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African Assignment
- GenresAfrica
291 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1953
31 people want to read
About the author
Francis Wilfred de Guingand
5 booksMajor General Sir Francis Wilfred 'Freddy' de Guingand, KBE, CB, DSO
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 19, 2017
Freddie De Guingand was seconded to the King's African Rifles from 1926 to 1931, serving in Nyasaland (now Malawi). This is his account of those days -- much filled with hunting and travels around an Africa that no longer exists. De Guingand rose to the rank of major general and achieved success as chief of staff to Sir Bernard Montgomery from the campaigns in North Africa through Northern Europe. De Guigand's memoirs of Africa are an enthralling look into times past.
October 29, 2017
My current reading list: an unintentional survey of douche-y 20th century colonists in southern Africa.
1. Kenya Diary (1902-06), Richard Meinertzhagen
2. Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld (Namibia in the first few decades of the 20th century)
3. African Assignment
There are countless early-20th-century-white-guy-in-Africa books choose from, and few to none from other points of view. Shocker, these books all end up being pretty pro-white-guys-in-Africa, and I don't pretend to read them with anything other than an expectation to hate them cover-to-cover.
But there are nuances. Francis DG is the least offensive of the three. He exemplifies a sort of naive tally-ho enthusiasm and sincerity. He is beside himself when he gets an assignment with the King's African Rifles (KAR) in post-WW I Africa. He throws himself into the work, surveys for a road, becomes very wealthy, and cries when he says goodbye to his fellow soldiers. Though apparently they are silent tears: "I rather haltingly tried to say a few words of thanks for the way they had served me, and my Chinyanga, never of great quality, utterly failed me. I had to give up the attempt." I found myself wondering how much effort he made to learn Chinyanga, over his decade-plus with the KAR, if he hadn't yet learned to say "thank you."
Unlike "Kenya Diary" or Mansfeld, his racism is more patronizing and clueless than hateful: e.g. complaining of the "fleur de Afrique" that one had to deal when downwind from the troops. But his 1952 addendum is the most interesting chapter (and where the banal evilness of that racism shows best/worst). Painfully, a lot of his clumsy social analysis -- for instance his description of Africans, their inherent laziness, the poor conditions in the protectorates, the unwillingness to help themselves -- would feel right at home in a Twitter account today. (Maybe even one written from Moscow or the White House.)
The SA Nationalist Party had won the 1952 elections in a landslide, and his reaction is about as clumsy as humanly possible. Exactly what the newly elected party's policy of "Apartheid" means is still unclear to him (but it might be good! he concludes). He dismisses the alternative of a more liberal policy as politically unfeasible, while sweeping morality and economics and the rest tidily under the rug: "There can hardly be a handful of Europeans in South Africa who would advocate such a policy, for it would mean a swamping of their position and leadership." He comes back to that image of the white man being swamped, over and over, and fwiw he uses the same gd word: unions, parties, cities, everyone and everything in mid-century South Africa was under constant threat of being SWAMPED.
Overall, he is a textbook apologist for the status quo. Negro wages are four times the negro wages in some other African colony! South Africa spends more on negro education than any other African nation! Both galling claims when you consider the size of the SA economy relative to other African countries. And after that weak sauce defense of South African race relations, he disparages U.S. race relations at length: genocide against the American Indian, KKK, segregation and Jim Crow, etc. Apparently there was a lot of criticism coming from the US back when -sigh- people cared what the U.S. thought.
After all that, his expert conclusion: South Africa needs a massive influx of capital into separate, "non-European" facilities and training for housing, health care, and education. Nothing unfeasible about that. Tally-ho.
1. Kenya Diary (1902-06), Richard Meinertzhagen
2. Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld (Namibia in the first few decades of the 20th century)
3. African Assignment
There are countless early-20th-century-white-guy-in-Africa books choose from, and few to none from other points of view. Shocker, these books all end up being pretty pro-white-guys-in-Africa, and I don't pretend to read them with anything other than an expectation to hate them cover-to-cover.
But there are nuances. Francis DG is the least offensive of the three. He exemplifies a sort of naive tally-ho enthusiasm and sincerity. He is beside himself when he gets an assignment with the King's African Rifles (KAR) in post-WW I Africa. He throws himself into the work, surveys for a road, becomes very wealthy, and cries when he says goodbye to his fellow soldiers. Though apparently they are silent tears: "I rather haltingly tried to say a few words of thanks for the way they had served me, and my Chinyanga, never of great quality, utterly failed me. I had to give up the attempt." I found myself wondering how much effort he made to learn Chinyanga, over his decade-plus with the KAR, if he hadn't yet learned to say "thank you."
Unlike "Kenya Diary" or Mansfeld, his racism is more patronizing and clueless than hateful: e.g. complaining of the "fleur de Afrique" that one had to deal when downwind from the troops. But his 1952 addendum is the most interesting chapter (and where the banal evilness of that racism shows best/worst). Painfully, a lot of his clumsy social analysis -- for instance his description of Africans, their inherent laziness, the poor conditions in the protectorates, the unwillingness to help themselves -- would feel right at home in a Twitter account today. (Maybe even one written from Moscow or the White House.)
The SA Nationalist Party had won the 1952 elections in a landslide, and his reaction is about as clumsy as humanly possible. Exactly what the newly elected party's policy of "Apartheid" means is still unclear to him (but it might be good! he concludes). He dismisses the alternative of a more liberal policy as politically unfeasible, while sweeping morality and economics and the rest tidily under the rug: "There can hardly be a handful of Europeans in South Africa who would advocate such a policy, for it would mean a swamping of their position and leadership." He comes back to that image of the white man being swamped, over and over, and fwiw he uses the same gd word: unions, parties, cities, everyone and everything in mid-century South Africa was under constant threat of being SWAMPED.
Overall, he is a textbook apologist for the status quo. Negro wages are four times the negro wages in some other African colony! South Africa spends more on negro education than any other African nation! Both galling claims when you consider the size of the SA economy relative to other African countries. And after that weak sauce defense of South African race relations, he disparages U.S. race relations at length: genocide against the American Indian, KKK, segregation and Jim Crow, etc. Apparently there was a lot of criticism coming from the US back when -sigh- people cared what the U.S. thought.
After all that, his expert conclusion: South Africa needs a massive influx of capital into separate, "non-European" facilities and training for housing, health care, and education. Nothing unfeasible about that. Tally-ho.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews