1/17/2018 0 Comments We Aren't Sending Our Best People: Reading the Pioneer Narratives of William Harvey Brown, Part OneBefore Christmas, I stopped by a small, but custom-built building, in the lower part of Bulawayo’s downtown. Books of Zimbabwe, it said. Its selection was miniscule – a few discarded tourists’ books, some in Spanish. There were wood and glass display cases on the walls, showcasing a series of books in and red papers: “The Library of Rhodesia.” If you visit, and the older gentleman behind the desk deems you a serious enough inquirer, he’ll encourage you to visit ‘the back room,’ which has a few more bookshelves with a larger assortment of books – books that curiously crystallize the Rhodesian moment – almost forty years past! – that flourished in the 1970s after Ian Smith’s UDI (not a tract infection – the Universal Declaration of Independence), which severed ties to England, but refused to grant rights and self-determination to the black people of Zimbabwe. That was the state of affairs that sustained the long civil war for independence in Rhodesia. A lot of things happened in the 1970s, all of it as a kind of last-ditch effort to define and consolidate “Rhodesian culture” (such as it was) in the service of a Rhodesian nationalism. Hence: The Library of Rhodesia. Books of Zimbabwe was, before, Books of Rhodesia, a local printing house that made admittedly beautiful new editions of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century books. Nevermind that most of the books are deeply problematic from almost all contemporary viewpoints – treatises on missionary work; treatises on how best to kill an elephant; narratives of the evisceration of wild game on the African prairie; treatises on settlement and colonization and “pioneering.” I found a particular volume that interested: On the South African Frontier, by William Harvey Brown. Although I knew the broad strokes outline of the settlement of Rhodesia – the staking of mineral claims and interest by the Rhodes corporation and the pioneer column that moved north from South Africa, cutting diagonally across Matabeleland and Mashonaland to what is now Harare (but was then Salisbury). But the broad strokes outline made me complacent to think that colonialism was the work, generally speaking, of the British. And it was – spoiler alert! – but like all 19th century endeavours, it was actually a multinational admixture of people, each of whom was there for their own personal reasons and personal gain. It is fascinating, though, that this American felt compelled all the way to the edges of European settlements, as if further enacting a pioneer impulse that may have felt stifled at the end of the American exploration of North America. Cool, I thought, at the bookstore – I’ll just read it and riff off it, go back and forth with my own experience interloping through Zimbabwe. Except that William Harvey is, by all contemporary accounts, a true monster – an unrepentant racist and aspirational genocidaire. Which led me to a consideration of our current president’s recent remarks, and in this text, I found some of the long-standing American ideologies and beliefs that continue to inform our President’s appalling racism. If there is any indication of the pride of place of violence and racism in the volume, the title page, which replicates the original title page, is faced by a carefully pasted plate, black and white; a white man with a bandolier of bullets around his chest and a rifle in his left hand, leans forward with a revolver in his right. The plate captures him mid-firing, and in the receiving line of the bullet is a Christ-splayed ‘native,’ arms thrown out, head back, receiving death by bullet, dropping his spears and shield. The plate’s title is taken from the text itself: “Instinctively I pulled the trigger of the revolver, and discharged three shots so quickly as to spoil the aim of my assailant.” The justification of the murder so casually portrayed at the beginning of the book is theoretically self-defense but the sentence also obscures what the picture reveals – those shots didn’t merely make the ‘native’ drop his weapons but killed the ‘native.’ Because the picture depicts the ‘native’ with hands thrown up and out, the picture ironically captures a moment of surrender – “Hands up; don’t shoot” is a gesture with a long human history. The feeble justification – “to spoil the aim” echoes heavily with contemporary justifications of police violence: “He was reaching for a weapon;” “I couldn’t know he wasn’t going to attack.” Merely “to spoil the aim” effaces the existence of a mother and a family of this victim, effaces responsibility for moral accounting. Crime and Punishment perhaps erroneously taught me too early that anyone who takes the life of another must live a life haunted by the dispatched spirit, haunted by the moral wrong they’ve done, dogged by the sense of wrong that cannot be righted. Brown teaches instead that there are many cheerful murderers, and that murderers can happily become the Mayor of Salisbury, even. “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and wouldn’t lose voters,” our President remarked before his election. Who cares about life, anyway? Oh, right, Brown. Brown was a ‘naturalist,’ in the 19th-century parlance. Not zoologist, per se, nor any other specialist in the scientific study of life, but rather that great 19th century tradition of the gentleman generalist. The very outset of the book, however, renders clear the work of 19th-century science and culture, that even if the ostensible object of study is “life,” the best way to effect that study was to rain down death upon one’s objects of study. Brown begins the text with a preface, composed in 1899, upon publication of the text, which covers the years 1890-1897, roughly. I am attempting to resist quoting from the text too heavily, but the preface does give a sense of what Brown thinks he’s doing: “This work is a narrative of the author’s experiences and observations, partly as a naturalist of an expedition sent by the United States Government in 1889 to the west coast of Africa, but mainly as a collector, big-game hunter, gold seeker, landowner, citizen, and soldier, during seven years’ participation in the settlement and early development of Rhodesia. It treats variedly of travel, collecting, hunting, prospecting, farming, scouting, fighting. It throws a few side-lights on pioneer life. Two chapters are devoted to ethnology. The race problems which arise during the stage of transition from barbarism to civilization are discussed to some extent, as well as the agricultural and mineral resources of Rhodesia, and the possibilities of that region as a future field for immigration and commercial enterprise.” (vii) Oprah Winfrey famously said, “When people tell you who they are, believe them.” When I read the above paragraph, itself one of the most carefully neutral paragraphs in the text, I see a lot of faults and slippages. First, the studied ersatz-neutrality of his tone: “This work is [with a silently humble ‘merely’] a narrative,” a statement that allows for personal expression and the simultaneous disavowal of authority. His sense of his own roles are clear: he “partly...a naturalist,” but “mainly” a “collector, big-game hunter, gold seeker, landowner, citizen, and soldier.” This list of shifting roles highlight what the 19th century took greatest pride and interest in. To begin, the figure of the naturalist – science with commerce with an intentionally amateurish enthusiasm. The 19th century saw an explosion in the work of science – science became first a field, developing out of natural philosophy and other softer versions of the study of life, most of which intertwined that study with either philosophy or theology. Famously, I remember learning the novel Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell, which ends with the Earnest Young Gentleman off on a ‘scientific’ expedition to Africa at the end. Gaskell’s novel was one of the first that envisioned the work of science – outside of the academy, but not cloistered in a personal studio – as a viable economic enterprise. In the Preface, Brown gives us a sense of what that means. He worked as a graduate student at the University of Kansas, and joined an expedition westward, “chasing butterflies and preserving the skins of grizzly bears and deer” (viii). After coming out well in that work of indiscriminate killing in the name of science, he was deputized to join an expedition run by the Smithsonian “to secure some skins and skeletons of the fast vanishing American bison” (viii-ix). The bison, you might recall, which were shot at out of the windows of trains for leisurely fun, the bodies left to rot on the prairies as the train pulled away. The great herds of bison which once sustained Native Americans on the continent for generations. The great herds, which, at the end of the 19th century, were already doomed to twilight. The phrasing here is crucially revealing: “fast vanishing.” The Smithsonian, eager to grab documentation of an ended era, unironically sent a man out to kill whatever bison remained. He did a creditable job at the bloody work, which earned him an invitation to an outing to the West Coast of Africa. The technical purpose of the trip was to observe a total solar eclipse on the coast of West Africa. Africa wasn’t first in his mind; he had been tutored, after all, on American plains fauna. “...the idea of ever visiting the Dark Continent had not yet occurred to my mind as a possibility,” he explains, but “A moment only did I hesitate,” before eagerly signing on, “getting together preservatives, knives, guns, ammunition, fishing-tackle, seines, insect nets, vials, jars, copper tanks filled with alcohol – in short, sufficient collecting material, it seemed to me, to preserve two ship-loads of African animals” (2). Ship-loads of animal (carcasses): an anti-ark. Each piece of his equipment is designed to deal death and preserve it. The frenzied packing montage is a tableau of suspended violence. Even if he is unfamiliar with Africa before going there, he nevertheless carries with him fully-developed preconceived notions. His innocence and ignorance and therefore always-already compounded by his faith in the precirculating racist narratives of Africa and her people. At the end of his Preface, Brown offers the following as a casual note, as if worthy of being noted, but completely unworthy of being commented upon or thought through rigorously – a defensiveness exhibited in his later racist musings. “Following the method usually adopted in books of travel, I have for convenience and variety spoken of the native inhabitants of Rhodesia indiscriminately as savages and barbarians. As these people have organized society, posses domesticated animals, practise rude agriculture, and work in iron, they are ethnologically in the stage of middle barbarism, and hence, technically, barbarians.” (x) The smugness of the language “technically,” his faux-scientific anthropological classification, and the offhanded violence of the terminology “savage” and “barbarian” all underscore the pre-existing justification of his colonial violences. In the manner of self-justifying hegemons everywhere, he is only ‘doing it for [their] own good,’ this violent trade in civilization.
Civilization itself, as we know, is a concept used with violence. The book at hand is a handsome one, but its first sally at this kind of epistemological violence comes with the facsimile of Rhodes’s endorsement of the book. It is “capital reading,” he says, and a “truthful picture of Rhodesia,” especially in the particulars around their suppression of ‘native’ ‘rebellions’ in the province. The jacket copy explains that the reproduction of the book is a “tribute to the parts played by the author, William Harvey Brown, and his fellow Americans in bringing Western civilization to this part of Africa.” The “bringing” of civilization clearly requires that all luggage packed is designed for violence. And this luggage includes clear ideological baggage, too. When his ship arrives at the Western Coast of Africa, the first phrase that comes to his mind is that the West coast is the “white man’s grave” “on account of its deadly fevers” (3). The problem with 19th-century science, however, is that it is not yet understand that the pestilential visitation of malaria has nothing to do with the inherent degradation of the land itself, that it is not a moral failure of the people attending the land. Early science chalked malaria up to “miasma,” to certain landscapes and environments whose inherent health qualities were damning and damaging to humans. “We found Africa,” he says, invoking “Africa” as a collating concept (as in the persistent misunderstanding that “Africa” is a “country”), “exactly as books of travel had led us to anticipate – a land of excessive heat, lofty palm-trees, gigantic baobabs, and naked savages” (3). A vision of Africa has always-already circulated before Brown, in his ignorance, arrived. But his ignorance preserved itself in spite of the nuance available upon first-hand witness. It is easier to preserve the fantasy of Africa than it is to confront Africa itself, materially. These images of Africa as the “Dark Continent” and an exotically toxic land of savages persist vociferously and materially today. They persist in some more subtle ways – imaginations of Africa as indiscriminate Desert or Jungle; visions of Africa that are replete with wildlife and empty of people; beliefs about Africa as either poisonously fertile or inhumanely infertile; ideas about the landscape and people of Africa as being consigned to or embracing “barbarity.” Moreover, the language of finding/founding rings in this passage; he doesn’t use “discover,” but uses “found” in the same vein. The sense of the present progressive work of discovery is a constant current in Brown’s book – and almost all outsider writing (white writing, in particular) about Africa. “Found”/ing also accords with Brown’s sense of being there at the outset of the Rhodesian nation. For a man who became, briefly, the mayor of Salisbury (see the inset photo of the book of him in a fancy hat with a hunting dog winding around his feet, standing on the colonial verandah and surveying his land), this work of “founding” is crucial to his self-identity. Nevermind that there were tons of Europeans who went that way before – fodder for another, later post – nor any and all of the Africans who have transited across this swath of Africa. For Brown, it was “travel books” that taught him this suite of hamfisted fantasies, the accounts of European “discoverers” like Stanley and Livingstone and Burton whose fantastic adventure tales ignited rounds of conquest and civilization under the aegis of saving wealth and beauty from a people who refused to appreciate either. I will speak more on this semper-colonial self-justification; I am currently at work on Doris Lessing’s critique of that salvific conservationism that animates white people in particular. Brown’s colonial fantasies are ostensibly confirmed when his vessel was “immediately surrounded by boats filled with men and women, shouting, jabbering, laughing, quarrelling, and even fighting” (3). The range of behaviours the “natives” display are all crypto-animalistic and subhuman. He refuses to ascertain with any rigor what is actually happening amongst these people seeking his trade, but rather renders them loud but inarticulate, embodied but graceless, and in the paranoiac colonial fantasy (see Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” or Lessing’s The Grass is Singing for deep explorations of this) – always laughing. The laughter of the native is never confirmation of their congeniality or amiability, nor of their happiness or pleasure per se. In the ears of the colonialist, the laughter of the native always harbours something darker – rejection, refusal, mockery, anger, ignorance, laziness, accusation. The native is always-already presumed to live a failed life, one naturally bereft of the real pleasures known to the colonial agent, pleasures derived from the simplifications of technology, the baroque mutations and evolutions of aesthetics, the exercise of exercises and pursuits and hobbies and vocations. If the native somehow thinks herself happy or content, it is a false consciousness, as she simply does not yet know real pleasure, real happiness, the roads to which imperatively travel through “development” and “progress.” This fear of being laughed at – of being left out, and singled out – is a particularly powerful psychoaffective formation for white men. (Once more, see George Orwell’s careful deconstruction of it in “Shooting an Elephant.”) And no one signifies the effects of this traumatic formation more than our incredibly thin- (and orange-)skinned President. Like white Arizonans holding misspelled ‘English Only’ protest signs, this fear accrues to the nonwhite and the immigrant, in particular. It means these subjects are always-already marked by the fearful projection of white men, it is a symptom of their entitlement, and it is a structural strike against the foreigner, doing double damage. President Trump was recently caught out saying brashly, and publicly, that he wanted to discourage immigration from “shithole” (or “shithouse,” as the administration has feebly argued was the actual language, as if that were in any way better) African countries instead of (white) countries like Norway. There is no debate about the rank racism of this remark. And much of our collective response to that remark has been, appropriately, horror. But it’s also an articulation of a complex set of racist ideologies that describe ostensibly milder manifestations of racisms, too. There is, in Trump’s scatologically phobic language “shitholes,” an invocation of impurity and degradation that adheres around poverty and race in the white imaginary. Such pathological fears already took the form of separate bathing and toilet and pool facilities in the Jim Crow South: sharing embodied spaces with those of other races was a direct vector of contagion and defilement. These fears of contagion have been largely supplanted by an ideologically impure fascination with sanitation and development that cuts through all of our liberal discourse. A particularly American fascination with bathing, cleanliness, and sterility no doubt also descends from these race-as-communicable-disease motif that cuts through American cultural discourse. The morality associated with wellness – those who are fit, eat healthfully, practice exercise-as-spirituality, refrain from overindulgence are morally superior beings – doubles back to bite the nonwhite, who are barred from the high cost of entry into this cult of wellness/morality by virtue of the persistence of economic structures that proscribe nonwhite employment and opportunity. The anthropologist Mary Douglas long ago argued that constructions of purity and impurity, cleanliness and filth, healthfulness and neglect are fantasy constructions, ideologies that dovetail with colonial and racist imaginaries, and with class-based ideologies of morality inextricable from pathologies of hygiene. The President is a notorious germophobe, and the pathology of that anxiety is coterminous, undoubtedly, with his racism. “Shitholes” do double duty with a previous statement the President made, when he claimed that Nigerian immigrants to the West would “never return to their huts” after witnessing the miracles of the advances and technological comforts of ersatz-advanced civilization. “Huts” is a deeply ideological word, obviously, as it describes the persistence of the belief in savagery and barbarity in spite of the advances of Western architecture and aesthetics. “Huts” also describes a previous form of human waste removal – huts and outhouses and latrines and shitholes. The oscillation between “shithole,” which could describe the anus itself as much as a toilet, and “shithouse,” which stresses the latter, is of no real concern, except in the mind of Trump himself, for whom genitals and waste production are simultaneously icky. In catalogs of his racisms, mention is often made of the fact that he refuses to accept the innocence of the Central Park 5, the five nonwhite men accused of raping a white woman in Central Park in the eighties. They’ve long since been exonerated after a court of public opinion condemned them – helped along by a voluntary full-page ad Trump took out calling for the death penalty for the men, something he has not gone back on. William Harvey Brown, American pioneer in Rhodesia, presided over a foiled lynching that turned into a speedy trial ending in a public hanging, of one gentleman named “Zulu Jim.” Brown charmingly believes that there is an “inborn blood-thirstiness,” added to the fact that black Africans “act[] almost solely by impulse” (249). These things justify the hasty trial and execution of a man not at all proven to have committed any crimes, but was accused of the murder of several settlers. Foully, disgustingly, Brown narrates the hanging of Zulu Jim with relish, smirking “Justice had been done, and law and order had triumphed over lawlessness in Britain’s youngest colony (255). Much as our current President advises the public that there are “good people” on “both sides” of the question of white supremacy, Brown defensively offers the following disclaimer to projected liberal readers back home: “People in distant countries are prone to criticise the residents of African colonies for bearing what is termed ‘race hatred’ towards the black. If those distant and well-meaning critics might have brought to their doors the dastardly outrages and pitiful tragedies enacted by the blacks against the white in these frontier countries, there is not the slightest doubt that the white colonists would be regarded with more leniency than at present.” (248-249) Indeed, this echoes directly the unwavering support the Border Patrol Agents’ unwavering support of Trump and their gleeful enactment of the tightening net Trump and his administration is drawing around immigrants – which recently culminated in a series of daylight raids on 7-11s around the country, arresting anyone with documentation and prepping them for deportation. The rhetoric of those loud voices crying out for the end to all immigration in the current moment brandish cases real, exaggerated, and imagined, that would seem to prove the coming multicultural hellscape. This accords with Bannon’s phraseology “American carnage” from Trump’s dismal inaugural speech. Consistently, Trump has worked overtime to argue that America’s cities, their sanctuary cities, their borders, their suburbs and small towns, all, all are a festering dumpster fire that is threatening to overwhelm white Americans once and for all in an orgy of lust and violence. Because of course there was Trump’s opening presidential salvo, that rambling press conference in which he announced his desire to run, if only, it seemed, to stanch the flow of rapine and pillage streaming up from our southern borders. “Mexico isn’t sending its best people,” he bellowed; they are sending rapists and criminals and drug dealers. His fixation on immigrant rape, in particular, has continued without break from these earliest days. It is another barely-concealed variation on his fully-formed and historically-rooted beliefs in racial purity and white supremacy. Well, inasmuch as America sent The Racist William Harvey Brown across the Atlantic to ship home literal shit-tons of animal carcases and skeletons, we’ve never really sent our best, either. Although British colonialism didn’t need much help from American racism, the unique constellations of American racisms wove their way into Rhodesian ideologies through vectors like Brown. Stay tuned for the next episode, when I discuss the paradox of self-righteous white conservationism, climate change denial, trophy hunting, museums, and the Trump Sons right alongside WH Brown’s terrible pioneer tract.
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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