topics: |  autobiography | africa

Excerpts

Those were the days when to lack respect was a more serious crime than to neglect a child, bewitch a man, or steal a cow, and was generally punishable by beating. Indeed respect was the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered families, among thousands of Africans accustomed to constant warfare and armed with spears and poisoned arrows, but had themselves no barricades, and went about unarmed. This respect preserved them like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic, and seldom failed; but it had to be carefully guarded. The least rent or puncture might, if not immediately checked and repaired, split the whole garment asunder and expose its wearer in all his human vulnerability. Kept intact, it was a thousand times stronger than all the guns and locks and metal in the world. - p.21

'They are fools,' Tilly replied. She disapproved of romantics, but of course was one herself, though she concealed it like a guilty secret. It is always our own qualities that most appall us when we find them in others. - p.17

Small doves with self-important breasts - p.24

  'Are rectangular buildings a sign of civilization?' Robin
wondered. 'I can't think why they should be, but it seems to be so.'
  'The Colosseum was round,' Tilly reminded him. 'And the Pantheon.'
  'They were public buildings. Roman houses had corners like ours.
  'I can't think of anything round in England, except
Martello towers. Even the Saxons had square dwellings. There must
be a connexion, though I don't know what it is.'
  'Perhaps it is the furniture,' Tilly suggested. 'It doesn't fit
very well into round houses. Natives have scarcely any furniture
at all.' - p.40

She had besides that flame of animation without which all beauty
is petrified. - p.48

[The attitude of the Boers'] was simple. White men were few in a
savage black land and only by standing together and stamping on the
least sign of resistance could they hope to survive. The British
feudal spirit that prompted them to protect their own men against,
as it were, rival barons, appeared to the Dutch as a base
betrayal. The British were concerned with personal status, the
Dutch with racial sruvival. Each of the two peoples feared,
distrusted, and even detested the other's point of view.
- p.55

[This feudal spirit in the British, a sense of developing loyalty,
is one of the principal aspects in which they differ from the
American culture of faceless uniformity of relations. This has
struck a chord in feudal India, and remains one of the hardest to
remove legacies of colonization: everyone has to build his own
loyal cadre, without which all is lost.]

'It's curious how many people think they can make foreigners or
natives understand by shouting at them,' Robin once remarked. He
was quite right. On station platforms, in rickshaws, and
especially in hotels one often heard baffled Englishmen bellowing
angrily at mute, uncomprehending Africans such phrases as
'Where-is-my-bedding?' or 'This-bacon-is-cold,' as if hammering a
nail into a stone wall. - p.63