Will Ferguson’s latest book documents a three-week excursion to Rwanda undertaken by the writer and his friend.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Western writers have done well by the Rwandan genocide.
Bill Berkeley, Roméo Dallaire, Philip Gourevitch, Christian Jennings and many more have written remembrances of the unspeakable tragedy that left more than 800,000 people dead during several terrible weeks in 1994. Recently, Will Ferguson, whose oeuvre toggles between humorous non-fiction and dolorous fiction, has joined the club. His Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey into the New Heart of Africa, is something of a combo meal of his disparate styles, and it documents a three-week Rwandan excursion undertaken by the writer and his friend, a newish Canadian named Jean-Claude Munyezamu. Like so many of its literary predecessors, Ferguson's book intentionally teaches us something about Rwanda, and also accidentally teaches us something essential about the human condition: We have a seemingly limitless appetite for hoovering up (to say nothing of writing) holocaust narratives, and zero ability to learn anything from them.
Road Trip Rwanda is in fact Ferguson's second foray into darkest Africa. His first was a novel called 419, and it was expertly rendered Giller-bait: terse descriptions of snow; fragmented, poetic hiccups through space/time; generalized, apocalyptic descriptions of Nigeria's oil-oozing delta – a region that in one of his funny books Ferguson might have rendered as "Africa's Fort McMurray." 419 was described by the jurors of Canada's richest literary prize as "the birth of something new, the global novel," which ignored the fact that Nigerians such as Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Okey Ndibe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had been writing exactly that since the mid-zeroes.
Ferguson cannot be held to account for the Giller jury's misplaced hosannas, but one assumes that he was largely responsible for everything else to do with 419. He claimed in interviews never to have visited the Niger Delta, and it showed – 300-plus pages of ersatz Conrad run through an Anne Michaels paragraph generator. This time, however, Ferguson actually travelled to the African continent, and the reader might have expected the results to be different.
The reader would be correct in these expectations.
Road Trip Rwanda opens with one of the three tones Ferguson uses alternately, but not at random, in order to introduce a) jocular on-the-ground observations, b) book-learned historical data and c) genocide-derived megapoignancy. During the first scene, we find Ferguson at the border between Rwanda and Tanzania, waiting for his pal Jean-Claude Munyezamu, a Tutsi who experienced the worst of the genocide as a NGO worker, and who now lives and works in Calgary as a celebrated children's soccer coach. (Brief update: Since the genocide, under president Paul Kagame, Rwanda has cleaned up nicely, and is often referred to as "Africa's Singapore.") Munyezamu's story, which is indeed remarkable, is peppered throughout the tale, and he is represented as the teetotal immigrant overachiever to Ferguson's All-Canadian beer-swilling palooka – an eighties buddy-cop match up, except with a much greater body count.
Humour-wise, however, Ferguson is not what I would describe as Lethal Weapon hip. There is a fustiness to his jokes, a telegraphed Rick Mercer-ish self-deprecation that simultaneously serves as self-aggrandizement. To wit:
"Some of the smaller children, always with the most encrusted noses it seemed, stopped to force moist handshakes on me, which I always obliged. Mental note: Buy hand sanitizer."
How you cope with the above paragraph serves as a pretty decent gauge of how you'll handle the book. I coped badly.
Serious-wise, Ferguson can get very very serious, likely because of the historical matter that runs like deep waters (not my metaphor) under the reupped Rwanda that the writer finds himself travelling through. It's probably worth noting that the tiny central African country, under Kagame, has rebounded both economically and socially. It's probably also worth noting that Kagame has severe dictator tendencies, and the genocide wasn't ended so much as it was outsourced – the ongoing Second Congo War, in which almost two million people have been slaughtered, was to no small extent the result of the Tutsi president going after Hutu génocidaire holdouts in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite this – despite Kagame's murderous NIMBY-ism and the myriad miseries that still provide Western writers with so much African material – the continent is changing whiplash fast, and to his credit Ferguson addresses this, sometimes with the use of bullet points.
But he offsets his decent historical accounts with the occasional koan-like declaration: "At Murambi, the lime had turned the dead the one colour that might have saved them." More unfortunate still, because Ferguson tends to glibness in most areas that don't concern the genocide, he misses huge opportunities to fully explore the country's current standing and its relationship to a wider, surging Africa. As a result, by midway through the text the serious bits begin to read like holocaust porn.
It takes years to write a book. It takes hours to trash one. But here's the thing – Road Trip Rwanda isn't Will Ferguson's fault, or rather it isn't entirely his fault. Blame the market, baby. His publisher, in this case Penguin Random House, must not escape censure – note the gaspingly wretched cover portraying an anthropomorphized gorilla, ageless and unfathomable expression on his/her face, staring out at the literature consumer. This sort of thinking creates a feedback loop exemplified by the 419 Giller jury flap: The richness, the variety of African literary voices are erased by high-end Western awards-ready Seriousness, and the industrial circle-jerk that this engenders.
We're dead out of Hannah Arendts. So is it, I wonder, not time that we addressed how little writing about genocide actually humanizes the victims of genocide, or explains the multiple intersecting evils behind genocide, or prevents genocide? Would the world be worse off if not a single A-list writer wrote another word about genocide? Do we not require a new methodology for addressing our darkest horrors, one that doesn't necessarily bait glowing reviews and executive parking on an Indigo sales rack?
I'm dreaming, right? How could I suggest such a thing? What fresh horrors would slip through the literary net? Writing is not meant to prevent anything. And yet, throughout the Road Trip Rwanda reading experience, I couldn't help but think back to Peter Orner's stunning, Namibia-set roman-a-clef The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. It's a book about many things, but mostly about the exquisite boredom that prevails in this desert-riddled southern African nation. Orner, an American, didn't mention genocide, didn't portray truckloads of dead black bodies and only glancingly referred to AIDS. Every character – black, white and in-between – was rendered as utterly human. The book, something of a cult classic, was so superb that its (few) readers could have been forgiven for believing that it ushered in the age of Western writers detailing the African prosaic. Failing that, there's always Teju Cole, Helon Habila, Sefi Atta, Okey Ndibe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
But nope. Because genocide kills. Every time.
Richard Poplak has just finished co-authoring a book interrogating the notion of "Africa Rising." He lives in Toronto and Johannesburg.