Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conflict with Tribal Peoples

  • Mark Cocker
Cape: 1998. Pp. 416 £20

The old school books used to tell the story of the European civilizing mission and the benighted savages who resisted it, embellished with the inspiring legends of Clive, Gordon or Livingstone. Mark Cocker's book tells very much the same story, “the confrontation between the civilised and savage”, as he puts it. But he inverts the Victorian judgements and swaps around the heroes and villains, and instead of rousing accounts of Gordon being cut down by dervishes, he retells some of the goriest episodes of imperial brutality. The moral of the story is that the savages did not become civilized, but that the conquerors were turned into savages.

The bulk of the book is taken up by four stories, each dramatized as a confrontation between a vicious European leader and his tribal opponent. We have the conquest of Mexico in the early sixteenth century (Cortés versus Moctezuma), the destruction of the Tasmanians in the late nineteenth century (the British governor versus the Last Tasmanian), the more or less contemporary defeat of the Apache (Custer versus Geronimo), and the subjugation of Hendrik Witbooi's people by a German force in the colony of South West Africa in 1905.

Drawing on modern syntheses, without reference to detailed historical monographs, and relying entirely on sources in English, the case studies are highly sensationalized. But the main problem is Cocker's failure to discriminate and put them into context. He might have hinted at other, equally familiar but less bloody episodes, perhaps saying something about Hawaii or Buganda, or discussed Cook or Livingstone. He might even have made an effort to justify his conviction that European imperialists behaved very differently in the New World and the Old. (The Spanish conquest of the Americas is generally regarded, in important respects, as a continuation of the ‘reconquest’ of the Iberian Peninsula, which was associated with the repression of Moslems, Jews and unorthodox Catholics, and which provided a model for the repression of the Aztec and Inca civilizations.)

Cocker's Europeans are all chips off the same block, up to the same tricks over a period of 500 years. And all those who suffered from European colonialism during this long period, in four different continents, are also largely the same. He describes them unblushingly as savages (but in a loving, caring way, as Dame Edna Everage would put it). And they are all, he says, tribal peoples. This is, of course, the stereotyped Victorian designation, evoking a picture of age-old ethnic groups, ruled by powerful chiefs, engaging in unspeakable rites under the direction of sinister magicians and priests, and constantly at war with their neighbours. If they have a fault, according to Cocker, it is this tendency to feuding, which makes them vulnerable to outside incursion.

The Europeans confronted very, very different peoples at different times and in different places. The Spanish stumbled on huge, well-organized, dazzlingly rich kingdoms, with literate élites and complex agricultural systems, at the hub of immense trading networks. The colonists in Australia were dealing with small, nomadic bands. The German soldiers in what is now Namibia came up against Dutch-speaking, gun-toting, often Christian ‘coloured’ or ‘Baster’ peoples, in many ways indistinguishable from the Boer frontiersmen who were causing the British such problems across the border, and who were regarded as enemies by many of the local Bantu-speaking peoples. The so-called Apache were virtually bandit groups, established in the interstices between the British colonies and Mexico, and feared by their settled neighbours.

But for Cocker, the half a millennium of European imperialism is all the same, and its defining act is the bloody conquest of what he calls tribal or savage peoples. Moreover, as far as he is concerned, it is still going on. The French nuclear tests in the Mururoa Atoll represent just another episode in the history of the annihilation of native peoples.

Reading Cocker's book is a sobering experience. The writings of modern historians and anthropologists have obviously had little impact on popular mythologies. Even an enlightened journalist such as Cocker (he writes for the UK newspaper The Guardian) can write as though the world of Victorian scholarship was still intact. This book is just like the productions of Victorian imperialist propaganda, albeit with the signs reversed. It is the new morality, all right, but in the service of the old scholarship.