This is just a brief reference to a couple of small books recently read concerning fairly current historical events in two vastly different parts of the African continent – one written by a Frenchman, and the second, from the experiences of a South Sudanese refugee. The contents of the second book, may prove quite disturbing to many readers, but unlike fiction, one cannot [or shouldn’t] hide from the reality of actual recent history, and pretend or ignore it didn’t happen.
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The first of these is titled – ‘A Bookshop in Algiers’ by Kaouther Adimi’, translated by Chris Andrews from French, published in 2017, 146 pages.
To my own detriment perhaps, I’d really given little thought to the North African former French colony of Algeria, before picking up this little book – a very thought provoking little story, to which I was initially attracted by the title [not surprisingly]. The story was quite tragic and disturbing in places, and did not install within me much favour towards the French, and their colonial treatment of Algeria, even as late as the tragic protests in Paris on the 17 October 1961. Although admittedly, in many ways, some of the French reactions depicted, were little different from the attitudes of the English, and other European colonial powers over the past century or so.. Also disturbing was the reminder, that literature, books and writers have been so persecuted and ridiculed through the centuries by those who disagree with views expressed, etc. Overall, though a small book, it provided me with an historical insight into a country I’d never given much thought to – and encouraged me to learn so much more about that aspect of world history [if I have the time!!].
Algeria, after in ancient times being under Carthage and then Roman rule, was conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, and about 800 years later, taken over by the Turks in 1518, with the country eventually becoming one of the Barbary pirate states. French conquest followed in 1830, and Algeria was declared French territory in 1848. A move towards nationalism after WWII led to much brutal fighting in 1945-46, and then a further uprising in 1954 led to even more violence and bloodshed. French President De Gaulle promised self-determination for Algeria in 1960, but the French population rebelled, almost creating civil war, and the resulting revolt in 1961.
Much of the storyline in the book covers the period from the 1930s to this period of self-determination. A Bookshop in Algiers charts the changing fortunes of Charlot’s bookshop through the political drama of Algeria’s turbulent twentieth century of war, revolution and independence. It is a moving celebration of books, bookshops and of those who dare to dream.
A brief review from publishers, Allen & Unwin summarises, what the book is about
“A moving novel inspired by the true story of an extraordinary bookshop and the man who founded it.. A Bookshop in Algiers celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto ‘by the young, for the young’, discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers.
A Bookshop in Algiers interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad, who is dispatched to the old shop in 2017 to empty it of books and repaint it. Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.”
Our second book was ‘Father of the Lost Boys: A Memoir by Yuot. A. Alaak, published in 2020, 230 pages, written about a part of Africa which has always been close to my thoughts over the years – Sudan and Ethiopia. Back in the early 2000’s, I was privileged to be a part of a small group of friends who assisted in the sponsorship of two young boys and two adults from refugee camps in the Sudan to Melbourne, greeting their arrival at Tullamarine Airport, and in later years, visiting the boys on a couple of occasions. In more recent times, I have wondered how those boys [now in their 20;s] have made their way in Melbourne’s Sudanese society, which has so often been maligned due to the actions of a small minority of their race..
In this book, the worst of the actions of the human race are depicted. Back in the late 1980;s in that part of Africa – well, some of us may have read about events of those times [which in many ways continue today] or watched reports on TV, and I dare to say, in most cases, we quickly turned our minds to other matters and continued with, in the main, our comfortable and safe lives here in Australia. This story reminds us of just how ‘lucky’ we really are!
Briefly, ‘Father of the Lost Boys’ is centred during the second Sudanese Civil War, when thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks by Northern “government” troops, with many becoming refugees in Ethiopia. When that nation’s government was subsequently overtaken [and supported by the North Sudanese government forces], those refugees, not just the boys but whole families, were forced to flee again, for their lives. In 1989, teacher and community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak [the father of the book’s author], himself a survivor of imprisonment and torture, assumed care of the Lost Boys as he sought to protect them from becoming child soldiers, and simply save their lives. He would spend the next four years leading the 20,000 Lost Boys out of Ethiopia back to Sudan [where most had fled from in the first place], and on to the supposed safety of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Together, those that survived, endured starvation, animal attacks, and the horrors of what was a determined policy of genocide that included landmines, ambushes and aerial bombardment.
From the pages of this book, a couple of quotations to perhaps illustrate just ‘how lucky we are’ in Australia!!
- [The author as a an 8 year old child, fleeing to Ethiopia with his siblings and his mother] – “We spend the day under a tree in Anyidi. As evening approaches, we are told that since we don’t have a secure hut, we will have to sleep in the military compound guarded by soldiers. Hyenas and lions have been feeding on human flesh since the war started. They trail government troops, feeding on he corpses of massacred Southern villages. The adapt to hunt us, a far easier prey to catch than anything in the wild. We have moved up on their list of staple prey. Hyenas hunt in packs at night. They have almost annihilated some villages. Each night, packs roam on the outskirts of Anyidi. They search for doors left unsecured, or anyone foolish enough to step outside at night……………..The army compound lies at the centre of Anyidi. Hundreds of displaced persons sleep there each night. It is bare, open land encircled by a grass fence. If it rains, people must simply wait it out. We arrive as dusk approaches. Mum picks a spot at the centre of the compound. It is prime real estate – the safest spot. She verbally fights off several other mothers to keep it. There is little energy for a physical confrontation. As night falls, I am petrified. The howl of Hyenas is constant. It gets louder as they prowl closer to the centre of Anyidi. A lion’s roar rumbles. Gunfire rings out from surrounding villages. The roar of the beasts gets louder. I hang onto Mum tightly through the long night….” [p.36-37]
- [The early stages of the trek from Ethiopia to Kenya, the author aged 10-11years, as Alaak attempts over many days to get thousands of boys, women and younger children over the flooded Gilo River to reach the border of Ethiopia and southern Sudan, with less than a dozen canoes at his disposal, and rebel forces closing in behind them] – “Before long, planes appear in the sky, and begin their attack. As bombs fall, I pray with hope and fear that Mum and Athok [my sister] are far enough that the artillery shells from the direction of Gilo do not reach them. We step over the dead with no time to stop, no time to cry and certainbly no time to bury……Some of the shells tear into the jungle, killing wildlife. In this moment, hunter and hunted, we are all victims of war…………………….Even so, as we race towards Pochalla, lions, tigers, hyenas and African wild dogs continue to snatch babies from their mothers’ breasts, and attack the youngest and smallest of the Lost Boys. They prey on the elderly and the frail, as if they are a herd of zebras. Pythons constrict and swallow babies and children who are resting by the trackside with their exhausted mothers….. Slaughter was what the president of Sudan had ordered for his citizens in the south. The rebel soldiers mowed down refugees and Lost Boys with their bullets. Small boats loaded with machine gunners appeared on the river and opened fire on the refugees on the riverbank. The rebels fired at those already in the water trying to escape. Bullets cut canoes and barges and their occupants into pieces. Women attempting to run with children on their backs were felled. Young children dived into the river but were snapped up by crocodiles, drawn by the smell of blood…………….When the shooting stopped, toddlers and babies were clinging to their dead mothers. Other little ones, separated from their mothers, crawled around in agony and shock. The bodies of Lost Boys were scattered along the river’s edge or were carried away in the water. The river was red with the blood of hundreds of innocent victims, most of them women and children……………My father takes the news very badly. Although he had managed an exodus of nearly twenty thousand Lost Boys, it is the loss of hundreds of lives that weighs on him…” [p. 101-103]
That latter quotation was taken from the very early stages of that 4 year trek – and if readers get that far in the book, well, you may not feel like continuing. However, like so many similar stories, not just from within the African continent, but worldwide, they are aspects of history, and basically, man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, that we should never ignore, or pretend didn’t happen – well, while modern history suggests we don’t seem to have learned from the past, one can only hope, that maybe in the future, lessons can be learned and heeded to. It’s difficult to be optimistic however.
I’ll conclude with reference to a recent television report, and specifically to the aspects of the story referred to the foregoing quotations.
As reported on an SBS news feature earlier in June, this eyewitness account by Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot, is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun. Aged 76 years, a towering figure of a man, Alaak now lives in a suburb of Perth, WA.. Mr Alaak’s mind is a lifetime away. Thirty years ago, in Pinyudu refugee camp in Ethiopia, he was responsible for the education of around 16,000 displaced youth from southern Sudan. “I was a teacher, and the role of a teacher is to educate the people and the community,” he told SBS News recently. “That was the role that I saw, to help these children to have a future.” Mr Alaak had been a headmaster at a secondary school in Sudan before the country was plunged into its second civil war in 1983. Like many others, he fled to Ethiopia. As Pinyudu camp’s director of education, he was given responsibility for the schooling of ‘lost boys’, thousands of youths who had been displaced by war. “The children were in a war where they might be attracted to be child soldiers, but my aim was to have the education for them. That is why I say ‘the pen is mightier than the gun’. I wanted to draw them away from the war,” he said..
Mr Alaak’s son, Yuot A. Alaak, who also now lives in Western Australia, was 11 years old when, in 1990, he joined his father and thousands of lost boys on a perilous march from Ethiopia through southern Sudan.
“We basically left in the wet season, it was raining so we walked through the mud. A lot of the boys were attacked by wild animals and eaten along the way. Some fell and broke bones,” Yuot, 41, recalls.
After several days of walking, the group made it to the crocodile-infested banks of the Gilo River on the border between Ethiopia and Sudan. On the other side lay the relative safety of Pochalla, a South Sudanese garrison town occupied by soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
“Once we reached Gilo, the river had swelled during the rainy season. It was flooded, but Dad managed to take canoes from the soldiers and he used that to get as many boys across as he could,” Yuot says.
As thousands lined up and waited to cross the river, a group of Ethiopian rebels attacked, in what has come to be known as ‘the Gilo massacre’.
“Dad lost hundreds of boys that day, some were shot as they jumped into the river, or drowned while they were trying to reach the other side.”
The survivors made it across the river to Pochalla, but they arrived emaciated and faced more starvation
Next time we are quick to criticise the South Sudanese refugee communities [or refugees from other parts of the world], perhaps it may be wise to keep in mind that they and/or their families most likely were a part of the kind of stories depicted in this little book by a man and his father who lived through the worst of a genocidal situation…..
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