All posts tagged imperialism

Entangled Pasts, 1768 to Now: Art, Colonialism and Change @ the Royal Academy

The Royal Academy has discovered that Britain used to have an empire, and that this empire and many other aspects of British culture and economy were deeply indebted to the Atlantic slave trade and wants to tell everyone about it! Those of us who have known, read and written about the British Empire and the Atlantic slave trade for a quite a long time are not quite as excited about these great discoveries as the curators of this exhibition are.

But then we don’t work for an organisation like the Royal Academy which, like a growing number of British institutions (banks, insurance companies, the Church of England, the National Trust) are coming under pressure to uncover, publish and apologise for all their institutional connections with slavery and imperialism.

Installation view showing ‘The First Supper (Galaxy Black)’ by Tavares Strachan (2023), commissioned specially for this exhibition

So that’s what this exhibition is about. It is a huge, dazzling and quite exhausting exhibition about the links between Slavery and the Royal Academy, ‘informed by our ongoing research of the RA and its colonial past.’ Featuring over a hundred works by around 50 artists connected to the RA, it is designed:

‘to explore themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging.’

A theme of our times

These, as anyone who reads my blog knows, are the same kinds of themes which dominate most contemporary art exhibition. Notable recent examples which focus on empire, slavery or the Black experience include:

‘no world’ from ‘An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters’ by Kara Walker, Hon RA (2010) British Museum, London © Kara Walker, courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co. and Sprüth Magers

Mixing ancient and modern

Of all of these shows Entangled Pasts most resembles the 2016 Tate show which took a very straightforward view of the British Empire and colonial guilt, and mixed up classical works from the 18th and 19th centuries with bang up-to-date pieces by contemporary Black artists. Same here. Maybe the most striking thing about this huge show is the way that it deliberately mixes up past and present, into a sometimes confusing, a-chronological, thematic display.

Portrait of a Man, probably Francis Barber by Sir Joshua Reynolds PRA (around 1770) The Menil Collection, Houston Photo © Hickey-Robertson, Houston

So paintings by old masters like Royal Academy founding president Joshua Reynolds, John Singleton Copley and J.M.W. Turner are presented alongside works by what the curators call ‘leading contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas’, including by Ellen Gallagher, Yinka Shonibare and Hew Locke, Sonia Boyce, Frank Bowling and Mohini Chandra.

Installation view of ‘Woman Moving Up’ by showing Yinka Shonibare (2023) Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry © Yinka Shonibare CBE RA

Exhibition premise

The exhibition starts from the fact that the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, at more or less the peak of the transatlantic slave trade. Some of its early members actually owned slaves, but most of them certainly painted portraits of rich people who derived their wealth from sugar or tobacco plantations which were worked by slave labour, generally painting their portraits in England or, occasionally, painting life on slave plantations in the colonies.

Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, although the legal condition of slavehood wasn’t abolished until much later, in 1833. So for the fifty years or so between the founding of the Academy (1768) and the final abolition of slavery in the British colonies (1833) people at all levels of British society continued to benefit from slave labour – at the low end of the social scale, workers in factories using raw cotton from American plantations, at the high end, rich plantation owners, merchants and companies which benefited from the profits of the slave triangle.

So the early part of the exhibition brings together lots of work by Royal Academicians which:

  • portray rich slave owners and their plantations
  • portray families in Britain who benefited directly or indirectly from slave labour
  • more generally portray Black people in the 18th and 19th centuries, many of whom have a backstory involving slavery and liberation

These early works provide an impressive and interesting range of paintings to look at, enjoy, and read picture captions about. In addition there are display cases containing relevant relics, such as early editions of memoirs by freed slaves such as Olaudah Equiano or Frederick Douglass, and correspondence about them with various members of the Academy.

As it happens, I’ve written for this blog a detailed summary of Douglass’s most famous work:

But right from the first room, mixed up with all these classical works are a variety of much more modern pieces by predominantly Black artists, including bang up-to-date pieces and some works commissioned specially for the exhibition.

I was expecting to mostly like the classical pieces but was impressed by a lot of the contemporary work. Some was super-memorable, like Hew Locke’s installation of a fleet of model boats, created with loving attention to detail, and suspended from the ceiling to create an ‘armada’. As a keen model-maker, I really loved these.

Installation view of ‘Armada’ by Hew Locke (2017 to 2019) Photo by the author

The videos

What nothing I’d read had prepared me for was the impact of the two enormous videos. An entire room has been hung with thick red velvet curtains to create a heavy Victorian flavour and onto a big wall-sized screen is projected a nicely-shot and powerful 26 minute film by Isaac Julien about the African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass who, during his active years in the 1840s and 50s, was ‘the most photographed person in the USA’ and a tireless campaigner against slavery. Here’s a clip:

In my opinion moving pictures quite eclipse static ones in interest and imaginative power which is why I am prejudiced against films and movies – their appeal is too immediate and visceral and flashy. Watching a movie and then returning to a book or painting is like staring at the sun and then looking back at trees or flowers, you are too dazzled to register their much weaker but more profound content. In this exhibition the two videos were beautifully made, with powerful polemical messages but, in my opinion, tended to drain the impact of the paintings.

This was even more true of the second video piece, an enormous installation towards the end of the exhibition. This is ‘Vertigo Sea’ by John Akomfrah, which involves the projection of immaculate, high definition videos onto three enormous screens. The piece dates from 2015 and lasts a whopping 48 minutes.

The 3 or 4 minutes I watched contained awesome footage of whales cavorting in the southern seas (according to the wall label, the film incorporates footage from the legendary BBC Natural History unit) before introducing old black and white footage of whales being harpooned by whaling ships, dragged aboard and their carcases eviscerated. This was unpleasant enough but was intercut with shots of Black people in chains washed up on a beach, presumably intended to depict victims of the vast evil of the slave trade, so I could sort of see a connection, how an instrumental view of others – whether people or animals – leads us to brutality. But then, suddenly, there was black and white footage of an atom bomb going off in the Pacific, and this cut to footage of Japanese survivors of Hiroshima, looking very sick indeed.

So it felt like the whole 48-minute video was turning into a review of humanity’s worst actions and activities (after all, countries like Norway and Japan still pursue commercial whaling). It felt like a long powerful Feel Bad movie and, as someone who reads the daily news headlines, I really don’t need any more bad news to tip me over the edge.

Responses

This brings me to my responses to the exhibition. Well, I can see that the basic premise – a review of the involvement of the Royal Academy and leading individual academicians to the issues of slavery and empire and then, by extension, attitudes to race and ethnicity, from its founding to the present day – is valid and interesting. And many of the works from the classic period (18th and 19th centuries) had interesting wall labels which highlighted direct links between the grand, beautifully dressed sitters for various portraits and their involvement in the slave trade, members or the aristocracy and royal family, portraits of plantation life, and much more.

But when art curators write about history you start to get into difficulties. Art curators are not historians. They are paid to keep up with developments in art studies, they are not trained to undertake historical research or to assess new evidence and ideas in historical studies.

It is this, I think, which accounts for the way that this and all the exhibitions about slavery and imperialism I’ve been to feel – no matter how thorough their selection of works of art and how scrupulous the art historical research has been – from a purely historical perspective, shallow and superficial.

If we take ‘history’ to be the record of all human activity, then you can’t just take an enormously long period, from the start of the European slave trade around 1500 until the cessation of slave trading to places like Brazil in the 1900s – and make it all about just one issue.

1. A simplistic view of imperialism

It may be true to say that a good deal of the history of the European nations from the 1500s to the 1960s was affected by or heavily involved in, imperial and colonial activities, but the more you simplify that huge and multifarious history down to the two ‘issues’ of slavery and imperialism, the more you realise you are missing out on all the multiple complexities which make it ‘history’.

To take an obvious aspect, for most of that period, the European nations were at one another’s throats with an enormous number of wars, on mainland Europe and at sites around the world. If we focus on the period from the founding of the Academy, you have the Seven Years War, then the American War of Independence, and then the gargantuan Napoleonic wars between Britain and France. At the end of the period you have the two great conflicts of the twentieth century.

So both the trade and the broader activity of imperialism must be set against the complex, troubled conflicts between the colonial powers and the permanently shifting web of alliances they created, other people’s battles which the populations of Africa, in particular, found themselves caught up in (resentment against fighting in the white man’s wars is a recurring theme of the three novels by Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o which I recently reviewed).

Presenting ‘imperialism’ as just the One Bad Thing which characterises the history of Western Europe misses out on all the multitudinous complexity of imperialism in practice, and its complex embedding in a host of other historical, economic, social and military realms. The best introduction to this complexity that I know of are John Darwin’s brilliant books:

The first one, in particular, goes into great detail about the many types of imperial enterprise which came under the heading imperialism (commercial, military, territorial, legal and so on) and the more you read, the more vastly complicated and confusing the subject becomes.

It also makes the staggeringly obvious but often forgotten point that, for most of history, most human beings have lived under empires. Empires have been the usual way in which societies have been organised for as long as we have written records. Therefore, the European empire builders were simply expanding a mode of social organisation which can be found in the Chinese Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and many others.

One of the interesting questions, from an intellectual or historical point of view, is how the European empires differed from the many, many empires which preceded them or existed alongside them. And that is the kind of question, triggering detailed and sophisticated analysis, which makes studying the concept of empire, as explained by professional historians, so rewarding – but visiting simple-minded, dumbed-down exhibitions like this so shallow and frustrating.

It’s not that an exhibition like this one which presents ‘imperialism’ as one thing, carried out by one group of people – ‘white people’ or ‘Europeans’ – with one sole aim in mind, which was the exploitation of all non-white peoples, is wrong, exactly – it’s just that it’s so simplistic. It doesn’t begin to capture the multi-layered complexity of everything that happened over such a long period of time.

2. A simplistic view of slavery

Similarly, the exhibition takes a very simple view of slavery, which is that it was something done exclusively to Black Africans by white European nations who were all as bad as each other and had no redeeming features. There are, of course, numerous caveats to this naive idea.

1. Slavery is a universal human institution. It existed in all the empires I listed above. The Romans exported slaves from Britain. the Vikings captured Saxons as slaves. When William of Normandy conquered Britain in 1066 an estimated 10% of the population were slaves. But there’s not much here about the Roman slave trade, the Viking slave trade or Saxon slavery because they’re the wrong kinds of slaves, white slaves.

2. About a million white Europeans were carried off into slavery by Arab raiders:

Many historical studies exist but you won’t find them mentioned in exhibitions like this. Wrong kind of slaves.

3. Slavery existed in Africa before Europeans ever arrived.

4. Slavery existed between Black people who. Before the advent of Europeans with their binary notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’, Africans divided themselves into numerous tribes, all of which were continually fighting and jockeying for power with their neighbours, some of which rose to becomes ’empires’, such as the Empire of Mali (1226 to 1670) or Greater Zimbabwe (1220 to 1450). But the history of Black imperialism and of Black-on-Black slavery are rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this.

5. Long before Europeans arrived, there was a thriving Arab slave trade, the systematic kidnapping of Black Africans by Arab slavers who shipped them across the Sahara or up the East coast to the slave-hungry markets of the Arab heartlands. For a comprehensive description see Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora by Ronald Segal (2001). Segal cites scholars Ralph Austen, Paul Lovejoy and Raymond Mauvey who estimate the total number of black Africans trafficked into the Islamic world between 650 and the twentieth century was between 11 and 14 million i.e. directly comparable to the number trafficked in the transatlantic slave trade we hear so much about. None of this alleviates the guilt and responsibility for the Atlantic slave trade, it just puts it in wider, fuller historical context – but it is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions like this because the enslavers weren’t white, and this is an exhibition about white guilt.

6. Once the Europeans arrived, Black Africans conspired to capture and sell their African ‘brothers and sisters’ to the slavers. The full extent of the complicity of Black tribes and leaders in capturing and selling into captivity other Blacks is rarely if ever mentioned in exhibitions, nor how it continued long after the British banned slavery and tried to stamp out slave trading at its source in Africa.

All these omissions are glossed over and suppressed because exhibitions like this, and entire subject of imperialism and slavery in broader cultural discourse, in the media, in education, is less about these messy complexities and more about emphasising white guilt, British guilt.

Taken together, all these omissions build up an impression that only white Europeans are capable of evil and exploitation. The implication throughout, in every wall label, video and caption, is that no Africans or non-white groups ever did anything wrong, that all Black people were always and everywhere only the innocent victims of the appalling trade. It’s an impression encouraged by the complete omission of any reference to the Arab slave trade.

I’m not saying the Atlantic slave trade wasn’t a monstrous evil, a crime against humanity, a scar on European history, a scandal whose damning legacy we may well never escape from. I’m just making the fairly obvious point that like any other historical event which took place over hundreds of years, across two or three continents and involved scores of millions of people, it was a very complicated phenomenon, which breaks down into countless millions of smaller actions and events. The interest, for me at any rate, is precisely in the full historical complexity, not in simplistic naming and shaming.

To someone like me the interest of history is in the complexity of human affairs and the often counter-intuitive nature of people and events. That’s one of the things which I would have thought make art and literature valuable – their capacity to surprise us in the same way that people we know, even the ones we think we know well, sometimes surprise us. Unexpected twists. Strange ironies. Moments of humanity amid the darkness.

But in an exhibition like this there are no surprises. Empire bad. Slavery bad. White people bad. Britain bad. Anyone who disagrees with these uninflected sentiments runs the risk of being ostracised or cancelled because the conflation of empire and slavery, and a uniform, unquestioned condemnation of  both, have become the new cultural orthodoxy, and nuance, complexity and contradiction, questioning and curiosity, are not welcome.

7. One last point, the guilt of the British (traders, businessmen, plantation owners, politicians, army, artists) is hammered home in wall label after label, caption after caption, for running this wicked, evil thing the British Empire. But something you rarely if ever see referred to is that, once the wicked British Empire had gotten round to banning the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy, the British Army, countless British missionaries and a good deal of British diplomatic activity was deployed to get other countries to follow suit – to ban slavery, to end the Arab slave trade in Africa, and to intercept ships carrying slaves across the Atlantic and set them free.

The naval campaign against slavery is documented in books such as:

But none of the slavery and empire exhibitions I’ve visited ever mention the huge cost in men, resources, time, money and effort which Britain devoted to trying to end the slave trade. Why not? Because these exhibitions aren’t about presenting a complete review of all the historical evidence, in its vast and confusing complexity – they are about making the simple-minded political points relevant to our present cultural concerns and anxieties.

After a while the systematic erasure and suppression of all these other strands and of the broader context starts to look more like propaganda than history.

Installation view of ‘I’ll bend but I will not break’ by Betye Saar (1998) which combines a white sheet as worn by the Ku Klux Klan with an ironing board showing the famous image of slaves packed into a slave ship (for the importance of this iconic image see Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild). Photo by the author

Labels or works?

As I’ve mentioned lots of times, my friend Andrew the designer long ago stopped reading the wall labels at art exhibitions. He just strolls around responding to the art works as contemporary artefacts, reacting to shapes and designs, patterns and poses, colours and textures, as he finds them.

Unfortunately, I had a lot more of a literary education than him and am addicted to texts, so I’m the kind of visitor who reads every single wall label, sometimes several times, in order to orientate myself within the curators’ worldview and claims.

Very often I end up disagreeing with these labels because curators have only one job, which is to write just enough to justify their exhibition and their selection of works but nowhere near enough to deeply analyse and work through the issues which they routinely raise, name-check, and then leave hanging.

Art curators’ grasp of history is generally superficial and is always selective, carefully selected to make the kinds of points that will justify, market and promote exhibitions which are themselves responding to contemporary times and trends.

Art galleries (surprise surprise) have to make money. They need visitors and so have to wait until they think a blockbuster exhibition like this will be commercially viable i.e. until pretty much all the ideas in it have become common currency and widely accepted, in this case, by the kind of people who visit Royal Academy exhibitions. This is why so many of the big exhibitions tend to be on trend but rarely ahead of it.

And what could be more on trend, what is dominating the news and the political agenda these days more than issues of race and ethnicity, what with politicians and businessmen accusing each other of racism, and making outrageous slurs against Black and Asian people? (I am, of course, referring to the scandalous remarks allegedly made by businessman and Conservative Party donor Frank Hester about former Labour MP Diane Abbott, coming hot on the heels of former Conservative Party deputy chairman Lee Anderson’s outrageous comments about London mayor Sadiq Khan)

And these recent controversies involving (Conservative) politicians’ views about Black and Asian people come against the grim backdrop of the 7 October Hamas attack into Israel and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, which have, apparently, triggered an alarming rise in incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Political, social and cultural problems or issues around race, and the role of the British Empire whose legacy, in the form of a deeply multicultural society we now live in, could hardly be more topical.

The way this kind of exhibition is following public opinion, not leading it, is clearly indicated by the press release for the show. This explicitly states that the curators were reacting to events and responding to public opinion, not shaping it.

The exhibition was programmed in 2021 in response to the urgent public debates about the relationship between artistic representation and imperial histories. These debates were prompted by the Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol in 2020.

All of this, the responsive nature of the thinking behind this exhibition and the fraught nature of recent headlines about race and racism, all explain why the show feels in many places more like an extension of the news – illustrated by a selection of works from the Royal Academy archives – than an exhibition in its own right – because that’s, in a sense, what it is.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the omission of the more complex perspectives I mentioned above (Darwin, Segal) rubbed me up the wrong way and gave me an unduly negative view of the whole thing.

Maybe I should be more like Andrew the gay designer, who strolls around the same exhibitions as me, but never gets cross or confused because he never reads the curators’ wall labels and so never takes issue with them. Instead he simply delights in the wonderful things that he encounters – an armada of model boats hanging from the ceiling (Hew Locke), a sculpture of a woman with a globe for ahead struggling up some broken stairs (Yinka Shonibare), beautifully realistic portraits of Black men, women and children from the 18th century (Reynolds, Copley), not one but two rooms full of life-sized cartoon cut-out figures of Black people in colourful costumes (Lubaina Himid), two enormous immersive film installations (Isaac Julien, John Akomfreh), and the many other visual and artistic delights this huge and dazzling exhibition has to offer.

Installation view of ‘Naming the Money’ by Lubaina Himid RA (2004) © Lubaina Himid. Photo by the author.

Warning

As the topics of race, imperialism, immigration, identity and gender become ever more dominant in the art world as in the so-called ‘real’ world, so, apparently, does the need to warn people about some of the exhibits found in these exhibitions.

Long ago in the 1960s and 70s the aim of radical art was to shock the staid bourgeoisie. Nowadays, the exact opposite is the case. Anything which might possibly shock or trigger any possibly type of visitor has to be flagged up in advance with multiple warnings.

Tate did it very prominently in their exhibition about the British Baroque because it contained some paintings of Black slaves in chains. This exhibition also comes with a general warning:

This exhibition contains themes of slavery and racism. Some works include historical racial language and violent imagery.

And by the doorways into some of the individual rooms there are warnings that you are about to be confronted with upsetting imagery depicting racism and slavery. We didn’t use to need these kinds of warnings. Now we do. They are straws in the wind indicating the huge social and cultural changes which we are all living through.

Related links

Related reviews

Other posts about slavery and racism

Origins

The Islamic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade

The American civil war and slavery

Slave accounts

4 Comments
by Simon on March 16, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture, Slavery
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on March 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/entangled-pasts-1768-to-now-art-colonialism-and-change-royal-academy/

Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art @ the Barbican

Big and beautiful

This is a great exhibition, a huge and dazzling collection of contemporary fabric art from around the world, works large and small, incorporating a wide variety of techniques, bringing together images and traditions and colour palettes, stories and ideas from around the world.

Blood in the Grass, 1966 by Hannah Ryggen © Hannah Ryggen / DACS 2023. Photo by Kode / Dag Fosse

It brings together just over 100 artworks by 50 international practitioners. These include well-known names such as Faith Ringgold, Tracey Emin, Cecilia Vicuña, Magdalena Abakanowicz and Yinka Shonibare, alongside many less well-known figures. And it covers a very wide range of media, from intimate hand-crafted pieces to large-scale sculptural installations.

Textile as a medium

Textiles play an extraordinarily wide variety of roles in our everyday lives. They cover and protect us, engage our senses, trigger our memories, indicate our gender, display our beliefs. We are wrapped in cloth when we’re born and shrouded in it when we die and every day in between will be wearing some kind of fabric. I just towelled myself down after a shower, then slipped on some comfortable fleece trousers and a t-shirt, am sitting on a cotton-cushioned chair, later tonight will slip between a white cotton sheet and a patterned duvet cover. Fabrics are everywhere in our lives.

Exhibition aims

But Barbican exhibitions are never just about beautiful objects, they are always polemical and political, they’re always making a point. This one has two aims:

1) One is to challenge and question the way artistic work in fabrics has always played second fiddle to the fine arts i.e. painting and traditional sculpture, always been looked down on, often demeaningly referred to as ‘women’s work’, or slighted for having such close association with domestic and artisan production.

2) The second aim is very strongly political: every one of the artists has been chosen for the way they use textiles, fibre and thread with political goals – to challenge oppressive power structures, to commemorate the victims of state power and historical wrongs, to stand up for the weak and oppressed, to act as rallying cries or symbols of resistance to power.

The exhibition aims:

to shine a light on artists from the 1960s to today who have explored the transformative and subversive potential of textiles, harnessing the medium to ask charged questions about power: who holds it, and how can it be challenged and reclaimed?

to communicate vital ideas about power, resistance and survival.

And:

From intimate hand-crafted pieces to monumental sculptural installations, the works [gathered here] offer narratives of violence, imperialism and exclusion alongside stories of resilience, love and hope.

‘Hard-luck stories’

What this means in practise is that a lot of the works on display, no matter how beautiful or appealing at first glance, turn out to have harrowing and shocking inspirations or subject matter. For some reason I’ve been listening to the old Bob Dylan song, Black Diamond Bay. In the last verse the narrator cynically laments that:

Seems like every time you turn around
There’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear.

Well, that perfectly describes the exhibits here. All of them have darker sides, and you need quite a strong stomach to cope with some of the stories you read about.

For example, the very first room contains a big bold quilt by Tracey Emin. This recalls her famous quilted tent, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995’, and I immediately liked it because of the punk associations of the Union Jack. It also made me think of my daughter, a classic ‘school refuser’ who might well have said, with the artist, ‘No you listen – I’m not late – you’re lucky!’ All of which made me smile.

NO CHANCE (What a Year) 1999 by Tracey Emin © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2022, courtesy White Cube Photo by Stephen White

But then I read the wall label and discovered that this hand-stitched appliqué blanket expresses Emin’s feelings as a 13-year-old girl in 1977, the year a man raped her. Ah. Oh. Not so funny or entertaining now, is it? Now you understand the way the work’s sweary, confrontational text, cut out in felt and hand-stitched onto fabric, really comes from a place of great hurt and anger and vulnerability. God. Upsetting.

In a similar vein, I turned a corner into one of the upper gallery’s 12 alcoves and was immediately struck and attracted by the rich deep scarlet colouring of this wonderful piece of fabric, made all the more vibrant by the way it’s set against the jet-black background.

Installation view of ‘Luingamla Kashan’ by Zamthingla Ruivah (1990 to the present). Photo by the author

Until I read the wall label:

In 1986 a young woman in Northern India named Luingamla, a friend of the artist, was murdered by army officers who attempted to rape her. The officers walked free due to a law, a remnant of British colonial rule, that meant that armed forces were immune from being tried in civil courts. Student groups and the Tangkhul Shanao Long (Tangkhul Women’s Association) rallied to bring a case before the courts. They won the case in 1990, four years after her murder. Ruivah wove this keshan — a woollen sarong worn by men and women in the Naga Hills of Manipur, northeast India — to commemorate Luingamla’s path to justice. Since then, the design has been passed down through Naga communities across the region, with more than 6,000 women having produced over 15,000 of them. They have become a symbol of solidarity with the Naga resistance movement and the fight against state violence towards women.

Probably ‘hard luck story’ isn’t the correct term, but see what I mean? Every single artifact here has an upsetting or problematic inspiration or purpose.

Take the image I opened this review with, ‘Blood in the Grass’ by Hannah Ryggen. This turns out, on investigation, to be a visual depiction of the US war in Vietnam. Once you read the wall label you learn that the face at the top right is a stylised portrait of US President Lyndon B. Johnson, who presided over the disastrous escalation of the war in the late 1960s. And that the green rectangles represent the lush fields of Vietnam while the grid of red lines represents the blood shed by the massacred Vietnamese. Ah.

Or take this massive, wall-sized piece by Tau Lewis, ‘‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ which, at first sight, looks like lots of sea creatures frolicking against a patchwork of blue fabrics representing the ocean, a fairly harmless work you might find hanging in a sixth-form art block.

‘The Coral Reef Preservation Society’ by Tau Lewis (2019) © Tau Lewis, courtesy the artist and Night Gallery, Los Angeles

But in fact:

This patchwork quilt in part pays homage to the enslaved women and children who lost their lives during the Middle Passage (the enforced transport of enslaved people from Africa to the Americas in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries). Reimagining them as sea creatures, Lewis transforms the trauma that lies in underwater territories into spaces of regeneration and emancipation.

There’s a lot about the historical crime of the slave trade, which feeds through into more up-to-date crimes against Black people and invocations of the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘american Juju for the Tapestry of Truth’ by Teresa Margolles (2015) Courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich/ Paris

Apparently, artist Teresa Margolles often uses material residues from murder sites in her art. This patchwork tapestry was laid on the ground at the site in New York where Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man, was placed in an illegal chokehold and killed by New York police.

It’s one of a pair of works by Margolles which are laid flat on lightboxes like the bodies of the murdered placed on autopsy tables. The works were made collaboratively with embroiderers who were close to the victims. Members of the Harlem Needle Arts cultural arts institute made the work commemorating Garner’s death, a patchwork which also honours other African American victims of police brutality.

So, to recap: this is very far indeed from being a collection of pretty textiles. Every work tells a story and many of the stories are harrowing and upsetting.

Favourites

Here are some of the works I liked most, based more on their actual appearance and the impact they made on me than the righteousness of the issues they address. I add the curators’ explanations in italics.

‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018)

Installation view of ‘TIKAR/MEJA’ by Yee I-Lann (2018) Photo by the author

In TIKAR/MEJA, images of tables are woven into the mats through the weft and warp of colourful strips of pandan leaves, using the same techniques Yee’s ancestors used for centuries. The table serves as a symbol for the imposition of a patriarchal and colonial worldview onto a population, while the mat signifies a more democratic and mutual power, imbued with ancestral knowledge and traditions. This display shows twelve works from a series of sixty that can be displayed in different configurations.

‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019)

Installation view of ‘To Teach or to Assume Authority’ by Sarah Zapata (2018 to 2019) Photo by the author

‘I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.’ This passage from the Bible inspired the title of Zapata’s first sprawling ‘shag’ sculpture. Its structure references the architecture of the Nazca ceremonial site Cahuachi, where a huge woven cloth was excavated in 1952. She transforms the ruin into a landscape of vibrant latch-hooked threads, refusing any risk that this ancestral site might be lost to time. The undulating form subverts the notion of the rug as floor-based: Indigenous communities in Peru only began using textiles on the floor after the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century.

Incidentally, the Zapata work raised a basic question about the exhibition which is that I really, really wanted to reach out, touch, stroke and run my hands over lots and lots of the works here. The curators make it worse by repeatedly emphasising how warm and intimate and comforting so many different types of fabric are – only to place around every single one of them, loud alarms which are triggered if you step or even put your hand beyond the black bars on the floor. Frustrating.

As usual the show is spread over the Barbican’s two floors. The 12 or so upstairs rooms have some great pieces, but the most impressive space is the big room downstairs, which contains the Zapata piece, a typical Abakan by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, whose major retrospective at Tate Modern I reviewed not so long ago.

Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012)

It also contains maybe the single most striking work in the show, a forest of slender, brightly coloured fabrics suspended from the ceiling and billowing gently as people walked past them, created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña.

Installation view of ‘Quipu Austral’ by Cecilia Vicuña (2012) photo by the author

The idea of hanging fabrics is familiar to anyone who caught Vicuña’s recent installation at Tate Modern. According to the curators:

Lengths of knotted, unspun wool stream down from the ceiling, accompanied by the sounds of Vicuña chanting poems related to water, for which thread is a metaphor in Andean culture. This monumental work, which Vicuña describes as a ‘poem in space’, embodies her deep engagement with the ancient Andean form of the quipu (meaning ‘knot’ in the Quechua language): a system of ‘writing’ with knots. This ritualistic way of communicating was understood to connect its makers to the cosmos.

In 1583, following the Spanish conquest, quipu were banned and ordered to be destroyed. For Vicuña, reviving the quipu is ‘an act of poetic resistance’ — it is ‘a way to remember, its potential involving the body and the cosmos at once.’

Quipu Austral was commissioned for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. Proposing the work as a ‘prayer for the union of the world’, Vicuña found poetic resonances between the ancient Indigenous peoples of South America and Australia, connecting their world views of exchange, equality and freedom. This included the parallel oral traditions of the Andean concept of the cosmographic ceque (meaning ‘line’) and the Aboriginal ‘Dreamtime’ songlines, as metaphysical maps honouring the life-giving force of earth, water and song. The vibrant colours of the wool are based on the hues found in both Aboriginal Australian rock paintings and Andean weavings.

Igshaan Adams

Mind you, the upstairs has a very impressive room, probably the best single space, filled with works by Igshaan Adams. It’s an installation consisting of several works. From the ceiling hang ‘prayer clouds’ gassy feeling conglomerate structures made from gold and silver link chain, copper , gold and silver wire, gold chain and spray paint, polyester braid, metal charms, copper, brass and silver wire, wood, plastic and crystal beads, cowrie and sea snail shells, galvanised steel and wood centre, gold and silver link chain and clear lacquer spray paint. Quite a mix!

Installation view of the Igshaan Adams room. Photo by the author

Through the ‘foggy’ effect of these metal imbroglios you see a more conventional rectangular work hanging on the wall. This is ‘Heideveld’ (2021) made of wood, painted wood, plastic, glass, stone, precious stone, metal and bone beads, shells, nylon and polyester rope, cotton fabrics, wire and cotton twine. It was worth going right up close to the surface of this to see the extraordinary range of material which have been used and the awesome amount of work it must have taken.

Close-up view of ‘Heideveld’ by Igshaan Adams (2021) Photo by the author

This installation by Igshaan Adams grows out of his expanded practice of weaving and his exploration of so-called ‘desire lines’ in post-Apartheid South Africa, the informal pathways that are created over time through footfall, often acting as shortcuts. He understands these lines as ‘symbolic of a collective act of resistance by a community who have historically been segregated and marginalised through spatial planning. Intentionally or not, these pathways remain symbolic of carving out one’s own path, collectively or individually.’

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993)

Although the works the curators have chosen all too often commemorate murder, oppression, racism, sexism, misogyny and so on, there are occasional moments of happiness, like the sun breaking through the clouds on a gloomy winter’s day. One such piece is ‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks.

‘Family Treasures’ by Sheila Hicks (1993) © Sheila Hicks, ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2023, courtesy Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

In ‘Family Treasures’, Hicks draws upon the intimacy of textile: we all wear it, we invest it with feelings and it is literally the texture of our everyday lives. While in Amsterdam in 1993, she asked close friends and family members to surrender their most beloved items of clothing, which she wrapped in colourful yarn and thread. Each tightly-wound bundle is a reminder of what we hold dear.

Hicks is a leading member of the fibre arts movement in Europe and the United States in the 1960s and 70s, in which mostly women artists experimented with fibre and thread as a legitimate medium for art. Hicks’ work is often sculptural, playful and harnesses a variety of scales — from the small and intimate to the monumental — challenging the idea that textiles are flat, decorative and wall-based. Her work has been motivated by the acknowledgement that fibre permeates peoples’ lives. She has commented: ‘you can’t go anywhere in the world without touching fibre.’

Sweet idea, huh? And very valid point that fabric art needn’t be flat and wall-based, as many, many of the works here amply demonstrate.

Hammock by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003)

‘Hammock’ (part of ‘Four Hammocks’) by Solange Pessoa (1999 to 2003) Courtesy of Rubell Museum, Miami and Washington DC. Photo by Chi Lam

‘Hammock’ was created in response to the land of Minas Gerais, Brazil, where Pessoa grew up. Textiles — in the form of rags and canvas — act as a carrier for living and decaying matter. Here fabric bags, stained with the orange soil that fills them, resemble voluminous, lumpen bodily forms that evoke internal and external organs, as well as life and death. They could be breasts, uteruses, entrails, testicles. In Brazil, cadavers are often transported in hammocks instead of stretchers.

Conclusion

I’ve covered 11 of the 50 exhibitors. That leaves 39 more for you to discover in this big, colourful, wonderful but – be warned – sometimes upsetting and challenging show. If it sets out to prove that work in fabric can be every bit as interesting as more traditional ‘fine art’, then it triumphantly succeeds. And if it wishes to show that this kind of work also lends itself to collaborative, community-based responses to brutality, abuse of power and exploitation, then it also succeeds.

Lastly, I haven’t devoted enough time to considering the actual techniques of quilting, sewing, knitting, collaging and assembling which are on display throughout the show. That’s because I’m not really qualified to do so, but the friend I went with hardly read any of the labels (thus sparing herself quite a lot of distress) and instead was riveted by the variety and inventiveness of technical skills on display.

I haven’t really dwelt enough on the artistry, skill and inventiveness which has gone into so many of these pieces. It’s worth visiting for anyone interested in fabric, quilting, sewing, decorating and texture-based art for that reason alone. Quite apart from the loud blare of the political stories and issues, here is a collection of quietly fastidious and intricate artistry.

Detail from ‘Dylegued (Entierro)’ by Teresa Margolles (2013) Photo by the author

Participating artists

  • Pacita Abad (The Philippines/USA)
  • Magdalena Abakanowicz (Poland)
  • Igshaan Adams (South Africa)
  • Ghada Amer (Egypt/France)
  • Arpilleristas (Chile)
  • Mercedes Azpilicueta (Argentina)
  • Yto Barrada (Morocco)
  • Kevin Beasley (USA)
  • Sanford Biggers (USA)
  • Louise Bourgeois (France / USA)
  • Diedrick Brackens (USA)
  • Jagoda Buić (Croatia)
  • Margarita Cabrera (Mexico / USA)
  • Feliciano Centurión (Paraguay)
  • Judy Chicago (USA)
  • Myrlande Constant (Haiti)
  • Cian Dayrit (The Philippines)
  • Tracey Emin (UK)
  • Jeffrey Gibson (USA)
  • Antonio Jose Guzman and Iva Jankovic (The Netherlands / Panama and The Netherlands / Yugoslavia)
  • Harmony Hammond (USA)
  • Sheila Hicks (USA)
  • Nicholas Hlobo (South Africa)
  • Yee I-Lann (Malaysia)
  • Kimsooja (South Korea)
  • Acaye Kerunen (Uganda)
  • José Leonilson (Brazil)
  • Tau Lewis (Canada)
  • Ibrahim Mahama (Ghana)
  • Teresa Margolles (Mexico)
  • Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe)
  • Małgorzata Mirga-Tas (Poland)
  • Mrinalini Mukherjee (India)
  • Violeta Parra (Chile)
  • Solange Pessoa (Brazil)
  • Loretta Pettway (Gee’s Bend) (USA)
  • Antonio Pichillá (Guatemala)
  • Faith Ringgold (USA)
  • LJ Roberts (USA)
  • Zamthingla Ruivah (India)
  • Hannah Ryggen (Norway)
  • Tschabalala Self (USA)
  • Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (UK)
  • Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon)
  • Angela Su (Hong Kong)
  • Lenore Tawney (USA)
  • T. Vinoja (Sri Lanka)
  • Cecilia Vicuña (Chile)
  • Billie Zangewa (Malawi / South Africa)
  • Sarah Zapata (Peru / USA)

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on February 18, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 18, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/18/unravel-the-power-and-politics-of-textiles-in-art-the-barbican/

Prester John by John Buchan (1910)

I was going into the black mysterious darkness, peopled by ten thousand cruel foes.
(Davie Crawfurd penetrating the headquarters of the great black rebellion, Prester John page 99)

John Buchan (1875 to 1940) was absolutely determined to be a writer, and started being published while still at university in the 1890s. Prester John was Buchan’s sixth published novel but the first to reach a wide readership, establishing him as a writer of fast-paced adventures in exotic settings.

The historical Prester John

Between about the 12th and 17th centuries stories circulated throughout Europe of a legendary Christian patriarch and king ruling a fabulous kingdom somewhere in ‘the Orient’ named Prester John. At first Prester John’s kingdom was imagined to be in India, later its location moved to Central Asia. As European explorers, starting with the Portuguese in the 16th century, discovered Africa, Prester John’s mythical kingdom was relocated there, starting with the little-known coastal kingdom of Ethiopia, especially once it was understood that Ethiopia was a Christian enclave in what had been thought to be the Muslim world. Later still the mythical kingdom was said to be located somewhere in the African interior. By the time Buchan’s novel was published, most of Africa had been explored and nobody seriously believed in Prester John any more. He had become one among many children’s legends and stories.

Buchan knew about Africa. Soon after leaving university, he had spent two years in South Africa (1901 to 1903) as political private secretary to Lord Milner, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, who many people held responsible for the Boer War which was in its closing phases (it only ended in May 1902).

He puts this knowledge to good use in a story which deliberately harks back to the Africa adventure stories of Henry Rider Haggard, especially the ones about the hero Allan Quatermain, which were still being published when Prester John came out (Haggard novels continued to be published into the late 1920s). Presumably there’s a whole category of these kinds of fictions, given a name like ‘Imperialist Africa fictions’.

Prester John

Prologue with dancing black minister

The opening chapters of Prester John have a very consciously Scottish tone and vocabulary (see the vocabulary list at the end of this review). It opens in the village of Kirkcaple. The boy hero, David Crawfurd’s father is minister of Portincross. A black preacher comes to town and preaches about racial equality. The boy hero has a gang of mates, including Archie Leslie and Tam Dyke. One night they come across the black preacher on the beach, stripped down walking round a fire, lifting his hands to the moon, having drawn symbols in the sand. They creep up closer to get a better view but one of them makes a sound and the infuriated black man chases them up the gully of the stream which feeds down to the beach. David only escapes by throwing rocks in the pursuer’s face.

Next day they see him again, all respectable in his minister’s clothes, being driven in the free Church minister’s trap, gratified to see he has a swollen eye, and two strips of sticking-plaster on his cheek.

Seven years later

Years pass (on page 72 Arcoll states it is seven years since Davie saw Laputa dancing on the shore at Kirkcaple). David finishes his education in Edinburgh and goes on to the university. Then his father dies and his mother can’t live on the tiny pension he bequeaths. An uncle steps in on the basis that Davie and his mum move to Edinburgh. Days later this uncle says he’s had a word with a friend who runs one of the biggest businesses in South Africa – Mackenzie, Mure and Oldmeadows – and has secured him the job of assistant storekeeper at a place called Blaauwildebeestefontein. The general idea is that Davie will be encouraged to open up trade to the area north, becoming a successful entrepreneur or maybe getting involved with gold and diamonds. Better than sitting on a stool in an Edinburgh office.

The journey out

David makes friends with a couple of fellow Scots aboard the ship heading from Southampton to South Africa but gets the shock of his life when one day he sees the black man he hasn’t seen for years, since the incident on the sand, travelling first class. He discovers his name is the Reverend John Laputa. At one point David eavesdrops Laputa conferring with a bad-tempered, ugly-looking baddie named Henriques (‘that ugly yellow villain’).

The ship docks at several places in South Africa, at Cape Town where Henriques disembarks, then Durban where David meets up with his cousin, then with the local manager of the firm he’s going to be employed by, one Mr Colles. Colles briefs him on the place he’s going and why so many previous employees have quit: it’s in the middle of nowhere, there’s hardly any white men to socialise with, but also there’s some kind of religious centre nearby which natives for miles around go on pilgrimage to.

Lourenço Marques

David then takes a small cargo steamer to Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese East Africa, and discovers that none other than his boyhood friend Tam is the second mate. They have a good yarn but are both amazed when, just before the ship sails, none other than the black minster, Mr Laputa, comes hustling up the gangplank. Tam is indignant when he is turned out of his cabin which is given to this VIP passenger.

When the ship docks at Lourenço Marques, Tam takes him to meet a Mr Aitken, ‘landing-agent for some big mining house on the Rand’ who was born and raised in Fife and turns out to have heard David’s father preach in his young days. Within the skeins of the British Empire was this subsidiary matrix of Scotsmen. Aitken gives him another layer of briefing about Blaauwildebeestefontein, namely 1) it’s the location of a wizard famous among the natives and 2) it’s a centre for diamond smuggling.

Blaauwildebeestefontein

After a journey by rail and then rickety ‘Cape cart’ across arid plains, through dusty gorges, David finally makes it to Blaauwildebeestefontein and he discovers it is a one-horse settlement, with just two solid buildings and twenty native huts. He discovers his boss-to-be, Mr Peter Japp, an old, balding, smelly man, passed out in a room reeking of alcohol on a shabby palette bed.

On the ship out from Britain David had met a small modest schoolteacher who, it turned out, was also heading for Blaauwildebeestefontein. Relations with Japp deteriorate, not least because of the appalling way he treats their girl servant Zeeta, one day whipping her till David seizes the whip (sambok) from his hand and promising to whip him (Japp) within an inch of his life if he does it again. At the same time Japp is strangely servile to the big booming black men who patronise the shop.

David buys a dog off a stony-broke prospector, ‘an enormous Boer hunting-dog, a mongrel in whose blood ran mastiff and bulldog and foxhound, and Heaven knows what beside. In colour it was a kind of brindled red, and the hair on its back grew against the lie of the rest of its coat.’ He takes some breaking in but eventually becomes David’s loyal companion. David names him Colin, and the dog proceeds to follow him everywhere and protect him.

Slowly, David comes to realise he is being spied on by natives hiding among bushes during the day and sometimes coming right up to his bedroom window at night.

Umvelos’

David’s manager, Colles, writes to revive an old idea, that he set up a commercial outpost at a place called Umvelos’. David travels half the way there with a convoy of Boers who he comes to admire as rugged honest country folk. Ample descriptions of the countryside, and of the Boers’ culture, tales of hunting, lore about the local tribes, with a sprinkling of Boer vocabulary. He admires the oldest of the party, a farmer called Coetzee, who’s a crack shot with a rifle.

As he penetrates into Africa, he finds people call him Davie.

The Rooirand

Arriving in his own cart at Umvelos’, Davie gets a mix of Dutchmen and natives to build a shop and house. While they do so he explores the mountainous ridge to the north, known as the Rooirand. An extended passage describing his arduous trek there and then dangerous climbing up cracks and chimneys and whatnot. The most significant event is he has made it back down off the cliffs when he becomes aware of someone moving through the jungle, creeps closer, and observes a black in a leopard skin marching towards the cliff face. But when David makes his way through the jungle to the same rockface he discovers the man has disappeared without a trace. Black magic! He half walks half runs away from the area, back along the road towards Umvelos’ where he rendezvous with one of the black workers from the new shop and homestead who was sent to meet him.

‘Mwanga

David arrives back early at Blaauwildebeestefontein and catches Japp discussing stolen diamonds with the most frequent black visitor to the shop, ‘Mwanga. So Japp is a fence for stolen diamonds! David tells Japp he must write a letter to Colles quitting, then leave and not be found within 20 miles or he’ll report him to the police.

Wardlaw’s premonitions

Davie moves in with Mr Wardlaw the schoolteacher who tells him about his paranoid premonition that the native blacks could rise up and massacre all the whites, as in the Indian Mutiny. There seem to be more blacks around than actually live there and the black kids have all stopped coming to his school. Davie calms him down, but moves his own bed out of direct sight of the window, keeps a loaded shotgun by the bed, and has his massive dog Colin sleep close by.

Days pass and the tension, the sense of being spied on and surrounded increases. Henriques pays a visit to Japp who takes him up to his bedroom but Davie is a building across the road and can’t see what they’re discussing, diamonds or the native insurrection Wardlaw is so worried about?

On a walk with Wardlaw they hear a shiver of drums rolling from north to south, are they war drums? A scribbled note arrives with the cryptic message ‘The Blesbok are changing ground’ (p.65). What does it mean? Davie gathers together all the firearms in the shop, plus some knives.

James Arcoll the spy

Late one cold afternoon (the town is on a berg or mountainside) a broken-down old black beggar appears. Davie kindly gives him some meal but then he invites himself inside, makes sure the door is secure, takes off his wig, washes his face and is transformed into Captain James Arcoll. He is, of course, a British Intelligence Officer (p.75) and, first, quizzes Davie about what he knows, then reveals the situation:

The idea is that Prester John was a real historical conqueror, founder of an empire in Ethiopia, as the generations passed, various successors claimed his title and the specificity of the historical figure blurred into legend. The key point is his power came to be associated with a particular fetish, probably a wooden carving. Chaka who built the great Zulu emperor had it but his successors couldn’t find it.

Ethiopianism

Arcoll has found that a black evangelist has been travelling up and down south Africa, preaching the word but going way beyond that and telling his audiences ‘Africa for the Africans’, claiming they can kick out the whites and establish a great empire again. Also known as Ethiopianism.

Laputa the reincarnation of Prester John

There’s a lot of detail (Arcoll has met Laputa disguised as a native in Africa but formally dressed like a white man in Britain, where he addressed Church gatherings and hobnobbed with MPs) but at his meetings with minor chiefs learns that Laputa considers himself the Umkulunkulu, the reincarnated spirit of Prester John, and he owns the Ndhlondhlo, the great snake necklet of Prester John.

Laputa has been making a fortune from the illegal diamond trade, working partly through Henriques, generating a fortune which he has spent arming the different tribes from the Zambezi to the Cape. Davie is stunned when Arcoll tells him the native rising is planned for the day after tomorrow! BUT Davie goes to bed happy and no longer scared. Arcoll has told him that, although Laputa has organised the tribes to rebel he, Arcoll, has also established a network of a) informers in those same tribes and b) alerted the authorities and settlers who are ready to rise up once the rebellion kicks off. So Davie is no longer frit because a) a leader has appeared who is going to take control, and b) far from being alone he’s discovered he’s a part of a huge co-ordinated army.

The plan

Arcoll knows that Laputa is scheduled to meet Henriques next day at Davie’s store, so the conspirators decide it will look perfectly natural if Davie turns up there but surreptitiously tries to gather as much intel as possible about the uprising.

To his horror, en route Davie encounters Laputa. Worth noting that Laputa, despite claiming to be the reincarnation of Prester John, has a far from classical African physiognomy, for Davie recognises ‘the curved nose, the deep flashing eyes, and the cruel lips of my enemy of the Kirkcaple shore.’

Davie the storekeeper

Somehow Laputa gains in stature and presence through the narrative. Davie now observes that he is a massive 6 foot 6 tall, and of ‘noble’ proportions. When Laputa says he’s heading for the store, Davie plays the fool and says he is the storekeeper. He gives Laputa a chair to sit on, shares dinner with him, even gives him a fine cigar, prattles on about how he believes the blacks are fine fellows, better than ‘the dirty whites’, how he hopes Africans will take Africa back for themselves etc, all designed to ingratiate himself with the man he knows is leader of the rebellion. In return Laputa politely warns him to leave this remote outpost and head back to ‘the Berg’, and not tomorrow, but tonight!

Davie spies

Later, Henriques arrives. He and Laputa confer in the outhouse and Davie sneaks through the cellar to eavesdrop. He’s nearly discovered but rushes back to the store and pretends to be dead drunk. Henriques wants to murder Davie in his supposed sleep, but Laputa stays his hand. Soon as they’ve left, Davie scribbles everything he’s heard about Laputa’s plans on a scrap of paper which he ties to the dog’s collar and tells it to run back to Blaauwildebeestefontein. Then Davie steals one of the horses and sets off north to the rendezvous point Laputa had mentioned.

The secret ceremony

Here he arrives and is greeted by black guards and led a merry tour into the face of the cliff, up narrow passages, emerging onto a ledge with a stone bridge across a chasm in which a fierce river flowed, then further in into the mountain till he emerges in a huge open space, one wall of which is a thundering waterfall.

We are, in other words, in the Land of Fantasy, a fantastical setting almost as dazzling as the Lost City in ‘She’. There are some 200 blacks gathered in a circle round an old blind black man with a circlet of gold on his forehead who is obviously ‘The Keeper of the Snake’ who Arcoll described as a key player in the ritual of anointing Laputa the rebel leader. Davie has been accepted because he claimed to be a messenger from Laputa, and he knew the password (‘Immanuel’) which he’s overheard Laputa sharing with Henriques.

Davie witnesses the impressive ritual of the reincarnation of Laputa with the spirit of Prester John, the daubing on the forehead of all present with the blood of a sacrificed goat, and the bestowal on Laputa of an ancient necklace of priceless rubies once worn by the Queen of Sheba, taken from an ivory box

During all this the narrative tells us that Davie is still only nineteen years old! (p.105)

To Davie’s amazement the priest and then Laputa invoke not pagan African gods but Christ and Christianity, a wild incantation, a long recital of glorious rulers from African history – ‘I was horribly impressed’. Once installed, Laputa delivers an awe-inspiring sermon listing all the infamies of the white man and calling on his black brothers to rise and overthrow them. Davie finds himself stirred and displaying fascist tendencies:

I longed for a leader who should master me and make my soul his own, as this man mastered his followers.

(He likes to be mastered. A lot later, when he meets up again and is close to passing out, Arcoll fixes him with his gaze: ‘Arcoll, still holding my hands, brought his face close to mine, so that his clear eyes mastered and constrained me,’ p.164.)

A key part of the vows Laputa makes is that for the next 24 hours nobody will commit any act of violence. As I read this I thought this was pretty much to ensure Davie’s safe escape or at least guarantee that he doesn’t get bumped off when he is discovered, as he surely soon must be.

Then the leaders of all the tribes take turns to kneel and swear allegiance to Laputa. Buchan gives a vivid sense of the varied appearance and appurtenances of the different tribesmen:

Such a collection of races has never been seen. There were tall Zulus and Swazis with ringkops and feather head-dresses. There were men from the north with heavy brass collars and anklets; men with quills in their ears, and earrings and nose-rings; shaven heads, and heads with wonderfully twisted hair; bodies naked or all but naked, and bodies adorned with skins and necklets. Some were light in colour, and some were black as coal; some had squat negro features, and some thin, high-boned Arab faces. But in all there was the air of mad enthusiasm.

Finally, it’s Davie’s turn to advance from the shadows to take the vow and, of course, first Henriques and then Laputa recognise him as the storekeeper, denounce him, he is seized by a hundred hands, beaten and passes out.

Tied to a horse

When he comes to Davie finds he is, of course, bound hand and foot and tied to the horse of none other than Mwanga, the domineering black who Japp fawned over and Davie chased out of the store. Now he has his revenge, gloating over Davie’s capture. The entire black army is marching south for a rendezvous with more forces at a place called Dupree’s Drift. Haggard and almost delirious from exhaustion and lack of food, nonetheless Davie estimates the black army at maybe 20,000 strong (!).

Finally there’s a break in the marching and a ‘savage’ looking native comes to check his bonds and give him some food but then whispers and turns out to be a messenger from Arcoll. Improbably enough his dog, Colin, got back to Blaauwildebeestefontein, Arcoll found him and read the message i.e. that the black army was going to march south to Dupree’s Drift. The messenger tells Davie that Arcoll will start firing just before the army gets to the drift at which point the native will cut his bonds and Davie can scamper free.

Along comes Henriques who stands gloating over him but then leans down and whispers that, actually, he is loyal to the white man’s cause, that he never killed the Boers he claimed to have, and that he’s on Davie’s side. I thought this might be an interesting development but Davie lets fly a deluge of insults and accusations and Henriques spits in his face before ordering a nearby African to tighten Davie’s bonds.

Henriques, looking tall despite being described in the text as short and slight, gloating over our hero, Davie, looking surprisingly fresh-faced for someone the text describes as dirty and fainting with hunger. Illustration by Henry Clarence Pitz (1910)

The ambush at Dupree’s Drift

At sunset they reach Dupree’s Drift and the army are half-way across the ford, and the litter carrying the priest bearing the ivory box containing the ruby necklace are precisely half-way across, when firing breaks out from a bluff on the other side. It is Arcoll and the white men, as arranged. As promised the African leading Davie falls to cutting through his bonds. However, firing hits the litter bearers from somewhere much closer. Once Davie is free he realises it’s Henriques who has only one motive, to seize the priceless necklace. He is a crack shot and shoots several of the litter guards and then the old priest himself.

It is now almost dark and Davie trails Henriques into the shallow water, watches him take the ivory box from the dead priest’s hand, open it and extract the ruby necklace. He is just standing up with it when Davie cracks him one on the chin, knocking him out, grabs the necklace, stuffs it in his breeches’ pocket. But instead of running downstream and crossing somewhere safe to join Arcoll’s men on the bluff, in the heat of the moment, scared by the size of the black army and the fact Laputa was riding back across the drift towards him, Davie bolted back up the track they’d come along.

Davie’s flight

After the initial buzz of the battle and his punch have calmed down, he realises he has a march of something like 30 miles to the West to ‘the Berg’ or the foothills to the mountains, which he regards as ‘white man’s territory’, ‘white men and civilisation’. For some reason the cool hills he regards as ‘white’ and the hot plains as ‘black’.

An exciting account of Davie’s feverish scared trek across wild African country, involving crossing two rivers, in one of which he manages to lose the revolver he’d nicked from Henriques. The stars are bright in the big black sky.

It was very eerie moving, a tiny fragment of mortality, in that great wide silent wilderness, with the starry vault, like an impassive celestial audience, watching with many eyes.

Davie is caught

Dawn shows him he is not far from the first glen which will lead him up into the safety of the mountains but at that moment he is cut off by black scouts who have beaten him to it. He makes it into the glen and climbs a good way through its varied terrain including jungle, but comes out to see a number of black figures spread out ahead of him. He slips into a side glen, slips off the necklace and places it in a cleft in rocks which gives onto a still shallow pool. Then he returns to face the men who are from Machudi’s tribe and explain they’ve been ordered to capture and bring Davie to Laputa. They treat him well, giving him food and letting him sleep before they set off back east and south to the place Laputa had appointed for meeting place of the tribes, Inanda’s Kraal.

At Inanda’s Kraal

He is too weak to walk and has to be carried in a litter which Machudi’s men efficiently construct. Description of the long trek and final arrival at Inanda’s Krall. Here all is pandemonium because the 24 hours of peace the vow pledged the army to make has lapsed and now scores of natives crowd round Davie threatening him with their assegais or spears. He sees Laputa surrounded by lesser chiefs and strides boldly over towards him. Laputa weighs him up, says it was folly to try and escape and tells his men to take Davie to his kya or hut, but Davie makes an impassioned attack on Henriques as the real traitor. Henriques lurches forward and goes for his pistol to shoot Davie. In that second Colin leaps forward and pushes Henriques to the ground but the Portuguese gets his gun hand free and shoots Colin three times. End of faithful hound.

Davie leaps forward but is soundly beaten and pricked by some of the spears before a final blow knocks him senseless.

Davie bargains for his freedom

When he comes round it is in a darkened hut being spoken to softly by Laputa who describes in detail the sadistic tortured death he is about to meet. Davie responds that Laputa needs the necklace. Laputa loses his temper and says is Davie so stupid as to believe his power derives from a petty trinket. He has the ivory box and if he chooses not to open it nobody will be any the wiser.

“Imbecile, do you think my power is built on a trinket? When you are in your grave, I will be ruling a hundred millions from the proudest throne on earth.” (p.147)

Davie is inspired to offer him a deal. Give him his life and he will lead him to where he hid the necklace. Even if his men torture him he wouldn’t be able to describe where it is, because he doesn’t know the country well enough. Laputa hesitates then accepts the deal. He has Davie blindfolded and shackled to his horse which he then rides at a slow trot so that Davie can just about keep up, stumbling and nearly falling.

Shattered David Crawfurd tethered to the horse of Laputa as they go off in search of Prester John’s necklace. Note Laputa’s angular features, more like a native American than an African. Illustration by Henry Clarence Pitz (1910)

Journey back to the Berg

It’s a long trek. At one point Davie asks Laputa how, as a sincere Christian, he can unleash a bloodbath against the whites. Laputa replies briskly that a) Christ turfed the moneychangers out of the temple and said he came to bring a sword b) Christianity in the intervening centuries has had many bloody reformations c) the Africans are ‘his people’.

After a long trek with various incidents they arrive at the glen where Davie hid the necklace. He has to be untied to clamber up the rocks and waterfalls to the pool where he hid it. He finds it and hands it to Laputa who transforms into ‘savage’ mode, demanding that Davie bow down to it.

At the sight of the great Snake he gave a cry of rapture. Tearing it from me, he held it at arm’s length, his face lit with a passionate joy. He kissed it, he raised it to the sky; nay, he was on his knees before it. Once more he was the savage transported in the presence of his fetish. He turned to me with burning eyes. “Down on your knees,” he cried, “and reverence the Ndhlondhlo. Down, you impious dog, and seek pardon for your sacrilege.” (p.157)

Davie escapes

Laputa’s anger distract him while Davie backs away up a ledge and works loose a big rock which he topples into the pool momentarily blinding Laputa with the splash. In that moment Davie is away up a ‘chimney’ in the cliff, staggers out onto the grassy top, leaps onto Laputa’s horse and, as the latter fires shots at him, gallops away, to safety!

I found the bridle, reached for the stirrups, and galloped straight for the sunset and for freedom. (p.159)

Pulp fiction (or what Buchan in the dedication to The Thirty-Nine Steps calls ‘shockers’) delivers simple, simple narrative pleasures.

Looking back

He rides through meadows as the sun sets, in a kind of transport of delight, delivered from the constant fear of death that has hung over him. Reminiscent of another boys’ adventure story, ‘Moonfleet’, which I’ve just read, the narrator is obviously writing some considerable time later, as a mature man looking back on the immature actions of his 19-year-old self.

Remember that I was little more than a lad, and that I had faced death so often of late that my mind was all adrift. (p.160)

Davie at Arcoll’s camp

But after the initial euphoria wears off he realises he has a duty to find Arcoll’s camp and warn him that Laputa is nearby and cut off from his army. An hour passes till his horse stumbles out of woods onto a path where a figure approaches. It is a white man who helps exhausted Davie out of the saddle then he hears the voice of Aitken, the Scot he met at Lourenco Marques. By luck (!) Arcoll’s camp is only 200 yards away and soon Davie is telling his story, but through a tide of weariness, barely able to remember. But he conveys the crucial fact that Laputa is without a horse, on foot and will have to cross the very road Davie has just reached i.e. if Arcoll can line the road with his men they can capture Laputa and prevent an Armageddon of bloodshed!

Davie passes out and so has the rest of the adventure told him later by Arcoll and Aitken. The trope of his narrative being set down much later is emphasised by mention of a two-volume history of the abortive rising which he is looking at as he writes i.e. it must be some years later.

The war against the rebels

Long story short, the various forces (Boer commandos, farmers, loyal blacks) deployed along the road force Laputa to try all kinds of angles to get south but in the end he is turned north, joining up at one point with Henriques, and the pair are forced all the way back to the cavern

Meanwhile Davie sleeps for 24 hours but has fever dreams in which he, spookily and supernaturally, sees Laputa meet up with Henriques, the pair swimming the river, arriving at the very store he had set up and spied on them at, then heading further north. In his exhausted feverish sate, Davie knows they are heading for the holy cave and feels it somehow his duty to find and confront them. He staggers out of the tent where he’s been sleeping, orders an astonished native to fetch him the same horse that he arrived on, and then he’s off for the final climactic 20 pages of the book.

Back at the secret cavern

He rides in a dream but nerveless, cold, sober, unafraid. He thinks he is riding to meet his God-given destiny and that he, Henriques and Laputa will somehow all died in the holy cavern. After riding all night he arrives at the cliff face where he had been brought four long days ago.

I marched up the path to the cave, very different from the timid being who had walked the same road three nights before. Then my terrors were all to come: now I had conquered terror and seen the other side of fear. I was centuries older. (p.175)

At the entrance to the path up to the cave Davie discovers Henriques’ body, His neck has been broken. But there is blood on his clothes and he finds his revolver nearby with two chambers empty. Henriques must have shot Laputa, hoping at the last to get his hands on the black man’s accumulated treasure, and wounded him, but Laputa still sprang at him and strangled him to death.

Vivid description of Davie retracing his steps through the various obstacles, the secret stone entrance, up the narrow steps, across the perilous rock bridge etc, and finally into the cavern. Here he finds Laputa badly wounded and bleeding from his side, kneeling before the ashes of the fire which had burned so brightly during the ceremony.

Death of Laputa

It takes Laputa ten pages to die during which he a) shows David all the chests and coffers filled with gold and jewels which he has amassed b) throws into the abyss the stone bridge over the river, cutting off Davie’s escape and c) maunders on at length about how he would have created a legendary kingdom and ruled his people wisely and well. Now his race will go down as drudges and slaves. At which he ceremonially clasps John’s necklace round his neck and throws himself into the cascade of water which runs along one wall of the cavern and is gone. A grand, romantic ending.

Davie climbs to freedom

At first Davie is overcome with lassitude and indifference sitting staring at the cascade. Only slowly does the will to live return. Then there is an epic description of his heroic act of climbing up the rock face, onto a tiny spur of rock jutting out of the cascade and so by slow painful ascent eventually up out of the cleft in the rock and into the joy of sunlight and the joy of lying on fresh turf. Saved!

It is very noticeable the way Buchan associates the binary worlds of darkness and light, the subterranean cave and the sunlit plateau, with savagery and civilisation.

Here was a fresh, clean land, a land for homesteads and orchards and children. All of a sudden I realized that at last I had come out of savagery. The burden of the past days slipped from my shoulders. I felt young again, and cheerful and brave. Behind me was the black night, and the horrid secrets of darkness. Before me was my own country, for that loch and that bracken might have been on a Scotch moor. (p.189)

Going over to the external cliff face he looks down, far down to the foot of the cliff, and sees the body of Henriques and two whites beside it, his friends Aitken and Wardle. Saved.

Epilogue

The uprising continued but without Laputa’s leadership degenerated into guerrilla warfare, inevitable white victory followed by white reprisals and then the magnanimous gesture of an official amnesty for the chiefs involved. Davie is brought to Arcoll and tells him about his escape and about the treasure. Thus Arcoll learns that Laputa is dead and is silent a long time. As for the treasure, he says it should be Davie’s reward.

The final act comes as Davie is involved in debate about what to do about the rebel army now surrounded in Inkana’s Kraal. The white forces could shell them then attack, but Davie has a brainwave. Rather than a bloodbath Davie suggests they walk in under a flag of truce and offer the rebels a decent deal – and this is what they do.

They’re allowed in and Arcoll makes a speech to the chiefs about the white man’s justice but it doesn’t move them. In desperation he calls on Davie to talk and Davie delivers a moving account of his last encounter with Laputa and the death of their leader. He describes it with respect and the chiefs respect him for it. One by one they lay down their arms.

And so the entire army is disarmed section by section, a prolonged process lasting months. Davie then delivers a controversial passage about the white man’s burden:

Yet it was an experience for which I shall ever be grateful, for it turned me from a rash boy into a serious man. I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all risks, recking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his task.

That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies.

Moreover, the work made me pitiful and kindly. I learned much of the untold grievances of the natives, and saw something of their strange, twisted reasoning. Before we had got Laputa’s army back to their kraals, with food enough to tide them over the spring sowing, Aitken and I had got sounder policy in our heads than you will find in the towns, where men sit in offices and see the world through a mist of papers. (p.198)

This passage combines the patronising patriarchalism of the colonial mentality with, towards the end, the endlessly repeated complaint from white men on the ground about their higher-ups not understanding the reality of colonial rule. This is a note sounded again and again by Kipling but also, 60 years later, attributed to the white colonial officials in Chinua Achebe’s Africa trilogy.

Finally, Arcoll supervises white soldiers blowing open the secret rock entrance to the steps up to the cavern, they throw planks across the chasm, and so liberate the boxes of treasure. The government intervenes and diamond companies lay claim to the stolen diamonds, but Davie had become a popular hero especially for the parlay with the chiefs which persuaded them to end the uprising without bloodshed and so he is awarded some of the gold and diamonds to the eventual tune of a quarter of a million pounds.

Davie goes home

He takes the train to Cape Town puzzled and perplexed by his sudden fortune, wondering what to do. He bumps into his old friend Tam who he treats to a luxury dinner. It’s a way of rehabilitating himself (and the reader) back from the realm of Adventure into the prosaic world of the everyday. We feel like we are being eased gently back into the real world.

The text finishes with the idea that two years later Aitken finds the pipe from which the biggest diamonds in Laputa’s treasure had been taken, sets up a lucrative mining business but spends a lot of the profits setting up a college for young Blacks, technical training, experimental farms, modern agriculture.

There are playing-fields and baths and reading-rooms and libraries just as in a school at home.

The white man’s burden. Well, this could either be described from a white perspective as philanthropy and development or, as in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, as deracination and cultural destruction.

In charge is Mr Wardle, the very schoolmaster Davie met on the voyage out and who at one time ran the dusty little classroom in Blaauwildebeestefontein. How far they have both come since then.

The many faces of John Laputa

I was hypnotised by the man. To see him going out was like seeing the fall of a great mountain.

Laputa is obviously the centre of the story and the narrative does a good job of developing a kind of cult around him. The seeds is sown on that fateful night on the Fife shore but once we’re in South Africa, and meet the savvy intelligence officer Arcoll, the latter massively expands Laputa’s cult image with his tales of meeting the black leader in various settings, concluding that he is:

‘The biggest thing that the Kaffirs have ever produced. I tell you, in my opinion he is a great genius. If he had been white he might have been a second Napoleon. He is a born leader of men, and as brave as a lion. There is no villainy he would not do if necessary, and yet I should hesitate to call him a blackguard. Ay, you may look surprised at me, you two pragmatical Scotsmen; but I have, so to speak, lived with the man for months, and there’s fineness and nobility in him. He would be a terrible enemy, but a just one. He has the heart of a poet and a king, and it is God’s curse that he has been born among the children of Ham. I hope to shoot him like a dog in a day or two, but I am glad to bear testimony to his greatness.’

And this is all before we meet Laputa again about half-way through the book and learn of his plan to reincarnate the power of Prester John and lead a black uprising. What’s interesting (maybe) is the way Buchan attributes to Laputa such a variety of facets or personalities. There is the Christian preacher. The suited mover and shaker in meetings of MPs. The educated scholar who can quote Latin. The inspiring leader and general. The awesome figure at the centre of a thrilling religious ceremony. And the ‘bloodthirsty savage’.

This multifacetedness is all made explicit in the last scene, as Laputa kneels dying:

He had ceased to be the Kaffir king, or the Christian minister, or indeed any one of his former parts. Death was stripping him to his elements, and the man Laputa stood out beyond and above the characters he had played, something strange, and great, and moving, and terrible. (p.178)

On the face of it this multifacetedness builds up his stature as a Prize Baddie. But from another, more pragmatic point of view, it allows Buchan to write about him in different ways – I mean it gives Buchan the opportunity of using different baddie tropes.

Or, if you want an interpretation which foregrounds Buchan’s racism I suppose it could be interpreted as Buchan implying that not far below the surface of even the most ‘civilised’ black person lurks the ‘bloodthirsty savage’.

To really assess where Buchan stands in this regard, I think you’d have to be familiar with pulp adventure tropes of the time. For example, mention of Napoleon made me think of Sherlock Holmes’s adversary, Professor Moriarty, regularly described as ‘the Napoleon of Crime’ and who is, like Holmes himself, a master of disguise. But I wonder if other pulp characters, such as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, are described in a similar way. I wonder whether multifacetedness is in some deep way the hallmark of the stage or pulp villain?

More recently, and in a much more grown-up novel, Giles Foden’s terrifying book The Last King of Scotland contains a sustained portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin which makes it clear that a lot of his success was down to his terrifying unpredictability, moving from genuine laughter and bonhomie to loud anger, from civilised plans for his country to personally overseeing torture and executions, in a completely arbitrary way which kept everyone, even his closest entourage and family, on permanent tenterhooks.

So maybe what at first glance seems like a fictional trope in fact reflects the real world where real (male) terror figures are partly so scary because of their many faces and the unpredictability with which they move between them.

(Actually, I’ve just read commentary on Buchan’s 1916 novel ‘The Power-House’ where critics are quoted as saying that the central obsession of all Buchan’s fiction was the thin dividing line between civilisation and barbarism, that the novel contains the most famous line in all his works, when the baddie tells the hero ‘You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass’ (the Power-House, chapter 3). So maybe it isn’t a sentiment targeted specifically at Blacks, but just the local expression of the deep fear he felt about all supposedly civilised men or societies: one blow hard enough and they crumble.)

(Incidentally, the fact that ‘Napoleon’ was the stock go-to name for great leaders is reinforced by the incident in Buchan’s comic novel John McNab, where a housekeeper is said to have handled a horde of over-inquisitive reporters ‘like Napoleon’ (World Classics edition page 148), and by the five references to Napoleon in his short novel, The Power-House.)

Race

The book is so drenched in the racial attitudes of its time that it’s hard to know where to start. Buchan’s narrator takes it for granted that white man’s rule is just and inevitable. As so often in this kind of colonial writing, the narrator is alive to the native’s grievances, the way their culture has been erased by the white man who has seized all the best land for himself etc – all this is explicitly stated in Laputa’s rabble-rousing speech – yet at the same time ignores it and depicts Laputa’s goal of rousing the Africans to overthrow white rule as ‘treason’, ‘treachery’ and betrayal.

When they are submissive passive objects of the white gaze, then the white master can indulge a kind of patronising aesthetic appreciation of black bodies – hence the narrator’s repeated admiration of Laputa’s stunning physical magnificence and charisma, and Arcoll’s admiration of him as a black Napoleon.

I forgot all else in my admiration of the man. In his minister’s clothes he had looked only a heavily built native, but now in his savage dress I saw how noble a figure he made. He must have been at least six feet and a half, but his chest was so deep and his shoulders so massive that one did not remark his height.

But as soon as these black bodies start to display agency i.e. a determination to reclaim their ancestral land (a cause which must have awakened some stirrings in a Scot like Buchan, whose own country had been absorbed by the English, whose own traditional warriors i.e. the Highland clans, had been disarmed and disempowered) then they suddenly become ‘savages’, routinely described as ‘bloodthirsty’, ‘maddened savages’, ‘the wave of black savagery seemed to close over my head’.

And once Davie is among the black army, the narrative lets rip with a whole series of racial stereotypes:

To be handled by a multitude of Kaffirs is like being shaken by some wild animal. Their skins are insensible to pain, and I have seen a Zulu stand on a piece of red-hot iron without noticing it till he was warned by the smell of burning hide…

You know how a native babbles and chatters over any work he has to do. It says much for Laputa’s iron hand that now everything was done in silence…

A Kaffir cannot wink, but he has a way of slanting his eyes which does as well, and as we moved on he would turn his head to me with this strange grimace. (p.119)

It was Laputa’s voice, thin and high-pitched, as the Kaffir cries when he wishes his words to carry a great distance.

A note on ‘Kaffir’

To paraphrase Wikipedia:

The term was used for any black person during the Apartheid and Post-Apartheid eras, closely associated with South African racism. It became a pejorative by the mid-20th century and is now considered extremely offensive hate speech. Punishing continuing use of the term was one of the concerns of the Promotion of Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act enacted by the South African parliament in 2000 and it is now euphemistically addressed as the K-word in South African English.

I’ve only just read this and discovered how offensive the word is. Obviously I am citing quotes which include it precisely to show the negative way it’s used by Buchan. But now I’m aware, I’ll make every effort not to use it in my own prose.

Bravery

Of course Buchan was not so consumed with the issue of race as we are nowadays. The issues were much simpler and untroubled for him. Instead, the novel contains a number of reflections on the nature of bravery and duty which were probably more salient for its Edwardian readers.

As to duty, the several occasions when Davie’s conscience overrides his animal wish for safety, compelling him to do the right thing for ‘his own people’, for the white race. I’m thinking of his realisation that instead of merely escaping on Laputa’s horse, he must actively seek out Arcoll in order to isolate Laputa north of the highway and thus cut of the general from his army, nipping the uprising in the bud. As to courage, he reflects on its nature half a dozen times, including right at the end when he and Arcoll walk into the rebel stronghold:

I believed that in this way most temerarious deeds are done; the doer has become insensible to danger, and his imagination is clouded with some engrossing purpose. (p.195)

Thoughts

Possibly other considerations distracted me (I read it at a time when I was very busy with work) but I found the book hard to get into. The word that initially came to mind was ‘forced’: Buchan’s narrator tells the reader he is embarking on an adventure rather than showing it. On the face of it, Davie is going to Africa to work in a shop, nothing very adventurous about that. OK, he recognises a black man he saw in outlandish circumstances in Scotland on the boat out but, again, there’s nothing desperately exciting about this.

For the first 80 pages or so, it felt like Buchan was telling us to be excited when I didn’t feel at all gripped. Even when Davie begins to suspect he’s being spied on, it doesn’t really make sense why Laputa’s people should spy on a teenage shop assistant. For quite a while the narrative tells us that it’s all a huge adventure before the adventure actually arrives. It doesn’t quite hang together.

The adventure only really kicks in when Arcoll wipes off his disguise as old black man, reveals the scope of the conspiracy – i.e. a mass uprising of Blacks across South Africa – and that it’s going to kick off tomorrow! From that point onwards the adventure really does kick in and I found it much more readable and gripping.

Different vocabularies

Obviously, most of the text is written in standard English but Buchan makes surprisingly extensive use of terms from other languages. At the start of the book, set in rural Fife, he deliberately deploys Scottish dialect words, including one in the very first sentence – ‘I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man’ – where the Scottish word ‘mind’ stands for the English word ‘remember’. Later on, once he’s arrived in Africa, the text becomes littered with words of Afrikaner or Boer i.e. Dutch origin (although Scots keeps glimmering through the text as well).

Scottish vocabulary

  • to bide – stay or remain somewhere
  • a brae – a steep bank or hillside
  • a burn – a stream
  • a burnfoot – place at the foot of a burn or stream
  • a cockloft – a small upper loft under the ridge of a roof
  • to collogue – talk confidentially or conspiratorially
  • a fanner – a wind machine that blows away the husks during the process of threshing wheat
  • to fling up (a game) – to give up
  • to fossick – to rummage
  • a glen – a narrow valley
  • a glim – a candle or lantern
  • to grue – to shiver or shudder especially with fear or cold
  • hotching – swarming
  • a linn – a waterfall or the pool below a waterfall
  • ower – Scots for ‘over’
  • podley – a young or small coalfish
  • scrog – a stunted shrub, bush, or branch
  • a shebeen – an unlicensed establishment or private house selling alcohol and typically regarded as slightly disreputable (also Irish and South African)
  • a stell – a shelter for cattle or sheep built on moorland or hillsides
  • thrawn – twisted, crooked
  • whins – gorse bushes

Afrikaner vocabulary

  • battue of dogs
  • a baviaan – baboon
  • a blesbok – a kind of antelope
  • an indaba – a discussion or conference
  • a kaross – a rug or blanket of sewn animal skins, formerly worn as a garment by African people, now used as a bed or floor covering
  • a kopje – a small hill in a generally flat area
  • a kloof – a steep-sided, wooded ravine or valley
  • knobkerrie – a short stick with a knob at the top, traditionally used as a weapon by some indigenous peoples of South Africa
  • a kraal – an enclosure, either around native huts, forming a village, or an enclosure for livestock
  • a laager – an encampment formed by a circle of wagons and, by extension, an entrenched position or viewpoint defended against opponents
  • a naachtmaal – the Communion Sabbath
  • outspan – verb: to unharness (an animal) from a wagon. noun: a place for grazing or camping on a wagon journey
  • a reim – a strip of oxhide, deprived of hair and made pliable, used for twisting into ropes
  • a ring-kop – the circlet into which Zulu warriors weave their hair
  • a rondavel – a traditional circular African dwelling with a conical thatched roof
  • a schimmel – type of stallion
  • a sjambok – long, stiff whip, originally made of rhinoceros hide
  • Skellum! Skellum – rascal
  • a spruit – a small watercourse, typically dry except during the rainy season
  • a stope – a veranda in front of a house
  • a vlei – a shallow pond or marsh of a seasonal or intermittent nature

Plus a number of Afrikaans names for plants and animals e.g. tambuki grass, eland, koodoo, rhebok, springbok, duikers, hartebeest, klipspringer, koorhan

African vocabulary

Part of the problem or challenge for the white colonials was that there were so many tribes and cultures and languages in Africa, which they rode roughshod over. I’m aware that words here come from different languages but I’m trying to keep these headings simple and also couldn’t always find which language a specific word comes from. I like the flavour of diverse and novel words but I’m not an expert in them.

  • assegai – the slender javelin or spear of the Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa
  • dacha – hemp or marijuana
  • impi – an armed band of Zulus involved in urban or rural conflict
  • induna – a tribal councillor or headman
  • the Inkula – title applied only to the greatest chiefs
  • isetembiso sami – very sacred thing
  • a kya – Zulu for hut
  • a tsessebe – a species of buck, famous for its speed

Rare English words

  • to snowk – to smell something intensely by pushing your nose into it like a dog (Yorkshire)

European vocabulary

  • en cabochon – (of a gem) polished but not faceted (French)
  • machila – a kind of litter (Portuguese)

Conrad

The morning after he witnesses the great inauguration of Laputa, Davie reflects: ‘Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me.’ Joseph Conrad’s great novella Heart of Darkness had been published just ten years earlier (1899 to Prester John’s 1910). Presumably this a deliberate reference to it? The fact that writers as wildly diverse as John Buchan and Chinua Achebe felt compelled to quote or reference Conrad, is testament to the huge imaginative shadow cast by his famous novella.

The Thirty-Nine Steps

In a sense ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ takes up where ‘Prester John’ leaves off. ‘Prester John’ ends with the young hero returning to England having made his fortune in Africa (if not quite in the way his uncle imagined he would) and not sure what to do next. ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’ opens with the hero, Richard Hannay, having just returned to England from Africa (from Buluwayo in modern-day Zimbabwe, to be precise) having made his fortune and discovering that … he is bored (‘I was the best bored man in the United Kingdom’, page 1) – boredom, in Buchan, invariably being the prelude to an exciting new adventure!

Credit

Prester John by John Buchan was published in 1910 by T. Nelson & Sons. References are to the 1987 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

John Buchan reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on February 16, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Africa, Childrens
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on February 16, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/16/prester-john-john-buchan/

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe (1987)

‘Your Excellency is not only our leader but also our Teacher. We are always ready to learn…Your Excellency is absolutely right. I never thought of that. It is surprising how Your Excellency thinks about everything.’
(The head of the secret police, Professor Okong, grovelling to the military dictator in Anthills of the Savannah, page 18)

‘Worshipping a dictator is such a pain in the ass. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was merely a matter of dancing upside down on your head. With practice anyone could learn to do that. The real problem is having no way of knowing from one day to another, from one minute to the next, what is up and what is down.’
(Irreverent journalist Ikem Osodi, page 45)

‘This is negritude country, not Devonshire.’
(John Kent, also known as the Mad Medico, page 57)

‘This country na so so thief-man full am.’
(Drunk police sergeant at a roadblock lamenting the theft of his radio, page 213)

Background

There was a gap of 21 years between Chinua Achebe’s fourth and fifth novels. A lot happened in his life and in Nigeria, which I’ve summarised in my review of his 1983 pamphlet, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’.

Achebe wrote five novels. Two are emphatically set in the past, in the colonial period of the 1890s (Things Fall Apart) and the 1920s (Arrow of God). Three of them have contemporary settings: No Longer At Ease (late 1950s), A Man of the People (mid-1960s), and this one, Anthills of the Savannah (late 1970s). Read in sequence, they neatly represent a story of decline and fall of the nation, at the same time as the characters go up the political pecking order.

No Longer At Ease takes the time and trouble to portray one man, Obi Okwonkwo, a university graduate who has studied in Britain, who struggles to maintain his high moral ideals in the face of a series of personal crises and difficulties, culminating in him doing what he spent most of the novel swearing he would never resort to, which is to start taking bribes to influence his decisions as a civil servant in the Education Department. It is a private tragedy limited to just one fairly lowly civil servant, which Achebe makes symbolic of the widespread corruption afflicting Nigeria even before Independence.

A Man of the People ups the stakes by having its protagonist, Odilo, take an active part in politics, standing as a candidate in a general election against his far more canny opponent, a tribal chief and sitting cabinet minister. So A Man of the People a) steps up a rung to examine politics at a regional level but b) in terms of decline and fall, is a far more wide-ranging depiction of corruption, bribery and bad leadership than No Longer.

And Anthills of the Savannah completes the progress: in terms of social rank, it is set at the highest level, opening with ministers attending a meeting chaired by the terrifying military dictator who now runs their country. In terms of what I’ve called decline and fall, it shows how the purely personal scruples of Obi, and then the party political idealism of Odili, both from the idealistic 1960s, have been completely swept away in the tsunami of a military coup.

In the late 1950s Achebe’s characters are fretting about corruption; in the mid-60s they are feebly trying to set up a new political party; by the late 1970s they exist in a state of continual fear about how to survive an arbitrary and violent military regime.

That’s what I mean by saying that Achebe’s three contemporary novels chart the decline and fall of Nigerian political life, from high-flown optimism at the time of independence (the early 1960s) to cynicism and terror 20 years later.

The detail with which Achebe wanted to portray a military dictator and the impact of military rule on a nation presumably also explains why Anthills is the first of his novels not to be set explicitly in Nigeria, but in the fictional Africa country of ‘Kangan’. Presumably it was just too dangerous to write something which would be interpreted as a direct attack on very powerful people still pulling the strings in 1980s Nigeria.

(Nigeria was ruled by the military from 1966 to 1979, in which year the army allowed free elections and the return to civilian rule. Achebe worked on Anthills throughout the 1970s so, although the army relinquished power in 1979, the novel very much captures the atmosphere and fear of living under military rule. In the event, the short-lived Nigerian Second Republic came to an end when another military coup overthrew it in 1983, ironically in the same year Achebe had published ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ complaining about the country’s terrible leaders. Renewed military rule was to last another 16 years, until 1998.)

Setup

Anthills is set in the fictional African nation of Kangan (capital city: Bassa). The military dictator is a successful general named Sam. He didn’t carry out the military coup himself but the coup leaders asked him to become President and he agreed.

Trained at Sandhurst and a lifelong soldier Sam knew nothing about how to run a country so he turned to his civilian friends. Chief among these was Christopher Oriko, an academic. He and Sam had been schoolboys together at the Lord Lugard College 20 years earlier (pages 65, 66). Oriko helped Sam recruit various eminent figures to become his cabinet and was made Commissioner of Information.

The novel opens (Chapter 1) with a meeting of this cabinet which makes it perfectly clear that all these grown men are now absolutely terrified of the general. He has shed his initial nerves, is now in complete control of the situation, and has grown into a mercurial and quick-to-anger tyrant on the model of Idi Amin. (The comparison with Amin is explicitly made by Captain Abdu Medani in the final chapter, who says that rumour had it that Amin used to personally strangle then behead rivals for any woman who took his fancy, storing their heads in a fridge, p.221.)

What’s making him cross today is that a delegation from the troublesome province of Abazon has arrived in the city and wants to meet him to plead for investment in water holes and wells for their drought-stricken region. The President wants to fob them off by sending a photographer and journalist to give their visit lots of publicity but not actually have to meet them, make excuses about him having to meet some other VIP or something.

Technique

Such is the power of his subject matter that it’s easy to overlook Achebe’s interest in technique. Take his deployment of a consciously simplified monumental style in the two tribal novels, Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. Or the way No Longer At Ease starts at the end, with the protagonist in court facing corruption charges, then flashes back in time to describe the sequence of events which led him there.

Well, Anthills represents a notable leap forward in narrative technique. Two things are immediately noticeable, in structure and style.

In terms of structure, many of the characters have periodic chapters named after themselves, which give their points of view in the first person. These are mixed with other chapters told in the third person. This is surprisingly effective.

In terms of style, one big thing. Some of the text is in the conventional past tense, but there are also passages told in the present. The interesting thing is this doesn’t bother the reader, you barely notice the switch from past to present tense in the verbs even when it happens in sequential sentences.

She shot up from my face where she was lying and gave my face a quick scrutiny. ‘I hope you are not being sarcastic,’ she said. I affect great solemnity, pull her back and kiss her mildly. (p.67)

Summary

In a sense Anthills of the Savannah is an African version of the terror experienced by the courtiers of any tyrant. It reminded me of descriptions I’ve read of Stalin’s court. My mind also leaps to the scenes featuring Robert Shaw as King Henry VIII in the movie ‘A Man For All Seasons’, by turns hugely jovial and terrifyingly angry. And Henry isn’t an inapt comparison because Achebe has his character Chris remark that most African leaders are like ‘late-flowering medieval monarchs’ (p.74).

The book describes in detail the changing relationships between:

  • Chris Oriko, who helped General Sam to the presidency and is now the government’s Commissioner for Information
  • his girlfriend, Beatrice Okoh, also known as BB, a Senior Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Finance (p.75)
  • his old schoolfriend Ikem Osodi, now editor of the National Gazette, a newspaper fiercely critical of the regime
  • and his girlfriend, Elewa

The three men have known each other since school and their lives have been intimately connected.

‘We are all connected. You cannot tell the story of any of us without implicating the others.’ (p.66)

Oriko and Osodi have settled into a long-term antagonism because, as the former explains, he’s tired of waking up every Thursday knowing he’s going to have to defend Osodi’s latest inflammatory editorial to His Excellency (HE).

It was only in the last quarter or so of the book that I realised how privileged Achebe intends us to see his characters as – living in a privileged government compound, having servants, cars and drivers, operating at the highest levels of state and politics. This didn’t come over at first because the characters seem so ordinary and even banal. It’s only when they step outside their privilege bubble into the ‘real world’ that the characters, and the reader, begins to feel the real poverty which the huge majority of the population live in…

Chapter 3

Ikem gets into a ludicrous race/rivalry with a taxi driver to get ahead in spaces in the colossal traffic jam on the route to the Presidential Palace, both losing their tempers in the temper-fraying permanent bad traffic which characterises Bassa.

Chapter 4 (Ikem)

Ikem remembers a year earlier attending a public execution on a beach. The crowd roared its approval and he was disgusted. Welcome to the Colosseum.

(Compare and contrast the brilliantly thorough exhibition about public executions at the Museum of London Docklands, which explained how executions were the occasions of public holidays, festivals, celebrations, eating and drinking and picking pockets in London from the 16th to 19th centuries.)

Ikem is appalled at watching four criminals being led out of the police van, tied to stakes on a beach with bull’s eyes attached to their chests, and then killed by firing squad, while the crowd roared. This episode seems to demonstrate a) the crudeness of civil life in the newly independent state and b) Ikem’s huge distance from the mass of the people which, like any Third World intellectual, he claims to represent or speak for.

Chapter 5 (Chris)

White man John Kent, who goes by the nickname Mad Medico, hosts a drinks party for Chris, Ikem, their girlfriends and an arrival from London, Dick, who set up a new literary magazine, Reject, nearly four years ago (p.58). They reminisce about how approachable and innocent Sam was back in the old days. The chapter starts with anecdotes about how Mad Medico acquired his nickname and ends with stories about sex, see below.

Chapter 6 (Beatrice)

His Excellency phones Beatrice and invites her to a small dinner party. We get a sense of the closeness of the trio when Beatrice tells us that for the first year of HE’s rule, she and Chris went regularly to the palace, till HE found his style and became more aloof. I think Achebe indicates the voice of Beatrice by making her sentences long and clumsy, and having her mangle some phrases i.e. not as fluent as Chris or Ikem.

It’s a fairly formal dinner of 15 or so people, including senior officials, the Army Chief of Staff, that kind of level. There’s a woman American journalist who Beatrice, characteristically snaps at. A long difficult dinner is followed by dancing in the drawing room overlooking the lake. The President boomingly introduces the subject of African polygamy to roars of laughter from his sycophants. For reasons I didn’t fully understand Beatrice undertakes to seduce him and shimmies so close against him that she feels his erection growing (see Sex, below). But then for reasons I didn’t understand tells him a story about being jilted by a lover when she was at a student dance in London, something which infuriates the President who storms off. Next thing Beatrice knows she’s being escorted to the car to take her home. Was it because she didn’t simply go to bed with him but insisted on telling some moralising anecdote?

Chapter 7 (Beatrice)

Yes, the prose style of Beatrice’s sections is different from the others, deliberately long winded and confusing. In this chapter she seems to be explaining that she is bringing together all the scattered parts of the narrative to tell ‘their’ story. This begins, however, with the story of her life, how she was raised on an Anglican Mission and how if any of the children misbehaved, their father thrashed them with a cane and sent them to bed (p.85). In fact her father whipped insubordinate children throughout the region, and whipped her mother, too. Once she tried to console her mother, who instead pushed her away so violently she hit her head on a stone mortar. She was 7 or 8 at the time. Man hands on violence to man.

Then she describes her very close blood-brother friendship with Ikem who she met as students in London, how she’s always been enchanted by his grand thoughts and fluency but they never quite became lovers.

Chapter 8: Daughters

This chapter continues the theme of interpolated stories, in this case Igbo legends, starting with the story of Idemili, daughter of God.

The text becomes confusing. It jumps to Beatrice being marched in disgrace from HE’s soirée, as described at the end of chapter 6. Next morning she wakes to bird song and remembers stories from her girlhood although, as the omniscient narrator points out, she was brought up in a British Anglican compound and so was deprived of her cultural legacy (the legacy Achebe devoted his lifetime to promoting).

Chris calls her the next morning and motors over, they have an argument, she bursts into tears, he cuddles her, they kiss, then go to the bedroom tear off each other’s clothes and Achebe wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 1987 (p.114).

Beatrice tells Chris everybody was criticising Ikem at HE’s party and so he (Chris) must patch up his arguments with Ikem.

Chapter 9: Views of Struggle

Ikem drives to the seedy Hotel Harmoney which is where the delegation from Abazon is staying. He is welcomed and feted at which point I realised that Ikem is himself from the province in question, which becomes even clearer when some of the speakers mildly criticise him for not attending the monthly meetings of the Abazon community in Bassa (the capital city). This is identical to the structure of No Longer at Ease whose protagonist, Obi Okwonkwo, is an Igbo and is severely criticised by the monthly meeting of Igbos living in the capital (Lagos).

At which an illiterate elder from among the Abazon delegation stands up and delivers an extended speech which concludes that folk stories are what save us (p.124). He goes on to describe what the referendum held two years earlier to decide whether Sam should be made president for life looked like to village illiterates like himself i.e. highly suspect. They trusted the opinion of Ikem and when he didn’t write in favour of it, they voted No. Then the Big Chief’s people were in touch and said that as punishment for voting no all investment in water infrastructure in their region would be cancelled.

Now the white-haired old man says they have travelled all the way to Bassa to put their case to the Big Chief but he claimed to be meeting some other Big Chief so he couldn’t meet them. He tells the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, whose point is that the tortoise was determined not to give up without a fight. The elder says they may lose but at least future generations will know at least they put up a fight.

In the hotel parking lot Ikem is issued with a totally spurious parking ticket by a typically arrogant mocking threatening policeman. Next day he calls the Chief of Police and uses his reputation, goes to visit the police HQ. The Chief is embarrassed such an important man was hassled by his traffic cops, calls in everybody on duty that night and gives them a bollocking before identifying the culprit who is ordered to hand over Ikem’s papers, which he had confiscated.

Clout. Pull. Intimidation. The thing is it works both ways: in the cop who threw his weight around, and then in the Chief’s embarrassment at having bothered a VIP. Somehow everything about this trivial incident highlights the lack of principle, the lack of objective service, the personalised nature of law enforcement, which is at one with its universal corruption.

Chapter 10: Impetuous Son

A knock at the door of Ikem’s apartment and it’s two taxi drivers, the one he got into the silly race for spaces in the traffic jam in chapter 2, and the head of his union of taxi drivers. They’ve come to thank Ikemi for standing up for them and the working classes in his editorials. Most of this chapter consists of dialogue in pidgin which I didn’t understand a word of.

Chapter 11

That night Ikem has sex with Elewa then drives her home. He returns home, brews a coffee and reflects on the absurdity of so-called ‘public affairs’:

nothing but the closed transactions of soldiers-turned-politicians, with their cohorts in business and the bureaucracy (p.141)

Characteristically, for Achebe, the only actual political ‘policy’ Ikem is associated with is writing editorials against capital punishment. Nothing about industrial, economic or fiscal policy. Instead a load of poetic guff about how the leaders need to:

re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being. (p.141)

Not particularly practical. Meanwhile Sam calls Chris to his office and announces he is going to have Ikem arrested for working cahoots with treasonous elements from Abazon, for attending a secret meeting with them in the north of the capital (i.e. the meeting with the Bassa Abazon Association we saw being dominated by a worthy old man). He goes on, in classic security state style, to claim Ikem also had a role in conspiring to deliver a No vote in Abazon during the presidential referendum. Sam orders Chris to sack Ikem as editor of the Gazette. Chris refuses and tenders his resignation. Sam laughs in his face and says he better watch out, or he’ll be next (p.144). Chris refuses to write the letter but Sam says it will get written anyway, and also that the head of the security service will be investigating his (Chris’s) role in the referendum.

So it’s Ikem’s visit to the Hotel Harmoney to see the Abazon delegation (as Sam himself requested back in chapter 1) which looks like it’s going to be the mainspring of the tragedy.

The letter of his dismissal is couriered to Ikem that afternoon. Ikem drives over to Chris’s place, finding Beatrice there. It’s only now that Chris tells everyone how deeply upset Sam was when he lost the president-for-life referendum, and was particularly hurt that his two closest friends let him down, that Chris as Commissioner for Information, didn’t do more, and Ikem chose to take annual leave and so didn’t write an editorial supporting it.

Elewa turns up and they all watch the 8 o’clock news. Ikema smiles through the item about his sacking but leaps from his chair when the next item announces that the six men in the delegation from Abazon, including the kindly old tribal elder, have been arrested on charges of conspiracy.

Chapter 12

Ikem delivers a speech at the university on the folk story of the tortoise and the leopard, as told him by the white-haired Abazon elder in chapter 9. Tough audience of students who all appear to take Marxism with literal seriousness, one student calling for Kangan to be placed under the dictatorship of the proletariat. He then mocks the leaders of the ‘working classes’ i.e. the trade union leaders who are more concerned about preserving their privileges and being treated like VIPs than changing the system they inherited. Ikem refuses to give easy answers. Obviously acting as Achebe’s spokesman in the text, he says everybody asks the writer for easy answers but the writer’s job is to ask questions.

‘No, I cannot give you the answers you are clamouring for. Go home and think! I cannot decree your pet, textbook revolution. I want instead to excite general enlightenment by forcing all the people to examine the condition of their lives because, as the saying goes, the unexamined life is not worth living. As a writer I aspire only to widen the scope of that self-examination.’ (p.158)

Everyone in the country must, in other words, become a reflective intellectual like himself. And when this doesn’t happen, as it can’t happen, Ikem will, like Achebe, write a long essay explaining why his country has let him down.

Ikem’s lecture concludes with an attack on his student audience for replicating in miniature all the vices of the nation at large, tribalism, corruption and the preservation of mediocrity and bad management. All covered by parroting right-on revolutionary phrases from Marxist professors who have absolutely no intention of overthrowing or even reforming the system they do so well out of.

During the jokey question and answer session which follows his lecture, someone asks whether he’s heard the proposals by the president to have his face put on the currency. Ikem jokes that any head of state who puts his head on a coin is tempting his people to take it off, the head he means. Much laughter. It was probably this light-hearted joke which condemned him to death (see below).

Chapter 13

Next day’s newspapers lead in the biggest type that Ikem has been promoting seditious beliefs including the suggestion that our Beloved President be beheaded! The secret police have been monitoring the Mad Medico. He is arrested, held and interrogated for four days, then deported. Chris and BB drive round to Ikem’s flat (at 202 Kingsway Road) to find his flat has been ransacked and he (Ikem) is not there. The neighbours say they saw two army jeeps outside in the middle of the night.

Chris spends the day on the phone ringing round the other high officials (he is a cabinet member, after all) like the Attorney General, the head of the State Research Council, the President himself, but they are all either unavailable or claim to have no knowledge.

Then the 6 o’clock news leads with a long story which accuses Ikem of being at the heart of a conspiracy to overthrow the state, how he was arrested by security forces but chose to fight and in the struggle a gun went off which killed him (p.169).

Chris packs and leaves for a ‘safe house’ immediately. He reaches out to foreign journalists to disseminate the true story of Ikem’s behaviour and murder, and claims on the BBC that Ikem was murdered by the Kangan security forces. He has a clandestine meeting with the leaders of students who photocopy Chris’s leaflet on the case and widely distribute it. In retaliation the security forces descend on the university campus, rampaging through it with batons (not actually shooting anyone) raping some female students. Then the campus is closed down.

The British High Commissioner complains but is handed a letter written by that poet, Dick, from chapter 5, who had written to the Mad Medico about the little drinks party at his flat at which he had heard a member of the cabinet (Chris) speak so openly and critically of the president. In other words, the security services have done a very good job of marshalling and then twisting all available evidence to make it seem like Ikem and Chris really were part of a conspiracy against the President and the State.

That night security forces come knocking on the door of Beatrice’s flat, where the terrified Ewela had come to seek sanctuary. Both women dress and watch the soldiers as they search everywhere, but leave without arresting either woman.

Chapter 14

Someone in the security forces phones Beatrice and tells her he knows where Chris is but doesn’t want to arrest him, tell him to move safe houses. Is it a trick to catch him? Beatrice phones and tells him to move. She goes to work as normal, then shopping to give an air of normality. The unknown mole in the security services calls again to say the city isn’t safe; Chris has to move out. The TV news announces that anyone found guilty of helping Chris, now an enemy of the people, will be guilty of treason which is punishable by death.

A couple of pages devoted to describing how callous and harsh Beatrice had been on her servant, Agatha, for years, ridiculing her membership of a revivalist Christian congregation and so on. Now, for the first time, Beatrice begins to feel compassion for her.

Chapter 15

Describes how Chris was handled through a succession of safe spaces. But the announcement of the death penalty for people helping him makes his current patron think someone might grass him up, so he better move out the city. First step is to move from the Government reservation to a safe house in the northern slums.

He’s collected in a taxi which is part of the network, with three minders. They get through three roadblocks but are stopped at a big one with many cop cars, lights flashing. On impulse Chris gets out of the car but this draws attention to him and his companion and a fierce soldier approaches. Tense scene where his companion does most of the talking, assuring him Chris works in a garage, and he has the brainwave of taking a kolanut out of his pocket and offering the soldier some. That’s all it takes. The soldier’s face lights up and he waves them through.

Chapter 16

Five days later Chris starts the move north. For those days he stays in the house of the very poor Braimoh, a taxi driver with five children. Beatrice elects to spend the night with him on the noisy bed Braimoh and his wife give up for their distinguished guests.

It was only at the point I realised just how privileged and elite a lifestyle Chris in particular had enjoyed, with a big house in the Government compound. a) the height of his privilege and so now b) the depth to which he has fallen, cadging a kip on the bed of a dirt-poor, taxi driver.

And realised that his journey represents an odyssey out among the common people who he and Ikem and their ilk spend so much time pontificating about but of whose lives they really know next to nothing. It is by way of being an education and a sort of penance. He has become ‘a wide-eyed newcomer to the ways of Kangan’ (p.201) undergoing a ‘transformation’ of the man he was (p.204).

Chapter 17

The bus journey on the Great North Road. The colourful design and slogans painted on long distance buses. The poverty of the passengers. The change from tropical rain country to dusty savannah as you head north. There’s been drought for two years. All water has to be bussed in (p.208).

Chris had been joined on the run by a student leader who is also wanted by the authorities, Emmanuel. He is still being accompanied/guarded by the faithful taxi driver, Braimoh. So there are three of them watching the landscape change, become more arid. Chris notices the anthills dotted around the savannah and thinks of Ikem’s prose poem hymn to the sun (the one quoted in full in chapter 3).

The bus is regularly stopped at checkpoints whose sole purpose is to extort money from the driver. Chris begins to understand the universal extent of the low-level extortion which dominates all Nigerians’ lives.

Then they come to a ‘checkpoint’ which is packed with a crowd all drinking beer and talking loudly, some dancing. When the bus stops, instead of just the driver going to pay the routine bribe, all the passengers get out and hear the astonishing news that there’s been a coup. The sergeant in charge of the checkpoint heard it on the radio half an hour ago just as a lorryload of beer pulled up, so they stopped the lorry and impounded its contents and distributed it to the growing crown and triggered an impromptu street party. Chris and Emmanuel try to get sense out of the crowd or the drunk policemen, but they just tell them to stop asking questions and drink like everyone else.

There’s a scream and Chris sees the drunk police sergeant dragging a young woman towards a nearby group of mud huts, with the obvious intention of raping her. Some women are asking him to stop, lots of the men are cheering. Chris strides right over and confronts the sergeant, tells him to stop, tells him he will report him to the Inspector-General of Police. The sergeant takes his gun from his holster, cocks it and shoots Chris point blank in the chest. Emmanuel runs over and kneels by Chris as he lays on his back and dies.

The cop drops his gun and runs off chased by Braimoh who tackles him on the edge of the scrub and they roll around struggling a bit but the cop is bigger, stronger and more desperate than Braimoh, staggering to his feet and running off leaving the latter lying in the dust.

Chapter 18

Beatrice arranges a naming ceremony for Elewa’s 28-day-old baby. Seeing as we were told Elewa was just barely pregnant in chapter 14 as Chris’s flight began, I take it this must be 7 or 8 months later.

In a brief recap we learn that after hearing about Chris’s death Beatrice collapsed, withdrew into herself etc. But then Elewa nearly had a miscarriage which forced Beatrice to emerge from her grief and assume responsibility for the young, poor, uneducated woman. So, it turns out, Beatrice has gone on a journey of self discovery comparable to Chris’s.

A group of friends or comrades regularly come to her flat, worried about her, namely:

  • Braimoh the taxi driver (so he wasn’t hurt in the fight with the drunk sergeant, as I’d feared)
  • Emmanuel the rebel student leader who accompanied Chris on his journey
  • Captain Abdul Medani, who had led the search of her fat and, she realises, was the voice of the mystery calls warning Chris to move on
  • Adamma, the pretty girl Emmanuel spent the later stages of the ill-fated bus journey trying to chat up, joking about his failure to do so with Chris

As far as I can tell the coup was an intra-military affair i.e. one bit of the army overthrew the President and the new leader is Major-General Ahmed Lango (p.218).

We learn that in the coup Sam was kidnapped from the Presidential Palace, tortured, shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave in the bush. The obvious point is that all three of the men who had been friends since their schooldays and whose fates were entwined with the modern history of Kangan (or so Achebe tries to persuade us) are now dead, run over by the juggernaut of history. And that kind of flaccid rhetoric about ‘history’ is precisely how Beatrice/Achebe see it. Were, she wonders, Ikem and Chris just victims of random accidents, or:

Were they not in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed by an alienated history? If so, how many more doomed voyagers were already in transit or just setting out, faces fresh with illusions of duty-free travel and happy landings ahead of them? (p.220)

This is OK as ‘literary’ writing, I suppose, but pointless waste of breath as political or sociological or historical analysis. I doubt it, because Achebe clearly believes in his characters and much of their debate, especially the long speech Ikem gives at the university defending the importance of storytellers – but you could argue that the entire novel is a satire on the uselessness of writers and writing, vapouring away in their ivory towers while history or events continue relentlessly on, completely ignoring all their fierce inconsequential debates.

The naming ceremony is held in Beatrice’s flat amid much tears over the dead father (Ikem) whose spirit, however is floating over them and smiling, apparently. Many tears which the reader is, I think, meant to join in.

Agatha chants one of her Christian songs and starts dancing. A Muslim woman who we’ve never heard of before, more or less invented for this scene I think, starts dancing along. So Beatrice, a self-declared pagan, thinks what the hell and starts dancing, too. I think we’re meant to see it as significant that this ecumenical gesture, this healing of communities, takes place among women, the healing sex according to much feminist thought (p.224).

Elewa’s mother and uncle turn up. The latter is a keen guzzler of booze but then unexpectedly becomes quite authoritative, and leads a traditional prayer (described as ‘the kolanut ritual’) for the long life, health and happiness of the newborn child (a girl) and indeed for everybody there (p.228).

(The baby is named Amaechina which means May-the-path-never-close, or Ama for short, p.222.)

On the book’s last pages we learn a secret. As he lay dying Chris’s last words to a tearful Emmanuel were ‘The last grin’, or at least that’s what he thought. When Emmanuel tells the christening party this, Beatrice rushes off in tears. When she returns, it’s to explain that this was a coded message or in-joke for her benefit. In one of their many arguments, Chris and Ikem had referred to themselves and Sam as three green bottles hanging on the wall (as in the song ten green bottles).

Somehow Beatrice manages to slightly distort this message into the Author’s Message for the book as a whole, which is about the isolation of its intellectual protagonists from the mass of the people.

‘The bottles are up there on the wall hanging by a hair’s breadth, yet looking down pompously on the world. Chris was sending us a message to beware. This world belongs to the people of the world not to any little caucus, no matter how talented…’ (p.232)

The very last paragraphs describe Beatrice achieving a kind of serene happiness, knowing that Chris died a good death, achieved wisdom at his death, like a holy man in a parable. ‘Beautiful,’ whispers Beatrice with tears running down her face, ‘Beautiful.’

Servants

A theme of the novel is how the intelligentsia as represented by Chris and Ikem, are out of touch with, disconnected from, remote from, the ‘ordinary people’, despite Ikem in particular going on about how his class needs to reconnect with ‘the poor and dispossessed of this country’.

Meanwhile, it seems to be taken for granted that all of Achebe’s characters have servants. I was staggered that even the poor young civil servant in No Longer At Ease had a houseboy, and the characters in this novel all seem to have a ‘boy’, housekeeper or cook. For example, Ikem’s cook Sylvanus, who is itching to demonstrate his culinary prowess to Beatrice when Ikem brings her home (chapter 5), or Beatrice’s maid, Agatha. Servants? A cook? A maid?

The African intellectuals go on and on about how the wicked white imperialist used to boss around and humiliate their fathers and grandfathers…and then boss around and humiliate their own (black) servants. The narrator tells us that Beatrice regularly reduces her maid Agatha to tears, making her cry for hours (p.185). Here’s Beatrice addressing her:

‘Agatha, you are a very stupid girl and a wicked girl… get out of the way!’ (p.182)

Only towards the end of the book is there a kind of set-piece where Beatrice for the first time sees Agatha as a human being, and realises how mean she’s been for years and years. Illumination too late.

Marxism

The chapter describing Ikem’s lecture crystallises the sense that a lot of the opposition to the military regime back then was couched in the date rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism. The radical characters refer to ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ as if this was a viable policy or could ever be the answer to anything.

This led me to realise that Achebe wrote Anthills of the Savannah through the 1970s and 80s i.e. in a dire period of the Cold War, when communist rhetoric was very popular, not just among students in the West, but much more pressingly in Third World countries, in places like Angola or Mozambique where Marxist parties were at war, in the rhetoric of the ANC in South Africa and so on. A whole mental worldview cast in terms of outdated concepts like ‘the bourgeoisie’ and ‘the proletariat’, ‘class war’, ‘revolution’, ‘communist utopia’ and so on.

It was only two short years after Anthills of the Savannah was published that the Berlin Wall came down leading the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe. Leaving Marxist intellectuals around the world intellectually and morally bankrupt. Epic fail.

It was a sudden insight for me that Achebe’s entire writing career took place during the Cold War. He wrote poems, some stories and essays after the Wall came down, but no more novels. He may well have been the godfather of African literature but he was also a Cold War author.

Anger

Lack of self discipline, immaturity and quick temper are just some of the things Achebe accuses his countrymen of in his withering essay, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’. These negative attributes are very visible in the quick tempers and violence dramatised in A Man of The People and are on ample display here. Nigerians, according to this book, get furious with each other at the drop of a hat.

When Ikem phones Chris at work and the latter’s secretary insists he’s not in, Ikem starts yelling down the phone, ‘an angry man’ (p.27). It doesn’t take much to make Elewa become ‘really aggressive’ (p.35). Ikem is in the middle of his morning conference when his stenographer peers round the door to say he’s got a call, and Kiem asks who it is ‘angrily’ (p.36). Chris’s secretary makes a pert remark after Ikem has had an angry meeting with him, so he slams the door behind him in his rage (p.44). Ikem is parked in a market when he sees a soldier aggressively park his car, nearly knocking a trader over. The soldier then insults the trader ‘with a vehemence I found astounding’ which leaves Ikem ‘truly seething with anger’ (p.48). When the soldier sent to collect her tells her they’re not going to the Palace but the Presidential Guesthouse Beatrice is ready to ‘explode in violent froths of anger’ (p.72).

According to Beatrice, Ikem and Chris are always having ‘fierce arguments’ (p.73). When the security guard at Chris’s apartment complex won’t let a taxi driver in, they get into a heated altercation (p.149). When the soldiers come to search Beatrice’s flat, the sergeant leading his platoon is bursting with anger and hatred of her (p.177). When Beatrice loses her car keys and returns to a phone box where she made a call to find a man using it, when she taps on the window he angrily insists there’s no keys there and makes an angry hissing noise at her (p.181). When Beatrice gets back to her flat and finds her servant Agatha hasn’t made Elewa a proper big breakfast, she is furious at her (p.183).

As Achebe suggests in ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, this lack of self-control, this lack of self-discipline, is connected to immaturity and childishness. The reader can extend the trait to the country’s leaders, whose speeches are full of petulant complaints, and are themselves quick to rain down dire threats on their opponents. Everyone seems to be angry all of the time.

Stupidity

Notoriously, the central claim of Achebe’s long essay ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’ was that the problem was the terrible quality of its leaders, not least that these leaders were uneducated, ignorant and stupid. In this book His Excellency Sam is described by Ikem as ‘not very bright’ (p.49) and there is a constant, understated hum throughout the book, a continual criticism of people who are illiterate, semi-literate and uneducated; and an implicit valorisation of Chris and Ikem and their like for having enjoyed a top hole education, first within Kangan and then topped off with post-graduate study in Britain.

Sex

As in A Man of the People I was dismayed by the novel’s bluntness about sex. Take Ikem’s description of Elewa’s lovemaking, ‘I shall never discover where in that little body of hers she finds the power to lift you up bodily on her trunk while she is slowly curving upwards like a suspension bridge’ (p.37). Or how he believes that, soon after sex a man should return to his own apartment in order to work. How he ‘couldn’t write tomorrow’s editorials with Elewa’s hands cradling my damp crotch’ (p.38).

How, when young Sam was in bed in Camberley recovering from double pneumonia, MM set him up with a good-time girl who gave excellent blowjobs (with an ‘invigorating tongue’, p.61). Which in turn makes Chris recall his ill-fated 6-month marriage to a woman named Louise who was ‘totally frigid in bed’ (p.63), and then another girl he went out with who ‘flaunted her flesh’, lacing her performance with ‘moans and all that ardent crap’ (p.63).

On one of their early nights together, Chris tells Beatrice loads about him and Ikem and Sam, including the morning after Sam and his then-girlfriend, Gwen, had sex, she woke and wanted another go, he said ‘there was nothing left in the pipeline’ so she:

‘swings herself around and picks up his limp wetin-call with her mouth’

at which point he gets an erection. This leads to a whole page devoted to Beatrice commenting on this behaviour, saying ‘how disgusting’, asking whether he ejaculated in her mouth, that’s something she’ll never do, and so on (p.69).

When Chris and Beatrice have sex in chapter 8 it should win an award for embarrassingly over-written sex scenes. In the same chapter Chris caricatures what would happen if he fled Kanga, went into exile in the west and it is typical of the novel’s worldview that he immediately thinks that in exile he would ‘sleep with a lot of white girls’ (p.118). Are white girls that sexually available to Nigerian students? Apparently so.

When Beatrice compares Chris and Ikem the salient point is not regarding their political position or economic theory or ideals for the country, it’s that Ikem has had a ‘string of earthy girlfriends’ (p.119).

When Beatrice insists on spending Chris’s last night in Bassa with him, even though it’s at the slum home of taxi driver Braimoh, the pair still have sex in someone else’s bed and despite the fact that his host’s five small children are sleeping on mats in the same room, separated only by a sheet hung from string strung across the room, so any wakeful children can hear the act (p.198).

Maybe we’re meant to find the sexual anecdotes, especially in the first half of the text, warm and funny; maybe they’re meant to indicate the openness between the three former friends and their girlfriends, a kind of prolongation of their student-era, light-hearted promiscuity. But to me almost all this sex talk felt somehow joyless and crude. It put me off the characters and the book.

And, just as in A Man of the People, I found it disappointing that these so-called ‘intellectuals’ don’t have an idea in their heads, don’t have a single practical suggestion about how to improve the law or commerce, industry, investment or economy of their country: they just spend all their time telling stories or thinking about sex.

And, of course, the entire narrative climaxes, or ends, with a fight over a sex act, namely Chris intervening to stop the police sergeant raping a young woman. Putting aside the (nasty) content of the act, it’s characteristic of Achebe’s contemporary stories that the decisive event is sexual rather than political, just as the swing event in A Man of the People is not a political decision but Odilo’s anger at Chief Nanga sleeping with his girlfriend. Seems like, in Achebe, sexual hot-headedness always trumps politics analysis.

Embedded stories

The character Ikem is now a powerful newspaper editor but like all literature students, fancies himself as a poet and author. All Achebe’s books contain numerous traditional proverbs and some of them (Arrow of God) describe characters telling each other traditional folk stories. In this one, we have Ikem’s productions quote in full, being:

  • a Hymn to the Sun (pages 30 to 33)
  • a ‘love letter’ to Women (i.e. a feminist interpretation of history and reform) (pages 97 to 101)
  • the leopard and the tortoise

Explanation of the title

At the end of chapter 3 Ikem composes a Hymn to the Sun – an unlikely thing, maybe, for a tough newspaper editor to do, but adding an interesting extra layer of meaning to the novel’s text. Half-way through he describes the way a hallucinatorily fierce sun burns away vegetation from the face of the earth, leaving trees looking like bronze statues:

like anthills surviving to tell the new grass of the savannah about last year’s brush fires.

So the anthills are repositories of history which survive a disastrous fire in order to tell succeeding generations what happened. So maybe that is the purpose of this book: to survive in the fierce times of Nigeria’s military dictatorship, to preserve history and stories for later generations.

Conclusion

I read Anthills of the Savannah when it first came out and it left a lasting, positive impression on me. Rereading it almost 40 years later I found I disliked many things about it. Of Achebe’s five novels I think it’s the weakest: I’d recommend any of the others, but especially Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God before it.

Without maybe being fully aware of it, Achebe seems to have moved into thriller territory, with the last 40 pages being an account of a man on the run from the state security services and he does a capable job but it’s not really his forte. The folk stories interspersed in the narrative are not as numerous as I expected, only about three in total, not enough to lift the book into the realm of magical realism which was so fashionable when it was published.

He makes a clear effort to be a feminist, taking time to flesh out the character of Beatrice, her one-sided upbringing, her experiences in London, falling in love with Chris, her boldness at the President’s party, overcoming her terror when Chris goes on the run, with plenty of reflections thrown in about the plight of women, the oppression of women, how women have to stick together, women are the future etc. All correct sentiments, but not really dramatised in the plot. Good intentions, somehow not fully worked through.

Also his prose style has gone to pot. I initially thought the long unravelling sentences were limited to Beatrice’s sections of the novel and designed to characterise her feminine thought processes like Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses. But they’re not. They occur throughout and are often really clumsy.

All these attractions of Abazon had of course to be set against the one considerable disadvantage of being a place where the regime might be sleeping with one eye open especially since the death of Ikem and an ugly eruption of a new crisis over the government’s refusal to turn over his body to his people for burial under the provocative pretext that investigations were still proceeding into the circumstances of his death! (p.195, cf p.196)

Achebe took over a decade to write this relatively short novel. Don’t you think that sentence could have been a teeny bit improved? Probably by breaking it up into two or more shorter sentences? And does it need the exclamation mark at the end? It serves mainly to make the thought it contains come over as callow and naive.

But most of all I disliked how useless, impractical, spurious and distracting most of its intellectual content is. Economic, social, industrial, developmental, fiscal and social problems need practical, thought-out and costed solutions, not folk stories and witless vapouring about:

re-establishing vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being.

I know it’s only a novel not an economic strategy, but it was Achebe himself who chose to make it a novel about politics, to get his hands dirty by entering the political arena and to give his characters great long speeches about the future of their country, the future of democracy, the validity of revolution, about feminism and overthrowing the patriarchy and smashing the system and supporting the poor.

So it is deeply disappointing that amid all this fine rhetoric the book’s political analyses are so limited and shallow – big on rhetoric about stories and feelings but, for all practical purposes, quite useless.

Credit

Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe was published in 1987 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 1988 African Writers Series paperback edition.

Related link

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on January 29, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on January 29, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/29/anthills-of-the-savannah-chinua-achebe/

Ladysmith by Giles Foden (1999)

Published the year after Foden’s famous debut, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘Ladysmith’ is even longer, weighing in at a chunky 362 pages. He must have been working on them at the same time and this prompts the thought of considering them as two prisms or perspectives, from different periods, on their subjects – Africa, white people in Africa, colonialism and war.

Talking of dates, I realised Foden probably wanted the book to be published in 1999 as this marked the centenary of its subject, the start of the siege of Ladysmith. I wonder if the actual publication date was aligned as well i.e. in October or November. In fact one of the characters wonders whether the siege will go on for decades and his diary of it will be dug up a century hence, in 1999 (George Steevens the journalist, p.175).

Anyway, Ladysmith is a dazzling feat of imagination and bravura writing, hugely gripping, informative and entertaining. Also, it is very hard, grim and violent.

The siege of Ladysmith

The (Second) Boer War lasted from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902. Less than a month into the conflict Boer forces surrounded the town of Ladysmith in the colony of Natal on 2 November 1899 – occupied by British civilians, Asians and Africans and a contingent of the British army – and besieged it for 118 days, until it was relieved by British forces on 28 February 1900.

Prologue

The narrative opens not in Africa, but in late-Victorian Ireland (later on, we realise it’s about 1880). Four dramatic pages briskly describe the poverty and persecution suffered by the unnamed narrator, which drives him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The underlying point is the implied connection between the Irish and the Boers, small subject peoples oppressed by the British Empire. He’s involved in a shootout with British police, escapes, is hidden by comrades in the Brotherhood, then smuggled to Liverpool, where he plans to start a new life in the colonies.

Part 1. Crossways

It quickly becomes clear that a distinguishing feature of the book is its very large cast of characters. Here’s a list of the characters who appear in the first hundred pages or so:

  • Bella Kiernan, 20, eldest daughter of…
  • Leo Kiernan, red-haired proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Ladysmith (p.19)
  • Jane Kiernan, 18, Bella’s blonde younger sister (p.24), admired by gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade (p.62)
  • Gunner Herbert Foster, likely young lad and beau to Jane Kiernan
  • Antonio Torres, barber, from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now named Maputo and Mozambique, respectively) which he left when his beloved Isabella Teixera da Mattos (p.93) married another man (Luís)
  • Mrs Frinton, thin, ascetic, grey-haired, God-fearing widow (p.47), most religious woman in town (p.125)
  • Mr and Mrs Star, the Ladysmith bakers (p.15)
  • Tom Barnes of the Green Horse regiment (p.20), writes long descriptive letters home to his mother and sister Lizzie, one of which includes burning down the house of an absent Boer including piano and music (pages 60 to 65)
  • four journalists: George Steevens of the Mail; Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle; Donald McDonald of the Melbourne Argus; William Maud the Graphic’s special artist (pages 21 and 120); MacDonald is coarse and racist (p.75); Steevens, small and bald and scholarly, is a legend for his calm under fire (p.76); Nevinson is more the neutral 40-ish narrator type (p.78) albeit a ‘dour figure’ (p.203)
  • Atkins of the Manchester Guardian
  • Perry Barnes, Tom’s younger brother who’s followed him into the army, a farrier by trade, aboard the same ship bringing the Biographer, Winston Churchill and thousands of troops to South Africa (p.26)
  • Lieutenant Norris, Tom and Bob’s superior officer
  • the Biographer who it took me a few pages to realise is not a photographer but a pioneer of moving pictures i.e. film photography – describes the loading and sea voyage of the Dunottar Castle setting off from Southampton to Cape Town – he grew up in Birmingham and considers himself an outsider at the captain’s table full of plummy posh officers (p.26); he is so-named because he works for the Mutoscope and Biograph Company (p.56)
  • Winston Churchill, correspondent for the Morning Post (p.30)
  • General Redvers Henry Buller (p.35)
  • Muhle Maseku, wife Nandi (who Maseku married when he was 13) and young son Wellington, one of thousands in a refugee column fleeing (p.36), he is separated from his wife and boy into a group of 400 Blacks by Boers who force them to work on building fortifications; in the rush down a muddy slope after a day working in the rain he breaks his ankle
  • Marwick, kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department (p.38)
  • General Piet Joubert, Commandant-General of the Transvaal (p.40)
  • Major Mott, the military censor (p.43) started out ‘harsh’ and, as things become intense, becomes ‘merciless’ (p.97), proud possessor of a grand sealion moustache (p.195)
  • Mohandas Gandhi, speaking at a Hindu political meeting and interviewed by the Biographer (pages 54 to 57)
  • Bob Ashmead, soldier sharing a tent with Tom Barnes (p.58)
  • Dr Sterkx, doctor in the Boer camp who looks after Muhle Maseku and his broken ankle (p.66); turns out it was his house and piano and music Tom Barnes and his troop burned down and took his wife Frannie prisoner into Ladysmith; he makes primitive crutches for Muhle who he gets to become an assistant; they watch battles from a nearby hill
  • Mr Grimble of the Ladysmith town council, local farmer and leading light in Carbineers (p.86), producer of fruit jams (p.104)
  • Archdeacon Barker (p.88)
  • Lieutenant General Sir George White, overall commander of the Ladysmith forces (p.171)

The start of the bombardment

The first shell from the surrounding Boers lands in Ladysmith on 2 November 1899. The town council debates evacuating the wounded and non-combatants. Jingos are outraged. Nevinson the journalist is developing into our eyes and ears and visits the station as the first long train of wounded and women and blacks and Indians pulls out. The telegraph line has been cut so he advertises for Blacks to be paid runners i.e. sneak through the Boer lines and get to the nearest British town in order to get his despatches sent back to London. Since they might be shot on sight the Blacks are charging £20 a journey. Nevinson hires a boy, Wellington, who’s the son of Muhle Maseku who we’ve seen being co-opted into the Boer camp then breaking his ankle. Nevinson includes not only his own despatches but letters friends want posted, including Tom’s to his mum.

Bella and Jane discuss their boyfriends, how long the siege will last, what will happen afterwards. Bella drops by the Star bakery. All food is rationed now and can only be bought with coupons. Bella pays triple the price for a loaf of bread which turns out to be adulterated and makes her sick.

General of the besieging Boers, Joubert, allows trains of wounded and non-combatants to be taken to Camp Intombi down the railway line. Jingos christen it ‘Fort Funk’ (p.106). (According to Wikipedia, the Intombi Military Hospital was some 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) outside Ladysmith and run by Major General (later Sir) David Bruce and his wife Mary. During the siege, the number of beds in the hospital camp grew from the initial 100 to a total of 1900. A total of 10,673 admissions were received and treated at Intombi.)

All classes of men are conscripted into digging defensive trenches and sangars. Torres the barber is bombed out.

Ladysmith measures not 3 miles in any direction. By 5 December 1899 some 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron have been thrown at it (p.123). Growing stress at the ceaseless barrage of incoming shells. Night-time burial parties. Food becomes scarcer. Water from the river polluted with faeces. More and more disease. British forces make a few night-time sallies and spike one Long Tom, cause of celebration. But there are others and numerous other field guns surrounding them. The constant barrage continues.

Dramatic tension

In all kinds of novels the reader experiences an element of suspense and tension as they wait to see what will happen to the characters, how the story will pan out. Well, in a war story like this, there’s a pretty obvious brutal tension involved, as you read about all of these characters, share their thoughts and feelings and perceptions and that is…which of them are going to be killed, or die of disease, or be horribly maimed?

(Lots) more narrative

Tom and Bob are practising cavalry manoeuvres when interrupted by shellfire (they’re not hurt). At the Boer camp Muhle Maseku wakens to see his son, Wellington, has been caught carrying his package of messages through Boer lines, by members of the Irish Brigade, who are kicking and beating him and about to drag him away to execute him. Muhle intervenes, hitting the leader of the Irish Brigade, John MacBride, with his crutch and is shot in the thigh for his troubles, passing out.

(Mention of John MacBride is significant, because he appeared in the prologue to the entire book set, we later learn, around 1879, a member of the small group of Irish Nationalists which includes the unnamed narrator of the prologue. The significance of all of this is explained towards the very end of the book.)

The Biographer has made it by train as far as Frere where the line has been blown up by the Boers. Churchill has gone and got himself captured when the Boer derailed an armoured train he was riding in. The other correspondents are making a fuss to get him freed.

The Biographer is an eye witness to the Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899. He gets involved in carrying stretchers of the wounded which is where he bumps into Mohandir Gandhi who, somewhat improbably, takes the opportunity to explain that all this bloodshed has helped him crystallise his worldview of satyagraha or non-violence (p.151).

Colenso was one of the three catastrophic defeats which were dubbed Black Week (Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December 1899) in which some 2,800 British troops were killed, wounded or captured (p.153). Buller sends, via the new helioscope system which has been set up to replace the broken telegraph, a depressed defeatist message to Ladysmith to surrender which the town’s commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir George White, to his credit, ignores.

We are given the text of a letter Perry Barnes writes home to his sister from the camp at Frere i.e. Buller’s camp trying to get past Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. The point is that at the end of the narrative, Foden explains that one of the sources of the novel was an actual cache of letters written by one of his forebears who was in the siege.

A shell lands on the steps of the Royal Hotel blowing off the leg of a doctor who later dies. Bella ponders the mother she never knew, Catherine, from back in Ireland.

(At which point I realised this is probably the ‘Catherine’ we see getting shot dead by British police in Ireland in the dramatic opening Prologue. And realise at the same moment that the unnamed narrator of the Prologue must have been the man now known as Leo Kiernan, Bella’s father and owner of the Royal Hotel.)

Bella and Tom have slowly become an item though Bella is wary. Novels and love, do all ‘serious’ novels have to feature a love story?

Nevinson is astonished to spot the young Zulu he had sent with his despatches bathing in the river with his mother. Wellington explains how he was caught, beaten up, the documents taken from him, read and defaced, but he was saved from execution by General Joubert who instead tasked him with returning them to Ladysmith, which Wellington did by creeping up on a sentry post and chucking the bag in then running off.

Bella finally agrees to ‘walk out’ with Tom, they walk out to the empty orchard outside town and have first sex, breathily described: ‘She rubbed against the straining tip of him’ etc (p.187). Although they get as far as him licking her through her panties, she bridles, pulls back, unzips his trousers and masturbates him till he climaxes, giggling quietly because his name is Tom, and the big guns firing on the town are nicknamed Long Toms and she is holding his Long Tom in her hand.

George Steevens has had enteric fever for weeks and Nevinson is justifiably concerned for him and his sometimes hallucinatory feverish conversation. The bored journalists have amused themselves by setting up a home-printed broadsheet called the Ladysmith Lyre whose purpose is exaggeration, rumour and amusement.

Very long description of a cricket match put together by the General, between two teams called the Colonials and the Mother Country. Both Tom and Gunner Foster do good batting, to the admiration of Bella and Jane. Tribal courtship rituals. To his irritation Leo Kiernan is compelled to be captain of the Colonials. It all builds to a climax as Bella’s dad turns out to be an improbably fine cricketer (improbable because he’s never played the game before) and the Colonials are just one run away from victory when just the one shell is lobbed at the game by the Boers on the surrounding hills. It explodes sending red hot splinters everywhere but apparently harming no-one, the final ball is played, Bella’s dad misses it but it hits young Herbert Foster who had remained in his wicket keeper’s crouch and when Tom goes up to see him, realises he is dead, killed instantly by a liver of shrapnel from the Boer shell.

Part 2. The Tower

Two days later Jane is in deep shock, shell-shocked, PTSD, shakes, catatonic, throws up, can’t answer questions. Bella cleans up the vomit, remakes the bed, puts her in, goes downstairs to the hotel bar which promptly receives two direct hits.

When she wakes up in the makeshift hospital in the town hall, she discovers both her dad and she have gashes but otherwise unhurt. Leo has sent Jane with a nurse in that day’s train to Intombi. Leo takes Bella to see the hotel which is utterly ruined. She reclaims some dirty clothes and sheets from the wreckage then her dad takes her to the network of caves along the river Klip, where bombed-out women and children are living.

Gaza

It’s unnerving to read the account of a population traumatised (and killed and mutilated) by relentless, merciless bombardment on days when, making coffee or lunch, I turn on the radio and hear more grim details of the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Even more eerie to read about the huge network of tunnels the homeless men and women of Ladysmith constructed in the soft soil alongside the river Klip, reminding me of the vast labyrinth of tunnels Hamas has are said to have created in Gaza. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t get the contemporary resonance out of my head as I read descriptions of crying women and children surrounded by unrelenting, random death.

‘When will it end?’
‘I never thought I would see myself like this.’
‘Mummy!’
‘My God, I have no hope left in me.’ (p.231)

It was as if they’d gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now. (p.234)

1899. 2023. Some people think the human race changes, that ‘humanity’ is moving forwards and upwards, that we are ‘progressing’. I don’t.

More part 2

Bella is settled into a dugout cave, has sort of bed made up for her by kindly Mrs Frinton. Standing outside she notices the Portuguese barber, Torres, digging. Turns out he’s digging up unexploded munitions. When a shell comes over Torres grabs her hand and yanks her over and into the men’s tunnels. Here a rough uitlander makes an off-colour remark prompting Torres to fight him for the lady’s honour. Arguably, this section should have been called ‘The Tunnels’ as the narrative dwells on Bella’s completely changed circumstances and how poor and alone and ill and hungry she feels. It’s called The Tower because in her distracted mind she creates a shimmering tower rising above the ruined town, an image of transcendence and escape.

On Christmas Day 1899 a shell lands nearby spattering Bella with mud as she was dressing in her best blouse, she spends hours rocking on the floor in despair. Her dad arrives with a letter from Jane at the military hospital who, mercifully, has recovered.

After two weeks Bella is sent by the river cave women to get provisions from the Commissariat in town. She visits the Royal and is distraught to see it looking like it’s been abandoned for years. In the ruins she discovers the Zulu mother Nandi and Wellington the messenger boy are squatting. Nandi tugs her skirts and begs and Bella gives her some of her precious supplies.

(The degrading immiseration of once cheerful well-fed westerners also reminds me of the imprisonment of the Europeans in the Japanese internment camp in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’.)

She goes to the Town Hall to see her father, is disconcerted to see that he is sitting on the military tribunal alongside Mayor Farquhar and Major Mott, and then horrified when they drag Torres the barber before them and arraign him for spying and treason, for which the penalty in time of war is death. Tom had reported seeing someone flashing messages using a mirror from some shrubbery on the edge of town, had fired into the bushes, missed the man who disappeared, leaving fragments of a mirror of the type which Torres used to sell from his barber’s shop, and the footprint of a boot with a big V on it.

The case is not proven but he is still roughly tied up and dragged off to the Dopper Church which has been surrounded by barbed wire and turned into an ad hoc prison for suspects.

Part 2 is much much more focused on one character (Bella) than part one had been with its cast of over 40. Now it’s all about Bella’s feelings at being bombed out, realising she doesn’t like Tom who obeys orders rather than listen to her, and hates her father after he defended the xenophobic unfairness of trying Torres.

Next day she goes back into town and to the Dopper Church, where she asks the guard to fetch Torres to the barbed wire where she apologises for everything and promises to do whatever she can. Then she goes to the ruins of the Royal Hotel, climbing gingerly up the ruined staircase to the Star Room where she finds her father, white with intense strain. His revolver is on the desk. He makes her swear not to try to find him till the siege is over but stay in the caves. In a flash it came to me that Leo is the spy, the traitor, the anti-British Irish Republican Brother who is signalling information to the Boers. I bet at some crucial moment we discover Leo’s boots have a big V pattern on them.

Part 3. Amours de Voyage

Rather mercifully, the narrative leaves Bella and her agonisings about Tom, the meaning of love, her father and Torres and we’re back with Nevinson, the dour journalist. ‘Amours de voyages’ is the ironic description Nevinson gives to the final delusions of his friend Steevens as he approaches the final stages of enteric fever. Nevinson visits the sheds at the (now disused) railway station to see for himself the vast abattoir and horse-stewing factory it’s been turned into, producing revolting foods such as ‘chevril’, made from boiling horses’ bones and guts.

There’s an interlude where Foden inserts newspaper reports, and Churchill’s telegram to Britain, giving details of his daring escape from Boer captivity and wild escape by train and walking the 300 miles north to Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

That night the Boers mount their biggest attack, seizing part of the vital Caesar’s Camp area. Nevinson finds command headquarters in total chaos and rides out to see for himself, ending up taking refuge in a sangar of the Irish Fusiliers, during the fierce battle and on into a sudden rainstorm. The British counter-attack and take all the key positions. 500 British soldiers killed to about 800 Boers. A significant battle. By the time he gets back to the cottage he’s been sharing with the other correspondents, Nevinson feels chill and ill.

Cut to Churchill taking a boat to Durban then hastening back to Buller’s relieving force, where he is greeted and filmed by the Biographer (quite a while since we’ve heard about him). They can see the terrible guns firing down onto the town but every attempt to cross the river Tugela is repulsed by the Boers who are firmly entrenched on the other side.

A slightly delirious, impressionistic description of the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, 23 to 24 January 1900, premonition of the Somme and First World War butchery. Ends with a letter from Perry Barnes back to Lizzy describing the slaughter and blaming the useless British generals (pages 303 to 304).

Dr Sterkx comes to the Zulu Muhle Maseku whose gunshot wound to the thigh is healing, says he will help him escape from the Boer camp into Ladysmith, if he will take a message to his wife, Frannie.

Bella now spends all her time by the filthy, faeces-full river, brooding, hungry and depressed. She is slightly deliriously metaphysical, staring at the same scene till it shimmers and wobbles, until she feels like one more shape in the lifeless scene (p.307).

Torres becomes desperate stuck inside the barbed-wired church. He becomes fascinated by the Boer woman who still has her goose with her. The reader realises it’s Frannie, distraught wife of Dr Sterkx.

Thrilling description of Muhle Maseku’s escape from the Boer camp during British shelling, under cover of drifting smoke, but still they spot and trail him, taking pot shots till he abandons the obvious route down a gulley and goes up the side and over land, hiding and resting as the full moon floods the landscape with light (p.314).

Tom is depressed, with the duration of the war, with guarding the church, with his ended relationship with Bella who just gives him a hard stare and turns away. So at some cheap estaminet he pays ten shillings to go with a Malay prostitute. Pleasantly pornographic: ‘A soft warm hood of flesh began to press itself over the tip of him’. (p.318). She blows him then rides him to a climax.

On the subject of sex we learn that the Biographer and Perry have been (male, same sex) lovers for some weeks, regularly jerking each other off in the river.

Bella seeks out Nandi and asks for her help. These days Wellington doesn’t smuggle food in, he spends all his time roaming round the surrounding country looking for the sign his father said he would make. That night Wellington appears to Torres inside the church and tells him to follow him. They wriggle through a small window he’s loosened, then sneak across the empty space to the fence which has a square cut out of it. There’s a sentry box but as he watches, Torres sees a female figure approach the sentry, engage it in conversation, then kiss. It is Bella, calculatingly distracting Tom.

Torres is led by Wellington through back streets, out of town to a copse where there’s a brazier with one of the town’s many observation balloons tethered over it. In a little while Bella arrives, they climb into the basket, undo the ropes, and drift into the sky, escaping the imprisoned town.

Tom is flogged for letting Torres escape, so badly he is sent to Intombi camp, where his bloody back is tended by Jane Kiernan. Wellington Maseku brings in his wounded, badly ill father, who he found hiding in a shallow burrow he’d dug to hide from the Boers, but weak and emaciated and his leg wound badly infected. Because of all the goods Wellington smuggled into the camp, the doctors say they’ll see what they can do.

Ladysmith is relieved. The Boers pull out and head north. Buller’s relieving force enters from the south. We are shown the characters reacting differently (Mrs Frinton, of course, praying). Most vivid is MacDonald coming across Nandi weeping at the front of the ruined Royal Hotel. She’s just learned her husband died of blood loss as a result of the amputation of his leg. Perry Barnes is decapitated by one of the last, random Boer shells. The Biographer, who had been filming his lover at the moment of his gruesome death, collapses in hysterics.

Paintings and patriotic accounts record General Buller riding up to General White, dismounting and shaking his hand as the crowds cheered but no such thing happened; Buller just rode blithely by.

Part 4. The monologues of the dead

An oddity. A series of short, sometimes very short (half page), texts by various characters from the narrative, being:

  • Tom Barnes (December 1901) – the British are in the ascendant and in this letter Tom describes razing Boer farmsteads he is completely disillusioned with empire, queen and country, thinks the entire war has been a shambles
  • Mrs Sterkx (March 1902) – an unforgiving description of the concentration camps the British herded Boer women and children into, where they died by their thousands
  • Nevinson (December 1915) – reporting at the conclusion of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, reporting that many think Churchill should be publicly hanged for his part in promoting the campaign
  • Bobby Greenacre (January 1916) – was about to sign up and go to the war when he is bitten by an adder
  • Nevison (November 1916) – talks about his friendship with W.B. Yeats, his lover Maud Gonne who has gone off to nurse soldiers on the Western front, leaving the man she married, John MacBride who a) had led the Irish Brigade in Natal and b) took part in the famous Easter Rising in Dublin; he heard that Bella and Torres landed safely in their balloon and are presumably living somewhere
  • The Biographer (February 1931) – during the main text the Biographer was always frustrated the moving pictures alone didn’t tell the full story; here he is now doing the voiceover for a Movietone News film about Mahatma Gandhi
  • Churchill (February 1931) – speech to the West Sussex Conservatives in which he takes the time to execrate Gandhi turning up to meet the Viceroy of India dressed in peasant clothes
  • Jane (May 1933) – multiple sadnesses; she has just buried Tom, who she married; and she remembers back to discovering her father dead in the ruins of the Hotel, having shot himself with his revolver and slowly discovered that he was the spy signalling information to the Boers; thought as much; then how she tracked down Bella and Torres, discovering he sold a bauxite claim for a fortune and took Bella back to Portugal where they lived the life of the 1910s and 20s rich, spats, feather boas and fast cars
  • MacDonald (December 1938) – bumped into Bobby Greenacre who is now an eminent lawyer, a KC in Australia
  • Gandhi (August 1942) – he has been arrested for publicly stating his party will not fight the Japanese if they invade India; so he’s been incarcerated, yet again; he marvels at the way everything – he, history – are misrepresented: ‘everything is distorted and misrepresented’ – this seems a rather obvious comment about the nature of fiction itself, and maybe about Foden’s own kind of historical fiction in particular
  • Churchill (27 May 1944) – a secret cypher telegram which indicates Churchill’s vehement dislike of Gandhi right to the end
  • The Biographer (July 1945) – retired now, he reflects on how Churchill will be kicked out at the election, how his time and his romance of the British Empire is over; the British will leave India as soon as they decently can; still, Churchill’s rhetoric and determination kept the British at it for six long years; respect
  • Wellington – reflects on the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960, the enduring wickedness of the Pass Laws in South Africa’s history; Wellington is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and in prison for burning his Pass Card in front of the press; he is being represented in court by a young Nelson Mandela; he remembers Ladysmith, the experience of being in prison, and reflects how, for people like him – South African Blacks – it has never been otherwise

Obviously deliberate that a Black African is given the last word in this story about Africa.

Foden’s multifarious styles

There were fairly frequent moments in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when I was surprised by an oddity of Foden’s prose style, but assigned it to the narrator. But there are more here, so I’m concluding they’re part of Foden’s essential approach to language.

Formal prepositions

He has an old-fashioned way with prepositions, for example he insists on using their full formal versions, ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’, ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’.

He is much given to the old-fashioned inversion of phrases to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at Dundee, to where a column had rashly been thrown forward. (p.45)

Flight to Intombi was now a measure of which many non-combatants availed themselves. (p.105)

In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. (p.52)

Is this meant to convey the archaic quality of late-Victorian prose, the formality of late-Victorian social life, or the stilted pompousness of this particular pair of characters? Or does Foden just regard it as a valid form of phrasing he can mix in with other far more modern, even slangy, phraseology? Whatever the motive it results in a text which is a mosaic, or mashup, of multiple tones and registers.

He has a similar fondness for an antiquated use of the word ‘so’.

The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking… (p.119)

Wouldn’t this be more naturally be phrased as ‘it was like this where he was walking’? Is the unusual phrasing ‘It was so…’ intended to evoke Victorian phraseology, because I’m not sure it does. It reminds me more of Captain Picard’s catchphrase in Star Trek Next Generation: ‘Make it so.’ It’s a conscious style decision; Foden repeats it later:

Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so. (p.295)

It’s one among many odd, anomalous, unmodern turns of phrase which Foden deliberately deploys. Much earlier in the book, describing the town council debate about whether the non-combatants should leave the town:

Others, in particular those who had suffered injury to family or property from the bombardment, were all for leaving the soldiers to it and getting out from under the shadow of shell. (p.87)

‘The shadow of shell’ is an odd phrase, isn’t it? It’s not Victorian or modern, if anything it reminds me of the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Ornate phrasing

There are many such unorthodox or contrived phrasings, not massive in themselves, just a continual trickle of unusualness:

‘Let me explain,’ intervened Bella, in agitated fashion. (p.111)

But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. (p.189)

All seemed set to enjoy themselves in fair measure. (p.195)

This sounds more like Shakespeare than late-Victorian prose.

Yet, if truth be told, there were other constants… (p.214)

Is the deployment of ‘if truth be told’ an attempt to mimic late-Victorian oratory? Is it conscious pastiche or irony? Or is it Foden writing in his own style? Does his own style combine this odd range of registers, taking in modern slang, through boys’ adventure clichés, oddly formal word order, to passages of fairly contemporary psychological description and analysis?

Slang

Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night (p.230)

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand. ‘I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.’ (p.262)

Use of the word ‘spring’ made me think of a 1940s film noir, or the thousands of American movies where the associates of criminals ‘spring’ them out of gaol.

Grandiloquent

But sometimes Foden’s prose is the opposite of slangy and goes beyond historic pastiche to take on a conscious pomp and circumstance, as here, where the correspondent Nevinson is meditating on the futility of war:

No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them. (p.286)

Grandiloquent, meaning: ‘pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, especially in a way that is intended to impress.’ I understand that this grand style reflects the personality of Nevinson who, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly prone to grand reflections on history i.e Foden is capturing the style of a specific character.

Grandiloquence of a different type is deliberately deployed in the climactic scene when Ladysmith is finally relieved by British troops and you can feel Foden reaching for a different, feverish style to try and convey the emotional release of the moment, to evoke the hysteria of the crowds:

The crowd opened to let them [the liberating army] trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if the siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts (p.331)

‘Very breasts’. The whole liberation scene is written like this, in a deliberately high heroic but sentimental Edwardian style, which is very noticeably different from most of the rest of the book.

Prose poetry

And sometimes into the mix Foden throws long, lyrical sentences of prose poetry. Here’s the funeral of the highly literate correspondent George Steevens who dies of enteric fever after a long delirious illness:

A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. (p.290)

It doesn’t have the lustral mellifluousness of, say, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, but it is obviously a conscious effort at lyrical landscape painting.

Playful prose

Sometimes Foden indulges in wordplay, picking up on his own phraseology for the lolz:

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents – although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. (p.102)

I had to read that twice before I realised the phrase ‘such a measure’ is referring back to the hair’s breadth (that the person he goes on to talk about, Bobby Greenacre, did escape death by a hair’s breadth). This picking up, echoing and playing with his own phrases occurs fairly often. The soldier Perry Barnes swears when he describes the murderous effect of the Maxim gun:

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash. That night dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. (p.293)

See how he picks up and plays with his own phraseology.

I’m not complaining, I’m not meaning to criticise in the negative sense. The opposite. I’m celebrating the complexity of Foden’s style. I’m trying to analyse out some of the many different lexical tricks or quirks, along with the varying registers, tones and strategies going on in Foden’s prose style, which make it sometimes odd and unpredictable, always interesting and highly readable.

Imperial politics

Strangely, there’s relatively little politics in the book. Early on there’s a set-piece argument or friendly debate, between the journalists Nevinson and Steevens, about the point of the British Empire.

Nevinson, in his youth tempted by the teachings of the anarchist Kropotkin, puts the standard liberal view that the Boer War is unnecessary and has been fomented by jingos such as Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain purely out of greed, to annex the Boer republics so Britain can get its hands on their diamonds and gold.

‘Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after wat we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all?’ (p.83)

And his colleague, Steevens, puts the standard riposte that the war must be won because failure, or even weakness, will inspire the hundreds of millions of other subjects of the empire to rise up and end it. Nevinson:

For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself? (p.48)

When Nevinson points out how shabby and squalid many of the doings of the supposedly ‘noble’ Empire are in reality, Steevens is given some pithy lines about how the Empire shouldn’t be judged by any of its practical applications, but as a platonic ideal of perfect community and administration:

‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…but it is certainly folly to let it go….

‘It’s the vital ideal of Empire one must hang on to – however tawdry the reality, however full of outrageous postures and cheap tricks. We’ve got to keep aiming at something beyond the truth. I suppose, at base, it is all to do with spreading light.’ (p.84)

I enjoy bits like this not because I agree with them (at all) but because it’s a point of view you never hear nowadays, drowned by today’s blanket execration of everything to do with the British Empire.

Also, reading contemporary debates about the point of an empire from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and so on, sheds quite a bit of light on absolutely modern issues in international affairs. Michael Ignatieff’s series of books from the 1990s wonder whether there aren’t many countries which are too poor or chaotic to run themselves and where ‘the international community’ needs to step in and run them in order to save the populations from massacre – Bosnia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza.

Obviously he’s not talking about the same kind of exploitative conquest as characterised the European empires but, to many of the peoples watching the arrival of Western armies in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, the subtle moral differences made by liberal commentators are irrelevant: they were just the latest waves of Western invaders and they needed to be resisted.

Twentieth century politics

The short final section four has a powerful but, I think, questionable affect. In very short order (i.e. in a hurry) we are shuffled through extremely brief descriptions of:

  • the concentration camps set up in the later stages of the Boer War
  • the First World War
  • the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
  • the Easter Rising in Dublin
  • three or four brief snippets which ask us to consider the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany in particular
  • ending with Wellington talking about the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC, Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid

This is a lot of stuff to take in and process. In my opinion, too much. As in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ only more so, it feels as if the novelistic subject matter – the focus on people, their characters, and interactions and thoughts and feelings – is swamped by the powerful associations attached to the historical events Foden describes.

Just considering the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany, in particular, but also his increasingly outdated attempts to preserve the British Empire, is a vast, simply enormous subject. Its scale and complexity completely overwhelm the thousands of fine and beautifully imagined details Foden has filled his book with (the descriptions of the fruit in Mr Grimble’s orchard spring to mind, or the cricket match, or Torres’s escape from the church, Major Mott’s sealion moustache, and hundreds of others).

This final section feels like wave after wave of overwhelming, each one eclipsing the one that went before – concentration camps, Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, Indian independence, the Second World War – the scale of each of them is too enormous and also too historical, in the sense that it’s more interested in political issues than in people.

And the last wave, the last three pages containing Wellington’s thoughts, his references to the Sharpeville Massacre and then onto the figure of Nelson Mandela, now universally acknowledged to be a secular saint, completely erases everything that went before, burying much of the fine detail so carefully depicted in the previous 350 pages, to become the abiding image and memory of the book. It’s a shame.

I can see that Foden intended these snippets to demonstrate that history doesn’t end with one event but is a continuum and that people’s lives continue way after the significant events they’ve been part of. That’s seems to me a fine and fairly traditional strategy for a novel, thousands do the same thing, tying up loose ends of characters’ afterlives. It’s the fact that Foden associates every one of these loose ends with major political events which is the dubious decision, a decision which – to repeat myself – risks swamping the subtlety and detail of much of what came before.

Christian feminism 1899

Mrs Frinton, in normal times a figure of fun (to Bella, anyway) for being an uptight old widow lecturing everyone about Our Lord, in wartime becomes reliable and solid (if still given to lectures). At one point she tells Bella all this trouble is down to men, the same everywhere:

‘They [men] are just like us, really,’ [Bella] ventured. ‘Only most of the time we don’t realise it.’
‘That’s a very new-fangled view,’ said the widow. ‘It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight – not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This – it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.’ (p.229)

I know plenty of feminists who would wholeheartedly agree, 123 years later.

Credit

Ladysmith by Giles Foden was published in paperback by Faber Books in 1999. References are to this Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on December 20, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, British Empire, History, Novel, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 20, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/20/ladysmith-giles-foden/

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)

I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it – but it is not at all what I expected. With the title ‘Dictatorland’ and a photo of an African dictator on the cover, I expected it to be an entertaining romp through the careers of Africa’s most notable dictators and kleptocrats, and it certainly contains that element, with chapters describing the rise to power of the following notable crooks and dictators:

  • Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo)
  • Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
  • Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)
  • Sani Abacha (Nigeria)
  • Francisco Macías and Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast)
  • Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)

Kenyon gives potted biographies consisting of short, punchy sections, scenes depicting the origins, education and early years of each baddie, their early involvement with their country’s independence movements or army (training ground for most dictators) or with a nationalist guerrilla movement.

Then he moves on to gruesome snapshots from their years in power, their madcap schemes (Mobutu’s Versailles-sized palace and Houphouët-Boigny’s basilica in the deep jungle vie for winner of the most expensive African folly) – descriptions of their secret police and torture chambers (Equatorial Guinea’s Macías Nguema is estimated to have had up to a quarter of the entire population of his country executed, making him ‘one of the most brutal dictators in history’) – and then on to the inevitable economic collapse, and their final overthrow, leaving a country in ruins.

In telling these stories Kenyon gives excellent backgrounders on the colonisation of the relevant country; the behaviour of its colonial government; the rise of nationalist agitation during the 1950s; the fraught political manoeuvres around independence, and so on.

All these profiles and pocket histories are clear and authoritative. They make for an immensely enjoyable read which conveys a lot of historical information with a sure, light touch.

The geological context

BUT there is one more crucial aspect of the book which I hadn’t expected at all; this is that Kenyon places the careers of all his dictators within a broader, what you could call, geological context. The entire book starts not with the this or that imperial conquest of this or that part of Africa, as you might expect, but with a description of the earliest ancestor of the genus Homo which has so far been found in Africa, the so-called specimen LD 350-1.

The point is that this introduces a deep historical perspective, far deeper than the past century or so of political history, a deep perspective from which Kenyon describes the geological history of Africa, and in particular the origin of the high value minerals and resources which were to play such an important part in modern Africa’s history, namely copper, diamonds, gold and then oil.

So, for example, he tells us about the discovery of the enormous stands of diamonds in southern Africa which caused the white invaders to seize the land from its black African inhabitants, and then to start fighting among themselves. He tells us the origin of the de Beers company and why the Kimberly region got its name, none of which I knew before.

This ‘geological perspective’ provides a deeper historical context for the actions of all the imperial conquerors, the colonial administrators, and then the newly independent black African leaders. It shows how they all tended to be dazzled by, fall victim to, act on the basis of, lust for Africa’s mineral wealth.

This perspective explains why the first few years of Congo’s independence era were characterised by civil war when the mineral-rich province of Katanga tried to secede from the nation (with the help of the Belgian government which wanted to hang on to its copper and diamond industries). It helps you understand how the Great War of Africa (1998 to 2002) developed into a struggle between numerous factions and foreign armies to seize parts of the country rich in minerals (diamonds, copper, gold, cobalt).

In the same vein, chapter three isn’t about a dictator at all but consists of an extended, and very readable, history of the rise of oil as the central fuel of the twentieth century. Kenyon gives the history of oil discoveries, first of all in Persia, then in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, in the 1920s and 30s, the controlling role played by Britain – which still owned or ran many of those places – alongside the growing power of America and how, by contrast, for decades, no oil companies thought Africa would yield oil deposits.

The oil chapter introduces us to a number of white, European oil prospectors, from back in the glory days of prospecting, the 1950s. We meet more of them than we do Africans, especially the ones Kenyon has tracked down and interviewed, old white men in their 80s (men like Dave Kingston, Rex Brown, David Orser) who still remember the excitement of the primitive conditions they worked under in the deserts of Libya or the malarial swamps of the Niger Delta.

The point is that a lot of those early prospectors and the oil companies they worked for (BP, Shell, Esso) were dead wrong about Africa: certain parts of it turned out to be sitting on top of vast oceans of oil, starting with Nigeria, where oil was struck in 1956, and then in Libya in 1959, then offshore Angola.

But the deep political-historical point is that, just as the so-called winds of political change were sweeping through Africa, many if not most places on the continent were about to undergo a sweeping economic change which would see their entire economies becoming orientated around a handful of commodities, commodities which the West would not only discover and develop, but do everything in their power to keep their sweaty hands on.

The dictators didn’t plan it, but they came to power just as a handful of commodities emerged as the dominant factor in their countries’ economies and the key importance of this is that an industry like gold or copper or oil is a) highly centralised and b) generates fantastic wealth.

The coincidence of mineral discoveries with independence gave the dictators immense personal control about which foreign companies were awarded contracts and licences to mine and extract the resources, and taught the dictators how to cream off for themselves and their families, hangers-on and clients, truly vast fortunes, billions and billions of dollars.

To put it another way: although nobody understood it at the time, the mineralisation of the economies of so many African nations was to create and entrench the rule of dictators and elites who acquired obscene wealth, while their nations’ infrastructures fell to pieces and their populations starved in the streets.

Many resource-rich African nations were to turn into rentier states (p.225), a rentier state being ‘a state which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments…With virtually no taxes citizens are less demanding and politically engaged and the income from rents negates the need for economic development… Instead, the government essentially ‘bribes’ the citizenry with extensive social welfare programs, becoming an allocation or distributive state…In the words of Noah Feldman in his book After Jihad, “no fiscal connection between the government and the people. The government has only to keep its people in line so that they do not overthrow it and start collecting the oil rents themselves.”‘ (Wikipedia).

Dictators like Mobutu or the successive rulers of Nigeria dealt solely and exclusively with multinational corporations dealing in oil, copper, diamond or gold, raking in fortunes from licensing fees and a cut of the profits.

With this guaranteed income the rulers of rentier states do not need to consult the population (no need for pesky elections) because their administrations aren’t reliant on taxation the way ‘normal’ western states are; with a guaranteed income not reliant on elections or representative assemblies of any kind, billionaire dictators become ever-more detached from conditions in their countries which they let go to rack and ruin. They can spend a fortune on building up a state-of-the-art military and still earn enough in corrupt rake-offs to build a palace in the jungle and hire Concorde to fly in ice cream from Paris (as Mobutu did) or build the biggest most expensive folly in Africa (as Félix Houphouët-Boigny did), while their populations see their standard of living collapse, prices hit by hyper-inflation, food become rarer, drinking water unavailable, and ultimately starve.

Back to Kenyon’s book, so it’s only after this long disquisition on the early history of oil exploration in chapter 3, that Kenyon returns to his ostensible subject, the dictators, in chapter 4. This gives an excellent summary of the 1969 Libyan coup staged by the Free Officers Movement which overthrew King Idris (friend to the West), and which installed what was supposedly a free socialist society, but which quite quickly came to be dominated by Colonel Gaddafi and became more and more authoritarian – spies and eavesdroppers in all public places, midnight arrest, torture and imprisonment without trial, the usual stuff. The point being, he was able to do pretty much what he wanted, set up a security state, claim to have invented a whole new political philosophy, and provide training bases for terrorist groups from around the world, because of the vast oil revenues his government acquired year after year without lifting a finger.

I expected a book titled ‘Dictators’ to consist of maybe a chapter each about Africa’s top ten dictators, amounting to an ‘Observer I Spy Book of African Dictators’ – but although that is, obviously, the ostensible subject, it’s not really the core of the text. It’s this geological or mineralogical context which is, arguably, the book’s most distinctive feature.

Contents

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

Clearly the topic of chocolate doesn’t quite fit into my initial suggestion that the book has a ‘geological’ or ‘mineralogical’ perspective. Chocolate is very much about geography, as I learned from Kenyon’s typically clear and interesting description, which explains that cocoa bean trees only grow in very restricted latitudes, in the right kind of tropical forest. The plant originated in South America but was experimentally introduced into Africa by Europeans, and nowadays Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are by far the two largest cocoa growing countries, accounting for over 60 % of global cocoa production.

Which is why, after chapter 7 introducing and explaining the history and development of cocoa in Africa, chapter 8 of the book focuses in on Côte d’Ivoire and the notorious figure of Félix Houphouët-Boigny who started out as a mild-mannered doctor, union leader, and cocoa planter himself, before winning election to the French Assembly and then becoming Ivory Coast’s first president, a position he held from 1960 to his death in 1993, making him the longest-serving leader in Africa’s history (a record subsequently beaten by Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017). So a chapter about a dictator, alright; but placed in the broader context of a history of the relevant basic resource.

Anyway, chocolate is obviously not a mineral, which left me a little stumped at how to give an overall summary of the book’s perspective. ‘A resource-based history of some dictatorial African rulers’? ‘A commodities-based explanation of African tyrants’? Not exactly catchy, are they? I can see why Kenyon’s publishers will have struggled to come up with a title capturing what it’s taken me three or four paragraphs to explain and how ‘Dictatorland’, although very catchy, doesn’t begin to convey this historical and resource-led backgrounding which I’ve been banging on about.

So: the book is not at all what I was expecting because its focus on precious resources makes it much more interesting, and much more penetrating, than just another purely political history would have done.

Lots of context, not so much analysis

A reviewer on Amazon points out that, entertaining and well told though the dictators’ stories are, the book lacks any kind of political or intellectual analysis.

Well, yes and no. Kenyon has no ideological axe to grind and amid his many anecdotes, his stories about oil, independence struggles, his very readable accounts of the early days and triumphant rises of his dictators, it’s true that there’s little or no effort to question or dig deeper.

If you compare him with Michael Ignatieff’s books about international affairs, the latter uses examples and interviews to make searching points about the nature of nationalism and society which I found immensely illuminating and useful. There’s nothing or not much like that here. Kenyon tells his stories, describes key scenes from each country’s history, interviews survivors from those times, very well and very readably, and that tends to be your lot.

The Amazon reviewer wanted answers to more theoretical questions like: Why has post-independence Africa been such a disaster? What is it in African culture which makes Africans incapable of ruling themselves? Is democracy impossible in Africa and if so, why? Kenyon never asks those kinds of questions. He’s a descriptive not an analytical writer.

Except that, arguably, the mineralogical and resource-focused context is his theory, his analysis, his explanation. His mineral and resource-based perspective in fact goes a long way to presenting an explanation which underpins many of Africa’s troubles, and which, although it may be familiar to experts, I hadn’t come across in the dozen or so other books about Africa which I’ve read or not, I think, considered in such detail.

His short reference to ‘rentier states’, so brief it doesn’t merit inclusion in the book’s index, is a mighty key which unlocks not just the behaviour, but the tendency to total corruption, and the longevity which characterised so many of the dictators.

That first generation of dictators, coming to power in the early 1960s, is now routinely vilified, but their longevity did ensure stability of sorts. Since their overthrows, whether in the 90s (Houphouët-Boigny), in the Arab Spring (Gaddafi) or later (Mugabe in 2017), their countries have often got even worse and the resource perspective explains why: it’s because the dictators weren’t followed by ‘democracy’ in any sense we in the West understand. The demise of the dictators resulted in the eruption of multiple groups, parties and leaders, including the ever-intrusive armies, who themselves set about squabbling for control of the narrow range of commodities which generate such obscene wealth.

The West and the aid organisations have been fighting a battle for over 50 years to persuade the ruling classes of African countries to give a damn about their populations, to invest in infrastructure, industry and agriculture, to make long-term plans to develop the country as a whole and thus remove their populations from poverty. Meanwhile the elites themselves have been engaged in often cut-throat competition to fight their way to the seat of absolute power which the first generation of post-independence rulers showed is the pathway to unimaginable wealth, power and prestige.

This deep economic and political conflict is still at work in many African countries to this day, it’s arguably the key to understanding African affairs, and Kenyon’s excellent, hugely readable, enjoyable and illuminating book really helps to explain why.

Let the facts speak for themselves

There’s one other really strong aspect to Kenyon’s narrative which I want to emphasise. This is his admirable ability to let the facts speak for themselves.

The last two books about Africa I’ve read – ‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong and ‘Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ by Tim Butcher – are both excellent in their ways, but irritated me because the authors banged on and on about the evils of imperialism and the racism of the colonial administrations, throwing these terms of abuse around on every page, repeating the same old accusations in the same old clichéd phrases, all the while generally downplaying the role of modern African rulers in Africa’s woes.

In my Wrong review I pointed out that simply venting the opinion that the colonial regimes were racist and exploitative, and insistently blaming ‘the West’ for everything that ever went wrong in Eritrea, soon becomes boring, irritating and, eventually, counter-productive.

By complete contrast Kenyon’s text is studded with facts, gives the facts, just the facts. For example, the opening chapter about diamonds states the facts about how the imperialists in the 1880s and 1890s stole the land from its native owners, in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in stark, straight, factual terms which really bring home the inexcusable iniquity of their behaviour.

Kenyon gives the facts about how local chieftains and rulers were swindled out of their land by crooked legal documents they didn’t understand, or simply driven off it at gunpoint; how Africans were corralled into small, unhealthy, infertile areas, while the whites stole all the best agricultural land (notably in Kenya and Rhodesia), or any land which showed signs of gold, copper or diamonds (South Africa in particular).

In the chapter about Mugabe Kenyon describes the surreal maze of passes and identity cards and papers which the British colonial authorities in what was Southern Rhodesia demanded that every African needed just to get around, just to walk down the street, how they had to step off the pavement if white people were walking towards them, how the slightest infringement of this world of rules triggered shouted abuse, beatings or arbitrary arrest.

In other words, Kenyon’s simple statements of the facts of imperial conquest, imperial land grabbing, imperial hypocrisy, imperial greed, the imposition of deliberately discriminatory, deliberately demeaning and humiliating regulations, at every level and every minute of an Africans’ life, is infinitely more powerful than Wrong or Butcher’s more generalised sloganeering about ‘racism’ or ‘the West’.

I don’t think Kenyon anywhere in the book uses the word ‘racist’ because he doesn’t have to. Kenyon’s plain, lucid stating of the facts of each of these issues does the same job but infinitely better; makes you quiver with anger, shrivel with embarrassment, and totally understand the rage and the impatience for freedom which drove agitators like Lumumba and Mugabe.

And this is another reason why I think this is an excellent book.

Eritrea

The very last chapter demonstrates Kenyon’s strengths and weaknesses. It gives a good account of the rise to tyranny of Isaias Afwerki, the man who rose steadily through the ranks of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to lead them to victory in the bitter 30-year-long war against Ethiopia, which finally came to an end in May 1991, with Ethiopia’s granting of Eritrea’s independence.

Kenyon tells the same story as Michela Wrong does in her long, digressive book ‘I Didn’t Do It For You’ in literally one-tenth of the space (one 44-page chapter versus Wrong’s 432 pages). Moreover, Kenyon’s account is more up to date, Wrong, published in 2005, hoping Afwerki’s regime might be overthrown or soften, Kenyon, published in 2018, giving the bad news that Afwerki’s regime not only didn’t soften but has become steadily more harsh and repressive.

Since independence Eritrea has had no elections, no constitution, no free press or media. It is almost impossible to gain entry to report on it. Eritrea commonly competes with North Korea as least free country in the world.

Also, Kenyon is balanced. Michela Wrong, as I’ve mentioned, comes over as very biased, repeating whenever she can the strongest criticisms of western nations like Italy, Britain and the West, very slow to blame anyone else (such as the brutal Derg regime in Ethiopia or its Soviet suppliers or the vile Afwerki), very slow to concede that the colonial period brought any benefits.

Kenyon, by contrast, feels fair and balanced. He clearly states that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imperialism at its most brutal, involving poison gassing of entire villages; but that the Fascist regime did then set about building roads and harbour facilities and wide boulevards and a modern infrastructure. Similarly, he mentions that the Brits asset stripped the country after they’d won it from Italy in 1940 but also introduced democracy, a free press and trade unions. In other words, he shows that the imperial legacy was mixed.

Something also emerges from Kenyon’s account which doesn’t so much from Wrong’s, which is the importance of the visit by Afwerki and a few other EFPL leaders to Maoist China in the mid-1960s. They arrived in the middle of the so-called Cultural Revolution and were very impressed by the zeal and sense of embattled virtue of the young Red Guards who rounded up the entire bourgeoisie and shunted intellectuals off to the country to work alongside peasants.

This more than anything explains how Afwerki went from being a hero of the independence struggle to one of the most repressive dictators in the world – because he knows no better. All he knows is The Struggle, and so he imagines himself surrounded by conspirators, a paranoia which is occasionally proven true because people have, understandably enough, conspired to overthrow him, and then was confirmed when was broke out anew with Ethiopia in 1998, and then 9/11 confirmed the rising threat from Islamists in the country, and then the civil war between Tigrayans from the north fighting against the Ethiopian government and so, you can see it from his point of view: there is constant struggle; the revolution is in continual jeopardy; only one man can save the revolution and save his country, and that’s why he can’t afford to hold elections. What if Islamists, if regional separatists, if rebels or traitors were elected? No, of course not. Only one man can save the nation, and he has to carry on his embattled lonely duty for as long as it takes.

And so another African dictator is born.

Wrong spends 400 pages trying to persuade us that it was Italy, Britain and the wicked West who are responsible for Eritrea’s current plight. In Kenyon’s account, both imperial nations were guilty of bad or atrocious acts, and the UN of foolish ones, but the real responsibility falls on Afwerki’s Maoist indoctrination, the man’s personal paranoia and delusions of destiny.

(The same goes, in spades, for the career of Paul Kagame who’s been at the heart of Rwandan Political Front (RPF) activity since the late 1980s and, like Afwerki, brought the paranoid style developed when the RPF was a small outfit hiding out in the mountains into office into general government when the RPF seized power in 1994, where this anxious guerrilla mindset has blossomed into intolerance of any dissent, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution worthy of Stalin or North Korea. See ‘Do Not Disturb’, the breath-taking indictment of the Rwanda regime, by Michela Wrong.)

Credit

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon was published in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd. References are to the 2018 Apollo paperback edition.

More Africa reviews

3 Comments
by Simon on December 1, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/dictatorland-the-men-who-stole-africa-paul-kenyon/

A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt (2017)

This is a very good book – scholarly, serious, authoritative. Newitt summarises the latest thinking in a whole range of issues which affect Africa’s prehistory, early modern history, colonial periods and contemporary history. It doesn’t aim to please. There are no fascinating anecdotes, colourful vignettes or pen portraits of key figures. Just the most up-to-date facts, dryly presented.

Born in 1943 (and so now 80 years old) Malyn Newitt had a long academic career during which he wrote over 20 books on Portugal and Portuguese colonialism. He was a professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London, and then deputy vice chancellor at Exeter University, before retiring in 2005. So this book is by way of being the summary of a long and distinguished academic interest in the subject.

Mozambique factsheet

The first European to land in Mozambique was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498.

The coast, territory inland and coastal islands were very slowly settled and colonised by Portugal over the next 200 years. Initially the refuelling ports scattered along the west and east coasts of Africa and onto India, later reinforced with defensive forts, were all part of the same entity, the Estado da India, way stations on the sea journey to India which was where the spices and wealth were.

In the early years the main Portuguese settlement was on the Island of Mozambique, lying off the coast at the northern end of the modern country. The sea between the island and the mainland is still known as the Mozambique Channel. The Portuguese established a port and naval base on the island in 1507 and it remained an important part of their maritime estate for centuries. It became the capital of what came to be known as Portuguese East Africa until 1898, when the administrative centre was moved to Lourenço Marques in the far south of the country, ‘reflecting the shift in economic and political importance’ (p.115).

The name of the island, and so the country, is derived from the name of Ali Musa Mbiki, Muslim sultan of the island when da Gama arrived. So never a western name, then.

For centuries a handful of coastal ports and some territory further inland were part of a huge tract of coast known as Portuguese East Africa. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, as rival European nations like Britain, France and Germany staked out their claims to Africa, was this huge territory pared away and reduced to the borders of the current Mozambique, which were only finally defined in 1891.

Mozambique is bisected by the Zambezi River, the fourth longest river in Africa (after the Nile, Niger and Congo) which rises in Zambia then flows through eastern Angola, along the north-eastern border of Namibia, the northern border of Botswana, then along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, until it enters Mozambique.

North of the Zambezi a narrow coastal strip gives way to inland hills and low plateaus, then onto rugged highlands further west. South of the Zambezi the lowlands are broader with the Mashonaland plateau and Lebombo Mountains located in the deep south.

Until the 1960s there was no paved road link between the north and south halves of the country. A railway bridge across the Zambezi linking north and south was only completed in 1932.

In 1964 guerrilla fighting broke out and developed into what became known as the Mozambican War of Independence. It lasted for ten years. The main independence fighters were the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) led by Samora Machal.

After ten years of conflict Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975, following the overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian regime in the so-called Carnation Revolution of April 1974.

Soon after independence a civil war broke out which was to last from 1977 to 1992 between FRELIMO and the anti-communist insurgent forces of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). Like so many African wars it was exacerbated by the Cold War: the Soviet Union and Cuba backed the Marxist government (cf Angola and Ethiopia) while the USA, South Africa and Rhodesia provisioned, helped and trained RENAMO.

Mozambique’s capital was for centuries known as Lourenço Marques after the 16th century Portuguese explorer who explored the area. (It was only made Mozambique’s administrative centre in 1898). Soon after independence, in 1976, the city was renamed Maputo and remains the country’s capital. The distinctive thing about it is that, instead of being in the centre of the country, maybe on the mouth of the mighty Zambezi, Maputo is way down at the southernmost tip of Mozambique, less than 75 miles from the borders with Eswatini and South Africa.

Mozambique has a land area of 801,590 square kilometres, compared to Portugal’s 92,225 km².

Newitt’s book

A Short History of Mozambique is a brisk, no nonsense, 225-page overview of the subject, written in a very dry, very academic style, a very theoretical style. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone as a history of Mozambique since it’s the kind of history which deals with issues and theories rather than dates and people. For example:

Newitt gives a sophisticated explanation of the concepts of language, ethnicity, empire, kingdom and tribe which Europeans have used ever since the Portuguese first landed on the coast of Mozambique to try and categorise and order and understand its inhabitants. He carefully explains why all of them are flawed and inaccurate. ‘Ethnicity’ is a notoriously slippery category. People’s identities change and even the idea of what an ‘identity’ is has changed over the period we have records for, roughly 1500 to the present.

It was interesting to learn that even right up-to-date contemporary linguists struggle with African languages. It is interesting to learn that modern linguists can’t agree a common definition of what a language is; some linguists consider some African languages as discreet languages, others consider them dialects of parent languages. This explains why even ‘experts’ consider there might be anything from 17 to 42 languages spoken in Mozambique. Just as confusing is the notion that ‘most Africans speak more than one local language or dialect’ (p.19) with the result that language isn’t a reliable indicator of ‘identity’.

You know how progressive critics complain that the Western imperialists imposed nations and categories and tribal names onto much more fluid African identities? Well, Malyn is their dream come true, deconstructing pretty much every type of western category and concept to indicate a fluidity of identity which is, by definition, hard to capture, and equally challenging to read about.

This carries on being the central theme for chapter after chapter. When he’s covering the historical records left by the earliest Portuguese traders and administrators in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even more so in the full-blown imperialist 19th century, Newitt goes to great lengths to explain that the names which westerners assigned to tribes were almost always wrong. Sometimes, to take a blunt mistake, they called tribes after native words which simply meant ‘king’ or ‘leader’. (The country of Angola takes its name from the title ngola, a formal title which was held by the kings of Ndongo and Matamba.)

Westerners assigned social structures familiar to their own history – of empires and emperors, kings and kingdoms – to societies which had completely different, alien structures and identities.

The Africans were organised in groups and social structures but modern scholars have to reach back beyond the distorted and error-ridden Portuguese records to try and piece them together. Some societies were matrilinear, but there appear to have been several types of matrilinearity. Archaeology is not much help, since Africans built so few towns and their villages, made entirely of organic materials, disintegrated back into the earth.

Incidentally, Hewitt’s history obviously focuses on the territory and towns (mostly the notable ports) of what is called Mozambique, but he is not the first to point out the arbitrariness of the borders the Europeans drew up – in Mozambique’s case, finalised in 1891 – and how the deep history of the peoples who lived in this randomly drawn territory obviously had a huge overlap with peoples in the surrounding areas.

His account gives a bewildering sense of a kaleidoscope of peoples, continually migrating, fighting, conquering and holding territory, establishing dynasties that ruled for a few generations before a handful of recurrent issues – drought and famine, flooding, invasion of outsiders – reshuffled the picture.

The result is an immensely detailed and complicated picture, consisting of a blizzard of unfamiliar names – using names the tribes in questions may not even have called themselves – which is very hard to follow. This is why I’m not recommending it as a practical history. Two names which recur are the Ngoni and the Karanga, but there are many more.

Another theme which emerges very strongly indeed is the role of slavery. Slavery was present well before white Europeans arrived. They discovered it to be an intrinsic part of many African societies’ strategies, not only of war and conquest but even of basic survival. Newitt tells us that drought and famine have been recurrent features of the huge territory now known as Mozambique and the region around it, often threatening tribes’ very existence (pages 31, 50). Thus slaves, especially women, could be seized from other groups simply to provide more breeding vessels in order for the group to survive.

What comes over is that all the African groups practised slavery before the Europeans arrived but (as in everything else in this complex account) in a multitude of ways. Some slaves were relatively high caste, and might even serve as warriors or leaders. Some were forced into menial agricultural work. There was a recurring category of sex slaves i.e. women taken from tribes defeated in war.

The capture of slaves, especially women, in warfare had always been a way in which communities that depended on agriculture rather than cattle herding increased their productive (and reproductive) capacity. (p.71)

For hundreds of years the Portuguese were just one more invader-warrior-trading group among many, in a region used to wars and incomers. Alongside the Portuguese were Arabs from the Persian Gulf. These set up trading stations manned by an Arab elite which traded heavily in slaves. For centuries before the Europeans came there had been a trade capturing African slaves and carrying them off to the Arab gulf kingdoms.

For many hundreds of years slaves had been exported from the ports of eastern Africa to markets in Arabia, the Gulf and India where they were in demand as soldiers, domestic servants and sailors. (p.52)

But the numbers were relatively small, maybe 3,000 a year. A sea change occurred when the French established plantation agriculture on the Mascarene and Seychelles islands after about 1710. The numbers jumped again in 1770. Between 1770 and 1810 around 100,000 slaves were exported. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, France only in 1848.

Another major shift occurred in 1840 when the Sultan of Oman relocated the centre of his kingdom from the Gulf to the island of Zanzibar. Arabs not only transhipped slaves to the Gulf but set up their own plantations which required African labour, setting in train the ethnic mix of peoples on Zanzibar which was to cause conflict at independence, hundreds of years later. As the years passed Arab slavers penetrated further inland, setting up bases of operation and converting natives to Islam (p.71). This combined with the many slaves working on Zanzibar or other Arab-owned plantations to spread Islam. Today about a third of Mozambique’s population is estimated to be Muslim.

The Royal Navy cracked down on the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. In response business boomed on the East coast. After the Napoleonic War Brazil boomed as an exporter of coffee and sugar, and importer of slaves. Between 1800 and 1850 Brazil imported around 2,460,000 slaves, mostly from Portuguese East Africa. Under increasing pressure from Britain, Portugal finally outlawed the slave trade in 1842 (pages 62, 67) and Brazil formally ceased to import slaves in 1851.

The peak of slavery from Portuguese East Africa around 1830 coincided with a bad drought. This disrupted local societies and led to invasion from outsider tribes: Ngoni warbands from modern-day Natal and groups of Yao moving from northern to central Mozambique. These a) conquered and enslaved their adversaries b) became involved in trading to the coast.

Although the external slave trade was severely dampened in the 1850s, explorers like David Livingstone arrived to discover it was still flourishing inside Africa, as native and Islamic warlords led militias which conquered and enslaved weak tribes, then sold them on to burgeoning plantations. Maybe 23,000 mainland slaves were exported to Madagascar every year till the end of the nineteenth century.

The hectic nineteenth century

1858 to 1864 – David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition.

1866 – Livingstone’s ‘Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries’ becomes a bestseller and inspires a generation of British explorers.

1867 – First gold and then diamonds are discovered in South Africa.

1871 – Discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines.

1874 to 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley undertakes his epic journey, crossing Central Africa from east to west, mapping the route of the river Congo.

1875 – The French president confirms Portugal’s right to Delagoa Bay, the best deep sea port in south eastern Africa. This encouraged the Boers in the Transvaal to think of it as an outlet to the sea rather than the Cape, which was owned by Britain.

1877 – Britain annexes the Transvaal.

1879 – Portugal helps Britain in the Zulu War.

1881 – The Transvaal Afrikaners rebel against Britain, which grants them independence.

1884 – Congress of Berlin called to clarify the rights of the colonial nations in the Congo and Niger regions, turns into a general carving up of Africa.

In the late 1880s there was a race between Portuguese authorities – who dispatched explorers and agents to sign deals with natives in a bid to create a band of Portuguese territory right across central Africa – and agents working for the British buccaneer, Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes won, his people planting flags and seizing territory in what came to be called north and south Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia) thus ruining Portugal’s plans to own one uninterrupted band of territory across Africa.

Prolonged negotiations about the frontiers of British and Portuguese south Africa began in April 1890 and continued until August 1891 when the borders of modern Mozambique and Angola were almost completely finalised (p.93). Failure to achieve their much-trumpeted goal of creating a ‘rose corridor’ across Africa was perceived in Portugal as a public humiliation and rocked the Portuguese monarchy.

The early colony 1891 to 1919

You tend to think of the imperial nations as large and mighty powers engaged in fierce rivalry to gobble up even more third world countries. It comes as a bracing surprise to learn that after its diplomats had fought hard to win these two huge new territories, Angola and Mozambique, they didn’t know what to do with them. They had developed coastal ports and trade networks up the rivers and licensed companies to develop some areas (fertile highlands). But most of the territory was undeveloped, there were few roads, even fewer railways, much land remained in the hands of native rulers, and some parts had never even been explored or mapped by white men.

Moreover, Portugal was very poorly placed to take on such onerous responsibilities. It had experienced not one but two civil wars earlier in the century and was currently the poorest and arguably the most backward country in Europe. People were leaving in droves. Newitt gives the striking statistic that between 1890 and 1920 some 750,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil, while 170,000 went to America.

It’s fascinating to learn that Britain and Germany signed not one but two secret treaties agreeing how they would carve up Portugal’s colonies if, as most expected, the country went bankrupt.

But Portugal’s solution to its challenge was to revert to a variation of the 17th century idea of leasing out land to individual landlords or businesses to develop. On a much bigger scale the government now divided Mozambique into half a dozen territories and leased them out to commercial companies to develop. The result was very mixed.

The big story in this period was the importance of South Africa. The details are complicated but it became ever clearer to the Portuguese authorities that its neighbour to the south was rich and getting richer due to the discovery of diamonds and gold. So three things:

1) South African mines needed miners and so a large number of blacks from southern Mozambique became migrant workers in South Africa, and the government established a steady stream of income by taxing them.

2) The Portuguese built a railway from the Transvaal into Mozambique and to the deep-water port at Delagoa Bay. This became very commercially successful, as the government raked off various taxes and fees.

3) It was these very close economic connections with South Africa which led the Portuguese to move their administrative capital from Mozambique Island in the north right down to the settlement at Delagoa Bay, named Lourenço Marques. The capital’s dependence on South Africa (it even got its power from SA) was to have big implications for the future (p.115).

Mozambique developed into a reserve of migrant labour for British South Africa and South Rhodesia, while also serving as an outlet (via the railway) to the sea.

The mature colony 1919 to 1974

In 1910 Portugal’s tottering monarchy was overthrown in a revolution and replaced by a liberal republic (pages 114 and 116). This promised all Portugal’s colonies greater autonomy though nothing like democracy. Even the whites had no say in how their colonies were run and the native population had no rights at all.

These plans had hardly got going before the First World War. Portugal joined on the Allies’ side in 1916 and emerged heavily in Britain’s debt. South Africa’s General Smuts wanted to annex the entire Delagoa Bay railway and Lourenço Marques into his country.

In 1926 the Liberal republic was overthrown in a coup. After two years of uncertainty the authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) regime of António de Oliveira Salazar emerged. In 1930 this published a Colonial Act declaring Portugal and all its colonies one political entity. The colonies were expected to balance their books without subsidies from the centre.

The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression confirmed Salazar’s regime in its theory of Autarky i.e. a protectionist policy of trading among themselves, which boiled down to: the colonies supplied raw materials, the metropole converted them to manufactured goods and sold them back. So the colony was divided up into sugar, cotton and rice growing areas, the investment in farms, the wages paid to natives, the prices sold to middle men and onto importers, all controlled and dictated from Lisbon.

The Second World War saw a spike in prices of raw commodities which greatly benefited Portugal, which carefully stayed neutral during the conflict. Using some of its profits, Portugal began to sketch out a network of health and education facilities across Mozambique.

It was only in 1942 that the last of the business concessions dividing the country into separate entities came to an end and the country came under one unified government, tax and business regime (p.147).

After much bureaucracy, a comprehensive 5-year plan was published in 1953, with two more to follow in the 1960s. Schools, hospitals, more railways, a huge dam across the river Limpopo.

All populations grow. At the First World War there were around 10,000 Europeans in Mozambique. In 1945, 31,000. By 1970, 164,000 (out of a population of 8.5 million). Half of these lived in the capital, many as administrators.

Independence movements

Ghana kicked off the rush to African independence in 1957. Between 1958 and 1962 the Salazar regime back in Portugal experienced a crisis of support and vision. A general stood in the presidential election against Salazar’s candidate and attracted a wide range of opposition movements. In January 1961 a revolt broke out in Angola. In March India unilaterally seized Goa, a move which staggered the Portuguese regime.

In June 1962 the various opposition groups in exile reluctantly agreed to come together to form Frelimo, which commenced a low-level guerrilla insurgency. Tensions between secular, left-wing modernisers and conservative, traditional ‘Africanists’. It was only at the second party congress in 1968 that the modernisers under Samora Machal triumphed. Dissidents fled abroad where some were assassinated. By 1970 Frelimo was a disciplined and effective fighting force that was successfully keeping the Portuguese army tied down.

In 1973 Frelimo moved into Tete Province and for the first time launched attacks south of the Zambezi. In the same year a Portuguese general published a book questioning the entire future of Portugal’s colonies. The army was tired of fighting in Angola and Mozambique. In April 1974 a military coup overthrew the regime.

Frelimo never succeeded in mobilising the general population let alone fomenting a mass uprising. They just fought the Portuguese army in the northern two provinces of the country for ten years with very little impact on the rest of the country, none on the capital far away in the deep south. Frelimo came into power because the Portuguese simply gave up and withdrew. But this left Frelimo lacking either military or political legitimacy (p.146).

The civil war 1977 to 1992

First of all, the transition to independence was bungled. Frelimo came into power with a programme of hard-core Marxism-Leninism with the result that 90% of the white educated population and an unknown number of the Asian business community simply left. Frelimo immediately made enemies of the white nationalist governments in South Rhodesia and South Africa. These set about training a combination of Frelimo dissidents and anti-communists into what became Renamo, short for Resistência Nacional Moçambicana i.e. Mozambican National Resistance.

Renamo’s insurgency against the Frelimo government lasted for 15 long years with atrocities committed, of course, by both sides. Peace was eventually made possible when Frelimo softened its doctrinaire communist ways in the later 1980s as the writing on the wall for the Soviet Union became clearer. Newitt doesn’t go into the relationship between Frelimo and the USSR, and how this changed with the advent of Gorbachev, which feels like a glaring omission.

Negotiations began in the late 1980s but the war dragged on because neither side was capable of ending it. Eventually Frelimo caved in to the demands of Renamo and the international community for a multiparty system and free elections.

These have actually been held, in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014. They were accompanied by violence, international monitors say they were rigged, but in each of them Renamo won 40% or so of the vote i.e. they weren’t a complete stitch-up. As communism faded away, Frelimo converted itself into your standard African corrupt, nepotistic patrimonial government, committed to staying in power forever.

However, Mozambican politics are notable for two exceptions to African traditions. One is that tribalism hasn’t reared its ugly head. Leaders on both sides refrained from playing the tribal card which so often, in the rest of Africa, led to massacres. Instead the country’s politics continue to be dominated by what have become entrenched regional divisions, with Frelimo being seen as the part of the south and far north, Renamo holding the centre and mid-north.

Second exception is that, whereas in most African countries presidents turned themselves into dictators-for-life (Mobutu, Mugabe, Kagame, Afwerki) in Mozambique, although Frelimo is committed to eternal rule, it has actually changed presidents after each has completed his two terms.

Interesting to learn that some 50% of the government budget is funded by international donors, over $2bn in 2014 (p.210). Frelimo has become dependent on staying in office on foreign aid (pages 187, 192). In fact Newitt drily comments that, seen from one angle, Frelimo’s chief skill has been dancing to the changing whims and fashions of western aid to ensure the money keeps flowing (p.212). The Frelimo elite then channels the aid to itself and its followers, who live a luxury, First World existence in one of the poorest countries in the world.

After twenty-five years the most striking consequence of the government’s policies is the huge disparity in living standards between rich and poor. A relatively small Mozambican elite, which includes many senior members of Frelimo and the foreign business, diplomatic and NGO communities, enjoy an exaggeratedly high standard of living. The modern buildings of Maputo are grand and even ostentatious, the city hotels are clad in marble with fountain courts and air conditioning. Expensive cars are parked outside to whisk businessmen to the ministries or the banks. (p.222)

I was interested to read that Frelimo set out in 1977, under Marxist puritan Machel, to create New Socialist Man, to force peasants off their traditional land into collective farms, to ban pagan religions and old spiritual beliefs, to educate the population into zeal for the revolution. Obviously all that failed, and Newitt quotes peasants (who make up 75% of the population), interviewed by researchers, who expressed relief at being able to return to their ancestral land, worship their ancestral spirits, practice polygamy, and so on. The African way.

Why, Newitt asks, are the bottom 25 countries on the Human Development Index all in sub-Saharan Africa (with the one exception of Afghanistan)? Because of the special style of patrimonial politics which has established itself as distinctively African, meaning rule by a corrupt elite which run national budgets to benefit themselves, their cronies, and keep themselves in power. Screw their actual populations (p.204).

The 1992 Peace Accord, and the aid bonanza that followed, rapidly transformed the Frelimo elite into a patrimonial political class which, in spite of the lip-service being paid to liberal democratic ideals, was determined to hang on to power at all costs. And the costs increasingly involved not only corruption, soon to achieve gargantuan proportions, but crime, fraud and political assassinations. (199)

Newitt is entertainingly satirical about the bureaucratic, organisation-speak of the countless plans and strategies and policies unleashed on poor Mozambique by a never-ending stream of western institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN with its utopian Millennium Development Goals. He quotes some of these documents purely to mock their high-minded rhetoric, which usually bears no relation to what’s happening on the ground.

Apart from killing each other, which they still do in periodic outbursts of renewed fighting between the last Renamo holdouts and government forces, the main thing happening on the ground in Mozambique is that its inhabitants, like humans all round the planet, are destroying the environment and degrading the ecosystems they rely on for their existence.

Forests are being cut down and the native iron wood and ebony has been plundered uncontrollably; illegal hunting is emptying the game parks and illegal fishing is plundering the seas; the Zambesi dams are radically altering the ecology of the river valley and illegal washing for gold is destroying whole landscapes. (p.211)

In 1964 when the war for independence started, the population of Mozambique was 7.3 million. Now it is 32 million. Human beings are like locusts, locusts with machine guns.

Credit

A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt was published in 2017 Hurst and Company. All references are to the 2017 paperback edition.

Africa-related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 29, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/29/a-short-history-of-mozambique-malyn-newitt/

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong (2005)

Michela Wrong has had a long career as a journalist, working for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times, specialising in Africa. She came to the attention of the book-buying public with the publication in 2001 of ‘In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo’, which I read and reviewed.

This is the follow-up, a long and thorough (432 pages, including chronology, glossary, notes and index) account of the modern history of Eritrea, the country to the north of Ethiopia, which was bundled in with Ethiopia at independence and which fought a 30 year war to be free.

The milky haze of amnesia

I’m afraid Wrong alienated me right at the start, in her introduction, by claiming that the ex-colonial and imperial powers (Britain, Italy, America) have made a conscious effort to erase their involvement in such places in order to conceal all the wrongs we did around the world

History is written – or, more accurately, written out – by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers – from Italy to Britain, the US to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all – behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than to dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism; well, which nation really wants to remember that? (Foreword, page xi)

This is an example of conspiracy theory – that everything that happens in the world is the result of dark and threatening conspiracies by shady forces in high places. It may sound trivial to highlight it so early in my review, but it is the conceptual basis of the entire book, and an accusation she returns to again and again and again: that there are so few histories of Eritrea because the imperial powers want to suppress the record of their behaviour there, to display ‘the conquerors’ lazy capacity for forgetfulness’ (p.xxii). I’m afraid I take issue with this for quite a few reasons.

1. First, I tend towards the cock-up theory of history. Obviously there are and have been countless actual conspiracies but, in geopolitics at any rate, events are more often the result of sheer incompetence. Read any of the accounts of the US invasion of Iraq or Britain’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea that the establishments of three or four countries have placed an embargo on discussion of imperial interventions in Eritrea is obviously doubtful.

2. Second, there has been no embargo on accounts of Britain’s involvement in plenty of other and far worse colonial debacles: the concentration camps we set up during the Boer War or during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya are common knowledge or, at least, there are loads of books and articles about them. Or take India. Nowadays there’s a growing pile of books about how we looted and ruined the subcontinent; Britain’s responsibility for the catastrophic partition featured in an episode of Dr Who, about as mainstream as you can get.

Books about the evils of the British Empire are pouring off the press, so these are hardly ‘forgotten’ or ‘erased’ subjects. Quite, the reverse, they’re extremely fashionable subjects – among angry students, at middle class dinner tables, in all the literary magazines here and in the States, among BBC and Channel 4 commissioning editors falling over themselves to show how woke, aware and anti-colonial they are.

Or check out the steady flow of anti-Empire, anti-slavery exhibitions (like the current installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall about empire and slavery, or Kara Walker’s installation in the same location about empire and slavery, or the upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy about empire and slavery) and, in the bookshops the same twenty or so books about the crimes of the British Empire or the evils of the slave trade trotted out time after time. Anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery sentiments are the received opinion of our time, one of its central ideological underpinnings.

Eight reasons why nobody’s much interested in Eritrean history

Wrong makes a big deal of the fact that so many Italians, Brits and Americans she spoke to during her research had no awareness of their nations’ involvements in Eritrean history, but this has at least seven possible explanations, all more plausible than it being due to some kind of conspiracy. Let’s consider just Britain:

1. British imperial history is huge

First, the history of the British Empire is a vast and complicated subject. Hardly anyone, even specialists, even professional historians, knows everything about every period of every colony which the British ruled at one point or another. Understandably, most people tend to only know about the big ones, probably starting with India, the slave trade, not least because this is being hammered home via every channel.

2. Second World War history is huge

Second, the British took over the running of Eritrea from the Italians when we fought and defeated them in the spring of 1941, in a campaign which was wedged in between the bigger, more important and better known Desert War in Libya. So the same principle applies as in the point about the empire as a whole, which is: even professional historians would probably struggle to remember every detail of every campaign in every theatre of the Second World War.

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of the main theatres and campaigns of the Second World War. Did you know them all?

It was only reading up the background to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy that I realised there was a whole theatre of war in West Africa, which I’d never heard about before. Was this due to what Wrong calls the ‘milky haze of amnesia’ deriving from some government-wide conspiracy to forget? I doubt it. The reality is people only have so much time and attention to spare.

3. Limited attention of ordinary people

What percentage of the British population do you think gives a monkeys that Britain was, for ten years or so, in the late 1930s and through the Second World War, responsible for administering Eritrea? Weren’t we also running about 50 other countries at the time? I suspect my parents’ experience of being bombed during the Blitz and watching Battle of Britain dogfights over their London suburb were quite a bit more relevant to their lives than the details of British administration of the faraway Horn of Africa.

4. General historical awareness is dire, anyway

Most people don’t care about ‘history’, anyway. If you did a quick basic history quiz to the entire British population of 67 million, I wonder how many would pass. Auberon Waugh once joked that the fact that Henry VIII had six wives is probably the only fact from history which all Britons know, but I suspect this is way out of date. I live in the most multi-ethnic constituency in Britain. Most of the people I interact with (doctor, dentist, shopkeepers, postman, electrician, council leafblowers) were not born in this country and many of them barely speak English. I struggle to explain that I want to buy a stamp at the shop round the corner because they don’t speak English so don’t know what ‘stamp’ is until I point to a pack. I can’t believe many of the non-English-speaking people who now live here give much of a damn about the minutiae of Britain’s imperial history unless, of course, it’s the bit that affected their country.

5. Busy

And this is because people are busy. The difference between Wrong and me is that she thinks it’s of burning importance that the British ‘confront’ every aspect of their ‘colonial past’, whereas I take what I regard as the more realistic view, that a) most people don’t know b) most people don’t care c) most people are stressed just coping with the challenges of life.

By this I mean trying to find the money to pay their rent or mortgage, to buy food, to pay for the extras their kids need at school, or to find money to pay for their parents’ ruinously expensive social care. Most people are too busy and too stressed to care about what happened in a remote country in Africa 80 years ago. Most people are too busy and worried about the day-to-day to care about any of the big global issues that newspapers and magazines are always trying to scare us about, whether it’s the alleged impact of AI or the war in Ukraine or the threat from China. Most don’t know or care about ‘history’ and, I’d argue, they’re right to do so, and to live in the present.

I’m a bookish intellectual who’s interested in literature and history but I’ve had to learn the hard way (i.e. via my children and their friends) that there are lots of people who really aren’t. They’re not ‘erasing’ anything, they just live lives which don’t include much interest in history, be it imperialist, early modern, medieval or whatever. They’re too busy going to music festivals or shopping at Camden market, and sharing everything they do on TikTok and Instagram, getting on with their (exciting and interesting) lives, to know or care about the minutiae of the historical record of every single one of the hundred or so nations Britain had some kind of imperial involvement in.

Wrong thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy on the part of the British authorities not to give Eritrea a more prominent part in our history. I think it’s a realistic sense of perspective.

6. Commercial priorities

Books tend to be published, and documentaries commissioned, if the editors think there is a commercially viable audience for them. Last time I visited the Imperial War Museum I spent some time in the bookshop chatting to the manager because I was struck by the very, very narrow range of subjects they stocked books about. There were entire bookcases about the First and Second World War, a big section about the Holocaust, one about Women in War, and that was about it. I couldn’t even find a single book about Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, for God’s sake! When I quizzed him, the bookshop manager explained that they’re a commercial operation and need to maximise their revenue, and so only stock books on the subjects people want to buy.

Living in a commercial/consumer capitalist society as we do, maybe the lack of awareness, books and articles about the modern history of Eritrea is not due to a government conspiracy to suppress it but simply because it is a niche subject which interests hardly anyone, and so – there’s no money in it.

7. News agendas

When this book was published (in 2005) the population of Eritrea was 2.8 million i.e. it was one of the smallest countries in the world. Britain’s involvement in Eritrea was a tiny subset of the enormous, world-encompassing commitments of the Second World War, and one among many, many imperial entanglements which lingered on after the end of the war, of which India and Palestine were the headliners.

Even now, the current conflicts between Eritrea, Tigray and Ethiopia barely reach the news because they are, in fact, minor conflicts, they are far away, they have been going on for decades with no particularly dramatic changes to report on and, crucially, no signs of a conclusion – so they just never make the news agenda. Why would they, when Russia is threatening to start world war three?

8. Predictable

And I suppose there’s an eighth reason which is that, for anybody who is interested in modern history, it is utterly predictable that today’s historians or historical commentators will take a feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperial line. Nothing could be more predictable than a modern historian ‘revealing’ the racist repressive truth about British imperial behaviour. This is the stock, standard modern attitude. To reveal that European imperial behaviour in Africa was ‘racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief’ is the opposite of news – it is the utterly predictable compliance with modern ideology, as expressed through all available channels of print, TV, social media, films and documentaries.

So, those are my eight reasons for not buying into the central premise of Michela Wrong’s book which is that there has been some kind of conspiracy of silence among the ex-imperial powers, that they have deliberately let the history of their involvement in Eritrea sink into ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ in order to conceal from a public eager for every scrap of information about Italy, Britain and America’s involvement in one of the world’s smallest countries.

Presumable origin of the book

Wrong first visited Eritrea in 1996 in order to do a country profile for the Financial Times. She was surprised to discover that there was very little published about the place. She saw an opportunity. She approached her publisher, who agreed there was an opportunity to fill a gap and sell to the kind of niche audience which is interested in the history of tiny African countries. Obviously she would be building on the success of her first book to extend her brand.

But, to make the book more marketable it would have to incorporate several features: 1) elements of touristic travelogue, passages dwelling on, for example, Asmara’s surprising Art Deco heritage or the vintage railway that snakes up into the high plateau of the interior, the kind of thing that appears in ‘Train Journeys of The World’-type TV documentaries. Tick.

Second way to sex it up would be to adopt the modern woke, progressive, anti-imperial ideology so much in vogue, and make sure to criticise all the western powers for their racism, sexism, massacres and exploitation. Tick.

And so we’ve ended up with the book we have. It is a history of Eritrea in relatively modern times i.e. since the Italians began annexing it in the 1890s, up to the time of writing in about 2004, written in a superior, judgemental, often sarcastic and sneering tone, regularly facetious and dismissive about every action of the colonial powers, hugely reluctant to point out that the relevant African powers (i.e. Ethiopia) were ten times worse than anything the imperialists did.

I’m not saying Wrong is wrong to point out that the Italians were racist exploiters who carried out appalling, semi-genocidal massacres and installed apartheid-style laws; or that the British, to their shame, maintained many of Italy’s racist discriminatory laws and practices while dismantling and carting off much of the country’s infrastructure; or that the UN screwed up big time when it assigned Eritrea to be part of Ethiopia against the wishes of its people; or that the Americans should have done more to foster statehood and encourage Eritrean independence when they used the place as a listening post during the Cold War.

I’m sure all her facts are completely correct and they certainly build up into a damning portrait of how successive western powers abused a small African nation. No, what put me off the book was a) Wrong’s assumption that the lack of knowledge about Eritrea was the result of some kind of cover-up among the imperial powers, and b) her tone of sneering, sarcastic superiority over everyone that came before her. Her snarky asides about this or that imperial administrator or British general quickly become very tiresome.

It is possible to write history in a plain factual way and let the facts speak for themselves. Nobody writes a history of the Holocaust full of sneering asides that the Nazis were ‘racist’ and ‘discriminatory’ – ‘Hitler, in another typically racist speech…’. You don’t need to say something so obvious. The facts speak for themselves. Constantly poking the reader in the ribs with sarcastic asides about the awful colonialists gets really boring.

Travel writing

Wrong strikes a note of travel writer-style indulgence right from the start of her book. The opening pages give a lyrical description of what you see as you fly over the desert and come into land at Eritrea’s main airport. From her text you can tell she regards flying from one African capital to another, jetting round the world, as an everyday activity. It isn’t though, is it, not for most people, only for a privileged kind of international reporter.

She then goes on to explain that Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, has one of the finest collections of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the world. In other words, the opening of her book reads just like a Sunday supplement feature or upscale travel magazine article. Although she will go on to get everso cross about Eritrea’s agonies, the opening of the book strikes a note of pampered, first world tourism which lingers on, which sets a tone of leisured touristic privilege. I know it’s unintended but that’s how it reads.

Anti-western bias

Like lots of posh people who have enjoyed the most privileged upbringing Britain has to offer and then become rebels and radicals against their own heritage, Wrong is quick to criticise her own country and very slow to criticise all the other bad players in the story.

In particular, she downplays the elephant in the room which is that most of Eritrea’s woes stem from its 30-year-long war to be independent of Ethiopia, the imperialist nation to its south. She downplays the extent to which this was two African nations, led by black African leaders, who insisted on fighting a ruinous 30-year war in which millions of civilians died… and then started up another war in 1998, conflicts which devastated their economies so that, as usual, they needed extensive food aid to be supplied by…guess who?.. the evil West.

Gaps and absences

Imperial benefits, after all

There’s a particular moment in the text which brought me up short. In the chapter describing the machinations of various UN commissions trying to decide whether to grant Eritrea its independence or bundle it in with Ethiopia (Chapter 7, ‘What do the baboons want?’), Wrong describes the experiences of several commissioners who toured the two countries and immediately saw that Eritrea was light years ahead of Ethiopia: Ethiopia was a backward, almost primitive country ruled by a medieval court whereas Eritrea had industry and education and a viable economy which were established by the Italians. And the British had given Eritrea an independent press, trade unions and freedom of religion (p.171).

Hang on hang on hang on. Back up a moment. Wrong has dedicated entire chapters to excoriating Italian and British administrators for their racism, their exploitation of the natives, Italian massacres and British hypocrisy. Entire chapters. And now, here, in a brief throwaway remark, she concedes that the Italians also gave the country a modern infrastructure, harbours and railway while the British introduced modern political reforms, freedom of the press and religion, and that these, combined, meant Eritrea was head and shoulders more advanced than the decrepit empire to its south.

When I read this I realised that this really is a very biased account. It reminded me of Jeffrey Massons’s extended diatribe against therapy. Nothing Wrong says is wrong, and she has obviously done piles of research, especially about the Italian period, and added to scholarly knowledge. But she is only telling part of the story, the part which suits her pursuit of unremitting criticism of the West.

And she is glossing over the fact that the Italians, and the British, did quite a lot of good for the people of Eritrea. This doesn’t fit Wrong’s thesis, or her tone of modern enlightened superiority to the old male, misogynist, racist imperial administrators, and so she barely mentions it in her book. At a stroke I realised that this is an unreliable and deeply biased account.

Magazine feature rather than history

Same sort of thing happens with chapter 10, ‘Blow jobs, bugging and beer’. You can see from the title the kind of larky, sarky attitude Wrong takes to her subject matter. Dry, scholarly and authoritative her book is not.

The blowjobs chapter describes, in surprising detail, the lifestyle of the young Americans who staffed the set of radio listening posts America established in the Eritrean plateau in the 1950s and 60s. The plateau is 1.5 miles high in some places and this means big radio receivers could receive with pinprick accuracy radio broadcasts from all across the Soviet Union, Middle East and rest of Africa. The signals received and decoded at what came to be called Kagnew Station played a key role in America’s Cold War intelligence efforts.

As her larky chapter title suggests, Wrong focuses her chapter almost entirely around interviews she carried out with ageing Yanks who were young 20-somethings during the station’s heyday in the late 60s. One old boy described it as like the movie ‘Animal House’ and Wrong proceeds to go into great detail about the Americans’ drinking and sexual exploits, especially with prostitutes at local bars. She sinks to a kind of magazine feature-style level of sweeping, superficial cultural generalisation:

This was the 1960s, after all, the decade of free love, the Rolling Stones and LSD, the time of Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix and Hunter Thompson. (p.223)

This is typical of a lot of the easy, throwaway references Wrong makes, the kind of sweeping and often superficial generalisations which undermine her diatribes against the British and Italian empires.

Anyway, we learn more than we need to about service men being ‘initiated in the delights of fellatio’ by Mama Kathy, the hotel in Massawa nicknamed ‘four floors of whores’, about a woman called Rosie Big Tits (or RBT) who would service any man or group of men who paid, about the disgusting behaviour of the gang who called themselves The Gross Guys (pages 225 to 226).

This is all good knockabout stuff, and you can see how it came about when Wrong explains that she got in touch with the surviving members of The Gross Guys via their website, and then was given more names and contacts, and so it snowballed into what is effectively a diverting magazine article. She includes photos, including a corker of no fewer than seven GIs bending over and exposing their bums at a place they referred to as Moon River Bridge.

I have several comments on this. 1) Interwoven into the chapter are facts and stats about the amount of money the US government gave Haile Selassie in order to lease this land, money the Emperor mostly spent on building up the largest army in Africa instead of investing in infrastructure, agriculture and industry, with the result that he ended up having loads of shiny airplanes which could fly over provinces of starving peasants. So there is ‘serious’ content among the blowjobs.

Nonetheless 2) the blowjob chapter crystallises your feeling that this book is not really a history of Eritrea, but more a series of magazine-style chapters about colourful topics or individuals (such as the chapter about the Italian administrator Martini and the English activist Sylvia Pankhurst), which don’t quite gel into a coherent narrative.

3) Most serious is the feeling that this approach of writing about glossy, magazine, feature-style subjects – interviews with badly behaved Yanks or Sylvia Pankhurst’s son – distracts her, and the narrative, from giving a basic, reliable account of the facts.

It’s only after the chapter about blow jobs and drinking games that we discover, almost in passing, that the same period, the late 1960s, saw the rise and rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) which waged a steadily mounting campaign of attacks against centre of Ethiopian power e.g. police stations. And that the Ethiopian police and army, in response, embarked on a savage campaign to quell the insurgents / guerrillas / freedom fighters in the time-old fashion of massacring entire villages thought to be supporting them, gathering all the men into the local church and setting it on fire, raping all the women, killing all their livestock, burning all their crops, the usual stuff.

For me, this is the important stuff I’d like to know more about, not the ‘four floors of whores’ popular with American GIs.

Religious division

And it was round about here that I became aware of another massive gap in Wrong’s account, which is a full explanation of Eritrea’s ethnic and in particular religious diversity. Apparently, the low-lying coastal area, and the main port, Massawa, was and is mostly Muslim in make-up, with mosques etc, whereas the plateau, and the capital, Asmara, are mostly Christian, churches etc.

Wrong’s account for some reason underplays and barely mentions either religion or ethnicity whereas, in the countries I’ve been reading about recently (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo), ethnic and religious divides are absolutely crucial to understanding their histories and, especially, their civil wars.

She only mentions very briefly, in passing, that it was ethnic difference which led to there being two Eritrean independence militias, the ELF and the ELPF. It was only from Wikipedia that I gathered the former was more Arab and Muslim, the latter more Christian or secular, and socialist. She nowhere explains the ideological or tactical differences between them. She nowhere names their leaders, gives histories of the movements or any manifestos or programs they published. All this Wrong herself has consigned to the ‘milky haze of amnesia’. Is she involved in an imperialist conspiracy to suppress the truth, I wonder? Aha. Thought so. It’s all an elaborate front.

Similarly, when the ELPF eventually eclipse the ELF to emerge as the main Eritrean independence militia, Wrong doesn’t explain how or why. Her description of this presumably important moment in rebel politics is described thus:

The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat. (p.283)

That’s your lot. A bit more explanation and analysis would have been useful, don’t you think?

Key learnings

Each chapter focuses on a particular period of Eritrea’s modern (post-1890) history and Wrong often does this by looking in detail at key individuals who she investigates (if dead) or interviews (if living) in considerable detail.

Ferdinando Martini

Thus the early period of Italian colonisation is examined through the figure of Ferdinando Martini, governor of Eritrea from 1897 to 1907, who made heroic activities to modernise the country even as he endorsed Italy’s fundamentally racist laws. Wrong draws heavily on his 1920 literary masterpiece about his years as governor, ‘Il Diario Eritre’ which, of course, I’d never heard of before. Maybe Wrong thinks that almost all foreign literature has been sunk in ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ whereas I take the practical view that most publishers find most foreign publications commercially unviable and so not worth translating or publishing.

It was, apparently, Martini who gave the country its name, deriving it from the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa, based on the adjective ‘erythros’ meaning ‘red’.

It was Martini who commissioned the Massawa to Asmara train line, a heroic feat of engineering from the coast up into the steep central plateau, which Wrong describes in fascinating details and wasn’t completed during his time as governor.

Italian emigration

The Italian government hoped to export its ‘surplus population’ i.e. the rural poor from the South, to its African colonies but Wrong shows how this never panned out. Only about 1% of the Italian population travelled to its colonies compared to a whopping 40% who emigrated to America, creating one of America’s largest ethnic communities.

The Battle of Keren

Wrong’s account of the British defeat of the Italians in Eritrea focuses on a gritty description of the awful Battle of Keren, in March 1941, where British troops had to assault a steep escarpment of bare jagged rocks against well dug-in Italian (and native) troops, in relentless heat, with much loss of life. Once in control the British embarked on a scandalous policy of asset stripping and selling off huge amounts of the infrastructure which the Italians had so expensively and laboriously installed, including factories, schools, hospitals, post facilities and even railways tracks and sleepers.

Sylvia Pankhurst

Surprisingly, one of the most vocal critics of this shameful policy was Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the redoubtable Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading suffragette. Sylvia fell in love with Ethiopia and ran a high-profile campaign against Mussolini’s brutal invasion of 1936, demanding the British government intervene. After the war, her relentless pestering of her political contacts and the Foreign Office earned her the gratitude of the emperor Haile Selassie himself. Wrong estimates that the British stole, sold off, or shipped to her full colonies (Kenya, Uganda) getting on for £2 billion of assets (p.136). When she died, in 1960, aged 78, she was given a state funeral and buried in Addis Ababa cathedral. A lot of the material comes via her son, Richard Pankhurst, who was raised in Ethiopia, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and who Wrong meets and interviews on several occasions.

John Spencer

Meetings with Spencer, an American who was international legal adviser to Haile Selassie. In the early 1950s the UN was worried (among many other pressing issues) with the future of Eritrea. There were three options: full independence; full integration into Ethiopia; federal status within Ethiopia. There were strong views on all sides. Independent commentators wondered whether Eritrea could ever be an economically viable state (good question since, 73 years later, it is still one of the poorest countries on earth). Ethiopians wanted complete assimilation in order to give them access to the Red Sea. As a canny, aggressive American lawyer, Spencer lobbied hard for the Ethiopian option with the result that he is remembered with hatred to this day in Eritrea.

Kagnew Listening Station

The Americans discovered the high Eritrean plateau was uniquely located to receive clear radio signals from all over the hemisphere. From the 1950s onwards they paid Selassie a hefty premium, plus military and development aid, for the right to build what ended up being some 19 separate listening stations. Ethiopia became the largest recipient of American aid in Africa. Wrong tells its story via interviews with half a dozen of the thousands of GIs who staffed it in the 1960s. She (repeatedly) blames them for ignoring and erasing the reality of the violent insurgency and brutal repression spreading throughout Eritrea. What does she expect a bunch of 20-something GIs to have done? Launched an independent peace mission?

Wrong works through interviews with Melles Seyoum and Asmerom to tell the story of the widely supported EPLF insurgency against the Ethiopian occupying forces.

Keith Wauchope

Similarly, she tells the story of the brutal Ethiopian crackdown of the 1970s through the eyes of Keith Wauchope, deputy principal officer at Asmara’s US consulate from 1975 to 1977. In particular the ‘Red Terror’ when the Ethiopian revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries and Chinese revolutionaries before them, moved to eliminate all political opponents and even fellow revolutionaries who deviated even slightly from the party line. By this stage I’ve realised that the book doesn’t proceed through events and analysis but by moving from interviewee to interviewee.

Nafka

Bombed out of their towns and villages by the Soviet-backed Ethiopian regime’s brutal campaign, the EPLF withdrew to the high Eritrean plateau where they holed up for a decade. they developed a cult of total war, total commitment, even down to the details of combat wear (basic, functional), disapproval of romantic relationships between fighters. They built an entire underground town including hospitals and schools, the famous Zero school, around the highland town of Nafka, to evade Ethiopia’s Russian-supplied MIG jets.

Wrong has met and interviewed a number of ex-fighters. It comes over very clearly that she venerates them as, she says, did most of the other western journalists who made their way to the EPLF’s remote bases and were impressed by their discipline and commitment, not least to education, holding seminars and workshops about Marxism, Maoism, the Irish struggle, the Palestinian struggle and so on. Western journalists called them ‘the barefoot guerrilla army’. She calls these western devotees True Believers.

But she is candid enough to admit that the hidden redoubts of Nafka also nursed a fanatical sense of commitment and rectitude. This was the Marxist practice of self criticism and self control, which would translate into the overbearing authoritarianism the Eritrean government displayed once it won independence in 1993.

‘Eritrea is a militarized authoritarian state that has not held a national election since independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), headed by President Isaias Afwerki, is the sole political party. Arbitrary detention is commonplace, and citizens are required to perform national service, often for their entire working lives. The government shut down all independent media in 2001.’ (Freedom House website, 2023)

Ah, not so cool and fashionable once they actually come to power.

John Berakis

In line with the rest of the book, the chapter about the EPLF’s long years in its secret underground bases and highland redoubts, is told / brought to life via the biography of John Berakis, real name Tilahun (p.299) who was, improbably enough, both a committed fighter but also a qualified chef. Wrong interviews him and hears all about improbable banquets and feasts and recipes which he cooked up for the Fighters.

Asmara tank graveyard

The huge graveyard of tanks and other military equipment on the outskirts of Asmara is the peg for describing the astonishing amount of hardware the Soviet Union gave to Ethiopia: at one point in 1978 Soviet aircraft bearing equipment were arriving every 20 minutes in Ethiopia. By the end of the Soviets’ support for the Derg, the Russians had sent nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia , about $5,400 for every man, woman and child in the population (p.314).

She makes the point that the USSR’s influence was on the rise. In 1975 Angola and Mozambique both became independent under Marxist governments. Across Africa one-party rule was ripe for Soviet influence. Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia all had Marxist governments. It felt like the tide of history was flowing Russia’s way. By contrast America, had been weakened and humiliated by its defeat in Vietnam which had promptly turned communist, as did Laos and Cambodia.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Wrong profiles Mengistu, his personal grievances for being looked down on by Ethiopia’s racial elite, his slavish devotion to the USSR (he declared Brezhnev was like a father to him), busts of Marx on the table, erected the first statue of Lenin anywhere in Africa etc.

But, of course, over the years Mengistu slowly morphed into another African strongman, driving in his open-topped Cadillac through the hovels of Addis Ababa, eliminating all possible opponents, living in a miasma of paranoia, surrounded by courtiers and flunkeys, turning into Haile Selassie. During the catastrophic famine of 1983/84 Ethiopia continued to spend a fortune on its military, which had ballooned to almost 500,000 troops, and spent $50 million on the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Selassie and their coming to power. Over a million Ethiopians died in the famine.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 worried all the communist regimes and his coterie slowly changed the tone of political commentary, starting to question the huge amount of aid the USSR was giving to supposedly Marxist African regimes. Even so between 1987 and 1991 Moscow still sent Addis $2.9 billion in weaponry (p.327).

Yevgeny Sokurov

Wrong appears to have interviewed quite a few Russian diplomats and military men. Former major Yevgeny Sokurov has some savagely candid words about the USSR’s entire African policy:

‘Helping Mengistu, that arrogant monkey, was pointless…In Moscow there was a pathological desire to support these thieving, savage, African dictatorships. It was a waste of time.’ (quoted p.340)

Anatoly Adamashin

A really profound comment is made by Anatoly Adamashin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, who points out that the Cold War led both America and the USSR and the African countries themselves to believe they were engaged in a historic struggle between reactionary capitalism and revolutionary communism, but it was never really that: it was always wars between ethnically-based factions, or ambitious individuals, simply for power.

As with Mobutu (Zaire) or Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Jonas Savimbi (Mozambique) or Eduardo dos Passos (Angola) or here, with Mengistu in Ethiopia, when the Cold War evaporated it revealed that most of those conflicts had been the crudest struggles to achieve and maintain power.

It’s such a powerful view because it comes from a former Soviet official i.e. not from what Wrong regards as the racist imperialist West.

Mengistu flees

As the EPLF closed in on the capital, Mengistu took a plane to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum by another bogus Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe, given a farm (probably confiscated from the ghastly white colonists) and lived an allegedly pampered life for decades. During his rule over a million Ethiopians died in the famine, and over 500,000 in the wars and/or the Red Terror, or the forced relocation of millions of peasants which, of course, led to famine and starvation.

The Organisation of African Unity

Wrong delivers an entertainingly withering verdict on the Organisation of African Unity:

One of the most cynicism-inducing of events: the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table. (p.357)

Even better, she describes it as ‘a complacent club of sclerotic dictators and psychopathic warlords’ (p.358).

Eritrean independence

In 1993 the population voted for independence and Eritrea became an independent country with its own political system, flag, army and so on. Five years of reconstruction and hundreds of thousands of exiles returned home. When war broke out again, Wrong characteristically doesn’t blame it on the new Ethiopian or Eritrean governments, the parties that actually went to war, but on the wicked imperialists:

The national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea’s face. (p.361)

It’s because of our legacy, apparently, that the Eritreans and Ethiopians went back to war, bombing and napalming and strafing each other’s citizens, killing 80,000 in the 2 years of war, 1998 to 2000. Two of the poorest countries in the world spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bomb each other into submission. Surely the leaders of those two countries have to shoulder at least some of the responsibility themselves?

The result of this second war was impoverishment for Eritrea which was rightly or wrongly seen as the main aggressor. Foreign investment dried up. Ethiopia imposed a trade blockade.

Afwerki Isaias

The man who rose to become secretary general of the ELPF, and then president of independent Eritrea in 1993. The trouble is that, 30 years later, he is still president, in the time-honoured African tradition. To quote Wikipedia:

Isaias has been the chairman of Eritrea’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. As Eritrea has never had a functioning constitution, no elections, no legislature and no published budget, Isaias has been the sole power in the country, controlling its judiciary and military for over 30 years. Hence, scholars and historians have long considered him to be a dictator, described his regime as totalitarian, by way of forced conscription. The United Nations and Amnesty International cited him for human rights violations. In 2022, Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea, under the government of Isaias, second-to-last out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index, only scoring higher than North Korea.

Tens of thousands have fled one of the most repressive regimes in the world and the jaundiced reader is inclined to say: you fought for independence; you made huge sacrifices for independence; you won independence; at which point you handed all your rights over to a psychopathic dictator. You had the choice. You had the power. Don’t blame Italy. Don’t blame Britain. Don’t blame America. Blame yourselves.

Paul Collier’s view

Compare and contrast Wrong’s fleering, sarcastic, anti-western tone with Paul Collier’s discussion of Eritrea. Collier is an eminent development economist who is concerned to improve the lives of people in Africa here and now. He gives short shrift to third world rebel movements. In very stark contrast to Wrong’s 400 pages of grievance and complaint against the West, Collier’s account of Eritrea’s plight is brisk and no-nonsense:

The best organised diaspora movement of all was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The diaspora financed the war for thirty years and in 1992 they won. Eritrea is now an independent country. But did the war really achieve a liberation of the Eritrean people? In September 2001, after an unnecessary international war with Ethiopia, half the Eritrean cabinet wrote to the president, Isaias Afwerki, asking him to think again about his autocratic style of government. He thought about it and imprisoned them all. He then instituted mass conscription of Eritrean youth. Ethiopia demobilised, but not Eritrea. Eritrean youth may be in the army as much to protect the president from protest as to protect the country from Ethiopia. Many young Eritreans have left the country…Was such a liberation really worth thirty years of civil war?
(The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, 2008 Oxford University Press paperback edition, page 23)

Or compare Wrong with the chapter describing the horrific punishments, prisons and reign of terror run by Afwerki, in Paul Kenyon’s 2018 book, ‘Dictatorland’. The horror of Afwerki’s rule is glossed over in Wrong’s account because of her relentless concern to blame the West for everything. These two other accounts provide a necessary balance, or just simple reminder that sometime African nations’ dire plights are less to do with colonial oppression 80 years ago, and more the result of gross mismanagement and terrible leadership in the much more recent past.

Eritrea timeline

16th century – Ottoman Empire extends its control over the Red Sea/Ethiopian/Eritrean coast.

1800s – The Ottoman Turks establish an imperial garrison at Massawa on the Red Sea coast.

1869 – An Italian priest buys the Red Sea port of Assab for Italy from the local sultan.

1870 – Italy becomes a unified nation.

1885 – The British rulers of Egypt help Italian forces capture the Red Sea port of Massawa. This was to prevent the French getting their hands on it.

1887 to 1911 – Italians construct the Massawa to Asmara railway.

1890 – Italy proclaims the colony of Eritrea.

1894 – revolt of the previously loyal chief, Bahta Hagos, crushed.

1896 – 1 March, Italian army trounced by the Emperor Menelik at the Battle of Adwa; the borders of Eritrea are agreed.

1912 – After defeating Ottoman forces Italy seizes the two provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which it joins under the name Libya (a division which reopened after the ousting of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, and last to this day).

1915 – Italy is persuaded by France and Britain to join their side in the First World War, with the promise of Trieste, southern Tyrol, northern Dalmatia and expansion of her territories in Africa

1922 – Mussolini seizes power, campaigning on many grievances one of which is the Allies never gave Italy the empire they promised

1930 – coronation of Ras Tafari as emperor of Ethiopia; he takes the regnal name Haile Selassie. The coronation is attended by Evelyn Waugh who writes a hilarious satirical account, which is also full of accurate details about the country, Remote People (1931). (As a side note Waugh’s book is extensively quoted in Giles Foden’s humorous account of First World War naval campaigns in Africa, ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’.)

1935 – Mussolini launches a campaign to conquer Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie addresses the League of Nations to complain about the invasion, the use of poison gas and atrocities, but is ignored.

1936 – Italian troops enter Addis Ababa and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are all incorporated into ‘Italian East Africa’. Italy institutes apartheid-style race laws stipulating segregation. Evelyn Waugh was sent to cover the war and turned his despatches into a book, which includes a surprising amount of straight history of Ethiopia, Waugh In Abyssinia (1936).

1941 – During the Second World War, British advance from Sudan into Eritrea, fighting the brutal Battle of Keren (February to March 1941), which Wrong describes in detail, featuring a map.

1941 to 1942 – Britain crudely strips Eritrea of all the facilities the Italians had spent their 5-year-imperial rule installing, removing factories, ports, even railways sleepers and tracks, stripping the place clean. Britain also keeps in place many of Italy’s race laws.

1945 to 1952 Britain administers Eritrea, latterly as a United Nations trust territory.

1948 – The UN Four Powers Commission fails to agree the future of Eritrea.

1950s – former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst devoted her final decade (she died in 1960) to denouncing the asset stripping of both Eritrea and Ethiopia carried out by the British.

1950 – A fractious UN commission settles on the idea of making Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia, which is ratified by the General Assembly in 1952 in Resolution 390 A (V). The US signals that it favours the integrated model because it needs a quiescent Ethiopia as location for its huge radio listening station.

1950s – Ethiopia slowly but steadily undermines Eritrea’s identity: closing its one independent newspaper; having its sky-blue flag replaced by the Ethiopian one; having its languages of Tigrinya and Arabic replaced by Amharic; downgrading the Eritrean parliament, the Baito, to a rubber stamp for the Emperor’s decisions.

1953 – The US and Ethiopia sign a 25-year lease on the Kagnew radio listening station.

1958 – The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) is formed with a largely Muslim membership, looking to brothers in the Arab world.

The Eritrean war of Independence

1961 – First shots fired by ELF guerrillas, against a police station.

1962 – On 14 November 1962 members of the Baito were browbeaten and bribed into accepting full union and abolishing themselves i.e. Ethiopia annexed Eritrea without a shot being fired. A day of shame, a day of mourning, many of the Baito fled abroad. For the next few years the UN refused to acknowledge or reply to petitions, letters, legal requests from independence activists. The UN washed its hands and walked away.

1963 – Organisation of African Unity set up in Addis Ababa, largely at the Emperor’s initiative, and freezes African nations’ borders in place.

1967 – Full-scale guerrilla war. The Ethiopian army carries out numerous atrocities.

1970 – ELF splits and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) is formed, a secular socialist predominantly Christian highlanders. By the early 70s the liberation movements had secured some 95% of Eritrean territory.

1974 – Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown in a slow-motion military coup (see ‘The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński). A military junta calling itself the Dergue or Derg comes to power. After squabbling (and killing) among themselves, a forceful lieutenant, Mengistu Haile Mariam, emerges as its leader and driving force. The Derg declares Ethiopia a socialist state committed to Marxism-Leninism. It rejects Selassie’s alliance with the US and turns instead to the Soviet Union.

1975 – In response to increasing insurgent attacks, the Ethiopian army goes on the rampage in Asmara, slaughtering up to 3,000 civilians, then destroys over 100 villages, killing, burning, raping wherever they go.

1977 to 1978 – Massive Soviet support enable Ethiopian forces to reverse the EPLF’s hard-won gains, thus ensuring the war would double in length, continuing for another 14 years.

1978 – Somalia launches a campaign to seize the Ogaden region of Ethiopia which is now fighting two wars, in the north and east. Soviet ships and artillery mow down EPLF fighters, airplanes carpet bomb Eritrean villages.

1982 – Ethiopia launches a massive military assault named the Red Star Campaign in an effort to crush the rebels, but itself suffers heavy casualties.

1985 – Mikhael Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union.

1988 – March: Battle of Afabet is the turning point of the war, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front smashes an armoured convoy and then takes the town with barely a shot fired. Wrong describes the surreal way the Ethiopian commanders destroyed their own armoured column, once it had been trapped in a steep valley, burning hundreds of their own troops to death. Basil Davidson on the BBC described it as the equivalent of the Viet Minh’s historic victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (p.337). It is described in an article by Peter Worthington.

1989 – May: senior Ethiopian generals try to stage a coup the day after Mengistu flew to East Germany to plea for more arms. The coup was foiled, several key generals, 27 other senior staff and some 3,500 soldiers were executed in the month that followed, further weakening the demoralised Ethiopian army. The Soviets, fed up with supplying Ethiopia (and their other African ‘allies’) huge amounts of munitions, withdraw their ‘special advisers’. The last one leaves in autumn 1989.

1990 – February: The EPLF takes Massawa in a daring land and speedboat operation.

1991 – Spring: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front captures the entire coast and moves on the Eritrean capital, Asmara. In the last few years disaffected Amharas and Omoros in central and southern Ethiopia had formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPDRF). Running parallel to Eritrea’s history, the equally rebellious province of Tigray had spawned the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975. Now the three groups worked together to topple Mengistu.

Eritrean independence

1993 – In a UN-supervised referendum, 99.8% of Eritreans vote for independence.

1994 – Having won independence, the EPLF reconstituted itself as the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and went onto establish one of the most autocratic, dictatorial regimes in the world.

1998 to 2000 – Eritrean-Ethiopian border clashes turn into a full-scale war which leaves some 70,000 people dead.

2001 – September: Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, closes the national press and arrests a group of opposition leaders who had called on him to implement a democratic constitution and hold elections.

END OF WRONG’S NARRATIVE

That’s as far as Wrong’s narrative covers. What follows is from the internet. There are loads of websites providing timelines.

2007 – Eritrea pulls out of regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) as IGAD member states back Ethiopian intervention in Somalia.

2008 June – Fighting breaks out between Djiboutian and Eritrean troops in the disputed Ras Doumeira border area. At least nine Djiboutian soldiers killed. The US condemns Eritrea, but Eritrea denies launching an attack.

2009 December – The UN imposes sanctions on Eritrea for its alleged support for Islamist insurgents in Somalia.

2010 June – Eritrea and Djibouti agree to resolve their border dispute peacefully.

2014 June – The UN Human Rights Council says about 6% of the population has fled the country due to repression and poverty.

2016 July – The UN Human Rights Council calls on the African Union to investigate Eritrean leaders for alleged crimes against humanity.

2017 July – UNESCO adds Asmara to its list of World Heritage sites, describing it as a well-preserved example of a colonial planned city.

Peace with Ethiopia

2018 July – Ethiopia and Eritrea end their state of war after Ethiopian diplomatic overtures.

2018 November – The UN Security Council ends nine years of sanctions on Eritrea, which had been imposed over allegations of support for al-Shabab jihadists in Somalia.

Credit

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong was published in 2005 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2005 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

Related reviews

More Africa reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 24, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 24, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/24/i-didnt-do-it-for-you-how-the-world-used-and-abused-a-small-african-nation-michela-wrong/

Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe by Martin Meredith (2007)

‘Africa for Africans’
‘In Africa, the African is supreme’ (p.230)
(Mugabe slogans)

‘This is not about correcting a colonial imbalance. This is about punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. This is about staying in power no matter what the damage is to your country or its economy.’
(Philemon Matibe, MDC i.e. Zimbabwe opposition candidate, whose farm and assets were confiscated by war veterans, quoted page 221)

I must stop reading out-of-date books about current affairs. When I picked this book up second-hand I didn’t realise that it was first published in 2007, and breaks off as Mugabe is gearing up for the 2007  presidential and parliamentary elections; in other words that it doesn’t cover the last 10 years of Mugabe’s long, horrible career (he was only, finally, ousted by the army in 2017).

Meredith is a wonderfully fluent writer. I often struggle to read factual books but I found his 700-page history of post-independence Africa flew by, like eating ice cream. He has a real knack for relaying lots of factual information in an extremely accessible, readable way.

Then again, like any good journalist, he recycles his copy and so I recognised lots of the content here from the chapters about Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in his 2005 book, ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence’. Clearly he sub-edited the content from that book down to create the relevant chapters here; but I recognised hundreds of the same sentences. Given how out of date this book is, I’d recommend buying the ‘State of Africa’, for the wider context.

Learnings

The long shadow of colonialism

Colonialism was the fundamental crime from which no African country is ever likely to recover.

In this respect, the most interesting passage of the book is the one which describes the white conquest of the territories which were to be amalgamated into what became Rhodesia and the blatant, flagrant theft of land from the indigenous populations. Everything follows from that primal crime. It’s like Original Sin in Christian theology; nobody can escape from its consequences.

The land issue

This is why the land issue, treated at length in chapter 7, was so central. Whites stole the land from its African owner. But restoring it to its African owners proved to be very tricky indeed, and ended up being a rhetorical catchcry to cover Mugabe’s growing nepotism and corruption.

Independence war

The Rhodesian Bush War, also called the Second Chimurenga as well as the Zimbabwean War of Liberation, was a civil conflict from July 1964 to December 1979. It:

  • habituated all sides to violence as a way of getting their way
  • habituated the state to behaving illegally, to deploying illegal detention, detention without trial, ignoring the courts and due process

These were all traits Mugabe saw being deployed by the white government of Ian Smith and was himself to copy.

Rivals

There were rival political and guerrilla forces combatting white supremacism, namely:

  • the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), militantly socialist, which was formed as a split from
  • the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)

As in so many African countries (Angola and Mozambique spring to mind), the division between African parties fighting the coloniser for independence continued on after independence, not as a constitutionally contained political divide, but as an armed struggle between seasoned guerrillas used to deploying brutal tactics. Rival independence / nationalist forces sowed the seeds of civil war.

In fact Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Patriotic Front) has been in power continuously in Zimbabwe since the first free elections of 1980.

Negotiated peace

The long story by which Ian Smith’s UDI Rhodesia was forced to the conference table. All sides were surprised at the mildness of Mugabe’s political demands in the peace conference held in London. In ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent’ Meredith says it only later became clear that Mugabe came over as moderate and forgiving to the whites because he had a very clear idea that his first task was to eliminate opposition among the Black population i.e. the rival political party ZAPU.

Which is why he made honey-tongued promises to Britain and everyone else about his commitment to democracy, the rule of law, freedom of the press, and a 2 or 3 year honeymoon after full Black independence was achieved in 1980.

Repression

Then:

  • establish one-party rule
  • eliminate rivals
  • siphon off aid
  • loot the state budget
  • land redistribution becomes a political weapon

Land redistribution in particular was a long, drawn-out business with Mugabe ranting against white farmers. So he illegally seized their land and redistributed it to…his political cronies, many of whom proceeded to asset strip them and run them into the ground. Notoriously, Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, began to rely more and more heavily on imports and then on foreign aid.

Systematic mismanagement of the economy by Marxist ideologues or corrupt cronies led to famously high inflation.

In 2008, hyperinflation in Zimbabwe peaked at an estimated 500 billion percent. It currently stands at around 176%, while all forecasts for the country paint a picture of doom and gloom with no real prospects of a turnaround on the horizon.
(In Zimbabwe, hyperinflation meets its match on the streets)

Leading to:

  • economic crisis
  • strikes, riots

Overthrow

The complex manoeuvring which led to Mugabe’s overthrow are described in my next blog post, a summary of ‘Two Weeks in November’ by Douglas Rogers (2019). Wikipedia:

On 6 November 2017, Mugabe sacked his first vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. This fueled speculation that he intended to name his wife, Grace Mugabe, his successor. Grace was very unpopular with the ZANU–PF old guard. On 15 November 2017, the Zimbabwe National Army placed Mugabe under house arrest at his Blue Roof mansion as part of what it described as an action against ‘criminals’ in Mugabe’s circle.

Repeat

The new regime found all the institutions of law and order and security, of a free society, civic society, had been hollowed out. It inherited the universal corruption and complex matrix of networks of patronage from the previous 30, 40, 50 years. It saw that this was what worked –this is what Zimbabwe had become – and copied it. Meredith ends his account by quoting the Catholic bishops of Zimbabwe who, in their Easter 2007 pastoral letter, warned of the effect the Mugabe regime would have on the next generation:

‘If our young people see their leaders habitually engaging in acts and words which are hateful, disrespectful, racist, corrupt, lawless, unjust, greedy, dishonest and violent in order to cling to the privileges of power and wealth, it is highly likely that any of them will behave in exactly the same manner.’ (quoted page 244)

Biography

I think the weakness of both ‘The State of Africa’ and this book is that, although Meredith gives an outstandingly readable, brisk authoritative account of what happened, he rarely delves below the surface to consider why.

Only in the final, four-page chapter does he attempt a fairly simple psychological explanation of Mugabe’s psychopathology. It reminded me of the lines in W.H. Auden’s poem:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Mugabe grew up, a sensitive, intelligent young man in a country where he and everyone with black skin was treated like second class citizens, mocked and slighted and belittled and deprived of life chances by the profoundly racist white colonial regime. ‘We feared the white man. He was power. He had guns.’ And so young Robert determined that he would never rest till he had the guns, he had the power, and he was feared.

Mugabe had planned a career as a teacher but when he went as a teacher to Ghana in 1958 he was intoxicated by the atmosphere of freedom and liberation and joy and the inspiring rhetoric of the country’s first Black Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, about building a socialist paradise. Returning to Rhodesia in 1960 Mugabe threw himself into the liberation struggle, soaking himself in the rhetoric of revolution and liberation and, above all, committing himself to the Leninist idea of a radical one-party state.

He was arrested for making inflammatory statements, tried and imprisoned from 1963 to 1975.

Although he acquiesced in the Lancaster House agreement of 1980 and let democratic elections take place, he always regarded these as a stepping stone to his ultimate goal of a one-party state run with an iron fist.

But, like all dictators, the rhetoric of revolution and liberty concealed the unrelenting accumulation of power for its own sake. He never showed any evidence of caring for the weak and powerless, in fact he victimised:

  • the tribal backers of the rival Zapu party
  • backers of the MDC party
  • the urban poor who he set about removing from shanty towns in the Operation murambatsvina (‘Move the Rubbish’) campaign

Instead, Mugabe’s fiery rhetoric concealed the extraordinary rise of a corrupt elite prepared to use any means, go any lengths of violence, torture and intimidation, to stay in power. Meredith cites hundreds of examples. Appalled, you end up thinking, why does the West give any aid money to regimes which rob their own nations, steal money from their own treasuries, impoverish their own countries, lock up and kill anyone who disagrees with them?

Notable names

  • Blessing Chebundo
  • Justice Maphosa
  • Saviour Kasukuwere
  • Strive Masiyiwa
  • Welshman Ncube

Credit

An early version of this book, ‘Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe’ by Martin Meredith, was published by Public Affairs in 2003. The paperback of this revised version, Mugabe: Power, Plunder and the Struggle for Zimbabwe, was published in 2007.

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 17, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 17, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/17/mugabe-power-plunder-and-the-struggle-for-zimbabwe-martin-meredith/

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2

This is a huge, 700-page, compendious history of all the African nations from independence (roughly the mid-1950s) to the time it was written (around 2010), so 55 years or so of modern African history.

Meredith chooses as epigraph to this big book the Latin tag from Pliny the Elder, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ meaning ‘Out of Africa always something new’ – but a reading of the actual book confirms how utterly inappropriate this is. For if Meredith’s book demonstrates anything it is that, since independence, out of Africa have come the same five or six stereotypical narratives or events – civil war, one-party rule, dictatorship, economic collapse, famine, vast amounts of foreign aid – and the consistent failure to deliver the utopian dreams everyone hoped for in the heady first years of independence.

Two major contexts

Meredith only mentions them in passing but two broad historical contexts are worth bearing in mind.

  1. The independence movement in Algeria spiralled out of control into an appallingly brutal war which neither side was able to stop, and which threatened to tear the colonial power, France, apart. The war was at its worst in 1957 to 1961. The point is that Algeria stood as a terrible warning to the other colonial powers (Britain, Belgium, Portugal) of what might happen if they mismanaged things or delayed.
  2. The victory of Fidel Castro’s communists in Cuba in 1959 ushered in an era when the threat of the new African states falling to communism seemed very real and of global importance in the war between the two superpowers. Hence the head of the CIA warning President Eisenhower that Congo’s Patrice Lumumba might be ‘the African Castro’ and America’s feverish paranoia that if Congo fell to the communists it might influence the entire continent (p.104). Looking back, this level of anxiety seems exaggerated, even absurd. But the context is crucial in understanding the actions of all the colonial powers, but especially of America, which set about undermining left-wing governments and supporting right-wing, capitalism-loving dictators across the continent.

Both of these examples or precedents (Algeria, Cuba) lay behind the decisions of Britain and Belgian, in particular, not to linger or suppress independence movements. In other words, they added to the sense of urgency and haste which characterised the rush to make Africa independent, with such questionable results.

Part 1

1. The Gold Coast experiment (Ghana)

The tragic life of Kwame Nkrumah who went from political prisoner in the early 1950s, to lead his own political party, the Convention People’s Party, won the general election held under British auspices in 1954, before leading Ghana to independence in March 1957. Meredith vividly describes the week-long celebrations, attended by worthies from around the world including Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.

With a sickening inevitability Nkrumah found the new country difficult to rule, repressed political opposition and rigged elections. In 1964 he amended the constitution to make Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup led by the National Liberation Council.

2. Revolt on the Nile (Egypt)

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led the 1952 revolution which overthrew the 32-year-old playboy King Farouk I. Much rhetoric about freedom and Arab socialism as Nasser tightened his grip on power, imprisoning rivals and getting elected president in 1956. The catastrophe of the Suez Crisis which put the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. From that moment Britain’s rush to decolonise picked up speed.

3. Land of the Setting Sun (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria)

Apparently, the Arab word for north-west Africa, maghreb, means ‘land of the setting sun’ (as opposed to our word ‘Levant’ which means ‘rising’, to describe the old Ottoman Empire).

This chapter describes the descent of Algeria into a terrible insurgency which kicked off in the spring of 1954 with a wave of bomb attacks by the National Liberation Front (French: Front de libération nationale or FLN) with both sides slowly breaching their early declarations to target only combatants, so that by August 1954 the FLN was bombing civilian cafés and restaurants while the French security forces cracked down hard on the civilian Arab population, with large-scale arrests and torture.

An often overlooked aspect of the terrible war in Algeria (1956 to 1962) was that it made the French more amenable to granting its neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, independence. Meredith describes the independence campaigning of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. The French arrested, imprisoned and exiled both these leaders, but eventually gave into widespread protests and both Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in March 1956.

In 1957, amid an upsurge in terrorist bombings, the French governor of Algeria handed power over to the military, led by General Jacques Massu. The army locked down the capital city Algiers, ringing it with barbed wire, dividing it into sections which could be searched, cleared and then surveilled. Thousands of Algerians were arrested and tortured using electric shocks or waterboarding. It became known as The Battle of Algiers. In the country, peasants were rounded up into camps while native collaborator/spies (harkis) were deployed by the French.

By 1958 the FLN had been defeated, its leaders seeking refuge in Tunisia, whose new leader Bourguiba gave them sanctuary. However, the political system in France itself was in crisis. Violent disagreements about policy in Algeria led to the collapse of a series of short-lived governments. Worried that pacifist-defeatist politicians would gain power, in May 1958 the military took control of Algeria, allying with leading colons (white French colonists) to form a Committee of Public Safety. The French government declared a blockade, at which the Committee called for the return of the wartime hero, General de Gaulle.

4. L’Afrique Noire (Senegal, Ivory Coast)

L’Afrique Noire was the French term for the sub-Saharan part of its colonial empire, including Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Meredith describes the careers of Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire.

5. Winds of Change (British colonies)

This chapter covers the independence movements in British colonies such as Nigeria.

Nigeria

Nigeria had only been created by the forcible union of north and south Nigeria in 1914, the north and south having themselves been slowly cobbled together from former, smaller protectorates since 1900. Nigeria could be divided into three great blocs: the north was Muslim and Hausa-speaking, with a conservative, feudal social system. It had few schools or colleges. The West, including the capital Lagos, was mostly Yoruba. Being on the coast, dotted with cities, it was more economically advanced and urban. In the East lived the Igpo who tended to be very well educated but had no social system of their own and so were scattered around Nigeria’s other territories. In addition there some 250 other ethnic groups, some of which protested and rebelled, including the Edo-speaking people of Benin province who longed to restore the kingdom of Benin. The British struggled with successive constitutions to try and create a balance between all these different constituencies. Nigeria was granted independence in 1960.

As a rule of thumb British colonies in West Africa were much more advanced than British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika) and Central Africa (north and south Rhodesia, Nyasaland). Politics in these latter countries was dominated by the fierce lobbying of the small white minorities, who dominated the local governors. Thus the settlers persuaded the Colonial Office to create a federation of Central Africa, consisting of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Kenya

Plans for a similar federation in East Africa were wrecked by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was an organised protest against the grotesque monopoly of the best agricultural land in Kenya by whites, and the land deprivation and lack of rights enforced on the million-strong Kikuyu population. Meredith gives a thorough account: the phrase mau mau actually meant nothing in Kikuyu, it was just a rallying call, and then the name given to the secret meetings where oaths of allegiance were sworn to the movement. Despite white paranoia, very few whites were actually killed during the so-called ’emergency’ (1952 to 1960), Meredith gives the number as 32, fewer than lost their lives in traffic accidents in Nairobi over the same period. He details British accusations that the Kikuyu leader Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU) was involved, which led to a kangaroo court convicting and imprisoning him; and the brutal measures the British took against the insurgency, including setting up concentration camps.

The first Blacks were elected to Kenya’s legislative council in 1957. In October the Highlands area was formally opened to all races. The British thought they would continue to rule Kenya for at least another decade. In the event, independence was granted on December 12, 1963.

Nyasaland

Meredith gives the story of Nyasaland, to which the elderly Dr Hastings Banda returned as leader of the independence movement in 1959, determined to scupper Britain’s plans to make it part of a federation with Rhodesia. The colonial governor imported troops who tried to quell protests which turned into riots, troops shot, protesters killed, it becomes a nationwide movement etc.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring north Rhodesia, in the run-up to contested 1959 elections the authorities banned a leading nationalist party and imprisoned its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. Britain was losing its reputation for progressive colonialism in a welter of protests and arrests across all its African colonies.

Abruptly, Harold Macmillan’s conservative government gave in. Late in 1959 the Foreign Secretary Iain Macleod said further repression would lead to bloodshed. In February 1960 Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech. Behind it was fear that further suppressing calls for independence would drive African nations into the hands of the communists. The British knew most of their colonies weren’t ready for independence – Meredith lists the pitiful number of native lawyers or administrators in the central and east African countries – but hurrying was a less bad option than delay, with the increasing repression, bloodshed and reputational damage that would inevitably entail.

6. Heart of Darkness (Congo)

The gruesome history of the Belgian Congo. It beggars belief that there are still statues of King Leopold II, one of the most blood-thirsty rulers in history, in Belgium. Congo was notable for four or five reasons:

  1. It was and is the largest country in Africa.
  2. The grotesque rule of Leopold II was probably the most evil, mass murdering of all the colonial regimes. As many as 10 million Congolese died during his rule, 1885 to 1908.
  3. Once the colony had been handed over to the Belgian government to run, it developed through the 20th century as one of the richest sources of minerals (particularly copper and diamonds) in the world.
  4. The rush to independence was hastiest and most foolhardy here than almost anywhere else. At independence Congo had 3 Black civil servants, 30 university graduates, no doctors, secondary school teachers or army officers. The firebrand new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, had just four years of secondary school education plus one year in a technical college for postal clerks (p.95).
  5. With the result that within days of winning independence on 1 June 1960, Congo collapsed into chaos.

The army mutinied, the entire province of Katanga tried to secede, riots in the main cities included attacks on whites so that the entire Belgian community i.e. everyone who knew how to run the infrastructure of the country, fled in panic. Profile of the hectic unpredictable character of Lumumba, and the long dismal series of events which led, first to his arrest and, eventually, to his murder by Belgian and Congolese soldiers on the orders of his one-time lieutenant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, with the collusion of the UN and US, on 17 January 1961.

The stream of crises continued until Mobutu took power in a definitive military coup in 1965, and was to rule a one-party state for 32 years, until 1997.

7. The White South

South Africa

Meredith points out that the southern nations of Africa – north and south Rhodesia, south-west Africa and South Africa – looked at the other African countries gaining independence and were horrified by what they saw, especially the complete chaos punctuated by bloodbaths and military coups in Congo.

The fiercest response was in South Africa which in 1948 had established the system of apartheid and spent the next decades hardening the division between whites and blacks. Meredith chronicles the early history of the African National Congress (ANC), revolving round the figure of Nelson Mandela and the failure of peaceful efforts to counter apartheid. Peaceful protests such as general strikes became harder to justify after the SA authorities carried out the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, killing 69 protesters and injuring 180.

The more violent atmosphere heralded by the massacre led the ANC to establish the armed wing of the struggle, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. These guys carried out a not very effective sabotage campaign against a variety of infrastructure targets. In 1962 Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, despite a lack of evidence against him. But then in 1964 the authorities discovered the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe hideout at Rivonia, which was stuffed with incriminating documents. On the basis of these, Mandela was retried and, along with the key leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto, sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.

Rhodesia

Meredith gives the history of Rhodesia, taking in the creation of the two independence parties, ZANU and ZAPU, up until November 1965 when Ian Smith‘s Rhodesian Front government, rebelling against pressure to grant Black independence, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the mother government in the UK.

Angola

Angola was a backwater of the mouldering Portuguese empire, which was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1956 the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) was founded but police swoops in 1959 and 1960 arrested most of its leaders. In 1961 the colony was horrified by an outbreak of extreme violence in the north, where machete-wielding gangs massacred white bosses and the Blacks who worked for them. This was partly the work of a different group, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), run by Holden Roberto.

Mozambique

On the other side of the continent, in the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, 1962 saw the creation of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) which commenced a campaign of small-scale guerrilla attacks against border posts etc.

Dates of independence

1956 – Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia

1957 – Ghana

1958 – Guinea

1960 – Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian), Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo (France), Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania,

1961 – Sierra Leone, Tanganyika

1962 – Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria, Uganda

1963 – Kenya, Zanzibar

1964 – Nyasaland (Malawi), North Rhodesia (Zambia)

1965 – Gambia

1966 – Botswana, Lesotho

1975 – Angola, Mozambique

1980 – Zimbabwe

1990 – Namibia

1993 – Eritrea

2011 – South Sudan

Part 2

8. The Birth of Nations

A chapter summarising the dire state of the geography and economies of most African nations at independence, and the consequent economic challenges they faced. It’s here that Meredith gives the shocking figures about the lack of African graduates or professionals right across the continent.

9. The First Dance of Freedom

Abandoning democracy

Meredith laments that almost all the new national leaders consciously disavowed democracy and instituted one-party rule. It’s interesting to read their justifications. It was claimed that democracy derived from advanced societies with well-defined classes and class interests which could be represented by political parties. By contrast, leaders like Nkomo and Kenyatta argued that while parties may have been necessary to organise and motivate different groupings in the fight against colonialism, now the colonialists had left and the nations were free, democracy represented a threat to African countries because the likelihood was that parties would come to be based on tribal or regional allegiances and so work to split and divide the nation. There’s actually a lot to this argument, as that’s what many African parties came to be, fronts for specific tribes or regional interests.

One-party rule

Regardless of the justifications, almost all the first leaders of the newly independent African nations went on to abolish democracy, establish one-party rule, declare themselves presidents for life, lock up any opposition figures (p.176), create cults of their greatness (p.180), set up a secret police which was told it could go to any lengths to save the state from communist or capitalist or imperialist subversion etc etc. These cults often took the name of the Great Leader – Nasserism, Nkrumahism and so on (p.163).

Corruption

And misuse money, in two specific ways: 1) instituting state-sponsored corruption at every level of society, while 2) spending fortunes on grandiose building projects, palaces, mansions, waterfront hotels. Presidents, ministers and powerful figures swiftly awarded themselves ‘the platinum lifestyle’ (p.171).While Nkrumah was crapping on about ‘African socialism’ his ministers made fortunes. Ghanaian minister Krobo Edusei caused a scandal when his wife ordered a £3,000 gold-plated bed from a London store. In later life he admitted to owning 14 homes, a luxury beach house, a London flat, expensive cars and six different bank accounts. African socialism.

Army coups

In 1958 in Sudan the army took control in Sudan from squabbling politicians. In 1963 Togo’s president was shot dead in a coup. In 1964 African mobs overthrew rule by the Arab elite and the sultan was forced to flee, the French army had to put down military coups in Gabon and Cameroon, while the British army suppressed army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya. From 1965 coups became more frequent: in 1965 Algeria’s first leader was deposed; Mobutu overthrew president Joseph Kasa-Vubu in Congo; there was a military coup in Benin; Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic, and so on.

10. Feet of Clay (Ghana)

An extended description of Kwame Nkrumah’s slow descent into authoritarian rule, isolation, paranoia, arbitrary arrest of opponents, accompanied by rising corruption. Meredith makes the pretty well-known point that patronage and corruption weren’t parasites on the system which could be eliminated; they were the system.

A detailed account of how Nkrumah destroyed the Ghana economy through mismanagement, ignorance, terrible accounting, disastrous decisions and so on. Incompetence on a national scale, plus classic withdrawal into dictator paranoia. And, also classically, when the army intervened it wasn’t for the good of the country – they’d happily watched it go to wrack and ruin – it was because Nkrumah started tampering with it, wishing to bring it directly under his control as he had done every other aspect of Ghanaian life. So it was that while Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, the army deposed him. Joyous crowds celebrated in the streets, his statues was pulled down and portraits defaced. The kind of thing we were to see scores and scores of times in developing countries around the world over the past 60 years.

11. A House Divided (Nigeria)

Nigeria. Meredith explains the entirely tribal basis and vicious infighting of Nigerian politics which led up to the January 1966 military coup, in which the Supreme Council of the Revolution not just sacked but executed civilian politicians. And the complicated rivalries between North, West and East Nigeria which led leaders in the East to declare independence as Biafra, and the 3-year-long war which followed, in which up to 2 million Nigerians died.

12. Death of an Emperor (Ethiopia)

An entertaining account of the elaborate ritual which surrounded the Emperor Haile Selassie and the surprisingly aggressive imperial campaigns which had doubled his country’s size, starting back in the time of his ancestor Menelek (ruled 1889 to 1913), including the annexation of Eritrea and contested parts of Somaliland.

In the early 1970s mismanagement, especially of a famine in Wollo, protests by various sectors, and Selassie’s hastening senility, emboldened a group of army officers, who called themselves the Derg, to stage a coup in stages throughout 1974, which ended with the complete overthrow of Selassie on 12 September. In November the junta executed 60 former officials of the imperial government plus dissident elements within the Derg itself, by firing squad, and Ethiopia was declared a republic to be governed on Marxist-Leninist lines.

  • The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)

13. The Coming of Tyrants

After the first few heroic years of optimism, the military coups began. But worse was the advent of the monsters: Abaid Karume in Zanzibar (1964 to 1972); Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic (1966 to 1979); Idi Amin in Uganda (1971 to 1979); Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (1968 to 1979); Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia (1977 to 1991).

14. In Search of Ujamaa (Tanzania)

Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. He was a committed socialist though without a socialist party or advisers. In the mid-1960s he nationalised everything in Tanzania and proclaimed this native form of socialism ujaama, which is KiSwahili for ‘familyhood’ (p.253). In 1974 this was turned into the forced movement of some 11 million peasant farmers into collective farms, which had the same kind of catastrophic effect as in the Stalin-era Ukraine or Mao’s China i.e. the collapse of agricultural productivity and widespread hunger. Nyerere had to go begging to the World Bank and IMF and food agencies for emergency food supplies. As its economy went steadily downhill, Nyerere’s one-party state did improve literacy, schools, drinking water etc, but almost entirely funded by aid from the West.

15. The Passing of the Old Guard

Ghana

Nkrumah’s sad exile in a slowly deteriorating villa in Guinea planning a triumphant return to Ghana which never took place.

Egypt

Nasser’s great dreams of leading an Arab renaissance came to nothing, attempts to unify with Syria were a fiasco, his intervention in Yemen backfired, leading up to the humiliation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which the Israelis seized the Sinai with its oil wells from Egypt. Yet he remained popular and Egypt was plunged into mourning when he died in 1970 of a heart attack, aged just 52.

Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta was the opposite of Nyerere, a keen advocate of capitalism, and provided the stable political and legal framework within which private enterprise could flourish. Much of the land belonging to the white settlers, the issue behind the Mau Mau movement, was sold to Black Kenyans. During the 1970s he faced political challenges and hardened his one-party rule. His fiercest critic was found murdered etc. Late in life Kenyatta slowly lost interest in ruling, preferring to concoct complex riddles. He died peacefully in 1978.

Senegal

President Léopold Senghor remained strongly Francophile, committed to maintaining links with France, accepting French capital in business and retaining French troops to safeguard his regime. In France he was a noted poet. In 1976 he bucked the one-party trend of his neighbours by allowing the establishment of two new political parties. In 1980 he handed over power to his protégé, becoming the first African ruler to relinquish power voluntarily.

Guinea

The first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, created a paranoid atmosphere of permanent plots which he claimed to uncover and used to arrest, torture and publicly execute opponents, real or imagined. A fifth of the population fled abroad. Touré nationalised industries, persecuted independent businesses, created parastatal agencies, so that the economy tanked and was, eventually, only surviving on western aid. After 20 years of enforced socialism, he began to relent and allow some elements of private enterprise.

16. The Slippery Slope

An overview of the calamitous economic issues which hit Africa in the 1970s and 80s, being:

  • famine and drought
  • the two oil shocks of the 1970s
  • the collapse of commodity prices on which most African states depended for foreign revenue
  • the disastrous loss of agricultural land, soil degradation and desertification

On top of all this, an explosive growth in population.

17. The Great Plunderer (Zaire)

This refers to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who ruled Congo from the date of his second military coup in 1965 to his overthrow by the forces invading from Rwanda in 1997. During those 32 long years he changed the country’s name to Zaire, Africanised all placenames (Leopoldville > Kinshasa, Elizabethville > Lubumbashi) and even his own name, changing it to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

Mobutu nationalised agriculture, seized all businesses from foreign owners, causing a collapse in the country’s economy, and looted it on a grand scale, siphoning vast amounts into private bank accounts. Probably the greatest African kleptocrat, he was said to have stolen up to $15 billion. The Americans supported him on the simple Cold War basis that he was fiercely anti-communist and so maintained the centre of Africa against any Soviet influence. Mobutu was an honoured guest of US presidents from John F Kennedy to George Bush. Meredith doesn’t need to comment.

18. White Dominoes (Mozambique, Angola)

Portugal was the last European country to decolonise. Independence movements in its two main African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, commenced military activities in 1961, leading to what became known as the Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974).

In 1968 Portugal’s long-serving dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was replaced by another authoritarian ruler, Marcello Caetano. He inherited military operations in Portugal’s main two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. However, junior army officers had become unhappy with the way the army seemed like it was committed forever to these ruinous, unwinnable wars and so, on 25 April 1974, carried out the Carnation Revolution, overthrowing Caetano. Portugal’s new military rulers set out to divest themselves of her colonies immediately. Small Guinea-Bissau was easily granted independence in 1973.

Mozambique

In Mozambique the main liberation force had been the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led by the zealous Marxist, Samora Machel. Terrified by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Marxist Machal, in the year between the declaration of independence in 1974 and its legal implementation on 25 June 1975, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique fled the country, including all the civil servants, administrators, managers of the infrastructure and all businesses.

Frelimo passed a law ordering the remaining Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless, leaving a country empty of experienced administrators, engineers and so on.

Frelimo commenced an aggressive implementation of Marxism-Leninism which proved a disaster: central planning was as badly managed here as in most other African countries, leading to economic collapse, inflation, shortages of everything but especially food. Industrial output and agriculture collapsed leading to widespread famine. Frelimo eventually generated so much opposition that the anti-communist forces united to form the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias.

Renamo found backing from South Africa and the US. Civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was to consume 15 ruinous years from 1977 to 1992. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, with somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dying of famine. 1.7 million Mozambicans took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced.

Angola

Something similar happened in Angola. As the deadline for independence approached, three rebel or independence groups/parties/armies vied for power, being the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA. As violence broke out most of the white Portuguese fled and the country collapsed into a civil war between what emerged as the two main forces, the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The civil war lasted from 1975, with interludes, until 2002. See:

Part 3

19. Red Tears (Ethiopia)

How in 1974 the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) of army officers, also known as the Derg, overthrew the regime of emperor Haile Selassie. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized full control and initiated a wave of repression which became known as the Red Terror. During this two-year campaign as many as 50,000 Ethiopians were arrested, tortured and executed. The Derg dumped the corpses in the street and gained notoriety by demanding that families of the executed pay for the bullets. Marxist-Leninist housekeeping.

Meredith explains how Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist policies, along with his brutal campaigns against Eritrean and Tigrayan separatists in the north, helped bring about the great Ethiopia famine of 1984 which led to Live Aid. At the time more than half of Ethiopia’s annual budget was devoted to maintaining an army of 300,000 (armed and supplied by Soviet Russia) in order to carry out operations against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (p.334).

Mengistu was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed in collectivising agriculture and enforcing super low prices in order to provide subsidised food for his key constituencies in the cities. The detailed chronicle of his deliberate ignoring of the famine, attempts to deny it, to prevent journalists or aid agencies entering the famine-stricken areas, and then the politically motivated strategy of moving hundreds of thousands of starving people against their will from the north (close to where Eritrean separatists operated) to the more secure south where they had no homes or livelihoods, makes for terrible reading. What a complete bastard.

The title of this chapter comes from a memoir of his time in Mengistu’s government written by a defector from the Derg, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, ‘Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia’. In the words of reviewer Mohammed Hassen, this exposes ‘the callous brutality of the Ethiopian government towards its own people’, and the leaders of the Derg as ‘uninformed, anti-people, anti-democratic criminal thugs’ (Online review).

20. Fault Lines (Chad, Sudan)

Chad

Across the north of Africa is a line between the Arab Muslim north and the start of the Black African and often Christian south. Meredith gives a long, detailed and deeply depressing account of the north-south conflict in Chad, in which both sides massacred each other and Colonel Gaddafi, in power in Libya from 1969 onwards, took advantage by trying to seize northern Chad and, at his most ambitious, declared the unification of Chad with Libya – under his supreme control, of course.

Sudan

To the East, the equally long-running and demoralising war between Muslim north and Christian south Sudan. A key aspect of the backstory to both conflicts is that the northern Muslims had, for centuries, captured southern blacks as slaves as part of the widespread Arab slave trade. In fact Meredith records Arab militias capturing and enslaving Black southerners in the 1980s, all accompanied by vitriolic racism about the Blacks being sub-humans etc. About the Atlantic slave trade I hear on a daily basis and in virtually every art exhibition I go to; about the Arab slave trade, never.

21. The Scourge of AIDS

The interesting point is the number of African governments which refused to acknowledge AIDS or dismissed it as a racist Western conspiracy, with the result that many African countries didn’t commence AIDS-awareness campaigns till the 1990s by which time the disease had taken hold in their populations. Two notable exceptions were Senegal under Abdou Diouf, and Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni. Respect.

22. The Lost Decade

A detailed look at the economic collapse of almost all African countries by the 1980s so that they became increasingly dependent on foreign aid, on loans which needed to be continually rescheduled, and the accompanying demands from the IMF and World Bank for ‘structural reforms’. Through mismanagement, drought, civil war, collapse of commodity prices, most African countries became dependent on aid from the West.

What comes over, and is expressed in terms by African commentators themselves, is what condemned Africa to becoming the most backward and poverty-stricken of the world’s continents was the appalling quality of African leaders – tyrants, dictators but, above all, thieves, on an epic, mind-boggling scale.

23. The Struggle for Democracy

The long hold on power of Africa’s strong men, the generation who took power at independence and often clung on to it for 25 years or more, for example:

  • Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (president for 38 years)
  • Omar Bongo in Gabon (41 years)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (president for 33 years)
  • Mobutu in Zaire (32 years)
  • Hastings Banda in Malawi (30 years)
  • Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (27 years)
  • Moussa Traore in Mali (22 years)

Of the 50 African states in 1990, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships.

The fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era. One party regimes and Marxist regimes appeared old-fashioned overnight. But the strong men clung on in the new landscape, for example Mobutu who struggled on for another 7 years.

24. A Time of Triumph (South Africa)

A long and harrowing description of ‘grand’ apartheid in all its totalitarian, racist horror. Meredith gives an interesting explanation of the changes in international affairs and geopolitics during the late 1980s which led the apartheid leadership to consider sweeping reform. He ends with a moving account of negotiations with Nelson Mandela, climaxing with his release and then the first free, multi-racial elections in South Africa’s history.

Apart from the long, complex history of violence, guerrilla warfare, civil war between the ANC and Inkatha, South Africa’s interference in all the nations bordering it and so on – on a human level I learned that a) Mandela and the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk, really didn’t get on, and that b) when his marriage to wife Winnie Mandela ended, she very publicly took a much younger lover and embarrassed him in public (‘Mandela’s late years of freedom were constantly blighted by her wayward example’), leaving him an often lonely figure (p.438).

Part 4

25. In The Name of the Prophet (Egypt, Algeria, Sudan)

Sayyid Qutb

The imperialists had oppressed them. Secular nationalism was a failure. The first generation of post-independence rulers turned out to be corrupt tyrants. Socialism and Marxism turned out to be dead ends. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 there began a revival of political Islam which seemed to many ordinary people a last resort, given that all western political systems and theories had failed. Political Islam encouraged the idea that western concepts like democracy or capitalism were infidel and inappropriate to Muslim lands, and that only return to the purity of the Prophet’s laws and rules would restore society.

The principal architect of jihad ideology [was] Sayyid Qutb…whose writings influenced generations of radical Islamists. (p.444)

Qutb, an Egyptian who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, was imprisoned by Colonel Nasser, then executed in 1965 – but not before he’d developed, written and distributed a starkly simplistic view of Islam. According to Qutb the entire Muslim world can be divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan with no middle ground. Repressive regimes cannot be changed from within and so must be overthrown by jihad i.e. armed struggle.

Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar el-Harb – the Abode of War. ‘It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there.’ (p.444)

This is really, really important. Qutb’s writings are crucial to understanding the modern age. His simplistic binary worldview, and his insistence that democracy, nationalism, human rights and all those other ideas, are infidel western abominations – all this explains the wars which have steadily engulfed the Arab/Muslim world in the last 30 years.

Qutb’s writings explain why generations of jihadis have been convinced that the only honourable and devout course of action is to fight your enemies to extermination. His writings have hugely contributed to instability right across the Arab world and are the ideological background to jihadis fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Meredith mentions a couple of other Muslim thinkers:

  • cleric Omar Abdel Rahman who taught that jihad was the only way to vanquish the enemies of Islam (p.445)
  • Muhammed al-Farag, who taught that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and that armed struggle is imperative for all true Muslims in order to cure a decadent society: ‘the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them with a complete Islamic Order’ (p.446)

Only jihad can bring about the perfect Islamic society. Jihad must be waged until the perfect Islamic society is achieved. But there are many forces resisting this, the obvious outside forces of America and the West, but also the populations of many of these countries. So the kind of perfect Islamic state the jihadis dream of will probably never be achieved. Therefore the Muslim world, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, is condemned to permanent war or insurgency for the foreseeable future.

Algeria

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) had been the main force behind the long bloody war for the independence of Algeria from France. After independence was finally granted in 1962, the FLN became the party of government, instituting socialist policies and a one-party regime. Meredith lists the reasons why the FLN slowly became unpopular. Two stick out. One was that they downplayed agriculture in a bid to industrialise, keeping food prices artificially low in order to placate their constituencies in the towns and cities. The result was that life as a farmer got harder and harder, with many rural youths deciding to quit the poverty of the countryside and try their luck in the city. This is interesting because it’s an abiding theme of so many of these countries. If I could travel back in time to the early 60s and was an adviser to newly independent African nations, I’d say: ‘Cherish your farmers’. In Algeria, as everywhere else, neglecting and even undermining agriculture led to the country becoming ever more reliant on food imports.

The second is the explosion in population. I am a Darwinian materialist, a believer in the blunt facts of the environment and biology a long way before culture and politics. Thus the simple relevant fact is that the population of Algeria exploded from 10 million in 1962 to 26 million in 1992. No rate of economic growth, anywhere, could keep up with this explosion in mouths to feed and, more to the point, young men to employ.

Groups of young men hanging round on street corners become a prey to warlords and the siren call of violent revolution. This is true all round the developing world. The West supplied the medicines to developing countries which hugely improved infant mortality and recovery from illness, but without doing anything to transform a) cultural attitudes to women and childbirth or b) expand the economies. Result: lots of aimless young men looking for a cause.

Enter radical Islam which promises a better world, which gives young men a purpose, a goal, a sense of identity, and money and respect. What’s not to like, what’s not to sign up and commit your life to?

As radical Islamic parties began to appear in Algeria the military command which called the shots in the FLN tried to cancel them. After complicated manoeuvres the FLN agreed to hold free elections and Islamic parties stood in them. But when the Islamists looked like winning, the FLN abruptly cancelled the results and took back military control. The rest of the story could have been written by an AI bot. The Islamists hit back with a terror campaign, the army cracked down, arbitrarily arresting thousands, imprisonment without trial, torture etc, the Islamists ramped up their campaign, and so on.

Again, with utter inevitability, the insurgency spawned an extremist wing, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). With utter predictability they started off saying they’d stick to military targets but soon found these too well protected and their attacks having less and less affect so they widened their targets. Journalists were singled out, but more and more members of the general public were also murdered. Abdelkader Hattab wrote a pamphlet titled: ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’ (p.457).

As in Iraq, in order to build the perfect Islamic state, it turned out to be necessary to kill lots of Muslims, first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands.

What became known as the Algerian Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002 and led to around 150,000 deaths. Of course the economy was wrecked. Of course a lot of the best and brightest middle classes simply fled abroad.

Egypt

I visited Egypt in 1981 and then in 1995, just before Islamist terror groups began attacking tourists. Groups like Jamaat al-Jihad and Gamma Islamiyya increasingly targeted government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians, burned Christian shops and churches, and bookshops and theatres and video stores. Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best known writers, was shot dead. The Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was knifed. ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’, in practice.

Then they started attacking tourists: in 1996 17 Greek pilgrims were murdered outside their hotel. In 1997 58 foreign tourists were murdered in the Valley of the Kings. Meredith tells us that a Japanese man was eviscerated and inside his stomach cavity was stuffed a note reading: ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ (p.461). Fine by me. I’m never going back to a Muslim country.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat by army Islamists in 1981. Now Mubarak set about crushing the Islamic groups ruthlessly, telling his own people and the international community that he wouldn’t let Egypt become the next Algeria. This chapter takes the story up to 2000, when Mubarak was arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organisations to prevent them standing in that year’s elections.

26. Black Hawk Down (Somalia)

The first fact about Somalia is that, at independence, about 40% of the people who thought of themselves as Somalis lived outside the borders of the country, in Ethiopia or Kenya. So from the day of independence the government neglected agriculture and the economy and focused on military action to try and extend its borders to include the full population.

Second fact is the Somalis have a strong and complex clan system, clans within clans, which extends in a hierarchy from the five main super-clans down through ever-diminishing sub-clans. So:

  1. Never-ending warfare helped impoverish the country, especially after the Soviet Union dropped its support for Somalia in favour of Mengistu’s Marxist revolution in neighbouring Ethiopia.
  2. As central government collapsed under the pressure of military defeats, poverty, famine and so on, the country disintegrated into a warzone of permanently fighting, feuding clans, at multiple levels, with warlords ruling their territories through terror.

27. The Graves Are Not Yet Full (Rwanda)

The Rwandan genocide. I’ve summarised the dreadful events elsewhere. I’ll just pick up on two related themes, mentioned re. Algeria. 1) the population of Rwanda ballooned from 2 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1990, which led to 2) lots of unemployed youths hanging around, waiting for a cause and meaning (and cash):

Youths with no prospect of work were easily recruited [into the interahamwe) with promises of land, jobs and other rewards… (p.496)

The French government of François Mitterrand comes over as the genocide-supporting scumbags indicated by all the other accounts. For example, it was the French government which refused the Belgian request to increase the number of the latter’s peacekeepers, so that Belgians ended up being forced to watch Tutsis being hacked to death in front of them but were unable to intervene. Because of France (p.510).

Mitterrand was determined to prevent a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in Rwanda even if it meant continuing to collaborate with genocidal killers. (p.519)

France made five arms shipments to the Hutu government while it was carrying out the genocide. Bastard Mitterrand sent a French force into Rwanda to protect the Hutu Power génocidaires (the equivalent of protecting the SS). Meredith tells of French soldiers slowly realising that the Hutus they had been sent to protect were in fact genocidal killers and realising that their government (Mitterrand) had lied to them. The piles and piles of Tutsi corpses were a clue. But the French government refused to allow their troops on the ground to track down and bring to justice the génocidaires hiding among the mass Hutu refugees who fled into Congo, once the Tutsi-led RPF reactivated the civil war and invaded in order to end the killing.

To the end, the French protected the organisers of the genocide. (p.522)

We’re never meant to forget the Holocaust. Well, in the same spirit, surely we should never forgive the arms and aid and support and protection the French government extended to the perpetrators of the second most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

Mind you, Meredith goes on to paint the UN as far worse, biased towards Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, ignoring reports from the Canadian commander of the UN force on the ground, UNAMIR, General Roméo Dallaire. And then the Belgian government, which withdrew their contingent altogether, abandoning thousands of Tutsis who had taken shelter in their compounds and who were hacked to pieces within hours of their abandonment (p.512). And the Americans behaved disgracefully, Bill Clinton doing everything he could to avoid using the G word (genocide) and refusing to commit troops. Everyone in a position of power in the West let the genocide happen.

More Tutsis were killed in churches than any other type of building, although a lot were killed in maternity wards where a lot had their bellies ripped open and their babies hacked to pieces before they themselves were hacked to death.

Some people still believe in the essential goodness of the human race. Such innocence is touching, charming, but dangerous.

28. Where Vultures Fly (the two Congo wars)

Who supported Mobutu after he had reduced Zaire to starving ruins? France. Why? Because he spoke French. Because he represented la francophonie. Because he represented a bulwark against the rise of the beastly English-speaking leaders such as Museveni of Uganda. France supported mass murderers and world-beating kleptocrats because their crimes were less important than the preservation of ‘French culture’ (p.525). Look at their wise and good achievements in the realm of international affairs: Vietnam. Algeria. Models of wisdom and statecraft. And Vichy, when millions of French people wholeheartedly co-operated with German Nazis whose values they enthusiastically endorsed.

This is not an exaggeration. When considering international affairs, it’s important to bear in mind what despicable depths the French establishment’s paranoid fear of the English-speaking world drives them. James Barr describes the despicable behaviour of the French in Lebanon and Syria during the Second World War:

This chapter describes how the million and a half Hutu refugees from Rwanda were crammed into refugee camps, mostly in Congo, where the Hutu Power génocidaires rebuilt their power, controlled the distribution of aid, murdered dissenting voices, kept the refugees in line with terror, while they sold some of the aid the West gave them in order to buy arms to re-invade Rwanda and resume attacking Tutsi communities.

Meredith explains how the leader of the RPF, Paul Kagame, conspired with President of Uganda Mouseveni to invade eastern Zaire, to crush the Hutu Power leaders, to force the Hutu refugees to return to their country. How they found a useful idiot from within Zaire to front the army they were creating, namely fat, stupid guerrilla turned nightclub-owner Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

The combined RPF and Ugandan army force which Kabila fronted not only liberated the Hutu refugee camps, but marched on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, triggering the panic-stricken flight of the sick old dictator, Mobutu in 1997. In short order and to his own surprise, Kabila found himself in power and set about surrounding himself with cronies in the traditional style. Unwisely, he tried to bolster his support among the Congolese by turning on his Ugandan and Rwandan-Tutsi backers, whose forces were much resented in Kinshasa and beyond.

This policy badly backfired because when Kagame and Museveni found their puppet acting up against them, in 1998 they instituted a second invasion from the east, this time not marching but flying their forces direct to Kinshasa to overthrow Kabile. At this point, however, various outside countries began to get involved, several big ones supporting Kabile who had signed lucrative deals with them allowing them to plunder Congo’s natural resources.

This was the complex situation which led to what became known as the Great War of Africa. Slowly the country splintered into regions held by rival warlords or outside armies. A peace treaty was signed in 2002 which required armies from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. In four years of chaotic conflict (1998 to 2002) some 3 million Africans had died, mostly unarmed Congolese civilians. But even after the peace treaty, fighting continued in east Congo, and continues at a low level to this day.

29. Blood Diamonds (Liberia, Sierra Leone)

Liberia

Meredith recaps the extraordinary early history of Liberia, a colony on the west coast of Africa funded in 1822 by guilt-stricken liberal Americans who wanted to return some of their slaves to the motherland. Instead, the few thousand returned Blacks ended up creating their own version of slavery, subjugating the poor locals, exploiting their labour, building homes and dressing in the elaborate nineteenth century style of their former American oppressors. Now the immigrant Blacks oppressed the locals. The Americo-Liberians amounted to no more than 1% of the population but lorded it over the indigenes.

In a neat historical irony, in 1931 an international commission found members of the entirely Black Liberian government guilty of involvement in organised slavery (p.546).

But it the story stops being in any way funny when in April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a coup which overturned a century of Americo-Liberian rule. Semi-literate, Doe came from a minority tribe, the Krahn, from the deep jungle. He and colleagues broke into the mansion of President William Tolbert to complain about unpaid wages. Finding him asleep in bed they shot him multiple times before disembowelling him and dumping his body in the garden. This was the coup where Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were taken down to the beach, tied to posts and shot by a squad of drunken soldiers. I remember seeing the video on the news. This set the tone of ten years of savage, primitive, ignorant, incompetent rule.

Like all stupid people, Doe thought the world revolved around him and thus saw conspiracies everywhere. His comms people publicised the idea that he had survived 38 or more assassination attempts because of his magical powers, because bullets stopped in mid-air, knives refused to cut him, and so on – fairy tales designed to appeal to the largely illiterate population.

In August 1984 Doe arrested a popular university lecturer and 15 colleagues claiming they were planning a coup. When students protested, Doe sent a troop of soldiers who opened fire indiscriminately, stripped students naked, demanded money and/or raped them (p.551). This all made me think of all Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches from the 1950s and 60s about ‘Africa for Africans’, ‘African values’, how a liberated Africa would become a beacon of progress and civilisation…

Throughout all the mayhem the US government stood by Doe, declaring his obviously rigged elections valid, overlooking his brutal massacres, upping annual aid to $80 million, and inviting him to the White House for red carpet treatment. Why? Because he was staunchly anti-Soviet. That’s all that mattered (p.555).

In November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa, who had led the 1980 coup along with Doe, tried to seize power and there was premature rejoicing – until Doe managed to regain control, hunt down Quiwonkpa and have him kicked and hacked to death, followed by even harsher crackdowns on the population, which including victimisation of the entire Gio tribe which Quiwonkpa came from.

In 1989 another former colleague, Charles Taylor, led a militia into Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast, thus commencing a guerrilla war against Doe. Doe sent out death squads to devastate villages in the regions Taylor had seized. Taylor armed children (‘Small Boy Units’) and told them to kill everyone. The country descended into barbarity.

Bolstered by cane spirit, marijuana and cheap amphetamines, youths and boy soldiers evolved into psychopathic killers, adorning themselves with women’s wigs, dresses, fright masks and enemy bones and smearing their faces with white clay and make-up in the belief that this gave them supernatural perception…’It’s a children’s war,’ said a senior United Nations observer. ‘Kids get promoted in rank for committing an atrocity. They can cut off someone’s head without thinking. The troops move into a village. They take everything and kill and rape. They stay a couple of weeks and then move on.’ (p.558)

It’s interesting to read that many of the stoned fighters thought that wearing wigs or dresses i.e. adopting two identities, would confuse enemy bullets. Traditional African values. Reminds me of the website I found last time I was reading about this subject, a collection of photos of the surreal garb of drug-addled psychopathic militia men.

In 1989 a colleague of Taylor’s named Prince Johnson split off from Taylor’s army to set up the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, with the result that Liberia became caught in a three-way civil war. Or just – war. Marauding soldiers from each side burned, looted, raped and massacred at will. Half the population fled the country. Nigeria sent a peacekeeping force which didn’t establish any kind of peace but secured a few buildings in the capital Monrovia. When Doe drove down to the port to greet them, he was captured by Prince Johnson’s men.

Johnson ordered a video to be made of his men torturing a badly battered Doe, including the moments when they sliced his ears off. The video became a bestseller across West Africa. You can watch it on YouTube and reflect on the speeches of Kwame Nkrumah explaining how African values would civilise the world.

Inevitably, the African peacekeeping force turned out to be every bit as corrupt and lawless as the militias they were sent to police, giving warlords weapons in exchange for looted goods, leading to the joke that ECOMOG stood for ‘Every Car Or Moving Object Gone’.

Taylor established control everywhere outside the capital, and came to commercial arrangements with western companies to allow trade to continue. In two years he’s estimated to have raked off £200 million from these gangster deals.

Sierra Leone

The chaos from Liberia then spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone. This country was already a basket case due to the 17-year, one-party rule of President Siaka Steven whose regime made a fortune trading diamonds via Lebanese dealers, while the economy languished, government employees went unpaid, and gangs of youths filled the streets looking for a cause. The usual.

The force Taylor sent into Sierra Leone in March 1991 called itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was led by the psychopath, Foday Sankoh. This was the group Anthony Loyd writes about terrifyingly in Another Bloody Love Letter. Child soldiers became a key feature of Sierra Leone’s civil war. They were given drugs, indoctrinated and taught to kill. Some had to kill their own parents as an initiation test. Some hated it, wanted to leave but were afraid of themselves being killed. But others loved it. As researchers Krijn Peters and Paul Richards concluded:

‘The pay may be derisory but weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did; soon the AK47 brings food, money, a warm bath and instant adult respect. The combat groups substitutes for lost family and friends.’ (quoted page 563)

Like the white overseers in King Leopold’s Congo, the RUF took to hacking off the hands and limbs of civilians, at random, purely for the terror it created. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes. A coup in the capital brought Valentine Strasser to power. He paid a firm of mercenaries, Executive Outcomes, to clear the capital Freetown in exchange for rights to the country’s diamond mines. Executive Outcomes fighters cleared Freetown in one week, testament to the shoddy, amateurish character of the African fighters on all sides.

More splinter groups, more coups, more fighting, 14 attempts at a ceasefire, tens of thousands more hand choppings and mutilations. A final ceasefire brought UN intervention. But when the UN went to seize the diamond mines, in 2000, the RUF captured 500 of its peacekeepers. It was now that Britain sent in a full battle force to release the UN troops, seize government buildings and train the SL army. Sankoh was arrested and the RUF splintered into ineffectual groups. In the wake of the British intervention, the UN deployed 18,000 troops to bring about a comprehensive peace.

Eleven years of war had left 50,000 dead, 20,000 mutilated, three quarters of the population displaced, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the league of human development. Back in Liberia, Charles Taylor amassed a huge fortune from illegal diamond trading. His overthrow in 2003 was as violent and brutal as his coming to power, with two more factions, groups or militias murdering and raping their way to the capital. Eventually Taylor was forced out but flew peacefully to Nigeria to take up life in a comfortable retirement villa. There is no justice on earth, nothing like justice.

30. No Condition Is Permanent (Nigeria)

Meredith describes the brutal rule of General Sani Abacha, military ruler from 1993 to 1998. His crackdown on all opposition. The rise of organisations representing the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta who had seen none of the tens of billions of oil money generated around them, only the pollution and destruction of their environment. The work of the popular writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was eventually arrested, accused of organising an anti-government conspiracy etc and, despite international protests, executed in November 1995.

Abachi’s death in 1998 is the opportunity for a review of how far the country had fallen. Despite annual oil revenue of $280 billion, income per head was less than a third of what it had been in 1980, at $310; half the population lived on less than 30 cents a day and had no access to clean drinking water. Half of under fives were stunted due to malnutrition. Nigeria was regularly judged to be the most corrupt country in the world.

What this litany of disasters begins to impress on even the most sympathetic reader is that Africans do not seem able of running their own countries. Catastrophic wars, epic corruption, barbaric violence resulting in crushing poverty, if the generation of independence campaigners had seen the future would they have been in such a tearing hurry to gain independence from their colonial masters?

Abachi’s death didn’t bring peace and light: the end of the military regime led to an explosion of political parties across the country, which themselves exacerbated ethnic rivalries, and also the rise of Islamic militancy, which led to clashes between Muslims and Christians. Despite free elections in 1999 and again in 2003, observers wondered whether Nigeria, a country of 120 million made up of 250 ethnic groups, was ungovernable. [That was in 2000. Nigeria’s population in 2023 has almost doubled, to 215 million.]

31. The Honour of Living (Sudan)

General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and declared his commitment to creating an Islamic state. This was followed by the arrest of all opposition figures, torture including burning, beating and rape, the usual behaviour of leaders promising to build a better society – first you have to lock up a lot of people. 1991 saw the introduction of a new Islamic penal code: women were hounded out of public life, segregation of men and women was enforced in all public places, there was a ban on music, cinema and the compulsory Arabisation of all culture.

The ideologue of all this was Hassan al-Turabi, founder of the National Islamic Front and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the first Gulf War, in 1991. Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference to bring together thinkers and leaders to fight back against America’s ‘colonisation’ of the Arab World. Sudan became a refuge for anti-western terrorist groups. This is very important. It marks the start of a new type of aggressive new anti-western ideology, of the war on America.

Meredith gives a good short description of the career of Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the blind cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman organised the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Extremists trained in Sudan undertook assassinations and attacks across the Arab world. In 1998 activists trained by al Qaeda attacked hotels in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people. Now we enter ‘the modern world’, the era we still live in in 2023, the era of unceasing conflict and Islamic insurgency across the entire Arab world.

Their Islamic ideology justified the Bashir regime in intensifying the war against southern, Black, Christian rebels. Villages were bombed, populations massacred and sold into slavery, with the blessing of Islamic scholars. The southern forces split into two parties who had a civil war between themselves in which tens of thousands of civilians died, which triggered a famine in which hundreds of thousands perished (p.594). Humans, eh? Impressive species.

Alongside massacres in the south went the discovery and exploitation of oil. The Khartoum government reaped a huge bonanza and spent it on…arms. By 2002 the civil war had left an estimated 2 million dead. But after 9/11 the Americans became active. Sudan was identified as a training base for Islamic terrorists and Bashir had to back down and promise to comply.

32. Black Gold (Angola)

The crushingly depressing history of Angola in the 1980s and 1980s, a country destroyed by an endless civil war between the supposedly ‘Marxist’ MPLA government based in Luanda, and the madly self-centred, narcissistic, overweening arrogance of Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

Land mines, aerial bombing, indiscriminate massacre, burning, looting, rape of women and children. Maybe 5 million died, many more had legs blown off by the millions of landmines, the country was laid waste – all while Eduardo dos Santos and the elite of the MPLA lived like kings by salting away the revenue derived from the huge oil deposits found just offshore. Getting on for half the annual oil revenue, billions of dollars, was stolen by dos Santos and his clique, while the children starved to death in the streets. As with Congo, or Nigeria, why give aid to oil- and resource-rich countries which have enough natural income to invest in infrastructure, roads, markets, clean water, schools, but which they either steal or spend on arms and weapons?

33. A Degree In Violence (Zimbabwe)

The slow descent into paranoid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. I hadn’t realised that he was initially conciliatory towards the white minority, and even his arch enemy Ian Smith, for the first two or three years of his rule because his first priority was eliminating all his black rivals, starting with Joshua Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). It was called the Gukurahundi campaign (Shona for ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’). During this campaign Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans, rampaged through ZAPU’s heartland, Matabeleland, and massacred thousands of civilians accused of being ‘dissidents’. Some estimates say as many as 80,000 were killed during the 5-year campaign.

Slowly Zimbabwe became like all the other African one-party states, a machine for redirecting wealth into the pockets of a small elite around the figurehead leader. As the economy collapsed and inflation and unemployment rose, so did Mugabe’s deployment of racist, anti-white rhetoric, focused on the policy of farm reclamation, seizing back land from the white farmers who owned a disproportionate amount of it. As Meredith explains, it’s all Mugabe had left, rabble-rousing racism to distract attention from the complete failure of his leadership.

Mugabe’s successive rounds of farm seizures spelled the end of commercial farming as a major industry in Zimbabwe. Many of the confiscated farms didn’t go to the deserving poor but to friends and family and tribal supporters of Mugabe, who then stripped and sold off their assets or left them to rot. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks who worked on the confiscated farms were thrown out of work. Land lay fallow. Food production collapsed. Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, became dependent on food aid.

By 2003 the economy had collapsed and an estimated quarter of the population had fled the country. Three-quarters of the remainder lived on less than a dollar a day. Meredith covers the coming together of opposition movements in the Movement for Democratic Change and the rise of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the elections he contested in 2002 and 2008, elections Mugabe comprehensively managed with intimidation, violence and hectoring messages through state media.

Opposition activists were hunted down, beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. (p.646)

Meredith’s narrative takes the reader up to 2008 when Mugabe, despite spending 28 years utterly devastating his country, was still in power. It was very depressing to switch to Wikipedia and see that Mugabe continued to rule the country he had ruined for another nine years, till he was overthrown in 2017.

34. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (South Africa)

The books and movies all focus on Nelson Mandela‘s long march to freedom. Not so many examine the calamitous challenges he faced on taking power in 1994: trying to reverse the best part of a century of totalitarian racism which had entrenched grotesque inequality between the affluent whites and the crushingly poor Black population; trying to integrate millions of badly educated young Africans into the economy, trying to introduce Blacks into every level of a 100% white political and civil administration and into SA’s commercial life. The army, the police, the education system, everything needed reforming.

Plus the expectations of activists at all levels who had spent a lifetime working for the ‘revolution’ which would create a land of plenty. There was an epidemic of strikes and protests or just straightforward crime. To all this Mandela had to react much like Mrs Thatcher, explaining that the state just didn’t have the resources to make everyone rich. There would have to be belt-tightening. It would take time.

Meredith has an extended passage describing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it struggled to find its way, was a compromise in nature and intent, but ended up unearthing far more than anyone expected. Its impartiality was emphasised by the way it was reviled by both sides, both stalwarts of the apartheid regime and the ANC itself, found guilty of murdering white civilians, Black opponents, of prosecuting a civil war with Inkatha, and the 400-plus victims of ‘necklacing’.

Meredith’s account of Mandela’s sustained efforts to achieve reconciliation between the races at every level bring a tear to the eye. What a hero.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, elected unopposed to lead the ANC in 1997, was not a hero. Despite having been raised a communist, Mbeki promptly announced a set of neoliberal capitalist policies designed to boost the economy, namely strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation and liberalisation of state industries.

But Mbeki will go down in history as the man who adopted a minority view that HIV did not cause AIDS, promoted this view at every opportunity, refused to support AIDS awareness campaigns, refused to license anti-HIV drugs, for year after year, in the face of mounting criticism both within SA and internationally.

Mbeki insisted on playing the race card i.e. insisting that the global scientific consensus about HIV/AIDS was a racist attack on Black Africans on a par with apartheid. His obstinate refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients and pregnant women was calculated, by 2008, to have led to the premature deaths of 365,000 South Africans.

The greatest political challenge facing every nation is not to end up being led by idiots.

Mbeki undertook a more aggressive strategy of getting white businesses to include Black partners but, far from lifting the entire Black population out of poverty, this tended to enrich just the small number of educated, well-connected Blacks. The strategy developed into crony capitalism. Perceiving that they were being discriminated against, some 750,000 skilled whites just left the country, replaced by less qualified or experienced Blacks (p.679). Services decayed. Poverty grew alongside rising violent crime.

South Africa now has exceptionally high rates of murder, gender-based violence, robbery and violent conflict. It has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mbeki turned into a typical African leader. He created a climate of fear in the ANC. He emasculated parliament. He appointed officials for their loyalty to him, not their abilities. He shamefully supported Robert Mugabe even as Mugabe turned into a dictator and reduced his country to beggary.

And, falling into line with traditional African leaders, Mbeki and his cronies became involved in corruption, in particular creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars from state defence procurements. The ANC became split between the Mbeki faction and one led by Jacob Zuma, who himself was charged with money laundering, fraud and rape.

In 2007 Zuma stood against Mbeki and won the post of ANC leader, then stood for the presidency in 2009. The party split, but corruption became more embedded. The gap between rich and poor grew. Crime became the only way to survive for millions. After this book was completed Jacob Zuma went on to be elected president and serve from 2009 to 2018.

Incidentally, Meredith has written a series of books about South Africa, including a biography of Mandela, which explains the authoritativeness of his SA chapters:

  • In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa In The Post War Period (1988)
  • South Africa’s New Era: The 1994 Election (1994)
  • Nelson Mandela: A Biography (1999)
  • Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth (2001)

35. Out of Africa

Decline

In 2001 the Organisation of African Unity was replaced by a new African Union. Same old dictators, though. Same corruption, same tribalism, same civil wars. Same population explosion which means half the population live below the poverty line, same huge unemployment, with millions permanently on the brink of starvation. 250 million Africans are undernourished; school enrolment is falling; life expectancy is falling. [This appears to be wrong, now; life expectancy in Africa is, apparently, 63.]

MDGs

By some estimates the West has spend £1.2 trillion in aid to Africa. There has often been little to show. In the 2000s there was a flurry of activity with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005 Bob Geldof created a huge media event around the Live 8 campaign and gigs. But the West has donor fatigue. Pledges made under MDGs and Live 8 weren’t carried through. African countries have promised to reform and then utterly failed to do so too many times.

China

Into the breach has stepped China, which has been signing trade deals across Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). By 2010 China-Africa trade had leapt to $115 billion. A million Chinese had moved to Africa.

The Arab Spring

And then, just as Meredith was completing this book, along came the Arab Spring leading to the overthrow of ageing dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on into the Middle East i.e. Yemen, Bahrein, Syria. And yet within a few years, Egypt was back in the hands of the military, Libya had collapsed as a state, Syria fell into a ruinous civil war; only Tunisia survived and flourished as a democracy.

Kenya

Meredith ends with the calamitous recent history of Kenya, which threw out Daniel arap Moi and his cronies (known as the Karbanet syndicate) after 23 years of looting the country. However, his successor, Mwai Kibaki, merely instituted a new kleptocracy for his tribe and supporters (who came to be known as the Mount Kenya mafia). Corruption reached scandalous new heights with some $4 billion a year, or one third of the national budget, being raked off by the corrupt elite.

When Kibaki refused to accept the results of the 2007 election i.e that he had lost to opposition leader Raila Odinga, he plunged Kenya into tribal bloodshed which left thousands dead, the economy damaged and Kenya’s reputation for stability in tatters. It had become just one more African country, ruined by its corrupt rulers’ inability to cede power.

Africa’s wounds are self-inflicted. Africans have proved ruinously incapable of running their own countries. Meredith ends his book by describing the majority of Africa’s rulers as ‘vampires’ who have converted all the instruments of the state into money-making scams, who use rabble-rousing ethnic rhetoric or state terror to remain in power, while their populations slip ever backwards into poverty, sickness and starvation.

Thoughts

Some pretty obvious themes emerge from this 700-page odyssey but in the last 5 or 6 chapters something bigger than the themes struck me, which is that this is a very negative view of Africa. Often it is very harrowing and dark indeed, as when the subject matter is bleak, as in Algeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola.

But it took me a while to grasp how much this is a journalist’s not a historian’s or academic’s point of view of the subject. And, like all journalists, Meredith accentuates the negative. Man buys a puppy for his kids, who love it, is not news. New puppy attacks children, that is news.

I know it’s an obvious and well-known journalistic principle, but in the last 100 pages it really struck home that Meredith focuses relentlessly on the bad news, on countries with long-running wars and political crises, the ones we read about in the newspapers: Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, settings for horrible wars, massacres, genocides even. On the basis of this book it would be tempting to write all of Africa off as an irredeemable disaster zone. But there are 50 or so countries in Africa, and not all of them are having civil wars all the time. Some of them might even be doing rather well. Many people might be living ordinary lives, doing jobs, getting married, having parties. Despite the impression Meredith gives, life expectancy across Africa is actually rising.

Anyway, that was my one Big Thought: that if you only read this book you would be left with the impression that Africa is a vast abattoir of eternal massacre and mutilation, vampire leaders and epic corruption. I don’t think Meredith intends to be biased and I’m sure everything he writes is absolutely true. But by the end of his book I began to think that it’s not necessarily the complete truth, about the entire continent, and all its countries, and all the people who live in them.

Credit

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith was published in England by the Free Press in 2005. A revised edition was published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.

Related links

Leave a comment
by Simon on November 10, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in Africa, History, War
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/the-state-of-africa-martin-meredith-2/

« Older Posts