POLITICS
What Caroline Cox teaches us about the Africans and the British
BRUCE ANDERSON
We British are a curious race. In try- ing to work out what it means to be one of us I start with one advantage, or disadvan- tage: all my great-grandparents came from the Shetland Isles. So I am one of the few inhabitants of the British Isles who can assert with near certainty that I have no English blood in his veins. Old-fashioned Shetlanders would be reluctant enough to admit that they were Scottish, though that is where my sympathies lie, at least in sporting contests.
Then there is Ulster Unionism. I was at school in Belfast, and there took part most mistakenly — in the early civil rights movement. Out of those tragic and con- fused events, I eventually embraced a new loyalty: Ulster Unionism. Yet on almost every occasion when I have been assaulted or threatened in the Province, it has been by fellow Unionists. They are the most impossible, self-destructive people, many of whom are even inclined to follow jack- anapes such as Paisley and McCartney; the Unionists have never been reliable custodi- ans of their own self-interest. Yet they have something to teach the rest of us who aspire to be British: they understand rugged allegiance.
These random thoughts were inspired by an article in Tuesday's Telegraph about Baroness Cox. Caroline Cox, a reckless girl of 60, has been in the Sudan, undergoing considerable hardship and danger, rescuing slaves. The Muslim-dominated government has been encouraging slave-traders to mur- der Christian families and steal their chil- dren.
This is not big news in Britain. There are other items to cover, such as Mr Mandel- son's plans for the Dome, Mr Blair's newest way of concealing his baldness — physical and spiritual — or Mr Sinatra's funeral. Isn't universal education wonderful?
Caroline Cox is a surprisingly conven- tional eccentric. A doctor's daughter, she was trained as a nurse, and retains a reas- suring bedside manner. But she has been drawn to remote and dangerous regions, to oppressed and friendless peoples, to the most unfashionable of causes, not out of insatiable egotism or psychological abnor- mality, but out of a sense of decency.
We British have always had an affinity with the world's wild places. Where there have been deserts to cross, wildernesses to explore, savage continents to map, savage peoples to tame, we have been in the van. Yet most of those pioneers exemplified `great wits to madness near allied': Park, Livingstone, Gordon, Selous, Rhodes, Younghusband, Wingate. Most of the Englishmen — and that includes the other nations of these islands; 'Britons' does not work and no other collective noun will do — who have gone into extreme places have also been extreme characters. This is also true to an extent of the travel writers, a genre in which we British excel. But with Wilfred Thesiger and Paddy Leigh-Fermor, plus two possible successors to their laurels, Colin Thubron and William Dalrymple, one senses that despite the immaculate manners and the clubland ease, there is an inner ten- sion and that the hardest and best writing is done in a cold and lonely tower, by a naked soul.
Caroline Cox is different. But for her equally immaculate manners, she would remind one of the landlady in Brighton Rock, who hunted down Pinkie like a flat- footed wrath of God, because what he had done was not right. Like John Major, Lady Cox is an extraordinary ordinary person. Her success in ensuring publicity for her causes comes not from genius but from dogged-as-does-it Englishness. There is a lesson here, and a warning.
At some stage, we are going to have to decide what to do about Africa. There are those who would argue that it is none of our business. A century ago, we repressed canni- balism; we subsequently endowed our colonies with clothes and democracy. If they in their democratic wisdom should now choose to revert to their former habits, what business is it of ours? And besides, with the end of the Cold War, what does it matter?
But that is not the British way. There is a danger that an intellectual and aesthetic revulsion from the banalities and hypocrisies of the ethical foreign policy could blind us to our true nature. In a recent article, the motoring correspondent of this magazine, Alan Judd — who has other guises — reminded us about the methods Britain used to suppress the slave trade. We have never had a more ethical foreign policy: we have rarely had one which was pursued by more ruthless means; often extra-legal, frequently unjust. It need- ed a combination of imperial and moral self-confidence with the firepower of the Royal Navy: ethics and the gunboat. We are still the same people who termi- nated the slave trade. In that spirit, we must now address the vastly more complex problem of abolishing the endless slavery that is the daily life for most of the peoples of Africa — and there is a way.
It was impossible to sustain old-fash- ioned imperialism. We had lost the means and the will, while the Americans were against us. We would also have been in constant conflict with those blacks whom we had educated and who could never have been persuaded that prep-school tutelage was the right way to treat their fellow-coun- trymen. But there is an alternative.
Throughout Africa, the West maintains embassies. In the Congo and Sierra Leone, we have discovered during recent years how easy it is for small numbers of trained troops to change governments, while the World Bank and the best non-governmental organ- isations have built up a formidable body of expertise in coping with African problems.
So let us put all this together. Use the embassies as focal points of neo-colonial- ism. Tell Moi of Kenya that if he leaves within days, he can take an undeserved por- tion of his plunder with him; otherwise it is the firing-squad, while his family is forced to regurgitate all the swag. Inform new rulers that they are allowed to build up a pension fund but that their raids on the GDP should be at Robert Walpole's level, not Mobutu's, and that they must do what the World Bank tells them. Do not insist on democracy — this is Runnymede, not 1832 — but use Western power to find local elites to impose good government.
What I have written here is probably as much of a fantasy as British identity will be, if Mr Blair has his way. The West cannot act together, because the French are only interested in Francophonie, while the Americans are mired in their own racial problems, as interpreted by Hollywood. The days, alas, are gone, when we British could do it on our own. So in a century or so's time, some equivalent of Caroline Cox will still be tracking down slave-traders to pay ransom for terrified children. These are not grounds for complacency; we would be foolish to conclude that the terror will only fall on Africans. Henry Kissinger once described the Soviet Union as Upper Volta plus nuclear weapons. But what happens when Upper Volta acquires nuclear weapons?
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