Chapter 4.
White versus Black: A Study of Racism in Imperial Fiction.
The complex relationship between the nationalities of the east and the west is sometimes reflected, in imaginative literature, as a myth in which the black person sees the white man as a threat, or even worse, as a figure of gigantic fearsomeness. Conversely, in romance fiction particularly, the white person is seen to experience the sense of danger and threat allegedly evoked by the black man, 1. which is distinguished by a fear of cannibalism. In the imperial adventure story, the white man can undergo the terrible ordeals of witnessing torture and execution until he succumbs, and the fear of being eaten alive is always a fictional possibility.
On the other hand, however, in the corpus of Haggard, Henty, Buchan and similar writers, the imperialist character more often than not finds himself in Africa in the midst of a crisis which his superior wisdom, civilisation and technical knowledge has no difficulty in solving. The Haggard or Henry hero in some foreign milieu, encounters a situation such as a revolution where battles are being fought, statesmen are being toppled, old regimes swept aside, and new reforming ones being put in their place. Then he enters the situation, defies the odds against him, and turns them in his favour. ln much of this literature there is a presupposition that by virtue of their adventurous spirit and their indefatigable pride the explorers are able to discountenance African people. However, it is very difficult to see how characters in the masculine novel of action could defeat African people as easily as their authors allowed.
In novels such as Alan Quatermain and King Solomon's Mines, there is an idea that with just a conjuring trick Europeans were able to achieve superiority over African people, by virtue of the possession of gunpowder and the use of positive attitudes in human psychological relationships. With a pair of false teeth and an eyeglass, with Captain Good engaging in some superior marksmanship, they are able to tum an eclipse of the sun to their advantage by convincing the African people that they could ‘put out the sun’.
Alan Quatermain claims to have mystical powers and employs magical realism in his confrontation with the potentially hostile Kukuanas. Quatermain tells Twala that he and his companions come from the stars, and that their rifles - which are said by the tribesmen to be ‘magic tubes which speak’ - as well as Captain Good’s eyeglass, false teeth and white legs, are all magical. Sir Henry Curtis does cut a ridiculous figure, it is to be admitted, without his trousers in a long shirt and with unkempt hair - but to believe that he could, thereby, terrify and subordinate other human beings defies all logic.
What Haggard appears to be attempting to say here is that, because Sir Henry Curtis was wearing a shirt, and because he was, after all, an English gentleman, with a collar and tie, he had a badge of moral authority (despite his untidy, unshaven and barelegged appearance) as a heroic leader of men and as someone to whom as a gentleman automatic deference was due as Haggard, too, a member of the landed squirearchy in Norfolk expected deference from his own lessers.
This duplicitous behaviour continues as the characters make use of the eclipse as a ‘sign’ of their magical powers to win the confidence of Umbopa and some local chiefs. Ignosi, the alias under which he is also known, remains ignorant of the methods used in the deception and seems to accept it as part of the Eng lishmen’s ‘magic’. "Had ye not been Englishmen, I would not have believed it," he exclaims. In this way the heroic nature of the English explorers is revealed, and the automatic superiority of the British over the foreigner is underscored. The handsome, supernaturally strong Englishman abounds in the Haggard canon and is a reminder to the reader of his reflected glory. 2.
With only a thin veneer of cultural relativity to mask it, Haggard’s contempt for Africans, and his fundamental sense of superiority is shown in a preface to a story of white deception of the Zulus which clearly shadows his own antipathy to the leaders of the Zulu nation:
''All the horrors perpetrated by the Zulu tyrants cannot be published in the age of melanite and torpedoes.'' 3.
Examples of racism abound in literature set in the period. In E M Forster’s rites of passage novel 'A Passage to India', 4. Mrs Alice Quested’s rejection of, and supposed sexual abuse by Dr Aziz, and his subsequent remission from guilt by her own inability to make a sworn statement in court, (and the English community in India’s continued belief, despite the exoneration by the court, in Alice’s rather than Dr Aziz’s innocence), could be seen as nothing less than class and race hatred spawned by a century or more of misunderstanding, hatred and mutual intolerance.
Writing in a notebook 5. over the years from 1892, the author Somerset Maugham described in many sketches different aspects of the environment in which he had lived; the India and the far East of his day. He was particularly mindful of the colonial life in Singapore and spoke of the hotel there, Rafiles, which was a magnet for expatriates, with great nostalgia. Talking of a white-haired general whom he termed "the Empire Maker", he ascribed to him racist characteristics:
"‘The only thing that makes India possible is the shootin’. I’ve had a lot of Shikaris who were first-rate sportsmen, keen as mustard, I mean, except for their colour pukka white men. I'm not exaggeratin’, you know. It’s a fact."’
To suggest that there is a link between the popular novels of adventure, and racialism and, moreover, imperialism, is perhaps tenuous, but there can be little doubt that, firstly, racialism and, secondly, the discovery of the British identity in foreign parts are two of the abiding themes of the literature. Martin Green’s thesis in 'Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire' 6. was that the stories of popular literature were one of the vehicles for creating an "energizing myth" which propagated enthusiasm for empire, and for action: they were the dreams that the Englishman went to bed with at night. But Green also showed how it was the function of literary "second-raters" rather than of what Hugh Ridley, who has looked specifically at the images of imperial rule, 7. defines as the serious Realist novelists of the nineteenth century, to propagandise and extol the virtues of expansionism.
The ‘noisy assent to European imperialism’ - the phrase is Ridley’s - which writers including Haggard and Henty gave was also accompanied by a strain of antipathy which was most marked in its racial virulence and by the inconsistent racial pattem seen in its stereotypes of African people as endowed with physically attractive features, but seemingly mindless, soulless and amoral.
Whilst agreeing with this thesis we will attempt to clarify it, to show how the joumey to Africa to study the black man in many cases were joumeys to the centre of Britain, and in many respects journeys to the centre of the white man. Self knowledge through a study of the Other 8. would be attained more easily and more readily by an intensive and self reflexive study also made through the medium of the romance novel of quest and adventure. There was often less chance of real meaningful contact with the indigenous members of the black population and, as we will attempt to assert, there occurred no actual discovery, nor any real change of heart or mind.
The prolific Victorian writer, George Alfred Henty, is an example of the race consciousness and conflict over culture which, because of the pulp fiction, was becoming endemic in the white man in the nineteenth century. His febrile, weakly-characterised stories reinforced archetypal images of class, race, and colour which are difficult to eradicate. Black people of many kinds featured in his works and the author stereotypes the African, and even the aboriginal inhabitant of New Zealand, the Maori, with the degrading word "nigger". In his novel Maori and Settler, the suggestion is made, long before the main characters reach New Zealand, that the very human activity, laughter, is somehow an indication of a lack of intelligence:
"The negroes amuse me most," Marion said. "They seem to be always laughing. I never saw such merry people." "They are like children," her father said. "The slightest thing causes them amusement. It is one of the signs of a low intellect." 9.
The stereotypes of people of colour as lazy, childlike, without capabilities, and, even more, the feeling of contempt for them are obvious in this novel. The aboriginal people are portrayed as less than human and no details of their physiognomy are given, nor of their clothes nor their speech; they seem child-like and even robot-like, and infinitely inferior to the imperial characters. Henty could be apportioned a fair share of the responsibility of propounding the kind of views which have done such damage to British relations with African, Asian or Oceanic peoples in the past.
What is more reprehensible is that in a school history text- book, which surely formed the minds of the young in their attitudes to other peoples in that very late Victorian period, Henty categorised the native peoples of Australia and New Zealand as, "thinly scattered bodies of savages". 10.
Henty’s boys’ story, 'Capt BayIey's Heir' is loosely about some schoolboys - who, like Henty, attended Westminster school, 11. and some duplicity between two cousins. Frank is wrongfully accused of theft by his cousin who had planted money on him and advised him to emigrate, which he does - to the United States.
The story is set in Califomia, in the goldfields, where Frank Norris, the hero, has gone with some friends, Peter, the scout, Harold, his servant, Jake, and others. He takes work on a river-boat, travels across America by wagon, and then sets to at panning for gold in the gold rushes.
The heir referred to in the title is, in fact, Harry, the nephew of Captain Bayley who is the sole heir to the title, which ex plains the chicanery over the inheritance. He, it transpires, is the crippled son of a working-class family, which demonstrates an unusual stooping for Henty.
Frank travels steerage on a ship to America and joins a river - going barge on the Mississippi and from then onwards the conversation is all dominated by the derogatory word "niggers". The river barge is nearly capsized in a terrible wind and gale when a tree falls on their craft trapping them in their cabin. With typical resourcefulness they hack their way out of trouble, then they turn their attention to the plight of the black workers:
"Do you hear them niggers holloaing like so many tom-cats? What good do they suppose that will do?" 12.
Finding it difficult to proceed, and with Frank and Hiram, the barge manager loading themselves up with provisions, not, as one might expect for the relief of the trapped workers, but for themselves, they then crawl out through the hole they have made in the side of the barge:
"Hand me the axe, sharp, Hiram," he said, "the niggers can't get out, and our bow isn’t a foot out of water." 13.
Cutting through the branches of the tree and rippling the planks away from the superstructure of the boat, they succeed in freeing the frighted workers. They address them in no uncenain terms, reaffirming stereotypes of white-black relationships:
"Shut your mouths and drop that howling," Hiram said, "and grip hold of the tree; the boat will sink under our feet in another minute. Stick to your lantern, lad..." 14.
They stop for refreshment, and they kindly offer a drink of rum to help revive the workers, but not without making reductive comments about the colour of their faces, and their lack of sang froid:
"Now here is a good strong tot for each of you to make your faces black again; you were white with fear when you got out of that cabin, and I don’t blame you; I should have been in just as bad a fright myself if I had been there, though I shouldn’t have made such a noise over it." 15.
Then, when they have succeeded in completing the rescue of the barge workers, Hiram explains to Frank the intricacies of the supposed difference of race:
"Still, one can’t expect men of one colour to have the same ways as those of another, and I am bound to say that if the boat had gone down your boss would have lost four good pieces of property." 16.
In a discussion which follows the perilous event, the portrayal of the religion of the Afro-Americans is revealing of white people’s attitudes both to the place of religion in their own lives as well as in the minds of the black men:
"...and when our time comes, I fancy as there ain’t many of us is afeared of death, or feels very bad about the account they say we have got to render afterwards. It's different with the niggers; it‘s their way to be singing hymns and having prayer-meetings, and such like. There is some as is agin this, and says it gives ’em notions and sets them again their masters; but I don’t see it; it pleases ‘em and hurts no one; its just the difference of ways..." 17.
Racism seems here to be a matter of religion also, because it is not of any account if the black men have a spiritual life - it is just "their way". It cannot have any impact on the white people, even though some, it would appear, would regard it as having threatening economic and political overtones. Racialism is surely in any culture an ugly factor and the unnatural nature of such a religious philosophy is to be faced ultimately with a coherent and united opposition.
Henty’s works, then, appear to be a canon of reductive attitudes where the unusual orientation of black people, workers in this case, as Other has given a special kind of difference to them, not only on the grounds of their religion and colour but of their economic and class position in a society.
To emphasise how the same fears and dangers apply even in contemporary literature as they were applicable in the period under discussion, and to give just one example of the fear the black man has for the white person, the prize-winning Nigerian novelist, Ben Okri, has encapsulated the sense of dread which a white man can evoke in a black person in the imaginative, poetically evinced novel 'The Famished Road' which recounts how a group of politicians came to their village distributing food, which turned out to be a source of poisoning. Fear of retribution was the cause of their silence about it, and it was only through the activities of the author, and his father, that the truth of the politician’s cynical manoeuvrings was brought to light. In describing his fear as a young black child worker of being eaten by the white employer, Ben Okri has recounted how:
"We laughed and he suspected us of some prank and he gave money to some of the workers and pointed at us and they came in our direction, abandoning the cables for a moment, and we scattered and ran, for we were convinced that if we were caught and taken back to the white man he would eat us up." 18.
Conversely, the white man, such as Haggard’s hero, can undergo the terrible ordeal of witnessing a group of Ignosi tribesmen ‘hotpotting’ one of his party, that is their placing an earthenware jar full of scalding water on the man’s head until he succumbs. 19.
Joseph Conrad, too, in the period under discussion, puzzles over how, when travelling up rlver in a steamboatful of Africans who have "been growing increasingly hungry for at least this month past", cannibalism was a real possibility:
"Why in of all the gnawing devils of hunger they didn’t go for us - they were thirty to five - and have a good tuck-in for once amazes me now when I think of it." 20.
In John Buchan’s adventure story Prester John, David Crawfurd, the son of the manse in the tiny Scots village of Kirkcaple, and his two friends, Archie Leslie and Tam Dyke, miss church to go on an adventure to the seashore. There they encounter the Reverend John Laputa who again features in the story when David goes to Africa in pursuit of a legendary treasure, the ruby collar which belonged to Prester John, "the great orthodox Emperor of Africa", who had it from the Queen of Sheba.
Mr Henriques is a captain of industry, and Laputa becomes a man of God - a Christian minister - as well as being the apparition of an African King, having inherited the mantle of Prester John, represented by a totem - the same necklace of rubies, which he wears in an encounter with David Crawfurd in a cave. Laputa falls to his death over a mighty chasm, with the jewels entwined around his neck, to be lost forever.
Nevertheless, David Crawfurd retums home to Scotland with a horde of diamonds, but not before meeting up again with Tam Dyke, his boyhood friend from the days of the Kirkcaple shore.
It would appear that John Buchan had a special attitude to people of colour, whereby they did not rate the same consideration in matters of religion, war, employment, economics and social class. At the outset in Prester John we find Reverend John Laputa, who shares the same Christian name with the author as well as with the legendary king, performing rituals which place him far beyond the pale for David Crawfurd, the son of a Presbyterian minister, and his erstwhile friends. Albeit that the boys, whose adventures make up the early part of the story, find Reverend Laputa walking around a fire with measured steps, and raising both hands to the sky, this act of meditation, intuilion, salutation and prayer is taken immediately by the boys for Satanic worship: "It’s magic," said Archie, "he’s going to raise Satan." 21.
It is not until much later in the work that Reverend John Laputa is revealed to be a man of God. Does this plot sequence have deep resonances in the Calvinist Scots mind as seen over recent allegations of Satanic rituals in the Orkney Islands involving boys, Reverend gentlemen and social workers? Is it a Scotsman’s idea of colonialising‘? And is it another story of dual personality and the ‘doppelganger’? An examination of the author’s own patriarchal background as a son of the Kirk, the dutiful Scottish son of a Presbyterian father who desires fictional immortality as an African chieftain, might be instructive. Also a scholarly study of the years of destructive tensions between the Calvinistic and the humanistic in Scottish reformed religion would be informative. This may lead to an investigation of the position of the official Church of Scotland, as incorporated within the Union, and of Buchan’s meteoric rise through the social strata of Scottish society, with the conesponding changes in his attitudes which were formed by prejudices conceived in youth, but reinforced by his marriage to Lady Tweedsmuir into the aristocracy. Is it possible also to read John Laputa as a fictive image of the author himself; these expressions of personal philosophy giving scope for the idea that the imaginative text is taken to hold reflections of fantasy, which Stephen Prickett has described as, "ultimately the most philosophic form of fiction, giving scope to man’s deepest dreams and most potent ideas"? 22. Answers to all of these questions should be looked at in the light of the discussions of his texts which follow.
When David Crawfurd travels to Africa by sea there is a shipboard service in which the voyagers are addressed by a black man, resulting in racial intolerance and with a subtlety shown to the gradations in the matter of pigmentation:
"Some of us were hurt in our pride in being made the target of a black man’s oratory, especially Mr Henriques whose skin spoke of the tar-brush, protested with oaths against the insult. Finally he sat down on a coil of rope and spat scornfully in the vicinity of the preacher." 23.
In the case of racial characteristics, Buchan, in a description which is fuller and more fleshed out than most, and in which his tastes and prejudices are clearly shown, paints John Laputa in vindictive terms:
"The man’s face was as commanding as his figure, and his voice was the most wonderful thing that ever came out of human mouth. It was full and rich, and gentle, with the tones of a great organ. He had none of the squat and preposterous negro lineaments, but a hawk nose like an Arab, dark flashing eyes and a cruel and resolute mouth. He was as black as my hat, but for the rest he might have sat for a figure of a Crusader." 24.
In the war with the Zulus, of which a few glimpses are seen in the novel, the black man is a supematural or demonical being, causing fear to the white man. Even the act of moving among these peoples is the cause for some great concern for the white person because:
"the sensation of moving through them was like walking on a black dark night with precipices all around. I felt odd quiverings between my shoulder blades where a spear might be expected to lodge." 25.
The juxtaposition of fear and tremulousness is a common homophobic and xenophobic feature of the racialism within the system in the adventure novels of quest in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
A black person was incapable in Buchan’s text of attaining the sympathy and fellow feeling of a white person such as David Crawfurd, even when given to fundamental human matters of speech and of the senses:
"Their skins are insensitive to pain, and I have seen a Zulu stand on a piece of red hot iron till he was warned by the smell of buming hide. Anyhow, after I had been bound by Kaffir handsand tossed on Kaffir shoulders, I felt as if I had been in a scrimmage of mad bulls."
"I found myself looking up at the moon. It was at the edge of the bush, and all around me was the stir of the army getting ready for the road. You know how a native babbles and chatters over any work he has to do. It says much for Laputa’s iron hand that now everything was done in silence." 26.
In the case of employment the white man is referred to as "Baas" and the African is termed by the degrading term "boy" suggesting a black man is incapable of maturation and development into his full potential as an adult human being.
Meeting John Laputa on the road, David Crawfurd is asked by him to provide food and shelter for the night. David Crawfurd does not reveal himself as the youth on the Kirkcaple shore and pretends not to know him. David explains that there are insufficient provisions for him. John is naturally disappointed:
"That is bad news. l had hoped for food and drink yonder. I have travelled far, and in the chill nights I desire a cover for my head. Will the Baas allow me to sleep the night in an outhouse?" 27.
It appears to be a very modest request and the author has him make it in the must abject manner, reflecting expectations of the lowest order between employee and employer, and between black man and white man.
The author is sometimes notable for reductive attitudes which lower the indigene to a caricature image of the particular kind of person referred to as a "native" in the Buchan corpus as a result, possibly, of the late Victorians’ attitudes to race, although Christine Bolt has shown how "there are signs that some Victorians could distinguish one African tribe from another, and ad- mire some aspects of African culture" 28. These incidents illustrate, we believe, the left-over attitudes from slavery and are, some would claim, historical extensions of racialism, liberation and integration, and continuing economic subjugation of Africans, Afro-Americans, Native-Americans and Asians. 29.
Alan Sandison, Haggard’s biographer, 30. found his character, Allan Quatermain, to be conscious of an affinity with "those subject races which metropolitan attitudes so decried". He quoted from The Witch’: Head in support of his argument:
"Scratch the polish and there you have best raw Zulu nature. Indeed to anybody who has taken the trouble to study the question it is simply absurd to observe how powerless high civilisation has been to do more than veneer that raw material, which remains identical in each case." 31.
However, this does not appear to be a question of being "in affinity with subject races", rather it appears to be the antithesis of that position, and it is difficult to reconcile the one statement of Sandison with the other from Haggard. It would seem that for Haggard the Zulu human nature was of a different kind from that of the European one and was, rather, incapable of affinity with it. It is a source of some confusion to find that Sandison responds in complete agreement with Haggard’s writing, and he even concludes that Haggard "was able to escape the vice of racial prejudice", an opinion which the very helpful Wendy Katz believes results from a remarkable view of the evidence.
Haggard really believed as a colonialist that the racial status of his characters as Englishmen raised them above the people of colour in the world, implicitly assuming that all would remain the same in his democratic world at home. He gives the Englishman the pride in his race to be no less than:
"...the highest rank to which a man can reach upon this earth." 32.
According to Alan Sandison, Haggard, "in his African stories displays his humanity and his humility. His consciousness of ‘process’ and of the truth that it is impossible to isolate phenomena from their antecedents and their consequences gave him a broader perspective (and) enabled him to avoid the colour prejudice which so many of his contemporaries demonstrated.”
But, we would argue that in a number of his books Haggard displays a racist attitude which is profoundly anti-egalitarian. For example, in Allan Quatermain to take a further example from the texts, Haggard gives an account of a peace loving Scottish missionary, Rev MacKenzie who is quietly looking after his mission station in Kikuanaland. But when the Masai fighters attack his station he resorts to shooting and axing the Masai by the dozens:
"The clergyman flung down his gun, and drawing his huge carver from his elastic belt (his revolver had dropped out in the fight) they closed in desperate struggle." 33.
The fury of the fight is taken to such ends that the warriors claim that, because of the simple device of wearing steal armour, he and the other Britons were "devils" and they were "bewitched". Haggard gives an account of a severed head being found on the veranda of the mission station in Kikuanaland, leaving the lurid impression of a black man’s head propped up on the porch of the white man’s sanctified property. Snatching the head by the hair Allan Quatermain exclaims:
"It is the head of one of the men who accompanied Flossie," he said with a gasp. "Thank God, it is not hers!" 34.
It would appear that the life of a black man, here, was less important than the fate of a young white child. Sandison argued in a whitewash account of Haggard’s work that he (Haggard) "does tend to regard the people he visited as having a genuine social organisation and culture of their own though the fashion was to abuse them and talk of them as ‘black dirt which chances to be shaped in the fashion of man’." Though "the ways of black people are not as the ways of white men", as Ignosi reminds Sir Henry, this does not invalidate their particular moral code which frequently puts him "above the Christian who for the most part regards the Negro as a creature beneath contempt". 35.
Now, it is small wonder if the reader is confused as to whether these are the sentiments of someone given to racial equality and a belief in the brotherhood of mankind, but we would argue that what Sandison refers to as "the fashion" to abuse black people and disparage them was a systematic code endemic in his literature; any pretence at understanding their culture was a superficial knowledge of it in his texts, and Sandison’s account is a most unrealistic view. A measure of cultural relativity merely masked deep-rooted antipathies and ingrained prejudices, whether religious, social, or philosophical. There was, it must be said, a certain degree of an understanding of the consequences of the discovery of entirely different cultures, for example in She there is the cult of the feminine which is the embodiment of an ultimate femininity, immortal, which is the glue holding together the remnants of a lost civilisation, but the fact that he made Ayesha a white queen ruling over black people is a mythical aspect of his racial outlook.
It is not surprising to find Sandison in complete agreement with Haggard’s writings, even concluding that Haggard "was able to escape the vice of racial prejudice", a view of the textual evidence which is unusual in its partiality. Haggard does, it must be said, attempt to portray in his novels a class society which he sees as a harmonious one. Although Allan Quatermain and his companions are characterised as ordinary men who speak plainly, act spontaneously, and represent a type of Englishman and an example of uprightness, an ordering of life is a given aspect of their world. What helps to contribute to notions of race and nation are types and ideals which minimise the significance of class differences. The class stratifications of the various African peoples he encounters are noted in passing by Allan Quatermain, suggesting that social classification is endemic to humanity. In one part of Allan Quatermain, for example, the nation of the Milosis are dressed according to their social rank, togas being: