Book review: Colonialism, the Golden Years

Memoirs, by J A Golding. Bought from Oxfam a few months back. There's a decent review at britishempire.co.uk with which I largely agree.

The cover, I think, is intended to represent the view from within a heavily shuttered African building, desperately trying to keep the heat out.

Our hero is very much in the mould of the traditional English district officer (which he eventually becomes; we follow his career from noob upwards): unflappable, resourceful, respectful of the locals and prepared to listen to them, but with a goes-without-saying ingrained belief in the superiority of the English. And this belief must have been easily sustained; a couple of examples might explain:

At one point, he has to deal with apparent witchcraft, as reported and believed by the locals, which has caused the deaths of "lots" of people; eventually, he realises that it is sleeping sickness.

Or then again, it was his job to dispose of - shoot - man-eating lions that would prey on the locals. Or elephants that were ravaging the crops. They had to be helped you see: they could not do this themselves.

We get his not-at-all-impressed view of the African pols who took over at independence.

An example of resourcefulness, of local knowledge, or canniness: to keep a tribe in order, he needs to punish them when they do bad things. So, he threatens to shoot a camel when their people do bad things. And he does this. To the objection: "but did the shot camel belong to the actual malefactor?" he replies: "the tribe knew who owned the camel, and who did the bad deed; they would force that person to compensate the camel owner". This nicely avoids micro-managing them, and allowing them to keep their own power structures in place; had he instead barged in and forced them to hand over the malefactor, it would have been more disruptive.

However, what is lacking - what is always lacking - is some sense of how it might have been done better. His only nod in this direction is that it would be better to do it slower, and yet... I don't really find that convincing.

Incidentally, whilst the book is nicely typeset on nice paper, it has many grammatical errors, mostly involving commas.