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A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)

‘Big man, big palaver’
(The one-eyed thug, Dogo, describing Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga in A Man of the People, page 15)

The Africa trilogy

Achebe’s previous three novels – Things Fall Apart (1958), No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964) – are grouped together under the title of the ‘African Trilogy’. They are all told in the free indirect style, meaning they have an omniscient third-person narrator but that narrator tells everything from the point of view of a central protagonist, at moments entering deep into their minds and thought processes so we see the world from their point of view.

Books 1 and 3 of the trilogy are entirely set within the world and mindset of ‘backward’ ‘primitive’ tribal people from a subset of the Igbo people of south-east Nigeria. Their whole point is to immerse you in the mindset, beliefs and practices of these people and make you understand that they in fact had a deep and rich cultural and spiritual life, complicated customs, laws and processes for managing themselves, most of which were brutally over-ridden with the advent of white Europeans, specifically British imperial administrators.

Book 2 is set in the contemporary world (i.e. around 1957/58) but is also told in the free indirect style, and has the protagonist, Obi Okonkwo, frequently returning to the undeveloped village of his birth and ancestors. It’s also tied into the trilogy because the protagonist, Obi, is the grandson of the central figure of the first book, Okonkwo.

A Man of The People

The point is that A Man of the People marks a significant break with the trilogy. It is still set in Nigeria but it is a) very much the contemporary Nigeria of 1964 and b) above all, it is told in the first person.

It is a first-person narrative told by a young male teacher, Odili Samalu (full name p.23). It is a mazy narrative, punctuated with lots of flashbacks. In these we learn about Odili’s boyhood in the village of Urua, his success at the local school, winning a scholarship to university, his womanising student days, travelling to London to do a post-graduate certificate in teaching, then his decision to take up a teaching post at an out of the way private or grammar school in the town of Anata. He has been teaching there for 18 months (p.8).

Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga

The present part of the narrative kicks off in 1964 when this school is paid a visit by an eminent Nigerian politician and cabinet minister, Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga.

It turns out that Odili has a history with Nanga. Back in 1948 Nanga had been Odili’s teacher in standard three and Odili had been one of his favourite pupils. Then the narrative jumps to 1960 and political events which first disillusioned Odili with his country’s politicians.

A general election was imminent. The world price of coffee had collapsed throwing the Nigerian economy into crisis. The Minister of Finance, Dr Makinde, who had a PhD in Economics presented a well worked out plan for dealing with the public finances which would require cuts to public services. Because of the election, the Prime Minister said no and abruptly sacked not only the Finance Minister but also the majority of the cabinet which had backed him. He instructed the central bank to start printing money, which led to the high rate of inflation which is still dogging the country as the narrative opened. But much worse, he launched fierce attacks on the Finance Minister, calling him and those who backed the plan conspirators and traitors and saboteurs working with foreign powers to undermine the country. Press and radio echoed these cries and ambitious MPs in Parliament joined in, yelping like jackals, like a ‘pack of bench hounds, at their prey.

Odili happened to be in the public gallery of the Parliament when the Prime Minister made this speech and was appalled at the naked greed, the unleashing of public hatred, and lickspittle sycophancy he saw on display. Among the lead jackals baying for a place in the cabinet was the Chief the Honourable N.A. Nanga who Odili is welcoming to his private school.

From the day a few years before when I had left Parliament depressed and aggrieved, I had felt, like so many other educated citizens of our country, that things were going seriously wrong without being able to say just how. We complained about our country’s lack of dynamism and abdication of the leadership to which it was entitled in the continent, or so we thought. We listened to whispers of scandalous deals in high places – sometimes involving sums of money that I for one didn’t believe existed in the country. But there was really no hard kernel of fact to get one’s teeth into. (p.39)

So a central strand of the novel is a portrait of this corrupt politician who embodies everything Achebe thinks is wrong with Nigerian politics in the first few years after independence.

  • he presents himself as a great benefactor of his people, dispensing largesse at every opportunity
  • despite having two wives, Nanga has a mistress (a ‘parlour wife’, p.22) he has appointed to various profitable positions within his portfolio with the result that she is festooned with expensive clothes and accessories
  • he is accompanied everywhere by a journalist writing down his wit and wisdom and feeding positive stories to the press
  • and by an entourage which includes ‘a huge, tough-looking’ security guard
  • full of himself, Nanga has had numerous streets, avenues and so on named after him

And he’s stupid (see below). Nanga invites Odili to look him up next time he’s in the capital (of the region, Bori, not Lagos, capital of Nigeria), saying ‘we must promote clever people like you’ etc.

First Odili goes to visit his father, Hezekiah Samalu, in his home village of Urua. They have an argument because his father is about to marry his fifth wife (Odili’s mother died in childbirth).

With Nanga in the capital

Then Odili takes Nanga up on his invitation, pays a social call on him in Bori and finds himself invited to stay in the minister’s huge mansion, being taken the houses of his fellow cabinet ministers,

What comes across loud and clear is that within a few years of independence all the elements are in place for Nigeria’s decline and fall. Universal corruption. Politics seen as not an opportunity to serve the country but to garner position, power and wealth for yourself, your family and clan. Over indulgence in the trappings of power i.e. big cars, huge houses, every mod con, bodyguards, multiple wives. Extreme rhetoric whereby ministers or authority figures constantly scream about murder, poisoning, conspiracies and so on, and are correspondingly hysterical in their threats of punishment, torture, death and so on. The assumption right from the start that the press is not there to be a free and critical part of the system of checks and balances but a medium of propaganda to be whipped into line.

Achebe is well aware of all this, it’s the issue at the core of the book:

A man who has just come in from the rain and dried his body and put on dry clothes is more reluctant to go out again than another who has been indoors all the time. The trouble with our new nation – as I saw it then lying on that bed – was that none of us had been indoors long enough to be able to say ‘To hell with it’. We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky and hardly ever the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former rulers left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase – the extension of our house – was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house. (p.37)

We see plenty of examples of Nanga creaming off backhanders and bribes which are called ‘dash’. Odili’s own father is more in turn with general opinion than his priggish son:

My father’s attitude to my political activity intrigued me a lot. He was, as I think I have already indicated, the local chairman of P.O.P. in our village, Urua, and so I expected that his house would not contain both of us. But I was quite wrong. He took the view (without expressing it in so many words) that the mainspring of political action was personal gain, a view which, I might say, was much more in line with the general feeling in the country than the high-minded thinking of fellows like Max and I. (p.114)

According to the publisher’s summary on the cover the book is intended to be a comedy (‘a very funny satire’ opines Angus Wilson) but: 1) nothing in any of it made me laugh except for one sentence at the very end (see below), and 2) instead it felt like a grim anticipation of the 60 years since independence during which Nigeria has become one of the most violent, unequal and corrupt places on earth (ranked 150th out of 180 countries for corruption by Transparency International).

Plot summary

Odili is a schoolteacher at a country grammar school. Cabinet minister the Honourable N.A. Nanga comes to address the school. Odili reminds him that he was his teacher back in 1948 and tells him he want to university, then did a PGCE in Britain, before returning to become a teacher. Nanga invites Odili to come and stay with him in his luxurious government mansion in Bori. Here Odili has sex with a white married woman guest of Nanga’s but when he then invites his own girlfriend, Elsie, to stay the night, she prefers to have sex with the chief, prompting Odili to storm out and go and stay with his friend, the lawyer Maxwell Kulamo. Maxwell inducts him into a new political party they’re setting up named the Common People’s Convention (CPC). There’s a meeting of the small steering committee which includes a trade unionist and someone from an Eastern Bloc country, though they’re all careful to emphasise that they’re not communists. Also, none of them are working class i.e. the people. Odili is surprised to learn the party’s backer is a minister in the existing government. At a stroke I guessed he’s encouraging the CPC as part of an internal powerplay. Odili goes back to his town, and pays two visits, one to Chief Nanga’s ‘bush wife’ who is tired and bitter that he’s taking up with a new young parlour wife; and then the young wife-to-be of Nanga, Edna, and her protective greedy father. Odili offers to give Edna a lift on the back of his bicycle to visit her mother in hospital, taking a home-made lunch but like an idiot manages to crash it, spilling all the food in the sandy road and grazing her knee. Ouch. Odili is in a campaign to seduce and sleep with Edna, maybe taking her virginity, in revenge for Nanga bedding Elsie. It’s like a children’s game with women as the winnings.

A corruption scandal blows up and brings down the government. An election is called. Odili announces he is going to contest Nanga’s seat which consists of five villages, including his home village Urua and Nanga’s base, Anata. This is on page 100 of this 150-page book so exactly two-thirds through. He encounters resistance in Anata. The principle of his school, Mr Nwege, sacks him. Like all the characters, Odili can’t behave politely but starts insulting Nwege who is instantly enraged and runs to get his shotgun, so Odili flees (p.102). Everyone is so quick to anger, insult then violence. When Odili tries to gain admission to Edna’s hospital the gateman doesn’t tell him private cars aren’t allowed in but shouts at him ‘like a mad dog’. I don’t see how this is comic. It is symptomatic of the high levels of anger and intemperance throughout the text. They even frighten the protagonist:

I reflected on the depth of resentment and hatred from which such venom came – and for no other reason than that I owned a car, or seemed to own one! It was depressing and quite frightening. (p.104)

He then drives over to Edna’s place and when she lets him in she is petrified that her father, who’s popped out for a poo, will kill him when he returns. She is literally shaking with fear (p.104). And when the father sees Odili, he does, indeed, run to fetch his machete with the aim of hacking him to death. I don’t see how this is funny. They manage to calm him down but as Odili leaves, Edna’s father threatens to beat her. Funny?

The election campaign commences and Odili has to hire bodyguards, a main on, Boniface, a violent thug, and three assistants, plus load up on weapons which eventually included machetes and two shotguns. The youth wing of Nanga supporters carry violent placards and attack his rallies. In his essay ‘The trouble with Nigeria’ Achebe claims it’s the corrupt and badly educated leadership – he says nothing about this resort to anger and violence which characterises every level of public discourse.

Anyway, Chief Nanga drives up in a Cadillac full of bodyguards to Odili’s father’s house and very smoothly converts the father, over a new bottle of whisky describing how abominably his son behaved in abusing his hospitality etc. Then Nanga offers Odili a scholarship for further study plus £250 to pack in his campaign. He’s going to lose anyway, Do what his buddy Maxwell has already done, which is take the money and stand down.

In fact Nanga was lying and the next day max and the rest of the team (a dozen organisers) roll up to help Odili with his campaign bringing a car, a minibus and two new Land Rovers with loudspeakers fitted on the roofs. They hold a rally with Max declaiming through the speakers but the crowd is apathetic and replies with two points: 1) the politicians may be corrupt, but so is almost everybody down to the lowliest council official and storekeeper, so an attack on ‘corruption’ is actually an attack on the very ‘people’ the CPC claims to be standing for, and 2) nobody expects the CPC to be any different, everybody expects them to join the existing political parties, the P.O.P. and P.A.P. on the gravy train (p.125).

Max tells Odili he did take a bribe from his opponent in his constituency (Max and Odili are fighting campaigns in adjoining constituencies), £1,000 from Chief Koko – it’s what paid for the shiny new Land Rovers – but he won’t honour the terms of the deal, he won’t stop campaigning.

Things start to go wrong. Odili’s father is expelled from his party (just to be clear, his dad was a treasurer of the established opposition party the P.O.P.), then tax inspectors came demanding a new, much bigger payment, and could only be persuaded not to arrest him with the payment of a cash bribe (£24). How can Odili, Max and their dozen friends hope to change the embedded practices of an entire society?

Next day the village Crier announces there is only one candidate worth voting for, Chief Nanga. The message is repeated on the radio. A message comes that his father’s expulsion from his party will be reversed if he simply signs a document dissociating himself from his son’s (Odili’s) subversive activities.

A day or two later Nanga holds the inaugural rally of his campaign. Foolishly, Odili decides to attend. He tries to mingle with the crowd but one of Nanga’s creatures spots him and Nanga immediately tells the crowd to seize him. So Odili is manhandled to the front of the crowd and then taken by minders up onto the stage where Nanga reads out the long list of his bad behaviour, treachery and scheming, as the roars of anger get louder. Then Nanga playfully hands the microphone to Odili so the crowd can hear his excuses but he doesn’t get further than ‘I came to tell the people that you are a liar…’ before Nanga slaps him, then lots of other fists are pummeling then something hard feels like it is cracking his skull and he loses consciousness.

When he awakes it is to find he has a cracked skull, a broken arm, and bruises to his groin where he was heartily kicked by Nanga’s henchmen. He is confused for weeks and only slowly finds out he is under arrest for having dangerous weapons in his car (the machetes and shotguns), a car Nanga’s thugs ransacked, turned over and set on fire. In fact the charge was dropped once it was clear Odili wasn’t going to sign his nomination papers to stand as a candidate (he thought he’s already submitted them but they were intercepted by Nanga’s thugs).

Anyway the day of the election comes and goes and Odili is still in bed recovering. When he hears that his good friend Maxwell was killed in his electioneering, in the process of investigating vote rigging, he suffers a relapse. Max was run over as he was getting out of his vehicle by thugs of Chief Koko’s. For some reason Koko is nearby and Max’s girlfriend, Eunice, gets a gun out of her handbag and shoots Koko dead, before she’s arrested.

On election night the gangs assembled by these ruling MPs, Nanga and Koko, get out of control and go on the rampage, attacking markets, burning and looting, which lasts for days.

At first the Prime Minister is re-elected and selects all the cabinet who had been disgraced, including Nanga. Violence continues across the country and he assures foreign investors the country is safe and stable.

Meanwhile, in the love interest part of the story, Edna has been visiting him. Turns out she refused to marry Nanga. Turns out she loves Odili. This is very inconsistent with the scene where she shouted at him to leave her house (?) but it does provide the standard happy ending of the slight comic novel.

When he finally gets out of hospital he and his father go and see Edna’s father to begin a ‘conversation’ about marrying her. Edna’s father says no but then history takes a hand. In the only thing that made me smile in the whole book, I liked the phrasing of:

But the Army obliged us by staging a coup at that point and locking up every member of the Government. The rampaging bands of election thugs had caused so much unrest and dislocation that our young Army officers seized the opportunity to take over. We were told Nanga was arrested trying to escape by canoe dressed like a fisherman. Thereafter we made rapid progress with Edna’s father who, no doubt, saw me then as a bird in hand… (p.147)

So there’s a military coup, the entire existing government is thrown in prison, and Odili ends up with the girl. Happy ending, of sorts.

The final thought of the book is Odili’s complete disillusion with the people of Nigeria, because the day after the coup the entire population, from the loftiest intellectuals to the lowliest latrine cleaners, like the population of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four, completely and absolutely switches its allegiance from the old regime, which it now reviles, to the new one, which it fulsomely praises.

So the novel ends on a note, I thought, of real despair. In his essay The trouble with Nigeria Achebe famously wrote that it’s Nigeria’s main problem has been its appalling leaders. The implication, in fact the explicit conclusion of this book, is that this is not the case. But the real trouble with Nigeria, the last pages of this novel imply, is its people.

Note

I now proceed to say some very blunt things about the stupidity, childishness, ignorance, quickness to anger and swift resort to violence which characterises the world of the novel and, if it is in any way intended as a depiction of his native country, of Nigeria as a whole. I felt nervous doing this but have just finished reading Achebe’s 1983 essay The Trouble with Nigeria and have discovered that everything I comment on is raised and worried over in that essay. In other words, the negative qualities I discuss in the next few sections are aspects of Nigerian life which Achebe himself lamented. In other words, the novel deliberately paints Nigerian political and social life in almost as unflattering light as he could manage, almost as if he wanted to stun his country into reform.

Stupidity

It’s a tactless thing to write but what really comes across from the book is not that Nanga or any of his cabinet colleagues are especially corrupt – they are, of course, but the real take-home is that they’re just stupid, very stupid; stupid, ignorant and uneducated. All Nanga’s charisma and loud-talking makes it easy to forget the surprising fact that he is, as Odili tells us, ‘barely literate’ (p.47). And he was a teacher!

I know the novel is packed with the moral fol-de-rol which GCSE students are told to waste their time writing essays about (‘Was Odili right to do x?’, ‘What options does Edna have in a patriarchal society?’ etc) – but surely the important dynamic is established early on, in that story about the Minister of Finance, who had a PhD in public finance and a sound plan, being sacked and vilified by the Prime Minister and the lickspittle press and replaced by Nanga, who is a loudmouthed ignoramus.

It’s not me imposing this on the text – the young university-educated characters (Odili, Maxwell, Kadabie) themselves comment on the ignorance of their leaders. Here’s Odili’s friend, the lawyer Maxwell:

‘That’s all they care for,’ he said with a solemn face. ‘Women, cars, landed property. But what else can you expect when intelligent people leave politics to illiterates like Chief Nanga?’ (p.76)

And one of the villagers, an elderly man. Max addresses in a campaign rally freely admits the people’s ignorance:

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

Not everyone can go away to university. Hardly anyone gets to go and be educated in Britain. Meanwhile 99% of the population continues illiterate and soaked in its traditional beliefs, namely that the tribal chieftain’s first job is to provide for his people. Out of that venerable, traditional, tribal, people’s assumption comes the corrupt structure of most African countries’ political and economic systems.

Quick to anger

I’ve highlighted the little sequence of characters getting irrationally furious (the hospital gatekeeper, Edna’s father, gangs of Nanga’s supporters). But the protagonist, Odili, is like this, extremely quick to take violent offence. And so is his father. When Nanga visits them at their house in Urua, Odili refuses to put his newspaper down so his father, instantly super enraged, steps towards him as if to hit him (p.115). When Edna’s brother doesn’t immediately go and fetch Edna when he pays her family a visit, Odili immediately starts shouting at the poor boy (p.129). After Edna has given him a good dressing-down, the brother warns Odili that the minder set on her by Nanga will castrate him (Odili) if he finds him there in Edna’s house (p.129). Then, of course, Odili is badly beaten up on Nanga’s campaign stage. And then his friend Max is murdered by his political opponent, Chief Koko.

Can’t everyone just try to calm down and be civil to each other?

Childish

Much of the behaviour of a lot of the characters, comes over as petulant and childish. The narrator is touchy:

‘Hello, Jalio,’ I said, stretching my hand to shake his… He replied hello and took my hand but obviously he did not remember my name and didn’t seem to care particularly. I was very much hurt by this and immediately formed a poor opinion of him and his silly airs. (p.62)

A trait which forms the spine of the plot when he makes his juvenile determination to get his own back on Chief Nanga for sleeping with his girlfriend, by sleeping with his future wife (Edna).

The same tetchy quickness to feel insulted comes over in Nanga’s touchiness about what journalists write about him and his heartfelt wish to muzzle and silence them.

It explains why all the characters’ political ideas are blunt and stupid as a child’s: to acquire more money and power; muzzle the press; intimidate other political parties; throw anyone who disagrees with them in prison. In fact most of the satire is at Odili’s expense because he never has any idea how to run a country or an economy, he has no policies or ideas of any kind except to get his own back on Chief Nanga.

It’s not that it’s corrupt or wicked so much as that it’s childish, a childishly inadequate mentality for running a country.

‘We are ignorant people and we are like children.’ (p.126)

And it’s this childishness, this immature petulance and resentment of any criticism, which the outside world was to hear in the angry speeches of African leaders like Patrice Lumumba, lashing out at the West for not helping him tackled Congo’s chaotic crises, the angry rants of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe or Thabo Mbeki, over the decades to come.

Over-symbolising

This is connected to something else I noticed, which is the way all the characters (the meaningful characters i.e. the men, in this patriarchal narrative) madly over-inflate even the tiniest incident into being symbolic of The State of Nigeria. When Nanga shags Odili’s ‘good-time girl’, the latter delivers a long aggressive diatribe to the startled older man, but what stood out for me is when he says ‘What a country!’ as if one man sleeping with another man’s girlfriend somehow typifies an entire nation.

But that is exactly how the narrator thinks. Everywhere he looks he sees symbols and allegories of Nigeria’s present and portents of its future. It explains his conviction in the novel’s last 30 pages or so that the gimcrack little ‘party’ he and his schoolchum have cobbled together is somehow ‘our society’s only hope of salvation’ (p.128). Similarly, when Edna tells him to buzz off and leave him alone, Odili is immature enough to make it hugely symbolical:

What I felt was sadness—a sadness deep and cool like a well, into which my hopes had fallen; my twin hopes of a beautiful life with Edna and of a new era of cleanliness in the politics of our country. (p.130)

I think it was this incorporation of a supposedly ‘political’ element in the novel which led critics to praise it and give it its status. Yet just having your character constantly worrying that every little event somehow threatens the very future of his country, nay the whole of Africa!! doesn’t really amount to political analysis. The opposite. It makes him sound like any saloon bar bore droning on about the country going to the dogs.

Sex

Odili is highly sexed and lets us know it. He describes his sexual exploits at university. He tells us he slept with his current girlfriend, Elsie, a nurse, within an hour of meeting her. There’s a dinner for some foreign guests of Nanga’s and he ends up sleeping with the white American, Jean. This doesn’t stop him going to see Elsie the next day and trying to sleep with her. He has a role model in his father who has four wives and is about to wed a fifth, thus being able to have sex with any of five women.

And it spills over into Odili’s initially tolerant attitude to Nanga, who has two wives, a mistress, and is expected to have sex with any of his (especially foreign) guests who are up for it – ‘a man who had so many women ready to make themselves available’ (p.60), who has sex with an educated woman lawyer paying her £25 a pop (p.127).

While he stayed in his household, Odili and Nanga ‘swapped many tales of conquest’ (p.59) and the text shares some humorous anecdotes about these sexual ‘conquests’ with us. When Nanga asks about Elsie Odili dismisses her as a ‘good-time girl’ (p.59) i.e. not marriage material. In a taxi with Elsi, Odili throbs with anticipation, Elsie dressed up for a party ‘looks ripe and ready’ (p.68), sex indeed throbs through many of the pages.

This may well be an accurate depiction of a modern (1964) Nigerian young man but it felt like a shame. One of the many appeals of the African trilogy was its tremendous chasteness about sex which was almost never mentioned. Both casual sex and adultery barely seem to have existed in the tribal culture Achebe describes in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God and this is one of the aspects which gives them such a chaste, monumental, timeless aspect, like Homer.

Not so in this novel which throbs with sweaty male sexuality and often feels as seedy and sordid as the nastier Kingsley Amis novels. We learn about ‘ the unsettling effect which imminent fulfilment always has on’ Odili and that his fantasies about Elsie are so intense that one night he had a wet dream so messy he had to change his pyjamas. When Elsie decides to sleep with the rich cabinet minister instead of Odili, the latter goes on a long soulful walk round Bori and calls her a ‘common harlot’ (p.71), all of which feels insufferably childish.

The book cover tells us that Anthony Burgess included A Man of The People in his personal selection of the 99 best novels in English since 1939. To be unfair, maybe this was partly because Achebe had managed to reproduce the casual sexism and political simple-mindedness of a British writer like Kingsley Amis in an African setting.

Pidgin

A pidgin or pidgin language:

is a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people that do not have a language in common. Typically, its vocabulary and grammar are limited and often drawn from several languages…A pidgin is a simplified means of linguistic communication as it is constructed impromptu, or by convention, between individuals or groups of people. A pidgin is not the native language of any speech community, but is instead learned as a second language.

All the African characters in A Man of The People slip into pidgin very easily and have extensive conversations in it:

‘I think I tell you say Chief Nanga de go open book exhibition for six today,’ I said.
‘Book exhibition?’ asked Elsie. ‘How they de make that one again?’
‘My sister, make you de ask them for me-o. I be think say na me one never hear that kind thing before. But they say me na Minister of Culture and as such I suppose to be there. I no fit say no. Wetin be Minister? No be public football? So instead for me to sidon rest for house like other people I de go knack grammar for this hot afternoon. You done see this kind trouble before?’ (p.60)

According to the narrator pidgin has an inbuilt ‘levity’ or lack of seriousness so that merely switching to it lightens the mood or indicates jokiness. Similarly, switching out of it implies a refusal to be jokey or a switch to more serious subject matter (p.87).

I understood occasional words and phrases (this exchange starts out reasonably comprehensible) but almost all of it was impenetrable to me and so I ended up skipping all the dialogue in pidgin.

Beyond the novel

In case you think my judgements on the worldview and political and cultural situation depicted by the novel are harsh, here are some excerpts from Martin Meredith’s book The State of Africa (2011), from his chapter describing the build-up to the Nigerian military coup which took place in 1966, the year A Man of The People was published:

By nature, Nigerian politics tended to be mercenary and violent. Political debate was routinely conducted in acrimonious and abusive language; and ethnic loyalties were constantly exploited. The tactics employed were often those of the rough house variety… (p.194)

Of the 1965 general election in the Western region of Nigeria, he writes:

The campaign was fought on all sides with brutal tenacity; bribes, threats, assault, arson, hired thugs and even murder became the daily routine. Akintola’s new party – the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) – used its position in government ruthlessly to rig the election at every stage – blocking the nomination of opposition candidates, kidnapping election officials, destroying ballot papers and falsifying results… (p.198)

It was this environment of political chaos and violence which triggered the military coup launched in January 1966. Meredith describes it with a blunt candour which is worth reproducing for its shocking effect:

The hopes that Nigeria would serve as a stronghold of democracy in Africa came to an abrupt halt on 15 January 1966. In a series of coordinated actions, a group of young army officers wiped out the country’s top political leaders. In Lagos they seized the federal prime minister, Sir Adubakar Tafawa Balewa, took him outside the city and executed him by the side of the road, dumping his body in a ditch; in Kaduna, after a gun battle, they shot dead the premier of the Northern Region, the Sardauna of Sokoto. In Ibadan they killed the premier of the Western Region, Chief Ladoke Akintola. The wealthy federal finance minister, Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, a notoriously corrupt politician, was dragged screaming from his house, flung into a car ‘like an old army sack’, and driven away to be murdered… (p.193)

The army leaders claimed to be not just staging a coup but sweeping away the entire old order, managed by corrupt elders. Two points:

1. Odili and Max talk about sweeping away the old regime, as if a dozen or twenty utopians with a few loudspeakers could ever do such a thing, but a) that was obviously always hopelessly naive and b) there are hints in the text that even if the CPC had won the election (impossible) they would have been sucked into the same patterns of corruption as the old guard. So only an actual revolution which decimated the old ruling class could have hoped to effect change.

2. But it didn’t effect change. Instead the country sank into further chaos triggered by the fact that most of the young military leaders were Igbo, which triggered resentment and then anti-Igbo violence in the north then west of the country, leading to huge flight of the Igbo minorities in both places back to their homeland in the south-east, and then the secession by the Igbo authorities, the declaration that they constituted a new independent country, Biafra. Which led to the Biafran War or The Nigerian Civil War (1967 to 1970) in which up to 2 million Igbo civilians died from famine.

This catastrophic background makes the naive political dreaming and petty personal feuds of A Man of the People‘s protagonist, Odili, look even more childish and superficial. In the real world this half decade of Nigeria’s history showed that it had basically three options: corrupt but essentially peaceful civilian rule; military coup and rule by the army; ruinous civil war. Of the three the first one, the one Idoli and his friends so fervently want to overthrow, is quite clearly the least bad.

In a sentence

Critics praise A Man of The People as a ‘political’ novel or for its ‘political’ content but, in my opinion, its so-called ‘political’ element is shallow, childish and completely inadequate to the catastrophic political and historical moment it purports to describe.

Credit

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe was published in 1966 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1988 Heinemann African Writers series paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 24, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/24/a-man-of-the-people-chinua-achebe/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 1. Key features of 17th century Britain

Mark Kishlansky (1948 to 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

  1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I and Charles I) 1603 to 1642
  2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 to 1660
  3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II and James II) 1660 to 1688
  4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William and Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 to 1714

Although obviously you can also divide it by monarch:

  1. James I (1603 to 1625)
  2. Charles I (1625 to 1642)
  3. Wars of the three kingdoms (1637 to 1653)
  4. Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653 to 1660)
  5. Charles II (1660 to 1685)
  6. James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685 to 1688)
  7. William and Mary (1688 to 1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge that his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

  • business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
  • empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
  • feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
  • media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
  • new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
  • the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
  • sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
  • architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
  • philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
  • non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Patriarchy

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

Hierarchy

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography

80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West

The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east

The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population

The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation

Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy

The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans

Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

  • abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
  • reforms of theology and practice: getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
  • reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
  • adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning

Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping

The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus

Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

The point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion

What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties

It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

More seventeenth century reviews

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by Simon on August 24, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-1/

Black Ivory (2) by James Walvin (1992)

Without the slaves there would have been no sugar and without sugar there would have been no national addiction to coffee and, later, to tea.
(Black Ivory, page 4)

I bought Walvin’s book 20 years ago, read it and found it as unsatisfactory then as I do now. He uses a thematic approach to grouping the material in order to loosely follow the slave experience. Thus the opening chapters describe the ways slaves were seized in Africa – in war or expressly for slavery – marched to the coast, he describes the coastal slaving forts, the Atlantic crossing, the slave auctions in America or the Caribbean, and then life and death on the different types of plantation.

It’s a valid enough approach, but the downside is it is very bitty. It creates a kind of magpie effect, picking out dazzling facts and incidents from Barbados in 1723 or Georgia in 1805 or Jamaica in 1671, fragmenting your understanding.

Not only is there little sense of chronological development and change, but some of the incidents he chooses are in reverse chronological order, so that the chapter about slave rebellions opens with the massive slave rebellion in Haiti in the 1790s, treating it at some length. But a) to do so he has to bend his own rules since Haiti – then called Saint Domingue – was a French colony and everywhere else Walvin restricts himself strictly to British colonies.

And b) he then works backwards from the Haiti revolt, to describe far earlier uprisings from the 1600s onwards, for example the Stono uprising in South Carolina in 1739, or jumps forward to uprisings near the end of the period – Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia, 1831, or the 1822 Charleston uprising, and then back to Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica in 1760, then forward to the Baptist Uprising on Jamaica in 1831.

It all ends up being quite confusing. Much more sensible would have been to try and show what the slaves cumulatively learned about organising uprisings, and what the authorities learned about suppressing them.

Walvin repeatedly refers to the differences between plantation culture in the West Indies and on the American mainland, but never makes them as clear as Alan Taylor does in his outstanding book American Colonies: The Settlement of North America to 1800 (sugar grew best in the West Indies, tobacco in the Chespeake Bay area (Virginia, Georgia) and Europe-style agriculture from New York north into New England).

It was entirely these agricultural and climatic facts which gave rise to the intensive slave labour of huge sugar plantations in the Indies, to large but not-quite-so-vast tobacco slave plantations in the South, and to the relatively slave-free, family-run farms of the middle and northern states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, New England).

Most irritating of all, Walvin has a fondness for rhetorical questions, which often just seem lame. It’s as if a historian of the Holocaust kept stopping every few pages to sigh, ‘But where are the memorials to all the Jews that died at Belsen?’ or ‘How can we imagine the feelings of the Jews of Jewish mothers as they carried their babies into the gas chambers?’

The facts are quite horrifying enough. They don’t need lachrymose embellishments, such as:

When Lord Mansfield died, in March 1793, he was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey… But where are the memorials to those thousands whose lives were touched by the career of England’s Chief Justice? (p.22)

But how many watery miles would always remain between the slaves he had sold in Antigua and their loved ones in Africa? (p.43)

Nuggets

Nonetheless, the book does have loads of nuggets of information tucked away in it, and I thought I’d extract and list ones which stood out for me, as an aide-memoire:

Drinks

The new fashionable drinks of the late 1600s and early 1700s – coffee, tea and chocolate – are all naturally bitter. They need sweetener. Sugar. Grown by slaves. What a stunning fact that a product from China (later imported into India and Ceylon), sweetened by tea from the West Indies, grown by slaves imported from Africa, became an addiction in cold northern Europe.

Puddings

During the 18th century the British became famous for their puddings which required prodigious amounts of sugar: hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, creams, charlottes and bettys, trifles and fools, syllabubs and tansys, junkets and ices, milk pudding, suet pudding, custards and cakes, and rice pudding (rice grown by slaves in Georgia and Carolina, sugar grown by slaves in the Indies).

Somerset v Stewart (1772)

Slavery had never been authorized by statute in England and Wales, and Lord Mansfield decided that it was also unsupported in common law. Lord Mansfield tried to narrowly limit his judgment to the issue of whether a person, regardless of being a slave, could be removed from England against their will, and said they could not. Nonetheless the case ‘aroused enormous interest and political controversy’ (p.305) and became one of the most significant milestones in the abolitionist campaign.

Mansfield had in his own household a black slave, Elizabeth Dido, born to a slave woman captured aboard a Spanish ship by a British pirate, who got her pregnant and passed the baby on to his relative Mansfield, who brought her up.

In his will Mansfield specified that Dido be freed and given an annuity for life.

The Zong case (1781)

The Zong was a Liverpool-based slave ship. In September 1780 it departed the coast of Africa for Jamaica with 470 slaves on board. 60 Africans and seven crew had died from disease on the crossing when, on November 29, Captain Luke Collingwood called a meeting of his officers to decide whether to throw the sick Africans overboard in order to preserve the others and save drinking water. 131 slaves were thrown overboard. The owners of the Zong, Gregson, claimed the loss of their slaves (£30 each) from their insurers, Gilbert. The insurers refused to pay. The case was taken to court and provoked a storm of outrage. Another milestone towards abolition.

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

A depiction of the Zong massacre, November 1781

John Newton

John Newton, later in life an ardent abolitionist and author of the hymn Amazing Grace was, early in life, captain of a slave ship and responsible for punishing and reprimanding uppity slaves. He used thumbscrews.

The Middle Passage

It surprised me that, as a proportion, more of the white crews died in the Atlantic crossing, than the slaves. I have seen the diagrams of the slaves packed tight below decks hundreds of times, and they have been recycled in numerous works of art as symbols of unprecedented suffering. Who knew, that as a proportion, more whites died than blacks!

All Souls

Barbados was the most densely planted and cultivated sugar island in the West Indies. The largest slave owner was Christopher Codrington. It was his land which funded the establishment of the Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford. It comes as no surprise to learn that in our politically sensitive times, the College is setting up a scholarship to help West Indian students.

West Indian output

Between the 1660s and the abolition of slavery, the African population of the West Indian sugar islands rose to 1 million. During that period over 10 million tonnes of sugar were produced.

Task work

Slaves were set tasks and, once these were complete, were free to tend their own gardens, practice artisan skills and so on. In fact, one of the biggest learnings from Walvin is that many slaves had a surprising amount of freedom and agency.

Many were trained in a very wide range of skills, from artisan work such as coopers, carpenters and smiths, to work gang overseers, to book keepers and accountants, while off to one side of field work was an entire hierarchy of domestic servants from lowliest char to senior butler and household supervisor.

I thought the chapter about ‘runaways’ would be about desperate conspiracies to break shackles, get through the barbed wire fence and escape – but this is completely wrong. It turns out many, many slaves had jobs which naturally took them far afield, taking all kinds of goods to local markets, fetching and carrying from towns or neighbouring plantations, and even operating boats and ships to carry plantation produce down river to collection centres and big towns.

Slaves were much more mobile than we might imagine. (p.165)

Some slaves’ jobs required them to be absent from the plantation for weeks on end, and so it turns out that the definition of ‘runaway’ is ragged round the edges. Many slaves didn’t ‘run away’ so much as stay away longer than a job warranted – for all kinds of human reasons, because they had a sweetheart to visit, or distant spouses and children they’d been separated from, to gamble and get drunk.

Free blacks

Similarly, it is startling to have it brought home how many free Africans lived in the slave areas, specially of the Deep South. They also sailed the seas as free sailors, alongside white sailors, ending up in ports wherever European ships anchored – which is to say, right round the world.

Striking that Olaudah Equiano, who left a detailed account of his life, worked aboard a British ship which made an expedition to the Arctic in 1773!

If there is one really pervasive message to Walvin’s book, it is the counter-intuitive one that slaves – captured, enslaved Africans and their descendants – were emphatically not passive helpless victims, but adapted to their appalling new circumstances, spread into all walks of life available, acquired skills, saved up and earned their freedom, set up businesses and schools, and sailed the seven seas alongside their European one-time captors.

As Walvin puts it, everywhere historians look, they see:

the growth of an independent slave culture, linked to the world of plantation slavery but operating and thriving at an economically autonomous level. (p.115)

The black African element not only underpinned the wealth of the British Empire in the 1700s, but was everywhere visible in that empire.

It was news to me that there was a black drummer in the Scottish court in 1507, that Henry VII and Henry VIII employed a black trumpeter, that Elizabeth I had black musicians and dancers. At a celebration ball in London in 1764 all the musicians were black.

Black servants were highly fashionable among the 18th century aristocracy. And not just aristocrats. Samuel Johnson’s much-loved manservant Francis Barber was black, and Johnson not only made him his heir but left him most of his important papers.

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, with a black servant by Pierre Mignard (1682)

Death in the Indies

The majority of slaves were imported into the West Indies where they dropped like flies, because of poor food, appalling conditions, and being worked to death by the brutal requirements of sugar production. Fewer slaves were imported onto the American continent, but more of them survived because working tobacco was relatively less onerous, food and conditions were better, and, above all, disease was less lethal.

Music

The testimony of slave owners and visitors to plantations is full of evidence for the slaves’ fondness for music of all sorts, from chanted and sung words alone, to the accompaniment of instruments made from whatever came to hand, through to full proficiency on European instruments like the violin.

Christianity

I’ve met no end of progressives, especially feminists, who think that Christianity’s influence was and is and can only ever be a terrible, calamitous thing. In some respects this may be true, but Walvin has a chapter ramming home the fact that it was the Great Religious Awakening from the 1750s onwards, and the spread of Protestant missionaries throughout the slave colonies, the conversion of many slaves to Christianity, and then the widespread dissemination of Christian anti-slavery pamphlets, sermons and so on, from the 1770s onwards – which played a huge role in creating widespread public and political support for abolition. The role of Christianity in freeing the slaves was ‘seismic’ (p.194).

Phases of abolition

Anyone familiar with the subject knows this, but it’s worth emphasising that abolition came in waves.

In the 1780s there were attempts to rein in what were becoming the well-publicised excesses of plantation owners in the colonies. Parliament passed laws restricting the types of punishment (for example, the number of lashes) they could dole out.

Phase one was the campaign from the end of the American War of Independence (1783) to abolition in 1807. This first abolition was the abolition of the slave trading by ship. From 1807 no British ship was allowed to carry slaves. Parliament and the campaigners expected that  this would result in an improvement in the conditions of slaves in the West Indies, and they set up a demographic register to monitor change.

In the event, the evidence came in that it improved nothing. The condition of slaves in the Indies remained as miserable as ever. Abolitionism was put on hold during the Wars with France. When these ended in 1815, there was a period of intense political repression in Britain. But this slackened in the 1820s and a new generation called for further reform, and not just of slavery.

The new post-war generation chafed against the domination of the landed gentry under the old voting franchise. The industrialists of the north chafed against having no political power to match their new wealth. Apologists for capitalism insisted that Free Trade was the great panacea which would drive the British economy and so campaigned against trade tariffs. Christian missionaries provided a ceaseless supply of literature describing the appalling conditions and sufferings of the ongoing slave colonies.

This was the second wave of abolitionism, led by a new generation, which called for the abolition of slavery on moral, Christian, but also economic and political grounds. Free market economists insisted that slavery distorted markets, businesses and wages, thus hampering the growth of British trade and prosperity.

It was only after the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, and a new ‘reformed’ Parliament assembled, that a laws was finally passed to abolish the condition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

On 1 August 1834 all slaves under 6 were freed. Adults became ‘apprentices’ and were still forced to work for their owners for 40 hours a week, for nothing, for a period of 6 years. Some islands decided tojust get on and free all their slaves.

Many of the colonies had reacted to the unrelenting pressure from the church and the mother country against slavery, by steadily releasing slaves already, especially if they were old, ill or unable to work. Slavery was always first and foremost an economic consideration.

Full abolition only came at midnight on 31 July 1838. Freed slaves across the West Indies held marches and parades, made speeches, attended church, decked their houses and towns with flags and bunting.

The British effort to quell the slave trade

Having seen the light, the British became enthusiastic opponents of the slave trade wherever it remained. It became a standing order of the Royal Navy to confiscate slave ships. Between 1820 and 1870 the Royal Navy seized 1,600 slave ships on the Atlantic and freed 150,000 slaves, especially heading to Cuba and Brazil.

American slavery

But we no longer had jurisdiction over the United States. By 1860 there were some 4 million slaves in the USA, far more than had been liberated from the British colonies in the 1830s. Their struggle for liberation, and the epic civil war it prompted, is another story.

More eighteenth century reviews

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by Simon on August 10, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on August 10, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/black-ivory-james-walvin/