Our African Winter by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - for the 1929 Club

 Since I ended the last review with mention of those diamonds I’ll start this with them. It really does seem like diamonds were almost lying around for the taking in that part of Africa, and that story in The Mendip Mystery practically plausible.

However, the most striking thing, to the modern reader, is in all the mention of diamond mines and artificial restriction of supply, and gold and platinum and farming and copper and everything else, the thought ‘it doesn’t really belong to us’ never once crosses Conan Doyle’s mind. In fact he thinks more immigration of Brits into Africa is the answer to certain social problems.

The word savage also gets used a lot (and worse) – and yet what the Europeans are described as doing is at least as savage, and Conan Doyle doesn’t sugarcoat or gloss over that, either. Wants some kind of oversight to be established to ensure proper criminal sentences are given to those who abuse or murder the natives and describes several cases and the meagre sentences and small fines that were given, clearly hoping to stir up outrage in his readers and get something done about it.  

He’s just – very complex, I think. The book is a journal of his and his family's trip to Africa for him to lecture about Spiritualism, and he’s clearly clever, and even sceptical in some ways, and yet in others he seems utterly naïve. His faith in the British Empire as a force for good, his faith in the Cottingley fairies and Spiritualism (although as I say he could be highly sceptical of certain practitioners and critical of practices). His pleasure at being greeted by crowds and spreading the message. His faith that during the Boer War the women and children were put into a camp to be fed (this may be true, I have no way of knowing, what I cannot help noticing though is a doubt of it never even crosses his mind) and outrage at a perceived slight on a memorial he’s unable to properly read.

I agree with him very little, but I would hardly expect to, nearly a hundred years later, and with him probably already old fashioned (Conan Doyle was 70). What I do feel is that he was scrupulously honest himself, and struggled to understand that other people could be horribly dishonest, or the world different to the way he’d always known it.

What is also utterly disarming is his endless curiosity – interested in everything: diamonds, the legal system, the friction between Boer farmers and English rule, the workload of the ship porters, what will happen to Johannesburg when the mines are worked out. One moment he’s describing his son collecting specimens with his killing bottle, the next giving lyrical descriptions of scenery and twilight, the next praising his wife’s work to try and ensure captive animals are treated better. 

But of course the main thrust of the book is about Spiritualism, news about which he believes it is his mission to spread. He gives well-attended lectures and seems to have given good value for money, wonders why the church is so resistant when after all the message he’s spreading is the good news of an afterlife, describes cases and particulars, complains that scientists won’t judge the matter scientifically but is scrupulously polite about them as people.

And he writes extremely well. Of course he does. However dated it’s a very, very readable book with a lot of fascinating asides about things I’d like to know more about. 

Thanks as always to Simon and Karen for running these clubs.