AN
ICE-CREAM WAR
(New
York: Vintage International, 1999; c.1983, c.1982 UK)
By
WILLIAM BOYD
Review
by Hugh Murray
Boyd
has written a novel about the colonies – but without colonials.
All of the characters are white (one Indian insurance agent is a
minor exception). The Africans are described as porters, askaris
(soldiers), maids, etc. They are not described individually except
to reveal that some of the German askaris filed their teeth and
possibly filled the British with dread due to a brutal reputation. A
central character in the novel, Gabriel Cobb is a newly married
English soldier who is assigned to duty in British East Africa
(Kenya). The British stage a landing to capture the German East
African port of Tanga; the German defense is stronger than
anticipated, the British assault ends in chaos. Gabriel, fleeing
from the enemy's askaris, is bayoneted in his leg and torso. He is
then treated at a hospital in German East Africa (GEA, today's
Tanganyika). Several years later when he escapes the POW camp there,
he is pursued by a German officer, a man who farmed near the border
with British East Africa (Kenya), and whose wife helped nurse the
injured Gabriel at the hospital. When Gabriel flees, the Germans
suspect he has overheard information about the “Chinese thing,” a
secret project. The German orders his askaris to “get” Gabriel.
However, the German is shocked when they return with Gabriel's
severed head.
Boyd's
book contains 400 pages – some about Gabriel's wedding in late
summer England 1914, the couple's truncated honeymoon in Paris and
its Normandy beaches, and the quick call to colors at war's outbreak.
Meanwhile, Gabriel's younger brother Felix drifts from Oxford to a
touch of bohemianism and into a relationship with Charis, his
brother's wife after Gabriel is off in an enemy hospital in Africa.
Following a traumatic ending to the affair with Charis, Felix joins
the army with the wild hope of finding his brother.
When
war first broke in August 1914 GEA attacked the neighboring British
colony, but their intrusion was shallow – though deep enough for an
American planter whose farm was near Mount Kilimanjaro. The Germans
pulled up rails on his farm and burnt other supplies. On the other
hand, Britain ruled the waves, so the Germans in their colonies were
on their own, unable to be resupplied by the Vaterland, and one after
another surrendered or were decisively defeated: Togoland, Kamerun,
Germ. S. W. Africa, Kaiser Wilhelmsland, the Shandong Peninsula in
China. The British, with additional troops from Europe, India, and
West Africa began their assault on GEA at the small port of Tanga,
where the naval based invasion failed to dislodge the German
defenses. In this battle, Gabriel was wounded by the German askaris
and captured. The Germans then claimed the spoils of battle, gaining
supplies they could not receive from the homeland. Boyd is good at
describing battles.
By
January 1917 Dar-es-Salaam, capital of GEA was in British hands as
they prepared assaults against German positions to the south.
However, the Vaterland has not forgotten the colony. In November
1917 the Germans prepared a large zeppelin, the L57, to depart from
one of the Central Powers, Jamboli, Bulgaria, carrying 15 tons of
medicine, food, and military supplies to the beleaguered GEA. Boyd
weaves this fascinating episode into his narrative. The zeppelin
flew across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, across Egypt, across
half of the Sudan. But then it turned back to Bulgaria. This was
the secret “Chinese matter” that is part of Boyd's plot. In the
novel, Boyd has British intelligence, aware of the German secret
codes, signaling the airship that GEA has already surrendered, and
therefore it should return to Europe. Wikipedia relates that the
German commander in GEA, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, then stuck in
mountainous areas, believed it would not be safe for the dirigible to
successfully land in the rugged terrain as the airship might be
punctured and explode in flames; so he ordered it to return to
Europe. Whatever the source, the airship did return to Bulgaria, but
in doing so it established a world record of 94 hours in continuous
military air flight – a record that still holds after a century.
Soon
after WWI erupted W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that when Germany invaded
Belgium, it conquered the Congo. The Congo barely appears in this
novel, but had the Central Powers been victorious, surely the African
colonies would have been redistributed, with Portuguese and Belgian
colonies already discussed for transferal to more advanced nations.
Instead, the Kaiser Reich lost; all the Central Powers had
surrendered by 11/11/1918. All except German East Africa.
While
the Germans of GEA were losing Tanganyika to superior British forces,
the German forces (most of whom were native Africans), crossed the
River Rovuma to invade Portuguese Mozambique. They easily conquered
and resupplied the themselves while still being pursued by slower,
but more powerful British forces. Showing that they were not simply
picking on the weaker of the allies, the German forces then invaded
British Northern Rhodesia and continued to conquer and resupply.
When they overtook a British town, they discovered newspapers, days'
old, telling of the armistice and the end of the war in Europe.
Consequently, on 25 November 1918 von Lettow-Vorbeck capitulated to
the British. WWI was over. Those he surrendered were “155
Europeans, 30 of whom were officers, medical officers and higher
officials, and 1,168 askaris.”(p. 392)
Was
there any memory of these long-lasting battles that showed the
fragility of some of the colonies? That town upon town in Portuguese
and British Africa could fall to a small army composed mainly of
natives, which supplied itself on the spoils of battle?
In
the 1920s the films of Hollywood and perhaps Babelsberg were
pre-eminent, but Britain too had a film industry. And some of those
films were to be shown in the colonies. Some of the films for the
largest empire on earth would feature the American
actor/singer/former all-American football player, Paul Robeson.
Various African students studying in the UK were hired as extras, to
be natives in the films. Robeson would speak informally with many of
the Africans on the set, befriending some. One of the extras in
“Sanders of the River” was a young Kenyan, Johnstone Kenyatta,
and he and Robeson discussed issues of the day, such as Mussolini's
invasion of Abyssinia. In the 1930s the most famous civil rights
case in the US was the Scottsboro rape cases, beginning in 1931 in
Alabama after 2 young white women lied and said 9 young Blacks had
raped them on a freight train when all of them were hoboing in Great
Depression America. The Communists dominated the defense team of the
accused Blacks, and appealed the cases to the US Supreme Court for 2
major decisions on civil rights. The international Communist
movement also led in demonstrations to free the young men, making the
cases an international cause celebre with petitions signed on behalf
of the defendants by the likes of Albert Einstein and many prominent
intellectuals of the era.
In
Britain, a Scottsboro Defence Committee was organized in the 1930s,
co-chaired by Paul Robeson and the young African, Johnstone Kenyatta.
In 1939 the European war began and in 1941 it was a widespread Asian
war too. Robeson returned to the US. Kenyatta worked in the UK.
After WWII, in 1945 Kenyatta co-organized a Pan-African Conference in
Manchester, and the next year returned to Africa. He dropped his
Europeanized first name and became Jomo Kenyatta. He also became
head of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya against the British colonial
authorities. The 1957 film “Something of Value,” sought to
depict the struggle in the colony by pitting Rock Hudson against
Sidney Poitier in the battle for Kenya. In the movie, Hudson wins.
In reality, Kenyatta became the first president of an independent
Kenya in 1964.
Was
Kenyatta aware of the role of German askaris in overturning settled
colonial areas in eastern Africa? His brother had joined the
British troops in WWI but disappeared and never returned. Jomo
Kenyatta had studied at missionary schools for much of his early
life, a short stint at a university for toilers in Moscow, and
various universities in Britain. Nevertheless, could that determined
“German” army of WWI have been an inspiration for the successful
Mau Mau rebellion following WWII?
Boyd's
novel is a vocabulary builder, and many words from the WWI era are
sprinkled to season the pages of the book. Here is a list of some,
not all of which I was able to find in dictionaries: topee (p. 41),
dickie (66), landaulet (77), boater (89), jodhpurs (112), bandoliers
(125), pillion (131), Subadar (153), tarbooshes (179), puttees (229),
and kopje (367). Boyd, who is Scottish, includes a Scot who speaks
with such a brogue that neither the English Felix Cobb nor this
reader could comprehend the dialect.
There
are fashions in literature as there are in women's clothing. This
book was nominated for various prizes when first published in the UK
in 1982, even for the prestigious Booker Prize. But today, a novel
set in Africa without any real Black African characters would likely
be dismissed from consideration for lacking inclusion. There are
also fashions about book titles, designating them with titles that
have nothing to do with the novel. I have no idea why this is called
the Ice-Cream War after reading the volume. One hopes that fashion
has abated. After discussing the novel with an American friend in
Paris, he decided to google the ice cream war, and there found the
reason for the title. I quote from wikipedia: “The
title is derived from a quotation in a letter (included in British
editions of the book but not the American ones) 'Lt Col Stordy says
that the war here will only last two months. It is far too hot for
sustained fighting, he says, we will all melt like ice-cream in the
sun!”" As this is NOT included in the America version of the
book, no wonder the title seems bizarre. If the essential quotation
was deleted, the title should have been changed for the American
editions. Boyd is no Dostoevsky with
trick stories that force philosophical questions that haunt readers.
Boyd's novel is a simple. well-written story, and one from which I
learnt much.
