Sarah Penny INTO THE HOUSE OF THE ANCESTORS by Karl Maier (John Wiley & Sons) EATING THE FLOWERS OF PARADISE by Kevin Rushby (Constable)
Last year Nelson Mandela made the following statement: “The time has come for Africa to take full responsibility for her woes and use the immense collective wisdom it possesses to make a reality of the ideal of the African renaissance, whose time has come.” Two years ago, Tanzanian statesman Julius Nyerere was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “A new leadership is developing in Africa”.
Optimism for Africa constitutes the philosophical heart of Karl Maier’s Into the House of the Ancestors. Maier builds a core of hope based not so much on the words of politicians as on grassroots transformations – a series of alterations and initiatives which he maps through interviews with healers, doctors, entrepreneurs, scientists, artists.
Maier draws his sources from the plethora of successful but under- recognised voices which stretch across the face of Africa – professors lecturing at a university created from a converted chicken farm in the ruins of Mobutu Sese Seko’s collapsed kleptocracy, a Transkeian sangoma who instructs her clients on the correct use of condoms, a Zulu woman chief who managed to contain the African National Congress/Inkatha factionalism in her chiefdom by organising a series of dialogues between the two parties.
The central tenet which reverberates throughout the book is simple: Africa needs – and is achieving – African solutions to African problems. Africa’s formidable legacy – unwieldy and internally explosive European-created nation states, autocratic politicians, civil wars, ethnic genocide, poverty, stagnation – has to be responded to in her own terms. Implicit in this idea is a re-affirmation of the fact that Africa was never a “raw continent” – a seat of barbarism onto which the colonists grafted a temporary order. Pre-colonial Africa had traditions of government, of diplomacy, of survival. The regeneration of Africa demands that these truncated and traduced institutions of the past have to be connected to the course of the future.
Maier’s book is refreshing in the almost bald pragmatism of its anecdotal style. He has obviously set out to avoid preachiness and he has largely succeeded. His voice is a welcome counterpoint to the CNN- packaged wails of woe with which we are constantly inundated. Without negating the continent’s real and ongoing problems, he achieves a syncretic viewpoint which allows for a wider and vastly more interesting apprehension of the challenges it faces.
And if negotiation doesn’t work, there’s always hallucination. Kevin Rushby’s Eating the Flowers of Paradise is an extended panegyric in favour of the popular East African stimulant qat. Also known as mira and chat, this foul-tasting herbacious stalk has to be gnawed in extraordinary quantities to produce any reaction at all (a headrush equivalent to that produced by a cigarette and mild nausea in my case, but Rushby explains that the common Western distaste for the drug is only part of a restrictive paradigm on the part of the unadventurous).
Rushby’s qat addiction inspires him to follow the old trade route from Ethiopia to Yemen which he narrates in tones of growing complacency, ever at pains to assure the reader of his skills as a cultural chameleon. If you don’t share his obsession with Yemen, Ethiopia and qat, this travel narrative will fail to enthrall.
Sarah Penny’s book on travelling through Africa, The Whiteness of Bones, is published by Penguin