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Nature

Harry’s advent calendar of birds, day 3: Secretary Bird

The Secretary BirdSagittarius serpentarius:

Because it’s a bird of prey which has evolved long legs like a crane; something I think is just fabulous beyond words. They stalk across the grasslands of Africa, hunting small prey like snakes and lizards.

It looks more eccentric than terrifying, and it hasn’t lost the power of flight; but as a long-legged predatory bird, it offers a faint echo of the prehistoric Phorusrhacids which once roamed South America, crunching the skulls of their prey in their huge hooked beaks.

» Secretary Bird is © Vearl Brown and used under a CC by-nc licence.

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Culture

Chaka by Thomas Mofolo

Chaka is a fictionalised account of the life of the C19th Zulu king Shaka. It’s unusually early for an African novel, originally published in 1925 but existing in manuscript in some form as early as 1910.

I wasn’t entirely looking forward to reading it. It has started to really bother me when those who rose to power and built empires through force are presented as Great Men, as admirable or heroic. Qin Shi Huang, Alexander the Great, Napoleon: these men were ruthless megalomaniacs who glorified themselves through the misery of others. But we are fascinated by power, and there’s never a shortage of people who are willing to read history through rose-tinted bifocals. Hell, the Russians are even doing their best to rehabilitate Stalin.

I assumed that Chaka would do the same; but part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is that, on the contrary, its portrayal of Shaka is absolutely excoriating. He is presented as a handsome man of great courage and physical and military prowess; but also as capricious, cruel, violent and terrifyingly, unswervingly power-hungry. In fact the scale of his violence, against his own people as well as his enemies, would seem ridiculously exaggerated, if you’d never heard of Stalin, or Mao, or Idi Amin.

Which isn’t to say that the novel is historically accurate. It doesn’t even pretend to be; it’s told very much in a mythic, folkloric style rather than a historically realist one, and it takes substantial liberties with the history for the sake of telling a good story, to the point of inventing major characters — including Chaka’s love interest and a sorcerer who provides him with his power. His life story is tweaked and manipulated to bring out the themes of ambition and power, and present him with decisions which are loaded with symbolic resonance. I would normally shy away from comparing a writer to Shakespeare — just too much baggage — but as a piece of myth-making based freely on a historical source, it really reminds me of Macbeth or King Lear.

I wasn’t immediately gripped by it, but as the action ramped up and Chaka developed into a more and more extreme character, I thought it was electrifying.

Chaka is my book from Lesotho for the Read The World challenge; a quick hat-tip to the translator, Daniel P. Kunene.

» The Chaka Print cloth ticket is from Trevira’s collection of cloth tickets on Flickr. She explains:

These large gummed labels – known as cloth tickets – were attached to bales of printed cotton cloth for export from Britain (read ‘Manchester’ in many cases). They were designed by British artists who depended on information from company agents in the various territories for subjects that were intended to be appealing for their markets.

It is used under a CC by-nc licence.

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  • "These large gummed labels – known as cloth tickets, shippers tickets, or bolt tickets – were attached to bales of printed cotton cloth for export from Britain (read 'Manchester' in many cases). They were designed by British artists who depended on information from company agents in the various territories for subjects that were intended to be appealing for their markets.

    Most of these probably date from around the 1920s to the 1950s (but I could be wrong) and were intended for the African market. "

    (del.icio.us tags: design labels Africa )
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Culture

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Season of Migration to the North is my book from Sudan for the Read The World challenge. Originally published in 1966, ‘in 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century’.

I didn’t really know anything about it before I started reading, and expecting it to be set entirely in Sudan, I was slightly startled by the amount of London in it. It is narrated by a man who is returning to Sudan after seven years studying in Europe; when he comes back to his home village, he meets a stranger called Mustafa who also, it turns out, spent many years in London.

It is very much a culture clash novel, exploring Mustafa’s experience, firstly in London as an outsider figure who plays up his exoticism to attract women, and then a different kind of outsider after he has returned to Sudan and is living as a farmer among people who know nothing about his background.

The London sections are not too different from what you might find in a mid-C20th English novel; I was more interested in the Sudan stuff. I do appreciate there’s an irony in reading a book about a man who trades on his exoticism and then complaining, effectively, that it’s not as exotic as I was expecting; but there it is. It is quite intriguing to read a novel about English society with the ‘exotic’ character at the centre, though — I’m sure I’ve read a few novels by British writers from early-mid C20th with Mustafa-type characters turning up on the periphery. Not that I can think of specific examples offhand.

Most important Arab novel of the century? I wouldn’t know, although as I say, it reads to me like a fairly conventional novel of the period. A good novel — extremely good in parts — but it didn’t blow me away. But then I don’t think the novel is exactly a traditional part of Arab culture, so it may have been more radical in its context.

» The two pictures — Kadugli – Dilling Provincie Kordofan and West Nuba Mountains — are both © Rita Willaert and used under a CC by-nc licence. They don’t have any very precise connection to the book but they were taken in Sudan and I liked them. There are lots more where those came from.

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  • 'In the 1980s video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the people to see.

    In order to promote these showings, artists were hired to paint large posters of the films (usually on used canvas flour sacks). The artists were given the artistic freedom to paint the posters as they desired – often adding elements that weren’t in the actual films, or without even having seen the movies.'

    (del.icio.us tags: Ghana Africa film posters )
  • More amusing cover-design madness from a POD company that does overpriced editions of books that are out of copyright.
    (del.icio.us tags: books covers )
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