Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [66]
Chapter Seven
‘Producing capital meals with three bricks and a baking pot’
The Handbook for Girl Guides, or How Girls Can Help Build up the Empire, 1912
In H. Rider Haggard’s late-Victorian adventure yarn She, two Englishmen set off for darkest Africa to discover the origins of a legend. Intrepid, level-headed chaps in Norfolk jackets, they carry the conventional prejudices about primitive peoples, the dangers of polluting the blood by intermarriage between races, and so on. But, instead of the usual imperial spoils, the two men fall among a cave-dwelling tribe ruled over by ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’, the queen Ayesha, one of the greatest femmes fatales ever invented. Although the novel was published – and an instant best-seller – in the year of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee, Ayesha is a different sort of monarch altogether. When the Englishmen first enter her kingdom, a kindly native explains how it works: ‘In this country the women do what they please. We worship them, and give them their way, because without them the world could not go on; they are the source of life.’ This is a bit of a tricky one for our flannelled heroes; the narrator replies, ‘Ah,’ adding that ‘the matter [had] never struck me quite in that light before.’
Just in case the whole narrative becomes altogether too subversive, She-who-must-be-obeyed does not have the black skin of most Africans, being, by some freakish occurrence, a pale-skinned descendant of King Solomon – the 2,000 years she has spent living in a complex of caves has clearly not done much for her complexion. In the chapter at the heart of the book, ‘Ayesha Unveils’, our heroes get a closer look. ‘She lifted her white and rounded arms – never had I seen such arms before – and slowly, very slowly, withdrew some fastening beneath her hair. Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form.’ The men are dumbstruck until they catch sight of her face.
This beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil … Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion … and it seemed to say: ‘Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand – evil have I done … and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.’
It is enough to burst the buttons on a Victorian gentleman’s waistcoat.
Before long, of course, the narrator succumbs. ‘I am but a man, and she was more than a woman … then and there I fell on my knees before her, and told her in a sad mixture of languages that I worshipped her as never woman was worshipped, and that I would give my immortal soul to marry her.’ Being an Englishman, of course, our hero soon snaps out of it, escapes the danger of sexual subjugation, and by the end of this tremendous adventure fantasy has returned to the sanity of Victoria’s England, where, whatever else may be said, women knew their place.
Rider Haggard knew his market – She became one of the best-selling books of all time. He also knew the empire, having been dispatched to South Africa by a father who considered him ‘only fit to be a greengrocer’, and, at the age of twenty, raised the flag in Pretoria when Britain annexed the Transvaal. By the following year he was the youngest head of a government department in South Africa,