Ex libris

By far the best thing we've achieved at the school here is the establishment of the library. I spend all my free time there and I still get a bit choked when I look round and see groups of students reading or studying quietly. We've got a decent number of books; all the text books previously kept untouched in a locked room have been released into the library, plus we have tapped into various charities which ship unwanted books from UK and USA. You don't get much choice about what you get, but books are books. We have a lending system which works fine now that pupils have finally believed that they are allowed to take books home. I'm just as keen a borrower as anyone. The cast-offs from the Britain and America are happy hunting grounds for me. Dumbing-down in the developed world could be the raising-up of the third. We have every Shakespeare play. Last week I read Measure for Measure. Not bad. "But man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he's most assured, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep." The angels have plenty to weep about in Tanzania. It was about 20 years ago that I found I could read Shakespeare without a teacher telling me what it meant. Last week I opened “The Franklin’s Tale” and found I could understand it. What next? The Mahabharata in the original Sanskrit? I suppose I could try "Finnegans Wake" again. Not all our books have come direct from UK or USA. I recently read “As Berry and I were saying” by Dornford Yates, with a book plate saying “Nairobi Club Library”, last borrowed 18 Mar 1957 and stamped Sold. Quite enjoyed it. Berry coming out with gems like “as much use as a belch in a barrage” which earned him a “You filthy beast” from his wife. Daphne called lots of people “filthy beast”, "filthy brute" or “filthy swine", entire nations in the case of the French and Germans. So, mildly entertaining but you hope no-one under 40 catches you enjoying it. Ernest Hemingway is another guilty pleasure, as he swaggers his way across East Africa shooting anything that moves. The school library has all the American classics: Fenimore Cooper, Melville, Edith Wharton, Hawthorne. I've just finished "The Scarlet Letter". Unconsciously I always thought it meant an incriminating epistle but in fact it's a big red A for adulterer the heroine is condemned to wear. At home in my hotel I read on my Kindle. What a wonderful gadget. Predictably Mrs Scrooge mostly downloads old stuff ie Kindle Price $0.00. I also shamelessly use it as a free, if primitive, internet provider.Every so often it refuses to connect to Yahoo or Google or whatever and displays a polite but firm message saying that the Kindle's internet connection is supposed to be for buying books and I have overused it this month. So then I quickly try to mollify it by buying a couple of books with above zero prices. I like things set in Africa eg some of William Boyd's. The other day I bought one called "The Baobab Accord". It started with a few paragraphs written in a brilliant pastiche of the sort of African English so common here; a pompous, ungrammatical mish-mash of tenses and disjointed phrases. Here’s an excerpt: “Martin then opened and proceeded to chair the meeting for which no minutes would be scribed, by welcoming everyone and thanks them for their attendance, and by not wasting too much time in the hot forty degrees baking sun. Martin got straight to the point of how to move forward with this brutal regime, alternatively what other options are at his disposal.” I know the style only too well from English language newspapers, government propaganda, pamphlets, school text books and exam papers. Boyd had captured it perfectly. I read on…… Chapter one,…….Chapter two……”OK Boydie” I thought, “You’ve made the point, enough is enough, start writing properly.” But no, it continued, and it gradually dawned that this wasn’t the William Boyd. When I looked back I saw that the author was one William R. Boyd, probably a graduate of Dodoma University. When I went back to Kindle store I found some angry letters from other victims of this outrageous deceit. So, one of the very few drawbacks of the Kindle. I don’t think I would have been fooled if I had picked up “The Baobab Accord” in Waterstone’s. But, the one “Bookshop” in Dodoma sells only stationery and school text books, so I’m not going to start complaining about the Kindle.