Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

I also love Kenya

It is 30 years since Dan Eldon - a bright young star of photojournalism - was killed aged only 22 covering events in Somalia that presaged the so-called Battle of Mogadishu later that year. Eldon’s memory has been kept alive by his family through various initiatives, one of which is a website - Dan Eldon: artist, activist, adventurer - which has a lot of information about, and many extracts from, Eldon’s extraordinary, collage-based, journals.

Dan Eldon was born in London in 1970, the son of a British father and American mother. Aged seven, he and his younger sister moved to live in Kenya with their parents. During the 1982 attempted coup and the aftermath, Eldon joined his mother, a journalist at the time, on local assignments, and was soon taking photographs for local newspapers. Aged still only 14, he launched a fund-raising campaign to help save the life of a young Kenyan girl, and a year or so later began supporting a Maasai family by buying their handmade jewellery, to sell on to students and friends.

In 1988, Eldon graduated from the International School of Kenya, winning various awards and being voted the most outstanding student. That same year he went to New York to work on a magazine, but a few months later moved to study in California. Thereafter, and for the next few years, he kept switching his place of study, while regularly dreaming up schemes to get back to Africa, usually by undertaking somewhat wild but charitable adventures. One of these involved the donation of a Land Rover and money to a refugee camp in Malawi, while others involved the purchase of goods in Morocco to resell in the US to fund a charity he had set up.

In April 1992, Eldon joined a film crew in Kenya; then, with the Somali famine raging, he flew to the Somali town of Baidoa, where he shot some of the first dramatic photographs seen in the West. Reuters spotted them, and engaged his services, thus giving his photographs (of the increasingly desperate situation) much wider coverage. During the spring of 1993, he stayed in Mogadishu, and in June one of his photographs made a double-page spread in Newsweek magazine, as well as the covers of newspapers worldwide. By this time he had also published a first book of his photographs, and had set up various businesses - selling t-shirts and postcards, for example - to raise money.

A few weeks later, on 12 July, he raced, with three colleagues, across the city to cover a raid to arrest the warlord General Aidid. Many innocent people were killed in that UN raid, and in the subsequent confusion Eldon and his colleagues, trying to take photographs, were stoned and beaten to death by an angry mob. Further biographical information is available from the Dan Eldon website, and from Wikipedia.

After Eldon’s death and to honour his legacy, his mother Kathy Eldon and sister Amy Eldon Turtletaub founded, in 1998, the Creative Visions Foundation (CVF) to help others like Dan ‘use media and the arts to create meaningful change in the world around them’. To date CVF ‘has incubated more than 100 projects and productions on 5 continents, by providing fiscal sponsorship, mentorship, inspiration, fundraising, connectivity, and step-by-step toolkits for launching projects’. It claims that creative activists under its umbrella ‘have touched more than 90 million people and raised more than $11.2 million to fund their projects’.

One of projects organised by the family has been to set up the website - Dan Eldon: artist, activist, adventurer - and another has been to promote Eldon’s extraordinary journals and notebooks. The website says this: ‘Dan left behind seventeen bound leather journals filled with drawings, writings and photographs which constructed vivid collages of the world he saw. These journals chronicle a child’s journey into manhood, visual editorials on society, and homages to strangers and loved ones. Dan’s images represent his enduring belief that every individual has a creative spark within that can transform their environment for the better. His journals are a celebration of adventure and a testament to live life to its fullest.’

The diaries were first published as The Journey is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon in 1997 by Chronicle Books in San Francisco and Booth-Clibborn Editions in London. The publisher’s blurb stated: ‘This is no ordinary diary; it is an astonishing collage of photographs, drawings, words, maps, clippings, paints, scraps, shards, and trash that reveals his strange and vivid life. The wild trips and weird places, the lovers and late nights, the danger and fun are captured in pages that seem to shiver with passion, opinion, and dark humor. Eldon’s journal holds up a pure mirror to both the sickness of the modern world and the fragile happiness of the human condition, and ultimately, reveals the accidental beauty that only a young artist can truly capture.’

A detailed introduction to the journals by Jennifer New can be found on the Eldon website, as can a generous collection of extracts and images from the diaries themselves. The earliest diaries do contain some text and diary writing, but most of the pages in all the journals are filled to bursting with collages rather than text - but here is one short extract from one of the earliest journals.

22 August 1982
‘I have decided that I am happier this year than any other. I am enjoying life and the people in our class. I have a lighter class load this year. Last year I took French and German and I have dropped German for a year. I also love Kenya (I always have but I still do). I like it less when the weather is bad. We have bought land at the coast where we will build a house which I am looking forward to.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 12 July 2013.

Thursday, October 13, 2022

We crossed the equator

‘At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand shoals. We crossed the Equator this afternoon.’ This is Mary Henrietta Kingsley, a Victorian traveller and explorer, born 160 years ago today. She became a respected expert on West African society and politics, and she authored two popular books based on her experiences - the first includes a few extracts from her diaries.

Kingsley was born in London on 13 October 1862, the daughter and oldest child of physician, traveller and writer George Kingsley, and niece of novelists Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley. The family moved to Highgate less than a year after her birth. She received little in the way of a formal education, though she did have access to her father’s large library, and she loved to listen to his travel stories. Later, once her brother Charley had been admitted to Christ’s College, Cambridge, she benefitted from his academic connections. When her parents fell infirm, it was Mary who was by their bedside, until their deaths in 1892. 

Thereafter, with a reasonable inheritance, Kingsley was able to travel herself, first to the Canary Islands, and then to explore West Africa (twice), where she often immersed herself among the native peoples. On one expedition, she travelled through the country of the Fang, a tribe with a reputation for cannibalism, having many harrowing adventures apparently. She also collected natural history samples - not least specimens of fish previously unknown to western science - for the British Museum. Through her experiences, she acquired a detailed knowledge of West African society and politics.

Back in England, Kingsley spent several years touring and giving lectures to a wide variety of audiences about life in Africa. She was the first woman to address the Liverpool and Manchester chambers of commerce; but she also ran into trouble with the church for criticising missionaries who were engaged, she felt, in corrupting local religious practices. Hugely sympathetic to the Africans’ ways of life, her views were often controversial. Wikipedia has this analysis: ‘[Her] beliefs about cultural and economic imperialism are complex and widely debated by scholars today. Though, on the one hand, she regarded African people and cultures as those who needed protection and preservation, she also believed in the necessity of British economic and technological influence and in indirect rule, insisting that there was some work in West Africa that had to be completed by white men.’

After the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Kingsley travelled to Cape Town where she volunteered as a nurse. However, she soon contracted typhoid, and she died in June 1900, not yet 40 years old. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, British Empire, or The Victorian Web

Kingsley kept detailed diaries on her travels, and later published two books based on those diaries. The first - Travels in West Africa: Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons published by Macmillan in 1897 - was an immediate best-seller, and added to her academic prestige. (This is freely available online at Internet Archive or Googlebooks). She followed it two years later with West African Studies (1899). 

The first of Kingsley’s two books includes some - rather few - extracts from her diaries, and even those fade into the main narrative, so it is not always clear where the diary extracts end. At the start of Chapter 4, she goes to some lengths to explain why she put any diary extracts in at all.

‘I MUST pause here to explain my reasons for giving extracts from my diary, being informed on excellent authority that publishing a diary is a form of literary crime. Such being the case I have to urge in extenuation of my committing it that -Firstly, I have not done it before, for so far I have given a sketchy résumé of many diaries kept by me while visiting the regions I have attempted to describe. Secondly, no one expects literature in a book of travel. Thirdly, there are things to be said in favour of the diary form, particularly when it is kept in a little known and wild region, for the reader gets therein notice of things that, although unimportant in themselves, yet go to make up the conditions of life under which men and things exist. The worst of it is these things are not often presented in their due and proper proportion in diaries. Many pages in my journals that I will spare you display this crime to perfection.’

And then she includes the first verbatim extract from her diary.

5 June 1895
‘Off on Mové at 9.30. Passengers, Mr. Hudson, Mr. Woods, Mr. Huyghens, Père Steinitz, and I. There are black deck-passengers galore; Ï do not know their honourable names, but they are evidently very much married men, for there is quite a gorgeously coloured little crowd of ladies to see them off. They salute me as I pass down the pier, and start inquiries. I say hastily to them: “Farewell, I’m off up river,” for I notice Mr. Fildes bearing down on me, and I don’t want him to drop in on the subject of society interest. I expect it is settled now, or pretty nearly. There is a considerable amount of mild uproar among the black contingent, and the Mové firmly clears off before half the good advice and good wishes for the black husbands are aboard. She is a fine little vessel; far finer than I expected. The accommodation I am getting is excellent. A long, narrow cabin, with one bunk in it and pretty nearly everything one can wish for, and a copying press thrown in. Food is excellent, society charming, captain and engineer quite acquisitions. The saloon is square and roomy for the size of the vessel, and most things, from row-locks to teapots, are kept under the seats in good nautical style. We call at the guard-ship to pass our papers, and then steam ahead out of the Gaboon estuary to the south, round Pongara Point, keeping close into the land. About forty feet from shore there is a good free channel for vessels with a light draught which if you do not take, you have to make a big sweep seaward to avoid a reef. Between four and five miles below Pongara, we pass Point Gombi, which is fitted with a lighthouse, a lively and conspicuous structure by day as well as night. It is perched on a knoll, close to the extremity of the long arm of low, sandy ground, and is painted black and white, in horizontal bands, which, in conjunction with its general figure, give it a pagoda-like appearance.

Alongside it are a white-painted, red-roofed house for the light-house keeper, and a store for its oil. The light is either a flashing or a revolving or a stationary one, when it is alight. One must be accurate about these things, and my knowledge regarding it is from information received, and amounts to the above. I cannot throw in any personal experience, because I have never passed it at night-time, and seen from Glass it seems just steady. Most lighthouses on this Coast give up fancy tricks, like flashing or revolving, pretty soon after they are established. Seventy-five percent, of them are not alight half the time at all. “It’s the climate.” Gombi, however, you may depend on for being alight at night, and I have no hesitation in saying you can see it, when it is visible, seventeen miles out to sea, and that the knoll on which the lighthouse stands is a grass-covered sand cliff, about forty or fifty feet above sea-level. As we pass round Gombi point, the weather becomes distinctly rough, particularly at lunch-time. The Mové minds it less than her passengers, and stamps steadily along past the wooded shore, behind which shows a distant range of blue hills. Silence falls upon the black passengers, who assume recumbent positions on the deck, and suffer. All the things from under the saloon seats come out and dance together, and play puss-in-the-corner, after the fashion of loose gear when there is any sea on.

As the night comes down, the scene becomes more and more picturesque. The moonlit sea, shimmering and breaking on the darkened shore, the black forest and the hills silhouetted against the star-powdered purple sky, and, at my feet, the engine-room stoke-hole, lit with the rose-coloured glow from its furnace, showing by the great wood fire the two nearly naked Krumen stokers, shining like polished bronze in their perspiration, as they throw in on to the fire the billets of redwood that look like freshly-cut chunks of flesh. The white engineer hovers round the mouth of the pit, shouting down directions and ever and anon plunging down the little iron ladder to carry them out himself. At intervals he stands on the rail with his head craned round the edge of the sun deck to listen to the captain, who is up on the little deck above, for there is no telegraph to the engines, and our gallant commanders voice is not strong. While the white engineer is roosting on the rail, the black engineer comes partially up the ladder and gazes hard at me; so I give him a wad of tobacco, and he plainly regards me as inspired, for of course that was what he wanted. Remember that whenever you see a man, black or white, filled with a nameless longing, it is tobacco he requires. Grim despair accompanied by a gusty temper indicates something wrong with his pipe, in which case offer him a straightened-out hairpin. The black engineer having got his tobacco, goes below to the stokehole again and smokes a short clay as black and as strong as himself. The captain affects an immense churchwarden. How he gets through life, waving it about as he does, without smashing it ever two minutes, I cannot make out.

At last we anchor for the night just inside Nazareth Bay, for Nazareth Bay wants daylight to deal with, being rich in low islands and sand shoals. We crossed the Equator this afternoon.’

Thursday, June 9, 2022

Marches without water

Poor William Grant Stairs. Aged but 28 he died of malaria 130 years ago today. Having been caught up in the feverish ‘Scramble for Africa’ at the behest of the ruthless King Léopold II, he became a cruel leader himself. On an expedition to win mineral rights in Katanga many of his men died, and many others deserted. A diary he kept of his exploits in Africa, not published in English until the late 1990s, gives a good feel for the moral corruption of those enacting imperialist ambitions, as well as the arduous conditions they suffered.

Stairs was born in 1863, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and educated in Edinburgh before attending the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. He spent three years working for the New Zealand Trigonometrical Survey. In 1885, he was commissioned in the British Royal Engineers, though soon after he joined the privately-funded Emin Pasha Relief Expedition led by Henry Morton Stanley which sailed from London in 1887. (See more on this extraordinary expedition in The Diary Review article Rescuing the Emin Pasha.) On his return, Stairs was named a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Subsequently, and on Stanley’s recommendation, Stairs was appointed by King Léopold II of Belgium, who privately ruled over the Congo Free State, to command a mission to claim Katanga, a mineral-rich territory, now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A rival expedition, led by the Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, was also after the minerals in Katanga.

Stairs set out from Zanzibar in June 1891, and ultimately achieved his goal in that Katanga became part of the Congo Free State. But, he was a cruel leader, often resorting to violence, and he lost many of the 400 men he started out with, either because they died from appalling conditions on the expedition or because they deserted. He himself was frequently sick, and while onboard a steamer on the lower Zambezi he died - on 9 June 1892 - from an attack of malaria. In 1908, the Congo Free State was annexed by the government of Belgium after the increasingly brutal mistreatment of local peoples and plunder of natural resources had become an international scandal.

Wikipedia has plenty of information on Stairs, his expedition, and the part they played in the ‘Scramble for Africa’. But more can be read in the introduction to African Exploits: The Diaries of William Stairs 1887-1892 by Roy D. MacLaren (sub-titled as ‘A personal account of imperial ambitions in Africa in the nineteenth century’). This was first published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 1998, and most of it is free to read at Googlebooks. At the time, Roy MacLaren was High Commissioner for Canada to the United Kingdom.

According to the publishers, ‘few diaries of the period convey better than Stairs’s the nature and course of imperialist expeditions in Africa in the nineteenth century and the psychological and moral corruption caused by absolute power’. Stairs’s diaries of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, it continues, ‘present a candid, personal account of the long and arduous venture, including a very unflattering assessment of Stanley, whom Stairs described as cruel, secretive, and selfish’.

African Exploits is divided into two main sections: Stairs’s diary of the Emin Pasha expedition, and the diary of the Katanga expedition. According to MacLaren, the latter is less spontaneous and less personal, because it was written as per the terms of his contract, as an expedition diary. It also suffers, he says, from having to be translated back from the French (the only extant version of the Katanga diary is in French in Léopold’s journal Le Congo Illustré) and along the way has lost ‘the lively Victorian idiom which Stairs habitually employed’.

Nevertheless, here are a few extracts from the Katanga diary in African Exploits.

27 August 1891
‘I have tried, during my leisure hours, to write some verse. I certainly have not achieved anything notable, but if I have been able to analyze faithfully the changing lights and shadows of the daily life of an African expedition, I shall have realized a long-held goal.’

28 August 1891
‘Tomorrow we must tirika: sleep in the bush without water . . . an eleven hour march almost twenty miles from here to the next water. A camp without water worries me, for on the following day, the men are good for nothing.’

29 August 1891
‘We have marched twenty kilometres in five hours and fifty minutes. We passed the place where poor [Thomas] Carter [a British army officer who had tried to introduce Indian elephants to Africa] was killed several years ago. . . Our camp is near the Lake Cheia which at the moment is simply a parched expanse without a drop of water. I sent natives on ahead to search for water. . . they report only empty wells, surrounded by decomposing buffaloes, giraffes, and antelopes, all dead from thirst. Extraordinary as it is for this region, there is also the corpse of an elephant upon whose putrid flesh the Africans feed.’

30 August 1891
‘Marched from 5:15 am until 10:15 am, when we arrived at Itura with my caravan dying of thirst and exhaustion. In the wells there was no more than a small ribbon of water. An Arab whose caravan preceded ours assured the natives along that route that we rob the natives. The result is that only with the greatest difficulty have I been able to buy any food. And to think how kind and courteous I have been to the Arabs.’

31 August 1891
‘Six and a half hours of march to cover fifteen miles. We camp amidst the brush, tired beyond description and without water. Tomorrow we shall reach water after a two and a half hour march, but the following day there is a wasteland of fifteen miles to Rubuga. [. . .]

As we approach Tabora I fear increasingly the desertions of more of my men. These long marches without water terrify them and I sense that they would prefer to desert than to continue in such conditions. . . The hardships and the weariness cause me such endless cares. . . that I have become as thin as a rail and my cheekbones stand out in my face.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 9 June 2012.

Tuesday, September 1, 2020

For a few cattle

One hundred and twenty years ago today, a young Tasmanian soldier, John Hutton Bisdee, serving in the Boer War, risked his life to carry an officer out of danger, and thus became the first Tasmanian to be awarded a Victoria Cross. His diaries, along with other Bisdee family papers, are held at the Archives Office of Tasmania, and contain a vivid account of the day he became a hero.

John Hutton Bisdee was born in 1869 at Hutton Park, Melton Mowbray, Tasmania. He was schooled in Hobart, and then worked on his father’s property until 1900, when he enlisted in the 1st Tasmanian Imperial Bushmen’s Contingent to serve in the South African War.

Soon after arriving in the Transvaal, Bisdee was one of an advanced scouting party ambushed. Six out of the party of eight were hit, and the horse of one of the wounded officers broke away and bolted. Still under fire, and in an exposed position, Bisdee dismounted, lifted the wounded officer onto his own horse so as to carry him out of danger. This action led to him being the first Tasmanian awarded the Victoria Cross.

Subsequently, Bisdee had a lung infection and was invalided home; but after recovering he returned to the war in March 1901, this time with a commission as a lieutenant in the 2nd Tasmanian Imperial Bushmen’s Contingent and served until the end of the war. He later served as a Lieutenant Colonel in the First World War, during which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and was Mentioned in Despatches. He died in early 1930. There is a little more information available at Wikipedia, and Archives of Tasmania

A significant collection of papers once belonging to the Bisdee family - John Hutton Bisdee’s grandfather first sailed to the Antipodes in 1820 - are now held by the Archives Office of Tasmania. These include a journal written by the grandfather during his voyage, and three diaries written by Bisdee between 1898 and 1901, mostly during the Boer War. Bisdee’s diary is quoted extensively in Tasmanians in the Transvaal War by John Bufton (1905), freely available at Internet Archive (and the source of the following extracts).

1 September 1900
‘Warned last night that we should be called at 2 a.m. to repeat the day before’s movement, but this was countermanded during the night. I expect Boers were lying in ambush for us. Twenty of us sent on patrol in the afternoon under Captain Brooke and Lieutenant Wylly to secure some cattle. Had a terrible experience, which I shall never forget. We were led through a narrow neck into a veritable death trap. I cannot understand how the officers did not realise the danger. This neck led into a sort of basin with steep rocky hills rising in front. They opened fire on our five advance guardmen at short range, and then upon all of us, and how we got away at all is most wonderful. As it was we had four wounded, Wylly slightly, and Sergeant G. Shaw and Willoughby and Corporal Brown rather worse, and J. S. Brown very seriously, and the guide also severely wounded. The two latter fell into the hands of the Boers, and we fear they are in a critical state. The others are being attended to by the ambulance. The bullets came round us as thick as hail, and exploded with loud report as they struck. Captain Brooke was unhorsed. I gave him mine, running alongside myself, as he also received a slight wound in the leg. Corporal Brown’s horse was shot, and Wylly gave him his horse, as he was wounded badly in the foot. Groom then picked up Wylly on his horse, and we rode for our lives. Two men, Clark and Blackaby lost their horses (Clark gave his to Willoughby), but managed to evade the Boers, and arrived in camp late. Walter’s horse was shot, and he, stopping with J. S. Brown, was captured by the Boers, who let him go to report upon Brown’s case, and send an ambulance in. Altogether it has been a terrible experience, and seems so utterly foolhardy to go into such a place without scouts well out in front and good supports behind. All for the sake of a few cattle!

5 September 1900
‘Rest to-day. Prepared for Boers, but they kept in check and driven back by our friends, the guns.’

8 September 1900
‘Marched till 1 o’clock this morning, then had a rest for three hours, when we were sent off again patrolling after some Boers supposed to be in the vicinity. Some of our men came across two of them and gave them a hot time, but they got away, leaving bandoliers and meat bag. We stopped most of the afternoon at Saltpan, a large salt factory close by a salt lake, which lay in a deep basin. It looked like a lake frozen over. Started again at 5.30, and marched on to Waterval, which we reached at about midnight, very tired.’

This article is a slightly revised version of one first published on 1 September 2010.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Pen & Sword diaries

A newly published diary from Pen & Sword Books tells the story of Anthony Barne, a young soldier who started the Second World War as a captain in the Royal Dragoons and ended it as a confidant of Winston Churchill and a commanding officer of the 4th Hussars. According to the publisher, the diary is witty, outrageous but also poignant and philosophical. First World War diaries from Pen & Sword Books include Herbert Suzbach’s With the German Guns and Mabel Goode’s The Lengthening War.
Barne was born in 1906 at the family home, Sotterley Hall, one of four children. Aged 13, he had hoped to join the Navy but instead studied at Marlborough College before joining the army. He thrived at Sandhurst, excelling in horsemanship. On leaving, he joined the Royal Dragoons, a cavalry regiment, which departed for Egypt in 1927 then relocated to India for several years. There, at a polo match, he met Cara Holmes-Hunt who came from Melbourne and was spending a ‘season’ in India. The regiment was finally returning to England when, with the Italians mobilising in Africa, it was suddenly ordered to Egypt again. 
Barne, on leave, married Cara in England in 1937, and she joined him in Cairo, until moving to Rhodesia during the war years. Barne had an active war, being present at the battle of El Alamein, and eventually joining Churchill’s regiment, the 4th Hussars. During his two periods of command, the Royal Dragoons won two battle honours, and the 4th Hussars won eight. He was awarded the OBE. He remained in the army until 1953, stationed at various bases around England. His final posting was in Dorset, and this led him to buy a farm in the county at Culeaze, where he lived happily with Cara and their one son, Christopher. Barne died in 1996  
Charles Barne - Christopher’s son and Anthony Barne’s grandson - found his grandfathers diaries when clearing out their house. He transcribed and edited them for publication, in 2019, by Pen & Sword Books as Churchill’s Colonel: The War Diaries of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Barne. Some pages may be previewed at Amazon
From the publisher’s blurb: ‘He wrote an entry for every day of the war, often with great difficulty, sometimes when dog-tired or under fire, and sometimes when things looked black and desperate, but more often in sunshine and optimism, surrounded by good fellows who kept one cheerful and helped one through the sad and difficult times. His diary ends in July 1945, by which time he was commanding officer of the 4th Hussars, having recently visited Downing Street for lunch alone with the Churchills. The diaries have an enormous scope covering time in Palestine and Egypt before he joins the Eighth Army, describing the retreat back to El Alamein, the battle and its aftermath. He ends the campaign commanding his regiment. He often graphically details the physical realities of war: the appalling conditions in the desert, the bombardments of the regiment from the air, the deaths and serious injuries of fellow soldiers. In 1943, he flies down to Rhodesia to see his wife and infant son before returning to Cairo to join Churchill’s regiment, the 4th Hussars. Arriving in Italy in 1944, he recounts the campaign as the Allies push north. The tone of the diaries varies wildly: often witty, sometimes outrageous but also poignant and philosophical. The voice and attitudes are entertainingly dated, but are delivered with warmth, a charming turn of phrase and a keen eye for the absurd.’ Here are two extracts from Barne’s diary.
28 September 1944
‘It rained heavily again in the night giving Kesselring a chance to recover himself. It means our tanks will be bogged down where they stand for several days I fear. I may even find them where I left them when I escape from here.
Jack White appears in the afternoon. He has worms and feels it is a good chance to be cured. It is gratifying to know I’m missing nothing but this vile weather.
Perhaps jaundice is getting me down but I truly believe we are unlikely to get the war finished this autumn and if that is so then it may well drag into next summer. What a dreary prospect. I must review my plans for the future.
8 April 1945
‘A cold, windy morning. I talk to each squadron in turn during the course of the day regarding the forthcoming battle. Each talk takes over an hour and there’s half an hour of driving between three of them. One talk is in a schoolroom, one behind a haystack and others in farmyards out of the wind.
We also have to move RHQ and have two conferences. My bus moves up while I am out so the moment I come in I can sit straight down and get the paperwork dealt with. With no increased staff I am directly working with three divisions and my own tank strength is about that of a brigade. Thank goodness the office staff are most capable, helpful and friendly.’
***
Among its many other war titles, Pen & Sword Books offers several diaries. Mabel Goode was born in 1872 in Derby to a well-off family, the youngest of three. Her father was a doctor and a mayor of Derby. Her mother died when Mabel was but six months, and her father married Emma in 1874. When her father died in 1879, it was Emma that was left to bring up her step-children, which she did in a suburb of Heidleberg, Germany, The family returned to England in 1887 when Mabel’s elder brother Stuart wanted to join the army. They lived in Kensington, London. The family took on a new servant, Price, who would go on to serve Mabel for forty years (and be one of her closest relationships - since she never married). In 1895, Mabel entered The Slade School of Fine Art. In the mid-1900s, the family moved to York, where Mabel’s other brother, Henry, had bought a practice. After the war, Henry married, and Mabel bought two properties in the Lake District, one where she lived for the rest of her life (with Price), and the other for renting out to provide an income. She spent much time painting (selling her work), and travelled often to Italy in the winter. She died in 1954.
The Lengthening War: The Great War Diaries of Mabel Goode (2016) was compiled by Henry’s great grandson (having found the diary in the bottom of a ‘dusty trunk). Mabel’s actual diary takes up some 70 of the 200 pages, with other chapters providing much historical and biographical context as well as photographs. According to Pen & Sword: ‘The diary shows us how the war came to the Home Front, from enrolment, rationing, the collapse of domestic service and growth of war work, to Zeppelin attacks over Yorkshire, and the ever mounting casualty lists. Above all else, Mabel’s diary captures a growing disillusionment with a lengthening war, as the costs and the sacrifices mount. Starting with great excitement and expecting a short struggle, the entries gradually give way to a more critical tone, and eventually to total disengagement.’ In fact, although there are glimpses of her home life and the people around her, most of the entries, and the bulk of most entries, are reports of news about the war. The book can be previewed at Googlebooks. Here is one example.
6 June 1915
‘The news from the Eastern side of the theatre of war has been very bad this week. Przemysl has been recaptured by the Germans & Austrians & they are pressing on towards Lemberg. This setback of the brave Russians is entirely due to the superior artillery, especially big guns & great supplies of ammunition of the Germans. They fired 200,000 shells in 2 hours! The Russians admit that they will for the present be obliged to act on the defensive until England can supply them with munitions & it is feared that the Germans will move large numbers of their victorious troops from the East to the West & the great guns & try to break through the English & French lines, leaving only sufficient troops to hold the Russians in check. It seems most probable & a serious outlook for us, as our supply of high explosive shells is admittedly insufficient. I fear it will very much prolong the war & cause terrible loss of valuable lives, all alas! our best. Conscription has not been brought in even now, & all the slackers & shirkers are allowed to stay at home. Lloyd George says they have sufficient men at present for the equipment which is ready for them. He has been speaking in Manchester to rouse up masters & men to do their best possible work in making shells & munitions.
Stuart is still at Dovercourt.
I heard from Henry last on Wednesday.’
***
Finally, Pen & Sword Books has also re-issued With the German Guns: Four years on the western front by Herbert Sulzbach. ‘At once harrowing and light-hearted,’ the publisher says, ‘Sulzbach’s exceptional diary has been highly praised since its original publication in Germany in 1935. With the reprint of this classic account of trench warfare it records the pride and exhilaration of what to him was the fight for a just cause. It is one of the very few available records of an ordinary German soldier during the First World War.’ The edition contains a short memoir of Sulzbach by Terence Prittie, and a note from the translator (Richard Thonger), but no index nor annotations. The book can be previewed at Googlebooks. Here are two extracts
29 December 1914 
‘I am given orders to ride to St Morel with Lance-Sergeant Debler. I take Lance-Sergeant Lauer’s horse and we ride off on the two little Arabs, across fields to Granddeuil. Nothing but mud. Lance-Sergeant Debler had business with the Captain, while I waited outside. We made our way back as night was falling, and it was very hard indeed to find one’s way.
In the evening I was on guard duty.
We receive our first mail in this position - that is, we have to fetch it ourselves from the rear by limber, which is a dreadfully difficult operation, with the vehicle and horses practically sunk in the mud. After these few days we really look like pigs. The fire gets heavier, it’s developing into an artillery battle, what they call a ‘gunners’ duel’.’
21 January 1915
‘I receive another special order, pick one of the little Arab horses and ride to the Battery. It’s 6 a.m., still pitch dark, and you can only just find your way about. From the Battery I get an order to proceed to the Battalion Staff, lying this side of some high ground only 100 metres behind the front trenches. Since this high ground lies in front of the enemy trenches, I can ride towards the front without being seen by the French; but a hellish burst of fire starts up, and small-arms and artillery fire compete with each other in making things hot for me. I’m as hoarse as a crow and can’t speak a word. I get my orders and ride back to the Battery, which is now commanded by Captain Henn, while 2/Lt Reinhardt is what you might call his right-hand man, and acts as a liaison officer with the infantry.’
With thanks to Pen & Sword Books.

Monday, June 15, 2020

From bomber to writer

‘Another four years to say “less than thirty years old”. Will I be forgiven for being “old” without having yet published ten novels and four essays?’ This is from the diary of a young Jules Roy, friend of Albert Camus (both he and Camus were Algerian born) and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Although he took up a military career, and flew bombers for the Allies in World War Two, he did, in fact, go on to become a prolific writer, putting into print many strident political opinions on France’s colonial activities, though he also wrote some novels and plays. In the last years of his life - he died ten years ago today - his publisher brought out three volumes of journals, none, alas, available in English.

Roy was born in Rovigo, Algeria (then a French colony), in 1907, of an adulterous relationship between Mathilde Roy, the wife of a policeman, and Henri Dematons, a school-teacher. Although, his mother later married Dematons, he kept the surname Roy. He was brought up on his maternal grandparents’ farm, and educated at Roman Catholic schools. Having considered a career in the priesthood (he remained religious throughout his life), he chose instead a military career, joining the French infantry and later its air force. He married Mirande Grimal and they had two children. In 1940, he answered Charles de Gaulle’s call to resist the Nazis and joined a flying squadron based in England, taking part in some 30 bombing missions over Germany. Soon after the war’s end he published La vallée heureuse in which he recalled, critically, his war experiences. The French authorities objected to the book, but, nevertheless, it won the Renaudot Prize. Two years later, he published another controversial volume, Le métier des armes. In 1953, he resigned from the army, at the rank of colonel, in protest at the government’s policies in Indochina.

Subsequently, in Paris, Roy made his living as a writer of political/social books, as well as novels, essays, plays, pamphlets, film and television scripts. He was a life long friend of both Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and an ongoing supporter of Algeria’s independence movement - few of his books have been translated into English, but The War in Algeria is one. He divorced Grimal, and, in 1965, married Tatiana Soukoroukoff. They moved to Vezelay in 1978, where he lived near the town’s Romanesque basilica of Sainte-Madeleine and became a mystical devotee of Mary Magdalene. His friend François Mitterrand raised him to the rank of Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor in 1990. He died on 15 June 2000. A little further biographical information can be gleaned from Wikipedia, or obituaries in The Guardian and New York Times.

Roy’s last books were three volumes of journals published by Albin Michel in 1997-1998: Journal 1, Les années déchirement, 1925-1965; Journal 2, Les années cavalières, 1966-1985; Journal 3, Les années de braise, 1986-1996. All three can be previewed at Googlebooks, alas not in English. The following extracts, from the first volume, have been crudely translated using Googletranslate.

5 October 1932
‘Another four years to say “less than thirty years old”. Will I be forgiven for being “old” without having yet published ten novels and four essays? October. To tell the truth, is it not there that we must seek the key to my sadness with causes which are rather obscure and too frequent? I change my mood twenty times a day, like the sky. Fromentin makes Dominique say: “There is in the minds of some men I do not know what an elegiac mist always ready to spread in rain on their ideas. Too bad for those who were born in the mists of October!” ’

7 October 1932
‘Every evening, late, in the closed night, the planes hum and spin. Their position lights go away, like two shooting stars, red and green, and the lighthouse, then, moves away and gets lost. I am thinking of Vol de nuit de Saint-Éxupéry. I think of Captain André Faucilhon who said to me: “It’s very funny. We start straight on the bisector of the isosceles triangle formed on the ground by the lighthouses, and we go for it.”

Installation troubles. Boring. And the money goes, melts. I wonder if we will get there. And you should have central heating installed in this house without a fireplace. This winter, in harsh weather, we will freeze.’

11 October 1932
‘Versailles, the old city of dead voluptuousness. Golden silence on autumn mornings. Grass grows between the paving stones of the sidewalks. Rue Royale, a neighborhood in a small province, enough to make Huysmans roar, Place Saint-Louis, Rue de la Sainte-Famille, towards the bishopric and the seminary. A tram leaves with difficulty, the crowd on the left bank, the town hall with flower beds, the avenues of glory that lead to the castle. Purity of lines, quickly familiar designs, nobility of horizons! Perhaps these terrible Corinthian pediments ... But one of them does not hide the royal chapel, too worked for prayer, and the other the theater which Valéry would like it to be a French Bayreuth?

The coast, towards Satory, towards the still green woods where the hairy chestnuts will burst.’

15 October 1932 , note found.
‘B. said to me the other evening: “See your story. When you find a solid work there, you will find that it was done without any great principle being at its base. France? Philippe le Bel said to himself: ‘Excommunicated? I’m not going to the crusade? Good deal! Take advantage of the absence of our enemies, our rivals, our friends!’ What about Napoleon? Did little Corsica have all these extraordinary projects in mind? Ambition, yes.”

28 October 1932
‘Doyon will not yet have the Goncourt Prize which will go to the big novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit. Doyon has no bitterness. At least apparently. He tells me that the author of this book will even deserve the prize.’

8 November 1932
‘Best day. Tonight Jean Louis is getting better. In Paris this morning. True Paris sky, with its light mist, its pale sun, and the glory of the old black walls of palaces, idealized by the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle.

Doyon is full of praise for my short story, Retour du front, whose manuscript I had passed to him. He just says it’s a bit special and the story, in fact, is thin. Obviously. There is nothing - just a railroad adventure. Sent the news to the N.R.F.’

8 December 1932
‘Prix Goncourt to Mazeline, a work of the last hour. Céline had three votes when he had to win. I don’t care. Doyon doesn’t even have the voice of Rosny Jeune.’

***

The Polish writer, Leopold Tyrmand (see Cramming preserves into a jar
mentions Roy in his  Diary 1954 (Northwestern University Press, 2014).

19 March 1954
‘I’ve read Jules Roy’s book La Bataille dans les rizières. Roy, a former pilot, a friend of Saint-Exupéry, a right-wing liberal, was sent by Le Figaro to Indochina and Korea to see the wars going on there firsthand. He returned under the impression that the French expeditionary corps in Vietnam were heirs to the crusading knights, children of Godefroy de Bouillon. A beautiful message, but he doesn’t explain why the crusaders, even the French, fought like lions in the Holy Land, whereas their descendants seem most eager to wage war in the Saigon whorehouses. Roy perceives the communist threat and menace correctly, and even writes beautifully about Seoul bombed by the Chinese: “I was crushed by the impression that the Seoul nights would never end, that they foreshadow a great darkness that one evening will fall for good on the world, as if over a cemetery of all hopes ...” But he doesn’t say what the French want and are doing in this regard, how they are confronting, mobilizing, immunizing themselves against the plague, which, after all, is already eating them from the inside. Instead, he himself is already infected with the loathsome French chutzpah, which the French are still selling as spiritual mettle or dash, but behind which stands neither action nor wisdom. Roy writes about the Americans in Korea that they are unfeeling, naive, dull-witted. Yet somehow the Americans won their war, despite their dimness, while the winged superiority of French virtue collapsed utterly.’

Saturday, May 2, 2020

Crushing the slave traffic

‘We met a Brazillian named Jose dos Cento, who came to Whydah a poor man, but has become rich, from his own direct energies, and perseverance, he ships a great quantity of Palm oil, as well as a little in the Slave Trade when a fair opportunity offers, on that point he does not speculate much, I am glad to be encouraged to state that the legitimate [trade] is beginning to Bud, competition has become so great that it has so far enhanced the value of Palm Oil from 2 dollars for a measure of 19 Gallons to six dollars for the same, so it is too obvious, that could the abominable [i.e. slave] traffic be crushed legitimate trade would soon outstay the odium.’ This is from the diary of a John Beecroft, a Yorkshire-born sailor, explorer and colonial governor baptised 230 years ago today. He is remembered for the part he played in helping Britain combat the slave trade.

Beecroft was baptised on 2 May 1790 in Sleights near Whitby, North Yorkshire. Little is known about his early years, but from his teens he was employed at sea, on coastal vessels. In 1805, he was captured by a French privateer, during the Napoleonic Wars, and held prisoner until 1814. Subsequently, he joined the merchant navy and, as master of a transport vessel, traveled to Greenland with William Parry’s expedition searching for a Northwest Passage. The significant part of Beecroft’s career began in 1829 with his appointment as superintendent of works at Fernando Po, an island in the Gulf of Guinea nominally under Spanish control but where Britain was establishing a base for combating the slave trade. The following year, when the island’s governor returned to England on sick leave, Beecroft took over as acting governor, a post conferred on him by the Spanish government with the rank of lieutenant in the Spanish navy.

Britain gave up its settlement on Fernando Po in 1833, but Beecroft stayed on as a partner in a firm that controlled the shore establishments and trading, and despite his status as a simple private citizen, effectively he continued to govern the island, maintaining a court of justice, and generally overseeing the island’s affairs. In 1843, in fact, the Spanish formally made him governor of Fernando Po and two other Spanish islands. During this time, he systematically explored the interior of Africa using steam ships to navigate up the Niger and other river systems further than had been possible previously. The native Africans he employed as crew proved far more resilient to the endemic malaria which had claimed numerous European lives on previous expeditions. In 1849, he was also appointed consul, by the British, of the Bights of Benin and Biafra.

As consul, Beecroft assisted in the British bombardment of Lagos in 1851, negotiated (and was a signatory to) the Treaty Between Great Britain and Lagos, and was instrumental in the deposition of Pepple, King of Bonny, in 1854. He died that same year just as he was about to embark on another Niger expedition. According to Anthony Tibbles’ bio of Beecroft in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery, ‘his principle contribution to the abolition of the slave trade was in using his influence with African chiefs to cut off the supply of slaves to illegal slavers and to help provide the more stable conditions required by legitimate traders.’ Further information is also available from Wikipedia, Genealogy, and The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log-in required).

In 1850, Beecroft undertook a diplomatic mission to Dahomey (in present-day Benin) to visit its king, Gezo. The mission was part of a sustained effort by the British government to persuade Gezo to collaborate in the suppression of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Although the mission of 1850 was a failure, Beecroft’s account of it - his journal - is now considered an invaluable source for the history of Dahomey, especially for the information it provides on the role of the slave trade within the kingdom, as well as its response to British pressure for the trade’s abolition. The journal exists in a single manuscript version in Beecroft’s own handwriting. It was 
edited by Robin Law and published recently - in 2019 - as Consul John Beecroft’s Journal of his Mission to Dahomey, 1850 (Oxford University Press). According to the publisher, the book includes extensive editorial annotations and analysis.

Frederick E. Forbes, a naval lieutenant who accompanied Beecroft on the Dahomey mission, also kept a journal, but his was published in 1851 immediately after the mission’s conclusion. Dahomey and the Dahomans: being the Journals of Two Missions to the King of Dahomey and Residence at his Capital in the years 1849 and 1850 can be freely consulted at Internet Archive. Law suggests it is not clear why Beecroft’s journal was overlooked for so long, but suggests Beecroft’s manuscript was much longer and more difficult to decipher than Forbes', and that Beecroft himself expected to produce a revised/edited version which he never did. In any case, Law says publication of the Beecroft journal now serves to redress the imbalance.

Law has edited the Beecroft journal to be an ‘accurate transcription of the original text, with all its defects and idiosyncrasies’. Here are two extracts.

16 May 1850
‘I arose at 5 o’ clock. Ther 74°. washed and shaved in readiness to receive our friend the Vice-Roy as he promised to pay us a visit early, but we were disappointed, he had been carouseing all night, and required sleep when he ought to be have been on his legs, I am extremely sorry that Mr Hutton, has thought fit to take the greater part of the useful community belonging to English Town with him to Badagry, they have been absent about six weeks, it appears rather mysterious, I trust there is not any sinister motive to annoy, still I have a better opinion of Mr Hutton, but it is very annoying as we are in want of people to send the King’s Presents on to Abomey. There are only a few Hammock bearers here, Noon all the Presents were removed from the Fort to Caboceers, he having received orders from his Majesty to leave Whydah for the Customs at Abomey on the 20th inst[ant] this afternoon we waited on Monsieur Casse and Blanchely at the French Fort, and were very kindly received, showed us through the whole Factory, it is well adapted for trading purposes, with large Vats for storing palm oil, they will have a great quantity left after dispatching the Barque Bon Pere she will be completed in a day or two having 300 Tons.

we had previously applied to Mr Hutton for a supply of cowries for the mission, they not having any we were necessitated to purchase from Monsieur Casse at 21 dollars per cwt [= hundredweight] a high price I ordered two casks, and thirty pieces of different sorts of cloth, for use at Abomey We returned at 4 o’clock to the English Fort. We met a Brazillian named Jose dos Cento, who came to Whydah a poor man, but has become rich, from his own direct energies, and perseverance, he ships a great quantity of Palm oil, as well as a little in the Slave Trade when a fair opportunity offers, on that point he does not speculate much, I am glad to be encouraged to state that the legitimate [trade] is beginning to Bud, competition has become so great that it has so far enhanced the value of Palm Oil from 2 dollars for a measure of 19 Gallons to six dollars for the same, so it is too obvious, that could the abominable [i.e. slave] traffic be crushed legitimate trade would soon outstay the odium.

Whydah has many drawbacks, the distance it has to be rolled to the Beach shipment, at a risk these are obstacles not to be easily surmounted, but it only requires the energies & mind of the purchasers to obviate, in a great measure, a moiety of these difficulties and commence a new plan, if the other [trade] was finished the Path would be made perceptible.

Received from the French Fort 1014 lbs of cowries and the 30 pieces of cloth ordered.

After dinner I took a walk accompanied by Capt Forbes and Mr Roberts, round the Fort, on our way we came upon the Fetish peoples performances their superstitious fooleries and rogueries, we were detained a short time, as they belonged to English Town, looking at their distortions, and gesticulations, going round the circle, Keeping time to their rude music of country Drums, and Horns, there were a great number of lookers on with us en passant, at last an aged Lady and three or four more of Grey haired venerables, Old Gents heads of the Fetish, came up and paid their respects to us, we were then in a measure obliged according to the Custom of the Country to acknowledge the same and give them a small present of rum, particularly being Englishmen and strangers, for which they overwhelmed us with thanks and e[n]comiums, shortly after Capt Forbes and myself left and prolonged our walk a short distance into the country, the Path we had chosen appeared a very impoverished soil, Iron stone, and mica, saw several gigantic Bombax Trees, taken possession of by the Fetish and walled in, the country as far as the eye can discern is level, with a Park like appearance, we returned at sunset, on our arrival at the Fort found a messenger from Badagry with letters from Mr Hutton stating that he had remained at Porto Novo, on his way here, the messenger was one of their own people, he of course accosted accosted Mr Roberts in a very friendly manner, it did not seem pleasing to Mr Hastie. Capt Forbes and myself left and retired to our own domicile and talked over other matters more serious connected with our mission we retired to rest at 9 o’clock this day ends with a very find wr. Reported that a very small schooner of 35 Tons [was] taken by Phoenix belonging to a Black man named José liveing at Aghwey.’

26 June 1850
‘daylight dull cloudy wr Ther 75° Forbes took his walk as usual, returned at 7 o’clock took a light Breakfast of Tea and eggs. 10 o’clock the Mayo-gau made his appearance, to report progress it was as I had expected that the King wished us to remain to see the Fetish Custom, and the small Schooner dressed out with Flags and some other fooleries, that would take fifteen days, I told him it would be three weeks for they Procrastinate too much you are never sure of their word, as soon as that was communicated we sent down for 50 dollars more cowries, Noon fresh westerly Breezes Mayo told us the Fetish people were going to amuse themselves with their ribaldry if [we] wished to see them we were at liberty, I told him that I had seen them and got them in my Book. Then at 2 o’clock 78° dined and took a walk to the Gate, where the Fetish women were performing an old Caboceer very polite introduced us to two of the Kings Brothers, and gave us each a Country stool to sit on, sent small decanters of rum, Gin &c &c and a Pot of water and Peto, or country Beer, we tasted of each with them, they were all women performers, a few of the King's wives, and one of his daughters were present, sent for a Keg of rum and presented to the old Caboceer, it was placed in front. The two Kings sons and two Caboceers presented it in due form with a long speech, they returned us many thanks Bah-dah-huu Kings Brother was particularly complimentary. and said it pleased him too much to see Englishmen at Abomey, friends with his brother the King. They sung Praises trusting God would take care of us, and Protect us from harm, they said that they would be glad to see us tomorrow as they were going to sacrifice a Bullock, they then retired and we returned home, we received a few necessaries from Whydah from Mr Hastie they arrived at a very convenient season for we were nearly dry, it is truly Kind and thoughtful of him, he states that he has been confined 8 days, retired to rest at 9 o’clock. the Fetish performers were all aged.’

Monday, February 10, 2020

The mud of Dakar Bay

Alex Comfort, a scientist and the famed author of the sex manual The Joy of Sex, was born a century ago today. In fact, he wrote many books, scientific and political, as well as fiction and poetry; but his very first published work was a diary kept during a six week voyage, with his father, to Senegal and Argentina.

Alexander Comfort was an only child born in London 10 February 1920. He was home educated to begin with and then at Highgate School. Aged around 15, he lost four fingers of his left hand while trying to manufacture fireworks in his garden. He studied medicine at Trinity College, Cambridge, qualifying in 1944. By then, he had married Ruth Harris (with whom he would have one son), and he had already written several works of fiction and poetry. He went to work for London Hospital and later became a lecturer in physiology at the hospital’s medical college. He earned further qualifications at University College (a PhD in 1950 and a DSc in 1963).

Comfort was a conscientious objector during World War II, and he became an active member of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He wrote many a political pamphlet for Peace News and PPU, and exchanged public letters with George Orwell defending pacifism. In 1961, he was imprisoned for a month, with Bertrand Russell and other leading members of the Committee of 100, for refusing to be bound over not to continue organising protests.

During the 1950 and 1960s, Comfort focused his science work on studying the biology of ageing, and popularised the subject by publishing several books. In the early 1970s, he was highly successful in popularising another subject: The Joy of Sex (1972) brought him international fame, as well as wealth. He divorced his wife soon after it came out, and took up with Jane Henderson, his long-term mistress. The much-admired illustrations in The Joy of Sex were based on photographs taken by the two of them. That same year, they relocated to California, US, where they then married.

Comfort joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an unconventional think tank, but he also took up academic appointments at Stanford University (1974-1983), the University of California at Irvine (1976-1978), and at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in Los Angeles (1980-1991). He also worked at Brentwood Veterans’ Hospital in Los Angeles (1978-1981) as a geriatric psychiatrist, and as a consultant at Ventura County Hospital, California (1981-1891). In California, Alex and Jane became involved with a swingers community, the Sandstone Retreat. 


By the mid-1980s, Comfort and his second wife had returned to live mostly in England, though Comfort maintained his professional connections with the US. Jane died in the early 1990s, while Alex suffered several strokes, leaving him wheelchair bound. He died in 2000. Further details are available from Wikipedia, Libcom, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, or from a chapter on Comfort in Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow by David Goodway (see Googlebooks).

There is no evidence that Comfort was a diarist by nature, but the very first book he published, aged 18, was a journal of a six week voyage he took with his father by ship through the South Atlantic, stopping in Senegal and Argentina.  The Silver River - Being the Diary of a Schoolboy in the South Atlantic, 1936, was published by Chapman & Hall in 1938. Although there are dated entries in the narrative, much of the time they read more like a memoir than a bona fide diary. However, the diary does demonstrate Comfort’s precocious literary ability - he was only 16 at the time of writing it. Here are several extracts.

30 September 1936
‘To-day, the 30th of September, I sacrificed any reputation for sanity which I may have had among my Greek hosts by collecting at some pains all the mud brought up by the anchor and passing it through a fine wire sieve into a tin can. The mud of Dakar Bay is crammed with shells: descriptions of those to be found there were published by the indefatigable naturalist, Adanson, in 1757, and later by a specializing conchologist, Dautzenberg. It is not my place to bore the reader with a catalogue of empty whelk shells, but for such as are interested I have placed at the end of the book a short list of my collection, which adds a few names to Dautzenberg’s careful catalogue. It is perhaps worth a page to put this list on record.

The skipper had filled the larder. He purchased the entire supply of fish existing in Dakar, to the extent of one hundred and forty kilos, and during the coaling all hands sat among the black dust gutting the fish and littering the deck with their intestines, while the cook fried the remains in batter and preserved them in herbs, vinegar and salt. On the first day they were excellent. On the second day they were hard. On the third day they could usefully have been used for building. On subsequent days - and we had fish every day till we passed Ushant - they were unspeakable. I have no idea where the cook can have stowed his fish. They seemed endless, and we who had to eat them were glad of the other additions to our larder which had come on board. There were hibiscus pods - one of the most tasty vegetables I know: there were also the more truly Greek melisdanas or egg-plant (Solanum melongena) which are wholly unlike the French aubergine variety. They are oval, purple fruit, which the Greeks boil, fry in slices, and otherwise maltreat until they produce a mass of orange pulp, brown hides and pertinaceous pips, tasting of unripe tomato and smelling strongly of nightshade, datura, and the other noxious members of the same family. I will stick to the edible hibiscus pod. It surpasses all known greens save spinach. But I have only to hear the name melisdana to smell pickles and hear the water outside and Niko grumbling in the alley-way.’

3 October 1936
‘At six o’clock on the morning of October the 3rd we passed between Tenerife and Gran Canaria We had entered the South Atlantic by the back door and we came out by the front. The skipper had been nervous of the passage: the civil war in Spain had been in progress for some months, and a battle had been fought at the Canary Islands the previous week. But we had no cause to be apprehensive. To our right lay the irregular shape of Gran Canaria, grey and mist-capped, but beginning to assume a gradual oriole of gold as the sun rose behind it. To port was Tenerife, its peak shrouded in a curtain of cloud, and its scoriaceous slopes sinking into a nebulous transparency of scented foliage. Between the two was the strait, blue and rippling, with islands and towers of mist which passed and repassed on its surface. Nobody ever fought a battle here; we were the discoverers of an archipelago. I sat in pyjamas on the fore-hatch, wondering what group of islands our shiploads of tourists had mistaken for the Hesperides. A long finger of sunlight passed suddenly over the peaks of Gran Canaria, above our masts, and fell upon the curtain of mist. The vapour eddied, divided, and lifted as if it had been rung up. Under it lay the perfect cone of Tenerife, its summit of rose-tinted sugar, its sides falling in ridges and hummocks to grey and olive. The first ray of light a lifted the heavens off Atlas’s shoulders, and there he stood, crested and supreme, while the fiery red orange of the [s]un rose and silhouetted in its disc the cairn surmounting a jagged peak on the farther island. Then the glow faded, and the curtain fell once more. A long column of smoke rose from the far corner of Tenerife, where Santa Cruz lies in its bay.’

9 October 1936
‘In the afternoon of October the 9th we passed Ushant. The weather abated, and the waters began to depart from the face of the earth. With their going a silence settled upon the ship - broken only by the dismal “thump . . . swish . . . drip” as a wave came over - and remained undispelled even by the sight of the cook shaving bull’s trotters for the night’s soup with a safety razor. The last carcase swung idly on the bridge, which was now clear of most of its vegetables. There had been a day in the voyage, before we passed Finisterre, when the midday peace of the ship was shattered by a most terrible racket on the lower bridge. A hoarse shouting and a persistent swishing noise were blended with a wild yelling, and the observer, peering cautiously round the end of the captain’s quarters, could see the little man, a malacca cane fully a metre long in his hand, dashing about in pursuit of one of the little dogs, walloping wildly at everything within reach, and hitting chairs, table, sides of beef, and himself, but never under any circumstances his victim. Madame and the daughter stood wringing their hands and trying to arrest their lord and master’s progress as he thundered about, demolishing lifebelts and cucumbers, while the dog, more frightened than hurt, yelled as if the whole crew was cutting its throat.’

Thursday, January 16, 2020

The Mountains of Jagga

‘This morning we discerned the Mountains of Jagga more distinctly than ever; and about ten o'clock I fancied I saw a dazzlingly white cloud.’ This passage from the diary of the German missionary Johannes Rebmann - born two centuries ago today - describes the first moment any European set their eyes on the mountain that would become known as Kilimanjaro. The white cloud was, of course, snow, but when reports of a snow-capped mountain so close to the equator reached Europe, they were not believed.

Rebmann was born on 16 January 1820 to a farmer and winegrower in Gerlingen, Württemberg, southern Germany. From an early age, it is said, he aspired to be a preacher. Indeed, he trained as a missionary first in Basel, and then, from 1844, at the Church Missionary Society College, London. The following year he was ordained as a priest by the Bishop of London. In 1846, he travelled to East Africa, Mombassa, in the area which is now Kenya, where he joined a veteran missionary Johann Krapf, who had recently lost his wife and daughter to malaria.

Rebmann and Krapf together were able to set up some of the first mission posts in the region. In 1848, Rebmann was the first European to see Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the following year Krapf first sighted Mt. Kenya. At first the existence of these mountains was not believed in Europe, but it was Rebmann’s accounts and sketches that eventually stimulated more systematic scientific exploration of the area, including expeditions looking for the sources of the Nile. Rebmann and Krapf also visited other areas of Africa, including the Great Lakes and Mt. Meru. Rebmann married another missionary, Emma - they worked together for 15 years until her death in 1867. Rebmann learned to speak several native languages; he completed a dictionary of the Nika language, and he compiled the first ever Chichewa language dictionary.

Having almost lost his eyesight, Rebmann returned to Germany in 1875, the first time in nearly 30 years. He lived in Korntal near Stuttgart, where he was close to his old friend Krapf. In 1876, he married the widow of another missionary, from India, Louise Däuble, but Rebmann died within a few months. Further information is available from Wikipedia, the Johannes-Rebmann Foundation (a religious society devoted to Rebmann and his memory), or Climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

According to the above biographical information, Rebmann kept a diary from 1848 for the rest of his life. One extract is widely quoted, not least by Wikipedia, which concerns the first sighting of, what is now known as, Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa.

10 November 1848
‘This morning we discerned the Mountains of Jagga more distinctly than ever; and about ten o'clock I fancied I saw a dazzlingly white cloud. My Guide called the white which I saw merely ‘Baridi,’ cold; it was perfectly clear to me, however, that it could be nothing else but snow.’

The full text of the Rebmann’s 1848-1849 diary - in German - is available on the Johannes-Rebmann Foundation website. The same website also offers a (rather crude) English translation of a longer passage from the diary concerning the first sighting of Dschagga/Jagga. (Curiously, and I have no explanation for this, the passage starts with the date 11 May.)

‘May. 11. At daybrake we left. When we had walked for about half an hour, we saw right from us 2 people who ran away when they saw us. Bana Cheri wanted to shoot with the shotgun. But the Teitas, who thought that the refugees were compatriots, refused him to do that and ran after them, but they couldn’t catch up with them. Northeastern we saw a mountain, about 2 day trips away, that’s called Ongotia and that should belong already to Ukamba land. After another half an hour we arrived in a desert where again more gras grew and where it therefor was harder to walk, particulary as we had not one small foot path. The normal way goes along Daffeta [e.d.: nowadays Taveta, a market place in Kenya at the border to Tanzania], where my guide didn’t want to go because he was in quarrels with the king of that country. This morning we saw the mountains of Dschagga clearer and clearer, until I thought at about 10 am that I see on on the top of one of them a noticeable white clowd. My guide confirmed me first in my opinion - if he wanted to hide the truth from me or if in fact in that moment a white cloud floated around the mountain, I didn’t know. When we had walked a bit more, I noticed again the white and I asked my guide again, if that there really could be a white clowd. While he answered, this would be a clowd, but he wouldn’t know what the white is - he assumed it would be cold - I got obvious and sure that it can’t be anything else than snow, for which the people have no name, because it never falls in this region. All the strange stories about an inaccessible, from bad ghosts inhabited mountain with gold and silver in the inner, that I had heard often with Dr. Krapf at the cost since I had arrived, were now suddenly clear.

Of course, that the unusual cold forced the half naked visitors of the snow mountain to go back, or when they had to continue by order of the despotically Dschagga king until their body wasn’t totally got numb, them really killed, what then out of ignorance was put the blame on the bad ghosts. I tried to explain the circumstances to my people, but they seemed not really want to believe me. When we rested, I read psalm 111 in the english Bible, to which I came in the ordering. The psalm made double the impression on me, at the sight of the wonderful snow mountain so close to the equator, especially verse 6, that particularly and clear said that, what I only faint suspected and felt.

In N.W. we saw again another large mountain from Ukamba land, that was named Kikumbulu.

At noontime some of my people saw again some rhinos. My short face [e.d. bad eyesight] caused huge fuss, because, to see them, I continued walking, while my people let me stand still. Because of my words that I first wanted to see the animals, they shouted more that I should go back. They seemed to be very worried about me, that nothing bad will happen to me.’

A translation into English of the whole diary document by Google Translate can be found here. A further document available on the Foundation’s website is a transcript (in German) of a diary kept by Rebmann’s wife, Emma - see a here for a translation into English by Google Translate. Elsewhere, the introduction to a biography of Rebmann by Steven Paas contains more information about Rebmann’s diary (tagebuch), not least the fact that some parts of the diary have been lost.

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Things will not go well for Ghana

Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, was born 110 years ago today. He led the British colony of Gold Coast to independence and oversaw his nation’s transformation into a republic. But as president, he became overly autocratic and was eventually deposed in a coup in 1966. A diary he kept in the last decade of his life found its way to the United States where it became the subject of a legal battle between its owner and a Ghanaian patriot. Although the diary was returned to Ghana in 2012 amid a flurry of publicity, there seems to be no information online about what it happened to it then, and I can only find one small tidbit concerning its contents: he wrote, ‘Things will not go well for Ghana’, and ‘[my] vision’ for the country will now be ‘lost’.

Nkrumah was born on 21 September 1909 and raised in a rural village in the British colony, Gold Coast. He was schooled at a local Catholic mission, and then at a government training college in Accra. He took up teaching at a primary school, but was then made head of a school at Axim, where he began to become involved in politics. He had heard the Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe speak, and it was him that advised Nkrumah to enrol at Lincoln College, a historically black college in the US, where he himself had studied. Starting in 1935, Nkrumah spent ten years in the US, first at Lincoln, then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Masters of Philosophy and a Masters of Education. At first he supported himself with menial jobs, but he also began to lecture and preach at Presbyterian churches. He was an activist student, organising a group of expatriate African students in Pennsylvania and building it into the African Students Association of America and Canada, becoming its president.

Nkrumah moved to London in 1945, with the intention of studying for a doctorate, but failed to stay more than a term or so at LSE or University College. Instead, he became very involved in organising the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester (October 1945). In 1947, he returned home to take up a position as general secretary of the new United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) which aimed for self-government. Following extensive riots in 1948, he and other UGCC leaders were briefly arrested. A year later, he split from the UGCC to form the Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP) which was committed to achieving immediate self-government. He initiated a campaign for nonviolent protests, strikes and non-cooperation with the British colonial authorities, but this led to him being arrested and imprisoned for a year. In 1951, though, after being elected to parliament, he was released, and he then became prime minister of Gold Coast in 1952. It would be five more years before full independence was realised and Gold Coast became the self-governed nation of Ghana. Nkrumah was hailed as the Osagyefo - meaning ‘redeemer’ in the Akan language. That same year, in 1957, he married Fathia Rizk, 
an Egyptian Coptic, and they had four children.

While Nkrumah set about building roads, school and health facilities, his style of leadership proved increasingly authoritarian. In 1960 he won a plebiscite for Ghana to become a republic. Nkrumah became president. However, mounting economic troubles and foreign debt (and other troubles) began to threaten his presidency. He was forced to abandon the country’s Second Development Plan; the economy contracted, and widespread unrest culminated in a general strike. An attempt on Nkrumah’s life in 1962, led to his increasing seclusion from public life, as well as to a massive buildup of the country’s internal security forces. While Nkrumah focused on the ideological struggle for black peoples, the crisis in Ghana itself worsened, until, in 1966, while he was visiting China, the army and the police seized power. On returning to Africa, he found asylum in Guinea, where he spent the remainder of his life, writing books, among other things, such as Dark Days in Ghana and Class Struggle in Africa. He died, while in Romania, in 1972. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, South African History Online, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In the last years of his life, from the mid-1960s onward, Nkrumah kept a diary. It was with him when he died, but then, somehow, it seems to have found its way to the US. Some 30 years after his death, the diary became the subject of a legal battle. An article to be found online at GhanaWeb describes the story of the diary as reading like ‘a whodunnit bestseller’. For 20 years, the diary was in the possession of an American, a financial consultant called Robert Shulman, but then it was tracked down by Vincent Mbirika, a Kenyan scholar and expatriate who lived in New York, and who wanted the diary returned to Ghana. A law suit followed, and in April 2012 the court agreed that the diary rightly belonged to Ghana and to the Nkrumah family (see New African Magazine, GhanaWeb or Denise Valentine’s blog.)

I have not been able to track down any online trace of the diary since 2012, nor any extracts from it. However, this GhanaWeb article (dated two weeks earlier than the one above) does give some information about the diary, as follows:

‘The diary entries start from the mid-1960s, when the Osagyefo was president, and run to the late 1960s when he had been deposed and was living in exile in Guinea as a guest of President Sekou Toure.

One entry, from 1966, the year Nkrumah was ousted by the military, mentions the purchase of military equipment from the Soviet Union. In another entry, from 1968, when Nkrumah was living in Guinea, the former president instructs his wife, Fathia, to “take care” of their children - Gamal Gorkeh, Sekou, and Samia (who is now an MP in Ghana and chairperson of the Convention People's Party founded by her father).

Possibly the most compelling entry in the diary (which is about the size of a small paperback and has a bookmark with the colours of Ghana’s flag stuffed in its pages), is one where Nkrumah, who had been Ghana’s head of state since independence from Britain in 1957, reflects on the abrupt end of his presidency. It makes clear that Nkrumah was worried about Ghana and Africa’s future. He wrote: “Things will not go well for Ghana” and said his “vision” for Ghana would now be “lost”.’