FOREIGN PARTS

frogs, alligators and piranha (Rondon had previously lost a toe to one). And there were human dangers too. One camarada murdered another, and disappeared into the jungle and an unknown but surely ghastly fate. The hostile Cinta Larga Indians lurked in the shadows, seeing but never seen. Fevers and illness stalked the party. Roosevelt injured his leg, the gash festered and his temperature rose to 105 degrees. Delirious and near death, he constantly recited the opening lines of Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’. Roosevelt carried a vial containing a lethal dose of morphine, and in a moment of lucidity, he told Cherrie and Kermit that he refused to burden a party already in peril. ‘I will stop here,’ he declared in high Victoriana. But the expedition struggled on and finally, in mid-April, discovered a rubber-tapper’s outpost. Two weeks later they reached the confluence with the Aripuanã and the gate

T OM S TACEY

A CONTINENT’S CURSE

T HE S TATEOF A FRICA : A H ISTORYOF F IFTY Y EARS OF I NDEPENDENCE

★By Martin Meredith (Free Press 752pp £20)

A FRICA : A M ODERN H ISTORY

★By Guy Arnold (Atlantic Books 1028pp £35)

T WOFORMIDABLEBOOKS , in unwitting rivalry, present us with the chronicle of Africa’s politics, wars, disease, and political and tribal violence over the past half-century, during which forty-eight of its lands, islands and archipelagos were released into sovereign statehood from colonial rule or calved from greater neighbours (Namibia from South Africa and Eritrea from Ethiopia), a further four (Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia and Liberia) being already independent. Both works purport to give us histories. This is true to the extent that they lay out, with varying clarity, those events and statistics which provide a frame for the cascade of rule or misrule and the collapses or reassertions of order such as characterise the period, above all in the sub-Saharan reach of the continent. Yet neither writer has anything to tell us about African literature or music, of the plastic arts or film of the period, or of religion except in a political context. Michael Meredith has a cursory line or two on Senghor’s (and Cézaire’s) négritude, and that’s it. Both books are divided into four sections, each

way to survival. Until Candice Millard’s superior rendition of this tale, it wasn’t much more than a footnote in American history. But the story is gripping (though the book sorely needs a map), and her prose flows along as swiftly as the river. Of the human relationships, she subtly treats the mounting tension between Roosevelt and Rondon (the first a let’s-forge-ahead Stanley; the second a let’s-measure-this Livingstone), and her handling of the complex relationship between Roosevelt and his son Kermit is a model of restraint and sensitivity. As a further demonstration of her prowess, Millard skilfully weaves into the story many absorbing observations about the phenomenal diversity and mystery of the Basin’s breathtaking ecosystem and she thus evokes the wonders of the book’s principal character: the living Amazon. To order this book at £15.19, see order form on page 78

covering a successive decade or so. Guy Arnold forces out sectional headings – ‘The 1960s: Decade of Hope’; ‘The 1970s: Decade of Realism’; ‘The 1980s: Basket Case?’; ‘The 1990s: New Directions and New Perceptions’ – which are virtually meaningless. Meredith wisely eschews them. It is impossible to define passages of change or evolution in terms of decades. Meredith organises his material better, writes with a fine sense of narrative, captures the personalities of the main players, provides sustained coverage of particular countries and their particular turmoils, and has a grasp of colonial inheritance and the varying post-colonial roles and motives, both of the former masters and of the US and (Communist) Russia. He pulls no punches, for example, over the culpable flaccidity of Boutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the UN, in his approach to the predictable and predicted1994 Rwanda massacre in which 800,000 children, women and men died in a month. That entire account is admirable in its clarity and frankness, as is Meredith’s coverage of all the devastations and conflicts of the period: Somalia, Liberia, Congo (DRC), Sierra Leone, and so on. He writes without prejudice or special pleading. Arnold, by contrast, is pedestrian as a writer, and chippy, characteristically – in a single passage – blaming this or that Western power for failing to use its influence (as aid-provider or ex-colonial mentor) andfor using its influence (in a ‘neo-colonial’ or even ‘new neo-colonial’ manner). Government aid invariably hides its real agenda. The Western powers cannot please Guy Arnold whatever they do; and whatever the whites did in the colonial role, or have done as settled African communities, is blight. Sub-Saharan black Africa, and the black Horn, are the central concerns of both writers; yet both, in my view, burden their books by bracketing Mediterranean, Arabicspeaking Africa with the fundamentally other, sub-Saharan

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 FOREIGN PARTS

world. Ben Bella’s war and Nasser’s Arab nationalism had little bearing on blackAfrican events. Where both writers fail fundamentally is in omitting to pause and reflect, in a little depth, on what has been happening and why, and on where the deepest trends lie in the engagement and reconciliation of black Africa with the rest of the world. In respect of their main theme, black Africa, they tell a tragic tale, and admit as much. ‘After decades of mismanagement and corruption,’ Meredith writes on his last page, ‘most African states have become hollowed out. They are no longer instruments capable of serving the public good.’ He quotes the Ghanaian Kofi Annan: ‘In reality, fifty years after the beginning of the independence era, Africa’s prospects are bleaker then ever before.’ Arnold, among his other activities a chronicler of aid, seems also to abominate it. ‘[Africa’s] problems are daunting,’ he concludes, ‘and Africa has fallen into a habit of dependence that must be broken.’ I do not dissent. Yet neither writer chooses or dares to confront the true dilemma of the Dark Continent. Black Africa is indeed condemned to much suffering. Since independence (but not, for the most part, before) it has suffered on a gargantuan scale. Pandemics ravage the continent; innocent generations are cursed. Incapable of preparedness, it is a continent vulnerable to the caprice of climate, to the consequences of drought or flood. For the most part it is incompetently administered and corruptly governed. None of this will foreseeably improve. The incompetence and corruption, and the unpreparedness, are the whelps of a despair at a presumed, predestined inability – indeed, a mute unwillingness – to compete either as nations or as folk with a world where white men’s values, or (prevailingly) white men’s technocracy, faute de mieux, masquerade as civilisation. A mute unwillingness? The despair is doubly rooted. Bantu philosophy, of which these writers appear to know nothing, imbues the great body of those whose ‘history’ they presume to write. It makes no space for the competitive, atomised, grotesquely self-regarding, reductive existence of modern Western man, acquisitive of chattels, wealth, and status, and with his deferred rewards. There has been negligible osmosis. The tower block had and has no medium of relation to the mud hut. There endures, therefore, an African anamnesis – that half-aware, half-recollected treasure of a previous

Darfur, 2003

innocence and truth-inlife, in the compound, in the tribe – which haunts the modern soul and saps the will to run the race that inner Africa never sought to enter. This world of ours and of the authors of these books, and the life-denying motives and legitimate goals of the black politicos, generals and ambitious thugs their histories focus upon, do not concern, au fond, black Africans or black Africa except in

terms of the suffering and its concomitant despair. These books have their usefulness. Yet the valuable history of independent black Africa remains to be written. It will be written in the light of that era still to evolve when the neurosis of the political assertiveness willed upon black Africa, in its fabricated statehoods, will have given place to the grace and inspiration of négritude–a melding Africanness which our Manichean world can already, just perceptibly, be seen to crave. To order these books, see order form on page 78

R ICHARD D OWDEN Over the Mountains And Far Away

T HE C HAINS OF H EAVEN : A N E THIOPIAN R OMANCE

★By Philip Marsden (HarperCollins 298pp £14.99)

T HIS IS THE land where the 1984 famine took place – the famine ‘of biblical proportions’, the phrase that Michael Buerk used to jab the suffering into our souls. It was a resonant allusion. We know this place. Almost every year since then the television cameras have been back to remind us, panning across the vast, harsh landscape of barren mountains, thatched huts and meagre fields. And we know Ethiopians too. Wiry little people dressed in white garments, with wrinkled faces and dark, patient eyes, tending their goats and sheep and hacking the soil with mattocks or ploughing with oxen. That is how Moses, Isaac and Jacob lived, and Ethiopians knew those names before they were known

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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