Porter’s Pensées

Colonialism and imperialism at the present time are usually discussed in very simplistic moral terms. Are you – and the books written about them – ‘for’ or ‘against’? The fall-back position for most commentators is that imperialism was an unrelieved evil, responsible for many if not all of today's problems in places like Africa. Hence my interest, as an imperial historian, in this contribution to a blogsite I subscribe to (USA Africa Dialogue), by an African scholar, Oluwatoyin Adepoju, dealing with some of the questions about colonialism that ought to be asked.

If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for scribal literacy, which was low on the continent?

If Africans were not colonised, what would have been the implications for the unquestioned dominance of classical African religions, as opposed to the greater pluralism, the range of choices, opened  up by the current co-existence of these religions and  Christianity?

Without passing through the colonial experience, would we be using an international language, English and chatting on the Internet?

All contemporary Africans are shaped by colonialism, particularly poignantly so those deeply invested in the globally dominant educational system, which has its origins in Europe and has little input in its methods  and understanding of reality from learning systems from other cultures. 

Would any such person prefer a classical African education to the Western one? Under what circumstances, outside the forceful coercion of colonialism,  would an informed choice between them or to integrate them have been possible?

Colonisation birthed the Universities of Ibadan and Makere, for example, pioneers in post-classical African scholarship, more critically oriented, more international in range of reference and communicative scope, than the earlier classical African systems of Ifa, among others. 

Is the current challenge not  one of synergy between these systems?

The creative possibilities represented by these  developments are  possible without colonisation but colonisation is the historical trajectory through which they emerged.

Ursula le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover novels visualise encounters between a space faring Terran civilisation and non-technological cultures, in which the Terrans are scrupulous about not interfering in the local culture on the planets they find themselves.

Its also true, I think, that Africans were visiting Europe before colonisation.

How best could we have benefited from what Europe had to offer, without having to pass through the still reverberating agonies of colonisation?

Perhaps I need to understand the colonial experience better. While not justifying the self serving so called civilising  missions of the colonisers, I think colonialism in Africa and perhaps Asia needs to be appreciated in more complex terms than that of binary good and evil.

A painful journey but one whose every segment is vital, in my view.

(I've finished the copy-editing phase of 'the book'. But yesterday, just an hour or two later, being asked by a Swedish friend of Kajsa's what the book was about, I couldn't for the life of me remember. Dementia? Or simply a reaction to the months of work that went into it? - Now I need to write a press article to accompany the book's publication in the early summer. This is my first sketch.)

Why a ‘patriot’ would need to feel any kind of ‘pride’ in the history of his or her country is a mystery to me. In most cases – unless the aforesaid patriots are comparatively old, and played a significant part in the events and achievements they so admire – none of that history can be credited to them. Very few of them have had any choice over where they live and were brought up, even, unless they are expatriots or immigrants, in which case they might justifiably take some pride in where they have chosen to live; so long, that is, as it’s because of those nations’ virtues, and not simply because they were the only countries they were allowed in to, or to exploit. (The more ‘racist’ kind of ‘native’ patriot might baulk at that.)

As well as this, countries change, and people’s views of their virtues, too; so that – for example – pride in conquering other countries in the past – Rome, and of course the British Empire – might seem less of a virtue in less imperialistic times. If I could ever allow myself to take on this kind of historical ‘pride’, in my case it would more likely attach itself to Britain’s anti-imperialist traditions than to her acquisition of colonies all over the world. But I’d rather not take any credit for that, either; except for the part I played in my early life protesting against South African apartheid, the Kenyan ‘emergency’, and the like. And that didn’t amount to much. (Mainly marching and shouting.) So, pride in – and even, conversely,  shame towards – one’s national history is simply nonsensical. ‘It wasn’t me, guv. I wasn’t there at the time.’

In any case, your nation shouldn’t need to have had a ‘virtuous’ history for you to feel patriotic towards it. Some years ago when I was teaching at an American university (Rochester, NY), a student told me of a Republican neighbour of his who had asked him why he was studying British history. ‘America’, he went on, ‘has the best history in the world!’ Most of us would probably dispute that: either its placing of the US at the top of the moral (or whatever) hierarchy of nations; or its implied view that only the ‘best’ nations need to be studied by historians; or its assumption that America has a ‘history’ that is immutable; or of course on all these grounds. Most countries’ histories are ‘mixed’, changeable, and controversial. That’s what makes studying them so challenging, so enlightening and therefore useful, and also – for us scholars – such fun. 

Nor, surely, is a pride in your country’s past a necessary desideratum for ‘patriotism’. Swedish school students are taught to admire their country for its aspirations, not its history: which was, it has to be said, somewhat chequered before the Social Democrats got in. Britain is entirely different, on the political Right at least, in seeking to base its people’s patriotism on its past. That’s why earlier ‘heroes’ so often come up in ‘patriotic’ accounts of Britain: King Alfred, Drake, Churchill, Gladstone, Emily Pankhurst (at a pinch); and great victories – the Armada, World War I, World War II, the 1966 World Cup; as well as heroic failures (which we may be rather better at), like the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott at the South Pole, and Dunkirk. Not all these heroes and their deeds have survived the critical attentions of later historians unscathed (viz. Churchill); but the fact that Brits need to have a past to be ‘proud’ of is the most telling thing.

Of course the impression we’re given in Britain of ‘unchanging’ traditions must be one of the reasons for the appeal of the ‘past’ as a focus of patriotism; dressed up as it is in the clothes of the past – literally in the cases of lords, judges and Eton schoolboys, including the top-hatted Jacob Rees-Mogg – in order to give an impression of immutability. Of course this is highly misleading. Clothes don’t ‘maketh the man’, or the woman; as neither do names and titles. The ‘Conservative Party’ for example hasn’t wanted to ‘conserve’ anything (except its members’ privileges) since Thatcher’s time; the Labour Party no longer represents horny-handed labour; ‘Public’ schools are no longer either public or the repository of the good old ‘noblesse oblige’ values that preceded capitalism, and might be said to justify them; football is no longer the ‘people’s game’ – and so on. But they give the impression of having endured for aeons, and to be worthy of ‘patriotic’ respect for that reason. 

But surely a genuine patriot would want to make his country better; into a ‘New Jerusalem’, rather than insisting on our allegiance to an old – and highly misleading – one: ‘our island story’, or ‘flag and queen’, as a newly-elected Conservative MP (Lia Nici) put it recently. She thought that anyone who wasn’t ‘proud’ of these two symbols ‘should move to another country they prefer’. Well, I’ve done that, albeit for other reasons too; and without my abandoning what I still regard as my fond and even patriotic feelings towards many aspects of my country of birth. (Shakespeare and cricket are the two things that still bind me to the place. Other patriots will choose other foci. But not, please, ‘Flag and Queen’.)

What do you think? Bloomsbury obviously didn’t take to my recommendation of Boris in a hard hat and holding Union Jacks suspended helplessly over the Olympic stadium (you must have seen it); and have have come out with these suggestions.

I don’t like the teapots at all. The Bloomsbury people prefer no. 2 – the torn flag.  I’d prefer no. 3 – the Palace of Westminster under a glowering sky; but with the sky looking a bit more glowering, and perhaps the torn flag superimposed over the left of the image.  Any opinions?

Tomorrow I have to get my Identitetskort renewed at the Central Police Station in Stockholm. You need an Identity card, and a ‘Personnummer’, to do almost anything in Sweden. Years ago I used to object strongly to the very idea of people being obliged by governments to carry these, when they were mooted in Britain by – usually – the political Right. I associated them with Orwellian regimes (and Apartheid-era ‘passbooks’ in particular), and feared the use that authoritarian governments could make of them. I felt uneasy about public surveillance for the same reasons – security cameras, hacking, and the like.

All this stemmed, I suppose, from my immersion in the typically ‘freeborn English’ values of my youth: devotion to privacy, especially, and resistance to the authorities’ knowing more about us than we want to tell them. I always thought that the occupation of ‘espionage’ was a rather dirty one, against whomever and for whatever reason; and that was despite my having written books about the history of it, which – I have to say – did little to dispel my mistrust. I like openness and honesty; which is why I also greatly disapprove of ‘bloggers’ who post pseudonymously, unless they have really good reasons for it. I regard anonymous blog-posts rather like unsigned poison-pen letters: cowardly, basically, if someone won’t put a name to his or her hostile Amazon review of one of my books. I hope that none of my readers indulges in that.

Twenty-six years in Orwellian Sweden, however, has cured me of that. It may be because I trust Swedish governments not to abuse their control over me as much as I fear British governments might. This may be naïve of me; but there it is. It also has something to do with the fact that we can’t escape from surveillance and control any more, almost anywhere. Even in Britain you have to have a National Insurance Number, and a driving licence (which looks awfully like an Identitetskort), and a passport to travel abroad; and can’t order anything on line without your personal details and tastes immediately being spread far and wide – by Amazon, for example. So we freeborn Englishmen might as well throw in the towel. And the little bit of plastic I’ll get from the Polis tomorrow will come in terribly useful, after all.

So the only thing I’ll be worried about tomorrow is whether the photo on the card is not too unflattering. I can’t put my thumb over it every time I use it.

In the meantime I have no identitet. I am nothing.

Last night on SVT there was a fantastic performance, from a restored 18^th-century theatre near Stockholm, of Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas. ‘Dido’s Lament’ has always been one of the pieces of music that has moved me the most. I got it up afterwards on Youtube, thinking that the singer here was Anne-Sophie von Otter (she looks a bit like her), only to find it isn’t, but is – Kajsa tells me – the mother of Greta Thunberg.

We always mourn the fact that Mozart died so young. But Purcell died younger. What a loss to music his death represented. And also the prodigy Thomas Lindley’s, who was drowned in a freak boating accident in Lincolnshire at the age of 22. Together, if they’d lived, they might have repaired England’s reputation as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ over the next couple of centuries.

(Personal)

2022 will probably be the year when I change my domestic arrangements, selling my house in Hull, moving into a small flat there, and living most of the time in Sweden, away from what England has become. That is, as soon as Kajsa has fixed up a ‘Room of My Own’ in her house, as a study for me to work in and keep some of my books. Not all, because I have far too many of them, which I’m unlikely to need again, and which I’d therefore like to find a good home for.

Any ideas? A bulk exodus would be best. I’ll give my children and local friends first option. After that I’ll try Hull University Library, if they still have books as well as computer terminals. Otherwise it will be charity shops. The problem with them, however, is that mine are mostly History books, which aren’t usually the charity shops’ kinds of thing. And I can’t be bothered with E-bay, if it would require me to itemise the books.

I also have hundreds (literally) of CDs to get rid of; mostly classical, but also some jazz, plus Brenda Lee. And novels, poetry, some lovely art books, archaeology…

And tons of working notes from my old researches. I had hoped to go back to these, looking for loose ends – of which there are plenty – to turn into articles; but I feel I’ve run out of time and also enthusiasm for that now. Kajsa suggests establishing a ‘Porter Archive’ somewhere; but I can’t imagine anyone wanting that. In which case it will be an awful lot of hard work and brilliant ideas wasted; but – hey – I have got a dozen books out of it all. Those are what I’ll show to Peter at the Pearly Gates, to persuade him to let me through. (Not that I’m anticipating a visit soon.)

Any other ideas? Second-hand bookshops that collect books in bulk and then find good homes for them? I shan’t want any money for them, only for the recipient to take them away, and put them to good use. That’s after I’ve sorted out the few that I’ll want to keep. I’ll probably be back in Hull – putting the house on the market – in the spring. Visits to look through the books then will be welcome. (Obviously from UK-based people.)

There must be many other academic oldies in this situation. What are they doing?

I know it’s unfair to judge a whole organisation by the conduct of one of its members; but how on earth does the Catholic Church let Jacob Rees-Mogg get away with it?

I was brought up a Christian: a faith I abandoned many years ago (it was the word ‘faith’ that did it for me, as a professional sceptic), but it was a very different kind of Christianity from – evidently – Rees-Mogg’s sort, and one whose dominant ethic, as I understood it, and which I still greatly admire, went right against his. Camels and needles come to mind. Together with ‘but the greatest of these is charity’. And ‘give everything you have to the poor’. And ‘blessed are the meek’. And all those instructions against bearing ‘false witness’. (You see: my Methodist upbringing wasn’t entirely lost on me.) OK, he may have spurned contraceptives, which goes down well with certain kinds of ‘Christian’. But so far as I remember the Bible doesn’t mention them in any case. So by my understanding of Christianity Jacob isn’t exactly Mother Theresa. (Not that, in my opinion, she was all that Christian herself. But what do I, as an ex-Christian, know?)

Does he go to Confession? What sort of priest is his confessor? Does he (JRM) know how sinful he is, and therefore which of his actions and opinions count as transgressions that he should confess? What is his priest’s reaction? How many Hail Marys does he make him say in penance? Does JRM have the time to recite them all? Do they – in Catholic theology – give him an ‘out of jail’ card to resume his un-Christian ways afterwards? Or does his condom-less begetting of lots of Catholic children make up for it all?

I really would like to know what his Church – i.e. the Pope – makes of him. Does it still ‘excommunicate’ people? After all, the Labour Party does, and for far less. (Which is why I’ve abandoned that, too.)

All the people I am currently dealing with at Bloomsbury are women; as from my experience they almost all seem to be in the publishing world. (It wasn’t like that in my earlier authorial days.) I have no problem with that, of course; but it set me thinking.

All the dogs I see around me just now are bitches. (I’m aware of this, as we have a dog of our own; and we have to make sure that the only bottoms she sniffs are other girls’.) So, what has become of all the male dogs? – Then, on the human side: between us Kajsa and I have nine grandchildren, eight of whom happen to be girls. Sweden of course is a very gender-aware society, and Britain is becoming more so. Are ‘they’ putting something in the water to prevent male babies (and puppies) from being conceived? Or aborting them as soon as their willies show up on the scans? Or are they being shifted out immediately after birth to some very secret male-only orphanage, where they have to live out their lives without women, and with the left-over male dogs, until they all slaughter each other, as men do? Is this part of a great feminist plot to end the oppressive hegemony of the male sex once and for all? – I wouldn’t particularly mind that: my female publishers are wonderful, as is my sambo; and look at most of the women prime ministers there are around currently (i.e. post-Thatcher); but I do have some concerns for us boys: specifically, for what may be happening to us, in or just out of the womb.

Then yesterday I had a message from another of the people who are getting my book produced, called ‘Merv’. That can’t be a girl’s name, can it? Thank goodness, I thought; at least they’re keeping some males on. – Or is this only for breeding purposes?

Of course it could be just that I notice women more, now that they’ve been let out of the kitchen and into the public domain. It wasn’t like that in my youth.

Is it a symptom of a real depression when England are swept away by Australia in the first Test, and West Ham are beaten 2-0 by Arsenal, both within a couple of days – and I really don’t care?

Anyone who thinks I’m a bit hard on Britain’s ‘Public’ schools – and the damage they are still doing to our politics and our country – should read the following, from today’s Guardian. It reveals a lot about Boris Johnson, in particular.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard.

I recognise a lot of it from my own school – an ‘Independent’ fee-paying boarding school but with the fees of ‘day boys’ like me paid by the local County Education Authority – and from my Cambridge college, where nearly all my undergraduate contemporaries were from ‘proper’ Public schools. And mainly stuck together, in ‘Old Boy’ groups. As they did in the prestigious and highly-paid jobs they managed to get into afterwards – Civil Service, diplomacy, the Law, Conservative (and sometimes other) MPs, the BBC, Bishoprics, journalism (not ‘reporting’, simply ‘commentating’ on the basis of their ignorance of the world), high up in the Army, on the Boards of investment companies (not businesses that made anything); all of this due in great part to their Public school backgrounds. Which was, of course, why their parents had sent them to those schools originally. ‘OK, little Boris (or whoever): so you’re going to miss our love, and contact with normal human beings, and have your emotional growth – and especially your humour – stunted for good, and develop appalling attitudes toward ‘oiks’ (the lower classes), ‘blacks’, ‘swots’, ‘queers’ and ‘gals’, and have your loyalties restricted permanently to your own ‘kind’… and all the rest. But it will give you a start in life.’ As of course it did; and for Boris most of all. – And a finish, hopefully. Maybe it’s he who will undermine the totally unmerited prestige of the Public schools, once and for all.

It still amazes me that Eton and its like managed to make this amazing comeback into high British politics in the 2010s, when most of us assumed that their day had passed: faded into history along with jousting and the jus prima noctis.  Wilson and Thatcher, Grammar School products both, were meant to have presaged a new meritocratic age. Eton, of course, has little to do with ‘merit’, of any kind.

Not, by the way, that the schools conditioned all their boys in this way. I knew a number at Cambridge who were almost normal, and even friendly. I must have been their token oik. And then there’s ‘George Orwell’, of course (an Old Etonian himself). But the general point stands; as well as the puzzle. – To which I could suggest a number of possible solutions. But not just now.