African Interest

Brief Summary Philip Marsden returns to the remote, fiercely beautiful landscape that has exercised a powerful mythic appeal over him since his first encounter with it over twenty years ago. ‘Ethiopia bred in me the conviction that if there is a wider purpose to our life, it is to understand the world, to seek out its diversity, to celebrate its heroes and its wonders – in short, to witness it.’ When Philip Marsden first went to Ethiopia in 1982, it changed the direction of his life. What he saw of its stunning antiquity, its raw Christianity, its extremes of brutality and grace prompted his curiosity, and made him a writer. But Ethiopia at that time was torn apart by civil war. The north, the ancient heartland of the country, was closed off. Twenty years later, Marsden returned. The result is this book – the account of a journey deferred. Walking hundreds of miles through a landscape of cavernous gorges, tabletop mountains and semi-desert, Marsden encounters monks and hermits, rebels and farmers. And he creates an unforgettable picture of one of the most remote regions left on earth. As in his award-winning book ‘The Spirit-Wrestlers’, Marsden reminds us of the brilliant heights that travel writing can attain, whilst celebrating the ageless rewards of the open road and the people for whom the mythic and the everyday are inextricably joined. " ISBN:9780007343409 Author:Philip Marsden

Brief Summary How to Euthanize a Cactus' contains fifty five accessible poems from a respected Kenyan poet, poetry editor and judge. Approximately half of the poems are those that were written `raw' during Kenya's widely-publicized and sometimes misinterpreted Post-Election Violence (PEV) of early 2008, and which were circulated within Kenya, especially via a new group of young writers which formed at the time, `Concerned Kenyan Writers'. These include the popular `Praise Poem'. Kenya's PEV rocked a country that had previously been known (perhaps naively) as one of the most stable countries on the continent: possibly thousands were killed; hundreds of thousands were displaced, and often remain so. Occasionally journalistic, sometimes angry, sometimes hopeful, but always powerfully responsible, these PEV poems reflect an insider-outsider's experience of that time. These particular PEV poems are not quoted as part of this promotional blurb, at the writer's request. Many of the other poems are more personal, but never fully privatize in that manner which often separates much Western literature from that of the postcolonial world. These poems reflect a British immigrant's process of hybridizing into a new place, Kenya. They include the impressive `Continental Drift', which speaks from an out-of-body position about overlaps between cultures and the possibility of contented hybridity rather than that traditional `alienation' and `schizophrenia' which was expressed by earlier generations of immigrants and `colonial subjects' across the globe. Here is the first, UK-based verse paragraph of `Continental Drift', a multi-perspective poem that later screes effortlessly into East Africa: The sole of your boot grips a stone, and it begins: flakes of shale cascading over shale like swarms of graphite atoms gliding over graphite as an artist shades a mountain, dark Skiddaw, that has a figure (rapid scratching showing motion),slate-grey, almost imperceptible: but squint, you’ll see he's screening down the slope toward the lake. ISBN:9781907090165 Author:Stephen Derwent Partington