Reckoning with the legacy, entitlement of colonialism
• Bryan Rostron’s ‘Lost on the Map’ probes everything from history to psychology
Within a few paragraphs of Bryan Rostron’s Lost on the Map, I identified with the root of his family intrigue.
Mine, too, has a tall tale, passed down by a few generations, that my ancestry includes Cossack guards to Russia’s royalty and that my greatgrandfather served as guard to the last tsar. I’ve never checked this, convinced it cannot be true given that imperial guards were selected for their height, and all the male relatives I’ve met on that side of my family are noticeably short.
Rostron, however, has uncovered the truth behind his family’s legend that his greatgreat-great grandfather discovered Tahiti in 1767, and was subsequently eaten by the cannibal queen, Oberea, who ruled that Pacific paradise.
However, this opening chronicle dating back more than 250 years is the springboard for much more than the unravelling of a family tree or a personal memoir. Rostron — a contributor to Business Day who has also worked at The Guardian and The New York Times — has storytelling in his blood, but things have been nagging at his psyche, and gnawing at his intergenerational post-memory and conscience.
A covetousness for riches was at the heart of why Europeans, including his forebears, journeyed to unknown places. In Africa, the evidence is in the names: Gold Coast, Ivory Coast, Slave Coast. “This was not a realm of novelty or wonder, but one to be raided and used,” writes Rostron of the mentality of the early explorers, and many of those who followed.
Something else was in their hearts, too: Africa held up a mirror to the soul of Europeans, and they saw the continent as dark, a place where they could behave basely. Colonialism was brutal, often savage, and certain sections of the book remind us of the evidence. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is regularly referenced, most powerfully in this quote from the novel’s narrator: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or a slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
BOER WAR
The Boer War broke out shortly after the publication of Heart of Darkness, which confirmed for Conrad that it was appalling to view imperialism as somehow furthering the cause of democracy. This was “enough to make you die laughing”, he wrote to a friend. (Conrad died shortly afterwards.)
Lost on the Map features a rich sprinkling of such literary references, which enliven Rostron’s anecdotes and help readers understand the attitudes and behaviours of his forebears. Mention of Robert Ardrey, for instance, conveys a particularly unsavoury — and sad — note.
Hugely influential in the 1960s and 70s, Ardrey was an American author of faux, racist philosophical treatises. “The pariah state South Africa is attaining peaks of affluence, order and internal solidarity,” he wrote in The Territorial Imperative, one of his many justifications for white supremacy. One of Rostron’s aunts revered Ardrey and gave Rostron his books in an attempt to shake him into the “right” way of thinking as a young white South African. Rostron loved his aunt, whom he remembers as a kindly person — but with abhorrent views, typical of most white South Africans of her generation. He is left to ponder, “where did it all go wrong?”
As Lost on the Map progresses, it evolves into a probative blend of history, identity, ideology, psychology and personal reflection. Some chapters evoke admiration, notably for Rostron’s father, Frank, also a newspaperman, who seems to have had the most incredible connections to epoch-defining events, being either invited to or eavesdropping on the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hitler’s gigantic Nuremberg birthday celebration rally in 1938 and the British royals’ tour of SA in 1948, just before the National Party gained power. Here, Rostron writes with filial affection. But he is not in agreement with how many of his ancestors sometimes behaved, and he abhors what they usually thought.
In the first quarter of the 20th century both of Rostron’s grandfathers were immersed in SA’s turbulent events. One grandfather was poor, a closet communist, and active in the fight for workers’ rights, including the Rand Revolt of 1922. The other, Lewis Rose Macleod, was a wealthy archracist who, as editor of The Sunday Times, wielded powerful influence in sparking the agenda of the day. Rostron painfully describes his grandfather’s racist invectives in editorials addressing the franchise question, which was being reviewed as part of the pre-Union National Convention of 1908-1909. Macleod’s epithets reflect appallingly upon his legacy, and Rostron laments that “as his grandson, these diatribes make for exceptionally uncomfortable reading”.
Readers can glean an added layer to Rostron’s distress: as a journalist he believed his grandfather would have been a kindred spirit. “It’s become intensely personal,” he says of this chapter in the country’s history.
It’s no small compliment to position Lost on the Map alongside Dan Gretton’s 2019 opus
I You We Them. Like Gretton, Rostron’s book focuses on the spectrum of awful imperialistic deeds — from everyday deceits and pillaging to mass atrocities — and the small seeds of contrarian but normal thinking that germinated and eventually took root within him. Finding truth is devilishly difficult, Gretton and Rostron agree, because it is masked by memory’s mutations — or, we choose to remain oblivious or ignorant. The real journey, then, becomes one of self-discovery; Rostron doesn’t have to travel vast physical distances to learn the truth, but, like Gretton, he has taken decades, and deep introspective voyages, to find his place on the moral map.
MOVING
The last chapter, “Journey’s End: almost Africa”, is especially moving. I know, precisely, the lie of the land Rostron describes in Hout Bay where he now lives. But I’ve never thought of its residents and their specific locations with his insight: the original coloured fisherfolk and farmers shunted off to ugly tenements on Sentinel Hill; black people in the Imizamo Yethu shack settlement on the opposite mountainside, scrambling for scraps of space; whites in comparatively luxurious properties and security estates in the beautiful valley, with easy beach access.
“Many white South Africans seem not to wish to peer too closely into the past,” he writes. The zonal map of Hout Bay is proof of that, and I’m guilty too of seeing, but not seeing.
Despite the pathos of the chapter, and the book’s overall admission of the small disappointments and large ethical failings of many comprising Rostron’s family tree, it’s no surprise that Lost on the Map ends with a sense of restrained optimism.
“The axis has shifted,” he believes, meaning that we now have a proper, moral map. Besides, the location of where we end up is less important than the journey, and how we behave to the people we meet along the way. Maps, ultimately, are in our minds.