The announcement of an Italian translation of Waugh’s final travel book has appeared in at least two Italian papers. This is A Tourist in Africa (Un Turista in Africa) published by Aldelphi Edizioni. Here’s a translated excerpt of the review from the Italian books journal Il Libraio:Â
…But here the enthusiasm for travel returned: “ I declare, and with satisfaction, that at fifty-five I am in the season of life in which I must winter abroad , though to tell the truth it is a stage I reached thirty years ago. I liked fox hunting, or so I thought, but at Christmas time the enthusiasm faded”. Waugh perceives himself from time to time as the last traveller , because, he writes, by now “tourism and politics have made a scorched earth. And fifty-five is not an age for travel : too old for the jungle, too young for the beach, better to be encouraged by watching others at work, who lead a very different existence from ours. Few experiences are more exhausting than socialising with those who spend their holidays on the north coast of Jamaica and who are all older , fatter, richer, more idle and uglier than we are” . And yet once again he is about to touch at least the jungle and even the beaches, while his bad mood will decrease as always, graced by an Africa that is no longer the same.
The signs of the imminent decolonization , and the consequent end of the British Empire, are now increasingly evident . It is curious, however, that from Port Said to South Africa (but with a first stop in Genoa, which he finds wonderful and surprising), along the entire western coast of the continent, between uncomfortable trains, acceptable ships and hated planes, Waugh behaves exactly as in the decades of his time that one would presume lost (and regretted), between letters of introduction, very polite guests, solicitous officials who accompany him everywhere, real tours de force , mischievous explorations of cities that do not seem to reserve anything interesting and instead, like Mombasa, hide the little jewel of the Star Bar; where good people do not want to go, but Waugh has a great time.
Nothing seems to have changed, on the surface. The writer is actually welcomed more than ever with all the honors (he is very famous, even in America where his novels have sold very well), he does what he wants and gets everything he desires, he seems to become more and more pleasant and kind, in fact he admits it himself, wondering why; his bitter moods emerge here and there but towards third parties and not directed at his interlocutors, as when he asks himself “to what extent the loss of prestige of Europeans in hot countries depends on the vile preference for comfort at the expense of dignity” given that his fellow countrymen resident there go around in shorts. He admires the Masai, but basically almost does not see – or pretends not to see – the local populations, he amuses himself with cannibal legends .
His Africa is largely English, Boers and Germans – the latter being highly recommendable as hoteliers unlike their compatriots, and this is underlined by a snarling and hilarious trait of futility.
The snows of Kilimanjaro, for example, have no Hemingway effect ; if anything, they are memorable for a healthy drop in temperature and “a solid, old-fashioned German inn, with balconies, a terrace, a lawn, a flower garden and a cage of monkeys”. The eastern highlands of Rhodesia , which he greatly enjoys, offer him the opportunity to take it out on tourism on the French Riviera, where “the survivors and imitators of the elegant young neurotics described by FS Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night are now those greasy masses of flesh that the proletariat besieges and invades”; and to reiterate that “The craze for sunbathing has lasted too long”. In Tanzania, the coastal town of Pangani gives rise to some Hamlet-like doubts, because “perhaps it will not survive for long. It is of little use to modern Africa. Should I be afraid of disturbing its gentle decadence by recommending it to tourists? I don’t think so”.
He was wrong, Pangani is still a destination, even if it is out of the way . But that is not what interests Waugh. He pretends to write a book for potential tourists who do not matter to him; the title itself is probably a provocative fiction, the framework to tell, almost between the lines, a world that is waning. He knows well that by now, at the height of the Sixties, everything is changing . He sweats, toils and has fun, but what he sees is not nature, it is the end of an empire, of a white society that now lives in a subtle sense of temporariness. There is no lack of allusions to independence movements , but as if they emerged by chance from some chat over a glass of whisky; and so the failures of the Labour government (which he detested) to try out a colonialism with a human face and launch bizarre and disastrous development plan
In some cases, many barely hinted references to the political reality of the time may seem cryptic to the Italian reader, but that is not what counts in the magnificent writing of a fascinating, irresistible antipathetic . At the end, almost as if to remind us that he is well aware of the situation, but has decided not to address it explicitly, Waugh performs an extraordinary excusatio non petita , which is perhaps the key to the book – and the recognition of tourism as the great fiction of its time: “It is noble to atone for the sins of humanity vicariously in a hermit’s cell. In the absence of such a remedy, let me gratefully accept the good things that the world still offers and, please, do not try to impute to me the blame for what is totally beyond my control”.
Emphasis in original. Translation by Google. Quotations from the book are based on Italian text.
Another newspaper, Il Manifesto, a daily leftist paper published in Rome, has also issued a review. Â Here’s a translation of an excerpt from that one:
…It is the account in the form of a diary of a journey made in the early months of 1959, mostly by ship, to Tanganyika and Rhodesia – as today’s Tanzania and Zimbabwe were still called – with stops in Genoa, Port Said, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Salisbury, among others. The itinerary was entirely internal, as can be seen, to the English colonial empire. Waugh insists on the word “tourist” in the title to differentiate the book from his previous accounts, which were more those of a “traveler” and journalist. In the 1930s he had published, among other things, Labels (1930, translated by Adelphi in 2006: Etichette ) … and Waugh in Abyssinia (1936, translated by Adelphi in 2022: In Abissinia ), all focused on African experiences, partly conducted as a correspondent for newspapers such as the Times and the Daily Mail. A certain sense of adventure and discovery of exotic realities dominated these works, even if, compared to the models of Conrad and Leiris, the charm of “primitive” authenticity had completely disappeared: in its place, that sceptical irony so typical of Waugh emerged in every line, which led him to underline on the one hand the most squalid aspects of colonial cities, on the other the grotesque and sometimes surreal situations produced by cultural hybridizations. In A Tourist in Africa, not only is there no search for authenticity, but not even adventurous aspects: the author finds himself in places he already knows, he moves with ease and at each of his stops he is hosted and accompanied by people he knows or by officials who take care of him, such an illustrious visitor. What remains, however, is the taste for describing situations and characters who find themselves at the crossroads of different cultural worlds: from the cosmopolitan workers he meets on the ship, to the German hoteliers in Tanganyika, to the missionaries who found art schools for the natives, to the Maasai who go to boy scout rallies in London.
Figures from the margins that stimulate Waugh’s subtle sarcasm but, evidently, also his admiration: they are for him the living proof of the senselessness of those nationalisms that believe in pure cultures and that have just brought Europe into the catastrophe of war. This is the only clear political judgment expressed by Waugh, who otherwise never misses an opportunity to equally tease both Labour and Conservative visions. The result is very harsh judgments on Rhodesian apartheid, which the author attributes entirely to the influence of Afrikaan culture: it is the fruit of a “sick logic”, of “an infection of racial madness that is rising from the south”, he states, and it would have appeared incomprehensible and insulting in the eyes of all the first adventurers, who, while fighting the natives, cheating and plundering them, had somehow amalgamated with them. Which brings us to perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book: Waugh travels from North to South across the British Empire on the eve of its end. It is an end that is considered inevitable, and – it seems – not even particularly feared by the English and other Europeans. The climate is certainly not that of Algeria. It seems that many of the officials Waugh meets are progressives eager to create the conditions for the independence of African states. But our cynical author does not end on an optimistic note at all: he is concerned that the overcoming of colonialism is taking place on the basis of nationalist policies, and without a native ruling class having consolidated. He has this point of view expressed by an old Italian priest he meets in the Mbeya mission in Tanganyika: «the mistake was to introduce ‘Africanization’ through politics and not through public administration».
For his part, the Catholic Waugh advances a sinister comparison with the liberation of Latin America, accomplished by “local revolutionaries speaking the already antiquated language of the Enlightenment”, and which “was followed by a century of chaos and tyranny that has not yet been mitigated throughout the continent”. Assertions that sound – today – paternalistic and prejudiced, but perhaps not entirely unfounded: they serve at least to remind us that colonialism and its overcoming were complex and multidimensional phenomena, full of gray areas, and not reducible to the clash between Evil and Good that we too often tend to represent.
The review seems to have been written by Fabio Dei, although that may be a pen name. Translation by Google. The translation of Adelphi’s edition of Un Turista in Africa is by Stefano Manfarlotti and the price is €14.00. It might also be mentioned that Aldelphi recently published (2022) an Italian edition of The Holy Places as explained in an earlier post and earlier still, of When the Going Was Good (Quando viaggiare era una piacere, 2005).
