JBR: A modern Africa love story
Richard Ali reviews Dance of the Jakaranda by Peter Kimani
Two Europeans exchange confidences on a train travelling through the Great Rift Valley. Following after them, in separate coaches, groups of Indians and Africans sing in celebration of the train’s maiden journey. The year is 1901. Sixty-two years later, a kiss in the dark sets off a search that ends, after many twists and turns, with the death of a young man. This is not a love story.
There is more, of course. The kiss is, in fact, a collision that defies the certainties of a generation divided into neat, immutable categories, listed in order of descending privelege — White, Indian, African. The Jakaranda Hotel where the kiss happens, a nightclub in Nakuru in what is now Kenya, is a place for a last stand atop a hill, a place to wait for the fire to come. …
