Last year, while trying to pick the sixth book for my African Reading Challenge, I explained how I wanted a book that wasn’t self-consciously a book about Africa. I wanted a story, a biography, a self-help guide, whatever, that just happened to be set in Africa. I failed. And as a result didn’t even manage to finish the six books that I was hoping to review.
Then along comes Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Olympian and I have my sixth book. This biography is most definitely a book that would be filed under sport rather than world affairs, but in telling the story of Abebe Bikila, who exploded on to the sporting scene at the 1960 Rome Olympics, Tim Judah has found a very human story that also reveals a huge amount about Ethiopian life through the 1960s and 1970s.
As he cruised to victory in the Marathon, Bikila was the first black athlete to win Olympic gold thus setting the tone for the rest of the century. That he did it barefoot pretty much in the shadow of the looted Axum Obelisk and only a couple of decades after Mussolini claimed Ethiopia for Italy, only added to the historical resonance.
Judah masterfully interweaves Ethiopia’s troubled political history with the story of Bikila’s triumph and ultimate decline. There are audiences with Haile Selassie, Bikila is detained during a failed coup and there are agonised discussions about whether it was appropriate for an Ethiopian to be seen running barefoot, such was Abyssinian pride.
Bikila’s is an incredible story. He and his coach, Onni Niskanen, revolutionised the way Africa was viewed by the rest of the world. But like many African runners Bikila succumbs to his celebrity lifestyle, drinking heavily and is eventually paralysed in a car crash. He died a year later.
Judah’s book is filled with some of the best sports journalism from the age, vivid accounts of Olympics past but at times it reads too much like a journalist’s book, heavy on sources and quotes. I would have liked him occasionally to put his notebook aside to fill in the gaps and round out the story. But then I guess the blurb wouldn’t have been able to say "for the first time, his true story is told". This is still a cracking read.
My previous reviews in the Africa Reading Challenge
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If there was ever a heyday for journalism then it must have been in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As pre-festive season memos circulate newsrooms warning that Christmas party expenses must be kept to a minimum, reading about Henry Morton Stanley’s instructions to travel the world for a year writing travel features before turning his attention to finding Livingstone somewhere in Africa is enough to send the modern reporter green with envy.
The parting words from his editor were: “Draw £1,000 now, and when you have gone through that, draw another £1,000, and when that is spent, draw another £1,000, and when you have finished that, draw another £1,000, and so on — BUT FIND LIVINGSTONE!”
By the time he had set off on his epic journey, Stanley needed 200 porters to carry his supplies, which included eight thousand yards of calico (for bartering), two collapsible boats, dozens of 62lb bags of beads, and a bottle of Champagne to be opened once Livingstone had been found. (None of it had to be approved by the beancounters upstairs.)
He needed it all, for his journey would take him through malarial swamps, a companion would die from elephantiasis and crocodiles snatched donkeys. Slaving wars hampered his progress and disease stalked his massive caravan.
This is the sort of adventure tale that tells itself. But Martin Dugard has managed to set the rescue mission in the context of British and American rivalries – the decline of one empire and the emergence of a new world power – as well as joining the dots to reveal the very human characters behind the story, while never falling behind the pace of what is ultimately a riproaring adventure yarn.
My previous reviews in the Africa Reading Challenge
Have picked the final book for my Africa Reading Challenge. In the end it was a toss-up between Sydney Brenner’s My Life in Science and Horn Of Africa by Philip Caputo. At one stage in my life I knew more about the vulva of the nematode worm than is healthy. Specificially, I knew more about its development than is required for a budding journalist. The reason, before you get any strange ideas, is that Caenorhabditis elegans is one of biology’s model animals and the vulva is a particularly good place to study programmed cell death in embryonic development if you happen to be a student of molecular biology. Brenner, a South African, was the chap who came up with the idea of studying nematodes so I thought maybe his memoirs might show a different side of Africa to the slightly worthy tomes I’ve been dealing with so far.
But in the end I picked Horn of Africa because it involves a foreign correspondent being signed up as a mercenary. Thrilling stuff indeed. I suspect it will turn out to a heap of tosh – despite a glowing quotation from the Dallas Morning News on the cover – but it fills my brief of not being self-consciously “about” Africa. And you never know, it might turn out to be as good as The Dogs of War.
Joseph Kony is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle disguised by two decades of misunderstanding as his ragtag band of rebels tries to bring down the Ugandan government. That he came close at times and has managed to evade capture or defeat has long baffled observers who believe Kony’s few public statements suggest he should be wearing a sandwich board proclaiming the “end is nigh” or some such.
I make no apologies for belonging to the Kony is a “nutbar” (as one analyst described him) camp. When he emerged into a jungle clearing 18 months ago to meet the UN’s head humanitarian honcho he had the wild staring eyes that I’ve only ever seen set among the thick, bushy bears of London’s down and outs. The sort of people who have slipped through Britain’s shaky mental health safety net for a life on the streets. I wish I’d taken a pyschiatrist with me for an on-the-spot diagnosis.
In Matt Green’s quest to meet the man who has kept northern Uganda in a state of abject misery since the 1980s, he manages to show that the conflict is about much more than just one man. Kony is of use to people with very sane and rational objectives. Whether it’s Khartoum and the Sudanese government’s war against its southern rebels, or the Ugandan president’s desire to keep potential enemies among Kony’s Acholi people locked away in squalid camps, or even Ugandan army commanders who keep their hotels filled with aid workers and journalists, the LRA is a useful tool.
At times the writing also gives a neat insight into life as a journalist on the road. Green repeatedly agonises over opening his tins of sardines when he is travelling with people who have little in the way of food. Leads come and go, promises are made then broken, and Green misses his quarry time and time again. All the while his time and finances are ticking down.
I’m still not sure what it is that motivates Kony. (And I write this less than 100 miles from the jungle clearing where he sits after a week hunting down survivors of the LRA.) But this book goes a long way to reinterpreting the Kony myth in terms of a more prosaic conflict – of the sort that Africa specialises in – where the bad guys it turns out are not as bad as their paymasters who sit in government chairs and keep their hands clean. And where everyone is a victim.
My previous reviews in the Africa Reading Challenge
When Salim leaves his home on Africa’s ocean coast to take over a small trading shop deep in the continent’s interior he embarks on an adventure that marks his coming of age – in stark contrast to the progress of his adopted country, which is stuck in an endless cycle of upheaval.
The town at the bend in the river has emerged from colonial rule to strike out on its own. Naipaul constructs a fascinating cast of characters – Greeks, Asians and left-over colonials – that still turn up in the most unlikely of African backwaters today. There are small shops selling nothing very much, tedious local officials and an endless supporting cast of mysterious mercenaries and mzungus who have caught the eye of the president.
Salim, a young man from an Indian family, is both an insider and an outsider: Viewed as a foreigner by the locals but with no other home except Africa he makes a perfect narrator of the repeated crises that erupt around him. The writing is at times blinding, brilliantly evoking the feel of the trading posts that give Africa its heartbeat and the crooks and thugs trying to smother it.
They made such play with the national flag and the portrait of the President – the two now always going together – that in the beginning I thought these new officers stood for a new, constructive pride. But they were simpler. The flag and the President’s portrait were only like their fetishes, the sources of their authority. They didn’t see, these young men, that there was anything to build in their country. As far as they were concerned, it was all there already. They only had to take.
A deeply depressing read but at the same time it captures a time and a place that seems to perfectly describe the trouble with Africa.
My previous reviews in the Africa Reading Challenge