Tefuga

by Peter Dickinson

Guided by his mother's sixty-year-old diary, a son re-enacts her arrival in Nigeria and the next twelve tempestuous months of her life in an attempt to solve her mysterious and bloody death

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction, Africa

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Peter Dickinson was an English author and poet widely respected for his children's fiction, detective novels, and imaginative speculative writing. Raised partly in southern Africa before continuing his education in England, he developed an early fascination with adventure stories and classic literature, influences that later shaped his narrative style. He attended Eton College and later studied at King's College, Cambridge, before beginning a long association with the magazine Punch, where he worked for many years as assistant editor, reviewer, and resident poet. Dickinson eventually left journalism to pursue writing full time, publishing works for both adult and younger audiences. His crime novels featuring detective James Pibble earned critical praise, while his fiction for children established him as one of Britain's most distinguished authors in the field. Over the course of his career he produced nearly fifty books that combined historical imagination, fantasy, and thoughtful reflections on human behavior. He achieved rare distinction by winning the Carnegie Medal twice, for Tulku and City of Gold, recognition that placed him among the most celebrated children's writers in Britain. Dickinson also received numerous other literary honors and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In addition to fiction, he wrote poetry and essays, and his work continued to influence generations of readers and writers in the field of children's literature.

Reviews

[Penn Hackney · Rating 4 out of 5]

1986. Bought for $2.11 on 5/11/26 to read for an Osher class in June with David Walton.

Alternating timelines in alternation chapters: odd = today (1983); even = 1923 very helpful to keep the story straight. Even so I had to go back and forth to remind me of the significant incidents in this story, complicated despite being deceptively simple.

Why not titled The Tefuga Incident?
Where are all Betty’s paintings and sketches now?
How many times did Betty go to Tefuga?
She refers back to scenes she remembers or reads again, and I need to read them again too. I should have made an index.

specfic = magic, creepy, speculative,

What Atafa Guni told me at Jabu, ch. 10 pp. 142-49
Tefuga hill, where I’d painted my picture and listened to Femora Feng, ch. 6 pp. 89-93


Femora Feng & Atafa Guni
Elongo Sisefonge -> Sarkin
Kama Boi & sons Zafiro and
ill wind
the harmattan
Bangwa Wangwa



Publishers Weekly:
Sixty years after his mother, Betty Jackland, came from England to tribal, backwater, colonial Nigeria to marry his district-officer father, Ted arrives to make a documentary film based on her diary. Its pages recreate that time in detail: the life of an isolated woman in the overwhelmingly man's world of the British Empire; the ways of the resident Kitawa and Hausa people; the ambiguities of "indirect rule''; Betty's identification with native servants (including a houseboy who later rises to the rank of spiritual leader). Hovering over the shadowy events of the past and over a present steeped in corruption and violence is a mysterious shaping event toward which the action moves. In 1921, in the shadow of Tefuga hill, the new emir selected by the British is killed by the Kitawa women. Given its climactic significance, this act is strangely undramatized: it occurs, in fact, offstage. While prolific writer Dickinson (The House Party) delivers a smoothly phrased, interesting narrative, it is somewhat marred by a sense of anticlimax and a profusion of pedestrian detail. (April 21,

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man makes me proud to be classified as a mystery writer.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is really two interwoven stories, one taken from the diaries of Betty Jackland, a young women newly arrived in 1920s Nigeria as the wife of a British colonial official, and the second following her son Ted as he tries, 60 years later, to make a documentary of sorts based on the diaries. The diary half is better, I think: Dickinson does a really good job of finding an interesting voice for Betty, effectively showing her increasing self-confidence as she finds her feet in a strange country and steadily asserts her independence from her husband. Despite the fact that we are in principle reading a record of what Betty is thinking and feeling, he nonetheless manages to keep us guessing as to what some of those thoughts and feelings really are. The depiction of the intersection of the court politics of imperialism, with British district officers (and Betty) scheming against each other to install their preferred Emir, with a more modern style of mass politics, albeit one carried out in a primitive-seeming register, is also very well done. Plus, Dickinson is good at the semi-anthropological description of the Kitawa (who are, I'm pretty sure, entirely his invention) that makes up a chunk of the diaries: he has a knack for subtly bringing out the sophistication of what a modern reader would think of as a rather primitive people. And the fact that we know that something terrible happened at the end of the period covered by the diaries -- the Tefuga Incident that gives the book its name -- ensures that a certain measure of suspense is maintained throughout.

The modern chapters don't do quite as well, partly because Ted's position, that of a famous journalist and filmmaker spending a short time in Nigeria to shoot a few scenes for his latest project, simply isn't as interesting as his mother's. He is, like the reader, trying to work out what really happened during his mother's time in Nigeria, but while this detective work adds interest to the diary chapters, the fact that all the events happened sixty years prior removes the suspense from his half of the story. So Dickinson works to add some, using post-colonial politics, which makes sense but doesn't quite work out because the continuities with the colonial politics of the diary chapters aren't established as firmly as they could be. In the end, he falls back on a military coup, which, though realistic for Nigeria, isn't all that interesting. The final revelations, not just of what actually happened at Tefuga but what came afterwards, still pack a punch, though. "Tefuga" is an excellent example of Dickinson's expansive view of what a mystery novel can be.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A television journalist examines the circumstances surrounding an African revolt in the 1920s; a revolt in which his parents were involved. The protagonist bases his research around his naïve and idealistic mother’s diary of colonial life and scandal in northern Nigeria and dark secrets surface in a nicely written if underwhelming novel

[Rogue Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminiscent of Karen Blixen's Out of Africa, a son seeks his mother's truth in 1920s Nigeria, then under colonial rule and in the midst of insurrection.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is in many ways very good, but not what I was quite in the mood for at the moment.

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to get past chapter two

It’s a slow starter, some skipping around might be in order for chapter two. It gets good, really good, after that.

[Junessa Gray · Rating 2 out of 5]

The bio about this book on Goodreads is not correct - the women does not have a mysterious and bloody death. Overall, very bad book - do not waste your time.

[Cera]

I got about 100 pages in and was just really, really distracted by wondering how much of the described situation in Nigeria was historical and how much was made up for the purposes of the novel, and then further distracted by wondering what a post-colonial take on the period would be, so in the end I decided to give up on this one. Plus, the main character being named Betty further distracted me, because I connected it so much with the Betty from Caryl Churchill's play Cloud Nine, which is also about British colonialism in Africa and the way it ties in to the patriarchy. There seemed to be enough thematic connections that I can't help wondering if Dickinson did it on purpose.

Also, having now read (or in this case half-read) five or six of his adult suspense novels, I find that the frame he uses of having a past mystery and present-day investigations shedding light on it is very hit or miss for me; some books I love it, but in some (including this one) I feel like I already know how everything came out, so I don't really care what happens.

[Cathy Posner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is like an original Out of Africa. I read it a long time ago but still one of my favorites.