Julius Chingono was born on a commercial farm and worked for most of life as a blaster on the mines before late in life becoming a published author.
I have reviewed his very fine collection of poetry and short stories, NOT ANOTHER DAY, at Africa Book Club. If you’re not going to click through, let me just leave you with this lovely little sample of his work, the poem AFRICAN SUN:
The African Sun
shines bright
even upon dictators
warms even
absolute rulers,
Sets even upon despots
This book recounts the author’s life in Kenya. Originally from Italy, she had always been fascinated by Africa, and eventually moved there with her second husband, buying a large ranch on which they kept cattle and provided a safe haven for wildlife.
She provides an interesting picture of Kenya in the 70s and 80s, at the tail end of the Happy Valley period, and includes many accounts of her intimate experience with African wildlife. The heart of the book however is her various bereavements. Her husband is killed in a car crash, and then a few years later, her son, an amateur herpetologist, is killed by a puff adder. Their funerals are minutely recorded, as are those of two or three of her friends.
Now, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.
I think I may have a heart of stone.
Great suffering does not necessarily make a great novel. Heartfelt sincerity, while important, is not all you need. (Oscar Wilde: “All bad poetry is sincere.” Ouch)
Now, before you start hating me in the Comments, let me give you an extract, and you hand on heart try and tell me that this is not dreadful:
There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa . . . A last eagle flies majestically back to nest on steep cliffs.
Clearly, while she may have dreamed of Africa, she did not dream of writing without cliché.
In the interests of fairness, I should say it is very readable, especially if you skip the funerals. I couldn’t sleep last night, and polished off about 200 pages from 1am.
I admire the lady, who has a genuine and inspiring love for the Kenyan landscape, and has had a genuinely terrible time; but I just cannot admire the writer.
A friend kindly lent me this as I am moving to Kenya. It tells the true (as far as that’s possible) story of one John Githongo, who famously decided to blow the whistle on corruption in the Kenyan government.
Kenya used to be run by Daniel arap Moi, who presided over a fairly corrupt administration. (A contemporary joke was: l’etat, c’est moi). Eventually, he was voted out of power (and actually went – take a tip, ZANU), and replaced with Mwai Kibaki. Kibaki promised an end to the corruption, and hired John Githongo to head a special anti-graft unit. There was much hope throughout Kenya that a new dawn was genuinely on the horizon.
Githongo was a well-educated young man, a journalist who had worked for Transparency International, and he set to work with a will, believing that Kenya really could change. He uncovered a massive government scam, which became known as the Anglo-Leasing (or Anglo-Fleecing) scandal. He slowly realized however that neither President Kibaki, whom he had believed in so whole-heartedly, nor any of his ministers wanted the scandal uncovered, primarily because they were its’ main beneficiaries.
He taped incriminating conversations, and kept incriminating documents, and then in fear of his life fled to the UK, where he arrived on the doorstep of a journalist he barely knew asking for shelter. (Thus Michela Wrong our author enters the story). He eventually released his information, and while a huge scandal did unfold, very few heads rolled.
Wrong ties this to the growth of ethnic divisions in Kenya, pointing out that Moi was a Kalenjin, and his regime mainly assisted them, while the Kibaki regime, though it did preside over a growing economy, was perceived to mainly assist his people, the Kikuyu. John Githongo’s special crime was thought to lie particuarly in the fact that he was a Kikuyu, and thus ‘betrayed’ his own people. The book takes us up through the explosion of ethnic tensions that marked the last elections.
So, in some respects a very depressing story. Ms Wrong clearly finds it so, making much of how wasteful aid is, what a hopeless case most of Africa is, etc etc. Personally, I didn’t find it to be that way. The main point I think is that John Githongo did stand. And there were those who stood with him. As we see in North Africa at the moment (viva Benghazi, viva!) there has been an old way of doing things,and Africa is currently run by old people, familiar with these old ways. But I have hope: a new generation is coming. Perhaps it is just that it is a sunny morning, but look – Kibakis is one of these geriatrics, born 1931, Mugabe, 1924, Gbagbo 1945 – while John and all those with him are young.
Ms Wrong writes with a lovely clear lucid journalist’s voice, and has a lovely turn of phrase. She did get me down with her old-Africa-hand despair, and by her typical white British way of dismissing white Africans. But whatever, it was an interesting and informative book.
I only arrived in Nairobi yesterday, and on the way from the airport I already noticed one of the small businesses she mentioned. A good introduction.
Oh god. This didn’t go well. It was given to me as a very kind gift. The back cover, a review, calls it a “remarkable book that will be widely read . . a sprawling analogy.” Hmmm. Remarkable how? Remarkably bad?
And sprawling? This clearly means: needs editing.
I tried for 70 pages or so, but I just couldn’t do it. I could just tell he was settling in for a long one, and I couldn’t handle it. I feel bad, because they’ve even dressed the crow up on the front in Zimbabwean colours, because it’s about a dictator, so I give them props for that, but I just couldn’t handle it.
I bet there aren’t too many blogging on this one.
I’ve had this in my bookcase for a while; it belonged to a friend of my father’s, who was forced to leave Zimbabwe during the Gukurahundi (if you don’t know what this is you really ought to Google it), lived in Darfur for a while, setting up schools (most of which were burnt down in the recent events there – definitely Google that if you don’t know what that’s about) and then had to move to London as he badly needed the NHS, due to an incident with a stomach virus and some vets. He spent the rest of his life in a tiny flat, a fine example of living in a way above and beyond your circumstances: books, newspapers, music, his flat was as big as the world mentally, for sure.
ANYWAY. I still didn’t really want to read this soppy “Memoir of Africa,” (that’s it’s very dodgy subtitle). I just had it because it had his name in it in his rather charming old school hand. Anyway, I was too hungry to lug my ass to the Library, so I needed someething to read and had a look through the bookcase. I thought it would probably be kind of racist, and full of weird issues about being ‘British’ in this exotic land, even though she’s lived in Africa since she was four, so how it’s exotic I’m not clear. So I thought that was how it would be and I wouldn’t like it, but what do you know, that is how it is and I kind of like it!
Actually, it’s not very racist; it’s problematic by our standards, but it’s very clear from her description of her life that she was far more liberal than anyone she knew. She was in Bulawayo from the age of four, and we learn all about her WWI veteran father, and her parents’ horribly bad marriage, and her weird childhood; she wasn’t allowed to play with white children in case she lost her upper class accent. She got pregnant at 16 by the first man she kissed. This being the 1940s, she had to marry him and went on to have 25 years of misery. They founded a farm in Matopos, and have moved to camp in the middle of the Okavango Delta – that’s where I am now.
The book is firstly interesting, and quite charming, for her clear love of the African landscape, and, in a strange and mixed up way, her love of African people. It’s full of vervet monkeys getting into the chicken coop and throwing eggs at each other and at the chickens, of chats that fly into her bedroom in the morning and wait to have some of her toast, of sunset over the granite hills and so on. She spoke fluent Ndebele, and knew a great deal of the culture and wife of life of these people – she even knew a man who’d fought in Lobengula’s impi (Google also).
It’s also interesting as a view into her community and the ideals of her time. She’s totally not bothered to tell us she never got on with her mother: no remorse, no bitterness, and even better, no psychologising. Very not modern. I love it. Apparently once her mother was moaning about something, and our author told her not to, and the mother replied, with pride “But I’ve always been a grouser. I’ve always been a moaner.” This is too much for our author.
It’s more or less a biography, but fabulously also she spends little time on her children. Love it. You certainly get the impression that the farm and the landscape were of far more interest to her than her children, and, incredibly interstingly, she feels no societal pressure to pretend it isn’t so. She gets pregnant for the third time, and is with good reason too scared to get a backstreet abortion, so goes through with it, and refers to it quite frankly as a little wretch.
Also, there’s lot of sex and naked dinner parties, which goes very oddly with the fact that she felt she couldn’t get a divorce. I’m not quite following. More when it’s finished.
