Mandoa, Mandoa!

Book 211: Virago Modern Classics

by Winifred Holtby

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Mandoa is a small African state. At its head a virgin princess conceives (immaculately) further princesses. The old traditions are undisturbed until the Lord High Chamberlain visits Addis and discovers baths and cocktail shakers, motor cars and telephones. This is 1931.

Release date: June 2, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 381

Sample

Winifred Holtby began writing Mandoa, Mandoa! towards the end of 1931 during the aftermath of the October General Election. It was a time of national disillusionment;
a succession of economic disasters and rising unemployment had forced the collapse of the Labour Government, and its replacement
by a National Government at the October election marked the beginning of an era of hopelessness when the Depression seemed
to settle inexorably on the country, and when timidity and expediency were to dominate the political scene. And for those
who listened, “the angry noise of history” could already be heard in ominous unrest and aggression abroad.


The end of 1931 also saw the onset of Winifred Holtby’s serious and ultimately fatal illness, kidney failure. Its symptoms
must have seemed an internalisation of the disintegration around her. In one of the poems in her sequence, “For the Ghost
of Elinor Wylie”, she described what it was like to have abnormally high blood pressure:


       … in the abysmal hour,

   When angry pulses leap,

And black blood lashes its frustrated power

   Against tall cliffs of sleep …

   The fear, the pain, were mine.

Mandoa, Mandoa! is perhaps a surprising response to these events and circumstances but in the light of what is known of Winifred’s personality,
not uncharacteristic. She worked on the novel in the loneliness of a rented cottage at Monks Risborough, near Oxford, where
she had been sent to rest, and it was written, Vera Brittain tells us, “mostly in bed when her body was tormented by pain
and her mind had to struggle, often after wakeful nights, against impairment by heavy drugs”. But there is no doubt that at
this time, and in varying degrees throughout her life, writing was an escape from unhappiness, from the ultimate distress
of knowing that she who was still young and had much to give to life, was likely to die soon. She later wrote: “Sticking to Mandoa and to other work with me is not courage. It may be a kind of superficiality. Pain, sadness and regret bore me so that I
would rather think of anything else. I welcome work as something positive and real that we can get a grip on.” But if Mandoa, Mandoa! was an escape from the circumstances of her life, an “irrelevance”, as she subtitled it, it did not become escapist as a
literary work but something much more substantial and hard-edged: a novel of political comedy.


Yet the novel’s origins lay in an escapist dream of flight from a present world of suffering and tedium to a remote world
of beauty and happiness. The name “Mandoa” surely derives from the title of a poem which had been much in her mind during her
tour of South Africa in 1926, Sir Walter Raleigh’s “Manoa”:


Over the silver mountains

Where spring the nectar fountains,

There will I kiss the bowl of bliss

And drink mine everlasting fill

Upon every milken hill.

She had used these lines to preface her earlier novel, The Land of Green Ginger, named after a street in Hull which represents to the eight-year-old heroine the “dark, mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy
Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa which was the goal of all men’s longing”. This dream of Africa was Winifred’s
own: “I had always been interested in Africa, partly because the only one of my forebears who ever did anything at all distinguished
became one of the first governors of Uganda – and he was only a distant connection; but my mother told me stories of him when
I was a child on my father’s farm.”


But the romantic origins of Winifred’s involvement with Africa were overlaid by her developing social and political concern
for the country, particularly after her six-month visit to South Africa in 1926. By the time she came to write Mandoa, Mandoa! she had a large experience of African affairs and a deep knowledge and understanding of the country’s racial composition.
Although she was, she said, “a passionate imperialist by instinct”, who found in enlightened colonialism a nostalgic parallel with the paternalistic farming community of her youth,
she recognised that the most hopeful future for South Africa lay in the constitutional advancement of the black population.
Her political sympathies for black people found their practical issue in her commitment to the growth and organisation of
trade unionism among the urbanised black population of the Transvaal. As a reformer throughout the rest of her life, she lectured
and wrote to raise funds for this cause; as a novelist, her imagination was stirred by the changes in African life such reforms
would necessarily bring. What interested her was “the struggles of a bewildered black race confronted by the phenomenon of
twentieth-century industrialism. … During all my contact with Africa, I had felt that one day I should want to write a novel
about the contrast between the two ways of life – African and European.”


But although Mandoa, Mandoa! draws much of its material from Winifred Holtby’s African experiences, and satirically invokes South African history in its
depiction of a black population as the potential victims of white commercialism, the novel is not precisely about South Africa:


I did not want to lay the scene in South or East Africa, because, knowing a little about them, I felt I did not know enough.
I preferred to take an imaginary place, so that errors of factual accuracy could not divert me and my readers from the human
story. I wanted to take as my Africans a race of Portuguese-Abyssinians rather than Bantu, because, in the first place, I
felt they would be more articulate, being more highly developed in social civilization and less drawn in upon themselves,
and therefore better exponents of comedy. In the second place, the more I saw of Bantu, the more I realized that I could not
yet hope to portray the working of their minds, the effects of tribal experience and the corporate symbolism which forms so
important a part of their consciousness. In the third place, I wanted an independent, proud and unconquered race, without
the psychological complications which emerge after white rulers have enforced their superiority upon their black subjects.


The occasion which gave her the plot for her African novel, and its element of fantasy, was the coronation in 1930 of the
Emperor of Abyssinia. Even the Times accounts of the ceremonies and celebrations make colourful reading: “The service was of extreme liturgical interest and was
conducted throughout the night until 7.50 this morning amid continuous chanting, beating of drums, and the brandishing of
brass rattles.” A banquet, attended by 30,000 people, comprised “large joints of raw, freshly-slaughtered beef … Each man
carved for himself with his own dagger … The meat was raised to the mouth with the left hand, and the piece taken between
the teeth was then severed by an upward slash of the dagger.” During the feast military bands recited “with the utmost animation
and much gesticulation, verses, partly humorous, partly inflammatory”.


Winifred Holtby never visited Abyssinia. She heard an account of the coronation, which seems to have captured Western imaginations,
from an acquaintance, and she read extensively about the country where traditions of court intrigue, slavery, fierce independence
and distorted Christianity were, not without violent tribal dissent, under pressure from Western influences introduced by
Haile Selassie. It seemed to her that the transitional state of Abyssinian culture, and the bizarre events of the coronation,
could most appropriately be drawn on to expose the contrasts and conflicts between African and European ways of life, and
that they were such as led inevitably to a comic, even satiric, exposure.


The comic possibilities were not missed by a novelist who was present at the coronation and whose considerable African experience
had also given him a desire to write a story which “deals with the conflict of civilisation, with all its attendant and deplorable
ills, and barbarism”. Winifred wrote that she was “conducting a literary steeplechase of the kind I thoroughly disapprove
of and despise – because Evelyn Waugh is bringing out a novel with the same plot … so mine has to be rushed through”. In the
event, his Black Mischief was published in October 1932, three months before Mandoa, Mandoa!

Both Mandoa, Mandoa! and Black Mischief belong to a line of imperial novels of which Kipling, Conrad and E. M. Forster were the most distinguished exponents and
which Paul Scott and J. G. Farrell, amongst others, have continued into the present. What interests these novelists is not imperial achievement and adventure as such but the problems of communication
imperialism thrusts into prominence and the challenge to Western values it invites. Intrinsically interesting in these respects,
imperialism also provides an image of the problems of communication between all people, even those who attempt to know and
care for each other. Forster’s humane advice, “only connect”, is as appropriate to the inhabitants of North Donnington as
it is to the visitors to Lolagoba, and as difficult to put into practice. In Waugh’s case, the emphasis of his comedy is on
the hopelessness of making such connections: “I just don’t want to hear about it, d’you mind?” says one of his characters,
and this is a logical response to a world in which events are arbitrary and people deluded or self-interested. Life is indeed
mischievous, and the wit of Waugh’s writing does nothing to conceal the pessimism of a novel based on this conception; it
is as if Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been rewritten as a farce.


Mandoa, Mandoa! acknowledges the near hopelessness of the task of constructing right relations between people of different cultures, and
by extension between all people. Its conclusion is reminiscent of the end of A Passage to India where Forster’s vision of communion between East and West must be postponed: “‘No, not yet’ … ‘No, not there.’” In one of
the most powerful passages of Mandoa, Mandoa! the four Europeans of the International Humanitarian Association, in danger and discomfort, in turn silently express the
sense of isolation that undermines all human intercourse: “there’s no liking, no friendship, no love … There is no real companionship.
We each live in a private, distorted world … how alien we are. Not two people in the world share the same thought, the same
mood.” As societies, both England and Mandoa are shown as equally, though differently, corrupt; decadence and exploitation
amongst Europeans are matched by the cruelty and treachery of the Africans, and the respective miseries of capitalist and
pre-industrial societies are paralleled in the fog of North Donnington and the mud of Mandoa, and in the dole queues outside
the labour exchange on Remembrance Day and the annual slave train from Mandoa to the Red Sea. But the novel is saved from
the nihilism of Waugh by its joyful engagement with the political intricacies of the central situation, and its view that, on the whole, people
are probably likeable, and certainly that their behaviour is to be enjoyed without cynicism or malice. When the heroine, Jean
Stansbury, says, “I like the sense of things happening all over the world – and feeling the contact with curious enterprises,”
she expresses the author’s own enthusiasm for “things happening”, her delighted awareness of the complexity which constitutes
a historic moment. In fictional terms, the wedding of La’gola is such a moment more publicised than most and more motley in
its constituents; it can therefore the more vividly be employed to demonstrate the diversity of human behaviour and motivation
and the connections and causal relationships that can be discovered within that diversity. It is in these terms that Mandoa, Mandoa! can be classed as a political comedy.


Like other such works – Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm come to mind – Mandoa, Mandoa! is less interested in psychological and social realism than in the creation of characters who typify human attributes and
of situations which show those attributes in action. With schematic thoroughness it assembles a large cast of cultural and
class types and draws them into a complex situation by means of a narrative which is simple – a wedding to which many guests
come – but a brilliant focus for the interaction of the economic, racial and personal forces involved. Much of the humour
and satirical thrust of the novel depends on the incongruities which arise from such interaction, for example, those caused
by the impact of technology on a primitive people. Winifred Holtby’s comic penetration is well illustrated in the instance
of Talal’s infatuation with motor cars, cocktail shakers, telephones and steamboats, which is not only amusing, and even absurd,
given the absence of technology in his country, but sharply questions the benefits civilisation bestows. Do such commodities
represent the summary of Western achievement, and is Talal’s susceptibility to them an avenue to his and his country’s exploitation?
To Winifred Holtby’s contemporary readers, themselves precariously embarking on an era of the mass production of consumer
goods as well as of colonial contraction, such questions must have seemed doubly relevant.


But Mandoa, Mandoa! is more of a hybrid work than say Animal Farm; it has ambitions other than single-minded political satire, and, as contemporary critics noted, occasionally shifts gear
from caricature and near-fantasy into realism. This is particularly true of the two main English characters, Jean Stanbury
and Bill Durrant. Jean Stanbury is brought into the novel not for her usefulness to the plot but as a foil to the extravagant
characters around her. Admirable, hard-working Jean, who is so much a projection of Winifred Holtby herself, provides a standard
of common sense, practical dedication, and liberal tolerance, what is good, in fact, in Western society, against which the
excesses and idiosyncracies of other characters, both European and African, can be measured. She is a figure of enlightened
English ordinariness: “We have to work for the world as we know it as best we can … we have to go on,” she says at the end
of the novel, and this is the belief Mandoa, Mandoa! adheres to and which underlies its political satire and also its racial and cultural assumptions. The “world as we know it”
is one in which the values of Jean Stanbury are considered if not superior then certainly the standpoint from which those
of other cultures are viewed. Inevitably, therefore, the African characters are portrayed as comic or barbaric and Mandoa
itself as a fantasy country in which types, even stereotypes, can flourish without too much regard for cultural accuracy or
neutrality. As Winifred Holtby said, her concern was not with “tribal experience” but with “the human story” of her imaginary
place. Mandoa, Mandoa! is only superficially an African story; its main purpose is with the variousness of political and social behaviour defined
in Western terms. Although it would be too crude to say that Mandoa, Mandoa! is peopled with English eccentrics, some of whom have blackened faces, there is a sense in which, like Swift’s Lilliput,
it is less the people and conditions of Mandoa that are of interest than what they tell us about English society.


Bill Durrant, Jean’s male counterpart, and a negative version of the values she upholds, is likewise “realistically” depicted
as a type of Englishman only too likely to have found reluctant employment in an African country during this era of the tail-end of imperialism and its replacement by commercial development. It is interesting that Evelyn Waugh’s “hero” in Black Mischief is a similarly disillusioned, penurious Englishman who is superfluous to the advanced industrial society which has so expensively
reared him for a role it can no longer afford. Bill Durrant’s usefulness in England has expired with the war which he feels
should logically have destroyed him; his only escape from the nightmare of his own and England’s history is as the rueful
and doubting bringer to a “primitive” people of the “three great gifts of civilization – Profit, Power, Pity”.


Winifred Holtby invariably drew on her wide circle of friends and acquaintances to populate her novels; Mandoa, Mandoa! is a gallery of such fictionalised portraits. Bill Durrant, for instance, is based on Harry Pearson, the charming, inadequate
friend she had loved since childhood. As characters, Bill and Jean are successful examples of such autobiographical quarrying;
thematically and structurally they are constructive to the novel. But the relationship between them is another matter and
although so closely based on the author’s own experiences and feelings, its presence in the novel is uneasy and incompletely
realised. Winifred Holtby backs away from a committed portrayal of the emotions these two characters have for each other,
and at any such attempt the language she employs is stale and evasive:


She laid her hand on his arm.

That startled him. He clutched her hand, crying, “My dear—!”

She felt the strong shock of emotion flow through her. For a moment anything might have happened.

“Good heavens, he loves me. He feels …”

They waited.

Every instinct, every memory, hung between them. Their past and their future stood balancing on a breath.

Then long-trained habit intervened. Jean drew away.

But of course, the story of Jean and Bill is not about lovers; rather, it is Winifred Holtby’s stoical and supportive valediction,
in what must have seemed likely to be her last book, to a man whom she had come to realise could offer her neither passion nor comfort: “She was laying aside physical and emotional adventures; she was laying aside her husband and her children.”
In the novel Jean marries solid Maurice: disappointing, perhaps, but a movement back from an introspective digression into
a fictional realisation of the novel’s major theme: “we have to go on”. It is fitting that Jean Stanbury, “strong and maternal”,
should be a vehicle, in all respects, for this commitment to life.


The story of Bill and Jean is a digression, and its unsatisfactoriness is not detrimental to the success of the novel. It is, in any case, crowded out
by the ideas the novel is concerned with and by the comic and political ramifications of the situation it is centred on. This
is also true, to some extent, of the friendship between Bill and Talal. Talal is Winifred Holtby’s colourful and sympathetic
fictionalisation of another man she knew well, Clements Kadalie, “a magnificent native of Nyasaland, educated at a Scottish
Presbyterian Mission … [with a] boundless confidence in his own importance”, who was the general secretary of the Industrial
and Commercial Workers’ Union, the union for South African black workers which Winifred Holtby helped to support during the
last eight years of her life. The figure of Talal is no simple caricature; his depiction is much fuller than that of the characters
of comic or satiric singularity like Sid Granger, Mr. Gish and Felicity Cardover. But he is extraordinary, and it is an impressive
achievement that he is credible whilst being so much larger than what we normally think of as life, so much of a convincing
contrast to what Jean and Bill represent. His characterisation is an imaginative acknowledgement of the vitality and variety
the human personality is capable of. The relationship between him and Bill is an attempt, rather in the manner of the friendship
between Fielding and Aziz in Forster’s A Passage to India, to provide an emotional, personalised focus to the themes of the novel. But perhaps because as characters Talal and Bill
are in different registers, the affection between the two men, and their incompatabilities, are left disappointingly undeveloped.
Perhaps given the ambitious scope of the novel, there was simply not enough time or space to develop the realism of personal
relationships, and it seems that it was almost with a sense of impatience that Winifred Holtby broached such an activity at all. For, as she made clear, her purpose in Mandoa, Mandoa! was largely an intellectual one: “I want to do something hard, muscular, compact, very little emotional, and with the emotion
hammered into the style. Metalwork, not water-colour.”


In this respect Mandoa, Mandoa! is different from Winifred Holtby’s other novels. Whilst not “water-colour”, they follow conventional patterns of the nineteenth-century
realist novel in their concern with the details of parochial, domestic and personal issues. This is the mode she returned
to in her final novel, South Riding which is in the tradition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. But Mandoa, Mandoa! is an expression of the political acumen and acerbity of mind which made her so good a journalist. Indeed, Mandoa, Mandoa! is the novel of a reforming journalist, the fictional jeu d’esprit of someone who could not, she said, “get out of my head my responsibility for contemporary affairs … I am a publicist and
a darn good one when I exert myself.” Mandoa, Mandoa! is much more than the publicisation of a progressive view of imperial conflict, written “to make old girls sit up”, as one
of her friends put it, but more than her other novels it does represent a compromise between the self-acknowledged divisions
in her energies: “I shall never quite make up my mind whether to be a reformer-sort-of-person or a writer-sort-of-person.”


It is also an unusual novel for a woman to have written. Several of its reviewers remarked on this: she showed “an almost
masculine appreciation of practical issues”, L.P. Hartley wrote, and, with some surprise, Graham Greene likened the strength
of her writing in Mandoa, Mandoa! to that of Waugh and Conrad. Indeed, the novel can be seen as the antiphonal voice to that of a work which was being written
alongside it, Vera Brittain’s highly personal and “feminine” Testament of Youth. There is a certain irony in that the only book Winifred dedicated to Vera, the Very Small Very Dear Love of the inscription,
should be so different from anything Vera wrote herself. “Hard, muscular, compact” are the last adjectives one could apply
to Testament of Youth but they are, for the most part, true of Mandoa, Mandoa! as is Winifred’s later description of it as “vital and gay”. The endeavour and achievement of Mandoa, Mandoa! was for Winifred Holtby a form of control over her illness, her fear of death, and her grief at the failure of love; it is
as much a Testament as Vera Brittain’s book. But with an interesting defiance of traditional modes of female writing about
such subjects, Winifred Holtby chose an escape into what is generally regarded as a masculine form, the novel of political
comedy. As she remembers the suffering and tedium of the occasion of Rollet’s death, Jean Stanbury voices the rationale of
the novel: “be brave … be stoical, be helpful”. To this might also be added an earlier comment: “She could not give herself
away.”


Marion Shaw, Hull 1982

MORNING had come. From the jagged pillars of the Eastern hills the sky hung like smooth dun-coloured silk above the squatting huts.
One by one, through black, gaping doorways crept the people, stooping beneath the lintels, stretching their cramped limbs,
sniffing the grey air that was flat rather than cool, then making soundlessly for the vast square before the palace. Behind
the men came the women, behind the women, the donkeys. The deep dust of the roads was pocked by a thousand footmarks. The
smallest children, strung behind their mother’s backs, crowed or whimpered; bangles tinkled; the accoutrements of young warriors
rattled as they strode; now an old man grunted as he upheaved his crippled body from a pile of skins and dragged himself out
from the warm stench of the hut; now a girl, wide-eyed and shuddering, uttered one coughing sob, and then was silent. But
for the most part the crowd assembled quietly. The hour was holy and terrible. Implacable spirits of fortune and misfortune
were abroad.


The square was already crowded. Before the high stockade the priests had gathered. The six hundred and seventy-nine archbishops
of Mandoa stood like statues, their dark hands folded upon the staves of their tall crosses, their white robes as still as
marble, till, growing weary of an unfamiliar discipline, one sneezed, another spat, a third scratched hopefully in his hair.
Yet their massed figures remained solemn and portentous.


Long before daylight the travellers had been stirring. They stood now, a great uneven caravan, awaiting dismissal. In front,
out of sight of the watchers by the stockade, were their bodyguard, Arabs, Somalis, gigantic Turkanas and Abyssinians, armed
with rifles; four stout donkeys bearing a dismembered and unusable machine gun patiently submitted their flanks as propping-posts
for their Abyssianian drivers, their long, sensitive ears and brown velvet nostrils twitching as the insects woke with the rising sun. Behind them a string of prisoners, bound wrist to
ankle by thongs of hide, drooped limply after a sleepless night of terror. Their impotent misery evoked no pity from the onlookers,
who for the most part had eyes to spare only for the voluntary adventurers. These were young men from the drought-stricken
villages, insubordinate sons from the rich eastern valleys, town-dwellers tired of the tyranny of the priests, rebels against
the old order, warriors dissatisfied with the routine of the army, all the youth and restlessness and initiative which Lolagoba
was too small to hold. These did not crouch like the prisoners, smeared with ashes of humiliation. Proudly they stood, their
limbs polished and oiled, their hair stiffened with clay, frizzled with combs, or bound with copper, their weapons in their
hands, their hearts beating fast behind their hairless chests. Behind them lay the familiar life of unvarying tradition, the
life of their fathers and of their father’s fathers, the cooking pots beside their mother’s huts, the winding, trodden paths
between the thorn-bushes, the secret discipline of their church and gods; around them arose the admiration of the crowd and
the exhilarating strangeness of the royal city; before them stretched the unknown future, terrifying and splendid. Being young,
being ignorant, being trained in a school that honours courage, they were ardent for action; they desired glory; and since
they were going far, they dreamed that they must be going gloriously.


The girls who followed them had no such fancies. Though here and there a bold wench simpered before the watching crowd, twisting
her body so that her short kilt slapped her swinging thighs, ogling the men and boys with brazen indifference to all time
beyond the present, for the most part they huddled together like scared antelope, their great eyes liquid with apprehension.
The familiar world being so hard for women, they had little to hope from the unknown.


The procession straggled back towards the city. Dishonoured priests and landless nobles, gamblers who had staked and lost
even their bodies, artisans who had outworn their skill, brought up the rear. They, too, had little to hope; they knew that neither in Mandoa nor Ethiopia nor Arabia would life be good to the dishonoured and defeated. Yet
waiting there in the dawn, expecting the sacred blessing, they too were touched by a faint exhilaration.


The only travellers unmoved by expectation were the captured slaves. Torn from villages beyond Mandoa, driven and bullied
across the inimical hills, starved, beaten, dazed and terrified, they stood like herded beasts. The tall Mandoans in their
bright co