The heart of Africa.

The Dust Diaries

Seeking the African Legacy of Arthur Cripps Owen Sheers

Houghton Mifflin, $23, 320 pp.

With an ambivalence tracing back to Conrad, modern European writers portrayed Africa in extremes of innocence and violence, depravity and delight. Paralleling empire's project of mining the continent for buried treasure, novelists explored a moral and psychological geology, digging deep into the self to discover what lay beneath. Uncivilized Africa served as a blankness or void: the veld, the bush; the screen upon which Europe threw the pattern of its inner fantasies, both noble and corrupt. For a Cecil Rhodes, of course, the lure of Africa was obvious. But what about the fringe figures of empire, the explorers, the bureaucrats and missionaries? Mixed themes of paradise and exile mirror in a "mysterious" continent the mystery of its conquerors.

The Dust Diaries is Owen Sheers's investigation of the life of his great-great-uncle, Arthur Sheerly Cripps. An Oxford graduate, poet, and Anglican priest, Cripps left England in 1901 for Rhodesia, where he lived for half a century as an impoverished and notably eccentric missionary, in the process authoring a 1927 treatise, An Africa for Africans, that raised an angry voice on behalf of the colonized. Owen Sheers, poet and Oxonian himself, had heard about his ancestor in family conversations over the years; curiosity and a vague intuition of affinity spurred him to find out more. Armed with boxes of correspondence and manuscripts, Sheers set out to shed light on his forebear and the mystery of why he abandoned Europe for a life in the veld.

I must admit to being skeptical about "on the trail of" books; too many seem like excuses for the writer's excellent adventure. But Sheers has redeemed the genre brilliantly, with a thoughtful, lovely, and innovative work. The Dust Diaries comprises three narrative strands: Sheers's evocation of August 1, 1952, and a small hut where the blind, octogenarian missionary is living out his last hours; his own travel report from current-day Zimbabwe, where he tracks down the dwindling circle of elderly people who knew his great-great-uncle; and the largest strand, a piecemeal novel taking up Cripps's decades in Africa. "This story is written as a fiction," Sheers explains, "the fiction I formed in my mind so as to better understand Arthur's life."

It's a challenging life to take on. The Arthur Cripps of The Dust Diaries is many things to many people: "a troublemaker, a liberal, and a negrophile" to officers of the British South Africa Company, whose policies he opposes; "simple, direct and just a little ridiculous" to a litterateur district commissioner who envisions him the subject of a novel; unsettlingly attractive to a bored frontier wife whose dinner table he enlivens; a wielder of magical powers to the Mashona peasants he lives among, who know him as Kambandakoto, or "He-Who-Goes-About-As-A-Poor-Man." As for Sheers, he develops his own thesis about the man. Struck by a life "almost penitential in nature, as if governed by a duty of atonement," he suspects some buried wound. A handful of obscure references in poems and other documents hint at romantic tragedy: a woman left behind in Britain, possibly a child fathered out of wedlock. There's a love story there, Sheers decides. He writes it into his book. Doing so lies somewhere between discovery, fabrication, and interpretation--Sheers burrowing through a life of driven service to a core of sorrow, attempting to locate in Cripps a specific, personal love as profound as the man's selfless idealistic love of Africans.

The language of The Dust Diaries bears a poet's stamp of beauty. "He lay there for a moment, listening to the night outside: the turning of the sea's pages, the hush and fizz of the waves on the shore, the sudden screeching and confusion of two cats fighting, then silence." But Sheers proves a skillful novelist as well, deftly portraying vivid secondary characters, such as the pugnacious Bishop William Gaul, who removes his cleric's collar before delivering a pugilistic rebuke to a drunkenly abusive Irish railway worker. Historical figures wander in for sparkling cameos, like the notoriously brutal hunter and soldier Richard Meinertzhagen, about whom Cripps wrote a nightmarish poem.

Indeed, The Dust Diaries could have been written simply as a historical novel, and a good one. But Sheers has larger ambitions, and they involve frequently interrupting his story to show us how he put it together. Thus we read an engrossingly detailed scene, set in the 1930s, between Cripps and his longtime personal secretary, Leonard Mamvura--then turn the page to find Sheers in Africa, visiting the real-life Mamvura, who is providing information Sheers will later use to write the fictional scene we have already read. It's startling to shift time frames and genres like this, to be repeatedly reminded that the engrossing reality we've been enjoying is a fictional construct. The Dust Diaries gives us both a moving human story and the author's commentary on the problematic nature of composing that story.

Beneath all the playful narrative undercutting lies a haunted fascination with time and mortality. Opening a packet of Cripps's correspondence, Sheers imagines he is inhaling the same air his great-great-uncle breathed over them a century ago; he runs his finger across the page, "tracing the looping, slanting ink that ran back through the pen to your hand." Studying photos of Cripps in boyhood and old age, he feels "uneasy," sensing "something voyeuristic in my ability to have the boy and the old man in front of me, a lifespan laid out on the table." These musings reveal a romantic's awe at the sublime nature of time and its powers of oblivion, burying the living Cripps under "a hundred years of forgotten memories."

To unearth someone from oblivion, Sheers perceives, is both rescue and appropriation--"colonizing your life with my imagination," he writes, addressing the ghost of his ancestor. People in Zimbabwe relate conflicting impressions of Cripps; their memories of the man tend to mirror their own life values and predicaments. Is The Dust Diaries' version of Cripps's life, the theory Sheers himself puts forth about the man, true? "Perhaps," the author muses; "perhaps not." And yet it has the truth of fiction, persuading us by letting us inhabit it. Sheers insists this is not simply a benign process. Ironically he joins himself to the company of empire: like those digging for gold or for souls, the writer digs the past for stories, unearthing historical figures and making them his own. From now on, Cripps will largely become the person we meet in these pages--left for posterity as Sheers has re-created him here. By laying bare both the procedures and the implications of his attempt to capture Cripps in narrative, Sheers highlights the contingent nature of history, our collective memory. This may sound dryly academic, but it isn't; in Sheers's hands, it comes off as elegant testimony to the stubborn elusiveness of the past.

The Dust Diaries is finally a sympathetic portrait of a turn-of-last-century sensibility, part muscular Christianity, part passionate Romanticism, and part fiery late-Victorian reformism. Sheers shows us a man who found his life bearings almost entirely in reading--Keats first and foremost, but also David Livingstone, Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner--deriving an idealism all the more uncompromising for its being essentially literary. "Above all," writes Sheers, "he wanted to prove himself worthy." He did so by becoming a thorn in the side of administrators (and his own superiors in the church hierarchy) bent on producing docile African Christians for the colonial labor market. Sheers uses his captivating biographical fiction to comprehend the split nature of Cripps's character, joining the man's moral stringency with his swooning, poet's susceptibility to beauty. One reads The Dust Diaries as a twenty-first-century poet's ode to a nineteenth-century forebear, and to his attempt to locate in poetic ecstasy a viable stance for confronting injustice in the world. Sheers's haunted elegy of a book is postmodern in structure, but its soul is Romantic to the core.

Rand Richards Cooper reviews movies for Commonweal, and is the author of two books of fiction.