A brief intro to a vast subject: The Other Africa

It was impossible for the four writers on The Other Africa panel today to give us anything more than a glimpse of such a complex and diverse continent. And that was partly what Kwame Antony Appiah, Majok Tulba, Uzodinma Iweala and Sefi Atta talked about, in their conversation with Arnold Zable. I’ve been reading Iweala’s wonderful book Our Kind of People about people and communities in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The book takes an intimate view through Iweala’s conversations with HIV-positive individuals, community leaders, and government representatives; and through personal questions and reflections. As Iweala said on the panel, he was trying to find a ‘different way to talk about HIV/AIDS in Africa, which doesn’t descend into hyperbole’. He wants to get away from the idea of Africa as a monolith, and the way to do that is through individual stories, individual voices. Iweala spend four or five years on the book, letting himself be guided by the stories people told him.

Esteemed philosopher Kwame Antony Appiah spoke about the fact that, yes, Africa is an enormously diverse and complicated continent (and not just countries but the diverse cultures, languages and religions within them) but when travelling about the world he said that someone from Nigeria, South Sudan, Ghana (to name a few) is often simply perceived is as ‘African’. He said while that is never going to be enough (would ‘Australian’ be enough to describe you?) that perception still informs a part of one’s identity. It is not so much that people intentionally stereotype, though certainly reading nuanced stories about people from cultures other than our own goes some way to helping us break down stereotypes.

Fiction, of course, takes us into the world and experiences of another person, a character, and can be incredibly effective at building empathy and complexifying one’s relationship to other people and places. Nigerian-born Sefi Atta began writing when she was 30, living in the US. She realised she’d never read a novel about a Nigerian woman like herself. She builds up her stories with detail from the characters’ lives so as not to fall on/enforce any particular ideology, though she says ‘there’s something about integrity which matters’ to her as a theme in her writing. She says this is possibly a response to misconceptions about Africa. Her latest novel, being launched at the festival, is A Bit of Difference.

Majok Tulba’s debut novel Beneath the Darkening Sky I have written about in detail previously on the blog. It was a pleasure to hear him talk about his work. Tulba said that writing the book wasn’t easy, because of the topic. As a child he thought that starvation and war were ‘all the world was supposed to be’. In Australia he saw a different world. He returned to his village (which he talks about so movingly) in 2007 and was heartbroken to see the aftermath of war. He remembered some of his friends he used to play with, eat with. He believes in the power of writing, as a way to make people realise the horror of what some children go through (and he did choose not to specify the country in the novel, because he said it could have been a few countries besides South Sudan) but also to show them the beauty of the Africa ‘where we can tell the time by a rooster crowing’. ‘This is the Africa I love’, he said. He wrote the book also to ask the question: ‘why is this happening?’ And he hopes the reader will ask this too.

Appiah spoke about how problematic it can be when there is a perception that an ‘African writer’ is approached only to write about ‘African topics’. His latest book, The Honour Code, is about the role of honour in shaping some specific moral movements. He says that, of course, we also cannot deny the influence of our backgrounds, our cultures, and he recounted a story of his father lying in bed smoking and reading the Ghanaian newspapers, before (I believe) Appiah went off to England, and he said: ‘don’t forget you’re taking the family name with you’. Despite the fact Ghana, and Africa, are not present in the book, the idea of exploring honour may have come from his own personal (and cultural) background.

I don’t want to make this too long. As I said, the session barely scratched the surface (and my notes probably don’t even do it justice) so I would encourage you to check out the work of these writers, the fiction and the nonfiction, and try to catch them at their other sessions during the festival. Click their names in the first paragraph for more info on those.

I hope to see you at the first Morning Read session at 10am tomorrow (featuring Majok Tulba) or at the one on Sunday (featuring Sefi Atta and Uzodinma Iweala).

(More than) five facts: Majok Tulba

Majok Tulba was born in Sudan and lives in Western Sydney with his wife and children. His debut novel is Beneath the Darkening Sky (read my review). Tulba is CEO of the charity SudanCare, made a film that was a finalist at Tropfest, and has been a recipient of the NSW Premier’s CAL Literary Centre Fellowship.

Facts: 

My favourite place in the world is my village, because of the memories and the beauty of the sky and the smell of the fresh air.

I’m currently reading Six Months in Sudan by Dr James Maskalyk.

The best thing about being a writer is sharing my ideas and stories with others.

When I was a child I wanted to be a storyteller, but no one makes any money by telling stories in the village. So I wanted to be a cattle keeper.

My favourite cocktail is American champagne—Coca cola.

My favourite artwork is a photograph by Kevin Carter showing a vulture and a child in Sudan. Because it captures the enormous tragedy of so much loss of life there. It’s haunting.

When I’m stuck, or need to take a break from writing, I take a walk to a park or grab my saucepan and make myself a BBQ.

The first thing I ever wrote was a recount about a lion attack in Sudan when I was sixteen. It had a great influence on me, because I realised I could tell a story and entertain people.

I hope that in/by reading my work, people will learn the power of courage and human spirit.

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Majok Tulba will be discussing The Other Africa with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Uzodinma Iweala, Sefi Atta, and Arnold Zable on Friday 24 August at 2:30 pm, and will be reading from his work in The Morning Read session on Saturday 25 August at 10:00 am.

Book review: Beneath the Darkening Sky by Majok Tulba

Hamish Hamilton (Penguin)
9781926428420
July 2012

It’s taken me a little while to get over Majok Tulba’s unflinching novel about a young boy kidnapped by rebels and forced to become a soldier. On the cusp of adolescence Obinna is forced to witness unimaginable horrors, from murder to rape, starvation, and children being blown up by landmines.

Obinna, whose (first) nickname is Baboon, dares to continue dreaming, remembering, and questioning. But the rebels continue to break him, to beat him down. My heart ached. Sometimes I had to put the book down, to walk away.

But Majok Tulba manages to extract some beauty from this horror. How does he do it? Maybe it’s because the love of his own South Sudanese village is so strong. Tulba imagines, in this novel, what would have happened had he been tall enough to have been recruited. Tulba came to Australia when he was 16, and it’ll be amazing to hear him speak about Beneath the Darkening Sky at the festival, about the choices he made in the novel: what to show, who to focus on.

The dream sequences often centre around Obinna’s lost village and the people in it (many also gone). For the reader, the dreams are welcome relief from the horror, but they are not entirely full of hope—they are sweet but often twisted. In an early dream sequence, the villagers, including Obinna’s mother and father, sing and clap around the bonfire. No one dances except his friend Pina:

Pina jumps and spins, turning her body sideways as she flies. Her dance is frantic. Pina moves faster than I thought anyone could.

Even though everyone is smiling, a bad feeling cramps up my stomach. Like I’m watching a car engine rattling, until it explodes. My village, singing for Pina’s crazy dance, looks like it’s shaking, about to erupt. Everything is about to fall apart.

Tulba’s prose is striking. Obinna’s voice is strong—he deals with much of the horror, at least for a time, through the heartbreakingly innocent eyes of a child. When he first sees a woman beaten, for example, he thinks: ‘Maybe she’s sleeping.’ The first time he witnesses a boy being killed by a landmine, which happens almost in slow motion for the reader, he notes: ‘Landmines don’t kill you, they eat you.’ There are some incredibly memorable lines.

Looking at my notes now I realise, in my memory, I have transposed the dream before the ending for the actual ending. There’s just so much you don’t want to happen, but it does. It must, for this story to be so powerful. While reading the book, I thought it would give me nightmares, but instead I dreamt of children dancing. Like Obinna, I dreamt of something that was a life buoy, keeping hope afloat.

This book is devastating, but it isn’t relentless. And it is important. One reason it is important (among many) is that it reminds you that the person sitting next to you on the tram, standing by you on the street, sitting at the bar—whether a refugee or not—could have endured horrors you couldn’t even fathom. It’s a reminder of the importance of kindness, of generosity, of listening, in a world that can be both spectacularly beautiful and overwhelmingly cruel.

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Majok Tulba will be discussing The Other Africa with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Uzodinma Iweala, Sefi Atta, and Arnold Zable on Friday 24 August at 2:30 pm, and will be reading from his work in The Morning Read session on Saturday 25 August at 10:00 am.