THERE is something magisterial about the work of John Reader. Who else would
dare to write a biography of Africa? Who else could bring it off? He should be
awarded a blockbuster TV series immediately. Africa: A Biography of the
Continent (Hamish Hamilton, 拢30, ISBN 0241130476) has been several
years in the writing and a lifetime in the making. Even so, the breadth of
material assembled by Reader, a man who modestly describes himself as a 鈥渨riter
and photojournalist鈥�, is awe-inspiring. He begins his story two billion years
ago, with the formation of the ancient crust that makes up most of the
continent. And he ends in the mid-1990s, with the optimism surrounding Nelson
Mandela鈥檚 election in South Africa and the despair at Rwanda鈥檚 genocide.
His kaleidoscopic journey takes more than 700 pages. It has him analysing the
DNA of human fossils from 30 000 years ago, meeting the first Egyptian pharaoh
and examining the fall of an ancient Ghanaian kingdom a thousand years ago. Our
hero also finds space for a feminist perspective on the origins of the Atlantic
slave trade, investigating demographics and the Zulu wars, cycling through the
border posts of East Africa and analysing the brutal diplomacy behind the Congo
crisis of the 1960s.
Along the way you will encounter Prester John and the Ark of the Covenant,
arms sales and the strange underpopulation of Africa, plus impressive analyses
of everything from infectious diseases through to agricultural technology.
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Reader has the journalistic skills to make you turn every page with
anticipation, and the authority to make you believe what you read when he tells
you that apartheid ended for much the same reason as Soviet communism (it no
longer delivered the economic goods), bananas introduced from Southeast Asia
2000 years ago revolutionised African agriculture, and how elephants and humans
struggle for control of the African bush. And, dammit, he takes good photographs
as well.
While Reader offers an Olympian view of his subject, Princeton anthropology
professor Gananath Obeyesekere prefers dishing the dirt and engaging in
hand-to-hand combat with ethnographers. But The Apotheosis of Captain
Cook (Princeton University Press, 拢11.95/ $17.95, ISBN
0691057524) is enlightening, too, not least because its backdrop is another vast
and dimly understood region of the world.
Subtitled European mythmaking in the Pacific, the Sri Lankan鈥檚 book
rips into Cook鈥檚 reputation as a model imperialist and benign civiliser of
natives. His preface to this new edition lands some heavy blows on the critics
who had the temerity to disagree with its predecessor. Obeyesekere argues that
Cook reveals the paradox at the heart of the idea of the invading civiliser and,
by the time of his final trip to the Pacific, had been transformed by into a
figure akin to Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad鈥檚 Heart of Darkness鈥攁
鈥渟elf-conscious civiliser who, his mission gone awry, becomes a `savage鈥�
himself鈥�. And Obeyesekere ransacks Cook鈥檚 journals to show that the idea of him
being received in the South Seas as a god was an invention of European colonial
myth-makers.
Far lighter in tone, but equally compelling on the dark side of Western
endeavour in far-off lands, is Ed Douglas鈥檚 Chomolungma Sings the Blues
(Constable, 拢18.95, ISBN 0094763909). A mountaineer himself, Douglas spent
many months living and climbing with Sherpas round the mountain that they call
Chomolungma and we call Everest. He repeats John Ruskin鈥檚 attack on the
mountaineers who 鈥渕ade racecourses of the cathedrals of the Earth鈥�.
Douglas finds grubby commercialism behind many of the loudly proclaimed pure
motives of Western climbers on Everest. But he also finds that Nepalese have
succumbed to the star climber syndrome. When Pasang Lhamu became the first
Nepalese woman to climb the mountain in 1993, the year Englishwoman Rebecca
Stephens grabbed headlines for her assault. But while Stephens came down, Lhamu,
鈥渁 mediocre climber, dangerously slow and unconfident鈥�, died on the mountain. It
didn鈥檛 stop her becoming a national hero. We all need heroes.