Beyond the Malachite Hills: A Life of Colonial Service and Business in the New Africa

Beyond the Malachite Hills: a life of colonial service and business in the new Africa, by Jonathan Lawley. London: LB. Tauris, 2010. [xi] + 304 pp. ISBN 9781-84885-049-1. £27.50. Jonathan Lawley was born in India during the Raj, and he was educated in Kashmir, Britain, the then Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, before joining the Colonial Service in Northern Rhodesia. He served there as a District Officer and District Commissioner for nine years, including five in the newly independent Zambia before being required to retire. He subsequently worked on a mining project in Zaire, as well as undertaking many different business assignments and consultancies in countries as diverse as Morocco, Madagascar, Mauritius and Namibia. He is also a former Director of the Royal African Society. This memoir thus offers an account of a lifetime's engagement with Africa, encompassing a variety of roles. The early chapters present an evocative and nostalgic, even elegiac, account of central Africa in the last years of colonial rule, with stories of long safaris and fishing trips, meetings with chiefs and village elders, golf and other social gatherings at the ubiquitous club. Yet even this early in the book, there are hints that it has more to offer than the normal colonial memoir. Perhaps because of his unusual upbringing (having been taught, for example, by the renowned Eric Tyndale-Biscoe in Kashmir), race was for him, as he states "not an issue" (p.3), and he was shocked by the casual racism he found in both Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. Initially a supporter of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and of the 'partnership' it was supposed to promote, he came to see that this was merely a fig leaf for white supremacy. As a DO in Northern Rhodesia he became aware not just of the political 'winds of change' leading to independence, but, more generally, of the need to be able to communicate with Africans in their own language and appreciate their point of view. From the conversations he records with his counterparts in Southern Rhodesia, the divergence in viewpoint between them is clear. Yet at the same time, he always seems to have had a hankering for Southern Rhodesia, a place he describes as "special and surely with a special future if only whites could see the light" (p. 9), and it is worthy of note that he, a civil servant in the front line state of independent Zambia, should have chosen to spend his honeymoon in UDI Rhodesia, even meeting Ian Smith along the way. On another subsequent visit to Rhodesia he was careful enough to ensure his passport did not receive the immigration stamp of the illegal regime. Eventually, some fifteen years later, Lawley got the chance to help establish the new non-racist state of Zimbabwe when he was appointed an election supervisor following the Lancaster House Agreement. Posted to a remote rural region, he was able to use his knowledge of the local language and his experience as a DO to good effect, winning the trust of all sections of the community and ensuring that the election was conducted in as free and fair a manner as was possible. Unlike the white Rhodesiane, or indeed Mrs. Thatcher, he realised early on that the Patriotic Front would win an overwhelming victory. His detailed account of this seminal event in Zimbabwe's history will be, for many readers, the most interesting and important part of the book. In his chapter on the Zimbabwean elections, and elsewhere in the book, Dr. Lawley quotes from the diaries he kept at the time. He also refers to confidential documents he was ordered to destroy but instead retained from his time as a District Commissioner in Northern Rhodesia. These are clearly important primary source materials, and it is to be hoped that Dr. Lawley will arrange for them to be deposited in an appropriate archive in due course. Later chapters deal with his work for the Zimbabwe Teclinical Training Management Trust (ZTTMT), a pioneering programme which aimed at training indigenous technical managers in southern Africa, and for the British Executive Service Overseas (BESO), serving as Africa Director of the latter body. …