schools progressively proselytised all their students and staff, demanding of them to shed all traditional and cultural entrapment, regarding those that imbibed European culture and sensibilities as the avant-gardes. They became the 'path clearers' for the colonial administration. In most African countries, baptismal certificates became the only official document the colonial government accepted when one was dealing with the state. The role of these priests is treated in Mongo Beti's The Poor Christ of Bomba, though unlike Father Superior Drumont, most of these priests never gave.

Reflecting on Ngugi's memoir, it becomes clear that every country has done to another that which it has at one point in time itself fought against. It became clearer that people do not fight oppression because they are entirely anti-oppression or that they abhor, strongly detest, oppression. People do fight oppression because they think they are superior and above oppression. Not others. Most often, when such anti-oppression fighters gain their freedom, succeed in their fight, the very first thing they do is to implement what they had fought against on others they feel superior to, sometimes on the very people they have just defeated. Whilst the British fought Hitler and this occupation of European countries and spread of Nazism, they were at the same time implementing equally draconian and Nazi-like segregation, apartheid, eviction, and occupation in their colonies. If Nazism is racism, what is segregation, apartheid, black land-confiscation?

After the African soldiers - Kenyan soldiers in this specific case - helped the British in a war they had nothing to do with - the Second World War, they - the British colonial government - took lands away from the natives to settle their white soldiers as payment for their war efforts. Thus, while the white soldiers came home to large tracts of land, the black soldiers came home to displaced families. This is a universal phenomenon and it is one that confound exceedingly. After that abominable holocaust and the Jews' return to 'their homeland', they displaced the Palestinians in a blitzkrieg that shocked and still shocks the world. The world is not about fairness or equality. It has never been and might never be. Regardless of what one thinks, the Orwellian principle of Animal Farm reigns. Fairness and Equality are concepts the strong proposes to subject the weak, whose weakness prevents them from retaliating the fairness and equality. A prejudiced mind, a mind of racial and tribal superiority, of religious fundamentalism, of birthers and truthers, a mind which defines brotherhood not in humanity but in other concepts that eliminates others can never ever beget fairness and equality. Asking such a mind to do so is like asking darkness to produce light.

How different therefore was the colonialist's behaviour in Africa during the struggle for independence, especially in Kenya, different from the atrocities carried out the world over? They killed en masse, people disappeared during the night, people were arrested and killed without trial, they wiped out villages, they engaged numerous spies, they hauled resources, they psychologically destroyed people, they dehumanised the natives. Was this not another genocide? What is it called, when a country sets out to destroy another by surgically destroying its history, identity - through controlled manipulations in classrooms, by confiscating its land (to the African land is more than just a piece of the earth), and by killing them en masse at the least resistance? Were these not exactly what the communist countries were accused of?

To stray off, and jump Ngugi - for I know this would definitely appear in his other memoirs, some of the African leaders who led the fight for independence, or who forcefully took power right after independence, behaved similarly. These folks only wanted to be like the white rulers - to enjoy the perks of power, the position and rewards it affords, not necessarily to remove the yoke from their people's necks. In Dreams in a Time of War, a classic example would be Rev Stanley Kahahu, who after becoming a priest, thought he had scaled a wall higher than his people, and armed with the colonial knowledge he had gained and with the backing of the colonial administration he supported, took lands away from their rightful owners. His wife was worst, for she treated everybody, especially the non-Christians, as dirt - cheating them as and when she deemed fit. And one shivers when one realises that one is not reading Weep Not Child, or A Grain of Wheat or any fiction for that matter, but a memoir - a true account of events. Thus, a person does not lose his character when he acquires power. His traits become pronounced. A wicked person may be humble only because he is poor, his real character comes to the fore when he is in a position of power.

Just as not all whites behaved like the colonialists, not all blacks supported the nationalists in their fight for an independent Kenya. In fact, the most brutal colonial force - those who descended heavily physically and emotionally - on the Mau Mau fighters and their families was the Home Guards, which consisted of natives sympathetic to the colonial cause. These folks, living among the people, sometimes from the same womb, developed tortured their kin in droves. And do we not have such elements in our midst today as we pretend to fight neo-colonialism? Are there not Africans out there who say we cannot and should not think of going beyond our means? Are there not Africans who have sold Africa and continue to sell it for their sole benefits?

This war, which Ngugi lived under, which destroyed homes, families, friendships, would turn brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour. It will cause a rift within families and villages. The victims were thus divided, as each takes a stand in the colonialists versus the nationalists struggle. No one would leave the turf unscathed.

Ngugi also talked about the nascent transportation infrastructure that was taking place in the country, with a child's fascination. At a point in time, he had to choose between fulfilling his desire to ride in a train and his pact with her mother to stay at school. All through Africa, in colonial period, the construction of roads and rails meant further oppression from the colonialists. Usually these transport systems were directed at areas with huge resource reserve. It also paved the way, literally, for the evangelical works of the church, which precedes and prepare the people for colonial administration. 

Dreams in a Time of War treats politics, as a pre-teen-early-teen child saw it, and socioeconomic changes that followed rapid colonisation and the war that ensued. It captures the nuances of life - the sad times (a father's rejection; a brother's flight into the bush; an education that was nearly lost), the happy times (gaining admission into one of the best schools; participating in the rite of passage), the emotional moments (beaten by a British soldier for not adding the respectful 'effendi' to statements; having to go without food in the quest for education), and youthful carelessness (the near-asphyxiation; the life-goes-on regardless of the 'bush war').

The writing and narrative style - past and present - put the reader right in the midst of the actions as Ngugi describes them. This makes the reader's emotions synchronous with the emotions exuding from the pages of this magnificent book. The reader goes through all the topsy-turvy moments, living with the figures (not characters), the near misses, the deaths, and pain of realising you have been sold out by a brother, a friend. Reading this book, one has to remind himself that he is reading a memoir and not a work of fiction. It is the reservoir from which Ngugi draws out his work of fiction and anyone who has read any of Ngugi's works will understand it better after reading this work. This work - and may be the others that follow like In the House of Interpreters - encapsulates the essence of Ngugi's oeuvre. 

Individuals who lived within this period of Africa's history - the period when the struggles against the colonialists were at their peak - have a lot to tell. For in their lives is the real history of Africa and Africans. Their lives provide the human side of the struggles narrated in History text books, which is sometimes skewed - told to make some others look macho and important, to exaggerate the roles of sellouts and people who did nothing, or even to water-down the atrocities of the colonialists. These stories expose the evil of colonial rule and the native stooges of the time. And it is these that we must fight; that we do not do to ourselves that which we have fought ferociously against. That we shall no more become colonised, but fight neo-colonism, and whilst doing so prevent the return of the Bokassas, the Mobutu Sese Sekos, the Idi Amins, and such barbaric rulers that shattered the continent. And finally, be wise not to be caught up in any East-West struggle, the like of the Cold War era.

More importantly, these memoirs show that the journey of life is not smooth. It has its bumps and anyone who wants to take a ride must know and appreciate this. They also show us the volume of work that is left or needed to be done. The struggles that Ngugi went through to get education should not be seen in Kenya today. These are the markers against which progress will be measured. Our failures and achievements would be determined by the rate at which we can distinguish between life under colonial rule and life under independence.

This is a quintessential Ngugi book, one that I will recommend to all.

_________________

Read about the author here

268. Women of Owu by Femi Osofisan

Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu (UP PLC, 2006; 78) is considered a re-reading of Euripides' The Trojan Women. The story is about the plight of the women in a defeated town. Oyo mercenaries and warriors from the tribes of Ijebu and Ife had surrounded the city of Owu, on the premise that they were there to liberate the people from their oppressive King. After 7 years of siege, the walls finally gave and the allied forces entered. Sparing none, they killed all men and children and some women. For majority of the women, the leader of the forces and his followers made whores and wives out of them. 

The story discusses how the gods of the Owu people deserted them and the major reason for the invasion. It was clear that the wife of the leader of the combined forces had been captured and married to the King of Owu, in an earlier military campaign against the the Oyo people; this loss transformed the artist husband into a military commander and hence this attack. The other reason espoused was the takeover of the famous Apomu market. 

However, what this story tells is not an ancient story of struggles but a current phenomenon where the strong invades and fights the weak under the banner of liberation.

Nowadays, when the strong fight the weak, it's called a Liberation War to free the weak from oppression. [8]

Several of this liberation invasion has resulted in the death of more civilians than those which led to the attack against the supposedly 'oppressive' king. A case in point is Iraq and currently Libya. Today, Iraq is in such a mess that even those civilians who jubilantly brought down Saddam's statue in Baghdad to mark their victory over the man are not satisfied with the current state of events, where to live through a day is a miracle. One would ask, has the supposed democracy, that magic wand of governance returned to the country? Are the people freer to live or to kill? What makes the invasion that has been declared a success by the invaders such?

What is clear is that like the mercenaries who took over Apomu market, or fought for it, Iraq became a commerce ground for American industries in Iraq, with its oil, building contracts, and infrastructural development. Thus, those who benefitted were not the ordinary Iraqis who are still dying in their numbers, and who - according to one source - have become addicted to tranquilizers. The actual beneficiaries are the people who made 'wives and whores of the women', figuratively speaking. Those who raped the land of its resources.

However, every event has multiple stories. And this the destruction of Owu is no different. There were people who praised the invaders, for having liberated them from the oppression of their king - a king who had the day before the invasion escaped. Such folks claimed that the invaders were only interested in lofty ideas and ideals like freedom and human rights and were blessed to have had them.

WOMAN: No Erelu, what are you saying, or are you forgetting? They do not want our market at all

WOMAN: They are not interested in such petty things as profit - 

WOMAN: Only in lofty, lofty ideas, like freedom - 

WOMAN: Or human rights - 

WOMAN: Oh the Ijebus have always disdained merchandise - 

WOMAN: The Ifes are unmoved by the glitter of gold - [12/13]

Unfortunately, as the allied forces fledged fully their intentions, it was clear that their destruction had no humanity in them. They killed everybody including the dogs and the children. Only the some of the women were spared and even they their future was hazy. Thus, there are folks who would stick to whatever reason they are fed like leeches even if their lives show the contrary. 

In all these there were those who were lucid. They saw things as they were and called it as such. They never recognised the brief effect of the invasion; but they also recognised what was ahead of them. Sarcastically, they cried:

WOMAN: Bless the kindness which has rescued us from tyranny in order to plunge us into slavery! WOMAN: Sing, my friends! Let us celebrate our new-won freedom of chains! [13]

And this is what all liberation and war is about. In an attempt to solve one problem it creates a bigger one. Problems are not solved through fighting; the only reason that war exists is because it makes war investors happy and keeps the psychopaths - masochists and sadists - thrilled. And it is for this reason that

War never ends, but only moves to another place? [58]

An interesting play that I will love to see performed on stage.
______________________________________

About the Author: Babafemi Adeyemi Osofisan (June 1946 in Erunwon, Ogun State) is a Nigeria writer known for his critique of societal problems and his use of African traditional performances and surrealism in some his novels. A frequent theme his novels explore is the conflict between good and evil. He is in fact a didactic writer whose works seek to correct his decadent society.

Osofisan attended primary school at Ife and secondary school at Governor College, Ibadan. After secondary school, he attended the University of Senegal in Dakar and later the University of Ibadan. He continued post-graduate studies at the University of Ibadan and went on to hold faculty positions at the University. [Source]

266. True Murder by Yaba Badoe

Divorce and separation have become part of the natural phases of family life in the Twenty-first Century. It is almost as if any couple on the verge of marriage know that the next phase of this knot-tying ceremony will be the extrication of the one from the other, and are prepared for it. It is as commonplace as marriage itself. However, whereas divorce, usually but not always, satisfies the wishes of the two consenting adults, its effects on the children are hardly examined. The children who had nothing to do with the choices their parents made become their ultimate victims. Their views are hardly sought or considered in the making of the divorce-separation decision. Rather, all they are told, to assuage its psychological impact, is that limp and trite phrase 'sometimes things just don't work between people'. And with this egocentric statement, delivered with trembling voice by each of the parents at different times, they presume their work done, believing that with this the child will survive the tides. Parents seeking their self-interest at the expense of their children and the effects this has on the children are what Yaba Badoe's True Murder (Vintage, 2009; 262) addresses. It is a story about the lives of two pre-teen girls from such homes, with a layer of mystery.

Ajuba Benson's mother had emigrated to London, from Ghana, with her daughter after her husband separated from her. This separation and emigration resulted from a weird mixture of dreams, stillbirths and miscarriages. In London, Mrs Benson sought to start life anew. However, things worked out differently and Ajuba had to live with her father, Michael Benson, who had to put the eleven-year old in a boarding school at Exe to enable him work in Rome. Polly Venus was no different. Her cosmopolitan American parents - Peter and Isobel - had moved to London and had bought a house - Graylings - near Exe. Consequently, she had been enrolled there. On the first day the two - Ajuba and Polly - met, they were bound to be best friends forever. Together with Beth, they formed an alliance that would see them brave misfortunes, including a near-death incident which occurred when, in a elaborate plan mapped out by Polly, they sought to act some of the stories in Polly's True Murder series they had been reading.

Without a family to spend her weekends and holidays with, Ajuba's friendship with Polly was set to solidify when she was invited to spend her holidays at Graylings. The initial conviviality among the members of Venus household was promising and Ajuba thought she had found the solace she had been yearning for. However, it was not long before the superficiality of the initial wide-smiles cum hugs dissipated. The Venuses were tearing themselves apart: Peter was bent on leaving Isobel; Isobel was tirelessly on holding on to him; Polly was on her father's side and would go to any length to hurt her mother; Theo, Polly's elder brother, was unconcerned of the happenings in the family, choosing rather to spend time with his girlfriend Sylvie. It was within this chaotic, emotionally unbalanced family that an already unstable Ajuba was thrust.

During one of such holidays, Ajuba, Beth, and Polly, playing in the attic of Graylings, discovered a package the previous owner - the late Miss Fielding - had left in one of her clothes. In the package were tiny bones, which the trio had initially conceived as those of kittens. The detectives they invited to investigate their little finding - following the narratives in their series - concluded that their specimens were more than kitten bones. It was something else. Overnight the three became local heroines. But as True Murder addicts, they were not going to leave the entire investigation to the detectives. They were going to conduct parallel investigation into the matter, beginning with visits to Miss Edith Butterworth - Miss Fielding's closest friend who, until the latter's death, lived with her at Graylings.

Yaba Badoe's story is filled with egoistic adults and stubborn children. One cannot but abhor and pity the children in equal measure - pitying them for what they had to go through on their own; and abhor them for who they were, what they did and how they turned out, sometimes intentionally. Or may be not. Polly was not the average preteen girl any mother could contain, tolerate, or love. She was systematically awful and wicked. Her outrageous and repugnant behaviour would overwhelm even the rights' activists and their loyal psychologist friends in the West. Even in such countries, where children were given an abundant room to operate and behave, Polly would be difficult to accommodate. She maltreated, bitterly insulted, and ferociously hated her mother, while openly courting her father's love and siding with him on every issue against her mother. She did this so openly, so blatantly and with obvious malice that Isobel returned her favour in an almost equal measure. Polly threw solid objects at her mother and refused everything she asked of her. Polly perhaps took her father's side as a survival strategy, and Peter, all too happy to have someone to associate with in those tensed post-quarrel periods, was not very eager to contradict her. Instead, he enjoyed it. One could tell Polly's behaviour was a natural emotional consequence of the strain the family was going through, for beneath this open rebellion, hard as a tortoise shell, was a softness that connected with Isobel. And even though mother and daughter were almost always at each other's throat, they did relate positively once in a while, and on those few occasions they did, the love was palpable. However, regardless of Polly's behaviour, Ajuba loved her unreservedly, even when she completely and silently disagreed with her some of them and was sometimes astounded by her audacity to disobey adults.

Ajuba, on the other hand, was in dissonance with herself. She seemed to understand everybody's misdeed but her father's. She never recognised the disconnect between her hatred for her father - for leaving her mother, and her love for Peter - who was also divorcing his wife. Ajuba loved Peter and wished he was her father. She understood and sympathised with him and wished he would be happy. Yet, she was not interested in her father's happiness. She hated the Senegalese woman he was planning to marry, though she did not flinch when she heard that Peter had a fling relationship with the mother of one of their school friends, Maria. In Isobel, she saw her mother, who suffered similarly, and loved her accordingly.

These inconsistencies - choosing and picking - made it difficult to trust Ajuba as a narrator, for she filtered everything through a prejudiced mind. This hatred for her father sharply contrasted her general behaviour, which was one of love. This dissonce might have resulted from her mother's advice to never trust her father, who, she said, would at a point in the future try to poison her mind against her and take Ajuba away from her. Thus, her lack of paternal love for Michael and her hatred towards his wife - Nina - could be her subconscious's interpretation of this advice and a decision she took a younger age. When Mrs Benson referred to everybody as witch and accused Michael of adultery, he deserted the family at that moment of need, leaving Ajuba to cater for her sick mother. This hurt young Ajuba that she swore never to forgive him.

He left her to me. And for that I can never forgive him. [30]

However, Ajuba's story of her mother's breakdown and separation from her husband was itself doubtful in parts. The following discussion ensued after Polly, speaking on Peter's infidelity, said adultery hurts:

Yes, some fathers are like that, ... It drives my mother crazy. Does Isobel go crazy as well?'

Polly nodded: 'Yeah. She doesn't understand Peter like I do.

'Just like my mother.'

'Yeah?'

'She hates it it when Pa has girlfriends. She says some men can't help themselves. Then she cries, and when she stops crying, she says they're weak - like children.' [104]

The above suggests that Michael's adulterous behaviour led to Ajuba's mother's breakdown, resulting in the separation. However, earlier, Ajuba had said that her mother's accusation of her father's adultery was all made up; that her father was not having an extramarital affair. She had said

My father must have realised that his marriage wasn't going to survive. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to leave. But there's never a good time to leave a grief-stricken wife. So, instead of abandoning us, Pa did the next best thing: he avoided my mother as much as possible, staying away for days on end. Dismissing her accusations of infidelity, he claimed she was imagining things; he was staying overnight with relatives. Since Mama wouldn't let them visit us, he was spending time with them for a change. Of course there wasn't another woman! Mama was being neurotic, overwrought. [30]

Ajuba's mother's miscarriages and stillbirths resulting in the Bensons' inability to have more children made her consider the relatives of both families as witches and wizards, set on destroying her family. This misfortune led to her breakdown. Perhaps, this could be Ajuba's own way of supporting her friend and showing solidarity, as was visible in other sections as well.

There were elements of surrealism especially in relation to Ajuba, as a character, which bordered on clairvoyance. She could see things before they happen and past events sometimes revealed themselves to her. Whether this was true or that her imaginative mind conceived them post-facto, was difficult to tell. This contributed to the distrust of Ajuba as a narrator. For instance, in her narrative, she saw Polly's death before it happened and when it did she saw how it happened. Could not this foresight be a trick her mind played on the events she witnessed? Could she not have actually seen them happen? Could not she be misinterpreting her apprehensions as clairvoyance? Further, she saw how the bones came to be in Miss Fielding's attic and Isobel's brutal reaction to Peter's departure.

Yaba Badoe's examination of the mind of these children is excellent, revealing, and interesting. The story is fantastic. Her description of life at the boarding house was engaging and relatable: the white lies told to impress friends; the over simplification of issues hardly understood; the I-am-better-than-you attitude; the strange things said to back an opinion and the defence mounted when they are challenged; the friendships and quarrels were all present and perfectly handled . The lives of the adults were also well-described to such an extent that the reader could feel the pangs of pain, the hurt, and sometimes the stupidity exuding from the pages. The book really did come alive.

However, the period between the inception of an idea to the point of revelation - or the suspense lag - is too long and caused a snag in the story especially when it turned out to be not very mysterious; it created an anti-climactic feeling. The writer seemed to have held back a lot, preventing herself from fully exploding into the Stephen King kind of mystery and spookiness. The book had the promise to blossom into one huge spine-chilling story, but when it did not, I felt let down. The discovery of the bones in the attic which was presumed to a kitten's but which turned out to be something more significant than that could have become something stupendous. The way the Venuses part of the story ended - though shattering - could have been explosive. Or even Ajuba and her father's wife. In the end, we were only made to imagine what she really did with that metallic comb. The goosebumps could have been complete if the author had not withheld from the macabre, because excellent glimpses of them were found throughout the story: the True Murder serials they were reading, the acting of the stories in them, the visits to Edith, and more. Perhaps as an ex-psychological thriller fan, I expected too much. 

This is an interesting book. Yaba Badoe, in one single book, has provided a lot for both the young and the old; each will come out with a different lesson. Young Adults might like the mystery more, but adults, especially parents, will anlayse the effects of their decisions on their children. They will learn that they become the choices they make and so do their children. A highly recommended book.
_______________________

About the author: Yaba Badoe is a Ghanaian-British documentary filmmaker, producer and writer. A graduate of King's College Cambridge, she worked as a civil servant in Ghana before becoming a General Trainee with the BBC. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and has worked as a producer and director making documentaries for the main terrestrial channels in Britain and the University of Ghana in Accra. Her short stories have been published in Critical Quarterly an in African Love Stories: an Anthology edited by Ama Ata Aidoo. In 2009, her first novel, True Murder was published by Johnathan Cape. Her TV credits include: Black and White, a ground-breaking investigation into race and racism in Bristol, using hidden video cameras for BBC1; I Want Your Sex, for Channel 4 and a six-part series, Voluntary Service Overseas, for ITV. In 2003, she directed a one-hour documentary about the life and work of Nobel Laureate, Toni Morrison, for BBC4. Her film, The Witches of Gambaga (Fadoa Films, 2010), won the 2010 Best Documentary Award at the Black International Film Festival and 2nd Prize, Documentaries at FESPACO 2011. [Sources: Here and Here]

251. Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein

Ama - a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (374; Techmate) by Manu Herbstein won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book in 2002. It explores, boldly, one of the darkest moments of human history when human beings (blacks from Africa) were traded like articles or farm animals. Assessed for defects - muscles, clear eyes, etc. - and for profitability. Thus, in that period, black men and women were no different from livestock - in treatment and in conception. 

Manu Herbstein painfully peels off the gangrenes from our necrotic wounds to show us our painful complicity as Africans in our own enslavement and therefore our debasement. To this extent Manu is in league with Ayi Kwei Armah, who in his books - Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers - showed how far we went as Africans, how lowly we bowed, how stupidly we grovelled, and how greedily we participated in our own destruction. Armah called the chiefs who stupidly surrendered our sovereignty for perks of mirror, Schnapps, and shiny clothing, Ostentatious Cripples. In Manu's work, there were such chiefs. Though this theme should have been a fodder ground for African novelists, it has hardly been touched and those who did preferred to romanticise the Africa of the time, thus narrating half the story. What most writers care to write about are the effects of the slave trade and not the event itself - at least not the entire chain of events. And those who do are academicians who only discuss it in essays and academic writings thus taking the story away from the larger majority to whom such academic discourse remains a mystery. It is in the light of this that Manu's well-researched novel plays an important and significant role in the telling of this horrific story, this stain in human history.

The story follows one character Nandzi, a Bekpokpam girl, who was captured by the Bedagbam slave hunters in present day northern Ghana, as part of hundreds of slaves who had to be sent to the King of the Asantes as payment for the annual tax placed on them by the latter after a defeat in a war. Thus, as Nandzi moved from her home village to Yendi and then from there to Kumase, the capital of the Asante Kingdom, her story - which is synonymous to the story of the slave trade - unfolds in graphic details. In Kumase she was given as a gift to the Asantehemaa (the Queenmother of the Asantes), where she worked as a servant girl and where the name Ama was given her. But a misfortune befell her when after the death of the ailing king, the young one who succeeded him, Osei Kwadwo, fell in love with him. To avoid embarrassment to the kingdom, she was sold to the slave traders along the coast to be shipped across the sea. Thus, Manu's story is more than the story of the Atlantic slave trade. It is also about the internal slavery that existed among ethnic groups of the time. For Ama was first an internal slave to the Asantes before she was sold to the Dutch and would have forever remained so had it not being her poor judgement.

Another important issue this book raises was those macabre traditions that existed at the time like beheading of people - mostly non-royals - upon the death of a king, for burial. Here Manu's dexterity in bringing images alive with his precise words, made these macabre and grisly parts difficult to read. However, they are also important and contribute to the story of the slave trade; for they show how far we have come as a people.

The role the autochthons played in the slavery enterprise were not limited to the supply of men, but also included its funding, and even directly buying and selling of slaves to support their acquired taste for those foreign goods the slave ships bring in when coming to load the slaves. This is clear in the case of Augusta, a black woman who was neck-deep in the trade herself. Also, some of the people - chiefs and elders and other denizens - worked to keep the slave trade bourgeoning and physically fought those who opposed them. An instance of this occurred in another location, possibly on the more western part of Africa (Senegal). Tomba, the son of a man who himself had escaped from chains and a woman whom the man had saved from being transported as a slave, had worked to prevent several potential slaves from being shipped abroad. Consequently, he established a village with these freed slaves and together attacked every ship that docked at the village to purchase men and women and children as slaves. With time the business became unprofitable as ships docked less and less. However, the people of the village - unhappy with this decline in trade and wealth - enlisted the help of a captain of a ship that had come to dock, attacked Tomba and his men with sophisticated weapons and arrested them as slaves. 

The conditions in the dungeons, where the captured men and women were kept, the persistent rape of the women, beating of the women who resisted, the conditions on the slave ships, the conditions they met the on the ship, and the work the slaves are put to were discussed in their heart-wrenching details. The diseases and the deaths were more than a person should bear, yet it became their lives. Ama was raped by several men as she made her way from her native village to the Edina where the Elmina Castle was (is) located. First she was raped by Abdulai, leader of the the slave hunters who took her from her home; then by Akwasi Anane, a drunk Asante who was to watch over them as they journeyed to Kumase; then by Jensen, who became the new Mijn Heer after the death of Debruyn; and Jesus Vasconcellos, when she was taken to Brazil. And there were those who took her, and to whom she gave herself, because there were no other choices to be made. This included De Bruyn, who took her as his partner, renamed her Pamela, lived with her for several years, thought her to read and write and do maths, and was ready to marry her before his sudden death; and Captain David Williams - captain of the slave ship The Love of Liberty, when she planned for their escape. Some reviewers discussed Ama's treatment as a metaphorical representation of Africa in general and women in particular. Here Ama becomes that Africa raped by its European invaders, colonisers, and neo-colonisers, and also by its Eurocentric and parochial Africans whose thoughts are filled with the satisfaction of their personal needs, regardless of the means. Today, there still are the Tombas and Amas fighting to liberate the continent from the shackles of economic slavery, and the Augustas and Tomba's opponents who work to benefit themselves. 

The role of Christianity in entrenching slavery cannot be overlooked. In fact, no matter how one looks at it, it will be difficult to deny that Christianity was deeply embedded in the enslavement of the people and the slave trade itself. It is exceedingly shocking that the irony was lost to the slaves who took up the religion. However, Ama - having learnt how to read and write, noticed the irony that existed in that religion including the part of the Lord's Prayer "as we forgive those who trespassed against us..." (P. 230). Even though the missionaries were preaching the love of God towards man, they asked blacks to be meek. Thus, it created and entrenched the idea that the black man was not the man God was referring to in the bible, for even in the presence of God there was discrimination and the relegation of blacks.

This relation between the white and the blacks regarding culture and how the blacks were aping the whites is the theme of Kobina Sekyi's The Blinkards and The Anglo-Fante Short Story. However, in no one did this cultural buffoonery reach an apogee of disastrous proportions than in Reverend Philip Quaque, a chaplain at the Cape Coast Castle. This historical figure, as are many of the characters in this story, would not speak in his native language - Fante - and would not respond when spoken to in it. He considered English as a divine and civilising language. In fact, he considered his native Fantes who weren't Christians and who could speak no English as pagans and their names heathenish. To complete this absurd transformation he married a white lady. Also, like the character in Sekyi's play, most families saw the marriage of their daughters to the white men as key to success and like in the case of Taguba, sometimes mothers kidnapped and sold their daughters into such unions. However, this obsequious grovelling before the white man was not restricted to only the supposedly free folks but also those in his chains exhibited such reverential tendencies. Sometimes even the oppressed (the shackled and manhandled slaves) still grovel and marvelled at the white man's beauty and intelligence.

"Me broni," said another to a young seaman, "wo ho ye fe se anoma," meaning, "My precious white man, you are as beautiful as a bird" [228]

There were several sources of disunity among blacks that worked against them; sources, which are as germane to our unity and development today as they were at the time of slavery. The first is the role of language. With almost every ten slaves [my speculation] speaking a different language and none capable of understanding the other, this Babel of tongues worked against them. Thus, when Ama worked to free the slave ship from the captain, it was this which acted as a barrier to their freedom. Unable to understand each other, the escape was botched and the culprits punished so severely that some died and were fed to the sharks and others lost parts of their bodies; Ama for instance, lost an eye when one of the hooks at the end of the whip hooked onto it and came out when it was forcefully pulled. However, upon reaching Brazil, faced with a common Portuguese language they were able to come together for a common purpose.

Another source of disunity arose from their diversity: that is, the usual suspicion one person holds against the other because one cannot comprehend what the other is saying. In this way, consensus building and making a decision became a problem. Each unit - a unit being people who could understand themselves - worked for its own good but in the end led to nothing because it was working sometimes against the whole. 

The other source of disunity lay in favour-seeking: for the fear of repercussions and punishment, to seek favour and promotion from their masters, there were those other slaves who were more inclined to do the bidding of their masters even to the detriment of their people and sometimes, most often after a rise in rank, would do more than what they have been instructed to do to please their masters. These others were more likely and did indeed betray all plans of escape whenever they came to be in the know.

Race or colour also became a matter of importance, which affected the unity of the people even in their new country. For instance, the slaves who had been ferried earlier into the Americas thought themselves better than the new arrivals; claiming that they are more civilised 

"Don't call me brother, woman. I am not an unseasoned guiney bird like you," he replied. "Now stand in line so that master can look at you properly." [295]

Similarly, those who were born in captivity, especially the Mulatto breeds, considered themselves better than the rest and were more inclined to serve the interest of their white side than their black side, though they were never treated any better by the white men. This quest and eagerness among people to be superior to their kin even when they are facing a common enemy was addressed in Bessie Head's Maru. 

And if the white man thought that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with relief - at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern Africa could still smile - at least, they were not Bushmen. [6]

Linked to race is the monarchic system of governance, which also encouraged the slave trade. The monarchical structure puts people into either inferior or superior class. Thus, in England and Portugal mere white wasn't a guarantee of a better treatment. These non-royals and mistreated people also looked at blacks and say we are better than them, creating a situation where there is no remorse for maltreatment but a justification. For Africans, this royalty and monarchy encouraged the arrest and sale of 'inferior' tribes and non-royals of the same tribe into slavery.

Overall, Ama was hardworking and resourceful; she loved freedom too. She helped whomever she could. Yet she was never free to do anything; she was always under somebody's command, as a slave - sexual and non-sexual.

The language in this novel is effective and fits the era being discussed. Interspersing the narrative are proverbs - common in most African languages and with African people - and folkloric tales. Manu's diction and descriptions did not make the period as antiquated and backward as one might have expected. For instance, he talks of inns and hostelries in a remote area of current Ghana in the 18th Century. There was also talk of international trading (at Kafaba), customs and exports.

This is a well-researched novel, filled with historical figures and events that one would not help but shiver at the enormity of human wickedness, the depths to which man could fall. For this is just the story of one individual - Nandzi (or Ama or Pamela). Take this and multiply it by the millions and millions of people who were transported across to those lands and those who died on the way and it is only then would one understand the importance of what Manu has done; for

African slaves were sold in Lisbon as early as 1441. The European discovery and colonisation of the Americas set the scene for the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted from early in the sixteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth. The slaves were all African. So too were many of those who sold them. The buyers and shippers were almost all Europeans. In the course of three hundred years, upwards of ten million black men, women, and children arrived in the Americas as unwilling migrants. Millions more died on the journey to the Atlantic coast, and at seas. [Epigraph to the section Americas, 203]

My only problem is that some places - though not widespread - were somewhat preachy. The telling of this story itself evokes deep imagery of wickedness, evil, and the moral failure of the time and therefore I believe those statements were not very needed. In addition, there were one or two dramatic events like Ama fainting upon seeing Tomba again, after their separation at the place where they were sold. However, this also set the scene for a beautiful love story at a subplot level. Regardless of these, which are not necessarily a failing, this book deserves to be read by all. It should be an important part of Africa's literary canon.

However, there are some questions that bothered me when reading this and which we will need to discuss:

1. Would the slave trade have ended if it had not been banned in Europe? That is, would and could Africans have worked to ending it? 
2. Did we as Africans ever realise that slavery was bad?

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About the author: Manu Herbstein, a civil and structural engineer by profession, was born in Muizenberg, near Cape Town, in 1936 and educated at the University of Cape Town. His Jewish grandparents, he writes, had "emigrated to South Africa in the 1890s. Two from Russia, one a Litvak, her husband a Romanian, whose name I bear."

Manu Herbstein has lived and worked in England, Nigeria, India, Zambia, and Scotland, and now lives in Ghana. He first visited the slave castle at Elmina, Ghana, which features in this novel, in 1961. He has returned many times since and says that the experience never fails to move him.