Review: Vivien Horler
Follow Me to Africa – A novel by Penny Haw (Sourcebooks Landmark)
Seventeen-year-old Grace Clark finds it’s a long way from Tewkesbury to the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, where her estranged father has dragged her so he can meet the famed archaeologist Mary Leakey.
A sulky Grace thinks the only thing worse than being somewhere you don’t want to be is discovering no one else wants you there either. Grace has overheard Mary telling her father: “We can’t have a teenager hanging around. This is a dig, not a discotheque. She’ll have to do something.”
Grace surveys the area – it looks dry, scorched and ragged. Her father doesn’t feel the same way: “Look at this place. Isn’t it magnificent? It’s nothing like Cambridge. Or Tewkesbury. Nothing like anything you’ve seen before.”
To which Grace responds: “Thank God.”
Our story begins in 1983, when Mary Leakey, 70, is preparing to pack up her dig after a lifetime in Africa, and says Grace can use the 10 days she is in camp to help her with some labelling, filing and packing.
Unlikely as it seems, Mary takes to Grace, recognising something in her of the girl she once was. Grace too begins to take to this corner of East Africa, and the pair begin to forge a friendship.
The book has two narrative strands – the life of Mary Leakey, based on the historical record, and the life of Grace, which is entirely fictional.
As I understand it, the received wisdom today is that humans first emerged in Africa, actually near Mossel Bay, which seems extraordinary. It was the Kenyan-born archo-palaeontologist Louis Leakey whose work in the Olduvai Gorge in then Tanganyika, now Tanzania, persuaded him Africa was home to the human race. Until then people were believed to have originated in Europe.
Mary Leakey is almost entirely uneducated, having been desperately unhappy at the few schools she was sent to, but she has inherited a capacity to draw from her artist father, and a fascination with all things archaeological. As a very young woman living in London she attends every lecture or talk she can access on the subject, and begins to make contacts.
Work on a dig in Devon follows, which in turns to work as an illustrator of artefacts for archaeological books. Which is how she meets Leakey, suntanned, handsome – and married – who sweeps her off her feet.
But this in 1933, a time much less permissive than the present. Leakey, however, seems as smitten by Mary as she is by him, and he takes her off to Africa, over her mother’s fervent protests.
There she begins to carve out her own career as an archo-palaeontologist.
When Grace meets Mary, Louis has been dead for more than a decade, and Mary has been fully recognised as a scientist in her own right.
While Grace and her father are still at the dig, a scrawny cheetah wanders into the camp and is immediately set upon by Mary’s dogs. The dogs are pulled off, and they realise the cheetah is wearing a radio collar. It emerges the animal has been hand-reared and then released into the wild, where it is not being successful, partly due to the weight of the collar, which has gouged an infected wound into her neck.
Grace becomes determined to save the cheetah, realising that working with animals is what she wants to do with her life.
Author Penny Haw, who lives near Cape Town, has written two previous novels about pioneering women: Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz of Mercedes-Benz fame (The Woman at the Wheel), and Aleen Cust, who around the turn of the 19th century was determined to become a veterinary surgeon despite the gender strictures of the time (The Invincible Miss Cust).
And I’ve just discovered a fourth novel about another pioneering woman is about to hit the bookshelves: The Woman and the Stars, the story of Caroline Herschel who, in 1787, became the first woman to earn an income as an astronomer.
In a note at the end of Follow Me to Africa, Haw says: “Why do I write historical fiction about real people? Because I’m drawn to stories about remarkable people who’ve achieved extraordinary things. Above all I write about women from history whose lives I want to celebrate.”
Well she’s certainly achieved that in this thoroughly readable book about Mary Leakey, introducing a new generation of readers to her extraordinary life.
And now I’m looking forward to reading about the remarkable Caroline Herschel.
All her books sound excellent, but historical fiction is not my thing, much preferring historical fact.
BTW (modern) humans seem to have evolved in a few, or several places around Africa, in a complex tree of evolutionary sprouting; mostly where there was big water (lakes and ocean) as well as on the SA Highveld, which has possibly the mildest habitat on Earth. The East African hominids date mostly from 2-3 mya. The Highveld (Cradle of Humankind) apears to have the longest fossil record of “recent” – post 3-mya – hominid evolution.