The heart of Africa

Commonweal, Nov 5, 2004 by Rand Richards Cooper

The Dust Diaries

Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps Owen Sheers

Houghton Mifflin, $23, 320 pp.

With an ambivalence tracing back to Conrad, modern European writers portrayed Africa in extremes of innocence and violence, depravity and delight. Paralleling empire's project of mining the continent for buried treasure, novelists explored a moral and psychological geology, digging deep into the self to discover what lay beneath. Uncivilized Africa served as a blankness or void: the veld, the bush; the screen upon which Europe threw the pattern of its inner fantasies, both noble and corrupt. For a Cecil Rhodes, of course, the lure of Africa was obvious. But what about the fringe figures of empire, the explorers, the bureaucrats and missionaries? Mixed themes of paradise and exile mirror in a "mysterious" continent the mystery of its conquerors.

The Dust Diaries is Owen Sheers's investigation of the life of his great-great-uncle, Arthur Sheerly Cripps. An Oxford graduate, poet, and Anglican priest, Cripps left England in 1901 for Rhodesia, where he lived for half a century as an impoverished and notably eccentric missionary, in the process authoring a 1927 treatise, An Africa for Africans, that raised an angry voice on behalf of the colonized. Owen Sheers, poet and Oxonian himself, had heard about his ancestor in family conversations over the years; curiosity and a vague intuition of affinity spurred him to find out more. Armed with boxes of correspondence and manuscripts, Sheers set out to shed light on his forebear and the mystery of why he abandoned Europe for a life in the veld.

I must admit to being skeptical about "on the trail of" books; too many seem like excuses for the writer's excellent adventure. But Sheers has redeemed the genre brilliantly, with a thoughtful, lovely, and innovative work. The Dust Diaries comprises three narrative strands: Sheers's evocation of August 1, 1952, and a small hut where the blind, octogenarian missionary is living out his last hours; his own travel report from current-day Zimbabwe, where he tracks down the dwindling circle of elderly people who knew his great-great-uncle; and the largest strand, a piecemeal novel taking up Cripps's decades in Africa. "This story is written as a fiction," Sheers explains, "the fiction I formed in my mind so as to better understand Arthur's life."

It's a challenging life to take on. The Arthur Cripps of The Dust Diaries is many things to many people: "a troublemaker, a liberal, and a negrophile" to officers of the British South Africa Company, whose policies he opposes; "simple, direct and just a little ridiculous" to a litterateur district commissioner who envisions him the subject of a novel; unsettlingly attractive to a bored frontier wife whose dinner table he enlivens; a wielder of magical powers to the Mashona peasants he lives among, who know him as Kambandakoto, or "He-Who-Goes-About-As-A-Poor-Man." As for Sheers, he develops his own thesis about the man. Struck by a life "almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement," he suspects some buried wound. A handful of obscure references in poems and other documents hint at romantic tragedy: a woman left behind in Britain, possibly a child fathered out of wedlock. There's a love story there, Sheers decides. He writes it into his book. Doing so lies somewhere between discovery, fabrication, and interpretation--Sheers burrowing through a life of driven service to a core of sorrow, attempting to locate in Cripps a specific, personal love as profound as the man's selfless idealistic love of Africans.

The language of The Dust Diaries bears a poet's stamp of beauty. "He lay there for a moment, listening to the night outside: the turning of the sea's pages, the hush and fizz of the waves on the shore, the sudden screeching and confusion of two cats fighting, then silence." But Sheers proves a skillful novelist as well, deftly portraying vivid secondary characters, such as the pugnacious Bishop William Gaul, who removes his cleric's collar before delivering a pugilistic rebuke to a drunkenly abusive Irish railway worker. Historical figures wander in for sparkling cameos, like the notoriously brutal hunter and soldier Richard Meinertzhagen, about whom Cripps wrote a nightmarish poem.

Indeed, The Dust Diaries could have been written simply as a historical novel, and a good one. But Sheers has larger ambitions, and they involve frequently interrupting his story to show us how he put it together. Thus we read an engrossingly detailed scene, set in the 1930s, between Cripps and his longtime personal secretary, Leonard Mamvura--then turn the page to find Sheers in Africa, visiting the real-life Mamvura, who is providing information Sheers will later use to write the fictional scene we have already read. It's startling to shift time frames and genres like this, to be repeatedly reminded that the engrossing reality we've been enjoying is a fictional construct. The Dust Diaries gives us both a moving human story and the author's commentary on the problematic nature of composing that story.