The "White man in Africa" or the "White African"?

It's not gotten off to a fantastic start, I'll admit that. 4 months between the first and second posts isn't the greatest precedent. Unfortunately for blogging, it comes well after living, thinking, eating, working and reading in the priorities list. (Oh, and after sleeping... definitely well after sleeping.) 

One persists nonetheless.

Like blogging, reading is of course rather an egocentric pursuit; we gravitate to books that promise to illuminate aspects of what we sense is our own condition. We seek to be understood and to understand ourselves. I doubt it's anything to be ashamed of - As CS Lewis says, we're all looking for that jubilant moment of kinship; the moment of “what? You too? I thought I was the only one!”. 

So given that Aminatta Forna's most recent novel, “The Memory of Love”, paints a white man attempting to settle (in a very emotional as well as physical sense) in Africa as a central character, I read it with a predictable self-interest. But much as I am seeking the alternative ending, Adrian does not succeed in the quest to "belong". He tries and fails to mould into the life, memories and chaos of war torn Sierra Leone. Though the country does leave some mark on him, in the end he must return to Norfolk where he can find some semblance of peace and reminisce about the wretched continent;

"He sees it now. Too wrapped in love, seduced by the beauty of this broken country, this was his failure. This is not a place to live one's life."

His Sierra Leonian friend and foil, Kai, is left to truly belong to Africa, since only he seems equipped to nurse her brokenness and understand her silence.

It's a rather irritatingly familiar story. Like Adrian, Hannah Musgrave of Russel Banks fascinating Liberian novel, “The Darling” is white, naïve and looking to Africa to give her purpose and heal her wounds. Predictably, it does not. Why should it after all?

The same character takes shape in Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche's novel - "Half of a Yellow Sun" as the white British expatriate, Richard. Though Richard loves Nigeria with a child-like hope and immerses himself in Biafra's bloody story to the point where he loses everything, he is finally led to realise that “the story is not his story to tell”. Whilst I sympathise that Adiche is reacting against all the Joseph Conrad's who never let Africans speak for themselves, it is not, I confess, a message I like.

Adiche - one of Nigeria's best

These narratives are somewhat bleak for those muzungus and mukiwas amongst us who seek to knit our beings into this dusty, unforgiving soil. We do not like their excluding inferences as we do not like Mugabe's insistence that “you can never be one of us”, or that “indigenous” shall always mean black, no matter how many generations we stay. 

But perhaps to read that message into these novels is somewhat unfair. One could be accused of perceiving too much through the haze of a stale colonial guilt and a post-Mugabe reactionism...(who? me?!)

After all, those three characters are only one part of the white man in Africa's story. It is not the whole. Forna is not attempting to tell the story of the white African who does not or cannot escape back to Norfolk. Adrian calls Britain home, but what of the white man for whom Africa is the only home he knows? For this we must read Lessing, Gordimer and most of all Coetzee. Authors for another blog ;)

J.M Coetzee - definitely the subject of a future blog.

In the meantime, beyond books, I continue to work out the possibilities of belonging here in Lusaka, Zambia. One is reminded that the obstacles to this quest lie on both sides and that they each require patience. Certainly the Mugabes and Malemas of this world are in part to blame, with their polarizing insistence that “indigenous” equals “blackness” and that there lies some vast, unassailable chasm between “us” and “them”. Then there's the Adrians of course, for whom Africa is a brief and adrenaline-filled sabbatical or development project but never a "home". And then there's the man I met last week...

A white Kenyan, 4th generation. Having left that country "which was going to the dogs", he railed against “their corrupt practices” and the fact that “they are constantly at each other's throats”. And it struck me that although Africa was more home to him than any other place in the world, still he has chosen to live by an “us” and “them” which precluded the very possibility of his belongingness. His rhetoric betrayed an actual pursuit not of belonging but of separation. Thus, whenever Kenya fails it will always be because of them. 

As though his footprints upon her soil leave no marks.
He does not belong because he chooses again and again not to.

 

In the end Adiche, Forna and Banks's characters are part of the white man's story but not the full one. There is both more hope and more complexity than that. I do not think our belonging is inevitable, but neither is it impossible. In the end it shall be a matter of active choice and of patience, on all sides.

After all, one cannot forever be rushing back to Norfolk.

Reading recommendations:

In addition to the 3 superb novels mentioned above, some other (fairly unrelated) books I have read in the past weeks which it would be particularly heinous for me not to recommend:
(In a gross disservice to the authors I shall attempt to sum them up in 3 words...since one can't be sure if/ when I shall ever have time to blog about them)

Roma Tearne's "Mosquito" - SriLanka beautiful and tragic

Foster's "Howard's End" - classic classist satire

Mistry's "A fine Balance" - humanity, achingly hopeful

Meek's "Beginning our descent" - painful and piercing introspection

Mitchell's "Thousand Autumn's of Jacob de Zoet" - Empire and romance in Japan

Lola's "the Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives" - dark, beguiling and droll

Farell's "Troubles" -   charmingly inevitable ruination