Henning Mankell’s The Eye of The Leopard, it will be recalled, received a hard smack in a previous review. Percy Zvomuya to the rescue!
Although he bashes a bit around the bush, because he finds the text “racially raw” and warns that “sensitive readers will flinch at the tone of the conversations”, he concedes, by the end of his review, a carrot.
A compliment concludes his assessment: “I advise that you do not start reading The Eye of the Leopard when faced with work-related deadlines. You may miss them and find yourself in the mouth of a leopard.”
Best part is, it’s a two-for-one click-through: the page with Zvomuya’s piece also contains Meg Samuelson’s gloss of Sister Outsiders: The Representation of Identity and Difference in Selected writings of South African Indian Women (whew!) by Devarakshanam Govinden:
One repeatedly reads about barefoot people or people wearing bad shoes and somehow the fate of these people is linked to the state of their shoes. He thinks that “if the condition of the African continent is the same as the shoes of its inhabitants, the future is already over and all is irretrievably lost”. He is scared too, of its heat and, rather strangely, of its odours.In other words Africans are smelly. “I’m too much visible here,” he concludes, overwhelmed by the black mass.
Hans meets a dissatisfied white couple who believe independence was a disaster. “This would be a good country to live in if it weren’t for the blacks.” This is another way, of course, of expressing love for Africa the earth and not the real Africa, the people.
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