The African Bestseller - If You're...Pink

Writing African Bestsellers

APKY

Euroancestral reporters and novelists in Africa (including Keith B. Richburg, the African-American who wrote Out of Africa and is glad to be a descendant of slaves rather than of continental Africans) are a breed out of heaven knows where. Especially to the Africans. Let’s take Kiragwe Nzili of Botswana. After seeing him on Weltspiegel, a German weekly television reportage of news around the globe, eating dust on a plastic plate with his son outside his miserable little hut, I made up my mind to find him the next time I’m in Africa. The journalist in me was angry about this because I believe that journalists must not degrade another human being this much just for the sake of money. It degrades the profession. It degrades the entire humankind’s achievement in civilisation.

It took me two days to locate Mr Nzili. In the lounge of my hotel I interviewed him about the dust dinner. He told me the journalist and his camera crew had interviewed him about the hunger situation in his country, where the people had been told not to eat the genetically manipulated maize that had been donated from the USA. After telling the journalists that he and his son often go hungry for days “eating only dust”, which is a euphemism in his language, Setswana, and means “eating nothing at all”, the German team offered him five dollars for the “eating dust” filming. Five dollars is a lot of money for a poor man in Botswana who has no job but a son to feed. You can on the other hand imagine how much money the journalists earned with their “sensation”.

I think this kind of journalism is a disgrace to all decent journalists.

Yet this is the kind of voyeurism the West wants to project of and into Africa – so that they can feel – what – truly superior? Or just good civilized Christians? Take the bestseller lists of books about Africa and Africans. Excision. Cannibalism. Modern slavery. Child soldiers. Forced marriages. The famous “sexploitation” material – are “they” as biblically good in bed as is rumoured? And the good old ghosts, spirits and the witchdoctor. But in their intoxication with their hegemony, Euroancestrals forget that Africans may be poor, but they have long since learnt how to get those dollars or euros out of the pockets of such hegemony- drunk Western journalists, ethnologists, the lot. The thicker you lay it on – the needy African has learnt – the more dollars/euros you reap. The more bizarre the more extra hard currency. If decadence is what they prize as journalistic or ethnological material, they can have it and a lot more as spices.
The same with the novelists and “Africa experts”. Here, I’ll give you more tips, Western voracious writer with the hegemonic delusion.

To write about Africa, start with, say, a breathtaking sunrise as you climb into your chauffeured four-wheel-drive. Describe the sunset in details for at least one page. Don’t forget your driver – sorry – your black, or better still, pitch black driver. Whatever your good eyes tell you, the African’s skin colour is black. Give him three or four sentences which must dwell only on his characteristics that differ from Euroancestral characteristics. The complexion is very important especially if you’re a Scholl-Latour-type writer, because it is the one thing that uplifts him from the rest of humankind: the tall black man had bronze skin, a fine European-like nose, whereas his bride had flat, navel-region-long breasts…. etcetera, etcetera. The whiteness (hallelujah!) of his very big, widely-spaced teeth with that ear-to-ear broad smile of his is so very worthy of praise. Especially because he smiles all the time. The Ohoven-like lips and the hair texture – very relevant. The curiously pink palms of the hand and soles of the feet – a phenomena where nature had surely freaked out.

Then off to the safari. But, better still, off to meet a corrupt dictator. If you write about his government later in your prospective bestseller, don’t – absolutely don’t – forget to refer to it as a black government. Governments in Africa are for some reason or other black, even if half of the cabinet ministers are pink or olive. But let’s keep to the shooting safari.

Have your driver be drunk at the end of the day and wonder why. Then remember that he had been disappearing behind a bush every now and then, when he was not holding the zoom lens or a film role for you, while you had been working hard all day taking shots of the Big Five (but no shooting them because playing Hemingway or Holden is not politically correct anymore, and the animals have their own very powerful two-legged Weighty Watchers lobbyists. Your bestseller would be a flop). This being the state of your driver, a state he denies vehemently, you have to drive back to the hotel yourself, you treasure your life. The driver is snoring in the back seat before you even turn the ignition key. Say how you ignore that and concentrate on the magical beauty of Africa. This time it is the marvellous sunset covering the savannah like a thin sheet of molten gold. Give it all you’re worth in descriptive imagery. Don’t even think of mentioning the chirping birds and the crickets. This is Africa at her most dangerous, malicious, threatening self! The heart of darkness! Lions roaring, buffaloes stampeding, a fifty-plus aunt elephant herd with dozens of calves roaming, mosquitoes on the rampage with all the most resistant viruses and bacteria hovering in their flimsy proboscis – here, worry at length about whether your malaria protection was in time. The hyenas are laughing like maniacs, the leopards dropping down from acacia branches (at least three of which should drop on the roof or bonnet of your 4WD), the gazelles and antelopes galloping across the excuse-for-a-road you’re driving on threatening to make you a killer – but you give them no chance. You swerve dangerously into a ditch just to let them cross the road. Here you must give details of your Paris-Dakar-like style of driving. Hit your head a few times on the roof of the 4WD, then (as your head throbs with pain), that huge, beautiful, golden African sunset on the horizon more than makes up for the pain and fear. But from one nanosecond to the next, the huge orb is gone.

Time for phase two of darkest Africa. Pitch darkness except for your headlights and the occasional firefly, and then it happens. You plunge into an entire crater on the road that defies being referred to as a road. The 4WD flips over belly up. Both front tyres are busted. You are unconscious for you don’t know how long. The black driver is draped over the seat, bleeding from various cuts but still snoring. Be very amazed at the robust nature of the African. Crawl out, your body all but mangled, then retrieve your expensive camera and laptop equipment. And, belonging to human beings who plan ahead, you also pull out your portable tent and sleeping bag, glad that you had rightly brought these with you. Don’t forget all this while to constantly mention the dangerous Africa around you, roaring, stampeding and so on. You realise that now you don’t even have the safety of your 4WD. And Africa starts attacking with her long, long thin as a bicycle pump or thick as the outline of your toilet s-bend crawling creatures. At this very moment the headlights of the 4WD go out in a slow yellowing and flickering way. The battery is out. Your robust African is still snoring away despite his wounds. He must be alright. But you’re a plan-ahead kind of person so you pull out your powerful battery operated torch from your gear. Directing the torchlight at your Doc Marten boots your heart misses many beats – you’re wearing shorts! Those long, long thin or thick things crawl, and the mosquito is on the rampage with God knows what virus and African ants are a legend as torture machines!
Now is the time for you to attack Africa. Describe your anger and fear. Damn this horrible darkest Africa, the stone- aged Africans who can neither build roads nor remain sober to drive a decent person to a photo shooting safari and back again. Pull the bloody idiot out, but here worry first about whether you have gloves – damn, you don’t! He’s bleeding all over, you see. Check whether you have any wounds on your hands or arm – you don’t, thank God. The idiot has cuts because he had not fastened his seatbelt. With these black Africans you always have to think for them.

Damn and curse Africa a bit more under your breath as you check the wounds or cuts without actually touching them. Get out the first aid kit and do your very best, you’re the thinker and protector of poor, childlike, unable Africa. He’s awake now but seems to take things as normal as if he had only had a nap before a picnic and now he could join the picnickers. All the same ask him how he feels. The ear-to-ear smile as an answer. Tell him to change the tyres. The snoring seems to have made him almost completely sober again. He fiddles around the boot of the car, you check the engine and discover it is seriously damaged and hanging at an odd angle because it had been fastened in place with metal coat hangers. No wonder the headlights gave up the ghost. But Africa, this strange village, is very generous with dilemmas. Amid all the threatening animals and mosquitoes and God knows what else, she offers you yet another: there are no spare tyres, the black driver says, smiling ear-to-ear. But I especially sent you off to go and pick up not one, not two but four spare parts I had paid for at the dealer’s! you scream with anger, disbelieve, desperation, fear – the lot.

Here is where the child-African comes in. The driver hungs his head like a reprimanded child, says he was indeed on his way to pick up the spare tyres yesterday, when he spotted his “very close brother” and stopped to shake hands. Then he learnt from his “very close brother” that the mother, who is by all means also the driver’s “very close mother”, was sick and needed to be taken to a doctor. So he made a quick little detour with this close brother, picked up the close mother, took her to the cheapest but very good doctor where there was a very long queue. By the time the close mother had been checked and treated and driven back, the tyre dealer had closed his workshop. And this morning, he and you left for the safari shooting so early that the dealer had not opened his shop yet. But instead of tyres, he says, he has a fetish in his pocket which he got from his grandmother a long, long time ago and the grandmother had got it from her grandmother a much, much longer time ago. This fetish is going to protect the two of you even better than the tyres and then tomorrow…

You tell him to shut up in the most disparaging tone of voice. The idiot tells you this now, the dirty Ni… this stupid black fool! Tells you this now when you’re caught in Africa’s dangerous darkest fangs like a canary in the fangs of a large cat! You want to whip him to death on the spot but memories of Carl Peters, von Trotha and the Hereros probing your guilty conscious stop you. All this while, inject in tarrying scenes of the danger around you, the live jungle and whistling mosquitoes…

But planners have no time to waste especially when threatened. The black nincompoop is not yet that steady on his feet – fetish or no fetish – and that’s why you hitch the tent and sleeping bag on his back, not the expensive camera and laptop equipment. Explain that it is not that you want to imitate David Livingston and use the native as a beast of burden, it is just because you want no damage done to your expensive tools of trade. Describe how you are the one who guides the two of you in a long night match – unless he is a pygmy. Short African natives wearing bark loincloths are always brave and innovative. Otherwise Africans have no sense of orientation, you had read in a book by professor this and that, that’s why before colonisation they roamed around their continent without establishing any proper borders. Of course you had never read any such book but his kind of genial invention makes your book sound authoritative, well researched. The invented professors need not have names. An English Professor or a German Ethnologist will do very well. Everybody will believe you because anything written about Africa by anybody with a pink skin is the Gospel Truth, nobody will check the facts, and the natives who know the truth will never read your bestseller, let alone afford to buy a copy.

By pure chance you reach a tiny village ten miles from your site of accident. But before this, have the torch run out of power and snuff out after the first two miles, and your mobile phone useless – not because the battery has run low but because … well, this is Africa. They haven’t got around to transmitters yet.

Have the villagers welcome you in the middle of the pitch black night with the abandoned noisiness of little children. They grab you all over. They dance around you and clap, God has arrived amid them. Eat only your biscuits and drink only your bottled mineral water. Be careful to give the impression that you only have one biscuit and very little bottled water – the way you learnt in your survival course before you set off for Africa. You’re not mean, only realistic. Planners are also observers and note-takers especially among “primitive tribes”. So notice everything. Notice that everybody here goes to “bed” on mats spread out around the open fireplace which is in a corner of the tiny round hut with no windows but a lot of foul-smelling smoke. Each mat is shared by the whole family. There are no blankets but mention that this is in fact a very ecological and environmental-friendly tradition of keeping the whole family warm. Mention that the village chief has a bed made of one-foot-high stilts driven into the mud floor and spanned with branches, twigs and leaves. You just know he is the chief from your information gathered in the books written by Euroancestral sociologists. No, ethnologists. Sociologists are strictly for European societies. Don’t forget to put in details of the chief also sharing his bed with wife Number X and their three children, one of which is an infant. The infant’s limbs are half hanging out over the open fireplace. Through your cultured instinct you have a funny feeling about this.

Get into your sleeping bag in your zipped up tent but don’t sleep a wink all night – the lions are still roaring, the elephants trumpeting, the black mambas calculating how to chew their way into your tent. Also mention that you have to watch over your expensive equipment which the natives, you had noticed, had taken a bewildering interest in – peering at the camera from the wrong end of the lenses and so on. The laptop, as you were sending off an Email to your five-year-old son, had made even the black chief jump and run away. Until you had explained to everybody that the images flickering on the laptop are not a population of ghosts who can steel their souls. Your half-sober black driver, acting now as your translator, had told the natives just how much, in dollars, your equipment is worth, how it could fetch one up to – how many dollars? – oh, very, very many dollars in the city. And the city is only about fifty miles away, a distance the native could cover in a couple of hours of steady jogging with your equipment worth the immeasurable sum of dollars tucked under the arm. Here, mention how you try to get such thoughts out of your mind.

As you try to get the frightening thoughts out of your mind you suddenly remember the books you read about armies of red safari aunts matching into tents in a trillion zillion, and stinging the occupiers all over, even getting into their underclothes. And if these ants were migrating from a spot in the jungle where they had adequately fed themselves on the carcass of a dead monkey, and if the monkey had died of Ebola or AIDS… You cannot sleep. Africa is scaring you to death again. All because you had been stupid enough not to bring that aunt-terminator chemical from Bayer – the latest – which one only needed to spray outside the tent in a circumference six inches away for the tent walls! Curse Africa with all the devils known to you. In this damned continent one had to equip oneself like a visitor to Chernobyl! This godforsaken continent – you’re never going to set foot on it again. Never ever. Well, perhaps you will, but only when your sponsors insert a new clause in your contract allowing you to hire convoys of 4WDs plus a light aircraft with a European (but no Russian or Ukrainian) pilot, just in case one or two 4WDs land in a crater in the middle of these no-roads in the jungle surrounded by Africa’s darkest, wildest, most evil dangers-to-civilised-humankind…

Africa tears you away from your morbid thoughts and tired bones. It warmly caresses you like a smitten lover. It sends your heart racing. It intoxicates you. You slowly crawl out of your tent without being conscious of the fact because it has sent you into a trance. You stand outside with your eyes glued on its divine beauty. Glued on Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god. The African sunrise in all its gloriously divine enchantment. You had never quite understood the books about Africa’s intoxicating splendour until this moment. Africa the schizophrenic. Africa the biblical myth. Africa of the mysteriously divine magic. Africa of the prehistoric beauty. Africa the innocent. Mention that you’re clicking your camera with tears running down your cheeks as Ra rises majestically on the horizon to set the entire savannah glowing orange-red.
Keep this up for about five pages.

And now is the time to give yourself a thorough mea culpa flagellation in penance for having cursed and damned Africa and her people and her animals, insects etcetera. Africa has got you cradled safely in her warm bosom. You shouldn’t have screamed at your driver just because Africans are always there for each other and disregard time with finality. You should have remembered to tell him to fasten his seatbelts, dear God, he has never driven in Europe! And didn’t the villagers welcome you, A Strange Stranger Out Of The Dark, in their middle and offered you something to eat and to drink? It was sensible to refuse eating their food and drinking their drinks, but your tin of biscuits and bottles of mineral water should have been shared around or, better still, given to the children. These children with sad old eyes too big for their heads and visible Shakespearean ribs supporting their global bellies. Why, a single night of a bit of hunger and thirst wouldn’t have killed you…etcetera, etcetera.

Continue the mea culpa flagellation while folding up your tent and sleeping bag. The sleeping bag – give it as a present to the chief, you can easily buy another later when you get to the city. Oh, and the rest of your biscuits and mineral water are for the children’s breakfast. Definitely. Well, maybe you should keep a bottle of water for yourself because the day ahead will be long and hot. This is only sensible.

Carrying your sleeping bag for the chief, tin of biscuits and bottles of water for the babies and children with Shakespearean ribs, let Africa slap you resoundingly in the face. With a scene from the Palaeolithic era.

About a couple of dozen half naked people are squatting in the dust in a circle outside the chief’s hut. In the centre of the circle is something charred black placed on a few leaves on the ground. You’re not sure but you think you know what it is. Locate your now-sober-driver-cum-translator. He explains things to you. You are right. Your cultured instincts of last night and a while ago had served you correctly. It is the chief’s dear infant. He fell off the bed some time in the night. Straight into glowing coals in the open fireplace. The coals are actually dried dung of any and all animals roaming the savannah. The best suppliers, almost with a monopoly, are elephants. Sober Driver – what was his name again? Ask him. Make note of it but later in your manuscript give him the name of Babugu Wugaduba because this sounds so authentically African to your readers of exotic places with exotic people and exotic names. Babugu Wugaduba explains all this to you and you feel an anger engulf you, an anger that is larger than the wrath of God. Couldn’t these primitive fools think even half logically and know that the helpless infant should at least sleep in the middle of their family contraptions? Well, it would be better not to give the chief the sleeping bag after all – he could burn down the whole village with it in the middle of the night! And just as you are giving Babugu Wugaduba the biscuits and water for the children, you see the chief hacking away at the little charred head. Here you have to dwell on the movements of his machete, his grunts, the sounds the bones make etcetera etcetera, before you run to behind a bush to vomit your guts out.

But now more than ever you know you have the best bestseller.

You come back, not to stop the horror, but to motivate Babugu Wugaduba with a five-dollar bonus if he translates in every detail and answers your questions or nods yes or no to your statements. A five-dollar motivation seems to send Babugu Wugaduba’s imagination and fantasies to ecstatic domains, you suspect, but the domains are the very fodder your readers have been hungering for. Boy, this is IT!

Charred Infant’s head complete with eyes, ears and brain go to the chief because this was his first and only son with Wife Number X. Whereas Wife X is entitled to the lungs because lungs are too airy for male consumption, the chief also gets the heart , liver and gall bladder – an organ considered too bitter for a woman to eat because it could ruin all her ovulation functions. The chief gets all the inner organs for his potency, Babugu Wugaduba explains to you. Really, Babugu? (this is where you start addressing him with his first name but without letting him know yours). True, true (mention that he has the habit of always repeating certain words like many, many and very, very and true, true and today, today). True, true. From tonight on the chief is not only going to sire twin sons across the landscape of his wives each single night, no, no. Tonight and for the next full six months he is going to sire twin sons right across the landscape of his subjects’ wives and daughters, true, true.

Here you mention that you give Babugu a little smile with a condescending pat on his back because Africans appreciate condescension. Say that the only small problem is that Babugu’s t-shirt is not the cleanest and is soaked with his sweat. But you will continue patting Babugu’s sweaty back in several occasions just to show the man that you’re not General von Trotha. Let the readers know that Babugu’s T-shirt has Mr Natural Viagra sprawled on it back and front. I suppose the chief doesn’t need viagra either, suggest with a smile because you’re now Babugu’s other side of Carl Peters – the side that liked native things. Do a little paragraph of how amazing it is that Africans (it is a village, don’t forget this) seem to catch on on the latest Western trends they have never even seen. Mention the teenaged boy in the street yesterday who was wearing a t-shirt announcing: The Cannibal of Rothenberg. But get back to the breakfast scene again quickly before the reader gets bored. The bit about all girl children born this month being turned into delicacies or offered to ancestors so that the ancestors do their duty of protecting the people and their children properly. The ancestors are guilty of not having protected Chief’s Dear Male Infant. This seems too outlandish to be true, but you remember that colleague of yours who commented on the credibility of such titbits from their translator, saying these were most likely simply made up stories for a few dollars more. Poor chap had his publisher demanding the advance payment back and no editor even reads his Emails or faxes. You’re right here in the thick of things: a million sold copies in three months with translations into fifty languages including Japanese. Film rights in eight months…

Babugu now explains that the femurs, tibias, skull, ribcage bones and so on are all going to be used as jewellery on scooped out earlobes, pierced nostrils and lips. Make sure you have at least five chapters on The Charred Infant Breakfast – interviews with the chief, the women, the older children etcetera. It is a bit late to take photos of the Charred Infant now but in your manuscript you still have the chance to run off and get your camera instead of running off to vomit your guts out. But take photos of the rest of the events and interviews, Shakespearean ribcages supporting global bellies suspended above small male genitals. Also see to it that you take close-ups of eyes and noses covered with labouring flies. Look around, you will definitely find some great, big gush of a wound oozing greenish-yellow pus mixed with blood. Photograph this from all sorts of angles.

But – what’s that? It’s Wife Number X. And she is holding her infant baby son on her hip! You recognise the child immediately because last night you had held his black little fingers as he played them on the keyboard of you laptop! Babugu Wugaduba has cheated you! But don’t confront him with this. Pay him the bonus dollars you promised him. You are going to write your best bestseller, by God, and he will be your alibi. He told you it was the chief’s infant son, didn’t he? Well then, your conscious is clean. And monkeys are near enough to human beings to legitimise this breakfast as cannibalism.

End the book with that ambivalent umbilical cord about Africa. It leaves you the big chance to come back for the sequel/s and your publisher will notice this need at once. Yes you will come back to this disgusting and intoxicating “land” Africa. Because once Africa seduces you “successfully” so to speak or simply emotionally, you’re hers to do whatever she likes with, for the rest of your life. You already know that you will come back. Soon.

With the film crew.