By Stephen Williams

Abyssinian Chronicles

By Moses Isegawa

£16 Picador

ISBN 0-330-37664-0

First published in Dutch in 1998, Abyssinian Chronicles has been translated into German, French, Finnish, Italian, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese. Polish, Swedish and Spanish before last year appearing in English. It was published to great acclaim in the US last summer, followed by a British imprint late last year. Abyssinian Chronicles is a powerful first novel from the pen of Ugandan writer, Moses Isegawa.

Within the book, Moses Isegawa explores diverse and often troubling themes which reflects three decades as a young man comes of age. Central to the books’ theme is Uganda’s tragedy at the hands of Milton Obote and Idi Amin’s brutal dictatorships.

The saga is narrated in the first person by Mugezi who we first meet as young boy living in a village with his adored grand-mother. When he reaches nine years, he leaves for the city to live with his parents and siblings. Quickly, he has to learn how to meet the challenges of the adult world around him. He asserts himself by conducting calculated campaigns to avenge the humiliations inflicted by a pious and pitiless mother.

These skills he further perfects at his seminary boarding school. Faced with institutional neglect, and bullying from fellow students and faculty, Mugezi’s daring is no match for his adversaries - but while dealing with this personal world, Uganda is descending into a chaotic, brutal nightmare.

Amin/Obote II changeover

He leaves the seminary to begin a teaching post at the cusp of the Amin/Obote II changeover. Mugezi’s return to his village reveals a changed world, taken over by coffee smugglers, liquor, gambling, supermarkets and hotels. Waves from the turmoil and violence ripple ever closer to Mugezi. An Aunt becomes involved in working for the guerrillas, Grandfather disappears and is murdered. Hunger and hardships stalk the land.

Mugezi drifts into brewing ‘kill me quick’ moonshine alcohol, leaves his teaching post to join an old schoolfriend, now in the army, but ambitious to exploit the economic chaos. Together they extort, while around them Amin falls, Obote returns, retribution and vengeance unfold and the civil-war continues. Mugezi’s narrative captures a surreal period, at times resembling a biblical Armageddon, before finally an exhausted nation arrives at some sort of stasis - only to be confronted by the ravages of the Aids pandemic. Finally, our narrator emigrates to Europe where his struggle is to find a place to live and find work, and come to terms with his past.

Moses Isegawa’s stunning saga is written with real verve. The book may have a conventional format and obvious allegorical and autobiographical flavours, but nonetheless it possesses a rare originality. With its sharp wit, acute detail and expressive energy, it must rate as one of the finest first novels to appear for many years. You have to sympathise with the author for having set himself such a huge challenge - writing another book to match this debut.

It is also one of the most accurate descriptions of what people go through during civil conflicts and pandemics. For the first time in years, we are given the human dimensions of war, death and destruction. We see how people cope, how they wring out the tiniest drops of hope and even humour from apocalyptic situations. If you want to understand what it is like living in Africa in turmoil, read this novel.

The Bang-Bang Club

Snapshots from a Hidden War

By Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva

£17.99 William Heineman

ISBN 0-434-0733-1

The Bang-Bang Club was a group of four young ‘conflict’ photographers, Ken Oosterbrook, Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva - who covered the last years of apartheid in South Africa.

Two of them won Pulitzer Prizes for individual photographs. Only two were to survive - Ken Oosterbrook was fatally shot by a stray bullet in Thokaza in April 1994 and Kevin Carter, some months later, took his own life. He had sunk into depression shortly after winning a Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of a vulture and starving child in southern Sudan.

The two surviving members of the Bang-Bang Club tell the story of the four friends and colleagues. It focuses on the huge dilemmas they faced in covering and bringing to the world’s attention the terrible violence, pain and suffering that attended the end of apartheid.

They may have tried to be neutral observers, professional witnesses for the world’s conscience, but there is little doubt that their political allegiance lay with the liberation movement in its fight against the apartheid regime.

The role of conflict photographers is always fraught with moral dilemmas, but its results can have a massive impact. Consider perhaps one of the most famous photographs from Africa, Sam Nziwa’s 1976 photograph of schoolboy Hector Peterson. Hector is being carried away by a weeping classmate after being shot during the Soweto uprisings. It is an image that immortalised an event. Published around the world, it brought to millions direct evidence of the apartheid state’s violent response to protest.

The values of conflict photography are different from other photo-disciplines. Shooting from the hip, with little opportunity to concentrate on framing and focussing, it makes few concessions to aesthetic considerations. There is something random, almost arcane, about it. What this book does is highlight the extreme pressures and stress that those who make a career out of conflict photography must expect to endure.

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War of Words

Memoir of a South African journalist

By Benjamin Pogrund

£16.99 Seven Stories

ISBN 1-888363-71-7

Benjamin Pogrund began working as a journalist for South Africa’s Rand Daily Mail in 1958. He became the paper’s specialist on the black political scene covering the activities of the ANC and leaders such as Nelson Mandela and the PAC’s Robert Sobukwe - both of whom became subjects of the author’s previous books and lifelong friends. For three decades he was one of South Africa’s most effective liberal white voices raised against the increasing tyranny and repression of the apartheid state.

Essentially, the Rand Daily Mail had embarked on a steadfast campaign to improve living conditions, freedom of expression and social justice for all South Africa’s citizens.

Exposed prison conditions

In June 1965, Pogrund began a three-part series in the Mail, exposing conditions and abuses within South Africa’s prisons - apparently in direct breach of the Prisons Act which made it an offence to publish details about prisoners.

The series detailed allegations of brutality, and the widespread corruption and theft among the warders. The reports caused profound public shock, and attracted huge international attention.

The Nationalist government dismissed the reports as a smear campaign, raided the Mail’s offices three times and finally detained Pogrund and a colleague for trial. Eight months later the trial ended in modest fines and suspended prison sentences, much to the chagrin of the security services who had targeted them.

Shortly afterwards, Benjamin Pogrund became night editor and later deputy editor of the Mail and saw the paper evolve from essentially a white liberal organ into a more inclusive daily.

Part of this book concerns the battles waged by the editorial staff with the paper’s owners and business managers. The Nationalist government probably paid more attention to the Mail than any other South African paper, and the 1970s saw the introduction of a plethora of legislation which severely curtailed what the press could publish. Part of this legislation is reproduced in the book to illustrate the broadbrush constraints the government imposed.

While the Mail took as much care as possible to stay within the law, it also took the lead where it could. The Mail was the first paper to question the government’s explanation of Steve Biko’s death in custody. It also played a central role in the Muldergate scandal, when (among other attempts at media manipulation) government money was secretly channelled to finance a bid to buy the Mail and, when that failed, to establish The Citizen as a direct competitor.

Remarkable coincidence

Years later, in 1985, in a somewhat murky business transaction, an Anglo-American Corporation subsidiary took control and subsequently shut the paper. Pogrund poses the question of a ‘nagging suspicion’ that a deal had been struck between the government and Anglo American: In exchange for an agreement on granting a licence for the M-Net TV channel (a hugely profitable investment for Anglo) the new owners would close the paper. He can offer no firm proof but describes the timing of both the paper’s closure and the licence being granted as a ‘remarkable coincidence.’

Benjamin Pogrund’s account of the tumultuous eve- nts he reported is, in itself, a valuable contribution to our knowledge of South Africa’s long, hard struggle to overthrow apartheid.

It is also testimony to the crucial role elements of the South African press played in keeping alive - during the longest, hardest days the dreams of freedom.

Guns and Gandhi in Africa

Pan-African Insights on Non-violence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa

By Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer

£13.99 Africa World Press

ISBN 0-86543-751-3

The themes of the book are explored through summaries of dialogues and discussions - over many years - with a broad spectrum of African leaders, including Walter Sisulu, Ela Gandhi, Kenneth Kaunda, Graca Machel, Sam Nujoma, Julius Nyerere, Jerry John Rawlings and Salim Ahmed Salim. Bill Sutherland does not reveal his age, but notes that in 1935 a high school teacher gave him a copy of W.E.B. DuBois’ book, Black Reconstruction.

Jailed for resisting war

Seven years later he would be incarcerated in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, facing a four year sentence as a war resister. He got out of prison in 1945 and helped found the Congress of Racial Equality.

Five years later he joined the Peacemakers Organisation, a group of radical war-resisters, and with them embarked on a cycle ride across Europe to Moscow, calling for the laying down of arms on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Along the way he had his first encounters with Africans, mainly students who were enthusing the possibilities of a post-liberation Africa. The message proved contagious. As Bill puts it “I had a vision of Africa so idealistic that it almost prevented me from getting there!”

Bill Sutherland’s co-author is Matt Meyer, well known in anti-war circles for his decision to publicly resist US President Jimmy Carter’s Selective Service Registration Programme. He has worked with Bill Sutherland for two decades, and together they have had long hours of conversations with African leaders, visiting over a dozen countries and mapping the changes and transitions since independence.

Following a stint as a correspondent covering the Lancaster House Conference on Nigerian Independence, Bill Sutherland first visit to Africa was always intended to be to Nigeria - but he found his visa application blocked by the British colonial office who still controlled such matters.

So he changed plans and in 1953, took a boat for Accra, capital of Ghana then known as the Gold Coast. There he met and married Efua Theodora Morgue, a Ghanaian teacher and poet, and began a teaching project in the eastern region.

Through a friend from the US, Bill Sutherland was put in touch with the late Komla Agbeli Gbedema, then a building contractor and lay preacher, but who was to become Ghana’s first post-independence Finance Minister.

Martin Luther King

It was through his role as Private Secretary to Gbedema that Bill Sutherland suggested that a young African American preacher be invited to Independence celebration - Dr Martin Luther King.

Alongside Gbedema, he played a pivotal role in protesting against the French nuclear bomb tests in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso, joining in a caravan that organised protest rallies throughout northern Ghana and twice being arrested by the French after crossing the border illegally attempting to reach the test site itself.

Bill Sutherland’s next African home was to be Dar es Salaam where his home became a refuge for fellow African-American exiles and activists, and he began working for the Tanganyikan government in the office of Prime Minister Rashidi Kawawa.

Dar es Salaam was, post-independence, a haven for almost all African liberation movements, and many African-American radicals. His recollections of this period, along with conversations with Mwalimu Nyerere, provides much of the book’s more revealing aspects, for example Mwalimu’s describing the Union with Zanzibar being originally envisaged as a model for the East Africa Community project as a whole. This explains the current tension on the islands - in effect the Union is unfinished business.

Stephen Williams

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