Fascinating 'What If' Sci Fi novel.
How would cope with the presence of pods seeding the place where you lived with flora that grew and consumed all man made products as it evolved and expanded at a rate of 50 metres per day.
That not only consumed but mutated what it came across, people included.
The first pod landed on the peak of Mt Kilimanjaro. The local Wa-Chagga people first told of what they were encountering. From there the something growing there was known as Chaga.

This Sci Fi novel covers many topics, doesn't pretend to offer answers, just presents what is and what could be.
Politics of Africa, macro and micro.
Corruption both internal and by those sent to protect the locals.
The place of the media, the right to know and the issues and ramifications of exposing the facts.
The irony of people scared of change and shunning those changed by contact with the Chaga and at the same time shunning those who live among them for being poor, a different colour, tribe or gender.

The science is believable, just bear in mind it is written in the 1990's and what we have now is scifi to them.

"There was a bridge between terrestrial and Chaga-life. It was the chemistry of the carbon atom, but the Chaga was not built on the chains and lattices of earth-bound carbon forms. Its engineering was that of the sixty-atom sphere of the Buckminsterfullerene molecule; its organic chemistry a three-dimensional architecture of domes, arches, cantilevers, tunnels and latticed skeletons.

‘The molecules are immensely complicated, hundreds of atoms in length,’ Dr Shepard said, waving the red dot of his laser pointer across the screen where wire-frame spheres cannoned off each other and convoluted molecular intestines twined and wriggled.

I bet that is the only suit he has, Gaby McAslan thought.

‘Locked into hollow cylinders, they become essentially machines for processing atoms. Molecular factories. This is the mechanism by which the Chaga absorbs and transmutes terrestrial carbon - in vegetable form, mostly, but as you all know, it’s not averse to the odd juicy complex hydrocarbon or polymer. The fullerene worms break the chemical bonds of terrestrial organic components into the equivalent of short peptide chains - analogies tend toward the biological, for obvious reasons. We’re talking, in a sense, about a form of life on a smaller scale than the fundamental units of terrestrial biology; each of these smart molecules is the equivalent of a cell. The fullerene molecules pass the broken-down terrestrial molecules through their guts, for want of a better expression, in the process adding new atoms, realigning molecular bonds; building copies of themselves, imprinting them with information. In a sense, it’s a kind of alien DNA, processing basic amino-acids and inorganic compounds into the pseudo-proteins of Chaga biochemistry. "

Much has been written about the protagonists. Gaby McAslan, the feisty, driven Irish reporter and her on/off relationship with Dr Shephard research director. Some deride it as poor Mills and Boon, others are offended by any suggestion that they have a sex life. These two main characters drive the narrative. Would the book be changed if they had different personalities? Of course. Would it make the book any better? Who knows. It doesn't matter. We don't have to like them, become best buddies or life partners. It is how they interact, mostly Gaby, with the Chaga and those intimately involved with it. It is how they respond to the concepts of change and what it is to be human that makes the book. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2015/02/review-of-chaga-uk-evolutions-shore-us.... ( )

My reactions to reading this novel in 1996. Spoilers follow.

This novel reminded me of several other sf novels: the image of men living in a vast jungle populated by vegetable-like creatures reminded me of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse, the image by a alien flora taking over the Earth is reminiscent of Thomas Disch’s The Genocides (a novel I’ve never read) and H. G. Wells War of the Worlds, and the theme of mankind pushed by alien agency into the next step of evolution evokes Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. (I suppose the Big Dumb Object could be said to bring up memories of Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama which I never read). In fact, Irishman McDonald seems not only a humorous writer but a glib (not in a good way) writer. I suspect he’s read many of the same things I have from Omni articles on clay as the origin of terrestrial life to an explicit allusion to the “Big Dumb Object” entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia. I base this on a book ad in which he stated he practiced “sampling”.

This book is full of trivial asides from the opening Gaby McAslan experience in varying Coriolis forces while crossing the equator (not actually possible but a repetition of a popular myth) to a statement on people from the Plains states marrying early (perhaps from a sociological article McDonald read?) to trivia on Auschwitz inmates composing opera to the several – too many, in fact – movie allusions (though, to be fair, this novel is only set 6-15 years in the future approximately). However, though I suspect McDonald adds these things from his mind as handy story padding, he usually puts them in at appropriate moments.

Like Childhood’s End, this novel derives most of its strength from the tension of what the Chaga offers: a complete transformation into something unhuman or a society freed from material want and political suppression? I like the Chaga offering simply a new environment for African culture (a culture perhaps uniquely suited to take advantage of it).

However, I think the novel suffers form a couple of weaknesses in its Chaga story. First he Western nations seem rather oblivious to the inexorable if slow onslaught of the Chaga and see it only as a source of new medicines, weapons, and materials (though this smugness is criticized by some Africans). Second, in McAslan’s journey through “buckeyball jungle” she sees tribal and gang wars so it seems – material wants satisfied or not – wars will be fought amongst the Ten Thousand Tribes of the Chaga (unless you buy the notion people only war for resources which I don’t). The Chaga was marvelously strange and enigmatic (an artifact? an alien? a symbiote? a lifeform evolved in space or a tool designed to develop a “panhumanity” for the stars?). Other weaknesses were the unpleasantly ambitious character of McAslan -- explicitly acknowledged as ruthless, selfish, and self-righteous.

I liked the Kenyan setting very much. It and the Kenyan characters seemed quite real. One thought occurred to me in regard Havan and his hacker gang. 14 years ago, in the age of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the element of a Third World gang of hackers would have been the center of a story. Here they are a minor element (Another change in fashion since 1980’s sf is the fall of futures where Japan dominates. Now China is often mentioned as a future power.) This also may be one of the few novels where the UN (which Irishman McDonald sees as a neo-colonist tool of Western nations like America) are villains. Usually sf is internationalist and likes the UN. ( )

This one kind of lost me when the protagonist confimed the Coriolis effect using an aeroplane toilet.