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Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1964)

‘Hurrah and victory for the black folk!’
(Typically naive political slogan Weep Not, Child, page 73)

Weep Not, Child was Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s first novel, written in English and published in 1964, the same year as Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s third novel, Arrow of God. But whereas Achebe wrote about the Igbo people in Nigeria in West Africa, Thiong’o is a native of Kenya in East Africa, which is where all his fictions are set.

I write ‘written in English’ because, after writing three novels in English, Thiong’o came to feel strongly that the African novelist ought to write in his or her own native tongue and so, from the 1970s to the present day, his novels, plays and essays have all been written in his native tongue, Gĩkũyũ.

Via a long writing career, along with his committed political involvement, and his numerous essays, Thiong’o long ago established himself as a major presence in African literature, and has been nominated for the Nobel prize.

Weep Not, Child

It’s a short book, just 136 pages in the Heinemann African Writers’ paperback edition and, I’m afraid to say, after the monumental vision of Achebe’s Africa trilogy, or the stylish grace and lucidity of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s prose, Thiong’o suffers by comparison. His prose feels simple, almost school level, and the insights and ideas expressed by both the third-person narrator and the characters also seem childish in their illiterate simple-mindedness (more detail, below). That said, the very simplicity of the style arguably matches the stark (and highly political) outlines of the story.

Part One. The Waning Light

It’s set in Mahua village not far from Kipanga town. Ngotho is a middle-aged African, not well off, living in a village compound with his two wives, Njeri the eldest and Nyokabi. By Njeri he has three children, Boro, Kori and Kamau. By Nyokabi he has two sons, Mwangi, who died in the recently finished Second World War, and the boy Njoroge.

Boro fought in the white man’s war, and is now withdrawn and drinks too much. Kori works in an African tea shop. Kamua is apprenticed to a carpenter, Nangwa, in the village. The narrative kicks off as it is announced that Njoroge is going to school (Kamahou Intermediate School, p.109), a big achievement to be proud of in their community.

We learn about their neighbours who are each emblematic. The immediate neighbour is a man named Jacobo who owns a lot of land and a big house ‘like a European’s house’ (p.18). His wife is Juliana, a fat jolly woman. They have a daughter, Mwihaki, a little girl who Njoroge likes to play with. She’s in the year above Njorogoe at school and looks after him when he is a vulnerable new boy.

Mr Howlands is the local big white man, who owns most of the good land and a fine house and has lots of black employees and servants. His wife, the Memsahib, is bored, and regularly demands that the black servants be beaten and, periodically, sacked. Howlands is a product of the First World War, uncertain and disillusioned by the peace, who sought an opportunity and a purpose in Africa.

The older black characters, Ngotho and his friends, like meeting up in the barber’s shop in Kipanga. Recurring scenes turn the conversations there into a kind of chorus commenting on the main action.

Like Chinua Achebe, Thiong’o is not shy of depicting his people as they actually were, warts and unacceptable attitudes, customs and behaviour, and all. Njoroge is afraid of his father. Ngotho’s attitude to his wives:

When a woman was angry no amount of beating would pacify her. Ngotho did not beat his wives much. (p.11)

Children are routinely beaten and thrashed, at school or by their parents. Njoroge longs to be a bit older in order ‘to have the freedom to sit with the big circumcised girls and touch them as he saw the young men do.’ (p.22)

This community loves listening to old stories. The father, Ngotho, tells old folk stories, legends of the creation of the world by the Creator Murungu, as well as stories from when he was a boy and was press-ganged along with so many others during the white man’s first war. He explains that the Creator gave them all the land but the white man took the best of it away. In their little area the best land now belongs to the white man Mr Howlands.

As the narrative unfolds the Land Issue develops as the central theme. Ngotho obsessively remembers the words of Mugo wa Kibiro, an old medicine man and prophet who foresaw the arrival of the whites, and that they would seize the ancestral land given them by the Creator, but also that they would, eventually, leave. So:

  • the white man Mr Howlands thinks he owns the land. He thinks that ‘he alone was responsible for taming this unoccupied wildness’ (p.31)
  • Ngotho and Africans of his generation remember the folk stories about the Creator giving all the land to his ancestors in perpetuity, and passively wonders when the white man will leave and give it back to its rightful owners
  • Ngotho’s sons, especially Boro and Kamau, are disgusted that his father and father’s father were weak enough to have the land stolen from them by the white man

Njoroge’s father, Ngotho, loyally, faithfully works for Mr Howlands, turning up day after day, on time, and working the land with impressive fidelity, but in fact exemplifies the mutual misunderstanding about the land. Ngotho does all this not because he respects Mr Howlands, but in order to maintain his contact with land which he is convinced is his, and will one day revert to him and his sons.

Some of them have vaguely heard of a man named Jomo who came back from the war and calls for their ancestral land to be given back. One of the brothers refers to Jomo as the black Moses, come to lead his people home. (Presumably this refers to Jomo Kenyatta, the great Kenyan nationalist leader.) This chimes with the ways, as he attends school and learns to read, Njoroge develops a deep and simple Christian faith, that God rewards hard work with justice and fairness (p.49).

The thing is, the entire narrative is told in a kind of fog of ignorance and half understanding. The characters are illiterate peasants or barely urban workers. None of them have the education or articulacy to really analyse their situation. Things such as the land issue or the character of this rumoured leader, Jomo, are the stuff of rumour conveyed with great vagueness or naivety. Here’s a typical dialogue between young Njoroge and his older brother Kamau:

‘Do you think it’s true what father says, that all the land belongs to the black people?’
‘Yes. Black people have their land in the country of black people. White men have their land in their own country. It is simple. I think it was God’s plan.’
‘Are there black people in England?’
‘No. England is for white people only.’
‘And they have left their country to come and rob us of what we have?’
‘Yes. They are robbers?’
‘All of them?’
‘Yes.’ (p.43)

It’s not that it’s untrue, it’s just that it’s a very basic, very primitive account, on a par with the extremely simple creation myth which Ngotho tells his family. This makes reading the book frustrating, because all the characters are at such a very low level of education and awareness. Then again, maybe this is the entire point of the novel, to show the slow growth in awareness and political understanding of the main character, from village ignorance to more informed disillusion. But it’s an irritating read.

The menfolk gear up for a general strike, many coming to visit Ngotho to discuss it. They airily assume that all black men will join it because its aim is so noble, to drive the white men out of the land and reclaim their birth-right – that’s how simple and naive they are. Njorege, through whose eyes we see most of the action, doesn’t know what a ‘strike’ is. See what I mean by low level? How can something succeed when most of the characters don’t even know what it is?

Mr Howlands warns his black workers that if any of them join the strike they’ll be sacked on the spot. The Ngotho household is divided because his two wives tell Ngotho he would be mad to join the strike, achieve nothing, and lose his job. The theme of masculinity and patriarchy is evident and generally attached to Ngotho who genuinely doesn’t know what to do for the best.

Five years later New Year. Njoroge’s class assemble for their marks. He is top of the class (which made me reflect on how the schoolchild protagonists of this kind of novel generally are top of their class cf the natural intelligence driving Ugwu in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun). Mwihaki passed, too.

But they get home to find both their families in too much of a state to congratulate them. It was the day of the much-vaunted strike. Speakers came from Nairobi to address the locals, including Ngotho’s son, Boro, who has gone into politics. They describe how the white men came, stole their land and forced them to fight in two white men’s wars, from which they returned poorer than ever. Loud cheers.

To everyone’s surprise the police invade the stage and then usher onto it Jacobo, Ngotho’s neighbour, wealthy black man who has thrown in his lot with the whites. Outraged, Ngotho stands and strides toward the stage, and the crowd hesitates enough for the scene to crystallise as Ngotho for the blacks and Jacobo for the whites, before the crowd roars and surges towards the stage. The police reply with tear gas, truncheons and bullets. Two are killed. Ngotho is knocked to the ground and loses consciousness.

In the barber’s shop the old men discuss the riot and say it only goes to show that ‘we black people will never be united. There must always be a traitor in our midst.’ (p.60).

p.61 Ngotho is thrown off his land because it turns out it ‘legally’ belongs to Jacobo, who has now become his arch enemy. The family relocates to land owned by Nganga. It costs a lot to build new huts and Mrs Howlands has, of course, fired Ngotho, so times are very hard. But Kamau’s wages go up and they survive. He and Kori also donate money to continue funding Njoroge’s education.

There ought to be a name for the genre of story which is about the first member of a family to attend school and further education, often thanks to significant funding and sacrifices by his family or community. The same kind of story is told by Chinua Achebe in No Longer At Ease. Later, when he goes on to secondary school, the entire local area raises money for his fees, so proud are they of his achievement (p.105).

Interlude

Two and a half years later Fragments. An angry white administrator looks out over the Kenyan country shortly before returning to Britain, with the self-serving thought: ‘And to think of all we did for them’ (p.62). Some men gossip about the assassination of a black chief who was collaborating with the white administration.

We hear that Jomo has been arrested and a state of emergency is declared (p.63). This latter references dates events to October 1952, when the British authorities declared a State of Emergency after the Mau Mau murdered a loyal Kikuyu chief.

Njoroge continues to hear important things, central issues to the politics of independence, but his child’s point of view makes them frustratingly dim and naive.

Njoroge had heard about the colour-bar from his brothers in Nairobi. He did know what it was really. But he knew that the strike had failed because of the colour-bar. Black people had no land because of colour-bar and they could not eat in hotels because of colour-bar. Colour-bar was everywhere… (p.64)

Part 2. Darkness Falls

Two years later Njoroge has left primary school and been going to secondary school for two years (p.68). For his loyalty to the whites, Jacobo has been made a chief. The whites have banded together to protect themselves against the Freedom Boys of the Forest. Mr Howlands has been appointed District Commissioner.

Njoroge gets home to find the family assembled. Boro has come to tell them that Kori was arrested with a number of other agitators. As he’s describing it Kori comes staggering in, having jumped out of the police lorry carrying him and other prisoners. Boro regularly argues with his father. Ngotho refuses to take the Mau Mau oath from his own son. (This is the first mention of Mau Mau, p.71)

p.72 The men of the family discuss the Mau Mau. They all hope Jomo Kenyatta will win his court case and freedom. But he doesn’t.

Ngotho is upset because he has lost the vital connection with his ancestral land and wonders what kind of man that leaves him. He put all his hopes in Jomo. ‘For him Jomo stood for custom and tradition purified by the grace of learning and much travel’ (p.74).

What the text lacks in psychological depth or sophistication, it makes up for in the straightforward simplicity of its agit-prop rhetoric. As they discuss how Jomo lost his court case to be released from prison, Ngotho’s wife, Nyokabi, speaks out:

‘It seems all clear as daylight. The white man makes a law or a rule. Through that rule or law or what you may call it, he takes away the land and then imposes many laws on the people concerning that land and many other things, all without people agreeing first as in the old days of the tribe. Now a man rises and opposes that law which made right the taking away of land. Now that man is taken by the same people who made the laws against which the man is fighting. He is tried under those alien rules….’ (p.75)

Boro says the white people win because they stick together while the black people are divided.

p.76 Cut to Mr Howlands, now District Officer Howlands, in his office. Showing how embittered he is that his wife has left him to become a missionary. All he has left is the land which he has worked so hard to develop i.e. he’s not going to give it up without a fight.

Describes the malicious pleasure he takes in promoting Jacobo and setting one black man against another. Divide and rule. Jacobo comes in for order. He thinks Howlands likes him, respects his loyalty. But Howlands thinks he is a ‘savage’. I found the characterisation of Howlands thin and naive. He doesn’t sound or think like a British colonial administrator. He has the same simple, naive thoughts as the African characters i.e. I’m afraid, Thiong’o.

Jacobo feeds Howlands false information that Ngotho is a Mau Mau leader. Howlands gives Jacobo carte blanche to arrest Ngotho and his family for anything he can.

p.80 As a result Njeri and Kori are arrested for breaking curfew. Ngotho is abused by Boro for sitting by and doing nothing about the arrest. He becomes a shell. He looks none of his family in the eye. Young people no longer congregate in his compound to hear him tell the old stories.

p.82 Njoroge’s school receives a letter saying that if it doesn’t close down immediately, the headmaster and all the pupils will be beheaded. The kind of message sent out by the Viet Cong, by the FLN in Algeria, by umpteen jihadi groups across the Middle East – all collaborators with the oppressive colonialist authorities will suffer the ultimate penalty. Always the same logic to terrorise the entire population into submission.

p.84 The climate of fear created by the Mau Mau. Njoroge is preparing for the exam for entrance to secondary school. (Hang on, if that happens at age 11, as in the UK, and nine and a half years have been mentioned as passing since the opening scenes…well, no way was Njoroge one and a half when the narrative opened. I admit I don’t understand the timeline.

Njoroge laments that his infant friend Mwihaki’s father (Jacobo) a) became a leading figure in the white man’s homeguard and b) was attacked (no details).

p.87 Njoroge walks into town to see Kamau who tells him half a dozen local men were abducted and found dead in the forest, including the barber who hosted so many convivial evenings, and Nganga who kindly gave Ngotho permission to build a new compound on his land. The whites say it was the Mau Mau but the blacks say it was the whites who then blamed the Mau Mau.

Walking home Njoroge bumps into Mwihaki. He still holds a torch for her. She has grown, is an adolescent with budding breasts. Njoroge himself is tall, appears older than he is. They nervously make a date for the following Sunday.

They meet at the church where the preacher (who was once one of Njoroge’s infant school teachers) laments the tragedy, the bloodshed and fear, which have come over the land of the Gikuyu. He implies that the end of days is at hand.

Njoroge and Mwihaki walk back to her house i.e. the house of Jacobo. He isn’t there. He is always away on business but when he does return everyone is terrified of his power and anger. Unexpectedly Jacobo arrives with three bodyguards but, equally unexpectedly, he doesn’t abuse or threaten Njoroge, instead praises him for continuing school and says he will be one of those who rebuild the country.

Njoroge and Mwihaki go up a hill, look out over the plain, and worry that the end actually is at hand. They are both genuine Christians and wonder how Jesus could countenance the destruction of the world and all the people in it. They both struggle to express their emotions (and so does Thiong’o). In a burst she says she wants to live with him and be friends forever. But Njoroge is starting to see himself as a kind of saviour figure, sent to comfort and liberate the land from its white oppressor.

p.97 Cut back to Howlands who is portrayed as a pantomime villain, chortling at how easy it is to set black against black. What does he care if entire villages in the jungle are wiped out, mwah haha, the Sheriff of Nottingham played by Alan Rickman, he might as well be twirling the ends of his black moustache.

Enter Jacobo, the Sheriff’s dim sidekick. Somehow neither of them have managed to arrest Ngotho yet, despite Howlands allegedly having spent years scheming to defeat his enemy. Bit of a pathetic enemy, and pretty useless schemes.

Jacobo shows Howlands the most recent anonymous letter he’s received threatening death if he doesn’t leave off helping the white man.

Some months later Njoroge is heading a Christian procession to a nearby village, chatting to a fellow devotee, with a group of Christian woman walking behind them singing hymns. All of a sudden they are stopped by a white officer and realised they are surrounded by soldiers. The officer lets the women go then makes the boys and the men squat while he examines their papers. The black soldiers beat some of the black Christians.

Their preacher, Isaka, is separated from them because he has no papers. The others are told to be on their way but haven’t gone far before they hear two screams then machine gun fire.

p.102 Cut to Boro and his lieutenant hiding in the bush and discussing their next steps. It was Boro et al that the white man’s patrol was out hunting. We are given a very simplistic account of Boro’s motives, namely Revenge. Boro doesn’t care about the other’s fine talk about freedom. Killing the white man and his lackeys is his aim.

‘Freedom is meaningless unless it can bring back a brother I lost [in the white man’s war]. Because it can’t do that, the only thing left to me is to fight, to kill and to rejoice at any who falls under my sword. But enough. Chief Jacobo must die.’ (p.103)

In the fairy tale simplicity of this I suddenly heard the note of Victorian melodrama at its cheesiest. ‘Chief Jacobo must die!’

p.104 Njoroge graduates from junior school, the only boy in his area to do so. Many people in the area contribute to his school fees. He now has a full-blown messiah complex.

Njoroge now had a new feeling of pride and power for at last his way seemed clear. The land needed him and God had given him an opening so clear that he might come back and save his family and the whole country. (p.105)

Njoroge meets up with Mwihaki, as he keeps doing. It’s one year after the last time they walked up the hill. Now she criticises him for always talking about tomorrow and going on about the people. Njoroge replies with guff about Jesus and faith and hope and freedom and this completely reassures Mwihaki. I’ve no idea what age they’re meant to be, 11, 12, 13? It’s a childishly simple-minded conversation but without the charm.

p.108 So Njoroge starts attending the famous Siriana secondary school, a boarding school. It’s the first time he’s been taught by white teachers and he is surprised by how warm and supportive they are, surprised how boys from the other tribes of Kenya all get along.

One day a football team from a European school come for a game. To his surprise Njoroge gets talking to one of the boy supporters who is none other than Stephen, son of angry bitter Mr Howlands. Turns out the two boys share the same experience of being stared at and made uneasy by boys of the other race. They are both uneasy in this country covered in black stormclouds.

p.112 Mwihaki writes from back in Kipanga, where her father (Jacobo) lives in fear of attack. Every day bodies are found in the forest. She walked past some black people being beaten by police and begging for mercy. It’s a nightmare.

p.114 It’s the third term at the school. Njoroge really loves it, especially likes English lessons (of course), is awed by the way the white missionary teachers work alongside their black colleagues and black children with no colour consciousness at all. It is a sort of utopia.

With no warning Njoroge is called to the headmaster’s study and handed over to two policemen who drive him to a homeguard post nicknamed the ‘House of Pain’ where he is accused of being Mau Mau, interrogated and beaten unconscious. One night to recover then he’s interrogated again, this time by Mr Howlands who applies pincers to his genitals. Njoroge screams in agony. For the first time Howlands reveals what it’s all about: Jacobo has been murdered. Apparently, they’ve interrogated his father who, under torture, confessed to being Mau Mau and killing Jacobo which is, of course, nonsense. A few days later Njoroge and his two mother are released.

p.119 Ngotho on the other hand is detained. What happened is Jacobo was murdered and the cops arrested Ngotho’s son, Kamau. it was then that Ngotho decided to sacrifice himself for his son by walking into the nearest police station and confessing to Jacobo’s murder. Ngotho has become, for Howlands, the symbol of everything ungrateful and blocking his will in this wretched country. Hence the fury with which he tortures him, day after day.

In some obscure way Njoroge is racked by the thought that it’s his relationship with Mwihaku which somehow brought all this tragedy down on his family.

p.122 Ngotho is allowed home. He has to be carried out of the homeguard post. His nose is split in two, he can’t move his legs, he can’t sit without pain (was he in fact castrated, as Howlands in a frenzy told Njoroge?)

Out of the night appears the prodigal son, the accusatory son, the genuine Mau Mau, Boro. There’s a melodramatic scene where Ngotho struggles to sit up and blesses his son, tells him to fight on, before falling back on the bed and expiring. Victorian melodrama.

p.126 Five months later Njoroge is 20 years old. He is working as a shop assistant in a dress shop owned by an Indian. It is a humiliating come-down after all his fancy talk of saving his family and his country. Turns out that Mr Howlands was murdered the same night Ngotho died. His brothers Boro and Kamau are facing murder charges.

p.127 Thiong’o describes Howlands’ last hours of anger and frustration against Ngotho and his entire family really, really badly. Boro bursts in and accuses him of stealing the land, killing many black people, raping women etc. Howlands says it is my land. Boro shoots him. it is all done very, very badly, with laughably thin psychology or insight.

p.130 Mwihaki’s perspective, how she had heard about her father’s murder from the head of her school, then returned home. Her mother, obviously, hates the Ngotho family and Mwihaki is understandably swayed by this but, despite everything, still wants to see Njoroge again.

Mwihaki and Njoroge meet on the hill where they’ve had so many conversations. Njoroge has been beaten down, all his hopes destroyed, the only reliable thing in his life has been Mwihaki and so now he tells her that he loves her. Good grief, this is bad:

‘Mwihaki, dear, I love you. Save me if you want. Without you I am lost.’ She wanted to sink in his arms and feel a man’s strength around her weak body.

Njoroge tells her that he wants to flee Kenya, go to Uganda maybe, but Mwihaki, like so many young women, says No, she has to stay near her mother who needs her. Njoroge experiences her refusal to leave with him as a massive disappointment and disillusion. He sees his last hope of escape, of starting anew somewhere else, disappear, stricken that ‘his last hope had vanished’ (p.134). Unfortunately, all these overwrought feelings came over as barely comprehensible twaddle, to me.

p.134 It is a very shallow book, an immature young man’s book. It’s overstuffed with themes but Thiong’o treats none of them adequately, with any depth. He makes this character of Njoroge bear all kinds of significances which the story, and its complete lack of psychological depth or acuity, just don’t justify.

Thus now, in the last few pages, the narrator makes a big deal of the fact that Njoroge has, at a stroke lost his faith in God, lost his hope for a better day, lost his naive belief that he could be the redeemer who saved his country. Once he thought he would save his country but now he works in a dress shop whose customers look at him sadly and whisper about his family tragedy behind their hands. He has plummeted from utopian heights to humiliating depths.

Which is why he goes out wandering along the endless road till he comes to a tree which has been familiar to him all his life and prepares a noose. He’s about to hang himself when he hears his mother Nyokabi’s voice calling. Like Mwihaki, filial duty overcomes him, he turns from the noose, greets his poor aged mother and returns home with him.

The last sentences describe how Njoroge’s conscience accuses him of being a coward and how the poor young man, completely broken in spirit, miserably agrees.

Thoughts

I see the political importance and consciousness-raising purpose of Weep Not, Child but I couldn’t warm to either the simple style or the even simpler level of thought.

The blurb says it’s a novel about the impact of the Mau Mau emergency on one family but, as my summary conveys, it’s a very skimpy summary, with few if any descriptions of Mau Mau members – Boro popping up for a page two or three times in the narrative is not an adequate treatment of this massive, long-lasting, nationwide rebellion. I suppose some killings, like the execution of Howlands, are described in some detail but, due to the very poor psychology of the scene, it made little or no impression on me. Instead, the story foregrounds the shallow but shrill family melodrama which I’ve summarised.

I think we’re meant to react to the poignancy and emotion of the story, especially the humiliation piled on humiliation of the once buoyant and optimistic Njoroge, at the end. But I’m afraid what came over to my cynical mind was how abjectly unprepared African nations were to manage themselves, if they were placing their hopes in the hands of simpletons and ignoramuses like Njoroge or Boro.

Maybe the situation obtaining in Kenya and Uganda and Nigeria at independence was entirely the fault of the British government, but this book, far more than an insight into the Mau Mau phenomenon (which it hardly gives at all) struck me as being an indictment of how naive, ignorant and unprepared for any form of self rule that generation of Africans was.

So I read it as a tragic story but for this reason and not at all for the reasons given in the narrative and which Thiong’o intended.

Credit

Weep Not, Child by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was first published in the Heinemann African Writers’ series in 1964. References are to the 1987 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on February 9, 2024

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The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly (2006)

This book will offer plenty more suggestions for experimental improvements to Western assistance, but don’t expect a Big Plan to reform foreign aid. The only Big Plan is to discontinue the Big Plans. The only Big Answer is that there is no Big Answer.
(The White Man’s Burden, page 26)

The dynamism of the poor at the bottom has much more potential than plans at the top.
(p.94)

William Easterly (born 1957) is an American economist, specialising in economic development. He is a professor of economics at New York University, joint with Africa House, and co-director of NYU’s Development Research Institute. Surprisingly for an American academic, he’s only written three books, all of them about development economics.

  • The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (2001)
  • The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)
  • The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014)

This was the second one and established him, as the title suggests, as a robust critic of the entire ideology of western aid to the developing world.

Background

Right at the end of 2005 the doyen of US development economists, Jeffrey Sachs, wrote a book called ‘The End of Poverty’, an optimistic clarion call whose introduction by globally famous rock singer Bono helped propel it into the bestseller list. The book was timed to precede the G8 conference and summit held in Scotland in July 2005. The G8 leaders pledged to double 2004 levels of aid to poor nations from $25 billion to $50 billion by 2010, with half the money going to Africa

This book by William Easterly is by way of being a refutation of Sachs’s one. Very crudely, Sachs said we must give more aid, lots more aid to Africa – and Easterly says ‘oh no we shouldn’t’.

Easterly thinks the messianic save-the-world attitude of people like Sachs is perilously close to the old colonial assumption that We Know Best what to do for the natives.

Right at the start of the book he distinguishes between two types of foreign aid donors: ‘Planners’, who believe in imposing generalised, top-down, big plans on poor countries, and ‘Searchers’, who look for bottom-up solutions to specific needs. Planners are portrayed as utopian romantics while Searchers are more realistic because they focus on piecemeal interventions.

Planners and Searchers

The basic binary or dichotomy idea is repeated countless times:

Planners announce good intentions but don’t motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward.

Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions.

Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand.

Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions.

Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom.

Planners never hear whether the planned got what it needed; Searchers find out if the customer is satisfied.

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional, and technological factors. A Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation.

A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Searchers have better incentives and better results.

Searchers could find ways to make a specific task—such as getting medicines to dying children—work if they could concentrate on that task instead of on Big Plans. They could test whether a specific task had a high payoff for the poor, get rewarded for achieving high payoffs, and be accountable for failure if the task didn’t work.

Foreign aid has been dominated by the Planners.

The War on Terror

The new military interventions are similar to the military interventions of the cold war, while the neo-imperialist fantasies are similar to old-time colonial fantasies.

Military intervention in and occupation of a developing country show a classic Planner’s mentality: applying a simplistic external answer from the West to a complex internal problem in a non-western country. Iraq. Afghanistan.

The aid-financed Big Push is similar to the rationale behind the invasion of Iraq = we in the West know best, we’re going to show you how to run your country. With all the disastrous consequences Easterly’s book predicts for top down, Planner solutions.

Politico-philosophical traditions

Early on Easterly claims that his binary reflects the most basic one in politics, between Utopian revolutionaries and pragmatic reformers. The French Revolution epitomises the first, with its grand Plan to introduce liberty, equality and fraternity. Edmund Burke, father of modern conservatism, epitomises the latter, believing society is best improved by targeting specific identifiable abuses and implementing limited, focused solutions. Ad hoc reforms.

In practice, the latter is how all western democracies work, overflowing with Acts and Bills and Laws fixing this, that or the other issue unaddressed by the vast quantities of previous legislation on the subject. Incremental, reformist.

Capitalism versus communism

And then he related it to another world-size binary, that between capitalism and communism.

Communists believed top-down Big Planning would deliver utopia. Capitalists believe in bottom-up, ad hoc solutions, called businesses, markets. Following on from this is his description of the often overlooked but vital quality of economic freedom which we in the West enjoy without really being aware of it.

Economic freedom is one of mankind’s most underrated inventions, much less publicised than its cousin political freedom. Economic freedom just means unrestricted rights to produce, buy, and sell. Each of us can choose the things we want and not have somebody else decide what is best for us. We can also freely choose what we are going to sell and what occupation to choose, based on our inside knowledge of what we are best at and most like doing.

Easterly overflows with fluent, articulate ways of expressing really big ideas.

The conditions for markets

Property rights, contract enforcement, rule of law, corporate accountability.

On one level, as Easterly makes abundantly clear, he is defending free market capitalist solutions to poverty. But it’s more than that, because he is very well aware that free market capitalism, pure and simple, far from delivers utopia – witness America, the most capitalist society on earth and also the most inequitable (not to mention its vast prison population and violent crime levels).

No, once he’s delivered his broadside against Planners and for Searchers, against communism and for capitalism, Easterly very interestingly goes on to describe the complex matrix of prerequisites necessary for a functioning market and productive economy and the many, many ways these can fall short, be corrupted or undermined.

To put it another way, Easterly launches into a sequence of explanations of what is required to make democratic capitalist society work and these turn out to be numerous and complicated.

No cheating

There are a myriad ways for people to cheat each other in market exchanges. The avoidance of cheating requires a certain amount of social capital or, to put it more simply, trust. He cites studies which have shown a correlation between income and trust i.e. better off people are more trustworthy; poor people are likely to cheat. Hence well off, equal societies like the Scandinavian countries have high median incomes and very high levels of trust. By comparison Mexico is a ‘low trust’ country.

Social norms also seem to be stronger among rich people than among poor people, as a rich person loses more economic opportunities and income from social disgrace.

In better off countries people can rely on the law to enforce norms of honesty although, as anyone knows who’s been to law, it is still i) very expensive ii) tardy and slow iii) has an element of randomness involved, principally in the quality of your solicitor or barrister.

The poorer the country, the less able the majority of citizens are to go to law, and the more likely aspects of corruption will creep in.

Trust networks

There are two tried and tested ways to ensure standards of trust and honesty, working within family or ethnic groups. Family is obvious and the basis of networks of trade and business around the world. Within many societies specialisation in trading is particularly prominent in minority ethnic groups.

In pre-industrial Europe, it was the Jews. In East Africa, it’s the Indians. (Indians own almost all businesses in Kenya, although they make up only 1 percent of the population.) In West Africa, it is the Lebanese. In southern Africa, it is whites and Indians. Among indigenous African groups, often one dominates trading—the Bamileke in Cameroon, the Luba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Hausa in West Africa, the Igbo in Nigeria, and the Serahule in the Gambia. In Southeast Asia, the overseas Chinese (the “bamboo network”) play this role.

It’s overflowing with concepts like this which he illustrates with detailed and fascinating examples, which entertain and shed light, expanding your understanding of the world we live in.

Mafias

Unfortunately, the down side of strong ethnic networks is they often have their own systems of enforcement, which easily slip into intimidation. The mafia we know about, also the triads which figure largely in Chinese business networks. Drug lords in Jamaica, the farflung Russian mafia. Most societies have criminal networks which enforce their own systems of justice, outside official systems.

Property rights

If you own property you can mortgage it or borrow against it to raise money to invest in business. My shaky understanding of the rise of western capitalism is that we pioneered unique and innovative concepts of property, developed over centuries of adaptation and common law, which enabled the development of the money-making machine we call capitalism.

One aspect of this was the invention of the limited liability company and the corporation, a type of entity. Obviously this takes you into a vast area of history of the evolution of companies, company law, and company law-breaking. Easterly gives some examples but doesn’t go into detail because all he needs is to demonstrate his basis thesis, that:

Property law in the United States, as with many other kinds of law, evolved as piecemeal solutions to deal with particular problems as they arose.

Meanwhile, ‘Poorer societies define land ownership more by oral tradition, customary arrangements, or informal community agreement than by formal titles’. He gives a detailed description of land ‘ownership’, among the Luo tribe in western Kenya.

The traditional system among the Luo was a complicated maze of swapping plots among kin and seasonal exchanges of land for labor and livestock. There were both individual and family rights in cultivated fields and free-grazing rights for the community after the harvest. Each household’s claim to land included many plots of different soils and terrains, on which many different crops grew – not a bad system with which to diversify risk in an uncertain climate. The traditional land patron (weg lowo) would often give temporary land rights to the client (jodak). There were seasonal exchanges of ploughs and draft animals for land, or land for labour.

These may work in the context of their cultures but not many of them approach the objectivity and impersonality found in western concepts of property and companies. It’s small-time, localised.

Britain versus France

Interpreting everything in the light of his binary he applies it to the European traditions of law which he divides into two opposites. Britain good:

The common-law tradition originated in England and spread to British colonies. In this tradition, judges are independent professionals who make rulings on cases based on precedents from similar cases. The principles of the law evolve in response to practical realities, and can be adapted to new situations as they arise.

France bad:

The modern civil-law tradition originated under Napoleon, in France, and spread to French and Spanish colonies. (Spain was under the control of Napoleon at the time.) In this tradition, laws are written from the top down by the legislature to cover every possible situation. Judges are glorified clerks just applying the written law. This system of law lacks bottom-up feedback of the common law that comes from having cases determine law. As a result, the law is less well adapted to reality on the ground and has trouble adapting to new situations as technology and society change.

So:

The United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Pakistan and Uganda are examples of former British colonies that have well-developed property rights protection for their level of income. Algeria, Colombia, Haiti, and Nicaragua are examples of former French or Spanish colonies that have poor property rights protection for their level of income.

Surely Easterly could add in the whole of South America, repeating the centuries-old comparison between the poverty and political instability of the Hispanic south and central America and the (relative) stability and astounding economic success of Anglophone North America. (In fact he rolls on into a section on the dire financial mismanagement of Mexico in the 1990s and makes very interesting points about the limitations of Latin American societies and economies throughout the book.)

The failure to westernise Russia

At the collapse of communism in Russia, in 1991, scads of western economists and consultants descended on Moscow with the aim of showing them commies how it’s done and helping them transition to western-style democracy and capitalism in one ‘Big Push’. Planner behaviour par excellence.

One example of how not to do it is having Western lawyers and accountants rewrite the legal code overnight from the top down, as the West tried in Eastern Europe after 1990. In Eastern Europe, chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms in the West. 43 who drafted new laws for Eastern Europe and trained thousands of locals in Western law. Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct.

You can pass all the laws you like for the establishment of democracy and free markets but if the population they’re imposed on has no experience of either they will continue to behave according to the old ways, via networks of identity and obligation, through widespread ‘corruption’ and nepotism i.e. favouring family, tribe, clan, ethnicity and religious group first. Economic theorist Avinash Dixit’s research:

may help explain why the transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union was such a disaster, and why market reforms in Latin America and Africa were disappointing. Even with severely distorted markets, the participants had formed networks of mutual trades and obligations that made the system functional at some level. Trying to change the rules all at once with the rapid introduction of free markets disrupted the old ties, while the new formal institutions were still too weak to make free markets work well.

The Russian people, especially managers of businesses and state industries, carried on ignoring the new capitalist rules in much the same way as they had ignored and circumvented the old communist rules. The Russian economy continued to be ineffective and corrupt. What keeps the Russian economy afloat is its huge reserves of oil and gas. In its dependence on a handful of basic commodities to sell to the rest of the world Russia is more like the petrostates of the Middle East and Africa than like a diversified, productive western economy.

Bad government

Anybody who wants to know about bad government in developing countries, particularly in Africa, should look no further than The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015) and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018).

Democracy works, but imposing democracy from the outside doesn’t.

Trying to impose it quickly failed in Russia, failed in Iraq, failed in most Arab countries after the Arab Spring, and has failed in most African countries where it has been imposed.

This is because democracy doesn’t start with elections every four or five years, but is the end point of a long, complex evolution of social norms and standards of behaviour. These standards are still undermined and not adhered to in many western countries; look at shameful recent events in the UK and America i.e. the Trump presidency and the hilarious incompetence of the Conservative Party. ‘Democracy’ is a kind of Platonic ideal which no individual country actually lives up to.

It is awfully hard to get democracy working well (p.128)

Thus the development of democracy, like that of free markets, in Easterly’s view, is something that evolves slowly over decades, centuries, to address specific social needs.

Just like markets, the functioning of democracy depends on the slow and bottom-up evolution of rules of fair play.

Democracy is an intricate set of arrangements that is far more than just holding elections.

Social norms may be the most difficult part of building a democracy – many poor countries are far from such norms. A staple of elections in many poor countries is to harass and intimidate the opposition so that they don’t vote.

What his account hints at but never quite states is that democracy might just never be the appropriate form of rule for most countries in the world. He hints as much in the section about oligarchies which explains that oligarchies i.e. the rule of a small class, generally a wealthy elite, will be economically effective for a certain period but will inevitably lead to stagnation. At some point an oligarchy realises that it has to make concessions to democracy i.e. the people, the majority of the population, in order to allow change and development, often driven by changing technologies and new economic patterns. Oligarchies stagnate and eventually acknowledge the need for change but the crux of the matter is the terms on which the oligarchy will concede power to the demos. The basis one is that it doesn’t want to give away too much of its power and too much of its money.

This explains the history of South America. All those countries were settled on the Spanish model of economic inequality – silver mines which required huge peasant labour, sugar plantations which required huge slave workforces, vast latifundia worked by big peasant workforces, with a small oppressed proletariat in the cities. A century or more of this established rule by a landed elite, that is their social model or norm.

Perpetual oligarchy is more likely in unequal agrarian or mineral societies than in more equal industrial societies, as Latin America demonstrated for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (p.109)

But societies, technology, cultures and economies change and so Latin American societies see the recurrent pattern of repressive rule by an elite, which is eventually overthrown in a violent revolution which gives hope to the majority of social change and economic redistribution, which the oligarchies permit, up to a point, at which there is a violent counter-revolution i.e. military coup.

The Mexican revolution typifies one part of this see-saw, being a broad social rebellion against the entrenched rule of a narrow elite. The military coup against Allende in Chile represents the opposite end of the cycle, as the forces of money and privilege stepped in when Allende threatened to take away their money and power. South America’s challenge is getting beyond these violent mood swings to achieve the kind of middle class, social democrat stability epitomised by the Scandinavian countries, but this will always be hampered by the legacy of a large, poor, rural peasant class and, these days, by the huge numbers of the poor in the countries’ teeming slums.

Security from violence

This, of course, is a prerequisite for the development of any economy. Western aid will not do much good in a country mired in civil war. Violence is part of the human condition, well, the male human condition. One of the key causes of conflict in the past 70 years since the war has, of course, been ethnic, religious or tribal difference. All the conditions listed above for the development of either markets or democracy are void if your country is mired in conflict, worst of all a civil war.

Reasons why good government may not take hold

  • conflict
  • elite manipulation of the rules of the political game
  • landed wealth
  • weak social norms
  • the curse of natural resources
  • high inequality
  • corruption
  • ethnic nationalism and hatreds

Part 2. Aid in practice

What I’ve summarised so far is ‘Part 1: Why Planners cannot bring Prosperity’. Part 2 of the book, titled ‘Acting out the burden’ applies these ideas to the actual practice of administering foreign aid, finding the same sorts of conclusions. Easterly very frankly describes himself as one of the hordes of bureaucrats the by-now bloated aid industry:

We bureaucracies will devote effort more to activities that are more observable and less to activities that are less observable. By the same token, we bureaucrats will perform better when we have tangible, measurable goals, and less well when we have vague, ill-defined dreams. We will perform better when there is a clear link from effort to results, and less well when results reflect many factors besides effort. We will perform better when we have fewer objectives, and worse when we have many objectives. We will perform better when we specialize in particular solvable problems, and less well when we try to achieve utopian goals. We will perform better when there is more information about what the customers want, and less well when there is confusion about such wants. We will perform better when agents at the bottom are motivated and accountable, and less well when everything is up to the managers at the top. (p.157)

You need to set narrow, achievable targets. You need to listen to feedback from your customers, the poor.

Aid agencies are rewarded for setting goals, not for achieving them. Aid agencies and transnational organisations publish plethoras of reports every year. Incestuous and narcissistic these reports rarely feature the voices of the poor in the developing world. Instead they proliferate aims and goals and targets like bunnies, the vaguer the better. It actually has a name: ‘goal proliferation’.

The UN Millennium Project developed a framework in 2005 with the help of 250 development experts, commissioning thirteen reports from ten task forces. All this helped the project to come up with its framework, with its eighteen indicative targets for the eight MDGs, its ten key recommendations (which are actually thirty-six recommendations when you count all the bullet points), “a bold, needs-based, goal-oriented investment framework over 10 years,” seventeen Quick Wins to be done immediately, seven “main investment and policy clusters,” and ten problems to be solved in the international aid system. (p.164)

Western countries all too often make aid conditional on the promise it will be spent on donor country products and services. Or dependent on the recipient country’s aid in, for example, the War on Terror.

Chapter 6. Bailing out the Poor

A chapter describing the origins, aims and achievements of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF needs to shed its excessive self-confidence that it knows in detail what is best for the poor, based on an analysis of the whole economy that shares the presumptions of utopian planning.

Easterly uses a fair amount of data and graphs. Here he assembles data showing that countries the IMF and World Bank have heavy involvement in tend to have disastrous political and economic records. Of course, you could argue this is because it’s precisely struggling or failing states which they ought to get involved in.

Chapter 7. The Healers: Triumph and Tragedy

A chapter on AIDS which, like everything else he discusses, Easterly fits into the terms of his primal binary:

The breakdown of the aid system on AIDS…reflects how out of touch were the Planners at the top with the tragedy at the bottom, another sign of the weak power of the intended beneficiaries. It shows how ineffective Planners are at making foreign aid work. (p.213)

Among a blizzard of facts it contains the riveting statistic that money spent educating prostitutes to be hygienic and insist on condoms can save between 100 and a thousand times more lives than money spent on (very expensive) retroviral drugs once people have contracted HIV (p.227) and both are eclipsed by oral rehydration therapy which can save babies dying of diarrhea or vaccinating against measles.

Aid, like all political-economics, is about choices and trade-offs. Easterly thinks western governments and aid agencies are unduly influenced by high profile, image-led, televisable results, what he calls ‘the bias towards observability’ (p.322). Thus a statistic like ‘number of retroviral drugs sent to Uganda to treat x number of AIDS patients’ eclipses ‘number of children vaccinated against measles thus preventing a measles outbreak and saving an unknown number of children’.

Part 3. The White Man’s Army

When I worked on Channel 4’s international affairs programme I met pundits and theorists who discussed the need for a new imperialism i.e. many developing countries just can’t run themselves and that was in the late 1980s, over 30 years ago.

A decade later it had become a fashionable idea. In Empire Lite (2003) Michael Ignatieff said the West needed to have the courage of its convictions and take control of failing states for the good of their citizens. In Colossus (2004) Niall Ferguson says America should face up to its position as sole superpower and formalise its financial and military control, claiming that there is:

‘such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing…in many cases of economic ‘backwardness,’ a liberal empire can do better than a nation-state.’

Senior British diplomat Robert Cooper wrote an article advocating for more western intervention in failing states, thinking which influenced Tony Blair’s famous Chicago speech, a set of ideas which explain his enthusiastic support of George Bush’s plan to invade Iraq and overthrow the evil dictator Saddam Hussein.

Leaving aside the vast culture wars-style furore this would cause, there’s a simpler problem with this superficially attractive idea, which is that the Iraq fiasco proved that the West isn’t, in fact, up to the job.

One reason for this is clearly stated by Rory Stewart and various other commentators on the Iraq and Afghan debacles, namely that the old imperial powers were in it for the long term. Their administrators stayed for decades, got to know and love the local languages and cultures, probably exploited the locals and their resources, but also built schools, roads, railways, abolished slavery, tried to help women (banned suttee etc).

The commentators and analysts he cites talk about ‘postmodern imperialism’. Whatever it’s called, it reeks of the same top down, Planner mentality which came to ruin in Iraq and no just ruin, but laughable, ridiculous ruin.

As he says:

One thing today’s nation-builders could learn from their colonial predecessors: once you get in, it’s very hard to constructively get out.

See America’s 20 year, one-trillion-dollar involvement in Afghanistan which reverted to Taliban rule before the last US troops had even left.

I found Easterly’s chapter on the legacy of European colonialism fascinating because its focus is on colonial incompetence rather than malice. The imperialists undermined traditional societies, imposed outside rulers, exacerbated tribal rivalries and drew preposterous borders mainly out of ignorance and stupidity. His detailed examples of blundering interference, destroying local cultures and rulers, embedding conflicts many of which are still with us today, are far more powerful and shaming than the  cheap and easy blanket accusation of ‘racism’.

This emphasis is, of course, because Easterly wants to draw the comparison with modern-day aid agencies, western governments, NGOs and so on who he accuses of comparable amounts of ignorance and outside interference ignoring the wishes and complex realities of the natives. So he presents an entertaining survey of imperial mistakes and cock-ups.

There are three different ways that Western mischief contributed to present day grief in the Rest. 1) First, the West gave territory to one group that a different group already believed it possessed. 2) Second, the West drew boundary lines splitting an ethnic group into two or more parts across nations, frustrating nationalist ambitions of that group and creating ethnic minority problems in two or more resulting nations. 3) Third, the West combined into a single nation two or more groups that were historical enemies.

He describes a detailed analysis he did with academic colleagues. They examined the percentage of the population that belongs to ethnic groups that the borders split between adjacent countries.

Former colonies with a high share of partitioned peoples do worse today on democracy, government service delivery, rule of law, and corruption. Highly partitioned countries do worse on infant mortality, illiteracy, and specific public services such as immunisation against measles, immunisation for diphtheria-pertussis-tetanus, and supply of clean water.

They then did something interesting and amusing, which is calculate a value for how wiggly a state’s borders are, on the assumption that long straight borders indicate they were drawn on a map by ignorant colonial bureaucrats, whereas wiggly borders indicate older or more ethnically aligned borders.

We found that artificially straight borders were statistically associated with less democracy, higher infant mortality, more illiteracy, less childhood immunisation, and less access to clean water – all measured today. The straight hand of the colonial mapmaker is discernible in development outcomes many decades later.

Easterly gives extended descriptions of Congo, Palestine and the broader Middle East (Syria, Iraq), India and Sudan, in each case going into much detail to show how ruinous western involvement in each country was.

Chapter 9. Invading the Poor

This brings us up to date with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and then the Coalition Provisional Authority’s attempt to turn Iraq overnight into a free market capitalist system. Cheerleader of neo-liberal capitalism and post-modern imperialism, Niall Ferguson, is quoted again:

The United States should be devoting a larger percentage of its vast resources to making the world safe for capitalism and democracy…the proper role of an imperial America is to establish these institutions where they are lacking, if necessary…by military force…Imposing democracy on all the world’s “rogue states” would not push the U.S. defence budget much above 5 percent of GDP. There is also an economic argument for doing so, as establishing the rule of law in such countries would pay a long-run dividend as their trade revived and expanded…

But Easterly then goes back before the Iraq adventure, back before the fall of communism to look at two case studies of American intervention during the Cold War, in Nicaragua and Angola, a country of ‘spectacular misery’ (p.277). He demonstrates how the West and America in particular never really understood the local history, culture and political dynamics of either country, and how their interventions (supporting the murderous Contra opposition to the communist Sandanista government in Nicaragua, and the psychopath Jonas Savimbi against the Marxist MPLA government in Angola) resulted in decades of misery, extreme violence, unnecessary deaths and economic ruin.

This is yet another area where the Planners’ utopian goals—universal peace, democracy, human rights, and prosperity—substitute for modest tasks that may be more doable by Searchers, such as rescuing innocent civilians from murderous attacks.

So, to summarise:

The pre-cold war, cold war, and post-cold war record on intervening militarily to promote the more ambitious goals of political and economic development yields a cautionary lesson – don’t.

Chapter 10. Homegrown development

By contrast with the sorry record of weak states created by uninformed western bureaucrats, ruled by colonial exploiters and then abandoned to their fate in the 1960s, Easterly contrasts a series of nations which have done very well economically, rising to and sometimes superseding western levels of economic development and which were never colonised. The highest per capita growth rates in the world 1980 to 2002 were enjoyed by South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. What they have in common is they were never colonised but also, more Easterly’s point, found their own paths to economic success and had little or no western aid and intervention.

Most of the recent success in the world economy is happening in Eastern and Southern Asia, not as a result of some global plan to end poverty but for homegrown reasons.

Whereas the bottom ten countries in the per capita growth league are all in Africa, are all former colonies, are all the recipients of massive amounts of western aid, which doesn’t seem to have helped them at all.

He has sections about two of the home-grown high-growth success stories, Singapore and Hong Kong, analysing the reasons for their success. Both were, in fact, British colonies but, crucially, ones where the British authorities were wise enough to leave the local merchants and businessmen to their own devices.

He then goes on to the two giants of Asia, China and India. China’s story is simple. It stopped being a backward country, and took a huge leap forward as soon as the ruling communist party replaced Mao’s repressive, ruinous tyranny with measured, controlled form of Chinese-style capitalism.

In the mid-2000s I worked at the UK Department for International Development for 18 months. On the first day, as I was being shown round, my guide made the frank and disconcerting point that over the past 20 years nearly half a billion people had been lifted out of poverty and it was absolutely nothing to do with western aid; it was entirely down to China adopting capitalism.

You could argue that China has developed a strange hybrid version of capitalism:

It is an unconventional homegrown success, failing to follow any Western blueprint for how to be modern. It combines lack of property rights with free markets, Communist Party dictatorship with feedback on local public services, and municipal state enterprises with private ones. (p.310)

But that plays right into Easterly’s thesis, which is that each country has to work out its own way to economic success, precisely by not having identikit western models (à la World Bank and IMF) forced on them.

After China and India, Easterly gives us 3 or 4 page summaries of the success of Turkey, Botswana and, surprisingly, Chile. I quote his conclusion at length because it’s an important, succinct summary of his position.

The success of Japan, China, the East Asian Tigers, India, Turkey, Botswana, and Chile is turning into a comic relic the arrogance of the West. Americans and Western Europeans will one day realise that they are not, after all, the saviours of ‘the Rest.’

Even when the West fails to ‘develop’ the Rest, the Rest develops itself. The great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West only when it suits the Rest to do so.

Again, the success stories do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success. But we have seen in chapter 3 that creating free markets is itself difficult, and the success stories certainly don’t all fit some pristine laissez-faire ideal.

We know that gross violations of free markets and brutal self-aggrandizing autocrats usually preclude success. Beyond that breathtakingly obvious point, there is no automatic formula for success, only many political and economic Searchers looking for piecemeal improvements that overcome the many obstacles described in chapters 3 and 4.

Bottom-up, diverse, culture-specific, exploratory, open-minded, experimental, market-driven, are the characteristics of economic success in developing countries. Piecemeal solutions to defined problems. NOT the top-down, highly planned, centralised, vague and unspecific utopian visions of western aid donors.

Chapter 11. The Future of Western Assistance

When you are in a hole, the top priority is to stop digging. Discard your patronising confidence that you know how to solve other people’s problems better than they do. Don’t try to fix governments or societies. Don’t invade other countries, or send arms to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and naive institutional reform schemes. The aim should be to make individuals better off, not to transform governments or societies.

Aid cannot achieve the end of poverty. Only homegrown development based on the dynamism of individuals and firms in free markets can do that. Shorn of the impossible task of general economic development, aid can achieve much more than it is achieving now to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

Put the focus back where it belongs: get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the textbooks, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

He then gives examples of ground-up, localised interventions which have improved the lives of poor people, especially children, in Mexico, Kenya and India. He does a survey of small-scale interventions and also new methods of evaluation which he thinks could be replicated. Then a list of 6 basic principles which, again, I quote in their entirety so as to share the ideas and knowledge:

  1. Have aid agents individually accountable for individual, feasible areas for action that help poor people lift themselves up.
  2. Let those agents search for what works, based on past experience in their area.
  3. Experiment, based on the results of the search.
  4. Evaluate, based on feedback from the intended beneficiaries and scientific testing.
  5. Reward success and penalize failure. Get more money to interventions that are working, and take money away from interventions that are not working. Each aid agent should explore and specialize further in the direction of what they prove good at doing.
  6. Make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to do more of what works, then repeat step (4). If action fails, make sure incentives in (5) are strong enough to send the agent back to step (1). If the agent keeps failing, get a new one.

And a restatement of his core position:

Aid won’t make poverty history, which Western aid efforts cannot possibly do. Only the self-reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so. But aid that concentrates on feasible tasks will alleviate the sufferings of many desperate people in the meantime. Isn’t that enough?

If we can’t sort our own countries out, how can we expect to sort out other peoples’?

Since the turn of the century inequality has increased in all western countries, as the rich get richer, public services collapse, and the middle and working classes get poorer.

If we cannot ‘abolish poverty’ in our own countries, what kind of deluded hubris makes us think we can solve it in countries completely unlike ours, with wildly different cultures and traditions?

The fallacy is to assume that because I have studied and lived in a society that somehow wound up with prosperity and peace, I know enough to plan for other societies to have prosperity and peace.

Western social scientists don’t begin to comprehend fully the complex process of state formation and rule of law in the West, so they shouldn’t be too quick to predict how it will work anywhere else.

The rules that make markets work reflect a complex bottom-up search for social norms, networks of relationships, and formal laws and institutions that have the most payoff.

To make things worse, these norms, networks, and institutions change in response to changed circumstances and their own past history. Political philosophers such as Burke, Popper, and Hayek had the key insight that this social interplay was so complex that a top-down reform that tried to change all the rules at once could make things worse rather than better.

In the section titled ‘You can’t plan a market’, he writes:

Introducing free markets from the top down is not so simple. It overlooks the long sequence of choices, institutions, and innovations that have allowed free markets to develop in the rich Western economies.

Markets everywhere emerge in an unplanned, spontaneous way, adapting to local traditions and circumstances, and not through reforms designed by outsiders. The free market depends on the bottom-up emergence of complex institutions and social norms that are difficult for outsiders to understand, much less change…Planners underestimated how difficult it is to get markets working in a socially beneficial way.

But, as Easterly indicates, the arrogance never stops, and each new generation of politicians wants to strut and swank upon the world stage, and pledge billions to ‘aid’ and ‘poverty reduction’, commissioning the same kinds of Grand Plan, which will spend hundreds of millions on western consultants and experts and advisers and banks and planners with, in the end, little or no permanent effect on most of the inhabitants of the poorest countries.

Conclusion about the book

It might be 15 years old but ‘The White Man’s Burden’ is like an encyclopedia of ideas and arguments, every page exploding with explanations and concepts told in a clear, punchy, often humorous style. It’s hugely enjoyable and massively enlightening.

Thoughts about the West

Easterly’s book, written in 2004 and 2005, comes from a position of confident superiority – I mean it takes for granted that the West is rich and has an obligation to sort out ‘the Rest’ i.e. the Third World, the developing world or the Global South, whatever the latest term is for the poorest countries.

But nearly 20 years later it feels to me like the whole picture has changed. I can’t speak for America but the fact that Donald Trump might be re-elected president tells you all you need to know about the state of its ‘democracy’ and its deeply divided society.

But as for the country I live in, Britain no longer feels like a rich country. For thirteen years it has been mismanaged by a Conservative party in thrall to the neoliberal mirage that Britain can ever be like America, that – if only the state could be reduced to a bare minimum, all state-provided services slashed to the bone, personal and corporate taxes significantly cut – then the British people’s inner capitalist would be set free, Free Enterprise would flourish and Britain would become a high-education, high-tech, 21st century economy like the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

In pursuit of this grandiose delusion the Conservative Party has undermined all Britain’s social services,  sold off our utilities, privatised state industries, making Britain a poorer, dirtier, more polluted and miserable place for most of its inhabitants to live in, with most public services on the verge of collapse (English town halls face unprecedented rise in bankruptcies, council leaders warn).

Easterly takes it for granted that the West is rich and will continue to be rich, and is democratic and will continue to be democratic, so that we can continue to intervene in other countries from a position of stable superiority. But what if this assumption is wrong?

Easterly’s book amounts to a long list of all the elements which need to be in place to secure wealth and democracy and, the longer the list went on, the more nervous I became about its viability. Democracy seems so unnatural, so against human nature, requires such a concerted effort to maintain and, in the 15 years since the book was published, so many forces have arisen, within western countries themselves and her enemies abroad (Russia, to some extent China), which seek to actively undermine it, not least the forces of the authoritarian, nationalist right.

And then there’s global warming. Severe weather conditions are coming which threaten to permanently damage food and water supplies, make parts of the planet uninhabitable and uproot billions.

The net effect of this book was to terrify me at the fragility and uncertainty of western wealth and democracy. What if Vladimir Putin is correct and liberal democracy is doomed? Personally, I don’t think  he is, Putin said that for propaganda effect. On the other hand, it’s fairly clear that liberal democracy is in trouble. Easterly’s book is nominally about our obligation to save the poorest countries in the world. But what if we can’t even save ourselves?

Credit

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly was published by Penguin Books in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Oxford University Press paperback.

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The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson (2013)

Caado la gooyaa car alle ayey leedahay
(‘The abandonment of tradition calls forth the wrath of Allah’, Somali proverb, quoted in The World’s Most Dangerous Place, page 398)

James Fergusson worked on this book with help from a grant from the Airey Neave Trust, a charity whose objective is to promote research ‘designed to make a discernible impact and to contribute in a practical way to the struggle against international terrorist activity’ (p.447). So at least one of the book’s aims is to provide a background to, and history of, the rise of Islamic terrorism in the Horn of Africa.

But it also explains something else, which isn’t immediately obvious, which is that the book is in two halves and only the first half (parts one and two) are set in Somalia (part one in and around Mogadishu, part two further afield, in Puntland and Somaliland). The entire second half of the book (part three) is not set in the most dangerous place in the world at all, but in the West, first in London, then in Minnesota, then back in London again.

This makes it different from your average reporting-from-Africa book because Fergusson is less reporting from Africa than investigating a problem (Somali Islamic extremism) which has both an African dimension (obviously) and, less obviously, ramifications for the Somali diaspora in the West.

So the title is a little misleading because over a third of the text is not from the most dangerous place in the world but from West London and the American Mid-West and, although he meets lots of politicians, soldiers and locals in Somalia, it is in London and Minneapolis (and, right at the end of the book, in France) that he has his longest and most thought-provoking conversations with Somali emigrants.

Contents

The locations, dates and themes of the book are conveniently indicated by its chapter titles:

Part 1: Living on the Line

  1. An African Stalingrad: the war against al-Shabaab (Hawl Wadaag district, Mogadishu, March 2011)
  2. At the Bancroft Hotel: America’s proxy war (By Aden Adde International Airport, March 2011)
  3. The field hospital: What bombs and bullets do to people (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  4. Aden’s story (AMISOM HQ, March 2011)
  5. The failure of Somali politics (Villa Somalia presidential complex, March 2011)
  6. What makes al-Shabaab tick? (Hodan District, June 2011)
  7. The famine (Badbaado refugee camp, Dharkenly district, June to July 2011)

Part 2: Nomad’s Land

  1. In the court of King Farole (Garowe, Puntland, August 2011)
  2. Galkacyo: Pirateville (Galmudug, August 2011)
  3. Hargeisa Nights (Hargeisa, Somaliland, July 2011)
  4. How to start a border war (Taleh, Sool, June 2011)

Part 3: The Diaspora

  1. The Somali youth time-bomb (London, July 2011)
  2. The missing of Minneapolis (Twin Cities, Minnesota, September 2011)
  3. ‘Clanism is a disease like AIDS’ (London, February 2012)
  4. Operation Linda Nchi: The end for al-Shabaab? (Besançon to Nairobi, March to June 2012)

Postscript to the paperback edition (Edinburgh, November 2013)

Fergusson’s enduring interest in Islamic affairs

Prior to a spell working with the UN, Fergusson was a journalist with a special interest in Muslim affairs, reporting from Algeria, Bosnia and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. After serving in several administrative positions (press spokesman for the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, 1998 to 2000) Fergusson returned to journalism and wrote a run of factual books including:

  • A Million Bullets (2008), a critique of Britain’s military engagement in Afghanistan
  • Taliban – Unknown Enemy (2010), a plea for greater engagement with Nato’s Afghan enemy

This present book follows on from those two, evidence of his long-term engagement with Islamic warriors and terrorism. As Fergusson says in his introduction, it was triggered by the rise of al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. Members of al-Shabaab came from the same kind of poor, neglected societies as the Taliban, and some of its leaders had fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, so it felt like a natural progression to move from covering an Islamic insurgency in one country (Afghanistan) to a closely connected new one (al-Shabaab in Somalia).

Out of date

This book is, alas, 10 years old. A lot of its predictions i.e. that Somalia was turning a corner, the peace deal might stick etc, turned out to be hooey. Somalia now (2023) has an official government but continues to be mired in violence. Al-Shabaab are still there, killing people.

Why do I keep reading these out-of-date books? Well, a) because they’re cheap and the most up-to-date books about these countries are in hardback and very expensive, but b) because there aren’t that many popular journalistic accounts of these countries and conflicts available.

Fergusson’s book is very people-focused. It goes long on the people he meets and interview and hangs out with and gets to know, from as many walks of life as he can, from as many parts of the country as he can. I really liked Paul Kenyon’s book, ‘Dictatorland’, because it includes interviews and whatnot in it, but each chapter is focused on just one country, and pared back to give you the essential info. Fergusson’s is much more chatty, diffuse and long, at 464 pages including index.

Somalilands

It’s important to understand that ethnic Somalis live scattered across five countries, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and northern Kenya, and that, during the colonial era, there were no fewer than three colonies named Somaliland. At the north-west was the small French colony of French Somaliland. This won its independence from France in 1977 and called itself Djibouti. Next door to it was British Somaliland and, in the territory containing the actual Horn of Africa and then round to the south, was Italian Somaliland.

British Somaliland was granted independence in June 1960, with the name of Somaliland, and promptly united with the former Italian Somalia to form the Somali Republic. However, at the overthrow of the Somali dictator Siad Barre in May 1991, representatives of the leading clans and Somali National Movement proclaimed Somaliland an independent state. Almost no other states accepts it as an independent nation; the West, the United Nations etc all regard it as an autonomous province of Somalia.

Spanning the actual Horn of Africa is another statelet, the province of Puntland, which has its own elections, assembly, prime minister and president, but remains a part of Somalia. Spanning the Horn, Puntland is the epicentre of Somali piracy, as Fergusson discovers when he goes to meet the president, and then is introduced to actual pirates via local fixers and contacts.

As to the Somalis across the border in Ethiopia, in 1977 Somalia’s dictator, Siad Barre, invaded the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia in a bid to claim it and its ethnic Somali population for Somalia, but was badly defeated by the (Marxist) Ethiopian regime, backed by the Soviet Union.

Tension between the two neighbours remains. In 2006 Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia in order to overthrow the Islamic Courts Union. This, as you would expect, triggered a wave of Somali patriotism, which the newly formed al-Shabaab exploited to the full. The war lasted from 2006 till 2009 when Ethiopia withdrew, having thoroughly destabilised Somalia, yet again.

When Fergusson goes to America to explore the largest Somali community there, sited, incongruously enough, in wintry Minneapolis, he finds a lot of anger at how America supported Ethiopia in invading their country, and at the three years of fighting which left Mogadishu even more destroyed and displaced hundreds of thousands. All things considered, it seems to have been a very bad move.

So, the complex colonial heritage of badly conceived administrative regions has been a central contributor to Somalia’s collapse.

Somalia’s clans

Somali culture is dogged by its clan system. Every single Somali is born into a clan, sub-clan and sub-sub-clan, and these have been at war with each other forever. There are an estimated 140 clans, sub-clans, and sub-sub-clans, but there are five major clans which sit at the top of the tree:

  • Hawiye, 25%
  • Isaaq, 22%
  • Darod, 20%
  • Rahanweyn, 17%
  • Dir, 7%

This map gives a good sense of how the Somali people and clans spill over the borders imposed by European colonialism and inherited by modern states.

(However, in London Fergusson interviews the founder of the Anti-Tribalism Movement, and makes the point that the younger generation of Westernised Somalis consciously reject the tribalism of their elders and tradition, p.379.)

The Somali civil war

Nobody agrees exactly when the Somali Civil War started. It grew out of resistance to the military junta which came to power in 1969, and came to be dominated by General Siad Barre, resistance which grew during the later 1980s. Numerous rebel groups formed, generally structured around Somalia’s very strong clan structure. The Siad Barre regime fell in 1991 and no central authority replaced it, instead the start of a multi-sided civil war.

In the chaos of civil war, during the 1990s, local Islamic courts were established amid the chaos to enforce basic law and order. When warlords attacked them, they united in around 2000 to form the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). Although fractious and disagreeing among themselves, the Islamic courts offered pretty much the last remaining source of authority and justice in a ruined society.

In 2006 ICU forces defeated a coalition of warlords backed by the US and established a period of peace and security for the first time in a generation. This was wrecked after just six months when Ethiopian forces, backed by the US, invaded, leading to the 2006 to 2009 civil war. As a result of the war, much of the leadership fled abroad, leaving the youthful and most zealous members, who set up the party they called al-Shabaab, ‘the Youth’. These called for jihad against the Ethiopian invaders and their US sponsors, and this cry was answered not only inside the country but by small numbers of young men in the West’s Somali diaspora, notably in the UK and USA.

In 2009 a former chairman of the Islamic Courts Union, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, became president of Somalia and replaced the Transitional Government with the Federal Government of Somalia. In 2012, the country adopted a new constitution that declared Somalia an Islamic state with Sharia as its primary source of law.

Al-Shabaab

Al-Shabaab, also known as Ash-Shabaab, Hizb al-Shabaab, and the Popular Resistance Movement in the Land of the Two Migrations (PRM). In Arabic, al-Shabaab simply means ‘the youth’ so Hizb al-Shabaab simply means ‘the Party of Youth’.

Numerous interviewees tell Fergusson that al-Shabaab’s mindset, dogmatic Islamism and violence are alien to Somali traditions. Somalis have traditionally been Sufis, a peaceful, spiritual version of Islam. They reverence their saints and build shrines to them. It is well-known that the top rank of al-Shabaab is dominated by foreigners, hard-liners from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Saudi, who impose a brutally puritanical version of Islam. For example, in areas they hold al-Shabaab has embarked on programmes of blowing up shrines to Somali Sufi saints, to the horror of the locals; but their punishments are so extreme and violent that no-one dare speak out. Fergusson meets many Somalis who says Islam is a religion of peace and forgiveness and so al-Shabaab, with its doctrine of unrelenting violence and vengefulness, are not Muslims.

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb

Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM is an Islamist militant offshoot of al-Qaeda Central that is engaged in an insurgency campaign in the Maghreb and Sahel regions. AQIM raises money by kidnapping for ransom and is estimated to have raised more than $50 million in the last decade.

Osama bin Laden put off a closer alliance with al-Shabaab. But after his assassination in May 2011, his successor as leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahari, agreed to a merger between Al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda (p.128).

Islam, identity and purpose

Fergusson cites Gerald Hanley, a British officer who spent years among the northern Somali in the 1940s, making a related and broader point:

‘Islam does wonders for the self-respect of non-white people.’ (quoted p.54)

Islam offers discipline, focus, purpose and self respect in people who feel themselves second or third-class citizens, citizens of states so obviously failed and impoverished compared to the wonderlands of the West which they can see via the internet or in the astonishing wealth of UN and Western and aid agency staff, fabulously well fed, living in air-conditioned bases and hotels, swanning round in their big white land cruisers like new imperialists.

Militant Islam offers a source of identity and self-respect in the face of all the batterings young men are subject to in these kinds of impoverished chaotic societies.

This long book contains contributions from numerous interviewees about why Islamic terrorism arises, flourishes and spreads, but this is an important one of them.

The African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM)

Fergusson’s narrative opens in March 2011. A UN-approved force raised by the African Union is fighting its way through Mogadishu, trying to restore order. Most of the soldiers came from the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF). They were fighting for the Transitional Federal Government or TFG, which was established in 2004. The AU mission as a whole was called the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Fighting had been fierce. AMISOM’s casualty rates were worse than those of NATO in Afghanistan.

Fergusson is effectively a guest of AMISOM, and stays in an air-conditioned portakabin on the military base at Mogadishu airport (p.37).

The problem of young men

Early on Fergusson makes a profound point which is relevant to all developing countries, to some extent all states. In his opinion, the problem with all these (developing) countries is what to do with the young men.

‘I just don’t know what we’re going to do about our young men,’ [says an elderly man, Abdulkarim, who’s been injured by a stray bullet]…Abdulkarim was expressing the despair of a patriarchal society that had lost all control of its successor generation. With the traditional bonds broken, the young men were rudderless, and now, exploited by foreigners and misled by extremists, their mad and endless violence was slowly destroying Somalia…(p.64)

Their corrupt dictators have run failing or rentier states with little interest or understanding of how to invest across all sectors of their economies in order to grow and develop them but people have kept on breeding at rates appropriate to pre-industrial societies. Lots of babies who grow up into lots and lots of unemployed young men hanging round on street corners.

(In his book The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life, Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński says that in West Africa these unemployed hopeless young men are called bayaye. He uses the example of Samuel Doe, president of Liberia from 1986 to September 1990, who started life as an unemployed peasant without a future, who trekked from a remote impoverished village though trackless jungles to the capital, Monrovia, in search of work, food and a purpose:

The trek from the jungle to Monrovia requires many days of difficult marching across roadless tropical expanses. Only young, strong people can manage it. And it is they who arrived in the city. But nothing awaited them here: neither jobs, nor a roof over their heads. From the very first day, they became bayaye – that army of the young unemployed squatting idly on all the larger streets and squares of African cities. The existence of this multitude is one of the chief causes of turmoil on the continent: it is from their ranks that local chieftains, for a pittance, often with only the promise of food, recruit the armies they will use in their struggles for power, organising coups, fomenting civil wars. (‘The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life’ by Ryszard Kapuściński, page 244)

Mind you, when I googled bayaye one of the first results is from the Oxford Dictionary of African politics, which defines it as: ‘A Bantu term that has come to refer to idle youth or ‘street thugs’ in Uganda, i.e. people who are unemployed and can be seen hanging out on street corners’. So it looks like a commonly used term across central Africa. )

The West tries to broker peace deals, to oversee ‘democratic’ elections and continues to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and all the aid adverts you ever see will feature either young children, girls and women because these are the sentimental, wallet-opening faces of poverty. But no development in any Third World country can take place until you stop the fighting. And the fighting won’t stop until you give unemployed, aimless young men roles and goals which give them more dignity, self-worth and camaraderie than joining an Islamic militia.

Somalia had always been riven by clan rivalry and warfare. But over the years a system had evolved of controlling and limiting the violence, known as xeer, an ancient and sophisticated system of customary laws traditionally administered by the elders of rival clans who would meet and agree compromises and solutions to disputes and feuds. The dictator Siad Barre deliberately ran down this system while promoting his socialist revolution, thus helping to eliminate ancient ways of controlling or moderating clan violence.

In the old days, said Aden, the young men of al-Shabaab would have been brought into line by their elders and betters. The problem was that the war had destroyed that system. ‘It is not possible to convene a council of elders because there are no elders,’ he said (p.90)

Fergusson makes a striking visit to a camp for reformed or defecting al-Shabaab fighters. He expects to find ideologically hardened fanatics so is taken aback to encounter a group of boys, 15, 16 and 17 year olds, who lark around and take the mickey, pulling faces and giving sarcastic answers, like any other gang of unruly lads.

Everywhere he goes Fergusson sees ‘unemployed young men one saw in every Somali town, hanging about on street corners’ (p.220). The bayaye.

A criminologist named Daniel LeDouceur explains that the entire situation in Somalia needs to be seen through the prism of gang culture and gang psychology: the clans are really extended gangs; the pirates are formed in gangs; the people smugglers (across the Red Sea to Yemen) work in gangs; and al-Shabaab is really another congeries of gangs. So the solution is not ‘democracy’ etc etc, but the same approach to solving gang culture anywhere, which is to give young men, the bayaye, meaningful work and prospects (p.146).

‘Every man who has nothing will try something to get money.’
(Abdi-Osman who tried life as a pirate before being recruited to al-Shabaab, p.147)

Poverty

Poverty is one cause. Recruits to al-Shabaab, like recruits to the Taliban in Afghanistan, were attracted by the simple promise of pay; no matter the risks, it was better than being utterly unemployed and penniless. When the famine hits in spring 2011, Fergusson comes across three lads who were in a school classroom when an al-Shabaab recruiter asked for volunteers and stuck up their hands. ‘Why?’ Fergusson asks. Because they were paid a piece of fruit per day. That’s all it took (p.176).

Or the extended story told by Dahir Kadiye of the family who make $48 from each sheep they sell which will feed the family for three weeks, or a million dollars from one successful pirate hostage which will mean the entire family of eight never has to work again (p.401).

Ignorance

No schools and a very primitive nomad existence for the majority of the population explain the high levels of illiteracy and ignorance. (The literacy rate in Somali adults is currently estimated to be 40%.)

The root problem he [AMONO Chief Medical Officer, Colonel James Kiyungo] thought, was lack of education. ‘The fighters here learn to read the Koran, but they have no skills. There are no carpenters, no cooks, no plumbers – only the gun.’ (p.69)

Ignorant boys are easily led, specially by glamorous older boys with guns and money, and food.

The poverty and ignorance of the young which fuelled the insurgency were genuine grievances and had to be addressed. (p.178)

In fact this theme forms Fergusson’s conclusion. We need to address the problem of bored, rootless, alienated young men if we are to address al-Shabaab and militant Islam more generally, to address it in its heartlands before its violence spreads to Muslim diasporas in the West.

In Western cities, as in the Horn of Africa, sustained engagement with Somalia’s young men is the key to a better future for us all. (p.21)

Mohamed Alin

Somali politicians recognise and try to address the issue. Fergusson meets Mohamed Alin, who had returned from exile in Northolt, Middlesex, to make himself president of the self-declared autonomous region of Galmudug, a small statelet on the border between south Somalia and Puntland in the north. Alin explains that he wants to properly fund schools ‘to educate young men about the perils of piracy’, with skills training to provide livelihoods such as carpentry, electrical engineering and so on (p.226).

But such a thing requires, above all, peace, law and order: security; and then, proper funding, which has to come from abroad. And any link in the fragile chain of requirements can be sabotaged at any moment by outbreaks of clan or Islamic violence.

Thus peace remains elusive, aid donors are reluctant to give money which will disappear in corruption, and so ‘piracy’ remains a viable career for thousands and thousands of young Somali men, many of whom travel hundreds of kilometres from the drought-stricken, famine-stricken interior on the promise of rich pickings which will allow them to splash the cash, buy fancy cars, live high on the hog, take a wife and generally be a man (p.233).

Somalis in Britain

The book includes a long, deeply scary chapter about Somalis in Britain. No-one knows how many Somalis there are in Britain, maybe as many as 200,000. They have a lot of social problems. Only half of Somalis have any qualifications and only 3% have a higher education qualification. With the result that unemployment among Somalis runs at 40%, the highest of any immigrant community (p.299).

What scares various experts, educators, and Somali community leaders Fergusson speaks to is Somalis’ hyper-violence, ‘feral’ behaviour according to a teacher in a state school a third of whose pupils are Somali (p.304). Hundreds are permanently excluded from the education system because of bad behaviour and violence (p.306).

Evidence that Somali gangs have trounced white or Jamaican gangs in immigrant hotspots (Southall, Leytonstone). Some of this is down to having experienced hyper-violence in Somalia before immigrating (p.322). Many lack the restraining influence of a father (pages 306, 319) – ‘the specific Somali problem of paternal absenteeism’ (p.374). (In Minneapolis Fergusson discovers that 90% of the young men who’ve absconded to fight in Somalia grew up in fatherless households, pages 336, 348).

Mothers are failing to discipline their sons (p.307). It doesn’t help that many of these mums can’t read, write or speak English. This feeds into lack of educational achievement and a cycle of alienation and violence. According to a community worker, young Somali men are harder to reach than any other ethnic group, and often this is because they are just thick – stupid, uneducated, violent and proud of it (p.322). Fergusson comes to think it is a distinctive Somali trait, to be pig-headedly obstinate, even at your own expense (p.340)

Some Somali young men, raised in the UK, have travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab and become suicide bombers. Fergusson expresses the concern that homegrown Somalis will carry out terrorist attacks like the 7/7 bombings. In fact, of the major terrorist attacks carried out since the publication of his book, none involved Somalis:

  • 22 March 2017: Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old black Briton, drove a car into pedestrians on the south side of Westminster Bridge, injuring more than 50 people, four of them fatally, crashed the car into the perimeter fence of Westminster Palace grounds, ran into New Palace Yard where he fatally stabbed an unarmed police officer before being shot dead by an armed police officer. Five dead.
  • 22 May 2017: the Manchester Arena bombing carried out by Salman Abedi, a British citizen of Libyan descent, killing 22 people and injuring 1,017.
  • 3 June 2017: three men drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge, then attacked shoppers at Borough Market with carving knives, killing eight people and injuring 48. All three attackers were shot dead by armed police. They were: Khuram Shazad Butt, a Pakistan-born British citizen; Rachid Redouane, a failed asylum seeker of Libyan or Moroccan origin; Youssef Zaghba, an immigrant with joint Italian/Moroccan nationality.

No Somalis.

Foreign aid

In the 1990s an estimated 80% of foreign aid to Somalia never reached its intended recipients, being stolen by corrupt officials or warlords. In 2010 an estimated 50% of foreign aid was being stolen by contractors, warlords or al-Shabaab (p.170).

Somali snippets

Somalia’s most famous novelist is Nurrudin Farah (p.31).

The very first novel to be published in the Somali language was ‘Ignorance is the Enemy of Love’ by Faarax M.J. Cawl, as recently as 1972 (p.269).

Somalis refer to the civil war period as Burburki meaning, simply, ‘the destruction’.

Everyone in Somalia chews qat which releases a substance which affects the brain like amphetamine i.e. gives you a speedy buzz (p.39).

Warriors of all varieties drove ‘technicals’, the nickname of pick-up trucks with a massive anti-aircraft gun bolted to the back of its load bay. Apparently, ‘the technical’ was invented in Somalia (p.135), although the idea of bolting heavy machine guns on to light trucks actually goes back to the Second World War, according to this article about technicals in The Conversation.

Western contractors nicknamed Somalis ‘skinnies’ (p.161).

Vivid description of Somali piracy (pages 213 to 233).

The ‘Somali rose’ is the nickname for the shreds of plastic that snag on the thorn bushes that grow in all the country’s abandoned urban spaces (p.224).

gaalo is the Somali word for white person or Westerner.

Grim account of female genital mutilation in the Somali community (pages 234 to 238).

Sayid Mohamed Abdullahi Hassan (1856 to 1920), a Somali religious, military and political leader who headed the Somali Dervish movement in a twenty-year struggle against British, Italian, and Ethiopian power in Somalia. Referred to as simply the Sayyid, he is often considered the father figure of Somali nationalism. Fergusson gives a biography of the great man, along with excerpts from his improbable epic poem on the death of a British officer, on a trip to the ruins of his garrison fortress at Toolah (pages 258 to 264).

The importation, distribution and consumption of qat or khat, chewing whose leaves cause stimulation, loss of appetite and mild euphoria (pages 367 to 377). marfish is Somali for qat-chewing den (p.368).

P.S. Black Hawk Down

The Battle of Mogadishu took place nearly 20 years before Fergusson arrived in Somalia. It’s the name given to the ill-fated attempt by American special forces to seize warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, who they blamed for an attack on UN forces, on 3 October 1993. During the attempted abduction of Aidid, two US helicopters were shot down and the marooned soldiers were quickly surrounded by mobs and militias. American reinforcements went in with overwhelming force to rescue their boys, leaving an estimated 700 Somalis dead, but despite their efforts, 18 Americans were killed and some of their bodies dragged through the streets, amid cheering crowds. Home-made footage of these chaotic bloody scenes was widely broadcast with two consequences:

1. President Clinton was horrified and ordered the termination of US involvement in Somalia. Reluctance to risk footage of American boys being treated the same way underlay America’s extreme reluctance to get involved in the Rwandan genocide, which commenced just 6 months later, in April 1994, at exactly the same time that the last US forces were withdrawing from Somalia.

2. In 1999 journalist Mark Bowden published a forensic account of the disaster, titled ‘Black Hawk Down’, and in December 2001 a movie of the book was released, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an all-star cast. Fergusson talks to people who, at the time of his visit 10 years after the movie release, claim the film had a very negative impact on the image of Somalis, painting them all as fanatical psychopaths, a charge also made by Somali community groups in the US who objected to the way not a single Somali was consulted about the script or filming, and not a single Somali actor appears in it.

Credit

The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson was published by Bantam Press in 2013. References are to the 2014 Black Swan paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 27, 2023

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The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005) – 2

This is a huge, 700-page, compendious history of all the African nations from independence (roughly the mid-1950s) to the time it was written (around 2010), so 55 years or so of modern African history.

Meredith chooses as epigraph to this big book the Latin tag from Pliny the Elder, ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ meaning ‘Out of Africa always something new’ – but a reading of the actual book confirms how utterly inappropriate this is. For if Meredith’s book demonstrates anything it is that, since independence, out of Africa have come the same five or six stereotypical narratives or events – civil war, one-party rule, dictatorship, economic collapse, famine, vast amounts of foreign aid – and the consistent failure to deliver the utopian dreams everyone hoped for in the heady first years of independence.

Two major contexts

Meredith only mentions them in passing but two broad historical contexts are worth bearing in mind.

  1. The independence movement in Algeria spiralled out of control into an appallingly brutal war which neither side was able to stop, and which threatened to tear the colonial power, France, apart. The war was at its worst in 1957 to 1961. The point is that Algeria stood as a terrible warning to the other colonial powers (Britain, Belgium, Portugal) of what might happen if they mismanaged things or delayed.
  2. The victory of Fidel Castro’s communists in Cuba in 1959 ushered in an era when the threat of the new African states falling to communism seemed very real and of global importance in the war between the two superpowers. Hence the head of the CIA warning President Eisenhower that Congo’s Patrice Lumumba might be ‘the African Castro’ and America’s feverish paranoia that if Congo fell to the communists it might influence the entire continent (p.104). Looking back, this level of anxiety seems exaggerated, even absurd. But the context is crucial in understanding the actions of all the colonial powers, but especially of America, which set about undermining left-wing governments and supporting right-wing, capitalism-loving dictators across the continent.

Both of these examples or precedents (Algeria, Cuba) lay behind the decisions of Britain and Belgian, in particular, not to linger or suppress independence movements. In other words, they added to the sense of urgency and haste which characterised the rush to make Africa independent, with such questionable results.

Part 1

1. The Gold Coast experiment (Ghana)

The tragic life of Kwame Nkrumah who went from political prisoner in the early 1950s, to lead his own political party, the Convention People’s Party, won the general election held under British auspices in 1954, before leading Ghana to independence in March 1957. Meredith vividly describes the week-long celebrations, attended by worthies from around the world including Zhou Enlai and Richard Nixon.

With a sickening inevitability Nkrumah found the new country difficult to rule, repressed political opposition and rigged elections. In 1964 he amended the constitution to make Ghana a one-party state, with himself as president for life. In 1966 Nkrumah was deposed in a coup led by the National Liberation Council.

2. Revolt on the Nile (Egypt)

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser led the 1952 revolution which overthrew the 32-year-old playboy King Farouk I. Much rhetoric about freedom and Arab socialism as Nasser tightened his grip on power, imprisoning rivals and getting elected president in 1956. The catastrophe of the Suez Crisis which put the nail in the coffin of the British Empire. From that moment Britain’s rush to decolonise picked up speed.

3. Land of the Setting Sun (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria)

Apparently, the Arab word for north-west Africa, maghreb, means ‘land of the setting sun’ (as opposed to our word ‘Levant’ which means ‘rising’, to describe the old Ottoman Empire).

This chapter describes the descent of Algeria into a terrible insurgency which kicked off in the spring of 1954 with a wave of bomb attacks by the National Liberation Front (French: Front de libération nationale or FLN) with both sides slowly breaching their early declarations to target only combatants, so that by August 1954 the FLN was bombing civilian cafés and restaurants while the French security forces cracked down hard on the civilian Arab population, with large-scale arrests and torture.

An often overlooked aspect of the terrible war in Algeria (1956 to 1962) was that it made the French more amenable to granting its neighbours, Tunisia and Morocco, independence. Meredith describes the independence campaigning of Habib Bourguiba in Tunisia and Sultan Mohammed V in Morocco. The French arrested, imprisoned and exiled both these leaders, but eventually gave into widespread protests and both Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence in March 1956.

In 1957, amid an upsurge in terrorist bombings, the French governor of Algeria handed power over to the military, led by General Jacques Massu. The army locked down the capital city Algiers, ringing it with barbed wire, dividing it into sections which could be searched, cleared and then surveilled. Thousands of Algerians were arrested and tortured using electric shocks or waterboarding. It became known as The Battle of Algiers. In the country, peasants were rounded up into camps while native collaborator/spies (harkis) were deployed by the French.

By 1958 the FLN had been defeated, its leaders seeking refuge in Tunisia, whose new leader Bourguiba gave them sanctuary. However, the political system in France itself was in crisis. Violent disagreements about policy in Algeria led to the collapse of a series of short-lived governments. Worried that pacifist-defeatist politicians would gain power, in May 1958 the military took control of Algeria, allying with leading colons (white French colonists) to form a Committee of Public Safety. The French government declared a blockade, at which the Committee called for the return of the wartime hero, General de Gaulle.

4. L’Afrique Noire (Senegal, Ivory Coast)

L’Afrique Noire was the French term for the sub-Saharan part of its colonial empire, including Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Meredith describes the careers of Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire.

5. Winds of Change (British colonies)

This chapter covers the independence movements in British colonies such as Nigeria.

Nigeria

Nigeria had only been created by the forcible union of north and south Nigeria in 1914, the north and south having themselves been slowly cobbled together from former, smaller protectorates since 1900. Nigeria could be divided into three great blocs: the north was Muslim and Hausa-speaking, with a conservative, feudal social system. It had few schools or colleges. The West, including the capital Lagos, was mostly Yoruba. Being on the coast, dotted with cities, it was more economically advanced and urban. In the East lived the Igpo who tended to be very well educated but had no social system of their own and so were scattered around Nigeria’s other territories. In addition there some 250 other ethnic groups, some of which protested and rebelled, including the Edo-speaking people of Benin province who longed to restore the kingdom of Benin. The British struggled with successive constitutions to try and create a balance between all these different constituencies. Nigeria was granted independence in 1960.

As a rule of thumb British colonies in West Africa were much more advanced than British colonies in East Africa (Kenya, Tanganyika) and Central Africa (north and south Rhodesia, Nyasaland). Politics in these latter countries was dominated by the fierce lobbying of the small white minorities, who dominated the local governors. Thus the settlers persuaded the Colonial Office to create a federation of Central Africa, consisting of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

Kenya

Plans for a similar federation in East Africa were wrecked by the Mau Mau rebellion, which was an organised protest against the grotesque monopoly of the best agricultural land in Kenya by whites, and the land deprivation and lack of rights enforced on the million-strong Kikuyu population. Meredith gives a thorough account: the phrase mau mau actually meant nothing in Kikuyu, it was just a rallying call, and then the name given to the secret meetings where oaths of allegiance were sworn to the movement. Despite white paranoia, very few whites were actually killed during the so-called ’emergency’ (1952 to 1960), Meredith gives the number as 32, fewer than lost their lives in traffic accidents in Nairobi over the same period. He details British accusations that the Kikuyu leader Jomo Kenyatta, leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU) was involved, which led to a kangaroo court convicting and imprisoning him; and the brutal measures the British took against the insurgency, including setting up concentration camps.

The first Blacks were elected to Kenya’s legislative council in 1957. In October the Highlands area was formally opened to all races. The British thought they would continue to rule Kenya for at least another decade. In the event, independence was granted on December 12, 1963.

Nyasaland

Meredith gives the story of Nyasaland, to which the elderly Dr Hastings Banda returned as leader of the independence movement in 1959, determined to scupper Britain’s plans to make it part of a federation with Rhodesia. The colonial governor imported troops who tried to quell protests which turned into riots, troops shot, protesters killed, it becomes a nationwide movement etc.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring north Rhodesia, in the run-up to contested 1959 elections the authorities banned a leading nationalist party and imprisoned its leader, Kenneth Kaunda. Britain was losing its reputation for progressive colonialism in a welter of protests and arrests across all its African colonies.

Abruptly, Harold Macmillan’s conservative government gave in. Late in 1959 the Foreign Secretary Iain Macleod said further repression would lead to bloodshed. In February 1960 Macmillan gave his famous Winds of Change speech. Behind it was fear that further suppressing calls for independence would drive African nations into the hands of the communists. The British knew most of their colonies weren’t ready for independence – Meredith lists the pitiful number of native lawyers or administrators in the central and east African countries – but hurrying was a less bad option than delay, with the increasing repression, bloodshed and reputational damage that would inevitably entail.

6. Heart of Darkness (Congo)

The gruesome history of the Belgian Congo. It beggars belief that there are still statues of King Leopold II, one of the most blood-thirsty rulers in history, in Belgium. Congo was notable for four or five reasons:

  1. It was and is the largest country in Africa.
  2. The grotesque rule of Leopold II was probably the most evil, mass murdering of all the colonial regimes. As many as 10 million Congolese died during his rule, 1885 to 1908.
  3. Once the colony had been handed over to the Belgian government to run, it developed through the 20th century as one of the richest sources of minerals (particularly copper and diamonds) in the world.
  4. The rush to independence was hastiest and most foolhardy here than almost anywhere else. At independence Congo had 3 Black civil servants, 30 university graduates, no doctors, secondary school teachers or army officers. The firebrand new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, had just four years of secondary school education plus one year in a technical college for postal clerks (p.95).
  5. With the result that within days of winning independence on 1 June 1960, Congo collapsed into chaos.

The army mutinied, the entire province of Katanga tried to secede, riots in the main cities included attacks on whites so that the entire Belgian community i.e. everyone who knew how to run the infrastructure of the country, fled in panic. Profile of the hectic unpredictable character of Lumumba, and the long dismal series of events which led, first to his arrest and, eventually, to his murder by Belgian and Congolese soldiers on the orders of his one-time lieutenant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, with the collusion of the UN and US, on 17 January 1961.

The stream of crises continued until Mobutu took power in a definitive military coup in 1965, and was to rule a one-party state for 32 years, until 1997.

7. The White South

South Africa

Meredith points out that the southern nations of Africa – north and south Rhodesia, south-west Africa and South Africa – looked at the other African countries gaining independence and were horrified by what they saw, especially the complete chaos punctuated by bloodbaths and military coups in Congo.

The fiercest response was in South Africa which in 1948 had established the system of apartheid and spent the next decades hardening the division between whites and blacks. Meredith chronicles the early history of the African National Congress (ANC), revolving round the figure of Nelson Mandela and the failure of peaceful efforts to counter apartheid. Peaceful protests such as general strikes became harder to justify after the SA authorities carried out the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, killing 69 protesters and injuring 180.

The more violent atmosphere heralded by the massacre led the ANC to establish the armed wing of the struggle, uMkhonto we Sizwe, in 1961. These guys carried out a not very effective sabotage campaign against a variety of infrastructure targets. In 1962 Mandela was arrested and imprisoned, despite a lack of evidence against him. But then in 1964 the authorities discovered the ANC and uMkhonto we Sizwe hideout at Rivonia, which was stuffed with incriminating documents. On the basis of these, Mandela was retried and, along with the key leadership of the ANC and uMkhonto, sentenced to life imprisonment on 12 June 1964.

Rhodesia

Meredith gives the history of Rhodesia, taking in the creation of the two independence parties, ZANU and ZAPU, up until November 1965 when Ian Smith‘s Rhodesian Front government, rebelling against pressure to grant Black independence, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) from the mother government in the UK.

Angola

Angola was a backwater of the mouldering Portuguese empire, which was ruled by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. In 1956 the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA) was founded but police swoops in 1959 and 1960 arrested most of its leaders. In 1961 the colony was horrified by an outbreak of extreme violence in the north, where machete-wielding gangs massacred white bosses and the Blacks who worked for them. This was partly the work of a different group, the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), run by Holden Roberto.

Mozambique

On the other side of the continent, in the other Portuguese colony, Mozambique, 1962 saw the creation of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) which commenced a campaign of small-scale guerrilla attacks against border posts etc.

Dates of independence

1956 – Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia

1957 – Ghana

1958 – Guinea

1960 – Cameroon, Senegal, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo (Belgian), Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo (France), Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania,

1961 – Sierra Leone, Tanganyika

1962 – Burundi, Rwanda, Algeria, Uganda

1963 – Kenya, Zanzibar

1964 – Nyasaland (Malawi), North Rhodesia (Zambia)

1965 – Gambia

1966 – Botswana, Lesotho

1975 – Angola, Mozambique

1980 – Zimbabwe

1990 – Namibia

1993 – Eritrea

2011 – South Sudan

Part 2

8. The Birth of Nations

A chapter summarising the dire state of the geography and economies of most African nations at independence, and the consequent economic challenges they faced. It’s here that Meredith gives the shocking figures about the lack of African graduates or professionals right across the continent.

9. The First Dance of Freedom

Abandoning democracy

Meredith laments that almost all the new national leaders consciously disavowed democracy and instituted one-party rule. It’s interesting to read their justifications. It was claimed that democracy derived from advanced societies with well-defined classes and class interests which could be represented by political parties. By contrast, leaders like Nkomo and Kenyatta argued that while parties may have been necessary to organise and motivate different groupings in the fight against colonialism, now the colonialists had left and the nations were free, democracy represented a threat to African countries because the likelihood was that parties would come to be based on tribal or regional allegiances and so work to split and divide the nation. There’s actually a lot to this argument, as that’s what many African parties came to be, fronts for specific tribes or regional interests.

One-party rule

Regardless of the justifications, almost all the first leaders of the newly independent African nations went on to abolish democracy, establish one-party rule, declare themselves presidents for life, lock up any opposition figures (p.176), create cults of their greatness (p.180), set up a secret police which was told it could go to any lengths to save the state from communist or capitalist or imperialist subversion etc etc. These cults often took the name of the Great Leader – Nasserism, Nkrumahism and so on (p.163).

Corruption

And misuse money, in two specific ways: 1) instituting state-sponsored corruption at every level of society, while 2) spending fortunes on grandiose building projects, palaces, mansions, waterfront hotels. Presidents, ministers and powerful figures swiftly awarded themselves ‘the platinum lifestyle’ (p.171).While Nkrumah was crapping on about ‘African socialism’ his ministers made fortunes. Ghanaian minister Krobo Edusei caused a scandal when his wife ordered a £3,000 gold-plated bed from a London store. In later life he admitted to owning 14 homes, a luxury beach house, a London flat, expensive cars and six different bank accounts. African socialism.

Army coups

In 1958 in Sudan the army took control in Sudan from squabbling politicians. In 1963 Togo’s president was shot dead in a coup. In 1964 African mobs overthrew rule by the Arab elite and the sultan was forced to flee, the French army had to put down military coups in Gabon and Cameroon, while the British army suppressed army mutinies in Tanganyika, Uganda and Kenya. From 1965 coups became more frequent: in 1965 Algeria’s first leader was deposed; Mobutu overthrew president Joseph Kasa-Vubu in Congo; there was a military coup in Benin; Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa seized power in the Central African Republic, and so on.

10. Feet of Clay (Ghana)

An extended description of Kwame Nkrumah’s slow descent into authoritarian rule, isolation, paranoia, arbitrary arrest of opponents, accompanied by rising corruption. Meredith makes the pretty well-known point that patronage and corruption weren’t parasites on the system which could be eliminated; they were the system.

A detailed account of how Nkrumah destroyed the Ghana economy through mismanagement, ignorance, terrible accounting, disastrous decisions and so on. Incompetence on a national scale, plus classic withdrawal into dictator paranoia. And, also classically, when the army intervened it wasn’t for the good of the country – they’d happily watched it go to wrack and ruin – it was because Nkrumah started tampering with it, wishing to bring it directly under his control as he had done every other aspect of Ghanaian life. So it was that while Nkrumah was visiting China in 1966, the army deposed him. Joyous crowds celebrated in the streets, his statues was pulled down and portraits defaced. The kind of thing we were to see scores and scores of times in developing countries around the world over the past 60 years.

11. A House Divided (Nigeria)

Nigeria. Meredith explains the entirely tribal basis and vicious infighting of Nigerian politics which led up to the January 1966 military coup, in which the Supreme Council of the Revolution not just sacked but executed civilian politicians. And the complicated rivalries between North, West and East Nigeria which led leaders in the East to declare independence as Biafra, and the 3-year-long war which followed, in which up to 2 million Nigerians died.

12. Death of an Emperor (Ethiopia)

An entertaining account of the elaborate ritual which surrounded the Emperor Haile Selassie and the surprisingly aggressive imperial campaigns which had doubled his country’s size, starting back in the time of his ancestor Menelek (ruled 1889 to 1913), including the annexation of Eritrea and contested parts of Somaliland.

In the early 1970s mismanagement, especially of a famine in Wollo, protests by various sectors, and Selassie’s hastening senility, emboldened a group of army officers, who called themselves the Derg, to stage a coup in stages throughout 1974, which ended with the complete overthrow of Selassie on 12 September. In November the junta executed 60 former officials of the imperial government plus dissident elements within the Derg itself, by firing squad, and Ethiopia was declared a republic to be governed on Marxist-Leninist lines.

  • The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)

13. The Coming of Tyrants

After the first few heroic years of optimism, the military coups began. But worse was the advent of the monsters: Abaid Karume in Zanzibar (1964 to 1972); Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic (1966 to 1979); Idi Amin in Uganda (1971 to 1979); Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea (1968 to 1979); Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia (1977 to 1991).

14. In Search of Ujamaa (Tanzania)

Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. He was a committed socialist though without a socialist party or advisers. In the mid-1960s he nationalised everything in Tanzania and proclaimed this native form of socialism ujaama, which is KiSwahili for ‘familyhood’ (p.253). In 1974 this was turned into the forced movement of some 11 million peasant farmers into collective farms, which had the same kind of catastrophic effect as in the Stalin-era Ukraine or Mao’s China i.e. the collapse of agricultural productivity and widespread hunger. Nyerere had to go begging to the World Bank and IMF and food agencies for emergency food supplies. As its economy went steadily downhill, Nyerere’s one-party state did improve literacy, schools, drinking water etc, but almost entirely funded by aid from the West.

15. The Passing of the Old Guard

Ghana

Nkrumah’s sad exile in a slowly deteriorating villa in Guinea planning a triumphant return to Ghana which never took place.

Egypt

Nasser’s great dreams of leading an Arab renaissance came to nothing, attempts to unify with Syria were a fiasco, his intervention in Yemen backfired, leading up to the humiliation of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which the Israelis seized the Sinai with its oil wells from Egypt. Yet he remained popular and Egypt was plunged into mourning when he died in 1970 of a heart attack, aged just 52.

Kenya

Jomo Kenyatta was the opposite of Nyerere, a keen advocate of capitalism, and provided the stable political and legal framework within which private enterprise could flourish. Much of the land belonging to the white settlers, the issue behind the Mau Mau movement, was sold to Black Kenyans. During the 1970s he faced political challenges and hardened his one-party rule. His fiercest critic was found murdered etc. Late in life Kenyatta slowly lost interest in ruling, preferring to concoct complex riddles. He died peacefully in 1978.

Senegal

President Léopold Senghor remained strongly Francophile, committed to maintaining links with France, accepting French capital in business and retaining French troops to safeguard his regime. In France he was a noted poet. In 1976 he bucked the one-party trend of his neighbours by allowing the establishment of two new political parties. In 1980 he handed over power to his protégé, becoming the first African ruler to relinquish power voluntarily.

Guinea

The first president of Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré, created a paranoid atmosphere of permanent plots which he claimed to uncover and used to arrest, torture and publicly execute opponents, real or imagined. A fifth of the population fled abroad. Touré nationalised industries, persecuted independent businesses, created parastatal agencies, so that the economy tanked and was, eventually, only surviving on western aid. After 20 years of enforced socialism, he began to relent and allow some elements of private enterprise.

16. The Slippery Slope

An overview of the calamitous economic issues which hit Africa in the 1970s and 80s, being:

  • famine and drought
  • the two oil shocks of the 1970s
  • the collapse of commodity prices on which most African states depended for foreign revenue
  • the disastrous loss of agricultural land, soil degradation and desertification

On top of all this, an explosive growth in population.

17. The Great Plunderer (Zaire)

This refers to Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who ruled Congo from the date of his second military coup in 1965 to his overthrow by the forces invading from Rwanda in 1997. During those 32 long years he changed the country’s name to Zaire, Africanised all placenames (Leopoldville > Kinshasa, Elizabethville > Lubumbashi) and even his own name, changing it to Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga.

Mobutu nationalised agriculture, seized all businesses from foreign owners, causing a collapse in the country’s economy, and looted it on a grand scale, siphoning vast amounts into private bank accounts. Probably the greatest African kleptocrat, he was said to have stolen up to $15 billion. The Americans supported him on the simple Cold War basis that he was fiercely anti-communist and so maintained the centre of Africa against any Soviet influence. Mobutu was an honoured guest of US presidents from John F Kennedy to George Bush. Meredith doesn’t need to comment.

18. White Dominoes (Mozambique, Angola)

Portugal was the last European country to decolonise. Independence movements in its two main African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, commenced military activities in 1961, leading to what became known as the Portuguese Colonial War (1961 to 1974).

In 1968 Portugal’s long-serving dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, was replaced by another authoritarian ruler, Marcello Caetano. He inherited military operations in Portugal’s main two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. However, junior army officers had become unhappy with the way the army seemed like it was committed forever to these ruinous, unwinnable wars and so, on 25 April 1974, carried out the Carnation Revolution, overthrowing Caetano. Portugal’s new military rulers set out to divest themselves of her colonies immediately. Small Guinea-Bissau was easily granted independence in 1973.

Mozambique

In Mozambique the main liberation force had been the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) led by the zealous Marxist, Samora Machel. Terrified by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Marxist Machal, in the year between the declaration of independence in 1974 and its legal implementation on 25 June 1975, most of the 250,000 Portuguese in Mozambique fled the country, including all the civil servants, administrators, managers of the infrastructure and all businesses.

Frelimo passed a law ordering the remaining Portuguese to leave the country in 24 hours with only 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of luggage. Unable to salvage any of their assets, most of them returned to Portugal penniless, leaving a country empty of experienced administrators, engineers and so on.

Frelimo commenced an aggressive implementation of Marxism-Leninism which proved a disaster: central planning was as badly managed here as in most other African countries, leading to economic collapse, inflation, shortages of everything but especially food. Industrial output and agriculture collapsed leading to widespread famine. Frelimo eventually generated so much opposition that the anti-communist forces united to form the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) rebel militias.

Renamo found backing from South Africa and the US. Civil war between Frelimo and Renamo was to consume 15 ruinous years from 1977 to 1992. An estimated one million Mozambicans perished during the civil war, with somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dying of famine. 1.7 million Mozambicans took refuge in neighbouring states, and several million more were internally displaced.

Angola

Something similar happened in Angola. As the deadline for independence approached, three rebel or independence groups/parties/armies vied for power, being the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA. As violence broke out most of the white Portuguese fled and the country collapsed into a civil war between what emerged as the two main forces, the communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the anti-communist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The civil war lasted from 1975, with interludes, until 2002. See:

Part 3

19. Red Tears (Ethiopia)

How in 1974 the Provisional Military Administrative Committee (PMAC) of army officers, also known as the Derg, overthrew the regime of emperor Haile Selassie. In 1977 Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam seized full control and initiated a wave of repression which became known as the Red Terror. During this two-year campaign as many as 50,000 Ethiopians were arrested, tortured and executed. The Derg dumped the corpses in the street and gained notoriety by demanding that families of the executed pay for the bullets. Marxist-Leninist housekeeping.

Meredith explains how Mengistu’s Marxist-Leninist policies, along with his brutal campaigns against Eritrean and Tigrayan separatists in the north, helped bring about the great Ethiopia famine of 1984 which led to Live Aid. At the time more than half of Ethiopia’s annual budget was devoted to maintaining an army of 300,000 (armed and supplied by Soviet Russia) in order to carry out operations against the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (p.334).

Mengistu was a doctrinaire Marxist who believed in collectivising agriculture and enforcing super low prices in order to provide subsidised food for his key constituencies in the cities. The detailed chronicle of his deliberate ignoring of the famine, attempts to deny it, to prevent journalists or aid agencies entering the famine-stricken areas, and then the politically motivated strategy of moving hundreds of thousands of starving people against their will from the north (close to where Eritrean separatists operated) to the more secure south where they had no homes or livelihoods, makes for terrible reading. What a complete bastard.

The title of this chapter comes from a memoir of his time in Mengistu’s government written by a defector from the Derg, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, ‘Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia’. In the words of reviewer Mohammed Hassen, this exposes ‘the callous brutality of the Ethiopian government towards its own people’, and the leaders of the Derg as ‘uninformed, anti-people, anti-democratic criminal thugs’ (Online review).

20. Fault Lines (Chad, Sudan)

Chad

Across the north of Africa is a line between the Arab Muslim north and the start of the Black African and often Christian south. Meredith gives a long, detailed and deeply depressing account of the north-south conflict in Chad, in which both sides massacred each other and Colonel Gaddafi, in power in Libya from 1969 onwards, took advantage by trying to seize northern Chad and, at his most ambitious, declared the unification of Chad with Libya – under his supreme control, of course.

Sudan

To the East, the equally long-running and demoralising war between Muslim north and Christian south Sudan. A key aspect of the backstory to both conflicts is that the northern Muslims had, for centuries, captured southern blacks as slaves as part of the widespread Arab slave trade. In fact Meredith records Arab militias capturing and enslaving Black southerners in the 1980s, all accompanied by vitriolic racism about the Blacks being sub-humans etc. About the Atlantic slave trade I hear on a daily basis and in virtually every art exhibition I go to; about the Arab slave trade, never.

21. The Scourge of AIDS

The interesting point is the number of African governments which refused to acknowledge AIDS or dismissed it as a racist Western conspiracy, with the result that many African countries didn’t commence AIDS-awareness campaigns till the 1990s by which time the disease had taken hold in their populations. Two notable exceptions were Senegal under Abdou Diouf, and Uganda under the leadership of Yoweri Museveni. Respect.

22. The Lost Decade

A detailed look at the economic collapse of almost all African countries by the 1980s so that they became increasingly dependent on foreign aid, on loans which needed to be continually rescheduled, and the accompanying demands from the IMF and World Bank for ‘structural reforms’. Through mismanagement, drought, civil war, collapse of commodity prices, most African countries became dependent on aid from the West.

What comes over, and is expressed in terms by African commentators themselves, is what condemned Africa to becoming the most backward and poverty-stricken of the world’s continents was the appalling quality of African leaders – tyrants, dictators but, above all, thieves, on an epic, mind-boggling scale.

23. The Struggle for Democracy

The long hold on power of Africa’s strong men, the generation who took power at independence and often clung on to it for 25 years or more, for example:

  • Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo (president for 38 years)
  • Omar Bongo in Gabon (41 years)
  • Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire (president for 33 years)
  • Mobutu in Zaire (32 years)
  • Hastings Banda in Malawi (30 years)
  • Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (27 years)
  • Moussa Traore in Mali (22 years)

Of the 50 African states in 1990, almost all were one-party states or military dictatorships.

The fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ushered in a new era. One party regimes and Marxist regimes appeared old-fashioned overnight. But the strong men clung on in the new landscape, for example Mobutu who struggled on for another 7 years.

24. A Time of Triumph (South Africa)

A long and harrowing description of ‘grand’ apartheid in all its totalitarian, racist horror. Meredith gives an interesting explanation of the changes in international affairs and geopolitics during the late 1980s which led the apartheid leadership to consider sweeping reform. He ends with a moving account of negotiations with Nelson Mandela, climaxing with his release and then the first free, multi-racial elections in South Africa’s history.

Apart from the long, complex history of violence, guerrilla warfare, civil war between the ANC and Inkatha, South Africa’s interference in all the nations bordering it and so on – on a human level I learned that a) Mandela and the last apartheid leader, F.W. de Klerk, really didn’t get on, and that b) when his marriage to wife Winnie Mandela ended, she very publicly took a much younger lover and embarrassed him in public (‘Mandela’s late years of freedom were constantly blighted by her wayward example’), leaving him an often lonely figure (p.438).

Part 4

25. In The Name of the Prophet (Egypt, Algeria, Sudan)

Sayyid Qutb

The imperialists had oppressed them. Secular nationalism was a failure. The first generation of post-independence rulers turned out to be corrupt tyrants. Socialism and Marxism turned out to be dead ends. Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 there began a revival of political Islam which seemed to many ordinary people a last resort, given that all western political systems and theories had failed. Political Islam encouraged the idea that western concepts like democracy or capitalism were infidel and inappropriate to Muslim lands, and that only return to the purity of the Prophet’s laws and rules would restore society.

The principal architect of jihad ideology [was] Sayyid Qutb…whose writings influenced generations of radical Islamists. (p.444)

Qutb, an Egyptian who supported the Muslim Brotherhood, was imprisoned by Colonel Nasser, then executed in 1965 – but not before he’d developed, written and distributed a starkly simplistic view of Islam. According to Qutb the entire Muslim world can be divided into the Party of God and the Party of Satan with no middle ground. Repressive regimes cannot be changed from within and so must be overthrown by jihad i.e. armed struggle.

Any land that hampered the practice of Islam or failed to apply sharia law was ipso facto part of Dar el-Harb – the Abode of War. ‘It should be combated even if one’s own kith and kin, national group, capital and commerce are to be found there.’ (p.444)

This is really, really important. Qutb’s writings are crucial to understanding the modern age. His simplistic binary worldview, and his insistence that democracy, nationalism, human rights and all those other ideas, are infidel western abominations – all this explains the wars which have steadily engulfed the Arab/Muslim world in the last 30 years.

Qutb’s writings explain why generations of jihadis have been convinced that the only honourable and devout course of action is to fight your enemies to extermination. His writings have hugely contributed to instability right across the Arab world and are the ideological background to jihadis fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Sudan. Meredith mentions a couple of other Muslim thinkers:

  • cleric Omar Abdel Rahman who taught that jihad was the only way to vanquish the enemies of Islam (p.445)
  • Muhammed al-Farag, who taught that jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam and that armed struggle is imperative for all true Muslims in order to cure a decadent society: ‘the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them with a complete Islamic Order’ (p.446)

Only jihad can bring about the perfect Islamic society. Jihad must be waged until the perfect Islamic society is achieved. But there are many forces resisting this, the obvious outside forces of America and the West, but also the populations of many of these countries. So the kind of perfect Islamic state the jihadis dream of will probably never be achieved. Therefore the Muslim world, certainly in the Middle East and North Africa, is condemned to permanent war or insurgency for the foreseeable future.

Algeria

The Front de libération nationale (FLN) had been the main force behind the long bloody war for the independence of Algeria from France. After independence was finally granted in 1962, the FLN became the party of government, instituting socialist policies and a one-party regime. Meredith lists the reasons why the FLN slowly became unpopular. Two stick out. One was that they downplayed agriculture in a bid to industrialise, keeping food prices artificially low in order to placate their constituencies in the towns and cities. The result was that life as a farmer got harder and harder, with many rural youths deciding to quit the poverty of the countryside and try their luck in the city. This is interesting because it’s an abiding theme of so many of these countries. If I could travel back in time to the early 60s and was an adviser to newly independent African nations, I’d say: ‘Cherish your farmers’. In Algeria, as everywhere else, neglecting and even undermining agriculture led to the country becoming ever more reliant on food imports.

The second is the explosion in population. I am a Darwinian materialist, a believer in the blunt facts of the environment and biology a long way before culture and politics. Thus the simple relevant fact is that the population of Algeria exploded from 10 million in 1962 to 26 million in 1992. No rate of economic growth, anywhere, could keep up with this explosion in mouths to feed and, more to the point, young men to employ.

Groups of young men hanging round on street corners become a prey to warlords and the siren call of violent revolution. This is true all round the developing world. The West supplied the medicines to developing countries which hugely improved infant mortality and recovery from illness, but without doing anything to transform a) cultural attitudes to women and childbirth or b) expand the economies. Result: lots of aimless young men looking for a cause.

Enter radical Islam which promises a better world, which gives young men a purpose, a goal, a sense of identity, and money and respect. What’s not to like, what’s not to sign up and commit your life to?

As radical Islamic parties began to appear in Algeria the military command which called the shots in the FLN tried to cancel them. After complicated manoeuvres the FLN agreed to hold free elections and Islamic parties stood in them. But when the Islamists looked like winning, the FLN abruptly cancelled the results and took back military control. The rest of the story could have been written by an AI bot. The Islamists hit back with a terror campaign, the army cracked down, arbitrarily arresting thousands, imprisonment without trial, torture etc, the Islamists ramped up their campaign, and so on.

Again, with utter inevitability, the insurgency spawned an extremist wing, the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). With utter predictability they started off saying they’d stick to military targets but soon found these too well protected and their attacks having less and less affect so they widened their targets. Journalists were singled out, but more and more members of the general public were also murdered. Abdelkader Hattab wrote a pamphlet titled: ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’ (p.457).

As in Iraq, in order to build the perfect Islamic state, it turned out to be necessary to kill lots of Muslims, first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands.

What became known as the Algerian Civil War lasted from 1991 to 2002 and led to around 150,000 deaths. Of course the economy was wrecked. Of course a lot of the best and brightest middle classes simply fled abroad.

Egypt

I visited Egypt in 1981 and then in 1995, just before Islamist terror groups began attacking tourists. Groups like Jamaat al-Jihad and Gamma Islamiyya increasingly targeted government officials, intellectuals, journalists and foreign tourists. They attacked and murdered Coptic Christians, burned Christian shops and churches, and bookshops and theatres and video stores. Farag Foda, one of Egypt’s best known writers, was shot dead. The Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz was knifed. ‘Throat-slitting and murder until the power is God’s’, in practice.

Then they started attacking tourists: in 1996 17 Greek pilgrims were murdered outside their hotel. In 1997 58 foreign tourists were murdered in the Valley of the Kings. Meredith tells us that a Japanese man was eviscerated and inside his stomach cavity was stuffed a note reading: ‘No to tourists in Egypt’ (p.461). Fine by me. I’m never going back to a Muslim country.

Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had come to power after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat by army Islamists in 1981. Now Mubarak set about crushing the Islamic groups ruthlessly, telling his own people and the international community that he wouldn’t let Egypt become the next Algeria. This chapter takes the story up to 2000, when Mubarak was arresting members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organisations to prevent them standing in that year’s elections.

26. Black Hawk Down (Somalia)

The first fact about Somalia is that, at independence, about 40% of the people who thought of themselves as Somalis lived outside the borders of the country, in Ethiopia or Kenya. So from the day of independence the government neglected agriculture and the economy and focused on military action to try and extend its borders to include the full population.

Second fact is the Somalis have a strong and complex clan system, clans within clans, which extends in a hierarchy from the five main super-clans down through ever-diminishing sub-clans. So:

  1. Never-ending warfare helped impoverish the country, especially after the Soviet Union dropped its support for Somalia in favour of Mengistu’s Marxist revolution in neighbouring Ethiopia.
  2. As central government collapsed under the pressure of military defeats, poverty, famine and so on, the country disintegrated into a warzone of permanently fighting, feuding clans, at multiple levels, with warlords ruling their territories through terror.

27. The Graves Are Not Yet Full (Rwanda)

The Rwandan genocide. I’ve summarised the dreadful events elsewhere. I’ll just pick up on two related themes, mentioned re. Algeria. 1) the population of Rwanda ballooned from 2 million in 1940 to 7 million in 1990, which led to 2) lots of unemployed youths hanging around, waiting for a cause and meaning (and cash):

Youths with no prospect of work were easily recruited [into the interahamwe) with promises of land, jobs and other rewards… (p.496)

The French government of François Mitterrand comes over as the genocide-supporting scumbags indicated by all the other accounts. For example, it was the French government which refused the Belgian request to increase the number of the latter’s peacekeepers, so that Belgians ended up being forced to watch Tutsis being hacked to death in front of them but were unable to intervene. Because of France (p.510).

Mitterrand was determined to prevent a Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) victory in Rwanda even if it meant continuing to collaborate with genocidal killers. (p.519)

France made five arms shipments to the Hutu government while it was carrying out the genocide. Bastard Mitterrand sent a French force into Rwanda to protect the Hutu Power génocidaires (the equivalent of protecting the SS). Meredith tells of French soldiers slowly realising that the Hutus they had been sent to protect were in fact genocidal killers and realising that their government (Mitterrand) had lied to them. The piles and piles of Tutsi corpses were a clue. But the French government refused to allow their troops on the ground to track down and bring to justice the génocidaires hiding among the mass Hutu refugees who fled into Congo, once the Tutsi-led RPF reactivated the civil war and invaded in order to end the killing.

To the end, the French protected the organisers of the genocide. (p.522)

We’re never meant to forget the Holocaust. Well, in the same spirit, surely we should never forgive the arms and aid and support and protection the French government extended to the perpetrators of the second most horrific genocide of the twentieth century.

Mind you, Meredith goes on to paint the UN as far worse, biased towards Hutu president, Juvénal Habyarimana, ignoring reports from the Canadian commander of the UN force on the ground, UNAMIR, General Roméo Dallaire. And then the Belgian government, which withdrew their contingent altogether, abandoning thousands of Tutsis who had taken shelter in their compounds and who were hacked to pieces within hours of their abandonment (p.512). And the Americans behaved disgracefully, Bill Clinton doing everything he could to avoid using the G word (genocide) and refusing to commit troops. Everyone in a position of power in the West let the genocide happen.

More Tutsis were killed in churches than any other type of building, although a lot were killed in maternity wards where a lot had their bellies ripped open and their babies hacked to pieces before they themselves were hacked to death.

Some people still believe in the essential goodness of the human race. Such innocence is touching, charming, but dangerous.

28. Where Vultures Fly (the two Congo wars)

Who supported Mobutu after he had reduced Zaire to starving ruins? France. Why? Because he spoke French. Because he represented la francophonie. Because he represented a bulwark against the rise of the beastly English-speaking leaders such as Museveni of Uganda. France supported mass murderers and world-beating kleptocrats because their crimes were less important than the preservation of ‘French culture’ (p.525). Look at their wise and good achievements in the realm of international affairs: Vietnam. Algeria. Models of wisdom and statecraft. And Vichy, when millions of French people wholeheartedly co-operated with German Nazis whose values they enthusiastically endorsed.

This is not an exaggeration. When considering international affairs, it’s important to bear in mind what despicable depths the French establishment’s paranoid fear of the English-speaking world drives them. James Barr describes the despicable behaviour of the French in Lebanon and Syria during the Second World War:

This chapter describes how the million and a half Hutu refugees from Rwanda were crammed into refugee camps, mostly in Congo, where the Hutu Power génocidaires rebuilt their power, controlled the distribution of aid, murdered dissenting voices, kept the refugees in line with terror, while they sold some of the aid the West gave them in order to buy arms to re-invade Rwanda and resume attacking Tutsi communities.

Meredith explains how the leader of the RPF, Paul Kagame, conspired with President of Uganda Mouseveni to invade eastern Zaire, to crush the Hutu Power leaders, to force the Hutu refugees to return to their country. How they found a useful idiot from within Zaire to front the army they were creating, namely fat, stupid guerrilla turned nightclub-owner Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

The combined RPF and Ugandan army force which Kabila fronted not only liberated the Hutu refugee camps, but marched on Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, triggering the panic-stricken flight of the sick old dictator, Mobutu in 1997. In short order and to his own surprise, Kabila found himself in power and set about surrounding himself with cronies in the traditional style. Unwisely, he tried to bolster his support among the Congolese by turning on his Ugandan and Rwandan-Tutsi backers, whose forces were much resented in Kinshasa and beyond.

This policy badly backfired because when Kagame and Museveni found their puppet acting up against them, in 1998 they instituted a second invasion from the east, this time not marching but flying their forces direct to Kinshasa to overthrow Kabile. At this point, however, various outside countries began to get involved, several big ones supporting Kabile who had signed lucrative deals with them allowing them to plunder Congo’s natural resources.

This was the complex situation which led to what became known as the Great War of Africa. Slowly the country splintered into regions held by rival warlords or outside armies. A peace treaty was signed in 2002 which required armies from Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Angola and Zimbabwe to withdraw. In four years of chaotic conflict (1998 to 2002) some 3 million Africans had died, mostly unarmed Congolese civilians. But even after the peace treaty, fighting continued in east Congo, and continues at a low level to this day.

29. Blood Diamonds (Liberia, Sierra Leone)

Liberia

Meredith recaps the extraordinary early history of Liberia, a colony on the west coast of Africa funded in 1822 by guilt-stricken liberal Americans who wanted to return some of their slaves to the motherland. Instead, the few thousand returned Blacks ended up creating their own version of slavery, subjugating the poor locals, exploiting their labour, building homes and dressing in the elaborate nineteenth century style of their former American oppressors. Now the immigrant Blacks oppressed the locals. The Americo-Liberians amounted to no more than 1% of the population but lorded it over the indigenes.

In a neat historical irony, in 1931 an international commission found members of the entirely Black Liberian government guilty of involvement in organised slavery (p.546).

But it the story stops being in any way funny when in April 1980 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe led a coup which overturned a century of Americo-Liberian rule. Semi-literate, Doe came from a minority tribe, the Krahn, from the deep jungle. He and colleagues broke into the mansion of President William Tolbert to complain about unpaid wages. Finding him asleep in bed they shot him multiple times before disembowelling him and dumping his body in the garden. This was the coup where Tolbert’s cabinet ministers were taken down to the beach, tied to posts and shot by a squad of drunken soldiers. I remember seeing the video on the news. This set the tone of ten years of savage, primitive, ignorant, incompetent rule.

Like all stupid people, Doe thought the world revolved around him and thus saw conspiracies everywhere. His comms people publicised the idea that he had survived 38 or more assassination attempts because of his magical powers, because bullets stopped in mid-air, knives refused to cut him, and so on – fairy tales designed to appeal to the largely illiterate population.

In August 1984 Doe arrested a popular university lecturer and 15 colleagues claiming they were planning a coup. When students protested, Doe sent a troop of soldiers who opened fire indiscriminately, stripped students naked, demanded money and/or raped them (p.551). This all made me think of all Kwame Nkrumah’s speeches from the 1950s and 60s about ‘Africa for Africans’, ‘African values’, how a liberated Africa would become a beacon of progress and civilisation…

Throughout all the mayhem the US government stood by Doe, declaring his obviously rigged elections valid, overlooking his brutal massacres, upping annual aid to $80 million, and inviting him to the White House for red carpet treatment. Why? Because he was staunchly anti-Soviet. That’s all that mattered (p.555).

In November 1985 General Thomas Quiwonkpa, who had led the 1980 coup along with Doe, tried to seize power and there was premature rejoicing – until Doe managed to regain control, hunt down Quiwonkpa and have him kicked and hacked to death, followed by even harsher crackdowns on the population, which including victimisation of the entire Gio tribe which Quiwonkpa came from.

In 1989 another former colleague, Charles Taylor, led a militia into Liberia from neighbouring Ivory Coast, thus commencing a guerrilla war against Doe. Doe sent out death squads to devastate villages in the regions Taylor had seized. Taylor armed children (‘Small Boy Units’) and told them to kill everyone. The country descended into barbarity.

Bolstered by cane spirit, marijuana and cheap amphetamines, youths and boy soldiers evolved into psychopathic killers, adorning themselves with women’s wigs, dresses, fright masks and enemy bones and smearing their faces with white clay and make-up in the belief that this gave them supernatural perception…’It’s a children’s war,’ said a senior United Nations observer. ‘Kids get promoted in rank for committing an atrocity. They can cut off someone’s head without thinking. The troops move into a village. They take everything and kill and rape. They stay a couple of weeks and then move on.’ (p.558)

It’s interesting to read that many of the stoned fighters thought that wearing wigs or dresses i.e. adopting two identities, would confuse enemy bullets. Traditional African values. Reminds me of the website I found last time I was reading about this subject, a collection of photos of the surreal garb of drug-addled psychopathic militia men.

In 1989 a colleague of Taylor’s named Prince Johnson split off from Taylor’s army to set up the Independent National Patriotic Front of Liberia, with the result that Liberia became caught in a three-way civil war. Or just – war. Marauding soldiers from each side burned, looted, raped and massacred at will. Half the population fled the country. Nigeria sent a peacekeeping force which didn’t establish any kind of peace but secured a few buildings in the capital Monrovia. When Doe drove down to the port to greet them, he was captured by Prince Johnson’s men.

Johnson ordered a video to be made of his men torturing a badly battered Doe, including the moments when they sliced his ears off. The video became a bestseller across West Africa. You can watch it on YouTube and reflect on the speeches of Kwame Nkrumah explaining how African values would civilise the world.

Inevitably, the African peacekeeping force turned out to be every bit as corrupt and lawless as the militias they were sent to police, giving warlords weapons in exchange for looted goods, leading to the joke that ECOMOG stood for ‘Every Car Or Moving Object Gone’.

Taylor established control everywhere outside the capital, and came to commercial arrangements with western companies to allow trade to continue. In two years he’s estimated to have raked off £200 million from these gangster deals.

Sierra Leone

The chaos from Liberia then spilled over into neighbouring Sierra Leone. This country was already a basket case due to the 17-year, one-party rule of President Siaka Steven whose regime made a fortune trading diamonds via Lebanese dealers, while the economy languished, government employees went unpaid, and gangs of youths filled the streets looking for a cause. The usual.

The force Taylor sent into Sierra Leone in March 1991 called itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and was led by the psychopath, Foday Sankoh. This was the group Anthony Loyd writes about terrifyingly in Another Bloody Love Letter. Child soldiers became a key feature of Sierra Leone’s civil war. They were given drugs, indoctrinated and taught to kill. Some had to kill their own parents as an initiation test. Some hated it, wanted to leave but were afraid of themselves being killed. But others loved it. As researchers Krijn Peters and Paul Richards concluded:

‘The pay may be derisory but weapon training pays quicker dividends than school ever did; soon the AK47 brings food, money, a warm bath and instant adult respect. The combat groups substitutes for lost family and friends.’ (quoted page 563)

Like the white overseers in King Leopold’s Congo, the RUF took to hacking off the hands and limbs of civilians, at random, purely for the terror it created. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled their homes. A coup in the capital brought Valentine Strasser to power. He paid a firm of mercenaries, Executive Outcomes, to clear the capital Freetown in exchange for rights to the country’s diamond mines. Executive Outcomes fighters cleared Freetown in one week, testament to the shoddy, amateurish character of the African fighters on all sides.

More splinter groups, more coups, more fighting, 14 attempts at a ceasefire, tens of thousands more hand choppings and mutilations. A final ceasefire brought UN intervention. But when the UN went to seize the diamond mines, in 2000, the RUF captured 500 of its peacekeepers. It was now that Britain sent in a full battle force to release the UN troops, seize government buildings and train the SL army. Sankoh was arrested and the RUF splintered into ineffectual groups. In the wake of the British intervention, the UN deployed 18,000 troops to bring about a comprehensive peace.

Eleven years of war had left 50,000 dead, 20,000 mutilated, three quarters of the population displaced, and Sierra Leone at the bottom of the league of human development. Back in Liberia, Charles Taylor amassed a huge fortune from illegal diamond trading. His overthrow in 2003 was as violent and brutal as his coming to power, with two more factions, groups or militias murdering and raping their way to the capital. Eventually Taylor was forced out but flew peacefully to Nigeria to take up life in a comfortable retirement villa. There is no justice on earth, nothing like justice.

30. No Condition Is Permanent (Nigeria)

Meredith describes the brutal rule of General Sani Abacha, military ruler from 1993 to 1998. His crackdown on all opposition. The rise of organisations representing the Ogoni people of the oil-rich Niger Delta who had seen none of the tens of billions of oil money generated around them, only the pollution and destruction of their environment. The work of the popular writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was eventually arrested, accused of organising an anti-government conspiracy etc and, despite international protests, executed in November 1995.

Abachi’s death in 1998 is the opportunity for a review of how far the country had fallen. Despite annual oil revenue of $280 billion, income per head was less than a third of what it had been in 1980, at $310; half the population lived on less than 30 cents a day and had no access to clean drinking water. Half of under fives were stunted due to malnutrition. Nigeria was regularly judged to be the most corrupt country in the world.

What this litany of disasters begins to impress on even the most sympathetic reader is that Africans do not seem able of running their own countries. Catastrophic wars, epic corruption, barbaric violence resulting in crushing poverty, if the generation of independence campaigners had seen the future would they have been in such a tearing hurry to gain independence from their colonial masters?

Abachi’s death didn’t bring peace and light: the end of the military regime led to an explosion of political parties across the country, which themselves exacerbated ethnic rivalries, and also the rise of Islamic militancy, which led to clashes between Muslims and Christians. Despite free elections in 1999 and again in 2003, observers wondered whether Nigeria, a country of 120 million made up of 250 ethnic groups, was ungovernable. [That was in 2000. Nigeria’s population in 2023 has almost doubled, to 215 million.]

31. The Honour of Living (Sudan)

General Omar al-Bashir seized power in Sudan in 1989 and declared his commitment to creating an Islamic state. This was followed by the arrest of all opposition figures, torture including burning, beating and rape, the usual behaviour of leaders promising to build a better society – first you have to lock up a lot of people. 1991 saw the introduction of a new Islamic penal code: women were hounded out of public life, segregation of men and women was enforced in all public places, there was a ban on music, cinema and the compulsory Arabisation of all culture.

The ideologue of all this was Hassan al-Turabi, founder of the National Islamic Front and founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the first Gulf War, in 1991. Turabi set up the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference to bring together thinkers and leaders to fight back against America’s ‘colonisation’ of the Arab World. Sudan became a refuge for anti-western terrorist groups. This is very important. It marks the start of a new type of aggressive new anti-western ideology, of the war on America.

Meredith gives a good short description of the career of Osama bin Laden. In 1996 the blind cleric sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman organised the bombing of the World Trade Centre. Extremists trained in Sudan undertook assassinations and attacks across the Arab world. In 1998 activists trained by al Qaeda attacked hotels in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 263 people. Now we enter ‘the modern world’, the era we still live in in 2023, the era of unceasing conflict and Islamic insurgency across the entire Arab world.

Their Islamic ideology justified the Bashir regime in intensifying the war against southern, Black, Christian rebels. Villages were bombed, populations massacred and sold into slavery, with the blessing of Islamic scholars. The southern forces split into two parties who had a civil war between themselves in which tens of thousands of civilians died, which triggered a famine in which hundreds of thousands perished (p.594). Humans, eh? Impressive species.

Alongside massacres in the south went the discovery and exploitation of oil. The Khartoum government reaped a huge bonanza and spent it on…arms. By 2002 the civil war had left an estimated 2 million dead. But after 9/11 the Americans became active. Sudan was identified as a training base for Islamic terrorists and Bashir had to back down and promise to comply.

32. Black Gold (Angola)

The crushingly depressing history of Angola in the 1980s and 1980s, a country destroyed by an endless civil war between the supposedly ‘Marxist’ MPLA government based in Luanda, and the madly self-centred, narcissistic, overweening arrogance of Jonas Savimbi, leader of UNITA.

Land mines, aerial bombing, indiscriminate massacre, burning, looting, rape of women and children. Maybe 5 million died, many more had legs blown off by the millions of landmines, the country was laid waste – all while Eduardo dos Santos and the elite of the MPLA lived like kings by salting away the revenue derived from the huge oil deposits found just offshore. Getting on for half the annual oil revenue, billions of dollars, was stolen by dos Santos and his clique, while the children starved to death in the streets. As with Congo, or Nigeria, why give aid to oil- and resource-rich countries which have enough natural income to invest in infrastructure, roads, markets, clean water, schools, but which they either steal or spend on arms and weapons?

33. A Degree In Violence (Zimbabwe)

The slow descent into paranoid dictatorship of Robert Mugabe. I hadn’t realised that he was initially conciliatory towards the white minority, and even his arch enemy Ian Smith, for the first two or three years of his rule because his first priority was eliminating all his black rivals, starting with Joshua Nkomo and his Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). It was called the Gukurahundi campaign (Shona for ‘the early rain which washes away the chaff before the spring rains’). During this campaign Mugabe’s notorious Fifth Brigade, trained by North Koreans, rampaged through ZAPU’s heartland, Matabeleland, and massacred thousands of civilians accused of being ‘dissidents’. Some estimates say as many as 80,000 were killed during the 5-year campaign.

Slowly Zimbabwe became like all the other African one-party states, a machine for redirecting wealth into the pockets of a small elite around the figurehead leader. As the economy collapsed and inflation and unemployment rose, so did Mugabe’s deployment of racist, anti-white rhetoric, focused on the policy of farm reclamation, seizing back land from the white farmers who owned a disproportionate amount of it. As Meredith explains, it’s all Mugabe had left, rabble-rousing racism to distract attention from the complete failure of his leadership.

Mugabe’s successive rounds of farm seizures spelled the end of commercial farming as a major industry in Zimbabwe. Many of the confiscated farms didn’t go to the deserving poor but to friends and family and tribal supporters of Mugabe, who then stripped and sold off their assets or left them to rot. Hundreds of thousands of Blacks who worked on the confiscated farms were thrown out of work. Land lay fallow. Food production collapsed. Zimbabwe, once the bread basket of southern Africa, became dependent on food aid.

By 2003 the economy had collapsed and an estimated quarter of the population had fled the country. Three-quarters of the remainder lived on less than a dollar a day. Meredith covers the coming together of opposition movements in the Movement for Democratic Change and the rise of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, the elections he contested in 2002 and 2008, elections Mugabe comprehensively managed with intimidation, violence and hectoring messages through state media.

Opposition activists were hunted down, beaten, tortured and in some cases murdered. (p.646)

Meredith’s narrative takes the reader up to 2008 when Mugabe, despite spending 28 years utterly devastating his country, was still in power. It was very depressing to switch to Wikipedia and see that Mugabe continued to rule the country he had ruined for another nine years, till he was overthrown in 2017.

34. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (South Africa)

The books and movies all focus on Nelson Mandela‘s long march to freedom. Not so many examine the calamitous challenges he faced on taking power in 1994: trying to reverse the best part of a century of totalitarian racism which had entrenched grotesque inequality between the affluent whites and the crushingly poor Black population; trying to integrate millions of badly educated young Africans into the economy, trying to introduce Blacks into every level of a 100% white political and civil administration and into SA’s commercial life. The army, the police, the education system, everything needed reforming.

Plus the expectations of activists at all levels who had spent a lifetime working for the ‘revolution’ which would create a land of plenty. There was an epidemic of strikes and protests or just straightforward crime. To all this Mandela had to react much like Mrs Thatcher, explaining that the state just didn’t have the resources to make everyone rich. There would have to be belt-tightening. It would take time.

Meredith has an extended passage describing the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, how it struggled to find its way, was a compromise in nature and intent, but ended up unearthing far more than anyone expected. Its impartiality was emphasised by the way it was reviled by both sides, both stalwarts of the apartheid regime and the ANC itself, found guilty of murdering white civilians, Black opponents, of prosecuting a civil war with Inkatha, and the 400-plus victims of ‘necklacing’.

Meredith’s account of Mandela’s sustained efforts to achieve reconciliation between the races at every level bring a tear to the eye. What a hero.

His successor, Thabo Mbeki, elected unopposed to lead the ANC in 1997, was not a hero. Despite having been raised a communist, Mbeki promptly announced a set of neoliberal capitalist policies designed to boost the economy, namely strict fiscal discipline, lower government deficits, privatisation and liberalisation of state industries.

But Mbeki will go down in history as the man who adopted a minority view that HIV did not cause AIDS, promoted this view at every opportunity, refused to support AIDS awareness campaigns, refused to license anti-HIV drugs, for year after year, in the face of mounting criticism both within SA and internationally.

Mbeki insisted on playing the race card i.e. insisting that the global scientific consensus about HIV/AIDS was a racist attack on Black Africans on a par with apartheid. His obstinate refusal to allow anti-retroviral drugs to AIDS patients and pregnant women was calculated, by 2008, to have led to the premature deaths of 365,000 South Africans.

The greatest political challenge facing every nation is not to end up being led by idiots.

Mbeki undertook a more aggressive strategy of getting white businesses to include Black partners but, far from lifting the entire Black population out of poverty, this tended to enrich just the small number of educated, well-connected Blacks. The strategy developed into crony capitalism. Perceiving that they were being discriminated against, some 750,000 skilled whites just left the country, replaced by less qualified or experienced Blacks (p.679). Services decayed. Poverty grew alongside rising violent crime.

South Africa now has exceptionally high rates of murder, gender-based violence, robbery and violent conflict. It has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Mbeki turned into a typical African leader. He created a climate of fear in the ANC. He emasculated parliament. He appointed officials for their loyalty to him, not their abilities. He shamefully supported Robert Mugabe even as Mugabe turned into a dictator and reduced his country to beggary.

And, falling into line with traditional African leaders, Mbeki and his cronies became involved in corruption, in particular creaming off hundreds of millions of dollars from state defence procurements. The ANC became split between the Mbeki faction and one led by Jacob Zuma, who himself was charged with money laundering, fraud and rape.

In 2007 Zuma stood against Mbeki and won the post of ANC leader, then stood for the presidency in 2009. The party split, but corruption became more embedded. The gap between rich and poor grew. Crime became the only way to survive for millions. After this book was completed Jacob Zuma went on to be elected president and serve from 2009 to 2018.

Incidentally, Meredith has written a series of books about South Africa, including a biography of Mandela, which explains the authoritativeness of his SA chapters:

  • In the Name of Apartheid: South Africa In The Post War Period (1988)
  • South Africa’s New Era: The 1994 Election (1994)
  • Nelson Mandela: A Biography (1999)
  • Coming to Terms: South Africa’s Search for Truth (2001)

35. Out of Africa

Decline

In 2001 the Organisation of African Unity was replaced by a new African Union. Same old dictators, though. Same corruption, same tribalism, same civil wars. Same population explosion which means half the population live below the poverty line, same huge unemployment, with millions permanently on the brink of starvation. 250 million Africans are undernourished; school enrolment is falling; life expectancy is falling. [This appears to be wrong, now; life expectancy in Africa is, apparently, 63.]

MDGs

By some estimates the West has spend £1.2 trillion in aid to Africa. There has often been little to show. In the 2000s there was a flurry of activity with the creation of the Millennium Development Goals. In 2005 Bob Geldof created a huge media event around the Live 8 campaign and gigs. But the West has donor fatigue. Pledges made under MDGs and Live 8 weren’t carried through. African countries have promised to reform and then utterly failed to do so too many times.

China

Into the breach has stepped China, which has been signing trade deals across Africa. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). By 2010 China-Africa trade had leapt to $115 billion. A million Chinese had moved to Africa.

The Arab Spring

And then, just as Meredith was completing this book, along came the Arab Spring leading to the overthrow of ageing dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and on into the Middle East i.e. Yemen, Bahrein, Syria. And yet within a few years, Egypt was back in the hands of the military, Libya had collapsed as a state, Syria fell into a ruinous civil war; only Tunisia survived and flourished as a democracy.

Kenya

Meredith ends with the calamitous recent history of Kenya, which threw out Daniel arap Moi and his cronies (known as the Karbanet syndicate) after 23 years of looting the country. However, his successor, Mwai Kibaki, merely instituted a new kleptocracy for his tribe and supporters (who came to be known as the Mount Kenya mafia). Corruption reached scandalous new heights with some $4 billion a year, or one third of the national budget, being raked off by the corrupt elite.

When Kibaki refused to accept the results of the 2007 election i.e that he had lost to opposition leader Raila Odinga, he plunged Kenya into tribal bloodshed which left thousands dead, the economy damaged and Kenya’s reputation for stability in tatters. It had become just one more African country, ruined by its corrupt rulers’ inability to cede power.

Africa’s wounds are self-inflicted. Africans have proved ruinously incapable of running their own countries. Meredith ends his book by describing the majority of Africa’s rulers as ‘vampires’ who have converted all the instruments of the state into money-making scams, who use rabble-rousing ethnic rhetoric or state terror to remain in power, while their populations slip ever backwards into poverty, sickness and starvation.

Thoughts

Some pretty obvious themes emerge from this 700-page odyssey but in the last 5 or 6 chapters something bigger than the themes struck me, which is that this is a very negative view of Africa. Often it is very harrowing and dark indeed, as when the subject matter is bleak, as in Algeria, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola.

But it took me a while to grasp how much this is a journalist’s not a historian’s or academic’s point of view of the subject. And, like all journalists, Meredith accentuates the negative. Man buys a puppy for his kids, who love it, is not news. New puppy attacks children, that is news.

I know it’s an obvious and well-known journalistic principle, but in the last 100 pages it really struck home that Meredith focuses relentlessly on the bad news, on countries with long-running wars and political crises, the ones we read about in the newspapers: Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, settings for horrible wars, massacres, genocides even. On the basis of this book it would be tempting to write all of Africa off as an irredeemable disaster zone. But there are 50 or so countries in Africa, and not all of them are having civil wars all the time. Some of them might even be doing rather well. Many people might be living ordinary lives, doing jobs, getting married, having parties. Despite the impression Meredith gives, life expectancy across Africa is actually rising.

Anyway, that was my one Big Thought: that if you only read this book you would be left with the impression that Africa is a vast abattoir of eternal massacre and mutilation, vampire leaders and epic corruption. I don’t think Meredith intends to be biased and I’m sure everything he writes is absolutely true. But by the end of his book I began to think that it’s not necessarily the complete truth, about the entire continent, and all its countries, and all the people who live in them.

Credit

The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith was published in England by the Free Press in 2005. A revised edition was published by Simon and Schuster in 2011. All references are to the 2013 paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on November 10, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/10/the-state-of-africa-martin-meredith-2/

A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern

This is an outstanding, wonderful exhibition bringing together some 150 photographs (and a few installations and videos) by no fewer than 36 photographers and artists from across Africa. It is full of breath-taking and beautiful works, suggesting a continent alive with wonderfully creative, innovative artists.

It’s divided into three ‘chapters’, each of which are sub-divided into themes. To quote the curators:

The first chapter is rooted in ancient African cultures and traditions which have survived periods of struggle and resistance. Inspired by Pan-African liberation movements, the second chapter looks at photography’s ability to produce counter histories – archival practices and the agency of photographer and subject are brought into focus. The third chapter explores the impact of globalisation and the climate emergency.

Chapter 1: Identity and tradition

Queens, Kings and Gods

For centuries Africa was conquered and colonised by European countries. The artists in room one pay tribute to the monarchs and matriarchs who resisted colonial conquest and occupation. The photographers here invoke the heritage of kingdoms such as the Asante of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria, who are descended from the goddesses and gods of the ancient spiritual capital, Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Thus a series of big, beautifully clear portraits of traditional monarchs of the present day by George Osodi (born Nigeria 1974).

Installation view of ‘Nigerian Monarchs’ series by George Osodi (2012 to 2022) in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern (photo by the author)

There is a set from the ‘We Live in Silence; sequence by Kudzanai Chiurai (born 1981, Zimbabwe) which elaborately recreates biblical narratives, history painting and Christian iconography which themselves turn out to be scenes from the 1967 film, ‘Soleil Ô’, by Mauritanian-born French filmmaker Med Hondo. So, worlds within worlds…

We Live in Silence IV by Kudzanai Chiurai (2017) courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery © Kudzanai Chiurai

Spiritual worlds

The next room gestures towards the complex and diverse history of religion across this vast continent. There’s a set of photographic self portraits by Khadija Saye (1992 to 2017, born and worked in the UK, of Gambian heritage). You might recall that it was one of these photos that British artist Chris Ofili used as the centrepiece for his huge new site-specific Requiem for Grenfell Tower at Tate Britain. In this sequence Saye photographed herself performs a series of rituals using sacred objects that combine her African, Christian and Islamic heritage.

Installation view of the ‘Dwelling: in the space we breathe’ series by Khadija Saye (2017) (photo by the author)

At the end of the room is a stunning work, a set of five huge digital photos arranged to create a striking tableau by Maïmouna Guerresi (born 1951, born in Italy, works in Senegal). Titled ‘M-eating – Students and Teacher’ it shows four girls and an older man sitting around a long table draped in a yellow cloth. The wall behind the table is inscribed with the Basmala, a Muslim prayer recited to elicit God’s blessings. It’s a huge and really powerful image of absorption and contemplation but, more than that, it’s just a beautifully clear and vividly coloured composition.

‘M-eating – students and teacher’ by Maïmouna Guerresi (2012) Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Masks

The next room is devoted to the role of masks in African religion, ritual, folklore and culture. There’s a stunning series by Edson Chagas (born 1977 in Angola), the Tipo Passe series of sitters wearing contemporary clothes but traditional Bantu masks. ‘Tipo passe’ is Portuguese for passport and the frontal composition references passport photography.

Installation view of the ‘Tipo Passe’ series by Edson Chagas (2014) (Photo by the author)

Opposite these is a series of really wonderful photos by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (born 1965, works in Benin), instances from the Egungun series.

Installation view of ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (photo by the author)

As the curators explain:

Egungun is a Yoruba masquerade practice which calls upon the spirits of departed ancestors. Through ceremonial drumming and dance, ancestral spirits inhabit the bodies of Egungun practitioners to pass on blessings and guide the passage of the dead to the spirit world. Clothing plays an important role in Egungun masquerade – elaborate masks and fabrics must completely seal the performer’s body. Agbodjélou’s performers wear costumes which layer expensive foreign materials and traditional Yoruba cloth. This combination of the traditional and the contemporary parallels the Egungun’s complex role as mediators between the world of the living and the dead.

They’re absolutely stunning, vivid photos.

Untitled from the ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou

There’s a massive video piece by Wura-Natasha Ogunji titled ‘Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?’ and showing women dressed in colourful (traditional?) clothes, dragging kegs of water roped to their ankles through the backstreets of Lagos. Here’s a clip:

You may not be altogether surprised to learn that it’s a feminist piece. Their costumes evoke images of Egungun masquerade, a Yoruba practice that manifests ancestors’ spirits and is traditionally reserved for men, and Ogunji explains the piece is designed to question the heavy labour still done by many women in traditional societies.

Chapter 2: Counter Histories

The next room is big with a lot going on. Along one wall is a series of relatively small ‘family portraits’. These loving portraits of family members gesture towards the long history of studio portraiture that gave agency to African photographers and their sitters, letting them create domestic alternatives to the imperial rhetoric of colonial postcards, posters and magazines. These included pioneering photographers such as James Barnor in Ghana and Lazhar Mansouri in Algeria, photographing families and individuals who would gather proudly to have their portraits taken, often for the first time. All fair enough, but they’re relatively small and struggle to compete with the other, enormous offerings in the same space.

Most striking is the large assembly of old box files arranged on a pebbly red base. This is ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike (born UK, works in Nigeria). These old file boxes are filled with archival documents, including colonial-era postcards and photographs, and then carefully choreographed on sand and soil. It is a general metaphor for the way information was power for the old colonial authorities and was hidden away in files and folders but then, during the period of independence, colonial archives were abandoned, hidden and destroyed. And yet…that information decayed, became irrelevant, barely concealing the true earth of the country, its geological bedrock, symbolising the country’s real roots.

Installation view of ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike in room 4 of ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Tate (Lucy Green)

In the centre, at the back of n this photo, you can see a set of four figures, blown-up and pasted onto cardboard bases, these are the work of Samson Kambalu (born 1975 in Malawi, works in the UK). They’re actually cardboard cut-outs of African soldiers use photographs sourced from the Weston Library in Oxford, UK. They represent the unnamed infantry who fought for the British Empire during the First and Second World Wars and were known as the King’s African Rifles. The cardboard indicates the soldiers’ expendable status to colonial powers. Behind them is a patchwork of quilts inspired by Kambalu’s childhood memories of collecting bubblegum cards of world flags.

Next to them, on the right, you can see a sequence of three big pieces. These are from the sequence ‘Figures’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (born 1971 in Madagascar, works in France). These are collages of maps, fragments of bank notes, record sleeves and other archival documents which build up into complex, evocative collages. The maps are, as you might expect, old-style colonial-era maps, the idea being that maps were used by the imperial countries to define and control; while the images are of strong African figures, including striking portraits of ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. These are strong, highly impactful images.

‘Figures 1861’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (2016) at ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Malala Andrialavidrazana

Away on the opposite side of the room is a large alcove with a distinctive black-and-white tiled floor, containing three big vivid sets of photographs by three different photographers.

They are, from left to right, four photos by Ruth Ginika Ossai (Nigeria), three by Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco) and four by Atong Atem (born 1994 in South Sudan, works in Australia).

Ruth Ginika Ossai’s portraits are carefully staged on floormats made of Astroturf and parquet-style laminate flooring. The backdrops are inspired by the special effects featured in Igbo gospel music videos and Nollywood films and give them a super-real feel.

The central three are by Hassan Hajjaj in a series called ‘Kesh Angels’ (named after the Hells Angels and the city’s motorbike culture). These are brilliant. The women are not only wearing vivid djellabas and veils but are posed in deliberately in-yer-face, take-no-**** attitudes. To cap it all, the frames are inset with tins of popular products, one appears to be lamb meat, another of tomato juice. So they’re stylish, stroppy, modern and funny.

Installation view of ‘Kesh Angels’ by Hassan Hajjaj (photo by the author)

To the right of the Kesh Angels are four portraits by Atong Atem. Atem portrays friends who are fellow members of Australia’s African diaspora. She says: This body of work honours the South Sudanese Dinka tradition of record-keeping and archiving as an intimate cultural practice.’ Aren’t they beautiful, brightly colourful, densely patterned, vibrantly alive?

‘Adut and Bigoa’ by Atong Atem (2015) courtesy of the artist and MARS Gallery © Atong Atem

Chapter 3: Imagined Futures

The final room contains yet more series of really strong photographs. The theme is the environmental challenges facing Africa, specifically its overpopulated cities and its degraded environment plus, of course, the heating up and drying out caused by global warming.

Kiripi Katembo (1979 to 2015, born and worked the Democratic Republic of the Congo) discovered that people in his home town of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, didn’t like being photographed. But he could get away with photographing their reflections in the city’s countless large puddles and pools of water. Often these contained rocks or building rubble, but Katembo discovered that the intrusion of these objects into the crystal clear reflections created an interesting disturbance. As the curators describe it: usually depicted as a chaotic and busy capital, ‘here Kinshasa appears as a dream-like landscape populated by shadows and unidentified objects.’

Installation view of ‘Un regard’ by Kiripi Katembo (photo by the author)

There’s a striking series of large black and white photos by Mário Macilau (born 1984, born and works in Mozambique). These, as the images instantly convey, document the workers of the Hulene landfill site in Maputo, Mozambique. Obviously it shows human beings reduced to picking through rubbish to glean a living, and, of course, affected by the toxic substances released into the air and soil by the widespread practice of burning.

‘Breaking News’ from ‘The Profit Corner’ series by Mário Macilau (2015) © Mário Macilau, Courtesy Ed Cross Fine Art

Related to the same topic of environmental destruction, but in a completely different register, is a series of 3 wonderful photos by Fabrice Monteiro (born 1972 in Belgium, works in Senegal). They’re from his ‘Prophecies’ series and they are absolutely brilliant.

Untitled #1 (2013) from ‘The Prophecy’ series 2013 to 2015 by Fabrice Monteiro in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern

‘The Prophecy’ series captures environmental issues facing communities in Dakar, Senegal, from forest fires to coastal erosion. Spookily tall spiritual figures, inspired by West African masquerade and animism, rise up out of the rubbish dumps, themselves made of rubbish and detritus. They’re stunning.

And next to them is arguably the best set in the show, the ones the curators have (wisely) chosen as the posters, a set of four quite stunning, beautifully, staged, semi-abstract photos by Aïda Muluneh (born and works in Ethiopia, 1974).

Installation view of ‘Water Life’ series by Aïda Muluneh, being (top row): The Shackles of Limitation, Steps (bottom row): Star Shine Moon Glow and The Sorrows We Bear

These were commissioned by the charity Water Aid and depict – in an obviously highly stylised way – ‘rural water access and its impact on women’s rights, well-being and education.’ The impact of global warming will obviously further degrade access to drinking water for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest countries. But clearly the thing here is Muluneh’s stunning use of a limited palette of bright blue and red, and her incorporation of traditional African body painting and dress.

Epilogue

The final (small-ish, corridor-like) room in the exhibition hosts videos by two artists. On the whole I don’t like videos. I don’t have the patience – the photos I’ve highlighted earlier in the show all make their impacts with dramatic immediacy whereas art videos are, by and large, extremely slow.

The most striking is ‘In Praise of Still Boys’ by Julianknxx (born 1988 in Sierra Leone, works in the UK).

The 3 or 4 minutes of this I sat and watched featured lots of footage of a very young Queen Elizabeth II visiting somewhere in Africa (Freetown?), white British sailors steering a motor launch through canoes rowed by local Africans, then British troops from the (I’m guessing) 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone (almost none of this is shown in the trailer, above). And this harking on about the British colonial legacy prompted the train of thought which follows in my political commentary on the exhibition.

Political commentary

I hugely enjoyed this impressive, wide-ranging exhibition about African photography as an aesthetic i.e. visual and psychological experience. But aesthetics and politics are far apart, at least in this exhibition and Tateworld more generally. As political analysis or commentary, this exhibition was rubbish. Dire. Seriously misleading. On and on and on and on and on the curators go about ‘colonialism’ which, for most of these countries, ended in the 1960s, 60 years ago, and on and on and on the curators and the artists go about the Atlantic Slave Trade, which Britain banned in 1807, 216 years ago.

In chapter 3 the curators optimistically claim that the featured artists ‘imagine multiple futures’ and cite Senegalese academic, musician and writer Felwine Sarr (born 1972) who calls for ‘Africans to think and formulate their own future’. In his 2016 book Afrotopia, Sarr writes:

‘Africa has always been the object of discourse by others. Now is the time to dream this utopia in Africa itself, to design Africa ourselves, to think, and to act for ourselves.’

Which immediately prompts two objections. 1) Dreaming isn’t going to get you anywhere, buddy. Practical policies might. See Paul Collier’s list of practical steps in his hard-headed book ‘The Bottom Billion’.

But more relevantly to this exhibition, 2) there’s almost nothing about the future, instead there is a sustained, deep immersion in the legacy of colonialism. Loads of the 36 photographers’ work is directly about colonialism, the colonial legacy, colonial control, colonial archives, ‘the colonial gaze’, colonial images, colonial photography, colonial identity cards, colonial posters, colonial postcards. The word ‘colonial’ occurs 26 times on the wall labels. Even if the artist isn’t themselves addressing it, you can bet the curators will drag in a reference to slavery or colonialism or both in their wall labels.

In other words, the overall effect of the exhibition is immensely backward-looking. It’s like a traumatised adult condemned to act out the abuse of their childhood again and again, with no hope of escape. Maps of colonial Africa, footage of colonial Africa, old box files from colonial Africa, old derelict buildings from colonial Africa, trying to escape from the Christian religion imposed by colonial Africa. Backwards backwards, everything relates backwards to a lost era of 60 years ago.

Here’s a timeline of the year and date African nations gained independence, just to make clear how long ago this all was.

24 December 1951: Libya
1 January 1956: Sudan
2 March 1956: Morocco
20 March 1956: Tunisia
6 March 1957: Ghana
2 October 1958: Guinea

1 January 1960: Cameroon
27 April 1960: Togo
26 June 1960: Madagascar
30 June 1960: DR Congo
1 July 1960: Somalia
1 August 1960: Benin
3 August 1960: Niger
5 August 1960: Burkina Faso
7 August 1960: Côte d’Ivoire
11 August 1960: Chad
13 August 1960: Central African Republic
15 August 1960: Congo
17 August 1960: Gabon
20 August 1960: Senegal
22 September 1960: Mali
1 October 1960: Nigeria
28 November 1960: Mauritania

27 April 1961: Sierra Leone
31 May 1961: South Africa

1 July 1962: Rwanda
1 July 1962: Burundi
3 July 1962: Algeria
9 October 1962: Uganda

12 December 1963: Kenya

24 April 1964: Tanzani (Tanganyika 9 December 1961 – Zanzibar 10 December 1963)
6 July 1964: Malawi
24 October 1964: Zambia

18 February 1965: Gambia

30 September 1966: Botswana
4 October 1966: Lesotho

We’re talking about the era of Sputnik. The era when the Berlin Wall was going up. Before the Beatles’ first LP. That is the era, of the 1940s and 50s, which so many of these artists, at least in their Tate interpretation, are harking back to, again and again and again.

This obviously indicates a glaring great gap, two gaps if you like, which are: 1) what happened in Africa during the 60 years since independence and 2) what is happening in Africa today?

Sixty years of mismanagement, civil war, famine and genocide

One wall label sports a quote from Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, the first British African colony to become independent in 1957.

‘We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control.’

Nkrumah overflowed with utopian quotes about how socialism would bring peace and plenty to Africa, he was full of them (see the references to Nkrumah in my review of ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence‘ by Martin Meredith).

What the Tate wall label does not mention is that Nkrumah went on to become a steadily more repressive figure, passing emergency laws, outlawing the opposition, creating a cult of personality, having himself referred to as the ‘the Man of Destiny’, ‘the Star of Africa’, ‘His High Dedication of Redeemer’ and so on. He was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, receiving a Lenin Prize, tried to abolish tribalism and wasted money on vast white elephant building schemes. He made himself very unpopular with the rulers of neighbouring African countries when it was discovered that he was supporting various communist and guerrilla movements to overthrow their capitalist governments. In 1966 Nkrumah was himself overthrown in a coup by the army which set about de-Sovietising the economy and reversing most of his calamitous economic policies. At independence Ghana had a GDP on a par with South Korea, but decades of political instability, military coups and economic mismanagement brought the country to the brink of ruin. Ghana is now 83rd in the world rankings of GDP compared to South Korea at 13.

NONE of this is in the Tate exhibition, none of it, no politics, no economics, no contemporary history at all. Africa’s desperate history of secessions, civil wars, genocides, famines, economic mismanagement, rule by brutal Marxist murderers, by kleptocrats and homicidal dictators, NONE of that is here, none. It is all erased, made invisible, ignored, brushed under the carpet.

Instead what the wall labels repeat again and again and again are the only two tunes they know, the evils of colonialism (ended in the 1960s) and of the slave trade (ended 200 years ago). Simplistic binaries.

Why artists and curators simplify history and politics to make them more acceptable

In my review of Paul Danahar’s irritating book about the aftermath of the Arab Spring, I sketched out four reasons why even high-end (BBC, Channel 4) coverage of foreign affairs tends to be simplified and sanitised. These are:

1. Logistically easy It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely, so countries with good infrastructure, like Israel or America, tend to be over-represented.

2. Familiar narratives Editors prefer sticking to super-familiar, easy narratives, my examples being the Arab-Israeli conflict and the (now defunct) struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Absolutely everyone was familiar with the outline of those stories which had taken on the simplicity of fairy tales. Pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about, all your emotions pre-packaged and ready to take away.

To give an example, bad stuff is happening in various parts of China (Xinjiang, Tibet) but my points 1 and 2 apply in that: 1) it’s difficult to get access to those places, and 2) the issues are complicated. But, for the sake of argument, say that a protest march in Hong Kong is broken up by riot police and – because it’s easy to access and easy to cover – it’s all over the front pages for days. Easy access. Easy issues. Somewhere we know about. Easy to relate to.

3. Britain-related Some places matter more to Brits than others because they used to be colonies or places where Brits lived and feel a residual attachment to, thus India, Hong Kong, Egypt, Kenya – or which we feel some kind of special responsibility for (the Middle East, all those lines on the map, the Balfour Declaration yadda yadda yadda). The result is that these countries are over-represented in British foreign news at the expense of everywhere else.

4. Student causes Lastly, there’s what you could call student politics. Some of these places are associated with big, simple-minded political causes. All good progressive people marched against apartheid in the 1980s. All good progressive people are outraged by Israel’s bombing of Gaza today. All good progressive people agree that China is not keeping to its bargain of letting Hong Kong remain a democracy. Etc.

In the same kind of way all good progressive people are shocked and disgusted by anything to do with the European empires. And all good progressive people are shocked etc by the slave trade.

These are hot button topics, guaranteed to win over the audience, please the crowd, which can’t fail to unite artists, curators and visitors in a cosy feeling of moral righteousness, moral superiority, grievance from the artists and grovelling apology by white gallery goers.

Slavery and the evils of empire are the new consensus topics – everyone agrees that they were utterly evil and that they explain everything about modern Africa.

All the artists chosen for this exhibition stick to the narrow line adopted by the curators that African history ceased some time in the 1960s, at the moment of independence, that nothing whatsoever has happened since then, that all Africans are still trying to cope with the trauma of imperialism or the trauma of the slave trade – and that absolutely nothing significant has happened since.

No military coups, civil wars, mad rulers, stupid socialist economics, thieving stealing looting leaders like Mobutu, psychopaths like Idi Amin, mass murderers like the Hutu regime in Rwanda, cannibals like the Emperor Bokassa, ruinous rebel leaders in Angola or Mozambique, warlord chaos in the Congo.

No African history beyond the 1960s is present in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the simple-minded, pantomime-level narrative which many of the artists address and the curators almost obsessively promote – white slave traders / colonialists = evil, all black people = saintly victims.

I’m not saying the slave trade wasn’t bad or that colonialism wasn’t wretched, humiliating and shamelessly exploitative. Of course they were. And forms of neo-colonialism are obviously still alive and constraining African nations in all kinds of ways today. But that’s just the starting position: that’s the obvious stuff you need to process before moving on to a more sophisticated understanding of the situation.

You’re not going to begin to understand the plight of modern African countries unless you move on from the 1960s and engage with the 60 years of history since then. And then, once you’ve processed the 60 years since independence, it requires a further effort to engage with the host of military, economic and security issues which plague Africa today, in 2023.

Africa today

And what about the political and economic and social issues which face Africa today? Are these addressed in this exhibition? Is there any mention of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across North Africa, of the havoc being wrought by al Qaeda, or Boko Haram, or al Shabaab? No. Nothing.

Is there any mention of China’s involvement in Africa over the last 20 years, buying up raw materials and rare metals and food in exchange for infrastructure projects? Mention of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives all across Africa? Nothing.

Any mention of Russia’s growing involvement in North Africa, specifically through the Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group? Nothing.

Mention of the US’s surprisingly extensive investment in army, navy and air force bases across the region in efforts to combat Islamic terrorists? Nothing.

Lots of complicated geopolitical, military, strategic and economic manoeuvring is going on all across Africa, right now, as we speak, and none of it is discussed, described or even mentioned in this immensely backward-looking exhibition.

Conclusion

So I really liked lots of the art on display, a lot of these photos are stunning and breath-taking, world class, outstanding, and it is such a relief to get away from America and the usual suspects of the art world. Congratulations to Tate for staging this exhibition so beautifully and bringing so many great photographers to our attention.

But as politics this show is a washout, a whitewash, a travesty, a systematic erasure of African history for the last 60 years in favour of a fairy-tale story about colonialism. It not only takes absolutely no account of Africa’s 60 years of troubled tragic post-colonial history but presents a complete blank when it comes to the complex, difficult, multi-sided political issues faced by Africa today. An artistic triumph  but when it comes to any serious discussion of the political, economic and social challenges of contemporary Africa, this exhibition is a travesty, seriously misleading in its omissions, elisions and simplifications of a long inconveniently complex history.

Related links

Tate Modern reviews

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by Simon on November 6, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 6, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/06/a-world-in-common-contemporary-african-photography-tate-modern/

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger (2015)

Asymmetrical warfare is defined by asymmetry. Any terrorist ideology that can attract five recruits and the contents of their bank accounts can make headlines for months. A terrorist group with twenty recruits and half a million dollars can make headlines for years.
(ISIS: State of Terror, page 191)

ISIS is the crack cocaine of violent extremism, all of the elements that make it so alluring and addictive purified into crystal form. (p.235)

This book comes highly recommended as ‘a timely account’ and ‘the most important account’ of ISIS, but suffers from the same shortcoming as half the other books I’ve been reading about the Iraq-Afghanistan-al Qaeda turmoil, which is that it’s way out of date. My fault, obviously, not theirs.

It contains an admirably detailed chronology but it only goes up to November 2014. At many points, the authors say things like, ‘At the time of writing it looks like ISIS will…’, ‘It looks like ISIS might…’ expand and hold more territory, or maybe buckle after sustained attack by the US and its allies…they don’t know.

This is irritating because, in a sense, the most interesting thing about ISIS was the international campaign to extirpate it which only got underway in 2014/15 as this book was being finalised and published. Well, more fool me for buying a book which is nearly ten years old, although I can’t find anything more recent on Amazon.

ISIS

As usual, it’s easiest to go to Wikipedia for the basic facts:

The Islamic State (IS; as of 2014), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; in 2013) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a transnational militant Islamist terrorist group and former unrecognized quasi-state that follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. It was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and gained global prominence in 2014, when it drove Iraqi security forces out of key cities during the Anbar campaign, which was followed by its capture of Mosul in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the Sinjar massacre. The organization significantly influenced the course of the Syrian civil war when it announced its expansion into Syria in mid-2013 and began conducting ground attacks against both Syrian government forces and Syrian opposition militias. By the end of 2015, it held an area that contained an estimated eight to twelve million people and stretched from western Iraq to eastern Syria, where it enforced its interpretation of Islamic law. ISIL was estimated at the time to have an annual budget of more than US$1 billion (much derived from control of oil revenue from captured refineries) and more than 30,000 fighters.

The authors start by giving a straightforward chronological account of the rise of Islamic State out of its predecessor organisation, al Qaeda in Iraq (up to the time of writing, in late 2014). Then they go back and retread the same path or narrative but focusing on particular themes, such as the role of foreign fighters and of women; chapters on ISIS’s use of promotional videos and social media; on the complicated struggle to win over followers of al Qaeda and other jihadist groups, not only in the Arab heartland but further afield in the Maghreb and North Africa. They have a chapter on the long-term psychological aims of ISIS, which they consider is to produce a society of dehumanised psychopaths, which partly explains their conscious policy of training child soldiers, forcing them to witness beheadings and whip or shoot prisoners. There is a very interesting chapter about how ISIS’s belief that it is operating in the end time before an apocalyptic Final Battle underpins all aspects of its worldview. And the book concludes with some suggestions about how we in ‘the West’ should manage and contain ISIS.

Names

The group grew out of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). When it formally asserted its independence in 2013 it was under an Arabic name which can be translated as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS was the version picked up by most western media outlets, maybe because it has a certain zip and cachet as a word.

In June 2014 the group proclaimed itself to be a worldwide caliphate, a restoration of transnational Islamic rule, and began referring to itself as the Islamic State (IS) and this is the position and the name it retains to the present day. However, the authors, after some discussion, decided to use the earlier name, ISIS for two reasons: a) it is familiar from lots of press coverage b) it is challenging, and silly, in English, to continually write sentences which include ‘IS is…’ ISIS is an easier acronym to manage: ‘ISIS is, ISIS was’ etc.

ISIS leaders

1. ISIS was ‘founded’ by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 1999 and led by him until his death in an American air strike in 2006. In fact this history is deeply contested, as the group Zarqawi founds was called Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad and, in 2004, after he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, he was appointed chief of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In other words, he was killed before an organisation specifically named ISIS came into being. It is analysts and commentators who claim that the doctrines he practiced in AQI and its extremist policies of a) attacking other Muslims b) in particular attacking Shia Muslims and shrines c) attacking Western operations previously all considered off-limits e.g the United Nations and aid charities – these policies were disapproved of by bin Laden and others in al Qaeda Central but proved attractive and mobilising for the cadres of extremist Sunni jihadists who went on to form ISIS.

2. Zarqawi’s role was taken by Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the militant groups Mujahideen Shura Council and its successor, the Islamic State of Iraq, until he, too, was killed in an American missile strike in 2010.

3. He was succeeded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is recorded as the second Emir or prince of the Islamic State of Iraq from 2010 to 2013. In 2014 ISIS declared the existence of an actual state, the Caliphate, which governed a large part of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and Baghdadi was declared first caliph of this Islamic State, which he ruled until he blew himself up during an American raid in October 2019.

4. A week later IS’s media outlets announced that the new caliph was Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. For a while there was debate about whether this person actually existed or was a fictional front man hurriedly invented by IS leadership. Having lost almost all the territory they held at their maximum reach, in 2016, ISIS were reduced to traditional insurgent attacks, but made significant advances through partner groups in Africa; new branches were opened in Congo and Mozambique. On 3 February 2022, al-Qurashi killed himself and members of his family by triggering a large bomb during a raid by the US Joint Special Operations Command.

In May 2022 ISIL’s West Africa Province said that it had killed 20 Nigerian Christian men in Borno State in a mass execution as a retaliation for al-Qurashi’s assassination. And so it goes on forever, the ideology of massacre, murder and vengeance.

5. Replaced by the third caliph of Islamic State, Abu al-Hasan al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, as confirmed by Al-Furqan Media foundation, Islamic State’s primary media outlet, 10 March 2022. As usual there was a lot of mystery about his true name and identity. In November 2022 it was confirmed that he killed himself by detonating a suicide vest during an operation carried out by former Free Syrian Army rebels.

6. He was replaced in November 2022 by the fourth caliph, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurashi. There are now some 40 IS provinces i.e. regional operations, throughout the Middle East and far into Africa. On 30 April 2023 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the Turkish National Intelligence Organization had tracked down and killed Abu al-Hussein the previous day, on 29 April, but this has not been confirmed by the US, who we tend to trust more, nor confirmed by ISIS itself. Schrödinger’s caliph…

The differences between al Qaeda and ISIS

According to the authors the fundamental difference with al Qaeda was that the latter was an elite intellectual movement (pages 55, 192), whereas ISIS set out to be a popular mass movement. Al Qaeda was a sect or cult; they made joining it very difficult, starting with being difficult to track it down or contact it, then you had to go through tests or proofs of fitness. ISIS’s approach was diametrically opposite: it set out to create a utopian new society and advertised for as many members and volunteers as possible (p.73). ISIS made promotional videos and posted messages on twitter and Instagram. Muslim equivalents of the old Lord Kitchener poster, ‘Your country needs you’. The ISIS message was:

You have a place here, if you want it, and we’ll put you to work on this exciting project just as soon as you show up (p.73)

ISIS’s brand, its offering, was a unique combination of extreme violence – horror violence – with promises of a new life and a new world. al Qaeda had a lofty spiritual goal of eventually reaching a new Islamic world at some point far over the horizon. In this respect, its entire worldview was fundamentally defeatist (p.195). ISIS, in its blunt and practical way, declared the brave new world was here and now (pages 118, 195).

Al Qaeda worked on the premise, familiar to us from the revolutionary Marxist terrorists of the 1970s (the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Red Brigades in Italy) that the masses are slumbering in a sleep of ignorance (p.55). If only you can wake them from their conformist slumber with acts of sufficient outrage and transgression, they would suddenly wake from their slumber, realise that the terrorists were right and that they need to throw off the shallow western consumer capitalist culture which exploits them, overcome their oppressors and institute a new communist/Islamic utopia.

Same here. al Qaeda thought the right kind of terrorist outrage would trigger a mass awakening of the Muslim masses who would suddenly realise that Osama bin Laden was right, the infidel needed to be kicked out of Muslim lands and a new, purified Islamic rule established. But ISIS thought they had achieved that, in the huge swathe of territory they captured 2014 to 2016.

Stern and Berger have a fascinating chapter describing the development of ISIS’s management of traditional and social media. Again, they contrast the very different subject matter and tone between al Qaeda and ISIS productions. al Qaeda’s rhetoric was all about Muslim powerlessness and victimhood. bin Laden lamented how Muslim lands were crushed and downtrodden, in the grip of corrupt leaders in hock to Western powers, the infidel. It was a discourse stemming from the apparently complete grip Western-backed leaders held over the Muslim world, and al Qaeda’s embattled, isolated resistance to that grip (p.108).

By complete contrast, ISIS came to prominence on the waves of chaos and social collapse triggered by the Arab Spring. Suddenly all these immoveable old regimes were collapsing like dominoes. Anything seemed possible. So ISIS’s rhetoric, messaging, videos and social media all reflect exuberant confidence that the world is changing and this is their moment (p.114). The overarching theme of ISIS propaganda was: ‘We are strong and we are winning’ (p.112).

The multiple appeals of ISIS

There are multiple appeals to this way of thinking. One of the most practical is the reality that the transformative event the organisation promises is never actually going to happen and so membership of then organisation is, in a sense, a job for life. The naive utopian dream of transforming the world is the gift that keeps on giving; since the transformed world will never arrive, you’ll just have to keep organising, fund raising and carrying out atrocities. Forever.

This leads to the second appeal, which is that such crusades obviously provide its members with a number of psychological rewards and comforts. Your life acquires a messianic meaning. You acquire a family, the brothers you never had and a wise and all-seeing father figure. You are among like-minded people whose clarity and conviction answers all your anxieties about life (p.82).

And you are working towards a Better World. If, in order to get to this Just, Fair and Peaceful World, you have to kidnap, rape, torture, murder and behead some people, well a) the boss told you to b) the extremity of the acts reinforces the high stakes you’re playing for: the future of the world is in your hands. Also c) such extreme acts bond you with the people you carried them out with; once you’ve beheaded someone with your own hands there’s no going back. And d) such acts show the world that you’re serious, this is the real thing, you’re not backing down until you have built The New World.

All this goes to explain why a disproportionate number of ISIS fighters are foreign i.e. don’t come from its heartlands in Iraq and then Syria. It’s been known for thousands of years that a convert to a religion or cause is usually more zealous and committed than someone born and bred into it. Same here. According to researcher Thomas Hegghammer a) the atrocities recorded on videos which are then distributed i.e. ritual beheadings, are disproportionately carried out by foreign fighters. The text mentions ‘Jihadi John’, real name Mohammed Emwazi, born in Kuwait but raised in London. He became such a notorious figure that he has his own, surprisingly long Wikipedia entry, and was hunted by both the US and UK governments until assassinated in a drone strike.

Plus another, simpler explanation – toxic masculinity:

The ultraviolence served multiple purposes. In addition to intimidating its enemies on the ground… ultraviolence sold well with the target demographic of foreign fighters – angry, maladjusted young men whose blood stirred at images of grisly beheadings and the crucifixion of so-called apostates. (p.72)

Some young men just like fighting. Some yearn for the thrill of killing and risking being killed. Others want the trappings of being a ‘warrior’, not least the sex slaves ISIS took wherever it captured, particularly among Iraq’s Yazidi minority (p.194). Some are criminals looking for opportunities for loot. Some are just psychopaths.

So Stern and Berger’s account fits ISIS neatly not only into the matrix of Islamic terror groups, but also among the wider context of terrorist groups around the world over the last 50 years or so. They define terrorism as having two aspects:

1. Terrorism is deliberately aimed at civilians or non-combatants; this puts it outside all definitions of ‘just war’ in most religious traditions, starting with the Islamic tradition itself.

2. Terrorism is designed to be dramatic in order to achieve propaganda ends; in the case of Islamic terrorism in order to:

a) create fear and dread in the wider target population (‘the hostages should be liquidated in the most terrifying manner which will send fear into the hearts of the enemy’, p.122)

b) wake passive Muslim communities in their host nations from their slumber; to ignite ‘the deadly tinderbox fizzing just beneath the surface of every western country’ (p.97)

Internecine Muslim killing

Mainstream Islam seeks to live in peace with non-believers. Radical or jihadist sects take a more binary approach, believing all infidels or unbelievers can be freely tortured and murdered, for exemplary and propaganda purposes.

But the authors also tell us that recent Islamic theorists have developed the handy notion of takfir which is the pronouncement that a Muslim is no longer a Muslim but an unbeliever i.e. any Muslims who don’t agree with your beliefs aren’t, in fact, real Muslims, and so can also be killed.

This conceptualisation feels like a rationalisation, or extension of, something which already existed in the sweaty world of Islamic jihadi / insurgency / radical politics, which is the notable tendency of Islamic radicals to kill each other. ISIS’s beheadings of Western hostages received a lot of publicity because they were intended to; they were well-produced videos of the killings, very effectively distributed them across social media and the internet, and Western media picked them up and rebroadcast them, exactly as ISIS intended.

Less well known was the time, effort and expense Islamic radicals have devoted to murdering each other. It’s one of the main revelations of this book. In the field, different Islamic fighters attack each other and fight battles. Individual Islamic leaders are targeted and assassinated and sometimes entire meetings of senior leaders. In this respect, many Islamic radical groups do the West’s work for them, which is nice.

Seen from another angle, the internecine bloodshed of these squabbling jihadist groups is just another version of the sectarian violence which erupted all across Iraq after the American invasion, above all of the profound and poisonous enmity between Shia and Sunni Muslims which emerged from the shadow of Saddam to wreck Iraq. And these are both examples of the tendency of Muslim, certainly Arab Muslim countries, to contain seething sectarian animosities just waiting to boil over into civil war: before our modern tribulations came the prolonged civil war in Lebanon and the murderous civil war in Algeria. Now we have social collapse and civil war in Libya, the terrible conflict in Syria, and the under-reported war in Yemen. How these Muslims hate each other.

Al Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni movements. ISIS follows the Salafi jihadist branch of Sunni Islam. This appears to mean that, in order to create their Islamic paradise, they have to intimidate, terrorise and kill as many Shi’a Muslims as possible, as well as carrying out attacks on their mosques and holy places, witness the 2006 ISIS attacks on the Al-Askari Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Shi’a Islam, in Samarra, 80 miles from Baghdad (p.25). This succeeded in triggering reprisal attacks by Sunnis and helping to precipitate the Iraqi civil war (p.25). ISIS propaganda films included accounts of Shi’a death squads killing Sunni Muslims, turncoats from ISIS tell stories of being brainwashed with endless stories of Shi’a evil-doing…which, of course, then justified massacring as many Shi’as as possible. (p.107)

In its publications and in countless videos ISIS extolled the virtues of killing the rafidah (a derogatory term for Shi’a Muslims) and nusayri (a derogatory term for Alawites, members of a sect of Shi’a Islam practiced by members of the Syrian regime). (p.116)

Paradise can, it appears, only be attained by wiping out most of humanity – the whole of ‘the West’, obviously; all other countries or cultures which practice any religion apart from Islam, natch; all Shi’a Muslims, of course, (p.230), all other minority Muslim groups (Alawites, Sufis), plus any Sunni Muslims who disagree with anything ISIS say and can now be rendered unmuslim by the simple process of takfir.

ISIS aims to cleanse the world of all that disagree with its ideology. (p.233)

It is, then, standard genocidal millenarianism. Set out to kill almost the entire world population in order to make the world ‘pure’. And when, as a result of your indiscriminate use of barbaric violence, you’ve alienated the entire world against you – not to worry, the very fact that everyone rallies against you fact is one more proof that you and your brothers alone possess The Truth and are part of a small elite of Truth-knowers and Holy Warriors which the entire world wants to smother.

And so it is that these people become trapped in the paranoid, self-confirming death spiral of the millenarian cult.

The end of the world

Most educated people know that our word Armageddon derives from its use in the Bible’s Book of Revelations and is supposed to be the site of the Last Battle before the End of the World. The word is a Latinisation of the Hebrew‎ Har Məgīddō where Har means mountain and Megiddo means place of crowds.

But I hadn’t heard about Dabiq. Dabiq is a small town in northern Syria near the border with Turkey. It features heavily in traditional Islamic end-times prophecy which predicts that it is here that Muslim forces will defeat ‘Rome’, which modern interpreters take to be ‘the West’, before going on to conquer Constantinople (p.220). Like the Book of Revelation, conceived and written millennia ago, when the configuration of forces and powers was drastically different, but twisted by modern interpreters to suit their current policies.

Anyway, so central was the place and concept and resonance of Dabiq to ISIS that when they established a multi-language magazine to promote their cause, they called it Dabiq (p.119). The authors not only mention this but quote from various editions of Dabiq. And the magazine was first published just a month or so after ISIS captured the actual town of Dabiq (p.224).

This leads into an entire chapter explaining the various Islamic prophecies about the end of the world. Some of these include the institution of slavery, especially sexual slavery, as well as intensified war between the Muslim sects. Seen in this light ISIS’s deliberate inflammation of Sunni-Shia sectarianism in Iraq has an eschatological purpose i.e. it is consciously designed to bring about the End Times.

All of which is set against the over-heated and hysterical atmosphere created by 9/11 and then the American invasion of Iraq. Both the al Qaeda and ISIS leadership have paid close attention to end time prophecies and, of course, their propagandists proudly claim to be striking the first blows in the Final Battle which will lead up to the arrival of the Mahdi and the End of Days.

Except that none of this will happen. The jihadists will just carry on beheading Western hostages, carrying out random atrocities in Africa and, above all, killing lots of Muslims in the name of their common God.

The authors make one important point. Because these warriors are living in the End Times and fighting the Final Battle between cosmic forces of Good and Evil normal moral rules do not apply. Millenarian groups are the most likely to carry out acts of barbarity because they have passed beyond the realms of normal human morality (p.225).

This chapter, Chapter 10: The Coming Final Battle, is arguably the most enjoyable of the book. It presents a useful summary of modern thinking about apocalyptic and millenarian movements, listing their attributes, quoting experts on the subject on the appeal of their psychology, and then assessing how many of these attributes apply to either al Qaeda or ISIS.

For example, it offers fascinating interpretations of the beheading videos which brought ISIS notoriety in the West. There are at least three motives or meanings:

  1. The beheadings are designed to create fear and terror in western countries out of all proportion to ISIS’s actual capacities.
  2. The beheadings are meant to goad western powers i.e. America, into another invasion, this time of Syria, which will a) spread even more chaos across the region, thus allowing ISIS to flourish b) comply with millenarian prophecies that the ‘crusaders’ will return to Muslim lands once again and be finally, definitively defeated.
  3. Then there’s just the simple explanation that the people carrying out the beheadings really are psychopaths and sadists.

But towards the end of the book, they offer a fourth interpretation: this is that the beheadings enact the great psychological simplification that the beheaders have undergone: they now live in an End Time world of extreme black and white, us and them, good and evil. So the videos are designed to trigger an equally simplistic response in their viewers, making viewers so angry that they themselves resort to the same psychologically basic binary of good and evil.

In other words, they were designed to erase the sophistication and complexity of modern western thought, to trigger the same simple-minded binary good guys-bad guys dichotomy that characterised Bush and Blair’s response to 9/11.

But, the authors warn, we shouldn’t let ourselves be brought down to their level, not just of barbarism, but of simple-mindedness. The world is a complex place, societies are complex thing, people are complex animals and multi-levelled complex problems like Iraq or Syria require immensely subtle, complex and thought-through solutions.

Using good guy-bad guy rhetoric like Bush and Blair did is a failure of the sophistication and intellect we pride ourselves on, but this isn’t just a rhetorical analysis. It led us into simplistic thinking (invade – overthrow dictator – install democracy – leave grateful nation) which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the immense complexity of the situation on the ground. ISIS want us to do that again. We mustn’t.

ISIS and social media

Immensely knowledgeable though the book is, it has, in my opinion, a central weakness. The longest chapter in the book (Chapter 7: The Electronic Brigades) is a detailed analysis of al Qaeda and ISIS’s use of social media, particularly Facebook but especially Twitter. I found this very tedious – ISIS use social media much like everyone else, to publish videos and share propaganda material, no real surprise – but the chapter is clearly so long because one of the authors, J.M. Berger is, apparently, a real expert in this area and, they tell us, was commissioned by Google Ideas to carry out research into ISIS supporters and Twitter (p.171).

So this explains why this chapter is so long and contains so many detailed stats about ISIS social media users and followers. But the thirty pages of this account boil down to a repetitive and boring iteration of the basic problem facing the owners of Twitter which is how far the principle of free speech should let Twitter users publish highly inflammatory and homicidal content. The chapter includes lots of really boring facts about al Qaeda and ISIS’s twitter accounts and social media stars and how many accounts were suspended or cancelled and the various strategies jihadis resorted to to try and hang onto accounts etc etc. It feels exactly like an academic report prepared for a big corporation which has been tweaked and re-versioned to become the chapter of a book.

Then, at the very end of the main body of the book, is a chapter which offers the authors’ thoughts about the way forward for the West in tackling ISIS and this also is mainly concerned with a detailed look at how to counter ISIS’s messaging on social media, repeating many of the ideas already laid out at boring length in chapter 7. They list five goals ISIS have in their social media strategy and how we in the West can counter all five.

Anyway, my point is that, all this focus on the minutiae of ISIS’s twitter accounts comes at the expense of a military analysis of ISIS. There is nothing anywhere in the book about how ISIS came to be such a successful military operation. ISIS didn’t manage to overrun a large part of Syria and Iraq, eventually controlling a third of Iraq’s territory and seizing the hugely important city of Mosul, just by being good at social media.

This book is very interesting on what you could call the cultural aspects of ISIS, about jihadi psychology, the psychology of terrorism and millenarian cults, good at giving extended comparisons of its radical worldview with that of its progenitor al Qaeda, and much more.

But it is a complete blank when it comes to explaining how this ragtag outfit of extremists and sadists was transformed into such a very effective fighting machine. There is nothing about its military campaigns, no analysis of its military strategy or tactics, no account of any battle or fighting at all.

And, having been published in 2015, no account at all of the military campaign undertaken by the US and other Western allies to extirpate it. For the entire military side of the story you’ll have to look elsewhere.

American comedy

The United States had invested $25 billion in training and equipping the Iraqi army over the course of eight years. That investment evaporated in the blink of an eye as Iraqi soldiers turned tail and fled in the face of ISIS’s assault on Mosul. (p.45)

Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, fell soon after Mosul. At many stops along its march, ISIS captured US-supplied military equipment from fleeing Iraqi soldiers, which they trumpeted with photos on social media. (p.46)

Money well spent, then.

American chaos

The American invasion of Iraq created chaos, insurgency, ethnic division and civil war throughout Iraq, which then spilled into neighbouring Syria when it experienced its failed Arab Spring rebellion in 2011.

This catastrophic environment, the collapse of these two societies into chaotic violence, also explains the difference between al Qaeda and ISIS because it made the apocalyptic, millenarian, end-time beliefs espoused by the latter seem much more plausible.

Wikipedia quotes from William McCants’ book, ‘The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State’:

‘References to the End Times fill Islamic State propaganda. It’s a big selling point with foreign fighters, who want to travel to the lands where the final battles of the apocalypse will take place. The civil wars raging in those countries today [Iraq and Syria] lend credibility to the prophecies. The Islamic State has stoked the apocalyptic fire…For Bin Laden’s generation, the apocalypse wasn’t a great recruiting pitch. Governments in the Middle East two decades ago were more stable, and sectarianism was more subdued. It was better to recruit by calling to arms against corruption and tyranny than against the Antichrist. Today, though, the apocalyptic recruiting pitch makes more sense than before.’

So… America is directly responsible for creating the super-chaos which raged across Iraq and amid which new types of extreme jihadi terrorism were able to develop and flourish. Also from Wikipedia:

According to Iraqis, Syrians, and analysts who study the group, almost all of ISIL’s leaders – including the members of its military and security committees and the majority of its emirs and princes – are former Iraqi military and intelligence officers, specifically former members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government who lost their jobs and pensions in the de-Ba’athification process after that regime was overthrown.

The former Chief Strategist in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism of the US State Department, David Kilcullen, has said that: ‘There undeniably would be no Isis if we had not invaded Iraq.’ (Wikipedia)

Or as Stern and Berger put it:

The rise of ISIS is to some extent the unintended consequence of Western intervention in Iraq. Coalition forces removed a brutal dictator from power but they also broke the Iraqi state. The West lacked the patience, the will and the wisdom to build a new, inclusive one. (p.238)

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, with fine moral ideals and high-sounding rhetoric about ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ (see the speeches of George Bush and Tony Blair), all pitiful bullshit. Stern and Berger sum up the message of all the books I’ve read about Iraq and Afghanistan in one pithy sentence:

The only thing worse than a brutal dictatorship is no state at all (p.237)

Or Islamic State.

Credit

ISIS: The State of Terror by Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger was published by William Collins in 2015. References are to the 2016 paperback edition, with an additional afterword.

Related links

New world disorder reviews

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by Simon on November 1, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in History, Islamic terrorism, Middle East
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Posted by Simon on November 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/01/isis-the-state-of-terror-jessica-stern-jm-berger/

Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (2004)

The dehumanising picture of the West painted by its enemies is what we have called Occidentalism. It is our intention in this book to examine this cluster of prejudices and trace their historical roots.
(Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, page 6)

Some features of Occidentalism

Many groups have queued up to hate ‘the West’ over the past 200 years, for many reasons, claiming that:

  • the West is a purveyor of ‘poisonous materialism’
  • Westernism is a disease of the spirit
  • the Western mind splits human knowledge into soulless specialisms
  • Westernism promotes alienated individualism over communal belonging
  • Western science destroys religious belief and faith
  • Western media are decadent and pornographic
  • Western culture is shallow and materialist so destroys spiritual values
  • Western society is capitalist, greedy, exploitative
  • Westernism is a ‘machine civilisation’ (compared to hand-made rural arts and crafts)
  • resentment / hatred of Western imperialism
  • of Western colonialism
  • of Western (particularly American) global power and selfish foreign policy
  • Western civilisation is associated with huge, degraded, corrupt cities (compared with organic rural life)
  • the West represents ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and multiculturalism (compared with homogeneous native traditions)

These are the accusations and stereotypes which the authors set out to analyse and investigate, going much further afield than the contemporary Middle East, and much further back in time than the past few troubled decades, to do so.

The authors

Ian Buruma (born 1951, aged 72) is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the US. Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan.

Avishai Margalit (born 1939, aged 83) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011 he was George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Both were contributors to The New York Review of Books during the 1990s and in fact this book grew out of an article published in that magazine in 2002, less than 12 months after the 9/11 attacks on New York shook the world of international affairs.

The background: Edward Said’s Orientalism

Buruma and Margalit don’t mention Edward Said in the text but they explicitly state that their concept of ‘Occidentalism’ is conceived as a mirror image of the notion of Orientalism which Said was instrumental in defining and popularising.

The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. Some Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings; they ha the minds of children and could thus be treated as ‘lesser breeds’. Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down. [It reduces] an entire society or civilisation to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grabbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites… (p.11)

Prior to Said’s book, Orientalism had been the value-neutral name given to a perfectly respectable academic discipline, the study of the languages, peoples and societies of ‘the East’ (loosely defined as lands from the Middle East to Japan) until Said published his landmark study, Orientalism in 1978.

Orientalism was a long, thorough, polemical attack on the entire discipline, claiming that from its earliest beginnings it 1) drew up a clear unbridgeable distinction between ‘The East’ and ‘The West’, 2) invented stereotypes of ‘the Oriental’, ‘the Arab’, ‘the Muslim’ and 3) attributed to them and their world a shopping list of negative qualities, the stereotypical ‘Oriental’ being lazy, irrational, dominated by a simple-minded religion, corrupt, sensual, and so on.

Orientalism was intended to be a comprehensive demolition of an entire academic field which Said proved by showing that the same mental structures underpinned, and the same demeaning stereotypes and clichés appeared in, almost all Orientalist writing, from the late eighteenth century right up to the present day.

This would all have been fairly academic, in the narrow sense – academics squabbling over the epistemological foundations of a particular academic field – but for the real bite of the book which is its highly political approach.

This has two elements. Firstly Said claims that the entire field of research into the languages, culture, religions, society and so on of ‘the Orient’ enabled and justified imperial control of the region. Knowledge is power, and the ever-more comprehensive and intrusive studies done of the countless peoples, religions and cultures of this vast area enabled Western imperial control over them. Orientalist academic studies served colonial power.

The Palestinian issue

This by itself would have been a fairly controversial conclusion, but there’s a second, really inflammatory element to Said’s critique. This is his attempt to show the discredited assumptions and degrading attitudes of Orientalism played, and continue to play, an important role in determining attitudes across western culture and politics to the Problem of Palestine.

This, as every educated person knows, is one of the most contentious issues in international affairs. In 1917 the British Home Secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared that Britain would support the Jews of Europe in their wish to create a homeland in the Biblical Lands of Palestine. Between the wars increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants fled Europe and settled in Palestine, buying land from its Arab owners. Tensions between incomers and natives erupted into regular bouts of violence which the British authorities, given a ‘mandate’ to run the area after the First World War, struggled to contain. After the Second World War, an exhausted, impoverished Britain tried to hold the ring between increasingly violent Jewish and Arab nationalist political parties and militias, until, in 1948, they effectively gave up and withdrew.

The well-organised and well-armed Jewish settlers promptly declared the existence of the independent state of Israel and the neighbouring Arab countries promptly attacked it, seeking to strangle it at birth. The Israeli army successfully defended its country and amid, much bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, or were expelled, into neighbouring countries, especially Jordan.

In 1967 a joint force of Arab countries led by Egypt was mobilising for another attack when Israel launched a lightning pre-emptive strike, crushing the Egyptian army and forcing the Arabs to sign an armistice after just six days. As a result Israel seized the Jordanian-annexed West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip.

As many as 325,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Syrians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, respectively, creating a humanitarian crisis.

In 1973 the Arabs launched a surprise attack on October 6, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Once again Israel faced numerically overwhelming forces but fought them off in what was effectively the Third Arab-Israeli War. In the aftermath of the war the Israelis realised that they couldn’t rely on fighting off Arab armies indefinitely, and so they began to put out feelers for some kind of peace treaty, which was to lead to the 1978 Camp David Accords under which Israel return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

Orientalist attitudes to the Palestinian problem

The point of this long digression is that Said was a Palestinian. Both his parents were of Palestinian heritage, he was born in Palestine and raised in Egypt, attending English-language schools in Jerusalem and then Alexandria. Said’s father had served with US Army during the Great War and so earned US citizenship so, when he was expelled from his Egyptian private school for being a troublemaker he was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts, USA. Thus began his career as an academic in America (in New York).

But as he progressed through the academic hierarchy, as well as his purely academic publications about comparative literature, Said became known for his ‘outspoken’ opinions about the Palestinian issue, namely speaking up for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, calling for the government of Israel to moderate its policies in the occupied territories and so on.

This, as you might have expected in polarised politicised America, drew down on his head the wrath of numerous journalists, commentators, Jewish groups and so on, many of which didn’t refrain from employing exactly the kinds of denigratory stereotypes he had listed in Orientalism against Said himself and the Palestinians he spoke up for.

In the Introduction to Orientalism Said explains that the motivation to write the book was partly driven by his own personal experience of Orientalist tropes. In New York academia he found himself extremely isolated as almost the only Palestinian and Arab working in an academic and publishing environment dominated by white liberals or Jews sympathetic to Israel and its policies.

So his own personal experience of having anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim slurs directed at himself, his writings and his opinions was a big motivation behind the years of research and labour of love which Orientalism amounts to.

This explains why the huge book, with its mountains of evidence, all work one way, criticising ‘the West’, Western attitudes, Western academia, Western imperialism, Western racism and so on.

In the Introduction Said explicitly says that he is not interested in exploring ‘the Arab Mind’ or ‘the Islamic World’ and so on. That would have doubled or quadrupled the length of the book, plus which he wasn’t professionally qualified to take on such huge subjects. His interest is solely in a deep investigation of how Western attitudes against ‘the Orient’ were created and proliferated throughout Orientalist studies, fiction and so on.

9/11

A lot happened in the real world between Orientalism‘s publication in 1978 and the publication of Occidentalism in 2002, but in the world of academia, magazines and publishing Said’s critique of Western attitudes had become very widespread among bien-pensant liberals. In the academy and liberal journals Said’s view that ‘the West’ continually sees the Middle East, the Arab world and Islam through simplistic, racist ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes, had become very widely accepted.

The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and (possibly) the White House (the fourth plane that came down in Washington) galvanised and transformed the culture, shocking and terrifying people around the Western world. It led numerous commentators and analysts to claim that we had entered a new era of war between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ etc, an inflammatory rhetoric which translated into actual war when, within a month of the 9/11 attacks, in October 2001, US forces invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime there.

Occidentalism

This is where Buruma and Margalit come in. They readily concede that 9/11, like the First Gulf War before it, led to an explosion throughout the media of just the kind of Orientalist racist stereotypes which Said had dedicated his life to uncovering and critiquing. But they point out that there was a gap in the whole discussion. If ‘the West’ could be accused of deploying Orientalist stereotypes against ‘the East’, ‘the Arab world’ etc, what about the stereotypes of the West which could be found in the media and political and terrorist discourse of the East? Didn’t Arab and Palestinian and Muslim leaders regularly rail against ‘the West’, didn’t an endless stream of news footage show enraged mobs burning the American flag and shouting ‘Down with America’, and wasn’t this anti-western rhetoric routinely associated with a predictable shopping list of negative stereotypes? Short answer, yes.

So what are these anti-Western tropes and where did they come from?

The West and ‘the Modern’

Right at the start Buruma and Margalit made a fundamental conceptual decision which underpins everything that follows: this is to identify anti-Western discourse with anti-Modernism. They argue that when nationalist commentators and activists in the rest of the world attack ‘the West’, they almost always conflate ‘the West’ with every aspect of the modern world which they dislike, despise or fear, everything from industrialisation, secularism, capitalism, rationalism through to cultural products such as pop music and pornography.

What many of the anti-Western nationalist movements of the past 100 or 150 years, whether in India or China or Japan, in the Middle East or across Africa, have in common is that they want to turn the clock back. They dream of an era which preceded the arrival of the West with its monstrous attributes of godless science, nation states, brutal capitalism, cultural hegemony and so on, they dream of an era when their countries were untainted by western influence, untainted by godless capitalism, when everyone lived in small rural communities and shared the same simple faith and devoutness.

At the roots of much anti-Western feeling is a deeper resentment at all these aspects of the modern world and a passionate desire to turn the clock back to simpler, more spiritual times. This leads them to a counter-intuitive conclusion:

Anti-westernism is a western product

The first people to loathe and hate modernism i.e the rise of a secular, godless, liberal, pluralistic society based on industrial capitalism, with the uprooting or rural populations and their herding into monster cities which became sinks of immorality and degeneracy etc, were westerners themselves.

It is one of our contentions that Occidentalism, like capitalism, Marxism, and many other modern isms, was born in Europe before it was transferred to other parts of the world. (p.6, emphasis added)

The main opponents to the birth and spread of industrial capitalist society were inhabitants of that society itself. Marx is the obvious epitome of this trend, but there had been plenty of opponents to the rise of godless rationalism and capitalist industrialisation for generations before him, and loads of theoreticians who tried to cling onto older ideas of pre-industrial societies bound together by a common religion

To put it simply, Western society has, for well over 200 years, contained a large number of intellectuals who fear, hate and loath their own western society, and who have developed an extensive set of concepts and vocabulary to express that hatred in.

Communist anti-westernism

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 appeared, at a stroke, to validate the enormous, world-reaching rhetoric of Marxist analysis, to prove the inevitable collapse of capitalism and of communist revolution, and the Soviet regime spent the next 70 years energetically spreading its anti-western ideas and rhetoric around the world.

Fascist anti-westernism

But the Bolsheviks triggered an equal and opposite reaction in the extreme nationalist movements which developed into totalitarian fascism in Italy, then Germany and the other European governments who fell prey to authoritarian or fascist regimes between the wars.

And the fascist, anti-modern rhetoric developed by these regimes and their numerous intellectual defenders and propagandists, continued long after the Second World War, helping to justify and underpin semi-fascist military regimes in, for example, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the generals, or right-wing regimes in South America such as Pinochet’s Chile (1973 to 1990) or the military government in Argentina (1976 to 1993).

So this is the most fundamental thing about the book – Buruma and Margalit’s decision to expand its frame of reference faaaar beyond a consideration of anti-western rhetoric in the Middle East, in the Arab world or as expressed by Islamic terrorists like Osama bin Laden, and to turn it into an investigation of anti-Western thought in its widest possible definition.

Scope

In their introduction, on page 11, Buruma and Margalit briefly consider taking a chronological approach to the subject, tracing the origins of anti-western feeling all the way back to the Counter-Reformation, through the Counter-Enlightenment, before exploring the roots of the various types of socialist, communist and fascist opposition to the modern world.

Mercifully, maybe, instead of the kind of exhaustive multi-volume study this would have turned into, they decide to take a thematic approach. They will look at certain key images or symbols of the decadent, greedy, rootless etc West, and sketch out their origins in (mostly) Western discourse. This helps explain why the book is a light and frolicsome 149 pages long, although some of the explication is so dense and compressed that it sometimes feels like longer…

Contents

Accordingly, the text is divided into six chapters. The headings are neat and logical but I found the text they contain often very digressive, in the sense that it hops between quite disparate topics, times and places and then, just as unpredictably, returns to what they were originally discussing. On the upside this means the text is often as interesting for the sidelights or incidental observations it throws out as for the central points.

1. War Against The West

Introduction, as summarised above.

2. The Occidental City

Contrary to received opinion, people who hold strong Occidentalist views tend to be educated, or at least educated enough to be familiar enough with the values of the West to hate them. Taking the view that ‘Western values’ are undermining this or that set of traditional native values requires you to have a pretty good theoretical understanding both of what your native values are, what Western values are, and how the latter is ‘poisoning’ the former.

Far from being a dogma favoured by downtrodden peasants, Occidentalism more often reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals, who feel displaced in the world of mass commerce. (p.30, emphasis added)

Re. the 9/11 attacks on hi-tech buildings, Osama bin Laden trained as a civil engineer. the ringleader of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, studied architecture at Cairo University and went on to do a Masters in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology. He hated modern architecture. He thought the concrete high-rise buildings built in Cairo and across the region in the 1960s and 1970s ruined the beauty of old neighbourhoods and robbed their people of privacy and dignity.

The tower of Babel

Tall buildings have been a focus of anxieties and symbols of ill omen from at least as long ago as the Bible. The Old Testament or Jewish Bible has barely got going before, in chapter 11, we are told about Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel with a view to making a name for themselves. God and, it appears, his angels, feared what they might do next, so afflicted the workers on it with different languages so they couldn’t understand each other, and then dispersed them across the face of the earth.

I visited New York in the 1980s and went to the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre which had an observation deck on the 107th floor and an outdoor viewing platform. It was 1,377 feet above street level. You could feel the building moving under your feet since it was designed to have a certain amount of ‘give’. I have acute vertigo and was terrified.

Cities as sinks of iniquity

Throughout recorded history, cities in every culture have been associated with corruption, greed, exploitation of the poor by the rich, decadence and immorality.

It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city. (p.27)

Western sources

Regarding the authors’ focus on western texts, they live down to my expectations. In just the first part of this chapter they quote the Bible, Juvenal, the Goncourt brothers, William Blake (Dark Satanic mills), T.S. Eliot (The Rock), Richard Wagner (despised the frivolity of Paris), Voltaire (admired the liberty of eighteenth century London), Theodor Fontane (disliked London’s materialism), Friedrich Engels (horrified by the poverty of Manchester) and not a single Arab or Muslim voice.

It feels like a fairly obvious sixth form selection of obvious cultural figures (Blake, Eliot, Wagner). I’d so much have preferred an explanation of Islamic traditions about ‘the city’.

Antisemitism

They then move onto antisemitism, long associated with cities, cosmopolitan i.e. non-native culture, money-lending and capitalism etc, citing (again) Eliot, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Marx. The Nazis incorporated late-nineteenth century tropes of seeking to escape the city for a healthier life in the country into their fascist propaganda about racial purity, despising a checklist of big capitalism, cosmopolitan crowds, decadence (nightclubs and jazz), corruption of good Aryan women into prostitution and, of course, managed to blame all of this on ‘the Jews’.

A lot of these concerns and the language they were expressed in were picked up by other nativist nationalists, in Japan (about which Buruma knows a lot and which developed its own form of fascism during the 1930s) and in the Arab Middle East, developing its anti-colonial, anti-western rhetoric (many nationalist Arab leaders allied with Nazi Germany on the twin bases that a) my enemy (Britain)’s enemy is my friend and b) shared antisemitism).

Sayyid Qutb

They make a brief mention of Sayyid Qutb (1906 to 1966), widely considered the father of modern Islamic fundamentalism, to address not his writings, but his miserable alienation when he moved to New York to study in the 1940s and was repelled by absolutely everything about American life, its soulless materialism, its obsession with capitalist consumerism, its degraded immorality. Maybe they felt obligated to wedge him in somewhere, but Qutb’s importance to the development of Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism isn’t developed at all. A paragraph on him before swooping back to Europe and…

The French Revolution

Surprisingly, maybe, they then move to the French Revolution. The French Revolution crystallised Enlightenment trends against medieval monarchs and aristocrats, the rule of the Church, traditions of all sorts, which needed to be torn up and thrown away, replaced by the cult of Reason, modern laws for modern enlightened citizens.

Antisemitism was implicit in Christianity from the beginning, with the Jews being blamed for insisting on the crucifixion of Jesus by the earliest Church Fathers. Buruma and Margalit attribute the birth of modern antisemitism to the French Revolution. Traditional upholders of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church were easily persuaded that the whole thing was a Jewish conspiracy, and so was born a whole modern antisemitic way of thinking about the world, which was to flourish and become steadily more toxic in the heart of Europe as the nineteenth century progressed.

The German Volk

Soon after the revolution, France invaded Germany, or the German states. Ideological opposition to the teachings of the French Revolution became mixed up with patriotic fervour. This all happened to the first generation of German Romantics. France came to represent the modern, godless, cosmopolitan city, riddled with over-clever philosophers and money-grubbing Jews, which was trying to conquer and obliterate the values of the Volkisch, spiritual German town, the German landscape of sturdy peasants, wise artisans and soulful poets. The authors cite the German folklorist Gottfried von Herder (1744 to 1803) as an example of this view.

Japan and China struggle to adopt Western culture

But western ideas of democracy, industrialism, capitalism and so forth were undeniably effective. They provided the underpinnings for the astonishing spread of Western imperialism. The question for rulers in countries from Morocco to Japan was which ideas from the West it would be profitable to accept, and which they needed to reject in order to maintain their culture and traditions, protect their nations from ‘spiritual pollution’ i.e. Western liberal ideas. Tricky.

Japan and China in different ways tried to adopt Western techniques without changing the core of their culture. Japan was much more successful, maybe because its centralised administration was stronger: it imported Western industrialisation while managing to keep a strong sense of national culture. By contrast the Chinese political system had become corrupt and inefficient so it failed to import Western industrialisation but instead found itself infected with all kinds of Western ideas about republics and democracy and the individual etc, ideas which led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1911.

The appeal of Marxism to anti-colonial nationalists

For the central 70 years of the twentieth century many developing countries thought that Marxism offered a way forward. It was modern, industrial, scientific but rejected the soulless materialism, corruption and imperialist mindset of the Western capitalist societies. hence its attraction for many developing countries, especially in the decades after independence in the 1940s and 50s.

Unfortunately it was the dream which failed. The failure of the secular socialist nationalism promoted by the likes of President Nasser of Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria led to a wave of disillusion across the Arab world and opened the cultural space for Islamists who promoted a radical solution, a return to a world before any kind of modernity existed, back to the pure, unsullied, pious and unified world of the early Caliphate.

Mao and the war against the city

The authors devote 4 or 5 pages to Chairman Mao, ruler of China from 1949 to 1976. They see Mao as the biggest exponent in all world history of the war of the country against the city. The corrupt westernised city was epitomised for Chinese communists like Mao by Shanghai, administered by westerners and packed with a cosmopolitanism, capitalism and corruption. Mao thought such places needed to be purged in the name of a peasant communism.

Mao’s promotion of peasant values promised an escape route from Western capitalism, from urban alienation, decadence and corruption, and a return to integrated rural communities, where life and work would have proper, deep human meaning and purpose.

And so during the 1950s he unleashed the Great Leap Forward which involved rounding up and shooting hundreds of thousands of members of the urban bourgeoisie, those who survived being sent to huge rural labour camps. It was, he boomed, in countless speeches, a good thing ‘to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China’ (p.42).

The Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979

This is the mindset which went on to guide the horrific Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, 1975 to 1979. Most of Pol Pot’s soldiers were illiterate peasants, often only boys. When they took the capital, Phnom Penh, they were staggered by the wealth, the size, the swarming multinational population, the coffee shops and fleshpots. All these were ruthlessly emptied and its inhabitants either shot on the spot, or dragged off to be tortured, or marched off to labour camps in the countryside. Only by exterminating the urban bourgeoisie could the country be restored to purity and truth and correct living. It was a kind of logical end point of centuries of anti-city rhetoric.

The Taliban 1996

Same with the Taliban, illiterate peasants in flipflops armed with weapons seized from the fleeing Soviets or donated by America. After a ruinous civil war they took the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, in 1996. First they butchered the leader of the pro-Soviet regime, Mohammad Najibullah, then they banned everything to do with modern life, which they associated with the hated West, in a bid to return society to the ‘purity’ of the earliest days of the Muslim Caliphate.

All music was banned, along with television, soccer, and most forms of socialising. Women had to cover themselves from head to foot and were not allowed out without a chaperone. Kabul was ruled by a six-man shura not one of them from Kabul, not one of them had ever lived in a city.

The Khmer Rouge and the Taliban represented the triumph of ‘authentic’ rural values over the corrupt, decadent modern city.

Germania

The authors then take a characteristic leap in subject, concluding with a page describing a different way of triumphing over the chaotic modern western city: this was to demolish it and build a totalitarian alternative.

Hitler hated Berlin and planned to rebuild it as a totalitarian capital, its alleys and slums replaced by broad boulevards designed for marching armies, its swarming cosmopolitan crowds replaced by the unified adoring Aryan crowd. All the messy attributes of the decadent West – civil liberties, free market economies, democracy, individualism – would be replaced by one Folk, one Reich, one Führer and one Capital City.

The Hitler regime was overthrown before building got very far but other countries have made the experiment. The authors cite Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, as what Germania might have looked like, a neoclassical testament to untrammeled, totalitarian power.

Lastly, they reference the steel and glass cities of coastal China which have mushroomed in the last twenty years, which represent a kind of defiant triumph over the less impressive, shop-soiled cities of the West. We can do it bigger, better and shinier than you, say high rises such as the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, the Shanghai Tower in Shanghai, the Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower in Mecca, the Ping An International Finance Centre in Seoul and so on.

These are not so much anti-Western, as supra-western, denying old ideas of Western supremacy by outdoing it.

3. Heroes and Merchants

Werner Sombart

This focuses on the roots of Germany’s sustained sense of being different from ‘the West’, which German intellectuals defined as soulless mercantile Britain and godless revolutionary France.

The authors zero in on a book written in 1915 by a German sociologist named Werner Sombart and titled Händler und Helden or Merchants and Heroes. In the book Sombart contrasted the commercial civilisation of Britain and the liberty, equality, fraternity culture of France with the heroic culture of Germany. The Western bourgeois is satisfied with ‘comfort’ (in German Komfortismus) and the soporific sports of the British. By contrast the German welcomes death as the ultimate sacrifice he can make for the Volk.

Similar ideas were shared by the historian Oswald Spengler and the warrior-author Ernst Jünger. Happy happy Germany to have such ideologues of the glory of war. The fundamental trahison des clercs (‘treason of the intellectuals’) is to promote exciting ideas about glory and sacrifice which lead hundreds of thousands of young men to their death. ‘The young must shed their blood,’ write Thomas Abbt (p.58). Other young men, obviously. You need to stay safe in your study in order to produce such intellectual masterworks.

The authors make a direct link between the widespread contempt for bourgeois Komfortismus described by numerous right-wing German intellectuals, and the attitude of the jihadi fighter interviewed early in the 2001 Afghan who said that the Islamists would triumph because ‘You [the West] love life, but we love death’.

Personally, taking a materialist Darwinian evolutionary view of Homo sapiens, it seems unlikely that impatience to make live heroic lives and die in a noble cause, particularly among zealous young men ‘ardent for some desperate glory’, will ever die out. It has been so ubiquitous throughout all human history, in all cultures, that it appears to be hard-wired into the species. I’ve recently read a suite of books about the problems of African society and prominent among them is what to do about disaffected, unemployed youths, hanging round, looking for a cause to redeem their alienated lives…

Military death cults in Japan

The authors go on to trace how German hyper-nationalism and Occidentalism went on to become surprisingly influential in intellectual circles in the Middle East and Japan. The same valuing of a heroic ideal of nationhood which led Hitler to sacrifice an entire generation of German youth, was the one that made the Japanese fight to the death, island by island and send waves of kamikaze pilots in 1944.

Buruma has a counter-intuitive interpretation of Japanese suicide warriors. The phenomenon was considered at the time as being somehow specifically Japanese, but Buruma says the surviving farewell letters of many of the kamikaze pilots (and drivers of the less well-known suicide torpedoes) indicate that most were highly educated students studying the humanities at leading universities, and that a surprising number of them were well read in German literature and philosophy. They dressed up their feelings in tropes about the Samurai and cherry blossom but their fundamental ideas about the diseased decadence of the West and the need for heroic sacrifice are actually Western ideas.

Buruma gives a potted summary of the way Japanese politicians and intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century cobbled together a patchwork copy of Western intellectual, economic, political, military and religious life, not least in the cobbling together of a state religion, Shinto, which they thought would echo the Christianity which seemed to be such a central part of European life. Ditto the transition of the emperor from a remote and powerless figure in Kyoto, who was moved to Tokyo to become a combination of kaiser, generalissimo, Shinto pope, and highest living deity. People talk (dismissively) about the British inventing many of their ‘traditions’ in the nineteenth century (Christmas trees, the kilt) but the Japanese did the same with knobs on.

Regarding the development of a cult of heroic sacrifice Buruma says an important source was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882 which the armed forces learned by heart and included a passage commanding the ultimate sacrifice for the emperor.

A practical consequence of this Occidentalism were that, when Western forces surrendered, as at Singapore in 1942, the Japanese viewed surrendering forces as dishonourable cowards who preferred to save their skins rather than fight on to the death i.e. the exact opposite of Japanese martial values.

As a result the Japanese regarded the surrendering British forces as less than human and treated them accordingly, working them to death in brutal labour camps. My best friend at school’s dad was in the army in Burma at the end of the war. He saw the state of soldiers repatriated from the Japanese camps. As a result he refused to have anything Japanese in the house.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The authors then move on to India for a quick description of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which means the ‘National Volunteer Organisation’. Founded in 1925 this was a far-right, Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation which aimed to instil ‘Hindu discipline’ in order to unite the Hindu community and establish a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). Like the Nazis they aimed to create a new society based on racial purity, military discipline and sacrifice.

Osama bin Laden

Then, in this whistlestop tour, we are on to your friend and mine, the demon figure of the first decade of the 21st century, Osama bin Laden. The authors give quotes from an interview bin Laden gave after the 1996 al-Khobar Tower attack in Saudi Arabia. They say the language bin Laded uses of self-sacrifice, of suicide attacks, is emphatically not part of the Islamic mainstream tradition. In mainstream Islam dying in battle against the infidel is what creates justified martyrs; blowing yourself up along with unarmed civilians is something quite different, feared and despised by many Muslims as much as by Westerners.

They slightly contradict themselves by then describing the death cult of the Assassins, created in the 13th century for reasons which are still debated, and the pattern they set for being prepared to die for Islam in taking out an infidel opponent.

Anyway, whatever the precise roots there’s no denying that throughout the nineteenth century Muslim leaders called for jihad against western colonists and their godless capitalism, against their Jewish agents, and against native leaders who had been corrupted by their infidel ways.

Assassination

When I read this I immediately thought of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad for signing a peace treaty with Israel and instigating a crackdown on Islamic extremists, and so was painted as ‘a traitor to Islam’.

Sadat’s fate raises a general principle of Occidentalism which is that often opponents of the West aren’t actually opposed to the distant West, which they had never visited and of which they knew relatively little, so much as against the westernisers in their own society, political or social leaders who they blame for importing Western secular values. So they kill them.

Historically, the main embodiment of Muslim resistance to westernisation was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 with the following manifesto:

‘God is our objective; the Qu’uran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.’

Then, in another leap, the authors tell us that Japanese kamikaze tactics were adopted by the Hezbollah in the Lebanon with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings which killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel.

Buruma and Margalit wrote this book before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, an occupation which triggered an epidemic of suicide bombings by Sunni and Shias against the occupying forces.

Weimar

They conclude with a simple but crucial message. The Weimar Republic didn’t die because it was liquidated by Nazis, big business and the Army. It died because too few people were prepared to defend it. See the books on the subject by Peter Gay and Walter Laqueur. Passionate young men from the Right and the Left conspired to attack and undermine it at every opportunity. Nobody stood up for the boring, unromantic business of liberal democratic political life.

4. Mind of the West

Russian anti-westernism

Occidentalists accuse the West of being effective, technologically adroit, economically triumphant, and yet lacking the soul, depth, spirit and godliness which the critics, of course, pride themselves on having. I particularly despise the long tradition in Russian culture of belittling the frivolity and superficiality of France or Britain compared to the Great Russian Soul and its vast capacity for Noble Suffering. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Occidentalists.

Dostoyevsky despised the West because it sought happiness and comfort whereas it should have been seeking salvation. And the route to salvation is via suffering. Only suffering brings wisdom. The West is afraid of suffering. The West can never be wise. Only a people devoted to suffering can be genuinely holy. The Russian soul welcomes and endures great suffering. Thus it is superior to everyone else’s.

Dostoyevsky and the propagandists for Russian suffering prepared the way (or just accurately reported the mindset) of the great Soviet barbarism of the twentieth century, the horrific civil war, the mass famines of Stalin, the huge gulags, total repression of civil society, the incredible death toll of the Great Patriotic War caused by Stalin’s ineptitude (and having massacred all his leading army officers) and Russian military readiness to sacrifice soldiers by the hecatomb in ways the Western Allies couldn’t believe. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts.

The line continues all the way through to Vladimir Putin. Putin sits in the main line of Russian cultural thought in despising, like Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, the decadence of Western liberalism, whose rapid end he has confidently predicted in numerous speeches.

Meanwhile, while he wastes his nation’s resources on a stupid nationalist war, the population of Mother Russia is going into decline as people flee Putin’s dictatorship or just die of ill health due to its wretched health problems.

Russia has the world’s 11th-largest economy but ranks 96th in life expectancy. Life expectancy for Russian men is 67, lower than in North Korea, Syria or Bangladesh. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts, eh.

The authors spend a long section describing ‘the love affair of Russians with their own soul’ and the achievement of nativist thinkers, loosely termed ‘Slavophiles’.

Anti-westernism’s German roots

In fact, counter-intuitively, Buruma and Margalit attribute Slavophilia, like so much anti-westernism, to German roots, specifically German Romanticism. Humiliated by Napoleon’s victories over them, conscious of their political backwardness (fragmented into scores of little princedom and dukedoms) German intellectuals, in a massive case of sour grapes, said worldly success didn’t matter, what mattered was what was in your soul. They compensated for their economic, social, political backwardness by asserting the supremacy of their spiritual life.

A spectrum

It occurs to me that there was a spectrum in the moving west to east across Europe in the nineteenth century. At the western extreme was Britain, economic powerhouse of the world but almost bereft of genuine art, philosophy or religion (sure it had the oppressive Church of England but this had little or no spiritualist tradition). Then came France, nearly as economically diverse as Britain, a good deal more artistic and philosophical. Then Germany, economically and politically backward but packed with ‘deep’ philosophers and its great musical tradition. Poland, which is never taken account of by anybody in these kinds of surveys. And finally Russia, the most economically and socially backward of European nations and, accordingly, possessed of a self-congratulatory sense of its immense spiritual superiority over everyone else.

In the authors’ view, to be blunt, it’s all the Germans’ fault. Extremely resentful of the military, economic and artistic success of Napoleon’s France, German Romantics compensated for national humiliation by working out the theory of the superior spiritual value of Das Volk and the nobility of dying for it.

Isaiah Berlin on German Romanticism

No less an authority than Isaiah Berlin thought this was the case and, moreover, thought the model the Germans worked out became a template which could be exported to all peoples who feel mocked and humiliated. The template was copied by the Russians during the nineteenth century and, as we’ve seen, adopted by Arab and Indian nationalists between the wars.

Buruma and Margalit summarise Berlin’s model. The German Romantic movement was the Counter-Enlightenment. It valued intuition and spirit over reason and calculation. It preferred heroes to shopkeepers. It looked back to a lost era of national and religious unity and looked forward to its glorious restoration.

On this view Nazism, Japanese fascism and Islamic fundamentalism are all the heirs to the original German Romantic anti-Westernism.

Russian Orthodox Christianity

The authors tell me things about Russian Christianity I didn’t know. They describe the messianic conviction that Moscow is a second Rome and only home to true Christianity. They explain that Russian Orthodox Christianity is far less interested in theology than Greek or Roman Christianity and far more concerned with custom and practice. Icons are more important than intellectual debate.

Intellectualism is suspect. And any kind of change is not needed. The thousand year old tradition of the Russian church suffices. Innovation tends to come from outside, representing threat and betrayal.

The authors give a potted history of Russia, with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great realising they had to import Western technology and ideas. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian intellectuals split into westernising and slavophile parties. They give potted biographies of individual westernisers. And they explain that for these men, the West meant Germany and its succession of Romantic philosophers.

As with Orientalism, all these Russian thinkers worked out their theories and defined themselves against the Other, the Other being a highly simplistic, stereotyped view of The West, a West which was materialistic, godless, mechanical, superficial, divided, corrupt and decadent, which lacked the soulfulness and the unity of people and purpose which characterised Mother Russia.

The triumph of will over reason

One major aspect of Occidentalism is the valorising of will over reason. Timid reason calculates the best course of action, tots up the pros and cons, a shopkeeper mentality. All this contrasts with the will which acts instinctively, in large glorious romantic causes. Following the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hitler and the Nazis famously praised the Triumph of the Will over pettifogging rationalism. And so did nineteenth century Russians.

Konstantin Leontiev

The Russian Nietzsche was Konstantin Leontiev (1831 to 1891). He wrote a big book, Russia and Europe, which made a big splash. He was one of hundreds of late-nineteenth century philosophers and commentators who worked up an ‘organic’ theory of history i.e. that societies are like organisms which have a birth, a youth, a maturity and then a decay.

Surprise, surprise, Leontiev thought that the West with its decadent liberal democracy was in the last stages of decay. Exactly what Vladimir Putin thinks today, 150 years later. Continuities like this demonstrate that this is not a rational belief based on evidence, it is a prejudice, an unchanging tenet of anti-western bigotry, of Occidentalism.

The authors end the chapter with a brief history of the word nihilism which came to prominence, in Russia, in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The chapter ends with more evidence of Dostoyevsky’s fanatical hatred of the West and fear that it’s godless, scientistic values were undermining the noble soul of Mother Russia.

5. The Wrath of God [Muslim fundamentalism]

 Buruma and Margalit draw a distinction between religious Occidentalism and secular Occidentalism. 

They say that Islamism is the form Occidentalism is taking in our time. What is new or unique is Islamism’s view that the West is guilty of barbarous idolatry and proceed to explain what this means, starting with a definition of idolatry.

They give a pocket history of the concept of idolatry which stems from the Jewish Bible. Here God is depicted as a jealous husband who is hurt when his Chosen People whore after strange gods. But obviously it has a deeper charge than that. God is also king of the universe, master of creation, source of existence. Denying God is the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable. In the Old Testament numerous kings and rulers are depicted as behaving as if they were as powerful as, or more powerful than, their creator, and demanding the veneration which is due to God.

So idolatry is giving to men the devotions and worship which are due to god. They discuss the meaning of Arab terms such as tajhil, jahiliyya and jahili. jahiliyyahas been used to describe the religious ignorance which prevailed in Arabia before the advent of the Prophet Mohammed but also, more metaphorically, as the notion of barbarism, in the same way the ancient Greeks used it to refer to everyone who wasn’t Greek. At school I was told it was a joke term for people whose unGreek languages made them sound like they were saying ba-ba-ba-ba.

To summarise, the use of the term jahiliyya in Islamist discourse can be interpreted as referring to a new barbarism (godless idolatry) which originates from the West and is infecting the Muslim world.

The authors have a digression into the history of Manicheism, first as an actual belief system propounded by the Iranian prophet Mani (216 to 277 AD) then as the strand in most religions which posits an absolute divide between God and Evil. Then they show how ‘evil’ in most religious traditions is associated with the body, with its weakness, tendency to degrade and die, its distracting appetites, worst of which is, as we all know, sex. The body is contrasted with the soul which is taken to be immortal and the part of a human body which can approach or commune with god.

Ali Shari’ati

They discuss Ali Shari’ati (1933 to 1977), an Iranian Shia Muslim revolutionary and opponent of the westernising regime of the Shah. Shari’ati thought the best way for developing countries to fight back against the infection of godless western materialism was by rallying around their religious beliefs and traditions, in his case, Islam. He explicitly linked the influence of the West as encouraging Muslims to idolatry i.e. diverting worship away from God and towards the godless things of man i.e. money, consumer goods.

The industrial revolution made the West rich but it led to what sociologist Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It lost its magic and spirits. It lost God. And so all its goods and products are tainted by this tendency to disenchant and divert men’s worship from God to things. Idolatry.

Sayyid Qutb

The authors tell us about Islamic radical thinkers who fought back against the forces of secularism, for example Muhamed Taleqani in Iran, before returning to Sayyid Qutb, first mentioned in chapter 2.

For Qutb the whole world, from decadent Cairo to New York, was in a state of jahiliyya. He saw the West as a gigantic brothel, steeped in animal lust, greed and selfishness. Human thought, in the West, was ‘given the status of God.’ Material greed, immoral behaviour, inequality and political oppression would end only once the world was ruled by God and by His laws alone. The opportunity to die in a holy war would allow men to overcome selfish ambitions and corrupt oppressors (p.117)

One of the appeals of Islam is its egalitarianism: all men really are equal in the eyes of God in a way they rarely have been in the Christian West, and the Islamic dream is of a society where all men worship God, all laws derive from God, all behaviour is godly, and so it is literally impossible for large disparities in wealth or for corrupt immoral rulers ever to arise.

Qutb is given more space this time around, with a thumbnail biography describing the two years he spent in America to improve his English and which turned him into a West-hating Occidentalist. He also became a ferocious antisemite, literally believing in the famous forgery, The Elders of Zion and the ‘worldwide Jewish conspiracy’ and associating the global nature of finance capital with ‘Jewish bankers’ and so on. Schoolboy antisemitism.

To look at it another way, Qutb thought he was developing an approach which saved the noble and godly in human nature. The West wasn’t just godless, it actively worshipped the things of the body, the West is a cult of physical appetites, valuing food, drink, sex, holidays, fast cars, thus degrading human nature, instead of uplifting it through things of the soul by focusing solely on God. jahiliyya is the culture of animals or, worse, of humans who have thrown away their human attributes in a mad rush to become animals.

So, if Westerners have deliberately denied their humanity and turned themselves into animals, then they can be treated like animals, as worse than sub-humans. It’s this development of a train of thought which led him to consider all Westerners as sub-human which makes Qutb, as Buruma and Margalit out it, ‘the high priest of Occidentalism’ (p.121).

More, the world is in a state of war, between those who seek the righteousness of Islam and the rest. Even Islamic countries have been tainted to some extent by Western or secular innovations, and so jihad must be fought to overthrow idolatrous leaders. This is, obviously enough, an incitement to permanent warfare. You can see why it would appeal to zealous young men disgusted by the West, such as Mohamed Atta and so it explains the never-ending supply of young men prepared to take up arms to defend and assert radical Islam. But it just as easily explains why those societies, Islamic societies, will never be at peace with themselves. Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq. Permanent war.

Abu-l-A’la Maudadi

Then we are introduced to Abu-l-A’la Maudadi (1903 to 1979) Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist and activist, who is described (on his Wikipedia page) by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as ‘the most systematic thinker of modern Islam’.

The thing about all these Islamic thinkers is it’s hard to remember them because they all appear to have had the same pretty simple idea: Islam needed to reject the corruption of the West, purged of Western corruption, in order to become pure. Then everyone will live happy godly lives.

In practice Maudadi opposed Indian nationalism because it was Hindu, and democracy because it would impose majority Hindu values on Muslims. He said in a speech that anyone who voted would be a traitor to the Prophet and to God. He wanted to revive the early Caliphate (what Islamic fundamentalist doesn’t?).

Maudadid founded the Jamaat I-Islami Party which went on to be influential in the politics of the new country formed at the Partition of India, of Pakistan.

Tawhid and Muhammed Iqbal

Tawhid is the doctrine of the Unity of God. One of its proponents was Muhammed Iqbal (1877 to 1938) writer, philosopher and politician, considered by many to be ‘the spiritual father of Pakistan’. In his view human society should practice unity, harmony and justice in order to reflect the Unity of God. Against this settled social background each individual should be able to develop their individuality or khudi.

So, Buruma and Margalit ask, what was it that made Qutb an Occidentalist and Iqbal not? Partly it was personal psychology; Qutb was overwhelmed and disgusted by everything he experienced in America, whereas Iqbal enjoyed his British education and took a degree at Cambridge.

But basically Iqbal was tolerant. He thought there were many ways to God; the best way is Islam but there might be others for men of good faith. Qutb, by contrast took a fiercely Manichean view: there was the world of Islam and then everything else, which was full of sub-human barbarians. Qutb wrote:

Any society that is not Muslim is jahiliyya

And true believers need to take up jihad to enforce the rule of God in their nations. Permanent war.

Protestantism and liberalism

The authors then shift their ground to explain that the Reformation i.e. rebellion against the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, began the long process whereby religion and the personal sphere were separated out, in the Protestant countries of the West. The separation of church and state. The right to freedom of conscience, of belief, of religion.

And this is anathema to Islamists who insist there is not, there cannot be, a divide between religion and private belief or morality. Everyone must believe and worship the same, follow the same morality. This is why some critics of political Islam liken it to fascism. More accurately it might be likened to totalitarianism. Mussolini said: ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ Swap ‘Islam’ for state. Note the Morality Police in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Women in Islam

Buruma and Margalit finally get around to the hugely contentious subject of women in Islam. They claim that many Muslims yearn for a return to traditional and community values. Islamic fundamentalism draws its support from a nostalgia for a return to proper Muslim values, which are associated with tradition beliefs and customs.

One of the central areas is the role and behaviour of women because in a patriarchal culture like Islam, the behaviour of women directly reflects on the honour of their menfolk, in a way most of us in the West just don’t understand.

Countless visitors to Muslim countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries observed the strict segregation of the sexes, the way women were completely invisible in many rural communities, or else were covered from head to foot in towns.

They zero in on the issue of the veil. The veil for women appears to have existed way before Islam there are depictions of it in pictures from the first century. Maybe Muslims copied it from the Byzantine Empire. It came to signify that the owner did not do manual labour i.e. became a status symbol.

During the independence struggle in Algeria many women took the veil as a proud assertion of their Islamic heritage and defiance of the French colonialists. But 50 years later, in the era of the Taliban, women are to be covered in what are effect shapeless sacks, completely denying their physicality, the assumption being that the merest glimpse of female flesh will cause an outbreak of ungodly fleshly thinking among surrounding men. In this respect ‘the veil’ is a symbol of a Manichean tension between the Spirit and the Body.

Wisely the authors don’t propose to delve deeper into the symbolism, meaning and all the debates raging around ‘the veil’, as fully explicating the history and then trying to find quotes in the Koran or the hadith to back up all the different opinions would keep us here till Doomsday.

Their book is not about Islamic beliefs and customs, it has the narrower focus of being about Muslim opinions about the West, in this case, Eastern views about Western women.

Islamic fundamentalists (and, the authors emphasise, Orthodox Jews) regard women’s dress and behaviour in the West as little better than prostitutes’. Here we’re back to Sayid Qutb’s opinion that Western immorality isn’t just bad, but degrades human beings to a level lower than animals. Animals don’t know any better, but humans do, and to reject what they know (of God’s demands for respect and morality) means they forfeit their humanity.

Also, in a patriarchal society, a woman is the ‘protected jewel’ in the crown of a man’s honour. Which means that how a man protects and defends his woman is a large part of his honour or identity. And here’s the point: Western men who relate to Western women as if they were just other citizens without any of the respect due to them in a Muslim country, show that they lack even the most basic sense of honour.

Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia

Three packed little pages which describe the alliance in the eighteenth century of fiercely puritanical preacher Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and warlord Muhammad Ibn Saud. The warlord adopted the puritanical beliefs of the preacher and together they conquered the Holy Places. Then a lot of history as first the Ottomans and then the British took control of the Saudi peninsula, but by shrewd manoeuvring the family of the Sauds took control of the new kingdom and imposed an extremely fierce version of Islam on their population.

Then came the discovery of oil and these phenomenally strict Puritans found themselves among the richest people in the world. The result, say Buruma and Margalit, is an uneasy form of ‘officially sanctioned hypocrisy’, where the Saudi authorities impose a strict morality in public but live like Roman emperors in the privacy of their own palaces, or in their mansions in London and New York.

Saudi ‘hypocrisy’ would be of limited interest or importance if it weren’t for the fact that in the last decades of the twentieth century the Saudis began to export their form of intolerant Islam. As of 2004 the authors thought that:

Saudi Arabia is now the prime source of fundamentalist, puritanical ideology affecting Muslims everywhere, from North Africa to Indonesia. Oil money is used to promote religious radicalism around the world… (p.136)

That was 20 years ago, the trend has only increased since then, with Saudi involved not only in the Arab Spring uprisings and aftermaths, funding groups in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, but also bankrolling sides in the ruinous civil wars in Syria and Yemen; and that’s before accounting for their promotion of their particularly virulent purist form of Islam in Muslim countries across North Africa and central Asia and into the Far East, in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. And part of the package is a virulently anti-Western Occidentalist message.

6. Seeds of Revolution

A 12-page chapter on how the main venom of Occidentalism falls, even more than on distant America, on Israel. Eccentrically, they tackle this vast bottomless subject via a little known, unimportant novel published by the Theodor Herzl (1860 to 1904), the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist who was the father of modern political Zionism.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Zionism as a Jewish nationalist movement, originating in central and eastern Europe, that had for its goal the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews.

The novel was titled Altneuland which was translated into English as ‘The Old New Land’ when it was published in 1902. It’s apparently a huge text but the core of it is a vision of what Palestine will look like twenty years hence i.e. in 1922, after Palestine has been successfully occupied by Jews. The place has become a technological and economic miracle, the previously barren desert blooming, the previously rundown ports now full of cranes and ships, the rundown towns transformed into European-style cities with wide boulevards and cafes. Religion there is some, but hollowed out to become little more than the civic holidays of a mostly secular European culture.

Visitors to this brave new Jewish world marvel at the gleaming cities and high technology but find time to ask the one Arab in the book what he thinks, and he is overjoyed. Palestinian land-owners sold to the Jews for good prices, Palestinians are employed in all the new works, even the poor are lifted up by the rising standard of living. It’s win-win-win.

Of course it didn’t turn out that way and the modern state of Israel has become the number one hate figure for Arab politicians and Islamists throughout the region, a running sore in the Middle East which will, probably, never go away.

Anyway, the authors don’t really scratch the surface of the issue before proceeding to their rather rushed conclusion: this is that most of the nationalist responses to western imperialism borrowed western ideas to fight it with, whether they be the liberty-equality-fraternity of the French Revolution, the scientific positivism of Comte, the communism of Karl Marx, the anti-Enlightenment tropes of the German Romantics.

They move from Margalit’s home territory (Jerusalem/Israel) back to Buruma’s, Japan. He explains how the samurai leaders of Japan who realised in the 1860s that they needed to carry out a wholesale modernisation of their nation did so by importing selected Western ideas but also sparked a nativist nationalist backlash. But even this, although dressed in Japanese costume, borrowed ideas on how to run society from European fascists and the Nazis in particular.

They conclude that no Occidentalist can be free of ideas from the Occident. The modernisation of Japan gave rise to an anti-modern backlash which borrowed ideas and technology of the modern world in their effort to reject it. Same, they suggest, with Islamic fundamentalists. They loathe and fear western materialism, but communicate using laptops and mobile phones.

On almost the last page the authors start discussing the Ba’ath Party, which gained power in post-independence Syria and Iraq, and how it was forged in the 1930s from a combination of nostalgia for a holistic Arab community and ideas taken from European fascism. One of its theoreticians, Sati’ Husri, was a keen student of German Romantic theorists like Fichte and Herder who rejected the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of the organic, völkisch nation united by blood and soil. This was translated by Husri into the Arab word asabiyya or (Arab) blood solidarity

The end of the book feels rushed and hurried. Only here do they make the big point that Arab ‘nationalist’ leaders have killed far more of their fellow Arabs than all the colonialists and Zionists put together, witness Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who everyone thought was a cruel mass murderer until the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011 and we all discovered that his son, Bashar al-Assad, is even viler. Over half a million Arabs have died in the Syrian civil war.

What not to think

 Buruma and Margalit conclude with some very rushed thoughts. For a start they predict that the war against terror will mostly be fought within Arab states, against extremists. 

Secondly, they say the conflict is against a worldwide, loosely affiliated underground movement. (Presumably they mean al-Qaeda, though they don’t say so.)

As to the first prediction, now, in 2023, 20 years after the book was written, we know that America went ahead with its idiotically badly conceived invasion of Iraq, which on the face of it was an invasion by a foreign power, but that this triggered the collapse of Iraq into prolonged civil war and ethnic cleansing. The ‘within states’ thesis was more dramatically proven by the Arab Spring which led to the disintegration of the states of Libya and Syria, turmoil in Egypt, and a cruel civil war in Yemen. Presumably al-Qaeda and all its affiliates wanted to create pure Islamic states or restore the Caliphate, but they’ve turned out to be part of a process which has destabilised and wrecked much of the Arab world. My view is that it’s their culture, they’re their countries, we’ve interfered enough in that part of the world (and too many other parts of the world, too). Let them sort it out.

Buruma and Margalit say we shouldn’t be paralysed by ‘colonial guilt’ but I think we’re way beyond that now. Every time we intervene we make things worse. We turned Iraq into an abattoir. The Yanks spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over 20 years and look at it now: still the poorest country in the world and back to being ruled by the Taliban.

The West intervened in Libya to prevent Gaddafi massacring protesters in Benghazi but didn’t follow it through by leading and uniting the opposition which, instead, collapsed into regional factions, so that twelve years later, Libya has no one central government.

Total intervention, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, failed.

Partial intervention, as in Libya, failed.

I suggest the only viable policy is complete non-intervention as the West, in effect, is doing in Syria.

If Arabs and Muslims want to spend decades massacring each other, it’s not so much that we don’t want to intervene, or don’t have a moral duty or whatever to intervene; it’s more that we’ve tried intervening, in different countries in different ways, and almost always we make it worse. Non-intervention seems to me the only responsible policy.

This book was written when the Western world was reeling from the 9/11 attacks which everybody felt turned the world on its axis and introduced a whole new era. There was felt to be an urgent need for commentary and analysis, not least explanations of what Islamic fundamentalism was and why the terrorists hated us so much. This book was an interesting attempt to fill that gap.

By the end, although it contains lots of references to specific writers and theories, it feels somehow rushed and superficial. Buruma and Margalit’s thesis, which they repeat half a dozen times, is that German Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century developed a worldview opposing the rational scientific values of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, and this template for opposing all the forces of ‘modernity’ was then taken up by intellectuals in other countries which resented the way the godless materialism of Britain and France seemed to be destroying traditional values, in countries as far afield as Russia, China, Japan and India, and, in the twentieth century got mixed into the anger, resentment and humiliation of a number of Arab and Muslim theorists and theologians.

Their basic idea is that opposition to the West, and the negative stereotypes which its enemies use to characterise it which the authors call Occidentalism, began in the West and always carries the spoor of its Western origins.

However, it’s a long time since 9/11. Now, in 2023, it feels like a lot of the excitement, paranoia and hyperbole of that era has drained away. The Arab Spring, then the Arab Winter, then the collapse of Libya, Syria and Yemen, changed the landscape. Up till then Arab nationalists and radical Islamists believed that all they had to do was overthrow the ageing dictators who in one way or another had imposed Western ideas (nationalism, socialism, science) onto their peoples, and the purified, communal, traditional Islam of the good old days would rush back in to restore the Caliphate. Instead , when the dictators were overthrown, first in Iraq, then Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, with the vain attempt to do so in Syria, the result wasn’t the Unity of Islam but chaos and massacre.

Al Qaeda affiliates across North Africa continue to terrorise their countrymen but they will never be able to seize power; all they do is create the chaotic conditions in which warlords and mercenaries like the Wagner group thrive (in places like Chad, Mali or the Central African Republic or the wretched failed state of Somalia), while political and military leaders with no principles overthrow each other in naked bids for power, as in the utterly pointless Sudanese Civil War.

Piled onto all this is the relentless degradation of the environment of the Arab world, which is only going to get hotter and hotter, with evermore water shortages and the loss of evermore agricultural and even pasturing land. A lot of the Arab world is going to become a hellish place to live.

So the situation is massively more screwed up than when Buruma and Margalit wrote this book and their scholarly shuffling through tomes by Herder and Fichte, Schelling and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, feels like bookish trip down memory lane. Then again maybe they were right to stick to the library; their treatment of the role of Israel in all this, approached through Theodor Herzl’s novel and a half page description of modern Jerusalem, feels entirely inadequate.

Either way, ahead lies total chaos in which the Occidentalism they describe and define will seem increasingly irrelevant to an Arab world collapsing into endless civil war and social collapse. The West wasn’t behind the Arab Springs, that was what so excited the protesters, they were entirely homemade, of domestic Arab and Muslim origin. But so was the chaos and collapse they brought in their wake, of entirely Arab and Muslim origin. It’s their countries, their people, their problems. We’ve intervened too many times. We shouldn’t get involved.

Credit

Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit was published in 2004 by Atlantic Books. References are to the 2005 Atlantic Books paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on September 27, 2023

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Orientalism by Edward Said, Afterword (1995) and Preface (2003)

This blog post is a summary of the 1995 Afterword and 2003 Preface which Edward Said added to his classic work of cultural criticism, ‘Orientalism’, itself first published in 1978.

Afterword (1995)

Said starts off by remarking on the surprising success of the book, which had become a bestseller and been translated, as he wrote, into at least 10 languages, having an influence and life far greater than he ever expected.

Then he sets out to address several misconceptions. One is that the book aims to be a comprehensive attack on the West. The other is that it is an unquestioning defence of Islam or the Arab world. This second one couldn’t be further from the truth for the simple reason that he is not qualified:

I explicitly say that I have no interest in, much less capacity for, showing what the true Orient or Islam are really like. (p.331)

Nonetheless, Muslim fundamentalists apparently welcomed the book as it was a huge indictment of Western Islamophobia. Said is not thrilled to find himself in this company which he regards as being as essentialist as its opposite, Orientalism. By essentialism he means the belief in fixed, unaltered, almost Platonic ideals or essences, in Islamic fundamentalism’s case, a belief in the timeless, unchanging, eternal truths of a primeval and pristine Islam.

Whereas Said again and again says he believes the opposite. He is anti-essentialist, he is trying to deliver the anti-essentialist message that history is made by people, that ideas are created, invented, nurtured and adapted by people who are themselves the products of societies with intellectual constraints and ideological pressures and so on. This view underpins his scepticism about academic world in general and the disciplines connected with Orientalism in particular.

My objection to what I’ve called Orientalism is not that it is just the antiquarian study of Oriental languages, societies and peoples, but that as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; suggesting both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence which observes that Orient from afar and, so to speak, from above. This false position hides historical change. (p.333)

(The fact that he keeps having to restate his position reinforces my experience of his book as being slippery, obtuse, imprecise and hard to understand. He’s a desperately poor communicator. He sounds good, he sounds like he’s making awesome sense, but, in the end, there’s just a handful of ideas which he restates in countless ways.)

So he spends nearly a page recapping the facts about Napoleon’s Description of Egypt, the starting point of modern Orientalism, and the subtlety of its interplay with local Arab accounts of the same events because this is what he’s trying to achieve, a subtle sense of the complex interplay of texts and ideology which are continually changing ideologies and ideas, an ongoing dialectic – before repeating that he was not about something as vulgar and simplistic, as binary, as just pitting East and West against each other, let alone creating either an anti-Western or a pro-Islamic work.

Hmm. He can tell us that he intended it to be a subtle and sophisticated account all he likes (he flatters himself that his account is ‘nuanced and discriminating’) but, to be honest, I thought Said’s book was profoundly and howlingly anti-Western, fierce criticism of Western attitudes mentioned on every page, occasionally rising up to really angry diatribes against Western prejudice and racism and colonialism. One Arab reviewer, he tells us, described the author as:

a champion of the downtrodden and abused, whose mission was to engage Western authorities in a kind of epic and romantic mano-a-mano

The second reason why he thinks his subtle, ‘nuanced and discriminating’ message has been overlooked is the brutality of contemporary politics. Little did he know that the year after it was published Iran would witness the great Islamic Revolution and that this would be followed by new depths of brutality in the Arab-Israeli conflict i.e. the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the 1987 start of the Palestinian intifada. Then there was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to which the West responded by arming the mujihadeen, then the rise of Gorbachev, then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, alongside the First Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.

The thing is, Edward, if you tie your book to highly contentious issues in international affairs (Israel, Palestine, Islamic fundamentalism, Western neo-imperialism) then your book will inevitably get caught up in the maelstrom surrounding all these complex, continually changing events, with two results:

  1. People on all sides will try to co-opt you for their cause.
  2. ‘Events, dear boy, events’; the world carries on its violent unpredictable way and, if you’ve tied your text to the tiger’s tail, you’ll find yourself being dragged along behind it.

Like all his writings, this Afterword is long but goes round and round in circles, repeating that he wanted to avoid an ‘Orient-versus-Occident opposition’ and yet insisting on using the simple binary terms ‘the Orient’ and ‘the West’ that litter the main text; insisting that he thought he was offering ‘a multicultural critique of power using knowledge to advance itself’ while anyone who reads the book encounters impassioned protests against the abuse and exploitation of ‘the Orient’ and ‘Orientals’ at every turn.

He talks bravely about ‘crossing’ the barriers of the ‘imperial East-West divide’ in his own life, and seeking to rise above it, and yet…what has he just called it, what does he call it throughout the book? An ‘East-West’ divide. He insists that his analyses of each different author and each different era are distinctive, different, nuanced etc, but that’s not how I read it. Whatever distinctions he thinks he makes between eras and authors are continually being collapsed when he claims that they all are based on the same, basic latent Orientalism which underpins prejudicial views of ‘the East’ in 1780, 1860 or 1910.

In fact, the reader struggling to the end of this 350-page book emerges with a hugely expanded sense of a much deeper divide between East and West than I previously appreciated. Said’s book seems to me to exacerbate the very problem he claims to be curing.

He has an entertaining passage criticising (insulting) the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis, an expert in the field who, nonetheless, despises the Arab world and Islam he knows so much about, and who, predictably, wrote a scathing and personal review of Orientalism when it came out. Now Said returns the favour with some biting criticism.

The second part of the Afterword is much more understandable and interesting. It is a pithy overview of developments which had taken place between 1978 and 1994 in academia, in studies of culture and history. These were the rise of feminism, black studies, post-colonial studies and subaltern studies (a history-from-below perspective applied to south Asia i.e. India, Pakistan etc).

What they all had in common was the aim of restoring the voices of types of people erased or overlooked by the traditional white European male narratives of history and culture. And, as part of this, overturning monolothic and essentialist narratives. of East and West etc. Modern developments in all these fields have all tended to show that history is far more complex, mongrel and interactive than previously thought. And Said is (justifiably) proud that his book (profoundly flawed and difficult though I, personally, found it to be) has contributed to these developments.

Preface (2003)

Born in 1935, Said was 43 when Orientalism was published, 50 years old when he wrote the Afterword, and 68 when he wrote this Preface. He says he feels old. He was to die later the same year from leukaemia.

Said begins by expressing his ongoing amazement that a book he produced as a personal project has gone on to become a worldwide (academic) bestseller, translated into 40 languages, and hugely influencing the new(ish) disciplines of post-colonial and subaltern studies.

Then, as W.H. Auden wrote, ‘Let your last thinks all be thanks,’ and so Said generously thanks colleagues and the entire American university system, specifically Columbia University, New York, his employer for 30 years. He says in his entire career he published plenty of articles about Palestine, but never actually taught anything about the Middle East. His day job was teaching comparative literature for all those years, his first love and the profession he was trained to.

Whereupon he picks up the cudgels again to repeat all his arguments. He tells us (as he did in the Introduction and in his 1999 memoir, ‘Out of Place’) that he grew up between two contradictory worlds, the Arab world and the West.

One fundamental thing I find puzzling about Said’s entire schtick is that he repeatedly says he wrote Orientalism to try and abolish the naive binary of East and West, yet he invokes it every turn, as here, in the rather tired trope of growing up ‘between two worlds’. He asserts for the umpteenth time that neither term ‘the Orient’ nor ‘the West’ have any ontological stability and yet here he is, using them both in exactly the same way he did 25 years earlier, and as we do today (2023) i.e. as if they have exactly the ontological stability he claims they don’t have.

Back to current affairs and he tells us the fairly obvious fact that 2003 was an even more politically turbulent time than 1978 or 1994. Again I bridle at this idea, it’s a classic example of two tropes ever-present in our culture. One is presentism, which is where a political commentator claims that the present moment is more critical, urgent and crisis-ridden than ever before, evah!

Check out any one of the daily articles in the liberal press wringing their hands at the prospect that Donald Trump might be elected president again and that this time it will mean the end for democracy in America. In other words, fostering the same atmosphere of panic that they all did last time, for the long year of the presidential campaign and then the gruelling four years of Trump’s presidency, when the liberal press overflowed with outraged articles about every single presidential tweet.

But of course, a properly historical perspective, such as Said is always saying we must take, militates against the view that the present is somehow uniquely and unprecedently critical and urgent: the outbreak of World War Two was a pretty critical moment, the attack on Pearl Harbour, the dropping of the atom bomb, the outbreak of the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world nearly ended, I could go on.

To take one of cardinal years in Orientalism‘s publishing history, 1978 wasn’t a particularly turbulent year, but 1979 was the year of the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which are both having repercussions to this day. To look closer at the year of the Afterword, 1995, this was just a year after the Rwanda genocide, a pretty turbulent year if you lived in Rwanda, and the terrible war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo was still ongoing, a running sore in Europe’s conscience.

Today, as this is published, is day 579 of the war in Ukraine, I don’t know how many days into the civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, a month of more into the civil war in Sudan, and month into the coup in Niger, and so on.

Plus climate change plus the Conservative government plus the collapse of the NHS plus the threat of another pandemic etc etc etc.

So my point is simple: it’s always terrible times.

The second reason this is such a tiresomely common trope is because political commentators have to make a living and so have a vested interest in persuading their editors and readers that we live in times of unprecedented jeopardy and that, if you want to understand why, you simply have to buy my article / magazine / book.

Quite obviously 9/11 was an epoch-making event which created a genuine sense of crisis around the world (or the Western world, anyway) and Said, writing in 2003, was doing so against the backdrop of a campaign of anti-Arab rhetoric being orchestrated by the Bush administration to justify its upcoming invasion of Iraq. It was a bad time for anyone trying to improve relations between ‘the West’ and ‘the Arab world’.

Trying to be even-handed, he laments that this is all taking place against a resurgence of pride and arrogance in both the West and the Arab world. It was definitely a bad time to be the kind of liberal exponent of calm and reason which Said tried to be and very bad to be the guy trying to speak up for the Arab world, or at least the Palestinian people, in the midst of such an avalanche of anti-Arab propaganda.

But, as he goes on to concede, the really interesting thing (for me) about all of this impassioned discourse is the question that, after 25 years of academic effort put into creating and teaching post-colonial and subaltern studies and the widespread dissemination of all the anti-racist, anti-colonial teachings promoted by Orientalism, had all this effort improved America’s image of the Arab world or Islam?

No, Said has to concede that, tragically – for the country soon to be invaded and ruined and for the region as a whole – the reverse is true, the situation has, if anything, gotten worse, with:

the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalisation and triumphalist cliché (p.xiii)

This interests me because it highlights the limitations of academic discourse, particularly the kind of critical theory Said made such a big contribution to, a discourse which overflows with bombastic claims to be ‘interrogating norms’ and ‘subverting stereotypes’ and ‘questioning prevailing ideologies’ etc etc and yet, when push comes to shove, turns out to have precisely zero effect in the wider world.

There’s something deeply comic about the massive discrepancy between the world-shattering rhetoric of so much critical theory, that it is ‘subjecting the discourse of power to radical scrutiny’ etc etc, and its actual impact on the world of power: zero.

Anyway, Said is right to nail the ignorant arrogance of the Bush administration which thought that a quick surgical invasion of Iraq could change the map of the Middle East, plant democracy and transform the entire region as if its ‘ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar’.

He’s right to wail that he Arabists, Islamists and ‘experts’ Bush’s White House gathered round itself were just the latest incarnation of the ‘Orientalist’ scholars who had produced 200 years of stereotypes designed to empower conquest and colonialism, who had provided power with ‘expedient forms of knowledge’ (p.xiii).

But I had the usual experience, in reading Said, of swinging from total agreement with his political analysis to coming up short and disagreeing with other aspects of his commentary.

For example, he mentions the terrible looting of Baghdad not once but twice, predictably, for an arts professor, dwelling on the ruination of the museums and their artefacts and for anyone who loves art and archaeology and history, it was of course a catastrophe.

But he irked me by implying that it was the direct fault of the invading Allies. It was the Iraqis who, the second there were no police on the street, looted everything from every possible public building, including all schools, ministries, factories, power stations, dams, water purification facilities, destroying their own country far more extensively than any conquering army could have done (see my reviews of detailed accounts of the Iraq War).

Certainly all the looting occurred because an army had invaded and overthrown the dictator, and in particular because the irresponsible moron Donald Rumsfeld ignorantly forbade the American army to take along enough military police to restore law and order to the streets once the Saddam regime was overthrown. The invading Americans certainly carry a huge burden of responsibility.

But, in the end, that invading army didn’t make the Iraqis loot their own country. When the Allies liberated France, the French population didn’t embark on an orgy of looting and destruction, burning down the Louvre and stealing everything they could from every single public building. The Iraqis did that to themselves.

Because Said sees absolutely everything through the spectacles of his obsessive monomania that ‘the West’ is responsible for everything bad that ever happened in the Middle East, his thought isn’t free, isn’t flexible enough to acknowledge real complexity. Which is ironic because it’s precisely this kind of ideological inflexibility that he continually accuses Orientalists and the West of displaying.

Said is right to castigate the intellectual bankruptcy of the American administration which, in its bottomless ignorance, not only of the country it was invading but of its own country, of the complex economic, religious, ideological and political roots of its own ideas, thought that ‘democracy’ and ‘free market capitalism’ are things you can take out of a suitcase and hand around like Smarties.

Said proceeds to name some of the guilty men, modern Orientalists who lent their ‘learning’ to neo-imperialism, singling out the egregious Bernard Lewis (see the his earlier criticism of Lewis in the 1995 Afterword) and Fouad Ajami, plus an army of journalists, shock jocks, right wing radio hosts, Fox News and so on, the vast mediascape of ignorance, prejudice and belligerence. Without the basic lies of Orientalism – those people aren’t like us, they don’t understand our values, we have to ‘liberate’ them, educate them, raise them up to be like us etc – the invasion couldn’t have happened.

This Preface is definitely the clearest thing, the most easily comprehensible 17 pages, in the whole book because a) his subject is so simple and universally known – the US invasion of Iraq is an act of gross imperialism justified by shameful lackey intellectuals – so b) his style is unusually frank and accessible; it reads more like a magazine article than the more gnarly and obtuse prose of the main text itself.

Said makes some good points. He refutes all the apologists who tell the formerly colonised people to stop belly aching about their imperial oppression and get on with building their countries (singling out the Anglo-Indian write V.S. Naipaul as guilty of this) and points out that the disastrous impacts of empire live on for generations, continuing to impact the impoverished lives of hundreds of millions of the voiceless and oppressed, in Algeria, the Congo, Iraq and Palestine. In his characteristically eccentric prose he makes the point that:

We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation in what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do? (p.xvii) (cf Orientalism p.262)

That’s a telling point, and he attributes the tragic succession across the Third World of colonisation, nationalist movements, liberation, the era of military coups, insurgencies against them, civil wars, the rise of religious fanaticism and the descent into ever more brutal chaos – in his view all of these disasters were the direct result of a century or more of European imperialism, which hasn’t just altered the consciousness of our time but makes up the consciousness of our time, for everyone, for the entire world, colonisers and colonised alike.

Said tells us that he wanted to use critical analysis to reveal the cultural and intellectual power structures which enabled and then justified imperialism. He did so in the name of ‘humanism’ i.e. the hope that calm, rational enlightened study creates its own environment of sympathy and inclusiveness, undermines idées recues and idées fixes, lets people escape from the tropes and clichés, ‘the reductive formulae’ of the past, confront the realities of the present, and establish a basis on which discussion and negotiation can take place for a better future. It’s incumbent on independent intellectuals such as him ‘to provide alternative models to the simplifying and confining ones, that have prevailed in the Middle East and elsewhere for so long’ (p.xvii).

See what I mean by this is the clearest part of the book? Possibly you could read just these 17 pages and pick up virtually all you need to know about the book and Said’s political stance.

Then, unexpectedly, he shifts his ground entirely to mount a defence of philology as ‘the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts’. That’s the tradition he was raised in and he singles out as the peak of its achievement Erich Auerbach and his great book Mimesis. In this book Auerbach takes passages from the entire history of European literature, from the Iliad to Virginia Woolf, and enters into their worlds via a very close reading of the actual text, the words and their meanings and histories and connotations. That’s what Auerbach, and Said, mean by philology.

Huh. This is identical to what I feel and what I value about literature. Fully committing yourself to literary texts means entering into these other worlds, opening a space in your mind for other worlds, other peoples, other languages, other values, other stories.

Said then goes into grumpy old man mode and laments that this practice of wholesale immersion in books which he loves so much has disappeared from the academy of his time (2003). He accuses modern (2003) academia of  a) having become compartmentalised into ever smaller specialisms, while b) students are encouraged to get bite-sized snips of information off the internet and no-one reads books any more – nothing like the expansive, curious, enquiring and committed way that he, Said, obviously grew up reading. God, what would he have made of the world of TikTok and Instagram?

But then, after this charming interlude, it’s back to contemporary politics, to 2003 and the war in Iraq and Said is warning his readers against the viciously simplistic influence of the handful of zealots (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz) who have taken control of the White House and disseminate the most appallingly simplistic messages about ‘Arabs’ and ‘Islam’. (See my forthcoming reviews of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

But then, in an effort to be even-handed, Said goes on to be just as hard on the Muslim world where, he says, repressive rulers (often backed by the West) crush their populations, who in response turn to simplistic slogans and rebellion, among which is an anti-Westernism every bit as stereotyped as Western Orientalism. In particular he laments the crushing of the Islamic tradition of free and flexible enquiry which he says has been replaced by fanaticism, purism and rote learning. Interesting that he concedes the charge of fanaticism which, throughout the main book, is viewed as an unjustifiable stereotype and slur. Now he’s admitting that it’s an empirical fact.

He concludes with a hymn of praise for humanism, for a humanism:

centred upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. Texts have to be read as texts that were produced and live on in the historical realm in all sorts of what I have called worldly ways. (p.xxii)

Yes. I am in complete sympathy. That is what I try to do, how I try to approach texts, in this blog, and with the same motive: to set them in their historical context, to pay close attention to individual sentences and words, but also to be aware of how words and phrases are shaped by contemporary politics and have changed meanings over time as history has shifted our frames of reference. Paying attention to all of this, in my opinion, helps to broaden and widen and increase imaginative spaces and sympathies, for other times and places and people.

Practical criticism

See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes, in Western (British) coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):

Credit

Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).

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Posted by Simon on September 25, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/09/25/orientalism-edward-said-afterword-preface/

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 2

‘Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’
(Salisbury writing about the Balkan crisis of 1887 in a sentence which sums up his political philosophy)

‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’ is divided into two equal parts of about 430 pages each:

  1. Tory Tribune, 1830 to 1885 (pages 5 to 422)
  2. Tory Titan, 1885 to 1903 (pages 425 to 852)

By the second half I thought I had a good handle on the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Its obvious strength is the way it examines all the major political events and issues in British and international politics between about 1865 and 1902 in fantastic detail, as seen from the point of view of the hero of this enormous biography, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.

Using extensive quotes from Salisbury’s correspondence and speeches, plus citations from the letters or reported remarks of those around him (principally his political colleagues, occasionally his family) we get day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour recreations of how it seemed to Salisbury, what his thoughts and strategems were, how he manoeuvred those around him or attacked those on the opposition party, how he managed the relentless, hyper-complex task of managing British domestic, international, and imperial challenges.

So: amazing insights into a figure who really does emerge as a giant of his times, Prime Minister from 1885 to 1902, with only a three year gap. And yet the book’s strength is also, I think, its weakness, which is that the focus is so unrelentingly on Salisbury, what he said and thought and wrote, his speeches around the country and in the House of Lords, his comments over dinner or at parties, what family and confidantes recorded him saying to them – that, although the book covers an amazing number of issues, I began to realise that you fail to get a well-rounded presentation of those issues.

One example stands for many: only as much of the ill-fated expedition of General Gordon to Khartoum is explained and described as is necessary to understand what a political opportunity it presented to Salisbury to attack Gladstone for failing to relieved besieged Gordon in time. But the full background to the Mahdi’s rising, explaining the context of his rise, his appeal, and previous military engagements, and the subsequent history of British involvement in the Sudan are mostly missing. The topic swims into view as it affects Salisbury then, when it ceases to be relevant to him, disappears.

A bigger, more dominant and recurring theme is Ireland and Irish nationalism. Again, it initially feels like you’re getting a lot of information but, after a while, I realised it was a lot of information only about Salisbury’s day-to-day management of the way successive Irish crises impinged on British politics. So Roberts mentions agrarian disturbances, the regular murders and atrocities, and he mentions that this is mostly caused by inequalities to do with land and rents – BUT you don’t get a clear explanation of why. There’s no stopping to give a broader explanation of the context of Irish discontent, the rise of nationalism, the background to rural violence and so on. Roberts mentions a number of organisations, such as the Irish Brotherhood, but without any background on their formation and activities.

The great tragic Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell appears in the narrative mainly in a very detailed account of his trial which Salisbury helped to organise and provided evidence for. Yet after reading pages and pages about this I was still left feeling unclear what the distinctive thing about Parnell and his party was. And Roberts throws away the event that ruined Parnell, his being mentioned in a divorce case, which led his puritanical supporters to abandon him, in a few phrases. So I didn’t get a full, rounded, thorough explanation of Parnell’s success and rise, just a few episodes as they impinged on Salisbury’s concerns to manage the Irish Problem.

I hope by now you’ve got my drift: this is an awesomely huge, thoroughly researched, insightful, clever and beautifully written biography of Salisbury BUT it is not a good history of Britain during his times. Every page is plastered with quotes and citations from his letters and speeches but these focus entirely on how Salisbury used events to manipulate the politics around him.

It is an extraordinarily detailed view of what politics is actually like i.e. the ceaseless calculating of what is to your own or your party’s advantage, the constant jostling and politicking against the opposition party and just as much with enemies within your own party. Reading about Salisbury’s Machiavellian manipulations is wonderfully insightful and entertaining. But time and again I felt I was being short-changed on the issues themselves. It’s perfectly logical and entirely sensible that we only see events or issues insofar as they impinge on our man Salisbury. But as page 400 turned to page 500, and then on to page 600, I became a little irked at a sense that I was missing out on the actual history of the period.

Contents

Roberts gives sub-titles to his chapters which summarise the issues each one covers, so an effective way of conveying its scope is simply to copy that:

Chapter 26: Reconstruction at home and abroad (January to April 1887)

  • 1887: Salisbury reshuffles his cabinet, coming to rely on George Joachim Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen, a former Liberal, then Liberal Unionist, who he makes Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Michael Hicks Beach as the Chief Secretary for Ireland
  • death of Stafford Henry Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Lord Northcote, Salisbury’s challenger in the Commons to leadership of the Tories
  • 1887: The Mediterranean Agreements, a series of treaties with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Spain
  • Bulgaria: Alexander of Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, abdicated in 1886 after a pro-Russian coup, triggering a Balkan crisis about who to replace him: the constant worry was that Russia would interfere, prompting Austria to retaliate, triggering a general European war
  • 1888 June: Kaiser Wilhelm II ascends the throne of the German Empire, worrying everyone with his impetuous outbursts and lack of understanding of the intricate skeins of European diplomacy
  • Egypt: ‘I heartily wish we had never gone into Egypt’, Salisbury wrote. British influence was necessary to safeguard the Suez Canal but upset the Ottoman Sultan, the rival Power, France, and the people of Egypt who resented British influence
  • The French were afflicted by a permanent ‘inferiority complex’ and so behaved badly at every opportunity, in a dispute about the Newfoundland fisheries, in the New Hebrides in the Pacific, obstructive in Egypt, planting a flag in the empty wastes of Somalia

Chapter 27: ‘Bloody Balfour’ (March 1887 to July 1891)

  • March 1887 Salisbury appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour the Chief Secretary for Ireland. An aloof, philosophical man, commentators thought he would be a soft touch but he implemented Salisbury’s strategy of cracking down on lawlessness that, in the wake of the Mitchelstown Massacre when Irish police opened fire on protesters killing 3 (9 September 1887) and Balfour gave them his full support, he was nicknamed ‘Bloody Balfour’. Conversely, Balfour’s sternness impressed the future defender of Ulster, Edward Carson.
  • (It speaks volumes about this society and this ruling class, that the Irish Viceroy, the 6th Marquess of Londonderry, had been Balfour’s fag at Eton.)
  • July 1887: Balfour steered the passage of the ‘Perpetual Crimes Act’, a Coercion Act to prevent boycotting, intimidation, unlawful assembly and the organisation of conspiracies against the payment of agreed rents which led to the imprisonment of hundreds of people including over twenty MPs
  • March and April 1887: The Times newspaper published letters they claimed proved Parnell’s association with the Phoenix Park murders and violent crimes. Parnell sued the newspaper whereupon it emerged that the letters were all forged by a notorious crook. Salisbury backed the Times and the prosecution i.e. Tories talk about ‘honour’ and ‘the law’ when it suits them, but break it or ignore it when it suits them

28: ‘The genie of imperialism’ (May 1887 to January 1888)

  • June 1887: Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; interesting to learn what a struggle the authorities had to know how to mark it appropriately; in the end it was the template or trial run for the much bigger Diamond Jubilee ten years later; of course a cartload of ‘honours’ were doled out, usually as a reward to the Unionist cause (p.461)
  • The Colonial Conference: Salisbury was not a doctrinaire imperialist and was against the idea of forging a closer union or federation with the (mostly white) colonies i.e. Canada, the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand; but the Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Holland took advantage of all the premiers being in London for the Jubilee to stage one anyway
  • In the 1880s Britain took control of Bechuanaland, Burma, Nigeria, Somaliland, Zululand, Kenya, Sarawak, Rhodesian and Zanzibar
  • 13 November 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’: a crowd of marchers protesting about unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts, and demanding the release of Irish Nationalist MP William O’Brien, clashed with the Metropolitan Police, with 400, 75 badly injured, two policemen were stabbed and one protester was bayonetted
  • Tithes: an example of Salisbury’s defence of the Church of England, his Tithe Rent-Charge Bill was wrangled over for 4 years, from 1887 to 1891; it aimed to get non-payers of tithes to the Church subject to County Court judgements which would make it easier for the clergy to obtain their money
  • Allotments: Salisbury strongly objected to a Bill brought to allow local councils to compulsorily purchase land in order to create allotments for the poor;
  • Fiscal retaliation: this was another phrase for protectionism which Salisbury was also vehemently against; the issue was to grow and grow, reflecting the fact that sometime in the 1880s Britain lost the industrial and economic lead she had enjoyed for most of the century; protectionism was raised at party conferences again and again but Salisbury managed to stave it off; after his retirement the policy of imperial protectionism would tear the party apart and contribute to the Tories’ catastrophic defeat in 1906

Chapter 29: Rumours of Wars (February to July 1888)

  • A reshuffle:
  • ‘Pom’ Macdonnell: Salisbury appointed as his personal private secretary Schomberg ‘Pom’ McDonnell, fifth son of the Earl of Antrim who turned out to be an outstanding administrator and confidante
  • The Vienna Incident: the new young touchy Kaiser thought that his diplomatic overtures had been snubbed and so made it known that he planned to ‘cut’ his uncle, the Prince of Wales, when they were both on visits to Vienna; diplomatic panic; chancelleries and embassies go into overdrive; children
  • General Boulanger’s war scare: Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, nicknamed ‘General Revenge’, was a French general and politician, an enormously popular public figure who won multiple elections in the 1880s, vowing revenge for the defeat of 1870, taking on not only Germany but Britain if necessary, causing many sleepless nights in the Foreign Office; at the height of his popularity in 1889 it was widely was feared that he might make himself a dictator; as usual with French bluster, it came to nothing
  • Newfoundland and Bering Sea disputes: diplomatic fracas with France about fishing rights off Newfoundland and then with America about ownership of the sea around the Bering Straits; the point of all these quarrels is the way Salisbury managed them down, without letting them escalating into fighting talk
  • House of Lords reform: surprisingly, Salisbury supported reform of the House of Lords (mainly to kick out crooks) but was predictably against professionalising it; he defended the House of Lords not for its members’ achievements or intelligence but because simply by dint of being wealthier and better educated than most people, they were less likely to be influenced by ‘sordid greed’ (p.493); this of course sits at odds with the reams of evidence throughout the book that those who sought ‘honours’ were precisely the ambitious and greedy
  • February to July 1888: Sir Garnet Wolseley, hero of the (unsuccessful) march to relieve Gordon at Khartoum (1885), was promoted to Adjutant-General to the Forces in the War Office from where he issued a series of alarmist warnings about the threat of a sudden invasion from France and cuts to the army budget, all of which an irritated Salisbury had to manage down

Chapter 30: The Business of Government (August to December 1888)

  • County councils: the most important piece of domestic legislation of 1888 was the creation of County Councils as the primary instruments of local government replacing the previous ad hoc and regionally varying procedures (p.499)
  • The Drinks trade: the nonconformist and Temperance interest among the Liberal Unionists tried to add to the local government bill provisions to limit pub opening hours and cut back on the drinks trade; Salisbury opposed this, believing every Englishman should be free to go to hell his own way
  • Votes for women: in the County Council elections which were held in 1889 women candidates were elected for the first time (p.502); Salisbury wasn’t against women having the vote, and is cited as saying he had no problem with educated women having it; he was against extending the franchise to the lower classes; in the event, like lots of other pressing issues he managed to block and delay it so women’s suffrage became an issue which damaged the Edwardian Liberal governments
  • In 1888 Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British minister at the Washington legation, made a rookie error by replying to a letter, ostensibly from an Englishman in America, asking who he should support in the presidential election; Sackville-West wrote back suggesting Grover Cleveland would be better for Britain; the letter was a ruse, written by an American, Sackville-West’s reply was published in the newspapers and the US government kicked him out for this undiplomatic faux pas i.e. an ambassador expressing about an election in a foreign country; Salisbury was furious; during the fracas Sackville-West succeeded to his father’s title and went back to the huge Knole Park estate with a state pension
  • A ‘black man’: in 1885 a Tory colonel had won the Holborn by-election against an Indian, Dadabhai Naoroji; in 1888 Salisbury made a speech in which he referred to this event and made the remark that ‘I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them’; not only the Liberals but many commentators came down on him like a ton of bricks; interestingly, the Queen wrote to criticise him; Dadabhai Naoroji was elected MP for Finsbury Central in 1895, becoming Britain’s second ethnic minority MP; he enjoyed referring to himself as ‘Lord Salisbury’s black man’
  • The Viceroy’s India proposals: before Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was sent off to India to be viceroy (in 1884) he had drawn up proposals to extend the powers of viceregal and local legislative councils, including an element of direct voting; Salisbury quashed these as all other hints at Indian self-rule
  • This leads Roberts into a consideration of Salisbury’s diplomatic style which was highly secretive; he often didn’t inform cabinet colleagues about initiatives; this was partly because he considered the Foreign Office ‘a nest of Whiggery’ and the level of ambassadorial competence generally very low (p.514); Roberts discusses the basis of his diplomatic thinking which was utterly pragmatic – most treaties, he admitted, are based on force or the threat of force (p.512) or, as he put it somewhere else, bluster and bluff; 15 years later, as the world entered the new century, that bluster and bluff would no longer do – big armies, big navies and heavy industry increasingly became key to international affairs
  • Fascinating fact: before 1914 Britain only had 9 ambassadors (compared to 149 in 1997) and just 125 diplomatic posts abroad

Chapter 31: Africa (1885 to 1892)

When Salisbury left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody talked about Africa. When he returned in 1885, everyone was talking about Africa, and the quarrels it was causing between the Powers (p.518).

Between 1885 and 1900 most of the borders of modern Africa were set by European statesmen who’d never been there. To this day, this is one of the root causes of the chronic instability, political and economic backwardness of Africa. But at the time the various deals the nations of Europe struck, and the straight lines they drew through jungles and deserts, represented a triumph because the primary aim was never fairness or the interests of Africans, it was to prevent European nations going to war.

The lines on the map weren’t drawn in accordance with the logic of geography or tribes, traditional territory, language or commerce. The aim was to stop Europeans going to war.

‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’ (p.529)

(Some) reasons the European colonisation of Africa accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century:

  • the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa
  • the opening up of East Africa by the Suez Canal
  • the evangelical impulse to eliminate the slave trade and convert the heathen
  • France’s lust for la gloire after her ignominious defeat in the Prussian War
  • private adventurism and entrepreneurship (Rhodes)
  • the quests of each nation’s industry to sources of raw materials and markets
  • the evil greed of Belgian’s King Leopold II
  • Britain’s need for a safe route to India
  • the invention of steamships and advanced weaponry (the Gatling gun)
  • the development of medicines for tropical diseases (p.518)

African issues:

  • Bullying Portugal: ‘a tiresome little Power’ (p.520) I was surprised how much trouble it was to negotiate a treaty with Portugal to stop their incursions into what we called Nyasaland, thus preventing the Portuguese owning a belt right across the middle of Africa, from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the East
  • Zanzibar: managing German attempts to overthrow the Sultan of Zanzibar and to establish Uganda as a German protectorate; Salisbury was appalled at the Germans’ brutality to Africans; acquiring Zanzibar involved a trade-off whereby we accepted France’s acquisition of Madagascar (p.529)
  • March 1890 the Kaiser abruptly sacked Bismarck (p.525); Salisbury negotiated a deal to hand Germany Heligoland in the Baltic in exchange for sole protectorate over Zanzibar
  • Britain acquired the future Uganda and Kenya, Germany kept Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi;
  • 1890 The Sahara: Salisbury agreed Conventions with France whereby we backed the Royal Niger Company’s claim to the Niger valley in exchange for agreeing French control of the western Sahara and the Algerian hinterland as far as Lake Chad
  • Italian ambitions: in exchange for British control of the Nile valley Salisbury let the Italians stake the Red Sea coast i.e. Eritrea and Somalia
  • Cecil Rhodes: Salisbury though Rhodes a chancer but backed his request for a royal charter to develop the huge area in south-central Africa which would develop into Rhodesia; in thanks for his support Rhodes named the dusty capital of his new territory Salisbury (which would become the city of Harare, capital of modern Zimbabwe) (p.534)

During a seven year period Salisbury laid down the outlines of colonial Africa which were to last well into the twentieth century.

Chapter 32: Mid-Term Crises (January 1889 to December 1890)

  • The Kaiser pays Victoria a visit, potentially embarrassing because he had been rude to the Prince of Wales the previous year
  • General Boulanger, a bellicose right-winger who had threatened a coup in Paris, in the event fled to Brussels
  • Royal grants: Salisbury became very close to the Queen, they thought alike on many matters, and so he tried to move the question of grants to minor royals out of the Commons, where it had become a regular peg for Liberals and Radicals to make republican remarks
  • The two-power standard: Salisbury secured cabinet support to greatly increase spending on the navy and invented a new rule of thumb, that the Royal Navy should be as big as the next two largest navies (of France and Russia) combined
  • The Paris Exhibition: Salisbury refused to let the British ambassador attend the centenary celebrations of the French Revolution, an event which haunted Salisbury and informed his reactionary Toryism
  • The Shah’s visit: after initial reluctance Salisbury hosted Nasr-el-Din in London and at his Hatfield home
  • The ‘socialist’ current: the London dock strike from August to September 1889 and the huge marches to support it worried gloomy Salisbury that socialism was on its way; he thought it represented an attack on property and law (of contracts, rents etc)
  • The Cleveland Street Scandal: scandal about a male brothel just north of Oxford Street, frequented by members of the royal household and some posh army officers
  • A mid-term crisis: objections to a slew of domestic bills bring his government close to losing a vote and having to quit
  • Prince Eddy in love: Eddy being Prince Edward’s eldest son, second in line to the throne; when he fell in love with a French princess it threatened the delicate balance of European power because Salisbury’s general aim was to keep in with the central powers (Germany and Austria) as protection against France and Russia; having a potential French queen-in-waiting would wreck his whole strategy so he moved heaven and earth to get Victoria to forbid the marriage
  • Trouble at Barings bank which faced bankruptcy until the ruling class rallied round to refund it

Chapter 33: Alliance Politics (January to October 1891)

  • Visitors at Hatfield: the Kaiser visits; Salisbury thinks he is mad and dangerous; and then Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy
  • Free education: a policy of Chamberlain and the Radical Unionists to which Salisbury acquiesces, creating an Education Bill which passed in August 1891
  • The Prince of Wales in difficulties: Salisbury negotiates peace in a bitter row between the prince and some offended aristocrats
  • The death of W.H. Smith, a steadfast and loyal supporter of Salisbury as Leader of the House of Commons; after careful politicking Salisbury has the post filled y his nephew Arthur Balfour
  • Party organisation: the importance of chief agent of the conservative party, Richard Middleton, and Chief Whip, Aretas Akers-Douglas
  • The Liberal Unionist alliance: the importance of the good working relationship with the super-posh Marquess of Hartington, 8th Duke of Devonshire, leader of the Liberal Unionists

Chapter 34: Leaving Office (November 1891 to August 1892)

  • The general election: friends and colleagues die; the Tory government finds it hard to pass bills; by-elections go against them; much debate whether to call an election for the end of the year (Salisbury’s preference) or June; July 1892 it was and although the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists won 314 seats and the Liberals 272, the balance of power was held by the Irish Nationalist MPs who won 72, and who went into alliance with the Liberals on the understanding that Gladstone would introduce a Home Rule bill
  • Gladstone: Salisbury considered Eton and Christ Church-educated, Anglican Gladstone a traitor to his class in the long bloodless civil war which is how he saw British politics
  • Cabinet style: Salisbury accepted the result and in August tendered his resignation to the Queen, who was very upset; she loathed Gladstone; his cabinet colleagues testify to Salisbury’s calm and cheerful collegiate style; once they got rid of Randolph Churchill, it had been a successful and good tempered cabinet

Chapter 35: Opposition (August 1892 to June 1895)

  • The Second Irish Home Rule bill: Gladstone lost no time in forming an administration, then moving his Home Rule Bill on 13 February 1893; Salisbury’s calculations about the best strategy to block it, his effectiveness because it was defeated by 10 to 1 in the House of Lords
  • Gladstone resigns: Gladstone found himself increasingly at odds with his own cabinet, in particular opposing the ongoing increase of the Royal Navy; he was the oldest person ever to be Prime Minister, aged 84, and on 2 March resigned
  • Lord Rosebery: the Queen couldn’t call for her favourite, Salisbury, because the Liberals still had a majority in the Commons, so Gladstone was replaced by the Liberal Imperialist Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895 when he called, and lost, a general election; Rosebery was naive and fell into Parliamentary traps Salisbury laid for him, undermining confidence in his government
  • Evolution: Salisbury was sympathetic to science and Roberts describes a major speech he gave at Oxford about Darwin’s theory of evolution which, however, basing itself on Lord Kelvin’s completely erroneous theory about the age of the earth, claimed there wasn’t enough time for Darwin’s theory to have taken place; all completely wrong, as Kelvin’s theories were utterly wrong: Kelvin thought the sun about 20 million years old, whereas we now know it is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the earliest life on earth probably developed about 3.5 billion years ago
  • Dissolution: The Spectator called Lord Rosebery ‘the butterfly Premier’ and he couldn’t heal the widening divide between his form of Liberal Imperialism, aggressive abroad, radical at home, with the Liberal core; his cabinet split on all its policies, namely the annexation of Uganda, the increased navy budget and appointing Lord Kimberley foreign minister, and Home Rule and the introduction of a graduated death duty at home
  • 21 June 1895 Rosebery lost a minor vote, when his war minister was censured for a supposed lack of cordite for the army, and chose to take the opportunity to resign; the Queen called for Salisbury who agreed to take office and prepare a general election for July
  • Chamberlain: though he disagreed with some of his Radical policies Salisbury came to respect Chamberlain for his forthright character and that, not having gone to public school or university, he didn’t give himself airs

Chapter 36: Problems with Non-Alignment (June to December 1895)

  • A landslide: oddly, to us, Salisbury formed his government before holding the election; it was a landslide, the Tories taking 340 seats, their allies the Liberal Unionists 71, with the Liberals on 177, and 82 Irish Nationalists; the cabinet numbered 19, compared to 1886’s 15 (today it is 22)
  • The Hamidian massacres: series of atrocities carried out by Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896, named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, up to 100,000 died; Salisbury wanted to send the fleet to the Dardanelles but was over-ruled by his cabinet and the reluctant Royal Navy, infuriating him, and then he was castigated in the press and by the opposition for being weak

I was particularly interested in the fervid debate about this because lots of well-meaning liberals and churchmen insisted that ‘something must be done’, just as they do nowadays when there are atrocities in the Arab/Muslim world, but Salisbury’s objections remind me of the modern debate I’ve followed in the pages of Michael Ignatieff, Frank Ledwidge and so on, which is, there’s only so much we can do? Exasperated, Salisbury asked one correspondent would he have us invade Turkey and take on the Sultan’s army of 200,000? And then other European powers come in on Turkey’s side thus triggering a European war? No.

  • The signing of a Franco-Russian Entente led to the setting up of a Joint Naval and Military Defence Committee
  • Walmer Castle: his other nominees crying off because of the cost, Salisbury ended up appointing himself Warden of the Cinque Ports
  • Venezuela: the problem – America takes a very tough line about a border dispute between Venezuela and British colony, British Guiana, with President Cleveland seeking re-election, populists and the yellow press calling for war; Salisbury loftily ignores the fuss

Chapter 37: ‘Splendid Isolation’ (December 1895 to January 1896)

  • The Jameson Raid: the foolishness and failure is dealt with in my review of The Boer War by Thomas Packenham
  • The Kruger telegram: the Kaiser congratulated the Boer president, Paul Kruger, for snuffing out the Jameson Raid before it got started; the British press went mad with anti-German hysteria; rumour had it Germany was sending marines to help the Boers; Britain responded by sending battleships; it knocked British trust in German good faith
  • The poet laureate: Tennyson died in 1892. In 1895 Salisbury appointed his sometime all, the small poet and pamphleteer Alfred Austen to the job; Roberts thinks was a joke at the expense of the literary establishment
  • ‘Splendid isolation’: Roberts is at pains to show that Salisbury was never a splendid isolationist, a phrase coined by a Canadian politician and which he rejected; on the contrary he had signed various treaties and deals which allied us with various European powers, but his belief was that the country should act independently of treaties, in response to ever-changing events
  • Venezuela: the solution – the Americans continued very belligerent and Canada made plans to repel an American attack and Salisbury asked the war office to make plans to send Canada help, but after months of bombast an international tribunal resolved the Venezuela question

Chapter 38: Great Power Politics (February 1896 to May 1897)

  • The Jameson aftermath: i.e. the raiders were handed back over to the British authorities who brought them back to Britain for trial, as well as setting up a Royal Commission which, as usual, exonerated the senior political figures (most notably Chamberlain who almost certainly encouraged the raid) while sending to prison some small fry
  • The march on Dongola: on 1 March 1896 the army of the Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia defeated the Italian army of Eritrea at Adowa. This raised fears that he might incurse into Sudan and so threaten southern Egypt. This was the pretext Salisbury needed to send an army south into Sudan to retake it from the Dervishes also known as the Mahdi Army, who had held it ever since the killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885
  • September 1896: The Balmoral Conversations: against the backdrop of another pogrom against Armenians, with Tsar Nicholas II about Turkey in which Salisbury raised his hobby horse that the Powers partition the Ottoman Empire while the Tsar said his country wanted control of the Dardanelles
  • The ‘wrong horse’ speech: Salisbury’s speech to the House of Lords on 19 January 1897 announcing an end to support for Turkey and its bloody Sultan, saying British policy since Lord Palmerston (the 1850s) and the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) had been mistaken; ‘we put all our money the wrong horse’ (p.646); British Near Eastern policy had shifted from Turkey to Egypt (p.703); a major foreign policy rethink; into the vacuum left by Britain’s rescinded support stepped Germany, as described in The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918 by Sean McMeekin
  • Crisis on Crete: Christian Greeks outnumbered Muslim Turks 7 to 1 and wanted to be united with Greece; Salisbury thought it ridiculous that the territory or policy of a modern nation ought to be based on its literary history; he blockaded Crete ports to try and enforce peace but representatives of Greek Prince George landed and acclaimed him leader of liberated Crete at which point both Greece and Turkey started preparing for a major land war. Salisbury cajoled the cabinet into blockading Greece but war broke out in April 1897 with Turkey quickly invading northern Greece who promptly begged the Powers to intervene for peace: ‘The Greeks are a contemptible race’
  • Gerald Balfour: Salisbury appointed another nephew, Gerald Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and he promptly brought out an Irish Land Bill which Salisbury thought contemptible and worked to defeat in the Lords; then the idea of a permanent royal residence in Ireland, like Sandringham, except none of the royal family approved; then the 1898 Irish Local Government Bill
  • The Transvaal: the economic and political build-up to the Boer War, namely that British experts predicted that the Transvaal’s mineral wealth would soon make it the pre-eminent power in South Africa to which the Cape Colony would defer; Salisbury appointed Lord Milner as Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Salisbury himself wanted to avoid a conflict with the Boers, but in his first official meeting with British officials in SA, Milner made it clear he was determined to engineer one

Chapter 39: Apogee of Empire (June 1897)

  • The Diamond Jubilee: detailed description
  • Jingoism: Salisbury was against extreme patriotism and sabre rattling in speeches and articles; in practice he believed all international affairs derived from physical force but a permanent aggressive imperialist stance hemmed in a foreign policy which he believed had to remain agile and adaptive; scornful of the two Jingo pipe-dreams of 1) a Cape to Cairo railway entirely through British territory, 2) an Imperial Federation behind protective tariffs
  • The three high points of Jingoism were the Diamond Jubilee, Mafeking Night and the Khaki Election (p.835)
  • Honours: Roberts gives a sustained consideration of Salisbury’s attitude to, and record of, giving ‘honours’ (see section below)
  • Bishop-making: as with the honours, an assessment of his policy of bishop making which was pragmatic i.e. he tried to make equal appointments from the Low, Broad and High church traditions in order to keep the Church of England together, something he believed vital for the nation
  • The Munshi: Victoria became irrationally attached to an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim, aka the Munshi, meaning ‘teacher’, who came to represent all her Indian subjects to her; unfortunately, pretty much the entire Royal household hated him and Salisbury was called in on several occasions to calm arguments

(It’s worth noting Queen Victoria’s striking lack of racism, the reverse, her active wish to promote and encourage subjects of all races from across the empire. Thus she repeatedly demanded that the army in South Africa be supplemented by Sikhs, Gurkhas and Zulus, only to be met by obstructiveness from the War Office, Cabinet and Salisbury himself. Their arguments were 1) distributing arms to coloured subjects set a bad precedent and 2) in a tight spot, English squaddies might refuse to take orders from a person of colour; p.756.)

Chapter 40: Choosing his ground (July 1897 to September 1898)

  • Imperial Federation: pipe-dream Salisbury pooh-poohed; thought Britain stood to lose out economically and, if every citizen in the Federation got a vote, politically, too
  • A French convention:
  • Port Arthur: the Russians seized Port Arthur on the coast of China forcing British ships to vacate the area, signalling a ramping up of the scramble for China; newspapers, politicians and even his own cabinet saw this as a humiliation and claimed Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation had failed, but Salisbury’s mild response was because he saw trouble brewing with France
  • Anglo-German relations: when Salisbury was off sick his Secretary for the Colonies, Chamberlain, suggested to the German ambassador that Britain and Germany sign a non-aggression pact
  • 4 May 1898 the ‘dying nations’ speech: to a packed audience of the Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall describing a Darwinian vision of nation states, that weak states become weaker whilst strong states become stronger; “The nations of the earth are divided into the sheep and the wolves – the fat and defenceless against the hungry and strong”; as a comment on the rise and fall of nations it was banal enough; its real purpose was to justify Realpolitik
  • The death of Gladstone: Salisbury was one of the coffin bearers and was genuinely upset which is strange given his deep-seated loathing of Gladstone as a traitor to his class, not least in Ireland (p.693)
  • Curzon as Viceroy: January 1899, Salisbury appointed George Nathaniel Curzon, aged just 40, Viceroy of India; he was to be an inspired choice (p.694)
  • Secret Convention with Germany (‘the Delagoa Bay agreement’, p.719) agreeing no other Power allowed to intervene in Angola or Mozambique the two huge colonies of the weak Power, Portugal, and how the 2 colonies would be divided if Portugal collapsed
  • 2 September 1898 The Battle of Omdurman: part of General Kitchener’s campaign to retake Sudan from the Mahdist Islamic State, revenge for the death of Gordon, a disciplined Anglo-Egyptian force let 50,000 or so Mahdists charge their lines and massacred them with machine guns; around 12,000 Muslim warriors were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner while Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded (p.697); journalists present with the British force, and young Winston Churchill in his account of it, were critical of Kitchener for allowing the wounded Sudanese to be murdered; Kitchener was rewarded by being made Baron Kitchener of Khartoum
  • 1898: Winston Churchill published his first book, aged 24

Chapter 41: The Fashoda Crisis (September to November 1898)

  • The Fashoda Crisis was the biggest international crisis since 1878. The intrepid Captain Marchand of the French army marched across the Sahara and planted the French flag at the abandoned mud-brick fort on the banks of the White Nile named Fashoda. A week later General Kitchener, fresh from the victory of Omdurman, arrived with his army and insisted that Fashoda, like all of the Sudan, belonged to Britain. There was a real risk Britain and France would go to war. Salisbury wasn’t fussed about places in mosquito-ridden West Africa (about which we signed Conventions with France) but was insistent that British control of the Nile valley was a sacrosanct principle of British foreign policy
  • France was being disputatious over colonies around the world including Siam (Thailand), Tunis, Madagascar, Niger; ‘They [the French] are so unreasonable and have so much incurable hatred of England’ (p.480)
  • It’s worth remembering how rubbish France was; a century of revolutions, not least the 1871 Commune, had left its society riven by religious and class hatred which had been revived by the bitter Dreyfus Affair – Émile Zola published his famous letter ‘J’Accuse…!’ on 13 January 1898 – and France was on her seventh government since 1893; that’s why its governments and ruling class were so touchy about Britain’s apparently effortless superiority; that’s why populist press and politicians whipped up patriotic feeling against Britain – to try to paper over the large cracks in French society
  • The Marchand expedition: the impressive achievement of Captain Marchand who led 20 French officers and NCOs and 130 French Senegalese over 2,000 miles on a 24-month trek on foot and by boat from Loango at the mouth of the Congo to the Nile
  • When Kitchener met up with Marchand at Fashoda the two men raised their respective flags, denied each other’s right to occupy it, then settled down into a cordial friendship while they let the politicians back in Europe sort things out
  • Parisian politics: the British ambassador worried that war fever was running so high there might be a military coup in Paris led by generals who would use a war with Britain to smother the ongoing Dreyfus scandal; while her populist press ranted for war, ministers were uneasily aware of Germany’s ongoing animosity, and when the Tsar explicitly proclaimed the Franco-Russian entente didn’t apply outside Europe France’s position got steadily weaker; the French government looked like collapsing (again)
  • Triumph: realising they couldn’t win, the French backed down, covering their pusillanimity with vaunting rhetoric; Marchand was ordered to make his way to the Red Sea through Abyssinia (he didn’t have enough provisions to return the way he’d come and returning down the Nile under British supervision would have been humiliated)
  • In February 1899 a Convention was signed with a new French ambassador laying out clear demarcation between the zone of French influence in west Africa and the Maghreb, giving Britain exclusive influence over Egypt and Sudan

Chapter 42: The Outbreak of the Boer War (December 1898 to October 1899)

  • grossly overweight Salisbury had a tricycle with raised handlebars made for him and cycle paths laid out in the grounds of Hatfield House
  • like many grandees back in London, Salisbury had a low opinion of the Boers who he had met on his travels 30 years earlier and thought rough, ignorant slave drivers of the native Africans;

Background: Britain had annexed the Cape Colony, the band of territory right at the bottom of Africa, with the results that the Boer population, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, undertook their ‘Great Trek’ into the interior and set up what developed into two states, the Orange Free State and, to its north, the much larger Transvaal, so called because it was on the other side of the River Vaal. Their descendants called themselves the voortrekkers.

In the 1880s diamonds and gold were discovered which promised to make the Boer government rich. In 1882 the Boers elected as president Paul Kruger, a hard-core, unrepentant Boer nationalist.

The issue was that tens of thousands of migrants had moved into the Transvaal, to work in the ever-growing mines. The Boers referred to them as ‘Uitlanders’ and subjected them to an array of discriminatory laws: they were heavily taxed but in return had worse schools, poor accommodation, were subject to high prices, police brutality, arbitrary arrest, biased legal decisions, censorship of the press and so on. Above all, although they paid taxes, they were forbidden from voting. In Roberts’ opinion the Boers ran little less than ‘a tight, tough, quasi police state’ (p.717). Most of these Uitlanders were ‘freeborn’ Britons so that when the British Uitlanders petitioned the Queen to intervene on their behalf, the war party could claim that lack of help undermined the prestige and authority of Britons throughout her empire.

So British men of the war party, such as Cecil Rhodes, Joe Chamberlain and Lord Milner, kept up a steady barrage of propaganda back to their masters in London, claiming the Boers subjected their black workers to slave-like tyranny, were backward and uneducated, were liable to declare war on friendly black tribes, as well as all the injustices meted out to the Uitlanders.

The fundamental argument was that the ongoing existence of two troublesome, unjust, unpredictable colonies disturbed Britain’s settled rule in South Africa and would only get worse. The war party argued that conflict was inevitable, and so helped to create the expectation, in Parliament and the press, for war. Milner sent Salisbury a note comparing the British workers were treated like ‘helots’ (p.721), Salisbury said they were treated like serfs.

The Boer view was it was their country which they had founded by the sweat of their brows in the face of native reprisals, and that they had their own, highly puritanical ultra-protestant belief and culture, all of which were being swamped by tens of thousands of incomers, and also by the booming immigrant population in the Cape. In other words, they felt their entire identity and heritage was being threatened (p.726).

  • Sir Alfred Milner: High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, was instructed to negotiate better rights for Britons at the so-called Bloemfontein Conference, but found Kruger unmoveable and called him ‘a frock-coated neanderthal’ (p.722)
  • Appeasing Germany: Britain and Germany had been haggling about possession of the islands of Samoa; Salisbury didn’t care tuppence about Samoa so happily gave them all to Germany with a view to mollifying the ever-aggrieved Kaiser
  • Lady Salisbury’s illness: she suffered a stroke and showed signs of dementia, partly distracting Salisbury from his duties; you wonder whether Roberts inserts this as an extenuating factor, softening Salisbury’s responsibility for the war
  • Exasperation with the Transvaal: Kruger offers to give Uitlanders the vote once they had been resident for 7 years, plus guaranteed seats in the small Transvaal parliament; some in the cabinet thought the crisis was over
  • (The Aliens Bill: Roberts points out that at the same time as Salisbury et al were supporting unlimited emigration to the Cape and were compelling it on the Boers, his cabinet passed an Aliens Bill designed to severely restrict immigration into Britain; this was to address the flood of Jewish immigrants who were fleeing antisemitic pogroms in Poland and Russia)
  • Both sides arm: British intelligence reported that both the Transvaal and Orange Free State were buying arms in Europe and importing it via Delagoa Bay, the major port right at the bottom of Mozambique, only 30 or so miles from the border with Transvaal (p.724); for their part the British government moved troops into Natal
  • The Smuts Proposals: Transvaal’s Attorney General Jan Smuts contacts the ambassador to make a series of proposals which represent significant concessions around offering Uitlanders the vote and representation in parliament, but premised on the Transvaal remaining independent and outside British suzerainty
  • The Boer Ultimatum: the British government ramped the pressure up on the Boers, with a series of demands which the Boers, initially, acceded to; so it was a surprise when it was the Boers who issued the set of demands or ultimatum which finally triggered the conflict, setting out a list of demands which must be met by 5pm on Wednesday 11 October

Chapter 43: ‘The Possibilities of Defeat’ (October 1899 to May 1900)

I was wrong about Roberts mentioning Lady Salisbury’s illness in a bid to exonerate his hero because he does the opposite; he heavily blames Salisbury for the Boer War. He cites AJP Taylor who apparently said that Milner dragged Chamberlain who dragged Salisbury into the conflict – but in order to flatly contradict him (Taylor).

No, Salisbury had masterminded British foreign policy for over a decade, was a master of far-seeing strategy; he personally approved every dispatch sent to the Boers, and Roberts cites memos and messages between the key ministers which show Salisbury approving the escalation of Britain’s demands, approving the sending of troops to Natal, and manipulating the presentation of the issues so as to ensure the casus belli (cause of war) was one which would rouse and unite the widest number of the population, or politicians and the press (p.736).

Salisbury should have known better. He should have accepted Kruger’s very fair offers to address the issue of the Uitlanders and worked to extend British suzerainty slowly, by economic means maybe. He should have thought of a clever solution.

Instead he let himself and the British government be painted into a corner where the only two options were fight or have British prestige around the world undermined (p.734). This was an epic failure of statecraft. It was Salisbury’s war and, although he proved remarkably phlegmatic about its initial reverses (so-called ‘Black Week’, Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December, when the British Army suffered three devastating defeats) its length, bitterness, cost, the way it divided the nation, the enmity it raised in the other Powers, especially Germany, and the sheer cost of death and misery, all are down to Salisbury.

As Britain’s powerful and long-serving Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Salisbury must bear overall responsibility for the situation. (p.732)

Moreover, it was entirely his responsibility that the War Office and the British Army were so poorly prepared to fight such a war (p.756).

  • The death of Lady Salisbury: Salisbury was devastated and never the same again
  • ‘Black week’: Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December (p.749): the British army began its war the same way it had begun every one since Waterloo, led by useless generals to a series of disastrous defeats
  • A peace offer: the presidents of the two Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) offered peace, so long as they retained sovereignty, which Salisbury contemptuously refused, claiming they had started the war
  • In the first weeks of the war the Boers surrounded and besieged three major towns, Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The military turning point probably came when Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February 1900 but the psychological breakthrough came with the relief of Mafeking on 17 May 1900 after 217 days (p.761) though not before 478 people had died of starvation

Chapter 44: Resolution (May to October 1900)

  • Curzon: Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy in India but was obsessed with the idea that Russia was extending its influence into Persia and that we must fight back; Salisbury put up with Curzon’s criticisms but complained that he spoke as if Salisbury had an army of 500,000 at his back (as the Czar did) when a) there weren’t that many British troops in the whole world and b) the most active forces were tied up in South Africa
  • The Boxer Rebellion: see my review of The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
  • On 3 September General Frederick Roberts formally annexed the Transvaal
  • Social policy: Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain bombarded Salisbury with proposals for social reform bills almost all of which Salisbury managed to reject; they did manage:
    • 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act
    • 1899 Small Dwellings Acquisition Act
  • The ‘Khaki’ election: held between 26 September and 24 October 1900, when popular opinion believed the Boer War was won, the Boer president Kruger had fled to Holland and all their regular forces had surrendered; result: the Conservative and Liberal Unionist Party 402, Liberal Party 183
  • The Unionist alliance: a short review of the effectiveness of Salisbury’s coalition of Conservatives with Liberal Unionists; Chamberlain said he was treated with more respect as a Liberal Unionist in a Conservative cabinet than he had been as a Radical in Gladstone’s Liberal cabinet

Chapter 45: Reconstruction (October 1900 to January 1901)

The ‘Hotel Cecil’: Salisbury handed out so many official positions to members of his extended family that he prompted widespread accusations of nepotism and croneyism (pages 789 to 790), something he himself acknowledged (p.825). Conservative MP Sir George C. T. Bartley wrote to Salisbury in 1898 complaining that in the Tory Party:

‘all honours, emoluments and places are reserved for the friends and relations of the favoured few’ (p.788)

It says it all that, when he finally resigned as Prime Minister, on 11 July 1902, he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.

The death of Queen Victoria: they had become very close, and even if they disagreed, the Queen was always a fixed point of reference to navigate by, so Salisbury took her sudden death (on 22 January 1901) very hard. Late in her life her eyesight was failing and notes to her had to be written in letters one inch high, often only ten words to a page. In return she sent replies written in a handwriting which had become so indecipherable that special experts were called on to explicate it (p.794).

What this kind of anecdote displays is not so much something about Victoria, but about Roberts and the kind of book he wants to write, namely popular, unacademic, accessible, strewn with humorous anecdotes and so, very readable.

Chapter 46: ‘Methods of Barbarism’ (January to December 1901)

  • King Edward VII: Salisbury had had some professional encounters with the new king, when they sat on committees, but he generally ignored his suggestions and limited what government papers he saw; but to his own surprise they quickly formed an effective working relationship
  • The Boer War, the second phase: the main fighting ended but the Boers upset everyone by mounting a scattered guerrilla war; when you consider that they were fighting for the land they had settled and called their own, for land they and their forefathers had worked for generations, it’s entirely understandable
  • Anglo-German relations: after victory in the Khaki election of 1900, Salisbury reshuffled his cabinet but the biggest change was him giving into cabinet pressure and relinquishing the dual role he had had of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; he was replaced by Lord Lansdowne, a Liberal Unionist, who had had a poor reputation at the War Office (but then, everyone did); Lansdowne’s arrival marked a break with what had come to be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as Salisbury’s policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ i.e. refusing to commit to alliances with any of the major European Powers (France, Germany, Austria, Russia)
  • The concentration camps: Roberts seeks to set the record straight: the concentration camp was not invented by the British but by the Spanish in the war against America 2 years earlier; the camps came about because thousands of Boer women and children, left undefended when their men went off to join commando unit, were at the mercy of the Blacks and/or unable to fend for themselves; plus the deliberate British policy of deliberately burning homesteads anywhere near where a commando attack took place rendered them homeless; but the British were completely unprepared for the scale of the immigration and coralling all underfed people in barbed wire encampments quickly led to the spread of epidemic disease; at their peak the numerous camps held some 118,000 white and 43,000 coloured inmates; the Royal Army Medical Corps had planned to serve 40,000 soldiers – in the event they had to cater to 200,000 soldiers and over 200,000 refugees; some 20,000 women and children died (4,000 adults, 16,000 women); these were obviously not extermination camps like the Nazi ones, but British incompetence led to a holocaust of innocents which is held against us to this day; Roberts lists all the possible extenuating circumstances (a handy list) but is robust regarding his hero: Salisbury ‘must bear the ultimate responsibility for what happened’ (p.806) campaigner Emma Hobhouse blamed it on ‘crass male ignorance’ i.e of the hygiene and accommodation required by women and children

It’s worth pointing out that even in Roberts’s broadly sympathetic account, Salisbury, as I understand it, habituates himself to lying about the causes of the war; its origins were all about redressing the injustices suffered by the Uitlanders; once the fighting started, some Boer units mounted incursions over the border into the Cape Colony; and this allowed Salisbury to completely change his rhetoric and claim that the British were acting in self defence against a dastardly invasion. He took to repeating this in public speeches, in private correspondence and diplomatic replies to the Powers, for example in a note to the new king, advising him how to reply to a personal communication from Tsar Nicholas:

‘The war was begun and elaborately prepared for many previous years by the Boers and was unprovoked by any single act of England’ (p.808)

Obviously, he is presenting the strongest, most unambiguous case possible to one of the great Powers, and during a time of war but it was a line he peddled in a variety of contexts, including private correspondence. Here he is writing to his son:

‘This unhappy war has lasted much longer than we expected…but I have no doubt that it was forced upon us and that we had no choice in regard to it.’ (p.810)

This strikes me as being a very Big Lie. Moreover, if Salisbury and his ilk based their claim to rule the country on the idea that they represented a disinterested values of honour and legality, then bare-faced lies and distortions like this undermined that claim, and showed them up to be just another special interest group protecting their own interests (and grotesque mistakes).

The cost of the Boer War

Salisbury spent a lifetime castigating the Liberals for the costs of their policies and claimed to run a fiscally responsible administration. Roberts shows how the Boer War blew that claim out of the water. It ended up costing some £223 million, led to increases in income and other taxes, and a vast increase in government borrowing. Salisbury left his successor (Balfour) a fiscal disaster.

  • The Taff Vale judgement: on 22 July 1901 the House of Lords handed down a judgement that a trade union could be sued (by employers who suffered from a strike). Superficially a victory for the forces of Reaction, this decision single-handedly galvanised working class movements and activists to realise they needed organised representation in Parliament and led to the setting up of the Labour Party.

Chapter 47: A Weary Victory (January 1902 to August 1903)

  • The Anglo-Japanese alliance: 30 January 1902 Britain departed the splendid isolation she had enjoyed for decades by making a defensive pact with Japan to last 5 years; this was to counter relentless Russian expansion into decaying China and the worry that the Russian and French fleets combined outnumbered the British one and so could, potentially, disrupt Britain’s Pacific trade
  • Coronation honours: Salisbury strongly opposed some of the names the new King Edward put forward for his coronation honours, particularly Thomas Lipton who he thought entirely unworthy of entering the House of Lords
  • The Education Bill: English education policy was stymied because the core of the system was so-called Voluntary schools which were run by the Church of England and taught Anglican religion; many of these schools were poorly funded and so Salisbury wanted to give them government support; however, ratepayers from other religions, some Catholic but many non-conformists, refused to pay rates if they were going to support their children being taught a different religion; the solution was, obviously, to increase the provision of non-denominational state schools but Salisbury blocked this because a) of his deep attachment to defending the Church of England and b) because of his scepticism about teaching the children of the working classes, anyway; Roberts digs up some scandalous comments from his journalism period, in which Salisbury says what’s the point of educating working class kids if they’re just going to return to the plough or the factory; this was not only a scandalously snobbish, privileged point of view, but economically stupid; while Britain wasted a huge amount of political time and money fussing about these issues, the Germans and Americans were instituting practical educational systems appropriate to the needs of a modern industrial economy i.e. technical and engineering apprenticeships and colleges; Salisbury embodied the kind of ‘principled’ and ‘honourable’ Reaction which condemned Britain to slow economic decline
  • Peace at Vereeniging: 31 May, after prolonged negotiations, a peace was signed ending the Boer War; Milner had wanted to fight on until every Boer combatant was killed but head of the army Kitchener thought enough had been done, a difference of opinion reflected in fierce arguments in the cabinet; the treaty terms were surprisingly lenient, amnestying most Boer fighters and letting them return to their farms (the ones that hadn’t been burned down) and families (the ones who hadn’t died in the British camps)
  • Retirement: Salisbury had said he would go when the war ended; with his wife dead and Queen Victoria dead and the war over, he began to feel his age and infirmities, nodding off in cabinet meetings;

‘I thought I had much better resign and get out of the way; especially as, since the death of the last Queen, politics have lost their zest for me.’ (p.829)

  • Salisbury prepared the way for his retirement with his cabinet colleagues; he rejected the plan to have his nephew, Balfour, replace him on the same day as smacking too much nepotism; and went to see the King to hand over the seals of office on 11 July 1902; the King was prepared for the visit and handed him the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; within 24 hours his nephew was appointed Prime Minister, to much mocking from the Liberal and Irish Nationalist benches; allegedly, this is the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’, though that is disputed; Balfour found it difficult to fill his uncle’s giant shoes, the coalition began losing by-elections, and was eventually massacred in the landslide Liberal victory at the 1906 election
  • Death: he went steadily downhill after retiring, suffering a series of ailments (ulcers, kidney problems) then a heart attack which led to the final decline and he died on 22 August 1903

The legacy

What an enormous biography this is, overflowing with facts and insights, completely achieving its goal of persuading the reader that Salisbury was one of the titans of the Victorian age. Roberts makes a sustained case for his hero but the more he defends him, the more negative the final impression one has, of a big reactionary buffalo who set his face against all change in any aspect of British society, and solidly, intransigently in defence of his class, the landed aristocracy, its wealth, privileges and power.

The nature of the Conservative Party

‘Hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of conservatism.’

‘The use of Conservatism is to delay changes till they become harmless.’ (writing to Lady Raleigh after the 1892 election defeat; p.841)

Salisbury engaged in a lifelong struggle against what he saw as the forces of atheism and political progressivism, becoming a master of patient obstructionism. (p.841)

The Conservative Party opposed the extension of the franchise, votes for women, reform of the voting system, home rule let alone independence for Ireland or any of the other colonies, opposed trade unions and workers’ rights, opposed universal education, opposed old age pensions, opposed the welfare state, opposed the National Health System, opposed the abolition of the death penalty, equal rights for women, gay liberation, opposed the expansion of universities and every new artistic movement for the past 200 years. In other words, the Conservative Party opposed every political measure and social achievement which most modern people would describe the hallmarks of a civilised society. They defended the privileges of the aristocracy and the bigoted Church of England, hanging, fox hunting, the brutal administration of Britain’s colonies, and corrupt nepotism. In international affairs they gave us the Boer War, Munich and the Suez Crisis. In every argument, on every issue, they have been the enemy of enlightenment, peace and civilisation.

And what kind of people are attracted to this small-minded, snobbish, xenophobic party of reaction? Admittedly he was writing in a private letter to the Radical Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain, but in 1900 Salisbury described the Conservative Party as:

‘a party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.’ (p.800)

Roberts reports this all quite candidly. It’s for the reader to decide how much this description still applies to the Conservative Party of today.

No policies

To explain, or put the case for the defence, Salisbury’s was a strong disbeliever in theories, manifestos and policies. He distrusted all such claptrap. He despised continental philosophy and was proud of being a philistine in the arts. 1) He thought general theories (such as everything the Liberals espoused) led to unintended consequences, and tended to overthrow the established practices he was so attached to (see the French Revolution, proclaiming brotherhood and ending in tyranny). And 2) he thought a politician needed to be free of pre-commitments in order to react to each issue or crisis as it arose, with the maximum of flexibility, without having his hands tied by promises made to get elected years previously. Epitome of pragmatism.

‘I believe that freedom from the self-imposed trammels of particular theories is necessary if you want to deal with the world as it is.’ (p.475)

He could barely be persuaded to issue any kind of manifesto or platform before the general elections he fought. He thought it sufficed to say the government of the country would be in safe, conservative hands.

Foreign policy

The case is stronger for Salisbury’s foreign policy. Here his dislike of prior commitments was (arguably) a virtue, as it led him to reject every suggestion by his cabinet colleagues to form alliances with this or that of the Powers (France, Germany, Austria or Russia). The central portion of the book makes it clear that this was important as it allowed Salisbury maximum freedom of manoeuvre in handling the many crises which kept coming up, especially in the decaying Ottoman Empire. In fact the major learning from the diplomacy of the 1880s and 90s was how close Europe repeatedly came to a general conflagration, and Roberts shows that Salisbury’s adept diplomacy often prevented that coming about.

Roberts calls the period from Salisbury’s becoming Foreign Secretary to his retirement the Pax Saliburiana. On the face of it the Boer War is a massive, disastrous stain on that claim but from Salisbury’s point of view the single most important thing about it was that none of the major Powers got involved. They complained but the crisis didn’t trigger a general European war.

Same with the Scramble for Africa. In most modern books this is viewed from a woke perspective as a scandal, a historic crime. But seen in context, the thing is not that Africa was arbitrarily carved up with no consultation of the people who lived there, but that none of the potential conflicts between the Powers led to actual war. At the back of his mind was fear of a vast European conflict and he was 100% successful in avoiding this. As Roberts pithily puts it, one of the most remarkable things about the First World War was not that it occurred, but that it didn’t break out earlier.

Everything changed as soon as he retired, and the Entente Cordiale of 1904, far from securing Britain’s security and the peace of Europe, was just the first of the web of alliances which was to plunge Europe into the catastrophic World War ten years later. Would the war have occurred if Britain had stuck to Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation? Discuss.

Salisbury sayings

‘I was delighted to see you had run Wilfred Blunt in. The great heart of the people always chuckles when a gentleman gets into the clutches of the law.’ (p.448)

The Pope is ‘to be looked upon in the light of a big gun, to be kept in good order and turned the right way.’ (p.449)

‘Always tell the Queen everything.’ (p.515)

Salisbury cynicism

Salisbury was brutally honest about imperialism. He didn’t waste his time with fancy ideas of civilising and morality and whatnot. He really disliked colonial adventurers and chancers. He saw imperialism as an extension of the precarious balance of power between the ‘powers’ or main countries of Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia). Thus he was under no illusion that empire was anything other than the imposition of force to maintain Britain’s interests. Thus Egypt and Sudan had to be held in order to secure the Suez Canal as the conduit to India (p.519), whereas he frankly rubbished the fantasy the fantasy of Cecil Rhodes and the Jingoists of building a railway running from Cairo to the Cape without leaving British territory (p.534).

Thus Britain installed a new pliable ruler of Zanzibar who was installed:

as soon as British warships had bombarded the palace and ousted the pretender. (p.52)

Overthrowing the Ottoman Sultan for a more biddable alternative; overthrowing the king of Burma; overthrowing the Khedive of Egypt; overthrowing the Amir of Afghanistan; overthrowing the heir to the Zanzibar throne, and so it goes on, Britain bringing ‘civilisation’ to the rest of the world and then lecturing everyone about rights and duties and law and honour. No wonder the French despised the British establishment for its deep-dyed hypocrisy.

Imperialism

Poor Lord Curzon saw all his grand schemes for India and beyond (winning influence in Persia, building railways lines across the Middle East) stymied by Salisbury’s basic principle of not alienating Russia and then, when the Boer War drained Britain’s finances, by chronic lack of money. In one of his many letters to Curzon Salisbury gives a (maybe exaggerated) insight into imperial policy earlier in the century:

‘In the last generation we did much what we liked in the East by force or threats, by squadrons and tall talk. But we now have “allies” – French, German, Russian: and the day of free, individual, coercive action is almost passed by. For years to come, Eastern advance must depend largely on payment: and I fear that in this race England will seldom win.’ (p.809)

Salisbury was always gloomy about the present, but this suggests the interesting idea that the empire was created during a unique ‘window’ when force and bluster won huge territories but, by 1900, that era had ended. (Cf taking colonies by force, p.511)

Manipulating the legal system

One of the things that comes across powerfully is the way the ruling class of all flavours (Tory, Liberal, Liberal Unionist) blithely manipulated the legal system, throwing their weight behind prosecutions or releasing individuals early, as it suited them, for example, releasing Irish MP John Dillon early from prison because he was ill, to ensure he didn’t die behind bars and become a martyr (p.451). In the case of the Cleveland Street scandal, Roberts casually mentions that his hero ‘technically’ conspired to pervert the course of justice and committed misprision of a felony, but he did it in a good cause so that’s alright (p.546).

The rotten ‘honours’ system

And the way politicians treated the ‘honours’ system as a simple set of partisan rewards. There was absolutely nothing ‘honourable’ about them, as there isn’t to this day. ‘Honours’ were used to reward loyal service to the government or big financial donors or, frequently, to get rid of unwanted colleagues, ‘kicking them upstairs’ to the House of Lords. Talking of the Liberal Unionists, Robert remarks:

although they refused the rewards of office Salisbury ensured that they were liberally sprayed by the fountain of honours. (p.427)

Home Secretary Henry Matthews was considered to have performed badly during the Jack the Ripper crisis (3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891):

and in 1895 he was awarded a viscountcy as a consolation for not being asked to return to office. (p.507)

The Duke of Beaufort, an important Tory magnate:

corresponded with Salisbury over twenty-five years on the usual aristocratic subjects of cadging arch-deaconries for friends, baronetcies for neighbours and honours for the mayors of towns on his estate. (p.546)

The only reason the Lord Mayor was keen on the visit of Kaiser William was that he thought ‘he might cadge a baronetcy out of it’ (p.555). In 1890 some Tories planned to lure the Liberal Lord Bernard over to their party with the offer of an earldom (p.569). Salisbury himself turned down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom not once but twice, but allowed his son (already Lord Cranbrook) to be raised from a viscount to an earl (p.579).

When forming his 1895 cabinet Salisbury did not appoint Henry Holland, Lord Knutsford, and so gave him a ‘consolation’ viscountcy; Matthews was no reappointed but made Viscount Llandaff; Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wasn’t given a job, but ‘picked up a consolation knighthood’ (p.602).

Thomas Lipton the tea magnate brown-nosed the queen by donating a huge £25,000 to the Princess of Wales’s project to give London’s poor a banquet at the Diamond Jubilee. Salisbury considered him ‘worthless’ (p.796) but he was a friend of the Prince of Wales and so ‘duly received his knighthood the next year’ (p.661). Basically, you can buy these ‘honours’ if you pay enough and put in enough brown-nosing.

Salisbury despised ‘the rage for distinctions’ but used it as cynically as any other prime minister (pages 668 to 673). In fact in the 6 months of his short caretaker government, he doled out no fewer than 13 peerages, 17 baronetcies, and 23 privy councillors. As Roberts says, not a bad haul for party hacks the party faithful (p.670).

The man more responsible than anybody else for the self-defeating fiasco of the Boer War, Lord Milner, was, of course, given a barony as reward (p.800). Then, as now, colossal failure was rewarded by corrupt politicians.

(Roberts uses the verb ‘cadge’ so many times to describe pushy officials grubbing for honours that I looked it up. ‘Cadge’ is defined, formally, as: ‘to ask for or obtain something to which one is not strictly entitled’, less formally as: ‘to get (food, money, etc) by sponging or begging.’ So you can think of all those Victorians jostling and bothering the Prime Minister for honours as well-heeled beggars and pompous spongers.)

The endless queue of people in the worlds of politics, the church or local government relentlessly pestering him for awards and honours made Salisbury’s view of human nature even more cynical and jaded:

‘Directly a man has satisfied his most elementary material wants, the first aspiration of his amiable heart is for the privilege of being able to look down upon his neighbours.’ (p.668)

And yet he continued to hand them out like smarties, as politicians have continued to do right down to the present day.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on August 23, 2023

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The African War 46 BC

Context

After the death of Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) in September 48 BC, forces loyal to his cause (the ‘Pompeians’) rallied in north Africa (modern-day Tunisia). They were given support by King Juba of Numidia.

Caesar, arriving back in Rome from the East (whose pacification, starting in Egypt, moving through Syria and into Turkey, are described in The Alexandrine War), quelled a mutiny in Campania. He took steps to relieve debtors. Loyal followers were given rewards i.e. governorships and priesthoods. Some were enrolled in the senate to fill gaps. Repentant Pompeians were forgiven i.e. there was no bloodbath as under the dictators earlier in the century, Sulla or Marius.

At the very end of 47 BC Caesar was elected consul and sailed to Africa to defeat this last holdout of Pompeians. The Pompeian forces were led by Quintus Caecilius Metellus Scipio, along with Titus Labienus, Publius Attius Varus, Lucius Afranius, Marcus Petreius and the brothers Sextus and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey’s sons). They key port of Utica was held by Caesar’s old foe, Cato the Younger and the Pompeians had a key ally in King Juba I of Numidia.

The African War consists of 98 ‘chapters’ taking up 48 pages of a Penguin paperback.

The African War

Map of the Roman province of Africa showing the towns and cities mentioned in the text

1 to 6: Arrival

Caesar assembles an army from different contingents at Lilybaeum, a port on Sicily. Leaving a Caesarian governor in place, he embarks and sails for Africa. The crossing takes three days and his ships are scattered by winds.

3 to 6: Arrival at Hadrumetum, an important port 50 miles down the Tunisian coast from the ruins of Carthage. Its commandant Caius Considius Longus refuses to negotiate. Caesar sends a prisoner with a message. When Considius asks who it’s from, the messenger replies ‘From the commander-in‑chief, Caesar.’ Then Considius retorted: ‘There is but one commander-in‑chief of the Roman people at the moment, namely Scipio’ and has the messenger executed in front of him.

Caesar rides round the walls and lands his 3,000 or so infantry but rather than lay a siege, knowing other Pompeian forces (Gnaius Piso with 3,000 Moorish troops) are approaching, Caesar makes a fighting withdrawal to Ruspina. Meaning that he had barely left his makeshift camp before Numidian cavalry mount a surprise attack and threaten to overwhelm his rearguard until he sends in Gaulish cavalry, who rout him. But for the entire march his rearguard is subject to lightning attacks.

7 to 19: Operations near Ruspina

Caesar advances to Leptis which he secures but doesn’t let his cavalry ashore. He sends back to Sicily for reinforcements, sends a contingent to find the transport ships which have gone astray, and another detachment of ships to the island of Cercina, which he hears has a large supply of corn.

Next day he returns to Ruspina. He is waiting for the arrival his missing transports. The enemy, led by Meanwhile the enemy, led by Labienus​ and the two Pacidei, arrive and line up for battle. Caesar deploys his men in a single line with archers in front and cavalry on the wings. Quite quickly Caesar’s force is surrounded and forms into a circle. Labienus rides up and down his front line mocking the Caesarians until one veteran centurion of the Tenth Legion confronts him and throws a spear which transfixes his horse. Caesar turns his legions round and tries to make for the camp but fresh enemy reinforcements arrive. He orders his men to make one last attack and throws his last cohorts into the field, driving the enemy back off the plain, then withdrawing in good order to his own fort

The Penguin edition notes that the historians Dio Cassius and Appian both say this battle was a big defeat, with the Caesarians taking heavy losses and being forced onto a hilltop where they would have been cut to pieces had both Marcus Petreius and Labienus not both been injured.

The account gives Labienus’s reasons for feeling confident, including the rumour that three legions had mutinied back in Rome, listing the mixed forces at his command, then recapping the facts about this battle, namely it was fought on 6 January 46, on the sixth day after Caesar disembarked, on a wide flat plain, from 11 in the morning till sunset.

19 to 36: Waiting at Ruspina

Caesar hears that Scipio is approaching with the main forces (8 legions and 3,000 cavalry (and so builds up the defences at Ruspina, bringing more men from the ships (Gallic and Rhodian rowers and marines, archers of all nations). He sets up smithies to manufacture arrows, javelins and sling shot.

Corn is an issue. The enemy have gathered all there is to collect into strongholds and then laid waste and ravaged the land around.

There’s a kind of interlude or digression in which we are shown Cato (who, it will be remembered, had always been against Caesar and bore some of the responsibility for the civil war by constantly blocking Caesar’s conciliatory offers). Anyway Cato is now in charge of the city of Utica and the text gives us a lengthy speech in which he reminds Pompey’s son, Gnaeus, of his father’s immense military achievements, and encourages him to emulate them. Thus inspired Gnaeus sets off from Utica with 30 ships and a force of 2,000 slaves and freemen to invade the kingdom of Mauretania (to the west of Africa i.e. the coast of modern day Algeria. He is approaching the town of Ascurum when the inhabitants sally forth in force and crush his forces, causing them to flee in panic to their ships, and once embarked they sail all the way to the Balearic Islands.

Meanwhile Scipio leaves Utica and marches via Hadrumetum to join Labienus. The text dwells on Caesar’s shortage of corn and fodder for the horses. Seasoned veterans take to feeding the horses seaweed cleaned in fresh water.

Meanwhile King Juba decides to join the Pompeians and gathers infantry and cavalry to march east and join Scipio. But this leaves his own kingdom undefended, and Bochus, king of West Mauretania, joins with the Roman bankrupt and mercenary Publius Sittius, to attack Juba’s kingdom in the west. They attack Cirta, the richest town in the kingdom. When it refuses to yield, they take it by storm and slaughter the entire population and set about ravaging the land. When Juba hears this he understandably decides he has to defend his own country, and so withdraws his forces from Scipio’s army and returns west, though he leaves 30 elephants.

Some nobles (does this mean Romans of the equites class) come to Caesar, telling him Scipio’s forces are devastating the land and begging him to save them.

Farms were being burned to the ground, fields stripped, herds plundered or butchered, towns and strongholds destroyed and abandoned, and the principal citizens either murdered or held in chains, and their children haled off to slavery on the pretext of being hostages.

Caesar had been planning to winter his troops (it is January) but decides to commence his campaign and sends for reinforcements from Sicily. While Caesar continues fortifying his camp and building causeways to the sea to allow safe disembarkation, a passage is devoted to Scipio’s attempts to train his elephants, difficult beasts.

A digression for the sad story of the Titius brothers who are aboard one of the many troop and transport ships which get scattered en route to Africa, are captured by Pompeian forces, taken before Scipio who has them executed. Why is this tragic little story included?

Cavalry squadrons from both sides skirmish and sometimes talk. Labienus tries to take the town of Leptis which is held by a Caesarian commander. At one point his horse is hit by a javelin from a scorpion and they retreat.

Scipio brings his forces out to face Caesar’s camp every day, with no response, each day becoming more mocking and scornful, till one day he deploys his entire force. Detailed description of how Caesar orders the foragers back inside the camp and deploys a minimum of cavalry but doesn’t offer battle. There’s a page describing Caesar’s motivations and the reason for his confidence which includes the solidity of the camp’s defences and the power of his own reputation. What’s striking about it, though, is its weakness. These are not very effective reasons, and neither is the claim that he didn’t want to win victory over a mere ‘remnants of his enemies’.

This passage lacks the vigour and unstoppable logic of the same kind of thing found in the Gallic Wars i.e. it doesn’t feel at all by Caesar, but very much like an apologist cooking up reasons to defend his actions.

Anyway, Scipio hangs round then withdraws his army into his camp and gives a pep talk. Meanwhile, allegedly, Caesar’s numbers are augmented by a steady stream of Gaelutian deserters. The text claims this is because many of them were done kindness by Marius, to whom they have heard Caesar is kin.

[Caesar’s aunt, Julia, was married to Marius. The editor of the Penguin edition, Jane F. Gardner, speculates that these Gaelutians, or this forebears, had served Marius in the war against Jugurtha, and so had entered into a patron-client relationship with him, which they thought still bound them to his kin, Caesar.]

When they’re Africans, he gives them letters to their kin and sends them back to their territories to recruit.

A little fuss about Acylla. A deputation come from the town and offer Caesar their allegiance and their store of corn so Caesar gratefully sends Gaius Messius to take it, and he arrives just before Considius Longus the Pompeian commander of Hadrumetum.

So this long sequence amounts to Caesar establishing his beachhead and resisting the temptation to battle till he is ready. He sends Gaius Sallustius Crispus to the island of Cercina which he takes without a fight and loads its store of corn aboard ship to be sent to Caesar. And the proconsul Alienus embarks two legions, 800 Gallic cavalry and 1,000 archers and slingers from Sicily and they arrive soon after with Caesar. Two reasons to be cheerful.

Puzzled why Caesar isn’t giving battle or moving about the country, Scipio sends two Gaetulians to pretend to be deserters, find out Caesar’s intentions and report back. In fact once in the presence of Caesar they confess their mission and say they and their countrymen want to desert, and also remember the kindness done them by Caesar’s kinsman Marius. Caesar welcomes them and they are joined by a steady trickle of deserters from Scipio’s legions.

Slow developments: Cato is recruiting more and more forces in Utica; a deputation arrives from Thysdra saying ships with a huge amount of wheat have arrived from Italy; in the west Publius Sittius invades King Juba’s territory and takes a town.

37 to 48: Operations near Uzitta

Instructing the ships to return to Sicily to collect the rest of his army, in the middle of the night of 25 January Caesar strikes camp and moves his army quietly along the coast to an area where a large plain is bounded by a semi-circular ridge.

[I tell you what would be fabulously use in this, the Civil War and the Gallic War – photographs. If the editor/translator had been paid to go out to the locations of these towns or battles and taken photos of the sites. The cumulative effect of all these descriptions is to make you realise how very poor words are at conveying landscape.]

Caesar advances along the ridge taking abandoned forts. The last one is held by Numidians. There is a fight between the cavalry forces. Caesar sent cavalry down into the plain where they massacred some more cavalry, putting Scipio’s forces to flight. A passage reflecting on the bodies of the Gaulish and German dead cavalry and why they had followed Labienus from Gaul.

[One of the subsidiary dramas of the civil war is the way that Labienus went from being Caesar’s right-hand man and most dependable lieutenant in Gaul, to defecting to Pompey at the outbreak of war, and now, commanding the forces directly opposing Caesar in Africa. What were the thoughts of both men about this turn of events?]

Next day Caesar advances his complete army down the ridge, into the foothills and slowly out onto the plain. Scipio advances his army but uses the town of Uzitta as a bulwark for his centre and stops in that position. Caesar realises he can’t fight both an army and storm a town at the same time. After facing each other all day in the African heat, the armies both withdraw and Caesar orders his men to extend their fortifications. Much time spent building camps and fortifications.

The narrative has a habit of cutting away to other developments going on at the same time, and as a result the author deploys the word interim a lot, which Gardner translates as ‘meanwhile’. So:

Meanwhile the Pompeian Considius is still besieging the town of Acylla, held by Gaius Messius. When he hears of Scipio’s cavalry’s defeat (the dead Germans and Gauls) he abandons the siege, burned his corn, spoiled his oil, marched through Juba’s territory to give Scipio some of his forces, then retreated with the rest to hold Hadrumetum.

Caesar is still suffering the problem that troop ships are being blown off course. Several are captured by Pompeian ships. Once contained veteran troops who are brought before Scipio. He very decently offers to spare their lives if they will join him. A centurion of the 14th Legion refuses, says he’s loyal to Caesar, tells Scipio to lay down his arms, and offers to take on Scipio’s strongest cohort with just ten colleagues.

Infuriated, Scipio has the centurion executed on the spot and all the other veterans taken outside the town walls and there tortured to death. Caesar is upset and angry because he had posted lookouts along the coast to spot his ships and they had failed. He has them all dismissed.

Unseasonal weather: rainstorms which flood Caesar’s camp, the men already hard pressed for provisions.

Meanwhile King Juba received a request from Scipio to join him and, leaving a force under Saburra to combat Sittius, marched to join Scipio with 3 legions, 800 cavalry, Numidian riders without bridles, light infantry and 30 elephants. Now there had been much rumour, paranoia and fear among the soldiers about the threat of Juba’s vast forces, but when they lined up with Scipio’s the next morning, the Caesareans were not impressed, all their fears dispelled, and morale restored.

49 to 66: Caesar takes the offensive

Now Scipio has the maximum force available to him battle can’t be far off. Caesar pushes to secure all the forts lining the ridge surrounding the plain, but Labienus beats him to the last in the series. It is reached by going down into a rocky ravine and up the other side and Labienus set an ambush with cavalry hiding behind the heights. But some of Labienus’s men bolted, giving away the plan, so the entire force ends up turning tail and Caesar’s force kills them and occupies the last fort.

Caesar decides to build ‘two containing walls’ across the plain from his main camp to the town of Uzitta. The aim was to protect his flanks as he advanced towards the town and make it easier for the enemy to defect and desert. As usual I found it difficult to envision the position of these walls, and impossible to understand their purpose, and difficult to understand how long walls can be constructed while part of his force stood in front of them skirmishing with barbarian cavalry and light infantry.

That evening, as Caesar is withdrawing his forces to the main camp, the massed forces of Juba, Scipio and Labienus attack and drive Caesar’s cavalry back, but Caesar quickly reverses the direction of march, turns his legions around and they stop and then rout the Pompeians, fighting them back to their camp with much loss of life. Only nightfall prevented Scipio and Labienus falling into his hands, and in the aftermath lots of Pompeian troops defect to Caesar.

Ships carrying the Tenth and Eighth legions arrive. Recalling the disorder and mutiny of some legions in Campania and Sicily, Caesar now assembles the entire army and makes a page-long speech singling out some five officers who have incited mutiny or, in the case of Gaius Avienus, brought over a ship filled entirely with household slaves rather than soldiers – dishonourably discharges them from the army and sends them back to Italy accompanied by just one slave.

Meanwhile the messages Caesar had sent via friendly Gaetulians have borne fruit and the entire people rises up against Juba, who is obliged to withdraw some of his forces from Scipio in order to put down the rebellion.

Caesar’s ‘lines of fortification’ are now complete and he brings up troops and siege engines to attack the defenders of Uzitta. More Gaetulians, specifically about 1,000 cavalry, defect to him.

A digression on Juba’s arrogant behaviour in ordering a Roman officer not to fraternise but worse, ordering Scipio not to wear a red cloak like himself. To think of freeborn Romans taking orders from a barbarian!

Next day Scipio comes out with all his forces yet again. Caesar lines his men up in front of his fortifications and they stand staring at each other. The town is incorporated into Scipio’s line so Caesar is reluctant to attack because, once he’s passed the town, he knows the legions inside it will come out and attack his rear. Impasse.

The text gives a detailed breakdown of the deployment of both forces but, as there is no battle, who really cares. Instead, as Caesar is packing up and withdrawing his army, some of Scipio’s Numidian cavalry attack. Caesar’s Gaetulians respond, counter attack but go too far, across some marshy ground on the battlefield and are quickly surrounded. His cavalry are mauled before making it back to camp as night falls.

Next day dawns and both generals have their soldiers continuing to develop their fortifications.

Caesarian ships arrive and anchor off Leptis. Pompeian Varus attacks them, setting fire to the transports and capturing dome five-bank warships. As soon as he heard this Caesar rode the 6 miles to the harbour, ordering all his ships to meet him there. Alarmed, Varus turned his fleet back towards Hadrumetum; Caesar pursued and captured a quinquereme and trireme. Varus’s fleet makes it into the harbour at Hadrumetum and Caesar can’t follow because of an adverse wind but sets fire to all the transports anchored outside.

In the captured ship are some Roman nobles. Caesar executes on man he had pardoned in Spain, only to have him go join Pompey in Pharsalus, and then come here to serve Varus. Another noble he spared because he honestly claimed to have been taken prisoner and had no time to escape.

Caesar discovered secret underground stores of corn and sent men to fetch them. Learning of this Labienus set an ambush for next time they did it, deploying cavalry and light infantry. Learning of this Caesar lulled him into a false sense of security, then deployed three legions and all his cavalry behind the foraging party. When Labienus attacked the latter, the Caesarian cavalry attacked, when the main body of Labienus’s cavalry came to their help Caesar revealed his three legions and Labienus withdrew.

Next day King Juba had all the Numidians who had fled their posts during the failed ambush crucified.

67 to 78: The Pompeians lose the initiative

Lack of corn prompts Caesar to abandon his camp, burning it, assigning garrisons to the three friendly towns of Leptis, Ruspina and Acylla, setting his ships to blockage Hadrumetum and Thapsus. He marches with the remainder to Aggar, where he establishes a new camp, and goes successfully foraging for food. By ‘foraging’ I take it the text means stealing food from all the inhabitants of the region.

Scipio follows. Caesar captures Zeta, leaves a garrison and is minded to attack Scipio’s forces which are themselves foraging when more legions appear. As he marches back towards Aggar past Scipio’s camp, the latter attacks. Fierce fighting, the Numidian cavalry attacking if he retreats but pulling back if he stands. It takes all night to slowly retreat back to his camp while fighting off the skirmishing Numidians.

The Africans’ tactics of constant skirmishing but retreat as soon as the infantry offer engagement, requires a completely new set of tactics, and so Caesar personally sets about retraining his troops.

How many feet they were to retreat from the enemy; the manner in which they must wheel round upon their adversary; the restricted space in which they must offer him resistance — now doubling forward, now retiring and making feint attacks; and almost the spot from which, and the manner in which they must discharge their missiles — these were the lessons he taught them.

Caesar imports elephants from Italy for his troops and horses to get used to, for the troops to learn the weak spots of and practice throwing untipped javelins at. And has to accustom the legions to this new, sneaky, guileful, tricky opponent.

A deputation from the town of Vaga arrives to ask for Caesar’s protection. Soon after which a refugee arrives to declare that Juba had hastened to the town to stop it being occupied, stormed it, slaughtered the entire population, and abandoned it for his troops to plunder.

On 21 March Caesar holds the traditional purification ceremony of the army. Apparently, this had something to do with marking the start of the campaigning season although, as we’ve seen, Caesar campaigned throughout the winter. Next day he marches to Scipio’s camp and presents his army in battle array, but Scipio doesn’t rise to the bait.

Next day he marches to Sarsura. Labienus attacks the rearguard, capturing many camp followers then attacking the troops themselves, but Caesar had anticipated this and stationed men without baggage in the rear who promptly turned, raised standards, and scared Labienus off.

At Sursura Caesar slaughtered the entire Pompeian garrison. Caesar distributed corn to the army then marched on to Thysdra but finds no water and so retires to Aggar.

The town of Thabena revolts against Juban rule, massacres its garrison and asks for Caesar’s protection, so he sends a detachment to take it. At the same time more troop transports arrive from Italy, some 4,000 infantry, 1,000 slingers, 400 cavalry, so Caesar assembles his force and marches to a plain two miles from Scipio’s camp.

It’s near a town named Tegea. Scipio brings his men out of his camp, deploying them. Time passes. Eventually a cavalry skirmish develops in which both sides send in reinforcements, but Caesar has the best of it, his cavalry pursuing the enemy three miles up into the hills and killing many before returning.

But Caesar can’t get the enemy to fight. He realises two things: that they lack confidence in their own abilities and so are relying on Caesar’s shortage of water to wear him down. And so on 4 April, by night, he left the camp by Aggar and marched 16 miles to Thapsus, which Vergilius was holding with a large garrison.

Scipio follows him and now, according to the narrative, is forced to give battle. Why? ‘To avoid the utter humiliation of losing Vergilius and those most staunch supporters of his cause — the men of Thapsus’.

79 to 86: The battle of Thapsus

Caesar advances to Thapsus and begins to invest the town. Scipio follows and finally encamps 8 miles south. Thapsus is on a promontory with a big salt lake to its south, creating a narrow land corridor. Because Caesar had blocked this Scipio went up and round the western side of the lake.

Map of the battle of Thapsus, 6 April 46 BC

Scipio’s men give signs of agitation behind their fortifications and this incites Caesar’s forces. It’s an oddity of this battle that Caesar does everything in his power and even gets his centurions to try and restrain the men, but then a bugler gives the signal to advance and the cohorts run forward charging, and Caesar gives in to fortune and destiny.

Sling shots terrify the elephants. The Moorish cavalry panics and flees. (Digression to describe the action of one brave legionary who attacks a furious elephant to stop it trampling to death a camp follower.) The garrison of Thapsus emerge from their fortifications and wade through the water to join their comrades but are beaten back by slings and arrows.

The retreating Pompeians arrive at Scipio’s base camp but discover there is no one there to rally them. They run to Juba’s camp to discover it is in enemy hands. The Scipionians drop their arms and beg for mercy but Caesar’s men’s blood is up and they massacre them to a man, despite Caesar’s orders to stop, and even wound eminent nobles and knights on Caesar’s own side.

In the way of these kinds of texts, the casualties are given and seem a) suspiciously round figures and b) ludicrously one sided. Thus, 5,000 of the enemy are killed to Caesar’s 50 dead and a few wounded. He captures 64 elephants. What I want to know is what happened to Scipio, Labienus and Juba who all disappear from the narrative.

(Plutarch, in his life of Caesar, 53, says: ‘Thus in a brief portion of one day he made himself master of three camps [Scipio’s, Juba’s and Afranius’s) and slew fifty thousand of the enemy, without losing as many as fifty of his own men’.)

Next day Caesar lines his whole army up in front of Thapsus and calls on Vergilius to surrender but there is no reply. Next day he gives rewards and praise to the bravest fighters, then leaves a commander to besiege Thapsus and one to besiege Thysdra, while he proceeds to Utica.

87 to 98: Final stages of the campaign

Scipio’s retreating forces arrive at the town of Parada. The people have heard of Caesar’s victory and so refuse the Pompeians entry but the Pompeians storm it, pile up logs in the forum, burn the town’s precious belongings, then tie up townspeople and throw them into the flames.

Cato the Younger was governor of Utica. He didn’t trust either the senate of 300 or so eminent Romans or the townspeople. The latter he forced into a trench in front of the town, the latter he kept under guard. When Scipio’s cavalry arrived they attacked the townspeople in the trench but were beaten off. So instead the cavalry break into the town and plunder and loot it. Cato could only stop them by promising 100 sesterces each, joined by a Roman noble Faustus Sulla, who gave them money, then they rode off west to join King Juba.

Cato assembles the Three Hundred (presumably meaning the town’s senate or leading figures) and persuades them to free their slaves in order to join the defence of the town. Only some comply. Many want to flee, so Cato sets about carefully and methodically putting ships at the disposal of the fleeers. He assigns his children to the care of his questor, then withdraws to his bedroom, where he runs himself through with a sword. When his slaves and friends run in and try to patch him up, Cato pulls at the wound and his guts with his own hands, killing himself. Yuk.

These last acts of his management of the town and suicide are described in detail in Plutarch’s life of Cato. The townspeople opposed him but came to respect his rectitude.

His deputy, Lucius Caesar, opens the town gates and welcomes Caesar’s forces. Caesar marches through the territory picking off towns which now throw themselves open to him, including Usseta and Hadrumetum, finally arriving at Utica as it got dark. Along the way he met and pardoned a suite of Roman nobles who had been holding the town against him.

Next morning Caesar assembled the 300 and upbraided them for opposing him. They were trembling all expecting to die but Caesar forgives them, albeit on the harsh condition that all shall love all their properties, confiscated by the state. If any buy them back, they shall hold their property secure and the fee amount to their fine. He imposed a group fine on the 300 of 200 million sesterces.

King Juba flies west, hiding in farmhouses during the day, till he arrives at the town of Zama. Now he had built a huge pyre here and threatened the people with burning them on it with the result that, no surprisingly, they refuse to let him in. Neither will they hand over his treasure or wife and children so Juba ends up taking refuge with Marcus Petreius in a country villa.

The people of Zama send an envoy to Caesar begging his protection so he sets off. Some of the king’s cavalry officers approach him asking for forgiveness and he forgives them all. This is excellent policy because, as word spreads of his clemency, more and more towns surrender to him and senior officers come over.

Considius, who had been holding Thysdra for the Pompeians, hearing of their defeat at Thapsus, takes treasure and slips out of the town with a small entourage of barbarians. But somewhere along the trail the Gauls cut him down, stole the gold and absconded.

At which point, realising it is all over, Vergilius asks safe conduct for him and his family, then surrenders Thapsus.

King Juba, with no army to command and abandoned by his people, resolves on suicide. There are a number of versions: some say he and Petreius agreed to duel, he easily killed Petreius then stabbed himself; or Petreius killed him then stabbed himself; or they killed each other at the same time; or they both committed suicide.

Meanwhile, in the west, Sittius routed the army of Juba’s general, Saburra, killing the general. Then he heard of the 1,000 cavalry under Faustus Sulla and Afranius, fresh from sacking Utica and being paid off and planning to take ship to Spain, last holdout of the Pompeians. Sittius ambushes them, killing a great number but taking alive Faustus and Afranius. A few days later, in some obscure affray, they were killed. Caesar pardoned their children and let them keep their property.

Scipio, Damasippus, Torquatus and Plaetorius Rustianus were making for Spain aboard warships. After a stormy passage they were carried towards Royal Hippo, where Sittius had his fleet at that time. Outnumbered as they were by the latter, Scipio’s vessels were surrounded and sunk and Scipio and the others all perished. [Other accounts say that, after losing the naval engagement Scipio also committed suicide by stabbing himself with his sword.]

Having entered Juba’s royal town of Zama, Caesar holds an auction of King Juba’s belongings and gives the citizens of Zama rewards for resisting their king. He declared the kingdom a Roman province, appointing Gaius Sallustius proconsul, awarding western Numidia to King Bochus. Sittius founds a colony there. (This Sallustius is the same man who in the late 40s retired from public life and wrote monographs in the Jugurthan War and the Cataline Conspiracy.)

At Utica Caesar sold the property of commanders under Juba and Petreius, imposed fines on the towns which held out against them but took steps to make sure they weren’t plundered. On Leptis he imposes a fine of 3 million pounds of oil a year.

On 13 June Caesar set sail from Utica, arriving at Caralis on Sardinia. Here he punishes the people of Sulci for rebelling against him, then set sail along the coast of Italy and arrived safely back in Rome.

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by Simon on June 17, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 17, 2022

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