The Daily Telegraph published a portion of a memoir this week about a woman’s time spent volunteering in Zambia as a teenager on her gap year.
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Unfortunately for Louise Linton, social media is calling bullshit on the whole thing, in which she wrote about caring for an HIV-positive orphan and hiding out from murderous rebels.
The book’s synopsis describes it as:
The inspiring memoir of an intrepid teenager who abandoned her privileged life in Scotland to travel to Zambia as a gap year student where she found herself inadvertently caught up on the fringe of the Congolese War.
The only problem is that people in Zambia and from other countries in the region say there are no records of Congolese rebels invading Zambian villages the way Louise describes.
She writes about “the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in neighbouring Congo” – which actually happened in Rwanda.
She also refers to a “monsoon season” in Zambia, even though the country doesn’t have one.
Even BBC Africa’s Victoria Uwonkunda says the memoir contains ‘objectionable stereotypes’ and ‘questionable claims’.
Naturally, Twitter got involved too:
Ugh. Do people still think we don't have internet in Africa? In the 'jungle'. That we'll never read what they write about us. #LintonLies
— Sithe Ncube (@_LadySith) July 4, 2016
https://twitter.com/Kvhuyi/status/750047749337415681?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/jay_nyendwa/status/749917587962748929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/TwentyKwacha/status/749893583440936960?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/MaceWimbu/status/750207783430225924?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The ridiculousness and exaggeration of this tale from "long angel haired" Brit in #Africa is as unimaginative as anything I've read lately
— Victoria Uwonkunda (@Afroscandi) July 4, 2016
https://twitter.com/WriteRevolt/status/749901940872609792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
https://twitter.com/Skip_toMyLu/status/750063353607786496?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Asked to respond to the accusations, Louise says she is uncontactable at the moment and that her ‘editor and publisher’ was responsible for fact-checking the book.
Let this be a lesson to everyone – no one gives two shits what you did on your gap year abroad. But if you’re going to insist on bullshitting your way through a memoir then be prepared to get called out on every detail. The whole Internet will fact-check your book for you, that’s for sure. Even over in Africa where they have Internet too, don’t you know?
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