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Sue Segar talks to Veronica Cecil about her Congo memoir – but also about the chaotic situation in the DRC today, which Cecil believes is the making of “big business” and “world powers”:

Author Veronica Cecil becomes more and more angry as she watches events unfolding in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“I am angry because I think what has happened there and what continues to happen is directly our fault,” she says.

Cecil was in Cape Town to promote her book, Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo, a memoir of her life as a young wife and mother in the Belgian Congo during the sixties. The book takes the reader on a journey with Cecil, aged 25, with her husband who took up a position with a large multinational company, and her baby son.

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• Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo by Veronica Cecil
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  EAN: 9780795702822
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As previously noted, Italian publisher El Piemme has bought the translation rights to Aher Arop Bol’s The Lost Boy, which is the story of the author’s 15-year journey through Africa after fleeing civil war in Sudan. The story caught the eye of Times journalist Karen van Rooyen, who reports that Bol has big plans for the future:

Bol, who recalls sharing one pencil with two other boys and begging to attend schools in various countries, values education and aims to build a school one day — hopefully in Sudan.

He sells sweets, biscuits and cigarettes outside a railway station in Pretoria North.  But Aher Arop Bol is not just another vendor — he is a published author who has secured a lucrative deal with an Italian publisher.

Bol’s book, The Lost Boy, captures his remarkable 15-year journey from the age of three when he was forced to flee the horror of civil war in Sudan.

The Lost Boy, which has already been published in South Africa, tells how Bol — carried on the shoulders of an uncle — arrived in an Ethiopian refugee camp in 1987. By bus and sometimes on foot, Bol later trekked through countries including Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania, before leaving Zimbabwe for South Africa on Freedom Day in 2002.

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Kwela Books and Boekehuis invite you to the Johannesburg launch of Veronica Cecil’s memoir, Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo.

The event takes place as part of Boekehuis’ popular “Saturday Voices” series. Get there early – we look forward to welcoming you!
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Kwela Books, an imprint of NB Publishers, has just sold the translation rights of the internationally celebrated book, The Lost Boy by Aher Arop Bol, to the well-known Italian publisher, El Piemme. El Piemme is part of the Mondadori group, which is the Italian publisher of renowned authors like Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner) and Michael Connelly, and is the foremost publisher of memoirs in Italy.

Since an interview with Bol appeared in The Observer in the UK on 5 July 2009, Kwela Books has been overwhelmed by requests for foreign, translation, film and tv rights. In a fierce bidding among three major Italian publishers, El Piemme came out on top and Kwela Books sold the rights for a six-figure sum. The negotiations were handled by Kwela’s subagent, Sibylle Kirchbach, from the Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale in Milan.

The Lost Boy (published in April 2009) is Bol’s remarkable account of how he fled the civil war in Sudan as a boy of three or four. Today Bol lives in Pretoria. He runs a spaza shop which enables him to pay his UNISA fees for his law studies as well as maintain his two brothers, with whom he has been reunited, at a boarding school in Uganda.

Bol is delighted about the deal with the Italians: “It is such great news! It is a real breakthrough! Now Italians will be able to read what is going on in my country, Sudan, and in Africa.”
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When Veronica Cecil learned that her husband, an accountant, had got a job in the Congo and that they were leaving for Africa from the UK, she took the news in her stride. A child of the colonial world – born in Peshawar, raised in Rhodesia, schooled in Johannesburg – she looked forward to a return to the colonial’s life. She wanted to get involved with the issues of the day: it would be a fun adventure.

It was the 1960s and Veronica Cecil was, in her own words, “stupidly idealistic and naive”, as she told the audience at the launch of her memoir, Bongo Bongo Bongo, I don’t Wanna Leave the Congo, last night. (The title derives from a song written by Bob Hilliard and Carl Sigman, and originally performed by the Andrews Sisters with Danny Kaye; lyrics are here.) She read a passage from the prologue of her book that illustrates why:

Video: Veronica Cecil reads from Bongo Bongo Bongo

(The video was recorded before the launch; she read the same passage during her launch speech.)

Despite the chilling opening scene, Bongo Bongo Bongo is quick-paced and at times very funny: its central drama revolves around the fact that, when civil war comes to the palm oil plantation on the Congo river where she and her husband were stationed (with twelve other white families – the nearest town being over 100kms upriver), she was heavily pregnant, on the cusp of giving birth. She was whisked out on a plane just as she went into labour, and the book charts the “puddle jumps” the plane took, collecting people from all around the Congolese countryside (in searing equatorial heat), en route to Leopoldville (now Kinshasa) and safety.

Cecil read from a passage that describes the arrival of the plane at a time when things were more idyllic:

One Congolese living in Cape Town, the poet Mwila Mambwe, attended the launch – and brought his drum, which he played softly during Cecil’s readings, and which added to the ambience of the occasion. After Cecil finished at the microphone, Mambwe had his turn:

Video: Mwila Mambwe performs at the launch

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After reminiscing with African friends from South Africa, the Congo and elsewhere, Cecil remarked that she hoped that the Congo would be like the phoenix, and rise from the ashes of its horrible wars – a sentiment toasted by all at her launch.

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• Bongo Bongo Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Leave the Congo by Veronica Cecil
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  EAN: 9780795702822
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This feature on the story that informs Aher Arop Bol’s memoir, The Lost Boy, appeared yesterday in the UK’s Observer:

By the age of 18 he had travelled more than 4,000 miles, crossing eight African borders without a passport – a lone boy living on his wits and depending on the kindness of strangers.

Now Aher Arop Bol sells sweets and cigarettes under a railway bridge in the South African capital, Pretoria, but his adventure is not over. He has just become one of the most extraordinary authors in the history of African literature.

Arop Bol has shared his story in a unique memoir, The Lost Boy (published by Kwela Books), which offers a rare insight into the life of a child on the run from war. South Africa, which in May last year was the scene of more than 100 xenophobic killings directed at refugees such as Arop Bol, has greeted his story with fascination. Drum magazine called it an “extraordinary tale of pain, desperation and, above all, survival against all odds”. The respected poet and journalist Antjie Krog said simply: “This story stays with me.”

It is not hard to see why. The book’s publication, and the astonishing world it opens up, is further evidence of the tenacity and desire that took a young boy across a vast continent.

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In a hauntingly appropriate setting at the Women’s Gaol at Constitution Hill, guests at the launch of Aher Arop Bol’s The Lost Boy wandered around before the proceedings got underway, admiring prison artwork by Fatima Meer and memorabilia from other struggle activists that commemorate their time spent at the facility.

Then Bol began to speak, and quietly but quickly cast a spell upon the audience.

The unassuming author enraptured his listeners with stories of his experiences of writing the book, which was a cathartic process. He explained that writing was his way of dealing with the trauma of being a displaced person.

Kwela publisher Nèlleke de Jager and Bol discussed the motif of his pursuit of education as he traveled through Southern Africa: it was what motivated him to escape his circumstances. “[The desire for education] was like something burning within me” explained Bol.

Bol actively identifies himself as a “lost boy”, one of the tens of thousands of Sudanese children who were forced to leave their homeland because of their country’s civil war. He has two hopes for his book: that it will spread awareness of the difficulties that so many young boys of his generation experienced – and that it will help prevent anything similar from happening to the next generation of Sudanese children.

Amidst the cold concrete of the central room of the jail’s foyer, there was awed silence as the audience listened to Bol describe the hospitality and generosity that was extended to him by people in each country he travelled through. The evening concluded with a splash of wine and an array of nibbles as an antidote to the chilly autumn cold.

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• The Lost Boy by Aher Arop Bol
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  EAN: 9780795702785
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