Chris Dunton
THE BOY: BADEN-POWELL AND THE SIEGE OF MAFEKING by Pat Hopkins and Heather Dugmore (Zebra)
Robert Baden-Powell, the authors of The Boy remind us, “came whooping into the `Varsity of Life’ in England on 22 February 1857”. In 1895 he came to Africa – to the Gold Coast first, then Matabeleland, and then, notoriously, to Mafeking (now Mafikeng).
Ungracious, dishonest, a hypocrite and proto-fascist (charges Pat Hopkins and Heather Dugmore effectively sustain), Baden-Powell is remembered for his military strategy in defending the siege town and for, a few years later, founding the Boy Scouts movement. What he most decidedly deserves to be remembered for (and this is the main thrust of Hopkins and Dugmore’s book) is his role in the appalling treatment – betrayal is a mild word here – of the Tshidi-Barolong of Mafeking and its hinterland, and for the contribution his intervention made to the subsequent entrenchment of the oppression of blacks in South Africa.
Distressingly, for such a potentially appealing and important book, Hopkins and Dugmore’s prose style is – by and large – atrocious. The naff (possibly anachronistic?) use of the phrase “Varsity of Life” in the quotation above offers only a hint of what is to follow. Hopkins and Dugmore compulsively play Picture-the- Scene: as in their reconstructions of daily life language alternately hyperventilates and drops on the page like overripe fruit, the effect is generally risible (“the fronds of palm trees hung tiredly in the decaying air crawling with mosquitoes and thick with the odours of rotting fish” – well, that’s the Cape coast for you). Worse, the authors are effortfully offensive even where no offence is due, finding, for example, in a street in Dublin, “slavering boys and their flame- haired colleens … breathlessly losing their virginity against the walls of begrimed alleyways”.
I keep looking for some underlying deconstructionist irony to make better sense of this shlock, but, if such is here, it escapes me. The only justification I can think of for writing this way is that perhaps through this book Hopkins and Dugmore are trying to provide a narrative, an entertainment that alerts its readers to cardinal facts in black South African history that are usually omitted from writing of this kind.
Perhaps. The book’s title, and its explanation, are promising. “Boy” refers to the boy-man, Baden-Powell, to his suspected lover, the officer Kenneth McLaren, and to Sol Plaatje – at the side of the British throughout the siege – and all those other blacks demeaningly (and at best) referred to as “boys”. This is a neat and telling structuring device, but it’s not adequately worked through. McLaren, for instance, is rarely mentioned – and when he is, as Baden-Powell’s “little prince”, the approach is vaguely, sleazily homophobic.
Where the book comes into its own – and here, for the most part, even the prose style improves – is in Hopkins and Dugmore’s account of the treatment of the Tshidi-Barolong and other black peoples during the siege. Here the authors offer a sober account of a shameful history, tracing Baden-Powell’s callous cynicism – over, for example, the leave-or-starve policy for black refugees in Mafeking (when Baden-Powell sent Boer Commander Snyman a note protesting against Boer treatment of evictees, Hopkins and Dugmore record, “Snyman replied that the person sending these people to their death should not espouse their cause”).
Anything that brings that history to light is valuable, especially in the siege centenary year when, as Andr Brink points out, there will be an urge to “perpetuate myth and reinforce stereotypes”. The Mail of Mafikeng has run a series of articles this year on the hidden history of the siege; Hopkins and Dugmore in their book do make a contribution to the demolition of the lies, still sounded, of imperialist discourse.
Their final chapters (and these work well) highlight the significance of the siege, the relations between English and Afrikaner, the role of the British government and the increasingly ferocious oppression of the black majority, from the 1913 Land Act onwards. They end with an account of the hapless Afrikaner Vryheidsfront-led 1993 intervention in Bophuthatswana’s capital, Mafikeng/ Mmabatho, neatly bringing the story to some kind of closure.