By Stephen Williams

Tanzania - African Eden

Photographs by Javed Jafferji

Text by Graham Mercer

£30.00 The Gallery Publications, Zanzibar, Tanzania

ISBN 0-9987-8877-7-5

Coffee-table books, especially on Africa, have always presented me with problems. The photographs are usually stunning - not a very difficult achievement considering how stunning Africa is to photograph and the text is usually lively and factually accurate. But there has always been something missing. Most of these coffee-table books have been produced by outsiders for outsiders. The inevitable result is that your perceptions of the subject are circumscribed by the limitations of the photographer and author.

For example, a photographer who neither speaks the language of the area he is filming nor is steeped in its culture, will see only shape, colour and form and compose his pictures accordingly. The result, especially in pictures of people, while accurate from a photographic point of view, is often completely lacking in the spirit of the subject. Therefore it is hardly surprising that some of the best pictures of contemporary life are those taken by natives of the places featured.

Africa, unfortunately, has suffered in this regard since so few native Africans have looked at their continent through a camera lens and tried to record the emotional impact of their views. South Africa has been the exception - producing a host of top drawer photographers. These have ranged from superb landscape and wildlife photographers to award-winning social documentarists , many of them black.

Now Javed Jafferji can justly claim to belong to this elite group. His cultural base is Zanzibar - an island whose magic neither time nor politics seems to have been able to extinguish. In his previous work and in this volume, he has tried to capture the essence of this magic, to somehow obtain an imprint of the genie on film. He has lovingly caressed the Arabian Nights architecture of the stone town, the dazzling show of light and shade on textures of wood and stone. He explores the nooks and crevices of the narrow streets and manages to induce the sense of mystery, wonder and anticipation that you feel when walking these alleys. His pictures don’t so much tell a story as point enticingly to the hundreds of human stories that lie just hidden from sight.

In this volume, Jafferji has taken on the whole of Tanzania, i.e. the mainland formerly known as Tanganyika and the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba. This has allowed him full scope to train his lens on the astonishing beauty of the landscape. He allows the majesty of nature, unfettered and unconfined to burst through. It is nature raw and sharp and clear and it has shaped the creatures, both human and animal that inhabit this Eden.

But he always returns to areas where people congregate - the towns and cities and the coast which he loves so well. He is photographing people on the move as they change and adapt to new times and necessities yet remain the same at the core.

This is an insider’s rendering of one of the most interesting and achingly beautiful spots in the world.

Graham Mercer, who provides the text, cannot claim the same insider status and it shows. However, the text is lucid, well researched and doled out in convenient bite-sized chunks.

Tanzania, African Eden is one coffee-table book you should not be without. If nothing else, it is a wonderful antidote to all those tales of doom and gloom that so pervade our continent.

Anver Versi


The Gallery Publications, P.O. Box 3181, Zanzibar, Tanzania.

Tel: +25524 232244; mobile: +255471 320 644

email: gallery@swahilicoast.com

www. swahilicoast.com

UK distributors: Global Book Marketing, 38 King Street, London WC2E 8JT.

Tel: +44 (0)207 487 0309.

Lost Lion of the Empire

The life of ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Grogan

By Edward Paice

£19.99 HarperCollins

ISBN 0-00-257003-3

Ewart Grogan was born in 1874 of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family. One of 21 children sired by his father in two marriages, he the eldest of the second union. His intellectual abilities were soon recognised and at Winchester School, one of Britain’s premier public schools, he proved a quite exceptional scholar. It was also at this school that he developed a keen interest both in rifle shooting and Africa, inspired by reading Frederic Courtney Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa.

These early readings had a formative effect, but Grogan’s interest in Africa had to wait until, at his mother’s insistence (his father had died in 1891), he completed a university education.

He also had to overcome adolescent ill health following a severe bout of measles. This he achieved with four seasons of mountaineering in the European Alps.

Typically, demonstrating the kind of single-minded determination that was to be a hallmark of his remarkable life, shortly after conquering the formidable Matterhorn summit he was elected the youngest member, at the age of 21, of the Swiss Alpine Club.

Dream opportunity

By the time he was to arrive at Jesus College Cambridge as a Freshman in 1893, he had disproved his doctor’s worst fears, adding four stone in weight and growing to almost six feet in height.

Despite his formidable intellect, Grogan’s love of practical jokes and pranks saw him sent down from university - following his part in herding a flock of sheep into a tutor’s rooms that promptly set about devouring the carpet and furnishings and leaving the odour of a shearing shed.

For a time Grogan half-heartedly considered pursuing a career in law or possibly becoming an artist, but the idea of travelling to Africa, stimulated by his extensive readings about the continent, had never died. Although left a large legacy by his late father, it was not enough to finance an expedition of any sort. It was not until the first gruesome reports of an uprising by the Ndebele peoples in Southern Rhodesia appeared in the British newspapers - and Cecil Rhodes called for volunteers for the fight - that the opportunity to follow his ambitions presented itself.

He was soon on a boat to Cape Town, and thanks to a fortuitous meeting with a cavalry officer on board ship, Grogan found himself ‘deputised’ to run a wagonload of ammunition to Bulawayo. There he was signed-up as a member of the Matabele Mounted Police and issued with a horse, Martin-Henry rifle, a gun bucket and curry-comb.

Ferocious attacks

He saw little action in Matabeleland, and the town was relieved shortly after his arrival. But Rhodes and his campaign to secure the territory for his Chartered Company still faced formidable opposition from Ndebele warriors hiding in the granite boulders of the Mambo and Matopo Hills, and the Shona nation had also risen up against the European invasion and laid siege to Salisbury.

Grogan was dispatched in a column to relieve Salisbury. He endured ferocious attacks by Shona warriors, appaling weather with unseasonably heavy rains, starvation rations, dysentery and fever before reaching Salisbury. But survive it he did, and on his return to Bulawayo, promoted to scout, he became a member of Rhodes’ small retinue.

Grogan’s recollections of Rhodes and listening to the man’s dreams for Africa left a lasting impression. These soliloquies, usually delivered round a fire after nightfall, he described as having ‘the spell of greatness in the air.....the crystallisation of a set purpose to which self, family, everything had to be subservient’.

Grogan’s next mission was to escort Lord Gray, the Administrator of Rhodesia, to Portuguese East Africa. There he was released from the employ of the Chartered Company, given a campaign medal and his final pay. After a near fatal hunting expedition during which he only just survived a further bout of fever, his first African adventure was to end when he inadvertently killed a Portuguese officer in a bar room brawl in Beira and had to be spirited aboard a German ship for Zanzibar to avoid a diplomatic incident.

On his return to Britain, he fell ill with a liver abscess, a condition that would recur throughout his life.

Cape to Cairo trek

Having recovered his health, Grogan set off on a trip to New Zealand, a colony that much impressed him, where he met and fell in love with Gertrude Coleman-Watt. In order to win her hand, and aware that his prospects seemed less than brilliant, he promised her family that he would make his name by undertaking the first south to north traverse of the African continent.

Back in Britain he found a patron for his expedition and spent months in meticulous preparation for the adventure. Finally, in the company of Harry Sharp, the two men set off.

What followed was three years of extraordinary hardships and dangers culminating in Grogan reaching his goal, alone, in 1900 An account of this epic journey forms a large part of this biography. Sharp got only as far as Fort Portal in Uganda where he learned that pressing family matters required his return to England as soon as possible, and he left his companion for Mombasa and home.

But an even greater proportion of the book is given over to Grogan’s East Africa exploits. After the great Cape-to-Cairo trek, his name was indeed made and he married Gertrude. However, settling back in Britain and a life of lecture tours and authoring was the last thing on his mind. He might have joined the ‘Milner Kindergarten’ with like-minded imperialists in South Africa had he not chanced on reports of timber resources in the British East Africa protectorates.

There, his unbounded ambitions and energy would be given free reign.

Bwana Chui

He would, before his death in 1967, found the country’s timber industry, build Mombasa’s first deep water port, construct a luxury hotel and open East Africa’s first children’s hospital. Along the way he would provide invaluable assistance to the British war effort in two world wars, with his first-hand knowledge particularly of the Belgian colonies of central Africa. Although always a patriot, he would was almost constantly at odds with the British government’s colonial office who simply could not share the vision that he had of Africa’s vast potential. He would also be on hand to see decolonialisation come to the region.

Edward Paice, a former history scholar at Cambridge University, has penned a scholarly and well-researched study of Grogan’s life and times. However, it is apparent that Grogan was no saint. Frequently he displayed the egotistical, overbearing, paternalistic, bullying, maverick side of his nature.

Perhaps a more rounded portrait of the man, the man Africans called Bwana Chui (‘the leopard’ in Kiswahili), would have been more fitting; never-the-less, this is a book worth reading for anyone remotely interested in Africa’s colonial paste.

Apricots on the Nile

By Colette Rossant

£12.99 Bloomsbury

ISBN 0-7475-5397-1

Colette Rossant spent her childhood in Egypt, arriving in Cairo as a young child. Confusingly, she variously cites her age as ‘just four’ and then five years of age when she and her parents arrive in the city. They live with her Egyptian Jewish father’s wealthy parents while he works for a top department store as its European buyer and her mother, a glamourous Frenchwomen, leads a life of luxurious idleness.

The memoirs are tinged with a barely concealed disdain for her mother who, following the death of her father from a massive stroke, leaves the young Colette in the care of her grandparents to return to France. Life for the young child contrasts a highly privileged upbringing with the inevitable sense of abandonment she experiences with the death of her father and the absence of her mother.

Emotional turmoil

Her grandparents are loving and slowly the emotional turmoil, while never totally resolved, does at least subside. A great deal of comfort is taken from the grandparent’s household staff, who in the absence of child playmates, take her under their care. After school, the young Colette spends hours in the kitchens with the cooks and develops a passion for the delicious Egyptian dishes being prepared. Visiting Cairo’s markets with her grandmother to buy provisions also stimulates a lifelong love of good food. In later life, Colette became the author of eight cookbooks and a contributor to food magazines. Forty three recipes for many of her favourite childhood dishes punctuate the book’s narrative.

This is a curious book. It is a small pocket book format of less than 200 pages, and as a memoir it does have a certain charm. There are some interesting old photographs, descriptive of a long-lost era, and at times the narrative is moving. But it is so deeply personal in its recollections that it can leave you feeling distinctly uncomfortable. It is as if the author as she bares her soul is asking the reader to take the role of the author’s confessor or psychoanalyst.

On another level, you could also question the need to reproduce recipes for such simple dishes as a tomato salad. While recipes for Sambusaks, or Cousbareia sauce to accompany fried mullet sound tempting - surely anyone with an interest in preparing food would not really require instructions to master cutting four tomatoes and preparing an oil and herb dressing?

One Market Under God

By Thomas Frank

£18.99 Secker & Warburg

ISBN 0-436-27619-4

For many Africans, the market economy is the radical imposition over the last couple of decades of structural adjustment policies and conditionalities attached to the continuing ‘support’ of the Bretton Woods institutions, namely the World Bank and IMF.

For the vast majority of those living on the continent, and in the developing world in general, the market economy has signalled ever deepening poverty and the loss of even rudimentary employment security, healthcare and education - even while its virtues are sold as an extension and underpinning of a new world order promising democracy, human-rights and progress.

As Thomas Frank’s stunning critique makes clear, similar promises are made to the peoples of developed world. While this book is US-centric, in a world of corporate globalisation and where the US is the dominant world economy, the arguments he raises are as pertinent whether you live in Detroit or Dar es Salaam, Salt Lake City or Soweto.

Those arguments are that, simply put, corporate America has hijacked rationale and is busy persuading and cajoling consumers that the market equates to democracy and the will of the people. Those that question the evangelistic fervour of this propaganda are dismissed as modern day heretics.

It is, of course, a monumentally preposterous and self-serving proposition - but one that has by mere force of repetition successfully permeated America’s psyche.

Thomas Frank’s razor sharp analysis, caustic commentary and biting wit expose the fallacies of this new faith. He highlights corporate America’s deceits with a series of chapters that take on the cybereconomy - where company’s that have only a dream to sell can amass market capitalisation of the magnitude of General Motors.

He describes how brands such as Nike, Gap et al have deceived by reinventing themselves as symbols of authenticity and rebellion, how CEO’s have massively enriched themselves via share options by crushing labour union power before embarking on large scale retrenchment programmes, and media houses have choked freedom of expression by blurring advertising with copy, dumbing down and diluting editorial content and ruthlessly stomping any competition.

This is a picture of capitalism gone mad, its agenda sold to the people with the language of democracy. Thomas Frank’s book is clearly telling us that, truly, these corporate emperors have no clothes but are like chameleons peddling their wares in the name of illusory new age values.

Travel Photography

By Richard I’Anson

£9.99 Lonely Planet

ISBN 1-86450-207-X

In this guide from the Lonely Planet publishers, producers of some of the world’s most popular travel guides, house photographer Richard I’Anson runs through some useful techniques, tips and advice for the traveller who wants to capture images of the people and places he or she might visit.

In general the information the book contains is basic, non-technical and straight forward.

I’Anson also reproduces many of his own photographs to illustrate the text, with the camera, lens and film noted. He also includes some variations of a particular shot at various exposures and apertures, at different times of day, or with and without filters to explain just why it is so important to consider more than simply the subject and composition to take a good photograph.

Much of what I’Anson has to say is just good common-sense, although the book is limited to the use of chemical film rather than taking digital images. Nor does the book touch on video photography, an increasingly popular camera for travellers with the development of smaller and lighter weight equipment.

Perhaps surprisingly, he makes no mention of one piece of invaluable advice. Always carry more film than you think you might need! Keeping a note book of what you shot and how, and referring to your notes when you get back your film from the processors, goes a long way to developing your photographic skills.

You might also take note of the views of Anver Versi in his review of Javed Jafferji’s sumptuous photographs in Tanzania - African Eden. Learning a few words of the local language and at least something of the culture you are observing can make all the difference.

The Enviropaedia

By Arend Hoogervorst

R115 in South Africa - foreign prices on application.

The Eco-Logic Environmental

ISBN 0-620-52605-2

Both established and proposed business operations - from manufacture to mining and agriculture - are becoming increasingly regulated by the environmental restrictions that must be considered and investigated along with all other vital elements of good business practice and feasibility studies. The Enviropaedia tells you where to start.

Although the publication carries the title of The Enviropaedia - Environmental Encyclopedia & Networking Directory of Southern Africa, it’s scope and usefulness for businesses and institutions extends far beyond the borders of the southern African region. While the directory concerns itself with southern African environmental issues and catalogues associated organisations in the region, it has continental application because of the universality of matters ecological.

In a nutshell, The Enviropaedia is designed to inform, advise and network amongst all who need environmental information and the contacts and links to put that environmental information to practical use.

The volume contains over 80 A4 pages of plain language descriptions of environmental topics. At the end of each topic is a cross-reference to associated topics and organisations. The directory and listings section categorises organisations, companies, individuals, NGOs, consultants, pressure groups and other environmentally interested and affected parties.

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