David Livingstone Birthplace

Episode 5: Petina Gappah on 'Out of Darkness, Shining Light'




In this episode Petina Gappah (Author and International Lawyer) discusses with Kate Simpson (David Livingstone Trust Trustee, University of Glasgow Lecturer, Livingstone Online Project Scholar) her 2020 novel 'Out of Darkness, Shining Light'.

‘ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 2020 FICTION HIGHLIGHTS: Petina Gappah's epic journey through nineteenth-century Africa is ‘engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative.’ (Yaa Gyasi) This is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone – and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country.

The wise men of his age say Livingstone blazed into the darkness of their native land leaving a track of light behind where white men who followed him could tread in perfect safety. But in Petina Gappah’s radical novel, it is those in the shadows of history – those who saved a white man’s bones; his dark companions; his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march – whose voices are resurrected with searing intensity.

This final, fateful journey across the African interior is led by Halima, Livingstone’s sharp-tongued cook, and three of his most devoted servants: Jacob, Chuma and Susi. Their tale of how his corpse was borne out of nineteenth-century Africa – carrying the maps that sowed the seeds of the continent’s brutal colonisation – has the power of myth. It is not only symbolic of slavery’s hypocrisy, but a portrait of a world trembling on the cusp of total change – and a celebration of human bravery, loyalty and love. ’ Faber Publishers https://www.faber.co.uk/.

Transcript

Kate: Hi, my name is Kate Simpson, I’m a lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow, I’m Associate Project Scholar for Livingstone Online and a long-term collaborator with the David Livingstone Birthplace Trust.

Today I'm lucky enough to speak to the brilliant Petina Gappah, author of An Elegy for Easterly which won The Guardian First Book Award in 2009, The Book of Memory, which one the McKitterick Prize from the Society of Authors in 2015, and the outstanding short story collection Rotten Row. I’ll be talking to her today about her new book Out of Darkness, Shining Light: a fictionalised account of the epic journey taken by David Livingstone's attendants to get his body back to the coast and subsequently returned to Britain.

Thank you Petina, for meeting me this way. Had it not been for the C-19 outbreak, we would have had a wonderful event at Summer Hall in Edinburgh. But, alas, we have to scale things back, so we are a separated group of two, instead of a united group of 200.

Petina: Aw, thank you so much Kate. It is such a shame that we can't do this in Edinburgh. I would say that out of all the events that I'm doing around the world that, and the one that I've got planned for the Victoria Falls, those are the two events that I think I was looking forward to the most. So it's such a shame, but thank you so much for inviting me to talk to you on this podcast.

Kate: I'm so grateful to have you here. Your book is just absolutely wonderful. As a long-term Livingstone scholar I've always wanted these stories to come out and like magic, I heard that you were writing this book and I was just like, yay! Halima is someone that I have studied for a fair few years and to hear her voice as you write her, which was actually almost how I heard her in my head when I was researching her, was just wonderful. And actually, that pretty much leads onto my first question, which was: What brought you to the stories of Halima and Jacob?

Petina: Thank you so much for the first of all for those kind words. I was actually quite nervous to talk to you and other academics who know and study these characters and study David Livingstone and his journey and his companions, because when you bring an academic lens onto something, it's actually quite forensic. I was hoping that there wouldn't be a lot of red marks in the book as you read it. But yeah, Halima and Jacob - what drew me to them was there very peculiar circumstances. Halima as a woman who was a slave, really, because David Livingstone bought her from somebody who was her owner, so to say. And it just made me curious to think, does she understand what this transaction was, does she understand what that was about? What did David tell her?

It helped a lot that - and I’m sure we’ll going into this in some detail later – it helped a lot that David Livingstone was interested in his companions, and he wrote about them and he wrote a lot about Halima. He said that she was the best spoke on his wheel. He wrote about how she has an outrageous tongue. Those glimpses of Halima that I got from David Livingstone's journals made me really interested in fleshing her out a lot more. And, as for Jacob, his backstory is just so compelling, as one of the Nasik boys - educated in India, having been rescued, as a slave on the Indian Ocean. And then of course, in real life, he actually wrote a journal. So, it was very easy for me to make that decision to have him narrate the second part of the novel, while Halima narrated the first part of the novel.

Kate: Jacob is a funny character because he writes in his journal in such a stilted way. You wonder at his backstory. What made him stay and he is a really interesting character. Actually, the book narrates a series of really powerful events and none more so for me, and this was one of the reasons why I loved your book from the off, is because you write about the massacre in Nyangwe, which Livingstone would go on to use as a rallying cry against slavery and the slave trade. What prompted you to include the details of the massacre and how did you go about writing it because it was just such a horrific event and the senselessness of the violence comes through so powerfully in what you write?

Petina: Thank you so much for that. It was not an easy chapter to write, but I thought it was a necessary chapter to write because slavery, the slave trade is such an essential part of not only the David Livingstone’s story, but an essential part of the companions’ story. Many of them were rescued slaves and one of the decisions they made to go to Bagamoyo, to move his body from Chitambo, in what is now modern Zambia, to Bagamoyo, on the coast of Tanzania, instead of to the port called Kilwa, which was a much shorter distance, was partly informed by the fact that they wanted to avoid parties of slave traders. So, having the story of Nyangwe in the novel was important to convey just how powerful the slave trade was at that time and how feared these slave traders were because they wreaked unimaginable violence and we still don't really know. Maybe you can explain it to me better, but we still don't really know why they chose to do this. Maybe it was a show of force, but the Nyangwe massacre, really, to me, is one of the most important moments of David Livingstone’s life, and consequently of the companions, as I imagined them.

Kate: In the book, when you have Halima ruminate on the massacre being the point at which Livingstone's heart essentially broke and, in some ways, he gave up his fight - his essence kind of went out of him. I read that and I thought: yes, because, having transcribed Livingstone’s account of the Nyangwe massacre and because of the way he wrote it at the time, it was an almost blow-by-blow account of what was happening as it happened. You could see just how traumatised he was and how visceral the people's emotions were and the fact that they had to make the decision to not do anything to save themselves and you wondered whether everyone agreed with that decision. To sit there and watch these people be killed and not do anything, just blows my mind. And the idea of the massacre was not even a massacre - that sounds a terrible way to say it - didn't really have a reason behind it, other than, as you say, the closest we've come to understand, subsequently, is it was a show of force to reinforce the slave trade to say to people: if you don't continue to partake in the slave trade, we will do this and we will keep doing this and the idea that there was a massacre in Nyangwe and then they burnt all the subsequent villages around it is genocide.

Petina: And that's exactly it. And I'm so glad you highlight the sense of helplessness that must have engulfed Livingstone and his companions, as they watch this. And you say, very rightly, that it really almost was like a report from the frontline. You know, it was a blow-by-blow account. And one of the things that I picked up was the Livingstone, saying ‘even when we did try to help, especially those who had fallen into the river, they couldn't tell who was who, they couldn't tell whether my men were friends or foes and some of them actually fought against being rescued’.

And that was just really devastating sad. And actually, Kate, I really should say thank you so much to you and the whole team behind the forensic sort of revelations of what he actually wrote, because all that information was usually helpful to me as I wrote.

Kate: I'm very very glad, I’m very glad for two reasons, one because, well, I'll be honest, I did actually cry as I transcribed it because I thought it was so awful. But two, sometimes the academic work that I do doesn't reach audiences quite as much as I would like it to.

Your fictionalised version makes it so present. It really makes people aware of this idea that it wasn't just one person in a kind of bubble walking across the continent of Africa. People seem to forget that when they narrate the history of Livingstone and it feels like a constant battle sometimes to make people aware that Livingstone didn't put a rucksack on and travel alone and that actually, even more so than that, when the indigenous members of the parties that Livingstone led are noted, it's often only the men.

As men who carried things, the porterage, men for their geographical knowledge, gate-keeping to allow folk into areas, about translation or getting supplies for the group. Or companionship and their socio-political knowledge. People like Halima, you know the indigenous black African female is unseen often in traditional stories of exploration. I apologize. That was a terribly wordy academic question!

Petina: It’s a wonderful question and it’s a question that's really at the heart of the novel as a project. It's what animated me and motivated me to write this. I mean, I don't know how much Brecht you're familiar with, but there's a wonderful poem, which is called A Worker Reads History, that I love very much. ‘Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hold the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time?’

It’s this idea that behind the great men, behind the history, the stories of the great battles, the great this the great that, there are ordinary people who actually did the work. It’s what you academics call the subaltern view of history. So instead of studying the story of Lord Nelson and his great naval battles, you also look at the cabin boy. What was the cabin boy doing while Nelson was giving the orders? To me it’s very important to look at history from the point of view of the subaltern and the marginalised, the unvoiced. And that’s in part what I sought to do by placing the companions at the centre of the narrative. You know, Kate, when I actually started the novel, I had Livingstone in there, alive, as a voice. It was initially very much like a Faulkner As I lay dying novel-narrative by 13 voices, including Nanny, his daughter in England, and Livingstone himself. And then, the more I thought about it, I thought – hang on, Livingstone has been speaking for centuries, almost 200 years. But we have not heard from his companions, so I wanted him to die. He did die, but he didn’t do it for my convenience! I wanted him not to be alive in the book and I wanted him to be alive only in the memories of his companions. So that was a very deliberate choice to put them front and centre.

Kate: Just to go back to Halima more specifically - in my own work, what first drew me to her, well actually two things: one there was rumours that Livingstone hated her cooking, but was too afraid to actually say to her. He would always eat what she put in front of him.

Secondly, she was paid the same as Chuma and Susi when it came to dotis of cloth and it was just an entry in one of his notebooks and I thought that’s interesting that she's so important to the group that Livingstone pays her the same wage.

And then I looked for other scholarship and there's really been nothing about it. And I wonder if it's because you have to take your approach, you have to take those tiny little bits of history and weave a narrative around them that we just don't have enough to research her in more depth. There’s only little bits here and there, and quite often it’s second hand or third hand.

Petina: It’s so interesting because it's the men, you are absolutely right - I mean, the men themselves are not that well known. But those that are known about - Chuma and Susi - because they went to England and participated in producing the last book, the posthumous book that Livingstone produced – The Last Journals. So, to a degree, Susi and Chuma are known about. And if you then look back at academic work and papers, you find people like Matthew Wellington you find people like Carrus Farrar. They gave early accounts about people who went looking for them, at the turn of the last century they gave accounts, and a lot of these have been published in what used to be this wonderful journal – the Uganda Journal – so you have some of this out there, but I could not find anyone who was really interested in Halima at all. Not just Halima but the other women. What intrigued me and fascinated me was that there were more than a few women who travelled with Livingstone, and some of them were not official members of the party, but they were – I call them ‘road women’ in the novel – but they were companions to some of the men. And some were even their wives and had children on these journeys.

Kate: Yes, event on that very last journey, when they were going through the Bangweolo swampland, they pick up a young girl. And a young girl joins the group, but we never know her name. Livingstone says she walks wonderfully. This little girl, who has obviously been left by a slave party, she keeps up. There’s this tiny little half-life that we see a small amount of. And I always think her story is one that I keep going back to. Once you notice that, you start to notice more and more these Montsuyane, who’s a Chief’s daughter or Majima, who was a member of someone else’s household, who just happens to speak to Livingstone.

And there are these names – Njelenje who was the headwoman at the Masinje River. These tiny little snippets of these women go all the way through his works, which, I suppose, makes Livingstone better in recording his journeys than people like Stanley. They’ve just been obfuscated from history in some way… people have just not been interested?

Petina: I don’t think that they’ve been erased as such, it’s just that they never existed. It was never even an attempt to erase them. They were just not talked about. They were just taken for granted. They were handmaidens and cooks it’s the story of women in history everywhere. Unless you’re a queen, unless you’ve been beheaded, your divorce from a powerful king forces a rupture from the Catholics, women are just not talked about in history in the same way. And you can imagine then, if those women are African and poor and just don’t have the power to write. That is another thing - Jacob Wainwright wrote a journal, which I didn’t manage to read before I finished my book. Halima couldn’t have written anything, because she couldn’t write, she was illiterate. Women generally have not been part of the story. And that’s one of the reasons that I really wanted Halima to shine.

Kate: Thank you very much. You’ve just led perfectly onto my next question. How you decided to write them, the way you have written them, those different narratives of more personable Halima at the beginning and the quite conflicted Jacob, with the more stilted style, in the second half of the book. To my mind, that was how they would sound. How did you get a feel for their voices?

Petina: As I said earlier, that wonderful entry from Livingstone’s journal: ‘she’s a good soul, but she has an outrageous tongue’. Which is then confirmed by Stanley, who is not the most kind ‘observer of the natives’ – to use the words of the time – but he could hear the sounds of furious gossip, as we sat and talked. So, these two men, unrelated report exactly the same thing about Halima, that she is an absolute chatterbox. And that really helped me a lot, because I’m a bit of a chatterbox myself! So I basically gave that quality to Halima and let her run and run and run…and talk and talk. But she had to stop talking. And this was quite a heart-breaking decision for me. I would have loved for her to narrate the whole novel, but it just wouldn’t have been possible. And that’s when Jacob comes in. Jacob has something that Halima doesn’t have. He has a knowledge of places and an interest in geography. If not for his own sake, but because he wants to be able to report in England, where they were, what they saw. And so he knows that marking these places, locating these places will be important information that people in England will want to know. Whereas if Halima had continued narrating the novel, it would have just been ‘and then we went to this place, and then we came to that place, and then we came to this place’, and she wouldn’t have been able to locate us within the geography of East Africa, which is what Jacob then does.

Kate: I was very grateful to you that you brought Halima back at the end, though. It satisfied my soul to hear her speak.

Petina: And mine too actually. It was wonderful to write her. But then, of course, is a different Halima. Just as Jacob in the last section is also a different Jacob, because this was a journey on two levels. It was a journey in the physical sense - carrying the body of Bwana Daudi - but it was also a journey in the sense that it transformed almost everyone who took part in it because things happen on that journey and here I'm actually grateful for the silence around the journey because then I could make a lot of things up, and make it a really fun immersive experience for the reader. So all these things that happened, obviously made up, will have transformed the two of them and their companions at the end.

Kate: It’s that gap, in effect, that you always get, where Livingstone died and then five months later the party is in such and such. Everyone still lived during those five months. So there are so many narratives that just become a jump in the text, usually, and going into that was really interesting for me. You say made up, but actually the geographical sightedness of the story is so intrinsic to the narrative. How on earth did you do that?

Petina: I read everything, you know, and I bought maps. You know I travelled to Arusha quite a bit, because I teach there. I teach trade law in Arusha. And, every time I went to Arusha or Bagamoyo or wherever I would buy maps and things like that. So I actually have a wall. I don't know if you watch Homeland. Do you watch Homeland? You know Carrie’s wall? I had my own Carrie’s wall with lots of maps and I really plotted the journey and I wanted to take the journey myself. Unfortunately I was working while I wrote the books and I didn’t really have the time to take as many days as I wanted to, to walk the journey, well not really walk the journey, that would have been impossible, but just to drive through it. It was a wonderful experience to see how the geography changes, as they’re leaving Zambia, to what is now a game park actually. So suddenly there are all these beautiful animals that they’re seeing. I really enjoyed the journey part of it.

Kate: Just thinking about the journey and the different landscapes that people went over. You say you acquired maps, but I also have read in some of your other interviews that this book was 20 years in the making. Was the idea 20 years in the making or were you collecting information from 20 years ago to now.

Petina: Oh, it was always meant to be my first novel. I actually started writing it in 1998 and I have it on a floppy disk. I had 15 voices. I started writing it that long ago, but I realised that that more I wrote, the less I knew. I actually started, Kate, with nothing beyond having read a couple of history books. Scramble for Africa by Thomas Packenham was probably the thing that got me going. Just reading that wonderful first chapter where one dramatically imagines Livingstone’s death and his importance - the importance of that journey to African exploration - that’s really what fired me up. But then the more I wrote, the more I realised I actually knew very little. I didn’t know anything about how many companions there were, and so I started researching that long ago, in 1998. And I’ve collected first editions of Livingstone’s journals, and Stanley’s journals, I’ve got stuff in French, stuff in German. Every time I went to an antiquarian bookshop, I would look for whatever they had on Livingstone, and I actually have a sizeable collection of material. And that’s really what I did for those 20 years, but I also just thought about it, ruminating it, but most importantly I became a better writer, I wrote other things, while I was still thinking about this novel and collecting things. And so, by the time I actually came down to writing it, it didn’t take that long. It took me about 9 months to produce the first draft. Then it was very quick. Because by now I really knew this inside out. Then it was just a matter of polishing and polishing and polishing. And so it was really, for me, a labour of love. And I felt quite bereft after I’d handed in the manuscript, because it’s been with me for such a long time. It’s a project that’s been in my mind and in my life the longest. So now I have to replace it with something else. (laughing)

Kate: Yes, you’ll have to find someone else’s untold story! Mind you, I’m grateful it took you 20 years, we wouldn’t have had The Book of Memory or Rotten Row otherwise. And I do have to say that Rotten Row is absolutely one of my favourite books. Such a wonderful narrative, well, such wonderful narratives, rather. But I know that’s not what we’re talking about, so we’ll save that for the next podcast!

Panashe Chigumadzi said that history is like water: it lives between us and at us comes in waves, always in a state of flux, always a sight of discovery. Her phrase kept going through my head as I read your, as I read the narrative. Do you think we’ve got more to learn about these people? It’s 20 years you’ve amassed, of information and data, do you think we’ll find out more, or…?

Petina: I had mixed feelings… Let me preface my answer by saying that I had mixed feelings about the possibility that somebody else might write the story. On the one hand I had people telling me ‘that’s the most brilliant idea for a novel I’ve ever heard’ and I thought ‘Yes! And I’m the one that gets to right it’. And another part of me, the more generous part of me that really loves history, kept thinking… ‘bloody hell, why has no one written the story, where are these books?’. So, when I read, for example that Namwali Serpell has written a book called The Old Drift where, I think he starts with David Livingstone’s death, I was very excited and thinking finally, this is coming back into the conversation. So I think that’s where I am, we need more of these stories. If someone wants to re-write Halima’s story from their perspective, brilliant! Let’s do it. Let’s have more of them. Let’s have Susi and Chuma again, let’s have them on film, let’s have them on TV. Let’s have more unwritten-about characters come to the fore. If you read, which I’m sure you have, Stanley’s journals or Cameron’s journals or Burton, you find all these wonderful characters like Seedy Mbarak Bombay, for instance. His story has been fictionalised by a really brilliant Bulgarian writer. The book is called The Collector of Words, and he imagines the story of Seedy Mbarak Bombay. So, yes, I agree with you, that we still have a lot to learn. Not only about these particular people, Livingstone’s companions, but also about other figures, that played a role in different parts of African history.

Kate: You bring up a valid point there, which I totally forgot to bring up: there was an industry in exploration. These people… that paternalistic, imperial idea that these were Livingstone’s people… A lot of these people worked in caravans and moved around. Like Bombay, he worked for lots of different people, his business was taking these Europeans on exploration. There are so many stories of people who…

Petina: You remind me, do you know Donald Simpson? He was a librarian, well the Chief Librarian at the British Library, and he wrote a wonderful book. And this was the first book to come into the mainstream about the companions, it’s called The Dark Companions? That book was just such an eye-opener, because there were so many of them, there were so many companions. And he looks at most of the companions, of the major explorers, so you can just imagine the stories and stories that can be told about these people.

Kate: Exactly, I hope you are the wave-breaker then and behind you comes this wealth of more writers, writing about these people. Even people like Bombay, who, Livingstone declined his services, so he went back to Stanley and he said not that Livingstone had declined his services but that ‘Oh I felt I would be better working with you’ and Stanley was all blown up about it and thought ‘ Oh yes well this man clearly wants to work with me’ when in actual fact Livingstone, well, it had been Halima and Chuma and Susi who had said that they really didn’t want to work with him. (laughing)

How do you feel your opinions of Halima and Jacob changed over researching this book and also, actually, your opinion of Livingstone?

Petina: Well, I didn’t really start with any firm opinions of Halima and Jacob, because there wasn’t much for me to base an opinion on. But I would say that my view of Livingstone really has changed. Obviously we learned about him in history, but we learn about him as a two-dimensional, rather one-dimensional character. We learn about him as things, as ‘the great discoverer’, as ‘the great explorer’ as ‘the great this – the great that’. But when you actually really look at him, his life was marked by failure and his greatest success came after his death. Which is that his eye-witness account of Nyangwe was instrumental in closing the slave market in Zanzibar. So there’s a sadness, I think, to his life. And this is where Halima has a very clear-sighted view of Livingstone. She’s saying ‘what is this for?’ – who leaves their wife, their children, just to look for the beginning of a river?

All the stuff that he gave up, in a failed search, but still, what riches he brought to many people, and how important he was to history. The fact that his papers were instrumental in opening up the continent. That’s just… you can’t even begin to process the magnitude of his life’s work. But at the same time, looking at it more forensically, he was also a personal failure in many ways. So he’s a very complicated man. And I have to say that I’m very glad that it was Livingstone who died in Chitambo and not Stanley. Because I don’t think I would have enjoyed writing about Stanley, because in a way I became very very fond of David Livingstone.

Kate: Just to go back to your point there about what Halima had raised, about why he had given up his family. When you read Livingstone’s personal journals, towards the end – I don’t think it made it into the published version – where he starts prepping the letters that he’s going to write, when he finds the source of the Nile. He puts gaps in his notebook, for ‘Oh I found the four fountains were – space – however many feet apart’. It is, as you say, you feel quite sad that the magnitude of his failure is, in some ways, equal to the magnitude of his subsequent success, after he had died.

Petina: And also, it’s really quite interesting that he names these different landmarks that he comes across after great figures in public life – the Victoria Falls – and I think he names a river after Lord Palmerston and so on. He never names anything for his wife. He doesn’t even name anything for his children. The closest creature that he names something after is his poor dog Chitane, who drowns in water, in a river. And he calls it Chitane’s Water after that. But no, he was a cold fish, wasn’t he?

Kate: Yeah, it’s funny you mention his wife, because I was just thinking about how he writes about his wife in his other journals – he calls her Ma Robert. So he even takes away her name in his own writing. He gives her the name that the local groups give her. She is the mother of his son and not a woman…

Petina: And not his wife, yeah. But actually, let me be fair to Livingstone, because he did name the boat that he took on the second journey, the Zambezi, he did call it Ma Robert. So he did name a boat after his wife. Unfortunately the boat did crash…

Kate: I don’t mean to do him a disservice. But, as you say, he was definitely a bit of a cold fish, and to have been lucky enough to chance upon people like Halima and Chuma and Susi. People who were willing to help him, willing to carry him when he couldn’t walk, and just supported him as a friend group. There’s a rarity and also, you mentioned Stanley, that nothing like that ever comes across in Stanley’s writing. There is a divide between himself and the people who are portering for him, and there’s very little humanity in the interaction.

Petina: That’s so true, and in fact there’s an episode where Chuma and Susi run away from Livingstone after a quarrel, and then they come back. You sort of think, especially around the time he was stranded in Unyanyembe, they could just have abandoned him. It’s not like he was paying them, he had nothing. But still, they hang on. It’s really quite extraordinary. And this is why one of the things I wanted to do in the novel, as well, was to imagine Livingstone from the point of view of the companions. How did they see him? And I think it was a mixed thing, because he was such a complicated character. He was capable of great kindness, but he could also be very cruel, you know. He used to allow some of the men to be beaten as punishment. I wanted to highlight what those qualities of Livingstone would have done to the companions, especially in terms of motivating them to travel with his body.

Kate: Yes, the humanity of Livingstone. Why he managed to do as much as he did, considering, how, towards the end, they had to very much carry the weight of the expedition. But, I think that comes across so much in your book. The understanding, from Halima’s point of view, of Livingstone’s humanity and Jacob almost as the voice of the London Missionary Society – in some ways going ‘he wasn’t as successful as he could have been’ and ‘he didn’t go about proselytising right’. Jacob going ‘if I had done it my way, I’d have done it differently’ and you kind of – although he is quite parsimonious – you listen to Jacob and you go ‘actually he probably has a really good point’. Livingstone was not a very good missionary. (laughing)

Petina: He was a terrible missionary! He only made one convert who soon changed his mind.

Kate: Oh dear! Well, thank you so much, Petina, for talking to me today. I would just like to remind everyone, the book is available in all good bookshops and most independents are doing deliveries at the moment, should you wish to get it. And there will be a link in the bio at the bottom of the podcast.

Petina, thank you so much for your time, this has been a wonderful hour. Thank you.

Petina: Thank you so much, Kate.

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