In the Other Direction Now: Dispatches from East Africa

On a journey from southern Madagascar to Sudan, via the Comoros, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia, Navid Kermani finds people and cultures in flux, often fleeing war and drought. In Madagascar, he witnesses the dramatic effects of the first climate-related famine, the once fertile land appearing like an abandoned mine littered only with the stumps of trees. In northern Ethiopia he meets fighters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, participants in a brutal and senseless war that has claimed half a million lives. By turns fought over and forgotten, the regions through which Kermani travels have been ravaged by conquest and economic exploitation; today China and the West compete for scarce resources, and the Arab north carries its religion and culture southwards, often by force. But, from personal encounters and conversations on the road, Kermani finds reasons for hope. Music emerges as a unifying thread, for example, and Christian hymns, Sufi dances, and Sudanese jazz become symbols of resilience and transformation that bind communities across conflict, faith, and time. In the Other Direction Now is a work of great human depth about a region from which Europe’s gaze is too often averted.