African Assignment by Francis Wilfred de Guingand

Overall, he is a textbook apologist for the status quo. He dismisses the alternative of a more liberal policy as politically unfeasible, while sweeping morality and economics and the rest tidily under the rug: 'There can hardly be a handful of Europeans in South Africa who would advocate such a policy, for it would mean a swamping of their position and leadership.' He comes back to that image of the white man being swamped, over and over, and fwiw he uses the same gd word: unions, parties, cities, everyone and everything in mid-century South Africa was under constant threat of being SWAMPED. Exactly what the newly elected party's policy of 'Apartheid' means is still unclear to him (but it might be good! he concludes).

The SA Nationalist Party had won the 1952 elections in a landslide, and his reaction is about as clumsy as humanly possible.

(Maybe even one written from Moscow or the White House.) Painfully, a lot of his clumsy social analysis - for instance his description of Africans, their inherent laziness, the poor conditions in the protectorates, the unwillingness to help themselves - would feel right at home in a Twitter account today. But his 1952 addendum is the most interesting chapter (and where the banal evilness of that racism shows best/worst). complaining of the 'fleur de Afrique' that one had to deal when downwind from the troops. Unlike 'Kenya Diary' or Mansfeld, his racism is more patronizing and clueless than hateful: e.g. I had to give up the attempt.' I found myself wondering how much effort he made to learn Chinyanga, over his decade-plus with the KAR, if he hadn't yet learned to say 'thank you.' Though apparently they are silent tears: 'I rather haltingly tried to say a few words of thanks for the way they had served me, and my Chinyanga, never of great quality, utterly failed me. He throws himself into the work, surveys for a road, becomes very wealthy, and cries when he says goodbye to his fellow soldiers. He is beside himself when he gets an assignment with the King's African Rifles (KAR) in post-WW I Africa. He exemplifies a sort of naive tally-ho enthusiasm and sincerity. Francis DG is the least offensive of the three. Shocker, these books all end up being pretty pro-white-guys-in-Africa, and I don't pretend to read them with anything other than an expectation to hate them cover-to-cover.īut there are nuances. There are countless early-20th-century-white-guy-in-Africa books choose from, and few to none from other points of view. Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld (Namibia in the first few decades of the 20th century) Kenya Diary (1902-06), Richard MeinertzhagenĢ. My current reading list: an unintentional survey of douche-y 20th century colonists in southern Africa.ġ.

African Assignment by Francis Wilfred de Guingand