Kariba

"For me this is a manga . It has Japan all over it, from the way that people are drawn to the way the page is composed and sounds are represented, to the little ephemera lines that show people are moving. It’s also emplotted like a manga, with stories wrapped within stories within stories. It’s myth and history and adventure story, tied together in the way that Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli does. I’ve got a whole bunch of Japanese historical texts, which also happily push this line. That’s fascinating to me. The authors are all in Cape Town. There are three but it’s mainly the Clarke brothers. Daniel Clarke is an illustrator with a definite Japanese influence, James Clarke writes fiction at the intersection of history and literature. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The reason I love Kariba is that it’s a good comic: it lets the art do the work and makes you care about the people in it. It’s mixed with this myth of the Zambezi River god, Nyami Nyami. It reproduces that myth quite faithfully and ties it up with history, which is about the dislocation of people for projects like the Kariba Dam. People die building these dams and they also have to move to make way for the water. That has a real impact. I think that in a cosmopolitan age, when Africa is very much part of these circulating styles and narratives, Kariba represents an authentic contribution that draws upon Japanese style, and at the same time accurately represents African characters, African stories, African myths and histories. Is it history? I don’t know. But it exists somewhere in a historical universe. I read a court case where a young African woman, Abina Mansah, who didn’t speak English, went before a British judge and complained that she had been enslaved. She said, “I could not take care of my body and myself.” I wanted to know what she meant and what her experiences were. I followed that for many years, trying to understand what was going on. In my classroom, I wanted students to understand how historians struggle to hear the voices of people like her and what tools we can have to do that. It suddenly occurred to me that the way I could do that best was to give students my interpretation of her words in comic form, and then to give students the tools to question or come up with their own interpretations of what it meant. That’s what my comic book is. More than anything, it’s a teaching tool. It’s an attempt to help the students understand why we should listen for these voices and how we can do that. We made lesson plans and things, but different people use it in different ways. Truthfully, I was not prepared for the fact that it was successful. I’ve since corresponded with people who use it. Teachers come up with their own lesson plans. Some of them have students create comics in the end. Some of them have students send me comics in response. It’s in its third edition now. The responses are so good that they force me to go back and do new editions, making changes, and explaining why I made changes, based on the way students have responded. You create these things and you let them out into the world. If you create something for classroom use, you never know how teachers are going to use it. It’s been really great. I worked with a fantastic artist, Liz Clarke, who also contributed a chapter to All Rise . I wasn’t the worst kind of historian to work with on a comic because I love comics. I had read lots of comics, but I didn’t know how a comic worked. Liz taught me how they worked, and I’ve gotten successively better at making comics since then. I would say that anybody who wants to make a history comic has to know something about history and how it works, but they’d better love comics. If you don’t love comics and you’re doing it just because you think it’ll sell more copies, then you’re going to fail."

"You don’t see many stories set in Zimbabwe , which made this graphic novel a bit different for me. The art is nice and colourful and depicts the nature of southern Africa really well. The characters are well written and it’s a good story. I like it. The main character, Siku, is the daughter of the river god Nyaminyami. She is found as a baby by two treasure hunters, or pirates. One of them stops being a treasure hunter to raise her. White people want to build a dam but the river god wouldn’t like it and would break it down, so they try to kill the river god. The tribespeople don’t want the dam because it will flood them, and they don’t want to have to leave their homes. Siku has to make a decision and face her powers and stop the river god getting killed. So she goes on a big adventure with some pirates and an Italian boy whose mum is an engineer working to build the dam. The Kariba dam really exists on the Zambesi river. It was built in the 1950s so the story is set then, although it is fantasy. It’s about having to make a choice between the environment and development, or whether there is a way to find a balance. This book has quite a lot of pages, I think it’s best for 10-13 year olds."