Sri Vikrama Maduro

Sri Vikrama Rajasinha’s captured throne

From about 1812 until 1815, members of the Kandyan nobility conspired with a foreign power, the United Kingdom, promising to acknowledge its suzerainty over their country in exchange for help in removing their king while confirming them in their titles and positions under a new regime. The parallel with what happened in Caracas on the third of January seems exact.
    There were hints of it before, but Marco Rubio’s remarks yesterday let the cat out of the bag. The US, he seemed to suggest, will accept whatever constitutional arrangements the remaining leaders of the old Maduro regime propose, leaving them in power and granting them impunity in exchange for acknowledgement of effective US sovereignty over Venezuela and a monopoly of the country’s natural and economic resources. The form of words to describe this arrangement remains to be worked out, but the practical meaning of it is that Venezuala becomes an economic colony of the United States and America takes over its oil industry.

    It seems obvious now how it was possible to find Maduro and capture him so easily. The arrangement with Rodriguez, Padrino et al. must have been agreed some time ago; since then, their agents have been keeping track of Maduro’s movements and informing the Americans. I wonder who the person was who made the approach and conducted negotiations from the US side. Who was the American equivalent of John D’Oyly?

    In the fall of Kandy and its incorporation into the British Empire, the Kandyan chieftains ended up being the biggest losers of all. They got what they demanded from the British all right, but soon realised how worthless it was under a new culture and economic dispensation that devalued their assets and rendered their privileges meaningless. The Venezuelan ‘nobility’ will discover, in their turn, that they have sold their country and their people out for fools’ gold.

    The people of Venezuela will realise it earlier. In Kandy, it took just two years before the Uva Rebellion erupted and almost succeeded in driving the British out of Kandy. In that rebellion, most of what remained of the Kandyan nobility was wiped out. I expect much the same fate to befall the Chavista elite of Venezuela.

A.G. Fraser, Missionary Imperialist

Fraser of Trinity & Achimota

by W.E.F. Ward

Alec Garden Fraser was a legendary headmaster at Trinity College, Kandy, an elite boy’s school run by the Church Mission Society in colonial Ceylon. Founded in 1872, it had fared poorly until Fraser was appointed head in 1904. He served there until 1924, though with many long absences in England and India as he pursued other work for the CMS and the Church of England. His Trinity phase formed only part of his career; earlier, he had been a lay missionary in British East Africa and his later working life, as an educationist and a priest of the Church, was pursued in Ghana, then known as Gold Coast.

    I did not read the whole book; my interest was in Fraser as head of Trinity and a contemporary of William Stone, another legendary Ceylon headmaster and a key figure in Thomia, my own history of St Thomas’s College, a competing elite school founded and supported by the CMS’s High Church rival, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The two men did not approve of each other or of their respective educational ideas (Stone once disparagingly described Trinity, which is built on a hillside, as ‘all steps and drains but no brains,' but were each firm supporters of Ceylonese independence, something that most Britons involved with Ceylon (as well as nearly all Ceylonese who had a say in the matter) had barely contemplated at the time. 

    I read the account of Fraser’s youth, skimmed the East African period and concentrated my attention on the chapters dealing with his years at Trinity, after which I set the book aside.

    Written in typical CMS missionary style – circumlocutive, bland and deeply reluctant to call a spade a spade – it is not a good read, although it brings out the driven, contentious nature of the man very well. The Society valued him highly – in spite of his remoteness from London, he played a substantial role in their counsels – but had to put up with a great deal from him. His colleagues at Trinity were ridden hard and often resented it; it is remarkable how many of them he quarrelled with and caused to leave, although he himself admitted their value to the school. The boys, of course, adored and feared him. All this aside, he was the saviour of an institution whose continuance was in doubt when he took it on, and he began the process of making it the great school it is today. He is a revered figure at Trinity, though one suspects that he must have been rather less generally loved there in his own time.