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MARTYRS AND MURDERERS
Price: US$ 15 |
It begins with a bang. The assassination of an African "president", Miroo David, as fortuitously recorded in a razor sharp snap by English photographer, Toby Sanderson. Then it spins out into a mosaic or relay novel, each chapter following a separate character in depth and a strictly limited, almost Aristotelian time frame - from a couple of hours to a few days.
But along the way we manage to cover most of the 20th century.
The first chapter (1977) focuses on the basically apolitical, bit of a lad photographer and his on again, off again love affair with the mysterious and elusive dancer, Jill. The second (1953) an anthropologist cum paleontologist-archaeologist, Alfred Taggart, after he has been accused of prejudicial translations at the kangaroo trial of alleged Mau Mau leaders and stormed off in a sulk. The third (1969) a retired police captain, Carey Carothers, who arrested the former "terrorist" leaders and fought their "followers" and is now being threatened with expulsion from his beloved, but independent Kenya.
The fourth (1975) the Kenyan president himself, Miroo David, assassinated in Chapter 1, on trial in Chapter 2 and making Carey an offer he can't refuse in Chapter 3. The fifth (1977) tracks a missing and presumed dead Mau Mau general returning from decades of exile in Yemen to assassinate the once trusted and unequivocally obeyed leader now grown insufferably corrupt and indifferent to the plight of his people.
Sometimes the characters' paths cross, sometimes they don't. All are caught at moments of crisis. Some due to specific events. Others because they are crisis junkies.
The major themes are history on both the macro- and micro-cosmic levels. What people do and are made to suffer in this conglomerate or that - groups, crowds, tribes, target audiences, nations and religions - and the one on one exclusionary zones of love and marriage. On the streets and between the sheets.
