Colonialism is the habit of knowing what is good for others and seeing that they get it. Elspeth Huxley By Rob Nixon Illustration by Jana Rekosh months back, in the upper-crusty British magazine Harper’s and Queen, I came across a feature celebrating those places around the globe where expats continue to uphold the standards of “gracious colonial living.” Hong Kong and Singapore were named, as was Dubai, but Kenya held pride of place. There, we are told, it is still possible to live in dashing style if certain details are attended to: Servants: Kikuyu cooks and houseboys are the cleverest, but Luos ensure a more peaceful (if less well-run) establishment. The dream is still of the handsome Somalis who always ran the grandest houses. Key lingo: Lete—bring (as in “Lete gin and tonic”); Mbwa kali—fierce dog. Essential reading: James Fox, Baroness Blixen, Elspeth Huxley. Essential viewing: The Flame Trees of Thika. By now the list should be amended to include, as obligatory viewing, Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa which this April won the Academy Award for best picture. The trumpeting of imperial triumph, though never exactly stilled, did for a while grow muffled. Between 1947 and 1980, forty-nine British territories became independent. And by the eighties, the once-sprawling British empire had been whittled down—if one excepts the five million or so inhabitants of Hong Kong—to one hundred fifty thousand colonial subjects dotted about on some two hundred islands. Gibraltar, St. Helena, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Turks & Caicos Islands, Ascension Island, the Falklands. . .the merest confetti of empire. During the era of decolonization, history which had hitherto been told from the standpoint of the victors began to be retold from that of the (not altogether) vanquished. New international voices were heard. Aime Cesaire, C.L.R. James, Basil Davidson, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Eric Williams and others started to put together remedial histories chronicling the plunder. But now the redressing of history is itself being redressed, and imperial chic threatens to leave no room for imperial shame. More concertedly than ever, the British are recalling that they were formerly great and seeing to it, on TV, in film and in print, that the dulled image of empire is burnished once more. India was conscripted first for the restored empire of the imagination: in A Passage to India, Gandhi, The Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions, Mountbatten, Viceroy of India. But the brassy tones of Harper’s and Queen foretold what Out of Africa was to make obvious: Kenya (alias “Africa”) now too has been pressed into the ranks of a rehabilitated empire. If America has today stepped into Britain’s imperial shoes and is walking abroad more confidently than ever, it still lacks a strong national image of empire and is borrowing from a presently enfeebled Britain the glorious style that once went with possession of the earth. In Out of Africa that identification is less vicarious and moves closer to something more openly American. Pollack's Out of Africa, while feeding off a tradition of Anglophilia, is less wholeheartedly British than any of the Indian endeavors. V -A ut of Africa is at first glance an improbable commercial success.- A somewhat obscure Danish writer who ran a failed coffee farm in East Africa in the 1920s seems scarcely a powerful enough subject for a film that would gross $27 million in its first three weeks. And one that would bring in its train a retinue of titles: a combined edition of Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass, Blixen’s Letters from Africa, Judith Thurman's biography, a Sierra Club pictorial edition—Isak Dinesen's Africa: Images of the Wild Continent from the Writer’s Life and Words—and Errol Trzebinski’s Silence Will Speak, the story of Denys Finch Hatton’s life, centered on his romance with Blixen. But the plangent “I had a farm in Africa” that opens Pollack’s film resonates with a fine aristocracy of the imagination that is the film's style and its allure. Pollack’s empire, like Blixen’s, 4 Clinton St. Quarterly
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz