Ryszard Kapuscinski
TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS (Knopf)

It's sad to get news from a dustjacket. I eagerly grabbed the latest book by Ryszard Kapuscinski, perhaps my favourite contemporary writer, but no sooner had I opened it than I learned he died in 2007. I had always somehow imagined I would run into him somewhere and have a great conversation with him. Anyway I tore through it, recklessly. Now I will start over on his first book. TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS covers familiar terrain, that is in terms of his life's work, stories you may have caught in GRANTA or the NEW YORKER about his early days as a reporter. In the 50s and 60s he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, so was constantly being sent to Iran, Congo, China, or wherever there was a revolution or coup going on. He has a wonderful style of writing, very poetic for a journalist, but modest and full of keen observation. Whether he's describing snow and tramcars to Nigerians or detailing how he is in another fine fix, having been arrested as a spy and sentenced to be shot, it's all gripping.

I don't know how relevant this is to a music blog (He does describe seeing Louis Armstrong perform in Khartoum before a stone-faced crowd in a very engaging passage), but I think anyone with a passion for music of other lands also wants to go there and experience it first hand. I know I do. If I am in Africa, India, Haiti, or Brasil, or even Chicago or LA, I am thinking, Where's the music scene?

Kapuscinski's shelf is quite modest but every book is rewarding:
Another Day of Life (about the civil war in Angola: Cuban soldiers defend Shell oil platforms from CIA-funded South African mercenaries!)
Shah of Shahs (about the fall of the Shah of Iran)
The Emperor (scenes of terminal life at the court of Haile Selassie)
The Soccer War (a collection of shorter pieces: the title is about an actual war that erupted between Honduras and El Salvador after a world cup qualifying game)
Imperium (magisterial study of the break-up of the Soviet Union)
The Shadow of the Sun (RK covered 27 revolutions and coups in Africa. Gripping stuff!)

Here's a passage from IMPERIUM, where he stops to talk to a small girl called Tanya in Yakutsk, Siberia, about relative coldness:

"One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child -- a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor because she is slender, but, for her age, it is a high one -- which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school -- they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbours and friends look like. ...If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home. Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means --Tanya lowers her voice -- that some drunk was walking, tripped, and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street."

Compare that to Charles Dickens' descriptions of fog & mud at the opening of Bleak House and you will agree that here is another great writer worthy of the name.

At the end of TRAVELS WITH HERODOTUS we get an insight into what connects Kapuscinski with the ancient Greek: "But how could Herodotus, a Greek, know what the faraway Persians or Phoenicians are saying, or the inhabitants of Egypt or Libya? It was because he traveled to where they were, asked, observed and collected his information from what he himself saw and what others told him. His first act, therefore, was the journey. But is that not the case for all reporters? Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the reporter feel like himself, at home."

It's this rare passion to keep moving on and looking and recording that unites Kapuscinski with Herodotus. Most of us, truly, would rather sit home surrounded by our familiar things. Kapusinski didn't mind where he lay his head as long as Herodotus was under the pillow.

KURT THOMETZ
LIFE TURNS MAN UP AND DOWN (Pantheon Books, New York, 356 pp, hardback in dust-jacket)

"LIFE TURNS MAN UP AND DOWN: High Life, Useful Advice and Mad English" is a compilation of African Market Literature from Nigeria assembled by Kurt Thometz. This beautifully produced book includes part or all of 18 pamphlets that were sold for half-a-crown in the Onitsha market (the largest open-air market in Africa) in the 1950s and 1960s. The Biafran War put an end to the culture and many of the writers and publishers included, so this is a truly precious and rare historical artifact. The Highlife scene exploded after Nigerian independence from England in 1960, in a riot of booze, women and song as ostentatious spending and free love erupted among the joyous populace. The writers captured this moment in pulp stories like "Rosemary and the Taxi Driver," or "Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away" by Speedy Eric, that are aimed at the emerging literate middle-classes. Thometz calls the colloquial language of the pamphlets "uncooked English" and compares it to the freedom of expression seen in Elizabethan England. Their unexpurgated contents are basically sex, money and style delivered with racy and hilarious panache. They are set in the nightclubs of Onitsha, Port Harcourt and Lagos (one of the authors was even Rex Lawson's double-bass player!) and vast amounts of liquor are consumed, dates made with loose women, and fabulous scams pulled off.

To add to the excitement of the writing, the pamphlets are reproduced from the originals, complete with bad typography, wrong fonts and of course the original spelling is preserved so you are occasionally left guessing at the meaning. As Thometz says, "A phrase like 'head over feels in love,' or 'means of lovlihood' might be the product of poetic license, a cliché spun on its head, or the unintentional error of an illiterate printer."

Titles like "Money Hard to get but Easy to Spend" or "No Condition is Permanent" tell it all up front, but "The Life Story and Death of John Kennedy" is truly instructive because the President delivers a measured harangue from his deathbed on the political state of the world and manages to end by forgiving his murderer ("As a matter of fact, I am extremely sorry for the person who shot me because of what might follow my assassination and his actions") and blessing "the American Negroes whom I am sacrificing my blood for their own safety."

Here's a bit of dialogue from "How to Avoid Corner Corner Love and Win Good Love from Girls":

Oliaku: Palaver don finish now. Go callam for we if she ask you who dey callam, tellam say na me.

Chief John: Look Raymond. When she come make you brainam proper. Come, tellam say if she do as una tellam, she go be your wife the time wey you go be king.

Raymond: That is an easy job for me because I have been playing such game before. She must surely fall into the trap for with money, man can buy any thing -- even his father's head.

The introduction and bibliographical apparatus appended to this book make it a worthwhile contribution to scholarship as well as pure enjoyment.

GARY STEWART
RUMBA ON THE RIVER

Gary Stewart's RUMBA ON THE RIVER, subtitled "a history of the popular music of the two Congos," comes from Verso editions. It's a beautifully designed book, although it could have used better photos, but I am not complaining: this is the first really detailed study of the birth of modern Congolese music, from the Second World War (a period coinciding with the first large radio transmitters which could reach all of Africa, and led to the musical dominance of the Congo sound) to today. Putting the music in a cultural context, with politics, race and social progress all playing a part, Stewart has produced a truly valuable document that finally straightens out all the facts about the various studios in Leopoldville and Stanleyville -- Ngoma, Opika, Loningisa, etc. -- that gave birth to the sound and the fluid mix of musicians that made up the various house bands and led to African Jazz, OK Jazz, Rock-a-Mambo, the Bantous de la Capitale and others.

While there is no CD specifically to accompany the book, anyone interested in the music will want to find the ROOTS OF RUMBA ROCK CDs (craw 4, and craw 10 from Crammed World), BANKOLO MIZIKI ("Les pionniers de la musique congolaise de Leopoldville '88 Kinshasa") (Ngoyarto NG 047, NG 048) and the two Ngoma compilations from Popular African Music: NGOMA: THE EARLY YEARS, 1948-60 and NGOMA: SOUVENIR YA L'INDEPENDENCE (pamap 102 and 102), as well as the MERVEILLES DU PASSÉ series (3 volumes, and 12 volumes of COMPILATIONS MUSIQUE CONGOLO-ZAIROIS) on Sonodisc (currently out of print). For specific bands, the book includes a discography, but a basic collection would include Grand Kalle & L'African Jazz SUCCÈS DES ANNÉES 50/60 (2 vols, Sonodisc 36560, 36561), Bantous de la Capitale LA BELLE EPOQUE VOL 1 (Glenn Classics GM 324001) and Franco & OK Jazz ORIGINALITÉ (Retro 2XCD) which has been remastered for the 1999 reissue.

If you are interested in African Music, even slightly, this book will inspire you. If you are already a fan you doubtless have it & browse it regularly.