Small talk prompted Namibian homecoming
Peter Midgley’s Counting Teeth chronicles trip with teen daughter
Peter Midgley didn’t set out to write a book. On that fateful day in 2008, he was just trying to update his credit card information.
“The guy on the other end (of the phone) said, ‘Wow, I know your accent. You’re from Namibia.’ Turns out he grew up in the same small town that I grew up in,” says Midgley, a poet who is also president of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and an acquiring editor at the University of Alberta Press. “You know how you make small talk while they’re updating records with a slow computer. He asks had I been back. I said no.
“From there, the idea just kept growing.”
That small talk became the spark that eventually led to Midgley’s new travel memoir Counting Teeth (Wolsak & Wynn), which chronicles the two-month trip he and his daughter Sinead took to Namibia in 2011. The pair wanted to see what the southwest African country looked and felt like, two decades after winning its war for independence against South Africa.
For Midgley, the trip was a homecoming of sorts. He lived in Namibia until the age of five, at which point his family moved to South Africa and, from there, he to Canada.
Aside from a year-long teaching stint in his 20s, he hadn’t been back since.
For the 19-year-old Sinead, however, the trip had a slightly different tenor.
“Most Canadian teenagers go off to the Dominican (Republic) after high school,” Midgley says. “Mine spent six weeks looking at graves.”
He’s quick to add that the two of them had always shared a love of stories and especially local and family history — just as Midgley’s own mother had instilled the same in him. Sinead also served as the trip’s stenographer, taking notes on the many interesting people the pair talked to and the places they visited.
In the book, navigating Namibia turns out to be more difficult than they’d anticipated. Midgley has an old-fashioned love of maps, while his daughter insists on renting vehicles equipped with GPS. It doesn’t matter: many of their sought-after landmarks and memorials seem to have faded from the Namibian consciousness, and in some cases have been forgotten entirely. Those locals who do know the way, meanwhile, insist on taking Midgley and Sinead there in person.
On the other hand, the timing of their visit was spot on. As they were getting ready to leave, it was announced that some longtime negotiations had been resolved, and a series of 70 skulls that had been taken to Germany (of which Namibia was a colony until the end of the First World War) during the Namibian genocide of 1904-1908 were finally set to be returned to Africa. The Midgleys went looking for history, and they found it.
“She’s what we know as ‘born free.’ ” PETER MIDGLEY, TALKING ABOUT HIS DAUGHTER SINEAD
Having his daughter along also made Midgley realize how far the country had come in recent years.
“She’s what we know as ‘born free.’ A post-liberation child,” Midgley says. “At several times throughout the trip, she’d say to me, ‘I know apartheid is wrong, but I cannot even conceive of living in that kind of a society. It’s beyond comprehension.’ ” Midgley’s response? “Good,” he says. “We’ve managed to teach you to get beyond something that my generation had had to work through. We’ve freed you from that encumbrance, which is a huge step forward.”
Over the course of Counting Teeth the pair covers a lot of ground, in a country with lots of it to go around. Thanks to a large desert, Namibia is one of the least densely populated nations on Earth.
Midgley and Sinead also camped on the charmingly named Shark Island, which has an even less charming past, as the site of a former concentration camp during the Namibian genocide. When Midgley asks Sinead if she’d prefer finding a different campsite — one sheltered from the brutal winds that come from a front-row view of the Atlantic, perhaps — she stoically puts on another hoodie and declines. “I want to feel the ocean.”
Despite that unlikely inspiration provided by the credit card operator, Midgley says he’d known for a long time, on some level, that he was going to write about his homeland some day.
“I knew there was a book,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to wait three decades for the story to provide the right framework.”