bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2003) — Fall/Winter 2003 // Automne/Hiver 2003, pp. 25–27
THE WEEKENDERS — TRAVELS IN THE
HEART OF AFRICA, Ebury Press (Random
House), UK, 2001, $ 7.99 (paperback).
The Weekenders — Travels in the Heart of Africa is a book of short stories – with a difference.
Over the past several years, veteran Daily Telegraph reporter William Deedes — reputedly one of the inspirations for Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop – has followed ever more closely the long-running civil war in Sudan. Frustrated with the poor understanding by the outside world of this interminable conflict, Which may have cost as many as two million dead and four million displaced, he came up with a novel idea: recruit a posse of well-known short story writers, persuade them to donate some time to a good cause, fly them into Sudan for a few days and give them free rein to write a short story — all proceeds to UNICEF’s programmes for South Sudan.
The six writers he assembled are an interesting group. They include well-known biographer Victoria Glendinning, Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting fame, and Tony Hawks, author of the off-beat Round Ireland with a Fridge and, most recently, One Hit Wonderland
Deedes himself contributes the second story in the collection: A Small Mission of Enquiry. This may be of considerable interest to DFAIT readers in that it is a transparently fictionalised account of the real-life commissioning by then Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy of John Harker, to investigate allegations that Canada’s Talisman Energy was complicit with massive human rights abuses in and around the oilfields of Unity State, Sudan. Canada becomes Oceana, Talisman is Phoenix, Axworthy is Foreign Minister William Oldfield and the real-life John Harker becomes Judge Lawrence of Queen’s University. The essence of the story is that Judge Lawrence finds that Phoenix is indeed guilty as charged, and Oldfield — who has already decided that forcing Phoenix out of Sudan is not an option — must then choose between having Judge Lawrence doctor his report, or himself resign.
The story is too transparently factual to be of great interest to Sudanophiles. Portions of the real-life Harker Report are transcribed almost verbatim into Lawrence’s (“the gunships which have attacked villages South of the river flew to their targets from airstrips in the oilfield where Phoenix are operating…”) so that one might as well read, instead, the real Harker report and the newspaper accounts of the time (including those of Deedes himself). And nor is this great literature: the characters are too stereotyped (“the Deputy of the African Department in the Ministry was the sort of man who would be a Deputy all his life…”) and the real and important issues at stake are explored only superficially. But this is not a bad introduction, all the same, to the ethical investment debate; the implicit central accusation – that high-minded Canada somehow fudged this one — is perhaps not an unjust one.
If A Small Mission of Enquiry is definitely tilted in favour of the rebel SPLM/A and against the fundamentalist regime in Khartoum, the same criticism cannot be made of the other stories. The title story, Weekenders (by Giles Foden), opens and closes with an ostensibly obvious villain: a Sudanese airforce pilot whose main job is to bomb targets in South Sudan, in the full knowledge that most of his victims will be innocent civilians. But the villain becomes the victim at the end of the story when he turns on his TV to the news of the USA’s cynical and misguided 1998 attack on the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum:
“He was in a stupor, he could not speak, he had lost his son. His baby son who had burst like a plum in the shockwave of a Tomahawk missile.”
Rather more subtle is A Song for Sudan. This is an apparently innocuous account of Tony Hawks’ brief visit to bucolic Yambio, on the border with Congo, but one small incident stays with Hawks after his return to a wet and dreary Heathrow: his giving away of his camera to his SPLM/A chaperone, Justin. “Giving it had been largely a selfish act. I’d wanted the power of feeling like I was making a difference, and I’d wanted to bask in the glory of the gesture….” The recounting of this episode invites a sudden re-think by the reader of all that has gone before, in particular of the blithe and self-satisfied assumption that the many millions of dollars the West has poured into South Sudan (Canada alone has delivered $130 million of aid in a decade) in the form of relief have been well spent and for the right reasons.
The most accomplished story is the longest: indeed it is really a novella: Contamination. Irvine Welsh prefaces the story with a modest disclaimer that the characters and places in this story “probably don’t correspond to anybody’s concept of the country, not even my own”, but from my own relatively limited experience this is the story that comes closest to capturing the reality of the place. Bootleggers, warlords, witchdoctors, well-meaning aid-workers and priests, random and terrifying violence: they’re all here.
There is many a character I have met in Sudan who could be warlord-in-training Luke Chediah:
“They could debate philosophy about means and ends as much as they like; there always came a time when you had to pick up a gun. And in the buzz of victory, the lunacy of war, emotions were coarsened and morals shed like a snake’s skin. And what emerged was always something newer and slicker, but colder to the touch, something more treacherous and wicked.”
Weekenders leaves you perplexed, depressed, uneasy, guilty. Just like Sudan.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2003) — Fall/Winter 2003 // Automne/Hiver 2003, pp. 25–27. Read the rest of this issue →
