Africa
The white man's guilty burden
Published 12 June 2006
Michela Wrong defines a black embarrassment
I recently attended an event that reminded me of a puzzling African conundrum. An academic who has researched how the Brit-ish colonial authorities bamboozled the Maasai tribespeople into surrendering most of their ancestral land was presenting her book to a packed hall in Nairobi. Outlining the manoeuvres which ensured that the Maasai were first penned into two reserves and then had even that modest allotment whittled away, Lotte Hughes was both witty and sarcastic. She seemed braced for a challenge from the white people present, who accounted for about a third of the audience, but they just looked glum.
What intrigued me was not the number who had turned out to hear this retroactive denunciation of their forefathers. It was that, yet again, the person launching the broadside was as white as the officials being criticised.
Despite Gordon Brown's defiant declaration on the topic of colonialism ("it's time to stop apologising"), the trend is running against him. Accessible, readable and carefully researched works portraying Africa's colonial administrations in the most appalling light are rolling off the presses, breathing life into subjects hitherto confined to the academic sector. And, bizarrely, it is we whites who are giving dead whites the hardest time.
In the past couple of years there have been two shocking books about Britain's crushing of the Mau Mau movement: Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson and Britain's Gulag by Caroline Elkins. Belgium's terrible record in the Congo was exposed in Adam Hochschild's King Leo-pold's Ghost and Neal Ascherson's reissued The King Incorporated. My own work forms part of the syndrome: in my book on Eritrea, published last year, both the Italians and the British get a well-deserved hammering.
What all these writers have in common is their skin colour. We are white westerners, which means that however we may empathise, however vicariously angry we may grow as we pore over old documents, ours remains an essentially intellectual interest. It wasn't our ancestors who found their paths barred by prejudice, their lives shaped by laws and taxes devised by Africa's uninvited guests. We weren't the ones who grew up hearing stories of injustice at our grandparents' knees. We didn't run our fingers over scars left by the chicotte and the rungu. So why aren't young Africans writers, who did hear those stories, whose families experienced those privations at first hand, playing a more prominent role in penning these fresh histories?
It is not, I am convinced, because the western academic or publishing establishment is weighted against them. If anything, the opposite is true. Nowadays, the heads of foundations, institutes and publishing houses are in frantic search of the talented African of humble origins and strong opinions who has the potential to become the bright young thing of tomorrow.
As someone who until recently enjoyed almost no luck at winning institutional funding, I am ruefully aware that though it helps to be a woman - one minority-interest box ticked, at least - being white and middle class are positive disadvantages when you're asking western benefactors for money.
No, the explanation for why Africans so often leave it to us whites to tell Africa's colonial story must lie elsewhere. One reason, I suspect, can be traced to a simple fact: in much of Africa, academia is no longer regarded as an aspirational career path. In the 1960s and 1970s, when presidents poured money into prestige projects, the universities offered an emerging middle class respected white-collar employment.
In Africa today, most universities are dilapidated and demoralised, crammed with anxious students who know that good qualifications no longer guarantee job security. For the young and ambitious, the notion of studying for a history PhD and eventually becoming a professor holds little glamour; they look to business school and the world of information technology instead. Galloping towards the future, they have no time for or sympathy with the past.
I think the other reason goes deeper, and it also explains why there remains such a dearth of monuments and even halfway decent museums across the continent. It is rooted in a sense of embarrassment. The missionaries sowed the seeds of awkwardness, teaching their charges to be ashamed of the traditional beliefs and practices of village life. Life in post-independence Africa then bore out the message that the greater the distance a modern African established between rural people and himself, the better he would do. The pioneering writers who later rediscovered the continent's indigenous languages alongside their African names only managed slightly to correct that dislocation.
When a rap-humming, internet-savvy, iPod-owning young urban Nigerian or South African imagines how his grandfathers lived upcountry, he feels a dizzying awareness of a vast cultural gap. When he looks at old photographs, he finds himself wondering whether he actually might have more in common with the detestable white administrator in his shorts than the villager being summoned from his smoky hut for a ticking off. Does he then want to sit down and log how that villager was humiliated and exploited by that administrator? Not really, no.
"Moving the Maasai: a colonial misadventure" by Lotte Hughes is published in the St Antony's Series by Palgrave Macmillan (£50)
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