In post when the curtain came down on Britain’s African empire, there survives today a generation of colonial officers whose numbers are dwindling fast. Many were fired by an idealism already out of fashion when they chose their career. Most came to love their adopted continent. Some can write. Two of these are Jonathan Lawley and John Hare. Each has an incredible tale to tell. Here is a pair of books that, placed with a decanter of whisky on the bedside table of any Spectator reader’s guest bedroom, will have the reading-light burning late into the night.
Yet they are very different stories, quite differently written. Beyond the Malachite Hills is a businesslike account of the last days of colonial government in Northern Rhodesia, and the first years of African self-government in its successor state, Zambia.
Here Jonathan Lawley was asked to stay on as a colonial officer (and African linguist) in the wild and beautiful country above the Zambezi river. Bitten by the African bug, he went on to train up black workers in the copper mining industry in the Congo. And he was invited by HMG to supervise the first general election on a universal franchise in Rhodesia: signalling the end of Iain Smith’s government.
Lawley has made himself an expert on training and management in what he perceptively calls the New Africa: post-colonial, post-revolutionary, post-basket-case bombast; a continent we’re only just beginning to notice, where economies are growing (regardless of, and sometimes despite, the corruptions of politics) and a new African generation is getting its teeth into making things work.
Lawley has an optimistic story to tell here; but this reviewer loved best his tales, told more in the workaday prose of a Wilfred Thesiger than the poetry of a romantic, of a young bachelor bashing his lonely way through bush hardly trodden by whites since David Livingstone passed by, trying to keep in repair a vast and overstretched net of fairly nominal administration, his authority sustained by little more than bravado; and determinedly acculturating himself to the life and language of the people he oversaw. At one point he ends up — a British district commissioner— as interpreter for Kenneth Kaunda, the new President of Zambia being unable to speak the language of the tribe he was visiting.
John Hare — the last man to be recruited into the colonial service for Northern Nigeria — is more of a romantic. His writing is a real discovery. Hare would be a master of evocative prose, of sharp humour and of adventure-telling even if he were writing about Godalming; but when his canvas is the remote immensity of Northern Nigeria and what was once British Cameroon, rivers and mountains, naked tribesmen, drunken orgies, nobility and savagery, and cultures and customs that are beginning to die even as Hare records and describes what he is witnessing… the result deserves to become a minor classic. Time and again I noted in the margin: ‘Has anyone else written any of this down?’
Where to start? The burning of records by the outgoing British administration — a crime against history against which Lawley, too, inveighs? The red-hot-chilli-based punishment of an adulterous wife? The day Hare saved a tribal rainmaker’s skin by organising an English-style picnic (so it would rain: which it did)? Suffice it to quote a summary he offers of his duties as a district officer, in sole charge:
He was judge, policeman, tax collector, election officer, census official and interpreter of political change. He delineated boundaries, settled feuds and accounted for cash. He was doctor of himself and others, sanitary officer, road builder and town planner. He collected tsetse flies and samples of local produce. He decided how to segregate lepers or lunatics; why a person should be vaccinated or, indeed, educated. He assessed taxes on cattle. He stamped out witchcraft and trial by ordeal.
And — forgive me — I cannot forbear to quote a letter Hare himself quotes from an aggrieved former employee:
To the District Officer, King, Sir,
On opening this epistle you will behold the work of a dejobbed person and a very much childenised gentleman. Who was violently dejobbed in a twinkling by your goodself. For Heaven’s sake, Sir, consider this catastrophe as falling on your own head and walking home at the moon’s end of five savage wives and 16 voracious children with your pocket filled with non-existent cash. … When being dejobbed and proceeding with a heart and intestines filled with misery to this den of doom myself did greedily contemplate culpable homicide …
The poor fellow was reinstated.
Amid the humour and the derring-do, however, in both Hare’s and Lawley’s account, is a pride in what they did, a pride in what Britain achieved in and for the continent they love, and an uncomplaining sadness that we made our exit in a selfish rush.
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