CapitalistImperialistPig

My latest read is V.S. Naipaul's A Bend in The River. It can be considered another lens on Africa, in this case, immediately post-colonial Africa. Naipaul is a Trinidad born writer of Indian ancestry, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and often considered the finest writer in English currently around. India has been trading with Africa for many centuries, and the narrator is a member of an Indian community living on the East coast of Africa. Just after the end of the European colonial empires he goes to seek his fortune deep in the interior of Africa, buying a trading store at a bend in the big river, in a little town just starting to recover from post-colonial violence - a setting nearly identical in space if later in time than that of my last two novel reads - Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart . Not quite sure where the story is going yet, but I can say that the author fully lives up to his reputation. He is a terrific stylist w...

I've been reading Stanley Wolpert's India and one disaster Britain inflicted on India was one of those unintentional disaster intrinsic to modernity: midland factories and mills in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, triggered almost as many changes in Indian society and economic life as it did in (treat Britain itself. Manchester manufacturers' faith in laissez-faire and their lobby's power in Parliament put an end to the Company's monopoly privileges after 1813, opening India to rapacious armies of free merchants, seeking new and bigger markets for their prolifically produced goods. Cotton cloth manufactured in Manchester mills was sold up a thousand rivers throughout Bengal for half or one-quarter the price of hand-woven "Dacca," launching a revolution of sorts in British India's economy by putting millions of Indian spinners, weavers, and other handicraftsmen out of work in a matter of decades. Stanley Wolpert. India: Third Edition, Wit...

Ever since civilization began, the civilizations have been overrun by occasional waves of barbarian hordes. Some of our earliest records describe such invasions, and we have fairly detailed information about some of them - the feats of Joshua, the successive waves that flowed over Spain and Britain, the Muslim expansion, and others. India seems more subject to invasions than most, though, despite being pretty well fortified by natural barriers, and despite having developed a high technological civilization at a very early stage. At one level, this is a direct consequence of it's vast diversity - linguistic, cultural, and political. Conquerors, like Alexander, picked off one small Indian state at a time - India was unable to muster any unified response. Later conquerors, internal and external, relied on the same strategy. Perhaps the Aryans did as well. Somehow, India failed to develop a collective immune response to foreign invasion. Perhaps you have guessed that I'm work...

What's the practical use of history? Well, it's mostly captured in Edmond Burke's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" Those who do can often exploit it. In Guns, Germs, and Steel , Jared Diamond gives an example of a simple trap that Pizarro used to to help his tiny army defeat the millions strong Inca empire. His advantage, he claimed, was literacy, and his knowledge of the uses of the strategem from time immemorial - or rather from time memorialized in historical record. Without literacy, the Inca fell for the trap. Most literate civilizations have practiced some sort of history, and the West imbibed the spirit of Greek and Roman history and has been diligent in it's practice. The great exception is India. The oldest extant civilization has been singularly remiss in recording its own track through time. It's hard to believe that it hasn't sometimes paid Burke's penalty for that neglect. Almost all that we know ...

In Conrad's The Heart of Darkness , the jungle that borders the river is a wall or barrier between the river boat our narrator captains, and the darkness beyond. This barrier is both real and metaphorical - beyond are black limbs and white eyes peering out and sometimes firing arrows and spears. Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart , he says, as a response to Conrad. As a response, I find it more counterpoint than counter. It tells the story of a man in an Ibo village, with the first part coming almost entirely before any vestige of contact with whites, but the final grim conclusion impelled by the coming of missionaries and soldiers. Obviously Achebe lived many years after Conrad, but I suspect we can trust his depiction of village life. The life he depicts is neither idyllic nor squalid, but eventful, human and highly organized by principles of community and ritual. It was also sometimes violent, brutal and to our eyes terrible - twins were always murdered by abandonment, f...

I just finished the first of my "novels for 2013" - oops - it was short and I finished early. It was Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, often considered the best short English novel of African colonialism. For balance, I also read the acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's highly critical review. Beside's closely paralleling certain event's in Conrad's life, Heart of Darkness was also the inspiration and pattern for Apocalypse Now , the parallelism extending to the names of the critical characters Mr. Kurtz (Conrad) and Colonel Kurtz (Coppola) and their respective last words. Conrad's narrator is a sailor named Marlow who undertakes a journey up the Congo river to relieve Mr. Kurtz, a charismatic character who's dealing seems to produce an incredible bounty of ivory. Achebe's critique of the novel charges Conrad with racism, mostly on the basis of his portrayal of Africans and Africa. It's certainly true that no African character...