Whiteman
Tony D'Souza Portobello Books, 288pp, £12.99
ISBN 1846270499
A young, idealistic American aid worker is sent to Africa to establish clean water supplies in a remote village. There follow any number of cross-cultural misunderstandings, encounters with beautiful women and observations on the otherness of African culture. The writer is a 30-year-old American who has based this, his first novel, on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Côte d'Ivoire.
If the above makes Whiteman sound like sub-Alex Garland student holiday reading, then don't worry. Tony D'Souza has used his experiences as an aid worker to write a serious novel whose story and characters stay with you. The protagonist Jack Diaz is despatched to a forest village in the Muslim north of war-torn Côte d'Ivoire. Unfortunately his time there coincides with the aftermath of 9/11, and US aid money dries up as funds are diverted into the war on terror. Diaz - renamed Diomande Adama by his Worodougou community - is left in the village, twiddling his thumbs and coming to terms with who and where he is.
How to write of the immersion of a "Whiteman" in a traditional rural culture without dragging up familiar clichés and treading well-worn ground? Plenty of writers would not be able to surmount this hurdle, but D'Souza manages it. As Adama learns to till the fields, negotiate local customs, make friends and avoid enemies, we are carried along with him. The book resonates with the speech patterns of a West African village: nature-based allusions that would sound corny if the author had invented them, but ring true because he clearly hasn't.
Crucially, the characters come to life: Mamadou, Adama's young close friend; Chauffeur, the village witch doctor; Djamilla, Adama's almost-accidental wife, whom he first seduces and then abandons. When war forces Adama to leave his new home and become Jack again, as he flees to the US, the reader feels the loss almost as sharply as he does. Through the book runs one story: the otherness of the Whiteman. Several times Adama seems to settle into his new life, believing he understands it, is part of it - only for some event or person to shake him back to reality. All well-meaning, liberal white men who have ever worked in the "third world" will shift uncomfortably as D'Souza reminds them of the untouchable, unrecognisable, envied, resented elite that they cannot help but belong to.
As the book gathers pace, so does the rush to war. Adama sees the old generation of village chiefs, who were forced to fight for the Europeans in the Second World War, dying off, their well-learned reluctance to fight replaced by the bloodlust of young men brought up with a Christian/Muslim divide fomented by cynical politicians. As his time in the village comes to an end, Adama, on a whim, buys dozens of pots of paint from the nearest town and sets about painting the doors of the villagers' huts in brilliant hues. For days they help him out, formulating their own designs. Then the village chief dies. His replacement is the champion of those in the village who are rallying for war. As they celebrate the election they pull out AK-47s and bring them to the party.
"Long into the night, the young men handled the weapons," writes D'Souza, "laughing, passing them around, the firelight colouring their eager faces. All around them in the night, the doors of the village were painted in many and beautiful hues. They didn't notice this any more, though they had been the ones who'd painted them."
As a metaphor, and not just for the state of Côte d'Ivoire, this is powerful enough to need no elaboration. As Adama's friend Mamadou says, as they sit smoking one night in the moonlit village: "All that was bad has risen up to take the place of the good. Now is not a time of sense. Now is not a time of men like we are."
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