Guests
by Julian Smith, February 4, 2011 11:04 AM
One of the toughest parts of writing Crossing the Heart of Africa was trying not to fall into the morass of cliché that pervades the body of literature about the continent, at least the majority of it written by non-Africans. Sitting down to write about Africa as a Westerner is to step into a minefield of hackneyed images, stale themes and stereotypes that date back centuries. The problem bloomed in the 19th century as European explorers, missionaries and travelers started churning out breathless accounts of the "Dark Continent." Although Grogan isn't nearly as bad as some, he certainly has one foot in that camp; some passages in his book are genuinely cringeworthy. One of the best descriptions of the issue I've found is Binyavanga Wainaina's acidic essay in Granta titled "How to Write about Africa." "Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated," he writes with blistering irony: In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care. Paul Theroux's latest book Dark Star Safari, in which he follows a route similar to Grogan's and mine except from north to south, gets nailed twice in the essay's very first sentence: "Always use the word 'Africa' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title." (The piece was so popular Wainaina wrote a follow-up, "How to Write About Africa II: The Revenge.") Some of the more offensive and inaccurate clichés have been stamped out ("cannibal savages" that need to be "civilized" for their own good), but many persist, and new ones are still cropping up. For example, as Wendy Belcher asks in an article in Salon, why do so many accounts of Africa start the same way? Most travel books about Africa open with the author alone, carried along by some vehicle, looking down over some landscape and feeling anxious. If I were a critic, rather than a practitioner of the genre, I could start right in with a long essay on this finding. I can't do this, however, because I am distracted by my dismay. To be an utterly "conventional" writer, open your book about Africa with yourself arriving. Let me admit it then: I am guilty as charged. Whatever the explanation today — writerly laziness, or simply the unavoidable result of outsiders trying to encapsulate a place so much larger than life, so alien, that words simply fail — it does make it difficult as a writer. All those unoriginal phrases and characters are so deeply impeded in our thinking about Africa that it's easy to forget they're there at all. Movies have just made it worse. There were moments on my trip where it even seemed like the clichés had started to become self-fulfilling, like this encounter in Chiromo, Malawi: A man in the front seat introduces himself as Zola Emanuel. He's good-looking in the gaunt way of a long-distance runner. "In Africa there is no happiness," he says. "I'm sorry?" This keeps happening, these conversational bombs out of nowhere. It's like a first date bringing up her colon issues before the appetizers arrive. "There is nothing here." He looks out the cracked windshield at the town square, where people stumble in and out of the Why Not Booze Garden. "Nothing." He has a point. For whatever reason — politics, geography, misguided attempts by outsiders to help — two-thirds of the least developed countries in the world are right here, between South Africa and the Sahara. The average Malawian barely earns enough in a year to buy an iPod. According to some estimates, the country has a million AIDS orphans out of 13 million people. I'm mystified why misery is so often a conversation-opener. Everything that's said and written about Africa, all the hand-wringing and blanket generalizations and dismal statistics — I wonder how much of that sinks into your consciousness, living here, like acid rain into limestone. How could you not absorb the pessimism, like a child who's always told he's not good enough? "Africa is crying, always." Zola says. Am I wrong to wonder if he read that somewhere? I did my best to face the challenge head-on, by presenting the people I met and the things I saw in an honest, straightforward way, not as characters in an all-too-familiar tableau. It's up to you the reader, of course, to decide whether I succeeded. (One of my proofreaders started to throw a fit every time he crossed out yet another description of a hazy sunset in an early draft — touché.) But it definitely changed how I read, and think, about Africa. Well, this is the end of my week on the blog. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have, and thanks again to Powell's for having me. Happy travels!
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Guests
by Julian Smith, February 2, 2011 9:41 AM
Aside from the route, my journey across Africa was obviously light years away from Grogan's. He and Harry Sharp, Gertrude's uncle and his partner for part of the trip, moved by boat and boot leather — and occasionally, when one was too sick to walk, in a hammock slung from a pole. They were in no hurry; safety and security were far more important than speed. Apart from the food they were able to kill and trade for along the way, they had to bring everything they needed with them, and since they were 19th-century gentlemen it was a long list: Compared to most African expeditions, Grogan and Sharp traveled light. Their main weapons for hunting and defense were two magazine-fed .303-caliber rifles, which could bring down anything from ducks to large antelopes. Grogan brought a giant black-powder "elephant gun" for bigger game [each four-inch shell held a bullet as big as a man's thumb], and both men had backup rifles and cases of ammunition.Wooden boxes held tents and folding cots, shoes and clothing, fishing rods and mosquito nets. They took surveying tools and a camera, three Union Jacks, a phonograph and books of poetry and classic literature, including the complete works of Shakespeare. For trading with the natives, they packed beads and multicolored rolls of "Americani," a type of cloth made in the United States. There were 64 cases of food and drink in all, including whisky, brandy and champagne and plenty of Worcestershire sauce, Grogan's favorite, "without which life…is intolerable." The medicine chest held quinine for malaria; Elliman's Universal Embrocation, a cream made of turpentine, eggs and vinegar, for aches and pains; and plenty of permanganate of potash (potassium permanganate), dark purple crystals that made a disinfectant and antiseptic when mixed with water. They hired natives along the way to carry their gear, a fixed distance for a fixed price negotiated up front. Occasionally the porters would subcontract other porters en route for part of the fee, and so on, until some boxes had three or four men walking alongside them. (The explorers put a stop to that.) At one point they led a caravan of 130, but by the end the party was down to Grogan and fourteen men.
Riding in a public pickup truck. In contrast, I traveled mostly by public minibuses, usually white Toyota Hi-Aces with a dozen or more people crammed inside. Next came full-sized buses, about half as big as a large school bus and much, much less comfortable, or and sometimes pickup trucks. On one short stretch in Mozambique I rode in the bed of a pickup truck with 21 other people. (Notice a pattern?) Two overnight ferry rides up Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika, and the occasional bicycle or motorcycle, rounded things out. In a way, traveling through the hinterlands of sub-Saharan Africa is easier than traveling in, say, the US or Europe. Just about anything on wheels will stop if you wave it down (and they have space), from mopeds to cement trucks, and the ride usually costs pennies, at most a few dollars, and occasionally nothing. No matter how far you are in the backcountry, the most remote little village in the middle of nowhere, you can depend on some sort of vehicle coming and/or going at some point in the day. No schedules, no train or bus stations to find or tickets to buy, just a slow shifting of bodies from every point to every other point by any means available, eventually. The trick becomes learning to wait until the vehicle in question is full of enough paying passengers for the driver to decide it's worth leaving. You learn quickly that "full" is a culturally relative term.
Kampala Uganda public bus station, typical room. I carried everything I needed for two months in a convertible bag/backpack. About three changes of clothes, hand-washed along the way. (Speaking of easy traveling—after a week or two of this, the idea of "what to wear today" becomes quite abstract.) A pair each of off-road sneakers and Tevas. A toiletry/medicine kit with more pills than I think I've ever brought on a trip. (Many of these, along with a raft of shots, came courtesy of the excellent travel clinic in downtown Portland. Two digital cameras, an SLR and a point-and-shoot; the latter ate too much sand and crapped out somewhere in Tanzania. Two absolute essentials: a Swiss Army knife and foam earplugs. An old-school iPod, music only. Used paperback books came and went from town to town, a sort of alternate traveler currency. For a while I carried a PacSafe, a steel mesh bag you can secure your stuff inside, but I never used it—never left my bag anywhere except a locked hotel room—and it was heavy, so I gave it away. Most important, a Neo word processor to take notes. Designed for grade-school classrooms, it's nearly indestructible and runs forever on three AA batteries. Much less headache than a laptop or writing by hand, and a great conversation starter.
Lake Tanganyika
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Guests
by Julian Smith, February 1, 2011 10:23 AM
I'm always astonished at how few people have ever heard of Ewart Grogan. His trek equaled anything other world-famous explorers like Henry Stanley and Richard Burton ever pulled off. Yet, after his return in 1900 and the burst of publicity that followed, Groan faded quickly from the public eye, and died virtually unknown. More than anything, he just didn't seek fame like other explorers, who in a way were the rock stars of their time. Grogan seemed content to be a big fish in the small pond of colonial Kenya, where he and his wife Gertrude spent most of the rest of their lives. When it comes to attention-seeking — or not — it's interesting to compare Grogan to Winston Churchill. The two men were remarkably similar in background, ability, and temperament — both gifted, iconoclastic, ambitious, unpredictable and larger than life — but their lives took very different paths. Churchill was born just two weeks after Grogan in 1874. He was just as independent and defiant as Grogan early on, and he also served as a soldier in his 20s. Churchill came from a more aristocratic family, but he also had to work harder than Grogan did. He had to overcome a speech impediment and didn't shine so brightly in school; it took him three tries to pass the entrance exam to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. While Grogan and Sharp were marching toward Lake Nyasa in September 1898, Churchill rode with the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, one of the last and most famous cavalry charges of the British Army. Churchill wrote about his experiences in The River War, published while Grogan was still suffering in the Sudd himself. Every bit as eloquent as Grogan — and more prolific by an order of magnitude — Churchill worked as a war correspondent for the Morning Post during the Second Boer War, during which he was taken prisoner and escaped. In 1907, Churchill descended the White Nile from the northern end of Lake Albert to Cairo, covering much the same ground Grogan had less than a decade ago. By then, the Nile was clear of vegetation and much safer. "Ten or eleven years ago this journey which I was now able to make so easily, so prosperously, so comfortably, would have been utterly impossible," Churchill wrote. That same year brought Grogan's "Nairobi incident," in which he was jailed for a month for publicly beating two servants, after they allegedly insulted his sister. Churchill, then Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, condemned Grogan's actions in Parliament. Yet the following year he invested money in Grogan's sawmill venture in the Kenya highlands. Who knows how Churchill and Grogan would have gotten along had they ever inhabited the same social sphere? My guess is no room would have been big enough to hold two such outsize personalities. They died within three years of each other, one the most famous Brit of his time, the other nearly
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Guests
by Julian Smith, January 31, 2011 11:32 AM
Many thanks to Powell's for having me as a guest blogger this week, and for helping kick off my speaking tour for Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure in December. We had a great crowd, including a special guest, who I'll get to in a bit. What's CHA about? Ah, the elevator pitch: fifteen seconds to describe your project before the bell rings and the doors slide open. It's a mouthful, but I've whittled the plot down to two sentences: It's about retracing the route of the British explorer Ewart Grogan from one end of Africa to the other. The 26-year-old Cambridge dropout traveled 5,000 miles from South Africa to Cairo in 1898-1900 to prove to his beloved's jealous stepfather that he was worth her hand in marriage, and I followed in 2007, right before I married my wife, in part to help face down my own pre-marriage jitters. So — an adventure-travel-historical-romance-memoir. Simple enough, right? The book is really three stories woven together, which made it a particular challenge to write: there's the story of Grogan's two-year trek, bracketed by his pre- and post-journey life; the story of my own two-month trip by public transportation from South Africa to Sudan; and the history of my relationship with my wife Laura, from the moment we met through our snowy wedding day and beyond. At times this braided structure had me wishing I'd picked some nice, simple narrative, like the unknown history of light bulbs or something, but I'm happy with how it turned out. I first heard about Grogan in a book called Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language by psychologist Robin Dunbar. It's a fascinating read about how language may have developed to let people, or primates, share interesting tidbits about others in the family group, instead of to help coordinate hunting parties. (In other words, we owe our ability to talk to females instead of males.) It has lot of finger-snapping tidbits like Dunbar's number, the theoretical largest groups of people you can have meaningful social relationships with at one time — around 150, he says — as well as this, in a chapter about the lengths males will go to impress females: The young Captain Ewart Grogan walked the 4,500-mile length of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo in 1899 to gain the hand of the woman he loved. Her family had dismissed him as a ne'er-do-well who would be unable to keep their daughter in the manner to which they thought she should be accustomed. Grogan banked on the fame (if not the fortune) that a dramatic adventure would bring him to persuade them to reconsider. How could you not be hooked? And in a strange way it fit my situation perfectly. I'd known that my girlfriend Laura was The One for a long time, but I still had a bad case of commitment cold feet, even after I popped the question and she said yes. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was spending two of the last three months before our wedding bumping through eight African countries by bus, bike, boat and bush taxi. That's my story. The rest of this week I'll be exploring side channels and filling in background information that didn't make it into the book. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope you'll come along. Oh — the special guest? One of Grogan's great-grandsons, who just happens to live near Portland. Small world,
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