by William Boyd
Indeed this quality applies to all the pieces collected in this fine book. Kapuscinski gallops through the history of the Algerian war but paints a portrait of Ben Bella that is highly individual and immediate. The complexities of Congolese politics are sketched in as background to an article on Lumumba but what lingers in the memory is a wonderful description of a bar in Leopoldville.
And so on. Again and again it is Kapuscinski’s feeling for the quiddity of a place, a person or a moment that emerges as trenchant and moving. For a man so widely travelled, who must have seen enough of the world’s injustice and misery to last several lifetimes, Kapuscinski’s essential magnanimity and sympathy remain a constant behind his writing and irradiate it with a kind of tough, clear-sighted integrity. In one of his personal reflections that punctuate the book (having once more come close to death) he reflects on an unknown official in Leopoldville whose act of kindness, whose selflessness, has saved his life. “There is so much crap in the world,” Kapuscinski concludes bluntly, “and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.” True of the world. And true of Africa.
1990
Carving Up Africa
(Review of The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham)
The “Scramble for Africa” began, according to Thomas Pakenham, in 1876. The Germans had a handy word that summed it up more succinctly—the Torschlusspanik—the “door-closing panic.” There the continent lay, ripe for exploitation, and nobody wanted to miss out. Europeans had been there for many years, of course, but only on the fringes—in Lagos, Zanzibar and Alexandria, for instance—where trade and climate had made a settlement necessary and possible, but, as the last quarter of the nineteenth century approached, they queued up, in an unseemly turmoil, like avid shoppers on the opening day of a sale, to see what they could lay their hands on. The “shopaholic” analogy is worth pursuing a little further: some of the would-be colonists had vaguely justifiable reasons to be in the race, but others were there fortuitously, simply to participate. There was land to be grabbed, vast tracts of it, and, so they believed, unimaginably large amounts of money to be made, and in their train came the added bonuses of strategic and political influence, of setting the agenda for the power struggles of the new century. And so they moved in on Africa: Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Germany all at once found themselves involved in an extraordinary “Sale of the Century.” A whole continent was available—and surely everyone would be able to claim a piece of the action. But the avid metaphors of commerce can only be sustained so far: this was no real sale, there were no real “vendors.” The multitudinous populations of Africa were not consulted about the identity of their new landlords. Heavy and powerful fists were beating at the door and property was going to be sequestered, like it or not. Suddenly the image of a smash-and-grab raid appears more apposite, and it would take another half century to set that particular injustice right. After a fashion.
A glance at a map of Africa, around about 1912, is a daunting testimonial to the sheer efficacy and uncompromising nature of that overwhelming urge to stake a claim. We now see that the entire continent, this vast unexplored landmass, most of which, fifty years before, had been terra incognita, has been parcelled up. Only two independent states exist: the empire of Ethiopia and the state of Liberia. All the rest belongs to Europe. Thomas Pakenham’s fine book tells the story of this particular gold rush with admirable and judicious poise. These four decades of European colonization contain some of the best-known episodes of nineteenth-century history as well as some of the most mythologized and colourful characters the world has ever seen. Pakenham steers us through the familiar and less familiar chapters lucidly and expertly. He is particularly good on the famous battles and short, brutal wars that characterized this period of history—notably Isandhlwana, Tell el-Kebir and the savage genocide of the Herero uprising. We encounter Livingstone and Stanley, Brazza and Rhodes, Kitchener and Gordon, Lugard and Jameson. We relive the seige of Khartoum and the Boer War, the relief of Emin Pasha and the Fashoda incident, and investigate the sinister manipulations of that most malign of colonists, Leopold II, the king of the Belgians.
Inevitably, any attempt to provide a conspectus of these tumultuous decades, however detailed, is bound to be accused of sins of omission. In the last year, for example, I have reviewed a massive life of Cecil Rhodes and a hefty biography of Stanley, both books considerably longer than The Scramble for Africa. In order to subsume this type of exhaustive documentation Pakenham has had to condense, summarize and elide constantly, yet there is never any sense of sketchiness or corner-cutting—and the fact that he has brought the book in under 800 pages is a phenomenal achievement. To take one small instance: the annexation of Bechuanaland in 1885 is both a key episode in the career of Cecil Rhodes and also of major importance in the subsequent evolution and history of southern Africa. The bibliography of this forgotten but highly complex episode is considerable—shelves of learned articles and doctorates and at least one highly documented, and excellent, scholarly monograph. Pakenham manages to summarize the whole affair, identify the key players and outline the vital consequences in little more than two highly readable and comprehendable pages. His ability to ingest libraries of primary source material and transform them into a clear, authoritative and compelling narrative is a remarkable talent and one that this book bears witness to again and again.
There was another scramble, of course, this time out of Africa, in the eleven years between 1957 and 1968 when the former European colonies emerged as the forty-seven independent nations of contemporary Africa. We may marvel at the pace of change in Eastern Europe today but the speed of transformation that Africa has undergone in just under a century appears, with only a little hindsight, to be even more breathtaking. The twentieth century arrived in Africa with astonishing and devastating pace. For example, the French explorer Brazza (founder of Brazzaville on the Congo) reached that mighty river in 1880 after one of the most arduous and debilitating cross-country treks ever undertaken—he was sick, exhausted, his clothes in tatters. A mere twenty-five years later he passed the same spot sitting on the deck of a double-storeyed steam-powered river boat with an ice-making machine on board. In the light of this incredible velocity—no continent has ever “fast-forwarded” through history in this way before—Pakenham asks at the end of his book (clearly expecting the answer “no”) whether the Africans of today “would wish to turn the clock back to the 1880s.” It is a fantastical notion, of course, but I have a feeling that rather more of the continent’s inhabitants would like to indulge in that hypothesis than he suspects. The scramble for Africa, whatever zealous gloss might have been put on it by missionaries such as David Livingstone (by all accounts a thoroughly unpleasant individual) with his idealistic vision of the “three Cs” that he was bringing to Africa—Commerce, Civilization and Christianity—was at the end of the day far more to do with plain avarice and chauvinistic ambition, and it would be revisionist, not to say wrong, to infer otherwise. It was all about the greater greed and glory of Britain and France, Germany and Belgium and the other Europeans participating in the carve-up. The Africans did not feature in the equation at all.
1992
The African Hundred Years War
(Review of Frontiers by Noel Mostert)
This is the epic narration of a war in Africa that lasted one hundred years. It was fought in fits and starts from its first tentative skirmishes in the eighteenth century until it reached its full-blown military denouement in 1877. It took place at the continent’s southern tip and embroiled all of southern Africa’s tribes and peoples: white and black, coloured and Boer, settler and nomad, English redcoat and Xhosa impi. In the footnotes of imperial history books these bush conflicts were dubbed the “Kaffir wars”—inglorious, violent, muddled affairs, that brought no particular honour to the British Army (no Victoria Crosses were won) and reflected rather the attenuated, sweaty struggle involved in administering the pax Britannica. There were nine of these w
ars altogether, punctuating the century with savage and absurd regularity, but they have been overshadowed in the popular imagination—in the historian’s imagination too—by the more dramatic and compelling Zulu wars of the 1870s and Cecil Rhodes’s annexation of Matabeleland.
All this will change now, I should imagine, as a result of this massive, extraordinary and fascinating book. All histories of colonization shame the colonizers and this one is no exception. But Frontiers’ ambitions are prodigious. Over 1,300 pages, weighing as much as a car battery, its sheer heft and palpable scale provide a daunting objective correlative of its historical claims and scholarly revisionism. For Noel Mostert’s grand aspirations are cogently and confidently set down from the outset. Forget other imperial struggles in Africa, he states, the nineteenth-century wars in South Africa’s Cape are “central to the experience of the Atlantic community, or the Western world as it is usually referred to …” and, moreover, he will also demonstrate how these wars, this interminable conflict, are “integral to the confused moral debate about human conscience and the values of empire that arose in the post-abolition world of the nineteenth century.”
These are large claims, but Mostert makes his case not only exhaustively but with skill and passion. They arise from events that took place in a comparatively small area of land around the coast, eastwards from the Cape, on territory demarcated and irrigated by two rivers, the Great Fish River and the Great Kei River. It was here, more or less, that the crucial frontier was variously to be found between white and black, between the colonists of the Cape and one of the indigenous black peoples of southern Africa, the Xhosa nation. This was the line of confrontation where the battles and skirmishes ensued, the volatile border where colonial expansion met local intransigence and brutal warfare proved to be the only solution to the impasse.
Mostert begins his history some five centuries earlier, however, with a vivid and extensive account of the first visitors to the Cape, the Portuguese, who arrived in 1488. This was a small fleet of three ships commanded by one Bartolomeu Dias. A two-week gale blew them round the Cape and they landed to replenish their water barrels. Natives approached and began hurling stones. Dias picked up a crossbow and shot one of the stone throwers dead. This was the first indigene to be killed by a white man in southern Africa. It hadn’t taken long. (Indeed one of the many satisfactions in this book is the way hindsight provides such ghoulish and baleful ironies—the breezes of discord that presage the whirlwind we are reaping today.)
After the Portuguese came the Dutch who planned to use the Cape as a provisioning port-of-call for ships making the long voyage to the East Indies. The little plantation (first established in 1615) did not thrive and the colonizers were reluctant settlers. As they struggled to survive and slowly establish themselves they encountered three distinct native groups: the Bushmen (whose few successors still roam the Kalahari desert), the Khoikhoi (known disparagingly as Hottentots) and, a little further north, the handsome, prosperous and peaceful Xhosa, leisurely following their vast herds of cattle from grazing ground to grazing ground.
As with all incipient colonies at first some sort of coexistence appeared possible. There were occasional flare-ups and hostilities but by and large this curious new white tribe posed no real threat, even when pastoralist Boers began to move out of the Cape settlement into the hinterland during the “long quietude of the eighteenth century.” In fact at this stage there was little to separate Boer and Xhosa in terms of way of life. It centred round their beasts and their needs; it was tough, secular, communal and distinctly un-European in character. Families slept together in crude huts, miscegenation was frequent and unstigmatized. The Boers, like the Xhosa, wanted only to lead their own lives, free from external influence and control.
All this changed at the end of the eighteenth century, more or less when the British arrived, and took over from the Dutch as the colonial power in the Cape Colony. After “a century and a quarter of slothful and haphazard presence in South Africa” the remorseless northward drift of the whites had begun to penetrate the traditional Xhosa grazing lands. Cattle-raiding, farm-burning and skirmishes forced the government of the day to try and determine where the colony ended and a rudimentary frontier was posited. What this meant, of course, was that the Xhosa had to yield. They were to be encouraged to move north of the Great Fish River. If they wouldn’t move they would be “dislodged.” The hundred years war had begun.
The story of the nine “Kaffir” wars between the whites and the Xhosa is the main burden of Mostert’s history. Essentially, all the wars followed the same pattern. As a result of repeated provocation and encroachment the Xhosa would take to arms and attack white settlements. Commandos—groups of armed horsemen—would be raised (in the early days) in reprisal and Xhosa kraals would be attacked and their cattle driven off and seized. There would follow some terrifying ambuscades and hand-to-hand fighting in the bush before exhaustion set in and some sort of peace would be made and the frontier redrawn, inevitably to the Xhosa’s disadvantage.
By 1828 the Cape had become a fully-fledged British colony and the subsequent wars and the subsequent destruction of the Xhosa people take on a different character. Now professional British soldiers marched against black insurgents and the violence and blood-letting remorselessly escalated on both sides.
No summary can do justice to the vividness and detail of Mostert’s patient documentation of this tragic crescendo, nor can one do more than indicate the wealth of character and incident that this turbulent period of history throws up. Certain personalities emerge, on both sides, as key players in the drama. Harry Smith, a coarse, stupid and colourful British soldier determined “to put the kaffir in his place.” Andries Stockenstrom, a wise and humane Dutchman endlessly trying to mediate between settler and Xhosa. The Xhosa chiefs themselves, Maqoma, Ngqika and Hintsa, shrewd and proud. And the missionaries, the soldiers, the farmers and their families all trammelled up in the endless cycle of war and pillage.
In retrospect we can now see that the penultimate frontier war, the eighth, proved to be the most significant. It lasted twenty-eight months, the longest war in South Africa’s history (longer than the Boer War), and was its most bloody and devastating. It cost the British government £2-3 million to prosecute and 16,000 Xhosa died compared to 1,400 on the colonial side. The carnage and turmoil were to have a more bizarre and terrible side-effect on the Xhosa people. As if in response to the virtual disintegration of their way of life a millennial fervour arose en masse amongst a majority of the tribe. A young girl called Nongquwuse claimed to have seen a vision that promised the resurrection of the Xhosa and their eventual triumph. The British would be swept into the sea and new cattle would replace the old herds. The great day was proclaimed as 18 February 1857. Two suns would rise that day as a signal that the new order was about to begin. In preparation the Xhosa began killing their cattle and ceased to sow and reap grain. As an example of mass hypnosis this shocking self-immolation of the Xhosa is virtually unparalleled in human history. With the cattle slaughtered and the grain stores empty the Xhosa gathered on hilltops to watch two suns rise. As the day dawned, bright and completely orthodox, and the solitary sun marked its regular trajectory across the African sky the Xhosa nation knew that its time was over. Appalling famine and fatalities completed the job that one hundred years of frontier warfare had only partially achieved. Forty thousand are believed to have died in the famine and the survivors were dispersed about the colony as menial labourers. The first and most tenacious frontier to the north had been breached. The white tribe was moving on. Now it was the turn of the Zulus and the Matabele.
1992
Film and Television
As I began to write and publish my novels I always hoped that this would encourage a door to open to the world of cinema. And it did, relatively quickly, thanks to the arrival of Channel 4 and their decision in their first season of “Film on Four” to ask non-film writers to write a film for their new channel. I was duly comm
issioned and the first film to be made from one of my scripts was Good and Bad at Games in 1982. Since then twelve of my scripts have made it to the screen, one of which— The Trench—I also directed. I suppose I must have written some three dozen scripts in total over the years since Good and Bad at Games. A success ratio of one-in-three is actually not bad going for a screenwriter. The debilitating aspect of the job is that so much of the work you do goes both unseen and unpublished, therefore the key thing, from my point of view, is that films must be made from time to time: otherwise all the effort and frustration that inevitably comes with the job begins to take its toll. Luckily enough—and a lot of luck is involved—I seem to have been able to keep that sporadic momentum going. An added bonus for a moonlighting novelist is that the film world provides a refreshing sense of collegiate mutual endeavour. After the long solitary work required on a novel it is a pleasure to collaborate. Equally, after collaboration, it is a pleasure to return to the closed study.
No such collaboration, however, is involved in the job of TV critic, yet I was very pleased indeed, in 1981, to be offered the job of writing the television column of the New Statesman, taking over from Julian Barnes, who was moving on to be the Observer’s TV critic. Not only was I joining the staff of a magazine I revered but I was also to be paid a sum of £80 per week and provided with a free television and video recorder. I started on 1 May 1981 and lasted until 25 February 1983. It is the only regular column I have ever written and the most sustained work of journalism I have ever attempted. I found the unfamiliar discipline both a challenge and rewarding and discovered that, amongst the consumption of ephemera that two-years’ television-watching inevitably encourages, there were films and programmes that were not only stimulating but proved enduring. But because I wasn’t a professional journalist I grew increasingly conscious of the sheer amount of writing I was doing. This, more than anything, made me call a halt: when I left I calculated I had written some 80,000 words of television criticism—a reasonably sized novel’s-worth.