Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in The Village of Waiting with a note of reference.

We (Kwame Amekufui) talked about his mother and father, whom he hardly ever saw now, about Camus and Malraux, African politics, and finally Togolese politics.

Albert Camus

Kodjo and Yawa reminded me of the couple in the film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice -the amiable dim shopkeeper and his clever, trapped wife stewing behind the desk.

I never learned exactly what was going through on, but it didn't stop me believing he had a secret; and in the humid heat my imagination conjured up a scenario of Kumavi selling his soul to one of the forest gods in exchange for a lifetime's flow of palm and gin.  Privately I dubbed him, "Faustus."

I reread King Lear over two afternoons.  I'd spent a good part of my senior year in college writing about it,  but now I understood the words for the first time:

Is man no more than this?  Consider him well.  Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume.  Ha! Here's three on's are sophisticated.  Thou art the thing itself.  Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings!

Kenya left me at a loss.  It was yet another Africa.  Not the village one I'd spent my first year in; not the new one of squalid survival .... This seemed a fantasy Africa that Kenya and its white tourists concocted for their mutual benefit.  It brought the feeling of nostalgic adventure to the whites and confirmed their sense of themselves at the center of things; it brought foreign currency to the country.  There were "Isak Dinesen Tours," hot-air balloon rides over Amboseli, charbroiled lunches at the Carnivore Resturant outside Nairobi, glasses of Kenya Coffee Liqueur at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, where antlered trophies graced the walls and the voices of old British settler-hunters still lingered in the lounge.

To him the past was full of drama, abundance, order, meaning. He reminded me of old Nester in the Iliad - “A stone that is ales ten men to lift today was lifted in those days by only one.”

The next evening thinking of the sadness in the old chief's eye, I remembered T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion": 

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

In his essay "The Crocodiles of Yamoussouko," V. S. Naipaul makes a distinction between two African worlds.  " There was the world of the day; that was the white world.  There was the world of the night; that was the African world, of spirits and magic and the true gods. 

And in that world ragged men, humiliated by day, were transformed - in their own eyes, and the eyes of their fellows - into kings, sorcerers, herbalists, men in touch with the true forces of the earth and possessed of complete power ... To the African - however much, in daylight, he himself appeared to mock it - it was the true world: it turned white men into phantoms."

More than once I saw a boy at the Kpalime station in Lome peddling works of Marx and Engels alongside the women with oranges and peanuts.

One evening, transfixed by a Chinua Achebe novel, he came into the room where I was lying under a mosquito net and intoned: 

"When I touched her hand she pushed me away, when I put my arm around her shoulder she said, 'Don't touch me!" But when I began to play with the little beads around her waist she pretended not to notice, because - silence ... means ... consent.  Shilensh" - the slur was for prurient effect - "meansh conshent!"

I noticed on his desk, next to a pile of used paperbacks - Achebe, Hardy, Twain - a thick stack of business cards.