"The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu" by Joshua Hammer

The story of a massive smuggling operation to save mediaeval manuscripts from jihaidists.

There are two hooks. The first is that title. There seems to be a spate of books recently with the title The #name of a profession of #name of a place, such as The Bookseller of Kabul and The Beekeeper of Aleppo. Normally they leave me unmoved but when I saw this title, I knew I had to read the book. The second hook is the prologue which recounts the most dramatic incident recounted in the book, the sort of prologue that seems to be obligatory for this sort of book.

Duly hooked, I then moved into a five chapter section that recounts how Abdel Kader Haidara, our hero, became a librarian after inheriting his fathers collection of manuscripts. Timbuktu, where Haidara lived, had been one of the jewels of Islamic scholarship in the middle-ages and was home to about 400,000 manuscripts, some single pages, some books, which - because of trouble over the last few hundred years involving colonial rule and regular attempts by the local Tuaregs to gain independence - were mostly scattered in family collections and hidden in cellars and store rooms and caches in the desert. Haidara became recruited by the Ahmed Baba Institute to search out manuscripts and persuade their owners to lend, donate or sell them to a central library where they could be properly preserved (the dry desert conditions meant the manuscripts were unlikely to rot but termites were a huge problem) and archived. He also set up his own family library.

The second section of the book (another four chapters) considers the provenance of the fundamentalist jihadi Islamists who were to capture Timbuktu in April 2012. Here we are introduced to several of the main jihadi leaders.

Then we come to the meat of the book. Haidara realised that Islamists are likely to destroy many of the manuscripts because, besides Islamic teachings, many of them refer to secular matters, including history, medicine, astrology, magic and love poetry. So he started to smuggle them out of the now 45 libraries and back into hiding places with trusted residents. Then he realised that even this is insufficiently secure and organised a covert operation to move them by river to the Malian held city in the south.

Finally we learn of the defeat of the Islamists and the return of music and tourism. 

It's presented as a stirring adventure story, goodies versus baddies, with no attempt to consider alternative viewpoints. As such, it exceeds expectations. It is exciting. There is ever-present danger. There are moments when you wonder why any back-packing tourist would dream of exploring the frequently-god-forsaken corner of the earth, braving not just discomfort and disease but the threat of kidnap and murder. For those of us who like sitting comfortably at home, it's armchair excitement.

It also made me ask whether any work of art or cultural artefact is worth the price of a human life. But I suppose these things endure, testifying to the human spirit long after we temporary humans have turned to windblown dust.

Selected quotes: 

• “A Sudanese proverb from the time declared that ‘Salt comes from the north, gold from the south, and silver from the country of the white men, but the word of God and the treasures of wisdom are only to be found in Timbuctoo’” (Ch 2)
• “Timbuktu grew from a collection of tents and mud-and-wattle houses along the riverbank into a crossroads of the world and a collision point of two cultures - bringing together desert and river traffic in continuous and mutually enriching exchanges.” (Ch 2)
• “In 1995, the town had no newspapers, one radio station, and two phone lines.” (Ch 5)
• “We were sitting on carpets ... The salon was decorated with Tuareg swords and dusty family photographs, and a gas-operated ‘cooling machine’ stirred up the stultifying air, rattling as we talked.” (Ch 11)
• “The knife-edge summit of the giant dune, its surface intricately scalloped by the constant wind.” (Ch 11)
• “The forty-five libraries served as repositories for a total of 377,000 manuscripts.” (Ch 12)
• “The worship of saints and the construction of shrines had spread through much of the Islamic world following the death of the Prophet Muhammad ... It was not until the eighteenth century, when Muhammad Abd al Wahhab ... began his campaign of religious purification, that such rights and practices began to be seen as heretical.” (Ch 13)
• “The streets outside the noisy and squalid, a jumble of shabby concrete-block buildings and exhaust-spewing motorbikes.” (Ch 14)
• “Haidara kept a cell phone on each ear ... receiving reports from his couriers every few minutes: the sweat acted as an adhesive, gluing the device's to his ears.” (Ch 16)

May 2025; 242 pages

First published by Simon & Schuster in New York, USA in 2016

My Simon & Schuster paperback edition was issued in 2016

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Sanders of the River" by Edgar Wallace

Not so much a novel, more a collection of tales about a District Commissioner in Africa during colonial rule. 

Fundamentally racist, it portrays the Africans as childish, ignorant and bellicose who must be ruled using corporal and capital punishment; white people who seek to educate the Africans and who see them as having rights are frequently murdered; Sanders keeps order with soldiers and machine guns. The implicit values espoused in this book are horrid and make it difficult to read.

The author, Edgar Wallace, was a hugely prolific and hugely popular writer of thrillers from 1905 until his death in 1932; Sanders of the Rivers (written 1911) inspired a series of works. His other popular works were the Four Just Men series; he also wrote the original screenplay for King Kong. His immense popularity suggests that he tapped into the zeitgeist of the time. It is instructive to read books such as this if only to understand the values of popular culture at the time and to be thankful at how far we have come from that in only just over one hundred years, even if we have not yet progressed far enough.

I also found it interesting that Wallace adopted short sentences, short paragraphs and a very direct tell-don't-show (past tense third person) style.

Wallace spent some time in South Africa as a soldier and journalist, so presumably he had some background on which to base his stories. His books are mostly out of print in the UK, presumably because they are too racist to publish, but wikipedia says that Wallace still has a readership in Germany.

Selected quotes:

•  "Gold-leaf imposed upon the lead of commerce" (Ch 1)
• "The people hesitated, surging and swaying, as a mob will sway in its uncertainty." (Ch 2)
• "For many years have the Ochori people formed a sort of grim comic relief to the tragedy of African colonization." (Ch 3) There are occasional indications that Wallace is aware the colonialism is an evil system but fundamentally he has espoused and incorporated its basic values: that one man's life is worth more than another's and that this valuation depends upon the colour of his skin. 
• "The Isisi Exploitation Syndicate, Limited, was born between the entree and the sweet" (Ch 4) The word 'exploitation' is at least frank. But the exploiter is a (disguised) Jew and Wallace demonstrates his racism includes anti-semitism.
• "the green path to death" (Ch 4)
• "There had been good crops, and good crops mean idleness, and idleness means mischief." (Ch 5) 
• "Heroes should be tall and handsome, with flashing eyes; Sanders was not so tall, was yellow of face, moreover had grey hair." (Ch 6)
• "You who do not understand how out of good evil may arise must take your spade to some virgin grassland, untouched by the hand of man since the beginning of time. Here is soft, sweet grass, and never a sign of nettle, or rank, evil weed. It is as God made it. Turn the soil with your spade, intent on improving His handiwork, and next season - weeds, nettles, lank creeping things, and coarse-leaved vegetation cover the ground." (Ch 8) He uses this to suggest that missionaries are bad for Africa but by extension it suggests that education is bad for poor people. 
• "He had sown ... the seed of an idea that somebody was responsible for their well-being." (Ch 8) Wow! Wallace was a fascist in so many ways.
• "He was in the despondent mood peculiar to men of action who find life running too smoothly." (Ch 9)
• "The wise goat does not bleat when the priest approaches the herd." (Ch 9)
• "As he walked, you saw the muscles of his back ripple and weave like the muscles of a well-trained thoroughbred." (Ch 12) 
• "A story about Africa must be a mystery story, and your reader of fiction requires that his mystery shall be, in the end, X-rayed so that the bones of it are visible." (Ch 13)
• "'Puck-apuck-puck-apuck-puck' went the stern wheel slowly, and the bows of the 'Zaire' clove the calm waters and left a fan of foam behind." (Ch 13)

June 2022; 159 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Gravel Heart" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

A young boy, Salim the narrator, grows up in Zanzibar with his mother and her brother; his father lives on his own down the road. Then uncle goes to England, gets married and begins to work for the Embassy; Salim goes to live with him to make the most of his opportunities in England. Salim's life is a serious of casual happenings, almost a picaresque, and it is not until his mother dies in Zanzibar that he begins to understand the shameful secrets at the heart of the family.

It begins and ends in Zanzibar; the middle section is in  England. The first line is "My father did not want me." and the central mystery revolves around why the narrator's father left the family home to live by himself. But, perhaps, the psychological narrative explores how the narrator learned to accept the frailties and actions of his parents; this is perhaps the biggest lesson of growing up. So the events that take place in England, where the maturing narrator fails to achieve his potential, and experiences love and heartbreak, despite their seeming randomness, are key to his development.

There is a political narrative as well, which is to do with colonialism. Following the imperialistic British 'protectorate' of the island there was a revolution which led to a socialist government. These events interact strongly with the narrator's family, leading to his grandfather's exile; the subsequent corruption of the revolutionary government also has a huge influence on the family.

It is beautifully written in elegant and elegiac prose. The settings are crystal clear: "These were streets built for the shuffle and slap of human feet." (Ch 1). The characters are vividly real. It has a first person narrator and it is written in the past tense.

Selected quotes:

• "My father did not want me. I came to that knowledge when I was quite young, even before I understood what I was being deprived of and  along time before I could guess the reason for it." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Fathers, just like everyone else, have to deal with the relentless manner in which life conducts its business." (Ch 1)
• "European colonial officials ... lived in huge old Arab houses by the sea, and marked their ceremonial imperial rituals with white linen uniforms adorned with fantasy medals." (Ch 1)
• "I was fourteen years old then and a person can feel old and wise at that age even when he really had no idea, and what he took for wisdom was only a precocious intuition arrived at without humility." (Ch 2)
• "'That is not a smile, that's a grin,' Uncle Amir said. 'Next time I take a photograph of you, I want you to compose yourself so that your personality comes through, not your teeth'." (Ch 3)
• "What is the point of literature? I think that the person who asks that question will not find my answer convincing anyway." (Ch 4)
• "I did not tell him that my mother was the one who sent me here and that something broke in my father;s life a long time ago and I was the debris of their disordered lives." (Ch 4)
• "I was required to read books that opened up the world for me and made me see how much roomier it was than I had imagined." (Ch 5)
• "In repose after pleasure her face was slack-jawed with satiety." (Ch 5)
• "It seemed that human sorrow was always based on regret and pain in the past." (Ch 5)
• "She carried herself as if she was a beauty and her self-love made her provocative." (Ch 7)
• "It was pointless pedantry, like poetry, a delight in complexity, a relish for detail, a stubborn refusal to forget what was known." (Ch 9)
• "It was a conceit of the time that the existence of anything, a river, a lake, a mountain or a beast, could not be assured unless a European person had seen it and wherever possible named it." (Ch 9)
• "At a certain age you don't understand how long life is." (Ch 10)
• "Some people have a use in the world, even if it is only to swell a crowd and say yeah, and some people don't." (Ch 11; last line) There seems to be a reference to The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock by T S Eliot where the narrator, looking back at the pointlessness of his life, says "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two,"

January 2020; 261 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Also by Abdulrazak Gonfur, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2021, and reviewed in this blog:

• The Last Gift
• Afterlives

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021)

Afterlives
The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook
The Fifth Child
The Good Terrorist
Ben, In the World 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gumah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gumah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gumah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021)

Afterlives
The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

October 2021

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Livingstone" by Tim Jeal

 A biography of the Victorian British missionary and explorer of Africa who was greeted by Stanley with the famous words: "Doctor Livingstone, I presume."

Despite the fact that, as a missionary, he made only one convert who later apostatised  and, as an explorer, he made no significant discovery, David Livingstone was one of those Victorian icons who achieved near-saint status. This biography shows the man behind the myth. And he was horrid.

He was a self-made man. Born to poverty, living in a single room with his parents and four other siblings, he worked in a textile mill from the age of ten. Education came after eight PM. He must have had incredible determination and strength to save the money needed to go to medical school at the age of 21, moving on to missionary school and eventually being funded to go to Africa. But this strength and determination and the lack of either a proper childhood or, indeed, the chance to make mistakes and do the normal things that men learn from in their early adulthood meant that he was driven, intolerant of failure and weakness, and that he had almost no empathy. There is no doubt that these character traits made him able to struggle on where others gave up or died and there is equally no doubt that he was psychologically crippled, unable to provide leadership, and deeply flawed as a human being. His intolerance of personal failure led him to distort the truth to the point of lying and these lies led to other missionaries and their wives and children losing their lives. His inability to empathise led to the death of his own wife and the deaths of some of those for whom he was responsible, in expeditions he led. He was a monster.

The author makes these points time and again:

• "He was never able to judge others except by the standards he had set himself." (C 2)
• "He believed without question that in all working relationships one person had to dominate the other person or persons absolutely, whether man, wife, or fellow-missionary." (C 5)
• "Livingstone was to show himself capable not only of hypocrisy and self-righteousness in his dealings with colleagues but also of lies and double-dealing." (C 5)
• "Livingstone ... deliberately maligned innocent people for whose deaths he had been partially responsible, in order to escape the slur of having misrepresented the true situation ... He never showed regret for this behaviour." (C 12)
• "Livingstone ... would simply prove a disastrous leader." (C 14)
• "That central defect in Livingstone's character: his virtual inability to respond to the sufferings of others." (C17)
• "When his colleagues on the Zambesi fell ill, and could not endure hardships which he considered routine, he despised them for it. This scorn became so pronounced that in the end he was able to shrug off the deaths of the missionaries ... as just another form of spinelessness and lack of guts." (C 24)

But perhaps worse than these personal failings which might be excused as the normal foibles of a great man was Livingstone's intentions. He saw with crystal clarity that the reason missionaries were struggling to convert Africans to Christianity was because the power of tribal culture was too strong. "The central problem which any Christian critic of tribal organization faced was the fact that the whole system was based on collective generosity rather than on private ownership and personal wealth: a far more 'Christian' society in that respect than capitalist nineteenth century Britain." (C 8) So he proposed destroying tribal culture by a process of colonisation; he sought to replace tribalism with capitalism and the model he favoured was a few white people managing the labours of many black people: 

• "Everything, he repeated, was hopeless for Africa unless there was 'contact with superior races by commerce'. The Africans ... were cowardly and through their constant use of cannabis could not form 'any clear thought on any subject'." (C 10) 
• "Livingstone was one of imperialism's earliest prophets and advocates. From the mid-1850s he began writing about the British as a 'superior race' with a divine mission 'to elevate the more degraded portions of the human family'. British businessmen, he averred, were 'the most upright and benevolent in the world'." (C 13) 
• "Colonization ... would force social change on the Africans, destroying their customs and institutions and so leaving them psychologically prone to accepting a new set of beliefs." (C 24)

In the end the author tries to be fair to his subject and to explain why he was hero-worshipped: 

• "His dogged refusal to give up in the face of hopeless odds, his uncomplaining acceptance of agonizing pain and finally his lonely death conjure up images so powerful that his contemporaries' adulation seems, in retrospect, the only possible response." (C 24)
• "To be great is to be different, so ordinary criteria of judgment fall short. The point at which determination becomes obsession, and self-sacrifice self-destruction is very hard to estimate." (C 24)
• "Yet even if Livingstone's determination is called obsessive - and it was - it must be acknowledged that without this inflexibility he would never have left the mills." (C 24)

But in the end the people around him suffered. His wife (whom he had married because he felt that a missionary should have a wife to help him) and children were dragged along with him or sent back to England to live in poverty when he decided that they were an encumbrance. His fellow explorers were routinely denied any share in his discoveries by being lied about and libelled and just ignored when he wrote his books. Those who believed his claims about Africa (over-optimistic and false) suffered and died in trying to fulfil his plans.  

In many respects (such as the dreadful childhood and the routine use of falsehood to self-glorify and to libel others and the carelessness with the lives of others) Livingstone is very like that other famous African explorer Stanley: Frank McLynn in Stanley: the making of an African explorer shows what an awful man he was. Another 'eminent' Victorian who also worked others to death through refusing to believe that anyone's sufferings could match her own was Florence Nightingale, who biography by Cecil Woodham-Smith is here. Was it just Victorians whose heroes were monsters or are all 'great' people seriously flawed?

Other selected quotes:

• "Livingstone was not the first nor the last religiously motivated man to see his own wishes and personal preferences in terms of the dictates of Providence, and to justify them accordingly." (C 8)
• "Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five most young men learn, through close contact with other people, to accept that earlier ambitions and ideals may have been pitched too high. They come to realize that their are limits to their own abilities, and in marrying, or forming close attachments, are forced to recognize that compromise and concession are vital for the success of any close relationship." (C 24)
• "The expanding middle class ... discovered that Christian virtues could easily be exchanged for business virtues: abstinence, diligence, an exemplary home life and a weekly confrontation with the Maker could produce rewards in this life as well as the next." (C 11)

A brilliantly written book which exposes the monster behind the saintly hero.

September 2021; 384 pages

Other books about travel and exploration which are reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Virus Hunters" by Joseph B McCormick and Susan Fisher-Hoch

Ebola. Lassa Fever. AIDS. These are viral diseases responsible for horrible deaths. The authors have worked in Africa and Asia on the front-line of the war against these terrible diseases. The book, written in 1996, is not up to date with the latest treatments, or the more recent outbreaks, but it provides a compelling and highly readable account of how doctors, virologists and epidemiologists work in sometimes primitive conditions in scarcely-functioning underdeveloped countries to understand the methods of transmission of these diseases and to find ways of curing or, if possible, preventing them. The tenacity, skill and raw courage of these people is remarkable and the story that they tell is fascinating. And there are some great observations and sometimes some very funny moments.

I suspect some people might object to this book because it portrays various African and Asian countries as underdeveloped, frequently chaotic, and in dire need of Western help. I understand that this narrative reinforces a potentially racist perspective, suggesting that these countries are backward, uncivilised and primitive. On the other hand, it appears to be an honest reflection of the societies at that time, often torn by civil strife and misgovernment, and attempting to cope with rapid urbanisation and overwhelming poverty. It seems to me that it is better to be realistic about situation and to provide what help can be given, rather than to argue about who is to blame for what. Surely what we should do is try to alleviate the suffering of our fellow humans. These medics did that.

Selected quotes

• "These microbes do not lurk in some dark corner, waiting to pounce, in ambuscade for human prey. It is we who interfere with their habitat, not the other way around. Left to their own devices, they reside successfully - and often silently - in biological balance with their natural hosts. Only when man invades their environment does he become their prey." (Preface)
• "Ebola can produce a throat so swollen and painful that a victim of the disease can't even swallow his own saliva. When you peer down such a throat, you see what could be mistaken for a raw hamburger." (Prologue Nzara, 1979)
• "The first thing you have to do is become an instant expert. You have to get your hands on everything you can find on the subject and read it, for the most part en route to the site of the outbreak." (Of Epidemiology and Potato Salad)
• "Zaire was at peace now, but it was a peace of the dead and the dying." (The Death of a Nurse from Yambuku)
• "The advice the map offered wasn't exactly reassuring ... 'The delineation of international boundaries must not be considered authoritative'." (The Battle Commences)
• "The pace of the railroad challenged the snail for slowness."  (The Battle Commences)
• "Beer serves as a barometer of how an African economy is faring. When the beer goes, you know that things have hit rock bottom."  (The Battle Commences)
• "Anyone who had power and failed to use it was like as not to lose it forever."  (The Battle Commences)
• "He was laconic to the point of being mute. His silences had something belligerent about them, though." (The Ebola Trail)
• "Medicine ... reminds us: we make feeble gods." (Of Souls and Centrifuges)
• "Getting aloft seems a miracle unlikely to be matched by landing in one piece on the same trip." (Nzara Revisited)
• "There was no way I would find anyone willing to transport me. ... And then, lo and behold! Deus ex machina. Or if not Deus himself, then his representative. For who, of all people, should appear ... but the archbishop of Canterbury! And what's more, he has his own plane." (Sue's Story)
• "I was born in August of 1940 in Denby, England, in the middle of the only bombing raid the town experienced during that long, hot summer." (Sue's Story)
• "As we stepped out onto the runway we were immediately enveloped by a heat so intense asnd humid that it felt like walking through glue." (The Lassa Project Revisited)
• "Nothing moved except the flies and the mosquitoes, and the lizards chasing them over the walls and into the light fixtures." (Juju)
• "Sitting around the table were men of few words, many of which were now expletives." (Ebola in Virginia?)
• "In the Falkland Islands, mutton is called '365' because it is served every day of the year." (Desert Fevers)

An incredible book. August 2021; 365 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Blonde Roots" by Bernardine Evaristo

I am rather at a loss to understand how I should judge this book. It is not a novel in the sense that the works of Dickens or Conrad or Chinua Achebe are novels. Rather, it seems to be an extended satirical rant. I don't really know a comic novel quite like it.

Essentially, it is a story about slavery in a world where Africa is the dominant culture whose wealth is based on the labours of European slaves (this is presented as satire but there really were raids by North Africans to capture Europeans from European coastal regions including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, England, and even Iceland). The protagonist is a whyte woman slave who seeks to escape cruel bondage.

In books in which a fundamentally different world to our own is to be described, such as in most science fiction, the author is obliged to do what is called 'world building'. This means that time and writing must be spent describing the world. This can get in the way of developing the characters or progressing the narrative. Margaret Atwood, in The Handmaid's Tale, builds the world of Gilead by drip-feeding us with information do that we are not faced with too much too soon. I felt that in this book, there was more world-building than there needed to be and that this was at the expense of developing the characters. The author had a lot of fun depicting the whyte europanes as cabbage-eating peasants ("We were taught how to cook: cabbage soup, cabbage pie, fried cabbage, pickled cabbage, skillet cabbage, scalloped cabbage, cabbage and turnip bake, cabbage and potato casserole, cabbage and spinach cake"; 1.2) living in a northern serfdom and emphasising their backwardness compared to the cultural and technological superiority of the Aphrikans. She had a lot of fun describing the Aphrikan capital of Londolo and all its constituent parts: Kanada Wadi, Dartfor City, "the arsenal town of Wool Wi Che, famous for manufacturing the finwest spears, shields, crossbows, poison darts, muskets and cannons in the world." However, I found the humour rather heavy handed, perhaps because the same joke was repeated again and again.

The characters, as befits a satire rather than a novel, were fundamentally stereotypes. The vast majority of the blak characters were evil: as slave owners and the wives and sons and daughters of slave owners they were viciously selfish, greedy and lustful and violent, and unredeemed by any suggestion of good. By contrast, most of the whyte characters were slaves and the salt of the earth.

The narrator of sections one and three, the protagonist Doris Scagglethorpe, was from peasant stock who had been enslaved. The descriptions of the slave voyage was terrible, the conditions in which she lived were awful, she has been raped and abused ... and yet she didn't seem angry or bitter. Early in the book she complains that her Mistress insists she wears her hair in the 'Ambossan' fashion: "My long blonde hair was threaded through with wire and put into plaited hoops all over my head. I wanted to protest that we whytes just didn't have the bone structure to carry it off." (1.1) Bone structure? This woman who has been abducted and enslaved and raped and abused worries about bone structure. She sounds more like a sulky teenager than an angry woman. Much of the book is energised by outrage but then you find moments of bathos, such as when the rag dolls are modelled after Aphrikan ideals of beauty which "was so bad for our self-esteem" (1.1) When reading a novel one has to suspend one's disbelief and these were moments when, for me, that suspension was made difficult.

I suppose that my fundamental problem was that this is a novel about slavery. Slavery is like the Jewish holocaust of the Second World War. They are huge topics. Unbelievably horrible things happened to people; the people doing these things were unbelievably evil. Except that they were normal people, people who, within the context of their societies, were respectable. To tackle that subject in a novel is extraordinarily difficult. A traditional, character driven novel would explore these issues in depth.  There would be room for moral ambiguity (because humans are defined by moral ambiguity). Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which not explicitly about slavery, was an attempt to do this. (There is one moment when she appears to quote from Heart of Darkness: "What can I say, Dear Reader, but the horror, the horror ..." (2.4; as a further clue to the identification, the chapter is entitled Heart of Greyness).

Blonde Roots is not a traditional character driven novel. It seeks to mine humour from slavery. That is a hard challenge and risks trivialising the horror. So Blonde Roots tries to remind you of all the awful things that happened during slavery. My problem was that because I found the characters stereotypical and because the protagonist was upset at the trivialities leaving little room for her to be outraged, I did not invest in the characters and so, ultimately, I did not care about their terrible experiences as profoundly as I should have done.

There were moments when I worried about the editing:

• "Our shack was constructed out of corrugated iron which was boiling in summer nights." (1.1): It must have been hot if the iron boiled!
• "When I asked for chilli pepper to spice it all up, my gracious host retorted that his palette could no longer take it." (2.5); palette should be palate.

There are some wonderful moments:

• "Dreams and disappointment were inseparable bedfellows." (1.1)
• "Such was the demand for sugar, the price of a sweet tooth was a toothless smile. Such was the demand for coffee, the price of caffeine was addiction, heart palpitations, osteoporosis and general irritability. The price of rum was chronic liver disease, alcoholism and permanent memory loss. The cost of tobacco was cancer, stained teeth and emphysema." (1.1)
• "In this life there were 'fairy-tale castles' and 'peasant shit-houses', and wasn't it a pity not to have a choice." (1.2)
• "I could see he needed a drink now because he kept twitching ... as if flies were landing on different parts of his anatomy." (1.4)
• "Their eyes were flint in the act of ignition." (1.6)
• "The humid air draped itself languorously over the surface of my lungs so that I could barely breathe." (3.4)
• "Real men were so damned sexy women got wet just looking at dat fine-lookin hunk-a-beef ova dere. Women cried, fought, poisoned, even killed over them, but when their real men let them down, they complained about having to put up with dat bastard filandara and dere iz no good man in-a dis place. But the good men - not tall enough, broad enough, well-endowed, sexy, handome, confident, cocky, muscular or sweet-talking enough - weren't real men so they didn't count." (3.6)
• "I had put my childhood in its rightful place, as history to be revisited but not relived." (3.7)

If you want a book to chronicle the effect of colonialism on African society then read the trilogy of novels starting with Things Fall Apart and continuing with No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Each one is a great book. If you want a book in which white and black swap places read Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman (but don't watch the TV version which castrated itself by changing the ending). Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi is another book about slavery. Sins of the Fathers by James Pope-Hennessey is a slightly old-fashioned history of the slave trade.

July 2020; 261 pages

"The Great Trek" by Oliver Ransford

This history records the creation of the Afrikaan community who were farmers 'boers' living in the Dutch Cape Colony. Following the Napoleonic Wars it became a British possession and the Boers became trekkers, travelling over the Orange River to found what eventually became the Orange Free State, and then crossing the Vaal river to found what would eventually become the Transvaal Republic, and even, following vicious fights against the Zulus, founding the state of Natalia around Port Natal before the British annexed it, calling it Natal and naming the capital after a Governor of the Cape called D'Urban.

It is an interesting history about a time and a people of which and whom I knew almost nothing. There are passage of wonderful description and their are accounts of horrendous massacres and battles. This was a time when three dozen farmers, armed with rifles and in a strong defensive position created by drawing their wagons into a circle, could hold out against a force of several thousand Zulus armed only with spears. It doesn't seem surprising that they developed a belief in their own  superiority, a belief which was bolstered by their Calvinism with its emphasis on a select and chosen people. But the origins of the racist Apartheid regime seem to have been in the Boers from the start: one of the motivations for the first trek was that the British abolished slavery and insufficiently compensated the former slave owners. The classic pattern of Boer settlement involved allowing sufficient 'squatters' (Africans who had no title to the land were regarded as squatters even though the Boers had as little title to the land) onto the farm to provide the farmer with labour while other Africans were herded into reservations. One of the reasons why the Boers might have thought that the land was empty and therefore theirs for the taking was that  between 1818 and 1824 Shaka, chief of the Zulu, had developed an new form of warfare which almost completely cleared the original inhabitants of the southern part of Natal and triggered a succession of waves of migration and warfare among the Bantu peoples of the veldt.

Poor understanding of the Zulus (an early misunderstanding came about because of a meeting in which they had to shout across a flooded river) led to an early massacre of 500 trekkers (including 200 African servants).

The book was published in 1973 when the Republic of South Africa was still politically dominated by the Apartheid policies of the Nationalist Party. It is difficult for me to be certain whether the author condemns racism or accepts it. Otherwise, this was an interesting read.

Some great moments:

• "Trekking was in the blood of these land Vikings." (C 1)
• "A host of Christian  missionaries who were determined to preach the fashionable doctrine of brotherly love and racial equality ... The missionaries' teachings were, of course, repugnant to a white race convinced of its superiority ... the missionaries were earnest irritable men who had no experience of dealing with a multi-racial society ... Many of the missionaries came from the artisan class ... John Philip ... had been a mill hand ... Robert Moffat ... had begun life as a gardener ... This sort of background inevitably led them to display a narrowness of vision which might have been avoided by a wider education." (C 2) This extract makes me uncertain as to whether the author sympathises with the naive missionaries or with the racist Boers. The last sentence certainly portrays the author as a snob.
• "Potgieter ... was one of those men who have been born with an idee fixe, in his case with a consuming hunger to break new ground ... a hunger which could only be appeased by establishing himself as the unrivalled patriarch ... to hack out a fief for himself which he could rule as undisputed governor." (C 4)
• "Potgieter waged life rather than lived it." (C 4)
• "The laager seemed a fearful place the next day, surrounded by a hideous circle of bodies turning black and swollen under the sun; they encircled the trekkers like grisly captors." (C 5)
• "The trek was no longer a migration in the normal sense. ... For these Voertrekkers ... intended to subjugate the indigenous people ... and turn their country into a state where their own social and political ideas might be practised and perpetuated without outside interference." (C 6)
• "The prospect of Natal ... is one for the connoisseur of landscapes. Africa here has subdued itself and become peaceful. ... a century ago it must have looked fresh from the hand of God, a special creation empty of all sighs of human habitation, alive only with immense and unhurried herds of game. It was a land to delight the heart of a farmer as well as that of an artist: to carry such game the grass must surely be good; to grow such trees the soil must surely be deep; and here, unlike so much of Africa, there was no scarcity of water." (C 7)
• "On Kwa Matiwane most of the Boers were clubbed to death ... but some died when their skulls were broken with rocks. A few ... victims were skewered and left on the hill to a more lingering death. ... Retief was made to witness the agonies of his companions before he himself was put to death and one can only guess at his thoughts as he watched the killing of his son. After every bit of life had been battered out of him, Retief's chest was ripped open, and his heart of liver wrapped up in a cloth and taken to the king." (C 8)
• "He tended to an imposing portliness and carried a small paunch in a stately sort of way as though it was filled with securities and bank drafts." (C 9)
• "As the air began to smell of morning the white men watched the pattern of flat-topped thorn-trees on the hills across the river starting to show against the eastern sky, and listened to the birds which began to give chorus before setting off on their daily quest for seeds and insects. Then the sun's rim broke free from the horizon, tinting the surrounding hills with red so that the entire landscape for a few moments seemed to be drenched in blood." (C 9)
• "The former kraals of many of the returning Africans now lay on farms marked out and worked by the Boers. To avoid overcrowding the farm lands the Afrikaners found it imperative to limit the number of squatters on their farms to five families, a figure which would satisfactorily provide for their labour requirements ... These Bantu were unenfranchised and subjected to numerous by-laws ... The problem of the 'surplus natives' on the other hand was solved by segregation in ad hoc reserves where they were stringently controlled by pass-laws." (C 10)
• "Although he was brave and very determined it cannot be denied that Smith was also conceited and pompous and the proud possessor of South Africa's largest ego." (C 11)
• "The Boers oft-repeated joke that the greatest pests in southern Africa were drought, locusts and Englishmen" (C 11)

April 2020; 211 pages

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

"Life with Ionides" by Margaret Lane

This is a beautifully written biography of an extraordinary man.

Ionides was the nickname of an Englishman of Greek descent brought up in Brighton who went to East Africa and spent time there as an ivory poacher, a big game hunter, and a game ranger before becoming famous as a hunter and trapper of snakes. Margaret Lane, an established biographer married to the sixteenth Earl of Huntingdon, went to live with Ionides for some months and produced this charming and beautifully descriptive memoir.

The historical context is of an East Africa transitioning from British colonial rule into independence and the narrator is probably as empathetic as she could be given her privileged English background but there are still colonialist and racist overtones which make the book a little difficult to read. Ionides is unsympathetic to the colonialists who feel they are thrust aside; "Protests about the best years of one's life and the ingratitude of Africans leave him contemptuously cold. ... Those who claimed to have dedicated themselves to an alien people, and expected gratitude, had failed to observe nature. In the human as in the animal world, ingratitude was the rule." (C 5)

Ionides is trenchantly fascist: he goes through a list of great men and their main characteristic seems to be that they came from very humble backgrounds and ended up killing (or having killed) a lot of people. He has unrepentant Darwinist views of nature, seeing the occasional fisherman lost to a crocodile as keeping a balance of nature which would be lost if the crocs were killed. "He cannot bring himself to agree that the tribes around him are happier or better off than in the days when their prime occupation was tribal warfare. 'These people have been largely emasculated ... Their splendid virtues have been driven out of them; it isn't their fault if we've turned them into a rather second-rate lot.'" (C 9) He denies that he has a magical power to curse, as some of the villagers seem to believe, but "I've had a bit of luck on several occasions. Twice, when I happened to have been really angry with certain people, each time the man was shot with a poisoned arrow  very soon afterwards." This seems a sinister use of the word 'luck'. (C 9) His is a fascinating character but not a comfortable dinner party guest.

It seems to me that books about nature and wildlife such as Gerald Durrell's corfu trilogy My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods, perhaps even documentaries (David Attenborough), promote high description. This book starts as it means to go on. Its first line is: "The first sounds of morning, long after the frogs had finished and the silence had become total, were disagreeable: no dawn chorus of birds or papery rustle on wind in the banana leaves, but the sudden scrape of a chair on the concrete floor, a broom banging the table legs, Makanga's sniffs which were like the tearing of calico, and immediately, as though it had been long held in suspense for these permissive signals, the slow, painful crescendo of Ionides' coughing." (C 1) What I particularly like about this beginning is the way it immediately debunks the thought that this is some simpering evocation of noble savages in a rural paradise: it is actually a kitchen-sink-sober portrait of a man making a living in the bush.

Other great descriptions include:

• "The roads are deep in sand and full of holes, the bush paths overhung with thorns which scrape us as we pass, the hard tracks broken with eroded gullies, so that the boxes and the metal grab-sticks leap and crash as we lurch along, breathing the dust which rises from every crevice and settles softly in our hair and clothing." (C 2)
• "The head [of the snake] ... revealed itself as thick and spade-shaped, with steady topaz eyes underlined and emphasized with a cunning cosmetic stroke. The face had a curiously mild and dog-like look, and the tongue ... was moist and brilliant, a tendril of pink and black." (C 3)
• "The muzzle and the throat, I saw, were pale as ivory, and the spread hood, making the high-shouldered outline of a sitting hawk, was marked with moth-like patches of black, flushed with a tint which varied from cream to rose. The face was startlingly bird-like, accipitrine, flat-headed, the eye as deeply bright as polished jet." (C 8) I looked up accipitrine: it relates to hawks.
• "I could recognize the grey, dusty appearance of the skin ... which distinguishes a child suffering from malnutrition, and also, at this hungry time of year before the harvest, the gingery bloom on the hair which is another symptom." (C 8)

There were other things I learned:

• The locals wear kangas which are embellished with mottoes like our tee-shirts. "The mottoes ... were originally the speciality of prostitutes who favoured distinctive slogans on their garments such as 'Come sir, I am ready', and other less translatable invitations." (C 2)
• "Death from a gaboon viper is singularly unpleasant: the venom's haemotoxic and neurotoxic - haemorrhages, constricted breathing, bleeding from all the orifices of the body and from old scars." (C 3)
• "The snake must be sexed ... an assistant must grasp the thrashing tail and turn the vent upwards, massaging vigorously with a thumb until the sexual organs, powerless even in this humiliating posture to resist the stimulus of friction, moistly emerge from a neat aperture" (C 3)
• "Conversion to Christianity implies monogamy, all male converts being required to return the surplus wives and stick to one, with the results that in the villages where Christianity has made progress there is also the greatest number of prostitutes." (C 5)
• "The sadistic beatings endured at school were certainly a shock They taught him fear, but he sets a value on fear, and if one can accept the paradox, is not afraid of it." (C 6)
• "The driving force behind his single-mindedness ... a lifelong thirst for intensity of experience." (C 6)
• "He is a connoisseur of fear ... It is not a sensation he enjoys, but he is familiar with its features, has marked its curious ebb and flow in the presence of danger, and in the aftermath of languor and satisfaction which followed the most intense of his hunting experiences accepts it as having been a prime ingredient." (C 6)
• "The average hunter goes through four distinct stages of experience. In the beginning he's nervous and apprehensive, even over-careful. Then he learns that in normal conditions, with the wind right, very great liberties can be taken. He takes them, with impunity, and tends to get rather reckless. ... Then he gets ... a narrow escape ... and learns to be intelligently careful. ... The fourth and last stage is when he's getting old, and thinks his reactions are still as quick as they were ten years before." (C 6)
• "Every moment of pause ... you should relax and rest, even if it's only for a second, so that you don't become nervously exhausted. Carelessness on these occasions is entirely due to nervous exhaustion." (C 6)
• "One feels practically no fear when the animal charges. When it's all over, of course, that's a different matter. Trembling, lassitude, coldness" (C 6)
• "There was a 'white man's hut' in those days in every village, exceedingly comfortable you know, a roof and everything." (C 7)
• "There are no absolutes. Surely we all live ... on the principle of 'You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." (C 9)
• "One must never expect too much of human beings. Always expect people to act as self-interest dictates, and you won't be unduly embittered when you're let down." (C 9)
• "It makes me sick to hear Europeans complain ... of being let down by Africans; one frequently hears of the base ingratitude of these people. What have they got to be grateful for? ... An African may be your paid servant, but his first loyalties are to his wife and family." (C 9)

This is a fascinating and wonderfully described portrait of a fascinating person. February 2020; 180 pages

Other trivia:
This is the first book not linked to the subject that I have ever read that mentions Joanna Southcott (in the context of her false pregnancy rather than her preaching or her box).

My parents were members of the Readers Union Book Club. They must have had a great person to choose the books. This is one of the many I have enjoyed and reviewed in this blog. Here is a list:

• Life with Ionides by Margaret Lane: about a man catching snakes in East Africa
• The Golden Isthmus: the history of Panama from its discovery by Europeans
• The Incredible Mile by Harold Elvin: the travelogue of a journey on the Trans Siberian express
• A Pattern of Islands by Arthur Grimble: the memoir of a Colonial Officer on the Gilbert and Ellice Islands
• Invasion 1940 by Peter Fleming: an account of Britain's unpreparedness and preparation for a Nazi invasion
• Bus Stop Symi by William Travis: three years lived on the sometimes less than idyllic Greek island of Symi
• A Memoir of the Bobotes by Joyce Cary: a memoir of time spent in the Balkan Wars (before the First World War)
• The Great Trek by Oliver Ransford: a history of the formation of the Orange Free State and Transvaal by Boer farmers trekking from the Cape Colony

"Stanley: The making of an African Explorer" by Frank McLynn

This is a partial biography of the man who became Sir Henry Morton Stanley which ends after his crossing of Africa from East coast to West coast, a journey that took him 999 days.

When I was a boy, I read a book called something like "With Stanley up the Congo." wehich was a boy's own adventure story type of book which I (being a boy who enjoyed tales of derring do) loved; I was unaware at the time of all the problems involved in colonialism. I thought of Stanley as a British Hero. McLynn's book has certainly changed this idea.

It is an amazing and revelatory book. Stanley was a horrid man. He had a strange relationship with sex. He told appalling lies. He drove his men to death: the first five white men who accompanied him on his explorations all died en route; countless Africans also died. He fought his way across Africa in battle after battle. He epitomised the worst excesses of colonialist racism.

And on a personal level, Stanley's fame in England was such that my grandfather was named after him.

Stanley was born John Rowlands on 28th January 1841 although he was buried with a birth date of 10th June 1840 and he believed for a long time that he had been born in 1843. He was the eldest son of Elizabeth Parry who had four children out of wedlock; he was born in  Wales and spent some of his young life in a cottage in the grounds of Denbigh Castle; being an unwanted burden on his family he was taken to the local workhouse (following the death of his grandfather, with whom he was living, he was fostered by a couple who, when Stanley's family refused to continue paying for his upkeep, betrayed Stanley's trust by telling him they were taking him to his Aunt's) when he was six.

McLynn suggests that the workhouse was responsible for Stanley's subsequent dysfunctional sexuality: "The workhouse system was ... a breeding ground of promiscuity, vice and perversion. ... Among the workhouse 'clientele' were prostitutes giving birth of recovering from venereal disease, young girls learning the tricks of the trade from their elder sisters, sodomites and other perverts. The children slept two to a bed, invariably an older with the younger, so that the already depraved corrupted the young.  ... We may therefore conjecture that Stanley was at the very least sexually assaulted and manhandled even if he was probably not ... the victim of actual homosexual rape." (C 1)

At the workhouse, Stanley was taught  by James Francis. In his adult writings, Stanley characterised Francis as a sadistic monster and tells of an incident when, rather than face a beating, he thrashed the schoolmaster before escaping from the workhouse with a fellow pupil. This incident appears to be made up; the workhouse records show no 'escape' at this time; it is possible that Stanley borrowed the story from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Furthermore, McLynn suggests that Francis favoured Stanley, praising him, buying him cakes, putting him forward for prizes and trying to reconcile him with his mother. He also put Stanley "in charge of discipline during his absence; Stanley ... would thrash enthusiastically any pupil who stepped out of line." (C 1) This portrayal of his teacher seems to be one of Stanley's many misleading statements and outright lies.

Following his troubled childhood, he went to sea as a cabin boy and was brutally beaten which led to him leaving the ship in America. Here he met, a lived with, a childless couple called Stanley; he soon fell out with them. More untruths occur when he describes the death of his adopted father  as if he had been there; he records this in his diary: "To lie to the world is one thing; to lie to oneself in the privacy of one's diary argues for serious neurosis." (C 2)

He then enlisted in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and was captured and spent some time in an appalling prisoner of war camp from which he escaped by the expedient of enlisting in the Union army; he was almost immediately discharged because he was ill. After a period as a merchant seaman he re-enlisted with the Union Navy where he met 15-year-old Lewis Noe; the pair deserted together; he proposed they should make money by Stanley enlisting Noe in another regiment and collecting the bounty, then Noe would desert and they could repeat the operation. Perhaps fortunately the Civil War was over soon after that idea.

He then took Noe to Turkey. The idea was to travel to Persia, pick up the precious stones that littered the ground there, and bring them back to America for sale. But when they arrived in Turkey, Stanley 'tested' the now 17 year old Noe by making him steal from local villages as they travelled. Then, in a forest clearing, he tied Noe up and whipped him in a sado-masochistic frenzy. He then decided to use Noe as bait. He persuaded an Arab that Noe was a girl available for sex; then Stanley attacked the Arab intending to steal his horse but the Arab fought back and, with his friends, hunted Stanley and Noe down. Having captured their prisoners, Noe was then buggered by three men that night while Stanley, also tied up, watched. He claimed to be shocked but one wonders whether he enjoyed it. Somehow Stanley not only got out of the scrape he was in but had the Arab whose horse he had tried to steal arrested and punished. (C 3)

He became famous for his exploration of Africa but it was exploration red in tooth and claw: his journey down the Congo river to the sea was day after day of bloodshed; he shot his way through tribe after tribe who attempted to prevent him 'invading' (as they must have seen it) their territory.

Sexually Stanley appears to have had problems with women whom he either idolised as Madonnas or demonised as whores; “A total loving relationship with a woman, including sexual intercourse, was the ultimate horror.” (C 4). He was probably homosexual: “It was characteristic of all Stanley’s travels that he needed a young male as companion, protege and amanuensis.” (C 4) He certainly seemed to enjoy flogging other men as described above and in a number of incidents when he beat black servants, even, in one case, one who was suffering at the time from smallpox (C 7)

He was a pathological liar. “There was always method in Stanley's madness, as he made a point of lying about his private life to the public (who could verify his public life) and about his public life to private individuals who lacked the intellectual sophistication to falsify his tall tales.” (C 5)

He was a horrific leader. He treated the sick with contempt. “Although Stanley would always call a halt if he was dangerously ill ... he showed no such consideration for anyone else. If another white man fell ill, Stanley immediately rationalized the inconvenience as ‘malingering’.” (C 6) He abandoned his very ill second in command on his first expedition at a village and left him without medicines. The man died. (C 6) Furthermore: “It was beyond Stanley ever to admit that any of his lieutenants had done well.” (C 6) In these respects he seems remarkably like that other Victorian hero Florence Nightingale who worked some of her devoted followers to death, never understanding how anyone, except herself, could be ill

Here are three quotes from Stanley's own writings which seem to express his inability to put himself in the place of anyone else:

• “I am afraid that I could not yield my life to every Tom, Dick and Harry who chose to demand it. The waste of good material for bad would strike me as wrong.” (C 8)
• “The woodenheaded world needs mastering.” (C 8)
• “Six shots and four deaths were sufficient to quiet the mocking.” (C 15)

There are some other remarkable characters outlined in this book:

• Stanley’s newspaper boss, James Gordon Bennett, “spent his younger years in an ambience of fantastic wealth, surrounded by sycophants, but without adequate parenting.” (C 5) He ran the New York Herald. “Much of the Herald’s success was based on its ‘Personal Column’ advertisements - a guide to every prostitute in New York able to publicise her wares and in particular to the brothels of Bleaker Street and Sixth Avenue.” (C 5)
• “Livingstone's status as missionary and explorer was shaky. As a missionary he had made a single (later lapsed) convert and as an explorer his only undisputed discovery was Lake Bangweulu.” (C 8)

One of the things which this book made me realise is the extent to which Africa was not a dark continent. It was well known by the Arabs who conducted an extensive trade with the Africans of the interior, although much of the trade involved slaves. I hadn't realised how huge the Arab slave trade of the time was. There was organisation and towns and technologies. There was even a spa town where sick people bathed in hot pools. In the early 1870s Arab trader Tippu Tip “had a commercial and political empire based on slavery and the ivory trade ... it was said that through the ivory trade he could convert an initial capital of $3 into $1,000.” (C 15)

McLynn can certainly write purple prose: “The expedition began to pick its way through 20-foot high undergrowth, fed by a feculent humus of fallen branches and rotten leaves. They marched in permanent twilight, soggy with dew under a fuliginous forest canopy, floundering through ditches formed by rivulets.” (C 16)

Other selected quotes:

• “The more one lives for action alone, the less is one capable of discrimination about which actions are valuable; hence the near-mania of the Alexanders, Napoleons, Caesars, and Cromwells.” (C 2)
• “As with many people like Stanley, who habitually inhabit the twilight area between sanity and madness, the possibility of failure imparted renewed strength.” (C 6)
• “The myth of the ‘superman’, increasingly required by the exigencies of imperialism, seemed, on Stanley’s fallacious reading, to require the stiffest of stiff upper lips.” (C 8)

An incredible book which paints a picture of hero as psychopath. December 2019; 330 pages

Other books about exploration and explorers, and travel, that are reviewed in this blog, may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God