James Morris:
Conduct unbecoming
The British in Africa Roy Lewis and Yvonne Foy (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 0.75) No Englishman could live in Africa for long, a sage observed at the turn of the century, and remain a gentleman: and it is true that on the whole the least soigne segment of the British Raj was the Raj in Africa. Heroes figure in its narratives, scholars, visionaries, evcn martyrs, but the predominant flavour of the adventure was coarse. Hoping to duplicate, in the last unexploited continent, the gilded triumphs of their conquests in India, the British found in Africa nothing but disillusionment, and they left little but confusion. Wherever they governed, from Cairo to the Cape, tumult or oppression has succeeded them. Their examples have been abandoned. Their investments have been seized. Their enemies have been exalted. Seventy years ago the African empire seemed a gem in the British diadem: it turned out to be only a pain in the British neck.
The story of the British presence in Africa is often unedifying, and in this admirable memoir of the adventure, start to finish, Mr Lewis and Mrs Foy have hardly restrained a note of distaste, or at least of satire, in their prose. Their research has been astonishing, and they have most skilfully reduced to order the rich and jumbled complexity of their theme, but their book does not feel a labour of affection. The British in Africa is specifically a social history, and though it includes one fairly astringent chapter on the military life, it is therefore skimpy on the most moving episodes of Anglo-African history — Gordon at Khartoum, 'sandhiwana and Rorke's Drift, poor Colley dead among his Highlanders on the summit of Majuba. Instead we wander, with an Infinite variety of detail and vivacity of comment, through a world without grandeur: a fiddly flyblown sort of world, With no style to it, and only rare moments of splendour.
Though the English first settled in Africa in the seventeenth century, when Charles II acquired Tangier as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry, the British African empire was essentially a nineteenth century creation. Until then the scattered coastal settlements were little more than isolated outposts, as remote from each Other as Bombay and Gibraltar, and falling into no imperial pattern. It was the Victorian movement into the interior — the quest for the Nile sources, the missionary impulse, the gold rush, the Scramble — that brought Africa to the centre of the stage, and made it the grand arena of imperialism. A climax in the Imperial heyday, an epitome of the imperial decline, Africa provides to this day the bitter aftertaste of supremacy. The quality of this empire was, as this book subtly if tacitly demonstrates, second-class. Some of its possessions were simply company colonies. Some were established by a missionary zeal that seems to a later generation at worst arrogant and at best drab. In Kenya we watch the emergence of a white governing class as aloof to social conscience as to imperial responsibility. In South Africa we see the British, sapped by too much ease and too few convictions, progressively worsted by those magnificent bigots, the Boers.
This does not imply a shortage of remarkable men. They were probably more common, as it happens, than they were in that far nobler dominion, the Indian Empire. Moffatt and Livingstone, Burton and Stanley, Rhodes, Jameson and Goldie, Milner and Cromer, Gordon and Kitchener — these were striking men by any standards, and the scale and savagery of Africa, its brilliant lights and impenetrable shades, threw them into theatrical relief. They were stars of a continuing drama, in the most sensational period of British history.
Nor were imperial achievements lacking. The quest for the sources of the Nile was perhaps the most astonishing of all terrestial explorations. The brief British administration in the Sudan will probably always be remembered as a textbook example of the genre. Some advantages of empire — law and order, technical progress — were adequately demonstrated in roads, railways, telegraphs, and a period of stability probably unexampled in the whole of African history. There are parts of Africa_— Sierra Leone, for example — which may well look back to the British connection with satisfaction.
But for the most part these are sorry memories, and the reason I think is a matter of timing. As the authors say, "the last British Empire was Africa," and it was born out of period. The British liad gone into India, in the seventeenth century, as suppliants to a foreign power, with a freebooter's eye to the main chance, indeed, but with no sense of contempt. Their subsequent conquests there conformed with the ethos of the age, and possessed, historically at least, a certain organic elegance.
The scramble for Africa was undertaken in a very different mood. Europe was seized then in an unnatural frenzy of expansion, recognizable now as the preliminary heavings of the war to end wars; and the British in particular, perhaps sensing that their ascendancy was passing, behaved with a queer heightened intensity. Most of their nastier characteristics displayed themselves, as they scooped up the kingdoms and deserts of Africa : national conceit, greed, snobbery — the most horrible of all the post-imperial phenomena, I think, is the look that enters the Rhodesian lady's eye, the curl to her voice, the mask that stiffens her sunpeeled face, when with harsh cadence and affected accent she summons the black man contemptuously to her table to pour another cup of tea (milk first, you mutt).
And there too, in that chill cameo, lies the reason why the fondest addict of the Raj (perhaps even the authors themselves, brilliantly though they have done the job) can read this book only with melancholy. This was an empire loveless. The British never felt for Africa and ,its,,people the
enchanted yearnings. that-' 'magic to their engagement with itheAtiiit! 1By and large they despised their Africa subjects. "What is Empire„1" ii4n-ulded,,,'; Lord Rosebery Once, ",bu,t the, ptOprniriance of race?" He was' right; 'of ebUrSe: but it was the dawning of thi$,very truth, so soon to shatter the whole itrdthhndcius edifice of the Raj, that made the r onduct of empire in Africa so often unbecoming to a gentleman.
James Morris, the widely-travelled author and journalist, is writing a trilogy about the British Empire
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