Writing Influences: Africa

This morning Julie, my co-writer, asked what possessed me to pick up a copy of City of Secrets (Quest Books, 2008) by Patrice Chaplin? The answer was complicated, and led me to start thinking about how to describe all the influences that led me to write The Shell, the first book in our Turtle Island Rising series.

• What drew me to look in the bargain bin at Vroman's Bookstore several years ago and pick up a copy of Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press, 2007) by Tim Jeal? 
• Why did a female co-worker give me a copy of Beryl Markham's West with the Night (North Point Press, 1983) for my 33rd birthday? 
• Why did my 12th grade English teacher take the time to patiently suggest several books to a diffident young man who thought he didn't much like "literature," only to have a passion for literature ignited by one of her suggestions, Cry, the Beloved Country (Scribner's, 1948) by Alan Paton?

The short answer to all these questions is: I don't really know. But I will tell you that I believe that something - guidance, intuition, Fate, call it what you will - led me to all of them.

I was already well into the writing of The Shell when I picked up that masterful biography of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, whose real name was John Rowlands and who is best known - if at all - for the phrase, "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" I knew that I was writing an "adventure story," which critic Don D'Ammassa defines as: 

"...an event or series of events that happens outside the course of the protagonists's ordinary life, usually accompanied by danger, often by physical action. Adventure stories almost always move quickly, and the pace of the plot is at least as imporant as characterization, setting and other elements of a creative work." (Encyclopedia of Adventure Fiction, Infobase Publishing, 2009)

So maybe it was the blurb by Paul Theroux on the book's cover that made me pick it up: "Magnificent....A superb adventure story." It may also have been the cover photo, which shows Stanley in the quintessential African explorer's garb - pith helmet, rifle, mustache, puttees - standing next to an African boy of about 12 or 13, naked from the waist up. When I finished the book, I knew that the real reason had more to do with a story of "first contact" between Europeans and Africans.

West with the Night had the same appeal: an eyewitness account of a still wild Africa about to disappear forever. Markham's memoir also spoke to a childhood fantasy of adventure and romance that my co-worker, Torrie, could have known nothing about: bush pilots in East Africa.

Cry, the Beloved Country is an emotionally-wrenching tale of what was called apartheid in South Africa and racism in the United States. The book provided me with a strong picture of the basic humanity of all people and caused me to look more deeply into the causes and persistence of injustice and intolerance. I was presented for the first time with the image and challenge of "writer as social activist."


All three books, though set on a different continent and read at different times in my life, informed my approach to writing an adventure story, set on my own continent, that has at its heart a message about humanity and justice.