Elkins and out

Previously logged on April 28th and May 13th last year in the other place.

'Britain's Gulag' having languished at the bottom of a pile for getting on for a year now, I decided that it was time to polish it off, one way or another. Polishing off did not include actually finishing wading my way through any more accounts of colonial brutality, but I did come to the summary of events which I offer below.

The inhabitants of what is now Kenya were fighting each other for land and status long before we arrived, it being in the minds of some of us to civilise them. Maybe to introduce them to Jesus and to sell them the strange idea that one wife good two wives bad. Maybe also to do something about their terrible sanitary arrangements.

Another part of this civilising process was to bring in lots of white settlers (many of them rather unpleasant types and not even proper farmers) and to give them lots of land. Land to which there might not have been any clear title beforehand, but which was certainly denied to the blacks afterhand. A process which rather reminds me of the current doings with settlers in Israel.

After a while the blacks, in particular the Kikuyus, had had enough and started to make trouble, trouble which some have dressed up into a civil war among the blacks, rather than a push for justice from the whites. We pushed back with all the brutality documented by Elkins. A brutality which gradually seeped into the awareness of folks back home, with Barbara Castle being one of the honourable few who tried to do something to stop it, aided and abetted by African-Asian lawyers, that is to say Kenyan lawyers of Asian ethnic origin. Eventually, in the early sixties say, the (home) government of the day realised that while it might have succeeded in containing its problems in Kenya, its position in Africa was untenable and we had to get out (all this being at roughly the same time as the French messes in Algeria & Vietnam). The alleged rebel leader was released from prison and became leader of the new country; a leader who was magnanimous enough to crack jokes with the governor who had had him jailed, and whose desk & office he had taken over. A leader whose main business was to bury the past, for better or for worse; a burying which us brits were only too happy to go along with. And Barbara Castle was given other fish to fry.

Excess deaths as a result of our incompetence, racism & attendant brutality look to be in excess of 100,000; a disaster of the same order as that perpetrated in Iraq some sixty years later. As the French would no doubt say, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. But the numbers are contested and a few minutes with Wikipedia gave me the following abstract: 'This article examines the allegation that up to 300,000 Kikuyu and others died as a result of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s. This figure was based on comparative numbers from the 1948 and 1962 censuses, but they failed to take into account the changes in the tribal classifications and differences in the coverage of the two censuses. Using data from the 1969 Kenya census, we have reconstructed the levels and patterns of mortality in the 1950s, and we show that mortality of the Kikuyu was consistently lower than those of the Kamba, Luhya and Luo peoples. We have also used unpublished data from the 1948 census to estimate infant mortality among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru prior to the emergency. Using this figure as an indicator of ‘normal’ mortality, we have compared them with the estimates derived from the 1969 census, and so calculated the number of ‘excess’ deaths. They amount to perhaps 50,000; more than half of them were children under 10. Given the fragile nature of the data and assumptions, our estimates are subject to large margins of error, but they at least give us an order of magnitude'. Will we ever come to rest?

PS 1: Elkins is an acclaimed Professor of Bash the Brit Studies at Harvard University, so I expect that she is more personable in person than she is on the page. And to be fair to her, while her book could have been a lot better and a lot shorter, it did serve its purpose. I do now feel I have something of a grip on the whole sorry business.

PS 2: Microsoft seem to have fiddled with my desktop again. Having just about learned how to fire up Notepad (which I use to strip unwanted formatting from things), they have seen fit to move it in the course of last night's very important update.

Media factlet

Not impressed by the much larger amount of coverage accorded to the terrorist attach in Kenya to that in Pakistan, despite the similar numbers of dead and injured.

I don't quite see quite why Kenya should be so much more newsworthy than Pakistan. Both of them are former British colonies, both have troubled pasts. Pakistan is a lot more Muslim than Kenya but I do not think that is the difference. One hopes, probably vainly, that it is something more edifying than some fraction of the Kenyan victims being white.

Deal 1b

From St. Leonard's continued into town to park next to the Royal Hotel, a hotel once graced by a visit by Admiral Nelson and his paramour.

Inspected the long and interesting High Street, interesting despite the large number of charity shops.

Found St. George's, which I initially thought was a 20th century construction, perhaps a reconstruction after bombing, but which turned out to have been built in the early 18th century. Large, handsome and apparently busy church, dressed on this occasion for a wedding. A double decker gallery with the lower gallery including the preaching chair and lectern, more or less in the middle of this snap. All most unusual, perhaps an ideal place from which to thunder out Finnegans Wake onto the congregation below. Perhaps with a learned explanation about the absence of an apostrophe.

Then found the Spires for lunch, a congregational church repurposed as a community centre. They did me a bacon sandwich, adequate but marred by the use of salty back bacon with too much fat and by decoration with crisps and a splash of salad. Not the real thing at all.

From there, along the esplanade to what was left of Sandown Castle (one of the three built by Henry VIII to keep out the French), then, having found a £20 note at the castle, back to the Foresters Inn for a drop of Paddy. Quiet and respectable house, catering mainly to older, respectable folk. Landlady ensconced on a handily swiveling chair. Rather busy for a weekday afternoon. Good atmosphere.

While there we pondered about whether it was reasonable for one Brian Thompson not to have known about the dark deeds being done in our name in Kenya while he was on national service there with the King's African Rifles along with a chap called Idi Amin - BH having picked up his memoir 'Clever Girl' from somewhere, maybe Raspberry Ripple (see above). Still not got to the bottom of that one.

PS: a toss up whether this St. George's was better than the converted church in South Street, Exeter, now a Wetherspoons, for FW purposes. The Wetherspoons has the minus of being an improper place, full of people who might not take FW seriously, but the plus of a very fine pulpit, carefully retained by the Wetherspoons conversion crew.

McCord

Yesterday to the McCord museum on Sherbrooke where we had first people clothing, Montreal miscellanea and Ben's deli.

A quality display of first people clothing, inter alia, nicely illustrating the way that the customs prevailing before our arrival changed after our arrival, both with our industrial goods, such as beads, and with our appetite for collecting first nation artefacts. Also reminding us that it was not just a tale of disease, depopulation and marginalisation. For some time, the first peoples were interacting and trading with the newcomers, on something more like equal terms, this being nicely illustrated by a blow up of painting of important members of the first nations wearing top hats along with more traditional items. We may have seen the original at Chateau Ramezay.

Like the Tudor aristocracy in England, the first nation aristocracy in Canada wore their wealth. Unlike the Masai in Kenya who herded theirs.

Montreal is gradually sinking in, so the display of miscellanea from Montreal was entertaining, particularly as regards the drive among the monied classes in the second half of the nineteenth century to emulate, if not ape, the customs of their betters in old world. I wonder this morning how much snobbery there was about old money and new money, considering that there must have been a good deal of the latter. There was also an early example of a maid powered washing machine, illustrated,

Our visit closed with the galley devoted to Ben's deli, which we learned was famous, in some part because of his smoked meat sandwiches, in the middle of the 20th century, before drifting to a rather sad ending in 2006, with the catering workers of today not being prepared to work the sort of hours in the sort of conditions which had brought the place to fame in the first place. After a heritage wrangle, a larger version of the sort of thing we have in Epsom, the place was demolished in 2008.

The museum café was said to be doing Ben's smoked meat according to the original recipe, but it looked both crowded and expensive so we settled for the new to us Pannizza along the road where they assemble and cook your pizza or panini while you wait, in 2 minutes 15 seconds to be precise, the pizza base being part cooked to get the time down this far. Not bad at all, although the pizza top had a tendency to detach from the pizza bottom, certainly much better than the slices of ready made pizza one can buy from hot cupboards in Leicester Square.

We did slightly better in the evening, taking poutine with smoked meat topping from the Lester's attached to our hotel (the Days Inn on René Lévesque), with Lester's being alleged to be one of the chains who had taken up Ben's mantle. The smoked meat turned out to be chopped and rather salty bacon and the poutine had rather too much rather strongly flavoured gravy in it. Not bad, but not a patch on the poutine which we had had on 15th October.

Reference 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bens_De_Luxe_Delicatessen_%26_Restaurant.

Reference 2: http://www.pannizza.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.ca/2014/10/poutine.html.

PS: according to wikipedia there is something in the Quebec language laws which prohibits the use of apostrophes in words like 'Bens'. Certainly the famous sign outside their shop does not appear to have one.