King Leopold's Ghost

In King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild chronicles the “discovery” and conquest of the Congo Free State, a massive expanse of central Africa that fell und the dominion of King Leopold of Belgium. Unlike most of the colonies obtained before and during the scramble for Africa, the Congo was not colonized by a country or empire, but by a single man. This state of affairs is made more bizarre by the fact that King Leopold never set foot in his colony, nor did he care much about it besides as a source of money and prestige.

There's no question that Leopold was an awful man, even by the standards of his day, but he was by no means a stupid one. The book describes the deft maneuverings that allowed a single man--a king, yes, but a king from a parliamentary democracy who's power was dwarfed by those of evenother royals whose rule was mostly ceremonial--to acquire a tract of land nearly half the size of Euripe over which he exerted absolute power.

The book has it's heroes, too. Chief among them us E.D. Morel, a shipping clerk who, after casually observing the flow of goods in and out of the Congo, deduced the presence of slavery in the colony and devoted his life, almost on a whim, to the wholesale elimination of this odious practice. The book is no hagiography, and Hochschild openly describes some of Morel's faults, but he remains a remarkable and principled man.

The book's perspective is predominantly European, resulting from the indifference to local African voices at the time the events, but Hochschild makes a good effort to include them where he can. His prose is sleek and engaging, and he paints rich pictures of the many characters in his story.

The Interpreters - Wole Soyinka

I often put a hold on books at my library that don't arrive for months, and by the time I get them I don't remember what they are or why I wanted them in the first place. The Interpreters has been a similar experience, only I bought it instead of borrowing it. I don't recall when or why, but I'm glad I did.

The novel concerns a wide-ranging cast of young intellectuals in Lagos, Nigeria. There is little by way of an overarching plot. Instead, stories come and go and cross paths with one another, not in an episodic faction, but rather a fluid and ever-shifting narrative flux. Targets emerge for satire--politics, the news media, universities, religious cults--before dissolving into the textual mists. The result is disorienting, though Soyinka's rich prose and dark humor propel things along.

The book offers little by way of narrative signposts. Characters are introduced with no context for who they are or how they relate to one another, and names take a central role before disappearing for chapters at a time. Egbo opens and closes the novel, and his traumatic memory of seeing his parents drown acts as a thematic bookend, but other characters play a much bigger role in the novel's center. Kabo, the disillusioned painter, is one example. Sagoe, a beleaguered journalist, is another. A few white visitors emerge as peripheral characters, where they serve as both targets of satire in their own right and ammunition aimed at the obsequious treatment they receive by black intellectuals in some circles.

The prose is rich with imagery, the dialogue quick-witted and playful. It reminds me, in a free-association sort of way, of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The stories are nothing alike, and the writing styles are different—Soyinka’s more florid and poetic, Heller’s more jokey—but both authors deal with a fluctuating cast of characters, through which they paint a stinging picture of of a community, and through it society at large.

This book is a real find. I just wish I remembered where it was I found it.

(An additional point: none of the characters are interpreters by profession, and no one does any interpreting, so I’m at a loss as to the meaning behind the title. I could probably come up with some sort of symbolic reason, but it would be a guess and probably wrong)