Publishers Weekly
In this limpid biography, Welsh poet Sheers reconstructs his English great-great-uncle's unorthodox missionary career in colonial southern Rhodesia. Intrigued by Arthur Cripps's reputation as a poet and as the beloved "shaman" of a rural Rhodesian native community, Sheers recounts his life of self-imposed exile through intercut time frames, imagined points of view and fragments of documentary evidence. Charting Cripps's life from his 1901 arrival in central Mashonaland to his death there in 1952, the author convincingly delineates a portrait of an ascetic subversive, more sympathetic to native custom than to white colonial rule. Sheers effectively conveys the white community's disapproval of Cripps's belief in African land rights and independence, although he does not explore a wider political context for Cripps's colonial critique. As for the contemporary sections of his book, while Sheers's account of his travels in the footsteps of his ancestor provides an informative update on postcolonial Zimbabwe, such journalistic impulses are sacrificed to anticlimactic pursuit of witnesses to Cripps's past. Sheers narrows his focus to a quirky family figure whom he can only distantly imagine, rather than undertaking a fuller historical journey. Obsessing over a rumor of a lost love in Cripps's past, he closes the book on the disappointingly clich d note of a secret unlocked. Still, if Sheers fails to allow for full imaginative transport to the world he describes, he diligently accumulates absorbing and authentic visual and factual details that will be of value to those interested in Britain's former African colonies. (Mar. 25) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Poet Sheers, a descendant of his subject, lustrously re-creates the life of Reverend Arthur Cripps: poet, African missionary, thwarted father, a man about six leagues ahead of his European contemporaries. Writing about "my great, great uncle . . . reflected through my imagination," the author pays close attention to the surroundings: "the muezzin's call to pray, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets," the coral-rag buildings of Zanzibar, the ruins of Arthur's church, where he is buried with "a long key in the lock of his grave." Sheers is a highly visual writer; impressions and meanings reveal themselves like the horizons of a dig. ("There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm.") As the author seeks to take his relative's measure, he finds plenty of storms: Arthur's cherished, and pregnant, beloved's father would not let them marry ("Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr. Cripps!"); he saw the grotesqueries of WWI as fought out in Africa; and he forever ran counter to the church and the colonial administration in the respect with which he treated the African people. Arthur opposed the hut tax and bitterly noted the "asymmetry of indulgence on behalf of the philanthropic nature of European settlement." Ultimately he was hounded out of his official capacity, a man too appreciative of the Shona's highly developed spiritual intelligence and the maturity of their belief system. But he returned as an independent missionary, an itinerant teacher, minister, and doctor. Sheers reveals Arthur to be a man in love with beauty, with Keats, with faith, and with thepeople among whom he lived and died. A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos) Author tour
