Reviews: Meditations In My Favorite Places In Southern Africa

Several months back, when I received an email advertisement for Gail Evans’ then unpublished book Meditations In My Favorite Places In Southern Africa: A Travelogue For Inner And Outer Jounries, I became excited. This book, I figured, would offer insight into sacred places and practices on a continent that remains largely unknown to most Americans. Unfortunately, Evans’ offering turns out to be New Age pabulum at its worst.

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Not that she hasn’t tried. She’s attempted to fashion a book that is both a travelogue of awe inspiring places of natural beauty in southern Africa, and a book of meditations that are loosely tied to each location. Her narrative visits seven locations, mostly protected park lands, which she associates with one of the body’s seven chakras, or energy centers. Each chapter ends with a meditation on the chakra, along with information about what that chakra means to the individual. However, her effort fails, both as a travelogue and as a meditative guide.

Although her writing about the beauty of southern Africa is often lovely and descriptive, it leaves the reader with no sense of place. Perhaps a reader from Johannesburg, someone already familiar with these places, would find her descriptions right-on. The rest of us, though, are left with the impression that South Africa is exactly like the Great Smokey Mountains, with the addition of monkeys and baboons. There is little in her descriptions to explain the uniqueness or history of the locations that she obviously loves. When she describes South Africa’s mountains, she could just as easily be talking about the Rockies or the Andes. By the same token, when she visits Africa’s east coast, she leaves us with a mental picture that could just as easily have been taken in Florida, the Bahamas or the Caribbean.

In some cases she doesn’t even tell us where in Africa we are. For example, in the first chapter, we join her as she takes flight on a Cessna to the Okavango Delta, a beautiful region by her accounting. We learn that we’re in a remote area with “no roads, no highways, no buildings, no televisions, no televisions, no telephones, no museums, nothing to disturb nature’s sweet majesty,” but we’re given no information that will help place us on a map of southern Africa. We do learn that we’re on the Moremi Game Sanctuary, “One thousand eight-hundred kilometers of unspoilt beauty fed by the Okavango river, the third largest in Africa, which rises in Angola and flows into the northern Kalahari of Botswana,” which has very little meaning to those of who’ve never ventured south of the equator and across the Atlantic.

Interestingly, she doesn’t even bother to describe the river and we never get to know whether it flows wide and slow or narrow and rapid. We learn that there are giraffes and buffalo, and that there are “boats” on the water – but little else to give us a sense of place.

The travelogue seems to take a Eurocentric (read Caucasian) view of the African continent. Although race or color are never mentioned per se, there’s an impression that whenever she mentions a charming village with interesting shops that they are inhabited by the descendants of white European settlers. Except for a couple of fleeting mentions in the meditations, there are no references to local indigenous cultures. The southern Africa we see is an idealized Europeanized land, often seeming more like a tropical Lake Geneva than a land with a rich history of tribal kinship.

The meditations of the chakras that accompany each chapter are equally as vague, and the way that she ties them into the places is often downright dumbfounding. In the sixth chapter she takes us into Sterkfontein Caves, which are located “about thirty minutes drive from Johannesburg.” Here she takes us deep underground, into a world of stalactites and stalagmites and an ancient underground lake populated by minuscule, transparent and sightless shrimp. Oddly, she connects this place with a meditation on the third eye, located in the middle of the brow, instead of the root chakra, where the body connects with the earth, which would be appropriate.

There are other problems as well. Her meditations are way too simple to do much good and the colors she associates with the chakras are strange, and correspond with no system known to me. In her favor, when she describes the effects of healthy and unhealthy chakras, she is pretty much right on the mark.

All of this is a shame. Evans is obviously a talented writer with a great love of the southern third of the African continent. I can’t help but feel that she could’ve produced a valuable book with the help of a competent editor to guide her.

Meditations In My Favourite Places In Southern Africa by Gail Evans is published by Writers Club Press and can be ordered from any major online bookseller or from the publisher at http://www.iuniverse.com.

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