ANOTHER VOICE
Much may yet be achieved by some violent riots
AUBERON WAUGH One of the problems of dealing with Americans is that we can never be sure which sex they belong to until we have met them. Planning a short holiday in the French Caribbean next month, I was alarmed to read of a talk given to the Royal Institute of Geographers by Dr Briavel Holcomb of Rutgers University, New Jer- sey. Tourists in those parts were establish- ing a new colonialism, I learned. Attracted by the promise of 'sea, sun, sand and sex', tourists saw themselves as being waited on by black or Hispanic people, always smil- ing, often wearing white gloves and serving delicious tropical fruit. They stay in little islands of luxury amid seas of poverty, never seeing the slums on which far too lit- tle of the tourist money is spent. 'Local people are mainly smiling servants or sexu- al lures.'
It was only when I was halfway through this dismal plaint that I realised Briavel Holcomb is a woman. More particularly, she is an East Coast American female aca- demic. I am not for a moment suggesting that this intelligence automatically disquali- fies anything she has to say, but we must all agree it helps put things in context. Need I really reconsider my holiday plans?
Holcomb would undoubtedly have had a point if she had remarked how, in the age of mass tourism, there will soon be practi- cally nowhere left in the world which will still be a pleasure to visit. I made the trip down the Nile about 15 years ago, and so, mercifully, got there before Simon Jenkins, who seems to have returned from Egypt in a very silly frame of mind, almost as if he had been talking to some American female academics. Declaring that it is time Europe returned its 'stolen' monuments to the Arabs who now control Egypt, he wrote in Saturday's Times:
What is currently called the rising tide of nationalism will overwhelm all question of ownership rights. Like the Elgin Marbles, the great treasures of Mesopotamia and the Nile will be demanded back by peoples seeking to reassert their identity and rightly recognising in these monuments their unique gift to civili- sation.
Anybody who is not an East Coast Amer- ican female academic should be aware that the Arabs, despite their gifts to civilisation of the hookah and Arabic numerals, had nothing to do with building the pyramids or the temples of the Nile, any more than the present Turkic inhabitants of the Greek mainland, with their snub noses, low-slung bottoms and short, hairy legs, had anything to do with the building of the Parthenon. Perhaps the Egyptian Copts, a persecuted Christian minority in Egypt, have some claim to be descended from the ancient inhabitants of Thebes and Heliopolis, but they must get rid of their Arab rulers before anybody can take their claims seri- ously.
The rising tide of nationalism has little or nothing to do with history or culture, how- ever many coachloads of academics, art his- torians and sub-Byronic journalists try to join the movement. It has far more to do with simple xenophobia — foreigners as the scapegoats for a nation's ills. Nothing encourages xenophobia so much as tourism, especially in poorer countries like Egypt, Britain and the Caribbean although foreign aid, as in Somalia, runs it a close second. But the real blight of mass tourism is that it has made nearly all the great historic sites of the world — from Rotorua, in New Zealand, to the Great Wall of China, Luxor and Stonehenge — unvisitable. They are all swarming with tourists from Germany, Scandinavia, Japan and the three corners of the world.
It is in this context that we should read Jenkins's absurd, girlish demands for us to send back to their original locations all the antiquities which have been drifting west since Roman times. Must the ancient basili- ca of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul send back the Greek columns which have been sup- porting its cupola since the 6th century AD? St Peter's lose the obelisks brought to Rome by Octavius Caesar?
`The old arguments against restitution are wearing thin,' proclaims Jenkins.
Tourism and television are making the monu- ments of the Nile accessible to millions who previously could appreciate them only as museum pieces ...
In addition, the art of facsimile is now advanced . . . If Londoners wish to gaze on Rameses II [at the British Museum] or Cleopatra's Needle Ion the Embankment], if Parisians are (improbably) in love with the Luxor obelisk, they can make do with copies. The originals 'belong' to the temples and gods for which they were designed. It is absurd that the marvellous Sekhmet lion god- desses in the British Museum should be con- demned to a gloomy London staircase . They should be basking resplendent in the sun of Thebes.
This sentimental, sub-poetic nonsense should be treated with the contempt it deserves. There is already plenty to attract mass tourism to the Nile. The joy of Luxor and Karnak is the joy of relics and ruins. The joy of Cleopatra's Needle (and, indeed, the British Museum) is that so few people go to see them. Once a year I visit Cleopatra's Needle on the Embankment after The Spectator's Politician of the Year luncheon in the Savoy. If it were a modern copy, I would not have the slightest interest in it. Its brother, in Central Park, New York, looks rather more out of place, it is true, but if it succeeds in keeping a single American at home, it is fulfilling a useful purpose.
We should all do whatever we can to dis- courage people from travelling. The case for dispersing the historic sites and putting everything up for auction has never been stronger.
Those interested in antiquities should be encouraged to save up, buy one and con- template it in the home. I have a 2nd-cen- tury bust of Diana brought back from Eph- esus which I fondly believe not to be a forgery. No doubt Jenkins would order me to send it back, but as a result of its posses- sion I have no desire to climb into a chars- bane and push my way through all the Ger- man factory workers being taken over the Roman sites of north Africa. I certainly have no intention of taking it with me to bask in the resplendent sun of the French Caribbean.
An enjoyable correspondence in the Telegraph last week drew attention to the rising tide of anti-Catholicism in this coun- try and asked whether we might not expect a repetition of 1780's Gordon Riots. MY impression is that anti-Catholicism in Britain has always been a product of xeno- phobia, and most xenophobia is nowadays tied up in the anti-Maastricht movement. We might yet contrive a few anti-European riots, using foreigners as a scapegoat for our present and future woes, all of then' the result of reckless government over- spending. The riots might not do much to reduce government spending — I think every sin- gle newspaper on Sunday was urging the government to increase spending in one area or another — but they might discour- age tourism. That, as Dr Holcomb maY have discovered by a different route, is all there is left to be done.
Previous page
