Booklover -- Africa
http://blog.libraryjournal.com/an
Booklover -- Africa
Donna Jacobs 0
0 @Brunning: People & Technology from page 58
Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation
-
Booklover — Africa
Wseemed like the most exotic thing
hen I was young, going on safari
you could do. Maybe this idea
came from watching John Wayne ride
on the side of a jeep through the plains of
Tanzania in Hatari or admiring the
richlydetailed photographs published in National
Geographic; either way I still have a safari
on the “to-do” list. In the meantime, I have
recently taken a literary safari of Africa,
which is more affordable. My guides were
V.S. Naipaul in The Masque of Africa:
Glimpses of African Belief and Ryszard
Kapuściński in The Shadow of the Sun.
Before we embark on our safari, I would
like to tell you how I got started on this
particular literary journey. If you have been a
follower of this column you will know about
my book-loving friend, Joy, who resides
in Eleuthera, Bahamas. The
recommendation to check out Ryszard Kapuściński’s
The Shadow of the Sun came via her. And
although I have read two previous works
(The Bend in the River and The Enigma of
the Arrival) by V.S. Naipaul, The Masque
of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief was
recently reviewed in the Sunday edition of
The Post and Courier, the local newspaper
in Charleston, SC, by an old classmate.
Seemed necessary to pick up the new work
and explore it, which led me right down a
narrow African alley and the connection to
the work of Ryszard Kapuściński.
consequences. Surely, the hackers among us
will figure the bit torrent solution to free-for-all
with this loophole. Whether libraries will brave
the illegality of gaming the loophole — who
knows, it’s wild!
Your Links:
http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Amazon-Raises-the-Stakes-inYour-Reading-Experience-The-Platform-War-Continues-74056.asp
V.S. Naipaul, a native of Trinidad, won
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001 “for
having united perceptive narrative and
incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel
us to see the presence of suppressed
histories.” A recent biography of V.S. Naipaul
paints a somewhat different and monstrous
picture of race, sex, and cruelty. Most of
us outsiders only see the beauty created in
his words, a few more intimate companions
have the privilege of knowing a cruel hand
and a tart quip.
Ryszard Kapuściński, a native of
Poland, was the only foreign correspondent for
the Polish Press Agency with the
responsibility of covering 50 countries. His career in
journalism began after attending university
in Warsaw and carried him throughout the
developing world observing the end of
European colonialism. Kapuściński arrived in
Africa in 1957. He was to begin his affair
with this country as colonial rule was
beginning to dissolve. The book is a work of
journalism with a feel of fiction and, by some
scholars’ view, more fiction than fact.
Maybe one would not immediately think
to join the works of these two authors, but
with respect to their writings on Africa, I
found a remarkable equality of observation.
While Kapuściński’s work is a compilation
of his adventures as he is reporting from
Africa, Naipaul has a specific quest in mind.
He is exploring African belief, the taboo
surrounding it, where did the beliefs arise,
how have they been influenced by Western
religions, the cruelty, the bigotry, the
witchcraft, and what is to be made of it. Naipaul
speaks of the influence of the missionaries,
the fear of the Western world to understand
the black magic of Africa, his impressions
of the colonial settlements. Kapuściński
strives to avoid the typical Western enclaves
in exchange for the bright, sandy, sometimes
dangerous huts of the natives and seeks to
uncover the real Africa.
Both find a way to capture the minute and
the mundane and make it vibrant, and exotic.
This reader wanted to find the saw-marked
timber of the stairwell, the Hewlett Packard
laptop in the chief’s house, the bench on the
side of the sandy road, the intense light of an
unshaded desert, the corrugated sheet metal
homes of Monrovia. Yet, neither book is
without its description of the vast natural
beauty of Africa. The animals of the
Serengeti plains, and the Sezibwa waterfall in the
Mukono district of Uganda are two amazing
visuals that entertain us.
Sidebar thought, sorta like stopping at
a desert oasis: I own a hardback version
of The Shadow of the Sun and I own an
electronic Kindle version of The Masque of
Africa: Glimpses of African Belief. While
immersed in the
two perspectives
of Africa I am also
immersed in the
two perspectives
of reading styles.
The hardback version allows me to see the
book in total, hold it, touch it, embrace the
dynamics of the page. It is littered with
post-it notes to remind me of passages that
spoke to me. The electronic version is fun,
new, alive in the sense I can easily take it
everywhere with me (a (...truncated)