Atlantis found!

Stanley - Thursday

I am grumpy again!

I've recently returned to South Africa, to enjoy my endless summer; to launch Dead of Night in the country where most of it is set; and to revel in the glories of spring in the smallest floral kingdom on the planet - around Cape Town.

So why grumpy?

Well, I'm still smarting at being called a deplorable from a shithole country. I've also been catching up on my reading about the Scramble for Africa - formalised at a meeting convened by Otto von Bismark in Berlin in 1884. One of the main agenda items of the meeting was to create rules by which Europe could divide Africa - something most major European countries wanted because of the cheap labour and abundant natural resources. There were no Africans at the meeting. King Leopold II of Belgium conned the others into giving him what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo as his personal possession. In forty years Africa went from being 10% European controlled in 1870 to 90% in 1910. Not a friendly take-over. And millions of local Blacks were killed or maimed.

Kids had a hand cut off if they didn't work hard enough!.

And I'll write sometime soon about the African refugees seeking asylum in Europe.

Grrrr.

To alleviate my grumpiness, I went back to a blog I wrote over 5 years ago. I moaned and groaned in it too, but I also explained how Africa also brings me solace.

Here it is, from July 2013.

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Those of you who read my blogs probably realize that I think that Africa is much (and unjustly) maligned by people in the West.  I attribute this to ignorance as well as prejudice.

I could write blog after blog supporting my thesis that whenever most Westerners think about, write about, or talk about Africa, their frontal lobes seize up, resulting in sweeping generalizations that have little currency in reality.

For example, 'Africans are uncivilized.'

Have people who make this statement, which I've heard in various forms hundreds of times, either forgotten or do not know that the pyramids, the Sphinx, hundreds of other temples temples, are in Africa?  Long before Archimedes lived, the Egyptians were using his principle to float 100-ton pieces of stone hundreds of miles down the Nile.  Yes, they slung them under boats rather than carry them on top, thus effectively lowering their weight by the weight of water displaced.

Have these people either forgotten or do not know that one of the greatest libraries of ancient times - the library at Alexandria - was in Africa?  It was subsequently destroyed - the details of which are somewhat murky - by Europeans and Muslims.  After the great library had gone, scholars worked in a branch library in a temple call Serapeum.  This was subsequently also destroyed  - by decree of the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Theophilus.

Have these people either forgotten or do not know that one of the great libraries of today is in Timbuktu, Mali?  Actually, calling it one library is probably a misnomer, because it comprises many smaller private libraries.

 I don't think these people have forgotten these things.  I think that they do know these things (with the possible exception of the libraries in Timbuktu).

What these people actually mean when they say Africans are uncivilized is that black Africans are uncivilized.

So let's take a look at this statement from one aspect of what is regarded as one attribute of civilization, namely art.

Picasso is one of the most admired artists of all time, known for his daring shapes and use of colour.  We know he lifted most of his ideas on cubism from African art.  Yet he continues to be the once who garners the accolades - not the artists whose works he drew so heavily from.  But then they were African!

Here is a Fang mask, similar to the one that Picasso saw in 1907 in Paris, which resulted in changes to his famous painting, Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.  Most people have heard of Picasso; most people haven't heard of the Fang.

Here are a few photos from my collection - you can see why Picasso was so influenced by African art.

My favorite story in this regard - the intersection of Western bias and African art - took place around 1910.  A very interesting German explorer, Leo Frobenius, discovered a remarkable piece of art in Southwestern Nigeria, in an area called Ife (EE-fay).  It was a bronze head made using the lost wax method (you can read about this sophisticated process here). 

As you can see from the photos of similar heads (his has disappeared), they are very appealing, combining a physical beauty with an ethereal expression. 

Frobenius was so amazed by the beauty of what he had just found that he immediately announced that it could not have been made by a black African.

Instead he decided that he had discovered Atlantis, not an island under the sea but a part of West Africa, and that the piece had been made by Athenians who had travelled across the Sahara and conquered the people of Atlantis.  The New York Times reported this in some detail.

The Kingdom of Ife thrived economically from about 1100 to 1500 and was home to artists (African artists) who produced heads (and other things) made from both metal and terra cotta.  Since 1910 many more heads of both types have been found.

To my eyes they are stunning.

For many years, whenever I was in Johannesburg, I went to an art gallery owned by a legendary collector of African pieces, and drooled over two pieces - a terra cotta head and a bronze leopard, both from Ife.  Both five hundred years old. They were both well out of my price range.  However, a year after I had recovered from colon-cancer surgery, I was again in Johannesburg, working with Michael on DEADLY HARVEST.  Of course I went to the gallery to drool yet again.  But this time, I said to myself, why enjoy these magnificent items only for a few minutes a year.  And after all it only takes money to acquire them.

So I spent far more than I should ever have and bought the terra cotta head.  Buying both would have put me in the poorhouse.

Now I enjoy my Ife head all the time - and if I ever need the money I am sure I can sell it.

As far as I know there are only three terra cotta heads in American museums, including my home town's Minneapolis Institute of Art.  and now there's one in the Trollip gallery.

Terra cotta Ife head in Minneapolis Institute of Art - stunning!

Ife head in the Trollip collection

And I cannot tell you how delighted I am to have a piece of African art that stands with any sculpture ever made and to have my friends drool over it.  I am a lucky man indeed.

It also serves as a constant reminder as to how much further those in the West have to go before they see Africa as it is, not as they believe it to be.

Africa: The daily violence in fiction and in reality

Leye - Every other Wednesday

I was invited to The Buenos Aires Negra this year, and like other invited authors, I was given a topic for a twenty-five minutes lecture. Below is the lecture I wrote - a bit different from the one I actually delivered. 

Ever since the first hand stencils 65,000 years ago, art has captured the reality of the time. 

The first figurative cave paintings of prehistoric man appeared about 35,000 years ago. They depicted the animals they hunted, the animals that hunted them, the successful hunts they participated in, the hunts that took the lives of their fellow Neanderthals. Their art, preserved for millennia in the caves in which the sort shelter from the violence of their time, captured the reality of their lives, because, art is, after all, simply an expression of the artist; and the artist is compulsorily, a product of her time. 

We live in violent times. If you do not know this, then you probably don�t not have a twitter account. 

We live in violent times. Nations are at war with nations. Governments are at war with their people. Populations are violently divided by referendums. Man is at war with nature and Nature, through unstoppable violent force, is fighting back, trying to purge the earth of this most prolific, most violent of parasites.  

Oceans are full of plastic debris choking innocent marine life. Oceans or full migrants� bodies: women, men, children, and unborn babies, fleeing violence only to meet violent ends beneath impassive waves - or violent rejection on foreign shores. 

Today it is not safe to be brown on a flight. To be Muslim outside a mosque. To be black in America. We live in violent times. Today, it is not safe to accuse your rapist after 35 years, when even your president will mock you.  

We live in violent times, and for this, we, writers, owe it to posterity to record the true nature of the life of the modern human in the twenty-first century. We cannot leave the job to gangster rappers alone. 

Crime fiction, of all the great genres of literature, has served humanity the most in this regard, for in crime fiction we find a true and accurate depiction of the dark heart of the human and the violence it creates everywhere in the world. 

Through the James Bond novels and short stories, Ian Fleming chronicled the violence of his time even as the flavour of said violence changed and changed again. Through the villains 007 tackled, and invariably dispatched, we get a sense for the dominating fears of the time. 

In Casino Royale, the first of the James Bond books, the super spy was pitched against SMERSH, a fictional Soviet counterintelligence agency modelled on the real SMERSH, an umbrella organisation for three independent counterintelligence agencies in the Red Army. The name SMERSH was coined by non other than Joseph Stalin himself. Book after book, Bond battled SMERSH. 

In later books, after many escapades involving the KGB and the Soviet UnionUNION, Bond�s great new nemesis becomes SPECTRE � a fictitious criminal enterprise with no alliances to any nations � just bad people doing bad things until James Bond stops them with his licence to kill. 

Similarly, Lee Child�s Jack Reacher starts his life of fiction outwitting and outshooting dirty police officers, and eventually, several books later, gets to deal with government conspiracies. 

I can�t but sense a correlation between what�s going on in the real world at the time, and the evil conquered by the heroes of these two great writers. And so it is with many other works of crime fiction: the antagonists are caricatures and composite characters of the real baddies of the writer�s real world, and the protagonists are the Christ figures, un caped Supermen and Wander women that the society under siege daydreams of. The Russians are coming: James Bond will stop them. The terrorists have a nuclear bomb and it�s ticking down. Send Jack Bower. He�ll find it just in time. The villains of our literature are the true-life humans and institutions and situations that fill our lives with violence and the threat of violence, and our heroes are the people who look like us who defeat the evil plaguing us � for in them we find hope. They are our fantasy.

Do crime fiction books contain violence? Yes. Do my books contain violence? Yes. It talks about a violent topic. Is the violence in the book similar to everyday violence in Africa? Yes. And everywhere else in the world. It is the violence that led to the ME TOO movement. It is a violence that has historically been suffered daily by half the population of the world. It is a violence that is still suffered daily by half the population of the world. It is the violence that makes it dangerous for a woman to go jogging in the park with earphones in her ears. It is the violence that makes women anxious at the thought of getting onto a crowded train. It is the violence that a young girl anticipates as she�s about to walk past a group of men. It is the paralysing violence that is permitted, perpetuated, and prolonged by the overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of men in positions of power. 

Recently, a new book prize was announced: The Staunch prize which, according to its website, �will be awarded to the author of a novel in the thriller genre in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.�

Amaka, my protagonist, is a woman who has dedicated her entire life to fighting the violence and injustice suffered by women in her society. How can I write about her work without showing the violence she has dedicated her life to fighting? My Amaka may be a creation of my own imagination, but what about the many real life Amakas out there waging their own daily battles in daily struggle against violent masculinity? 

I could write a book in which half the population of men in a city are stalked by killer aliens who beat them up before raping them with their alien phalluses and eventually killing them, and my book would be eligible for this prize. Or I could write a fictitious story about a catholic priest tracked down after many years by one of the men he raped as a boy. I could make it a revenge story in which the abused man, now grown up, damaged and exceptionally skilled at torture, stalks the retired priest, rapes him like he himself was raped, then dices up his victim�s body and feeds the pieces to his pet alligator, and I would be eligible for this prize � and I might even win, but do women not get raped? Is the sexual exploitation of young boys a more serious crime deserving of exposure through literature than the exploitation of women? Are men so much more important than women such that it is so much more important to record the violence done to men, then that done to women?

This prize, unintentionally, calls for the erasure of women. Blaming the victim is where it starts; denying the violence suffered by women is a place we must never go to. Thank God for writing and thank God for crime fiction writers; we shall never forget.

In my books in the Amaka Series, my protagonist, Amaka, is our fantasy of us standing up to the patriarchy that has denied half of the world�s population full participation in all of the world�s affairs. But it is not a moral story. There is nothing moralistic in the depiction of violent crime and violent punishment in crime fiction - it�s just the way life is.  The universe started with a big bang, and ever since then, the violence of that primal event has reverberated through time. As crime writers, all we do is the listen to the times and write what we witness.

Visit to the police laboratoire - it's all in the DNA. Not.

Last week in Paris I got ahead of myself. I was so excited after my visit - the second one! - to the Police laboratoire and frustrated that I couldn't upload these photos from the cafe where I'd get WiFi or weefee as the waiter said. Or explain why I can NOW commit crime in Paris!

 While I was on the tour with C. the head biologist and expert trial witness she insisted my visit follow the route of evidence. Which is how the lab works; first the police evidence arrives comme �a.

 Under seals

 Then the scientific technicians do their thing. Which includes striking a pose - did I forget to say they're a lot of fun?

 On the tour where we're heading to the blood analysis lab to pull DNA out of blood samples that arrived in those evidence envelopes above. C. showed me the police report; a headless, armless, male torso had been discovered outside Rouen and their remit is to help identify the torso victim via DNA.

Part of the process to obtain DNA from the blood - this was much more involved than I'm showing. It's an involved process with different labs and super high tech machines whose names I can't pronounce.

 Tools of the trade.

We followed through the whole process on each floor.  C. took my DNA, which will rest in the French database for eighteen months. Why? In case I contaminated anything on my visit to the lab ie involving their work or this headless, armless torso.  When I was de-robing I joked to C. that I needed to be on good behavior and couldn't commit any crime or I'd be a suspect, right?
Au contraire, she said, once I register your DNA 

Your sample exonerates you for eighteen months. She winked. Now you can plan your perfect murder and get away with it legally.

I like how she thinks. Here's an update she sent me on the headless, armless male torso from le Parisien. The lab helped ID him via DNA. The investigation now has four suspects in his murder - all women.

 This is translated from le Parisien sent to me by my new BFF, my scientific contact at the lab. "The girlfriend of the homeless found dead a week earlier and the mother of the latter are among the suspects.
The investigation of the case of the body found dismembered and decapitated Monday, November 4 near Rouen progresses. According to information from France Bleu Normandie, four women were placed in custody Saturday and indicted.
They all knew the 45-year-old homeless man whose body without a head, feet or hands was found wrapped in a tarpaulin and covered with cellophane at Amfreville-la-Mivoie (Seine-Maritime). It is about the companion of the victim, two friends of this companion and the mother of this one.
Two of the indictments were "for murder and damage to the integrity of the body, and two others, for voluntary abstention to prevent a crime or an offense against the integrity of a person" "said Saturday evening in a statement the public prosecutor of Rouen, Pascal Prache.
The circumstances of the murder remain unknown, as is the potential motive of the suspects. It would nevertheless be a "premeditated" act, ensures the local radio.
On Wednesday, legs and arms that may belong to the body discovered were also found in the area of ??Pont-de-l'Arche, south of Rouen. "It is possible that this is related to the dismembered corpse and beheaded," said a judicial source."
Cara - Tuesday

Japan 2018: A Journey of 165,000 Steps

Annamaria on Monday

According to the app on my phone, I walked 165,139 steps (67.2 miles) and climbed 70 flights of stairs in the thirteen days I spent in Japan in late October.   Roughly the equivalent of climbing to the top floor of Chrysler Building 

My favorite NYC building, BY FAR!

Or walking Times Square to Philadelphia 

Thanks to my vagabond nature, I have taken scores and scores of trips in my life.  For many, many reasons, the one from which I have just returned went straight into my pantheon of voyages.

Here are some favorite images from my time with Susan in her adopted country, were she introduced me to its beauties - both the artefacts of its culture and the natural beauty of its lands.

Created by mankind and Mother Nature

Some of people were exotic

Some looked 100% familiar to denizens of anywhere in 2018

Some were too cute to be believed 

Mother Nature's displays were all surpassingly beautiful.

The artefacts of the popular culture range from astonishing...
(This the back of the driver's seat in an ordinary taxi??)

...to surpassingly cute...

...to LOL bizarre uses of American pop cultural ideas.  Look at what it says
under the red swatch.

One of the first places we visited, I have to admit, made me envious.  Tokyo has a historical museum with accurate dioramas of the time period Susan writes about.  How I wish I could see the times and places that I write about so presented.   BUT!  Then there is the fact that the town, the people, and especially the bridge that I saw in the museum were familiar to me.  I would have recognized them even if Susan had not pointed them out.  You know why?  I had read her books.  And her prose descriptions made me see them clearly and remember them.  A picture may be worth a thousand words.  But Susan's writing is worth a thousand pictures. 

I have proved to myself that I can get in and out of a Medieval sedan chair. 

Animals

Owls in captivity

Fish too

We visited many shrines and temples.  I had several to show as a group.  But Google Blogger in its typical unhelpful behavior shuffled them into its own idea of the right order.  It's nearly midnight in NYC and tomorrow in Tokyo. This blog is due to launch in minutes.  So here are two favorite temple pictures with more to follow.

We sailed across a lake in a pirate ship, sort of.

Fuji-san

Stunning is only word to describe the iconic mountain.  Here are some of the hundred or so photos I took of it while entranced.

Susan told me that the cycle-shaped trail you see on the left of the snow cap
is the trail she took when she summited this splendid peak

 After seeing Fuji two days in a row, I could not help imagining that the beauty and simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic evolved and was inspired by the surpassing splendor of this most beautiful of mountains.  Look at these temple roofs.  What do you think?

Fuji, day two of viewing--at sunset

I took a lot of pictures of Susan taking pictures.

 Climbing

I made it to the top of three of Susan's 100 summits and about 80% of the way on the fourth.  What a privilege this whole trip was.  With Susan as the best of all possible guides, it was much more than a tour.  It was a master's degree class, a love-fest, and blast.

 Here is a snippet of the kind of introductions she gave me.