The Africa Network 2017 Conference

From September 29 to October 1, the Africa Network held its conference here at St. Olaf College. About 50 scholars came together to discuss various topics concerning African studies in the undergraduate curriculum. We talked about study away programs, globalization, Afropessimism, and Afropolitanism. We heard presentations on teaching Africa through simulation, collaboration and fieldwork.

We talked about the necessity of studying and teaching Africa on its own terms, not through foreign perspectives. We talked about teaching and studying that inculcate empathy. We talked about misconceptions and stereotypes about Africa, such as the idea of tribe.

We explored the situation of Americans taking students on study abroad or internships in Africa. The point was raised that in such situations, local professors should teach the American students and the American professors who accompany the students should be taking notes, not teaching. I think, however, that professors should be able to both teach and learn.

There were topics that I had not encountered at previous Africa Network conferences, such as entrepreneurship, African sport history, and teaching Africa in Scandinavian studies courses. The issue of cultural differences came up again and again. This issue interests me in a special way as a cultural consultant.

I had proposed that Papa's Shadow, a documentary on Hemingway in East Africa, be introduced at the conference. This documentary is largely based on a study abroad course I taught in Tanzania titled "Hemingway in East Africa." We invited Jimmy Gildea, who had taken that course and produced the documentary. He showed a trailer of Papa's Shadow and trailers of two other Africa-related documentaries: one on Sudanese refugees at Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya, and the other on me presenting African storytelling.

Papa's Shadow features an extended conversation between Patrick Hemingway, the only remaining child of Ernest Hemingway, and me, discussing Hemingway's travels in East Africa, his writings about that experience, and his philosophy of life, writing and other matters, such as hunting, which he thought of as an artistic pursuit, alongside bull fighting.

One of the main aims of the Africa Network is to facilitate the sharing of academic, pedagogical and other resources. At this conference, an open access digital pedagogy journal was launched by editors Matt Carotenuto and Fiona Vernal.

From all accounts, this was a very successful conference in many ways, including the quality of presentations and the good number of attendees. The Africa Network continues to attract new scholars year after year.

I appreciate the experience I have gained of working on the conference planning committee, and I thank fellow committee members--Matt Carotenuto, Anene Ejikeme, Fiona Vernal and Todd Watkins. I thank St. Olaf College for readily taking on the role of conference host and ensuring that the conference went smoothly.

A Gift From Ramble Pictures Honouring Hemingway

A few days ago, I received a special gift from Ramble Pictures, a film production company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a framed picture announcing a documentary titled Papa's Shadow, which deals with Hemingway in East Africa. Much of the documentary is a conversation between Patrick Hemingway and me about Hemingway's African experiences as reflected in his writings, as well as his ideas about writing, culture, and life in general.

The picture features Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway and me, as well as Mount Kilimanjaro, the vast plain below it, and a plane in the air. This scenery magnificently evokes Hemingway's famous short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."

I am humbled to be featured alongside Ernest Hemingway, one of the greatest writers in the English language, as well as Patrick Hemingway, his son and only remaining child, who knows my country and East Africa very well, having lived there for twenty five years, and who has been my mentor in my efforts to study Ernest Hemingway.

I am equally humbled that Patrick is also a great admirer of my work, such as my book, Africans and Americans: Embracing Cultural Differences. In Papa's Shadow, Patrick refers to it and he is seen reading a passage from it, in Swahili and my English translation.

Papa's Shadow focuses on a dimension of Ernest Hemingway that is not well known: his life long fascination with Africa. In the course of studying Hemingway, I realized this deficiency and decided to create a course, Hemingway in East Africa, which inspired Jimmy Gildea, one of the students, to create Papa's Shadow. I highly recommend this documentary. To order it, contact Ramble Pictures. email: info@ramblepictures.com, telephone: (952) 426-5809.

The Ghost of Hamlet's Father

In the past several days, I have been reading Shakespeare's Hamlet, not only to experience again the power of a creative genius of unequalled talent, but in order to reflect on the ghost of Hamlet's father, one of the characters in that play that has always fascinated me. Ever since I watched a film version of Hamlet, in which Laurence Olivier played the role of Hamlet, I have remembered the ghost of Hamlet's father. This was in 1971, when I was a student at Mkwawa High School, Tanzania.

The ghost's eerie appearances in that film, and his voice,  have continued to haunt me, so to speak. The encounters between the ghost and the sentries and between the ghost and Hamlet are among the most memorable moments in the play. I remember most of all the tale the ghost tells Hamlet which begins this way:

     I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.... (Act 1: Sc. V)

In subsequent years, reading Alex la Guma's novella, A Walk in the Night, set in apartheid South Africa, I encountered the ghost of Hamlet's father in a memorable way. One of the characters in this novella, Uncle Doughty, is an old, poor Irishman, who lives in a poverty-stricken place, "dying of alcoholism, diabetes and old age". We see him with Michael Adonis, a troubled black man, having an agitated conversation while drinking liquor. The topic of their conversation is life's troubles, and Michael Adonis thinks that, being a white man, Uncle Doughty cannot have troubles.

"Worry? Worry? the old man whined. We all got something to worry about." He mustered himself for a moment and shook a dried twig of a finger at Michael Adonis. "We all got our cross to bear. What's my white got to do with it? Here I am, in shit street, and does my white help? I used to be an actor. God bless my soul, I toured England and Australia with Dame Clara Bright. A great lady. A great actress she was." He began to weep, the tears spilling over the sagging rims of his eyes and he reached for the bottle again. "We're like Hamlet's father's ghost. I played the ghost of Hamlet's father once, London, it was."
   "You look like a blerry ghost, you spook," Michael Adonis said bitterly. He jerked the bottle from the old man's hand and tipped it to his mouth and took a long swallow, gagging and then belching as he took the neck from his lips. His head spun and he wanted to retch. (25)

Every time I teach A Walk in the Night, I point out the presence of the theme of the ghost of Hamlet's father as a clear example of the inter-textual dimension of this novel. I also invoke Richard Wright's Native Son, pointing out the striking similarity between the difficult living conditions of the people in the two novels and the suspenseful police pursuit of Bigger Thomas in Native Son and Michael Adonis in A Walk in the Night.

Contemplating the ghost theme in Hamlet and A Walk in the Night reveals interesting connections. I note, for example, how murder features in the two situations. The ghost of Hamlet's father tells Hamlet the story of his father's murder and urges him to take revenge. Uncle Doughty, the "ghost" in  A Walk in the Night, is eventually killed, accidentally, by Michael Adonis. The shock that Michael experiences as a result can be compared to the shock that Hamlet feels at the news of his father's murder. I wish I could write more, but this is a simple blog post, not a scholarly essay.

My South Asian Literature Course is Underway

My South Asian Literature course has completed its third week, and I am pleased with it. We have read Bapsi Sidhwa's Water and watched Deepa Mehta's movie of the same name, on which the novel is based. Having taught two other novels by Sidhwa--Cracking India and The Crow Eaters--I found it easy to introduce Sidhwa to my class, situating her within the South Asian Literary tradition.

Reading Water has been eye-opening. Never had I encountered a novel that explored so deeply and passionately the situation of widows in Hindu society. I had some understand of Hindu traditions regarding widows, such as the concept and practice of sati. Water, however afforded a more detailed, more nuanced understanding of the existential condition of widows sanctioned by the religious doctrines going back thousands of years.

The central character is a young girl, Chuyia, married when she was barely ten to a man in his fifties and widowed soon thereafter. In accordance with Hindu Brahmanic tradition, she is taken away from her parents' home and put into an ashram, a home for widows. Chuyia's experiences in the ashram elicit the deepest sadness and sympathy especially since she entertains the hope of returning home sooner rather than later, little knowing that that is not possible.

Before Chuyia is widowed, we hear about the illness of her husband, Hira Lal, through the thoughts of Bhagya, her mother:

She and Somnah [her husband] both knew that if Hira Lal managed to recover, Chuyia would be allowed to return home; but if he didn't recover she would be a widow and she would never return to them....Bhagya's thoughts tormented her all night. She knew that in Brahmin culture, once widowed, a woman was deprived of her useful function in society--that of reproducing and fulfilling her duties to her husband. She ceased to exist as a person; she was no longer either daughter or daughter-in-law. There was no place for her in the community, and she was viewed as a threat to the society. A woman's sexuality and fertility, which was so valuable to her husband in his lifetime, was converted upon his death into a potential danger to the morality of the community. Bhagya's heart was filled with dread (p. 31-32).

When I think about the relationship between films and novels, I assume that the novels came first, inspiring the film makers. Sidhwa's novel, however, reverses this pattern. Watching the film after we had read the novel, I had a hard time keeping this in mind. I appreciated both, nevertheless, touched by the film's vivid portrayals of scenes, characters, and scenery that I had encountered in the novel. The colours and sounds in the film brought back memories of the month I spent in India in 1991.

If You Like My Writing, Please Support "Papa's Shadow"

I know there are thousands of readers of  my writings out there, thousands who have read my book, Africans and Americans: Embracing Cultural Differences. A number of these have told me how much they like this book.

One of them is Patrick Hemingway, the only remaining child of Ernest Hemingway. Having lived for much of his adult life--over twenty years--in my country, Tanganyika (later Tanzania), he knows exactly what I am saying in this book, which he calls "a tool of survival."

I wish to let my dear readers know that I have joined hands with Patrick Hemingway to share our reflections on his famous father. We appear in a documentary film by Jimmy Gildea titled Papa's Shadow, discussing Ernest Hemingway's life, travels, writings, and thoughts, especially those connected with his African experiences in 1933-34 and 1953-54.

If you have read my Africans and Americans book, you will enjoy hearing Patrick Hemingway mentioning it and reading from it as he and I talk about Hemingway's appreciation of different cultures.

Papa's Shadow is a unique documentary. It will change the way people view Ernest Hemingway. I saw this a few weeks ago at its premiere screening in Minnetonka, a suburb of Minneapolis.

The documentary is completed, but it will only be released after certain costs are  met. There is a fund drive going on, scheduled to end just over a week from now. As a contributor to this effort, I am joining hands with Ramble Pictures, the company that Jimmy founded, to solicit the remaining contributions. There are special incentives attached to the contributions, including a signed copy of my Africans and Americans book, for contributions over 200 dollars.

Read more about Papa's Shadow, and, if you can, make your contribution at this Kickstarter site.

Papa's Shadow: A Hemingway Film by Ramble Pictures LLC

A 2014 graduate of St. Olaf College, Jimmy Gildea has embarked on a career in filmmaking. After several years of hard work, he has produced Papa's Shadow, his first film (2015 Ramble Pictures, LLC). He is already working on his next one, "A Place Called Nowhere," about refugees at Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya.

Since, alongside Patrick Hemingway, the only surviving child of Ernest Hemingway, I feature prominently in Papa's Shadow, I will let others comment on it. However, the film comes with the following description:

FEATURING AN EXCLUSIVE TESTIMONY GRANTED BY HIS SON, PATRICK HEMINGWAY, PAPA'S SHADOW DIVES HEAD FIRST INTO AUTHOR ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S HUNTING EXPEDITIONS IN EAST AFRICA AND THEIR DEFINING ROLE IN SHAPING A LEGEND.

YOUNG FILMMAKER JIMMY GILDEA DOCUMENTS HIS EXPERIENCE WHILE STUDYING HEMINGWAY UNDER THE INSTRUCTION OF AFRICAN AUTHOR JOSEPH MBELE, JOURNEYING ACROSS MIDWEST AMERICA, THROUGH THE SERENGETI PLAIN AND UP THE STEEP CLIFFS OF MT. KILIMANJARO.

HEMINGWAY'S SON PATRICK AND MBELE ENGAGE IN AN INSPIRATIONAL AND REVEALING CONVERSATION REGARDING THE FAMOUS AUTHOR'S FASCINATING RELATIONSHIP WITH EAST AFRICA.

THIS PERSONAL AND EMOTIONAL FILM EXPOSES MANY ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS HEMINGWAY FANS HAVE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR.

Jimmy and I have been in constant communication from the time he enrolled in my Hemingway in East Africa course, several years ago. We took the photo featured here on April 21, 2015, when he visited me at St. Olaf College to talk about Papa's Shadow.

Jim says that these films will be premiered at festivals in America throughout the year. Eventually, they will be available for purchase. I will keep readers of this blog posted on these developments.