All posts tagged starvation

Ladysmith by Giles Foden (1999)

Published the year after Foden’s famous debut, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘Ladysmith’ is even longer, weighing in at a chunky 362 pages. He must have been working on them at the same time and this prompts the thought of considering them as two prisms or perspectives, from different periods, on their subjects – Africa, white people in Africa, colonialism and war.

Talking of dates, I realised Foden probably wanted the book to be published in 1999 as this marked the centenary of its subject, the start of the siege of Ladysmith. I wonder if the actual publication date was aligned as well i.e. in October or November. In fact one of the characters wonders whether the siege will go on for decades and his diary of it will be dug up a century hence, in 1999 (George Steevens the journalist, p.175).

Anyway, Ladysmith is a dazzling feat of imagination and bravura writing, hugely gripping, informative and entertaining. Also, it is very hard, grim and violent.

The siege of Ladysmith

The (Second) Boer War lasted from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902. Less than a month into the conflict Boer forces surrounded the town of Ladysmith in the colony of Natal on 2 November 1899 – occupied by British civilians, Asians and Africans and a contingent of the British army – and besieged it for 118 days, until it was relieved by British forces on 28 February 1900.

Prologue

The narrative opens not in Africa, but in late-Victorian Ireland (later on, we realise it’s about 1880). Four dramatic pages briskly describe the poverty and persecution suffered by the unnamed narrator, which drives him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The underlying point is the implied connection between the Irish and the Boers, small subject peoples oppressed by the British Empire. He’s involved in a shootout with British police, escapes, is hidden by comrades in the Brotherhood, then smuggled to Liverpool, where he plans to start a new life in the colonies.

Part 1. Crossways

It quickly becomes clear that a distinguishing feature of the book is its very large cast of characters. Here’s a list of the characters who appear in the first hundred pages or so:

  • Bella Kiernan, 20, eldest daughter of…
  • Leo Kiernan, red-haired proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Ladysmith (p.19)
  • Jane Kiernan, 18, Bella’s blonde younger sister (p.24), admired by gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade (p.62)
  • Gunner Herbert Foster, likely young lad and beau to Jane Kiernan
  • Antonio Torres, barber, from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now named Maputo and Mozambique, respectively) which he left when his beloved Isabella Teixera da Mattos (p.93) married another man (Luís)
  • Mrs Frinton, thin, ascetic, grey-haired, God-fearing widow (p.47), most religious woman in town (p.125)
  • Mr and Mrs Star, the Ladysmith bakers (p.15)
  • Tom Barnes of the Green Horse regiment (p.20), writes long descriptive letters home to his mother and sister Lizzie, one of which includes burning down the house of an absent Boer including piano and music (pages 60 to 65)
  • four journalists: George Steevens of the Mail; Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle; Donald McDonald of the Melbourne Argus; William Maud the Graphic’s special artist (pages 21 and 120); MacDonald is coarse and racist (p.75); Steevens, small and bald and scholarly, is a legend for his calm under fire (p.76); Nevinson is more the neutral 40-ish narrator type (p.78) albeit a ‘dour figure’ (p.203)
  • Atkins of the Manchester Guardian
  • Perry Barnes, Tom’s younger brother who’s followed him into the army, a farrier by trade, aboard the same ship bringing the Biographer, Winston Churchill and thousands of troops to South Africa (p.26)
  • Lieutenant Norris, Tom and Bob’s superior officer
  • the Biographer who it took me a few pages to realise is not a photographer but a pioneer of moving pictures i.e. film photography – describes the loading and sea voyage of the Dunottar Castle setting off from Southampton to Cape Town – he grew up in Birmingham and considers himself an outsider at the captain’s table full of plummy posh officers (p.26); he is so-named because he works for the Mutoscope and Biograph Company (p.56)
  • Winston Churchill, correspondent for the Morning Post (p.30)
  • General Redvers Henry Buller (p.35)
  • Muhle Maseku, wife Nandi (who Maseku married when he was 13) and young son Wellington, one of thousands in a refugee column fleeing (p.36), he is separated from his wife and boy into a group of 400 Blacks by Boers who force them to work on building fortifications; in the rush down a muddy slope after a day working in the rain he breaks his ankle
  • Marwick, kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department (p.38)
  • General Piet Joubert, Commandant-General of the Transvaal (p.40)
  • Major Mott, the military censor (p.43) started out ‘harsh’ and, as things become intense, becomes ‘merciless’ (p.97), proud possessor of a grand sealion moustache (p.195)
  • Mohandas Gandhi, speaking at a Hindu political meeting and interviewed by the Biographer (pages 54 to 57)
  • Bob Ashmead, soldier sharing a tent with Tom Barnes (p.58)
  • Dr Sterkx, doctor in the Boer camp who looks after Muhle Maseku and his broken ankle (p.66); turns out it was his house and piano and music Tom Barnes and his troop burned down and took his wife Frannie prisoner into Ladysmith; he makes primitive crutches for Muhle who he gets to become an assistant; they watch battles from a nearby hill
  • Mr Grimble of the Ladysmith town council, local farmer and leading light in Carbineers (p.86), producer of fruit jams (p.104)
  • Archdeacon Barker (p.88)
  • Lieutenant General Sir George White, overall commander of the Ladysmith forces (p.171)

The start of the bombardment

The first shell from the surrounding Boers lands in Ladysmith on 2 November 1899. The town council debates evacuating the wounded and non-combatants. Jingos are outraged. Nevinson the journalist is developing into our eyes and ears and visits the station as the first long train of wounded and women and blacks and Indians pulls out. The telegraph line has been cut so he advertises for Blacks to be paid runners i.e. sneak through the Boer lines and get to the nearest British town in order to get his despatches sent back to London. Since they might be shot on sight the Blacks are charging £20 a journey. Nevinson hires a boy, Wellington, who’s the son of Muhle Maseku who we’ve seen being co-opted into the Boer camp then breaking his ankle. Nevinson includes not only his own despatches but letters friends want posted, including Tom’s to his mum.

Bella and Jane discuss their boyfriends, how long the siege will last, what will happen afterwards. Bella drops by the Star bakery. All food is rationed now and can only be bought with coupons. Bella pays triple the price for a loaf of bread which turns out to be adulterated and makes her sick.

General of the besieging Boers, Joubert, allows trains of wounded and non-combatants to be taken to Camp Intombi down the railway line. Jingos christen it ‘Fort Funk’ (p.106). (According to Wikipedia, the Intombi Military Hospital was some 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) outside Ladysmith and run by Major General (later Sir) David Bruce and his wife Mary. During the siege, the number of beds in the hospital camp grew from the initial 100 to a total of 1900. A total of 10,673 admissions were received and treated at Intombi.)

All classes of men are conscripted into digging defensive trenches and sangars. Torres the barber is bombed out.

Ladysmith measures not 3 miles in any direction. By 5 December 1899 some 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron have been thrown at it (p.123). Growing stress at the ceaseless barrage of incoming shells. Night-time burial parties. Food becomes scarcer. Water from the river polluted with faeces. More and more disease. British forces make a few night-time sallies and spike one Long Tom, cause of celebration. But there are others and numerous other field guns surrounding them. The constant barrage continues.

Dramatic tension

In all kinds of novels the reader experiences an element of suspense and tension as they wait to see what will happen to the characters, how the story will pan out. Well, in a war story like this, there’s a pretty obvious brutal tension involved, as you read about all of these characters, share their thoughts and feelings and perceptions and that is…which of them are going to be killed, or die of disease, or be horribly maimed?

(Lots) more narrative

Tom and Bob are practising cavalry manoeuvres when interrupted by shellfire (they’re not hurt). At the Boer camp Muhle Maseku wakens to see his son, Wellington, has been caught carrying his package of messages through Boer lines, by members of the Irish Brigade, who are kicking and beating him and about to drag him away to execute him. Muhle intervenes, hitting the leader of the Irish Brigade, John MacBride, with his crutch and is shot in the thigh for his troubles, passing out.

(Mention of John MacBride is significant, because he appeared in the prologue to the entire book set, we later learn, around 1879, a member of the small group of Irish Nationalists which includes the unnamed narrator of the prologue. The significance of all of this is explained towards the very end of the book.)

The Biographer has made it by train as far as Frere where the line has been blown up by the Boers. Churchill has gone and got himself captured when the Boer derailed an armoured train he was riding in. The other correspondents are making a fuss to get him freed.

The Biographer is an eye witness to the Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899. He gets involved in carrying stretchers of the wounded which is where he bumps into Mohandir Gandhi who, somewhat improbably, takes the opportunity to explain that all this bloodshed has helped him crystallise his worldview of satyagraha or non-violence (p.151).

Colenso was one of the three catastrophic defeats which were dubbed Black Week (Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December 1899) in which some 2,800 British troops were killed, wounded or captured (p.153). Buller sends, via the new helioscope system which has been set up to replace the broken telegraph, a depressed defeatist message to Ladysmith to surrender which the town’s commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir George White, to his credit, ignores.

We are given the text of a letter Perry Barnes writes home to his sister from the camp at Frere i.e. Buller’s camp trying to get past Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. The point is that at the end of the narrative, Foden explains that one of the sources of the novel was an actual cache of letters written by one of his forebears who was in the siege.

A shell lands on the steps of the Royal Hotel blowing off the leg of a doctor who later dies. Bella ponders the mother she never knew, Catherine, from back in Ireland.

(At which point I realised this is probably the ‘Catherine’ we see getting shot dead by British police in Ireland in the dramatic opening Prologue. And realise at the same moment that the unnamed narrator of the Prologue must have been the man now known as Leo Kiernan, Bella’s father and owner of the Royal Hotel.)

Bella and Tom have slowly become an item though Bella is wary. Novels and love, do all ‘serious’ novels have to feature a love story?

Nevinson is astonished to spot the young Zulu he had sent with his despatches bathing in the river with his mother. Wellington explains how he was caught, beaten up, the documents taken from him, read and defaced, but he was saved from execution by General Joubert who instead tasked him with returning them to Ladysmith, which Wellington did by creeping up on a sentry post and chucking the bag in then running off.

Bella finally agrees to ‘walk out’ with Tom, they walk out to the empty orchard outside town and have first sex, breathily described: ‘She rubbed against the straining tip of him’ etc (p.187). Although they get as far as him licking her through her panties, she bridles, pulls back, unzips his trousers and masturbates him till he climaxes, giggling quietly because his name is Tom, and the big guns firing on the town are nicknamed Long Toms and she is holding his Long Tom in her hand.

George Steevens has had enteric fever for weeks and Nevinson is justifiably concerned for him and his sometimes hallucinatory feverish conversation. The bored journalists have amused themselves by setting up a home-printed broadsheet called the Ladysmith Lyre whose purpose is exaggeration, rumour and amusement.

Very long description of a cricket match put together by the General, between two teams called the Colonials and the Mother Country. Both Tom and Gunner Foster do good batting, to the admiration of Bella and Jane. Tribal courtship rituals. To his irritation Leo Kiernan is compelled to be captain of the Colonials. It all builds to a climax as Bella’s dad turns out to be an improbably fine cricketer (improbable because he’s never played the game before) and the Colonials are just one run away from victory when just the one shell is lobbed at the game by the Boers on the surrounding hills. It explodes sending red hot splinters everywhere but apparently harming no-one, the final ball is played, Bella’s dad misses it but it hits young Herbert Foster who had remained in his wicket keeper’s crouch and when Tom goes up to see him, realises he is dead, killed instantly by a liver of shrapnel from the Boer shell.

Part 2. The Tower

Two days later Jane is in deep shock, shell-shocked, PTSD, shakes, catatonic, throws up, can’t answer questions. Bella cleans up the vomit, remakes the bed, puts her in, goes downstairs to the hotel bar which promptly receives two direct hits.

When she wakes up in the makeshift hospital in the town hall, she discovers both her dad and she have gashes but otherwise unhurt. Leo has sent Jane with a nurse in that day’s train to Intombi. Leo takes Bella to see the hotel which is utterly ruined. She reclaims some dirty clothes and sheets from the wreckage then her dad takes her to the network of caves along the river Klip, where bombed-out women and children are living.

Gaza

It’s unnerving to read the account of a population traumatised (and killed and mutilated) by relentless, merciless bombardment on days when, making coffee or lunch, I turn on the radio and hear more grim details of the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Even more eerie to read about the huge network of tunnels the homeless men and women of Ladysmith constructed in the soft soil alongside the river Klip, reminding me of the vast labyrinth of tunnels Hamas has are said to have created in Gaza. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t get the contemporary resonance out of my head as I read descriptions of crying women and children surrounded by unrelenting, random death.

‘When will it end?’
‘I never thought I would see myself like this.’
‘Mummy!’
‘My God, I have no hope left in me.’ (p.231)

It was as if they’d gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now. (p.234)

1899. 2023. Some people think the human race changes, that ‘humanity’ is moving forwards and upwards, that we are ‘progressing’. I don’t.

More part 2

Bella is settled into a dugout cave, has sort of bed made up for her by kindly Mrs Frinton. Standing outside she notices the Portuguese barber, Torres, digging. Turns out he’s digging up unexploded munitions. When a shell comes over Torres grabs her hand and yanks her over and into the men’s tunnels. Here a rough uitlander makes an off-colour remark prompting Torres to fight him for the lady’s honour. Arguably, this section should have been called ‘The Tunnels’ as the narrative dwells on Bella’s completely changed circumstances and how poor and alone and ill and hungry she feels. It’s called The Tower because in her distracted mind she creates a shimmering tower rising above the ruined town, an image of transcendence and escape.

On Christmas Day 1899 a shell lands nearby spattering Bella with mud as she was dressing in her best blouse, she spends hours rocking on the floor in despair. Her dad arrives with a letter from Jane at the military hospital who, mercifully, has recovered.

After two weeks Bella is sent by the river cave women to get provisions from the Commissariat in town. She visits the Royal and is distraught to see it looking like it’s been abandoned for years. In the ruins she discovers the Zulu mother Nandi and Wellington the messenger boy are squatting. Nandi tugs her skirts and begs and Bella gives her some of her precious supplies.

(The degrading immiseration of once cheerful well-fed westerners also reminds me of the imprisonment of the Europeans in the Japanese internment camp in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’.)

She goes to the Town Hall to see her father, is disconcerted to see that he is sitting on the military tribunal alongside Mayor Farquhar and Major Mott, and then horrified when they drag Torres the barber before them and arraign him for spying and treason, for which the penalty in time of war is death. Tom had reported seeing someone flashing messages using a mirror from some shrubbery on the edge of town, had fired into the bushes, missed the man who disappeared, leaving fragments of a mirror of the type which Torres used to sell from his barber’s shop, and the footprint of a boot with a big V on it.

The case is not proven but he is still roughly tied up and dragged off to the Dopper Church which has been surrounded by barbed wire and turned into an ad hoc prison for suspects.

Part 2 is much much more focused on one character (Bella) than part one had been with its cast of over 40. Now it’s all about Bella’s feelings at being bombed out, realising she doesn’t like Tom who obeys orders rather than listen to her, and hates her father after he defended the xenophobic unfairness of trying Torres.

Next day she goes back into town and to the Dopper Church, where she asks the guard to fetch Torres to the barbed wire where she apologises for everything and promises to do whatever she can. Then she goes to the ruins of the Royal Hotel, climbing gingerly up the ruined staircase to the Star Room where she finds her father, white with intense strain. His revolver is on the desk. He makes her swear not to try to find him till the siege is over but stay in the caves. In a flash it came to me that Leo is the spy, the traitor, the anti-British Irish Republican Brother who is signalling information to the Boers. I bet at some crucial moment we discover Leo’s boots have a big V pattern on them.

Part 3. Amours de Voyage

Rather mercifully, the narrative leaves Bella and her agonisings about Tom, the meaning of love, her father and Torres and we’re back with Nevinson, the dour journalist. ‘Amours de voyages’ is the ironic description Nevinson gives to the final delusions of his friend Steevens as he approaches the final stages of enteric fever. Nevinson visits the sheds at the (now disused) railway station to see for himself the vast abattoir and horse-stewing factory it’s been turned into, producing revolting foods such as ‘chevril’, made from boiling horses’ bones and guts.

There’s an interlude where Foden inserts newspaper reports, and Churchill’s telegram to Britain, giving details of his daring escape from Boer captivity and wild escape by train and walking the 300 miles north to Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

That night the Boers mount their biggest attack, seizing part of the vital Caesar’s Camp area. Nevinson finds command headquarters in total chaos and rides out to see for himself, ending up taking refuge in a sangar of the Irish Fusiliers, during the fierce battle and on into a sudden rainstorm. The British counter-attack and take all the key positions. 500 British soldiers killed to about 800 Boers. A significant battle. By the time he gets back to the cottage he’s been sharing with the other correspondents, Nevinson feels chill and ill.

Cut to Churchill taking a boat to Durban then hastening back to Buller’s relieving force, where he is greeted and filmed by the Biographer (quite a while since we’ve heard about him). They can see the terrible guns firing down onto the town but every attempt to cross the river Tugela is repulsed by the Boers who are firmly entrenched on the other side.

A slightly delirious, impressionistic description of the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, 23 to 24 January 1900, premonition of the Somme and First World War butchery. Ends with a letter from Perry Barnes back to Lizzy describing the slaughter and blaming the useless British generals (pages 303 to 304).

Dr Sterkx comes to the Zulu Muhle Maseku whose gunshot wound to the thigh is healing, says he will help him escape from the Boer camp into Ladysmith, if he will take a message to his wife, Frannie.

Bella now spends all her time by the filthy, faeces-full river, brooding, hungry and depressed. She is slightly deliriously metaphysical, staring at the same scene till it shimmers and wobbles, until she feels like one more shape in the lifeless scene (p.307).

Torres becomes desperate stuck inside the barbed-wired church. He becomes fascinated by the Boer woman who still has her goose with her. The reader realises it’s Frannie, distraught wife of Dr Sterkx.

Thrilling description of Muhle Maseku’s escape from the Boer camp during British shelling, under cover of drifting smoke, but still they spot and trail him, taking pot shots till he abandons the obvious route down a gulley and goes up the side and over land, hiding and resting as the full moon floods the landscape with light (p.314).

Tom is depressed, with the duration of the war, with guarding the church, with his ended relationship with Bella who just gives him a hard stare and turns away. So at some cheap estaminet he pays ten shillings to go with a Malay prostitute. Pleasantly pornographic: ‘A soft warm hood of flesh began to press itself over the tip of him’. (p.318). She blows him then rides him to a climax.

On the subject of sex we learn that the Biographer and Perry have been (male, same sex) lovers for some weeks, regularly jerking each other off in the river.

Bella seeks out Nandi and asks for her help. These days Wellington doesn’t smuggle food in, he spends all his time roaming round the surrounding country looking for the sign his father said he would make. That night Wellington appears to Torres inside the church and tells him to follow him. They wriggle through a small window he’s loosened, then sneak across the empty space to the fence which has a square cut out of it. There’s a sentry box but as he watches, Torres sees a female figure approach the sentry, engage it in conversation, then kiss. It is Bella, calculatingly distracting Tom.

Torres is led by Wellington through back streets, out of town to a copse where there’s a brazier with one of the town’s many observation balloons tethered over it. In a little while Bella arrives, they climb into the basket, undo the ropes, and drift into the sky, escaping the imprisoned town.

Tom is flogged for letting Torres escape, so badly he is sent to Intombi camp, where his bloody back is tended by Jane Kiernan. Wellington Maseku brings in his wounded, badly ill father, who he found hiding in a shallow burrow he’d dug to hide from the Boers, but weak and emaciated and his leg wound badly infected. Because of all the goods Wellington smuggled into the camp, the doctors say they’ll see what they can do.

Ladysmith is relieved. The Boers pull out and head north. Buller’s relieving force enters from the south. We are shown the characters reacting differently (Mrs Frinton, of course, praying). Most vivid is MacDonald coming across Nandi weeping at the front of the ruined Royal Hotel. She’s just learned her husband died of blood loss as a result of the amputation of his leg. Perry Barnes is decapitated by one of the last, random Boer shells. The Biographer, who had been filming his lover at the moment of his gruesome death, collapses in hysterics.

Paintings and patriotic accounts record General Buller riding up to General White, dismounting and shaking his hand as the crowds cheered but no such thing happened; Buller just rode blithely by.

Part 4. The monologues of the dead

An oddity. A series of short, sometimes very short (half page), texts by various characters from the narrative, being:

  • Tom Barnes (December 1901) – the British are in the ascendant and in this letter Tom describes razing Boer farmsteads he is completely disillusioned with empire, queen and country, thinks the entire war has been a shambles
  • Mrs Sterkx (March 1902) – an unforgiving description of the concentration camps the British herded Boer women and children into, where they died by their thousands
  • Nevinson (December 1915) – reporting at the conclusion of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, reporting that many think Churchill should be publicly hanged for his part in promoting the campaign
  • Bobby Greenacre (January 1916) – was about to sign up and go to the war when he is bitten by an adder
  • Nevison (November 1916) – talks about his friendship with W.B. Yeats, his lover Maud Gonne who has gone off to nurse soldiers on the Western front, leaving the man she married, John MacBride who a) had led the Irish Brigade in Natal and b) took part in the famous Easter Rising in Dublin; he heard that Bella and Torres landed safely in their balloon and are presumably living somewhere
  • The Biographer (February 1931) – during the main text the Biographer was always frustrated the moving pictures alone didn’t tell the full story; here he is now doing the voiceover for a Movietone News film about Mahatma Gandhi
  • Churchill (February 1931) – speech to the West Sussex Conservatives in which he takes the time to execrate Gandhi turning up to meet the Viceroy of India dressed in peasant clothes
  • Jane (May 1933) – multiple sadnesses; she has just buried Tom, who she married; and she remembers back to discovering her father dead in the ruins of the Hotel, having shot himself with his revolver and slowly discovered that he was the spy signalling information to the Boers; thought as much; then how she tracked down Bella and Torres, discovering he sold a bauxite claim for a fortune and took Bella back to Portugal where they lived the life of the 1910s and 20s rich, spats, feather boas and fast cars
  • MacDonald (December 1938) – bumped into Bobby Greenacre who is now an eminent lawyer, a KC in Australia
  • Gandhi (August 1942) – he has been arrested for publicly stating his party will not fight the Japanese if they invade India; so he’s been incarcerated, yet again; he marvels at the way everything – he, history – are misrepresented: ‘everything is distorted and misrepresented’ – this seems a rather obvious comment about the nature of fiction itself, and maybe about Foden’s own kind of historical fiction in particular
  • Churchill (27 May 1944) – a secret cypher telegram which indicates Churchill’s vehement dislike of Gandhi right to the end
  • The Biographer (July 1945) – retired now, he reflects on how Churchill will be kicked out at the election, how his time and his romance of the British Empire is over; the British will leave India as soon as they decently can; still, Churchill’s rhetoric and determination kept the British at it for six long years; respect
  • Wellington – reflects on the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960, the enduring wickedness of the Pass Laws in South Africa’s history; Wellington is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and in prison for burning his Pass Card in front of the press; he is being represented in court by a young Nelson Mandela; he remembers Ladysmith, the experience of being in prison, and reflects how, for people like him – South African Blacks – it has never been otherwise

Obviously deliberate that a Black African is given the last word in this story about Africa.

Foden’s multifarious styles

There were fairly frequent moments in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when I was surprised by an oddity of Foden’s prose style, but assigned it to the narrator. But there are more here, so I’m concluding they’re part of Foden’s essential approach to language.

Formal prepositions

He has an old-fashioned way with prepositions, for example he insists on using their full formal versions, ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’, ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’.

He is much given to the old-fashioned inversion of phrases to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at Dundee, to where a column had rashly been thrown forward. (p.45)

Flight to Intombi was now a measure of which many non-combatants availed themselves. (p.105)

In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. (p.52)

Is this meant to convey the archaic quality of late-Victorian prose, the formality of late-Victorian social life, or the stilted pompousness of this particular pair of characters? Or does Foden just regard it as a valid form of phrasing he can mix in with other far more modern, even slangy, phraseology? Whatever the motive it results in a text which is a mosaic, or mashup, of multiple tones and registers.

He has a similar fondness for an antiquated use of the word ‘so’.

The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking… (p.119)

Wouldn’t this be more naturally be phrased as ‘it was like this where he was walking’? Is the unusual phrasing ‘It was so…’ intended to evoke Victorian phraseology, because I’m not sure it does. It reminds me more of Captain Picard’s catchphrase in Star Trek Next Generation: ‘Make it so.’ It’s a conscious style decision; Foden repeats it later:

Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so. (p.295)

It’s one among many odd, anomalous, unmodern turns of phrase which Foden deliberately deploys. Much earlier in the book, describing the town council debate about whether the non-combatants should leave the town:

Others, in particular those who had suffered injury to family or property from the bombardment, were all for leaving the soldiers to it and getting out from under the shadow of shell. (p.87)

‘The shadow of shell’ is an odd phrase, isn’t it? It’s not Victorian or modern, if anything it reminds me of the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Ornate phrasing

There are many such unorthodox or contrived phrasings, not massive in themselves, just a continual trickle of unusualness:

‘Let me explain,’ intervened Bella, in agitated fashion. (p.111)

But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. (p.189)

All seemed set to enjoy themselves in fair measure. (p.195)

This sounds more like Shakespeare than late-Victorian prose.

Yet, if truth be told, there were other constants… (p.214)

Is the deployment of ‘if truth be told’ an attempt to mimic late-Victorian oratory? Is it conscious pastiche or irony? Or is it Foden writing in his own style? Does his own style combine this odd range of registers, taking in modern slang, through boys’ adventure clichés, oddly formal word order, to passages of fairly contemporary psychological description and analysis?

Slang

Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night (p.230)

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand. ‘I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.’ (p.262)

Use of the word ‘spring’ made me think of a 1940s film noir, or the thousands of American movies where the associates of criminals ‘spring’ them out of gaol.

Grandiloquent

But sometimes Foden’s prose is the opposite of slangy and goes beyond historic pastiche to take on a conscious pomp and circumstance, as here, where the correspondent Nevinson is meditating on the futility of war:

No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them. (p.286)

Grandiloquent, meaning: ‘pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, especially in a way that is intended to impress.’ I understand that this grand style reflects the personality of Nevinson who, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly prone to grand reflections on history i.e Foden is capturing the style of a specific character.

Grandiloquence of a different type is deliberately deployed in the climactic scene when Ladysmith is finally relieved by British troops and you can feel Foden reaching for a different, feverish style to try and convey the emotional release of the moment, to evoke the hysteria of the crowds:

The crowd opened to let them [the liberating army] trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if the siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts (p.331)

‘Very breasts’. The whole liberation scene is written like this, in a deliberately high heroic but sentimental Edwardian style, which is very noticeably different from most of the rest of the book.

Prose poetry

And sometimes into the mix Foden throws long, lyrical sentences of prose poetry. Here’s the funeral of the highly literate correspondent George Steevens who dies of enteric fever after a long delirious illness:

A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. (p.290)

It doesn’t have the lustral mellifluousness of, say, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, but it is obviously a conscious effort at lyrical landscape painting.

Playful prose

Sometimes Foden indulges in wordplay, picking up on his own phraseology for the lolz:

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents – although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. (p.102)

I had to read that twice before I realised the phrase ‘such a measure’ is referring back to the hair’s breadth (that the person he goes on to talk about, Bobby Greenacre, did escape death by a hair’s breadth). This picking up, echoing and playing with his own phrases occurs fairly often. The soldier Perry Barnes swears when he describes the murderous effect of the Maxim gun:

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash. That night dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. (p.293)

See how he picks up and plays with his own phraseology.

I’m not complaining, I’m not meaning to criticise in the negative sense. The opposite. I’m celebrating the complexity of Foden’s style. I’m trying to analyse out some of the many different lexical tricks or quirks, along with the varying registers, tones and strategies going on in Foden’s prose style, which make it sometimes odd and unpredictable, always interesting and highly readable.

Imperial politics

Strangely, there’s relatively little politics in the book. Early on there’s a set-piece argument or friendly debate, between the journalists Nevinson and Steevens, about the point of the British Empire.

Nevinson, in his youth tempted by the teachings of the anarchist Kropotkin, puts the standard liberal view that the Boer War is unnecessary and has been fomented by jingos such as Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain purely out of greed, to annex the Boer republics so Britain can get its hands on their diamonds and gold.

‘Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after wat we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all?’ (p.83)

And his colleague, Steevens, puts the standard riposte that the war must be won because failure, or even weakness, will inspire the hundreds of millions of other subjects of the empire to rise up and end it. Nevinson:

For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself? (p.48)

When Nevinson points out how shabby and squalid many of the doings of the supposedly ‘noble’ Empire are in reality, Steevens is given some pithy lines about how the Empire shouldn’t be judged by any of its practical applications, but as a platonic ideal of perfect community and administration:

‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…but it is certainly folly to let it go….

‘It’s the vital ideal of Empire one must hang on to – however tawdry the reality, however full of outrageous postures and cheap tricks. We’ve got to keep aiming at something beyond the truth. I suppose, at base, it is all to do with spreading light.’ (p.84)

I enjoy bits like this not because I agree with them (at all) but because it’s a point of view you never hear nowadays, drowned by today’s blanket execration of everything to do with the British Empire.

Also, reading contemporary debates about the point of an empire from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and so on, sheds quite a bit of light on absolutely modern issues in international affairs. Michael Ignatieff’s series of books from the 1990s wonder whether there aren’t many countries which are too poor or chaotic to run themselves and where ‘the international community’ needs to step in and run them in order to save the populations from massacre – Bosnia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza.

Obviously he’s not talking about the same kind of exploitative conquest as characterised the European empires but, to many of the peoples watching the arrival of Western armies in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, the subtle moral differences made by liberal commentators are irrelevant: they were just the latest waves of Western invaders and they needed to be resisted.

Twentieth century politics

The short final section four has a powerful but, I think, questionable affect. In very short order (i.e. in a hurry) we are shuffled through extremely brief descriptions of:

  • the concentration camps set up in the later stages of the Boer War
  • the First World War
  • the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
  • the Easter Rising in Dublin
  • three or four brief snippets which ask us to consider the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany in particular
  • ending with Wellington talking about the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC, Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid

This is a lot of stuff to take in and process. In my opinion, too much. As in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ only more so, it feels as if the novelistic subject matter – the focus on people, their characters, and interactions and thoughts and feelings – is swamped by the powerful associations attached to the historical events Foden describes.

Just considering the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany, in particular, but also his increasingly outdated attempts to preserve the British Empire, is a vast, simply enormous subject. Its scale and complexity completely overwhelm the thousands of fine and beautifully imagined details Foden has filled his book with (the descriptions of the fruit in Mr Grimble’s orchard spring to mind, or the cricket match, or Torres’s escape from the church, Major Mott’s sealion moustache, and hundreds of others).

This final section feels like wave after wave of overwhelming, each one eclipsing the one that went before – concentration camps, Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, Indian independence, the Second World War – the scale of each of them is too enormous and also too historical, in the sense that it’s more interested in political issues than in people.

And the last wave, the last three pages containing Wellington’s thoughts, his references to the Sharpeville Massacre and then onto the figure of Nelson Mandela, now universally acknowledged to be a secular saint, completely erases everything that went before, burying much of the fine detail so carefully depicted in the previous 350 pages, to become the abiding image and memory of the book. It’s a shame.

I can see that Foden intended these snippets to demonstrate that history doesn’t end with one event but is a continuum and that people’s lives continue way after the significant events they’ve been part of. That’s seems to me a fine and fairly traditional strategy for a novel, thousands do the same thing, tying up loose ends of characters’ afterlives. It’s the fact that Foden associates every one of these loose ends with major political events which is the dubious decision, a decision which – to repeat myself – risks swamping the subtlety and detail of much of what came before.

Christian feminism 1899

Mrs Frinton, in normal times a figure of fun (to Bella, anyway) for being an uptight old widow lecturing everyone about Our Lord, in wartime becomes reliable and solid (if still given to lectures). At one point she tells Bella all this trouble is down to men, the same everywhere:

‘They [men] are just like us, really,’ [Bella] ventured. ‘Only most of the time we don’t realise it.’
‘That’s a very new-fangled view,’ said the widow. ‘It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight – not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This – it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.’ (p.229)

I know plenty of feminists who would wholeheartedly agree, 123 years later.

Credit

Ladysmith by Giles Foden was published in paperback by Faber Books in 1999. References are to this Faber paperback edition.

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The Struggle For Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284 by David Carpenter (2003)

This is Volume Three of the Penguin History of Britain and I’m afraid to say it’s pretty boring. It opens logically enough with chapters on ‘The Peoples of Britain’ and then on ‘The Economies of Britain’, which no doubt synthesise the latest findings in archaeology and textual analysis, and do shed light if you’re really paying attention (I had to read them twice) and are already familiar with the key historical events of the period, but are still, well…boring.

A major challenge is the way that, in order to make his thematic points, Carpenter’s narrative jumps all over the chronology, so that we skip from 10th century Scotland to mid-1100s England, there’s an anecdote from 1175 and then he’s summarising changes made in the early 13th century or the mid-13th century or the late-13th century, all in one sentence. These swooping leaps around the period make it hard to follow a lot of the analysis.

The Norman Conquest

I was looking forward to getting to Chapter Three, on the Norman Conquest when, as Carpenter promises, a more traditional chronological narrative of events kicks in, but I was disappointed. Key players, key relationships like Harold’s with Morcar or Tostig – are introduced mid-way through the narrative, and then only fleetingly. In fact, when he is first introduced into the narrative Carpenter doesn’t make it clear enough that Harold of England was the son of the Earl Godwin, who had risen to be the most powerful man in the land and threatened the reign of King Edward the Confessor. It feels like you have to figure out a lot of the relationships and jostling for power by yourself: I kept having to reread paragraphs to understand what he’d just said.

Same for the complex background which explains why Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, and William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, both felt they were entitled to the English throne after Edward the Confessor died – I felt these situations weren’t conveyed thoroughly or powerfully enough.

Reading the Norman Conquest chapter reminded me just how complicated a business it was: all the main players were related to each other by marriages stretching back several generations. In fact to tell the story properly you have to go back to the reign of Ethelred the Unready (978 to 1013) and get a sense of the deeply destabilising impact of the Danish invasion of Sweyn Forkbeard, whose campaigns in the early 1000s led up to the reign over England of his Danish son, Cnut the Great (1016 to 1035), then the brief rule of his son Harthacnut (1040 to 1042), before the throne reverted to an Englishman, Edward the Confessor, himself married to the daughter of the overbearing Earl Godwin.

During this period the female relatives of most of these players were married off into each other’s families or into families in France and Normandy, creating a very complex web of alliances and relationships. You really need to have a good sense of these dynastic matrices in order to understand the constraints and pressures all the players were operating under.

The best book I know on the subject is ‘The Norman Conquest 1066’ by Marc Morris, because it does indeed require an entire book to fully describe the sixty years or so of complex warfare, invasion, foreign rule and dynastic intermarriages which lay behind the successful Norman invasion. Carpenter’s book touches on all this, of course, but doesn’t go anywhere near conveying the depth and complexity and fraughtness of the political situation. He conveys the facts with a kind of deadening punctiliousness, with no sense of the threat or risk or excitement.

Social history

This is chiefly because Carpenter is much more interested in social and economic history than in kings and conquerors. The opening chapters set the tone with their wealth of information about the fundamental social and geographical realities of 11th century Britain, and how it slowly, slowly evolved under the Norman kings. There is an awful lot about the way the country was defined, laid out, administered, farmed and taxed – a lot about nucleated villages and carucates (the extent of land which could be ploughed in a year and a day), demesnes (the land attached to a manor), sokes (an area overseen by a local court), sokemen (the peasant inhabitant of a soke), wapentakes (the northern equivalent of the hundreds which southern counties were divided into) and so on. A typical sentence runs:

Tax records from the end of the thirteenth century show that at Aberffraw wheat was grown extensively, indeed the balance between wheat and oats was better than in some parts of Oxfordshire. (p.39)

There are hundreds of snippets like this. Are you supposed to remember them all? True, they form the basis for and lead up to more graspable general conclusions, but still…

Wales

Wales was economically and socially undeveloped compared to England. The Welsh had no coins and no mint; any coins circulating came from England. There was no one central ruler but hosts of petty kings and princes and dukes who fought among themselves (this was to a large extent determined by the geography of Wales, divided by highlands and steep river valleys). This fighting was rarely what we would call a ‘war’, but more a life of constant raiding and plundering. Thus ‘the law’ was difficult to enforce, and mostly took the form of revenge and vendettas. There was a lot of murdering and maiming. Even Welsh writers lamented the violence and instability of their own society and looked with envy at the strong centralised organisation of England, which benefited from the rule of one strong king, with one set of laws, with a sophisticated system of regional courts, with a strong agricultural economy and one centrally controlled currency.

Ireland

Ireland was even ‘worse’, a land of unbridled internecine conflict between umpteen ‘kings’ – mostly just local warlords – lacking writing and so written laws, without courts or taxation, coinage, even settled towns, apart from Viking-founded Dublin – lacking everything, in fact, which the Normans defined as ‘civilisation’ (p.15).

One aspect of this was the practice of war: the Normans brought a new war-winning technology from the continent – heavy warhorses, crossbows and ‘the castle’ (there wasn’t a single castle in England in 1066; by 1100 there were an estimated 500!) But they also brought rules and a certain amount of ‘chivalry’ to the business of war. Most obviously this meant the aim of battle was to capture rather than just slaughter opposing nobles, and then barter them for big ransoms or land (p.126).

(According to one online definition, ‘chivalrous’ means: ‘gracious and honourable toward an enemy, especially a defeated one’.)

By contrast, a contemporary chronicler laments that the Irish and Welsh practice in battle continued to be to kill, mutilate and behead captive nobles, and take non-noble prisoners into lifelong slavery.

The ransom played a key role in chivalrous continental warfare and was dependent on the existence of money and coinage: a captured lord could be ransomed if you could muster £1,000 in money; but if – as in Wales and Ireland – there was no money at all, then you could only offer his holders… what? Cows, horses, sheep? Giving these would undermine the ability of the people dependant on you to eat and survive. So…Let him die.

So it is a fascinating insight that chivalry depended on the institute of ransom which itself depended on the existence of cash.

Scotland

Scotland is the exception to the Celtic rule due to the sweeping changes wrought under King David I (1124 to 1153). David had been brought up in the court of King Henry I and witnessed the fluency and power of a continental-style monarchy. When he ascended to the Scottish throne, he invited Norman and Flemish settlers to come and settle the Lowlands; he introduced written records for tax purposes, along with continental-style tax and coinage, land-holding patterns. He took wide-ranging steps to generally ‘civilise’ – certainly to ‘continentalise’ – Scotland.

Hence, where Carpenter describes the rise of Anglo-Norman ‘racism’ in the 1100s against the Irish and Welsh (because they were perceived as being illiterate, having no central court or authority, no taxation, no coinage, no modern economy, and because of their inveterate habit of mutilating and slaughtering each other) he also reports the Anglo-Normans were forced, in the 1200s, to concede that Scotland was different. ‘Savages’ though the Highlanders might be, the Lowlanders had more in common with their Anglo-Norman neighbours than with the Celts.

Conclusion

This is a very long book which trawls through the reigns of kings William, William Rufus, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard, John, Henry II and the start of the reign of Edward I. A lot happens at the level of high politics – successions and civil wars and battles – which Carpenter dutifully reports, but he tends to get these bits out of the way so he can get back to what really interests him, which is the social and economic developments during the period, the changing patterns of trade and agricultural practice, reforms to tax laws or the ongoing reforms to church regulation and monastic rule.

Though this is mostly rather dull, it does throw up a steady trickle of useful insights. But for the thrill of high political intrigue, and a sense of how the pressure of tumultuous events limited and determined the actions of successive kings, I would look elsewhere.

Insights

English or Norman?

It seems there was 150 years during which different writers, kings and nobles called themselves English or Norman or French, depending on the context. In the 1120s chroniclers still complained about having been defeated by the Normans. But from the start, the Conqueror described himself as king of the English. Carpenter quotes lots of evidence before summarising, uncontroversially, that by the 13th century England, Scotland and Wales all had a greater sense of national identity than in 1066.

Revolt

Carpenter makes the subtle point that England was so far in advance of the Celtic countries, politically, that by 1200 not only did it have a strong centralised unified monarchy, but the nobles and aristocrats had a highly developed sense of their rights, and what the kingdom should expect from its king. This was the point of Magna Carta, to define and circumscribe the rights and role of the English king, and the political history of the 13th century – as I know from Dan Jones’s rip-roaring history of the Plantagenets and from Marc Morris’s thorough history of King Edward – was the conflict between errant kings (John, Henry III) and rebellious nobles who tried to curb their power and hold them to account against written standards of behaviour.

1204

1204 is referenced repeatedly as the key date in the Englishisation of the Normans because it was the year King John lost the Duchy of Normandy to the French king. John, his court and senior nobles all stopped being able to shuttle between their Norman estates and their English estates and were henceforth bottled up in Britain. Carpenter downplays the ongoing holdings in Gascony in south-west France to emphasise that the loss of Normandy set the kings of ‘England’ on the path towards mastering the rest of Britain i.e. the loss of Normandy leads to the conquest of Wales, the Norman colonisation of Ireland, the invasion of Scotland. Maybe. Quite a long lead time, though – from 1204 until King Edward’s campaigns in Wales the 1280s. Also, this downplays the simple geographical logic: strong powers tend to attack their neighbours sooner or later. The Anglo-Norman invasion of eastern Ireland began much earlier, in the 1170s.

As it happens, 1204 was the year of the Sack of Constantinople by members of the Fourth Crusade, which led to the imposition of Latin control over the Eastern Empire. So a key year to remember.

Slavery

As with Robert Bartlett’s book on the Making of Europe, I was shocked at the extent of slavery in pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon Britain and by the fact that it continued on into this period of the High Middle Ages.

It is estimated that a the time of the conquest about 10% of the rural population of Britain were slaves; Domesday Book mentions 28,000 slaves. You could become a slave by being captured in an armed raid (generally by the Scots or Welsh) but also for simply being unable to pay a debt. Carpenter claims one of the few trades we know about in 11th century Wales was the export of slaves to Ireland.

The Conqueror banned slavery but it lingered on into the 11th century. It was regularly attacked by the Church (although the Church itself owned slaves) but the reason slavery declined and disappeared in the 12th century is that it was uneconomic in a more advanced economy. Slaves have no land and have to be fed. Norman lords realised it was more effective to give slaves land and then extract routine work or produce from them. Thus slaves were converted into ‘villeins’, the precise category of what is more loosely called ‘serfs’ – peasants who were attached to estates and manors, and could be sold on with them. But the key legal difference is that a slave could be punished, physically mutilated and killed by their owner with no comeback. Serfs, on the other hand, as the new stricter laws of the Anglo-Normans insisted, belonged to the king; an attack on their bodies was an attack on the king’s property.

Not war but slave hunts

I was particularly surprised to read about the behaviour of the Scottish during this period i.e. they engaged in routine, large-scale invasions of northern England, during which they lay the country waste, murdered, raped and dragged off the survivors into slavery. Repeatedly. For example, contemporary chroniclers were appalled by the behaviour of the Scots army led into Northumbria by King David and eventually brought to battle at the Battle of the Standard on 22 August 1138. Richard of Hexham described:

An execrable army, more atrocious than the pagans, neither fearing God nor regarding man, spread desolation over the whole province and slaughtered everywhere people of either sex, of every age and rank, destroying, pillaging and burning towns, churches and houses.

The Scots were perceived as going beyond normal Norman ‘harrying’ by systematically carrying off women and children as slaves. In the contemporary Celtic world this was regarded as a useful source of revenue, and not significantly more reprehensible than cattle-raiding.

Then (horrible to relate) they carried off, like so much booty, the noble matrons and chaste virgins, together with other women. These naked, fettered, herded together; by whips and thongs they drove before them, goading them with their spears and other weapons. This took place in other wars, but in this to a far greater extent.

This testimony supports the chroniclers’ tales of sexual abuse of the slaves and the casual slaughter of unsalable encumbrances:

For the sick on their couches, women pregnant and in childbed, infants in the womb, innocents at the breast, or on the mother’s knee, with the mothers themselves, decrepit old men and worn-out old women, and persons debilitated from whatever cause, wherever they met with them, they put to the edge of the sword, and transfixed with their spears.

So the Anglo-Normans’ description of the extremely violent, cruel, enslaving Scots, Welsh and Irish wasn’t just prejudice. This wasn’t war as continental chivalry; it was war as slave-hunt and butchery. These tales influenced English attitudes to their neighbours for generations.

Poverty

Carpenter lays out very clearly the techniques and the source materials used by modern demographers to try and work out the population of Britain in 1066 and then calculate how much it increased in the following two centuries (this lays bare just how much guesswork is involved and why the estimates vary so much). Best guess is the British population was 2 million in 1086 and doubled to over 4 million by 1300, possibly as many as 5 million.

But the more powerful aspect of his account of the British population is the grinding poverty of most of the population. An elite peasant might have a pig, a few cows, some chickens for eggs; a basic ‘cottager’ might have a cow; but the majority of peasants only ate what they could grow, and mostly lived on an unchanging diet of bread and pottage (porridge of oats and corn).

Life still remained miserable and short. Most of the population lived right on the borderline of survival. If there was a bad harvest large numbers starved to death. A bad harvest in 1257 led to large numbers of starving peasants roaming the countryside in 1258, commented on by chroniclers and prompting the government to slacken the law on burying the dead without a full identification, because corpses were piling up so fast. In the second half of the 13th century life expectancy was 24. 24! In 1300 60% of the peasantry were too poor to be taxed.

So the population doubled, new towns were founded along with hundreds of new markets and fairs, a small new merchant class began to crystallise – but the vast majority of the population increase was in the shape of chronically poor peasants tied to the land, who, at a dip in agricultural yields, starved to death.

In 1066 there were no towns north of York, in either England or Scotland, and no towns at all anywhere in Wales! Britain was an almost unrecognisably underdeveloped and empty land.

Credit

The Struggle For Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284 by David Carpenter was published by Penguin Books in 2003.

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Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn (2)

The collision between Europe and Africa came at a time when European self-confidence, based on the wonders of science, was at a peak, and African social conditions were at their worst. (p.175)

This book turns out to be longer and more complex than it initially seems. In the first section, which makes up around a third of the text, McLynn details all the important European expeditions and explorers of note from 1788 to the end of the explorer era around 1890 in a packed hundred pages. It feels quite rushed and hectic.

But as you proceed on into the text it emerges that the first part is by way of being a glorified timeline or chronology, merely a sketch of the main series of expeditions, because McLynn’s real interest is in writing a thematic history of the subject, which aims to consider wider the issues and problems and practicalities of African exploration.

Once the timeline and the key figures are roughly established in our minds, McLynn goes on to examine the issues surrounding exploration at some length, considering the problems, the obstacles, the solutions and the compromises common to the entire era of European exploration of Africa, roping in aspects of specific expeditions or explorers whose names we’ve already encountered in part 1, quoting from books and diaries and letters, as required. In the preface McLynn himself describes this book as:

A sociology of African exploration rather than a history [in which I stress] the common problems and experiences faced by the explorers rather than their unique exploits. (my italics)

So while part one (pages 1 to 128) is by way of being an introductory chronology, the subsequent three parts then re-approach the subject from various angles. In doing so we get to see other sides, aspects and interactions of the key explorers and this goes to build up a more rounded and thought-provoking portrait of the era.

The topics, each addressed in its own chapter, are:

Transport and porterage

In a continent without roads and without viable pack animals, where every animal the explorers tried to use as carriers (horses, mules, oxen, even elephants) died without fail, everything, on all these expeditions, had to be carried by humans. McLynn explores the long list of supplies included on every expedition, including: medicines, alcohol, clothes, helmets, tents, soap and toiletries, weapons and ammunition, food and lots of fresh water, trade goods such as cloth, beads and wire.

Many tribes were used as porters but the Nyemwezi emerged as the most effective and reliable, able to carry up to 70 pounds of equipment and goods. Portering for the white man became big business. By the 1890s it’s estimated that some 20,000 porters a month were leaving Bagamoyo for the interior (p.209).

The importance of hongo or tribute which had to be paid to a tribe to pass their territory.

‘Dark companions’

(‘Dark companions’ was the phrase Stanley used for the many African porters he knew, a phrase he used as the title of a collection of stories he claimed the porters told around campfires at night, ‘My Dark Companions and Their Strange Stories’, published in  1893.)

Without help from the Africans there would have been no exploration of Africa by Europeans. (p.170)

Looks in details at the profession of porter on these expeditions. Porters were known by the generic term wangwana.

In opening up the Dark Continent the wangwana played a key role. (p.170)

The most important fact to grasp was that portering work was, for most Africans, well paid. If they made it back to the expedition starting place (most often Zanzibar on the east coast) they could live as relatively rich men. But the conditions were challenging and many porters were laid low by disease (either dying outright or becoming unable to work) while many others simply absconded. Of the 708 wangwana who left Zanzibar with Stanley in November 1887 on the Emin Pasha expedition, only 210 returned in December 1877.

This chapter looks at how the porters were ordered, how they were managed, a typical day’s march, the problem of discipline – how to read the fine line between being too weak and being too brutal, in charge of a large number of malingering, mutinous and absconding natives He looks in detail at the careers of three wangwana who rose to become senior figures in the portering business, and senior managers on a succession of expeditions, namely Bombay, Baraka, Susi and Chuma. The latter two became the most famous porters of the age after the took the decision, by themselves, to carry Livingstone’s embalmed body from Ilala, where he died in May 1873, nearly a thousand miles down to the sea opposite Zanzibar.

An object lesson in obstacles

A consideration of the many obstacles which dogged all African expeditions demonstrated through a detailed description of just part of the 1874 to 1877 Stanley expedition, the three months spent crossing of modern Tanzania to Lake Victoria, which featured a harrowing list of experiences, including virulent disease, famine and starvation, mutiny of the porters, flash floods, sustained attack by warlike tribes, death of all the pet dogs and two of the five white men from disease, a catalogue of horrendous trials and misery.

The impact of disease

The impact of disease was catastrophic. The porters died, the horses died, the mules died, the dogs died and the Europeans died. McLynn lists virulent African diseases which, in the absence of effective traditional medicine or any real Western medicine, ran rampant through explorers and their porters, and included: smallpox, fever, ague, amoebic and bacillic dysentery, guinea worm, ulcers acquired when scratches (from thorn bushes or tall sharp grass) got infected and festered in the heat and humidity, bronchitis, pneumonia, rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), bilharzia, filariasis, hookworm infestation (ankylostomiasis), river blindness (onchocerciasis), exanthematic typhus, yaws and leprosy, for each of which he proceeds to give a stomach-churning description of symptoms, explorers who caught it, and various attempts by Africans and Europeans at cures.

McLynn gives us excerpts from journals of explorers which describe the symptoms of fever in graphic and gruelling detail, the most notable parts of which were not the cold, the shivering, the fever, vomiting, difficulty breathing, inability to eat or drink, and so on, but the sometimes vivid hallucinations, dreams and nightmares fever gave rise to.

He also points out that fevers often led to feelings of paranoia, which might explain why some of the white explorers fell out so vitriolically and might also explain the sometimes unusual violence of white explorers towards local tribes or their own porters, the result of fever-inspired paranoia or aggression (p.237).

McLynn comes to the sweeping conclusion that, because almost all Africans were exposed to these devastating illnesses (as many are to this day), that all Africans ‘operated at very much less than full energy or efficiency.’ That the severity and widespreadness of these severe illnesses resulted in: smaller crop reduction, reduced calorie intake and hence widespread ‘malnutrition and apathy’ (p.252).

Armed clashes

The use of force was endemic to Africa; the most admired human beings were warriors ans conquerors. (p.253)

McLynn emphasises the traditional patriarchal values of African tribes. He describes how, in some tribes, heirs to a throne had to fight it out between themselves (as in medieval Europe), before going on to look at the violent behaviour of the Europeans, contrasting the fiercely anti-African Sir Samuel Baker with Henry Morton Stanley.

In the late Victorian period Stanley acquired the unenviable reputation of being a hard man, violent and sadistic, using beatings, stealing, intimidation and armed attacks to get his way, but McLynn suggests Stanley was more subtle and strategic than that, whereas Baker genuinely enjoyed nothing more than massacring Africans with rifle and machine gun.

A key text is when Baker admitted he had done much worse than Stanley but was wise enough to hush it up and never to write it up in print. Stanley, naively, included his violent engagements with Africans in his various books and, what is more, exaggerated them, and was therefore was his own worst PR enemy.

McLynn sketches a spectrum of anti-African violence with the saintly David Livingstone at one end, genuinely believing in his Christian mission and that kind words and deeds recruited natives to his side; with Baker, Chaille-Long, Frederick Lugard and Carl Peters at the explicitly racist, hyper-violent end; beside whom Stanley was a lot less violent, used his superior arms strategically (to fight his way down the Congo against a never-ending succession of aggressive tribes), was prepared to use peaceful negotiation when he had the time, and often spoke highly of the native Africans. But while the former are forgotten, Stanley’s name is the one which has gone down in the annals of infamy (p.273).

Animals dangerous to man

McLynn selects stories from explorers’ accounts of encounters with the most dangerous fauna in Africa, working thematically through lions (only attack if provoked), leopards (far more dangerous) hyenas, elephants, rhinoceros on land, terrifyingly aggressive crocodiles and easily enraged hippopotami in the water. He has a passage about snakes and various terrifying encounters with cobras and pythons. And lastly a section on the deepest enemy of man in Africa, insects, bees, wasps, locusts, white ants which ate anything and the fearsome soldier ants who devoured everything in the path of their huge armies. And, of course, the malaria-carrying mosquito and the ruinous tsetse fly.

The main story, though, is that in doing the discovering, drafting the maps and pioneering the routes into various parts of Africa, the Victorian explorers opened the way for big game hunters and tourists who, as early as the 1870s had driven some unique African species extinct (the textbook example is the quagga), by 1900 had emptied regions which only 50 years earlier had teemed with wildlife, and on into the twentieth century’s long, sorry record of extermination.

Explorers and imperialism

Obviously the explorers drafted the maps, joined up the rivers and lakes, established routes and provided a wide range of information about geography, flora, fauna, tribes and societies which was then used by those who argued for greater British involvement in Africa which, by the late 1880s/early 1890s was becoming known as the New Imperialism. McLynn points out that many Africa watchers expected British intervention in Africa to come in the shape of chartered companies on the analogy of the East Indian Company. The British government didn’t get directly involved until it annexed its first African territory, Uganda, in 1894.

Formal empire began with the annexation of Uganda in 1894. (p.316)

In fact the explorers were very different men with a wide range of attitudes towards Africa, Africans and the commercial opportunities there, some believing fortunes could be made, some believing (with Livingstone) that western commerce would help develop Africa into a thriving economy, others (like Baker) believing nothing could redeem the African from his savagery.

McLynn groups the views justifying imperial interventions of the very diverse Africanists into five overall arguments (p.314):

  1. There was no alternative. The explorers depicted a continent riven by tribal wars, mired in poverty and ignorance, and prey to the brutal activities of Arab slave traders. Could European Christians stand by and let this situation continue forever? Or intervene.
  2. Piecemeal measures were inadequate. Baker and Gordon tried to annex territory round the source of the Nile and abolish slavery there, but the distances were too great, the lack of communications infrastructure too weakening, the local rulers too corrupt, the Arab slavers too flexible. Only wholesale annexation and complete administrative control by well-funded European bureaucrats could shift the situation.
  3. Experience showed that formal agreements to end slavery, such as that between Sir Bartle Frere and the Sultan of Zanzibar, were ineffective unless backed by systematic state force.
  4. In the era of liberal free trade economics it was thought iniquitous that the African lived in poverty, squalor and famine in a land which, if it was only ‘developed’ properly by European masters, could provide ample food, material goods, education and progress towards European standards of living.
  5. Racial theorists, and the more anti-African explorers such as Burton and Baker, thought Africans were children in terms of intellect, emotion, ability to reason and so on, and therefore needed to be taken in hand and guided by wise parents. Westerners, of course.

Reputation and impact

McLynn examines the impact of the explorers on African tribes and societies. Their reputations, obviously, varied, from the very positive memories of Livingstone and Speke, to the negative folk memories of Burton and Baker, with Stanley a complex mix of both.

The most striking thing about this chapter is the profound ignorance of the Africans, who, across many tribes and regions, thought the white men were spirits returned from the dead or arriving from a different realm, who thought the cloth they bought was woven by spirits contained in their steamships, who didn’t understand how their weapons or any other technologies worked and so thought they were magicians, had supernatural powers, and so on.

As to impact, it was universally disastrous: the white men uprooted settled societies and beliefs, undermined local religions and practices, undermined traditional methods of transferring or holding power (by backing usurpers who supported European aims), undermined the currency, disrupted trading patterns, and again and again, opened up previously inaccessibly areas to the evil attentions of the Arab slave traders.

The psychology of the explorers

McLynn mixes up a number of ideas. He contrasts the mentality of the explorer and the mere traveller (the traveller seeks out the little known, the explorer the unknown). Obviously there was a Romantic thirst for grandeur and spectacular scenes. There is the highly driven ambition to be the ‘first to set eyes on’ or ‘the first man to establish’ some geographical fact, the most famous one being the intense quest to establish the source of the Nile.

Many explorers expressed the same deep feeling that only in Africa, far from the constraints and conventions of European civilisation, did they feel really free, did they feel truly themselves, a feeling vividly expressed by Burton and Stanley, who revelled in demanding physical endurance and the exercise of untrammeled power over large numbers of men. McLynn ropes in psychoanalysis and one of its founding mothers, Melanie Klein, but we don’t really need her theories to understand that Africa represented a vast canvas on which highly motivated individuals could act out all kinds of fantasies of power over other men, direct personal struggles against physical limitations and death, and psychological rewards, in terms of achieving goals, completing epic journeys, answering huge geographical speculations, which in turn brought fame, wealth and the love of women.

Livingstone was a subtler more complex man and described complex feelings, which included the ‘far from England’ liberation but also the warmth of feeling one was doing good work in a good cause. Livingstone enjoyed unerring confidence that God was guiding him, that Providence was on his side, that Stanley observed at close quarters, envied, but thought ultimately deceptive.

Something Livingstone and Stanley had in common was the extreme poverty of their backgrounds. Exploring offered an opportunity for freedom, power and, when the results were published back in Blighty, extraordinary fame. As the age of exploration drew to an end many of the explorers transitioned to holding official and extensive power under the new colonial dispensations, such as de Brazza and Lugard.

This chapter ends with extended psychoanalytical speculation of four leading figures, Livingstone, Speke, Stanley and Burton, all of whom had larger than life, obsessive and florid personalities which they were able to express freely in the wilderness and then embroider even further in their many published writings.

I found McLynn’s speculations a bit tiresome in the same way so many modern biographer’s psychological speculations about their subjects are. a) It is an old, worn-out creed, Freudianism. b) McLynn, like so many of his ilk, is not a trained psychologist or psychoanalyst, so all his speculating is that of an amateur.

Reading McLynn’s speculations that Livingstone was obsessed with sex, Speke was dominated by a death drive, and Stanley was a repressed homosexual don’t really add to the preceding accounts of their extraordinary achievements against so many odds. This kind of amateur psychosexual speculation degrades the biographer’s subjects and demeans the biographer himself. It sullies the reader. Yuk.

************

All these subjects are interesting in themselves but the chapters which really stood out for me were the one about guns and the one about slaves. These contain some really Big Ideas.

Guns

Jared Diamond’s 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel sets out to give a materialist explanation for why some parts of the world, specifically the Eurasian land mass, supported cultures and civilisations which advanced in complexity and sophistication, while others remained primitive and backward. The two key ones are the presence of domesticatable animals and a wide variety of grasses which could be carefully bred and modified to improve food yields (wheat, barley, oats) are two important ones. This enabled agricultural surpluses which could support non-labouring classes, kings, warriors, priests, administrators and bureaucrats, the kinds of people who invented writing and art to tally up the king’s possessions and record the king’s mighty deed.

Writing meant later generations could read about the achievements of previous generations and try to better them. For thousands of years all aspects of the culture could be improved from agricultural techniques, breeding livestock, improvements in military and other technology. But the big lift-off came with the industrial revolution which gathered pace in Britain from the mid-18th century onwards and led to the development of the factory production of a huge range of goods.

All this explains why, when white men first appeared on the coasts of Africa and then slowly penetrated inland, they might as well have been aliens from another planet for all they had in common with the local inhabitants, who had no writing or history or technology, had no pack animals, survived on subsistence agriculture, had no cities or roads or canals, whose only water transport was canoes.

Everything the white arrivals wore and carried and bartered was produced in factories and economies driven by technologies and linked by international trading routes beyond the comprehension of most Africans.

But nowhere was this more important than in the realm of weaponry. All Africans used bows and arrows and spears and primitive knives. None of them had seen guns. It was like aliens invading with ray guns. ‘Bunduki sultani ya bara bara,’ – ‘the gun is the ruler of Africa’, as Stanley’s wangwani are alleged to have told him.

McLynn goes into great detail about the makes of gun and their technical spec and the munitions carried and preferred by the various explorers. But it is the central idea of the magic of killing from afar, killing from a distance, which makes you stop and reflect on the relationship between the gunned and the non-gunned or (once they start acquiring old flintlocks from some European traders) the outgunned.

The heyday of exploration, 1870 to 1890, happened to coincide with a quantum leap in western armaments, with the invention of the breech-loading rifle in the 1860s, the magazine rifle (first used in the Russo-Turkish war in 1877) and the Maxim machine gun in 1884. The early explorers overawed the Africans they met with their Snyder rifles. The last generation, in the 1890s, annihilated them with machine guns. These instruments of death burst upon an African scene which was already characterised by tribal rivalry:

The pre-existing structural instability of Bantu tribalism, with raiding, looting and tribal war a way of life, and a worldview that exalted power over all attributes and held human life cheap, were all part of an essential indiscipline likely to be made worse when the rifle arrived. (p.175)

Almost as devastating was the way the advent of Western firearms undermined traditional structures of power and authority. Previously, there were village elders and councils and traditional wisdom of sorts which bolstered traditional hierarchies of power. The advent of guns meant power was transferred to the ones with guns, to the most tooled-up. Traditional hierarchies were replaced by charismatic warlords who led roving bands of raiders, generically referred to as the ruga-ruga, a situation which still obtains in parts of Africa, and resurfaces wherever modern authority structures collapse in civil war (Somalia, Eritrea, Darfur, eastern Congo).

Did the explorers take many weapons? The very earliest ones, not so much. But fifty years later Stanley led expeditions huge in manpower (up to 800 porters) and massively armed. On the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Stanley took 510 Remington rifles with 100,000 rounds, 50 Winchester repeaters with 50,000 cartridges, 2 tons of gunpowder, 350,000 percussion caps, 30,000 Gatling cartridges and 35,000 special Remington cartridges (p.176).

Makes me reflect that it is true to this day. America was able to overthrow the rulers of Iraq and Afghanistan because of the awesome power of their weapons, and the shattering way they were able to co-ordinate mass attacks, wave after wave of carefully targeted bombs. It was when the fighting came down to the ground level, with gangs of men with guns shooting at other gangs of men with guns, that the technical superiority faded away, and the occupying forces, American and British, found themselves in such difficulties in the narrow alleyways of Lashkar Gah or the Sunni Triangle.

As I read detailed accounts of how Europeans at first shot, then fought, and then massacred native Africans with steadily escalating weaponry (climaxing in the gatling gun which mowed down Sudanese warriors by the thousand at the notorious battle of Omdurman in 1898) I reflected that the situation in today’s world is unchanged.

World peace is maintained by America’s vast spending on its military. Much of it may be useless or corrupt and siphoned off into the accounts of America’s vast arms manufacturers and traders. But they can deploy overwhelming force to any part of the world in a way Russia certainly can’t and China doesn’t want or need to. Only the vast superiority of their weaponry gave the Americans the confidence to intervene in Somalia and Iraq and Afghanistan.

What I’m driving at is that everybody nowadays mocks the Victorian explorers-cum-imperialists for their hypocrisy, for the discrepancy between their high-minded rhetoric about civilisation and culture and freedom – and the reality of the brute force they actually deployed. But wherein are we different? All liberal rhetoric about human rights boils down to who has the better guns (the Americans) and whether they’re prepared to use them (not any more, or not for a while, anyway)

Slavery

This is a vast subject which is becoming ever more fashionable. An unending tide of books and movies and art works and activism and political movements and statue toppling is going to keep the issue of historical slavery in the headlines for the foreseeable future. It doesn’t dominate McLynn’s book but crops up throughout and he is wise to devote an entire chapter to it.

Firstly, he explains that there were two types of slavery, domestic i.e. internal African slavery, and external or export slavery (p.189). Domestic slavery had been a fact of African life since time immemorial and was widely accepted. Slaves were taken as prisoners of war after battle. Slaves could be traded on the open market for other goods. Family members, especially children, could be offered as requital for homicide.

Buying and selling human beings was a culture already widespread in the Dark Continent. (p.204)

Most slaves were women. Verney Cameron estimated 90% of slaves in Ujiji as women and children. Men were too risky, and so were generally slaughtered on the spot. Women slaves could potentially become wives of their owners and, if they bore children, well treated. Women slaves to Arab traders and on the coast were treated less well. Slaves could be put to work as servants, retainers, canoe paddlers, to work the fields. They could be bought to be made human sacrifices. German explorer E.J. Glave watched two slaves being bought, killed, cooked and eaten (p.191).

Like any system, slavery could be gotten around. All observers noted that the systems were varied from place to place and tribe to tribe, and included a bewildering number of rules and exceptions and traditions and customs. It wasn’t just One Thing.

The Atlantic slave trade

The British abolished the slave trade in 1807 and liberated all slaves across the empire in 1833. Other empires weren’t so willing. The Portuguese continued shipping slaves from Mozambique to Brazil for decades to come. Brazil didn’t abolish slavery till 1888.

In 1841 Britain organised the Quintuple Treaty whereby Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia agreed to impound all ships fitted out for slave trading. The Portuguese were forced into signing a year later but ignored it and the American government vigorously protested the right of the British to stop and search it ships, in fact the issue became so heated there was some talk of a war.

The East African slave trade

The Muslim-Arab trade in African slaves had been going on since the 7th century, if not before. It received a boost when Omani Said, Sultan of Muscat, transferred his entire court to Zanzibar in 1833. By the time the British arrived it was estimated about two-thirds of the population of 200,000 were slaves. The trade moved inland, with trails commencing from the major port of Bagamoyo on the coast opposite Zanzibar, leading to the waystation of Tabora and on to Lake Tanganyika.

The British consul estimated that about 40,000 slaves were brought to Zanzibar each year of which half were exported north to the Arab world. In 1866 Livingstone observed the slave market where between 100 and 300 slaves were sold off every day. As many as half the original captives died on the long march to the coast, and significant numbers then died in the 24 hour crossing from the coast to Zanzibar, packed like sardines into filthy and boiling conditions below decks.

In 1873 Sir Bartle Frere arrived in Zanzibar as British consul and delivered an ultimatum to the sultan, which forced him to sign a treaty abolishing the slave trade. But the sultan himself didn’t control it and Arab slavers simply moved their routes and markets to other islands.

McLynn describes the process whereby Arab traders entered new territory, bribed their way into the favours of local rulers with trade goods, assisted in their wars in exchange for a cut of the slaves. Mostly these were women and children who were place in the sheba or forked pole which fit round the captive’s neck. Shackled together, they then began the long trek to the coast in blistering heat with inadequate food and water. Anyone who fell sick or protested was killed out of hand.

Cameron estimated that to achieve a haul of 52 female prisoners, the slavers had to destroy 10 villages, each with a population of 1,500 to 2,000, burned to death when the villages were torched, or shot down if they tried to escape, or dying of starvation in the jungle. Thomson thought about 2 in 3 died on the way to the coast. Livingstone observed it at close quarters and thought the figure was closer to 1 in ten. The tremendous loss of life explains why, once the Arabs entered an area, it was devastated.

In 1863, on reaching Gondokoro, [Baker] found a populous region teeming with vast herds of cattle. On his second journey in 1872, he found the area denuded of people; the slave trade had wiped the land of milk and honey off the face of the earth. (p.206)

This was the trade that all the explorers without exception, and the British government, were committed to ending but found hard to do so with so little power on the ground. If the British were serious about ending slavery, then they needed more than a few scattered explorers and single-handed consuls. They needed to take over full administrative and security responsibility for entire regions.

Towards the end of the book McLynn quotes historian Dorothy O. Helly making the startling point that, if the British were serious about completely stamping out slavery in Africa, then imperial rule was the only way to achieve it.

‘Played out to its logical end…the British antislavery impulse led to empire.’ (quoted on page 309)

On this view, the extension of the British Empire into Africa was nothing to do with the Hobson-Lenin thesis that the empire existed to soak up excess capital, to provide opportunities for profitable investment which had dried up at home.

On the contrary, it was a moral crusade which ended up being costly and impractical and involving the British in an ever-deepening mire of repressing rebellions and independence movements which eventually proved unstoppable.

The end of slavery?

Frederick Lugard’s attempts to eliminate slavery around Lake Nyasa in 1888 were a humiliating failure. It took the post-Berlin Congress takeover by the Germans to begin serious eradication. As the Germans advanced along the classic route from Bagamoyo to Tabora to Ujiji, they captured and punished slavers as they went. Only in 1900 had they wiped out all traces of slavery around Tanganyika. Domestic slavery, however, endured with the result that when war broke out in 1914 there were still some 50,000 domestic slaves in German East Africa. After the war the British took over the territory but it wasn’t until 1939 that slavery in the area was completely extirpated.

African rulers

Leading African rulers of the era included kings Mutesa, Lobengula, Mzilikazi, Mirambo and Kabbarega.

Insults

Glave reported that on the upper Congo the imprecation Owi na nlorli was a mortal insult. It means ‘May a crocodile eat you’ (p.290).

Credit

Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa by Frank McLynn was published in 1992 by Hutchinson. All references are to the 1993 Pimlico paperback edition.

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Posted by Simon on August 25, 2021

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