Book 242: Turks & Caicos Islands (English) – Deadly Deceit (Jean HARROD)

On the main road into town, it was a normal Grand Turk rush hour. No-one was driving fast, or in a panic. These hurricanes were part of everyday life in this Territory. Most storms veered off course anyway, before they got near the islands. But the few direct hits they’d had loomed large in island folklore.

The salty water slopped up over the sides of the salina, and the rusty weather vanes creaked in the wind. There were no green herons or other birds to be seen now. They knew what was coming, and had already left.

 

Recently I was excited to get my first reader from the Turks & Caicos Islands, so it was time to finally do a reading! (I’m so honoured to have all you readers from most of the places in the world).

The Turks and & Caicos Islands is a Caribbean group off the southern end of the Bahamas archipelago; it used to be part of the Bahamas but opted to remain an overseas territory of the UK when the former became independent in 1973. Relevantly, they have a history of deliberately luring ships onto rocks.

Author Jean Harrod was a British diplomat and lived all over the world, including Australia and China (the scenes of the first and third in her Diplomatic Crime series), and the Turks & Caicos Islands, which is the setting of this second one. They say you should write about what you know, and Harrod obviously does.

The heroine of the stories is diplomat Jessica Turner. She is suddenly called from London to cover for the absent Head of the Governor’s Office. Almost everyone else who could assist her is either away/has been in an accident/suicides/gets killed/can’t get there because of a looming hurricane. Like almost everyone else she knows nothing about the islands, but gets up to speed pretty quickly!

Fortunately, her Queensland policeman friend from the first in this Diplomatic Crime series bumps into her when they are in transit in Miami airport, and decides it might be profitable (from two points of view) to make a side trip to TCI. He is now working on preventing illegal immigration and is studying how the Americans do it, why not how the Brits do it too? (Tiny TCI has a problem with Haitian ‘boat people’ who really intend to make it to the US).

So starts the series of accidents/murders among the ruling class. Clement Pearson hangs himself in his garage. The Governor is seriously injured in a car ‘accident’ with a truck (we subsequently learn that he was going to ‘confess’ something). Mrs Pearson is then murdered at a dinner party in the same garage in the same gruesome manner as her husband.

There is a lot of (non-indigenous) voodoo being practised, not least in the two garage murders, which seems to immediately link to the Haitians, but what is the real connection?

On the whole, it was a very enjoyable read. The characters were well-described and believable. I liked that there were good summaries of the dramatis personae, sometimes it’s easy to forget who is who in a thriller, or any novel.

If I’m being picky, I might question how Jess in the middle of managing hurricane planning still had time and mental space to run around investigating and having adventures. Why would expert diver Tom go diving apparently without an alternate air source? After the hurricane why doesn’t Jess stop to check if people are OK in the flimsy Haitian settlement? I felt the changes of character were very abrupt. The suspicious aspect of the Governor’s car crash is left a bit up in the air. When listing those in a car, the driver is left out. Jess uses a torch on her late-night snoop even though the moon is almost full. Most of all, it’s surprising that on such a small island there is no general knowledge (or at least rumours) of what has been going on. (Wouldn’t someone notice that the kindergarten full of Haitian children was slightly suspicious?)

But I’m nitpicking. Even though I could predict some elements of the plot, including the main scenario, that didn’t detract in the slightest from my enjoyment. It’s a real page-turner, a great discovery and highly recommended! Just as well TCI exists, and needed to be read, otherwise I never would have stumbled across this one.

Harrod, Jean, Deadly Deceit (Diplomatic Crime Series 2), Layerthorpe, York Authors Coffee Shop, 2016, ISBN 978-0-9929971-4-4

Book 165: Gabon (English) – Mema (Daniel MENGARA)

 

 

And my mother would start to talk. She would talk for hours, for days and for months. She would spit words out like bombs, burning the village with their atrocious fire. Her words would rush out like troops on the assault and invade the village, taking no prisoners. They would tornado over the village like a hurricane, blowing off thatch rooftops. She would drown the village in the mortal lake of her words, hammering them like a carpenter his nails, leaving of her victims only lifeless ant-gnawed carcasses that told of her memorable passage. Tired of listening to this indomitable woman, the mediator would simply walk out, vanquished and swearing never again, in the future, to accept a mediation involving this woman.

 

This is a small novel but has lots packed into it! The style of storytelling obviously comes from the oral tradition, with its sound effects, repetition, and refrain (“Mema. Mother. My Mother.”)

It is told from the perspective of a village boy. He has a pacifist father (Pepa) and a much stronger mother (Mema) – she apparently used witchcraft on him to make her husband pliable, and continually gourds him. These suspicions and her loud mouth eventually get her ostracised by the village. She is a skillful but hated speaker – most men and women fear her. She often took over the sermons in church – she criticises catechist for his Biblical inaccuracies – and everyone else – but herself uses witchcraft to try to save her husband. When people don’t react to her she gets angrier. She is a lioness.

That isn’t to say that other households weren’t effectively ruled by the wives as well – just that they were more subtle about it. They ruled at home, rather than the men, in some sort of constitutional monarchy. (A woman is able to flee an abusive husband – she just has to wait for the right time, politically. And in the war of the sexes, they are able to successfully carry out a Lysistrata-like strike). But Mema was not content to exercise control behind the scenes like this, which meant she was “both admired and loathed, respected and feared.” After she loses her husband and two daughters she goes quiet (the village tries to take her remaining children), but she walks quietly and carries big machete. The women of the village war against her under her aunt (who is similar to her or even more so).

There is less than usual comment on the encroachment of the modern world. It is true that the young get respect from living in the city being educated. But the place we are in is still mostly traditional.

I learnt a lot about the fascinating local beliefs and culture from this one, and really enjoyed it.

 

MENGARA, Daniel (1967 – ), Mema, Oxford…, Heinemann (African writers Series), 2003, ISBN 0 435 90923 1

 

Book 60: Ivory Coast (French) – En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages = Waiting for the wild Beasts to Vote (Ahmadou KOUROUMA)

He had gone back up into the Sahel and the Sahara, his native land, and had gone back to the great tribal wandering. And he had fully recovered. It is only the desert which heals despair. For the desert is endless spaces, the silence of the sand dunes, a night sky enamelled with thousands of stars. An environment which faultlessly saves those who have profoundly lost hope. In the desert, it is possible to cry without fear of making a flood overflow a wadi. Nowhere is nature so favourable for meditation as the desert. That is why all the great prophets were born in the deserts.
[my translation]

 

This is the story of Koyaga, the eternal president-cum-dictator of the ‘Gulf Coast’. His story is an amalgam, and a peerless sendup, of several dictators – Ivory Coast’s own Houphouët-Boigny, ‘Emperor’ Bokassa of the Central African Republic/Empire, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (now Congo DR), Eyadema of Togo. It is narrated mainly by a griot (praise-singer/minstrel/musician/historian/king’s fool) in a deliciously satirical, pseudo-sycophantic way. The great nationalist leader began his career as a stooge of the French colonialists, fighting for them in Indo-China, and when the president of his newly-independent country refuses the returning soldiers their pensions, Koyaga overthrows him. He becomes one of those dictators (like Houphouet-Boigny) who shout their anti-Communism so as to receive massive aid from the West. But with the fall of the Iron Curtain their usefulness to the West is at an end and they are forced to undergo democratic elections – and to re-invent themselves once again.
To European eyes it might seem like a sort of magical realism, yet here the unbelievable comes out as somehow more credible than the evident. For example, instead of the blatant obviousness of Koyaga ‘escaping’ from a prison where he was already permitted to come and go by his friend the prison director, and that he arrived in the capital disguised as a poultry seller (rather than as a white cock) – these are two banal for the legend, which would have magic warfare (and counter-magic from the to-be-assassinated president). For Koyaga is a shape-changer (such as you might find in Norse mythology). And prophecies, as usual, find fulfillment when you try to avoid them.

Kourouma’s novel is the story of Ivory Coast in particular and Africa in general. It is a scathing critique of a continent that has been betrayed by its leaders, who continue to inflict colonialism on their people in another form. Long but rich, it is another classic which I cannot recommend highly enough.

KOUROUMA, Ahmadou (1927-2003), En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1998, ISBN 978.2.02.041637.5

 

[English translation: KOUROUMA, Ahmadou, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, London, Vintage, 2004, ISBN 9780099283829]

 

 

Book 50: Ghana (English) – Wife of the Gods (Kwei QUARTEY)

The forest was black and Darko was afraid to enter. The trees, covered from apex to root with dry, sloughing scales, beckoned him with their crackling, stunted branches. The forest floor erupted in a charcoal-colored cloud of dust as the gnarled, ragged tree roots burst from the earth and turned into massive, thrashing limbs. Swaying, the trees began to lumber toward Darko. He wanted to escape, but terror paralyzed him. He opened his mouth to scream but no sound came.

Fairly light-hearted for a murder mystery, but treating its themes with due consideration, this is a very likeable, easy-to-read novel. Yet I found I learnt a great deal about the local culture and ways of thinking from it. A ‘wife of the gods’ (trokosi) is a local girl offered to the local healer/witch doctor in expiation of some supposed transgression. That this is without the poor girl’s consent goes without saying… The not-very-nice witch doctor in this work is one of the prime suspects in the murder of a young woman who had locked horns with him in her anti-AIDS campaign, but did he do it? There are certainly one or two rather extreme AIDS remedies in this book! The hero, Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, who had moved to the capital Accra, digs up dark corners of his own past in this apparently sleepy village. He is a very likeable character, even if he does go off the rails occasionally (and understandably). I suspect this novel will be enjoyed by a much wider circle than just those who read murder mysteries. A totally enjoyable read.
Quartey was raised in Ghana but now lives in the US.

 

QUARTEY, Kwei, Wife of the Gods, New York, Random House, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8129-7936-7