Matigari
by Ngugi wa Thiong’o
(Heinemann)

Ngugi is unquestionably one at Africa’s greatest and most evocative writers – and his Petals of Blood was recently included in the NI’s list of the top ten Third World novels. His latest book, composed as much in the tradition of African oral literature as that of the Western novel, is a powerful and moving attack on neo-colonialism - the economic relationship between rich and poor countries which still leaves countries like Ngugi’s own Kenya bleeding long after independence.

Matigari ma Njirngi (his name means ‘the patriot who survived the bullets’) emerges from the bush in an unnamed African country at the end of a liberation war. His old enemies, Settler Williams and servant John Boy, have been defeated but he finds that the old ways have not changed and that the sons of his enemies are in control. He travels the country in search of truth and justice. Finally he decides to return to the bush to dig up the weapons he had earlier buried - ‘Justice for the oppressed comes from a sharpened spear’.

Originally written in Gikuyu, and in a deceptively simple style, Matigari is laden with recurring symbols and slogans. Its message is one of trust in ordinary people and hope for the future: ‘There is no night so dark that it does not end in dawn’.

When the novel was published in Kenya in 1986, the police soon heard rumours of a man called Matigari roaming the country talking about truth and justice. Finding that he was a character in a book and so could not be arrested, they raided all the bookshops and seized every copy. They clearly understood the power, and the danger to them, of a great writer speaking for and to the oppressed.

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Political Pawns
by Josephine Reynell
(Refugee Studies Programme)

As the peace negotiations on Kampuchea get under way, the outcome will be anxiously awaited by 300,000 refugees in camps on the Thai-Kampuchean border. Trapped between the aspirations of their own leaders and the political interests of the world’s major powers, these refugees are Political Pawns.

Josephine Reynell is the first person to have done a systematic study of the border camps. She has spent several months inside them, doing research for the UN World Food Programme, and has travelled extensively inside Kampuchea. Her book examines the prison-like conditions endured by the refugees.

The camps have existed for nine years but their inhabitants are not free to leave. They live in continual fear - not only of shelling by the Vietnamese but also of violence from the Khmer and Thai soldiers who are supposed to be protecting them. They are completely dependent on foreign aid to stay alive. But because their refugee status is temporary, aid programmes set out to provide only basic food, shelter and health care. Secondary education is prohibited.

Reynell dissects the power games from Beijing to Washington that have kept these people in the camps. Fearing Vietnamese incursion into Thailand, the Thai Government wanted to use Khmer-Rouge-controlled camps as a protective buffer. In their turn, the Khmer Rouge, who massacred millions while they were in power in the 1970s, used the camps to legitimize the status of the coalition government they have formed with other resistance groups. They have been supported by China, the US and South-East Asian governments who wanted to offset Soviet influence in the region.

The only real solution to the refugees’ plight is political. Reynell is quite clear that the Khmer Rouge should be disarmed, the coalition government no longer recognized, and the refugees given a choice as to whether they want to return home or be resettled abroad.

And that clarity is very welcome - not least to the refugee children who have lived all their lives in the camps.

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The Duvaliers and their Legacy
by Elizabeth Abbot
(McGraw-Hill)

Papa Doc was not Haiti’s first dictator, nor did he introduce cruelty and violence to the island. Others before him leeched the country’s wealth, leaving poverty and environmental destruction in their wake. Yet Papa Doc Duvalier managed to lower these traditions to new depths.

The most interesting story in this book of many stories is the evolution of Papa Doc from a poor, quiet country doctor to a cruel and deranged dictator. He trusted no-one and embarked on the ruthless extermination of thousands - and intimidation of many thousands more. While this is unfortunately typical behaviour for dictators, Duvalier was probably unique in having peep holes cut into the walls of the torture chambers below the palace so that he could watch. A chilling portrait emerges of a man weaving back and forth between ruthless political pragmatism and mad, sadistic paranoia.

His son Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) was simply too lazy to go to these extremes but maintained the family traditions by bringing new meaning to the words corruption and graft, treating the national treasury as a private bank account.

The final fall of the Duvaliers was a combination of mounting popular pressure and military plotting. The tragedy was that popular forces were not able to take a lead but instead let the army take it - and the Duvaliers’ vicious private army, the Macoutes, simply blended into the new military framework. The book begins as the story ends, with a blow-by-blow account of the Macoutes’ machete massacre of voters at the abortive election of 1987.

As sister-in-law of General Henri Namphy, who headed the interim government when Baby Doc left, Elizabeth Abbot has unique and credible insight into the lives of Haiti’s elite, and combines with her training as a journalist and historian to make for a fascinating, if alarming, read.

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Soubindoor
by Jali Musa Jawara
(World Circuit)

Swooping, shivering, shimmering, Jali Musa Jawara’s voice dances into the ether like an athletic version of Demis Roussos. The comparison is not entirely frivolous - there is no way of writing about music that can really convey what it sounds like without comparing it to previous known quantities. And that is all the more true of Westerners approaching African music, where the normal signposts and reference points don’t apply. And Jawara’s voice has Roussos’ easy falsetto range without any of his syrupy inclinations.

He is also a superlative player of the kora. This is a 21-stringed instrument that is a cross between a harp and a guitar - it creates those cascading, watery backdrops so typical of the harp while also allowing the sharper accents of the guitar. Weaving around it is the sound of the balaphon (a wooden equivalent of xylophone) and the harsher interjections of the women who provide the vocal response to Jali Musa’s sinuous call.

Jawara is a Guinean and his half-brother is Mory Kante, who came close to scoring a worldwide crossover hit last year with the exhilarating Ye Ke Ye Ke. Jawara has spent most of the six years since his influential first record (released in the West as Direct from West Africa) playing in Abidjan - West Africa’s musicians are drawn to the cosmopolitan capital of the Ivory Coast as inexorably as its rural poor are sucked in to work on the country’s plantations. There’s both verve and sadness in those two migrations, words that will do as well as any to describe the feel of Soubindoor.

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State of Shock
directed by David Bradbury

On an oppressively hot summer’s night in 1979 Alwyn Peter stabbed his 19-year-old girlfriend to death in a drunken rage. Alwyn, an Aborigine, was born in 1957. In the same year the Queensland Government passed the Comalco Bill, which saw the Aboriginal people of Mapoon lose their last hope for autonomy - they were dispersed throughout Australia’s north. Alwyn Peter’s family were force-settled in Weipa, a drab and lifeless Comalco mining town.

David Bradbury offers a disquieting insight into Peter’s story. He had filmed previously in Chile, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador yet nothing, he says, prepared him for the human abuse and misery suffered by the Aboriginal community at Weipa. This is the self-destruction of a people forced to live together in almost subhuman conditions; a people taken to the limits of tolerance.

Alwyn Peter’s defence counsel argued that he was not morally responsible for his actions given such an appalling environment. An expert witness stressed that Alwyn lived within a self-mutilating subculture of violence, in a community with the highest recorded homicide rates in the world. Death by murder and suicide among Aborigines has quadrupled in the past decade.

And Bradbury is ruthless in exploring the self-destructiveness that is the response of Aboriginal communities to the ignorance and arrogance of white Australians. Their powerlessness has all too often forced their anger and frustration inwards. More than two-thirds of Aboriginal drinkers, for example, do so to dangerous excess - though most women abstain and Bradbury sees them as the salvation of Aboriginal communities, particularly through their efforts to keep the family unit together.

This is Bradbury’s first Australian feature - as sad, issue-packed and powerful as we have come to expect from his Latin American work. And it is exactly the subject we would have wanted him to tackle on returning home.

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^{Mine Boy}
…^{being one of the first black South African novels}

There was once a young black man working in a South African office. One day he heard a short-sighted Jewish woman read from Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.

‘The story of Othello jumped at me and invaded my heart and mind as the woman read,’ wrote Peter Abrahams years later. He began to go to school, learned to read and write and treasured books of European literature. In 1946 be became the first black South African to publish a novel since 1930, and by the late 1940s was part of a group of African intellectuals including Kenyatta and Nkrumah who were working to raise the world’s consciousness of the plight of non-white South Africans.

Abrahams himself escaped from the South African system to write for Western newspapers and eventually end up as chair of Radio Jamaica. His characters are usually not so fortunate. The hero of the first novel, Mine Boy, comes to the slums of Johannesburg as an innocent fresh from the countryside. ‘You are afoot, Xuma,’ the group of beer-selling women who take him in keep saying. In a world where plush restaurants for whites are a short walk from the illegal beer establishments which are constantly raided by police, these women live on their wits to survive. In this underworld are people like Daddy, the former leader of a black consciousness movement, who lies drunk in the gutter and wets his pants. And ‘in this place where people hide their feelings and their pains in drinking,’ Xuma comes to consciousness.

Mine Boy makes black people’s desperate poverty clear - even electricity is ‘white man’s light’. Yet this is not a miserable book. In the middle of pain, joy is always bursting out. The exuberance of the women who dance at Malay Camp’s spontaneous parties helps to wipe out the memory of the brooding mine dumps surrounding the city - at least for a while. Nor is the book sentimental. Xuma smiles at one of the old women selling beer, reminded by her ‘sweet and motherly’ voice of his own mother, only to hear her yell "‘Come up! Come up you sons of dogs! Come and choke your guts with drink!"… there was nothing motherly in her voice. Xuma looked at her and laughed. She winked roguishly at him and her leathery old face creased in a naughty smile’.

The simplicity of Abrahams’ language manages to suggest a suppressed passion and a desperation in the face of a system already extremely efficient at keeping the races - and the races’ standard of living - securely apart. ‘And... And... But... And...’ the most powerful passages repeat, creating an intensity that is almost Biblical. This is, after all, a prophetic book which predated the declaration of apartheid by just two years.

Against a backdrop of drunken arguments and stabbings, Abrahams’ black characters are tough in their loyalty to one another. By contrast, relationships between whites seem as over-elaborate as the number of their material possessions, as seen from the sparseness of the slums. The black people are forced to have a response to the contrast between black and white experience: to the doctor, having books, warmth and electricity are simply ‘a comfortable place ... not copying the white man’; Eliza, the female protagonist, is tortured by her craving for material possessions that belong only to whites; and Xuma is shoved into a final protest by the cynical approach of the mine bosses to human rights and safety.

Yet unlike many later black writers, Abrahams is cautiously kind on the subject of the white baas. Of the three in command at the mine, two are liberals. ‘It is not good to think only as a black man or a white man,’ says Xuma’s boss. ‘The white people in this country think only as white people, and that is why they do harm to your people.’

In the end, though, it is impossible for even liberal whites to comprehend the way black people are forced to live amid a dreadful tension, always on a knife’s edge. How far can anyone understand an experience they don’t share? the book keeps asking. ‘Did you FEEL these things like I do?’ Xuma finally explodes. ‘How can you understand, white man! You understand with your head. I understand with pain. With the pain of my heart.’

Carol Fewster

Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams (available in Penguin).