African Curriculum
BOOKS
“Allah is Not Obliged” by Ahmadou Kourouma
“All we could hear was the tat-tat of AK-47s. While all this was going on, all of us in the convoy were going crazy. Everyone was screaming out to the spirit of their ancestors and to every protective spirit in heaven and on earth. With all the noise, it sounded like thunder. And all this because the guy on the motorcycle had been showing off with his kalash and fired at the child-soldier. And then child-soldiers starting appearing from all over the place, all waving their AK-47s. First they surrounded us and started yelling, ‘Out of the truck! Hands on your heads!’ And we all started getting down, hands on our heads. I let them pull me to my feet. I was blubbering like a spoiled brat, ‘Child-soldier, small-soldier, soldier-child, I want to be a child-soldier, I want to go to my aunt’s house in Niangbo.’ They kept taking my clothes off and I kept blubbering, ‘Me small-soldier, me child-soldier, me soldier child.’ Then they ordered me into the jungle but I wouldn’t go, I just stood there with my bangala hanging there. I don’t give a shit about modesty, I’m a street kid.”
“A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah
I stayed home for three days without leaving my bed to finish this book. It’s a true story about a brave, clever young boy whose whole loving family is massacred by Sierra Leone’s RUF rebels. He runs through the jungle for something like 6 months to escape them, and his only salvation is a rap tape of “OPP” in his pocket that amuses villagers who would otherwise burn him at the stake (as in, “You down with OPP man? You know me!”). He’s a hero, anyone would like this book whether they care about Africa or not. It’s also a great way to learn about Sierra Leone and west African values in general, which are quite impressive.
“Emma’s War” by Deborah Scroggins
I am starting to see a trend here in my reviews — I picked mainly books by white people about Africa or about white people in Africa. I suppose that reveals my poor level of assimilation. This is definitely a book about a white person, and Africa. Emma might have been one of the most fabulous, fascinating white people ever born. She was a sloan (Princess Di) who got into Africa when she was in college. But she didn’t get ankle deep like most white people, by smoking pot in the SOAS student union and wearing a turban and listening to Fela Kuti with sorority chicks bored of their conservative parents. She smoked pot, went to the SOAS union, wore a turban, and took African lovers — married, Sudanese ones. She joined a Sudanese activist agency, tried to start her own NGO, and moved to Karthoum. She wasn’t a wimp who needed to live in a gigantic walled villa with drivers and maids like most expats, and ended up living in a refugee camp in the middle of a south Sudanese warzone, where she ran an education NGO, starting 110 schools where there never were schools. She walked alone from village to village, in a miniskirt. She married a warlord, became his campaign manager, and trudged through crocodile infested swamps for days, getting bilharzia, to reach distant tribal ceremonies. She ate greens cooked in river water and almost died every month it seems. She convinced UN planes to take her back and forth to Kenya even after being fired for her political activism and put on a no-fly list. And from the way Deborah Scroggins tells the story, she never once complained. She thought it was all fabulous! Granted, Emma did make some pretty bad calls (river water? seriously) — maybe as many as she did fabulous ones. I have just heard from my friend who’s a movie producer that the script is being written and Kiera Knightley will start as Emma. If “Domino” was any indication this may become the most badass movie ever made.
“Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis” by Gerald Hanley
If you don’t get why on earth I am so keen on Somalia, read this book. Gerald Hanley is a soul searcher who imparts precious insights about the human condition and I think he saved me from five nervous breakdowns. His memoir is about his five years working as a British military captain in Somalia during WWII, and accounts brilliantly the character of his endlessly charming Somali soldiers.
“Another Day of Life” by Ryszard Kapuscinski
This guy is the original badass. He drives across embattled Angola dodging ambushes, land mines, roadblocks and South African mercenaries, then does some calisthenics. (He also manages to explain the convoluted roots of the Angola’s 20-year civil war in a non-boring way.)
“The Shadow of the Sun” also by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Excerpt from “The Cooling Hell,” an essay in the collection: “‘I don’t have any documents,’ I confessed to the Lebanese, who just smiled. ‘That’s not important,’ he said. ‘Here, few people have them. Documents!’ he laughed, and looked knowingly at John and Zado. To him, I was clearly a visitor from some other planet. On the one called Monrovia, the main preoccupation was how to survive from one day to the next. Who cared about papers? ‘Forty dollars a night,’ he said. ‘But food is not included. You can eat around the corner at the Syrian’s place.’”
“The Graves Are Not Yet Full” by Bill Berkeley
Bill is one of my mentors and in this comprehensive tome of African politics in the 1980s he gets into the nitty gritty of corruption, war and genocide. It’s not an easy read but it’s edifying. All of those vague African tragedies from McNeil Lehrer or whatever that old news show was called in 1980’s are here in this book — a great service to all of us who were just kids at the time. Bill illuminates all the disgraceful blunders of the Reagan administration and the various ethnic cleansing campaigns that we inadvertently funded with our tax dollars.
“Whites” by Norman Rush
Okay, so Norman Rush has to be one of the driest writers around, and his books scream social criticism with their silences in the place of expected narrative judgement. This one is about expats in Botswana. You want to hate the expats, and do, but you also empathize, uncomfortably, and you sort of idolize them for living this sick colonial ideal. I think the whole point of Norman Rush books about Africa is to make white people feel terrible. Each short story in this book is like a documentary film. The one long story by a young (African) orphan/street child in Botswana called “Thieving” verges on some of the most brilliant anthropology available. Oh, and how about the story about the white missionary who is so disturbed by the racism of white Batswana that he drowns himself in a well? Brilliant. Stuff to offend a thousand cocktail parties of smug expats.
“Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America” by Francis Bok (Author) and Edward Tivnan (Contributor)
I read this book while I was living in a tent on a Moroccan army base in Dungu, northern DR Congo. It made me cry every time I read so much as a paragraph, it was that touching. I had also just stopped taking antidepressants a few days before, so that may have accounted for some catharsis. But poor Francis. His life as a slave to Arabs in Sudan was so sad.
“Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures” by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson
This is not a book about Africa, but it has a long and significant segment on Operation Restore Hope/UNISOM in Mogadishu, 1993, a joint U.S./UN military effort to pacify Somalia’s capital. That mission is still heavily referred to in geopolitical dialogue, and worth understanding if you’re a curious person. This book’s inside angle is easier to follow than “Black Hawk Down,” which is best suited to retired U.S. military officials. “Emergency Sex” is riveting, it’s pop, it’s sincere, and a little unnecessarily sordid. (Poor Heidi’s agent probably forced her to talk only about sex because “that’s what sells” and women aren’t supposed to know about wars anyway.) It’s alternating journal entries by three civilian UN peacekeepers in the 1980s and 90s. It’s about war, aid workers, and badasses. Andrew is a doctor who actually windsurfed on ponds in Cambodia when he was working there. And he built his own house on an island of natives, with no other expats around.
“Quand on refuse, on dit non” by Ahmadou Kourouma (The sequel to “Allah is Not Obliged” but not yet translated into English except here by me)
“When I found out that the tribal war had started in Ivory Coast… (The Republic of Ivory Coast is a state on the west coast of Africa. It’s like all the screwed up republics of that region, democratic is a couple of ways but rotten to the bone with corruption in all other ways.) When I found out the tribal war had arrived, I dropped everything and went underground (to a dive bar) to blow off steam (liberate myself from constraints and tensions). I got smashed and lit (drugs and booze). Stumbling and singing, I went home. Arriving, I cried out loudly several times for the benefit of my cousin’s wife, Sita, ‘I don’t give a shit anymore, the tribal war has arrived.’ I went to my room and fell deeply asleep.”
MUSIC
Ethiopiques Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale 1969-1974, by Mulatu Astatqe
You never knew Ethiopia was one of the coolest places on earth right? You will learn.
Club Sodade, by Cesaria Evora
This album would make the perfect soundtrack to Kapuscinski’s book if it were made into a black and white art film. Cesaria Evora is from Cape Verde in west Africa so she sings in Portuguese. I like the remix album as much as her acoustic stuff, it’s got a really poignant cinematic vibe.
The Very Best Mixtape (Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit)
The DJ played their song Sister Betina about every five minutes on Friday and Saturday nights at the hallowed Doga bar in Goma. As far as I’m concerned, this song is Africa today. Mwamwaya sings and raps in the Chichewa language spoken in Mali, where he’s from. I got it from the Doga DJ on a compilation CD he burned for me for $5. I asked him who sang it and where it was from. “I don’t know,” he said. “A South African peacekeeper gave it to me and told me to play it all the time. But he left Congo already.”
Ceasefire by Emmanuel Jal and Abdel Gadir Salim
This South-North Sudanese peace activism album is made up of rap/Sudanese Arab tracks by a black rapper and an Arab bandleader. If there is ever a moment when you need motivation to be the best you can be, read about Emmanuel Jal’s childhood on the internet or watch the documentary about him, “War Child.” There is also a book I haven’t read yet. While you are listening to the song Aiwa and knowing about Jal’s life and understanding the social feat of an Arab-black/North-South Sudanese duo, your troubles will suddenly seem so small and you will feel so moved to be a badass that you will immediately stop being depressed and do something. This song can instill the belief that Rainer Maria Rilke counsels us to adopt — “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.”
MOVIES
“Blood Diamond”
This is such a fine Hollywood product. It also manages to teach about the problem in Sierra Leone and depict the enduring wholesomeness of so many Africans even after being subjected to the most cynical war crimes. Leo’s soldier of fortune is not a fantasy. They really exist, because I know one named Juan. Only thing is most foreign correspondents are colder than Jennifer Connelly’s character, a winsome and sentimental aberration.
“The Lost Boys of Sudan”
This is a documentary about South Sudanese refugees resettling to the U.S. for a better life and then realizing they’d rather be refugees in Kenya than live in Texas. It’s scary what we learn about American culture from these vexed Africans.
“General Idi Amin Dada”
Says to his cabinet: “And marketing here in Kampala, you must tell our womens to pull up their socks. I want to see that Ugandans work very hard. You must not make the womens of Uganda very weak. They must get up quickly in the mornings at about 5 o’clock, they are already in Kasero preparing vegetables and everything to sell in the shop. If you go to Ghana, if you go to Nigeria, you will see the whole shops, market, everything is in nigeria! I think you will agree with me. Why not here in Uganda? You must tell our women I said that the duty of the woman is the house woman. He knows how to keep house very well. If he can do that, let me make first examinations — appoint women to be the managers of hotel, which is done. Because this is a part of the womens job, if they can keep house very well, it is exactly like their duty as housewife! If he is well educated, he has got that brain, he is determined, he can look after the hotel very well. And you as a minister you can do this! If you find any man not trying to obey her, you can punish him!”
“The Lord of War”
Appealingly rebellious premise and protagonist in this Nicholas Cage movie about an arms dealer during the cold war. It’s handsomely edited and depicts the Liberian problems of the 1980s and 90s. See it if you want to understand Charles Taylor, an epic villain. And my badass friend, veteran Africa correspondent Massimo Alberizzi, says he wrote the articles that inspired this screenplay.
“Darwin’s Nightmare”
Take a huge lake and fill it with a gigantic and alien fish. The fish eats everything in the lake including the kelp, so the lake begins to die. Sell the fish to Poland, in exchange for guns for some rebel group in Angola. Children from the lake region meanwhile starve and sniff glue until they get lung diease, sleeping on the streets while their fathers, who fish for the people in Europe, have sex with prostitutes, give their mothers AIDS, and then die. It’s a succinct representation of one unfortunate regional dynamic.
“Mobutu, roi du Zaïre”
Thierry Michel is an intrepid documentary filmmaker with a succint reporting style and a marvelously dry sense of humor. I really want to see his newest doc, “Katanga Business,” about mining in Congo, which I was told features lots of static interviews with Chinese businessmen. He actually screened it for a bunch of expats in Gisenyi when I lived in Goma, but I didn’t find out until it was too late. Anyway, this doc on Mobutu explains everything. There’s a lot of old footage of Mobutu, so much that you get to know the dictator and forget the footage is cobbled together. The scene where he’s swimming in his nouveau riche swimming pool and talking about how his children amuse themselves crystallizes the problem of African leadership — because it’s all about leisure when you get to the top, and stealing to maintain it. I wish someone would do a doc like this about Siad Barre.
TELEVISION
“Prison Break”
Why do Kenyans love “Prison Break” so much that images of Wentworth Miller grace the sides of matatus? Because they see their chronic poverty as a conspiracy that has put them in a metaphorical prison from which they will only escape by wily, illicit maneuvering. That’s my guess anyway. It’s a good show.
