Paradigm, No. 25 (May, 1998)

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the propaganda of empire: historians such as John MacKenzie have examined the use of media ranging from cigarette cards to school textbooks, to disseminate and propagandise the values of empire.¹ The approach and methodology of these historical studies have, however, ensured that they less often explore or identify the extent to which this ideology may also have been contested and criticized in such productions. Ranging widely across the popular propaganda of Empire it is all too easy to find only evidence which supports the thesis that popular cultural forms simply disseminated the values of jingoistic imperialism. Elsewhere I have noted the way in which history textbooks echoed the general thrust of imperial propaganda: this article explores the extent to which it was both disseminated and, more surprisingly, contested within the genre of the imperial adventure story.²

Martin Green has argued that ‘the adventure tales that formed the light reading of Englishmen for two hundred years and more after Robinson Crusoe were, in fact, the energizing myth of English Imperialism’.³ Already in 1951, Hannah Arendt traced one of the major sources of modern European racism to that experience of empire whose guiding myth was expressed in the qualities of the hero to be found in the adventure story. Brian Street has disinterred from these adventures British attitudes to the cultural ‘other’.⁴ Feminist and psychological re-readings have argued that ‘the cultural, racial and sexual assumptions of these stories are predicated on constructions of masculinity’.⁵ These heroes, who ventured out from Britain to conquer and subdue the racial, sexual, geographical and species ‘other’, fired the imaginations and constructed the self-image of generations of English men. By focusing on representations of one imperial climactic ‘event’, I examine the way in which the genre of the adventure story was used both to confirm, but also to contest, aspects of imperial ideology.

This article examines the use made by adventure story writers of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, and of Zulu history more generally, and compares representations of those events in the work of Bertram Mitford with the better-known and more typically generic work of Rider Haggard and others.

B. Mitford, The Curse of Clement Waynefleet (1894)

"The captain's horse utters a loud, shrill scream of agony." (Page 3)

 

I

The war, in which the British suffered humiliating defeats, aroused huge interest and generated an outpouring of popular histories, true-life adventure stories, journalism, paintings, illustrations and novels. Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, Constantine Ralli, Ernest Glanville, F. S. Brereton, H. C. Adams and Bertram Mitford all used the events of Zulu history as the basis for novels of imperial adventure.⁶ In Haggard’s case, and in keeping with the genre, there is a clear imperialist message in his works, despite his distaste for the modernising effects of liberal imperialism on warrior nations.⁷ Haggard had a nostalgic respect, shared with many members of the late nineteenth-century English military gentry caste, for the traditional warrior society of the Zulus and he had a major influence in disseminating the heroic image of the Zulus which came to be accepted in Britain. Other tales based on the history of the Zulus, such as G. A. Henty’s The Young Colonists and Constantine Ralli’s The Strange Case of Falconer Thring, confirm the straitforwardly imperialist theme of the genre. These generic productions, with their variations in the telling, glorify the values of the masculine, imperial, military-gentry caste. However, the adventure novel was also, on one level, used to question not merely this particular war, but the assumptions of white imperialism more generally. Ernest Glanville, in The Lost Heiress, mocks the British claims of a civilizing mission in his angry descriptions of peaceful villages, full of playing children, which are suddenly torn apart and destroyed by British cavalry.⁸ The question of whether cruelty is part of the pathology of European imperialism or merely a failing of its villains, who can be expelled from their caste leaving a virtuous liberal imperialism to spread the benefits of civilization, is left hanging.

The contradictions at the heart of liberal imperialism and the complexities of the genre are exemplified in the work of Bertram Mitford, who shared Haggard’s roots among the English county gentry and his early career in colonial administration and farming.⁹ In general Mitford is either ignored by critics or dismissed for his weaknesses, although Brian Street has commented on some of his tales and Martin Green compares him in passing with Haggard.¹⁰ The contrasts with Haggard are striking. While even the more complex of Haggard’s tales glorify empire, through the figure of the English gentleman hero, several of Mitford’s stories use the genre to contest the assumptions on which it was based. Haggard’s white heroes represent the masculine and racial virtues of the British gentleman, a figure often debunked by Mitford in one of whose tales the main character boasts to a friend about his five-year-old son; ‘Isn’t this chap a true Briton, George, bent on killing something even from his very cradle’.¹¹ Mitford’s heroes include renegades who, for example, sell guns to the Zulus in order to defeat the British, thus demonstrating their loyal qualities by sticking to their Zulu friends in their time of national crisis.¹² Haggard’s heroines are either powerful goddess figures who are destroyed by their ambition or submissive handmaidens who are killed serving the hero: in either case they must die to free the hero for adventuring across the empire.¹³ By contrast, typical Mitford heroines court physical danger and rescue endangered males who end up in companionable marriages rather than being freed to do what comes naturally to imperial heroes.¹⁴

Mitford uses a variety of narrative voices behind whom the author’s attitudes are, in the main, opaque: his positive heroes include slave-traders, renegade whites, stereotypical settlers, liberals sympathetic to black tribes, and wise tribesmen seeking to understand the white invasions which threaten their societies.¹⁵ Nor is there much apparent consistency in the implicit use of contemporary anthropological theories of social evolution and of the genesis of different ‘races’, which underpin the assumptions of virtually all nineteenth-century imperial adventure tales.¹⁶ Mitford moves from using the concept of savagery (and of immutable difference) to that of the noble savage; and although the assumption of social evolution is a common theme in many of Mitford’s stories, in key books it is emphasised that nineteenth-century black society is comparable, in essential respects, to European society, indicating a shift to a relativist and functionalist anthropology. It is therefore not possible directly to read from Mitford’s narrators and characters the views of the writer: rather his tales are of interest as a cross-road of various discourses in late nineteenth-century popular imperialism.

A theme running through Mitford’s tales is the perceived conflict between humane, progressive and liberal attitudes to Empire and an overtly racist, and therefore unacceptable, attitude typical of one type of gentleman hero.¹⁷ Many of Mitford’s characters are intended to exemplify the worst aspects of colonial racism. Tom Carhayes, told of a poacher on his land, threatens to ‘lick the nigger . . . within an inch of his life’ and refers to local tribesmen as ‘black scum’.¹⁸ Carhayes, though courageous, is carefully portrayed as a bullying oaf compared to his friend Eustace Milne. Milne does not condemn the local tribes for fighting their white neighbours and, even after they take him prisoner and ransom him, he refuses to give information to the whites which might lead to the downfall of the black leaders: ‘he was not going to give any information to their detriment merely because, under a doubtfully administered system of organisation, they had taken up arms against the colony’.¹⁹ Similar contrasts between bullying British colonials and heroes sympathetic to black tribal Africans are to be found in several of his books.²⁰

This theme underlies The Curse of Clement Waynflete. Captain Royston Waynflete, the heir to the family estate, is presented as a typical British officer who can glory in ‘six dead niggers, by the living Jingo!’²¹ From the start the authorial voice detaches itself from the holders of such attitudes as when the Captain’s sergeant complains that the natives will not fight like soldiers:

There is a telling scene when the news of the British defeat at Isandlwana is reported at the family’s manor house. Confronted by male outrage, Vera, Captain Waynflete’s sister, ingenuously asks;

In South Africa, fate throws the Captain up against his cousin, Eldrid, and the two of them form a typical Mitford contrast. Eldrid, the hero of the story, likes his black neighbours, only getting drawn into fighting them in order to defend a (white) stranger who is being attacked: he is accused of ‘niggerophily’ by fellow colonists. When his house is burnt down and his cattle are driven off, he fights in the Zulu War from desperation but comes genuinely to regret his decision.²⁴ He is captured and his Zulu captors shame him with the logic of their questions.²⁵ The Zulu leaders are, in the main, portrayed as thoughtful and humane people who treat him well while his comrades are massacring Zulus. Finally Eldrid becomes the prisoner of King Cetshwayo, who is on the run from the British. The King is represented as a man of dignity and wisdom, who decides to free Eldrid; and the latter evades the security offered by the British flying columns and risks death rather than being put in the position of having to give away Cetshwayo’s hiding place to the British.

In these tales, however, while sympathy is shown for specific black tribes, and while specific manifestations of imperial expansion are criticised, the underlying process is implicitly assumed to be unalterable. If Mitford’s tales did no more than this then they would still be interesting examples of how the genre could be used to question aspects of imperialism. In an important quartet of novels, however, Mitford attempts to picture this world entirely from a black perspective.²⁶ In The King’s Assegai, The White Shield, The Induna’s Wife and The Word of the Sorceress, Mitford uses the genre to explore Zulu and Matabele society and the response of his tribesmen and women to the encroaching white domination.

The four books are narrated by Untuswa, an old Zulu warrior who tells his story to an unnamed Englishman travelling around Zululand in the early 1880s.²⁷ In their four meetings Untuswa tells his listener (who is to be, unknown to the Zulu, his [fictional] scribe), the story of his life from the time when, as a young man, he risked death by joining (King) Umzilikazi and escaping from the Zululand of King Tshaka to trek north with their tribes and found the Amandabele (Matabele) nation until, having returned to Zululand, he becomes a commander in the Zulu army resisting the British invasion. The saga interweaves personal passions with the epic of a migrating people at war. The ferocity of these wars is mitigated in the telling by incidents of generosity and mercy, as when Untuswa saves a white child from the spears of his warriors. Finally, in The Word of the Sorceress (1902), Mitford completes the saga after the Zulu defeat of 1879: Untuswa’s son by Lalusini, the heroine of these tales, rescues the daughter of the white girl whose life Untuswa spared twenty-years earlier; and the two Zulus are in turn saved from a British firing squad by the white women.

Much of this could be merely sentimental, but the books often make uncomfortable reading. Mopo, the narrator in Haggard’s Nada the Lily, disassociates himself from and disapproves of the treacherous massacre of Retief and the Boer commando in 1838 while they enjoyed the hospitality and feasting of King Dingaan: the massacre is explained by Haggard as the product of Dingaan’s cruel and treacherous nature.²⁸ By contrast Mitford’s narrator explains it as a fully justified coup against a treacherous white people who are out to steal Zulu land: this is the tone of the whole. Much of the story concerns the fighting and because this is a coherent imaginative creation of an alien culture, the narrator is able to describe the ‘savage’ battles and particularly the subsequent massacres, without losing the sympathy of the British readers who come to relax their own perspective for that of the imagined world they have entered.²⁹ Such behaviour becomes acceptable within his created world without in the process creating a picture of wild and cruel savages who need to be ruled by civilized outsiders for their own future development.

This is a complex world of laws, mores and personal inclinations which may therefore produce unexpected moral judgements among British readers. The morality is that of a warrior nation fighting for survival in a time of war, first against Tshaka and then against the Boers and the British. Against the normal representation of savagery and cruelty, the black nations are portrayed in these books as having a system of punishment that was, when properly applied, functionally necessary. Throughout the stories there runs the theme that none of these monarchs were simply tyrants, ruling without the acceptance of their people or the authority of tradition. The reader is led to accept the assumption, common to most societies whose history is known, that killing is a normal human activity: it is an assumption that liberal imperialism could question only at the cost of a glaring contradiction between its ideology and the practice which inevitably must flow from that ideology. Mitford pushes the point further: through Untuswa’s sympathetic eyes we see the British as a strange and, by implication, as a less chivalrous people than the Zulus.³⁰

In the biographies of missionaries, traveler’s and soldiers and in popular novels set in Africa the witchdoctor and sorceress are the focus of a demonology which demonstrated that African society must gain from European rule even if such societies could never hope to reach a European level of development. In keeping with this literary tradition the witchdoctor plays an important part in Mitford’s saga, but he is given a significant twist. True to type there is indeed a group of witchdoctors, complete with gruesome appendages, who justify killings and torture on the grounds of the merest superstition and self-interest, but they are contrasted with three other dominant figures by whom they are worsted. The most important is Masuka, a wise old man whose power over individuals is based on the strength of his personality, his knowledge of natural phenomena, and watchfulness.³¹ When Masuka causes the deaths of dozens of people by naming them as traitors, he is condemning the guilty, and it is on account of these real powers that King Umzilikazi supports him. The second major ‘doctor,’ or ‘sorceress’ is Lalusini, Untuswa’s great love and his chief wife, who fuses nature and good psychology in a way which stands for much more than mere trickery and which helps to save the nation.³² The third force of religion, or magic, which strengthens the Amandabele, is that of a Jesuit missionary whom King Umzilikazi protects.³³ The Jesuit and Masuka get on well together, and respect each other’s ‘magic’. The narrator’s reaction, as he observes the priest saying mass, is one of interest in this new magic which is easily placed by him on a level with indiginous rituals and mysteries. The religion of this society is presented as on a par with European religion: they are equally rational and mystical, or not; a believable mixture of good sense and human longing. The suggestion is that, given the knowledge available, these are reasonable (though not necessarily ‘correct’) explanations of observable facts, and that such explanations have a useful function in the social structure when used by people like Masuka and Lalusini. Here there is a clear underpinning of relativist and functionalist anthropology at the expense of evolutionary assumptions of European superiority.

In the main, Untuswa’s story is that of a people on the move and at war. Nevertheless, there are at least reminders of what Evans-Pritchard described as the ‘mass of orderly life’ with which Mitford balances the wars, high drama and deaths.³⁴ The Zulus enjoy friendships among themselves, as against the endless bloody rivalries of Haggard; and enjoy love between adults which does not immediately end in the woman’s death in order to release the hero for further adventuring.³⁵ In The King’s Assegai the love-making of Untuswa and Nangeza is narrated with a simplicity which contrasts with the often febrile and prurient innuendoes about savage sexuality to be found in comparable tales.³⁶ Later the marriage degenerates into loathing and betrayal, though Untuswa gives a decidedly male account of female loudness and dominance.³⁷ Untuswa’s chief wife, Lalusini, is a strong and powerful character and their love is described with affectionate sentiment. Lalusini plans a kingdom for her lover, but he lacks the ruthlessness to take what she puts in his path, and she happily accepts her role as a ‘sorceress’ and the wife of an induna.³⁸

In Mitford’s quartet the relationship of the narrator to white people is one of the recurring themes of the saga. The imagined world is sufficiently coherent for it to seem that white people who enter the narrative do so as intruders whose culture is assumed to be alien and probably inferior. The white officers who, after Isandiwana, assume that the captive Untuswa and Masingana, who they are about to shoot, have murdered white women, are fearlessly confronted: ‘"Hau!" cried Masingana mockingly. "The white people are great indeed. . . . is it the part for a brave captain to sit in the midst of his armed soldiers and name two unarmed men cowards?" and he uttered a contemptuous click.’³⁹ Various devices are used to engage the sympathy of British readers: British antipathy to the Boers and respect for decent British colonists find a mouthpiece in the narrator. To Untuswa the Boers are thieves of Zulu land, while the British, until 1879, are allies and friends.⁴⁰ The implication of all this is, however, that the only serious issue which was destroying good relations between the British and this independent black kingdom was the invasion of 1879, a suggestion which ignores the growing pressure on black tribes and nations, their lands and cultures, in every part of southern Africa.

The four stories are told in a complex structure of time, place and narrative by an old man whose attitude changes in the years about which the story is told (as the events approach the period in which he is speaking), from its start fifty-years earlier; and the telling (within the story) is spread over a period of months during which events which affect the story are also occurring. In part the story carries conviction with the reader through the qualities of the fictional narrator, himself defined by the gloss put on him by the fictional scribe. Whereas Haggard’s remarks about the underlying similarity of all individuals and cultures seem to be appendages in stories which generally belie these claims, the brief comments with which the fictional scribe draws the moral of the story in the introduction and conclusions of Mitford’s quartet emerge naturally and necessarily from the narrative in whose structure and texture they are deeply embedded. The scribe is aware that his readers may, unless they are instructed otherwise, read this as a tale of a savage and uncivilized people. Intermittently, therefore, in his asides, the scribe puts words such as ‘savage’ and ‘civilization’ into inverted commas. He marvels ‘exceedingly . . . over the boundless stupidity of certain Britons of the denser sort, who in official and private capacity could move among such for a greater or lesser period of time, and yet bring away no more of an impression than that of a lot of "blacks" who wore precious little clothing and were not eager to learn the arts of "civilization".’⁴¹ At the end of The Induna’s Wife, the white scribe reflects on the danger of seeing history ‘from one hard-and-fast point of view, and that point of view the British’ and argues that one should not condemn the methods of a black ruler in defending his kingdom from ‘Christians, whom subsequent events show to be the reverse models of uprightness or fair dealing themselves’. Finally, the scribe draws the moral that, ‘it was a tale essentially human, showing how the same desires and motives enkindle the same actions and their results in the heart that beats beneath a brown skin as in that which beats beneath a white one’.⁴²

The moral drawn by the scribe in his afterword cannot, however, be read as unproblematic. Even on the surface there is much of the old picture of brutality and savagery, and this becomes stronger in the accounts of tribes other than the Zulus and the Amandabele.⁴³ Moreover, at a deeper level, as noted above, the tale validates the virtues and values of a warrior caste at a time of wars of conquest by black kingdoms, both through the nature and form of the genre itself and through the glorification of supposed Zulu qualities. The glorification of these values and qualities within the genre of the adventure tale, also validates, by extension, the British warrior caste, insofar as that caste can match the heroic and aggressive qualities of this ‘imagined’ Zulu nation. It is this validation of the imperial project which underlies much of the mythologizing, in British popular culture, of the Zulu people.

In addition, these problematic ‘morals’ drawn by the white scribe need to be read beside those in other Mitford tales such as Forging the Blades, a story about the Zulu uprising of 1906. The heroine, Verna Halse, is another of Mitford’s dominant females, with a stronger will than her father, lover or black protagonist.⁴⁴ Initially, Sapazini, the local Zulu chief, is portrayed as a sympathetic figure, attempting to retain the character and independence which his tribe had possessed before the subjugation of the Zulu kingdom.⁴⁵ The emphasis shifts and darkens as Sapazini becomes involved in a plot to throw off British rule.⁴⁶ The situation under the British is portrayed as an idyll of rural security and comfort to be threatened by a savage (‘the blood in his warrior veins’) who is being led astray by outside agitators. Sapazini’s revolt envelopes the book’s other plot. Verna’s fiance, Denham, admits Sapazini’s qualities, ‘but to himself he was thinking that had Sapazini been a white man he would have resented the way in which the chief had looked at Verna more than once. Being a native of course, any such idea was absurd.’⁴⁷ In the event, Denham’s suspicions about Sapazini prove to be correct. Sapazini captures Denham and threatens Verna with slowly torturing her fiance to death unless she consents to become his chief wife. At one extreme the moral seems very clear: even the most intelligent and sympathetic of black chiefs uses evil methods to obtain his sexual wants in an incident which plays on racial fears and on atavistic justifications for the ruthless control of black tribes within the empire. At best, it suggests that the two cultural traditions are too far apart to be bridged at present. Verna of course, in the way of Mitford’s heroines, is up to the challenge. First, she warns Sapazini of the wave of race revenge which he will bring down on himself (‘every white man in Zululand would hunt you down’), a threat which he brushes aside.⁴⁸ But Sapazini has met his match. As the revolt falters. it is Verna who shoots him dead, and ‘a ringing cheer went up from the men’.⁴⁹

As Sapazini is dying, there is some kind of reconciliation. He asks to see her; ‘"It is well", said the dying chief. "I am content. We have been friends."’⁵⁰ It is, however, a reconciliation based on subjugation by the Pax Britannica ; a subjugation symbolised by the punishment of black male assertiveness and sexuality by death. The black male and white female ultimately return to their proper places in the racial and gendered hierarchy of the imperial adventure story, just as the Zulu nation re-embraces its honoured place as the greatest, black, subject people in the British imperial-racial hierarchy.

Martin Green, in his discussion of the differences between the genre of the adventure tale and that of the domestic novel has argued that the domestic novel carried ‘a protest against the crudest expansive thrusts of the modern system -- including imperialism and adventure’, if only by an aversion of interest from such themes: ‘They created a literature of largely silent resistance. The adventure novel, on the other hand did not resist.’⁵¹ I have tried to show that by the late nineteenth-century the issue was more complex than this and that, even within the conventions of the genre of the imperial adventure tale, one can find resistance as well as confirmation: some of the assumptions of British military imperialism are questioned even as the values of the gentry-warrior caste are confirmed, if only by extension from the Zulu warriors to their British counterparts. It is the latter values also, despite the specific author’s purpose in any particular work, which are validated at the underlying the level of the genre (or ‘langue’): ‘The adventure form carries its own imperialist message, despite the individual artist’s intentions’.⁵²

Whatever the precise nature of Mitford’s intention in his different books (and of his changing attitudes over time) his stories are symptomatic of developing and overlapping stages of liberal, imperial ideology in the period between 1879 and the Great War. In his more interesting tales the reader gathers that African societies have their own cultures and values, that they should be viewed with sympathy and sometimes with respect and that such societies contain admirable and intelligent people. It is true that, in general, Africans remain unmistakably ‘savage’, even if noble, and therefore must remain for the foreseeable future inferior to, and often necessarily also subject to, white empires. In his quartet, however, Mitford moves hesitantly beyond this conclusion of evolutionary theory to frame his description of Zulu society in terms of a more relativist, functionalist anthropology. The contradictions between his tales go to the heart of the liberal imperialist paradox.

Mitford’s tales are the product of conflicting discourses in late nineteenth-century liberalism and imperialism. His adventure stories illuminate, if unwittingly, the contradictions of a developing liberal democracy attempting to dominate other nations. In subjugating black tribes and giving their land to white settlers, it is impossible not to develop racist attitudes; ‘imperialist discourse is inseparable from racism’.⁵³ As Hannah Arendt and others have pointed out, the Boers, constantly attacked by the likes of Mitford for their treatment of black Africans, were being realistic in developing an overtly racist ideology to justify their domination.⁵⁴ The British, at their decent and muddled best, or aggressive and hypocritical worst, were deceiving themselves and the world in suggesting that military, political and economic domination could be combined with a liberal tolerance for others in a coherent or sustainable ideology.

'The black leopard-skin is paid for! (p. 103)

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