Mark Faulkner flatters me when he calls my stance “idiosyncratic”. Though, in this case, I doubt if I deserve the accolade. To hold that the Luo fought their way from the Sudan does not sound idiosyncratic to my old friend Paul Olaka: he shakes his belly with laughter when I tell him that white Africanists can teach him nowadays that the Luo came from nowhere. When I consult my younger friend Molly, she says she heard about the Luo trek from her old grandmother; “Had grandma been to school?” “No”.
Mark is correct when he feels that he is more familiar with Africanist authors. I must confess I prefer thinking to quoting, even if in his opinion my “information and thinking is out of date”. But I don’t think Mark understands me all that well. Since many years I do not adhere to the “Hamitic Hypothesis”, taught by former Africanists; nor do I harbour “conations of European racial superiority”. Is my recollection of the colonial era “infused with a rosy glow”? Good heavens no. Is “pacification” my term? I find it in books.
I think Mark misread Martin Meredith who rightly stressed that the so-called tribal groups had “shifting and indeterminate frontiers and loose allegiances” . That does not mean that there were no clear ethnic groups. For a new national administration more stability was needed. I suppose the British, trying to bring more order, overdid it.
It seems to me that Mark does not understand John Janzen, who reminds us that tribal communities had no watertight borders, but constantly borrowed from each other. “Borrowing” is not the same as “sharing”: the English borrowed a lot of words from the Dutch, but they never shared the language.
Mark says I am getting personal when I refer to the practical effects of his writing. But being practical is quite different from being personal. And it is real.
I cannot follow Mark when he describes the cruelty of some British against interned African women as “consensual” torture. I have heard of consensual sex. I have a suspicion that he means to say that the other British encouraged the torture, thinking it was a jolly good joke. I hope I am wrong.
Finally, if Mark wants to know what I really think about the beginning of the colonial era, let him take my book “The Way The Catholic Church Started In Western Kenya” (which took me 13 years to research) and read chapter 5: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AFTER 1895, pgs. 49 to 53. It’s a layman’s point of view, but I think it is correct. I wish him happy reading.
And happy thinking.
Hans Burgman
April 10th 2008
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