Here are the first three volumes from the newly established Radcliffe Press. What a welcome they deserve! Attractively produced in every department - printing,
layout, illustrations, binding, dust-jacket, index (a pity about the modern disease of
proof-reading even in these sound volumes) - and in no way impossibly priced for
125-200 pages of superior-looking text in hardback, they will deservedly earn as much
respect for the enterprising publishers as they will give a full measure of pleasure to
their readers - and an angostura-like dash of justifiable pride to the authors, too. Only
for me, properly faced by the editorial ukase of 'not more than 1200 words', is the
opportunity for exuberant indulgence limited.
Joan Sharwood-Smith, whose manuscript "Uwargida" lay for too long unappreciated
in the archives at Oxford until it was 'discovered' by Helen Callaway as one of the
sources for her brilliant study of European women in colonial Nigeria (1987), will be
already known to many readers as the wife of the late Sir Bryan Sharwood-Smith,
Governor of Northern Nigeria 1952-1957, and to yet others who used to read the then
Colonial Service journal Corona. To Sir Bryan's first-class autobiography. But
Always as Friends (1969) - the American title differs -, Joan Sharwood-Smith now
adds her own important memoir, covering the years from 1939, when she sailed to
Lagos and joined her husband who was then SDO Kontagora (colloquially, and to the
initiated, Mai Wandon Karfe)uip to 1957 when, in the wake of the double triumph of
the Royal visit and the marriage of Sir Bryan's daughter, Sarah, to HE's former ADC,
Victor Hibbs, the Sharwood-Smiths left Kaduna on retirement. It is typical of the
author that she should not choose to title her story in a Government House mode.
Instead, her quiet yet positive sense of humour, her capacity for lively observation, and
above all her creative gift for warm-hearted portraits, emerge endearingly from every
chapter of what she prefers to look on as the experience of just another Colonial
Service wife. Undoubtedly one of the most engaging colonial memoirs I have read for
many a harmattan, it is also a personal record I shall want to return to again and again
in what working years are left to me.
The fact that I was privileged to read the next two manuscripts some five years ago
has simply made me all the more eager for their publication. Like fine wine, they are all
the better for a shrewd period of laying down. Lord Grey hits the nail neatly on the
head when he introduces Mike Atkinson's delightfully readable memoir of service in
the Provincial Administration of the Western Region from 1939 to 1959 as "the story
of one man ... and of his wife, daughter and son ... in one part of Nigeria ... a
light-hearted tale of strenuous, yet enjoyable and deeply satisfying, endeavour".
Atkinson's explanation of his need to write his book as an exorcism of nostalgia, to get
"the Bush out of my Soul", is a telling thought. He will already be known to readers as
the compiler of two volumes of amusing Nigerian Tales (see Nos. 56 and 61), with a
third reportedly in hand. The literary dimension is evident in this "Tales of a Colonial
Officer", too. Granted Atkinson's punctilious identification of who was who in his
story, it is maybe only fair to agree with him that the DO whose house was deliberately
burnt down should remain unnamed, however instantly recognisable by his brother officers as "the least sympathetic character among them". While nearly every chapter
is, mutatis mutandis, bound to provoke one's own memory of the scenes and incidents
described, often routine yet never the same, outside analysts of Colonial Service life
will be grateful to Atkinson for his calculated breakdown of how he spent his time both
as a DO (Ch. 2) and as a Permanent Secretary (Ch. 10). An even braver and equally
valuable - attempt is his insight into expatriate social life in the Western Region (Ch.
9). Is it only Northern conservatism (certainly not puritanism!) that may lead others
from 'the Holy North' to question the alleged post-Nigerian comprehensiveness of the
West's "pattern of drinking [as] consistent and conventional ... a tendency to be
boastful and exhibitionistic about one's drinking prowess'7 True, the Elder Dempster
ships could be a great leveller of castes!
Like Atkinson's, McClintock's book is also a masterpiece of unhyped description of
the daily yet never dull nature of official, personal and social life as an Administrative
Officer in post-WWII Nigeria. His is the longest of the Radcliffe Press volumes under
review. If it is, too, arguably the most reflective in its intent and its subtitle (the
rationale is firmly set at p.vii), the positive carrying-you-along character of the
narrative represents a boon to the reader. In addition to the HQ view from both Lagos
and Kaduna and a spell in Kano, Nicky McClintock, who served for some fifteen years
in Nigeria focuses essentially on his several sojourns in 'his' Bornu Province, equally
the 'home'(and, in 1912, sadly the grave) of an illustrious relative, the legendary Major
Augustus McClintock, widely known as Mai Doron Yaki, 'the one who carries the
whole burden of the war upon his shoulders'. For a number of years now I have tried to
find a Northern Nigerian memoir to match Kenneth Bradley's longstanding Colonial
Service classic from Northern Rhodesia, The Diary of a District Officer (1943). With
the publication of Nicky McClintock's Kingdoms in the Sand and Sun to join John
Smith's stimulating Colonial Cadet in Nigeria (1968), I feel that, as they say in the best
police circles, the search has been called off.
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