Two books I would like to say something about as we lift our groggy bodies out of this fleeting season of good cheer: Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun and American novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. Why? Because they both represent a spirit of compassionate reflection on the condition of the maligned African continent, a spirit all too easily
overlooked in the smoke of war, patronage and stubborn antagonism. Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible had been hanging around for years before it suddenly caught the imagination of the book-buying public in Britain and the United States.
This was one of those little miracles — a sharply penetrating novel about Africa that actually became a best-seller on continents that were generally thought to have mentally trashed the place long ago. There is intelligent life out there after all. (I should add that the book has since become a best-seller among South Africa’s tiny band of literati, too, proving that there are signs of intelligent life south of the Limpopo as well.)
Kingsolver tells the story of an appallingly blinkered amateur preacher from America’s Southern Bible Belt (George W Bush country, let’s not forget) who drags his family on a personal crusade to save the population of a remote village in the Belgian Congo. The mission is to save the Congolese from their own devils, and bring them to Jesus instead. In the process, the Reverend Nathan Price drags himself and his family to the edge of their own destruction — through which, in the end, his wife and daughters, narrators of the saga, find their own, separate streams of redemption.
How does a blossoming young woman deal with a father who says things like: “Sending a girl to college is like pouring water in your shoes. It’s hard to say which is worse, seeing it run out and waste the water, or seeing it hold in and wreck the shoes.” If her dad really believes in homespun homilies like these, how can she even begin to believe in his God?
“I could never work out whether we were to view religion as a life-insurance policy or a life sentence. I can understand a wrathful God who’d just as soon dangle us from a hook. And I can understand a tender, unprejudiced Jesus. But I could never quite feature the two of them living in the same house. You wind up walking on eggshells, never knowing which one of them is home.”
The feeling is intensified as the daughter begins to see the true effect of her father’s proselytising mission on the hapless Congolese on whom it has been unleashed: “According to my Baptist Sunday-school teachers, a child is denied entrance to heaven merely for being born in the Congo, rather than, say, Georgia, where she could attend church regularly … Would our Lord be such a hit-or-miss Saviour as that?”
And so the saga unfolds, stripping layers of evasive half-truth from native life in the American South and the Congolese heartland with equal clarity, pathos, humour and a grippingly literate honesty.
While Kapuscinski’s Shadow of the Sun is a synthesis of documentary journalism, rather than a novel, it makes equally gripping literature. The narrative unfolds with equally engaging insight — an outsider (a white outsider, at that) who explores the continent not with his nose, but with his soul: “Europe’s image of Africa? Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; Aids; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread.
“The world, therefore, rushes in with aid.
“Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object, as the reflection of some alien star, as the stomping ground of colonisers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organisations …
“Meantime, most importantly, it exists for itself alone, within itself, a timeless, sealed, separate continent, a land of banana groves, shapeless little fields of manioc, jungles, the immense Sahara, rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities — a world charged, at the same time, with a restless and violent electricity.”
Kapuscinski has a wonderful way of being able to see (and laugh at) himself within this African tapestry: “Gare Routiere [Dakar] is an enormous, flat square, still empty at this hour. A group of young boys materialised instantly at the gate, asking where I wanted to go. [When I told them], they led me to more or less the centre of the square and, without a word, left me there. Because I was alone in this desolate place, a group of vendors, shivering in the still-cool air … gathered around me, pushing their wares — chewing gum, biscuits, baby rattles, cigarettes, sold individually or by the pack. I didn’t want anything, but they kept standing there; they had nothing else to do. A white man is such an anomaly, a foundling from another planet, that it is possible to stare at him with interest almost forever …”
The test of a work on Africa that avoids being either patronising or dismissive is its ability to look at both the ugly and the beautiful sides. Kapuscinski’s compassion lies in his ability to look squarely at both sides of the picture, yet understand the roots of this (largely unsolicited) ugliness at the same time: “In one of the … main intersections [of the Eritrean city of Massawa] stood an enormous burned-out Russian T-72 tank. They clearly had no means of removing it. There wasn’t a crane in Eritrea capable of lifting it, no platform on which it could be transported, no forge that could melt it down. You can bring a great tank like this into a country like Eritrea, you can fire away with it, but when it breaks down, or someone torches it, there is really nothing to be done with the wreckage.”
We are witnessing the making of new wastelands of war wreckage as the American jihad in Afghanistan grinds on. Apparently Somalia’s turn is soon to come around (once more) and who knows what other part of the small space left to the poor mass of humanity will follow?
Yet in the testimony of Kingsolver, Kapuscinski and a hardy band of other world writers, a small, defiant flame of humanity still flickers on.
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