Every man must kill the thing he loves: Empire, homoerotics, and nationalism in John Buchan's Prester John

Smith, Craig

Reading Prester John (1910) invites discovery of the diverse and multiple pressures exerted upon a Scot writing a boy's adventure story in London, on the eve of South Africa's nominal independence and at the end of the "Scramble for Africa," amid debates of franchise extension, the suffragette movement, military reform, and national efficiency, and at a time when Great Britain was newly insecure about its world hegemony in the face of German industrial growth, turmoil in Russia, and American self-assertion in the western hemisphere. This text, and others like it from the late nineteenth century on, open themselves to a politically deconstructive analysis that pulls apart discourse, revealing anxieties and contradictions entangled around race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation.

In this paper, I will be suggesting that an imperialist novel such as Prester John can sustain a symptomatic reading in which the text negotiates concerns specific to the authors local or national space.(1) I intend this symptomatic level of analysis to complement the more fully realized exploration of the complex strategic struggle between imperialism as an extroverted, even hypertrophied manifestation of British nationalism on one side, and African resistance or indeed incipient nationalism on the other, as they collide and collaborate in the dynamic of homoerotic desire and homosexual panic which structures the formation of maleness here. My essay examines three elements in the complicated, contradictory, parallel construction of British male identity and of British national and imperial identities during the climax of European expansion in the three decades before World War I. The first element is the renewal of British imperialism in ways that will ameliorate the internal condition of Britain at the same time as it will settle the struggle between British and Afrikaner settlers in South Africa. The problem of British hegemony is worked through with the aid of one of its chief obstacles, the resistance of indigenous peoples--the other obstacle, largely ignored, being the alternative hegemony of the Afrikaners. The second element is the construction of an exemplary British masculinity that covers class and regional subtleties with strict hierarchical prescriptions,(2) and that is worked up to meet the needs and responsibilities of empire but also to respond to challenges against patriarchal privilege "at home."(3) The third element is, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's terms, the "homosocial bonding" that secures colonial domination and structures masculinity yet endangers both by crossing over into homoerotic attraction, whereupon the mechanism of homosexual panic quickly triggers the reinstatement of "proper" male relations.

These three elements interconnect in a colonial space, but their "foreign" setting by no means precludes their participation in the social processes going on "at home." In fact, the setting enables their domestic work. For it is the parallel, even reciprocal nature of this tangle of masculinity, homoeroticism, and nationalisms that I wish most to establish. The text's largest frame of reference is the British empire, which it sees as the real context of British male identity; the homosocial/homoerotic continuum provides the space in which both the problematics of masculinity and of competing nationalisms within empire are worked out. Like other texts which are concerned with the meaning of race and gender in colonial places, Prester John is a stereoscopic text, looking in two directions simultaneously: at home and abroad.(4) The domestic contexts in which such works are produced, in other words, form another determining pressure in the resolution of plot and politics, shaped as these elements already are by the colonial meanings they generate. Simultaneously and reciprocally, the meanings generated in the resolution of colonial problematics are exported back "home" like some raw material, to be fashioned and consumed in the metropole as facets of what Mary Louise Pratt calls the "domestic subject."

By way of introduction, I want to look at a passage at the end of Prester John. However regressive they seem today, the ideas it expresses are clearly intended to be the apogee of enlightened colonialism, virtual blue-book recommendations for the correct administration of a colony. With a Kiplingesque homily on the worldly duties of the higher race, the hero recruits and educates British youth about its responsibilities while, underneath, the enormous riches he has gained advertise the glamour of Empire:

[I]t was an experience for which I shall ever be grateful, for it turned me from a rash boy info a serious man. I knew then the meaning of the white man's duty. He has to fake all risks, wrecking nothing of his life or his fortunes, and well content to find his reward in the fulfillment of his task. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as toe know this and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone but wherever there are dark men who live only for the day and their own bellies. Moreover, the work made me pitiful and kindly. I learned much of the untold grievances of the natives, and saw something of their strange, twisted reasoning .... (198)

This is colonial discourse in a concentrated form. It justifies once more the endless deferral of self-rule for the colonies. While it warns the prospective colonial that he (It is programatically he.) must expect no reward other than the job-well-done, the novel itself implies that the hero returns with bags full of diamonds. And because imperial ideology must restrain indigenous peoples in epistemological and ontological stasis (They do not progress until progress is brought to them.), any discomfiture of imperial knowledge must be presented as new, enlightening (We didn't realize the extent of this problem; now that we do we will consider how to remedy it.), and therefore disturbing. To anticipate a symptomatic reading, the moment allows that such paternalism can apply at home as well as abroad in order to accommodate and soothe threats to established social structures.

But this proposal for enlightened colonialism in southern Africa could not go uncontested in 1910. John Buchan is writing about native policy as if it could be changed "for the better," even though by 1906 it seemed clear that southern Africa would be unified under Afrikaner leadership. In 1909, England saw the proposed South Africa Union Treaty, with its rejection of any political representation for black Africans and inclusion of merely symbolic representation for "Asians" and "Coloureds." In May of 1910, the Union Treaty passed unamended, and South Africa was an autonomous state eager to secure a docile and depoliticized labor force for its mines and industries. As John Eddy and Deryck Schreuder explain, "Ultimately, an early form of African decolonisation was involved, to the extent of the imperial power passing the South Africa Act in 1909 with the clear aim of securing British interest in the region through a transfer of authority to a reasonably secure and conciliated colonial government of moderate Afrikaner leaders" (204). The blueprint for the perfect apartheid colony Buchan offers at the end of Prester John mixes nostalgia and whitewash.

Still, if this novel lays out one vision of ethnic politics in a newly independent South Africa, a vision that denied the actualities of Afrikaner power, it also yearns for a completely different world, wherein Boers are peripheral, officials not yet omnipresent, and the land open for British endeavor. This is a pastoral version of South Africa, where neither State nor Government has been organized, leaving the arena clear for the enterprising man.(5) Arcoll defeats the rebellion, Davey finds a fortune in diamonds. All the text's jabs at bureaucratic inefficiency, ignorance of frontier contingencies, and unrealistic, academic plans trumpet the virtues of individualism and practical empiricism. One would never guess that the territory in which Buchan places his action was dominated by Afrikaner settlers, not British; even after the Boer War, fought to secure the Rand-lords' British sympathies, the Transvaal was never as accessible and amenable to British authority as Buchan imagines it here. In this vision, the British perform an imperial service for Afrikaner and African alike; their presence will have a civilizing effect on both groups; Davey and his race will remain guardians, figureheads, the natural aristocracy. It also authorizes and anticipates further cooperation between white partners in the organization of this new country's natural resources: gold, diamonds, and Africans.(6) Finally, it instructs the rulers how to treat the "natives"--with firm, paternal benevolence, killing the dangerous ones and keeping the pacified ones on well-organized re-education estates. If this solution, through death or through pacification, also beheads the native threat to settler hegemony, then all the better. And if this murder simultaneously preserves for the white man an unconstrained training ground-cum-holiday resort wherein he can discover his manhood and escape the new challenges of domestic and national politics, it becomes all the more necessary. Prester John celebrates a frontier mythology, the freedom of the (white, British, male) individual, that is at once imperial fantasy, nostalgia, propaganda, and education.

For the sake of clarity, but insisting that the issues should not be compartmentalized, I want now to outline the range of domestic concerns surrounding Buchan and Britain at the turn of the century, before outlining some of the imperial issues which reveal how thoroughly the international had permeated the local. Then, I will examine the most suggestive aspects of the novel, its handling of interracial homoeroticism and of African nationalism.

Loving Empire

In the true doctrine of Empire the chief emphasis is rightly laid on the sentiment of Empire, as the existing bond of union--a sentiment ... an impulse to work together in the solution of common problems .... The young nations are striving to develop their material resources, while our problem is how to devise a higher type of national life.

(Buchan, Comments 93)

Buchan went to South Africa in 1901 at the age of twenty-seven, in the final, messy stages of the Boer War. He was appointed secretary to the High Commissioner, Lord Milner, a hard-core imperialist who had pushed the Boer republics into war in order to justify British seizure of the Transvaal and its gold mines. Buchan's responsibilities on his tour included managing the controversial concentration camps in which Afrikaner wives and children were impounded during the scorched-earth campaign against the guerilla bands. In an article he wrote for Spectator three months before he went to the area, he defended the camps, claiming that they protected women and children from "famine and pestilence" (qtd. in Kruse 35), though by the time a peace treaty was signed in 1902, twenty thousand inmates had died.(7) Late in life, writing his memoirs, he still dismissed the scale of suffering with a callous analogy: at first, the camps "were no better than lazar-houses .... When we took charge the worst was over, and in our period of administration we turned them into health resorts" (Pilgrim's 105).

He returned to London in August 1903 and soon published his report, The African Colony: Studies in Reconstruction. In it, on the strength of less than two years' exposure to a few missionary-educated African workers, he repeated the standard analysis of the unchanging, un-differentiated "native" who is

as crude and naive as a child, with a child's curiosity and ingenuity, and a child's practical inconsequence. Morally he has none of the traditions of self-discipline and order, which are implicit, though often in a degraded form [Boers or Portuguese in white people. In a word, he cannot be depended upon as an individual save under fairly vigilant restraint; and in the mass he forms an unknown quantity." (qtd. in Kruse 55)

Back home, Buchan resumed his writing and journalism (including his philosophical novel on imperialism, A Lodge in the Wilderness, of 1906), switched some time before 1908 from the Liberal to the opposition Conservative Party, and in April 1910 began the serialization of a story called "The Black General," published as Prester John after its run in a boys' journal called The Captain ended in October (Daniell 90).

Many historians have commented on the changes that came over Britain's attitude to empire after the Boer War, especially after the Liberals won their landslide in 1906. The confrontational and Machiavellian imperialism of Chamberlain and Milner lost its public appeal after the excesses and ultimate failure of the war, which was perceived to have been waged for the sake of Rand capitalists (themselves Jewish and therefore automatically suspect). The jingoism of 1900 died down, replaced by a more pragmatic, conciliatory Liberal imperialism orchestrated by men Buchan knew from Oxford. Indeed, although the pre-war decade saw the most peaceful and prosperous Empire yet, many observers discerned decline in the calm. No longer penetrating the wilderness or extending the frontier, and becoming increasingly dependent on its colonies for export markets and basic commodities, Britain seemed to be softening, enfeebling the racial muscles that had won the world. In his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (originally published in Great Britain as Memory-Hold-the-Door), Buchan recalled how, in the post-Milner colonial years, he "began to have an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart" (Porter, Lion's 230).

Since Prester John is, avowedly, a boys' adventure story, a virtual handbook for the budding colonial, it is worth noting that this genre itself was changing in the post-Boer War years. According to Patrick Dunae, the first boys' magazine, the Boy's Own Paper, was founded in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society; by the mid-1880s, it had a circulation of over one million for its blend of proselytizing and sensational colonial features. In the 1890s, fiction began to replace the moralizing, though the BOP was anti-War and seldom mentioned Britain's aggression in South Africa. In contrast, most of the other boys' magazines were rabidly jingoistic, portraying the Boers as retarded brutes, even lower than Africans.(8) Along with the adult public's taste in Empire, however, post-war boys' journals modified the jingoism and turned inward, preaching Empire for its medicinal effect upon the national soul: "After 1902 the spirit of empire was revised and redirected under the new banner of 'National Efficiency'.... Efficiency ... was synonymous with progress" and tied together imperialism and British nationalism in the face of Germany's increasing strength (Dunae 116). A second post-war development was the popularity of invasion stories, often in tandem with calls for national service or conscription, and of spy tales, part of the "spy-fever" paranoia also caused by Germany's emergence: "Vigilance was the key word in boys' literature during the years which immediately preceded The Great War, and readers must have realized that they were being exhorted to prepare for the defence of Great Britain--not for the expansion of Greater Britain" (Dunae 120). In the face of military incompetence, bureaucratic muddling, and parental ignorance, it would be up to Britain's boys to save the day.

It is easy to see, then, how a story like Prester John, about a plan by the "enemy within" the imperial borders to overthrow benevolent and disinterested British rule, draws on both the invasion plot and the spy fever, along with the public compound of imperial complacency and vague fears of national and racial decline. I want now to suggest that such stories articulate and negotiate numerous domestic concerns which would trouble a man in Buchan's position at the turn of the century and which saturated readers and texts between the "Scramble" and World War I. Consider these arrivals on the national scene: the New Woman of the 1880s and 1890s, demanding access to higher education, recognition, and liberation from her customary subordination; radical and working-class politics in the 1880s, plus the 1893 founding of the Labour Party, which quickly secured the allegiance of the Trades Union Congress; the wider importance of class interests in elections, evident in the Liberals' 1906 triumph; the victory of manufacturing capital over the old elites. Consider also the newly organized pressure for male franchise extension (As late as 1911, only 7.5 million men out of an entire adult population of 45 million could vote.) and the Suffragette Movement's calls for universal suffrage. (During the long Liberal government of 1906-14, twenty-seven Bills on women's suffrage were read and defeated.) And factor in the growth of eugenics as a science, aiming to prove why Britain did and should rule the world and arousing fears about the purity of the national blood.(9) No wonder Buchan and his readers preferred an imagined youthful freedom on the African frontier. In the passage from his autobiography quoted above, he laments the new century: "both the great parties were blind to the true meaning of empire .... The historic etiquette was breaking down; in every walk of life money seemed to count for more; there was a vulgar display of wealth, and a rastaquouere craze for luxury" (qtd. in Porter, Lion's 230).(10)

Bernard Semmel's study, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social Imperial Thought, 1895-1914, raises several more of the concerns current in the first decade of this century, especially the impact of social Darwinism and eugenics upon the debate over "national efficiency" and racial fitness. According to Semmel, a key text for turn-of-the-century Empire was Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution of 1894, which took a nationalist and imperialist view of Darwinism's implications and elaborated it into a policy of "External Social Darwinism" or Darwinist Imperialism, the world-wide triumph of the fittest race.(11) Kidd, whose book earned him an immense following, organized a binarism of racial characteristics that explained Britain's traditional dominance. He devalued intellect and sensibility (French traits), Semmel explains, in favor of "[s]uch qualities as 'reverence,' 'great mental energy, resolution, enterprise, powers of prolonged and concentrated application, and a sense of simpleminded and single-minded devotion to conception [sic] of duty.'" An overly rational approach such as socialism might even harm the racial stock or "lower social efficiency to a dangerous degree, and so contribute to the decided worsting, in the evolution which is proceeding, of the people possessing it" (qtd. in Semmel 34). Buchan's Davey Crawfurd exemplifies the national characteristics of the External Social Darwinist in his patriotic individualism and in his final paternalistic construction of suitable lives for the subdued Africans. Recall the sine qua non of his racial burden: "that is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king; and so long as we know this and practice it, we will rule ... "(198).

The conservative political implications of such beliefs--and the veiled warning against national decline and social engineering--are obvious: the imperial center equals and replicates Britain's aristocracy and the best (most efficient and predatory) parts of the entrepreneurial middle classes, while the colonies, and still further out the uncolonized world, ought to act like the lower classes, led and gradually reformed by their betters. So the task of the imperial reformer must be to extend to the world the social structure and class values which had worked so well (minus a few interruptions) throughout British history. And, if done with proper British thoroughness, the extension of "Britain" overseas would simultaneously reinstate it at home, where it seemed in jeopardy. In all this, a man's (sic) devotion to work and duty remain paramount values for all classes; self-interest is a regressive, foreign fault. The British are the world's elite, and Davey Crawfurd belongs to this natural/national aristocracy.(12)

Eugenics, another new "science," worked in tandem with social or racial Darwinism. Sir Francis Galton's first book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, was published in 1883; more immediately for Buchan's time, Galton's Essays in Eugenics, 1909, argued that eugenics had "strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics co-operates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races" (qtd. in Semmel 46). Once again, the post facto teleological employment of abstract and anthropomorphized categories (religion, Nature, Humanity, races) sanitizes and sanctifies the entire process in clearly coercive ways: anyone who refuses his (sic) vocation is an atheist and a barbarian, a throwback to the unfit races.

These currents in turn-of-the-century thought flowed so strongly that they entered Liberal and even socialist thought, via what Semmel calls the theory of "Social Imperialism," whereby Britain needed its empire in order to encourage the breeding of great British men. The demands of empire would keep the racial stock high, while the high racial stock would, in turn, inevitably ameliorate what C.F.G. Masterman dubbed "the condition of England." (His book by that name was published in May 1909; by November it was in its third edition.) Thus we hear Lord Rosebery, Liberal free trader and power-broker, in stump speech after stump speech, tying domestic and imperial together: "An Empire such as ours requires as its first condition an imperial race--a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid .... [I]n the rookeries and slums which still survive, an imperial race cannot be reared." And in 1902: "The true policy of Imperialism ... relates not to territory alone, but to race as well. The Imperialism that, grasping after territory, ignores the conditions of an Imperial race, is a blind, futile, and a doomed Imperialism .... [A] drink-sodden population ... is not the true basis of a prosperous Empire" (qtd. in Semmel 63).(13) By appealing to the concerns of middle- and working-class citizens, at least some of whom were voters (and many more of whom might shortly become voters), reform expansionists sought to generate broad popular support for free trade and "humanitarian" imperialism, at the same time developing another rationale for paternalist interference at home: if the "drink-sodden" lower orders are letting the race down, what can we do to fix them? As Semmel puts it, "Social imperialism was designed to draw all classes together in defence of the nation and empire and aimed to prove to the least well-to-do class that its interests were inseperable from those of the nation" (24).

Domestic political platforms such as these drew strength from the creeping doubt, the something-must-be-done malaise, that many observers developed over Britain's apparent industrial and military decline. Prester John is a product of this environment, and it is important to discern in its action and thematics the influence of these currents. But it is also crucial to recognize how the novel transplants all the fears of Britain in 1910 back, however many years, into a day when the frontier was still there to offer all the easy solutions, solutions involving daring, application, and Britishness rather than the messy compromise and negotiation of politics. This novel accomplishes the supercession of state/governmental politics, installing instead--in the guise of individual enterprise and national character--a politics that can appear non-political, or what Pratt terms an "anti-conquest" narrative wherein "strategies of innocence are constituted in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest associated with the absolutist era" (7).

Before we look closely at how Buchan articulates all these issues in his boys' adventure tale, one more area needs clarification: the immediate South African context. The date of the novel's action remains vague, but judging from the prefatory map tracing "the various journeys of Mr. David Crawfurd," as well as the sparseness of white--and especially British--settlement and the topicality of the diamond sub-plot, the action seems to take place in the extreme north-east of the Transvaal, some time after the Kimberley diamond rush of 1870 but perhaps before the Boer War, which would have made the few Afrikaners Davey actually encounters even less welcoming than they are. Then again, as a romance, Prester John can quite easily construct a no-time, an imaginary historical moment compounding invented and actual times and places.

More precisely; I would suggest, in its manifestation of Britain's turn-of-the-century imperial imaginary, the story is "set" in 1870, in 1878, in 1899, in 1906, and in 1909-10, as well as at all the moments of Britain's domestic development already discussed. 1870 saw the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley; 1886 began the Rand gold rush. Both increased the value of the two Boer republics and thus required a balancing northward extension of British power; Anglo-Afrikaner wars followed each discovery. The "Kaffir Wars" sputtered throughout the 1870s and 1880s; the most violent was Cetewayo's uprising of 1876, finally smashed in 1878. In 1899, Rhodes and the Rand financiers, with Chamberlain's help, backed the Boers into a corner and started a war; Britain eventually won it, at a cost of 270 million pounds, but quickly lost the peace. In 1906, the Zulu chief Bambatha led a rebellion in Natal; 3500 Africans were killed, 7000 were gaoled, and 700 were reported lashed (Porter, Lion's 228). Also in 1906, Britain handed back to the Boers control of Transvaal and Orange Free State, surrendering all influence over "native policy" in the two republics. Finally, in 1909, while Britain was responding to the "German Naval Scare," the Dominion of South Africa sent its proposed constitution to the British parliament which passed it unamended, again sacrificing black and "Coloured" Africans to the labor needs of a wealthy ally's industrial and mining sectors (Eddy and Schreuder; Porter, Critics discusses Labour MPs' objections to Afrikaner racial politics). British politicians claimed they trusted white South Africa's concern for its black workers; Jan Smuts revealed the extent of that concern in 1906: "I do not believe in politics for them [people of non-European descent]" (qtd. in Eddy and Schreuder 218). In the end, the first decade of this century witnessed the emergence of two organized nationalisms--Afrikaner and African--at the same time that Britain's own nationalism was seeking rebirth through new theories and practices of Empire.(14) African nationalism constitutes the most immediate threat to Empire in Prester John. But the novel is also actively involved both in negotiating new British positions vis-a-vis Afrikaner hegemony, and in orchestrating a new--or revivified-nationalism based on what J.R. Seeley had famously, and axiomatically, traced in his 1883 history, The Expansion of England.

Laputa's Body Politic

I longed desperately for that country where white men thronged together in dorps and cities.

(Buchan, Prester 64)

Two transgressions of Britain's self-image lurk in the white unconscious of Prester John: homoeroticism and African nationalism. Each threat operates independently, but they also knot intimately together in the seductive and dangerous figure of Laputa. And each has its own history in European discourse, variously traced by scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jonathan Dollimore, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha. As a perhaps unique combination of masculinism, violence, and economics, the colonial arena provides a most conducive stage for the concatenation of homoeroticism and homosociality on the one hand, and European versus "Third World" nationalisms on the other. If the capitalistic economy that Sedgwick believes organizes itself through "male homosocial bonding" and the oppression of women "at home" gives rise to expansion and empire, the empire in turn allows for, even demands, the continuation and reinvention of male homosocial bonding "abroad." Equally, if what drives colonialism is, among other things, an expansive nationalistic spirit at home, then the very expansionism driven by that nationalism will in turn spark an anti-colonialism (eventually a nationalism) of the subject peoples.

Sedgwick's vision of bourgeois capitalism, elaborated in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, posits that European society operates through negotiations between men, the controllers of capital. Capitalism requires homosocial bonding because men join with other men (partners, employees) to produce more opportunities to produce and to exclude and control others necessary for production, notably women and workers. This homosociality, however, jointly facilitates and disallows another kind of desiring bond, the homoerotic--the bond that cannot be allowed. The homosocial/homoerotic continuum functions unconsciously and libidinally, but must be interrupted or disguised for the sake of--what? For the sake of control over women (involved as labor, as consumers, as reproducers), who appear as the objects of male desire but through whom men desire other men in a triangulated scheme; for the sake of the means of production (the smooth operation of collaborative work); and, abroad, for the sake of control over other races (slaves, laborers, consumers, objects of desire, and passive assistants in the construction of national and racial identities).

Even more strikingly than the domestic scene, imperialism establishes itself as a homosocial space: men play "the game" with other men in an arena where women (white women, that is, the only kind that signifies in Buchan) are not necessary, have no presence or currency (Said 136-137). "The Native" performs the sexual functions of aggression, control, reproduction-a sexual function which is in any case sublimated (especially for imperialists like G.A. Henty, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Buchan) through work. And what does imperial work require but intercourse with other men? In short, empire is a world which can operate without (white) women; indeed, as many of these texts show, it operates better without them because they interfere with male-to-male production and because they are not needed for reproduction: there are always more "natives" to replace any that die, for they are interchangeable, inexhaustible. This line of thinking places the trope of colonial conquest in a new light. Imperialism as penetration, of course, but as a rape which must overcome not just the "female" resistance of the land (and of the women violated and enslaved) but also the "male" resistance of warriors, slaves, laborers, rebels, and nationalists. When we view colonialism through the lens of homosociality, we see it as the homosexual rape which satisfies, extends, and reveals the homosocial/homoerotic economy of the fatherland (see Sedgwick, Between 182).

For the issues which concern me here, however, the most useful aspect of Sedgwick's work is her explanation of "homosexual panic."(15) According to Sedgwick, homosexual panic, "the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement" in a patriarchal and capitalist society (and thus within Empire), is at once the naturalized outcome of and terroristic policing of such a society's homosocial functioning. Faced with the possibility that their involvement in men-only enterprises like imperialism and warfare (and competitive sports) might be--and might be construed as--something "not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds" (Sedgwick, Epistemology 185), imperialists found one sure way of disproving appearances: kill the object of desire. Within the colonial context, it would be no sad coincidence if this self-exonerating murder were to behead the native threat to settler hegemony or to restore the colonial's indubitable rectitude in the eyes of his peers and his woman.

Elaine Showalter, among others, has discussed the emergence of "homosexuality" as a recognized and analyzed sexual orientation in the last decades of the nineteenth century--precisely at the height of empire. Hitherto unspeakable, homosexuality became part of legal, scientific, and cultural discourses, situated by intersecting phenomena which included the Labouchere Amendement criminalizing it (1885); pioneering works such as Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion (1897); and the notoriety of the decadents and aesthetes, notably Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symonds, and Aubry Vincent Beardsley (Showalter, chapters 6, 9). To a conservative social analyst, the "decadent" homosexual subculture would have been one more sign of Britain's larger "decline," like the Rome of Caligula before it. This subculture was not unified: Showalter traces two prominent models, a "feminized" one developed by the aesthetes and a more "masculinist" model celebrated by writers such as Edward Carpenter, which glorified physicality, hardship, bonding in the face of adversity. This is the model chosen by later figures like T.E. Lawrence, the pattern more obviously available within the imperial arena, condonable when kept chaste and sanctified within the atmosphere of men devotedly and fraternally working for their country. It is worth noting that the masculinist model articulated by middle-class intellectuals often fetishized the working-class body, incorporating a degree of class alterity into its sexual economy. For the imperial situation, as we see in Buchan's homoerotics (and in the stories of Haggard, Henty, Kipling, and Joseph Conrad), the equivalent transgressive alterity is racial. Davey's ambivalent response to Laputa--an object of physical desire/an object of racial and political terror--teaches us that the two forces of homoeroticism and nationalism intertwine in this text. In order to organize my reading, however, I will initially consider them separately.

The text shifts its vision of Laputa(16) along an axis of racial and political alterity, according to the threat or lack of threat he poses to the white presence. At one end, he becomes the standard savage African of imperialist literature, straight out of Henty, Haggard, or Conrad; at the other end, he becomes enlightened, civilized, "a friendly, rational companion" (151), proof of the misguided impact of imperial philanthropy and the pernicious interference of American "Ethiopianism" (75). Either savage or civilized, "Negroid" or "Semitic," safe (i.e. passive) or dangerous (i.e. active, rational, political): Laputa's position within the standard manichean opposites of colonial discourse is never fixed, a sign of the contradictions within this discourse that draw, first, upon the colonizer's simultaneous desire for dominance and recognition, and, second, upon his homoerotic longing. That is, Laputa's position is not fixed until the text decides that, with his fluid and often conscious oscillation along the axis, he poses too much of a threat whenever he occupies the Negroid/active/political pole because "Negro" cannot signify "political," it must signify only "docile" and "childlike." To be black and political (rather than just "restless") is to blend racial characteristics properly kept separate and thus to be dangerous. At this moment, he must be contained. And, of course, at this moment it is still possible to contain him because one facet of his position is still recognizable and manageable: "the African," hypostasized and known.

Nevertheless, Laputa casts a powerful spell over Davey no matter where on the manichean axis he happens to be. Indeed, his oscillation is signalled most clearly by descriptions of what really fascinates Davey about Laputa--his physique. When Davey as a boy stumbles upon "the black minister" performing "some strange magic alone by the sea ... the black art ... the unlawful," physical description is kept to a minimum; Davey is pre-pubescent, after all. But the other parts of the binary apparatus operate already, as we witness Laputa devolving in front of Davey's eyes. Although he has "shed his clerical garments," this "great Negro" is still seen as a minister until he "took something from his belt, and began to make odd markings in the sand between the inner circle and the fire. As he turned, the moon gleamed on the implement, and we saw it was a great knife. We were now scared in real earnest. Here were we, three boys, at night in a lonely place a few yards from a great savage with a knife" (14-15, emphasis added). In this devolution, we see Davey learning to read the black man as the fearful, phallic savage, not the respectable minister.

The devolution continues when Laputa chases the boys up the cliffs, a scene imaged as attempted rape and repeated when Davey is a youth. Here, in the immediate threat of Laputa's violence, Davey can note the man's bodily beauty before he feels forced to bracket him as completely other: "the face stamped itself indelibly upon my mind. It was black, black as ebony, but it was different from the ordinary Negro. There were no thick lips and flat nostrils; rather, if I could trust my eyes, the nose was high-bridged, and the lines of the mouth sharp and firm. But it was distorted into an expression of such terror and devilish fury and amazement that my heart became like water" (16). Laputa's difference from "the ordinary Negro" permits two modifications to the usual interracial encounter of colonial fiction which will continue until Laputa is destroyed. First, it legitimizes Laputa as a suitable antagonist for the European hero; it elevates him, makes him worthy. Second, it allows Davey to recognize him as someone who is not-quite not-white (in Bhabha's apt phrase); it makes Laputa available as a not wholly unsuitable object of interest. It is because Davey finds him "different from the ordinary Negro" that he can even imagine desiring him.

Davey encounters Laputa before he begins his new life in the Transvaal, for they sail on the same ship to Durban. Now supposedly a more astute observer, despite his provincialism, Davey rearranges the details of his first terrifying vision, for Laputa becomes again the educated and sophisticated minister: "He had none of the squat and preposterous Negro lineaments, but a hawk nose like an Arab, dark flashing eyes, and a cruel and resolute mouth. He was black as my hat, but for the rest he might have sat for a figure of a Crusader" (25). Buchan's evacuation of Laputa's Africanness recalls similar moves by Haggard in She, using the racial, "must-have-been" explanation to account for any qualities he cannot accept as African: Ayesha must have been descended from Semitic peoples; her empire must have been built by one of Israel's lost tribes, and so on. In Prester John Buchan attributes Laputa's superiority over "Negroes" to an innate aristocracy more than to his international education--since, albeit impressive, this education has exposed him, in Wardlaw's opinion, to "Ethiopianism ... a kind of bastard Christianity," which mixes up "Christian emotion and pagan practice" in volatile places like Haiti and "the Southern States" (56). It is due to Laputa's natural superiority, for instance, that he can recognize the quality of Davey's dog, Colin--"he was a brave animal, and my people honour bravery" (149)--shortly after Davey informs us that "Kaffirs are mortally afraid of a white man's dog" (141). Clearly, Laputa is no "Kaffir"; even when he's a savage, he's noble.

This epithet, which Davey throws around with all the confidence of a settler, recurs in the novel's first fascinated description of Laputa's body; again, "Kaffir" signals what Laputa is not--or at least what he is not only. They meet as Davey travels still further into frontier territory, scouting out the African settlements. He addresses "a tall native, who carried himself proudly .... In such a man one would have looked for a ring-kop, but instead he had a mass of hair, not like a Kaffir's wool, but long and curled like some popular musician" (85). After this perhaps unfortunate analogy, Davey's attention to "the curved nose, the deep flashing eyes, and the cruel lips of my enemy" commingles with the "noble savage" trope and gender/class hybridity to elevate the tone:

He thanked me with a grave dignity which I had never seen in any Kaffir. As my eye fell on his splendid proportions I forgot all else in my admiration of the man. In his minister's clothes he had looked only a heavily built native, but now in his savage dress I saw how noble a figure he made. He must have been at least six feet and a half, but his chest was so deep and his shoulders so massive that one did not remark his height. He put a hand on my saddle, and I remember noting how slim and fine it was, more like a high-bred woman's than a man's. (85-86)

The suppressed erotics of desire and fear emerge more explicitly as, hidden among "so many burly savages," Davey spies on Laputa's coronotion as Africa's new emperor. When "Laputa stripped off his leopard skin till he stood stark, a noble form of a man .... I was horribly impressed. Devouring curiosity and a lurking nameless fear filled my mind. My old dread had gone. I was not afraid now of the Kaffir guns, but of the black magic of which Laputa had the key" (102-03). It is a moment of narcissism and of voyeuristic identification with the other, of "dread" and "devouring curiosity." The contradiction between Davey's homophobia--the "walking nameless fear"--and his palpable desire for some of Laputa's "black magic" is perfectly expressed in the admission, "I was horribly impressed," which suggests the extremity of his emotional and somatic sensation.(17) Soon, carried away by this man whose heart was "black with all the lusts of paganism," Davey is seduced into welcoming his dream of revolution and a new empire:

By rights, I suppose, my blood should have been boiling at this treason. I am ashamed to confess that it did nothing of the sort. My mind was mesmerized by this amazing man. I could not refrain from shouting with the rest. Indeed I was a convert, if there can be conversion when the emotions are dominant and there is no assent from the brain. I had a mad desire to be of Laputa's party. Or rather, I longed for a leader who should master me and make my soul his own, as this man mastered his followers .... I longed for such a general. (108)

Along with the two pursuit/violation scenes, the charged language of moments like this reveals the latent homoeroticism in colonialism's economy of male recognition and reciprocity. In turn, such homoerotics trigger the homophobic backlash that forcefully rejects the reciprocity, turning attraction into repulsion, desire into violence, fascination for a body into disgust.

For Davey's "nameless fear"--or "mad desire"--is not only Wilde's love that dare not speak its name, it is also insurrection and nationalism. Laputa's speech consists of a reasoned account of Africa's grievances against European rulers and a roll call of illustrious generals, including "Chaka the Terrible," the settlers' nemesis. It all grips Davey "equally with the wildest savage." But unlike his companions, he can save himself from surrender and climax by calling upon those tested national/racial virtues: modesty and devotion to duty. Besides, as the quotations emphasize, Laputa appeals to his listeners' hearts and emotions, not to their reason (as "Kaffirs" they would not respond). So Davey escapes Laputa's spell, and suppresses his own "mad desire," by recovering his reason and balancing what is at stake. Significantly, however, he will not assess Laputa's argument on its own terms, only on colonial terms. Of necessity, the argument fails, and neither Davey nor Buchan need explain why.

The climax of Laputa's metamorphosis into object of desire/object of fear for Davey comes at the close of his speech. Once the African rebellion begins, the noble, Semitic, reasoning Laputa again devolves into and is subsumed within the "Kaffir" hordes who threaten white interests. He ceases to be also an object of desire and becomes only an object of a racialized fear. Hence, by the time Davey catches up with him, the homoerotic allure has passed. Laputa has shown himself, as the text expected all along, to be irredeemably African; now he can be easily contained. But not without one more ritual of bonding, a moment of recognition which, within the imperialist text, must automatically be finite and can now safely be elegiac.

Davey finds Laputa in the secret cave that staged the coronation ceremony. Laputa has been fatally wounded by Henriques, the mixed-blood "Portugoose" whom Davey treats like a white "Kaffir" because he is willing to be a "traitor to his [white] race" (91)--although Davey never considers him "white" in the first place: his "skin spoke of the tar-brush," and he is soon "that ugly yellow villain, Henriques" (25-26). Even with Laputa's physicality reduced, Davey feels the man's power. Yet this time he can temper it with a condescending concern: "I had no fear, only a great pity--pity for lost romance, for vain endeavour, for fruitless courage. 'Greeting, Inkulu!' I said in Kaffir, as if I had been one of his indunas" (177). Easy enough, now, to consider Laputa only a romance hero, a harmless dreamer or exemplar of nobility: he no longer threatens to snatch away a rich British dominion.

Quickly enough, Davey finds himself again "hypnotized by the man" and studying Laputa's broken body, now like that of "an old worn man standing there among the ashes." Echoing his first description of the black minister dancing on a Scottish beach, with its movement from domestic to alien, Davey offers an honorific devolution of the dying leader intended to highlight their common humanity: "[Laputa] had ceased to be the Kaffir king, or the Christian minister, or indeed any one of his former parts. Death was stripping him to his elements, and the man Laputa stood out beyond and above the characters he had played, something strange, and great, and moving, and terrible" (178). Boys' adventure stories tend not to treat their heroes and anti-heroes ironically; this stripping-away from Laputa of "the characters he had played" is a universal-humanist gesture of recognition--we are all human, all mortal. Its language recalls the understanding reached in the mad scenes of King Lear. But of course it is intensely motivated, and it becomes ironic in a critical reading. First, Laputa becomes recognizably "like us" when he no longer threatens, no longer asserts his dangerous difference, no longer operates in a political way. Second, the recognition insists that Laputa's insurrectionist activities, from fund-raising minister to revolutionary leader, were not the essential Laputa; they were just roles or delusions. Third, even as the honorific donation of equality strips him "to his elements" so that "the man Laputa" becomes visible, the language of this description reinstates his inevitable difference: he remains "something strange ... and terrible." Davey claims to be seeing Laputa clearly now; obviously, he is still dreaming.

Thus, even when Laputa reminds Davey of an old man or a child (181), his otherness persists, hypnotic and frightening. His death will end the immediate fear and can transmute desire into nostalgia, so Laputa must die. Of course, death also curtails any further discussion of Laputa's politics, which throughout the novel have provoked no response in Davey except either temporary, mesmerized enthusiasm or unreasoned, automatic rejection, no matter how fully and clearly and passionately Laputa spells them out. Significantly, now that Laputa as political/racial threat has been contained, so too has his unruly and seductive sexuality: the old man/child analogies void Laputa of erotic power at the same moment that the revelation of hidden diamonds and gold guides the plot back into adventure, a safer genre.

The reversal and dissolution of this crucial conjunction of sexuality, identification, and fear is clearly evident in the thematic of impotence which runs through the text. Put simply, Davey feels impotent in the face of the African threat; he is "cured" by a masterly white man, Arcoll. Once Davey is warned about unrest in the area, the theme begins: "The peril, whatever it was, did not threaten me only, though I and Wardlaw and Japp might be the first to suffer; but I had a terrible feeling that I alone could do something to ward it off, and just what that something was I could not tell. I was horribly afraid, not only of unknown death, but of my impotence to play any manly part" (63). From then on, whenever he is in Laputa's presence, he is passive and receptive, whether during the coronation ritual or the chase/rape scene.(18) Escaping Laputa, Davey receives intensive white-male psychotherapy from Arcoll: "You're back among friends, my lad" (163). The treatment takes time, however: as he struggles to tell Arcoll what Laputa is doing, Davey still feels himself "in a torment of impotence." But "Arcoll, still holding my hands, brought his face close to mine, so that his clear eyes mastered and constrained me" (164). Thus saved, and with his homoerotic bonding properly redirected, Davey has a reassuring dream in which a beautifully white road runs--like "a rampart, built of shining marble, [a] Great Wall of Africa"--thoughout the land, enclosing the unruly Africans like ducks in a shooting gallery: "Down in the bush were the dark figures of the hunted, and on the white wall were my own people--horse, foot, and artillery, the squadrons of our defence. What a general Arcoll was, and how great a matter had David Crawfurd kindled!" (164). A proto-allegory of genocidal apartheid restores David's manhood. He sleeps well.

By means of such reversals within the schema of containment that Buchan builds in the text, through a grid of sexuality, power, and violence, Davey and Laputa maintain their oppositionality throughout. They figure the attraction of polar opposites, always in hierarchy, which must remain polar for the sake of each higher value in the polarity. Even a temporary disruption of the hierarchy, as when Laputa renders Davey impotent, actually triggers a more forceful restitution of the opposition and subordination. Furthermore, since Prester John is an instruction manual for British youth, each turn in the polarities teaches a new part of the imperial code. Thus, when Laputa is noble, the text endorses Davey's humility and honesty. And when Laputa is rebellious and self-assertive, the text endorses instead Davey's modesty, his self-sacrificing devotion to duty and work. The range of Davey's character traits--from cunning to submission--is never seen to be contradictory in the way that Laputa's various traits are. Naturally, two oppositions are taken for granted; they do not require instruction, nor are they seriously jeopardized. One is the black/white racial essentialism: no matter the qualities that periodically remove Laputa from the black, he will never approach the white. The other is the political/apolitical binarism so important to hegemonic groups: what you do is political, nationalist; what we do is humanist, altruistic, universalist.

"He was not telling us this yarn for our amusement": Nationalism and Containment

Laputa's aggression is presented as physical and sexual when really it is also political and epistemological, challenging Britain's right to its African holdings--challenging, ultimately, the very idea of Empire that came to structure Britain's self-understanding in the final part of the nineteenth century. With issues of nationalism in mind, therefore, we turn now to the tenor of Laputa's aggression, his violation of British expectations--the content of his threat, rather than its ambiguous form. We are prepared to notice here just how much space Buchan gives to Laputa's politics and what little effort the text makes to refute them. On the one hand, it assumes readers will reject such politics out of hand; on the other, it deploys the most effective short-term response of all: it kills their mouthpiece.

A few jabs at Ethiopianism and "flabby educated Negroes from America" (75) begin the negotiation of competing nationalisms. The schoolteacher Wardlaw, with whom Davey by necessity becomes friends (they are the only two whites in the area, besides nasty Mr. Japp), catches on to signs of local unrest. Using the Indian Mutiny as his model, he constructs what to Davey seems an impossible, paranoid vision: "Supposing a second Chaka turned up, who could get the different tribes to work together. It wouldn't be so very hard to smuggle in arms .... If they got a leader with prestige enough to organize a crusade against the white man, I don't see what could prevent a rising." Davey believes whites would "get wind of it in time to crush it at the start." No, Wardlaw replies, the "native telepathy" enables them to "send news over a thousand miles as quick as the telegraph, and we have no means of tapping the wires" (56). As we have seen, fears of insurrection produced much of the popular literature of the Edwardian years; here the insertion of European analogies--an African "crusade," an exiled leader "who came back like Prince Charlie to free his people" (56)--point to the newly conceived symbiosis between threatened colony and threatened metropole. Germany's militarization couples with the Zulu Wars of the 1870s, 180s, and 1906.

The certainty that a covert insurgency could exploit a complacent bureaucracy and a credulous western populace figures among the mass of colonial-discourse tropes and thematics buried in the text's first full treatment of Laputa's activities, a discussion between Davey and Arcoll, "Chief Intelligence Officer among the natives" and a sort of colonial James Bond (75). Arcoll traces a genealogy of southern African rulers, from the titular Prester John through Chaka (a "black Napoleon" [74]) to Laputa in his double act as Ethiopianist preacher and revolutionary leader: "Presently I found that he preached more than the Gospel. His word was 'Africa for the Africans,' and his chief point was that the natives had had a great empire in the past and might have a great empire again .... He told them that he was there to lead the African race to conquest and empire" (75, 77). He warns Davey that the rising is near, though Government officials "were all asleep. They never dreamed of danger from the natives" (78). Fortunately for civilization, however, Laputa remains limited by his race: "I said he was an educated man, but he is also a Kaffir. He can see the first stage of a thing, and maybe the second, but no more. That is the native mind. If it was not like that our chance would be the worse" (78).

Because he is British, Arcoll can recognize Laputa's innate superiority, as Davey does. The regret Davey can easily feel for the dying Laputa appears in Arcoll as good-sportsmanlike honor: if Laputa "had been white he might have been a second Napoleon .... [T]here's fineness and nobility in him ... and it's God's curse that he has been born among the children of Ham" (79). Arcoll even acknowledges that settlers have been occasionally unjust: "In spite of risings here and there, and occasional rows, the Kaffirs have been quiet for the better part of half a century. It is no credit to us. They have had plenty of grievances, and we are no nearer understanding them than our fathers were. But they are scattered and divided ... " (75). Nevertheless, Arcoll adds, "We shall smash Laputa and his men, but it will be a fierce fight, and there will be much good blood shed. Besides, it will throw the country back another half-century" (79).

The contradictions and ambiguities here are typical of Prester John's ideological richness. The racial determinism frustrates Laputa as surely as it aids the British, and racial determinism has been decreed by God, so there's no use fighting it. After centuries of British benevolence and some abuse, "the Kaffirs" still have their grievances; we're doing our best, but you know it takes time. The ambiguity of "we are no nearer understanding them" opens up a gap in what Edward Said terms the "Orientalist" will-to-knowledge: does "them" refer to the Africans or to their grievances? Either way, it illuminates the paradox of native knowability/native inscrutability, as well as the failure of scientific anthropology. It keeps Africa Other. Conversely, the equally Orientalist inscription of African actualities within imperial and European analogical schemes--crusades, Napoleon (Britain defeated one Napoleon, so it can defeat "a second")--domesticates and familiarizes. The regret that smashing Laputa will interrupt the colonial progress, will "throw the country back another half-century," disguises the desire for precisely this kind of retardation. If southern Africa returned to the 1830s or 1840s, Britain could do its settlement over again and get it right, maybe take care of the Boers too. The very threat that Laputa represents would then be still far off; educational and travel opportunities might be curtailed. Justifying bloodshed for the sake of "the country"--undifferentiated, but implicitly the "white" country--also makes Laputa responsible for his own repression. It is the typical reactionary justification of "stability."

But even in all its paranoia, this text can never take seriously any idea of African independence. The sheer physical menace is there, but within imperial discourse it must be inconceivable, a pleasurable, necessary nightmare, but never a reality.(19) In a 1908 editorial entitled "The Colour Problem in the Colonies," Buchan repeated without comment the settler's creed in South Africa: "They wish to develop on British lines, and to make sure that the future population of their country, which is a white man's country by nature, shall be white men" (Comments 121). This doubly breathtaking axiomatic, whereby "nature" intended southern Africa for white people, indeed, white men (in fact, the single, solitary, individual white man), is what guides the text's response to Laputa's nationalist challenge. The challenge is never seriously or thoroughly engaged; it is simply-dismissed or, more calculatingly, recirculated into other challenges that no decent man could tolerate--outrages against white women and children, disruption of free enterprise and progress, rejection of Christianity and reversion to barbarism, homosexuality. What the Africans want--self-determination, control over land and minerals--must be refigured as much more outrageous and morally indefensible demands, partly in order to justify their rejection and partly to disguise the awkward fact that these are exactly what the British settlers want--freedom and control over mineral wealth. One typical example of how the text teaches its readers that ideas of African autonomy are not worth taking seriously comes when Davey feigns stupidity in order to put Laputa at ease:

First I made him sit on a chair opposite me, a thing no white man in the country would have done. Then I told him affectionately that I liked natives, that they were fine fellows and better men than the dirty whites round about. I explained that I was fresh from England, and believed in equal rights for all men, white or coloured. God forgive me, but I think I said I hoped to see the day when Africa would belong once more to its rightful masters. (86)

It is a remarkably thorough, destructive parody of early twentieth-century liberal attitudes to Empire, recruiting its older readers to think similarly by assuming that they will not think otherwise, while educating its younger readers into believing liberalism unsuited for colonial purposes. As Davey notes, "[Arcoll] was not telling us this yarn for our amusement" (74).

Laputa's fullest presentation of his nationalist platform comes during the coronation ritual, with Davey looking on as an enraptured convert. Laputa begins with a range of Christian prayers, re-contextualized in terms of an apocalyptic insurgency. Davey is initially so astonished at Laputa's hubris that he forgets to condemn it:

It was amazing to her these bloodthirsty savages consecrated by their leader to the meek service of Christ. An enthusiast may deceive himself, and I did not question his sincerity. I knew his heart, black with all the lusts of paganism. I knew that his purpose was to deluge the land with blood. But I knew also that in his eyes his mission was divine, and that he felt behind him all the armies of Heaven. (106)

He seems about o make a leap into cultural relativism but, just in time, two imperial responses pull him back into condemnation: the equation pagan=evil=black and the assertion that bloodshed and revenge are not "proper" Christianity--conveniently forgetting Old Testament and colonial violence alike. Davey buttresses the saving distraction he locates in Laputa's pagan barbarism by criticizing his presumption: "There was in the prayer more than the supplications of the quondam preacher. There was a tone of arrogant pride, the pride of the man to whom the Almighty is only another and greater Lord of Hosts. He prayed less as a suppliant than as an ally (106). Again, Davey conveniently forgets the Empire's conscription of God and the Gospel in conquering the heart of darkness.

Needless to say, Davey's responses studiously evade the real issue, which is the threat Laputa and his army pose to white interests in southern Africa. Mixing direct and indirect speech, the text finally lets Laputa deliver his message:

He spoke of the great days of Prester John, and a hundred names I had never heard of. He pictured the heroic age of his nation, when every man was a warrior and hunter, and rich kraals stood in the spots now desecrated by the white man, and cattle wandered on a thousand hills. Then he told tales of white infamy, lands snatched from their rightful possessors, unjust laws which forced the Ethiopian to the bondage of a despised caste, the finger of scorn everywhere, and the mocking word .... "What have ye gained from the white man?" he cried. "A bastard civilization which has sapped your manhood; a false religion which would rivet on you the chains of the slave. Ye, the old masters of the land, are now the servants of the oppressor. And yet the oppressors are few, and the fear of you is in their hearts. They feast in their great cities, but they see the writing on the wall, and their eyes are anxiously turning lest the enemy be at their gates." (107)

This is the kind of conflicted moment at which an imperialist text loses its calm. By using the word "nation" of Prester John's empire and implicitly of his own, Laputa introduces his political goal, since by this time "nation" had shifted from meaning just a "people" to signifying a united people within its sovereign territory (Neuberger). Yet with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia (and the Egyptian compromise), there were no "nations" in Africa by the end of the Scramble, so that any talk of a nation in southern Africa by definition reject imperial control, foreign settlement, and federation. Then again, Laputa's rhetoric of liberty and justice manipulates Davey's responses as well as the text's, momentarily interposing an irrefutable call for honesty between the formerly hostile white man and his object of fear. It is as if Davey, so well trained within this Enlightenment discourse, responds automatically or unthinkingly to it before he can pull himself together and remember its source. For one moment, in other words, the text itself agrees with all of Laputa's grievances, just as it did when Arcoll admitted them to Davey. At the same time, we can pull out of this passage's conclusion a symptomatic trace of Tory fear about domestic social reform and franchise extension: the sudden appearance of the imagery of class antagonism, still in its Biblical tone but now also alluding to the European revolutions of mid-century when "servants" turned on their "masters," depicts a fading elite threatened by the proletarian mob. It signals the Edwardian complex of internal decline and external threat. Like socialists from Karl Marx to William Morris, of whose ideas Buchan was intensely skeptical, Laputa closes with a vision of utopian revolution, "a picture of the overthrow of the alien, and the golden age which would dawn for the oppressed. Another Ethiopian empire would arise, so majestic that the white man everywhere would dad its name, so righteous that all men under it would live in ease and peace" (107-08). In this presentation, Laputa becomes a hyper-imperialist, a crusader who outdoes the British in his zeal. The British, after all, claimed only to administer and improve; Laputa aims at an apocalyptic cleansing and re-creation. And in this aim, he again becomes disreputable, offering the text new grounds on which to dismiss him: he is a fanatic, a fundamentalist.

This strategy of discrediting Laputa and his cause together by emphasizing its extremism and savage atavism is characteristic of any hegemonic group's response to "alien" insurgency. (The official and unofficial British response to Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, for instance, employed the same rhetoric.) Davey uses it again later, with grandiloquent drama, as he leads Laputa to where he hid the totemic jewels of Prester John:

"O man!" I cried, "what in God's name are you doing in this business? You that are educated and have seen the world, what makes you try to put the clock back? You want to wipe out the civilization of a thousand years, and turn us all into savages. It's the more shame to you when you know better .... If you are a Christian, what sort of Christianity is it to deluge the land with blood?" (152)

The mantric word "civilization," the baffling imprecision of the "thousand years" (since the Middle Ages, in the standard Eurocentric delimitation of civilization?--including, therefore, the occupation of the New World?), and the sly, crucial, interpellative "us" all collaborate in Davey's humanist recourse to higher values.

Laputa rejects all of Davey's appeals, for to him they are assertions rather than arguments: "I want a simpler and better world, and I want that world for my own people. I am a Christian, and will you tell me that your civilization pays much attention to Christ? You call yourself a patriot? Will you not give me leave to be a patriot in turn?" As we have seen before, the text refuses to engage Laputa on his own terms here. Davey has "no answer, being too weak and forlorn to think. But I fastened on his patriotic plea. 'Where are the patriots in your following? They are all red Kaffirs crying for blood and plunder, Supposing you were Oliver Cromwell you could make nothing out of such a crew.'" The all-purpose racial binarism comes back into play, revising British history (Cromwell's army was uniformly educated, motivated and scrupulous, as are settlers--British ones at least.) in order to isolate its opposite. Laputa's response, "These are my people," momentarily silences Davey; some timely action ends the debate.

The ironic similarity between Laputa's imperial crusade and Britain's justification of Empire demands of this text some awkward acrobatic evasions. For imperialist ideology, the problem is that the new "Ethiopian empire" of righteous ease and peace Laputa envisions (107) sounds exactly like the new world order the British Empire was supposed to inaugurate. Even their methods share key features--notably violence sanctified by Christianity, not coincidentally the same combination South Africa's independent government will begin to install in 1913, on its way to apartheid. Nevertheless, Laputa's mistake is presumption, the transgression of racial boundaries, the miscegenation of racial qualities. He is usurping white prerogatives. Thus when, before re-crowning himself and leaping to his death, he laments that "I would have taught the world wisdom .... There would have been no king like me since Charlemagne," his fate seems to Davey like "the fall of Lucifer" (180). In this romanticized and depoliticized vision, pride and nefarious cunning provoke Laputa's downfall, not his revolutionary threat to Britain's racial, sexual, political, and economic interests.

The upshot of the text's duplicitous containment of Laputa is security for whites and a new regime for blacks. The rebellion, only a "sorry mutiny" after Laputa's death, has taught colonials a valuable lesson: "white Africa drew breath again with certain grave reflections left in her head" (191). Arcoll and Davey visit the defeated chiefs in an effort to begin reconstruction:

[Arcoll] asked them what their grievances were; he told them how mighty was the power of the white man; he promised that what was unjust should be remedied, if only they would speak honestly and peacefully; he harped on their old legends and songs, claiming for the king of England the right of their old monarchs. (196)

Concern shades into warning, promises contain conditions, legitimacy involves revisionary mythmaking. Arcoll does not convince the African chiefs, so Davey, who, like "every man, becomes an orator," "in moments of extremity," finds himself speaking "like a man inspired," retelling in epic tones the heroism of Laputa's last moments. He also gives an opportunistic interpretation of Laputa's final speech:

Your king is dead .... His last words were that the Rising was over. Respect that word, my brothers. We come to you not in war but in pence, to offer a free pardon, and the redress of your wrongs. If you fight you fight with the certainty of failure, and against the wish of the heir of John. I have came here at the risk of my life to tell you his commands. His spirit approves my mission. (197)

Violently re-reading Laputa's legacy, Davey begins the crucial act of legitimizing and mystifying white control with a narrative of "anticonquest." This penultimate chapter's title, "A Great Peril and a Great Salvation," exemplifies the mixture of paranoia, political sang-froid, and clammy religiosity which can now resume its central place in colonial discourse. The whites construct a more watchful hegemony, part of which involves renewed lip-service to uplifting the natives. What it really means is relocation to pseudo-utopian disciplinary ghettoes. Until recently, they were called "homelands."

The complex cultural work performed in Prester John can be usefully read by linking terms elaborated by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression with Frantz Fanon's meditations on race and sexuality. In their discussion of carnival and other licensed occasions during which the privileges of "high" and "low" classes and the borders between them are violated, Stallybrass and White provide an account relevant to my concerns here: the parallel paranoias triggered by threats of class and race rebellion. They find in post-Renaissance European culture and society

a striking ambivalence to the representation of the lower strata (of the body, of literature, of society, of place) in which they are both reviled and desired. Repugnance and fascination are the twin poles of the process in which a political imperative to reject and eliminate the debasing "low" conflicts powerfully and unpredictably with a desire for this Other. [This process produces a] recurrent pattern ... the "top" attempts to reject and eliminate the "bottom" for revisions of prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the classic way that Hegel describes in the master-slave section of the Phenomenology), but also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life .... It is for this reason that what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central." (4-5)

The mechanics of this paradoxical debasement and desire are clear in Buchan's representations of Laputa, once we re-locate Stallybrass and White's formulation to the context of pre-World War I Britain: here the racial other is not only a constituent of the dominant group's imaginary, but also of an empire's worldly existence.

Drawing on his own experience as a psychiatrist, Fanon suggested in Black Skin, White Masks that "the [male] Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety" (151) for whites; that the white man's fear and hatred of the black man equals a fear of impotence (159); that the black man is the white man's double, necessary for the successful formation of identity but thereafter an obstacle to the closure of the white's "postural schema," so that he must be eliminated (161). For these reasons, "it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked" (163). Davey's desire for Laputa, because it is a desire for Europe's obsolute other, cannot be permitted, cannot be allowed satisfaction--for if the desire for experience were satisfied, it would at once disrupt all established hierarchies, all the naturalized elevation of supposed European qualities over supposed African qualities. Empire's legitimacy would, like Kurtz's Russian disciple, turn out to be hollow at the core, and the smooth operation of the homosocial economy would be disrupted by the embrace of a "reprobated" bond. In order to rescue the imperiled economies, then, the text enlists a range of representations for Laputa which collaborate in keeping him unacceptable, impotent, dead. The termination of Laputa as an object of sexual desire also brings about his termination as a threat to the masculinist subject of white male gendering in the imperial arena, in the way Fanon describes. But it also terminates the epistemological--the political--threat he poses to race, nation, and empire.

The symbolic centrality of Laputa to the entire reconstruction of empire and masculinity proposed, sanctioned, and begun in Prester John needs no further comment. The array of technology mustered for his termination--imagistic, narrative, ideological, military--suggests the dreadful need Laputa creates in this imperial imaginary. It is proper, therefore, to ask if it was precisely the unproblematic transparency of Buchan's solution to the contradictions of this imaginary that made his work so popular in Britain and its dominions: the lessons it teaches are so clear and yet so extensive, applicable in training grounds as disparate (and as connected) as public-school playing fields and outposts of empire. It is proper, also, to point out that the word "terminate" with which I end this essay sounds two quick imperial echoes: Kurtz's scribbled postscript, "Exterminate all the brutes!" and U.S. paramilitary jargon, "terminate with extreme prejudice."

1 I am working within the following provisional distinction. A "colonial" novel is written about and largely set in a colony; it can be written by an alien or a native and need not be politically aligned. An "imperialist" novel like Prester John, on the other hand, is usually written by a person not native to the colony and is by definition pro-Empire and imbued with a colonizing ethos. A novel might thus be colonial without being imperialist (A Passage to India is an obvious example) but only rarely vice versa (Sara Jeanette Duncan's The Imperialist, 1904, being a case in point). I would like to thank Houston Baker, Jim English, Dan Bivona, Gabrielle Collu, and Eric Savoy for their commentaries on this essay.

2 The fine distinctions between "England" and "Britain" with regard to the source, will, and meaning of "Empire" must be kept in mind when reading the work of Buchan, a Scot who held various high posts in the colonial bureaucracy and who chose a Scottish lad as the vehicle for his propagandizing on behalf of a "British Empire."

3 Said has led the way in proposing that the binary categories "home" and "abroad," or "England" and "Empire," only conceal the real linkages and continuities between what should no longer be considered discrete fields. Pratt traces the way in which colonial discource constructs the "domestic subject" (Spivak's phrase) via its organization of Europe's colonial peripheries.

4 This kind of symptomatic reading draws on the work of Jameson, particularly his description of the workings of the "political unconscious" as it seeks "the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" (77). Showalter's discussion of "the male quest romance" is also useful here. She suggests that "these stories represent a yearning for escape from society, rigidly structured in terms of gender, class, and race, to a mythologized place elsewhere where men can be freed from the constraints of Victorian morality" (81). She reads the genre's themes of "the male muse, male bonding, and the exclusion of women" as a complicated response to late-Victorian "female literary dominance, as well as to British imperialism and fears of manly decline in the face of female power" (83). For the rise of the "New Woman" see A.R. Cunningham, G. Cunningham, Dowling, and Fernando; for the Suffragette movement, Remelson.

5 Hulme points out that, from the beginning, colonial fiction has often been nostalgic, setting its adventures in an earlier time when competition between European powers for land and primacy was just beginning. See his discussions of "Robinson Crusoe and Friday" (181). Spurr notes that "the European experience of Africa allows for nostalgic pastoralism to be projected onto the future and made into the object of utopian desire" (30).

6 See McClintock for a parallel discussion of this re-organization.

7 Plus 3,700 Boer soldiers and 5,774 British soldiers killed in action, with another 16,000 dead of wounds and illnesses (Kruse 42).

8 Buchan himself shared this contempt. In The African Colony, he offers his opinion of "the Boer": "His most obvious characteristic is his mental sluggishness. Dialetic rarely penetrates the chain-armour of his prejudices" (qtd. in Daniell 98). For preliminary treatments of Buchan, see Kruse, Brantlinger, Spidle, and Turnbaugh. Buchan awaits comprehensive critical work.

9 I draw this partial and reductive list from Bivona, Faber, Hobsbawm, Porter, Shannon, Semmel, Showalter, and Robinson et al.

10 Buchan's collection of commentaries and essays from his two years as editor of the Scottish Review, 197-08, offers ample evidence of his own politics. Without explicity judging their cause, he criticizes radical Suffragettes for alienating potential supporters, dismissing their chances of victory because "the middle class is rooted in its aversion, and the average working man is merely ribald" (Comments 55). He supports colonial governments' rights to curtail free speech and to silence nationalist agitators in the interests of stability: "If we give freedom, we are bound to guard against its abuse, or we shall fail in our duty to those whom we govern" (Comments 107). He doubts that the socialism of the Labour Party will ever catch on with "the working man" because the working man wants to keep what he has and cannot think of sacrifice for change (see his "The True Danger of Socialism" and "Surrender of the Labour Party"). Eradicating slavery more than justifies the colonial incursion, but so too does civilization: "the native must be given a chance to lead a peaceful and prosperous life. If habits of foraying and brigandage are to eradicated, habits of industry must be put in their place. Industry, again, means an increasing standard of civilization, and for this some contact with the white man is necessary" (Comments 326). Neither the vapidity nor the hypocrisy of these imperialist nostrums can surprise, given the source and the content. Their short-sightedness, however--"India, so far as the imagination of man can reach, will never be autonomous" (Comments 106)--can be refreshing.

11 The word "race" here occupies a notably slippery position. Within this kind of imperialist discource it means a "people"--specifically the British, even English, man. In other words, "race" implies a people that has managed to constitute itself as a nation and a nation-state. When pressed or threatened, imperialism allows the expansion of "race" to include all Europeans, then all white men, and then all white people--as opposed, implicitly, to everything non-white. The slippage between these considerations always functions politically and to the advantage of the narrower category.

12 That all this international racial Darwinism, all this national efficiency and colonizing work, seems bloodless, clean, and kind no doubt stems from its status as pseudo-science needing no laboratory demonstration: its proof had been there in India, Egypt, South and West Africa for years. That in practice it needed great amounts of blood, dirt, and cruelty comes out much more in the fictional texts which glorified and legitimized Britain's imperial job, from Haggard through Kipling and Henty to Buchan--though such texts always interrupt the boys' own violence to make sure its readers understand the moral.

13 Needless to say, Rosebery's arguments do not arise from a devotion to public education. He is campaigning against a Tory government who followed Rhode's lead into a messy war for the benefit of (Jewish) capitalists, while also warning against Socialist efforts to forge an international solidarity of workers which would disrupt the labor requirements of the Empire. And he is pushing a Liberal platform in which the Empire--still popular among all classes, still perceived as indissolubly part of Greater Britain--can go hand in hand with social reform at home, something Chamberlain and the Tories neglected. Simply put, the Liberals were looking for a way to keep the Empire and win the home front. For a discussion of the frequent anti-Semitism of anti-Boer-War arguments, even in liberal critics like Hobson, see Porter, Critics 201-03.

14 The African National Congress was founded in 1912, but pressure for an organization to represent African concerns had been building throughout the preceding decade, as Afrikaner hegemony became obvious. Gandhi, who had already set up his Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses, was an important influence, though he did not directly involve himself in African politics (see Eddy Schreuder 208-12).

15 For a critique of Sedwick's formulations, see Van Leer, "Beast," as well as his exchange with Sedwick, "Critical Response I" and "Critical Response II"; Bergman provides an overview.

16 The name "Laputa," Spanish for "whore," seems a curious choice at first, since the economic aspect of whoring is absent from Laputa's motives--the text does him the honor of recognizing his honesty where it condemns Henrinques's "Portugoose" treachery and greed. But, for Davey/Buchan/the text, "whore" can signal corruption, sexuality, danger, disease, illegality, seduction--and femininity. This last association--Laputa's hand is later described as "like a high-bred woman's" (86)--operates suggestively in the light of one biographer's strenuous denials of the rumor that Buchan was homosexual (Daniell 14, 84). The connection invites us to read Laputa as a figure for Buchan's outlaw fantasy or his self-denial. Killing Laputa, he enacts his own "homosexual panic." Conversely, Eric Savoy has suggested to me that Buchan may be echoing Swift in Book 3 of Gulliver's Travels, where Laputa is a place of excess and absurdity.

17 I thank Eric Savoy for this wording.

18 "He dropped his pistol and flung himself on me. I was helpless as a baby in his hands. He forced me to the ground and rolled my face in the sand; then he pulled me to my feet and tossed me backward ..." (157).

19 Buchan performs a familiar ideological move here. The African rebellion must be inspired from without; "our" Africans would never act this way without foreign troublemakers. And Laputa's foreign education, particularly his Ethiopianism, "explains" his radical difference from the pacified natives. Yet there must always be the threat of native rebellion in order to justify military presence--so the unruliness must actually be indigenous to the colony. Faced with this paradox, imperial discource insists that "natives" are by nature restive (even though this goes against the premise of Indirect Rule). Only occasionally can imperial discourse recognize that the unrest might be caused by colonial policy; it can never recognize that the unrest is caused by colonialism itself.

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