Africa, Africa! - Softcover

Frederic Hunter; Hunter, Frederic

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885942184 ISBN 13: 9781885942180

Publisher: Cune Press, 2000

Synopsis

A collection of stories that depict Westerners encountering Africa -- its people, its mysteries, its beauty and bafflements. Often those encounters change the Westerners, leading some to wisdom, others to heartache. The stories take the reader from the heart of the Congo to modern Madagascar, from a village in Nairobi to the mountain-top palace of the Mwami of Kabare, from a train in South Africa to a dinner party in Ouagadougou. Journalists, diplomats, and teachers experience the problems and fascinations of life in Africa.

About this title

About the Author:

Fred Hunter came of age in Africa. He served first as a US Information Officer in the Congo, opening an American Cultural Center in the Equateur, its remotest region, then fleeing when rebellion engulfed the country. Later he became The Christian Science Monitor s Africa Correspondent, based in Nairobi and covering sub-Saharan Africa.

Leaving journalism, Fred had a 25-year career as a screenwriter. For PBS he adapted his The Hemingway Play as well as Ring Lardner s The Golden Honeymoon and for that network wrote Lincoln and the War Within about the Fort Sumter crisis.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Equateur

Entering the Equateur. . . . Some have described it as traveling back to the earliest beginnings of time.

Driving into the region you see little: only the track before you, the rutted, orange-colored road rising and falling, descending to a watercourse bridged by logs and rising again to the top of the next low ridge. Beside you flashes the jungle. It grows thick and dark and does not entice you. Above is the sky, brilliantly blue. It winds like a river through the leafy overhang of trees. And you go up and down, up and down on the orange laterite road.

When you fly into the Equateur, the land spreads below you with unrelieved flatness. It extends beyond the range of your eyes, beyond the haze lying across it in the dry season, beyond the reaches of binoculars during the rains when the air itself is as clear as a lens. It sweeps to the Atlantic; it stretches to the backbone of Africa: the Rift Valley Escarpment and the Mountains of the Moon.

Below lies the jungle, a green sponge of vegetation surging outward. It lies dense and endless over a space whose walls are the sky. Looking down you may spot a mud pond fringed by trampled grasses where elephants dance and bathe in the evenings. Or a river. Or an occasional plantation or mission, perhaps a cluster of huts. But as a rule you see only the greenness of vegetation.

Plantations untangle and order this verdure; they do not interrupt it. From the air you suddenly notice that the patternless intertwine of plant life has given way to textured design, to rubber trees or oil palms set out and tended in neat rows. A referee has stopped the struggle among the trees for space.

Along one edge of the textured design plantation buildings hug the river's edge; corrugated roofs glint in the sun. The pattern of trees continues; then abruptly it ends. The chaos of jungle resumes. . . .

Villages line the roadways, eight or ten huts to a side. They stand at the regular intervals where colonial administrators resettled their residents to provide a maintenance force. They cluster close to plantations, too, and to missions and European trading towns. And they cling to the shorelines of rivers and swamps where the fishing is good.

Only rivers interrupt the jungle. From the air they have the appearance and much of the mystery of snakes. A jungle river is a silt-covered living force; it twists through primeval growth and sleeps in the sun.

In the Equateur the greatest of these river-serpents is the Congo. It is a broad flat boa with an island-dotted hide, curling out of Africa's heart. It travels north from the Katanga highlands, turns west sliding over the rapids at Kisangani and at Mbandaka is moving south. Running broad and flecked with islands, its waters seep back into swamps. It swallows the Ruki; it absorbs the Ubangi and Kasai, sweeps past Kinshasa, plunges through a gorge and surges into the Atlantic. It meets the ocean with such force that it discolors the water for miles out into the sea.

For the Equateur the river is the central fact of life.

Sailing into the region you realize this. Going by sternwheeler the passage from Kinshasa takes four-and-a-half days. During that time you are part of the river. Watching the shoreline you feel that nature has held itself unchanged for centuries. You pass fishing villages, some of them abandoned. Beached pirogues mark the inhabited ones. Men weaving nets wave to the boat.

You slip by short rises of ground where the trees thrust upward, yearning toward the sky. Profusions of lianas hang from their branches. You see the shoreless expanses of swamp: grass simply growing into the river.

Soon the variations lose significance. You realize that only the constants have meaning: the sky, the water, the land.

Your white sternwheeler is pushing several motored barges. You climb forward to observe them. The steerage passengers, having built squatter villages on them out of mats, are loving the breeze and the leisure, the change from daily routine. Gaiety enlivens their movements and cha-cha music fills the air. Nursing and bathing their infants, the women laugh and yak; their inflections are like a song. Men crowd the rails to bargain for food from fishermen who have pulled out to the paddlewheeler and lashed their pirogues alongside.

The hours pass. You return to the deck outside your cabin to read. But the sun is hot. It glares off the river and has already reddened your skin. You are reading Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness. The story is slow, the sentences as tangled as the jungle's vegetation. You put the book down. You watch the sky, the water, the land. You understand what is really here: space without time.

And silence. Silence. A great silence hangs over the river.

At night you hear it. You stand on the deck in darkness. The stars seem within reach. The air has at last turned cool. The water whispers below, sliding away from the boat. Do you see the shoreline or only imagine it? You cannot tell. Then you hear the silence. It is vast and heavy; it presses down on the Equateur.

The next day you try to read again. But again the sun is hot. You do not wait so long to close your book. You watch the sky, the water, the land, and now and then you doze. You begin to understand Africa's sense of time.

Time is like the river: vast and silent and ever onwardly flowing. You ride its currents. Time, like the river, is there: before you came, after you go. Like the river, time is bigger than you. And with or without you it flows.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cune Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1885942184
• ISBN 13: 9781885942180
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 263