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The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)

‘I should have known’, that is the phrase of my life, its summing up, its consummate acknowledgement.
(The narrator of The Last King of Scotland, Nicholas Garrigan, looking back over the sorry series of events depicted in the book, page 119)

Giles Foden

Giles Foden was born in 1967. When he was 5 his parents moved from Warwickshire to Malawi and he spent a lot of his early years in Africa, although he was sent back to Britain to be educated at public school (the very posh Malvern College) then Cambridge.

Foden has written six novels but is still best known for this one, his first novel, which won a clutch of prizes (the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize). It gained a significantly greater prominence when it was made into a powerful movie, in 2006, starring Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy, himself just about to be propelled to superstar status in the X-Men movies.

The Last King: premise

The premise of the novel is simple: it’s a first-person narrative told by young Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, who goes to Uganda in 1971 on secondment from the British government’s Overseas Development Agency, to see something of the world and, through a chance encounter, is selected by the country’s new military dictator, Idi Amin, to become his personal physician.

Over the next 200 pages Garrigan witnesses Amin’s descent into psychopathic dictatorship, the ethnic killings, the arrests and tortures, mysterious disappearances, the expulsion of Uganda’s Asian community, the humiliation of the white community, the rising body count – he witnesses much of this in person, up close and personal, yet fails to intervene, at various key moments, to save friends and colleagues from horrendous fates, becoming more and more morally compromised and implicated in the process.

The reader accompanies Garrigan as he is dragged deeper into an inferno of violence, cruelty, torture, murder and terror until the narrative feels like it’s inhabiting a different kind of reality, one of endless melodrama and horror, war, destruction, evisceration, terrorism, random killings. The narrative turns into a gruelling nightmare.

It’s a solid book at 345 pages but I found it easy and pleasurable to read (at least to begin with) because of the narrative voice Foden creates. Garrigan’s narrative has a relaxed candid manner conveying an appealingly easygoing but observant, slangy but perceptive worldview. Basically, it’s enjoyable being in his company for a couple of days. (Compare and contrast with H.E. Bates’s classic ‘Fair Stood The Wind for France’ which I just finished reading and found a metallic, alienating, cold and heartless ordeal. By contrast, Garrigan is fun, chill and interesting.) Here’s what I mean by casual tone and easy-to-read style:

On the way back, after we’d poured Ivor into his bungalow, Sara invited me in for a whisky. Her place was even more sparsely furnished than mine: not much more than a desk, a chair and a sofa. And a bed, I supposed, though I didn’t get to see that. (p.100)

Apart from ‘sparsely’ it’s pretty much how someone would speak. Sometimes Garrigan’s tone can be consciously entertaining:

She turned a knob and a wave of white noise came out. On top of it or behind it, or wherever things happen in radio world, was an eerie electronic neighing, going up and down jaggedly, and a deep squelchy voice choppily declaiming in a foreign language some repetitive sounding set of orders or other permutation of words and numbers. Altogether, it was as if the football results were being read by one of the prophets. In a snowstorm. On a runaway horse. (p.101)

One of the ways the book challenges the reader is the way this easygoing attitude and approach, which we are encouraged to identify with from the beginning, turns out to be hopelessly inadequate for coping with the increasingly fraught situations Garrigan finds himself in.

Part 1

The narrative starts with a frame. Garrigan explains that he is back in Scotland, safe and sound, looking back over his mad time in Uganda as physician to Idi Amin and is determined to write a history of this period of ‘blood, misery and foolishness’ despite the fact that he seems to be the subject of scandal and criticism, for he tells us the newspapers ‘continue to execrate me’ (p.19). What for? We don’t know, it’s a teaser for what will emerge in the main narrative.

Very briefly Garrigan describes his boyhood and upbringing in the Scottish suburb of Fossiemuir, West Fife, his years as a student doctor. His father, George (p.41) was a stern presbyterian minister: ‘religion covered our family like a fine soot’ (p.19). But after just a few pages we’re on to him graduating as a doctor, to escape his parochial background and see the world, taking the civil service exam.

The narrative slows down to give more detail about his flight to Kampala, meeting the Embassy people (Nigel Stone and the eccentric Major Weir, intelligence officer, who builds model helicopters). He stays at the rundown Speke Hotel while he gets used to the heat, the street life, the food. Meets fellow guest Freddy Swanepoel.

He is posted to assist a Dr Alan Merritt at his hospital in the West Ugandan town of Mbarara. He takes an overcrowded minibus or matatu there, helped and advised by friendly local Boniface ‘Bonny’ Malumba (p.49). Soldiers stop the bus at a makeshift roadblock to demand bribes. When a Kenyan diplomat refuses to pay, the soldiers smash him in the face with a gun. After they’ve gotten off Nicholas goes to help him and is surprised when the Kenyan is very angry, saying ‘where were you when I needed you to stand up for me?’ (p.153) Why does this passage exist? Is it intended to be an early indicator of Nicholas’s cowardice or, to be more fair and accurate, his not knowing what to do in confrontation situations?

So he arrives at Mbarara, some kids guide him out to the medical compound, and we are introduced to Dr Merrit, his tutting wife Joyce (who calls her husband ‘Spiny’) and the servant Nestor. More importantly to the sprawling ‘hospital’ with its primitive facilities. Garrigan gives us an overview of the kinds of patients and diseases they’re called on to treat, which is very interesting (machete wounds, elephantiasis, vaginal fistulas in women caused by giving birth at home in primitive conditions, malaria etc pages 74 to 77).

Earlier Garrigan told us he arrived in Uganda on Sunday 24 January 1971 (p.21). The precise date is important because Amin carried out his military coup, overthrowing the government of President Milton Obote, the very next day, on 25 January 1971.

Why did Amin overthrow Obote? Because he learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds and, more generally, threatened the army’s lucrative corruption. In the words of Wikipedia:

The 1971 coup is often cited as an example of ‘class action by the military’, wherein the Uganda Army acted against ‘an increasingly socialist regime whose egalitarian domestic politics posed more and more of a threat to the military’s economic privileges.’

Of course none of this is clear to any of the characters because it’s only just happened, although Dr Merritt gives Harrigan the view of a jaundiced old hand:

‘It’s very simple. This place – chaos, you just have to expect the worst. You think it’s a matter of it having to get worse for it to get better, but actually it just gets worse and worse. Take this new business with Amin. I hear they’re all happy as sandboys right now up in Kampala, but it’ll end in tears, I promise you.’ (p.60)

This little remark obviously plants a seed of expectation of the horrors that will come later. Prolepsis or the anticipation of something that comes later in a story.

Garrigan is introduced to Sara Zach, on secondment from a hospital in Israel, to two Cuban surgeons, and to a ravaged Englishman, Ivor Seabrook, with the ‘destroyed features of the long-term tropical alcoholic’ (p.71) and closet homosexual who seduces the various serving boys. He is taken on field trips by Merritt’s assistant, William Waziri, vaccination and anti-mosquito spraying (pages 79 to 80) on one occasion being stopped at another army roadblock by drunk soldiers demanding a bribe (p.81). Africa.

Altogether this first hundred pages or so give a vivid, fascinating and totally believable picture of an outback medical practice in rural Uganda, packed with fascinating details? How on earth did Foden find out all this stuff?

The new president, Idi Amin, comes to Mbarara to make a speech to an excited crowd. Garrigan records his incoherent thoughts about God, the crowd lap it up, Sara makes notes and hustles them off, scared of being attacked because they’re white.

Cut to a year later, so must be 1972, and he mentions June as the month, when he’s getting used to conditions and has, rather inevitably, started an affair with the tough, no-nonsense, attractive Israeli doctor, Sara, descriptions of picnics in the foothills of the Ruwenzoris mountain range, making love, spotting exotic flowers and birds.

There’s an attack on the barracks in town. The doctors learn that troops were sent from the north and massacred all the Langi and Acholi soldiers, supposedly because they’re from a different tribe than Amin (p.106). Some Americans came snooping round, supposedly journalists, and are themselves killed and buried.

A few months later there’s a mortar attack on the barracks which misses and kills a lot of civilians. Merritt and Sara tend to them. Garrigan’s friend Bonny, and his mother and father, are among the dead.

Garrigan and Sara take in Bonny’s kid brother, Gugu, but he is mute and never speaks again. Eventually his extended family come to collect him. His relationship with Sara breaks down: Garrigan is prone to psychoanalysing everything and comes to realise he and Sara liked having Gugu with them because it created a family feel, gave them both security. With Gugu gone Sara moved back to her own bungalow. The radio reports weirder and weirder speeches by Amin.

Garrigan describes Operation Mafuta Mingi, the name Amin gives to his campaign to intimidate and eventually expel the entire Asian population of Uganda, around 50,000 people. Garrigan watches them being rounded up, their belongings impounded, bullied by soldiers, then driven to the airport deprived of all their belongings.

He records the effects of the expulsion: shops closed because many of them operated on lines of credit from India which terminated overnight. Basic items like salt, matches, sugar or soap became scarce. The army slaughtered a dairy herd for beef and so milk disappeared. This happened in August 1972. Sara had been increasingly distant and one day in October she simply leaves, without telling anyone (p.119). It’s because Amin had also been making speeches attacking the Israelis in Uganda, mostly working on development projects, about 600 of them and so, overnight, they left.

A few weeks later Garrigan has his first personal contact with Amin, being fetched by soldiers because the great leader had driven his Maserati into a cow and sprained his wrist. Garrigan is bowled over by his primeval physical presence. Amin has a soldier pour them brandy which, on the hot day, makes Garrigan light-headed.

And so it is that a letter arrives from health minister Wasswa requesting that Garrigan becomes Amin’s private physician. By this time he’s fed up of the Mbarara hospital which reminds him of the sad affair with Sara so he’s happy to go.

Ominousness

As it progresses the text drops references to Garrigan’s current position, contrasting the time of writing (now) with the events he’s writing about (then) and emphasising how something has made him re-evaluate everything. The technique adds an air of ominousness, the sense that something dreadful happened in the interim:

I realise now that… (p.116)
Or so I thought back then… (p.118)
Bewildered in Uganda, and not for the last time… (p.128)
Looking back, it seems crazy… (p.144)

Part 2 (p.131)

Part 2 opens with a recap of Amin’s birth, boyhood, young manhood, rise in the colonial army, rise in the post-independence army of President Obote, his involvement in smuggling from Congo, his overthrow of Obote in January 1971.

The strange thing about this section is that it seems to be told in a completely different narrative voice from part one. It is mannered and strange in a style so different from the laid-back casualness of part one that I thought it must signal the arrival of a completely new narrator.

I have been able to find out little of the history by which Amin is come to us. After all, who knows where any of us is come from, who could go to the cause?

This unusual phrasing, and the present tense, persist throughout this chapter (chapter 16), throwing me completely off-kilter, wondering if it was a different person talking, or a different type of text, like maybe the transcript of a recording. But no, chapter 17 returns to the normal voice of Garrigan, now installed in Kampala as Idi Amin’s personal physician and with very little to do. Odd.

Anyway, back in the narrative, every encounter with Amin is hair-raising. He is a big man, he dominates his courtiers who laugh with him, applaud his every word, out of obvious terror. He is painted as deeply stupid and illiterate but loving the sound of his own voice, capable of speaking at great length.

For it is true, also, out of my nature, I love to rule! (p.148)

Garrigan is mesmerised and hypnotised by Amin, like the rest of his retinue. The narrative continues to emphasise Garrigan’s gaucheness and insecurity – worry about what he looks like, what he says, how others perceive him, rising to stammering terror when faced with Amin. He is, after all, only a few years out of university. The book is a study in callowness.

After the weird opening chapter part 2 settles down into a series of brilliantly imagined scenes: Amin phones Garrigan to tell him his son is ill, come over immediately; Garrigan hurries over to discover the boy has put a piece of Lego up his nose, pulls it out and anti-bacs the nose (p.153). The wife is delighted and Amin sends him a Toyota van as reward (admittedly, still painted with the logo of the Asian fashion shop it was confiscated from).

As doctor to the Prez, Garrigan is now living in a bungalow in the State House compound, near Entebbe, a suburb of Kampala. He attends to Amin at the so-called ‘Command Post’, in fact a large suburban villa, or Nakasero Lodge where he spent most of his time (p.155), then at Cape Town, a property on Lake Victoria he awarded himself (p.165).

Garrigan works at the city’s main hospital, Mulago, filling us in on the kinds of patients you get in a big city compared to the countryside (car accidents), working alongside a fellow Scot, senior surgeon Colin Paterson, makes friends with a local surgeon, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa (p.157). The hospital is big enough to have foreign teams, from China, Algeria, Vietnam, Russia, and to be carrying out serious medical research. How did Foden get to know so much about tropical medicine? And not just knowledge but a feel for all the spin-offs and insights of doctoring:

Hospitals are like people, they grow, they develop, they learn. And they decay too, and die. (p.163)

He and Mbalu-Mukasa cruise the bars of Kampala and bump into the meaty, dodgy South African Freddy Swanepoel, Garrigan permanently afraid that Swanepoel’s outspokenness about the regime will get him into trouble.

Right from the start Amin had a bonkers fondness for Scotland, having spent some of his military training in Britain there, but it becomes ever more surreal, him outfitting regiments in kilts and making them learn the bagpipes; making booming speeches about how the Scots were like the Ugandans in having suffered from English imperialism. Now Amin invites Paterson and Garrigan for tea and tells them he is going to punish the English community in Uganda for its imperialism. As a local had told him back in Mbarara, ‘First wahindi, then muzungu’ (p.172). He forces some Brits to carry him in a litter through the streets, others to kneel and take an oath of fealty.

Stone, from the Embassy, invites Garrigan for a chat and works the conversation round to asking Garrigan to take advantage of his position to administer Amin with calmatives, tranquilisers, to try and bring him to his senses.

Merritt, his boss at the Mbarara hospital is kicked out, visits Garrigan on the way, says he if he’d stayed at the hospital it might have saved it. He is not the last to blame Garrigan for cowardice or failing to do the right thing.

In another demonstration of his gaucheness Garrigan takes Marina Perkins, wife of the British Ambassador, Robert Perkins, who he’s been chatting up at the swimming pool, on a fishing trip. All goes well till he makes a move to kiss her at which she is shocked and horrified, sits bolt upright and insists he take her home (p.177). He has completely misjudged the situation.

The famous scene (well, a centrepiece of the movie) in which Garrigan is summoned at night to Amin in his bedroom (carefully described) because he is in great stomach pain which, after extensive examination, Garrigan determines to be wind, and helps Amin into a position where he can release a great fart, thus relieving the pain, and overjoying the dictator.

Amin takes Garrigan into his confidence and talks about the burdens of office. He makes a feeble attempt to ask Amin to stop the army killing people which Amin swats aside.

Brief review: he tells us he was in Uganda for eight years in all, two in Mbarara, six in Kampala (p.191). A general overview in which he describes their many meetings, tea and conversation, naively thinking he’s getting to know him. The narrative begins to feel like summaries of a series of episodes:

There’s an attempt to assassinate Amin at an army review, which fails but kills the driver of his jeep. (In fact Amin survived eight attempted coups.)

In 1972 Amin gets married, to wife number four, and the text gives a detailed description of the ceremony and pen portraits of the previous three (chapter 24).

Amin phones Garrigan at all times for confidential chats and to let off steam. In public press conferences he announces he is training to be an astronaut. Also that he is assembling a pan-African army to attack South Africa. An excuse to quote (presumably actual) press meetings and outrageous quotes.

Amin sends inappropriate letters to world leaders, for example Mrs Thatcher on her election as leader of the Conservative Party (February 1975). He publicly states that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews. he did a deal with Colonel Gaddafi and Libyan businesses and soldiers become seen on the streets of Kampala. A lot later, after he’s escaped, in the novel’s aftertime, his sister Moira asks him why he stayed on so long, and let himself be portrayed as being close to such a lunatic. Garrigan can barely understand it himself. He was hypnotised. He’d fallen under Amin’s spell. He knew he was a monster but sometimes thought he loved him. Psychology of a dictator’s minions.

The closer I got to him, the fewer my illusions about him – and still I stayed, more fascinated than frightened. (p.213) (cf his ‘reluctance to get the hell out of there,’ p.222)

One stormy night his friend from the Kampala hospital, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, turns up. Tells him he’s been having an affair with Amin’s second wife, Kay, and has got her pregnant. Since Amin hasn’t been having sex with her, he’ll know she’s been unfaithful and murder her and any lover he can track down. The man is understandably terrified and asks Garrigan if he can perform an illegal abortion on Kay. Garrigan lets himself be driven to Mbalu-Mukasa’s apartment, encounters the terrified moaning woman, but realises he can’t do it. Not only is he also terrified of being discovered, but he’s never actually performed an abortion and will likely make a mess of it. With all kinds of excuses, he refuses, backs out, and makes his way home.

It’s the last time he sees either. Rumour had it that Mbalu-Mukasa botched the abortion, Kay died of blood loss, and Mbalu-Mukasa committed suicide (August 1974). Worse, Garrigan was invited by the mortuary assistant who shows him Kay’s body and how all four limbs and the head had been detached from it, then clumsily sown back on.

In a bar Garrigan is appalled to see fat oafish Freddy Swanepoel putting his paw on the knee of the trim woman who rejected him, Marina. Chagrin. Worse, at their next meeting Amin tells him Nicholas knows all about his attempts to seduce Marina, about her affair with Swanepoel, and his poor opinion of the South African pilot, who he thinks is a spy.

Stone calls Garrigan back to the Embassy. He makes clear that the Ambassador is just a front man, it’s he, Stone, who pulls the strings. He shows Garrigan a series of photos of Amin taking part in executions and torture. Hundreds of people are dying every day. Stone accuses Garrigan of being complicit in this mass murder. Then he asks Garrigan to murder Amin. Use whatever is necessary, poison, adrenalin or inject air into his heart, whatever it takes. Garrigan refuses, a) because he’s a doctor but b) because, on some level, he likes the man:

There was, I conceded it to myself again, something in me that actually liked the man, monster though he was. (p.231)

To his amazement, Stone tells him the authorities have placed £50,000 in his bank account, with more to come when he achieves the murder. Garrigan turns him down. Next week Amin expels Stone, Perkins, the entire British Embassy.

Then Garrigan’s bungalow is burgled and his journal disappears, the one he’s been keeping notes in on all the events and all his opinions. He gets a midnight call from Amin to go see him immediately. Amin pulls a gun and terrifies a sweating Garrigan who grovels on the floor. Amin tells him that Weir, from the Embassy, told him about Stone’s request that Garrigan murder Amin! Then Amin summarises the contents of Garrigan’s journal and is disappointed at his lack of loyalty.

Then, in a scene which crosses the line from mundane reality into horror, Amin opens a secret door (in his bookshelves) and takes Garrigan deep into the cells and torture chambers which are just a short walk away, along dim concrete passages.

Here he is shown his colleague from the Mbarara days, William Waziri who used to take him on medical tours of local villages. He is pinned down, tied and gagged. Amin says he is associated with enemy guerrillas. Garrigan is forced to watch as soldiers press him to the floor, one stepping on his head, as they use a kitchen knife to saw open his throat, and Waziri’s eyes meet Garrigan’s as they do it.

Garrigan passes out and regains consciousness to discover he, also, is in a prison cell where he stays for a day, being insulted by the jailer who comes to deliver the disgusting food. Obviously all the worst thoughts in the world go through his mind, maybe he’ll be there forever, or be tortured or murdered. In fact, only a day later the door opens and the health minister, Wasswa, is there with clean clothes. He hustles Garrigan along the corridor, telling him he’s lucky to be alive. From the cells they pass along the corridor where prisoners shout at him to help them. Garrigan hesitates but Wasswa tells him there is nothing he can do. Along some more corridors and then through a concealed entrance and, bizarrely, back into Amin’s bedroom where the dictator is resplendent in an electric-blue safari suit and greets him like an old friend.

Amin tells Garrigan he has to renounce his British citizenship and become a Ugandan citizen. Then orders him to come back soon. Amin disapproves of Garrigan’s journal because it is informal and unofficial but approves the fact that he’s a writer. And so he orders Garrigan to come back so that Amin can dictate to him his Life and Achievements.

Next day Garrigan drives straight to the airport to discover Fate is against him. It is July 1976 and terrorists have hijacked a civil airliner and rerouted it to Libya, then Uganda.

Entebbe raid

Which is why Garrigan is an eye witness to the hostage crisis, and to the arrival of Amin at the airport where he congratulates himself on persuading the terrorists to release the non-Jewish hostages. The captain of the plane refuses to leave without the 40-something Jewish hostages who are being held in a separate room. There is an implied contrast between the professionalism and responsibility of this plane captain, and Garrigan’s shuffling out of all his responsibilities.

That night he is amazed to get a phone call from his Israeli lover Sara, the one who left without saying goodbye. She now reveals she’s a Colonel of the Israeli Defence Force and insists that he describes the layout of the airport at Entebbe, where the hostages are, how many terrorists are guarding them etc. She is obviously laying the groundwork for the famous Israeli raid which frees the hostages.

(The present: slowly we have been drip-fed details about where Garrigan is writing all this. We learn it is in the bothy (‘a basic shelter, usually left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge’) left to him by a great-uncle [Uncle Eamonn, p.336], on a remote Scottish island. It’s from the peace and quiet here, that he is looking back, and trying to patch together, these last horrific months. Pages 249, 256, 263, 266)

As the Ugandan economy collapses, conditions at the Mulago hospital collapse with it. Garrigan continues to work, he considers he has no alternative. One day, during one of their tape recording sessions, Amin gives him a package contained a stuffed mounted lion’s head to deliver to a small plane at Entebbe airport, to the chairman of Rafiki Aviation who will be waiting for it. Garrigan nervously does so, handing it over to this man who gets into a small plane piloted by Freddy Swanepoel, and off it flies. Garrigan later finds out that the plane exploded and crashed for unknown reasons. He’s pretty sure there was a bomb in the package he gave.

It’s only 6 months later that he plucks up the guts to ask Amin about the package. By now their recording sessions have become well established. Garrigan comes close to witnessing examples of Amin’s cannibalism (p.260). Once or twice he has opportunities to kill Amin, one in particular when he is in reach of his holster and pistol. Something always holds him back.

Garrigan has of course been thinking about fleeing the country for years but doesn’t see how he can, now that the airport is tightly watched. His plans are paralleled by Amin’s increasing rhetoric about war with neighbouring Tanzania.

The escape attempt

Garrigan finally packs his necessaries in the van and heads off for the southern border, hoping to cross south into Rwanda via some remote mountain road. Unfortunately he runs into an army checkpoint. When he begins reversing, an army Land Rover comes charging towards him. Mad with panic he drives back the way he came and then wildly off into a road through the jungle which comes to a dead end at a deserted cabin. He leaps out of his van but has no idea what to do till he sees the cabin is slightly raised and wriggles under it. From here he watches the Land Rover arrive, the soldiers inspect the empty cabin, loose off some gunfire, then drive off with the Land Rover and his van, leaving him stranded.

He’s just wondering what to do when a huge snake rears up and bites him in the calf. He stumbles into the jungle and passes out. He comes round in a native village where the villagers have been feeding him and nursing his wound. Lying sick and delirious in a native hut he reflects on the long series of decisions which have brought him, an uptight, callow Scotsman, a ‘casket of emotional defects and diffident, inward-turning passions’ to this catastrophic situation (p.275). When he’s recovered a man indicates that he should follow him along a jungle track.

Obviously Garrigan hopes this will come out at some highway where he can hitch a lift back to civilisation. Instead it’s a further step in the descent into barbarism. they come to a road alright, where there’s a huge pile of corpses, twenty feet high, many still showing the gunshot wounds that killed them.

Feeling like he’ll vomit, Garrigan goes blundering down the road and soon, to his amazement, realises he’s in the vicinity of Mbarara. He carries on to discover a great crowd of locals. Pushing through he sees soldiers beating a figure tied to a chair. Pushed towards the front of the crowd, Garrigan finds the soldier turning and swinging his rifle butt into Garrigan’s ribs. To his absolute horror he realises it’s Gugu, the orphan boy he and Sara took in all those years ago. Now he has become a sadistic boy soldier in Amin’s deadly army.

But even as the boy stands above him, gun pointing towards him, there’s an explosion, presumably from artillery fire, and he sees the boy blown backwards, his chest opening in a splurge of blood.

The Tanzanian invasion

This summary has gone on long enough already. Long story short, Garrigan is rescued by / comes into the custody of Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa of the Tanzanian Defence Forces. In response to a feeble mini invasion of their land by Amin, Tanzania has repulsed the Ugandans and is no only invading, but on a mission to overthrow Amin.

Garrigan is bundled into an armoured personnel carrier (APC) and accompanies the Tanzanian Army, seeing action, coming under fire, seeing soldiers killed around him, protected and fed by the Colonel once he’s understood that Garrigan is a trained doctor, who he gets to tend to his wounded.

So Garrigan accompanies the Tanzanian army all the way to Kampala and is eye witness to its capture (and to the vignette of the destruction of the Volkswagen fleeing from the Embassy quarter across a golf course, which was carrying Dr Gottfried Lessing, East German ambassador and husband of Doris Lessing.)

He is with Tanzanian soldiers when they enter and ransack Amin’s formal residences. He realises he won’t be safe in the streets and makes it across town to the Mulago Hospital. Here it is chaos with the surgeons giving emergency care to all-comers. The head of surgery, Dr Paterson, barely contains his anger at him: ‘How very nice of you to join us, Nick’ (p.299). He, like everyone else, simply thought Garrigan had run away with Amin. Once again he seems to have done utterly the wrong thing at the wrong time. He scrubs up and helps out.

Later, out in the streets he sees rioting followed by looting, alongside bizarre victory marches. He follows the flow of the crowd towards one of Amin’s residences at Nakasero.

Amin redux

The novel builds up to a really weird climax. Garrigan follows the local mob into Amin’s residence, noting how everything has been smashed and looted, following them up to Amin’s bedroom where all portables have been pinched and his big waterbed exploded. But nobody knows about or has opened the secret doorway in the bookcase. So Garrigan does.

And once again, as in a horror movie, relives the experience of walking down the dank concrete corridor. And then, just as in a horror movie, he sees Amin. Standing in one of the chambers which controlled the electricity supply to the torture instruments. Amin is addressing a surreal monologue to a severed head on a plate. Only as he moves around does Garrigan realise with horror that it is the severed head of the Archbishop of Uganda, the same diminutive churchman we met conducting Amin’s fourth marriage way back earlier in the text. The horror.

And then Amin addresses Garrigan. He’s seen him hiding. They have a bizarre dialogue, Amin as relaxed and confident as ever. Amin is made to implicate all the western countries who helped train his army, and train and equip his dreaded security police, the State Research Bureau (p.312).

Finally, unbelievably, Amin asks Garrigan a favour. Turns out that one of the maze of tunnels from his residences comes out at a landmark on the way to the airport. There he has a plane waiting for him. Could Garrigan go to the landmark and collect him and drive him to the airport? Amin comes and stands over him and Garrigan experiences a dizziness and a complexity of emotions which is like drugs or arousal or love – and agrees.

In the event it takes him so long in the general chaos to get hold of a vehicle that he gets to the landmark and waits and waits but Amin never appears. Eventually he drives on in the vague direction of the compound and his bungalow, passes a lake, stops, notices a number of boats moored at the quay, gets down into one, kickstarts the motor and heads off north, casual as that.

It takes 6 or 7 hours, chuntering away all night till he arrives at a quayside in Kenya and quickly makes himself known to the police.

In fact his travails are far from over as a curt Foreign Office official informs him that a) he no longer has British citizenship so might easily be turned away from Britain b) he is universally thought to have been one of Amin’s closest henchmen, so is very unpopular in the press c) he might be charged for murder for his part in planting an explosive device on that small plane that blew up.

Stone forces him to sign a document swearing to be silent about all activities of the British government in Uganda i.e. the offer of payment to murder Amin, but other things as well. In return for signing these non-disclosure agreements, Stone says he will be reassigned his British citizenship.

Lastly, Garrigan has to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by a handful of chosen journalists in a hotel at Heathrow under the supervision of a PR ‘handler’ named Ed Howarth, who is there to ensure the interviews are a one-off event and that Garrigan says nothing which will compromise the British government – an illuminating process for Garrigan and the reader.

Then he is free to go and catches a train north to Scotland, then travels by hire car, then ferry, over to this little island where…he has been holed up in the bothy writing this long account and trying to exorcise his demons.

At the very very end of the narrative the phone rings in the little cottage and…he hears Amin’s voice, friendly and coaxing as ever, tutting about his treatment in the papers and telling him how much he is enjoying his quiet retirement in Saudi Arabia. Is this real? Can this be happening? Will he never be able to escape from dreams and phantasms of the monster? Either way, Garrigan puts the phone down and that’s the end of the narrative.

Summary

Amazing

This is a mind-bogglingly brilliant achievement, an awesome historical novel which not only recreates life in Uganda and Kampala with superhuman accuracy and vividness, but is also a searing insight into the twisted mentality of a psychopathic dictator and, above all, into the psychology of an educated Westerner who lets himself be manipulated into becoming complicit and acquiescent in horrifying atrocities. A terrifying but profound novel which leaves you reverberating with horror for weeks afterward.

Zelig

The main criticism of the novel would be that at some stage, maybe from the incident of Kay’s botched abortion, Garrigan begins to feel like a Zelig character who keeps popping up at key moments during Amin’s career: the death of Kay, then the Entebbe hostage situation, and then the Tanzanian invasion, Garrigan increasingly happens to be at the right place at the right time, with mounting improbability.

I think credibility snaps when he finds himself on the receiving end of Gugu’s rifle butt. That’s just one coincidence too far. From that point onwards Garrigan becomes less like a character and more like a cipher with which to dramatise a checklist of incidents during the invasion. And that realisation feeds backwards, making you think the same about the Entebbe terrorist situation, and other incidents, too.

Maybe it sort of has to be like this – in order to have a dramatic fiction Foden has to make Garrigan part of all these real historic events – but in doing so the story leaves behind plausible realism and becomes something else: first, in the torture cells beneath Amin’s residence, into a genuinely hair-raising horror story; and then follows the delirious sequence of his Land Rover escape, his bite by a snake, his recovery in a native village, his being taken to a huge pile of corpses, and then stumbling across Gugu beating a prisoner to death and, at that very moment, an artillery attack blowing Gugu to pieces etc. By this time the whole thing has become more of a hallucination than a narrative, piling agony on agony, one vivid hyper-violent scene after another, until the reader’s imagination is shredded.

Comparison with William Boyd

William Boyd is another Englishman brought up in Africa by ex-pat parents, sent to a pukka public school then Oxbridge, who also became a novelist tackling African themes. His first novel, ‘A Good Man in Africa’, is about another Englishman completely out of his depth in a dire African country, who drinks too much, makes a fool of himself with women, and completely fails to understand what’s going on around him, leading up to a violent climax in riots and a coup.

So these are two books about useless Brits caught up in violent events in Africa, the difference obviously being that in Boyd’s books it’s played for laughs (‘A Good Man’ is a very funny farce) while in Foden’s the same basic subject is played for tragedy and horror.

Given the grim times we live in, I’d recommend people read the Boyd for its many hilarious scenes and smiling memories although, at the very end, it too has a bitter denouement.

Wikipedia on Idi Amin

The opening summary of Idi Amin’s Wikipedia article:

Idi Amin Dada Oumee (c. 1925 to 16 August 2003) was a Ugandan military officer and politician who served as the third president of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. He ruled as a military dictator and is considered one of the most brutal despots in modern world history…Amin’s rule was characterised by rampant human rights abuses, including political repression, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, as well as nepotism, corruption, and gross economic mismanagement. International observers and human rights groups estimate that between 100,000 and 500,000 people were killed under his regime.

Foden takes a middle estimate, that Amin’s regime killed 300,000 Ugandans (p.133).

Africa words

muzunga – white people

musawo – a doctor

Chapter 9, pages 84 to 90, gives an extended explanation of various Swahili terms

the wananchi – ordinary citizens

Credit

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden was published by Faber Books in 1998. References are to the 1999 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

The Last King of Scotland (1998)
Ladysmith (1999)
Zanzibar (2002)
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
Freight Dogs (2021)

Related reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on December 18, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged Acholi tribe, Africa, Archbishop of Uganda, atrocities, Boniface 'Bonny' Malumba, bothy, Cambridge, cannibalism, Cape Town, Colin Paterson, Colonel Armstrong Kuchasa, Colonel Gaddafi, corruption, Doris Lessing, Dr Alan Merrit, Dr Gottfried Lessing, Dr Merrit, Dr Paterson, economic mismanagement, Ed Howarth, elephantiasis, Entebbe, Entebbe raid, ethnic persecution, extrajudicial killings, fiction, Forest Whitaker, Fossiemuir, Freddy Swanepoel, George Garrigan, Giles Foden, Gugu, Hitler, horror, human rights abuses, Idi Amin, Idi Amin Dada Oumee, Israeli Defence Force, Israelis, Ivor Seabrook, James McAvoy, Joyce Merrit, Kampala, Kay Amin, Kenya, Lake Victoria, Langi tribe, machete wounds, Major Weir, malaria, Malawi, Malvern College, Marina Perkins, Mbarara, military dictator, Milton Obote, Mrs Thatcher, Mulago hospital, musawo, muzunga, muzungu, Nakasero Lodge, nepotism, Nestor, Nicholas Garrigan, Nigel Stone, novel, Operation Mafuta Mingi, Overseas Development Agency, Peter Mbalu-Mukasa, political repression, psychopathic, public school, Robert Perkins, Ruwenzori mountains, Sara Zach, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Speke Hotel, State Research Bureau, Swahili, Tanzania, Tanzanian Defence Forces, the Command Post, The Last King of Scotland, torture, Uganda, Ugandan Asians, Uncle Eamonn, vaginal fistula, wahindi, wananchi, Wasswa, West Fife, William Boyd, William Waziri, Zelig

Posted by Simon on December 18, 2023

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Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country; by the problems of transport that its geography becomes a reality and its inhabitants real people…[by describing them one offers one’s reader] a share in the experience of travel, for these checks and hesitations constitute the genuine flavour.
(Ninety-Two Days, page 170)

Waugh had a reason for going to Ethiopia, the subject of his previous travel book, Remote People – to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie. The journey described in this book, by contrast, had a much more ramshackle provenance. He chose to go to British Guiana, the colony tucked up on the north coast of South America, north of Brazil, more or less because few other people did. Unlike India or Kenya or Egypt he could find no books on the place and nobody else who’d been there.

By sea to South America

So off he went on a cheap steamer down the English Channel, across the rambunctuous Atlantic, to the fragrant West Indies and so on to dock at Georgetown, capital of British Guiana. Here he is looked after by the Governor and introduced to Mr Bain, the Commissioner for the district, who supervises the purchase of a large number of supplies for his trip and accompanies him by train along the coast to New Amsterdam at the mouth of the River Berbice.

But what exactly is the purpose of his trip? Waugh doesn’t know, even after he’s got back to Blighty, which partly explains why the book opens not with him aboard ship or setting off into the jungle, but domiciled in a nice English house in the country, preparing his desk with nice clean foolscap paper and a pen and ink and then himself wondering… what was that all about?

Quick summary

Well, the basic outline is easily conveyed. From New Amsterdam, Waugh headed by boat up the Berbice River, pausing at various settlements, then leaving the river to trek on foot or horseback through the jungle, crossing the border into Brazil and northern Amazonia, before hiking north along the Ireng River, stopping at isolated ranches and remote settlements, then taking to boat again on the River Essequibo, skirting various waterfalls, including the famous Kaieteur Falls, then a short train east across country to the Demarara River, and so by boat back to Georgetown where the river debouches into the Atlantic.

To Kurupukari

First stop was Kurupukari, 100 miles south. Half the journey is by paddle steamer along the Berbice River (p.33). Then they land and go by horse along a cattle track, These are tracks the vaqueiros use to drive cattle from the savannahs of the interior down to market at the coast. The journey takes six days travelling at 15 miles a day, through rain forest he describes with awe, huge columned trees rearing a hundred feet overhead (p.40).

After talking about it every day of their 6-day hike, Waugh is surprised to find it consists of… a flagpole lying in the grass (it isn’t finished yet and they don’t have a flag) and one bungalow built in a clearing. Not even a jetty, not even native mud huts (p.44). This extreme sparseness of population characterises the entire trip.

Kurupukari is on the Essequibo river and they are awaiting a boat laden with supplies to meet them. Waugh describes the staple foods of the interior which are farine, a tasteless and rather disgusting vegetable product made from the cassava root, and tasso, made from salted wind-dried strips of dead cow.

On this first part of the trip he is accompanied by the talkative Mr Bain and a plan of sorts had evolved, that Waugh proceed in stages along the cattle track, visiting various small settlements along the way, until reaching the larger settlement of Bon Success, from which he could head west to Boa Vista, ‘next to Manaos the most important town in the Amazonas’. Mr Bain paints a picture of a city of inexpressible grandeur, complete with boulevards and opera houses. Sounds great. Waugh adopts the plan. The reader knows with certainty that he is going to be bitterly disappointed.

To Kurupukari and beyond

Bain remains at the primitive government station at Kurupukari. Once the boat with its supplies arrive, they’re unloaded then distributed among several horses, then early the next morning Waugh and his group of 4 servants/natives (Yetto, Price, Sinclair, Jagger) cross the river and set off on horseback. The dominant figure of this section is the egregious Yetto, a black man of surpassing ugliness, but a solid support who he becomes deeply attached to.

There follow 6 days riding along a traditional cattle track, occasionally meeting one or two vaqueiros driving a handful of cattle, sometimes coming across the corpses of cattle, which don’t endure the journey to the coast very well, dying of insect-borne diseases or sometimes attack by large animals. He learns more about his travelling companions.

Jagger is an enigma, a civilised man from a notable family on the coast, he was educated in Scotland. According to Yetto he was ruined in lawsuits with his family and has degenerated into one of the ‘race of tramps who wander the cattle country, there and in Brazil, living indefinitely off the open hospitality of the cattle ranches’ (p.53). He attaches himself to Waugh’s party for a while, then is too ill to keep up the pace and stays behind at one of their temporary camps, never to be heard of again.

He meets half a dozen vaqueiros driving 50 cattle. Next day they meet three Englishmen travelling in the other direction, towards the coast.

On the third day they cross a dry creek and come into a little savannah (i.e. open area of sand and scrubby thorn bushes) named Suranna. There is a native settlement. Waugh explains something about size and scale. A dozen or so mud and thatched huts constitutes a ‘large’ settlement. More than 20 mud huts is exceptional. The largest he ever saw apparently contained 22, though he arrived too late at night to see this vast metropolis. Next day they arrive at Annai which consists of precisely one house (p.58).

In other words the entire region, both the settlements in the savannahs, the so-called ranches, the white ‘settlements’ – all are characterised by emptiness and very sparse population.

After a long hot ride across the parched savannah, he arrives at Christie’s ranch (p.62). Christie is an old black guy who has religious visions and agreeably lunatic ideas. He’s been preaching to the local Indians for thirty years and hasn’t made a single conversion.

Next stop is a ranch owned by Georgetown Chinese named Mr Wong and run by Daguar (p.67). The ranch consists of three wattle and mud huts in a wired enclosure. Primitive, isn’t it? The ranch is on the River Ireng and Waugh is surprised to find this forms an international border. Across the muddy river is Brazil. He describe the pestilential effects of the cabouri fly, whose bite you don’t feel till it’s gorged itself and dropped off, and ticks which burrow into the skin, and bêtes rouges, little red creatures which burrow under your skin and cause unbearable itching.

(Later he tells us the rivers contain stingrays, electric eels and carnivorous fish, p.77. Why were these areas never settled or developed? There’s your answer.)

Next morning’s ride brings him to a village marked on the maps as Pirara but which in fact simply doesn’t exist. The name has been transferred to a ranch five miles away, owned by an American named Hart. This actually amounts to more than one building, with facilities such as a shower room, with very decent meals cooked by the wife, a Creole nanny for the children and – mirabile dictu – a truck, which had been manhandled this far up the trail, didn’t have much petrol and no regular roads to travel.

Waugh explains that South American countries are notorious for going to war over remote bits of territory. Britain nearly went to war with Brazil and Venezuela about different bits of remote savannah. He learns maps are largely invented, and based on rumoured natural features (such as rivers) which often don’t exist. He gives a mocking account of a boundary commission which is meant to be working with Brazilian officials on defining the border (p.71).

Next day’s journey brings them to the ranch of Bon Success owned by Mr Teddy Melville, one of Mrs Hart’s brothers. They drive there in the famous motor van. It is very bumpy (p.73). They have breakfast with Teddy and his charming wife, before driving beside the River Takuru to the missionary settlement of St Ignatius, where Waugh is hosted by the lovely Father Mather. Waugh pays off Price (who’s going on to the station at Bon Success, Yetto and Sinclair (who turn and head back down the trail). Part one of the journey is over.

Again, Waugh remarks on its bareness and lack of people. All over Africa he saw missions, schools and churches packed out with native pupils, congregations, teachers and pupils. Here, almost nobody. A tin and thatch church, and a primitive schoolhouse which holds, at most, a dozen Indian children. The mission building has a second story (first one he’s seen) and, amazingly, a reading lamp. Great relief (p.75).

Most of the scattered ranchers and all the Brazilians across the river are Catholics. Father Mather ministers to them all. There is one shop, the only one for 200 miles in any direction, kept by an affable Portuguese named Mr Figuiredo, who dresses comfortably in pyjamas, treats them to a feast, and charges exorbitant prices for everything (p.79). He is taken to visit local Indians including a charming tattooed witch.

After a delightful restful week, on 1 February he sets off with a guide, David, and his Brazilian brother-in-law Francesco, to cross the river and so the invisible border into Brazil and ride the 3 days to Boa Vista (p.81). They stop for the nights at primitive mud and thatch huts, with a few other travellers kipping in a shack full of hammocks, served weak revolting tasso stew by sleepy womenfolk.

Next day is the longest, hardest, hottest of them all. Waugh is struck by the way the locals carry no water at all, presumably because the land is criss-crossed with streams. Except they’re all dried up and the sun is fierce. Twelve hours without a drink and he hallucinates walking into his club and ordering glass after glass of iced orange juice. At dusk they reach an actual stream and drink mug after mug of freezing water.

Next day they enter the inhabited Rio Branco district and come upon a well organised sugar mill, where they are welcomed and well fed. Teams of workers and passers-though eat in series at a long bench. Next day they reach the Rio Branco opposite which stands the legendary Boa Vista he’s heard so much about.

(It might be worth noting that Boa Vista is simply the Portuguese for ‘Good View’, bom and boa being equivalent to the French bon and bonne i.e. ‘good’, depending on whether the noun is male or female. Rio means river and branco means white. So they arrive at Good View on the White River. Pretty basic, isn’t it?)

Boa Vista

Of course Boa Vista turns out to be nothing like the gaudy fantasies he’s concocted on the tiring journey there. It is a shabby collection of ramshackle buildings laid out on an ambitious grid pattern with a broad muddy high street and cross streets which peter out into bare savannah a few hundred yards in either direction. Population maybe a thousand skinny, scrawny, malnourished, sulky, listless people.

The inhabitants of the entire Brazilian region of the Amazonas were, apparently, descended from convicts sent there as punishment. Waugh found a low, sullen, suspicious atmosphere everywhere. There was an atmosphere of homicide, everyone has guns, there have been well publicised murders. He finds it: ‘a squalid camp of ramshackle cut-throats’ (p.92).

And the population insisting on eating the same monotonous, revolting farine and tasso as everywhere else, despite the achievement of the local nuns in having a very diverse vegetable garden.

Waugh stays at the Benedictine Mission, led by Father Alcuin, and is predictably complimentary about the monks and nuns’ level of quiet, constructive civilisation.

Three things

1. Waugh is easily Bored

According to these books, Waugh had a great capacity for getting very, very bored. He describes sauntering round town to the 4 or 5 people he knows and watching them work, staring at the sky. Attending church is by far the most colourful and interesting thing to do, not only for him but for many of the inhabitants, what with its colour, decorations, smells of incense and singing, no matter how ragged. He gets so bored he reads an edition of Bossuet’s sermons and lives of the saints in French (p.98).

At which point I remembered the almost identical descriptions of his crushing boredom which appear in Remote People. There he gives a comic description of being stuck between trains in the dusty town of Dirre-Dowa, resorting to reading a volume of Alexander Pope’s poems and then, even more desperate, a French dictionary. In his later travelogue, Waugh in Abyssinia, Waugh gets so bored in Addis Ababa waiting for war to actually break out that he buys a baboon!

The point is, Waugh is obviously quickly and easily bored. It would help if he had any hobbies but the issue of boredom highlights two others.

2. Music

He has no ear for music. None at all. He doesn’t enjoy hearing music and, at one point, when he is in a particularly good mood riding among beautiful scenery, he says he’d like to sing, but doesn’t know how. Having no sensitivity at all for music means living in a greatly reduced world of experience.

3. Waugh is no naturalist

Waugh is walking, riding or taking boats through exotic and varied country (savannah and rainforest) and yet his observations of the natural world are rudimentary. He notes the way rainforest consists of enormous tree trunks like columns with all the interesting stuff way at the top. He notes the 3 or 4 super-irritating bugs (the carouba fly et al). He gives detailed notes on all the horses he rents, hires, buys, and that he and his various colleagues ride at various times.

Apart from that – nada. Nothing about the birds or rodents. Occasional general references to blossom but no detail about the flowers, flowering bushes and so on. Maybe the savannah is parched and sandy as he describes, but still.

Pondering these absences makes you realise what is present in his writing. Thinking about what isn’t in the travelogues, made me reflect on what is. Which is people. He’s interested in people, characters, what they look like, how they behave, and really interested in how they talk.

Every single person he meets on a trip like this is foreign, non-English. True, many of them speak a form of English, but generally mangled and contorted, creoles or stumbling phrases. Or they don’t speak English at all and he has to struggle by with his schoolboy French. And then he observes other people who don’t speak each others’ languages struggling to communicate by talking pidgen Portuguese or German to each other (p.96).

What emerges from this little ponder is that Waugh is interested in – and devotes his energies to – people and how they speak. Thus he gives a peremptory description of Boa Vista, but his account only comes to life when he is describing people. People such as Mr Figuiredo who keeps the only decent store for hundreds of miles around, the mysterious German, Herr Steingler (p.95), Father Alcuin who is convinced England is run by freemasons (p.97), the little Brazilian Boundary Commissioner (p.99), Martinez the low-spirited manager of the town’s main story (p.100), Eusebio, a plum native of the Macushi tribe who is striking for not having one belonging in the world (p.117), Mr Hart the kindly middle-aged American with a lovely wife and a Creole nanny who looked like Josephine Baker (p.119).

It is a significant moment right at the end of the book when, assessing what he had learned or seen and done on the trip, he says he has added the religious visionary Mr Christie ‘to my treasury of eccentrics’ (p.168). And:

In Georgetown I met an agreeable character named ‘Professor’ Piles who lived by selling stuffed alligators. (p.168)

Evelyn Waugh’s ‘treasury of eccentrics’. Quite.

And where his ears really prick up is with gossip and the way people are inter-connected. There isn’t that much to say about a man who lives by himself or who you encounter on his own. But a man and his wife are immediately more interesting to gossip and speculate about, and a man and wife and various children, hopefully by different wives, gives you a lovely, juicy subject to explore. Thus, in this account, Waugh comes to life when he discovers that so and so is married to Mr Hart’s sister. Or that Teddy Melville is a legendary man of the area with countless children and grand-children. People are his thing: stories, gossip, the quirks of how they behave and talk. This is what makes his famous diaries so wonderful, a lifetime of observing people and giving little anecdotes.

The turning point

After a week he is desperate to get away from Boa Vista and reckons on taking boat with the Brazilian Boundary Commissioner who is steaming down the River Branco and so will be able to take him to the legendary metropolis of Manaos. Except that, after days of waiting, the Boundary Commissioner refuses to take him (p.99). By now Waugh is quite concerned about catching malaria – everyone he meets has malaria and suffers malarial fever for half the week, starting with his host Father Alcuin who is wretchedly ill during his entire stay.

So he decides to stop trying to penetrate further south into Brazil, but to turn about and retrace his steps back across the river and into British Guiana. Back to St Ignatius Mission, Bon Success, Pirara and Daguar’s ranch BUT, at that point, instead of completely retracing his route i.e. a long trek through the rainforest back to Takama, turning north-north-west and taking a new route, through forest hugging the border with Brazil and then beside the River Potaro with its many waterfalls, to where it joins the mighty Essequibo river, fifty miles or so along this, and then by train east to join the smaller Demarara River which runs down to the sea at Georgetown.

Highlights of the return journey

After crossing back into Guiana, Waugh gets wildly lost and rides his horse north instead of east, stumbling by chance over the shack of an old Indian who very kindly leads him back to the proper trail and so on to St Ignatius’ Mission. Here he stays with kindly Father Mather for ten days, as he assembles the goods which will be needed for the new route home.

Calling the travel bluff, myths of travel (pages 114 to 116)

Here he includes an amusing digression in which he sets out to debunk some of the myths which surround solitary travelling, such as:

You feel free

On the contrary every single item you want to take becomes an encumbrance which slows you down and there are very often only two possible directions along long lonely trails, forward or back. He often feels trapped by limitations of time, energy, money and distance.

You are untrammeled by convention

On the contrary, Waugh feels he knows a wide range of eccentrics, bohemians who dress and behave in all kinds of florid ways back in England. It’s true that you meet a wide range of people on a trip like this, and some of them are very scruffy, and the native Indians may be almost naked, and so on. But you aren’t. Conventions must be maintained, especially in the Tropics where, if you begin to slip, it’s easy to go completely to pieces.

You have a hearty appetite and sleep the sleep of the blessed

Rubbish. The food is inedible, everywhere they go the monotonous inevitability of farine and tasso nearly drives him mad. Often he can barely eat what villagers offer and prefers to go hungry.

And the ‘beds’ are generally hammocks or, if you’re lucky, lumpy tin beds, or a thin sheet on stony savannah. Either way, the Tropics, specially the rainforest, are filled with noise, the endless racket of hooting wild animals. And then there are the mosquitoes, flies and ticks which mean a moment’s lack of attention can lead to any numbers of bites and then the whole night spent itching and tossing and turning. And then, when you’re at the end of your tether, it starts to rain and you get soaked to the skin (p.141).

River baths

If there was one thing he definitely enjoyed and was unique to the trip, it was bathing in cool river waters, ducking under waterfalls, lying in pools near waterfalls. Nothing in England could match the sheer physical bliss of this experience, particularly after a long day’s horse ride or trek.

Karasabai

The primitive little village of Karasabai which prompts an extended meditation on the character of the Amazonian Indians. He ropes in recent books about the existence of primitive matriarchal societies, and throws in some general cultural speculation about the noble savage, the myths of the garden of Eden and so on. Very run-of-the-mill. What came over for me was the Amazon Indian’s listlessness. Their flat, unemotional, morose affect.

He has an interesting passage explaining that the Indians have no hierarchy at all, no words for sir or servant, no words conveying superior or inferior status. They do things when they want to, and stop when they don’t and nobody can make force them.

The Indian villagers stare at him but never move, never say anything, never display any real curiosity. He unpacks various marvels from his bag and then goes for a wash and when he comes back the things and the Indians are in the same position.

He compares this with the blacks he met in Africa who all showed far more energy and creativity and inventiveness and would have pinched everything in his bag if he turned his back. The Indian women wear shabby little linen dresses and try to hide in them. He contrasts them with what he calls ‘the swagger and provocation of a Negress’ (p.124). When they take a shallow boat down the river, the two blacks with him enjoy strenuously rowing and showing off their strength. The little Indian family with them have a vague got at it, dangle paddles in the water, uninterested, then give up and huddle together.

The Indians are divided into ‘peoples’ and refuse point blank to cross from the territory of their people into another people’s, or to have anything to do with other peoples. Peoples Waugh meets include the Macushi, Kopinang Indians, the Patamonas. (Wikipedia suggests the correct term is ‘indigenous tribes’ and lists nine residing in Guyana: the Wai Wai, Macushi, Patamona, Lokono, Kalina, Wapishana, Pemon, Akawaio and Warao.)

You could choose to interpret the Indians’ listlessness and incuriosity to a special spiritual understanding of the world, lack of interest in material goods or the white man’s worldview. Waugh doesn’t comment much till the very end when he is driven to deep dislike of the selfish Indian family who share the paddled boat down the river. They can’t be bothered to walk a few hundred yards to see the Kaieteur Falls, one of the wonders of the world, and Waugh bluntly ascribes it to ‘mere stupidity and lack of imagination’ (p.158).

Tipuru

At the village of Tipuru they catch up with the Catholic priest Father Keary who is going his rounds of the villages. After his initial surprise at meeting a posh young English Catholic rider, Keary agrees they can travel on together. This makes everything much easier for Waugh, for Keary understands the people, the language, has his own resources and, of course, can speak English so Waugh will have someone to talk to.

So they set off accompanied by a new servant, Antonio, his wive and four native bearers. A sequence of villages, Shimai with five houses, one hut by itself inhabited by an old black woman, an unnamed village of three huts, Karto with three huts, Kurikabaru a metropolis of thirteen huts on a bleak hilltop, and so on. Sparse and empty country. Isolated Indians who are, however, wonderfully hospitable, laying out supplies of cassiri drink, peppers, cassava bread and sometimes milk. (To this day Guyana remains ‘one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries.’)

Mikrapuru

And so via a series of tiny settlements over the watershed which divides Amazonia from the Caribbean rivers and so down out of the rainforest to Mikrapuru, 15 or so miles from the river Essequibo and home to the civilised and hospitable Mr Winter. Waugh had met Winter at a social do back in Georgetown on the coast.

Winter has set up a camp here and employs native Indians to wash for alluvial diamonds in the river Potaro. Waugh describes the ingenious series of filters fed by dammed creek water into which Indians employed for the purpose pour, throughout the day, gravel and mud, in the hope the filters will reveal either river gold or diamonds. Winter had kept his camp for three years. It is very isolated, the few white neighbours who once lived within reasonable reach have all left, and the Indians work for him for a while, to earn simple gewgaws and then, with their own mysterious timing, melt back into the forest. Waugh contrasts the Indians’ wispiness, their ghostliness and general lack of interest, with the bullish enthusiasm of the blacks he sees. Winter’s foreman is black. Coming from the coast they have a better sense of work and discipline.

Journey to the river

After ten days or so, Waugh has exhausted his own provisions and Winter was low on them to start with, so it’s time to leave. He will ride with Winter’s foreman down to the River Potaro to board the first of three boats which will take him the stages between the impassible waterfalls which punctuate the river (being the big one, Kaieteur Falls, then Waratuk Falls and Amatuk Falls).

Haunting description of Holmia which had once been an extensive European plantation, built for the balatá trade (balatá is ‘a hard rubber-like material made by drying the milky juice produced principally by the bully tree). Holmia fell into poverty and ruin, has been abandoned for decades and now largely reclaimed by the jungle.

He describes the 700-foot fall of the waterfall at Kaieteur (p.155). Wikipedia tells me it is ‘the world’s largest single drop waterfall by the volume of water flowing over it’. It is ‘about four and a half times the height of Niagara Falls…and about twice the height of Victoria Falls.’ As you might expect, it prompts Waugh to a burst of lyricism:

I lay on the overhanging ledge watching the light slowly fail, the colour deepen and disappear. The surrounding green was of density and intenseness that can neither be described nor reproduced; a quicksand of colour, of shivering surface and unplumbed depth, which absorbed the vision, sucking it down and submerging it. (p.156)

After they’ve scrambled down the side of Kaieteur Falls, it’s a morning’s boat ride to Waratuk, where they unload the goods and Waugh watches the two blacks lower the boat through gaps in the huge boulders which make up the rapids with astonishing skill, and then 3 hours or so on to Amatuk, where the river is impassible and the boat has to be secured, ready for Winter’s foreman to recover it in 4 or 5 days time after he’s completed the journey to Georgetown to buy stores.

There is something approaching a guesthouse at Amatuk, opened by a Mrs McTurk for tourists who never came, and Waugh pays the old black housekeeper a dollar to sleep in something like a real bed and sit in an armchair and read a book. He is nearly back in civilisation.

There follows a complicated sequence of lorry journeys, two more boat journeys from landing point to landing point, and then the journey east along what I now learn was an abandoned railway from the Essequibo to the Demarara river.

This is a peg for the general point makes which is that the area he was visiting was past its boom years. Twenty years earlier there had been boom times for plantations of ballata, and gold and diamond sieving. But the ballata trees were all used, the gold and diamonds never appeared in sufficient quantities, now Waugh’s journey is through a degraded and stagnating landscape, or a beautiful jungle landscape punctuated with wrecks and ruins. The government is building a proud new road to open up the interior but Waugh gives an impressive list of reasons why this is too little, too late (p.163). If the road fails, then maybe the colony will revert to being just a coastal strip and a couple of coastal towns and the interior will revert to its primitive integrity.

And so by slow boat down the ever-widening Essequibo to Rockstone. This is another settlement which has collapsed, with most of the buildings lying empty and rotten (p.166). It’s the terminus of the railway which runs 50 miles east to Wismar on the Demarara River but it no longer functions as a railway. People walk along it and there is an old tractor which pulls an empty carriage, if anyone can be found to drive it.

He uses all his persuasiveness, and five dollars, to persuade of the boat that brought him and the ‘stationmaster’ to beat the tractor into life and, at midnight, he and other passengers are roused from sleeping on the platform, mount into the open carriage and it shunts off slowly and perilously along the rail line. After a few hours it starts to hiss down and everyone is soaked.

At dawn he arrives at the railway’s terminus at Wismar on the Demarara River where the boat is, mirabile dictu, waiting, and he boards it for a pleasant sail down the river and back to civilisation (of a sort) in Georgetown. Where he looks up friends, buys a ticket and waits to catch the next boat back to England.

The Dickens connection

While staying with Father Mather at the Mission he discovers a passion for reading and discovers that good father has a library of all Charles Dickens’s novels. These make good big chunky reading and Waugh borrows some volumes for the journey to the coast. This, obviously, is the germ of the fate of Tony Last at the grim climax of A Handful of Dust.

Credit

Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh was published by Duckworth in 1934. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Other travel books

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn (1992)

Frank McLynn

McLynn, 80 this year, has made a very successful career as an author, biographer, historian and journalist, having written some 30 books. He clearly aims to produce enjoyable, accessible and non-scholarly histories and biographies for a wide audience. This is suggested, among other things by his use of casual and rather boys’ own adventure story diction:

It was the Moors who had done for Major Houghton. (p.16)
His plight was grim. His horse was on its last legs. (p.16)
The Landers shook the dust of Badagry off their shoes with gusto and plunged into the wilderness… (p.27)
The master of the Thomas proved to be a blackguard. (p.30)
Speke would not have to fear the supercilious basilisk eye from a superior beetling brow, as with Burton, every time he wandered off to slaughter a few dozen of Africa’s wildlife.
Once again the expedition came within an ace of disaster… (p.104)
Meanwhile the Upper Nile was proving a hell on earth… (p.119)

I found McLynn’s book about the Mexican Revolution very useful, accessible and gripping, and was impressed by his talent for shaping the complicated facts into a compelling narrative. But that book had the advantage of telling the story of a huge social upheaval through the lives of just two legendary figures who are central to the entire drama, which itself only covered a period of about 20 years.

Here the challenge is the reverse: there were hundreds of European explorers to Africa, most of them undertook more than one expedition, many stayed for years carrying out complex sequences of explorations, and the total period of Western exploration lasted about a century (from 1788 to around 1890). In other words, there’s a lot more subject matter to cover and so it’s harder for this book not to feel more scattered and diffuse.

Brief history of exploration up to the European era

The ancient Greeks and Romans probed into Africa but never crossed the barrier of the Sahara or managed to penetrate far up the Nile. From the seventh century, Muslim Arab traders explored the east coast of Africa, set up numerous settlements and established a lucrative trade in black slaves. From the 1480s onwards the Portuguese created stopping off points on their circumnavigation of Africa to reach India. But McLynn tells us that the accepted date for the start of the ‘modern’ exploration of Africa is 1788. For it was in this year that the African Association was set up in London by a dozen London businessmen led by Sir Joseph Banks, the noted botanist who accompanied Captain Cook on his journeys to the South Seas.

The African Association (to give it its proper name, The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa) sponsored a series of expeditions throughout the 1790s, then activity went into abeyance for the duration of the wars with France (1793 to 1815) before being revived once peace returned. As soon as you google this subject you discover it is extremely well covered online and there is a recognised and much repeated canon of early explorers, namely:

Pre-Napoleonic war explorers

John Ledyard, set off 1788, died in Cairo aged 37.
Simon Lucas, departed Tripoli 1788; forced to abandon expedition south by tribal wars.
Daniel Houghton, 1790, penetrated deep up the river Gambia in West Africa before being robbed and murdered aged 51.
Mungo Park, 1795, penetrated further into West Africa than any European to date, discovering that the Niger flowed east, but died in the attempt to travel the length of the Niger by canoe, murdered or drowned it’s not clear to this day, age 35.
Friedrich Hornemann, 1797, set off from Cairo to travel across the Sahara to Timbuktu and was never heard of again; if he died around 1800, he would have been 28.

Post-Napoleonic war explorers

Alexander Gordon Laing, Scottish, first European to reach Timbuktu in 1826, being murdered by Tuareg soon afterwards, aged 31.
René Caillié, son of a convict (!) first explorer to visit Timbuktu (in 1828) and return to tell the tale, before dying of ill health and tuberculosis aged 38.
Heinrich Barth, considered one of the greatest of the European explorers of Africa for his scholarliness and commitment to learning Arabic, spent five years living in Sudan, crossing the Sahara to West Africa, first person to visit remote Timbuktu since Caillié (in 1853).
Charles John Andersson, explored south-west Africa from his base in Cape Town, at one stage was a war lord to the Damara tribe, died of fever aged 40.
Karl Mauch, son of a Bavarian carpenter, taught himself and scraped the money to travel to South Africa, where he worked to earn the funds to pay for an expedition up into south-east Africa. He discovered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in 1872, but was ignored when he returned to Germany and died in poverty aged 37.

General conclusions

McLynn draws a handful of conclusions from these early pioneers:

1. Exploring Africa was a young man’s game.

2. All the explorers fell ill, very seriously ill, multiple times, and a high percentage, even of the young and fit, died.

3. This didn’t stop the obsessive ambition of many of the most successful ones to be ‘the first man to see’ whatever feature they had been sent by the Association to discover: the fabled city of Timbuktu, the origins of the river Niger, various waterfalls and so on.

4. African exploration was connected to low birth. It presented an opportunity to people condemned to lifetimes of lowly obeisance in Britain’s class structure, to make a splash, to make a name for themselves, to achieve wealth and status. Simon Lucas was the son of a vintner. David Livingstone was one of seven children who grew up in a tenement in a grim Scottish mill town and was sent aged ten to a cotton mill where he and his brother John worked twelve-hour days as piecers, tying broken cotton threads on the spinning machines. Henry Morton Stanley was abandoned by his mother and spent ten years from the ages of 6 to 16 in a remote Welsh workhouse.

5. Many of the explorers were Celts, outsiders to the English establishment: Mungo Park and David Livingstone came from lowly backgrounds in Scotland, Stanley from a wretched workhouse in rural Wales. Hugh Clapperton from Annan, Dumfriesshire (died of dysentery in Sokoto, aged 38). Richard Lander, son of a Truro innkeeper (died on the Niger river, aged 29) and so on.

6. Expeditions do not bring people together. Many of these trips are notorious for the extreme hatred and bitterness they engendered between the protagonists. Most notorious is the tremendous falling out between the famous Arabist Richard Francis Burton and the big game hunter John Hanning Speke on their 1858 expedition from Zanzibar into East Africa, during which they mapped Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria, which lasted after they returned to England and pursued a feud against each other in the press right up till the day of Speke’s death (or suicide?) in 1860.

A blizzard of names and dates

McLynn plunges straight into accounts of these early expeditions, telling them in pared-down, summary style with the result that I felt bombarded by names – of European explorers and of the countless villages and towns they discovered/arrived at, and the plethora of Africa tribes with their kings and sheikhs who they encountered, traded with, fought against and so on. I soon realised I was never going to remember.

Much more interesting and enduring are the broader points he makes about Africa in general and the perils of European exploration in particular.

The African scene

Pitiful agriculture

Most African cultures lived right on the breadline, on the border of starvation (p.146). This was caused by poor soil, poor climate and erratic rains which, in the tropical regions, fell almost constantly all year round. Many Africans lived on a very basic diet of yams, manioc, corn, supplemented by berries and fruits, only rarely fish or meat protein. There was rarely the kind of guaranteed agricultural surplus which had allowed for the creation of complex civilisations in the Fertile Crescent and then across the Middle East and Europe for millennia.

Therefore, even a slight incursion by outsiders, let alone domineering white men leading a train of 300 porters, could upset delicate ecological balances and plunge villages and entire regions into famine. In fact the explorers regularly came across whole regions which were in famine conditions, where the locals were starving and where, therefore, no food could be bought for their huge trains for any amount of calico or beads (e.g. pp.217 to 219)..

And this explains many tribes’ fierce protectiveness of their territory and the often hostile response of African leaders to the arrival of the explorers and their huge hungry trains.

Tsetse flies

Tsetse flies were a menace to humans and livestock in Africa. They are to this day.

Tsetse flies, through the cyclical transmission of trypanosomiasis to both humans and their animals, greatly influence food production, natural-resource utilization and the pattern of human settlement throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa. It is estimated that the annual direct production losses in cattle alone amount to between US$6bn and $12billion, while animal deaths may reach 3 million. (United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization)

Lack of pack animals

There was a lack of pack animals or domesticable animals such as had underpinned the development of civilisation across Eurasia, which was home to oxen, cattle, donkeys but above all horses, which had performed a key economic function for millennia.

The evidence was overwhelming that all domesticated animals, whether oxen, camels, mules, horses or camels, succumbed very soon to the effects of climate and disease once taken north of 5°N. (p.132)

Later on he links the lack of pack animals to one central factor, the tsetse fly which transmitted the trypanasomes which caused ‘sleeping sickness’.

It was the tsetse that has barred passage to black Africa by killing off the Arabs’ horses and camels. The fly also kept the technology of black Africa primitive, since, deprived of animals, the African could hand plough only small plots of land, had no transport and lacked a source of first class protein. (p.240)

Lacking any kind of pack animals, most sub-Saharan cultures were primitive in the extreme. (The importance of domesticatable animals and of the wide range of edible grasses to the rise of Eurasian civilisations is explained in Jared Diamond’s 1997 classic Guns, Germs and Steel.)

Hundreds of porters

Therefore, an enduring feature of African exploration was simply that humans had to carry everything. (McLynn does describe a handful of explorations which experimented with horses, donkeys and even elephants, but in every case the animals wasted and died, leaving the human porters with even more to carry.) Hence native porters numbering in the hundreds. McLynn reports that of all the different tribes the Nyamwezi were head and shoulders the most reliable, foresightful and organised of porters. On the east Africa coast, at Zanzibar and the vital coastal town of Bagamoyo, huge numbers of porters were available and certain individual porters rose to prominence, were able to organise and manage their peers and so were hired by successive explorers and feature in accounts of successive expeditions.

Expeditions routinely included two to three hundred porters, and Stanley’s exceptionally well funded ones, up to 800! He had to be a master of organisation, man management and discipline, and McLynn gives examples of moments when European masters either a) managed to, or b) miserably failed to, maintain discipline and rank.

Lack of roads

Explorers discovered an almost complete lack of transport infrastructure. Most of the rivers were too large to be navigable or presented obstacles such as rapids and waterfalls. Roads through tropical jungle were impossible to maintain, so most people used narrow tracks.

‘The pathway seldom exceeded two feet in width, with tress and tall grasses growing up to its edges.’ (Alfred Swann, quoted on page 133)

There were few if any roads as understood in the developed world, nothing like canals and nothing remotely like Western railways. McLynn tells us Western-style tarmaced roads, and railways, didn’t really arrive in Africa till the 1930s.

The perils of European exploration

Sub-Saharan Africa remained unexplored for so long for a number of reasons.

No navigable rivers

Most African rivers debouch into sandbanks and have neither natural bays nor deep estuaries which characterise European and American rivers and allow ships to anchor and navigate upstream. If ships did anchor, water-borne explorers found it impossible to proceed far upriver because of rapids, cascades and waterfalls.

Violent humans

Anyway, chances are they would be attacked by any of the complicated patchwork of tribes and regional warlords who fiercely protected their territory. A simple motive for African violence and resentment was related to the dire poverty of most African communities but there were also continual low-level conflicts between neighbouring tribes; there are calculated to have been around 700 distinct tribes. But as MacLynn emphasises, Africans owed far more allegiance to their villages, village elders and traditions. There were hundreds of religions, mostly primitive ancestor or fetish worship.

What this amounts to in the book is a blizzard of names of the kings of umpteen different tribes and regions which the explorers pass through, most at war with all their neighbours, thus making negotiating with them for safe passage very dicey, plus all these rulers tended to want presents and dues. Hence the enormous trains of porters the explorers required to carry not only their food and weapons and tents etc, but also a sizeable treasury of Western goodies to be handed over to the series of rulers they had to mollify. The African word for it was hongo which translates as ‘tribute’ or ‘bribe’, depending on your worldview. As the (admittedly rabidly anti-African explorer) Samuel White Baker complained:

‘It is the rapacity of the chiefs of the various tribes that render African exploration so difficult.’ (quoted on page 75)

And plenty of explorers were just murdered outright by nomads, bandits, lawless tribals. McLynn gives a vivid account of the attack by the Eesa tribe on the expedition of Burton, Speke, Stroyan and Herne along with 42 porters encamped just outside the town of Berbera on the coast of Somaliland on the night of 19 April 1855. Lieutenant Stroyan was killed outright, Burton took a spear thrust through one cheek and out the other but managed to run to the beach and safety while Speke was captured, suffered spear thrusts in eleven places including right through one thigh, was tied up and threatened with castration until he was left in the care of one armed guard who he managed to knock out before also running to the sea where he was discovered by rescuers then following morning (p.255).

Violent animals

No continent has so many fierce animals as Africa. Lions routinely attacked and killed members of exhibitions. If travelling by water, crocodiles and the surprisingly aggressive hippopotamus were a peril. Aggressive birds attacked larger animals, for example camels, leaving wounds which festered and killed.

Heat

Explorers died of simple heatstroke or from the combo of heat and high humidity in forest regions.

Disease

But disease was the most obvious peril. All Europeans attempting travel into sub-Saharan Africa quickly became ill, often seriously ill. Malaria, typhoid, ophthalmia, and any number of causes of diarrhoea, afflicted almost all European explorers with devastating consequences. Half the explorers who set out were killed by disease; most of the survivors emerged severely weakened by prolonged illness with lingering debilitating effects. McLynn mentions smallpox, fever, ague, amoebic and bacillic dysentery, guinea worm, ulcers acquired when scratches (from thorn bushes or tall sharp grass) got infected and festered in the heat and humidity, bronchitis, pneumonia, rheumatism, sciatica, athsma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), bilharzia, filariasis, hookworm infestation (ankylostomiasis), river blindness (onchocerciasis), exanthematic typhus, yaws and leprosy.

Regularly you read that the explorers were laid up for months on end with fever and dysentery, or rendered so weak they literally couldn’t walk and had to be carried in hammocks. In fact McLynn devotes an entire chapter, chapter 11, to the subject (pages 227 to 252).

Attrition rates

Thus it was that all the expeditions suffered appalling death rates. For example, Stanley left Bagamoyo in mid-November 1874 with 4 white companions and 342 African porters. By the end of February 1875, 181 had been lost to famine, illness, desertion or attacks by tribesmen. On the Emin Pasha expedition, Stanley left Zanzibar in spring 1887 with 708 men. Two and a half years later only 210 returned (p.152). The situation was summed up by the German explorer Wilhelm Junker:

‘Famine and disease are the chief causes of the depopulation of Central Africa; in comparison with these the export of slaves is but a small item.’ (quoted on page 117)

No profit

And, despite all the rumours of treasure and secret cities and rare gems and valuable resources, it turned out to be impossible to make a profit from any of these expeditions. They were either sponsored by national geographic associations, by missionary organisations, or by wealthy backers (p.146). None of the explorers McLynn describes got involved in any businesses set up to trade with Africa, there were few if any businesses involved there. Stanley came the closest, in the sense that he was central to helping King Leopold of Belgium set up his evil and rapacious regime in the Congo, but that was more slave exploitation than a ‘business’. A number of explorers ended their days as colonial administrators, such as da Brazza, Frederick Lugard and Carl Peters. But most came home, wrote up their experiences and lived off their ublications and lectures.

The great British explorers

Having skated through the early pioneers McLynn slows down and pays more attention to the famous expeditions of David Livingstone, Richard Burton (the first European to see Lake Tanganyika, which he wrongly thought must be the source of the Nile) and John Hanning Speke whose joint expedition was sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society and lasted from 1856 to 1859.

Burton and Speke were involved in the great quest to find the source of the mighty river Nile. Speke won, showing that its main source is Lake Victoria, to the anger of the far more scholarly and conscientious Burton, who made the wrong call when he attributed the source to Lake Tanganyika. On their return to England in 1859 they embarked on a long and bitter war of words through the press and pamphlets.

And Samuel White Baker, who I’d never heard of but, apparently, was second only to Livingstone in popular fame, for his extensive 4-year-long explorations around the Great Lakes region of central east Africa (1861 to 1865).

Baker was the first European to see Lake Albert and a substantial waterfall on the Victoria Nile which he named Murchison Falls after the then-president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick Murchison. Back in Blighty he wrote a considerable number of books and published articles which bolstered his reputation as the grand old man of Africa exploration and an expert on the Nile, though he was almost as famous for his extravagant big game hunting on four continents, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.

Suppressing the slave trade

Britain abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire in 1807. The actual state of enslavement i.e. slavery as a whole, wasn’t abolished, and existing slaves freed, until 1833. By the 1850s suppression of the slave trade carried on by other nations had become a major moral crusade for the British. The Royal Navy had an Africa squadron specifically tasked with patrolling the west African coast and intercepting slave ships, forcing them to return their captives to Africa.

In east and central Africa where the great competition to find the source of the Nile played out, there was a long established slave trade run by Arabs, capturing and transporting black Africans up the coast to the Muslim world. High-minded missionaries like David Livingstone raised funds and publicity by their stated aim of combining geographical exploration with steps to suppress the slave trade. Baker was another Brit who boosted his reputation among high-minded Victorians by emphasising his anti-slavery credentials, without much justification, in McLynn’s view.

Yet McLynn brings out how ambiguous the relationship between British explorer and Arab slaver could be on the ground, in reality. This is epitomised in the career of Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi, better known by his nickname, Tippu Tip, which is Swahili for ‘gatherer of wealth’. Born in 1832 in Zanzibar, Tippu rose to become one of the wealthiest men of his time, based on his twin trades in ivory and slaves. Eventually he became the leading slave trader in East Africa, supplying the Muslim world with hundreds of thousands of black slaves and himself owning plantations worked by an estimated 10,000 enslaved blacks.

The point is that if you were a white man who wanted to explore central Africa from the most reliable starting point of Zanzibar, you had to reach an accommodation with Tippu who had established and ran the key trading posts, watering holes, provision stores and so on on the main routes inland from the coast to the great lakes, from Bagamoyo on the coast via the trading entrepot of Tabora, which was equidistant from Lake Tanganyika in the west and Lake Victoria in the north. And so David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley, to name the most famous, were forced to forge working relationships with Tippu.

It was one thing to make grand declarations in Britain about abolishing the east Africa slave trade; it was quite another to find yourself amid rich, powerful men who ran it, who had everything to lose by its abolition, and try to reach practical accommodations with them.

Tippu Tip was famous enough to feature on the front cover of the Illustrated London News, 7 December 1889 issue.

Later, non-British explorers

After the high profile, super-publicised expeditions of Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, Speke and Baker, the narrative goes on to describe scores of lesser figures. The Big Names are big because they sketched out the really central issue of African geography, they were the ones who traced the paths of the major rivers (the Niger, Congo, Zambezi and Nile) and discovered the complex of great lakes in east-central Africa. The created the frame and established the broad shapes, like completing the border round a jigsaw.

But there was still a huge amount of work to be done to join the dots, for example to work out the order of flow between the umpteen lakes in the African lake district which eventually led into the sources of the Nile, or to identify each of the scores of tributaries of the river Congo – and this was done by a host of lesser names, most of them not British and therefore not enshrined in our national history.

McLynn notes that two other nationalities became prominent: Belgian explorers, once King Leopold had established his ‘right’ to the vast Congo basin at the 1885 Congress of Berlin; and the same event crystallised the urgency among German politicians and scientists to secure their slice of the African pie, so there was a notable upswing in the number of German explorers, for example George Schweinfurth.

This left the French who, as usual, burned with envy and at the successes of their hated rivals, the British, and spurred them on, post 1880, to map and seize as much territory as possible. The national rivalry was made plain in the individual rivalry between Stanley, who was contracted to explore and establish waystations along the river Congo by Leopold of Belgium well into the 1890s, and the lead French explorer, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, who also explored the Congo basin in the 1870s and 80s, going on to become a French colonial administrator in the 1890s. The capital of the Republic of the Congo was named Brazzaville in his honour and retains the name to this day.

A body of work was done by ‘Gordon’s men’, a set of adventurers hired by General Gordon when he was governor of Equitoria province in the service of the Khedive of Egypt in the 1870s, who included Emin Pasha (despite his name, actually a German Jew born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer), Frederick Burnaby, Rudolph Slatkin, Romolo Gessi, Mason Bey, Gaetano Casati, Linant de Bellefonds, Carlo PIaggia and others. McLynn gives us brief pen portraits of these men and their exploratorial adventures.

Kenya, of all African countries the one with the climate most congenial to Europeans, was, surprisingly, one of the last to be explored, an achievement credited to the trio of Joseph Thomson, Harry Johnston and Samuel Yeleki.

The end of exploration

The era of exploration by dashing individuals drew to an end during the 1880s and may be considered over by 1890 (p.128). It was replaced by the era of colonialism i.e. the now-surveyed and mapped areas passed into the administration of the European nations which had drawn lines on maps and defined administrative areas at Berlin. Administrative regions were consolidated into ‘nations’. The map of Africa as we know it today crystallised during the 1890s and turn of the century. In most cases it was a continual process of ongoing accretion and centralisation.

To take Nigeria as an example. Britain annexed the coast region of Lagos as a crown colony in August 1861. At the Berlin Conference in 1885, Britain’s claims to a West African sphere of influence were recognised. The next year, in 1886, Britain set up the Royal Niger Company under the leadership of Sir George Taubman Goldie, which proceeded to subjugate the independent kingdoms along the Niger River, conquering Benin in 1897 and other regional leaders in the Anglo-Aro War (1901 to 1902). In 1900, the company’s territory came under the direct control of the British government which established the Southern Nigeria Protectorate. The British then moved north to subdue the Sokoto Caliphate, which was defeated at the Battle of Kano in 1903 and the British set up the Northern Nigeria Protectorate. By 1906 all resistance to British rule had ended. On 1 January 1914 the British formally united the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and the Northern Nigeria Protectorate into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. 46 years later, Nigeria gained independence from the United Kingdom on 1 October 1960.

A thumbnail sketch of how exploration passed on to patchwork colonial administration, government takeover, integration of various territories into a nation, which then fought for and gained its independence.

Bad maps

The maps are terrible. You’d have thought the people producing a book entirely about exploration would realise the importance of maps showing just what was explored, when and by who.

1. The book does contain about 14 maps but, as my vagueness implies, there is no list or index of them at the front.

2. Far worse, though, is that none of the maps have titles or numbers. So a map suddenly appears in the text but you have no idea what it’s meant to be showing. Of course, you can see it depicts a bit of Africa, but there’s no indication why, you have to deduce this from the text.

3. When I read the accounts of the first few explorers described, Daniel Houghton, Mungo Park, Joseph Ritchie, Hugh Clapperton and others, the text mentioned the African villages and towns they travelled to but none of these appeared in the map. I spent ten minutes trying in vain to find any of the placenames mentioned in these expeditions on the bloody map. There were lots of places indicated on the map but none of these appeared in the text! What?

4. Worst of all hardly any of the maps show the single most important thing you want to know, which is the routes of the actual expeditions. The first couple of maps, which show the river Niger and the region around Lake Chad appear to be there to show the first few explorations of the region in the late 1700s but there is no indication of the routes taken by the explorers named in the text. Later maps, relating to Burton and Speke or LIvingstone and Stanley, do bother to have routes marked on the maps but no title indicating whose journeys they were. In every instance a quick google of the expedition in question produced umpteen maps on the internet showing quite clearly the route you need to be able to see in order to make sense of the narrative.

The poorness of the maps is a real limitation of this book.

African words

Obviously, hundreds of languages were and are spoken across this vast continent. McLynn’s text mentions certain key words in Swahili:

askaris – soldiers
chikote – strip of hide used as a whip
hongo – bribes or tribute to chiefs
kanda – long, narrow canvas carry bag
karaba – a brass measure for rations
kitanda – litter (to carry people in)
madala – weights hung at each end of a pole carried over the shoulders
masika – season of heavy rain
mukongwa – slave fork in which the slave’s head was fastened
pagazi – porter
posho – daily rice ration
ruga-ruga – irregular troops or mercenaries
tembe – camp or base
wangwana – ‘sons of the free’

English words

McLynn enjoys writing and is a pleasure to read. Along with his occasional boys’-own-adventure register, he sprinkles the text with recherché terms which are a pleasure to look up in a dictionary and savour.

febrifuge – a medicine to reduce fever
feculent – of or containing dirt, sediment, or waste matter
fuliginous – sooty, dusty
lacustrine – relating to or associated with lakes
ophiolatry – worship of snakes
riverine – relating to or situated on a river or riverbank; riparian
rugose – wrinkled or corrugated
thaumaturge – a worker of wonders and performer of miracles, a magician
the veridical – the truth

Credit

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn was published in 1992 by Hutchinson. All references are to the 1993 Pimlico paperback edition.

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (5) by James M. McPherson (1987)

Stepping back from the detail, this reader’s general sense of the actual fighting of the American Civil War – having just finished this 860-page book about it – was that the slaughter steadily escalated, until tens of thousands were being killed and wounded at each brutal, bloody, slogged-out battle, causing death and injury on such a scale you’d have thought they’d be decisive.

And yet they weren’t. There was a terrible fatality or weakness about the commanding generals on both sides which prevented them from landing really knockout blows and allowed the war to drag on for years longer than necessary.

The reader gets very impatient with General George B. McClellan who was in charge of the north’s largest army, the Army of the Potomac. He was, by all accounts, an excellent organiser of armies and inspirer of men who, however, turned out to be pathologically reluctant to risk his shiny military machine in actual battle. And, on the rare occasions when he did engage and repel the Confederates, McClellan consistently failed to pursue and crush them, allowing them to retreat, lick their wounds, regroup, re-arm and come again. Eventually, President Lincoln became so impatient with McClellan’s fatal indecisiveness that he sacked him.

But, to the reader’s frustration, the same thing turns out to be true of his replacement, Major General George Meade, who commanded the northern army at the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 to 3 1863), massacring the rebels as they tried to storm his men entrenched along Cemetery Hill.

But then, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee called off the rebel attack and withdrew, Meade refused the calls from his officers, and from Lincoln himself, to pursue and crush the exhausted southern survivors – thus ensuring that Lee could withdraw, regroup, and that the war went on for another two years!

Apparently, a contemporary satirist described the armies of the American Civil War as little more than armed mobs wandering over the Virginia countryside at random, occasionally bumping into each other, massacring each other, then wandering off again with no decisive result. For long periods of time this satire does seem to be true.

According to McPherson, the siege and capture of the rebel stronghold of Vicksburg, which took place at the same time as the enormous Battle of Gettysburg (May to July 1863), marked a turning point in the war – but quite clearly neither was a knockout blow, and the South continued to field armies for 24 more bloody months, two years of bludgeoning, desperate bloodletting, as bigger and bigger armies engaged for longer and longer, at the costs of tens of thousands of eviscerated mangled bodies, with an enormous loss of life and treasure.

Meanwhile, as the generals of both sides failed to win the war, the conflict was nonetheless a time of rapid social, economic and technological change.

Military innovation

The generals initially carried on implementing Napoleonic battle strategy i.e. close ranked men march forwards, protected by cavalry on the flanks, until they’re within range to charge and close the enemy with bayonets – at which point the enemy breaks and runs, hopefully.

However, this was the war during which the rifle replaced the smooth-bore musket. Rifling made a bullet fly further and more accurately. This meant rifle fire could now kill men at three or four times the distance i.e. infantry advancing in the old style were cut down like grass.

Suddenly the advantage was with well-entrenched defenders. This explains the carnage at the Battle of Antietam as attacking Union troops found themselves funnelled into a lane which led towards the Confederate positions, and were mown down in their thousands. Or the carnage at Fredericksburg, where Union troops walked towards a solid wall at the base of St Marye’s Heights lined with Confederates assembled in ranks who fired in sequence – it was like walking towards machine guns.

It’s in the last two hundred pages, from the year 1864, that the power of defensive trenches really comes into its own, with the enormous losses suffered by Union soldiers trying to take rebel trenches at Spotsylvania and Petersburg. Here the fighting anticipated the appalling attrition rates of the First World War.

Arguably the single biggest reason why the American Civil War was so long and so blood was the development of the rifle, and the advantage it gave defenders in any battle (page 477 and following pages).

The scale of the slaughter

Some of the slaughter was awe-inspiring. The massacre at Antietam Creek left 6,000 men dead and some 17,000 wounded – four times the total number suffered on the Normandy beaches on D-Day – more than all American casualties in the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Spanish-American war combined.

Similarly, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg was an abattoir, with some 8,000 killed out of about 50,000 casualties. Even relatively minor encounters seemed to result in appalling rates of death and maiming. Some 620,000 men from both armies died in the civil war. It was a catastrophe.

Disease the biggest killer in most wars

But disease was an even bigger killer than rifles and artillery. For every soldier who died in battle, two died of disease. The biggest killers were intestinal complaints such as dysentery and diarrhoea, which alone claimed more men than did battle wounds. Other major killers were measles, smallpox, malaria and pneumonia.

The fundamental basis of modern medicine – the fact that microscopic bacteria spread infections – had not yet been discovered. Medicine was, as McPherson puts it, still in the Middle Ages. The result was that no-one appreciated the importance of sterile dressings, antiseptic surgery, and the vital importance of sanitation and hygiene.

The impact of disease was so severe that it disrupted or led to the cancellation of a number of military campaigns. (p.488)

The changing role of women

McPherson goes out of his way in several places to discuss the changing positions of women. This is especially true of his section on medicine and nursing during the war where, in a nutshell, certain strong-willed women followed the example of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War and set up nursing homes and went into the field as nurses. These women nurses and organisers impressed the medical establishment, the army and the politicians, and made many men revise their opinion of women’s toughness.

Notable pioneers included Clara Barton and Mary-Anne Bickerdyke (page 483). In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell became the first American woman to earn an MD.

The same went for factories and agriculture, specially in the North, where women were called in to replace men, and permanently expanded cultural norms about what women were capable of (pages 477 to 489).

Financial innovations

But arguably the most profound changes wrought by the Civil War – and certainly the most boring to read about – were the financial innovations it prompted.

To finance the war the northern government instituted the first ever federal income tax, on 5 August 1861. Taxes on other goods followed quickly under the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 which taxed ‘almost everything but the air northerners breathed’ (p.447) including liquor, tobacco and playing cards, carriages, yachts and billiard tables, taxes on newspaper adverts and patent medicines, licence taxes on virtually every profession, stamp taxes, taxes on the gross receipts of corporations, banks, insurance companies and the dividends or interest they paid investors.

The relationship of the American taxpayer to the government was never the same again.

This was accompanied by a Legal Tender Act of 1862 which issued, for the first time, a federal currency. Up to this point each of the states had had their own treasury and their own forms of payment. Now the Federal government set out to supersede all these with the green dollar bills it produced by the million. These soon became known as ‘greenbacks’ and endure to this day.

Having revolutionised the country’s monetary and tax structures, the 37th Congress (1861 to 1862) did the same for public land, higher education and railways.

McPherson shows how the economic dynamism of the north had been hampered and blocked for decades by southern states suspicious that every attempt to spread its free market, industrial culture was an attack on the South’s slave-based, agricultural economy.

Once the southern states seceded the Congress, now representing solely northern states, was set free to unleash its free market vision. A homestead act granted 160 acres of land to settlers who developed it for five years, underpinning the explosive expansion westwards.

A Vermont congressman developed a bill to make 30,000 acres of public land in each state available for the founding of further education, and especially agricultural colleges, establishing a network of institutions which ensured the most efficient exploitation of farmland by American farmers for generations to come.

And the Pacific Railroad Act granted land and money for a railway which eventually ran from Omaha to San Francisco. Much of the land dealing and speculation about the construction of this and later railways became notorious for corruption and sharp practices. But nonetheless the railways were built, connecting people, services and supplies across this vast continent.

Taken together these changes amounted to a ‘blueprint for modern America’, a:

new America of big business, heavy industry, and capital-intensive agriculture that surpassed Britain to become the foremost industrial nation by 1880 and became the world’s breadbasket for much of the twentieth century… (p.452)

The capitalists, labourers and farmers of the north and west superseded the plantation aristocracy of the South in the economic and political system, permanently remodelling America as a high-finance, industrialised, capitalist country.

Reconstruction

And this is the background to the idea of ‘Reconstruction’.

As in any war, the war aims of both sides changed over time. Initially most northern Democrats and many Republicans simply wanted the southern states to de-secede and return to the Union, more or less as they were.

But savvier radicals realised that there would have to be drastic changes in southern economy, culture and politics if the whole nation wasn’t simply to return to the permanently blocked political deadlocks of the decades which led up to the conflict.

Even slow-to-change Abe Lincoln realised that the South would have to be remade on the model of the industrialised, capitalist North. Having been devastated, economically, in terms of war dead, in terms of goods and assets destroyed, burned and bombed to bits, and having had the fundamental underpinning of its entire economic existence – slavery – abolished, the South would need to be entirely rebuilt from scratch.

This is what the term ‘Reconstruction’ came to mean and McPherson’s book comes to an abrupt stop just before it begins. His book ends with the end of the war, with the moving encounter between the old enemies as Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, and then Confederate troops came in and surrendered their weapons to their Union victors.

A short epilogue fleetingly references the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on 15 April 1865, the vast funeral, the flight of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and half a dozen other events which quickly followed in the wake of peace – but that’s it as far as McPherson’s account is concerned.

The whole enormous story of what came next:

the attempts to reconstruct the South and their long-term impact, in terms of poverty and ongoing racial prejudice
the conquest of the West and the so-called Indian Wars
the astonishing industrial and financial rise of the North until America was on a par with the mightiest European powers

remains to be told in the next book in the series of the Penguin history of America.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee (left) signs the terms of surrender to Union General Ulyses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, as painted by Tom Lovell in 1964

Confederate General Robert E. Lee (left) signs the terms of surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on 9 April 1865, as painted by Tom Lovell in 1964

Books & Boots

All posts tagged malaria

The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden (1998)

Giles Foden

The Last King: premise

Part 1

Ominousness

Part 2 (p.131)

The escape attempt

The Tanzanian invasion

Amin redux

Summary

Amazing

Zelig

Comparison with William Boyd

Wikipedia on Idi Amin

Africa words

Credit

Giles Foden reviews

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Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh (1934)

By sea to South America

Quick summary

To Kurupukari

To Kurupukari and beyond

Boa Vista

Three things

1. Waugh is easily Bored

2. Music

3. Waugh is no naturalist

The turning point

Highlights of the return journey

Calling the travel bluff, myths of travel (pages 114 to 116)

You feel free

You are untrammeled by convention

You have a hearty appetite and sleep the sleep of the blessed

River baths

Karasabai

Tipuru

Mikrapuru

Journey to the river

The Dickens connection

Credit

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Other travel books

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Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn (1992)

Frank McLynn

Brief history of exploration up to the European era

Pre-Napoleonic war explorers

Post-Napoleonic war explorers

General conclusions

A blizzard of names and dates

The African scene

Pitiful agriculture

Tsetse flies

Lack of pack animals

Hundreds of porters

Lack of roads

The perils of European exploration

No navigable rivers

Violent humans

Violent animals

Heat

Disease

Attrition rates

No profit

The great British explorers

Suppressing the slave trade

Later, non-British explorers

The end of exploration

Bad maps

African words

English words

Credit

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa