Seldom one to read “travel books” - I’d rather just go - Peter Moore’s Swahili for the broken-hearted came as a surprise. Together with Annie Caulfield’s Show me the magic: travels round Benin by taxi, these two were my first foray in to this genre. Sadly, the diagnosis is not good: strictly toilet reading.
Perhaps it is unfair of me to assess both Moore’s slightly humourous but ultimately benign jottings and Caulfield’s more assured, extended ruminations; as a regular traveller to the African continent, I am surely excluded from their target demographic. Nonetheless, my scepticism is due less to the failings of the respective authors and points to a deeper malaise; I suspect that the books’ limitations are more fundamentally rooted in the genre, assuming it is meaningful to speak of it as a distinct genre, and explains the generous shelf space given to such a field.
They are bound by expectations of Otherness identifed and accentuated, and face further contraints set up by their near second cousins - journalismo - to string endless anecdotes and humdrum observations by the dozen. Hence no room here in this genre for the state-sanctioned hit squads that rid Ghanaian roads of gangs of thugs; nor of the HIV+ prostitutes that roam Mombasa’s streets.
Such sanitisation of foreign terrain and experience is not the most offensive aspect, however; neither is the lure of exotic locations, or of misadventures accidentally on purpose chanced upon. Surely the basis for a good book transcends the division of genres; yet requisite to this particular genre is the complete annihilation of the narrative craft. In other words, herein lies the crux: travelogues exemplify Kantian approaches to Idealism.
