Equatoria (South Africa)
ISBN: 9781906300012 Price: £8.99 Click image to BUY
By Tom Dreyer
Translated by Michiel Heyns
THE almost mythical central African creature Okapia johnstoni could only be imagined in early twentieth-century Europe from descriptions comparing it to the unicorn. Antwerp zoo commissions two English adventurers to bring a live specimen back from the Belgian Congo.
The trip by Willis Reed and Guy Nichols takes place in 1912, barely ten years after the shy okapi had been witnessed by a European for the first time. Reed has devoted his life to researching this shy creature and the journey turns from mission to obsession.
This odyssey upon the rivers and through the jungles of central Africa is not one of darkness but of well-meaning imperial arrogance, as the two “explorers” come face to face with the limits of their own folly and the absurdity of trying to name the unnameable.
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‘As a novel from Africa it challenges stereotypical representations of the ‘heart of darkness”
– African Review of Books
‘This is a poetic and thought-provoking meditation on discovery and loss’ - New Internationalist
‘Dreyer plays a complex game with naming, categorisation and classification, and ownership, as it figures in the (misplaced) identifications between man and nature and man and fellow men’
– Litnet.co.za
‘In Equatoria reality is an unknown jungle which results in the reflection and distortion of certainty, and despair’
– Burger, South Africa
REVIEWS
Litnet.co.za
Complete Review
Mail & Guardian, South Africa
Book SA
School Library Journal, USA
The South African, London
New Internationalist