Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  Few people outside Britain, I think, find this picture entirely acceptable. To begin with, personal bribe-taking, although obviously a serious vice in an official, can be less grave than a form of corruption much more general at various periods among servants of the Empire: that vicarious form of corruption which consists in being an unquestioning agent of collective rapacity. Thus Sir George Trevelyan was, according to the conventional view, an upright civil servant. It would have been far better for the Irish people who were unfortunate enough, during the famine of the 1840s, to have their fate decided and sealed by Sir George, if he had been a drunkard and a bribe-taker with some compassion in his heart and less complacency about “iron laws” which enriched those whom he served.

  There is an area also—which the writers of this book ignore—where the satisfactions of being an instrument of collective rapacity cease to be entirely vicarious. Thus certain British administrators in Southern Africa in Cecil Rhodes’s time—and that was later than 1880 and they were true sons of the Victorian middle class—ignored, condoned or were collusive in illegalities committed by Rhodes, retired from the service and accepted seats as directors of Rhodes’s company. Almost certainly there was no explicit corrupt bargain involved in these cases. Rhodes, it was generally assumed, picked these men for his board because he was struck by their experience, prudence and ability. These qualities had, however, manifested themselves to him by the benevolent non-intervention (at the very least) of the officials concerned in relation to his activities during the time when they were still public servants. Other public servants could easily realize, without a word spoken on either side, how best to impress Rhodes with their ability, prudence and experience.

  Many people in the developing countries and elsewhere outside Britain are inclined to believe that by way of this kind of structure of tacit assumptions, corruption has been not so much eliminated from British public life as distilled into a more refined essence the nature of which tends to elude even those who are saturated in it. Thus we may be sure that Sir Sydney Shippard, at the very moment when he retired as Her Majesty’s Commissioner for Bechuanaland and took his seat on the board of the British South Africa Company, would have heartily despised and condemned any employee of his who took a bribe of £5. Such an action would have been “corrupt.” Yet Shippard, by his collusion with Rhodes, inflicted far more lasting damage on his African “wards” than any petty thief could have done.

  Developing countries—that is, poor countries—have not reached such a pitch of sophistication. Corruption, when it occurs in such countries, takes crude and often fairly open forms, forms often falling more precisely under the head of extortion than of bribery: a minister puts pressure on a bank to lend him money on inadequate security; a petty official exacts a “dash” for forwarding an application, and so on. No one can deny that these are serious social evils, that they are widespread in all the poor countries—although less widespread than is sometimes supposed in Europe—and that they help to keep them poor. I would agree with much that the authors have to say in their conclusion about cures for corruption: passage of time, spread of education, evolution of public opinion, growth in commerce and industry and in the professional class, and so forth, but the most disappointing feature of the book is that it makes no attempt to compare progress made in this direction in different kinds of developing countries. Their own experience is mainly with Nigeria—and what they have to say about Nigeria is interesting and instructive—but they seem inclined to assume that what holds good for Nigeria holds good for Africa and, indeed, the “emerging” world as a whole. This is an assumption which should be tested. For the regimes in the African countries differ very widely in character—and especially in their relation to the former metropolis and in the degree of evolution of political parties—and it seems rash to assume that these differences in regime have no bearing on the degree and character of corruption practised and tolerated. Are states like Guinea and Mali, where political power is really in native hands, less or more corrupt than states like Ivory Coast and Cameroon, which are managed by the former colonial power through a system of indirect rule? Such little evidence as I have suggests to me that in the genuinely independent states there is significantly greater effort to end corruption than there is in the nominally independent countries. If a serious study of corruption is to be made, this question surely deserves to be examined, and examined in conjunction with others—contrasting, for example, not merely nominally independent with genuinely independent, but also relatively poor with relatively rich: Mali with Ghana, Upper Volta with Ivory Coast. Admittedly the whole subject of corruption by its very nature tends to elude analysis, but a methodical effort at comparisons between situations in the various African states, classified in some such ways as I have suggested, would seem to be a more helpful starting point than a comparison between twentieth-century Africa and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Britain. A comparison between African states would, however, have to take into account the extremely important factor of the degree and kind of influence of the former colonial powers. This is a subject which most British, French and American writers on African subjects seem to avoid as if by instinct. Yet unless this factor is adequately and explicitly considered, it is impossible to write anything really illuminating about the political, social or economic life of Africa today.

  * Ronald Wraith and Edgar Simpkins, Corruption in Developing Countries, Including Britain up to 1880.

  THE SCHWEITZER LEGEND

  It is more than fifty years since Albert Schweitzer went to Lambaréné, in what is now Gabon, to practise medicine and found a hospital. In that time he has become a symbol, to a large white public, of altruism, self-sacrifice and dedication to the Negro. To educated Africans and Afro-Americans on the other hand—with a few exceptions—he represents the most irritating, if not the most noxious, aspects of the white man in Africa: paternalism, condescension, resistance to change. A by no means revolutionary African thinker, Dr. Davidson Nicol, Principal of Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, was applauded by a large student audience in Ghana some months ago when he subjected Schweitzer’s writings about Africa to severe criticism, pointing out in particular that in his famous “respect for life” Schweitzer tends to equate African Negroes with insects as two inferior forms of life which must none the less be “respected,” since all life is sacred. It is not likely that Schweitzer would have been moved by this criticism. He would readily concur with the view of a British nineteenth-century administrator: “the educated African, the curse of the West Coast.” The Africans in whom he is interested are the “simple” ones—the more primitive the better—and for their sakes he keeps his hospital also “simple,” that is to say primitive. The photographs, which are the best part of Verdict on Schweitzer,* show this clearly. They show Dr. Schweitzer and his helpers wearing solar topees—long since abandoned by everybody else, except some of that class of Africans known as “migrant madmen”—and fondling pelicans in the middle of a chaotic and artificially preserved medical slum. There are several—though far from enough—modern hospitals in Africa, and it seems clear that Schweitzer’s fame has brought him enough financial support to turn Lambaréné into such a hospital. He keeps it as it is because he believes that “simple people” would not come to a modern hospital: an opinion disproved by the experience of the modern hospitals of Africa. When he first came to Lambaréné in 1913, Schweitzer and his wife were running real risks, enduring real hardships and making a real contribution to the health and welfare of those among whom they chose to live. Today, by refusing to admit that anything has changed, this proud and obstinate old man has become a tragic anachronism.

  This is the story that any doctor who has visited Lambaréné tells his friends; it is therefore widely known throughout Africa and in the medical world generally. Mr. McKnight now tells it to the general public. So far, so good. But having shattered the Legend of Lambaréné—no difficult task, since the camera does most of it—he pursues the Man w
ith a dull, pertinacious hostility, an obsessive anxiety to find discreditable interpretations of the most innocuous biographical data, which can only make one reflect how much greatness must still smoulder, even in the wreck of Schweitzer, to arouse so much envious malice. Mr. McKnight’s writing has the worst features of the kind of British mass-circulation journalism which formed it; cockiness, ignorance, carelessness, prurience, innuendo, and lip-service to the highest moral standards. Schweitzer, Mr. McKnight is shocked to find, falls below these standards. When Schweitzer receives him, the old man permits himself the unsanctified luxury of sitting in a “chair padded with several layers of foam rubber,” while leaving the young journalist to sit on “a hard wooden stool.” His diet also is pretty lax: he has two hen’s eggs “specially reserved” for him each day: “Thus the jungle doctor whom the world sees as a saint ensures that his strength is kept up whatever happens to anyone else.”

  The old man’s depravity is in part explained by the tendencies of his early youth. He liked Wagner, a fact which when interpreted by Mr. McKnight gives us this sinister picture: “The music that later inspired the Kaiser’s and Adolf Hitler’s goose-stepping soldiers made a thunderous impact on the young man sitting alone in the stalls.” Schweitzer’s responsibility for the war was, however, even closer than this. The year 1905, in which Schweitzer gave up his academic post to study medicine was, as Mr. McKnight tellingly establishes, “nine years before Europe was brought to war by his Kaiser.” Having noted this chronological link with Hohenzollern aggression, we are not surprised to find that Schweitzer prefers “savages and cannibals” to his own family. Did he not refer, in an autobiographical work, to the “pain of parting” from Africa, although he had not used these words about leaving his wife and daughter in Europe?

  If the man who turnips cries,

  Cry not when his father dies,

  ’Tis a proof that he had rather

  Have a turnip than his father.

  Proof enough for McKnight on Schweitzer, certainly. Schweitzer’s early life was a sad business altogether. Snobbery and sex reared their ugly heads. He is entertained by Countess Melanie de Pourtales: “How cosy and titillating these aristocratic associations sound … and how hard it is to imagine them culminating in a life of abnegation in the jungle!” He goes for walks with a Miss Herrenschmidt. Mr. McKnight licks his lips: “Together we can imagine them roaming the student quarter and enjoying the piquant life of the city. Though he makes no excuse [sic] or explanation for alluding to her in an exclusive paragraph of his memoirs except to say that they ‘saw a good deal of each other,’ doubtless Schweitzer’s usual reticence about everything private in his life is reflected here.”

  One could forgive the debauchery, the writer seems to feel, if the fellow wasn’t so furtive about it. Even after he went to Africa his goings-on have something to do with sex, although Mr. McKnight cannot, greatly to his disappointment, find out just what, except that the nurses are women and tend to admire Schweitzer. Some of them are a little odd, and all have come a long way. One lady’s journey, by bicycle from Abidjan to Gabon, gives Mr. McKnight an opportunity to display his Africamanship:

  When the ship reached her port of destination, Mrs. Clent trundled her bicycle down the gangplank, mounted it, and rode towards the jungle. Her path to Schweitzer lay across nearly 1,000 miles of jungle, bush, scrub, wild-land, bad-land, swamp, river, tundra, forest, lake and plain. The tribes she would pass among contained many with savage reputations. Cannibalism is not extinct, by any means. (While I was in Lambaréné, there were seven convictions for it in Sierra Leone, farther up the coast.) A few miles east of Abidjan Mrs. Clent crossed the border into Ghana. Farther in the same direction she entered Togo; then Dahomey, Nigeria and the Cameroons. Here she turned south, though by now she had parted with her map and went only on the directions given her by friendly natives. Having cycled her way across the high Cameroon and skirted tiny Spanish Guinea, she entered Gabon. The end of her journey was unbelievably in sight.

  On this journey the lady was hardly in more danger of being eaten by cannibals than of freezing to death in all that “tundra.” Apart from mosquitoes and saddle sores, the greatest risk she ran was that of being knocked down by a truck on the busy stretch of highway between Sekondi and Accra. Catty about Schweitzer though he is, Mr. McKnight has uncritically acquired the Schweitzer vision of Africa: the Africa of 1913. All references to “the natives” in Verdict on Schweitzer reflect Schweitzer’s basic assumptions, to the effect that these primitive creatures are at their best when they are most “unspoiled.” “They are no good any more,” as a Belgian hired assassin once told the present writer, “when they are polluted by the Town.”

  Verdict on Schweitzer has its comic aspects, but the total effect of the constant drip of feeble spite is most depressing. Take, for example, the chapter boldly entitled “The Tragedy of Madame Schweitzer.” Here the writer wrestles flabbily with meagre data to get such holds on reality as these: “Schweitzer [in his autobiographical writings] deliberately avoided mentioning Hélène whenever possible. This could have been, and is believed by his admirers to have been, praiseworthy reticence … Nevertheless the rigorous skirting of Mme. Schweitzer’s role in events he was describing gives an altogether different impression from chivalry. And where she is mentioned the reader can be pardoned for wondering what special reason lay in the Doctor’s mind for choosing to reveal her.” If one starts from the assumption that Schweitzer is a thoroughly bad hat then it is clear that, whether he leaves her out or puts her in, he must have some discreditable motive, which, if one had sufficient imagination, one might even find. What the tragedy was I have been unable to discover from Mr. McKnight’s account, except that Mme. Schweitzer like other mortals was sometimes ill, may sometimes have been lonely, probably found the tropics hot, and eventually died. The culminating passage is a quotation, from Norman Cousins’s Dr. Schweitzer of Lambaréné:

  January 1957. The first time I saw Mme. Schweitzer I could see she was not well. The blue veins stood out in her forehead and seemed stark against the pure whiteness of her skin … When she spoke it was with considerable effort. Her breathing was labored … Once I saw Mme. Schweitzer start out across the compound, her weight bent forward on her stick and her whole being struggling for breath. I rushed to her side and took her arm. She looked up at me, somewhat puzzled, as though I did not know the rules of the game at Lambaréné.

  What a brute Schweitzer must have been—the whole context of this chapter in McKnight’s book implies—to reduce his wife to such a condition! The message loses some of its impact when one realizes, by comparing dates, that this description is of Mme. Schweitzer a few months before her death, which took place in Zurich at the age of seventy-five.

  It is discouraging that the Schweitzer legend still lingers on; it is no less discouraging that it can now be debunked in this particular way—a way that displays the maximum meanness towards the man, while leaving intact that dangerous illusion: the pasteboard Africa which he and his admirers think he is living in.

  * Gerald McKnight, Verdict on Schweitzer: The Man Behind the Legend of Lambaréné.

  TWO ADDRESSES

  In mid-September 1961 when United Nations headquarters in Elisabethville was under fire, mainly from mercenaries and local Belgians, the President of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, addressed to United Nations headquarters a message of concern for my personal safety.

  When this message was transmitted to me by Dr. Bunche I was particularly grateful to Dr. Nkrumah because I knew that messages of a very different character about me were reaching United Nations headquarters from other governments at that time.

  I had met Dr. Nkrumah briefly before this on two occasions. The first time was in May 1960 when he made an important address in Dublin in which he stated that if South Africa, having become a republic, was allowed to remain in the Commonwealth, Ghana would leave: a statement which was generally and rightly regarded as a prelude to South Africa’s extru
sion from the Commonwealth. The second time I met him was in New York in September 1960 when he addressed the Secretary-General’s Advisory Committee on the Congo—a committee on which I was representing Ireland at that time. I was impressed by his analysis of the Congo situation—an analysis which led me to reconsider my own approach to this question, hitherto largely conditioned by the atmosphere on the East River—and also by the patience and good humour with which he replied to some very aggressive questioning.

  After my resignation from the United Nations Secretariat and from my own country’s service in December 1961 in the circumstances related in my book To Katanga and Back, I received a telegram from Dr. Nkrumah inviting me to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana. Despite the high regard which I had for Dr. Nkrumah as an African leader, I had considerable hesitation about accepting this offer. I knew that relations between state and University had been strained and I had no wish either to appear as one imposed by a state on an unwilling university or to be caught in a similar though less tangible cross-fire to that which I had encountered in Katanga. Dr. Nkrumah invited me and my wife, however, to come to Ghana without commitment so as to see for ourselves how matters stood. We went there accordingly in February 1962. We were attracted to Ghana as all who know that country have been, and I found that not only the President but also the leading members of the teaching body at the University whom I met were in favour of my accepting the appointment—on the principle, I apprehended, that if I did not accept it somebody worse might be found. I agreed to accept it and in my first address to the Academic Board on October 12, 1962, I told the representatives of the teaching body some of the principles which would govern my tenure as Vice-Chancellor. The text of this address follows.