Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  After the triumph of Fidel Castro, and even more after the defeat of the US attempt to overthrow him at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, there was not an intellectual in Europe or the USA who was not under the spell of Latin America, a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions. Though this also drew me there, my chief reason was practical, namely linguistic. Historians who deal with the activities of ordinary people must be able to communicate with them by mouth, and Latin America was the only part of what was known as the Third World where large numbers of them spoke languages within my reach. For I was not concerned simply with a geographical region, but with a much larger unknown, that is to say the 80 per cent of men, women and children who live outside the zone inhabited until the last third of the twentieth century primarily by people with (notionally) white skin.

  For the first half of my life these 80 per cent knew nothing of the world and, give or take a few thousand individuals, the world knew practically nothing about them. Nothing is more impressive to someone of my age than the extraordinary discovery, since 1970, of the First World by the peoples of the Third World or – since these terms themselves belong to the era of the Cold War – of the possibility that poor people from anywhere can change their lives for the better by moving to the rich countries. Of course, with the rarest exceptions, such as the USA since the 1960s, we do not want them to come, even when we need them. A world dedicated to the free global movement of all profit-making factors of production is also a world dedicated to stop the one form of globalization that is unquestionably desired by the poor, namely finding better-paid work in rich countries. We have come to be so familiar with the century’s inhumanity that we no longer distinguish between refugees and the Afghan and Kurd emigrants transported in coffin-ships by emigration contractors, like the Italians and Russian Jews of the 1880s, who had just discovered that they did not have to live and die in the paesi and shtetls of their birth.

  For the first forty years of my life it was simply not so. Language – not the ‘national’ languages but what illiterates really spoke, the dense localized dialects or patois almost incomprehensible fifty kilometres away – isolated people from each other. Illiteracy, but even more, the absence of accessible radio and television, isolated them from what we think of as ‘news’, though not from one or two major world events. ‘Where is England?’ a Mexican farmer asked me, even in the 1970s, when I told him that was where I came from. (The first question to strangers in all societies that live by oral communication, including armies, is always ‘Where are you from?’) My explanations did not help. He had probably never thought about the Atlantic either. Finally he narrowed me down to something he had heard of: ‘Is it near Russia?’ I said, not too far. That satisfied him.

  Then non-white skins were exceptionally rare in ‘Caucasian’ countries, except for the anomaly of the African-Americans in the USA. Latin American immigration was so small that before 1960 the US census counted South and Central Americans together, without distinguishing between separate countries of origin. So, apart from European settlers such as the French-Algerians (actually largely of Spanish stock) and the Jewish colonists in Palestine, were whites who lived in countries with large indigenous populations. Ordinary whites were very unlikely in the course of normal life to encounter the pluri-racial street-scene of today’s large western cities. Except for small and untypical minorities very few whites not resident overseas were likely to know, and even fewer to be on terms of friendship with, people of other skin colours. Before the 1960s they belonged primarily to two groups: Christians (assuming the label stretches to include Quakers) and communists, both committed, in different ways, to a general emancipatory and egalitarian hatred for racism. And both, but especially the Marxists, on grounds both of practical anti-imperialism and the potential of eastern revolution, had a special interest in the history of non-white humanity. That is what had brought me into the ‘colonial group’ of the Party as a student and drew me into exploring North Africa, and eventually Latin America. And our ‘colonial’ friends, in my case mostly from South Asia, were our first windows into these worlds.

  Until much later I did not realize how untypical they were of their societies. Those who got to Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics were the elite of elites of the ‘native’ colonial populations, as soon became evident after decolonization. They also tended to be rather better heeled than us. They were family friends of the Nehrus, like P. N. Haksar of the LSE, who provided cover in Primrose Hill for the courtship of Indira Nehru with Feroze Gandhi and, as civil servant, was the most powerful man in independent India when I visited him in New Delhi in 1968. The man who came to meet my plane on the tarmac was my old friend from King’s Mohan Kumaramangalam, until recently a communist, then in charge of Indian Airlines, soon to be the minister perhaps closest of all to Mrs Gandhi until he died tragically in an air crash in 1973. His younger sister, Parvati, who visited Mohan in Cambridge, had now let her hair grow again, had married the General Secretary of the Communist Party and sat in Parliament. Another brother, an Etonian like his siblings but this time non-communist, had become the commander-in-chief of the Indian army. The Kumaramangalams of Madras were that sort of family. So, in a different way, were the Sarabhais of Ahmedabad, strict Jains who abstained from killing any animal however tiny, whom I came to know through Manorama, a close friend from LSE days of my first wife, who had Le Corbusier build her a house. They were one of the great Congress-supporting Gujarati business dynasties, textiles diversifying into higher technologies. Culture was probably their most visible public activity, but a Sarabhai was to be in charge of the Indian nuclear programme. For the first generation of independence, the affairs of an India of several hundred millions – public and private, government and opposition – were run by an extraordinary anglicized, modern-minded ‘Establishment’ of perhaps 100,000 people drawn from highly educated (that is, mainly wealthy) families, those who had served the Raj as well as those who had built the freedom movement. The bizarrerie of this combination came out at a Christmas dinner in the house of the doe-eyed Renu Chakravarty, by then a communist MP – the Communist Party had not yet split – and powerhouse in Calcutta. After ham and turkey, provided by Renu’s cousin, secretary of the Calcutta Club, which clearly had not abandoned the menu of the days when no Indian would have been allowed into the building except as a servant, came biryani and finally Christmas pudding, also provided by the Club and chewing pan (betel nut). They were anglicized even in the language some of them spoke at home and wrote or read most easily, for I had the impression that only the Bengalis among them, and perhaps some of the more traditional Muslim families whose radical young read the progressive poets in Urdu (admired by my old friends and comrades Victor Kiernan and Ralph Russell) lived their mental lives fully in a vernacular.

  There is only so much – actually not very much – that one can learn about a society through personal friendship. Friends may be too deeply rooted in it to recognize its peculiarities, and in any case class is at least as great a segregator of experiences as distance, culture or language. When the Party put him in charge of leading the tramwaymen’s union in Calcutta, and later the juteworkers of (West) Bengal my admirable friend and comrade from King’s, the late Indrajit (‘Sonny’) Gupta, subsequently General Secretary of the Communist Party and briefly Minister of the Interior, had as much to learn about the Calcutta working class as any foreigner. What I hope I owe to such friendships, based on the anti-racist comradeship of student communism, is the separation of the sense of equality from the consciousness of skin- or hair-colour, physical appearance and culture. The global village of business, science, technology and universities of the twenty-first century is so multi-coloured that this may no longer be a problem, although I suspect it is. Before 1960 or so the sense of racial superiority among western whites was reinforced by the sheer weight of western power and achievement in all fields except some of the arts, and the sheer bodily superiority of races commonly rega
rded as inferior, and so psychologically resented, repressed and overcompensated, especially by white males. The Israeli Jews made no secret of their contempt for ‘the Arabs’, especially before 1987, when their intifadas had not yet broken the passive acceptance of Israeli occupation of the Palestinians’ territories. It was a strange but instructive experience to be treated as one of them on my visit to the West Bank in 1984, the only time I have found myself living under the rule of a foreign military.

  The enormous advantage of communism, especially when reinforced by friendship, was that one could simply not treat a comrade other than as an equal. The patent self-confidence of the favoured few from the coloured ‘colonial’ elites who made it into pre-war British universities helped. Just as horses sense fear in their riders, so humans sense the expectation of being treated as inferiors in their respondents. Ruling classes and conquerors have always exploited this expectation of superiority. My pre-war ‘colonial’ friends did not expect to be treated as inferiors.

  Nevertheless, until I was awarded a travelling grant from the university to go to French North Africa in 1938, I had not been to what was not yet known as the Third World since I left Egypt as a baby. I travelled in Tunisia and east-central Algeria, from sea to Sahara, but never got to western Algeria and Morocco, and I acquired a lifelong scepticism about rural statistics in such places from a lonely French administrator in the field, ready to talk to any educated visitor. (‘When the government asks me for a livestock census, I make very casual enquiries, because the flocks would vanish into the hills otherwise. Then I look up what we said last time round, and put in a figure that looks plausible.’) I also acquired respect for the mountains and people of Kabylia and for the intelligence and erudition of the French Maghrebists and Islamic experts, even though most of them, like British African anthropology in those days, served the relevant empire. I met the leader of the small Algerian Communist Party, exiled into the Sahara after 1939 and killed, but not the then most important revolutionary, Messali Hadj. I have sometimes wondered whether I would have become a better historian if, after the war, I had returned to the research theme of ‘The Agrarian Problem in French North Africa’ which I brought back from my travels. People I admire – the great historian Braudel, my friend Pierre Bourdieu and the late Ernest Gellner – have been inspired by working in the Maghreb, and I can understand why. However, if I had, few would have noticed. Except, curiously enough, in sub-Saharan Africa, the end of empires led to a generation of amnesia about their history. Besides, the bloody Algerian war of the 1950s and the bitterly disappointing record of independent Algeria since would have rather marginalized the field. I note in passing that, while the future of Tunisia under its eventual president Habib Bourguiba was already identifiable in 1938, absolutely nothing discoverable about Algeria in that year would have led anyone to predict, or even to envisage, the force that eventually liberated the country, the FLN (National Liberation Front).

  II

  Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959 led to a sudden upsurge of interest in everything to do with Latin America, a region about which there was much rumour, but at that time little knowledge outside the Americas. With rare exceptions the locally resident Europeans, other than the Spanish war refugees and North Americans, lived in their own worlds like my non-intermarrying Chilean relatives, who still saw themselves as English expatriates or at least European refugees. (I think all my five cousins spent the Second World War serving their country in British uniforms.) Since the continent had been decolonized, it lacked the large, intelligent and documented literature provided by imperial administrators whose business it was to understand countries in order to rule them efficiently. Communities of expatriate businessmen, as the record shows, are almost completely useless as sources of information about the countries they operate in, although the British ones in their time founded the football clubs in which South American patriotism has found its most intense expression.

  Latin America was then remoter from the Old World than any other part of the globe – though not, of course, from the imperial power in the north, overseeing its technically independent satellites. It experienced the two world wars only as bringers of prosperity. It passed through the most murderous of centuries without more than a single brief international war on its territory (the Chaco War of 1932–5 between Bolivia and Paraguay), though not, alas, without considerable domestic bloodshed. A continent of a single religion, it has so far escaped the world epidemic of linguistic, ethnic and confessional nationalism.

  Latin America was not easy to come to grips with. When I first went there in 1962, the continent was in one of its periodic moods of expansive economic confidence, articulated by the Economic Commission for Latin America of the UN, an all-continental brains trust located in Santiago de Chile under an Argentine banker, which recommended a policy of planned, state-sponsored and largely state-owned industrialization and economic growth through import substitution. It seemed to work, at least for giant, inflation-plagued but booming Brazil. This was the time when Juscelino Kubitschek, a president of Czech origin, launched the conquest of Brazil’s vast interior by building a new capital in it, designed largely by the country’s most eminent architect, Oscar Niemeyer, a known member of the powerful but illegal Communist Party who, he told me, designed it with Engels in mind.

  Its main countries were also in one of the continent’s occasional phases of constitutional civilian government which was soon to end. However, the caudillo or personal chieftain of the old type was already on the way out – at least outside the Caribbean. The regimes of the torturers were to be collectives of faceless and mostly colourless officers. In South America the only country under military dictatorship at that time was the unusually old-fashioned Paraguay under the eternal General Stroessner, a nasty regime, kind to expatriate Nazis, in a disarmingly attractive and charming country, which lived largely by smuggling. Graham Greene’s touching The Honorary Consul is an excellent introduction to it. I am, perhaps, inclined to excessive kindness, for it was the only Latin state officially recognizing an Indian language, Guaraní, and, when I visited it some years later, I discovered that my name was familiar to the editor of the somewhat unexpected Revista Paraguaya de Sociologia published there, as the author of Rebeldes Primitivos. What scholar can resist fame in Paraguay?

  Nobody who discovers South America can resist the region, least of all if one’s first contact is with the Brazilians. Nevertheless, what was most immediately obvious about its countries was not so much its spectacular economic inequality, which has not ceased to increase since, as the enormous gap between its ruling and intellectual classes with which visiting academics had contact, and the common people. The intellectuals, mostly from comfortable or ‘good’ – overwhelmingly white – families, were sophisticated, widely travelled, and spoke English and (still) French. As so often in the Third World (to which the Argentines vociferously refused to belong), they formed the thinnest continent-wide social layer, for in their minds, unlike the artificial concept of ‘Europe’ in the minds of the old continent, Latin America was a constant reality. If they were in politics, they almost certainly had a spell as exiles in another Latin American country or a common trip to Castro’s Cuba; if academics, a spell as members of some multinational establishment in Santiago, Rio or Mexico City. Since they were thin on the ground, they knew each other or knew about each other. That is how in 1962, from the start, being passed from one contact to another, a visitor like myself could quickly find his bearings from people whose names meant nothing in Europe, but who turned out to be key intellectual or public figures. But the very fact that such people moved in a world equally familiar with Paris, New York and five or six Latin capitals separated them from the world in which most darker-skinned and less well-connected Latin Americans lived.

  Outside the already urbanized ‘southern cone’ (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile) these people were flooding from the countryside into the shanty-towns of the exploding cities, bringing their rural
ways with them. Sao Paulo had doubled in size in the ten years before I got there. They squatted on city hillsides as in the country they had dug up unoccupied corners of the big estates and built shelters and shacks, eventually to become proper houses, the way it was done in the village, by mutual help of neighbours and kin, rewarded with a party. On the street markets of São Paulo, overshadowed by the new high-rise buildings, the masses from the parched hinterlands of the northeast bought shirts and jeans on instalment payments and the cheap illustrated booklets of verse ballads about the great bandits of their region. I still have the copies I bought then. In Lima, Peru, there were already radio stations broadcasting in Quechua – in the early morning hours when the whites were still in bed – to the Indian immigrants from the mountains, now numerous enough to constitute a market, in spite of their poverty. The great writer, folklorist and Indianist José śMaria Arguedas took me to one of the music halls where, on Sunday mornings, the highland people came to listen to songs and jokes about ‘down home’. (‘Anyone here from Ancash? Let’s hear it for the lads and lasses from Huanuco!’) In 1962 it seemed almost unthinkable that thirty years later I would supervise the son of one of them for a doctorate at the New School in New York. It is an extraordinary experience to have lived with the first generation in recorded history in which a poor boy with an illiterate wife from a Quechua-speaking village in the high Andes could become a unionized hospital driver by picking up the skills of driving a truck and thus open the globe to his children. I have his long letter still, written in the deliberate handwriting and careful Castilian orthography of the autodidact. Though his life was hard by our standards, by those of the masses of day-labourers, street-sellers, casual and miscellaneous poor he was at the top.