Vera and Tolliver Sound Off

Annamaria on Monday


Actually my title today probably should say "Sound On."  I have not had a BSP (Blatant Self-Promotion) post for well over a year.  Today, I am taking a raincheck on my Bouchercon hiatus opportunity in order to tell everyone this:

I am very proud to announce the publication of audio versions of Idol of Mombasa and The Blasphemers—Vera and Tolliver #s 2 and 3!

The audio for the first in my Africa series—Strange Gods—has been available for some time.  The voice artist who narrated Vera and Tolliver # 1 did such a marvelous job that I knew I wanted him to record the other books in the series.

You can find out more about Dennis here



Dennis Kleinman is a South African, living in LA, who has the right soul, the right voice, and ALL the right accents to do a superlative job of reading Vera and Tolliver. Audible chose him to narrate Strange Gods, and when I first heard his recording, I was stunned by the result. In Dennis’s voice, my own characters became even more real to me than they were in my imagination.  The Scots, the English, the tribal people all sound exactly right to me when Dennis reads their dialogue. He also puts just the right emotional ring to what they are saying.

Once the audio rights to Idol and Blasphemers reverted to me, Dennis went to work, doing his magic on characters that presented new challenges: Arab and Swahili voices, Midlands English, as well as tony British aristocrats.  The results are superb.

If you listen to books and are new to the series, you can start with the audio book for Strange Gods here:

And then,  I invite you to follow Vera and Tolliver from Nairobi and its environs to the costal Arab trading city of Mombasa and then to the Maasai region of Nakuru in the East African Highlands:

Idol of Mombasa Audible 


The Blasphemers Audible 

What next for Vera and Tolliver?

There is no fourth in the Vera and Tolliver series to brag about this year.  What that is so is a long story and definitely not a thriller.  Here is the expurgated version:

I completed the next in the African series—A Death on the Lord’s Day—some time ago. Complications of changing publishers has kept it under wraps. Readers have asked me for more of V&T, and I promise you more is on the way.

We used to use the word “glacial” to describe things that moved painfully slowly.  Now we are pained by how terribly fast glaciers are moving. I can safely say that moving at “publishing speed” wins my vote as the new metaphor for the most frustrating pace on the planet. Snails gallop by comparison. Tortoises are far less tortuous. Or torturous for that matter.

Photo: Annamaria, Serengeti 2006


I promise I will not give up.

A Death on the Lord's Day will be published soon.

Stay tuned.

https://www.annamariaalfieri.com

The Mau Mau Rebellion Retold

I thought I knew the story of the Mau Mau.  Reports of it were circulating when I was old enough to be paying attention.  This past week, my assumptions about how much I understood were blown away. 

As very often happens with things I want to talk abut, this discussion started with an episode of RadioLab.  If you want to go right to the inspiration for this blog, there is link at the end.  I will go ahead and give a summary of the information here.

During WWII, thousands of Kenyan tribesmen had fought for justice and freedom on the British side.  When they returned home, they found they were given no quarter when it came to their own personal freedom and prosperity.   Between 1952 and 1960, the Kenyan tribal people’s anger at their treatment at the hands of the colonial government boiled over.  Led mostly by Kikuyu, a sworn brotherhood of rebels rose up with the goal of ejecting the British from their land.

Some horrific incidents ensued.  A few settler families were butchered, including in at least one case, a small child.  Stories began to circulate abroad of savage black on white violence.  The news that spread worldwide reported that the Mau Mau warriors were a splinter group, that their wishes and tactics were espoused by only a small percentage of the population, that the majority of the tribal people wanted the Mau Mau to be controlled.   The violence involved was portrayed as black Africans gone berserk.  Eventually the term Mau Mau came to mean brutal rebels out for nothing but blood.

And that’s the way the story remained.  In 1963, when the British withdrew from the Kenya Colony, lots of their colonial records were destroyed or tossed overboard (as was the practice with all the colonies, large and small.)

End of story.

Until the 1990’s when Caroline Elkins, a Princeton undergrad history major went to Nairobi to research her senior thesis.  In the Government Archives building, she came across a curious file.  It seemed to contradict the prevailing Mau Mau story.  After finding other files in that Nairobi repository, she began to interview people about what had really happened.   The evidence that she rediscovered pointed to the fact that there were thousands of Kenyans involved in the Mau Mau “war,” and that contrary to popular belief most of the victims were, not white settlers, but Kenyan tribal people.   Eventually, the trail of investigation led to the town of Milton Keynes, northwest of London, site Hanslope Park—a top-secret repository of British government archives.  Suspicions were that more and damning information regarding the British behavior vis-à-vis the Mau Mau reposed in that place.  But access was impossible.

That stalemate was not broken until 2012, when a group of elderly Kenyans won permission to sue the British government for their suffering at the hands of their colonial rulers.  In the course of the case, files from the secret stash were subpoenaed, and contrary to anyone’s expectations, the judge ordered the government to open its records.  What emerged was a picture, not of black savagery on whites, but the opposite.  One source that I consulted put the white death count at 32.  Hundreds of thousands of blacks were imprisoned in concentration camps, and many thousands were executed, others castrated, raped, and tortured.

As a result, the British government was found guilty of committing violence against the tribal people of Kenya Colony.  They paid the plaintiffs in the case £14 Million and another £6 Million in court costs.  Most important of all, they took responsibility and apologized.  Here is what Foreign Secretary William Hague said in June 2013, when the case was settled:

"I would like to make clear now, and for the first time, on behalf of Her Majesty's government, that we understand the pain and grievance felt by those who were involved in the events of the emergency in Kenya," he told the Commons.

"The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.

"The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya's progress towards independence."

One of the reporters of this story thought to ask, why did the British government keep those records?  If they had wound up at the bottom of the Indian Ocean or in an incinerator, there would have been no proof of the allegations.  Here is the good news: those files contain reports and complaints from British officials who were appalled about what was happening in Kenya, and they kept the files because they wanted a record both of the wrong-doing of their government and of their objections to it.

If you want to hear a riveting account of all this on the best radio show in history of the universe—RadioLab, go here.

If you want to see a wonderful film about one of the plaintiffs in the case and how he went to primary school in his 80’s, you should watch the great film The First Grader. After the sad story told by this post, the film will lift your heart! Here is the trailer. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD1bYbcxkrM

Annamaria - Monday

The Beat Goes On: The Lunatic Express—Part Two

The “Beat” in this regard involves beating the bushes.  Brave and somewhat loony Englishmen did a lot of that in Africa in the Nineteenth Century.  With gratitude to Michael Sears, I invite you to take a look here at MIE’s previous discussions of that subject. 

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2013/02/dr-livingstone-i-presume-stanley-asked.html#comment-form

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Source+of+the+Nile

You can see from the stories of Livingston, Speke, and Richard Francis Burton that the Uganda Rail Way, whose history I took up last week, had lunacy in the family.  Let me trace its family tree back a generation from when the Brits began constructing it. 

Wanting a more efficient way to move wealth from India to England, Great Britain had dug the Suez Canal.  Then, to make sure the canal remained open and in their hands, they needed to take hegemony over Egypt.  They concluded that to control Egypt, they needed to control the Nile.  And to control the river, they wanted to take control of its source.  Eventually those intrepid and colorful men that Michael so deftly describes went out and found Lake Victoria.

Controlling the lake was not so easy.  To do so the Brits needed to keep administrators and troops there, men who needed supplies and the ability to communicate with the outside world.    Today, in a Mercedes or a lorry one can drive the 840 km (525 miles) between the lake and Mombasa in a day.  But a hundred and twenty years ago, they had to walk and it took months.  To make the trip safer and  much quicker, Great Britain built the railroad that became known as the Lunatic Line—a sobriquet based on facts given in my previous post.  Once the railway was completed, goods and people could make the trip in less than two days.  And they put in telegraph lines along the tracks, making communication all but instantaneous.  Hooray for modern technology.

But that was not the end of their trials.

Having built the railroad, they needed to maintain it.  And they had some special problems to deal with in that regard.

For reasons no one could fathom, rhinos would undermine the tracks, elephants would knock over the telegraph poles, and purloined telegraph wire became the raw material for many a tribesman’s favorite jewelry.  (Not that I blame them for such theft, considering the fact that the British were in the process of stealing their homeland.  But that is much bigger subject, for another post some time in the future.)

The bill for keeping the trains going was causing great consternation on the home front.  The taxpayers were sick of the expense.  What the railroad needed was paying customers.

Though at the equator, the area around a remote station stop called Nairobi, about halfway along the line, was a mile above sea level and had a climate the King’s administrators called “healthful.”  What a perfect area for farms.  Europeans might be enticed to move in and grow coffee and sisal, raise cattle, cut and ship rare woods, and so on and so on.  Then, they and their produce would pay to ride the rails.  What a swell idea.  And so they did.

I fully admit that there were also other forces at work throughout the story given here—from the search for the source of the Nile to the white settlement in the highlands of what is now Kenya.  The motivations I have mentioned so far existed in concert with a worldwide compulsion of “manifest destiny,” in which Europeans saw it as their right, even their duty to take charge of the earth, especially those parts of it that they judged to be savage.  Such as Africa and the American West.

When it came to Africa, there was also the moral imperative to stop the horrors of slavery, which was accompanied by a hope of bringing the pagans of the world to Christianity.

Social change in northern Europe coincided with all this.  Industrialization meant that aristocrats in those countries could no longer remain rich and privileged just by owning land.  But with cheap labor and unexploited resources in Africa, they could have all the servants and entitlements of their former life style.

 

And in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, there developed an ideal of manhood the proof of which lay in striking off into uncharted territory and conquering it.  Perhaps this happened because Europe had become too manicured and tame for the available testosterone.  That would be my guess.

All these factors, working together, resulted in the colonization of pretty much the last habitable and pristine places on earth.   East Africa was one of the victims.

Annamaria- Monday