Michela Wrong

Whenever the legacy of colonialism comes up for debate, a Monty Python sketch springs to mind. It’s the one from Life of Brian in which Reg, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea, exclaims: ‘What did the Romans ever do for us?’ Corrected, he eventually concedes: ‘OK, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?’ It’s a brilliant exchange. But as Simukai Chigudu’s beautifully written memoir testifies, one that misses an essential point, in that colonialism’s bequest extends beyond infrastructure and administrative systems. Its most abiding – if tantalising – legacy has been psychological and emotional.

It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of the country. But it mattered a great deal to Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, the author of this book, as she was one of the children evacuated in June 1994. At 15, she did not meet the criteria stipulated by the convoy’s organisers, so she and her mother hid under a tarpaulin sat upon by the smaller children as the trucks worked their painstaking way through a series of road blocks manned by Hutu militiamen hungry for fresh victims.

In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating. The portrait Deibert paints is a million miles away from the Cold War binary world of John le Carré The DHL invitation was fake digital bait. By clicking on it, Abdulaziz had enabled Pegasus, a spyware program designed by a now infamous Israeli company, NSO Group.

What does it take to bury an outdated argument? The thought occurred while reading Motherland, one of a series of recent books seemingly haunted by the ghost of Hugh Trevor-Roper. Back in 1964, Trevor-Roper, an expert on the English Civil War and the Third Reich, made the mistake of opining on African history. There was nothing much to teach, he said, other than the history of Europeans in Africa. ‘The rest is largely darkness... And darkness is not a subject for history.’ He then added insult to injury with a snitty reference to the ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes’. These were silly remarks; but Trevor-Roper was the man who later authenticated the Hitler diaries, so not above the odd clanger.

‘If I’d died in my thirties, what would be left behind?’ is the question that keeps coming to mind reading this timely new biography of Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and philosopher who became an icon to leftist revolutionaries across the globe. ‘Would I want history to judge me by what I wrote at 36?’ For that was the absurdly young age at which Fanon died of leukaemia in 1961, leaving two key works to his name: Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. Not a huge legacy, then, in sheer numbers of words.

The mantelpieces of many an Asian family in Leicester and London, it is said, sport two framed photographs. One is of Idi Amin, the African dictator who expelled them from Uganda; the other is of Edward Heath, the prime minister who allowed them in. ‘This double gratitude,’ writes Lucy Fulford, ‘says thanks for throwing us out and thanks for taking us in.’ Asians filled teddy bears with jewellery and baked diamonds into snacks taken aboard their last flights out If the expulsion from ‘the Pearl of Africa’ of 80,000 Asians was the most traumatic experience of their lives, many also retro-actively recognise it as the best thing that ever happened.

Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in 2002. Just this August, William Ruto, a politician once charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC, was voted president of Kenya, wresting power from Uhuru Kenyatta, who had faced identical charges before the same court. A lawyer accused of witness-tampering in their cases then died in what looked very like a poisoning. So much for ending impunity for the ethnically targeted violence that swept Kenya after its 2007 polls.

Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she could become a spouse, he first had to raise her. Her education involved beatings when she left the house, even if it was only to borrow shallots from a neighbour. At 14, she gave birth for the first time. Successive pregnancies came like waves. Some of the children died or succumbed to diseases for which the only known treatment was prayer; most survived. She was a grandmother by her early thirties. In Ethiopia, it’s a story that ranks as utterly banal. Millions of women have lived it and millions will continue to do so, development programmes and government policy papers notwithstanding.

Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, hired me as guide for his first trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to research The Mission Song. Evenings were spent on the terrace of the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu, ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of Scotch. It was easily the most entertaining ten days of my life, despite the stonking hangovers. Cornwell proved to be a thespian manqué. The wry, extremely funny anecdotes about his career as diplomat, spy and writer, his charming conman father, his peripatetic childhood and his encounters with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Richard Burton and Rupert Murdoch were all gloriously enriched by the fact that he can do all the voices.

The highlight for me this year was the South African writer Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (Cape, £18.99), hugely topical at a time when Europe is contemplating what it means to be a refugee. I’ve repeatedly found myself recommending it to friends. Steinberg is a novelist camouflaging himself as a non-fiction writer, and his story of Somali tradesman Asad’s meandering journey across Africa — from the clan violence of Mogadishu via the slums of Nairobi and Addis Ababa to the townships of Cape Town and their vindictive, xenophobic attacks — is extraordinarily poignant. A real-life picaresque tale, it doesn’t contain a single dull sentence. Shame (Weidenfeld, £14.

Great men rarely come smaller than Haile Selassie. In photographs, the golden crowns, pith helmets and grey felt homburgs he often donned can’t conceal the fact that he is the shortest man in the room. It didn’t matter: for the 44 years of his reign — with a five-year interruption engineered by Benito Mussolini’s invading troops — he was effectively lord of all he surveyed. Ethiopia’s current government, established by a former Marxist rebel group, has always harboured mixed feelings towards Tafari Makonnen, as he was baptised.