Utopian Morning

We had our monthly meeting in the Alliance Française on Kildare Street. Imagine, it’s been thirty years since I passed through its doors!

The theme for the meeting was dystopia but it was clear to me the our membership are living utopian retirements. Indeed, Eugene’s world was so utopian that he came to find out if people actually wrote about dystopia.

Michael offered us Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and we marvelled at the kind of idealogical madness that causes people to condemn themselves for the cause. Richard gave us Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven about a global pandemic which he described as “unputdownable” and Eugene was quick to snap it up. I note it’s being developed into a TV series.  (I should have thought to recommend he play Pandemic, a cooperative boardgame.)

Tony produced two classics, (Kafka’s The Trial and Huxley’s Brave New World) but preferred to talk about the decline of democracy in the world we actually live in. David gave us Tom Wall’s Dachau to the Dolomites, on how the Nazi’s treated special prisoners as bargaining chips as they saw the end approaching. Don produced Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes about the horrors of colonialism in 19th century Africa and how it was reflected in literature. Richard decided to try it out.

After some derogatory remarks by Don, it was suggested that the theme for the next meeting (postponed to May) will be, Best Book by a Woman Author. Richard assures me this is not an oxymoron 🧐.

 

 

Darkest Africa

Review: Exterminate All the Brutes by Sven Lindqvist

What a great read! I was well prepared for this book. I’ve read Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness, H.G.Wells’ War of the Worlds and Adam Hochschild‘s King Leopold’s Ghost. Sometimes I knew what I was reading, sometimes the deeper message eluded me.

Translated from the Swedish, Lindqvist writes a sort of journal of a trip in Saharan Africa where he reflects as he goes on the very dark history of European conquest there. The underlying theme is that the Holocaust is perceived as a Nazi invention but that its pedigree is perfectly European.  (Watching the news this evening on the white supremacist terrorist assault in New Zealand, and the journalist’s remark that it was the worst ever in the country, I couldn’t help smiling wryly at her innocence (or disingenuousness?) when I recalled that wholesale slaughter of the Maori people by British colonists in the 19th century which far exceeded this event). He describes how Germany was late to the field and how early German writers criticised their neighbours’ conquests while later ones then tried to modify the tone as Germany joined the race for territory.

The title is taken from Heart of Darkness.  If you haven’t read it, recall Apocalypse Now which was Francis Ford Coppola’s loose transfer of the book from the African Congo to Vietnam. Conrad was showing his disgust and his book pales in comparison to what was actually perpetrated by the British, the French and the Belgians. I hadn’t realised that Wells‘ War of the Worlds was another commentary on colonialism, the martians representing invaders with a technology unimaginably superior to ours. Lindqvist points out that the only defence the African’s had was malaria (just as the martians succumbed to bacteria).

The eugenics movement and the influence of Darwin is a disturbing theme.

The message of the book is not that we should open our eyes but that we know exactly what they (we!) did and we need to fix it.

Apart from being a very moving commentary, this book is written by a very fine writer who I could describe as almost poetic.