Into the House of the Ancestors
  Inside the New Africa
   Karl Maier
  1998 John Wiley & Sons Inc NY USA
   ISBN: 047113547X


Experience the vibrant & volatile life of Africa in it's struggle for a "second revolution". A penetrating narrative based on interviews with traditional healers, chiefs, business innovators, scientists, generals, doctors, poets & politics.

The stories, observations & interviews Karl Maier brings us are woven into a vibrant fabric as fascinating & devastating as any you'd expect while talking to one of the child soldiers.

The reason I began marching on the South African Embassy off of Trafalgar Square back when the 1960s were very young, was the incarceration of a young African National Congress leader called Nelson Mandela. As a single, local student I had met many Africans, studying in the bosom of the Empire. I was asked to volunteer my skills at the new Anti-Apartheid offices: listening in on the strategy meetings of a diverse group of children of colonialists, a rare Afrikaaner, the majority of tribal students from all parts of Africa & a handful of Indians from South Africa. I worked at all those ordinary political things like stuffing envelopes, typing & "raking & covering the latrines".

We were very daring in those days when South Africa was still in the Commonwealth; after the realization burst upon our consciousness that there were millions of Africans to what was, virtually, a handful of whites. When the concept of civil rights, civil freedoms & civil equality shattered our subservience to that pervasive assumption Geraldine Brooks alludes to in her memoirs: Foreign Correspondence [also reviewed]: wouldn't everyone rather be British, Christian & White? In those days, at the end of the stranglehold of the evil empire, not one African had the right to own decent property, a decent job, vote or have any say on how he would be governed.

So it was, with the fervor of the newly awakened that we lobbed things at the Embassy windows, got hauled off to jail by the hundreds to be released later; all done with that English politeness. After fortifying ourselves at all-night parties in freedom-fighters' flats, listening to Miriam Makeba or the penny whistle of the Kwela music; eating piles of hot curry & delicate chapatis & drinking gallons of room temperature sweet juices, we would renew our siege.

Thus I came to Into the House of the Ancestors/Inside the New Africa with a lot of curiosity, colored by my past limited perspective. What Karl Maier delivers is an absorbing patchwork of interviews & descriptions of how movements began & took hold. Zimbabwe artists carving soapstone, creating a school & a company; Nigerian artists working with silicon chips, computers & banks. Just two examples.

Karl Maier's reporting about old age in Africa is grim. We take care of our 89 year old Poppa & the words of Veronica Ayisi, a Help Age Volunteer in Accra, Ghana rings so true: "We visit the elderly in their homes, we pray for them, we sing for them, we converse with them. Sometimes we sweep their rooms, wash their things, anything to make their lives more comfortable. It's a very difficult task because you have to be patient if they are old. They are a bit troublesome."

In every nation in Africa, the long-desired overthrow of the white colonial rule seems to have signalled generations of civil wars while infrastructures were plundered & abused. Absolute military power took over & set tribe against tribe, quashing the have-nots just as the evil empire had done before. Great sheddings of blood have washed over so many of Africa's nations, those arbitrary borders set down by map makers half a world away, confining erstwhile nomadic peoples, separating compatible tribes & creating deadly enemies between others.

Then there is health in Africa: about AIDS, cholera, meningitis, malaria, tuberculosis. Where once the whiteman's hospitals & churches brought succor, many are now viewed with resistance & distrust as Africans find their balance after generations of being lorded-over & made to feel worthless, brainless & helpless. You learn of an important word: Dananai which means "unconditional love" in the Shona language. Of course there are the charlatans too, those expecting to get rich from miracle cures & mysterious teachings & the now, invidious catch-all: blame the long-gone whites.

This is a long rambling evocative read. Karl Maier takes us into the classrooms, both urban & rural, elementary schools & universities. He also takes us out to join a platoon of army troopers, some smaller than the mortar launchers they tote. Ammunition is scarce, as too food & shoes. "...pint sized, tireless baby Rambo[s]..." who spend their tender years roaming the battlefields of Africa's civil wars.

In Heroes of the Apocalypse we are at a brief ceremony, to be repeated countless times throughout the central republic of Rwanda, where survivors of the 100 days of 1994 genocide pay their last respects. Rwanda has been likened, in scenic grandeur to Switzerland, except for the stench of death.

This is one serious, hopeful, realistic & insightful read. Worth all the effort, dipping into the horror before emerging into the bright light of Africa's new century.

More from Karl Maier: Angola: Promises and Lies
Africa Correspondent for the Independent newspaper
Also to the Washington Post, the Economist & the Christian Science Monitor.
(07/18/99)

Rebecca