Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa

Chapter 1: “A Beautiful Country Badly Disfigured”: Enframing and Reframing Eric Dutton’s The Basuto of Basutoland

Chapter 1 “A Beautiful Country Badly Disfigured” Enframing and Reframing Eric Dutton’s The Basuto of Basutoland Garth A. Myers This chapter is an analysis of Eric Dutton’s 1925 book The Basuto of Basutoland.1 I use Timothy Mitchell’s concept in Colonising Egypt of an enframing colonial discourse, in combination with other theoretical insights, to analyze the book.2 Dutton, who later worked as an administrator in four British African colonies, orchestrated the construction of Lusaka as the capital of the future Zambia, and authored four other books, began his colonial career in today’s Lesotho in 1918–19. He used the experience as the basis for writing this text, mostly while recovering from multiple surgeries that followed his severe injury during World War I. The Basuto is a curious and fairly thin human geography of the country. The book is at once a patronizing misreading of the history of the Basotho and a searching attempt not only to understand the people but also to come to grips with the landscape. The text attempts to transform that landscape from what was an “order without framework,” in Mitchell’s terms, into colonialism’s segmented plan from the bedrock on up (55).Yet Dutton has more interest in Basotho senses of place and cultural practices than in the broader colonialist canvas with A Beautiful Country Badly Disfigured |  which the book begins; he struggles with what he thinks he ought to say and what he likes and longs for in the African world around him. This struggle between repulsion and desire appears to have been lifelong . Dutton’s book suggests ways in which British colonialism in Africa contained within it both attraction and repulsion for colonialists. This work also suggests the influences that came from Dutton’s denial of his postwar disability. Even as he exemplifies tropes and tactics of colonialism ’s environmental order, Dutton struggled against daunting personal and physical demons with a humor that betrays both the sentimentalist imperial geographer and the survivalist tactics of a disabled man. Eric Dutton During Dutton’s thirty-four-year colonial career, he engaged and corresponded intimately with the intellectual vanguard of British imperialism in Africa. He served in secretarial posts in five different British colonies in eastern and southern Africa between 1918 and 1952, and he published four geographicallyorientedbooksonAfrica .3 Liketheworksof better-knownBritish geographers in Africa, Dutton’s writings present him as “both accomplice in, and critic of, the business of imperialism.”4 The representations of place, landscape, and environment in his writings manifest this ambivalence. Dutton, the youngest of nine children in a middle-class parson’s family, was born in Yorkshire in 1895. Like all four older brothers, he entered the army after studying at Hurstpierpoint and Oxford. His first and only battle experience came at age twenty-one in 1916 at Gallipoli,where he suffered severe injuries to his legs and spine.Although he was one of the few officers or enlisted men of the North Yorkshire regiment to survive, he never regained full use of his legs and never lived without severe pain.5 After Dutton experienced a half dozen surgeries, a long convalescence at home, and a brief attempt at a clerkship in Basutoland, Robert Coryndon, then the governor of Uganda, hired Dutton as his private secretary. Dutton served Coryndon in Uganda from 1920 to 1922 and then moved with him to his new post in Kenya. Dutton served in Kenya (1922–30) and moved on to serve in Northern Rhodesia (1930–37), Bermuda (1938–41), and Zanzibar (1942–52) before his retirement. It was during the early part of his service in Kenya that he finished writing his first book, The Basuto, and published it. In this chapter, I give a close reading of this odd little book. From this book onward,Dutton’s spatial sense of colonialism suggests how frequently a “sense of landscape” and the power to produce it went hand in hand in masculinist ideological justifications of imperial rule (Kenya Mountain, xi).  | Garth A. Myers Yet Dutton had spent much of his time in Lesotho recovering from his horrific war wounds, which still affected his service in Kenya throughout his work on the book. As a consequence, the physical challenges of his experience make for a profound subtext to the book. Thus, throughout the book there is a bit of ambivalence about colonial power in Lesotho, as in much of Africa...