Verdict: carrot with reservations
Ngugi has also blurred the margins in this intercontinental tale set in Wisconsin in the United States and in Kenya. An unidentified blonde woman is found murdered on the porch belonging to Joshua Hakizimana, a Rwandan professor who teaches genocide and testimony at a US university. A dead blonde girl and a black prime suspect. It’s enough to excite white America, especially in a city where the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan is active.
Indeed the narrator, Ishmael, a black detective, has advice for black criminals: “Do not commit crimes against white people because the state will not rest until you are caught.” Hakizimana isn’t perturbed, he’s even philosophical about the whole thing.
“Detective, where I come from death is a companion, like lover or good friend,” he says in English shorn of prefacing articles.
The educator ostensibly saved thousands from machete-wielding militia during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Some accounts suggest that the school he headed was a refuge for those fleeing the murderous mobs.
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Verdict: stick
Remember Cincinnatus in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading? He was imprisoned for “gnostical turpitude”. Love that word, turpitude. Maureen Isaacson deploys it with a different descriptive in her review of Michela Wrong’s true story of corruption in Kenya, It’s Our Turn to Eat. As Wrong’s book demonstrates, “moral turpitude” may prevail in high places in east Africa, Isaacson observes; but she calls out the author for opportunistically seizing on an “African Watergate” to score, with off-putting smugness, cheap points against the continent. It’s turpitude all round, then:
‘Eating” is the Kenyan term denoting the gorging on state resources and Michela Wrong’s new book is about gorging, about ethnic entitlement, about corruption and the man who blew the whistle on the sleaze in the Kenyan government.
John Githongo, a journalist turned anti-corruption czar, uncovered the scam about the Anglo Leasing and Finance Company, which had 18 contracts with the Kenyan government and turned out to be no more than a facade for a company which was no more than an address in London Like Kibaki, Githongo belonged to the same ethnic group as Kenya’s first post-independence Kenyan president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu man.
When Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin, came to power in 1978 things changed, but with Mwai Kibaki at the helm from 2002 Kikuyu snouts were back in the trough. They no doubt expected loyalty from one of their own, says Wrong. They felt betrayed by Githongo. She had known him since the 1990s when she was reporting on Kenya, and thought him “a highly moral, ethnically denatured young man. He would probably have thought of himself as a spiritual being first, a Kenyan second, a Kikuyu third.”
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Verdict: carrot
Botswanan reviewer Sheridan Griswold takes a look at Nick Brownlee’s Bait, set in Kenya.
Bait is a first work of fiction by Nick Brownlee. He is a British journalist who fell in love with deep-sea fishing off the coast of Kenya. His experiences there provided the framework for this detective story that uses the word ‘bait’ at a variety of levels. He says that this mystery tale is about “White Mischief” in the 21st Century (no recognition of Evelyn Waugh).
Bait is organised to relate the events over 12 days at various locations between Mombasa and Malindi and out in the Indian Ocean. There are 67 short chapters making it a quick, easy and exciting read.
There is a wide range of unusual characters in “Bait”. Central to the story are two English men, who for a variety of reasons joined forces to establish Britannia Fishing Trips at Flamingo Creek north of Mombasa. Their fishing boat, “Yellowfin”, is already 15-years-old, but still seaworthy. They call their clients, mostly gung-ho Europeans or North Americans, “Ernies” as they have found many of them aspire to catch a giant Marlin, just like in The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
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