[lbo-talk] Whitewash on the Dark Continent (John Dolan book review)

[Chris Doss]

The eXile 44 Feb 06
Whitewash on the Dark Continent 
By John Dolan ( dolan at exile.ru )

"The State of Africa A History of Fifty Years of
Independence"-by Martin Meredith London 2005

See it on Amazon.com... 

You Russians will instantly recognize the thesis of
Martin Meredith's book. It's simple: turns out
Africa's problems are the fault of:the Africans. Just
like all Russia's problems in the late 1990s turned
out to be all your own fault, after you had the
effrontery not to transform yourselves into
Republicans as quickly as Yeltsin's imported con men
and thieves, exemplified by that erudite thief and con
man Anders Aslund, had exhorted you to do.

Now Meredith performs the same service for Westerners
who might feel a wee little twinge of conscience about
their role in the mess that is Africa. That's not
surprising. What does surprise me is how crudely it is
done, and how successful sheer crude whitewashes seem
to be these days.

Meredith's most powerful trick is so obvious I can't
believe no mainstream reviewer has noticed it. He rigs
the game by starting the story of each African
country's fall into chaos at the moment of
"independence"--that is, the day when the colonial
occupier decided to dump a particular swath of African
land it had been exploiting over several generations.

This is like starting the biography of a woman who's
been gangraped and shot as she lies in Intensive Care,
her vital signs fading. Clearly, she just didn't have
the will to live. Nobody's fault but hers.

Of course, Meredith realizes he can't entirely
airbrush the fact of colonialism. Too many people have
at least a vague idea that some not-quite-cricket
deeds were done by Victoria's darlings, those brave,
sunburnt pederasts in pith helmets who "explored"
Africa via enslavement, expropriation and massacre.

So Meredith does what any smart propagandist would do:
he compresses that long nightmare story of multiple
genocides, mass rape, slave raids and degradation into
a 14-page "Introduction." Like all Introductions, this
one doesn't actually have "Don't Read This Bit"
stamped on it, but may as well have. By consigning
Europe's 500-year-long Sadean idyll in Africa to this
glorified footnote, Meredith has done enough to
satisfy gullible provincials eager to be told that
their smug wealth has nothing to do with African
misery. It doesn't take much to convince a Tory
audience that they have nothing to apologize for.

That's been all too clear lately. Meredith's book is
only the latest in a stunning series of simplistic
Tory gloats. Meredith is a squeamish moderate compared
to outright neo-Imperialists like David Gilmour, whose
bestseller The Ruling Caste aims to show us that the
Brit functionaries who whipped India into shape back
in the day were actually a swell bunch of guys. I can
only quote this summary of Gilmour's booklength
commercial for the Raj, as perceived by the
permanently clueless reviewers at Publishers Weekly:

"Gilmour's deftly organized, encyclopedic account of
the day-to-day existence of the members of the Indian
Civil Service (ICS) upends the view of the British
rulers as tyrannical, racist philistines, an image
born out of such works as E.M. Forster's A Passage to
India and advanced strenuously since postcolonial
studies emerged in the 1970s. Gilmour, author of
highly regarded biographies of Rudyard Kipling and
Lord Curzon, assembles a wealth of light, amusing
anecdotes on an astounding range of topics concerning
the members of the ICS, including their college days,
bad habits, job duties, gripes about the weather and
courtship practices. Though lacking in analysis, the
sympathetic general portrait gives a good insider's
view of how these men fared in an unfamiliar and
sometimes dangerous region. A firm understanding of
the British mindset and playful characterizations of
its idiosyncrasies provide entertainment and insight,
but, lacking a central thread or thesis, the book
often feels inessential."

With reviewers as hopelessly dense and gullible as the
idiot who wrote this, it's no wonder the Tories are
getting bolder with every new publishing cycle. It
doesn't occur to the reviewer that a man whose
previous works were biographies of Kipling and Lord
Curzon might have a bit of an ideological bias in
favor of colonialism. And even though this anonymous
cretin manages to grasp that Gilmour is putting
together "sympathetic" anecdotes, showing these
bipedal tapeworms at work and play, he or she or it
can't even imagine there might be an agenda here.

So s/he concludes by accusing Gilmour of the one crime
of which this sort of author is never guilty: lacking
a thesis. Yeah, that was the problem with Triumph of
the Will: no thesis.

If Publishers Weekly represents the mean intelligence
of Western non-fiction readers, I'm surprised that
propagandists like Meredith even bother with these
G-string "Introductions." You're overestimating your
audience, Meredith! Just start the book, "Africa
emerged from the ocean, fully formed, in 1961, as a
crowd of European well-wishers looked on, flinging
wreaths inscribed "Best Wishes!" onto the waves."

When Meredith does concede that the European
colonizers might have done a few icky things here and
there, he is careful to focus on nasty Continentals
like the French or Belgians, carefully protecting
England from the least hint of blame. His one
exception is, not surprisingly, the Boer War, one of
the few British atrocities to get a fair bit of
publicity thanks to the fact that the victims were
white Europeans. He spits up an entire paragraph to
the Empire's use of concentration camps to reduce the
population of troublesome Boers--but carefully omits
any discussion of the sleazy origins of the war in the
discovery of gold and diamonds on the formerly
worthless land to which the Brits had been willing to
allow the Boers to flee.

Every stat, every adjective in the book is stacked not
only against the Africans but against Britain's rival
colonial powers. In a very quick, forced account of
European land grabs, he mentions that "French claims
[in Africa] extended over about 3.75 million square
miles, those of Britain about 2 million square miles."

True enough:but he neglects to add that the
overwhelming majority of French territory in Africa
consisted of the Sahara. Britain allowed the French to
claim huge chunks of desert because it was worthless.
The Union Jack flew over every part of Africa that a
nineteenth-century Great Power would have considered
worth having, from Suez to Cape Town.

Thus, as Meredith moves from country to country, one
sees a very clear pattern: when he bothers with a
longer view of history, one that actually touches on
the wrongs of colonialism, it's always when he's
dealing with a former colony of France, Portugal, or
Belgium, those nasty Papist countries. So Leopold
comes in for vilification--as he damn well should-in
Meredith's account of what went wrong with Congo, but
when it comes to British territories like Nigeria, the
long view disappears and this shameless apologist for
the Raj tells the story of Nigeria's slide to
corruption and dictatorship as if it started at the
moment of independence.

That's why his account of the Biafra War is strikingly
lacking in any sympathy for the Igbo: because Britain
backed the murderous, cowardly and corrupt Nigerian
leadership against the rebels. It really is that
simple, and that vile.

I get tired of saying this, and I'm sure many readers
are far more tired of hearing me say it. But somebody
has to, and at the moment the publishing world seems
to consist solely of credulous American reviewers and
Tory liars working day and night to convince them that
the Empire was the best thing that every happened to
Wog-dom, and the whole 20th-century "independence"
guff nothing but flim-flam.

You don't need to learn world history from scratch to
discover what a sickening list of atrocities this Big
Lie is meant to cover. Just pick a country, any
country, and study its history through the 19th
century. So vast and cruel was the Raj in that century
that no matter what country you choose, you'll learn
enough to be unable to read books like Meredith's
without retching. If you want a tip, I'd say you could
start with the Opium Wars. Or the British conquest of
Burma. But you'd do just as well throwing a dart at a
world map, because although they like to pretend they
were just Eric-Idle types, harmless twits, the truth
is that the Imperial Brits were by far the most
effectual predators in the history of the planet.

One reason they did so well is that they had a talent
for storytelling. And now, having had to make a
tactical withdrawal from the hot countries, they're
taking care of business by moving from the Eric-Idle
cover story to a more assertive one: the Empire wasn't
just harmless, it was wonderful. Why, just look at how
those African countries collapsed when we left!

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the entire content
of this 750-page book. Africa was just dandy at the
moment the Colonialists departed, and now look at it!
Fifty years of independence and the place is a mess!

Of course, that last clause is true enough; Africa is
a fearful mess, no doubt. But it's disingenuous at
best to pretend that its problems began when the
rapists shot their loads and left, sniggering. In
fact, "disingenuous" my ass. It's a filthy, calculated
lie designed to exonerate the Empires who perpetrated
the most protracted and cruel exploitation of
conquered peoples in history.

What makes me dizzy and sick is the fact that Meredith
seems to be a sane, intelligent man. Like many Tory
pop historians, he knows how to tell a good story and
has a cooler, more droll eye for grotesque detail than
his sanctimonious American counterparts. That tang of
honesty makes the book a quick, entertaining read. But
this amounts to assembling many small truths in the
service of a huge, contemptible lie. How can you DO
this, Mister Meredith? How can you sleep after writing
filth like this book? Don't you have any decency at
all?

Note: This book is being marketed under two rhyming
titles, The State of Africa and The Fate of Africa. I
read the hardcover version, titled The State of
Africa:; the paperback version has been re-titled The
Fate of Africa:, probably because "State" isn't
melodramatic enough to suit Oprah's fans. As far as I
can tell (having compared the "Table of Contents" of
the two titles), the books are identical.

John Dolan is the author of Pleasant Hell published by
Capricorn Publishing. Buy it on amazon.com or risk
being called "the healty and successful type."



Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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