HEART OF AFRICA
AUTHOR: SIHLE KHUMALO
A couple of days back I was minding my business at work when I received an email inviting me to the launch of Sihle Khumalo new book titled Heart of Africa. I was excited at the opportunity of meeting the man in person and couldn’t wait to ask him a few questions. Sihle Khumalo is the author of the acclaimed travel book; Dark Continent. I must say he is full of humor in person, just as he is in the book.
Heart of Africa is his second travel book, but this time he’s not doing the Cape-to-Cairo. This time he is travelling to the ‘Heart of Africa’. His aim for taking the second trip was to: take a ride on a ferry on Lake Tanganyika, stand on the equator in Uganda, bungee jump at the official source of the Nile in Jinja, Uganda, get up close with mountain gorillas, visit the remote source of the Nile and visit Kigali Memorial Centre in Uganda. This is enough to make one green with envy.
Though Dark Continent was about adventure, Heart of Africa is more about finding meaning to life in this continent and to some extent as Sihle would admit, highlight problems facing Africa. He goes in details in scrutinizing each and every place he visits.
In Zimbabwe he observed: Thinking of the way things were in Zimbabwe, I could not help but remember the title of Alan Paton’s famous book, Cry the Beloved Country [….]. I could not help but think about: – people who were forced to leave home and then had to return because they feared death at the hands of their fellow Africans. […] I was reminded of Edmund Burke’s timeless observation: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Was that not exactly what happened in Zimbabwe?
Through-out the journey he suffers from what we South Africans suffer from – that is the fear of crime. And each time he thought he was a victim, he’s proven wrong. He noted: […] the honesty of my brothers in other African countries baffled me once again. Back home we are forever being told that poverty is the main reason for the high crime rate. Yet when you go to other African countries you see dire, naked poverty and very low crime levels. Which then leaves one question: What it is the real cause of crime in South Africa?
Although Heart of Africa is often poignant, there are a lot of light moments, especially when he struggled to communicate with locals due to language barrier. (Note: If you are going to travel Africa, learn Swahili and French). My favorite part of the book is no doubt when he visited Kigali Memorial Centre. I’ve always had a special interest in the *Rwandan genocide. One could never fully comprehend how can human beings be so inhumane to their brothers and sisters
As much as I enjoyed reading the book, there were times where I felt that Sihle was constantly complaining. I mean, this was his second trip. He should have known that in Africa not everything is formal. Sometime you just got to go with the flow. After all this was about adventure.
All in all the book is a great read and I have learnt so much about this beautiful continent. I suppose the next stop for Sihle would be West Africa and I am looking forward to that.
Something New I Learnt From the Book
According to Swahili time you start counting at six in the morning. So when it is 07:00 (universal time), Swahili time is one in the morning, and when it is 08:00 according to universal time, it is two Swahili time. Come to think of it, you start counting Swahili time in the early evening: 18:00 our time is midnight for the Swahilis.
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* The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda’s Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by the Hutu dominated government under the Hutu Power ideology. Over the course of approximately 100 days, or more, from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed. Estimates of the death toll have ranged between 500,000 and 1,000,000, or as much as 20% of the total population of the country.
By Sithe Sikhosana ©