by Melvyn Bragg
RICHARD RATHBONE: The paternalism that lurks behind this is a very, very powerful bit of nineteenth-century reasoning. This was good for Africans, Africans were going to be saved from themselves, saved from the darkness by the combination of Christianity, commerce and civilisation, as it was seen.
Leopold’s association was to deliver those aims in the Congo, and Bismarck applauded him for having such principles. Leopold, personally, came out of the conference owning land that was seventy-eight times the size of his own kingdom in Europe. On this land, he was to become responsible for one of the major humanitarian disasters of the modern age, in which millions died. Melvyn wondered why he was praised by Bismarck, when previously he had called him a swindler and a fantasist.
JOANNA LEWIS: Maybe they think it’ll be all right on the night, but actually they don’t know the extent of what’s going to happen. He has huge support from abolitionists, from Baroness Burdett-Coutts, he is the toast of all humanitarians virtually, although there is just some scepticism.
Not all the European countries emerged with what they wanted. Portugal had hoped for more. Britain had protected its interests and had stopped France from getting the Congo even if that meant Leopold had it instead.
Within days of the conference settlement in early 1885, Richard Drayton said, the Germans claimed a protectorate over east Africa, the area covered by Tanzania today. The British soon tried to enforce their control over the Niger, sending King Jaja of Opobo, for example, away on a gunboat to the West Indies because he had interfered with British trade in the Niger. In the Congo, Leopold decreed very quickly that all vacant lands belonged to his territory and he created a private army, the Force Publique, to ensure there was a supply of forced labour.
While gold in South Africa transformed the profitability of the colonies from the 1880s, an industrial development in Europe was felt in the Congo from the 1890s.
JOANNA LEWIS: One significant discovery, which affects the Congo dramatically and increases the enslavement of peoples that’s going on there, ironically under the banner of getting rid of slavery, is the development of the inflatable tyre by Joseph Dunlop in the late 1880s. So that means that Leopold has got another lease of life in order to try to clear his debts.
For these inflatable tyres, Leopold turned his attention to the rubber vines in the forests and that led to conditions that inspired the story Joseph Conrad eventually told in Heart of Darkness after Conrad had sailed up the Congo. Some say he based the character of Kurtz on a Belgian officer in the Force Publique, Captain Léon Rom.
Richard Rathbone wanted to stress the extent to which Africans were agents in the nineteenth century, not simply passive recipients of whatever Europeans did. There were existing issues, such as those leading from the importation of modern firearms, which gave rise to serious warlordry in central Africa, and the breakdown of law and order, which helped the slave trade internally and across the Indian Ocean. There were civil wars within African kingdoms and, for many of those parties, the arrival of Europeans on the ground meant potential allies.
Picking up on this, Richard Drayton noted that, by the end of the nineteenth century, there were attempts by Europeans throughout the continent to transform what had previously been forms of collaborative relationships into ones in which Africans were more clearly subordinate. To him, many contemporary understandings of European imperialism essentially involve a retrospective application to the early nineteenth century of a kind of white dominance that didn’t really exist in the earlier period.
RICHARD DRAYTON: We could see the scramble for Africa, from another perspective, as having to do with what we might call the crisis of the middlemen states, which had emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the coast of west Africa and had actually become quite strong and wealthy, dealing in slaves first of all and then later on in palm oil and gum and other commodities.
Richard Rathbone pondered what might have happened if there had been no scramble for Africa, and whether there would have been more examples like that given by Ethiopia, which had retained control of its destiny to some extent. Richard Drayton noted the Europeans’ disproportionate, violent command of the world’s resources, and the impact it had on the forms of modernity that appeared in Ethiopia and, under American protection, in Liberia. Following on from that, when looking at the kinds of possibilities for decolonisation that emerged later on, the options were all extremely constrained by the structures set in place under empire.
MELVYN BRAGG: What would you say is the legacy, Joanna Lewis?
JOANNA LEWIS: The legacy of the scramble for Africa is that Africa gets divided up by countries who produce states that are too greedy, too rushed and too racist to live up to any of the humanitarian ideals that were on the books in the Brussels Conference in 1889 on antislavery and empire, and in Berlin. And so, at independence, they were then passed-over states and not nations.
As the programme closed, Melvyn apologised for rushing through, with so much to say in a live discussion of forty-two minutes. He picked up some of the themes in the newsletter he dictated in these years to Ingrid, the production assistant who has worked on In Our Time since the first episode. ‘After the programme ends, we have approximately thirteen minutes in the studio. Then a World Service programme moves in. In those thirteen minutes, we grab a cup of tea and a bit of fruit and generally talk through the programme. In this instance, the three contributors talked as fast, as enthusiastically and as intensely as they had done on the programme itself.’ They told him that North America, China and western Europe would fit into Africa. Joanna Lewis said that her favourite film was Anchorman and she managed to see it in full, twice, while flying over the Democratic Republic of Congo. On the question of the Congo, Mark Twain wrote a very long poem about called ‘King Leopold’s Soliloquy’ and, according to Melvyn’s guests, Twain ‘got him’. While the programme had left Melvyn almost winded with information, as he described it, and in the guilty knowledge that so much had not been said, he left the building. ‘Outside on the pavement – blow me down – the three contributors were standing together, intently continuing, with no sign of concluding, the discussion they’d had so vividly in studio 50F a few minutes ago.’
ASHOKA THE GREAT
In 1837, a young British administrator in Calcutta, James Prinsep, succeeded in deciphering a series of mysterious and ancient inscriptions. These had been discovered on rocks and stone pillars all over India. Prinsep proved that they were relics of the reign of an ancient king called Ashoka, who had lived in the third century BC. Ashoka ruled most of the Indian subcontinent for almost forty years, creating one of the largest empires the region had ever seen through ruthless military endeavours. But he later renounced violence and converted to Buddhism. In a series of edicts carved into monuments all over his territories, he depicted himself as a benevolent and kindly leader intent on the welfare of his subjects. Today it is believed that his influence was of critical importance in the development and spread of Buddhism.
With Melvyn to discuss Ashoka the Great were: Dr Jessica Frazier, research lecturer at the University of Oxford and the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies; Richard Gombrich, founder and academic director of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and emeritus professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford; and Naomi Appleton, senior lecturer in Asian religions at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh.
The Great Stupa built by Ashoka the Great at Sanchi, Madhya Pradesh, India.
Ashoka was a member of the Maurya dynasty, which came to power in India in the fourth century BC. Jessica Frazier compared the nature of that power to other examples in the world at that time, in the Mediterranean, in China and in northern India, in which there were many different states, kingdoms, city states and administrative units that were thriving and could be linked but were not yet unified.
JESSICA FRAZIER: Alexander the Great had almost unified this region when he came in and tried to take north India, but he retreated, he failed, prob
ably best for India. But this had left a power vacuum of different dynasties and it is into this context that the Mauryans are going to come into power.
She mentioned the stories, of uncertain accuracy, that tell of a political adviser named Kautilya, who is often credited as the author of the Arthashastra, a work that explains how to rule. These stories place Kautilya in that period, and say that he was insulted by one of the most important of the earlier dynasties, the Nandas, in the vibrant kingdom of Magadha. Looking for a champion to overthrow that dynasty, he put forward someone called Chandragupta Maurya, who succeeded in fomenting dissent within Magadha and took over the throne in 321 BC, establishing an extraordinarily successful empire.
JESSICA FRAZIER: There was great diversity – it was really not just an empire of states, it was an empire of ideas. And, among the most important of these, we get a real pluralistic range of religions. There’s the ritual Brahminic culture that later becomes Hinduism, but there’s also a swathe of atheist ethical philosophies.
This world included the Jains, who had a monastic culture and focused on non-violence, the Charvakas, who were early atheist materialists, and the Buddhists, who also had a monastic culture and a very strong ethical tradition that was going to be influential on Ashoka later on.
On top of the uncertainties hinted at by Jessica Frazier, Naomi Appleton recommended caution over the quality of the evidence about Ashoka’s life. There are later Buddhist biographies of Ashoka, for example, but not contemporary.
NAOMI APPLETON: We do hear that he was not the natural heir, according to some accounts he was very ugly, his father didn’t like him, he sent him off to quell an uprising but without any weapons, we’re told, so a clear indication that he didn’t think he was the chosen one. Some accounts tell us that he tricked his father into crowning him on his deathbed because his brother was away, and, when his brother came back, he tricked his brother into falling into a pit of live coals.
There are other stories that he killed ninety-nine brothers, half-brothers by the king’s many wives, and he was depicted as a violent character and not the natural successor. Naomi Appleton suggested that the violence of his pre-conversion life was exaggerated in order to make his conversion seem more remarkable.
NAOMI APPLETON: He’s said, for example, to have tested the obedience of his ministers by telling them to dig up all the flowering and fruiting trees and leave only the trees that had thorns in them. And his ministers queried this as a bit of a strange command, and in the end he got so impatient with them he’s said to have had them all beheaded.
Richard Gombrich emphasised the uncertainty even further, with the only contemporary evidence for Ashoka being his inscriptions. The Buddhist texts come from many hundreds of years later and it is typical of hagiography that if you want to say someone became a great saint, then you say he was a terrific sinner before.
MELVYN BRAGG: So you’re casting dispute on everything that’s been said so far?
RICHARD GOMBRICH: Absolutely, yes.
MELVYN BRAGG: Well, at least we know where we are.
Ashoka, though, was rather unique in leaving thirty-three inscriptions, which Richard Gombrich said were the first examples of writing in India. The inscriptions are all over India: some are on rocks, others are on pillars. In this way, Ashoka recounted that, when he was in the eighth year of his reign, he fought against the people of Kalinga, which is in modern Orissa, in eastern India. He was terribly distressed, he said, by the fact that 150,000 people were captured and enslaved, that 100,000 were slain and many times that number died after.
RICHARD GOMBRICH: He certainly modelled himself on the Persian habit of putting up great inscriptions, and Darius had put up great inscriptions saying that he killed hundreds of thousands of people, enslaved hundreds of thousands of people and so on. And this is a counter-statement, so to speak: ‘I do it differently.’ And he then says how he’s terribly upset and this caused him, really, a complete change of heart, and he converted to Buddhism.
Ashoka wrote at some length, he added, about how terribly people suffered when their relatives were killed, when all the people they respected were scattered, and Ashoka described it as an awful thing that changed his mind and made him into a Buddhist. There was another, later story that told how he was converted by a Buddhist monk on the road, but there is no surviving contemporary evidence for that.
RICHARD GOMBRICH: This is probably, I think, unique in the history of the world. He renounces war completely and says he will never again wage war and he hopes that none of his descendants will ever wage war, and that he will only reserve the right to defend himself if attacked. And I don’t know of any king, any great king, who has ever put up such a statement before or since.
Following his success at Kalinga, for which he felt such remorse, Ashoka commanded a huge area from Bengal to Afghanistan and almost to the tip of India, and he started to communicate his message across it. Jessica Frazier argued that Ashoka had to hold that region not by force but by ideas, and that was where the pillar and rock inscriptions came in. There was no paper for publishing, and there were too many villages to send out criers from a central point. According to Richard Gombrich, people gathered around the inscriptions and officials explained their meaning.
JESSICA FRAZIER: On the one hand, he has the pillars, quarried near Varanasi, sent up and down the Ganges, and they talk about his philosophy of life, his philosophy of politics and the kind of state that he hopes to reign over. He also has rock edicts inscribed much further afield, often on routes that are taking people outwards towards the Mediterranean, up into the Himalayas, down into the south.
These were messages not only to his own people but also to the people at the borders, written in Prakrit, an Indian language, but there were also some in Aramaic and Greek, and Ashoka talked about links with kings as far afield as Egypt and north Africa, as well as in Macedonia. He was saying that he was the kind of ruler people wanted, that he was not like other rulers. Naomi Appleton added that some of the messages on the practical steps that Ashoka took, such as digging wells, planting trees and finding herbs to cure diseases, were all proclaimed on the main routes across his enormous empire. Richard Gombrich mentioned another, where Ashoka said he should always be active for the welfare of his people and strictly commanded that anything that needed doing must be reported to him: even if he was in his bedroom, even if he was with his women, even if he was on the toilet, he must be informed, because he was the father of his people and he felt responsible for everything.
MELVYN BRAGG: And I think the big question that we all want to know is: was this mere propaganda or a bit of propaganda or not propaganda at all?
RICHARD GOMBRICH: I’m convinced that it was absolutely sincere. Why would you go to this immense trouble of talking about spreading your doctrine? He used the Buddhist term dharma and he actually says in these words: ‘What is dharma? Dharma is having few vices and many virtues, compassion, generosity, truthfulness and purity.’
Melvyn sought some further clarification of what Ashoka meant by dharma. Jessica Frazier explained that there are different spellings, from different languages, and the meaning for Buddhists was also multi-faceted, including things like the truth of reality, an ethical way of life and, specifically, compassion, which she described as the most impractical and yet one of the most idealistic of virtues.
When Ashoka translated these ideas into Greek in his inscriptions, he used the word eusebeia, a kind of piety, the good way of right conduct. The implication was that behaving in the right way was natural, and that it was easy to be ruled in an empire where Ashoka was in charge.
RICHARD GOMBRICH: He says: ‘Don’t rely on silly rituals. What you’ve got to do is to be kind to your servants, obedient to your parents, respect your religious teachers, be generous and give money wherever it is needed. And should these things not bring you good results in this life, at least you won’t have lost anything and they will certainly bring you good results in the next life.�
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These inscriptions were created during Ashoka’s reign, and are significant for how he is understood today. It can be hard to reconcile the Ashoka of the inscriptions with the Ashoka of the later Buddhist texts, though, the earliest of which date from the first or second century AD.
NAOMI APPLETON: The textual sources provide a very different account and they don’t seem to show any awareness of the Ashoka of the edicts at all. So, for example, the Kalinga conversion is not mentioned, he’s said to have been converted simply by a charismatic monk.
In the later texts, there are two main sets of legends about Ashoka. One is from north India, the early one mentioned above with Kautilya, and the other is from Sri Lanka and is concerned with the history of Buddhism there. These hold Ashoka personally responsible for sending missionaries to Sri Lanka, including his son Mahendra, also known as Mahinda. Naomi Appleton suggested that some of the perception that Ashoka sent out Buddhist missionaries, rather than envoys, may have been coloured by these later texts. Whatever the case with those envoys or missionaries, Richard Gombrich was clear that Ashoka listed a number of Buddhist texts by title on one of his inscriptions, and recommended that his people should study them.
Did Ashoka rule as he promised? On the evidence available, Jessica Frazier found that very difficult to assess. There were earlier reports from Greek travellers that indicated there were already sophisticated societies in India before Ashoka, well run, just as there were after, and it is very hard to find evidence for the difference he made.
JESSICA FRAZIER: People sometimes are sceptical because a lot of his most idealistic edicts are found furthest away from the territories he’s actually ruling. So, for instance, his remorse about Kalinga is expressed away from Kalinga. But, when he gets actually to the edicts that are in Kalinga, he doesn’t say, ‘Guys, I’m really sorry’, he says, ‘I’m just going to try to rule you well from now on.’
