Out of Africa always something new in armchair solutions, with the eternal certainty that none will work. Colonialism? Bad. Decolonisation? Disastrous. Neo-colonialism? Wicked. Bob Geldof? Er, no. So, leave the place alone and its bonjour Mugabe, or worse.

For well-wishers from the north it has been a slow learning-curve. Colonialism was designed by Whitehall mandarins and old Wykhamists who knew what was best for the natives. Settlers were sent in to grow food and extract minerals and generally bring the place forward. The settlers managed to grow a vast amount of food, although they needed rather a lot of land to do so profitably, which left the natives feeling restless. When the colonies became expensive they were abandoned and decolonisation was designed by a new generation of mandarins who also knew what was best for the natives. The Punch humorist, Pont, summarised both situations:

The most disturbing nightmare

Which haunts each White Man’s son

Is: ‘If there had been no White Men

What would the Blacks have done?’

Nearly 50 years ago the Colonial Office hauled down the Union Jack and lined the natives up beneath brand new flags telling them that henceforth they belonged to nations they had never heard of. These uneasy national arrangements replaced the tribal regions of old, and tribalism was recategorised as a colonial invention. The word ‘tribe’ did not appear in the index of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Africa (1981). It had been abolished by massed ranks of tenured experts from SOAS, the LSE and the International Disaster Institute. The Encyclopaedia’s entry on newly independent Zimbabwe refers to President Mugabe’s ‘avowedly conciliatory stance’. How very perceptive. (This was just a few months before Mugabe sent his 5th Brigade into Matabele land, where its Shona officers arranged to massacre 25,000 of their fellow citizens.) In a Cultural Atlas of Africa, also published in 1981, in Oxford, tribalism was described as ‘a prejudicial term’. In its place over 1,000 African languages were listed. The same po-faced nonsense lives on today and has infected the Oxford English Dictionary, whose Compact edition (2008) solemnly warns readers that ‘the word tribe can cause offence’ if used about a living community.

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