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Jeffrey Gettleman

Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival. By Jeffrey Gettleman.
“Just remember, let’s not get too ‘ooga-booga’ out there.” So warned one of Jeffrey Gettleman’s bosses in 2006, shortly before he flew off to take over as East Africa bureau chief of the New York Times.

When Mr Gettleman looked confused, the man patiently explained: “You know, the stereotypes, the platitudes, Africa as primitive and violent.” Soon after he got to Nairobi, a seasoned Africa hand sat Mr Gettleman down and over a long lunch offered his own advice. “Whatever you do, Jeff . . . don’t forget the ‘ooga-booga’. It’s what makes Africa Africa.”

The term “ooga-booga” sounds a little outlandish to anyone seriously covering Africa. But the dilemma facing Mr Gettleman — how to pique the interest of Western readers in a part of the world where history has invariably been portrayed as dark, without simply reinforcing their prejudices — is one that is all too familiar to most who write about the continent.

With this uneasy tug-of-war in mind, Mr Gettleman embarked on a decade of reporting on a region, large parts of it torn by conflict, that was to earn him a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

His reporting took him to areas where people were being killed, raped or starved. “I felt irresponsible sinking time into a lighter story when I knew that one short plane trip away, people were being slaughtered,” he muses in his book. “A story in our pages really does have the power to put pressure on governments to adjust their policies or the United Nations to send in more peacekeepers.”

Sadly, however, there is little sense of that higher purpose in this book, which places the author at the centre of all the dramatic events occurring around him, interweaving them with a love story. His posting to Baghdad early on in the American occupation offers few insights into a conflict that still reverberates through the Middle East. Instead Mr Gettleman talks about the electrifying sex he had with a photographer while cheating on the woman he was later to marry.

His recounting of a trip deep into the Ogaden region of Ethiopia with a rebel army reveals hardly anything about the conflict. Instead you learn about the spat Mr Gettleman was having with his wife.

His visits to the Democratic Republic of Congo say little more about the place than that many women were raped there. Mr Gettleman seems less concerned about what he has seen than about the decision by one of his editors in New York to cut from his copy the lurid descriptions of a group of women being forced to eat a foetus freshly killed by members of a rebel group. Despite his intention not to get too “ooga-booga” when writing about Africa, that is exactly where he ends up.

Yet for all that one may not learn much about Africa from this book, Mr Gettleman’s writing certainly zips along. His tales, whether of madcap antics such as nearly getting arrested for illegally climbing Mt Kilimanjaro as a student to being arrested years later for sneaking into the Ogaden, convey a vivid sense of a place where anything seems possible. – The Economist