Title: Heart of Africa
Author: Sihle Khumalo
ISBN: 9781415200810
Publisher: Umuzi
Publication date: October 2009
Heart of Africa, travel writer Sihle Khumalo’s second book, is a light-hearted, often humorous account of his journey through Central Africa, commemorating the discovery of the source of the Nile 150 years earlier. As in his previous book, Dark Continent My Black Arse (Umuzi, 2007), Khumalo once again attempts to travel through Africa using only public transport. This time, however, his goal is not to traverse the continent; rather, spurred on by a fascination with nineteenth-century explorers and their search for the source of the Nile, Khumalo sets out for Central Africa, hoping to accomplish six goals along the way:
- Take a ferry ride on Lake Tanganyika.
- Stand on the equator in Uganda.
- Bungee jump at the official source of the Nile in Rwanda.
- Visit the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda.
- See the Rwanda mountain gorillas.
- Visit the remote source of the Nile at Nyungwe forest in Rwanda.
For the most part, Heart of Africa dwells on the difficulty of achieving these goals when relying solely on public transport, especially when one is severely hampered by time constraints. In describing his various travails, Khumalo maintains a fine balance between humour and frustration. The reader is often treated to a detailed account of his annoyance at the vagaries of public transport in Central Africa, or of his disgust at the state of some of the guesthouses he stays at, but is moreover entertained with quirky anecdotes and bizarre incidents that focus more on kindness and generosity than they do on human failing. His physical discomfort is often turned into amusing little quips; for example, when in Mpulungu, a town on the southernmost point of Lake Tanganyika in which “(t)he humidity … was unbearable and life incredibly slow” (70), Khumalo invents the “life-enhancing formula”: Mpulungu – pu = Mlungu [white person in Zulu] (73). This is, however, only one of many instances where his jokes have a distinctly eschatological undertone.
While the overall tone of Heart of Africa is decidedly funny, the book also has its more serious moments. Dana Snyman writes on the back cover that “Khumalo avoids all the clichés we believe about Africa.” However, it would be more accurate to claim that Khumalo comes to realise that all the clichés we believe about Africa are not, in fact, true. As he travels through various African countries, Khumalo frequently reflects on crime and corruption on the continent. Whether because of his own “paranoid nature” or the fact that he “live(s) in Johannesburg” (35), he persistently expects someone to rob or cheat him out of his limited funds. Every taxi driver, every hawker, every government official becomes a potential thief or corrupt bureaucrat in his eyes. In fact, his concern with crime extends so far that, out of the seven questions the book poses to the reader, four dwell on the possibility that he was somehow conned out of his money. Still, when he is proven wrong again and again, he realises that “[i]t is amazing how we sometimes prejudge others purely because we know their plight and therefore assume they are thieves, thugs and criminals” (29). His final insight at the end of his journey includes the maxim that “you can trust people in Africa not to steal your backpack” (220).
Heart of Africa also self-consciously explores the genre of black travel writing, especially in the context of a journey that commemorates the discovery of the Nile by a nineteenth-century Western explorer. One of the most pertinent questions the book poses is whether “there [were] any black explorers and, if there were, who were they and where did they go and what did they do?” (107). The book highlights the “irony that [Khumalo], a Black African travelling to another African country, was so fascinated by white explorers of two centuries ago” (107). As an African travel writer, Khumalo makes the valid claim that the “so-called discoveries by early explorers were nothing but first sightings by non-Africans; local people knew about the rivers and lakes and waterfalls long before exploring Africa became such a thing to Europeans”, but then comes to the rather simplistic conclusion that “in reality, there were no discoveries” (220). His own discoveries of Africa tend towards the individual and interpersonal, rather than the geographical; while he makes vague generalisations about the beauty of Africa, he notes the specific human kindness of “people in Kigali who find it in their hearts to clean the yards of other people in the name of reconciliation and nation building” (220).
For all its quirky, light-hearted anecdotes, as well as Khumalo’s honest and self-deprecating deconstruction of clichés about crime in Africa, Heart of Africa propagates extremely troubling gender stereotypes. Unlike in Dark Continent My Black Arse, Khumalo (with a pregnant wife and a young daughter at home) no longer tries to chat up every young woman he encounters on his journey. However, most of the women in the book are still described in decidedly patriarchal language of objectification. The first example is when Khumalo is very taken with the Red Pepper, a local Ugandan tabloid, described as his “favourite newspaper” (155), as the “lovely, delicious, chilli-hot Red Pepper” (156) and later as his “favourite newspaper in the whole world” (202). Khumalo quotes from the tabloid at length on more than one occasion, and seems especially interested in a story about the sexual humiliation of a female Ugandan MP, who was apparently cursed for divorcing her husband: “She must open her legs for the husband to enter. She must choose between insanity and opening her legs for the man she disgraced and divorced, if she is to overcome the powerful spell cast on her by powerful wizards from Congo and Tanzania” (144).
Khumalo mentions, at least, that he “couldn’t contain [his] laughter” (144) after reading the story, suggesting that he, too, finds it utterly ridiculous. However, he admits to enjoying the tabloid, not for its preposterous brand of humour, but simply because it is “raunchy” (155). Furthermore, the Red Pepper stories he quotes always involve assertive young women who challenge patriarchal gender norms and are then subjected to sexual humiliation.
The underlying discourse of female sexual humiliation is made even more apparent and troubling when Khumalo encounters a “young woman with kissable lips” (187) in an office in Rwanda, who informs him that he will neither be able to see the mountain gorillas nor visit Nyungwe forest, as he had not made the necessary arrangements to obtain a permit, camping gear and personal transport in advance. He frames his response to the young woman and the bad news she delivers in a very troubling manner: “I know they say you should not shoot the messenger, but the more the woman spoke and the more my dreams were being shattered the more I felt like tipping her over before lying on top of her with my heavyweight body” (188).
There is nothing ambiguous in the image of a man “tipping” a young woman “over” and “lying on top of her” with his “heavy”, masculine body – in short, Khumalo seems to propagate the use of rape as a form of punishment for unruly women.
In his review of Dark Continent My Black Arse, Fred de Vries comments on Khumalo’s objectification of women, writing that “[s]uch remarks could and should be highly irritating. But Khumalo gets away with it, essentially because he’s self-deprecating, vulnerable and almost naïve” (LitNet, 17 June 2008). However, there is nothing vulnerable or naïve about using rape as a patriarchal discourse of punishment, especially since Khumalo is angry with the woman for pointing out that he is in the wrong, as he had failed to make the necessary arrangements. Living in a country where young black women have, in recent times, been stripped of their clothing and/or beaten for daring to subvert conservative patriarchal gender norms, one has to ask oneself whether any author should “get away” with a description in which an assertive young woman is reinscribed into a discourse of rape as a method of social control. In the same review, De Vries remarks that Khumalo “has taken on the persona of a 100 percent Zulu boy”. Again, one has to question whether this persona should be condoned, or whether it is, in fact, harmful to South African gender politics. It is a pity that this scene follows Khumalo’s visit to the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda. The visit to the Memorial Centre is, perhaps, the most honest and touching account in the entire book. However, one cannot help but feel that Khumalo’s reflections on the devastating effects of violence on human lives is rather cheapened and diminished by his violent response to this young woman only four pages later.
In conclusion, Heart of Africa is playful and troubling at the same time, making it, paradoxically, both a very light and a highly disconcerting read. The book deconstructs stereotypes about Africa in an honest and candid way, but then reinforces the most troubling gender stereotypes when it comes to the portrayal of women. The narrative style is very simple, sprinkled with superfluous adjectives, and the plot rather predictable, as we follow Khumalo on a chronological journey from one country to the next. Written 150 years after the colonial exploration of Central Africa, Heart of Africa suggests that colonial stereotypes may have changed, and that the genre of travel writing may have broadened to include African explorers writing about their own continent, but also illustrates that rampant gender stereotyping is still as prevalent today as when Speke discovered the source of the Nile in 1858.