Stephen Ellis’ Season of Rains Launched in Johannesburg

by Thando on Jan 24th, 2011

The launch of Season of Rains at Exclusive Books Hyde Park was the first of the year for the popular Joburg bookshop – and, as Mary-Anne Hancock from Exclusive Books pointed out, “It is an appropriate launch for the new year, being Afro-optimistic.”

Prof Anthony Butler, who introduced Ellis, said, “He is a special author because he writes from the position of a university academic but he ranges across themes, countries and continents and he writes in a variety of references.” Butler first came across Ellis when he read his book, Comrade against Apartheid, which he said was unlike any other book he had read about the ANC, as it was “written without illusion.” Nor is Season of Rains – the optimism contained inside is far from unfounded.

Ellis said of his new book’s title, “it comes from a poem by a Cameroonian writer, Simon Pondo, who says when the season of rains comes, the old men and women go out and look at the leaves and try and find out what kind of year it will be.”

“Like those old people who look at the patterns of nature but don’t really know what’s going to happen, I look at what’s happened in Africa in recent years, then what’s happened over hundreds of years, and then try and see where I think Africa is going.” Ellis explained that he was talking about the whole of Africa: “I am a former journalist and I have visited most countries in Africa and lived in several. In the book I have tried to synthesise information from all over, so you find little vignettes and sketches from South Africa, but also Nigeria, Gabon and so on.”

Ellis said that he had never been called an “Afro-optimist” before, but that, “Africa is at the most promising juncture economically for 50 years. The World Bank is estimating that the economic growth rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is at 5% for this year and the next, which, considering the world economic crisis, is a very high figure. In the last 60 or 70 years Africa has had the highest population growth in the entire history of the world, too. There are now about 1 billion Africans, so Africa has become a viable consumer market. Africa also has about 80% of the world’s unused agricultural land.”

Ellis explained that foreign internationals are buying up land and the future of Africa will depend crucially on how Africans collectively react to this. “We have entered a new period of world history after the post-colonial era, which ended at the end of the last century, and we need to drop our preconceptions of Africa and start thinking about it in new ways.”

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