Amie Cut For Life

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Fiction

Mutilation, migration, spycraft

Amie Cut For Life
By Lucinda E. Clark
312 pp. Umhlanga Press

Reviewed by: David E. Hoekenga, M. D.

Whenever I talk about going back to Africa with excitement in my voice, I invariably run into well-meaning people who claim they can experience it just as well watching a show or two on TV. Well, they can’t. I’ve never been able to convey the amazing smells of the continent that are like no other. If olfactory memories are more persistent than any other, then Amie Fish traveling under the name Felicity Mansell as a British spy tries hard. After, unwisely, spending time with her parents in Jo’berg even though her elaborate cover is that she was killed previously in an explosion in Zimbabwe. Her elaborate fake funeral is a waste because her mother is a blabbermouth. Then she wanders around Botswana and Zimbabwe where an attractive white woman sticks out like a sore thumb.

Clark captures the flavor of African towns beautifully.

Atari was just as she remembered it, just like many African towns. There was the usual taxi stand, teeming with minibuses, while throngs of men, women and children swarmed along the pavements, while stepping into the street without looking either way. In front of the two-storey store buildings that lined either side of the road, row upon row of women sat on the pavement with their wares set out before then on pieces of material or torn up cardboard boxes. Mostly they were offering pieces of fruit, vegetables, and raw meat. A few had assembled makeshift stalls where they were cooking a variety of animal parts and whole mealie cobs. One wizened old man was grinding away on a battered metal structure pressing the juice of sugar canes into small plastic cups. There was the usual cacophony of sound: shrieking voices, horns blasting, the odd goat bleating as it tried to escape the ropes tying it to a lamppost. And the inevitable squawks from chickens as they were hauled out of their cages feet first, bound tightly around the legs and handed over, still complaining, to the waiting customers.

And of course there are piles of trash everywhere, a good reason to get out of town as quickly as possible.  

Amie heads out of the capital of Botswana with poor communication equipment, no weapon, in league with a group of four people she doesn’t know. Additionally, her mission is totally unclear to her. No wonder bizarre unfortunate events begin to befall her group and the people around her immediately. She heads north through the country of Zimbabwe where anarchy rules and a rich land produces no crops and no longer nourishes herds of wild game. It only provides sustenance for criminals and bullies. In this, the fourth book about Amie’s adventures involving espionage, her skills are woefully underdeveloped. Not even a meeting with the legendary Ian Fleming helps.

Amie finds a group of four girls about to be altered by destructive surgery known as female genital mutilation. Amie describes it this way:

It's a barbaric practice...They cut off the clitoris and the labia and in some cases they sew the skin together leaving only a small opening to pee through. Can you imagine what hell it must be when they lose their virginity? Jean-Pierre explained to me how they have to be sliced opened again before they give birth. It's excruciatingly painful for them.

It leaves them deprived of their natural feelings and several bodily functions. But in a paradoxical way it makes these dark skinned pubescent females of great value to older males of a perverted quasi-religious orientation. One handsome Frenchman named Jean-Pierre initially appears to be a help to Amie, but he soon turns out to be a ruthless agent bent on the destruction of the innocence of the terrified young girls.

Amie and the girls get swept up the immense natural power of the annual migration. Despite her years in Africa, Amie has never experienced it before. Unfortunately, they are right in the middle of it.

To their horror they could now see a huge cloud of dust swirling above the bushes, moving closer and closer at a phenomenal speed. A faint drumming got louder and louder, creating shock waves that made the ground shake as hundreds maybe thousands of hooves thundered over the bare earth. A group of large wildebeests were the first to appear, galloping flat out, looking neither right nor left, the whites of their eyes glistening through the rising dust. All that could be seen behind them was a mass of panicking bodies, pushing and shoving, bumping into each other, the younger ones flung to one side, several running in circles trying to avoid the flailing hooves unable to find their mothers in the rising clouds of sand. The charging animals stretched across the open plain, hell bent on fleeing some as yet unseen danger.

Cleverly, the author moves the great migration one thousand miles from the Serengeti to Zimbabwe.   

In the end Amie bumbles her way to saving four girls from genital mutilation, which the author writes has befallen two hundred million women. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book because of its sloppy spycraft, untidy plot devices and the careless treatment of my beloved Africa.