Paperbooks

Author Post: Jon Haylett

The publication of Black Mongoose coincides with the appearance of a rash of books describing the problems which Africa faces – Dambisa Moyo’s ‘Dead Aid’, Robert Calderisi’s ‘The Trouble with Africa’ and Michela Wrong’s ‘It’s Our Turn to Eat’, to name but a few. All of them lay out, at great length, the damage that a half-century of ill-advised and poorly accounted western aid has done, all describe the excesses of the parasitic elites that have fed off our largesse, all detail the dreadful problems most countries in that continent now face as a result of the irresponsibility of leaders such as Robert Mugabe.

As an old friend of mine, a man I grew up with in East Africa, who went to school there and, later, worked there, reminded me in a recent email after I’d told him my new book was about to be published, “AIF, Jon. AIF”.

AIF stands for ‘Africa is fucked’. He should know as he’s been watching it, at first hand, for the last 60 years. When he became fed up with planting tea in Kenya, he joined BOAC as cabin crew and has, for some forty years with BOAC and BA, been visiting Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria and Ghana.

Of course, most of the serious books about Africa’s current problems don’t dismiss it so lightly. All, in different ways, suggest cures – though most of them could be likened to those drastic remedies suggested for a man with terminal cancer.

Black Mongoose could be called a political thriller as it too suggests remedies. One of the problems of publicising a book which is primarily a thriller is how much of the story to reveal: too much, and I spoil some of the readers’ enjoyment, too little and the book risks sounding bland. All I can promise is that Black Mongoose’s are short, sharp and to the point.

Jon

Jon Haylett blog

One of the joys of writing about Africa is the exuberant variety it offers: it is raw, dangerous, colourful, unpredictable, exciting. Sadly, but not unjustifiably, the average British man in the street associates it with starvation, massacre, dictatorship and extreme poverty.

‘Black Mongoose’ takes full advantage of Africa’s variety but I’ve tried to go one further than write a taut, action-packed thriller. The website which is linked to it describes something of the background to events or references in the book. While, inevitably, it shows much of the bitter side of the modern African experience, it also puts on display the joy of the continent, a joy that grows so often out of adversity.

So when it came to choosing a theme tune, one name jumped to mind: Spokes Mashiyane. I’d first come across the ‘kwela’ music for which he is famous when, as an eighteen-year old, I taught in Southern Rhodesia. At morning break and at midday, in the heat of the day, my pupils would return to their boarding houses, not to relax but to…. dance.

The ‘kwela’ to which they ’jived’ was the music of Soweto, of a black South Africa groaning under apartheid, a place of police raids, disappearances, repression and discrimination – things that would start, all too soon after, in Rhodesia under Ian Smith, and re-emerge, decades later, under Robert Mugabe. Yet its tunes are catchy, its beat is joyful, its cyclical form hypnotic. It’s escapist music: in its time, it needed to be.

But what I like so much about this music is the underlying simplicity. Mashiyane plays a penny whistle. He learned on the reed flutes he made when he herded cattle as a small boy. He graduated to a whistle made, so the story goes, from the spokes of a bicycle – hence his name. This is wonderful, grass-roots, African music.

Jon

www.black-mongoose.co.uk

We are really excited about the launch of Jon Haylett's fantastic second novel Black Mongoose on 25th April. The book has its own dedicated website with general information about the issues the book covers and chapter by chapter information to enhance the readers' reading experience.

Black Mongoose is set in a fictional country in Africa, but is closely based on Jon's own experiences of several African countries including Zimbabwe and Kenya. The book is about the beauty, crisis and hope of such countries and is a brilliant and highly relevant read for anyone interested in the current political and national difficulties effecting many African countries. The website is packed full of stuff from blogs, videos, photos and detailed background information and is well worth a browse. Visit:

www.black-mongoose.co.uk

Pre-order your copy of Black Mongoose now - £7.99 

Lucy

Author Post: Jon Haylett

I have a friend in the village whom I shall call Angus. Angus, like too many Scots, is a serious alcoholic. I like him immensely, for he has the most wonderful sense of humour, but I have a problem when he comes to visit. He asks for it, but I do not give him alcohol. Alcohol is killing him. I don’t want to be part of that death.

Africa has the most terrible problems. I used to collect money to help solve those problems. At school, the form I supervised sponsored a little girl in Kenya. I wanted the British Government to increase its aid budgets. I was wrong, terribly wrong. Sending aid is like providing Angus with a constant supply of neat whisky. According to Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian who worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs and who has recently published ‘Dead Aid’, aid is killing Africa:

So Africa is becoming more and more like Angus, down-at-heel, dishevelled, increasingly sick, a slight embarrassment, someone best not mentioned and, certainly, best kept over there. Yet, led by our government, we continue to use aid to salve our collective conscience: last year our DFID spent around £1.25 billion on bilateral and regional programmes to reduce poverty in Africa, which will rise to £1.75 billion in 2010/11. Oxfam, Cafod and other charities pour in many more millions. Despite this, the average African is poorer than ever, and getting poorer still.

Moyo doesn’t like to admit it but misplaced generosity has created a huge kleptocracy of corrupt politicians and businessmen who have a vested interest in the continuation of aid. ‘Black Mongoose’, due out at the end of this month from PaperBooks, is a fast, action-packed thriller which tells of how a small group of conspirators sets about freeing their country from its corrupt and repressive elite.

Jon

Jon Haylett's second novel Black Mongoose is out on 25th April

Pre-order your copy now - £7.99 

Jon Haylett - Happiness is a Contagion

Sadly, The Smile of Cresta Bear, a children’s book which all my four children loved, isn’t readily available in the UK. Its story is simple. Cresta Bear, who lives on an iceberg, is feeling glum, so he comes up with the brilliant idea of selling smiles at a penny each. He isn’t the only denizen of the Arctic who’s feeling miserable, so he quickly makes a small fortune. I won’t spoil the rest of a magnificent story, but it came to mind when New Scientist this week (3rd January) carried an article on something which fundamentally affects us all: what makes us happy. Unsurprisingly, it concludes from a review of recent research that one of the factors that most influences our emotions is the people around us. But, from that point onwards, things become increasingly weird.

For a start, the evidence is that the moods of those with whom we associate are even more important than scientists had hitherto believed, that emotions behave like a contagion spreading from person to person. Stranger still, it isn’t those who are closest who affect us most. So the happiness of a good friend who lives a couple of kilometres away increases our chances of feeling happy by 60% – however that is measured – while for a next-door neighbour the figure drops to about 30% and one’s cohabiting partner to less than 10% – even the friend of a friend of that friend has almost as much influence as a spouse. Sadly, the mood of your Legend/PaperBooks office colleagues, Tom, has very little influence.

Delve deeper, and even more worrying things are catching in a similar way, including suicidal tendencies, smoking habits and the prevalence of obesity. For example, the increasing obesity of a close friend is hugely influential on one’s weight trend, while the weight trends in a friend of a friend of that friend are far more important than one’s spouse’s.

Right! If these scientists are to be believed, then a few things that are bothering us can be solved pretty damn quickly. For a start, there’s the financial problems that are affecting us, which were, after all, started by a sudden loss of confidence by people working in the banking world, hurried upon their contagious way by the eternal cheerlessness that is the hallmark of our modern media. So there’s a simple cure for those woes:

EVERYBODY, GO OUT AND SMILE!

Jon

Author Post: Jon Haylett

George and the Rabbits: A Christmas Story

George helped me with the school rabbits. A short, cheerful man, he was utterly reliable – something one has to be when dealing with something as crucial as the school rabbits. It was his job to clean them out and feed them when the schoolchildren couldn’t.

George came to mind because of Lucy’s efforts to cheer us up in the run-up to Christmas – the sleighs, reindeer, Christmas tree baubles, obese Santa in his red, ermine-trimmed coat, that sort of thing – because what happened to George related to that strange human condition, religious belief. To most of us, this Christmas thing is a charade, a commercial bonanza foisted on us earlier and earlier each year, a pagan festival that has far more to do with excess than believing anything. George, along with the true Christmas believers, the ones who, Wenceslas-like, go out and give their time and money to causes Jesus would have approved of, actually believed in his religion. It didn’t happen to be Christianity, nor any of the other major world religions: George was an animist, a believer in the spirits of his ancestors and the African bush, a believer in the power of the witch doctor.

I need to digress a moment on this matter of the rabbits. I may have misled you into thinking they were the sort of cute bunnies primary children bring home from school for the holidays because it’s ‘their turn’. I’m sorry: the rabbits we kept at this school were a commercial concern, mostly New Zealand whites. We kept hundreds of them – and killed a hundred or so every Wednesday, packaging them neatly for the local butcher. So you can imagine how serious the matter became when George, very suddenly, stopped being the pleasant, reliable bloke he had been and became morose, sullen and thoroughly unreliable.

One day he didn’t pitch up at all so I walked up to his quarters to find out what the hell was wrong with him. He looked terrible: wasted, grey, haggard, a pinched husk of the man I had known. Someone, he declared, had bewitched him, someone he had offended or, perhaps, who was envious of him, someone who had been prepared to pay the local ‘nganga a couple of goats to punish him. He was possessed of a devil. His end was inevitable. He was dying.

George didn’t die, not quite, though he was a very sick man for a very long time. His cure was to return to his village way out in the bush and pay his village witch-doctor to cure him, rather as Jesus cast the devils out of some of the people he cured.

As a result I believe in witch doctors far more than I do in Father Christmas. There’s a witch-doctor in Black Mongoose, not an evil one like the one who did for George, but a good one. A sort of black Father Christmas.

Jon

Author Post: Jon Haylett

Conception

The story that became ‘Black Mongoose’, due to be published by PaperBooks in February, was conceived one lunchtime on a hard wooden seat in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, one of those run-down Victorian red-brick London hostelries tottering on the edge of what looked like a bomb site, to which I’d repaired while my wife and daughter pillaged the West End.

Conception requires a seed, and the seed in this case was a dance, an annual dance which takes place thousands of miles away from muddy Thames-side. I know you’ll say that likening what’s in this link to a seed is sadly inappropriate, because the clip features publicly-professed virgins – that’s why they’re carrying reeds, though one does rather wonder at those who drop theirs. Rather lovely virgins they are too, but the best part of this is definitely the singing. I love African singing for, however untutored they may be, both men and women sing like God’s angels, and all seem to have an innate ability to harmonise. See what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbj8lmWE5xY

This reed dance is the Swazi version, but the Zulus do a similar one, the main difference being that, in the Swazi version, the local King gets to choose one of the damsels as his latest wife. As a consequence, the current King, Mswati III, has thirteen wives and 23 children, which is rather slow going as his father, Mswati II, had no less than 70. Mswati III’s latest, a 17-year old schoolgirl, was a singularly unfortunate choice as, in the face of one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the whole of Africa, the Swazi Government had been preaching abstinence, particularly among the young.

Don’t ask me why this particular gem of African culture suddenly bobbed to the top of my mind in a grubby London pub, for I have no answer, but the description of just such a dance began to came out almost too fast for me to write it down. I was hampered by only having a tiny notebook in my pocket and the stub of a pencil. The notebook had been borrowed from my daughter, a blue, mock-suede covered thing with a large pink flower on the front, but each page was emblazoned with a very appropriate logo: ‘Go Girl!’

Jon