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.

Random Acts of Mindlessness

Review: An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd

Rating: 8/10

The back-drop to this novel is the merry dance which Prussian lieutenant-colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck led the British forces in German East Africa during The Great (!!) War. Boyd grew up in West Africa and knows what colonial life was like. He is a Scot and perhaps this is why he enjoys making quite a mockery of the British officers.  (Think Captain Mannering of Dad’s Army).  Nonetheless, between guffaws, he brings us firmly back to earth with sudden unexpected explosions of violence, all the more powerful for their purposelessness.  I had the sense of reading about a cricket match where bodies get chalked up as runs.

One troubling point was the occasional references to ‘niggers’ and ‘coolies’ and my 21st century sensibility struggled with the conflict between respectfulness and authenticity.

Initially I found the book old-fashioned in presentation (comic-book cover) and writing style, reminding me of Boy’s Own yarns but this soon yielded to pleasure in a well-told story where much of the humour turned out to be a well-honed metaphor for the mindlessness and chaos which arises when politicians and generals send young men to pointless deaths. I began to dread the appearance of the very comic district officer Wheech-Browning which always presaged more dreadful deaths.

Following on a recent reading of The African Queen by C.S. Forester, I may be starting to build an African bookshelf.