In Out of Africa Isak Dinesen writes of Kenya: 'Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of the heart. In the highlands you woke up in morning and thought, Here I am, where I ought to be.' Of my five-hundred-odd mornings in the Togolese highlands I woke up hung over, bathed in sweat, hungry, blowing on an extinguished lamp instead of turning off my alarm, mildly at ease, or mildly anxious. But never where I ought to be.
This book surprised me in three ways.
- I expected not to like it, just on general principle, because it's a Peace Corps memoir, and specifically because of negative comments by some people in my Bamako book club who said they didn't like Packer's attitude toward Africans. They cited one supporting example in particular, which I never found in the book -- either I was reading too fast, or they were thinking of a different book by a different author! -- and as for his attitude, I was looking for problems with it and found none. Quite the contrary. I thought Packer was honest, rational, sympathetic to his African friends, neighbors, and colleagues, but not prone to romanticize. In fact he's quite gloomy, writing of anxiety and disillusionment and despair. But it's clear already in this book that he's an excellent writer who will move on to better things.
- Although he was a PC volunteer in Togo in the early 1980s, living in a small village in the bush, and I am a relatively wealthy expat living in Bamako in 2005, so many of the details are strangely familiar to me. I expected something foreign, and instead I found myself reading a book about West Africa that generally matches my perceptions of the place.
- Unlike the only other Peace Corps memoir I've read before (Mike Tidwell's Ponds of Kalambayi) Packer works the history of the region into his observations. Togolese history may have seemed irrelevant to me until recently, but with the recent end of Eyadema's reign (he had already been president for something like seven years when Packer went to Togo in 1982) what happens in Togo may have repercussions for all of West Africa.
I almost wish I'd read this before I came to Mali, but I'm glad I had a chance to form my own impressions. But if you are wondering what it's like in West Africa, read this book!
