Revising Stanleys footsteps: encountering

tlie otiier In Darkest England (1996) by

Christopher Hope
Henriette Roos
Department of Afrikaans & Dutch
University of South Africa
PRETORIA

E-mail; rooshm@unisa.ac.za

Abstract
Revising Stanleys footsteps: encountering ttie ottier in Darkest England
(1996) by Christopher Hope
/As has now become a familiar image in Hopes writings, once again ttie
idea of looking at a society from the position of an outsider and an exile
forms the central theme of Darkest England (1996). In this satirical novel,
the tradition of nineteenth-century travel writings set in a colonial context is
reversed, undermined, and then remarkably recreated to portray the
present-day manifestation of encounters and relations between (black)
Africa and the (white) IVesf. Presenting the (fictional) journals of a Khoisan
leader, David f/lungo Bool, within a dynamic frame of reference to classical
colonial texts by, among others, Livingstone and Stanley. Hope writes a
new travel report. This essay discusses how, by the reversal of point of
view, a change in time and space, and creating a satirical mood, the
colonizer and the colonized are interchanged and the original texts are
evoked to be rewritten. The notions of Self/Other, colonial /(post-)colonial
and primitive/civilized are placed in new and disturbing contexts, adding to
the complex structure of this fascinating text

1. Introduction
Surely the best known phrase in nineteenth-century travel writing is
Henry Stanleys rhetorical question: Dr. Livingstone, I presume? - a
phrase dating from 1871, and one to which many facetious and trivialized
meanings have been attached ever since. But from a current point of
Uterator21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

85

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

view, there is also much more to it than just being an idiomatic clich.
Withiin the context of its historical and geographical origin, the social and
political status of the original speaker and the one he addressed, and
because of the cultural and ideological echoes resonating through the
ensuing century, these four words encapsulate the tone, attitude and
perspective which not only characterise colonial histoiy but also suggest
some of the complex issues surrounding postcolonialism today. In 1996
Christopher Hope, a South African expatriate living in London, published
Darkest England, a text which inverts the whole literary tradition - a
tradition which can be called the rhetoric of Empire (Spurr, 1993) epitomized by Stanleys writing and especially that of his most famous
book, In Darkest Africa (1890). Hopes inversion is based on the satirical
recreation of voyages and discoveries, of barbarians and colonizers,
heathens and missionaries as seen through the eyes of a modern day
Dr. Livingstone.

2. Narrator and narrative

Darkest England is structured as a multi-layered narrative. The Fore

word, signed and dated (March 1995) by Christopher Hope, and the
Postscript form an encompassing frame. In these two framing parts a
narrator speaks in the first person of how he was given a torn parcel
containing two notebooks written by one David Mungo Booi, of what he
did with these notes and how he disposed of Bool's tattered hat which
was also included in the package of books. Within this frame a second
narrative unfolds; the contents of the notebooks are presented in eleven
separate chapters, edited by Hope in the form of footnotes and the
implicit translation of some passages originally written in the vivid,
earthy Afrikaans of the Karoo nomads (p. xviii); but now with David
Mungo Booi as the first person narrator. The storyline can be
summarized as follows: On a visit to a small Karoo town in South Africa
during that countrys first democratic elections of 1994, a narrator called
Christopher Hope is given two notebooks by a group of impoverished
Karoo nomads who, like David Booi, regard themselves as the
descendants of the already extinct San people. Hope hears from them
and reads for himself how David, a foundling adopted and educated by
an English Boer, was delegated by his people during 1993 to travel to
England to carry back the treaty granted them in 1877 by Queen Victoria,
the Old Auntie with Diamonds in her hair (p. xiv), and now to seek the
patronage of her great-granddaughter the Queen, because their lives
were trampled like those of dung beetles by black people and whites
and browns (p. 13). The notebooks chronicle this mission he undertook
in the name of the Bushmen Society for promoting the Discovery of the
Interior Parts of England, a journey also intended to explore the
86

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henrette Roos

possibilities of establishing a colony there and exploiting its commercial

possibilities for his people back home. On arrival David is jailed as an
illegal immigrant while he imagines himself to be a respected guest of
the Queen, and just before forced deportation he is released into the
hands of a wacky, defrocked bishop with whom he stays among the
strange people of the village of Little Musing. Here he revitalizes the life
of the bishops daughter Beth, a woman who, because of her huge,
swaying posterior, lives as a recluse in England, but whom David
regards as a remarkable beauty. He is stalked and poached for a mad
peers safari park, foxhunted but noisily rescued by Green activists,
detained in a madhouse but then released into the community without
receiving any treatment. He exchanges his little bag of uncut star
stones for far too little money, outwits the security at Buckingham Castle
by posing as a fruit dish, and finally, sadder and wiser, has a gratifyingly
frank discussion with the monarch and her spouse. In sympathy with
their reduced position, he offers them sanctuary in the Great Karoo, in a
kind of Royal Game Park, where their heritage and person will be
respected, an offer which they seriously consider but in the end
regretfully decline. David never retumed from this trip to England, his
final whereabouts and fate remained unknown. His notebooks and hat
were returned in a mysterious way, the latter eventually buried along
the lonely Karoo roadside by Christopher Hope, the inscription on the
pile of stones above it the same as that on Livingstone's monument in
Westminster Abbey.
Christopher Hope is mainly known as a novelist and has been awarded
some of the most prestigious literary prizes in Britain and South Africa,
although his best known works have been published since he settled in
England at age 30 in 1974. Themes of exile, of isolation within refugee
communities and of existential loneliness permeate his work; his
characters can be summarized in the same way as he has described
himself, namely as; one who would inevitably end up a stranger in his
own country (Dear, 1995:200). However, the images of alienation and
disillusionment are usually couched in witty, even hilariously funny
terms (as claimed on the book cover); and it is with this same satirical
perspective that Hope exposes in Darkest England the ridiculous
cruelties of the colonial mind; a book described in the Times Literary
Supplement (March 22, 1996) as often entertaining, more often angrily
moving (Korn, 1996). Most reviewers, however, have described the
novel as a modern travellers tale, written in the mode of Gullivers
Travels or even the works of Henry Fielding (Lourish, 1996:37).

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

87

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

3. Postcolonial experiences

The complex nature of postcolonial writing, and the disparate nature of

what constitutes settler and postcolonial experiences, are startlingly
revealed in this text. Hope himself was in his childhood part of the
internal colonialism of Apartheid South Africa, though he became a
refugee from this state through self-exile. But he also is a settler/ colonial
who migrated to the metropolitan capital, and one who - like the
conquered others - rails against the colonial power which in Africa
colonized both black and white, though in many different ways. He uses
the freedom of expression that the English language and the English
culture permit, to - as has been said of V.S. Naipaul (Boehmer,
1995:177-179) - articulate the fractures and discordances caused by
his personal experience of constant transition, failed acculturation and
underlying alienation in the new English life. In the person of the
bushman David Mungo Booi, a representative of that most reviled and
mistreated of all colonized peoples, Hope develops as the central idea of
his book the theme of how bankrupt and ridiculous, but also how longlasting, the notions of Empire and Colonialism are. Booi becomes a
present day version of the Imperialist explorers, thus displacing the
conventional representations of Western authority by the act of doubling
the white mans image (Boehmer, 1995:172). Being mimicked, the
colonizer is cut down to size in crafted and complex ways.
The novel is developed within a familiar sociopolitical context in South
Africa and Britain during 1993-1994. Through allusion and direct
references, the South African history of racial conflict is part of Boois
narrative. This includes the many wars between black and white and
between white and white, and with both groups participating in the
genocide of the San people. The historical motif culminates in the
democratic government elected in 1994, an event of which Booi only
hears when he is found deep in the English countryside by a latter day
Stanley (who greets him with the words David Mungo Booi, ek s
p. 185), and an event which brought these descendants of the San - in
fiction and in fact - very little of a new lease on life. From David Mungo
Boois perspective it is the timeless wanderings of the Ash people (the
karretjies mense), the anonymous nomads who criss-cross the Karoo
on their little donkey carts in search of piece-meal employment on the
isolated farms, which give history focus. He recaps their history by
recalling the ancient First Best Time when the land was fat and all the
fountains flowing, loved by the she-rain falling softly from heaven ....
(when they) roamed as wide as the wind (p. 4), an age followed by the
times of being hunted and killed by the whites. Then came the short-lived
joy of the Second Best Time, that season when the red-clad soldiers
from Britain (k)icked the arses of the Boers all the way from the Snow
88

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henrietta Roos

Mountains to Murderers Karoo (p. 4). In describing the typical rhetoric

of Empire, Spun- (1993:98) identifies a discourse of negation, that is,
the colonial text portraying Africa as having no history before the
colonizers arrived. This absence of history is starkly corrected wfhen it
becomes evident that from Davids point of view, the arrival of the
colonizers caused the ancient and rich San history to be destroyed.
Davids travels through England is contextualized by a dismal social
structure depicting the early nineties: the bankruptcy and suicide of
fraudulent businessmen, the vicious murder of little Jamie Bulger by his
young playmates, the soccer violence, the race riots, the burning down of
Windsor Castle, the conflict and chaos in the Labour Party and the
Anglican Church, the Royal divorces. In short, that period referred to by
Queen Elizabeth as her personal annus horribilis, and experienced and
described by a perplexed Booi as the true and accurate portrait of this
near-mythical island race (p. 99).

4. Text and intertext

The intertextual references in Darkest England are organized into an
extremely dense and multi-layered structure. The nineteenth-century
travel books of David Livingstone, Henry Stanley and Mungo Park, and
the writings of imperial authors like Kipling and the poets Keats and
Shelley, form the most important strain of intertext. But numerous
idiomatic cliches also intersperse his narration: like Boois speculation if
there were corners of foreign fields that were for ever England? or his
reaction during a sexual assault to lie back and think of Bushmanland
(p. 100, 179). These references illustrate the story line of the baby David
Mungo Booi being educated as a little Englishman by his Red-neck
master, an education based on his masters own lonely and drunken
delusions about a far off civilized, European culture.
From his old, rich books he taught me to say my letters, and told
wonderful stories of homble darkness and violent death, heathen
tribes and disgusting savagery, as related by the great English
explorers on their travels through darkest Africa from Bushmanland
to Stanleypool, from Bongas country to the mountains of the Moon.
Their names became my hymn; I still mutter them to myself when I
wish to sleep: Baines, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Grant, Kingsley,
Livingstone, Speke and Stanley ... Even now they make, when
strung together like beads, a little Anglican necklace (p. 7).
The passages on p. 112 and 214 give but a few more examples of this
frame of reference. But, in Boehmers (1995:173) terms, it is through
ventriloquizing the colonisers voice, that David Booi subverts and
Uterator21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

89

Revising Stanleys footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

upturns the dominant meanings. Passages from the great travel writers
taken over verbatim or in a slightly rew/ritten form appears throughout the
narrative, and especially Mungo Parks Travels in the Interior of Africa
(1799) provides a significant source of infonnation. The lofty aims of the
Africa Association, that venerable institution underwriting the fixation with
British Imperial Discovery, and which sent Mungo Park on his tragic way,
are renewed in the words of the wily but illiterate Karoo Nomads when
they decide to send David overseas. When Bool is almost raped by the
frustrated bimbo wifelings of his captor, the eccentric Lord Goodlove, the
whole of chapter 7 in Parks classic book is re-created in chapter 8 of
Darkest England. The similarities continue - David Booi, like Mungo
Park, never returned from his trip, both were evidently drowned in the
great rivers they wanted to explore (the Thames, the Niger), and all that
remained of both mens belongings were their notebooks and their hats
(Encyclopedia Britannica). Through these references conventional
meanings are destabilized, generating new and ironic interpretations.
Once again the reader recognizes binary stereotypes such as self/other,
hero/victim and civilized/savage - but now the traditional roles are
reversed. And in the reversal a sad awareness is conveyed of not only
how senseless, but also how enduring these stereotypes are.
There is, however, a second text that resonates through David Boois
tale. This is a collection of poetry which, according to the publication
date, he could not likely have known about, but which Hope in his role as
editor, refers to several times. The text is Return of the Moon. Stories
from the //Xam (1991), Stephen Watsons rewritings of nineteenthcentury prose narratives by the San. Watson based his poems on the
famous Bleek and Lloyd transcriptions of folklore, songs and other
stories told by Bushmen convicts languishing in the Breakwater Prison in
Cape Town during the 1870s. By referring to people and places and
terms appearing in Watsons poetry, the ancient narratives of a people
almost completely extinct are once more recalled. By recreating in a
different context the same mood of those eariy lyrical expressions, and
now also devoid of all satire and sneering, the idea that David indeed
speaks for his long gone ancestors (and does so in a similar mood of
nostalgia, with a great sense of loss and by means of beautiful imagery)
is firmly set. A pervasive sense of doom is also established through
these words: what happened to his forebears foretells his own fate. At
the beginning of the last chapter, Davids weariness and disillusionment
are evident in his description of the wet and dari< English park:
Too much water is never good; it sends people mad. IKwala gave his
creatures dry seasons, deserts, thirsts, so that they should ache for
the love of the All-High and pray for his gift, the sweet she-rain to fall
90

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henretle Roos
and make all below grow fat and moist. For everything God loves is
wet.
In my country when it rains all creatures pray, for then all the world is
holy. The green succulents step closer to the edge of the old dam
that has not seen water in living memory ....
But in England their rain means nothing to them; they consider it
merely water.
I slept as I imagine one will sleep at the last, when the after-world
awaits, a land - It is said - of locusts and honey. Those of my family,
knowing that water and melons and meat cannot last, will build me a
shelter against wind and sand and hyena, and, leaving what little
they can in the way of wild onions and brandybush ben-ies, slip away
for ever (p. 247-249).

These lines are in imagery and theme, and sometimes even in the use of
specific phrases and words, directly linked to poems like The
abandoned old woman and The rain that is male (Watson, 1991:43
and 48).
Through these and many other such passages the colonial rhetorical
tradition in which non-Western peoples are essentialy denied the power
of language and are represented as mute or incoherent (Spurr,
1993:104), is completely annulled. An alternative rhetoric, that of the
power, depth and beauty of the oral traditions of the San" (Watson,
1991:9) is recognised and revived.

5. Colonial counter-discourse

An absorbing counter-discourse to the conventional colonial rhetoric

takes shape in Darkest England - a discourse developed on many
different narratological levels. The authorial text - which I see as in
cluding the title, the cover illustration, the subtitle and motto, the detailed
subheadings of each chapter, the contents of many of the footnotes and
the direct comparisons made in the final postscript - gives perhaps the
clearest indications that it is with the eyes of the postcolonial, mostly
cynical author at the end of the twentienth century that the great
colonial accomplishments of the West are seen and evaluated. The well
known typographical style of early travel books and novels are visually
recreated with surprising effects, as can be seen in the subtitle:
Uterator21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

91

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

The Life and Strange

Surprising Adventures
of David Mungo Booi
who lived among
the English.
As told in his own
Words and written
down by Himself
and the subheadings of the chapters:

(p. 1)

C hapter One

The author tells something of himself,

his people and the great promise made by Old Auntie
with Diamonds in Her Hair; his expedition abroad
and arrival among the English
(p. 3)
The illustration on the cover mockingly uses the image of that other
intrepid colonial, the Belgian comic book character TinTin in the Congo,
showing four sturdy, bowler-hatted Englishmen carrying a black explorer
in a sedan chair into the mysterious Heart of England. The travel writings
of Livingstone, Stanley and Mungo Park are resurrected in style and
content (see eg. p. 1, 3,187,112), but by their use in a fictional work and
in the portrayal of a fictional character, simultaneously diminished to
fictions themselves.
Many of the rhetorical features recognized as characteristic of colonial
discourse appear in this novel, startling in their anachronistic bluntness,
but also with an unsettling and ironic impact on the reader of today. I
found it revealing to read Darkest England alongside David Spurrs The
Rhetoric of Empire. Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing and
Imperial Administration (1993) in which he analyses modern European
colonial discourse. Hopes satiric adherence to this kind of rhetoric is
very obvious. For instance, both Spurr and Mary Louise Pratt (1992)
refer to the rhetorical convention based on the visual mastery of a scene,
the monarch of all I survey gesture, typical of all Victorian explorers and
especially dear to Henry Morton Stanley (Pratt, 1992:201; Spurr, 1993:
17). This surveillance implied that the explorer, filled with self-satisfied
pride in the advantages and innate superiority of Western ways, saw
Africa as it might become under colonial rule. With this same eye of
appropriation, the explorer/author also invaded the dwellings of the
primitive and exotic heathens, regarding these as the lowly locations of
their inferior cultures, always comparing them unfavourably with civili
92

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henhette Roos

zation back home. As a final stage in this visual penetration, there is

the minute observation of the human (African) body itself. Stanley for
instance, continually comments on the bodies of the Africans he en
counters, describing them in the same quantifying way as one would do
with landmarks on a piece of land (Stanley, 1890:361-365). When David
Booi travels through England, he observes and is observed by others in
an almost exact repetition of Stanleys original imperial gaze:
Their land is a world made of grass, monotonous, broken by trees or
small woods with bulges here and there that pass for hills and a few
mountains. I estimated that one cannot run in any direction for more
than an hour without coming across a batch of little huts that seem to
burrow into the cracks and creases of the green, grassy skin like
fleas in an old springbuck pelt. The natives, on this island, are less
occupants than infestations. It is clear that they breed like rock
rabbits, and have done so since the beginning of time. If you were to
slice through the centre of a tall standing ant-heap in the Karoo and
examine the writhing life inside, you might have some idea of their
clustering, scunying, teeming millions. So it is in England (p. 75).
Here we approach the primitive origins of the famous stiff upper lip.
This may even be a fomi of penile substitution. Perhaps their
peculiarly repressive sexual culture allows stiffening of the lip, where
it frowns upon tumescence in other procreative organs? (p. 77; also
see eg. 113-114).
Through parody, the arrogant stare of colonialism is mocked in front of
the more tentative readers who are now watching with end-of-thetwentieth-century eyes. The brutal judgments of imperial eyes (Pratt,
1992) are thrust into our politically correct intellectual lives; not only
causing discomfort because the colonial roles are now reversed, but also
because the harshness of the description reveals a narrative perspective
directed by disdain.
A puzzling ambiguity is implied: David can be praised or pitied, but also
be feared.
Other rhetorical conventions are exploited in a similar way. To mention
but a few: colonial texts again and again explain the characters and
morals (or, more usual, the lack of them) of the primitive people in terms
of nature and the climate (Said in Williams & Chrisman, 1993:145; Spurr,
1993:180). This view also sees Africa as a hotbed of sexual passions
and excesses, one big erotic swamp, an integral part of the primitive
subordination to the uncontrolled, natural forces. To David such a
synergy also seems a given: the outer appearance of the English with
Uterator21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

93

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope

their pustular faces, bad teeth, a long nose and lower lip, the inability to
pronounce sounds properly and their repressive sexual culture, he
naturally ascribes to their grey climate and choked countryside (p. 30,
75-77). The allegorization of colonized nations in terms of the female
figure, of an exotic mistress and harems full of willing wives, and of the
transracial love affair as the pinnacle of a colonial adventure, are well
known nineteenth century clichs (Spurr, 1993:171; Pratt, 1992:81-85).
David also becomes involved in a related form of discourse, as the
seducer and the seduced. The sight of his permanently erect qwai-xkhwe
drives Beth and her father wild and causes three frustrated wives of the
mad Lord Goodlove to throw themselves at David with glee. These
seraglio scenes, where the traveller is inspected by foreign females
with a scientific-erotic gaze, are repeatedly described in Travels in the
Interior of Africa by Mungo Park (Pratt, 1992:82). Although David tries to
behave like a gentleman (also taking into consideration the growing
jealousy of the young soccer hooligan warriors of Little Musing) and
treats Beth with great courtesy, she stalks him like a hungry hunter does
a fat eland. She goes native for a while, bare breasted and wearing
grass skirts, camping in the rectory garden and singing to the moon.
David is left musing about how this attraction would annoy his people
back home, and wondering if by such an intimate relationship with one of
the locals, some of their less admirable qualities would not rub off on
one? (p. 124-125). These words echo Stanleys warnings about African
women, whose sexual attractions he saw literally as a threat to the white
mans life.
Through the medium of language and literature, assimilation, or
subversion by imitation, has remained to anti-colonials an important
mode of resistance (Boehmer, 1995:174). In Darkest England a
resistance to the standard colonial binary notions (eg. Primitive x
Civilized, Africa x the West, Margin x Metropolitan and Self x Other)
steers the structure of the narrative and the ideological core. But it is a
process of assimilated resistance during which these notions acquire
complex and relative meanings, their frames of reference often changed
and even undennined. For instance: even in a postcolonial world,
London and the monarchy still constitute to many once colonized
communities the metropolitan power, one that David respects and upon
which he depends. But this power reveals itself to a gullible David as a
corrupt, crumbling and disdained one. Davids offer to relocate Queen
Elizabeth to the Great Karoo where respect for age and tradition still
exists, implies that it is in the so-called margins, however impoverished
and isolated they are, that the real powers of meaningful life can exist. In
the termite like suburbs of the big cities the new primitives reign, while
among the nomads there are civilized neighbourliness and caring and
94

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henrietta Roos

love. The conventional clichd distinction betv\/een Self and Other is

given a new significance when examined from Davids point of view. The
bishop addresses him as my poor, deluded son, and Davids response
to this patronising attitude is;
They refer to all and sundry in familial terms: father, son, sister,
mother - kinship tenns used in a very casual fashion. Yet I soon
realized that they have a very vague idea of the patterns of kinship.
Perhaps they understood something of them once, but the memory
has faded like the duikers urine in the desert. For instance, they
know nothing of joking partners, as we do. Their system appears
functional to the point of akwardness: all foreigners are regarded as
avoidance partners; all related natives are held to be close partners,
or kith and kin. Or, as they say in their economical way, the world is
divided into Them and Us. This is, in our tenns, a crude distinction,
but it seems they know no other (p. 72).

Mary Louise Pratt (1992:7) uses the idiosyncratic term autoethno

graphy to refer to instances in which colonized subjects undertake to
represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizers own
terms. By this she means that the former subject, the other, uses the
traditional genres and narrative structures of the metropolitan culture,
and that the idioms appropriated and transformed are often those of
travel and exploration writing. Autoethnographic texts are typically
heterogeneous on the reception end as well, usually addressed both to
the metropolitan reader and to literate sectors of the speakers own
social group, and bound to be received very differently by each (Pratt,
1992:7). I would use this term to describe what Hope does in Darkest
England, in this case, however, dealing with an unusually complicated
version of the conflict colonizer x colonized. The part of colonizer should
obviously be awarded to Britain and that of the colonized to David Booi,
even though David intends at the outset of his journey to be just the
opposite. But as I have argued above (Section three: Postcolonial
experiences), Hope himself can be viewed as both colonizer and
colonized; once part of a colonial settler community, but eventually
settling uneasily in the superior metropolitan. Putting David Booi in
Stanleys shoes is thus not merely satire. Debunking nineteenth-century
travel writing and therefore the rhetoric of Empire, also implies a
questioning of the (metropolitan) literary culture with which Hope himself
has become identified, and therefore reveals the authors unease with
his adopted identity.

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

95

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

6. C onclusion
One could say that in telling the story of David Mungo Booi, Hope also
perpetuates a colonial stereotype; that the white male author still
manipulates the uncomprehending native whether he is presented as a
noble savage or as the stooge from Bongo-Bongo land (Boehmer,
1995:166; Hope, 1996:44). And it is true, David is mistreated and
appears to be outsmarted at every turn; in the end he is even killed,
probably by the kind of young thug he often pitied but in the end
misunderstood. This fate, however, mirrors more than the face of a
typical colonial victim. He also becomes a representative of all modern
day minorities, going down fighting against the diminishing consequen
ces of massification and neo-colonialism. But as an individual David
never loses faith in himself or his beliefs - a very remarkable revision of
nineteenth-century self-assurance - and perhaps that is why he is no
stereotype. His reflection of his relationship with Beth verbalizes this
attitude:
But the strength of the attraction was there, and it can be explained, I
believe, by very compelling characteristics we held in common: in a
world where others found us odd, we saw that we were beautiful;
and in a world dominated by height, two smaller persons found each
other truly towering (p. 125).

It is also possible to read the book as a personal, rather truculent attack

on a society that is in fact much bigger and more complex than the
selected slice portrayed in Hopes text. The reader may see the railing
against an England of 1993 and the Old South Africa before 1994 as an
outdated fight, and decide that the editor/narrator speaks too loudly from
an individual, highly subjective point of view. Both Hope and his
character David Mungo Booi can be called cultural halfbreeds in
Demdean terms; displaced identities belonging to the margins of two
worlds (Spurr, 1993:196). Revising Stanleys footsteps from the streets
of the London of today, speaks of a simultaneous nostalgia for and
disdain of the absolute certainties of an epoch long gone. Darkest
England in many ways reflects the disappointments, quirks and tensions
characteristic of our late postmodern age, and these general ailments
surface clearly and often in the book.
But in acknowledging its signal excesses and limits, I read Darkest
England primarily as a particulary interesting and very topical post
colonial text. It is a hybridic work, both factual and highly imaginative,
displaying bitter satire as well as moving, lyrical lines. It appears cultural
ly heterogenous, structured by means of multi-layered images, always
subversive in its intent. The specific postcolonial questions of Race and
96

ISSN 0258-2279

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

Henriette Roos

Politics and Power form the centre of the book; it does not focus on a
vague millennium malaise.
To the readers not part of once British dominated Africa, many
obscurities and silences exist which will complicate their comprehension
of and grip on the text. The South African family and place names - eg.
Prettyman Lottering and his wife Niksle, the farms Alles Verloren and
Abrahams Grave in the Murderers Karoo - are in many Instances
fictitious, but always recognizable as absolutely regional, and mostly
emotionally and politically loaded as well. The idiom is very often locally
rooted and represents distinct perceptions of a uniquely South African
world: the policemen and shopkeepers of the small Karoo towns; the
interracial snobbery and strife; the anti-British sentiment; the delusions
and idealism which form part and parcel of our political life. The
postmodernist notions of meaning as something arbitrary, of identity as
an illusion and of value as relative at best, are resisted and rejected in
this text. To David and the Ash People of the Karoo life is certainly
capricious, but hunger and poverty and a history of pain are realities
which they experience every day. Being part of the postcolonial
discourse would have very little practical impact on their colonized world:
The word of white people ... was worth no more than sheepshit" (p. 16).
Darkest England is a text which belongs to the grainy, agitated and
sometimes contradictory writings of most once-colonized literatures, a
creative contribution to the differentiated postcolonial discourse of our
day (see Boehmer, 1995:248 and Spun-, 1993:184-201). This is a dis
course aware of and understanding the particularity of different textual
situations, of locating texts in their specific worlds of meaning, of
resisting patterned and thus limiting views of our world. It makes possible
the encountering of the Other, respecting and getting to know more
about that Other, recognizing the complexities and contradictions and
not trying to construct only more copies of an idealised Self.

Reading List

Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors.

Oxford/ New York : Oxford University Press.
Dear, Pamela S. (ed.) 1995. Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. Volume
47 New York : Gale Research.
Encyclopedia Britannica. Micropedia Ready Reference.
Hope, Christopher. 1996 (1890). Darkest England. London : Macmillan/Picador.
Korn, Eric 1996. Heart of Whiteness. The Times Literary Supplement, 4851: 25,
March 22.

Uterator 21(1) April 2000:85-98

ISSN 0258-2279

97

Revising Stanley's footsteps: ...in Darkest England (1996) by C. Hope________________

Livingstone, David. 1857. Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa;
Including a sketch of sixteen years residence in the interior of Africa, and a
journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda on the West Coast, thence
across the Continent, down the river Zambezi, to the Eastern Ocean. London :
John Murrray.
Loutish, Simon. 1996. Red, white and blue. New Statesman and Society, 9:37, March

22

Park, Mungo. 1984 (1799). Travels in the Interior of Africa. London : The Folio
Society.
Pratt, Mary Louise 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London
: Routledge.
Spun-, David. 1993 The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel
Writing and Imperial Administration. Durham : Duke University Press.
Stanley, Henry M. 1872. How I found Livingstone. Travels, Adventures, and
Discoveries in Central Africa, including four months residence with Dr
Livingstone. London : Sampson, Low, Marston & Searle.
Stanley, Henry. M 1890. In Darkest Africa, or the Quest, Rescue, and Retreat of
Emin Governor of Equatoria. London : Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle &
Rivington
Watson, Stephen. 1991. Retum of the Moon. Versions ftom the//Xam. Cape Town :
The Carrefour Press.
Williams, Patrick & Chrisman, Laura (eds.) 1993. Colonial Discourse and Post
colonial Theory. A Reader New York : Harverster/Wheatsheaf.

Key concepts:
colonial discourse
{post-)colonialism
postmodernism
travel literature
Kernbegrippe;
koloniale diskoers
(post-)kolonialisme
postmodernisme
reisverhale

98

ISSN 0258-2279

Literator21(1) April 2000:85-98