And so I come to the end of commentary on the longest book I will ever write, the two-volume Buffalo Gals saga – a semi-fictionalised tale about my greatest, my most rewarding and possibly my most foolish life adventure. This is a book I have intended to write for 30 years and now it is done.
It has not been easy to find readers for Buffalo Gals, let alone buyers. There have been some volunteers, but they have found parts of the book uncomfortable and have not provided feedback .
While I have received no endorsements for the book (unlike its predecessor Jacob's Ladder which has had a glowing reception), I have slowly received a few criticisms – from Critics #1, #2, #3 and #4.
The blurb
Critic #4 based her Facebook assessment of reader disinterest on the blurb, saying, ‘You seem to have had an interesting life yet all you talk about is office politics and your love life. Who is going to be interested in that?”
I spluttered in reply that Romance is easily the largest genre and office politics makes the world go round. What would she find interesting, if not working all over the world amid a series of extraordinary romances?
My own take on the general lack of interest in this book so far is that first, it has never been harder for emerging authors to be noticed, given the huge surge in self-published material. Without online reviews, nothing will sell, and without sales, there are no reviews. Also, thanks to negative publicity from NGOs seeking funding to help the “poor Africans”, no-one is interested in Africa, and no longer wishes to read about it the way I did in my childhood.
Form and protagonist
The fictional proponent is following an exact timetable of real-world events in 1993-97. Critics #1 and #2 wanted to know, if these were largely real events, why I did not just tell it as autobiography and why I bothered with the Jack device?
The original reason I adopted this rather idiosyncratic style was because of possible litigation. My mother was once sued for libel, in works where it was not so easy to identify her characters as real people. A few of her works were used after her death to destroy her reputation. This was also my main reason for waiting 45 years to conclude Jacob’s Ladder and 30 years for Buffalo Gals. As well as the concealment afforded by the passage of time, adopting an alternate persona for the narrator has made it easier to change details and avoid identifying anyone.
During the writing of Jacob’s Ladder it turned out that the adoption of an alter-ego, moving among considerably modified characters taking part in real events supported my style. I am simply not the same person I was 45 years ago or 30 years ago, Jack is not me as I am today. Jack is socially timid; he really likes women but he is afraid of approaching them romantically, and especially of being approached. Jack is not particularly funny or witty, though he enjoys banter with Maggie, and he is not self-satirising. He is not particularly self-aware, and takes risks of all kinds. He engages in very little reflection, though he is able to put himself in the place of the suffering and the damaged.
My move away from strict reality not only covers the characters, but occasionally the events and places. Back in 1979 with Jacob’s Ladder half-written, I was exceedingly nervous about writing a fictitious scene involving a meeting with an indigenous medicine man in a cave, and stopped writing the novel. This is unfortunate, as the 1980s were the Golden Age of publishing. Today, with fantasy a premium book genre , this scene is unremarkable.
From the original planning phase of the book in 1997, I intended Jack to wallow in the grand parody James Bond and Ernest Hemingway scenarios, as a Walter Mitty. At first, Jack knows nothing about other cultures, The “soukous fusion” band Umoja with a European lead is another highly improbable sequence planned from the start.
While it may be disturbing for some readers to have a narrator and people who live pretty much identical lives to real people, except when they don’t, the idea of “alternate dimensions” where only a few things are different to our world is now accepted widely enough in fiction. And, once that has been accepted, it becomes easier to bend reality in some sequences, as we move into an alternate world.
A related criticism of the book Is that it does not follow ”Aristotelian rules”. In that style, the plot should be linear with clear cause and effect, everything directed toward the ultimate resolution. Buffalo Gals is instead arranged chronologically, with parallel action sequences work/home and episodic structure.
The chronology of the Indicators Programme has been reconstructed from the many actual letters and reports of the period, which I have kept for 30 years with this book in mind. Much of the timer, we have loosely connected adventures as the hero wanders from place to place.
Sexuality
Critic #1 (male) says the style is “soft porn” and the author is “boasting” of his “conquests”. Not so.
The story is a mid-life coming-of-age story. The hero never had the chance to reach maturity because he had to spend his twenties supporting and bringing up a family. He feels essentially trapped and tries to cut loose in his thirties, but is still bound and largely unable to have other relationships. Finally, during his time in Africa, he has the chance to discover what he really values. Even though Jack is in his 40s, starting new relationships is something very new and stressful for him. He has three girlfriends over four years in Africa and there is nothing triumphal about it, they are all a struggle. His son Gabe also enjoys sudden success with girls in Nairobi – he has more than three in a few months.
The sudden interest of the opposite sex in Jack and Gabe is more a case of supply and demand. They have come to a place where there are large numbers of single women among both the locals and the expatriates. They are not shy about making advances – presumably because Jack and Gabe are single, available, presentable and holding down fairly important jobs.
The younger girls Jack employs in the Programme are quickly caught up in the expatriate singles scene. Snygging and Pippa find important relationships in only a few weeks, though older women have more difficulty in finding boyfriends.
What is not customary about Buffalo Gals is that the varied sexual behaviour of women is actually described in the text, something still regarded as improper. This creates something of a taxonomy, since the women are so different in their responses. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, Agnar Mykle’s controversial books provided some sort of a useful guide to sexuality and women for me, and this book is influenced to some extent by his Song of the Red Ruby. I follow his example because, despite the free availability of explicit online porn today, Jack’s experiences hopefully still provide useful information to young men as to what they might encounter out in the wild.
Critic #3 has made a different criticism: she cannot bear the book because it shows African girls being abused by white men and unable to escape because of their poverty.
This has been answered in the June 2 entry on "Buffalo Bills", where it is explained that negotiations are always voluntary, consensual, good natured and relatively safe, without any of the humiliation or routine debasement of women that Western strip joints provide. It is actually a good place to have some conversation and a beer. Jack originally goes to Buffalo Bills as a tourist and observer. Later he visits to find simple company and some excitement and gossip.
Still, this criticism cannot exactly be dismissed. Probably the most telling clue is the absence of Kenyan customers, black or white. Mumbi is an exception because she remembers the bar nostalgically as an artists’ pub. Rich African customers do patronise the more anonymous New Florida nightclub, where the women head after closing, and here the girls are recruited for events such as “Buck’s turns”.
The Lonely Planet Guide’s description of Buffalo Bill’s as the most colourful and exciting meeting place in town is just irresponsible. The author Geoff Crowther claims there is nothing like Buffalo Bills anywhere else, it is a national wonder, a prime tourist attraction and a community all its own.
However, Jack soon discovers the underlying dark element and leaves the bar behind.
Ten years later, Africans and others have found a safer and more profitable means of separating Europeans from their excessive amounts of cash: through online date and romance fraud. Jack is in fact an early victim of in-person romance scamming by Njoki, who extracts about $2,500 from him overall in 18 months. She also defrauds several other kindly men and breaks their hearts.
Changes and progression
Some visible changes take place during the book: changes in aid and development philosophy, changes in preferred employees, changes in a few governments, technological change that would soon alter everything, and changes in some of the major characters as they progress through the book – especially the protagonist Jack.
The major change in aid delivery took place in early 1996 when the World Bank (but not the IMF or USAID) moved away from the economic growth principle toward poverty reduction. The failure of neoliberalism to deliver was the main cause.
In development, the collapse of the USSR was still under way in 1993. Jack sees this in action in the story “Letter from Moscow”, set in the week before he meets Maria in the Bauhaus. Distaste for Russians affects his Ankara meeting in 1995, and Jack’s contribution is excised from the Uzbek Human Development Report as being pro-urban and not anti-Russian enough.
Dubai airport is on the rise at the start of the book in 1993. Terminal 1 is a huge overheated hangar with no usable lounges. Soon It develops a small number of sleeping compartments that can only be booked through travel agents. In 2000 the Dubai International Hotel launched, and before long, the airport was the largest in the world for international passengers.
In the mid-1990s, middle-aged white men were replaced in employment almost everywhere. Steve Mayo, Jack’s mentor, loses his job in the World Bank. Young professionals from developing countries are increasingly hired. At Road Lodge, the bar population changes almost completely from white to black professionals in three years. During the book, Jack advances from being a little-known national researcher to a global authority. When he returns to Australia at the end of the book, men of his age are being laid off to balance the workforce, and there are no jobs for him. He never receives the promotions he was anticipating, and he is never employed again except as a short-term consultant. His sons do much better; their international experience is seen as valuable and they subsequently receive related work opportunities.
At the personal level, after many years of being ignored by women, Jack suddenly finds himself on the Mating Mound, and begins to understand the concept of dating. At the start, he completely strikes out when Agnes never speaks to him again after their disastrous dinner date. Two years later, he has a best-ever dinner date with Ashley in Venice. And he finally finds the right African girl with Mumbi, nearly completing his 18-year search for someone equal to Carmen.
A major change in global communications takes place during the course of the Buffalo Gals narrative. Before 1990, organisational communication was conducted through faxes, telex and letters, often routed through gatekeepers and censors, and only computer scientists were connected to email.
In 1994, there was still no general email. Jack was the first in UNON to use it, when he was given access to a dial-up connection by the World Bank. Back in Australia, his correspondent MIchelle began communicating by internet in 1995, and Carmen’s university was hooked up soon afterward.
UNON began to be connected to external email in 1995, extending their internal system, Because Kenya’s telephone service was so bad, email became immediately valuable to UNON. Their new system was the only one in Kenya for some time. UNON showed its usual responsiveness to need by first connecting the top managers, who did not know how to use computers. Jack had been the first to use email at UNON, and was the last to be formally connected, just before it was time to leave for Australia.
The following year he found out through Mumbi that enterprising Kenyans had established a covert business, sending and receiving emails through the new United Nations system.
At home, Jack was using tape compilations of favourite music. He had no CDs at the time, and did not buy a CD player as part of his new hifi system from Dubai. He did however buy a topline video player which could play all systems. Unfortunately, most of the local videos were shaky handheld efforts from people sitting in movie theatres.
Jack saw his first webpage on his return to Australia at the end of 1994. His son Gabe was trained to design webpages at university. After starting an internship in Nairobi in 1996, Gabe was very much in demand in the UN and with international NGOs – and with Kenya’s young unattached female population.
Where next?
I hear the drums echoing tonight ... Toto
I have been keen to write this book for 30 years, as a homage for the women who kept me sane or sent me insane during that first difficult year in Kenya. I believe that ultimately it will prove to be at least a cult book.
In the meantime, I am looking at the possibility of creating an African edition. Understandably, Africans have probably had enough of white men telling them about their own place. But Africa is at the heart of this book.
Jack’s choice to mix and work with Africans rather than expatriates made his programme possible. Africans delivered the results he needed and Africans did the best work, so that he “oversamples Africa”. Africans also keep Jack company in Kenya, and his greatest compliment is when one of his African colleagues says,” Don’t worry about Jack, he’s an African like us.”
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After 1997, I returned to Nairobi only a few times, called by work, but did not travel within Africa. The glowing images of Kenya I held in my head were more than enough. In 2009, I took a private trip to Accra and Kumasi, the principal cities of Ghana, as I had never previously seen West Africa.
This is the end of my commentary on Buffalo Gals. Let’s hope the book slowly builds support among readers, as I write and publish the other books on my publishing programme (see the leading blog post, April 28).