Across the pond

To a talk in the village hall this evening by Peter Press on the history of Charmouth, which to most visitors is a place they can stay by the seaside, if they cannot get into Lyme Regis, where they can pose their wives on the Cobb to the background which became an iconic image when Meryl Steep, let her hair blow in the wind in the French Lieutentant’s Woman.

But, as I discovered this evening, history started before Hollywood. And when theRomans marched into Britain just over two thousand years ago, they did not even notice Lyme Regis, (which got the Regis bit of its name because a later ruler of England, a German immigrant, liked to holiday there.)

The road they built goes from Winchester, past Thomas Hardy’s birthplace, near Dorchester, and within a whisker of my bungalow, to link up with the Fosse Way, which reaches the sea at Axmouth, then a viable port. As I write I can hear the tramp of Ceasar’s soldiers, pacing a route which in part follows that of the present A35. They marched on regardless of the local sniper fire. And they were probably moving nearly as fast as the twenty-first century holiday makers, driving their cars which are capable of doing twice the legal speed limit, but reduced to a crawl, because where they are going is where thousands of other people want to go; once, the season starts.

In the Doomesday Book, which was the survey conducted by England’s next conqueror in 1066, so that he could collect his taxes efficiently, Charmouth is recorded as a thriving little agricultural community. It earned its bread from tilling the soil, and its soil was richer than that at Lyme, two miles away. In those days the tourist industry was not a major factor in the economy.

In the hall tonight there was still some pride in that heritage. And in the Cistercian monks who nourished it, long after the solidiers had departed. They were devoted to their God in the Sky, but when that God talked to them, he told them to take of their cassacks and do some hard work, to set an example to their flock, rather than pontificating about how they should live their lives.

But of course the Romans did conquer England, even though it took a later continental army to force the English to measure in centimeters. And William did win the battle of Hastings; King Harold is dead, not gathering a resistance army in Argentina.

They certainly won the battles, just as surely as George W Bush scored with his recent surge. But history tells that the English, after they had licked the wounds of defeat, went on to establish British rule over countries that Ceasar and William the Conqueror did not know existed.

But that was quite some time ago. And today’s reality, is the ‘natives’ are governing themselves. Including Robert Mughabe, who came to power, with the support of the majority of the his own people in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia, a country named after Cecil Rhodes, who captured chunks of Africa for the British Crown and for British capitalism.

And, in whose honour, legions of Americans come to Oxford to study as Rhodes scholars.

Mughabe won his particular war. But he has not been able to manage the peace. His poor are amongst the poorest of the world. Many of them don’t have enough to eat, let alone the economic power to get fat and unhealthy on the junk food of American capitalism.

One of the placards held up by Mughabe’ s marchers after the election, whose results we still do not know, was something like, ‘We will never be a colony again.’. That is the spirit with which those who risked their lives to fight with Mughabe in the bush were imbued.

But that was twenty-eight years ago. The younger generation want him to move on to the challenges of today. Mughabe has not made the transition from ‘freedom fighter’ to ruler, that has been made by Saint Nelson Mandela and, less successfully, by Fidel Castro.

It tookk a few hundred years after the Roman and French invasions for the English to move to ‘democracy’.  Time is truncated in the modern era, but change takes time. Anything that the west says about Mughabe is suspect. It smacks of the old British colonialism or of the American neo-colonialism of George W Bush. We need to stand back.

And hope that the other new leaders of Africa will be able to persuade Mughabe that now he has won he needs to start thinking about how to govern. How to give his people enough to eat. And also how to give them as good an education as they might get if they won one of those much coveted Rhodes scholarships at Oxford.