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In the spring of 1992, audiences in Britain were treated to the premier of Bruce
Beresford's film "Mister Johnson", shot nostalgically (for many of us) on location in
the Plateau Province of Nigeria. It is the pathetic (in its literal but obsolete sense of
being full of pathos) story of a Southern 'Native Clerk', as the title was in the 1920s,
posted to a small outstation in Northern Nigeria, where the culture of both the emirate
inhabitants and of his European masters was as disorientingly remote as geographically
Fada was from his riverain hometown. Mr. Johnson, "with his morocco bag of letters
under his arm, his patent shoes in his hand" and a discarded sun helmet on his head, is
a young clerk who turns his life into a romance, a life which ends dramatically by
death at the 'humane' hand of his friend Mr. Rudbeck, Assistant District Officer, "de
bigges' heart in de worl' ". The approving initial reaction by a major Nigerian critic
may have taken some former colonial civil servants (and some other African
reviewers) by mild surprise. "Mister Johnson" was not widely shown in Nigeria, and film-buffs and African-watchers alike will recall Kenya's angry
rejection of Elspeth Huxley's moving TV film "The Flame Trees of Thika", for all its
rapturous reviews in Britain. Incidentally, I have so far come across no reference to the
fact that a stage version of "Mister Johnson" was made in the USA in 1956. It folded
after a mere month on Broadway.
Meanwhile, the release of "Mister Johnson" in London raised a
question in the minds of thoughtful cinema-goers; who wrote the script? Many may be
satisfied to know it is the celebrated contemporary novelist, William Boyd, author of
such Africa-located, prize-winning novels as A Good Man in Africa (1981) and An Ice-Cream War (1982). Neatly, it is an excellent preface by Boyd, who had for some
time if with some ambiguity been aware of the novel's status as "a classic of colonial
fiction", which graces the new reprint of Mister Johnson brought out by Penguin. However, for many such an answer will not be enough. "Mister
Johnson" is indeed another of those 'film-of-the-novel' phenomena. For us, the extra
interest lies in the fact that the original novel, published more than fifty years ago, was
written by Joyce Cary - the same Joyce Cary who was once a junior District Officer in
Northern Nigeria.
If our sons and daughters, or likely their sons and daughters, have enjoyed (I'm not
myself fully convinced of the applicability of that word) reading Joyce Cary's Charley is My Darling or the Gulley Jimson trilogy (Herself Surprised, To Be A Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth) among their prescribed Eng. Lit. texts,
more likely at university than at 'A' level, we elders are aware that Joyce Cary
also wrote a number of first-class African novels. While it may well be that it is the
non-African novels that have earned Cary a canonical place in Eng. Lit. syllabuses and
an entry in such honourable roll-calls as the Oxford Companion to English Literature,
his African novels and short stories do represent a classic source, both of pleasure to
those of us who like to read recreationally about imperial territory and of authenticity to
those who like to study the image of Africa and of colonial government in fiction.
The rationale of this article, then, inspired by the 1991 release of "Mister Johnson",
was to serve as a brief biographical journey to discover who Joyce Cary was, in the sense
of what his experience was in and how he knew what he did about Nigeria, the setting
of his quartet of African novels (a fifth was published posthumously) and of his dozen
or so short stories. At the same time, the biographical narrative is set within the wider
context of 'colonial fiction'. eg see The District Officer in the African Colonial Novel.
The Colonial Service in Fiction
"Mr. Cary, A.D.O." leaving aside those who worked in the Empire, how many younger, even middle aged,
people will recognize the honorific "A.D.O."? And if they do manage to identify
that rank of the cadet entry into His/Her Majesty's Colonial Service, the new boy of
the Administration if you like, for how much longer will that instant recognition of the
former British Empire's largest civil service, a Crown career, continue? Despite all the
nostalgic literature of the Raj revisited, reviewed or just revived, from the creative art
of Paul Scott to the imagology of D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke and the reconstructive art of
Plain Tales from the Raj, may it not be sooner rather than later before the job of the
District Officer, even in jewel-in-the-crown India let alone Tropical Africa and the
Sudan, will be as remote and half-forgotten as, say, the profession of gladiator or town
crier is today?
As real as that risk is, of receding acquaintance with the community of Britain's
overseas civil servants instead of commonly taking them for granted when so many of
them were our neighbours, especially if one lived in soi-disant 'Blimpish' Cheltenham
or Tunbridge Wells or the warmer counties of the South West, such a loss in the
tangible evidence of our national history is fortunately compensated in the field of our
literary heritage. Indeed, the colonial official can be said to emerge as one of the
sub-themes (I hesitate to claim 'sub-heroes', as either word could be controversial) of
the English novel and short story of the last hundred years. On the stage, too, at the top
level of the colonial hierarchy the Governor has taken a leading part in plays, for
example the Christies' post-war West End success HIS EXCELLENCY: A Novel Basded on the Play By Dorothy & Campbell Christie and George Bernard
Shaw's pre-war Captain Brassbound's Conversion , while the men in the middle, the
District Officer and his colleagues, have featured, for better or for worse, in films such
as The Heart Of The Matter [DVD] [1953] , A Pattern of Islands and Korda Collection 4: 5-DVD Set ( The Spy in Black / Anna Karenina / An Ideal Husband / Sanders of the River / Lydia ) .
Indeed, at least fifty authors have chosen the District Officer as the principal
character of their story. A few did not progress beyond the racy pages of the Boys' Own Paper or Wide World Magazine. Some were District Officers before becoming
would-be writers of fiction, for example Ian Brinkworth, Hugh Clifford, W. Fowler, A. C. G, Hastings, M. Kittermaster and Michael Taafe; like Napoleon's soldiers,
mutatis mutandis, every colonial civil servant seems to have believed he had one book
under his solar topi, though possibly the wiser ones often left it there. Others reached
the literary (and financial) heights of Blackwood's Magazine. Other novelists again
have used the imperial scene to mount yet one more rung on the ladder of literary
reputation: for instance, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, J. G. Farrell, Gerald
Hanley, Elspeth Huxley, Compton Mackenzie, John Masters, Leonard Woolf and the
under-recognized Sara Jeanette Duncan all come to mind. Modern spy-story writers
like John Le Carre have not been afraid to bring back the ex-colonial administrator,
now reincarnated as a member of MI5, while one of Nadine Gordimer's novels
features the retired colonial official who, after independence, returns to 'his' former
territory. Among the top echelons of English literature, one of Thackeray's well known
characters is the elephantine Collector (or District Officer) of Boggley Wallah,
and another is banished to the governorship of the remote Coventry Island; Dickens'
Mrs. Jellyby gets mixed up with "educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left
bank of the Niger"; and Trollope's Phineas Finn has a lot to tell about the Colonial
Office. A few novelists may be said to have so immortalised the "Keepers of the King's
Peace" in English literature that their own reputation as writers is virtually inseparable
from at least one masterpiece featuring them: Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster in
India, Graham Greene and Gerald Hanley in Africa, George Orwell in Burma and
Somerset Maugham in Malaysia and Hong Kong are all cases in point.
To these authors we must add the name of Joyce Cary. He holds the peculiar
distinction of being a front-rank man of letters who, alone among his peers who
featured the District Officer in their novels, had himself been a member of the Nigerian
Political Service.
The Nigerian Political Service in 1913
Strictly speaking, there was no such thing as the Colonial Service until 1930. Before
then, every African territory had its own Political - later Administrative - Service, so
that one joined the Nigerian Political Service or the Nyasaland Administration (there
was, of course, no Tanganyika or Northern Rhodesia Crown Service until after World
War I). Up to World War I, in fact, one entered not even the Nigerian Service but
either the Northern or the Southern Nigerian Service. In the North, the Service
indulged in the aura of being Lugard's creation: that sense of superiority, both
administrative and social, was to persist for many years after Lugard's departure from
Zungeru in 1905, as Sylvia Leith-Ross confirms in her memoir Stepping Stones
(1983), and was maintained (and recognized) on board the Elder Dempster ships as
they disembarked their passengers along the Coast in ascending order of snobbery,
with the green-cummerbanded, 'golden boys' of the Northern Provinces being the last
to land. Joyce Cary joined the Nigerian Political Service in 1913 and was posted to the
North.
At that time, and indeed right through to 1939, 'real' colonial administration meant
rural administration. Perhaps 75% of the colonial officials were serving in Africa, and
of these three-quarters were in 'bush' administration. District Officers engaged in the
very essence of colonial administration. Almost obsessionally, to spend as much time
as possible out on tour or safari, not in the boma or station, was an official
requirement. At the bottom of the administrative hierarchy were the ADOs, formerly
known under Lugard as Assistant Residents and later generally called cadets. As an
ADO, Cary was on probation for three years. During that time he was required, apart
from at least adequately convincing his superiors of his qualities (and, as Cary was to
learn through his wearisome encounters with Mrs. Hamilton-Browne, of also at least
not displeasing the Resident's wife), to pass examinations in the laws and the General Orders of the colony and, most critical of all, in the local language. Then, all being well
(and that caveat covered not only passing examinations and earning official approval
but also surviving the very real health hazards of service in West Africa, from malaria,
blackwater and yellow fever down to more mundane appendicitis and snakebite, still
killers in the 1950s), an ADO might look forward to promotion to full DO after a
further four or five years; and, if things went better yet, to becoming a Resident in his
late forties. His salary would then rise from his initial 250 pounds a year to nudging the four
figure range - risible today but better paid than many occupations in England in the
1920s, when the stipend of even the grandiose Beit Professor of Commonwealth
History in the University of Oxford was a bare 1200 pounds a year. When I went out to N.
Nigeria some 40 years after Cary, my salary was 450 pounds p.a. and that of my Resident
1800 pounds. The Governor earned 8500 pounds. But the leave, on full pay, was generous, with
roughly a week earned for every month's service - and the two week voyage each way
counted as duty, not leave. As junior officers were not allowed to marry - or at least
were forbidden to have their wives accompany them - and even senior ones were for
many years required to obtain prior permission from the Governor to bring their wives
with them (Cary's Celia Rudbeck may be a bit of a General Orders anachronism), such
long leaves back home were a godsend to young married officials like Cary.
A DO - and an ADO even more so - could expect to be regularly moved around the
thirty or more Divisions into which the ten Northern Provinces were then divided,
theoretically in the name of his own training and experience. Such was the manpower
shortage, in turn exacerbated by illness and death, that, as Cary's letters about the
perpetual game of musical chairs among the staff make clear, a postings policy could
often be no more than lip service to the principle of continuity of administration.
Inter-provincial transfers, frequently after a matter of mere months, could involve, as
in Cary's case, not only several weeks' trek in riding or walking from one station to
another, complete with a line of porters carrying one's total possessions on their heads,
but also in exchanging one administrative milieu, for example the sophisticated
Hausa-Fulani emirates where Indirect Rule was possible, for the less cohesive riverain
districts where there was often little choice save a positive, direct rule. That distinction,
between the theory of the DO being an adviser to the local chief and often the practical
necessity of his being an executive catalyst lest he run foul of his Resident, was a classic
dilemma in the implementation of the Lugardian principles of Indirect Rule and
Native Administration. Cary was to experience both styles of administration, in
Bauchi and then Bussa, and of both kinds of DO as his superior, the debonair H. S. W.
Edwardes and the fire-in-his-belly T. F. Carlyle. At the early age of 30, Cary decided
this was not the kind of career for him to look forward to, even with a pension to boot
before he reached 50. Instead he resigned after only six years' service. He was then 31.
The Colonial Administrator in Fact: Mr. Cary, ADO, 1914-1919
Joyce Cary was one of only six out of 64 applicants accepted for the Nigerian
Political Service in 1913. Then, as right up to the end of Colonial Service some fifty
years later, a successful application hinged on character, interviews and references, not
on written examinations. Molly Mahood, a pioneering and brilliant interpreter in her
Joyce Cary's Africa (1964), may be guilty of a slight exaggeration in implying that
there was little more to it than Lugard's belief that "the best administrators could be
recruited from the youngest sons of the professional and landed classes, even if they
possessed no special qualifications for the work". Be that as it may, Cary's
qualifications seemed to fit the Nigerian bill: a less than satisfactory Oxford law degree
(a Fourth) was offset by a sound, respectable background of family and school, with
ample evidence of character and self-reliance displayed during his experiences in the
Balkans campaign to outweigh any raised eyebrows at what he himself called his
"somewhat Baudelairean" period of having been an art student in Edinburgh and having tried to be a writer in Paris. His training consisted of three months' instruction,
mostly in colonial history, law and tropical hygiene, at the Imperial Institute in
London. But at least he became, as he tells us, "an enthusiast for Indirect Rule", that
system of African adminstration evolved in Northern Nigeria and as clearly envinced
in Cary's Master Johnson as it was enunciated in Lugard's Political Memoranda.
Sailing in April 1914, Cary reached Zungeru, still the capital of the North, in May.
He found himself posted to Bauchi Province, away to the north-east. Its headquarters
were at Naraguta, the tin-mining centre which later developed into the modern Jos. No
sooner did he reach Bauchi, arguably with Adamawa the most scenic of the Provinces,
than he went down with malaria. Cary was lucky in that most influential of
newcomers' career hazards, his immediate superior. His substantive DO was H. S. W.
Edwardes. Given to natty eccentricities in dress, in due course Edwardes had a
difference of opinion with his Resident, and having earned the black mark of being
labelled "temperamentally unsuitable" to be placed in charge of the Province, he saw
out his time in what Cary described as "the dustbin posts of Kabba and Munshi", the
so-called 'punishment' riverain provinces. Two other DOs whom Cary was to meet in
the Province similarly made a deep impression on the young Cary. One was J. J. F.
Fitzpatrick, a fellow Irishman (and, later, a fellow writer) but cantankerous, who also
came unstuck and was posted out, all the way to Nyasaland. The other was T. F.
Carlyle, a great "pagan man", in Cary's own words, and to me rather like the
reincarnation of a life-size 'Sanders of the River': all-seeing, all-knowing and almighty.
Cary's first blissful months were soon shattered by the outbreak of war with
Germany. Nigerian troops were ordered to Yola, on the eastern border, preparatory to
invading the Cameroons, and their route passed through Nafada, where Cary was
enjoying his first independent command. His letters home encapsulated the ADOs life,
then as 40 years later when the present writer was upcountry in the same north-east:
"Alone here... no other white man for 150 miles... no doctor and no possibility of
help coming in case of riot in less than seven days."
In another letter his description of the ADOs work was no less accurate of many
another day and age: "I am the [military] Censor as well as Builder, Surveyor, Road
Constructor, Police Inspector, Assessor and Collector of Taxes, Magistrate, Meteorologist,
and Doctor". Soon after the heavy casualties suffered by the Yola column
more ADOs were drafted into the army. In July 1915 Mr. Cary ADO became
Lietuenant Cary of the Nigeria Regiment. After something of a breakdown at Yola in
1916, he was declared unfit for further combat and sent to England on furlough. He
arrived on 15 April, became engaged to Gertrude Ogilvie on 2 May, was married on 1
June, and sailed back from Liverpool on 9 August. Not a bad itinerary! His posting,
still in the army, was switched at the last moment from Yola to Lokoja, but soon there
came the best news of all: he was to return to Nafada, this time as OC Troops.
When Cary was demobilised in March 1917, he was posted to Kontagora Province,
to the west, three weeks' trek away and at the height of the hot season. As with many of
us, Cary was sad to leave his station, "where every soul was a friend". As soon as he
reached Kontagora, his resident broke the news that he was sending him to take charge
of Borgu. Cary was to write, thirty-five years later:
"At my first coming I had hated it. I had left an Emirate of the North with its
desert traders, its pageant of horsemen, and got in exchange for this 12,000 miles of
waste."
To his wife he explained that Kontagora Province was more than not being his
beloved Bauchi, it was "the most backward and deserted province in Nigeria" and
Borgu "a long way from Civilization and rails ... the loneliest station of them all". It is in notional Borgu that Mister Johnson is set. Cary was, as was customary with young
and well-balanced officers and as he recalled many years later, "on the list of men who
could be sent to the loneliest place without the risk of sending them off their heads". It
was the experience of Borgu which was to dominate Cary's four published novels,
whereas most of his short stories and the posthumous Cock Jarvis draw heavily on his
Bauchi and Yola days. The year ended on a high note: the armistice in November and
the "glorious news" of the birth of his second son less than a fortnight after his own
birthday. As with his first son, Michael (later Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet), who
had been born in April 1917 while Cary was trekking wearily from Nafada to Naraguta
en route for Kontagora, the painful pattern of Colonial Service life frequently meant
that thousands of miles disturbingly separated the parents at the precious moment of a
child's birth. Cary needed these fillips. He had been suffering from another bout of
depression. "My work is hopeless", he wrote, "I can't do anything, sometimes I don't
believe that I will ever do anything". He suffered from severe attacks of asthma,
insomnia and depression, culminating in outbursts of temper which he described as
'bush hates' - "those unreasoning fancies which seize you when you are alone in the
bush" - which, as he explained to Gertie, "lead sometimes to strange and even tragic
results" (he was too solicitous to mention the several cases of suicide by colleagues).
If 1918 had been the year of administrative details (Jangali and tax arrears. Native
Treasury accounts, court work, etc.), 1919 was to be a time of practical, creative work
("I love making things"), of clearing roads and building bridges now that the dry
season was here. These counter-balancing responsibilities of the DO's work, so often
reflected in the contrasting personal interests of successive DOs in charge of a
Division, Cary was subsequently to depict in Mister Johnson:
"Just as Blore is particular about tax assessment and is always collecting
statistics, so Rudbeck, as soon as he comes to a station, sends for the chief
and complains about the roads [and] spends his afternoons riding about the
country..."
With his Hausa examination behind him and a good name earned from his superiors,
in Kontagora and again in both Kaduna and Lagos, where the Governor himself had
commented favourably on the quality of the Assessment Reports compiled by Mr.
Cary, ADO, he seemed well set on his Colonial Service Career.
Set, that is, until the creeping feeling of guilt about being separated from his family
came to a climax. In May the storm broke over Cary's head, with a letter from Gertie -
what Alan Bishop, his new biographer, in Gentleman Rider (1988) calls "the letter he
must have been dreading". In it she once more cogently set forth the old arguments
about whether he should:
"remain in Nigers [as she called Nigeria] for good ... a ghastly country ... which
daily threatened his health, if not his very life."
Enforced separation, like risk, Cary accepted, but the tone of Gertie's next sentence
made him feel "awfully unhappy". She had written:
"I know the work you do is splendid, and that it should be done by someone keen
and capable, but I think you mean to stick to it mainly for financial reasons and
because you think there is nothing else you can do."
Nobody who has been engulfed in that long loneliness of bush life will fail to realise
how criticism tends to hurt and quickly fester. There was, too, the earlier, poignant
letter written in 1917 in reply to Gertrude's entreating him to leave the Nigerian
Service, with its opening lines of:
"I've been four months alone now ... I haven't exchanged a word of rational
conversation... When I do talk English, I have to pick up the simplest words and
repeat my meaning in two or three forms ... I know what to guard against -
nerves, drink, illness, etc."
Like a sore, the more irritated attention it is given the deeper the poisoning tension
of suspicion, depression and resentment penetrates the mind. For Cary the radix malorum seemed to be whether he could "find some other way of making an income".
Humbly, he concluded "the only aptitude I seem to have is writing". He was back to
square one, to the dilemma of 1913 when his decision to join the Nigerian Political
Service was prompted as much by his determination to show that he could hold down
a steady job after his earlier years of flitting from France and Edinburgh to Oxford,
Montenegro and Ireland, as by economic enthusiasm.
And so Cary once more turned his thoughts to writing. In those long and lonely
hours in bush he had had plenty of time; he reckoned that since his return to Borgu he
had written enough to fill two and a half novels. True, little was finished, yet much had
been started. Now he took the plunge. He sent off a literary agent several "potboiler"
short stories. That day in Bussa in late May 1919 was to prove the turning point in
Cary's life. Six months later, Cary heard that three of his stories had been accepted by
the Saturday Evening Post. What is more, the fee offered was over 200 pounds. As he
commented to a fellow ADO, if he could make that kind of money in his spare time he
would be better off as a writer in England than as a colonial administrator in Nigeria.
In the following year he sold more stories, about his Bohemian days in Paris, for nearly
200 pounds each. That indeed "looked like wealth", but in the event it was a flash in the pan.
Suddenly the demand for Cary's work came to an end. For the public, what followed
was a long period of silence. It was another twelve years before Joyce Cary's first novel
appeared, Aissa Saved, and twenty before Mister Johnson was published.
Yet as he sailed from Nigeria on leave in January 1920, Cary was keyed up by the
dazzling prospect of a new career and an end to his anxiety about and worries from his
family. Against that, he loved the work and was well thought of in the Nigerian
Service. In her study Molly Mahood claims that what tipped the delicate balance was
the report by the Colonial Office medical board. Though only 31, his health was
declared no more than "fairly good" and he was advised by the doctor that he ought
not to return to the tropics. Accordingly, he sent in his papers to the Colonial Office.
His Nigerian career was not much longer than five years. Yet, as he was to write when
he was in his successful sixties, "My years in the African Service ... are richer to my
memories than any of my books". If the life of "Mr. Cary, ADO" was no longer for
him, fortunately for posterity his second career would be that of a writer.
The Colonial Administrator in Fiction: Joyce Cary's District Officers
Countless Caryists have analysed the characters of Joyce Cary's African novels.
Much ink has been spilt - and no few tears - on just how 'real' Cary's Africans are.
Certainly they are far more than bland stereotypes. William Boyd, in emphasising
Cary's supreme gift of imagination, holds that he:
"achieved an insight into the mind of the African which avoids sentiment,
condescension or paternalistic complacency, attributes which dog even the most
well-intentioned accounts of colonial life ... There is a freedom and forthright
vigour about the way his imagination ranges through the minds of all his
characters that is unimpeded by good liberal reticence and prudent self-awareness."
For Boyd, then, not only is Mr. Johnson "a great literary character [who] can safely
take his place beside any of the enduring characters world literature has presented us
with", but, in Boyd's view, "his race is - paradoxical though it may seem - quite
irrelevant". Cary's Nigerian critics have sometimes been less kind: one whose "facts
read as strangely as the 'fiction' " and who, for Michael Echeruo, is no more than one
more writer among "a long and undistinguished line of European novelists of Africa".
As Molly Mahood rightly reminds us, "Like almost every masterpiece. Mister
Johnson has been misunderstood from the day of its publication". What I set out to do
here is to comment on Cary's characterization of the DO.
It goes almost without saying that it is in his four 'African novels', Aissa Saved
(1931), An American Visitor (1932), The African Witch (1936) and Mister Johnson
(1939), along with the posthumous Cock Jarvis (1974), that Cary's primary
presentation of the DO is enshrined. An examination of, say, the contrasting character
of Gore and Bewsher in An American Visitor, of Sangster and Fisk in The African
Witch, of Rudbeck and Blore in Mister Johnson, or of Killick and Thompson in Cock
Jarvis, is as much of an absolute 'must' for students of the District Officer in fiction as
is that of setting Bulteed beside Burwash or the careerist Tarling beside "the rat''Tring
for those who want to understand what the senior administrators (the Residents) of
the time were really like. Bradgate, and even more young Rudbeck, has a lot of Cary
himself in them. The characteristics and the characters of them all earn instant
recognition from anyone who has ever been in the Colonial Service.
It is not hard to identify the originals of some of these DO portraits. Not
surprisingly, Cary draws on the officers under whom he served in those formative
months of his own apprenticeship. In Mister Johnson there is much of the inimitable
H. S. W. Edwardes, his first and inspiring DO, in Rudbeck's respect for "Old Sturdee",
"Well-kown for his enthusiasm in road-building", derived from his dictum that "When
you make a road you know you've done something - you can see it!". Bradgate, too, in
Aissa Saved has echoes of Edwardes. The no less inimitable but very different T. F.
Carlyle, the 'pagan main' par excellence, is the prototype of Monkey Bewsher in An
American Visitor, inspired by the desire "to preserve and develop the rich kind of local
life". The larger-than-life, "law to himself", eponymous hero of Cock Jarvis is closely
modelled on J. J. F. Fitzpatrick. To introduce a personal note, the Cock Jarvis
stereotype was still alive and well in my first DO in Northern Nigeria, another
eccentric and loveable member of the Irish gentry, forty years after Cary's experience;
in both cases, the exposure was unforgettable and could be conditioning, positively or
negatively, in career terms. Among the short stories, "Christmas in Africa", "Buying a
Horse", "The Boundary Commission", "Too Good to be True" (so relevant that I call
it "Too Good to be Fiction"), and the unpublished "Daventry", all constitute further
primary sources for a study of the District Officer in Cary's fiction. The best are often
autobiographical, such as "Railway Camp", "Audu" or "Marching as to War", where
Joyce Cary, now Mr. Cole, ADO, appears as "a young man lately joined from Oxford,
with an eye-glass and some very smart bush-shirts of a dashing pattern". True to what I
have always assumed to be the novelist's creed, Cary assures us that "none of my
characters is from life", yet I suspect there was more biographical portrayal than he
admits in his qualification of "but all of them are derived from some intuition of a
person".
What is more, in my reliance on Cary for piecing together the character of the DO in
fiction, I would not want to overlook his admirable descriptions of the DO in fact:
namely his letters home to Gertie (often enchantingly illustrated with line drawings),
his Handing-Over Notes, and the actual diary of his post-Cameroons campaign days
as a DO in Borgu. All of these and more are among his papers in the Bodleian Library
at Oxford, and Alan Bishop has for some time now been working on a full edition of
the Cary letters.
Conclusion
I do not want to claim that what I have written here on analysing Cary's experience
and presentation of the African administrator forms a startlingly original
contribution to the study of Joyce Cary. All that I offer is another perspective on Cary.
This is derived from a blend of my own good fortune to have been a latter day DO in
the 1950s and in 'Cary country' too; next, since the 1960s, to have been an academic,
also in Cary's Oxford, now working on the history of the DO in Africa; and then, the final catalyst, to have been consulted by Bruce Beresford and his team, in however a
properly marginal manner, in the making of "Mister Johnson". Together these have
helped me to integrate Cary's African fiction more securely into its context of Colonial
Service history, in so far as the image of the DO in literature is concerned.
That character, of the DO, is no stranger in English fiction. He has fascinated
Kipling and Forster, Hanley and Huxley (and Edgar Wallace), Orwell and Maugham.
Yet sui generis and arguably outstanding is the writing of Joyce Cary as a source for
the study of the DO in fiction. Sometimes I ask myself, as I settle down to tackle
another dusty, daunting ms. memoir in Rhodes House Library, why do I undertake
such laborious research when the end might just as effectively, and likely more
elegantly, be achieved by quoting verbatim passages from Joyce Cary's novels and
stories and letters as the essence of what life was like as a DO in Nigeria at the zenith of
colonial rule? For Cary has the unique claim to be not only an established writer but
also to have been a District Officer. He might not have endorsed the fact that Mister
Johnson is still regularly used at Oxford, seventy years beyond its conception and fifty
since its publication, in a course of lectures on "Imperialism and Decolonization" in
the Modern History Faculty, in order to illustrate the principles, practice and puzzles
of Indirect Rule. Doubtless they use it for 'better' reasons in the English Faculty! The
release of the film will doubtless and deservedly give Mister Johnson a fillip, in the
same way that Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" earlier did for undergraduate
audiences in the history of the Raj. Yet I believe Cary might well have approved of
another encomium of the Johnson story. "No civil servant [alas! here he was too late],
business executive or missionary", urged Douglas Stewart in the W. T. Whitley
Lectures for 1960, "should embark for Africa without having read Mister Johnson".
If, as I sombrely prophesied at the beginning, the life and work of the DO becomes
for the next generation as underknown and misunderstood as is today the occupation
of, say, the Odeon organist of the 1930s or of Robert Louis Stevenson's Leerie the
Lamplighter, to the point that one's offspring are being sincere rather than cynical
when they ask "What did you do as a DO, grandpa?", as long as J oyce Cary continues
to be read one need not despair that all is lost. Come the centenary of the closing down
of the Colonial Office in 2066, the true image of the DO in Africa, warts and all yet
dimples included, stands to be more widely perpetuated and more tellingly portrayed
in the novels and short stories of Joyce Cary than in the archives of our imperial
history. It is to the shelves in Blackwells and the Bodleian, not the basement in Rhodes
House, that those interested in what the British DO did in Colonial Africa may most
likely, and most rewardingly, turn in the first instance.
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