The Eye of Kuruman (Pegasus, 2017)—a romance set in Botswana and South Africa, in which a young public health nurse working for the WHO struggles with questions of love, cultural challenges, social injustices, and self-discovery.
Ever since her grandfather told her stories about the famous David Livingstone, Alex Gordon has been fascinated by Africa. When offered the opportunity to work there as a public health nurse, Alex is excited. But bringing Western maternity medicine to rural Botswana and South Africa proves complicated. Alex faces unanticipated challenges: personal rivalries, water shortages, resistance, and the hidden toll of historic injustices.
In her resolve to promote culturally sensitive healthcare programs, Alex is kept emotionally buoyed by the affection of two very different men – Johan, a Dutch doctor recovering from the stress of an East African pandemic, and Fin, a black consultant with a doctorate in organizational psychology.
Wavering between such wonderful romantic and professional options, Alex must eventually decide on her future. What will her heart tell her matters the most?
For a detailed, comprehensive review by a famous academic psychologist discussing the cultural issues raised in this novel, please go to the review section and look for the review by Ronald Gallimore, Professor emeritus at UCLA.
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The Eye of Kuruman—a novel by Ian M. Evans
Reviewed by
Ronald Gallimore, PhD
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UCLA
If you wonder what it’s like to learn to work in a totally different culture and society, then read this book. If you like fast moving stories set in modern times, read this book. If you want to see a new and different place through eyes of a young woman on a quest, read this book.
This is the tale of a young nurse, Alexandra (Alex), sent by the World Health Organization (WHO) first to Botswana and then South Africa. Alex was drawn to modern day Africa by childhood stories her grandfather told her. One in particular captured her imagination — the life of the Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone. Yes, the one thought to be lost somewhere in Africa, and eventually located by Henry Stanley, who famously announced his arrival with what became an iconic greeting: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
The search for Livingstone, breathlessly followed by a surging 19th century mass print media, was prompted by his elevation to popular British hero of the late-19th-century. Unknown to Livingstone, he was portrayed variously as a Protestant missionary martyr, working-class “rags-to-riches” success, scientific investigator and explorer, and anti-slavery crusader. Some of this was deserved, some perhaps not. But that’s another story.
The story of Livingstone Alex learned as a child did not at first map onto what she experienced once she settled into her work in Africa. Her job was sharing modern maternity practices with providers in rural areas in Botswana. Soon enough she discovers she must navigate cultural differences in Botswana. Drawing on her nursing training and upbringing by a clinical psychologist father and social historian mother, she managed this first challenge well enough for WHO to send her to South Africa to repeat her success in the Northern Cape.
South Africa posed more than cultural challenges. Although the story is set in the second decade of the 21st century, and years after Mandela was released and majority rule established, Alex encounters cultural difference compounded by historical tragedy. The peoples of Botswana never suffered the brutal repressions imposed on black South Africans, first by a colonial and then the apartheid regime.
Enabled by the privileges granted a fiction writer, Alex is sent by WHO to Kuruman, South Africa, connecting her back to Livingstone’s life story. Kuruman was at first a station of the London Missionary Society founded by Robert Moffat in 1821. It was also the place where David Livingstone arrived for his first position as missionary in 1841. Present day Kuruman is a small town of approximately 13,057 people in the Northern Cape province, known for the Eye of Kuruman, one of the largest known natural springs in the southern hemisphere. The spring forms a small lake in the middle of the town, and water from the spring supplies the town.
The Eye is a literary motif, of symbolic importance in Alex’s quest. Her search for an oasis like The Eye, which would always have water and slake her thirst for the things that mattered in life: companionship, safety, affirmation, adventure. The Eye was a spring of mystery; it came, like love, from deep within (p. 1). Buried later in the story, we learn that Alex’s hometown in upstate New York also has a population of more than 13,000. Probably other echoes of the “oasis motif” are sounded here and there to be noticed by the discerning reader.
Spoiler alert. Not really. Actually the motif quotation appears on the first page of the novel’s prologue. It hints at one of the several levels on which this novel can be read, including the foreshadowing of her romance with two young men she meets, and her struggle to find in one of them the “oasis” she seeks. The symbolic Eye of Kuruman Alex searches for is on the personal, psychological identify level.
Hang on, more is coming, for there are other levels to this story: cultural, social, historical, political. All is revealed as the story unfolds, including the connection to David Livingstone, Alex’s work as a WHO nurse, and how his and her story threads through the modern challenges and conflicts confronting South Africa. She goes to Africa to share what she’s learned about modern maternity care. In this respect, this is a modern day missionary aiming to do “good” as did Livingstone in this time. There is an early warning the author shares about the disappointments even modern medical missionaries might encounter. David Livingstone, despite years of dedication at his mission (where he was thought to be lost) managed only one convert to Christianity. And that soul might have feigned conversion to please an old and dying man. Alex learns that good intentions are not enough, and can produced unwelcomed consequences. This is something to keep in mind as Alex’s story unfold. Fellow readers, draw your own conclusions.
After her success in Botswana, Alex faces edgy distrust, lingering bitterness, and outright hostility from the medical staff at Kuruman hospital. These responses thwart and frustrate Alex’s efforts to share her knowledge with local nurses and midwives. In Kuruman, the workshops honed to perfection in Botswana with the guidance of her Setswana colleague Ruth, are poorly attended and negatively evaluated. In sharp contrast to Ruth, the black supervisor in Kuruman is rejecting, unhelpful. No matter what she tries, Alex fails, despite a native flexibility, superb training, and psychological insights learned from her father.
She phones a young black consultant to industry she met by chance when she first arrived. Fin is a Ph.D., trained in anthropology and cross-cultural communication, which he uses to help white managers work with black employees in the new South Africa. Although Fin knows nothing about maternity care or medical care in general, he agrees to visit her in Kuruman, a long drive from the city where he is based. Together, they visit distant villages to “listen” to people in culturally familiar settings such as traditional gathering places where local matters are addressed. In anthropology such work is called “participant observation,” the meaning of which is pretty obvious.
For example, on their first expedition, Alex learns that infertility is a culturally devastating condition for rural wives and husbands, where having children is a mark of significant status. Alex realizes she had been stereotyping in this sense: she saw the large families in the rural villages and assumed the only issues she needed to address was prenatal and postnatal care. Infertility was something she never thought of, but once alerted, responds as readers might at this point in the story expect of a character now established as not only resourceful and motivated, but willing to learn from her mistakes.
A small quibble. Words in several languages, e.g. Afrikaans and Tswana, are salted now and then in dialogues. Sometimes the meaning is obvious from the context, or the words don’t hinder understanding. But sometimes knowing what the words mean does, or seems, to matter. I kept wishing for a glossary of terms. Perhaps the author might consider posting a glossary somewhere for the curious. If he had a webpage, I’d be interested in asking him some questions about historical, cultural, and psychological facts and issues that are so skillfully woven into the novel.
There’s more. On their return from the first expedition, Alex and Fin get soaked in a torrential rainstorm, covered with mud, and end up in his hotel room, where their sexual affair begins. Unexpectedly so it seems, but the attentive reader will already have guessed the two twenty-somethings were attracted to each other.
And some more. Alex is already intimately involved with a young Dutch physician, Johan, working on Ebola education for Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières). They had met and begun their romance in Botswana and began living together after they were both by coincidence transferred to South Africa, which is how they both ended up in Kuruman.
What happens in the end with Alex’s romantic life I will not reveal. But I will say this. There are erotic parts, all tasteful. But steamy enough that in an author’s note at the end of the novel, Evans writes neither of his two very young granddaughters “can read this book until they are a whole lot older.”
And now for something completely different. Different, that is, from the personal, psychological ride on which this narrative pleasantly and engagingly carries the reader. Completely different is the skillful threading into Alex story perspectives based on anthropology, culture, history, politics, and race relations. I learned about the history of South Africa, more than the ordinary account I think because the author grew up there, and probably stayed in contact despite being so worldly— he left to take a psychology Ph.D. in Britain, and teach and research clinical psychology in Hawai’i, New York, New Zealand, and then in professorial retirement back to Hawai’i. Evans uses Alex’s story to explore culture resistance and change. Will the people living a traditional life in rural villages be open to new medicines and maternal practices? Can local barriers to implementing good practices be addressed if medical personnel seek the cooperation of local leaders and officials? Will they be willing to change what might have been thought “good” for generations for something brought in by a young white American who does not speak the language, dresses in Western style, and is seemingly unaware of local customs?
Evans’ deep knowledge and understanding of human psychology and culture shows in many places, seamlessly woven into a story that carries the reader along. Where these nuggets of insight appear they seldom seem forced, rather they are a natural part of Alex’s story.
For instance, he weaves into the story rich insights about the nature of human behavior change as affected by cultural context. Culture changes slowly because that is its purpose. Cultural beliefs and practices are an “oasis” of stability because social and economic environments change more quickly than humans. Culture keeps lives from spinning out of control as new challenges arise: a weather disaster, armed conflict, an economic slump, a plunge in employment, an epidemic of a deadly disease, etc. At those times, cultural tradition provides roles and rules to help people cope as they adapt to new circumstances.
Cultures do change. Slowly. Too slowly for young people who might blame elders for being conservative and out of touch. But if cultures do change, and if they did not they would not survive. The problem is in any one generation or two there may be a stressful, wrenching transition from the old way to a new way that fits changed circumstances.
For instance, one of the issues Alex faces is the challenge of getting local maternal care practices into greater use. She discovers the problem isn’t so much resistance by health care professionals, or their lack of knowledge, but circumstances that frustrate implementation. For instance, proper hydration of pregnant women is key to prenatal care. If access to clean water is a problem, the problem is not the nurse’s knowledge or the expectant mother’s motivation. Alex proposes adding to the workshops she provides a new element: train the health-care providers to be problem-solvers as well as dispensers of good maternal advice. Teach them to analyze local conditions situations to see if failure of expectant mothers failure to use good practices, such as proper hydration, is due to “poverty, ignorance, alternative beliefs, practical difficulties, social barriers, embarrassment or what… ” (p. 309).
Alex wants to release the local maternal care providers from the straitjacket of “a few rigid guidelines from the [regional departments of health]”. She wants to give the nurses and midwives permission to become problem-solvers who rely on their personal knowledge of local cultural beliefs and practices. And in this opening up the role they play so they can help their patients overcome the sometimes small, sometimes large local situations that prevent use of good maternal health practices. She wants them to stop offering “the patients a standard formula… .” Instead teach and free them to offer “an infinite variety of practical solutions…. ” (p. 310).
With this new approach, Alex believes it more likely that modern practices can be fitted into traditional ones without diluting the former or disrupting the latter. Her plan reflects how cultures change: they take in new practices and beliefs in small doses by making them fit into traditional culture, rather than the opposite.
If the author has an axe to grind about contentious issues roiling South Africa’s multi-culture, multi-racial society, it’s this: no matter the issue, there is a lot to learn about history and context and few questions can be boiled down to a simple answer, solution, or slogan. Instead of general solutions, he believes in observing local circumstances, learning what changes are possible and sustainable. His characters are constantly reminded how complicated things can be, especially when modern-science-based thinking of the West comes on a mission to help parts of the world where tradition rules, roads are poor or non-existent, transportation is absent or unreliable. Where local peoples of color have good reason to doubt the promises of well-fed, well-dressed whites from industrialized nations.
Evans does not preach solutions to dilemmas his characters encounter in South Africa. He uses story characters to “speak” different points of views. Is colonialism and apartheid the main, or only cause of social problems in the black community? Is the black-dominated government of South Africa better or worse than the one it replaced? How to undo centuries of injustice done to one group without heaping injustice on another? He uses the interactions of the characters, black, white, educated, uneducated, poor, rich, young, old, male, female speak their own truths as they see them.
Evans consistently offers up this guidance for how to deal with cultural differences and social conflicts. Get into society and listen to those who are different from you. Visit their places. Participate in their lives. If you do, if you listen, they will talk and soon their strangeness fades a little and then more. And they will begin to listen to you, and want you to talk. When people listen to each other, they begin to hear.
A colleague of mine once took the Transiberian Railway from Vladivostok to the western border of the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war. They spoke no Russian, and the people they met on a journey of thousands of miles spoke no English. But when my friend and her husband showed photos of their children and grandchildren, their train-mates produced photos. Barriers pierced despite a seemingly impenetrable wall of language and culture: connections made.
I came away from this book better informed about South Africa, and with this understanding: learning more helped me sharpen the questions I am asking myself about that place (and would like to ask someone as thoughtful as Ian Evans). One I am asking myself, is what better understanding of race relations in the USA might be possible with a deeper knowledge of South African history. South Africa is a distant mirror in which I see from a different angle the challenges my country the USA faces now, and faced (or did not) in the past.