Full of detail and historical background information

• Book: The Ringtone and the Drum
• Location: Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone
• Author: Mark Weston

Here are some poignant stories written in an understated way and woven into a book that seeks to describe both area and culture in some detail. There is a lot of descriptive detail and a lot of imbedded history and current affairs. The narrative style is observational. I felt the book would have been improved by the addition of some photos, illustrations, or both, as I found the text rather dense at times and the journey difficult to follow.
Illustrations would have made the book so much more accessible for me, and helped me see clearly where Mark and his wife were going. Perhaps a route map, with time and locations marked on, could be added possibly even as a little illustration at the start of each chapter. I hope there will in due course be another edition and that some photos, maps and sketches will be added to augment the text.
The author describes a journey and people he meets. He fills in with background information and history as well as narrating conversations he has with the people he meets along the way, to make important points. There is real pertinent detail which is interesting and evokes the feel of a very real Africa for me, in contrast to the often ‘glossy’ images we see on our screens at home, where the people hardly seem real but become actors in a script that has little relevance to us. It feels Mark is talking about and to real people here, and real places and real characters that he is really meeting. I never feel a gap in personhood between them and him either and this I find helpful. I feel as if the characters he meets are using him to tell their story for them, and there is much in this book that is very educational and to be admired.
I found the writing very eloquent at times and I enjoyed the little details, such as how coffee was made with condensed milk. Many would have left those details out. There is a feeling of dissociation too in some of the people he meets and from the things that people have seen, and he conveys the feeling of traumatised people very well, even if they don’t yet realise it themselves. e.g ‘Joseph, a young human rights worker we meet in a cafe….’After a few days things settled down,’ Joseph continues, ‘and I came into the centre of town. I saw a pile of corpses outside Connaught Hospital mortuary. I hope nobody ever has to see that again.’ I can imagine a slightly detached man (due to the horror of his experience) by that simple sentence. It is more convincing to me and feels more honest than sensationalising it would have done and the message hits home hard to me of the relative cheapness of human life in this part of the world. It really conjured up for me a sense of the difference between the lives of the people in these areas and the lives we live here in the west.

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