Wizard of the Crow

There are quite a few legends in this world. One of the oldest tells of how the people of Babylon decided to build a tower all the way up to Heaven. But to no one’s great surprise, The Lord disapproved, and not only did he tear the tower down but by making everyone speak different languages he also made sure that nothing like it would ever happen again.

Bah humbug, says the dictator of the compleeetely fictional African country of Aburiria (really, it has absolutely nothing to do with wa Thiong'o's native Kenya. Really.) He’s ruled the country with an iron fist almost since the day the English left, he’s both the ruler and the lord of everyone, and nobody’s going to tell him that there are limits to his power. No, he’s going to build a modern Tower of Babel and march all the way to the stars to show the world that Africa can do things the West can’t even imagine. All he needs to get it going is to a) use both whips and carrots to convince the people that this is much more important than nonsense such as democracy, jobs and food, and b) convince the World Bank to finance it since Aburiria doesn’t actually have much money of its own. How difficult can it be? Thanks to the English language there’s a common lingua franca again, just like back in the day, and in these neo-colonialist days borrowing money shouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re prepared to pay interest. As one character notes, it's funny how "independence" came to mean "dependence."

But of course, the Ruler hasn’t taken the wizard of the book’s title into account. Which is one of the few things he can be excused for, since the wizard hasn’t taken himself into account either; he’s just an out-of-work academic who, while running from the police together with a woman from the resistance, makes up a story based on an old folk tale to make himself scarier than he really is. But before he knows it, the legend of the magic of the crow has spread and everyone – politicians, businessmen and the huddled masses – want his help to get ahead in the world. And somewhere around that time the magic, which began as a hoax, starts to gather real power.

wa Thiong’o’s huge novel has enough dashes of magical realism and modern-day fairytale to be compared to both Márquez and Rushdie (as indeed it has), but for my part, I keep thinking that this is more like an African take on Bulgakov’s The Master And Margarita. It’s got the same wildly disrespectful and bawdy sense of humour, coupled with a pissed-off, clear-sighted social critique that seems to want to kick over the whole damn tower of power hunger, nepotism, sexism, racism and faceless structures, all set to notes of both ancient myths and modern thinking that sometimes collides wildly and sometimes fuses into something completely new.

For a parallel, consider this. A somewhat younger legend than the Tower of Babel concerns Great Zimbabwe, the very real and ancient stone city in Southern Africa, which the newly colonized Africans back in the day claimed to be have been built by their ancestors. Their new rulers, of course, laughed at this idea (even when their own archaelogists confirmed it); since the white race was superior, something this big must have been built by white people, ergo they were simply reclaiming their rights to rule Africa. The logic of the victorious can often seem a bit weird in hindsight, when all the evidence has been twisted to serve the purpose of the one with the power to enforce his interpretation on others.

Aburiria is clearly based on Kenya and the Ruler on Daniel Arap Moi, but Wizard of the Crow is bigger than that; it’s a furious satire on all sorts of oppression, whether based on political, economical or physical power, and the Ruler echoes both Pinochet, Honecker and Putin. The West uses Africa, whose dictators use the military and police to use the people, where the men turn to the only outlet that remains and use the women. Lick up, kick down, shit flows downhill. wa Thiong’o constantly plays around with language; hardly a surprise, since he was one of the first African writers to refuse to write in English and instead write in his native tongue – something which cost him a year in jail and eventually exile when the regime didn’t like what he wrote. The value of language seeps through everything here; all old sayings, Bible verses, and English platitudes are twisted by those in power until the language itself becomes a trap the powerless must find their way out of. (In one scene, our hero remembers an old girlfriend who told him the story of how Jesus asked his disciples to become fishers of men – only to spot her on a street corner in a miniskirt, wasting away from HIV, still fishing for men. On a lighter note, there’s a misquote of Descartes that eventually turns into a linguistic virus that almost overthrows the government by itself.) And the way out turns out to be through storytelling; the legend of the people’s wizard, who can hold up a mirror and change the world, causing those in power to panic and become ever more paranoid. Just like in Bulgakov everything turns upside down, roles reverse and re-reverse, laughter goes from the bitter to the uproarious and back. wa Thiong’o’s language is a fantastic mix of colourful folk tale and modern novel, complex without being too complicated, hilarious without dropping its serious undertone, and it’s one of the most rewarding novels I’ve read all year. At 768 pages it might be a bit longer than it needs to be, but even the bits that aren't strictly necessary are simply too much fun to want gone.

The world keeps creating new legends, and they don’t necessarily need to be true to be strong enough to tear down towers. One of the newest is about an African grass roots movement where men and women work as equals, unite old truths with education and new ideas and only demand to control their own future. I don’t know how true that one is or can be, but it makes a cracking good read.