British colonialism in India, Africa and elsewhere spawned a very extensive library of fiction, much of it by writers such as G. A. Henty, the master-teller of adventure-stories for middle-class English boys in the age of empire.
Trading on king-and-country heroism, such books as At the Point of a Bayonet: A Tale of the Mahratta War (1902) inculcated an attitude of unreflective superiority and patriotic idealism in those destined to work in the Colonial Service or else in the armed forces, maintaining the apparatus of imperial government around the world. [1]
At the summit of empire literature for boys stand Rudyard Kipling’s great novel Kim (1910), the creation of a man born in India, the son of English parents, and a passionate believer in the idea of Empire - though not the kind established simply by military and commercial power so much as the cultural idea of empire as a moral force. Kim embodies in an almost visionary idea of India as a synthesis of the English and the India spiritual outlook, and hence a bulwark against the ambitions of other Europe nations - notably the Russians whose alleged attempt to steal the Raj from the British forms the plot of that novel.
Young Kim travels around India as the chela [pupil] an ascetic Buddhist lama [monk] while secretly acting as the eyes and ears of the English spy-master Col. Creighton. What qualifies the boy-hero for this role is his own divided nature: Kimball O’Hara - as he is properly called - is the son of an Irish colour-sargeant and a “native” Indian woman. He is, in fact, a hybrid both in the biological and the cultural sense; as such, his real quest is to find the synthesis of the native and the British view of India in his own imagination. It is this which has brought to novel to the attention of so many postcolonial criticis, notably Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1993) [2].
For a very different writer Lieut.-Col. J. H. Patterson, author of Man-eaters of Tsavo (1907), taking up the white man’s burden chiefly consists in shooting lions before they sink their fangs into yet another African - or, in a most most unfortunate case, an Irish civil-engineer while peacefully a-bed with his wife along the route of the railway track which he is running through Uganda. (By a coincidence, the ill-fated engineer is also called O’Hara, hinting once again at the part played by Irishmen in empire).
At the outset of a best-selling memoir of lion-hunting in British East Africa, Patterson promises to regale his readers with an account of ‘rather unique experiences in the wilds ... far away from civilisation’ [Ftn]. Before advancing very far, he informs us us that he has ‘always been very keenly interested in the different native races of Africa, and consequently availed [himself] of every opportunity of studying their manners and customs’.[3] The accounts of various tribes that follow convey the sense of paternalistic condescension which is so much part of the British colonial outlook.
The Masai, we learn, for instance, are ‘an upright and honourable savage race’ whose gradual extinction is regarded as ‘a great pity’. It seems, that '[t]heir numbers have latterly become greatly reduced through famine and small-pox, [though] the remnant of the tribe, more especially the men, are still a fine, lithe, clean-limbed people’. Of their underlings the Wa Taita, Patterson has this to say:
| [T]he Wa Taita are essentially a peace-loving and industrious people; and, indeed, before the arrival of the British in the country, they hardly ever ventured down from their mountain fastnesses, owing to their dread of the warlike Masai. |
It is their attire that next comes under scrutiny - an attire that corresponds to Kipling’s notion of ‘fluttered folk and wild’ in “Take up the White Man’s Burden” [link]:
As usual, their ideas of costume are rather primitive; the men sometimes wear a scrap of cloth round the loins, while the women content themselves with the same or with a short kilt. Both sexes adorn themselves with a great quantity of copper or iron wire coiled round their arms and legs, and smear their bodies all over with grease, the men adding red clay to the mixture. Many of the women also wear dozens of rows of beads, while their ears are hung with pieces of chain and other fantastic ornaments. [4; for a longer extract, see infra.] |
Passing judgement on the physical attractions of female members of the different tribal groups, even when they are less ‘clean-limbed’ than the men, is apparently one of the author’s self-imposed responsbilities. Of the Swahili we are told, for instance, that ‘the women - who are too liberally endowed to be entirely graceful - go about with bare arms and shoulders and wear a long brightly-coloured cloth which they wind tightly round their bosoms and then allow to fall to the feet.’ [5]
Of the Wa N’derobbo, a race of hunters who ‘hide in caves and thickets’ - apparently for fear of the Masai - he has only a little first-hand experience but this is enough to inform him about the cut of their young women also: ‘Not long ago I saw a few of them in the neighbourhood of the Eldama Ravine: but these were more or less civilised, and the girls, who were quite graceful, had abandoned the native undress costume for flowing white robes’.
In a similar vein the
Wa Kikuyu of Kenya are said to be ‘similar to the Masai in build but not nearly so good-looking.’ In this way, the colonist surveys the African “races” in terms of a Hellenic aesthetic of the body-beautiful lodged in his own mind. Lodged in that receptacle also are definite ideas about religion leading to the blithe assertion that for one such tribe at least the age of barbarism is over:
| I am glad to say, however, that owing to the establishment of several Mission Stations amongst them, the Wa Kamba are quickly becoming the most civilised natives in the country; and the missionaries have adopted the sensible course of teaching the people husbandry and the practical arts and crafts of everyday life, in addition to caring for their spiritual needs. [6] |
Although little more than a late bloom of Victorian imperialism, Col. Patterson’s book was to enjoy a second life in Arch Oboler’s Bwana Devil which promised its audience ‘a lion in your lap [and] lover in your arms’ - all in glorious 3-D colour [7]. It was of course the bounding lions that determined the choice of subject-matter. For cinema-goers in 1952, the world of African ‘safari’ was no more likely to stimulate a serious critique of empire than contemporary ‘Westerns’ were likely to engage with the rights and wrongs of warfare on native Americans.
In contrast to Patterson’s period, the 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of an increasingly critical response to colonial life in English fiction. A essentially conservative writer such as Somerset Maugham - one of the greatest chroniclers of colonial decline - tended the portray the district officers of the Colonial Service as“jolly good sorts” at bottom if often prone to madness of the “mad dogs and Englishmen” variety celebrated in Noel Coward’s comic song; yet others such as George Orwell - himself a district officer in Burma at one time - saw empire as a poison chalice and rightly saw that the oppression of the English working-class was connected to racist attitudes abroad.
Evelyn Waugh, an Anglo-Catholic writer who was firmly on the side of the upper-classes, neverthless wrote of the complacent Englishman abroad and his self-serving native clients with a sure satirical touch in works such as Black Mischief (1932) - a farce about liberal colonialism in an fictional island of Azania though inspired by his own visit to the coronation of the Abyssinian Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930. In an earlier essay on that subject he gave a brilliantly corrusive account of an affair that mixes grandeur and silliness in Alice-in-Wonderland proportions - the only comparison he himself can find for the court of the new Emperor.
“A Coronation in 1930”, for all its comic brio, flagrantly exploits colonial stereotypes regarding the African native as viewed from the horse-drawn carriage of the European visitor. It is less a question of facts than tone when he reiterates the tired judgement about the good looks of the Somali people of Ethiopia (an widely-shared judgement which presumably conditioned the professional success of Naomi Campbell):
| The Somalis are a race of exceptional beauty, very slender and erect, with delicate features and fine, wide-set eyes. most of them wore a strip of rag around their wawists and a few coils of copper wire in wrists and ankles. Their heads are either shaven or dyed with ochre. [8]. |
But Waugh is a naughty observer, and he will not stop there:
| Eight or nine harlots beseiged our carriage until whipped away by the driver; innumerable naked children splashed through the mud after us, screaming for bakshish [i.e., Arabic, money gift, as in tip or alms]. |
And with that he returns to the ethnographical standpoint of the European observer, tinged with a comic appreciation of the domestic architecture that the African native inexplicably adopts for his own discomfort:
| Some splendid fellows with spears, in form the skirts of the town, where the huts, formerly grass-thatched, mud-built squares, became little domed structures like inverted birds’ nests, made out of twigs, grass, rags, and flattened tins, with out hole through which a man might crawl on his belly. |
In all of this Waugh conveys the air of a fundamentally disordered society, lost in the gap between the primitive and the modern and for that reason alone helplessly irrational and funny. Yet the Europeans in his sights are no more kindly handled than the silly, helpless natives. Among the entourage of visitors at the coronation, for example, are ‘two formidable ladies in knitted suits and toppees’ of whom he has these stern things to say: ‘though unrelated by blood, long companionship had made them almost indistinguishable, square-jawed, tight-lipped, with hard, discontented eyes.’
| For them the whole coronation was a profound disappointment. What did it matter that they were witnesses of a unique interpenetration of two cultures? They were out for Vice. They were collecting material, in fact, for a little book on the subject, an African Mother India [...] Prostitution and drug-traffic comprised their modest interests, and they were too dense to find evidence of either. [9] |
It is the sense of Europeans being as much at sea in the colonial encounter as those to whom they believe themselves to be bringing civilisation that informs the best of English colonial writing. A new complexity was revealed, however, in E. M. Forster’s masterpiece of Anglo-Indian fiction A Passage to India (1924), a novel which turns upon the suspected rape of a young English woman by her Indian friend Aziz in the Marabar Caves of Chandrapore.
The rape is a hysterical delusion but nevertheless serves to open up a chasm between the English and the educated Indians which was just then narrowing to the degree that a romantic union between them began to seem possible. With the events of this novel, the two groups moved fatally apart and Indian independence becomes, in a sense, an emotional necessity - even though the novelist seems to agree with the Fielding, the chief administrator:
| India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood! Waddling in at this hour of the world to take her seat! She, whose only peer was the Holy Roman Empire, she shall rank with Guatemala and Belgium perhaps! [10] |
When, in the late ’thirties, Joyce Cary sat down to write a novel on the basis of his experience as a colonial administrator and soldier in Nigeria and the Cameroons he could draw upon literary examples that included not only the subtle shadings of colonial pride, shame and hilarity in recent novels by Waugh and Forster, but also upon a personal experience based on his background as a member of an Anglo-Irish family living in Co. Donegal.
For Cary was a member of a social caste which had lived in Ireland for long generations past but remained essentially apart from the majority population - whether it be the Catholic Irish or the Presbyterian Ulster Scots. Yet, for all that, the Anglo-Irish often felt themselves to be, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase, as close to the Irish as ‘the mist is to the bog’ - a not-entirely flattering comparison for either party involved. [Ftn.]
In practical terms this might well mean that Cary was no less capable of imaginative sympathy with Africans that W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory or John Millington Synge were capable of sympathy with the ordinary people of Ireland. At least, he might envy them their imaginative possessions, in a phrase that Yeats favoured to describe the oral traditions of peasant Ireland. In regard to Cary no less than Yeats, the question must be posed whether he crossed the threshold between colonial and postcolonial forms of response. It is this question which we turn to consider when we consider Cary’s Mr Johnson (1939). |