Waughior

More to the point, calling Waugh a racist would miss the brilliance of his satire. For, with all his unflattering depictions of Africa and the Africans, he is equally, if not more vicious, when he is pillorying the upper-crust British society, from the ineffectual Lord Courteney, head of the British legation, who is more concerned with his afternoon tea than the country going up in flames around him, to the doddering British ladies who come to Azania to save the animals and end up in the midst of a riot.

Some of Waugh's best jibes come from the mouths of his African characters commenting on the unsuspecting whites, like the following exchange from Black Mischief'.

   "Which of the white ladies would you
   like to have?"
   "The fat one. But both are ugly."
   "Yes. It must be very sad for the English
   gentlemen to marry English ladies."

WAUGH WAS an irascible character in life who used biting satire to turn an unflattering mirror onto real-life scenes and society. The British upper-class, the journalism profession, the incompetent African Big Men running dysfunctional states--none of these escaped his finely-aimed pen.

Deedes, Waugh's contemporary and brief partner in the Abyssinian adventure, returned to the country, now called Ethiopia, in 2000, for the ceremonial burial of the Emperor Halle Selasse, upon whom, at least in part, Waugh's Emperor Seth seems to be based. Using a laptop computer, Deedes is able to send off 900 words of copy to London in the blink of an eye, and he quietly marvels at how much has changed in the intervening sixty-plus years since he and Waugh first met amidst the journalistic chaos that became the inspiration for Scoop.

For Waugh aficionados--and mainly for modern-day war reporters and anyone who follows the unfolding tragedy of Africa--the true marvel seems how much things stay the same.

Keith B. Richburg is Paris Bureau Chief of the Washington Post and author of Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa (Harvest Books, 1998).

COPYRIGHT 2003 The National Interest, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning