4. Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana. Fiction. Baingana is
Ugandan, and I was hoping for a little more punch in these connected short
stories than I got. There is a sense that the author was trying to touch all
the bases in this collection: adolescent female reveries, schooling at Gayaza,
dating black and white men, professional career, going to LA, going back to
Entebbe. "A Thank You
Note" was the most powerful story for me; in letter form it is an
appreciation of friendship even though both the writer and the recipient are
dying of AIDS. Interestingly, the narrator returns to Uganda; Baingana has
stayed at U Mass.
5. Vive Nelson Mandela. DVD. At another point on the continent, is South Africa.A 95
minute history of Nelson Mandela. It is inspiring and decidedly encouraging. It
is available on DVD at the Amazon.com site via another vendor for $13.
6. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. Fiction. I have
not read this book, but Tracy Kidder is a fine writer. A wonderfully written,
inspiring account of one man's remarkable American journey. Deo arrives in
America from Burundi in search of a new life. Having survived a civil war and
genocide, he lands at JFK airport with two hundred dollars, no English and no
contacts. He ekes out a precarious existence delivering groceries, living in
Central Park and learning English by reading dictionaries in bookstores. Then
Deo begins to meet the strangers who will change his life, pointing him
eventually in the direction of Columbia University, medical school and a life
devoted to healing.
7. Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. Fiction. In the
tradition of No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, this gloriously written tale--set
in modern-day Rwanda--introduces one of the most engaging characters in recent
fiction: Angel Tungaraza--mother, cake baker, keeper of secrets--a woman living
on the edge of chaos, finding ways to transform lives, weave magic and create
hope amid the madness swirling all around her.
8. Blood River: The Terrifying Journey Through the World's
Most Dangerous Country by Tim Butcher.Non-fiction. A compulsively readable
account of a journey to the Congo vividly told by a daring and adventurous
journalist. Ever since Stanley first charted its mighty river in the 1870s, the
Congo has epitomized the dark and turbulent history of a continent. Daily
Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000. Before
long he became obsessed with the idea of recreating Stanley's original
expedition -- despite warnings that his plan was suicidal. With a great
website.
9. The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget: Murder
and Memory in Uganda by Andrew Rice. Non-fiction. A story of who killed whom in
Amin-era Uganda with the suggestion that Museveni can be implicated in the
current chaos of Ugandan politics.
10. The Meanings of Timbuktu by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane
Diagne. Non-fiction. This elegant book attends to the charge of the title by
exploring scholarship associated with Arabic writings in West Africa. The
content goes beyond literature. There are two chapters on Swahili culture in
East Africa. This book is a gem.
11. Lamu: Kenya's Enchanted Island by the Abungus, Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher, David
Coulson, Nigel Pavitt.
Non-fiction. The way it used to be and a little of what it is now. Elegant
photos.
12. God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe,
570-1215, David L. Lewis, Norton, 2008. This book was by far my best reading on
Ed's and my 2009 school-visiting trip and the story even has a connection to
Africa, the route of Arab Islam's westward expansion. Along the way, North
Africa provided Berber warriors who played a key military role as they and the
Arabs marched and rode through the lands south of the Mediterranean before
sailing the Gibraltar Strait to Spain in 711, there to gain and keep Islam's multi-century
foothold in Europe and make possible the powerful and progressive Islamic role
to which the book's title refers. If you are as unfamiliar as I was with the
intellectually enlightened and religiously tolerant Islamic regime in
Andalusian Spain - at a time when the rest of Europe was enduring the violence
and ignorance of what we euphemistically call the Dark Ages - you may, as I
did, take heart (in our own fraught decade) from this book's accounts of
Moslem-Jewish-Christian collaboration in government (with Moslems as senior
partner) and in the extension and transmission of ancient and contemporary
scientific, mathematical and especially medical knowledge. History may be
written by the winners, but the Andalusian Arabs had their victories, historians
and scribes too, not to mention a sophisticated economy and huge library
holdings, in dramatic contrast to their contemporaries across the Pyrenees. It
was therefore possible and indeed came to pass that Arabs too recorded what
happened, making it available to us in our own time. So if your high school,
like mine, featured a Euro-centric syllabus of "world history" and
you missed this stuff, here's an engaging read that equalizes the account.
Reviewed by Henry Hamburger
13. ON THE WEB
a. A list of vetted children's books with African themes is
available at the following website:
http://www.africaaccessreview.org/aar/awards.html.
b. People from East Africa will enjoy the sights of old
Nairobi, taking them back over 60 years:
http://www.mccrow.org.uk/eastafrica/kenya/kenya.htm
c. The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African
Photographs 1860-1960 can be found at http://repository.library.northwestern.edu/winterton/index.html
d. http://www.freeweb.hu/etymological/ which gives etymological
dictionaries for several languages, one of which is Swahili.
e. Archaeologist/prehistorian Merrick Posnansky, director of
the Uganda Museum and, later, head of the graduate program there in African
Studies. He has recently penned a
memoir, Africa and Archaeology:
Empowering an Expatriate Life , a personal account of his lifelong love affair
with Africa.
14. Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski - Reviewed by Henry Hamburger
You will not regret reading this book, even taking into
account the time you could have spent doing something else, because, in
Portia's phrase, you are twice blest, once in having been such a person as
would up and go to live and work in a distant land, and then again, having
gone, enriched by being there. And so, as you read this book, there will be
three travelers, not only Herodotus and the renowned Polish foreign
correspondent and author, but also your own earlier (and perhaps current) self.
Writing in 2007 near the end of his life, Kapuscinski tells how in the 50s and
60s he came to know the world, cultures and people, and how his ancient Greek
forerunner helped him from across the millennia. He will also fill you in on why
Herodotus is famous. I am so awed by this book, so eager to convince you to
read it, that I'm turning to one whose business it is to advertise books. The
back cover of the paperback states this: "Revisiting his memories of
traveling the globe with a copy of Herodotus's 'The Histories' in tow,
Kapuscinski describes his awakening to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of
new environments, and how the words of the Greek historiographer helped shape
his own view of an increasingly globalized world. Written with supreme
eloquence and a constant eye to the global undercurrents that have shaped the
last half century, 'Travels with Herodotus' is an exceptional chronicle of one
man's journey across continents."
15. Blood River by Tim Butcher - Reviewed by Jonne Robinson
The book's subtitle, "Journey to Africa's Broken
Heart," sets both the theme and tone of the volume which tells the story
of Butcher's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Stanley, his predecessor as
a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, as he travelled from the origin of the
Congo River to its outfall into the Atlantic. Nearing the end of his travels,
Butcher attempts to draw together the various threads of his account, to
analyze how things developed as they did: "How Stanley's trip turned into
one of the greatest missed opportunities of modern history," a fact which
has "enraged" him. He also looks at how decolonialization has brought
not progress, but more the exact opposite because "one of the great
fallacies about white rule in Africa was that when it ended, power was handed
back to the people of Africa. Instead it was hijacked by elites who publicly
claimed they were working in the interests of their people, but were in fact
only driven by self-interest." It may be asked what place a book about a trip
in the Congo has in a TEAA newsletter. I think that aside from the obvious
interest of the book to anyone with an interest in Africa, there are other
considerations. First, the downward trajectory Butcher traces in the Congo is
mirrored in other parts of Africa. Secondly, the situation in the Congo
reverberates throughout the area. For example, it has been reported that the
situation in the Congo has been exacerbated by forces from Uganda impacting
further West and thence on to Congo. I found this to be an interesting,
exciting and significant book and would recommend it to anyone interested in
the area and enhancing their understanding of what is going on now and how we
got there, which, it seems to me, is a necessary prerequisite to doing anything
about it.
16. The Shackled Continent by Robert Guest - Reviewed by Henry
Hamburger
The Shackled Continent takes aim at political oppression,
cronyism and the imposition of misguided economic policy as the principal
culprits slowing or reversing the growth of (sub-Saharan) African economies. It
thereby downrates - though it does not ignore - the terms of trade in the
global economy and the historical role of colonial machinations. I found this
book annoying yet worth reading. On the positive side, the author has paid his
journalistic dues, creatively pursuing interviews with a wide range of economic
actors in a wide range of African economies, sometimes putting himself at some
risk to obtain information and punchy quotes. On the other hand, as he notes in
the 2005 epilogue to the paperback edition, the book has offended a lot of
people, one reviewer calling it 'arrogant, blinkered, self-righteous [and]
casually offensive.' What is particularly casual, in my view, is his
unquestioning and unanalyzed adoption of selected ideas from economics. This is
a book about economies, written by an author for The Economist, but no claim is
made for training, scholarship or research credentials in economics. At the
risk of cuteness, I would call him an 'economist' in the sense of practicing an
ideology of 'economism,' a faith in the kind of unfettered labor markets that
allow sweatshops and the mindless deregulation that has allowed the current
debacle in the American banking and housing sectors. Still, those of us who are
trying to figure out what TEAA can most usefully do to assist secondary
education in East Africa would do well to contemplate our role in the context
of the on-the-ground anecdotes in this book.
17. Three Books on Africa - Reviewed by Brooks Goddard
Commenting on three books about southern Sudan, Brooks
wrote, "I found ACTS OF FAITH the least readable of the 3, so I think you
will like the other two - if you want to learn more about the southern Sudan. I
would read WHAT IS THE WHAT first because it gives a fictionalized account of
what the lost boys had to endure; it is a what-was-it-like-on-the-ground type
of book. It opens with a robbery and a tying-up which is what we in lit studies
call a 'conceit,' a kind of metaphor that is supposed to carry allegorical
weight. EMMA'S WAR [nonfiction] is more of a personal story, and it is
powerfully told. Emma was a Brit who fell in love with a southern 'rebel' and
went a bit native. Specifically yes, both of those books are about Africa. You
might also consider Ngugi's latest book, WIZARD OF THE CROW, especially in
light of current Kenya political unrest. I have not read this book (it is 700+
pages long).
18. I [Brooks] bring you news of 3 books that may intrigue you.
*** a. One, Unknown Soldier and its informative website http://www.joshuadysart.com/wp/. I am indebted to a short NYT article which alerted me to this book which focuses on the ongoing war in northern Uganda, the government vs. LRA. Who knew that this topic would interest the comic book world, but it has. I confess to not having read it, but we now have a hero in UG instead of political villains.
*** b. Two, Forgotten Africa: An Introduction to its Archeology written in 2004 by expert Graham Connah. It is addressed to us laity in the topic and has 29 shortshort chapters each with reading recommendations for extended study. Great maps and illustrations. Want more?ŃConnah's second edition of African Civilizations: An Archeological Perspective (2001).
*** c. Three, a beauty of a book although admittedly esoteric,
The Meanings of Timbuktu by Shamil Jeppie and Souleymane Bachir Diagne. I am
half way through this book and have been admittedly motivated by my own visit
to Timbuktu in 2007. But who knew that I'd find a clear and concise history of
West Africa in the chapter on paper in the Sudan (did you know that we owe
Buddhist monks for the dissemination of the glories of paper?).
While these books represent the joys of retirement, the
first two titles are easily accessed by current teachers.
And do read the article:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/31/090831fa_fact_brill.