99% of all books written about Africa by non-Africans are about non-Africans. Africa becomes a metaphor for their own problems, a canvas on which they paint their own landscape. (And of course, the same largely applies to non-African readers such as myself.) The difference with Oreille Rouge (Red Ear) is that it's very, very aware of it, and delights in poking fun at it.

A writer (possibly named Eric) gets a chance to stay in Mali for a few months to work on a book. Immediately, he's completely overcome by all the images the simple word "Africa" (never "Mali", he has no idea what Mali is) conjures up; the savage, pure, uncorrupted, oppressed, dark, light, ancient, brand-new land of hippos and elephants and noisy crickets where he, as a white man, will submerge himself and show the hipocrisy of white men who think they have the right to that story. Of course, Mali turns out to be a foreign country, no more, no less. But Eric doesn't notice, he's too busy wrestling with the images of Africa he insists on inventing and trapping in his carefully selected and deliberately water-logged little moleskin notebook.

And so, the Africa that can be perceived with one's senses escapes him. He begins to expound. Let us listen to him for a minute. The cars down there were driven in France twenty, thirty years ago. The libraries get the books we would have destroyed ottherwise, old, cheesy, nonsensical entertaining novels. The hospitals get to inherit our expired drugs, their TVs show our worst shows. In this way the rich countries think they support Africa: by pouring their garbage on it.

He's not wrong.

Oreille rouge is a very funny book, saying virtually nothing about Africa and a lot more about westerners' view of it. (Even the local boy who's promised to show Eric a hippo knows everything about hippos from an encyclopaedia.) In the end, I'm not entirely sure that that works for the whole book; after a while, you get pretty annoyed at writer-Eric's puppetry of character-Eric. But still, it's an intriguing book that asks its questions simply with an innocent grin.