Booklaunch Issue 9

Black History month

Black History month: time for a cautious reappraisal

doing promoting such caricatures? And what damage did they do to British racial attitudes?

The question is worth asking—especially in Black History Month—because of Rupert’s status as a muchloved national icon (in which DreamWorks Animation now has a majority interest). Published in the Daily Express since 1920, Rupert and his adventures have been enjoyed by millions of children, if not in the daily paper then in the annuals that appeared every Christmas. So popular has he been that this September, the Royal Mail issued a commemorative set of eight Rupert stamps, celebrating his centenary, with different stamps appearing in Guernsey and five partly coloured 50p coins minted in the Isle of Man.

News about the stamps was syndicated in local papers, and carried in the Times and Daily Telegraph; naturally, the Express covered the story twice. But the Guardian, Independent and BBC ignored it—not just, presumably, out of a wish not to endorse the Express but because Rupert’s historic association with ‘coon’ imagery now makes him toxic.

Rupert was first illustrated by Mary Tourel but was taken over by Alfred Bestall in 1935 as her eyesight failed, and Koko and the ‘coons’ were an invention of his, albeit one that played on the pre-existing stereotype of ‘golliwogs’ and minstrel shows.

are bears; his friends have their origins in other species and geographies, with various dogs, a pig, two foxes, a Wise Old Goat, and various Chinese characters: a human (Tiger Lily), a Pekingese (Pong-Ping) and a dragon (Ming).

The stories are certainly founded on a Pax-Britannia mythology—innocent domestic hero goes round the world helping out—but his involvement is minimal and life continues as before when he returns home. Rupert is neither colonist nor capitalist. The places he visits—far away, below the ocean or up in the mountains—are idyllic and remain so.

While a question mark hangs over the depictions of the ‘coons’, Bestall’s intentions are as far from the Stürmer’s as could possibly be. Rupert’s message is one of racial communality. Koko and his friends have the sweetest nature. They are morally responsible, self-organising, hospitable, socially concerned and in tune with their environment—all role model behaviours—and Rupert embraces them. Walking along the beach with Koko, the two hold hands. Rupert takes Koko home for tea, gives him his bed for the night and sleeps beside him on the floor. The next day Mrs Bear makes a picnic breakfast for the two of them and Rupert follows where Koko leads, eventually across the sea to rescue a white castaway, stranded alone on a deserted island.

Look at this picture. It should cause any reasonable person a grimace of pain and embarrassment. It is one of several outrageous images that Beaverbrook Newspapers, the owner of the Rupert Bear franchise, thought fit for publication in its 1954 Rupert Bear Annual. Here, in a story called ‘Rupert and the Castaway’, Rupert rediscovers Koko, a character he had first met in 1945. Koko is a male but curiously ungendered child who lives across the sea on Coon Islands with other ‘coon friends’. Like Koko, ‘coons’ have black heads with white reflective highlights, ping-pong ball eyes, doughnut lips and ‘spiky hair’. They are described as ‘little darkies’, and ‘squeak’ ‘excitedly’ ‘in a queer langage Rupert cannot understand’. Another story depicts Koko as illiterate and only able to scribble. What on earth did Rupert’s creators think they were

The 30s was a time when offensive imagery flourished, the most obvious being the depiction of Jews in Der Stürmer, which thrived in Nazi Germany. As far as one can tell, however, Bestall had no similar intent. He was born in Burma in 1891 to a Methodist minister father and artist mother, returning to England in 1897, attending art school in the 1910s and then drawing for the illustrated weeklies. His god-daughter described him in 2003 as ‘a saintly man whose faith supported him throughout his 93 years’. Pictures in his 1924 travel notebooks of Arabs in Cairo and Jews in Jerusalem are sensitive and respectful.

Bestall’s depiction of Rupert’s world from 1935 seems equally benign. While all the characters and settings are formulaic in appearance and behaviour, the point of them seems to be to reflect the world’s diversity. Though set in the chocolate-box village of Nutwood, they promote an early idealisation of harmonious multi-culturalism in which none of the heroes is Anglo. Rupert and his parents

This is a world of equals and were it not for the imagery, it would be an object lesson in racial harmony. Our fear, however, is that the awkward images may be made to do double duty as a rallying point for racists protesting their virtue outwardly while privately—even provocatively—relishing the hurt they cause.

Cartoons are always clumsy. Rupert was not intended for a black readership when he first came out and while it is clear from the context that he was meant to inspire children, in this case the moral message has been hijacked by the visual. I would rather give the victory to the moral message, but then I’m not injured by the depiction of Koko and his friends; others are. If Rupert, set in an idyllic England, leaves flag-waving supremacists feeling good about themselves while black Britons feel hurt, the injured party must have the final say. In this edition of Booklaunch, especially, with four white writers discussing white attitudes to black history, that caveat is vital. I welcome your feedback.

Stephen Games / Publisher and editor

Image courtesy of Daily Express

In medieval society, the ass was an unremarkable but indispensable beast; it carried packs, contributed to farm life and pulled heavy loads. The ass helped the poor and the rich carry out their daily commitments; it accompanied armies on their campaigns, took produce to and from markets, enabled merchants to make deliveries, and carried people to and from their destinations. Yet despite its hard-working reputation, the ass was also associated with laziness— slow-to-react and sluggish.

In medieval society then, the ass was a paradox. It was at once a mundane, everyday beast but also, in medieval texts, the epitome of obstinacy and folly. Fable asses had a reputation for being stupid, and the bestiary ass was stubborn and slow.

Asses were associated with notions of the sacred and the virtuous. Sainte Foy of Conques, a fourth-century child martyr, performed the miracle of resurrection, reviving a dead ass, and in the Old Testament, Balaam’s ass delivered God’s word through the act of speaking. In the New Testament, Christ’s decision to ride an ass into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday meant that the lowly beast became associated with the Christian virtues of patience and humility.

Asses also had a reputation for sexual deviancy. According to some medieval writers, asses who mated with horses to produce mules practised unnatural copulation. One fictitious ass was compelled to have sex with a woman. In a 14th-century Spanish text, ‘The Book of Good Love’ (Libro de buen amor, c.1300), Juan Ruiz, a Spanish archpriest, offered lessons through a series of short stories on God’s good love and worldly, foolish love that made humans sinful. As a didactic example, he reworked the fable ‘The Ass and the Lapdog’, exploiting the ass’s sexual nature, resulting in a sexualised reading of the fable that was more fabliau-like—i.e. obscene— than fable. In Ruiz’s rendition, the dog and the ass shared a mistress rather than a master, and the attention that the dog lavished on its mistress was highly sexualised. The dog licked and kissed with its tongue and mouth, and wagged its tail euphemistically before standing on its hind legs to exhibit its masculinity. When the ass mimicked the dog’s actions, it entered the mistress’s personal space by invading her dais before it covered the mistress frontally and placed its forelegs on her shoulders. This action revealed the ass’s sexual prowess, as its phallus was exposed and the whole manoeuvre was described in terms more suited to a sexually frenzied stallion (commo garañón loco el nesçio tal venía—‘like a mad stud the fool came on’). The ass also brayed (rebuznando), recalling the sexually frustrated wild asses who brayed to relieve their sexual tensions. As in the original fable, the ass was then severely beaten with phallic-shaped clubs for its transgression.

In the medieval world, the ass’s reputation—sacred or profane, derided or acclaimed—was codified in fact, fiction and image. However unusual its binary nature may seem to the modern-day reader, paradoxical rhetoric was a common feature in medieval beast genres, and the fact that the ass had contesting reputations offers multiple avenues for analysis. Even the various names ascribed to the ass are eclectic and contradictory. Often the ass would be instantly recognisable as much by its diminutive or pet name as by its Latin name. It is not until the eighteenth century when Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, introduced his binomial nomenclature that the ass was identified by its scientific name—Equus africanus asinus.

Asinus, assellus or onager, Brunellus (sometimes Burnellus) or Carcophas, donkey or ass? These are just some of the medieval and modern names that have been ascribed to the humble beast of burden. Like the ass’s reputation they too can be contradictory, with descriptive, ironic and even modest nomenclatures.

In the Middle Ages, learned authors used a variety of Latin names to identify the ass: asinus (‘ass’) and assellus (‘little ass’). Isidore of Seville’s etymological assessment associated asinus with the Latin verb sedere (‘to sit’) to reinforce the ass’s subjugated nature.

The wild ass, onager, had a descriptive title whose name was derived from the Greek on, meaning ‘ass’, and agrios for ‘wild’. It did not inhabit medieval Europe, but it was known by medieval authors and featured in animal compendiums. The onager shared its name with an ancient and early medieval form of catapult. Just as the beastly onager was reputed to use its back legs to kick stones at its hunters, the operative of the onager weapon violently hurled rocks at its enemy, invoking the image of the proverbial ‘kick like a mule’.

Literary asses, such as Brunellus and Carcophas, also had descriptive names. The 12th-century Canterbury monk Nigel Wireker, in his satirical Speculum Stultorum, named his ass Brunellus. Wireker derived the ass’s name from the Latin brunus (‘brown’), meaning ‘little brown’ and whilst this, no doubt, reflected the ass’s colouring, it also suggested a dull, unintelligent quality—Wireker’s Brunellus to a tee.

Another ‘brown’ literary ass was Burnell, who appeared in the Chester Cycle plays. Rather than implying a dull animal, Burnell was likely an ironic name. In this play, Burnell was the antithesis of its Old Testament owner, Balaam: the metaphorically blind and thus unintelligent prophet, who rode the all-seeing, intelligent ass. There is also conjecture that donkey, the modern anglophone word for ass, is a similar colour derivative, stemming from the adjective dun, to denote the ass’s dull greyish-brown colouring.

Even today the ass is known by various names. Although English speakers more readily recognise the ass by its anglicised name—donkey—the medieval world knew the ass by its Latin name—asinus. In the romance languages of France, Italy, Spain and Portugal, lexically the Latin tradition has persisted through l’âne (l’asne—OF), asino and asno respectively. In the anglophone world however, ass (beast of burden) is also understood as arse (bottom) depending on the mode of pronunciation. And it was late 18th-century English, with its varying pronunciations of a long or short ‘a’, that led to the introduction of the replacement word ‘donkey’ to spare any embarrassment to speaker, reader or listener.

This then, is a book about donkeys in the medieval world. It is not about arses, bottoms, rears, derrières or behinds, although it will consider the donkey’s sensual and sexual appetite, as understood by medieval society.

Origins—nature, holy, scholastic and literary

Before the ass arrived in medieval Europe, it already had a long association with humankind, and its early history is worth outlining momentarily here as it underpins medieval understandings of this beast. From a natural world perspective, archaeological evidence reveals that humans domesticated the ass around 6,000 years ago in the Middle East, an area often referred to as the Fertile Crescent.

Once domesticated, the ass’s usefulness as a pack animal facilitated extended trade routes and offered migration possibilities, leading to the geographical spread of people, ideas, goods and the ass itself across and beyond north Africa and the Middle East. The ancient Greeks brought the ass to the Balkans and the northern shores of the Mediterranean, and the Romans introduced the ass into the rest of continental Europe and the British Isles.

The ass of the ancient world held a religious and elite significance that predates Christianity, yet informs medieval understandings of the ass. In the Hellenic, Judaic, Roman and other religious traditions, the ass often symbolised sacredness. It also claimed a lofty position in the realm of high priests, kings and gods. In ancient Egypt, asses were ritually immured in royal tomb complexes, carefully oriented eastwards, possibly in response to a sun god and sunrise. The 18th-century BC king of Mari, Zimri-Lim, was exhorted to ride an ass as a sign of his kingship. In Damascus white asses were specially bred for use by the elite class, and Greek and Roman gods rode on the backs of asses. Ancient religious customs conveyed an association between animal, human and deity that influenced medieval religious perspectives of the ass.

Ancient philosophers and naturalists wrote about the ass in their attempts to explain the natural world, scholars produced practical guides on animal husbandry, and other authors anthropomorphised the ass for entertainment. Aristotle’s Historia Animalium (‘The History of Animals’, 4th century BC) took a zoological approach to explain the whys and wherefores of animals and their behaviours; Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis (‘Natural History’, c. AD 79) had an encyclopaedic approach, offering a universal sketch of the ass; Varro’s 1st-century BC Rerum rusticarum libri tres (‘Three Books on Agriculture’) demonstrated the Roman scholar’s close knowledge of farming and mule production; and although it was Phaedrus’s fables that survived into the medieval period, they were usually credited to Aesop, the ancient Greek slave. Combined, these ancient sources underpinned medieval knowledge of the ass.

This book considers medieval receptions of the ass and its relation to humans from social

INTRODUCING THE MEDIEVAL ASS

Kathryn L. Smithies

Medieval Animals, University of Wales Press (Cardiff), Softback, 128 pages, 7 b/w illustrations, 129 x 198, September 2020, 9781786836229

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The ass was the medieval world’s white van, and one that also carried metaphorical burdens.

The literature of modern warfare

Léon Werth (1878–1955) was a brilliant French essayist, writing against militarism, French colonialism, Nazism and the Vichy regime. During the First World War Werth served in the French army, then used the character of an invalided soldier — Clavel — to voice his anti-war position, characterising the war’s hospitals and convalescent homes as ships of fools. His writing is modernist, with diary observations transformed into impressionistic collages of conversation, polemic and interior monologue

PRIVATE CLAVEL PATIENT IN WAR

Léon Werth (transl. Michael Copp)

Grosvenor House (Tolworth, Surrey), Hardback, 276 pages, 135 x 210, April 2020, 9781839750564

From his bed, Clavel catches a glimpse of the tops of some plane trees, with their leaves glinting in the atmosphere of a Paris September sun, flickering like sequins.

His ear rubbed against the pillow. Was that noise a mouse?

The movement of his left arm was, in the darkness, briefly reflected against the bar of his brass bed: a dark shape, moving quickly in a straight line and then suddenly disappearing. Was that a big rat?

But he soon gets used to things. He recognises the hospital noises and the vague murmur that comes through the open window and the ‘whoo … whoo …’ puffing noises of the inner circle trains and the sudden ‘whoo … whoo …’ of trains farther away.

It was all very simple. He was smoking his pipe in the trench. A sudden impact on his arm, then a sort of numbness and the blood running down his greatcoat. It could have been four o’clock in the afternoon. He was carried to the dugout. He stayed there stretched out until the evening. But already he didn’t feel he was part of things anymore. He thought: I won’t do the next relief. After the rudimentary dressing applied by the stretcher bearer, he tried hard to stay still although it was painful. He didn’t want to cause a disturbance. That’s how he wanted to show things to the doctor. And the comrades around him, the comrades he was going to leave, already seem to him to be far away. They were staying in the game. He was leaving it.

He also thought: Will I have to lose my arm? Will I stay disabled? But he was hardly troubled by these thoughts, and they disappeared without any effort on his part. He waited for the stretcher bearers who were to carry him by night to the first-aid post.

And it was even simpler than that. From the first aid post he went to the division ambulance and then to the transit station. He was lifted onto the hospital train. He was aware of nothing but his fever. A label was attached to his greatcoat. On the hospital docket the doctor had written: Multiple fracture of the central part of the left humerus by a shell splinter.

And on the train, emboldened by his wound, he enjoyed the luxury of indulging in familiar exchanges with a young doctor who spoke to the soldiers in a remote and disgusted manner.

Now Clavel is lying in a bed in this bedroom in a palace which has been transformed into a military hospital. There are two beds in the bedroom, but for the time being, the other one is empty. His good fortune has brought him to Paris, and in a top-class hospital, of the sort visited by important personages, who then have their photographs in magazines.

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Clavel had not slept in a bed for over a year, had not undressed to go to sleep for over a year. When he found himself, for the first time, in front of the brass bed, his astonishment was that of a beggar transported into a palace. But this astonishment was short lived. As soon as he had been washed and deloused, he was stretched out in the bed. Clavel felt nothing but a pleasant torpor. The war had disappeared; like waking up from a nightmare. His body forgot the earth of the trench, the planks of the camp, where he had slept for a year. With this bed, he re-discovered the habit of bed. It was, quite simply, a feeling of well-being, and not a mirage anymore. A newspaper lay open on the white sheet. Clavel luxuriates in a lie-in. He does not pick up the newspaper. He does not feel like picking it up. And he realises that a great change has come about in him: When I was back there, he says to himself, I opened every newspaper I came across, even one eight days old, with a furious impatience. I searched their lines for the vaguest promise of peace. I was in the war, like an unjustly locked up prisoner. But at this moment, I accept … I accept that the war will not end this very day.

A cleaner was sweeping the bedroom. She leans for a moment on her broom and looks out of the window at the street lined with small private houses. She points at the houses.

‘That’s the house of M. Rodier, an engineer; that one belongs to M. Lagrange, he’s ever so rich; that’s M. Dalou’s house, I don’t know what he does … that’s M. Manset’s house, he died in the war …”

‘Died in the war … .’ That’s a sort of profession, thinks Clavel.

cated a heroic and hearty life, a clear contrast with the monotonous life that she, as a middle-class woman, led before the war.

They are also silent through weariness, through a vague consent to the conventions of the period and through that feeling of cowardice and timidity which, in peace time as in war time, causes ‘lower-class’ men to tell lies when faced with a scholarship holder or someone learned. The soldier is condemned to tell lies. If, in peace time, sick soldiers were cared for by the wives and cousins of their colonels, would they tell the truth about the barracks? And would they want to, how would they struggle, with their pathetic little comments, against the idea of propriety, of hierarchy and necessity that the colonels’ women and cousins have about the barracks? Now, the war is a large barracks, more dangerous, that’s all.

The period in hospital, the length of planned convalescence, depends on the doctor’s assessment. A word from the nurse often influences his decision. ‘He is so sweet … he is so tired … he’s lost all use of his arm.’ Also, the soldier learns very quickly, through instinctive cunning, a conventional courtesy, like the one that a man of the world possesses. Clavel understood all that more clearly by certain words of his nurse. She complained that the soldiers did not distinguish properly between the voluntary care of society women and the paid care of professional nurses. She naïvely expressed the idea that the soldiers had got accustomed to hospital routine.

‘They are much nicer now. But at first, there were some who didn’t even say thank you … If you as much as reproached them gently, they would answer: “We fought on your behalf, you can at least look after us …” At first, but no longer; you should hear what they said about the officers … .” ’

And Clavel thought: ‘You can’t imagine a period less heroic than this. The men face death, when they can do nothing else. But their only worry is their individual safety. And the best ones only differ from the rest because they also want their friends to avoid death. It’s not among the soldiers that you should look for the ardour to “serve”. If they think about the need for soldiers to make war, each individual man would seek to escape. But, without being forced to do so, some women serve the country and the church.’ And he remembered certain Red Cross ladies made known to him by wounded comrades he had met while on leave. They denounced to the authorities any soldiers who uttered words of anger or despondency. And they used the most cunning schemes with the doctors to shorten the hospital stay for soldiers who resolutely refused to go to Mass. But there were very few of these soldiers. For the Mass wisely confused obedience to the Red Cross ladies with obedience to the military leaders.

Then he had tender memories of an old primary school teacher whom he considered to be ridiculous in peace time. She would keep on saying: ‘Atheists, of whom I am one …’, and she would suddenly insult Napoleon in the middle of the most banal conversation: ‘Napoleon, that rogue, that murderer …’. The picture of the little old woman, gaunt and kindly, had entered his mind. And, for a moment, she was the incarnation of the spirit of peace.

The second bed in the bedroom was now occupied by an Engineers corporal, in hospital for having been gassed. A small young man, well-behaved and right-thinking, and who spoke while sucking his words. He had just got engaged and was thinking about objects to decorate his drawing room with:

‘When I get out, I’ll go to the antique shops. Should I buy Moustiers1, Delft or Chinese?”

He had the smooth talk of a stupid man-about-town.

‘Do you like photography? I’ve learned to do the Rembrandt portrait … .’

When he was able to go out, he came back one evening with an old tattered canvas by Jouy2, and asked Clavel:

‘It’s not poor taste, is it? … You’re a bit of a connoisseur, perhaps? …’

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The cleaning woman ceased her chatter because the nurse, Mme. Monnerot, was coming in. She was the wife of an architect. She derived obvious pleasure in calling the wounded men ‘my dear man …’. For her, that indi-

And faced with this idiot, Clavel has a weird desire to weep, to throw his arms around him, and to ask for his forgiveness, as if he, Clavel, was responsible for his foolishness. Or is there a means of dealing with the foolishness, in the way a surgeon would tackle an abscess or dress a wound? Perhaps it would be better to look away, as one would with a cripple, to look as if you hadn’t noticed anything … But this corporal insists on talking. He thrusts his tumour into

continued in the book

PRIVATE CLAVEL’S WAR ON WAR

Léon Werth (transl. Michael Copp) Hardback April 2019

IMAGIST DIALOGUES LETTERS BETWEEN ALDINGTON, FLINT AND OTHERS Michael Copp (ed.) Softback October

What is wine, and what are its effects? What has made men from the first recorded time distinguish between wines as they have done with no other food or drink? Why does wine have a history that involves drama and politics, religions and wars? And why, to the dismay of young men on first dates, do there have to be so many different kinds? Only history can explain.

Wine has certain properties that mattered much more to our ancestors than to ourselves. For 2,000 years of medical and surgical history it was the universal and unique antiseptic. Wounds were bathed with it; water made safe to drink.

Medically, wine was indispensable until the later years of the 19th century. In the words of the Jewish Talmud: ‘Wherever wine is lacking, drugs become necessary.’ A sixth century BC Indian medical text describes wine as the ‘invigorator of mind and body, antidote to sleeplessness, sorrow and fatigue ... producer of hunger, happiness and digestion’. Enlightened medical opinion today uses very similar terms about its specific clinical virtues, particularly in relation to heart disease. Even Muslim physicians risked the wrath of Allah rather than do without their one sure help in treatment.

But wine had other virtues. The natural fermentation of the grape not only produces a drink that is about one10th to one-8th alcohol, but its other constituents, acids and tannins in particular, make it brisk and refreshing, with a satisfying ‘cut’ as it enters your mouth and a lingering clean flavour that invites you to drink again. In the volume of its flavour, and the natural size of a swallow (half the size of a swallow of ale), it makes the perfect drink with food, adding its own seasoning, cutting the richness of fat, making meat seem more tender and washing down dry pulses and unleavened bread without distending the belly.

Because it lives so happily with food, and at the same time lowers inhibitions, it was recognized from earliest times as the sociable drink, able to turn a meal into a feast without stupefying (although stupefy it often did).

But even stupefied feasters were ready for more the next day. Wine is the most repeatable of mild narcotics without ill effects—at least in the short or medium term. Modern medicine knows that wine helps the assimilation of nutrients (proteins especially) in our food. Moderate wine drinkers found themselves better nourished, more confident and consequently often more capable than their fellows. It is no wonder that in many early societies the ruling classes decided that only they were worthy of such benefits and kept wine to themselves.

The catalogue of wine’s virtues, and value to developing civilization, does not end there. Bulky though it is in transit, and often perishable, it made the almost-perfect commodity for trade. It had immediate attraction (as soon as they felt its effects) for strangers who did not know it. The Greeks were able to trade wine for precious metals, the Romans for slaves, with a success that has a sinister echo in the activities of modern drug pushers—except that there is nothing remotely sinister about wine.

In this sense it is true to say that wine advanced the progress of civilization. It facilitated the contacts between distant cultures, providing the motive and means of trade, and bringing strangers together in high spirits and with open minds. Of course, it also carried the risk of abuse. Alcohol can be devastating to health. Yet if it had been widely and consistently abused it would not have been tolerated. Wine, unlike spirits, has long been considered the drink of moderation.

Even at its most primitive (perhaps especially at its most primitive) wine is subject to enormous variations— most of them, to start with, unlooked for. Climate is the first determining factor; then weather. The competence of the winemaker comes next; then the selection of the grape. Underlying these variables is the composition of the soil (cold and damp, or warm and dry) and its situation—flat or hilly, sunny or shaded. Almost as important as any of these is the expectation of the market: what the drinker demands is ultimately what the producer will produce.

As soon as wine became an object of trade, these variables will have started to affect its price. Consensus arrives surprisingly quickly. The wine the market judges better makes more profit. If the merchant and the maker work together and do the sensible thing, they reinvest the profit in making their wine more clearly better—and more distinctive.

It is easy to see this process happening in the modern marketplace. It is the standard formula by which repu-

tations for quality are built. The key word is selection: of grape varieties, yes, but also of a ‘clone’, a race of vines propagated from cuttings of the best plants in the vineyard. Then restraint in production: manuring with a light hand, pruning each plant carefully to produce only a moderate number of bunches, whose juice will have far more flavour than the fruit of an overladen vine. In the ancient world such practices probably first developed in the sheltered economy of royal or priestly vineyards. It would have been the king’s butler who commended a particular plant and told the vine dressers to propagate from it. But the principle has not changed. Selection of the best for each set of circumstances has given us, starting with one wild plant, the several thousand varieties of grapes which are, or have been, grown in the course of history. And each grape variety has given the possibility of a distinctive kind of wine.

Taking this panoramic view, the discovery that must have done most to advance wine in the esteem of the rulers of the earth was the fact that it could improve with keeping—and not just improve, but at best turn into a substance with ethereal dimensions seeming to approach the sublime. Beaujolais Nouveau is all very well (and most ancient wine was something between this and vinegar). But once you have tasted an old vintage burgundy you know the difference between tinsel and gold. To be able to store wine, the best wine, until maturity performed this alchemy was the privilege of pharaohs.

It was wonderful enough that grape juice should develop an apparent soul of its own. That it should be capable, in the right circumstances, of transmuting its vigorous spirit into something of immeasurably greater worth made it a god-like gift for kings. If wine has a prestige unique among drinks, unique, indeed, among natural products, it stems from this fact and the connoisseurship it engenders.

Archaeologists accept accumulations of grape pips as evidence (of the likelihood at least) of winemaking. Excavations in Turkey (at Catal Hüyük, perhaps the first of all cities), at Damascus in Syria, Byblos in the Lebanon and in Jordan have produced grape pips from the Stone Age known as Neolithic B, about 8,000 BC. But the oldest pips of cultivated vines so far discovered and carbon dated—at least to the satisfaction of their finders—were found in Soviet (as it then was) Georgia, and belong to the period 7,000–5,000 BC.

You can tell more from a pip than just how old it is. Certain characteristics of shape belong unmistakably to cultivated grapes, and the Soviet archaeologists are satisfied that they have evidence of the transition from wild vines to cultivated ones some time in the late Stone Age, about 5000bc. If they are right, they have found the earliest traces of viticulture, the skill of selecting and nurturing vines to improve the quality and quantity of their fruit.

The wine-grape vine is a member of a family of vigorous climbing woody plants with relations all over the northern hemisphere; about 40 of them close enough to be placed in the same botanical genus of Vitis

Its specific name, vinifera, means wine-bearing. Cousins include Vitis rupestris (rock-loving), Vitis riparia (from river banks) and Vitis aestivalis (summer fruiting), but none of them has the same ability to accumulate sugar in its grapes up to about one-third of their volume (making them among the sweetest of fruit), nor elements of fresh-tasting acidity to make their juice a clean and lively drink. The combination of these qualities belongs alone to Vitis vinifera, whose natural territory (since the Ice Ages, when it was drastically reduced) is a band of the temperate latitudes spreading westwards from the Persian shores of the Caspian Sea as far as western Europe.

The wild vine, like many plants (willows, poplars and most hollies are examples), carries either male or female flowers; only very rarely both on one plant. Given the presence of a male nearby to provide the pollen, the female plants can be expected to fruit. Males, roughly equal in number, will always be barren. The tiny minority of hermaphrodites (those which have both male and female flowers) will bear some grapes, but about half as many as the females.

The first people to have cultivated the vine would naturally have selected female plants as the fruitful ones and destroyed the barren males. Without the males, though, the females would have become barren too. The only plants that would fruit alone or together are the hermaphrodites. Trial and error, therefore, would in time lead to hermaphrodites alone

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Hugh Johnson’s classic biography of wine has been revised.

We owe the statistical prediction of life

a doctor ostracised because of his club foot

William Morgan is my great-great-great-grandfather. Born in 1750, he was a Dissenter and a reformist. He mixed with the radical thinkers of the day, amongst them Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, John Howard, Thomas Paine, John Horne Tooke and Francis Burdett. Through his membership of reformist societies and through his own publications, William campaigned for electoral reform and government accountability. In doing so he took colossal risks and narrowly missed being sent to the Tower of London.

William spent 56 years at the Equitable Life Assurance Company, where he learnt how to understand and manage financial risk. In 1789, for his work on the mathematics of life assurance, he was awarded the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s most prestigious decoration. Subsequent generations have hailed him as ‘the father of the actuarial profession’—recognition of his having established many of the rules and standards on which the science is based.

In the course of his tenure as Actuary, the Equitable became one of the most successful insurance companies of its time. Its success continued under William’s son, Arthur Morgan, and by the 20th century the Equitable was the dependable insurance company of choice for many professional people. Its problems in the 1990s and its demise in 2000 were a shock to the financial world. Had it stuck to William’s rules of prudent management, the crash could have been avoided. He would have been devastated by its ignominious end.

William gets a mention, and due praise, in works on the history of actuarial thought. He has a cameo role in the autobiographies of his great grandson, Arthur Waugh, and his great-great-grandson Evelyn Waugh. He gets a significant part in the numerous biographies of his uncle, Richard Price, most recently Liberty’s Apostle, by Paul Frame. He also appears in Travels in Revolutionary France, the edited letters of his brother, George, from Paris in1789.

William was born club footed. Today a club foot can be corrected either with surgery or with a series of plaster casts, each moving the foot very slightly until the bones lie in a normal position. We do not know how William’s foot was treated but subsequent events show that his disability was visible and was to have a profound effect on his life and his career.

William’s parents could not protect him from taunts and teasing but they could—and did—give him a secure and loving family circle. When he was only 19, he composed some verses in imitation of the Odes of Horace, Book 4, which celebrated the ‘peace of mind’ that a return to one’s birthplace can give, and which was addressed to his younger brother, George. In fact William had good reason to envy George who, clever and good looking, was allowed the freedom to choose his studies and went up to Jesus College Oxford to study Classics; William with his deformed leg and a rather plain face had his career decided for him by his father. He was to become a doctor, even though he had ‘a greater inclination for academical learning than for the study of pharmacy’.

Had his father charged higher fees for his own medical services, there might have been enough money to pay for a decent medical training; instead, William suffered considerable financial hardship in his apprenticeship. He was just 19 when in 1769 he said goodbye to his family and set off for London and the home of his mother’s brother, Richard Price.

FROM THE SAME PUBLISHER

At Newington Green, William was happy in the midst of what he described as the ‘unbounded love’ of ‘heavenly minded friends’. Richard Price and his neighbour Thomas Rogers had a weekly supping club where discussion and debate were as important as the meal. As a guest, William would have been exposed to a heady mix of radical political and intellectual thinking. In his Memoirs of the Life of Richard Price (1815) he records differences in metaphysical thought between Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. Elsewhere in the Memoirs he writes about another disagreement, that between Price and David Hume.

Price was willing to give his nephew financial support but William did not want to take advantage of him. Instead, he set about apprenticing himself to an apothecary, a Mr Smith of Limehouse Docks. It was a dodgy appointment and one that William quickly regretted. For a start, Smith was only a self-styled apothecary. His name is not included in the records of the period at the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries, membership of which, by then, was on a professional basis. It is unsurprising that he practised in Limehouse Docks,

an insalubrious area where the patients were poor dock labourers. William was expected to work long hours and, at the end of the day, to sleep under the counter.

‘He treated me no better than a dog,’ William recorded in his diary. He stuck it for three months until his ‘Welsh temper could stand it no longer’ and he laid Smith in the gutter. He had, however, timed his flash of rage very conveniently and made advance preparations. On the following day, 11 October 1769, he was apprenticed to a new master, Joseph Bradney, in Cannon Street.

By this time William seems to have been ready to accept financial help from his uncle to meet the annual fee of £16, and the further expense six months later when, in May 1770, he entered St Thomas’s hospital as one of the pupils and dressers. Dressing pupils paid as much as £50 for the privilege of changing bandages and attending to wounds. They were also allowed to perform minor operations, such as the commonly prescribed bleeding, and to give general assistance to the surgeon in his work.

Little more than a year after he started at St Thomas’s, William received the news of his sister Betsey’s death, aged 26. Only a few months later his brother Jack, aged just 14, became ill with a fever which quickly proved fatal. Dr Morgan was himself in poor health by this time and died in the summer of 1772.

William had not completed his medical training but knew he must return to Bridgend and take over his father’s practice. His father’s patients viewed him with suspicion. Not only was he young and inexperienced, he was a cripple. His club foot was regarded as a weakness. How could anyone trust a doctor who could not heal his own malady? Besides, there was by now a rival doctor in the town. Jenkin Williams, six feet tall and quite the dandy in his gold-laced hat, inspired confidence in his patients. To make matters worse, he had fallen for William’s sister Kitty and in 1773 they were married. In the same year William relinquished the practice and returned to London where his only course of action was to seek out Richard Price and ask his advice.

Price had a wide circle of influential friends and had been a fellow of the Royal Society since 1765. He had published a number of papers on financial matters and was a regular consultant to the recently formed life assurance company, the Equitable Society, and this was to give William the opportunity for a new career. In the autumn of 1773, shortly after William’s return to London, John Edwards, who held the key post of Actuary at the Equitable, died. A replacement was urgently needed. The exchange between William and his uncle has become part of actuarial folklore. ‘Billy,’ Price said to his nephew, ‘do you know anything of mathematics?’ ‘No, Uncle,’ the young man replied, ‘but I can learn.’

William set about learning the very difficult mathematics of life assurance calculations. In April 1774, he was appointed Assistant Actuary at the Equitable on a salary of £100 per annum. His hard work paid off. When, less than a year later, the post of the replacement Actuary fell vacant, William was unanimously elected by the directors.

It is inconceivable today that anyone so young and inexperienced could be appointed to such a post. A 21st-century actuary climbs the career ladder by means of study, training and examinations. William had invaluable guidance from Price but in many respects had to make it up as he went along. During his time the Society became one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.

One benefit of William’s medical training was his expertise in judging the fitness of those wanting to take out life assurance policies—a signed declaration of their state of health being a key part of the process. Applicants had to come in person to the Society’s office after 11 o’clock on a Tuesday, where they met the Actuary and in his presence filled in the relevant forms, giving name, address, occupation and age. Sometimes the assurance was to be on the life of another person, in which case more details were required, not least to make sure that the policy was not merely a respectable front to gambling.

In the early days of life assurance there was nothing to stop you effectively taking a bet on whether someone might die before a certain date, then collecting your winnings if the insured person lived beyond that date. In 1774, the Life Assurance Act put a stop to such ‘gaming or wagering’ by requiring that the insurer had to have a ‘legitimate interest’ in the person whose life was being insured.

The list of those on whose lives policies were granted includes members of the aristocracy, parliamentarians and members of the clergy. These one might expect—also a host of literary names:

expectancy to

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How we interact with digital devices matters. Digital technologies are accelerating and fragmenting our everyday lives, and the data our devices gather are used to profile and target us. So we should step back, even if just a little, to try and seize some self-control. We are not against computing and the digital age but there needs to be more balance. We call this ‘slow computing’: the need to be more careful in how we lead a digital life and how we allow our digital society and economy to operate.

This challenge has been hugely complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from its impact on our domestic and working lives, it has propelled new social and technological arrangements that amplify surveillance and data extraction. Led by governments and companies, these technologies have been rolled out for five primary purposes:

1. Quarantine enforcement/movement permission (knowing people are where they should be, either enforcing home isolation for those infected or close contacts, or enabling approved movement for those not infected)

2. Contact tracing (knowing whose path people have crossed)

3. Pattern and flow modelling (knowing the distribution of the disease and its spread and how many people passed through places)

4. Social distancing and movement monitoring (knowing if people are adhering to recommended safe distances and to circulation restrictions)

5. Symptom tracking (knowing whether the population are experiencing any symptoms of the disease).

Numerous digital technologies are employed to perform these tasks, including smartphone apps, facial recognition and thermal cameras, biometric wearables, smart helmets, drones and predictive analytics.

For example, citizens in some parts of China have been required to install an app on their phone and then scan QR codes when accessing public spaces (e.g., shopping malls, office buildings, communal residences, metro systems) to verify their infection status and permission to enter. The Polish government introduced a home quarantine app that requires people in isolation to take a geo-located selfie of themselves within 20 minutes of receiving an SMS or risk a visit from the police. Israel repurposed its advanced digital monitoring tools normally used for counterterrorism to track the movement of phones of all coronavirus carriers in the 14 days prior to testing positive in order to trace close contacts.

As of mid-April, 28 countries had produced contact tracing apps that use Bluetooth to detect and store the details of nearby phones and contacts them if someone who had been near them tested positive, and another 11 were planning to launch imminently. Other states have utilised technologies designed to measure biometric information. For example, hand-held thermal cameras have been used in a number of countries, some mounted on drones, to screen movement in public space.

Technology companies have offered, or have actively undertaken, to repurpose their platforms and utilise the data they hold about people as a means to help tackle the virus. Most notably, Apple and Google, who provide operating systems for iOS and Android smartphones, are developing solutions to aid contact tracing. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom are providing aggregated, anonymized information to the government on people’s movements; likewise Telecom Italia, Vodafone and WindTre are doing the same in Italy.

Unacast, a location-based data broker, is using GPS data harvested from apps installed on smartphones to determine if social distancing is taking place, with several other companies offering similar locational and movement analysis. Experian, a large global data broker and credit scoring company, has announced it will be combing through its 300 million consumer profiles to identify those likely to be most impacted by the pandemic and offering the information to ‘essential organizations’, including health care providers, federal agencies and NGOs. Some of the most problematic aspects of surveillance capitalism have been repurposed by the state, further legitimating and cementing their practices.

Beyond society-wide surveillance to combat the pandemic, some companies have rushed to implement their own versions of these technological solutions, for example scanning the temperature of workers or deploying their own contact tracing systems. These are likely to become more common as restrictions are lifted, and their use might become a mandatory condition of entering workplaces.

In addition, many have adopted remote work sur-

veillance systems so they can monitor the activity and productivity of their employees working at home, including recording keystrokes, how many emails are sent and their contents, and what employees are printing, or seeking constant status updates or that work is always undertaken while a video call is live. These companies argue that they are trying to ensure that their workers are not taking unfair advantage of flexible work arrangements, or are not leaking confidential information. They take no account of workers trying to cope with changes in their workplace environment which may not be conducive to work due to increased care duties, living in a shared space, or having poor or no broadband, or their having to learn new systems and procedures at short notice, or not necessarily having the technical competence to perform any IT services needed to set up and maintain home-based work.

Some citizens will no doubt embrace surveillance technologies in the hope they will help to limit the spread of the virus and thereby save lives. Others will accept that companies should be able to know if their employees are performing the work they are paid to do.

An underlying problem, however, stems from the track record of digital technology providers and governments in handling, protecting and extracting value from data. It seems logical to expect that data on movements, contacts or health will have value beyond the current public health crisis and they will be repurposed in some way that is not necessarily beneficial to citizens. There are legitimate concerns as to whether public health and workplace surveillance systems will be turned off after the crisis or whether they will become a normal part of a new surveillance regime, as was the case with systems adopted after 9/11. Without embracing data sovereignty, privacy, civil liberties, workers’ rights, citizenship and democracy are under renewed threat.

In this regard it is significant that civil liberties organizations have set out ethical principles designed to protect privacy and rights, while acknowledging the potential utility of digital tools to tackle the virus. The key argument is that we should strive to ensure both civil liberties and public health, rather than simply trading the former for the latter. For example, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, the Ada Lovelace Institute and the European Data Protection Board have demanded that:

• data collection and use must be based on science and need;

• the tech must be transparent in aims, intent, and workings;

• the tech and wider initiative must have an expiration date;

• a privacy-by-design approach with anonymization, strong encryption and access controls should be utilized;

• tools should be opt-in with consent sought, with very clear explanations of the benefits of opting in, operation and lifespan;

• the specification and user requirements, a data protection/ privacy impact assessment, and the source code for state-sanctioned coronavirus surveillance should be published;

• data cannot be shared beyond the initiative or repurposed or monetized;

• no effort should be made to re-identify anonymous data;

• the tech and wider initiative must have proper oversight of use, be accountable for actions, have a firm legislative basis, and possess due process to challenge misuse.

In other words, the tools must only be used when deemed necessary by public health experts for the purpose of containing and delaying the spread of the virus and their use should be discontinued once the crisis is over. We would add that we must also be vigilant to any potential control creep; that is, the risk that apps designed to limit movement based on health status will continue to be used and their criteria extended.

The temporal and organizational aspects of tackling the coronavirus pandemic raise other questions about the ethics of digital care. How do we ensure wellbeing and protect our civil rights while responding rapidly to an emerging crisis? How can we find a balance between the interests of public health and the economy and our own self-care? We don’t have ready answers to these questions; formulating individual and collective interventions for slow computing within such a context is not straightforward. We are all now dealing with radically different circumstances.

But an obvious conclusion to draw about the crisis response hitherto is that employers and employees need to define and deliver an ethics of digital care. For sure, some managers will have pursued admirable practices: facilitating flexibility and accommodating workers with respect to workload, hours, continued in the book

The world is changing far faster than you thought—and towards a point of no return

The pace of population growth seems terrifying. In 1820 there were a billion people on Earth. A century later, there were more than 2 billion. After a brief hiatus resulting from the Great Depression and World War II, the rate of growth gathered breathtaking speed: 3 billion by 1960, 4 billion by 1975, 5 billion by 1987, 6 billion by 2000, and 7 billion by 2010. ‘Population control or race to oblivion?’ was a tagline on the cover of Stanford University professors Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s highly influential book The Population Bomb, published in 1968.

The reality is that by 2030 we will be facing a baby drought

Over the next few decades, the world’s population will grow less than half as swiftly as it did between 1960 and 1990. In some countries, the population will actually decrease in size. For instance, since the early 1970s, American women have on average had fewer than two babies each over their reproductive lifetime—a rate insufficient to ensure generational replacement. The same is also true in many other places around the world. People in countries as diverse as Brazil, Canada, Sweden, China, and Japan are starting to wonder who will take care of the elderly and pay their pensions.

As birth rates decline in East Asia, Europe and the Americas, combined with a slower decline in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, the global balance of power shifts. Consider: For every baby born nowadays in developed countries, more than nine are being born in the emerging markets and the developing world. Or, for every baby born in the United States, 4.4 are being born in China, 6.5 in India, and 10.2 in Africa. Moreover, improvements in nutrition and disease prevention in the poorest parts of the world have made it possible for an increasing number of babies to reach adulthood and become parents themselves. Half a century ago one in four children under the age of fourteen in African countries such as Kenya and Ghana died, whereas today it’s fewer than one in ten.

To assess the worldwide impact of these demographic shifts, focus your attention on 2030. By that year, South Asia (including India) will consolidate its position as the number-one region in terms of population size. Africa will become the second-largest region, while East Asia (including China) will be relegated to third place. Europe, which in 1950 was the second largest, will fall to sixth place, behind Southeast Asia (which includes Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand, among other countries) and Latin America.

Booklaunch

International migration might partially mitigate these epochal changes by redistributing people from parts of the world with a surplus of babies toward others with a deficit. In fact, that has happened repeatedly throughout history, as when many Southern Europeans migrated to Northern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s. This time around, however, migration won’t offset the population trends. I say this because too many governments seem intent on building walls, whether the old-fashioned way (with brick and mortar), by leveraging technology such as lasers and chemical detectors to monitor border crossings, or both.

But even if the walls are never built or something renders them ineffective, my forecasts indicate that … migration may not have a big impact on these population trends. Given present levels of migration and population growth, sub-Saharan Africa—the fifty African countries that do not border the Mediterranean Sea—will become the second-most populous part of the globe by 2030. Let’s assume for a moment that migration doubles over the next twenty years. Twice as much migration will merely delay that reckoning until the year 2033. It won’t derail the main population trends leading to the end of the world as we know it, but merely postpone them by approximately three years.

Women and babies rule the world

In Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, there are millions of women today who give birth to five, ten, or even more babies over their lifetime. On average, however, the number of babies per woman is falling in the developing countries as time goes by, and for the same reasons it began to plummet in the developed world two generations ago. Women now enjoy more opportunities outside the household. To seize those opportunities, they remain in school and, in many cases, pursue higher education. This, in turn, means that they postpone childbearing. The change in women’s roles in the economy and in society more generally is the single most important factor behind the decline in fertility worldwide.

Women are increasingly determining what happens around the world. Consider the case of the United States, where women’s priorities have shifted rapidly. In the 1950s, American women married on average at the age of 20; men, on average, married at 22. Nowadays it’s 27 and 29, respectively. The average age of first-time mothers has also climbed, to 28. Much of this change has been driven by longer schooling. More women now graduate from high school, and more of them go on to get a college education. Back in the fifties about 7 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 29 had a college degree, half the rate of men. Nowadays, the proportion of women with a college degree is nearly 40 percent, while for men the figure is only 32 percent.

Our declining interest in sex

Philosophers, theologians, and scientists have wrestled for centuries with the question of how many human beings can be supported by Earth’s resources. In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, a British economist and demographer, warned about what would later become known as the ‘Malthusian trap’, or our tendency to overbreed and deplete our sources of sustenance. During Malthus’s lifetime, the world’s population was below 1 billion (compared to today’s 7.5 billion). He thought that humans are their own worst enemies because of their unfettered sexual impulses. In his view, runaway population growth would result in famine and disease because the food supply could not keep pace with the population. Malthus and many of his contemporaries feared that the human species was at risk of extinction due to overbreeding. ‘The power of population,’ he wrote, ‘is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.’

With the benefit of hindsight, we can say today that Malthus underestimated the potential of invention and innovation, which has led to phenomenal improvements in agricultural yields. He also downplayed the immense possibilities for expanding the food supply through international trade thanks to faster and cheaper transoceanic transportation and missed how modern technology might reduce our appetite for sex.

The connection between the two is disarmingly simple. The greater the number of alternative forms of entertainment that become available to us, the less frequently we engage in sex. Modern society offers a panoply of entertainment options, from radio and TV to video games and social media. In some developed countries, including the United States, rates of sexual activity have been declining over the last few decades. A comprehensive study published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour found that ‘those born in the 1930s (Silent generation) had sex the most often, whereas those born in the 1990s (Millennials and iGen) had sex the least often.’ The study concluded that ‘Americans are having sex less frequently due to an increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners.’

The new kids on the block: The African baby boom While populations are not replacing themselves in Europe, the Americas and East Asia, they are growing in sub-Saharan Africa, albeit much more slowly than in the past. Even so, its population is projected to grow from 1.3 billion today to 2 billion by 2038 and 3 billion by 2061. Some people predict that a big war or a devastating epidemic might derail Africa’s demographic momentum. … The global AIDS epidemic has so far resulted in 36 million deaths, of which two-thirds occurred in Africa, with South Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Uganda and Zimbabwe suffering the most. And yet … during the 1980s and 1990s, when the epidemic was at its most lethal, the population curve for Africa barely shifted. Thus, only a massive war or epidemic claiming hundreds of millions of lives would significantly alter the continent’s demographic growth relative to other parts of the world.

You might be thinking that Africa cannot possibly accommodate its projected population growth. Consider, however, how big Africa actually is. Cartographical representations of the continent in our school textbooks greatly underestimate its true size relative to the Northern Hemisphere. In fact Africa’s landmass is just about as big as that of China, India, Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and Japan combined.

To be sure, there are big, largely uninhabitable deserts in Africa. But that’s equally true of each of those

other countries on the map (except Japan). Even Europe has deserts—the famous movie Lawrence of Arabia was filmed not on the Arabian Peninsula but mostly in southern Spain. Even taking into consideration the vastness of the African deserts, the continent contains the most undeveloped yet fertile land for agricultural development on the planet. Given Africa’s size, overpopulation seems unlikely. The continent currently has 1.3 billion people; the other countries on this map have populations that exceed 3.5 billion. Today the density of the population per square mile is more than three times higher in Asia than in Africa, and four times in Europe.

Africa’s population growth creates some thorny problems. The continent is home to some of the world’s most intractable hotspots of religious and ethnic conflict. About half of Africa’s 54 sovereign states are beset by political chaos, anarchy and lawlessness. Much of the migration from rural areas to cities, and from those to international destinations, mostly in Europe, is due to conflict and violence, which endanger not only personal safety but also economic development.

Thus Africa is not risk free, but the potential returns to its own growing population are huge. Because of its increasingly large population, Africa can no longer be ignored. For better or worse, its fortunes will matter globally. If things go well, Africa will be a vibrant source of dynamism to the benefit of the entire world. If things take a turn for the worse, the negative consequences will be felt globally. Demography is not destiny, but it does shape people’s lives.

Feeding Africa’s population as huge opportunity

The future of Africa’s babies, most of them born in rural areas, hinges on the transformation of its agricultural sector. Despite its enormous landmass and abundant water, the continent is currently a net importer of food. And while extractive industries such as cocoa, mining and oil have been fundamental to national economies for the longest time, most African growth in the near future will result from the expansion of agriculture and of the associated manufacturing and services catering to the continent’s expanding population.

The agricultural challenge is dual: bringing into cultivation up to 500 million acres of land—about the area of Mexico—and vastly improving productivity. In order to realize this potential, many different kinds of organizations and companies are bringing new ideas and new practices to African agriculture. For instance, one ingenious way to turn the African population boom into an opportunity involves growing, harvesting and processing a prodigious plant called cassava. This root vegetable, which is native to South America, is remarkably resilient to drought, can be harvested at any time within a flexible 18-month window and requires manual labor to be planted, thus providing locals with a source of income. In sub-Saharan Africa at least 300 million people rely on it for their daily dietary needs. Additionally, cassava is naturally gluten free and has a lower sugar load than wheat, making it a healthy alternative to grains and a better carbohydrate source for diabetics. As the continent improves cassava yields, some portion of its production could also be turned into higher value–added products for export: it’s an ingredient in plywood; it’s used as a filler for many pharmaceuticals, including pills, tablets, and creams; and it can be turned into a biofuel.

The silicon savanna

Beyond the coming agricultural-industrial revolution, Africa has leapfrogged into the 21st century faster than anyone else in one area: mobile telecommunications technology. Mobile technology has proved to be especially helpful in the healthcare sector. In Kenya, for example, most of the rural population lives at least an hour away by bus from the closest doctor or medical facility. To solve the issue of access, many mobile services have been launched, from medical hotlines and early-diagnosis tools to education, medicine reminders, and follow-ups. Today, 90 percent of the population has a cellphone. Phone records in Kenya are actually more comprehensive than official censuses. Government agencies use cellphone data rather than payroll or school records to plan for healthcare policy and outreach.

Like many other countries—rich and poor alike— Kenya faces a shortage of qualified healthcare personnel, rising costs and skyrocketing demand. There are hundreds of e-health projects and programs benefiting an increasing number of rural residents. The model of using mobile telecommunications technology in

healthcare, as seen in Kenya, may offer a technological solution to healthcare access that is both efficient and inclusive, something that other nations can emulate— even a country like the United States, where healthcare has been a perennial political talking point and the costs of care seem to increase year after year.

How Covid-19 impacts the trends discussed here Most people believe that a major crisis disrupts ongoing trends, as if there is a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’. The coronavirus pandemic is one such crisis, but contrary to conventional wisdom it will most likely intensify and accelerate—rather than derail—the trends analyzed here. Consider the declining fertility rate discussed in Chapter 1. There are three reasons why a pandemic will accelerate that trend. First, people usually postpone major decisions (like having a baby) when faced with uncertainty. Second, having a baby is a financial commitment, and the threat of a recession will force many to reconsider whether the timing is right. (We saw this during the Great Depression in the 1930s and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.) Third, life-altering events like war, natural disasters, and pandemics disrupt our daily routines and priorities, and this includes our fertility decisions.

The divergence of generational experiences, discussed in Chapter 2, is another trend that will accelerate. As of this writing, the virus is considered lethal to people who are immuno-compromised, which includes many people over the age of 60 and people with pre-existing medical conditions. As we look to the future, with Europe and East Asia composed of an older age cohort and Africa and South Asia experiencing a baby boom, the share of the world’s population moving to the latter will only accelerate if the mortality rate internationally continues at the pace we are witnessing.

The crisis will also continue the existing trend toward inequality: the working poor and the homeless, in particular, are unlikely to have access to good healthcare, and their immune systems may already be compromised due to poor diets or insalubrious living conditions. While the virus won’t discriminate by income or healthcare coverage, people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid are far more exposed to the consequences of infection.

There are also grave economic consequences to this crisis we must consider. For example, the pandemic comes at the worst time for many European coun-

tries, which are still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. Italy and Spain, in particular, are among the most affected, and with their public sectors severely underfunded, they will be limited in what they can do. Europe’s middle class is already stagnant compared to the middle classes of emerging markets, as we saw in Chapter 3, and this trend will only intensify during the pandemic. For countries that are already politically unstable or economically vulnerable, like Iran, the crisis will be a severe test for leadership, as pressure will mount from all sides by an already anxious public.

As a society, we are generally prepared to cope with familiar natural disasters like earthquakes or hurricanes. There are guidelines to follow. And commercial buildings and residential housing are built to withstand such catastrophes. Are we equipped to do the same with pandemics? Generally, the world faces a global pandemic every 40 to 70 years: the Third Plague of 1855, the flu pandemic of 1918–1919, the AIDS pandemic beginning in the early 1980s, and now Covid-19 in 2020. Significant earthquakes occur in roughly the same intervals: for instance, in the San Francisco Bay area, the last two big earthquakes occurred in 1906 and 1989. The public and private sectors should have protocols in place to manage the moment when an epidemic becomes a pandemic. The existence of such protocols should ease public hysteria and concern. They would include, of course, a healthcare system that’s well staffed and equipped to handle a public health crisis and to scale its efforts accordingly.

Aside from policy decisions, personal responsibility solutions such as social distancing and lockdown to limit community spread are more important in densely populated areas like cities (which is where most people are headed in 2030 and beyond). These will intensify several trends under way: online shopping (Amazon, feeling the demand surge, went on a hiring spree and increased overtime pay for all warehouse employees), virtual communication (from remote work to maintaining social connections, nearly everyone has turned to telecommunication services like Zoom or WhatsApp to stay in touch), and digital entertainment (producers of movies, books, and music, for example, will be forced to find their customers online rather than in bricks-andmortar retail establishments).

The sharing economy, already a disruptive force, will further accelerate under the crisis; which industries suffer consequences (like

continued in the book

Gerd Schwartz, Manal Fouad, Torben Hansen and Genviève Verdier International Monetary Fund (Washington, DC), Softback, 340 pages, Illustrations, 152 x 229, August 2020, 9781513511818

Public infrastructure is a key driver of inclusive economic growth and development and the reduction of inequalities. Roads, bridges, railways, airports and electricity connect markets, facilitate production and trade, and create economic opportunities for work and education. Water and sanitation, schools and hospitals improve people’s lives, skills and health. Also, if done right, broad-based provision of public infrastructure can support income and gender equality, help address urgent health care needs (for example, during epidemics), reduce pollution and build resilience against climate change and natural disasters.

Yet, creating quality—that is, infrastructure that is well-planned, well-implemented, resilient and sustainable—has often been challenging. Almost all countries have infamous white elephants—major investment projects with negative social returns—that have never delivered on their initial promise. One does not have to search far to come across infrastructure projects that were poorly designed, had large costs overruns, experienced long delays in construction, and/or yielded poor social dividends. Examples of poor project appraisal, faulty project selection, rampant rent seeking and corruption, or lack of funding to complete ongoing projects abound, and not only in low-capacity countries. And even perfectly good public infrastructures may deteriorate quickly when maintenance is inadequate, which often reflects a lack of funding or political attention.

Losses and waste in public investment are often systemic. On average, more than one third of the resources spent on creating and maintaining public infrastructure are lost because of inefficiencies. These inefficiencies are closely linked to poor infrastructure governance defined as the institutions and frameworks for planning, allocating and implementing infrastructure investment spending. Estimates suggest that, on average, better infrastructure governance could make up more than half of the observed efficiency losses.

The need for stronger infrastructure governance for quality investment is widely recognized, and initiatives have been launched to provide guidance on good practice. Yet, although much has been written on what constitutes good infrastructure governance or public investment management, most countries still lack the institutions needed to produce good infrastructure outcomes. Countries frequently stumble over key institutional issues. For example, they may struggle to select projects with the highest social and economic returns and finance projects in a fiscally sustainable way, given limited resources, or struggle to ensure that funding is available as needed throughout project implementation. Budgeting for operations and maintenance costs, ensuring that procurement is transparent and rigorous, or harnessing private sector skills, innovation and funding without creating undue risks to public finances can also be challenging.

In the wake of The Great Lockdown and the Covid-19 pandemic, more infrastructure investment and strong infrastructure governance are likely to become even more important. First, with economic growth turning negative, public investment will have to be part of stimulating weak aggregate demand. For example, in the area of health, the pandemic has revealed a lack of preparedness of many health systems and an urgent need for upgrading health infrastructure that will have to be addressed. Second, countries will emerge from the pandemic with scarce fiscal space, elevated debt levels, large financing needs, and therefore a renewed need to make every dollar count, to ensure the efficiency of investment spending.

This book addresses how resources for public investment can be spent well. The overall message is simple: aspirations to end waste in public investment and create better quality infrastructure outcomes have to be met by specific actions on infrastructure governance to reap the full economic and social dividends from public investment.

An aspiration for all countries

Quality infrastructure plays a crucial role in fostering economic development.

• Public investment improves delivery of public services and the quality of life of citizens. Quality infrastructure affects our physical well being at the most basic level. An estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide do not have access to safe water. Their health and livelihoods are at risk from a variety of diseases and epidemics. (For example, the World Health Organization (2016) estimates that environmental factors, including the availability of sanitary water sources, account for 57 percent of those affected by diarrheal diseases.) Research has found that

interventions to improve water and sanitation infrastructure have been the most effective in reducing morbidity from these diseases (Freeman and others 2014; Wolf and others 2014; World Health Organization 2016).

• Public investment connects citizens to economic opportunities by supporting private sector activities. For example, quality transport infrastructure can reduce travel times and transportation costs significantly (BenYishay and Tunstall 2011), and contribute, among others, to better access to jobs and the facilitation of trade.

• Public investment is a catalyst for inclusive economic growth and development. Public investment can increase demand in the short term and productivity in the long term, sometimes even with limited increases in indebtedness, if spending is done efficiently (IMF 2014, 2015; Chapters 2 and 8 of this book).

Infrastructure spending needs are staggering almost everywhere. Low-income developing countries and many emerging market economies have looming infrastructure needs in most sectors. In September 2015, governments assembled at the United Nations agreed on a comprehensive development agenda with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that will require a large scale-up in infrastructure, particularly in water, sanitation and hygiene, energy, and transportation. The estimated total cumulative investment needs to meet the SDGs by 2030 are more than 36 percent of GDP in low-income developing countries and emerging markets.

Many advanced economies have aging infrastructures and see urgent spending needs for their upkeep and modernization. For example, in the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers (2017) estimates cumulative spending needs of more than $10 trillion through 2040 to maintain, repair, or rebuild existing infrastructure. In Europe, in November 2014 the European Commission announced an Infrastructure Investment Plan to unlock more than €315 billion for investment spending. In the same year, the IMF (2014) called for an infrastructure spending push to help support both short-term demand shortfalls and longer-term development needs; the OECD (2019) did the same more recently.

In addition, almost all countries face issues related to making their infrastructure more resilient to climate change. Specifically, damage to buildings, transport, energy, and water infrastructures caused by climate change is expected to run into billions (Chapter 15), with small states that are prone to natural disasters being particularly at risk (Chapter 9). In some countries, this is also compounded by daunting infrastructure challenges as a result of wars, prolonged civil strife, or major migration movements.

Meeting these spending needs will be challenging at best. In most countries, spending needs contrast sharply with the resources available to meet them in fiscally responsible and macroeconomically sustainable ways. What are the options?

• Additional borrowing is often hampered by already large debt stocks. At $188 trillion—or about 226 percent of global GDP in 2018—global debt levels were at a record high even before the Covid-19 pandemic, with most countries having little room to increase borrowing without risking to put their public debt on an unsustainable path. (Global debt data are available from the IMF Global Debt Database: https://www.imf.org/external/ datamapper/datasets/GDD.) Even with debt relief, global debt levels are continuing to rise substantially in the wake of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

• Revenue mobilization is key to expanding the resource envelope and creating fiscal space but is unlikely to be sufficient in and by itself to generate the resources needed. The median low-income developing country raises about 15 percent of GDP in tax revenue. Gaspar and others (2019) estimate that many countries, including most low-income developing countries, could aspire to increase revenue ratios by about 5 percentage points by 2030. This would certainly help to provide some, albeit not all, of the infrastructure spending needed to achieve key development objectives, like the SDGs. But large and continuous increases in revenue require a strong and sustained government commitment that is sometimes not politically feasible.

• Private sector participation in building infrastructure and providing infrastructure services can be an important component of a government’s infrastructure strategy but goes hand in hand with significantly increased fiscal risks. Public-private partnerships, for example, can harness private sector innovation and efficiency to improve infrastructure service provision while allowing governments to share project risks with a private partner. But they continued in the book

For over 60,000 years, African huntergatherer pygmies survived in the Andamans. Then came the British Raj and, after Indian independence, settlers and tourists. Today, these fiercely independent tribespeople are threatened with extinction by our indifference to their wish to avoid us, and by official apathy. Jonathan Lawley, whose grandfather was a colonial administrator of the islands in the early 1900s, makes an urgent plea for their survival

Jonathan Lawley

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THE SAME AUTHOR

Once they could avoid us. Not any more

Michael Holman

EnvelopeBooks (London), Softback, 275 pages, 152 x 229, 8 October 2020, 9781838172008

It gets bitterly cold in Gwelo, my home town in the heart of Zimbabwe—so cold that in midwinter there would often be an early-morning layer of ice on the cement dog bowl at the foot of the garden tap. When I rode to school, shivering in my school uniform of khaki short trousers and green blazer, the route took me from the family home at 8 Kopje Road, which ran along the foot of the small hill or kopje that gave its name, and emerged from the surrounding savannah, peppered with acacia and flat-topped msasa trees. Had I cycled further, I would have come to the mining town of Selukwe, where Ian Smith, the prime minister to be, had his farm, with its herd of prize-winning cattle.

But one year we spent three months on the other side of town, and the journey was longer and even colder. The road dipped down into a vlei, shrouded in mist in the winter months. As I approached its low bridge, my legs pumped away at the pedals of my bike as much to generate warmth as speed.

This journey to school took me past Gwelo’s jail, which from March 1959 to April 1960 was home to Hastings Banda, a black politician feared and loathed by white Rhodesians, and which in 1964 briefly housed Robert Mugabe. It was a white-washed building with walls topped by barbed wire, and surrounded by a fence and sentries.

Twenty years later I got to interview Banda, who by then had become the first president of a newly-independent Nyasaland (now Malawi). I began by telling him that he and I had three things in common: we both had degrees from Edinburgh University; we both had spent time against our will in Gwelo (now known as Gweru); and we both had received an early morning knock on the door from the Special Branch.

Banda, then in his 80s, looked at me impassively from behind dark glasses, and said not a word. With his pinstripe suit, red rose in his lapel and ever-present ivory-handled flywhisk, he radiated a combination of Victorian values and African voodoo. He demonstrated that in Africa age need not be a handicap, but an asset— and when combined with the status of his country’s founding president, his personality alone was a powerful and disturbing force.

My opening line had not captured his interest however. So much for what I hoped would be an ice-breaking opening question for someone who rarely gave interviews. Then the old man, sitting behind his desk in a room in Blantyre’s Sanjika Palace, broke his intimidating silence: ‘Tell me more about Gwelo.’

Today many of the ‘Europeans’ who flocked to Rhodesia in the mid-1950s, followed by a second wave of immigrants in the early 1970s, live overseas. Born perhaps in Birmingham, they lost their heart to Bulawayo, and then emigrated to Brisbane as Rhodesia’s guerrilla war intensified, eventually forcing Ian Smith to capitulate to independence at the Lancaster House talks in London in 1979.

They are now part of a curious diaspora, a forgotten footnote to colonialism, cherishing their memories and perpetuating their myths, in tribute to their passion for an ersatz culture, racist at heart, not even true to the philosophy of the man after whom the country was named. Cecil John Rhodes had at least nominally advocated equal rights for all civilised men, by which he meant ‘a man whether white or black who has sufficient intelligence to write his name, has some property or work, in fact is not a loafer”, but even such a restrictive doctrine was unacceptable to Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister who made a unilateral declaration of independent (UDI) on 11 November, 1965, a gesture doomed to failure.

FROM THE SAME AUTHOR

‘Rhodesian-born, Rhodesian-bred, strong in arm, thick in head,’ went one disparaging ditty about the tribe Smith led and to which I belong, albeit as a renegade member. Strong of arm, certainly. At one stage Rhodesia had enough cricketers in English county sides to have made up a decent Test XI. Not so thick in head, however. Those who have made their intellectual mark abroad include a former editor of The Economist, a senior member of the British government and a host of businesspeople, writers and academics.

Not bad for what was sometimes called ‘Surbiton in Africa’, after the uninspiring London suburb with as many residents as Rhodesia had Whites. Much of the tribe is now scattered around the globe. A contact magazine called Rhodesians Worldwide offers nostalgia, advertisements of army memorabilia, and the news that ‘Jock and Hazel, ex-Fort Victoria, offer a bed and beer to “Rhodies” passing through Vancouver.’

Yet for nearly 15 years Jock and Hazel and their like defied the world. Never more than 275,000 of them, and outnumbered 15 to 1 by Africans, they were eventually ground down by sanctions and a guerrilla war. Thousands of people died—468 white and 1,790 black civilians, 1,361 members of the security forces (just under half of them white) and 10,450 guerrillas.

By comparison South Africa got off lightly. Apartheid’s death toll in the 1970s was under 10,000. On a deaths-to-population ratio, South Africa would have had to endure 120,000 fatalities before reaching a settlement. UDI brought out the best and the worst of white Rhodesia, caught up in the myth of a frontier society. They kept Morris Minors on the road, and Viscounts in the air, longer than anyone thought possible. They broke sanctions with ingenuity, and either manufactured what they formerly imported, or managed without.

The dark side is that white Rhodesia tortured its enemies, executed jailed guerrillas in secret (and lacked the decency to tell next of kin) and compulsorily regrouped thousands of peasant families in ‘protected villages’ which became urban slums. All this was known at the time, but Ian Smith retained the loyalty of most Whites to the very end. Other truly terrible deeds have since been revealed.

Ken Flower, Smith’s intelligence chief, recruited a black church minister to supply poisoned clothing to youngsters who thought they were joining the guerrillas. Hundreds died a horrible death. Flower had the minister assassinated to avoid exposure but recounts the tale in his autobiography, Serving Secretly. As the deported Catholic bishop Donal Lamont observed, in their battle to defend what they considered Western, Christian values, white Rhodesians abandoned any morality.

Omens of what was to come were apparent well before UDI. The African nationalist movement within and beyond the Central African Federation began flexing its muscles and the mood in southern Africa started changing as the 1950s drew to a close. Although hardly into my teens, I felt the rise in political tension as tangibly as the build-up of those awesome African storms, when purple black clouds gather, and the atmosphere becomes electrically charged, to be relieved only when the first heavy raindrops raise little explosions of dust as they fall on the powder-dry earth.

For me and my family, secure in our segregated white suburb, the black townships were a world away, but clashes between rival African nationalist parties brought home a very different reality. Night after night, the ‘boys’—which is what we then called the men who worked for us as cook and gardener—returned from their outings in the townships with tales of factional fighting.

‘My head, he ache; my nose, he bleed,’ complained our cook as he took refuge in the kia, the servants’ quarters, at the back of our garden.

For me, a white Rhodesian Gwelo boy, it marked the end of an era.

The impact of the bloody upheaval in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) in the early 1960s created ripples extending to Gwelo as white refugees made their way south. Newspapers carried advertisements for mercenaries and the psyche of white southern Africa was being prepared for the Rhodesian Front’s victory in the 1962 election, which brought Ian Smith to the premiership a year later.

The turning point for white southern Africa came when I was in what was then Salisbury (now Harare), not very long after I had returned from Edinburgh in 1973 to work as a freelance journalist. I remember sitting with a Roman Catholic priest in the open-air section of a restaurant on the first floor of a building overlooking the city, as we digested the news of the 1974 coup in Portugal. It was a time when black students in southern Africa were beginning to rebel. In Rhodesia, that same year, I went with the priest to Regina Coeli mission on the eastern border with Mozambique, and learnt that students were crossing the border in their hundreds to join the guerrilla forces of Zanu. Not long afterwards school students in Soweto took to the streets, and the war against white rule took on a new dimension.

It was about that time that I saw my first dead body. The sickly-sweet stench of death wafting over the whitewashed walls of the police compound in north-east Rhodesia gave advance warning of what I and other journalists had been flown in on an ageing Dakota to see. Three bodies, curled up in foetal position, so charred by fire that they were reduced to skeletal figures, captured weapons neatly laid out continued in the book

In 1960s Rhodesia, student activist Michael Holman was considered a threat to national security. He continues to challenge

CHAP 13: PIONEERS FOR CIVILISATION

Great Rhodesian Trek

I had long dreamed of extending the empire towards the north, across the Limpopo (and even the Zambezi) to ultimately link the Cape to Cairo—if you like, to ‘paint the map red’ for the benefit of empire, civilisation in Africa’s backward, feudal, lands, and for pioneers and settlers. Other Great Powers and their acolytes had the same intentions at the time, if only to somehow colonise Zambesia from different directions.

The Zambezi was not the northernmost limit of my hopes for Zambesia. It was ‘God’s Highway’, in Livingstone’s prophetic words, and the route for the delivery of commerce to central Africa. For me, it remained a vivid geographic marker separating the Rhodesia-to-be from the Barotse under their king, Lewanika, and an inaccessible Africa.

The Barotse had lived in regimes stained with blood. An antecedent, Chief Sepopo, had conquered and enslaved the Batoka and tribes around the Zambezi to reign supreme by 1886 over large tracts of land. Internecine wars had led to several chiefly downfalls, Lewanika eventually emerging on top, ruling by conquest with 20 subsidiary ethnicities in 1899 paying annual tribute and treated like slaves. To the west, native slavers conducted their trade in Angola. To the south, Lobengula, king of the Ndebele people, posed a threat and caused more anxiety.

I selected Frank Lochner to take on a mission to Lewanika, which ended in the Barotse Concession under my remit signed on 27 June 1890 that brought an area the size of Germany into my sphere of interests. I am happy to say that the Company brought an end to the domestic serfdom practised by Lewanika, with all Barotse slaves emancipated by 1906.

Similarly, North-Eastern Rhodesia, the lake country, later Nyasaland, was brought into the fold of civilisation by my efforts and colleagues. It had formed the slaving grounds of Arabs, with their native cohorts trafficking in human cargo and as the target of predations by Portuguese prazos-holders. Several invasions onto the Nyasa plateau, one by Angoni, others by Yao and Makololo, had kept the lake societies in submission amid disruption while invaders often fought between themselves. Missionaries had been impotent to arrest all these conflicts. The Arabs in the North contested Christianity and there was a state of war prevalent.

Harry Johnston, with my financial aid, managed to bring an end to the turbulence and keep out the menaces coming from the prazeros and Portuguese claims to the swathe of lands from Mocambique to Angola. I will not here detail the story of those efforts, or with Barotseland, but the many malign ulcers festering in both lands were excised by the Company’s efforts. However, in the case of Katanga, my efforts and emissaries sent during 1890-91 failed, leaving Msiri, the warlord ruler there, undisturbed. He later succumbed (killed in conflict) to Leopold’s forces from the Congo Free State. Yet many years of carnage, cruelty, slaving, raiding, savagery, witchcraft and wars in the interim followed.

Great Games for Zambesia

Zambesia at large was also on the minds of my closest adversaries: the Boers, Germans and Portuguese. The first wanted the plateau in order to shut it off, the second desired expanded empire and to link the southwest with its eastern domain, and the last was keen to take Zambesia to enjoin its provinces in west and east. Even Jan Hofmeyr of the Afrikaner Bond, whom I well knew, had intrigued and overtly sought, with Boer allies in the independent Boer republics, to establish a Dutch confederacy up to the Zambezi. He was not known as ‘The Mole’ for nothing: he beavered away at his plans, often unseen.

The prize, Bechuanaland, was huge: more than a quarter of a million square miles. It was eventually captured as a British Protectorate, but denied to me. Similarly, a Lusitanian empire built across Zambesia would have been a disaster for all, my plans included. Portugal’s Foreign Office had produced a ‘rose-coloured map’ of their central African claims in 1887. It stretched from the Indian to the Atlantic Ocean, across the entire Zambesia plateau, including the lower Zambezi valley over its upland basin into Barotseland. Lisbon had held talks with both Germany and France on that design, to seek consent and allies for its plan. Portugal had even been sounded out by Germany, to see if Lisbon would allow a German Expeditionary Force to cross Portuguese East Africa via the Transvaal. The Kaiser mooted a condominium with Lisbon, in a putative southern pincer movement, to further intrude onto the plateau.

Equally, Portugal coveted all Zambesia on the basis of an alleged treaty originated over one century and more before with a defunct kingdom, Monomotapa. It was a wholly fraudulent claim. Worse still, any joint Boer-Portugal concord could have split Zambesia along north-south lines. It might have implicated Bechuanaland as well. Even my staunch missionary critic, John Mackenzie, who had once cast me as a potential dictator in Zambesia, had feared Kruger’s ambitions there even more, along with the president’s desire to turn the entire country into a giant Boer republic. Such an obscure and backward ‘empire’ would have established an unhappy marriage of backward feudalisms, probably leading to a perverse future history of repeated recidivism in Zambesia.

To avert these risks, and with my efforts, a concession for mineral and trading rights in Barotseland was secured on 27 June 1890, as the pioneers left for Mashonaland. When the flag was raised in Fort Salisbury, I secured a concession over Manicaland, signed with Chief Mutasa. He subsequently repudiated it under Portuguese duress, as did the chief in Gazaland who had signed one a few days later and then denied it to us the following year, once more due to Portugal’s pressure.

Negotiating in Barbary: my opponents and critics

With the Great Powers’ eyes on Zambesia, the requirements of ‘effective occupation’ first required me to secure a Concession: that is, Lobengula’s signed assent. Yet he could be obstinate and duplicitous. The Moffat Treaty provided only an option for the king to affiliate with Britain, and the king’s word, only, to keep out Boers and any others. Relying on that alone would be folly: Portugal, Germany and the Boers were knocking at the Ndebele door and fomenting furtive initiatives towards Mashonaland. There were other commercial claimants for Zambesia too. So, I needed to equally and simultaneously finesse consortia with similar aims based in London. Then there were aspirants in the form of earlier syndicates at work, opposed to my ambitions. On the spot, there were the threats from a motley ragbag of chancers in hope of some foothold, living within the king’s capital of Bulawayo. I needed to act on many fronts, with speed. At the same time, I needed British government assent to the Charter.

First, the Ndebele king needed aligning. That Lobengula had been long dallying with the Boers I well knew. With the Moffat Treaty signed on 11 February 1888, Lobengula penned an accord of perpetual friendship with the Great White Queen, Victoria. Finally, Lobengula assented to sign my Concession amid intense concession-seeking by rival speculators, with diplomatic activity evident inside Lobengula’s kraal, as my agents secured the king’s accession on 30 October 1888. It was sealed with financial terms, agreed with generous compensation and arms. The arms agreed had to be delivered quickly as quid pro quo. It was equally important to forestall Portuguese interests that threatened entry from the east. Kruger’s Boers, not all always acting in unison, were not yet wholly mollified. They had allies in Germany. The Great Game was rapidly unfolding. I had opponents in London who were politically antagonistic, as well as many commercial rivals. Concession was one step only: opposition of all sorts had to be overcome. I needed a Royal Charter too.

Of opponents, there were many. Some wanted to keep central Africa out of the hands of companies that made financial gain. Others objected to the many powers that would come with the Charter. Critics objected to the indeterminate boundaries that would touch on Portugal’s interests in the east. The Treasury would not offer money for any colony. A few royalists worried about the Queen ceding powers to my private company. The Charter took time to be negotiated and terms agreed. Meanwhile, some journalists took exception to my plans. Exeter Hall adherents, opposed to slavery, questioned the nature of the Rudd Concession’s remit, and so induced Lobengula to try to disown the agreement. I sent Jameson off to Bulawayo in August 1889 to calm the king’s nerves and keep to his word. All appeared to be unravelling by the day.

Time was of the essence. One private rival, the Exploration Company in London, had designs on Zambesia too. This group of English worthies, Lord Gifford and the stockbroker George Cawston, sent an agent, Edward Maund, to entreat the king to grant them such a title. Meanwhile, Gifford and Cawston had sought a Charter from the Colonial Office which they said was based on their alleged concession given to their representative by the king. I had yet to secure the Rudd Concession, an

revives an ill-tempered ghost

RHODES’ GHOST THE CONQUEST OF ZAMBESIA

Duncan Clarke

Duncan Clarke (Norfolk), Softback, 796 pages, 16 b/w illustrations, 170 x 244, July 2020, 9798664159219

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For more information, visit www.dgclarke.com www.RhodesGhost.com

FROM THE SAME AUTHOR

AFRICA:

If Cecil Rhodes rose from the dead, how might he defend himself? Duncan Clarke

Above Africa Map, after the death of Cecil Rhodes in 1902, and after the incorporation of the Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State as British Crown colonies, showing British territory in Africa as a north-south chain broken only by the Congo Free State and German East Africa.

Below Cartoon of Rhodes as a colossus, satirising his wish to connect Cape Town in the south to Cairo in the north by telegraph. It was drawn by Edward Linley Sambourne and first appeared in Punch magazine in 1892 alongside a satirical poem the first stanza of which associates Rhodes with the movement for black liberation:

The World’s Seven Wonders are surely outshone!

On Marvel World’s billows ’twill toss us—’twill toss us, To watch him, Director and Statesman in one, This Seven-League-Booted Colossus—Colossus!

Combining in one supernatural blend Plain Commerce and Imagination—gination; O’er Africa striding from dark end to end, To forward black emancipation—cipation.

instrument needed for any Royal Charter to be granted. Already Bulawayo was awash with a few dozen suitors, all seeking Lobengula’s blessing for any or similar concession.

With time in short supply, I went to London and entreated the Exploration Company to abandon their plans in exchange for shares in my Company and board seats. They acceded. Then I negotiated the Charter with the government, obtaining support from the Prince of Wales and Lord Rothschild. The Queen eventually concurred and signed the Charter. While not home and dry, I was elated. But the Pioneer Column and the Pioneer Corps were still unformed and yet to be put into action. Also, my Company had been formed with only limited capital. The venture had to be fully funded, so expeditious use had to be made of only limited funds, my monies mainly.

Seemingly definitive, there were potential risks in this contract, as I saw it. Well-armed Ndebele could prove a future threat to the pioneers on trek and any future settlers. Lobengula was still under the influence of others, Edward Maund one, who sought to undermine this agreement, acting for the Exploration Company, as a subsidiary of Gifford and Cawston’s Bechuanaland Exploration Company. Maund had persuaded Lobengula to send a letter to the Queen in the hands of two indunas, accompanied by Maund, to seek proof of the existence of the White Queen and undercut the Rudd Concession. This tactic was a devious initiative: the letter did not bear Lobengula’s mark, nor had it been attested by the missionary, Charles Helm, who generally acted for the king in official matters related to the white men. It only bore Lobengula’s Elephant Seal, kept by the storekeeper James Fairbairn, as its nominated custodian, in whom the king placed utmost confidence. To my mind, this initiative was inauthentic, probably fraudulent.

Fortunately, my plans for Zambesia had advanced from 1888 when I was in London and raised with the government there the issue of forming a chartered company for Zambesia. These vehicles had been used in Niger and East Africa. My concept would cost the Treasury nothing, at a time when Britain was loath to incur any extra expenditures on colonies. I had valuable allies as well from my political connections in the Cape and Bechuanaland. Thus in August 1888 I sent my associates, Charles Rudd with James Rochfort Maguire and Frank Thompson, to confer with Lobengula for the purpose of acquiring the concession. The race was on, and competition even from the Boers could not be ignored.

Squaring the king

To smooth my demarche, Rudd took along 100 gold sovereigns as a gift for the Ndebele king. On the spot, I could count on the missionary Charles Helm to translate our offer in favourable terms and I hoped that John Moffat, the British Resident, would act for my interests as well.

Rudd persisted in Bulawayo amid much intrigue from a plethora of hostile rivals, malicious rumours abounding, many indunas and impis hostile to all concessions, in a patient wait for the king’s nod of approval. It was a tense time for them as well as me. After six weeks of parlaying, Lobengula finally relented and granted the Rudd Concession, fixed his mark to the document prepared, signed, and had it witnessed. We were home and dry. The final piece of the puzzle for my Company had come together. What remained was for the Royal Charter to be granted, the pioneers recruited and assembled, and the Pioneer Column to then enter Mashonaland, this task yet to be organised.

Much writing has dwelt on the nature, content and legitimacy of this Concession. Critics there have been in all quarters: in England, among commercial rivals, and in Bulawayo and Pretoria. This has led to much controversy which has persisted over the century that has followed. I do not wish to belabour the minutiae, but it is my firm view that it was acceptable as a valid agreement between the parties, and I thus acted accordingly. Let me explain. The Rudd Concession allowed Lobengula to claim far larger swathes of Mashonaland than reality confirmed. This fiction suited my interests also, although our Company’s own maps had the king’s territorial limits at the Zambezi and well west of the Sabi River, even far below the northeast limit of the plateau. When Rudd left Kimberley on 17 August 1888 on a six-week journey on my instructions to see the king, I had made him aware of these geographic facts. I gave him £5,000 in specie with a signed letter of introduction from Sir Hercules Robinson, the High Commissioner, to provide adequate means with status to secure the concession.

Moreover, my concession was not strictly for Matabeleland, the king’s acknowledged domain, but for entry into Mashonaland where, despite what the document said, Lobengula was never its anointed or hereditary king, let alone the de jure sovereign. There the Ndebele had exerted naked power to sublimate, raid and enslave the Shona clans, while he had acted in similar fashion in adjacent territories north and west. If Lobengula assigned me access to that land it was an act of his own making, however weak it stood in terms of any legal definitions or the fictions that implied any Ndebele statehood.

The agreement equally enabled my pioneers to exercise complete and exclusive charge over metals and minerals, with all consequential rights to secure those benefits. It represented a concord accepting my access to that territory on unimpeded terms: in other words, that the large Ndebele army would not interfere with my efforts there. Paradoxically, the Concession too spoke of such powers granted in Matabeleland but I did not exercise that aspect of the agreement. Nor did I think that wise. It would almost certainly have led to a war with dissident indunas in Lobengula’s court, many of them

hostile to this or any agreement. I duly accepted to settle our agreement with the king on financial terms: the provision of payment of £100 monthly in perpetuity to any Ndebele king, initially Lobengula; the supply of 1,000 Henry-Martini rifles, plus 100,000 rounds of ammunition; and a steamer put on the Zambezi, with guns, to defend the Ndebele, or £500 in lieu. The alleged ‘verbal promise’ from Helm, that only ten white men would prospect and mine in Mashonaland acting under Ndebele laws, was, to my mind, mere hearsay. This bizarre stipulation was not cited in the agreement. Helm was the only later source of this alleged idea. It was not mine, nor Rudd’s. Also, it contradicted the agreed written words of the Concession to cede all powers to me to do all things that might be deemed necessary to procure, mine, control and collect revenues from the minerals or related matters in Mashonaland. If Lobengula was so intent on such a clause, he did not say so at the time, nor add it to any document. He signed all agreed terms without duress. Nor did Ndebele ‘laws’—which were never in any codified script, and if they applied in Matabeleland were at the whim of the king alone—have any accepted or logical jurisdiction in Mashonaland. Mashonaland was a semi-lawless zone inside Zambesia. Any traditional writ there extended only in highly fractured form within the boundaries of a mix of patriarchal tribute chiefdoms: in some zones not at all, as not all these chiefdoms were in an ordered mix of neatly contiguous boundaries known, demarcated and so observed.

No good deed unpunished

Many critics likewise sought to invalidate my treaty on the grounds that Cape law at that time prohibited the sale, gift, or traffic of arms to natives. Missionaries in the south joined this clamour. Well, so be it. I was not acting under Cape law, which did not apply in Zambesia where the Colony’s holy writ did not extend. It was my own problem as to how the commercial terms of the agreement would be met, all of which I achieved in due course. Lobengula of course primarily wanted arms. His clear interest was to enhance and upgrade Ndebele military firepower. This was a risk to me, as it turned out to be the case when the Ndebele war commenced in 1893: it was no risk in the Cape or to its politicians. Moreover, it was the lubricant that in all likelihood sealed this transaction. I took responsibility for it on behalf of the Company in due course. If the arms supply contravened British policy that too was wholly ambiguous, in my opinion, since Britain had often supplied arms to others in Africa: no cast-iron, unbreeched policy—let alone applied law—existed in its recent history. Indeed, in the rivalries still playing out over Zambesia, both the Boers and Portuguese would have been indifferent to meet these military needs in order to secure their concessions. In every de facto sense, I acted to secure British interests, at my cost alone. When it all became a fait accompli, no government in London acted to withdraw their support on the grounds that my accomplishments had somehow been ‘illegal’.

Naturally my many rivals in Bulawayo, who had lost out in the stakes, were unhappy: they raised false doubts and beseeched the king to overturn the agreement. The king sent two indunas to London to intervene with Queen Victoria, and to deny that he had ‘given away’ his country. He ‘gave’ nothing away: it was settled in an agreed quid pro quo. The indunas were feted in London and met the Great White Queen to whom they delivered the king’s assertions. The Queen’s ambiguous reply sent by government in a letter did not explicitly advise Lobengula to deny me. Her words noted that she had not mandated specific Englishmen to make an accord with her authority: and I had not done so. She advised the king not to grant concessions `hastily’, not to entreat him to never come to terms on any agreement he might wish to make. It was always a decision for Lobengula. Again, I did not take ‘his’ country. Nor did the Pioneer Column ever enter Matabeleland, while Mashonaland was not the king’s unrestricted private domain, as many Shona chiefdoms would readily confirm.

Naturally my enemies circled. They sought to interpret my concession and these events in the most malign manner. This became all about a struggle over whether a Royal Charter should be forthcoming. The missionaries were at the forefront of protest, as expected. It was as if they assumed a form of in loco parentis status over their ‘presumed charges’: the king and the natives. Theirs was a patronising presumption. Missionary arrogance was widespread. I was besmirched prior to any entry into Mashonaland of intent to ‘steal’ native lands:

yet it was not I, but Lobengula and his father Mzilikazi, the founding dynastic king, who had already done so, while the Ndebele had inflicted enormous pain by continuous raiding of the Shona clans, with captives taken and cattle stolen. The London Missionary Society’s Reverend John Mackenzie, who had opposed me on many occasions—and who never set foot in Matabeleland— acted as the self-appointed champion of native rights, along with a gaggle of earnest humanitarians and retired Imperial officials. He asserted that I would never allow natives any land rights, which proved incorrect; and that in my hands they would have no civil rights—again, quite wrong, as traditional civil rights under customary law were widely upheld—and that all natives would be allowed to do was pay a but tax: once more, this was not instituted at the time and was a distorted, prejudiced and incorrect speculation on what actually followed.

It was not the missionary parroting that most echoed in my mind. Others had more influential stations. Some politicians wanted to place Zambesia into British hands rather than my own; Cape interests were thought likely to threaten imperial business and so many commercial interests weighed against my plans. The ambitious politician Joseph Chamberlain and the influential publisher of the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead, lined up against me; the redoubtable Colonial Office stood removed from accession to my aims to secure the Charter; my long-standing and good relationships with the Afrikaners in the Cape were discounted and impugned by none less than the prime minister, Lord Salisbury; the self-appointed commentariat of Exeter Hall issued the usual dismal statements of antipathy; I was denounced publicly by an important civil servant within the Colonial Office, Edward Fairfield, in demeaning ad hominem terms, my character tarnished and diminished, and myself described as both grotesque and a clown. A significant body of public opinion was orchestrated to weigh against me.

The North

To put into effect my northern expansion plans, I gathered my principal lieutenants with me in May 1890 to discuss ideas. At heart it was a team of great ‘Africanists’, if I might say, with substantial knowledge of the North. I benefited from their experience and insights. All had a purpose to fulfil, most outside their allotted tasks. From initiatives I had already taken—for Rudd’s Concession, the Charter, Company establishment, and gathering of capital funds—arose the embodiment of my dream, the Pioneer Column and its associated Pioneer Corps.

Recruitment for the Pioneer Corps took several public forms. Adverts were placed in the press for men who could ride and shoot. More than the requisite numbers put themselves forward. Volunteers were sought in Kimberley and Mafeking by public notice with specific individual incentives proffered (land of 3,000 morgen, with rights to 15 mining claims). Over 2,000 willing souls in the south volunteered, only ten per cent taken, such was the widespread interest and desire to join my expedition, either in the Column or in its protective Corps. Selection agencies were set up in Cape Town, Kimberley, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, East London and Queenstown, and the Zoutspansberg, to sift out applicants and separate the wheat from the chaff.

The Pioneers had been judiciously selected from all over the colonies and in many districts, not just the Cape, but on the Rand, so that in the event of crisis there would be widespread support for their cause. I wanted, too, those who would stay on and settle the country, and so military men needed to be accompanied by pioneers with a judicious range of trades and professions. I insisted that some selections favoured the sons of wealthy families—so that should something go awry their survival and interests would attract strong Cape attention and commitment, even, if needed, British government concern and remedial action.

I was happy that it had a widespread multi-ethnic composition as well, a point oft overlooked. The settlers chosen came from several of the great civilisations of Europe, even from America. The mixture of Cape and Natal English and others from England, Afrikaners, French, Germans and Coloureds was joined by natives from various domains in southern Africa and aided by others from the tribes in Bechuanaland. While all selected were living south of the Limpopo at the time, over half derived from English Home Counties. Most of the Pioneer Corps were in their 20s at an average age of 27 years, officers a little older at 30 years. Most NCOs came from the Bechuanaland Border Police. Not all men

Above Geography and disposition of southern Africa, 1890. Below The route of the Rhodesian trek (4) from Fort Tuli to Fort Salisbury, plus older trails (1) (2) and (3) and the extent of Ndebele lands under Mzilikazi and Lobengula.

Below Rhodes’ journeys into Rhodesia, 1891-1901, showing the then contemporary boundaries, adjacent states, towns, forts and rivers.

had the requisite capital, nor all the necessary skills and capacities to form and manage their intended mining syndicates, although many an unemployed ex-miner came from the Johannesburg goldfields where depression had dimmed prospects. A few were army or navy deserters. All were promised land and claims on arrival in Mashonaland.

Great Rhodesian trek

Not since the Great Trek out of the Cape Colony by Boers in 1836 had such an organised and large-scale expedition been seen as the Pioneer Column chosen to enter Mashonaland. Unlike the Boer trekkers, mine had no families. It was a dual-designed convoy of hardy pioneers and skilled military support. Not led by Boer heads of families and clans, my leaders were a trifecta: Lieut. Col. Edward Pennfeather of the Police to protect the Column, my emissary Dr Jameson and Frank Johnson for the Corps. Added thereto was Frederick Courteney Selous with independent status as intelligence officer and guide for the combined expeditionary Column. In The Scramble for Africa, Thomas Packenham has argued that I had made a bizarre choice on leadership, that there was no clear chain of command, and that I had designed all this sow the seeds of confusion. Packenham, like many writers on matters about Zambesia, was wrong. The Corps formed a formidable outfit, far superior in leadership, military and fighting experience, bushveld skills and allied talents that any scratch force that could have been assembled for any campaign. Many continued afterwards to become settlers—but no bed of roses awaited the Pioneers and the Corps who settled in Mashonaland. Around 30 per cent died within 12 years after the Occupation: from fever, the Ndebele war in 1893, the Shona rebellions and in the Boer War, while accidental deaths took place as well, a few suicides, and some from natural causes. Many an ordeal awaited: uncertainty about the mind and fragile attitude of Lobengula to the Column, threats implied from around 18,000 Ndebele warriors, malaria and diseases prevalent in the lowveld, wild animals, swollen rivers, heat and dust, hunger and thirst at times, occasional waterlogged bush, threats from nagana or horse-sickness to the animals and mounts taken, the unknown dangers of trekking through a trackless savannah, and the risks of failure. It was no picnic.

turn back, claiming that the Column only had permission to dig for gold in Tati, not in the land of the Mashona. At the time the king had ordered nearly every regiment to Bulawayo for review, where they paraded in full war dress. He told them to ‘wait for my word’. This was Lobengula’s way to forestall the impis from an attack, said Colenbrander, a diplomatic manoeuvre to ward off the war and also keep the agreement to the Concession. Fortunately, Jameson was all not threatened by this initiative. Lobengula had already on 15 July for the first time refused to accept his monthly stipend. So, greater vigilance was now required by day, especially at night and before dawn, the favourite time for attacks. Selous became more anxious, too, since the local natives, fearing the Ndebele, might no longer assist in guiding and cutting the route.

It took more arduous trekking, watchfulness and toil until 13 August, when the wagons could traverse the hills, spruits and dongas to ascend from 2,000 ft to 3,500 ft and reach the midveld plains of Mashonaland. The gateway, Providential Pass, was found by Selous and negotiated by the Column. There, on the safer zones over the Mashona plateau was built a small fort, 196 miles from Tuli, later to become the small town of Fort Victoria. Here the Column rested and repaired for five days, while a scientific party under Ellerton Fry went off to explore the much-fabled monoliths and passages of the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, fourteen miles from the fort. There it found a small band of Mashona living amid the overgrown granite stones and kopjes. The only previous white visitor who had beheld the Ruins was the German explorer and the source of the Ophir myth, Carl Mauch.

GLOSSARY

Dongas Gullies or ravines found in the bush in which often trees and rocks are found.

Drifts Streams or river crossings.

Impis Ndebele regiment, usually armed with assegai, shields and knobkerrie, later (in Lobengula’s time) with guns.

Kopje Literally ‘little head’. A small hill or one with a set of boulders on top, hence a ‘granite kopje’.

Lusitanian Portugese, hence the empire and Lisbon. In Zambesia, denotes Portuguese East Africa.

Prazos Large estates leased to Portuguese colonists, settlers and traders in Portuguese Africa to exploit land resources. Operated as a semi-feudal system in the Zambezi valley.

Prazeros Owners of prazos, inheritance of which was reserved exclusively for female descendants of Portuguese female citizens through three generations, who had to be, married to Portuguese men.

Spruit A small watercourse, typically dry except during the rainy season.

Our Occupation, or ‘invasion’ as critics later described it, was a rather modest affair, involving only around 700 people in all. It was conducted in public and a conspicuous manner. There was no subterfuge or clandestine entry. With passage on the edges of known hostile lands and for the protection of the men and the mission, officers and troopers were furnished with arms: Martini-Henry rifles, Webley revolvers, boots, bandoliers, saddles, bridles and blankets, with patrol tents for two men apiece. Seven-pound field guns and Maxim machine guns were taken too, in case of extremis, and an electric searchlight was loaded as a means to ward off any putative attacks at night in the vicinity of the laager, set in the wilds each evening.

It is not remiss of me to call the pioneer journey the Great Rhodesian Trek. It spanned less than three months. It brought more wagons and oxen into the country in one column than ever before as a centripetal drive towards a single destination. It was quite unlike the exodus that would follow at the end of 90 years, as Rhodesians left in a slow exodus, in successive waves, often in despair, departing bit by bit over a period of twenty or so years. This time, Zambesia was considered a land of hope and opportunity. In the beginning there had been one vision: mine. At the end of Rhodesia, there were visions fractured, hope broken into thousands of pieces.

Selous had plotted the 60-mile route to Tuli, reached by the Column on 1 July. The Shashi River was forded on Sunday 6 July, following a wait for supplies. From Tuli it was necessary to cross swampy marshlands, numerous rivers and thick virgin bush. The pioneers and natives hacked at the trees to clear the pathway, amid the treacherous thorn bush. One armed section was detailed to watch for Ndebele impis. Rivers had to be forded, ‘drifts’ built, banks levelled by pick and shovel, and often paved with sandbags to allow heavy wagons to cross safely. All this was done in scorching heat with nightly fortifications made around the laagers for protective sleeping, defences cut from thorn bush.

All along the route, Ndebele scouts watched and probed, and on 5 August Johann Colenbrander, living at Lobengula’s kraal, arrived unexpectedly with a message from the king, peremptorily ordering the expedition to

Leaving Fort Victoria on 19 August, Selous and the Column continued across the highveld and watershed, the roadwork much alleviated. Local Shona, constituted of the old men and women with a very young, were often found inhabiting ruined villages. Once fearful, they were relieved by the knowledge that the Occupation would now provide protection against the constant Ndebele raids, slaughter and tribute payment in stock and grain. Omens of the ruinous past littered the veld and 123 miles from Fort Victoria, Fort Charter was established in a bleak and desolate plain at 5,000 ft altitude. Here, Selous and Jameson departed with an escort for the east, to Mutasa’s kraal in distant Manicaland, to secure concessions from chiefs further beyond Lobengula’s writ and influence and to forestall future Portuguese intrusions. The Column continued forward to cross the Umfuli and Umgase rivers to the Hunyani on 11 September that year. With 400 miles traversed, the pioneers had aimed to reach Mount Hampden, an open area that Selous had earlier explored. But finding itself then in flat grassland with watered marches, the Column came to rest under a prominent kopje. Paradise had been reached.

Fort Salisbury: the Kopje

Above and below Stamps issued during the 1890s by Rhodes’s British South Africa Company for use in Rhodesia. Note the company’s motto “Justice, Commerce, Freedom” and the boast of incorporation by Royal Charter. continued

On 13 September the Pioneer Corps paraded on the veld at ten o’clock. Lieut. Tyndale-Biscoe was given the honour to hoist the Union flag on a rough-made flagpole in commemoration. The Company now had possession of Mashonaland and an unclaimed zone in south-central Africa. It was ‘effective occupation’ as the Berlin Act and the Great Powers understood it, and added substantial land to the empire to plant the seeds of what from Mashonaland would become Rhodesia. An earthworks fort was commenced on 15 September near to what became known as the Kopje and therefore the camp was named after Lord Salisbury (then British prime minister). My endeavours and the final acquisition of this vast tract in Zambesia had not cost the British Treasury one penny, nor did Rhodesia cost anything over its lifespan, and yet it served London’s ambitions and wider interests, as well as the empire for decades to follow.

Not all Pioneers settled in Mashonaland or later remained in Rhodesia. The naval troopers left, not being equipped as frontiersmen. Some miners from the Rand soon became disappointed with the absence of an El Dorado and so returned south. About one half of the officers and men had abandoned settlement by turn of the millennium. The rest remained: some murdered or killed in action during the Ndebele war and rebellions, others to succumb to disease, with still one-third of those surviving living in Rhodesia after my death.

Many of those who settled built impressive careers in public life, administration, farming, mining or private commercial ventures. It is clear to me, as to many others, that the Occupation of Mashonaland, with the many settlers who followed, was built on grit and determination. It took courage, endurance,

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The Rhodes Must Fall campaign started on 9 March 2015, when a politics student named Chumani Maxwele threw excrement on Rhodes’s large statue on the campus of the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. The apparent aim of the gesture was not so much anger about the statue as anger at how little had changed in everyday life since majority rule in 1994.

The UCT campus itself seemed a relic of yesteryear. Only five of its 174 professors were black; almost all the rest were white. A humanities student could complete a three-year course without meeting a single African woman lecturer or seeing any other learning materials than those steeped in a European point of view. The protesters wanted Rhodes’s statue removed, but more than that, they wanted a transformation of UCT and the country as a whole.

The vice-chancellor of UCT, Max Price, was overseas when the storm broke, so his deputy, Sandra Klopper, had to step in. She had never liked the statue, and sympathized with the students’ ultimate objective, which was to change the character and curriculum of UCT. On his return, Professor Price, a former Rhodes Scholar, acknowledged that Rhodes was ‘a villain’, but insisted that there be a proper discussion of next steps within the governing bodies of the university.

To the protesters, progress seemed painfully slow but within a month the decision was taken and the statue was removed, on 9 April. This did not quell the protests. Students continued to occupy UCT’s main administration building, demanding the promotion of black lecturers, more enrollments for disadvantaged communities, a more diverse university curriculum and the removal of other names that offended them on campus. The protests also spread to other formerly white universities such as Witwatersrand, Rhodes University, Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu. In an important concession, Stellenbosch announced in November 2015 that Afrikaans—the language of the old white ‘masters’— would no longer be the primary medium of instruction.

By then, the Rhodes Must Fall flame had spread to Oxford, and in particular to the small, rather clumsy statue high above the High Street on the façade of a college wing that Rhodes had funded and that passersby rarely noticed. Sobered by the pandemonium that had spread worldwide on social media, Oriel College immediately parleyed with the protesters and committed to spending the next six months studying various options, from taking it down altogether to ‘contextualizing’ it by adding an explanatory plaque.

That led to a ferocious pushback in the popular press and scholarly journals. Donors, too, were up in arms. Oriel College benefactors threatened to cancel £100 million in funding if the statue was even touched. In January 2016, Oriel suddenly reversed course and announced that the statue would stay where it was. Then, in June 2020, in response to new public pressure, it decided to think again.

Former Rhodes Scholars also considered cancelling their contributions to a recent replenishment of the Rhodes Trust’s capital, when they learned that rooms at Oxford’s Rhodes House had been renamed, that a bust and a portrait of the ‘Founder’ had been moved out of sight and that he was no longer being toasted at dinners there.

In 1968, when I won a Rhodes Scholarship for the Province of Quebec, my African history professor (who was on sabbatical in Kenya) wrote to congratulate me but also teased me for accepting the money of an ‘imperialist fink’. The next year, behind closed doors, the Warden of Rhodes House—a character out of an Evelyn Waugh novel—referred to Rhodes as a ‘scoundrel’. My next-door neighbour in college (the British Caribbean Rhodes Scholar) insisted, whimsically perhaps, that he and an African-American from Massachusetts were the only ones that year who really deserved the scholarship as it was the product of black sweat and suffering. Almost fifty years later, raising the tone considerably, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign called Rhodes a ‘mass murderer’, denounced his ‘crimes against humanity’ and likened him to Hitler and Stalin. Some of the accusers were themselves Rhodes Scholars.

Some moral standards evolve; others are permanent as granite, and it is not true that all Rhodes’s misdeeds can be understood and justified in the light of the practices of his time. Even in his own day, he provoked controversy. ‘You worship Rhodes?’ the novelist George Meredith wrote to a friend; ‘I would crown him and then scourge him with his crown still on him.’

What then was new about the Rhodes Must Fall movement and why did students at UCT wait almost a quarter-century after majority rule to campaign against the man? Of course, they hadn’t waited. Most hadn’t been born in 1994. And each generation has the right—even the duty—to question the past. But the historical parallels they used and the harsh reactions they unleashed in South Africa and particularly the UK were puzzling and require elucidating.

In August 2017, sixteen months after the protests at UCT, violence broke out in the usually peaceful university town of Charlottesville, Virginia over the proposed removal of statues commemorating the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In December 2018, students at the University of Accra in Ghana insisted that a statue of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi be taken down because of disparaging remarks he had made about Africans as a young lawyer in South Africa. Even in Canada, a country proud of its generally peaceful history, statues of the first prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald have now become controversial as a result of his treatment of the country’s First Peoples.

Then, in June 2020, the igniting of the Black Lives Matter movement on both sides of the Atlantic and the revival of the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford shattered the status quo about historical ‘heroes’. It also raised the question about how much of the past should be subject to ‘correction’.

Falsehoods about Rhodes abound. A 2018 travelogue by an expatriate South African suggests that, as a young man, Rhodes made a fortune as a fruit farmer. In fact, he grew cotton for just over a year and barely broke even. The same author refers to Rhodes’s life-long aversion to the Boers and the Africans. In fact, one of Rhodes’s deepest ambitions was to nurture good relations with the other European ‘race’ as a way of promoting a South African federation. That led him to support legislation that, as a liberal, he might otherwise have opposed, in order to curry favour with rural white settlers.

There is also no evidence of a deep animus towards the original inhabitants of the region. He used harsh words at times in the heat of war but otherwise prided himself—rightly or wrongly—on his relationships with Africans. Nor is it clear that Rhodes was ‘one of the chief manipulators’ of the South African War (1899–1902). Up to the very last moment, he doubted it would happen.

Another recent writer has bestowed a knighthood on Rhodes, calling him ‘Sir Cecil’. He was a Privy Councillor and a ‘Right Honourable’ but carried no other titles. That is because, while popular with the general public, he was in bad odour with sections of the British Establishment. He was refused membership in one of London’s most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs (The Travellers) and saw his 1899 honorary degree at Oxford contested by ninety of its teaching staff.

One fact that is not in doubt is that Cecil Rhodes was a white imperialist and imperialism, especially European and British imperisalism, is very difficult to separate from issues of race. Southern Africans, for example, did not regard themselves as African or ‘black’. What bound them together were local ties—to the land, their leaders, their family and clan, and their particular languages and traditions. It was the British and other colonizers who introduced them to race and the ‘colour bar’.

People of African descent have a unique and bitter past. That experience, coupled with persistent systemic racism in countries like the US and the UK and the blindness of many people to flagrant and even slight acts of discrimination, means that if a black person deems something to be racist, it probably is. African supporters of Rhodes Must Fall may have appeared intemperate to those who did not share their history; but some European reactions to their views were just as shocking.

This is a book that attempts to look even-handedly at Rhodes’s reputation, and in this his imperaliasm cannot be wished away. But there are other filters that also need to be brought into play. Of the 26 biographies of Rhodes published between 1897 and 1996, the most solid (The Founder, 1988) was by the distinguished American historian (and Rhodes Scholar) Robert Rotberg. It ran to 800 pages and took 18 years to write. Collaborating with a psychiatrist, Rotberg analyzed key episodes in Rhodes’s personal development in clinical terms. Setting out to debunk much of the lore about Rhodes, he was the first to broach the subject of Rhodes’s homosexuality.

My book focuses on the historical charges that have been made against Rhodes, and attempts to be fair both to the man himself and continued in the book

The Cecil Rhodes debate: Round 2

In the face of the campaign to weigh Cecil Rhodes in the scales of his victims rather than his peers, former Canadian Rhodes Scholar Robert Calderisi offered what he considered a balanced assessment of the Victorian imperialist to several prominent university presses.

All turned it down.

This raises an urgent question about how we treat contested historical figures. Is there space for readings that may not satisfy all modern sensibilities or does the urgency of accusation trump all others?

Specifically, can any academic institution now address Rhodes as anything other than Africa’s Hitler?

Duncan Clarke’s mammoth volume on Rhodes (pages 13-16) is entirely unapologetic; Calderisi’s brisker account is more equivocal. We run an edited extract from Calderisi’s introduction here

Robert Calderisi is the author of several works on economic and social development, including The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn’t Working, (2007) one of the Economist’s best books of the year. He spent 30 years living and working in Africa, principally with the World Bank. He studied at the universities of Montreal, Oxford, Sussex and London.

Booklaunch

Booklaunch Literary Challenge

No.4 “Relay Race” Set by Maggie Bawden

A favourite game in our family involves making up name chains where the last surname becomes the next first name, thus Upton Sinclair Lewis Carroll Nye Bevan … or Leslie Stephen King Charles Kingsley Amis. I challenge you to produce the longest string, using famous names— or, if you prefer, literary works (This Side of Paradise Lost Horizon …). Want a harder challenge? Why not limit yourself to only male or only female writers, or see if your chain can lead back to where you started. Email your entry to comp@booklaunch.london putting “Comp4” in the subject line and supplying your postal address, so we can send you a prize. Winning entries will be published.

Last issue’s winners:

No.3 “Last Brexit to Ooklyn”

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Well, this was fun. I asked you to choose two literary characters to debate the benefits of Brexit. First out of the slips was Catherine Miller from Wantage who opened Nonsense and Insensibility and found the prescient line, “Colonel Tusk continued as grave as ever, and Mrs May, unable to prevail on him to make any offer himself, nor commission her to make one for him, began to think that, instead of Midsummer, they would not be divorced till Michaelmas.” Angela Broughton in Ipswich offered a song rather than a conversation:

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Mad dogs and Englishmen say No to the Frog and Hun. The Portugese don’t care to, the Slovenes wouldn’t dare to, Irish and Austrians just argue from twelve to one, When Englishmen request a siesta. In the Netherlands and all other lands, there are laws that are quite unfair, In each Baltic state there are rules they hate, which the Britishers won’t wear, Directives that Spaniards swear at, nobody else would shun But Mad Dogs and Englishmen say No to the Frog and Hun.

I’d like to have included all of Simon Fifield’s rewriting of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (Lord Britain: When an old country marries lots of young ones, what is he to expect? ’Tis now 40 years since Lady Union made me the happiest of nations—and I have been the most miserable dog ever since! …) but length prevents. I liked Jancis Tye’s exchange between David Davis and Nigel Farrage in Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker.

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Davis (Looks around Europe for a parliamentary constituency, but can’t find one.)

Farrage: Looking for a seat? Here, have one of mine.

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Davis: Forty years in that place and I couldn’t find a seat, not one. All them Greeks had it, Poles, Latvians, the lot of them, all them aliens had it. They had my share of adjusted VAT receipts and customs tariffs but I couldn’t find a seat.

Are you a publisher? A writer? Both?

Farrage: You’ve spent too long there. (Sits on the bed, takes out a Class II banana with non-regulation curvature, and starts eating it.)

Congratulations to all. But my prize goes to Geoffrey Locke in Stoke-on-Trent who got it bang on—and brief, too: “Brexit?” asked Christian. “Why, from the delectable mountains I saw the gates of the Celestial City.” “But before us lies the Valley of Humiliation!’ cried Faintheart”—and he got out of the mire on that side of the swamp which was next to his own house.

Important note: We’re very selective. We won’t take on your project unless we’re really impressed by what you’ve written and think it has potential.

£15

The Big Hippo Guide to Democracy, Referendums, Elections (and all that)

Martin Rowson and Bob Marshall Andrews

Everything with Words

Publication July 25, 2019

Paperback, ISBN 9781911427124, RRP £8.99

‘No one writes history as well as James Hawes or uses the past to make sense of the present so skilfully. This is an urgent and electrifying work that takes you to the heart of England’s sickness. Do yourself a favour and read it.’

Size Really Does Matter: The Nanotechnology Revolution

Colm Durkan

World Scientific Publishing

Showcase your book or MS in the print edition of Booklaunch and we will help you record an audio track on YouTube. Email Maggie Bawden at book@booklaunch.london

Booklaunch is a project of New Premises Ltd

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Website www.booklaunch.london

They Called Us Enemy George Takei

The hilarious joint creation of Bob Marshall Andrews, author, barrister, former Labour MP for Medway, thorn in Tony Blair’s side and guest on Have I Got News for You, and multi-award-winning cartoonist, author, illustrator, writer and poet Martin Rowson. Just what you need in Brexit Britain to keep your flag flying and madness at bay

NICK COHEN

ISBN: 9781786346612

RRP: £38.00

The science and history of nanotechnology, followed by reallife examples of how it is used

How the smart, sharing, circular, and platform economies are shaping a new era of alwaysconnected retail

visit www.franscript.co.uk

Publisher/editor Dr Stephen Games editor@booklaunch.london

IDW Publishing

ISBN: 9781603094504

RRP: £17.99

Design director Jamie Trounce jamie@jamietrounce.co.uk

Assistant editor Maggie Bawden book@booklaunch.london

A stunning graphic memoir recounting the childhood imprisonment of actor, author and activist George Takei within American concentration camps during World War II

Advertising Nick Page page@pagemedia.co.uk

Tel: 01428 685319 Mobile: 07789178802

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Printer Mortons Media Group Ltd, Horncastle, Lincolnshire LN9 6JR

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UK £15.95/Overseas £22.99