Frank Hives (–1938)

The memoirs of a colonial administrator in Nigeria in the early Twentieth Century. If you’re interested in colonialism you can send this straight to the top of your reading list. It lays out in shocking clarity the psychology of those responsible. This paragraph on the Aros is fairly representative:

“As a race they are deteriorating. They are less intelligent than they were forty years ago, and are gradually being absorbed by the Ibo population. In a few more generations they will probably not be identifiable by any of they former characteristics, though the new breed will likely inherit a good deal of original sin.”

If you were writing a parody of this sort of thing you would have to tone it down or people would think you’d gone too far.

Frank Hives’ mission was to penetrate upriver and ‘open up’ the country. Hives presents this as a fight of good against evil. He describes a situation where one tribe, the Aros, has come to dominate trade (including slavery) in a predominantly Igbo region by using fear, murder and religion. I trust Hives to correctly communicate his own opinions. His testimony is problematical when it comes to Africans because he hates them so much. His prejudices are so extreme is difficult to know where is the line between them and truth. That said, I know from other sources that West Africa at this time had serious sociological problems and I think the main thrust of the narrative is probably true. Hives appears to be unaware that his readers will realise that, whatever the faults of the existing power structures, his mission is not a fight against evil, but a fight to disassemble those power structures and leave the country ripe for colonial exploitation.

Quite apart from all this, the book is a real pleasure to read on a narrative level. Hives (and Lumley) really know how to tell a good story. He recounts one episode where he sees a ghost that really frightened me. It seems to be some sort of mass hysteria, but I did note that the ghost’s human counterpart had fallen prey to a previous colonial administrator whose mission had been the same as Hives’. I wondered if it might be his conscience working on him, though he otherwise shows no sign of possessing one.

At other times it had me in uncontrollable fits of laughter. There’s an episode with two goats. I’ll not spoil it with details, but it’s the sort of thing that if it happened round here people would say “Only in Norfolk”. Nice to see that human nature is the same the world over.… (mehr)