Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell’s latest novel, A Treacherous Paradise, tells the story of a young Swedish woman who ends up running a brothel in Lourenço Marques (today’s Maputo, Mozambique). According to Stephen Moss, in an article for The Guardian, the book exposes “the dark heart of colonialism”.
Moss interviewed Mankell, who divides his time between Sweden and Maputo, where he runs a theatre, for the article. Mankell told him that the idea for the novel came from a friend working in the Portuguese colonial archives. The friend told Mankell about the curious record of a Swedish woman who, at the beginning of the 20th century, had owned the largest brothel in the area, and was one of the biggest taxpayers for three years, before all trace of her disappears.
Mankell has had a strong connection to Africa since first travelling to the continent at the age of 20. “I learn more about the human condition by living with one foot in the snow and one foot in the sand,” he said. “The western world has lost the ability to ask questions. We are now a continent of talkers. We simply don’t listen to people any more, which is something that will punish us in the long run.”
He also commented on the continuing exploitation of Africa, saying: “That is the number one problem in Africa – people are coming and taking things instead of bringing things, taking minerals or football players”.
I approached my meeting with Henning Mankell, creator of the gloomy Swedish detective Kurt Wallander and thus the man who might be said to have started the current obsession with noirish crime drama, with trepidation. He has a reputation for being a little, well, curt. When one Swedish journalist started an interview with “What do you think I should ask you?” he walked out. Another who had travelled to Sweden to meet him found him icy.
“I am waiting for your clever questions,” is Mankell’s opening remark to me, not said with any malice, just as a statement of fact. Iciness isn’t really his defining characteristic; just matter-of-factness. He answers questions honestly, but without adornment; there are only occasional shafts of expansiveness or humour, as with his reply when I ask whether the fact he has been married four times suggests he is difficult to live with. “It shows I am an optimist,” he insists.
William Boyd, the author of the next James Bond novel, Solo, which will be published in October this year, has reviewed Mankell’s A Treacherous Paradise for The New York Times.
On the whole, Boyd is impressed by Mankell’s latest, calling it “fascinating”, and he believes that the author’s firsthand knowledge of both Sweden and Mozambique has added to the story’s “unusual flavor”. Boyd mentions an occasional “slip into colloquial anachronism”, but says, “over all, the novel’s tone — reminiscent of Latin American magic realism, transplanted to Africa — makes it work”.
We forget, in these postcolonial times, that until comparatively recently the world was replete with empires. I was born in a corner of the British Empire, in West Africa, in a colony known as the Gold Coast, and the Africa of those days (the early 1950s) was divided among several empires: British, French, Belgian, Spanish and Portuguese (the Germans having been expelled in World War I and their colonies appropriated).
The Portuguese had been there longest, since the 15th century, and their colonies — Mozambique, Angola and Guinea — were surprisingly integrated compared with others. The Portuguese had abolished slavery by the end of the 19th century, the death penalty had been rescinded (apart from cases of treason), and intermarriage between the settler class and the local Africans was tolerated, thereby earning the Portuguese colonies a louche reputation for decadence and immorality, particularly from the point of view of the British. A chapter of my second novel, “An Ice-Cream War,” was set in Portuguese East Africa (as Mozambique was then known) during World War I, and as I did my research this attitude of prurient revulsion on the part of its British colonial neighbors was particularly striking.
Book details
- A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell
EAN: 9781846556234
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Image courtesy OmVarlden