Destination: Africa

Book: One Day I Will Write About This Place (NEW August 2011) by Binyavanga Wainaina

(NOTE: After I wrote and titled this review, I carefully read Binyavanga Wainaina’s sardonic instructions on “How to Write About Africa” in the magazine Granta. You may want to check as you compile your Africa reading list.)

Binyavanga Wainaina reinvents memoir writing in One Day I Will Write About This Place.  I read two or three books a week and many of them are very, very fine writing, but this one knocked me back in my chair and made me reconsider the conventions of writing. Original. Poetic. Surprising. Experimental. He sees and hears and feels the world in ways you never thought of before.  Right from the first page, this book is a WOW experience. In this quote, he is describing a day playing soccer in Kenya when he was seven.

Warm breath pushes down my nostrils past my mouth and divides my chin.  I can see the pink shining flesh of my eyelids. Random sounds fall into my ears: cars, birds, black mamba bicycle bells, distant children, dogs, crows, and afternoon national radio music. Congo rumba.  People outside our compound are talking, in languages I know the sounds of, but do not understand or speak, Luhya, Gikuyu.

Maybe it is this early exposure to various languages that seem to be sounds without meaning that creates an approach to language that seems as much incantation as communication. These verbal meanderings come across as playful and spontaneous, but in fact are carefully crafted, because, as he says while contemplating the words “thirst and thirsty”, ”Words, I think, must be concrete things.  Surely they cannot be suggestions of things, vague pictures: scattered, shifting sensations.” Nothing escapes him.

One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees.  The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings.  Water from the showerhead streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.  

All together they are: shhhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhh is made up of many many tinny tiny ting ting tings, so small that clanking glass sounds become soft whispers; like when everything at the school parade is talking all at once, it is different from when one person is talking.

This reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s love of words which bursts out in his poem, The Bells, when he finds words to mimic the sounds of the bells from tinkling to tolling, and extols the “tintinabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.” Wainaina knows very early that he is meant to be a writer and spends all his money on novels and all his time reading. He says, (as many writers have discovered)  ”I…start to write and answers arrive, and after a while I realize I have followed a straight line and I am done.” But as a young man, the impressions of the world are overwhelming. “I do not have enough words for all of this,” he says. Eventually, he sends off a travel narrative to an Internet site and is paid for it. He is a professional writer.

But One Day I Will Write About This Place is much more than a travel memoir.  Instead, he uses the journeys he made through Africa to add to the picture  of the struggles that ripple over the continent.  Kenyans grow up saying, “We are not like those Ugandans,” but then the tribal conflicts emerge in Kenya as well. Because he is identified as Gikuyu, even though he does not feel that identity strongly (he just wants to be Kenyan) he and his family are in danger when the government turns anti-Gikuyu.  Even before the most dangerous period, his brilliance and high grades are not enough to get him into a top high school because he has the wrong identity. This awareness of dominant and minority groups sharpens Wainaina’s observations of other parts of Africa.

From childhood games, the influence of American culture, hairstyles and clothing choices, the book progress to corrupt politics and shockingly bloody oppression and reprisals. Wainaina depicts an Africa where real people live (see Granta article referenced at top)–an Africa that will stay in your mind.

He finds hope in the fact that Uganda has rebuilt itself. “This country gives me hope that this continent is not, finally incontinent.”

The light Wainaina sheds on “the dark continent” and his strikingly original expression make this book a must for the traveler’s library. And a real find for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of Africa.

Having won several literary awards and started a literary journal Kwani? (why not?), he now teaches at the Chinua Achebe (See Things Fall Apart review) Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in upstate New York.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

I am visiting Africa through literature on a semi-regular basis, as I try to expand my woefully small pool of knowledge. I welcome guest posts on books about Africa that may have inspired you, or suggestions to add to my reading list. And you can enter the Book Giveaway when you leave a comment, subscribe to A Traveler’s Library, or add your name in other ways. (See the rules here, and the list of books here.)

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Destination: Kenya

Movie: The First Grader, A National Geographic Film (2011) PG-13

I went to see The First Grader expecting to see a heart-warming feel good story about literacy. National Geographic is one of the producers, so I expected that it would be beautifully photographed and give me a scenic tour of Africa.

Justin Chadwick, whom you may remember as the director of The Other Boleyn Girl, directed the film. He worked with the BBC and the British Film Council. The fact the film was funded by a British entity is ironic, since the plot criticizes Britain’s handling of the 1950′s crisis in Kenya after the attacks of the Mau Mau, who terrorized white settlers as they battled for Kenyan independence.

The 84-year-old central character in this true story, Kimani Ng’ang’a Maruge (1920-2009), was a Mau Mau veteran and served time in a prison camp. Soldiers shot his wife for not telling who he was. They tortured him because he would not recant his pledge to the Mau Mau. Maruge never learned to read, so in the new century when he gets a letter from the now independent government, he takes the Kenyan government up on their offer of free education for everyone, and shows up at the local elementary school.

We learn the back story in flashbacks to his youth and see one scene of a Mau Mau attack and many scenes of the brutality of the British.  This was an eye opener for me.  Like many Americans, I tend to remain ignorant about the history of African nations, and all I remember about the Mau Mau times was feeling sorry for white farmers who had been in Africa for generations, as they were savaged by what we saw as a gang of thugs.

Now I see it differently. Yes, the Mau Mau did many very bad things, but the colonial rulers’ reaction, if it is anything like the cringe-inducing scenes in the movie, fought violence with violence in an equally inhumane way.

Kenya school children

The scenes in the school are delightful and at first I was thinking how my 6-year-old grand-daughter could benefit from seeing children in another country as they learned the alphabet. But DO NOT take young children to this movie.  The stark reality of the Mau Mau uprisings, and the somewhat related nastiness of townspeople toward the school teacher who decides to help the old man learn, makes a tough lesson for adults.  It is a lesson too complex for small children, particularly when you mix in a bit of government corruption and the prevailing poverty.

Oh dear, I hope I have not made this all sound too glum.  It is not glum. It is simply a well-rounded telling of the story of one man and reflection of many others. The view of Africa–both the countryside and Kenya’s capitol, Nairobi, may not be packed with travelogue beauty, but it shows real lives in a real and oddly alluring land.

Oliver Litundo, who plays Maruge, has played only bit parts before (after a career as a news reader), which makes his performance that much more amazing. Quoting from the National Geographic site: The children in the film–who are in many ways the stars–had never seen a film or television set before, let alone be involved in a filming process.

Kenyan children

Instead they are locals filmed in their own real school. And those school children are so beautiful that you would swear they are pampered little actors and actresses. And by the way, this is a good, heart-warming story about literacy. (That is my opinion, and I’m sticking with it, despite critics all over the map.)

You can make a difference by clicking over to You Tube to see The First Grader trailer . See how you will be contributing to children’s education. The film has pretty much run its course in the Western U.S., but will still be playing in East Coast states for a few weeks. The release date for London is June 24. The National Geographic movie site has a schedule for the U.S. Or put it on your Netflix or Amazon wait list.

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book: Unbowed by Wangari Maathai

A GUEST POST by Gayle Pescud

I was in a modern bookstore for the first time in months in January,  getting well and truly high on the smell of new books (we live in Bolgatanga, the Upper East Region of Ghana, 18 hours from Accra, the capital), but I could only buy one (I used my spending money on coffee and chocolate).

After browsing for an hour, I came across Unbowed in the African writing section and soon sensed I was on to a good thing: two of my favourite authors wrote front and back cover endorsements: Bill Clinton (yup, that Bill Clinton) and Alexandra Fuller (who wrote Let’s Not Go to the Dogs Tonight, another brilliant African memoir, by the way).

And The Guardian wrote, “Maathai’s book is frank and moving…Like a Nelson Mandela or a Mahatma Gandhi, Maathai stands way above most mortals.”

Truly.

An 18 hour bus ride later I finished reading Unbowed (and a whole packet of caramels). Now, if you asked me to name the one book that everyone should read, I would say, “You can read supernatural fantasies for the rest of your life, but read Unbowed first.”

Unbowed is a memoir of Wangari Maathai’s life growing up in Kenya, Africa. Her book shows that one need not pick up a traditional “travel memoir” to be inspired towards distant horizons and discover writing that evokes a sense of place and a yearning to jump straight inside the pages of the book.

From Page 1:

“At the time of my birth, the land around Ihithe was still lush, green, and fertile. The seasons were so regular that you could almost predict that the long, monsoon rains would start falling in mid-March. In July you knew it would be so foggy you would not be able to see ten feet in front of you, and so cold in the morning that the grass would be silvery-white with frost. In Kikuyu, July is known as mworia nyoni, the month when birds rot, because birds would freeze to death and fall from the trees.”

Throughout reading Unbowed you feel as if you are in the company of a kind and sensible friend who happens to be an African woman and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner, such is the humility, candor and warmth in Maathai’s writing.

Indeed, Maathai is famous for  her Greenbelt Movement which, since 1975, has planted more than 4 million trees across Kenya. But her environmental work is only half the story.

Unbowed tells about her life from birth through to the period of publication, but it’s the development of Maathai’s political consciousness and her transformation into an environmental and human rights activist in Kenya that most captivated me.

I discovered that Maathai’s commitment and dedication to protecting the environment has transformed the human landscape in Kenya, too. Her will and her network publicized, prevented or remedied human rights abuses, especially against women, corrupt practices, destructive environmental practices, and conflict across Kenya—in the face of death threats, abuse, harassment, imprisonment and much more. This was new to me and truly opened my eyes to the reality that Kenyans have had to endure for all these years.

But she is famous for her beloved trees and rivers and, to steal a Fuller phrase, the planet is “going to the dogs.”

When I visited Wli in 2005, a mountainous area on the border with Togo in Ghana’s east, the surrounding hills retained some forest cover, yet just one metre outside the “protected area” loggers were sawing down trees. When I revisited in 2007, I woke to the sound of chainsaws in the forest. All day, chainsaws. Wheezing chainsaws for the next five days. The mountains, while majestic in form, looked like something out of Mordor (Lord of the Rings): ugly and bare.

Looking around me here, where I live in the flat, semi-arid Upper East region, where conditions are harsh, hot, unforgiving and designed to make life as uncomfortable as possible, and women toil in the home and fields for virtually nothing—certainly not property rights when their husbands die and not for money while they’re living—I wonder where are Ghana’s Maathais?

Women, I’ve observed, especially in rural Ghana, are nothing if not strong and courageous. It only takes one strong woman to speak out and take action.

While Unbowed hasn’t exactly sparked my desire to visit Kenya, it gave me an urge to do something here in Ghana about the issues Maathai has dedicated her life towards. We could all “take a leaf” (forgive me) from Maathai’s life, her work, her determination and courage. Adding tree planting to an environmental project we’re supporting in Ghana was one significant action we took as a result of reading Unbowed. We are indebted to Maathai for the inspiration. You can read more about the project at the G-lish website. (Ed. Note: and find out what G-lish means!)

Read supernatural vampire wizard goblin fantasies for the rest of your life, but read Unbowed first because our planet is real and, as Maathai wrote on page 295, “We have nowhere else to go.”

Truly.

Gayle Pescud is an Australian living the ex-pat life in a cross-cultural relationship in Ghana. She and her partner Godwin have written the Insider’s Guide to Ghana and contributed to the Insider’s Guide to Volunteering in Ghana. She blogs at G Is for Ghana, and works on the website mentioned above. Thanks so much, Gayle for providing us with a terrific piece of literature about Africa for travelers.

How bout you? Have you been to Ghana or Kenya? Have you worked in an International volunteer effort? Let’s share.

If my trip is on schedule, I’m spending my last day in Brittany–on the south coast. Tomorrow we take a train to Bruges (Brugge, Brugges–take your pick).

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A Traveler’s Library has the great good fortune to talk to Peter West Carey who writes The Carey Adventures, about his People, Places, and Patterns Project. He will be traveling to Africa (including Spain and  Morocco; and then Kenya and Tanzania) and Nepal, photographing and learning about cultures along the way. And how can YOU be involved? Here goes:

Me: I  read your interview at The Mother of All Trips about PPP Project, and you talked about travel with your daughter. How old is your daughter and how will she be involved in this trip?

Peter West Carey: My daughter Sabrina, who is 8, will be joining me on the Africa leg of the trips.  Taking her to Africa was really the origin on this trip.  While the trip has some certain idyllic aspects (riding camels, going on safari) I also want to expose her to vastly different lifestyles, while showing her some of the commonality we all share.  And she finally had enough frequent flyer miles to make the trip less expensive. [Ed. Note: That is one Well-traveled little girl!]
Just tonight I started talking to her about doing the presentation at her school.  Her eyes lit up.   She sounded rather excited about being able to tell all the other kids about what she saw–even before she sees it!  While she won’t be with me for the 50 school, 10 library and 20 community group presentations I have planned before the end of 2010, I’d love to have her share the experience from her perspective as well.

PWK: It’s actually three locations but two trips.  Africa will be one trip, combining Spain (still not part of Africa, but close) and Morocco as one section and Kenya and Tanzania as the other.  Nepal is a separate trip about a month after getting back from Africa.   I had previously been to Nepal and the offer to climb a 20,000′ peak was intriguing.

After making these general plans… I knew I was going to take my camera gear…  But then the question came: why?  Sure, I have plans to sell some photos and write some stories to help pay the rent. I don’t believe all travel needs to have lofty reason (I very much enjoy sitting on a beach for a week at a time) but I wanted this trip to have a bit more life to it. That’s when I came up with the concept of a slideshow/presentation.

I had previously noted on my blog that I’d be concentrating on people photography in future travels.  So that was one.  Places seemed obvious as I wanted to give [conext to their lives].  And patterns have been a facination of mine for the past year, but I’ve never concentrated on them in a meaningful way.  Natural, man-made, symmetric…they all catch my eye…  Combining all three, I’d like to show how life, .. is the same in these distant locations  as well as how it differs from life back home.  I hope exposure to those threads and how they weave through vastly different cultures can bring about some understanding and tolerance in the view. [and some curiosity leading to travel].

Me: At A Traveler’s Library, we always would like to know–are there good travel books (or movies) that inspired you to travel?

PWK: I loved [amazonify]1570610835::text::::Voyage of a Summer Sun: Canoeing the Columbia River[/amazonify].  It hit close to home and has put “Kayak the Columbia River” on my list of life goals.

[also loved] [amazonify]078670621::text::::Endurance,Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage[/amazonify] defines how you lead, take risks and bring all your men home safely.

Right now I’m reading [amazonify]0217718817::text::::Farthest North[/amazonify] (the version edited by John Krakauer) about Nansen’s attempt to reach the North Pole.  Those types of books show me a lot of what it takes to really preserver in difficult situations and what type of character is needed for certain types of travel.  While I don’t plan on going on …a multi-year sledging trip to either pole, they do inspire me to learn more about those cold, distant, and often forgotten places on Earth.

PWK: There are three things I need help with for this trip:

1. Make a pledge to the People, Places and Patterns Project. The funding for this project[through kickstarter.com] works on the principle that a project must receive pledges for the entire goal or no funds are dispersed.  [Peter is over 27% of the way to his goal of raising $10,000 by February 16.] Any help is appreciated and pledges start as low as $1.

2. [Suggest]… connections at schools and community groups, starting in my local Puget Sound region and then expanding out from there.  I already have invites from schools in Utah, Oregon and California and I’d love to make the presentations as widely available as possible.

3. Spread the word!  This project is backed by no large corporation or media outlet (yet!) so word of mouth is key to its success.  As the date gets closer I’ve had some amazing response from complete strangers offering to help… It’s a wonderful use of the internet and interviews like this are greatly appreciated!!

Thanks so much for dropping by, Peter. We’ll try out your books, and perhaps you will come back with more complete reviews of a favorite of yours once this project is complete. And readers, do take a look at Peter’s web site and consider supporting his trip in one of the three ways he suggests. After all, we can’t have too much mutual understanding in this world. [If you make a purchase at Amazon by following the link from one of the books suggested here, I'll donate the income to Peter.]

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©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

When I want to consult a guidebook for travel, find an audio book to accompany me on the road, or research a book to discuss here, I just fire up the computer, request that the book be held at my nearest public library, and stop off on my way to the grocery store to pick up my free book.

In Kenya, it is not so simple. In northeastern Kenya, near the Somalia border, families are nomadic, and the schools that serve them struggle along in the desert, often far from paved roads. In order to reach them, books need to be delivered by camel (12 are in service so far). So the camel bookmobile arrives, the books are spread beneath an acacia tree and people select their books to read until the next time.

When author Masha Hamilton learned about the camel bookmobiles, she got an idea for a novel. And as a consequence of the novel, a charity was born. Book clubs, fellow authors, schools and individuals have been donating books and money to buy camels, local books and tents for shade, since 2006.

Now it is our turn.  I am sending off a box of books to Kenya. After looking at the Camel Book Drive site, you may decide to order books from Amazon, Powells, or one of the other sources with a wishlist; or you may decide to send a donation via Western Union. But please do help. Think about how easy it is for you to find a book to read, and then share this information with your church, your book club, your friends.

To get more details about how you can help, click here to go to the Camel Book Drive web pages. Be sure to read the suggestions about what not to send.

When I asked for a progress report, Masha wrote:

At this point, we have raised books for the initial camel library, raised books and funds for camels to start up a new camel library in Wajir, even closer to the Somalian border, and our books are now going to nomadic schools. We are also sending money to help publish, in a simple fashion, the traditional stories, hoping in this way to incorporate the old ways into the modern world.

Mr. Farah, the librarian in Kenya who oversees the project recently reported to Masha that a drought had interfered with deliveries, and his own university studies had slowed down the publishing, but:

So far, the nomadic schools received about 1,200 books through the camel book drive. These are schools that because of their proximity can not be reached  by the camel service. The books have been appreciated. We have also assisted some four of those schools with cupboards and book boxes that help them to keep the books.We expect also to utilize future donations to further develop more school libraries in the rural area.

International Literacy Day

Note: This post is part of an effort by Bloggers Unite celebrating International Literacy Day, September 8. The UNESCO projects promoting literacy have been celebrated on that day since 1966. We want to remind our readers that “Some 774 million adults lack minimum literacy skills; one in five adults is still not literate and two-thirds of them are women; 72.1 million children are out-of-school and many more attend irregularly or drop out.”

ANOTHER NOTE: When you visit the Camel Book Drive pages, you will see that they need updating.  Masha says,”You don’t know an intern, do you, who wants to update the project? ” Any volunteers?

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