Tag Archives: colonialism

Somewhere Toward Freedom, by Bennett Parten*****

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Bennett Parten is a fine historical writer, and here he examines General William Sherman’s renowned march through Georgia during the American Civil War through the lens of the formerly enslaved people that followed him. It’s a job that needed doing, and I’m glad that Parten was the one to do it. My thanks go to Simon and Schuster and NetGalley for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The Union’s approach to formerly enslaved people evolved considerably over the course of the war. (This is your reviewer talking, not Parten.) In the beginning, when both North and South thought the conflict would be a brief one—ending, of course, in their own victories—anyone that left a plantation without permission to follow the Union army was promptly returned to their owner. But this was problematic from the start, if only logistically, as such practices slowed the army’s pace and drained resources from it, all in service to the enemy. For a while, then, everything was unofficial, as gradually, the formerly enslaved were sometimes folded into the army as support staff, helping cook, set up camps, pave roads, and whatever other noncombat roles needed to be filled. Eventually the practice was codified, not because slaves were declared free—not yet—but as “contrabands” of war. The idea was that by taking the enemy’s property that one runs across, be it livestock, crops, or (wince!) human beings, one’s own forces were strengthened, the enemy’s weakened. And after the Emancipation Proclamation, the formerly enslaved could theoretically go wherever they chose, but since guns and dogs can render such a proclamation from a far away and often unrecognized authority, it seemed like a wise plan for the formerly enslaved to follow the Union army.

Prior to reading this book, I was unaware of the relative size of the crowd of followers as opposed to the army itself. As Sherman’s forces made their way through Georgia waging total war, razing fields and burning cities, the crowd behind it grew from hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands!

Sherman’s first obligation, as he saw it, was to win this war. The army had to be his focus. Yet, as enthusiastic followers swarmed, they needed food, shelter, and sometimes other assistance. Initially, the troops were instructed not to give food to anyone other than those followers tapped to serve the army, but it proved difficult to enforce. There were children there, and they might well starve if not fed. The army had, as an intentional strategy, denuded the farms and villages of food and other necessary resources, so telling the followers to go find their own food was disingenuous. The army had nearly all the food there was; unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for thousands of extra mouths. And at times, Sherman and his generals made an effort to prevent, or to at least not help, the followers from remaining with them.

The greatest scandal was the one at Ebenezer Creek. (Sherman himself was not physically present for this, but what happened was consistent with his policies.) Georgia was full of rivers, swamps, creeks, and bogs, and in order to cross them, sometimes the engineers constructed bridges, and then either burned them behind themselves to prevent the enemy from following, or retrieved them for later use. In this instance, the enemy was close at the rear, and the order was given to pull up the bridges just as soon as the last soldier was across. The result was horrifying: with the hounds baying behind them, the desperate followers used every possible means to try to stay with the army. Some drowned; others were captured and either returned to slavery or killed. Women and children perished in those muddy waters, and later, the Federals launched an investigation.

There were other less dramatic, yet still tragic, incidents of the same sort.

In order to solve this conundrum, Sherman ordered a series of abandoned plantations in Port Royal, an island in South Carolina, to be turned over for the use of the freedmen and women. The book goes into a fair amount of detail about how these were run, with a fierce competition between two sides for control. Despite an overly colonial administration, formerly enslaved people were able to farm for themselves, and in some cases were able to buy land with the money they earned. It was a sound, if flawed program that was ultimately destroyed when Lincoln was murdered and Andrew Johnson, a sympathizer of the South, became president and gave the plantations back to their original owners, making no provision whatsoever for the farmers that now worked them.

It is this aspect of which I knew nearly nothing. Part of this is because I am a coward; I have a dozen or more books about Reconstruction that I say I will read, but then I don’t, and that is because I know the ending will be heartbreaking. But there’s also this: conventional histories of the Civil War tend to follow one or another army, general, and so forth, and very few tell the story of what happens after the army marches onward. And so I learned a good deal from this portion of the book; and yes, my heart broke, but not as much as those of the people that were first assisted, and then abandoned by the U.S. government.

Finally, I want to comment on the notes and sources used here. They are beyond reproach, with many primary sources used, multiple sources per endnote in most cases, and well-integrated. I particularly appreciated the quotations of the followers themselves.

I highly recommend this book to all that are interested in the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the many social and racial problems that have continued to weigh on American society ever since.

The Great Divide, by Cristina Henriquez*****

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I found The Great Divide, by Cristina Henriquez, on a short list of most anticipated novels of 2024. I don’t like to get shut out when a book gets this much buzz; then there’s the added draw of an unusual setting. The U.S. doesn’t see a lot of fiction published that’s set primarily in Panama during the early 1900s, and so that sealed it. My thanks go to NetGalley and Harper Collins for the review copies, both audio and digital. This story lives up to the hype, and I recommend it to you.

I am not so sure about it at the outset. There is a robust quantity of characters that are important to the story, and each of them is given a brief chapter all to themselves. I wonder whether they will ever intersect, or if this will turn out to be a collection of short stories, but before much longer, characters are meeting other characters. They don’t all end up together in the end, but we can see the ties that have formed. There are a lot of people to keep track of, and for me, having both the print version and the audio is tremendously helpful. Robin Miles narrates in a way that is natural and fluid, and I don’t notice much of what is around me when I listen to her. But once in awhile a character is mentioned and I draw a blank; here is where the Kindle version is essential, because I highlight the names of each of the characters, and this enables me to instantly flip back to where they were introduced to us without having to stop listening. Eventually, of course, I no longer need to do so, but knowing that I can makes for stress-free reading.

I am engaged with these characters, each of whom feels real to me, and I groan when I see them get into trouble, and sigh with relief once they are in the clear again. The ones that I care about most are a father and son that are estranged from each other, neither wanting to stay that way, yet both of them incorrectly interpreting the silence of the other. As we reach the climax, I can tell there are three ways for this situation to resolve: they can reconcile; one of them can die; or the son can decide to follow another character back to the U.S.A. without reconnecting with his dad.  It only now occurs to me that there was a fourth possibility, which was to leave them still estranged at the end; but by this time, Henriquez had shown herself to be a better writer than that, and while I won’t tell you how they wound up, I will say that she didn’t leave her readers dangling.

Because this is an intricately woven tale with a lot of equally important characters, I’m not including any quotes, but I will say that Henriquez is a talented writer, and anyone that loves good historical fiction should get this book and read it. This applies even more so to those interested in Latin American history and the building of the canal. I hadn’t read her work before, but she’s on my radar now, and I look forward to seeing what she writes next.

The Night Tiger, by Yangtze Choo****

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Choo is a force to be reckoned with. Her dazzling second novel, The Night Tiger, crosses genres from historical fiction, to literary fiction, to mystery, to romance, to magical realism; it’s deeply absorbing and unlike anything else being published right now. My thanks go to Net Galley and Flatiron Books for the review copy. It’s hot off the presses; get yours before they sell out.

We have two protagonists, Ji Lin, whose widowed mother has married a tin ore dealer, and Ren, an eleven-year-old orphan that works as a houseboy. The story takes place in 1931 in Ipoh, Malaya, which was the name of Malaysia when it was still occupied, part of the British Empire. As the story commences, Ren’s master, Dr. McFarlane, has died of malaria, and his last words instructed Ren to go to Dr. William Acton, find McFarlane’s amputated finger and return it to McFarlane’s grave. He has 49 days, and the clock is ticking. Go.

So powerful is Choo’s storytelling voice that I was most of the way through the book before it occurred to me to wonder: who puts that kind of responsibility on a little kid, especially since the task involves traveling alone to a different town? But Ren loved his master, and he’s a loyal kiddo. Despite an offer by his former master’s housekeeper to take him in, he forges forward, determined to do as bidden.

Ji Lin has a different set of problems. She recently reached marriageable age, but the only man she’d have considered desirable is engaged to someone else. Her stepfather is looking for candidates so he can be rid of her, and Ji Lin doesn’t like the same men her stepfather prefers for her. And in 1931, there are very few respectable alternatives for women to support themselves. She might like to train as a teacher, but she needs money right this minute, before her stepdad finds out about her mother’s Mahjongg debt. That man beats her mother savagely over much smaller things, and this gambling debt is potentially ruinous. Ji Lin takes an apprenticeship with a dressmaker, but secretly makes a lot more money as a dance instructor, a risky job that can lead to assault, a ruined reputation, or both. One night on the dance floor, as she skillfully parries a handsy salesman trying to make a move on her, her hand brushes his pocket and a little glass tube rolls out. She pockets it so she can check it out later, and oh hey, there’s a finger in there!

Ji Lin’s stepbrother, Shin is an intern at the local hospital, and that place is seriously messed up: “There’s a secret, white and yeasty maggot, which threatens to undermine the neat and orderly life of the hospital.” Just for starters, what happened to all the amputated fingers that are supposed to be in the storeroom with the other medical specimens?

At the same time, an unusual number of deaths have occurred lately, and there’s concern that it’s a weretiger that’s behind them. A weretiger is like a werewolf in reverse: instead of originally being a human that changes to a monstrous sort of wolf when the moon is full, a weretiger actually is a tiger that can at times become human.

Choo is masterly at weaving a complex plot, developing characters, and using imagery and possibly allegory as well; the river is a symbol that has been around as long as literature. But her greatest contribution here is in the way she uses all these things to create suspense. Once the possibility of the weretiger is raised in more than a passing way, I find myself examining every secondary character—and some fairly important ones—whose whereabouts are unknown at about the same time a corpse is discovered with tiger tracks nearby. Could that person be a weretiger? Could this one? No. Well, maybe. We learn that a weretiger is distinguished by a limp or otherwise deformed back foot, and so then I am eyeing anybody with a hurt foot or a limp or a wheelchair.

There are a number of threads that weave in and out of the story: troubled dreams are shared by Ren and Ji Lin, who have never met, and Ren’s dead twin, Yin, speaks to him. Ren’s “cat sense” guides him away from trouble and toward the finger. I often struggle with magical realism, because I’ll be trying to solve the story’s main problem using real world information, but then someone will do something people cannot do, and I yelp with frustration. But Choo sells me on the notion that there’s a weretiger, because now I know that a dead twin that magically communicates here; who’s to say there can’t be a magical tiger monster that’s killing the local folk too? Somebody sure as heck keeps leaving tiger tracks, and I know it’s not me.

The author provides information about Chinese folklore, including the weretiger, in notes following the story, and about halfway through the book I read the author’s notes before finishing the story.

The only part of this book that I don’t like is the romance that pops up between Ji Lin and her stepbrother. Ew, ew! Why does Choo find this necessary? It doesn’t add interest so much as distraction. When their mother goes bonkers and tells them to stay the hell away from each other, I’m right there in her corner. You tell them, honey. Hit them again. You can borrow my umbrella. Let them have it! Sick little bastards. The author goes to pains to stress that they aren’t biologically related and that Shin’s father never legally adopted Ji Lin, but who the hell cares? The incest taboo has nothing to do with biology; it’s a social construct. We don’t screw the siblings we grow up with, period. This aspect of the story is just plain tasteless, and if I were her editor, I would cut it clean out of there, making Shin the fantastic brother that he had been when they were younger and nothing else.

That said, I nearly went for a five star rating anyway, because it is so gratifying to see a well written story about any part of Asia during the colonial period that is not written from the point of view of the colonists and whose main characters are native residents rather than the occupiers. By showing the ignorant, patronizing way that local Brits—many of whom are expatriates because they aren’t decent enough people to be accepted socially back home—Choo exposes the true nature of colonialism, and for this alone, I could stand up and cheer.

With the single caveat emphatically mentioned, I recommend this story to you.

The Tea Planter’s Wife, by Dinah Jeffries****

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theteaplanterswifeGwendolyn is 19 years old when she marries Laurence Hooper, the owner of a tea plantation in Ceylon, an island nation south of India now named Sri Lanka. Jeffries provides a compelling, sometimes painful glimpse of the mores and assumptions of the heirs of the UK Empire at the outset of the peasants’ rebellion led by Ghandi. Though a few small glitches occasionally distract, this is a strong piece of fiction that fulfilled the writer’s mission admirably. Thank you to Net Galley and Random House-Crown Publishing for the DRC, which I received free in return for an honest review. The book is on sale today.

The protagonist is not a sympathetic one, and those that need a main character they can love should stop even considering this book right now. But some of literature’s most interesting characters are flawed ones, and the development of this one within the constraints of what Caucasians in the UK expected their lives to resemble at this time, and within the even greater constraints of material self-interest, is fascinating. I found myself wanting to haul this character out to the cheese room and tell her that all other women are not her enemies. She has almost nothing required of her by the easy life into which she has married, and as a local gossip points out, Gwen has “never had to fight for anything”.

Gwen has a passel of problems, however, some real, some imagined. She sees her sister-in-law as a rival not only for her husband’s affections and loyalty, but also for his fortune. She sees his wealthy former girlfriend and business associate, Christina, trying to pull him back into a relationship. What about MacGregor, the surly foreman of the laborers? What about Savi Ravasinghe? By the time the book was halfway done, I found myself alternately scolding her for making enemies everywhere and then, a heartbeat later, screeching at her to beware.

Ultimately I didn’t think I was impressed by this story until I looked back on my notes. I had highlighted nearly every warning bell and red herring and made little notations like, “Noooo!” Obviously this story engaged me all the way through. At times I was frustrated, but that was the author’s intention. At no time was I bored. And given the level of suspense and a certain amount of mystery, I realized that one genre tag had gone missing. I added this title to my “mystery” shelf, because there is so much unknown information that will keep the reader up late as well as any whodunit.

The author makes a few missteps that break the spell of time and place momentarily. At one point there is an argument between two of the characters about Ravasinghe, and one accuses the other of race prejudice, while the other responds that it “has nothing to do with the color of his skin!” This is either ignorance or revisionism. In the 1920s and 1930s racism was at a fever pitch. Colonialists based their system of rule partially on paternalism, which overtly declared that the “lesser” races needed the great white fathers to look after them, employ them, house and feed them. In the USA, Jim Crow and the Klan were at their all time most powerful; African-Americans were afraid to walk on the same sidewalks in the South, and in the North they nevertheless kept to their own neighborhoods to the greatest degree possible. Biracial marriage was an invitation to ostracism or even death, and less than one percent of the Caucasian population in any English speaking nation would even pretend that such ostracism wasn’t about race.

In fact, US President William Howard Taft declared that the day would dawn when the United States flag would fly at “equidistant points” that would include North America, South America, and Central America in fact rather than merely economically, and he told the American people that God had willed this due to the moral and racial superiority of Americans—by which he meant Caucasian Americans. In the East, look what the peasantry went through just to get the vote!  No, no white folks in the British Empire or USA were going to defend themselves against charges of racism; racism was assumed to be the will of God.

There’s another “oopsie” moment when the roof of a large building catches fire and the fire is put out with a garden hose and pots of water. No.

But all of this is mitigated by the expert manner in which the author describes the setting, having had a family member that lived on such a plantation, or a similar one. Part of the reason I wanted to read this DRC is the fact that it was set in Ceylon, and here Jeffries does not disappoint.  I was afraid the ending would either be saccharine or unspeakably brutal, but she deftly avoids both extremes and comes up with a surprising and believable alternative.

So in the end, I recommend this book to you. It’s not always easy for some of us to look in the mirror, or at the mirror of one’s ancestors, but everyone comes from somewhere, and the playing field still isn’t level. Nobody can fix what’s wrong today without knowing where the trouble came from. The Tea Planter’s Wife is a historical treasure in this regard; Jeffries is to be congratulated.

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochchild *****

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Just as Europeans once looked upon the Americas as land that was unclaimed and waiting to be discovered, explored, and claimed by Caucasian Christian civilizations, so too was Africa, referred to as “The Dark Continent”, ripe for exploitation when the Europeans arrived.

Initially, through their own caste system, tribal chiefs were absolutely delighted to trade away the Africans they themselves kept in bondage for the wonderful new munitions, cloth, and other goods that were offered. But their satisfaction turned to horror when they learned that where Black folks are concerned, Europeans just don’t play by the rules. King Affonso of the Congo sat down and wrote a letter to the ruler of Portugal, explaining that he had sent his son to Europe to attend school, and he was never heard from again. Now he has learned that his own family members were being rounded up by slave traders! There must surely be some sort of mistake.

African missionary, explorer, and British emissary Dr. David Livingstone traveled to Africa and was the first known (at the time) European to cross Africa from coast to coast. He returned to England to be feted and celebrated, and then plunged back into Africa…and stayed there. He was happy. Why go home?

Henry Morton Stanley was a journalist of uncertain origins (see the book) who went in search of Livingstone and found him, uttering the famous quote, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Meanwhile, a royal in Belgium grew restless. Leopold had delusions of grandeur, and why not? If France, England, and Spain could enjoy colonialism, why not Belgium as well? Leopold thirsted for power. He wanted to become a king. As African territory was snapped up piecemeal, he leapt in and grabbed a slice through the middle, in what would for a time be known as the “Belgian Congo”.

By now, slavery had been declared illegal in Britain, and so Leopold strode in to civilize and Christianize dark-skinned people whom he was certain could not do so for themselves. A great road was built there…and it went straight in from the ocean, and straight back out again. Leopold had learned of the ivory to be obtained through the wholesale slaughter of elephants. He offered prizes to locals who brought these forward, and assured them they would be protected from the aggression of any other European powers. What a deal. Leopold sponsored Stanley and gave him the royal seal of approval when he went in to further explore the area. In the end, Leopold claimed all of the Congo, an area, says the author, the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River. Many different tribes and cultures, some peaceful, some not, were brought under his ruthless leadership.

Leopold himself was almost a perfect villain, obsessed with power and obnoxious even to other Europeans of his time and station. When Prince Albert visited the new palace Leopold was having built, he believed he was complimenting the man when he said it would be like “a little Versailles”. Leopold took offense instead. “Little?”

But as amusing as anecdotes like this one are, the brutal fact is that tens of millions of Africans were killed under European colonialism. When Belgium was more or less forced to grant sovereignty to the people of the Congo, he sabotaged the new government of Patrice Lumumba, a popularly elected leader, by refusing to let go of the mines where the remaining mineral riches of the nation were located. The United States helped him crucify this man and was party to the manipulation of tribal rivals. Wholesale slaughter of unimaginable cruelty ensued. Multinational corporations were “also in on the take”.

Though this is a painstakingly written and riveting account, and the research undeniably fastidious, well documented, and scholarly, I would differ with the lame conclusions drawn at the end, namely that the United Nations should have sent in a peacekeeping force during the transition. Who is in the United Nations? Britain and the US, for starters? What a pitiful conclusion to an otherwise brilliant book. I know that if Malcolm X were here, he’d say this was “like leaving the fox to guard the hen house.” For this reason, I considered giving four stars. It’s just too well done otherwise to deny it all five, with this caveat: those final two pages of conclusions should cause any reader who makes it this far down in my review to understand I really mean, four and a half stars.

I say the only way the Congo or any other African nation can rule itself is for colonial powers to get out. Go home. There is nothing there that they own anymore; it’s over. Africans can rule Africa, as long as colonialists let go of the entire pie.