Evangelical Baptist minister Nathan Price has a new mission, talking the word of Christ to the dark continent. What the Reverend Price decides, his family have to lump as God’s will, so wife, Orleanna, and four daughters have no option but to up sticks and leave their comfortable home in the southern United States for a primitive shack in the interior of the Belgian Congo.
But it is 1959, and white colonial rule enables the family to maintain a veneer of civilisation and relative wealth with a dollar stipend coming in and an established link with Leopoldville via a maverick South African airman.
It is still a culture shock, but more humorous than worrying, until the Belgians pull out and grant a chaotic independence to the natives. Most whites flee the country, but Nathan is determined to fulfil his (now unpaid) mission. The family remain and the consequences for Orleanna and the girls are profound.
The narrative is delivered in real time by the four girls, passing the baton chapter by chapter. This gives a pleasing variety of styles in line with their diverse personalities. Eldest Rachel (15) is the frustrated prom queen who bemoans most the lack of hair products, her language peppered with delightful malapropisms. Leah and Adah (14) are twins, but only in the sense of sharing their birthday. Leah is strong willed and confident, willing to follow her father into the good fight and well able to cope with jungle life. Adah, damaged in the womb, limps along in her wake, selectively mute but articulate in her dark atheistic thoughts. Ruth May is barely more than a toddler but adds her child’s eye view of events. Orleanna’s contribution is a retrospective introduction to each section of the book, bitter with hindsight and outrage.
The book delivers on so many levels – strangers in a strange land; familial relationships that are authentically complex; the impact of local and global politics at the individual level – with prose that uses words to great effect, witty, wise, angry and moving.
Read as part of the African leg of the
book-packing journey, the book wears its six hundred pages lightly, each of
them a gem to read.
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