SEPTEMBER'S BOOK OF THE MONTH
Tim Butcher has followed his brilliant book about the Congo, Blood River, with the story of his daring journey to Sierra Leone and Liberia in the footsteps of Graham Greene ...
‘A brave book by a writer of skill and principle … he exposes the toxic cocktail of colonial exploitation, tribal conflict, ritual violence and blood diamonds that spits out regional monstrosities such as Charles Taylor.’ Sunday Times
ARMCHAIR TRAVELLER: CAPE TOWN VIA SWEDEN
Chasing the Devil author Tim Butcher reads his first ‘biographical novel’ and thinks about Cape Town
My first encounter with a ‘biographical novel’ has had me thinking about nationality, roots and identity, as well as the novelist’s eternal challenge of blending fact with fiction.
The international credentials of The Journey of Anders Sparrman are hard to match. Written in Swedish, it is a fictional account of the life of an eighteenth-century botanist from near Stockholm who travelled the length of Africa to the then fiercely Dutch colony of Cape Town. There he joined the British explorer, James Cook, on a journey of discovery in the deep, deep southern seas around Antarctica. The author is Per Wästberg, a Swedish writer of such high standing he chairs the committee that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. I read it in an English translation published recently by Granta.
Intriguing though this international pedigree is, the remarkable thing about the book is that it falls into the category of True Fiction. I was fascinated by the interplay between text lifted from Sparrman’s actual diaries and material created by Wästberg. So good was the author at capturing the style of Sparrman that I struggled to spot the seams. Sparse has to be the best description of the book’s style. Sparrman saw remarkable things and suffered terrible privations so doing but both he and Wästberg leave it to the reader’s imagination to conceive how anyone can live, for example, in a damp, unlit, cramped space on board a tiny wooden ship dodging icebergs as a determined captain plots a course into yet colder, higher, remoter seas.
More than anything the book got me thinking about Cape Town, one of the world’s great nexuses and a city where I, a Briton, have chosen to make my home. At the bottom of Africa (care must be taken not to say that the Cape of Good Hope is the actual bottom of the continent. Cape Agulhas, about 100 miles south-east of Cape Town, is the southernmost point) people have always been drawn here by geography. The first to leave any record were the indigenous groups commonly referred to as bushmen. The cape being wet and temperate, there is little Kalahari-style bush this far south so perhaps they are better known as strandlopers, an early Dutch term for beachcombers who subsisted on what could be found on the foreshore. Then came the bantu tribes, herdsmen originating far away around the headwaters of the Nile but who, through the Middle Ages, permeated right down the continent. White man arrives only late in the timeline, with the Dutch colonists who took the cape as a victualling yard for ships of the Dutch East India company, followed by the British.
Today’s Cape Town reflects this Mulligan-stew bloodline with, to use the racial categorisation from apartheid that is still accepted locally 16 years after apartheid’s passing, a large black community rubbing up against an equally large population of coloureds, garnished by smaller groups of Indians and whites. My own arrival here feels nothing more than a tiny historical continuation of a process powerfully captured by both Wästberg and Sparrman.