Private Excavations - Exploring the Roots of Dogma by David Robbins

Private Excavations is superb travel writing with a profoundly important purpose. It is also a very necessary book for our rapidly polarising global village.

A journey through snow-clad northern Europe uncovers the fateful impact of a ‘one-truth’ vision of the world. By using as a platform important Scandinavians (writer August Strindberg and Advard Munch) the author explores absolutist thinking in its various religious and political guises. His fluid style blends evocative description with philosophy and history (especially art history) and persuades the reader towards a more humane understanding of existence. The extremists deny this point of view, content instead to seek salvation from an unacceptable world via their one-truth dogmas.

From a ravaged South Africa in the late 1980s, the author begins to envisage a pilgrimage to his family roots. As he travels, he unearths the rigid Pietist mindset of his Swedish and Norwegian ancestors, missionaries’ intent on bringing their band of Christianity to the heathen of Africa. His excavations shed important light on the recent rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world. More chilling are its linkages into apartheid, and into the absolutist Nazi credo that led to the burning of mountains of undesirable books and ‘degenerate art’ in pre-war Germany.

About the Author:

David Robbins has received numerous awards for his writing, beginning with a CNA Literary Award in 1986 and culminating twenty-four years later with a Lifetime Achievement Literary Award supported by the South African Department of Arts and Culture. He is widely regarded as a writer of significant insight and ability. He began publishing in 1985. His books include travel and short fiction, as well as some biography, history and socio-political analysis.