Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  For two months before the General Election I preached a constant message. There was an unsung solidity in British–German relations. There was a natural coincidence of interests across a wide range of issues. It was not possible to build a stable Europe without Britain.

  The message fell on barren ground. Instead, three questions were repeatedly put to me: who would win the election; and if Labour did, would Britain’s European policy change and would I be sacked? My replies were on all counts suitably reserved.

  The election result, in its decisiveness and drama, knocked the Germans’ socks off. It has even to a degree destabilised German politics.

  As early as Mr Blair’s visit to Germany in 1996, the cry went up: where is the German Tony Blair? This rose to a crescendo after 1 May and it was the smooth-talking Gerhardt Schroder, SPD leader of Lower Saxony, who stepped forward. I once sat in the back of a car with him waiting for the Duke of Edinburgh to arrive at Hannover airport. The conversation consisted of my answering questions, as best I could, on how New Labour had come into being.

  The attempt to Germanize New Labour has sharpened the competition between Schroder and Lafontaine to run against Kohl next year. Lafontaine once said to me in exasperation that after the French elections he would have to market himself as Tony Jospin – better, I thought to myself, than Lionel Blair …

  More important for us, 1 May has made it respectable openly to admire Britain: our political system, the speed with which the new Government has grasped the reform agenda, and the extent to which we have already restructured …

  … This is a complex, multi-layered country. I have visited 11 out of 15 Bundeslander and only scratched the surface. Germany has astonishing variety and regional differences. It is like having 18 Scotlands, plus the complexity of proportional representation. The most stultifying conservatism sits alongside a strong radical and anarchist streak. As the burghers of small town Germany tuck into coffee and cakes on a Sunday afternoon, the anarchists of Berlin burn a few cars and a supermarket. Variety shows on German television make Des O’Connor look like alternative comedy. But by 11.30 many channels are deep into medium-hard pornography. Ancient 1970s British rock bands rumble like Chieftain tanks across the North German plain, while, to wild applause, three naked male Japanese ballet dancers stand motionless on a Hamburg stage, while a fourth crawls backwards and forwards dressed in a nightie.

  Part II: SOUTH

  Nigeria

  ‘They make their blunders with an engaging air’

  SIR DAVID HUNT, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO NIGERIA, MAY 1969

  Sir David learned to read and write aged three, and by twenty-four was a Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. He served as Private Secretary to both Clement Atlee and Winston Churchill; and during a spell in the Commonwealth Relations Office he drafted Macmillan’s famous ‘winds of change’ speech. Yet Hunt became best known for his appearance on a TV quiz show. He won the BBC Mastermind ‘champion of champions’ competition in 1982.

  The Nigerians certainly deserve a happy and united future after all they have gone through. I have a great affection for them because they are generally cheerful and friendly in spite of their maddening habit of always choosing the course of action which will do the maximum damage to their own interests. They are not singular in this: Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery. But at least they usually make their blunders with an engaging air.

  Senegal

  ‘Possibly the only people to have made no use of the wheel’

  IVOR PORTER, HM AMBASSADOR AT DAKAR (SENEGAL, MALI AND MAURITANIA), AUGUST 1973

  … [M]ost Africans of my region are still basically animists – many still practicing … [T]hey tend to accept rather than to combat Nature and to rely on ritual and association with their natural environment rather than on tools with which to destroy it. They are possibly the only people to have made no use of the wheel and in a mechanical sense they are still well below par. At the same time they have gained in emotional and existential qualities – as evidenced by their dance and music – they have retained the warmth, dignity and stoicism which are declining in the more developed urban societies …

  As part of Nature they accepted sex, and the image of the sex maniacal buck nigger, which the Christian slave traders planted so effectively in our subconscious, seems to be no more true than the image of the noble African perpetrated in paperbacks during the ’50s. He prefers palaver [talking] to violence or fanaticism as much as, if not more than, the European …

  … [T]heir main preoccupation is in fact with the community rather than the individual. Hence their irritating cult of dialogue and consensus, which has turned the UN into so much of a talking shop. ‘Nothing came of it’, we say of an OAU1 or a UN meeting, though for people brought up to believe that consensus is essential to the preservation of the village community, it is perhaps not the meaningless resolutions that matter so much as the process of compromise which led up to them …

  They are quite good linguists, often speaking several African and one European language … [O]ral historians can be found in the countryside today who are still accurate for about two centuries back. Their over-reliance on personal contact and memory often of course leads to bureaucratic nonsenses. Our offer of 25 buses to Guinea two years ago seems to have disappeared without trace, when the Minister with whom I had almost completed the negotiation was locked up during Sekou Touré’s latest purge.

  In spite of his ineptitude with paper and under-development in other respects, the individual African of my region does not suffer from an inferiority complex towards the European. He believes his way of life to be inferior to ours in many respects; he accepts without apparent resentment the European’s disregard of his own qualities. He responds to an interest in his problems but only if it is an intelligent interest; any sign of paternalism causes him to withdraw, still talking pleasantly enough but to the European instead of to you.

  1. OAU: Organization of African Unity.

  Liberia

  ‘It is extremely difficult for them to keep working or even to stay awake’

  HAROLD BROWN, HM AMBASSADOR TO LIBERIA, MARCH 1963

  In moments of stress – and they occur, for one reason and another, almost every day here – I have sometimes turned for refreshment to the following which appears in a confidential Foreign Office Peace Treaty Handbook on Liberia dated March, 1919:

  The British Consul-General at Monrovia stated in 1910 that ‘labour is scarce and expensive, and probably the worst in the world’. This sweeping statement seems to be justified with regard to the majority of the tribes at present known in the interior … No supply of labour need be expected, from the descendants of the colonizing element (the Americo-Liberians) … They despise manual labour, and have shown no competence even in matters to which they mainly devote themselves such as politics and religion.

  It was easier to make sweeping statements about Liberians forty or fifty years ago than it is now but in at least one respect what was true in 1910 is still true today; labour was then and is now scarce … [M]ost skilled labour has to be imported while unskilled labour must be continuously supervised. The diet of most Liberian workers is inadequate and it is extremely difficult for them to keep working or even to stay awake during working hours. We have found with our own servants, however, that properly fed they need much less sleep and have more energy. I have no doubt that this is true for the working population as a whole and that with an adequate diet they could do as well as, say, the people of Ghana, but it will take time.

  The Americo-Liberians still generally despise manual labour, as they did when the Handbook was written, and have no incentive to acquire a taste for it. Some of them are now becoming doctors, dentists, engineers and the like and often show considerable competence. In politics and the law, as in journalism and literature, standards of performance are surprisingly low probably as a result
of Liberia’s isolation for many years from neighbouring and other countries. Liberia is by no means isolated now, and standards in consequence are gradually going up. In a few years’ time it may be possible for a foreigner to keep a straight face in court or to read the local newspapers or a serious Liberian poem without shaking with laughter but I am grateful that solemn stage had not arrived during my time.

  ‘It would be difficult to fall in love with the country or its people’

  MALCOLM WALKER, HM AMBASSADOR TO LIBERIA, JUNE 1967

  There is of course, much in the life of Monrovia which is absurdly pompous. I really find the Liberians’ pleasure in funerals impossible to swallow. Many of the functions I have had to attend have been hilariously funny – indeed ‘hilarious’ is a word which I have heard used about Liberia by a number of people. The press is often decorated with unbelievable misprints and tales that in England would not be printable. I have with regret to record that many of the people, particularly the women, are arrogant and ill-mannered. It has been a disappointment to me that there is not more natural gaiety among the people. I find it irritating that the English language should be so debased as it is here … [I]t is a strange place, still in some ways a more plausible site of ‘Black Mischief’ than Ethiopia. I think it would be difficult to fall in love with the country or its people …

  Brazil

  ‘Still a tremendously second-rate people’

  SIR JOHN RUSSELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO BRAZIL, JUNE 1969

  After leaving São Paulo, John Russell was given the embassy in Madrid, where one of his juniors was Christopher Meyer (see p. 42), at the start of a career that would end as ambassador in Washington. Meyer remembers Russell as a great stylist who took enormous pride in his despatches, and whose valedictories and Annual Reviews were famous – or infamous, according to taste – within the Foreign Office for their quirky tone, clever phrasing and shrewd analysis.

  Not everyone enjoyed them. Madrid was Russell’s last posting before retirement, but his final valedictory failed to impress his Head of Department, who wrote: ‘This is not a profound despatch and some of the judgements in it are debatable.’ The ambassador’s personal thoughts on the improvement of the Diplomatic Service were described as a ‘random collection of reflections … ranging from the eminently sensible to what might charitably be described as puckish’.

  But Russell’s Brazilian valedictory (below) did find favour. It was given priority printing and warmly reviewed by superiors in Whitehall: ‘In this very readable and highly personal despatch Sir John Russell outlines the extraordinary character of Brazil and casts the occasional well-deserved brickbat at its people.’ Russell overshot his Brazilian population forecasts, however: the 2000 census saw a population of 169 million; and he was perhaps a little hasty in his prediction of an imminent dissolving of all racial difference into a coffee-coloured melting pot.

  DESPATCH BRITISH EMBASSY

  RIO DE JANEIRO

  CONFIDENTIAL

  22 August 1969

  Sir,

  This is to be my valedictory despatch on Brazil. But how can any passing stranger pretend to write with truth and regard about a country so vast, so varied and protean as this? How on the basis of less than three years’ acquaintance should I presume to forecast the future of Brazil? The clue, I think, is not to generalise but to try to pick the significant out of the gross.

  At one end of the Brazilian rainbow you have stone-age Indian tribes living in the green depths of the rain-forest who still practice cannibalism and human sacrifice and who have yet (happily for them) to meet their first white man. It still takes 25 days by Booth Line1 from Liverpool to Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, as it did in 1890: and there is still no access to Manaus by land. In seven tenths of this country life is lived today almost exactly as it was on the Western frontier of America in the years immediately following the war between the States. Slavery was abolished within living memory.

  At the other extreme of the time-scale you have São Paulo, which has just passed the six million mark and is now the third largest city of Latin America (also unchallengeably the ugliest) …

  Demographically Brazil presents an extraordinary picture. Around ninety-two millions today, the population is growing at the rate of 3.4% per annum and will be around the 225 million mark by the year 2,000. And 42% of the population is under 15 years of age …

  One problem at least is on its own way to solution without benefit of planner. Within a generation or two the racial issue will have ceased to exist. By then there will be neither identifiable whites nor identifiable blacks. In the United States a drop of black blood makes a white man black: here a drop of white blood makes a black man white. (A little money does the same for him.) Fusion is the order of the day and differences are shading over fast.

  A very few years more will also see the disappearance of the last of the forest Indians, finally overwhelmed in their unequal struggle against the white man’s greed and brutality, his guns, his lethal gifts, his exploitation, his diseases. For all the noble work of the early Jesuits, of General Rondon2 and the Villas Boas brothers3 the Brazilian Indian is fast going the sad way of his brother of the North American plains …

  … Brazil owns one sixth of the world’s forests and one third of the world’s known reserves of iron ore: and produces more hydroelectric energy than any other country in the world. Wherever I have been in the country I have felt an urgent, irresistible prosperity: to the layman like me Brazil’s future appears set irresistibly at fair.

  Why then, you may well ask, is Brazil not already rich and prosperous? The short answer is, because the country is damn badly run – because there are five different gauges on the railways: because Guanabara has more civil servants than New York, and Petrobras in the State of São Paulo alone employs more chemists than Shell does in the whole world; because you can buy anything from a driving licence to a High Court Judge: because the Rector of the Federal University of Rio is paid $500 a month, whilst house-rents here are three times those of London and Rio’s hotels are among the world’s most expensive (also among the world’s worst run): because there are only 18,000 miles of paved highway in the country: because in 1968 the Brazilians killed 10,000 people on their roads – rather more than the total of U.S. casualties in Vietnam during the same period: because, as Peter Fleming4 put it, ‘Brazil is a subcontinent with imperfect self control’ …

  … And now, further to confound the existing administrative confusion, they are about to transfer the whole governmental machine to Brasilia, that wantonly remote and quite unworkable monument to one man’s, President Juscelino Kubitschek’s, corrupt and ruinous vanity. This move can hardly fail to divorce the government still farther from reality.

  The students are repressed … The Communists are few and ill organised and the only thing about them that is not underground is Che Guevara’s ghost – although many of the now almost daily bank hold-ups are widely believed to be fund-raising exercises for the party … (In São Paulo it is now said to be quicker and safer to rob a bank than to try to cash a cheque in one.) The Church is split … The Press is muzzled: the intellectuals exiled or disheartened: Labour weak and inarticulate … The expanding middle-class plods indifferently on acquiring the good material things of life. The rich continue very private-spirited. And the poor … ?

  There used to be – maybe there still is – an inscription bearing the date 1767 on the mill at Hawarden, Mr. Gladstone’s old parliamentary seat in Flint, which ran: ‘Wheat was in this year 19/- and barley 5/- a bushel. Luxury was at a great height and charity extensive. But the poor were starving, riotous and hanged.’ The poor of Brazil have not quite got there yet: but it is now open to question how much longer they will be content to go on hoeing their hopeless row …

  But now my sands are running out and I must wind up my Brazilian ledger. How does the account stand today as compared with three years ago? Materially the country has galloped ahead: politically it has gone backwards. The fl
at-earth hard-line colonels have arrested the spiritual development of what is potentially a brilliant country of liberal creative instincts and the most lively intellectual capacity. I like to hope that the check is only temporary.

  But if the government of Brazil has hardened, I think that I must have mellowed a little in the same interval. No longer, as in my First Impressions despatch, do I feel moved to caustic comment on the shortcomings of the Brazilian character. The Brazilians are still a tremendously second-rate people: but it is equally obvious that they are on their way to a first-rate future. Maybe I have yielded something to Rio’s tropical insidious charm: maybe I have just learnt to soften my dour northern standards, to see things a little less primly in this warm forgiving climate. I like to believe that the more indulgent eye gets the truer perspective …

  I have the honour to be,

  With the highest respect,

  Sir,

  Your obedient Servant,

  John Russell.

  1. Booth Line: A passenger service sailing from European ports to Brazil. The company’s posters from the 1920s show incongruously large steamships towering over native canoes, advertising ‘Tours 1,000 miles up the River Amazon’.

  2. General Rondon: Candido Rondon (1866–1956) founded Brazil’s Indian Protection Service. His expeditions laid thousands of miles of telegraph wire across the Amazon jungle, mapping the interior, despite frequent opposition from local tribes.