King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes (review)

King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes, by Neil Parsons. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. xviii + 322 pp., 37 line drawings, 3 maps. ISBN 0-226-64744-7, cloth, $50.00; 0-226-64745-5, paper, $18.95.

This is an odd book: a narrative history of a little-known visit to London in 1895 by three Bechuana chiefs and, to a rather limited extent, an epic tale of the events that will eventually lead to the founding of what would become in the 1960s the independent state of Botswana. While the 1895 visit led eventually to the so-called "Chamberlain Settlement" (and thus, in the 1960s, to the founding of the independent state of Botswana), the author seems less interested in that epic story than in an "anthropological" one. The eye-catching title implies that Parsons has attempted to narrate the story of the visit of those chiefs from their own perspective, thereby presenting his readers with a sort of reverse anthropological adventure: late-Victorian Britain through African eyes. Unfortunately, Parsons fails to follow through with telling this story in a satisfactory way at least partly because the available sources he has to work with are chiefly British (newspaper accounts, diaries, and especially the journal of the Reverend Willoughby, a London Missionary Society figure who accompanied the three chiefs to London as their chief translator and guided them through the difficulties of unfamiliar protocol). Moreover, as the book hints on more than one occasion, the three chiefs' visit was carefully staged--notably by officials of the London Missionary Society--to present the chiefs to the British public as benevolent, charismatic, indigenous alternatives to their chief political antagonist, Cecil Rhodes, who was, during the time of their visit in 1895, immersed in preparations for the notorious Jameson Raid. The attempt to present Victorian Britain as an odd and unaccountable place is ventured in only a half-hearted way in King Khama. In addition, the deliberate staging of the chiefs before a British audience for political purposes makes them less useful for Parsons's purposes than he seems to think: They are finally unreliable ethnographers of the peculiar customs of a little-known northern European people.

While Parsons does indicate that his intentions are chiefly to narrate a story that has never been told in any complete way before, his narration is largely free of the teleological anticipations of an end which typically drive a well-told narrative. To put my point another way: The book forces its readers to slog through an abundance of details only a few of which will be revealed as meaningful later on, near the very end of the book where Parsons briefly discusses the significance of the Chamberlain Settlement. One wonders, if this is meant to be epic narration, what function is served by detailed renderings of bills of fare and the expense account tables that abound in this book? The latter are usually the authenticating devices that establish the vraisemblance necessary to conventional narrative history. Yet the sheer abundance of such devices in this book induces a kind of readerly nausea, as seemingly pointless detail gets piled on top of seemingly pointless detail--most of it demonstrating only that the historian has visited the archives, little of it driving the story toward the fulfillment of a meaningful end. Parsons misses the opportunity presented by his material to set forth his small story as a large and important one, as a result, and he fails to take full advantage of the opportunity to raise important questions about what role cultural values play in predetermining what counts as a "large" story.

In the hands of another historian, the material here might nonetheless have provoked an interesting discussion of the theoretical complications that beset the narrative reconstruction of events in time; Parsons at least...