A Nasty Man in Africa

Remote People
by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was an unpleasant man with nasty political and religious ideas, but a brilliant writer when he chose to be. There are places in this book where he does so choose.

Waugh went to Africa in 1930 to cover the coronation of Ras Tafari, the emperor of Abyssinia, for the Times of London. His descriptions of the ceremony and his travels in the country are vivid and often hilarious, though anyone who has read Wilfred Thesiger’s account of Tafari’s coronation may wonder whether the two men had ended up at different parties by accident. In his autobiography Thesiger presents Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), as a heroically, splendidly barbarous land; Waugh agrees about the barbarity but gives it to us as a gimcrack shambles, populated by savages playing ineptly and absurdly at a game, civilization, to which they do not know the rules. He claims to find it all very funny, but his humorous sallies, which tend to rely for their effect on racism, religious prejudice and snobbery, often fail to amuse because they are so obviously based on a mistaken interpretation of what he sees about him.

Evidently stung at some point during the interminable coronation by the tsetse fly of perversity, Waugh decided afterwards to take in even more of a continent that he must, by then, surely have recognized as disagreeable to his own constitution. He thus commenced to travel by road, rail and steamer down the East African coast, visiting Aden, Kenya and Uganda before making a detour into the Belgian Congo in the hope of catching an aeroplane to fly him over Central Africa to an Atlantic seaport where he could catch a steamer back to England. The last part of this plan failed, leaving him to return to British East Africa and make his way by train down to South Africa, where (his funds now almost exhausted) he bought himself a third-class passage home.

His brief stay in Aden, a hellish place that he mischievously pretends to like, gives us the funniest passages in the book. These describe an outdoor ramble with a Levantine businessman and his muscular European clerks that turns out to be a kind of Outward Bound test of manhood, involving climbs up precipitous cliffs and a swim in a shark-infested bay. He professes to like Kenya, too, and gives us a sympathetic portrait of the white farmers and the decadent Happy Valley Set, who in spite of their decadence were very much his kind of people. Unfortunately he then ventures to expound for several pages on colonial and imperial politics, about which he doesn’t have a clue. It’s demented waffle, all of it, and completely ruins his picture of Kenya for us by making it plain that he traversed Africa quite blind to anything that he had not, in some sense, expected to see. This affects our vicarious experience as much as it did his direct one, because we don’t get to read about anything new, or even about anything old from a fresh perspective.

From this point onwards his travelogue becomes a litany of tedium and discomfort, taking a nosedive into genuine privation aboard a Belgian steamer on the Great Lakes. This part of Africa, I have found, does not lend itself to enjoyable travel writing, principally because it so unpleasant and ugly in every aspect, from the scenery to the souls of the people who inhabit it. Waugh only recovers his composure when he has left the Congo and is safely back in British territory.

There is not much to the book after this. The last few pages, about a visit to a London night-club, seem intended to prove that the civilized world can be quite as unpleasant as the interior of Africa. All they really do prove is that Evelyn Waugh could find something nasty to say in almost any circumstances.