When I first picked up Paperless by Buntu Siwisa (2023), I expected a story about paperless technology. But the word ‘paperless’ in the title refers to this novel’s focus on the plight of African migrants in Oxford, United Kingdom, in the early 2000s. To explore the migrant’s ambiguous sense of identity and need for community belonging, the novel presents both ‘paperless’ and ‘documented’ characters. Following the stories of Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa, the novel foregrounds the day-to-day difficulties of people who are far from home as they attempt to improve their lot in life.

Luzuko Goba, the protagonist of Siwisa’s novel, is a young, African student of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University. He is writing his doctoral thesis but is unsatisfied and unfulfilled in his work, aspiring also to publish a novel. This ambivalence about his work extends to and from other areas of his life: he does not have a defined sense of identity, and he yearns for a sense of belonging in a place where he can feel ‘at home’. This sense of longing is compounded by the recent deaths of both the grandmother who raised him and the father he never knew, a freedom fighter who was in exile, always absent from Luzuko’s life.

Luzuko half-heartedly attempts to assimilate into Oxford society, while paradoxically clinging to his Africanness. Adopting local lingo, for example, he talks of ‘heading out for a jar’ and at the pub ordering ‘pints’, ‘crisps’, and ‘pork scratchings’; and he is at pains to map out the area through which he moves, naming streets, buildings, and shops with an air of familiarity and intimacy; while associating almost exclusively with other African students at the university. This is not a cohesive group in which he can forge a sense of belonging, though: the African students in his orbit are each driven by their own personal ambitions and with them he finds little comfort or like-mindedness. Luzuko finds that “so many African students did not want to return to Africa” (Siwisa, 2023:137), a sentiment that sickens him as a choice he cannot understand. By way of explanation, the novel presents other perspectives. In juxtaposition to Luzuko’s experiences as a legal alien, the novel offers, also, those of ‘paperless’ characters. Alternative and alternating storylines introduce two characters, Bongani and Nomusa, who are both living and working in England illegally.

Bongani has arrived in the UK with a bundle of papers that is immediately rejected at Heathrow airport (whether the documents are authentic or not, is unclear). As he is being escorted to a holding area to await a deportation flight home, he takes advantage of an official’s carelessness and, left momentarily unattended, Bongani simply walks out of the airport to begin life in England as an illegal alien.

Nomusa lives a similarly precarious life having overstayed her visa. With the added responsibility of motherhood (she has a baby whose father is in prison) she hustles for cleaning and nursing jobs. Further complications ensue when Nomusa’s mother arrives to take the child home to South Africa but chooses, instead, to stay.

When Nomusa becomes embroiled in a friend’s problems, the migrant community’s tentative loyalties are reflected. Nomzamo (Bongani’s flatmate) is on the run, having escaped through a window during a police raid. Nomzamo blames Bongani’s carelessness for alerting the police, while Nomusa, in turn, distances herself from Namzamo. When Nomzamo asks Nomusa “what are we going to do now” (50), Nomusa tells her, “there is no we” (51). The cohesion of a group that Luzuko imagines will provide a sense of belonging is an entanglement that makes Nomusa vulnerable. She must carefully distance herself from her friends because, loneliness aside, she would “rather play this cat-and-mouse game for the next five years than leave this job” (51).

The three characters – Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa – cross paths at a house called ‘Sodom’ where a mutual friend hosts informal parties. By juxtaposing these three characters, Siwisa foregrounds themes of belonging and longing, the plight of the migrant, and the legacy of colonialism for Africans across the continent. With a vast cast of secondary characters – at least 14 African countries are represented: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Sudan, Togo, Zambia, Lesotho, Tanzania, Namibia, Benin, Uganda, Congo, Burundi, and Liberia among them – Siwisa makes clear that, indeed, Africa is not a country, it is a continent; and that each country’s population suffers its unique historical repercussions.  When Luzuko is introduced to the transient community at ‘Sodom’ he feels an immediate sense of relief and recognition: “The cab slowed down at the unfenced yard of a modest, yellow-painted house. What seemed like a freshly started fire glowed from the front porch, lighting up a slightly unkempt yard. […] This was Sodom. A fading Mafikizolo song yielded to the throbbing beats of Glen Lewis. Soon a hail of Zulu and Xhosa voices erupted I smiled. I knew that I was home. At last” (164). He has found “another, illegal Oxford” (174) where he feels a deluded sense of belonging. But his new friends, including Bongani, do not understand why he wants to be with them. They point out that they have come to England to work for money and that they work hard for that money, while Luzuko sits “on [his] arse and receive[s] money for reading books. Just for reading books” (209). From their point of view, it is an easy life when “you don’t even have to struggle for papers. They organise papers for you” (209). Interrogating their varying backgrounds, they become aware that some have come from poverty and working-class backgrounds, some from the middle-class/bourgeoisie, foreshadowing a later conversation between Luzuko and Bongani. Months later, Bongani confesses that their discussions in Oxford have been the catalyst for his interest in history. He seeks understanding about the historical and socio-economic differences that have given each of them (Luzuko and Bongani) a more-privileged or less-privileged start to life. Siwisa thus shows that the African migrant is as varied and as multi-faceted as humanity.

The novel is also a commentary on various forms of writing. Luzuko is a doctoral candidate writing a thesis, while also producing political pamphlets and speeches for his Togolese mentor and, at the same time, struggling to write a novel. In the final paragraphs of Paperless, Luzuko decides to start his novel afresh. He wants to start his story “from the beginning” (304); and the words he recites as his starting point for the novel (of which he is the author), are also the opening lines of the novel, Paperless, (in which he features as a character): “I was on my way to see Ian Smith. For twenty pounds, I was going to see the last white prime minister of Zimbabwe” (1, 304).

This metafiction underscores the autobiographical elements of the novel. While Paperless proclaims itself a novel on the title page, it could be deemed auto-fiction inspired by the author’s own experiences. Like his character, Luzuko, Siwisa completed a D.Phil. in Politics and International Relations at Oxford University and, while there, befriended South Africans who were in England to work and who, paperless, constantly worried about deportation. There were stark differences between the friends because although they “shared the same culture and language” what separated them was “the difference between [their] destinies” (Eeley 2004 n.p.). In keeping with the autobiographical elements of the novel, Luzuko’s storyline is narrated in the first-person and is therefore relatively subjective, while Bongani’s and Nomusa’s respective stories are told in third-person narration, giving a more objective account of their experiences.

The metafictional elements in Paperless extend to literary critique. Dela gives his opinion about why Luzuko’s fiction is failing: “You write to yourself, for yourself, and you’re far too expository. You want to explain everything” (101). Luzuko then becomes self-critical seeing that his work is “often unnecessarily expository [that] chunks of dialogue digressed, [becoming] long winded [and that] themes shouted over loudhailers, hanging over the storylines” (136). This commentary mirrors Siwisa’s own writing challenges: an earlier manuscript, he acknowledges, “went on and on about a whole lot of things” and he was advised to “instead focus on a core theme” (vi). Paperless does focus on the core theme of the African migrant in England, yet some of Siwisa’s own criticism applies. The novel is at times burdened with the sheer number of characters. Though they serve the necessary function of depicting diversity and variety of experience, the multitudes at times deflect attention – and empathy – away from the more important characters.

Thematically, Paperless pays homage not only to the struggling migrant, but also to literature and the power of narrative. At least twenty-nine authors are mentioned in the novel’s pages including, for example: Dambudzo Marechera, Wole Soyinka, James Baldwin, Ali Mazrui, Salman Rushdie, Jack Kerouac, Lewis Nkosi, Masize Kunene, and Robert Frost. Stressing the importance of literary creation, Luzuko’s mentor says that the writer is inspired because “you write to communicate to the people, to the reader. In any medium, in any form that suits your message best, you write” (100).

And it is through reading and writing that Luzuko again encounters Bongani towards the end of the novel. Having been finally deported, Bongani is subsequently put in prison in South Africa (for a crime he denies, a point not clarified) and, prompted by earlier conversations with Luzuko, is now immersed in South African history books. His reading exposes to him how inequalities result from historical events and, therefore, how someone like Luzuko, for example, is destined to have more opportunity than someone like himself, Bongani. The different paths their ancestors chose, affected their lives in the narrative present. In clandestine and hurried phone conversations, Bongani discusses with Luzuko the pros and cons of “changing faces through migrations” (281).

This discussion lies at the heart of Paperless. The way Bongani sees it, if you ‘change faces’, you can start afresh but, as Luzuko has experienced it, this is also where the longing for identity, belonging, and home begins. And while they are having their long-distance intellectual, abstract discussions, their friend, Nomusa, is yet again enacting a ‘change of face’. To elude Social Services and the police, she is moving on to a new place, this time disguised in a burka: a cab arrives for her in the half-light of dawn and “carrying [the baby] in her car seat, Nomusa head[s] stealthily down the stairs, covered from head to toe in black” (264).

Focusing on Luzuko, Bongani, and Nomusa, Paperless examines the realities of what it is to live and strive restricted or freed by the necessity of documentation. The novel foregrounds the starkly different experiences of the ‘paperless’ and the ‘documented’, raising questions about the (un)fairness of boundaries that dictate on which side of structured borders individuals must remain or through which they may move. If identity is “shifty, fluid, [and] flexible” (124), the novel raises the questions: what would a paperless humanity look like; what could a paperless humanity achieve?

Though the novel deals with serious matters and there are intellectually challenging conversations among the characters, the tone of the narrative remains energetic, light, and humorous. This may be because of the energy of the young (and young-at-heart) characters, who all retain the will to push forward with their aspirations. Amidst the chaos and turmoil of their lives there is beauty: “[t]he beauty was in the mess. It had always been in the clutter and jumble of it all” (300). There is a hopefulness in their optimism despite the sometimes-dire circumstances, which makes this book a worthwhile read.

Buntu Siwisa (2023) Paperless | Jacana | ISBN 978-1-4314-3401-5
Beverley Jane Cornelius is a lecturer at University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa.

References
Eeley, Stephen. 2004. “Buntu Siwisa: In Conversation with Stephen Eeley”. https://www.oxfordmuse.com/?q=node/94 [Accessed 4 January 2025].
Siwisa, Buntu. 2023. Paperless. Auckland Park: Jacana Media.
University of Johannesburg. Website. Staff Members. https://www.uj.ac.za/members/buntu-siwisa/ [Accessed 4 January 2025].

This book review was published in Africa Book Link, Spring 2025

Ndima Ndima is Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Mapepa’s debut novel, published by Catalyst Press in 2023. The narrative unfolds through at least three interconnected sub-narratives. The first sub-narrative delves into the experiences of Zuva and her family in Harare, exploring the intricate (dis)harmony between nature and humanity. A second narrative thread traces Zuva’s past, encompassing her relationship with her late parents, her involvement in the liberation war, the power struggle with her siblings, and her subsequent reclaiming of authority in the present. The ultimate subplot chronicles the growth of Zuva’s four daughters, with a particular focus on Nyenyedzi, whom Zuva designates as the heir to her Chieftainship.

Throughout the story, Zuva emerges as a formidable woman in her neighbourhood and a respected Chief in her place of birth. Possessing the ability to communicate with spiritual entities, she stands as the sole individual that Selina, a water-dwelling creature, a mermaid, created in the image of the Nigerian Mama water, heeds.

The term ‘Ndima’ in Shona, the language predominantly spoken in Zimbabwe, traditionally refers to a piece of land utilized for agricultural purposes. However, in Tsitsi Mapepa’s novel, this word takes on a new dimension, symbolizing an imagined traditional dance enacted during a rainmaking ritual. This dance serves as a remedy for the severe drought that evokes the historical drought of 1992. The rainmaking ritual, deeply rooted in indigenous practices, becomes a means of addressing the challenges posed by a ravaging climate crisis. The narrative explores indigenous beliefs, connecting the drought to the tragic events of the war, with speculation that the high death toll during the war conflict is a contributing factor to the current crisis.

Despite the title’s association with the ritual dance, the novel’s central theme revolves around land. It is worth noting that, it does not emphasize the political aspects of land, as often portrayed in stories following the contested land reappropriation of the 2000s, a significant factor in the Zimbabwean crisis. Instead, the focus shifts to the protagonist, Zuva, and her profound connection with the land upon which her family erected their second home. The land, distinguished by its fertile red soil and environment teeming with snakes, holds significant importance within the narrative. Mapepa skillfully explores the intricate relationship between humans and nature, highlighting both its nurturing aspects and the inherent threats to survival for both parties through the portrayal of the land.

In that way, the novel intricately weaves ecological themes into its fabric. The uneasy coexistence between humans and the natural habitat, particularly snakes, unfolds as a recurring conflict. The snakes pose a threat to Zuva’s family and neighbors, prompting a violent response of killing them to ensure human safety. In a parallel struggle, humans contend with pests such as lice and rats, leading to retaliatory violence. For example, the rats are flushed down the toilet, depicting a dynamic of predator and prey. Amidst these conflicts, instances of harmonious coexistence with other aspects of nature also emerge.

The harmonious interaction between nature and humans, for instance, involves humans benefiting from the moon’s light at night, trees providing shade on hot days, and the earth’s soil supplying iron to pregnant women. Mwedzi, Zuva’s husband recounts folktales that illustrate animals talking and interacting with humans. This aligns with Ngugi wa Thiongo’s (1998) perspective that:

Humans are undeniably part of nature. In that sense, they are no different from animals and plants, all reliant on the same environment of earth, air, water, and sun… orature takes that as a given. Thus, in orature narratives, humans, birds, and plants interact freely, often assuming each other’s forms, including language.

This ecological focus of the narrative explores human agency in the climate crisis, exemplified by Zuva’s actions to combat troublesome snakes in her neighborhood. She burns the grass to start a fire, boiling water that she uses to ‘burn’ the snakes to death. The smoke from the fire dissipates into the air, forming a thick grey blanket (3).

The interaction between humans and nature is further realised in the novel’s structure and characterization that expose an ecological preoccupation. One significant narrative strategy involves including a mermaid (half female and half fish), an aquatic feature through which Mapepa explores the concern with possibilities of harmonious interaction between humans and nature. Human character names that evoke celestial bodies like Zuva (sun), Nyeredzi (star), Mwedzi (moon) and others that refer to diverse climatic features Gwenga (desert), and Dutu (storm), as well as street names and toponyms like Chakohwa (harvest), are influenced by the environment. The first chapter, named ‘Sunset Street,’ is set during the autumn of 1990, with seasons defining settings throughout the narrative that concludes in the spring of 2003.

In Mapepa’s novel, natural threats complement human threats, such as murder along the river, past violence from the liberation war, evoked in the narrative through references to Abigail and Mwedzi’s ‘deep hollowed’ scars from the war. Traumas of the war, suicides, and the presence of thugs threatening everyone, with women facing specific challenges like attempted rape, further contribute to the intricate narrative of ‘crisis’ and human agency.

Mapepa’s novel addresses a seldom-explored theme in the Zimbabwean literary canon, diverging from the prevalent focus on the Zimbabwean crisis that often overlooks the climate change crisis.

Tsitsi Mapepa, Ndima Ndima (El Paso: Catalyst Press 2023)

References
Ngugi, wa Thiong’o. 1998. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The Catalyst Press book cover states that Ndlovu’s novel The History of Man is ‘set in a southern African country that is never named’. This is true, neither Rhodesia nor Zimbabwe is ever mentioned. But every other place in this novel can easily be located in what is now Zimbabwe: the Matopos hills in the south, where protagonist Emil Coetzee spends his happy childhood, and, some fifty kilometres further north, the city that he initially hates: Bulawayo, here consistently denoted by its nickname The City of Kings. The ceasefire date mentioned on the first page, 21-12-1979, the date which marks the end of the ‘bush war’ in which Emil Coetzee has come to play such a gruesome role, is exactly the day that was the beginning of the end of white minority rule in Zimbabwe.

Still, it does not really matter where and when this story takes place. This is not a book about Zimbabwean history, not even about British colonial history. It is the story of a man who happens to live in and love a country which he deep down feels is not really his to love – and the tragic events that leads to. As most great novelist do, Ndlovu works with big abstract notions – the limitations of linear history, the complexity of identity formation, the relationship between the individual and the state – and turns them into a single man’s story, which, in turn, sheds its light on the bigger things. Emil is part of the dynamics of British (post-)colonialism, even though he is not British – Coetzee is an Afrikaans name – which makes him somehow more suspect, but also less colonial. Or, in other words, it makes him, more than anything else, an ambiguous character, and I think that is exactly what he is meant to be. Emil’s first and last love is the savannah. But in between, in the period where he has lost touch with the elephant grass, he does not seem to be able to choose who or what he is.

This is Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s second novel, and it turned out to be the second of a trilogy. The first one, the acclaimed The Theory of Flight, explores, like The History of Man, how circumstances can change the experience of the self, in relation to others and to the state. But where The Theory of Flight is set in a post-colonial state and is multifaceted – it consists of several interconnected stories of a broad range of people and harbours a touch of magic realism – The History of Man is a story of one man in a colonial setting, and it is told in a collected, rational, (almost) linear fashion. In her third novel, The Quality of Mercy, released in 2022, Ndlovu tries to bridge these two worlds. Here, a black policeman who also played a minor role in The History of Man, researches the disappearance and possible death of Emil Coetzee.

At first sight, the thing Ndlovu tries to capture in The History of Man seems to be how an innocent and happy and sensitive boy can grow into a cruel man, a man who turned his back on everything he loved and lost any sense of who he is. That is also more or less what is stated in the first chapter, titled ‘Prologue’: ‘His story, if it were ever told, would have to be told chronologically, in a linear fashion, with a definite beginning, middle and end – none of that starting-in-the-middle-or-end modern nonsense. It would have to be told in that fashion because that was the only way to make any sense of the dark, grey, concrete room with his naked light bulb (…) and the man with the blood on his hands.’

Notwithstanding the deceiving title of this first chapter, this is not Ndlovu talking, it is Emil, or to be more precise: the narrator, giving voice to Emil’s thoughts. This narrator seems to comply with Emil’s wishes: his story is chronologically told – except that the Prologue, like a stuck-out tongue, is almost literally repeated in the second last chapter. But the outcome of this narration is not what Emil hoped or expected: his story still does not make sense. In the end, it turns out to be a series of seemingly unrelated events. There are moments where he feels love, and there are moments when he feels loss. There is the series of choices he made. All the important events of his life are being narrated, but that does not help to create meaning or a meaningful identity.

Especially in South African literature, a white middle-aged male protagonist whose controlling of the narrative or gaze in a novel reveals his own blind spot, has been a recurrent feature. Mehring in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974), may be one of the most famous, but another example is only a few years old: Francois Smith’s Gustav van Aardt in Die Kleinste Ramp Denkbaar (2020). What Mehring and Van Aardt have in common is that they don’t intend to look beyond their gaze, even though they vaguely recognise that something is amiss. It is only in their uncoordinated search for something else that they sort of stumble upon a deeper truth. Emil Coetzee, however, is very much aware of his own choices. He is also very much aware of his own shortcomings. He knows he is as much driven by fear as he is by love, and that his fear, especially his fear for being homeless, is the stronger force. He knows he teams up with the bullies at school because it will keep him from being bullied. He knows he is not really able to love his own son, because his softness reminds him too much of his own father, who Emil once caught wearing women’s clothes. He knows that betraying his best friend several times because of this friend’s ‘weakness’, made him, Emil, the weaker man. The only thing Emil has ever been proud of is that he created the Organization of Domestic Affairs, an institute set to recording the lives of African people. With it he tried, in his own words, to make African citizens less vulnerable by giving them a history.

Ndlovu, or the narrator, does not elaborate on why Emil is so proud of this accomplishment, or even why he feels the urge to do it. This seems to be the one flaw in this novel: for an intelligent man like Emil, his pride does not seem to make much sense. We, as readers, of course know that African citizens already had a history, a fact which is underlined throughout the book by using the name The City of Kings, a referral to the founding of Bulawayo by Ndebele King Lobengula in 1840. We know Emil Coetzee – and all the British colonial institutes that did the same thing – did not give Africans a history, only incorporated them in colonial history. His life’s work does not make them less, but more vulnerable. To Emil, however, his work is what gives his own life purpose, and it is the only thing he does not question. On a subconscious level he probably thinks it will make him less vulnerable. But one cannot help feeling that he should have known that he was wrong.

Problems arise when the bush war starts, and the colonial government becomes extremely interested in the data Emil has collected. Emil does not believe in the war, but he cannot escape being sucked into it, because he does believe in the state. When the war and the state as he knows it come to an end, he is completely lost. His story is a circular one after all: it ends where it started, at the savannah. But now there is no love, and also no fear, there is just the feeling that he has lost all humanity.

The only demerit I can find in this novel, is that the creative freedom with which Ndlovu gave room to her ideas in Theory of flight (2028), is a little lost here: she very clearly wants to make a point. Or rather: ten points. Which she does. And while doing so, Emil becomes a little less convincing as a character, at least in the last section of the novel. Nevertheless: Ndlovu convincingly pictures the absurdity and pettiness and uselessness of colonial power, its means and its moral foundations, and the psychological motivations for excessive violence within the state, while at the same time presenting us with an absorbing and intriguing, very human story. An impressive accomplishment.

Gitte Postel
Literary translator & journalist

Introduction

A humble corpus of seventy-nine limestone flakes – ostraca – and four papyri lies at the basis of this book, a study of what Jennifer Miyuki Babcock understands to be visual representations of Ancient Egyptian animal fables. The author is a professor of Art History and Archaeology in New York, and specializes in the visual arts and narratives of Ancient Egypt, an interesting combination of fields, as the book demonstrates.

As for the corpus, as a writing material, papyrus was expensive and ostraca were cheap; the latter were used for a variety of purposes. Some were ‘textual’ – letters, inventories, receipts, work journals, …- while others were ‘figurative’ and contained drawings and sketches. Many of the ostraca were ex-votos, offerings made to deities to fulfill a vow, some may have been created for educational purposes or perhaps even out of boredom, as the author suggests. A small but interesting group depicts animals acting like people – wearing clothes, playing board games, banqueting, playing music, … – and these are the focus of this investigation. The most popular animals, for this purpose, are cats, mice, canines and caprids, but there are also birds, hippopotami and lions. Jennifer Miyuki Babcock chose to exclude most pictures with primates (with the exception of the motif of the baboon and the cat), because, as she argues, their activities could be the result of animal training; they usually appear in the company of people, not in anthropomorphic animal settings like the others.

Animals play a big role in Egyptian culture, religion and daily life. In representations, they are symbols of danger, strength, power, etc. In the hieroglyphic script animal-shaped signs can carry both literal and metaphorical meanings. On paintings, they appear in real-life conditions, crying out in pain, galopping, … and even their odor can be expressed by using symbols. But the ostraca are a group apart, as the animals here engage in human behavior. This is what animals in fables do. However, linking them to specific stories is not self-evident. The original drawings are not accompanied by explanatory texts and most drawings are not backed up by a recorded story. Jennifer Miyuki Babcock leaves no stone unturned to overcome this problem.

Let the reader be warned (but not deterred): this book is a reworked dissertation, which is still palpable, and it is not an easy read. It is based on original source materials that are hard to interpret. Before one can enter the world of tree climbing hippos and ennobled mice, one is deeply immersed in academic debates. What a reader not too familiar with Ancient Egyptian history might miss, at times, is a concise historical framework before these debates start, something I would have added because this book is of interest, not only for Egyptologists, but also for other people interested in fables and story-telling in other parts of the world or other temporal settings. There are a few flaws in the register which could have been avoided – e.g., the entries hippopotami, hippopotamus and hippotamus (sic!), hippotamus and crow but no crow as an entry, … – but on the whole this is a good work. In terms of methodology, the author is a guide, who presents complex theories in an accessible way and uses them eclectically. In the course of the book we find reflections on terminology and definitions; when different interpretations of materials have been suggested pros and cons are duly weighed, conclusions are drawn after consideration, the author shares her doubts and provides tentative explanations, it is up to the reader to agree or disagree. The author argues that in order to analyze the pictures one has to contextualize them and this becomes the key to their interpretation.

The book has six chapters, each of which opens up a new perspective:

1. Introduction to the Materials
2. Artists and Audience: Deir el-Medina and Its Inhabitants
3. Understanding Ancient Egyptian Aesthetic Value
4. Constructing Visual Narratives in Ancient Egypt
5. Animal Fables and Their Purpose
6. Contextualising the Egyptian Imagination: Concluding Thoughts

There is an Appendix of 84 pages, with colour photos of the papyri and ostraca, a few drawings, detailed descriptions and references. Not only is this catalogue fun to browse through, it also allows the readers to see the evidence with their own eyes. This catalogue is a most valuable instrument as the materials are not easily available otherwise. Beside all the rest, this book tells us a story of archaeological evidence that was dispersed over so many museums and private collections that studying them, today, requires an odyssey. As a result of historical power relations, many small artefacts have left Egypt, and are now in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, … The whereabouts of some of the materials cannot be traced anymore, in which case a modern drawing is all that remains. Writing this book required a lot of patience and dedication, even on a material level.

Missing: the archaeological context

Sadly, an utterly relevant context was lost in modern times. The ostraca and the papyri had once belonged to the vestiges of an ancient civilization, like the remnants of temples, houses, streets, tombs, skeletons, plant and animal remains. It seems that ostraca of different kinds were found in various contexts, such as the ‘Great Pit’, houses, tombs, streets, … but no one took care to note which one came from where so that we cannot know whether those with anthropomorphized animals came from a specific context, as a group or in groups, or were found in different settings. It is believed that all of them came from Deir el-Medina, the ‘Valley of the Artisans’, near Luxor, which can be ascertained for many of these, but not for all, and that is as far as one can get. The animal drawings can hence not be linked, by their archaeological context, to domestic, funerary or religious contexts, let alone to specific owners, their houses, graves, or other possessions, contexts that could potentially have contributed to their interpretability. Had they not been robbed of this context, because of 19^th century looting and substandard excavation reports, all of these vestiges could have told their story in unison. The damage done is irreversible.

Deir el-Medina and its artisans

As for the makers of the ostraca, Deir el-Medina was not a run-off-the-mill village, as the author explains. Its artisans were the ones who excavated and decorated the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and that of the Queens. They were highly skilled and exceptional workers who also decorated tombs in their own village, with delightful scenes from every-day life. They were visually literate and educated people. Although the concept of art in contemporary European and American context has undergone a semantic shift – it now conjures up a world of individual expression, something almost transcendental, as the author explains – Jennifer Miyuki Babcock defends the position to call the products of Egyptian ‘craftmanship’ art. Artistic quality was something that was highly sought after and no one can doubt the artistic skills of the painters of Deir el-Medina.

Motifs

While in search of their meaning, the author notes that the anthropomorphized drawings on the ostraca reflect elite themes and that there are recurrent motifs. One of these, that of the cat and the vulture, can be successfully connected to the myth of the “Distant Goddess”: in this story the god Thoth appears in the shape of a baboon, while the goddess Tefnut has assumed the form of a cat. The former tries to convince the latter to return to Egypt by telling her a story of a cat and a vulture. Depictions of a baboon and a cat, or of a cat and a vulture (or other birds), are thus identified as depictions of fables. The author tentatively connects the story-telling and the ostraca to celebrations during festivals for the Distant Goddess. She points out that although materials from Deir el-Medina have been found in Amarna, no such ostraca were found in the city of Akhenaten (Akhnaton), an absence that she links to the pharao’s religious reforms. The fact that the connection with the Distant Goddess myth can be ascertained, means that other motifs which include anthropomorphized animals in story-like settings, are most probably also connected to animal fables. Some depictions are very specific, such as the hippopotamus sitting in a fruit tree with a crow climbing a ladder, or a hippopotamus and a crow sitting on opposite sides of a balance. These images raise so many questions that it would be easy to convert them into story lines (how did the hippo end up in the fruit tree? why does the crow not fly but use a ladder? is he crippled and if so, whose fault was that? …). Corroborating evidence that these are indeed animal fables, not just funny pictures, is that there seems to be ‘a stock of characters and motifs’ which, as the author states, include:

1. Elite Animals and Offering Scenes
2. Chariot Riding
3. Religious Scenes
4. Agricultural and Food Production Scenes
5. Animal Musicians
6. the Distant Goddess and the Cat/Vulture Fable
7. the Boy, the Cat and the Mouse
8. the Hippopotamus and the Crow
9. Unclear/Miscellaneous

Narration

The reconstruction of narratives based on sequences of images found on the papyri turns out to be a challenge, since the materials do not seem to have been organized in a linear way. In ‘Constructing visual narratives in Ancient Egypt’ the reader is introduced into the conceptual world and theories of narratology and their application to visual materials. The author argues that we should look beyond the modern bias, that narratives should be presented in a linear sequence. To investigate how stories are presented in the visual arts of Ancient Egypt, she looks into paintings in tombs which depict the road to afterlife. She incorporates the idea of Assmann, that myths are organized around ‘nuclei’ (larger themes) which could be combined into ‘narrative constellations’ in oral story-telling, and wonders whether the ostraca were ‘icons’ that could be arranged and rearranged, during performances. Tentatively, she points out that in the 18^th century, in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, lukasa memory boards were used by story-tellers (boards with beads, shells and metal) as a mnemonic device. Could the ostraca have had a similar function? The world of the Ancient Egyptian story-tellers is another lost dimension, but the author, as said, leaves no stone unturned to find relevant contexts and ideas which help us imagine how the texts might have functioned.

Interpreting the social implications of the fables is another topic that is covered, and here too we see how the author gains information from contextualizing the materials. Several ostraca reverse the roles of preys and predators, e.g., they depict mice who are being served by cats. Interpreting such scenes is not unambiguous and the author shows us a range of possibilities. Is role reversal a sign of rebellion against the existing social hierarchy? Not necessarily so, according to Jennifer Miyuki Babcock. She argues that the population of Deir el-Medina had more direct ways to express their dissatisfaction if needed; as evidence she adduces the fact that the first recorded strike ever was a sit-in near the mortuary temple of Ramasses II. She also denies that the pictures with the human-like animals are satirical or blasphemous representations of religious ceremonies. She points out that in the Book of the Dead, mice are presented as divine; the priest is a jackal. Blurred boundaries between humans and animals are omnipresent in Egyptian religion. It is by comparison with other materials from Egypt (Prophecies of Neferty, Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage) and near-by regions such as Mesopotamia and Greece that she finds reason to believe that stories about social upheaval and chaos could well end in a restoration and celebration of existing power relations.

Imagination

The ostraca and papyri are silent witnesses of the history of human imagination. To unmute them the author contextualized what she saw. The patience and dedication that was put into this scholarly work has paid off; she has definitely shed light on the interpretability of these images and there is a lot to discover in this book. Although the study is focused on a better understanding of Ancient Egyptian materials, it is relevant for a variety of readers. It shows us a road that lies ahead, one that runs in two directions. For one thing, it reminds us that research in fields like Assyriology and Egyptology that helps us interpret drawings on limestone flakes also urges us to deconstruct the myth of the Greek miracle, of Aesops who appear out of the blue. ‘Unmuted histories’ that are the results of archaeological, anthropological and textual explorations, are starting to shed light on the relations between cultures and on captivating literary networks. Historical power relations have created disbalanced views of the past. Contemporary research tells us to revise such views. Meanwhile, creativity and imagination keep doing their work, because subconsciously, when reflecting on this need to bring more balance in the reconstruction of the fragmented history of humanity, the image of the heavy hippo and the light-weighted crow, who struggled to find a balance, comes to my mind. An ancient fable whose original context is clouded is trying to rewrite itself in a contemporary setting, which is what fables do.

For all these reasons I recommend this book.

Caroline Janssen (Ghent University)

During the 1991-1992 academic year, the Division of the Humanities of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, with grant-funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities, restructured its two-semester core course entitled “Introduction to Humanities I and II”. The overall goal was to revise and expand the course content to include in the Humanities curriculum non-western literary historiography and cultural trajectories. Howard, like some other North American universities, quickly decided to include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as the exemplary novel to represent the wide expanse of African literatures written in English. Project administrators purchased a copy of Lindfors’ Approaches to Teaching Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Modern Language Association, 1991) for the faculty who would teach a section of the Humanities course. I was one of them. While there is no explicit reference to that work in the volume reviewed here, this reviewer believes that, in many ways, it is a comprehensive sequel to that publication and to the proliferation of other published scholarship heretofore on Achebe’s work.     

After a quite engaging introduction by editors Korieh and Nwajiaku, the volume is divided into three parts. Part I “Chinua Achebe and Igbo-African Realities” includes 6 chapters (essays); Part II “Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Representation” includes 4 chapters; and Part III “Achebe, History, and the National Question” comprises 5. The editors offer the following rationale for the division: “The rationale behind this division is that, although some aspects of the Igbo experience can be addressed in their relationship to African and Nigerian culture, unique contextual circumstances warrant such division” (p. 4). The 15 essays are authored by scholars representing a variety of fields in the humanities, social sciences, theology, and communications. This gives way to different hermeneutical approaches and to a variety of sometimes conflicting interpretations of Achebe’s perception, presentation, and representation of historical facts, hence the subtitle of the volume: Between Fiction, Fact and Historical Representation.  

By all accounts, this volume is indeed a welcome and timely addition to studies on Achebe’s literary works and persona because it takes us from chapter to chapter to a deeper understanding and fresh and new-fangled analyses of his work. Achebe’s efforts to unveil artistically the social, political, religious, male-female relations and the general psychological environment of the Igbo people are lauded, but they are examined critically and comprehensively to offer varying ways of reading and appreciating his artistry. In general, this volume makes a gargantuan contribution to African Studies, Igbo Studies, and cross-cultural literacy. The novice student as well as the seasoned scholar of African Literatures and Cultures will gain invaluable insights from reading the thought-provoking introduction and the 15 elucidating chapters followed by an excellent index of names, topics and themes.

James J. Davis (Howard University)