A Twist of Sand: a novel set in Namibia 65 years ago

A Twist of Sand by Geoffrey Jenkins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I first read A twist of Sand about 60 years ago, before I ever went to Namibia, so because that is the setting, it played a big part in my preconceptions. It is set in the Skeleton Coast, the dry north-western part of Namibia, then known as South West Africa, and ruled by South Africa. The only other thing I had read about it was set in the same area, it was a piece in a children's encyclopedia about the wreck of the Dunedin Star on the same coast. When I saw a copy of the book in a second-hand bookshop, I thought it would be interesting to read it again, after having been in Namibia.

It is the story of the captain of a trawler operating out of Walvis Bay, Geoffrey Macdonald, who is asked by a man he takes an immediate dislike to, Dr Albert Stein, if he can charter his boat to take him up to the Skeleton Coast, an the vague pretext that he is searching for an unusual beetle.Because of his past criminal activity, we discover that Geoffrey Macdonald isn't even his real name.

A Twist of Sand was the first novel by Geoffrey Jenkins to be published, and when I read first read it, soon after publication, I enjoyed it, and thought it was quite good. I read a few of his later novels, and thought they were rather flat by comparison. On rereading it, I still enjoyed it, but became aware of things about it that I missed on the first reading. For one thing, the plot is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. The protagonist is just as much an immoral criminal as the villain. That might not be a bad thing, in some ways, it makes the book perhaps more believable than those in which the good guys are too good and the bad guys too bad.

I first went to Namibia in 1969, just 10 years after the book was published, so the country would not have changed a great deal in that time. I got a job with the Department of Water Affairs, which took me to to most parts of the country within my first three months there. and I am pretty sure that in those three months I saw more of Namibia than most people who were born there saw in their life time. In the month I spent with Water Affairs (before being fired for suspect associations with the Anglican Church and the Christian Institute) I had been to Lüderitz in the south-west (including the Koichab Pan in the prohibited diamond area that Jenkins writes about); to Kamanjab in the northwest, and had driven down the dry beds of the Hoanib and Hoarusib Rivers, experienced a break-down in a Jeep in the Kaokoveld (the dreaded Skeleton Coast that Jenkins writes about); and gone to Rundu and Mukwe and camped on the banks for the Okavango River. On these journeys, which lasted for a week to 10 days, we camped out every night, and took a trunk of tinned food to eat on the way. Any tins left over at the end of the trip looked like rugby balls and had their labels rubbed off from bouncing over rough roads and tracks.  So I know that quite a lot of what Geoffrey Jenkins said about the country was inaccurate. 

At one point in the story he has his characters going up the dry bed of the Cunene River, but it is, in fact, one of the few perennial rivers in Namibia. All the perennial rivers in Namibia are on its borders -- the Kunene (Cunene if you're in Angola), the Okavango and the Orange. All the rivers wholly within the country are seasonal (my job at Water Affairs involved servicing instruments to measure the depth of the water in the rivers when they did flow). For any one interested, you can find more descriptions of journeys in some of the remoter areas of Namibia here.

I read some of the other reviews on GoodReads, and noted that some of the reviewers said that the book was "dated" because of the racism and sexism displayed by the characters. But at that time quite a lot of the white people in Namibia were racist or sexist or both, and that was perhaps one of the more accurate portrayals in the book. he, like The violence and criminality of the main characters in the story are perhaps exaggerated; if there were characters like that back then I didn't meet them, but the racism and sexism were not exaggerated. After I was sackedand she transformed the  from Water Affairs I worked for the time on the Windhoek Advertiser, and a South African journalist, Willie Lamprecht, came to work as the assistant editor. His wife Madeleine took over the women's page, and she was a feminist, though not one spoke of feminism back then, we said rather that she was into women's liberation, and she transformed the women's page from being full of cosy housekeeping tips into pointing out how women, including black women, were overworked and underpaid. This did not go down well with the establishment at the time, and Willie and Madeleine Lamprecht were sacked after a few months.

Jenkins contrives to give the impression that the Kaokoveld was virtually uninhabited, yet if anyone entered it without a permit the police would be on to them within 24 hours. In the desert areas along the coast it was largely uninhabited, but there were people living in most places though the population was sparse. And though the police were not quite as efficient as Jenkins suggests, they did nevertheless arrest people for being there without permits -- my wife's great-uncle, Frederick Alwyn Greene, served time in prison for being in that part of the world without a permit, and he, like the characters in the story, seems to have lived on the wrong side of the law for most of his life. 

In spite of its shortcomings, however, I still enjoyed the book on a second reading. It was a toss-up whether to give it 3 stars or 4, and in the end I thought it deserved 4.





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Nnedi Okorafor Deep Future Story for the Moment, Binti | A Pilgrim in Narnia

This book is quite high on my "want to read" list, but I haven't yet seen it in any book shops in the Great City of Tshwane Nnedi Okorafor Deep Future Story for the Moment, Binti | A Pilgrim in Narnia:

Binti is the award-winning novella of a young African woman with a special gift enhanced and challenged by her rugged stubbornness, deep love, and dynamic intelligence. Binti’s community is closely modelled on the Himba people of southwest Africa, including the special braiding of her hair and the red-clay otjize that coats her skin for beauty, protection, and an embodied sense of culture. Binti is a “master harmonizer,” someone who is able to use a genius for mathematics, a training in advanced technological development, and the customs of her people to “speak” into the world, bringing people and worlds together in harmony or challenge.

If you've read any of the books mentioned in that review, and especially if you've seen any of them on sale in Tshwane, please let me know.

Apart from the praise given to the books in Brenton Dickieson's review,  I have a couple of other reasons for wanting to read the books, mainly personal curiosity.

One reason is that the protagonist of the book comes from the Himba people of the Kaokoveld region of northwestern Namibia and southwestern Angola. I've met a few Himba people, and have been very impressed by them. They are related to the Herero and Mbanderu people of central Namibia and speak the same language.

I was once rummaging through some old files in the office of the Anglican Church in Namibia and came across some correspondence from and about one Thomas Ruhozu, who was said to be the only Anglican in Kaokoveld. There was an address on one of the letters so I wrote a letter to him, and six weeks later he appeared at the church office, 700 km away.

He arrived when a diocesan synod was starting, so he came to it as an observer, and someone was found who could translate the proceedings into Herero for him, and in between synod sessions we gave him a crash course in evangelism.

He told his story. He wanted to go to school so he walked 150 km to Odibo in Ovamboland, where there was an Anglican church school, and decided to become a Christian and was baptised. He got to Grade 4 but his father died, so he had to go home to look after the family cattle.

After the synod I had to take some of the delegates back to Ovamboland, and we went via Kamanjab, on the edge of the Kaokoveld, and left him there -- non-residents of the Kaokoveld were not allowed in without special permits -- this was 50 years ago. Here is a photo of us at the garage in Kamanjab vwhere we parted.

Gideon Ileka, Steve Hayes, Thomas Ruhozu

Thomas Ruhozu was a pretty active evangelist. A couple of months later a priest from Odibo visited and admitted 20 catechumens. A few months after that he visited again, baptised the first 20 and admitted 50 more.

I met a few other people from the Kaokoveld as well, and found them all pretty impressive.

My other interest in the novel that makes me want to read it is the name of the protagonist, Binti.

I had an aunt called Binti Growdon. Her maiden name was Cairncross, and my mother told me that the name Binti came from an Arabic word meaning "girl" or "daughter".

I lost touch with aunt Binti after my uncle Tommy Growdon died in 1965, though I heard she had remarried and lived in Cape Town. But I've never met anyone else with the name Binti, and would like to meet one, even if she's only a character in a novel.