http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog Thoughts on Thoreau, nature, Africa, books, investing, and whatever else comes up en gwisner@gmail.com Copyright 2013 2013-06-12T02:57:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/irrational_exuberance/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/irrational_exuberance/#When:02:57:00Z Do I read reviews of my work? Only the good ones! Fortunately, the Publishers Weekly review is very good indeed. I’m especially pleased that the book seems to have the strong emotional impact that I thought it would. Though difficult to believe, until now there has never been a single-volume collection of true-life narratives from Africa’s great, historical figures. This fact could explain Wisner’s apparent exuberance in trying to cram as many entries as possible into this remarkable book. Organized by geography, the wide variety of selections includes the world travels of 14th-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta, the court testimony of anti-Apartheid activist Steven Biko, the distant memories of a young Algerian boy’s first encounter with a foreigner, and a Maasai warrior’s initiation into manhood. The stories range from bittersweet to violent, wistful to seductive, leaving a deep emotional impression. Wisner (A Basket of Leaves) does not create any artificial hierarchies of relative importance between his entries, whether the “first biography of an Arab woman ever written” or the memoir of a South African Nobel Peace Prize winner. If there’s a criticism to be leveled here, it is with the brevity of each selection due the wide net Wisner chose to cast. Nevertheless, this volume is full of memorable anecdotes and images right through the final entry. (Apr.) It’s true, I wanted to cast a wide net and include as many distinctive voices as I could. I’m pleased to see that these stories retain their power even in relatively short selections. Africa, Books 2013-06-12T02:57:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/professor_rummels_course/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/professor_rummels_course/#When:23:50:00Z Thank you, Professor Rummel of Marlboro College! You’re the first professor so far (that I know of) to adopt African Lives as a classroom text. I’m delighted and grateful, and hope that this is only the first of many more to come. Africa, Books 2013-06-06T23:50:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_the_dark_side/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_the_dark_side/#When:15:43:00Z Being a nice person was not a requirement for being included in my new anthology African Lives. In his book Machete Season, the French reporter Jean Hatzfeld presented a perspective on the Rwandan genocide that is very rarely encountered. The book is largely an oral history of the killing from the point of view of the killers. Hatzfeld quotes from ten men who took part in the massacre of Tutsis in and around the district of Nyamata, south of Kigali. Many of the victims fled into the nearby papyrus swamps and were killed there. Jean-Baptiste Murangira, one of the killers whose words appear in Machete Season, was thirty-eight at the time, a civil servant married to a Tutsi woman who was spared during the genocide. For African Lives, I collected the words of Murangira from different places in Machete Season to focus on one killer’s experience of the genocide. We were on a path coming back from the marshes. Some youths searched the house of a gentleman named Ababanganyingabo. They frowned on him because this Hutu from Gisenyi was known to consort with Tutsis and might well lend them a hand. They discovered he had helped some Tutsis getaway their cows — behind his house, in a pen, I think. They surrounded the man and pinned him down helpless. Then I heard my name. They called me out because they knew I was married to a Tutsi. The news about Ababanganyingabo’s fix was spreading, people were waiting, all fired up because they had been killing. Someone said to the audience: “Jean-Baptiste, if you want to save the life of your wife Spéciose Mukandahunga, you have to cut this man right now. He is a cheater! Show us that you’re not that kind.” This person turned and ordered, “Bring me a blade.” Me, I had chosen my wife for love of her beauty; she was tall and very considerate, she was fond of me, and I felt great pain to think of losing her. The crowd had grown. I seized the machete, I struck a first blow. When I saw the blood bubble up, I jumped back a step. Someone blocked me from behind and shoved me forward by both elbows. I closed my eyes in the brouhaha and I delivered a second blow like the first. It was done, people approved, they were satisfied and moved away. I drew back. I went off to sit on the bench of a small cabaret, I picked up a drink, I never looked back in that unhappy direction. Afterward I learned that the man had kept moving for two long hours before finishing. Later on we got used to killing without so much dodging around. Africa, Books 2013-05-12T15:43:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_ruth_first/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_ruth_first/#When:15:07:00Z The daughter of Latvian Jewish immigrants, Ruth First was born in Johannesburg in 1925 and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, where fellow students included Nelson Mandela and Eduardo Mondlane. As a social researcher and journalist, she was active in the South African Community Party, which her parents helped found, and the African National Congress. In 1949 she married Joe Slovo, who became the head of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. First was one of the 157 defendants in the Treason Trial of 1956 to 1961. Following the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 she was placed under banning orders, and in 1963 she was the first white woman to be detained under the apartheid government’s 90-day detention law. Her memoir 117 Days describes that experience. In 1964 First left the country for England, and in 1978 she moved to Mozambique, where she was the director of the research training program at Eduardo Mondlane University. In 1982 she was killed by a letter bomb addressed to her. The passage below appears in my new anthology African Lives. (Exam copies are available for professors and teachers.) I slept only to wake again. My ears knocked with the noise of a police station in operation. The cell was abandoned in isolation, yet suspended in a cacophony of noise. I lay in the midst of clamour but could see nothing. Accelerators raced, exhaust pipes roared, car doors banged, there were clipped shouted commands of authority. And the silence only of prisoners in intimidated subservience. It was Friday night, police-raid night. Pick-up vans and kwela-kwelas, policemen in uniform, detectives in plain clothes were combing locations and hostels, backyards and shebeens to clean the city of “crime,” and the doors of Marshall Square stood wide open to receive the haul of the dragnet. Suddenly the noise came from the other side of the bed. Doors leading to other doors were opened, then one only feet away from mine, and I had for a neighbour, across the corridor, an unseen, disembodied creature who swore like a crow with delirium tremens. “Water, water. Ek wil water kry. For the love of God, give me water.” A violent retching, more shrieks for water, water. I caught the alcoholic parch and longed for water. Twice again I was jerked awake by the rattle of doors to find the wardress standing in my doorway. She was on inspection, doing a routine count of the prisoners. “Don’t you ever sleep?” she asked. Suddenly the door rattled open and a new wardress stared in. A tin dish appeared, on it a hard-boiled egg, two doorsteps of bread, and coffee in a jam-tin mug. Minutes later the crow was retreating down the passage. The wardress led me out of my cell, past a second solitary one, into the large dormitory cell which was divided by a half-wall from a cold water basin and a lavatory without a seat. I washed in cold-water and half a bucket of hot, put on my pyjamas and dressing-gown, was led out again into my little cell, and climbed back into bed. My first day in the police station had begun. Africa, Books 2013-05-04T15:07:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/on_the_radio/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/on_the_radio/#When:03:19:01Z Look! There! On the stack of books on the right! That’s my book! African Lives was one of the nonfiction books discussed on a recent episode of Mindy Todd’s program The Point on WCAI. Thanks to my long-time friend Jill Erickson for making this possible.  Africa, Books 2013-04-30T03:19:01-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_kenneth_kaunda/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_kenneth_kaunda/#When:14:30:00Z Happy birthday, Kenneth Kaunda! Kenneth Kaunda was born in 1924, the youngest of eight children of a Church of Scotland minister. He became a teacher and headmaster before involving himself in nationalist politics. In 1955 he was jailed for two months with his colleague Harry Nkumbula, the president of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. Kaunda eventually broke from the ANC and formed his own Zambian African National Congress in October 1958. The new party was banned the following March, and Kaunda and others were detained. In 1964 Kaunda became the first president of an independent Zambia, a position he held until 1991. Since his retirement he has served as a roving ambassador for the Zambia and has been active in the fight against AIDS. The passage below, describing Kaunda’s detention in the northwest Zambian town of Kabompo, appears in my new anthology African Lives. (Exam copies are available for professors and teachers.) Life was not all rosy at Kabompo. I almost lost my life at one time. I had a serious attack of dysentery followed by a sharp attack of malaria and then I suffered from a series of colds and coughing attacks. In so far as my health was concerned I did much better when I was re-arrested and sentenced to prison. There are other sad memories of Kabompo. One day I went to see the District Commissioner about the insufficiency of our allowances. I arrived at the offices at 8.30 A.M. At 9.30 A.M. the Hon. William Nkanza, member of the Legislative Council for North West arrived. He waited for forty-five minutes but the D.C. could not see him. We were just told to wait. Mr. Nkanza went back but I still continued to wait. At 12 noon I went past the messenger posted near the D.C.’s door to stop anyone from going in. My patience was completely exhausted. I knocked at the door very angrily and entered without his asking me in. He shouted at me to get out but I refused and instead demanded to be told why he had kept me waiting for three and a half hours. He replied that he was drafting something for me to sign. I shouted back saying surely it would have been good manners to let me know and then I would not have wasted my time. How would he have liked it if someone else had treated him as he had treated me? At this juncture, he lost his temper and called me names. Silently I went straight for him. He left his chair and we went round and round his table as he called for his head messenger. The head messenger came in and stood between us as we looked at each other like fighting cocks. Our newly found peace-maker was an old man for whom I had great respect and, when he pleaded with me not to do anything, I looked at my friend and saying, “I respect the head messenger more than I do you,” I left. An hour later, the D.C. came to my open-air office to make us sign certain documents. They were the orders — already referred to above — banning all three of us from addressing any meetings for three months.  Africa, Books 2013-04-28T14:30:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_james_r_mancham/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_james_r_mancham/#When:21:24:01Z Born in the Seychelles archipelago in 1939, James R. Mancham studied law in England, returned to found the Democratic Party, and promoted tourism as Chief Minister of the colony. In 1976, when the Seychelles won its independence, he was elected president, but was deposed less than a year later while he was attending a Commonwealth conference in London. These events are described in his memoir Paradise Raped, which was published in 1983. Spring seems like the perfect time to feature this selection, in which the future president gets some unexpected lessons. My teachers took their work seriously, yet ironically it was two of them who unwittingly furthered my less formal education. The first turned up one evening with her young man in a quiet spot frequented by lovers and proceeded to enjoy themselves, unaware that a friend and I were watching from behind a tree. To us, the sound and the sight of love-making was absurd and hilarious. We could not contain our laughter and when we ran away we were recognised. Next morning our teacher had reported us to the headmaster, the Rev. Brother Norbert, saying that we had been shouting names at her. The punishment was ten cuts of the heavy wooden ruler and as I stretched out my hands, I closed my eyes and saw again in my imagination my teacher’s wonderful legs thrashing around in the moonlight. Not long afterwards, another teacher took us on a nature ramble to the Botanical Gardens. When we arrived, we were met by a young agricultural officer who lived in a timber cottage among the tropical flowers. “Children,” said our teacher, “I want you to collect butterflies this afternoon. Catch as many as you can. At the end of the day, the gentleman here …” (pointing to the young man) “will give each one of you a mango. Now, all of you disappear and let me see who will bring back the most butterflies.” We all ran off. Looking back I saw the teacher and the agricultural officer sneak into his cottage. Wise now to the ways of the world, I decided to forget about butterflies and crept back to the cottage where I saw my teacher in all kinds of positions. It was the most instructive hour of nature study I ever had. Africa, Books 2013-04-21T21:24:01-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_exclusives/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/african_lives_exclusives/#When:08:00:00Z African Lives includes passages from some books that are fairly hard to find, like Maurice Nyagombo’s touching memoir With the People. But it also includes three selections that appear in no other book, because they were translated specially for African Lives by the impressive team of Alexis Pernsteiner and Antoine Bargel. A taste of each one is available at Words Without Borders: ”The neighborhood gangster” is about Childhood in Madagascar by Christian Dumoux, ”Friendship is a religion” is about The Fraternal Bond by Tahar Ben Jelloun, and ”First day at military school” is about The Writer by Yasmina Khadra (pictured). For the complete translated sections from Christian Dumoux and Yasmina Khadra, read the latest issue of the online magazine Asymptote. The new issue, released April 15, also includes my essay on Yasmina Khadra, ”Algeria and the Shirt of Nessus.” Africa, Books 2013-04-16T08:00:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/paul_du_chaillu_gorilla_hunter/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/paul_du_chaillu_gorilla_hunter/#When:16:51:00Z For a long time it felt as though I was the only one who knew about the Franco-American explorer Paul Du Chaillu, whose book Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa recounted in thrilling language his encounters with wild gorillas, which had never before been described by Westerners. But a chapter in Richard Conniff’s The Species Seekers and the new book Between Man and Beast by Monte Reel makes it clear that the word is out. I was pleased and surprised to see that the Brooklyn library has a copy of Michael Vaucaire’s 1930 biography of Du Chaillu, with its startling frontispiece. Much of the book consists of summaries of Du Chaillu’s own volumes of exploration, but since these are hard to find that is not unwelcome. In between are sketches of a charming man about town who never married and never settled in one place, an eternal house guest who moved from country to country, hotel to hotel, and one friend’s home to another. The checkout card in the back of the book reveals that the book was checked out frequently in the 1930s and a couple of times in the ‘50s, when library fines were apparently two cents a day, and books that were two weeks overdue might be “sent for at the borrower’s expense.” Few if any people seem to have checked it out since. 2013-04-13T16:51:00-05:00 http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/oliver_sacks_hallucinations/ http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/blog/oliver_sacks_hallucinations/#When:17:15:01Z Kids: Don’t try this at home. Oliver Sacks’ new book Hallucinations is not only one of his most entertaining in years, it is also, unexpectedly, a quasi-memoir more revealing than his more self-conscious memoir Uncle Tungsten. In it we get an indelible picture of the author as a madcap young neurologist, riding a motorcycle through California and experimenting with a variety of drugs from LSD to morning glory seeds. The episode below is one of the most memorable. It happened in the summer of 1965, a “sort of in-between time” after Sacks’ residency at UCLA and before he began a research fellowship in New York. It was during this idle, mischievous time that I descended deeper into drug taking, no longer confining it to weekends. I tried intravenous injection, which I had never done before. My parents, both physicians, were away, and, having the house to myself, I decided to explore the drug cabinet in their surgery on the ground floor for something special to celebrate my thirty-second birthday. I had never taken morphine or any opiates before. I used a large syringe—why bother with piddling doses? And after settling myself comfortably in bed, I drew up the contents of several vials, plunged the needle into a vein, and injected the morphine very slowly. Within a minute or so, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so, it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed scene. I could see silken tents of different colors, the largest of which was flying a royal pennant. There were gaily caparisoned horses, soldiers on horseback, their armor glinting in the sun, and men with longbows. I saw pipers with long silver pipes, raising these to their mouths, and then, very faintly, I heard their piping, too. I saw hundreds, thousands of men—two armies, two nations—preparing to do battle. I lost all sense of this being a spot on the sleeve of my dressing gown, of the fact that I was lying in bed, that I was in London, that it was 1965. Before shooting up the morphine, I had been reading Froissart’s Chronicles and Henry V, and now these became conflated in my hallucination. I realized that what I was gazing at from my aerial viewpoint was Agincourt, late in 1415, that I was looking down on the serried armies of England and France drawn up to do battle. And in the great pennanted tent, I knew, was Henry V himself. I had no sense that I was imagining or hallucinating any of this; what I saw was actual, real. After a while the scene started to fade, and I became dimly conscious, once more, that I was in London, stoned, hallucinating Agincourt on the sleeve of my dressing gown. It had been an enchanting and transporting experience, literally so, but now it was over. The drug effect was fading fast; Agincourt was hardly visible now. I glanced at my watch. I had injected the morphine at nine-thirty, and now it was ten. But I had a sense of something odd—it had been dusk when I took the morphine; it should be darker still. But it was not. It was getting lighter, not darker, outside. It was ten o’clock, I realized, but ten in the morning. I had been gazing, motionless, at my Agincourt for more than twelve hours. This shocked and sobered me, and made me realize that one could spend entire days, nights, weeks, even years of one’s life in an opium stupor. I would make sure that my first opium experience was also my last. Books, Medicine 2013-04-07T17:15:01-05:00