Factual history has always played a central role in Foden’s fiction, possibly, arguably, to its detriment.
Thus his harrowing account of a (fictional) Scottish doctor who gets caught up in Idi Amin’s murderous regime in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ begins to go off the rails when it tries to have our hero present at an increasingly unlikely number of actual historical events.
Similarly, ‘Zanzibar’ is a novel about an American couple who get caught up in the 1998 terrorist attacks on embassies in East Africa, a text which, at some points, puts the fiction completely on hold while it delivers straight lectures about the origins of al-Qaeda, or the Starr Enquiry into Bill Clinton, or the precise functioning of a Tomahawk cruise missile, among many other factual digressions.
In this book, Foden’s fondness for historical fact triumphs over fiction: it is not a novel at all. It is a factual account of actual historical events but not done in the dry tones of an academic historian. These real events are viewed from a deliberately playful, quirky angle, written in a consistently whimsical style, and with many scenes and conversations imagined. Semi-fictionalised history…
On Lake Tanganyika
At the outbreak of the First World War, Germany ‘owned’ the colony of German East Africa, roughly present-day Tanzania, bordered by Portuguese East Africa to the south (modern Mozambique) and British East Africa to the north (modern Kenya and Uganda).
The key geographical feature of the region was Lake Tanganyika (at 420 miles, the longest freshwater lake in the world) which the Germans dominated by means of several big warships, two motorboats, a fleet of dhows and some Boston whalers.
Dominance of the lake was important because a) it was the lynchpin to ownership of the entire territory and war is about controlling territory; which in turn b) gave the Germans access to a potentially large supply of native or askari troops, with c) the worst-case scenario of Germ,any assembling an African army from across the region and descending down the Nile to take (British-run) Egypt and threatening the route to the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, India (p.46).
In 1915, with the war in stalemate on the Western Front and Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign about to lurch to disaster, the Admiralty was persuaded by a British big game hunter named John Lee, of a plan to combat and destroy the German battleships on Lake Tanganyika. The plan involved transporting the parts for a couple of fast motorboats by ship to South Africa, then north by rail up through Rhodesia, then by land and river through the Belgian Congo, then by train again East and so, finally, onto the lake directly opposite the German base at Kigoma.
Here the motorboats would be quickly assembled and set to attack the German warships. The whole expedition was put under the command of a well-known eccentric and semi-disgraced naval officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson.
A factual account
I initially thought this was one more of Foden’s deeply historical fictions. It certainly opens with an obviously imagined scene of a big game hunter stalking an elephant, using fictional devices to imagine his thoughts and actions. This, it turns out, is the big game hunter John Lee, whose plan is going to kick start the narrative. It establishes Foden’s method basing everything on documentary evidence of the historical events but freely inventing ‘fictional’ details, especially the characters’ dialogue.
What made me realise it is indeed a history is the extent of Foden’s quotations from other histories, from numerous memoirs, articles and lectures – every page has quotes from other books about the First World War or Africa – and from the flotilla of footnotes bobbing at the bottom of every page. These serve to indicate the scope of Foden’s research and reading and generally bolster the authenticity of the narrative, augmented by four pages of maps at the start, showing just where everything happened, and a three-page bibliography (listing 41 books and articles) at the end. Also at the end is a nifty page showing silhouettes of all the ships involved in the narrative, indicating their relative sizes.
Whimsy
Yet despite all this factual fol-de-rol, it’s not really a book for adults. This begins to be indicated 1) by the frivolous title, 2) by the deliberate ‘Swallows and Amazons’ hand-drawn style of the maps, and 3) by the fact that every chapter starts with an equally children’s book-style illustration (by Matilda Hunt). These all give the visual impression that it is a Swallows and Amazons-style children’s book.
Most of all it’s indicated by the book’s brisk skipping over massively important historical facts (such as the outbreak and progress of the Great War, the conception and deployment of the Gallipoli campaign) in favour of foregrounding the maximum amount of silliness.
For the whole thing is played for laughs, liberally sprinkled with scenes of high farce. Take one of the earliest scenes in the book, which introduces us to the future leader of the expedition, Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson, watching the vessel he was meant to be captain of being torpedoed and sunk while he was irresponsibly having a drink in the bar of an English harbourside hotel. The general idea is that Spicer-Simpson was an obsessive incompetent who the Admiralty was happy only too happy to send on some wild goose chase into darkest Africa.
The narrative goes out of its way to wring the maximum amount of comic effect from the eccentricities of many of the key characters. Take Spicer-Simpson’s insistence on only smoking handmade cigarettes with his name monogrammed on them. Or Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, ‘one of the earliest English aviators’ and his habit of affecting a monocle and a taste for Worcester sauce as an aperitif and his nickname Piccadilly Johnny. It’s history rewritten in the mode of Jeeves and Wooster. Michael Palin’s ‘Ripping Yarns’. History for the lolz.
It goes out of its way to emphasise the whimsical and and droll: Tubby Eastward acquires a chimpanzee he names Josephine (p.99). When they capture a goat which was a mascot on a German ship, it turns out the goat will let Josephine ride on its back (p.204). A Tanganyika guidebook advises that dead Zebra noses make pretty slippers (p.104). All this before we get onto the expedition leader’s fondness for wearing skirts, admittedly made from army khaki, but which he insisted were suitable for the hot weather, to the derision of pretty much everyone else on the expedition (p.171).
This question of whether it’s for adults was answered for me on page 35, where he gives us a lengthy footnote explaining what the Crystal Palace was, how it was transplanted to Sydenham, and burned down in 1936. He has to explain what the Crystal Palace was. From that point onwards I realised this is an intelligent child’s version of history, and wondered what the book’s target age group was intended to be: 12? 16? A feeling reinforced by the egregious use of exclamation marks to ram home the comedy.
It was supposedly a secret mission, although Kapitän Zimmer’s memoirs reveal that he knew there was a British naval expedition on its way to the lake by late May 1915: before it had even set off! (p.56)
More accurately, maybe, as Conan Doyle wrote somewhere, it’s for the adventuresome boy of any age.
Basic facts
The expedition was officially named the Naval African Expedition. Its mission was to transport two motorboats across land to Lake Tanganyika and use them to sink the Germans’ three battleships, Hedwig von Wissmann, the Kingani and the Graf von Götzen. Here’s all the facts you need to know:
Note how the Battle article cites an impressive number of citations from Foden’s book, suggesting that, despite its larky tone, it is now the definitive modern account of these events.
Why ‘Mimi and Toutou go forth’?
Mimi and Toutou are what Spicer named the two motorboats, telling his men they were French for ‘miaow’ and ‘bow-wow’, respectively (p.37).
‘Mimi’ in 1915. Note the cannon at the front and machine gun at the back. National Maritime Museum, London
As to ‘go forth’, this is a Ripping Yarns-type phrase which Foden deploys early on in the narrative, presumably hoping for a laugh, and then repeats at various points of their journey through the jungle and deployment on the lake, presumably for comic effect. Except that, like most of Foden’s attempts at comic effect, it doesn’t come off. Not for me, anyway.
Timeline of the journey
June 1915: the two motorboats undergo trials on the River Thames.
15 June: the two motorboats loaded aboard the Llanstephen Castle which sets sail from Tilbury, London, bound for Cape Town.
2 July: arrive at Cape Town to hear word of Royal Navy engagement with the German battleship Königsberg, on the Indian Ocean.
16 July: load the motorboats onto trains at Cape Town and set off on the 2,000 mile train journey north.
26 July: arrive at Elizabethville, the most southernmost major city in the Belgian Congo (p.81)
5 August: the expedition reaches the end of the railway at Fungurume. The two boats are unloaded from the train from Cape Town and commence their journey overland (p.90).
Pages 90 to 158 describe the long journey of the motor boats by train, by traction engine-drawn trailer through the jungle, up and over the Mitumba mountains and down into the Congo river for a spell, before docking and taking the train east to Lake Tanganyika, are awesome. It was an epic journey fraught with countless problems (rain, mud, quicksand, buckling bridges, the traction engines continually slipping off the track into the undergrowth or down steep slopes), the white men showing amazing resourcefulness and the reader boggling at the sheer physical labour demanded of the hundreds of native labourers they co-opted to labour for them.
28 September: after the gruelling portage over the Mitumba mountains, the expedition reaches the railhead at Sankisia and the motorboats are transferred to train.
1 October 1915 (p.128) A brisk railway journey brings them to Bukama station, where the motorboats are transferred to lighters on the Lualaba river down which they’ll be ferried. The Lualaba is in fact the name for the higher reaches of the main tributary of the Congo, it changes its name to Congo at the start of the Stanley Falls (p.127). They hitch a ride on the Constantin de Burlay, skippered by the drunk and angry Captain Blaes, passing across Lake Kisabe.
22 October: arrive at the railhead at Kabalo where they’ll leave the river and head east by rail along the valley of the Lukuga towards Lake Tanganyika (p.150).
26 October: the expedition arrives at the railhead which in fact, in that African way, comes to an abrupt halt a few miles before the port at Lukuga, which the Belgians call Albertville. The Belgians ran out of rails and sleepers. The boats are hidden in a siding until
Timeline of naval engagements
1 December: German ship Kingani comes in close to Lukuga and is fired on by Belgian guns (p.176).
22 December: first of the motor boats launched onto the lake (p.184)
26 December: the German Kingani comes incautiously close to the new harbour being built for the motorboats. These wait for her to pass then set off in hot pursuit, scoring direct hits, killing the captain and forcing the chief engineer to surrender. The badly damaged ship is towed into the Belgian port (Lukuga). Macabrely, Spicer takes the signet ring from the finger of the dead captain and wore it continually afterwards (pages 192 to 197). Our boys repair the Kingani, and Spicer renames it Fifi, in line with his frivolous naming of the two motorboats. Apparently it was the first German ship to be captured and transitioned to the Royal Navy during the Great War (p.204).
9 February: the Hedwig is order to spy out the Belgian port before rendezvousing with the Götzen. Instead it finds itself engaged with four of the allied boats (though not Toutou which had been damaged in a storm, p.222). After an extended chase and shooting, the Brits score two direct hits on the Hedwig and sink her, capturing her captain and crew.
5 June 1916: the flotilla sail south to Bismarckburg to link up with colonial soldiers who take it from the Germans (p.252).
11 June: Belgian seaplanes bomb the Graf von Götzen (p.254).
26 July: seeing that a large Belgian force was about to seize the German base of Kigoma, the captain of the Graf von Götzen gives orders for it to be scuttled (p.255).
After which (from page 257) Foden gives a kind of epilogue. The naval force was broken up. A depressed Spicer was invalided home. The two motorboats were handed over to the Belgians. Various other members of the crew met different fates, staying on in Africa or returning home via different routes.
Ripping diction
Posh diction in a multicultural society
I live in the most multicultural constituency in the UK, Streatham Hill, where over 120 languages are spoken, not least by my Chinese postman, the West African women on the Tesco’s checkout, the Brazilian receptionist at my Asian dentist’s, the Albanian labourers who fixed my fence, the Somalis who sweep the streets and so on.
Foden went to a jolly good public school (Malvern College, current annual boarding fee £46,000 i.e. entire secondary education £322,000 plus extras). He has done terrifically well in the London literary mafia where such a background sets the tone.
Living in this multicultural, multilingual, white minority environment makes me more aware than ever how incongruous it is that a certain kind of jolly, public schoolboy English diction lives on and flourishes in the world of ‘literature’, when it has is being erased and superseded in the world I live in.
Examples of chaps phraseology
It’s this variance between the posh boy diction I still meet in books, and the people I encounter in the real world which made so much of the book’s phraseology really stick out to me. It felt like it came from a lost world, from the ripping yarns of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.
- It is not surprising that Spicer’s fellow officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright dangerous. (p.14)
- [Spicer insisted on his medical officer wearing a cutlass], tearing a strip off the doctor when he questioned the point of a medical officer wearing such an item. (p.41)
- Every evening in the bar he would hold forth on his skill in hunting big game. (p.49)
- They bespeak the wisdom born of experience… (p.49)
- The German inshore guns began to fire – 47 mm field guns and small arms – but the Severn and the Mersey returned the compliment in heavier kind. (p.69)
- Away to the south-west, at a dinner table in Salisbury, skulduggery was afoot. (p.71)
- Sinking the Hedwig would be no mean feat (p.79)
- Fate would test Spicer again soon enough (p.164)
- Odebrecht realised the game was up. (p.225)
- … a world about to be shaken to its core. (p.237)
I know Foden is writing a deliberate and knowing homage to John Buchanesque adventure stories, I know it is to a large extent deliberate pastiche, but this phraseology feels to me like a message from before the flood, like an old colonel at the club asking for another pink gin, rather than a denizen of 21st century Britain.
One does, doesn’t one?
As does Foden’s routine use of ‘one’:
- One can be sure that the full story of the victory did not come through on the Lanstephen Castle’s Morse set (p.61)
- How Spicer didn’t know about the Götzen is a mystery one can only attribute to the parlous state of communications in Africa… (p.77)
- One certainly gets a more powerful sense of the danger from Dr Hanschell’s account (p.114)
- One gets a sense of what this must have been like from the travel journals of Evelyn Waugh… (p.135)
I know it’s partly or wholly pastiche and maybe I’m having a bad sense of humour failure, but the archaic pomposity of the style outweighed the slender trickle of comedy and got on my nerves. Only the king sounds like this.
Dangling prepositions
I know it’s a petty point but, given what I’m saying about the modern world and modern English usage, I am irritated by Foden’s sometimes going to absurd lengths and distorting normal English word order so as to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. This is a feature of ‘good style’ which was old fashioned in the 1960s. but lingers on like a fossil in Foden’s writing. Mostly it’s just irritating but occasionally it really messes up the sense of the sentence.
Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander, ordered that [the guns] be dragged back to Dar es Salaam, to which task 400 Africans were promptly put. (p.73)
Why not avoid the problem and write something clear and readable such like: ‘a task which 400 Africans were promptly put to.’ Americans aren’t afraid of ending sentences with a proposition, but posh Brits are. Why? Here’s some advice off the internet.
Yes, it’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition. The ‘rule’ against doing so is overwhelmingly rejected by modern style guides and language authorities and is based on the rules of Latin grammar, not English. Trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition often results in very unnatural phrasings. (Scribbr.com)
Which kinds of schools still teach Latin in part because it is meant to form the basis of good English prose style? British public schools of the type Foden attended, bastions of conservatism in thought and style, forming the habits of mind of such masters of English prose as Boris Johnson.
Poor editing
The book appears to have been unusually badly edited. On page 65 we are told that a young journalist named Winston Churchill had stayed at a particular South African hotel during the Boer War.
It’s odd that the text introduces Churchill in this way as he has already been mentioned half a dozen times already:
- starting on page 22 when his disagreement with First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher is discussed as a contributory factor to the failure of the Gallipoli campaign
- then later when his removal from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty was a condition of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar-Law joining Lloyd-George’s wartime coalition in 1915
- then again when Churchill is quoted describing the monotony of life aboard ship (p.48)
- and the silly tradition of having someone dress up as Neptune and insist on pranks when a British ship crossed the equator (p.57)
So for Churchill to be introduced on page 65, as if for the very first time, reads very much as if whoever edited the book hadn’t noticed the earlier references (?) or that maybe the book was published in magazine instalments and then hastily cobbled together with nobody checking for continuity (?). Whatever the reason, it felt amateurish and further knocked my confidence in the narrative. The research seems to have been pretty thorough but the actual writing of the book, as everything I’ve listed above indicates, is surprisingly slapdash.
The African Queen
Speaking of clumsiness, I was surprised at the clumsy way mention of the classic movie ‘The African Queen’, based on the 1935 novel by C.S. Forester, was just dumped into the text early on, in a parenthesis and without any preparation or explanation.
Their brief holiday over, the Congolese paddlemen were once again put to work. As they paddled through the reeds – sometimes getting out to tug the boats through by hand, as Bogart and Hepburn would do during the filming of The African Queen 36 years later – enormous numbers of birds flew up from their nest places in the marsh. (p.140)
There’s no previous explanation of the film or its stars. It’s just assumed that you know what this is referring to. I do because I’m the kind of white, middle-aged, middle-class film and literature buff this kind of book is aimed at, but the throwaway introduction of the huge fact that Forester’s book and the resulting movie are fictionalised accounts of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika which this book is about, is further disconcerting example of the casual, random, throwaway way even the most important historical or cultural references feel like they’ve just been chucked into the text, almost at random.
Only at the end of the main narrative does Foden devote an entire chapter (chapter 23, pages 265 to 280) to the story of C.S. Forester’s novel and the movie adaptation of it, but even here he tells the story in a cack-handed, arse-over-tit, convoluted way.
In a condensed, hectic way he jumbles up the real history, Forester’s version, John Huston’s screen version, stories about Hollywood producers, a reference to Kathleen Hepburn’s memoir about the filming, quotes from Huston’s autobiography, then that a novel was written about the making of the movie of the novel, and then that this novel was itself made into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, then that the screenplay was written by James Agee who had written the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans’ famous photographic record of the Deep South, and so on.
It’s an extraordinarily muddled, helter-skelter, brain dump of a chapter, a shambles as explication, more like the embarrassing name-dropping of a cocky A-level student. Foden goes on to tell us that Huston’s film crew were ferried about in a boat which, twenty years later picked up Ernest Hemingway after he’d been involved in a plane crash, took him onto another location where he was promptly injured in another plane crash, tells us what Hemingway’s injuries were, then straight onto the trivial pursuit factoid that Hemingway was a big fan of Forester, and so on and so on.
It’s a movie buff equivalent of trainspotting, packed with trivial pursuit facts, quite bereft of insight or interest. I was appalled at the poor level of this farrago.
Heart of Darkness
The most obvious literary reference for any journey in the Congo is Joseph Conrad’s super-famous novel, Heart of Darkness. Foden is not shy about being obvious and his text contains references to and quotes from Conrad on pages 127, 131, 133, 146, 207, 272 and 275.
None of these shed any light whatsoever on Conrad, they are used in the most basic, bucket, banal kind of way just to cross-reference this or that setting or episode in Foden’s narrative. For example, he quotes Conrad’s descriptions of the river Congo, or the jungle, adding nothing much to the narrative except the Sunday supplement pleasure of spotting literary allusions. At one point, with wild inappropriateness, Foden compares Spicer’s daily bath– which he turned into a ritual for the bemusement of the local Africans – with the behaviour of Conrad’s Mr Kurz, who was (obviously) an absolutely and completely different kind of man (p.208). The comparison adds nothing to our understanding of Conrad or Spicer, it’s just a handy reference to chuck in along with a lot of the other lumber and junk which clutters the narrative.
Just as unoriginal is Foden’s yoking in of T.S. Eliot. Dear oh dear, what a lazy sixth form name to drop. The pretext is that one of Eliot’s poems (The Hollow Men) features a quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (‘Mistah Kurtz. He dead’) and his most famous poem, The Waste Land, was to feature another, super-famous quote (‘The horror! The horror!’) until its editor removed it.
Now, as any literature student knows, Eliot claimed that The Waste Land was ‘based’ on contemporary works of anthropology such as Fraser’s Golden Bough or Jesse Weston’s then brand-new study, From Ritual to Romance (p.251). All this irrelevant information is shoehorned into the text because Foden, reasonably enough, wants to give us an account of the African mythology of the people living around Lake Tanganyika and its surrounding mountains, goes on to describe the behaviour of the local Holo-Bolo tribe of killing off old kings and immediately crowning new ones – but it’s at this point that he begins to twist things by claiming that the Holo-Bolo ritual can be said to be an example of the cults of death and rebirth described by Fraser and Weston…and so all this can be linked to Eliot…and Eliot uses an epigraph by Conrad…and Conrad write Heart of Darkness about the Congo…and this book is about an adventure in the Congo…and so…SHAZAM! It all fits!!
See how contrived all this is? All this tying the text up in knots so as to name-drop some of the most obvious works of English literature. It’s like an undergraduate game of Consequences, clever and trivial.
It’s also disturbing or another reason not to take the book seriously, that Foden doesn’t take the opportunity to reference any modern anthropological work about the myths of central Africa, which I’m sure abound and would be genuinely interesting, but would require some actual serious research. Instead he prefers to draw on his own undergraduate degree to serve up bleeding obvious cultural references from a hundred years ago which will be greeted with knowing nods by every other English graduate but are absolutely useless as objective, serious anthropological analysis.
This entry-level use of undergraduate cultural references, combined with their clumsy shoehorning into a farrago of pointless name-dropping, really shook my faith in Foden as a writer. The factual historical parts of the book feel solid and interesting. But the blizzard of cultural references and ‘explanations’ which clutter it up feel obvious, thrown together, shallow and patronising.
Last night I read a comment by a reader on a Guardian article which immediately made me think of this book:
I think it’s quite common for writers to mistake cultural references for substance or insight in their prose. However, they often serve more to exclude rather than enlighten the reader.
(As backup to my view that T.S. Eliot is just about the most obvious English language poet for pretentious people to namedrop, I’m reading Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease, whose title is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, and when Achebe wants to highlight his protagonist’s callow inexperienced quickness to show off the learning he’s acquired in his recent English degree, he has him tell his nurse girlfriend that something she’s just said is ‘pure T.S. Eliot’. She is unimpressed. The scene exists in Achebe’s novel to highlight how callow, obvious and immature the protagonist is, keen to show off his newly acquired learning at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate…)
F0oden on human evolution
A prime example of a completely extraneous bit of pseud-culture which is shoehorned into the narrative and turns out to be both distracting and wrong comes towards the end.
In the final passages of the book, after the historical narrative is finished, Foden moves on to recount his modern-day journeys to research the story of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika. The idea is to see what physical remains of the events, if any, can still be found. Not much, is the answer. Instead these last 30 or so pages feel more like a tourist travelogue as Foden describes the various hardships he underwent on his journey round the lake looking for historical traces, almost as if they’ve been tacked onto the end of the book to bulk it out to the necessary length.
Thus it is that we find the author standing in the Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man and admitting that he can never remember the sequence of human evolution, does it go Australopithecus, then Homo habilis, then Homo sapiens?
Two points about this. Number one, why doesn’t he look it up on the bloody internet instead of making a point about his own ignorance? Because that’s the kind of text it is: cultivating a deliberate image of bumbling whimsy. It places Foden in direct descent from the bumbling Brits who managed to pull of their historic feat, not least the eccentric Spicer-Simpson. Maybe it’s meant to make him come over as endearingly imperfect, a sort of Michael Palin figure.
Number two: no, that is not the sequence of human ancestors, because our contemporary understanding of human evolution now rejects the entire idea of one line of human development. Instead, all the evidence points to a surprising number of Homo species arising in different places around Africa, flourishing for a while then dying out. The lineage we belong to survived by a fluke. The kind of simple one-line-of-descent Foden can’t even remember properly is, like his reference to Weston and Fraser, completely out of date and discredited. Read:
- The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer (2011)
- Where did they all go? How Homo sapiens became the last human species left (2023 Guardian article)
Having got this completely wrong, Foden goes on to repeat the equally out-of-date error that Homo sapiens ‘wiped out’ Homo neanderthalensis in a ‘genocide’ (p.288).
No. A genocide suggests a co-ordinated and sustained campaign of extermination which requires modern technology, weapons and, above all, population size. Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum, says that at their peak there were probably only about 50,000 proto-humans spread across all of Eurasia. The tiny groups they lived in might go years or even decades without bumping into other groups. There weren’t nearly enough early humans to conduct anything remotely like a ‘genocide’. Modern thinking is that they/we just had a fractionally better ability to survive than the Neanderthals, for whatever reason – slightly higher intelligence, slightly better social or cognitive skills – and that this gave us the edge which let us survive in a wide variety of ecological niches while the Neanderthals didn’t.
Why does Foden drag this incorrect misleading stuff into his text? Not to inform us, not to keep us up-to-date with the latest research but, it turns out, purely and solely because he wants to use the non-existent Neanderthal ‘genocide’ to introduce the topic of the appalling behaviour of the pre-Great War Germans in their colonies, where they mounted a real-life genocide against the native inhabitants of South-West Africa, and as a peg to describe how the Germans’ brutal treatment of natives in German East Africa triggered a revolt which was put down with equal brutality.
Why not just say that? Why drag in all this half-understood, out-of-date rubbish about human evolution to get on to the topic he wants to discuss?
By now I hope you can see how this just seemed to me just another example of the book’s modish superficiality. It’s a dinner party trope, a Radio 4 cliché, to talk about the ‘genocide’ of the Neanderthals, even though modern science thinks it’s bunk. Sounds cool, though. Makes it sound like you are a knowledgeable guy with a tough-minded approach to history.
Except it’s wrong.
And it’s insulting. If you’re going to raise the subject of a genocide then at least treat it with the respect it deserves. Foden mentions the extermination of the Herero tribe in half a sentence and the maji rebellion in less than a page. So this book is very much not the place to learn about either of these important events which very much ought to be memorialised and taken seriously.
If you’re interested in either, put down this book and pick up Thomas Pakenham’s epic account of The Scramble for Africa, which devotes chapter 33 to the Herero war (14 densely printed pages) and chapter 34 to the maji-maji rebellion (13 pages). That’s the way to treat a genocide. Give it the length, depth and detail the horribly murdered victims deserve.
So: the entire passage which starts quite promisingly with the author standing in Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man turns out to be inaccurate, misleading, and only there in order to provide a rather tortuous pretext for references to German imperial brutality which are, like everything else in the book – apart from the central narrative of transporting the motorboats – treated with almost insulting brevity and superficiality.
Thoughts
After working through 311 ages of often gripping narrative, I did, of course, learn a huge amount about this little-known aspect of the Great War. Nevertheless, I was very disappointed. I can see that the book is intended to be a comical entertainment but that comedy almost entirely depends on you buying into the world and tone of eccentric Edwardian chaps which Foden depicts and this, for some reason, I found impossible to do.
Maybe because I had been brutalised by the serious issues and graphic violence of Foden’s first three novels and was still reeling from the snakepit of issues raised by his descriptions of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, the clash of the West and Islam, discussed at length in his preceding book, Zanzibar and found it impossible to switch to the tone of light-hearted whimsy which dominates this book.
Maybe because I found the use of ‘one’, the odd word order, the jolly chaps phraseology, to be too much of a blocker. Maybe, quite simply, because the text just isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.
It has many striking and memorable moments. The account of the portage of the motorboats through the jungle, up over the Mitumba mountains and along the Congo is awesome. The account of the naval battles on the lake feels very thorough and authoritative. The factual accuracy about the ships, the war and the battles, at all times feels solid. The recreation of so many of the historical characters is full and persuasive.
But for me these achievements were undermined by:
- superficial discussion of related topics like the situation on the Western Front, or the sinking of the Lusitania (p.42) or the cack-handed treatment of The African Queen or the rubbish about human evolution or the inadequate treatment of tribal genocides, which I’ve mentioned
- the footnotes on every page, most of which are either really obvious or embarrassingly ‘quirky’
- the maladroit use of those Conrad quotations and all the other trite and clunkily inserted cultural references
- the repeated preference for slick attitudinising on the woke topics of the day (racism, imperialism, genocide) instead of the in-depth explanations or proper analysis which those topics deserve
Above all by the deliberate frivolousness of the tone which, as you can tell, just didn’t work at all for me.
If you like this kind of historical whimsy then ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika’ is for you, and I imagine it sold well to the same kind of people who bought ‘Nathaniel’s Nutmeg’ and other quirky takes on little-known episodes from history.
Maybe it’s a flaw in my taste that I either like full-on comedy (like William Boyd’s outrageously funny ‘A Good Man in Africa’) or full-on, serious history with proper analysis (see the many straight histories in my list of Africa reviews) so that, as you can tell, I just didn’t get on with this larky yarn which falls between both.
Interesting-sounding books which Foden namechecks
- Phantom Flotilla: The story of the Naval Africa Expedition by Peter Shankland (1968)
- The Great War in Africa by Bryan Farwell (1987)
- The First World War by Hew Strachan (2001)
Compare with ‘An Ice-Cream War’
William Boyd’s second novel, ‘An Ice-Cream War’, is set during the First World War in British and German East Africa, so there’s some overlap (though not, in fact, as much as you might think, Boyd’s book being a sweeping account of the land war, Foden’s entirely about the relatively small and specific events on Lake Tanganyika). For example, the (real, historical) overall commander of German forces, Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, appears in both books.
If it was a choice between the two books, I would hands down recommend the Boyd novel, which is long, rich, deeply researched, wonderfully imagined and luminously written – the opposite in every way of this book.
Credit
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden was published by Michael Joseph in 2004. References are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.
Giles Foden reviews
- The Last King of Scotland (1998)
- Ladysmith (1999)
- Zanzibar (2002)
- Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
- Freight Dogs (2021)
Books & Boots 