Close focus on Africa
Philip Glazebrook
CONGO JOURNEY by Redmond O'Hanlon Hamish Hamilton, £18, pp. 472 This book describes a perfectly awful journey: the horrors of African travel load each page. But from the moment O'Hanlon thrusts his arm through yours and sets off with jaunty eagerness to catch the ferry up the Congo, you are carried along by his exuberant garrulity. He talks in his sleep, in reveries, in daydreams, he even talks for 15 pages to a baby gorilla. His character wins sympathy, affection. Beastly as the trip is, one reads of its tortures with a gentle smile, as if listening to a fairy story.
The purpose of the journey was that O'Hanlon should see for himself the birds and beasts of central Africa which were already familiar to him from his books. But it is also a quest, a probe into the heart of darkness to find the secret, forest-girdled stretch of water in which dwells a legend, to the Africans known by sight as Mokele- embembe, known by hearsay to Europeans (and to Africans who want to make it a tourist attraction) as the last dinosaur.
A novelist wishing to represent diverse points of view couldn't have invented a Narrenschiff whose crew embodies national characteristics more decidedly than do Mr O'Hanlon and his companions. There is the American, indignant at the backsliding state of Africa, who is forever suggesting a practical, mechanistic cure for every ill; there is the African, a government official in charge of the journey, whose origins are at war with his aspirations, part of him wishing to exploit the natural resources of his country, part of him fearing the sorcery which meddling with those natural resources has aroused against him, and there is the European, observant Mr O'Hanlon from Oxford, his mind weighted with the history of the last 20 million years, his pack bulging with reference books from which everything he sees can be identified.
The book depends for its enjoyment very much on O'Hanlon's curiosity and powers of observation. He will describe a broad general scene — the floating city of barges drawn upstream behind the steamer — and then focus attention on a detailed human happening within the large panorama, a boy drowning, a mother serenely feeding and washing her baby, in a way that sup- plies the reader with all he needs to imag- ine the scene for himself. He is very exact. An adjective qualifies each noun. A chair is a steel chair, a table is formica-topped. This takes time. The tension of a con- frontational scene is defused by O'Hanlon telling us what everyone was wearing. How- ever hot the pace, he notes down the nicti- tation of a hen. And at any twinkle of feathers in a jungle tree action is suspend- ed while he looks up its identity in one of his books.
This passion of O'Hanlon's to name every creature that stirred a leaf reminded me of the contest between Adam and Satan to name the beasts of the field, a contest made unequal by God, who whis- pered in Adam's ear the true name of each creature passing before him, thus saving all but very few from becoming the devil's own creatures. The reference books in O'Hanlon's pack are his god whispering his truth. Whatever he names is rescued from the dark and added to the score; the pro- cess pushes out inch by inch a jetty of weightbearing fact into the legendary swamp of unknown Africa. Science exorcis- es fear. Startled by chimpanzees, he takes cover: 'Adult tschegos, I thought reassur- ingly, giving them a name.' Africa is indif- ferent, even discouraging. 'It is not good to name names,' says one, and when the Englishman hopes excitedly to have come across the droppings of the rarest of all mongooses, the African shrugs: 'OK, why not, if that's what you want?' We learn that the pigmy tribes have names only for those plants or creatures which are of service to them.
Sometimes this close-focus scanning and the weight of the reference books seem to hamper O'Hanlon's wider vision. turned to plate 18 and when I looked up the squir- Nothing much . . just accumulating money.' rel had gone.' When at last the secret lake opens before him, he writes, 'My attention [was] caught by a group of eight long-tailed cormorants crossing from left to right.' Wasn't that first glimpse of the legendary water the very moment in which the mys- tery dived out of sight? He is like Sir Bedi- vere describing the ripple in the reeds where, had he kept faith, he should have seen a hand clothed in white samite.
The American, meanwhile, identifies every scrap of old iron he comes upon as the wreckage of a once mechanised Africa now overgrown and discarded and defunct. Bursting with indignation, he urges practi- cal measures, listens to the catalogue of disasters, to the threats of sorcerers, and goes on prescribing storm-drains as the remedy most needed. He just endures Africa for half the book, his eyes fixed on the finishing post throughout. I wondered at first if I was going to be able to stand him wisecracking his way through the jun- gle in his L. L. Bean boots, but such is the affectionate quality of the book that I found I missed him when he'd gone.
Other traditional European approaches to Africa are embodied in other characters encountered — the admirable pastor and his wife tending the victims of diseases which colonialism had wiped out, the Frenchman who has created with his own hartds his self-dependent reality, but it is the attitudes of the chief African character towards his own continent — his self- knowledge — which makes the frankest and best of .the book's portraits. Aware of magical as well as physical threats, he guards the dependent O'Hanlon against both: 'You are now out of your depth,' he tells him. At other times he is made to exclaim, 'You and your white man's ques- tions!' or 'You whites are children'; and his most frequent resort is to retreat behind the statement 'This is Africa'. (If the phraseology is a little banal, the dialogue a shade stagy, it must be attributed to the fact that the language spoken on the trip was presumably French, in which banalities are always more resounding.) As if from an allegorical journey our hero returns from probing the mysteries of the dark continent stripped of all his pos- sessions. He is penniless, covered with bumps and blains and gorilla faeces, so miserable a figure that an African beggar apologises for soliciting anyone so evident- ly worse off than himself. Ah, but O'Han- lon has only to take a shower, to become a white man again: he cannot escape his identity any more than the leaf-nosed bat can escape classification. Thus restored to his heritage, O'Hanlon takes back to Oxford a very Oxford answer to the ques- tion of whether or not the beast of legend dwells in Lake Tele: 'It exists because we imagine it.'
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