Caravan

The history of a people or region can sometimes feel like a live organism, possessing a certain ethereal life that can in fleeting moments be glimpsed, and then we see that it is an awesome thing. This novel is also an epic and a documentary about historical happenings around given themes. The setting moves from a village home to a distant semi-arid place. Louis, a jobless graduate, goes with his cousin who works at a refugee camp, to look for a job. The first feature he notices as he enters through the gate is the grave-yard. Gloom, despondency and tragedy pervade the place. Sometimes, when he is free from volunteer teaching work, he types documents for refugees looking for resettlement. In this way he listens to their haunting stories about war and suffering. They are woven around loss, tragedy, broken nation-states and homelessness, telling the story of a continent and its peoples. He hopes to be awarded a job contract but already his muse and philosophical leanings nudge him to move on. The prospects of getting the contract are in any case increasingly bleak. Slaving caravans, he feels, never left Africa in the sense that mass dislocations and suffering occurs in much the same way, only actuated by different forces. It is in this sense that the situation invites us to stand on a crucible of time and take the benefit of an enlightened view, which could be all that we could have in the interim.