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Petina Gappah: ‘I learned Swahili to write this’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/petina-gappah-out-of-darkness-shining-light-interview

The Zimbabwean novelist on her new book about explorer David Livingstone, her fascination with goodness and servitude, and being grilled by her history‑loving father

Petina Gappah was born in Zambia in 1971 and has law degrees from Cambridge, Graz University and Zimbabwe University. Her debut story collection, An Elegy for Easterly, won the Guardian first book prize in 2009 and was followed by The Book of Memory in 2015. Her gripping new novel, Out of Darkness, Shining Light, tells the real-life story of how the body of the 19th-century explorer and physician David Livingstone was transported through Africa by his staff so he could be buried in Britain.

When did you first become interested in David Livingstone?
When I was 16 – at school we did a new curriculum of African history and I became fascinated by the faithful companions who carried Livingstone’s body and I knew I wanted to write about them one day. I started this book in 1998 – I have a floppy disk that I’ve now framed from that year – and finished it in 2018, so it took 20 years, though in between I wrote other things. Initially, it was very much inspired by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Livingstone’s voice was in there. But I ended up thinking: let me focus on his companions.

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