Weaver Press

Fools, Thieves and Other Dreamers
Seydi Sow, Florent Couao-Zotti and Abdourahman Ali Waberi
126 pp
ISBN 0 7974 2306 0

"Destroying the emptiness of silence"
The Mirror
November 24, 2002
Reviewer: Anne Derges

How to introduce Francophone African literature in an Anglophone environment? This was a question posed at the 2001 ZIBF, which had Senegal as the featured country. How to create the conditions for an African literature? These were the questions the Translation Project undertook to respond to. The result is a selection of stories translated by students and staff of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Zimbabwe – thus giving them the experience of formal published work – a challenge to which they have risen admirably.

Reading them, one wonders how these three short stories were selected. According to D’Almeida, one should be able to read [Francophone] African literature as destroying the emptiness of silence, and yet these stories ache with emptiness and hopelessness.

All the stories depict situations which are universal among Africans: there is no difference between the concerns (the hopelessness?) of people in Anglophone, Lusphone or Francophone Africa.

"Our saviour stands among us"
The first story, From the depths of a well, by Seydi Sow is the kind of moral tale which is popular throughout Africa. It deals with questions of leadership and corruption in a tale of five representatives of society – who we all recognize immediately – trapped in a well. Only one may escape, and the dilemma is to select who may be trusted to return and save the rest. Hopeless it is, as none of the five is able to trust any of his fellow men to return and save them, and so they are all doomed to perish. The story is rescued from banality by the fact that Sow shows that even the humble citizen, who has "always allowed himself to be manipulated by the forces of evil promoted by shameful interests…" is as corrupt and unworthy of trust as his leaders.

"Scarcely born and yet already sacrificed"
Small hells on street corners by Florent Couao-Zotti, graphically depicts the hell that is the life of the street child in Africa. In this case he is a street child on the run – a parable of the street child’s life, for there can be no escape. It is the most complex of the three stories, the narrative interspersed with a kind of sorrowful Greek chorus ("sad poet, your job is not to explain but to reveal") How has the situation of this once angel child become man-child come about, it asks? (Your job is not to explain…).

The street child’s story is told in language that is sometimes shocking, violent and beautifully graphic. For example, the African market – the one to be found in every African city – is described as a monster, "its insides continuously churning, writhing, knotting and distending."

"Leaning against the partition wall my father goes on grazing…"
The third story deals with another kind of well of hopelessness. The Fool’s Gallery, by Abdourahman Ali Waberi describes life in Djibouti/Somalia from the viewpoint of the chewer – or grazer – of khat. The use of this drug – a grass-like weed chewed incessantly by men in Somalia, which induces a sense of euphoria and is also used to keep people awake – may be "foreign" to readers in Southern Africa, yet the point is that all over Africa men need to use some drug to fill the emptiness. And the emptiness, populated only by fools, is what this story shows.

The khat-grazers pass their days watching the parade of fools, last of all being the "fool" who can see clearly, the "fool" who speaks out and tells of corruption.

The team of translators has done excellent work with sometimes-difficult texts. Some of the descriptive phrases are memorable: there is the "sleek charm" of a Minister, the market which writhes like a monster, and, "in a world adrift men cling to the most fragile thing that exists…"

A world adrift, and a world populated only by men. In all the stories the only actors are men, women merely exist in the background. It is to be hoped that the next collection of translations will include stories where women feature. Perhaps, then, we shall be able to see an Africa which is less hopeless, less empty. 

© The author/publisher