What a silly, naive bunny I was to think that. The American Colonization Society was a bunch of white guys who came up with the great idea of sending all the free black people to Africa, which would serve the dual purpose of getting rid of black people the American government didn’t want, and maybe converting some heathen Africans to Christianity. So then they want to some black churches all:

Guess what. It was not that fun.

Guess what else. There were already people living in that land, and they were not as excited about the arrival of a whole bunch of self-righteous Americans as the ACS might have been imagining. Most of the rest of Liberian history is the Americo-Liberians doing whatever they wanted, and the indigenous tribes of Liberia being super disenfranchised, which is one reason for the bloody and horrible coups and civil wars that plagued the nation in the late twentieth century.

My book, James Ciment’s Another America: The Story of Liberia and the Former Slaves Who Ruled It, doesn’t spend a ton of time on Liberia’s modern history. As the title suggests, he’s far more interested in the Americo elite than in the indigenous folks who were there first, which means that I came away from the book without much notion of what Liberian history looked like for 95% of the population.

That’s okay! I’ll try again with another book about Liberia! This one was very much written about the elite populations, and also very much written by a white dude: In the early parts of the book it was all “So-and-so led as good a life as a slave could expect in Kentucky.”

Meanwhile, I’ve decided to start a new feature in my nonfiction reading which I shall entitle Lebanese Diaspora Watch. Because what I have discovered as I’ve read more and more history is that the Lebanese diaspora pops up absolutely everywhere. Apparently during the Tubman presidency, there was a lot hostility towards the Lebanese people who had moved to Liberia and it was like “they come in here and use up all our dollars, these Lebanese interlopers.”

This is interesting to me for two reasons, the first of which obviously is that Liberia does not seem like the most predictable destination for expat Lebanese folks to go. The second is that I was just very recently reading about how there is also a substantial Lebanese population in Brazil. Brazil. Why Brazil? Why Liberia? What’s going on, Lebanon?

Let’s close with what, in Liberian history, counts as a delightful anecdote. One time not too long after the ACS had colonized Liberia, the natives of Liberia attacked the colonial settlement, and although the colonists repelled the attack, the natives made off with several American children. But hey! It’s not what you’re thinking! They were totally nice to them:

The children had been turned over to elderly ladies who had been “proverbially tender and indulgent”; they had sent messengers to the colony to inquire “the proper kinds of foods” to which the children were “accustomed.”

Aww. Also, they gave the children back after not too long. So it was okay.

The post Not a dumb American: Liberia edition appeared first on Reading the End.

For Jeane’s Dog Ear Challenge: West with the Night was the nonfiction book on an obscure topic/on a topic you don’t often read about.  I had a broad selection of Jeane recommendations for this one, since she is always reading books that sound interesting but that I would never pick up on my own.

West with the Night is Beryl Markham’s memoir of growing up on her father’s farm in Africa, and becoming a horse trainer, and eventually learning to fly a plane.  Beryl Markham sounds like a pretty cool person, though from reading her Wikipedia article it sounds like you sure wouldn’t want to be married to her.  (She had an affair with the author of The Little Prince!)  And the writing was lovely, though a bit plummy for me.

One thing that didn’t really work for me was the fact that the memoir is composed of chapters that tend to provide slice-of-life-y anecdotes about her time doing different things.  I liked some of the anecdotes a lot, and some of them not so much, but I struggled to fit them into a narrative.  If my brain were a laptop, it would have made a lot of whirring noises and eventually overheated, that’s how hard I was trying to make an overarching story out of the chapters.  This isn’t necessarily a fault in the book, but I didn’t care for that structure – every time I got interested in something, the chapter ended, and the book went on to something totally else!

Now I am on to something totally else: In Defense of Food.  I understand the food being defended is generally vegetables?  Maybe this will make me love vegetables more, or maybe it will make me hungry for fast food – which is what happened, I’m sorry to say, when I read Fast Food Nation.  Mm, I fancy some cheesy fries right now.

Other reviews: Jeane’s, Framed and Booked, ChainReading

The post West with the Night, Beryl Markham appeared first on Reading the End.

This book is about an American librarian who brings books to rural African places using camels.

I’ll give you that again: She uses CAMELS to bring people BOOKS.

There are no words that adequately express how sad I am that I wasn’t able to finish this book.  It contains BOOKS and CAMELS.  Bringing books to people via camels.  I love books (obviously), and God knows I love camels more than my luggage.  One time I went to a RenFest, and THEY HAD CAMELS there and I RODE ON ONE.  Didn’t even remotely know that I cared about camels until I got there and saw the sign for camels and instead of being like “Medieval Europe wasn’t exactly camelpalooza” in a snide voice, I seized my sister’s arm and plowed in the direction of the camels going CAMELS CAMELS CAMELS CAMELS.

But camels didn’t feature very much in the bits of the book I did get through, and anyway I couldn’t get through it.  There was much bashing the reader over the head with unsubtle things that the characters are thinking, like, Why does the American lady want to bring us books so much?  Doesn’t she know that here in Africa we are educated in other ways?  Books and reading are not the only ways of knowing things.

Practically in those words.  It gave me a headache.  I had to take two tylenol and an aspirin.

The post The Camel Bookmobile, Masha Hamilton appeared first on Reading the End.