The Swahili coast 2

This is from Basil Davidson’s 1984 sweeping Channel 4 television series Africa: A Voyage of Discovery (from the third of its eight one-hour parts).

Davidson put African history on the map for laymen, including Africans. Is he still regarded highly? If not, is that because he has been superseded or because he was self-taught and a journalist and lacked any academic qualifications? Or is it a residue from a time when he must have seemed unsettlingly left-wing and when African history was not considered a real subject?

This blog should have recorded his death in 2010 at the age of ninety-five. Guardian obituary. Telegraph. Independent.

The Channel 4 series is all on YouTube, but not in one place and not in good recordings. There is no decent bibliography of him online. Many people will know his Lost Cities of Africa (1959), African Slave Trade (1961), Africa: History of a Continent (1966) and Time-Life book African Kingdoms (1966).

Swahili, or Kiswahili, is a Bantu language of the East African coast. It became the tongue of the urban class in the Great Lakes region and went on to serve as a post-colonial lingua franca in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Romans visited the coast in the first century. Arab traders had contact with the black coastal peoples from the sixth century CE or earlier. Islam reached the coast in the ninth century or earlier. There is cultural evidence of early Persian (or Arabo-Persian) settlement on Zanzibar from Shiraz. Swahili contains many Arabic and Persian loan words.

City-states – Muslim, cosmopolitan, and politically independent of each other – began to flourish along the coast and on the islands: Kilwa, Malindi, Gedi, Pate, Comoros, Zanzibar. They depended on trade from the Indian Ocean.

The Swahili acted as middlemen between Africa and the outside world. Slaves, ebony, gold, ivory and sandalwood were brought to the coasts and sold to Arab, Indian and Portuguese traders, who carried them to Arabia, Persia, Madagascar, India, China, Europe. Many slaves sold in Zanzibar ended up in Brazil.

Zanzibar grew spices: cinnamon and cardamom were introduced from Asia (when?), chilli and cacao were brought by the Portuguese from South America. When were cloves introduced? Were spices sent mainly to Europe or also to Asia?

How Arab were the ruling classes? How much of the Indian Ocean sailing was done by black Africans? Is there evidence for the arrival of black traders in China? Wikipedia on Chinese in the Indian Ocean and in Africa.

The sultanates began to decline in the sixteenth century, as Portuguese influence grew. The Portuguese in turn were threatened by Omanis, who controlled Zanzibar from 1698 until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British started to interfere. They were in turn followed by Germans.

Commerce between Africa and Asia via the Indian Ocean declined, but some of the dhow trade survived when Davidson made his film. Swahili fishermen still sell fish to their inland neighbours in exchange for products of the interior.

The earliest known documents written in Swahili are letters written in Kilwa in 1711 in the Arabic script. They were sent to the Portuguese of Mozambique and their local allies. They are preserved in the Historical Archives of Goa. Another document in Arabic script is Utendi wa Tambuka (The History of Tambuka), an epic poem from 1728, written in Pate, about wars between Byzantium and Muslims from 628 to 1453. The Latin script was used later, under the influence of European colonial powers.

The Swahili coast

Map at Nairaland Forum and elsewhere. Click for better resolution.

From Somalia to Mozambique. Wikipedia list of settlements:

Lamu

Malindi

Mombasa

Tanga

Pangani

Bagamoyo

Pemba

Zanzibar

Dar es Salaam

Mafia

Kilwa

Comoros

Mayotte

Sofala

Quelimane

Brazil and Africa

Another west and east. A friend of mine, who worked in Lagos and then Rio, said:

“Africa is a fine claret, Brazil a gaudy cocktail.”

The Ethiopian monkey-zone

Gelada grazing

Man seems to be able to live in a wider range of climates than any of the other primates. If you traverse one of the canons that have been carved deep into the soft volcanic soil of Ethiopia, you descend from the temperate surface of the plateau to a level at which the canon is habitable for monkeys; but, before you reach the bottom, you leave the monkey’s habitat behind. You descend to a depth at which the canon is too hot to hold monkeys; but there is no altitude, from temperate plateau to tropical river-bed, at which Ethiopia is not habitable for Man.

What species is he noticing? Ethiopia’s most famous monkeys are geladas, which live at high altitudes in the Ethiopian Highlands. They only sleep lower down. How much lower? Was he seeing them as he descended into the canyons in the early morning? And why are there normally no monkeys in temperate climates? Wikipedia:

“Geladas are found only in the high grassland of the deep gorges of the central Ethiopian plateau. They live in elevations 1,800-4,400 m asl [above sea level], using the cliffs for sleeping and montane grasslands for foraging. These grasslands have greatly spaced trees and also contain bushes and dense thickets. The highland areas where they live tend to be cooler and less arid than lowlands areas. [...] Geladas are the only primates that are primarily graminivores and grazers – grass blades make up to 90% of their diet. [...] At night, they sleep on the ledges of cliffs. At sunrise, they leave the cliffs and travel to the tops of the plateaus to feed and socialize. When morning ends, social activities tend to wane and the geladas primarily focus on foraging. They will travel during this time, as well. When evening arrives, geladas exhibit more social activities before descending to the cliffs to sleep.”

The highest peak is Ras Dashen, at 4,500 metres.

In another book, he describes a journey from Gondar to Aksum in the far north, in early 1964, crossing the Tekezé Gorge – and, I think, the Semien mountains (any connection with simian?), where gelada live in particularly large numbers. Gondar was an Ethiopian imperial capital from 1635 until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Kingdom of Aksum emerged as a power in the first century and lasted for a thousand years. It was never conquered by Moslems.

The Kingdom of Aksum, in the northern part of present-day Ethiopia, had been converted to Christianity about half way through the fourth century. In the sixth century, Aksum, like Nubia, adopted Monophysitism, and the East Roman Imperial Government had to acquiesce. Aksum commanded the sea-route between Egypt and India, and its ruler was in a position to intervene in the Yemen in the Roman Empire’s interest. Constantinople could not afford politically to quarrel with Aksum over a theological issue.

Ethiopian Christianity is now predominantly Oriental Orthodox, which is quasi-Monophysite.

The road, which has kept more or less on one level so far, now gives way, without warning, beneath our wheels. The plateau breaks off short, and the road zigzags down the side of an apparently bottomless ravine. The descent is so steep that the sections of the road immediately below us are out of sight. Down we go and down and down again. A few more twists and turns and we have entered the monkey-zone. At our approach, these amusing creatures leap over the parapet with their children on their backs and hurl themselves into the abyss – a less formidable ordeal for them than coming to close quarters with their human cousins. A few more twists and turns, and the monkey zone has been left behind us and above us. Monkeys seem to be less adaptable than human beings are to differences of climate. The plateau is too chilly for them; the bottoms of the gorges are too torrid. Only human beings can make themselves at home in both these climates, and in the monkey-zone as well.

Gelada family (is the old one on the way to going grey?); sleeping on a cliff

White gibbons

Mankind and Mother Earth, OUP, 1976, posthumous (first two passages)

Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965 (final passage)

Colonial Film

“Welcome to Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire. This website holds detailed information on over 6000 films showing images of life in the British colonies. Over 150 films are available for viewing online. You can search or browse for films by country, date, topic, or keyword. Over 350 of the most important films in the catalogue are presented with extensive critical notes written by our academic research team.

The Colonial Film project united universities (Birkbeck and University College London) and archives (British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum and the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum) to create a new catalogue of films relating to the British Empire. The ambition of this website is to allow both colonizers and colonized to understand better the truths of Empire.”

African thing jokes

“Finn pushed back his chair. He spoke slowly.

‘Borrit told me when he was serving in the Gold Coast, one of the Africans said to him: “What is it white men write at their desks all day?”’”

Anthony Powell, The Military Philosophers, 1968. Ninth novel in A Dance to the Music of Time.

___

“My address book blew out of the window.”

Ghanaian c 1979 to a friend of mine, explaining why he did not turn up for something.

___

“Here is the minibar. Here is the remote control. Here is the safe. Here is the bathroom. And here is the machine for warming up your hair.”

A bellboy in Tanzania c 1999 to another friend of mine.

___

“Where was this Google all this time?”

William Kamkwamba (post here), the Malawian who built an electricity-generating windmill for his village without help from the Internet, on first being told about search engines. As told to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, 2009.

___

The friend who went to Tanzania said: “It wasn’t a joke. It was genuinely meant. That was his actual comprehension of what whites do with their hair, which makes it a better anecdote.” I replied: “He was working in a hotel and must have got the idea, no? Anyway, some African women use hairdryers. I don’t think it becomes less of an anecdote if you attribute just a bit of conscious humour.” He wrote back: “I do. It loses his charm and makes him appear wiley. Besides, as a joke it’s not that funny.”

I think I am right. His interpretation makes the chap sound naïve. That would kill the charm in a different way. (We are already in dangerous territory in looking for a common type of quaint humour in different parts of a continent. Africa is bigger than the US, China including Tibet, and the whole of Europe combined.) Even the man who lost his address book didn’t, in his heart of hearts, expect anyone to believe such a ridiculous story, though he told it in a deadpan way. And the Gold Coast man’s question is a good one. I ask it when I wonder why I am paid as much as I am to hit plastic squares in a certain order.

The humour is an infinitely gentle, barely conscious, postcolonial irony, a mock-naïveté about Western things. Offices, address books, hairdryers, search engines.

Plus ultra!

In A.D. 1952 [...] the feat that had to be performed by Western navigators on the face of the waters of History was to pilot their vessel, without disaster, through perilous straits in the hope of making their way into more open waters beyond; and in this post-Christian Odyssey there was more than one passage to be negotiated and more than one kind of ordeal to be faced.

To paraphrase and anticipate, sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: abjuring war without sinking into consumerism.

Sailing between the Pillars of Hercules: negotiating a spiritual passage between a Christian heresy, Communism, on one shore and a backward-looking Christian orthodoxy on the other.

In terms of our Mediterranean maritime simile, we may compare the social and spiritual enterprise to which these Western adventurers were committed in the twentieth century of the Christian Era with the navigational task confronting Hellenic mariners in the sixth century B.C. who had bidden farewell to their Ionian homeland and had set sail westward rather than submit to the alien dominion of un-Hellenic-minded Achaemenidae. Following in Odysseus’ wake, these Phocaean seafarers would have first to negotiate the straits between Sicily and Italy without approaching either an Italian shore where they would be pounced upon by the monster Scylla or a Sicilian shore where they would be engulfed by the whirlpool Charybdis; but, if, by managing to steer their course along the narrow fairway through this first danger-zone, they should succeed in making the friendly port of Marseilles, they would not there find themselves at rest in the haven where they would be; [footnote: Ps. cvii. 30.] for their bold and skilful negotiation of the Straits of Messina would merely have carried them from the inner basin into the outer basin of the Mediterranean, without having liberated them from the imprisoning shores of their landlocked native sea.

I’m not sure why the open waters of the Atlantic would have been a haven for them. Nor did the Persians reach the outer basin. But the speculation is half-fanciful. Rather than submit to Persian rule, the Phocaeans, or some of them, had abandoned Ionia. Where did they sail to, in fact? Some, perhaps, to Chios, some to Phocaean colonies on Corsica and elsewhere. Massalia or Massilia, Marseille (Marseilles, the English sometimes call it), was an existing Phocaean colony: it was an independent Greek city from 600 BC until Caesar conquered it in 49 BC. Some became the founders of Elea, or Velia, in Campania. Some eventually returned to Phocaea.

What were the actual political dangers of Scylla and Charybdis? The straits were controlled by Greeks (Messenians, at least on the Calabrian side), not Carthaginians.

If they were to reach the boundless waters of a globe-encompassing Ocean, these voyagers must put to sea again from the sheltering harbour of their mother country’s daughter city in order to make for the Straits of Gibraltar between the Pillars of Hercules, where this pair of menacing mountains, towering above the African and the European shore and threatening, from either flank, to fall upon any ship audacious enough to run the gauntlet without their leave, were visible embodiments of Imperial Carthage’s decree that no Hellenic vessel was ever to sail on through this golden gate leading out from the landlocked waters into the main.

Since Carthage controlled both sides of the straits, such a decree would not be surprising, but what source tells us that it was made? Were the Carthaginians in part protecting access to Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, the Azores? Some of these islands must have lain behind the tradition of the Hesperides, which Hercules had visited.

A Phoenician fleet had circumnavigated Africa by about 600 BC in the other direction. Herodotus describes how the Pharaoh Necho II sent out an expedition manned by Phoenician sailors. They sailed out of the Red Sea, rounded the Cape, and headed north to the Mediterranean. They paused on the African coast in two successive years to sow and harvest grain, and reached Egypt in the course of the third year.

A Carthaginian, Hanno, probably early in the 5th century BC, sailed to the Bight of Bonny, probably as far as Sherbro Island off Sierra Leone or Cape Palmas off Liberia. An account of his periplus was engraved in Punic on a bronze tablet set up in the temple of Baal at Carthage. It was translated into Greek. The translation survives, and is the only piece of Carthaginian literature we have. His account was used by Ptolemy and remained the standard guide for seafarers until the Portuguese explorations of the 15th century.

We have fragmentary evidence that a certain Euthymenes of Massalia sailed down the west coast of Africa as far as a river which was infested with crocodiles and whose waters were driven back by strong sea breezes. He thought that this river was the Nile. It may have been the Senegal River. We are not sure what century Euthymenes lived in, but there is a statue of him on the façade of the Marseille bourse.

Pytheas sailed from Massalia past the Pillars of Hercules to northern Europe, including Britain, c 325 BC. (The odd thing is that Queen Elizabeth II has never visited Greece.)

Polybius passed them after Carthage had been destroyed. Pliny the Elder tells us that he sailed down the west coast of Africa c 146 BC in ships lent to him by the destroyer, Scipio Aemilianus. He may have seen Mount Kakulima in Guinea.

So the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and presumably Persians were aware that Africa was surrounded by sea except where it was connected to Asia. Bartolomeu Dias sailed round the Cape in 1488. Vasco da Gama sailed round most of Africa in 1497-98 on his way to India.

And here woe betide the Hellenic mariner who allowed himself [if he wanted to reach his haven] to be intimidated by his adversary’s veto into following the Theban Pindar’s poor-spirited advice to his Agrigentine patron Thêrôn.

“And now Thêrôn’s achievements have carried him to the limit: they have brought him to the Pillars of Hercules on his long voyage from home; and what lies beyond this terminus is out of bounds (ἂβατον) for all men, wise or witless. I will not pursue this venture. I should deserve to lose my senses if I did this senseless thing!” [Footnote: Pindar: Odes in Honour of Victors in the Olympic Games, Ode iii, ll. 43-45.]

Theron had reached a metaphorical Pillars of Hercules by his unsurpassable excellence in the Olympic chariot race in 476 BC.

Ne plus ultra! These were the very words that a forbidding Carthaginian statesmanship had been intending to extort from defeatist Hellenic lips; and, so long as this self-imposed Hellenic psychological inhibition held, no Hellenic explorer would ever sail on to test the truth of a later poet’s intuition that the untried passage of the Ocean would prove to be the avenue to a New World. [Footnote: Seneca: Medea, ll. 364-79 [...].] More than two thousand years were to pass before Columbus’s victorious defiance of the veto once imposed by a jealous Carthage was to be commemorated, in the device of “the dollar sign”, by the first sovereign on whose globe-encircling dominions the Sun could never set. On coins minted for Charles V out of American bullion, the antistrophic words Plus ultra! were triumphantly inscribed on a scroll displayed behind the minatory pair of pillars; and the moral was one which a twentieth-century Odysseus ought to take to heart if this series of episodes in the history of the art of navigation was an apt parable of the spiritual voyage on which his sails were set.

According to a Renaissance tradition, the pillars had been inscribed with the words Ne plus ultra as a warning to sailors and navigators to go no further. There is no version of the phrase in Greek.

Luigi Marliano, doctor and advisor to the young King of Spain, proposed Plus Oultre for his motto as an encouragement to ignore the ancient warnings, take risks. (The OED can find no example of the phrase Ne plus ultra from before 1637, but that means in English sources.)

Plus ultra is on the present Spanish coat of arms as an inscription on a banner linking two pillars. Its history between Charles V and now includes use thus on the Spanish dollar (current in the Spanish Empire 1497-19th century; the main currency within Spain was the real). The Spanish dollar was contemporary with the German Thaler and was the basis of the American dollar.

The wrapped pillars do not appear on US dollars, but may be the origin of the US dollar sign.

Future post: global histories of anna, cent, centime, crown, cruzado, cruzeiro, denarius, dinar, dollar, drachma, escudo, florin, franc, Groschen, guinea, gulden, Kreuzer, krone, lira, livre, Mark, penny, peseta, peso, pfennig, piastre, pound, real, rial, ruble, rupee, Schilling, shekel, shilling, solidus, sovereign, talent, Thaler, zloty.

In the interpretation of this parable in terms of the Western Civilization’s prospects, the finding of a passage between Scylla and Charybdis signified the negotiation of the Western World’s immediate problem of finding some way of avoiding self-destruction without falling into self-stultification. Mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western Society was in imminent danger of destroying itself by failing to stop making War now that a demonic drive had been put into War by the progress of a Western physical science; and it was in hardly less imminent danger of stultifying itself by seeking asylum from War and Class-Conflict in Circe’s pig-sty. If post-Christian Western souls did succeed in threading their way between these two immediate perils, they would owe their happy issue out of this affliction to an inspiration to take Religion as the mark on which they were once more to set their course; but an impulse to return to Religion would not in itself suffice to bring the Western pilgrims’ ships out of inland waters into open sea; for the call of Religion was being uttered in diverse tongues; [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 28.] and the questions to which the agnostic Western pioneer in search of a Christian oracle would have, at his own peril, to find an answer for himself, were:

“Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? … Have all the gifts of healing? … Do all interpret?” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 29-30.]

In this spiritual ordeal the forbidding Pillars of Hercules were a pair of rival authoritarian and dogmatic faiths, both of which alike were offering to the storm-tossed voyager an everlasting Nirvāna in their stony bosoms and were threatening him with the eternal punishment that had been inflicted on the Flying Dutchman if he were to be so impious and so fool-hardy as to reject their offer and sail on past them out into the blue. From the one shore this ultimatum was being delivered to Western souls by a Christian heresy in which the stone of Communism had been substituted for the bread [footnote: Matt. vii. 9; Luke xi. 11.] of the Gospel, and from the other shore by a Christian Orthodoxy in which the body of Christ, [footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 27; Eph. iv. 12.] who had “come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly”, [footnote: John x. 10.] had been petrified into a pillar of salt [footnote: Gen. xix. 26.] by a backward-looking ecclesiastical tradition. To dare the passage between these two frowning Pillars of Hercules was a venture that might daunt even a mariner whose moral had been fortified by a previous success in making his way safely between Scylla and Charybdis. But, if, at this supremely critical point in his voyage, the pilgrim were to feel his heart failing, he might recover his courage and initiative by taking his oracle from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:

“Covet earnestly the best gifts; and yet show I unto you a more excellent way.” [Footnote: 1 Cor. xii. 31.]

OED defines petrify as “turn (an organic body) into a stony concretion by gradually replacing its original substance with a calcareous, siliceous, or other mineral deposit”, which I suppose makes “petrify into a pillar of salt” not quite a mixed metaphor.

If a contrite humility was the first of the Christian virtues that were necessary for the Western pilgrim’s salvation, an indomitable endurance was the second. What was required of him at this hour was to hold on his course and to trust in God’s grace; and, if he prayed God to grant him a pilot for the perilous passage, he would find the bodhisattva [in the Mahayana, an enlightened being who has voluntarily delayed his entry into Nirvana in order to help his suffering fellow-beings] psychopompus [conductor of souls through the underworld] whom he was seeking in a Francesco Bernardone of Assisi, who was the most god-like soul that had been born into the Western World so far. A disciple of Saint Francis who followed faithfully enough in the saint’s footsteps to participate in the saint’s gift of receiving Christ’s stigmata would know, with the knowledge that comes only through suffering, that his sacrifice had been accepted by the Lord. [Footnote: Gen. iv. 3-7.] Asperges me hyssopo et mundabor. [Footnote: Ps. l. 9, in the Vulgate Latin text, Ps. li. 7, in the English Authorized Version.]

Seville Town Hall (Ayuntamiento), reign of Charles V

A footnote after “minatory pair of pillars” advises us to

See Raymond, Wayte: The Silver Dollars of North and South America (New York 1939, Wayte Raymond, Inc.) for photographs of dollars coined for the Spanish Crown, over a series of reigns ranging from Charles V’s (regnabat A.D. 1516-56) to the break-up of the Spanish Empire of the Indies in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, which display the pair of pillars with the motto Plus ultra. On 46 of the 67 specimens (not counting “necessity coins” [small mintings of little value]) of “pillar type” coins here reproduced, including the earliest in the series, Charles V’s coin from Santo Domingo (p. 18, No. 1), the two words are inscribed on a single scroll linking the pillars (and passing behind an heraldic shield inserted between the pillars on coins of this type minted for the Bourbons). On fifteen specimens, each of the two pillars is wreathed in a separate scroll of its own, with “Plus” inscribed on the left-hand scroll and “Ultra” on the right-hand scroll. On six specimens, including Philip II’s dollar minted in Peru (reproduced in Supplement, p. 3, No. A 1), the motto is inscribed behind or above the pillars without being mounted on a scroll.

A Study of History, Vol IX, OUP, 1954

Africa’s “Agitators”

Belated plug for my cousin’s large book on anti-colonialism in Africa and the West between the wars. C Hurst, 2008.

Amazon: “In this compelling history, Jonathan Derrick recounts the opposition to British and French rule practised both by Africans living on the continent and by European anticolonialists and members of the Black Diaspora. He covers campaigns waged by an early incarnation of the ANC and other groups in South Africa who fought against legal and other aspects of white minority rule. He also analyses the Kikuyu protests against the settler regime in Kenya; Marcus Garvey’s African American movement and its role in sparking interest in Africa; the Étoile Nord-Africaine, formed mainly by Algerians in France, that called for the independence of French North Africa; protests led by European critics against forced labor in Kenya and French Equatorial Africa; and the activity of small militant groups like the Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (LDRN) in France and George Padmore’s International African Service Bureau (IASB) in Britain. Derrick also examines the role of the Comintern and Western Communist parties that were opposed to Western colonialism and ready to support militant action against it. He shows that, although colonial rulers greatly feared the specter of Communism in Africa, actual Communist activity was in fact quite small. The onset of the Second World War pushed colonial issues to the background, but as Derrick argues, in the long term the anticolonialists of the interwar era helped pave the way for later decolonisation.”

Order.

Timbuktu

Attack on the Sufi Sidi Yahia mosque in Mali. Sufis venerate saints. Salafi fundamentalists don’t like that. This is something like the destruction of the sixth-century Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001.

Timbuktu was an important centre of Islamic learning from the 13th to the 17th centuries. The city played a major role in spreading Islam in West Africa. As somebody has said, Mali is threatening to become the Afghanistan of Africa.

BBC slide show. BBC radio’s The World Tonight has a segment on this today, starting 34 minutes in.

Critical Muslim

Newish Granta-format quarterly published by the UK-based Muslim Institute.

Editors: Ziauddin Sardar and Robin Yassin-Kassab.

International advisory board: Karen Armstrong, William Dalrymple, Anwar Ibrahim, Arif Mohammad Khan, Bruce Lawrence, Ebrahim Moosa, Ashis Nandy.

I worried about the title at first, but I suppose the implication is fair.

Issue 1: The Arabs Are Alive

Issue 2: The Idea of Islam

Issue 3: Fear and Loathing

Issue 4: forthcoming on Pakistan

Subscribe

The White Man’s Burden

“Take up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
The savage wars of peace –
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper –
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard –
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: –
‘Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?’

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Ye dare not stoop to less –
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
Have done with childish days –
The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!”

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Kipling. See last post but one, including first comment. The Times, February 4 1899; Wikipedia says McClure’s magazine with no exact date; The Five Nations (1903). The text here is from The Five Nations.

“To veil the threat of terror.” That word already.

Very light soil

The nineteenth-century diplomatists’ idea of a desert was that it was a region of no economic or political value because it was incapable of supporting life. Accordingly, while they were prepared to haggle, and, in the last resort, to go to war, over a few square metres in Alsace or Oregon, they amicably partitioned the Arabian Desert and the African Sahara by blithely drawing straight lines of enormous length across small-scale maps. In this cavalier way they disposed of the sovereignty over vast areas which, in the atlases of the day, were the “perfect and absolute blank” commended as the ideal kind of map by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. During the late-nineteenth century partition of Africa between European states there was an occasion on which Lord Salisbury – under fire in the House of Commons at Westminster for having acquiesced in the annexation of startling numbers of African square kilometres by France – made the celebrated reply that most of this territory that he had let slip [in essence, Niger] was “very light soil”. Some of it, however, was the soil under which the French oil-prospectors have recently discovered what they believe to be rich oil-bearing strata; and the time has long ago passed when diplomatists negotiating international frontiers in either the Sahara or Arabia were carefree. The desert-girt Buraymi oasis is at this moment an object of acrimonious dispute between the governments of Saʿudi Arabia and Great Britain. The “idea formed” of a desert has in fact been transformed – in regions in which deserts overlie an oil-bearing subsoil – by the late-nineteenth century discovery of the economic value of mineral oil and the twentieth-century development of techniques for tapping it at ever greater depths below surface-level. The Arabian desert is just as inhospitable to life today as it ever was, yet it has now become a key part of the environment of the peoples of Western Europe.

In the agreement of 1890, the town of Say, in southwest Niger, was taken as the western end of an imaginary line which ran eastward to Barrua on Lake Chad. This is roughly the border between Nigeria and Niger. The “light soil” of the Sahara was recognised as French.

Niger has oil, but if you look at all the countries which once formed the colonial federation of French West Africa (1895-1960) – Mauritania, Mali (French Sudan), Niger, Senegal, Guinea (French Guinea), Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso (Upper Volta), Benin (Dahomey) – none, even today, whether of light or heavy soil, is a significant producer. In 1890, the industrialised world was getting its oil from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Azerbaijan, the US, Canada, not yet from Iran or Iraq, much less from the area now comprising the GCC.

The Buraymi oasis, or Al Buraimi, is in Oman, at the border with Abu Dhabi. The dispute arose from Saudi Arabia’s claim, first made in 1949, of sovereignty over a large part of Abu Dhabi where oil was suspected to be present and an area in a 20-mile circle around Buraymi. Both Oman and the Trucial States were British protectorates.

The Saudi claim was backed by the American oil company Aramco. In 1952 a small group of Saudi Arabian guards crossed Abu Dhabi and occupied Hamasa, one of three Omani villages in the oasis. The Sultan of Muscat and Imam of Oman gathered their forces to expel them but were persuaded by the British, who were no doubt under American pressure, to exercise restraint.

On July 30 1954, it was agreed to refer the dispute to international arbitration. Saudi Arabia began a campaign of bribery to obtain declarations of tribal loyalty. It even extended to Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan, the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi (he overthrew him in 1966), who is said to have turned down an offer of $20 million. In 1955 arbitration proceedings began in Geneva. They collapsed when the British abitrator, Sir Reader Bullard, objected to Saudi attempts to influence the tribunal. A few weeks later, the Saudi party was forcibly ejected from Hamasa by the Trucial Oman Levies (later known as the Trucial Oman Scouts), a British-backed force based in Sharjah (Trucial States), taken to Sharjah and dispatched to Saudi Arabia by sea. The dispute rumbled on and was settled in 1974 by an agreement, known as the Treaty of Jeddah, between Sheikh Zayed (then President of the UAE) and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia.

1961, Lance Corporal (later General) Saif Bin Mubarak sends morse code on a Trucial Oman Scouts dhow; Flickr credit: laponik

A Study of History, Vol XII: Reconsiderations, OUP, 1961

Mount Kenya

Good Friday

And some Easter sheep

Missa Luba

Arranged by Father Guido Haazen, 1958 or earlier. Recorded 1965.

I suppose one should dedicate an Easter hearing to Fabrice Muamba.

The story of a priest

… Anthony Musaala, a household name in Uganda, and a friend of mine. From connectuganda.com.

“I was born on June 25, 1956 in Dublin, Ireland. My father was Paul Musaala, a well known lawyer in Kampala, and my mother was Josephine Namakula.

My parents went to Ireland in 1954 and I was born two years later. My father went to study law there. So the first two years of my life were spent in Dublin and then for the next seven years my parents moved to London.

The first school I attended was run by nuns in Bridport, Dorset, in South West England. I came to Uganda in 1964; I did not speak Luganda and I didn’t know anything about Uganda. I attended Nakasero Primary School and that is where I began to sing.

As soon as I joined the school, I joined the choir at the age of eight and a half.

In those days there were very few Africans in the school. When I look at the pictures, I see there were only three blacks in my class.

There were no African teachers in the school in 1964 and 1965. They were all white.

In 1967 I was selected to sing in a musical play called Carousel which was being performed at the National Theatre. That was the first time I went on stage, with a group called Kampala Amateur Theatrical Society (KATS). I was the only African in the whole cast of the play.

In the audience, there happened to be the assistant headmaster of Savio School (Kisubi). When he saw me on stage, afterwards he came and said, ‘we want to offer you a place in our school because you are a good singer’. So in 1968, I went to Savio School because of singing.

I passed P.7 and went to SMACK – St. Mary’s College Kisubi.

At St. Mary’s, I immediately joined the junior choir. We had guitars, drums; we already had bidongo [pop: I am finding it hard to get a more precise definition]. It was very good for me as a child because the mass became interesting. And also, people think the Catholic Church has been boring for a long time, but before the balokole came, we already had bidongo in 1969.

I say that because people think I brought a revolution in the Church, but I am only doing what I saw in a Catholic School – SMACK – in 1969.

Now, these were my adolescent years and I was in rebellion to parents and authority. I was discovering myself. I loved school so much not because of studies but because of the friends.

Although I was very intelligent, I was often at the bottom of the class and after Senior Two, they did not promote me to Senior Three. I was very unhappy and I ran away from SMACK and joined East African Railways Training School in Nairobi at the age of 15 without my parents’ permission.

I went to train as a railway mechanic. I applied by myself and then sat an interview at Kampala Railway Station (that time we had East African Railways).

I passed, they sent me a ticket, I got on the train and went.

I just told my mother that ‘I am going to Nairobi today at 4 p.m.’.

She said ‘what?’ But I was a very determined person. If I said I was going to do something, nobody could stop me. I was in Nairobi for three months and my father wrote a letter to the [railway] principal saying he would sue him for kidnapping his son (me) – he was a lawyer, you know. So the principal sent me back to Uganda on the train.

My father took me to St. Charles Lwanga Kasasa. Since I had been expelled from SMACK , they could not take me back. At Kasasa, I lasted one year and we had a strike over food, then I was expelled. My father was very angry with me and sent me away from home.

I boarded a bus to Arua where my mother was working. My mother had separated from my father and I went to live with her. I did Senior Four at a school called St. Charles Lwanga in Koboko. I managed to pass and I was sent to Mvara S.S.S in Arua town, but I did not like the school.

Eventually I managed to get myself expelled after one term. My father said, ‘Oh, it is you again! You have been expelled again?’

I said ‘yes’, and he told me to work in his office at plot 14 William Street as a clerk. That was 1974. I was 18 years old. I was very disappointed in myself. My brothers and sisters were in school and I was seated in an office. Amin was killing people, there were roadblocks everywhere.

One day I woke up and said, ‘I am going to leave Uganda.’ I took some money from the office and boarded a train to Nairobi. I knew I had a cousin there. But it took me a week to find her and I slept at a police station until I found my cousin. There was a kind policeman who saw this boy coming with a suitcase from Uganda and said, ‘you can come and sleep on this bench.’ I later got a job working in a shoe shop. After two years in Nairobi, in 1976, I went to London.

You see, I discovered that having been born in the Republic of Ireland, I was entitled to Irish nationality. So I went to the Irish Embassy in Nairobi armed with my birth certificate and said, ‘I am your citizen; give me a passport please.’ It was so simple. They said, ‘do you have any one to guarantee …?’ Within two days, I had an Irish passport. Then some friends did a harambee (fund-raising) and I was off to London at the age of 20. I said to myself, ‘I will never come back to Africa.’ It was like I was going to the promised land.

I arrived in London and worked at London Tara Hotel in Kensington, washing plates – kyeyo. They were paying me about £5, but at that time it was a lot of money. I did various jobs from 1976 to 1981. I worked as a swimming pool attendant, in a bakery, as a travel agent.

Life was very good in London. Those were the years when discos were starting and I became a disco addict. I used to go to the disco every single night without fail.

I would go to bed at 3 a.m. and wake up to go to work at 7 a.m. The discos were very exciting. That was my entertainment.

I was a total pagan. I never went to church. I was enjoying life. I travelled to America, Russia, France, Spain, Nigeria, Ghana, Holland, Denmark … I was working for a travel agency – AfroAsian Travel – so I used to get free tickets. Every year I used to come to Nairobi but would never come to Uganda.

For me Uganda had bad memories – because of Amin and because of the poor relationship with my father. And for five years after I left, I did not even speak to my father. But it did not bother me at all. I think it was this feeling that ‘I am now a free person to enjoy life. Those people are old; they are there with their problems in Africa. Me I am a muzungu.’ I had this passport, and freedom, and money.

Those were interesting years of my life because I was exposed to so many experiences. I was able to see what good life was, as far as the world is concerned.

Now in 1981, out of the blue, I began to experience a depression; to feel empty; bored, sad that life had no meaning. I was only 25, but I felt like an old man. Like I had done everything in life and now there was nothing more to do. I had dined, partied, had girlfriends and travelled; I met very wealthy people and poor people. It was like ‘is there anything left to do now?’

I did not have any ambition. The people I was working with in office wanted to study more, get promoted, and for me I was content, as long I had money.

So I had a crisis of existence: What am I doing? Why was I created? Is this all there is to life? I couldn’t find the answers in London.

So towards the end of 1981, I visited Nairobi on a holiday and met a Catholic religious brother called Br. Richard Tamale (RIP) at the New Stanley Hotel. We had been at Savio School together and I had not seen him since 1968.

I found it very challenging that this guy, with whom I had been friends, had become a brother and was now looking very holy. His whole life had a meaning and a purpose. And that is what made me feel that may be there was something I had not done yet. I began to hang out with this guy; he took me to their house and I watched him closely.

They were called the Marianist Brothers and they were working in slums. They were working with the poor; they lived in community, and they had joy. I said that whatever they had, I wanted to have. Gradually, I began to experience the love of God. They accepted me as I was; nobody told me ‘get saved’ or something like that. I started to pray again. I had not prayed in I don’t know how many years. And this depression, this sadness, started to drift away. I began to feel a deep happiness.

After about six months with these brothers (I did not go back to London), I joined a brotherhood called the Benedictine Brothers and they gave me a name, Brother Michael (when you join, they give you a different name). That was 1982. I went through the stages of formation and in 1984, I took my vows of chastity, poverty, obedience and stability. I became a brother.

In the same year that I took my vows, I came into conflict with members of the community because I had so many ideas about being a Christian and a brother. But the community I was with was very traditional and I felt there was more that could be done.

I appeared to them like I was radical. I took my vows in February and in May, they asked me to leave.

It was not upsetting; it was traumatic. I was 28. I felt betrayed by God, by myself. I really went through the biggest internal suffering of my life because I had left the world to join this community and now I was being told to go back to the world. I was totally devastated. I remember telling God, ‘… I left London and came looking for you, now I have been chased out. I am going back to London, I will make more money, become rich and I will be very happy.’

But before leaving, I hung around for about one year. I tried to negotiate with the people who had expelled me from the monastery, but it did not work out. That was also when I started a project with youths in the slums.

I rented a mud-house in Kitui-Majengo slum in Nairobi. This was an area where people were smoking marijuana, but I used to gather youths in my small house and we used to sing. I had a small keyboard. I wanted to know what it meant to be totally poor and to have solidarity with poor people.

One of the youths could curve gourds which we would sell to tourists in town. We would spend the evenings singing.

It was very challenging. I became very sick there. You sleep on the ground and fleas bite you. I grew very thin, almost like a reed.

After one year, I said ‘if I don’t get out of this place I am going to die.’ I wrote to friends and they sent me a ticket, and that is how I went back to London in 1985.

On arriving in London, I got my job back in the travel agency. I had kept on good terms with the manager and she said: ‘why not? come back. We even don’t know why you left in the first place.’ I worked for about six months and I tried to go back to my former life; the friends I had been with, the discos I used to go to, travelling around, buying clothes.

And once again, I had this experience of total emptiness. And you see this is something you can’t talk to anyone about. They will say, ‘what is wrong with this person?’ So I ended up going for a retreat to talk to a priest. I told this priest that ‘my life is a failure. I am so confused. I have tried everything and I am so miserable …’

The priest told me that the Catholic Church was looking for people of African background to be priests. He advised me to tell my story to the Archbishop of London and that is how I met Cardinal Basil Hume in the middle of 1986. I told this Cardinal everything; I was very honest with him, and he said: ‘It is not the end. Have you ever thought of becoming a priest?’ I said ‘no; I wanted to be a brother and I failed.’

He said, ‘I would like you to think about becoming a priest. I am going to send you to my seminary and if after one year, you don’t like it, feel free to leave’. I said ‘okay.’

But remember I had not completed A-level, and I told him so. But he said, ‘you go and the Lord will help you.’ I was admitted to the seminary to begin studying philosophy. I was there like on probation because they wanted to see if I could cope with the studies, but I was also there for myself – to see if I wanted to continue. At the end of the year, I passed very well. I did the second year.

In the first year, I started composing music for worship. One of the first songs was called You Will Find Me There. I was leading the choir in the seminary and I was able to develop my music skills.

To rewind a bit, during the time I went to the discos in the late 70s, I had decided to compose because I wanted to be a pop star. I composed two songs; one of them was called Dog in a Disco. The other was called Some Things. You see, there were these talent shows in pubs and I used to go there and sing. People used to clap and say, ‘wow, you are good!’ But I never followed it up. When I went to the seminary, I wrote so many songs. I could fill another 10 albums without adding any new compositions.

So, I went through the priest formation for eight years and was ordained in 1994. I asked Cardinal Hume for permission to be ordained in Uganda because my mother was here, my relatives were here and it would have been expensive to transport them to London. He sent a letter to Cardinal Wamala and he agreed to ordain me here.

Many of my friends came from England to witness my ordination at Lubaga. The ceremony was also attended by my mother’s family and my ex-teachers from Kisubi. Some of them came to see if it was really true that Musaala was becoming a Catholic priest. It was like nobody could believe it. I think they said, ‘if Musaala can become a priest, God is there! There is hope for all of us.’

I went back to London and worked for two years, after which I began to feel a strong desire to come to live in Uganda. What I realised is that we don’t plan our lives. I am the person who had said, ‘I will never come back to Uganda’ and now I am working in London and want to come to Uganda!

Of course things had been so bad under Amin. Now Museveni had taken power, things were getting better. I felt I wanted to be part of the new Uganda. I wanted to come home and make my contribution.

So I shared this thought with my Bishop and he was very disappointed. He said look, ‘we ordained you because we are looking for black priests. We have invested in you and now you say you are going to Uganda?’

So Cardinal Hume was not happy; but in the end he let me return. However, he said, ‘it is a great loss to our diocese. We needed you to be a priest here; maybe you would have become a very senior priest; who knows what God had in stock for you here?’

Cardinal Hume really loved me. He saw many things in me and now I was telling him ‘bye’. I was hearing something telling me ‘go home’. And I really struggled with it. I prayed about it for a year … Eventually I had to return to Kyaddondo, near Kampala.

My Bishop had to write a letter asking if Cardinal Wamala would accept me as a priest in his diocese. Cardinal Wamala accepted me first as a priest on loan and after four years I was fully incardinated into the Archdiocese of Kampala.

I came back in 1996 and was posted to Ggaba Parish. While there, I got the idea to make an album. I started composing Luganda songs and made my first album which was called Katonda Taata, around 1999. I have made all my albums in Kasiiwukira Studios. But the first album, very few people bought it because it was not marketed. Still, I recovered all the expenses. It probably sold 2,000 tapes.

In the second album, Jesus is Coming, I included one song from the Mujje Tumutendereze (Luganda Hymn Book), which is Tusinde ffenna mu kisinde, but I decided to do this song to Afro-beat style. On the album, that is the one song that captured people’s hearts. That is the song which made me famous because it is the one that won the PAM Award the first time. Everybody seemed to like it – the Catholics, Pentecostals, Anglicans.

And to me it was very interesting because I never intended to become a Gospel artiste. I was just doing something that I enjoyed. And then people would say the song was so nice: ‘Father, thanks so much! We saw you on TV singing and dancing. We have never seen a Catholic priest doing this.’ The Catholics would say ‘Father webale kutujjayo nti naffe tuyinza okubaako kye tukola (thank you for showing that we can also do something).’

And that is a very important statement because Catholics are so talented musically, but when it came to gospel music, we were not represented. Some people even thought it was not allowed for a Catholic to sing and dance like that. People were buying all these gospel albums without any by a Catholic.

I think of my celebrity status as a kind of value added to my priesthood. I don’t see it as being negative. What does it mean to be a celebrity? It means you become a public figure. For me as a preacher, that is what I need. It gives me a platform to reach out to many people I would never be able to communicate to. It is so wonderful to be able to bring joy to so many people.

For instance, I go to town or walk into a shop and there will be people who will either point at, whisper or say something. You are always on stage. You are always being watched. But I think that is also an opportunity to witness who you are. The way in which you interact with your fans can say a lot about your faith.

You find people and they say, ‘Father, I saw you on TV, but now I am seeing you live.’ I actually bless people on the streets; they tell me their issues. It is an opportunity to evangelise and to share God’s love.

People look at you as a whole package; as a human being, as singer. When I am interacting with my fans or the public, it is at different levels and it is very important for me to accept people where they are and to accept the kind of response they want to have towards me.

And I can always use that response to show that person the love of God or to give them a kind word or a word of encouragement.

Jesus Christ was very attractive. We read in the Bible that there were all these women who were following him. He was a man. He was not married and so he was like an eligible bachelor. But more important, he radiated love. He was an attractive person physically, sexually, intellectually, psychologically. What did Jesus do with that? He was able to draw people into a relationship with himself in which they could experience the love of God.

When you are 51 and have been to all the places I have been, you have this experience and you can tell what someone is going to say even before they open their mouth. You just need to be very skilful in ensuring that you don’t get caught up in people’s emotional jungle. You learn to create boundaries. And you see, I am very tactile; I hug people all the time and someone can say ‘father you have hugged me, now I will take a week without bathing’ – Ooh!

I think celibacy is a sacrifice in the same way that a married person would make certain sacrifices in terms of not having certain things for the sake of their children – a sacrifice of love; a sacrifice you do for the sake of a greater good.

When a man is getting married and he has had 10 girlfriends, he has to decide to stop seeing the other nine and in some cases a married man may be living away from his wife – and if you have made a commitment and you want to have integrity, you will try to be faithful.

I look at celibacy as a sacrifice that I have to make and it costs something.

But I also believe that celibacy for chastity is not possible without grace of the Holy Spirit. In fact, celibacy is not about not having sex; it is about being single – to have a single lover, a single purpose for your life. Jesus himself never married. Paul never married.

The Church in her long history has seen the advantages of celibacy. If the Bishop wants to move me from here to Mpigi, I don’t have to think about where my children are schooling. He just uproots me and sends me there like a soldier because I don’t have family baggage. It also means the Church does not have to provide for my family. And when people have family, property becomes very important: The wonderful thing in the Catholic Church is that the property of the Church remains in the Church. There are no children who have to inherit it.

Now, there are disadvantages of celibacy: priests are human beings and they also have a need for a partner. There will be time when a priest will suffer loneliness. This can make a priest vulnerable and we know that priests have fallen. But the number of those who fall is small compared to those who are faithful. You must also remember that married people fall, although they have wives.

I think for any priest to say that they have never had such moments would be dishonesty. However, I counsel married couples and I know the tremendous difficulties of married life and raising children. Sometimes I think, ‘thank God!’ It is a double-sided coin because there are also moments when I am like, ‘I have not had children!’

When you take celibacy vows, it is not like an automatic magic wand which makes all your human emotions disappear. But actually, it is a grace and without prayer, you cannot live as a celibate priest. I also believe that since celibacy is a Church discipline, the Church can also change it and it may one day decide to do that. But the Church also looks at what works, what has worked.

One of the highest moments in my life was the day I received the gift of tongues in Germany in 1985. Having been expelled from the monastery, I went to appeal to the headquarters in Germany. As the appeal was going on, I was asked to stay in a monastery in Bavaria for five months. One Sunday I went for a walk and very near the monastery there was an American Army base.

I saw black people walk in and out and I also walked in and saw a chapel. I thought that ‘if there is a Catholic group here, they pray in English’ because in the monastery we were praying in German. Inside the chapel, there were black Americans and they had a Pentecostal Church and they were clapping and dancing.

Then they started speaking in tongues – it’s like a language of the Holy Spirit. I found myself singing in those tongues. At some point the leader told them to stop and I couldn’t stop singing. I just continued, tears coming down my cheeks and they realised that something had happened to me. They came and put their hands on me and after about 10 minutes, I collapsed on the floor. That is why when you see these things on TV as an outsider, you ask yourself, ‘Are they real?’ I felt an indescribable joy.

My ordination was of course another moment.

My lowest moment was the death of my father. He was murdered in June 1986. It was a very dark day. And my mother’s death. She died in my arms at Mulago Hospital in 2003. It is a terrible feeling to feel totally powerless when you are watching someone you love die.

I don’t know what God is going to do next. I don’t know what is going to happen.”

The World and the West

This is from the first of the 1952 BBC radio Reith Lectures, given under the title The World and the West. I posted the fourth, The Far East and the West, here. Background on Reith Lectures here.

In writing both the world and the west into my title, and writing the two words in that order, I was doing both things deliberately, because I wanted to make two points that seem to me essential for an understanding of our subject. The first point is that the west has never been all of the world that matters. The west has not been the only actor on the stage of modern history even at the peak of the west’s power (and this peak has perhaps now already been passed). My second point is this: in the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west, is the party that, up to now, has had the significant experience. It has not been the west that has been hit by the world; it is the world that has been hit – and hit hard – by the west; and that is why, in my title, I have put the world first.

Let us try, for a few minutes, to slip out of our native western skins and look at this encounter between the world and the west through the eyes of the great non-western majority of mankind. Different though the non-western peoples of the world may be from one another in race, language, civilisation, and religion, if we ask them their opinion of the west, we shall hear them all giving us the same answer: Russians, Moslems, Hindus, Chinese, Japanese, and all the rest. The west, they will tell us, has been the arch-aggressor of modern times, and each will have their own experience of western aggression to bring up against us. The Russians will remind us that their country has been invaded by western armies overland in 1941, 1915, 1812, 1709, and 1610; the peoples of Africa and Asia will remind us that western missionaries, traders, and soldiers from across the sea have been pushing into their countries from the coasts since the fifteenth century. The Asians will also remind us that, within the same period, the westerners have occupied the lion’s share of the world’s last vacant lands in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and South and East Africa. The Africans will remind us that they were enslaved and deported across the Atlantic in order to serve the European colonisers of the Americas as living tools to minister to their western masters’ greed for wealth. The descendants of the aboriginal population of North America will remind us that their ancestors were swept aside to make room for the west European intruders and for their African slaves.

This indictment will surprise, shock, grieve, and perhaps even outrage most of us westerners today. Dutch westerners are conscious of having evacuated Indonesia, and British westerners of having evacuated India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon, since 1945.

That was almost all the imperial evacuation that had happened by 1952, except for the abandonment of concessions in China. Hard as it is to believe now, the British Empire handed over no territory (except the Anglo-Egyptian “condominium”, Sudan; I don’t count Palestine or the military base at Suez) between the end of the Raj on August 15 1947 and the independence of Ghana on March 6 1957. 1952 was also a year of direct British and American interference in the internal affairs of Iran.

British westerners have no aggressive war on their consciences since the South African war of 1899-1902, and American westerners none since the Spanish-American war of 1898. We forget all too easily that the Germans, who attacked their neighbours, including Russia, in the First World War and again in the Second World War, are westerners too, and that the Russians, Asians, and Africans do not draw fine distinctions between different hordes of “Franks” – which is the world’s common name for westerners in the mass. “When the world passes judgment, it can be sure of having the last word”, according to a well-known Latin proverb. And certainly the world’s judgment on the west does seem to be justified over a period of about four and a half centuries ending in 1945. In the world’s experience of the west during all that time, the west has been the aggressor on the whole; and, if the tables are being turned on the west by Russia and China today, this is a new chapter of the story which did not begin until after the end of the Second World War. The west’s alarm and anger at recent acts of Russian and Chinese aggression at the west’s expense are evidence that, for westerners, it is today still a strange experience to be suffering at the hands of the world what the world has been suffering at western hands for a number of centuries past.

The lectures introduced ideas which would be developed in the eighth volume of the Study.

In the encounter between the world and the west that has been going on now for 400 or 500 years, the world, not the west [...], has had the significant experience

is the most striking sentence. These views were shocking, as he says, to many listeners in 1952. They seemed defeatist.

I have taken this from a transcript on the BBC website, not from the printed book: there may be differences. The transcript probably shows what was printed in The Listener. I have made the use of upper case in references to world wars consistent.

The lectures were published in book form as

The World and the West, OUP, 1953

Conrad’s stories and novellas

Tales of Unrest 1898
Karain: A Memory
The Idiots
An Outpost of Progress
The Return
The Lagoon

Youth, and Two Other Stories 1902
Youth
Heart of Darkness
The End of the Tether

Typhoon, and Other Stories 1903
Typhoon
Amy Foster
Falk
Tomorrow

A Set of Six 1908
Gaspar Ruiz
The Informer: An Ironic Tale
The Brute
An Anarchist: A Desperate Tale
The Duel
Il Conde

’Twixt Land and Sea 1912
A Smile of Fortune
The Secret Sharer
Freya of the Seven Isles

Within the Tides 1915
The Planter of Malata
The Partner
The Inn of the Two Witches

Tales of Hearsay 1925
The Warrior’s Soul
Prince Roman
The Tale
The Black Mate

romancehaslivedtoolonguponthisriver.com

Klaus and Mbeki

Václav Klaus stands in relation to Václav Havel as Thabo Mbeki stood in relation to Nelson Mandela: a science-denying smaller man.

Klaus only went into politics in 1989 and never spent time in jail. Nor did Mbeki, who chose exile and returned to South Africa only after the release of Mandela. Havel spent many years in jail.

Human dignity in South Africa

D’Oliveira, centre, in a Coloured team in South Africa, low resolution from basildoliveira.com

Guardian, November 19:

“Though Basil D’Oliveira, who has died aged 80 after suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was one of the greatest cricketers ever to come out of South Africa, he will be best remembered for the dramatic role he played in helping to defy apartheid in sport. As a mixed-race – in South African terms, ‘coloured’ – player of exceptional ability in his native Cape Town, he was denied the chance to play for the country of his birth by the racial segregation of the apartheid regime. When he went to play in England [1960 and permanently from ’61] and became a Test player there, his eventual selection for the 1968-69 England tour to South Africa so offended the warped sensibilities of John Vorster’s government that it refused to allow him to play, and the tour was cancelled. As a result, South Africa was exiled from international cricket until the fall of apartheid in 1994.

“The dignified but determined way that D’Oliveira dealt with the resulting turmoil won the hearts of the British public and, more importantly, proved to be a turning point in the South African attitude to segregated games. Although it took many years for things to change, the D’Oliveira affair ushered in the start of a gradual easing of official segregation in South African sport, and significantly hurt the regime’s world standing.”

D’Oliveira was of Portuguese and Indian descent and thus classified as Cape Coloured. The apartheid system became entrenched after the National Party came to power in 1948 and lasted until 1994.

Below, an appeal for the Defence and Aid Fund (London-based support for black South Africans) published in The Times on January 15 1964. Background on Fund here and here. It had its origins in fund-raising for the Treason Trials.

In December 1956, 156 members of the Congress Alliance, including Nelson Mandela, were arrested. The Alliance was a coalition (1954-60) of anti-apartheid groups, including the ANC, South African Communist Party, South African Congress of Democrats, Coloured People’s Congress, South African Indian Congress and Federation of South African Women. In March 1961 all the accused were found not guilty. In May, after a whites-only referendum, the Union of South Africa (1910-61) was dissolved and South Africa became a republic and left the Commonwealth.

The 1964 appeal was published during the Rivonia Trial (1963-64), in which ten ANC leaders were tried for 221 acts of sabotage. Rivonia was the suburb of Johannesburg where they were arrested. Mandela was convicted in June and would spend nearly thirty years in prison (1964-90).

The sponsors are a fascinating cross-section of the British great and good in 1964. A few of them are still with us. Toynbee is there, next to Michael Tippett (post here). Aldous Huxley is there although he had died several weeks previously. Vicky is the cartoonist.

List of anti-apartheid activists. Trevor Huddleston ought to be there.

Dignity (post here)

Once upon a time in Mogadishu

Photo essay at Foreign Policy (displays on single page).

Why Kenya invaded Somalia

“Nairobi sent troops into Somalia last month ostensibly to root out Islamist militants. But the real reason Kenya went to war has more to do with the restless ambitions of its own military, which is eager to abandon the country’s largely peaceful history.”

Cheerful opening of a piece in Foreign Affairs by Daniel Branch, Associate Professor of African History, University of Warwick and author of Kenya: Between Hope and Despair 1963-2011.

Fires and shadows

The word “Natives” is like a piece of smoked glass which modern Western observers hold in front of their eyes when they look abroad upon the World, in order that the gratifying spectacle of a “Westernized” surface may not be disturbed by any perception of the native fires which are still blazing underneath.

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Savages are distressed at the waning of the moon and attempt to counteract it by magical remedies. They do not realise that the shadow which creeps forward till it blots out all but a fragment of the shining disc, is cast by their world. In much the same way we civilised people of the West glance with pity or contempt at our non-Western contemporaries lying under the shadow of some stronger power, which seems to paralyse their energies by depriving them of light. Generally we are too deeply engrossed in our own business to look closer, and we pass by on the other side – conjecturing (if our curiosity is sufficiently aroused to demand an explanation) that the shadow which oppresses these sickly forms is the ghost of their own past. Yet if we paused to examine that dim gigantic overshadowing figure standing, apparently unconscious, with its back to its victims, we should be startled to find that its features are ours.

A Study of History, Vol I, OUP, 1934

The Western Question in Greece and Turkey, A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, Constable, 1922

Dangerous borders

Philip Walker, foreignpolicy.com, June 24.

Sudan – Southern Sudan

India – Pakistan

Afghanistan – Pakistan

United States – Mexico

Cambodia – Thailand

Democratic Republic of the Congo – Angola

India – Bangladesh

North Korea – South Korea

Venezuela – Colombia

Chad – Sudan

Saudi Arabia – Yemen

China – North Korea

Israel – Syria

The Obamas

Kwame Anthony Appiah, review of Peter Firstbrook, The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family, New York Review of Books, May 12.

Scholar of Ethiopia

Edward Ullendorff.

Thesiger bibliography

“The important thing for me in every case was that I should be travelling if possible in countries and among people who had had no previous contact with the outside world, and above all that I’d be travelling as they travelled, on foot or with camels or with mules in Ethiopia and so on, and a third of my life, I suppose, I’ve been in places which had never even heard an engine.”

Recording of Thesiger’s voice in Thesiger at 100.

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Arabian Sands 1959 (Arabia 1945-50; first chapter on early years in Abyssinia, Danakil country and the Sudan; he was born in Abyssinia)

The Marsh Arabs 1964 (marshes of southern Iraq 1950-58)

Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad (US title The Last Nomad) 1979 (Abyssinia, Danakil country and the Sudan 1910-45, Arabia 1945-50, Persia and Iraqi Kurdistan 1949-51, Iraqi marshes 1950-58, Chitral, Hunza, Hazarajat and Nuristan 1952-65, Yemen 1966-68, Epilogue: 1977-78, with photographs)

The Life of My Choice 1987 (autobiography)

Visions of a Nomad 1987 (photographs, all travels)

My Kenya Days 1994 (mainly 1968-94, with photographs)

The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930-34 1996

Among the Mountains: Travels through Asia 1998 (Iraqi Kurdistan 1950-51, Chitral 1952, Hunza 1953, Hazarajat 1954, Nuristan 1956 and 1965, Epilogue: Ladakh 1983)

Crossing the Sands 2000 (photographs, Arabia)

A Vanished World 2001 (photographs, all travels)

Uncollected interviews

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Peter Clark, Thesiger’s Return 1992 (UAE 1990)

Michael Asher, Thesiger 1994 (biography)

Alexander Maitland, editor, My Life and Travels 2003, posthumous (anthology)

Alexander Maitland, Thesiger: A Life in Pictures 2004 (photographs, all travels)

Alexander Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer 2006 (official biography)

Christopher Morton and Philip N Grover (curators of Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford), editors, Alexander Maitland, Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Allen, Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards, Schuyler Jones, contributors, Thesiger in Africa 2010 (with photographs)

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Some of the descriptions here reproduce chapter titles, some do not. All the books contain Thesiger’s photographs. I refer to them when you could describe the book as one of photographs, but My Kenya Days and Thesiger in Africa are equally important as texts.

Thesiger in Africa

Alexander Maitland on a new book, Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Various contributors. No text by Thesiger, but his African photographs are there and in an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum which runs until June 5 2011.

See also Thesiger’s The Life of My Choice (1987), My Kenya Days (1994) and The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930-34 (1996).

My Kenya Days (old-fashioned title for a book in 1994) took us to the eve of his return to London, though he said at the end of it that he hoped to die in Kenya.

No modern explorer travelled as much or for as long or so austerely, or retreated to comfort so rarely, or wrote so well when he did retreat or was a better photographer. When he travelled, his camera and, in some cases, medicines, not mainly for himself, were the only possessions which distinguished him from his local companions. No traveller was so little corrupted by voyeurism or careerism.

None has shown such detestation of modern life without being a dropout from his own society or a sentimentalist. He was a proud (his word) Englishman who spent little time in England. He knew that people, including himself, were happier in the old ways of life and that the Earth was being ruined. The British Empire would serve (he did not say this explicitly), where it ruled, as a guarantor of stasis.

When men landed on the moon, Thesiger was at Lake Turkana in Kenya.

Samburu youth, near Maralal, Kenya, 1977

Thesiger at 100

Thesiger’s question

Thesiger’s question

… about 24-hour news. I remember this in a published interview, 1990s. I wish I could find the reference.

“Why the hell do you think you need to know about a massacre in Africa the moment after it has happened?”

Thesiger at 100

BBC Radio 4 documentary, with Frank Gardner. Until December 20.

Audio slideshow.

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Arabian Sands:

“I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter [1949-50] and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and lighthearted gallantry. Among no other people have I ever felt the same sense of personal inferiority.

“On the last evening, as bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha were tying up the few things they had bought, Codrai said, looking at the two small bundles, ‘It is rather pathetic that this is all they have.’ I understood what he meant; I had often felt the same. Yet I knew that for them the danger lay, not in the hardship of their lives, but in the boredom and frustration they would feel when they renounced it. The tragedy was that the choice would not be theirs; economic forces beyond their control would eventually drive them into the towns to hang about street-corners as ‘unskilled labour’.

“The lorry arrived after breakfast. We embraced for the last time. I said, ‘Go in peace,’ and they answered together, ‘Remain in the safe keeping of God, Umbarak.’ Then they scrambled up on to a pile of petrol drums beside a Palestinian refugee in oil-stained dungarees. A few minutes later they were out of sight round a corner. I was glad when Codrai took me to the aerodrome at Sharja. As the plane climbed over the town and swung out above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.”

Istanbul, Lagos, London

The historic areas and buildings of Istanbul may be about to lose their UNESCO World Heritage status: BBC. Hürriyet Daily News: A city unable to care for even its Muslim treasures. The Ottoman wooden houses, the quiet streets left to themselves, are being pulled down. The equivalent has been destroyed in other places, so why not here? Many had recently been left to rough rural and other immigrants. (Cairo is unable to protect its Van Gogh.)

The photogenic scaffolding in Hagia Sophia (a museum, not a holy building) was removed earlier this year after seventeen years. Istanbul (with Essen and Pécs) is a European Capital of Culture. Would it have come down otherwise?

BBC series on Lagos now on YouTube starts here. Recommended at Marginal Revolution.

An East Asian or Second Empire approach to London would be to demolish most of the boroughs of Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark and build a new greater South Bank (I hope like neither Dubai nor Poundbury) to balance the historic city on the north bank.

Elephants, horses, Hitchens

Alastair Cooke’s overrated Letter from America, a BBC radio series that ran from 1946 to 2004, was succeeded by a programme called A Point of View, which has nothing in common with it except that it lasts ten minutes.

We’ve had mini-series from some historians recently: Simon Schama (entertaining and usually incomprehensible), David Cannadine, Lisa Jardine; before them Clive James; archive here, including

Jardine on

Sir Hans Sloane

and French fireworks

and Cannadine on

Eyjafjallajökull and Pompeii,

History of passports (see Yorick’s passport here),

PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and south London,

Asian elephants

and End-of-Empire ceremonies.

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Another series, Any Questions?, was launched on the radio in 1948 and is still running. Members of an audience somewhere in the UK ask a visiting panel for its views on topical matters. A slightly old-fashioned formula: the intelligentsia visits the masses. Except that most of them aren’t intelligent.

Two remarks took my breath away on Friday during a discussion on the proposed Park 51 near Ground Zero.

Ruth Deech: “There is this tendency, I think especially in Islam, to build on top of what has been conquered.”

Douglas Murray: Sufis “have become suicide bombers”. If true at all, surely “become” can only mean after ceasing to be Sufis. Yet he isn’t challenged.

Vignette of the opposite: New Yorkers grating on a Muslim sensibility. I was there in June and took a cab from Chelsea to the Metropolitan Museum. I found myself being driven along the west side of Central Park and asked the bearded once-Pakistani driver why we were there. He said he had been unable to get onto Madison from where we had started because of the Gay Pride Parade on Fifth Avenue. He could have joined it later, but went the other way round and crossed at 86th. He didn’t even want to see the march. My heart went out to him. He had been in the city for twenty-two years. And his political sympathies lay – with Imran Khan.

If you want a terrifying report on virtually-Nazi, mullah-inflamed persecution of gay men in Kenya, listen to this episode of Assignment on the BBC World Service broadcast earlier this year.

The most remarkable thing about the self-described English neocon Douglas Murray is that he published, while studying at Magdalen College in Oxford, at the age of twenty, not a slim volume of verse, but a full-fledged biography, based in part on unexamined letters, of Lord Alfred Douglas. This must be the youngest age at which anyone has ever written a book of this scale. I bought a remaindered hardback copy several years ago.

I’ve often wondered why Havergal Brian’s single-movement fifth symphony has never been recorded. It is a setting of Douglas’s poem Wine of Summer. The sheer oddness of Brian, of all people, having chosen this poet, and in 1937 of all times, would sell it.

New Yorkers seemed more attuned to soccer than they had been before. I had a cab-driver originally from Bangladesh who was obsessed by the World Cup (but football is bigger there than it is in Pakistan).

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Anyone who was interested in my post on The invention of Scotland should listen to BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week for last week while it’s on iTunes, Stuart Kelly’s Scott-land: The Man Who Invented a Nation.

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Five minutes with David Starkey.

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The Italian officer who led the last full cavalry charge ever faced by the British Army, Amedeo Guillet, died on June 16 aged 101.

The British invaded Italian East Africa in 1940. Guillet refused to surrender with the rest of the Italian forces in 1941, and led a charge astride his white Arabian stallion, Sandor, through a column of British tanks at Keru in Eritrea on January 21.

His force was the Gruppo Bande a Cavallo Amhara, Group Bands of Amharic Horse, under a banner of his own featuring the Cross of Savoy superimposed with an Islamic Crescent and the motto Semper Ulterius. The cavalry was supported by Yemeni infantry.

The last full British cavalry charge had been at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898. Churchill took part in it. Here is an article about cavalry “lasts” in the twentieth century. It mentions a British charge at Megiddo in 1918. I suppose that Omdurman was on a larger scale.

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I’m reading Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22. People in the UK don’t realise how large Hitchens looms as a public intellectual in the US. (He now lives in Washington, DC, but has dual citizenship.) A decade ago, without knowing his work, I’d been suspicious of a journalist who made a living from demolishing other people’s reputations. He supported the invasion of Iraq. He’d been a Trotskyite activist.

I watched him in the debate about Iraq with George Galloway, still knowing nothing, and was puzzled by this intense, combative, substantial yet rambling, self-promoting and insubstantial, nearly-funny and unsmiling, Enlightenment-defending enigma or hack.

Hitchens is irritated by being told this, but he has no idea what religion is. It has further to sink, anyway. Fascism, as he needlessly reminds us, was to a large extent a movement of the Catholic right.

His piece in Vanity Fair this month about his diagnosis with esophageal cancer deserves a place in any anthology about dying, and it’s impossible not to be moved by the interviews he gave after it, even on the day when it was suspected, while promoting Hitch-22 (a horrible name apparently suggested by Rushdie).

I have got about as far as his parents and education. You learn about England and his family, but not much about him. His vivacious Jewish mother died in a suicide pact with a lover. His father, having given his whole life to the Navy, was shabbily treated when it came to a pension: a familiar British tale. “He’d done so much for the empire and it had done so little for him in return.” I suppose his life has been a reaction against his father’s Toryism.

His descriptions of post-war England remind me of Roger Scruton’s in his Gentle Regrets. The passages about his prep school will have Americans groaning: “Not another Brit going on about the horrors of his schooldays. What is it with you guys?”

But Hitchens doesn’t say that he was traumatised. He implies that the experience was character-building and wonders what kind of person will be produced by schools now which attend to self-esteem and to special needs. His teachers surely supplied him with some of his cruel language. I can just about remember the old world. It is incredible what a volte-face has occurred in education in the UK.

His atheism is connected with his lack of self-pity. There may be a hollowness in Hitchens (there’s a sadness), but perhaps he’d have been a real dissident under fascism or communism. I might comment on the rest of the book later.

Elizabeth II

Source not stated.

Lists:

Crown dependencies

Commonwealth realms

Commonwealth realms (countries of which she is or was head of state)

Commonwealth countries

Visits by Elizabeth to colonies and Commonwealth countries since accession

Wikipedia articles about all British royal visits to Canada (since 1786) and Australia (since 1867)

Commonwealth Games since 1930

Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings since 1971

British royal Christmas messages

She is Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

From 1952 to ’56, she was Queen of Pakistan.

Main Wikipedia article.

The Commonwealth can be said to have begun with the de facto independence of Canada in 1867.

Basil Davidson

Historian of Africa.

Telegraph obituary.

Underclass

Theodore Dalrymple on English poverty. City Journal, spring 1999. A piece that has caused him to be compared to, and perhaps contrasted with, Orwell.

Mozart in the Congo

Astounding – at least in this clip:

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8709592.stm.

I did not mean that heading in some jokey or generic way. And I hate travel books with titles like that. I meant specifically Mozart in specifically Kinshasa.

But I love it when Elgar is taken out of his “context” – to Ramallah, for example, where he belongs. When European music is taken out of Europe, or English music is taken into Europe. I watched a televised concert when staying in the Grand Hyatt in Hong Kong in 1989 where Chinese players in the PRC were performing Britten’s Frank Bridge Variations. This would not be surprising now, but it was then, and it was wonderful to hear these great European winds blowing through China for a moment.

I loved being with ultracool Japanese who were picking up Vaughan Williams’s sixth symphony, conducted by Adrian Boult, from a pile in a shop in Roppongi, no longer there, called WAVE, one Sunday morning in 1991.

But where there is a personal European initiative with opera houses? Alexander McCall Smith’s opera initiative in Botswana? If I had any interest in Smith, I might know more. Christoph Schlingensief’s opera initiative in Burkina Faso? I did not have to google that: I was recently reading about him. Is that more than an exploitative and egotistical fantasy? Isn’t this just a kind of high tourism for a German director?

There is no African history

Hugh Trevor-Roper delivered a series of lectures at the University of Sussex in October 1963 which were reprinted in The Listener in November and December and then, with changes (not necessarily to the passage I am quoting, which is from the first of them), in The Rise of Christian Europe in 1965.

He was straying outside his main area, seventeenth-century European history and thought.

“It is fashionable to speak today as if European history were devalued: as if historians, in the past, have paid too much attention to it; and as if, nowadays, we should pay less. Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history.

“Please do not misunderstand me. I do not deny that men existed even in dark countries and dark centuries, nor that they had political life and culture, interesting to sociologists and anthropologists; but history, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests, dynasties and usurpations, social forms and social disintegration. If all history is equal, as some now believe, there is no reason why we should study one section of it rather than another; for certainly we cannot study it all. Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped; or shall I seek to avoid the indignation of the medievalists by saying, from which it has changed?

“For on this subject, I believe, with the great historians of the eighteenth century, whom I find very good company (the good sense of the ancients is often more illuminating than the documented pedantry of the moderns), that history, or rather the study of history , has a purpose. We study it not merely for amusement – though it can be amusing – but in order to discover how we have come to where we are. In the eighteenth century men certainly studied Afro-Asian society. Turn over the pages of the great French and Scottish writers – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Adam Smith, Millar. Their interest in non-European society is obvious. Indeed, in order to found the new science of sociology – one of the great intellectual contributions of the Enlightenment – they turned deliberately away from Europe. They read the accounts of European missionaries and drew general deductions from the customs of Otaheite and the Caribbees. But with Afro-Asian history, as distinct from society, they had little patience. When Dr Johnson bestowed excessive praise on a certain old History of the Turks, Gibbon pulled him up sharply: ‘An enlightened age’, he replied, would not be satisfied with ‘1,300 folio pages of speeches and battles’: it ‘requires from the historian some tincture of philosophy and criticism’. ‘If all you have to tell us’, said Voltaire, in his advice to contemporary historians, ‘is that one barbarian succeeded another barbarian on the banks of the Oxus or the Jaxartes, what benefit have you conferred on the public?’ And David Hume, pushing his way briskly through ‘the obscure and uninteresting period of the Saxon annals’, remarked that it was ‘fortunate for letters’ that so much of the barbarous detail was ‘buried in silence and oblivion’. ‘What instruction or entertainment can it give the reader’ he asked ‘to hear a long bead-roll of barbarous names, Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwold, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, who successively murdered, expelled, or inherited from each other, and obscurely filled the throne’ of East Anglia? This is not to say that Hume was indifferent to problems of Anglo-Saxon society. His brilliant appendix on that subject disproves any such suggestion. But he distinguished between society and history. To him, as to all these writers, whig or tory, radical or conservative, the positive content of history consisted not in the meaningless fermentation of passive or barbarous societies but in the movement of society, the process, conscious or unconscious, by which certain societies, at certain times, had risen out of the barbarism once common to all, and, by their efforts and example, by the interchange and diffusion of arts and sciences, gradually drawn or driven other societies along with them to ‘the full light and freedom of the eighteenth century’.

“Today, though it is fashionable to be more sceptical about the light and freedom, I do not think that the essential function of history has changed. And if the function has not changed, the substance has not changed either. It may well be that the future will be the future of non-European peoples: that the ‘colonial’ peoples of Africa and Asia will inherit that primacy in the world which the ‘imperialist’ West can no longer sustain. Such shifts in the centre of political gravity in the world, such replacement of imperialist powers by their former colonies, have often happened in the past. Mediterranean Europe was once, in the Dark Ages, a colony of Islam; and northern Europe was afterwards, in the Middle Ages, a colony of the Mediterranean. But even if that should happen, it would not alter the past. The new rulers of the world, whoever they may be, will inherit a position that has been built up by Europe, and by Europe alone. It is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which have shaken the non-European world out of its past – out of barbarism in Africa, out of a far older, slower, more majestic civilization in Asia; and the history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history. I do not think we need make any apology if our study of history is Europa-centric.”

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Otaheite is an old name for Tahiti, Caribbees for the Lesser Antilles.

Toynbee said more than once that he had no love of barbarians. This was a reaction against a habit of some national historians when he was young of detecting signs and portents of the modern European nations’ futures in their dimmest primeval pasts; and an old-fashioned contempt for anything that was not high culture (twentieth-century popular entertainment was put into the same barbarian bracket). He could write, in the Study, about African cultures as barbarous while despising personal racism.

I am surprised that the term “barbarian” has not yet been written out of respectable discourse in relation to the European past. We still use it, but we are squeamish about using it in relation to other pasts, or presents.

Toynbee wrote a sort of book about Africa, Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965, and in it makes an aside as he flies over the historic Mediterranean –

France, Britain, Newfoundland, Alaska: these are countries without a history – or, at any rate, without any history to speak of.

– that is a swipe against Trevor-Roper, though he doesn’t name him. He would have investigated more African history if he had lived longer.

As to Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwold, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert, confusion among these and other names when I was young led me to despair. By the way, Hume repeats Ethelbert: that is not a misprint.

What did Egric, Annas, Ethelbert, Ethelwald, Aldulf, Elfwold, Beorne, Ethelred, Ethelbert mean? They were arrangements of letters. Texts that were crowded with these arrangements were worse than dull, they were incomprehensible. Egric only means anything different from Annas if you know Egric’s and Annas’s contexts; those contexts will be full of similarly meaningless descriptors until they are given contexts in their turn. I wanted to go outward, in widening circles, until I was studying the history of a civilisation or the world.

Ascending the Aruwimi River (a Congo tributary), illustration in HM (“Dr Livingstone, I presume?”) Stanley, In Darkest Africa, 1890

South Africa before the Portuguese

Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965

The first

The Spaniards and Portuguese, who in A.D. 1493 had obtained from the Pope an arbitral award, [footnote: Embodied in Pope Alexander VI’s three successive bulls of the 3rd May, the 4th May, and the 25th September, 1493, which were taken as the basis for the Spanish-Portuguese Agreement of the 7th June, 1494.] partitioning between them the whole of the Overseas World as though no other claimants were in the field, saw their monopoly broken within less than a century when the Dutch and the English and the French made free with the Spanish preserves in America and the Portuguese preserves in Africa and India, and both the Iberian Powers’ preserves in the Far East, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. And the intoxication of the Iberian pioneers with their original achievement – their overweening pride in the knowledge that

We were the first that ever burst
into that silent sea [footnote: Coleridge, S. T.: The Ancient Mariner.] –

was the gaping joint in their armour through which their lynx-eyed and nimble-handed European competitors directed their disabling thrusts at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A Study of History, Vol IV, OUP, 1939

Mandarin against Greek

When Hastings Banda founded Kamuzu Academy (which I visited several years ago) in the Malawian countryside (1981), he made Latin and Greek compulsory at all levels. They are still compulsory up to O-Level. But from the 2010-11 academic year, Mandarin Chinese will be compulsory in the first year (age 11).

Banda had intended the school to support the four best students from every district of Malawi, however poor. It now takes mainly fee-payers.

I don’t know whether Mandarin will displace Latin or Greek in the first year, but the expectation is that it will become compulsory for older pupils and will displace them. Can that happen in defiance of Banda’s wishes? Yes. Malawi switched its allegiance from Taiwan to mainland China at the beginning of 2008.

Yamoussoukro and Kamuzu

Kamuzu Academy, Mtunthama

Persia, Napata and Carthage

According to Herodotus, Cambyses, after his conquest of Egypt, aspired to round off the Achaemenian Empire in North Africa by conquering the Napatan Kingdom up the Nile and the oases of the Libyan Desert and the Carthaginian Empire beyond the Syrtes. Operations against Napata and the Oasis of Ammon were actually attempted with disastrous results. Simultaneously, Cambyses “ordered the fleet to sail against Carthage; but the Phoenicians declined to carry the order out. They explained that they were bound to the Carthaginians by solemn pledges, and that they would be committing an atrocity if they made war upon their own colonists. The Phoenicians’ refusal was decisive, since the remainder of the fleet by itself was no match for the Carthaginian forces. Accordingly, the Carthaginians escaped the Persian yoke; for Cambyses shrank from coercing the Phoenicians, who had become members of the Persian Empire of their own free will and were the mainstay of the Persian Navy.” (Herodotus: Book III, ch. 19.)

The Persian navy today and its commanders since 1932.

A Study of History, Vol II, OUP, 1934 (footnote)

The end of freshness

“Journeys, those magic caskets full of dreamlike promises, will never again yield up their treasures untarnished. A proliferating and overexcited civilization has broken the silence of the seas once and for all. The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories.

Now that the Polynesian islands have been smothered in concrete and turned into aircraft carriers solidly anchored in the southern seas, when the whole of Asia is beginning to look like a dingy suburb, when shanty towns are spreading across Africa, when civil and military aircraft blight the primeval innocence of the American or Melanesian forests even before destroying their virginity, what else can the so-called escapism of travelling do than confront us with the more unfortunate aspects of our history? Our great Western civilization, which has created the marvels we now enjoy, has only succeeded in producing them at the cost of corresponding ills. The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

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John and Doreen Weightman, translators, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Jonathan Cape, 1973; first French edition Librairie Plon, 1955.

Mud, concrete and obsolete comparisons

1964, first half, and harking back to an ancient world view.

[In] Old Massawah [in Eritrea] [...] one is in the Oceanic world of Zanzibar and Maskat and Bahrain and Singapore.

1964, first half, and equally strange now.

The city that Kano recalled to my mind was Riyadh, the capital of Sa’udi Arabia [...].

In 1964, Riyadh did not look much more developed than Kano, northern Nigeria. Twenty years earlier, Kano must have had the edge.

Riyadh changed, Kano did not, or not as much. Much of Kano has become concrete recently. I haven’t been there. But old Kano has and probably has always had the edge in architecture. The mud buildings, domestic and religious, are close in style to the buildings of Niger and Mali.

There are now almost no clay or mud-brick buildings in Riyadh, though Masmak fortress stands. There were a few more when I first went there in 1984.

It is relatively difficult to make ugly buildings with mud and relatively difficult to make beautiful buildings with concrete.

Concrete replaced mud as Riyadh grew from settlement to metropolis, but it remained a low-rise city. There are only two high buildings, even now. One is the pointed Al Faisaliyah Center, which you can see on the left of the picture below. The other is the awe-inspiring and rather chilling Kingdom Tower, whose 66th floor (there are 99) is the private domain of Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.

I am the only person I know who prefers Riyadh to Jeddah, and I would choose it as the place to live if I had to live in Saudi Arabia.

October 1929, en route to Japan.

Bombay is one of the great cities of the modern world – the only really first-rate modern city which I have yet encountered on this journey since I left Vienna [...].

Newsreels and Imperial propaganda presented Bombay in this way, as a great, modern trading metropolis. What Toynbee and his contemporaries were seeing was a Victorian city with a big railway station and drains, and electric light and broad streets, and a port where big ships arrived. Therefore it was modern.

A few days earlier.

As I landed at Karachi I admired those docks where a ship could do its business alongside the quay without the plague of boats and lighters which beset the same ship when it calls at Muhammarah or Bushire. As I drove through the streets of Karachi I admired the solidity of the buildings: shipping offices and banks and business houses.

In February 1957 he is still sufficiently dazzled by the modernity of Bombay to think of it as a city apart from the real India.

Much of the World’s business is transacted [in Bombay]; but you might as well be in Liverpool or in New York.

The parallel with England and the US no longer works because the colonial scales have fallen from our eyes, because Victorian cities no longer seem modern anyway, and because Bombay, like most cities formerly in European empires, has lost most of its colonial neatness.

I have never thought of New York as at all “modern”, but as a nineteenth-/early twentieth-century encampment. It has changed less than London in the past twenty years, so it seems even more old-fashioned now than it used to.

Kano from Dala Hill, africawithin.com

Riyadh from the air, source lost

Hausa house in Kano, africawithin.com

Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965 (first two quotations)

A Journey to China, or Things Which Are Seen, Constable, 1931

East to West, A Journey Round the World, OUP, 1958

The barbarian hinterland

Toynbee mischievously parodies his own view of Europe.

From Tripoli to the Alps [en route from Libya to London via Rome] we have been on the qui vive; for we have been flying over historic parts of the Oikoumenê. With the Alps behind us, we can relax; for we are entering the civilized World’s barbarian hinterland. France, Britain, Newfoundland, Alaska: these are countries without a history – or, at any rate, without any history to speak of.

“On the qui vive” here = on the lookout at terrain. From the French sentry’s “Qui vive?” = Long live who? = What are your sympathies, who goes there?

The flight was on April 22 1964. The passage was probably syndicated by The Observer.

The remark was surely aimed at Trevor-Roper, who had said, about black Africa, in a televised lecture at the University of Sussex in October 1963 (reprinted in The Listener in November and then in The Rise of Christian Europe in 1965): “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness.”

Between Niger and Nile, OUP, 1965