Teju Cole’s small fates

After reading Teju Cole’s subtle and haunting novel Open City, I began following him on Twitter.

Right away I noticed that he was doing something quite different from the random links and observations most people disseminate. Each tweet was a miniature story—an example of flash fiction taken to the extreme. The ones below were posted on a single day.

Since Mrs Okafor, of Ikoyi, has a phobia of banks, her cook Peter helped himself to the $50,000 she left lying around the house.

Brick by brick, the new mosque sponsored by Alhaji Yusuf in Ijebu Ode went up, and when it was finished, it came down, all at once.

Police will never catch Ojo, alias Paraga, one of Akure’s most notorious criminals. With a noose, he escaped to the afterlife.

It is true that Chidi, of Anambra, beheaded his aunt Margaret, but it wasn’t for a ritual. He just couldn’t stand the woman.

The Audi 80 compact sedan is fast and reliable, with a trunk roomy enough to fit the swollen corpse of an adult male. In Yenagoa.

Digging a little further, I discovered that these tiny stories were not invented but instead were gleaned from Lagos newspapers as a side effect of Cole’s work on a nonfiction book about the city.

As I began work on this project, and was paying more and more attention to daily life in Lagos, a peculiar thing happened. I found myself drawn to the “small” news. I began to read the metro sections of newspapers, and the crime sections. In Lagos itself, where there is a thriving newspaper culture, I bought several papers and went through them each day. In Brooklyn, I rely on the internet, through which I have access to some dozen Nigerian papers each day: Daily Times, NEXT, Vanguard, Punch, This Day, National Mirror, Tribune, PM News, Guardian, and so on. What I found in the metro and crime sections of these papers was a different quality of everyday life. It was life in the raw, as one might find in the Daily News or the New York Post, but not in the Times. A lot of this material does not have direct bearing on the book I am working on. It is too brief, too odd, and certainly too sensational for the kind of writing the book requires. The material needed another outlet.

Teju Cole may consider them a mere by-product, but his collected “small fates” would make a strange, small, oddly absorbing book of their own.

Alexandra Fuller picks her top 10 African memoirs

African fiction gets a fair amount of attention from reviewers and anthologists, but the continent has produced some extraordinary memoirs too. Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is one of these, and in the Guardian she lists ten of her own favorites.

It’s a good list, and I second her choices of One Day I Will Write About This Place, This Child Will Be Great, What Is the What, and The Devil That Danced on the Water. I have not read Mandela’s Conversations with Myself, but his Long Walk to Freedom would make my own personal list. I’ve read other works by Zakes Mda and Albie Sachs, and look forward to reading the memoirs she mentions.

Putting together my top ten list would be tough, but here are a few of my favorite memoirs from Africa:

Algerian White by Assia Djebar
Out of Egypt by André Aciman
The Dark Child by Camara Laye
Aké: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka
Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé
An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie
Notes from the Hyena’s Belly by Nega Mezlekia
Dreams in a Time of War by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Unbowed by Wangari Maathai
My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose

The Explosion of the Radiator Hose is actually the second book I’ve read about an ill-fated attempt to move a car across Africa. In Malaria Dreams, Stuart Stevens and a former fashion model drive a Land Rover from the Central African Republic northward to Europe. In this book, the narrator, who if we follow Proust and “give the narrator the same name as the author of this book” we may call Jean Rolin, sets out to drive an Audi from France to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The book is well reviewed by Emma Garman at Words Without Borders (where I blog from time to time). My only quibble with her review is that she describes it as “ostensibly a travelogue that I assume has been partially fictionalized/embellished.” In fact (at least in its English edition) it appears under the marketing-friendly rubic “a novel.” But as you read it, it is impossible not to conclude that it is mostly a travelogue or memoir.

I expected Explosion to be entertaining but a little shallow, as so many road books are. The first line promises comic disasters: “When the radiator hose burst, the car had done exactly nine-nine thousand four hundred meters, since its odometer was reset to zero.”

Rolin’s reaction to this setback makes you suspect at once that he doesn’t know much about the Congo. Rather than finding some duct tape and sheet metal (or better yet, having brought some with him) he sends his partner Patrice to a nearby village to look for an Audi dealership. Not surprisingly, Patrice doesn’t find one.

First impressions are deceptive in this case. Rolin knows his Proust and his W.G. Sebald (an essential guide to the boundary of fact and fiction), and he spent much of his youth in the Congo. Peppered throughout this little book of 162 pages are asides that convey more knowledge of Central Africa than you will find in some authors’ entire tomes. Stranded in his car as night falls, page 12 finds him worrying about what will happen to him, but in a world-historical context.

Among the images of torture and humiliation that now presented themselves for my consideration, one stood out from all the others, for its detail and historical importance alike. The scene is from the personal Calvary of Patrice Lumumba, the ephemeral president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the months immediately following its birth: of all the heroes of African independence, Lumumba is arguably the only one to have retained his heroic status, as much for the circumstances of his demise as for the brevity of his reign (slightly less than three months), even though the latter bore the stain of a handful of massacres carried out under his authority, mostly against members of the Luba tribe, in the province of Kasai.

Here in a single sentence we get not only a quick précis of the career of Patrice Lumumba but a more evenhanded one than you will find in some full-length works. 

African Naturalist

For a landlocked country, Malawi is surprisingly aquatic. Much of Malawi is lakefront property, and the unofficial national dish is chambo fish and nsima, washed down with Carlsberg beer.

I had had several delicious meals like that before I had the chance to go snorkeling in Lake Malawi. When I did, I was stunned by the brilliant colors of the fish, as bright as fish from the tropical ocean.

Rodney Carrington Wood (1889-1962) spent half a century studying the flora and fauna of what was then Nyasaland, and established the first national parks there. African Naturalist, a new book by David Happold, tells his story. An authority in African mammals with 17 years’ experience in Malawi, Nigeria, and Sudan, Happold traces the life and career of Wood from his childhood to his last years in the Seychelle Islands.

Twelve pages of color plants are a welcome addition, including photos of Malawian landscapes, a 1919 caricature of Wood, and photos of some of his specimens: rodents, birds, bottled fish, and a beautiful assortment of butterflies from the collection of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe. 

Mugabe gets the band back together

One of the best reasons to travel, I think, is that you come to care about the rest of the world. I visited Malawi, Zimbabwe, Nepal, and Haiti when each of them was relatively peaceful and prosperous, and so their subsequent disasters have hit me harder than they would have otherwise.

Peter Godwin, whose Rhodesian childhood was recounted in his memoir Mukiwa, returned to Zimbabwe in 2008, when Robert Mugabe—already the oldest national leader in the world—had just lost the presidential election and was expected to step down. The country’s economy had been devastated to the point where you needed a brick of currency to buy a cup of coffee. In 1990, when I spent six months in Zimbabwe, the highest note in circulation was for twenty dollars. In 2008, the government was printing trillion-dollar notes.

As Godwin describes, the result was that even urban dwellers were turning to subsistence agriculture, growing corn on the median strips of highways, cooking over wood fires in houses that no longer had gas and electricity, and showing up at the office smelling of woodsmoke. But worst of all, and the focus of this book, was the reign of terror that Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party unleashed to stop political change.

As far as I can tell, there is no one Godwin met during his travels through Zimbabwe that I met myself when I was there. Yet in a way I feel I know them. The names are the names of people I met—Lovemore, Trymore, Tapiwa, Chenjerai, Tichaona—or they have a familiar Zimbabwean flavor. I knew a government official named Devious; Godwin met a man named Obvious. There are young women with old-fashioned English names, and a little girl named Pestilence—a sign that the Shona care more about the sound of English names than the exact meaning.

Conversational habits take me back too: the soft handclap greeting of rural women, the interjection “shame,” scraps of remembered Shona like makorokoto (congratulations) and pamusoroi (excuse me), and the ingrained use of “too” to mean “very.” “There are too many animals here,” says a senator of the opposition MDC party. “Leopard and kudu, mambas and puff adders.”

The places are familiar too. Living in Eastlea and working at a government office on Herbert Chitepo Avenue, I used to see the Meikles and Monomatapa hotels, the national art museum and the US embassy practically every day. I visited Cecil Rhodes’ grave (where Godwin’s eccentric sister claims to have had sex) and climbed dwalas like the ones he mentions: humped granite hills sometimes called whalebacks.

The truth about Mugabe should have been clear at least since the early 1980s, not long after he took power as the leader of an independent Zimbabwe. That’s when he unleashed the Fifth Brigade in Matabeleland, with the aim of crushing the opposition ZAPU party. Godwin puts the death toll at 20,000 civilians, or about 1% of the country’s population.

Yet because Mugabe was a plausible, well-spoken man with a business suit and several college degrees, many people resisted the idea that he was a killer and a dictator. Foreign investors were pleased that he didn’t nationalize their businesses, as he was expected to do. Progressives were pleased that he supported the ANC and put money into health and education.

I didn’t change my mind about Mugabe until 1990. It was an election year, and members of the ZANU-PF Youth League broke up rallies of the opposition Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM) and attacked its candidates. ZUM’s vice presidential candidate was shot and wounded, other candidates were killed, and several critics of the government died in convenient car accidents, sometimes by colliding with armored vehicles belonging to the army.

One sign of how bad things became in Zimbabwe is that Godwin doesn’t even mention the election violence of 1990. But he does note that to carry out the postelection attacks of 2008, Mugabe got his old band back together.

The pace of violence picks up around the country as Operation Ngatipedzenavo—“Let Us Finish Them Off”—gets under way. Mugabe’s election strategy has been completely militarized. The securocrats have taken over the day-to-day running of the campaign. The team that Mugabe has put in charge of the operation is led by the Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai, working with Air Marshal Perence Shiri and General Constantine Chiwenga, out of Joint Operations Command. It’s the same dream team that carried out the Matabeleland massacres twenty-five years before, when Perence “Black Jesus” Shiri commanded the North-Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, alongside Chiwenga, under the then Minister of Defense, Sydney Sekeremai. They are all architects of a previous genocide.

When The Fear was first published, its subtitle was “The Last Days of Robert Mugabe.” Now its subtitle is the less optimistic “Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe.”