Blood River by Tim Butcher

I’m delighted to have my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River appear in today’s Wall Street Journal, under the title Solo in the Congo. It’s the first time I’ve had the opportunity to write for the Journal.

Blood River is the story of how Tim Butcher, a journalist for London’s Daily Telegraph, set out to follow the course of Henry Morton Stanley’s 1874 expedition across Africa. Here’s an excerpt from the review:

As the author jounces over rugged forest paths on a motorbike, he comes upon a settlement where human bones lie scattered, “white among the green undergrowth.” Yet more unsettling than what he sees is the knowledge of all that is hidden or unknown. As roads crumble and people hide in the forest, each village is cut off from the rest. When Mr. Butcher asks about a local massacre where thousands died, no one seems to know about it. “There have been many attacks and many massacres,” one man says. “When it happens we flee into the bush, but nobody ever knows the details.”

The recent book “The World Without Us,” by Alan Weisman, asks us to imagine what the Earth would be like without people—if no one were around to tend the power plants and pump out the subways and repair the roads. The Congo provides a glimpse of that world.

Thoreau the climatologist

Thoreau is sometimes criticized for having spent too much of his later years in scientific speculation and in compiling tables of data about the plants and weather of Concord. Books like Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits, edited and published posthumously, eventually made it clear that Thoreau needs to be taken seriously as a naturalist.

Now a new study draws on Thoreau’s data to show how the climate of Concord has changed in the last hundred years. (I first heard this story on NPR, where the scientist being interviewed admitted with some chagrin that he had never actually read all of Walden. My mother then let me know about the story in the Times.)

On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology. Working with Charles C. Davis, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and two of his graduate students, they determined that 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long.

According to the scientists, “there is growing evidence that as birds change their migration patterns in response to climate change, they may no longer be in sync with the insect species they feed on.” The flower pictured is an Indian paintbrush, one of those that has adapted poorly.

A library of nearly nine hundred volumes

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau today features one of my favorite quotations from Thoreau, and one that almost any author can relate to. It should refute for all time the idea that Thoreau had no sense of humor. 

Transition 99

The quarterly journal Transition, founded in Uganda in 1961 by a writer named Rajat Neogy, was revived in 1991 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Having spent half of the previous year as a volunteer in Zimbabwe, I was hungry for intelligent writing about Africa and the African diaspora, and I became a Transition reader and subscriber right away. Since then, I have published three reviews in Transition: the first on Doris Lessing’s African Laughter, the second on Chester Crocker’s High Noon in Southern Africa, and the third on Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti.

(By some quirk of fate, every issue I’ve appeared in has featured a shudder-inducing cover. Issue 59 had a photo of Clarence Thomas, issue 60 showed the charred corpse of a Bosnian civilian, and issue 66 pictured O.J. Simpson with the African American wife who preceded Nicole Brown Simpson. That issue was titled “The Crisis of African American Gender Relations.")

Transition has a modest circulation, and its publication history hints at some problems. Issues 51 through 68 were published by Oxford University Press, 69 through 94 by Duke University Press, 95 through 97 by Soft Skull Press, and 98 and 99 by Indiana University Press. Gaps between issues were sometimes so long that I thought my subscription had been lost, or that the journal had quietly expired. Yet just when I had almost given up hope, a new issue would appear, and it was generally worth the wait.

Issue 99 is one of the best in some time. Nuruddin Farah describes looking for his family home in a devastated neighborhood of Mogadiscio, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on Chinua Achebe, the Biafran war, and what it means to write an “authentic” African novel. Plus, two essays uncover the neglected political and economic factors behind the genocidal killings in Rwanda and Darfur. “Coffee and Genocide” by Isaac A. Kamola shows how the high price of coffee in the 1970s and 1980s enriched the Hutu elites of Rwanda and how the later collapse of coffee prices led to economic and political crisis. “The Year of Fanatical Thinking” by David Mikhail argues that in 1996 the UN Security Council had an opportunity to pass strong sanctions against Sudan, which was being used as a training ground for terrorists. Once the country completed building its oil pipeline, Sudan had a powerful ally and customer in China and the money it needed to buy the fighter planes and other weapons used against Darfur. 

The Book of Chameleons by José Eduardo Agualusa

Interesting African writers keep emerging, and if there is ever a second edition of A Basket of Leaves, I will have to do some thinking about who should be included. In the meantime, I try to keep tabs on new writers, especially those from out-of-the-way countries.

The Book of Chameleons is a novel by the Angolan-born writer José Eduardo Agualusa. Though I like the title well enough, it’s a far cry from the original Portuguese: O vendedor de passados, or as the reading guide in the back puts it, The Genealogy Salesman. It doesn’t have that much to do with chameleons, either. The book is narrated, in fact, by a talking gecko. Not to be confused with the talking gecko in those car insurance commercials, this one has a fine prose style—and no wonder, since he was once the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Here’s an example:

Old Esperança had left his fish soup in the oven so it wouldn’t get cold. Early that morning she’d bought a lovely snapper, fresh from the island fishermen, and three smoked catfish from the São Paulo market. A cousin had come from Gabela bringing some chili-scented berries — solid fire, the albino explained to me — as well as manioc, sweet potato, spinach and tomatoes. No sooner had Félix put the dish out on the table than a powerful scent filled the room — warm as an embrace — and for the first time in ages I lamented my current condition. I’d like to be able to sit at the table too ... The foreigner ate with a glowing appetite, as though he weren’t tasting the firm flesh of the snapper but its whole life, the years and years slipping between the sudden explosions of a shoal, the whirling of the waters, the thick strands of light that on sunny evenings fall straight down into the blue abyss.