Jonathan Ball

In TheBrowser.com’s excellent “five books” series, To Heaven by Water author Justin Cartwright takes readers through five novels, mainly by white writers, that play light over the concept of “African literature”:

Q: What is African literature?

A: It comes in different varieties. One is African literature written by Africans, and which in South Africa has a particular dimension. Another is white writers writing about Africa. Some people deny there’s any such thing as “white writing” but in fact there clearly is. White writing is a phrase used by John Coetzee [Nobel Prize for Literature 2003]. It’s about the predicament of the white person in Africa – people who have been dropped down, willingly or unwillingly, in an alien environment, and who try to make an accommodation with it. Now a writer like Nadine Gordimer [Nobel Prize for Literature 1991] thinks she’s made such an accommodation with Africa that there is no such thing as white writing at all, but when you look at her books they’re essentially about the same problem: the white man in Africa. It goes back to Conrad and probably further.

• Read the complete article at TheBrowser.com

Book details

• To Heaven by Water by Justin Cartwright
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  EAN: 9780747598145
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• Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
  EAN: 9780141186900
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• Disgrace by JM Coetzee
  EAN: 9780099526834
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• A Good Man in Africa by William Boyd
  EAN: 9780140058871
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• The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer
  EAN: 9780747578246
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• Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary
  EAN: 9780460875875
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William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind has taken the literary world somewhat by storm. Here’s an excerpt from this inspiring book:

THE next day after lunch I began putting everything together. I took the fan, blades, bolts, and the dynamo outside behind our kitchen and arranged them in a neat row along the hard, barren dirt.

It was a wide, clear space to work and the perfect place to build my machine, close to both my room and the kitchen, which doubled as my laboratory, storage, and work sheds.

It was also the best place for shade. When the midmorning sun was blazing, a big acacia tree behind the latrine cast a long enough shadow so I could tinker in comfort. Once the sun shifted in the afternoon, the kitchen provided good shade of its own. It was also the best place in the compound to receive the eastern winds that rushed over the mountains from the lake. As I began to work that afternoon, the Dowa Highlands were wrapped in blue sky and looked quite majestic.

The first thing I needed to do was connect the blades to the tractor fan, so I went to the kitchen and prepared my drill. I took the long nail with a maize-cob handle and stuck it into the embers of the fire. Once it was glowing red, I used it to bore four holes in the top of each plastic blade, then two more holes down the centre. This process of heating, melting, and reheating took nearly three hours.

Taking a smaller bike wrench, I proceeded to fasten the blades to the tractor fan with the nuts and bolts Gilbert had purchased. We didn’t have proper washers to help secure the bolts, so I spent the next hour collecting bottle caps outside Ofesi Boozing Centre to use instead.

“Ah look,” said one of the drunkards in the doorway, his corkscrewed eyes ready to tip his body over. “The government is finally cleaning the roads. Hey boy, how about a drink for an old man? I’m an orphan, you know.”

“Sorry, I’m busy.”

• Complete excerpt in the Sunday Independent
• More information on William Kamkwamba and his book

Book details

• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer
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  EAN: 9780007316182
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Riaan Manser, who famously circumnavigated Africa by land, on his bicycle, has just completed his latest challenge – circumnavigating the island of Madagascar by sea, alone, in his kayak.

Manser’s Malagasy odyssey took a year. Some of his noteworthy experiences include being arrested for having an invalid visa; encountering cyclones Asma, Eric, Fanele, Izilda; being arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist; and being robbed on more than one occasion.

Here’s a write-up of the incredible journey that includes Manser’s key dates, from 4 July 2008, when he arrived in Antananarivo to 8 July 2009, when he paddled into Tamatave harbour, completing the 5000 km “Round the Outside” feat:

At the end of each day Manser would either pitch his tent on the shore or even barter for a small hut with the fish he had caught off his kayak. But it was landing the kayak Manser feared the most each day. ‘This isn’t just paddling from cocktail bar to cocktail bar,’ Manser told a radio host recently. Only a small percentage of Madagascar’s coastline resembles the post-cards with parts of the country being similar to the jagged Wild Coast of South Africa. ‘Sometimes I had no choice but to come through eight foot surfing dumping directly on to slabs of barnacled rock,’ says Manser. ‘I just have to hold my breath and let the adrenaline kick in. On several occasions I woke up the following morning flabbergasted at the shorebreak I had come through.’

(more…)

Riaan Manser, the adventurer who circumnavigated Africa on his bicycle, has completed his latest challenge, a new feat of endurance and a world first, the circumnavigation of Madagascar by kayak. The feat will be the subject of a follow-up book to his bestselling Around Africa on My Bicycle – watch this space!

Having a shark nudge his kayak, treading through storms to find a soft patch of land to sleep and spending days in a rotten Malagasy prison is Riaan Manser’s idea of a perfect career, he says.

The man who has just returned from an 11-month trip kayaking alone and unaided around Madagascar said it was his stubbornness and naivety that kept him going – and alive.

“I’d like people to remember me for having done something great with my life,” the South African adventurer told Reuters just a few days after finishing the 5 000km trip.

In 2005, Manser became the first man to cycle across Africa, covering 37 000km while passing through 34 countries, but physically, the kayaking was a different challenge, he said.

“I was busy stroking (the paddle) 20 000 times a day, every single day, to cover 40km… sometimes more,” he said.

The real every day battle

With the kayak and equipment weighing some 70kg and his own 100kg at the start of the trip on top of that, Manser said the physical exhaustion and loneliness was the real battle each day.

(more…)

In a world first, almost incredibly, Riaan Manser rode a bicycle around the continent of Africa. It took him two years, two months and fifteen days. He rode 36 500 kilometres through 34 different countries.

In Around Africa on my Bicycle – now released in a new edition – Manser tells the story of his epic journey. It is a story of blood, sweat, toil and tears. It is a story of triumph and occasional disaster. Of nights out under the stars, of searing heat and rain, of endless miles of Africa and of pressing on and never surrendering whatever the odds.

Mostly, however, it is the story of one man’s courage and determination to escape the mundane and see the continent he loves and feels so much a part of. It is the story of the human warmth he encounters, and occasionally human wrath and hostility as he crosses troubled countries and borders.
(more…)

Jonny Steinberg is currently a fellow of the Open Society Institute in New York. In the following podcast he discusses his research and experience of policing in South Africa, engaging with Herb Sturtz:

In 2007, Jonny Steinberg spent several months accompanying police patrols in Johannesburg townships to conduct an ethnographic study of the emerging relationship between democratic South Africa's police officers and its citizens. He argues that a democratic citizenry is policed only to the extent that it consents to be, and that South Africans have yet to give their full consent to being policed. The democratic state is in a sense half-formed, according to Steinberg; there are grey zones in cities where state institutions are sucked into a logic that long precedes democracy.

This talk focused on the controversial police practice of “stop-and-search” and the broader lessons for criminal justice reforms in emerging democracies.

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Book details

• Thin Blue: The unwritten rules of policing South Africa by Jonny SteinbergEAN: 9781868423033
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