Dr. read it. elephant. Daniel Arnett
It was a long time before the first push message came from a European media portal when the Swedish Academy announced the name of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature winner at the beginning of October. It seems as if the editorial offices were surprised that the favorite names they had already written are now outdated. Because the cultural departments must first know how to spell the name of the Tanzanian author Abd al-Razzaq Jarna (72).
“What do we already know about Africa?” Do the closing words in the new book of the German journalist Bartholomaus Grill (67). The sentence could serve as the catchphrase above this farce about the Nobel Prize, because African writers are not on the radar of local bookstores, after all, the highest literary prize to date has been awarded to old white men. One of these is now also a roaster, but it’s a proven African expert reporting almost half its life to “Die Zeit” and “Spiegel” from the unknown continent.
In 1980, in Tanzania, the homeland of guarana, philosopher and sociologist Grill set foot on African soil for the first time and wanted to set up a Maasai meeting place in a village. He writes, “A long love story should start here.” “It was a roller coaster of emotions, a constant fluctuation between confidence and disappointment, hope and pessimism.” But in all his years in this part of the world, he tried neither to be a romantic nor to be a prophet of doom, but rather to be an “African reality,” as he calls himself.
Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and South Africa – Grill has toured and reported from most African countries. Accordingly, the topics he tackled varied: population growth, civil wars, climate change, and migration. Grill thus departed from the norm, because: “Africa is often seen as a single nation,” he writes, “as a homogeneous crisis bloc, rather than as a diverse continent of 54 nations that developed quite differently.”
A silent paradise where people laugh, drum and dance: such clichés from Hollywood films as “Out of Africa” make up the European image of the southern continent. “It is by no means that I am free from clichés, not even after decades in Africa,” Grill wrote. He had no qualms about boarding the poorly maintained Afriqiyah Airways. “But as I got older, I checked out the cockpit before takeoff,” Grill says.
Bartholomaus Grill, «Africa! Looking back at the future of the continent,” Seidler
“Explorer. Communicator. Music geek. Web buff. Social media nerd. Food fanatic.”
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