View of the World (37 page)

Perhaps an hour later we reached the mulatto’s shack. By this time our clothing had dried on us. We found the mulatto waiting for us. ‘I’ve been thinking about doing something about voting after all,’ he told Dominguín. ‘Any chance of your finding anyone who can do better than a half sack of rice, if I come along with you?’

Dominguín with his connections in the city thought he might be able to do something.

We took our seats in Kemp’s commodious launch and the mulatto excused himself. He came back carrying something like one of those straw capes which Japanese peasants are depicted as wearing in the old
colour prints. This he fastened round his shoulders.

‘Going to rain in a minute again,’ he said. ‘And it won’t be a shower this time either, like the last one.’

I looked up. The sky was turning into porridge.

‘Another couple of hours,’ Dominguín said, ‘and we’ll be home.’

Norman Lewis’s extended article
Genocide
, included in this anthology, was written originally for Britain’s
Sunday Times Magazine
. In it he describes the horrors he had seen South American Indians facing at the hands of those who wanted their lands. The article sparked an outcry that led to the founding of the world’s foremost organisation for tribal peoples’ rights, Survival International.

Survival is now the worldwide voice for tribal peoples, helping them to defend their lives, protect their lands and determine their own future.

Norman called it the most important achievement of his professional life; ‘a tremendous triumph – something I would not have believed possible to achieve’. He regarded the article and subsequent creation of Survival ‘as the most worthwhile of all my endeavours’, and wrote that he had ‘reason to believe that it at least saved some lives, and probably even benefited the long-term prospects of the Amerindians’.

Survival administers the Norman Lewis Fund for Tribal Peoples which supports the publication and dissemination of hard-hitting writing on the way tribes are treated throughout the world.

Through this, the flame of Norman’s indefatigable and courageous exposure of extreme injustice continues to shine a light on to crimes against humanity – crimes in remote places which would otherwise pass unnoticed. As Survival has shown time after time, exposing these crimes is the most effective way to prevent them being repeated.

If you would like to help, please send a donation, or ask for more information from:

Norman Lewis Fund, Survival International

6 Charterhouse Buildings, London
EC
1
M
7
ET
Tel: 020 7687 8700

[email protected] www.survival-international.org

About the Author

Norman Lewis’s early childhood, as recalled in
Jackdaw Cake
(1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at
university
for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.

He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis’s masterpiece,
Naples ’44
, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.

Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably
A Dragon Apparent
(1951) and
Golden Earth
(1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel
The Volcanoes Above Us
, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and
The Honoured Society
(1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the
New Yorker
.

Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of nonfiction, mostly travel books, but he regarded his life’s major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled
Genocide in Brazil
, published in the
Sunday Times
in 1968. This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. He later published a very successful book called
The Missionaries
(1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.

More recent books included
Voices of the Old Sea
(1984),
Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India
(1991),
An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia
(1993) and
The World the World
(1996), which concluded his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in
The Happy Ant Heap
(1998) and
Voyage by Dhow
(2001). With
In Sicily
(2002) he returned to his much-loved Italy, and in 2003 his last book,
A Tomb in Seville
, was published.

Lewis travelled to off-beat parts of the world well into his nineties, returning to the calm of rural Essex where he lived with his second wife. He died in July 2003 at the age of ninety-five.

61 Exmouth Market, London EC1R 4QL
Email: [email protected]

 Eland was started in 1982 to revive great travel books which had fallen out of print. Although the list soon diversified into biography and fiction, all the titles are chosen for their interest in spirit of place. One of our readers explained that for him reading an Eland was like listening to an experienced anthropologist at the bar – she’s let her hair down and is telling all the stories that were just too good to go into the textbook. These are books for travellers, and for those who are content to travel in their own minds. Eland books open out our understanding of other cultures, interpret the unknown and reveal different environments as well as celebrating the humour and occasional horrors of travel. We take immense trouble to select only the most readable books and many readers collect the entire series.

Extracts from each and every one of our books can be read on our website, at www.travelbooks.co.uk. If you would like a free copy of our catalogue, please order it from the website, email us or send a postcard.