Early on, Evelyn Waugh’s travel notes did double duty providing material for novels while also sourcing his journalism. For that reason, his travelogues often feel like afterthoughts.
For lauded travel writers like Paul Theroux or William Least Heat-Moon, the book is the focus. However brilliant at dishing and dunking as Waugh was, his road accounts often feel unformed by comparison.
In Remote People, the World of Waugh is an exciting, amusing, often cantankerous place to explore. Still, at the end of the day the only road that matters may as well be the one that takes you back home.
Remote People is a sequel to Labels, Waugh’s first travel book. As that book covered journeys mostly across Europe, here we get Waugh in Africa from October 1930 to March 1931. He visits the independent nation of Abyssinia as it crowns a new emperor, then on to the British East African protectorate and the colony of Belgian Congo.
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| Waugh's journey in Remote People took him to Abyssinia (today Ethiopia) and immediately to its south, British East Africa (Kenya). "The difficulty (and of course the charm) of Abyssinia is the inaccessibility of the interior," he writes. Image from alarmy.com |
To say Waugh was not a happy visitor is to state it much too flatly, but not inaccurately. By his own account, he had a hard trip:
There are several good reasons for not traveling at night; one is that the lights in the train are liable to frequent failure; another that during the rainy season it is not unusual for parts of the line to get washed away; another that the Galla and Danakil, through whose country the line passes, are still primarily homicidal in their interests, and in the early days of the railway formed a habit, not yet wholly eradicated, of taking up steel sleepers here and there to forge into spearheads.
Danger was less onerous to Waugh than boredom, which he records experiencing a lot. In one of the most illuminating passages in Remote People, he analyzes with withering sarcasm how different people pretend to ignore boredom, either by reaping joy from the discovery of small things or casting one’s mind back to happier times.
They sicken him. “From time to time I meet people who say they are never bored; they are of two kinds; both, for the most part, liars.”
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| Evelyn Waugh (at right) in Africa, 1930. While Africans may be the titular subject of Remote People, the focus is often on fellow Europeans and Americans Waugh meets. Some repel him, others amuse him: "I think there is nothing essentially ludicrous about English officials abroad, it is the wives they marry that are so difficult..." Image from https://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-127/index.html |
Waugh’s amusing surliness makes Remote People an enjoyable read. As with Labels, he is not content with parroting the established view of the places he visits, but continually pushes the envelope of accepted wisdom, whether that be to offer a more rational, less romantic depiction or simply to unload his spleen at something which frustrates him.
The book begins with Waugh making his way to Addis Ababa, capital city of Abyssinia (today’s Ethiopia), to report on the coronation of the emperor Tafari. What drew Waugh to take on this assignment seems a whim; in Ireland someone regaled him with fantastic tales of Abyssinia. Abandoning plans to visit China and Japan, Waugh found a London newspaper willing to send him to the crowning of Tafari.
No sooner is Waugh there (the book begins with him already having arrived) then he is downplaying the whole affair: “At first sight there is something a little surprising in this sudden convergence on Abyssinia of the envoys of the civilised world, and I think that the Abyssinians were as surprised as anyone.”
He dubs the whole affair a “preposterous Alice in Wonderland fortnight.” He mocks the self-importance of the politicians and diplomats, the excessive attention given to protocols and invitations to parties, even the odd name “Haile Selassie” the emperor took when assuming office.
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| The coronation of Haile Selassie, Nov. 2, 1930. Waugh was on hand at Addis Ababa to report on the event, although he notes much of the investiture happened out of public view. "The succession was determined in theory by royal proclamation, in practice by bloodshed," Waugh writes. Image from https://www.anglo-ethiopian.org/publications/articles.php?type=A&reference=publications/articles/2005summer/coronation.php |
Most of Waugh’s amusement comes from the jostling spectacle his fellow members of the foreign press frequently make while getting things wrong:
Many correspondents, for instance, wrote accounts of the emperor’s solemn progress from the palace at sundown; actually it was late at night before he arrived, and then with the minimum of display.
But Waugh finds something joyful in the festivities, too. He notes the new ruler’s means of ascension involved the age-old method of killing a rival, but still he appreciates the people’s way of celebrating a new era:
They shuffled in and out, singing and swaying; the dance was performed with bodies and arms rather than with the feet. Their faces expressed the keenest enjoyment – almost, in some cases, ecstasy. The brilliant morning sun streamed in on them from the windows, on their silver crosses, silver-headed rods, and on the large, illuminated manuscript from which one of them, undeterred by the music, was reciting the Gospels; the clouds of incense mounted and bellied in the shafts of light.
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| Waugh was also on hand for the unveiling of a new statue in Addis Ababa to Haile Selassie's predecessor, Menelik II, which still stands today: "There was a rending of silk and a vast equestrian figure in gilt bronze was partially revealed...One piece, out of reach of their efforts, obstinately fluttered over the horse's ears and eyes." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Menelik_II |
The biggest problem with Remote People is its lack of a clear thesis. After watching Haile Selassie’s coronation, he travels south to British East Africa (today Kenya), the Aden Governate (today part of Yemen) and then west to the region of Congo. At first he is observing the continent; later he is escaping it, or trying to.
Waugh is never comfortable in his environs. If it’s not snippy customs officials or bad food, it’s the intolerable heat. He enjoys only British East Africa, where expatriates had set up a society known as the “Happy Valley,” legendary by this time for hedonistic excesses.
These genial country squires remind him of visits to Ireland for their “warm loveliness and breadth and generosity.” Perhaps he sensed in them an echo of the Bright Young Things set he found himself partying with and writing up in the 1920s:
The Kenya settlers are not cranks of the kind who colonised New England, nor criminals and ne’er-do-wells of the kind who went to Australia, but perfectly normal, respectable Englishmen, out of sympathy with their own age…
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| The colonists of British East Africa at leisure. By 1931 they had become famous for scandals among their upper class, trumpeted by the London press and later recalled in the 1987 movie White Mischief. Waugh thinks their randy reputation to be overstated. Image from https://www.somanami.co.ke/post/colonial-kenya-the-moulin-rouge-of-africa |
Soon he is explaining his concurrence with a kind of benign imperialism. The British colonization of Kenya and Uganda, he notes, was set up not for the usual self-aggrandizing reasons, but to convert natives and stop the slave trade. What could be wrong with that?
For Africans, Waugh adds, colonization was inevitable:
All the negative things were coming to him inevitably. Europe has only one positive thing which it can offer to anyone, and that is what the missionaries brought. In Uganda the missionaries got there before the trader or the official, and it is to this priority that they owe their unique position as managers of the entire elementary and secondary education of a country in which education is regarded as the highest function of government.
This is a big difference between Remote People and Labels. In the earlier book, Waugh was not yet a baptized Roman Catholic. Remote People kicks off Waugh’s career as a religious writer with firmly formed doctrinaire beliefs. He takes time not just to visit churches, but pray in them, and lets you know it, too.
Still, his newfound open piety doesn’t make him less willing to snark at other religious types. A gentle Seventh-Day Adventist he meets trying to get out of the Congo draws his scorn for his teetotaler, know-it-all ways. At the Ethiopian Orthodox monastery at Debre Libanos, he notices the monks are often crippled or deformed: “presumably they were pilgrims who had originally come to the spring in the hope of a cure, and had become absorbed into the life of the place.”
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| The monastery at Debre Libanos was one of Waugh's focal points in Remote People. Despite a common Christianity, the place did not seem to move him as much as annoy him, as when he was pressed into eating raw honey infused with dead insects and other debris. Image from https://www.worldhistory.org/image/14805/ethiopian-monastery-of-debre-libanos-in-1934/ |
There is also chauvinism and occasional racism, though less of that than I expected having read his later Waugh In Abyssinia. In sum, he finds a lot to like and admire in the African peoples he meets, writing of them eloquently and saving his scorn for Indians who came to Africa for work as shopkeepers and then chafed about British colonial elitism.
For Waugh, such elitism came naturally, though at least in this book, he is thoughtful about imperialism’s applications and conscious of its excesses. He saves his sharpest barbs for progressive critics back home:
It is useless to pretend that, suddenly, at the beginning of the Boer War, the foundation of the Third International, or at this or that time in recent history, the piano stopped and the musical chairs were over, the lava stream cooled and congealed, and the whole process was at an end, for no other reason than that the enlightened people of northern Europe – having lost their belief in revealed religion and falling back helplessly for moral guidance on their own tenderer feelings – have decided that it is Wrong.
This sums up the best and the worst Remote People has to offer. His interest in Africans may have drawn him on his journey, but once there it is his fellow Brits who fascinate him most. British reformer types and diplomats center the narrative in Waugh’s next book, the novel Black Mischief, also a direct product of this Africa trip.
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| In the ancient Ethiopian city of Harar, Waugh suffered the indignity of bailing out one of his guides for violating sanitary regulations. "I had to pay five dollars to get him out," Waugh writes. "He remarked, with some justice, how could one tell that there were any sanitary regulations in Harar?" Image from https://www.traveladventures.org/continents/africa/harar13.html |
Once Waugh leaves Abyssinia, Remote People lacks focus. After a solid opening account on Haile Selassie’s coronation, it becomes a rambling grab bag of impressions, of sights, of people, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant, often just matter-of-fact. Waugh is never less than tactile and vibrant in his descriptions; indeed Remote People is a fine showcase of Waugh travel writing. But his heart seems elsewhere.
“No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics,” Waugh writes.
Since
he writes well and often of things he liked about Africa, it is disappointing
how much of the overall takeaway is so bleak. But Waugh was building his brand,
and the spiky Remote People helps keep it up.
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