Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 I have just finished reading this latest book from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and have really loved it. Adichie is firmly one of my favourite authors. This is a huge book but I lapped it up, sneaking half hours to read it when I should have been doing other things...

It tells the story of two Nigerians, girl- and boyfriend at school, callled Ifemelu and Obinze, who both travel to the west as adults to find the "better life" they have dreamed and talked about as students.  Ifemelu gets a scholarship to the US, and Obinze finds work as an illegal immigrant in the UK. The book is partly their love story, but more about their experiences as immigrants, their relationships, how it is to be black (which wasn't an issue back home) and eventually how they return to Nigeria and pick up new lives there.

Ifemelu takes to blogging about her experiences as a "Non-American Black" and the sections on her blogging are brilliant, including some of her posts and readers' reactions.

For me the parts I read most avidly were the transitions, both how Ifemelu arrived in the US, and then how she felt about returning home after fifteen years abroad. I was surprised how completely I related to the descriptions of her initial reactions to the west. Her shock that it was not all as clean, wealthy, and beautiful as she had come to believe. Her feelings of confusion about everything. Her disappointment with the fruit and vegetables.

This is such a rich book, revealing about what it is to be an ex-pat, and a returnee, a woman, a friend, a desperate job-seeker, a lover, a writer. I highly recommend it.

Heart of Darkness

So many words have been written about this book over the years. But I have only just read it, so my thoughts are fresh - to me - , if not new. Having recently read the dystopian MaddAddam,one  of my reactions reading this was, it is not as graphic as the same book written today would be. The evil is hinted at, the suffering of the Africans forced to work for the colonialists is only sketched in. But in my view the horror is all the darker for that.

One way of thinking about the book is that it depicts a man's journey into his own soul, by journeying towards, first physically and then in understanding, another man, Mr Kurtz. And the ultimate revelation is that what lies within a person is "the horror, the horror"... The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke out against Conrad and this book, criticising it at one point for using Africa and the exploitation and suffering of Africans, as a mere backdrop for the story of the mental collapse of a petty white man. It is true that the Congolese people are kept very much in the background, their behaviour seems parodied, they appear out of the forest on the river banks almost as a wallpaper for the journey. And they are called savages and so on. There is some truth in Achebe's criticism. But on the other hand, I wouldn't say this is the story of the collapse of one white man - it is a description of the collapse into madness, futility, and evil, of all the white people involved - and Conrad does seem to link this to the whole evil of colonialism and the wickedness of using its people, stealing from them, stripping the Congo of its resources using the very sweat and blood of the Congolese people to do it. It is really the story of the fall into evil of the whole human race. But the Congolese people are not being blamed, they are the victims, and so they do appear as the props. And clearly Conrad didn't have much understanding of them.

It is true the Congolese people in the book are dehumanised, except for one or two glimpses of genuine interaction - such as at the helmsman's very moment of death - and that is sad, and leaves the book feeling dated. I felt the same reading Graham Green's The Heart of the Matter, where there are no African people included in the story at all. But Conrad was writing at the end of the colonial period and he was writing to show the evils of the colonial enterprise, not condoning it. He objects manifestly to the ignorance and self-seeking greed of the various agents and station managers his character Marlow encounters. He seems to prefer Kurtz's complete madness to their hypocrisy and stupidity, which is why Marlow sides with Kurtz in the end. I would see the book as a step in the right direction, a first awakening to what was going on in the "Scramble for Africa".

Conrad ends the book with the none-too-subtle message that the heart of darkness is not in far off "uncivilised" places, but just around the next bend of the river,  - for all of us.

This made me wonder about our capacity for evil, again. As Christians we know the source of light, and He is real to us. And I said in my recent post on this, that we have the responsibility of being that light to other people. But still sometimes I am touched by fingers of that darkness, that sense of horror at the heart of it all, even hints of despair. When the evil that goes on seems too much, too prevalent. When the news shows young blood-covered Syrian men lying in hospital, no living relatives left, no solution to the fighting, the beautiful Syrian cities shot and bombed to rubble. When fighting in south Sudan goes on, and on. When the flood waters damaging our farms, homes and churches sit and sit and sit, and it still rains and rains. When I then think of Bangladesh flooding worse than this every year...

Is the human race a messy, selfish disaster, and our world a ruined, warming planet heading inevitably to its man-made end?

That would be one way of looking at it.

Another way is that God made our world, and made us, male and female, in his image. When he made it, it was all good (Genesis 1). When we messed up, he sent his son to show us the right way to go about life (John 3:16). And at the same time, to give us a way to be saved from our own personal particular sins. And he also sent his Spirit to be in us, to give us the strength and ability to live right. And he also promises that he will return to reign on earth, and that then the evil and all the pain will be No More. This painful, sometimes dark time, is the grace period God has allowed us, for as many as possible to get to know him. Also, the world is not hurtling downward to disaster and ruin like a run-away train. It may be heading towards its end, but, only at the pace and timing allowed by God, and under his control.

That gives me a lot of hope to hold onto. And we do need hope.

Twelve Years, MaddAddam, Romans

We went to see Twelve Years a Slave, expecting not to enjoy it but knowing it was an amazingly well-told and moving story. Two things affected me the most: the cruelty of people to their own fellow human beings, and the strength of the will to live, partly through the ability to cling to a tiny shred of hope. Before we even see the way the plantation owners use and dehumanise the slaves, we see how two profiteers blatantly befriend and entrap a happy, normal family man and musician (the main character), and sell him to slavers, in full knowledge of what they are doing to him. What makes people able to misuse each other so baldly?

While I do sometimes feel like punching somebody (not saying who...!) out of anger or frustration, I'm not sure I could actually cause physical harm to another person cold-bloodedly, for my own gain. But we hear about this kind of cruelty and misuse of others all the time - young girls being trafficked, women held captive and raped for years on end in a suburban house, drugs cynically sold to teenagers, etc etc etc.

(But, what about the harm I cause others without seeing it? As when I buy a cheap T-shirt which was made by a child-labourer somewhere? Just because we don't see the effects of our actions doesn't mean they don't have that effect. I worry about that.)

I have just finished reading Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam, the third part of her brilliant MaddAddam trilogy. (The first book was Oryx and Crake, the second The Year of the Flood.) As with the film, this was an uncomfortable read, but giving some enlightenment. It is set in a dystopian future, where the human race has been almost entirely wiped out, through a drug hidden in a pleasure-pill called "Blyssplus". In this future world, people have become obsessed with leisure, self-image, and gain, and society is controlled by corporations who are developing more and more extreme ways of using technology to make money. Consumerism gone completely mad. For example, Paintball has become Painball where people literally fight to the death, watched online by any who want to. Corporations kidnap their rivals' employees and strip their brains of the information, rendering them brain dead. The depths of cruelty and cynicism in this world are phenomenal. But much of what the author imagines, has been done, or is now possible to do, and actually, the cruelty we see in our entire human history is only being projected into a more technologically able future.

Margaret Atwood does give a glimmer of hope, in that a very small group of humans survive, along with some human hybrids made by one of the corporation geniuses. The survivors are mostly former members of a quirky religious cult called The God's Gardeners. Whilst they are not really Christians, their religion is a hotch-potch of Christianity, Judaism, and conservationism. What I like is that it is the people of faith who still love the natural world and try to conserve it, who do recycling, grow their own food, avoid harming others. And they are the ones who survive, mostly (not taking the Blyssplus) and who know how to make a go of living in community, and without electricity or supermarkets. (By the end of the trilogy they are actually still using commodities raided from the falling-down malls. But there are some hints about them learning to make their own ink and paper for when those things run out.)

It is not as simplistic as I have made out here, the characters are complex and among the God's Gardeners there is all the nominalism, doubt and division that we see in our churches. I think it is the understanding of the deep-seatedness of faith in God, the wisdom of living his way, and as part of that, a hope for creation and a mandate to love it, that I really warm to.

Thinking about the cynicism and greed in our society, the terrible things that people do to each other in war or for financial gain, can make me pretty depressed, and sad in general for the world, and for God who must feel so let down, so disappointed. But reading the biblical book of Romans in our home group, I have been reminded that evil is nothing new, God knows and has always known what his people are capable of. And he is light. The light of goodness and love does shine, although sometimes it feels very small. But, it won't be overwhelmed. The hope we have is that evil practices will end, and that there will be justice, that God does reign. In the meantime, we have to hold on to the hope, not get too sad, and more importantly, keep doing our bits of goodness and kindness, being that light to others.

Best Reads 2013

Boy I have read a lot this year. Partly because of taking the bus to work two days a week (I drive on the others). Also because... I have come across some excellent books.

My reading year started with receiving a Kindle for a Christmas present. Having been reluctant to have one, I finally decided, though, that a Kindle might be a good thing. And I do believe that it has led to... more reading! I still read "real" books, borrowed from the local library, or from my brother Mark who reads as much if not more than me, or occasionally bought. And maybe one in three books I read on the kindle.

Kindle books:
I started by reading all three Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins. I raced through them, quite drawn into that world (another dystopia to add to my collection), wanting to know the outcome. The books are gripping, although I kept asking myself if I really should be reading about teenagers being made to kill each other. A bit dodgy... But now that Alex has read them, I am glad I did first. And we all enjoyed seeing the two films so far.

Another attraction of the kindle is that many older books are free. So I have filled in quite a few gaps in my reading of classics this year. These included Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Wolf - so clever how it segues from one scenario to another as though the reader leaps from one narrator's head into another's; The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - a fascinating journey with the suffering narrator, where you get to experience what electric shock therapy is like among other things; The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”) - if you haven't read this, I highly recommend it, it is a fabulous story and so beautifully, amusingly written.

Also on Kindle I read Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant, which is a historical novel set in a convent in Italy in the 1500s, about a younger daughter who is sent to the convent against her will because of an "unsuitable" romance - living through that captivity with her is eye-opening. Quite an easy read but very evocative.

"Normal" books:
One great non-fiction book I read was The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford. Since the author grew up reading many of the books that I did, it was such good fun being reminded of them all, but he also analyses them brilliantly to show how they shaped his growing understanding of the world. 

Another non-fiction book I adored was Congo Journey by Redmond O'Hanlon. This is a bit like Blood River in that it tracks a somewhat crazy white guy as he makes a sometimes dangerous, always fascinating journey on foot and by boat through the Congo. The author was interested in the wildlife of Congo in particular, giving brief but lovely descriptions of the birds and insects he found; his ultimate goal was to find the Congo dinosaur which was said to inhabit a remote, sacred lake. Whether he found it or not, I'll leave for you to find out... It is an amazing description of the country and the people he travelled with, giving occasional glimpses of the terrible history of the Congo. O'Hanlan entered fearlessly into the culture, drinking palm wine quite wildly with his guides at night, acquiring a fetish to keep himself safe, surviving on foufou, fish and monkey meat... Total immersion. It is a wonderful read.  

I also loved The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd, a murder mystery/love story/historical novel which describes 1930s colonial life in a new part of the world to me, the Philippines. The main character is loveable and annoying - but you so want to know how it all works out for him in the end. 

I raced through The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey, set in 1930s Alaska - a very sweet poignant tale of an older couple who long for a child; it reads like a folk story and is based on one - it is a beautiful book.

My two favourite books were Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver, and Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth. Flight Behaviour combines my interest (is that the right word?) in global warming, with the fantastic writing of Barbara Kingsolver who is one of my top authors. It tells of how an invasion of monarch butterflies transforms life for the people of an Appalachian town. 

Sacred Hunger is a historical novel set in the 1700s in England, about the slave trade, and human nature. It is told from the point of view of a wealthy merchant who sends off a ship to buy slaves from West Africa and sell them in Jamaica, and also of a doctor who travels on the ship, who abhors the whole thing and ends up bringing about, although involuntarily, a mutiny on the ship. This book was mind-blowing in revealing to me how the slave trade was considered legal and defensible among the Georgians, and how their entire economy was wound up in it. Some people were beginning to see the vileness of it, and yet how to bring about change? It seemed impossible as all the powerful, influential people depended on it for their wealth and status. It has made me think about things in our society that we take for granted as being reasonable, and that we depend upon, and yet in future will be obviously abhorrent and utterly unacceptable. As Dan and I talked about it we thought that the way we are damaging the planet is probably the thing about which in the future (I hope at least) people will look back and say, "How could they have been so arrogant, so foolish, and so blind?" In a similar way, the people, governments, companies who could bring the necessary changes, have too much to lose. But at some point, the obviousness of the cause, - the truth, in fact-, will become so clear that the necessary sacrifices will have to be made. 

A good year in books! 

Writing lessons from Laurie Lee

Most English schoolchildren are made to read "Cider With Rosie" and "As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning" by Laurie Lee at some point in their gradual progress through English Literature. I remember quite enjoying the first, with its line sketches and descriptions of a boy growing up in countryside similar to my own surroundings, running free in the fields and woods, and returning home to steaming stews with his mother and sisters in a chaotic but love-filled kitchen.

A few weeks ago I hauled the children and Frodo off on another "Gloucestershire Walk" - around the Slad Valley, where Laurie Lee grew up and the setting of his book. The valley was sumptuous, overgrown, green, and hot. We met a few characters along the way: an old gardener perusing his beans, who tried to help us find a shortcut when we had only just set out, and a lady who insisted on us joining her by her pond to feed her ducks. We hiked down narrow lanes, alongside hayfields being harvested, through thick green woodlands, past honey-coloured stone Cotswold cottages. At the end of the walk, the children completely refused to allow me to look inside the church or to stop at the Wool Pack Inn, which feature in the book, insisting instead we head straight to a shop for ice lollies and cokes.

Laurie Lee's writing is so evocative and extravagant, with brilliant metaphors, and adjectives calling on all the senses; you not only see, but hear and smell the garden, the run-down cottage, the fields, the schoolroom, the valley in summer and winter, and you know and recognise the spinster teacher, the so grown-up voluptuous sisters, the two grannies who live next door, and all the others. It is really a complete read, like a satisfying, delicious meal. 

A couple of quotes to whet your appetites!

"The great beech filled at least half the sky and shook shadows all over the house. Its roots clutched the slope like a giant hand, holding the hill in place. Its trunk writhed with power, threw off veils of green dust, rose towering into the air, branched into a thousand shaded alleys, became a city for owls and squirrels. I had thought such trees to be as old as the earth, I never dreamed that a man could make them. Yet it was Granny Trill’s dad who had planted this tree, had thrust in the seed with his finger. How old must he have been to leave such a mark? Think of Granny’s age, and add his on top, and you were back at the beginning of the world.” 

“Here I discovered water — a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground.” 
― Laurie Lee

Silence

Yesterday I finished reading Silence, by Shusaku Endo. It is amazing. Written in the 1960s by a Catholic Japanese author, thought of by some as a Japanese Graham Greene. It is so thoughtful, and beautifully written, simply drawing pictures with just the sparest phrases and details. Just like in art, the negative spaces make it meaningful.

The story is of two Portuguese missionary priests who travel via Goa to Japan in the early 1600s, to support the Christians in Japan who are being severely persecuted. Several hundred thousand people had become Christians through the missionary work of priests back in the 1500s. For a while Christianity was accepted but then the shoguns began to turn against it because of its connection with the west; they saw it as an insidious attempt at colonialism. So Japanese Christians and missionaries were tortured,   and when they didn't apostasize, killed, often by crucifixion, or by being tied to stakes in the sea. Tens of thousands were killed, and many more apostasized, but it is thought that many lived on as hidden Christians.

Word had got about that an older Portguguese priest, Ferreira, had apostasized and had taken a Japanese name and even a wife, and was now writing tracts against Christianity. The main character of the book, Rodriguez, wanted to track down Ferreira, whom he had known and admired as his tutor in seminary, in order to make sure this tale wasn't true - because he was unable to accept it.

Eventually Rodriguez himself is captured and has to face the torturers himself. His thought processes, his questioning, and his final coming to terms with his fate and with God are fascinating to follow.

Among the threads which run through the book, one of the most interesting to me was the challenge frequently given by Rodriguez's antagonists, who claim that Christianity has failed to take hold in Japan because the Japanese had never understood God in the Christian sense, but that all along they had made their own version of the Christian God. The whole study of contextualization I find very interesting. What's wrong with a Japanese version of Christ? Rodriguez is convinced that there are true Christians here, since they are willing to endure tortures and die for their faith. In fact he sees many of them as better Christians than himself, and he their priest. This dynamic is so interesting, as is the way his understanding of himself grows through the book.

Another thread is the use of sounds and silence. The silence of the title is the apparent silence of God in the face of the persecution of those who love him. Rodriguez is constantly calling on God to break this silence, to no avail, but he hears God speak towards the end of the book,  - apparently commanding him to deny him. But if he apostasizes, will he not be rejected by God for ever, a shameful creature despised by all, like Ferreira? All through the book, sounds are described, the sounds of the sea especially, and of birds in the night, and of voices heard in the dark.

The main character sometimes narrates and sometimes is described. He is a sympathetic and very human figure. I was touched by how his relationship with Jesus is so real, and by how the image of the suffering Jesus helps him deeply throughout the events of the book. Many times he calls on memories of pictures of Christ's face, and describes it as a face he loves dearly. It comforts him tremendously. (He only sees a physical image of Christ's face once in the book, because all Christian artifacts have been destroyed or hidden away - and it is when he is being commanded to trample on it in apostasy.) This devotion, in the sense of deep love for a person, Jesus, is lacking in our sometimes rather dry wordy evangelical faith, I feel. I am going to try for more devotion.

I can't give away what happens, but it gives the reader a huge amount to think about. What does come out in the end so powerfully, is the unconditional love of God for all his people both weak and strong. It is a beautiful message coming from quite a shocking tale, a tough book to read, but incredibly worth it.

I am interested in this story of Christianity in Japan because my own great-grandparents and grandparents were missionaries with CMS in Japan, from the late 1800s to 1938. I have so far never managed to look into it very much, but this book has made me much more aware than before, that they were part of a very fascinating story.

"The Disciple," by Lucy Peppiatt - and my thoughts on sermons...

I am reading a book by my friend Lucy Peppiatt, called "The Disciple". It is a really good book about being a Christian, written in a chatty, kind of flowing way, which carries you along. There are loads of good and often funny stories about incidents in people's lives, including Lucy's own family - and since I know them a little bit, it is fun getting those inside glimpses.

She talks about having what are traditionally called "spiritual disciplines" in your life, but she prefers the term holy habits, and she says that there is no point whatsoever doing them if it is out of a sense of duty, or to win points - but rather, if you have met and loved Jesus, you'll want to know him more, and these are the ways... She isn't saying the holy habits are dispensable, rather that, you can only really do them if you have the will and yes, a bit of willpower, but, then doing them will bring so much reward, so once you start it will become easier and more exciting. And you'll see transformation in your life. You do what you can, and then the Spirit of God will do ALL that He can - and there will definitely be results!

At least, this is what I am getting out of it... So far...

There is a section on the gift that God's Word is to us, and how we receive it in various ways including hearing preaching. She writes a bit here about how in many of the less traditional churches, there is an inclination towards abandoning the preaching - because it has come to be seen as irrelevant and boring in our entertainment age. She bewails this as preaching is still so important. But, there is a problem when preaching does become dull and long and out of touch. And I must admit, I have listened to so many dull, deadly sermons, I had begun to despair of the sermon slot myself. Until we started going to our church, St Andrews in Churchdown. The vicar there, Jonathan Perkin, is so gifted at preaching - I actually, honestly look forward to his sermons every week. Which is a miracle. He manages to be very easy to listen to, profound, and encouraging, week after week. (I also enjoy the curate's sermons too, - they are enjoyable and have humour in them.)

Of course, for those of you who know Dan, you'll know that his sermons are always entertaining and far-reaching, quite out of the box, and definitely teach you things. So I never despaired of his...

So, Lucy includes this brilliant quote from Martin Luther in her book, which I have to reproduce because it made me laugh and it is so true:

"Cursed be every preacher who aims at lofty topics in the church, looking for his own glory and selfishly desiring to please one individual or another. When I preach here I adapt myself to the circumstances of the common people. I don't look at the doctors and masters, of whom scarcely forty are present, but at the hundred or the thousand young people and children. It's to them that I preach, to them that I devote myself, for they too need to understand. If the others don't want to listen, they can leave... we preach in public for the sake of plain people. Christ could have taught in a profound way, but He wished to deliver His message with the utmost simplicity in order that the common people might understand. Good God, there are sixteen-year-old girls, women, and farmers in the church, and they don't understand lofty matters."     Luther's Works, quoted in Lucy Peppiatt, The Disciple: on becoming truly human, (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2012) p 39.

OK, so maybe things have changed a little bit now... but Luther's point stands! Only a few weeks ago I sat in another evangelical church with my children and their little cousins filling the row in front of us, while the preacher spoke seriously and deeply for thirty minutes, without one reference to their presence nor one sentence they could understand. It was almost beyond belief.

Preachers, please don't be boring and irrelevant! And if you have heard a lot of dull preaching, don't worry, there are still great preachers out there, and when you hear one, it is like water falling on dry thirsty ground.

Give Me This Mountain, by Helen Roseveare

Helen Roseveare when she was a medical missionary in Congo

I have just finished reading Dr Helen Roseveare's autobiography, "Give Me This Mountain." It is a classic missionary life story, telling of Helen's teenage years, university life as a medical student and as a star hockey and cricket player, her conversion, and then her first placement as a WEC missionary doctor, in the Congo in the fifties and sixties, pre and during the independence struggle.

It is so honest, which is why I loved reading it. She writes in a real and lively way, so that you feel that you can see the sparkle in her eyes as you read it. And it is almost like following a modern-day blog, in that, she recounts so many of her thought processes and emotions along the way, and the mistakes she made, the struggles she had, her disagreements with other missionaries, her feelings of being the odd one out, of loving the Africans too much, or of being imposed upon too much, her feelings about being single, and much more.

It is also a fascinating account of how just a few missionaries, in a country with no trained doctors of its own (then), managed to set up several hospitals and training centres: Helen herself established and monitored over forty local clinics in the surrounding areas, among many other projects. She sounds like such an independent, gifted woman, much-loved by the Congolese she worked with and for, and yet often she apparently felt lonely and misunderstood, and according to her book she felt as though she achieved little.

This book culminates with the account of how the hospital and the missionaries fared in the violent days of independence. Many left, but she did not, and was captured at one point by Congolese soldiers and even raped. She does not go into that at all in the book, apart from hinting that she and the others all suffered physically at the hands of the soldiers. But her willingness to suffer and to stay in the country, to side with the people, to try to understand, is inspiring.

Helen Roseveare 

I am now looking forward to reading the second book she wrote, about her return to Congo only a short while after these events. It is called, "He Gave us a Valley."

I recommend this book to all you medical and missionary types out there. Maybe some of you already know it, it is a well-known classic - I am glad I finally came across it.

The Lower River, by Paul Theroux

 If you have read Paul Theroux's 2002 Dark Star Safari, you'll know that Theroux worked at Makerere University in Uganda in the 1960's, and made a return visit to Africa forty years later, when he traveled from Cairo to Cape Town by local transport, revisiting Uganda on the way. (Before his stint at Makerere, he had gone as a Peace Corps volunteer to Malawi - but he was thrown out because of his political activities there.)
Dark Star Safari irritated me because, although I enjoyed Theroux's descriptions of the scenery, the people, and his journey, I found his attitude really annoying. He seemed to think that he alone understood Africans and Africa, and that all the people he met along the way, apart from poverty-stricken Africans, were either idiots, or misguided, or self-serving and making a buck. He wrote off every NGO worker, missionary, and settler.

But he had an agenda apparently which goes towards explaining this: he was out to show that Aid was a bad thing, all the "help"given to Africa  had failed. He makes the case that the cities and towns of Africa he visited on his journey, had badly deteriorated rather than improved in the forty years since he was there before. Especially Makerere - which was a beautiful and organised campus in the 1960's. He found it not so much so in the 2000s. Well, having recently seen photographs myself of Kampala and Makerere in the 50s and 60s, I might be inclined to agree on that point. However I still find Theroux arrogant. It would be somehow different if he would be even a little bit sympathetic to the people who have come with good intentions, sincerely trying to "help," rather than drawing them all as a hopelessly naive and/or cynical bunch. (Which OK, some missionaries and aid workers are, but, not all.)

This book, The Lower River, written in 2012, reflects Theroux's belief that aid has basically ruined Africa. It is quite a shocking story. He writes about the Malawians harshly, but puts all the blame for the way they have become on the westerners who picked them up, used them and dropped them, in his telling of it.

The story is of a retired shop-owner who, with nothing left in his American life,  returns to the remote rural village in Malawi where he spent four happy years as a Peace Corps volunteer in his twenties, building up a school, loved and accepted by the people, living the simple African life. But the village he returned to, turned out to be nothing like the one he had left before. Only a few people knew him still, but they had aged far more than him and were all but unrecognisable. But he was welcomed as an honoured guest, and apart from his disappointment that his school was a fallen-down ruin and home of snakes, he was initially happy to be back. But slowly he realises that the people have changed. Independence has been a disappointment to the rural areas of Malawi; the hope of prosperity and development, which had given the people such a positive and determined attitude back in the 60s, has failed them, and they find themselves worse off than ever, with no hope at all. So they see the white man, who tells them he has come back to help, as a dupe, and they basically wheedle, flatter and manipulate all his money out of him until he is as poor and helpless and trapped as anyone there - if not more so. The story turns very dark.

Some of the scenes are very telling, such as one of food aid arriving in otherwise unreachable places by helicopter, being handed out by famous pop stars from the west in ridiculous skimpy outfits, their unknown songs blaring out as the helicopter descends, and the people gathering since the night before, rioting, grabbing the sacks to take away and sell or to feed their own families instead of the orphans it is intended for. Some of what Theroux portrays is true.

But it is, at least I hope, exaggerated, and made into a very gripping but hyperbolic story: actually, a morality tale of the dangers of dependency and aid.

I loved it for its descriptions of scenery, village life and culture before it had gone so badly wrong, and also for the perspective of the mzungu who only came to help - that one could relate to a little bit. But it is incredibly sad. And definitively negative about the effects of foreign aid. There is no sighting of a person who has actually helped, or been a good or positive influence. There are glimpses of "good" Africans, but they have been chased out of the village; they are powerless to help the situation and can only mourn it.

So, read it if you can stomach it.

I still gobble up any book set in Africa, even if it leaves a sour taste in the mouth like this one does. I did abandon one (called Hotel Juliet) after a couple of chapters because it was so badly written. This one is very well written, but, it is only telling one part of the story, a tragic one. If you read it, please tell me what you think...

Small, step-wise changes

"How do you encourage people to keep their hope," Joan (Kingsolver's friend) asked, "but not their complacency?"She was involved that spring in producing a film about global climate change, and preoccupied with striking this balance. The truth is so horrific: we are marching ourselves to the maw of our own extinction. An audience that doesn't really get that will amble out of the theatre unmoved, go home and change nothing. But an audience that does get it may be so terrified they'll feel doomed already. They might walk out looking paler, but still do nothing. How is it possible to inspire an appropriately repentant attitude towards a planet that is really, really upset? ...

We cherish our fossil-fuel driven conveniences, such as the computer I am using to write these words. We can't exactly name-call this problem, or vote it away. The cure involves reaching down into ourselves and pulling out a new kind of person. The practical problem is, of course, how to do that. It's impossible to become a fuel purist, and it seems like failure to change our ways only halfway, or a pathetic ten per cent. So why even try? When the scope of the problem seems insuperable, isn't it reasonable just to call this one, give up, and get on with life as we know it?

... This is a now or never kind of project. But a project, none-the-less. Global-scale alteration from pollution didn't happen when human societies started using a little bit of fossil fuel. It happened after unrestrained growth, irresponsible management, and a cultural refusal to assign any moral value to excessive consumption. Those habits can be reformed. They have been reformed several times in the past. In the last century we've learned that some of our favourite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required are more systemic, and nobody seems to want to go first...

I share with almost every adult I know this crazy quilt of optimism and worries, feeling locked into certain habits but keen to change them in the right direction. And the tendency to feel like a jerk for falling short of absolute conversion I'm not sure why. If a friend had a coronary scare and started exercising three times a week, who would hound him about the other four days? These earnest efforts might just get us past the train-wreck of the daily news... searching out redemption where we can find it: recycling or car-pooling or growing a garden, or saving a species or something. Small, step-wise changes in personal habits aren't trivial. Ultimately they will, or won't, add up to having been the thing that mattered.

Barbara Kingsolver,  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, (London, Faber and Faber Ltd, 2007) pp 345-6.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver

Two of my favourite topics combined - yay! Food and the environment. So now I have another hero, Barbara Kingsolver. Actually, I have loved her books for years - you all know The Poisonwood Bible which stands out from the rest. If you haven't read it, you must. Just recently I read her latest book, Flight Behaviour, which is a wonderful read, and I think second best to Poisonwood Bible. Talking to a friend about that book, she asked me if I had read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and raved about it - so I got hold of a copy, and it is so far amazing.

Anyone who read The Dirty Life, about a couple who take up farming, will love this one as well.

Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from Tucson, Arizona, to southern Appalacia to farm their land there, because of the realisation that living in the middle of the desert means that every drop of food and water that crosses their lips has been driven, trucked or flown a very long way to sustain them there. The cost in energy and the damage to the planet for humans to live in Tucson is massive (there are some statistics) and they made a decision as a family to live where their food can be and is grown.

The book tells how they spent a year trying to live on food that is grown around them - food that they know exactly where it comes from and who grew it. They have their own farm and they grew a lot themselves; the book has seasonal recipes for cooking when you have a glut - though I wish there were more recipes in it.

Among the points the author makes in the introductory chapters are two that struck me. One is that by eating locally-produced food you are saving so much of the energy that goes into transporting it (she refers to "oily food.") Another is that regions where people have a strong food culture depending on local produce usually have the most delicious diets, and are the healthiest. She mentions Italy, France, Japan, among others. So she sees a need for the US to develop its own new culture of food based on traditional and local foods. Of course Britain does not get a mention - we do have traditional foods but I am not sure they live up to France and Italy's...! But nor has our diet become as badly commercialised as in the US, yet (thinking of portion size and additives).

I am enthusiastic about the idea of becoming a "locavore". I even talked with a friend about sharing their communal allotment this year!! It makes so much sense. However there are a lot of problems associated with it and I have some reservations. One is, growing your own food, canning food, and cooking everything from scratch is very time-consuming. Two, buying vegetable and meat from farmers' markets (which are everywhere now) is extremely expensive and we are living on a limited budget. Three, so many things have to be imported - can I manage without not only coffee but tea as well? Chocolate? Bananas? Wine? Pasta? Rice? Will potatoes be enough?? And a related point, don't countries depend to some extent on other countries buying their produce? If the UK stopped importing tea, wouldn't India have a financial crisis? So how can this theory be completely right? Of course Fair Trade is a good way to go and might be the answer to that. But it is complex: the carbon footprint is still there.

So, I will end up with some compromise version as usual and maybe just make myself feel a bit better... But, it will be a way to make myself try some new recipes and lose some weight... and, every little helps, right? And maybe if everyone did that little bit, it would make a difference.

As usual, I'd love to know anyone's thoughts...

Re-entry revisited

I am skimming through a book by Marion Knell called "Burn-Up or Splash Down - Surviving the culture shock of re-entry," and it looks good already. Isn't it a bit late to be reading that? I hear you ask... Don't worry, I did read a couple of re-entry books before our return in 2011; I am reading this now to see if it would be a helpful one to recommend to others, and also to see if it can shed light on why I found re-entry so stressful, and also because I will be teaching on re-entry later in my missions course, and also because I want to be able to help others who return from living abroad in future.

These are the five stages of re-entry as described by David Pollock in Third Culture Kids, quoted by Marion Knell on p11 of her book:

"1. Involvement A state in which you feel you belong in a place and society; people know you; you are committed and have meaningful relationships and responsibilities.

2. Leaving A time when you celebrate, grieve and say farewells. You withdraw from responsibilities, commitments and relationships. It is a stage marked by a mixture of emotions, such as excitement, anticipation, grief and guilt.

3. Transition The period when you first arrive in the new situation. It is best defined in the word chaos - feeling frustrated, confused, purposeless, and ignorant, not knowing people, places and social skills. This can affect mental, physical and spiritual health.

4. Entering The moment when things begin to come together and make sense again, when you discover the route map. This is a constructive phase, when a new sense of control is developed, a sense of significance and security. At this point, a person is willing to experiment, to try out some of the newly acquired skills and experiences.

5. Reengagement The point when the person feels secure and involved again, accepted and belonging. Re-adaptation has occurred, and a sense of personal security and identity has been reestablished.

All of this takes at least one year."

Looking back over the year and a half since we moved back here, I can relate completely to this description of the five stages. Stage 3 was definitely the hardest, and the longest. I would say stage 4 started when the second year started, when I began to feel connected and that I knew what I was doing. Stage 5 is very recent, and I think has only come with being involved at Redcliffe again, interacting with the students, and back in teaching. Maybe for me, an important part has been resuming my identity as a missionary and a teacher, and feeling that I am now contributing to God's Mission by helping prepare other people. I feel as though this is the right place for me to be - trouble is, it doesn't pay enough! Unless Redcliffe gives me a full time job... So that is a bit of a dilemma!

2012 Best Reads

As I really love finding out what other people have read and getting their book recommendations, I thought I'd add my own list of 2012 best reads -  although I have written about a few of the books already, so I won't say much about each one here.

To make it easier for me (!) I'm going to do categories. 

Africa books: Blood River by Tim Butcher. The author is a journalist, who travels by motorbike, foot and canoe across Congo, including a long stretch on the Congo River. He writes so evocatively about Congo, and respectfully about the people he met and who helped him. And a fascinating history, without getting boring, once. 

Non-fiction: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. This book is so so interesting! It is the story of a black American woman who died of a very virulent form of cancer, and cells from her tumour were removed and reproduced successfully (which was a first) in the lab - and then used and its descendants used in many major steps forward in cancer cures and discoveries, right up to the present - ie for over fifty years. The book also tracks the story of the Lacks family, who whilst knowing the impact of Henrietta's cells on medical science, have lived in relative poverty. It makes for a really good read, on several levels.

Christian books: Honestly, I don't read many "Christian books"... ahem. But this one, I loved, and I have gone on about it quite a bit so I won't again here: One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp.

Historical Fiction: This is my favourite genre and I have read loads. But my favourite of the year was Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. The main character is Thomas Cromwell, who rose up through the court of Henry VIII, and the book is mainly about his perspective on the rise of Ann Boleyn up until her marriage to Henry. I am looking forward to reading the sequel, Bringing Up The Bodies. Wolf Hall is clever and quite funny, and with lots of historical detail and great character development - a bit slow - but I loved it.

Other fiction: The Fear Index by Robert Harris. This is a little bit future dystopia/ science fictiony, which I also seem to enjoy for some bizarre reason. Why I like reading about the disasters we are heading towards beats me. Maybe because I dislike the unknown so much, this makes me feel as though I have a glimpse of where we might be going, and how humans will cope with it, at least. Anyway, this one is about a company which runs entirely without paper, and how they develop a process to predict the markets and so manipulate them, and how the computers making this happen become more clever than anyone ever expected... it is a very good read.

Another kind of fiction: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. This is an epic book that tells the story of the childhood and young adulthood of Edgar Sawtelle. His family are breeders of a unique type of dog, and much of the book centres around the relationship between humans and dogs. I must say, until I became a dog-lover, thanks to Frodo (!), I could not read this book. I was given it ages ago, and I tried, twice. But once I understood how a dog and a person can bond, I loved reading it. It is based on the story of Hamlet, so, yes there is a ghost, and intrigue, and a brother, and rivalry, and Edgar has to leave home and trek through the wilderness... The ending is dramatic and poignant and satisfying all at once. It has a slow beginning, but it is worth persevering as it becomes a very worthwhile, even a wonderful, read.

I have read lots of other good ones, including the first couple of the Corduoroy Mansions series by Alexander McCall Smith, which I had missed before - but they were as enjoyable as all his others -  funny and gentle.

I am always glad of recommendations, so please let me know of any books you think I'd like. or that you have relished. (Thanks Gwyn for writing about yours, which gave me the idea to do the same.)

Chinua Achebe

Hope Amazon doesn't mind...and, you can't look inside....
but there I've given them some much-needed advertising I guess...

Abby Bartels sent me a book for my birthday, "The Education of a British-Protected Child" by Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer of the famous "Things Fall Apart" and much more. This book is a collection of talks and pieces he has written on Nigeria, Africa, and colonialism. It is so interesting and well written, a very easy read but full of insights. I love his voice as much as anything; it is like sitting down with a John Senyonyi or an Eliphaz Maari - wise, critical but not hostile, humble, and both exasperated by and hopeful for Africa.

But, the book is making me feel a bit depressed for Africa at the same time, as I read about incidents from Achebe's childhood and early adulthood. And how the search for an African identity is still in process and is still needed. I didn't use to understand why so many of my colleagues' PhDs were on the lines of "In search of an African identity, an African theology, etc." As if it hadn't been found already. But reading this book has made me understand a bit more. Achebe describes how over the four hundred years since Europeans arrived in Africa, they have written and spoken stereotypes, in order to justify or rationalise  their treatment of Africa. In the second half of the last century, with independence, new images of Africa are arising, but there is still a lot of the old as well. And it takes a long time to emerge out of that, like a person who has been told for years and years that they are second-best, or not very clever, or ugly, or won't succeed.

Another new understanding for me came in a paragraph introducing his family:

"All my life I have had to take account of the million differences - some little, others quite big - between the Nigerian culture into which I was born, and the domineering Western style that infiltrated and then invaded it. Nowhere is the difference more stark and startling than in the ability to ask a parent: "How many children do you have?" The right answer should be a rebuke: "Children are not livestock!" Or better still, silence, and carry on as if the question was never asked." (p68)

I have asked that question so so many times, because I thought it was polite in Africa to be interested in a person's family! I remember being tickled once when the reply came: "...um, about eight." But I took this vague answer to be purposeful, rising from the feeling that if someone knew too much they could do some kind of harm to that family, rather than from an actual uncertainty of how many children they had. But now I wonder if the person actually objected to the question. I suppose thinking about it, one ought to ask "How is your family?" but perhaps not, "How many children are in your family?" Or maybe this is more sensitive in Nigeria than elsewhere. Eighteen years in Africa and still so much to learn!


Chinua Achebe's book Things Fall Apart was seminal and is read by nearly every African child in school, and I read it before going out to Zimbabwe, but now I want to read it again. Now I feel excited about African Literature all over again. Thanks Abby!

Wolf Hall

Historical novels set in Tudor times are fantastic - well-written ones that is - because the times were so turbulent, the clothes so colourful and opulent, the debates were about matters of faith, people rode horses everywhere or travelled up and down the Thames in rowing boats and barges, and ate a lot of meat and bread off trenchers, and threw the bones onto the straw-strewn floors - it all sounds kind of romantic and fun. Ladies had admirers who wrote them poems and sonnets. Tudor people lived either in castles, or in black and white beamed houses with upstairs windows jutting out into the streets and diamond-paned windows. They had open fires in each room, and jesters.

OK, this is probably the rich people only. If I lived in Tudor times, I would be some "goodwife" probably, wearing long dresses and aprons and kind of mobcaps, and carrying baskets of bread or washing around.


The poor people in Tudor times lived in mud-walled, thatched houses, worked the fields or were servants for others, and were uneducated and heavily taxed and very very poor.

I do seem to have only a very rudimentary grasp of Tudor life. But I like the houses, the dresses, the colours, the woodcuts, tapestries, and harpsichord music. But I expect I would have hated the cold and draughts everywhere, the smells because I don't think people washed very often, and the filthy streets. And the violence. In these times people were burned at the stake for their religious beliefs, or sometimes tortured for information and confessions, and then burned or beheaded - first the ones who wouldn't give up their catholic faith, and then the ones who did turn to the new protestant faith, and then the catholic ones again - all depending on the views of the monarch of the time. It swung one way and then another... People got hung up by their thumbs, put in iron spiked cages that closed on them slowly, stretched and dislocated on racks, you name it... It is all anathema to me, but I love reading about it!


I find it interesting that our evangelical protestant churches, those who believe everyone should have a Bible in their own home, in their own language, who are opposed to superstition, opposed to the notions of purgatory and confession to a priest and paying a priest to pray for your dead relatives, in other words, the churches I am aligned with, - that they came into existence through this process of burnings, confessions, torture, and the shutting down and even sometimes physical destruction of ancient, beautiful monasteries. Why did God have to birth the Protestant church in England in this way? I suppose it must be a bit like why the Israelites had to wipe out the Canaanites - the softly softly approach just wouldn't have got anywhere. But it was an inevitable and gradual process in fact, as people of faith saw the church, which was all catholic then, becoming more and more corrupt, and also as they longed to be able to read the Bible in English, and as the printing presses were built that made reproduction of those Bibles possible. The reformation didn't just start with Luther, and nor did it come into England just because Henry VIII wanted to be free from the Pope in order to divorce his wife and marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. Rather, it started in myriads of places throughout England and Europe, as people's yearning rose up for genuine understanding and faith and worship and they became determined to be set free from the superstitions, the faith in relics and paid-for prayers. I am extremely glad the Reformation happened, but, in spite of my romance with the Tudors, I am glad that I didn't have to live through it. I don't think I am brave enough to be burned at the stake. Seriously.

Wolf Hall is a brilliant novel set in those days. It is written by Hilary Mantel, who is an excellent writer. Her descriptions of people are evocative: for example, this is the first appearance of the Duke of Norfolk: "Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is as lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe-head; his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jewelled cases he has shavings of skin and ... splinters of martyrs' bones." The main character is Thomas Cromwell, who is normally portrayed as an ambitious, cruel self-made man - but in this book he comes across as a sensitive and caring, if pragmatic, reformer, who wants to get ahead. Whilst Thomas More, who is normally presented as a kindly, moderate man, in this book comes across as tactless and unpleasant. If you are a fan of historical novels, this one is absolutely fantastic and gripping, highly researched but not at all dry; it draws you into the world of the day, court life, Henry VIII's relationship with Anne Boleyn (and other women), Anne Boleyn's and Katherine of Aragon's perspectives - you understand them all and swing between sympathising with each in turn. I had never understood how Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More and Cranmer related to each other and fit into the chain of events, until I read this novel - now I have got it down. I thoroughly recommend this book. Can't wait to read the sequel...

The Heart of the Matter

Still addicted to reading books about or set in Africa... A few weeks ago I roared through "Chasing the Devil," Tim Butcher's book about Sierra Leone and Liberia - where he describes his recent journey on foot through these two countries following the route taken by author and MI5 spy Graham Greene in the 1940s. Like his book on the Congo, it is evocative and very readable, bringing in in a very interesting way the history of these West African countries as well as their current situation and beautiful descriptions of the people, country and culture.

This put me in mind of reading Graham Greene's own novel set in West Africa, "The Heart of the Matter," drawing on his experiences in Sierra Leone. I had read the book years ago when I was in a Graham Greene phase, probably in my teens. All I remembered from that reading (some years before I ever went to Africa) was Greene's description of the overpowering heat and humidity, such that whenever he touched his wife or shook hands with someone, sweat sprang out of their skin. And the conflictedness of the main character, Scobie.

It was such a pleasure to read it again now. Partly just such a joy to read a well-written, carefully crafted book after rushing through a pretty rubbishy one before it (NOT Tim Butcher's!) But also this book has interesting themes and a background I could relate to to some extent, although set in truly colonial Africa.

In brief, the main character, Scobie, is a police officer whose marriage to Louise has long deteriorated into a relationship of pity and some guilt on one side (Scobie's) and dissatisfaction and continual complaining on the other. Eventually Scobie finds a way to send his wife to South Africa, to escape the heat and loneliness, and his failure to be promoted in the colony. When she has gone, he falls in love with a young widow, Helen, and has an affair with her. This is also largely motivated by pity for her, and his belief that he has to make her happy. This relationship begins to look a lot like his unhappy relationship with his wife. Then, just when Scobie has made a promise never to abandon Helen (in spite of his better judgment) Louise sends a telegram that she is on her way back by ship, having realised she should never have left him. There is also Wilson, who watches Scobie, and loves Louise. Everyone except Scobie soon identifies him as a British spy.

Scobie has a deep Catholic faith, but this mainly consists of a conviction that he has to be honest with God, that God surely pities the young and helpless, but that he will punish the unrepentant. Scobie comes to believe that by his adultery and then inability to make either his wife or his mistress anything but miserable he is also making God miserable. Eventually he decides that the only way to set them all free from the despair he has inflicted on them in spite of his earnest desire to make them happy, is to commit suicide. He believes that suicide will doom him to damnation, but he sees it as a self sacrifice to set everyone else including God free from the consequences of his sins.

The introduction to the book comments that this shows Scobie's terrible pride. It shows to me how little he understood his faith. But, there is incredible power in Greene's description of Scobie taking communion when he has decided to continue in the path of adultery, feeling overwhelmed by his hypocrisy and by the damnation he is certain he is eating and drinking on himself - but the most powerful part to me was the image of how as he took the bread and wine it was as if he was punching the already bleeding Christ in the face.

One telling thing about the book is how relationships with Africans are virtually non-existent. Scobie is described as feeling great affection for the local people, but he has no actual friendships with any of them except possibly his house boy Ali. That was no doubt true of the ex-pat community then. The smallness and claustrophobia, range of quirks and incestuousness of the ex-pat world is recognisable and conveyed very well - the goldfish bowl syndrome as we know it.

Greene makes the heat and the corrupted, down-at-heel atmosphere of the West African port city very real for the reader, but he rarely describes or uses a landscape explicitly, to the extent that the book could really have been set anywhere where there is a closed group of people, unhappy for various reasons and dependant on one another. There are frequent references to the vultures, cockroaches and rats living around the humans. One of my favourite sentences in the book describes a group of vultures gathered around a dead chicken, their old men's necks stooped over, their wings sticking out like broken umbrellas.

True, it is not a cheery read, but, it is fascinating and I loved it. Highly recommended.

Meeting John V Taylor's daughter

Yesterday Joanna and Charles Woodd came to lunch. This was very exciting, because, Joanna is the daughter of Bishop John V Taylor, who was Principal of Bishop Tucker College from 1943 to 1954. Joanna was 1 year old when her family moved to Mukono, and 13 when they left. She herself went to work in Kumi as a nurse later on, and has made a few trips back to Uganda since then, although her most recent visit to Mukono was about ten years ago. From her description it seems the family lived in what is now the Owors' house. She agreed with us that Mukono was an idyllic place to be as a young child, and she had very fond memories of racing about the grassy campus, in and out of other people's houses, and of the freedom and safety for children there. She told us that she went to school in Kampala, although she couldn't remember the name of the school, but they used to stay with an English family in town during the week, and only travel home for the weekends. Hmm, we did think about that from time to time... Mind you, she said Kampala was beautiful, uncrowded and leafy back then...

Joanna brought to show me a fascinating book made in 1950, about a Passion Play which her father put on with the Bishop Tucker students. It contains beautiful black and white photos of tableaux from the play. The students were in Biblical style costumes, and interspersed the drama with negro spirituals which, according to John Taylor's book, they sang beautifully. Just the expressions on their faces convey the solemnity, reverence and beauty of the play The play was acted out in the chancel of the old chapel, and was performed for the local community, which is described as the college, the three schools and the parish church all on the hill. Sadly no names are in the book, and carefully as I looked at the photos I did not recognise any faces - but I suppose these students from 1950 would have been at least 80 when we arrived in Mukono, so I shouldn't quite expect to!


I read two of John Taylor's books while I was in Uganda: The Go-Between God, which I loved, and The Primal Vision which I thought was fascinating. Apparently he wrote The Primal Vision not when he was principal of Bishop Tucker but when he made a return visit to Uganda some years later in 1963, specifically for research, when he was head of CMS in the UK.


Its full name being, "The Primal Vision: Christian presence amid African religion," it was one of the earliest attempts to describe African philosophy and religion, and to see how Christianity can be understood in Africa, and in fact how we can understand it better with the help of the African worldview. It was criticised at the time for being a bit too sympathetic to and positive about African religion, and leaning towards syncretism.

John V Taylor went on from heading CMS, to being Bishop of Winchester. He is described as being a "liberal evangelical rather than a conservative one" and was clearly greatly loved and respected wherever he worked.

We had a wonderful time chatting away with Joanna and Charles. They still do a lot to support Uganda, Charles being treasurer of an English organisation called the "Uganda Church Association", which sends out a yearly newsletter about goings-on in the Church of Uganda to a list of 230 interested people in England - many of them former Bishop Tucker missionaries, and many Ugandans who now live here. In the latest edition, for example, is an article written by Monica Ntege! Needless to say, we are delighted to have made this great connection, and hope to have more contact with UCA.

Joanna and Charles Woodd

We also discovered recently that John Taylor's grandson, Jonathan, (Joanna's nephew), is a lay assistant at our church in Exeter, St Leonards! He approached us at the mission weekend we spoke at in March. What a small small world...

"Blood River" by Tim Butcher

I have just finished reading Blood River by Tim Butcher, and of all the books I have read about Africa in the last year, this might be my favourite. It tells how the author fulfilled a long-term dream in 2004, to travel in the footsteps of the explorer Stanley, traversing the Congo east to west using motorbikes, motor boat, dug-out canoe, barge and a variety of other vehicles, following the route of the Congo River. The book is fascinating, amusing, and depressing in turns, and beautifully written.

I didn't know much about the Congo, other than that it is a vast, forested country with little or no infrastructure connecting its towns  and cities, and that it has had a bloody history both during and since independence from Belgian colonial rule. When we lived in Zimbabwe, we had a friend whose brother and sister were both serving in the Zimbabwean army in the Congo, as Mugabe exchanged his soldiers' lives for diamonds. We read stories in the papers of the bodies being brought back from the Congo, once allegedly without their heads which caused a huge fuss, but our friend Oscar assured us that in fact his siblings were growing fat and rich serving there. He showed us a photo and it was true, they did look fat.

When we moved to Uganda, we got to know various Congolese students at UCU, most of whom had left with their families to escape the violence. We heard stories of different Congolese people in Uganda being poisoned, drugged, kidnapped and held captive. We heard of earthquakes and a huge volcanic eruption, and more violence. Poor Congo.

Tim Butcher captures the chaos, and the frustration and dangers of trying to travel overland through this country, a land where typically UN workers fly into remote towns, live and work in sterile prefab air-conditioned cabins, and leave again, never attempting to travel by land anywhere. Travel overland or downriver exposes the author to threats on his life, requests to adopt strangers' children, endless demands for papers, permissions to travel and visas, extortion, dehydration, hunger, and illness. He calls it "ordeal travel," and he is open about the fear and tension he suffered from through the entire journey.

A major theme of the book is the evidence he sees that the Congo was once far more developed than it is now. Under the horrifically cruel Belgian rule, there were large cotton factories, wide roads, trains, steamboats cruising regularly down the Congo River, even hotels. But in the years of fighting since independence the bush has taken over again, roads have dwindled to mud paths, factories and hotels have crumbled. He describes at one point how he met an old man with his grandchildren, deep in the rainforest, as he travelled through by motorbike. The elderly man commented that in the old days many cars used to pass by road this way, whilst the children gazed open-mouthed at the motorbikes, because they had never seen a vehicle in their whole lifetime before.

Tim Butcher portrays the potential and great natural wealth of the country, and the courage and resilience of the people who helped him along the way. He conveys always his respect for the skills, strength, and integrity of the many Congolese and few ex-pats he met, who guided him, gave him hospitality, and protected him, often for no reason other than their kindness and decency as people, sometimes for the dollars he paid them. But the tragedy of this country, of its history, and the way it is still oppressed by its violent leaders and by the complete breakdown of law, order and justice, is the overarching theme, and the book leaves the reader feeling sad and frustrated, and puzzled once again by the enigma that is Africa.

I will finish with an excerpt, just to give you a taste of the beauty:
"... we followed a track climbing up and away from the lakeside still. Nightjars roosted on the path. I would pick them up in our headlights and watch as they sat frozen to the spot, exploding a the last second from underneath the lead motorbike, peeling up and away into the darkness. Although Kalemie had appeared asleep as we left, for the first few kilometres I kept spotting ghostly figures on the roadside. They were women, with baskets and tools perched on their heads, making their way out to the bush to tend plots of cassava and other crops. From a distance I would make out their dark shapes against the lightening sky and then, for an instant, they would be caught in the headlights, the colours of their cotton wraps bright and their wide eyes frozen in surprise."