Botswana Time
by Will Randall
288pp, Abacus, £10.99
What colour is a black mamba? No, take your time, it could be important. A helpful parent at the school Will Randall taught at in Botswana tells him the mamba is green. I always thought they were grey with a pale belly. Everyone agrees they are very fast and deadly, however, so I'm afraid thinking time is probably finished. The spitting cobra is much easier - though you wouldn't want to test your new field identification manual while the serpent is inside the school piano and two dozen six-year-olds have just trampled you underfoot on their way out the door.
Heading off to more exciting destinations has always been a major attraction for the teaching profession and, as Randall points out, with bureaucrats dominating staffroom life in Britain, who could resist the offer of an interlude in the bush? Actually Randall does. For an overlong period at the start of this tale we have him agonising whether to take the post at Kasane on the Chobe River or not. Come on, Will, we know there's a book in it - get on with it! When he does, the story picks up instantly. His gentle, mild-mannered approach suggests this is going to be a picnic, but in fact he's rather good at subtly introducing some rough edges - notably Dirk and sons Erwin and Edwin, who are far more dangerous than mambas but more easily recognised (large pale belly, right hand clutching bottle of Castle lager, head full of racist venom).
There's a tradition of teachers writing about Africa - most notably perhaps, Paul Theroux, who used his Peace Corps experience in Malawi in his early novels. This of course pretty much reflects the post-colonial relationship with the continent that the developed world has wanted to foster: teacher and pupil. And teacher knows best, doesn't he?
Randall hits the issue early on. When the school needs a coat of paint a gang of men stand around looking at the brushes and tins. Our man is white, he steps up and takes charge. Randall doesn't like the feeling that gives him, but he doesn't much delve into why.
With Dirk, however, morality is simpler. Dirk is evil. He takes unwanted circus lions out into the bush, then leads rich Americans around in circles for days until they track down the heavily sedated beast and shoot it. For some reason these men are often dressed like villainous extras from a Batman movie; one wears a green trilby and a ginger toupee. Dirk also lures Botswanans into dodgy lending schemes so that when they die of Aids, he can pull the mat from under their family's feet. No doubt he'd help invade small principalities and fledgling democracies given half the chance.
On the side of good, there is Hans the Afrikaner farmer. He is strong enough to carry two bales of straw, one in each hand, but he is kind to children and not racist at all. And there are the Botwanans, who are mainly polite church-goers.
As the book progresses, the stereotypes gather faster than vultures over a roadkill. Even when Randall is taken in for questioning about his resident's permit - a tip-off from Dirk - it is all sorted out and the good guys remain good. All this is stitched together nicely with amusing episodes - monitor lizards in the bath, elephants on the football pitch - but what kind of Africa is this giving us? Travel-writing is not the same as novelising about ladies' detective agencies, there has to be a connection with reality, an attempt to understand and communicate complexities when they exist. This is an affable and easy-going book with a nice line in gentle chuckles, but it needed to go that extra mile up the track and dig deeper. Only then can one learn what kind of creature one is really dealing with and send back an informed report. Thankfully, in the case of mambas the identification is pretty straightforward. I checked it out. They're brown.
