by Jan Morris
Yet he remained, like it or not, a Boer himself—Cambridge-educated, British-fostered, world-renowned, liberally minded, estranged from the Dutch Reformed Church, detested by the Afrikaner Republicans, but still a Boer of the Volk. And perhaps it was his Boerness which flawed this truly great man, and kept him from the very highest ranks of human achievement. Fundamental to Boerness was the question of race, and behind every episode of Boer history, behind the Great Trek, behind the wars against the British, behind the re-emergence now of Afrikaner nationalism, lay the inescapable truth that the white man was outnumbered in South Africa overwhelmingly by the black. The profoundest Boer intention was to maintain the supremacy of the white race, and it was this unchanging resolve, touching upon the rawest nerve of Empire, which made South Africa so awkward a limb, of the imperial body. The British Empire might not always live up to its own best principles, but still it was au fond a liberal organism. To deny a man advancement because of his colour denied its own highest convictions: trusteeship implied, if not immediate equality of status, at least the recognition that, with luck and good behaviour, all men might be equal one day.
This was the root difference between the British and the South African view of Empire, and Smuts was torn by it. He believed genuinely in the community of the world, but he could not quite bring himself, so deep were his folk-instincts perhaps, to believe in the community of black and white. He was ‘Slim Jannie’ to his fellow-Boers because he seemed too flexible: he was faintly suspect to his fellow-cosmopolitans because on this particular issue he seemed too rigid. It was Smuts who, by persuading Milner in 1902 to postpone the problem of the native franchise, ensured that it would be handled in the Boer, not the British, way. ‘Allas sal regkom’, he used to say—‘everything will sort itself out’—and in the racial context this meant that nothing would change. ‘I sympathize profoundly with the native races whose land it was long before we came here,’ Smuts once said, ‘but I don’t believe in politics for them…. When I consider their political future I must say that I look into shadows and darkness; and then I feel inclined to shift the intolerable burden of solving the sphinx problem to the ampler shoulders … of the future.’
This was foresight. He could not have solved the problem even if he tried; sphinx-like it remained; shadows were truly to cloud its resolution. But Smuts’ evasion of it tempered his greatness nonetheless, and perhaps affected his style too. Even at his most majestic, there was something withdrawn about him. He saw the world in the grandest terms; he believed evolution itself to be only a symptom of cosmic brotherhood; his influence upon international events was never less than dignified, and sometimes noble; yet all around this famous figure, as he sat with his beloved and comfortable wife on his stoep at Doornkloof, there developed year by year the pseudo-philosophy of apartheid, which was one day to shatter his own dream of Commonwealth, and even threaten the unity of mankind. He was a man of his times, after all: a man of his race, too.
7
There were others, of course. There were wandering eccentrics like Bill Bailey of the Coconut Grove, whose refusal to leave his celebrated bar in Singapore immortalized him in a popular song. There were formidable individualists like Thomas Russell Pasha, the police chief of Egypt, who used to jump his favourite camel over the steeplechase course at Gezira, or his colleague Harry Boyle the Oriental Secretary, who was asked once by a total stranger on the terrace of Shepheard’s if he was the hotel pimp—‘I am Sir,’ he replied at once, ‘but since I am enjoying my tea interval perhaps you would direct your inquiry to my deputy over there’—and off the stranger went to Sir Thomas Lipton the tea magnate, who was taking tea nearby. There were great merchants like Antonin Besse of Aden, an entrepreneur out of the Arabian Nights, who lived in delicate splendour in his palace in the Arab quarter, refusing to join the British Club but sending his hides, spices and coffees in his own ships across the world.
There was Charles Vyner Brooke, last of the great imperial freelances, who had succeeded his father and his great-uncle as hereditary Rajah of Sarawak, and against all the trends of Empire, remained the despotic ruler of the land, appointing his fifty British officials personally, recruiting his own army, and accepting Whitehall’s authority only in matter of foreign relations. There was the aberrant soldier Orde Wingate, Royal Artillery, the furious son of Plymouth Brethren parents, who had adopted the Zionist cause while serving in Palestine, had organized his own night squads of young Jewish guerillas to combat Arab sabotage, and was to be encountered loping around Palestine with his devoted desperadoes, a rifle in his hand, grenades tied to his belt and dirty gym shoes on his feet.1 There was Captain A. T. A. Ritchie, the Old Harrovian Game Warden of Kenya, who fought in the Great War with the French Foreign Legion, drove about in a Rolls-Royce with rhinoceros horns affixed to its radiator, and so adored all living things that his house was full of stray wild animals, and he even made friends with individual fish. There were saint-like missionaries, unconventional engineers, flotsam and jetsam characters everywhere, keeping hotels in Suez, sailing steamboats up the Gambia, fossicking still on the deserted Klondyke, or pretending to imaginary pedigrees among the Melbourne matrons.
But they were the exceptions, the rebels even. ‘We spend our time’, wrote Freya Stark, contemplating the imperial British in 1933, ‘creating a magnificent average type of Englishman, the finest instrument in the world: none of our education sets out to produce great men.’ So it was. The Empire was withdrawing into the first postures of apology, and it needed the estimable average, Santayana’s just and boyish masters, not the great men or the heretics.
1 Some hundreds of them to the Uasin Gishu Plateau, in the west, which in 1903 had been offered by the British to the Zionist Movement as a National Home. What the Jews spurned, the Boers cherished, and the area became virtually an Afrikaner province. For years its principal town, now Eldoret, was known simply by a leasehold number: Sixty-Four.
1 The statue has gone, and Delamere Avenue is renamed for Jomo Kenyatta, but the New Stanley and the Muthaiga Club flourish still, and I think Lord Delamere might rather like the racy and somewhat garish flavour of modern Nairobi, black though its rulers be. His dreams of a great new Dominion never, of course, came about, Baker’s Government House now providing a lordly headquarters for the President of the Republic, but in the last decades of the Empire the separate territories did co-operate in many services, from pest control to East African Airways.
1 First go the Spies,
Bowing and presenting plausible credentials,
And then the honest Traders with their ribbons,
Striking an excellent bargain, one for two,
Tin for gold. Hard on their heels, the Conquerors,
Full of just cause and grievance, flying fierce flags,
Speaking of hinterlands. The Consuls next,
Elephant-borne or vastly palanquined,
Grandly distributing the Queen’s command,
Hanging disloyal miscreants now and then
After due process of law. And then a shift,
Into a worthier Schoolmaster’s pride,
Of benefits bestowed and gratitudes,
Like pedagogues regretfully reprimanding
Pupils of wasted promise. The sixth age
Adopts the shuffled posture of Apologist,
All ready now to see the other side,
Opening the door for last month’s criminals,
Bending the knee to vassals once in awe,
Giving the titles and the booties back
With murmurs of goodwill. Last scene of all,
Sail from the scented shore the Abdicators,
Back to their distant island, small and damp,
Sans guns, sans gold, sans flags, sans everything.
1 As soldier, explorer or administrator he had served in India, Afghanistan, the Sudan, Burma, Nyasaland, Kenya, Uganda, Bechuanaland, Hong Kong and Nigeria, and he died at Abinger in Surrey in 1945.
1 He died in 1955, but to th
is day there seems hardly a second-hand bookshop in England without a copy of Orientations on its shelves. Storrs wrote it half in Wiltshire and half at Axel Munthe’s famous villa of San Michele on Capri.
1 The Special Night Squads, officially disbanded by the British in 1939, became units of Haganah, the Zionists’ own defence force, and since this in turn developed into the Israeli Army Wingate is still honoured by the Israelis as one of the founders of their military strength.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Memsahibs and Others
AN allegorical factor in that withdrawal was the advance of women. Empire had generally been unkind to women (to British women, that is, for the women of the subject races had often benefited greatly, being relieved from the necessity of self-immolation or barbaric surgery, spared the hazards of slavery or tribal war, and occasionally persuaded to regard their husbands as less than god-like after all). Empire marched uneasily with the feminine principle. ‘We’re not pleasant in India‚’ says Heaslop the City Magistrate in A Passage to India, ‘and we don’t intend to be pleasant’, but his mother disapproves. ‘God has put us on the earth to be pleasant to each other … and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.’ Now, in the 1930s, the principle of being pleasant to people was gaining ground on the principle of being strong, and Mrs Heaslop’s view of Empire was imperceptibly leading to its dissolution.
In theory the British Empire was staunchly feminist—the first women in the world to get the vote were those of the Isle of Man, the next were those of New Zealand.1 In practice it was a purveyor of female heartbreak, relative or complete, temporary or life-long. The imperial memorials were full of women’s sadness: dead babies, fatal pregnancies, early widowhoods, disease, loneliness, terrible boredom, perpetual separations, the bicker and envy of small isolated communities, the gnaw of homesickness and regret. The Empire’s wars had deprived millions of mothers of their young sons. The adventure of Empire had destroyed countless families, and condemned thousands more to unhealthy alien climes, where for a couple of centuries the memsahibs and others tried to recreate, with their flowered curtains and their drooping cottage gardens, some sad verisimilitude of home.
To add insult to melancholy, it had become popular to blame women for the Empire’s decline. The imperialist attitude to the sex had detectably changed over the years. In mid-Victorian times the memsahib and her kind were sacrosanct, figures of porcelain perfection, above and apart from ordinary human functions, to be cherished tenderly in life and Mourned Perpetually in death. By Kipling’s day the memsahib had become a more fallible figure, and his Mrs Hawksbee, bitchy, snobby and conniving, became the fictional archetype of the imperial female. The ladies’ drawing room at the United Service Club at Simla was nicknamed ‘the snake-pit’, and the doughty novelist Maud Diver, a bold supporter of General Dyer and an imperialist to the core, felt obliged to write a book specifically to restore the damaged reputation of her sisters.
With the 1920s an element of bantering contempt entered the Empire’s attitudes to its women. ‘The hen-house’ was now the epithet for ladies’ annexes in the imperial clubs, and women’s efforts to fulfil their own potential, physically and intellectually, were generally greeted with affectionate and patronizing amusement. Later still their effect on Empire was represented as baleful. Until the women came, it was suggested in clubs and bar-rooms around the world, the Empire had been invincible. The British male, as everyone knew, was frank, fearless and no respecter of persons—the natives knew where they stood with him, an Englishman’s word was his bond and all that. Besides, there was nothing like a bit of black to cement race relations, was there? Living dictionaries, as they used to say! It was the damned memsahibs who wrecked it all. ‘Mark my words old boy, if the women had never come we’d still be on top of the world. What will it be now? No no, old boy, it’s my round … Bearer!’
There was something to this beery myth. Many women, like many men, were devoted to the country of their adoption—often their countries of birth indeed, especially in Anglo-Indian families. Few women, though, were imperialists. The Empire offered them so little. They were denied most of its chances and half its stimulations, and if it is true that they were often more race-conscious than their menfolk, equally they were much less ambitious to rule other peoples. The notorious absurdities of the memsahibs, satirized for so long by male writers, were generally only the frustrated expressions of unhappiness, fear, homesickness and waste—for surrounded as she generally was by servants, denied any real responsibility, the woman of Empire often felt herself to be no more than an ornamental, and progressively more un-ornamental, supernumerary. Nobody wanted her to be too clever, still less politically concerned. Any attempt to break from the herd would damage her husband’s career. All too often the climate, the society and the way of life sapped her desire to be beautiful. Male values were supreme almost everywhere in the British Empire, and even the family role, even motherhood itself, was forlornly disrupted by constant moves and partings.
How sad it was! The girls who flocked bright-eyed to India, Malta or Egypt, ‘the Fishing-Fleet’ as they were cruelly called, all too often returned sad-eyed and sallow, when thirty years later their husbands reluctantly retired at last, and they settled alien and out of touch at Guildford or Yelverton, all their imperial pretensions crumbled, all their memories rather a bore. No wonder, in their exiled prime, they were often supercilious and overbearing: there was purpose to their husbands’ imperialism, fun too very often, but there was not much satisfaction to their own.
2
Yet out of the generalizations, a thousand brilliant exceptions spring, for if the Empire did not offer much to the average woman, it was fertile in opportunity for the maverick, the solitary, the rebel and the visionary. The imperial adventure sharpened the outlines of exceptional men, and even more did it bring into focus the gifts of remarkable women, for the very fact of their independent presence on the frontiers marked them out as special.
Some were women who, for all the restrictions of their status, actively responded to the imperial idea: some were women who passionately opposed it. It was after all a matriarch’s Empire, and Victoria herself had always been able to see in it womanly terms, a gigantic family strewn around the globe for whom she was a universal Earth-Mother. It was true that she never ventured deeper into her domains than Ireland, but she was with all her dear peoples night and day in spirit, which was in many ways just as demanding as going there in person. The evangelical aspect of Empire held a true appeal for many women not only because, like Victoria, they wished to be good, but also because the mission stations of India and Africa offered them rare chances of active service in the field. Many an adventurous Englishwoman found her fulfilment looking after lepers in Bengal, teaching Dinka children in the southern Sudan, nursing sick Eskimos, vainly trying to persuade the Ashanti towards a Truer Light, or even, like the indefatigable Mrs Dorothy Brooke of Cairo, rescuing from their miseries the derelict quadrupeds of the fellahin.
Often in their pursuit of the good, they came up against the mighty. Smuts was not being altogether flattering when he called Emily Hobhouse ‘the eternal woman’: having been Kitchener’s scourge in the Boer War—‘that bloody woman’—she went on to nag Smuts to distraction towards racial enlightenment, and was one of the few people who presumed to offer moral guidance to Gandhi. Lady Anne Blunt, who raised her magnificent Arab horses almost in the shadow of the Pyramids, and was often to be seen careering across the desert in full Arab costume, was a staunch ally of her husband Wilfrid, the gadfly of Empire, and disconcerted all the Cairo hostesses by her wilful combination of radicalism and aristocracy. Who could be more aggravating to Authority than stumpy Annie Besant, henchwoman of the Mahatma, founder of the Theosophist cult, socialist, atheist, strike-leader, Indian nationalist, imprisoned for subversion but becoming in the end, in a triumph of will over circumstance, President of the Indian National Congress? Or who more infuriating than the handsome Coun
tess Markievicz, née Gore-Booth, who was born a favoured child of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, admired by Edward VII, but who went on to command the Irish rebels in St Stephen’s Green during the six days of the Easter Rising?
These were rebels all, but there were many more who influenced events obliquely, within the system. There were women who flatly refused to go to the Hills, and by staying with their husbands in the sweltering plains of the Indian summer, helped to shatter the myth of female uselessness and fragility. There were women like Helen Younghusband, who furiously advanced her husband’s interests whatever the opposition—she was, it was said, ‘inordinately proud of him, and despises the whole race of officials’. While Lutyens was building the Viceroy’s house his wife Emily was organizing crêches for the women labourers on the site—the first in India. While Frederick Lugard was presiding over the destinies of Nigeria his formidable wife Flora, confidante if not fellow-conspirator of Rhodes and Jameson, was powerfully propagating his ideas to captive visitors in the Gubernatorial drawing-room.