BOOK SA – Reviews

Verdict: carrot

FOR some two decades Getaway Magazine has taken us on journeys to some of the most remote destinations on the planet allowing us, through the lenses of its cameras, to view these amazing places from the comfort of our homes.

The magazine set the benchmark for travel journalism in Africa and really opened the continent up for the average traveller to explore the land north of our borders.

• Complete review at the Dispatch Online

• Africa Lens: 20 Years of Getaway Photography homepage

Book Details

• Africa Lens: 20 Years of Getaway Photography by Justin Fox
  EAN: 9781770097605
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Verdict: carrot, and an unusual one at that. Aimé Désiré Héma, a policeman, hails from Burkina Faso, and his first and so far only novel, The Democratic King / La monarque democrate, can be found at Ouagadougou’s Diacfa, “one of the best African bookshops” that reviewer David L Smith has found on his travels:

A cop from Burkina Faso wrote the last book I read. It was the week the president of Niger decided to change the Constitution. I was at a workshop in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, with politicians from Niger and five other West African countries. Those from Niger were, understandably, a little on the nervous side.

Their president, Mamadou Tandja, was to end his second and final term of office, but a quick change of the rules allowed him to stick around for at least another three years. My book safari led me to a novel that doesn’t condone this sort of thing.

In between sessions on managing the media in crises, I stumbled upon a bookshop just around the corner from where I was staying. I was looking for a restaurant recommended by a friend. The place is run by nuns and, according to my friend, let’s call him Nick, the food is good and so is the wine, but what’s really special is the singing. I was told that the nuns sing once they’ve delivered the food to your table. The nuns and their restaurant were eventually located. They weren’t singing that night and the food was mediocre. My luck was better on the book front.

• Complete review in the Mail and Guardian

• The Democratic King homepage

Book Details

• La monarque democrate by Aimé Désiré Héma
  EAN: 9782748009484
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Note from the reviewer: “The Democratic King is published by Burkina Livres (Ouagadougou) and was reprinted most recently in 2009. Sadly, the book cannot be found in South Africa, but it can be found on Amazon.fr if a trip to Burkina Faso is out of the question. Also visit www.burkinalivres.org“.

Verdict: carrot

Now here’s a book looks a likely candidate for my 2010 “to read” list: SMS Uprising< which treats how cell phones are changing activism in Africa, complete with case studies. The book’s blurb at its Pambazuka homepage is certainly worth a look alongside this review from Anne Perkins:

But the optimists – and the activists like Christian Kreutz, who wrote the second essay in this collection – believe mobiles can extend participation, monitoring and transparency, decentralise networks and provide opportunities for local innovation.

Mobile has greater penetration than television (although not radio, with which it can work as a kind of poor man’s internet, with radio broadcasts soliciting citizen journalism to report on local events and conditions). The essential element is not high technology, but universality – and people on the ground who can frame questions, find or write software and then recruit users. SMS activists are the sons and daughters of the first generation of internet users – passionate about open source technology and shared experience.

Theory is one thing: but where these essays really come alive is in the descriptions of projects that have already worked.

• Complete review in the Guardian

• SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa homepage

Book Details

• SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa edited by Sokari Ekine
  EAN: 9781906387358
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Verdict: big, big carrot

Chinua Achebe, one of Africa’s greatest writers, has received very little recognition from those who grant the world’s prestigious literary awards. The Man Booker’s lifetime award, its International Prize for fiction, was conferred on him as recently as 2007 but the grand acknowledgement, the Nobel Prize, eludes him still.

Yet, if world acclaim has been restrained, in Africa adulation has come in simple yet complete ways. In his native Nigeria Achebe (80) is affectionately known as the Eagle on Iroko. Two potent images: the majestic eagle, king of the birds of prey, and the iroko, a giant tree native to West Africa and considered to be sacred.

The Education of a British-Protected Child (Penguin), his new collection of essays, confirms his cultural and political importance to Africa and the rest of the world. Achebe’s oeuvre, comprising poetry, short stories, children’s books, essays and fiction, includes the much-adored Things Fall Apart, the majestic Arrow of God and the essay collection Hopes and Impediments.

• Complete review in the Mail and Guardian

Book Details

• The Education of a British-Protected Child by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9781846142598
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Verdict: carrot

Still, never mind the width, feel the quality.

Of the prize contenders, Parselelo Kantai’s You Wreck Her (that is, Eureka!) is a tough piece on prostitution. Giving an mzungu a blow-job, the central character muses “the fruits of independence came in strange ways”. Shocking through the twists and turns of its plot, this story is absolutely riveting.

Icebergs is (South African) Alistair Morgan’s first story to appear in print. The longest piece in the anthology and, like You Wreck Her, primed with narrative surprises, it grips the attention throughout.

E. C. Osundu’s Waiting is on children in a refugee camp (where in Africa is not specified). With its slender plot line and its focus on the minutiae of the interrelationship between the children, it is a little reminiscent of the work of Charles Mungoshi. In the event, Osundu’s story won the prize.

• Complete review in the Sunday Independent

• Work in Progress and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2009 homepage

Book Details

• Work in Progress and Other Stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 2009 by The Caine Prize For African Writing
  EAN: 9781770097506
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Verdict: carrot

Tebogo and the Pantophagist is the most recent book in the “Tebogo mystery series” from author Omoseye Bolaji. The following review on Kagablog does not shy away from carrot:

tebogo and the pantophagist, the latest in the line of the tebogo mystery series written by omoseye bolaji, is dedicated “to the memory of gloria marobele” a young female (free state) journalist who died cruelly just as her career was starting, yet progressing fast.

in this new adventure, tebogo (he uses the name ‘solomon’ in this particular story) has to locate an outstanding amateur scientist and get close to him. so he starts from the “underworld” as it were, getting himself well and truly inebriated; but this does not stop him from musing on “ladies of disrepute”:

“for a moment i put myself in her shoes and i winced inwardly. i did not like her grubby appearance and calculating lustful eyes; not to talk of her ever-swilling alcoholism. shuttling from one man to the other in a shady, vacuous existence; just happy to drink prodigiously, and eat every now and then.” (page 5)

• Complete review at Kagablog

Book Details

• Tebogo and the Pantophagist by Omoseye Bolaji
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Verdict: clownfish

Two reviews of Doreen Baingana’s short story collection, Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe, reveal themselves to be carrots. But for the sake of continuity, let’s call them clownfish.

Every once in a while you read a book that opens a whole new world to you. Or, it confirms, in a very subtle manner, some ideas that want to take shape in your mind. Such a book never allows you to rest; it literally comes to roost in your head at the most unsuspecting times. One such book is Doreen Baingana’s collection of short stories, ‘Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe’.[1]

I stumbled upon the book by chance when I was designing a course for my undergraduate class in post-colonial African literature. I remember taking it up, ignoring the hype in the blurb and then flipping through the pages. Captivated by the brilliant titles of the stories, I sat down and read one of them in a swoop, ‘Green Stones’. I was blown away by the surefootedness of the writing and the narrator’s control of the world she shares. So, it became one of the required books for the course. And what luck I had.

• Complete review at Pambazuka

In Doreen Baingana’s prize-winning book of short stories with linked characters and events, the stories are indeed like tropical fish: vibrant, rare, variegated, and exotic. Baingana’s stories offer a more intimate perspective on the Ugandan experience than Giles Foden’s Last King of Scotland, which is told through the eyes of a white foreigner and focuses more on the history and political scene than the emotional lives of individual Ugandans. Moviegoers captivated by the Oscar-winning film version of the Last King of Scotland will find much to interest them here.

• Complete review at Associated Content

• Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe homepage

Book Details

• Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe by Doreen Baingana
  EAN: 9780767925105
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Image courtesy Centre for Creative Arts

Verdict: carrot

This fascinating book discusses the animal, starting with the largest land mammal, including some interesting newspaper articles and photographs of victims where such exist, or in the case of the man teasing a lion, a potential victim, and then gives tips for avoiding trouble as well as some of the medical information for treating the likely condition arising from an unpleasant encounter with the animal or insect concerned. Highly readable, this is an excellent mix of the sensational and good old fashioned common sense.

• Complete review at Artslink

Book Details

• Dangerous Creatures of Africa by Chris Stuart, Mathilde Stuart
  EAN: 9781770073555
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Verdict: carrot

Armchair travellers can undertake an epic journey around Africa which saved and improved lives along with Kingsley Holgate.

Every so often I’d turn on the radio (Classic FM) and find “Dispatches from Kingsley Holgate” as he was making his way around the rim of Africa. These brought me great delight for several reasons. One is that Kingsley Holgate is an interesting person who tells his adventure story well. Secondly, the mission of mercy by a South African team is heartwarming. But the main reason I enjoyed his dispatches so much is because they reminded me of a time when I was at school and my father listened nightly to the news of the yachts taking part in the very first around the world yacht race (I Googled this and discovered that this was in 1968). My father, armed with an atlas (and a globe), followed the adventure closely.

• Complete review at Artslink

Book Details

• Afrika: Dispatches From the Outside Edge by Kingsley Holgate
  EAN: 9781770075047
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Verdict: carrot

ON the first day of January 2001 — the beginning of the new millennium — the French husband-and-wife team of Sonia and Alexandre Poussin set off on an epic trek to walk the entire length of Africa, a journey they hoped would symbolically retrace the one made by early humankind. With no logistical back-up and very little besides a few maps in their backpacks, their eccentric odyssey, while obviously including detours to such famous landmarks as Table Mountain, the Victoria Falls, the Ngorongoro Crater and Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, would also see them slogging their way, often in extreme heat, through some of the continent’s most remote, harsh and inaccessible landscapes.

• Complete review in The Witness

Book Details

• Africa Trek: In the Footsteps of Mankind, From the Cape of Good Hope to Mount Kilimanjaro by Alexandre Poussin, Sonia Poussin
  EAN: 9781770097179
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