TLS on Africa

on Africa

Bertrand Taithe
THE KILLER TRAIL
A colonial scandal in the heart of Africa
324pp. Oxford University Press. £16.99 (US $34.95). 978 0 19 923121 8

A major scandal is often a window on to an entire age. One that illuminates African colonial history began in 1898 when, following a division-of-thespoils agreement with Britain, France sent a military expedition on a long trek across the western shoulder of the continent to consolidate its hold on the region. Under Captain Paul Voulet and his second in command, Captain Julien Chanoine, the expedition's huge train of African soldiers and porters marched from the Atlantic coast at Dakar to Lake Chad, far in the interior. Voulet, Chanoine and their men pillaged and destroyed villages, raped women, beheaded people who did not cooperate and left their heads on sticks, enslaved locals as labourers and concubines, and left a trail of burnt and mutilated corpses that almost certainly numbered in the thousands. Worried by reports that the expedition was getting out of hand, French authorities sent another force after it, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Arsène Klobb, with orders to arrest the two officers. In an extraordinary finale, Voulet and his soldiers ambushed and killed Klobb, after which Voulet declared, "I am not French any more, I am a black leader . . . . We will create an empire in Africa". African soldiers shortly mutinied, killing both Voulet and Chanoine.
Besides the horrendous violence, the story has other dimensions, and one of them is a link to another scandal. Chanoine's father was a prominent general who, while his son was marauding across the continent, became minister of war. France was then in the midst of the Dreyfus affair, and General Chanoine was an active anti-Dreyfusard. A further point of interest is that, as a brutal European driven by the lust for power, wealth and glory in Africa, not to mention a fondness for displaying chopped-off heads, Voulet bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr Kurtz, the villain of Heart of Darkness - which, as it happens, Joseph Conrad wrote while the expedition was under way. The Voulet-Chanoine tale is thus one of those times when life seems to reproduce fiction (although Conrad, eyewitness to the notorious brutality of colonization in the Congo, did not depart that far from life in creating Kurtz).
The Killer Trail by Bertrand Taithe, a historian at the University of Manchester, is the first full-length account of the affair in English, and Professor Taithe's perspective is a wise one. He knows that the contempt for African life shown by Voulet and Chanoine was common to many colonial officials in the Africa of their time - and, in fact, the chance to act this way was part of the appeal of Africa to young Europeans. He is interested in a question we often skip over: why do some events turn into scandals, while others, involving equally appalling cruelty, remain ignored or forgotten? In this case the main answer, of course, is that one of the victims was a white man - and a superior officer at that, who could conveniently be mythologized into a hero, thereby bolstering the army's honour just at the time that the Dreyfus case was undermining it. "In the Voulet-Chanoine affair", Taithe writes, "the Africans themselves were so disenfranchised in every conceivable manner that only through the killing of Klobb would the story come to light. Yet in its excess it became a monstrous curiosity rather than a revelatory moment." The author also knows that "the heart of darkness of 1900 remains that of 2010". The way these two officers were demonized 110 years ago while the commanders who ordered them off on a mission of conquest were considered law-abiding, he points out, resembles the way in which low-ranking American guards at Abu Ghraib were criminalized while those who ordered torture techniques like waterboarding now enjoy a comfortable retirement. In these ways, the Voulet- Chanoine saga has many echoes for our time.
The story is rich and promising raw material for a riveting volume of history, but unfortunately The Killer Trail is not that book. Its first chapter tells the tale of the mission in a highly jumbled manner; then, abandoning any possibility for narrative or suspense, the author plods through seven more chapters analysing the episode in relation to European ideas about Africa, colonial warfare, humanitarianism, slavery, the Dreyfus case, Conrad and more. The prose ranges from clunky to obscure, and is often both. What are we to make, for instance, of a sentence which reads, in its entirety, "The threat that runs throughout the Heart of Darkness is beyond the loss of social and cultural control, the ironic self-denial of Kurtz's ideals"? The maps included in the book are equally puzzling, and Taithe expects us to remember a bewildering cascade of names, most of them people who are mentioned briefly at the beginning and then pop up again only several chapters later, with no reminder of who they are. There is also a bit of sloppiness with well-known facts: the Boer War began in 1899, not 1898 and Conrad completed the writing of Heart of Darkness not in 1898 but in 1899 - and that novel begins on a yawl, not a "barge".
Before long, however, any reader of this book will be distracted from such issues by something else. The text reads as if it had been outsourced for editing to some place like the Eastern European nation of Slaka, whose inhabitants mangle the English language so colourfully in the late Malcolm Bradbury's comic novel Rates of Exchange. Here, "salve" is repeatedly used instead of "salvo", as in "the salves of French longrange weapons"; commas are missing; "freemason" sometimes appears as one word, sometimes two; semicolons are used incorrectly; a Paris official is referred to as "the minister of the foreign office"; and we read of the hero "Lord Admiral Nelson". Of a road, the text says, "The ghosts of the colonial past literally haunt this major artery of Niger". A reference to a "Tiauritanion film director" was baffling until an internet search revealed the man to be from Mauritania.
Then there is a veritable arsenal of bizarre usage: the text reads "sue" where it should say "charge" (as in charging someone with a crime), and "inscription" when what is meant is "message". A few of these peculiarities appear due to flat-footed translations from French, leaving Captain Dreyfus to be found "guilty with attenuating circumstances" and French West Africa to be called "Occidental French Africa" - ruled in these pages, incidentally, by a "government general" rather than a governor-general.
All writers make mistakes, and someone could find plenty of them in any unedited manuscript of mine. But we count on publishers to provide an essential safety net in the form of good copyediting and proofreading. Here, Oxford University Press has let its author down, to a degree I have never seen in a published book. Whatever the cause, it is an insult to readers and writers alike when a piece of work edited with such negligence is put out by a press renowned for publishing some of the most distinguished books in our language.


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