Blinkered idiots
Mimi and Toutou go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
Giles Foden
2005, Penguin Books
256 pages
Reviewed by Tony Simoes da Silva
“What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to…” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1902)
Once upon a time, in dangerous and very far away lands, the British Empire set up countless little worlds in which everyone would live like an Englishman, walk like an Englishman and, hopefully, think like an Englishman. Such skills could be, and frequently were taught, though just as often they would be forcefully imposed; but they could also be impressed upon the natives by example. As the Empire had long been deemed a most worthy enterprise, at its core that ineffable and delicate idea, there was never a shortage of committed individuals willing to go out there and sacrifice it all for the sake of teaching the local multitudes its true meaning. And since passion and commitment were in such a setting far more important than skill, the empire soon became crowded with amateurs and dilettanti in search of adventure, attracting also its fair deal of heroes, stoic men and women who went out there out of sheer devotion to ‘the idea’. Sometimes it helped if in the process they could provide for their sunset days; stiff upper lip and all that, one does need to eat. In all fairness, some were in fact glad of the opportunity to do some good on earth - though it is hard to see why such individuals should have spent so much of their lives in places they saw as the wretched end of the world.
In his latest book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tankanyka Giles Foden shows that often it was out of a desire ‘to cover themselves in glory’, though that is hardly news to anyone, I suspect. Hubris masquerading as love of King and Country was a common reason for the presence in Africa, in India and elsewhere of people who, left in the motherland would soon have had to be incarcerated, both for their own good and the safety of others. The secret was in the telling of the tale afterwards, as Jawaharlal Nehru usefully pointed out. Foden’s history, which reads like a novel, epitomises the kind of story the Empire encouraged, now brought up to date to meet the needs of readers in the 21st century. Perhaps not surprisingly given the magnitude of its narrative, it is through these accounts of the little people who played its great game that the story of the Empire is best told, endowing the patina of grandeur with the emotional cache of intimate tales of human effort and despair. That horror - which the ‘idea’ alone was thought capable of taming - becomes at once more familiar and terrifying when endowed with a human face, preferably one just like one’s own. That way the daunting achievements of the British Empire become all the more admirable and easier to digest. Faced with such contradictory muses - colonialism, slavery, the concentration camps in South Africa, the massacres in 1950s Kenya and the brutality of Lord Kitchener, it should not surprise that British writers find themselves drawn to the deeds of single chaps and chapesses who, valiantly and selfishly, shouldered the mission civilisatrice.
| 'Foden conforms to a very British way of dealing with the legacy of Empire either by ignoring it altogether or by preferring to deal with quaint little tableaux vivants that distract from more serious analysis of its function in the political make-up of contemporary Africa' |
Giles Foden is not alone in his peculiarly naïve focus on the idiosyncratic ways of the Empire, of course; rather, in this as in earlier books he conforms to a very British way of dealing with the legacy of Empire either by ignoring it altogether or by preferring to deal with quaint little tableaux vivants that distract from more serious analysis of its function in the political make-up of contemporary Africa. In a review essay in the London Review of Books of 20 March 2005 of two recent works concerned with the British colonial response to the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and its treatment in British historical texts since then, historian Bernard Porter makes some provocative comments on this phenomenon.1 Porter is himself is in good comapny, as the work of Paul Gilroy, Linda Colley and Eric Hobsbawm, among others shows so well, but in the world of fiction it remains largely the domain of those whom history contrived to ‘make self interested’ - Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, Benjamin Zephaniah, for instance. Not long ago, during a recent interview dealing with his novel, The Good Doctor (2003), South African novelist Damon Galgut (2004) also commented disparagingly on the parochial concerns of so much British writing with the novel of biography, and its repeated claim that it is best equipped to deal with the little vignettes of British life (which one, one wonders?), rather than with the bigger picture. The lack of an answer suggests to him that this so-called lack of themes is simply one way of avoiding the haunting presence of the colonial past, though he opts out of the argument2.
Indeed, speaking again specifically about the place of the British Empire in the contemporary British political mind, German novelist Günter Grass has been equally critical of what he perceives as the refusal by most well known British writers to deal with its less pleasant or less humorous side. As he put it, “I sometimes wonder how young people grow up in Britain and know little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. In England it’s a completely taboo subject.”3 It is in this sense that Foden’s penchant for the bizarre aspects of the British colonial project seem to confirm, at least in part, Grass’ view. Despite the humour that mocks the seriousness of stories such as those of Spicer-Simson and his ilk, it is difficult not to read this type of narrative as a celebration of the resilience of the empire. To put it differently, stories such as Spicer-Simson, or indeed the account of the whole expedition, tell us little that is new about the pathologically insane temperaments of the Kurtzes and the Spicer-Simsons; so much for the journey into the heart of Africa, or its lungs, even. It is the idea that we are left to admire, its resilience in the face of such obvious ungratefulness and undeserving behaviour. Sadly, irony is not Foden’s most obvious narrative strength, even if Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika can be scathing about the claims for superiority of British or European civilisation.
True to type, then, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika is yet another narrative about not altogether likeable people; so much so that it is hard to fathom why we should care about them. This time he tells the story of one of those stiff upper lip chaps whose innate belief in that fundamental idea took him to early 20th century German East Africa, leading a mixed bunch of mercenaries and professional soldiers with instructions to destroy Germany’s small navy contingent on Lake Tanganyika. Ironically, while the tale itself celebrates the story and achievements of Spicer-Simson, albeit with the requisite trepidation suitable in the postcolonial moment, it seems unsure about whether it has a story to tell or not. For one thing, Foden seems completely in awe of his main subject. Despite all the complex background of real-politik, Foden is especially fascinated with Spicer-Simson, devoting him all the attention of a besotted fan. Moreover, although on occasion the writing is infused with the kind of edge of the seat energy that is typical of some of his work, here much of the it consists of tedious descriptions of the eventful attempts to get Mimi and Toutou to the Congo, and then across to Lake Tanganyika.
In a sense the ‘bizarre’ in the book's title reflects thus merely Foden’s cultivated fascination with the flotsam that the Empire threw up all over the place. That the lives of the local peoples mattered little or nothing hardly needs stating, though a bit of repetition will not go amiss in the context of Foden’s return to much visited spaces. In the tradition of boy’s own stories that he seems to have as a kind of underlay to much of his writing, the fate of the locals serves essentially as props to the much more riveting tale of the adventures of the Motherland’s charismatic crusaders, at least to his audience. This obsession with Africa, both a physical place and an invented one, is only one of the many overt echoes of his debt to Joseph Conrad’s imagining of Africa. Like Conrad’s, Foden’s work too has a strong link either to real people or to contemporary events, often drawing overtly on the non-fictional to produce stories that offer terrifyingly real insights into the world round us.
Even the more straightforward Zanzibar (2002), a reasonably uncomplicated story of the plots by al-Qaeda to blow up the US embassies in Dar-es-Salam and Nairobi in 1998 and global terrorism themes, at times invites comparisons with the kind of narratives the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe attacked in a famous essay on Conrad’s brilliant novella, Heart of Darkness. Although I think that he overdoes his criticism, Achebe’s point about Conrad’s work was that even the occasional glance into the horror that was the European colonial enterprise did little to diminish the enjoyment Europeans felt was to be had from being out there, unselfishly civilising the natives. When at one stage one of the Englishmen in Mimi and Toutou Go Forth is heard saying that “I’ve felt all along that the hand of God is over this expedition”, one feels it is safe to suggest the work be placed in the Great Deeds of British Imperialism section of the curriculum.
That the words of fellow British novelist William Boyd should be used on the back cover to endorse Foden’s work is also not surprising either; Boyd has himself written of the period Foden covers in this book, though exploring the Anglo-Teutonic enmity in the broader context of the conflict that raged between 1914 and 1918 in East Africa. Perhaps because it is clearly a work of fiction, however, An Ice-Cream War (1982) succeeds in recreating the political, psychological and human conditions that framed the conflict to an extent that Mimi and Toutou Go Forth cannot do. Foden is at his best with statistics, measurements, ‘thick description’ of place and people, but less so at getting into the mind of his characters; imagination, when he seeks to engage it, comes across in a rather slapstick manner. There is little human interest in the narrative, and although much is made of Spicer-Simson’s propensity to wear skirts, the hair colour or skin tone of some of his acolytes he remains throughout Foden’s creation, rather than ever coming across as his own man. Spicer, as he is known for much of the book, is a mad and arrogant brute, but we know this usually because the ‘narrator’ tells us so. It is not until the very end, for instance, that we discover that the sudden turn for the worse in Spicer’s erratic behaviour may be linked to the death of his brother in war-torn France. Might it be a little unethical for the author, not the narrator after all, to hold back such vital information for so long, allowing Spicer’s actions to appear those of a demented and cowardly figure when they might be easily ascribed to the trauma of personal loss?
In a work of fiction such questions might not arise in the same way, but then this is not strictly a work of fiction. As the blurb for Mimi and Toutou Go Forth states, “Unearthing new German and African records, the prize-winning author of The Last King of Scotland retells this most unlikely of true-life tales with his customary narrative energy and style.” Towards the end, and again after Conrad, Foden himself physically enters the narrative, getting on a boat sailing downriver in contemporary postcolonial Africa. As a frequent traveller on the continent, he is familiar with the high degree of risk faced by (White) people in such inhospitable places. At this stage the story becomes almost farcical in its recycling of the phantasmagoria of the European’s perception of Africa. The most banal noises outside his cabin will send Foden into paroxysms of terror; then, in a classic illustration of how hard it is for the White man to erase ‘monstrous Africa’ from his unconscious Foden reacts as countless other White people before him have done. He is wildly suspicious of everyone and everything, only to discover that the ‘bandits’ about to extirpate him are mere ambulant food sellers struggling to make ends meet by ploughing the waters of crocodile infested rivers. Oooh, but isn’t Africa a wicked place for the White man?
Let me conclude by paraphrasing, and wildly (well, it is Africa we’re talking about, after all) traducing words and sentiments invoked to a very different purpose by that well-known British writer, Jane Austen. Foden’s latest work, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika struck me as best surmised in terms of ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ - as further proof that only the British can write of defeat and despair as if these experiences precluded the need to consider issues of history and responsibility. It is a peculiar fascination that merits attention for the way in which it allows for the ongoing romanticisation of the British presence in Africa, in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Occasionally it might evoke the odd ‘Oh, dearie, dearie me, how ever did we muck it so?’ Rather than an answer to that question, though, which might elicit unpleasant truths about oneself, it is the tale of the screw ups that continues to attract the attention of writers, TV documentary and film makers - not in themselves either, but for the opportunity they create for the British bumbling idiot to rise above himself and emerge bumblingly glorious, an inspirational example to the hordes around the world, not least those across the Channel. As Bernard Porter might have put it, how do they get away with it?
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Footnotes
1. “How did they get away with it?”, Bernard Porter. The London Review of Books, Vol. 27 (5), 3 March 2005, pp. 3-6. Book review of David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (Weidenfeld, 2005) and Caroline Elkins’ Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Cape, 2005).
2. “My impression of a lot of English writers is that, yes, you are consigned to writing about adultery in Camden because the big themes are elsewhere. When apartheid ended, I think South African writers found themselves in the same vacuum. What most thinking people wanted had been achieved and now we have the freedom to write about things like love, for example, which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed. 'But the books that are regarded as important in South Africa are still those dealing with the big political issues. Whether that's overvalued by English writers because they don't have a similar moral complexity to write about, I don't have the background to answer.” (“Move over, Coetzee”, Stephanie Merrit, The Observer, September 28th 2003, http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2003/story/0,,1051063,00.html).
3. “Shaper of a nation’s consciousness”, Jonathan Steele in conversation with Günter Grass, March 8th 2003. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,909605,00.html
Tony Simoes da Silva is a lecturer of English at James Cook University in Australia.
