by Jan Morris
6
But epic, never quite. Suppose the Victorians had built this, the one supreme temple to the British idea of empire! Then what marvels of assurance we might have seen on Raisina Hill, what glinting flamboyances of skyline, what a tight-packed elaboration of pride, stern and imperturbable above the Jumna! Too late! The flare of the imperial confidence had been too brief, too illusory perhaps, and the only epic of Empire lay in the memory of the thing itself, in the surprise and the effrontery of it, in its own images of labour, service, swank and avarice, and in its effect, for good and for ill, upon the lives and manners of mankind.
1 The film critic Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker in 1976, observed cautiously of these stirring old movies that they induced in their audiences ‘pride in the imperial British gallantry … despite our more knowledgeable, disgusted selves’.
1 A conjunction listed as the fifty-third of 1,001 Reasons for Being Proud to be a Canadian (Toronto, 1973). My favourite Reason is No 35: ‘Canada has an almost square shape.’
1 ‘Proving the bona fides’‚ a local guide-book says, ‘of the well-known proverb “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever”.’
1 A category not everyone admired. G. W. Steevens, at the turn of the century, wrote that any Englishman would feel himself a greater man for his first sight of Bombay, but Aldous Huxley thought it ‘one of the most appalling cities of either hemisphere’. Most of the Victorian and Edwardian monuments still stand, overshadowed now by huge new developments along Back Bay. They never built the great Processional Way which was intended to lead from the Gateway of India into the heart of the city, but the Government buildings are almost as grand as ever, the hammocks still swing in the Kiplings’ garden, and the Taj Mahal Hotel has flowered in an enormous modern extension—when in 1956 King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia ordered a picnic lunch for 1,200 to take to the races, he got asparagus soup, paté de fois gras, smoked salmon, roast turkey, chicken, lamb, guinea-fowl, nine different salads and four desserts.
1 All delightfully survives, rejuvenated by independence. Mr Ribiero, alas, was not playing when I was at the Penang Hill Hotel in 1975, but the funicular is still running rigidly to schedule, there are race meetings five times a year at the Turf Club, and the E and O has given birth to a lively disco called The Den.
1 And to one of whom‚ Sir Sobah Singh, I am indebted for much in this chapter. Sir Sobah asked Lutyens to build a house for him, too, not far from the job. ‘I don’t build houses’, replied the architect, ‘I build palaces’—and in the consequent building Sir Sobah and his family live palatially to this day.
1 The ensemble of New Delhi has adapted easily enough to the republican style, though the names of its imperial creators are still commemorated beneath the cupolas of the Secretariat approach, where the martins like to nest: Architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Kt, KCIE, Sir Herbert Baker, Kt, KCIE; Chief Engineers, Sir Hugh T. Keeling, Kt, CSI, Sir Alexander Rouse, Kt, CIE. For years the old viceregal portraits remained in the palace, now the home of the President of India, and though they have now gone a bust of Lutyens still stands on a landing of his great staircase. When I was kindly shown around the kitchens in 1975, I was impressed to observe that though the cooks downstairs were busy smoking yellow pomfrets over charcoal braziers, scented with wheat grain, in the housekeeper’s room upstairs there was a well-thumbed copy of Escoffier’s Modern Cookery, 1928.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Stylists
THE British Empire lacked charisma now. By the 1930s it was more benevolent than it had ever been, more idealist in an unassertive way, more sympathetic to its subjects, less arrogant, more humane: but it was becoming a somewhat dowdy presence in the world. Even for its practitioners it had often lost its tang—‘in comfortless camps,’ as Orwell wrote of them in 1935, ‘in sweltering offices, in gloomy dark bungalows smelling of dust and earthspoil, they earn, perhaps, the right to be a little disagreeable.’ There was a reason for this. Nobody had properly analysed the root causes of imperialism, but everybody recognized the prime characteristic of the phenomenon: aggression was necessary to its spirit, whether it be aggression for bad or good causes, and when an empire lost its aggressiveness then the excitement of imperialism itself, for better or for worse, was lost.
In this chapter we meet some men who, in this prosaic matinée of the imperial performance, acted still with a sense of style.
2
In Kenya was Lord Delamere. Kenya was Lord Delamere. The British had acquired that delightful country, with its high pastoral downlands, its flamingo lakes and its tropical seashore, in the 1880s, and by building a railway through it from the Indian Ocean to Uganda, had opened it up to European settlement. They had always loved the place. Its rolling downs were like a freer, grander Wiltshire. Its fauna was noble, its tribespeople were handsome, its soil was fertile, much of its farmland was more or less free for the taking. It was Crown land. Lord Kitchener, looking around for an agreeable investment in the days of his stardom, acquired a few thousand Kenyan acres, and by the 1920s many other Europeans had done the same. Most of them were British, including a sizeable minority of aristocrats, but many more were Afrikaners, who trekked up with their families from the south.1 Of all the white settler colonies, Kenya was the most stylish, and the highland country north of Nairobi, much of it fenced off for European ownership, became the most desirable ranching and farm land of the overseas Empire. Kenyan life demanded hard work, rough living and real risks: but for a fit and adventurous man of the right disposition, and preferably the right connections, it was the imperial dream fulfilled.
Officially it was governed by the Colonial Office. A Governor sat in his handsome palace in its garden outside Nairobi, well-paid, well-servanted, with an elaborate official administration to interpret his wishes—more than a thousand men of the Colonial Service, in the most coveted posting of all. There was an elected legislative council, in the usual Crown Colony pattern, but all executive power was in the Governor’s hands. To him, and to his masters in Whitehall, Kenya was an African country. One day, one distant day, it would be returned to the black people, when they had been educated to run it themselves: in the meantime the Crown, represented in the field by His Excellency and his thousand diligent officials, would look after it for them.
This was not the view of the white settlers, and the leader of the settlers was the most vigorous, impatient and imaginative man in Kenya, Lord Delamere. He had first come to the country in 1898, leading an exploratory expedition out of Somaliland. Seeing for the first time the glorious landscapes that lay beneath Mount Kenya, rippling with grasses in the sunshine, and inhabited only by genially co-operative blacks, he had fallen in love with the place, and after an unsuccessful attempt to settle down on his family estates in Cheshire, came back to Africa, aged thirty-three, and obtained a 99-year lease on 100,000 acres of Kenyan highland.
Delamere was as tough as nails. He arrived on his new lands on a stretcher, having been injured in a fall, and all his life his fortunes alarmingly fluctuated. He was always in money trouble. With his young wife he lived for many years in a mud hut, curtained with sacking, and he tried almost everything on his property. He tried sheep, cattle, ostriches, wattles, wheat, pigs, oranges, tobacco, coffee. He built a flour mill, and bought a chain of butchers’ shops. He never did get out of debt, but his ranch Soysambu became a famous showplace, his merino sheep won prizes everywhere, he evolved the first successful East African wheat, and he walked through his wide acres with all the pride of a man whose roots are in the soil, and whose land is his by right.
For he believed firmly in that right. He thought this was country ordained for the white man, and he wanted to see a large European farming community controlling Kenya for ever. In 1921 the settlers of southern Rhodesia, resisting Colonial Office attempts to liberalize the colony, had persuaded the British Government to give them a limited form of self-government, by which they confidently hoped to sustain white supremacy indefinitely. Delamere wanted to achieve
the same in Kenya, and he dreamt of a chain of British white-dominated settlements running down Africa from Nairobi to Salisbury, linked in some federal arrangement as a huge East African dominion. He arranged conferences of delegates from Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which met three years running in different places, and discussed magnificent dreams of sovereignty. The first was held in a deserted mission house in southern Tanganyika, 450 miles from the nearest railway station, 800 miles from the nearest shopping centre. It was not for nothing that Delamere was called the Rhodes of Kenya.
He was a man of powerful convictions, or prejudices—‘part politician,’ a Labour MP thought him, ‘part poseur, part Puck’—and so resolutely did he practise what he preached that by the 1930s he was indisputably the great man of Kenya. He had been there longer than almost any other European. He had suffered and succeeded there. He knew exactly what he wanted for the country, and he cut through the liberalism of colonial officialdom as a knife through margarine. He believed at once in the natural superiority of the white man, and the qualities of the noble savage, and he thought the idea of eventual black sovereignty no more than a mischievous or sentimental day-dream.
Down the years he had watched the Governors come and go, like a constitutional monarch surviving all his Prime Ministers—‘the uncrowned King of Kenya’, thought Sir Edward Grigg, one of them, ‘to whom all the settlers looked up for leadership’. Officials prepared themselves nervously for his visits, hostesses vied for his company, and the Legislative Council, in which he represented the Rift Valley, the heart of the settler country, was dominated by his arguments. He not only influenced the policies of Kenya Colony, he also powerfully affected its manners. He was not a handsome man, with his small figure, his rather hawk-like face and his slightly cauliflower ears, but in his youth he had been distinctly racy. He dressed eccentrically then, in peculiar hats and disreputable clothes, and he grew his hair outrageously long, down to his shoulders. He had a taste for violence, his temper was foul, he indulged himself in bad language, strong drink and practical jokes, and he loved every sort of high jink and irreverence. His had been a subaltern’s, hunt ball kind of fun—shooting out street lamps, midnight rickshaw races, throwing oranges at the windows of the Nakuru Inn or shutting the manager of the Norfolk Hotel inside his own refrigerator, when he declined to serve more liquor.
In his maturity he was more sober, devoting himself to his farms and his politics, but by then he had become a legend, and the reputation of his youth attached itself to the colony, many of whose settlers liked to think of themselves as lesser Delameres, hard-riding, high-spirited, fast-living, well-bred individualist adventurers, there to stay.
3
They were a small community—in 1934 there were some 9,000 white people in Kenya, 1,500 of them farmers—and though some of them would hate to hear it said, essentially provincial. Nairobi, their capital, had started life as a shunting-station on the Uganda railway, and was now a curious mixture of the drab, the boisterous and the snobby. Its architecture was hardly distinguished, its roads were unpaved, its Africans lived in petrol-can shanties and its many Indians had created an untidy bazaar quarter of their own. But its rollicking New Stanley Hotel was always full of boisterous young men in Stetsons and plus-fours, and on the edge of town was the Muthaiga Club, encouched in lawns and creepers, which was the cosy bastion of the settlers, refusing membership to blacks and browns, and begrudging it to officials. There were three banks in town, and a synagogue, and a masonic temple, and a cantonment of the King’s African Rifles. The air was marvellous, for Nairobi stood 5,500 feet up, and the brilliance of the light and atmosphere gave life in the town a hectic and often bawdy feeling. Scandals of one sort and another were common, and from time to time the London popular papers printed exposés of Nairobi life, full of titles and wife-swappings.
It was generally agreed that this was destined to be a great capital. Government House itself had been consciously designed by Herbert Baker, Rhodes’s favourite architect, to become one day a viceregal residence, where the King’s surrogate could hold sway over a great new African dominion. Where the parties differed was over the character of Greater Kenya. The Colonial Office foresaw an African India, the indigenous blacks gradually acceding to power under Whitehall’s kindly tutelage, the European settlers relegated to the role of a planter class like any other. Lord Delamere and his friends held quite different views. They stuck to convictions long discredited at home, concerning the nature of civilization and the hierarchy of race, and they envisaged the East African Dominion as a species of Virginia, gracious and spirited, where a gentlemanly white ruling class would hold power in perpetuity. In this Lord Delamere was no more reactionary than most of his contemporaries. He had come to Africa at a time when black civilization seemed hardly more than a joke—‘blank, brutal, uninteresting, amorphous barbarism’, is how the first Commissioner for the East Africa protectorate saw the native cultures in 1900. Delamere had virtually created Kenya; he had written the style of the country upon what appeared to be an empty page, and it was beyond his imaginative powers to revise the conceptions of a lifetime.
He was bound to lose. In 1922, when the settlers were particularly incensed about Indians in Kenya being put on a common electoral roll with Europeans, there were plans for a rebellion on the Ulster pattern—communications to be seized, the Governor to be gently kidnapped, the imperial Government obliged by force to accept the Delamerian view. But it never happened, and by the end of the decade the settler community was already an anachronism. Most of Delamere’s cherished criteria were out of date even then. His opinions on race, on responsibility, on laissez-faire, were all robust survivals from the previous century, and more and more people were wondering if the white man had any right to settle in Africa at all.
Delamere’s last political act was a mission to London, in 1930, to protest against the Labour Government’s declaration that Kenya was primarily an African territory, where ‘the interests of the African native must be paramount.’ He must have known he would fail, fighting as he was so clearly against the tide, and he returned to Kenya depressed, sick and disillusioned, dying in the following year. They erected a statue of him in the middle of Nairobi, at the junction of Delamere Avenue and Government Road, and they buried him on his own land at Soysambu in the highlands, where the pink mass of flamingoes murmured and meditated at the lake’s edge, and across the open range the old adventurer’s merinos peacefully and profitably grazed.1
4
In London was Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, first Baron Lugard of Abinger in the county of Surrey, who had been a mercenary of Empire, and a pro-consul, and was now one of its few theorists. He had spent a lifetime in the imperial cause, starting in India, ending as a member of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, but he made his name, and evolved his philosophies of Empire, in a colony which he more or less created, Nigeria.
This was a very different kind of Africa. Nigeria was unarguably Black Man’s Country, sweltering tropical country, where few white men much wanted to work, still less to settle. With its 350,000 square miles it was much the largest African possession of the Crown, but hardly the most serene. There were at least 100 different Nigerian tribes, each with its own language, and they were by no means all fond of each other. Some, in the north, were Muslims, ruled by the elegant Fulani Emirs, whose bodyguards wore chain mail and blew fanfares on horn trumpets. Some were boisterous pagans of the seashore, who ate slugs and practised necromancy. There were great tribal federations like the Ibos and the Yorubas: there were infinitesimal clans, lost in the rain-forests, who lived by the hunt and the barter, and knew nobody else.
Long after the British had established themselves on the West African coast, they understandably stayed clear of the unnerving Niger hinterland, contenting themselves with a trading establishment at Lagos, the chief coastal town. The stimulus of trade took them tentatively into the interior, often against their better judgement—of t
he forty-eight Europeans of the first Niger trading expedition, thirty-nine never came home. By the end of the nineteenth century flag had followed trade, and partly for profit’s sake, partly to keep the French and Germans out, the British Government presently established protectorates over the whole country, and in 1914 converted it into the biggest of all their Crown Colonies. Its first Governor-General was Lugard.