The Soccer War
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated from the Polish by William Brand
Vintage International, 1992

Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska
Knopf, 2007

This pair of books by the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski brims with the creativity and insight of great fiction. The Soccer War details the explorations of Poland’s sole reporter with a ‘third world’ beat, from African independence movements to Cold War flashpoints in Central America. Travels with Herodotus is Kapuscinski’s last work and is more of a meandering memoir about the shaping of a journalist who met dozens of world leaders and thrust himself into the middle of conflicts under the drudge of the pen.

Read the full review here.

An article recently posted on the BBC chronicles the difficulty in measuring human rights violations - even when the alleged perpetrator releases ‘official’ statistics. The unfolding conflict in the South Ossetia region of Georgia is one such example. Russia has announced that there are 1,500 casualties, with no meaningful break-down of the numbers.

“The problem here,” the local Human Rights Watch Director is recorded as stating, “is that when Russia puts out a figure like that it does two things - it distracts attention from where there are violations and from the real scale of what is happening.”

Even when investigations are non-fictional, the results can be far from clear.

View the article here.

–Deji Olukotun

–Deji Olukotun

The Dictator Hunter
A Klaartje Quirijns Film
Directed by Klaartje Quirijns, Produced by Pieter van Huystee
Starring Reed Brody, Souleymane Guengueng
Documentary, 75 minutes. 2007.

This seminal film celebrates the efforts of victims, lawyers, and activists to bring Hissène Habré, the most notorious dictator ‘you’ve never heard of’, to justice for mass atrocities. Habré controlled the central African nation of Chad during the height of the Reagan era. Used as a bulwark by the United States against Libyan president Qaddafi, Habré profited from his American backing to systematically kill and torture ethnic groups throughout his country. He fled to Senegal in 1990, where he lived in peaceful luxury enjoying the spoils of his brutal reign. Peaceful luxury, that is, until his victims began to speak - and team up with one of the most extraordinary lawyers alive today.

Read the full review here.

This film follows on the heels of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), a slapstick comedy about two pot smoking twenty-somethings searching for adventure and good times in New Jersey. Escape from Guantánamo Bay picks up ten minutes after the first film ends as the two friends decide to travel Amsterdam to find Harold’s new flame. Their plan quickly goes awry when Kumar is unable to resist lighting up his bong in the bathroom of the airplane and the two are arrested as terrorists. They embark on an international adventure full of raunchy highjinx, screwball antics, and all the rest.

Go to White Castle broke new ground in American cinema by featuring Korean-American and Indian-American main characters. Escape from Guantánamo Bay pushes a whole lot further. What matters about this fiction is that it brings human rights issues into mainstream discourse - in a very funny way.

Read the full review here.

Here is another update from Catherine White, an HIV-AIDS activist who has been helping on the ground in Cape Town with the immigrant and refugee communities:

Hello Friends,
Things seem to be settling down in Cape Town in terms of violence, but there are now over 10,000 (and I think that is a conservative estimate) displaced people. People are still leaving their homes because they don’t trust that they are safe, and the various organisations that are working to manage moving people to safe locations are struggling to find places to send them.

Much love,
Catherine

Donations can be sent via PayPal to Catherine’s e-mail at catherineawhite@gmail.com. Go to www.paypal.com and click on the ‘Send Money’ tab. Catherine will send you an itemized receipt of your funds.

Author Manu Herbstein wrote FictionthatMatters with an update about his work Ama - A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade:

Wits PhD student Senayon Olaoluwa’s “Facing Up to Horror: Of Passion, Multiple Complicity and Survival in Manu Herbstein’s Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade” has been accepted for publication in the Selected Papers of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the African Literature Association (2007). This 10,000-word paper examines the novel in terms of Jacques Depelchin’s Silences in African History: Between the Syndromes of Discovery and Abolition (2005), “which seeks to unsettle and radicalize established perspectives on African history.”

Senayon presented another long paper, “Beyond Disability: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade And Female Heroism In Manu Herbstein’s Ama” at a CODESRIA conference in Cairo a few months back, but I’m not sure whether, or when, that will be published.

Visit the novel’s website here.