At the end of May most North Americans start thinking about holidays and travel. The summer is just around the corner, the weather may already be good enough to do interesting things outside. Along with millions of others, I’m daydreaming at the moment too, but I doubt that I’ll ever again have quite as amazing a trip as the one I took to research The Violets of Usambara.The idea was simply to check out the background for my story: a Canadian politician goes missing in Burundi in 1997 while his wife back home in Montreal tries to get news about what has happened to him. I had no problem with the sounds, smells and setting for the Montreal part of the story since that’s where I live, but I needed to go to Africa to tell the rest. What I hadn’t expected was that the trip would bring me face to face with our past as humans.
Scientists are now nearly unanimous in saying that everyone alive today is descended from early humans who evolved on the savannahs of East Africa. The great pleasure that people all over the world take in green grass and flowers corroborates the fossil evidence. Closed cropped green grass means big grazing animals to hunt, while flowers frequently signal that berries, nuts and fruits will soon develop. Like birds who can instinctively tell from the air that a marsh or wood will be good for nesting, the people who chose to live on good savannah lands there left more descendants than those who didn’t.
Did I feel at home in Africa when I was there? The question has come up more than once these last weeks as I give readings and talks about The Violets of Usambara. The answer is yes and no.
The setting of Bujumbura reminded me of the way Burlington, Vermont sits on the shores of Lake Champlain with the Adirondack Mountains to west and the Green Mountains to the east. The plains I saw in Tanzania reminded me of grasslands I’ve seen many places in North America. And the people I met displayed a kindness toward me that gave me hope for humanity at large even though I knew that many had been witnesses to—or maybe even involved in—horrific events.
Perhaps the welcome I received was due in part to a respect for someone with grayish hair: I was 58 when I made the trip. I was on my own, so perhaps amused curiosity toward a woman who didn’t fit in the usual mold was also a factor. When people could categorize me they seemed more comfortable, in fact. In Tanzania when I went out walking in the morning on country roads, people greeted me with “Jambo, Sister:” Irish nuns maintained a maternity hospital in the hills nearby and I guess with my formerly red hair suggested I might belong to them. More than once people assumed I was German, possibly because Canadian, British and American women of my age travel infrequently alone to the sort of places I was visiting. My guide at the Amani Nature Reserve seemed inordinately pleased that I could scramble down a rocky hillside as well as someone much younger.
But I also think that nearly all human beings have a fund of positive attributes—perhaps as much as part of our built-in psychological baggage as our preference for certain landscapes--that can be used to make things better. The big question is how to tap into that energy, how to use it for the common good and individual benefit. Both Thomas and Louise Brossard, the central figures in The Violets of Usambara, want to do the right thing. That they frequently fail, even when they want to demonstrate their devotion to the other, is at the heart of my story.
It is a story of love, pain, good intentions and missed opportunities. It is, I hope, true in many important ways even though it is an invention. The difference between truth and fiction, after all, is often as subtle as that between chance and destiny.
Photo: The savannahs of East Africa are where human beings evolved ov
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