Kate Turkington
INTO AFRICA: A Journey Through The Ancient Empires by Marq de Villiers and Shiela Hirtle (Jonathan Ball, R89,99)
Analysing Africa is a bit like facing the many-headed Hydra. Just as you’ve got one section neatly disposed of, another rears up and puts you back where you started. Similarly, any book that attempts “to see Africa correctly”, as Marq de Villiers tries to do, is taking on a task of equally heroic, and impossibly daunting proportions.
This is an ambitious book that doesn’t quite come off. De Villiers and Hirtle attempt an insider’s view of the real Africa, one that is not shaped by the stereotypical media perceptions of doom, gloom, famine, floods and bloody tyrants, but one which explores its astonishing vitality, its gift for reinventing itself and its enormous recuperative powers.
In pursuit of this quest the authors travel throughout Africa — the old and the new — and introduce us to its history, its people and its stories. In their well-written and thoughtful introduction they claim that to understand Africa “you must understand the timeline and pattern. Africa must be seen in long view, understood as a work in progress, in always-unfinished evolution.”
This is all very well, but the undertaking is too much for one book. The focus is never clear. One moment we are being asked to consider the history of Zaire, the next to conjecture about its future, the next to be told, ah well, “Africa has lots of time”, and then we’re off to the Zairean capital, Kinshasa, which is “a mess”, with a man staggering across six lanes of the main boulevard bleeding to death.
The authors explain that they use the first person singular throughout the book, even though De Villiers did the travelling and Hirtle the research. What happens is that the reader gets two books, one of anecdotes, stories and real-life episodes which are colourful, memorable and make for superb reading; the other a potted history of every country discussed, with titbits of lore and legend thrown in for good measure.
The resulting effect is understandably patchy. For example, do we need to know the history of the Fulani tribe of Mali and northern Nigeria in such detail, when the chapter only comes alive with De Villiers (or whichever author) in a local market buying earrings from a beautiful Fulani woman already married to her third husband?
Although there are some superbly evocative pieces of writing and thoughtful theorising, it’s rather the people and places that you will remember as you close the book — the author(s) flying in an old plane with a red-faced South African arms- smuggler in Angola, sailing in a dhow crewed by four Swahili teenagers, eating couscous and goat-meat sauce with Tuareg women, sharing an airless cabin with a family of three on a Congo river barge.
It is for these moments, and fortunately, they make up the bulk of this over-long book, that Into Africa is worth reading.