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.”

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

I’ve been curious for a while about the work of my near-namesake Geoff Dyer, and recently checked out a copy of his fat compendium Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

The book is divided into sections called Visuals, Verbals, Musicals, Variables, and Personals. I am usually a dutiful book reader, making my way through collections like this in the order the author and publisher have seen fit to present them. But in this case I guessed that more than a hundred pages of art criticism might be a wearisome way to begin, and that I might do better to find out something about the author before trusting his judgment on photographs, books, and music.

So I started at the back, with Personals, which turned out to be a good way to do it. I was pleased to read about Dyer’s childhood devotion to comic books and model airplanes, and his early-adulthood devotion to sex, drugs, and the dole. And I was pleased to find out that the title essay is not a ponderous piece on the meaning of life but is mostly devoted to the author’s quest for the perfect New York City doughnut-and-cappuccino combination. (The ultimate doughnuts, it seems, are manufactured by the Doughnut Plant, whose website—by Bluefuse Design—is animated and annoyingly high-bandwidth, and was probably expensive, but which does inform you that their doughnuts are available at Dean & Deluca, Zabars, Citarella, Joe’s Art of Coffee, Oren’s Daily Roast, and Agata & Valentina.)

This background helps the reader approach Dyer’s works of criticism with enjoyment but a little less reverence than one might otherwise bring. The best of these, I think, are the literary pieces collected in Verbals, and I particularly appreciated Dyer’s enthusiasm for Ryszard Kapuscinski.

His books may be rooted in his own experience, but they are full of amazing digressions, little essays—in Imperium—on how to make cognac, on the history of the Armenian book, on anything and everything. And yet these digressions are always integral to the conception of the work. In his nomadic life he has described real places—like the city of crates in Angola in the famous opening of Another Day of Life—that are as fantastical as Calvino’s invisible cities.

I reviewed Another Day of Life when it came out in 1987, but it would never occur to me to think that anything about it was famous. Linking it to Invisible Cities, one of my famous books, makes this tribute even better. 

How foreign writers make it to US bookshelves

I’m quoted (or at least paraphrased) in the Christian Science Monitor, on how African writers gain attention.

It’s the same for young African talents, says Geoff Wisner, author of “A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books that Capture the Spirit of Africa.”

Engaging an American audience is anything but easy. Winning one of Africa’s two biggest literary prizes – the Caine or the Wole Soyinka – is the best bet but even that is no guarantee.

Mr. Wisner notes that Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina won the Caine Prize in 2002, founded the influential literary magazine Kwani?, and teaches at Bard College in the US. Yet he is still best known (if known at all) to American readers as the author of “How to Write about Africa” – a short satirical piece mocking Anglo writers who set novels in Africa.

P.S. Libyan writer Hisham Matar has weighed on what’s it’s been like to be a judge for the Caine Prize.