Book 3 of 54: "The Real Life of Domingos Javier" by José Luandino Vieira

About the aurthor:

Born in Portugal in 1935, José Luandino Vieira's parents immigrated to Angola in 1938. Vieira grew up immersed in the language and the culture of the black quarters of Luanda, Angola's capital. He was so influenced by these experiences that later in life he wrote in a language unique to the black quarters: a fusion of Kimbundu (one of Angola's native languages) and Portuguese.

Vieira devoted himself to Angolan independence from Portugal. In 1961, he revealed a secret list of deserters from the Portuguese army to the BBC and was arrested and imprisoned for eleven years. It's sad to think that so many Angolans gave their lives for the realization of Angola's independence in 1975 (which is what the book is about), only to have the country enter a civil war that only recently ended in 2002.


The Real Life of Domingos Xavier (Angola):


This was quite an interesting book. It was about a land so far away that I have not been to yet. A land I knew very little about (until recently); a land I never thought about before. But the connection I made to Angola through this book went deeper than I expected. The similarities to South Africa's history are so uncanny.

"The Real Life of Domingos Xavier" is an ode to all the freedom fighters who made the ultimate sacrifice for Angola's independence. Domingos Xavier represents freedom fighters who were detained by the authorities, tortured, violated and eventually killed. The colonial police come to Domingos Xavier's house and arrest him in the dead of night. The book lays bare Domingos Xavier's torture by the white Portuguese colonial police and the cipaios (Africans recruited to serve in subordinate roles in the colonial police). He is beaten to the point where his eyes become so swollen he is unable to see through them. His wife Maria is sent around by the authorities from one office to the next, each official claiming to have no knowledge of her husband's arrest. These portrayals of Domingos and Maria's torture are inter-spaced by the underground freedom fighters outside jail trying to identify the prisoner that was paraded in the township by the police to curb political dissident.

Vieira succeeded in making me feel a lot of suspense. I found myself telling the characters not to speak to loudly about what they were planning because you never know who is listening. In fact, on two or three occasions I found myself going back on a page to make sure no one was near the characters who might report them to the police. When a scene included the characters of Mussanda, Chico, Grandad Patelo and Young Zito, I would be on edge the entire time, fearing an arrest was imminent.

There is an incident in Domingos Xavier's torture where the white colonial police officer offers him a sandwich and a beer having subjected him to beatings on previous days. This incident made me thing back to a book I read last year: Jacob Dlamini's "Askari". This book was about (among other things) an examination of the circumstances that lead some freedom fighters during Apartheid in South Africa to betray and continue to betray many of their comrades.

I think this idea of betraying your people still happens today. Where you have political leaders choosing the lavish lifestyle that money and other benefits will afford them as a result of bribes and other corrupt actions. This can further be extended to ordinary Africans choosing to participate in a systems and institutions that continue to oppress us today, naively believing that if we work hard enough, we can carve a seat for ourselves at the table, not realizing that for every one of us that makes it in the corporate world (for example) there are millions of us that continue to live under these oppressive institutions that were never created for the improvement of our lives as black people.

Domingos Xavier still refuses to betray his people even after he is promised the sandwich and beer and his "freedom". How many of us continue to accept the sandwich and beer and a false sense of freedom just so we can live a more lavish lifestyle than the next person, while betraying our sisters and brothers in the process?

Book 2 of 54: "Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue

About the author: Imbolo Mbue

Imbolo Mbue was born in a small village just outside of the town of Limbe in Cameroon. She spent much of her childhood in Limbe and after finishing high school, moved to the United States of America to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey. Like the immigrant characters in her book, the only images and perceptions Mbue had about America were the things she saw on television and (also like her characters), she says she was not prepared for what she found once she arrived.
After completing her bachelors degree, she worked a myriad of different jobs: as a dental-office receptionist, a bank teller, a preschool secretary, a dishwasher, she was a lingerie saleswoman at an American department store and also sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door. She managed to put herself through graduate school and obtained a masters degree in education and psychology at Columbia University.

After completing her masters degree, she got a job for a media house doing market research. She has said that she always wanted to do a doctorate degree, but when she got into a PhD programme in California, she turned it down to stay in her job in New York. She subsequently lost that job after the financial crisis of 2008 and remained unemployed for two years. In those two years, she started writing "Behold the Dreamers" (originally titled "The Longings of Jende Jonga") and a number of years later received a seven figure deal with Random House--the biggest book deal for an unpublished African author in history!

Before it was even published, the book's film rights were optioned by Tristar, a division of Sony Pictures. Mbue's literary Cinderella story is just as intriguing as her novel.

Behold the Dreamers (Cameroon)

I finished this book three days ago, but I have found it very difficult to write about it because it made me feel so many things.


Beginning in 2007, the book is about Jende Jonga and his family, who immigrate to America from Cameroon in search of a better future. They are trying to escape a life where they have to be content with the limited opportunities that come with being born poor in Cameroon and go after a life where there is an illusion of equal opportunity. They go to a country that has sold us the dream that we can all make it if we work hard enough, showing us only the success stories while hiding the many faces of failure for every one that made it.

Jende started out as a dishwasher and managed to get himself a drivers license. This provided him the step-up in life that he needed. He used the license to get a job driving those famous yellow taxi cabs of New York City and as a result could afford to bring his wife and son to join him in America.

When the book begins, Jende gets a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers banker. We then see the inevitable build up to the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath through the eyes of the immigrant characters.

The part of the book that has stayed with me is when Jende is reflecting about the financial crash and its aftermath. He compares it to a financial crisis they had in Cameroon in the eighties; he talks about the"money doublers" of Cameroon who promise people that they will double their money and how no one has seen this happen, but because of their desperation, people always go to them to lose large sums of money; and he thinks about all the people that have lost everything and how lucky he is to still have a job.

Then he thinks about all the dreams that people lost: dreams of sending children to college, dream weddings, dream vacations, dreams of retirement. "In many ways, it would be an unprecedented plague," he reflects, " a calamity like the one that had befallen the Egyptians in the Old Testament. The only difference between the Egyptians then and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshiping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing."

It is easy to dismiss Jende's naivety because of his idolization of America. His belief in "the American dream" blinds him to the wickedness of the financial tycoons of Wall Street. His employment by one of these tycoons blinds him to the fact that the bankers on Wall Street do the exact same thing as the "money doublers" in Cameroon, just on a much bigger scale. But when everything comes crashing down on him, Jende is able to see the lie that he has been sold and has the courage to escape a life that was slowly eating away at his humanity.

I can't help but think about the inter-connectedness of everything. The Wall Street banker's son says to Jende's wife later in the book: "I have to find a way...to stomach...all the bullshit the masses are blind to...so much mindlessness. People sit on their couches and watch garbage interrupted by messages to buy more garbage which will create a desire for more garbage. They go to their computers and order from incredibly horrible corporations that are enslaving their fellow humans and pretty much destroying any chance of children growing up in a world where they can truly be free. But hey, we have our material comforts and we're saving money and corporations are creating sixty-hour-a-week jobs with sick leave so what does it matter  if we're complicit? Let's just carry on with our lives while our country continues to commit atrocities all over the world."

Book 1 of 54: "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Bâ

About the author: Mariama Bâ

This is a deeply felt novel that mirrors some of the events of the author's own life. Born on 17 April 1929, Bâ was raised a Muslin in Dakar, Senegal. She was raised by her grandparents, who did not believe that girl children should be educated. As a result, she really had to struggle to get an education. She eventually qualified as a teacher, taught for twelve years, and became a school inspector as a result of issues with her health. Bâ was married to a member of Senegal's national assembly; they divorced and she was left to care for their nine children alone.

Bâ started writing quite critically about the shortcomings of African traditional society. She burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, "So Long A Letter", in 1980. Unfortunately, she died a year later, before the publication of her second novel. One can only imagine what great works she could have given us had she lived longer.

So Long A Letter (Senegal)



"So Long A Letter" tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher and the events before and after the death of her husband. It is written as a letter to her childhood friend Aissatou, who immigrated to America after her husband allowed himself to be blackmailed by his mother into taking a second wife. Aissatou completely rejects what her culture says she ought to do in this situation and decides to leave her husband.

Ramatoulaye goes through something similar. Before his death, her husband marries a second wife in an unexpected twist. He does not have the courage to talk to her about it, instead he keeps this courtship a secret and only after he has married the second wife does he send his brother and their Iman to tell Ramatoulaye what he has done.

He leaves Ramatoulaye to raise their twelve children by herself and spends all his money and time on his second wife. Slowly Ramatoulaye starts to realise that the patriachal society she lives in is not going to help her with this predicament. She slowly starts to realise that, Like Aissatou, she too cannot look to her culture and that she needs to reject it.
 
Bâ shows us how much responsibility African women take on and how African society would collapse without them. And yet, we do not value them as much as we should. She uses African men's lack of accountability and sexual instinct to demonstrate our irresponsibility and our pathology for hurting African women.

I am a male, and as such, my views of the lived experience of females is very very very limited (to say the least). I can only draw on the second hand experience of all the women that have been mothers, sisters and friends to me.

Bâ's novel was published in Senegal (on the other side of the continent from me) in 1980 (when I wasn't even an idea to my parents), and yet her views on the treatment of women in society in general still ring true today.

I see it in the way we emphasize to young girls to be neat and clean little ladies and how we don't do the same for young boys. Whether it is my school's deputy principal telling the girls at our school off at an assembly about their short skirts and untidy hair or my own mother telling my female cousins how they should dress and behave if they want to be married one day.

I see it in the way we police the bad behaviour of women and we don't do it to men: my uncle's wife was told she should accept that her husband had a girlfriend on the side because he married her and so he would always come back to her; my grandmother told me about her own father's philandering and simply told me "that's the way men are"; and yet when a woman I know had one sexual encounter with another man after her husband spent years cheating on her, she was demonized for being unable to keep her legs crossed.

I see it in the phrasing of the language we use. Whether it is a male colleague of mine insulting the boys in his class by saying "there are only girls in this class" (and the female students laughing the loudest) and seeing nothing wrong with that! Or the songs we sing at weddings that tell women what they should and should not do in marriage (and yet there are no such songs directed at men) and being told that I know nothing about life when I point this out.

It still astonishes me how much our society is built around protecting male privilege (across race, culture and even sexuality). Both men and women do whatever is necessary to protect the status quo. Bâ teaches us that women are just as important (if not more so) as men and for us to build successful societies, we need to take this lesson more seriously than we have in the past.

Day 2 of 365: Mariama Bâ and Imbolo Mbue

Yesterday was the first day of my "Readings from the Motherland."

I started two of the books: an old classic of African literature, "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Bâ, and a modern African classic, "Behold The Dreamers."

 I'm only about a quarter of the way with each book because of a slight illness. My pace should pick up soon and I hope to finish at least one of them by next week.

Each book is interesting in its own way.

"Behold The Dreamers" is a story about an immigrant family from Cameroon that moves to America. The father of this family starts working as a chauffeur for a Wall Street banker who works at Lehman Brothers just before the financial crash of 2008. The journey of these characters is made more interesting by the recent controversial travel ban instituted by the new American president.

"So Long A Letter" tells the story of Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese schoolteacher after the death of her husband. It is written as a letter to her childhood friend Aissatou. Bâ's writing is quite beautiful, written as a sequence of reminiscences, it's almost like watching a sequence of flashbacks in a film.

On Egyptian Literature

The story of Egyptian literature is nothing short of incredible! The kind of stuff we should be taught in school as part of the decolonization of education project.

The ancient Egyptians are considered to be the first culture to develop modern literature as we know it today. Texts from this period of African history were divided into two broad categories: religious texts like hymns, mythological texts, magical texts and mortuary texts; and areligious texts like instructive literature (known as "wisdom texts"), poems, what we might consider scientific treatises (like mathematical and medical texts), historical as well as biographical texts.

It's clear that the culture of reading and writing was well established (for the educated elite, anyway) much earlier than the era of the famous library of Alexandria. In fact, many of the texts that ended up in the great library were originally written during the Old and Middle Kingdom (2134 - 1668 BC).

With the rise of Christianity, many of these texts were destroyed as they were seen to teach and promote heresy. However, some important ancient texts were preserved in Egypt by some scholars.

After Egypt was conquered by Arab Muslims, the literature (and libraries) of Egypt thrived and saw a shift almost entirely to Arabic. The concept of a "blurb" dates back to this time and was known as a "taqriz" in medieval Arabic literature.

In fact, literary devices like similes, metaphors and alliteration can be traced back to ancient Egyptian literature.

Modern Egyptian literature is quite expansive and has seen a lot of development over the years. Recently, the shift as been towards writings about the expanding and ever changing Arab culture with a focus on the individual dealing with poverty as a result of rural-urban migration.

I have found three books from Egypt that I would like to read and I need some help deciding which to choose.

1. "Brooklyn Heights" by Miral al-Tahawy

This book tells the story of Hend and her eight-year-old son. They move to Brooklyn in New York City to escape a failed marriage and her family's restrictiveness.

While trying to build a new life for herself and her son, Hend has to deal with poverty, a job she does not like, relationships with men and following her dream of becoming an artist.

1. "Palace Walk" by Egypt's first Nobel laureate in literature, Naguib Mahfouz

This book is the first of Mahfouz's celebrated Cairo Trilogy. These three novels tell the story of a Cairo patriarch and his family over three generation. It represents three eras of socio-political life in Cairo.

Mahfouz examines issues of religion, education, women empowerment and plays a lot with the theme of "social progress being the inevitable result of the evolutionary spirit of humankind."

3. "Zeina" by Nawal el Saadawi

I was drawn to this book because of the beliefs and politics of the author, eighty-three-year-old feminist, activist, physician and psychiatrist Nawal el Saadawi. She has written numerous books on women in Islam, is a life-long activist for gender equality in Islam and has been critical of the Egyptian government as well the effect that American foreign policies and wars have on the rest of the world.

Zeina is her most recent novel. Published in 2011, it tells the story of a distinguished literary critic in Cairo who abandoned her illegitimate daughter, Zeina, when she was a university student. Zeina grows up to be one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers, while her biological mother is stuck in a loveless marriage and plagued with guilt.

Readings from the Motherland: Initial Musings

People who know me well all know that I love to read and that my love for the sharing of reading and books is even bigger (I must admit though that recently my love for sharing books has waned as a result of friends and family that do not bring borrowed books back).

On a number of occasions, people I know (particularly white people) have asked me if I have read what is considered to be "literary classics" by the likes of James Joyce, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck and and and... (by "classic" I'm not referring to writers who belong to a specific time in history, but writers whose work scholars tell us we should worship). To be honest, I find these classic authors to be quite dry and mundane.

I also find it problematic that it is only white European and American authors that make it on these lists. In all the book stores I have visited, I have only ever seen white (mainly male) European and American authors on the Classics shelf. I mean, who decides what book and which authors will be deemed classic?

What about classic literature from other parts of the world like Asia, South America and (for me personally) more especially Africa? Interestingly enough, the likes of JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Andre P Brink somehow make the cut. They are South Africans, but what sets them apart from their peers is that they are white.

So because the likes of Bessie Head, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mariama Ba and Thomas Mofolo do not fit the mold of whiteness their work is not considered "classic" as I have defined it above. This is very problematic.

So, I've decided that in 2017 I will be reading a book written by an author from all 54 African countries. This will not be an easy task, but I concluded a long time ago that if we do not support, read and celebrate our own authors, no one will.

I hope there is someone out there reading this, because I will need A LOT of help!

In my research, I have found that information about books and authors from some African countries is easier to find than others. This could be as a result of English translations of works not being readily available in some states, or publishing industries not being fully developed in some countries.

I have found some authors who are descendants from some countries, but have either never lived in or lived for very short periods of time in their countries, but because sometimes these are the only books I can find information about online, I have to choose them.

I want to try and avoid this, because I feel that no one's lived experience can be ilegitimized, but the experience of living in a country for long periods of time can be very different from a short stay. I also want to avoid this because some of these authors don't write about their countries or people from their countries. I see this as a learning experience and not reading about people from the motherland would not fulfill this goal.

My research continues and I hope I can get help from readers across the continent to help me out.

Here are the titles I have already gotten hold of:

Algeria: "The Wretched of the Earth" by Frantz Fanon
Angola: "The Real Life of Domings Xavier" by Jose Luandino Vieira
Cameroon: "Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue
Republic of Congo: "Memoirs of a Porcupine" by Alain Mabanckou
Kenya: "One Day I Will Write About This Place" by Bingavanga Wainaina
Ghana: "Ghana Must Go" by Taiye Selasi
Lesotho: "Chaka" by Thomas Mofolo
Nigeria: "The Famished Road" by Ben Okri
Senegal: "So Long A Letter" by Mariama Ba
Zimbabwe: "We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo

I hope we can travel this journey together.

Let me know if you have any suggestions.