Night of the Fireflies
by Michael Raeburn
(David Philip)
This book must surely rate as one of the stranger phenomena of post-colonial Africa. The author is the well-known filmmaker who was expelled from Zimbabwe by Ian Smith after he made the film, Rhodesia, Countdown. His most recent film, Zimbabwe, Countdown, shown at this year’s London Film Festival, examines the rule of Robert Mugabe, the hero of his youth. Raeburn is also working on the film version of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf, so he is no lightweight on the continent.
Night of the Fireflies is set in Maputo in the 1980s, when Frelimo and Renamo were still battling it out. The narrator-protagonist is Raeburn himself, a journalist and filmmaker who has come to Maputo to find his runaway lover, Kudzi, and persuade her to come back to him. The writing is elegant and engaging and sustains the bulging edifice of a story constructed around 14 sweltering days at Christmas. Michael finds himself an unwilling guest in the house of the volatile Rainer, who plays politics while exploring higher consciousness and his cosmic destiny. As this book is called a “novel”, one assumes some of it is fiction — it’s up to the reader to decide where to draw the line. Raeburn himself calls Rainer a “card-carrying crazy”, but seems to take him entirely seriously.
As the friendship between the two men deepens, Rainer expounds his attempts to understand the universe, the dualism inherent in human existence and, in short, his “theory of everything”, which includes much popular science. He takes on evolutionists and Richard Dawkins, positing the slow evolution of an altruistic gene, as opposed to Dawkins’s “selfish gene”. All this is very readably contained within the structure of the novel, which also gives an interesting portrait of 1980s Maputo, ravaged by war. There are detailed endnotes and footnotes for the reader who wants to pursue the theoretical side of this.
This unusual and mainly credible novel shows life as far more than everyday humdrum reality and politics. But it is taken too far by the introduction of the planet Zeega and its Zeegan inhabitants — predictably more highly evolved than earthlings.
The plot is highly melodramatic and keeps one reading to the very end, the characters are rich and real, and the writing full of intuition and insight. The scientific-spiritual theory is imparted with persuasive poetic clarity. Many people are going to love this book, which is a strange amalgam of religion, science and sci-fi. Above all, it is full of hope and vigour.