Environment at the Margins

Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Garth Myers

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780821444245
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

Environment at the Margins brings literary and environmental studies into a robust interdisciplinary dialogue, challenging dominant ideas about nature, conservation, and development in Africa and exploring alternative narratives offered by writers and environmental thinkers. The essays bring together scholarship in geography, anthropology, and environmental history with the study of African and colonial literatures and with literary modes of analysis. Contributors analyze writings by colonial administrators and literary authors, as well as by such prominent African activists and writers as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Mia Couto, Nadine Gordimer, Wangari Maathai, J. M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Ben Okri. These postcolonial ecocritical readings focus on dialogue not only among disciplines but also among different visions of African environments. In the process, Environment at the Margins posits the possibility of an ecocriticism that will challenge and move beyond marginalizing, limiting visions of an imaginary Africa.

Contributors:
Jane Carruthers
Mara Goldman
Amanda Hammar
Jonathan Highfield
David McDermott Hughes
Roderick P. Neumann
Rob Nixon
Anthony Vital
Laura Wright

Chapter 1

“A Beautiful Country Badly Disfigured”

Enframing and Reframing Eric Dutton’s The Basuto of Basutoland

Garth A. Myers

This chapter is an analysis of Eric Dutton’s 1925 book The Basuto of Basutoland.¹ I use Timothy Mitchell’s concept in Colonising Egypt of an enframing colonial discourse, in combination with other theoretical insights, to analyze the book.² Dutton, who later worked as an administrator in four British African colonies, orchestrated the construction of Lusaka as the capital of the future Zambia, and authored four other books, began his colonial career in today’s Lesotho in 1918–19. He used the experience as the basis for writing this text, mostly while recovering from multiple surgeries that followed his severe injury during World War I. The Basuto is a curious and fairly thin human geography of the country. The book is at once a patronizing misreading of the history of the Basotho and a searching attempt not only to understand the people but also to come to grips with the landscape. The text attempts to transform that landscape from what was an “order without framework,” in Mitchell’s terms, into colonialism’s segmented plan from the bedrock on up (55). Yet Dutton has more interest in Basotho senses of place and cultural practices than in the broader colonialist canvas with which the book begins; he struggles with what he thinks he ought to say and what he likes and longs for in the African world around him.

This struggle between repulsion and desire appears to have been lifelong. Dutton’s book suggests ways in which British colonialism in Africa contained within it both attraction and repulsion for colonialists. This work also suggests the influences that came from Dutton’s denial of his postwar disability. Even as he exemplifies tropes and tactics of colonialism’s environmental order, Dutton struggled against daunting personal and physical demons with a humor that betrays both the sentimentalist imperial geographer and the survivalist tactics of a disabled man.

Eric Dutton

During Dutton’s thirty-four-year colonial career, he engaged and corresponded intimately with the intellectual vanguard of British imperialism in Africa. He served in secretarial posts in five different British colonies in eastern and southern Africa between 1918 and 1952, and he published four geographically oriented books on Africa.³ Like the works of better-known British geographers in Africa, Dutton’s writings present him as “both accomplice in, and critic of, the business of imperialism.”⁴ The representations of place, landscape, and environment in his writings manifest this ambivalence.

Dutton, the youngest of nine children in a middle-class parson’s family, was born in Yorkshire in 1895. Like all four older brothers, he entered the army after studying at Hurstpierpoint and Oxford. His first and only battle experience came at age twenty-one in 1916 at Gallipoli, where he suffered severe injuries to his legs and spine. Although he was one of the few officers or enlisted men of the North Yorkshire regiment to survive, he never regained full use of his legs and never lived without severe pain.⁵ After Dutton experienced a half dozen surgeries, a long convalescence at home, and a brief attempt at a clerkship in Basutoland, Robert Coryndon, then the governor of Uganda, hired Dutton as his private secretary. Dutton served Coryndon in Uganda from 1920 to 1922 and then moved with him to his new post in Kenya. Dutton served in Kenya (1922–30) and moved on to serve in Northern Rhodesia (1930–37), Bermuda (1938–41), and Zanzibar (1942–52) before his retirement. It was during the early part of his service in Kenya that he finished writing his first book, The Basuto, and published it.

In this chapter, I give a close reading of this odd little book. From this book onward, Dutton’s spatial sense of colonialism suggests how frequently a “sense of landscape” and the power to produce it went hand in hand in masculinist ideological justifications of imperial rule (Kenya Mountain, xi). Yet Dutton had spent much of his time in Lesotho recovering from his horrific war wounds, which still affected his service in Kenya throughout his work on the book. As a consequence, the physical challenges of his experience make for a profound subtext to the book. Thus, throughout the book there is a bit of ambivalence about colonial power in Lesotho, as in much of Africa in the interwar years (1919–39). The context of its writing and the complexities of the author produce something quite other than a straightforwardly hegemonic masculinist imperial conquest narrative. Read broadly (meaning on a general level), The Basuto might seem to be a piece of “male megalomania,” and we could stop there.⁶ However, read more closely (meaning within the historical-geographical context of its production and with appreciation for author positionality), the book also speaks to important nuances of analysis. This means producing what James Duncan and Derek Gregory term “a principled recovery of the complex subject positions of both men and women” who authored colonialist geographies such as this while recognizing the “physical means through which they engaged them” within a particular moment in time.⁷

In this case, the 1920s produced some grave uncertainties about the imperial endeavor at home and abroad for Britain. An ambivalent as well as “hybrid and syncretic . . . yet unequal exchange” took place in British colonial discourse between British authors and African peoples in writing about and articulating Africa’s geography in these decades, when colonial administrations were in place and apparently in charge.⁸ Moreover, Dutton was one of hundreds of male British war veterans in Africa suffering from war-related disabilities that both impaired their physical capacities and affected the ways in which they were seen and treated by other men. Dutton’s “physical means through which” he “engaged” the landscape of Lesotho (to appropriate Duncan and Gregory’s phrase) become bodily manifestations of the character of colonial geographies in British Africa between the wars.

Colonial Enframing and Postexploration Landscape Geographies

The “siting, surveying, mapping, naming, and ultimately possessing” of colonial territory by Europeans in Africa as elsewhere depended upon geographical science.⁹ Literary studies have recognized that “imperialist structures of attitude and reference” depended on “the way in which structures of location and geographical reference appear in the cultural languages of literature.”¹⁰ Much as Roderick Neumann does in chapter 2 in this book, I seek to extend the interplay between geographical and literary analyses of landscape in colonial African contexts.

Once the possessing, pacifying, and (re)naming of the landscape was done in the era of exploration geography, the spatial tactics of British colonialism in Africa broadened and deepened.¹¹ After World War I closed the Scramble for Africa and up until at least the 1960s, British authors churned out books that sought a popular audience on African geographical topics. Many authors of such works were paid employees of colonial administrations and were writing about the people with whom and places in which they lived and worked. Some of this work followed in the wake of popular imperialist travel writing, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails (discussed in Neumann, chap. 2). Many but by no means all of these authors of this form of colonial geography were men for whom the “colonial tour” was a kind of rite of passage or assertion of belonging distinct from the agenda that Roosevelt brought to his writing.¹²

The postexploration colonial geographies of the interwar years in particular became part of a reorientation of ways of seeing the African political and ecological landscape in a more controlled frame, on a less fantastical map, beginning with books such as Dutton’s. Mitchell (45–62) identifies several conceptual themes for understanding the professional spatial strategies of British colonialism’s “enframing” order that sought to develop that sense of landscape, and at least one of Mitchell’s themes is widely applicable to the colonial landscapes that these interwar works explored. This involved altering African “orders without frameworks” into “segmented plans” (44). As colonial administrations asserted their power into wider corners of the colonies and established a coherent order, it became steadily apparent that race, class, and gender segmentation was intrinsic to the plan of that order. To Mitchell (44), this was an essential part of colonialism’s effort to separate the “container” (the colonizing power) and the “contained” (the African community). In practice, these plans of a carefully segmented order almost never worked, and actually the containers often became confused by the interwar period.

Here I assess Dutton’s The Basuto as part of the enframing order in the British colonies of the interwar years. I attempt to show how he sought in the book to shape orders without frameworks into segmented plans and to differentiate container from contained. This emerges in repeated assertions of differentiation and British superiority. The mundane enframing and segmenting order has close links to the megalomaniacal masculinist geographies of the exploration era.

The Basuto points toward the cracks in this frame that appeared quite prominently by the interwar years. One uncertainty centers on the performance of masculinity. Militaristic ideas of manliness went hand in fist with the Scramble for Africa and British colonial enterprises there until World War I.¹³ J. Bristow and R. Dixon point to “thrustingly masculinist . . . ripping yarns”—British narratives of African adventure in the late nineteenth century—as guides to this male ideal.¹⁴ Christian ideology imparted to early twentieth-century British imperial masculine ideals, in equal parts, the muscularity that Berg, Bristow, and Dixon suggest and gentlemanliness: “the ideal of Christian manliness imagined a ‘gentleman’ equally at home in the public as well as the private sphere. A ‘manly sensibility’—integrating robust manliness with refinement and tempering moral authority with a solicitous regard for dependents—would guide his conduct.”¹⁵ There were even considerable efforts to develop this “muscular Christianity” in African men living under British rule.¹⁶

Yet even this ideal was in practice highly unstable and variable, and it became more so after World War I. Colonial rule in many areas, particularly in Africa, was “haunted by a sense of insecurity” by the time of the interwar period.¹⁷ This insecurity extended to the “preferred forms of masculinity.”¹⁸ Richard Phillips’s detailed reading of the ebb and flow of masculinities in British adventure stories shows that the manliness on display in these stories is “not deterministic or static” but instead is decidedly plural.¹⁹ But Phillips (86–87) also notes that “the geography of adventure spills over into . . . ‘real’ gendered subjects and spaces inspiring merchants, investors, travelers, settlers, and others.” Connecting the analysis of discourse to its material implications for and context in the colonial enterprise is vital. One practical set of implications involved connections that texts by colonial officials had to “the practical tasks of building in brick and mortar”—that is, building the colonial order—and then to the growing sense that this order was not doing very well (Dutton, Hyena, 119). Another set of implications concerned the highly varied physical capacity to perform the hegemonic idea of colonial masculinity. In The Basuto, Dutton deployed a masculinist colonial discourse of spatial control and enframing alternated with the ambivalent, hybrid, and interdependent character of his encounter with colonized people.

Lesotho during 1918–19

At the time of Dutton’s hobbled arrival in 1918, Basutoland had already been under British control in one arrangement or another for some fifty years and was nearing the end of its first decade of being completely encircled by the independent white-ruled Union of South Africa. Since 1884, Basutoland had been a Crown colony with a resident commissioner answerable to the British high commissioner in southern Africa. In a rather short span of time, Basutoland had also become “nothing more than a labor reserve for its powerful white neighbor.”²⁰ Geographically and economically, Basutoland conformed precisely to what Samir Amin meant by “Africa of the labor reserves”: a territory whose sole purpose in regard to the colonial system was to provide laborers for white settlers, in this case in South Africa.²¹ Coryndon, the man who would later become Dutton’s chief mentor in colonial administration, had just completed a contentious and rather unfulfilling two years as resident commissioner prior to Dutton’s arrival. Coryndon was indelibly linked to the institutionalization of varied forms of indirect rule in his service as governor or resident commissioner in Basutoland, Swaziland, Barotseland (northwestern Rhodesia, the former Lozi kingdom), Buganda, and Kenya. As Bill Freund points out, these first three were “migrant labour reserve zones, a condition that went well with the depredations of ‘traditional’ authority reinforcing its own controls while acting in the colonial economic interests.”²²

Coryndon, and the British more generally, struggled to gain authority over the indigenous leadership of Basutoland in political terms. Economically the territory became completely under the thumb of white mining capital via contracted labor migration. Yet the Sotho paramount chief and his association of chiefs, and for that matter the “Sotho intelligentsia” of the Basutoland Progressive Association or th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “A Beautiful Country Badly Disfigured”: Enframing and Reframing Eric Dutton’s The Basuto of Basutoland
• Chapter 2: “Through the Pleistocene”: Nature and Race in Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails
• Chapter 3: “Hunter of Elephants, Take your Bow!” A Historical Analysis of Nonfiction Writing about Elephant Hunting in Southern Africa
• Chapter 4: Keeping the Rhythm, Encouraging Dialogue, and Renegotiating Environmental Truths: Writing in the Oral Tradition of a Maasai Enkiguena
• Chapter 5: Sleepwalking Lands: Literature and Landscapes of Transformation in Encounters with Mia Couto
• Chapter 6: No Longer Praying on Borrowed Wine: Agroforestry and Food Sovereignty in Ben Okri’s Famished Road Trilogy
• Chapter 7: Whites Lost and Found: Immigration and Imagination in Savanna Africa
• Chapter 8: Waste and Postcolonial History: An Ecocritical Reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
• Chapter 9: Never a Final Solution: Nadine Gordimer and the Environmental Unconscious
• Chapter 10: Inventing Tradition and Colonizing the Plants: Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood and Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness
• Chapter 11: Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor
• Contributors
• Index